"We're Bible-thumpers who just happened to end up on television," he explained. "You put in your article that the Robertson family really believes strongly that if the human race loved each other and they loved God, we would just be better off."
The odd thing is that many who have condemned Robertson would share his take on loving each other, and they'd cite it as a reason for condemning personal hostility based on someone's sexual preference. Thus did Wilson Cruz, a spokesman for the gay rights group GLAAD, declare that "Phil's lies about an entire community fly in the face of what true Christians believe."
Yet when even the pope wonders aloud as to whether it's appropriate for him to judge, you begin to see the difficulty of deciding what "true Christians" ought to believe. This raises the question of whether the religiously based principles are merely cultural artifacts that we bend to our own immediate purposes.
The answer lies in embracing a humility about how imperfectly human beings understand the divine, which is quite different from rejecting God or faith. This humility defines the chasm between a living religious tradition and a dead traditionalism. We need to admit how tempted we are to deify whatever commitments we have at a given moment. And those of us who are Christian need to acknowledge that over the history of the faith, there have been occasions when "a supposedly changeless truth has changed," as the great church historian and theologian Jaroslav Pelikan put it.
Read more: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2013/12/23/duck_dynasty_meet_pope_francis_121035.html#ixzz2oJ5Huq00
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Do you need a supposedly changeless truth, a spiritual stake in the ground? Or do you need a framework to make a meaning out of the seemingly endless and possibly pointless struggle of life? (or something else?).
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