#god is red

[apenitentialprayer]

It is said that one cannot judge Christianity by the actions of secular Western man. But such a contention judges Westerners much too harshly. Where did Westerners get their ideas of divine right to conquest, of manifest destiny, of themselves as the vanguard of true civilization, if not from Christianity? Having tied itself to history and maintained that its god controlled that history, Christianity must now accept the consequences of its past.

Vine Deloria Jr. (God is Red: A Native View of Religion, page 111)

[wordsofwisdomadjustwords]

In the religious world of most [Native American] tribes, birds, animals and plants compose the ‘other peoples’ of creation.  Depending on the ceremony, various of these peoples participate in human activities.

If Jews and Christians see the action of a deity at sacred places in the holy land and in churches …traditional Indian people experience spiritual activity as the whole of creation becomes active participants in ceremonial life….thus traditional people explain that these ceremonies are being held for ‘all our relatives.’  

-God Is Red, Vine Deloria Jr.

[apenitentialprayer]

The Need to Construct a Coherent Religious Worldview

The religious issue in American society has been developing for several decades. It is not as simple as the old Protestant-Catholic competition nor does it reflect the former Christian-Jew diversity. [The New Age ... has been a smorgasbord of religious experiences derived from any religious tradition willing to advocate its beliefs and whatever experiences could be packaged for sale to American consumers. Thus astrology, numerology, flying saucers with heavenly “space brothers,” past-life regressions, a variety of martial arts techniques, various brands of shamanism, and modern versions of witchcraft fill the empty hours of affluent fringe groups who reject Christianity but want to have some hold on religious experiences.] The religious situation today eloquently reflects the American psyche - we create our own reality and we are absolutely free to do so. This condition, however, suggests that there is no reality and that we live in a completely intellectual world where the free choice of the individual determines the values and emotional content of experiences. We are at ground zero religiously with little possibility of a revelation to enable us to move on. [...] While we would like our personal preferences to be realized, if we have any sanity, we must admit that the world outside our perspective has a bit of substance to it and must certainly be constructed on certain principles through which history and nature are related. It is therefore our task to examine with a great deal of seriousness the possible relationships that these two ideas have and the probable configuration that a new understanding of history and nature and time and space would give us.

- Vine Deloria Jr. (God is Red: A Native View of Religion, pages 57, [55], 57)

[apenitentialprayer]

The patriotism of the American conservative may be said to be an expression of the effort to become indigenous [... b]ut their allegiance is to democracy, a powerful idea, but it has no relationship to the earth upon which we walk and the plants and animals that give us sustenance. Developing a sense of ourselves that would properly balance history and nature and space and time is a more difficult task than we would suspect and involves radical reevaluation of the way we look at the world around us.

Vine Deloria Jr. (God is Red: A Native View of Religion, page 59)

[zhooniyaa-waagosh]

In 687 B.C., Sennacherib led his Assyrian army into Israel with the intent of conquering Jerusalem. On the evening of March 23, the first night of the Hebrew Passover, the Assyrians camped outside the city, ready to capture it the following morning. In what may have been history’s most spectacular lightning bolt, the army, 185,000 strong, was destroyed when an electromagnetic charge suddenly arched between Mars and Earth. The Hebrews had been saved twice on the same date by heavenly intervention. Is it any wonder that they used the most powerful, descriptive terms to praise their God?

me reading this complete and absolute nonsense:

[in-the-stacks]

Presenting God Is Red by Vine Deloria, Jr.

Reviewed by The Lone Reader podcast for the Everett Public Library in Everett, Washington.

https://buff.ly/3zwcbKh

[wordsofwisdomadjustwords]

“[We must have a] radical shift in outlook from our present naïve conception

of this world as a testing ground of abstract morality to a more mature view of the universe as a comprehensive matrix of life forms.”

-God Is Red, A Native View of Religion

Vine Deloria Jr.

[wordsofwisdomadjustwords]

“Ironically traditional people have been forced to hold these ceremonies under various forms of subterfuge and have been abused and imprisoned for doing them.

Yet the ceremonies have very little to do with individual or tribal prosperity.  Their underlying theme is one of gratitude expressed by human beings on behalf of all forms of life.”

-God Is Red, A Native View of Religion

Vine Deloria Jr