Religious sensitivities and anti-discrimination laws

A new bill by the Australian Labor Party will give religious organisations in Australia the right to discriminate against those who might cause "injury to the religious sensitivities of adherents of that religion."

It seems that the press wanted to present this in as controversial a way as possible, with many news outlets reporting that religious organisations were free to discriminate against those they considered 'sinners', which is not the actual wording used - and makes no sense at all in a Christian context, as we are all sinners.

However, one might well ask what does "injury to the religious sensitivities of adherents of that religion" actually mean?

I am a Christian. And I can think of no person whose employment would cause injury to my religious sensitivities. As a Christian, though, who believes God's love and compassion extends to all people, I do feel my religious sensitivities may be injured should someone be refused employment on the basis of sexuality, gender, marital status or religion.

The same stories that used the word 'sinners' also said:

"Under current exemptions to legislation, religious groups can reject employees for being gay, single parents or living "in sin"." (Read more: http://www.news.com.au/breaking-news/national/sinner-story-a-beat-up-christian-lobby/story-e6frfku9-1226554925167#ixzz2IPSaHuB6)

So are these the type of people who would injure 'religious sensitivities'? I would say no. But at the same time, I fear that it is these kinds of people that will be discriminated against.

Jim Wallace from the Australian Christian Lobby explains it differently. He says it's not a matter of vetting people, but of employing people who share the same beliefs. He gives the example that an environmental organisation would not employ someone who was an 'ardent logger'.

The difference is, of course, that environmental organisations (quite rightly) are subject to discrimination laws.

And however it's painted, in practice, I fear it's going to be used mainly as an excuse refuse employment to homosexuals.

And quite frankly I don't think that's right and I don't think that's Christian. For a start, why is that many (certainly not all, but many) Christian churches focus on this one group of people? They'll employ just about anybody and accept just about anybody - except for homosexuals.

I have heard many Christians say that a person cannot be a Christian and a homosexual. Why not? Even if they do believe it's a sin - there's lots of sins mentioned in the bible. I think it's safe to say that we're all guilty of at least one of them - and I include in there the sins mentioned as abominations. Lying is an abomination. Women wearing men's clothing is an abomination. There's lots of them. (For a full list of them all, go here: http://richardwaynegarganta.com/abomination.htm)

I'm pretty sure that there aren't too many people who are being refused employment by a Christian organisation for cheating or lying or oppressing the poor. We're perfectly willing to employ those people. But homosexuals, no, can't be done. That would offend our religious sensitivities.

And I do understand that some Christian organisations (such as schools) want to employ people who share those Christian beliefs. That does make sense. But if it ends up getting used mostly as an excuse to discrimination against people, then that's not right.

We believe in a God who has created us all and loves us all. We have the example of the Good Samaritan to show that even the people we detest may end up being the ones who do a lot better job of loving their neighbour than the 'right' people do. We have what might be considered an anti-discrimination verse in Galatians 3:28: ' There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free,nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.'

We also have a lot of bible verses and passages that tell us not to be judgmental, Matthew 7:1-5 being just one of them:

“Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.

“Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye."

Christians should be the people who accept others, the people who love others, the people who are least likely to judge others. We should be the least likely to discriminate, not the legal exception to anti-discrimination laws.  

I do realise that the press has probably not done the best job in reporting this story. Controversial stories sell more papers - I should know, I bought one myself when I saw the front page of The Canberra Times. And I also realise that there are many religious organisations who do not discriminate based on age, gender, sexuality, race or religion.

However, I also wonder how the average Australian sees the church at this time. Do they see a church that is accepting and welcoming, that represents a God that loves them? Or do they see a church that wants to exclude people and that dislikes certain groups of people? And which one really is more representative of the God who created everyone, who loves everyone and his son, Jesus Christ, who died for everyone?

Further reading: Shutting out the 'sinners' feeds bigotry

(Picture taken from "Religious groups free to discriminate" on www.smh.com.au -  http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/political-news/religious-groups-free-to-discriminate-20130115-2crlw.html)

Stranded on a desert island

Tonight at dinner, I asked my two boys what they would take with them if they were stranded on a desert island. I expected them to say something like playstations or TVs or chocolates or footballs or books. But when they replied, I discovered that I have the two most wonderful boys in the world (although I may be slightly biased).

My youngest son said that he would take me. I was really touched by this, not only because I was his first choice, but also because despite all the material things he could have chosen, he wanted love instead.

Our family doesn’t have a lot of money. And there are times when I look at the catalogues and think of all the things I wish I could buy my children. And I know there are times when they wish we could afford a lot more than we can. It can be hard living in a world that constantly tells you that you need this toy and that game and this food and those clothes, when you can’t really afford to get any of it. But in the end, I wonder how much it really matters. Because when given a choice of anything, most people would prefer to have love. It is so much more important than material items. And I am so glad my son recognised that.

As for my eldest son, he chose the smart answer. He told me he would take a ship so that he could get off the island. Love is wonderful and important. But I have to give credit to my son for thinking about the future!

As for my answer? I’m almost ashamed to say it now. What I wanted to take on my desert island, the very first thing I thought of -- it was my iPod. It didn’t even exist 10 years ago. Now I can’t bear the thought of any length of time without it. Okay, if I had really thought about it, instead of just saying the first thing that popped into my head, I would have chosen my children. I’d much rather have them than my iPod any day. But it’s pretty sad that I wanted my iPod on a desert island. In fact, I’m still having trouble thinking of how exactly I would survive on a desert island without my iPod - or diet coke for that moment.

In a way, we are all stranded on an island. It’s an island floating in space. As much smarter people than me have pointed out, this earth is all we have. We don’t have anywhere else to go.

And we need to ask what it is we really want while we’re here? Are we going to use up the earth’s resources making things like diet coke and iPods? Treat them as our main priority. Or are we going to recognise that love (including love for others and love for the planet) is far more important than material things? We don’t have a ship that can take us to another place. But maybe we should start realising that we need things that can guarantee our future.

I sometimes get pretty depressed about where the world is heading. But as the boys and I gave our answers around the dinner table tonight, I felt a glimmer of hope. It was obvious that the younger generation has a far better idea of what’s important than I do.

Seriousness of sin

Before I start this post on the seriousness of sin, I want to say three things.

1. We are all sinners.
2. Sinners need love and compassion.
3. We are all sinners.

So this post is not going to be about pointing fingers and judging people. That’s never been my approach and I’m not about to start now. It is, however, about recognising that sin is serious. And we do nobody any favours when we pretend that it isn’t.

Many Christians lean towards the love and compassion approach to Christianity. I have nothing against this. I’m all for love and compassion. I believe if everyone had more love and compassion in their lives, the world would be a better place.

When people sin, they do one of two things. They either feel sorrow for it or they don’t. If they don’t feel sorrow, generally nothing anyone says is going to make them feel sorrow. If they do, they feel bad enough on their own, without having other people make them feel worse.

But the love and compassion we extend to others should not involve saying that what they have done is quite okay.

Well, not always. Sometimes people feel bad about something when they really have no need to. Sometimes they exaggerate what they have done wrong and have an unhealthy sense of guilt. And so the best thing is often to say, ‘You know something, what you did wasn’t really that bad.’

When someone feels upset about something, it’s normal to want to make them feel better. It’s the loving and compassionate thing to do. But sometimes what we say to ‘make someone feel better’ doesn’t line up with God’s view of sin. The whole, ‘Well maybe you did have an affair with your husband’s best friend. But lots of people have affairs nowadays’ kind of approach.

And sometimes people don’t need to feel better. Their sorrow for sin is a good thing. It’s what leads to repentance and submission to God’s will. Sometimes making someone feel better is the worst thing you could do for them.

In the beginning I listed three points. Okay, it was more like two. The first and third point was that we are all sinners. Remembering this should help prevent us becoming too judgemental. But it should never lead to a downplaying of sin.

Sometimes the truth that we are all sinners morphs into a ‘We are all sinners, so sin doesn’t really matter’ kind of attitude. ‘After all, what is one sin amongst so many?’ I’ve had someone say to me, ‘Do you honestly think God is going to care if you do this, when there are so many people doing much worse things?’

Short answer, yes. Because sin does matter.

Sin is not like littering. You know how sometimes you’re in a public place, and there’s rubbish everywhere. You kind of look at your empty chip packet or soft drink can and go, ‘I should just toss it on the ground. It’s not going to make any difference. There’s so much rubbish here already.’

Well sin is not like that. Sin is not just one tiny spec in a sin-filled world, hardly noticeable from God’s perspective. Each sin is important. Each sin is an offence against God.

I was praying in Church the other day, looking at the wooden carving of Jesus’ crucifixion, thinking about how He died for our sins. And I thought I can never fully grasp that. My mind can never capture the entirety of what that means. I know Jesus died for the sins of the whole world. And it’s been repeated so often it almost sounds like a cliché. Which is sad in itself, really. But Jesus dying for the sins of the whole world is such a staggering idea. I can’t even begin to appreciate how truly astounding it is.

So I stopped thinking about how Jesus died for our sins and started thinking about how he died for my sins. Not from the point of view that He died just for me. But from the point of view that my sins put him there. My sins nailed God to the cross. If I was the only person in the world, or if I was the only sinner in the world and everyone else was perfect, Jesus would have still been crucified. He would still have undergone unimaginable agony. The suffering that my sins alone would have caused him are immense.

I can’t even grasp that. I will never fully understand just how much he suffered for my sins. And I will never be as thankful for it as I should be.

Perhaps it’s better that way. Perhaps if I did understand and appreciate it properly, I would never get off my knees.

Jesus Christ had love and compassion. Jesus Christ who died on a cross, in agony, suffering for what we have done, paying the price for our sins.

(Image details: Basilique Saint-Quentin, France - Crucifixion)

Understanding Jesus' Love

For my theology unit, one of the readings, Divine Teaching and Christian Beliefs (McIntosh, 2008), discusses the idea that theological beliefs could be tested by their effect upon the person with those beliefs. In other words, good practice equals right beliefs. McIntosh also discussed John Henry Newman’s idea that you can tell whether someone has healthy faith by whether they have love and compassion.

I disagreed with this view. Firstly, because Christians with good beliefs often do bad things. This doesn’t necessary mean their beliefs are wrong.

Secondly, it is not always easy to see what good practice - or even loving others - actually means. There are many Christians who all believe that they are modelling a Christian life of love, who are actually behaving in very different ways to one another.

How can we decide who is right? And if we start deciding that someone has an unhealthy faith because they are not loving, is it really that they are acting without love or is it simply that our idea of love is different to theirs?

Most people would agree that Jesus is our best example of how to love others. But still there is disagreement as to how we should love others, even when following his example.

To some, Jesus’ example is clear. He showed compassion and love on all occasions. Therefore, there should be no disagreement as to what our love should look like.

But Jesus’ example was not clear. Although he showed compassion, he also said things like:

‘You serpents, you brood of vipers, how are you to escape being sentenced to hell?’ (Matthew 23:33)

And:

‘And you, Capernaum, will you be exalted to heaven? You will be brought down to Hades. For if the mighty works done in you had been done in Sodom, it would have remained until this day. (Matthew 11:23).

Many Christians would suggest that mentioning hell to people is not a loving act. And yet if we are to hold Jesus up as the perfect example of love, we have to face the fact that Jesus mentioned hell.

The problem is that although Jesus modelled love perfectly, it is not always so easy to understand. It can’t be summed up in six easy to understand dot-points. It is not a one-sided view of love, that only seeks to love people in one way. It loves people in very different ways. And quite frankly, Jesus’ love is mind-boggling at times. Just when we think we understand Jesus’ love, He seems to approach it from a completely different direction.

I think the greatest mistake we can make is starting to believe we understand Jesus’ love. The first point is that we are not God. We cannot understand God’s love, because our minds our limited. God’s love is so much bigger than what we can comprehend.

Secondly, I think when we start believing we understand Jesus’ love, there’s a danger we may be seeing it from only one perspective. There is also the danger here that we may take that one perspective as the rule by which all our loving actions should be measured against. We must remember to consider the whole of Jesus’ actions and words, not just those that fit into our idea of what love is like.

It’s interesting to think about the Gospels from the point of view of the Apostles. I’m sure there would have been many times when they thought they were starting to understand where Jesus was coming from. But then Jesus goes and does something completely unexpected. Surely there were moments when they thought, ‘That doesn’t fit into my own ideas about who Jesus is. I’m going to have to rethink it all now.’

We like to put people in boxes. We like to figure out where they’re coming from and try and match all their actions up with that. But Jesus was far bigger than our little boxes. We can’t even imagine a box big enough to contain him. Whenever we think his example of love is easy to understand, what we’re really doing is reducing Jesus to a box that doesn’t extend beyond our own mind.

Jesus did not just have one approach to love. He didn’t come at love from the one angle. But we do. We tend to stress one aspect of love and ignore the others. We see love through very limited eyes. We cannot ever fully grasp how big love can be. Because we only ever see a tiny part of it.

Yes, we must always look to Jesus as an example of how to love. But we must never make the mistake of believing that we completely understand that example. We never will. Our minds (and our hearts) are too limited. His love is far bigger than our own ideas. And just when we think we finally get it, that we know how to love and what love means, Jesus is likely to do something completely unexpected. And we may have to rethink it all.

(Image details: Holy Trinity by Botticelli.)

Love is not...

At this time of year, you could almost be forgiven for thinking that love is about flowers, chocolates and very pink looking cards. It’s a pretty warped idea of love.

But then, watch any movie or television show and you’re likely to get as equally a warped view of love. Is it any surprise that many people’s idea of love is also warped?

Love is not flowers or chocolates or cards. Yes, these things may show someone’s love. But the absence of Valentine’s Day gifts does not mean love is missing anymore than their presence means that love is there.

Love is not wanting someone, in the way that someone wants to own or possess something. That’s lust.

Love is not trying to make someone fall in love with you or stay with you or come back to you. And it’s certainly not about trying to force them to do any of these things. That’s coercion.

Love is not about control or jealousy or always getting your own way or holding a grudge or winning an argument.

Love is definitely not about taking. And taking doesn’t just mean removing something from someone by force. It also means trying to make someone give you something they don’t actually want to give you. Trying to persuade someone to buy a gift or take you out for dinner is a form of taking. And love also isn’t about sulking or pouting when you don’t get what you want.

Love is not finding Mr or Mrs Right. It’s not about there being one special person out there who will finally make you happy or ‘complete you’. Or that there is one person for everybody and as soon as they find that one person, everything will be wonderful.

Love is less about happy endings and more about hard work.

And love is certainly not deciding that you have found that special person and that nothing else matters. That’s selfishness. Prior commitments, the pain of other people. The idea that these don’t matter once you find someone you ‘love’ is just nonsense. So is this idea that nothing else matters except being with the one you love.

Sometimes love means having to let go.

So what is love then?

As someone who didn’t exactly make a success of marriage, I feel more qualified to speak about what love is not than I do about what love actually is. So I’ll leave it to someone far wiser than me to describe it.

1 Corinthian 13:4-10.

[4] Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful;
[5] it is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful;
[6] it does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right.
[7] Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
[8] Love never ends; as for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away.
[9] For our knowledge is imperfect and our prophecy is imperfect;
[10] but when the perfect comes, the imperfect will pass away.

Love and Compassion in a Virtual World

In Australia recently, a teenager committed suicide about being bullied on the internet. Although I’m not a teenager and I wouldn’t exactly call it bullying, nor did the episode leave me feeling at all distraught, let alone suicidal, I too have experienced a fair bit of nastiness from people over the internet.

It left me wondering why people seem to be so cruel when the internet is involved. And whether we treat people differently on the internet than we do face to face. And most importantly, how should we interact with others in cyberspace?

When Jesus told his disciples that the greatest commandment was to love others, they could never have foreseen a world in which we communicate with people on the other side of the world. We write messages and interact with others who we may never see and never meet, who often seem not quite real to us. Not only that, but we ourselves can communicate in such a way that we remain mostly anonymous. We are virtual people talking to virtual people, living in virtual realities.

So does interacting in a virtual world mean we are only to love others virtually? Or does love and compassion have no place on the internet at all? Or should we always seek to treat others with dignity, love and compassion, regardless of how we are interacting with them?

It almost sounds like the question the disciples asked Jesus. Who exactly is our neighbour? Back then, I’m sure they were thinking of whether their neighbour was their friend or their relative or the people of their home town or a fellow Jew. When Jesus told the story of the Good Samaritan, Jesus expanded the idea of neighbour to include much more than they would have imagined.

Today, we might ask ‘Well who is my neighbour?’ Is it just the people I can see and touch and know. And I’m pretty sure that Jesus would expand our idea of neighbour to include even those people we only ‘meet’ on a computer screen. Even if we don’t know their name, even if we don’t know what they look like, even if they’re misrepresenting themselves, they are still our neighbour.

It is tempting to treat people in cyberspace differently than how we treat people we meet face to face. One reason why we may treat people differently on the internet is we are anonymous. The face that many of us show to the world is not a true reflection of what’s in our hearts. We treat each other with love and compassion, but our love and compassion only goes skin-deep. We act in a certain way because we don’t want to lose friends, or gain the disapproval of others.

The internet strips away many of these reasons. We cannot lose friends, because we don’t know the people we are communicating with. And if people disapprove, it doesn’t really matter, because they don’t know who we really are. In fact, the internet can often be an excuse to act out what really is in our heart, without fear of being found out or judged.

Jesus said that it’s what’s in our heart that matters. And the way we act towards others on the internet may be a good guide as to what we’re really like inside. We may think we are nice and fair and kind. But if we don’t act that way when we're anonymous, then perhaps we’re not really that way at all.

And we should also remember that just because we have certain thoughts in our mind, doesn’t mean we should put them out there where they can hurt other people. The fact we think something doesn’t mean we should write it. If what we are thinking is hurtful or mean, we should probably try to readjust our heart, rather than letting it all out on the internet.

Another reason we may be tempted to be cruel in cyberspace is we don’t know the people we are communicating with. And it’s harder to care about people who we don’t know. Different people will reveal different aspect of themselves. But for some of the people we interact with online, we know nothing more than the name they have chosen to use. We don’t know about their families or their friends or their problems or their lives. It is harder to care for people, when we know so little.

Not only do we know so little about them, but we see so little about how our words can hurt them. When we talk to someone in real life, we can usually tell when we have upset or offended someone or hurt somebody’s feelings. On the internet, we only know what someone chooses to reveal to us. Not only that, but we do not have to face their reactions to us if we don’t want to. We switch off the computer and no longer have to deal with it.

Sometimes it’s hard to even remember that they are real people. They feel a bit like the Microsoft Help paperclip. Just part of our computer experience. We turn the computer off and the person goes away. We read their comments. We interact with them. But we get no sense of who they really are, and so it’s easy to forget that they really are someone. They’re not just a character in a software program. They are real people who lead real lives. They care. They cry. They feel. And most importantly, God knows who they are. They are real people to Him. People that God cares about. And so we should care about them too.

(Image Details - The Good Samaritan - George Frederic Watts.

Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.)