Andrew Sullivan

Latest revision as of 15:19, 26 February 2008

Andrew Sullivan on Christianity... as usual, he makes up things to reconcile his own bizarre stance:

That is my intent with the term "Christianist" and "Christianism." The truth is: I do not recognize my own Christianity or the Christianity of millions in the blasphemous words of Tom DeLay or Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson. These individuals are political figures, using faith as a weapon to advance a political agenda that aims at policing people's moral lives, removing people's civil rights, and marginalizing minorities. Today, in the NYT, Garry Wills brilliantly defends Christianity and Jesus from such blasphemy and hubris. In this, I think many evangelicals and even fundamentalists quietly but overwhelmingly concur. The distinction between religion and politics was long understood among American evangelicals; and it is central to Jesus' message. It took hubristic liberalism to galvanize American evangelicals into a politicized response; but subsequently the movement of right-wing Christianism has achieved a momentum all its own. It has even spawned a Catholic off-shoot: the theocons who also want to deploy faith for political gain and an assault on liberty. Wills is right that a left-wing Christianism would be no better. Democrats should do all they can to resist that temptation.

Andrew had this to say when debating Sam Harris:

As the Pope said last year, I believe that God is truth and truth is, by definition, reasonable. Science cannot disprove true faith; because true faith rests on the truth; and science cannot be in ultimate conflict with the truth. So I am perfectly happy to believe in evolution, for example, as the most powerful theory yet devised explaining human history and pre-history. I have no fear of what science will tell us about the universe - since God is definitionally the Creator of such a universe; and the meaning of the universe cannot be in conflict with its Creator. I do not, in other words, see reason as somehow in conflict with faith - since both are reconciled by a Truth that may yet be beyond our understanding.[1]

This of course, is a classic example of Sullivan's fence-sitting when it suits his agenda. After all, Sullivan, who is HIV-positive and likely still alive today because he depends upon a plethora of drugs developed by secular science, cannot afford to fully-trust in his faith in God.

Here Christopher Hitchens debates Andrew Sullivan: