BroadSnark

By now you have probably heard about Brit Hume’s on air proselytizing directed at Tiger Woods. If not, you can watch the video below where Hume suggests that Christianity offers a forgiveness that Buddhism does not and recommends that Tiger Woods convert.

Really Brit Hume? Christianity offers a special kind of forgiveness? Tell that to the more than 3,000 inmates on death row.  According to gallop, 71% of protestants support the death penalty.  Christians say that, since god prescribed how death sentences should be meted out in the bible, the death penalty isn’t a problem.  In fact, the death penalty is love.

When Christians support three strikes laws that give people life in prison for theft crimes, is it all about love and forgiveness? How about the quadriplegic man who died in DC prison, after refusing to promise the judge he would never smoke pot again.  Was he, like the thousands of others put in prison for marijuana, supposed to have felt the love and forgiveness of the (primarily christian) people who work for the justice system?

Or maybe Hume is talking about the kind of forgiveness Iris Robinson has received.  She is the anti-gay bigot who was recently busted having an affair.  She confessed to have treated her family horribly, but says that god has forgiven her.  (Note: Nothing in the article about her family forgiving her.)

I often think that -  even more than fear of death, attachment to tradition, desire for community, or the need to deal with tragedy – it is trying to face their own mistakes that makes people turn to religion. Yet for so many people, their religion gives them the worst of two extremes.

On the one hand, Christianity paints a world in stark black and white, good vs. evil terms.  Christians labels people as sinners and are quick to throw them away when they screw up.  The religion lays on guilt and judgment for things as normal and necessary for life as sex.  And so it creates people unable to accept their own humanity, ashamed of who they are, unable to deal with their own desires and mistakes.

To the other extreme are those Christians who think their religion is like a get out of hell free card.  You can do whatever you want to people and then just say a few Ave Marias and all is well again.   These people act as though forgiveness can be bestowed, like a queen knights her subject.

Forgiveness is work.  You don’t develop compassion for other people until you can face your own worst mistakes and forgive yourself for them. And you don’t get to just accept easy forgiveness from your god without any attempt at reparations to the people and community you hurt.

While there may be those whose find in Christianity a path to the “soul searching” that makes forgiveness and reparations possible, more often than not their religion only seems to get in the way of that process.