Show me anything from any atheist organization like the Freedom From Religion Foundation, even those allegedly of the left, as that fraud started out claiming to be, that matches just this passage from Walter Brueggemann, based completely and forcefully on both the First and Second Testament of the Bible you mock.
And we have to recognize that the totalism in which we live is a system of incredible militarization, so that on the one hand what we are seeing is the militarization of the police, and on the other hand we are seeing the militarization of sports.
It turns out that the NFL is really the great military liturgy. And now at NFL football games, the announcer says, “Please stand, and place your hand on your heart.” It's kind of coerced patriotism. And we are able to see, if you just look at anything on television, that the totalism is committed to consumerism. It believes that more stuff will somehow make us safe, and will somehow make us happy. So, this combination of acquisitiveness, militarization, and consumerism adds up to a doctrine of exceptionalism, which then gets translated into "Make America Great Again." And it is all blessed by an anemic God who has no function except to bless white nationalism.
If you just take the case of Colin Kaepernick, you can see that this system is ready to ruthlessly silence anyone who speaks or acts to the contrary. So what prophetic judgment amounts to is making the case that acquisitiveness leads to violence, that militarization leads to bankruptcy, that consumerism leads to the evaporation of citizenship, that ecological exploitation leads to chaotic weather, that silencing leads to brutality, and that exceptionalism leads to white tribalism. It is a package that needs to be exposed at the teaching level of the religious community.
So the first task is to identify the totalism. The second task is to identify the contradictions that put us on the route to death, because one can see that we now live in a society that is engaged in its self-destruction.
Organized atheism is no alternative to that totalism, it shares in the exact same foundation in materialist scientistic worship of technology and the cargo-cult of ever multiplying products to make at an enormous environmental cost and cost in slave labor, to sell, to use briefly (using environmentally damaging energy production), then to send to the landfill or to be broken up for the poisonous components of it in third-world hell holes, some of those in the Marxist paradises such as China. All of which is based on the profit-making and wealth concentrating system of slave labor and wage slavery. In all too many instances "work" is slavery with a pittance being paid to those kept in bare subsistence if that.
Nothing in organized atheism, not even the remnants of the Marxist atheists, is as radical as what Brueggemann lays out in that article, some of what he said in the talk I posted yesterday strikes me as being even more radical. If the ecnonomic laws of Deuteronomy were the law of the land, billionaires would disappear, destitution would disappear, the leveling effect would be profound, debt slavery would end. Debt slavery is, as Brueggemann has pointed out, one of the issues that is constantly addressed in The Bible from Exodus to the last mention of it in the epistles. His argument about how the story of Joseph and Pharaoh's dreams about famine and the system that was set up to turn The People into slaves and how the central narrative of the Bible, the Exodus story is not only a complaint about that but a practical means of ending and avoiding such things should be at the center of a real egalitarian democratic left. Not some lame-asssed Ronald Reagan jr. fame fucking promotion of the scientistic materialism that is one of the central pillars of the totalism that oppresses us and which any real left has to fight. Atheism is inherently totalistic, its central ideology, materialism is a totalistic ideological holding. It will always end up oppressing people.
The Superbowl is the central religious holiday of the American Mammonist part of that totalism. It is the most anti-Christian day of the year. As Brueggemann has pointed out, the football industry has claimed "We own Sunday" a day which used to be devoted, at least in theory, to God. The extent to which any christian institution or sect or denomination tolerates that is the extent to which it has joined the totalism. As can be seen in much of Brueggemann's work, religion is self critical, atheism never is as the Mammonism that it is a part of never is, either.
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