Religious Atheism

Common Sense

2012-02-09T07:46:00.000-08:00

“Common Sense” is a very short book, written in 1776. Itcovers a lot of ground. It can be found for free on the Internet in variousforms. He eventually gets to talking about the necessity of a Navy for the newcountry and the importance of acting in a timely manner. But before that helooks at how the whole idea of countries and governments got started in thefirst place. He has to make some assumptions, but it still is a better place tostart than most of the arguments about government that go on today.

When discussing governments these days, either I’m in a roomfull of people who agree with me that there are few good leaders out there andthey are struggling against corruption by big money and political deals thatdon’t have the best interests of the country in mind. Or, I’m talking to just afew people who think we started out with some very basic values and thosevalues have been corrupted by a post-modern world that wants to redistributewealth. Both of those points of view involve a lot of assuming and rarely leadto a discussion of what are the basic reasons for government.

Thomas Paine starts his book with basic reasons. In a word,he says governments are for security. He goes on to talk about how we got tothe idea of Kings and eventually to the King of England and all the problemswith the monarchy and system of succession at that time. He is building a caseto convince the American people that it is time to separate themselves fromthat system and create their own. Regardless of how you feel about how thatworked out or whether or not he is being completely honest about his intentions,he presents his case well and it is worth studying his thoughts.

He is a man of his time, and he also has some assumptions heis working with. Although “separation of church and state” would not be utteredfor a generation, in the latter half of the book he says, “ For myself, I fully and conscientiously believethat it is the will of the Almighty that there should be a diversity ofreligious opinions among us.” Then immediately follows that with, “It affords alarger field for our Christian kindness; were we all of one way of thinking,our religious dispositions would want matter for probation; and on this liberalprinciple I look on the various denominations among us to be like children ofthe same family, differing only in what is called their Christian names.” Thisreminded me of the line from The Blues Brothers movie when John Belushi asks abar owner what kind of music they play, and she says, “both kinds, country andwestern.”

I digress somewhat, butbeing a man who lived in a world dominated by Christianity, Paine needs toaddress it to make a case for such a blasphemous idea as going against thedivine right of the King. He does so saying,

“As the exalting one man sogreatly above the rest cannot be justified on the equal rights of nature, soneither can it be defended on the authority of scripture; for the will of theAlmighty as declared by Gideon, and the prophet Samuel, expressly disapprovesof government by Kings.”

In a bit of Biblicalanalysis that foreshadows the actions of George Washington, Paine recounts thestory of Gideon, a conquering general who was offered the crown including successionof his progeny forever. Gideon refused saying, “"I will not rule over you,neither shall my son rule over you. THE LORD SHALL RULE OVER YOU." (Judges8:23) Not only declining, but denying their right to give it. It was abrilliant argument against monarchy.... for 1776.

In a different time, 1333 BCE, a 9 year old, Tutankhaten acceded tothe Egyptian throne. One wonders what divine right he (or his mother) claimedto make such an accession and how he justified restoring the old deities andgiving powers back to the priests of Amun. Probably not something Americans think much about, but many Americans docontinue to think about, discuss, even bring up in presidential debate, theirBiblical justifications for caring for the poor, giving much to those who frommuch is expected, the limits of usury, what is or isn’t an abomination, therights of women and much more.

At some point in the future, if our accumulated knowledgesurvives long enough, the question of King Tut’s justification for restoringearlier deities will be equivalent to the question of whether or not Americawas founded as a Christian nation. America will be just another empire thatrose and fell and Christianity another religion that reflected the culture ofits time. If you disagree, then you are saying that Christianity is unlike anyreligion that has come before. That it will survive all future changes andencroachments of new knowledge. I’m not so worried about the people whodisagree as those who see this future coming, but ignore it.

Introducing Averroes

2012-02-01T16:41:00.000-08:00

“Isti,qui negant aliquod ens contingens, exponendi sunt tormentis quousque concedant,quod possibile est eos non torqueri”Translation:“Thosewho deny the existence of contingency should be tortured until they admit thatit is possible for them not to be tortured.” ― Duns Scotus

WhenI first came across this, I was a bit shocked. Taken literally, it is barbaric.It was written sometime in the late 13^th century, in Europe, whichwould be known for barbarism. That context doesn’t make it much less shocking.However Duns Scotus was a philosopher, not a member of the Spanish Inquistion.

Itis likely that he did not actually intend to have anyone tortured. This quoteis supposedly how he demonstrated that we have free will. When he says“contingency” he was talking about what we would today understand as “freewill”. His logic is, if someone istorturing you and you ask them to stop, they would need to have free will to dothat. Philosopher’s arguments weren’t all that sophisticated back then. It hasthe ring of a bully saying, “why are you hitting yourself?” while he has yourwrist and is smacking your own hand against your head.

Freewill is an important element of Christianity because without it, we could notchoose to believe in God or not, or choose to follow his laws or not. If wearen’t doing that, then all of God’s punishments don’t make any sense. Theydon’t make any sense anyway, especially when someone says an entire nation ispunished for something done by one person in a previous generation, but such isthe logic of the Bible and its readers.

Whensomeone says that our entire system of law is based on Judeo-Christian thought,this is partly what they are talking about, and they are partly right. Manyother religions are based on gods and goddesses that act arbitrarily and takeover the minds of people and cause all sorts of things to happen for whateverreason they feel like. Gods not of the Bible often have personality flaws ormore human characteristics. God of the Bible sometimes does too, partly becausethere is the YHWH god and the Elohim god, but that’s a different blog. Most ofthe time, Judeo-Christian God is absent, speaking through bushes, a still softvoice, or sending cryptic messages via angels. But this idea that we have someability to reason and make choices is pretty consistent throughout the Bible.

Therewere of course other gods and philosophies and a strong influence on Europeanthought at the time was the rediscovery of Aristotle. When Rome fell and thetribes of Europe fell into constant warfare, the writings of Plato andAristotle were mostly lost to the West. They made their way to the new Rome,the Byzantine Empire in what is now Turkey and further East to Baghdad. As theMuslim Empire grew, they translated the Greek writings and expanded on their ideas,leading to what most agree is the beginning of modern science.

TheMuslim Empire expanded all the way across Northern Africa and into Spain.Cordoba Spain was a jewel of multi-culturalism, while most of Europe was stillin the Dark Ages. I know some will say that things were happening with theChristians, there was Pope Sylvester II who questioned authority andexperimented. But then not too much later there was the Inquisition. Theseconservative and liberal swings continue for centuries, with small advances inideas like better treatment for slaves, then a return to repression. For themost part, a culture of magic, the divine right of Kings and rule by forceprevailed. The Muslim Empire experienced similar swings with only slightlybetter success during the times when seeking knowledge was encouraged.

Duringone of those swings, in Spain, a man by the name of Averroes was commissionedto translate Aristotle. This led him to write on how one might reconcile faith,something that all but a very few considered the only way of looking at theworld, with reason, something Aristotle spoke of at length. Reading Averroes,you might think he was a bit crazy. It seems like he is rambling, grasping fora thought. You have to keep in mind he didn’t understand how energy gets herefrom the sun, how mountains were formed by glaciers or how humans evolved fromearlier life forms. He was one of the first to guide us toward how we wouldeventually figure out all those things.

Youalso have to keep in mind that he was aware of those conservative/liberalswings. He was commissioned by a liberal Caliph, but in his lifetime his workswere banned and he was exiled from Spain. Fortunately for him this was brief.He may have wanted to say much more but didn’t out of fear. He may have wantedto say that logically, there is no god, that god is a symbolic construct tohelp explain our feelings and dreams, that it is used by the powerful tooppress women and justify slavery. That probably would have got him more thanexiled. But I don’t know what he thought, only what he wrote.

Whenhis ideas and translations passed into the Universities that were run by theRoman Catholic Church, they met with more trouble. Thomas Aquinas attempted towork out his own version of reconciling faith and reason. Then in 1277, mostphilosophy was banned from being taught. The bans were eventually lifted andAquinas was eventually given sainthood, but not without much wailing andgnashing of teeth. It was William of Ockham who came up with the formula thatallowed science to move forward and religion to maintain its hold on the heartsof men.

According to Ockham, God creates the universe and can dowhatever he wants. We discover patterns in that creation, but reason is notinherent in nature, it is only in our minds. We can explain nature, but wecan’t explain God. This answers Euthyphro’s dilemma by saying good is what Goddeclares good. The Church is the only authority to say why or to determine whatis evil and who should be punished for it. Science is left to discover patternsall it wants, but has no say about what the church says is a miracle.

Underthat system, Galileo was given a tour of the torture chamber. Under thatsystem, the Church went through a string of some of its worse Popes untilLuther had his say. Against that system, governments finally started to buildwalls against the influence. The recent political debates have me wondering ifwe have made much progress in the last 1,000 years.

Fat Albert

2012-01-24T18:12:00.000-08:00

When Bill Cosby first introduced Fat Albert in his standuproutines, he told a story about scaring him with a big statue and how FatAlbert crushed his friend when he panicked. He got a big laugh. Then he said,“I told you that story so I could tell you this one”, and told another FatAlbert story. I did last week’s blog so I could do this one.

Before I started this blog, not just this post, the whole thing, I discovered something called the“Emergent Church” or some say the “Emerging Church”. Phyllis Tickle gives agreat explanation of it here.

Phyllis Tickle and the rose

I eventually came across the guy who everybody points to asgetting the idea started. His name is Brian McLaren. He became an Evangelicalpastor a little later in life and figured if he was going to be serious aboutit, he should go meet some of these poor people he was preaching about. He has sincevisited a variety of cultures and gained a deep understanding of what it is tobe poor. He has sat through meetings where people who are on the ground, withtheir elbows deep in helping oppressed people have challenged religious leadersto do more than just pray for those people. He has seen people shift theirthinking from other worldly thoughts to a hands-on focus of what needs to bedone to make this earth heavenly. So, I was kinda excited about reading one ofthe books central to his message, EverythingMust Change.

I was disappointed.

He starts with his personal story then asks, what do we donow? He looks at the global priorities of a few global organizations. Okay.Then he makes up an oversimplified model of the gears of society as theycurrently turn. Next he talks about how we should frame our discussion and ourwork and attempts to use Biblical stories to do it. I agree strongly with theproblems he points out with the framing stories that were used to subjugate thepeasants of Europe and build the not-so-holy Roman Catholic Empire, but Icringe when he tries to create a new framing story.

He seems to be familiar with the type of analysis I found inParables as Subversive Speech, but Iread every footnote and it ain’t in there. It’s as if he wants to use some ofthat history, but not all of it, only the parts that fit his preconceivedideas. Basically the same sort of cherry picking that every theologianthroughout history has done. But I don’t know if he has read Parables as Subversive Speech or not, soit may be that his view of history is incomplete, or just different from mine.

When he talks about parables with stewards in them, he comesvery close to describing the world described by the historian Lenski. But whenhe analyzes the Parable of the Unjust Steward, he selects a theology thatinvolves gathering up points for heaven instead of viewing the steward assomeone who is a cog in a corrupt system, who does what he can with the toolshe has. He praises the steward for “switching sides”. Since the steward wouldbe switching to the side of the peasants, McLaren doesn’t have an explanationfor his boss praising his actions. He leaves you dangling with an incompleteinterpretation, making you figure it out. Maybe that confusing line was Jesusadding a tag line to the parable. What does Brian think? Who knows?

McLaren has a huge heart, a sharp mind and I hope his handscontinue to do good work. He has no reason to care about what I have said here.He is having success turning eyes away from invisible things in the clouds downto the not so pretty problems with creation. We need that. The question is, ifwe maintain a view that still includes focusing on invisible things, will we be able tofix those problems or just be faced with different ones later?

Is his framing story different enough to make a difference?I’m wondering if it is different at all. After discussing some parables andproviding some translations from the Greek and pointing out some Bible passagesthat could be said to contradict the idea of a Jesus that came to support aright-wing political agenda of rules about what people do in the bedroom or howthey should treat their slaves, he starts listing what he thinks are the rightthings to do. Personally, I find these things non-controversial, like caringfor people who have less than me, looking for peaceful resolutions toconflicts, paying people what they are worth, stuff like that.

The rest of the book is lists of ideas like this,interspersed with data about how those things are not happening now; like howmany people live on less than a dollar day, or don’t have access to cleanwater. If you don’t know about those things and you think God is doing a goodjob, buy this book, otherwise don’t bother.

When he says “Everything Must Change”, by “Everything” hemeans the ancient framing story that got us into this mess. If you believe inthat story, he is only asking you to change a little bit. At the end of one ofthose lists of what he thinks you should be doing, he says, we can accomplishthem by “following a weaponless prophet in Galilee”. He doesn't explain that, he just makes up whatJesus might do if he were incarnate today.

So, really, you get to leave quite a bit unchanged. For thatreason, I believe this framing story will fail in basically the same way thecurrent one is failing. By loosely connecting the list of good ideas to aninterpretation of some scripture, the door is wide open to altering theinterpretation and picking different scripture to justify a different list. Ireally don’t know if McLaren’s reading of Greek is accurate or not. Since heknows I could check up on him, I hope he is honest, but very few people will dothat work or even care to. And we don’t know if the future will continue tobring us the amazingly easy access to information that we have been given inthe last few decades. Very small changes could put us back in the Dark Ageswhen a few people told everybody else what the Bible meant.

There are other framing stories. Just because I don’t offeran alternative in this week’s blog doesn’t mean they aren’t there or they arenot valid. McLaren is on a parallel track with some of those stories, but histrack is going to run out. I’m not worried about him causing a train wreck andhope to meet up with him further on down the line.

Shrewd or Unjust?

2012-01-19T11:16:00.000-08:00

I don’t have a Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. blog this year asI have in years past. However, I will make a comparison before I get started.Not the usual, obvious comparisons of what is similar between his life andJesus’ but how we treat the two differently.

You can’t tell the story of Martin Luther King Jr. withoutmentioning churches. You could skip the details of his career as a pastor butif you are telling the story with any detail at all, you would have to mentionthat he used the structure of the Southern Baptist church to do much of hisorganizing. You would not however need to stress these details or explain them.Churches and organizing just go together. When telling the story of Jesus, thecontext of his Jewish community is commonly left out, everything is fit intowhat his legacy eventually became. That is, the theology we humans have created.

Another set of details is normally left out and is notrequired to understand Rev. King’s part in the civil rights movement. That is,he liked to party on occasion. And he had some marital problems. There arewebsites dedicated to this. There are people that believe it defines the manand the movement and negates the progress that was made. Fortunately thosepeople are few and far between. For most people, a simple examination of lifein 1950’s America compared to life in the 1970’s is enough to understand theimportance of what was accomplished in the 1960’s.

That is not to say that the movement was simple. Forces wereat play for centuries leading to those momentous years. The individual actionsof the Freedom Riders and people who did seemingly simple things like sittingat a “Whites Only” café were profound and heroic. We are getting far enoughaway from those actions that it is necessary to not only tell the story ofthose heroes, it is necessary to explain why it was heroic, why there was a“Whites Only” café in the first place. We are not so far away that the full contextsof the stories are inaccessible or the meaning of the details of actions andwords are indecipherable.

When we tell the story of Martin Luther King Jr. we don’tneed to embellish the man. Some may object that his role as pastor is not highlightedenough, others that his influence from the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hhan israrely mentioned. Once these things are mentioned, what else is there to say?If his title as Reverend was the factor that made him great, then why didn’t adifferent Reverend accomplish what he did? If it was the influence ofChristianity, why was such a Christian nation so slow in dealing with its civilrights problems in the first place? When we examine how the movement took hold,we only need to examine the words that were spoken, the deals that were made,the strategies that were applied, the causes and the affects.

We can examine those things in great detail. When Kingstarted his “I Have a Dream” speech, he talked about coming to Washington to“cash a check”. We know what that means. We can view the video from that dayand see that that phrase was not very inspiring; the crowd was not reacting toit. We know his speech writer and he tells us that King had alternative scriptsthat he could use to improvise. When he moves on to drawing from the My Country Tis of Thee and the Old Testament, we know where he got those linesand we can see that his audience ate it up. We know why he choose those wordsand can marvel at his genius at being able to pull them up at that moment andinspire 250,000 people that day as well as generations to come.

We can only scratch the surface when attempting to do that withthe Bible. When the New Testament talks of the “New Covenant”, we don’t knowwhen exactly that started, or what changes to the laws of Moses it actuallycovered. The Old Testament refers to earlier books that we only know of becauseof those passages. We don’t know if they are quoted accurately or who wrotethem. When Jesus tells the Parable of the Unjust Steward, we don’t know how hisaudience reacted. That of course doesn’tstop people from claiming that they do know. Many people are quite sure they doknow exactly what Jesus meant. Unfortunately for the rest of us, this iswritten on their heart, and we can’t read that.

When we look at the life of Martin Luther King Jr. we don’tneed to first create a mythology and then fit his life into it. Hisaccomplishments stand on their own. We know what he was trying to do and howwell he did it. When looking at the words of a small group of Jews in Palestine2,000 years ago, we can’t be sure what they were trying to do. When we try tofigure it out, we are stymied by ancient languages and symbolism that wasalready becoming arcane at the time. Records were not made until decades afterthe event. Enough of it was timeless, universal and powerful that it survived,but its original form has been lost.

Very few books, articles or sermons even attempt to examinethe details of the words attributed to Jesus without first presupposing atheology. One that I just started is “Parables as Subversive Speech” by WilliamHerzog. He draws heavily the history scholarship of Gerhard Lenski and compares the scriptures to the teaching work of Paulo Freire He takes a line by line analysis of several parables and tests them against hishypothesis. He synthesizes, compares and contrasts his conclusions with thoseof several theologians in the last century as he goes. I’ll spare you most ofthose details but supply enough of them to give you an idea of what thisreveals.

The parable I’ll use as an example comes from Luke 16 and issometimes called “The Parable of the Shrewd Manager” or sometimes “The Parableof the Unjust Steward”. The naming problem indicates the difficulty theologianshave had. Later we’ll see how Luke himself may have been wrestling with whatwas meant. The parable begins:

¹ Jesus told his disciples: “There was a rich man whose manager was accusedof wasting his possessions. ² So he called him in and asked him, ‘What is this I hear aboutyou? Give an account of your management, because you cannot be manager anylonger.’

The first problem is determining who the characters are intendedto represent. Many assume the rich man is a representation of God. This becomesa problem later as we shall see. Herzog sees these characters as representingexactly what the story says they are. What is missing, what is not supplied inthe Bible, is an understanding of the roles these people would have played.More on that as the story unfolds.

We are also limited by the English language with the word“accused”. It doesn’t tell us if the accusation is false, verified, orgroundless. According to some, the verb diaballofrom the original text could imply a slanderous accusation. From history, wecan know the manager is in a tenuous position. Neither the rich man nor hisdebtors completely trust him. He has to please both of them while attempting togain profits from them.

Many interpreters also apply a capitalist’s viewpoint tothese opening statements. Assumptions are made that the manager has failed inhis ability to extract the correct amount of interest, or was accused of thetype of banking malfeasance that we have seen in recent decades. If the settingof the story is a Jewish community, that analysis could not apply. The laws ofMoses were clear on the subject of usury. That is not to say that there weren’tways around those laws. Rather than looking for who is corrupt and who is justin this parable, it may make more sense if we see the whole corrupt system; theoppressors have found ways to hide the interest they are charging and theoppressed find it necessary to lie just to survive.

Some highlight the fact that the steward is not immediatelydismissed, saying this is an act of Godly forgiveness. Instead he is told toget his books in order and explain his accounting. Some also note that thesteward does not put up a protest, a seeming admission of guilt. It could bethat he knows he is in a position of low power and a public display would only makematters worse for him.

Next we hear the thoughts of the manager, who has beenaccused of cheating the rich man,

³ “The manager said to himself, ‘What shall I do now? My master istaking away my job. I’m not strong enough to dig, and I’m ashamed to beg— ⁴ I knowwhat I’ll do so that, when I lose my job here, people will welcome me intotheir houses.’

A simple reading of this, with 21st century eyes, mightsound like this manager is weak, not willing to do some hard work. What hewould have known that isn’t explained to us here is that the demotion he islooking at, to beggar or laborer, is closer to a death sentence. Laborers didnot enjoy long healthy lives. They worked hard because of the threat ofbecoming beggars. Once a beggar, his life may only last a few more years. Managerssuch as he were motivated by this threat and rich men made sure to maintain thepool of beggars through arbitrary firings.

   ⁵ “So he called in each one of his master’s debtors. He asked thefirst, ‘How much do you owe my master?’
   ⁶ “‘Nine hundred gallons of olive oil,’ he replied.
   “The manager told him, ‘Takeyour bill, sit down quickly, and make it four hundred and fifty.’

A fifty percent cut. Anyone can easily understand this wasgood for the debtors. Who are these debtors? There were not very many middlemen in this system. Most likely these are the people who worked the land. Theymight have been some type of merchant, the power relationships change little ifthey were. If they were tenants, theywould keep some of the produce for themselves, but must give much of it to themanager. The manager is probably taking a small cut of his own, off the books,and the land owner gets the lion’s share, but he in turn he is taxed by theRomans and is in constant competition with those of his class.

   ⁷ “Then he asked the second, ‘And how much do you owe?’
   “‘A thousand bushels of wheat,’ he replied.
   “He told him, ‘Take your billand make it eight hundred.’

The rich man is telling his tenants (the debtors) to growolive oil and wheat. From theperspective of our culture where all produce is a commodity, this doesn’t tellus much. A little understanding of agriculture at that time tells us much. Theaudience hearing these words would know that the rich man had used Roman law toforce the peasants from their land and turned it from land that provided foodfor them to land that produced a commodity. Where once they could live off thatland with their own labor, they now had to work for the rich man for whatevermeager wage he would supply. The manager’s job was not only to handle the booksand run the errands; he needed to know just how much he could squeeze out ofthe peasants. The master is careful to keep his hands clean of this and nomatter how the manager explains his accounting; he will end up being blamed forsome kind of wrongdoing.

Note also that the steward deals with each debtorindividually. The debtors are not aware the he is about to be let go. They areall aware of the inherent corruption of the system and recognize that theamounts of the reductions are equivalent to the hidden interest. This paintsthe rich man into a corner and provides an explanation for the punch line ofthe parable.

^8a “The master commended the dishonest manager because he had actedshrewdly.

This is the difficult line, actually half line, that anyonewho has equated the rich man, now referred to as the master, with God or Jesusor anything good. That good character is now praising the manager for cuttingdeals that significantly reduce his profits. If up to now you have painted themanager as lazy or corrupt, why is the master suddenly praising him? If theriches of the oil and wheat are equated with riches in heaven, why is it goodthat he reduced their value?

Herzog and others assume that the manager has brought thedebtors and master together, back in the public light, putting the master in aposition of refusing to honor the negotiations of the lowered prices, thushurting his relationship with the debtors, or honoring them and saving face. Ifhe protested, he would have to argue that he deserved the interest payment thatwas kept secret by silent agreement. His loss will only be short term. Thedebtors know they have got away with a deal this time but it won’t happen againsoon. So the rich man has lost this hand, but new cards have been dealt for him.

In the end, all parties, normally at odds with each other,are happy with the current outcome and praising each other. The steward,although weak, has used one of the few weapons at his disposal to demonstratehis value. Briefly, the distinction of mine and thine was erased, giving all aglimpse of a more just world.

The following verses may or may not be from the originalparable. This post is longer than usual and you may qualify for canonization ifyou have read this far. I won’t bore you with more details about when the bookof Luke was written, who the actual author might have been, what his style wasor any of the four or more theories about where this parable actually ends.Suffice it to say that these verses appear to be attempts to make sense of theparable, just as we are doing now.

^8b For thepeople of this world are more shrewd in dealing with their own kind than arethe people of the light. ⁹ I tell you, use worldly wealth to gain friends for yourselves, sothat when it is gone, you will be welcomed into eternal dwellings.
¹⁰ “Whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted withmuch, and whoever is dishonest with very little will also be dishonest withmuch. ¹¹ So if you have not been trustworthy in handling worldly wealth,who will trust you with true riches? ¹² And if you have not been trustworthy with someone else’s property,who will give you property of your own?
¹³ “No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one andlove the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. Youcannot serve both God and money.”
¹⁴ The Pharisees, who loved money, heard all this and were sneeringat Jesus. ¹⁵ He said to them, “You arethe ones who justify yourselves in the eyes of others, but God knows your hearts.What people value highly is detestable in God’s sight.

*** Footnotes and references should be provided to clarifythe reliability of statements in this article. I decided to forego them andrefer you to Herzog’s work, a thorough and scholarly thesis.

2012 Kickoff

2012-01-05T08:58:00.000-08:00

Over the course of the last several years, I have searchedfor a perspective on ancient scriptures that could make sense. I discoveredthere are 30,000 perspectives on Christianity including something called The Emerging Church.I found an activist in my area who says that every church should be a peace church.For Christmas, I got a few books that have been on my list for a while, one ofthem says Everything Must Change.While waiting to unwrap them, I came across a tattoed, sarcastic Lutheran.

When I tired of looking for new leaders, I looked into moredetails about the old and dead people they were referencing, and found therewas not much new under the sun. The recent authors, writers and leaders havebrought some fresh language, some challenges that are more entertaining thanthe typical Sunday Sermon and, although it can’t proven, hopefully they haveinspired some young people to participate in a world that would be happy tohave them be disenfranchised consumers of a prepackaged culture. But the core messageonly changes slightly in flavor, not substance, and the substance is stillpaper thin.

Seeing young people inspired is an inspiration in itself.But it is not enough. Religion has been on the skids for 500 years. Warmed overversions of it have shown its amazing staying power but they don’t indicatereal change. The latest techno hip-hop networked version is not emerging asanything that will stand out when this millennium is reviewed.

As I prefer concrete examples, take a closer look at the Sarcastic Lutheran’s sermon about Jesus walking on water and inspiring Peter tohave faith and do the same.

The new packaging starts with the ripping of the oldinterpretation of the parable. And I agree completely with her assessment thatsimply telling someone to have faith doesn’t accomplish much. This begs thequestion of why she is there preaching on that very story, and she addressesthat directly. She answers that God’s story speaks to us better than any otherstory. She only offers this as an assertion then moves on to suggesting ways tofind yourself in the story. This is slightly better than just telling you whata sinner you are or who you should be, but she gets to the “shoulds” soonenough.

She moves on to her new and improved insight for theparable. She switches from you wanting to go walk on the water, to seeing thatJesus is coming to you. I see a room of twenty somethings leaning forward asNadia dances through that first half of the sermon, then slumping back, someshowing disappointment, some looking thoughtful as they try to figure out whatthe message was. Perhaps they discuss it over a macchiatto, or send a tweet,“Jesus walks on the water towards me #parable”. Hopefully they feel the senseof community as they clean up the park or visit the nursing home.

On to Christmas Day

When I unwrapped my books, Icouldn’t decide on just one so I had to skim several. I found that Brian McLaren’stitle “Everything Must Change” came from a Burundi woman living inRwanda. He had met her while there on a mission trip just after the war in thatcountry. They had been discussing the “essential” message of Jesus. The womanwas stunned by this discussion and realized,

“I see that it is about changingthis world, not just escaping it and retreating into our churches. If Jesus’message of the Kingdom of God is true, then everything must change. Everythingmust change.”

He goes on in the book to explainhow he went through a personal conversion, from wanting to organize a churchwith celebrations and support groups to becoming a participant in working onglobal problems. I was attracted to the book because I agree that everythingmust change, or it is unlikely that anything resembling our currentcivilization will survive. What I doubt the book will address is why thepresupposition of “If Jesus’ message…” is needed.

AndInto the New Year

One of the other books I got comesa little closer to answering that. This one has been on my list for a longtime. It contains a discussion of the original interpreter of The Parable of the Talents that inspired this blog. It is a rare look at the first century using historical analysis, rather than atheological one. There are attempts at this that claim to use historicalanalysis and the author, William Herzog, addresses them in his Introduction. Herealized that previous interpreters started with an idea of what Jesus’ministry was then fit the interpretation of the parables into that framework.

This would be expected intheology. There is an overriding theme that Jesus came to die for our sins andeverything has to fit into that. An historical analysis can’t make such anassumption, or even assume that Jesus was thinking it when he spoke. In fact,an historical analysis can’t even assume that Jesus was an actual person thatever walked on this earth. The book does not go that far.

The sub-title of the book is“Jesus as Pedagogue of the Oppressed”, and that is the assumption, thehypothesis, that he attempts to test against the analysis of the parables. Heis selective of scripture and admits that it will not work on all scripture. Heacknowledges the possibility that scripture may not always accurately reflectthe original teachings either by misrepresentation from the time they werewritten or the introduction of later errors. I have only just started the book,but as yet I don’t see any hint that he would consider Jesus was a made upcharacter.

So his historiography may not beperfect, but I am not aware of any similar application to this particularsubject. With the increasingly disappointing results from theology in a worldin need of teachers, it is long overdue.

Jesus Retires

2011-12-28T19:22:00.000-08:00

If I had more time or talent I would make a YouTube out of this or a cartoon or something. But here is a little script I wrote:

TV: (Play by play of baseball game. Fade this volume out ascharacters begin to speak. Props such as a ball, glove and bat for soundeffects as well as a couple people imitating crowd noise could add to thescene.)

Jesus (watching a baseball game in an easy chair)

Mary (walking by, cleaning): Aren’t you supposed to beworking today?

Jesus: This is work (picks up a stack of paper and slaps itdown)

Mary: It sure doesn’t look like it.

Jesus: Mother, please, I have 10,000 people praying for ahome run and 12,000 praying for a strike, not to mention a few dozen praying noone will get hurt and that one Methodist who just wants everybody to do theirbest. I have to figure out how to make this all look like they have free willbut still need all my love and power.

Mary: Well okay, but don’t forget your father had planstoday.

Jesus: What is Joseph up to now, he is not my real fatheryou know.

Mary: Of course I know, he reminds me of how he got left outof the gospels almost every day. I mean God’s plan.

Jesus: Oh, right, now what?

Mary: He is still trying to work in adoption. He startedthat “Adoption, it’s part of God’s plan” campaign before he had all the detailsworked out and people are getting a little antsy waiting for some results.

Jesus: Why is this my problem? I go down there, tell them tothink for themselves, I wrap it all up with “it is finished¹”, andthey are still looking up in the sky for answers.

Mary: You told them think for themselves? I don’t rememberthat.

Jesus: Well, not exactly, Aramaic is so difficult and then Markgoes and writes in Greek... I said, “laws are for man²” or somethinglike that, isn’t that clear?

Mary: Yes, well, the “man” part didn’t have much foresight,you could have at least mentioned your mother. Anyway, you also said you cameto fulfill the law, not to change it³.

Jesus: As soon as someone figures out exactly which laws Iwas talking about, I’ll fulfill them. I’m pretty sure they won’t. Why do youthink they say, “God works in mysterious ways”?

Mary: You also said you came with a sword⁴.

Jesus: That was allegory. It was about how change tends to tearfamilies and communities apart. Who couldn’t get that? When Peter went to pullout a real sword, I told him to put it away⁵. How much more clearcan I get?

Mary: Then why did you tell him to go get the sword in thefirst place⁶?

Jesus: There was a lot of ad-libbing while we were doingthat scene, I can’t explain everything. Ya know, maybe I should just retire.

Mary: You can do that?

Jesus: Sure, the Father hasn’t been needed for ages, all thevanquishing is long done. He’s justsymbolic. And now the Holy Ghost is everywhere, flowers, baby’s cries, Muppetmovies. The whole thing pretty much runs itself.

Mary: What about the game? (points to TV)

Jesus: If I choose which prayers to answer, we’d either haveevery batter hitting 1,000 or every pitcher pitching a perfect game. Therewouldn’t be a game⁷.

Mary: What about the end of times?

Jesus: I still can’t figure out how Revelations got in there.The Greeks don’t use it, that’s why they get to be called “Orthodox”. Let themexplain it to everyone else.

Mary: We have to leave them with some instructions.

Jesus: It’s all in the book. Or one of the millions of otherbooks that have been written in the last 2,000 years. Look, Paul clearly said,“base the law on love⁸”, we’ll start that ad campaign and peoplewill adopt out of compassion for their fellow human beings. They’ll be fine.

TV: (Slowly raise the volume of the announcer.)

Mary: Huh, okay, skooch over. (joins Jesus on the couch, grabssome snacks) Who’s playing?

Jesus: (Insert your favorite teams and scenario here. )

Mary: I never really understood bunting, why just tap itlike that when you could hit it way out in that big grassy area.

Jesus: The outfield, right, well, it isn’t always that easy,you never know what is going to happen with each pitch, that’s what makes it sofun…..

1 John 19:28-30

2 Mark 2:27 to Mark 3:5

3 Matthew 5:17-20

4 Matthew 10:34-42

5 Luke 22:47-53

6 Luke 22:36-38

7 David James Duncan

9 Romans 13:8-10

Emerson

2011-12-25T07:59:00.000-08:00

Ralph Waldo was a minister who had disagreements with doctrine and became a secular minister. He traveled across America in the mid 19th century "preaching" on manners, politics and literature. His words are as relevant today as they were then.

It is time that this ill-supported murmur of all thoughtful men against the famine of our churches... should be heard through the sleep of indolence, and over the din of routine...

The stationariness of religion: the assumption that the age of inspiration is past, that the Bible is closed; the fear of degrading the character of Jesus by representing him as a man; indicate with sufficient clearness the falsehood of our theology. It is the office of a true teacher to show us that God is, not was; that He speaketh, not spake. The true Christianity - a faith like Christs' in the infinitude of man, - is lost...

Let me admonish you, first of all, to go alone; to refuse the good models, even those most sacred in the imagination of men, and dare to love God without mediator or veil...

Yourself a newborn bard of the Holy Ghost, - cast behind you all conformity, and acquaint men at first hand with Deity... Look to it first and only... that fashion custom, authority, pleasure, and money are nothing to you, - are not bandages over your eyes, that you cannot see, - but live with the privilege of the immeasurable mind.

The OTHER STUDENT

2011-12-22T18:46:00.000-08:00

Stories, like the one in this link, sometimes get passed around as emails, sometimes appear on science vs. religion web sites, or sometimes actual people try them out. They are pretty crazy, but if you haven’t thought about them much, they can almost sound plausible.

It is a made up story where a student outsmarts a professor, but I would like to cover what would most likely happen in real life. This may be elementary for some, but hopefully a good exercise for others. I’ll even skip the part about the professor taking an attitude that he knows everything and his students are just empty vessels that need his wisdom. Certainly there are professors like that, just as there are priests like that. Fortunately, either one of them leaning into a student’s face and challenging them is becoming more and more rare.

The first argument that silences the professor and the class would not stump even the most elementary of philosophers. Terms such as “cold” are abstractions. If you want to get scientific about it, hot and cold are properties that are expressions of temperature. The OTHER STUDENT is right, “cold” is not really a scientific term. Temperature is relative. Cold to a person is hot to a polar bear. None of that matters. If the student has demonstrated anything, it is that some words are abstractions. I’m sure the philosopher would agree that “god” is a word that expresses something that is difficult to express. The same goes for the terms “light” and “dark”.

The next argument is at least two arguments meshed together and that mixing of arguments continues from here on. The OTHER STUDENT claims the professor is working on the premise of duality. What he then describes is actually a logical fallacy called a false dichotomy. The professor is somewhat guilty of that. A false dichotomy presents two options, God exists or he doesn’t, demonstrates one of those is false, or can’t be proven, and concludes the other must be true. This leaves out the possibility of any other options or of either option being partially true. Philosophy professors love playing with these possibilities, so it is unlikely one would act like the one in this story.

Before discussing any of this, the OTHER STUDENT has already moved on to using a lack of scientific knowledge as proof. Specifically, science has yet to map a thought, or even understand exactly what one is. That only proves that we don’t know everything. To leap from there to believing that there is a powerful being behind creation is no argument at all. That form of argument is called “the argument from ignorance”, when faced with a lack of knowledge, make something up that is simple and easy to digest and claim that it is true. He then tries another abstraction about “life” and “death”.

Without taking a breath, he moves on to immorality and fires a couple more abstractions. In the story this puts the PROFESSOR on his heels, in reality the PROFESSOR would be thinking, “abstraction, abstraction, abstraction”. He would also be thinking about how “good” and “evil” can’t be used as properties in the same way that “hot” and “cold” are. But thinking he has the PROFESSOR in a corner, he pulls out the Bible. He needs it, because he is entering another area that science has not figured out, free will. He will need an authority to support anything he says about that and Biblical teaching relies on free will extensively. The OTHER STUDENT tries to use his “some things only exist as the absence of some other thing” argument and say the existence of immorality proves God’s existence, but this is so unbelievably flawed, that he needs to throw in a new question before the PROFESSOR can respond. In a classroom, or just about anywhere, that would be addressed.

Instead, the OTHER STUDENT is allowed to go on with more questions about whether or not evolution has ever been observed. It of course has been observed. One of the first accounts is by Aristotle who noticed hair color being passed on from one generation to the next. Darwin used the long observed practice of breeding dogs for desired traits as part of his research. Since Darwin, more and more transitional species have been observed in the fossil record. Darwin could not explain a mechanism, but Watson and Crick did. Since then observations of DNA have demonstrated how evolution occurs. High School students breed fruit flies in test tubes and observe the traits being passed on from generation to generation. The OTHER STUDENT apparently requires seeing something like a monkey begin to talk, as in the latest installment of the Planet of Apes series, as the only possible evidence for evolution. This discussion never happens in the story because the PROFESSOR is turning red and making sucking sounds through his teeth.

As an aside, humans did not evolve from the monkeys that we see in zoos today. Both of us evolved from a common ancestor a few hundred million years ago, some little furry butted thing that might have looked like a lemur. It is actually worse than monkeys. Before the lemur, we were fish and before that we were vegetables.

This leads to the crescendo, where the OTHER STUDENT proclaims, “SCIENCE IS FLAWED”. His final proof, a good joke that a 4th grade boy might be able to pull off on his little brother, but would never get past a PROFESSOR. The idea that the PROFESSOR has no brain because no one has ever observed it. Instead of teaching children that these kinds of jokes can be used as serious arguments in a university setting, we should be teaching them how we know things. It is this very flaw in arguing that leads to millions of dollars being invested in museums that show people in robes and sandals running around with dinosaurs.

We begin with our five senses, but we need a lot more than that to fully understand the universe. When Galileo extended our ability to see, he figured out that some of the lights in the sky were planets and we could finally fully understand why they moved the way they did. When we figured that things fit patterns that could be explained with formulas, we also figured out that those formulas could help explain things that we couldn’t observe directly. Epistemology is really pretty interesting, something you might learn at a university. Or just look it up.

Just as a simple example, here’s how we know the PROFESSOR has a brain. First we rely somewhat on the authorities. Just a few hundred years ago, people still accepted that Aristotle was right, and the brain was there to cool the blood. Emotions came from the heart or the gut, thoughts came from the soul. Now we point to our heads when we say “think” and little children pick this up and never question that it is the center of our nervous system. We accept that everyone needs a brain to remain an upright, walking, talking person. The PROFESSOR does not appear to be a robot, a hologram, a figment of our imagination or anything other than a real person. We accept that the university had some sort of process to determine that he was intelligent enough to teach the class. All of this would require a brain. So, barring any far fetched notions and implausible scenarios, he has one. If as a philosophy student, you want to argue that is not 100% positive proof, that’s fine, and exactly what philosophy is all about. As a proof that science is flawed, it is a misunderstanding of science.

Even if all of the other arguments of the OTHER STUDENT were accepted as sound, in the end, he has only proved that the existence of God cannot be disproved. Some scientists would argue that when enough evidence has been examined, a lack of evidence constitutes proof. We don’t really need to go there. We can at least say that there is not enough evidence to constitute a valid theory of God. Assuming we agree on the understanding of what a valid theory is. I’ll leave that for later.

Banned Questions VI

2011-12-18T08:11:00.000-08:00

The final installment of my responses to some of the questions in Banned Question about the Bible by Christian Piatt. I know this hasn’t been my most exciting blog series, but it gave me a chance to comment on some new areas. The stack of books I’m getting for Christmas should prove to be more interesting.

Why would an all-knowing God begin the process of creation knowing that it would be corrupted by evil and lead to so much heartache?

Joshua Einshon tells a story of hearing the answer to this question in 9th grade. I can understand why the answer worked for him at that young age, but not as an adult. The answer is “free-will”. That is, God could have made a bunch of “wind up dolls”, but he didn’t. This answer is quite a bit more sick if you realize that this also means that God created us in a way that leaves us unsure if we should choose Him. It just leads you right back to the original question. Joshua restates the choice, saying it is between being loving to each other or not, which is really irrelevant to God’s existence. We do have that choice and that would seem to me to make the case that there is no God and we have to figure this out for ourselves.

This question contains within it a few theological questions that anyone who believes that they believe should consider. Is God all-knowing? What is time to God? Did he know the consequences of his creation? Why would he do it if knew it would turn out as it has? If He could give us more information to make an informed choice about Him, why wouldn’t He? What purpose could be served by leaving that choice up to His creation?

Why are there so many completely different interpretations?
This question goes unanswered in my opinion. I suppose because the obvious answer is that people throughout history have used the Bible to mean whatever it serves them to mean. The Bible does not provide answers that can be tested, or provide logical explanations. It chronicles a history of changing norms. Interpretations change depending on your knowledge of the author or the time of the writing. Leaving out some of that context, or making some up can easily alter what the text seems to mean.

This quote is typical, “The result of these multiple interpretations of passages is precisely why there is so much division among Christians and Jews – all of whom base their faith on the same text.” It is a logical fallacy, in that it states the reason as the explanation. It is similar to saying, “Ronald Reagan was the great communicator because he gave great speeches.”

Why are (or were) the Jewish people God’s chosen people? Why not someone else? Are Christians now God’s chosen people?
This is just a silly question and I only comment on it for comic relief. The Bible or any religion is about justifying yourself and your friends as the chosen ones. I’ll give Brandon Gilvin a little credit for having a discussion of the changing theism throughout the Bible, from Elohim to YHWH and the eventual switch to monotheism. But the more humorous statement comes from Christian Piatt,
“It’s no real surprise that those who wrote these scriptures down also are the ones chosen by God in the stories. The fact that men wrote the texts down probably had a similar effect in placing males at the top of the social pyramid.”

There is nothing in the surrounding text that gave me the sense that this was tongue-in-cheek. I know it doesn’t help, but the only response I have to this is, “Ya think!!?”

Banned Questions V

2011-12-08T14:03:00.000-08:00

My continuation of comments and additional answers to the questions in “Banned Questions about the Bible”, a book by Christian Piatt.

Banned Questions IV

I skipped this one earlier but then thought it worth addressing:

In the Old Testament, God seems to be actively involved in world events. In the New Testament, God is portrayed as less interventionist but still directly involved. Now, it seems God is much more abstract. What happened, and is this a good or a bad thing?

Gary Peluos-Verdend completely confuses you with “it is important that we understand the interaction of god’s agency with human agency”. Jarrod McKenna goes quite a bit further, suggesting the question is easy. He dismisses any theology that would say god is elsewhere or that god is everything. He says God is the redeemer. I won’t try to explain that, but he tries by using a series of other words that theologians pretend have meaning like “web of creation”, Trinity, Incarnation, “heal the brokenness” and grace. This is all almost completely useless.

In an earlier time, a “banned question” would get you a smack on the back of the head, or time cleaning the pews. Now, it gets you a string of words that sound like they are important, and will keep busy if you want to find out what a bunch of people think they mean. In the end, you will find out that someone a long time ago started using these words, and since then, people have argued about what they might have meant.

Where are all the miracles?

This question has one of the stranger quotes in one of the answers. There is a brief discussion about televangelists and faith healers, then, “Perhaps we don’t see or hear about more miracles because too many Christians have made us too cynical. When we put God to the test in prayer, it may put undue pressure on everybody. “

This is really twisted. It avoids the question and tries to deflect the reader into loosening up their rational thought process. What pressure does it put on anybody to test whether or not prayer works? Since when is praying a test for God?

Christian Piatt has some nice words about the miracle of birth and the little, everyday miracles, but he also says, “There may have been a time when people miraculously received sight, walked on water, or came back from the dead.”

This is dangerous thinking. Either we can demonstrate that miracles happen or not. If we can demonstrate that they are currently not possible, then they were not possible in the past. By some definitions, miracles go against what we can prove to be possible, so if one was claimed to have happened in the past, the only way to disprove it is to have been there and have collected evidence. This sets up non-falisifiability and is as worthless as my claiming that there is a pink dragon in my garage, unless you go look, because he goes away when you look.

Modern Christians attempt to reconcile the modern world with the worlds of Jesus and Moses by creating a world that has physical laws that have changed over time. If that were true, science would not work.

Are there any mistakes in the Bible?

This question has been central to the de-conversion of many since the Enlightenment. Many people still focus on this. If you come from a community that claims there are no mistakes, but then you find some, I can understand that it would be important. Many sects have dealt with this by modernizing the notions of God’s word and revelation, as does this book. Finding books or websites that discuss the known discrepancies is not too difficult these days but unfortunately many people will still not find these until later in life and continue to be surprised by them.

David J. Lose starts out with an important distinction that anyone looking to the Bible for truth should consider. That people didn’t think in terms of facts the same way we do now. In a Marcus Borg’s Heart of Christianity, he says, “ “the pre-modern meanings of English words believe and believing and Latin word credo very different from what believing has come to mean in our time.” Credo “does not mean ‘I hereby agree to the literal-factual truth of the following statements.’ Rather its Latin roots combine to mean ‘I give my heart to.” The word itself is possibly related to French term cri de couer (cry of my heart)- meaning "a passionate belief that comes from the heart...Given the pre-modern meaning of ‘believe,’ to believe in God is to belove God.” (39-41)

They don’t include Borg’s book in their references, but in this brief answer, David does gives you a decent way of approaching the Bible. The rest is pretty much repeats of earlier commentary about the Bible being “inspired” instead of inerrant. Great for discussion with a fundamentalist, but elementary to someone who has already dealt with that question.

In some cases, Paul (the purported author of many New Testament books) seems to support women in leadership roles in church, and in others, he says, they have no place. Which is it? Any why the seeming contradiction?

Becky Garrison scores big again with this answer. Although others in this book have given passing references to translation problems, changing doctrine, unknown authorship and understanding historical context, Becky applies that knowledge skillfully to this answer. She addresses women covering their heads and suggests this was done because others in the Roman Empire were doing it, and a small persecuted religious sect probably should be pragmatic and not draw attention to itself. The stronger statement about women being submissive in Ephesians, was probably edited in later, according to scholars, says Becky. She ends with this whopper:

“As the church became more closely aligned with empire, it began to tone down some its more radical teachings, such as the full equality of all in Christ.”

I wish she had more time to develop that thesis.

David J. Lose reiterates some of what Becky says, and makes an interesting comment about how the New Testament chronicles the splits that may have been occurring in the early leaders. The Letter to Timothy, sometimes attribute to Paul but more likely came later, constrains gender equality. This pattern of splitting of doctrines soon after the death of the original authors can be seen in other major religions, such as the Sunni/Shia split for Muslims and the North/South split of Buddhism. Rather than diminish religion and expose it as a farce, these patterns of cultures dealing with values bring color to history and give us an opportunity to reopen the conversations. I find it much more interesting than trying to guess how Paul would have voted on the Equal Rights Amendment.

All 4 answers take a strong stand that Paul was following an egalitarian message of Jesus and the statements that clearly state otherwise were probably added later by a male dominated world. This is the clearest stand like this that I have seen in this book so far.

Who gets to decide which laws in the Bible are irrefutable, which laws are out of date, and which laws should be applied only in certain situations?

This is the essence of the problem with religion. People who think they know the answer to this question and ignore any actual laws of their government when they enforce what they believe is God’s law. Or more often, just tell you what they think you are doing wrong. Fortunately, the answers are light hearted and admit that no one should be deciding this, only attempting to understand it. Nadia Bolz-Weber sums it up best. She says she would like to just know the rules and then follow them, but, “To do this is to effectively leave Jesus idling in his van on the corner as though to say to him, ‘If we know what to do to be saved, we’ll just do that rather than rely on you’.”

Thay is not special

2011-11-28T18:05:00.000-08:00

Thich Nhat Hanh is one of those people who should be more famous. I’m not sure I can blame the American media for this. It seems to be his choice. I have mentioned him before. Recently he has discovered social networking and begun to put his talks on the Internet. After following this link, you can click on the “Plum Village Online Monastery” and find lots more. This link is not representative. I wanted to talk about one of his answers to the children’s questions.

First, who is he? He has been a Buddhist monk since 1949. In the 1960’s he worked to rebuild bombed villages in Vietnam. He travelled to the U.S. and urged the government to get out of his country. He influenced Martin Luther King, Jr. as heard in something else that should be more famous, his speech at Riverside Church. I won’t attempt to explain his theology. As with any theology it contains its own vocabulary and symbolism that can seem circular in short summaries.

What happens in the link video explains enough. These are questions from children who have just completed a retreat on his teachings. The giggles and gasps are typical when children ask their innocent but also unfiltered and direct questions of the master. I really like his practice of having questioners take a few breaths first and again after the question is asked. Such a relief from the news and talk shows of the West or even casual conversation where we expect instant answers and brief but well thought out statements.

The third questioner (about 25 minutes in) is a bit reluctant as kids often are and he has to be translated through a whisper to his mother as well as across the language barrier. He has just had some training and education and was probably told that it would make him wiser or smarter. He is asking about just what was it that he learned. What is it that makes him so smart and so wise.

Thich Nhat Hahn almost appears stumped, but this is his usual slow and thoughtful way of responding. In the answer he refers to himself in the third person, using a nickname form of his name. The answer is “…nothing special, Thay has no special talent.” And, “…if you want to practice, then you can do it.” The compassion in his face as he looks in the boy’s eyes demonstrates his sincerity. The laughter shows a bit of relief from the audience when Thay says, “Thank you! Good question!”

The next question, “Why do we have homework?” is the perfect ice breaker after that, and Hahn, “This question is too difficult for Thay. I will have my brother answer it.”

While looking for this video, I found another blog that has a similar answer from the Dalai Lama. I couldn’t find anything like this from the three major monotheisms.

Occupy the gospel

2011-11-22T13:50:00.000-08:00

What’s up with that “occupy” thing?

I’ve kinda avoided current events on my blog, but if I feel up to commenting on the history of everything, why not include history in the making too? A recent OnBeing got me thinking in that direction, although that turned out to be mislabeled. It was good, it just didn’t talk much about “Occupy”.

So, if you read the above CNN article, or even if you didn’t, you have probably heard that the movement is criticized for a lack of focus, there is no leader, no symbol. Many of them have responded that this is their strategy. And it might be working. The symbol that is emerging is of innocent peaceful people being sprayed in the face with pepper spray. There is much outrage about this, but wasn’t it expected? The police are responding in a very traditional way to what may be a new way of organizing.

Let’s examine some of those traditions.

Create a mythology. Whether purposeful or not, great story tellers, leaders and writers have built cultures around them that have survived beyond their lifetimes. Whatever really happened to get them started gets lost in history and later generations defend what they believe happened because they so love the story. The story speaks to them, so it must be true.

Attack the symbol. Storm the Bastille or dump tea in the harbor. Take the thing that is the symbol of your enemy and turn it into your symbol.

Peacefully and strategically make a symbol. Rosa Parks was not the first woman to refuse to give up her bus seat to a white person, and she didn’t do it just because she was tired one day. There were people working in basements and churches before Martin Luther King Jr. came along, looking for just the right personality to take that action. They had newsletters, organizers and lawyers ready to popularize that incident and defend her in court.

Social media and instant news cycles have helped bring revolution to parts of the world that without it, may have remained under dictatorships, or ended up in much bloodier revolutions. These new communication systems have also affected how these strategies work.

We have been attacking our current leaders and their images for decades now, and when we tire of that we go back and rip the reputation of Thomas Jefferson and Christopher Columbus. History doesn’t get “lost” so easy these days. Mythology relies on a lack of information. Police and security forces have grown in strength and improved strategies and some parts of the media support anything they do, so acts of violent civil disobedience are not only difficult, they can come with a lot of backlash. Any strategizing is heavily scrutinized and often mischaracterized in the public debate. The battle can be lost in that arena.

The question is, is the strategy of not creating a symbol, a strategy or a mythology that can be attacked, working? Those are normally the things that give a movement fuel. The anger and frustration with a variety of structural problems are usually just recruiting tools. Only a couple months into the movement, maybe recruiting is all that needs to be done. If the opposition keeps responding in a traditional fashion, there will be plenty to be angry about and recruitment should be easy. But most youth have to go through this anyway. At some point they realize the world is not the well organized place they learned about in High School civics and there are bad people, and worse, people who appear good but do bad things. I’m glad an image of me facing that realization half a lifetime ago is not permanently archived on YouTube.

Besides slogans and speeches, leaders should also be supplying information. They had a library in Zuccotti Park, hopefully some people have had a chance to come into contact with authors and ideas that they were not exposed to by their teachers.

A frequent mistake I have seen leaders make is to not seek the counsel of other leaders. In a leaderless organization, a lot of people need to be seeking that counsel. Time will tell if old mistakes are repeated, but so far I see a focus on the non-corporeal corporations instead of a certain generation, a certain dress code, ethnicity or background. This is an improvement.

Leaders also act as a storehouse of ideas. Martin Luther King Jr. and other leaders of that movement shared bits of speeches, quotes from philosophers and scripture they were using and weaved those bits in as they were speaking. Take a look at the “I Have a Dream” speech. It starts out fairly dry and the crowd is not responding. Watch his eyes and the eyes of people near him as they notice this. He starts to weave in the “dream” and the crowd responds and he crescendos with bits from the Constitution, the Bible and America the Beautiful.

Perhaps the greatest lesson coming out of recent events is that we all should be asking ourselves what we are going to do instead of analyzing what happened and asking “Occupy” what they are going to do next. Waiting for a leader to show up has not gone well. We might have to limp along for a while, giving each other counsel, sharing ideas with each other.

What will you be doing?

New Thought

2011-11-17T11:44:00.000-08:00

The “New Thought” movement is actually over 150 years old. That’s the trouble with naming a movement. But this one is not about any particular set of thoughts that were once described as new, it has something to do with pointing your mind in new directions. Things like this used to fascinate me. I can see how, at the time they were developed, they might have seemed like a viable alternative to scientific thought that was just developing and sometimes failing. Since then, it has had to be repackaged and renamed to avoid criticism.

The forgotten name behind much of the thought of New Thought is Phineas Quimby.

Using his ideas of mind over matter, he treated Mary Baker Eddy, who went on to found Christian Science that is still going strong and still publishes the respected news magazine, the Christian Science Monitor. More recently, Norman Vincent Peale used some of the doctrine, mixed with Christianity and the psychology of Freud and Jung.

Since then it has crept back into popular use as a form of Christianity called “prosperity gospel”, often found in suburban mega-churches. Estimates of 17% of Christians believe in these ideas. The idea is that Christ wants to give you health and wealth, you just need to believe in him, and of course give 10% of what you have to your church. If that doesn’t suit you, there are books like “The Secret” or other “Law of Attraction” programs. You can find this idea of suspending reason and directing reality using your own thoughts mixed in with Buddhism, quantum physics or Mayan prophecies.

When trying to tease this apart, you can find some things that seem to map onto personal experience and seem to have merit and they kinda do. People do get stuck in ruts based on their thinking. You can read what Southern plantation owners said about their slaves, about how lazy they were, how they appeared to have no ambition, no self-motivation and it was only the whippings that got them to do anything. Even if you talked to one of those slaves, you would have trouble knowing how much of that is true. After years of conditioning, being told you are lazy, given no opportunities to better yourself, people will come to think of themselves as worthless. The slave system relied on this.

Slaves had to maintain the dual thinking required to see themselves as free human beings and still act subservient for the master to avoid punishment. Some of them were not able to do that. But how that affected their actions does not prove that our thoughts can change reality. Attempting to act on those thoughts of freedom led to death for many or the loss of a foot or a hand. It took efforts by slaves and people who could choose to own slaves or not to finally end slavery. Sometimes your circumstances really do suck and there is not much you can do about it.

Further evidence of this can be seen in the behavior of American slaves when they were declared free near the end of the Civil War. They immediately began to educate their children, fight for getting land that they had worked and to run for Congress. Reports of the “Sambo” mentality have since been shown to be greatly exaggerated. It took years of political maneuvering and terrorism by the Ku Klux Klan to restore the power relationship of whites over blacks.

Stopping your thinking is not the answer. That is more along the lines of what Quimby was suggesting. I’m suggesting that a lot of thought has been done about what “thought” is over the last 200 years and we can benefit from it. We have moved far beyond these philosophies and to continue to treat them as if they are useful puts us into the same kind of rut that they claim to be rescuing us from.

Any of these systems, Christian, New Age or otherwise, whether claiming divine intervention or that they are based on the thoughts of ancient philosophers, ultimately rely on making a leap from an effect to claiming their system is the cause. If the desired effect is not achieved the reason given is that the individual did not use the system properly. And that’s putting it nicely. Phrases that are spoken with an intention of being helpful have the opposite affect. Phrases like “you need to have more faith”, or “you just have to want it bad enough” or “buy my latest book”.

Thanks to the guys at Reasonable Doubts for the inspiration for this week’s blog and to Howard Zinn for some help with history.

Banned Questions IV

2011-11-10T07:59:00.000-08:00

More questions from the book by Christian Piatt with my comments. Some of the questions start to get repetitious, different ways of addressing the “literal meaning” question and others. Some are just not worth addressing. Even in one of the answers to the question about secret codes embedded in the Bible, he says it is not worth it. So, I’m skipping a few. Some are just disgusting, like the ones about the devil or Abraham and Isaac.

Link back to the first of this series

How to read the Bible?

The first answer is not bad, suggesting what not to do, but once again devolves into revelatory language. One guy points out that he came from a church that read the Bible to support their racist and classist position. He agrees with St. Augustine that any interpretation that isn’t about loving God and your neighbor is wrong. That leaves a lot of passages about God ordering killing unexplained, but it is better than that church he used to go to.

Thank goodness for Joshua Toulouse, he said there is no right way. That is the right answer to most of these questions. He also says that different translations can dramatically change the meaning of what you read. I haven’t heard that said enough in this book.

How do we reconcile the two different “creation stories”?

They got another one right.

The answers do more to explain the difference and tell why they are different and how attempting to reconcile them as if the Bible is a science book is the wrong approach. Brandon Gilvin does something very rare and points out that the God in the Bible is not the “Unmoved Mover” of Aristiotle or the God character usually portrayed in Western philosophy. The Bible grew out of an area near Egypt and is very much influenced by the East. It has God as a character in relationship with human characters. This doesn’t address “scriptural basis”, but it is an answer that gives the reader a way to look at the stories that they probably haven’t considered.

Does God justify violence in scripture?

Brandon Gilvin gives the only possible right answer. “Human beings wrote the stories in the Bible and an invisible, divine hand did not direct them.” They… “were struggling to make sense of how God was present in their histories.” He talks of how the Bible has been used to justify violence and says, “these are abusive readings.” He suggests “reading it with the knowledge that those who came before us struggled with the way to find God in every detail of their lives and histories and sometimes got it wrong.” (my underline)

What is dangerous about saying that of course is that it opens up the question of anything else in the Bible also being wrong. Even some of the good sounding things might not be good at all, or at least not really helpful. Gary Peluso-Verdend describes the dilemma that is created when you decide that the Bible is the direct word of God. You can’t get around the justifications of violence and you have to create a theology to explain it. If instead you decide that at least sometimes the Bible is written by men to justify what they do or have done, then you can answer “no” to this question. The world will be better off when more people do that.

Why is the gospel of John so different?

Is this question really banned? If I were a Bible student and asked this question of my teacher and they told me not to ask questions like that, I would be highly suspicious of what they were trying to cover up. This book doesn’t, and we are now up to 3 good answers out of 21.

To understand the gospels, you need to understand the audience they were written for. It also helps to know that scholars assume there was a source document that came before them that has been lost, usually referred to as Quell. Mark came first and is more of a simply telling of events. Matthew adds the birth narrative and others. Luke brings in more angels because he was writing to Romans who would have liked that. John came much later and was probably writing to Jews that had left the Jewish community because of the debates about who Jesus was. It spends a lot of time justifying that he is indeed the Jewish messiah, beginning with the first verses that puts him at the right hand of God before the world was created. These answers cover all of that and give excellent sources.

What about all the terms for hell?

These answers are helpful in that they sort out much of the confusion about the afterlife and how it is mentioned in the Bible and that it changed through time. Gehenna, a garbage dump in Jerusalem is explained a couple times and that would take care of several misinterpreted uses of it. In most Bibles this gets interpreted as the word “hell” which comes with meanings that were added on by the Greek ideas of Hades later as well as later authors such as Dante.

What the answers avoid are Jesus’ references to being thrown into eternal flames and separating the wheat from the chaff. This is common practice for theologians and unfortunate that it occurs here.

If I don’t believe every word of the Bible is literally true, how do I know what to consider in context and what to set aside?

This is the real question isn’t it? But once again, banned questions are treated as if they are banned. One answer directly chides the question for suggesting that anyone would “set aside” part of the Bible. Another suggests that it just “made sense” to view God as a warrior in the past. Everyone agrees to focus on Christ, but says nothing about what that means, or what you do with the contradictory pictures of him. They do recommend finding a community that you trust and using study Bibles and the internet for help with context. Not bad advice, but sorely incomplete.

The step that this book is not willing to take is to look at the Bible from outside of the Christian narrative that was fully developed after Constantine. That is, the Fall, the Exodus, exile and reconciliation through the Resurrection. Any attempt to make sense of that narrative is going to require logical gymnastics and leaps of faith. To make one of those choices will involve more of a feeling of comfort with a community than historical analysis. For any of those to work, you need to suspend the idea that a man wrote the story for a reason that suited him at that time and accept it as a revealed truth that ties the other stories together.

A few simple guidelines that I use;

1. Jesus often starts a parable with , “it is as if”. You’ll need to know a little about interpreting parables to understand what follows. For example it is usually the last character of a group that holds the lesson.
2. Language interpretation can be critical, as we found out in the question about hell and homosexuality. The Bible itself doesn’t contain clues that tell you when a word is misinterpreted. For critical passages, look at a couple different Bibles, if there are differences, find out why. This is easy to do at biblegateway.com.
3. There is no way to prove that a miracle from the Bible actually happened or that prophecies were fulfilled or will be fulfilled. Any source that tries to do this should be suspect and I would recommend finding another source.
4. If you want to jump right in, at least find a basic timeline. One that shows not only what the dates in the Bible say about what happened, but what historians say about when the books were actually written and by whom. There are controversies, but some useful items to note are that there might have been two authors claiming to be Paul the apostle. The gospel of John was probably not written by someone who knew Jesus. No historical evidence has been found for Moses or a large tribe of people wondering the desert for 40 years. It is more likely that Judaism developed out of existing communities in the Levant rather than as a legacy of Abraham. A little research on these questions first will help.
5. Historical context is key. Including knowing a little bit about the Sumerians and their gods and how the creation story in Genesis might have been a reaction to them. Influence from the Greeks to the West and from Eastern religions is also key, but be sure to use peer reviewed sources. There are some wild claims about mushroom gods, Jesus travelling to India and influences from Egypt.

Was Mary Magdalene a prostitute?

At least one answer tells you the name of the person and century when this idea was first spit out. That is really the important part of this question. This is not in the Bible, it was passed along as gospel for centuries, and still is. Anyone who says it doesn’t really care about what the Bible is trying to say. That covers a lot of people throughout history.

Banned Questions III

2011-11-03T18:07:00.000-07:00

Interesting little book by Christian Piatt I found recently with some more liberal answers to old questions that are usually considered taboo. The further I get along in it, the more disappointed I am. I would love to hear your thoughts on these questions, or responses to what I have to say. Comments can be left at the bottom.

Link back to the first questions

Was the book of Revelation written in code? Or had the author gone crazy? Was he hallucinating? Were the images portrayed to be taken literally?

Becky starts out with possibly the only intelligent response to this question by saying the rapture theories are laughable. She addresses the very recent theology and particularly crazy ideas of John Nelson Darby and rightfully notes, “If you only focus on otherworldly things, then there is no point in working toward peace, social justice, the end of poverty and the like, on the basis that such projects are futile.” Most of the rest is useless, although Jason Boyett does mention that the symbolism would have been clear to a first-century reader and Craig Detweiler calls it a brilliant satire. If you read Revelations and see the stuff about giant bugs, I don’t know how you could think it is literal.

Why haven’t any new books been added to the Bible in almost two thousand years? Is there a chance any new books will ever be added? Why or why not?

This question says a lot about what the Bible is and how religions in general and Christianity specifically developed. The first answer just ignores this and says people wouldn’t accept a new miracle story. The second at least acknowledges that there were regular people who argued about what books belong. And the third that different sects still have different collections in their canons. Most of the rest is the type of answer you get when someone doesn’t like you asking questions like this.

The authors that are in the references for this and other questions have responses to this but no mention is made about that. This would have been a good time to bring up the Documentary Hypothesis, but they don’t. This hypothesis has developed over hundreds of years, by Christians, and although there are competing hypotheses, it holds keys to understanding where the Bible came from. It identifies 4 distinct styles of writing in the Old Testament and how they were edited and the history that shaped the stories. Friedman’s “Who Wrote the Bible” is the definitive source for that. John Shelby Spong’s “Jesus for the Non-Religious” is better for discussion of who wrote the New Testament.

Equally important would be some examination of the Council at Nicea. This was a pivotal point in history and a sea change for Christianity. It involved intriguing politics and maneuvering by the powerful people of the 4^th century. This book, as with most Christian books, refers to the Council as if it were a friendly meeting of a few good Christians who just needed to iron out some details and get some ideas in writing. James Carroll’s “Constantine’s Sword” is a good reference for that.

The reason there have been no new books added to the Bible is that there are no new people claiming that they or someone fulfills a prophecy or continues with a lineage of someone in the Bible. Joseph Smith is the only one who has managed to pull it off in 2,000 years. He created Mormonism and that may be starting to unravel. Our relationship to writing has changed. We expect people to cite sources and have corroborating witnesses to events. That new books have not been added to the Bible should tell us what the Bible is, an ancient set of books that was created under very different circumstances than today.

Is it true that the Ten Commandments found in the Bible are almost a copy of the Code of Hammurabi, which has been around longer? Why not just include the Code of Hammurabi instead of having a whole new set of rules?

It’s nice that they are acknowledging that there were other similar lists of laws in ancient near east, but these answers don’t give us much. They mention the Ten Commandments appear twice but fail to mention there are differences in those two appearances. They say these laws indicate God cares about us, but provide little or no support that statement.

The Code of Hammurabi doesn’t tell us too much about the Bible, other than that the idea of listing laws existed before it did. Also the Code is not claimed to be divinely inspired. I guess that does tell us a lot.

Did God write the Bible? Is so, why didn’t God simply create it miraculously, rather than using so many people over thousands of years to write it down?

This is another atheist question and it is commendable to include it in any Christian book. If a manual for how to live peacefully suddenly appeared 3 to 10,000 years ago, a lot of suffering would have been avoided and that certainly would be some evidence for a divine being. Avoiding the question once again only makes it worse. If someone is asking this, either they already know that one answer is that the Bible is “inspired” but they don’t really accept that as much of an answer, or they are pretty well convinced that it is completely a human construct and are just giving you one more chance to address that.

One answer does say that the original words have been lost in translations and leaders “must become more honest about that.” This book seems to be that opportunity. Instead they dance around ideas about how God might communicate with us or inspire us, never noting that the Bible ends up looking like any other attempt to convey difficult thoughts about love, hope, loss, community, prejudice, poverty, corruption and forgiveness.

My comments under the “why no new books” questions apply here too.

Do Christians need to read the Old Testament? Why?

This book just gets more troubling as I go. The first answer claims the Bible is a continuous tapestry from creation to the end of time. Once again, banned question, traditional answer. I got a little excited in the second answer when Marcion was mentioned, but then he is branded a heretic.

Several statements are made about the OT being a foundation for the NT. I’ll take just one example. Rebecca Bowman Woods notes that Jesus said, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” on the cross and that those words come from Psalm 22, a traditional Jewish lament. I have heard this many times before, but never with any more reasoning than that. The reason there is no more reasoning, is that there is no more meaning. One writer wrote the words in a Psalm, a lot of people read them, then another writer used them. It is a literary structure, not a tapestry, it adds nothing to the meaning of Christ’s death.

Sure, you’re going to understand more about what is going on in the NT if you read the OT because the people in the NT read and lived the traditions from the OT. But the Bible rarely explains the traditions it just talks about them and includes assuming you know them. You need other sources to understand them. Some things will just be worse. For example Jesus talks about the laws of Moses, but then he breaks them. Some of that can be explained, some can’t but reading the OT will not help you to understand what laws of Moses are supposed to still apply or not. Biblical scholars have been arguing about that for centuries.

Who Wrote the Bible

2011-10-27T16:16:00.000-07:00

I can’t really answer the question that is the title of this blog. This is actually a book review/summary. If you are curious about that question, this is a great source. It summarizes the work that has been done on this question since Joseph ben Eliezer Bonfils first asked, if Moses wrote the torah how did he write of his own death. And if it was written in his time, why would he say, “and so it has been to this day”? That sounds like someone writing about the distant past. And it explains why there are two creation stories. I get so tired of people pointing that out.

You can get most of this information by googling “Documentary Hypothesis” or “J,E,D,P”, those are the letters assigned to the four distinct styles of writing. Most interesting in this book is the introduction of the writer “R”, the redactor. He combined the earlier 4 and did his best to make them a coherent history.

If you want the traditional answers to who wrote what, there are plenty of websites for that too, and of course there is Timothy 3:16 that says the Bible is “god breathed”. Some have taken that to mean the entire Bible, every word, is perfect and inerrant and has survived all of the translations to come to you directly from the Almighty. A little further down the spectrum, some say it means God inspired the writers and imperfect humans since then have introduced some errors.

We will probably never know how people 2,400 years ago responded to the Bible that Ezra brought to Jerusalem from his exile in Babylon. Would they have been comfortable with two creation stories, two sets of the commandments, a God that wreaks vengeance and is merciful, mixed up stories of Noah and Goliath? By time it got that way, the kingdom of Israel had already risen and fallen and been conquered by Assyrians then Babylonians, so whatever records there were, were already lost. Story telling was holding the community together, then this new idea of writing down history came to be accepted.

This book only covers the Old Testament, and not even all of that. The New Testament is barely mentioned and the story of how the Christian Bible was canonized is more about politics than history. What I found most interesting about this book was the tracing of how people related to writing through the ages, including the last few hundred years as we have unraveled this mystery.

I should mention that this is a Christian book. The study known as “textual criticism” has been done by Christian scholars. Friedman does not question the facts of the stories of Moses or Joshua or even Abraham. He starts in the time when scribes already had collections of these stories and were copying them. He does not discuss scientific facts like the age of the earth or whether or not Noah’s flood actually happened. He assumes there was a time when these stories were passed on orally and they eventually came to be written down. On two or three occasions, he mentions in passing that these stories ultimately come from God, but he does not spend any more time on this and it does not detract from the interesting history, regardless of your religious bent.

By the time that we can start to identify who the scribes were, or at least what community they came from, there were already multiple versions of the foundational stories. In the Bible, and in other writings, there are references to existing libraries that have not yet been discovered, and may be gone forever. We can only speculate how people related to these early libraries, and how the stories changed during the time of the oral traditions. According to the scholars of the Documentary Hypothesis, we can find two distinct voices in the early chapters of Genesis, from two kingdoms that resulted from division of the one that David brought together. This tells us these authors were distinguishing their communities by creating unique versions of the stories that came from their shared ancestry.

Ancestry was important to these people. The author who claimed to be a descendant of Moses would highlight him and make commentary on the descendants of Aaron by making Aaron look bad in the story. The Aaronid descendants would do the opposite. When Kings or priests wanted to create new laws that benefited them, they would write new stories, but weave them into the old stories and demonstrate how these new ideas were predicted or anticipated by the ancestors.

This might have unintended consequences, as a promise from God that the sons of David would rule forever seemed to be broken when first the Northern kingdom was overrun by the Assyrians and later the Southern kingdom fell when King Josiah was killed by the Egyptians. To explain this, new authors returned to old writings and found the conditional promises made to Moses. God’s promise still held, but the people had failed to uphold the law, so they would have to wait for a future descendant to return to the throne, a messiah.

At this point, there is no “Bible”, only a bunch 0f separate scriptures.

With the kingdoms in ruins it gets even more difficult to trace the writings until, under Babylonian rule, Ezra arrives in Jerusalem with all of these stories and more combined into one “book”. With growing influence from Greece, the idea of writing as a way to preserve history had worked its way in and this book was accepted as just that. Copying, adding and translating continued and with the decline of the empires of that time even more was lost. The differences of the 12 tribes were no longer passed on culturally. There was just one version of Jewish history.

Many centuries later, with the invention of the printing press, the Bible became more widely read and with the Protestant Reformation, asking theological questions became safer. When investigations like this start however, it is not known how they will turn out. What if whole sections of the Bible were found to be forgeries? Could it be shown that the Bible was not “God breathed”? Picking apart scripture was seen as blasphemy by some.

Textual criticism was one of the primary motivations for the fundamentalist movement. Believing in miracles has always been a problem. All of the prophets chided their people for not having faith. Now historians and scientists were creating more reasons for doubt and they might even prove that previous miracles never happened. Christians had to decide what it meant to be Christian. Believing the miracles and believing the stories really happened, no matter what anybody else says, was going to be the definition. Again the consequences of this were unintended. It is doubtful that anyone predicted or wanted a Christianity that focused on one or two issues like abortion or gay rights.

As it turned out, Christianity has survived a tremendous amount of being picked apart. Questioning and discussing scripture has always been a Jewish tradition, so it has also fared well. Many now consider the Bible a mix of history and symbolism, which may be a return to how it was viewed before Ezra. Preachers and writers continue to attempt to use the old stories to legitimate their actions and predict the future, but with peer review and the elite class of scribes being replaced by a legion of bloggers, that is a difficult sell. Although they can find a national stage, those who make truth claims based on the Bible also receive national ridicule.

As Friedman points out, by combining these different authors, we ended up with a book that reflects the world we experience. Sometimes rules must be obeyed and justice is swift, other times they can be bent, authority can be wrestled with, and sometimes transgression is met with mercy. By honoring all of the traditions, even though the story is sometimes confused and contradictory, it came to be accepted as one coherent tradition.

Parents have to decide between justice or mercy every day and as nations we have to continue a similar debate. Religion is declining in some ways and in some places and growing in others. Any predictions of its future are tenuous. The discussion of when or whom we shalt kill, what we should eat and what goods we shall covet is obviously a long way from over.

Note ** Since this book was published, more archaeology has been done and more textual hypotheses have been introduced. As quoted in wikipedia, sorting them out is “not for the faint of heart.”

Thoughts on being accomodating

2011-10-24T16:20:00.000-07:00

This is a great speech, actually 4 speeches. If you really have time on your hands listen to the whole hour. It covers some of the most important issues that any movement should know, or anyone wanting to forward an idea of any kind. Some of you may be familiar with the speakers, or at least one of them and be immediately turned off by it. Richard Dawkins wrote The God Delusion and speaks out often against religion. But here he talks about why it is important to take the tone that he does and why it is important to draw a line of decency.

In the segment preceding this one, Tom Melchiorre, talks about Martin Luther King and Malcolm X and how their works complimented each other. How the civil rights movement might have benefitted more from having both of them active rather than just one. Hopefully that intrigues you enough to watch that clip. He may be a little off in his historical analysis, but it still makes a good point.

If you dislike both Martin Luther King and Malcolm X then I don’t know what anybody can offer you. For me each had something to offer, both in what they actually did and through the stories of who they were. I was neither a drug dealer in Harlem nor a seminary student who just wanted a nice quiet ministry in the South so I can’t relate to the youth of either of these men. I can understand how each used those early experiences and took major turns in their life. They both saw the same problems but approached them very differently. Much of the discussion about the civil rights movement at the time was about their approach. Both publicly stated that they didn’t like the other.

If you liked either of those parts of this 5 part series, you might like to dial back to part one and hear Rebecca Watson talk about differences among people in a movement. Rebecca isn’t nearly as famous as Richard Dawkins, but she does merit a lengthy Wikipedia entry. She talks about setting some standards of behavior and ethics when anyone gathers to discuss atheism. Atheism has a bit of a problem in that first the word starts with the prefix “a” meaning “not”, so it isn’t “for” anything. Also, one of the big problems people have with atheism is that they believe it implies you have to no basis for morality.

It is true that there is no official website of atheism that lists rules of any kind. Many people don’t like to be associated with it as a movement even if they don’t believe in God, or Allah or any other god. There are conventions, blogs, newsletters, books and podcasts, but no official hierarchy and there probably never will be. Like civil rights, gay rights and women’s suffrage, organizing will be ad-hoc and someday it will not be needed at all. Some who are organizing believe it is also important to discuss standards and I agree some standards might help the movement. As Rebecca has noted, it would help if more women came to the atheist meetings or joined the secularist or humanist groups, so if they do, show them some respect.

This probably seems fairly simple but apparently some of the people in the audience didn’t get it. Later that night Rebecca was talking with several people, mostly men, in the bar of the hotel where the convention was and at 3:00 in the morning as she went off to bed, one of the men, who had hardly talked to her at all, followed her into the elevator and while they were alone, invited her to his room “for coffee”. Rebecca commented negatively about this in her blog, Dawkins commented negatively about her and you can now get a ton of Google hits on “Rebecca Watson elevator”. It is part of her Wiki page. I hope that is temporary.

I happen to agree with Rebecca and I wish I had heard her advice when I was 17. However I won’t be joining her in boycotting Richard’s book. I won’t dwell on any of that. The point is, in any organization, movement or when 2 or more are gathered for some purpose, disagreements on violations of basic standards can quickly sabotage the purpose. This YouTube post proves my point. It is a great presentation by some of the best in the movement, and it has not been viewed much. Look at the comments, and you’ll see a lot of them are about the elevator incident.

I’m not advocating taking any particular tone or suggesting any one side or segment of any population needs to be more accommodating than they currently are. For the moment, I’m pointing out that the path is difficult. There is no one set of standards in any book anywhere that will prevent all conflict, so maybe spending time arguing about what those standards might be is not terribly fruitful.

The discussion of religion, atheism, education, indoctrination, creation, evolution, global warming, ethics, birth control, prayer, women’s roles, abortion, money and love is a difficult one. I say “one” because all of those things get mixed up into one conversation. We all need to take responsibility for moving it forward.

There is one rule, known as “The Golden Rule” to Christians, and known to many other traditions under different names that is a good place to start. Some versions of it state more explicitly that understanding what the other person wants is an important part of the rule. There are plenty of other resources about how to be a nice person, so I’ll just leave it at that and hope you enjoy the links.

I will leave you with a quote from someone who has been much more successful at navigating the road or difficult political topics than I have. Dominique de Villepin was Prime Minister of France from 2005-2007.

Deep Space Nine Spirituality

2011-10-16T13:44:00.000-07:00

There are ample sites that summarize Star Trek episodes, so I won’t repeat the entire story here, but there is part of one that I see differently than anything I have found out there. The episode I am speaking of is the 2 hour pilot of the Deep Space Nine series. This series was a significant break from other Star Treks. For one, it was a space station instead of a ship. It also focused more on politics and religion.

The opening scene a flashback to an important point in the history of Star Trek. Long time fans will recognize the battle at Wolf 359. But if you aren’t familiar with it, the figure of Locutus of Borg, staring at Benjamin Sisko with his red eye conveys the idea of looking into the face of evil. What we need to know for this story is that this is where Sisko’s wife, Jennifer, died.

When then return to the present time for this series as Sisko is taking his first tour of the Deep Space Nine space station. He encounters a Bajoran priest, the priest says, “Welcome, the prophets await you.” In a bit of foreshadowing, Sisko answers “Another time.” A few hours later, the Bajoran attaché introduces Sisko to her religion and tells Sisko that their spiritual leader, Kai Opaka could help unify their people, but she rarely sees anyone. Just then the priest returns and says, “it is time.” He is taken immediately to meet the Kai.

Sisko learns more of their religion and is told that his destiny is to find the Celestial Temple. This kind of thing is pretty common for commanders in the Star Trek series and they usually don’t like it. Sisko is no different, but in this case he is given a vision. Not just a vision, but he fully experiences being back on a beach when he first met Jennifer. The vision comes via a large crystal they call the Tear of the Prophet. Kai Opaka gives Sisko cryptic advice like “I cannot give you what you deny yourself” and “Look for solutions within.” She sends him back to the station with the crystal.

An old friend of Sisko’s, Jadzia Dax, joins the team and applying the power of the United Federation of Planets, immediately finds answers about the crystals. In short order, they head into space and a wormhole opens up in front of them. Not just any wormhole, the first ever stable worm hole. They are pulled into it and they “land” in it, which should not be possible. It probes them and sends Dax back to DS9.

This is where it gets interesting. For those of you who don’t read physics books as a hobby, a wormhole is a theoretical structure in space. For most of human history we have thought of the heavens as something above us. Within the last few hundred years, we have seen that as bigger and bigger, but always as basically a straight line away from us. Very recently, we began to understand that space and time are curved. I don’t really know what that means, but it allows for the possibility that there could be pathways that take shortcuts around those curves, a hole that drops out of normal space/time and takes you somewhere very far away. Science fiction writers love to play with this stuff.

Sisko is left standing on a rocky surface that he knows can’t be real so he just starts shouting, looking for answers. He starts to see what look like familiar faces, but they are talking about him amongst themselves, trying to decide if Sisko is worth interacting with. He manages to engage them but they want to be convinced that he is not a threat. They are non-corporeal and any corporeal being destabilizes their existence.

He uses terms like “experiences”, “memories”, “my past” when trying to explain that he is not a threat. They appear to not understand these terms but talk of living only in the present. Sisko tries to explain that, for him, the future doesn’t exist, that his existence is “linear”.

They show him that his wife Jennifer, is part of his current existence and Sisko argues that she “was”. They say this is inconceivable and act suspicious of him. Their actions are also suspicious although Sisko only expresses confusion. They seem aware of so much, even able to read his thoughts, but their first question is, “what is this ‘time’ that you speak of.” They don’t acknowledge that they know of the vision he has already had or what Kai Opaka said so we don’t know for sure what they know. They are no doubt what the Bajorans call the Prophets, but they don’t call themselves that.

In an attempt to explain himself, Sisko realizes how time is required for logic. He tries to explain how one day shapes another. How pleasure and happiness depend on this. They can see his thoughts and keep coming back to the day he lost his wife and refuse to accept that this is in his past. He is unable to explain “loss”.

They show him a pleasant memory of his wife, it is a sweet proposal, they are planning their future together, then return to the chaos and death at Wolf 359 and say “this is your existence”. They ask why this is difficult. He says he doesn’t want to be there, but they keep saying that he exists there. They ask why, if we can understand consequences, why can we not predict them.

Sisko uses the analogy of a baseball game to explain his linear world. He starts to explain the rules, but realizing that won’t help much, focuses on how each player studies the possible moves of every other player but they don’t know what will happen with each pitch. We use our knowledge of the past to predict outcomes but we enjoy not knowing what will happen in the future. Sisko says, “The game wouldn’t be worth playing if we knew what was going to happen.” And they ask with surprise, “You value your ignorance of what is to come?!” Sisko explains that is what makes us human, we are explorers. He says, "That may be the most important thing to understand about humans. It is the unknown that defines our existence."

They seem to understand this, and are convinced that Sisko and his linear brethren are not a threat, but they still want to know why he exists at Wolf 359. They bring him there again, and Sisko feels the pain again. He asks for the power to take them somewhere else, but they say that it is he who keeps bringing them back there. One of the Prophets appears to him as the Kai, saying again, “we can’t give what you don’t give yourself”.

Sisko finally starts to breakdown as he explains that he was ready to die at that moment. In a sense, part of him did die. He understands that he never really left that ship. His life has been defined by that moment from then on. The physical death of his wife resulted in a death of his spirit, his will for living. He never let go. His past did not prepare him for that moment. He understands his own non-linearity. He looks around at the faces of the beings and they acknowledge that he now understands them. They understood him all along.

Commander Sisko returns to the station with a renewed sense of life. The wormhole will make this distant outpost one of the most important in the galaxy. He reconciles with Picard and starts planning for the future with his new team.

Banned Questions II

2011-10-11T18:59:00.000-07:00

A few more of the questions from the new book, "Banned Questions about the Bible"

What does the Bible really say about homosexuality?

They cover the basics, that the passages that do exist are most likely about rape as a humiliating tool used by militaries, or about ritual acts by other religions. Most important, that Jesus never directly addressed the issue. They note that the word arsenkoitai has disputed translations. All the references that I know of are included. That there are other laws near those references that are not followed today is also mentioned.

Several authors answer this question, giving it the attention it deserves, and they pretty well agree. I give them an A+ for this question.

What are the Apocrypha, the Gnostic Gospels, and the Dead Sea Scrolls, and why are they considered holy or sacred by some and not by others?

An important, but fairly academic question, and it is handled as such. The second answer ends with “we know so little about their theological context and much of their meaning is so obscure, even to knowledgeable scholars, that their introduction into a religious community would be a complicated venture.” I would love to hear a knowledgeable scholar’s response to that. It has a hint of avoiding the question to me.

Doesn’t the Bible condone slavery?

The first two answers are more avoidance behavior, using the “it reflects an era” excuse. And of course it gets better with Jesus and Paul, who says to treat your slaves with dignity. Then Rebecca Bowman Woods does a nice job of first explaining how the interpretation of Ham changed over time and concludes with a reference to Tavis Smiley who has written and spoke extensively about how the Bible does not condone slavery based on skin color. Exodus 21 is not referenced which is a suspicious oversight. That includes a verse that says if you beat a slave and he doesn’t die right away, there is no penalty, since you have already lost some property. I don’t know what Tavis Smiley has to say about that chapter.

Rebecca also says, “The more familiar we are with the Bible and other religious texts, the more difficult it is for cultures and institutions to use Holy Scripture for unholy purposes.” The last one really brings it home when he asks you to look at what you are wearing and think about the conditions of the workers who made your clothes. “Slavery” is a term that includes the broader issue of “oppression”. If you are reading this, you are most likely benefitting from the oppression of others. Jarrod asks why we read scripture, “Do we read to justify the status quo that we benefit from? Or do we read the Bible through the story of Jesus as the fulfillment of God’s liberating purposes through [ancient] Israel for all creation?”

I would have added a third choice, do we read it to hear the voices of oppressor and oppressed across time and listen to what those voices say about us? I can no longer read scripture as the fulfillment of a purpose. There are too many definitions of that and many of them are not a purpose I can support. Jarrod at least offers an interpretation I can partner with, although without the “God” part. He says of his second option, “If we choose the latter, we will find ourselves feeding, not killing; liberating, not enslaving. We will become God’s nonviolent army of abolitionists for all who suffer, for all of creation.”

In the suggestions for discussion for this one, there is a good example of how this book teaches without providing a right answer. The question is “Do you think God cares about the equivalent amount of four jumbo jets of people (predominately women and children) that are kidnapped and “trafficked” each day?” That is the type of question that has caused many people to turn away from organized religion or completely away from God. It is difficult to determine the intentions of a book that praises God, but then asks that question. The answers they provide do not qualify as open debate or full disclosure but to ask that question and not follow it up with a lame statement about how we can’t know God or that he is slowly revealing his plan is commendable.

Banned Questions

2011-10-05T17:55:00.001-07:00

I came across this book recently. It came out earlier this year. It presents many of the liberal interpretations that I have discussed in an easy to digest Q & A format. A free preview is available. I link to that and then review those questions.

Here's the preview.

Can I be a Christian if I don’t believe the Bible is perfect, handed down directly from God to humanity without error?

Craig Detweiler begins the book with the first answer to this first question with a series of non sequiturs about science, ending with “Surely the Bible operates on an entirely different plane and claim to authority.” I could discuss how we make claims to authority, but I would be wasting my breath because Craig, and I suspect most of the other answers in this book will always try to slip out of that discussion and simply state the Bible is different. Instead of “surely” in the above answer, I hear, “I really want there to be answers to things that science has not yet provided, so I hope the Bible might have them.”

He makes an analogy to love. Love is real and profound, but not definable. Being able to define love is not as important as practicing it. The Bible talks about love and gives us examples of practicing it. Beautiful. I wouldn’t argue with that. It does nothing to answer the implied question of this book; Why follow Jesus? I expect that will be a theme throughout this book.

Skimming through the rest of it, I see something else I expect to be recurring, a very brief mention of some scripture that is worth exploring in depth. That is not a criticism. The book is intended to be taken in short bits and used as a study guide, ideally in a group. The better the facilitator or student, the more they will get out of it. In this answer, Craig says, Jesus “gave little time or attention to those who tried to trap him into semantic arguments about obscure interpretations of the Torah.” That little statement has a lot of interesting scripture behind it. Mark 1:21-28 is listed in scriptural references that come at the end of each set of answers, but I’m not sure it is referring to this. Mark 2:27 would be a better choice. The point is, as with any Bible study, it is best done in a group. With the right people, you could spend many fascinating hours working through each of these answers.

The next answer draws the line that will keep this book out of many churches, “inerrancy… is not a requirement for salvation.” Amen Jason Boyett! He puts the Bible in historical context, a time when they wouldn’t have thought much about chronological or scientific errors. And points out that the discussion of inerrancy didn’t begin until the Enlightenment era (another one of those sentences worth hours of study). Then he slips in that the Bible is “inspired”. This means almost nothing, in that it still leaves you, the reader, free to interpret as you wish. Since it is a book written by mortal men, that is exactly what you should do anyway.

Next up, Jose F. Morales Jr. lays another wonderfully slippery, meaningless statement on us, “the awesomeness of the Bible is that it points beyond itself.” So, it isn’t the authority, it just points to God, who is the authority. He then gives a brief intro to “salvation”. There are lots of things to read about that, some of them are given in the notes that come after each question. I’ll give you a hint, the Bible is not clear on just how salvation works.

The editor, Christian Piatt, makes his first entry with an important piece of history about Martin Luther. Luther believed that people should not be beholden to the church. Piatt also makes an important point about psychology, “we humans aren’t big fans of letting go of control.” The next answer, by John Toulouse finally touches on where all the fuss comes from, and it is referenced later (Timothy 3:15-16). He then promptly dismisses it. The recommendations for further reading are excellent, and will be helpful if you are looking for an approach to Christianity that is comforting and semi-compatible to the modern mind. They will do very little to comfort or convince someone who does believe in inerrancy.

John Toulouse goes on to talk about how the Bible can still inspire us today, that it is a living text. This is a theological way of saying that you can read this book and apply its meaning to the world you know today. Theologically, this means God is inspiring us today. In modern terms, it’s a book, some books are inspiring. The next answer, by Becky Garrison, says it a little better. The Bible uses metaphors, symbols, poetry and literary devices. You need to be able to recognize those and sometimes know what a symbol meant 2,000 years ago to even get started with an interpretation of it.

The last entry, by Jim L. Robinson, opens up many more questions, some of them addressed later. Jim explains how the so-called “errors” could be in our “presuppositions about the texts”. Throughout history, some people “got” God and some of those writings were preserved. Scriptures contain truth, but God didn’t dictate it. My questions are, how do we know that the right words were preserved? What about all the translations? We have found books from that time that didn’t get in the Bible, was this a purposeful omission, or should we be doing the same evaluating that our ancestors did, and add these to the canon? Is it just a really old book and have we lost some its meaning to history? Given things were said by Presidents, Prime Ministers, Priests, Gurus, Kings and CEO’s just yesterday that we aren’t sure how to interpret, I think the answer to that last question is obvious.

My Answer: Yes. You can call yourself a Christian for many reasons.

If you want to join a church, they will ask you to participate in a ceremony that probably involves you saying that you give your heart, mind and/or soul to Christ. There also might be some statements about what you believe. There are a few churches that won’t do this. It doesn’t really matter. No matter what you believe, most people who call themselves “Christian” will say you are not a “true Christian”. If you are reading this book or this blog with an open mind, you are probably a “liberal Christian”, which indisputably puts you in a minority. If you are reading and sure it is blasphemy, you are probably a “conservative Christian”, a much louder minority, but still a minority. The middle ground is not that big either and very difficult to define. It is populated with a variety of denominations that don’t agree.

This goes for everybody, even if you are the Pope. The Pope is taking a lot of heat right now for his part in the child abuse scandals. Even many Catholics don’t think of him as a “true Christian”. If he can’t get the respect of the majority of Christians, who can?

If Adam and Eve were the first (and only) people on Earth, where did their kids’ spouses come from? Did they marry each other? And if everyone on Earth but Noah’s family was killed in a great flood, did Noah’s kids sleep with each other? Isn’t that a sin?

This is some more detail on the inerrancy thing and parts of the answers are similar to that first question. Christian Piatt does some interesting elaborating by discussing the roots of the name “Adam”, being “man” and “earth”, and a common translation for “Eve” being “life”. He also notes that there are many flood myths throughout history. A good thing to know, and something that should lead to more questions.

Then he says, these stories, “address the age-old questions of why bad things happen in the world and how we continue to endure them.” I would like to know what he is talking about. They do not address “why”, only subsequent interpretations say they do that. They say nothing about how to endure bad things, Adam, Eve, Noah and his family are simply commanded to do so. The second answerer seems to agree with me on this, although he doesn’t say much beyond, “don’t take them literally.” I suppose this could be seen as a positive, that the book provides multiple perspectives.

The creation story is a foundation for other stories in the Bible. It is crucial to the cycle of man’s fall from grace that is reconciled through Jesus. It is used to support creationism and anti-homosexuality. A critical examination of this story is important to healing the current conservative/liberal divide in the world of Abrahamic religions. Piatt takes a pass on that. Joseph Campbell, John Shelby Spong and Michael Pollan have all written about it, as well as many others, so there is no excuse for saying so little.

Aren’t women treated poorly throughout the Bible? Why would any intelligent modern woman today even want to read the Bible?

Rebecca Bowman Woods responds by first reiterating the questions she had since when she was eleven about women in the Old Testament. She then doesn’t answer those questions, but says it got better in the New Testament and that there are good stories about women in the Old Testament, although they are sparse. That’s it. That’s her thesis. Becky Garrison doesn’t do much better. Craig Detweiler again exposes some of the worst examples and again says, Jesus made it better. This despite the fact that he just quoted Paul saying women should remain silent. Note, Paul did not start his ministry until after the crucifixion.

Marcia Ford somewhat corrects Craig by noting that women did play important roles in the early church. The scriptural references and notes will help anyone digging for these hard to find passages. Marcia glosses over a couple millennia of history when she says, “While some see the Bible as condoning masculine control, others interpret the biblical perpetuation of patriarchy as a way of working within existing cultural norms.” Studies of the Minoans, Mycenaeans, Sumerians and other early Ancient Near Eastern cultures show women frequently playing more equal roles. One theory is that as war between Mediterranean cultures grew, men asserted their physical power and cultural norms changed. It was about this time that the Torah was written. Another opportunity for exploration that this book misses.

How can a God be all-loving yet allow people to be thrown into hell?

There are two answers given to this question. Jarrod McKenna uses “hell” metaphorically. He says it’s separation from God. God is love, and choosing to separate from that is hell. Jim L. Robinson answers by saying God doesn’t throw anybody anywhere. He gives the best explanation of grace that one could in just one page, then says, “I’m relatively confident that present-day teachings about hell will one day be revealed as human misinterpretation of scripture – either in the writing, the reading, or in both.” I would love to be a fly on the wall in a study group where some of the people are confronting that idea for the first time.

What does “apocalypse” mean, and does the Bible predict one?

Not much to say about this section, except I’m glad that Becky Garrison puts in here that the Left Behind series does not agree with scholars throughout history. All but one of them leave it way too open that Revelations might predict something that could happen. They at least mention other possible interpretations.

Pagans and Heretics IV

2011-09-29T08:47:00.000-07:00

Part III in the series

Summer is over, and this might be the end of the Pagans and Heretics series too.

Hopefully I have made the case that any belief system includes an element of cruelty. In this part of the series, I will address that more directly. I covered this previously in The Cost with a specific example and will cover it more generally here.

The cruelty that I am referring to shows up in a couple ways. In a discussion of a belief system, at some point, the believer will have to rely on a statement of faith. The more obvious ones don’t need to be covered. The more subtle ones sound something like, “we can’t understand the mystery” or “the truth is being revealed to us over time” or “anything is possible”.

Perhaps anything is possible, but how then do we decide how to live our lives? If we accept that anything is possible, say for instance that setting a goal somehow alters the forces of the universe and brings that goal closer, how are we different from someone that claims their prayers can cure cancer? If you claim that a negative thought about someone actually hurts them, how is that different from Jerry Falwell claiming pagans caused the 9/11 attacks? Once you open the door to “anything is possible”, how do you then put a limit on any claim of cause and effect?

Before describing the effect of this type of thinking, I need to separate this built-in cruelty from an individual’s cruel personality. Regardless of belief, anyone can be bad at arguing, that is, they can use unfair tactics when arguing or worse, be completely dismissive of the other persons’ ideas, perhaps even calling them names. Some people try to equate this behavior to extreme religious behavior and label it “fundamentalist atheism”. I don’t see much point in that.

For the non-believer, cruelty is still possible. Someone can claim to be a better person based on the quality or number of their scholastic degrees. Recommending that someone read a book before they can discuss a topic intelligently can be done in a positive and encouraging way, or cruelly. But these are qualities of the individual, not necessarily of the educational system that taught them or the books they read.

A belief system, by its very nature, has that arrogance built in to it. People are of course free to believe whatever they want, but it usually does not end with someone simply choosing to believe a particular thing. Any claim of truth that is made solely by a leap of faith is a statement that the believer has something, knows something that the non-believer does not. The believer may be the most peaceful person and have the most helpful of intentions but their bottom line is that you just can’t understand.

We can look back on more ignorant times and see this clearly. Kings claimed to have divine knowledge and used it to enslave everyone else. As ruling structures became more complex, there were still only a few who could read and they interpreted the rules to benefit them. Fortunately there have been those who have fought against this. As more people have gained the ability to determine philosophies for themselves, more concessions have had to be made and how they compete in the marketplace of ideas has had to become more sophisticated.

This has led to a very confusing morass of philosophies that require more than a few quick searches with Google to sort out. If you are easily convinced, you might happen on this website and consider your work done. You might know someone with a story of a miraculous healing and consider that a valid source. If you are skeptical, you are left with the problem of how long do you need to look before you can say that there are no proven cases of limbs regenerating or prayers curing cancer? Maybe you have heard of the Miracle of Fatima, with thousands of witnesses and consider that ample evidence on which to base some sort of belief. As knowledge has become more easily accessible, it has become less acceptable to take such cases on faith.

Because most people still consider doing this research too much trouble, because the waters are so muddied, most of mainstream religion, including the spiritual but not religious, completely ignore this market. There are some classics in the genre, going back to ancient Greece, and more recent 18^th and 19^th century works. The mid twentieth century produced some foundational material such as Friedman and Campbell. Since 9/11 the market has expanded as more people felt the need to understand the role of religion in politics. For the believers, there are thousands of gods to choose from throughout history. As historians have attempted to explain their roots, believers in those gods have responded with claims of how archaeology and science proves that their god was right all along.

For most people, there is no need to look in to any of this. If you aren’t asking questions, there is no need to look into long technical explanations. If you have made the faith decision, you don’t need additional confirmation. The market of material on religion, miracles, faith and magic is aimed somewhat at those who are questioning their faith or considering a faith decision, but mostly it is there as a prop. Bookstore shelves are filled with works by the atheists; Dawkins, Harris, Dennet, Hitchens, Price and Ehrman, something has to be said in response. That it has no substance doesn’t seem to matter.

To illustrate, let’s examine a couple examples of recent big sellers.

A huge success for Christianity has been The Purpose Driven Life.This is supposedly a new way of studying Christianity. I have never seen anything about it that convinces me that it is anything more than the standard line of; read the Bible, follow the rules, and share the gospel.

In another recent work that received high praises, Paul Copan tried to defend some of the worst parts of the Old Testament in a book titled Is God a Moral Monster. It is endorsed by some of the biggest names in apologetics. If you think it would be hard to explain away the murder, rape, slavery and genocide in the Old Testament, you would be right. This book fails on every level, including just being able to accurately provide chapter and verse. However, since most people won’t read it, it doesn’t matter. It is simply claimed that the work has been done and this book accomplishes what it says it does. Most people won’t know that a Christian who has some integrity has published an extensive refutation of it.

The authors I mentioned in part 3 have many books that sell considerably fewer copies but are equal in that they provide little in the way of support for reasons to believe. These books don’t look at the more difficult passages, such as Moses ordering 3,000 to be killed or Jesus throwing the chaff into the fire. They just ignore them. I have found some really good interpretations in these books, and I enjoy them and share them often. The people of Canaan really did accomplish something 4,000 years ago and the story of a god coming to earth as a servant is pretty unique. But ignoring most of the Bible and claiming that the few stories you like exemplify Christianity really helps no one.

Further along the spectrum, you can find books that mix the familiar characters of religion with other history and other traditions and fill in the gaps however they please. These can be interesting stories and can portray insights into the human condition, but when they attempt to create new beliefs or prop up old ones their value diminishes. I give credit to Dan Brown for at least making a statement in the foreword to The DaVinci Code that it is fiction. Many authors skip this, or claim they have uncovered something that no one else has.

At the far end of the spectrum, beyond claims of specific gods or miracles are books like The Secret. These take bits and pieces from ancient texts and claim to weave a common thread of wisdom that only the authors of these books have figured out. Here’s the secret, set goals and stick to them, build a support network, nourish your body and your mind, acknowledge those who have helped you along the way.

Feynman

2011-08-31T14:24:00.000-07:00

Somewhat on topic, but a slight departure from the series to do a book review.

One of the survivors of the 60’s counter cultural movement is a place near Big Sur called The Esalen Institute. From their own website, here is why people go there:

“They come for the intellectual freedom to consider systems of thought and feeling that lie beyond the current constraints of mainstream academia. They come to discover ancient wisdom in the motion of the body, poetry in the pulsing of the blood. They come to rediscover the miracle of self-aware consciousness.”

Esalen currently charges thousands of dollars for you to stay there and hundreds of dollars to take their courses. A few of them, such as yoga have continuing education credits, but most don’t. You might learn to paint from your soul though.

I heard of Esalen back in the 70’s but had forgotten about it. I’ve talked a lot about ancient wisdom and I’m going to just pass on the “miracle”. It’s the “lie beyond the current constraints of mainstream academia” that I want to address. What constraints? The constraint that if you are going to learn where stars come from you should know some Calculus? If you want to write some poetry, maybe you should read some classics?

I was reminded of Esalen while reading “Surely you are Joking Mr. Feynman.” This a collection of stories by Richard Feynman, the youngest physicist at Los Alamos when they were developing the atom bomb. He was a scientist and a bongo player and the book is divided equally between his cultural exploits and his scientific ones. I think there are better books on Feynman, but here is the speech I’m referring to.

He starts out talking about investigating some of these new ideas that Esalen was supposedly exploring and ends up talking about where our education system has gone wrong. He was born at the end of the time when science was respected, when it helped to unite a country, feed the world and defeat evil enemies. In doing that, it unleashed its own evil in the form of a mushroom cloud and there was a shift towards matters of the heart. The idea that science and capitalism could save us seemed like a lie.

The examination of the nature of that big lie is still going on. There is no simple way to account for all the harm and all the good that has occurred in the last century. Although I don’t come down on the side of war mongering and infinite expansion I also don’t come down on the side of the “miracle of self-aware consciousness.” It only took a few decades to examine astrology, out of body experiences, ESP, bending spoons, homeopathy and prayer to find that they are little lies. Claims of equal magnitude about these being our saviors have been made about these phenomenon. A few very serious people, like Richard Feynman, have looked into them and found them wanting.

Unfortunately, what Feynman suggested in 1974 has been ignored. What should be science’s greatest strength, that it admits what it can’t do, that it points to where it could be wrong, is seen as a weakness. Feynman exemplifies a man with intellectual freedom who considered systems of thought and feeling that lie beyond current constraints. Because he looked at the world that way and questioned other’s assumptions as well as his own assumptions, he won a Nobel prize for contributions to the development of quantum electrodynamics. People consider things beyond the current constraints all the time, some of them get Nobel prizes for it. They don’t need to go to Esalen and learn reflexology to do it.

Feynman questioned people that he had a great deal of respect for, Albert Einstein and Neils Bohr. He didn’t reject their work because he thought it was limiting his space or cramping his style or killing his buzz, he acknowledged their contributions and used them to further our understanding of the universe. He wasn’t constrained by academia, he used it to explore the mysteries of the world he found himself in. He didn’t look at musicians and painters as weird people who didn’t get it, he hung out with them and tried to learn from them to be a better drummer and a better sketcher. It seems to me the people at Esalen are the ones creating boundaries.

To Pagans and Heretics III

2011-08-23T18:40:00.000-07:00

Part II of the series

All of this defining I have been doing has been necessary to discuss the marketing of those ideas. I’m not talking about some conspiratorial campaign to market a new world over. Marketing includes the word of mouth exchanges that we all use. I will discuss the marketing of liberal Christianity, but I believe you will find parallels to the other groups I have discussed. I will also draw a connection to the fundamentalist beliefs.

More important than getting to know the ins and outs of this market is understanding who the market is for. Polls often cite the fact that 80 to 90% of Americans believe in God. However, time/use studies by the government show that only 25% of Americans are attending church on Sunday. So there is a majority in the middle that have a wide range of spiritual beliefs, but they are only expressed in polls as belief in God or not. When defending their Biblically based arguments, religious leaders will site that 90% figure, claiming that they are all in complete agreement.

There is one thing that the 90% do generally agree on, and that is a distrust of atheists. This was discovered in a poll somewhat by accident. They were attempting to measure feelings towards Muslims and included the Atheist label to increase the accuracy of the poll. They expected atheists to be statistically insignificant. Although that 75% that did not go to church this Sunday may not be comfortable with their clergy, or may feel that their church has become less Christ centered, or they like some of the ideas but not the rules, or just can’t give to an organization that covers up for child molesters, they still are less comfortable proclaiming that they don’t believe in God or even thinking about their sister marrying an atheist.

Another survey, discussing the growing group of "nones".

Churches have been aware of this for a long time. It is not stated in these terms and may not even be conscious for most. It is stated in terms of the latest idea to increase the membership. When working on increasing members, they look at what people are thinking. If people think Christ was all about doing good things then their church should be out there cleaning up parks. If people think church should be a celebration, get some new musicians. If people want to know about recent historical discoveries about the first century, offer a class.

In the mid 20^th century, more and more seminaries began to teach textual criticism, the idea that by reading the Bible, you could determine that it was not written by Moses, the prophets and the apostles. This led to heretical ideas like maybe the miracles in the Bible might not have happened. This was not immediately passed onto the people in the congregations. Some young people who thought they were very dedicated to the church found they could not be once they went through seminary school. Some of this started to leak into the mainstream. In the mid 1980’s a group of scholars and laymen founded The Jesus Seminar. They wrote books, toured and gave a new interpretations of the gospel stories.

About that time I was getting more involved in my community and found that churches were an important part of that. When you needed volunteers to help with your neighborhood cleanup, they seemed to have a group just ready to go. I eventually stumbled on a church that was involved in doing good works, had some good music and a pastor that hadn’t done anything I would have a problem with. And he was just starting a class using a book by Dominic Crossan, one of the founders of the Jesus Seminar. It was not until years later that I was shown a book that exposed some of the not so scholarly methods used by the Jesus Seminar.

Later, also somewhat by accident, I picked up a book by John Shelby Spong. He was one of the first of the older generation of church leaders to really look into the psychology of homosexuality. He found out that he had been wrong to preach that it was a sin. It was apparently quite natural. He is now retired and writes extensively about how the Bible is not the word of God. Somehow he has maintained his love for Christ, although he has never explained why in a way that satisfies me.

It is rare that anything will be explicitly stated that these tools are used to keep people interested. But sometimes it is. There was an organization named Campus Crusade for Christ that works specifically to attract those young people who weren’t indoctrinated into Christianity by their family. The group eventually figured out that the word “Crusade” has some negative connotations. Now they just call themselves “Cru”. This was specifically because, “some people may be initially turned off at the mention of Christ.”

To hear more of this type of talk, you really don’t need to dig too far. You only need to get past the nice brochures that are left out for that 50-75% of people who don’t come in every Sunday. Once you are past the Sunday Service, on just about any committee or in a meeting at any level above the most local, you will hear talk about membership. There may be some language about doing the work of the Lord, but there won’t be much detail. Once you are at this level you are supposed to know what that work is and make the connections yourself.

For me, I eventually could not look at anything we did that I felt had actual value and not find a completely logical reason for doing it that did not require a supernatural explanation. The only thing the church offered was an infrastructure of buildings, regional leaders and a communication system. There may not seem to be anything wrong with that. And if my church, the United Methodist Church, was an organization that built clinics in third world countries and fed the homeless in American cities and did little else, then I would agree. But that is not all that they do.

First there are just the buildings themselves. Look around at all of them in your area. Each one must be heated, kept cleaned, and have the lawn mowed. They are rarely full except for a few hours a week. The reason for so many of them is that each disagrees on the tiniest bits of theology, things that have little impact on the world but took years to parse out and tons of paperwork as each new difference split off to form another denomination. Imagine the community center that could be built with the combined effort of those organizations. A center that would be for everybody.

A good deal of effort of the particular church I attended was put into working to change the organizations official policy on homosexuality. One of the things that made the church vibrant was a very creative staff of people in the Sunday School which taught that there was a guiding consciousness that created all things and watches over us. The questions that began to arise for me were why am I part of an organization that needs to have its policy on homosexuality changed? And, do I want children to be taught to believe someone is watching out for them, or do I want them to learn to think for themselves?

Not too far away, in other churches in the same organization, children were being taught that their prayers could cure diseases. Most of the other churches were either oblivious to the issues of homosexuality or actively working to keep the current rules in place. Again, more time spent arguing over something that the rest of the world has already dealt with. Of course, I am just one person and there is the question of creating change from within an organization or from without. It is up to you to decide where you stand.

Pagans and Heretics II

2011-08-10T10:57:00.001-07:00

Part I of this series

Part III

So, what do I mean by Pagan? Most people who join groups, whether pagan or orthodox, don’t go on research projects about those groups. Most people make choices based on personal experience and the experiences of people close to them. There is nothing wrong with this and I will discuss it more in a moment. But this is a blog about examining those things, so here goes.

When I say “pagan”, I am talking about the shamanistic, polytheistic, and animist ways of looking at the world. The word has had many other uses throughout history, some of them not so nice. It was sometimes used to mean “NOT Christian”, usually for whatever indigenous culture the Christians were conquering at the time. To the ancient Romans it was used more like it’s earliest definition, someone outside the culture. The word predates the Roman Empire, from the Stone Age, and Rome fought hard to destroy that earlier culture of nature centered religion. Later when Rome became Roman Catholic, the stories of Dionysus or what are now Christmas traditions such as the yule log, were called pagan rituals.

Religious Tolerance.org is an excellent source for information that tries to stay neutral on just about any tradition, including Wicca and Pagans.

Heretic has less of a history, but its connotation is negative. I don’t see it as positive. Martin Luther was a heretic, and he helped to reform Catholicism. The important part of the definition of heretic for my purposes is that they come from within the tradition. Heretics study the classical forms, then see something new, something requiring change. If they are accepted, they are leaders, if not, they are heretics. Brian McClaren, the author of Everything Must Change has said that today’s heresies are tomorrow’s orthodoxy.

There may be other categories you see as a better fit for yourself. But I think what I have to say will map onto them. If I may make a few suggestions:
For Buddhists, you may want to read Confession of a Buddhist Atheist by Stephen Batchelor.
For Scientologists, how much have you been told? Do you know what happens when you reach Thetan level III?
I am not familiar with women’s groups, but if you are involved in anything associated with the Men’s Movement, there should be no dogma. The movement is an inquiry. No one should be demanding your belief or allegiance. Recommend reading would be Robert Bly or Robert Moore. There are many others.
If your interest in spiritual, psychic or paranormal activity is casual, you might be interested the story of Susan Blackmore.

Finally, I will also discuss science. But no need to get too scientific about it. As I stated before, for the most part, our beliefs are formed from personal experience. So your belief system is as strong, accurate and useful as your experiences. Of course we can’t be everywhere or do anything, so we also rely on those we trust, the people close to us. On the more complex issues, we have to trust others. We do this more than we realize. For example, I have never seen my own brain, but I trust brain scientists that it is where my thoughts come from. If I had lived in Aristotle’s time, I probably would have trusted him that the brain is there to provide a cooling mechanism for my blood.

I said I don’t want to get scientific, but there are some basics that educational systems don’t cover very well. One is the idea of proof. Science does not really prove anything. In math, there are proofs, but they are confined to the definitions of math. So you can prove that 2 + 2 = 4, but only as those characters are defined. There are many things that science can’t say much about. Even the things that it can say a lot about, it can’t say it knows for certain. This is starting to move into philosophy so I’ll stop.

The important thing that gets missed in discussing science and religion is that science begins with wonder. The mysteries of the universe inspired people to look for answers. There was no distinction between astrology and astronomy when people first sat up all night and watched the stars move. We continue to look for answers, but if the answers had all been found, there would no longer be a need for science. Somehow religion has managed to claim its place as keeper of the great mysteries, when it is religion that claims to have the answers. Science does not claim to have the answers. It just has a certain method for asking the questions.

Inquiry begins with some sort of anecdote. Something happens that inspires questions. There may also be a premise. Like I presume that I exist and that the laws of physics that can be demonstrated locally apply to the entire known universe. Experiments are done to ask those questions, data is gathered. The experiments are repeated and checked and confirmed. It is usually best to have several people involved. Inductive or deductive reasoning is used to further the study and hypotheses are proposed. Ideas are published, the work is checked again and a consensus starts to develop. When enough testing is done, a hypothesis becomes a theory, and it can be used as a new starting point for further investigation. So, to say that a theory is just a guess is not at all accurate.

This section has been rather dry. I hope some of the links were interesting. Next I will get into why this examination matters.

Incident in Norway

2011-07-25T08:54:00.000-07:00

By now, many of you will have heard this quote from the shooter in Norway,

"One person with a belief is equal to the force of 100,000 who have only interests."

It is from John Stuart Mill, although I’m not sure he got it exactly right, and he didn’t reference him, which really annoys me. The shooter may not know of John Stuart Mill, other than the things that support his viewpoint, or he doesn’t want you to know. Fortunately, we all have computers now, so people like this can’t start civil wars.

John Stuart Mill was against slavery and for women’s rights. He felt if you wanted to do just about anything that didn’t harm others, you should be free to do it. He used scientific analysis to consider the problems that arise from people who can’t make good choices in a free society. The Norway shooter does not appear to be capable of such detailed analysis.

Now let’s take a look at a similar quote, the type that can be found all over the web,

“It is due to the Power of Belief (or non-belief) which causes ANY ‘thing’ – condition, event, or circumstance, that you experience in your life to manifest, and it’s outcome is only dependent on whether you believe that the thing can or whether you think it can’t manifest.”

This if from “The Entrepreneur Super Star”, some sort of Life Coach. She is referring to an interview from Oprah’s early career. Oprah has done an amazing job of capitalizing on this idea of belief in your self. In my experience, the people who believe these statements most thoroughly are those who are making money by convincing others that the statements are true.

There is a fine line here, but people like the Entrepreneur Super Star are way past that line. There is value in believing in yourself. There is value in looking at the circumstances, realizing that your vision is beyond those circumstances and taking a leap of faith. There are millions of stories of people overcoming the odds and doing extraordinary things. The value lies in their perseverance and hard work. Those are values that make things happen. Faith is not a value. In and of itself, if creates nothing.

Note in the quote above, the trick that allows this belief in belief to continue. It comes at the end. If you fail, if you don’t overcome the circumstances, it was because you didn’t believe hard enough. No need to reassess the data, no need to seek out a mentor, no need to go back to school and take a class, don’t bother even reading a book that is available for free online. Just blame yourself. Take another course in the power of belief, get your ego pumped up and try again.

The trouble begins when that system fails. Most people will just go back to working for a living. Some will make less healthy lifestyles choices and maybe take down a few friends and family members with them. Some will take more drastic actions.

To Pagans and Heretics

2011-07-15T10:19:00.000-07:00

"The unexamined life is not worth living."

This is a quote by Socrates from his trial for heresy. He was on trial for encouraging his students to challenge the accepted beliefs of the time and think for themselves.

With that in mind, I will be attempting another mini-series over the next few months. Keep in mind it is summer, so this may be slow in developing. I hope to fill a niche. It is difficult to fill niches on the Internet, but I feel this is one that exists. In my quest for information on religion, I have noticed a lack of information on liberals and moderates. Among the anti-religious, there is sometimes a complete lack of realization that there is such a thing. More often, it is simply dismissed.

This is unfortunate for two reasons. One, the anti-religious could benefit from a discussion with these more reasonable individuals. Even if they don’t agree, a better understanding of the rationale for religion could be gained. Religion has evolved just like other ideas and we can be active partners in that. A good example of this is religious and secularists working together in the “Secular Coalition for America” to educate about and promote the separation of church and state. Two, since liberal believers are dismissed, they in turn dismiss the atheists, further isolating them.

This series will address the second of those two, hopefully in a way that won’t be dismissed.

One of my inspirations for this series is a YouTube series geared for the more traditional church going believer. He recognizes that belief is a network of patterns and traditions that is not knocked out with a single blow. The system of belief must be recognized and respected. In this well produced and calmly presented series, he covers:

Logical Arguments – perceived authority, friends, family and books.

Creation – Complexity and beauty are a testament to a creator.

Bible – It contains wisdom, it must be divine and inspired by God.

Other Christians – Examples of good people and just the sheer number.

Prayer – Perception of answered prayers.

Personal Relationship with God – If he spoke to you, how could you not believe?

Morality – God is the source. If not, what else is there?

If you already are forming responses to some or all of these, then that series is probably not for you. Logical arguments are well covered on the Internet, so I don’t need to cover them again. You might use many sources other than the Bible for wisdom, you meditate instead of praying, you may not have spoke with Jesus but had some other sort of numinous experience of oneness with universe. The network of ideas I am working on looks something like this:

How do we know what we know?

Ancient Texts – How well do you know them?

Numinous Experiences – What are they?

Ethics – What is their source?

Myth – The value of stories.

Community – The power of relationships.

Before and after our lives – Creation and death are major spiritual themes.

Awe and Wonder – The universe is amazing enough without the supernatural.

Before continuing to read these posts, you might ask yourself, how far do want to go into this exploration? You could start by considering what questions you would like to ask your spiritual leaders. I am most familiar with the responses from Christian leaders, so I’ll suggest a few here, but they may map onto whatever tradition you are currently following. People have questioned their leaders about the consistency or accuracy of their teachings throughout history, so although you could hear any one of these answers today, I will place them in a historical timeline.

Prior to the 17^th century, you would most likely be told that questions like that will land you in hell. Into the 19^th century the more nuanced response would be that questions are good, but ultimately you need faith. In the latter part of the 20^th century, leaders began to encourage people to bring their questions to Adult Bible class, or start a book group. With books such as Rick Warren’s Purpose Driven Life, or the titles from the Jesus Seminar, there are many choices.

A much more rare response would be an offer to work together to change the doctrine. Most organizations have some way for grass roots ideas to be raised up to the highest levels. As Margaret Mead famously said, this is how change happens. Anything beyond this response would be at the level of historic. It also might be career threatening, or for you, the end of your membership. I’m speaking of actions such as Thomas Beckett refusing to recognize the young King Henry in 1170 or Martin Luther challenging the corrupt Catholic leadership or Teilhard de Chardin a Jesuit priest and paleontologist speaking about evolution in 1920’s or Carlton Pearson a successful minister for Oral Roberts who said hell does not exist. More recently the heroic individuals such as Gene Robinson, Terry Brown, Jim Swiley, Mary Albing, Ruth Frost, Phyllis Zillhart, high ranking clergy who came out as homosexual.

Without these people we might still be living under the rule of kings who claim to speak to God directly and could kill you if you disagreed. Some of the people named above paid dearly for speaking up. I hope that is not discouraging. Everyone has to decide when and where it is appropriate to speak their mind. What you talk about when you visit your grandmother is probably different from what you say to your close friends. If you were invited to a Wiccan wedding, it would not be the best time to engage in a heated discussion about magic. At some point, that politeness crosses into the same type of double-think that a dissident under an oppressed government uses. How much you are willing to speak up is solely your decision.

Part II

Imagine No Malaria

2011-07-04T07:56:00.001-07:00

At the end of the movie “Letting Go of God”, a one woman show by Julia Sweeney, she muses over the idea of what it would be like if the Pope came to the realization that he had been misguided all his life. In a soft but mocking tone that only Julia can do, she has the Pope apologizing and promising to spend the rest of his life working in a women’s health clinic in Central America. I have had similar visions myself, although more along the line of Catholics returning the art as well as the gold that they have plundered from what are now 3^rd world countries.

Whatever you think of religion, you can’t deny that they have a lot of power. Angry atheists claim that accumulating power has been the only thing they accomplished. Those who are more accommodating acknowledge there have been some really bad Popes, but churches were the caregivers and educators in the Dark Ages. They were the first to build hospitals and develop programs to feed the poor. Finding cause and affect in history can be difficult so I will leave that aside for now and take a look at one particular history and a possible future.

In the history of the Methodist church, real estate was accumulated due to their policy of how to grow their church. When a congregation grew to a certain size, they split off some of the membership, went down the road a bit and built a new church. Acquiring real estate was not the goal, but spreading God’s word had the same affect. In the United States, this has become a liability to an organization that is declining in membership. In Africa, it has become an asset for one of the biggest goals for human health in recent history.

You may have heard of Bill Gates. He is not a member of the United Methodist church, or any church for that matter. He does know how to get things done. When he got done playing with computers and finally decided to use his wealth to do something worthwhile, he got interested in the problem of malaria in Africa. Defeating malaria will be on par with defeating polio. And, like Jonas Salk, no one is going to get rich by doing it.

The solution is fairly simple, an insecticide treated net, some education, some preventative health care. Simple if you were in the United States with roads and communication infrastructure. In the language of business, seeing a problem as an opportunity, Gates went searching for an organization that had people spread out across the continent. He was looking for people that were part of the communities, so they could explain these strange white nets in the plastic bags. People who weren’t there to sell anything, but to care for their brothers and sisters. He found two potential organizations, Lutheran World Services, and United Methodists Committee On Relief. He picked UMCOR.

Anticipating your next question, please click here:

This partnership of a secular organization and a church to eliminate a disease from a continent is without precedent. I hope it is precedent setting. First, I hope it is successful, then I hope it sets an example that others follow.

In 136 blogs I have never asked for money, and I don’t plan to start now. I would be remiss if I did not at least direct you to where you can participate. One net, including all costs of manufacturing, delivery and follow-up costs only $10. That usually benefits an entire family. The goal is to reduce malaria by 80% by 2015. That will take a concerted, coordinated effort. Toward that goal, a suggested level of giving is $1 per month over the next three years. The success of the program has already been proven in some countries.

Is this the future role of churches? Will UMCOR be here long after the UM part is gone?

For further reading:

http://tunein.com/radio/First-United-Methodist-Church-p46385/

http://www.gatesfoundation.org/speeches-commentary/Pages/bill-gates-sr-2008-united-methodist-conference.aspx

http://www.nothingbutnets.net/blogs/bill-gates-2011-annual-letter.html

Prospect Theory

2011-06-24T10:46:00.000-07:00

Okay, I spent the last two blogs talking about Enlightenment philosophers. Hopefully you noted I wrote about the variety of thoughts that were being thunk at that time and how they played against each other. I have also written in the past in a not-so favorable manner about the Enlightenment. So, was the Enlightenment a good thing or not? This entry will sort some of that out.

Enlightenment thinking was an improvement over the decision making process that had been used prior to that. Prior to that, the occasional genius thought stuff up and the rest of us could chose to believe him or not (it was almost always a him). So we had Confucius or Jesus, Aristotle or Moses. Frequently your choice would be determined by your parents or the law telling you to believe or die. The Enlightenment thinkers figured out how to avoid the punishments of the Inquistion but they were still just sitting down at a table with a pen and thinking about it.

The eighth painting in the series "The Rake's Progress" where the fashionable come to watch the whacky antics of the mentally ill.

When you stop and think about where ethics come from or how the world began, you are using a rational thought process, so it was natural for these philosophers to assume that humans are rational thinking beings. When we decide that we shalt not kill, it isn’t God telling us not to do that, we figured out that if we didn’t kill anybody we would be happier. We don’t covet our neighbor’s wife because we don’t want our neighbor coveting our wife. We’ll all be happier if we agree on that, right? This was eventually immortalized in the famous words that we are endowed “with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” It is this idea of calculating our maximum happiness that forms much of the theory of capitalism and our modern way of looking at the world.

The problem is, we are not rational at all. It took a couple hundred years before anyone stopped and did any analysis of these ideas or any experiments on how people really think. Economists only experimented with ways to trick us into buying things. They came up with elaborate theories about how allowing people with money to do whatever they want will somehow benefit all of us. Never mind that they got that money by putting a value on our labor then skimming off some of that value into their pockets.

But before I get off on a liberal politics rant, let’s get back to how we think. The first time I heard of Prospect Theory was on TV and radio shows about money. Studies were done that showed that people don’t think straight when it comes to money. If you were given $30, then given a 50/50 chance to win or lose $9, 70% of you would take that bet. But, given the choice of getting $30 for certain or a coin flip to get either $21 or $39 dollars, only 43% take the coin flip. The two scenarios have exactly the same odds. The only difference is when you make the decision. We generally don’t calculate odds, we base our decisions on irrational things like is the $30 in our wallet or not.

What the TV and radio shows did not tell me is that this theory was not developed by economists, it was developed by psychologists. They had to convince the economists that everything they had been basing their theories on for 300 years was wrong. In 2002, these psychologists, Tversky and Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in Economics. Of course that doesn’t mean that economists really care. They still tell us that the trickledown theory really works.

What does this tell us about the science vs. religion debate? 300 years ago some well off people just decided that we were rational thinking creatures, that there was no mystery to where ideas come from. This flew in the face of thousands of years of tradition but also in the face of anyone who thought about it and wondered why they got mad at some stupid little thing or lusted after something they knew they could never have. This was thrown in the bucket of irrationality, something those Enlightenment philosophers were above of course. If you didn’t understand rationality, you were probably just born that way and incapable of understanding them. And they wondered why some people didn’t like them.

Ironically, it took the ultimate tool of rational thinking, the scientific method, to prove that we are not rational thinkers after all.

Tsunamis, Then and Now

2011-06-12T18:04:00.000-07:00

In 1755 there was an earthquake off the coast of Portugal. Early estimates were that up to 100,000 of the 300,000 people in Lisbon died as a result of the tsunami, the buildings falling and the fires. There were three reactions to this disaster that provide interesting parallels to reactions that we see today. The priests blamed the sinners, some of the new humanists blamed modern society for concentrating people in cities, and a few people took it upon themselves to investigate the nature of the event.

The priests were not marginalized nor made fun of like Pat Robertson in 2008 when he blamed the Haiti earthquake on a voodoo witch doctor that had made a deal with the devil 200 years earlier. These priests were able to freely roam the city and collect whatever rumors they might find of people who had not done their prayers or slept with the wrong person or whatever they might want to connect to the earthquake. That the earthquake occurred on All Saint’s Day just added to their reasoning, and I am using a very broad definition of “reasoning”. The accused were gathered together and ritually burned as a symbol of the eternity in hell that they were headed for.

Rousseau wrote a piece claiming that the number of deaths would not have occurred if people had not concentrated in cities, unnaturally. If they had been spread out in the hills in smaller buildings the tsunami would have been something interesting that happened somewhere away from most people and didn’t affect them much. This of course ignores all of the possible disasters that could befall people living in the hills in primitive dwellings.

Voltaire heard of all of this and used the power of his pen to respond. He wrote letters and poems and sat down for 3 days and immortalized the earthquake in the short story Candide. Candide is a fast paced story of an optimistic young man travelling around the globe finding fortune and misfortune. It is a mix of Quentin Tarantino, Monty Python and the Canterbury Tales. He wrote to satirize not only religion, but Optimism. Optimism was becoming an alternative to religion in the French Enlightenment and Voltaire saw no more reason in it than in the mythology of Christianity.

Voltaire was enjoying the pleasures of old age after battling the church throughout his life and bringing to light a new age of reason and rationality. He had the ear of royalty and aristocracy and had the means to help people who did not have such advantages. Voltaire was one of the last men who could speak and write on almost any subject and be considered an expert. Knowledge has grown too much since then and disciplines too specialized. People still write about how our cities should be built or where, but very few of them could stand out like Voltaire. When one person speaks or writes today, a hundred more claim greater knowledge and the rest of us find it difficult to invest the time to sort it all out.

We may have learned to not blindly trust the authority of the previous generation, but that generation had just as many and more obstacles to developing critical thinking skills as the current one does. We may not have Jesuit Priests roaming the streets looking for anyone asking the wrong questions, but we do have Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Nintendo, NASCAR, Lady Gaga and Newt Gingrich muddying the waters of information. The school system never quite caught up with the rapid changes of science. In the rush to teach us how to get to the moon, it didn’t have time to teach us how to think about whether or not that was the right priority.

There was a study a while back that showed that recently more studies come out that refute earlier studies. For many, the reaction to this is to dismiss all studies. That misses the point of studying. Science has not figured everything out, if it did, it would stop. We owe a deep debt of gratitude to those who first started studying and asking questions in a critical way, a way that admitted that we didn’t know what was going on, that we were fallible and vulnerable, but that maybe we could figure it out by doing something other than sitting in a darkened room and making up explanations or referring to 2,000 year old books. The people who studied the causes and effects of the quake are now part of a long tradition. This is the first documented case of someone studying an earthquake. Letters were sent out around the area asking what they experienced. This resulted in much more conservative numbers of deaths. Today would be shocked if something like this happened and it was not studied.

The affect of this event was both long term and immediate. Portugal was rebuilt and reformed. The Jesuit Priests were exiled in 1759, although the decision was reversed later. This did lead to Portugal becoming the first country in Europe to build a secular education system. We are still feeling the effects of this tremor.

Second-Tier Philosophy

2011-05-31T03:58:00.000-07:00

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy lists Friedrich Schleiermacher as a second-tier philosopher, although they say he is one of the most-interesting in that class. The “second-tier” moniker refers to his work being derivative of the big guys like Emmanuel Kant and Baruch Spinoza. They also say he is clearly following Herder who they list as “of the first importance” although I don’t know much about him. Reading the stories of these men from centuries past who rethought what it is to be human always leaves me completely astounded. It has been difficult enough for me to form a worldview in fifty years and I have the advantage of being able to hear these philosophies synthesized into the poetry that plays regularly on FM radio.

Schleiermacher came well after Thomas Aquinas had attempted to reconcile religion with reason and in an the era when Kant and others were looking to abandon religion and re-ask the question of just what morality is based on if not divine decree. In some sense this may have been a defensive move, he was classically trained in theology after all. But although he made some clear statements about not being able to believe in the saving grace of a risen Christ, he said there was something more to religion than a set of rules or a place to be comforted. In later years he seemed to backpedal on his statements of non-belief. His true feelings are difficult to discern.

In his early and seminal work On Religion, he relinquishes both God and morality as unnecessary to religion. Instead he says, “Religion’s essence is neither thinking nor acting, but intuition and feeling. It wishes to intuit the universe.” This leaves a lot of room for philosophical discussion. Feelings can be defined in a couple of ways and are fallible, as is intuition, so what is he talking about? I will leave it up to the detectives of historical philosophy to sort that out. As a 21st century human being I have a lot more information to draw from about just what Schleiermacher could have been thinking.

He had no sense of the size and age of the universe like I do. He didn’t know that he shared atoms with stars that had burned and exploded a billion years ago. He didn’t know about energy fields and waves of light or strings that vibrate in other dimensions. All of these have spawned new philosophers, many of them only pretending to have anything worthwhile to add to the conversation. It is not terribly profound for someone today to say they don’t believe in God but there must be something else, something out there. If you said that 200 years ago, you would merit an entry in Stanford’s Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Schleiemacher was bucking two trends at once. He was part of a movement away from using religion as a basis for all ethical decisions, but he was not comfortable with the trend toward conscious reasoning as the only source of knowledge. As he says in Essence of Religion, "religious feeling should accompany every human deed like a holy music; we should do everything with religion, nothing because of religion"

If you abandon the idea that Gods or demons put thoughts into your head you are still left with the question of where thoughts come from. We still can’t find a thought and put into a jar but advances in neuroscience have led us back to the type of philosophy that Schleiemacher was considering. We know that we are descended from lizards and monkeys and parts of our brains still operate closer to how those animals think than what we think of as our rational selves. We are finding that emotions play a larger role in reasoning than previously thought.

The theory is called “motivated reasoning”. When faced with information that does not fit our current view, an EEG can pick up an emotional response that we are not aware of. That response directs our thoughts and the slower process of rational thinking, the thinking that we think we are doing, appears to be logical and rational but the emotional response has already directed that reasoning down familiar comfortable paths. Even acquiring more information, in other words “learning”, does not necessarily help. A more sophisticated person who should be capable of challenging his own assumptions is also capable of creating more sophisticated arguments to maintain his current view.

Chris Mooney recently laid out much of this in an article in Mother Jones magazine. He links to many studies and describes how this relates to the recent apocalypse prediction. He sums the article up with, “The upshot: All we can currently bank on is the fact that we all have blinders in some situations.” If we are going to work together on the biggest scientific problems that have ever faced humankind, we will need to be aware of the emotional reactions we illicit in others as we breach topics of recycling, global warming, gas mileage and religious pluralism.

In an October 1994 essay in Scientific American titled Descartes' Error and the Future of Human Life, Antonio R Damasio head of the neurology department at the University of Iowa College of Medicine found similar parallels with his work and the words of philosophers from the era of Descartes’ “I think therefore I am”.

It is intriguing to realize that Pascal
prefigured this idea within the same 17th
century that brought us Cartesian dualism,
when he said "It is on this knowledge of the
heart and of the instincts that reason must
establish itself and create the foundation for
all its discourse." We are beginning to
uncover the pertinent neurobiological facts
behind Pascal's profound insight, and that
may be none too soon. If the human species
is to prevail, physical resources and social
affairs must be wisely managed, and such
wisdom will come most easily from the
knowledgeable and thoughtful planning that
characterizes the rational, self-knowing
mind.

Oprah

2011-05-26T08:50:00.000-07:00

I’m not going off on a tangent of having this blog being about current events, but this week we get another big event in religion in popular culture. Oprah says “thanks” to Jesus on her final show. Not in a brief off hand way but in a very clear and strong statement. If you seem to remember having heard her say things that seem to contradict that, there is nothing wrong with your memory.

I really don’t care what products or individuals she has supported that go counter to Christian morals or her stand on abortion, gay rights, vegetarianism or whether or not I need a makeover. What I do care is that she has used religious techniques to sell herself. She has been criticized for it, and just like religious leaders throughout history, she has claimed that she helps people and that she is searching for “good” and that her critics should get on board. All that in lieu of responding to the criticism itself. Like any good non-denominational preacher, nailing down just what she means by “good” is hard to define. It has something to do with believing in yourself and buying your T-shirts from an up and coming single mother entrepreneur.

Oprah pot shots are really too easy and I’m sure you will hear a few in the coming weeks. You will no doubt also hear from the Christians who want to distance themselves from her. Her self-help message runs counter to giving up your life to Jesus Christ. She is perfectly positioned to go after the “spiritual but not religious” market that is currently growing. Her ability to wrap a variety of “law of attraction” type messages under one umbrella, without examining any of them too deeply, is likely to be appealing for some time to come. Atheism is currently defined as non-belief in existing deities. For some it includes non-belief in all supernatural phenomena, but for many that is not a problem. Oprah has no problem promoting all types of magic.

If Oprah was merely bringing some modernization to Christianity, saying it is okay to pick the best parts of the teachings and discard the miracles and dogma, I would be okay with that. But she stated that Jesus was with her even when she didn’t know it. This leaves her room to claim anything she has done could be attributed to divine intervention and still say that she thinks for herself when she needs to. The statement she made on her last show indicates some pretty strong belief, and it will be difficult to reconcile it with previous statements she has made about non-belief. Given her ability to sell just about anything, I don’t doubt she’ll manage.

There is more to this than just the evils of marketing and the shamefulness of using Jesus to promote yourself. Whether or not she is doing that consciously doesn’t really matter. I am more troubled by what she is doing unwittingly. By giving G-O-D credit for her accomplishments, she leads many to believe that they only need to do the same to accomplish just as much. She leaves a big question about all of the people who will never come close to what she has done, where is Jesus in their lives? A very strange god that selects one woman, makes her a billionaire, has her promote books and programs that have nothing to do with Him, and leaves a billion others living on less than one dollar per day.

Parts of the final show are available on her website. In one of them, I think it is titled "what Oprah knows for sure" she talks about doing whatever you do with passion and that you will receive in direct porportion to what you give. So, this woman who has spent 25 years listening to stories of tragedy and triumph, hope and despair, knows for sure that life is fair. I guess my teachers, my football coach, my parents and the kid who stole my lunch money were all wrong.

I hope someone in her inner circle has pointed out that her message is only
slightly removed from the “gospel of prosperity” that has been seen on conservative evangelical television for years. It supports perseverance and hard work, but at the same time tells you that if you fail, there is something wrong with you. There must be something that you didn’t follow correctly because there certainly can’t be anything wrong with Oprah’s message. But don’t worry, if you fail, you just need to read the next book in the book club, or get the new updated DVD series, or go to the right seminar. It is a strange and dangerous brew of self-reliance and co-dependence.

Not the end of the world

2011-05-22T04:51:00.000-07:00

I really didn’t want to say anything about May 21st, but it was so widely advertised I couldn’t resist. The only good thing I can see coming out of this is a larger awareness of how many people there are that believe that the end of times is near and how that type of thinking causes tremendous harm. The belief helps to explain a lot of our current problems. Why worry about where you’re great grandchildren will get clean water, if the world will be gone by then?

I was in college when 909 people died in Jonestown, followers of a man who had a utopian vision. These were smart people who wanted to build a better world. I have been interested in cults ever since. I was really bummed that the people with the May 21st vans were right near my work last week and I missed them.

Harold Camping’s Family Radio is not necessarily a cult but it shares the common theme of a large following of something that is based on a mix of very logical and very healthy teaching with some absolutely crazy shit. I don’t doubt that his programs have helped some people. The stories of people spending every last dollar right up to May 21st are people who will need a different help. I heard a pollster talking about the many people who believe the apocalypse will come in their lifetime, but younger people said they hoped it would come when they were 80. Harold Camping is 89.

One of the best studies on the phenomenon of apocalyptic preaching comes from Leon Festinger. In the 1950’s he followed a small group who believed aliens were going to destroy the earth. They didn’t. A few left the cult, but most deepened their faith when their leader had a new vision that it was their faith that had saved the world. This may be the strategy that Camping takes, according to this YouTube that claims to have some inside information. This is not the leader’s ability to tell a better story, it is the mind at work attempting to deal with doing something incredibly stupid.

If you need a humorous break at this point, this one is great.

There are many Christians who not too happy about all of this.

Even National Geographic felt is necessary to weigh in.

The craziest ones to me are the ones that say the prediction is wrong, but they know the real truth

I have not read all of those or made any attempt to critique the quality of one over another. They all say something about how his problem is that he uses an allegorical method of interpretation. Some say we should instead take Revelations literally. Using that method, you’ll know that the prophecy has come to pass when you see something like this:

7 The locusts looked like horses prepared for battle. On their heads they wore something like crowns of gold, and their faces resembled human faces. 8 Their hair was like women’s hair, and their teeth were like lions’ teeth. 9 They had breastplates like breastplates of iron, and the sound of their wings was like the thundering of many horses and chariots rushing into battle. 10 They had tails with stingers, like scorpions, and in their tails they had power to torment people for five months. 11 They had as king over them the angel of the Abyss, whose name in Hebrew is Abaddon and in Greek is Apollyon (that is, Destroyer)

The Cost

2011-05-16T10:38:00.000-07:00

Lots of links in this one, be sure to click on them for more information.

I attend a church that is opened minded enough to accept me regardless of my lack of faith, and small enough that the pastor can target his sermons to individuals. In a recent Sunday sermon, he spoke of Teilhard de Chardin and the anthropic principle. He talked of the convergence of Christian philosophy and its version of the coming of heaven with secular progress towards a more peaceful world. He said that to be a Christian, it is not necessary to believe in the details of the bodily resurrection of a man. It is enough to accept the moral of the story and find meaning in the symbolism. Ten minutes later, we were reading the ceremony for welcoming a new family of members and asking them to claim to believe that very thing. I’m sure the children in that family understood the consequence of answering “I will” to:

“Do you confess Jesus Christ as your Savior,
put your whole trust in his grace,
and promise to serve him as your Lord,”

much better than the historical significance of Chardin or discussions of a singularity. The second part of this proclamation of faith contains the contradiction of modern monotheism

“in union with the Church which Christ has opened
to people of all ages, nations, and races”

It is a proclamation that declares it is open to all people, but if you want to be in the club, you need to serve the right Lord. Any belief has this same cost. If you know someone who believes that George Bush was involved with planning the attacks on the World Trade Center on 9/11/2001, try to discuss the facts and respond to their logic and you will quickly understand the cost of belief. Try to discuss neuroscience with someone who believes they have traveled outside of their body, and you will see the cost of belief. Root for the wrong team at a soccer game and you will feel the cost of belief.

This is the dilemma that modern Churches find themselves in. They have dropped requirements to believe in most of the miracles or the historical truth of some of the events, they acknowledge contradictions in the gospels, they have re-interpreted long standing moral statements based on modern psychology, but they can’t drop the confession to Christ. If they did, what reason would they have for existing?

I AM

2011-04-27T11:22:00.000-07:00

About 100 years ago, when The Times asked several writers to comment on what is wrong with the world, one of them offered a very simple answer,

Dear Sirs,
I am.
Sincerely Yours,
G.K. Chesterton

Chesterton converted to Catholicism later in life, he wrote poetry, plays and Christian apologetics as well as fantasy. He often employed paradoxes.

In its simplest form, his answer can be seen as a restating of the status of humans as “fallen”. God gave us a perfect world, but because we want to know more and we want to control that world, as represented by Adam eating from the tree of knowledge, we have demonstrated that we can’t just accept the paradise that we are given, so we have to suffer.

In a more reasoned view, one that includes a knowledge of billions of years of suffering by billions of species that never had a sense of where they came from or why they were there, it has a sense of a statement of responsibility. In either view, it is a universal statement. He is not indicating that he actually did something that trumps every other action by every other creature in the world causing the world to be wrong. By stating his willingness to be individually responsible, he invites you to write the same letter, sign your name and publish it.

What makes this difficult is that you have no guarantee that anyone else will follow suit. If you publish your letter and the only response you get is laughter, you will feel pretty silly and vulnerable. We know that there are many people looking to blame someone else for what is wrong with the world, so the person who says they are the problem is an easy target. If you publish your letter only because you want others to do the same, then you really aren’t being as sincere as your letter says it is. If you wait until many others have published their letter before you publish yours, then those who blame and criticize will say you are doing it only because everyone else is. You really can’t win.

Really, we live in a world of competition, survival of the fittest, right? There has always been war and nature is full of creatures eating other creatures to survive. It IS our nature. We all knew it and Darwin proved it. We don’t need people taking responsibility, we just need the right people dominating those who are wrong.

Unfortunately the American education system provides a truncated view of Darwin, and it only seems to be getting worse. Our understanding of Darwin was altered in his lifetime by his contemporary, Thomas Henry Huxley and since then by distortions like the idea of an Aryan race. Like any idea, either science or Holy Scripture, it has been misused.

Darwin spoke extensively of cooperation and love in the animal kingdom. Its importance to the survival of species is just as obvious. Humans cooperate in ways unprecedented in the rest of the animal kingdom, but the roots of it can be seen when a school of fish all turn at the same instant, a herd of antelope go to the water hole together or a bees make honey. You might say that democracy is in our DNA.

As yet, I have not seen bees building voting booths to select the queen. Their form of cooperation involves far less choices than we have and their limited communication prevents something like confusion over a book written 150 years ago ever being an issue. If democracy were as simple as checking a box every two years, we would be as blissfully happy as a bee knee deep in pistil. I’m all for writing your congressman and contributing to campaigns, but there is more to it than that. Any truly democratic action begins with a handful of people.

And that leads to the movie that was named after G.K.’s letter. Most of us only have the resources to write little letters, but this film maker is making the statement in a much bigger way. He follows up the “what is wrong with the world” question with “and what can we do about it?” When he discovers in the course of making the movie that over-consuming, hoarding of wealth, and accumulating more than you need is a big part of what is wrong, he sells his mansion and moves into a trailer park.

It makes for a good story, but still he is just one person. The impact of his choices remains to be seen. We can wait to see how that turns out, or we can vote with him and make some of our own choices to contribute to the movement.

Before you get the idea that I am presenting this as something else to believe in, some new dogma, I want to offer one bit of critique about the movie. There is a section about 1/3 of the way through the movie that I wish he had left out. It has to do with “Noetic Science.”

In February 1971, Edgar Mitchell walked on the moon, took out a golf club, and hit the longest drive in history. During his return flight he was overwhelmed with a profound sense of connectedness with the world. He has spent much of his life trying to understand what that was and how to tap into it as a resource to make the world better. This type of study, combining the experiential, individual senses that can’t be validated and quantified, with the data that can be, is called by some Noetic science. Others call it pseudo-science.

It has the appearance of science, but does not have the same rigor and has not stood up to the same type of peer review that non-pseudo-science has. Both of those types of science share the same sense of wonder. Both begin with a suspicion, a feeling, something unexplained that asks to be explained. Both end up leading to more questions as more knowledge leads to more wonder. Both need to be treated carefully, so that their answers are not considered the only right answers. If we aren’t careful, we’re just back to criticizing and competing.

21st Century Conversation

2011-04-21T06:53:00.000-07:00

I realize most of you neither have the time nor the inclination to sit through a 2 hour debate between a fundamentalist and a self-proclaimed modern philosopher. So, I offer one of my many services. Relative to many such debates, this one was quite civil. The bottom line did not change much, but Sam Harris offers some new language in his book, The Moral Landscape, and he uses it well here. If you are not familiar with William Lane Craig, he is a big name in apologetic circles and many people draw on him as a source. He is well reasoned in this debate, but you don’t have to look too hard to find him defending Old Testament prophets slaying their enemies, because it was the will of God. This debate is about the basis of morality, so luckily, we don’t get into that.

Craig’s basic reasoning is that humans have not agreed on one standard for morality, and we are not capable of it. We need a god to provide it for us and making claims to have found a basis are not logical. If you try this out for yourself, you might find the idea appealing. A simple sounding idea like, you shouldn’t kill, is fine until someone is coming at you with a knife. If no one is currently attacking you, and you have some extra resources lying around, you should give something to charity, until you start getting low on resources or the guy with the knife shows up again, then what do you do? And what about more abstract thinking, like someone defenseless is being attacked somewhere far away. Or in some hypothetical world you have the power to decide between taking one person’s life or five peoples lives. Its enough to get you to say that it is in God’s hands.

Sam Harris says it is not. He says we may not have answers to everything, but we can figure it out. We should start with the idea of “human flourishing”. Defining that exactly is not important to his theory of morality. He talks about a scale. We are no longer in constant fear of being eaten every day and although there are still places where torture is commonplace and justice is arbitrary, we have created many safe societies, places where humanity has flourished. We don’t need a complex system, or ancient scripture to determine that being beaten with a rod is unpleasant. And yet many of those ancient scriptures recommend it if someone disobeys their parents, wears the wrong clothes, or does not believe some unsubstantiated bit of history. We can look at this scale from the worst possible suffering to the best we know and decide the direction to move along it.

Craig avoids the scriptural arguments because it is not the topic of the debate. That’s a fair statement, although it made me wonder how he would stand up to Harris if it were the topic. He focuses on what he calls the problem of “is” and “ought”. You can’t derive a prescription from a description. Because it feels right to give to charity doesn’t mean we should. We do that because we have been taught to, because an authority said we ought to. If Nazi Germany had won World War II, our sense of morality would be much lower and Harris would be arguing for that lower standard.

This is where Sam Harris says, “This is where you hit philosophical bedrock with the shovel of a stupid question.” Craig sees the world as requiring some sort of foundation, an ultimate authority worthy of our love. He claims science does the same thing with its basis in identifiable nature and its axioms. Harris tries to explain the difference but does not seem to get through to Craig. Fortunately most of the Notre Dame students in the audience seem to get it, so there is hope.

Science does rest on some ideas that technically can’t be proven, like that pain is painful, or when you’re dead you’re dead. There are a few people who claim that they enjoy pain, but we know there is something wrong with them, and we don’t include them in our moral framework. In the United States, we have accomplished an awful lot simply by eliminating the possibility that someone could be given the death penalty by throwing stones at them because they cheated on their husband based on a very old book. However, people in the highest positions in government still say we need to respect the right of other cultures to make such choices in a such a manner.

Harris addresses this is greater detail in a “Response to Critics” page at his website. Briefly, he says, science is based on values that must be presupposed, like the desire to understand the universe, a respect for evidence, etc. There is no reason to apologize for that, anymore than a doctor should apologize to a chronic smoker who does not share his presuppositions about health. In more subtle terms, the long distance runner trains very differently than the sprinter, but we don’t argue about what they ought to do, we just agree that both are healthy. We can abandon the idea of science all together, or we can mire ourselves in the gray areas, or we can agree to move toward something that we realize may never be attained but is better than where we are now. Those who want to argue that we can’t know what “better” is better, don’t need to come along.

Where Sam Harris really shines is when he talks about the value of religion. His approach takes the wind out of the sails of those who claim to hold the moral high ground. He has spent time in Buddhist retreats, meditating for most of his waking hours. He knows his scripture and has no problem cherry picking the good parts. He calls it, “having a 21st century conversation”, drawing on all of the accumulated human knowledge that we have to solve these most perplexing problems. Most modern Christians do this intuitively, by dismissing Old Testament stories of God’s wrath by saying that Christ reconciled man to God. Some even know the New Testament passages that override the laws of Moses, but most are just using their common sense, their 21st century brains.

There are many shorter interviews and articles by and about Sam Harris. If you google a few terms from this quote of his, you should find some of them:

“All we have is human conversation to do this with. Either you can be held hostage by the human conversation that occurred 2,000 years ago and has been enshrined in these books, or you can be open to the human conversation of the 21st century. And if there's something good in those books, then it is admissible in the 21st century conversation on morality.”

I know you think they're special

2011-04-15T06:42:00.000-07:00

Here is an R rated extremely offensive video, that I particularly love. Bill Hicks was starting to build a successful career just before he got a rare form of cancer and died. It is unfortunate because his commentary on the state of the world would be useful for recent events. He would sometimes preface the bit linked to here by saying, “Here’s what has kept me anonymous in this country.” So, if you don’t like it, I understand.

It really doesn’t have a whole lot to do with religion, except that, like everybody’s unique idea about theology, children are special, but only to a few people. We all know, we all hope, that your children are special to you, but that is how it is supposed to be and where it is supposed to end. We know that “children are our future”. Working toward a brighter future requires seeing all people as special and precious, not just one child.

In a similar way, all of the variations on spirituality are not special. And in the same way, people take great offense when you point that out. I’m not talking about religious wars. War is usually related to resources and religion only plays the roles of enabler. I’m talking about individual beliefs. It doesn’t matter if it is a set of beliefs that someone has determined as uniquely their own, perhaps drawing on a multiplicity of sources, or beliefs that are strongly rooted in a single tradition. If you watch two other people with different beliefs arguing it seems so clear that their differences are semantic or based on nothing but fantasy, but can you take that same objective look at your own?

If you can suspend your own attachment to your beliefs, even temporarily, it is easier to see just how much trouble is caused from having that attachment. I’m not suggesting that permanently suspending all beliefs is an answer to the world’s problems. Without beliefs, it is tough to get through the day. There are a lot of unanswered questions. If we wait for all the answers before moving ahead, we’ll find ourselves at the end of our lives having accomplished nothing. As Bill Hicks said, “let’s take a look at this whole food/air deal first.” Then later we can get back to what color your chakras are or just what the Trinity is or how quarks affect our emotions.

Who Cares

2011-04-08T08:10:00.001-07:00

Sometimes I wonder if it is worth the trouble to examine this issue of Science and Religion. It can take you out to the fringes of society. But as we saw recently, one little family with a church in Florida can cause problems on the other side of the world when they start messing with religious material. I started asking questions about just "religious fundamentalism" is and how people reacted to the early scientific discoveries several years ago.

Those questions led to more than simple answers about who said what. Understanding those answers also sheds light on current moors, our sense of place in the world, and ongoing political struggles. To lay it out takes more than a blog entry, so I have started outlining it here: Who Cares: The Battle Between Science and Religion.

Feel free to leave any comments about it here.

Sacrifice

2011-03-10T07:35:00.000-08:00

I have been thinking about sacrifice lately. America is in a war where young people sacrifice themselves everyday yet there doesn’t seem to be much sacrificing going on back at home, unless someone close to you is in the war. There seems to be more concern about waist lines or the latest American Idol.

Perhaps we have lost our understanding of sacrifice. It could explain why people have trouble making sense of the Biblical stories like Abraham being willing to sacrifice his son. Or the story of the Jewish boy who sheds his own blood as an atonement for all of our sins, so that we may be cured of this illness that was given to us when a woman was tempted by a serpent to eat an apple. Maybe we need another way of looking at it.

Are you familiar with Lindow man?

In 62 CE, near the end of the Iron Age, the Romans were on the march. Their goal was to expunge the Druids from Britian. Further on, outside of Roman domination, a Druid Prince, the Fox-Man, senses the coming of the darkness that will accompany a conquering empire. The loss of Queen Bodiccea was senseless, but that was only on the physical plane. Prince Lovernius, The Fox-Man, knew that he had the gods on his side. That is where the power of the Druids lay and where the battle had to be taken.

This is a story of his sacrifice. It is something all humans have somewhere in there ancestry. Sacrifice, both animal and human, are universal themes in early civilizations.

As a Druid, he had spent most of his life in training to direct rituals, a keeper of the sacred rites. He was an ambassador, a philosopher a poet and a theologian. He upheld the virtues of honor, loyalty, honesty and courage. His hair was a dark red, and as a Druid, he grew a full beard.

It is Spring, and the dust of mistletoe is in the air. The feeling of it filling his lungs reminds him of his youth. But there is no time for that. He packs a few meager supplies and chooses two warriors to accompany him. Trade and supplies had been disrupted because of the war, so they only had cereal grains. He brought with him a small jewel encrusted dagger, merely ceremonial. He was taught the ways of war, but was never meant to participate. His hands were not calloused and his nails were manicured.

They went into the woods, away from the roads as they approached the Northern edges of the Roman Empire. He didn’t know exactly when he had crossed the border, but at some point it no longer felt like it was his land.

On the first night after leaving his homeland he had a dream, Taranis,the god of the sky was welcoming him into her home. He asked his warrior chaperones what it meant, but they would only say it was a good omen. On the second night he had a dream, Esus, the god of the middle-earth had prepared a meal for him. He asked the men what it meant, but they shrugged their shoulders and tried to appear busy with things about the camp. On the third night he dreamt of Teutates, the god of the otherworld had prepared a bed for him. He did not trouble his companions with this dream.

On the fourth night, a fire was built unlike the usual fire, there were many small sticks and some moist bark was laid in the middle. A cake was being made, and baking required constant tending of the fire, adding the small green sticks as the fire died down but not letting it get so big that it set the bark on fire. As the cake was nearly finished it started to char and the prince opened his mouth to protest, but only a half of a sound came out as he remembered that the Beltaine-cake would be his final meal.

After a day of almost pure silence except for the sound of their boots in the mud the prince said, “I must hunt for a fox.”

The elder of the two warriors waited for a respectful moment then said, “would you choose a second sire?”

“I would”, said the prince. Neither one spoke of how this would ensure that the young prince would be successful in his hunt and ensure that he would return to camp that night. The meat of the fox went to the warriors where it would provide strength in the physical plane. The prince wanted only a circlet of fur which he fashioned and attached to his left forearm.

The next morning he could smell the Lyn Cerrig Bach bog, the Lake of Small Pebbles. There was no more need for talk. The only thoughts he had were of how to solicit the aid of those on the spiritual plane. Each time his heart leapt at the thought of his own importance he stopped and adopted the proper humble attitude for an audience with the gods. He covered himself in copper pigments to make himself presentable.

They had come to the place where sky met water met earth. He stripped himself of all of the vestiges of this world. The warriors peeled back a layer of the bog. He knelt down in front of it, staring into this doorway. With his head held high and a proud smile on his face, a sinew cord was wound around his neck. As that cord began to tighten, he was struck on the head with an ax. Then struck again, his head now just a weight pressing down to his chest. To complete the triple death that would bring him to the three worlds beyond, using his own dagger, his throat was slit precisely at the jugular.

He was pushed into the bog and covered. After an hour, he almost choked back to consciousness, but only enough to see a vision of a tunnel of light. Then all went black and he lay there for 1,922 years. Long enough for names of Druid princes to be forgotten and the bog to be renamed Lindow. As for the Romans well, they are history.

Preserving Words

2011-02-27T11:14:00.000-08:00

If you are not familiar with how fundamentalism grew in America, or even if you are, or if you know of a young person who has not lived through the history, an excellent overview is included in “God Laughs and Plays” by David James Duncan. The chapter is titled “What Fundamentalists Need for Their Salvation” in 7 parts. I’ll quote extensively from the part 7. He starts that final section with,

“There is one precious Earth, and she is finite.”

He goes on to discuss wounds that have been put on that Earth; wounds that are visible and those that are given by words. He lists some of the words that have been abused; “soul”, “sacrifice”, “salvation”, “grace”, and notes that many people have sidestepped the damage by rejecting the terminology. He suggests the harm that has been done to words is undone “when we work to reopen each word’s true history, nuance and depth. Holy words need stewardship as surely as do gardens, orchards, or ecosystems.”

David James Duncan is well read, and has written two bestselling novels, “The River Why” and “The Brothers K”. So when he says,

“If Americans of European descent are to understand and honor the legacy of Celtic, European, Middle Eastern, and other Christian traditions and pass our literature, music, art, monasticism, and mysticism on intact, the right-wing hijacking of Christianity must be defined as the reductionist rip-off that it is. To allow televangelists or pulpit neocons to claim exclusive ownership of Jesus is to hand that incomparable lover of enemies, prostitutes, foreigners, children, and fishermen over to those who evince no such love.”

I think it is worthy of consideration. David James Duncan writes beautiful prose about rivers and fly-fishing that honor the Earth. Rather than honor it, some claim that its end is near, and many ignore the danger. The claims of right-wing fundamentalism are based on a few Bible verses, and selectively ignore most others. But if we don’t know what those words are we hand the hen house over to the weasels. So, David James Duncan believes that contemporary fundamentalists need artists, agnostics, organic gardeners, gay restaurateurs, pagan preachers, heartbroken Muslims and peace marchers. Without them, much of Christian culture will be consigned to perdition and will take much of our literature and culture along with it.

Rethinking The Fall

2011-02-13T14:49:00.000-08:00

I heard a great interview with John Shelby Spong recently and it got me thinking.

John Shelby Spong is a former Bishop, raised in a fundamentalist Southern United States community. When confronted with an associate in the church who was homosexual he had to resolve how this respected member of his church could hold such a view. He contacted psychologists and studied the issue and determined he had been wrong about it. He has since written many books, explaining to lay people how the Bible was written, what the contradictions and inconsistencies are and how seminary schools have been teaching them for decades. He believes it is necessary to bring these things to light to save the church that he still admires. Through it all, he has never abandoned his love for Jesus Christ.

To reconcile these seemingly inconsistent beliefs he has had to reinterpret many of the basic stories in the Bible. In a recent interview, as part of a series of interviews under the banner of “Evolutionary Christianity”, he had some interesting comments on the creation story. I find this one of the most strange and allegorical stories, and as it is a basis for many others, merits a lot of attention.

If you haven’t read your Bible lately, a quick review; God creates everything, it is all good, a paradise. He creates man in his image, then woman out of the man. Even in paradise, there are rules and the big one is thou shalt not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Long story short, they do. God kicks them out of the garden and punishes them with things that we know as part of life, like tilling the land and having babies. This is sometimes called “The Fall” and is where the idea of “Original Sin” comes from.

To help his understanding of this, John Shelby Spong studied life. He took trips to the Galapagos and other destinations. He discovered the common thread that all life is geared around survival. Nothing too surprising there. As humans, we are separated from plants and most animals by our self consciousness of our desire to survive. In fact, we can get quite self-centered about it. Many people would give their own life for the life of their children or their mate and some do that for their country. But even those acts are abstractions of the survival instinct. When it comes to making sacrifices for complete strangers, our empathy drops off quickly. Some feelings of shame may accompany that, but the drive to survive is much stronger.

Jack Spong sees a parallel with these feelings and the story that some people very long ago were trying to tell. We don’t know just where that story came from or how much it was changed before it got to the King James Bible. We know that they couldn’t have understood synaptic brain activity or the history of stars and planets. They thought that burning a goat and sending those ashes into the sky was a way to communicate with the heavens. And who am I to say that it is not?

But that is not the question that I think will help move us into a world where there are no weapons targeting my country, mass destruction or otherwise. The question is no longer how can we be rescued from our sinful nature. The question is how do we live with these selfish instincts and grow into people that are civil and caring for each other? How do we care about our next door neighbor and the person 3,000 miles away who grew the lettuce we eat in January. How do we get past letting the survival instinct dominate our lives?

One place to look is retelling our creation story with the new knowledge we have of where we came from and what is up there past the planets. Spong has a wonderful sense of this. He thinks of those first humans at the dawn of consciousness and imagines that they must have had a deep sense of separation. With that understanding he sees why every religion he has studied has a doctrine of atonement. We want to be back in tune with the flow of time and nature and do things that will bring us into harmony with all of it, so we can survive without having to harm others.

At least I hope that’s what we want.

Discussion about the interview and many more links and references.

Audio of the interview, you may need to register.

What is for Man

2011-01-27T12:13:00.000-08:00

Mark Chapter 3
Jesus Heals on the Sabbath
1 Another time Jesus went into the synagogue, and a man with a shriveled hand was there. 2 Some of them were looking for a reason to accuse Jesus, so they watched him closely to see if he would heal him on the Sabbath. 3 Jesus said to the man with the shriveled hand, “Stand up in front of everyone.”
4 Then Jesus asked them, “Which is lawful on the Sabbath: to do good or to do evil, to save life or to kill?” But they remained silent.
5 He looked around at them in anger and, deeply distressed at their stubborn hearts, said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” He stretched it out, and his hand was completely restored. 6 Then the Pharisees went out and began to plot with the Herodians how they might kill Jesus.

The Bible is such a compact piece of writing, a simple read through it can miss so much. In this case simply getting some context by reading the preceding chapters would tell you that the Pharisees were following Jesus around, trying to figure out what he was up to and how to trip him up. A more thorough read of the entire Bible does not provide a complete explanation of the Pharisees. From this and other passages, you would know they were not followers of Christ, to put it mildly.

For my context in this blog, an important aspect of them is that they were well studied in the traditions and laws of the Torah. Many of those laws concern the Sabbath. Jews are not supposed to work on the Sabbath for instance. Much discussion is made about what exactly “work” means. Here Jesus asks the question of what can be done on the Sabbath in a way that the Torah can’t provide an answer.

Jesus thinks the answer is obvious, and he should know, I guess. In his act of working to heal a man on the Sabbath, he is putting an exclamation point on what he said at the end of chapter 2,

27 “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath…”

The Pharisees were accustomed to imposing their authority. They spoke from a position of certitude, something that people responded to or perhaps were afraid to speak against. Jesus rejects the concrete judgment. He asks a question that appeals to the heart. You don’t need to read the rest of the Bible to know that you should do good on the Sabbath.

As Juan Luis Segundo says, “Jesus reformulates the question or the problem on the level where it can find a positive answer in terms of what is good for people.”

We all want certainty and it is not wrong to strive for it. We want scientific accuracy, but we know that answers just lead to more questions. We want our politicians to be certain about their decisions even though it is their job to make decisions about things that don’t have complete data. Some go to church looking for certainty and many churches are glad to oblige. Other churches attempt to avoid that.

Segundo suggests that Jesus’ theology says something different, “It suggests that when people stop at theological certitudes, those certitudes fall apart in their hands.”

I find the churches that oblige with theological certainty are not consistent and often not honest. Those that avoid it may be consistent but not true to the heart. Jesus spoke to the oppression of his time and the political forces that supported it. Those times were different than Moses’ time and David’s time so he couldn’t rely on strict scriptural answers. Today is a still different time, and like Jesus we can’t rely strictly on the words of our ancestors.

Jesus and later Paul told us to look into our hearts first, then to understand the scriptures in that light. Our hearts say to take a stand against that which causes it to break. Churches should be speaking to those issues, not watering down their message for fear of scaring off members. Not doing so is likely to result in the churches that claim theological certitude but don’t honestly live it, being the only ones left.

Segundo quotes are from The Liberation of Theology Orbis Books, 1976

I have a dream

2011-01-13T05:20:00.000-08:00

It is likely in the next few days you will hear at least a few sentences from Martin Luther King’s most famous speech. Speeches are great, but I am more interested in the actions that they inspire. Great speeches like this one have inspired many great actions. I have of course, supplied a link.

I Have a Dream Speech

He talks of decency, and against violence. When he talks of what he wants, he asks only for simple rights, to vote, to stay in a motel. He uses the founding documents of the United States to make his case. He doesn’t want to be given special status, just to sit at a “table of brotherhood” with everyone else. The speech comes to a crescendo with

I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of "interposition" and "nullification" -- one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.
I have a dream today!
I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight; "and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together."

Some of the concerns from 1963 have been addressed, but not all. The need to remind people to solve their differences without violence became more prominent this week. How do I take this call to action? Do I go to the South and find some little black boys and black girls to join hands with, possibly helping them to rebuild New Orleans? Or should I go to Haiti or Colombia, or the Red River Valley in North Dakota? Why choose one group over another?

On a recent radio program “On Being” Krista Tippet, the narrator, asked Lord Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi of England a similar question. Lord Sacks had spoken of the dignity of difference and Krista pointed out that the Torah speaks of a covenant that is particular to the Jewish people. She asked how he reconciled that.

His answer was,

“A strong particular identity is the best hope for the sake of what is universal”

He demonstrated this by pointing out how Martin Luther King drew on words written a long time ago and put down in Isaiah Chapter 40

4 Every valley shall be raised up,
every mountain and hill made low;
the rough ground shall become level,
the rugged places a plain.
5 And the glory of the LORD will be revealed,
and all people will see it together.
For the mouth of the LORD has spoken.”

Isaiah delivered a prophecy particular to his time, but the struggle of oppressed peoples, the hope that they can just have a level playing field, is universal. To work toward that goal, you need to know your self, your strengths, your weaknesses. You can only do so much alone, so you need to find your community, people like you with similar values and similar histories to work with. We don’t all need to work on the same things at the same time, but we will get to the same place in the end.

Kairos Moment

2011-01-06T09:05:00.001-08:00

I came upon this term in a blog by Bishop Sally Dyck. It is an ancient Greek word referring to a type of time. As a modern Westerner, I am most familiar with “kronos”, chronological time, the regular movements of the planets and stars that we can now track to the smallest fractions of a second. We have become so good at it and so dependent on it, that we don’t think much about other types of time. We might say we want some “quality time” with family, meaning that for some segment of kronos time, we hope there will be more value than usual, but we don’t think of time itself as having value.

Kairos time isn’t measured in milliseconds. It is measured by it’s quality, so it is subjective. An important moment in the life of your child may not be so important to someone else. When Jesus was baptized in the river Jordan (Mark 1:5), a few people felt that an important turning point had come in the purpose of God. Most of Rome and the rest of the world did not.

An important aspect of kairos time is that it demands to be acted upon. Ancient people probably saw these moments as having some external force to them. They were looking up at the stars and wondering if they breathed and why a few of them, the planets, moved independent of the rest. They wondered what conscious agent affected that movement and how did it in turn affect people? Although predictions about our future are still printed in the astrology section of almost every daily newspaper, most people don’t take them seriously.

There is no question that we live in a time of rapid change. There are many opportunities for decisions that could have wide ranging affects. I think people today see their actions as more important to what will tomorrow than some external force on the flow of time. There may be a wide range of the degree to which that is true for any one person, but I’ll assert it anyway. The question is not what so much what is the particular quality of this moment of time but what will we do with it.

The Rebel Jesus

2010-12-21T07:29:00.000-08:00

The Bishop of the State of Minnesota introduced me to this song recently. I love Christmas songs, not the ones that were written 200 years ago and now sung by country singers, but ones that capture what Christmas feels like if you are walking down 5th Avenue in New York or in a cabin in Montana contemplating the insanity of another year and feeling thankful for what you have at the same time.

Jackson Browne draws you in with this song, then hits you with the thought of what would happen if all of us really started giving in the way the Christmas story points us. Here are the words:

All the streets are filled with laughter and light
And the music of the season
And the merchants' windows are all bright
With the faces of the children
And the families hurrying to their homes
While the sky darkens and freezes
Will be gathering around the hearths and tables
Giving thanks for God's graces
And the birth of the rebel Jesus

Well they call him by 'the Prince of Peace'
And they call him by 'the Savior'
And they pray to him upon the seas
And in every bold endeavor
And they fill his churches with their pride and gold
As their faith in him increases
But they've turned the nature that I worship in
From a temple to a robber's den
In the words of the rebel Jesus

Well we guard our world with locks and guns
And we guard our fine possessions
And once a year when Christmas comes
We give to our relations
And perhaps we give a little to the poor
If the generosity should seize us
But if any one of us should interfere
In the business of why there are poor
They get the same as the rebel Jesus

Now pardon me if I have seemed
To take the tone of judgment
For I've no wish to come between
This day and your enjoyment
In a life of hardship and of earthly toil
There's a need for anything that frees us
So I bid you pleasure
And I bid you cheer
From a heathen and a pagan
On the side of the rebel Jesus

Botany of Desire

2010-12-11T07:24:00.000-08:00

In “The Botany Desire”, Michael Pollan comes up with a surprising section about what he calls the Natural History of Religion. Michael Pollan is a farmer, who writes about food and the modern farming industry. In this book he covers the apple, and the history of Johnny Appleseed, the tulip and the financial bubble it created a few hundred years ago, the potato and its famous famine, and marijuana. The book is about how humans and plants have co-evolved and sometimes uses imagery from mythology to discuss changes in culture. One common thread is the pull between Apollo as the god of rules and order and Dionysus as the god of nature and wildness.

At the end of the marijuana section, he begins to speculate on the connections between hallucinogenic drugs and religion and notes that there is no definitive work on the natural history of religion. There are some examples of drugs being involved at the start of some early religions. The cult of Soma claims in its scripture, the Rig Veda, that such intoxicants are a path to divine knowledge. I hoped this section of the book would pass quickly. I have heard of books about psilocybin mushrooms leading to religion and know they are widely accepted. But fortunately Pollan did not stop at that simple premise. He follows this idea through the history of philosophers and connects it to modern chemistry.

Pollan suggests that drugs take the mind to the point where matter meets spirit, where our knowledge of the physical world meets the unknown edges of our awareness and intuition, or in modern terms, where chemistry meets consciousness. He notes that the era of Romanticism in Europe coincides closely with Napoleon bringing hashish back from Egypt. English and French poets are known to have used opiates. Certainly Stephen Taylor Coleridge’s concept of the suspension of disbelief could be a drug induced insight.

Modernism, Cubism, Jazz, Surrealism have all been nurtured by Coleridge’s ideas of a transforming imagination, the disillusion, diffusion and dissipation of the consciousness. All of these also owe their roots to classical philosophy, going back as far the Greeks. We have less information about their lives but we do know of rituals involving ergot, a strong hallucinogen. The Greeks respected these transforming chemicals and used them in highly ritualized ways. Much of this was also quite secretive.

So, can we learn anything from all of this? In attempting to do so, Pollan also traces the chemistry and neuroscience of marijuana. The chemical responsible for the alterations of experience, the “high”, have been found, tetra hydro cannibal. Also the receptors in our nervous system for that chemical have been found. And our bodies produce a chemical for those receptors, anandamide. So there appears to be a system, a function of chemistry. All of this says very little about why we have this system or about the individual reaction that each person has for the drug. Pollan notes that the wide variety of experiences reported from smoking pot indicates that dismissing it as pure chemistry is failing to recognize the individual’s contributions to the experience.

Is there any value for a built-in system that causes us to forget? Howlett and McCallum, two of the scientists who have done this research speculate that the ability to forget, such as forgetting pain, could be very important in motivating us to get up each morning and face the potential of being hurt again and again. Perhaps what we usually consider a breakdown of the operation of remembering is actually a perfectly functioning operation itself. We receive so much sensory data each moment, we have to filter it. But when Pollan tries to press the neuroscientists for more about just what the marijuana experience is, they say they will have to leave to the poets.

Fortunately, there is ample data from the poets. Even one who was is also a scientist. Carl Sagan wrote an essay on the effects of marijuana and published it under the name Mr. X. After his death, his authorship was revealed. Sagan spoke of the common phenomenon of having what seem to be profound insights while high, that seem trivial the next day. He was convinced that these should not be dismissed. That it is not a question of self-deception, but a failure to communicate from our high selves to the straight. The inability to articulate the insight is not evidence that the insight is false. It can’t be put into words because they are perceptions that precede words.

Nietzsche describes transcendence, when all of your being is focused on a single thing and all else drops away, in his essay, “The Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life”. He says,

“Consider the cattle, they do not know what is meant by yesterday or today, they leap about, eat, rest, digest, leap about again, and so from morn ‘til night and from day to day, fettered to the moment and its pleasure or displeasure and thus neither melancholy nor bored. A human being may well ask an animal, ‘Why do you not speak to me of your happiness, but only stand and gaze at me?’ The animal would like to answer and say, ‘The reason is I always forget what I was going to say.’ But then he forgot this answer too, and stayed silent. “

Aldous Huxley says in “The Doors of Perception” that we have a reducing valve of consciousness. This valve helps us deal with the mass of data coming in, but it also prevents from perceiving that data. Opening this valve opens us up to a sense of wonder. As Pollan says, “Memory is the enemy of wonder.” The less filtering, the more heightened our senses, time seems to slow, we live in the present moment.

There are many paths to this sensation. They have been written about in religious texts as well as by philosophers and experimenters with drugs. Huxley suggested that the reason we don’t see as many mystics today is that nutrition has improved. A healthier body means a healthier brain, healthy being defined as the ability to keep that reducing valve strong.

But to bring all this philosophizing back down to earth, the idea that spirituality and getting high from a freely growing plant are related is an affront to Western Christianity and capitalism. Both require that we set our sights on the future; both ask us to reject pleasures of the moment for a fulfillment yet to come. And, as the early Greeks knew, living in the moment is not something to be done every moment. Remembering what caused us pain in the past and being able to apply those lessons to the future are just as important and each should have its place for humanity to flourish.

Pollan traces how our current culture developed its aversion to marijuana through the stories of Hassan ibn-al-Sabbah from the 11th century and the condemnation of cannabis as a sacrament for witches by Pope Innocent the 8th in 1485. I will leave the retelling of those stories for another time, or you can read his interpretations. He also discusses how the alchemist Paracelsus successfully transferred the Dionysian pagan potions of sorcery to what we now consider the rational Apollonian healing medicines.

Pollan relates this to the story of Adam and Eve, rather ingeniously. He dismisses any discussion about what type of fruit the tree of knowledge was or exactly what the knowledge was. The important thing is that the tree was there at all. Those story tellers could not dismiss the idea that plants held powers of healing and of insights, because everyone knew that they did. So the new god, Jehovah, who supposedly creates everything and has all of the knowledge, puts the tree in the garden with a warning not to yield to its temptations. Of course they do yield to it, and the rest is history.

Guide to Winter Holidays

2010-12-03T05:54:00.000-08:00

Not sure what to say to people instead of "Merry Christmas"? Here are a few of the other celebrations going on this time of year.

Hanukkah December 1-9

A minor Jewish holiday with some confusing history. It is not covered in the Bible.

Kwanzaa December 26-January 1

An African American celebration

Solstice December 21 6:38pm

The shortest day of the year. A turning point from increasing darkness to increasing light. Formerly celebrated as the feast of Saturnalia by the Romans and by burning the Yule log in ancient Britian.

St. Lucia Day December 13

Celebrated in Sweden for the patron of light.

Bodhi day December 8

Buddhist commemoration of the Buddha’s enlightenment, after sitting under a Bodhi tree.

Eid-Al-Adha January 10-13

A Muslim feast following their pilgrimage to Mecca.

Bold and Clear

2010-11-14T19:00:00.001-08:00

Recently, I attended a meeting at my church that still has me as a member. There was a presentation from the district supervisor. She challenged us, the local leadership, to speak out more boldly and define a clear strategy. After the meeting, I asked her to take that same challenge back to her leaders. I’m in that church that Jon Stewart of the Daily Show compared to Phoenix University. Like many protestant denominations, you can go to two different churches under the same name and not see similarities in the theology.

I have tried to discern the beliefs of the leadership, and it sometimes seems that they are trying to determine the same thing from us. Maybe they are just trying to figure out what will be acceptable to those in the pews, what will keep the offerings coming. If that seems counter to an organization based on firm and long standing beliefs, well it kinda is. If a leader claims to know what was in the minds of people 2,000 years ago, I usually don’t talk to them again. I have become increasingly demanding for what I accept as a modern interpretation old scripture.

So, what would I consider a “bold” statement? One like this one from a bishop of a megachurch in the South would be good. You may have heard of pastors or bishops getting caught with gay prostitute drug dealers, but this is not that. This is a man who had a good family life, but he always knew he was gay. He tried every religious “cure” he knew for how he felt. He now understands that it is not a choice, or a disease. It still took a long time for him to come out, no doubt at least in part due to what he knew it would do to his career. I provided a link to the local news station, there are plenty more YouTubes, NPR stories, and of course blasts from conservative bloggers.

He also knew that he could no longer live a lie. If he believes that being gay is not anathema to being Christian, he should not keep it a secret. If he is asking his congregation to live their faith out loud, nothing hidden, he shouldn’t be hiding anything. He was already preaching inclusiveness, so he did not need to make any changes there.

I think this is going on a lot right now. Not that there are lot of gay bishops around, I mean there are a lot of spiritual leaders who are not clearly stating their personal beliefs. They leave it nebulous and let their congregations believe what they want. If you think that is not harming anyone, then you haven’t been paying attention to the news of young gay people killing themselves because they are told that being gay is disgusting. Or perhaps they are being told that God has global warming under control, or the end times are coming soon anyway. Or they are being told they have to make a choice between believing in something that is increasingly difficult to justify in a modern scientific world or risk an eternity of disconnection from their loved ones.

I think we have plenty of disconnection as it is.

Are you ready for some football?

2010-11-04T09:46:00.000-07:00

Rick Reilly ESPN Sports The Oddest Game

This American Life Show #378 from April 17, 2009 This I Used to Believe

Two of my area High School Football teams are in the playoffs, so it’s a good time for a football story. This one came to me via “This American Life”, or you may have heard about it via Rick Reilly on ESPN.

It is the story of a High School football coach at a Christian school who didn’t just teach football, he tried to instill some sense of values in his kids. They put their faith into action, such as the time they helped raise money for an opposing team affected by a hurricane. You might want to read the ESPN story first, that is where the story really starts. The executive summary goes like this; a Baptist High School team plays a team from the Gainesville State Boys School, criminals in other words. The Boys School team rarely wins a game and has almost no fans, no family support, so this coach gets half of his fans to learn about and root for them, even providing them with cheer leaders for the game. It is a great experience for the kids on both sides of the ball.

When Rick Reilly of ESPN picked up the story, it went viral on the Internet, follow up stories are still being written, two years after this happened. One of the people who heard about it was a woman, Tricia, who recently had a friend who died of cancer. While her friend was dying, she prayed. When her friend died anyway, she no longer believed in God. On Christmas morning, she finds herself alone in her apartment and decides to email the coach and acknowledge him for doing this great thing and for setting a good example for Christianity. She also tells him a little about herself.

Coach Kris Hogan has received a lot of email about his game against Gainesville State. Six hours after sending her email, on Christmas morning, the coach sent a reply. Her story touched his heart, and he wants to “witness” for her. At first she declines but he is insistent. This is when Ira Glass from “This American Life” gets involved. If you want to listen to that story, click on the link above, it is “Act 2”, about 19 minutes in.

For all his interesting approaches to Christianity, it is surprising how poorly the coach does in his discussions with this woman. She is experiencing a pretty standard lapse in faith. Survivor’s guilt is a common reason for questioning God, it is exactly when any good Christian would look to the sky and ask, “WHY?” Baptists frequently use funerals as an opportunity to preach to that very question. That always seemed in poor taste to me. In this conversation, he does very little listening to what she is feeling and focuses on technical discussions about what God is and the truth of his existence.

For Tricia, some time has passed since her friend died and she is still feeling that she should have been the one who was taken. She feels her friend was a better person. This is definitely someone in need of a good listener, or at least the shoulder of a good friend. Coach Hogan should be looking for the comforting passages in the Bible, maybe something from Psalms, instead he gives her Christian apologetics.

It seems coach has not thought this one through too well. When she brings up questions of subjective judgments of good and evil, he brings up Hitler. In the language of Internet discussion forums, this has been labeled Argumentum ad Hitlerium. If someone mentions Hitler, it is an indicator that the discussion has gone as far as it can go with those currently participating and no new insights are on the horizon.

I’ll give him a little credit that he leaves decisions of life and death to God, and does not claim that God answers all prayers. His worldview is that we live in a broken world, one where everybody sins, and we can’t know the plan and we can take comfort knowing everything is in His hands. This works for him, but not for Tricia.

Instead, it is Ira, the atheist, who senses what Tricia needs to hear and helps her to accept that things just are the way they are. To Ira, she is comfortable saying that she wants to believe, something she never said to Hogan. I wish this story had an ending that wrapped everything up nicely, like a half-hour television sitcom, queue the voice over with some words of wisdom. But all we get, and maybe we all we have for now, is a definition of the gap between believers and non-believers.

The Prophet Hen of Leeds

2010-10-28T09:08:00.000-07:00

I haven’t been focusing too much on the old blog lately, but I do have a list of fun things to draw from just for weeks like this. For those who are worried about when the end will come, it is good to occasionally look back at the many times that has been predicted and not come to pass. My absolute favorite has to be the hen that laid eggs with a message from God.

Unfortunately, this was in 1806, so there is no YouTube for this one.

The Hen, and a few others

Lamed-Vov

2010-10-21T06:02:00.000-07:00

Lamed-Vov means 36 in Yiddish. It refers to the 36 just men that are needed to support the world from the Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 97b, Sukkot 45b. These men receive the Divine Presence. It is an ancient oral tradition so, as you might guess, there are many interpretations of it. These are mortal men, living regular lives and dying normally, so what if the number dips below 36? Are the difficult times we are experiencing indicators that we have indeed dipped? These men walk among us, but they are hidden, so how do we know?

So, lots of great stories get told about the Lamed-Vov. Some think that the one Messiah will come from the 36. So, you better be nice to anyone you meet, they could be the Messiah. The world somehow depends on these men for continued existence, although I’m not sure if it is ever explained how that works, or how the world will come to an end.

The story where I first found out about the Lamed-Vov was in the book, “If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him.”

The story goes that a boy is informed by his grandfather that he, the boy, is to be a Lamed-Vov. This distresses the boy, and he tries to figure out what he needs to do. He holds his hand over a candle flame to learn about suffering. His grandfather hears about this and gets distressed too. He explains that it is not necessary to do anything, just be yourself. The Lamed-Vov are not able to change anything, they can’t stop suffering or prevent people from dying. Their job is to be open to the suffering of others, so no one suffers alone.

He eventually gets it. He learns that love is more than simply being open to experiencing the anguish of another person’s suffering. It is the willingness to live with the helpless knowing that we can do nothing to save the other from their pain.

A Spacey Odyssey

2010-10-14T06:34:00.000-07:00

If you are looking for something that seems sorta spiritual, but you want some scientific backing, this guy is for you. He’s a physicist. He draws on Star Trek and Buck Rogers for his analogies. He claims to have worked with Stanley Kubrick on the development of the “2001: A Space Odyssey” story. I have seen some comments that this is an exaggeration.

It is an interesting idea though. Given the speed limit of the universe, getting to other worlds is unlikely any time soon. However, we could send ships out and plant big black monoliths. Even if whomever or whatever found them couldn’t understand whatever we wrote on the monolith, it would at least give them evidence that there is something else out there. Imagine that something like that had been found 10,000 years ago.

This video discusses some of the science involved in vastly different species interacting.

This next one shows him as a bit more cuckoo. He talks about his role in the 2001 movie at the end. He starts out explaining his type 0,1,2,3 civilizations theory, something he talks about a lot. Note that he uses some language that I see as designed to tug at your emotions and then consider his ideas. Language such as, “privileged to be alive” at this time and how he sees “evidence in the news” that we are about to transform to the next level of civilization. He really sucks up to America and American culture as having signs of leading the world into this next level.

Good for a laugh if nothing else.

Should Americans Fear Islam?

2010-10-04T18:57:00.000-07:00

Link to the television debate on ABC

I happened to be visiting some people this weekend who watch a lot of television, otherwise I would have never seen this ridiculous display of journalism. I did not watch the entire broadcast, and parts of it were drown out by those in the room yelling at the TV or saying, “maybe we should go do something outside, it’s a beautiful day.” If I was a television executive and the idea had been pitched to me, I would have said, okay, but change the name to “Should some people whose parents had sex in a certain country be afraid of other people who claimed a certain religion, then had sex.” Hopefully those pitching the idea would realize how inane their idea was and walk out of the room in shame.

That didn’t happen. Fortunately, they did include at least one normal person, Donna Marsh O’Connor a woman who had lost a daughter who was pregnant on 9/11. When asked, “Do you think you, America, should be afraid of Islam?” She was sharp enough to not respond to the intimation that she somehow represented the entire country. She said,

“I think Americans should fear criminal behavior. I think we should do the best we can to control criminal behavior. But I can't raise my two remaining sons to fear the people who live next door to them. That is not what my grandparents came to America to escape you know, we are a group of 9/11 family members. I know a lot of family members are here. We share that pain and, you know, I think the unfortunate piece of this is that we don't agree on this.”

Seeing nothing controversial there, nothing that would lead to some yelling, Chrisitiane Amanpour turned to Billy Graham’s son who said something ignorant that I won’t repeat.

Most of the rest of the show went something like this:

AMANPOUR: Why do you call it a wicked religion, an evil religion?
GRAHAM: I think to -- to take your daughter, because you think that -- and the religion gives you the authority -- Sharia gives you the authority for honor killing. And we saw the young girl in Ohio just a few--
IMAM: It does not.
AMANPOUR: But does it?
IMAM: It does not.
GRAHAM: It does.
IMAM: It does not.
GRAHAM: It does.
IMAM: No it does not.
(CROSSTALK)
IMAM: -- justify those honor killings.
(CROSSTALK)
GADIEL: -- justify it. You can't deny that--
GRAHAM: It's true.
(CROSSTALK)
GRAHAM: But that's true.

Such is the state of the debate in America and the state of leadership and of journalism. What we should fear is ignorance. We should fear our inability to listen to each other. This program could have benefited from techniques for working in groups that have been available in self-help books since the 1970’s. Instead we get this,

GADIEL: …. And you can't deny it. And you may, for all I know, not be a moderate you pretend to be, because you may be engaging in takia and be engaging in lying for the purpose of furthering your religion.
(LAUGHTER)
GADIEL: Why should I believe you?
KHAN: I'm shocked at the inference that I am not -- my intention is not good. Have you looked in my heart? Have you --
GADIEL: No. No, I don't. You're right. You're right.
KHAN: Have you cut my chest and looked in my heart to see what my intention is? I think it's wrong for you to say that somebody's engaged in takia. You don't even know what the word takia is.
GADIEL: It means lying for the purpose of furthering your religion.
KHAN: Why would I do that?
GADEIL: Lying to people who are non-believers. .
KHAN: Why would I do that?
GADIEL: Why? Be it said -- are you not instructed to do that?
KHAN: No! Absolutely not!
(CROSS TALK)

I have a little bit of hope though because this statement got applause:

O'CONNOR: No, no, no. You let me finish now, please. With all due respect, I listened for a long time. You know, I don't know why on earth you would think that there is an address in America where, you know, Muslim people can't practice their religion. Number one, this is not a mosque; it's an Islamic cultural center. Number two -- and this is really important -- it is not at Ground Zero, it's two blocks and a half away. It's two blocks and a half away. I am not a religious expert. I only know when I was promised when I was born here and that this is a land where all people -- regardless of how difficult it is to have this democracy -- all people are allowed to practice their faith. I don't know Daisy Khan. I don't know Imam. I am not going to read his book to see if he's a good enough Muslim. I believe that in this nation we hold people accountable for crimes after they commit and never, never before.
(APPLAUSE)

The Fonz

2010-09-30T06:46:00.001-07:00

Some of you won’t remember, but there was a very popular television program in the 1970’s that was about the 1950’s. The show was loosely based on the movie “American Graffiti”. It was my first experience with nostalgia, so I don’t know if people in the 1930’s ever got nostalgic for the 1910’s or not. I have notice that only rather odd people get nostalgic for the 1970’s.

The stars of the show were the teenagers. They hung around at the malt shop and had problems with their boyfriends and girlfriends or their cars or whatever. They were generally clean cut kids with names like Richie and Potsie. One character that had a bit of mystery about him was the Fonz. You never saw his family, he didn’t go to school, he wore a leather jacket, he could tap the juke box on the side to make it play and he could undo a bra clasp with one hand.

He was also the guy you wanted on your side in a fight. Whenever some kids from another town were giving Richie and Potsie trouble, they called upon the Fonz to help them out. This was not “West Side Story”. There was never any fighting on the show. Someone would do something clever or say something that needed to be said, and the fight would not happen. The conflict would not always be resolved, but at least avoided.

Over the course of seasons of the show, more about the Fonz was slowly revealed. One Thanksgiving he was seen eating a can of beans alone, and you found out there were some unresolved family issues and a lot of sadness around his lone wolf exterior. During one episode where a fight seemed to be inevitable, Richie and Potsie asked for specific help on how to engage someone in hand to hand combat. The Fonz asked the boys if they had ever actually seen him hit anybody.

They thought for a second and realized they had not. The Fonz was always cool. His tag line is always a very deep and mellow, “Haaaaay”. His hair was always perfect. Somewhere, back in some mythic past, he developed a reputation that he was capable of taking on anyone, that he could do major damage without breaking a sweat. If it was true that he had ever actually done that, it didn’t matter, it was no longer necessary to demonstrate it. Simply knowing that the Fonz was coming to the fight was enough to bring the opposition to the negotiation table.

This is similar to the tradition of many of the martial arts that borrow their philosophies from Buddhism or Taoism, Shaolin Kung Fu, Aikido, Tai Chi Chuan. The masters don’t need to use their sting. If they were to use it, it would diminish their ability to use their power of language and presence. That power does more to maintain the stability of their culture than any slap across the face to someone who deserved it would.

This can be seen in the writings of spiritual leaders also, such as the Dalai Lama or Thich Nhat Hahn. These men could lash out and attack a great power like China or the United States with scathing commentary on their inability to lead, their poor example to the world, or their dumping of garbage into the air or water. But like a bee that can only sting once, then dies, if they did that, their ability to do it a second time would be severely diminished.