SOM - Evolution

 

To understand where we came from, understanding evolution is essential. A loud voice from a minority of religions is distorting what it is and how the theory developed. When I was rethinking my beliefs, I had to go back and review it.

Before Darwin, alternatives to religious origin stories were being floated. Then the Galapagos Islands were discovered off the coast of Ecuador. That country has continued to protect them, like the treasure they are, to this day. The climate there changes often, putting pressure on the flora and fauna, and the islands create places for the species to isolate and evolve into new species, making it a living laboratory.

Darwin travelled there soon after they were discovered and collected data. He followed that data to create his seminal work, The Origin of Species. He was a religious man and knew his ideas would be controversial. He struggled with publishing them. Sorry for the history lesson, but I didn’t want to clumsily introduce evolution. There are many misconceptions.

There were errors in the theory and it was not complete. Darwin included in it that he did not know what the mechanism was for how species evolved. That’s DNA, it was discovered later. I’ll leave it up to you to look up “theory” or anything I’ve said for more details. A key to my “spirituality of materialism” is that scientific methods were employed. That includes the principle that we are never 100% certain about our conclusions. So, any errors that have been found in Darwin’s original work do not result in the dismissal of the full set of data, the evidence, or the logic applied to them. Conclusions based on them may change slightly, but the basic ideas have stood the test of further scientific inquiry.

In my search for a spiritual practice, I have found that all of them include “mystery”. The Old Testament has a story of Moses not being allowed to see the face of God. Jesus taught in parables. Muslims don’t allow images of Muhammad. Buddhism has very little to say about the origin of the world. I have never understood why religious people have a problem with science changing, and continuing on a constant search for more answers. Answers almost always lead to more questions. This seems to me to be a spiritual quest, to know ourselves better. When universities began in the 9^th century, they were closely tied to religions. We seemed to have lost that the search for meaning and the search for facts came from the same curiosity about ourselves.

But I digress, or is this my central theme? I’m still figuring that out.

The importance of evolution, and that we are evolved from what we call “non-living” matter, is that it means each of us is not special. And no one is special for knowing that each of us is not special. The parents I had, the school I went to, something I saw on TV that I don’t remember, Matt Dillahunty and Aron Ra, all added up to me thinking my knowledge of the history of the universe is meaningful. Some people think it’s sad that I think meaning comes from something as inert as billions of years of protons rearranging themselves into my brain and my guts. But the people that think that, went to a different school, and listened to different podcasts, and their protons arranged differently.

I think the sadness comes from the thought that each of us has very little effect on the whole of the universe, or even on parts of this planet within our lifetime. Even for the names that we know from history, the people who are said to have had a great impact, do we know who they were, or what it was like to be around them? Very few people will know me, but that’s true for those famous names also. We know the thing they did that made an impact, but not much more. “Insignificance” is another topic I’ll need to get back to.

Evolution is not just new species and it’s not just DNA. It’s a long line of tiny changes, with millions of individual combinations. It takes thousands of years for a complex species like ours to develop. The fun and the joy are in experiencing those unique combinations. With language, we have added another dimension, a way to pass on thoughts and ideas within a lifetime and through the ages. Using the theory, we can look at our primate cousins and have a sense of how we developed as social creatures when we lived in the jungle. We can look at early language and symbols carved into rocks and paintings on cave walls, and get a sense of how we developed moral codes and ethics for living together.

The Spirituality of Materialism

 Okay so, I've said it before, I'm going to start a new series. And, they fizzle out. We'll see this time. 

Lately I have been inspired by Robert Sapolsky and others to see the world as a long series of amazing events, too many for one brain to hold. 

I'm past the "I debunk everything" stage of non-belief and into, well, that's what the series is for, into what? We'll see. Many people go through a year or more of anger when they feel they have been lied to all their lives. Some never get over that. I'm over that. Some get just as fundamentalist about their new belief system as they were before. It's merely coincidence that they are scientifically accurate. Anyway, there are a lot of people in the world. I'm interested in finding common ground. 

Here's the phrase that I woke up with the other day,

My spirituality comes from the awareness of the accumulated knowledge of who we are and how we got here. 

That knowledge has increased in accuracy tremendously over the last several centuries and it includes everything that came before, from our earliest common ancestor that looked up at the sun being blotted out in the middle of the day and wondered why that happened. 

To add a little to that: 

Materialism means dealing with matter, inert matter. 

When I say we came from matter, that sounds non-spiritual. Let's not forget about energy. This body I inhabit (I'll get back to that bit of language) generates energy. That's why you can touch that screen and it responds. 

I'm not going to veer too far into cosmology. There are many better ways for you to learn about that. But, real quick history of the material universe. 

There was something, or some cosmologists call it nothing (another thing to get back to) then there was spacetime. That burst of energy left behind some matter, mostly hydrogen and helium. The same forces of nature that exist today caused those atoms to combine and change into other atoms then form stars that cooked up a wider variety of elements then planets and eventually life. And there's all the stuff we don't know so we make up names like "dark matter". 

Knowing the details of that billions of years old story may or may not inspire you, confuse you, confound you, or make you laugh because you think it's nuts. 

I will continue on from here with a couple ideas in mind. Call them premises, conclusions of science (which never operates with 100% certainty), basic facts, it's not important. It's actually more important that we agree that we don't know how it works or where it all came from. I'm not seeking ultimate knowledge. I only need the building blocks of the world, the human size things we interact with, not quantum weirdness, and not sure I even need relativity. 

The simple ideas

The forces of nature have remained constant since a few minutes after the point that we call the beginning of time, the Big Bang, the furthest back we can trace the known universe. 

• For most of that time, we (our human ancestors) had no idea how those forces worked. 

Really, most of the time we weren't here. Pre-hominids go back a few million years. Somewhere around 200,000 years ago our species began. Written history can be counted in the 10's of thousands. 

• We (as a species, our ancestors) developed language to describe the forces. 

Gods made thunderbolts, one drove the Sun around, other spirits brought the seasons. Every culture that had a written or oral history has an origin story. 

• That language carried not only attempts at explaining all the life and how it came and went plus the movement of the heavens and the earth, it also carried the values that drove us toward larger tribes, working together to protect ourselves and grow and flourish. 
• 
  
• All that led to agriculture, architecture, bridges, aqueducts, sailing, mountain climbing, nations, more languages, and, it gets complicated after that, but it also gets more accessible because we are able to pass on more knowledge and build on it. 

This is where the description of what I'm talking about gets difficult. One way all of this is expressed is "The Pursuit of Happiness", but it took me a while to get comfortable with that, it seems too self-centered and hedonistic. Or, there's "The Survival Instinct", which seems kind of animalistic, dog eat dog. "Spiritual" means something different to just about everyone. 

I used "spiritual" in the title here, so this may be a good place to end the introduction. I've laid out a direction, a beginning at least, and pointed to the hazards of the discussion ahead. We'll see. 

Tony and Ahsley

This has been a long time coming. I’m a little late with it. It’s time to promote Tony Jones from “other theologians I’ve written about” to the “few who actually get it right”. He sealed his status in a recent podcast with Ashley Peters. Even if Tony had not made some upgrades to his theology over the years, just the way he conducts this conversation put him in the “doing it right” crowd.

My index of Progressive Christians

Okay, I kid a little about being “right”. Tony’s fine, he’s always been fine. There are probably parts of him I did not recognize back when I first started following him. If I had started recently, I’d probably be searching back, trying to figure where this guy is coming from. It can be hard to tell what he believes or if he believes at times. No question though, a love of nature and the values that are needed for humans to express that love come through loud and clear.

The Reverend Hunter Podcast. I couldn't index to the specific episode, so look for about the 10th one, "Ashley Peters: Conservation is my religion"

Ashley Peters is no stiff either. It’s interesting to hear her philosophy that is rooted in the many ways people relate to nature, hunting as well as just watching. From her responses to Tony, apparently she didn’t go through some of the years of doubt or difficult nights of sorting out beliefs that some of us have. This provides a fresh perspective. She uses Alaska as a jumping off point for seeing the “bigger” picture. I paraphrase here, removing the feedback and extra words of a conversation;

“When you live in Alaska, you see the large everything, “you understand the scale of things and feel so insignificant. You recognize your place in the universe

You get that sense on the prairie and the woods, if you’ve been there, you understand the scale of things. You feel so insignificant. You very quickly recognize your place as a human being on Earth and you suddenly recognize that this stuff is huge. You don’t have control over any of it. You have to focus on what you do have control over and hope for the best for the rest of it.

When I go into work each day, the thing I had control over, what the outdoors has taught me is that you focus on what you do have control over. You focus on the things in front of you.  I plan for what can go wrong, but it’s still the question of what I have control over and doing as much as I can to prepare and to be in that moment, but to recognize what I don’t have control over. I can worry all day long, and I still do, but you can only do so much as a human.

To relate that to a spiritual aspect, as a Christian growing up, it was “give it up to God”. That was the common narrative. That’s not dissimilar to what I do with the outdoors, but not giving it up to one deity. I’m going outdoors and laying it down, however you want to put it, it’s that same offloading of my worries and recognizing I don’t have control over ‘these’ things but I have control over these few things and that’s what I’m going to choose to focus on.”

The Listener

I’ve been exploring the mytho-poetic a little more lately, something I’ve been doing on and off for many years now. I found some old recordings I had of a story told in a lodge by a fire, back in 2010. Now it’s on the internet for everyone. If you’ve never heard anything like this, or even if you have, a good place to start is part 2 of 4 at 38 minutes or so. In the story, the hero, well, let’s call him the main character, has just killed a few people.

This raises a few questions. That’s the whole point of telling stories around fires, to raise questions, but this one needed to be addressed. Death in a sacred story is not like death in our real lives. There is one story teller in this recording, but there are a few people, men, on the stage (the bench as it is sometimes called), and they all chime in. I know all of them and have spent some very special times with each one of them, but I’ll leave all those stories until the Q & A session, which is anytime on this media. Tom Gambell talks about Ghandi, Martin Shaw talks about being pulled by different characters in the story. You could back up 5 minutes or so and hear Malidoma Somé talk about his initiation rituals in his tribe in Burkina Faso, . You get a nice overview of what this is about in a just a few minutes.

Then you can go back to part 1, or go back to 20 minutes before my mark above to get more of that, or whatever you want. If you don’t want to listen to the guys chatting, there are indices on each of the four YouTubes and you can just hear the story. Won’t take long. There was no video of the conference, but someone added images. They are quite beautiful. You’ll see the room in some of the pictures. It’s a big room with just a few mics, but the sound was edited and most of it is clear, especially the story telling parts.

Stories like this are not usually on the internet. There aren’t many like it left and in 2010 we were not planning on making this something publicly available. We didn’t do it to sell some albums or get people to join our merry band. It’s kind of intimate. This isn’t entertainment, although there's nothing wrong with being entertained by it. My voice is in there and if I knew you’d be listening to it now, I might have said something different. But, times change, words sometimes need to be heard first one way, then another.

These stories are the stories that we need now. I’d go so far as to say when they were heard long ago, they weren’t completely understood. Maybe they aren’t understood much better now. But they need to be grappled with, talked about, told to the younger ones and see if they can do something with them. Love of these stories is love of the earth and love for each other and for people who are not yet born.

Malidoma says, you don’t know where you are going to end up when you go through an initiation story, but once you decide to go, keep going. As his elders told him, “You go backwards, you die, you go forward you die, so, what the hell, go forward and die”. There are at least two meanings of “die” here. We’re all going to die someday, so you might as well keep growing and learning as much as you can. The other meaning is initiation, the transition from child to adult, from the safety of the village to the unknown risks outside out of it. A part of you may need to die so you can survive that transition.

The other thing to know, this was the year of the Minnesota Men’s Conference when Robert Bly, the guy who started it, stepped aside. This is the story that was being told while he stood in the back of the room. On one of the nights, he said goodbye, we sang a few songs, and he went off to be part of some other stories.

Intermission Summer of 2019

Summer is always a slow time for blogging for me. It's rainy and cold today, so maybe our one day of summer has past. I do have article #10 ideas, but it's getting to where I need to write a PhD thesis, or just keep rambling. Or, something in between. For now, here's an article that expresses some of the things I'm working on or towards or around. 

Six things I wish people understood about Atheism

1. There are lots of different types of atheists, and we don't all feel the same way about religion.

For me, I've felt differently at different times. Many people have some anger immediately upon leaving their church. As they find more people who have already worked through that, that might subside and give way to more reasoned thoughts about why people think the ways they do.

2. Atheist organizations are starting to do better at helping people and promoting social justice.

Really, secular groups have been around for a long time. Religion might inform your values, but different worldviews can and do lead to the same values. There have always been people who believed in the good works of religion but had private doubts about the theology.

3. Seemingly little things that religious people might not even notice can really drive us atheists bananas, and for good reason.

What Jay is saying here is that religion is everywhere. It's our calendar, many of our holidays, in political speeches, on our money, everywhere. It would be nice if they at least noticed this and acknowledged it.

4. There's a big difference between private individuals promoting their religious beliefs and the government doing the same. But this doesn't mean the government cannot promote facts and ideas that are inconsistent with some religious beliefs.

This one is a little more complicated. There are subtle differences between "freedom of religion" and "freedom from religion". This goes way back to before the Constitution was written.

5. Atheists and other secularists are getting pretty good at participating in public.

This relates to #2, plus, more people have grown up without religion in their homes now. More than that, they have found other ways to develop their world view and value systems and to articulate why they feel the way they do. It's help that they are able to do with less threat of being ostracized from their community. There are now strong secular groups on campuses and those people will go on to fund those groups and they will likely continue to grow.

Atheism for Religious and/or Spiritual 9

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Before I go on, I promised back in the 2nd of this series that I’d talk about the problems of the early Catholic Church. I hope I have spent enough time discussing the Enlightenment era and the flaws in Western philosophy in general. But there are good reasons why I still choose them over Christianity. There are a few things that started gnawing at me about Christianity and the more I looked into them, the more I realized they were foundational problems that could not be solved. That is, they weren’t just cracks in the foundation of Christianity; they were demonstrations that there is no foundation.

The first is the consensus on the existence of Jesus. That’s it really. That is, the entire extent of the scholarly consensus on Jesus is that he existed, and maybe that he was crucified. The dates of his life are disputed, his name is in dispute, everything he said is debatable, let alone what he meant, his family life, if he was a spirit or a man who was inhabited by spirit or if he was born God. All of these questions are played out in the scriptures and some of them have led to wars and schisms (John 14). Holy wars are not cool as they used to be. Claims about what someone did in the past are expected to come with data that can be confirmed and facts that are agreed upon by a number of experts. Part of the statement of the consensus on Jesus is that we can’t recreate any of these details from the documents we have, not the four gospels or with the help of the apocryphal documents.

They spent centuries trying to work back to some original theme and what they discovered was there isn’t one. Instead, we get Peter arguing with Paul (Acts 10), Thomas painted as an unbeliever who repents (John 20), and a fourth gospel that is out of sync with the other three. This was expected and normal at the time the scriptures were written. Authors added to and reworked the stories to bring their new insights to them. But now we have modern history which is expected to be accurate and to let us know when something is uncertain. This leads to a confusing mixing of these two different genres. A historical fact like “Jesus existed” is used to claim that everything written using the name “Jesus” is also historically true. It may be true that Jesus died at the hands of the Romans but that says nothing about how that death washed away sins or the details of how he rose or who found him or who saw him later. The truth of one historical fact has very little effect on the truth of most of what is found in the New Testament.

This leads to the second thing, the order of the New Testament. If that collection of books was simply reordered to the order in which they were written, I think we would all have a very different view of the meaning they are attempting to convey. The first book in the New Testament, Matthew, begins with a birth narrative, connecting Jesus back to King David. That makes sense if you are attempting to tell a story that you think is real. But many believe the story of the virgin birth was concocted later to sell people of that time on the idea of Jesus being God. Gods of that time were born of virgins, so Jesus should be too, so you need a story.

If you want to follow how the stories began and were copied and embellished, start with the Book of Mark. It was written first. It has no birth story. It doesn’t have a resurrection story either. Maybe I should say it didn’t have a resurrection story. Many Bibles have footnotes telling you that the last verses of Mark were added on later, to harmonize it with the other gospels. Matthew and then Luke were written after Mark, sometimes copying, sometimes changing stories slightly, sometimes adding a new story. The gospel of John was written decades later.

To further correct the chronological order, all of the works of Paul need to be shuffled to the beginning. All of them were written and its author died before the first gospel was even heard of. Acts talks about Paul, but it was most likely written by the same author as the Book of Luke. Making sense of the different stories and contradictions is hard enough, but if you were to be presented first with a story of a man who only met Jesus in a vision and mentioned virtually nothing of a family or any earthly travels, it would be disconcerting indeed to then find out about Kings hearing of a virgin birth, to read of encounters with priests, of a man having meals, and telling parables. Was Paul unaware of all of this? For me, it’s led me to consider that this is a legend that developed, not a history that was poorly documented.

This project of ordering the books chronologically is complicated by the difficulty of assigning dates to the writings. That is an inexact science, and the authors sometimes attempted to mask who they were and when they were writing. The complete reordering might begin with the “undisputed Paulines”, Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, and Philemon. These would be followed by Mark, Matthew, Luke/Acts then John. The job would get more difficult after that as we would need to sort out the psuedepigrpaha (like 2 Thessalonians), the works that were falsely attributed to Paul or other figures of the time. These were either assigned authorship in error by people who didn’t know any better, or deliberately claimed to be an author other than the actual one as a way to legitimize the message.

This is not just a New Testament problem either. Deuteronomy is the fifth book in the Old Testament, but is now known to have been written much later. Maybe most significant is the story of Eve tempting Adam with the apple. Besides simple facts like no apple appearing in the Bible, the story itself might not be a creation story. It may have been written earlier but it was given its place in the Bible by the people who assembled it, not some original author attempting to write a coherent narrative. It’s a folk tale, probably not intended to be an account of the first man and woman. So the entire reason for Jesus, to save us from the sin that got us kicked out of the Garden of Eden, is a mistake of some scholars in the centuries around the Fall of Rome who received a text and did not question its authorship or authenticity. They were told Moses wrote it and that was good enough for them.

With all of these competing narratives and a lack of scholarship, we arrive in 381 AD at the third thing. In that year, soon after Theodosius became emperor of Rome, he declared that he knew the correct version of all of this. Rather than honor other ancient traditions and allow for freedom of expression of a plurality of religions, it was time to get everyone under one system. To do that would require enforcement of these Catholic ideas using his military power and in many cases, the burning of anything and anyone who didn’t agree. This included not just pagan or Jewish places of worship, but Christian churches that didn’t preach the correct doctrine.

The page Theodosius gets at Catholic.com calls him a “just and mighty emperor” and puts it this way,

“In January, 381, the prefect had orders to close all Arian chapels in the city and to expel those who served them. The same severe measures were ordered throughout Theodosius’s dominion, not only against Arians, but also in the case of Manichaeans and all other heretics.”

It tries to soften exactly what these “severe measures” were but that’s why you shouldn’t get history from only one source, and especially from a source that is biased. By the way, “Arians” here have nothing to do with Nazis. The big problem with them was they were not Trinitarians. They said Jesus was subordinate to God, not part of him. My problem is no one can explain what the Trinity is. Instead of discussing it that though, Theodosius just said he was bored with all the talk and started killing people.

This wasn’t just an establishment of a strong military rule or just a wedding of religion with government it was a closing of minds that had been developing philosophies of democracy and science for centuries. In his book, Confessions, from around 397 AD Augustine wrote, “There is another form of temptation, even more fraught with danger. This is the disease of curiosity. It is this which drives us to try and discover the secrets of nature, those secrets which are beyond our understanding, which can avail us nothing and which man should not wish to learn.” Granted I’m taking this out of context in this short piece. He was confessing his thoughts as a young man and how they led him away from a more pious life. However, from archaeology we can see that technology stopped advancing around this time and we see less works of literature over the next few hundred years. I’m not blaming the Fall of Rome on Christians, but they didn’t prevent it and didn’t even seem troubled by it.

You should check all of my facts here and draw your own conclusions. Nothing I said here necessarily cancels out everything the Church has ever done. It shouldn’t change your relationship to your favorite parable or the community you consider your spiritual home. For me, it led to questions and it was the reaction to those questions from church leaders that eventually led to my lack of a belief in the divinity of Jesus and ultimately anything supernatural.

Atheism for the Religious and/or Spiritual 8

I didn't do anything special for the occasion, but it's been 10 years (plus a week) since I started this blog. Okay, move along.

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Theologians throughout the ages have attempted to straddle the worlds of belief and non-belief, of faith and reason. Thomas Aquinas was banned by the Catholic Church for his writings on this and then given sainthood not long after his death. In the last century, Catholic monk Teilhard de Chardin was told not to publish his thoughts on bridging these two worlds, but not long after he died, a friend published his works, (according to Teilhard’s wishes) and some gave him credit for contributing to the liberal ideas expressed at Vatican II. I find these philosophical thought experiments interesting, and although many do not, and even though I can show they ultimately don’t lead to a conclusion, I also hope to show that having the discussion has brought the people who hold those opposing beliefs closer together so we can work on the common goals.

Chardin became a Catholic monk not long after the turn of the 20th century and then began writing about his thoughts about spirituality. He was rewarded by being sent to a remote monastery in China. That’s sarcasm in case you didn’t catch it. He was also a paleontologist and his work with hominid fossils brought him a degree of fame. Evolution was a big challenge to the church at the time, and here was one of their own making strides in that area. As a contemplative and peaceful man, outwardly it appeared he was at peace with this. We can only speculate how it felt to him to have to choose between expressing his most important thoughts openly and keeping his job and position in the Church that he loved.

Teilhard tried to harmonize evolution and creation by saying that God does the creation thing while evolution builds the physical world. The two are not separate, but happening together all the time. God created and continues to create the world, and evolution is the mechanism that moves that creation forward. Our conscious is part of that evolution, so we have become co-creators with God. There isn’t one without the other, just as exhaling and inhaling are needed for there to be breath.

For him, this helped to solve the problem of evil in the world. The existence of evil is used as an argument that an all loving and all knowing God does not exist, because if one did, it would not allow such pain and suffering. Teilhard said that God does not will that suffering occurs. God is not intervening in the world on a regular basis to cause people pain because of something they did. Rather, God sets the world in motion toward the end, which is a world without suffering, but it is not possible to create that world without going through the suffering. We are part of the creation as it is occurring so we are experiencing what is required for it to happen. Since we are part of it, it becomes our job to prevent or at least reduce suffering, and we evolve skills and strategies to do just that.

I think it’s pretty clear why his ideas were not accepted by the Church. He disrupts the prescribed need to get you to go to confession every week. Less clear is why he decided to remain a monk his entire life and accept their condemnations of his writings and not be able to have them published until he was dead. He obviously wanted his ideas shared even knowing we would never be able to ask a follow up question.

To the scientifically minded, it should also be clear that none of his work comes close to qualifying as a scientific hypothesis. Although there is a certain logical flow to it, he makes assumptions about a need for a creator and endows that creator with attributes that are pulled straight from his theology classes, not his paleontology.

His posthumous following is thus peopled mostly by those who don’t accept the controls of religions, but still desire some sense of a supernatural to give meaning to our existence as well as those who are not too concerned with the rigors of scientific proofs. Many of these followers would consider themselves pantheists, but Teilhard often stated that a Christian sojourner is not a pantheist. He was firmly a Christian and being in the world didn’t mean his life in the world was divorced from his life in Christ. The Christian symbolism of the cross signified this connection and that was meaningful to him.

On pg 116 of the Divine Milieu, he says, “Pantheism seduces us by its vistas of perfect universal union.” But the Divine Milieu is about God and the world, not one or the other, so Teilhard is always working to keep that aspect in his writing, even while acknowledging that evolution is obviously happening and can be observed by us every day and confirmed using our powers of reason and logic. We evolved with animal traits, but we find individual fulfillment in the divine. I would have loved to ask him why he did not find fulfillment in participating in the discovery that we are connected to nature in ways that we have not been aware of before.

He says, “Christianity alone therefore saves, with the rights of thoughts, the essential aspiration of all mysticisim: to be united (that is, to become the other) while remaining one's self.” All punctuation is from the original. This axiom is sometimes expressed by him as “union differentiates”. That is, the essential aspiration of all mysticism to be in union with others, with God, with the world, and yet to be able to be one's self. Teilhard stresses that diving into Christian theology will not cause you to lose yourself, whereas other forms of mysticism or modernism will, “If you suppress the historical reality of Christ, the divine omnipresence which intoxicates us becomes, like all the other dreams of metaphysics, uncertain, vague, conventional—lacking the decisive experimental verification by which to impose itself on our minds, and without the moral authority to assimilate our lives into it.”

None of this works for me. On the contrary, I do find “decisive experimental verification” in metaphysics. They are not vague at all. I can only wonder if Teilhard and I sat down, if we might find we were talking about something different or of the same thing in different terms. But he didn’t leave behind experiments for me to repeat, so I can not verify his findings. Instead, we have physics, which can describe how I came from stars and stars came from hydrogen which was left over after an expansion from a compressed amount of energy. When those explanations fail to explain what came before them, I can still use the same methods to define the boundaries of what I know and what might be true. This “omnipresence” “intoxicates” me. Although there is much left unknown, there is certainty in the mathematical proofs of what we do know so I can “assimilate” that into my life. When combined with biology, we can begin to understand the basis for our morality.

But I didn’t go to the trouble of summarizing his work here just so I could shoot it down. I don’t need to accept his entire thesis to see that he made a contribution, he moved forward the conversation about how we relate to a vast cosmos full of unanswered questions. Teilhard de Chardin was an accomplished scientist and a devout Catholic monk. Many on either side see this as irreconcilable. He could be dismissed as a scientist troubled with cognitive dissonance who came up with some new age answers to explain his faith, or as a man of faith who felt the need to explain his discoveries of the origins of humans in terms of that faith. But as Yuval Harari said in his book Sapiens, it’s in our cognitive dissonance where we find understanding about our cultures.

The question of whether or not Teilhard accomplished his goal of reconciling science and faith, is perhaps the wrong question. What can be shown is that he lived through two World Wars, a time when the future of civilization was very much in doubt, and during a time when churches were struggling with the new theory of who we are and where we came from that began with Darwin, then, not long after he died and his writings began to be absorbed by the culture, the Catholic Church convened a Council, where they said this:

159. Faith and science: "... methodical research in all branches of knowledge, provided it is carried out in a truly scientific manner and does not override moral laws, can never conflict with the faith, because the things of the world and the things of faith derive from the same God. The humble and persevering investigator of the secrets of nature is being led, as it were, by the hand of God in spite of himself, for it is God, the conserver of all things, who made them what they are." (Vatican II GS 36:1)

You can enter the reference at the end into any search engine and bring up the full text. Granted it still is hanging on to the idea that God made it all, but this from 1965 and it is written by the Church. You change one word in that first sentence and make it valid from a scientific point of view, “…the things of the world and the things of faith derive from the same place.”  I changed “God” to “place”. The feeling of faith grew out of culture, which grew out of our biology which is a result of the physical laws of the universe. Whether a faith statement is true or not, it’s true that faith is a human experience.

This statement from the Vatican was a big step from 1859 and they have made greater strides since. Not everyone is coming along on those steps, but that is true of any discipline or culture. The question itself has not changed. That is, the question of how we reconcile the feelings we have of connectedness, of mystery, with the answers that we are getting from research and data, knowing that the data leaves much still unanswered. The amount and complexity of the data has changed, but the question remains.

Having sent probes above the clouds, where gods used to dwell and not finding them, having peered as far into space as the limitations of the speed of light will allow us, and finding nothing, the answer that there is a god out there that made all this is becoming increasingly less likely. Having gone beyond the Newtonian physics of cause and effect, into the quantum world, and still being unable to find how the electronic pulses in our brains translate into complex concepts, we are starting to wonder if there is a limit to how much we can know about ourselves. We’ve managed pretty well without answering either of these questions. Countless gods have been fought over until no one was left to believe in them. Science moves at its own pace, providing us with information, while civilizations move as they need to in order to survive.

All of this has involved a lot of pain and suffering. One of the most important things I take away from Teilhard is that God is not going to do all of the work of alleviating that suffering. A purely scientific approach to these questions would say there is no god at all and it is completely up to us to address the suffering in the world. No matter where you stand on that question, I think we can all see that it’s time to put the question of faith vs science somewhere off to the side and find more ways to work together on alleviating the suffering and less time arguing about where it all comes from.

Atheism for the Religious and/or Spiritual 7

The gatekeepers

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I realized I was not a Christian the day that I no longer accepted Christ as my savior.

There are a few people out there that would argue with that statement. That is, there are a few who would define what it means to be a Christian in a different way. Some would argue that it was when I stopped believing in hell, or miracles, or prayer or anything else in the Apostle's Creed. There are a few who would say I was never a "real" Christian". Ultimately, people's opinion about what a Christian really is, doesn't really matter since there is no way to reconcile all of them. And yes, I realize it matters very much to the individual who holds the definition. What is important, is that I can enter the doors of many churches and be welcomed just as I am.

At some point, someone inside that door will start asking me about my beliefs. The difference between mainline and fundamentalist churches is how quickly that happens, and how much it matters what I say. Currently, I'm a member at a church that knows exactly what I don't believe, and still welcomes me. They aren't expecting me to be "on a path" or worried about my soul. They actually welcome me. This is not as rare as you might think.

I wish I could say more about great conversations I have at this church about spirituality or quantum physics or other relevant matters of the day, but honestly, I hardly ever go anymore and even when I did, those conversations were sometimes great but not often and almost always brief. I'm sure if I went there regularly and spoke about the latest evil Bible verse I found, they might not welcome me quite as much as they do now. That's fine. Let's not get carried away.

The pastor there made a social media post of this quote from Barbara Brown Taylor. I'm sure it's sincere, that it is what he wants, but I understand why it's difficult to build a church that really does this. It's not what church traditionally is. We're not to the point where I can say, "traditionally was". They have to offer what people expect when they walk in that door. It's also very hard to advance in the hierarchy of an organization if your mission is to constantly question that organization and its hierarchy. I don't expect any of this to change soon. There will likely be continuing splits, scandals and bankruptcies as we move in that direction.

But as Ryan Bell said to Gretta Vosper, "A church can't call itself progressive if it doesn't keep progressing." That is a challenge for a large organization. I suppose there will have to be a conversation at some point about how to make that progress while keeping tradition somewhere or somehow. But that's not my conversation for now.

What I did, at some point, instead of walking through those doors and waiting to see how long before they asked me some theological test question, I started asking the questions as soon as I got there. Are you LGBTQ affirming? Do you have open communion? Do you preach a literal hell? Does membership require a faith statement? What kind of books do you use in your adult studies? As yet, no one has passed my test.

Acts explains some of the tests for Christianity
Peter talks in credal language
Galatians discusses judging people on their fruits, a better system than most in the Bible

Atheism for the Religious and/or Spiritual 6

This is the first time I missed a February for this blog. The Ides of March have already been upon us. No excuses. I even had an idea brewing. I have a few favorite podcasts and I want to relate a couple recent episodes from one of them. It’s Bart Campolo, and he includes something from another favorite, On Being. In fact, I’ll go ahead and start with the poem, rather than try to lead up to it. 

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Everything Is Waiting for You

David Whyte
After Derek Mahon

Your great mistake is to act the drama
as if you were alone. As if life
were a progressive and cunning crime
with no witness to the tiny hidden
transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny
the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,
even you, at times, have felt the grand array;
the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding
out your solo voice. You must note
the way the soap dish enables you,
or the window latch grants you freedom.
Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.
The stairs are your mentor of things
to come, the doors have always been there
to frighten you and invite you,
and the tiny speaker in the phone
is your dream-ladder to divinity.
Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the
conversation. The kettle is singing
even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots
have left their arrogant aloofness and
seen the good in you at last. All the birds
and creatures of the world are unutterably
themselves. Everything is waiting for you.


The podcast is called Humanize Me. If you follow the link you’ll see a story of a conversation with Conan O’Brien and Albert Brooks. 

The story doesn’t quite complete the answer to the question posed, can insignificance be liberating? Bart spends about a half hour filling in the blanks. It’s not some simple folksy wisdom. We’re all at different places with regards to how well known we are and how others judge our significance, but our approach to the idea of significance can have an effect on our happiness and maybe significantly more than that. He mentions the Tiger Mom who drives her kids to succeed. Whatever you think about that, it will most likely lead them to more success than if she had not done what she did. What her philosophy doesn’t talk about is that at some point in their lives, those kids will be able to make their own decisions, based on that success, and they will no longer need to be driven to succeed strictly for the goal of succeeding. They will be able to enjoy the journey they find themselves on.

With memes and commercials and self-help books and helicopter parents and just everything that is available to us at any moment, we receive a lot of wisdom in small bites, and a lot of it is not for us at this moment in our lives. Like, stopping to smell the roses is a good idea, but if you are on your way to your final exam, better not stop for too long. People will tell you all sorts of reasons for working hard and others will tell you to spend more time with your family. Others will tell you that you can have it all. What I love about Bart’s podcast is that he’s spent some time thinking about what “all” actually is.

In the story that starts this podcast, Conan O’Brien uses the example of President Calvin Coolidge and Bart has referred to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, people who have changed the world in significant ways. We don’t know much about Roosevelt’s private life, and very few people visit Coolidge’s grave. While they were alive perhaps only a hundred people knew them intimately, maybe less. When Albert Brooks tells Conan, “none of it matters”, he’s talking about his movies and his legacy and even the lives he touched because even those will pass and be forgotten. But of course, something matters. It’s true that all of us will be forgotten, so if we despair our individual inevitable end and dwell on the comparison of our accomplishments to those of great Presidents, we have miscalculated where we should be spending our emotional energy, because in the end, we all end up in that same place.

If you are focused on survival then you probably aren’t reading this. If you need to focus on survival, then do that. Hopefully you aren’t creating a sense of panic where there is no need for it. But if needed, you can find help and get to a place of comfort. There are tribes that have room for more and there are ways to find help, so do that first. If you’re already there, reflect on how that happened, what did your tribe do for you, what do you have to be thankful for? Bart tells the story of a chess mentor who teaches a young man not just to play well, but to love the game. Unfortunately, we don’t all get coaches like that, but we can hear about a story of someone who did. It comes around the middle of the podcast. I won’t spoil the story for you.

In February, this theme continued with a call in question from a 15 year old talking about her science class. It was great just to hear something so well thought out and articulated from someone her age. Bart wasn’t quite as happy with this his own answers as he usually is, so he followed up with a redo of it about a month later. I liked both episodes, but you could skip the first one and not miss much. Her question was about how to cope with the dire warnings of the future based on the climate science she is learning about.

In the first one, Bart tried to come up with some analogies, like riding a wave. You don’t control the wave, but you can control the surf board and make it to the end of the ride without getting dunked. He gets a bit dark at times and he apologies for that. He tries to end on a positive note about love. No matter when the end times occur or how, it’s still important to love your kids and appreciate the world we have now. The difficulty of this type of question is a matter of focus. The wave analogy breaks down when you start thinking about where our “waves of life” come from, the things that push us along, some of them are man-made and have levers behind them that we can get control of, and maybe we should try to grab them, instead of just going along for the ride. Or, I’d like to spend time appreciating the world, but there’s a lot of crap going on, and I’d like to fix some of it while I’m here. Bart posits that if the choices we make as individuals lead to a life well lived, then those same values should also apply to what we do as a species, as a whole.

After doing some research and giving it more thought, Bart comes up with some more solid answers to the question in episode 409. One of those is; we just aren’t wired for thinking about the future. Throughout history we’ve survived many disasters, of our own making or not, either by luck or ingenuity and that survival is both due to and feeds back into our optimism bias. I’m not even sure that’s a bad thing. You can check out the optimism bias Wikipedia page and TED talks about it.

Josey, the one called in the question, is a student, so she is just learning about this looming disaster and wondering why everyone is not acting like it’s coming and like it’s the highest priority for all of humanity. Her teacher is not wired to act that way and he has other things to teach. We could get hit by a meteor, our economic system could collapse or we could create nanotechnology that gets out of control and destroys everything. He has to teach all of those things knowing that his students understanding of any one of them could cause a lot of worry. He has also known about them for a long time and has continued to keep his job and feed his family throughout, so he might not see them as worrying. I don’t know what he is thinking, but it’s poor reasoning to equate all doomsday scenarios and conclude they are all wrong because we are still here, but that is part of how our brains work.

This is a problem for anyone trying to get others to adjust their actions to actual threats. Some people will respond to fear but many will get fatigued with constant warnings that don’t appear to be near or present. If you can show that people are trying to solve this problem, even if they are failing, you’ve just shown that someone is working on it, and we can hope they succeed. There are other problems, many more immediate, that also need attention. A constant drum beat becomes background noise. Bart didn’t defend this way of thinking, he just pointed out that we do it.

This isn’t just some psychology problem to deal with when you are talking to your friends either. It is built in to our political structure. To solve the problem of despotic kings a few centuries back, we created a democratic system where leaders can be voted out every couple years. This works great for slowing the accumulation of power but it is not designed for a change in climate that is occurring over many decades. We didn’t plan for this because it is only recently that we can predict such events. It’s only the last couple hundred years that we knew the earth was more than a few million years old. It’s even more recently since we have been able to predict the weather, let alone long term climate trends. We survived a long time without thinking on these scales.

It may be that the action we need is not the technological solution, although we’ll need that too, but we won't get to that if we don’t adjust our thinking first. We need to figure out how to accept and understand the science, understand our place in a vast universe and deep time, see our part as cooperative social creatures including future generations, and learn to discuss all of this with a diverse set of people and cultures knowing our survival depends on all of us getting along in ways we have never seen in human history. That’s a pretty tall order.

At the end of this episode, Bart says the answer to the question is to listen to all his other episodes. That might sound like a cop out or a marketing ploy, but I have listened to a lot of them, so I know it’s not. Bart’s theme of building community attempts to address all of these concerns at different times and in different ways. It takes hours of discussion to even begin to chip away at this and Humanize Me is one effort to do that. They answer it from the perspective of providing comfort to each other in difficult times, even up to and including the end of the world and how to be in a world of difficult choices so we can get together and solve all the world’s problems. The bottom line answer to all those is to care and nourish those close to you and do it in a way that helps to expand that caring and nourishing out into whatever surrounds you.

The summer of Year B covers some problematic behavior of Kings in the book of Samuel
Ecclesiastes really speaks for itself
Solomon upgrades the relationship to God in Kings
There are many ways to interpret Job. One could fit with this story.

Atheism for the Religious and/or Spiritual 5

The reason for the season

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I don’t have a link to this one unfortunately. I heard this story while driving years ago. It’s one of those stories from listeners on NPR. They set up some theme and people call in and tell a personal vignette. The theme for this one was something about introducing kids to religion when you are not a regular church-goer.

This particular dad picks out some mainstream Protestant churches and takes his daughter to a couple of them. They go to a Christmas service, which is about a baby arriving, so the kid relates to that. If I remember right, it was questions about the meaning of Christmas that got her started. That is a message of hope and the coming of something that will bring peace and joy, so everything was going pretty well.

After Christmas, we get Martin Luther King day. While all this learning about Jesus is going on she’s learning about that in school. They didn’t choose a home church so she was getting accustomed to noticing churches while they were driving around and considering if it looked like one they might like it. Dad doesn’t really have a curriculum in mind and has not thought about any potential pitfalls of this whole endeavor until one day they drive by a Catholic church. There’s Jesus on a cross. Suddenly all the questions and the innocence of discovery take a deeper and darker turn. He hadn’t covered the bloodiness of the crucifixion yet.

He has to quickly update her on the story of how that message of love and hope was not received so well by everyone. Some people don’t want everyone to love everyone else. Some people don’t think everyone is equal and don’t want to afford them equal respect and equal opportunity. When Jesus showed up and started suggesting they all should do that, they wanted him to be quiet, so they killed him. Oh, the little girl said, you mean like Martin Luther King Jr.? He ended his story there. There was really nothing left to add.

Sam Harris has a thought experiment that actually plays out every time a new person is born and goes through the experience of something like this. The experiment is to imagine that you wake up tomorrow and you and everyone else can remember how to do your jobs and the basics of survival, but you’ve lost all cultural memory. There are books on your shelf, but you don’t understand their significance or how one relates to the others. You know you live in a country, but you don’t know why there are boundaries or why we need police. At what point in our attempts to rediscover our own past would we prioritize a story about people in a desert and voices they heard and their choice of clothing or food? How would we choose from all the other stories about beings that we can’t see and can’t find anywhere except in these books? Would we believe in their promises and expect results from the actions they tell us to take?

My answer to those questions is probably obvious, so I don’t need to explain myself further. I wonder how someone who feels compelled to bring the message of Jesus to every remote culture would answer that. An Inuit Eskimo was once given an introduction to Christianity and afterwards he clarified that now that he knew of Jesus, he had to either choose to believe in him, or suffer an eternity in hell. He was also told that if he had never heard of Jesus, he wouldn’t have this problem. So he rather angrily asked why then did they tell him about Jesus at all.

Most of us don’t live at these extremes, but most of the people reading this probably grew up in a culture that had some version of Santa. Even those who didn’t include that story in their traditions saw Santa at every store and at some corner ringing a bell and suffered the music along with the rest of us. I’m noticing this year more than ever, people talking about a meaning of Christmas that transcends the trappings. The “war on Christmas” has become cliché and it seems most agree about over commercialization. The problems of the crazy uncle in the family are juxtaposed with the happiness of being with family.

I even read an article where old Scrooge was defended. Poor guy, everybody keeps using his name as if it means being cranky and unloving, even though, in the end, he becomes “better than his word” and helps the little boy heal and keeps Christmas in his heart throughout the year.

Christmas Lectionary, Year C
Christmas Lectionary, Year A
Christmas Lectionary, Year B

Atheism for the Religious and/or Spiritual 3

To understand this search for who we are and how what we think of ethics and morals has evolved, it helps to look back to the time when religion still dominated. If you go back too far it gets impossible to know just what people were thinking, not that it’s possible to know what anyone is thinking at any given moment even in the present, but at least we start to find more articulate writing sometime around the 12^th century. To get to those early Humanists, I’ll first tell what I think is the fascinating story of how Western ideas traveled east then returned over the course of a millennium.

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The 4^th to the 14^th centuries

As Rome fell, Plato and Aristotle fell out of favor. And when you fall out of favor in a warring ancient empire, it’s a lot worse than having your facebook account revoked. Anything written that contradicted an emperor could be burned, sometimes along with its author. Much of their works were taken east to Istanbul, which became Constantinople, the center of the Byzantine Empire. This was a Christian empire so they weren’t too interested in what the writings said, but they kept them. Language was also changing so even if someone wanted to read them they would need special training.

When the walls of Constantinople were finally breached by the Muslims, the writings were passed on to that Empire. They didn’t do much with them either, other than create copies and translate them into Arabic. Four hundred years later Ibn Rushd (also known as Averroes), schooled in law, theology, medicine, physics and more was commissioned to figure out just what those men were trying to say. He had to do this while maintaining his position in a theocracy. That is, he tried to balance the godless world of reason with his employers who were working to spread the word of Allah throughout that same world.

By this time, the Muslim Empire had reached its peak and was beginning to fall apart because it’s just plain difficult to maintain an empire that size and they continued to choose emperors based on the inheritance of kings instead of any merits of those kings. Also, the theologian Al-Ghazali had become popular with his Revival of the Religious Sciences, saying they needed to get back to their spiritual roots. He sparred with Averroes, writing Incoherence of the Philosophers and Averroes responding with Incoherence of the Incoherence. Averroes spent much of his last years in prison, so you can see how that went. In the next century, the Mongols sacked Baghdad and the Muslim Empire has never recovered. Fortunately, they survived long enough to ally with European Christian armies and prevent the spread of the Mongols further west. Not only did we never send them a thank you note, we took the works of Averroes and other translations and philosophy and made it our own.

With the works of the Greeks now reunited, it fell on the likes of the Christian Thomas Aquinas and the Jewish scholar Maimonides to take another stab at unifying the ancient with the modern. The 13^th century version of "modern" anyway. Teaching of Aristotle’s works was already under the watchful eye of the religious leaders. They were fine with logic and biology but wary of the metaphysics, psychology and anything touching on values. Professors had to stop teaching these subjects at the University of Paris or move to Oxford or Toulouse. These debates continued on to 1277 when a somewhat hastily thrown together list of Condemnations was published.

The idea of churches controlling what universities teach seems ridiculous today, so this is often seen as a horrible period of suppression of knowledge. It is also seen as the beginning of science since the result of the Condemnations was to divide the areas of the study of religious matters, like who or what ultimately controls the universe or what is or isn’t a miracle from areas allowed to be studied methodically like the motion of objects in space or the workings of living creatures. There was also dogmatic adherence to Aristotle and these bans forced the professors to develop proofs of his ideas. There is no one point of the beginning of science. Applications of scientific principles can be found in pre-Christian Rome and throughout the Muslim Empire as well as India, China and the Americas; however 1277 was a turning point in human history. At least Aquinas got sainthood not long after he died, which meant the Condemnations pertaining to him had to be adjusted. The world was changing quickly from then on.

Early Humanism

Not much was going on in the development of philosophy for that thousand years, but then voices like Erasmus began to emerge. His training was in the priesthood because that’s pretty much what you did if you wanted an education, you studied the Bible, in Latin. Hardly anyone spoke it, but it was the language of the Vulgate Bible, the one that was assembled in 382.  It remained The Bible until scholars tried to reconcile it to the original Greek and began to question the meaning of words, verses and whole books. This scholarly work grew out of the Renaissance and it has direct parallels to the work being done today to rescue Christianity from the hands of the Fundamentalists. With his reinterpreted version of the New Testament, Desiderius Erasmus hoped to restore and rebuild the Christian religion. He did not care for the 4^th century theology of St. Augustine preferring that of the earlier Origen of Alexandria who only garnered the title of Church Father, not sainthood.

Augustine wrote extensively on what horrible creatures we are and how we can be nothing but sinners due to our fall from grace in the Garden of Eden. Wikipedia summarizes his text titled On the wretchedness of the human condition thus; The text is divided into three parts; in the first part the wretchedness of the human body and the various hardships one has to bear throughout life are described; the second lists man's futile ambitions, i.e. affluence, pleasure and esteem, and the third deals with the decay of the human corpse, the anguish of the damned in hell and the Day of Judgment. Origen and then Erasmus did not see it that way. Reading critiques of Christianity today, you would never know this debate ever occurred. You would most likely be familiar with Pope Innocent III who launched one of the crusades. Innocent was a fan of Augustine. But most likely you have not heard of the response to it On the Dignity and Excellence of Man by the early humanist and Christian writer Giannozzo Manetti.

Manetti and others developed the principles of Christian humanism; every person is sacred and autonomous, we are participants in our salvation, not passive actors waiting for the end times, and religious pluralism. Pluralism was also being expressed by Sufi writers at the time like Ibn al-Arabi who said god is not limited by any one creed. With all of these men, a connection to their traditions was still maintained. Al-Arabi famously said, “So for wherever you turn, there is Allah.” He may have seen the divine in every face, but the divine was the god he grew up with. He did not relinquish his faith. Since their ability to get published was highly dependent on maintaining a faith statement, they may have hid their private thoughts.

An art historian who believes he has uncovered some evidence of this dynamic between artist and patron is Antonio Forcellino. While cleaning a sculpture made by Michelangelo he found a flaw and theorized that in the middle of making the piece, it had been changed. His theories about Michelangelo might be wrong, but they are interesting to consider. In 1505 Michelangelo was commissioned by Julius II to paint the Sistine Chapel. In 1513 Julius dies. Michelangelo has been paid to sculpt statues for his tomb but this is a time of contention among Catholic leaders and they pull him into other work. His work continues to be pulled in two directions by Popes and Cardinals.

They are also vying with each other to either split off the newly forming Protestants or work on reform within. Some of them, including Cardinal Reginald Pole, start a society called the Spirituali. Michelangelo is known to have attended some of their meetings. They eventually had to start meeting in secret when Pope John Paul III established an official Congregation of the Inquisition. When Michelangelo finally completes the tomb of Julius II it appears he may have included symbolism indicating his leanings toward that group, rather than the Church that was actually paying him. He included a torch, which could be a symbol of the power to enlighten and the Protestant belief that works alone can’t bring you to Christ, and Moses is looking to the left, not at the altar where the church leader is but instead searching for the light and contact with God. When Michelangelo died, his body was whisked away by his Spirituali friends and many of his papers went with it, so we may never really know

Philosophy of Erasmus

I used the book God’s Philosophers as a source. This link is to a negative review, but it links to rebuttals right at the top. I wanted to provide more than one perspective on this book. 
Randall Poole Alsworth lecture on humanism 

Comparing Romans to later philosophers 

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Atheism for the Religious and/or Spiritual 2

If this [the Mysterium cosmographicum] is published, others will perhaps make discoveries I might have reserved for myself. But we are all ephemeral creatures (and none more so than I). I have, therefore, for the Glory of God, who wants to be recognized from the book of Nature, that these things may be published as quickly as possible. The more others build on my work the happier I shall be.

— Johannes Kepler (1595)

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I am goingto get into the problems of 4th century Christianity and other dark periods, but first I want to talk about the problems of the Enlightenment. These are less often discussed. I don’t mean that the Enlightenment was a problem or that it is at the root of “our” problems today, but there were aspects of it left incomplete and some of its reasoning was misused. We have not corrected for these errors and we can’t if we remain unaware of them.

To be clear, I think this was one of the most significant phases of human development. From the time of the Buddha and Socrates until into the 15^th century if a person who had absorbed all the knowledge of their day could time travel throughout those centuries and sit down for a discussion about the universe and how it works, they would be able to understand each other. Barriers of language aside. By the end of the 16^th century so much had changed that parents would have trouble conversing with their children. Anyone who didn’t have a cell phone when they were a child knows this feeling.

Douglas Adams calls these the first two ages of sand. We took sand and molded it into lenses and looked out at the stars and realized they weren’t what we thought they were. We looked closer at everything with microscopes and began to deconstruct how things were made. We applied first principles and built on what we could demonstrate to be true. These concepts had been incubating since the dawn of human tribes but now they were seen not just as tools but as a philosophy. This new philosophy said we could experiment with everything around us and learn from it. We could read the book of nature. The concepts and discoveries from people like Newton led to the third age of sand, the silicon chip. Formulas developed at that time were used to put us on the moon and theorize how the universe began.

But I’m getting lost in the arc of progress and wonders of science and that is perhaps one of the mistakes I said I was going to talk about. There was an overwhelming faith in the ideas coming out of the Enlightenment. I’ll leave the philosophical discussions of what is good or bad about scientific progress for now and look at the problems created by this shift to rational thinking.

Rationality was not invented 500 years ago. Even if you are trying to figure out if your neighbor is a witch, you will use a certain degree of investigative thinking. Once you accept that there are witches, and come up with some basic ideas about what they are, the process of working out the logic is very much like that used in a laboratory. If the experiment you devise involves dunking in water, because witches float, this could work out bad for the person being tested, so when we talk about rationality today, we mean a much larger context, one that involves not just a single test, but proven techniques, repeated trials, and the ethics of the test as well. But still, the idea of performing an experiment was always there.

This era that led us away from burning witches and produced so much of what we now considered the modern world, also has an end. The effect of it never ended, but the movements and the people who can be said to be part of it, ended. As Martin Luther King Jr. said, “the arc of history bends toward justice”, but it is an arc, not a straight line. What began as a reaction to a bloody 30 years of war (1618 to 1648) ended with more war and more conquering by people like Napoleon. One of the last, perhaps the last, philosopher of this age was MarieJean-Antoine-Nicolas Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet.

Condorcet was a contemporary of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. His philosophies, like the “general will” were the inspiration for revolutions against despotic rulers with slogans like “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity”. A century before the abolition of slavery in the United States, Condorcet founded the Society of the Friends of the Blacks. But these ideas, no matter how noble, still had detractors and they required enforcement. Other men, like Robespierre did not have the patience for them to permeate into the world peacefully. The king was replaced by the assembly and anyone who deviated from what the assembly determined was the general will would be subject to its force.

This new idea of laws coming from nature was an early Enlightenment idea put forth by the likes of Francis Bacon. He felt that our destiny was in our hands and if we deny that dream we will return to barbarism. But perhaps we didn’t spend enough time understanding our nature before some decided to start enforcing its laws. In his final work Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, Condorcet applied to ethics and morality the idea that there are laws of physics that are consistent throughout time and space and that principle can extend to how we operate in the world. But even as he wrote this, the dream seemed to be dying.

Robspierre and the Jacobins were in the process of arresting some 300,000 and killing nearly 17,000, eventually this included Condorcet. These numbers sound terrible and they are in fact called The Reign of Terror, but as with all such state sponsored terrorism, they were justified by the political climate. France was surrounded by monarchies and they were prepared to join forces and restore Louis XVI. To preserve the newly formed country, they needed to ensure the loyalty of all of its citizens. A prime focus of this was religious authority and its ties to the aristocracy. While America was forming around states founded by religious groups seeking a place to practice their faith freely, France was stripping power from the Church and killing priests. Religious ideas that many Americans say their country was founded upon were considered barriers to the new government of France.

People who have faith in gods or spirits or anything non-material will criticize proponents of scientific methods by saying they put their faith in reason. The above brief look at the history of the movement toward science and reason demonstrates there is some validity to that sentiment. Much more could be said about the advancements in our ability to feed and heal the ills of human race, and that again could be countered by the ills that have been wrought by our own hands. This is the conversation in which we are currently stuck. The work of science is not likely to stop any time soon. The answers it provides lead to more questions and they provide the impetus to keep looking for answers. Faith is not likely to disappear any time soon. The answers it provides often resonate with us in a way we can’t necessarily articulate and scientific explanations for those feelings are not coming quickly.

Religion spends a lot of time addressing the big questions of meaning. Books like The Purpose Driven Life have been wildly successful while books by 17^th century philosophers continue to collect dust. This could be more a matter of public relations rather than actual content. People say they get something from going to church, people who read philosophy might also say so but not in a way that is terribly inspirational. Philosophers of course have something to offer in that market, but they also have detractors and they argue amongst themselves. Comparing and contrasting philosophers is part of how you do philosophy. Some people shop for a church, but most go on the advice of someone close to them, and once they find one they are comfortable with, they don’t keep comparing.

Enlightenment philosophy and the movements that came with it took power away from the church. This had the appearance of taking away a moral anchor for society. Friedrich Nietzsche said, “God is dead”. He on went to say that it was we who killed him and to note that there was a great danger to this. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra he portrays a man who seeks only his own comfort, unaware of what he has been given by previous generations. Men like that are subject to those who understand and use their will-to-power. Interpretations of these characters are endless, but there is definitely a shift to seeking human will rather than the will of any gods. Eventually, these philosophies came to be blamed for everything from slavery to Nazis.

Without going off into a long history lesson, slavery was not invented by Columbus or plantation owners in the Southern United States. It may have been one of the longest running and most brutal forms of institutionalized human trafficking, but the idea of people owning people was around before written language. The oldest decipherable writing of significant length is the Hammurabi code, a code of laws that includes slavery. Empires conquered smaller tribes and brutal dictators reigned back in Biblical Times. Separating this warring nature of ours from our higher aspirations is one of the promises of the Enlightenment that has been left unfulfilled.

The modern world can be blamed in part for these ills. Certainly it has provided new and improved tools for warfare. Strong militaries have always included protecting trade as part of their mission. The Golden Triangle of tobacco and sugar to Europe, manufactured goods to Africa, and slaves to America is no exception. But there are no simpler idyllic times to return to. The Romans had the Pax Romana. Pax means peace, but what it meant was criminals who interfered with trade along their roads were strung up to set an example for others who might consider anything similar. Many examples can be found in between. Any culture carries with it the baggage of our baser instincts, making it difficult to sell its ideology as more progressive than any other.

This list of problems with the Enlightenment is not exhaustive, but I’ll end with the bogeyman; postmodernism. Whatever you think about religion and its ability to deliver on a meaning for life, it’s hard to argue its ability to claim that it is doing just that. The early Enlightenment thinkers made similar claims, but then didn’t deliver. Philosophers today might be coming together around something called Moral Realism but of course it has its detractors and it mostly suffers from a century of more esoteric moral arguments that led to ideas about nothing having any meaning. And morality isn’t necessarily a reason for being anyway. As the world has shrunk, cultures have come into constant contact and although you could say it is progress that we are living next to each other without killing each other, we are also having trouble figuring what strange behaviors we should accept in our neighbors and what we should consider just plain wrong.

It didn’t help that around this time Einstein came up with his theory of the physical world and the phrase, “it’s all relative” became popular. His theory involves travel at very high speeds and calculations that only come into play if you are trying to land a probe on Mars, but no matter. In the past, the realization that Muslims were enslaving Christians was used as an argument for why Christians should not be enslaving Africans. Either owning another person is wrong or it is not. Now, a justification based on a tradition can be dismissed because it is a tradition in a certain part of the world. It might be wrong to discriminate against women and not educate them according to people who live in the Midwestern United States but it is okay in Afghanistan because it has always been that way. This is not a way of determining what is ethical that can be traced to any particular Enlightenment thinker or writing, but many consider it an effect of that movement.

I can’t summarize the centuries that it took to develop this strange way of thinking, but it probably has something to do with the sudden unmooring of that anchor of morality, the Catholic Church. Once that curtain was pulled back, and the arbiter of all that is good in the world was accused of perpetrating evil, it could not be covered up again. Once the constant fighting stopped, when we realized one religion was not going to win out over the others without killing us all in the process, we had to figure out how we could live together. We’re still working on that.

Douglas Adams Speech at Biota, Cambridge UK, 1998

Commentary on a mention of philosophy in Collosians

Witch, A Tale of Terror

Consilience, EO Wilson

MelissaChen at Mythcon #4 "Enlightenment Values and Why We Need to Safeguard Them"

Atheism for the Religious and/or Spiritual

Milepost 100

I have been working through the 3 year Lectionary cycle of the Christian Bible. People ask me why, given that I don’t believe in the Christian God. It’s not a simple answer. It lies somewhere in the people and ideas I discovered along the way. They don’t fit neatly in a box.

"Mystery generates wonder, and wonder generates awe. The gasp can terrify or the gasp can emancipate. As I allow myself to experience cosmic and quantum Mystery, I join the saints and the visionaries in their experience of what they called the Divine,..."

Goodenough, Ursula. The Sacred Depths of Nature. 

The God Box

In William R. Herzog II’s book Jesus, Justice and the Reign of God, he summarizes Robert Funk’s and Robert Miller’s work, Finding the Historical Jesus: Rules of Evidence, saying, “The Gospel writers ‘invent narrative context’, provide interpretive overlays, soften hard sayings, ‘attribute their own sayings to Jesus’ and translate Jesus’ words into ‘Christian’ language.” This was acceptable and expected of writers at the time. Anything you wrote was expected to be your perspective on it, not unbiased reporting of what someone else said.  This is especially true in the genre of storytelling. The teller adds their unique voice.

For Herzog, this doesn’t diminish what the Gospel writers were doing. He wants to understand what they were thinking by understanding how they developed their narratives. He isn’t attempting to make a case for or against the existence of a man named Jesus, although occasionally in his books he will make a comment about words having come from such a man. His main goal though is to determine what the words were attempting to teach.

Thomas Sheehan, in his lectures on the Historical Jesus (available on iTunes University), puts this search in a slightly differently light. He says the Old Testament legends are “read into” Paul. Paul’s writings came before the writing of the gospels, despite their order as they appear in the Bible. Paul's words are then “read into” the gospels. Looked at this way, you see their influence and how the story of a man became the story of a god. How the Kingdom of God Became Christianity

He begins his lecture series by saying you might be challenged to rethink Jesus. It’s not his intention, but it is a possible consequence of the study. He uses the name Yeshua ben Josef, because he is starting the history at a different point than the New Testament. He, as well Herzog and most scholars agree that the Gospels alone do not provide a consistent picture of a historical figure. Yeshua, or whomever it was that inspired the Gospels, cannot be accessed through the lens of the Jesus that has been handed down through the centuries.

Much of the effort to reconstruct how this was handed down to us was conducted by well meaning and devout Christians and Jews. This deconstruction and reconstruction has not thwarted the efforts to maintain the relationship between the God of the Bible and humankind. Some young people, called to ministry, don’t survive the education they receive at seminary. Once they learn how the Bible was assembled and the church came to be, the magic is gone. This could explain why those details are not heard from the pulpit. Religious education for the congregations might be offered on a Wednesday evening, but those are not well attended. Perhaps people just aren’t interested and would rather keep the mystery just as it is.

Some can bridge the gap between the literary and the historical. Eugene Peterson, who created The Message Bible, offers us a way to approach this academic exercise of attempting to understand what these ancient authors were trying to tell us. In his interview with Krista Tippet on NPR’s On Being, he talks of metaphor. “A metaphor is really a remarkable kind of formation because it both means what it says and what it doesn’t say. Those two things come together, and it creates an imagination which is active. You’re not trying to figure things out; you’re trying to enter into what’s there.” As a metaphor for metaphor, he refers to the hoop one uses for embroidery. The fabric is us, loose and unfinished, so it is stretched by the hoop then you can work with it, create the needlepoint art. He offers people poetry like the Psalms or sometimes Dickens and says, “just let your mind stretch around it, and see what happens.”

It’s important to note that you don’t leave the fabric in the hoop. At some point you move to a different part of the piece and hopefully you actually finish it and put it to good use. Peterson also said “People ask, ‘How do you mature a spiritual life?’” And he responds that you should eliminate the word “spiritual.” “It’s your life that’s being matured. It’s not part of your life.” The idea is not to get lost in these words, but to move with them and bring them into your life.

For others, the investigation into what’s factually true as opposed to what’s factually false but holds some metaphorical meaning that can be understood leads to a path that can no longer be called religious. Ryan Bell, a pastor who became increasingly liberal in his teaching until he was told he could no longer keep his position as a pastor, took this investigation about as far as it can go. As he put it, he kept learning new ideas, like the forgeries and mistranslations in the Bible or the science and psychology of LGBTQIA+ people and the limitations of inclusiveness that he found in his traditions, even in the words of Jesus. He applied the gospels to teachings of peace and justice and found he sometimes had to skip parts when preaching about them. He kept trying to fit all of this into his “God box”. He knew the ideas were right and he felt Christian teachings should include them, but what he had been taught did not always comport to what he was learning. The God box had to expand with each new thing. One day he realized the box was as big as all of his understanding of the world, and he no longer needed the box.

You might land anywhere along this spectrum. I make no claims here. The overwhelming number of people throughout history who say they have found inspiration in the Bible is not an argument I care to take on publicly. I can only report what I found and hope to engage a few people and listen to their perspectives. My own investigations have taken me through many books on philosophy and history and how they fit in with The Enlightenment and The Dark Ages and that elusive first century. I have almost as many questions as I did when I started. I don’t need to repeat that history, but I’ll connect a few dots, hopefully correctly.

More importantly, I hope to expand your definition of “atheist”, just as pastors and lay people I have met over the last few decades have expanded my definition of “theist”. I’m not sure if this quote is attributed to anyone in particular, but I think it came from Buddhism, “There are as many religions as there are people.” You don’t need to join the church to enjoy a hymn and you don’t need to leave it to be inspired by the exploration of the stars.

So with no particular goal in mind, I’ll start the conversation with a Psalm. You may find “stretching” yourself around a Psalm is perfectly comfortable and is a place you want to return to again and again. If you’re like me, you may it find it hard to see what all the fuss is about. Psalms are frequently drenched in allegory. With “saving horns” and “Cherubs” and “bulls of Bashan” and words that defy translation I wonder what they are talking about. Are they just pleas for mercy and justice, or something more? But sometimes, as in Psalm 40, I can feel the poetic tension pulling toward something we aspire to while knowing we will inevitably fall back. Year A, Week 2

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