Definitely a Crackup

I recently listened to a discussion with Coleman Hughes and Douglas Murray on Coleman’s podcast. At times I had trouble figuring out what world they live in. These are not small players and they covered many major talking points, so if someone can explain this to me, maybe I’ll find out what I’m missing. The title is “The Intersectional Crackup with Douglas Murray“, but intersectionality is far from the only topic. 

If you aren’t familiar with the term “Intersectional”, it covers the interconnected nature of the categorizations that people fall into. As we began to address centuries old oppression, we addressed them separately, such as women’s issues or rights for people of African descent. Intersectionality recognizes the dynamics when a person is a member of more than one of those groups. It sounds simple when you look at the definition but it gets convoluted when people want to make it so, like in this podcast. 

The podcast starts with a commercial, so you can skip that. 

Hughes seems to head into an important discussion about leading a meaningful life at about 4 minutes in but he keeps the discussion to how difficult that is in a world of identity politics. He says the current culture has taken on a “religious” like form. From then on he focuses on how not to build a sense of self. 

Murray’s first answer to Coleman’s opening question is to agree about the religion shaped hole in society. You can trace this back to Nietzsche, who famously said “God is Dead” and less famously said, “and we killed him”. He (Nietzsche) then went on to speculate what people will use to fill the missing answers and moral judgments provided by religion. Murray says the “intersectionalists” use guilt, atonement and heresy, just as religions have. He does not see a discussion about purpose. He denigrates youth on both the left and right. The conservatives don’t have a “how”. The Left does, but he rambles about some sort of “abdication” by adults that I don’t get. 

He says he could give his views on how people found meaning in the past, but then he is vague. He says “literature” without naming much. He says this is a failure of atheists. I have seen him interact with atheists, so I can’t figure out why he doesn’t see them doing this. It was the atheist thinkers and writers, past and present where I did find meaning and purpose. The only purpose I can glean from religion is “read the scriptures, pray, and if you don’t find purpose, you did it wrong.” Anything specific, anything meaningful, can be found in a non-religious source from writers contemporary to those sources. The non-religious ones are usually not only better, but they don’t require you to memorize any names of prophets or their movements. You just need to work through the ideas. 

Around this time in the podcast, 10 minutes or so, both of them have started using the term

https://www.facebook.com/WeStayWoke/

“woke culture”. This is the latest term that began with a positive meaning but is used in a derogatory manner. I understand why to some extent. Some people are actually aware and paying attention, thus “woke”, and some are pretending to care about the issues of the day but are really not well informed. Hughes and Murray are going after the latter group. 

Coleman then says something I couldn’t be sure I heard correctly it was so strange. He said, “If you are Right Wing, you can’t be unapologetically Christian”. I think he’s saying Right Wing Christians feel they have to hold back on expressing their religion because it is associated with oppression of the past. In the podcast, or any of the other times I’ve heard these two speak, I have not heard any awareness of a liberal version of Christianity. It is a wing of Christianity that has been growing for decades, with roots that go back to the 13th century and early Christian humanists. 

Hughes however grew up with what seems to be a narrow-minded sect of liberals that saw themselves as a rebel force, as he says, a ‘resistance’, ala Star Wars. Instead of finding the many more nuanced messages and movements in the country, he has become ‘anti’ to whatever that was. 

After the 13 minute mark, Murray pushes this even farther, saying these recent Left ideologies are not based on intellect. Occasionally, he does hit on something worthwhile. He notes that when a group of any kind presents a prepackaged system, it can gain followers, but there is a downside. He cites the Catholic Church and how Ireland, once a Catholic stronghold has lately been divorcing itself from that. I would say something simplistic, like Murray just hasn’t found a Liberal group that he likes, but that’s his job, to seek out and evaluate groups. So something else is going on here. 

Hughes makes a similar worthwhile statement, then messes it up. He says he is not comfortable with the idea of “my country, right or wrong”, but then ponders why all those brown people are coming here. He figures if they are coming here, we must be doing something right, and apparently doesn’t figure much beyond that. It does not occur to either one of them that they are coming here for the promises in our Constitution. They come here for the education system we subsidize, the business assistance, the protection of rights, the things they don’t have in their country. The things Liberal politicians vote for and fight for. 

Instead, at about 21 minutes, they launch into how amazed they are that we still get excited when another barrier is broken, like a black woman becoming Vice President. Hughes says Obama broke the final barrier and that should have “changed the model”. I’m not sure what that means, but he does not give the slightest nod to what happened to the culture during the Obama years.  

Another good point from Murray is that young people, or anyone else, should not “hack into history”, looking for something wrong. Instead we should try to “reconcile” who we are to that past. But he sets up a straw man to knock down. He says people then ask him, “what about injustice”. He accepts there are struggles but dismisses them, giving no examples of one that was fought and won. He does not make a case for why it’s time to put discussions of racism, inequity, or misogyny to rest. He alludes to “rivers of thought” that we should attempt to navigate, but never says what those are. And I’ll repeat that this is not the first or only Douglas Murray I’ve listened to.

At 27 minutes, he makes a comment that he doesn’t want there to be “types” of books or studies, there shouldn’t be “women’s books” for example. He backs this up by citing Bayard Rustin, a strategist for Martin Luther King Jr who was against the rise of Black Studies in Universities. It seemed like segregation, just what the White people wanted. He jokes at something he apparently has heard, that people say there are no gay writers in the canon. 

I don’t know who Murray is talking about because he rarely gives quotes or names. Of course

Getty images

there are gay people who wrote books, ancient to current, because there were always gay people. The problem is, many of them hid it, or if they didn’t, the next generation erased it. It’s harder to erase history now, it is not “written by the winners” as it once was.  This is an unusual time, when people of all stripes are gaining positions of power, crossing borders easily, working across cultural barriers. The only thing I can make of this is Hughes and Murray don’t want that. They play on the fact that they are each members of a category that has experienced disadvantages, Hughes is black, Murray is gay. They take their own example and claim that it proves these problems are behind us. They see none of the history of changes in norms, they never compare our time to any empire of the past that came close to the level of inclusivity we are experiencing. I can only speculate, but my guess is they see a zero sum game, and they are on the winning the side, so they want change to stop to reduce the risk of losing what they have.

 

It gets worse but the details are just a different flavor of the same theme. At 36 minutes, Murray calls the Left’s ideas “simple”, saying it’s easy to understand and the Left makes it more complex. The man has a platform as big as just about anyone, but I can’t find this simple message he says he knows. 

I’ll give Murray credit for one more item, on the topic of cancel culture. If you’ve seen it, you know what I mean. It’s when someone who has found fame, position, and hopefully even has said something worth saying but, then says something off the mark. Some group, large enough to get an audience, amplifies that mistake and calls for resignation or demotion or some other form of cancelling. This puts a damper on anyone who is even thinking about speaking up. It takes our open forums where ideas are incubated and encouraged and turns them into echo chambers where everyone fears offending the next fringe group. Murray speculates that this behavior might bring down the “woke” system. I think it might already be happening. 

After that he has a couple doozies. The one that tops them all was “we don’t need people to come along and pretend to us that we are things we’re not.” It’s at 52 minutes and 45 seconds. I agree that there are people who call themselves Liberal but don’t bring with it all of the liberal values that go with that label. They bring a set of standards that may not match the values and ideas that got us to the current enlightened era we are enjoying. We should all be vigilant of that. I don’t know how Murray misses that people in history who “pretend to us that we are things we’re not”, are the same types of people he is speaking against. Back in time, they were priests and princes and town constables and local sheriffs. Now they are bloggers and influencers and talk show radio hosts. 

What’s missing is, we have to base our decisions to “call out” problems on the values that built our free and open society. “Calling out” is not the problem, it’s what you call out. We can discuss the “how”, but don’t let that bury the “what”. 

Deb Haaland. Secretary of Interior Nominee

These two might be tired of people identifying themselves with a traditionally oppressed group. For myself, I am far from tired of hearing about barriers being broken. A Native American in the position of Interior Secretary for instance, is quite meaningful and worth noting. But these guys, now that it’s not just straight white guys getting everything, want to say, “oh yeah, that’s what we all wanted the whole time, see it’s fine, don’t say anything about it now and it will all go away forever”. They are getting paid by the system as it is, and they aren’t interested in why they are despite their intersectionality. Easier to denigrate anyone who does question it or blame them if they have not received their piece of the pie. 

What I’m hearing here is that they feel very much the same way that large groups of people have felt in the past. Blacks felt marginalized, and in the South with voter suppression and everywhere with housing red lining, they were. Women were harassed at work and it was portrayed in sitcoms as a joke. I understand that men like this are not treated as special as men were just a generation ago, and that probably feels like they have lost something. But the people they are talking about are not asking to be treated specially, just equally.

I’d like to cover just one more term, “identity politics”. The way Hughes and Coleman are using it here, they are pointing to the people that claim that say you have to be a member of a certain group to understand that group’s plight. They are complaining about people that are asking for something extra based purely on their membership in some group, identified by skin color, sexual orientation, or similar traits. I agree with this for the most part. It should be that equality is just that, equal. I think human beings are capable of empathizing with others and understanding the needs of others, without actually experiencing all possible circumstances. 

Hughes and Coleman aren’t limiting their solutions to just this narrow issue however. They are expanding it to claim that no policy should consider any type of identifying characteristics. When evaluating history, they ignore the basis of nations, wars, religions, hiring practices, and budgeting that was the norm until the middle of the last century. There were no black senators. Women could not get high paying jobs or leadership positions. Girls did not have sports programs. These facts matter. People who are born in a system that gives them privileges will rarely change the rules to reduce the privileges. Change requires legislation that identifies those traits that were used to identify those who were barred from those privileges in the past. 

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

Jesus didn't say that

A response to a response, from the Counter Apologist.

http://counterapologist.blogspot.com/2018/08/atheism-is-preferable-to-christianity.html

There are few ways to go with this. CA’s original statements stands well on its. Also, in any current form of religions I know, there is no preferable universalism that I know of. My problem with Randal is, he doesn’t go far enough with interpreting hell out of Christianity. I think that can be done, although it strips Christianity down to its Jewish roots, even into some type of Reformed Judaism, so it probably is not a popular route. My problem with the Counter Apologist is the use of assuming beliefs by the gospel writers when it’s convenient while claiming we don’t know what they meant most of the time. I think this hinders the very reforms we want to see in religion.

Starting with the reforms; I don’t think it’s a stretch to say the arc of the Biblical narrative is that history has a goal, that there is some inherent reason for our existence, and it’s something good, and we need to discover our part in making it happen. This is the MLK thesis on justice and even if you take the atheist view of meaning created by the individual, it is compatible with a goal oriented form of utilitarianism as a theory for morality. To have this discussion across cultures, we need to be reasonable and accept that neither modern philosophers nor the Bible have a clear sense of what “justice” and “good” are. Modern philosophy accepts that, practically as a premise. The Bible has its moments, like Job arguing with God, but for the most part modern day practitioners of Abrahamic religion believe a supernatural force is the source of “good” and don’t care if they can’t prove it with scripture.

The above point is somewhat proven in the way Randal backtracks on his own religion when confronted with a rather straightforward problem like eternal or long lasting punishment. So let’s look at how CA supports the argument.

If atheists want to make the point that the Christian version of hell is wrong, I don’t think they need to stray deep into what the Bible says hell is. The Bible is not clear on that, that’s clear. Atheists don’t need to quote Jesus to prove Jesus was saying something. This degrades their own arguments since they begin with the understanding that the gospels are a poor reflection of any actual Jesus. This is the consensus of scholars, including religious scholars, but it seems to get forgotten when atheists start looking for proof texts. We are always quoting unknown authors and worse we might be quoting many authors in the course of just one passage.

For example, “torments” and “flame” in Luke 16 might be an allegory of justice for the rich man who neglected to care for the poor man at his gate. The thrust of the parable up to that point is about upending the power structure, and rewarding goodness for goodness sake instead of rewarding the powerful just because they do their rituals. This passage looks like a Greek version of hell getting tacked on to an earlier tale. Whether that was for better marketing of the book or because that belief was creeping into Jewish culture is debatable and barely relevant to a debate on the reality of hell.

What I think is important here is to recognize the opening Randal gives us. Christian scholars are quick to say things like Hellenism had crept into and corrupted Judaism at the time the gospels were being written, but they are slow to say exactly how. Christian scholars probably won’t lead those discussions because they suspect or fear they will result in less believers. This is exactly why atheists should be pushing in that direction.  Two passages from Revelation were included in CA’s list. Maybe Randal is open to eliminating Revelations from the canon. It has been debated since it was first proposed and is not in some Bibles. If it is an inaccurate depiction of hell that is incompatible with 1^st century teaching, then let’s settle that and then move on to the next misinterpretation, redaction or mistranslation.

This might sound daunting, but I don’t think every line of scripture will need to be addressed before Christian culture begins to change. This approach to the Bible has been happening for a long time and has altered many denominations and led to reforms like women and gays being accepted. Atheists would do well to understand it.

Work for Peace

This is a continuation from last week.

Quitting religion for me was somewhat like quitting smoking, I did it several times. I probably could have gone on having positive moments with that community and just accumulating the good memories, but I kept thinking something about it wasn’t good for me. I could have focused on observing people going to church around me and then acting in the world in positive ways. In a slightly different world, that could have been enough to allay the doubts and just dismiss them as the normal human condition of not knowing the answers to the ultimate questions.

Church is very good at handling these doubts. They love to bring the lost sheep back into the fold. They have a wide of variety of books and techniques to deal with loss and pain. Not quite as well advertised, they are also willing to cut you loose if you don’t respond the way you are supposed to. I’ve heard more than a few stories of kids getting kicked out of Sunday School for asking too many questions. Adults need to figure it out for themselves and for some it can be quite painful. Some people leave behind their whole system of community support when they leave a church.

I was lucky. I was able to observe all of this safely and find an alternate community just by asking around. It took effort and time, but it was something I could afford to do. Some people are isolated and only have one version of religion presented to them. You can be isolated even in a densely populated urban environment, especially when you are young and still need the support of the people who raised you.

If you find yourself in that situation, the only advice I have is that of Charles Eastman’s father. Eastman, also known as Ohiyesa, was a Lakota, born in 1858 when the US government was forcing his tribe to relinquish their ancestral knowledge. His father, who had almost been killed as part of the largest mass hanging in US history, told him to not fight it, to learn as much as he could about the ways of the people who had conquered them. Eastman became a doctor and wrote about Sioux ethnohistory and even got invited to the White House as a sort of ambassador to the tribes.

Anyway, that wasn’t my experience, but in 2009, a book came out, 50 Voices of Disbelief. It told stories of people who had experienced that isolation and indoctrination. Many of them had gut wrenching experiences making the transition from their isolated worlds to the real one. Those stories really hit me and were difficult to not think about. I’ve since talked to many people who were raised in what we might consider a normal Middle American fashion that included religion and didn’t find the transition quite so hard.  They were given resources like a college education and understood they had choices, even if those choices caused a little disappointment with their parents.

I think we dismiss these stories a little too easy. There is a spectrum. There are certainly abusive churches out there and I don’t have a problem focusing on them, but I have heard the same fundamentalist half-truths and apologetics in the most liberal of churches. In one of my Bible study classes, back when I was still Christian, someone came to class having just read an article about the Leviticus 21 passage about slavery. She was concerned that the Bible clearly supported slavery. The pastor smoothed it over by talking about how slavery then was more like indentured servitude from a few centuries ago. We didn’t open the Bible and examine the verses in question or address the problem at all. She didn’t even get a chance to talk about them, so at the time I didn’t know the verse I just linked. I just filed the concern in the back of my head as a minor problem. Years later I had to have Matt Dillahunty, an atheist podcaster, shove those verses in my face before I understood my mis-education. 

I’m sure that pastor was just repeating what he’d been told. He probably avoided looking at those passages and that is exactly what he wanted us to. Any similar or more direct questions I have asked of religious people of all calibers since have been met with similar dismissal or, my favorite, “that’s not our church”. The story of the pastor above is someone I care about very much. I have other stories of churches that I have and still consider wonderful communities that are doing great things. That’s how I tell these stories. The entire point of the stories is that they are doing great things, and, and, they can’t reconcile that with the fundamental founding documents of their organization. But it doesn’t matter how well I paint those communities, when I tell the part about the slavery apologetics, or the kid who had to be excused from Sunday School, the response is, “that’s not our church”.

They might even have some evidence. They might say they learned from the pulpit that the book of Timothy was not really written by Paul and the anti-feminist stuff in there does not apply. They might just consider it obvious that slavery is bad and not understand why they even need to address it. If I point out that good Christians of the not too distant past supported slavery and patriarchy they still say it’s not them, that it’s in the past. When I point to Christians today not accepting homosexuality, they are at a bit of a loss for words.

What’s missing in these aborted attempts at a conversation is that these changes in morality were not guided by or sourced from any religious authority. It may have been Christians who led the abolitionist movement but they had to draw on secular philosophy and modern data to make their case. If people claim “their church” is modern and open to new data, it is data that is coming from outside the teachings of 1st century Judaism. For that matter, the gospels include the teachings from people outside of 1st century Judaism. This is the one of the paradoxes of modern religion. To be modern you acknowledge that change has happened throughout the history of the church, but when I try to get one religious person to address a particular needed change today, suddenly they don’t act so modern.

People who try to tell me that their church is different and wouldn’t act the way I describe people in my experience are, most likely, not asking the questions I asked or reading the books I’ve read or accumulating the doubts like I did. To remain in a church, or possibly any organization, you have to allow for some parts of it that you don’t like. It’s a matter of degree of how much is tolerable and explainable. For example, I have on occasion considered leaving my country due to some of its policies and actions, but overall, I like it here and prefer to follow the advice of Carl Schurz, an immigrant who fought in the civil war. In 1872 he said, “My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.”

There is no particular wrong that caused me to leave church. It was the inability of it to address what was wrong. Religion is uniquely designed to avoid change. It holds up the ideal at the highest levels of decision making that if you sit quietly in a darkened room with your eyes closed and just ask for answers, they will come to you. Change comes through claims of revelation and requires that you connect your revelation to an earlier figure in the tradition, an earlier figure that might not have even existed. This is the opposite of using reason and evidence and observation and worse, the opposite of listening to the voices of those around you.

Being frustrated with an organization you are member of, or your country or your family or anything in between is not that unusual. We all settle on family having done the best they could, well, most of us, I realize some families are really messed up. We accept that we get something for the taxes we pay and we hope that next time we’ll have better candidates to vote for. No matter what, we look for underlying principles of fairness and some sort of logical progression from biological needs of love and support up to the day to day fulfillment of those desires. The Bible fails at that. Sure, Jesus said to “love thy neighbor as thyself”, but a lot of traditions said that before. And that was his second commandment, the first was to “love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all they soul and with all they mind.” That part is not very well explained and has some serious problems.

Humanize Me

Two former pastors talk about how to reach understandings with people who are different from us.

If you are unfamiliar with Bart or uninterested in his whole story, you can skip to about minute 15 for the part I’m highlighting here. The movie he is talking about is about him and his dad and their religious differences. Bart left his dad’s ministry work and became an atheist. He was a Humanist Chaplain at USC up until recently and is interviewing Ryan Bell who just took over that job. Ryan is also a former pastor. 

The story Bart wants to tell is how people seeing the movie were not so interested in the reasons for choosing or not choosing religion, rather they enjoyed how a father and son worked to understand each other and discussed their shared values. He maps this on to the work they both do with young people.

In the secular groups they work with, people with different foundations come together and they aren’t interested in taking away their foundations, instead they want to know how that foundation generates their values. He lists three layers; the values, then the worldviews that generates them, then the reasons you adopt that worldview. The lowest of these is the reasons. It’s the least interesting and we often aren’t aware of why we believe what we believe, yet we spend a lot of time there.

Ryan points out it’s interesting to explore the reasons if you have the time and interest in philosophy and psychology, but that’s not essential to living a good a life. “You don’t need a master’s degree in philosophy to be a good person, thankfully, otherwise we’d all be a bunch of jerks.”

For many people, beliefs and identity are wrapped up, hard to separate.If you question why they believe something, they react as if you are attacking them, as if you are attacking who they see themselves as. This comes up when a value comes up, like how we treat children or should teens have sex or who should own what kind of gun.If instead of asking how they came to hold that opinion or why they hold it, ask, “how does your belief generate your value?” Like, what does Christianity make you want to do? Or, how does belief in some principle inform your political decisions? People can talk about that. They want to say how their beliefs function, not their validity or some logical explanation for them.

As Ryan says, we want people to explain their reasons when we are critical of their beliefs or actions. But when someone criticizes us, we find it hard to separate the reasons from our identity.

It may not be satisfying to hear their story, and by definition, not logical, but it’s more likely you will find common ground with the values. When we meet someone we don’t know much about we find more success if we don’t go looking for foundational differences. We talk about kids and grand-kids and how we want to see them grow up healthy with an honest view of the world and to be able to explore choices and to apply their talents to maintaining and improving an open society so they can pass it along to another generation. You will eventually bump into those differences and some people can’t get past them, but this approach Bart and Ryan discussed seems more likely to lead to continued relationships with a wider range of people.

Ryan sums it up by thinking about his goal for life, how he will look back and judge himself. His goal isn’t to get people to have his same philosophical underpinnings. He’s not going to judge his accomplishments based on getting 87 people to adopt his beliefs. But he will think about the lives he’s touched and how that expanded into the world. He hopes his being alive will make some small improvement on the overall well-being of others.

My not religious journey

I haven’t done a “spiritual journey” post in a long time, not since I was a church-goer, so it’s about time.

My early years are not that significant, other than to point out that I was not indoctrinated into any particular tradition. My mother left a very religious family when she married my father and my father’s family was more about business than church. My Dad’s brother did get involved with church after he had kids, so most of my church going and church family experiences happened when we visited relatives. I grew up in Mid-West America, so obviously I know about church, but more as an observer.

It was when I was 33 and bought a house that I really started to think about community and church was a natural extension of that. I had some Unitarian and Buddhist friends and a nice young pastor knocked on my door one day and gave me a video tape about the book of Luke. I eventually found a liberal United Methodist church populated by people who had grown up in the 60’s and who were now involved in their inner city neighborhood. We talked about and acted on the social justice aspects of the New Testament.

That was great, until I moved to a small town and found it a lot harder to find that type of community. There were a few people like that but you have to mix with a lot of other personalities if you want to have any kind of social life when there are so few people. This is really more typical of how churches work. Sermons have to appeal to range of politics and personalities. It was happening in my church in the city, but I just didn’t notice it as much since I was in the majority. Now it was very clear, they preach to what the people want to hear.

The church I found was so small, there was no children’s program, until one day a couple kids showed up, and something came over me and I volunteered to be the Sunday School teacher. It turned out to be quite a challenge to find a curriculum that wasn’t all about preparing little souls for the afterlife. 10 year old boys are also the best for asking the tough questions of why they need to go to church. This led me to the internet where I thought I might find some good arguments for the existence of God but instead I found these YouTubes of what began as a cable call-in TV show in Austin TX, The Austin Atheist experience. In my attempt to formulate an argument to call in, I talked myself out of belief.

There were other things going on. I was considering becoming a lay speaker and I found that the education they wanted me to have for that was very different than what those old hippies at the inner city church were talking about. I was also discovering liberal former Bishops like John Shebly Spong and reading their books. And there was this movie Zeitgeist. It had a strange logic against religion that I couldn’t quite refute, so I had to develop my own ability to research and think critically to decide if it was valid or not. In that process, I realized that movie was wrong, but the Christian narrative was also seriously flawed. All my bad reasoning dominoes fell.

So now I found myself in an almost alien world. I needed to figure out how it got that way and where I fit in. I had always lived a little less than a straight and narrow existence, but now I’d let go of the moral system I’d been living with for 17 years. I knew science and the philosophical enlightenment had led to the democratic system I lived in but I knew that system had some major problems. Studying the history of how those things came about has turned out to be much more valuable than reading the Bible and listening to sermons.

Also interesting though is how the two worlds of science and religion have evolved together. I never had the simple anti-evolution thinking of the fundamentalist, but when I started hanging out with atheists, I wasn’t too comfortable with the simplistic notions that Christianity was a barrier to science either. Questions like, why do people still believe in supernatural powers, are much more interesting than simple answers like, religion is all about power. Narrow minded thinking does not require religion. I felt that instead of shutting ourselves off from each other, we need to be asking how to promote open dialog and encourage the generation of new ideas.

So that brings me up to where we are now. I’ve learned from people like Bart Ehrmann that the seminaries are teaching the accurate history of the Bible; that it was written by men, often for political reasons, and it was compiled by fairly random decisions made by just a few people. Also, it is full of misinterpretations, some by accident and some deliberately inserted centuries after the original texts; in other words outright forgeries. Meanwhile, at those seminaries, they are teaching how to preach as if the ancient narratives are still true. There are some updated variations, but basically the same ideas.

You can find some of this out you go to the mid-week adult Bible studies but most of it I’ve learned from non-believers or Jewish if scholars or retired theologians. The sad thing, and believers and non-believers are both missing out on this; the real stories are much more interesting. The Bible is a rare collection of historical documents written by the slaves instead of the masters. How they dealt with being conquered and oppressed as well as their own internal struggles provides us with insight into us.

That pastors aren’t preaching this is all pretty well known if you just pull the curtain back slightly. Pastors I’ve known have tried to keep me at their church by agreeing with me and handing me books but then telling me that the rest of the church was not ready for it. What the rest of the church thinks is a lot harder to tell. They can’t have an opinion on what they don’t know, and I can’t make them read and listen to everything I do. It’s hard enough to get them to read along with the Lectionary on Sunday morning. You can find people who left their parent’s church for a more modern alternative, but they still enjoy the same hymns about the blood of Christ.

Still, I believe a lot of people sitting in pews are closer to what you would call a humanist than they are to being a Christian. They are there because they want to spend at least a couple hours a week talking about something that matters, something that might contribute to a better world. Most of them aren’t keeping track of the questions they have like I did and pursuing them when they can, rather they are having their doubts then just letting them go. Some will probably have the experience that Ryan Bell describes, of trying to fit his modern view of the world into the box he had created for God, until the box had expanded so much that he realized it was his whole view of the world and he didn’t need to call it God anymore.

Meanwhile, I’ll be looking for ways to bring the history and insights to light and hopefully keep some of them moving in that direction.

Discipleship plan

I recently happened upon a plan for discipleship from the United Methodist church in the US. It perfectly demonstrates a big problem with church in the US today. I’m not talking about the bad arguments for god or fundamentalist handbooks telling you to watch out for your children turning gay. I’m talking about churches that want to be active in their communities, working for peace and justice and helping people who need food, shelter and clothing. The kind of things we want non-profit community organizations to be doing. The kind of things that reflect universal human values.

You may already know where things like this go. You could skip to the end. I try to bridge the gap between humanist values and expressions of faith like this. But if you’re not familiar with what goes on in church planning meetings, read on.

The workbook attempted to help leaders find new members and new ways to motivate the congregation to do good things. Like most workbooks of this nature, it wasted a lot of words, but that’s not what was really wrong with it. The problem was, when it finally got to saying what the underlying motivation should be, it didn’t say anything. It addressed this as a potential problem then solved it with Bible verses. It said you can’t just tell people “because god said so”, then it said, “because god said so”. Like this:

 Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.  (Matthew 28 NIV)

This is known as The Great Commission. Not really a difficult choice for a passage in a pamphlet about mission statements. And, just to be sure you know the leadership is on board, he cuts and pastes from the 2016 Book of Discipline (the book the Methodists vote on to restate their theology in modern terms) "The mission of the UMC is: To make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world."

He focuses here was on the word “go”, saying “Methodists are a going church”. There is some tradition to that, some historical evidence. There are Methodist hospitals. There are community support groups. Their international aid arm functions more like a non-profit than a missionary group. They do actually help people build infrastructure and become self-supported. They were chosen by the Gates Foundation for one of the largest secular/church collaborations ever.So, I’m not saying they don’t do things, but I think it has more to do with them having the resources, not some magic that has roots in the 1st century.

He suggests the “Why, How, What” approach. I was first introduced to this by my sales training from Apple computers. You’re supposed to start with the “why”, but he goes straight to “what”. A couple pages later, he shows the outward growing circle from Simon Sinek’s book “Start with Why”. You would be better off just reading that book.

I can see why he thought this workbook needed to be made. He sees the problem. He shows the numbers. 80% of the people who are Methodists were born into a family of Methodists and raised in the church. It’s hard to get members any other way. The early church offered something new and once it had established a base it helped that a person could travel from Jerusalem to Rome and find that community. But what the church offers can be found in so many other ways now, that is no longer an advantage.

He continues with quotes, this time from the founder of the denomination, John Wesley. It is from his sermon “The Scripture Way of Salvation” that is just as vacuous, but it is responded to by the pamphlet writer as if it is the way the truth the light. I’ll spare you that one.

I can see how he gets the problem he is up against. After a half page about children asking “why” and parent’s responding “because”, he says, “So why is it that when we ask, Why do we make disciples? we often respond, Because Jesus said so? … ultimately it is not a good “why.” But this is exactly what he has been doing, giving you “not good whys”. When he gets to suggestions for how to write your own mission statement, he comes up with an example like this, “A disciple is one who knows Christ, is growing in Christ, serving Christ, and sharing Christ.”

What I can’t tell by reading it is; what did the author of this think? As he was compiling it, I can see how he was motivated. He knows what experiences he has had, but it can be a challenge to translate that motivation into a workbook. At some point, he needed to find Bible verses that describe the feelings of joy in fellowship that he experienced and express them in a way that inspires others. I can relate, because I tried to do that.

When I did, I found there just wasn’t anything there, unless I believed it was there. The feelings I had of community were more due to the people I was in relationship with than my relationship with a text or a worldwide organization or with a holy spirit. This is why you will often hear people talk of their local church when they are defending the idea of church. You might begin by asking them what motivates them, and asking if they believe in what the Pope says or whomever their leaders are. When they realize they are not completely in line with their own denomination’s theology, they will switch to saying that you need to come to their church and experience their community, and then you will see. That’s fine. I understand the sentiment, but it’s true of any organization that is accomplishing anything worthwhile. You don’t need a god to get that.

When I look at things like this, I often wonder what doubts are arising in the people writing it. Are they, as I once did, realizing that it is a struggle to find just what Jesus was talking about? Are they even further along, seeing that he was talking about blood sacrifices and ultimate battles of good vs evil that have not survived modern rational thought and scientific inquiry? Or, do they believe that if 3 wise men followed a star to a virgin birth, then there must be something to all this and it’s not for them to question?

Do they at least believe that a man who spoke of peace, and then acted peacefully, even when given the death penalty, actually caused a significant shift in the history of the world? Do they believe the thoughts of this one man are more important than the few people who wrote them down as well as the thoughts of everyone who has read them and thought about them and built on them and expanded on them and interpreted them? Do they believe that the changes in theology over the ages are explained by God slowly revealing his truth, or is it us discovering the truths of nature and adjusting theology to fit them?

In a sense, the answers to these questions don’t matter, because we can arrive at the same place without answering them. We can all agree that we should educate our children in the history of thought and culture as well as the amazing details of how things work. We all need food and air and water and there is just this one planet where we can get those. We can be in constant battle over those resources or figure out how to cooperate and make them available to more of us. You can address all those questions with universal ideas like “love your neighbor” and a maybe a few more technical details.

In another sense, the answer to whether or not Jesus caused anything matters very much. It changes our focus. If Jesus can affect our lives directly, we should know that. If the fate of our eternal soul is in jeopardy, we should know that. If not, it’s a distraction. It might be a good inspiring story that helps us remember to reach out and touch the sick and bring them into the community, but reading those same stories over and over again takes time away from doing the work.

If, to get people motivated to work with us, we need to frighten them with hell or convince them there is something unseen that has consequences, or promise there are supernatural forces available to them, then maybe the problem is with the work we are asking them to do, not the motivation for doing it. If the work is good, but they are not inspired by the child who’s teeth are straightened or eyes are corrected or who learns a trade and goes on to help another village somewhere, then maybe we need to help them understand how helping others helps all of us.

After 30 pages, he finally gets to a list of actual things to do. Most of them are lifted straight from Matthew 25; feed the hungry, visit the sick. He also lists “works of Piety”, like public worship and fasting and reading God’s word. Brief phrases like this are all the Bible has to offer as far as I can tell.

There isn’t a passage that spells it out in simple terms, but I think the message from the early gospels is that we only have each other. It is a story of people who want to get rid of the temple culture that required constant sacrifices. They were written at a time when leadership was partnering with the ones who had conquered them and were oppressing them. In Mark 2:23-28 Jesus says the Sabbath is made for man, and in Romans 13:8-10 Paul says the new law is the law of love. That’s inspiration enough for me.

Behold, I bring you tidings of great joy

We all know the verse that Linus recites at the climax of Peanuts Christmas. Charlie Brown is questioning what Christmas is all about. Linus ends his reading with “Peace on earth and goodwill toward men.” That’s great, and by 1965 when that was made, most Christians throughout the world agreed this is the meaning of Christmas. Trouble is, this was written before there was the modern version of Christmas and it originally said, "Peace on earth for those whom God likes." You need to understand a bunch of Greek and Latin to understand that, but simply, you drop one Greek letter and you have to also change the whole subject/object stuff of the sentence and that’s what you get.

I heard this a few times, and it just sort of passed by me. It’s an interesting artifact of history from a time when there were no copy machines. A simple mistake. No real harm done. Except, when you start digging through the various copies throughout history, it was not a mistake at all, it was quite deliberate. This didn’t just happen in the third century and now, with better tools of historiography, we are discovering it. This has been known throughout the history of Christianity by the few people who had control of these books. Just like now, where we have neighbors who are happy to break bread at their ecumenical gatherings and multi-denominational dinners and also fundamentalists who want holy war, there were people who said they wanted peace in the world and others who knew their scripture said only some of them should see that peace. Sometimes it was the same people, saying one thing while knowing the other.

http://ntvmr.uni-muenster.de/manuscript-workspace?docID=20022

The difference between now and then is the balance of power. For the most part, those who truly believe in tolerance and peace are in power. But every day we see signs that it is still a struggle. Mainstream religion may appear to hold these values, but the facts of these discrepancies in our manuscripts raises some questions. If you accept the expert opinion on this, if you accept that people who spend their days pouring over these fragments of paper and studying the ancient languages actually got it right, then why don’t we change the Bibles? That is, correct them to what they originally were. Even if we don’t change the Bibles, why don’t preachers tell us this is only what modern people believe, not the people who first wrote the words. Those were the people who were closest to the events that inspired the words. If we are saying that we should listen to what they say, that their ancient wisdom has value, why shouldn’t we be listening to what they really said?

There are a few ways to go from here. We could believe that peace should be for only a select group. We can believe that something from outside of the physical universe somehow guided these hands and created these words on paper once, then had another hand erase it or misspell it and somehow that series of changes was slowly revealing this truth to us. We can believe that the original authors had some special vision, maybe divinely inspired or maybe just some special set of circumstances that they observed that helped them tap into this wisdom. Or, we can believe we are creatures with the ability to reflect on the past and future, trying to figure out what to make of our existence on this lonely planet. There may be millions of other planets like ours, but the universe is rather large, and we can calculate the odds of contacting one of those other planets, and they aren’t good. We might want to figure out how to get along with just each other for the time being.

To put it simply, we need to say that whoever wrote the gospel according Luke, was wrong. And when I say “we”, I mean it needs to come from the people who make a living interpreting this book. Those authors were wrong on this account, and they were wrong about some of the other things they said. We have fought wars based on religion. That includes Christians fighting over the meaning of words like these. We have had Kings anointed by gods and we have died for them. We have believed that the world could unite under one set of laws, inspired by some spirit, and experience a thousand years of joy. We were wrong.

We have found that allowing for borders and respecting the sovereignty of others is a way to deal with our differences. We found we have universal values despite theological differences and tried to create international laws, and sometimes we even got it right. Sometimes, nations put aside their differences to keep one nation from getting out of control and imposing its will on weaker people. It’s rarely pretty, but we muddle towards a world where we talk more than fight.

Instead of looking to something that was said hundreds or thousands of years ago, we look to what can be demonstrated by our senses. We extend our senses with tools created by an understanding of basic principles that have been tested over and over again. We know the sun has come up every day regardless of what sacrifices were made, so we don’t make ritual sacrifices anymore. We know the earth compressed the organic material from millions of years ago to give us fuel to light our universities so people can work late into the night curing what was once called a curse. To make that happen, we also know that we need to have some degree of peace with the people who are sitting on a lot of that organic material. The same goes for copper and materials needed to create more sustainable energy infrastructure. What is important is, so far, we just have this one planet.

You can accept what I’m saying or not. You also have the tools to research this yourself. The manuscripts with these words on them have been cataloged, numbered, digitized and are available to you free right now. The 1% of today only have power over us because we don’t do this work. The 1% in the time of Luke had a much easier time of it because they were the only ones who could read at all. The fact that I learned these things is the result of the accumulated knowledge I mentioned above and the cooperation of people across borders. The internet began as a way for scholars to share their work. It has become a way to avoid the lines during the Christmas rush. How it will be used tomorrow is our choice.

People Suck

I came across this meme the other day while looking for something else. It's from a local Lutheran church. It's a nice church. I have friends there. They do good things. I don't know who put this up or how many of them would just agree to it without thinking. Hopefully not too many.

I couldn't confirm the exact quote, but it does paraphrase a work by Augustine, The Confessions. Augustine was born after Christianity was made legal by Constantine and contributed greatly to the work of trying to figure out what St. Paul meant and what the gospels were trying to say. Things like the Trinity were still being hotly debated at the time. Unfortunately, the people who won the debates were from some of the worst, most extreme forms of Christianity. The ones we would today call The Fundamentalists.

They wouldn't have called themselves fundamentalists, because they had not yet decided on what the fundamentals were. Today we define fundamentalists by those who call the Bible the literal word of God and consider Jesus to have been a real person, the son of God, who actually died and bodily resurrected . Back then, they were still debating which writings belonged in the Bible and if Jesus was a man, fully human and fully God, a spirit, a man who was born then possessed by the holy spirit, or what. The difference then was, people on all sides of those debates had some degree of power and influence. Today, suggesting that Jesus was not a physical human, walking around and talking to people, will get you laughed at in most circles, even outside of church.

So, why am I bringing this up? Sure, it's from 16 centuries ago. But here it is on a modern "wall". It's posted by a church that was founded by a guy who protested against a church that was corrupt. The Catholic Church claims to have it's roots in communities founded by all those writers from the first few centuries that Augustine was debating about. Those communities were protesting the corruption in the Roman Jewish community in their time. Churches today will often claim that they are challenging the world order, that they are uncovering the corruption of power, that they are symbolically turning over the tables of the money lenders in the Temple. And sometimes they do. But they also will tell you that you are not good.

Whatever other traditions churches might have, the legacy of them telling you that you are not good enough for God has endured throughout all of them. When you do that, when you convince people that there is something they don't know, and they need to keep coming back to you to figure out what it is, you can get them to do anything. In the case of the late 4th century Christians, they got people to burn the scripture they didn't like, tear down the churches that didn't teach the right brand of Jesus, and to do the same to people who sat in the wrong place and read the wrong books or said the wrong things.

This is not some alternate history. It is well known. It is the beginning of what came to be known as "The Dark Ages". I'm not blaming the Christians for this. The Romans started their own downfall when they kicked out Aristotle and gave power back to corrupt rulers instead of promoting democracy. Something would have replaced that, and we could have done worse, but we could have done a lot better.

After about a thousand years, we did start doing better. Instead of reading interpretations to people, we taught them to read. We didn't treat people like slaves, we encouraged each other to work for each other. We found out genius and inspiration was everywhere if you just gave it room to grow. Seems pretty obvious now, but it was a struggle to get where we are. People like Susan B Anthohy, Rosa Parks, Ghandi, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali continue that struggle today.

All of them fought using reason. They read, understood and developed philosophy that valued human dignity and human feelings. They didn't try to figure out some logic that explained why a God who claimed to be ultimately good could allow for evil in the world. They acknowledged that there is good and evil and they tried to find ways to deal with it. They didn't provide simple answers. They asked for the right to ask the question. They claimed the right to participate. If someone claimed authority by referring to someone from the 4th century who said they weren't good enough, that they could never measure up to some ultimate authority, they questioned that authority. It's the basis for the world of freedom we have today.

Keep what's good from religion if you can find it, but get rid of stuff like this.

How many partners do you need?

When I ask people what we should do when we disagree, most people say we should go find people who do agree with us and work with them. At best they might make some sort nod to inclusivity. This worked fine for most of human history, but then we found out that what we do affects people on the other side of the planet. What we wear and what we eat can cause suffering for children on other continents. What we don’t do can result in death and disease just down the road from us. Even if we want to be selfish, ignoring that suffering will eventually result in problems for us and our loved ones.

There are answers to the question. We have rules of order for running meetings. We have neighborhood groups and community organizations. We have Constitutions and International Law. We have the Rule of Christ if you prefer, Matthew 18:15-20. But very few people know how these systems work and even fewer actually use them or use them wisely. All of them are designed to regulate common decency; take turns speaking, respond to what was said before starting a new topic, when consensus doesn’t exist take a vote, seek facts, agree on how to determine truth then stick to that agreement. Drawing a boundary and keeping some people outside of it is the last resort.

I left the 3^rd largest denomination of Christians because they couldn’t agree on how to deal with the issue of homosexuality. The United States moved on and I realized my church was no longer a leader on one of the most important issues of our time. But I didn’t blame all Christians. I blamed half of the people in my church and I blamed the poor system of decision making they all inherited. But I still acknowledge and support those who are fighting that fight from the inside of what I consider a flawed organization.

That’s around 6 million people I consider allies, not enemies. I’m sure I have many differences with many of them. But they have a voice that gets heard in tiny villages all across Africa where they still have the death penalty for loving someone in the wrong way. They have ways and means of building community that I don’t. My facebook post congratulating my friend and his husband doesn’t have that kind of impact.

I just picked this one issue. If you think this post is about advocating for LGBTQ or whatever initials I forgot, you missed the point. Pick your issue; GMOs, Afghanistan, vaccines, big government, big organic, sending food to Kenya, choice, life, free speech, then think about who you can’t talk to because you disagree on those issues. Then pick an issue like breathable air or drinkable water or creating communities where children can grow and discover their place in the world. How many partners do you need to make that happen?

Palm Sunday, 2019

This one won't come around for three years, but I really wanted to get it out there. At best, I'm an Easter and Christmas Christian, so I went to church today. It was also a chance to catch up with a couple old friends.

Link to this week's text
Explanation of this series

Isaiah 50:4-9a, Luke 19:28-40

Palm Sunday, Last Sunday of Lent

The most important influence in my theological life has been Roger Lynn. I heard his Easter message in 1993 and it turned my head around on the meaning of the New Testament. In a way, that sermon was just doing what Paul did. He turned the cross, a symbol of torture and oppression, into a symbol of love and forgiveness and community. Roger also brought that message into the modern world and breathed new life into it. In 2016, I visited him in a small church where he is semi-retired and his message was just as powerful. He used the Luke passage from the liturgy of the Palms, and the Isaiah and Philipians passages from the liturgy of the passion.

He started by pointing out something that is easy to do, to see these stories as our memories of the stories handed down to us from Sunday School or TV specials. In those, Palm Sunday is a big parade and celebration and everyone is singing “Hosanna in the highest” as the King arrives. But we read the words in the Bible and it doesn't sound so ostentatious.

This story has palm fronds, and as far as I know, the history of why they were used is sketchy. It also has a donkey, not a great stallion. This symbolizes the opposite of self-aggrandizement. Instead of setting up shop and having others bring people to see his miracles, Jesus sends his disciples out to heal. He's saying we just need to open ourselves up to what we all already know. We don't need a big stick to prove we are powerful.

If we look into the historical context, we know that the people who would have been part of the community that is depicted in this story would have been people with no opportunities, no security about where their next meal was coming from. The people who owned the vineyards were not providing jobs, they were using the banking systems to confiscate more land from those who could barely make it to selling the next bushel. The people in this story are not middle class folks going to an Easter parade, they are protesters, staging a demonstration.

The other thing the TV shows depict is a world where no one has thought of these ideas of working together to build a just and peaceful world. However, in the Isaiah passage for today, we hear about turning the other cheek. The message of the New Testament is not unique in history. This is why it says if people were silenced, the stones themselves would talk. The message is that this is the nature of things.

Roger and I parted company a bit at this point. He differentiated people from stones and eventually led to the conclusion that we “need more Jesus”. That may not mean anything to you, but remember we are looking in to what it means to have stones sing Hosanna. If that can have meaning, then “more Jesus” can too.

We came from minerals and we return to dust, but that is not an end. We are not just our component parts. We are born of love and survive because we are loved. We endure the pain of child birth and the risk of raising children because we don't see ourselves as simply existing. We know there were many who came before us who made this a better place and we want to build on that foundation.

We want this even if we see the reality of pain all around us and see more people bent on destruction than working on creation. Even the feeling of loneliness tells us that we desire others, and from that feeling we infer that others desire us. If all of the beautiful poetry and music that speaks of friendship and togetherness were destroyed, we would still know this. If we were prisoners being beaten to work all day and barely given enough to eat or time to rest, we would still know this. We know that people who have endured such suffering did not give up hope. Some did, but not all.

Children do not intuitively know to hate people with different color skin or different abilities or different clothes or according to how much stuff they own. That has to be taught. Love on the other hand, comes completely naturally.

If you only look at the biology and theories of how we evolved into animals that have the ability to reflect on the past and consider the future, you miss part of the story, whether it is this Biblical story or the story from science. Even if you accept the theory that we are completely lacking free-will, that everything we do is a product of some chemical reaction, that does not lead to the conclusion that you should stop thinking and stop planning. Those chemical reactions are giving you the desires that call you to a brighter future. If you once thought there was some bearded man in the sky out there doing the calling, but now you think not, that doesn't change that the call is still coming in.

If you are someone who looks at all the facts, calculates the risks, and determines it is unlikely you will succeed, but then goes ahead and does it anyway, you have an evolutionary advantage over the one who is stopped by those calculations. Some people call overcoming the odds a miracle. If you understand probability, it's just overcoming the odds, but I kinda like giving it that another name.

According to probabilities, you don't really overcome the odds, it's just that some people make it and some don't. But if we knew exactly why some do and some don't, we wouldn't need probabilities, we would have certainty. Certainty is a good thing to have when you are thinking about jumping off from a high place. When you are a poor person speaking up against a powerful empire, expecting to be heard, we call that crazy, but fortunately, a few keep doing it. If you are living in a free society, where you can speak your mind with minimal consequences, it is because someone did that.

Philippians 2:5-11

In the Philipians passage, Roger said there is a feeling of it being a hymn, and it might have been, but was then incorporated into this letter. He said the Greeks had a sense of words forming from the essence of what was being said like the bouillon of a soup. I'll leave it up to you to look into that.

The feeling of it is included in the above. It draws on the symbolism we all know. That symbolism draws on Old Testament ideas of the messiah and from classic mythologies of dying and rising gods. I think this passage differentiates itself from those simple “corn gods”, the ones who arrived in spring, helped the crops grow, then died in the fall as a symbol of decay to be later reborn again. This is a son of a god that does not exploit his equality with his father god. A humble god who wants the poor to be fed and women to be recognized, who wants to see an end to war.

By the end of the passage, we've switched to him being exalted and bending our knees and confessing his glory, but I wonder how well that translation has held up. I wonder if we have lost the sense of the bouillon those words were simmered in. Certainly, in America, it seems we pay more heed to the one whose name is above every name and have forgotten that part about being a humble servant. People go to church to get to heaven, not to hear about the example set by the one who came from there. Well, some do, fortunately not all.

8 points of Progressive Christianity

This one flew by my virtual desktop the other day. I don't remember whence it came. It sounds nice at first glance, and you know there is a “but” coming after that, don't you? By time you get to the bottom, it sounds like all the good peace and harmony things in one tidy list. They didn't even try to force it to 10 items. Kudos.

I'll start at the bottom, where all those nice things are.

Items 4 through 8 are just basic human dignities. No society can survive for long without them. Even a repressive regime tells people they have these rights. George W Bush said he only choose war because that's what he needed to do to achieve peace. The language may lean toward the “liberal” end of the spectrum, such as “restore the integrity of our Earth”, but even those who claim dominion over the earth will usually say they are stewards.

I'll give a few extra points for item 5, “search for understanding” and valuing questions. Not everybody gets the importance of that. Of course saying that is different than actually responding to a question that challenges your world view in a truly open minded and respectful manner. But I don't need to get into the problems of implementing the list.

Moving up to item 3, atheists are not included. Probably because it implies an end to all of that questioning. You could say that's true, but only for religious questions. Atheists of course continue to ask all the questions that everyone else does, like why are we here, what's right, what's good, and what's for breakfast. I have enjoyed spending time in awe and wonder with people who had no idea I didn't believe in their god. Atheism leaves wonder and openness intact while concluding that enough work has been done on all existing theories of Christianity.

I’m not interested in a church that accepts atheists anyway. I’m interested in a community that accepts everyone for who they are. This doesn’t mean anything goes. It means whatever the community is organizing to do, it’s rules about who can join in are related to reaching that goal. Churches have goals and committees and functions, but if you want in, you have to pledge allegiance to a character in a book. You have to say you believe that things in that story are true. Most people do it without their heart really being in it, but if someone comes along and questions what’s in their heart, the wagons begin circle very quickly.

At least that's how it is for me, maybe they had some other atheists in mind when they left them off, and the item does say “ALL”, so that's nice.

Now I need to jump up to Item #1 because #2 doesn't make sense without it. This list starts with the same old barrier that has been around since the beginning, “believeth in me”. I realize that without that, there's no point in having this be about Christianity, but with it, why call it “progressive”? If you want an open community like you say in #3 that accomplishes the things in 4 through 8, why not just say you are a progressive “org” and then say something about welcoming faith traditions if you want. It would really simplify things.

In Item #2, it's almost apologizing for #1. After saying Jesus is the path to the Sacred and Oneness and Unity, it says that there are other ways to get there too. This one also has implementation problems. Just where can you go for this other wisdom? I went to a church that had a Ojibwa pipe ceremony in the basement once, Sufi dancing now and then on a Saturday night, and read from the Tao Te Ching every Sunday. But that was about it. And that's the most progressive church I've ever heard of. Even Unitarians tend to stick to Western Christian ideas.

The general feel I get from this list is, you’re fine with me choosing any belief system, but heaven forbid I choose a system that isn’t based on beliefs at all. Back when I taught Sunday School, I put a poster up in my class that had 15 different versions of what Christians call “The Golden Rule” from a variety of faith traditions, and Confucius, who made no supernatural claim. I've never seen that poster in any other church. I've seen high ranking religious leaders who were unaware that there were other versions. And something like that is not really much of a stretch. I can't imagine an adult Sunday School bringing Hume to their discussion on ethics or Sam Harris to their discussion of free will.

The question not addressed in this list is, what are you trying to accomplish? Is it the stuff in the second half or is making a statement about being inclusive as in 2 and 3 important, or is it all about Jesus and the Sacred and Oneness? Just what those capitalized words mean is a problem for me. It seems when I ask that question, they lead to the other points, so why not just dump the first 3? It would be much easier to understand if you just said you were a group of people that wanted to save the world. That's enough to set you apart.

The only honest answer, the only reason I can see to why you would start off with a belief statement, is that you think that is of primary importance. Nothing else here explains why that is important, and no church I've ever been to or theology I've ever heard of does anything but make that as an assertion. It is simply stated that Jesus leads to these things and the only way to find out is to try it for yourself. If you don't get it, you're doing it wrong and you're not in the club. I don't see what is so progressive about that.

A Courageous Pastor

I'd like to walk you through another post about one of those liberal pastors that I often write about. This one does not end with me being disappointed about how much like a fundamentalist she is. She takes a step beyond any pastor that I ever met. She is not afraid to let us know what she actually learned in seminary school. She's not afraid to challenge her leaders to move forward with her, even if it threatens her career.

In a letter to those leaders, she says belief in “the existence of a supernatural being whose purposes can be divined...” can lead to violence. There's a little more to it if you read the full article, but even in her more nuanced form, it's pretty strong stuff. She says something, that if I say it, I'm told I focus too much on the negative aspects of religion, and that Christianity has “reformed itself”. She says, “This belief has led to innumerable tragedies throughout the timeline of human history and will continue to do so until it fades from our ravaged memory.”

That's going pretty far, admitting that religion still has work to do to bring itself into a modern world where wars must be justified on grounds other than a difference in theology. Unfortunately this rather obvious statement has to be made by someone who is considered progressive and when she says it, someone calls for her resignation just for saying it. I think Christianity and all religion needs to go a lot further. She goes a little bit further with this statement, “If we maintain that our moral framework is dependent upon that supernatural being, we allow others to make the same claim and must defend their right to do so even if their choices and acts are radically different from our own; we do not hold the right to parcel out divine authority only to those with whom we agree.”

First, in case you don't recognize it, or don't know much about Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens, she is saying, all religions can't be right. Dawkins and Hitchens take this a step further and say, therefore, most likely all of them are wrong. But without going there, we are left with the choice of figuring out which one is right using some sort of method of discernment that we can all agree on, or killing anyone who disagrees. The latter has not worked out too well and the former is now called science. Like it or not, meditation and divine revelation are increasingly unacceptable in government or any institution, except theocracies and churches. When governments or businesses need a question answered, they turn to science.

But put that aside if you must and consider the implications of what she says. She is asking you to consider the consequences of choosing a supernatural explanation. By definition you have no natural explanation for that. You can't prove it, except by personal experience, and you are giving up the need to prove it, it's a choice made on faith. If you can do that, how can you turn around and deny someone else the right to do the same? Obviously you don't deny your fellow parishioners that right, but how do you feel about someone from a different religion, a different denomination, or someone who just doesn't understand Jesus like you do?

Greta simply asks that you extend the same courtesy to all believers that you would to your grandmother. I don't know enough about Greta, but my guess is she is calling for this level of tolerance because she believes it is a request that religious people will consider. I don't know if she sees it as a step toward something else, or as an end in itself. We all know that asking people to not believe at all is very unpopular.

But what is she trying to accomplish? This article was written right after a couple major events of religious violence. We look to the purveyors of reason and peace at those times, but is that the church? The argument is that if we lose the churches, we lose the holders of the rules, the houses of ethics, the ones with the soup kitchens and the shelters. Without them, it's anything goes. This works when the religion is in complete control. People do survive without it as history as shown with religions that have collapsed, but the culture is lost.

But look again at what she's asking. She's asking, let me choose my system of ethics based on nothing but tradition and I will leave you to choose yours based on a completely different tradition. Traditions that are well known to include justifications of violence. She is saying she has the right to choose an institution simply because it exists and has some history of doing some good. Well, Nixon opened negotiations with China and Clinton reduced the deficit, but I have a lot of other reasons for thinking which one of those is the better president. But I'm not arguing with her right to make that choice. I prefer a free world where such choices can be made and I'm willing to live with the consequences of that.

It's a bit ironic here that in her attempt to promote a world of reason, she suggests that anything goes. She ends up allowing for what all religions say about atheism. They say that if you are choosing atheism, you are choosing hedonism. Religions say they have the right set of rules to live by and they have the moral authority to set them. Some go as far as to say it is impossible to base moral rules on anything except their god. Without their god, there can be no basis for morality. Most at least claim a long standing tradition or the authority of many generations who have refined those rules.

We now have better ways of determining rules. We listen to the voices of not just those with land or weapons or those who happened to be born where the ground is more fertile or the animals could be domesticated or whose parents were in positions of power, but to everyone. These new systems still have some of the old problems, but solutions for them are not coming from the old voices.

Oddly enough, although I believe in freedom, I also believe in holding others accountable for their actions, in requiring explanations for actions. I don't accept someone else's moral system with the agreement that they will accept mine. If they are going to share my government, my schools, my health system, I expect some pretty complicated negotiations about just what is agreeable. I'll defend everyone's right to be free, but that doesn't include the right to restrict my freedoms without reason.

In a separate interview, Greta said her church has stopped most of the traditional rituals of a church. They stopped teaching the children the Lord's prayer because the parents said they didn't want them learning that they should believe those things and have to figure out for themselves later if they choose not to. If you have ever thought this, I encourage you to bring it up with your church leadership. If they aren't supportive, ask around, you might find out there are more just like you.

Interestingly enough, around that same time, a different pastor posted a statement that went quite a bit further. Greta even links to him via her blog page. I can't evaluate what this guy is doing, or if I'd join his “belief-less church” without spending some actual time there. But it's starting to sound like something that is truly workable in a tolerant pluralistic world.

He has a podcast, if you're interested in that guy.