You Are Here

You’re in My Light

A blog about my upcoming novel

One of my reasons for wanting to write this book was the story of how religious freedom has evolved in the United States over my lifetime. There are some good sociology books on this topic and plenty of polemics from one side or another as well as those who say they have found a middle way. I hope I’ve avoided any of those types of presentations. Instead, I follow two people who were born in the middle of these changes. 

I don’t ever mention the attack of 9/11 in the book. The Orions arrive on earth in 1999 and that event does not occur in my fictional timeline. Anything before alien arrival is factual, to the best of my ability. The two main characters grow into adulthood in a world where cross cultural relations are improving. The Orions focus on the more basic causes of conflict, like resources scarcity and fair distribution of technology. Cultural divides are in their distant past. Their one continent world developed sustainably and much more peacefully than ours. 

When Dave in his early thirties. His father divorced his mother because she wanted her son to go to church. She wasn’t entirely sure why, but she felt there had to be something that created the universe, and churches seemed to know what that was. He meets Suzanne, whose mother never had a relationship with her father. Her mother disdained organized religion. So she grew up in a community based shunning tradition, unless you call witchcraft and psychic phenomenon a tradition. 

The two personalities that result clash, but they gain respect for each other as they are riding across Indiana. The book begins in the middle of their journey, when they come across a conflict that is playing out with weapons and claims on territory. That conflict, of people with traditional values against a government they don’t feel represents them anymore, reflects the conflict that I see many people going through in this real today, of their values versus the world of powers and economics. Through flashbacks to how Dave and Suzanne ended up in the middle of a cornfield that is in the middle of a battle, we see how the world has ended up in the conflicts we experience now. 

We also see some of my thoughts, which are informed by better thinkers than myself, on how the world could have ended up differently. In the lore of the Orion world, in an early chapter, we find out that one of their early leaders fought to prevent the spread of the idea of land ownership. When they come to this planet, before they build their spaceport, they work with farmers who are barely able to feed themselves. When the spaceports are built, they offer an entire continent on a planet near their home planet. This essentially solves our current dilemma of not having a Planet B. 

As the heroes travel, we see the world as it has developed for 17 years of improvements to agriculture, reduction in population, and opening of borders. Non-motorized traffic is everywhere with some roads repurposed for pedal power only. Work is flexible and requires fewer hours. Families have more time for each other. Manufactured goods are being recycled into the new economy. By focusing on the poorest in the world, want has been reduced, and that has reduced conflicts and increased cooperation. And yet, not everyone is happy. 

With those needs met, the questions of where we came from and why we are here are freely asked. There is no powerful organization that can claim authority by claiming to have those answers. Almost no one feels that they need to give to such organizations to help procure a place for themselves in the afterlife. There is one character who offers religious advice, and her role, her job, includes meeting their physical and medical needs. 

I don’t offer much in the way of answers in this story. I hope reading it opens questions about what you might do if you had more choices and a clearer sense of where you were in the universe.

 The Worst passage in the Bible. Another expanded sermon helper.

Easter Sunday, Year C

I link to an article titled “The Worst passage in the Bible” this week. It’s the Corinthians passage, actually scheduled for Tuesday.  It’s not one of those articles that goes on about evil Christians who want to see people burning in hell. It’s not that kind of bad. It’s bad because it is not seen as bad by perfectly kind and loving people. What’s bad about it is that it sets up a wall between Christianity and anything good that doesn’t validate or might even contradict it. It renders useless any discussion about where we come from or something like morality comes from. As it states a few times, such talk is “foolish”. 

There are other difficulties in leaving or challenging religion, like in-group loyalty, or in more insular environments there are people who will come after you if you try. If this bit of bad logic only existed in Christianity then I think we would have overcome it a few hundred years ago, if not sooner. But like many things in religions, it was not invented by just one of them, it’s something more ingrained in human nature. 

That makes the way out of this bad reasoning a lot harder than people think. Those who are not involved in organized religion think they have the right reasoning, but often they are doing the same thing from the point of view of whatever worldview they have chosen. The problem is explained in the link within the Lectionary helper but I’ll skip to the positive answer first, rather than focusing on that negative. 

Religion can and does contain helpful practices and teachings. It is becoming more popular for mainstream churches to say they “don’t own the franchise” on faith. They are willing to partner with other faiths and with secular organizations to accomplish the goals they believe are in line with their faith. They will also use logic like this passage to explain why they still think it’s important to pick one set of beliefs, one denomination, and stick to it. And this logic prevents any curiosity about where else their ethical teachings might come from or why it is that there is so much cross-over with those other faiths.

The answer to that, I believe, is natural facts. That is, when choosing to put someone’s eye out, turn the other cheek, have an abortion, or enter war with another nation, everyone always relies on facts that can be derived from observing nature. Some experimentation may be needed, and in all cases, certainty is impossible, but deriving our views from our environment is part of being a conscious social creature. We figured out how to get along over millions of years of evolution and what we learned was passed on, with many errors along the way. 

We have some sense of being good. I’m going to have to wave a hand here and acknowledge there are bad people, but it is rare to find someone who can articulate that they know they are bad and that they don’t care. I’m not talking about having too many sweets or not flossing kind of bad, that’s covered in the “many errors” part of how we have passed along these ideas of right and wrong.

I also acknowledge that we can see bad behavior rewarded. Nature itself does not enforce morality. We can’t claim that killing is moral because predator animals do it. We can observe that and see that those creatures are still leading brutal lives, lives that don’t lead to cures for diseases or vacations by the sea. 

That good person that we think we are, is constantly challenged. Our choice of grocery store includes how our food sources and packaging affect people around the world. It can’t be avoided. Even doing nothing, when there is so much need in the world, is a moral choice. We can’t save the world, and sometimes that is a source of stress. Prayer does not always make that go away. 

Even if you believe in God and love your church, you bring some reasoning to it. When challenged to question your beliefs you will start with facts. You might say something about the value of human life. At some point, you will run out of reasons why, and you will rely on some cosmic origin for those values. These are patches for those errors in our understanding of the world. A less charitable anti-theist might call them “crutches”. In any case, they are a way to bridge what we are able to discern with our rational minds with the place we’d like to be, our aspirations for what we envision. 

I see the same phenomenon in Wiccans, or pagans, of some off-the-grid self-made philosophers. Even an average person on the street of an industrialized nation will admit there is work to do. You may have heard the words that capitalism or democracy are “the worst systems, except for all the others”. We are beings that look to the future, reflecting on the past, with barely a plan. 

It’s interesting that this passage comes on Easter Sunday, a day that attempts to reconcile the world to the Old Testament, and to deal with the death of Jesus on Good Friday. After a few hundred years of Jews trying to understand these letters and gospels, the dominant theology said that death had been conquered. I think that was an interpretation of people who had lost their own history. I think Easter is about accepting death and moving forward, not about finding a way around it or conquering it.