Corona Blog

So, I’m a blogger, so I guess I should do this. It’s about change, about lots of changes through history and what that means to us now. I might seem a bit annoyed. If you want to get a teenager to read this, preferably one who doesn’t want to, they might get the proper tone of voice for it.

Everybody is talking about change. Of course we will change. Hasn’t every President run on that platform for the last 50 years? Make America Whatever or Hopey Changey, I don’t care. Throw the bums out. That’s a desire for change. But there is always tension, against the fear. Too much rapid change to greater rights for more people and a move toward socialism resulted in populism, on the left and the right. I have watched the constant battle between the dawning of the Age of Aquarius and the good old traditions since I was born in 1960. Look at what’s happened in the last 100 years since the 1918 flu pandemic. That’s in your parents’ or grandparents’ lifetime if you are older, so hopefully you talked to them. If you are younger, hopefully you know someone in the next generation up. They might have an old recording or at least some pictures.

They went through:
Nuclear weapons
Invention of vaccines
1918 flu
World War I (1914 to 1918)

Despite the pace of change having increased in the recent centuries, we haven’t developed new ways to cope with it. I don’t have much to suggest for that, but for me, getting some perspective on how much has happened, how far we have come in a short time, and how it has always been the people pushing leaders to change. That has helped me understand it.

My Public Education history spent too much on the days before the Revolution in this country, that’s my opinion. I always wanted to get to the World Wars and why those happened.

It was a major change in how the world worked. Before then, we were a world of royal families. Generals road on horses with colorful uniforms and battles lasted for a few days. With the arms buildup of the late 19th century, a result of the industrial revolution, these in-bred idiots who had no idea how to live in a time of electronic communication and world travel, put a match to the powder keg they built. To defend against heavy artillery, they created trench warfare, to breakthrough that they invented tanks, and on and on.

If you don’t want to have a love for history, don’t click here. Dan Carlin has a great ability to tell the story and provide the facts. His “Blueprint for Armaggedon” series is the story of WWI. 

Going back through the 19th century further you had:
The Industrial Revolution, steam engines, mechanics, oil. Horses were no longer the best source of power, but we still use the term “horsepower”.
Darwin published the Origin of Species in 1859.
Michael Faraday, who died in 1867, advanced our understanding of electromagnetism. That’s kind of important to whatever device you are reading this on.

Pause for a moment on this guy. He discovered the mysterious energy floating around that we could use to move things and to communicate across miles. Click to see David Tong giving a lecture in the same hall where Faraday gave his. Tong is talking about the newly understood forces of quantum physics, that we now understand are the fundamental forces behind all things. He’s giving that lecture in the same hall, with the same desk, that Faraday did. It’s like we just figured out stone tools yesterday, and now we all have scalpels in our medicine cabinets. 

While Faraday was alive, we were finally throwing off the last myths about race and changing laws so we could no longer justify slavery. There are still slaves in the world, I know, but most people know that’s wrong now. What will be commonly thought of as wrong by end of your lifetime?

Change takes a little longer in the centuries before that, but let me connect just a few more things. Once the empires that grew out of ancient history started bumping into each other and “discovering” each other, we started accumulating our knowledge, sharing it actually, but not always in a nice way. You might have heard of Thomas Aquinas, who tried to reconcile the Catholic religion with Greek philosophy. He had a little help from the Muslims by the way. Not too long after that, we had Protestant kingdoms, so there was a lot of fighting with the Catholics.

At the end of all that fighting, after the Thirty Years War, 1648, a treaty was signed called the Peace at Westphalia. It took away powers from the Pope and created a new type of nation. That’s what you live in, a Westphalian nation-state. Sure, your way of life is rooted in a Judeo-Christian/Western Civilization/Constitutional Republic/Democracy/melting pot, sure. But the basic structure of our politics has only been around for 400 years, and it was formed under duress, and it’s not working. A bunch of morons from the Middle Ages made it up to get the Pope out their business and we can get the billionaires out of our pockets if we create the next system.

Something else happened once the European Princes and Bishops quit making us kill each other. It was the British Royal Society, founded in 1660 to promote scientific thought and learning. It was the fertile ground where Isaac Newton flourished. Newton created the mathematics that got us to the moon (along with some of those other folks above). Computers were first put to the test during that work. That pretty much brings us up to where we are now.

To have that sort of creative energy, to allow the brilliant people of the day to discover something, you have to first have some degree of peace. You have to have a little extra left over at the end of the day to give to the general welfare, to build some roads, to have some nurses ready to take care of us instead of working overtime to pay off student loans and a mortgage from that house they bought before the bankers destroyed the economy.

What gets left out of historical discussions like this is none of it happens if we don’t care about people that we will never meet; people on the other side of the world and people who are not born yet. If we aren’t keeping the world clean and free from violence and filled with beauty, if we aren’t nurturing the people who grow our food, or who are sitting in a room somewhere coming up with formulas that who knows what they will do, but we can bet they will do something, then none of this happens. Then we slip back into using those stone tools to harm each other and take whatever we can just because we can. None of this happens if we don’t realize we need each other.


A note on the present: We aren’t purposely crashing the economy by shutting it down, just so we can save a few million lives. The economy would have crashed if we didn’t do anything because the hospitals would have been overrun. People would have chosen to quit interacting with others after it was far too late. Services would be much more disrupted because the closures would be random; we wouldn’t be choosing to keep groceries open as opposed to restaurants, we would be choosing from far fewer options.

It would not be some simple math of 2 or 3% more people dead. We would be surrounded by sick people and no one would want to touch them for fear of getting sick themselves. This would multiply the problems. Any normal illness or regular medical attention needed would be almost impossible. We would have new priorities, like disposing of the bodies.

The stock market selloff was recognition by those who understand how their system works, that it is not working, that it is not designed to respond to a problem like this. It is not designed to take care of the people that actually create the wealth that they accumulated. Ironically, it created the problem by changing the environment, putting workers under stress, and prioritizing profits over health. It put messaging over science. They know this, they saw it coming. They didn’t tell us until they cashed out. But cashing out is a strategy of the dying system. I don’t know what the next system will be, but it won’t be the current leaders who create it.

Cold November

Yes, I know it's April and just warming up after a long winter. The title of this post is the title of a movie. Click here for the website. You'll need to keep an eye for screenings, but it will eventually be available for $4.99. Here's my brief review and synopsis. It's advertised as a movie where a young girl gets her first deer, so there are no spoilers.

Got to see this for a one night only showing. And they had the writer/director on Skype for questions. He’s a Minnesotan and used Minnesotan actors to portray stories that grew out his own experience. His hunting skills were passed down from women, which is a bit unusual, so the movie is a mother, grandmother and a couple sisters, one husband, with a third dead sister appearing in a dream sequence. The main character is the 12 year old and her coming of age experience of getting her first deer. Guns obviously appear in the movie, but when the heirloom gun is given to her, there is no ominous music or foreshadowing of trouble.

The tensions of the movie are family issues; a teenage daughter lost, apparently a car accident, although details are not given; the mother needs to work, but the missing men in these lives are not discussed or explained. The 12 year old is dealing with becoming an adult, so you get cute scenes like she says “shit” and the mother says, hey, “you said shit”, so the daughter says, “and so did you”. These are conversations you get to have at the hunting shack. More poignant, we hear about the difficult days when grandma had to poach deer to feed the family. Another story that stays at the shack.

But these aren’t hidden evil, these are normal things that you just aren’t normally talked about in polite company, but you do when you are with family for days in a row, supporting each other in the day to day mundane rituals, and the more significant ritual of getting meat from the land. I asked the director if he was thinking about gun legislation when he made the movie and he said he didn’t want to make an “issue” movie. To him, the appearance of guns and the handling of guns is normal. He talked about how this is something he has to explain when he shows the movie in Los Angeles.

He is going to continue making movies along these lines, about Northern Minnesota culture. I would love to be in a room full of people who have never even been “up north” for a weekend and see their reactions.

Troubled Times

I found out about this the other day while listening to Laura Erickson’s “For the Birds” on the radio. It has nothing to do with birds, but Laura ventures into philosophy now and again. This is what the internet and modern communication is supposed to do. It connects us to the wisdom from 600 years ago and reminds us of what is important to all human life.

Actually, the fear is not of tomorrow but of the day after, and that is its danger — for the fear of death can keep us from living.

The essay was written in 1951 and begins with a reference to a book written as people were awakening from the nightmare of the Black Death and beginning to experience the Renaissance. It talks about what to do in the face of such destruction and relates it to the fear of the time when it was written, nuclear annihilation. In the 14th century, people hid out in abandoned mines. In the 20th century, they cached weapons and fuel and built compounds in the wilderness in Oregon. For some today, they just stay home and don’t engage with the rest of the world. All of these are choosing death while they are still alive.

If you knew you were to die day after tomorrow, what would you do tomorrow? Only one answer has ever been sensible: Just what I would do if I did not know — go to the office, take the children to the park, go on with the job, get married, buy the house, have a baby.

People still respond by hiding and isolating themselves. If anything, we’ve just expanded what we fear. We fear the modern medicine and modern farming that was supposed to fix the problems of disease and starvation. We fear the government that was created in response to unchecked monarchies. We fear we are being lied to by the institutions that are supposed to offer us access to information so we stop trying to figure what is true. We build virtual walls by shutting out the voices of people not like us and by ignoring our neighbors.

This may all seem like a downer, but DeVoto offers an answer, perhaps “the answer”, an answer that is repeated throughout history in stories and poetry.



The link is to Laura’s blog. It expands on the quotes I’ve put here. It further links to the complete article by Bernard DeVoto.

Bart Campolo

Hemat Mehta interviews Bart Campolo 

My search for a preacher who offers real value continues, but I’m getting closer. This one calls himself a secular humanist, but isn’t even comfortable with that label. The label for what I’m looking for probably doesn’t exist yet. His current title is Humanist Chaplain. He talks about rejecting the term atheist in the interview, and I’m fine with that.

It’s also worth mentioning he is a former minister and the son of a famous minister, Tony Campolo who advised President Bill Clinton. All of this is in the interview. If you want to skip that and some other good stuff, fine, but at least go to minute 26. They are talking about the controversy of secular chaplains in the military and Bart slides into a long discussion about dealing with death.

The discussion is very life affirming. Death is one of those things that keeps people in religion. You can get away with all sorts of sin in life, but you better be concerned about your everlasting soul. He quotes Robert Ingersoll extensively and explains how our desire for eternal life arises naturally out of the experience of death. We want just one more conversation with the one we just lost, we hope to see them again.

He goes on to talk about how an eternal life in heaven is really not a very good solution to this problem. The inevitability of death shows us to the preciousness of life. Knowing our time here is short draws us through the weeds between us, seeking a connection. It drives us to share our joys now and to let go of our anger now because we don’t want to waste this time. As Ingersoll says, “Love is a flower that only grows on the edge of a grave.”

It keeps getting better from there. See for yourself. 

Everyday Wisdom

This is probably ill advised, but 3 things crossed my path last month and I'm going to combine them into one blog post. I finished Cheryl Strayed's "Wild", the story of a woman who walked 1,000 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail. I usually don't read books like that, but she grew up near here and I wanted to know about this friend of my friends. Throughout, she acknowledges the greatness of ordinary people she meets and ends with "It was my life - like all lives, mysterious and irrevocable and sacred." Then, I saw a great post by Krista Tippet at OnBeing.org about a woman who was recently killed in Syria. A woman doing perfectly normal work who we now see as a hero. Then finally, Sam Harris talked for a brief 25 minutes and covered everything that needs to be covered about how we should listen to all the voices and not distort them.

Maybe I should let Cheryl tell her own story. Here she is at the end of the book, reflecting on the years since her hike and what the hike meant to her.

“It was all unknown to me then, as I sat on that white bench on the day I finished my hike. Everything except the fact that I didn't have to know. That is was enough to trust that what I'd done was true. To understand its meaning without yet being able to say precisely what it was, like all those lines from The Dream of a Common Language that had run through my nights and days. To believe that I didn't need to reach with my bare hands anymore. To know that seeing the fish beneath the surface of the water was enough. That it was everything. It was my life - like all lives, mysterious and irrevocable and sacred. So very close, so very present, so very belonging to me. How wild it was, to let it be.”

We know about Cheryl because she wrote a book and an already famous movie star bought the rights. Oh, and Oprah liked it. But at the time of her experience of the hike, she was just another one of us, struggling to find her way. Millions of people we won't know are doing that right now. We probably would not have never heard from Kayla Mueller if she had not been kidnapped then killed while volunteering in Syria. We would not have heard her words that are as profound as any saint or mystic. Words she wrote while imprisoned by terrorists.

I have been shown in darkness, light + have learned that even in prison, one can be free. I am grateful. I have come to see that there is good in every situation, sometimes we just have to look for it.”

Krista tells us more about her and also talks of the three Muslims that were killed by a man in Chapel Hill North Carolina, apparently after arguing over a parking space. These three also were destined to do great things. We may have never heard of them, but people in their communities most certainly would have. See Krista's post for more about them.

But instead of them doing their good works, the person we will eventually hear from is the killer. People are speculating now. They looked at the killers Facebook page and found many posts about atheist writers, and have suggested this was a hate crime. By extension, some journalists have sad those atheist writers have blood on their hands. So we are having that conversation instead. Instead of building the world we want, we are arguing about motivations for violence and trying to assign blame.

Sam Harris, someone who is taking some of that blame, sorts it out better than anyone.

It is obvious that some instances of Muslim violence have nothing whatsoever to do with Islam, and I would never dream of assigning blame to the religion of Islam for that behavior. …

What we've built over the past few centuries is a world where we can discuss our beliefs and our aspirations openly. We've built a world where normal everyday people can accomplish amazing things in their spare time. But enough people want to return to a 7^th century world or 1^st century world, that the rest of us have to deal with them. As Sam says,

...there’s nothing about doubting that the universe has a creator, that suggests that violence in certain circumstances is necessary or even acceptable. And all the people who are comparing these murders to Charlie Hebdo – or to ISIS, as insane as that sounds – are really trivializing a kind of violence that threatens to destabilize much of the world.

If you listen to the audio from Sam, he plays the sound of gunfire that came into a meeting in Denmark where people were simply discussing the Charlie Hebdo murders. A woman is speaking about peace and free speech, then several shots are fired, chairs and desks can be heard scuffling across the floor and something like a pipe falling. It's disturbing, and I'm not easily disturbed. It's probably because it is real and it is in the present. Sam follows that with, "is this the world we want?"

Earlier in the talk, he talks of the differences in the types of violence we are seeing today and how we must be able to distinguish them and to speak out against the types that are dangerous. "The thing that very few people seem able to distinguish, and the distinction that Greenwald and Aslan obfuscate at every opportunity, is the difference between criticizing ideas and their results in the world, and hating people as people because they belong to a certain group, or because they have a certain skin color, or because they came from a certain country. There is no connection between those two orientations. The latter is of course bigotry and I would condemn it as harshly as anyone would hope."

We need to be able to criticize bad ideas and to recognize people quietly doing great things and not be afraid that pointing out either of those will somehow upset someone or lead them to violence.

Cheryl ends her book with a vision of hope for everyone, Sam ends his talk with a call to reasonableness, and Krista ends her blog post with an invitation to challenge ourselves. I'll quote her here:

I will look at their faces, and read their words, and ponder the world they are asking me to help them make. I invite you to ponder with me. How can we — and I use this “we” lavishly and presumptuously, challenging myself as much as you — now be present and supportive of all the beautiful lives which have not been extinguished, as a way of honoring those we have lost and found at the same time?

The Elevator Conversation

Hold that 'vator! Hey, I heard you are an atheist. What's up with that? What are you so angry about?

It just means that I live my life on the premise that there are natural laws that are consistent throughout the universe. I could be wrong, but it gives me a lot of peace to view the world that way.

Could you push 6? What makes you so sure? What if there is a hell? A lot of people have believed that for a long time. There is a ton of evidence for God.

Right, I could be wrong, but Christians could be wrong and they should believe in Allah. Or we all could be wrong and we should be sacrificing to Zeus. How do you know? It seems we have a different idea about "evidence". I like to see experiments repeated and verified by more than one person.

That sounds boring.

There are many mysteries in the universe. Science begins with one person having an idea, an inspiration or an insight. They talk about it and find that others have had similar experiences. They keep looking into it, often opening up bigger questions and greater mysteries. If we had all of the answers, we would stop, but we keep exploring. Belief interrupts that process and claims to have an answer, a supernatural cause, "God did it".

Some people say, "God is everything, it is the great mystery", and I'm fine with that as long as you understand you are using "god" as a placeholder for things we don't understand. Just don't get stuck there. When some of that mystery is cleared up, don't argue that it should remain a mystery.

[Elevator stops at third floor. Look at shoes while people get on.]

What about morality? Science tells us nothing about that. Science doesn't create community.

[Sideways glances from the people who just got on]

Maybe. We do know that people need food, shelter and regular rest. We know when things are really bad. Deciding how we feed everyone, how we take care of the sick or what we do with people who want to take more than they give are decisions we need to work on together. I've never seen a concise set of rules that solves all those problems. I have seen technological innovations that could solve them if we wanted to and I've seen belief systems that promote torture, slavery and the death penalty for minor crimes. Show me a system that has consistently held together a moral community and I'll be interested.

Okay, well, my floor is next, I'll have to get back to you on that. But doesn't science say that there was nothing before the Big Bang? Everything has to have a cause doesn't it? Isn't it just an arbitrary choice to say God created everything or that it came from a quantum singularity?

I'll send you a YouTube link about that. That is a great mystery, and I don't understand all the physics behind it, but it still fits with the premise that there are consistent natural laws. The Big Bang started the 13.7 billion years that we experience, that we can see with telescopes. There were natural laws that caused the Big Bang, ones that we are only beginning to understand. It is not arbitrary at all. My search has always been for the real world.

To Pagans and Heretics

"The unexamined life is not worth living."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prayer – Perception of answered prayers.

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

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

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

How do we know what we know?

Ancient Texts – How well do you know them?

Numinous Experiences – What are they?

Ethics – What is their source?

Myth – The value of stories.

Community – The power of relationships.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Part II

Not the end of the world

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

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

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

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

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

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

Even National Geographic felt is necessary to weigh in.

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

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

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

Sacrifice

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

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

Are you familiar with Lindow man?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are you ready for some football?

Rick Reilly ESPN Sports The Oddest Game

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Should Americans Fear Islam?

Link to the television debate on ABC

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Penance

It is the time of Lent, a time when you are supposed to be thinking more about Christ than other times. Or you are thinking about Mardi Gras and green beer, either way. If you manage to make it through this entire blog post, you can call it penance.

I stumbled into two good services this week. The first one was Lutheran. I was there to accept a donation from them for Kids Against Hunger. I sat up front, got my check, and didn’t think that just walking out at that point would have looked very good. The other one was my own church. I went in to work on the computer and there was a Lenten Bible study going on. The pastor said, “welcome, come and have a seat”, I didn’t want to be rude so I pretended like that was really the reason I was there.

The sermon was about the book of Luke, chapter 13. The parable of the fig tree. If you followed the link to the passage, you saw that they add in the title of “Repent or Perish”. It is historically interesting to me that people used to respond to “repent or perish” positively. I still can’t figure out why any modern person would do anything but run away.

The titles in bold in BibleGateway.com are modern additions, brief interpretations you might say. Interpretation of parables is always needed to get from “do it or die” to something more useful, but even in the text itself, there it is, “But unless you repent, you too will all perish”, right out of the mouth of Jesus. In anti-Christian interpretations of parables, I often here this one being pointed out as odd, that Jesus would come into an orchard and suggest cutting down a fig tree because it is not bearing fruit. Has that sound of, get on board with our God, or get out of here.

First that. In parables, don’t always assume that the “master” or “Lord” or in this case the vineyard owner is Jesus. Treat it like any story and look for what characters you can relate to, or who they might be like. Remember they will be analogies for people from 2,000 years ago. That makes it a little more challenging.

So what did the Lutheran pastor do with this? He brought up the horrible words of Pat Robertson about the Haitians making a pact with the devil, and quickly dismissed those words. He then gave a bit of a history lesson. A few people no doubt rested their eyelids, or opened their Blackberries, but I perked up.

Around 100 years ago, morals were loosening, cities were growing and Protestants were examining where they fit in. Specific rules of piety were developed, against gambling and drug use for instance. This was fine for some people, probably kept a few from losing their jobs and homes. The next generation took that on, adopted it and made it their own. Tom Brokaw wrote a book about them titled, “The Greatest Generation”. But the next generation just saw those rules as restrictive, something in the way of their experience of the world. They were not wrong for seeing it that way. That is something that happens with the passing of generations.

What is needed is to re-examine our rules every few generations. Thomas Jefferson proposed that the Constitution expire after 20 years and each new generation be forced through the same process that he did. Fortunately he lost that vote, or you might say his idea died in committee. Anyway, here’s a pastor, a Lutheran pastor, and if you listen to Garrison Keillor, you know what I mean, saying we need to rethink how pious we are. If we don’t, the future of the church is questionable.

How does this relate to “repent or perish”? Well, first, we all die, no gettin round that. The first couple examples are of people who died and were perhaps unprepared. One set by a building falling on them or something (I know of no extra-Biblical evidence of what that tower was or why it fell), and another set that somehow got caught up in some political action and killed by their occupiers, a Roman form of racial profiling. Jesus points to those that are alive, and says they are no better than those who died.

That all came from the pastor, this is my aside; an atheist complaint I often hear is that people will thank God that they lived when natural disaster comes near them. They are thankful that their home was not destroyed when their neighbors’ was, with everyone in it. They somehow skip over that the same God cut short the lives of people right next to them. Conversely, they don’t blame God when something happens to their church building. This passage points out how bad that theology is. One person’s survival says nothing about how God feels about them, or how well they have lived their lives.

Everyone is going to die. The question is, what will the sum of your life be? Are you waiting until later to do something for someone else? Are you hoping that things will get better, and then you will have some time to go visit someone in the hospital? Are you looking at how someone else’s life turned out and thinking, “at least I did better than that.” I don’t like lists of what is right and wrong, that’s why I shy away from politics, but I still think about it generally. That’s the message I get.

The second service was a Bible study, so the discussion was more important than the message, but I want to highlight a little of it. We were looking at 2 Corinthians 5:11. This is Paul speaking, the apostle that spread the word after Christ died and started a bunch of churches all across Rome. He is explaining the basis of Christianity, that Christ died for our sins, reconciling us to God and we have to be “in Christ” to get the benefit of that. If you believe Paul was directly inspired by God to write those words, and they have survived multiple translations to get to you in plain English, and you don’t read the rest of what Paul said then this is pretty clear. To give another translation, the comedian Bill Hicks interpreted the message as, “God loves you, he wants you to come to him, and if you don’t, you will burn in Hell.”

Is there anything else here? Well sure, but I’m already past 1,000 words here and have probably lots a few of you by now. One of the questions our pastor asked was, “How has God reconciled us to Godself through Christ?” There were several good answers, someone said Jesus was an arbitrator, and the pastor agreed that the book of Hebrews has that message. Another said that Jesus came to say that we are free from all the lists of rules, but we need to continue to consider what moral behavior is, and the pastor agreed that the book of Luke says that. Other answers could be related to other books and passages and all were confirmed.

There was no one answer. This can be seen as multiple aspects of one big answer. An answer that can’t be expressed in a few sentences or you could say that the Bible doesn’t tell you that. I kinda like the second one. Considering how many pastors there are that consider it their job to claim to have that answer, and seem to be intent on keeping you confused enough to not be able to figure out that the answer isn’t in scripture, I’m glad I have met a few that come right out and say that it’s not there. It may be in your heart, or you may discover it through some other means, but that is for you to find, not for someone else to tell you.

50 blogs on disbelief - Believing you believe

50 Blogs on Disbelief
My thoughts on the book, 50 Voices of Disbelief, Why We Are Athiests, edited by Russell Blackford and Udo Schuklenk. Written as I read them in no particular order. The page number of the essay is provided at the top of each entry.
p. 41 Adele Mercier “Religious Belief and Self-Deception”

I didn’t particularly enjoy this essay, although it had a few good points. Much of it was spent discussing how we think about our own beliefs. It included a lot of statements like, “knowing that I know” and “believing that one believes”. Interesting if you are interested in epistemology. She does apply all this in ways that make you say “hmm”, for example when she says,

“…whatever they may think or say about what they believe, most people believe that life ends at death”

This is one of those odd things about religion. So much is made about how great the after life is, but no one seems to want to hasten their way there. Suicide could get you to the wrong place, but heroic measures to add a few years to the end of a long and good life just don’t seem to be in tune with an eternity in heaven. Adele spends some time discussing this and gets a bit crass at times, so I’ll skip on.

She compares this idea of believing that you believe to membership in a country club. It is more about social status, not one’s golf game. What matters is that others believe you believe, not what the beliefs are. As she says,

“This is shown by the fact that people spend a lot of more time defending and justifying their right to religion than defining and justifying their purported beliefs.”

Consider also wars with religious roots. However they might be justified or whatever has come out of them, they have always been out of step with the beliefs of the religion they claim to be defending.

I happened to be reading Garrison’s Keillor’s “Homegrown Democrat” at the same time I was reading this essay, and I think Keillor puts this much better:

Everyone has to look in his own heart and ask, “Do I really believe or do I not.” Jews do it in the Fall, Christians in the Spring during Lent. Most people do not believe. They’ve tried to believe and they wish they did and they are sorry they don’t because they like to be around people who do so they come to church and enjoy the music and the décor and the hallowedness of it all, but the faith is not in them. They don’t need to tell me about it, they only need to answer to God on this, and he will understand. If they do not believe, He already knew that. The tragedy is when people who don’t believe are so tortured by their unbelief that they set out to scourge their fellow unbelievers”.

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50 blogs on disbelieft - Strange Bedfellows

50 Blogs on Disbelief
My thoughts on the book, 50 Voices of Disbelief, Why We Are Athiests, edited by Russell Blackford and Udo Schuklenk. Written as I read them in no particular order. The page number of the essay is provided at the top of each entry.
p 323 Udo Schuklenk - "Human Self-Determination, Biomedical Progress, and God"

Udo took the time to make a comment on an earlier blog, so I thought I would start the second phase of this project with his essay. He begins with two questions:

“Why am I an atheist? Why do I think it is important to speak out against the harmful consequences of religious interpretations of the world and of our place in it?”

I think his focus is more on the second question, and the answers to it lead to the answer of his answer of the first question. He prayed to God when he was young for youthful wishes such as help with his homework and, regarding God, figured that,

"If you are omnipotent and omniscient, helping a desperate teenage out of the claws of 'malevolent' Latin teachers should be a walk in the park."

His thoughts on God became more sophisticated and led him to the big theological question of “why is so much going so wrong so often?” In later studies he found that many people had asked the same question. Eventually he could not reconcile the existence of a God and the facts of events such as the Holocaust. He refused a Leibnizian interpretation.

I had to look up Gottfied Leibniz. He was 17th century philosopher and mathematician who had met Baruch Spinoza. I hope to find the time to study more of Spinoza, but the Leibnizian Cosmological Argument did not appear to offer much. Udo Schuklenk recommends Voltaire’s “Candide” whose character Pangloss has this view of the world. Udo would have been at peace just leaving it at that, but he could not ignore the “harmful consequences” of those who continue to believe. He goes on to list a few of these consequences.

He starts with abortion, and tells of Catholic hospitals that are prepared to sacrifice pregnant women’s lives for the purpose of rescuing embryos. I have never heard of this before, and he does provide a footnote (Judith Hendrick, “Law and Ethics in Nursing and Health Care” [New York: Nelson Thornes Ltd, 2005] p. 54), so I could research it myself. He has another footnote when he states that Muslim women “frequently” die in labor because their husbands do not permit a c-section.

Both of these cases seem extreme to me and say very little about 6,000 years of human history. By citing extreme examples, he skirts the issue of whether or not it is ethical for a couple to agree to abort their pregnancy. Our laws vary from state to state regarding how old a fetus can be when it is aborted and people’s responses to questions of abortion vary when a pregnancy is caused by incest or rape. These moral questions do not have definitive secular answers. Claiming that religion muddies the waters appears more like avoiding the question to me.

His next set of reasons for having a problem with religion I am in partial agreement with, but again, he takes an extreme position, which I think weakens his overall argument. He brings up the issue of homosexuality. I agree the United States has been slow to deal this and the church has been on the wrong side of if for too long. I also agree that the religious justifications for not doing stem cell research are just plain crazy (that is my extreme language, not his).

He then makes a statement that I can’t really argue with, “Churches routinely campaign against civil right protections that would guarantee the equal and fair treatment of all of a country’s citizens”. HOWEVER, I don’t attend those churches. I attend the churches that have a Peace with Justice Committee, the ones that march in the Gay Pride parade, the ones that organize campaigns to raise awareness about the School of the Americas and in the tradition of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., support civil rights.

He goes on to discuss “conscientious objection”. This is a law that allows for protection of professionals who choose, for religious reasons, not to provide services. Again I had never heard of this before, and he provides many footnotes for those who would wish to look into it. This goes beyond just not serving in the military, it extends to not providing services, such as abortions or even condoms because you object to them on religious grounds. Apparently precedence has been set in the US and UK. Then he provides a hypothetical example that gets a bit tough to swallow:

“An Aryan Nation church might well give its members a conscientious reason to refuse treating Black patients. Why should their conscientious objection be any less acceptable than that of members of any other church?”

He does not answer his rhetorical question, but I will. That would not be acceptable because it would violate laws that were fought for and debated over for generations by citizens of this country, many of them good Christians. I don’t think choosing not to abort a potential life and refusing to help a grown person even belong in the same class. This is a “slippery slope” argument, a logical fallacy.

His third and final reason regards death with dignity. Here we are in agreement again. The strange relationship Christians in particular have with death was demonstrated in 2005 when Pope John Paul II was on his death bed. At the same time, in Florida, people were arguing over keeping Terry Schiavo alive, someone who had been in a vegetative state for 15 years. Many people could not accept that we should “play God” and decide if she should live or die. The Pope, who lived 85 wonderful years, had deteriorated to the point that heroic attempts to resuscitate him and prolong his life would have been cruel. His final words were, ““Let me go to the house of the Father”.

So Udo is one of the strange partners that I have in a very confused world. We live in a world where thousands are mobilized to keep a feeding tube in someone who has no recognizable brain function, but just a few hundred miles away children are dying of hunger and none of them notice. We live in a world where criticizing a Muslim for abusing the women in his life is misconstrued as racism. I agree with him that we should vigorously confront the political activism of these fundamentalist regardless of race, creed or color. Church should not interfere with human rights. Mr. Schuklenk and I part company when he claims the solution is to confront belief.

My recent reading of David James Duncan’s “God laughs and plays” has helped me understand this form of atheism. He abhorrence with stories of a God that are sometimes violent and followers that feel it is there duty to choose how grace is distributed led him to reject anything related to religion and find and expose the worst of it. He does this in honor of his humanity. I hope he can understand the humanity of those who continue to honor the traditions.
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50 blogs on disbelief - Death with Dignity

50 Blogs on Disbelief
My thoughts on the book, 50 Voices of Disbelief, Why We Are Athiests, edited by Russell Blackford and Udo Schuklenk. Written as I read them in no particular order. The page number of the essay is provided at the top of each entry.
p 252 Edgar Dahl “Imagine No Religion”

I was drawn to this title because I am a John Lennon fan, but the essay never mentions him. It turned out to be the type of essay that I expected to find in this book, covering the standard for and against arguments. Happily most of them have not followed this same pattern. It does have a few surprises, and the author has an easy style, so it is enjoyable.

He starts with his own history, and says that where he is from, East Germany, most people don’t bother with religion at all. Usually I find these broad statements about people of a certain country inaccurate, but I was convinced by Mr. Dahl. He never even met a Christian until he was 12. He usually went to movies on Sunday mornings. One day he missed the beginning of the movie, so he wandered around until he happened upon St. Paul’s Cathedral. Imagine his shock when he overheard them talking about eating a body and drinking blood!

Surprisingly, he studied theology. He found it an excellent education in the humanities and several other disciplines. He then covers a few of the arguments for God, “The Ontological Argument” - God is that which nothing greater can be conceived, “The Cosmological Argument” - God is the prime mover, and the “Teleological Argument” - the universe is amazing, someone must have been behind its creation. It is a good quick history and introduction to these arguments and their refutations. He then covers an argument against God, “The Problem of Evil”.

His philosophical training led him to work with ethical issues relating to new biological and medical technologies. At first he thought this would take him away from religion, but he quickly discovered that not only do religious leaders have an opinion on these matters, they are taken seriously. He understands that religion and ethics are inseparable, but he can’t figure out why. He can’t figure how this idea that God and the Bible have the final answer on ethical questions has survived.

To discuss this, he uses the “Euthyphro Dilemma”, from Plato’s dialogue about a conversation between Socrates and a young man named Euthyphro. This was mentioned in Pete Singer’s essay, who Edgar Dahl has worked with, but Edgar spends much more time with it. The dilemma is:

Does God command the good because it is good, or is it good because it is commanded by God?

Either God is irrelevant, because good exists outside of Him, or God is an arbitrary law giver, and even cruel things are good because He says so, or they are good is some way that we have yet to understand. It is difficult for a believer to take either side, or to offer an alternative. Edgar explores this in more depth, and many similar discussions can be found on the web. It is worth thinking about and worth exploring.

In this case, the author of the essay leads to the conclusion that “morality is independent of theology”. That may be, but I think he takes this a step too far when he applies it to a subject he has worked with extensively, physician-assisted suicide. Dahl says,

“But who is the Church to tell those who do not subscribe to their religious views how they ought to die?”

I agree there are times when someone is suffering and continued efforts to keep them alive will result only in more suffering and needless expense, however, Dahl’s statement is an oversimplification. There is much more to this discussion than just what the Catholics or others have to say about it. Perhaps that is the nature of a short essay, but he could have used his allotted space to cover it in more detail, rather than leaving it until the last paragraph. And in his final sentence,

“A liberal democracy based on a strict separation of church and state ought to enable all of its citizens to live and die according to their own values.”

This also sounds simple and practical, but taken to its extremes, could result in family members condoning medical procedures that they don’t fully understand. I don’t agree with a strict interpretation of “Thou shalt not kill”, but once you start trying to find where to draw the line, it gets very complicated very quickly. Edgar Dahl seems to imply that just removing religion from the equation would somehow make it all so easy.

The Bible does not provide an easy answer. Theologians have tried for centuries, but often disagree. Biblical stories present the moral dilemmas, but do little to sort them out. Samson is chained between two pillars by his enemies. He pushes them apart, killing many of his enemies, and himself. Saul was wounded in battle, rather than be tortured by the Philistines, he chooses to fall on his own sword. Even the great Elijah prayed to the Lord to take his life. Catholics may consider suicide a mortal sin, but I am hard pressed to see how they reached this conclusion. On this, Edgar Dahl and I agree.

I would be just as hard pressed to define exactly when it was time for someone to consider “death with dignity.” Dahl does not provide much help in this essay. He has written extensively on the subject, so I hope more answers can be found there. I often find that writing on ethical issues is long on problem explanation and very short on solutions. In this case, I am only reading his blaming. That blame may be well placed, but people usually need an alternative before they begin to change their minds.

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