Atheism for the Religious and/or Spiritual 3

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

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The 4^th to the 14^th centuries

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

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

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

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

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

Early Humanism

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

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

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

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

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

Philosophy of Erasmus

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

Comparing Romans to later philosophers 

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Atheism for the Religious and/or Spiritual 2

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

— Johannes Kepler (1595)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Douglas Adams Speech at Biota, Cambridge UK, 1998

Commentary on a mention of philosophy in Collosians

Witch, A Tale of Terror

Consilience, EO Wilson

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

Atheism for the Religious and/or Spiritual

Milepost 100

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

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

Goodenough, Ursula. The Sacred Depths of Nature. 

The God Box

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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String Asymmetry

I’ve had one blog about TV, and that was Star Trek. The Big Bang Theory is a show about some sci-fi nerds who also happen to know a lot about actual science. But really, it’s a show about relationships and they tied it all together brilliantly in the season 11 finale with Sheldon and Amy’s wedding.

It takes a few scenes for it to be laid out. It starts with, well, it starts with years of developing the characters, but if you don’t know them, I think it still works. It starts with Sheldon attempting to tie his bow tie perfectly. His fiancé, Amy asks what he’s doing. She says maybe it’s not supposed to be perfect. Maybe it’s supposed to be a little uneven. No one can ever tell Sheldon he’s not doing something right, but he seems to relent a little this time.

Later he is getting dressed for the wedding with his best man and they have their moment, then Sheldon’s mother comes in and asks for privacy. They talk about his late father and the subject of the uneven tie comes up again. His mother waxes philosophic about how sometimes it’s the imperfect things that happen that cause a moment to be perfect. Sheldon notes that Amy said something similar, then gets that look on his face he sometimes does, the far off look towards a corner of the room that is focused somewhere further off into a distant galaxy. He says, “I gotta go.” His mother is left standing there alone, a perfect demonstration of something imperfect happening, and she says out loud to no one, “like that.”

Where he goes is to his bride’s dressing room. She is standing alone in her gown looking at a mirror. His first reaction is to be stunned by her beauty. This is unusual for Sheldon. Normally if he has something important on his mind, other people don’t matter. He does do what he normally does when he rambles and stumbles and goes on tangents as he explains why he’s there. Amy is one of the few people who can pull him back into focus and when she does he explains that the bow tie discussion has led him to a breakthrough in his ideas on String Theory. Instead of super-symmetry, it could be super-A-symmetry. The two begin writing out equations on the mirror, using lipstick. In an abnormal moment for Sheldon, he does not mention that he wants credit for this discovery. He says they will publish it together.

The show has science advisers who helped them come up with the super-asymmetry idea. They checked, and as mentioned in the show, no one has published something like this yet. The brilliance of the moment to me is that string theory is an attempt to find equations that unify all of our knowledge of the universe, to find symmetry in everything. Sheldon has believed he could do this since he was a little boy. He makes rules for everything, including relationships, and stresses the importance of sticking to them. The show has traced a long slow realization on his part that people don’t always function as a set of rules. To demonstrate that he is really finally getting this he is taking these lessons for life from his wife and his mother and applying them to his lifelong goal of understanding how the universe works through mathematical formulas. He is seeing the language of love in the language of the universe.

The equations of course are a metaphor. They are not suggesting that you can write a formula for the meaning of life. The science advisers make sure that the math that appears on the show is accurate in some sense, but accuracy is not the point. They know people will freeze the frames and scrutinize them. Sometimes they put math jokes on the white boards. I wouldn’t know. The metaphor is the search for meaning. Sheldon’s very Christian mother thinks she knows the answers and that it’s cute that her son is so smart. She also sees all the problems that it has caused for him. Sheldon sees nothing but problems coming out of his caricatured Texan family. The others on the show have their own approaches and philosophies that all get their time and place. What we saw at the wedding was that all of them are reaching for the same thing, and together, sometimes finding it.

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.

You're own evil demon

I came across this rather interesting use of a very old thought experiment. Descartes was trying to figure out if he existed independently, or if something was controlling him, like an evil demon. He eventually concluded his ability to think proved his independence. This still left him with a somewhat circular argument but some people start this thought experiment, and can't passed the evil demon. I see people doing to themselves or trying to do to others. They try to make people into their own “Cartesian demons”.

You can do it to yourself by thinking you are a failure, then believing it. You can let others do it by allowing them to tell you that you are in some way flawed. You can let them convince you that they are smarter, or that all humans are incapable of understanding some fundamental truth or that none of us know the real way things work. Of course they have the answer, and if you believe them, you give yourself up to them to get it. Or, you just give up to the idea. Either way you’ve let an imaginary “demon” take control.

The extreme case is a cult, but less extreme cases can be seen every day with fake headlines or fake science and claims that reality is fake. Well established facts become a conspiracy of the elite. Extensive investigations into voter fraud are tossed aside because one paper ballot was counted twice. Always left unmentioned is that the problem was caught and corrected, otherwise, how would we know it ever happened?

People believe we can’t make a difference and that we are being controlled by invisible forces. They fear poison in the water, in our food and even in our medicines. We accept the status quo that there will always be poor despite centuries of solving social problems. There is always some disaster or someone being slighted to prove the point.

The good news, no special powers are required to escape this demon. Just think for yourself. If it’s a claim about science, then find all the research you can and learn how a scientific consensus if formed. If it’s government, get involved. The US just had two polar opposites in the presidency. I’m guessing no one is controlling this. If your evil demon says we can’t know everything and we’re just animals, then how do you know that? You would need to know everything to know that we can’t know it. There is nothing to do but learn more. You don’t know what your limits are.

My Bibliography

In case you're wondering where I get my ideas. This is about 25 years of reading.

             Christian days

The Tao - Lao Tzu
Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time – Dominic Crossan

Something by Marcus Borg

The Doors of Perception  -

Religious America, Secular Europe? Peter Berger and Grace Davie. 2007

Iron John – Robert Bly

The Gospel of Inclusion – Carlton Pearson

The Great Emergence- Phyllis Tickle

Mere Christianity – C.S. Lewis

Abraham: A Journey to the – Bruce Feller – Well researched look at how the 3 monotheisms draw from one tradition.

Jesus for the Non-religious John Shelby Spong

                Not so Christian days

Blessed Unrest Paul Hawken – about organizations working for peace and justice

Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

The Imitation of Christ Thomas Kempis

Dante's Divine Comedy – actually, I couldn't finish it

Jonathan Livingston Seagull – Richard Bach

The Meaning of Life A Short Introduction – Terry Eagleton

The Story of Philosophy Will Durant – excellent complete coverage

Reason, Faith, and Revolution – Reflections on the God Debate by Terry Eagleton, 2009

Spinoza on Ethics - Surprisingly strong emphasis on god and the impossibility of uncaused events.

50 Voices of Doubt

                Definitely not Christian days

If You Meet the Buddha on the Road Kill Him – Sheldon B Kopp

The Pillars of the Earth – Ken Follet – fiction, but paints a picture of the time when there were two Popes

Siddhartha - Herman Hesse

What's So Great About Christianity – Dinesh D'Souza – Terrible, complete cherry picking of history, ignores anything bad about it. It was recommended by a liberal Methodist Bishop so I include only as an example of something that a Christian could be fooled by.

The Daily Show and Philosophy – not that great

Fire, Water, Spirit – Malidoma Some. A biographical story, not theology, some history, mainly mythology.

Banned Questions from the Bible – mostly for teens, a few high points.

Compassion – Karen Armstrong (I think I read her History of God)

Critical Thinking books recommended by Russell of ACA

                Demon Haunted World – Carl Sagan (read parts of it)

                Innumerncy –John Allen Paulos (ways people are fooled with math)

Who Wrote the Bible - Friedman

Mistakes were Made but not by Me – Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson  About psychology of belief

Not the Impossible Faith – Richard Carrier. Why Christianity flourished.

Tony Jones A New Atonement

The Jesuit and the Skull: Teilhard de Chardin – Amir D Azcel – this was more history of the man and his political problems and not much about this religious philosophy.

How the Irish Saved Civilization – Thomas Cahill – fills in a few gaps in history

The Liberation of Theology -  Juan Luis Segundo – religion is politics

Introducing Liberation Theology – Leonardo Boff 

Parables as Subversive Speech: Jesus as Pedagogue of the Oppressed - William R Herzog

The Botany of Desire – Michael Pollan – has a great bit on the Genesis creation story as a metaphor for the dangers of pagan rituals involving hallucinogenic drugs

Sir Gwain and The Green Knight

Bertrand Russell History of Philosophy – Comprehensive, reviewers have said it contains inaccuracies

God’s Philosophers – James Hannam – A rare look at early science in the Middle Ages, but it has some historical errors and leaves a lot out.

Everything Must Change – Brian McClaren

Thomas Sheehan, The First Coming: How the Kingdom of God Became Christianity

Quest for Jerusalem – about recent histiography on Columbus

Free Will – Sam Harris

Infidel  Ayaan Hirsi Ali amazing story of a woman escaping Islam

I am Malala – the girl who was shot in Afghanistan for going to school

Wittgenstein’s Poker – A fun history of 20^th century philosophy, including Karl Popper

Sense and Goodness Without God – Richard Carrier – rare idea for philosophy incorporating all modern knowledge

Wild – Cheryl Strayed – Not about religion, but a about a journey of healing.

And God Said Billy – Frank Schaeffer – bizarre, but a look into the fundamentalist mind

Why I am an Atheist Who Believes in God – Frank Schaeffer. Cherry picking, but at least he admits it.

Snowy Tower – Martin Shaw

Branch from the Lightning Tree – Martin Shaw – these are about myth, they are essential

American Gods – fiction, but a fun play on mythology and how the European gods followed people to the US

Think – Simon Blackburn Descartes to modern era

A.D. 381 Charles Freeman – covers the history of the theology of the 4^th century. Amazing.

In Faith and In Doubt – Dale McGowan – for mixed secular/religious relationships, but also has some interesting data on belief and how it doesn’t match the given identified denomination

The Brothers Karamzov – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Brothers K - David James Duncan 

Man's Search for Meaning – Viktor E Frankl. Totally amazing.

Why I am Not a Christian – Richard Carrier

Hitler Homer Bible Christ – Richard Carrier
Is There a God - Richard Swinburne - read this for a class, don't recommend it

The Tao of the Dude – Oliver Benjamin – fun, just sayings mostly

The Christian Delusion – John Loftus, a collection, got it for the Carrier chapter mostly

Eve – William Paul Young (Author of The Shack), fiction. Uses Genesis creation narrative to tell the story

The Way of the Heathen – Greta Christina - 2nd only to Sense and Goodness

Flourishing: Why We Need Religion in a Globalized World – Miroslav Volf, disagree with it, but it's still interesting

Islam and the Future of Tolerance – Sam Harris, Maajid Nawwaz

How to Defend the Christian Faith, Advice from an Atheist – John F Loftus, very sarcastic

Confessions of a Secular Jesus Follower – Tom Krattenmaker. Disappointing, very religious.

On the Historicity of Jesus – Richard Carrier

A Christian and an Atheist Walk Into a Bar – Shieber and Rauser.

Doubt – Jennifer Michael Hecht

Why I Left, Why I Stayed – Tony Campolo, Bart Campolo

What Is the Bible - Rob Bell
War on Science - Shawn Otto
Flourishing: Why We Need... - Miroslav Volf
Social Conquest of Earth - EO Wilson
The Bonobo and the Atheist - Frans de Waal

Misquoting Jesus - Bart Ehrman
How Jesus Became God - Bart Ehrman
Breaking the Spell - Daniel C. Dennett
The Brothers K - David James Duncan - fictional story that includes some amazing insight into the human psyche
How to Read the Bible - James L. Kugel - using it as a reference
The Sacred Depths of Nature - Ursula Goodenough
Ten Tough Problems in Christian Thought and Belief - David Madison
Jesus Mari and Joji - James C. Jensen
The G.K. Chesteron Collection
Jesus Interrupted - Bart D. Ehrman
Small  God: Discworld #13 - Terry Prachett - a humorous interlude
The Man Who Knew Infinity - Robert Kanigal - interesting look about someone who came from the Hindu tradition and how that affected his view of the world, but the story is mostly about his understanding of physics
Consilience - Edward O Wilson - not all that much about religion
Sapiens - Yuval Noah Harari (I include this one to say I don't recommend it. He overuses the idea that things are myths. That idea is better developed elsewhere.)
The Righteous Mind - Includes some history of the evolution of thought as it relates to religion
Paradise Lost by John Milton
Love Your Enemies Arthur C. Brooks (for a Conservative's perspective on politics in the Trump era)
Science of Religion course on EdX - highly recommend this

Braiding Sweetgrass - Robin Wall Kimmerer
Educated: A memoir by Tara Westover - Mormon raised by abusive survivalist family goes to college

Grain of Sand

You are as insignificant as a grain of sand. It takes so many grains of sand to make a desert, each grain is insignificant. Even if that grain is taken up by an oyster and makes a pearl, then the pearl is insignificant. It's merely a reaction to an irritation.  It doesn't matter to the desert. It doesn't matter to the ocean. It doesn't matter that the ocean gives life or that it is lined with beautiful coral reefs. Those reefs are just there to be eaten by the fish and excreted as sand to be washed up on a beach and blown back into the desert. 

All of that is part of something so large that it is beyond comprehension, rendering each part insignificant. It is a vast, incomprehensible collection of insignificant things, rendering the whole just as insignificant. It could be nothing else. There is nothing against which we can judge significance. 

Your statements, your thoughts about the "is" that it is, are meaningless to all the interactions of all the galaxies and all the waves on the all the shores. Your thoughts are just that, yours. You think them. You write them down.
You speak them. You live with them.

Advice on Life

Just another one of those passing thoughts at the height of summer as I try to get the garage painted and the woods cleared. I recently found out about brainpickings.org from OnBeing.org. I recommend both. I found this bit from a young Hunter S. Thompson, who is asked for advice on life and starts out pointing out how impossible that is and how arrogant it would be to try, then he pulls it off.

He does it by not offering any advice, but talks to his friend about setting himself on a path of self discovery. He doesn't give any actual advice, like "be a fireman" or "do what you love" or "follow your bliss" or "plastics!". Instead he says the answer lies in the questioner. The questioner has already taken the first step by asking the question. The answer is to keep asking.

Self reflection is a daily task, although not one to get obsessed with. Re-examining the landscape of everything out there is equally important, especially in this rapidly changing world we now find ourselves in.

Well, time to let Maria Popova walk you through this essay. Enjoy.

But, before you go, let me tell you where this sent my thoughts. I argue about politics, against libertarians, about God, against fundamentalists, about science, against anti-vaxxers, anti-GMOers, anti-global warmingers. And where these arguments often lead is to a point where my opponent finds completely unacceptable of the entire scientific method, including the integrity of our universities, the validity of peer review, the trustworthiness of government reports, the ability of experts to interpret data and the ability of anyone to verify that the data is accurate. It leaves me with nothing to build on since the only thing left is each of our opinions.

This attitude toward the modern world of delegation of authority and knowledge begins early. At some point you begin listening to the people that say a college degree has no value and that high schools are designed by capitalists who want to create subservient workers. There is some truth in there, that is, there are some horrible teachers and there are corporations that don't value human life, but it is not a vast conspiracy led by a secret cabal. That you can discuss the idea that it might be is evidence that it isn't.

To figure out if all or any of these systems are working, one merely needs to attempt to work within them, to create some change. Short of that, looking into the history of where these system came from will tell you a lot. If you can't find that documentary on your list of 80 stations, just think about basic high school history. At one point there were kings who cut your head off, now we have nations. At one point owning another human being was commonplace, now it's not. The Pope once had power over all of Europe, now he doesn't. Even if you weren't paying attention to exactly how we got from there to here, you have to accept that here is better and there must be a reason for that.

Meeting half way

When I started this blog I wasn't sure what I was looking for, then it became a search for how the philosophy of science began. Lately I have been asking the question about how or even if religion was reformed. What we call the reformation occurred alongside the beginnings of what we call science. It is almost impossible to disentangle the two. On March 24th I went down to Minneapolis to meet Tony Jones and listen to him talk about his new book on the history of how the resurrection has been interpreted. Two days later I went to a lecture on "The True Meaning of Humanism". Tony has been very responsive to my incessant questions, but Randall Poole, the lecturer of that talk, gave me answers without my needing to even ask. He's a professor at a local Catholic college. I wish I'd known about him 10 years ago.

His talk followed a similar arc of history as mine from last November. Although he is coming from a believer's theological point of view, he agreed completely with my theme that the religion practiced today by the fundamentalists is very much like the religion of Augustine in the 4th century and the politics of those two eras also have parallels. Over half way through his talk I was starting to wonder how he was going to get out of it without renouncing his faith. Our themes departed in the Enlightenment era.

He teaches at the College of St. Scholastica and, according to him, it was that saint along with St. Benedict that developed a humanists theology in the early centuries of Christianity. Their teachings survived the brutal, anti-humanist centuries of Roman Catholic rule and began to emerge again in the 13th century.

He mentioned Kant and Locke but did not give them anywhere near the credit I did. In Locke especially, I find concepts and nearly exact phrases that are passed into the Constitutions of the 18th century democracies. I do not find these words or concepts in the Bible. Poole finds human dignity and hope in the words of the humanist Christian writers. That may be true, but I do not see a strong connection to Christ when they write on humanism.

In my talk, I mentioned the myths surrounding Constantine, everything from how he invented Easter to "corporate religion" to writing the entire New Testament. The break from the more egalitarian, inclusive culture of the early Christians to the Church supported by the Roman army actually occurred over centuries. It can be seen in the subtle debates between Peter and Paul and more clearly in the gospel of John. It continued with Marcion and the Arians. Poole points to the debate between Augustine and Pelagius as a pivotal moment.

The problem with all of this is rarely do we progress to higher forms of human dignity via a debate among intellectuals. When Martin Luther King Jr met with President Johnson, they didn't debate civil rights, they debated the timing and political expediency of enacting civil rights legislation. Abraham Lincoln didn't come up with the idea of freeing the slaves, he just knew it was an idea who's time had come. The United States and the French Revolutions weren't invented on paper in a University and then implemented by some sort of international coalition. They were messy affairs involving corrupt people taking advantage of the idealists and the frustrations of a mass of people who were tired of being oppressed by monarchies.

You can see this clearly in the results. The United States, a country founded on freedom, started with classes of people defined by their sex and the color of their skin being denied the right to vote. Many other human dignities were also denied to them that didn't need to be explicitly stated in the Constitution. The difference though, is those founders knew they lived in a changing world. Change was not something invented in the 18th century, although the pace may vary, it is always part of the human experience. They simply recognized the futility of making proclamations that would stand until the end of time. They created a system that has increasingly included more of the marginalized and the disenfranchised with each succeeding generation.

Because of these new ideas, instead of living with the results of power struggles between elites, we actually have a say in how power is distributed. We expect leaders to not only win a debate, but to provide the evidence of how they arrived at their conclusions. We have learned how to study our world so we can better understand ourselves. We can determine what makes it better. We can find and correct wrongs with our systems without needing to go to war or depose a dictator.

Before I go too far down that road, I'd like to finish this installment with an attempt to meet Randall half way. As he said in his talk, in response to an excellent question about inclusivity from a student, he believes he has come more than half way. I see no reason to argue about where "half way" is and plenty of reason to acknowledge that Randall has come further than anyone I know, without leaving his religion.

For my part, I will give him that something extraordinary took place in the first century. Whether it was a single man or a loose collection of authors, a story was created that has endured. In the midst of brutal oppression, it is a story of peace. It's a story of loving your enemies and finding your own power, your own humanity. I mentioned Tony Jones' new book. At his book signing, he read from the conclusion,

What the ruling powers meant for the unclean, Jesus made clean. They threw Jesus over the boundary of socio-moral disgust meaning to silence him, but instead Jesus pulled everyone over the line with him redeeming the previously untouchable, revealing that we're all 'unclean' and tearing down the wall that religion had erected. 

http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/60324375

There is no question that powerful symbolism is in the gospels. But that's as far as I can go. There is a lot of symbolism that is not mentioned by liberal theologians, like blood sacrifices and apocalyptic visions. One version of religion may have been torn into but as with most overthrows, the power structures remain and it is only new faces occupying them. Leaderless, Utopian communities don't last because it's hard to find people to clean the streets and maintain the plumbing. 

If we're all 'unclean', then no one can be King and no immutable book of law can be maintained. Administrators of justice have to be answerable to everyone else and new knowledge has to be constantly incorporated. Democracy, with all its problems is the best version of that we've come up with so far. Religion never came close to suggesting it as an alternative. 

Randall said early in his talk that we should judge any religion on its humanistic values. He then did an excellent job of judging many Christian leaders throughout history, declaring many of them anti-humanist. He gave me the names of many Christians who were early humanists and influenced others. Eventually they influenced the liberal philosophers and then the modern politicians, leaders of civil rights, women's rights, gay rights and religious reform. 

I look forward to learning more about these early leaders. One reason we know about them is they maintained their belief in the official religion of the state. Those who did not, were not published. There was no such thing as self publishing. There were such things as lists of books that were anathema to the Church. It is no coincidence that things changed rapidly when writing could be copied quickly and cheaply using a printing press. 

I'm sure Randall is aware of all of this and would be able to respond. The talk was recorded and should be available soon. I'll return to it then.

For a list of all of the Alsworth lectures, click here.

Human Flourshing

(** Scroll to the bottom for an index of all the progressive Christians I've blogged about **)

When I was seeking instead of avoiding a spiritual community 20 years ago I believed there was some value to scripture and to calling for some other worldly powers. I read Michael Lerner’s The Politics of Meaning, a book by a rabbi that applied some very traditional values from Judaism to modern problems in a very politically liberal fashion. I still like that book, but it was the high point of my searching. Every other modern scriptural interpretation has been a dead end that looked a lot like fundamentalism.

John Shelby Spong, Dominic Crossan, C.S. Lewis, Alvin Plantiga, Tony Jones, Nadia Bolz Weber, Jonathan Sacks, Phyllis Tickle and pastors at churches that I attended, all have failed rather spectacularly. They may do great things, but their reasons make no sense. Their connection from what they say are decent values to the precepts of Christianity are tangential at best. I’ve never really stopped looking, and I occasionally find someone making a bold statement about non-belief in miracles or the possible non-existence of Moses or that writings of Paul were forged, but never a coherent, positive use of scripture and the stories of the Bible that inspires anything that couldn’t be arrived at easier and better using rational, natural means.

There are some former pastors, like Dan Barker, who can describe how they built community and counseled people in need, but they are former pastors because they got tired of making excuses for parts of the Bible they knew were not true, or worse, promoted bad behavior. Ryan Bell is a recent addition to that list. After being fired from his ministry work for “theological differences”, he took a year to decide if belief in God was right for him. It wasn’t. He recently tried to explain where he is at today by using the term “human flourishing”.

In a recent discussion with Michael Shermer about Michael’s book The Moral Arc, Ryan brought up how Miroslav Volf used this term. I did a little research. Volf seems like a nice guy. He is respected, he went to Fuller Seminary, his published works are highly regarded. I found this essay and that’s where I’ll probably stop. This is how it usually goes. Someone gives you a few words that sound nice, but when you look at their source, the whole story, it’s no different than a tent revival with Billy Graham.

The essay is a paper describing in brief what eventually became a book.

I’ll give Volf some credit for pointing to some flaws in Christianity and religion in general, but those credits have no value when he solves the problems by telling us we must believe in Jesus. This is typical of liberal Christian teachings and sermons. They start out with an analysis of the outdated system and how it doesn’t work for us anymore. We know that, that’s why we’re listening to the new guy. Then it says something about modern philosophy or The Enlightenment and how it reacted to the old system, and makes the case that it failed too.

At this point a transitional theologian like Spinoza or Maimonides might be brought in to sharpen the comparison to Hume or Freud. And the magic moment, back to a common quote from Jesus or some wisdom from the 4^th century. Volf wraps up his essay by telling us we must relate God to current ethical issues, make him plausible by showing he is good for us, and we must believe God is fundamental to human flourishing. I’ll go into more of the detail, but once you’ve heard that, do you need to know any more? He’s shown the problems with belief in God, then offered the solution of really, really believing in God.

He starts out talking about hope. He says hope is expecting something good that doesn’t come along every day. For Christians, hope comes from “outside”, not just an extrapolation of what could be based on what we have seen. It is the gift of God’s love. Then he asks, how this is related to human flourishing.

To answer that, he needs to look at the contemporary Western view of human flourishing. He says this is mostly about satisfaction. In the West, this is more strongly pronounced as “feeling happy” in the moment rather than a more stoic sense of having done well in the long run. Volf contrasts this with Augustine who said “human beings flourish and are truly happy when they center their lives on God, the source of everything that is true, good and beautiful.” Augustine says it’s okay to want things, but only if you want “nothing wrongly”. That is, want it in accordance with the Creator.

Well, okay, that was 360 AD or so. That’s how they talked then. Let’s see what happens when he starts applying this to modern times.

Skipping quickly over 1,500 years of history, Volf talks of the “anthropocentric shift” from God to humanism that doesn’t reference higher powers. The moral obligations were retained. Tribalism was transcended, at least in theory. And skipping to the 20^th century Volf finds flourishing defined increasingly in terms of the self. He sums up this movement from love of God and neighbor to universal beneficence to experiential satisfaction paralleling it to the diminishing of hope, saying, if hope is love stretching itself into the future of the beloved object, when love shrinks to self-interest, and self-interest devolves into the experience of satisfaction, hope disappears as well.

That’s kinda beautiful. I can get that, because I have some sense of what hope and love are. He’s right, if we center our love only on ourselves, where is our hope? We can hope for a better car, but that’s not very satisfying.

Volf quotes Andrew Delbanco when he talks of what happens when we decouple pleasure from the love of God or hope for a common future. In Delbanco’s words, we are left “with no way of organizing desire into a structure of meaning.” We are “meaning-making animals” says Volf, so this must leave us unsatisfied.

We are only at the beginning of p. 10 of a 24 page essay, and he’s already lost me. I followed the historical movement from God to self, but he never offers anything about meaning coming from anything except God. He left a glimmer of that in the 18^th century with a sense of community, but it’s gone as far as he is concerned by the 1960’s. Can he build a way out of this abyss? Let’s see.

He states this with no debate, “The most robust alternative visions of human flourishing are embodied in the great faith traditions.” Although in a moment of honesty, or maybe comic relief, he says, “True, you cannot always tell that from the way faiths are practiced. When surveying their history, it seems on occasion as if their goal were simply to dispatch people out of this world and into the next.” But he sees no alternative, he must look to thinkers from those great faith traditions.

He quotes Al-Ghazali and Maimonides, two major players, one from Islam, one from Judaism. He talks of how these traditions taught that we must know where we fit in with the ultimate reality. I don’t argue with that as a pursuit, even though many people get by perfectly well without even understanding what the equinox is or where babies come from. For these great religious thinkers, there is no escaping God. When quoting Maimonides, to have knowledge, is to know God, perfection consists “in the acquisition of the rational virtues—I refer to the conception of intelligibles, which teach true opinions concerning divine things.” So, knowledge leads to God.

Volf gives a little ground to non-theological intellectuals of the past, but immediately laments that an education formerly included a pursuit of life’s meaning. I think Volf misses that education today is specialized and we can’t acquire the breadth of knowledge that people used to have because there is so much more knowledge to be known. Where it was once normal to understand all that was known about literature, the cosmos and math, by sheer volume, that is no longer possible.

Also, this idea, that we can find our place in the universe by understanding it is an idea that didn’t die because we became more concerned with personal satisfaction, it died because we found out the universe is 13.7 billion years old and much larger than anyone could have imagined. What Volf fails to mention is that we also found out that the particles that were cooked in the first generation of stars are now part of us. We never found the connection he is looking for, but he ignores the one we did find.

The problem is not that science ruined the quest for a connection to the universe by finding we are just a little planet on the edge of just one of many galaxies, the problem was always with the looking for that connection out there. That connection is right here in the faces of people we care about. I make that connection, as Frank Schaeffer puts it, by getting my wife a cup of tea and then going on to the next mundane, simple act of kindness.

Volf only mentions Darwin in terms of the negative influence of the “survival of the fittest”. But Darwin wrote extensively of cooperation in Origin of the Species. In Darwin we find an explanation for how we climbed down from the trees and worked together so intelligence and skill could survive against larger and stronger predators. Through Darwin, we found we could look to nature to learn where we came from. Nature wasn’t a frightening and brutish place that we were separated from after all, it was where we belonged. It wasn’t given to us by God, we evolved with it and we are here now because our ancestors had the traits that matched their ever evolving environment. One of those traits was hope for the future. Volf is right, hope is love extended beyond the horizon. Each of us was loved by many people long before we were born. If you care enough to leave this planet in better shape than you found it, then you are part of that chain.

Volf doesn’t mention anything like that. He does give a nod to secular versions of philosophers trying to find a fit for humans within the larger reality we find ourselves. He does this to compare these secular visions to the religious tradition of seeking where we fit in reality. He doesn’t use the word “utilitarian”, but he alludes to the more utilitarian forms of morality that were discussed in the years of the enlightenment, and I have no problem pointing out the problems with that. You can’t simply add up the happiness in a society to decide what is right. If you do that, you miss Martin Luther King Jr’s words that if there is injustice anywhere it is a threat to justice everywhere. But unlike Volf, I don’t have to justify the words of 17^th century philosophers like John Locke or anyone from an earlier century. I can evaluate their words and provide reasons for discarding them or building upon them based on everything known today.

Volf instead covers Seneca’s “Cosmic Reason” and Nietzsche’s “higher humans”. Then he returns to his theme about the modern sense of how we fit into culture, saying, “Satisfaction is a form of experience, and experiences are generally deemed to be matters of individual preference.” I don’t think that’s true for everyone but here Volf goes somewhere I didn’t expect. He applies this to his fellow believers.

Even religious people can use their religious experience for personal satisfaction! Not surprising to me, but surprising to hear it from a theologian. By doing this, he says, they transform the “Creator and Master of the Universe” to “Divine Butler” and “Cosmic Therapist”. Volf now brings in the much more liberal Terry Eagleton, who blames this malfunction of religion on the “post-Nietzschean spirit” of the culture. Neither of them ever consider that the religious narrative has failed and can never again provide the type of transcendent experience it once did to those who had no idea what was above the clouds. He just keeps blaming some general decline of culture, and post-modern relativism caused by all these philosophers.

But again, he makes a statement that I completely agree with, “It is a mistake—a major mistake—not to worry about how well our notion of flourishing fits the nature of reality. If we live against the grain of reality, we cannot experience lasting satisfaction, let alone be able to live fulfilled lives.” This is in perfect agreement with The Amazing James Randi, who says, “wouldn’t you rather live in the real world?” Then Volf immediately returns to looking to religion for the solution, to find this “grain of reality”. It seems to never to occur to him that we now know how what we buy in the grocery store affects the farmer in Ethiopia. We know so much more about this “grain of reality” than any time in history. What is sad is he has the resources to meet a farmer from Ethiopia who sees these connections much clearer than I.

This is classic liberal sermon stuff right here. First, talk about the religion of your grandparents and say that’s not the right way. Then throw in some philosophers and show how they failed. Then bring in modern theologian/philosophers and start working your way back to a new way. At this point, I used to be on the edge of my seat, thinking all my time wasted singing hymns and washing dishes for the fundraisers was about to pay off. But as we’ll see, in the end, you walk off wondering if you’ve missed something. At least I did. I was a slow learner. Eventually I figured out there’s nothing there to be missed. What I was missing was the poetry of the cosmos and the beauty of the cycles of nature. And more important that there was a system for discovering the truth about that nature, things that my ministers weren’t integrating into our spiritual education.

Next Volf again tells us something we shouldn’t do, another malfunction of religion. We shouldn’t start with our preferred account of human flourishing and then construct an image of God to go with it, as if we are measuring ourselves for a pair of slacks. Volf knows that this is what Nietzsche says Christianity already did. He disagrees with Nietzsche who said they started out with perverse values and built a structure that supported them, but he agrees that even if you begin with decent, healthy values, it is still the wrong approach to God. He says “[this] divests faith of its own integrity and makes it simply an instrument of our own interests and purposes.”

Of course it does. That’s what people see churches doing and that’s why they are leaving. These are words Richard Dawkins could have said.

This is the point in any modern liberal theology that completely baffles me. He has so thoroughly and eloquently analyzed two major problems with religion. And he’s done it with minimal shaming of anyone in the present. He’s shown how we got here and how the invention of these traditions was a natural process driven by historical dynamics. But his very next sentence, on page 20, is the one where my heart sank. He says, “Let’s return once more to Augustine”. Let’s roll back 1,700 years of progress.

Fine.

To Augustine, God is not impersonal, it is loving. And to be human is to chose to love. To live well we love both God and neighbor, aligning ourselves with God. That’s how we flourish. He applies these ideas back to the earlier mentioned philosophies and shows how they just can’t work without God. That “tranquil self-sufficiency” of the Stoics or Nietzsche “noble morality” just won’t cut it. He even throws in Augustine’s comment on Epicurus, instead of “Let us eat and drink”, it should be “Let us give and pray.”

I should at this point offer some alternative. The language of morality and flourishing is difficult, and it’s unfair and too easy to simply bash the weaknesses of theology. I’ll give Volf and Jesus some credit for including “the least of these” in their philosophy. Most moral theories don’t talk much about the value of charity and the long term satisfaction of a life of sacrifice. If Christians actually embodied those notions and spent more time doing them rather than conquering land in the name of Christ or torturing those who wouldn’t profess his name, maybe the whole endeavor would have worked out for them.

And I know Christians hate it when we mention the worst aspects as if they are the norm. But when were they at their best? From the 5^th to the 14^th century they ruled Europe. What advances in democracy happened in those years? Science advanced for a while not in Christian Central Europe but in Baghdad and Muslim Spain because a few Caliphates listened to the few lines in the Koran that talked about acquiring knowledge. What great Christian literature came out of that time? When Erasmus wrote what are considered the earliest humanist writings, he wasn’t praised, he was suppressed. When Jan Hus tried to take it further, he was burned at the stake. When Galileo tried to teach what he observed, he was given a tour of the dungeon in the Vatican. So, why was there a dungeon in the Vatican? Sorry, it’s hard to get any distance from those worst aspects.

And how did we come out of those dark ages? We created nations that had religious freedoms instead of Kingdoms anointed by Popes. We created constitutions with words that can be directly traced to enlightenment philosophers and just barely mention a deist type of creator. We abolished slavery, which is too much to cover here, but there were and still are religious arguments for both sides of that issue. We created systems where you have a right to say that you have a special friend who is telling you something is true, but I have the right to say I think something else is true.

Those are the alternatives I have to offer. Words like “right” and “love” are the highest words we have. Poets have tried to help us express these words forever. You kinda just have to get them when you're young, not just understand them but let them become part of you. If you don’t, you just don’t quite fit. We have enough trouble trying to figure out what is right for a few dozen people in a room, figuring out a caring system for 7 billion is going to involve some arguments. So the question is not “what is the answer”, the question is “how do we deal with the questions”?

I think we can start with simple principles, like don’t step on my toe. If you are on my toe, youneed to get off. There is no cultural reason for you to remain on mytoe. If you have a toe stepping obsession, you need to work that out,and you need to get off of my toe. From there, we can build to determining which chemicals should be used where and how much, or who gets a bigger slice of the pie and why.

Volf instead, returns to the prophetic tradition, the fundamental movement of ascent to God to receive a message and the return to the world to bring the message to this mundane reality. He offers 3 aspects: 1, We must relate God to current ethical issues. 2, Make God plausible, by showing he is good for us. And 3, Believe God is fundamental to flourishing. And he puts that in italics, you have to “really mean” that God is our hope. That’s it.

This closing message, after all the history and philosophy and admitting the failures, is the same message of Jerry Falwell, Rick Warren, Torquemada, and Oprah Winfrey. It’s your worst High School coach. I know part of any difficult task is to have faith but at some point you have to say, coach, maybe we need a strategy, maybe we should have practiced more instead of listening to that Knute Rockne speech over and over. But if you say that, you become the problem, you’ve shown your lack of faith, so you are now the cause. So you just play along.

Even his first two suggestions seem so transparent, they are about the outward appearance, not the underlying structure that makes a system work. He says to apply this belief in God to current issues. But the Bible is not even a good source for ending slavery, let alone determining what we should do about anthropogenic climate change. I can easily use the Bible to make a case FOR laws against homosexuality. I wouldn’t do that by the way, I’m just saying it’s easy. Making the case for something like living with our Islamic neighbors, that’s not so easy.

When discussing the idea of making it plausible that the love of God is key to human flourishing, Volf shows a strong awareness of non-believer arguments. We non-believers have “railed against God’s nature”, which means “against theistic accounts of how humans ought to live”. He notes that we don’t believe God is good for us. He could be talking about a strident atheist, or someone just complaining about Sunday’s sermon. He notes that this idea that God is good is contested, but says it’s because Christians haven’t done a good enough job of showing God’s goodness. But isn’t that what every organization or philosophy tries to do? To produce results? That’s how you grow an idea, if it appears to be working, people will notice, then some will look into how you’re doing it and you build the next generation of leaders.

What Volf doesn’t address is the 99% of people in human history who were told God made them serfs and servants and soldiers and that’s just the way it is. That’s not a system that can survive outside pressure. It’s not a system that can progress. Of course people have contested these ideas. Through most of history they just had no power to do anything about it. Now that we have that power (and mean everyone, believers and non-believers), people like Volf are struggling to find other ways to get it back.

Volf never suggests that modern systems of listening to voices that traditionally were marginalized have anything to do with how the world is today. He never says that teaching more people math, reading, biology, history and ALL the philosophies has made the world more complicated but also has made it better. He never admits that we just don’t know how best to love our neighbor. We, like Christians since the earliest days, are still arguing about who exactly is our neighbor. He believes this one idea that has been tried a thousand times will finally work, if we just believe. He never considers we might be better off letting thousands of ideas be heard in the hopes that we find more ideas that have merit.

Other liberal theologians (or theologian types) I have written about:
Frank Schaeffer
Brian McClaren
Thich Nhat Hahn
John Shelby Spong
Terry Eagleton
The Shack (a book)
Nadia Bolz Weber
Mere Christianity
Greg Boyd
Karen Armstrong
Joseph Campbell

Spinoza
Deepak Chopra
Banned Questions (various authors)

Kind of in between Robert Wright
A few actually get it right.
Thomas Sheehan He's a Catholic and a history professor at Standford U
Averroes
William Herzog
Thich Nhat Hahn
Friedman
Tony Jones (mentioned often)
Me
Joseph Campbell
Walker Community Church
Bart Campolo
Irshad Manji
There are a few good ones in Banned Questions above also