Why Philosophy Matters - Introduction

 Welcome to another blog series. Sometimes, I don’t complete the series that I start, but in all cases, something along the way is worth it. Thanks for reading this far. To keep this from being 100,000 words, I will need to refer to other existing discussions, like the title itself. Bigger thinkers than me have questioned the usefulness of philosophy in an age of science. People like Lawrence Krauss and E.O. Wilson. I won’t recreate their arguments here and may not specifically reference them as I address their concerns. It’s a big question. I’m not out to win the debate.

Succinctly, for me, it matters because in this age of science, we have people with uniforms, authorized by their government, to cut off the breath of life of another, in public, until they are dead. This is debated. In some countries, if you try to debate it, you will join the dead. In industrialized democracies, you still need lawyers and new legal precedents to win the case that such actions are wrong. That is a debate I am out to win.

Very recently, I purchased a beverage, legally, publicly, that was made by a company owned by women. The beverage contained some THC. A half of a lifetime ago, there were very few companies owned by women, and buying, selling, and imbibing THC was illegal. Because of that, I lived outside the law for a couple decades, risking a felony offense almost every day. I had a lot of time to think about what is moral and right. For this one example, the state I live in finally caught up to me.

When a rich and powerful person claims they can act in ways that others can’t, that is an expression of a philosophy. It’s a statement that human nature and some imagined natural laws justify oppressing others, taking what isn’t theirs, and invading others bodily autonomy. To me, it shows that powerful person did not spend much time reflecting on what it is to be human and how we develop society to match natural laws, or if there are any. It shows that anyone can jumble words and have them appear to have a basis in logic and reason. I want to talk about how we can examine if those words are reasonable.

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

Next in the series

Why Milepost100?

I've been focusing less on creating new Milepost100 sermon helpers and instead adding to my background knowledge. One big source for that has been Richard Carrier's recent work, “On the Historicity of Jesus”. In this peer reviewed scholarly book, he applies modern tools to the questions surrounding Jesus and discusses how two approaches to the New Testament have failed; the religious apologist, who attempts to find the meaning that has been handed down by the theologians for centuries, and the historian who looks for some historical truth behind the text.

“Modern apologists respond with implausible ad-hoc harmonizations, while historians attempt to isolate the historical truth behind the conflicting accounts. This method has been found invalid. If the gospels are myth, both efforts are futile. Both assume the author is recording a collection of historical facts reported to them. If instead they are intending to construct myths about Jesus, we don't expect historicity, they aren't trying to distinguish fact from fiction, so the text does not give it to us. External evidence helps, and we can't use this approach to disprove historicity, but it does limit our ability to determine historicity. Instead our focus would be to extract the mytho-symbolic meaning and intent.” 

To answer that question, it is more important to look at the background information, the history of what was happening while the scripture was being written, and what earlier scripture they would have had available to them at the time. This is the opposite of how Christianity is presented to us now, beginning with the birth of Christ and following through to later letters written about him as if he existed. It is presented that way, but in actuality, those letters were written first, by someone who never claimed to have met a living Jesus. The accounts of his actions in life, came much later by different authors.

To begin before that, at the beginning, with Genesis and one family, is to ignore all the other creation stories that were being written at the time. It ignores that there were very few who could write at all. There were no fact checkers, no media watch dogs. If you wanted to write a counter narrative to someone else's myth, you wrote another myth, using the same characters, but added a new element that expressed your values and your desired outcome.

Any phrases inserted on an ad-hoc basis that claim the writing is true are there to attach the value message to the story. These were not notes to future readers in future millenia, these were devices for the illiterate, telling them to simply remember the name of John and don't be like those who are like Thomas. The listener then could express their values through that simple formula and had no need to remember a chain of logical arguments or even a list of what the values are. If anyone asked, they could refer them back to the story.

Biblical writing has special challenges because we have so many translations, so many copies and so many differences across those copies. The slight changes made back when copies were done by hand could have been mistakes, or they could have been purposeful redactions to steer the political message in a new direction. We know that this type of changing of the narrative happened in modern times and have no reason to believe it didn't happen back then.

It doesn't help that Romans were attempting near genocide of the Jews just as the gospels were being written in the late 1st century, or as the Romans would have said, “repressing a rebellion”. They lost track of who the authors actually were and they had far fewer tools than we do now for determining truth from fiction in the writings they were left with in the early 2nd century. We can't be certain what later emperors were thinking, but just as myth writers are more concerned with message over facts, the 3rd and 4th century co-opting of the message of this tiny Jewish sect  certainly helped both the emperors and the Catholics.

The rest is history, and history that we can become increasingly more confident about as we get closer to the present. We also get better at interpreting earlier history. We find more artifacts and we determine by the lack of evidence, that some things are highly improbable. We are also very far removed from any conquering Roman emperors who might not want us asking pesky questions.

So I will leave the medieval history to the historians. I may mention it occasionally, but only to point out how a particular verse led to a later belief. I may also mention an early church father who was just as sceptical as I am about the truth of a particular passage. Primarily, I want to put myself into the mind of peasants under extremely difficult living conditions, hearing a message of hope for their people.

Milepost 100. The sermon helper that doesn't tell you what to think.

Milepost 100 is up and running

If you have any comments on the sermon helper at Milepost 100, feel free to leave them here. I'm online often.

I had planned to start the site on June 12, but writing has been going well and web development turned out pretty good. Then I started working back to get closer to the current date and I wrote the May 22nd entry. It seemed like a good place to start, both in where it comes in the liturgy and the opportunity to talk about where this journey began for me.

If you don't like that one, please read a couple more. I tried to mix my commentary so almost anyone will find something that appeals to them if they read more than one or two entries.

I have some "rules of engagement" from earlier blog posts, but I'm going to hold off linking to those just yet. See how it goes.

A Year Without Atheism

Ryan Bell just completed an amazing year “trying” to live without God. No small challenge for a pastor. Inspired by that, I thought I’d try a year without atheism. It should be a lot easier since I’m not really giving up anything or trying anything on. To be a non-atheist is not a simple matter of applying math like logic and cancelling the double negative to end up with theist. It means not identifying myself as not being something else. In other words, it’s like being most other people.

I know some atheists can get pretty touchy about the definition of that word, and you either have some degree of belief in god or you don’t, or you’re still thinking about it, but anyway, the key word here is “identify”. I think if you ask most people to say who they are, they’ll start with a familial relation like “mother” or maybe with a career, next might be geographical like their hometown or country, then a few might start mentioning religion. Of course if you ask them about religion they might go on all night, but the key here is identity. For me, I’ve been saying I’m an atheist because I want it to be clear that there is no theology out there that is believable. For this year, I’m saying I just don’t care.

I heard a story that when rabbis were asked “what is the Torah” they answered that “it is the interpretation of Torah”. In other words, the stories are there to be told and also to be discussed. They are not flat or literal or unchanging or prescriptive. Their meaning should be discovered by each generation. That’s nice. Unfortunately it’s not how many people approach scripture, but for me, what it really misses, is that Torah is one of many books exploring how human beings have come to know who they are and why they’re here. For me, the answer to “what is the Torah” is “it is reading and listening to how others experience life”. Scripture is often a rare glimpse into the thoughts of regular people dealing with larger world events . 

I’m not “spiritual but not religious”, I’m not non-spiritual either. I don’t know what the word “spiritual” means and I’m a little burnt out by people using the word even though they don’t know what it means either. I’m looking forward to year of not thinking about it, not attempting to better construct or defend a worldview.

Ryan started out his year reading up on philosophy. I won’t be starting by reading up on theology. I won’t be looking for ways to challenge myself or my thought process any more than anyone normally should. I’ve been doing that for 4 years. I’m sure some will be relieved to know that I won’t be pointing out to others how some political action or world event is related to theism.

That doesn’t mean I won’t be listening for hidden agendas in the words of elected officials. That doesn’t mean I won’t be celebrating as the rest of the United States and who knows who else embraces same-sex marriage. It doesn’t mean my ideas about the cause of terrorism will change. Those are normal things that we all should do. Atheism never informed my values so my values won’t change. Atheism didn’t tell me to use the scientific method, I’ll still use it.

It will be more like the answer to this joke: How many atheists does it take to screw in a light bulb? Just one, they just unscrew the old one and put in a new one.

Summer Series - Starting Principles

I’m going to attempt another series. It’s summer which is usually slow blogging time and this will require a little more research than usual so it might unfold slowly. It’s not so much about religion as it is “truth discovery”. Before I introduce it, I want to lay down some ground rules for myself. You can police me as you like and keep me honest.

These are some key philosophical points I discovered after asking the questions of how do we know what we know and why do we think the way we think.

  

Principle of Charity

 This is generally accepted among philosophers and was employed widely by politicians a few decades ago. Since the advent of talk radio and then 24-hour news channels it is less well known. The idea is, unless you have very good reasons, assume whomever you are listening to is not crazy. At least on the first run through, give their idea as much credibility as you can stand. Even if you strongly disagree with the person do not immediately jump to the conclusion that they are evil or insane for taking their position.

  

Evidence

David Hume said, “A weaker evidence can never destroy a stronger.” Makes sense, but as Hume found, his own advice was difficult to follow. We all complain about the constantly changing “results of the latest study.” It would be great if “latest” was equal to “stronger” and it often is, but not always. Hume was the ultimate skeptic and said, philosophically speaking, we can’t prove anything. It’s too difficult to live like that but we should always keep in mind that our senses can fool us, we might learn something tomorrow that changes what we know today, that most everyone we know knows something we don’t, and we don’t have it all figured out.

Falsification

This is a major part of modern thinking that quickly fell into our background knowledge because it is so obvious. But it took some of the great minds of the 20^th century to formulate it rigorously. It is attributed to Karl Popper. He changed common sense thinking from truth being based on proof to saying that a theory is scientific if we know what would disprove it. Nothing can be completely proven. We can only increase our certainty until it is considered as a proven fact. For something to be science you must be able to design an experiment that will give you data that will lead to more or less certainty about it. If you can’t do that, it’s just an idea.

Another way to look at this is to consider your favorite difficult Uncle or somebody in your circle of friends who can’t be argued with. Most of us know someone who has a pet theory or is constantly coming up with new ones and never seems to listen to reason. No matter what evidence you present they have a way of deflecting it. If your evidence is strong, they will fall back on a theory of how that evidence was constructed to cover-up the actual truth. How they know that truth is a mystery.

Objections?

If you are uncomfortable with these principles, to borrow from Steve Novella, if you don’t like science, which part is it you don’t like? If you live in a country with a constitution, which is most of the world, do you not like the idea of “innocent until proven guilty?” There is unevenness in how that is enforced, but it is at its core a scientific principle. Because of scientific thinking, people can no longer accuse you of witchcraft and burn you at the stake, they have to have evidence and they have to prove their case.

Science led to principles that ended slavery and improved civil rights. Science is the fairest system. It allows to you sell a book that claims you can change the weather with your mind, you just can’t claim it is scientifically proven. It allows you to teach your children that the earth is 10,000 years old, it just asks you not to call it science or to teach it in a science class or call it an alternative scientific theory. It allows you say whatever you want and if you can provide evidence it will accept it as truth.

A Handy reference

Carl Sagan developed some strategies for sniffing out good science and put them in his book The Demon Haunted World. Michael Shermer worked some of those into a shorter list. He calls it the “Baloney Detection Kit." I will be employing this list throughout the series as well.

Beginning, End, In Between

I am considering bringing Lausten North to an end. His name indicates a search that is occurring somewhere in the wisdom direction of the traditional Lakota wheel. For me, no search is ever over, but at some point, you have to call it. The beginning for me was a sense of having something to offer, but not being sure what that was. That led to questions about just what science is and just what religion is. That led to the history of the philosophy of science and how and where it first flourished and why it is still struggling and why what happened is not common knowledge. It led to walking away from church and finding more wonder and inspiration in the natural world than I expected. 

Along the way, I think I’ve asked good questions, hopefully not offered too much unsolicited advice and occasionally entertained. At this point, the path is a bit too windy. I’m thinking about straightening it out a bit, like a timeline. If you don’t hear from me, that’s where I am. 

Why I Am an Atheist

I became an atheist after becoming a Sunday School teacher and reading the Bible. I was never a very good Christian so the first thing I had to figure out was exactly what would I teach. I found some dusty old books that said we weren’t descended from monkeys and some more contemporary curricula that talked about how to prepare for the second coming. I modified those lessons while I went on searching.

One of the first things I came across was a quote from Nicholas Humphrey,

“If it is ever the case that teaching this system to children will mean that later in life they come to hold beliefs that, were they in fact to have had access to alternatives, they would most likely not have chosen for themselves, then it is morally wrong of whoever presumes to impose this system.”

This really narrowed down what I could do. I found some history, some ethics and I was allowed to say that the Noah story was mythology, so I got by. Some days I put the Bible aside and talked about Ghandi or Martin Luther King Jr. One thing I could not get around was the story of how Jesus died for us. No matter how you word it, it involves some sort of miracle. If you change it to a story of a guy who stood for peace and justice, then it is no longer a Christian story.

What I saw when I got down to that one story, is that we don’t need the separate discipline. You can call it religion or theology, we just don’t need it. The discipline of history has informed us who wrote the scriptures and who decided which are included in the Bible. We have archaeology to tell us what was happening in the Levant while the scriptures were being written. We have science to explain rainbows and tell us what food is healthy and understand homosexuality.

A truce was made between religion and science some 700 years ago. William of Ockham said any man can recognize patterns and try to understand nature, but only the church can comment on the miracles of God. This allowed science to continue to be taught in a religious world. But now we live in a scientific world. In most of the world, the church has been tamed. The church is now fighting to maintain sway over what science can or cannot comment on rather than science fighting to make any comment at all.

The final question was the question of morality. I knew science was not informing me on that but religion was failing too. What I found were many ideologies and political processes that have been in play for centuries to inform us of how best to live harmoniously. None of them has proven perfectly successful. A few have done better than religions. Religion only plays a supportive role in this process and often it has backed the wrong horse.

All religion has left for me is community. It is a club. I suspect that this too shall pass. Every purpose that it once served or currently claims to serve is better served by another discipline. No matter how much it cleans itself up, dresses itself up with modern trappings, acknowledges its crimes and invites in new data, it is just not necessary. 

2012 Kickoff

Over the course of the last several years, I have searched for a perspective on ancient scriptures that could make sense. I discovered there are 30,000 perspectives on Christianity including something called The Emerging Church. I found an activist in my area who says that every church should be a peace church. For Christmas, I got a few books that have been on my list for a while, one of them says Everything Must Change. While waiting to unwrap them, I came across a tattoed, sarcastic Lutheran.

When I tired of looking for new leaders, I looked into more details about the old and dead people they were referencing, and found there was not much new under the sun. The recent authors, writers and leaders have brought some fresh language, some challenges that are more entertaining than the typical Sunday Sermon and, although it can’t proven, hopefully they have inspired some young people to participate in a world that would be happy to have them be disenfranchised consumers of a prepackaged culture. But the core message only changes slightly in flavor, not substance, and the substance is still paper thin.

Seeing young people inspired is an inspiration in itself. But it is not enough. Religion has been on the skids for 500 years. Warmed over versions of it have shown its amazing staying power but they don’t indicate real change. The latest techno hip-hop networked version is not emerging as anything that will stand out when this millennium is reviewed.

As I prefer concrete examples, take a closer look at the Sarcastic Lutheran’s sermon about Jesus walking on water and inspiring Peter to have faith and do the same.

The new packaging starts with the ripping of the old interpretation of the parable. And I agree completely with her assessment that simply telling someone to have faith doesn’t accomplish much. This begs the question of why she is there preaching on that very story, and she addresses that directly. She answers that God’s story speaks to us better than any other story. She only offers this as an assertion then moves on to suggesting ways to find yourself in the story. This is slightly better than just telling you what a sinner you are or who you should be, but she gets to the “shoulds” soon enough.

She moves on to her new and improved insight for the parable. She switches from you wanting to go walk on the water, to seeing that Jesus is coming to you. I see a room of twenty somethings leaning forward as Nadia dances through that first half of the sermon, then slumping back, some showing disappointment, some looking thoughtful as they try to figure out what the message was. Perhaps they discuss it over a macchiatto, or send a tweet, “Jesus walks on the water towards me #parable”. Hopefully they feel the sense of community as they clean up the park or visit the nursing home.

  

On to Christmas Day

When I unwrapped my books, I couldn’t decide on just one so I had to skim several. I found that Brian McLaren’s title “Everything Must Change” came from a Burundi woman living in Rwanda. He had met her while there on a mission trip just after the war in that country. They had been discussing the “essential” message of Jesus. The woman was stunned by this discussion and realized,

“I see that it is about changing this world, not just escaping it and retreating into our churches. If Jesus’ message of the Kingdom of God is true, then everything must change. Everything must change.”

He goes on in the book to explain how he went through a personal conversion, from wanting to organize a church with celebrations and support groups to becoming a participant in working on global problems. I was attracted to the book because I agree that everything must change, or it is unlikely that anything resembling our current civilization will survive. What I doubt the book will address is why the presupposition of “If Jesus’ message…” is needed.

And Into the New Year

One of the other books I got comes a little closer to answering that. This one has been on my list for a long time. It contains a discussion of the original interpreter of The Parable of the Talents that inspired this blog. It is a rare look at the first century using historical analysis, rather than a theological one. There are attempts at this that claim to use historical analysis and the author, William Herzog, addresses them in his Introduction. He realized that previous interpreters started with an idea of what Jesus’ ministry was then fit the interpretation of the parables into that framework.

This would be expected in theology. There is an overriding theme that Jesus came to die for our sins and everything has to fit into that. An historical analysis can’t make such an assumption, or even assume that Jesus was thinking it when he spoke. In fact, an historical analysis can’t even assume that Jesus was an actual person that ever walked on this earth. The book does not go that far.

The sub-title of the book is “Jesus as Pedagogue of the Oppressed”, and that is the assumption, the hypothesis, that he attempts to test against the analysis of the parables. He is selective of scripture and admits that it will not work on all scripture. He acknowledges the possibility that scripture may not always accurately reflect the original teachings either by misrepresentation from the time they were written or the introduction of later errors. I have only just started the book, but as yet I don’t see any hint that he would consider Jesus was a made up character.

So his historiography may not be perfect, but I am not aware of any similar application to this particular subject. With the increasingly disappointing results from theology in a world in need of teachers, it is long overdue. 

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

Read Me First (Parable of the Talents)

Okay, going a little long this time, you may just want to read the story before the story, or skip this one entirely, depending on what you’re looking for. I need to do this, because most of what else I have to say does not have much weight without it. I often hear statements like, “the answers are in the Bible, just read it” or “the Bible is just a bunch of fairy tales”, but rarely do I hear people backing either of those up. I could just take a few of the pretty verses out of my favorite sections, the ones that talk about caring for each other and all that nice stuff, but that would just open up the possibility of finding contradictions to those in another part.

Instead I will be taking a well known parable, one that I think is often misquoted. It can be misquoted to support a right-wing agenda or to support those who say God is angry and vengeful. My interpretation supports people working together, and I will attempt to show that it is what Jesus, or whoever wrote it down, was trying to say. I will also show why it is important to understand the context of the parable and to know a couple things about how to interpret scripture. You can skip down to it, or first read the story of how I came to have this understanding.

The story of the story

In my search for understanding, I have taken what I consider rare opportunities to find new points of view. When something passed my way called “Wild Christ”, I jumped at it. It was a Men’s spiritual retreat, just a weekend, put on by a couple of musicians I have become familiar with. I liked the way they blended the new and the old and the description of the teacher that would be there sounded very interesting. I was not disappointed.

We talked about the story of the loaves and fishes, but not in some dry fashion, not just the story of sharing and giving, but the whole context of what the people in the story must have been feeling. Look at the story and notice what comes just before. Their friend, the one that begins as the leader in two of the gospels, John the Baptist, is beheaded. This is why they all end up in the wilderness with very little on them. They were in deep grief. David brought this to life in a very moving way.

Later we covered another well known story, the Parable of the Talents. I will cover more details in a minute. Basically a rich man gives his “slaves” some money, called talents, and some of them use it to make money, but one doesn’t. He calls the master wicked, and the master calls him lazy. In many churches, when this comes around on the lectionary, the parishioners are handed 10 or 20 dollar bills and told to do something with it. You may have heard, “for to those whom much is given, much is expected”. Not all churches are comfortable with the money part, so they take the word “talent” and use it in its modern sense and ask, “What are you doing with the talents that God gives you?”

This is more or less the interpretation that David taught. After all the twists that had been added to the stories and Bible passages we discussed throughout the weekend, I sat there expecting another one. I kept looking back at my Bible and trying to find something that came just before it or right after it, or some subtle phrasing that David was about to point out. He didn’t. As he started to summarize what I felt was a capitalist interpretation, I finally spoke up. I knew there was something about usury laws that didn’t fit. I didn’t feel that the master in this story was an analogy for God. Unfortunately I couldn’t quite formulate or back up what I was feeling, so I just came across as negative. David was very gracious and said, “Well, okay, you have a different opinion.”

When I got back home, I did what I always do when I fail to make my point, I Googled. I found the perfect sermon, in fact it was titled with some person’s name “got it wrong”. The sermon talked about the person who had called the Parable of the Talents the capitalist parable, and he corrected him. I include some of my search results at the end.

The Parable of the Talents

We have a strange one here. This master is praising his slaves for doing well with his money, except one that is sent to the outer darkness. There are several key parts that I’ll need to cover to make this clear.

To start, it says, “Again, it will be like”. This may sound like another “The kingdom of heaven is like” parable, but note he is talking about the end times, and this comes near the end of his ministry, so what is the “it” that “it will be like”? Then there is this master handing talents to his slaves. A talent was a lot of money FYI, a few years wages. I don’t want to go off on a tangent about slaves, but this is not the type of slavery that Europeans imposed on Africa. He does not have them in chains, in fact they go off and do some unspecified business dealings with the money/talents. The people Jesus was talking to were mostly slaves, so he is telling a story they can relate to.

An important note on doing business, the Judean culture of the time valued stability. People hearing this story would see the first two slaves, who had parlayed the money into double its value, as not good. We, as modern readers, raised in a capitalist society, would skip right by that, thinking they had done a good job. This is why I recommend studying the Bible in community. By in community, I don’t mean finding someone who can tell you what it means and you just accept it.

In a group, you’re more likely to have someone who would know about the history of economic theories and might say, “Hey wait a minute, what would someone be doing preaching capitalism in ancient Rome? What do we think is going to happen here, are the slaves going to go off and start amazon.com or something? They’re still slaves.” Better yet, you can divide up the work of research. Each week someone could volunteer to find three or four interpretations of a passage and your group could discuss the merits of each. But I digress.

Now we come to our poor, one talent, third slave. He runs off and buries his talent. Why did he do that? The next line gives the answer, he says, “you are a hard man, so I was afraid” Those who want to twist this parable in to an advertisement for something that won’t even begin to be thought of for 1,000 years need to disbelieve this slave. I see no reason for that. I don’t see any support for the master being an analogy for God or Heaven, he is not acting in a manner consistent with either. Nowhere else in the Bible does God say the way to salvation is to get a job, make money off someone else’s money and be pleased with their praise, or to put your money in the bank and collect interest. In fact usury is banned.

Here are a couple passages on that, there are many others
Exodus 22: 24-25
Proverbs 28:8

On the other hand, there is nothing wrong with work. I’m all for everyone using all of their abilities. My life is much better when, at the end of the day, I feel used up, tired, exhausted from a job well done. I can’t really argue with the idea that if you have talent, in the modern sense of talent, you should use it. I just don’t think that is what this parable is about.

This is the same problem with the libertarian idea that welfare encourages laziness. I agree that people should pull themselves up by their own bootstraps and use their God-given abilities to improve their situation. I just don’t think welfare is designed with those people in mind. Not everyone is able to do that, especially if you are only 12 years old, which a lot of people benefiting from welfare are. Most people get off government assistance within two years. There are people who abuse the system, but last I checked it accounted for 2% of the cost.

There I go on politics again, when I’m supposedly talking about religion. I am great fun at parties. Another problem I have with the interpretation of the master in this parable as God is the punishment meted out for our friend slave number 3. I often see this quoted by people who are digging through the Bible looking for quotes to prove that God is mean and vengeful. If you go with Jesus praising those who put their talents to good use, you have to deal with what he does to the one who doesn’t. He is cast into the outer darkness. You need to go out into the desert on a moonless night with no flashlight to really know what that means. Actually, please don’t do that if you don’t know what you’re doing.

So, what is the lesson here? I should note that in a parable, it is usually the third person in the groups of three that carries the lesson. Those listening to the story can relate to the third slave. They are familiar with wicked masters and outer darkness, and with a little imagination and an understanding of the culture and the times, now we are too. Looking back to the parables just before this one, you can find that Jesus is talking about the end times. Looking ahead, you can see that this is the end of his ministry and the beginning of the crucifixion story.

By the way, if you aren’t familiar with wicked masters, lucky you. Personally, I have worked for two companies that went bankrupt. In both cases the people who ran the company seemed to walk away with plenty of cash. I worked for William McGuire at United Healthcare, you can Google him and see what his sentence was. I just heard Elizabeth Edwards on The Daily Show talking about how at one time, 1 of every $700 dollars spent on health care went to pay him. I am very familiar with wicked masters. If you are not, I’m happy for you, but be aware. I’m sure many people at Enron or Washington Mutual thought their bosses were pretty smart at one time.

I think Jesus is preparing his followers for what is about to come. Crucifying did not end with Jesus, in fact it got a lot worse. The assault by Rome on Jews and their new sect of Christ followers increased, ending with the destruction of the temple in A.D. 70. Those who are willing to point out that their masters are wicked will not necessarily be rewarded in this lifetime, or at least not soon. A parable can’t be interpreted in isolation, as I often see this one being interpreted. It may seem that the third slave is being punished, but who is doing the punishing, and how does Jesus normally treat the outcasts? Normally he welcomes them as followers.

It took 100 years or more to turn the death of Jesus in to a story with a happy ending. Churches today tend to avoid the ugly truth of how unhappy that time was. In Acts chapter 7, the book immediately following the gospels, a guy named Stephen is killed in cold blood just for recounting the Bible. The Apostle Paul is imprisoned and killed for his preaching. The early churches have problems of their own and grapple with spiritual questions. It is unfortunate that this is skipped, because it leads us to believe that all we need to do is accept that Christ died for us and everything will be okay. That’s not what happened 2,000 years ago.

The historicity of the crucifixion, or the reality of the resurrection is not something I’m going to debate. I’m saying, to determine if the Bible is some form of a possible truth, or even just a possible guide for how to build a loving community, read carefully what comes after the resurrection. People didn’t go have a ham dinner and hide colored eggs. People had to work hard and use their talents to build a community that had never existed before. That work is not done.

Some interpretations for comparison
The one I found after the weekend
Similar, with some differences
A story of students working through it

What's a Religious Atheist?

I hope you enjoy the song, it expresses some of what I'll be trying to say.

As for the name "Religious Atheism", I was trying to come up with something that said that I valued church and community and reading of the ancient texts with others, and also that I didn’t have a particular belief that I was trying to force on anyone. I do have beliefs, but they change often and are difficult to express, I don’t like to write them down except in my personal journals. It’s not that I have trouble making a decision it’s that I don’t know everything, and as I learn, I change my mind.

After coming up with the idea for the name, I immediately Googled it to see if anyone else had. I found some of the best web sites I have seen regarding religion. This one is a good definition, although I do not attend Unitarian services.

There is already a “religious atheist” blog by some guy in Australia. I hope I make a few more posts than this guy.

I think the most important thing I was trying to say with the title is to keep exploring. My explorations probably started somewhere around the time my father told me that I should leave a room better than I found it. That has grown into a much larger sense of responsibility. I don’t think we need to spend so much time arguing about whose religion is better, or whose is right. Not if we’re going to get any of the work done that those religions say need to be done.

It doesn’t matter if you believe in a 6 day creation or that aliens built the pyramids or in nothing in between. Anyone can read Matthew 26:31-45 and agree that the guy in the story is saying it is a good idea to feed the hungry and care for the sick. What I see is too much talk about the parts where there is disagreement, the parts about separation and the devil. I hope to do something different here.

Some other interesting sites I have found in my Googling travels are:

The Bible Geek, Robert M. Price, a noted scholar and former priest. Now he writes books that say Jesus never existed. He is a lot of fun, he does Monty Python voices sometimes when speaking, and uses Batman as an analogy. I have found many other sites claiming there is no Jesus, such as the movie Zeitgeist but I find their logic lacking, and their angry tone too much to bother with. When I dig deeper into their references, I find less information. Digging deeper into Robert’s works, I have not come to these dead ends.

By the way, if you watch the Zeitgeist movie, please also check out, the response, especially the parts where he quotes the movie and responds to them, then come back for more details unfolding here. I will discuss the mystery religions and pros and cons of both sides of this discussion.

I have only found a few articles, but I am intrigued by this David James Duncan guy.

I have already mentioned Karen Armstrong, I'll be following her work.

John Shelby Spong has been a major inspiration of late.

I will occasionally post a sermon by myself or others if I think it is one that expresses something that is not easily found somewhere else. And some musical references too, can’t have a sermon without a song.