Self Promotion

This is me, on a podcast. It's a guy in Duluth who invited me via the Lake Superior Freethinkers facebook page. His "topic of the month" was "The Meaning of Life". I give a couple answers, one from Dan Fincke, one from Dan Barker that the question is backwards. Aidin does some good probing in to my own journey. It's actually not that bad.

Topic a Month Podcast

I didn't quite get to an expression of my main theme, so added this in the comments afterward:

To tie this all together, the reason for caring for others is that others cared for us. As we expand who we help, who we educate, more people will be able to use their skills effectively and find their best fit in the world. As we have done this, for example, women have become more empowered, giving them the right to control their own reproductive choices. So, counter-intuitively, helping people who are having lots of babies results in decreasing population.

As people see a world of hope, where their children will survive and help each other, they don't see the need to have lots of children. Educating each other, empowering each other, leads to people making better choices for leadership, instead of feeling the need to join a paramilitary group and tear down governments.

We can do this on the world scale, bringing appropriate technology where it is needed, as well as across the table from each other, listening intently, and teaching instead of fighting.

Pray

If you are trying to follow the lectionary series in order, I just skipped a few weeks. I will have a website up in the next couple months that follows the schedule.

Hosea

This week's text

Explanation of the series

For Old Testament help, I frequently turn to John C. Holbert. This week, he lays it out pretty clearly. After discussing the odd behaviors of other prophets, he says, “…, but the use of a woman of the evening for an object lesson is quite something else. For those of us who are feminists—and I hope all you readers consider yourselves feminists, too—it is deeply offensive to use a woman as a metaphor for human idolatry. Such literary effects do nothing but demean women and hold men up for the crude and misogynist beasts that they too often are.”

So, yes, this is saying what you think it is on the first read. We don't get any details about just what they did wrong here, but God is obviously fed up with it. Depending on where you want to go with your sermon, you may need to do some more research into the context.

The names obviously have some symbolic meaning, so I'll cover those quickly. “Jezreel” is “God Sows”, in this case it will the bad kind of sowing. “Lo-ruhamah” is “not pitied”, that's followed by God's words about not pitying Israel. “Lo-ammi” is “not my people”. God is going back on his promise that Israel is his chosen people. It does get better, but scholars speculate that the verses about having pity on the house of Judah and how things are going to turn around, were added later, much in the way modern preachers would like to turn this whole passage around and make it something it's not.

Psalm

The Psalm goes perfectly with the Hosea passage. It accepts the idea that God can be vengeful and angry if he wants. It's saying its our job to let him know we are here for him and that we are certain he has a plan that we can all trust.

Colossians

I'm spending extra time on the parable this week, so I'm going to focus on only one aspect of the New Testament reading.

2:8 See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the universe, and not according to Christ.

Putting “philosophy” and “empty deceit” next to each other like that implies philosophy is deceitful. Bill O'Reilly now says Christianity IS a philosophy, so I guess he sees it different. Neither Bill nor the Bible discuss the details of this. Greek philosophy would have been known, certainly in the 1^st century, although we can't know how well versed in it the authors of the Bible were. There is no direct philosophical debate in the Bible. Here it is described as “according to human tradition”, so they are acknowledging that there is a distinction between Biblical teachings and some sort of secular school of thought. It also says, “elemental spirits of the universe”.

Rather than try to understand the mind of a 1^st century Palestinian who couldn't have heard of the word “science” since it hadn't been invented yet, I'll just make an observation. While Protestants and Catholics were killing each other for the right to worship differently, while thousands of new denominations were being created because new information about the Bible was coming to light and as people began to understand how the brain worked and that mental illness was not demon possession, we were also discovering that we are a small planet on the edge of a vast galaxy with galactic neighbors and all that took billions of years to come into being. We are gaining this knowledge so fast, the language is not keeping up. We are going to have to come up with a new word for “universe”. It's supposed to mean all that exists, but we are finding there is something before time and outside the boundaries of everything we know.

These discoveries, that the very fabric of our being was cooked in the first stars then blown apart only to come back together to form more stars and planets and atmospheres and creatures that could then reflect on all of this and ponder the mystery of it and experiment against that universe to discover why it is here and why we are here, none of this is covered in any part of the Bible or in any theology. We have discovered where we came from and evolution gave us a theory of how we came to care about each other. We found out that we were not put here as stewards of someone's creation with some unknown purpose, instead we are completely interconnected to that creation. We are part of its cycles on a biological level and if you get down to the smallest physical level, we are exchanging particles with everything around us. It is difficult to even find the boundaries.

These are profound discoveries that have altered the relationship of human beings to the planet, but religion refuses to integrate them. A few tepid attempts are made and they usually involve getting the science wrong. The Pope closed the universities in 1277 because he was afraid of anyone attempting to reach God using reason. If they had succeeded, why would we need a Pope, and if they failed, people would have to choose between thinking for themselves or not. He had to reopen the schools, but the world had already begun to move on.

There are references in this passage to pagan worship and other warnings to stay away from other religions. One of the few phrases I find agreeable is the one about not getting “puffed up”. That's wrong even if you happen to be technically correct. But I can't salvage much else from this passage. If someone has found a way to integrate all of our modern knowledge into their services, I would love to hear about it.

Luke

This passage starts with the Lord's Prayer, then tells us the parable of the Friend at Midnight, then tells us more about prayer. A basic reading might just see it as a suggestion to pray often. I will spend a little extra time on this parable because it is included in William R. Herzog III's Parables as Subversive Speech. This is a rare book that covers many modern interpretations and offers conclusions based on all data available to the modern reader. It considers the parables in light of Paulo Freire's work, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. It covers 9 parables, and is an invaluable tool for anyone serious about Bible study. Thankfully, it also accessible to the non-scholar.

Herzog spends 11 pages on this passage, going into great detail on the Greek word anaideian, which appears in verse 8 as “persistence” or possibly “importunity” in some translations. Translators have had trouble determining if this applies to the neighbor being awakened, or the friend at the door. Applied the wrong way, it can appear that Jesus is portraying God as the neighbor, who is reluctant to bother with the petitioner at his door. This could be a parable about being persistent with your prayers, something Luke definitely advocates.

To unravel this, Herzog spends almost a page just on how the community that Jesus is preaching to would handle its bread making; small loaves or large, community oven or not, everyone baking on Monday or a system of rotation. If this is not interesting to you, serious Bible study may not be your thing. If you want to have “our daily bread” mean anything other than a vague analogy to eating, these are important details.

Herzog doesn't just jump around wildly speculating, he sights theological, archaeological and textual evidence and how they support the different interpretations they have published. Without this information, we would be left trying to apply this story to our own experience. Would you even answer the door at midnight, even if it was a friend? Do you expect friends to make appointments? This is a family with children, is the friend being inconsiderate? Almost every word needs to be carefully considered to get the correct interpretation.

Herzog considers one theologian that he, and many others, think got it wrong. Herzog only gives us the name Levison, who says anaideian should be applied to the sleeping neighbor. If it doesn't it would lead to the view that prayer is nothing more than badgering God into submission. Levison needed to translate the word to “strengthen” to make this work. Herzog calls this “theological slight of hand”.

Preachers often do this, but rarely will they tell you they are doing it. Your only clue will be if you have not heard it before. If you haven't, you can check with your favorite source or a more familiar preacher, but even then, you are limiting your sources. This is the problem with theology, there is nowhere you can go to get a consensus answer. There is no code book like there is for electricians. It's not a science where some things are still speculation and others are well established theories based on empirical evidence, and data that has been verified as factual after repeated experimentation. This citing of many sources and discussing them is what makes a work like Herzog's so valuable.

To help us understand the irony in this parable, Herzog spends a few pages on the idea of “The Moral Economy of the Peasant”. They had to deal with the reality of a subsistence lifestyle, where they felt that any gain of their own was done at the expense of their neighbors. They felt powerless to deal with the ways they were being exploited, so they looked for how those means resulted in something left over for them. It is hard to understand for anyone living in a society where much is provided. They knew there was an elite status that they could never obtain, but they expected those elites to draw a moral line at limiting their exploitation in a way that left them with their subsistence living.

In this system, reciprocity was a norm. You helped others when they needed it and they understood the obligation to reciprocate. Also important, as was discussed two weeks ago earlier in this same chapter, there was a tradition of itinerant preaching. This tradition of receiving a traveler is included in the Holiness Code of Leviticus. This is not simple utilitarianism. It is friendships developed to alleviate the increasing pressures of those elite patrons. This act of giving mere sustenance, bread, is a participation in the hospitality of Abraham. As Herzog says, “every time they place their meager resources at the disposal of the village, they participate in some small way in the continual redistribution of wealth for the sake of protecting and caring for the vulnerable, as envisioned in the Torah.”

I've left out a lot of the details, but Herzog concludes that the parable is breaking a boundary. Modern readers can recognize this, but they have a very different set of boundaries. Boundaries were set by the Torah in 1^st century Palestine, but the elites had rewritten those boundaries with an oral Torah. They used that to continue to pursue their acquisitive greed at the expense of peasants and rural poor and still be Torah-clean. To them, extending hospitality to a stranger was shameless, using the “importunity” interpretation of that difficult Greek word. They were fools.

The parable delivers the punchline in verse 8 with irony. Jesus turns that judgment into an affirmation of village hospitality. By doing so, they created a messianic banquet, making a mockery of the lavish banquets of the elite that were done to promote themselves, not the community. This was a system of justice by the impure that those practicing the purity laws couldn't comprehend. The villagers didn't cave in to the desire to hoard and accumulate. This ordinary action of sharing bread was no small matter. 

Science of Peace

I'd like to make two observations that make a great difference in my worldview.

We are star stuff and we care about each other.

The second one is simpler, but relies on the first. I’m going to accept that we care about each other as truth without providing an explanation because the explanation is complicated and relies on assumptions and is ultimately un-provable. Call it an assertion if you want, but I call it an observation because I observe it in myself when I see any kind of story from a commercial designed to tug at my emotions to any of the great and timeless theatrical presentations or novels you might want to name.

It is not necessary to explain it, because “it” explains our mere existence. The complex organisms that we are don’t survive very well without a lot of nurturing. The first few years are literally impossible and to be anything other than an equal to any other animal in the kingdom takes several more years of attention and intervention of the natural tendencies we have to get ourselves into trouble. Anyone who has engaged in the simplest conversation with a child, who asks “why”, knows how frustrating it can be to deal with all those parts of the brain left over from earlier stages of our evolution. At some point in that conversation the adult starts to wonder why they are bothering to continue with it.

It can be logically concluded that we would not exist if we didn’t care about each other on some level that is so basic we can’t explain it with logic. At best, we would be a minor species, slightly more adaptable than others, a little better at hunting, but still vulnerable to the larger carnivores and always vulnerable to natural disasters and just as unaware of the age of the universe or its future as any other animal. We certainly would not have vehicles running on fuels or universities or grain storage or an understanding of invisible things that can poison our water. Life would be idyllic and without worries part of the time for some and a living hell for others the rest of the time. Large populations would disappear and no one would know why or for that matter, would have ever known about them it all.

We can despair in the fact that there are people who live in horrid conditions, that despite our knowledge of the universe and our ability to affect our environment, we still allow that to happen, or we can notice that we are the ones who care. We can feel small against a vast and mostly inhospitable cosmos circling above at speeds we can ‘t comprehend or we can feel big enough to do something for someone on the other side of this one little planet. We can get whatever sense of satisfaction that might bring even if that feeling is brief and only makes us more aware of the enormity of the problems that there are to solve. We can be thankful that we get to feel at all, that we have the luxury of grieving for another while we sip our coffee before heading off to whatever meaningless work we have to do for the day.

It is those moments, whether they are spent alone or with others who feel the same that bring the meaning to those day to day tasks. If you are composing a sonnet to rival Shakespeare or sending out a memo about some obligatory training session, your words, your expression of who you are, is fleeting. Very few people are remembered beyond a century and even those are not preserved well. It’s unfortunate that we hold those memorable moments in history above the moments that we have with each other. It is those moments with each other that build the foundations that give us the reason to have a history in the first place.

Civilization did not begin with some great person telling us to care for our children. It did not begin with someone providing a list of rules to live by and the need to enforce those rules because people did not understand that they needed to care about each other. By time we started writing down rules, we had been raising families and defending our way of life against others for a long time. We had run into the problem of peace through strength a long time before that. We developed any number of philosophies and rituals to deal with it and we continue to muddle through the problem today.

By any measure, by the number of weapons we possess, the number of people experiencing chronic starvation, the quality of our leaders or the number of safe neighborhoods in the world, we are still a caring and peaceful creature. We have managed to not blow ourselves up and to rebuild after disasters, human caused or otherwise. I could try to recreate one of the great observations by Sagan or Neil Degrasse Tyson about how amazing it is that we are here and can reflect back on what it took for us to be here, but they do it better, and it takes me too far distant from the things that actually matter to me and keep me connected to the ground that is a part of that larger thing.

It is enough to be able to look back on my own ancestry, up to the point that I can no longer name them, and then look at where they came from, the culture, the environment, everything that was needed to keep them alive, and see it is exactly the same things I need. And those things are pretty close to what every other living thing on the planet needs. And to see the larger forces like gravity and energy from the sun are needed just to hold the planet together and provide a place for life to get the whole thing going. If all of those resulted in me, and I’m occasionally able to feel happy about that and connected to it, that’s enough for me to want to figure out what I can do to keep it all going.

That’s enough for me to use that simple ability of reflecting on whatever is around me. To look up at the stars and wonder how they got there and if there is another creature somewhere looking at my home star. To see an old man walking with a child and be amazed at the years it took to create that moment. To then apply every bit of data I know and every bit of reason I have to determine what I can do right now to continue to create moments like that in the future. If those moments are fleeting, if they are just moments, that doesn't bother me. I still have those moments and we still have each other.

We are all related

Christmas is a time when generations come together. They get packed into one room and inevitably one of the older ones, perhaps the oldest one, has some story to tell or something they want to show one of the younger ones. This has all the potential for being a completely useless interaction, something that is suffered through, not just by the two who are actually participating in it but even those around them, those who have to hear it. There is a way to make this worthwhile, and, yes, I’m writing a story about how to save Christmas.

This year, my wife made ornaments. She learned how to do it with friends. It involved a Styrofoam ball and fabric and pins and it’s very intricate and she is very precise and she loves doing it and she loves doing it well. She sent them off to my aunts and uncles and to hers’ and more importantly to the children and grandchildren of some of those relations. Hopefully they see the significance of them, but odds are they won’t.  And hopefully we get that chance one day to visit them during the holidays and that ornament will be out and we’ll talk about it, rather than the weather or whatever horrible news is going on.

And somewhere in there, some tiny bit of wisdom will be shared. It will sound trite or canned at the time, but many Christmases later, that young person will be the old one, and they’ll be worried about that younger generation and how they don’t look things up on the internet anymore, or that they don’t know what it took to end poverty and how they don’t appreciate it and they’ll think “kids today…”, and they’ll try to figure out a story to tell and they won’t have one that is any better than the one about making Christmas ornaments.

It might be a different story about something else, about making soup and how all the ingredients mix to make it just right or something. It doesn’t matter because you can’t explain being old. You can’t explain what it means to earn your gray hair or your wrinkled skin. What matters is that those feelings, those intentions, were put into the project, the recipe or the story. You don’t need to know the whole story to see when that kind of care has gone into making something.

You’re going to get that gray hair and wrinkled skin either way, so you might as well earn it, but you’re not going to know what goes into getting them until you have them. Sorry, young people, your role in this is not that exciting. You get to do all those exciting things that young people do together, those things that would end up with a broken hip for us. Listening to grandma on Christmas is probably not on the top of your list. So, here’s the secret, that grandma had a whole bunch of Christmases before you were even born.

So, when she’s showing you something that doesn’t seem that interesting and telling that lame story, she’s looking at you and she doesn’t just see your nose and your hair. She sees your mother’s face and hears your uncle’s voice coming from you and she remembers a smell from some far off kitchen and hears an owl in the woods and she sees a long horizon across a windswept plain. It’s all related. We are all related. The only way to discover that is to live long enough and be conscious enough and to notice it while it’s happening. You can watch a movie, or sit there with your headphones on listening to music, but those are storytellers too and they are trying to get out the same kind of messages. For me, there is no better way to hear a story than from someone close to you.

Bart Campolo

Hemat Mehta interviews Bart Campolo 

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

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

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

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

It keeps getting better from there. See for yourself. 

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

Prayer Breakfast

I don’t usually do current events, but this Prayer Breakfast thing has got my knickers in a knot and I’m not seeing the kind of commentary on it that I think should be out there. There's a link to the video of the speech if you follow the Christian Science Monitor below. I’m not going to comment on anything that came out of “Right Wing Watch” or Breitbart or any other such extreme news sources. I’m mostly disappointed in the response by news sources that are still widely read and are supposed to be neutral. I’m disappointed too in the lack of response by those further left, who have mostly focused on the over the top response of the right, missing the actual message from the nation’s leader.

If you missed this news, here is the line that everyone is talking about. Taken by itself it could be critiqued in many ways. Taken in context, where he spends a few minutes talking about people misusing theology, then goes on to discuss the value of being humble in the face of violence and anger, it makes much more sense:

“Lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.”

I think these messages getting misunderstood is a symptom of the misplacement of the religion desk in media in general. It is off to the side, expected to come up with something around Christmas and Easter, but not much else. People who are not well versed on the topic are left to comment on it and we get a lot of bad information. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and hope they are not purposely giving us misinformation. In a time of war with nations and groups that justify their actions with religion, I think we need reporters who better understand the background.

Case in point, Chuck Todd on Meet the Press lauded Jon Meachem, his guest to start off the subject of the Prayer Breakfast speech. Chuck said if anybody knew this subject, Meachem did. They focused on the words “Crusades” and a little on “slavery”, and missed most of the rest of the speech. Chuck is supposed to talk politics, so I’ll give him a pass, but Meachem, a historian said, “Christianity has reformed itself”. That is inexcusable.

You can read my other blogs on that topic, as well as many others, or you can simply ask when did that happen? Everyone is tripping over themselves to point out the Crusades were 700 years ago, but I don’t remember them ending with a declaration that they were wrong. Nor did the Catholics elect reformists Popes when they had the chance in the years preceding Calvin and Luther. That’s why we call it the PROTESTANT reformation. And those two guys weren’t the most peaceful either.

If you think the reformation was some kind of peaceful transition of power, ask an Anabaptist. Their protests and demands for rights led to 100 years of war. Meanwhile people were heading off to America to escape religious oppression. Their progeny saw the contradiction of escaping persecution but having no problem with slavery in 1688.  It still took 200 more years and a Civil War to get actual legislation and if you think that settled it, read a book.

If you think the bad feelings ended in the 17^th century, ask your grandmother about how big of a deal it was for Catholics to marry non-Catholics and ask yourself if you’d want your sister to marry an atheist. Or look at more recent events. In Vatican II, the church finally made some truly liberal declarations, that was 1963. They’ve done nothing but backtrack since, except a few like Oscar Romero, a priest who spoke for peace against right-wing violence in his country. He was gunned down in 1980. The military groups that did it got funding from the US and the Vatican was conveniently quiet about it until just a couple weeks ago.

Most states in the US had statements about official religions in their original constitutions. People didn’t come here and proclaim they want all faiths to be considered equal, they came here to start local governments with their religion as the basis and they wanted the federal government to stay out of it. The power of Kings to tell people how to worship was taken away from them by the people. Then, in the US, those state constitutional laws were declared invalid by the Supreme Court, and there are people alive today who are still not happy about it. So what does it mean that “Christianity reformed itself”?

But my litany here should not convince anyone. I could easily be missing or ignoring or deliberately hiding some history where religious leaders met and agreed to leave each other’s flocks alone. There could be speeches out there where religious leaders tell politicians not to mention their God in a speech about war. There could be someone other than Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hahn who said you can do my practices or not, it’s okay with him. There could be books co-authored by Imams and Rabbis discussing their mutual desire for peace and how both of their scriptures support it. Please link to them in the comments.

And please don’t list some obscure quote from Bonheoffer or Chrysostom or Erasmus. These people were oppressed in their time, just like Martin Luther King was in ours. Of course there were always dissenting voices speaking out against the violence and corruption in the church. That’s because there has always been violence and corruption in the church. It was the enacting of laws that tamed religion. Laws against burning people at the stake, the repeal of apostasy laws, laws requiring people to use doctors for their children not just prayer, the whole concept of a nation as opposed to a monarchy ordained by God reformed Christianity, not itself.

Now that I’ve got that out of the way, what can we find in the press about this?

One of the few shining examples is PatheosProgressive Secular Humanist blog. It headlined with Obama’s mention of the right of every person to practice no faith at all and also covered the range of his comments. 

On the opposite end of the spectrum Bloomberg.com headlined: “Obama Trolls Prayer Breakfast” They included a full quote from Charles Krauthammer of Fox News, "What’s important is what’s happening now, Christianity no longer goes on Crusades, and it gave up the Inquisition a while ago. The Book of Joshua is knee deep in blood; that story is over too. The story of today, of our generation, is the fact that the overwhelming volume of the violence and the barbarism that we are seeing in the world, from Nigeria, to Paris, all the way to Pakistan, and even to the Philippines, the island of Mindanao in the Philippines, is coming from one source, and that’s from inside Islam."

It also quotes Rick Santorum who claimed Christians led abolition, Civil Rights and charity groups, and then he twists Obama’s words, saying he meant Christians “cannot stand up against” ISIS.

Not only does Krauthammer admit the Bible is violent then immediately dismiss it as irrelevant, he dismisses all the violence done by nations with Protestant leaders in the recent decades as if it has nothing to do with their religious upbringing or nothing to do with the wars and protests we are currently experiencing. Santorum tries to put words in Obama’s mouth and is just as fallacious in his logic.

The New York Times did a short balanced peice, highlighting the call for equality.

WaPo said Obama missed the mark, that the crusades were 700 years ago, and slavery was condemned by Christianity. Another simply lazy, 8^th grade level of analysis of history. The US came late to the game of condemning slavery and Christians were divided on it as any cursory examination of the Civil War will tell you. And there are still people alive who think the South was right.

CNN choose to focus on the comments to the Dalai Lama who was in the audience and the significance of that to our relationship with China.

The IJReview tried to argue that saying Jim Crow laws are supported by the Bible is “tenuous at best”. That’s true in the sense that saying there is any connection from the Bible to any actual law on the books is “tenuous at best”. Other than that it is misleading and simplistic. They also noted the variety of references Obama made to bad theology promoting violence. I’ll give them points for that.

NBC News did a very neutral report, simply providing a range of quotes that summarized the speech well  without much comment. I’ll give them a link.

Christian Science Monitor did a great job. They quoted Limbaugh and others, and even allowed speculation of the “trolling”, but offered as a counter, “But it’s more likely that he was taking the ecumenical setting of the prayer breakfast to try to reiterate something that’s been a US talking point since the Bush administration: America is not at war with Islam. It is fighting individuals who use distorted versions of faith as a weapon.” They continue to follow the context and flow of the logic, “Then he tries to make clear that it is people who are doing the twisting and misusing here. It is not inherent in religion itself.”

I don’t completely agree with the idea that Islam or any religion doesn’t have some powerful messages about violence, but the way Obama said it is exactly what I want my President to say. Regardless of cultural influences, in a country that is founded on freedom, it is most important that we allow people the freedom to state that their culture does not define them, that their choice of church doesn’t define them. We’re the ones who are supposed to be promoting universal principles. If you want to claim those principles agree with your religion, you’re welcome to, and the rest of us welcome you. If you want to claim your God disagrees with freedom, fairness and compassion, I defend your right to say that, but expect you to respect my right to say you are wrong.