Pagans and Heretics IV

Part III in the series

Summer is over, and this might be the end of the Pagans and Heretics series too.

Hopefully I have made the case that any belief system includes an element of cruelty. In this part of the series, I will address that more directly. I covered this previously in The Cost with a specific example and will cover it more generally here.

The cruelty that I am referring to shows up in a couple ways. In a discussion of a belief system, at some point, the believer will have to rely on a statement of faith. The more obvious ones don’t need to be covered. The more subtle ones sound something like, “we can’t understand the mystery” or “the truth is being revealed to us over time” or “anything is possible”.

Perhaps anything is possible, but how then do we decide how to live our lives? If we accept that anything is possible, say for instance that setting a goal somehow alters the forces of the universe and brings that goal closer, how are we different from someone that claims their prayers can cure cancer? If you claim that a negative thought about someone actually hurts them, how is that different from Jerry Falwell claiming pagans caused the 9/11 attacks? Once you open the door to “anything is possible”, how do you then put a limit on any claim of cause and effect?

Before describing the effect of this type of thinking, I need to separate this built-in cruelty from an individual’s cruel personality. Regardless of belief, anyone can be bad at arguing, that is, they can use unfair tactics when arguing or worse, be completely dismissive of the other persons’ ideas, perhaps even calling them names. Some people try to equate this behavior to extreme religious behavior and label it “fundamentalist atheism”. I don’t see much point in that.

For the non-believer, cruelty is still possible. Someone can claim to be a better person based on the quality or number of their scholastic degrees. Recommending that someone read a book before they can discuss a topic intelligently can be done in a positive and encouraging way, or cruelly. But these are qualities of the individual, not necessarily of the educational system that taught them or the books they read.

A belief system, by its very nature, has that arrogance built in to it. People are of course free to believe whatever they want, but it usually does not end with someone simply choosing to believe a particular thing. Any claim of truth that is made solely by a leap of faith is a statement that the believer has something, knows something that the non-believer does not. The believer may be the most peaceful person and have the most helpful of intentions but their bottom line is that you just can’t understand.

We can look back on more ignorant times and see this clearly. Kings claimed to have divine knowledge and used it to enslave everyone else. As ruling structures became more complex, there were still only a few who could read and they interpreted the rules to benefit them. Fortunately there have been those who have fought against this. As more people have gained the ability to determine philosophies for themselves, more concessions have had to be made and how they compete in the marketplace of ideas has had to become more sophisticated.

This has led to a very confusing morass of philosophies that require more than a few quick searches with Google to sort out. If you are easily convinced, you might happen on this website and consider your work done. You might know someone with a story of a miraculous healing and consider that a valid source. If you are skeptical, you are left with the problem of how long do you need to look before you can say that there are no proven cases of limbs regenerating or prayers curing cancer? Maybe you have heard of the Miracle of Fatima, with thousands of witnesses and consider that ample evidence on which to base some sort of belief. As knowledge has become more easily accessible, it has become less acceptable to take such cases on faith.

Because most people still consider doing this research too much trouble, because the waters are so muddied, most of mainstream religion, including the spiritual but not religious, completely ignore this market. There are some classics in the genre, going back to ancient Greece, and more recent 18^th and 19^th century works. The mid twentieth century produced some foundational material such as Friedman and Campbell. Since 9/11 the market has expanded as more people felt the need to understand the role of religion in politics. For the believers, there are thousands of gods to choose from throughout history. As historians have attempted to explain their roots, believers in those gods have responded with claims of how archaeology and science proves that their god was right all along.

For most people, there is no need to look in to any of this. If you aren’t asking questions, there is no need to look into long technical explanations. If you have made the faith decision, you don’t need additional confirmation. The market of material on religion, miracles, faith and magic is aimed somewhat at those who are questioning their faith or considering a faith decision, but mostly it is there as a prop. Bookstore shelves are filled with works by the atheists; Dawkins, Harris, Dennet, Hitchens, Price and Ehrman, something has to be said in response. That it has no substance doesn’t seem to matter.

To illustrate, let’s examine a couple examples of recent big sellers.

A huge success for Christianity has been The Purpose Driven Life.This is supposedly a new way of studying Christianity. I have never seen anything about it that convinces me that it is anything more than the standard line of; read the Bible, follow the rules, and share the gospel.

In another recent work that received high praises, Paul Copan tried to defend some of the worst parts of the Old Testament in a book titled Is God a Moral Monster. It is endorsed by some of the biggest names in apologetics. If you think it would be hard to explain away the murder, rape, slavery and genocide in the Old Testament, you would be right. This book fails on every level, including just being able to accurately provide chapter and verse. However, since most people won’t read it, it doesn’t matter. It is simply claimed that the work has been done and this book accomplishes what it says it does. Most people won’t know that a Christian who has some integrity has published an extensive refutation of it.

The authors I mentioned in part 3 have many books that sell considerably fewer copies but are equal in that they provide little in the way of support for reasons to believe. These books don’t look at the more difficult passages, such as Moses ordering 3,000 to be killed or Jesus throwing the chaff into the fire. They just ignore them. I have found some really good interpretations in these books, and I enjoy them and share them often. The people of Canaan really did accomplish something 4,000 years ago and the story of a god coming to earth as a servant is pretty unique. But ignoring most of the Bible and claiming that the few stories you like exemplify Christianity really helps no one.

Further along the spectrum, you can find books that mix the familiar characters of religion with other history and other traditions and fill in the gaps however they please. These can be interesting stories and can portray insights into the human condition, but when they attempt to create new beliefs or prop up old ones their value diminishes. I give credit to Dan Brown for at least making a statement in the foreword to The DaVinci Code that it is fiction. Many authors skip this, or claim they have uncovered something that no one else has.

At the far end of the spectrum, beyond claims of specific gods or miracles are books like The Secret. These take bits and pieces from ancient texts and claim to weave a common thread of wisdom that only the authors of these books have figured out. Here’s the secret, set goals and stick to them, build a support network, nourish your body and your mind, acknowledge those who have helped you along the way.

Feynman

Somewhat on topic, but a slight departure from the series to do a book review.

One of the survivors of the 60’s counter cultural movement is a place near Big Sur called The Esalen Institute. From their own website, here is why people go there:

“They come for the intellectual freedom to consider systems of thought and feeling that lie beyond the current constraints of mainstream academia. They come to discover ancient wisdom in the motion of the body, poetry in the pulsing of the blood. They come to rediscover the miracle of self-aware consciousness.”

Esalen currently charges thousands of dollars for you to stay there and hundreds of dollars to take their courses. A few of them, such as yoga have continuing education credits, but most don’t. You might learn to paint from your soul though.

I heard of Esalen back in the 70’s but had forgotten about it. I’ve talked a lot about ancient wisdom and I’m going to just pass on the “miracle”. It’s the “lie beyond the current constraints of mainstream academia” that I want to address. What constraints? The constraint that if you are going to learn where stars come from you should know some Calculus? If you want to write some poetry, maybe you should read some classics?

I was reminded of Esalen while reading “Surely you are Joking Mr. Feynman.” This a collection of stories by Richard Feynman, the youngest physicist at Los Alamos when they were developing the atom bomb. He was a scientist and a bongo player and the book is divided equally between his cultural exploits and his scientific ones. I think there are better books on Feynman, but here is the speech I’m referring to.

He starts out talking about investigating some of these new ideas that Esalen was supposedly exploring and ends up talking about where our education system has gone wrong. He was born at the end of the time when science was respected, when it helped to unite a country, feed the world and defeat evil enemies. In doing that, it unleashed its own evil in the form of a mushroom cloud and there was a shift towards matters of the heart. The idea that science and capitalism could save us seemed like a lie.

The examination of the nature of that big lie is still going on. There is no simple way to account for all the harm and all the good that has occurred in the last century. Although I don’t come down on the side of war mongering and infinite expansion I also don’t come down on the side of the “miracle of self-aware consciousness.” It only took a few decades to examine astrology, out of body experiences, ESP, bending spoons, homeopathy and prayer to find that they are little lies. Claims of equal magnitude about these being our saviors have been made about these phenomenon. A few very serious people, like Richard Feynman, have looked into them and found them wanting.

Unfortunately, what Feynman suggested in 1974 has been ignored. What should be science’s greatest strength, that it admits what it can’t do, that it points to where it could be wrong, is seen as a weakness. Feynman exemplifies a man with intellectual freedom who considered systems of thought and feeling that lie beyond current constraints. Because he looked at the world that way and questioned other’s assumptions as well as his own assumptions, he won a Nobel prize for contributions to the development of quantum electrodynamics. People consider things beyond the current constraints all the time, some of them get Nobel prizes for it. They don’t need to go to Esalen and learn reflexology to do it.

Feynman questioned people that he had a great deal of respect for, Albert Einstein and Neils Bohr. He didn’t reject their work because he thought it was limiting his space or cramping his style or killing his buzz, he acknowledged their contributions and used them to further our understanding of the universe. He wasn’t constrained by academia, he used it to explore the mysteries of the world he found himself in. He didn’t look at musicians and painters as weird people who didn’t get it, he hung out with them and tried to learn from them to be a better drummer and a better sketcher. It seems to me the people at Esalen are the ones creating boundaries.

To Pagans and Heretics III

Part II of the series

All of this defining I have been doing has been necessary to discuss the marketing of those ideas. I’m not talking about some conspiratorial campaign to market a new world over. Marketing includes the word of mouth exchanges that we all use. I will discuss the marketing of liberal Christianity, but I believe you will find parallels to the other groups I have discussed. I will also draw a connection to the fundamentalist beliefs.

More important than getting to know the ins and outs of this market is understanding who the market is for. Polls often cite the fact that 80 to 90% of Americans believe in God. However, time/use studies by the government show that only 25% of Americans are attending church on Sunday. So there is a majority in the middle that have a wide range of spiritual beliefs, but they are only expressed in polls as belief in God or not. When defending their Biblically based arguments, religious leaders will site that 90% figure, claiming that they are all in complete agreement.

There is one thing that the 90% do generally agree on, and that is a distrust of atheists. This was discovered in a poll somewhat by accident. They were attempting to measure feelings towards Muslims and included the Atheist label to increase the accuracy of the poll. They expected atheists to be statistically insignificant. Although that 75% that did not go to church this Sunday may not be comfortable with their clergy, or may feel that their church has become less Christ centered, or they like some of the ideas but not the rules, or just can’t give to an organization that covers up for child molesters, they still are less comfortable proclaiming that they don’t believe in God or even thinking about their sister marrying an atheist.

Another survey, discussing the growing group of "nones".

Churches have been aware of this for a long time. It is not stated in these terms and may not even be conscious for most. It is stated in terms of the latest idea to increase the membership. When working on increasing members, they look at what people are thinking. If people think Christ was all about doing good things then their church should be out there cleaning up parks. If people think church should be a celebration, get some new musicians. If people want to know about recent historical discoveries about the first century, offer a class.

In the mid 20^th century, more and more seminaries began to teach textual criticism, the idea that by reading the Bible, you could determine that it was not written by Moses, the prophets and the apostles. This led to heretical ideas like maybe the miracles in the Bible might not have happened. This was not immediately passed onto the people in the congregations. Some young people who thought they were very dedicated to the church found they could not be once they went through seminary school. Some of this started to leak into the mainstream. In the mid 1980’s a group of scholars and laymen founded The Jesus Seminar. They wrote books, toured and gave a new interpretations of the gospel stories.

About that time I was getting more involved in my community and found that churches were an important part of that. When you needed volunteers to help with your neighborhood cleanup, they seemed to have a group just ready to go. I eventually stumbled on a church that was involved in doing good works, had some good music and a pastor that hadn’t done anything I would have a problem with. And he was just starting a class using a book by Dominic Crossan, one of the founders of the Jesus Seminar. It was not until years later that I was shown a book that exposed some of the not so scholarly methods used by the Jesus Seminar.

Later, also somewhat by accident, I picked up a book by John Shelby Spong. He was one of the first of the older generation of church leaders to really look into the psychology of homosexuality. He found out that he had been wrong to preach that it was a sin. It was apparently quite natural. He is now retired and writes extensively about how the Bible is not the word of God. Somehow he has maintained his love for Christ, although he has never explained why in a way that satisfies me.

It is rare that anything will be explicitly stated that these tools are used to keep people interested. But sometimes it is. There was an organization named Campus Crusade for Christ that works specifically to attract those young people who weren’t indoctrinated into Christianity by their family. The group eventually figured out that the word “Crusade” has some negative connotations. Now they just call themselves “Cru”. This was specifically because, “some people may be initially turned off at the mention of Christ.”

To hear more of this type of talk, you really don’t need to dig too far. You only need to get past the nice brochures that are left out for that 50-75% of people who don’t come in every Sunday. Once you are past the Sunday Service, on just about any committee or in a meeting at any level above the most local, you will hear talk about membership. There may be some language about doing the work of the Lord, but there won’t be much detail. Once you are at this level you are supposed to know what that work is and make the connections yourself.

For me, I eventually could not look at anything we did that I felt had actual value and not find a completely logical reason for doing it that did not require a supernatural explanation. The only thing the church offered was an infrastructure of buildings, regional leaders and a communication system. There may not seem to be anything wrong with that. And if my church, the United Methodist Church, was an organization that built clinics in third world countries and fed the homeless in American cities and did little else, then I would agree. But that is not all that they do.

First there are just the buildings themselves. Look around at all of them in your area. Each one must be heated, kept cleaned, and have the lawn mowed. They are rarely full except for a few hours a week. The reason for so many of them is that each disagrees on the tiniest bits of theology, things that have little impact on the world but took years to parse out and tons of paperwork as each new difference split off to form another denomination. Imagine the community center that could be built with the combined effort of those organizations. A center that would be for everybody.

A good deal of effort of the particular church I attended was put into working to change the organizations official policy on homosexuality. One of the things that made the church vibrant was a very creative staff of people in the Sunday School which taught that there was a guiding consciousness that created all things and watches over us. The questions that began to arise for me were why am I part of an organization that needs to have its policy on homosexuality changed? And, do I want children to be taught to believe someone is watching out for them, or do I want them to learn to think for themselves?

Not too far away, in other churches in the same organization, children were being taught that their prayers could cure diseases. Most of the other churches were either oblivious to the issues of homosexuality or actively working to keep the current rules in place. Again, more time spent arguing over something that the rest of the world has already dealt with. Of course, I am just one person and there is the question of creating change from within an organization or from without. It is up to you to decide where you stand.

Pagans and Heretics II

Part I of this series

Part III

So, what do I mean by Pagan? Most people who join groups, whether pagan or orthodox, don’t go on research projects about those groups. Most people make choices based on personal experience and the experiences of people close to them. There is nothing wrong with this and I will discuss it more in a moment. But this is a blog about examining those things, so here goes.

When I say “pagan”, I am talking about the shamanistic, polytheistic, and animist ways of looking at the world. The word has had many other uses throughout history, some of them not so nice. It was sometimes used to mean “NOT Christian”, usually for whatever indigenous culture the Christians were conquering at the time. To the ancient Romans it was used more like it’s earliest definition, someone outside the culture. The word predates the Roman Empire, from the Stone Age, and Rome fought hard to destroy that earlier culture of nature centered religion. Later when Rome became Roman Catholic, the stories of Dionysus or what are now Christmas traditions such as the yule log, were called pagan rituals.

Religious Tolerance.org is an excellent source for information that tries to stay neutral on just about any tradition, including Wicca and Pagans.

Heretic has less of a history, but its connotation is negative. I don’t see it as positive. Martin Luther was a heretic, and he helped to reform Catholicism. The important part of the definition of heretic for my purposes is that they come from within the tradition. Heretics study the classical forms, then see something new, something requiring change. If they are accepted, they are leaders, if not, they are heretics. Brian McClaren, the author of Everything Must Change has said that today’s heresies are tomorrow’s orthodoxy.

There may be other categories you see as a better fit for yourself. But I think what I have to say will map onto them. If I may make a few suggestions:
For Buddhists, you may want to read Confession of a Buddhist Atheist by Stephen Batchelor.
For Scientologists, how much have you been told? Do you know what happens when you reach Thetan level III?
I am not familiar with women’s groups, but if you are involved in anything associated with the Men’s Movement, there should be no dogma. The movement is an inquiry. No one should be demanding your belief or allegiance. Recommend reading would be Robert Bly or Robert Moore. There are many others.
If your interest in spiritual, psychic or paranormal activity is casual, you might be interested the story of Susan Blackmore.

Finally, I will also discuss science. But no need to get too scientific about it. As I stated before, for the most part, our beliefs are formed from personal experience. So your belief system is as strong, accurate and useful as your experiences. Of course we can’t be everywhere or do anything, so we also rely on those we trust, the people close to us. On the more complex issues, we have to trust others. We do this more than we realize. For example, I have never seen my own brain, but I trust brain scientists that it is where my thoughts come from. If I had lived in Aristotle’s time, I probably would have trusted him that the brain is there to provide a cooling mechanism for my blood.

I said I don’t want to get scientific, but there are some basics that educational systems don’t cover very well. One is the idea of proof. Science does not really prove anything. In math, there are proofs, but they are confined to the definitions of math. So you can prove that 2 + 2 = 4, but only as those characters are defined. There are many things that science can’t say much about. Even the things that it can say a lot about, it can’t say it knows for certain. This is starting to move into philosophy so I’ll stop.

The important thing that gets missed in discussing science and religion is that science begins with wonder. The mysteries of the universe inspired people to look for answers. There was no distinction between astrology and astronomy when people first sat up all night and watched the stars move. We continue to look for answers, but if the answers had all been found, there would no longer be a need for science. Somehow religion has managed to claim its place as keeper of the great mysteries, when it is religion that claims to have the answers. Science does not claim to have the answers. It just has a certain method for asking the questions.

Inquiry begins with some sort of anecdote. Something happens that inspires questions. There may also be a premise. Like I presume that I exist and that the laws of physics that can be demonstrated locally apply to the entire known universe. Experiments are done to ask those questions, data is gathered. The experiments are repeated and checked and confirmed. It is usually best to have several people involved. Inductive or deductive reasoning is used to further the study and hypotheses are proposed. Ideas are published, the work is checked again and a consensus starts to develop. When enough testing is done, a hypothesis becomes a theory, and it can be used as a new starting point for further investigation. So, to say that a theory is just a guess is not at all accurate.

This section has been rather dry. I hope some of the links were interesting. Next I will get into why this examination matters.

Incident in Norway

By now, many of you will have heard this quote from the shooter in Norway,

"One person with a belief is equal to the force of 100,000 who have only interests.­"

It is from John Stuart Mill, although I’m not sure he got it exactly right, and he didn’t reference him, which really annoys me. The shooter may not know of John Stuart Mill, other than the things that support his viewpoint, or he doesn’t want you to know. Fortunately, we all have computers now, so people like this can’t start civil wars.

John Stuart Mill was against slavery and for women’s rights. He felt if you wanted to do just about anything that didn’t harm others, you should be free to do it. He used scientific analysis to consider the problems that arise from people who can’t make good choices in a free society. The Norway shooter does not appear to be capable of such detailed analysis.

Now let’s take a look at a similar quote, the type that can be found all over the web,

“It is due to the Power of Belief (or non-belief) which causes ANY ‘thing’ – condition, event, or circumstance, that you experience in your life to manifest, and it’s outcome is only dependent on whether you believe that the thing can or whether you think it can’t manifest.”

This if from “The Entrepreneur Super Star”, some sort of Life Coach. She is referring to an interview from Oprah’s early career. Oprah has done an amazing job of capitalizing on this idea of belief in your self. In my experience, the people who believe these statements most thoroughly are those who are making money by convincing others that the statements are true.

There is a fine line here, but people like the Entrepreneur Super Star are way past that line. There is value in believing in yourself. There is value in looking at the circumstances, realizing that your vision is beyond those circumstances and taking a leap of faith. There are millions of stories of people overcoming the odds and doing extraordinary things. The value lies in their perseverance and hard work. Those are values that make things happen. Faith is not a value. In and of itself, if creates nothing.

Note in the quote above, the trick that allows this belief in belief to continue. It comes at the end. If you fail, if you don’t overcome the circumstances, it was because you didn’t believe hard enough. No need to reassess the data, no need to seek out a mentor, no need to go back to school and take a class, don’t bother even reading a book that is available for free online. Just blame yourself. Take another course in the power of belief, get your ego pumped up and try again.

The trouble begins when that system fails. Most people will just go back to working for a living. Some will make less healthy lifestyles choices and maybe take down a few friends and family members with them. Some will take more drastic actions.

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

Imagine No Malaria

At the end of the movie “Letting Go of God”, a one woman show by Julia Sweeney, she muses over the idea of what it would be like if the Pope came to the realization that he had been misguided all his life. In a soft but mocking tone that only Julia can do, she has the Pope apologizing and promising to spend the rest of his life working in a women’s health clinic in Central America. I have had similar visions myself, although more along the line of Catholics returning the art as well as the gold that they have plundered from what are now 3^rd world countries.

Whatever you think of religion, you can’t deny that they have a lot of power. Angry atheists claim that accumulating power has been the only thing they accomplished. Those who are more accommodating acknowledge there have been some really bad Popes, but churches were the caregivers and educators in the Dark Ages. They were the first to build hospitals and develop programs to feed the poor. Finding cause and affect in history can be difficult so I will leave that aside for now and take a look at one particular history and a possible future.

In the history of the Methodist church, real estate was accumulated due to their policy of how to grow their church. When a congregation grew to a certain size, they split off some of the membership, went down the road a bit and built a new church. Acquiring real estate was not the goal, but spreading God’s word had the same affect. In the United States, this has become a liability to an organization that is declining in membership. In Africa, it has become an asset for one of the biggest goals for human health in recent history.

You may have heard of Bill Gates. He is not a member of the United Methodist church, or any church for that matter. He does know how to get things done. When he got done playing with computers and finally decided to use his wealth to do something worthwhile, he got interested in the problem of malaria in Africa. Defeating malaria will be on par with defeating polio. And, like Jonas Salk, no one is going to get rich by doing it.

The solution is fairly simple, an insecticide treated net, some education, some preventative health care. Simple if you were in the United States with roads and communication infrastructure. In the language of business, seeing a problem as an opportunity, Gates went searching for an organization that had people spread out across the continent. He was looking for people that were part of the communities, so they could explain these strange white nets in the plastic bags. People who weren’t there to sell anything, but to care for their brothers and sisters. He found two potential organizations, Lutheran World Services, and United Methodists Committee On Relief. He picked UMCOR.

Anticipating your next question, please click here:

This partnership of a secular organization and a church to eliminate a disease from a continent is without precedent. I hope it is precedent setting. First, I hope it is successful, then I hope it sets an example that others follow.

In 136 blogs I have never asked for money, and I don’t plan to start now. I would be remiss if I did not at least direct you to where you can participate. One net, including all costs of manufacturing, delivery and follow-up costs only $10. That usually benefits an entire family. The goal is to reduce malaria by 80% by 2015. That will take a concerted, coordinated effort. Toward that goal, a suggested level of giving is $1 per month over the next three years. The success of the program has already been proven in some countries.

Is this the future role of churches? Will UMCOR be here long after the UM part is gone?

For further reading:

http://tunein.com/radio/First-United-Methodist-Church-p46385/

http://www.gatesfoundation.org/speeches-commentary/Pages/bill-gates-sr-2008-united-methodist-conference.aspx

http://www.nothingbutnets.net/blogs/bill-gates-2011-annual-letter.html