Prospecting God

Pay dirt - November 22, 2011

2011-11-23T18:48:00.000-05:00

God and Jesus. It’s like when your parents get on Facebook.

NOVEMBER 17, 2011

On the way home from our vacation/hospital-stay, Victor and I ended up traveling with a very well-meaning man who wouldn’t stop talking about how God put me in the hospital on purpose because apparently He hates me.

Stranger: Well, God doesn’t close a door without opening a window.

Victor: Well that explains why our electric bill was so high. Because God doesn’t understand how expensive air-conditioning is.

Stranger: That’s...not what that phrase means.

me: I bet Jesus has to deal with this shit all the time. God’s always leaving the windows open at home…accidentally letting Jesus’ cat out. That sort of thing.

Victor: Right? And then Jesus would be like “Dad. STOP LEAVING ALL THE WINDOWS OPEN. WERE YOU BORN IN A BARN?”

Religious stranger: *stunned silence*

me: And then God would point out that Jesus actually WAS born in a barn. BURN, Jesus.

Victor: And then God would be like, “Look, I DON’T CLOSE A DOOR WITHOUT OPENING A WINDOW. IT’S WHAT I DO. IT’S IN THE CHARTER.”

Religious person: Wow. You guys have…really thought this out.

me: No, not really.

Pay Dirt: Heaven is a fairy tale, says physicist Hawking

2011-05-16T11:25:00.002-04:00

Source: REUTERS

LONDON - Heaven is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark, the eminent British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking said in an interview published on Monday.

Hawking, 69, was expected to die within a few years of being diagnosed with degenerative motor neurone disease at the age of 21, but became one of the world’s most famous scientists with the publication of his 1988 book “A Brief History of Time.”

“I have lived with the prospect of an early death for the last 49 years. I’m not afraid of death, but I’m in no hurry to die. I have so much I want to do first,” he told the Guardian newspaper.

“I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.”

When asked how we should live he said: “We should seek the greatest value of our action.”
Hawking gave the interview ahead of the Google Zeitgeist meeting in London where he will join speakers including British finance minister George Osborne and Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz.

Addressing the question “Why are we here?” he will argue tiny quantum fluctuations in the very early universe sowed the seeds of human life.

The former Cambridge University Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, a post once also held by Isaac Newton, has a history of drawing criticism for his comments on religion.

His 2010 book “The Grand Design” provoked a backlash among religious leaders, including chief rabbi Lord Sacks, for arguing there was no need for a divine force to explain the creation of the universe.

As a result of his incurable illness Hawking can only speak through a voice synthesiser and is almost completely paralyzed.

He sparked serious concerns in 2009 when he was hospitalised after falling seriously ill following a lecture tour in the United States but has since returned to Cambridge University as a director of research.

Pay Dirt: 'Last Supper' was on a Wednesday, not a Thursday?

2011-04-24T15:36:00.001-04:00

Suzette Dalumpines/ Veronica Pulumbarit, GMA News

Every year on Holy Thursday, Christians call to mind the "Last Supper" — the time when the Lord Jesus Christ shared a meal with His apostles on the eve of His passion and death.

However, according to a Reuters report (by Nia Williams), a study of the Cambridge University in the United Kingdom claims that the Last Supper actually took place on a Wednesday, not a Thursday.

Filipino priest Father Abundo "Jay-ar" Babor, Jr. of the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart based in Quezon City said in an interview with GMA News Online "the news of the study done by Prof. Colin Humphreys, a Cambridge University scientist, that the Last Supper took place on a Wednesday is indeed earth shaking."

"It comes at a time when we are celebrating the Holy Week. Humpreys theory, if it were true, would have a lot of implications and shake our understanding of the established traditional liturgical practices," he said.

Babor, who holds a licentiate in moral theology from the Academia Alfonsiana in Rome, cited the possible effect of the Cambridge study on the "Paschal Triduum" (also known as Holy Triduum or Easter Triduum) which begins on Holy Thursday and ends on Easter Sunday.

The Paschal Triduum begins with the Mass of the Lord's Supper on Holy Thursday. It remembers the passion and death of Jesus Christ on Good Friday and His resurrection on Easter Sunday.

"The Last Supper celebration, on Maundy Thursday, is essentially the beginning of the passion, death and resurrection of the Lord," Babor said.

"If the Last Supper happened on a Wednesday, as Humprey theorizes, then it would change the counting of what is liturgically considered the holiest three days: Maundy Thursday-Good Friday-Easter Sunday (the Paschal Triduum)," he added.

Babor said "Humphreys’ theory could just be taken at face value but won’t radically change our liturgical practice of celebrating the Last Supper on Maundy Thursday (or his concern of setting a fixed date of Easter)."

He said "what is important in the Biblical tradition and our liturgical tradition is the celebration of the Biblical event/s, not on the preoccupation on the accuracy of the exact day/s when these Biblical events happened.

Different calendar

In an interview over radio dzBB on Wednesday, Father Bong Bongayan of St. Andrew's Shrine in Cainta said the calendars used in ancient times were far different from what we know today.

“The day starts on sunset," he said.

Thus, “Wednesday" during that period is already counted as “Thursday" in our calendar, Fr. Bangayan explained.

He further said that the news no longer surprised him since it has already been spreading for quite some time now.

"Hindi na bago yan (that is no longer news)," he said.

Humphrey's theory

A Reuters report on Monday said "The Last Supper took place on a Wednesday -- a day earlier than thought -- and a date for Easter can now be fixed, according to a Cambridge University scientist aiming to solve one of the Bible's most enduring
contradictions."

"I was intrigued by Biblical stories of the final week of Jesus in which no one can find any mention of Wednesday. It's called the missing day," Humphreys told Reuters. "But that seemed so unlikely: after all Jesus was a very busy man."

Reuters said Humphreys' findings help explain an "inconsistency" among the Gospels.

Matthew, Mark and Luke said the Last Supper coincided with Passover while John said the meal took place before the Jewish holy day commemorating the Exodus from Egypt.

"Humphreys' research suggests Jesus, and Matthew, Mark and Luke, were using the Pre-Exilic Calendar, which dated from the time of Moses and counted the first day of the new month from the end of the old lunar cycle, while John was referring to the
official Jewish calendar of the day," the Reuters report said.

"The contradictions have been known for a long time but not been talked about by the general public very much. I am using science and the Bible hand in hand to solve this question and showing the Gospels are actually agreeing, just using different
calendars," he added.

Humphreys, a metallurgist and materials scientist and a Christian, said "It was an extremely curious mistake for anyone to make because for Jewish people Passover was such an important meal."

With the help of an astronomer, Humphreys reconstructed the Pre-Exilic calendar. They placed Passover on April 1 (Wednesday) in the year AD 33, widely accepted as the year of Jesus' crucifixion, Reuters said.

If Christians want to ascribe a date for Easter based on Humphreys' calculations Easter Day would fall on the first Sunday in April.

If the Passover meal and the Last Supper did take place on a Wednesday it would help explain how the large number of events that the Gospels record between the Last Supper and the Crucifixion took place.

What Humphreys failed to consider

According to Babor, "Humpreys theory apparently fails to consider the following:

(1) The four Gospels were written at different times with different cultural milieu. The Gospel of Mark, which Biblical scholars agree was the first Gospel ever written is dated between 60-70 AD; the Gospel of Matthew was written between 80-90 AD; the Gospel of Luke was written at the same time with Matthew, between 80-90 AD; and the Gospel of John between 90-100 AD.

What does it tell us? It means that there’s really no problem with the inconsistency of the date and time when those events happened. The Gospel stories were handed down from one generation to another; the Biblical message remained the same but the particular dates were not the particular concern.

Whether Matthew, Mark and Luke used another calendar than John didn’t really matter. The Gospels were not intended to be a biography of Jesus.

(2) The Biblical writers' primary intention was not Biblical accuracy of the dates (as Humpreys strongly argues that the discrepancy of the Gospel accounts of Synoptic Gospels on the Passover and that of John had been the source of debate on the reliability of the Gospels) but the preaching and the telling of the story, the “narrative" of Biblical events especially concerning the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus.

Pay Dirt: Bar vs. Church

2008-07-05T17:13:00.000-04:00

N.L. bar owner says church is unfair competition
Friday, July 4, 2008 CBC News

A bar owner in Conche, on Newfoundland's Northern Peninsula, says the Catholic Church is cutting into his profits by taking away his business.

Brendan Fitzpatrick owns Fitzpatrick's Lounge, the only bar in the community of about 250 people.

On Saturday nights in the summer, Fitzpatrick said, his bar tab usually runs from $2,000 to $2,500. But the local Catholic congregation has put an end to that with its Saturday night community dinners at the parish hall, he said.

Fitzpatrick told CBC News the church held its sit-down dinners on Friday nights in past summers.

"There's no problem with holding them on Friday nights. It's just Saturday night is the nights that I've had bands booked.... Now, in the last month or so, I've had to cancel three of them," he said, adding that he pre-books the bands in the winter months for the summer shows.
Fitzpatrick told CBC News he tried to work with the parish hall committee that hosts the dinners, offering to cater the events, but they declined.

Fitzpatrick said he now intends to take his fight to the diocese's bishop.

The parish committee declined a taped interview with CBC News, but spokesperson Alice Flynn said the parish has a policy that only parishioners can cater events at the parish hall.

Pay Dirt: Starfield Concert Goes to Hell

2008-04-26T14:47:00.002-04:00

Floor collapsed 'like an elevator' at B.C. church during concert: witnesses
By James Keller, THE CANADIAN PRESS

ABBOTSFORD, B.C. - Witnesses say excited rock fans were urged to stop jumping up and down in a B.C. church before a large section of the floor collapsed and the lighting system fell from the ceiling.

More than 40 people were injured at a concert at Abbotsford's Central Heights Church Friday night when the floor gave way.

The collapse people in the crowd falling several metres into the basement below.
Two people were transferred to hospital in Vancouver, and at least one of them is reported to have suffered critical injuries.

Seventeen-year-old Felicia Daase says she was farther back from the stage than the area that collapsed.

She says the band was telling fans who were jumping to the music to stop just before it happened.

Daase says the floor collapsed "like an elevator," landing in the basement, and a few seconds later a large lighting and speaker system fell from the ceiling and landed on audience members.
Rob Neiman, a 42-year-old from Abbotsford who was also at the concert, says after it happened he looked down into the hole and saw bodies laying on the floor and dozens of people scrambling among the wreckage.

Fraser Health spokesman David Plug says the injured arrived either on their own or by ambulance at four area hospitals.

All were treated and discharged except for two who were sent to Vancouver General Hospital for more specialized care, he says.

The condition of the two people transported to Vancouver was unavailable.

Police said about 1,000 youths were at the church when a large area in front of the stage gave way, sending people in the crowd falling several metres into the basement below.

Head pastor Chris Douglas told Vancouver radio station CKNW that the hall can hold up to 1,500 people.

He says plans for Sunday services were proceeding as usual.

Most of the patients treated in hospital suffered minor injuries.

Const. Casey Vinet of the Abbotsford police said every available officer responded, as did some from neighbouring communities.

When they arrived at the scene, they saw a hole in the floor about seven metres wide.

"It was very busy, certainly as word got out parents, friends and others attended the area as well," he said

One witness says people were walking away with "blood all over."

When news of the collapse first reached local health officials, they were told to expect mass casualties, but the actual number of injured was far lower than feared.

Plug said the hospitals were able to cope with the load.

"Some staff heard about it on the radio and came in to help and they've now been sent home," Plug said. "The waiting room is pretty empty."

All available Abbotsford police, local RCMP and ambulance crews were dispatched to the scene, Vinet said.

Vinet said detectives will now try to determine what caused the collapse.

"We've also called out forensic identification services, who will look at examining the scene, look at producing a diagram, taking photos and that sort of thing," he said.

Pay Dirt: Apostrophe

2008-01-26T10:16:00.000-05:00

Folks - here is a poem written by a good friend of mine...you can read it and more at his blog (www.bookpuddle.blogspot.com):

Apostrophe

Life’s one.
Remember how long we were confused about it?
Do you? I recall asking
Your opinion of the Fall.
You argued for myth, and I stuck to
Fact. So much, I damn near convinced myself.
The serpent was not even a snake, you said.
And I asked how you knew this.
I was there, you said.
You bit the fruit?
It was not a fruit.

And what’s so wrong with wanting to know?
This was you, and I, donkey-like, replied
Some things are a violation of the --
You lovingly stopped me, with a finger on
My stupid lips, and you whispered,
A violation of what?
Knowledge we were denied access to, I breathed,
And knew I was wrong.
Always, had been
Wrong.

Listen, dear -- you began. But I stopped you
A finger to your lips.
And just as I said We are God’s,
You proved to me that we are gods.

© Ciprianowords Inc. 2008

Pay Dirt: Top 2007 Religious News Stories

2007-12-31T09:16:00.000-05:00

The 2007 Top Religion Stories as selected by Religion Newswriters are:

1. Evangelical voters ponder whether they will be able to support the eventual Republican candidate, as they did in 2004, because of questions about the leaders' faith and/or platform. Many say they would be reluctant to vote for Mormon Mitt Romney.
2. Leading Democratic presidential candidates make conscious efforts to woo faith-based voters after admitting failure to do so in 2004.
3. The role of gays and lesbians in clergy continues as a deeply dividing issue. An Episcopal Church promise to exercise restraint on gay issues fails to stem the number of congregations seeking to leave the mainline denomination, while in a close vote, Canadian Anglican bishops vote to nullify lay and clerical approval of same-sex blessings. Meanwhile, Conservative Jews become more open to gay leadership.
4. Global warming rises in importance among religious groups, with many Mainline leaders giving it high priority and evangelical leaders split over its importance compared to other social and moral causes
5. The question of what to do about illegal immigration is debated by religious leaders and groups on both sides of the issue. Some take an active role in supporting undocumented immigrants.
6. Thousands of Buddhist monks lead pro-democracy protest in Myanmar, which is brutally crushed after a week.
7. Some conservative U.S. Episcopalians realign with Anglican bishops in Africa and elsewhere in the global South, initiating legal disputes about church property ownership.
8. The Supreme Court by a 5-4 vote rules on the conservative side in three major cases with religious implications: upholding a ban on partial-birth abortions, allowing schools to establish some limits on students' free speech, and denying a challenge to the Office of Faith-based and Community Initiatives.
9. Death takes evangelical leaders known, among other things, for their television work: Jerry Falwell, Rex Humbard, D. James Kennedy, plus Billy Graham's wife, Ruth, and Jim Bakker‚s ex-wife, Tammy Faye Messner. Other deaths include Gilbert Patterson, presiding bishop of the Church of God in Christ, and Bible scholar Bruce Metzger.
10. The cost of priestly sex-abuse to the Roman Catholic Church in the United States surpasses $2.1 billion with a record $660 million settlement involving the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, and earlier settlements this year totaling $100 million in Portland, Ore., and Spokane, Wash.

The survey polled active members of the Religion Newswriters. Of those polled, 80 people responded, for a 27% response rate. The poll was conducted via an electronic ballot from Dec. 7-13, 2007. Respondents were asked to select the top 10 from 20 choices.

Religion Newswriters is the world's only membership association for people who write about religion in the general circulation media. It is the leader in providing tools and training to help journalists write about religion with balance, accuracy and insight. The annual Top 10 survey has been conducted for more than 35 years.

Pay Dirt: Bishop Spong's Christmas Wisdom

2007-12-23T15:14:00.000-05:00

The story of Christmas as told by the biblical evangelists has a meaning beyond the rational. It portrays a truth beyond the scientific; it points to a reality that no life touched by this Jesus could ever deny. The beauty of our Christmas story is bigger than literalization could ever produce. For when this Lord is known, when love, acceptance, and forgiveness are experienced, when we become whole, free and affirmed people, the heavens do sing, "Glory to God in the Highest," and on earth there is "Peace and Good Will among Us All."

- John Shelby Spong

Pay Dirt: The Magnificat

2007-12-23T15:04:00.000-05:00

The Magnificat

Joy Cowley

My soul sings in gratitude.
I'm dancing in the mystery of God.

The light of the Holy One is within me

and I am blessed, so truly blessed.

This goes deeper than human thinking.

I am filled with awe

at Love whose only condition

is to be received.

The gift is not for the proud,

for they have no room for it.

The strong and self-sufficient ones

don't have this awareness.

But those who know their emptiness

can rejoice in Love's fullness.

It's the Love that we are made for,

the reason for our being.

It fills our inmost heart space

and brings to birth in us, the Holy One.

****************************

Merry Christmas to all!!

CM

Pay Dirt: The Human Perception of God

2007-12-08T16:13:00.000-05:00

Larry J. Kluth from Mesa, Arizona, writes: Where was the Christian God before he appeared to Moses and declared that the Israelis were his chosen people? Why didn't the great civilizations of the world, prior to this appearance, know about this God?

*****************************************

Dear Larry,

I'm tempted to follow the old adage attributed to Augustine of Hippo, who, when asked what was God doing before he created the world, responded, "God was creating hell for people who ask questions like that." I shall, however, avoid that temptation.

The Christian God, as you describe this deity, did not appear to Moses. That would be the God of the Jews. The idea that any people are God's specially chosen is a tribal idea that is shared by all tribal entities. We tend to associate that idea with the Jews because Christians have incorporated the Jewish God into the Christian story by proclaiming that we have encountered this God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Moses in a new way in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.

However, it is not God who is ever changing. It is the human perception of God. Of course, God was present among the ancient people of the world. God was called by different names, endowed with different qualities and understood in different ways. Some of these aspects of God are seen as immoral by people living today, such as child sacrifice, the purging of anyone who thought outside the box and the divine blessing of violence.

The human God consciousness is always growing. This is true even in the Judeo-Christian faith story. There is an enormous difference between the God of Moses, who was perceived as sending plagues on Israel's enemies, the Egyptians, the last of which was the murder of the firstborn son in every Egyptian household; the God of Joshua, who was perceived as stopping the sun in the sky to facilitate the slaughter of the Ammonites by Joshua's army; or the God of Samuel, who ordered King Saul to commit genocide on the Amalekites; when that God is compared to the God of Jesus, who said, "Love your enemies."

Please remember that while the experience of God may be a universal experience, the explanation of the God experience is always a human creation shaped by the perceptions of people living in history. Every God explanation, every sacred text and every creedal formula is always time bound and time warped. That is why literalizing religious formulas is so destructive. It is literalized formulas that cause us to believe our limited view of God is the same as God. Out of that view come questions like yours that reveal the absurdity of so many popular religious claims and therefore I thank you for your question.

- John Shelby Spong

Pay Dirt: Pentecostal threats

2007-11-23T16:24:00.000-05:00

Cardinals discuss Pentecostal threats
By Nicole Winfield, Associated Press Writer

VATICAN CITY - The Roman Catholic Church must figure out what it is doing wrong in the battle for souls, because so many Catholics are leaving the church to join Pentecostal and other evangelical movements, a top Vatican cardinal said Friday.

Cardinal Walter Kasper, who heads the Vatican's office for relations with other Christians, told a meeting of the world's cardinals that the church must undergo a "self-critical pastoral examination of conscience" to confront the "exponential" rise of Pentecostal movements.

"We shouldn't begin by asking ourselves what is wrong with the Pentecostals, but what our own pastoral shortcomings are," Kasper told the gathering, noting that such evangelical and charismatic groups count 400 million faithful around the world.

The Vatican has been increasingly lamenting the rise of Protestant evangelical communities, which it describes as "sects," in Latin America, Africa and elsewhere, and the resulting flight of Catholics. In Brazil alone, Roman Catholics used to account for about 90 percent of the population in the 1960s; by 2005, it was down to 67 percent.

Kasper's comments came on the eve of Saturday's ceremony to elevate 23 new cardinals. As he did during his first consistory in 2006, Pope Benedict XVI asked the world's cardinals to come to Rome early for a meeting to discuss church concerns.

This year, Kasper briefed the cardinals on relations with other Christians, focusing on the church's relations with the Orthodox, Protestants and Pentecostal movements.

Kasper said the rise of independent, often "aggressive" evangelical movements in Africa and elsewhere had complicated the church's ecumenical task. Nevertheless, Kasper told reporters that "ecumenism is not an option but an obligation."

Kasper opened his remarks by updating the cardinals and cardinal-designates on an important new document approved by a Vatican-Orthodox theological commission that has been working to heal the 1,000-year schism between the Catholic and Orthodox churches.

In the document, Catholic and Orthodox representatives both agreed that the pope has primacy over all bishops — although they disagreed over just what authority that primacy gives him.
The development is significant since the Great Schism of 1054 — which split the Catholic and Orthodox churches — was precipitated largely by disagreements over the primacy of the pope.
Kasper told the cardinals that the document was an "important turning point," since it marked the first time that Orthodox churches had agreed there is a universal level of the church, that it has a primate, and that according to ancient church practice, that primate is the bishop of Rome — the pope.

Kasper said that the Vatican's relations with the Russian Orthodox Church, in particular, had become "significantly smoother" in recent years.

"We can say there's no longer a freeze but a thaw," Kasper said.

Tensions between the two churches have been strained over Orthodox accusations that the Vatican is seeking converts on traditionally Orthodox territories, particularly in eastern Europe — charges that Rome denies.

The rift has precluded a meeting between a pope and Patriarch Alexy II, long sought by Pope John Paul II and pursued by Benedict.

Kasper noted that Moscow had "never categorically excluded" such an encounter.

Pay Dirt: God in Creation?

2007-10-20T18:18:00.001-04:00

Well, I just returned from a safari in South Africa. It was a very cool experience. And I must say that seeing nature in its finest really makes one reflect about whether all of 'this' could really just be the result of random luck.

Now don't get me wrong. I'm not questioning the validity of evolution or that the earth is billions of years old or anything like that. I'm also not suggesting that God intervened periodically to 'create' a new species.

But what I am raising is utter awe about the beauty and complexity of the planet we find ourselves on. I found it so inspiring that it pushes me to believe that all of 'this' was started by God who somehow set all of 'this' in motion and shaped the evolutionary path to allow us to continue to evolve and produce some of the most amazing beauty imaginable.

On the safari, I saw everything from the most beautiful, peaceful scenes to the raw, ugliness of animal carnage. Here are a few examples of what I saw:

Sunsets...

Tall beauties...

Brutalities of nature...

Prehistoric wonders...

Living pieces of art...

Overall, a very cool experience! And one that makes me appreciate the wonders of nature all the more!

Pay Dirt: Why Are You Still a "Christian"?

2007-09-29T13:02:00.000-04:00

Renee from the Internet writes: I was a Christian once - for about 18 years, or most of my adult life. But then I read the Bible honestly and realized it was mostly evil. I am now Pagan/Hindu and will never be a Christian again. I know you agree that there is much evil in the Bible. You even reject basic Christian doctrines like being born in sin, the vicarious sacrifice of Jesus' blood for those who believe and heaven and hell. How then are you still a Christian? The depiction of Satan in the Bible is far better that the depiction of God. If the Bible reflects God in any way truly, then he is a monster and Satan is a hero for rebelling. Don't you agree? So, why are you still a Christian?

John Shelby Spong responds: Dear Renee, no, I do not agree. Of course, there are parts of the Bible that reflect tribal hatred and portray God as a vindictive ogre. I point them out constantly in this column and in my books. However, that fact does not render the core message of the Bible to be either wrong or irrelevant. The Bible defines God as love in the book of Hosea. The Bible defines God as justice in the book of Amos. The Bible asserts that proper liturgy is not God's desire but proper lives that "do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with God" are. That is the message of Micah. The Bible stretches the tribal deity of its own limited past into a universal presence in the book of Malachi. The Bible enjoins us to rise to ever new levels of humanity in Jesus' exhortations to love your enemies and to bless those who persecute you. So I study the Bible daily and treasure it as a resource.

In three quick sets of statements, I cherish the Bible because
- It affirms that my life is holy and that all of us were created in God's image.
- It proclaims that I am loved no matter what I do or who I am.
- It calls me to be all that I can be.

Please note the Trinitarian formula, for that is what I mean when I acknowledge God as Father (creator), Son (fully loving life), and Holy Spirit (life giver).

I do not worship the Bible. I do not regard it as the inerrant word of God. I know its content far too well for that to be a possibility. I accept the Bible for what it is, the chronicle of a faith story that grows as people journey through time, seeking to understand their God experience.

The things you call basic Christian doctrines like "being born in sin" or the "vicarious sacrifice of Jesus' blood for those who believe" and "heaven and hell" are not basic Christian doctrines to me at all. They are various theories developed by a behavior-controlling religious institution designated to frighten people or to make them pliable. There is no sense of hell in Paul, for example, and the vicarious sacrifice as the interpretation of the cross appears not to be something that Jesus taught but the message of the Jewish Day of Atonement being literalized and applied to Jesus by a later generation of Christians. Only then did Jesus become the new sacrificed Lamb of God. I have no desire to worship a God who requires the death of Jesus as the means of achieving salvation. Sadism is hardly a Godlike attribute, neither is the victim's masochistic pleasure in being crucified. That idea of salvation is simply not consistent with the message of the Fourth Gospel that the purpose of Jesus was to give life abundantly.

So I suggest that the Christianity you reject is not Christianity at all, but a terrible distortion that we all need to reject. Christianity, as I understand it, is far more than that. I hope you will find someday a church that does not distort Christianity, as your present experience seems to indicate.

The Eightfold Path

2007-08-30T09:04:00.000-04:00

This is my second entry on Buddhism...this one covers "the eightfold path", which is where I left off my last Buddhism entry. To recap, in the four noble truths, Buddha started with the symptom (life is out of joint), followed with the diagnosis (our drive for private fulfillment is causing life to be out of joint), and then with the prognosis (we can cure this disease by overcoming the egoistic drive for separate existence). His last noble truth was the prescription...the eightfold path.

The eight steps in the path are preceded by one that he doesn't include in his list, but refers to so often elsewhere that is was likely a presupposition here: right association - that is, we should associate ourselves with people that will help us attain illumination (truth-winners) and converse with them, serve them, observe their ways, and imbibe by osmosis their spirit of love and compassion. With that preliminary step in place, here are the eight steps proper:

1: Right views - life needs a map the mind can trust if we are to deploy our energies in the right direction; we need to know what life's problem basically is. As such, right views consist of the four noble truths (I know, a little circular, but I didn't come up with these!).

2: Right intent - this involves making up our hearts as to what we really want...people who achieve greatness are almost invariably passionately invested in some one thing.

3: Right speech - this involves becoming aware of our speech and what it reveals about our character. Instead of resolving to speak nothing but the truth, it is likely more realistic to start by trying to notice how many times per day we deviate from the truth and follow-up by asking why we did so. Similarly with uncharitable speech. Once we do this, we can move on to try to attempt changes in our speech. First toward veracity (habitual observance of truth in speech or statement) and second toward charity.

4: Right conduct - again, we should start by trying to understand our behaviour before trying to improve it...reflect on our actions with an eye to the motives that prompted them. Then move our conduct to selflessness and charity.

5: Right livelihood - if we are intent on liberation, we should engage in occupations that promote life instead of destroying it...occupations that were conducive to spiritual progress as opposed to ones that would impede it.

Note that the third, fourth and fifth steps can be grouped under the heading of morality - with Buddha making it clear that moral ineptitude risks not the wrath of a deity, but the retardation of one's own inner development.

6: Right effort - Buddha laid tremendous stress on the will...reaching the goal requires immense exertion - there are virtues to be developed, passions to be curbed, and destructive mind states to be expunged so compassion and detachment can have a chance. "Those who follow the way" says Buddha, "might well follow the example of an ox that marches through the deep mire carrying a heavy load. He is tired, but his steady gaze, looking forward, will never relax until he comes out of the mire, and it is only then he rests." A low level of volition for this goal won't do. Buddha added some thoughts on timing and balance, having more confidence in an approach involving a steady pull rather than in quick spurts.

The last two steps represent the most distinctive aspects of Buddha's teaching - namely the pivotal importance of meditation (or mental development, or mental cultivation). This involves two things which are described in the last two steps.

7: Right mindfulness - "All that we are is the result of what we have thought. Our life is shaped by our mind; we become what we think." Right mindfulness aims at witnessing all mental and physical events, including our emotions, without reacting to them, neither condemning some nor holding on to others. Through right mindful practice, we begin to see that every mental and physical state is in flux, and habitual clinging to these states is at the root of much of life's problems. We also see that we have little control over our mental states and our physical sensations, and normally little awareness of our reactions. Most important, we begin to realize that there is nobody behind the mental or physical events, orchestrating them. It becomes apparent that consciousness itself is not continuous...like the light from a light bulb, the on/off is so rapid that consciousness seems to be steady, whereas in fact it is not. With these insights, the belief in a separate self-existent self begins to dissolve and freedom to dawn.

8: Right concentration - while the eighth step, in many ways it comes before the seventh because to undertake mindfulness exercises effectively, one must first learn to focus on'e mind. Buddhism counsels patient, persistent attempts at sustaining one's full attention on a single point, a common one being simply one's breathing. Initial attempts are inevitably shredded by distractions; slowly, however, attention becomes sharper, more stable, more sustained.

It should be noted that concentration does not end when mindfulness begins; in fact, they are mutually reinforcing.

Note: the above was extracted from Buddhism: A Concise Introduction by Huston Smith and Philip Novak.

Pay Dirt: Why Worship?

2007-08-29T18:37:00.000-04:00

From John Shelby Spong's weekly email Q&A:

Chris from Central Texas writes: I attended your recent lectures in Austin and realize I forgot to ask you a question that has been increasingly on my mind: How does the concept of "worship" figure into your vision of a new Christianity? For a long time I have felt that God doesn't need my worship or praise, and to think that God does need my worship and adoration seems silly. (I think that "worship" and "adoration" are different from feeling a sense of gratitude and connection to God.) My church has been having some serious discussions regarding worship changes and I've heard some folks say that worship shouldn't be about us — it's simply about praising God. Well, I think that worship is very much about me and about the other worshipers as well — it's about drawing us closer to God, about the community called the church, about inspiring us to care for others, etc. Creeds that I can't say, prayers of confession that beat people up, hymns focused on atonement messages, and an emphasis on liturgy and ritual over spirituality only impede my relationship to God. Am I just spoiled and self-centered to want a more meaningful and more relevant worship experience?

Spong's reply: Dear Chris, yours is a perennial question. I cannot imagine a God who "needs" worship, or a God who has some innate need to be flattered by the human praise that is so often the content of worship. Listen to the words of such hymns as "How Great Thou Art" and "Almighty, Invisible God Only Wise."

Worship is always a human activity that meets a human need. Whenever one engages in worship, it is not for the purpose of working on God but on the human being who is worshiping. Worship is designed to enhance our humanity: to increase our capacity to live, our ability to love and our courage to be all that God created us to be. If worship makes us "religious" or "righteous" or turns us into being intolerant "true believers," then it has become nothing more than an act of idolatry.

Worship in most of our churches today is a mixed blessing. It is frequently the result not of careful study and critical planning, but of rote and tradition. Much of it is designed to keep us childlike and immature and to make a virtue out of chronic dependency. One of the reasons churches exhort its people to be "born again" is that this will postpone forever the necessity of their growing up.

Worship at its heart is the practice of becoming aware of the presence of God so that we become more deeply and fully human. I judge every worship experience in which I participate by that definition.

- John Shelby Spong

Pay Dirt: Literalism or Myth?

2007-08-11T11:56:00.000-04:00

"Augustus came from a miraculous conception by the divine and human conjunction of [the God] Apollo and [his mother] Atia. How does the historian respond to that story? Are there any who take it literally?... That divergence raises an ethical problem for me. Either all such divine conceptions, from Alexander to Augustus and from the Christ to the Buddha, should be accepted literally and miraculously or all of them should be accepted metaphorically and theologically. It is not morally acceptable to say directly and openly that our story is truth but yours is myth; ours is history but yours is a lie. It is even less morally acceptable to say that indirectly and covertly by manufacturing defensive or protective strategies that apply only to one's own story. "

- John Crosssan, The Birth of Christianity, 1998, pg 28 - 29.

Pay Dirt: Harry Potter Quote

2007-08-03T09:25:00.000-04:00

I just finished Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling...the last of the Harry Potter series. Towards the end of the book, there is a scene where Harry is talking with Dumbledore (who is dead)...Harry isn't sure if he himself is also dead (and in some form of the afterlife) or if this whole scene is some kind of dream he is having. The last interchange between Harry and Dumbledore really struck me...especially the last quote by Dumbledore:

"Tell me one last thing," said Harry. "Is this real?" Or has this been happening inside my head?"

Dumbledore beamed at him, and his voice sounded loud and strong in Harry's ears even though the bright mist was descending again, obscuring his figure.

"Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?"

I found this very interesting when thought about from a religious experience perspective. We often say that the religious experiences people claim to have are "just in their heads". Interesting to consider the question "why on earth should that mean that it is not real?". Maybe in our heads is where we experience God???

Pay Dirt: D'Oh! Top Ten (Plus One) Religious Episodes on 'The Simpsons'

2007-07-25T18:37:00.000-04:00

From beliefnet.com

D'Oh! Top Ten (Plus One) Religious Episodes on 'The Simpsons'
By Mark I. Pinsky

Bart Simpson once asked his father about the family's religious identity. Homer classically replied, "You know, the one with all the well-meaning rules that don't work in real life. Uh, Christianity." In 18 seasons of "The Simpsons," nearly 20 episodes of the award-winning animated series have focused almost exclusively on faith, religion, and spirituality, while similar subplots, jokes, and images are scattered throughout 150 other episodes.With "The Simpsons Movie" opening on July 27th (and rumored to explore more irreverent faith-focused storylines), the time is ripe for a list of the top ten (plus 1) episodes dealing with religion. It wasn't easy, but as a repeat viewer and a student of the show, here is my list. Whether you're a die-hard Homer fan, a subscriber to the Ned Flanders school of faith, or even an Apu enthusiast, there's something in this gallery for you.

Homer the Heretic (Christianity) - Oct. 8, 1992
Hapless Homer, a borderline pagan whose faith is largely fear-based, decides that attending church every Sunday is a bad idea. Mostly, he is just lazy. But at one point he uses a theological argument with his despairing wife, Marge, that demolishes the notion of "one true faith." Homer has a great time staying at home while his church-going family suffers for their piety. Then God comes to Homer in a dream, and they work things out. Classic "Simpsons" line: "What if we picked the wrong religion? Every week, we're just making God madder and madder!" --Homer Simpson

Like Father, Like Clown (Judaism) - Oct. 24, 1991
Written with the help of three rabbis, this episode about Jewish identity dramatizes the debate between tradition and modernity--with a little help from the movie "The Jazz Singer." In the episode, Krusty the Clown is revealed to be a conflicted Jew who wants to reconcile with his faith and his estranged father, who, it turns out, is a rabbi. The show also draws on the early life and career of comedian Jackie Mason, who plays Krusty's dad. This episode should be watched with its sequel, "Today I am a Clown," Dec. 7, 2003, which deals with Krusty's adult bar mitzvah. Classic "Simpsons" line: "Mel Brooks is Jewish!?!" --Homer Simpson, after Lisa lists the many Jews in show business

She of Little Faith (Buddhism) - Dec. 16, 2001
Lisa, for many seasons the exemplar of socially-conscious mainline Protestantism, gives up on Christianity when Springfield Community Church goes commercial and seeker-crazy. After some theological wandering, she decides to become a Buddhist, with the help of Richard Gere. At one point the actor tells Lisa that Buddhism is about harmony, so in order to keep her family happy she can still observe Christmas with them. Still, even Gere becomes exasperated at Homer's co-worker Lenny, a Buddhist who doesn't know who Buddha is. Classic "Simpsons" line: "It's a good thing Buddha teaches freedom from desire, because I've got the desire to kick your ass." --Richard Gere

The Father, the Son, and the Holy Guest Star (Catholicism) - May 15, 2005
Thrown out of public school (again), bratty son Bart is sent to Catholic school, where he meets a cool priest, played by Liam Neeson. Homer, seduced by bingo, a pancake supper, and the concept of confession and absolution, decides that he and Bart should convert to Catholicism. Marge panics, and with her minister, Reverend Timothy Lovejoy, and her evangelical next-door neighbor, Ned Flanders, the trio proceeds to refight the Reformation. Lovejoy accuses Homer of being "under the spell of a man in a pointy white hat." But Bart reminds everyone, before bloodshed erupts (again) between the Protestants and Catholics, to remember that they share the same faith. Classic "Simpsons" line: "It's all Christianity, people. The little, stupid differences are nothing next to the big, stupid similarities." --Bart Simpson

Missionary: Impossible (Christianity) - Feb. 20, 2000
Failing to make good on his pledged donation to public television, Homer needs to get out of Springfield ahead of a mob led by Betty White and Rupert Murdoch. In desperation, he jumps on a Christian relief plane on its way to supply and replace missionaries on a South Pacific island. Homer prays to "Jebus," who he says he doesn't believe in, to spare him from the mission. Out of ignorance, incompetence, and an abundance of good will, Homer proceeds to repeat every error made by missionaries to indigenous people in the past five centuries. Classic "Simpsons" line: "I may not know that much about God, but I have to say we built an awfully nice cage for him." --Homer Simpson, after motivating islanders to build a church

Simpsons Bible Stories (Christianity) - April 4, 1999
In this Easter episode, the Simpsons are in church as Reverend Lovejoy drones on with a sermon that puts them to sleep. Homer, Marge, Bart, and Lisa each dream stories from the Old Testament, based on familiar stories from Genesis, Exodus, Kings, and Samuel. (The dreamt-up tales are like the "Fractured Fairy Tales" from the classic "Rocky and Bullwinkle Show.") Homer and Marge--as Adam and Eve--are expelled from the Garden of Eden. But Marge is optimistic, if unclear, on the concept of Original Sin. When the family wakes, they are alone in church, and as they exit the sanctuary, the apocalypse has begun. Classic "Simpsons" line: "I'm sure God will let us return soon. How long can he hold a grudge?" --Marge Simpson, in her dream where she is Eve

Thank God it's Doomsday (Christianity) - May 8, 2005
Homer and the kids stumble into a movie theater at the mall that is showing a film based on the "Left Behind" series of apocalyptic pulp fiction. "The virtuous have gone to heaven," a character intones, "and the rest of us are left below." Fear struck, Homer buys enough Christian books to calculate the exact time and location of the Rapture and convinces townsfolk to gather with him on a mesa at that moment. But he makes an error, and when the event doesn't happen on schedule, he becomes an object of ridicule. On the right date, Homer is raptured by himself. But without his family with him in heaven, he is desolate. So he convinces God to turn back time and postpone the Rapture. Classic "Simpsons" line: "There's no way in God's heaven that I can get into God's heaven. But maybe he'll let me in if I warn others that the apocalypse is coming." --Homer Simpson, wearing a sandwich board and ringing a bell through the streets of Springfield

Bart Sells His Soul (Religious Superstition) - Oct. 8, 1995
Taking a cue from Faust, Bart sells his soul for $5 to his friend Milhouse. Bart argues that he made a good deal, since the soul is not real--just something made up by people to scare kids, "like the boogie man or Michael Jackson." But he soon realizes he has made a terrible mistake. Automatic doors don't open when he approaches, his breath does not produce condensation on the door of a frozen food compartment, he sees no humor in his favorite cartoon show, and he takes no joy from his pranks. In the end, his soul is saved by his sister Lisa, who explains that the soul is "the most valuable part of you... the symbol of everything fine inside us." Classic "Simpsons" line: Bart: "What if you die in a submarine at the bottom of the ocean?" Milhouse: "Oh, [your soul] can swim. It's even got wheels in case you die in the desert and it has to drive to the cemetery."

Pray Anything (General Religion) - Feb. 9, 2003
Homer becomes jealous of Ned when he thinks his neighbor's prayers enable him to win a $50,000 prize for making a half court, halftime shot at a WNBA game. So Homer tries prayer, beginning with a search for a lost TV remote. Lo and behold, it actually works. Success builds on success, until Homer ends up owning Springfield Community Church--turning it into debauchery central. Naturally, this hubris angers God, who rains down retribution on Homer, who in turn is saved from stoning only by the intervention of Reverend Lovejoy. Classic "Simpsons" line: "From now on, I'll pray till my hands are chapped and bleeding." --Homer Simpson, after finding his remote under the sofa

Homer Loves Flanders (Evangelicalism) - Feb. 24, 1994
For once, Homer eases up on the scorn and abuse he normally heaps on his good-hearted but irritating next-door neighbor, Ned Flanders. But first Homer mocks Communion and transubstantiation (the idea that Jesus is present in the wafer) by mistaking a waffle stuck to Ned's ceiling for the Host. Then he prays for tickets to a big football game, only to have his prayer answered by Ned, who offers him a seat. "Why do you mock me, O Lord?" Homer cries. Still, Homer gradually opens his eyes to the evangelical's prayer lifestyle and the way he lives the social gospel. Yet Flanders finds this unexpected friendship stifling and flees Homer, who stands by him when church members are eager to assume the worst about Flanders's erratic behavior. Classic "Simpsons" line: "Bless the grocer for this wonderful meat, the middlemen who jacked up the price, and let's not forget the humane but determined guys over at the slaughterhouse." --Ned Flanders, when he is saying grace

The Two Mrs. Nahasapeemapetilons (Hinduism) - Nov. 16, 1997
Apu, the convenience-store operator, is threatened with the end of his role as Springfield's swinging bachelor, when his mother arrives from India, determined to preside over her son's arranged marriage to a woman from the subcontinent. After failing to convince Apu's mother that her son is already married to Marge, Homer tries to sabotage the ceremony by dressing up as the elephant-headed Hindu diety Ganeesha, with predictably disastrous results. Classic "Simpsons" line: "Do not offer my God a peanut!" --Apu to Homer, when his friend tries to feed Ganeesha

Four Noble Truths

2007-07-21T10:35:00.000-04:00

I just finished a short book on Buddhism, appropriately titled Buddhism: A Concise Introduction by Huston Smith and Philip Novak. I hadn't read anything on Buddhism, so even a short introduction was interesting for me.

What struck me on an overall basis was that the original Buddhist philosophy is much more akin to a Dr. Phil-like program as opposed to the stereotypical religious structure I was expecting (and for those of you who are not Dr. Phil fans, this comment was not meant to be disparaging to Buddhism...just that it came across to me more like a life improvement approach than a god-centered religious movement). This may be an incorrrect assessment (given my limited reading on Buddhism) but that is my first impression.

Having said that, I quite liked the basics of Buddhism, so I thought I'd outline some of them here on Prospecting God. In this blog entry, I will outline the "four noble truths" of Buddhism which were supposedly the content for the first teaching conducted by the Buddha. It followed his six-year quest for enlightenment and was a declaration of the key discoveries he had made - they are the "axioms of his system, the postulates from which the rest of his teachings logically derive":

The first noble truth is that life is dukkha, usually translated "suffering". In summary form, the first noble truth is that life (in the condition it has gotten itself into) is dislocated...something has gone wrong...it is out of joint; and as its pivot is not true, friction (interpersonal conflict) is excessive, movement (creativity) is blocked, and it hurts. The Buddha saw clearly that life as typically lived is unfulfilling and filled with insecurity. It should be noted that this observation was prompted more by realism than by morbidity or a pessimistic outlook on life. He did not doubt that it is possible to have a good time and that this was enjoyable, but he did then ask "how much of life is thus enjoyable?" and "at what level of our being does such enjoyment proceed?". He thought the level was superficial, sufficient enough perhaps for animals, but leaving deep regions of the human psyche empty and wanting. Because of this reality of life, we seek distractions to divert us from what lives beneath the surface...some distract themselves for long periods but the overall darkness is not relieved. He went on to pinpoint six moments when life's dislocation becomes glaringly apparent:

The trauma of birth
The pathology of sickness
The morbidity of decrepitude
The phobia of death
To be tied to what one dislikes
To be separated from what one loves

Two conclusions from the first noble truth: (1) even if one gets what one loves, the delight doesn't last; (2) it is not only the grasped-for world of experience that is impermanent - we, the graspers, are as well.

For the rift (as identified by the first noble truth) to be healed, we need to know the cause, and the second noble truth identifies it. The cause of life's dislocation is tanha - the desire for personal fulfillment. When we are selfless, we are free, but that is precisely the difficulty - to maintain that state. Tanha is the force that ruptures it, pulling us back from the freedom-of-all to seek fulfillment from our private egos. Tanha consists of all those inclinations which tend to continue or increase all forms of selfishness - the essence of which is desire for oneself at the expense, if necessary, of others.

The third noble truth follows from the second. If the causes of life's dislocation is selfish craving, it ceases when such craving is overcome. If we could be released from the narrow limits of self-interest into the vast expanse of universal life, we would be relieved of our torment.

The fourth noble truth prescribes how the cure can be accomplished. The overcoming of tanha, the way out of our captivity, is throught the "Eightfold Path". I'll cover that in my next blog entry.

Note: the above was extracted from Buddhism: A Concise Introduction by Huston Smith and Philip Novak.

Pay Dirt: Interesting Quote

2007-07-20T12:02:00.001-04:00

From the introduction to Chapter 4 of Hitchens' god is not Great:

In dark ages people are best guided by religion, as in a pitch-black night a blind man is the best guide; he knows the roads and paths better than a man who can see. When daylight comes, however, it is foolish to use blind old men as guides.
- Heinrich Heine, Gedanken Und Einfalle

Summary Reflections on Bible Exploration

2007-06-02T13:13:00.000-04:00

I've come to the end of my Bible Exploration series. I thought it would be useful (for me at least!) to summarize the key insights.

Many of my friends ask me why I even bothered to address the Bible. My response is that, although my thinking on things theological has evolved greatly in recent years, I still want to have a spiritual dimension to my life. For me, having grown up in the Christian tradition, I envision exploring that spiritual dimension with a Christian bias (although not with the fundamentalist perspectives I was indoctrinated with). As such, I need to be able to "fit in" the critical components of Christianity (i.e. God, Jesus, Bible, etc.) in a way that makes sense for me. So this is my attempt to explain how I see the Bible as being a potentially relevant source of thinking for that spritual dimension I seek.

Here are the key insights from this series of blog entries:

Bible Beliefs

The Bible is a human product, containing human words...not the very words of God.
It should not be read literally...but there are strong metaphorical messages that contain wisdom we can learn from.
Within the context of the previous two points, Christians should understand the Bible as it is the foundational document for Christians, since it captures the experiences of the ancient Israel community and the early Christian community and their responses to God and Jesus, which is important within the Christian religion.
For Christians, the Bible can be a mediator to God, as it discloses elements of God's character as interpreted through the Christian tradition.

How the Bible Became a Book

There are MANY examples of the Bible being incorrect...it is not the inerrant words of God.
The Biblical texts were initially communicated through oral tradition (for tens of years) before they were written down...wording and specifics would have clearly been altered during this process. In terms of the original texts, we don't have them or even copies of copies of copies of the original texts.
The texts themselves were copied by hand for hundreds of years...with mistakes and edits happening along the way.
The determination of what texts should be in the Bible was made by a variety of church leaders over time...with great debate.

A New Way of Reading/Seeing the Bible

When reading the Bible, we should take a "historical-metaphorical" approach, asking "What did this text mean in the ancient historical setting in which it was written?" and "What does this story mean as a story, independent of its historical factuality?"

Revisiting the Creation Stories

The creation stories were written in the 500s BCE, during or shortly after the Jewish exile into Babylon. Some suggest that key elements of the stories were used to emphasize Jewish beliefs...importance of the sabbath to the Jews of the day (as opposed to creation stories starting the sabbath ritual); and an assertion that the God of Israel is the creator and lord of heaven and earth as compared with Babylon and its gods (with whom the Jews were obviously not very happy at that point in time!).
The historical understanding of the universe is important context...Ancient Israelites thought of the earth as the centre of the universe and above the earth was the "dome of the sky" with water being above the dome (hence the falling of rain and snow). Thus, the description of creation (e.g. separating the waters so that dry land is below the sky, etc.) reflects their understanding of the nature of the universe.
The figurative nature of the creation stories can be seen even through the names of Adam (which comes from the Hebrew word adham meaning "humankind" and coming from the Hebrew word adhamah meaning "ground" or "dust") and Eve (which means "mother of all living").
Key metaphorical messages that may make these stories useful or relevant for Christians today include the following propositions: (1) God is the source of everything that is; (2) humans are the climax of creation but at the same time we are small, finite, mortal.
Finally, these creation stories set up the rest of the Bible which is, to a large extent, the Christian tradition's story of humankind's state of affairs: the human predicament and the Christian solution.

Plowing through the Pentateuch

The Pentateuch captures the story of the "beginning of Israel" as a nation and a people. Its main components include stories about Abraham and his family; Moses and the Jewish exodus from Egypt; Sinai, the covenant and the laws; and the journey through the wilderness.
The overarching theme throughout the Pentateuch is "promise and fulfillment". God promises Abraham that he will make of him a great nation. The rest of the story of the Pentateuch is the story of fulfillment of this promise...from slavery to the exodus and to the promised land.
While the Jewish exodus likely happened in the 13th century BCE, the completed Pentateuch was not likely written until around the Jewish exile in Babylon in the 500s BCE. At the time of writing (i.e. during the exile), the promise of God that the Jews would be "a great nation" seemed profoundly threatened again, as did their very existence. In this setting, they remembered and celebrated the promise given to their ancestors, the stories of Israel's liberation from a previous imperial power, and the gift of a new land and a new life.
In addition, the Pentateuch is Israel's story of radical protest against and liberation from the way Egypt and Pharoah governed human society at the time which included economic exploitation, political oppression and religious legitimation. In that context, the laws in the Pentateuch were written to prevent the emergence of a permanently impoverished class within Israel (i.e. for use in their world several thousand years ago as opposed to for Christians today).
The metaphorical interpretation and usefulness of the Pentateuch for today's Christian would be an underlying message that in spite of life's threats and seemingly insurmountable obstacles, when birth and rebirth seem impossible, when powers of empires seem to rule the world...living in a manner that mirrors God's nature will enable us to make it through - living fully, loving unconditionally, being all we can be.

New Perspectives on the Prophets

Historical context is crucial if one is to understand these books. These books narrate the history of Israel from the time of occupation of the promised land until the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians in 586 BCE. During that time, Israel lived as a "tribal confederacy" with no centralized government. Then, around 1000 BCE, a monarchy was put in place with kings like Saul, David and Solomon. When Solomon died in 922 BCE, the united kingdom split into 2 parts: Israel and Judah. Israel lasted until 722 BCE when it was conquered and destroyed by the Assyrian kingdom. Judah lasted until 586 BCE when it was conquered and destroyed by the Babylonian empire. Some of Judah's survivors were exiled to Babylon for about 50 years, at which time they were allowed to return to Judah to begin rebuilding their ruined country. So the prophets are writing some 500 years after the exodus, during the time of the split of the kingdom, destruction of the kingdoms, exile and return. It is also important to recognize that during this time period, Israel and Judah had essentially become miniature versions of the ancient domination system that had enslaved their ancestors in Egypt. The victims (the majority of the population) were Israelites, of course, but now the elites at the top were also Israelites...Egypt had been established in Israel.
In that context, criticism of the reality of Israel's and Judah's social situation is the core of what the prophets were addressing in these books...as they believed that this could not be the will of God who had liberated Israel from similar bondage in Egypt. In essence, they expressed a passion for social justice and had an anti-establishment message...and added warnings of consequences if the societies didn't take peace and justice seriously.
In that context, it also becomes clear that the prophets weren't foretelling Jesus' story as is commonly thought (instead, because the New Testament authors were Jewish and knew the Hebrew Bible well, they echoed the words of the Hebrew Bible in telling Jesus' story, in order to show continuity between Jesus and the tradition out of which they came, making it seem as though the prophets were foretelling Jesus' story).
For Christians today, the message of many of the prophets words can still have metaphorical meaning - it can be relevant to the victims and exiles of the domination systems of our time, proclaiming that our identify, value and worth are not grounded in the culture of the day, but in God's regard. The message of the prophets can affirm that God's character, will and justice are different from the justice of oppressive social orders and the solution for exiles of today's world is also a journey of return...a way or path through the wilderness...with the destination being a return to life mirroring God's will.

Gaining Wisdom from the Wisdom Books

These books (Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Job) were believed to have been written in the post-exile timeframe...between 500BCE to 300 BCE timeframe.
Proverbs generally affirms "Follow this way, and your life will go well."...essentially a book of conventional wisdom (i.e. cultural wisdom, community wisdom, folk wisdom, "what everybody knows", etc.).
Ecclesiastes questions conventional wisdom by claiming that the things of life (e.g. wisdom, power, fame, wealth, etc.) do not satisfy and then goes on to establish that bad things happen to good people through no fault of their own. It also emphasizes death...its utter inevitability and randomness...and the fact that there is nothing we can do about it, so we should "Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we may die".
In Job, we encounter a story about a righteous man who endures much suffering. His friends try to share conventional wisdom to him to explain his suffering, but Job dismisses that wisdom as worthless. In the end, Job has a discussion with God which also provided him with no answers or explanations for his suffering. The experience, though, did convince him that God is real in spite of our ability to see fairness in the world. Some think that Job wasn't written to address the question "Why do the righteous suffer?" but instead to illustrate a point that God should be seen not as a means but as the ultimate end (that is, religion unmotivated by self-interest).
For today's Christian, the wisdom books provide an interesting contrast between secondhand religion (i.e. religion learned from others...Proverbs) and firsthand religion (i.e. religion that flows from the firsthand experience of God...Ecclesiastes and Job). The books also provide a contrast between conventional wisdom and wisdom that is based more on randomness, chance and inevitability.

The Evolving Stories of the Gospels

The earliest is almost certainly Mark and the latest is John. The gospels are the product of a developing Christian tradition during the decades following Jesus' death...containing history remembered and history metaphorized.
Mark was a wartime gospel, and, as such, Mark emphasizes things like Jesus' suffering, warnings that followers of Jesus would suffer, and the promise of rewards to those who endured without losing their faith. Mark's theme seems to be focused around the "way"...that is, a way of return from exile (where the community found itself at wartime) which focused on dying to an old way of being and being born into a new way of being.
Matthew was written about 10-20 years after Mark. Matthew uses 90% of Mark and adds some material from Q as well as some "original" material to evolve the story of Jesus. Matthew was written at a time when Christian Jews were in conflict with other Jews, so Matthew tries to assert that Christian Jews are faithful to the traditions of Israel...he does this by quoting the Hebrew Bible, drawing parallels to the Hebrew Bible and quoting Hebrew scripture.
Luke was also written about 10-20 years after Mark and uses a lot of Mark and Q. But to evolve the story, he also adds a lot of "original" content as well. When Luke was written, Christianity had become a much more Gentile movement so he wanted to show Christianity projected to the whole world - both Jew and Gentile. Luke also has a repeated emphasis on the Spirit of God.
John was written about 60-70 years after Jesus's death. John is the most symbolic of the gospels and if you don't try to force yourself to read John literally, you'll find that it is a remarkable book that summarizes how the Christian movement came to understand Jesus...that is, through Jesus you can know what God is like.
The gospel stories clearly evolve from the first gospel (Mark) to the remaining gospels (e.g. virgin birth idea, resurrection stories, etc.). Matthew and Luke took Mark's writings and morphed them to meet their needs (i.e. Matthew's need to justify his belief in Jesus as being in line with Judaism; Luke's desire to move Christianity to a movement for Gentile and Jew and to emphasize the spirit). John takes the gospels to their next evolution... a more direct link between Jesus and God.
For Christians today, the gospels tell the story of Jesus, through whom we can see what a life full of God looks like...living fully, loving wastefully, and having the courage to be all that you can possibly be.

A Primer on Paul's Writings

Paul's letters were the way he kept in touch with the Christian communities he had helped start once he had moved on. Often, Paul's letters are responses to letters he would have received from a community. Thus, it is important to recognize that the letters were not intended to be a summary of his message, but more specifically dealing with issues arising in his communities. In fact, the agenda for Paul's letters was set more by the communities than by Paul...he deals with specific issues raised by them.
For today's Christians, Paul's themes included: (1) Jesus is Lord (i.e. he showed what a life full of God looks like and, as such, is Lord...and Caesar is not); (2) Being "In Christ" (i.e. characterized by things like freedom, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness and self-control); (3) Justification by Grace (i.e. you don't have to be Jew or live a certain way...justification by grace is the basis for anyone's relationship to God...it is a gift of God, not a human accomplishment); and (4) Christ Crucified (i.e. this represents various messages including Christ was physically crucified; an indictment of the rulers of the age who crucified Christ; a revelation of God's love for us; and a symbol of the path of transformation).

Revelations from Revelation

Revelation was written for specific Christian communities in Asia Minor (about the events that the author thinks will happen in his own time) as opposed to being a message for people thousands of years later. In this context, key messages were: (1) Despite appearances to the contrary, Christ is Lord and Caesar and the beast are not; (2) God will soon act to overthrow the rule of the beast and its incarnation in Caesar; and (3) Therefore, persevere, endure, be confident, take hear, have faith.
For today's Christians, there are various themes that can be seen in Revelation: (1) Tale of Two Lordships (i.e. the honor and praise demanded by Caesar is offered to God and Jesus instead); (2) Ancient Cosmic Combat Myth (i.e. story of cosmic conflict between good and evil that has been used in many cultures throughout human history); (3) Revelation and Empire (i.e. Rome won't bring peace as it claims...instead Jesus is the light of the world who can bring peace on Earth); (4) Indictment of the Roman Empire (i.e. Revelation personifies Rome as "the great whore" and a ferocious beast, and claims the fact that the economic exploitation will end); (5) Tale of Two Cities (i.e. city of Rome will fall to the kingdom of God...the "New Jerusalem").

Revelations from Revelation

2007-06-02T12:10:00.000-04:00

Revelation is the last book in the Bible...although it wasn't the last book to be written, nor did the author know it would be positioned as the "conclusion" to the Christian Bible. It was placed at the end due to its subject matter...that is, "the end". It is interesting to note that Revelation almost failed to "make it into" the Bible...it was reluctantly accepted in the Greek speaking Eastern church, listed by Eusebius as a disputed book, omitted from canonical book lists made by early church fathers, given secondary stature by Luther, and largely ignored by Calvin.

The book is an apocalypse. Apocalyptic writings flourished in Judaism from about 200 BCE to 100 CE. It was written in the last first century by a man named John. As many as 65% of the verses in Revelation echo or allude to passages from the Hebrew Bible. The book starts with a vision...and this continues throughout ("I saw" is used about 55 times)...using imagery, allusions to the Hebrew Bible, symbolic numbers, etc.

There are 2 ways of reading Revelation:

The Futurist Interpretation - the central claim of this way of reading Revelation is simple: it tells us about what will happen some time in the future. This is how most Christians read Revelation.
The Past-Historical Interpretation - this approach is based on a belief that we understand the message of Revelation only by setting the test in the historical context within which it was written - that is, emphasizing what Revelation would have meant in the past. This approach sees Revelation as a message to the specific Christian communities in Asia Minor (as referred to at the beginning of Revelation) as opposed to a message for people thousands of years later. The author seems to think the events will happen in his own time as well (he uses phrases like "what must soon take place", "for the time is near", "soon")...and while modern Christians try to overlay "God's time perspective" on these statements, the original hearers of Revelation would not have had that thought. There is also compelling evidence that the author was writing about realities of his own day (e.g. clear allusions to the Roman empire). In this context, key messages were: (1) Despite appearances to the contrary, Christ is Lord and Caesar and the beast are not; (2) God will soon act to overthrow the rule of the beast and its incarnation in Caesar; and (3) Therefore, persevere, endure, be confident, take hear, have faith. Taking this approach recognizes that the Roman Empire did not fall for another 300 years and Jesus did not return soon...it accepts that the Bible is a human product, not a divine product without error.

But Revelation is more than mistaken prediction...its larger themes are of interest:

Tale of Two Lordships - Roman emperors were given divine titles (e.g. son of God, lord, god, etc.) and there was religious legitimation to the rule of the empire and Caesar. Against this context, John in Revelation proclaims exclusive lordship of God and God as known in Jesus. The honor and praise demanded by Caesar is offered to God and Jesus instead. In summary, Jesus is Lord; Caesar is not.

The Ancient Cosmic Combat Myth - this plot is a story of cosmic conflict between good and evil, and has been used in many cultures throughout human history (e.g. in ancient writings, conflicts between the god of light and evil power of darkness, witht he evil power often imaged as a dragon or sea monster; in ancient Near East, stories of god killing the evil seven-headed monster; in postbiblical time, archangel Michael warring with the dragon; and we could keep going up to things like Star Wars with its depiction of good versus evil). John uses similar references in his story.

Revelation and Empire - there are remarkable similarities between Revelation and the story of Apollo's birth (from Greco-Roman culture)...when Apollos was born, the ancient monster looked to devour the infant, but Apollo was kept safe and went on to kill the monster. John seems to use that story. By identifying the dragon, he refers to the Roman Empire. Instead of Caesar and the Roman Empire being Apollo, Jesus takes that role and they become the dragon, the beast, the ancient serpant. Rome won't bring peace as it claims...instead Jesus is the light of the world who can bring peace on Earth.

Indictment of the Roman Empire - the ancient domination system included political oppression, economic exploitation and religious legitimation...elites of power and wealth controlled societies in their own interests and declared the order they imposed to be the will of God. In Revelation, John refers to all of these features. John personifies Rome as "the great whore" and ferocious beast...seducing, bewitching, claiming religious legitimation, and then ruling through intimidation and violence. In describing "the great whore", John describes the luxury of the empire (e.g. fine linen, gold, jewels, pearls, etc.), including slaves and human lives...and the fact that the economic exploitation will end.

Tale of Two Cities - the city of Rome will fall to the kingdom of God...the "New Jerusalem".

So in Revelation, we see an affirmation of the sovereignty and justice of God, and radical criticism of an oppressive domination system pretending to be the will of God. John's vision of the "New Jerusalem" may be the primary reason this book made it into the Bible. It speaks of the reunion of God with humankind, thereby overcoming the exile that began in Eden...there we will see God. It is difficult to imagine a more powerful ending to the Bible.

Note: the bulk of the above has been extracted from Marcus Borg's Reading the Bible Again for the First Time.

A Primer on Paul's Writings

2007-05-30T15:40:00.000-04:00

Next to Jesus, an argument can be made that Paul was the most important individual in the birth of what came to be Christianity. He wrote more of the New Testament than any other person (although scholars think that he likely only wrote 7, 8 or 9 of the 13 letters attributed to him), and was responsible for the spread of the Jesus movement into the Gentile world. While both liked and hated, there is not much debate that Paul was seen as an intellectual. He was also clearly Jewish and a Pharisee.

As a missionary, Paul would typically arrive in a new city and begin his missionary work by going to the Jewish synagogue where he would address Jews, but also Gentiles who were loosely associated with the synagogue. Paul's converts would begin a community life of their own, gathering regularly for worship and instruction and life together...in "house churches". These communities were likely small...well under 100 and more than likely between 10-30. Paul's missionary strategy also had him moving on after a local community had been established.

Paul's letters were the way he kept in touch with his communities after he had moved on. They would be read aloud at a gathering of the community. As such, Paul's letters are "conversations in context" - often his response to a letter he would have received from the community. Thus, it is important to recognize that the letters were not intended to be a summary of his message, but more specifically dealing with issues arising in his communities. In fact, the agenda for Paul's letters was set more by the communities than by Paul...he deals with specific issues raised by them.

For example, Paul writes in I Corinthians "Now concerning the matters about which you wrote. It is well for a man not to touch a woman. But because of temptation to immorality, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband." An interesting question raised about passages such as this is how much of the passage is Paul's point of view, versus how much is he noting what was written to him by the community. For instance, in this passage, try putting quotation marks around the second sentence (i.e. as if it was what the community had written...to follow the "concerning matters about which you wrote" opening) and then re-read the passage...you'll get a very different perspective. But since there are no quotation marks in ancient Greek, we don't really know...although many modern scholars think that the second sentence is Paul quoting from the letter he received from his community in Corinth.

Some of the key themes in Paul's writings are:

"Jesus is Lord" - Paul refers to Jesus as Lord frequently. This had both religious and sociopolitical meanings. He was affirming that the "risen Christ" participated in the power and authority of God. He was also affirming that since "Jesus is Lord", "Caesar is not Lord".
"In Christ" - Paul uses this phrase (or "in the Lord") 165 times. He uses it to refer to being free, no longer enslaved to the dominion of sin and death...characterized by things like freedom, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness and self-control. Life "in Christ" also has a social dimension in that it negates the social boundaries that mark conventional human existence.
"Justification by Grace" - Paul contrasts justification by works of the law with justification by grace through faith. Justification is a free gift, not a reward for achievement. In Galatians, for example, justification by grace through faith is the basis for Gentiles becoming part of the community without becoming Jewish through circumcision. Similarly, he makes this point in Romans. For Paul, justification by grace is the basis for our relationship to God...it is a gift of God, not a human accomplishment.
"Christ Crucified" - Paul attaches various meanings to this including that Christ was crucified; an indictment of the rulers of the age who crucified Christ; a revelation of God's love for us; and a symbol of the path of transformation.

The New Testament doesn't tell us about Paul's death, but according to early Church tradition, he was believed to have been executed in the 60s. If so, it is interesting that Christianity's two most formative figures were executed by established authority.

Note: most of the above was taken from Marcus Borg's Reading the Bible Again for the First Time.

Pay Dirt: Christpower

2007-05-29T20:12:00.000-04:00

Christpower

Look at him!

Look not at his divinity,
but look, rather, at his freedom.

Look not at the exaggerated tales of his power,
but look, rather, at his infinite capacity to give himself away.

Look not at the first-century mythology that surrounds him,
but look, rather, at his courage to be,
his ability to live, and
the contagious quality of his love.

Stop your frantic search!

Be still and know that this is God:
this love,
this freedom,
this life,
this being;

And
when you are accepted, accept yourself;
when you are forgiven, forgive yourself;
when you are loved, love yourself.

Grasp that Christpower
and dare to be
yourself!

John Shelby Spong. Christpower (arranged by Lucy Newton Boswell Negus). Richmond, VA: Thomas Hale Co., 1975. Reprinted in 2007 by St. Johann's Press, Haworth, New Jersey.

The Evolving Stories of the Gospels

2007-05-12T21:30:00.000-04:00

First, a little historical context:

In 63 BCE, the Jewish homeland was incorporated into the Roman Empire (and administered through "client kings" appointed by Rome)
Herod the Great was client king in 37 BCE until his death in 4 BCE. At the time of this death, the kingdom was divided into 3 parts.
Jesus was born around 4 BCE.
In 6 BCE, one of those parts - Judea - came under the direct Roman rule through governors - the most famous of whom was Pontius Pilate, from 26 to 36 BCE.
Jesus was executed around 30 CE.
Jewish revolutionary violence simmered throughout the first century, culminating in the catastrophic war of revolt against Rome in 66 CE. During this war, the Romans brutally reconquered the Jewish homeland and destroyed Jerusalem and the temple in 70.
The gospels were written between approximately 65 and 100 CE.

The gospels tell the story of Jesus. The earliest is almost certainly Mark and the latest is John. The gospels are the product of a developing Christian tradition during the decades following Jesus' death...containing history remembered and history metaphorized.

Mark was written around 70 CE. It is thought that Mark was a follower of Peter and that much of Mark is based on Peter's teaching. It was written around the time that Jerusalem and the temple were reconquered and destroyed. That event casts a shadow on this gospel...Mark was a wartime gospel. To strengthen those being persecuted in this wartime, Mark emphasizes things like Jesus' suffering, warnings that followers of Jesus would suffer, and the promise og rewards to those who endured without losing their faith. In that context, Mark's theme seems to be focused around the "way"...that is, a way of return from exile (where the community found itself at that point in time)...the path of death and resurrection. When Mark uses the word "repent", he isn't referring to contrition for sin, but returning from exile...that is, dying to an old way of being and being born into a new way of being. Some interesting tidbits about Mark:

He refers to Jesus' mother ("son of Mary") but doesn't mention Jesus' presumed father, Joseph
There is no virgin birth story in Mark
There is no resurrection appearance...just some startled women who "said nothing to any one"

Matthew was written about 10-20 years after Mark. Matthew uses 90% of Mark and adds some material from Q as well as some "original" material to evolve the story of Jesus. Matthew's content points to a late first-century community of Christian Jews in conflict with other Jews. After the Roman conquest of the Jewish homeland, the survivors sought to consolidate and preserve Jewish identity in spite of the loss of the temple. Soon after the temple's destruction, the Jewish community began to ostracize Jews who followed Jesus as the messiah, claiming they were no longer true Jews. Matthew tries to assert that Christian Jews are faithful to the traditions of Israel...he does this by quoting the Hebrew Bible more than any other gospel ("It is written" is used 40 times). He also parallels the Hebrew Bible's stories and quotes Hebrew scripture many, many times in telling the story of Jesus. He traces Jesus' genealogy back to Abraham, restricts Jesus mission during his lifetime to the Jews, echoes the story of Moses in Jesus (e.g. Herod, like Pharaoh, was claimed to command all male babies to be killed, structured Jesus' teaching in 5 blocks like the five books of Moses, etc.). Matthew also introduces some new concepts that differ from other gospels:

He introduces the virgin birth idea. He suggests Mary and Joseph live in Bethlehem and then move to Nazareth after spending time in Egypt following a plot by Herod to kill infants (Luke has them live in Nazareth but travel to Bethlehem for a census and then return to Nazareth afterwards...no Egypt trip and no Herod plot)
He has wise men visit Jesus by following a star (Luke has neither wise men nor a star, but instead has angels singing in the night sky to shepherds who come to visit)
He traces Jesus' genealogy back to Abraham (Luke traces it back to Adam)
He makes the "son of man" or Christ claim stronger and more overt than Mark did
He seems to have heightened the miraculous in his stories as compared to Mark
He emphasized hell more than other Christian writings

Luke was also written about 10-20 years after Mark and uses a lot of Mark and Q. But to evolve the story, he also adds a lot of "original" content as well. By the time Luke wrote his gospel, Christianity had become a much more Gentile movement. As such, he wanted to show Christianity projected to the whole world; to show how its center had shifted from Jerusalem to Rome; and to show how gentiles like himself had come to be included in this Jewish religion. He does this by evolving the story of Jesus through various and sometimes subtle means (for example, he traces Jesus back to Adam (father of all men) as opposed to Abraham; he has Roman Pontius Pilate pronounce Jesus innocent; etc. Luke's thematic construction involves a repeated emphasis on the Spirit of God (Jesus' conception by Spirit, Spirit descending on Jesus at his baptism, Jesus promising to send the Spirit to his followers, and in Acts - the companion book to Luke - the Spirit descending on the community through speaking in other languages...thereby breaking barriers of Christianity beyond language, nationality, economics, etc.). In the power of the Christ-spirit, all separations were overcome...including between Jews and Gentiles.

John is very different from the other 3 gospels, again showing the evolution of the gospels. John includes differences such as the length of Jesus' public activity (1 year in the others; 3-4 in John), geography (Jesus' public activity occurs in Judea and Jerusalem more than in Galilee), and message (Jesus message is about himself as opposed to the kingdom of God). John was written about 60-70 years after Jesus's death. John is the most symbolic of the gospels...Jesus inaugural scene is the "water into wine" story...symbolizing that Jesus message is about a wedding banquet at which the wine never runs out and the best is saved for last. John is also famous for the "I am" sayings...describing Jesus as Lord, Messiah, King and Son of God (those sayings are part of John's evolution of the gospels). For these sayings, the context of the time is important to note...there was a growing divide between some Jews and Christians, with a push by some Jews to argue that it was heritical to attribute to a human being too close a connection with the Holy God (like was being claimed about Jesus). John wrote to encourage and bolster those being banished because of their openness about following Jesus...and he did so through things like the "I am" sayings. The other gospels didn't say these things...in fact, it wouldn't have made sense, for instance, in Mark where the concept was that Jesus' divine identity was a secret only to be revealed through the cross and resurrection. If one doesn't force oneself to read John literally, it is a remarkable book at summarizing how the Christian movement came to understand Jesus...that is, through Jesus you can know what God is like. That is the message of John.

In summary, Mark started the gospel writings. Matthew and Luke took Mark's writings and morphed them to meet their needs (i.e. Matthew's need to justify his belief in Jesus as being in line with Judaism; Luke's desire to move Christianity to a movement for Gentile and Jew and to emphasize the spirit). John takes the gospels to their next evolution...making a more direct link between Jesus and God. And while there are glaring inconsistencies throughout the gospels, (which illustrates the evolving nature of the gospels), this is not a problem for those who don't see the gospels as having to be interpreted literally and as inerrant words of God. For others, this realization is startling and disturbing...in my experience, they either embrace it or refuse to even consider it.

Note: lots of credit for the content of this blog entry to Borg's Reading the Bible Again for the First Time, and to Spong's Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism.

Gaining Wisdom from the Wisdom Books

2007-04-29T11:20:00.000-04:00

The last portion of the Old Testament relates to Israel's wisdom literature - Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Job. These books were believed to have been written in the post-exile timeframe...between 500BCE to 300 BCE timeframe. There are 2 other wisdom books - Sirach and Wisdom of Solomon, which are not in the Hebrew Bible, but are seen as sacred scripture by Catholic, Orthodox and Anglican Christians, but not by most Prostestants. It is thought that these were written between the 200BCE and 100BCE timeframe.

In general, the wisdom literature in the Hebrew Bible are concerned with the individual as opposed to Israel's sacred story as a people or with criticism and reshaping of the social order. These books also seem to credit experience for their source as opposed to divine revelation. All 3 books are based on observation - "this is what life is like".

The wisdom books identify one of the two major conflicts within the Hebrew Bible. The first, which we have already discussed, is the conflict between the imperial theology of Egypt and exodus theology, between the royal theology of Israel's monarchy and the message of Israel's prophets. The second relates to the conflict between secondhand and firsthand religion, where secondhand religion is religion learned from others (i.e. Proverbs) while firsthand religion is the religion that flows from the firsthand experience of God (i.e. Ecclesiastes and Job).

We'll start with Proverbs (which tends to be fairly unambigous in its writings about life - secondhand religion) and then move onto Ecclesiastes and Job (which tend to hint at randomness and chance - firsthand religion).

Proverbs

First part is made of up wisdom poems - "in praise of wisdom"; the rest is a collection of individual proverbs (likely an accumulation of sayings of generations of wisdom teachers)
The wisdom poems often contrast 2 paths: the wise way and the foolish way; the righteous way and wicked way; way of life and way of death
The first chapters also introduce the personification of "Wisdom" in female form, commonly called Sophia (i.e. the Greek word for wisdom); there is also a personification of folly through "the strange woman" or "the alien woman" - often portrayed as an adulteress and seductress
The collection of proverbs in the rest of the book cover a variety of topics including elegance/humour, children/family, wealth/poverty, rewards of right living, etc.
In summary, Proverbs generally affirms "Follow this way, and your life will go well."...essentially a book of conventional wisdom (i.e. cultural wisdom, community wisdom, folk wisdom, "what everybody knows", etc.). Conventional wisdom contains truth - there are ways of living that do lead to dead ends, and some things can make life more pleasant. But there is also a corollary to conventional wisdom - if life fails to work out, you must have done something wrong. This clearly isn't always the case.

Ecclesiastes

Title likely refers to its author - Qoheleth (Greek word for Ecclesiastes), which means "wisdom teacher".
While the author writes as King Solomon in the first 2 chapters, it is believed that this is for rhetorical effect as opposed to reflecting actual authorship by Solomon...given that the book is believed to have been written around 300 BCE.
Some see the book as so pessimistic, they wonder how it got into the Bible. Others admire the book for its honesty and religious vision.
There are 2 central metaphors in the book: (1) Vanity of vanities: all is vanity (vanity refers to emptiness, meaningless, etc.); and (2) Chasing after (or herding or shepherding) the wind...that is, an image of futility.
The book starts by claiming that the things of life (e.g. wisdom, power, fame, wealth, etc.) do not satisfy. It then goes on to establish that bad things happen to good people through no fault of their own. It also emphasizes death...its utter inevitability and randomness...and the fact that there is nothing we can do about it.
And if that is the case, how should we live? "Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we may die" according to the author. Or alternatively, live fully...whatever is happening...be present to what it is (try reading Ecclesiastes 3 with that context!). "Go, eat your bread with enjoyment, and drink your wine with a merry heart...Enjoy life with the wife whom you love...Whatever your hand finds to do, do with your might" - Eccesiastes 9:7-10.

Job

Job continues with a radical questioning of conventional wisdom. It was probably written during teh Babylonian exile (around 600BCE or shortly thereafter).
The book starts in fairy tale like form..."There was once a man in the land of Uz whose name was Job." It then quickly goes to a meeting in heaven between God and Satan where a wager occurs. In summary, Satan first takes away Job's blessedness on Earth and then goes after Job's own body, but in the end, Job does not turn on God...God has won the wager.
There are 2 ways to look at the book although is it pretty much always the first that people assume is the question being addressed by the book: (1) The book addresses the question "Why do the righteous suffer?" with the answer apparently being that some things happen "over our heads" - like a heavenly wager. OR (2) The book addresses the question that Satan asks God "Does Job fear God for nothing?"...in other words, is there such a thing as religion unmotivated by self-interest...that is, taking God seriously not as a means but as the ultimate end. Think about that - it is a fascinating idea that this might be what the book is trying to get at.
In the central part of the book, we see Job's discussions with his friends who try to "comfort" him with conventional wisdom...you must have done something wrong to be facing all this! Job essentially replies that their conventional wisdom is worthless.
Then, we see Job's discussion with God...which displays God's wonder (through the nonhuman world of creation) and the absolute difference between the creator and the created. This stuns Job into smallness and silence. While this encounter provided Job with no answers or explanations for his suffering, the experience convinced him that God is real in spite of our ability to see fairness in the world - "I have heard of you with the hearing of the ear, but now my eye beholds you."

(The above was heavily extracted from Marcus Borg's "Reading the Bible Again for the First Time"...I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in the Bible)

Pay Dirt: Pope Revises 'Limbo' for Babies

2007-04-21T08:59:00.000-04:00

Pope Revises 'Limbo' for Babies
Associated Press

Vatican City - Pope Benedict XVI has revised traditional Roman Catholic teaching on so-called "limbo," approving a church report released Friday that said there was reason to hope that babies who die without baptism can go to heaven.

Benedict approved the findings of the International Theological Commission, which issued its long-awaited document on limbo on Origins, the documentary service of Catholic News Service, the news agency of the American Bishop's Conference.

"We can say we have many reasons to hope that there is salvation for these babies," the Rev. Luis Ladaria, a Jesuit who is the commission's secretary-general, told The Associated Press.

Although Catholics have long believed that children who die without being baptized are with original sin and thus excluded from heaven, the church has no formal doctrine on the matter. Theologians have long taught, however, that such children enjoy an eternal state of perfect natural happiness, a state commonly called limbo, but without being in communion with God.

Pope John Paul II and Benedict had urged further study on limbo, in part because of "the pressing pastoral needs" sparked by the increase in abortion and the growing number of children who die without being baptized, the report said.

In the document, the commission said there were "serious theological and liturgical grounds for hope that unbaptized infants who die will be saved and brought into eternal happiness."

It stressed, however, that "these are reasons for prayerful hope, rather than grounds for sure knowledge."

Ladaria said no one could know for certain what becomes of unbaptized babies since Scripture is largely silent on the matter.

Catholic parents should still baptize their children, as that sacrament is the way salvation is revealed, the document said.

Pay Dirt: Continuing with "Is Religion 'Built Upon Lies'?"

2007-04-06T14:50:00.001-04:00

Continuing with "Is Religion 'Built Upon Lies'?"
Best-selling atheist Sam Harris and pro-religion blogger Andrew Sullivan debate God, faith, and fundamentalism. (Courtesy: Beliefnet.com)

Dear Sam,
Thanks for your invitation to sup from "a clean glass." You unpack that revealing metaphor in the following way:

I'm asking you to imagine a world in which children are taught to investigate reality for themselves, not in conformity to the religious dogmatism of their parents, but by the lights of truly honest, fearless inquiry. Imagine a discourse about ethics and mystical experience that is as contingency-free as the discourse of science already is.My first thought is: where are all these children separated from their parents? Would they have to be sent away to protect them from the influence of parental dogmatism? And my second thought is amusement at your use of the passive tense: "are taught". By whom? You? Who is teaching these finally liberated children, and on whose authority? And where is this discourse they will enter that is "contingency-free"? I have never heard or read or engaged in one.

That is because I have never met a human being or a human mind that is "contingency-free", and never will. No child grows up without the contingent facts of their family, place, genes, and any number of details that make us who we are. You and I would be very different people if we had different contingent genetics and different contingent histories. This is the experience of being human, an experience eternally different from the dream of your new, unfettered, purely rational "education," where the young are severed from the toxins of contingent culture and faith and family. You echo the later themes of Plato's Republic in this respect, and Socrates' irony still echoes through the millennia. You are not the first person to come up with such an idea, Sam, and I have no doubt that the guardians you will pick to educate the young will be selected in good faith - your good faith, not the children's or their parents'. And I am not the first person to find this project for all mankind absurd in my lighter moments and deeply sinister in my darker ones.

Science, your preferred mode of human understanding, is not contingency-free either. I know of no scientist who would claim so. It is shot through with contingency. It is the consequence of millennia of human thought, logic, experiment, argument, discovery, thesis, antithesis, synthesis - propelled by human curiosity, pride, obsession, and error. What science knows at any given moment is a function of everything it has ever known. And it is built and unbuilt by human minds with human weaknesses. Yes, it can overturn all of it at any moment in theory - but it will still be defined in part by what it has overturned. And such moments of revolution are rare. Much more common is the slow accumulation of insight and evidence until it becomes the coral reef we call science "now".

Science rests as well on some basic elements of faith. You've read your Hume and you know what I mean. A reader came up with a useful list of some of them: our faith that our senses and our memories are (usually) reliable, rather than being hallucinations induced by some unknown outside source; our belief that our short-term thought processes are (usually) reliable (that is, that we are sane at all); our belief that the entire universe didn't whisk into existence a second ago (including all of us, with a complete set of fake memories), and won't whisk out of existence a second later; our belief that other bodies which act like ours contain conscious awarenesses like our own (and that the "intensity" with which they feel sensations and emotions can be judged by the complexity of their behavior); the belief that it is likely that a consciousness is permanently destroyed by the destruction of its physical body and will never be resurrected later in another body (that is, the only thing that makes us think murder is immoral at all).These little puddle-jumps of faith are the foundation for your reason. I think they are justified. But that reason is really, au fond, a belief, an act of faith, an acknowledgment that, as humans, we have no "contingency-free" place from where to start at all and no "contingency-free" place on earth to end up at. We are not gods.

The place you are seeking - this "contingency-free" place where no specifics exist but pure truth and a clean glass - is something we people of faith call heaven. Your search for it is a religious search, even if you are unaware of it. We religious people have known about heaven for ever; but only the truly foolish among us have ever mistaken it for earth, or human life. And when those truly foolish people have attempted to replicate this heaven on earth, they have been responsible for the worst atrocities religion has produced, which is why I fear similar darkness from the world-view you are, with impeccable intentions, enthusiastically proposing. But the glass you and I drink from, Sam, is never clean; it has been drunk from since before our human history; it has passed from lip to lip through vistas of history and pre-history. It has been filled and emptied and filled again, its contents traced in stories and myths and parables and histories and DNA. It is contingent in the way that everything human is contingent.

Can I imagine a world without such human contingency? Yes, I can. I can imagine all sorts of things - flying spaghetti monsters, to use one vivid term now beloved of today's atheists. I can imagine Lucy in the sky with diamonds. I can imagine all the people living life in peace.
But it is important to note that such a world has never, ever existed, and never, ever will. No human society has ever functioned without the large faith that underpins all the little faiths: religion. No society has ever existed without the mature human acceptance of what we do not know and what is greater than we are. No civilization has ever been atheist at its core. No polity has ever been constructed in the absence of faith, or in the absence of a tradition of faith that makes belief in the present possible at all. Earth to Sam: Does this not tell you something? Or is it plausible that human beings tomorrow will become something that in all of human history and pre-history they have never, ever been?

You write: "whatever is true about us, spiritually and ethically, must be discoverable now." Yes--absolutely yes. But now is always and everywhere a function of all that we have ever been. The key contribution of religion is to grapple with that fact at a far deeper level than science, to see human life as an intersection, in Eliot's words, of the timeless with time. Religion at its deepest is the attempt to reconcile this profound human predicament: that we exist in bodies but dream beyond them, that we are caught between the irrational instinct of beasts but endowed with the serene hope of angels. This paradox of humanity--which you would erase into a clean slate--is what religion responds to and has always responded to. The genius of the religious life lived to its fullest lies, in Oakeshott's words,

"in the poetic quality, humble or magnificent, of the images, the rites, the observances, and the offerings (the wisp of wheat on the wayside calvary) in which it recalls to us that 'eternity is in love with the productions of time' and invites us to live 'so far as is possible' as an immortal."
This is drinking from the unclean glass and drinking deeply.

In that context, let me unpack the contingency of my own faith. In my last letter, I wrote of how I experience faith as a gift, something I didn't actually choose. This unchoice can be understood as simply a function of the contingent accident of my birth and upbringing, as you point out and I readily concede. But I do not consider its contingency a mark against it - since there is nothing on earth that is not contingent. For eternal truth to be apprehended by the human soul, it must enter a contingent world, and be refracted and distorted by such an entrance. Contingency is as integral to any human being's faith as eternity. This is a logical necessity for faith to exist at all.

My story is the story of every person of faith--a mix of contingency and eternity. I have tried to explain the eternity, and I understand if it simply baffles the faithless. So let me explain the more comprehensible contingency, and why it actually supports my faith, rather than undermines it. The contingency comes from my family, of course. But it also comes from where I was born and grew up--England. The Catholicism I imbibed was a minority faith in a majority Protestant or agnostic culture. And I can track its origins through history--through my Irish ancestors who held onto it despite cruel persecution, back to the time when England itself was pervaded by the religious faith I still hold. In high school and university, I was able to study the history of that faith--the astonishing cultural wealth and spiritual depth of the Catholic church that kept the memory of Jesus alive for millennia. I was then able to move to a different continent and country and walk into a church that was itself part of that universal inheritance. There is no free place on earth where I cannot find a home. And I know who made that possible. Without that long lineage of faithful preservation, without that dreaded institution, the Church, I would have no cup from which to drink. They passed it, these souls, from person to person, from generation to generation, in one of the most astonishingly persistent endeavors in human history.

The more I discovered about that long endeavor, the more amazed I was by it. Yes, you will cite the terrible parts of its history, parts I have not shied from myself. But you have missed so much more. The more I questioned and asked, the more history and theology I engaged in, the more I used reason to inquire into faith, the more remarkable the achievement of Christianity appeared to me. My reason strengthened and informed my faith. I felt blessed to have been given this gift, amazed at my good fortune. The thought of throwing it away for a "clean glass" that is itself an illusion seems absurd to me.

Why would I want to forget all of that precious inheritance--the humility of Mary, the foolishness of Peter, the genius of Paul, the candor of Augustine, the genius of Francis, the glory of Chartres cathedral, the haunting music of Tallis, the art of Michelangelo, the ecstasies of Teresa, the rigor of Ignatius, the whole astonishing, ravishing panoply of ancient Christianity that suddenly arrived at my door, in a banal little town in an ordinary family in the grim nights of the 1970s in England?

You want to be contingency-free? Maybe you need a richer slice of contingency. There is more wisdom, depth, range, glory, nuance and truth in my tradition than can be dreamt of in your rationalism. In answer to your question, "why not leave all this behind?" my answer is simply: why on earth would I? Why would any sane person abandon such an astonishingly rich inheritance that civilizes, informs, educates, inspires and then also saves? If faith were to desert me, I may be forced to leave. But even then, the wealth of that human inheritance would inform me and make my life worth living. I would cling to and celebrate this cultural inheritance, even if the faith that made it possible has waned for me.

Why would a human being not look at the unclean glass he is born with and ask: what is this that I have been given? Who passed this down to me? Why? Who died to give this to me? Who suffered? Who spent their lives transcribing texts to keep the memory of this man alive? Who built these churches and composed these chants and wrote these books for me to engage long after they have all disappeared from the earth? How does this amazing cultural, intellectual, spiritual inheritance connect with that inchoate sense of the divine that still permeates my soul? Could it be that what I sense in my soul is what Augustine sensed? What Dominic sensed? What John actually saw and loved and rested his head against?

I know this may sound alien to you. So let me put this in a context that might appeal to you, as a rational, empirical person. How do you explain Christianity's enduring power? Is it all a terrible, ugly blight on the human mind that must be thrown out in favor of "truly honest, fearless inquiry"? But wouldn't "truly honest, fearless inquiry" into religious faith begin by asking how Christianity came to exist at all?

Consider the evidence. I do not believe in a flying spaghetti monster. I believe in Jesus of Nazareth as God Incarnate. We have no evidence of a flying spaghetti monster. But we have solid evidence of Jesus' existence. We have a handful of independent historical artifacts that attest that a minor Jewish rabbi in first century Israel was executed by the Roman authorities. We have many Gospels that date from the period after his death testifying to the power of his message. Purported messiahs and crucifixions were not uncommon at the time. But only one of the thousands of Rome's victims is remembered in this way - and not just remembered but worshiped over two millennia later in the most advanced civilization the world has ever known. Does this not intrigue you? Have you never asked in the spirit of "truly honest, fearless inquiry": How on earth did this happen?

As a simple piece of historical inquiry, it's an astonishingly unlikely turn of events. Within a short period of time, not only was an obscure, failed Jewish rabbi remembered, his teachings became the official religion of the empire that had executed him. In the ensuing centuries, his life and teachings inspired many of the greatest minds, souls and talents humankind has ever produced. The collapse of the empire that elevated him did not lead to the disappearance of Christianity. It led to its eventual re-emergence as a vibrant, beautiful, rich experience for millions. Only Muhammad and the Buddha rival the story of this man - a fact that leads me to ask questions of both (particularly Buddhism), but which prompts you to condemn and anathematize all religious claims of any kind.

Even today, as I type these words, I look on my desk and see the sign I bring with me everywhere: his cross. When I go to dinner later, a small cross will come with me, in my wallet. In my study at home, a fourteenth century wooden carving of Jesus stares down at me from the wall. He is alive in me and millions of others after all this time, sustaining, nurturing, inspiring not just me but countless more. Even if you do not believe in him in the way I do, surely you must acknowledge that something very special has been going on here, something truly remarkable, something beyond the norm of much else in human history.

I have a rational, empirical explanation for this. It is that those who saw Jesus saw something so astonishing, so utterly unlike anything that had ever occurred before, that they became on fire with this new truth. They saw God. It was a contingent expression of God - how could it not be if humans were to witness it? But it was also an eternal expression, so that today some will still say: I know this Jesus as well as anyone ever knew him. And Jesus grasped this paradox of contingent-eternity that is the core mystery of the Incarnation. "Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe."

What is your explanation? How do you account for why one person out of the billions who have ever lived had this impact? How probable is it that all these countless followers were all deluding themselves completely? And if Jesus wasn't nothing, what was he in your eyes? What secret did he hold that so many others haven't?

That is an empirical question. And it merits an empirical answer.

Andrew

Pay Dirt: My Sweet Lord!

2007-03-31T15:59:00.000-04:00

Chocolate Jesus Show Canceled

Holy Week exhibition of a nude, anatomically correct chocolate sculpture canceled after pressure from Catholics
Associated Press

A planned Holy Week exhibition of a nude, anatomically correct chocolate sculpture of Jesus Christ was canceled Friday amid a choir of complaining Catholics that included Cardinal Edward Egan.

The "My Sweet Lord" display was shut down by the hotel that houses the Lab Gallery in midtown Manhattan, said Matt Semler, the gallery's creative director. Semler said he submitted his resignation after officials at the Roger Smith Hotel shut down the show.

The six-foot sculpture was the victim of "a strong-arming from people who haven't seen the show, seen what we're doing," Semler said. "They jumped to conclusions completely contrary to our intentions."

But word of the confectionary Christ infuriated Catholics, including Egan, who described it as "a sickening display." Bill Donohue, head of the watchdog Catholic League, said it was "one of the worst assaults on Christian sensibilities ever.

"The hotel and the gallery were overrun Thursday with angry phone calls and e-mails about the exhibit. Semler said the calls included death threats over the work of artist Cosimo Cavallaro, who was described as disappointed by the decision to cancel the display."

In this situation, the hotel couldn't continue to be supportive because of a fear for their own safety," Semler said.The sculpture was to debut Monday evening, the day after Palm Sunday and just four days before Roman Catholics mark the crucifixion of Jesus Christ on Good Friday.

The final day of the exhibit was planned for Easter Sunday.The artwork was created from more than 200 pounds of milk chocolate, and features Christ with his arms outstretched as if on an invisible cross. Unlike the typical religious portrayal of Christ, the Cavallaro creation does not include a loincloth.

Cavallaro is best known for his quirky work with food as art: Past efforts include repainting a Manhattan hotel room in melted mozzarella, spraying five tons of pepper jack cheese on a Wyoming home, and festooning a four-poster bed with 312 pounds of processed ham.

New Perspectives on the Prophets

2007-03-17T14:05:00.000-04:00

Once the Pentateuch is finished, we go into Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings...all of whom narrate the history of Israel from the time of occupation of the promised land until the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians in 586 BCE. During that time, Israel lived as a "tribal confederacy" with no centralized government. Then, around 1000 BCE, a monarchy was put in place with kings like Saul, David and Solomon.

When Solomon died in 922 BCE, the united kingdom split into 2 parts: Israel and Judah. Israel lasted until 722 BCE when it was conquered and destroyed by the Assyrian kingdom. Judah lasted until 586 BCE when it was conquered and destroyed by the Babylonian empire. Some of Judah's survivors were exiled to Babylon for about 50 years, at which time they were allowed to return to Judah to begin rebuilding their ruined country.

The "classical" prophets (Amos, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Hosea, Zechariah, Obadiah, and so on) belong to this time. These prophets are writing some 500 years after the exodus, during the time of the split of the kingdom, destruction of the kingdoms, exile and return.

How do you think of the Prophets? Likely as predictors of the Messiah - that is Jesus - right? They were sent to foretell of Jesus' coming right? Certainly that's how I first encountered them. In fact, in Halley's Bible Handbook (a best seller!) there is the somewhat familiar statement "By the time we reach the end of the Old Testament, the entire story of Christ has been pre-written and pre-figured." But as I now understand the Bible, it is clear to me that the prophets weren't foretelling Jesus' story. Instead, because the New Testament authors were Jewish and knew the Hebrew Bible well, they echoed the words of the Hebrew Bible in telling Jesus' story, in order to show continuity between Jesus and the tradition out of which they came.

If the prophets weren't foretelling Jesus' story, what were they doing? Well, if you put them in their historical context (i.e. time of the split of the kingdom, destruction of the kingdoms, exile and return), you understand that, in large part, they were indicting Judah's or Israel's enemies and pronouncing God's judgement on them. They were also masters of the symbolic act (e.g. Hosea and Isaiah naming their children to convey messages, Isaiah walking around naked for years to make a point about Judah's fate if they take certain actions, Jeremiah wearing a wooden yoke around his neck, Ezekiel essentially starving himself to demonstrate what would happen to Jerusalem in exile, etc.). In essence, they expressed a passion for social justice and had an anti-establishment message...and added warnings of consequences if the societies didn't take peace and justice seriously. Given the prophets' own statements, they claim to have been inspired by God to give these messages. That doesn't mean the words were God's, but the prophets' passionate messages came out of their "experiences" of God.

It is also informative to recognize that by the time the classical prophets began to speak, Israel and Judah had essentially become miniature versions of the ancient domination system that had enslaved their ancestors in Egypt. The victims (the majority of the population) were Israelites, of course, but now the elites at the top were also Israelites...Egypt had been established in Israel. That is what the prophets were addressing...as they believed that this could not be the will of God who had liberated Israel from similar bondage in Egypt.

It is also interesting that this whole theme is repeated through the Hebrew Bible. In I Samuel, the people ask for a king over them...the request displeases Samuel and God (their request is seen as a rejection of God's kingship). But God grants the request with a warning about what a king will do to them...essentially take their fields and flocks and make them slaves...essentially what happened!

The prophets not only indicted enemies and social injustice. They also were "energizing" figures for the Jewish people. A large part of the predestruction prophets (i.e. before the kingdoms of Judah and Israel were destroyed) were indicting the actions of the day. A large part of post-destruction prophetizing (i.e. during and after the exile) was more energizing...generating hope, affirming identity and creating a picture of a new future for the Jewish people who were in exile and then (after the exile) rebuilding their nation.

So whereas you may have read passages like "Why have you forgotten us completely?...Restore us to yourselves, O Lord, that we may be restored..." as a statement for interpretation in today's world or for a projection of future events, if you re-read the prophets in their historical context, it is fascinating to see the meanings of the words in their worlds and time.

Having said all this, the message of many of the prophets words can have metaphorical meaning today - relevant to the victims and exiles of the domination systems of our time. Proclaiming that our identify, value and worth are not grounded in the culture of the day, but in God's regard. Affirming that God's character, will and justice are different from the justice of oppressive social orders. The solution for exiles is a journey of return...a way or path through the wilderness...with the destination being a return to life in God's will and presence.

(The above was heavily extracted from Borg's Reading the Bible Again for the First Time...I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in the Bible)

Pay Dirt: Spong on Dawkins and Harris

2007-03-14T20:07:00.000-04:00

James Jensen from via the Internet writes:

"My name is James Jensen. I read of you through UU World and recently read Sins of Scripture (excellent book, by the way). Today I ran across an article on Wired entitled "The Church of Non-Believers." The author talks about a so-called New Atheism pioneered by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennet that is quite militant about their non-belief. They accuse moderate and liberal believers of being essentially accessories in the harm done by the fundamentalists and radicals. They make a few good arguments, essentially mentioning the fact that no politician in this country has declared himself or herself an atheist because it wouldn't be politically safe to do so. I can also sympathize with the idea that moderate and liberal believers aren't doing enough to oppose the fundamentalists, who strike me as not unlike the Nation of Islam in their approach to freedom and justice. It seems likely to me that this means there is going to be a new consciousness (as you term it) breaking through soon enough, but I am left wondering whether this will be more of a breakthrough in Christian thinking or in atheist thinking. In other words, is this the end of religion, or of atheism? What's your opinion on the matter? Personally, I am no longer sure what to believe and while I sympathize with atheism, it seems to me that without some basis in faith for proclaiming that life is not only good but right, crackpots are going to start thinking they can "fix"human nature, just like people have thought nature needs to be "fixed"and made more orderly — resulting, of course, in environmental destruction. After all, both the experience-affirming Carl Rogers and the utopian-behaviorist B. F. Skinner were chosen Humanist of the Year by the American Humanist Association"

******************

Dear James,

Thank you for your letter. Religion is for many a vital and confusing subject and it justifies most of the criticism it receives. If religion were really about what the Religious Right proclaims, I would want no part of it. If my only choice was to be a Christian like the Falwells or the Robertsons, I would find atheism a compelling alternative. I believe that Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris are expressing exactly that.

I met Richard Dawkins when I did some lectures at New College, Oxford University, several years ago. Just that day I had been reading Dawkins' book, "The Selfish Gene" at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. I found it fascinating. It was even more fascinating to discover that we were seated that night side by side at the High Table. I found the man personable and charming. Every theologian in England wants to debate him. Few come out unscathed. There is much irrationality in our God thinking and Dawkins loves to point it out. Does that mean that there is no reality in the human search for God? I do not think so. Does it mean that human definitions of God are always doomed to die? Because they are human creation I am convinced that they will. The God Richard Dawkins rejects is the one I also reject. What is in doubt is whether the God to whom I am drawn is real, whether the human yeaning for the 'Transcendent,' the 'Other' is real and whether Richard Dawkins' search for truth and my search for God are in fact the same search, but by different names. That is not so easy to answer.

I have never met Sam Harris. I have read him, read reviews about him and watched him at great length talk about his book and answer questions on C-Span. I think his work has articulated what many people feel. It is difficult for religious people to admit they might be wrong so when Sam Harris points out the flaws he finds in religious understanding, he elicits great hostility. Religious threat always produces religious anger. I found him to be dead set against the abuses he observes in Christianity. He sees no alternative to those abuses than to attack and rid the world of Christianity. I think a better alternative is to attack and to rid the world of that abusive Christianity, which suggests that ultimate truth has been captured in creedal forms, that God is an angry parent figure in the sky who wants to punish us but relents and punishes the Divine Son instead, and that followers of Jesus have the right to hate anyone who disagrees with them. I have no need or respect for such a religious system or for that abusive deity. That is also not the God that I believe I engage as a Christian when I worship.
So I welcome the Dawkins, the Harrises and the Dennets of the world and believe the Christian Church must be willing to listen to them, to hear their criticisms and to respond to them with the respect that their criticisms deserve. When we do that, I believe we will discover that Christianity can still be a vital and alive force in the 21st century.

My best,
John Shelby Spong

Pay Dirt: Churches are Behind "American Idol"

2007-03-11T10:53:00.000-04:00

Churches Often the First Stage for 'Idol' Contestants
By Adelle M. Banks and Sally York Religion News Service

When LaKisha Jones belted out a song from the movie "Dreamgirls" in her debut on this season of "American Idol," the Michigan church that helped nurture her soulful sound was rooting her on.

The musical careers of Jones and some other "Idol" contestants -- past and present -- were birthed in churches across the country, settings where many singers perform each Sunday to a not-so-nationwide audience.

"Years and years of singing in church and never making a living off of something that I love to do," said Jones, a 27-year-old bank teller, summing up her musical career in a videotaped interview aired on the Fox talent show. "And now to have the opportunity ... it's a good feeling."

Churches, especially African-American churches, have often been the training ground for artists who make it to America's most prominent stages. As artists move from sacred to secular realms, their ministers of music and church choirs -- as well as supportive parishioners -- are cheering them on.

Members of Mount Zion Missionary Baptist Church in Jones' hometown of Flint, Mich., are busting with pride over the singer, whose powerful voice once belonged to their Voices of Mount Zion adult choir. Jones now lives at Fort Meade, Md.

"She's always been our `American Idol,"' said Cassandra Ellison, a Voices member for 13 years. "She was always the one who stood out."

At a recent Sunday morning service, Jones' mother, Beverly Jefferson, said "LaKisha would like to thank everybody for their support and votes" in the popular televised competition.

The connections between contestants and church don't surprise Christian music experts like Teresa Hairston, founder of Gospel Today magazine.

"There are so many people that have started in gospel, famous people like Elvis Presley, Al Green and Aretha Franklin and Gladys Knight," she said in an interview as she kicked off her Gospel Heritage Foundation's recent "Praise & Worship Conference" in Washington. "So many people who came from the church."

When opera singer Denyce Graves spearheaded a CD project in 2003, "Church: Songs of Soul and Inspiration," the first requirement for the featured singers was that they had grown up in church. Patti LaBelle, Shirley Caesar, Chaka Khan, Dionne Warwick and Graves herself all fit that bill.

When artists move on from the church, music ministers hope their faith remains with the fame.

Minister Ternae Jordan Jr., a worship leader at Mount Canaan Baptist Church in Chattanooga, Tenn., once sang backup for gospel artists with current "Idol" contestant Melinda Doolittle.

"Though she's doing the majority of everything in the secular realm, in the secular field, right now, she's bringing the cross over instead of crossing over," said Jordan, who attended the Praise & Worship Conference.

Doolittle, who attends the same Nashville, Tenn., church as gospel artist CeCe Winans and sang backup on one of her CDs, talked about her faith in a "Fast Facts" feature on the "American Idol" Web site.

Her personal goals, she said, were to "represent Christ well and do everything 150 percent."

Demetrus Stewart, president of the PureSprings Gospel Label that features Winans and other artists, said the style of many black churches gives singers the ability to do the musical runs and note-stretching that bring audiences to their feet. It's the kind of sound that differentiates R&B from pop, she said, and urban gospel from contemporary Christian music. "You've got to be able to, in the words of our slang, throw down," said Stewart, who is African-American.

Sam Patton, a music director at New United Church in Chattanooga, said music ministers like himself generally use their "picky" techniques to help a corps of volunteers create a grand choir sound. But, on occasion, they may discover a potential recording artist. He's currently helping a budding artist cut her first album.

Patton said the range of church music -- including elements of jazz and R&B, country and classical -- helps prepare artists, such as former "Idol" celebrities Ruben Studdard and Fantasia Barrino, for musical careers.

"It's easier for them because they have sung so many different styles in church," said Patton, who also was at the Washington conference. "With praise and worship evolving like it is, you have to be versatile."

Sometimes that versatility leads to appearances at talent shows, either secular, like "Idol," or religious. Trinity Broadcasting Network and the Gospel Music Channel have produced Christian talent competitions. Current "Idol" contestant Jordin Sparks placed second in the Gospel Music Association's "Music in the Rockies" competition in 2005.

"The 'American Idol' syndrome is even spilling over in the church so there are several within the Christian gospel community," Stewart said.

But for some churchgoers -- including members of Jones' Flint congregation -- the "Idol" stage seems particularly attractive, in part because one of their own is there.

"When I'm 16, I'm going to try out," said Ariele Hayman, a 13-year-old member of the same youth choir that once included Jones.

Plowing through the Pentateuch

2007-03-04T13:54:00.000-05:00

The "beginning of the world" (i.e. creation) stories take up the first 11 chapters of Genesis. After that and until the end of Deuteronomy, is the story of the "beginning of Israel" as a nation and a people: the exodus from Egypt under the leadership of Moses, the covenant and giving of the law at Mt. Sinai (all 613 of them - including ethical, ritual, civil and criminal laws which functioned as both constitutional and statutory law for Israel - and by grounding them in the nation's sacred origins, they gave the laws sacred status), and the journey through the wilderness to the border of the promised land.

Historically, the Jewish exodus likely happened in the 13th century BCE. But many scholars think the completed Pentateuch narrative was not likely written until around the Jewish exile in Babylon in the 500s BCE and perhaps as late as the 400s BCE. There are also questions about whether Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and his 12 sons really existed or if they are legendary personifications of tribal groups. Whether historically accurate or not, the question we should consider is why Israel told these stories and why they told them the way they did.

The overarching theme throughout the Pentateuch is "promise and fulfillment". God promises Abraham that he will make of him a great nation. The rest of the story of the Pentateuch is the story of fulfillment of this promise. In summary, the key stories of the Pentateuch include:

Abraham, Sarah and their sons, including Jacob
Jacob's son Joseph (and his brothers)
Israel's exodus from slavery in Egypt (Moses' call, the plagues, the liberation and parting of the sea)
Sinai and the covenant (59 chapters in all by the way!) - note that most scholars believe that the laws were drawn from many different periods in Israel's history and were accumulated over a period of centuries; and also that the laws reflect Israel's origins in Egypt as a radically oppressed and marginalized people, with the laws being written to prevent the emergence of a permanently impoverished class within Israel
Journey through the wilderness (with the Pentateuch ending with Deuteronomy - essentially a series of speeches by Moses just before they cross the Jordan, with the speeches basically being a summary of the law - hence "Deuteronomy" which means "second law")

In summary, the Pentateuch story is Israel's decisive "identity story" - the most important story they knew that shaped their understanding of the divine-human relationship, their identity, their life together as a community and their vision of the character of God.

Within the story, Egypt and Pharoah are an archetype of the preindustrial agrarian empire - the most widespread way of organizing human society at the time. In such a society, roughly two-thirds of the annual production of wealth (mostly from agriculture produced by the peasants) ended up in the hands of the ruling elites. They acquired the wealth through taxation on agricultural production and direct ownership of agricultural land (with peasants working as share-croppers, day-labourers or slaves). The consequences for peasant existence were dire: unremitting labour, borderline nourishment, high infant mortality rates, and radically lower life expectancies. In addition to this economic exploitation, such societies were also known for political oppression (i.e. ordinary people had no voice in the structuring of society) and religious legitimation (i.e. the religion of the elites affirmed that the structures of society were ordained by God).

This was the world of Egypt and the world that Moses knew. The Pentateuch is Israel's story of radical protest against and liberation from such a world...and it affirms that radical criticism of and liberation from such societies is the will of God. The exodus story is about the creation of a world marked by freedom, social justice and shalom (well-being, peace and wholeness). The story is not just political though; it is also about God as God is the central reality of the story and God's covenant with Israel.

In summary, the Pentateuch is not about social justice without God; equally, it is not about God without social justice. The story thus brings together two areas of life that we tend to separate: religious passion and social justice.

And, as noted earlier, the story is also framed by the theme of "promise and fulfillment". It is interesting to note that this theme was strikingly relevant to the situation of the Jewish people in the exilic and postexilic periods - the years when the Pentateuch was composed in its final and present form (remember...when the Pentateuch was written, Israel had been conquered again, greatly reduced in numbers and exiled by another imperial power). So the promise of God that they would be "a great nation" seemed profoundly threatened again, as did their very existence. In this setting, they remembered and celebrated the promise given to their ancestors, the stories of Israel's liberation from a previous imperial power, and the gift of a new land and a new life.

Finally, for Christian readers today (and in all times) the theme of promise and fulfillment is relevant. As such, the story of the Pentateuch can be read metaphorically today with the key message being: in spite of life's threats and seemingly insurmountable obstacles, when birth and rebirth seem impossible, when powers of empires seem to rule the world...living in a manner that mirrors God's nature will enable us to make it through.

Personally, I think this is a much better and more reasonable take on the Pentateuch (as opposed to some Christians trying to take the Pentateuch and apply, in today's world, a set of ancient laws that were developed several thousand years ago for use within a developing nation after escaping slavery and oppression).

(For more on this - and most of the above - see Marcus Borg's Reading the Bible Again for the First Time)

Pay Dirt: Ottawa Citizen "Faith on Fire" Website

2007-03-03T20:17:00.000-05:00

Check this out...very interesting:

http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/features/faithonfire/index.html

Revisiting the Creation Stories

2007-03-02T21:46:00.000-05:00

"In the beginning...". That's how we think of the creation story right? Well, would you be surprised if I highlighted that there are two stories of creation in the Bible itself? The first is found in Genesis 1:1 to 2:3; the second from Genesis 2:4 to the end of chapter 3.

In the first, God creates the universe in 6 days and rests on the 7th day. It takes us through each of the 6 days in succession. In the second, the focus is on the creation of humankind...not on the creation of the world. In the first, humankind is created last (after everything else) whereas in the second, humankind is created first (before vegetation and animals). In the first, humans as male and female are created simultaneously, while in the second, man comes first, with woman coming later.

From a historical perspective:

It is believed that the first creation story was written in the 500s BCE, during or shortly after the Jewish exile into Babylon. During this time, one of the distinctive practices of the Jews was observance of the sabbath. Some would argue that the writing of the first creation story with six days was done primarily to emphasize the importance of the sabbath as something that God also observes. It has also been argued that part of the purpose of the creation story was to assert that the God of Israel is the creator of heaven and earth and proclaiming the lordship of Israel's God over the lordship of Babylon and its gods (with whom the Jews were obviously not very happy at that point in time!).
The historical understanding of the universe is also interesting to note in the context of the creation stories. Ancient Israelites thought of the earth as the centre of the universe. Above the earth was the "dome of the sky" with water being above the dome (hence the falling of rain and snow). Thus, the description of creation (e.g. separating the waters so that dry land is below the sky, etc.) reflects their understanding of the nature of the universe.
Finally, the historical language used in the creation stories is interesting to understand. In the second creation story, Adam and Eve are the first humans. Adam comes from the Hebrew word adham which means "humankind" (coming from the Hebrew word adhamah meaning "ground" or "dust"). Thus, the story is not about a particular man but of "everyone". Similarly, Eve means "mother of all living".

From a metaphorical viewpoint:

A key point being made in the creation stories is that God is the source of everything that is. One person noted "The only literal statement in Genesis 1 is 'God created the heavens and the earth'".
Secondly, humans are the climax of creation but at the same time "dust creatures". That is, we are small, we are finite, we are mortal - yet, there is something different about us (e.g. greater consciousness than any species we know of).
Another key point is that the world is the good creation of a good God. All that is, is good.
Having said that, something has happened - though the world is beautiful, something is not right; we live in a world of hard labour, suffering, pain, violence and fragmentation.

On this last point, what went wrong (often referred to as the fall or the original sin)? There are different viewpoints including:

Human disobedience (this is the most common and simplist view within fundamentalist Christianity)
Human pride and self-centeredness
Living the agenda of others
The inevitability of self-consciousness

These various understandings can be combined. For example, the birth of consciousness in all of us as we move from infants to adults typically leads to pride and being centered in one's self. At the same time, the process of socialization leads to internalizing and living in accord with the agendas of others, including parents, culture and religion.

Given this combination of historical and metaphorical views, I can see the creation stories as profoundly true - not literally or factually, but in the truth of the stories' central claims. Borg says it like this: "This" - the universe and we - is not self-caused, but grounded in the sacred. "This" is utterly remarkable and wondrous, a mystery beyond words that evokes wonder, awe and praise. We begin our lives "in paradise", but we all experience explusion into a world of exile, anxiety, self-preoccupation, bondage and conflict. And yes, also a world of goodness and beauty: it is the creation of God. But it is a world in which something is awry.

The rest of the Bible is to a large extent the story of this state of affairs: the human predicament and its solution. Our lives "east of Eden" are marked by exile, and we need to return and reconnect; by bondage, and we need liberation; by blindness and deafness, and we need wholeness; by violence and conflict, and we need to learn justice and peace; by self- and other-centeredness, and we need to centre in God. Such are the central claims of Israel's stories of human beginnings.

A new way to look at the creation stories don't you think?

(Again, lots of credit to Marcus Borg's Reading the Bible Again for the First Time for the bulk of this blog)

A New Way of Reading/Seeing the Bible

2007-03-02T21:12:00.000-05:00

Before getting into the content of the Bible itself, a short blog entry on a new way of reading/seeing the Bible (most of this blog entry are taken from Marcus Borg's book Reading the Bible Again for the First Time).

There are two sides of the debate of how to read/see the Bible, specifically with regards to the Bible's origin, authority and interpretation:

Fundamentalist and many conservative evangelical Christians - see the Bible's origin as coming from God and as a divine product. It is God's truth...and as a result, it is authoritative. They read the Bible literally - often referred to as "conscious literalists" (i.e. aware of problems posed by a literal reading but insist upon it nevertheless).
Moderate-to-liberal Christians - see the Bible as a human product - a human response to God. As such, it does not express the authoritative will of God - so we need to decide on the relevance of the "wisdom" for our time. They are strongly convinced that many parts of the Bible cannot be taken literally. They also see the Bible as "sacred" for Christians in that it is a foundational document for our religion with which we should be in continuing dialogue.

This second group typically take a "historical-metaphorical" approach to reading the Bible. By historical, the question is "What did this text mean in the ancient historical setting in which it was written?". By metaphorical, the question is "What does this story mean as a story, independent of its historical factuality?" With this view, the Bible is seen as a combination of history and metaphor. That is, some events in the Bible really happened. At the same time, there are "metaphorical narratives" in which an event that happened (or may have happened) is given a metaphorical meaning; or events are not based on a particular historical event, but which instead are purely metaphorical or symbolic.

To take this approach to reading the Bible, you need to move from precritical naivete to postcritical naivete. Precritical naivete is an early childhood state in which we take it for granted that whatever the significant authority figures in our lives tell us to be true is indeed true. In this state, Christians simply hear the stories of the Bible as true stories. Postcritical naivete is the ability to hear the biblical stories as true stories, even as one knows that they may not be factually true - that is, you can accept that their truth does not depend upon their factuality.

The remaining blog entries in this Bible Exploration series attempt to adopt a postcritical naivete viewpoint and a historical-metaphorical approach to reading the Bible and understanding its meaning for Christians.

Pay Dirt: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief

2007-02-24T16:47:00.000-05:00

"Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind."
- Albert Einstein

Have a listen to this recent CBC Radio Tapestry program with Dr. Francis Collins who lives in both the scientific and the religious worlds. He’s a leading geneticist; in fact, he was the head of the Human Genome Project. The project mapped the code of DNA — which Collins called the "first glimpse of our own instruction book, previously known only to God." He is also a believer: not just in God — but in a God who hears prayers, who cares about souls — and who wants nothing more than a relationship with each one of us. Mary Hynes talks with Francis Collins about his journey from atheism to belief. Dr. Francis Collins' book is called The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief. It's published by Free Press.

http://www.cbc.ca/tapestry/archives/2007/021807.html

Pay Dirt: Continuing with "Is Religion 'Built Upon Lies'?"

2007-02-24T16:36:00.000-05:00

Continuing with "Is Religion 'Built Upon Lies'?"

Best-selling atheist Sam Harris and pro-religion blogger Andrew Sullivan debate God, faith, and fundamentalism. (Courtesy: Beliefnet.com)

Dear Andrew-

Many thanks for your latest essay. I must say, if we were at a dinner party, this is where I might be tempted to admit that rational dialogue can take us only so far (So, how are things over at The Atlantic?...). But we are not at a dinner party, and I think you and I have a responsibility to see whether a conversation of this sort can ever terminate in a proper meeting of minds.
I am, of course, unconvinced by your response. But this can hardly disappoint you, as it was not intended to convince me. You simply wrote to inform me that you have never doubted God’s existence, cannot account for how you came to believe in Him, and are well aware that these facts will not (and should not) persuade me of the legitimacy of your religious beliefs. I now feel like a tennis player, in mid-serve, who notices that his opponent is no longer holding a racket.
You have simply declared your faith to be immune to rational challenge. As you didn’t come to believe in God by taking any state of the world into account, no possible state of the world could put His existence in doubt. This is the very soul of dogmatism. But to call it such in this context will seem callous, as you have emphasized how your faith has survived—and perhaps helped you to survive—many harrowing experiences. Such testimonials about the strength and utility of faith mark off territory that most atheists have learned never to trespass. This reminds me of the wonderful quotation from Mencken: “We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.” The truth is, no one wants to be in the business of arguing that another person’s principal sources of comfort and gratification are not as he thinks them to be. But we are now in this up to our eyebrows, so permit me to just blurt out what I’m thinking and to tell you why I believe that your nonjustification-justification of faith should not satisfy you (or anyone else).
While you claim to have integrated doubt into your faith, you say that you have never (never) doubted the existence of God. This seems rather like my saying, “I am an extremely loving person. I just don’t happen to love my parents or my children. Never have. Probably never will.” There are surely instances where the caveats to an assertion loom too large to ignore.
As stated, your notion of God doesn’t have much in the way of specific content (apart from love). Beyond that, you have sought refuge in a towering mystery—and have boosted yourself there with the claim that any Being sublime enough to have created our universe must be so far beyond our ken as to perpetually elude our powers of description. This last assertion seems plausible, as far as it goes. But, of course, it isn’t an argument for the existence of God, much less a good one. In any case, your vaporous conception of a deity allows you to say that your religious beliefs do not conflict with those of others. God as a loving cipher allows for multiple, and even contradictory, doctrines to achieve parity. Faith in the absence of specifics makes a man humble.

All this, frankly, seems a little evasive. Given your attachment to Christianity and your admiration for the pope (who, as you know, makes far more restrictive—and, therefore, arrogant—claims about God), I suspect there is a raft of religious propositions that you actually do accept as true—though perhaps you are less certain of them than you are of God. I refer now to the specific beliefs that would make you a Christian and a Catholic, as opposed to a generic theist. Do you believe in the resurrection and the virgin birth? Is the divinity of the historical Jesus a fact that is "truer than any proof...any substance...any object"? If these are not the sort of things a person can just know without any justification, why can’t they be known in this way? If a man like James Dobson is wrong to be certain, without justification, that Jesus will one day return to earth, why is your assertion about the existence of a loving God any different? What would you say to a person who once doubted the story of Noah, but whose doubt “suddenly, unprompted by any specific thought, just lifted”? Is such a change of mood sufficient to establish the flood myth as an historical fact?

Perhaps I’m missing something, but your claim about God really does not appear limited to your own experience. You are not saying—“Sam, I just don’t know how I can convince you of this, but when I close my eyes and think of Jesus, I experience a feeling of utter peace. I’m calling this feeling ‘God,’ and I suspect that if more people felt this way, our world would be radically transformed.” An assertion of this sort would give me no trouble at all. But you are saying quite a bit more than that. You are claiming to know that God exists out there. As such, you are making tacit claims about physics and cosmology and about the history of the world. What is more, these are claims that you have just pronounced unjustified, unjustifiable, and yet impervious to your own powers of doubt.

You also appear to see some strange, epistemological significance in the fact that you cannot remember when or how you acquired your faith. Surely the roots of many of your beliefs are similarly obscure. I don’t happen to remember when or how I came to believe that Pluto is a planet. Should I say that this belief “chose me”? What if, upon hearing that astronomers have changed their opinion about Pluto, I announced that “I have no ability to stop believing…. I know of no ‘proof’ that could dissuade me of [Pluto’s planethood], since no ‘proof’ ever persuaded me of it.” I’m sure you will balk at this analogy, but I’m guessing that your parents told you about God from the moment you appeared in this world. This is generally how people are put in a position to say things like faith “chose me.” The English language chose both of us. That doesn’t mean that we cannot reflect critically on it or recognize that the fact that we both speak it (we might say it is the “air we breathe”) is an utterly non-mysterious consequence of our upbringings. Indeed, you do admit the role that such contingency plays in matters of faith. As you say, if you had been raised Buddhist, you’d almost certainly be a Buddhist. But you refrain from drawing any important conclusions from this. If you had been raised by atheists, might you even be an atheist?

I also hope you appreciate the irony of your viewing your sexual orientation as a gift from God. I’m very happy, of course, that you don’t consider your homosexuality to be a curse or a product of Adam’s fall. But the idea that homosexuality is sinful or otherwise pathological has more than a little to do with the history of religion. Is there any force on this earth that has done more to shame and terrorize homosexuals (or heterosexuals for that matter) than your own church? I’m not suggesting that the revulsion that some heterosexuals feel for homosexuals can be entirely explained in terms of religious doctrine (but it can be largely explained in such terms; and this hatred has, at a minimum, been enshrined and made durable by religious institutions). So I find it peculiar that you consider your successful ordeal of living as a homosexual in a homophobic faith to be evidence in support of the religious project. It’s like hearing a man who has been unfairly confined to a straight-jacket all his life say that he is grateful to have been taught such “economy of motion.” This is not to make light of the very obvious and important fact that we can all grow through adversity. Many people can honestly say things like, “cancer is the best thing that ever happened to me.” So, I do not doubt for a moment that your struggle with the sexual taboos of Christianity has made you a better person. But your experience does not transform a two-thousand-year pandemic of needless and crushing sexual neurosis in the name of Christ into some kind of spiritual sacrament. Generally speaking, the Church has promulgated views about human sexuality that are unconscionably stupid and utterly lacking in empathy. Full stop. The fact that you have navigated this labyrinth of sacred prejudice and kept your sanity is no point in favor of religion. The glory is very much your own.

Finally, let me make it clear that I do not consider religious moderates to be “mere enablers of fundamentalist intolerance.” They are worse. My biggest criticism of religious moderation—and of your last essay—is that it represents precisely the sort of thinking that will prevent a fully reasonable and nondenominational spirituality from ever emerging in our world. Your determination to have your emotional and spiritual needs met within the tradition of Catholicism has kept you from discovering that there is a mode of spiritual and ethical inquiry that is not contingent upon culture in the way that all religions are. As I wrote in The End of Faith, whatever is true about us, spiritually and ethically, must be discoverable now. It makes no sense at all to have one’s spiritual life pegged to rumors of ancient events, however miraculous. What if, tomorrow, a blue-ribbon panel of archaeologists and biblical scholars demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Gospels were ancient forgeries and that Jesus never existed? Would this steal the ground out from under your spiritual life? It would be a shame if it would. And if it wouldn’t, in what sense is your spirituality really predicated upon the historical Jesus?

I’m asking you to imagine a world in which children are taught to investigate reality for themselves, not in conformity to the religious dogmatism of their parents, but by the lights of truly honest, fearless inquiry. Imagine a discourse about ethics and mystical experience that is as contingency-free as the discourse of science already is. Science really does transcend the vagaries of culture: there is no such thing as “Japanese” as opposed to “French” science; we don’t speak of “Hindu biology” and “Jewish chemistry.” Imagine a world that has transcended its tribalism—racism and nationalism, yes, but religious tribalism especially—in which we could have a truly open-ended conversation about our place in the universe and about the possibilities of deepening our experience of love and compassion for one another. Ethics and spirituality do not require faith. One can even achieve utter mystical absorption in the primordial mystery of the present moment without believing anything on insufficient evidence.

You might want to say that every religion offers a guide to doing this. Yes, but they are provisional guides at best. Rather than pick over the carcass of Christianity (or any other traditional faith) looking for a few, uncontaminated morsels of wisdom, why not take a proper seat at the banquet of human understanding in the present? There are already many very refined courses on offer. For those interested in the origins of the universe, there is the real science of cosmology. For those who want to know about the evolution of life on this planet, biology, chemistry and their subspecialties offer real nourishment. (Knowledge in most scientific domains is now doubling about every five years. How fast is it growing in religion?) And if ethics and spirituality are what concern you, there are now scientists making serious efforts to understand these features of our experience—both by studying the brain function of advanced contemplatives and by practicing meditation and other (non-faith-based) spiritual disciplines themselves. Even when it comes to compassion and self-transcendence, there is new wine (slowly) being poured. Why not catch it with a clean glass?

All the best,

Sam

Pay Dirt: Continuing with "Is Religion 'Built Upon Lies'?"

2007-02-18T14:46:00.000-05:00

Continuing with "Is Religion 'Built Upon Lies'?"
Best-selling atheist Sam Harris and pro-religion blogger Andrew Sullivan debate God, faith, and fundamentalism. (Courtesy: Beliefnet.com)

Dear Sam,

Thanks for waiting for this belated response. As a form of apology, and since some readers have said I've ducked some of your specific questions in the past, perhaps I should answer your last question first. It may move things forward a little. You wrote:

"What would constitute "proof" for you that your current beliefs about God are mistaken? (i.e., what would get you to fundamentally doubt the validity of faith in general and of Christianity in particular?)"

It's a good question. It prompts me to say something I've been reluctant to talk about for reasons best expressed by Wittgenstein. But here goes anyway.

I have never doubted the existence of God. Never. My acceptance of God's existence - of a force beyond everything and the source of everything - goes so far back in my consciousness and memory that I can neither recall "finding" this faith nor being taught it. So when I am asked to justify this belief, as you reasonably do, I am at a loss. At this layer of faith, the first critical layer, the layer that includes all religious people and many who call themselves spiritual rather than religious, I can offer no justification as such. I have just never experienced the ordeal of consciousness without it. It is the air I have always breathed. I meet atheists and am as baffled at their lack of faith - at this level - as you are at my attachment to it. When people ask me how I came to choose this faith, I can only say it chose me. I have no ability to stop believing. Crises in my life - death of loved ones, diagnosis with a fatal illness, emotional loss - have never shaken this faith. In fact, they have all strengthened it. I know of no "proof" that could dissuade me of this, since no "proof" ever persuaded me of it.

I simply grew up from my earliest childhood in complete acceptance of this reality. I have had two serious crises of faith - but neither came close to a loss of faith in God's existence. The first crisis was the worst. Almost fourteen years ago, it occurred to me not that God didn't exist - that never occurred to me - but that God might be evil. I wrote about this experience - I remember precisely where and when it happened - in my spiritual memoir/essay, "Love Undetectable." I will not reiterate it here. The "proof" I contemplated for thinking God was evil was the cliched conundrum of human suffering. It was a particularly grim moment in the plague years, when the suffering of good people I loved a lot began to get to my faith. Yes, I know this paradox might (and should) have occurred to me earlier in life. But it's also human to avoid these things most fully until those closest to you are struck down. So there I was, having my Job moment.

What proof, what argument, what evidence persuaded me that God was actually not evil but good? Nothing that will or should persuade you. The sense that evil was the ultimate victor in the universe, that evil is the fundamental meaning of all of this, that "none of this cares for us," to use Larkin's simple phrase: this sense pervaded me for a few minutes and then somehow, suddenly, unprompted by any specific thought, just lifted. I can no more explain that - or provide a convincing argument that it was anything more than your own moment of calm in Galilee. But I can say that it represented for me a revelation of God's love and forgiveness, the improbable notion that the force behind all of this actually loved us, and even loved me. The calm I felt then; and the voice with no words I heard: this was truer than any proof I have ever conceded, any substance I have ever felt with my hands, any object I have seen with my eyes.
You will ask: how do I know this was Jesus? Could it not be that it was a force beyond one, specific Jewish rabbi who lived two millennia ago and was executed by the Roman authorities? Yes, and no. I have lived with the voice of Jesus read to me, read by me, and spoken all around me my entire life - and I heard it that day. If I had been born before Jesus' birth, would I have realized this? Of course not. If I had been born in Thailand and raised a Buddhist, would I have interpreted this experience as a function of my Buddhist faith rather than Jesus? If I were a pilgrim right now in Iraq, would I attribute this epiphany to Allah? An honest answer has to be: almost certainly.

But I am a contingent human being in a contingent time and place and I heard Jesus. Do I believe that other religious traditions, even those that posit doctrines logically contrary to the doctrines of Jesus, have no access to divine truth? I don't. If God exists, then God will be larger and greater than our human categories or interpretations. I feel sure that all the great religions - and many minor ones - have been groping toward the same God. I don't need to tell you of the profound similarities in ethical and spiritual teaching among various faiths, as well as their differences. I believe what I specifically believe - but since the mystery of the divine is so much greater than our human understanding, I am not in the business of claiming exclusive truth, let alone condemning those with different views of the divine as heretics or infidels. We are all restless for the same God, for the intelligence and force greater than all of us, for that realm of being that the human mind senses but cannot achieve, longs for but cannot capture. But I've learned in that search that integral and indispensable to it is humility. And such humility requires relinquishing the impulse to force faith on others, to condemn those with different faiths, or to condescend to those who have sincerely concluded that there is no God at all. And when I read the Gospels recounting the sayings and actions of Jesus of Nazareth, I see a man so committed to that humility he was prepared to die under its weight.

I should add that this unchosen belief in God's existence - the "gift" of faith - does not prompt me to lose all doubt in my faith, or to abandon questioning. I have wrestled with all sorts of questions about any number of doctrines that the hierarchy of the church has insisted upon. As a gay man, I have been forced to do this perhaps more urgently than many others - which is one reason I regard my sexual orientation as a divine gift rather than as a "disorder". For me, faith is a journey that begins with the gift of divine revelation but never rests thereafter. It is nourished by a faith community we call the church, and is sustained by the sacraments, prayer, doubt and the love of friends and family. It is informed by reason, but it cannot end in reason.
I understand that this form of faith would provoke Nietzsche's contempt and James Dobson's scorn. But there is a wide expanse between nihilism and fundamentalism. I fear your legitimate concerns (which I share) about the dangers of religious certainty in politics have blinded you to the fertility of this expanse. And I think you're wrong that we religious moderates are mere enablers of fundamentalist intolerance. I think, rather, we have an important role in talking with atheists about faith and talking with fundamentalists about the political dangers of religious fanaticism, and the pride that can turn faith into absolutism.

In fact, people of faith who are not fundamentalists may be the most important allies you've got. Why don't you want us to help out?

Andrew

Pay Dirt: Continuing with "Is Religion 'Built Upon Lies'?"

2007-02-14T20:21:00.000-05:00

Continuing with "Is Religion 'Built Upon Lies'?"
Best-selling atheist Sam Harris and pro-religion blogger Andrew Sullivan debate God, faith, and fundamentalism. (Courtesy: Beliefnet.com)

Dear Andrew,

Many thanks for your last essay. Before I address your central argument, I'd like to point out that you continue to misunderstand me in small ways that make me seem (even) more boorish than I am. I did not, for instance, claim that you could not possibly offer an adequate response to my arguments, only that repeatedly calling me "intolerant" would not constitute such a response. Indeed, if I thought there were nothing you could say to convince me of the legitimacy of your point of view, I could scarcely be having this debate in good faith. I remain open to evidence and argument on this and all other fronts. In fact, I could easily imagine a scenario that would persuade me of the existence of God, the divinity of Jesus, and the utter sanctity of the blessed Virgin. Granted, this communication would have to be of the crass "signs and wonders" variety, for I am a very doubting Thomas, but there is no question that my mind could be fundamentally changed, even in this email exchange. If, for instance, your "Imaginary Friend" gave you some highly specific information that you could not have obtained by any other means, I would take this as powerful evidence in favor of your point of view. To increase my vulnerability to this line of attack, I have just written a 30-digit number on a scrap of paper and hidden it in my office. If God tells you (or any of our readers) what this number is, I will be appropriately astounded and will publicize the results of this experiment to the limit of my abilities. It is, of course, true that your success would be open to a variety of interpretations-perhaps such a miracle says nothing about the existence of God but demonstrates that clairvoyance is an actual power of the human mind and that you possess it in spades. Or perhaps it proves that Satan exists, and he is similarly endowed. Of course, we should expect some skeptical readers to accuse us both of fraud. Let us cross these bridges if we ever come to them. The point, of course, is that if God exists, it would be trivially easy for Him to blow my mind. (Hint to the Creator: I'm thinking of an even number, and it's not 927459757074561008328610835528).

This brings me to a point upon which atheists like myself are always harping: most people consent to have their minds blown on far lesser terms, with far more ambiguous stimuli, and keep reason in chains while the "will to believe" triumphs in a very unfair fight. Atheists like myself are generally asked to contemplate "miracles" of the following sort: some fellow was a big drinker (like our president), prayed to Jesus, and now lives a life of blissful sobriety. It is left to professional skeptics to wonder how an intelligent person can believe that mere recovery from alcoholism confirms the doctrine of Christianity. Hindus get sober, and atheists do as well. These facts alone nullify any religious interpretation of the data.

Testimony on the basis of "spiritual" experience tends to be equally ambiguous. Here is something I recently wrote for the Newsweek/Washington Post blog "On Faith" I quote it here, because I think it bears on this question of what counts as evidence for specific religious ideas:

I recently spent an afternoon on the northwestern shore of the Sea of Galilee, atop the mount where Jesus is believed to have preached his most famous sermon. It was an infernally hot day, and the sanctuary was crowded with Christian pilgrims from many continents. Some gathered silently in the shade, while others staggered in the noonday sun, taking photographs.
As I sat and gazed upon the surrounding hills gently sloping to an inland sea, a feeling of peace came over me. It soon grew to a blissful stillness that silenced my thoughts. In an instant, the sense of being a separate self-an "I" or a "me"-vanished. Everything was as it had been-the cloudless sky, the pilgrims clutching their bottles of water-but I no longer felt like I was separate from the scene, peering out at the world from behind my eyes. Only the world remained.

The experience lasted just a few moments, but returned many times as I gazed out over the land where Jesus is believed to have walked, gathered his apostles, and worked many of his miracles. If I were a Christian, I would undoubtedly interpret this experience in Christian terms. I might believe that I had glimpsed the oneness of God, or felt the descent of the Holy Spirit. But I am not a Christian. If I were a Hindu, I might talk about "Brahman," the eternal Self, of which all individual minds are thought to be a mere modification. But I am not a Hindu. If I were a Buddhist, I might talk about the "dharmakaya of emptiness" in which all apparent things manifest. But I am not a Buddhist.

As someone who is simply making his best effort to be a rational human being, I am very slow to draw metaphysical conclusions from experiences of this sort. The truth is, I experience what I would call the "selflessness of consciousness" rather often, wherever I happen to meditate-be it in a Buddhist monastery, a Hindu temple, or while having my teeth cleaned. Consequently, the fact that I also had this experience at a Christian holy site does not lend an ounce of credibility to the doctrine of Christianity.

You are, of course, right to say that there are many different contexts in which a statement about the world can be deemed "true" (or likely to be true) and not all of these are empirical or scientific, narrowly defined. Some are even fictional. It is, for instance, true to say that "Hamlet was the prince of Denmark." But admitting the role of context does not render all truth-claims equally legitimate. As you point out, history is not an exact science, but it isn't exactly in conflict with science either. Permit me to quote from another of my essays, as it addresses precisely this point:

It is time we conceded a basic fact of human discourse: Either people have good reasons for what they believe, or they do not. When they have good reasons, their beliefs contribute to our growing understanding of the world. We need not distinguish between "hard" and "soft" sciences here, or between science and other evidence-based disciplines, like history. There happen to be very good reasons to believe that the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Consequently, the idea that the Egyptians actually did it lacks credibility. Every sane human being recognizes that to rely merely on "faith" to decide specific questions of historical fact would be both idiotic and grotesque-that is, until the conversation turns to the origin of books like the Bible and the Koran, to the resurrection of Jesus, to Muhammad's conversation with the angel Gabriel, or to any of the other hallowed travesties that still crowd the altar of human ignorance.

Science, in the broadest sense, includes all reasonable claims to knowledge about ourselves and the world. If there were good reasons to believe that Jesus was born of a virgin, or that Muhammad flew to Heaven on a winged horse, these beliefs would necessarily form part of our rational description of the universe. Faith is nothing more than the license that religious people give one another to believe such propositions when reasons fail. The difference between science and religion is the difference between a willingness to dispassionately consider new evidence and new arguments and a passionate unwillingness to do so. The distinction could not be more obvious, or more consequential, and yet it is everywhere elided, even in the ivory tower.

So, while I admit that there are many different contexts in which our beliefs may be justified, and many different modes of justification, there is still an important difference between justified and unjustified belief. My previous remarks-about not knowing what happens after death, about the gaps in science, about the potential validity of contemplative experience, etc.-do nothing to change this picture. And it is the manifest failure of most religious people to observe the distinction between justified and unjustified belief (generally calling their non-observance "faith") that leaves me convinced that they are generally misled in their search for truth.

It is the willingness of scientists to say "I don't know"-to really integrate doubt into their view of the world-that constitutes their privileged position with respect to truth. As you know, there are an uncountable number of questions upon which religion once offered a faith-based answer, which have now been ceded to the care of science. Indeed, the process of scientific conquest and religious forfeiture is relentless, unidirectional, and highly predictable. Some smart person begins to doubt received opinion-about the causes of illness, the movement of celestial bodies, the nature of sensory perception, etc.-he or she then observes the world more closely (often making shrewd use of technology and/or mathematics) and makes predictions that can be verified by others. What we see, time and again, is a general unwillingness for religious people to seriously interact with this discourse (and even an eagerness to subjugate or murder its perpetrators) whenever it challenges doctrines to which they are emotionally attached. Eventually, however, the power that comes with actually understanding the world becomes too seductive to ignore, and even the clerics give in. In this way, real knowledge, being truly universal, erodes the basis for religious discord. Muslims and Christians cannot disagree about the causes of cholera, for instance, because whatever their holy books might say about infectious disease, a genuine understanding of cholera has arrived from another quarter. Epidemiology trumps religion (or it should), especially when people are watching their children die. This is where our hope for a truly nonsectarian future lies: when things matter, people tend to want to understand what is actually going on in the world. Science (and rational discourse generally) delivers this understanding and offers a very frank appraisal of its current limitations; Religion fails on both counts.

I also disagree that religious faith can be as well-behaved as you suggest. You claim that religious beliefs are "freely chosen and definitionally dealing with matters that cannot be subject to common consensus." What does it mean to say that a belief is "freely chosen"? If our beliefs purport to represent any state of the world (physical, historical, contemplative, or even fictional), we do not "choose" them. They tend to be forced upon us by compelling chains of evidence and argument. Did you freely choose to believe that Jesus was crucified rather than guillotined? I doubt it. The biblical account just happens to specify crucifixion, and you find this account compelling. (I presume it is also relevant that Jesus predates the guillotine by over a thousand years.) The point, of course, is that you are not free to believe whatever you want. And people who would avail themselves of such freedom are demonstrably crazy. Consensus really is the gold-standard here, as elsewhere. Consensus, of course, admits of exceptions. It is possible for a solitary genius to have the truth in hand before anyone else realizes it. Eventually, however, others will authenticate his/her results. This is also true of contemplative or classically "mystical" results. Yes, subjective experience is private to a significant degree, but it isn't merely so. Language allows us to form a consensus about what is reasonable to believe even about one's private experiences.

Not lying to oneself and others takes discipline. It is, of course, hard to know how much progress one has made down the path of honesty, but it is not difficult to spot the pratfalls of others. Here, I do not merely refer to twenty-megaton displays of religious mendacity of the Ted Haggard variety. I mean the daily and ubiquitous failure of most religious people to admit that the basic claims of the their faith are profoundly suspect. How likely is it that Jesus was really born of a virgin, rose from the dead, and will bodily return to earth to judge us all? How reasonable is it to believe in such a concatenation of miracles on the basis of the Gospel account? How much support do these doctrines receive from the average Christian's experience in church? It seems to me that honest answers to these questions should raise a tsunami of doubt. I'm not sure what will be "Christian" about any Christians left standing.

It seems profoundly unimaginative-and, frankly, dangerous-to think that we cannot possibly overcome the religious divisions in our world. What is the alternative? Do you really think that the 23rd century will dawn, with unimaginably powerful technology having spread to every corner of the earth, and our thinking will still be governed by sectarian religious certainties? Muslims eager for jihad? Rapture-ready Christians holding political power?

Let me close by asking you a simple question: What would constitute "proof" for you that your current beliefs about God are mistaken? (i.e., what would get you to fundamentally doubt the validity of faith in general and of Christianity in particular?) I suspect the answer to this question will say a lot about why you believe what you believe.

Best,
Sam

Pay Dirt: Continuing with "Is Religion 'Built Upon Lies'?"

2007-02-12T18:17:00.000-05:00

Continuing with "Is Religion 'Built Upon Lies'?"

Best-selling atheist Sam Harris and pro-religion blogger Andrew Sullivan debate God, faith, and fundamentalism. (Courtesy: Beliefnet.com)

Dear Sam,

Thank you very much for your latest post. It was clarifying for me - and forced me to think hard about how to respond. I even communicated with my Imaginary Friend about it. You raise a blizzard of points, but there is one above all that needs to be addressed, because it cuts to the chase, and shows, I think, that we are closer than might appear.

Your fundamental point is the following, it seems to me. I can say that the revelation I have embraced is true, but because it cannot be proven by the robust standards of scientific empiricism, I cannot prove it to be true to your satisfaction. If I cannot prove it to be true, in empirical fashion, then my faith must be excluded from rational discourse. In fact, if I understand you right, it must not only be excluded, it must be stigmatized. It must be ridiculed. It must end. Even if religion were to mean that everyone loved one another for ever (which, I readily concede, it obviously doesn't), that still would not be relevent for judging its truth. And the truth of a religious claim is the most fundamental thing about it. If I cannot prove this, I should shut up. As you rightly say, with self-fulfilling precision:

"You can call me 'intolerant' all you want, but that won't make unreasonable claims to knowledge sound any more reasonable; it won't differentiate your claims to religious knowledge from the claims of others which you consider illegitimate; and it won't constitute an adequate response to anything I have written or am likely to write."

I agree with all of that, except the last phrase. I believe I can offer an adequate response. It may not be adequate to you; but it is adequate to me, and to many, many others - in fact, to the vast majority of human beings who have ever lived. My response rests on an understanding of truth that is not exhausted by empiricism or materialism. I do not believe, in short, that all truth rests on scientific premises and can be 'proven' by empirical or scientific methods. I believe science is one, important, valuable and respectable mode of thinking about the whole. But there are truth questions it has not answered and cannot answer. What I found insightful about your book was your openness to this possibility. You repeat that openness in your recent posting:

"While I spend a fair amount of time thinking about the brain (as I am finishing my doctorate in neuroscience), I do not think that the utter reducibility of consciousness to matter has been established. It may be that the very concepts of mind and matter are fundamentally misleading us."

So you allow for a space where the logic of science and of materialism does not lead us toward truth, but may even mislead us about it, and lead us away from it. This is a big concession, and it undermines the certainty of your entire case. Such an argument must rest on a notion of ultimate truth that is deeper than science, beyond science. It must rest on a notion that allows for the rational legitimacy of my faith.

It might even include an appreciation of other modes of rational discourse that are not empirical in origin or form. Take, for example, the question of historical truth. You rely in your books on a lot of historical facts to buttress your empirical case. But these facts are not true - and could never be proven true - by the scientific method that is your benchmark. There are no control groups in history. There are no experiments. But there is a form of truth. Discovering that historical truth is the vocation of a historian - and it is a different truth than science, and reached by a different methodology and logic.

Similarly, mathematics can achieve a proof that has no interaction with the physical world. It may even be the closest to divine truth that human beings can achieve. But it is still logically separate from empirically verified truth, from historical truth, and even from the realm of human consciousness that includes aesthetic truth, the truths we find in contemplation of art or of nature.

My point here is to say that once you have conceded the possibility of a truth that is not reducible to empirical proof, you have allowed for the validity of religious faith as a form of legitimate truth-seeking in a different mode. The reason why you are not like some other, glibber atheists is that you recognize this. I might say that God has already been in touch with you on the matter.

But that is not the sum of your argument. You argue further that even if you concede the possibility of a legitimate form of religious truth-seeking, the content of various, competing revelations renders them dangerous. They are dangerous because they logically contradict each other. And since their claims are the most profound that we can imagine, human beings will often be compelled to fight for them. For if these profound matters are not worth fighting for, what is?

I agree that this is a central problem for religion in the world. It has always been so. it will always be so. This is not a new problem. It is arguably the oldest human debate. Whether one reads Pascal or Spinoza, Locke or Montaigne, Hobbes or Leo Strauss, the religious question always prompts a political question. I think the problem is eased - if never fully solved - by a critical move that I unpack in my book, "The Conservative Soul." That move is rooted in skepticism. Hobbes put it best, as he often did:

"For the nature of God is incomprehensible; that is to say, we understand nothing of what he is, but only that he is; and therefore the attributes we give him, are not to tell one another, what he is, nor to signify our opinion of his nature, but our desire to honor him with such names as we conceive most honourable amongst ourselves."

In my book, excerpted in Time Magazine here, I put it this way:

If God really is God, then God must, by definition, surpass our human understanding. Not entirely. We have Scripture; we have reason; we have religious authority; we have our own spiritual experiences of the divine. But there is still something we will never grasp, something we can never know - because God is beyond our human categories. And if God is beyond our categories, then God cannot be captured for certain. We cannot know with the kind of surety that allows us to proclaim truth with a capital T. There will always be something that eludes us. If there weren't, it would not be God.

I don't think you're far away from this. That's why you've gone on retreats, explored Buddhism, experimented with psilcybin, as I have. You see: we are closer than you might think. But you differ with me on how this translates into life. You ask legitimately: how can I, convinced of this truth, resist imposing it on others? The answer is: humility and doubt. I may believe these things, but I am aware that others may not; and I respect their own existential decision to believe something else. I respect their decision because I respect my own, and realize it is indescribable to those who have not directly experienced it. That's why I am such a dogged defender of pluralism and secularism - because I believe secularism alone does justice to the profundity of the claims of religion. The attempt to force or even rig laws to encourage others to share my faith defeats the point of my faith - which is that it is both freely chosen and definitionally dealing with matters that cannot be subject to common consensus.

And that brings me to the asymmetry of our positions. We both accept that there may well be a higher truth beyond empirical inquiry or proof. I respect your opinions in this matter, and feel informed by them. You regard my opinions as inadmissible in public debate, ludicrous, a form of lying, and irrational. Yes, you are being intolerant. More, actually. The entire point of your book is intolerance. Where I respect your position, you refuse to respect mine.

Or maybe, now that I've unpacked it, you respect my position a little more. Let me know,

God bless,

Andrew

How the Bible Became a Book...

2007-02-11T12:29:00.000-05:00

In my December 16 posting "Bible Exploration", I committed to delving into the Bible a bit more to provide a further explanation of my current thinking about the Bible. Along with my "Fundamentals Framework", I think having a clear set of thoughts on the Bible is critical for me to be able to explain my current Christian thinking (especially to those who are still in more of a 'fundamentalist' mode of thinking). Some of my friends wonder why I even care (given our new thoughts on matters religious), but for me, I have decided that a spiritual dimension to my life is something I want to maintain. And for me, the framework within which I plan to address spirituality is Christianity (see Transformation: What It's All About for more on this) - not in a fundamentalist way, but with more of the emerging view of Christianity that is starting to be more prevalent. As a result, given the Bible's importance to the Christian tradition, I feel it is important for me to have a clear point of view on what to do with it.

I have decided that I just don't have the time to do this first blog on the Bible justice so I'm going to just throw together some points and hopefully they will have some sense of congruency.
(Note that many of the points below are from Bart Ehrman's book "Misquoting Jesus" so credit to him ahead of time - I'm not going to try to quote or reference all the direct quotes from his book...just trust me, there are many. And an up front warning - this is a long post!)

I grew up believing that the Bible was the inerrant, literal, divine words of God. As in "everything is accurate", "no errors", "if it says it in the Bible, it must be right", etc. It is interesting then to consider things like:

The mustard seed is not the smallest of all seeds on the earth even if Jesus said it was;
Mark says Jesus was crucified the day AFTER the Passover meal was eaten while John says he died the day BEFORE it was eaten.
Luke says Joseph and Mary returned to Nazereth just a month after they had come to Bethlehem, whereas Matthew says they fled to Egypt.
Paul says that after his conversion, he did NOT go to Jerusalem, whereas Acts says that was the first thing he did.

These are just a few examples of "differences" within the Bible text. Now I'm not suggesting that any of the above differences are significant to the overall message of the Bible, but it is impossible to claim that these types of differences don't exist (i.e. the inerrant idea falls apart).

Combine this realization with the fact that we don't have the original texts to determine the exact original wording...oh wait, we don't even have the first copies of the originals...oh wait, we don't even have copies of the copies of the originals...oh wait, we don't have copies of the copies of the copies of the originals. Most of the earliest texts we have were made centuries later than the originals. Take Galatians as an example. The first reasonably complete copy we have dates to about 200 C.E. - some 150 years AFTER Paul wrote the letter. Given the fact that it had been copied for 15 decades to get to that point (more on that later), how accurate was it at that point?

With that as context, it is easy (at least it was for me... surprisingly!) to realize the the Bible is a very human book. Just as human scribes had copied (and changed) the texts of scripture, so too had human authors originally written the texts. The Bible was written by different authors at different times, in different places to address different needs. Many, no doubt, felt "inspired" by God to say what they did, but they had their own perspectives, beliefs, views, needs, desires, understandings, theologies, etc.

With that, you quickly come to the realization that the Bible doesn't give a foolproof answer to the questions of the modern age - abortion, women's rights, gay rights, religious supremacy, etc. You realize that we need to figure out how to live and what to believe on our own...without setting up the Bible as a false idol - or an oracle that gives us a direct line of communication with the Almighty.

Let's step back for a second. Let's go back to Judaism. It was unique among the religions of the Roman Empire in that its religious "instructions" were written down in sacred books. It stressed ancestral traditions, customs and laws, and maintained that these had been recorded in sacred books, which had the status of "scripture" for the Jewish people.

Similarly, Christianity was also a "bookish" religion. This importance of written texts, however, does not mean that all Christians could read books...quite the contrary, most early Christians, like most people throughout the empire (including Jews), were illiterate. The texts (many of which were in letter form) were very important to the communities though...they were meant to be read aloud to the community at community gatherings. But most Christians couldn't read them themselves. Interesting isn't it?

Note that the texts weren't one big book...just many individual writings. At what point did the Christian canon of scripture get formed then? In the mid-second century, a philospher-teacher named Marcion (later declared a heretic) was the first Christian that we know of who produced an actual "canon" of scripture - that is, a collection of books that, he argued, constituted the sacred texts of the faith. It is interesting to note that Marcion was completely absorbed by the life and teachings of the apostle Paul, whom he considered to be the one "true" apostle from the early days of the church.

Some 30 years later, the bishop of Lyon in Gaul (modern France), Irenaeus, opposed Marcion and wrote a five volume work against heretics such as Marcion and the Gnostics. He claimed that Marcion and other "heretics" had mistakenly assumed that only one or another of the gospels was to be accepted as scripture (e.g. Marcion had suggested Luke). He claimed, in summary, that because there are four corners of the earth, four winds and four pillars, that there are four gospels. So, near the end of the second century, there were Christians insisting that there were four gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, John) - no more and no less.

Debates on the Christian canon continued for centuries...long, harsh and drawn out debates about which texts were authoritative. The first time we can find a list of the 27 books of our New Testament was in the second half of the fourth century. The powerful bishop of Alexandria named Athanasius (in 367 C.E.) wrote his annual letter to the Egyptian churches and in it, included advice concerning which books should be considered scripture, and excluded all others.

So how did the communities get those books? How were they put into circulation? There was no desktop publishing back then remember! No, the books had to be copied by hand. The copyists, by the way, in the early centuries weren't trained to do this kind of work, but were simply the literate members of the congregation who were able and willing. As a result, the multiple copies of the texts that were produced were not all alike - since the scribes inevitably made alterations (e.g. changing the words by accident or by design). So anyone reading the books in early Christian centuries wasn't completely sure that he was reading what the original author had written.

On top of the copying challenge in general, ancient Greek texts (including all the earliest Christian writings) had no marks of punctuation, no distinction between upper/lowercase letters, and no spaces used to separate words (scriptuo continua). Obviously, this made it difficult to copy and read. "Godisnowhere" could be different things depending if you were an athiest or a theist (work at it...you'll get it). Similarly, how about lastnightatdinnerisawabundanceonthetable ...normal or supernatural event?

To illustrate the challenges this caused, the third century church father Origen, once said "The differences among the manuscripts have become great, either through the negligence of some copyists or through the perverse audacity of others; they neglect to check over what they have transcribed, or in the process of checking, they make additions or deletions as they please."

This explains why authors would sometimes call curses down on any copyist who modified their texts without permission. With this context, re-consider the often quoted Revelation text "I testify to everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: If anyone adds to them, God will add to him the plagues described in this book; and if anyone removes any of the words of the book of this prophecy, God will remove his share from the tree of life and from the holy city, as described in this book." So this might not be a threat to believe everything in the book (as is often the claim associated with this text in many sermons!), but instead a threat to copyists of the book.

So even if you believe that Biblical texts are the very words of God, the challenge would be to determine what portions of the texts go back to the original authors. Here are 2 examples of texts which many biblical scholars don't think go back to the original authors:

The story of Jesus and the women taken in adultery (you know, where Jesus writes something in the ground and the accusers go running) appears in only one gospel (John 7-8). It is interesting to note that the story isn't found in our earliest manuscripts of the Gospel of John, its writing style is very different from the rest of John, and it includes a number of words and phrases that are otherwise alien to the Gospel. Interesting...perhaps a later addition to the text based on oral traditions of the time? If so, should this text be considered part of the Bible?
And now the last 12 verses of Mark. Before these verses, the story of the women encountering a risen Jesus is told and ends with Jesus fleeing the tomb and saying nothing to anyone "for they were afraid". Then the last 12 verses where Jesus appears to Mary Magdalene who tells the disciples, appearing to 2 others and finally to the 11 disciples. Jesus commissions them to go forth and proclaim his gospel. Very moving and powerful passage that is quoted often in many of today's fundamentalist churches. One problem..the passage wasn't in the original text (they are absent from the oldest and best manuscripts of Mark), the writing style varies from the rest of Mark, and the transition between the previous verses and the last 12 is hard to understand (in reference to Mary Magdalene), and there a number of words and phrases not found elsewhere in Mark. Without the last 12 verses though, the ending is a little abrupt. How could that be the ending? So scholars think that a scribe added an ending.

Let's get back to the canon itself. Near the end of the fourth century, Pope Damascus commissioned the greatest scholar of the day (Jerome) to produce an official Latin translation - which came to be known as the Vulgate. It became the Bible for the Western church that Christians read, scholars studied and theologians used for centuries.

In the early 1500s, a Dutch scholar named Erasmus produced and published an edition of the Greek New Testament. For the most part, in doing so, he relied on a mere handful of late medieval manuscripts, which he marked up as if he were copyediting a handwritten copy for the printer. In fact, he relied heavily on just one 12th century manuscript for the Gospels and another 12th century manuscript for Acts and the Epistles. For Revelation, he borrowed a manuscript from a friend, but it was impossible to read in places and had lost its last page...so Erasmus used the Vulgate (remember the Latin version translated by Jerome) to cover that last bit of Revelation. Erasmus' work is important since his New Testament was the primary source for the King James Bible created a century later, and became the standard form of Greek Biblical text to be published by Western European printers for more than 300 years. Hmmm...all that based on texts that were not of the best quality and produced some 1100 years after the originals.

One interesting story about Erasmus' text. It apparently didn't contain the Trinity verse..."There are three that bear witness in heaven: the Father, the Word and the Spirit...". This caused some outrage but Erasmus claimed it wasn't in his source texts and unless a Greek text could be shown to him with that verse in it, he wouldn't add it. So the story goes that a Greek text was produced (literally PRODUCED for that very reason). So, true to his word, Erasmus added it to the next version of his New Testament.

In the mid-1500s, another scholar (over a 30 year effort) produced a New Testament based on hundreds of texts available to him. The result was over 30,000 variations from the New Testament that was otherwise accepted as being the authoritative version (i.e. essentially the text that Erasmus had produced). Since then, more than 5,700 manuscripts have been discovered and catalogued. With these manuscripts, along with thousands of copies of the Vulgate and other texts discovered, schollars say there are more than 200,000 and maybe up to 400,000 variants known today. In summary, there are more variations among our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament.

There have been so many attempts to point out the true original texts over the years, I won't even attempt to summarize. And there are many very interesting examples of texts from our accepted form of the Bible that scholars question in terms of their authenticity. While Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus is just one book on this topic, I found it an interesting read nonetheless. For more on this, I suggest picking up the book yourself.

Given that the Erasmus text (which really is a key source to our modern Bible) was based on poorer quality manuscripts than many we have today, it isn't surprising that many "Bible-believing Christians", when faced with these facts, choose to pretend there is no problem and that God inspired the King James...not the original Greek!

Now don't get me wrong. Even though I now see the human nature of the Biblical texts, I do not deny the wisdom and insight we can get from parts of the Bible. As I noted in my "Fundamentals Framework", I see the Bible as a sacred document for Christians. It is the foundation document for our faith with which we should be in "continuing conversation" and from which we can better understand the character and will of God (see Bible Beliefs for more). Having said that, while I do not deny the concept of inspiration (although I do not see it as direct inspriration of the specific words), I think the Bible's words and thoughts are ultimately human words, not God's.

And, given this view that the Bible is a human product, as Christians, our interaction with it should be both from a critical viewpoint (i.e. deciding and discerning what passages are relevant to our time, or discerning/interpreting meanings of texts) as well as from a more open viewpoint whereby we allow ourselves to learn from and be shaped by the wisdom in the Bible. As such, I believe, for Christians, the Bible is a core document within our religious tradition and we should seek the wisdom and meanings of its texts - not seeing them as God's literal, inerrant words, but as a document that captures the experiences of the ancient Israel community and the early Christian community and their responses to God and Jesus, which is important within the Christian religion.

Pay Dirt: Continuing with "Is Religion 'Built Upon Lies'?"

2007-02-11T12:13:00.000-05:00

Continuing with "Is Religion 'Built Upon Lies'?"
Best-selling atheist Sam Harris and pro-religion blogger Andrew Sullivan debate God, faith, and fundamentalism. (Courtesy: Beliefnet.com)

Andrew,

Our debate appears to be heating up. You have now convicted me of "intolerance" reminiscent of "the worst aspects of fundamentalism." As I indicated in my last essay, I am quite familiar with this line of attack and find it depressing. Nevertheless, your specific charge is rather amazing, and I am eager to respond to it.

But first, a little housekeeping:

1. You spend the first two paragraphs of your last essay taking offense at something I did not say, culminating with, "spare me the thought that you know it [fundamentalism] better than I do." I did, in fact, attempt to spare you that thought when I wrote:

First, many moderates assume that religious "extremism" is rare and therefore not all that consequential. Happily, you are not in this camp, but I would venture that you are in a minority among religious moderates. As you and I both know, religious extremism is not rare, and it is hugely consequential.

Indeed, this was one of several places where I sought to communicate that I do not view you as a run-of-the-mill religious moderate. I was extending an olive branch, of sorts, and you have gone and poked yourself in the eye with it. What's a well-intentioned atheist to do?

2. Contrary to your allegation, I do not "disdain" religious moderates. I do, however, disdain bad ideas and bad arguments--which, I'm afraid, you have begun to manufacture in earnest. I'd like to point out that you have not rebutted any of the substantial challenges I made in my last post. Rather, you have gone on to make other points, most of which I find unsurprising and irrelevant to the case I have made against religious faith. For instance, you claim that many fundamentalists are tolerant of dissent and capable of friendship with you despite their dogmatic views about sex. You also remind me that many devoutly religious people do good things on the basis of their religious beliefs. I do not doubt either of these propositions. You could catalogue such facts until the end of time, and they would not begin to suggest that God actually exists, or that the Bible is his Word, or that his Son came to earth in the person of Jesus to redeem our sins. I have no doubt that there are millions of nice Mormons who are likewise tolerant of dissent and perfectly cordial toward homosexuals. Does this, in your view, even slightly increase the probability that the Book of Mormon was delivered on golden plates to Joseph Smith Jr. (that very randy and unscrupulous dowser) by the angel Moroni? Do all the good Muslims in the world lend credence to the claim that Muhammad flew to heaven on a winged horse? Do all the good pagans throughout history suggest that Mt. Olympus was ever teeming with invisible gods? As I have argued elsewhere, the alleged usefulness of religion--the fact that it sometimes gets people to do very good things indeed--is not an argument for its truth. And, needless to say, the usefulness of religion can be disputed, as I have done in both my books. As you may know, I've argued that religion gets people to do good things for bad reasons, when good reasons are actually available; I have also argued that it rather often gets people to do very bad things that they would not otherwise do. On the subject of doing good, I ask you, which is more moral, helping people purely out of concern for their suffering, or helping them because you think God wants you to do it? Personally, I'd much prefer that my children acquire the former sensibility. On the subject of doing bad: there are, at this very moment, perfectly ordinary Shia and Sunni Muslims drilling holdes into each other's brains with power tools in the suburbs of Baghdad. What are the chances they would be doing this without the "benefit" of their incompatible religious identities?

3. You have also made the false charge that I think religious people are "fools" or "idiots." Needless to say, I do not think Blaise Pascal was an idiot (nor do I think you are, for that matter). But I do consider certain ideas idiotic, and idiotic ideas can occasionally be found rattling around the brains of extraordinarily intelligent people. One of the horrors of religious dogmatism is that it can produce a Pascal--a brilliant man who was irretrievably self-deceived on matters of profound importance. As I wrote in The End of Faith:

It is true that Pascal had what was for him an astonishing contemplative experience on the night of Nov. 23, 1654-one that converted him entirely to Jesus Christ. I do not doubt the power of such experiences, but it seems to me self-evident that they are no more the exclusive property of devout Christians than are tears shed in joy. Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, Jews, along with animists of every description have had these experiences throughout history. Pascal, being highly intelligent and greatly learned, should have known this; that he did not (or chose to disregard it) testifies to the stultifying effect of orthodoxy.

I stand by this claim. There is no way around the fact that St. Paul, Pascal, the popes (any of them), and every other Christian worth the name have made a claim about the exclusive validity of Christianity. This claim is, at best, ludicrously provincial. The evidence adduced in support of Christian doctrine can be found in every other religion--saints performing miracles, resurrections from the dead, channeled books, psychic powers, devotional thrills, unconditional love, etc.--these claims are either equally compelling or equally bogus. Happily, for my purposes, "equally compelling" reduces to "equally bogus"--because these claims are mutually incompatible. If Christianity is right, all other religions are wrong. Christians are committed to the following (at least): Jesus was the messiah (so the Jews are wrong); he was divine and resurrected (so the Muslims are wrong-"Jesus son of Mary, Allah's messenger--they slew him not nor crucified him, but it appeared so unto them": Qur'an, 4:157); there is only one God (so the Hindus are wrong). But, of course, the Christians have no better reason to think they're right than the Jews, Muslims, or Hindus do.

4. Your brandishing of Vatican II is just silly, and only bolsters my argument. Are you saying that for about 1960 years Christians (including all the popes) were mistaken about the true doctrine of Christianity? Would you have our readers believe that Vatican II represents some kind of epistemological breakthrough? In reality, Vatican II was just damage control. The Catholic Church has been struggling to make the best of a bad situation ever since Galileo-who, as you know, was forced to his knees under threat of torture and obliged to recant his understanding of the earth's motion and then placed under house arrest until the end of his life. He wasn't absolved of heresy until 1992 (a few decades after Vatican II), at which point the Church ascribed his genius to God, "who, stirring in the depths of his spirit, stimulated him, anticipating and assisting his intuitions." (This might be an appropriate place to vomit.) In any case, I didn't have to quote Leo XIII for lack of modern material. I could have quoted John Paul II, post-Vatican II. Here he is in all his sagacity:

This Revelation is definitive; one can only accept it or reject it. One can accept it, professing belief in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ, the Son, of the same substance as the Father and the Holy Spirit, who is Lord and the Giver of life. Or one can reject all of this.

No doubt, if I wanted to take the time, I could find even less ecumenical statements coming from the current pope. The bottom line is that this pope, and all his predecessors (and you, apparently) believe that the Bible is a magic book: that it was not authored by human beings, however brilliant, but by some supernatural force. This is a claim for which there is not a scintilla of evidence and about which there are many good reasons to be skeptical. The Bible is, as you suggest, an "unsatisfying scriptural mess." But it is worse than that. No, I have not argued that the book is principally "about owning slaves," just that it gets the ethics of slavery wrong. The truth is that even with Jesus holding forth in defense of the poor and the meek and the persecuted, the Bible basically condones slavery. As I argued in Letter to a Christian Nation, the slaveholders of the South were on the winning side of a theological argument. They knew it. And they made a hell of a lot of noise about it. We got rid of slavery despite the moral inadequacy of the Bible, not because it is the greatest treatise on morality ever written.

You and I both know that it would take us five minutes to produce a book that offers a more coherent and compassionate morality than the Bible does. Did I say five minutes? Five seconds--just tear out Leviticus, Deuteronomy, Exodus, and 2 Samuel from the Old Testament, and 2 Thessalonians and Revelation from the New Testament. The book would be mightily improved. Would it then be the most profound book we have on morality (or cosmology, biology, psychology, etc.)? Not by a long shot. But it would be a much better book than it is at present.

5. Contrary to your assertion, I have not made any claims about there being a "nothingness at the end of our mortal lives." The truth is, I don't know what happens after death. Is it dogmatic for me to doubt that you and the pope do? What reason have you given me to believe that you know that "something" happens after death, or that your something is more probable than the Muslim something, the Hindu something, or the Buddhist something? The question of what happens after death (if anything) is a question about the relationship between consciousness and the physical world. It is true that many atheists are convinced that we know what this relationship is, and that it is one of absolute dependence of the one upon the other. Those who have read the last chapters of The End of Faith know that I am not convinced of this. While I spend a fair amount of time thinking about the brain (as I am finishing my doctorate in neuroscience), I do not think that the utter reducibility of consciousness to matter has been established. It may be that the very concepts of mind and matter are fundamentally misleading us. But this doesn't entitle religious people to imagine that all their crazy ideas about miraculous books, virgin births, and saviors ushering in the end of the world are remotely plausible.

6. I'd like to address some of the assertions you made in your first post. You wrote:
Science cannot disprove true faith; because true faith rests on the truth; and science cannot be in ultimate conflict with the truth… I have no fear of what science will tell us about the universe - since God is definitionally the Creator of such a universe; and the meaning of the universe cannot be in conflict with its Creator. I do not, in other words, see reason as somehow in conflict with faith - since both are reconciled by a Truth that may yet be beyond our understanding.

This is more than a little wooly and clearly question-begging. You are making the positive assertion that the universe had a Creator. Doing so, you are attempting to make a substantial contribution to the science of cosmology. When the real cosmologists come back from their next conference and say things like, "spacetime may be a closed manifold and, therefore, may have no beginning or end" this would be one of many possible descriptions of the universe which would close the door on a creation event and, therefore, on a Creator. There are many ways that science could conflict with the "truth" upon which your faith now rests.

Needless to say, your attempt to pull theism up by its bootstraps ("since God is definitionally the Creator of such a universe; and the meaning of the universe cannot be in conflict with its Creator") could be used to justify almost any metaphysical assertion. "The Flying Spaghetti Monster who created the universe" is also "definitionally" the Creator of the universe; this doesn't mean that he exists, or that the universe had a Creator at all. Many other chains of pious reasoning could be cashed-out in the same way: "Satan is the Tempter; I find that I am tempted on a hourly basis to eat ice cream and have sex with my neighbor's wife; ergo, Satan exists." Or what if I suggested that what we know about the brain renders the idea of a human soul rather implausible, and one your brethren countered: "The immortal soul governs all the activity in a person's brain; I have no fear about what neuroscience will tell me about the brain, because the soul is definitionally the brain's operator." Would this strike you as an argument for the existence of souls? Granted, there are still many gaps in neuroscience into which a soul might still be inserted, just as there are gaps in our understanding of the cosmos into which the faithful eagerly insert God, but such maneuvers are utterly without intellectual merit. You can insert almost anything "definitionally" into those gaps. The Muslims have inserted Allah, and the Qur'an is His perfect word. The Hindus have inserted Gods of every color and flavor. Why don't these efforts persuade you?

Now let me briefly address your primary charge of "intolerance." The sentences that you appear to have found most troubling are these:

Anyone who thinks he knows for sure that Jesus was born of virgin or that the Qur'an is the perfect word of the Creator of the universe is lying. Either he is lying to himself, or to everyone else. In neither case should such false certainties be celebrated.

What if I told you that I am certain that I have an even number of cells in my body? What are the chances that I am in a position to have actually counted my cells (there are on the order of 100 trillion) and counted them correctly? Would it be unfair (or worse, "intolerant") of you to dismiss my assertion as either a product of self-deception or outright dishonesty? Note that this claim has a 50% chance of being true (unlike claims about virgin births and resurrections), and yet it is patently ridiculous. Some claims to knowledge-even about facts that have a high order of probability--immediately brand their claimants as intellectually dishonest. Please forgive me for saying that it is extraordinarily obvious that neither you, nor the pope, nor any other Christian is in a position to know that Jesus was actually born of a virgin or that he will one day return to earth wielding magic powers.

As far as the Qur'an being the perfect word of the Creator of the universe, the Qur'an itself makes it especially easy to dismiss this idea. The book claims to be so perfect, it could not have possibly be written by a human being, (10:37), and readers are challenged to just try to write a surah equal to any in the text (2:23). Anyone who has actually read the Qur'an (and any other work of significant literature) would agree that this would be remarkably easy to do. The Qur'an declares that if it was not the perfect word of Allah, its critics would find some mistakes in it (4:82). Its critics have found mistakes in it. What's a reasonable person to conclude?

It is not my intention to go on at tiresome length, but your last post has opened so many doors to the winds of unreason that I can't resist running from room to room trying to settle things down. You seem to have taken particular offense at my imputing self-deception and/or dishonesty to the faithful. I make no apologies for this. One of the greatest problems with religion is that it is built, to a remarkable degree, upon lies. Mommy claims to know that Granny went straight to heaven after she died. But Mommy doesn't actually know this. The truth is that, while Mommy may be rigorously honest on any other subject, in this instance she doesn't want to distinguish between what she really knows (i.e. what she has good reasons to believe) and 1) what she wants to be true, or 2) what will keep her children from grieving too much in Granny's absence. She is lying--either to herself or to her children--but we've all agreed not to talk about it. Rather than teach our children to grieve, we teach them to lie to themselves.

You can call me "intolerant" all you want, but that won't make unreasonable claims to knowledge sound any more reasonable; it won't differentiate your claims to religious knowledge from the claims of others which you consider illegitimate; and it won't constitute an adequate response to anything I have written or am likely to write.

Best,
Sam

Pay Dirt: Continuing with "Is Religion 'Built Upon Lies'?"

2007-02-07T20:16:00.000-05:00

Continuing with "Is Religion 'Built Upon Lies'?"

Best-selling atheist Sam Harris and pro-religion blogger Andrew Sullivan debate God, faith, and fundamentalism. (Courtesy: Beliefnet.com)

Sam,

You raise so many points that I hope you'll forgive me for focusing for a moment on just a couple. I want to address the main point of your latest post: your disdain for religious "moderates" (including, I assume, me). You say first of all that religious moderates "don't tend to know what it is like to be truly convinced that death is an illusion and that an eternity of happiness awaits the faithful beyond the grave." We allegedly under-estimate the real power of religious fundamentalism.

I plead emphatically "not guilty". In many ways, we religious "moderates", because we are embedded in communities, churches, mosques and synagogues that may be prey to fundamentalist rigidity, know this phenomenon much better than you, an atheist outsider, ever could. We have read the scriptures not searching for gotchas, but for truth. Some of us have battled the fundamentalist version of this truth for much of our lives. Some of us have come out of fundamentalism ourselves. In my book, I describe my own fundamentalist periods in the past. As a gay Catholic, I know what the cold draft of fundamentalism is like; I've felt its dogmatism and dismissal and denial close at hand. So spare me the thought that you know it better than I do.

I'm also aware that it might not be as simple as you claim it is.

I have met fundamentalists whose convictions are extreme but whose spiritual humility nonetheless leads them to great tolerance for dissent and doubt among others and great compassion for the needy. I have met those who are utterly uncompromising on the issue of sexual morality and yet have never shown me anything but interest, empathy and friendship. I have seen fundamentalists do amazing work for the poor and forgotten - driven entirely by their fundamentalist fervor. Try and think of how many souls and bodies the Salvation Army has saved, for example, how many sick people have been treated by doctors and volunteers motivated solely by religious conviction, how many homeless people have been taken in and loved by those seized by the fundamentalist delusion.

I disagree with many of fundamentalism's theological assumptions; when fundamentalism enters politics, I will resist it mightily as an enemy of political and social freedom; when it distorts what I believe to be the central message of Jesus - love and forgiveness - I will criticize and expose it. But when I see it in the eyes and face of a believer, and when she glows with the power of her faith, and when that faith translates into love, I am unafraid and uncritical. I know I cannot know others' hearts; I cannot know their souls. I know further that the mystery of the divine will always elude me; and that beneath what might appear as a bigot may be a soul merely seized by misunderstanding or fear or even compassion. My sense of the fallibility of human reason and the ineffability of God's will leads me not to dismiss these "extremists" as fools or idiots, but to wonder what they have known that I may not know, even as I worry about their potential for evil as well as good (a potential we all have, including you and me).

I also disagree that religious moderates simply have less faith. You write: "Religious moderation is the result of not taking scripture all that seriously."

Blogger, please. In many ways, the source of much of today's religious moderation is taking scripture more seriously than the fundamentalists. Take the Catholic scholar Garry Wills. Read his marvelous recent monographs on Jesus and Paul and you will see a rational believer poring through the mounds of new historical scholarship to get closer and closer to who Jesus really was, and what Paul was truly trying to express. For me, the deconstruction of a crude notion of Biblical inerrantism is not a path to a weaker faith but to a stronger one, unafraid of history, of truth, of the past, or the inevitable confusion that the very human followers of a divine intervention created after his death and resurrection. I find in this unsatisfying scriptural mess very human proof of a remarkable event - the most remarkable event, in my view - in the history of humankind.

This is a real faith, a modern faith, a mature faith that cannot be dismissed as glibly as you'd like. Going back to Pope Leo XIII struck me as a very weak move. Have you heard of the Second Vatican Council? Are you aware of the development of doctrine, the evolution of theories of ecclesiastical authority that aren't reducible to some comic-book depiction of nineteenth century papal diktats? You say others cherry-pick the Scriptures, but you have done some of the more egregious cherry-picking in describing the priorities of Christianity. No, Sam, the Gospels really aren't, to any fair reader, about owning slaves, the age of the planet, or the value of pi. They are stories about and by a man who preached the love of the force behind the entire universe, and the need to reflect that love in everything we do. Yes, there are contradictions, internal clashes, vagueness, politics, cultural anachronisms, and any number of flaws in a divinely inspired human endeavor. But there is also a voice that can clearly be heard through and above these things: a voice as personal to me as it was to those who heard it in human form.
I also find in your last email a form of intolerance that reminds me of some of the worst aspects of fundamentalism. Take these sentences: "Anyone who thinks he knows for sure that Jesus was born of virgin or that the Qur'an is the perfect word of the Creator of the universe is lying. Either he is lying to himself, or to everyone else. In neither case should such false certainties be celebrated."

What you are doing here by the use of the word "lying" is imputing to the believer an insincerity you cannot know for sure. When we speak of things beyond our understanding - and you must concede that such things can logically exist - we are all in the same boat. Your assertion of nothingness at the end of our mortal lives is no more and no less verifiable than my assertion of somethingness. And yet I do not accuse you of lying - to yourself or to others. I respect your existential choice to face death alone, as a purely material event, leading nowhere but physical decomposition. Part of me even respects the stoic heroism of such a stance. Why can you not respect my conviction that you are, in fact, wrong? Why am I a liar in this - either to myself or to others - and you, in contrast, an avatar of honesty? Isn't this exactly the sort of moral preening you decry in others?

God bless,
Andrew

Pay Dirt: Continuing with "Is Religion 'Built Upon Lies'?"

2007-02-03T17:00:00.000-05:00

Continuing with "Is Religion 'Built Upon Lies'?"
Best-selling atheist Sam Harris and pro-religion blogger Andrew Sullivan debate God, faith, and fundamentalism. (Courtesy: Beliefnet.com)

ColdMolasses note: based on the following, it seems clear to me that Harris has a fairly narrow definition of "religious moderates" - for example, his premise about moderates would not be consistent with the writings of some of the best known Christian moderates/liberals such as Borg and Spong.

Hi Andrew--

I think we basically understand one another, and yet we disagree on many points of importance—so we're off to a good start. You are right to say that my view of faith doesn’t really allow for “solid distinctions within faiths,” while yours “depends on such distinctions.” This summarizes our disagreement very well. I recognize, of course, that there are many important differences between religious moderation (your “Christianity as it can be”) and religious fundamentalism. And I agree that these differences have something to do with doubt and the progress of reason on the one hand and a hostility to both doubt and reason on the other. But, as you expect, I don’t view the boundary between moderation and fundamentalism as “solid,” or even principled, and I hold a very different view of many of the topics you raised—Pascal included. (I do think Nietzsche had it right when he wrote, “The most pitiful example: the corruption of Pascal, who believed in the corruption of his reason through original sin when it had in fact been corrupted only by his Christianity.”)

First, on my frustration with religious moderates, to which you alluded: It is true that your colleagues in the religious middle have taught me to appreciate the candor and the one-note coherence of religious fanatics. I have found that whenever someone like me or Richard Dawkins criticizes Christians for believing in the imminent return of Christ, or Muslims for believing in martyrdom, religious moderates claim that we have caricatured Christianity and Islam, taken “extremists” to be representative of these “great” faiths, or otherwise overlooked a shimmering ocean of nuance. We are invariably told that a mature understanding of the historical and literary contexts of scripture renders faith perfectly compatible with reason, and our attack upon religion is, therefore, “simplistic,” “dogmatic,” or even “fundamentalist.” As a frequent target of such profundities, I can attest that they generally come moistened to a sickening pablum by great sighs of condescension. Present company excluded.

But there are several problems with such a defense of moderate religion. First, many moderates assume that religious “extremism” is rare and therefore not all that consequential. Happily, you are not in this camp, but I would venture that you are in a minority among religious moderates. As you and I both know, religious extremism is not rare, and it is hugely consequential. Forty-four percent of Americans believe that Jesus will return to earth to judge the living and the dead sometime in the next fifty years. This idea is extreme in almost every sense—extremely silly, extremely dangerous, extremely worthy of denigration—but it is not extreme in the sense of being rare. The problem, as I see it, is that moderates don’t tend to know what it is like to be truly convinced that death is an illusion and that an eternity of happiness awaits the faithful beyond the grave. They have, as you say, “integrated doubt” into their faith. Another way of putting it is that they have less faith—and for good reason. The result, however, is that your fellow moderates tend to doubt that anybody ever really is motivated to sacrifice his life, or the lives of others, on the basis his heartfelt religious beliefs. Moderate doubt—which I agree is an improvement over fundamentalist certitude in most respects—often blinds its host to the reality and consequences of full-tilt religious lunacy. Such blindness is now particularly unhelpful, given the hideous collision with Islamic certainty that is unfolding all around us.

Second, many religious moderates imagine, as you do, that there is some clear line of separation between extremist and moderate religion. But there isn't. Scripture itself remains a perpetual engine of extremism: because, while He may be many things, the God of the Bible and the Qur'an is not a moderate. Read scripture more closely and you do not find reasons for religious moderation; you find reasons to live like a proper religious maniac—to fear the fires of hell, to despise nonbelievers, to persecute homosexuals, etc. Of course, one can cherry-pick scripture and find reasons to love one's neighbor and turn the other cheek, but the truth is, the pickings are pretty slim, and the more fully one grants credence to these books, the more fully one will be committed to the view that infidels, heretics, and apostates are destined to be ground up in God’s loving machinery of justice.

How does one “integrate doubt” into one’s faith? By acknowledging just how dubious many of the claims of scripture are, and thereafter reading it selectively, bowdlerizing it if need be, and allowing its assertions about reality to be continually trumped by fresh insights—scientific (“You mean the world isn’t 6000 years old? Yikes…”), mathematical (“pi doesn’t actually equal 3? All right, so what?”), and moral (“You mean, I shouldn’t beat my slaves? I can’t even keep slaves? Hmm…”). Religious moderation is the result of not taking scripture all that seriously. So why not take these books less seriously still? Why not admit that they are just books, written by fallible human beings like ourselves? They were not, as your friend the pope would have it, “written wholly and entirely, with all their parts, at the dictation of the Holy Ghost.” Needless to say, I believe you have given the Supreme Pontiff far too much credit as a champion of reason. The man believes that he is in possession of a magic book, entirely free from error. Here is the Vatican’s position (from the Vatican website), in the words of Pope Leo XIII in Providentissimus Deus (his 1893 encyclical on the Study of Holy Scripture):

[I]t is absolutely wrong and forbidden, either to narrow inspiration to certain parts only of Holy Scripture, or to admit that the sacred writer has erred. For the system of those who, in order to rid themselves of these difficulties, do not hesitate to concede that divine inspiration regards the things of faith and morals, and nothing beyond, because (as they wrongly think) in a question of the truth or falsehood of a passage, we should consider not so much what God has said as the reason and purpose which He had in mind in saying it-this system cannot be tolerated. For all the books which the Church receives as sacred and canonical, are written wholly and entirely, with all their parts, at the dictation of the Holy Ghost; and so far is it from being possible that any error can co-exist with inspiration, that inspiration not only is essentially incompatible with error, but excludes and rejects it as absolutely and necessarily as it is impossible that God Himself, the supreme Truth, can utter that which is not true. This is the ancient and unchanging faith of the Church, solemnly defined in the Councils of Florence and of Trent, and finally confirmed and more expressly formulated by the Council of the Vatican. These are the words of the last: "The Books of the Old and New Testament, whole and entire, with all their parts, as enumerated in the decree of the same Council (Trent) and in the ancient Latin Vulgate, are to be received as sacred and canonical. And the Church holds them as sacred and canonical, not because, having been composed by human industry, they were afterwards approved by her authority; nor only because they contain revelation without error; but because, having been written under the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, they have God for their author." "

“This is the ancient and unchanging faith of the Church”—of course it does change a little from time to time. Being bogus to a remarkable degree, it has to. The fact that the current pope freely uses terms like “reason” and “truth” does not at all guarantee that he is on good terms with the former, or would recognize the latter if it bit him. Starting with the (utterly unjustified) premise that one of your books is an infallible guide to reality is not a particularly promising approach to inquiry—be it physical, ethical, or spiritual.

Please consider how differently we treat scientific texts and discoveries, no matter how profound: Isaac Newton spent the period between the summer of 1665 and the spring of 1667 working in isolation and dodging an outbreak of plague that was laying waste to the pious men and women of England. When he emerged from his solitude, he had invented the differential and integral calculus, established the field of optics, and discovered the laws of motion and universal gravitation. Many scientists consider this to be the most awe-inspiring display of human intelligence in the history of human intelligence. Over three hundred years have passed, and one still has to be exceptionally well-educated to fully appreciate the depth and beauty of Newton’s achievement. But no one doubts that Newton’s work was the product of merely human effort, conceived and accomplished by a mortal—and a very unpleasant mortal at that. And yet, literally billions of our neighbors deem the contents of the Bible and the Qur'an to be so profound as to rule out the possibility of terrestrial authorship. Given the breadth and depth of human achievement, this seems an almost miraculous misappropriation of awe. It took two centuries of continuous ingenuity to substantially improve upon Newton’s work. How difficult would it be to improve the Bible? It would be trivially easy, in fact. You and I could upgrade this “inerrant” text—scientifically, historically, ethically, and yes, spiritually—in this email exchange.

Consider the possibility of improving the Ten Commandments. This would appear to be setting the bar rather high, as these are the only passages in the Bible that the Creator of the universe felt the need to physically write himself. But take a look good look at commandment #2. No graven images? Doesn’t this seem like something less than the-second-most-important-point-upon-which-to- admonish-all-future-generations-of-human-beings? Remember those Muslims who recently rioted by the hundreds of thousands over cartoons? Many people wondered just what got them so riled up. Well, here it is. Was all that pious mayhem nothing more than egregious, medieval stupidity? Yes, come to think of it, it was nothing more than egregious, medieval stupidity. Almost any precept we’d put in place of this prohibition against graven images would augment the wisdom of the Bible (Don’t pretend to know things you don’t know…? Don’t mistreat children…? Avoid trans fats…?). Could we live with all the resulting problems due to proliferating graven images? We’d manage—somehow.

Of course, people of faith are right to insist that there is more to life than being reasonable—which is to say there is much more to life than merely understanding the world and getting one’s beliefs about it to cohere. But we can have ethical and spiritual lives without lying to ourselves and to others and without pretending to be certain about things we are clearly not certain about. Anyone who thinks he knows for sure that Jesus was born of virgin or that the Qur'an is the perfect word of the Creator of the universe is lying. Either he is lying to himself, or to everyone else. In neither case should such false certainties be celebrated.

Religious moderates—by refusing to question the legitimacy of raising children to believe that they are Christians, Muslims, and Jews—tacitly support the religious divisions in our world. They also perpetuate the myth that a person must believe things on insufficient evidence in order to have an ethical and spiritual life. While religious moderates don’t fly planes into buildings, or organize their lives around apocalyptic prophecy, they refuse to deeply question the preposterous ideas of those who do. Moderates neither submit to the real demands of scripture nor draw fully honest inferences from the growing testimony of science. In attempting to find a middle ground between religious dogmatism and intellectual honesty, it seems to me that religious moderates betray faith and reason equally.

I've gone on at such length, and I still haven’t addressed your claim that “God is truth” or your apparent attempt to ram through some hybrid of the ontological and cosmological arguments (“since God is definitionally the Creator of such a universe”). But I’m not sure what you mean by “God,” or what exactly you believe about reality that requires the framework of Christianity.

Feel free to spell it out in your next email, if you care to.

Best,
Sam

Pay Dirt: "Is Religion 'Built Upon Lies'?"

2007-02-03T12:23:00.000-05:00

The following is the first of several blog entries I will post from a "no-holds-barred blog debate between Sam Harris and Andrew Sullivan (courtesy of Beliefnet.com). I hope you enjoy:

Is Religion 'Built Upon Lies'?
Best-selling atheist Sam Harris and pro-religion blogger Andrew Sullivan debate God, faith, and fundamentalism.

Hi Andrew--

First, I'd like to say that it is a pleasure to communicate with you in this forum. We've engaged one another indirectly on the internet, and on the radio, but I think this email exchange will give us our first opportunity for a proper discussion. Before I drive toward areas where I think you and I will disagree, I'd first like to acknowledge what appears to be the common ground between us.

I think you and I agree that there is a problem with religious fundamentalism. We might not agree about how to solve this problem, or about how fundamentalism relates to religion as a whole, but we both think that far too many people currently imagine that one of their books contains the perfect word of the Creator of the universe. You and I also agree that the world's major religions differ in ways that are nontrivial—and, therefore, that not all fundamentalists have the same fundamentals in hand. Not all religions teach precisely the same thing, and when they do teach the same thing, they don't necessarily teach it equally well.

We are both especially concerned about Islam at this moment--because so many Muslims appear to be "fundamentalists" and because some of the fundamentals of Islam pose special liabilities in a world overflowing with destructive technology. I think, for instance, that we would both rank the Islamic doctrines of martyrdom and jihad pretty high on our list of humanity's worst ideas.

Where I think we disagree is on the nature of faith itself. I think that faith is, in principle, in conflict with reason (and, therefore, that religion is necessarily in conflict with science), while you do not. Perhaps I should acknowledge at the outset that people use the term "faith" in a variety of ways. My use of the word is meant to capture belief in specific religious propositions without sufficient evidence—prayer can heal the sick, there is a supreme Being listening to our thoughts, we will be reunited with our loved ones after death, etc. I am not criticizing faith as a positive attitude in the face of uncertainty, of the sort indicated by phrases like, "have faith in yourself." There’s nothing wrong with that type of "faith."

Given my view of faith, I think that religious "moderation" is basically an elaborate exercise in self-deception, while you seem to think it is a legitimate and intellectually defensible alternative to fundamentalism.

Assuming I've got that about right, I propose that in my next post, I launch into a brief diatribe about religious moderation, and then you can respond any way you see fit. If I have misconstrued any of your views above, please sort things out for me.

All the best,
Sam

**************

Dear Sam,

First off, same back at you. I found your book, "The End of Faith" to be an intellectual tonic, even when I strongly disagreed with it. It said things that needed to be said - not least because many people were already thinking them - and it said them without cant or bullshit. I was and am grateful for that. And I wrote the religious passages of my own book, "The Conservative Soul," with some of your arguments in mind.

We agree that Islamic fundamentalism is by far the gravest threat in this respect (because of its comfort with violence); and that the core feature of what occurred on 9/11 was not cultural, political, or economic - but religious. We agree that a large part of the murder and mayhem in today's Iraq is also rooted in religious difference, specifically the ancient rift between Sunni and Shia. We also agree, I think, that the degeneration of American Christianity into the crudest forms of Biblical inerrantism, emotional hysteria and cultural paranoia is a lamentable development. But we differ, I think, on why we find these developments discouraging.

The reason I find fundamentalism so troubling - whether it is Christian, Jewish or Muslim - is not just its willingness to use violence (in the Islamist manifestation). It is its inability to integrate doubt into faith, its resistance to human reason, its tendency to pride and exclusion, and its inability to accept mystery as the core reality of any religious life. You find it troubling, I think, purely because it upholds truths that cannot be proved empirically or even, in some respects, logically. In that sense, of course, I think you have no reason to dislike or oppose it any more than you would oppose my kind of faith. Your argument allows for no solid distinctions within faiths; my argument depends on such distinctions.

I'm struck, in other words, by the difference between Christianity as it can be and Christianity as it is expressed by fundamentalists. You are struck by the similarity between my doubt-filled, sacramental, faith-in-forgiveness and fundamentalism. We Christians are all as nutty as one another, I think you'd say. And my prettifying up religion as something not-so-crazy or unreasonable therefore may be more irritating to you than even the profundities of Rick Warren or Monsignor Escriva. At least, that's where I predict you will aim your next rhetorical fire. I'm braced.

Here's the nub, I think. You write:

I think that faith is, in principle, in conflict with reason (and, therefore, that religion is necessarily in conflict with science), while you do not.

Agreed. As the Pope said last year, I believe that God is truth and truth is, by definition, reasonable. Science cannot disprove true faith; because true faith rests on the truth; and science cannot be in ultimate conflict with the truth. So I am perfectly happy to believe in evolution, for example, as the most powerful theory yet devised explaining human history and pre-history. I have no fear of what science will tell us about the universe - since God is definitionally the Creator of such a universe; and the meaning of the universe cannot be in conflict with its Creator. I do not, in other words, see reason as somehow in conflict with faith - since both are reconciled by a Truth that may yet be beyond our understanding.

But just because that Truth may be beyond our human understanding does not mean it is therefore in a cosmic sense unreasonable. As John's Gospel proclaims, in the beginning was the Word - logos - and it is reasonable. At some point faith has to abandon reason for mystery - but that does not mean - and need never mean - abandoning reason altogether. They key is with Pascal: "l'usage et soumission de la raison." Or do you believe that Pascal, one of the great mathematicians of his time, was deluded into the faith he so passionately and simultaneously held?

Cheers,

Andrew

Pay Dirt: African Church Leader Warns of 'Disease' of Pentecostalism

2007-01-25T19:56:00.000-05:00

African Church Leader Warns of 'Disease' of Pentecostalism
By Daniel Burke
Religion News Service

The president of the All Africa Council of Churches, a fellowship of mainline Protestant, Orthodox and indigenous Christians, said Pentecostalism is a "disease" spreading across Africa, according to an AACC news release.

Speaking at the Ecumenical Platform of the World Social Forum in Nairobi, Kenya, the Rev. Nyansako-ni-Nku seemed to direct his remarks at a type of Pentecostal prosperity preacher who "gets richer and the congregation gets poorer."

The AACC news release also said that Nyansako, who is moderator of the Presbyterian Church in Cameroon, exhorted "mainline churches (to) wake up to the challenge and provide direction; otherwise many people will follow these Pentecostal churches."

Pentecostalism has become an increasingly prominent force in African life, according to a recent study by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. The movement's growth has been dramatic since decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s, according to Pew, rising from 5 percent of the population in 1970 to 12 percent in 2005.

Pentecostals play a large role in politics, particularly in Kenya and Nigeria, and control numerous radio and television stations, according to Pew.

Nyansako said mainline pastors at the pulpit are "becoming bashful and instead of naming the demon which harasses people by name, they are willing to socialize with the mighty and the powerful to the detriment of the people who have placed their trust in them."

The AACC is a fellowship of 169 churches and Christian councils in 39 African nations.

Pay Dirt: Who Believes in God--and Why?

2007-01-13T21:26:00.000-05:00

Who Believes in God--and Why?
Many say their own faith is based in reason, but others' beliefs are grounded in emotion.
By Michael Shermer

Why do you believe in God? I have been asking people this question for most of my adult life. In 1998, Frank Sulloway and I presented the query in a more official format—along with the question “Why do you think other people believe in God?”—in a survey given to ten thousand Americans. Just a few of the answers we received:

A 22-year-old male law student with moderate religious convictions (a self-rated five on a nine-point scale), who was raised by very religious parents and who today calls himself a deist, writes, “I believe in a creator because there seems to be no other possible explanation for the existence of the universe,” yet other “people believe in God to give their lives purpose and meaning.”
A 43-year-old male computer scientist and Catholic with very strong religious convictions (a nine on the nine-point scale) “had a personal conversion experience, where I had direct contact with God. This conversion experience, and ongoing contacts in prayer, form the only basis for my faith.” Other people believe in God, however “because of (a) their upbringing, (b) the comfort of the church, and (c) a hope for this contact.”
A 36-year-old male journalist and evangelical Christian with a self-rated eight in religious conviction writes: “I believe in God because to me there is ample evidence for the existence of an intelligent designer of the universe.” Yet, “others accept God out of a purely emotional need for comfort throughout their life and use little of their intellectual capacity to examine the faith to which they adhere.”
A 40-year-old female Catholic nurse with very strong religious convictions (a nine on the nine-point scale) says that “I believe in God because of the example of my spiritual teacher who believes in God and has unconditional love for people and gives so completely of himself for the good of others. And since I have followed this path, I now treat others so much better.” On the other hand, she writes that “I think people initially believe in God because of their parents and unless they start on their own path— where they put a lot of effort into their spiritual part of their life—they continue to believe out of fear.”

When Sulloway and I noticed the difference between why people believe in God and why they think other people believe in God, we decided to undertake an extensive analysis of all the written answers people provided in our survey. In addition, we inquired about family demographics, religious background, personality characteristics, and other factors that contribute to religious belief and skepticism. We discovered that the seven strongest predictors of belief in God are:
1. being raised in a religious manner
2. parents’ religiosity
3. lower levels of education
4. being female
5. a large family
6. lack of conflict with parents
7. being younger

In sum, being female and raised by religious parents in a large family appears to make one more religious, whereas being male, educated, in conflict with one’s parents, and older appears to make one less religious. As people become older and more educated, they encounter other belief systems that lead them to see the connection between various personal and social influences and religious beliefs. This helps explain the differences we observed in reasons people give for their own beliefs versus the reasons they attribute to other people’s beliefs.

From the responses we received in a preliminary survey, we created a taxonomy of eleven categories of reasons people give for their own and others’ beliefs. The five most common answers given to the question Why do you believe in God?:
1. The good design / natural beauty / perfection / complexity of the world or universe (28.6%)
2. The experience of God in everyday life (20.6%)
3. Belief in God is comforting, relieving, consoling, and gives meaning and purpose to life (10.3%) 4. The Bible says so (9.8%)
5. Just because / faith / the need to believe in something (8.2%)

And the six most common answers given to the question Why do you think other people believe in God?:
1. Belief in God is comforting, relieving, consoling, and gives meaning and purpose to life (26.3%) 2. Religious people have been raised to believe in God (22.4%)
3. The experience of God in everyday life (16.2%)
4. Just because / faith / the need to believe in something (13.0%)
5. Fear death and the unknown (9.1%)
6. The good design / natural beauty / perfection / complexity of the world or universe (6.0%)

Notice that the intellectually based reasons offered for belief in God—”the good design of the universe” and “the experience of God in everyday life”—which occupied first and second place when people were describing their own beliefs dropped to sixth and third place, respectively, when they were describing the beliefs of others. Indeed, when reflecting on others’ beliefs, the two most common reasons cited were emotion-based (and fear-averse!): personal comfort (“comforting, relieving, consoling”) and social comfort (“raised to believe”).

Sulloway and I believe that these results are evidence of an intellectual attribution bias, in which people consider their own beliefs as being rationally motivated, whereas they see the beliefs of others as being emotionally driven. By analogy, one’s commitment to a political belief is generally attributed to a rational decision (“I am for gun control because statistics show that crime decreases when gun ownership decreases”), whereas another person’s opinion on the same subject is attributed to need or emotional reasons (“he is for gun control because he is a bleeding-heart liberal”). This intellectual attribution bias appears to be equal opportunity on the subject of God. The apparent good design of the universe, and the perceived action of a higher intelligence in daily activities, are powerful intellectual justifications for belief. But we readily attribute other people’s belief in God to their emotional needs and how they were raised.

Pay Dirt: Atheists Challenge the Religious Right

2007-01-05T09:16:00.000-05:00

Atheists Challenge the Religious Right
Growing religious influence in the US government has led some nontheists to take positions some describe as 'secular fundamentalism.'
By Jane Lampman Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

For some time, the religious right has decried "secular humanism," a philosophy that rejects the supernatural or spiritual as a basis for moral decisionmaking. But now, nonbelievers are vigorously fighting back.

Only a small percentage of Americans admit to being nontheists (between 2 and 9 percent, depending on the poll), but that equates to many millions. And religionists' role in debates over stem-cell research and evolution vs. intelligent design - as well as radical religion in world conflicts - have galvanized some atheists to mount a counteroffensive.

In bestselling books, on websites, and with a national lobbying effort, atheists and other nontheists are challenging the growing religious influence in government and public life. Some are attacking the foundations of religion itself.

Two particularly provocative books, in fact, hit the top of Publishers Weekly's religion bestseller list in December. No. 1, "The God Delusion," by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, and No. 2, "Letter to a Christian Nation," by writer Sam Harris, are no-holds-barred, antireligion polemics that call for the eradication of all manifestations of faith.

"I am attacking God, all gods, anything and everything supernatural, wherever and whenever they have been or will be invented," declares Dr. Dawkins, the famed Oxford professor who wrote "The Selfish Gene."

These offerings are so intolerant of religion of any kind - liberal, moderate, or fundamentalist - that some scientists and secularists have critiqued their peers for oversimplification and for a secular fundamentalism.

"They undermine their own case by writing in a language that suffers from many things they say are true of believers - intolerance, disrespect, extremism," says Alan Wolfe, a professor of religion at Boston College, who is a secularist and author of several books on American religious perspectives.

Yet the authors are anything but modest about their efforts to supplant faith with pure scientific rationality. While critics point out that religion is a genuine reflection of people's experience and will always exist, Mr. Harris suggests it could be equated with slavery, which once was widely acceptable, but eventually was looked upon with horror. He sees it as responsible for many of life's tragedies.

Harris first hit the bestseller bull's-eye in 2004 with "The End of Faith," and he says the responses to that book, particularly those from Christians, spurred his latest epistle.
A mere 96 pages, "Letter" may be dismissed by many for its condescending tone or overheated rhetoric. Yet its bold arguments offer a useful window into nontheist perspectives and could also startle some complacent religionists into a rethinking and refining of perceptions.

Many nontheists don't share this militant perspective, but have decided that keeping silent in religious America no longer makes sense. They are astonished that a majority of Americans question evolution and support teaching intelligent design in the science classroom. They are distressed over polls that show that at least half of Americans are unwilling to vote for an atheist despite the Constitution's requirement that there be no religious test for public office. And they contend that in recent years, Congress has passed bills and the president has issued executive orders that have privileged religion in inappropriate and unconstitutional ways.

As a result, seven organizations of nontheists - including atheists, freethinkers, humanists, and agnostics - began the Secular Coalition for America (SCA), a lobby seeking to increase the visibility and respectability of nontheistic viewpoints in the United States.

"In some parts of the country, children are ostracized if someone finds out their families are atheists," says Lori Lipman Brown, SCA director. "We need to educate the public that people who don't have a god belief can be good neighbors and friends and moral and ethical people."

They also intend to stand up vigorously for their rights. "Some people want to go back to a time when religion was imposed, such as official prayer in public schools," she adds. "For someone to say they can't practice their religion appropriately if all schoolchildren are not required to recite a public prayer is very disturbing."

The SCA intends to lobby the new Congress to override a presidential veto on stem-cell research and to repeal land-use legislation and other laws seen as "privileging one religion over other religions or over those who don't follow religion."

Still, the group makes clear on its website that while it promotes reason and science as the bases for policymaking, it also supports religious tolerance.

"I have absolutely no problem with anyone believing differently than I believe, as long as they don't impose their religion on me or my government," says Ms. Brown, a former Nevada state senator.

To spotlight the prejudice against atheists holding public office - and to encourage atheists to "come out of the closet," SCA is sponsoring a contest to identify the highest US official who acknowledges being a nonbeliever. They expect to announce contest results in February.

Internet-based groups are also seeking to spread the atheist message, particularly among young adults. The Rational Response Squad (RRS) has chosen a provocative mode using the popular website YouTube. Their "blasphemy challenge" calls on young nonbelievers to create videos in which they renounce belief in the "sky God of Christianity" and upload it on the site; in return they'll receive a free documentary DVD, "The God Who Wasn't There," which includes interviews with Dawkins, Harris, and others. RRS is publicizing its campaign on 25 popular teen websites.

"We wanted to strike up more of a conversation about religion, and this was a way for people to show their nonbelief and encourage others to come out," says Brian Sapient, RRS cofounder.
Mr. Sapient says he was raised Catholic and then a born-again Christian, but later learned that many things he was taught were fictional. RRS now has some 20,000 people on message boards, with about 5,000 actively engaged in debunking religious claims, passing out fliers, and placing DVDs in churches.

As for the blasphemy challenge, "there's about 490 response videos so far, and 85,000 views on our trailer video," he says. Sapient acknowledges this approach may not persuade religious youths. "There are people with a more palatable approach to talking about religion," he says, "but I wonder if those people would be as effective if it weren't for us or Sam Harris or Richard Dawkins shaking up the group a bit."

He also insists that you don't really respect people unless you speak up when you think their beliefs are wrong. It's OK with him, he adds, if religious people try to convince him they are right.

Harris and Dawkins make it clear that they think faith has gotten off too easy for too long. Their books have spurred widespread commentary, much of it a strong critique of their arguments and lack of religious knowledge. But in a culture immersed in combativeness in politics and the media, the intemperate books are selling well.

Yet one critic, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, calls for a truce: "We've suffered enough from religious intolerance that the last thing the world needs is irreligious intolerance."

Pay Dirt: Poll: One in Four Says Jesus May Return in 2007

2007-01-02T19:53:00.000-05:00

Poll: One in Four Says Jesus May Return in 2007
By Adelle M. BanksReligion News Service

Twenty-five percent of Americans believe it is at least somewhat likely that Jesus Christ will return to Earth in 2007, a new poll from the Associated Press and AOL News shows.

The poll, conducted by the international polling firm Ipsos, looked at the public's predictions about what will occur in 2007.

Pollsters found that 11 percent of those surveyed said it is "very likely" that Jesus will return to Earth this year. An additional 14 percent said it was "somewhat likely."

Twenty-five percent of those polled said it was "not too likely,"
compared to 42 percent who said it was "not at all likely." Eight percent said they did not know or were not sure.

While a quarter of Americans polled said that it is at least somewhat likely that Jesus will return to Earth this year, views about the topic varied depending on religious persuasion, the AP reported.

For example, 46 percent of white evangelical Christians believe it's at least somewhat likely that Jesus will return this year, while 17 percent of Catholics and 10 percent of those with no religion feel the same way.

The poll, conducted Dec. 12-14, was based on telephone interviews with 1,000 adults from all states except Hawaii and Alaska.

Pay Dirt: Top Religion Headlines of 2006

2006-12-29T16:05:00.000-05:00

Top Religion Headlines of 2006 (Source: BeliefNet.com)

From Baghdad to the ballot box, 2006 was a year of upheaval. A prominent pastor and a powerful conservative Christian senator both exited public life (at least for now). The quiet, unassuming Amish world was thrust into the national spotlight. A movie and a cartoon each sparked controversy, and in the case of the latter, violence. Meanwhile, "old" issues--stem cell research, gay marriage--continued to divide. Read through the top faith-related news stories of 2006, as voted on by the Religion Newswriters Association:

1. Protests Erupt Over Muhammad Cartoon - Muslims in many countries reacted sharply--and often violently--to the publication in a Danish newspaper of a series of political cartoons depicting Muhammad. Muslims consider any portrayal of the prophet inappropriate, but were particularly inflamed by a cartoon of Muhammad with a bomb as his turban. As the violence spread to such places as Somalia, Thailand, and the Palestinian territories, many publications in Europe and elsewhere reprinted the cartoon in solidarity with the Danish newspaper, further fueling Muslims' anger.

2. Pope Benedict Angers Muslims - Pope Benedict XVI angered Muslims by quoting in a speech from a 14th-century Christian emporer who said that Muhammad was "evil and inhuman." The pope apologized and largely diffused the situation with a trip to Turkey, during which he prayed at a mosque and voiced support for Turkey's bid to become the first majority-Muslim member of the European Union.

3. The Episcopal Church Is Threatened by Schism - The Episcopal Church riled conservatives by electing a presiding bishop who supported the consecration of a gay bishop. Seven Episcopal dioceses refused to recognize the leadership of Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, the first woman elected to the top post. Some congregations have left the U.S. church and put themselves under the authority of African or South American bishops.

4. Ted Haggard Admits to 'Sexual Immorality' - The charismatic and powerful evangelical leader Ted Haggard was dismissed as pastor of the influential New Life Church in Colorado Springs and resigned as president of the National Association of Evangelicals after allegations surfaced of gay sex and methamphetamine use. Haggard has admitted that at least some of the accusations are true, calling himself "a deceiver and a liar," and saying in a letter to his congregation, "There is a part of my life that is so repulsive and dark that I've been warring against it all of my adult life."

5. Electoral Setbacks for Christian Conservatives - Candidates backed by Christian conservatives, including Rick Santorum (at right)--the powerful Pennsylvania senator who was one of the most steadfast supporters of the conservative agenda--suffered a series of defeats in the fall elections. An increasing number of Christian conservatives are calling for evangelicals to broaden their focus to include a wider array of issues and voices, or to take a step back from intense political involvement altogether.

6. Religious Violence Grows in the Mideast - As religious voices increasingly called for peace in Iraq, conflicts between Iraq's Sunni and Shiite Muslims intensified, and observers fear other nations could be drawn into the conflict. In Lebanon, the Israeli incursion, aimed at curbing attacks by Hezbollah, touched off major strife that is threatening the stability of Lebanon's government, while Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad repeatedly called for Israel's destruction and continued defying the West by refusing to abandon his nuclear ambitions.

7. The Amish Forgive a Schoolhouse Killer - Pennsylvania's Amish community was thrust into the national spotlight when a gunman entered a one-room schoolhouse in Nickel Mines, Pa., and shot 10 Amish girls, killing five, before shooting himself. Despite their shock and grief, the community reacted by publicly forgiving the gunman, bringing food to his family, and attending his funeral. Children who survived the massacre told of one of the murdered girls, Marian Fisher, who reportedly offered to be the first killed, to spare the others.

8 (tie). 'The Da Vinci Code' Movie Opens - Dan Brown's novel has sparked controversy since its publication, with its claims that Mary Magdalene and Jesus were married and had children--and its allegations that the Vatican has covered up these "facts," often violently, throughout the centuries. In the months leading up to the May release of "The Da Vinci Code" movie, Christians were divided over whether to boycott the film or engage with it as an opportunity for evangelism. Most seemed to take the latter route.

8 (tie). Gay Marriage Continues to Divide - In New Jersey, the state Supreme Court ruled that same-sex couples are entitled to the same benefits as married couples, leaving the legislature to decide what to call the arrangement. In response, the legislature passed and the governor signed a bill legalizing "civil unions" in the state. In the November elections, voters made Arizona the first state to defeat a proposed same-sex marriage ban. At the same time, referendums in seven other states passed, officially outlawing gay marriage there.

10. Pres. Bush Vetoes Stem-Cell Research Expansion - In the first veto of his presidency, Bush said no to a bill that would have expanded stem-cell research. The decision was no surprise: Bush has been consistently opposed to scientific research that involves destroying viable human embryos. The issue also was prominent in the Missouri Senate race, during which Michael J. Fox campaigned in support of a referendum to expand stem cell rearch and for Democrat Claire McCaskill, who backed the proposed bill. Other celebrities joined in on either side of the issue, making commercials that aired leading up to the election, in which McCaskill won and the referendum passed.

Pay Dirt: The Mystery of Christmas

2006-12-22T09:57:00.000-05:00

I watched a fascinating 48 Hours Mystery episode on "The Mystery of Christmas". Worth a read of the website summary: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/12/19/48hours/main1135330.shtml

In addition, this morning a good friend of mine pointed out the following article to me which is also a good read:

A Religious Santa Claus Tale: The birth narrative of Jesus shouldn't be taken literally by John Shelby Spong

The birth narrative of Jesus shouldn't be taken literally. Each year, the symbols are everywhere: on radio and television, in newspapers and magazine ads, in store windows, and eventually in our own homes. Sometimes they depict a jolly old elf dressed in red, sometimes accompanied by reindeer and a sleigh. Sometimes they show a manger, a baby, angels singing to shepherds, or wise men following a star. Some of the symbols rotate around the North Pole, the others around a little town named Bethlehem.

Most people do not literalize the story of Santa Claus. He is a symbol--a powerful symbol, but still just a symbol. I suggest that the birth narratives of Jesus, too, cannot be taken literally. They, too, are symbols, a religious version of Santa Claus. Some religious people will be offended by that suggestion. I invite them to reconsider.

The biblical story of Christmas is probably the best known text in the New Testament. These narratives have been part of our conscious life for as long as most of us can remember. We have seen pageants annually; perhaps we have even starred in one. We think we know this biblical content quite well. But do we? How long has it been since we have actually read the biblical text that tells the story of that first Christmas? And how much of our reading is colored by long-standing traditions, a pious imagination, or even those pageants in which we have participated?

Consider:

The average person would be quite sure that the mode of transportation employed by the Wise Men was the camel. Yet there are no camels in this biblical story at all, not a single one. They have been placed into Matthew's story by our imaginations, as a careful reading of the first two chapters of Matthew, the only place the story of the Wise Men is told, will reveal.

Second, if one is asked where in Bethlehem the birth of Jesus occurred, the familiar and traditional answer would be "in a stable surrounded by a variety of animals." We have seen that picture so often, we are quite sure of it. But we would be wrong again. There are no animals mentioned in the story of Jesus' birth, primarily because there is no stable present in which to house them. The stable is simply not part of the biblical birth story of Jesus. Check it out. Read the first two chapters of Luke. That is the only place in the Bible where details of his Bethlehem birth are given. There is only one word--crib, or manger--around which the stable has been erected in our imaginations.

Third, these two passages in Matthew and Luke are the only accounts of Jesus' birth found in the entire Bible. There is no mention of a miraculous birth for Jesus in the writings of Paul, in the gospel of Mark, or in the gospel of John, as a quick scan of these texts will reveal.

Paul, who is the first author of a book in the New Testament (he wrote between 50 and 64 C.E.), appears to have no knowledge of anything being unusual about Jesus' birth. All Paul says is that Jesus was "born of a woman, born under the law" (Galatians 4:4) and "according to the flesh" he was "descended from the House of David" (Romans 1:3). Paul never mentions the names of Mary or Joseph. The only reference he makes to a member of the family of Jesus was to James, whom he called "the Lord's brother," and with whom he did not get along very well (Galatians 1).

Mark, who wrote his gospel in the early years of the eighth decade of the Christian era (70-75 C.E.), also tells us no story of Jesus' birth. He does, however, have two references to Jesus' family (Mark 3:31-35, 6:1-6), neither of which is flattering. Mark writes that Jesus' family consists of his mother, four brothers (Simon, Judas, Joses and James), and more than one sister, all left unnamed because of the status of women in that time.

This family, led by Jesus' mother, believed Jesus was out of his mind and wanted to take him away. That is hardly the response one would expect from a woman to whom an angel had appeared to tell her that she would be the virgin mother of the Son of God.

Joseph makes no appearance in Mark's gospel, and Mary as the name of Jesus' mother appears only once--and that on the lips of a critic, who asks of Jesus, "Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary?" (Mark 6:3). Please note that in the earliest gospel, Jesus is a carpenter, Joseph is unmentioned, and Jesus is called the son of Mary. To call a Jewish man the son of a woman had a mildly pejorative quality about it. It was a hint that perhaps his paternity was questionable. But that is all we have in written form from any early Christian source until at least 50 years have passed since the end of Jesus' earthly life.

Mark clearly did not know about the virgin birth tradition. It had not yet developed.

Skipping over to John, written some time between 95 and 100 C.E., we discover that this writer also does not mention the Virgin Birth. It would be difficult to argue that by this late date, the author had not heard of that tradition. Instead, he opens his story with an even more powerful God claim: Jesus was the pre-existent word of God present at the creation. This word of God was simply enfleshed, said the fourth gospel. But that was not achieved by way of a miraculous birth. Indeed, on two occasions this evangelist refers to Jesus as "the son of Joseph" (John 1:45, 6:42).

So in the five major sources of New Testament materials--Paul, Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John--only two, Luke and Matthew, mention the Virgin Birth. It is neither the majority nor the universal understanding of Jesus' origins even in the Bible.

When we turn to the actual text in Matthew and Luke, the questions and problems indicating that these stories are not literal history multiply. Matthew, who wrote between 80 and 85 C.E., wrote the first stories of Jesus' birth. He was also the gospel writer most appreciative of and anchored in his Jewish background. Matthew introduced this birth story with a genealogy that grounds Jesus in a thoroughly Jewish past, describing his lineage from Abraham, through David and the kings of Judah, to the exile and finally to Joseph, whom he identified as "the husband of Mary of whom was born Jesus who is called Christ" (Matthew 1:16). Provocatively enough, and quite rare in the ancient world, Matthew adds four women to this lengthy genealogy-- all of whom are sexually tainted in the stories about them in the Hebrew Scriptures.

First there is Tamar, the daughter-in-law of Judah who became pregnant by her father-in-law in an incestuous relationship (Matthew 2:1, Genesis 38). Yet Matthew says the line of Jesus came through this woman.

Next, there is Rahab, who was called "the harlot," who assisted with Joshua's invasion of the promised land (Matthew. 1:5, Joshua 2). Matthew also says the line of Jesus came through this woman.

Then there is Ruth, the great-grandmother of King David who in her time was said to have seduced her future husband, Boaz, with the aid of much wine. When Boaz woke up to discover Ruth in his bed, he covered her with his blanket and proceeded to do the honorable thing by marrying her (Matthew 1:5, Ruth 3). The hereditary background of Jesus includes Ruth, according to Matthew.

Finally, there was "Uriah's Wife," Bathsheba, who was first King David's adulterous lover and eventually, after David arranged for the death of her husband, his wife (one among many). She was also the mother of the heirs of David's throne, including King Solomon. Bathsheba, an adulterer, is thus a major player in the line of Judah's kings and Jesus' ancestry (Matthew 1:6, II Samuel 11).

One wonders what he means to imply about Mary, who is the fifth woman mentioned in his genealogy.

Over and over again, Matthew grounds his story of Jesus' birth in the presumed expectation of the Hebrew Scriptures. When he comes to the story of Jesus' miraculous birth, his proof text appears to be Isaiah 7:14. It is a familiar text that reads, "Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son and shall call his name Immanuel." Clearly, Matthew developed his story under the influence of that text.

This text, however, has two problems. First, Matthew did not apparently read Hebrew, so he quoted this text from a Greek translation. If he had gone to the Hebrew original, he would have discovered that the word "virgin" is not in the book of Isaiah. Isaiah used the Hebrew word almah, which simply means "young woman." He did not use the word betulah, which means virgin. Isaiah's text announces that the woman is with child, which hardly qualifies her to be a virgin. When Isaiah was translated into Greek, the translators rendered almah with the Greek word parthenos. Only in that Greek word does the hint of virginity enter the text.

The second problem with this text is that when Isaiah wrote it, the city of Jerusalem was under siege from the combined armies of the Northern Kingdom and Syria. Isaiah suggested that the birth of this child would be a sign to the king of Judah that his nation would not fall to these enemies whom Isaiah described as "the tails of two smoking firebrands." A reference to a child born 800 years later would hardly have been relevant to that crisis.

Clearly, the prophet was not referring to either Jesus' birth or to some future messiah's birth.

There are still other problems connected with the stories of Jesus' birth, but these are sufficient to raise significant questions about their historicity--an issue I believe Christians must face. When one adds to that the fact that virgin birth stories were common in the Mediterranean world as part of the mythology of the first century, other concerns surface. A second-century Christian critic named Celsus articulated this concern when he wrote: "Do you think all the other stories are legends, but that your story of Jesus alone is noble and convincing?"

If the biblical stories we identify with Christmas are not history, then what are they? And what do they mean? Why did these stories become so powerful in shaping the Christian world? What are the story writers trying to communicate about God, about Jesus, about human life itself? Those will be the questions I intend to address in this column as the Christmas season unfolds.

Bible Exploration

2006-12-16T16:32:00.000-05:00

Well, it has been a couple of weeks since I finished my fundamentals framework. Since that time, I've been thinking about what I should tackle next. I've wavered between a few options, but I think I'm going to try to address the Bible in more depth.

I touched on the Bible in my Bible Beliefs entry, and I noted the pivotal importance that your perspective on the Bible (i.e. as either a divine product [God's very words] or as a human product reflecting the experiences and responses of two communities to God and Jesus) has on your approach to Christianity and theology. I also noted the impact that a couple of books had on my understanding of the Bible: Misquoting Jesus (by Bart Ehrman) and Reading the Bible Again for the First Time (by Marcus Borg). I am part way through two other books which continue to shed light on the Bible for me: Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism (by John Shelby Spong) and The Last Week (by Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan). Before I finish this series of blog entries, I anticipate delving into History of the End of the World (by Jonathan Kirsch).

So I'm going to try to provide a synopsis of what I've learned in these books. Here is my outline for this endeavour:

I must admit that this is a daunting exercise for me. I know for certain that it will take me a long time to complete this effort, and, as I start, I'm not even sure I will be able to finish. But as I felt when I started my fundamentals framework, I feel like this is the right topic to dive into next so that I can adequately explain and support my current Christian thinking.

Before I start, let me clarify that I anticipate taking very little credit for the thinking that will lie beneath the blog entries in this series - I am not a Biblical scholar by trade. I fully anticipate leaning heavily on the books I mentioned earlier, and I will attempt to give credit where I can.

I hope this series will be useful to all who encounter it. I will repeat the same three goals (1) I noted when I began my fundamentals framework, since they are equally relevant for this Bible Exploration series:

That the blog entries will be "interesting and refreshing" to Christians and non-Christians and will help both to "grapple with points of view they might otherwise have dismissed without serious thought";
That the blog entries' content might help "shift logjammed debates into more fruitful possibilities"; and,
Somewhat selfishly, that the process of writing the blog entries will help me to "grow in [my] understanding of the subject matter, and enable others to do so as well".

Here we go again...

Notes:
(1) Marcus J. Borg and N. T. Wright, The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions (San Francisco, HarperSanFrancisco, 1999).

Pay Dirt: Religion in the Funnies

2006-12-09T20:38:00.000-05:00

Pay Dirt: Religion in the Funnies

2006-12-09T20:35:00.000-05:00

Transformation: What It's All About

2006-11-25T22:01:00.002-05:00

With this blog entry, I have reached the conclusion of my Fundamentals Framework. So in this entry, I'd like to share a few summary thoughts on what I think the core of "being a Christian" is all about and why I have chosen Christianity as my pathway to God.

(1) Christianity for me is, first and foremost, about a personal transformation - a transformation to a life that is centered in God and that is intentional about having a deepening relationship with the Sacred. The result of that personal transformation is growth in love and compassion and life that can be lived more fully.

(2) Christianity for me is also about a social transformation that should lead to experiencing the "Kingdom of God" today...that is, the way life on earth (yes on earth, not heaven) would be today if God was ruler. The result of this social transformation is a focus on justice for the poor and marginalized, an indictment of the religious and political elites and a resistence to oppressive cultural systems of unfairness and dominance.

Why have I chosen Christianity as my pathway to God? Well, for me it is what I have always known...and I am comfortable with it. It works for me in that it affirms the Sacred and experiencing the Sacred, and it shows a path of transformation along with practices and traditions that can assist with that transformation and serve as sacraments to the Sacred. For me, the way I currently see and understand Christianity makes sense to me as a path to God.

Thus far in this blog, I have tried to capture my beliefs about Christianity and, in so doing, clarify my own Christian fundamentals (for a summary see My Fundamental Beliefs - Summary). Through undertaking this endeavour, I feel more comfortable that I can avoid answering "yes" to the questions posed in Mark 8:17-18: "Do you still not perceive or understand?...Do you have eyes, and fail to see? Do you have ears and fail to hear?". Hopefully, in some small way, my ramblings have also helped others avoid answering "yes" to these questions.

POSTSCRIPT: NOT SURE WHERE TO START WITH THIS ONE 3 YEARS LATER. I AM MUCH LESS FOCUSED ON CHRISTIANITY THESE DAYS...SO IT IS STILL THE RELIGION I UNDERSTAND THE MOST, BUT NOT THE FRAME OF REFERENCE I RELATE TO ON A REGULAR BASIS AT ALL. I DON'T BELIEVE IN "RELATIONSHIP" WITH THE SACRED LIKE I MIGHT HAVE 3 YEARS AGO AND UNFORTUNATELY, THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION IS SO SKEWED AT THIS POINT FROM A MAINSTREAM CHRISTIAN PERSPECTIVE, THAT THE IDEA OF SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION THROUGH THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION DOESN'T SEEM LIKELY TO ME. FOR ME, LIFE IS ABOUT LIVING IT TO THE FULLEST AND LOVING THOSE AROUND YOU TO THE HIGHEST EXTENT POSSIBLE. HOPEFULLY THAT IS THE TRANSFORMATION I WILL EVENTUALLY ACHIEVE IN MY OWN LIFE.

Routines and Thin Places

2006-11-24T22:59:00.001-05:00

Christianity is often defined by its routines like worship, prayer, Bible reading and study, attending church, listening to sermons, baptism, and communion. What is their purpose? How do they fit into Christianity? Are they required?

To answer those questions, I'll start with a concept called "thin places". This is a concept from Celtic Christianity (a form of Christianity that flourished in Ireland and parts of Scotland, Wales and northern England beginning in the fifth century). "Thin places" are places where the visible world of our ordinary experience meets or intersects with God, the sacred, Spirit. Occasionally, we do experience God through everything else...those are "thin places".

(1) I think the core purpose of Christian routines is to help us encounter "thin places" where our hearts are opened to experience God and grow in compassion and justice.

In that context:

Worship can be a thin place. It can create a sense of the sacred...it can move us to focus on and experience God.
Prayer and daily disciplines/devotions can be a thin place...see my What About Prayer? blog entry for some input on this.
Bible reading and Bible studies can be thin places...it can be sacramental (i.e. a bridge to the Sacred)...see my Bible Beliefs blog entry for further thoughts on this.
Being part of a church/Christian community and having Christian friendships can be thin places...if they nurture and nourish you while also stretching you at the same time.
Sermons can be thin places (in this case, I emphasize "can" be). Often they aren't, but sometimes they can be a thin place which opens our hearts to God matters.
Baptism and communion can be thin places as we focus on God by participating in these practices.

When I say these "thin places" help us experience God, what do I mean? I guess I'd say that through these types of Christian routines, we pay attention to God, we focus on topics like compassion and justice, we can deepen our Christian identity, we can be nourished. All these are ways to experience God. It doesn't mean that you have visions or hear voices or get specific direction or a sense of a direction even. But with a view that God is "isness without limits", I think we can "experience" God through these routines, even if only as "centering" activities that allow us to focus on or think through particular issues (sometimes I think this is all they are...but other times, I think you can "sense" God through these routines). I should note that these routines are often seen as chores or requirements for a Christian. I don't see them that way any more...I see them as potential practices that can help deepen our experience of God and lead us to a life of more compassion and justice.

(2) I don't think that Christian routines are requirements, nor do I think that they are always effective - but they can help us encounter "thin places".

In his book The Heart of Christianity, I like what Marcus Borg says about Christian practices: "Christian practice is about walking with God, becoming kind and doing justice. It is not about believing in God and being a good person; it is about how one becomes a good person through the practice of loving God." (1)

POSTSCRIPT: WELL, 3 YEARS LATER, I CAN SORT OF GET MY HEAD AROUND THIS...BUT SIMILAR TO MY VIEWS ON PRAYER, I THINK THESE TYPES OF ROUTINES ARE MORE ABOUT US THEN THEY ARE ABOUT "THIN PLACES" WHERE WE WOULD "EXPERIENCE" GOD - EVEN WITH THE BROADEST DEFINITION OF "EXPERIENCE" AS I EXPRESSED ABOVE.

Notes:
(1) Marcus J. Borg, The Heart of Christianity (San Francisco, HarperSanFrancisco, 2003).

What About Prayer?

2006-11-24T22:36:00.001-05:00

“Not as in the old days I pray,
God. My life is not what it was…
Once I would have asked for healing
I go now to be doctored,
I would have knelt long, wrestling with you.
Wearing you down. Hear my prayer, Lord hear
my prayer. As though you were deaf, myriads
of mortals have kept up their shrill
cry, explaining your stillness by
their unfitness.

It begins to appear this is not what prayer is about.
It is the annihilation of differences,
the consciousness of myself in you,
of you in me; the emerging
from the adolescence of nature
into the adult geometry
of the mind…
Circular as our way
is, it leads not back to that snake haunted
garden, but onward to the tall city
of glass that is the laboratory of the spirit.”

- R. S. Thomas, Twentieth-century Welsh poet

I noted in My ‘More Than’ God blog entry that I think we can interact with and experience God, but that I don’t see God as an interventionalist God – otherwise, there are too many unexplainable non-interventions for a God of love, justice and compassion that I believe God to be. Having said that, I also noted that I don’t deny that there are some paranormal and supernatural happenings which can’t be explained. I don’t know if there is some link between these events and God, but I’m content not to be able to take a position on this one way or another at this point in time.

With that as context, what about prayer? I still think prayer makes sense...although maybe not in the way I used to. I’ve come to think about prayer more as us paying attention to God. There are 3 main types of prayer: verbal, meditation and contemplation.

Verbal prayer often involves petitions and intercessions. Given that I don’t think of God as an interventionalist God, one would think that these types of prayer don’t make sense to me. On the contrary, they do. Why? I can only say that they feel ‘right’ to me. It gives me some comfort, it makes me feel like I am, in a sense, caring for (or thinking of) others. Do I think these types of prayers make any difference? Well, paranormal things do happen. I don’t understand why or how, but, given our lack of knowledge of the supernatural, I’m not certain enough to state unequivocally that prayer never has any impact. But I'm not expecting that these prayers will change the mind or will of an 'out there' God so that he intervenes in the normal course of the universe. And, more importantly, regardless of their effectiveness, I think these types of prayer still have the impact of us paying attention to God or to the concepts surrounding God.

The second type of prayer is meditation, which involves reflecting on an image or phrase or text or idea…dwelling on it. The third type of prayer is contemplation, which is the practice of internal silence…sitting silently in the presence of “isness without limits”. It often involves the silent repetition of a single word or short phrase to give the mind a focus so that the ‘self’ can sink into silence. These are sometimes referred to as 'centering prayers'. These quiet times can be powerful mechanisms to enable a person to solve problems, work through issues and fears and step across barriers. Both of these forms of prayer are more common to eastern religions but seem to be in the process of being re-discovered in western religions.

So, in summary, my thoughts on prayer are as follows:

(1) Verbal (petitionary/intercessory) prayer feels ‘right’ to me – it is part of my process of thinking of and caring for others...but I don’t have an expectation that through these prayers I will change the mind or will of an ‘out there’ God so that He intervenes in the normal course of the universe.

(2) Meditative and contemplative prayers can be powerful ‘centering’ mechanisms that allow us to ‘pay attention’ to God and focus on ‘experiencing God’. I believe these types of prayer can impact and change the pray-er, which can then help the pray-er impact and help others .

POSTSCRIPT: WOW...3 YEARS LATER, I MUST SAY MY VIEWS ON THIS HAVE CHANGED COMPLETELY. NO LONGER DOES VERBAL PRAYER FEEL "RIGHT" TO ME...THE ONLY TIME IT EVEN OCCURS TO ME NOW IS IN THE MOST AWFUL OF SITUATIONS WHEN "OLD HABITS" KICK IN. AND I DON'T THINK THE MEDITATIVE/CONTEMPLATIVE PRAYERS HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH "EXPERIENCING" GOD...THEY MAY BE USEFUL TOOLS TO CALM AND CENTRE OUR MINDS, ETC., BUT I THINK THEY ARE ALL ABOUT US, NOT ABOUT AN EXPERIENCE WITH GOD.

Pay Dirt: A Heretic's Guide to Eternity

2006-11-15T15:35:00.000-05:00

From the Foreward to A Heretic's Guide to Eternity:

"Someone recently sent me one of those clever top-ten lists that you always see floating around the Internet. It was entitled, "Top Ten Reasons Beer is Better than Religion." My favorite five out of the top ten are:

No one will kill you for not drinking Beer.
Beer has never caused a major war.
Nobody's ever been burned at the stake, hanged or tortured over his brand of Beer.
You don't have to wait 2000+ years for a second Beer.
There are laws saying Beer labels can't lie to you.

Now I'm not advertising beer, but I am advertising that we who have a sincere faith in God realize that there are a number of downsides to religion...some of which are implied by the humorous beer list. There's a grim historical track record of religious inebriation that, like drunk driving, has taken or ruined too many lives already."

Pay Dirt: Interview with Sam Harris

2006-11-12T16:29:00.000-05:00

Courtesy of CBC.ca:

Sam Harris has been called a heretic – and a very brave man. Harris, author of The End of Faith, believes that religious tolerance is a disaster in the making – but that political correctness and fear of racism make any discussion of his idea utterly impossible. Sam Harris is ecumenical in his fear: the Christian who welcomes Armageddon as the harbinger of Jesus is just as terrifying as the Muslim who yearns for a martyr’s death to guarantee his place in paradise. Both, Harris believes, are driving a muzzled, timid society “to the abyss.” Sam Harris' latest book is Letter to a Christian Nation. It's published by Random House.

Listen to CBC's Tapestry interview with Harris here.

Pay Dirt: United Church Ad Campaign

2006-11-10T22:50:00.000-05:00

TORONTO, Nov 7 (Reuters Life!) - The United Church of Canada hopes an ad featuring a can of whipped cream and the question, "How much fun can sex be before it's a sin?" will fill its pews as Christmas nears.

The country's biggest Protestant denomination launched an advertising campaign on Tuesday meant to provoke debate on the "deep and persistent attitudes and images of organized religion."

"In order to get past those stereotypes, we thought we needed an ad campaign that was different, had a head-snap to it, that people would have a second look," Keith Howard, executive director of the campaign, said in an interview.

The C$10.5 million ($9.3 million) campaign targets 30- to 45-year-olds and rotates six images though December issues of Canadian magazines and newspapers as well as Web sites.
One asks, "Does anyone object?" to an image of two plastic toy grooms on a wedding cake. Another features a child sitting on Jesus's knee in the traditional Santa's village of a shopping mall, and asks, "Would you still take your kids?"

"We've had a long tradition of engaging the issues and concerns of the society that we are a part of," Howard said.

The United Church of Canada has a declining active membership of about 573,000, although almost 3 million people have some sort of affiliation with the church. Between 1994 and 2004, membership dropped about 20 percent, according to church statistics.

Last month, the church issued a statement defending federal legislation that allows same-sex marriage.

Revisiting Sin, Salvation and the Afterlife

2006-10-22T15:25:00.001-04:00

It’s interesting to me that this blog entry has been so challenging to get my head around; but when you think about it, maybe more than anything else, the concepts of sin, salvation and the afterlife are the most emphasized in fundamental Christianity. Certainly in my Christian upbringing, these concepts were central to everything. I said in one of my first blog entries that if someone had said to me in my early Christian life, that there was proof that there was no afterlife, I would have had no idea why I should be a Christian – getting saved and not sinning SO THAT you could have eternal life was what it was all about.

And a big part of what I grew up with was a guilt factor around sin and a scare factor about salvation and the afterlife. You’d go to church and the congregation would be "preached" at from the pulpit about what awful people we were (i.e. man's fallen nature); we would be asked to think about how we had sinned that past week, month, year, etc.; and we would be challenged about whether we were really saved. And if not, repent…lest you spend eternity in hell. So for me, even though my thinking has changed on a lot of topics (as evidenced in my previous blog entries), I still find it difficult to get out from under the guilt of sin and the scare factor surrounding salvation and the afterlife. So all that to say, this blog entry has been challenging to write.

Let’s start with sin. What is it? Well, most would think of it as disobedience – against God’s commandments and laws. Others would describe sin as being focused on pride or self-centeredness. Others would focus on estrangement or separation from God. Others would say it relates primarily to unfaithfulness (i.e. not loving God with all your heart, mind, etc.). Others would say that sin is not about evil and moral depravity…it is more the actions that result from the survival nature within the human life and is just a part of the reality of humanity’s wholeness (as opposed to resulting from humanity’s fallen nature).

For salvation, most would describe it as “going to heaven” because you’ve believed or done (or not done) what is necessary. As an aside, it’s interesting to me that with such an emphasis in Christianity on faith (i.e. “believe and you will be saved”) and grace (i.e. not works), that everything still seems to come down to WHAT you do (i.e. did you sin and did you get saved). Many would say this isn't the case, but, in my view, the overriding preoccupation in fundamental Christianity is on exactly this topic.

So where am I at on the three concepts of sin, salvation and afterlife topic? Well, let me start with a fourth concept - repentance. From what I’ve read, the Hebrew biblical concept of repentance is more about resolve than contrition. It is about returning “from exile”, reconnecting to God. And in the New Testament, the focus of repentance is on following “the way” of Jesus - that is, the path of transformation (see my blog entry The Way). “The Greek roots of the word combine to mean ‘go beyond the mind you have’…go beyond the mind you have been given or acquired…go beyond the mind shaped by culture to the mind that you can have in/with God. " (1)

In terms of the concept of sin, it seems to me that it is more about mankind’s separation from God (or estrangement from God or lack of centering in God) than it is about disobeying a set of “divine rules”. From the time we are infants, we naturally begin to take on a more self-centered perspective and, by doing so, become less and less centered in God and God’s character (e.g. love, compassion, justice, etc.). If we think of that condition as being in exile from God (or having a life that isn’t centered in God’s character), that is how I would describe the condition of sin. Now, I’m not implying that we should go about doing whatever we like and ignore the implicit moral code that was present in many of the traditional perspectives or teachings on the classic sins. The result of that type of lifestyle would be to continue to hamper one’s ability to be centered in God and God’s character. What I am implying though, is that sin is not about disobeying a set of “divine rules” and suffering the consequences (e.g. eternal damnation).

In terms of salvation, for me it is about a personal transformation that results in a life that is centered in God and God’s character. It is about becoming conscious of our relationship with and connection to God. It is about becoming intentional about deepening our connection with God by experiencing God and trying to center our identity in “the sacred”. “Spirituality is the midwifery process of salvation – it midwifes the process of birthing the new self.” (1) The result of salvation (or the process of salvation, or the process of being “born again”) is a life marked by freedom, joy, peace, love and compassion (or as John Shelby Spong would say a life that fully loves and is fully lived). It is about a life centered in the presence of God.

Finally, the afterlife. I believe there is something after this life. There are enough snippets of thought on the afterlife, as well as experiences and reports of near-death experiences that make me think there is something beyond this life. What will it be like? I have no idea. There are so many versions of what people think it will be like that I don’t see how one can even start to try to decipher which is right. All I know is that we will die. And my hope is that when we do, we die into God’s presence…and if that’s the case, that can’t be a bad thing, now can it?

Will everyone experience an afterlife? Again, I have no idea. But my gut feel is that the answer may be no…I sometimes wonder if the degree to which we “experience God” and achieve a connection to God in this life is preparing some part of our spirit (or soul?) to experience God in the afterlife. I don’t know…just a thought. And if I’m right and some don’t connect with God in the afterlife, I don’t think there is an alternate afterlife experience (e.g. “hell”)…I think there is just eternal separation from God…nothingness...which is how some define hell (although most of the time, there are a set of flames to go with this description).

As an aside, the thing that is really interesting to me is that the concept of the afterlife doesn’t seem to hold the same importance it once did to me within my Christian beliefs. I think that is because I’m no longer scared of “going to hell” if I don’t believe, say and do the exact right things. It’s all up-side...there is a chance I can connect with God both in this life and in the afterlife! Is that just wishful thinking? Again, I don’t know, but I guess that’s part of working out these types of things with “fear and trembling” (or not “fear and trembling” in this case!).

So in summary, where am I at on sin, salvation and the afterlife? If I had to summarize at this point, I think:

(1) The concept of sin relates mainly to mankind’s natural separation from and lack of centering in God and God’s character. It is not about disobeying a set of “divine rules” and suffering the consequences (e.g. eternal damnation).

(2) Repentence is not about contrition and guilt, but about resolving to reconnect to and center oneself in God and God’s character.

(3) Salvation is about a personal transformation that results from a conscious and intentional centering of one’s life and identify in God and God’s character. The result is a life that fully loves and is fully lived; a life that is characterized by love, freedom, peace, compassion and justice.

(4) The afterlife is a great unknown, but I believe there is something after this life, and I’m hoping it is us dying into God’s presence – which would be the ultimate experience of and connection with God.

POSTSCRIPT: 3 YEARS LATER, I PUT MUCH LESS THOUGHT AND EMPHASIS ON ANY OF THESE CONCEPTS. I THINK THEY ARE PRETTY MUCH IRRELEVANT AND HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH LIVING A FULL LIFE...WHICH IS WHAT I THINK IT IS ALL ABOUT. I HOPE THAT THERE IS AN AFTERLIFE, BUT I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT THAT WOULD BE LIKE...THAT'S IT...NO IDEA. AND REGARDLESS, I AM LIVING MY LIFE NOW ASSUMING THERE ISN'T AN AFTERLIFE...SO THE GOAL IS TO LIVE FULLY NOW. AGAIN, THAT DOESN'T MEAN IGNORING BASIC HUMAN MORALS AND DECENCY...BUT I DON'T EVEN THINK ABOUT THE CONCEPTS OF SIN, REPENTANCE AND SALVATION WHEN DECIDING WHAT I WILL DO OR NOT DO.

Notes:
(1) Marcus J. Borg, The Heart of Christianity (San Francisco, HarperSanFrancisco, 2003).

Faith Matters

2006-10-19T21:22:00.001-04:00

What do you think of when you hear the word “faith”? Dictionary.com defines faith as “belief that is not based on proof”. I would suggest that this is the most common understanding of “faith” today. And certainly within Christianity, the concept of faith means believing a set of Christian beliefs to be true (sometimes interpreted as believing questionable things to be true and ignoring scientifically proven evidence in the process). Interestingly, there are other meanings of “faith” throughout the history of Christianity, which I will touch on later, but for now, let’s deal with the most common understanding of the word, as described above.

The belief-focused understanding of the word “faith” is so prevalent and emphasized in Christianity today that its effect has been that “Christian faith has turned into a ‘head matter’. Faith has become primarily a matter of the beliefs in your head – of whether you believe the right set of claims to be true. That Christian faith is about belief is a rather odd notion, when you think about it. It suggests that what God really cares about is the beliefs in our heads – as if believing the right things is what God is most looking for, as if having “correct beliefs” is what will save us. And if you have “incorrect beliefs”, you may be in trouble. It’s remarkable to think that God cares so much about “beliefs”.” (1)

For me:

(1) While faith should not be about believing things that go against our factual knowledge of the way things are, I do firmly believe that faith is a required component of a Christian life.

Why? Because, ultimately, for me, being Christian means affirming the reality of God (see My More Than God). In addition, Christian faith means affirming the centrality of Jesus (as a disclosure of God and what a life full of God looks like – see Jesus…“My God”, Man), and affirming the centrality of the Bible (not as the literal words of God, but as the foundational document for the Christian tradition – see Bible Beliefs).

Can these three things be proven beyond doubt? No. Can they be disproved beyond doubt? No. All three of these things require some degree of belief (or affirmation) in things that cannot be proven scientifically - that is, there is not "certainty" about these things. Ultimately, though, in my opinion, affirming these three things is central to being a Christian (i.e. these are central Christian convictions). And to hold these convictions requires faith.

I noted earlier that the understanding of “faith” as a set of beliefs is a fairly recent development (i.e. within the last few hundred years). Prior to that time, faith was more a matter of the heart than the head. Two developments led to this change in understanding of faith – the Protestant Reformation (with its focus on beliefs) and the Enlightenment (the birth of modern science and the emphasis on verifiable factuality as being the sole basis of truth).

In Marcus Borg’s book The Heart of Christianity (1), he describes four meanings of the word faith from Christian history, three of which are heart-focused and one of which is head-focused (sort of). In highly summarized form, Borg describes the four meanings as follows:

Faith as Assensus (this Latin word is closest to the English word “assent”) which is faith as belief – giving one’s mental assent to a proposition. However, it should be noted that, prior to the Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment, faith as assensus was quite different than today. Before mankind developed such substantial knowledge about so many things, it was more or less effortless to believe in things like the Bible, as there was nothing else to consider as possible alternative truth.
Faith as Fiducia (this Latin word is closest to the English word “trust”) refers to radical trust in God (not trust in a set of statements about God, but trust in God himself). The opposite of fiducia would be anxiety or worry. Faith, when viewed as radical trust, has great transforming power.
Faith as Fidelitas (this Latin word is closest to the English word “fidelity”) refers to faithfulness to our relationship with God. That is, loyalty, allegiance, the commitment of the self at its deepest level, the commitment of the heart – a radical centering in God. How do you do this? By paying attention to the relationship and by loving what God loves (e.g. compassion and justice).
Faith as Visio (this Latin word is closest to the English word “vision”) refers to faith as a way of seeing. That is, the way we see “the whole”…the way we see “what is”. We can see “the whole” as hostile and threatening (i.e. death will get us) which results in a defensive response to life. Or we could see “what is” in an indifferent manner (i.e. the universe is indifferent to mankind – this is the most common modern secular viewpoint). This view usually results in a concern primarily for ourselves and those who are most important to us. The third way to see “the whole” is to view it as life-giving and nourishing. “What is” is filled with wonder and beauty, even if sometimes a terrible beauty. This way of seeing the whole leads to radical trust, and generates a willingness to spend and be spent for the sake of a vision that goes beyond ourselves (i.e. the kind of life we see illustrated in Jesus’ life).

Martin Luther is likely as responsible as anyone for “faith” being central to the Christian vocabulary. But what form of “faith” was Luther’s? Not primarily assensus. “After entering a monastery after being struck by lightning, he went through a decade of agonized terror and ascetic self-denial, seeking to be righteous enough for God. During these years, he had assensus aplenty – and it terrified him. Perhaps because he believed “all of it”, he was filled with fear and anxiety. His transformation occurred through an experience of radical grace that transformed how he saw (visio), led him to see that faith was about trusting God (fiducia), and led him to a life of faithfulness (fidelitas) to God. For Luther, saving faith was not assensus. It was about visio, fiducia and fidelitas.” (1)

POSTSCRIPT: NOT MUCH TO SAY ABOUT THIS 3 YEARS LATER. I'D LIKELY PUT LESS EMPHASIS ON THE WHOLE CONCEPT OF "FAITH" BECAUSE IT IS SO FIRMLY ENTRENCHED IN TERMS OF HOW IT IS UNDERSTOOD TODAY. AND FOR ME, I WOULD HAVE LESS EMPHASIS ON THE CHRISTIAN PERSPECTIVE...AND MORE JUST ON THE "GOD" PERSPECTIVE.

Notes:

(1) Marcus J. Borg, The Heart of Christianity (San Francisco, HarperSanFrancisco, 2003).

Pay Dirt: Interview with Karen Armstrong

2006-10-15T15:26:00.000-04:00

From an interview with Karen Armstrong on CBC's radio show Tapestry on February 19, 2006:

"Lots of the time we are worried about religion. We're thinking about trancendance, going beyond, and what we are trancending to...what is the nature of God, Jesus, and so on. But really it is about what you are transcending from, but what you are going away from which is ego, greed. And once you've lost ego and greed, you should find that you've lost a lot of fear."

"What our world needs now is not more certainty. We've seen too much certainty - political and religious certainty - recently. What we need is compassion to be able to feel with the other."

"I had a very parochial religious upbringing...I was raised Catholic and that was it...I actually didn't even know much about Protestants for heavens sake. And actually this discovery of other religions - Judaism, Islam, Greek and Russian Orthodox and finally Buddhism - showed me what religion could be. It showed me what my own tradition had been trying to do at its best. And then I could reassess my own tradition more kindly and see much more about it than I had been aware of, despite my intensely religious childhood and youth."

Pay Dirt: The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot

2006-10-13T22:06:00.000-04:00

In responding to a recent comment on one of my blog entries, I found myself referring to the fact that throughout time (including today), there have been many varied beliefs within Christianity.

Along that line of thinking, I found myself in my local book store tonight flipping through a new book by Bart Ehrman (those who have read my earlier blog entries may recall me referencing one of his previous books, Misquoting Jesus). Ehrman's new book is called The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot. Now I haven't read much on the many other gospels (e.g. Thomas, Peter, Judas) or other gnostic writings that have been found in recent centuries, so I sat down and perused Ehrman's book.

What I found was fascinating. I read a gospel written around the second century which purports to describe Judas Iscariot's experience with Jesus. This is one of the gospels declared heretical by Bishop Irenaeus around A.D. 180 in his treatise Against Heresies. It's quite obvious that this gospel isn't like Matthew, Mark, Luke or John, which Irenaeus declared worthy of Biblical status. This gospel includes a description of creation involving a "god" which is many hierarchies below the "ultimate devine"; this creator "god" was the one who created humanity; and part of Jesus' teaching to Judas was that worship of this creator "god" was pointless and that when some humans die, they will have their spirits released to dwell with the "real" God; so the rationale behind Judas betraying Jesus was to let Jesus' spirit go free to dwell with the "real" God...well, something like that anyway.

Now the point of this entry isn't to talk about the validity of this gospel (since I think it - along with the Bible and other texts - says more about the author writing the text and his perspective or "take" on things than anything else). My point here is just to highlight that (especially) in the early centuries of Christianity, there were many VERY DIFFERENT points of view about Christianity. It just so happens that the Rome-based version of Christianity won out at the end of the day (yes, that's how we get to Roman Catholic Christianity), largely due to the wealth and power-base within Rome, no doubt. And that's why we see a more streamlined view of what Christianity is today (although there are still many differing viewpoints within Christianity today) .

So when people talk about today's Christianity (or their version/denomination within Christianity) as being the single truth, I think this is too simplistic a view. There have been, and continue to be, many different beliefs (within Christianity, and obviously between religions). To state that the one set of beliefs that you happen to have been taught is most certainly the correct one would be a somewhat naive belief in itself, in my opinion. This isn't to say that you can't find some truth in the beliefs you have been taught, but I think our real challenge is moreso to determine how to leverage our beliefs to truly experience "the sacred" and undergo a personal transformation...not to be fundamentalist about the correctness of our beliefs and our certainty of their being the single truth.

In any event, for more on the gospel of Judas, its discovery, pictures, expert views, and more, see this National Geographic website.

The Way

2006-10-08T17:55:00.001-04:00

Okay, so I grew up with a "Jesus is the only way" understanding in terms of the path to God. That's it. No compromise, no if's, and's or but's...Jesus is the way. Take it or leave it. Any other way is the wrong way.

Interesting! What were we thinking (or not)??? The whole notion that God has decided to be known through only one religion is somewhat strange in itself, when one thinks about it. But, fortunately, we (in my case, the Christians) were lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time to be taught that one way. What about all the others throughout the world who were brought up Hindu or Buddhist or another major religion? Well, too bad for them, right?

Here's an interesting scenario to think through. If you were brought up Christian, think about your experience of coming to know about Christianity. It was more than likely taught to you as truth and you accepted it as such. And did you believe the other religions were also the truth? If you are like many, probably not. But what if you happened to be born on a different continent and were brought up as a Buddhist? Do you think it would have been taught to you as truth and you would have accepted it? Would you believe that other religions were the truth? Similarly, probably not.

And depending on your religious upbringing, it might get even more complicated (or convoluted). I'll stick with Christianity (since that's my background). If you were born a Protestant Christian, you likely thought that the Roman Catholics and Orthodox Christians also had it "wrong" to some degree. Not as bad as those from other religions than Christianity, but somewhat wrong nonetheless. And let's say you were raised Pentecostal (or United or Anglican, etc.), you probabaly thought that those other Protestant denominations had it slightly wrong as well. Again, not as bad as the Roman Catholics, Hindus, Buddhists, and so on, but still, they didn't have it all right like your denomination did.

Hmmm...isn't that convenient. You just happened to be raised up and taught the exact right teachings about the one pathway to God. Whew!!! What luck...otherwise, you'd be finished. What's that? Your one slice of the religious pie is just a small proportion of the overall religious landscape? Well, again, all the more lucky for you right?

Okay, you get my point. So what do I believe about pathways to God?

(1) The enduring world religions are mediators of the absolute (the sacred) but, like Christianity, are not absolute in themselves.

(2) Christianity, as one of the world's great religious traditions (and my personal religion), is my pathway to God.

By extension, though, this doesn't make each religion the same. Marcus Borg notes the following similarities in his book The Heart of Christianity (1):

They all affirm "the more", "the sacred", etc.
They all affirm a path of transformation of the self.
They all provide practical means for undertaking "the path" or "the way" of transformation.
They extol compassion as a primary ethical value of life.
They contain a collection of beliefs and teachings.

It is often the last point noted above where the religions are most different - in their specific stories and beliefs, largely driven by the cultures and histories that shaped them.

As a Christian, than, how do we deal with the exclusive language often referenced by fellow Christians? The most famous 'exclusive' reference is "I am the way and the truth and the life; no one comes to the Father except through me" (John 14:6). A few thoughts on this:

This verse is found in John - the last gospel to be written. This "I am" language isn't found in the other gospels, and is thought by many to be more of an interpretation of the early Christian community than the words of Jesus.
What is "the way" being referred to? The way is the path of death and resurrection - dying to an old identity and being born into a new identity...a personal transformation. "The way" is not a set of beliefs about Jesus..."as if one enters into new life by believing certain things to be true or as if only those who know the word "Jesus" can be saved. Thinking that way virtually amounts to salvation by syllables." (1) Rather, for us, as Christians, "the way" is represented in Jesus - Jesus is "the way" for us...even though not the only expression of the way.
This verse should be seen as being written in the language of devotion. As Christians, Jesus is our "way". As such, written as it is, it represents the language of devotion of the early Christian community. It doesn't have to be interpreted as exclusive language.
Finally, the historical setting within which this verse was written was "a situation of bitter conflict in which John's community of Christian Jews was experiencing sharp social ostracism from non-Christian Jews. As a result, some of John's community would have been tempted to return to their community of origin. So when John wrote these words, he was thinking not of all the religions of the world, but of the synagogue across the street. He was saying, in effect, 'Stay within the community of Jesus. Don't go back to the way you left behind. Jesus is the way; that way isn't.' " (2)

So in summary, for us, as Christians:

(3) Jesus is "the way". He is the disclosure of what a life full of God looks like. This is who Jesus is for us...and we can say this without saying that God is known only in Jesus.

POSTSCRIPT: ON REFLECTION (3 YEARS LATER), MY VIEWS HAVE CHANGED A LITTLE ON THIS ONE...BUT NOT DRASTICALLY. I WOULD PUT LESS EMPHASIS ON CHRISTIANITY BEING MY PATHWAY TO "GOD"...I AM MORE OPEN TO WHATEVER WISDOM WRITINGS HELP ME EVOLVE IN MY HUMANITY AS OPPOSED TO BEING SO CLOSELY WEDDED TO CHRISTIANITY. ALSO, I WOULD TEMPER MY COMMENTS ON HOW ALL THE MAJOR RELIGIONS PROVIDE A PATH OF TRANSFORMATION, ETC. - I THINK SOME DO, BUT OTHERS HAVE SUCH FUNDAMENTALIST TENDENCIES, THAT THEY ARE ACTUALLY MORE DAMAGING THAN NOT.

Notes:

(1) Marcus J. Borg, The Heart of Christianity (San Francisco, HarperSanFrancisco, 2003).

(2) Marcus J. Borg, Reading the Bible Again for the First Time (San Francisco, HarperSanFrancisco, 2001).

Pay Dirt: Interview with Marcus Borg

2006-10-06T21:34:00.000-04:00

I came across a series of clips from an interview with Marcus Borg. Very interesting.

Watch the clips here