The Wrong Tree

Having watched and listened to the dear departed Carl Sagan talking about our tiny, fragile world recently, I found myself watching the next video that spooled up on that particular YouTube playlist.  I love listening to Carl, who in his gentle warmth and wonder is...to my soul, at least...so much more inviting than Mr. Degrasse-Tyson, the celebrity scientist du jour.  Or maybe I'm just cheesed at Degrasse-Tyson for his one great scientific achievement, which was leading the charge for the demoting of Pluto from its status as a planet.  Grrr.

The second video I watched from Sagan was a critique of the human tendency to self-absorption, and specifically, some gently spoken but pointed debunking of what the good Mr. Sagan considered the deepest tensions between the Judeo-Christian tradition and science.

Sagan was not a theist, not at all.  A "strong agnostic," perhaps, with the weight heavily on the doubt. Most specifically, he had beef with two things:  

First, that human beings should have the arrogance to imagine that God--should such a being exist--is like us.  For that, he relies on that passage of Genesis where the Creator of the Universe makes us "in his image."

God, a bipedal hominid?  How preposterous!  Against this idea, he recounted the writings of the ancient philosopher Xenophanes, who mocked the human propensity to create deities that resembled themselves.  If cows made gods, they'd look like cows.  When cultures make gods, they look like themselves.  How silly!  How arrogant.

Which would be fine, if that had been meant as a critique of theism itself.  Given that Xenophanes was one of the first Greek monotheists?   It's not.  

The core of Xenophanes' argument was not a critique of the idea of God, but of the absurdity of anthropomorphizing such a being.    It's the difference between Zeus and the I AM THAT I AM, between Storm from the X-Men and the One who Speaks from the Whirlwind.

So, sure, yeah, God's ways are not our ways.  We do get that, my friend.  Point taken. 

Second?  The second and more substantial thing that struck me was Carl Sagan's recounting of the story of the garden in Genesis.  In Sagan's telling, what happens in Eden is simple.  We are forbidden to eat of the Tree of Knowledge.  We are kept from truth, kept from exploration, kept from the joys of discovery.  Humankind in Eden exists in ignorance, willfully suppressed by an oppressive, controlling Deity.

In this line of thinking, the Eden of Torah may be perfect, but it is a dark perfection, in which we are denied the right to know and wonder and explore, trapped forever in a stunted, childish state.  This is recounted as an indictment against all of the faith traditions that arise from that story.  Even in our most primal story, we are oppressive, and the enemy of science. 

It's a familiar spin, casting out the second of the two Genesis stories as a functional variant of the Prometheus myth, with the serpent in the role of Prometheus, the giver of fire and knowledge.  In that telling, God is the dark demiurge, the one who would keep humanity eternally subjugated.  That's the take of the ancient Gnostics, who saw only malignance and oppression in the story of the Garden, and for whom the serpent is Christ.  Interesting folks, the Gnostics.

It'd be a fair critique, if the Tree that shows up in that story from Torah was the Tree of Knowledge.

But it isn't.   

In that story, the tree is מֵעֵץ הַדַּעַת טוֹב וָרָ.  
  

It is me-esh haddat towb warah, the "tree of the knowledge of good and evil."  

What the adam, which means "creature of dirt" is warned against is not knowledge itself.  Everything already exists in the garden, in a state of primal, archetypal goodness.  All that--every creature, every plant, everything--can be known, explored, named, and wondered at.  That is, in fact, stated as humanity's purpose.  It is a place of learning and delight, in which every choice is good.

The warning is against being able to know and choose evil. God knows what is evil, what is broken, what will bring woe and hatred and oppression, and chose not to place it in the garden.

Which is why the story of Eden does not involve God being really cheesed off at the ish and the isshah for drawing up the specs for an unauthorized large Hadron Collider.  

The knowledge they get from that tree is social shame.  What they have learned is not the capacity to help and support one another--their created purpose--but the ability to pass blame and recrimination.

And there, from context and purpose, I must demur from the gnostic/atheist spin on that story.   It's just not what it says, or the reason for its telling.

The Strange Predestination of Clinton Richard Dawkins

It was a peculiar quote, in a peculiar interview.

The quote came from atheist author and biologist Richard Dawkins, who'd talked a little bit about how much he appreciates Christian ritual.  The interview went on, and in it, he was talking about life, and his sense that all of us have a destiny that we fulfill.  His quote went thusly:

I think there are always paths not taken but if a different path is taken, I think there is a magnetic pull.  There is a sort of something that pulls you back to the pathway having taken a fork in the road.

It struck me as peculiar because, well, I don't believe it describes the nature of existence, certainly not in any meaningful way.  That I disagree with Dawkins on how the universe works might seem like a no-brainer.  I'm a theist, a Christian, and a person of faith.  He's an atheist, radically secular, and argues that faith is inherently monstrous.

But when it comes to this one, well, I'd sort of thought he and I might be in agreement.  Dawkins has argued--and did in his book The God Delusion--that the universe is a multiverse.  It's an infinite, endlessly blossoming churn of being, in which every possibility is actualized.

If you're Dawkins, that means every possibility except God, of course.  Of course.  Don't even think that.

That's how I see God's vast and impossibly dizzying work in creation.  Within the framework of multiversality, we are utterly free.  We can choose, and our choosing is both informed by probability and shapes it.  That's both liberating and terrifying.

I know, from my faith, that my life could be very very different now.  There have been decision points that would have radically altered my path.  In some of those points, grace poured in, and I was guided to make decisions that have shaped my life for the better.  Relationships have been healed.  Breaches have been restored.

In other of those places, I chose poorly, and things were broken that did not need to be broken.  Hurts were inflicted.  In other of those places, my inaction meant that injustices festered and grew.  Those things stayed broken.

I know that my intentionality--coupled with my integrity as a person, and the moral and ethical core that I've embraced--had and will have influence over the little flicker of being I inhabit.  There is no road I *must* take.  I have no single destiny.  There are things that are more probable, yes.  But one path that will draw me on unwilling?  No.

God does not force us to follow.  God does not need to.

Which is weird, because all of a sudden, it seems that Richard Dawkins may be more of a classical Calvinist than I am.

A Letter to Sam Harris about Nonviolence

Dear Sam:

A couple of years ago, I read my way through your Letter to A Christian Nation, that bit of provocative neoatheist polemic that sold so very well.

Although you're a bright guy, it was an impressively shallow bit of writing, one that tried to articulate Christianity through the peculiarly clouded and simplistic lenses of anti-theism.  Provocative and simplistic sells, I suppose.

Nothing good has ever come of Christianity, or so you argued.  Ever. It is terrible and hateful and violent.

In your writing, you anticipated a response: "Well, er, what about Martin Luther King and the whole nonviolent civil rights movement?  That was grounded in the churches, and in Christian faith."

But you had an answer, which you expressed in your book.  That wasn't Christianity.  That was MLK  stealing an idea from Gandhi, who got that idea from the Jains.  You had a bit of a forbidden crush on the radically nonviolent Jains back then, one that eventually got you into trouble with the "all-faith-is-icky-poo-poo" crowd you run with.  

But you confidently presented this thesis: Nonviolence had nothing at all to do with the teachings of Jesus, or with the faith that rose from his teachings.  Having actually bothered to read the Gospels and the Epistles, that felt wrong to the point of being a little bit insane, but gawrsh, you were just so confident.  Let's take a look at what you said, why don't we:

While King undoubtedly considered himself a devout Christian, he acquired his commitment to nonviolence primarily from the writings of Mohandas K. Gandhi.  In 1959, he even traveled to India to learn the principles of nonviolent social protest directly from Gandhi's disciples.  Where did Gandhi, a Hindu, get his doctrine of nonviolence?  He got it from the Jains. (Letter to a Christian Nation, p. 12)

Now, Jains are awesome. I love 'em too. And I loves me some Gandhi. I find common cause with everyone for whom truth and love for others matters.

But I recently came across something that makes your statement seem even more off.  I was reading Tolstoy's Anna Karenina.  Being a pastor and all, Tolstoy's passionate, heartfelt Christian faith led me to read more Tolstoy.  He wasn't just a novelist.  He was also the founder and leader of Christian anarchosyndicalist communities in Russia, and wrote extensively about abandoning force and power in our relationships with one another.

And in that reading, I came across something interesting.  It's a sequence of letters, part of the very real history of humankind.  Follow this link, and you can read them for yourself.  Gandhi, you see, did learn nonviolence from the Jains.  But he also paid attention to the world around him, and to other faith traditions.  One faith tradition he found remarkably inspiring was Christianity, and so he sought out Tolstoy, one of the most eloquent Christians of his day.

Early in Gandhi's career, he wrote to Leo Tolstoy, asking permission to print up tens of thousands of copies of one of Tolstoy's writings on nonviolence, to be circulated in India.  They corresponded back and forth, and their mutual respect was powerfully evident.  Gandhi, for his part, describes his relationship with Tolstoy as that of "...a humble follower of that great teacher whom I have long looked on as one of my guides."  Gandhi went so far as to create a community, in which he and others lived out the values Tolstoy taught.  It was called a "Tolstoy Farm," on which Hindus and Muslims and Christians worked side by side.

There are other influences on the both of them, of course.  But Christian faith was an influence on Gandhi.  Meaning: your statement about nonviolence, bold as it is, isn't just wrong about Christian faith understood theologically.  It's also materially and provably incorrect as a matter of historical record.

So, a suggestion, should you choose to ever make that argument again in one of the talks you give.  Human history, like the interplay of neurons and the the fabric of our time and space, is a complex and interwoven thing.  When you reduce it to the clumsy binary negation of anti-theism, you are no longer describing the real.

Just be aware of that.  It matters.

Peace and Blessings,

David

Dear Atheist Mom

The picture of your child stuck out at me, most likely because it was supposed to.  After a recent and somewhat painful debate between a popular elocutor for science and a Young Earth Creationist, some of the Creationists put up images of their unanswered questions, written with markers on pieces of paper.

One might think people for whom the written word is a fundamental absolute would get the difference between "your" and "you're," but maybe they're too focused on translating from the original Greek.  Sigh.

But snark I must not, because Lord knows I still regularly mangle "its" and "it's."

So, of course, it could not end there.  There was a 'net sign exchange, in which atheists pitched up their rebuttals and challenges, with counterquestions written in Sharpie on pieces of paper.

Of the atheistic responses, yours was the one that leapt out.  There was your daughter, smiling and bright eyed.  These were not her assertions, of course, but likely assertions posed by you, her atheist parent.  There was some subsequent net-kerfuffle about the use of a child as a public prop, but the way I figure it, you view religion as a fundamental threat to her integrity.  I'm guessing you're the mom, too, given the handwriting.  From your fierce mom-love and your anger at what you perceive as a threat to her, you want your beautiful kid out there, as the face of the debate.  I'll admit to having struggled with that, myself, especially when it came to including her image in this post.  I prefer to keep my children's faces off the net, particularly around contentious issues where net-trolls can and do say terrible things from the safety of their basement lairs.  But I will follow your choice, and respect her integrity as a person in this post.

She's great, of course, and looks like a charmer.  I will take your black-marker list as a very legitimate descriptor of your hopes for your great little kid.  Just looking at her, one can see that she is full of wonder, and smart, and full of potential, and beautiful, as all creation is.

What such a delightful little sentient creature deserves, though, is our best swing at an accurate representation of things...and I'm not quite sure atheism is serving her well on that front, because atheism as a movement is not interested in truth so much as it is in refuting faith in all of its forms.  It exists solely as a negation, after all, which means it has a problem with non-binary thinking.

That can be observed in the statements in red-ink.  "According to Religion," it begins, as if that's a single and univocal category.  According to Buddhism, are the subsequent statements true?  How about Hinduism?  What about the Bahai?  Or Unitarians?  Or Wiccans?  Is it true for Native American religious expression?  Do Jews believe this?  What about Muslims?   Or Sikhs?

None of the above, I'm afraid, if you understand how the concept of Sin plays out across human religious expression.  It is an accurate statement for a painfully significant subset of global Christianity, most likely the subset that is the dominant culture in the area where you live.   But even there, is this what some corners of American evangelical conservatism teach children about themselves?  In some cases, yes, and that's a pity.  As a Presbyterian Teaching Elder, I can tell you that it is not even close to how the old-line denominations teach our kids, not by a long shot.

But I've reviewed conservative Christian curricula for children in my role as a pastor, and even the ones that are too literal for my tastes tend to go this way:

"Jesus loves you."  "God loves you."  "Here are some wild ancient stories with cool characters!"  "Did we tell you you are loved?  Well, you are."

So is the red-marker-list accurate?  No.  And we owe our children our best shot at accurately representing the world.

Then there's the list in black-ink.  "According to Science," it says.  But is the list that follows according to science?  It is not.  It is the romantic view of science held by most atheists, one that I can understand myself.  Science is awesome and cool, a vital and essential human endeavor that opens our eyes to the ever-unfolding, incredible creation we inhabit.

But "Wonder," "Beauty," and "Greatness?" These are not scientific terms.

"According to science," one could just as easily describe that bright little child as a delivery system for replicating genetic material.  Or as a complex organic machine, interacting with the world through a sequence of biologically and culturally mediated patterns, both learned and hard-wired.  Her smile?  The reflex of a social animal.  The "love" felt for her by her biological parents?  A neurochemical response to visual cues that identify her as a vulnerable near-infant, part of an evolutionary pattern that insures the aforementioned continuance of particular genetic traits.

Her beauty?  She is beautiful the way that everything is beautiful, meaning she is remarkably complex.  From a purely scientific standpoint, her self-awareness is no more and no less beautiful than the amazingly intricate processes of digestion and excretion, or the processes of the human body as it decays following the cessation of life.

You're not going to tell her that, presumably.  You just tell her she is loved, and teach her to appreciate and marvel at the astounding reality around her, and tell her that she is great.  But in that, I would ask you to consider allowing her to engage with the real complexities that are part of faith and religious practice.  Where certain religious communities would bully and belittle and reduce her to nothing, don't allow them to do so.  It's a fight worth having, and I'm there with you.  But if you want her to grow up respecting your guidance, I'd encourage you to allow her to engage with the depth and subtlety of human existence.

Binary thinking does not do that.

Oh, and if you're actually Atheist Dad?  Oops.  Sorry for my assumption and generalization.  You have very neat, rounded, lovely handwriting!  Nothing to be ashamed of, and mea culpa.

Still and all, everything I said still applies.

Compassion is Selfish

It's one of the odder memes out there, but one I stumble across with some surprising frequency.

Like, say, yesterday, when I bumbled across it whilst skimming an article in the New York magazine.  It was technically an essay about the moral implications of George Eliot's Middlemarch, one of those things that people in the Big Apple are evidently deeply concerned about.  I was idling my way through it, when suddenly out of nowhere, I read this:

"For a guideline about how to treat others, the Golden Rule is strikingly egocentric. It does not urge us to consult our neighbors about their needs; it asks us only to generalize from ourselves—to imagine, in essence, that everyone’s idea of desirable treatment matches our own. As such, it makes a curiously narrow demand on our imagination, and, accordingly, on our behavior..."

Not to take anything from George Eliot, mind you, although I'm not quite as ready as the author of this magazine article to structure an entire Eliotist ethical worldview on one of her novels.  But that line of reasoning has made it's way across my consciousness before, usually as part of some atheistic screed.

Treating others as you'd be treated yourself?  Inherently selfish, of course.  It must be, because faithful people do it, and it seems to be a powerful and sustained ethical thread across many of the world's faith traditions.  If you're atheistic of bent, that means it must be inherently flawed.  And so the very idea of being compassionate becomes warped into something mildly assaultive and imperialist.

The absurdity of this line of argumentation is hard to miss.  It is primarily absurd because in an effort to display ethical superiority, it willfully misses the entire point of both the Golden Rule and compassion.

It is apparently impossible to imagine that perhaps we want to be listened to and respected.  Thus we will from that "selfish" foundation choose to listen to and respect others.  I do not like being beaten about the head and shoulders with other people's worldviews, for example.  From that foundation, I don't do that to others.  I'll talk, and discuss, and even get into a heated debate if it seems that heat is going to be mutually entertaining.  But I will not inflict/stalk/assail another soul, because that's a fundamental Golden Rule Violation.  So. Very. Simple.

And yet seen through a thicket of deconstructive folderol, it becomes turned into something falsely complex.

Amazing, what people manage to believe.

The Gods and Angels of Atheism

Having steeped myself in the writings and worldviews of the first century CE for much of the last week, an odd fragment that stuck in my head, one that came from the peculiarity of dipping my consciousness into a radically polytheistic pre-modern context.

Ancient Rome was a great heaping smorgasbord of gods and godlings, of peculiar beliefs from far off lands and odd mystery cults whose initiation rituals made joining the Masons look like applying for a library card.  It's worldview was a riot of magical beings and angelic influences, of spirits of the wood and stone and sky.  The world was rich with mystery.

Because my brain is peculiarly wired, I found myself taking that and playing it off of the secular assumptions of twentieth-century atheism about the nature of our cosmos.  There is no God, and there are no gods, and there are no spiritual beings, atheism asserts, with the certainty of empirical knowledge.

And yet, if Neil Degrasse-Tyson were to sit down with Cicero to describe what is known and expected about the nature of things, I wonder how that ancient would hear what he had to say.  Particularly when it comes to the heavens, and the gods.

Because in the heavens, most likely, there are living beings strange to us.  The cosmos is simply too vast to deny this as a probability.  Some may be simpler creatures, barely recognizable as life.  But some may have powers and capacities so beyond our own as to invoke Clarke's Third Law.  In fact, given the scope and scale of our time and space, the existence of such beings is not just possible, but likely.

This is why folks like Stephen Hawking would like us to maybe stop announcing our presence quite so loudly.  Who knows what beings lurk in the endless fastness?

Explaining what science knows and believes about existence to Cicero would just get a nod of agreement.  Oh, sure, he'd be a bit stunned at the size of things, but human beings adapt quickly.  I'm not sure the scientific view of the nature of existence would be quite as different from his worldview as one might like to think.  Beings more advanced than we?  Creatures inhabiting the heavens, with powers so beyond our own as to be indistinguishable from magic? 

Well, of course, the ancients would have thought.  You're describing the gods.

Funny, how little we humans have changed.

The Memorial Peace Cross

I've never been a big proponent of bringing too much Jesus into our complex national identity.   Not that I'm shy about teaching what he taught and encouraging others to follow along, obviously.  Christianity bears within it the promise of deep personal and collective transformation.  Jesus is where we need to be.  If I didn't think that, I'd be in the wrong profession.

But when the symbols of my faith are too deeply coopted by culture, I confess to having some reservations.   Jesus too easily becomes not the one who challenges our society, but the one who affirms our every action.   This cultural Jesus blesses every action of the state, and gives us the consumer-product blessings we know will make us happy.  I'm much happier with a countercultural Christ, a Christ who forces me in particular to consider how my citizenship and my consumption might not necessarily mesh with what he lived and taught.

For that reason, I'm not ever quite comfortable with aggressive displays of Jeezosity that seem to conflate Christian faith with the state.

So as I encounter the current religion and state kerfuffle in the DC area, I confess to having a peskily nuanced perspective.   The issue, in the event you haven't encountered it, is a large World War One Memorial erected on private land in 1927 by the VFW.  It has on it the names of Prince George's County residents who lost their lives.   The memorial itself is in the shape of a large Celtic cross, which now stands on public land.

This offended a passing atheist, who conveyed his offense to the American Humanist Association, which is now filing suit to have the forty foot tall concrete cross removed from public land as a violation of the separation of church and state.

The courts have dealt with this issue before, or tried to.  Some of the reasoning on the part of those who defend the existence of these memorials has been absurd, like Justice Scalia's theologically questionable assertion that the cross is just a generic religious symbol.  It is most certainly not.   The cross has a very specifically Christian purpose and meaning.

But while don't buy in to that kind of jurisprudential sophistry, I can't quite bring myself to the place where I can validate the atheistic umbrage over this.  In historical context, the memorial is entirely comprehensible.  Crosses...and particularly the Celtic cross...were common forms of early 20th century memorial, entirely representative of the culture of the period.  The memorials that exist across Europe to those who lost their lives in that wretched meatgrinder of a war consistently and unsurprisingly use the cross.  Some do not, of course, but those that do are entirely justifiable.

In context, it makes sense.  What I cannot see is how it represents any meaningful state support of religion.  Unless the Christian faith of early 20th century America is inherently offensive, removing/demolishing a 90 year old monument to the war dead of that era seems fundamentally irrational.  Were it being built today, such a response would be comprehensible.  But now?  It's just absurd.

Teaching Kids about Pluralism and Atheism

On the last day of our recent trip to San Francisco, we stayed in a humble cookie-cutter Holiday Inn Express near to the airport.  It was utterly nondescript, and completely functional, as it was shoutin' distance from where we'd need to be the next morning.

As we were packing up that morning, I checked...as I often do in hotel rooms...the drawer of the nightstand between the two queen beds.  In the drawer was a Yellow Pages and the inescapable Gideon's Bible, but there was also something else.  This being San Francisco, there was also a copy of the Bhagavad Gita, distributed by the followers of a Hindu holy man whose slightly scowling visage appeared on the back.

It was kind of cool, thought I, and so I pointed the books out to the family.  The boys asked me why the books were there, and I told them about the Gideons.  I've always felt that just leaving a Bible out doesn't really open up the kinds of conversations that really get to the heart of faith, but then again, it doesn't hurt, either.  So long as the hotel gives permission, it's fine.

I talked about how in the same way that the Gideons had the right to share the holy books of our faith, the Hindus who put their book in the drawer were equally empowered to present their belief system.  I talked about the importance of respecting others, and noted that it was all part of what made our country great.

I read through the Bhagavad Gita for a bit...it had been a while...and then absent-mindedly began to leaf through the Gideon's Bible.  It was then that I noticed that the Bible had been defaced with a large sticker, applied by an atheist to the interior front cover.  It was a leaving of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, that group of anti-theists who make it their business to be as unproductively aggressive as possible in their attack on faith.

The sticker itself was the usual diatribe, this one focused on attacking Gideon as a biblical character.  It was oddly irrational...the Gideons don't do what Gideon did, not being impromptu military leaders in a loose tribal federation and all...but this is typical of anti-theist rhetoric.  "Did you know that [insert name of figure from religious tradition here] was the most horrible person who ever lived?"  It would have been offensive, and it did cheese me off a little bit, but there was no point in growling umbrage.   Instead, as with all things, it served a very helpful teaching purpose.

I showed my Jewish/agnostic kids the sticker, and asked the boys what they would have thought about a Christian who had come into the room and defaced the Bhagavad Gita.   They thought that would be obnoxious.  I asked, then, if that would be any different from what this group had done.   Both boys concurred that there was this kind of activity was done by individuals who were best described as...well...both used a word that I think perhaps George Takei puts best.

I asked them, then, if atheists were all that way.  One of my boys said, no, and talked about a friend who didn't believe in God and who wasn't religious in any way.   I asked him if his friend was mean and disrespectful to those who were different.  No, of course not, said my son.  He would never do this.  You see, said I, not all atheists are like this.  I reminded them of family members who are atheists, and asked if they were obnoxious, angry people.   No, of course not, they said.  They just don't believe in God.

That lead to a short conversation about how faith...real faith, not reflexive literalism...is a challenging thing.  It isn't easy, or simplistic.   I also reminded them that an output of any authentic faith...and, frankly, the genuine application of reason...is a deep compassion for other sentient beings.

Which is something that fundamentalism and atheism often struggle with, in equal measure.

The Brick Testament, Atheism, and Fundamentalism

In sermon researching and exploring this week, I found myself again digging through the online presence of the Brick Testament dude.   This fellow, in the event you haven't encountered him, has made something of a name for himself by recreating stories from the Bible using Lego and Lego figurines.   Years back, I was gifted one of his books...the story of Genesis...by a family member, and it was worth a grin or two.   That same book now sits on the mantel of the abandonware fireplace in my 1827 church office.    It's cool and creative.

On the receipt of an Amazon gift card last year, I found myself thinking I might want some more of his stuff.   And so to BrickTestament.Com I went to peruse his wares.  It was not what I had hoped.  What I discovered there was interesting.   I first noticed something of a subversive edge when it came to presenting the Bible stories from the Tanakh.   There wasn't any talk of justice or care for the widow, orphan, and stranger.  There was no prophetic challenge to the structures of social and economic power.  Instead the editorial choices included stereotypical hellfire and brimstone, Bathsheba-schtupping, and bronze age ultra-violence.   When I wandered into the teachings of Jesus, the interpretive bias of the creator of these works became even more clear.

A significant super-majority of the images and recreations used to describe Jesus were deeply negative.  Jesus, or so the testament of brick pitches it, was a hypocrite, a delusional, sadistic zealot, who calls us to abuse ourselves and hate others.   Even his teachings about nonviolence are spun with images that interpret them nothing more than the babblings of an idiot, calling us not to stand up against bullies and criminals.   The Lego-crafted retellings were not neutral, or objective.

More importantly, they aren't playful.  They're just kind of mean.  Their splenetic and willfully negative view of the Nazarene bears no resemblance to what a disinterested observer would say he actually lived and taught.  We all pick and choose, of course.  But if you go looking for reasons to hate, it says more about your own desires than the text itself.   They read like simplistic atheist plastic brick political oppo-research.

Two further things caught my eye.  

First, as the Brick Testament guy interpreted his way through the teachings of Jesus, his approach to exegesis was exactly the same as that of fundamentalists.   To tell a story, he takes verses from different Gospel traditions and knits them together, often not even in chronological order.   Given the Frankenstein's monster character of the storytelling, it was clear that the context and intent of narrative were less important than the point he'd already decided to make.   This is a consistently shared interpretive technique of atheism and fundamentalism.

Second, almost every banner ad on Brick Testament guy's website was for a fundamentalist or evangelical ministry.  Big evangelical conferences?  Right there.  Ads suggesting that you enroll in Liberty University?  Sure 'nuff.   It was just another reminder of the peculiar symbiosis between atheist and fundamentalist literalists.

Some of the tableaux are still cool, and he's obviously a creative guy.   I'm keeping that book of Genesis on my mantle.  I'll probably snag some of the images off of the Net for illustrations now and again.    But the books were the familiar spin of the anti-theist, and as awesome as the Lego/Bible combination has the potential be, I'm not going to be doing any buying of them.

I just really never enjoyed playing with kids who go out of their way to be mean.

Cherry Pickin'

One of the most common charges leveled against progressive Christians is that we're the smorgasbord faithful.

We progs stand accused of wandering up to the Jesus buffet line and only taking those things that look yummy to us, while pointedly ignoring the stuff we don't like.  We serve ourselves a heapin' helpin' of Sermon on the Mount Roast, and a pour a big mess of 1 Corinthians 13 Gravy on our 1 John Mashed Potatoes.

The Revelation Hellfire Lentil Loaf doesn't even get a second glance, and we make a funny face at Ol' Uncle Paul's Obedient Slaveberry Pie.

For our pickiness, we're assailed from both sides.  Fundamentalists and atheists both assail us for...lets say it together..."cherry pickin'."  You only take what you like?  Cheaters!  Outrageous!  All or nothing!

So now, boys and girls, let's use the imaginations God gave us, and see ourselves standing in a garden.  Before us, there's a cherry tree hanging heavy with thousands of plump red morsels, the fruit ripe and delicious and in season.  We're hungry, and the smell is sweet.

Behind us and to our left, we've got the atheist, who looks at the entire tree with its leaves and branches and fruit.  I'm not going to eat that whole thing, he snorts.  Much of it is completely inedible!  And the fruit has pits!  How do I know I might not be allergic to it?!  He sits down in a snit, and with his best pinchy defiant two-year old pout, insists he'd rather starve.

Kneeling at the base of the tree, we have the fundamentalist, her mouth full of bark and twigs and leaves.  She gnaws vigorously at the indigestible hardwood near the bottom of the trunk.  Bits of masticated wood mingled with fragments of tooth enamel and dark green leaf juice drip from her lips.  It's absolutely, presuppositionally delicious, she insists.  By definition, it couldn't possibly taste any better.  And as an added benefit, she says with a slightly broken smile, I'm so much more regular now!

Cherry pickin'?  I suppose so.

"God Does Not Exist"

Kids, they say the darndest things.

In a recent conversation with my boys about God, the fruit of my loins offered up their perspectives on the nature of the Creator. These are, shall we say, rather non-dogmatic conversations. I realize my task as the father of two PKs would once have been to require the boys to memorize the Larger Catechism late into the night whilst hovering over them ominously fidgeting with a thick black belt. This is not my parenting...or pastoring...style. I do share with them what I believe, but will not force them to believe it. I listen. We talk.

Twelve-year old son number one, the big-hearted rationalist tweener, halfway between being a man and being a child, explained that he is essentially an agnostic. "How can I ever be certain," queried he. "How can you even know, especially in the face of a world where so many bad things happen?" This is more or less where I was throughout my teen years, and I agreed that finding that place where you are 100% certain is very very hard, if not impossible.

Nine year old son number two, whose thought processes are a whirl of convoluted intuitions, explained his position thusly: "God does not exist, and I believe in God." When his brother arched an eyebrow and asked him to unpack that paradox, the little guy went on. In order to exist, something has to be part of the universe. Because God made everything in the universe, God cannot be part of the universe. Therefore, it is not possible to say that God exists the way that a tree or a rock or you or I exist. But because the universe does exist, and something that is not the universe made it exist, he believes that there is a God.

Here, the little guy seems to be channeling Paul Tillich. I can't imagine where he might have picked that up. Ahem.

Tillich, a 20th century Christian existentialist theologian who occupies a significant portion of my study bookshelf, makes exactly that same statement in his three volume Systematic Theology. He says "God Does Not Exist" on Page 205 of Volume One, to be precise. This has not exactly endeared Tillich to modern literalists.

But in saying "God does not exist," Tillich was not being a heretic. He was also not being atheistic. He was being profoundly orthodox about the nature of the Creator.

Existence, for Tillich and for my son, means being part of space and time. There is no other way we can describe it. As creatures who are bounded by the parameters of the spatial and the temporal, we have no other ways to rationally conceive of being. If the Creator is to be understood in the way that Christianity describes, then God is not a being among beings, sitting on a vast throne on a moon orbiting a gas giant on the outer rim of the Andromeda Galaxy. God is also not all of time and space itself...because that would imply that God was governed by the rules and structures of physics, rendering God not God, but simply part of a process.

Neither of those two ways of conceiving of God reflects a classically orthodox Christian position. That doesn't stop hundreds of millions of Christians from believing those things, of course. But it ain't where the meat of two thousand years of Christian theology points us.

This is why Tillich obscurely described God as Being Itself...which means not all that is, but that which both transcends and underlies all that is. All that we know and can possibly know is part of God's own self-expression...but God goes infinitely deeper than that, into "places" that stretch and shatter the mechanics of the universe that frames us.

Grasping that, as son number one so astutely noted, is well beyond the capacity of reason. It is the realm of faith.

The Woo

As part of my daily blog feedage, I make a point of reading a mix of like-thinking progressives and mystics, but also spend time perusing the thoughts of the godless and the Pharisee. One of the more intriguing recent posts I've read recently was, again, at the friendlyatheist.com. In it, an atheist was struggling with whether or not to attend a local Unitarian Universalist congregation as a way of providing community for his family. UUs, from my own personal experience, are radically inclusive and tolerant of difference. Inclusiveness and tolerance are, in fact, the governing ethos of that community. That, coupled with a desire for social justice, is pretty much the only thing that UUs require for entry into their herd of friendly, purring cats.

Most remarkably, nearly all of the atheists who responded to this issue were incredibly supportive. There was a strong consensus that Unitarian congregations were atheist/agnostic friendly, and a great place to go to encounter other freethinking and open folks...so long as you didn't have a huge chip on your shoulder about folks who believe in God/Jesus/Goddess/Vishnu/Allah/The Force/Thingummy.

That pattern of thought took things to an interesting place. Nearly all of the respondents identified the one element of a Unitarian community to beware of as "the woo." A congregation might be to "woo-ey." Or have too much "woo." The word "woo" tends to evoke in me an image of a man down on his knee with a rose in his teeth. He's outside the window of a Victorian home in a small town, while a barbershop quartet sings Sweet Adeline in the background. This is not what they mean by "woo."

Or at least, I don't think so. I haven't been to a UU worship recently, and with them, you never know.

Instead, the Woo appears to be used to describe spirituality in any of its forms. Prayer. Candles. Dreams. Visions. Meaning, those things that tend to make we Presbyterians uneasy. As the Frozen Chosen, we're quite comfortable with process and structure and polity. We're also at home engaging in exegetical analysis of texts, preferably while providing citations from our favorite subset of scholars and referencing the Greek and Hebrew in ways that Show Our Superior Intellect. We're fine talking about social issues, be they from a liberal or conservative bent. We're practical people. We get things done.

But when it comes to experiential faith, to articulating those moments of trembling ecstasy, well, we clam right up. As someone who can officially declare himself a cradle Presbyterian, I heard talk of personal spiritual experience exactly zero times from the pulpit growing up. Not once. It was not spoken of in Sunday School, at any level. It just wasn't.

It's too disorderly. Too irrational. Too emotional. It lacks clear foundation in Scripture and tradition and process. It makes us seem...ugh...Baptist.

And we can't have that.

For those coming out of traditions that are all weeping and shouting and testifying and Feats of Spiritual Strength and weeping some more, that might seem a blessed relief. But for those coming up in our corner of the reformed tradition, I think it might be helpful for church to be...every once in a while...a place where we talk about those dreams and moments of numinous intensity, where we can share and pray and wonder. If we Presbyterians find themselves as unable to do that as atheists, then perhaps we should ponder whether or not this might be a factor in our struggles to revitalize our fading fellowship.

Convergence

Among the many feeds I read is the TED blog, which brims over with delicious esoterica and occasionally over-precious cutting edgeness. This last week, I watched an interesting presentation by Sam Harris, the atheist whose "Letter to A Christian America" I had such fun deconstructing a year or two back. In his speech to the gathered intellectual glitterati, the good Mr. Harris presented the core thesis that science can, in point of fact, provide a foundation for moral and ethical discourse.


Having watched it, and then watched it again, I'd have to say that while he and I have some major differences, some of his core theses are rather impressively simpatico. In particular:

• I agree with his assertion that the idea that morality is not relative, but is in fact consistent across individuals and cultures. What is good and right for sentient beings isn't mediated by cultural biases or preconceptions. Meaning, just because something is viewed as "right" in a society does not mean that it is, actually, good. When a member of the Taliban or a Stalinist says they know what is "good" for humanity, they are materially and objectively incorrect. Harris admits that this assertion of the good is something he shares with religion, even in it's more oppressive forms.
  
• Harris identifies well-being and happiness as the central purpose of sentient life. Not just one's own happiness, mind you, but the happiness of other beings. We who are aware favor the well-being of other beings who are aware. It's a defining feature of the good.
  
• When presenting exemplars of the "good," meaning images or sample individuals who represent commonly known archetypes for what Harris defines as "good," Harris uses two. The first is the Buddha. The second is the Dalai Lama. Yeah, they're not Jesus. That would be rather remarkably out of character, and too risky for an atheist in a Christian culture. But they are representative of a faith tradition for which Harris clearly has respect. Meaning, he's not dogmatically anti-faith. Just mostly so, particularly if that faith is Abrahamic/monotheist. This seeming openness has gotten him some occasional flak in the atheistic community, perhaps because by using exemplars who reach his "rational" ethic through ecstatic means, he leaves the door open to faith being...well...not a bad thing. Ah well.
  
• Harris views the goal of human existence as radical well-being, and suggests that it is appropriate to describe that highest peak state of human knowledge of the good as "spiritual" or "mystical." Given his exemplars, this is not surprising. But hearing a vanguard "militant atheist" use these terms...not redefining them or insulting them, but respecting them in context...is refreshing.

Though there are many areas in which I'm happy to disagree with Harris, and I have a teensy little quibble with the idea that religious experience and practice is somehow less capable than reason in guiding us towards knowledge the good, this was a surprisingly affirmative little talk.

Christian Atheism and the Golden Rule

Following on from yesterday's post, the exploration of the paradoxymoronic concept of the Christian Atheist continues. Though there is clearly no textual basis for making the claim that Jesus wanted us to be secular humanists, there is always that "Be a Good Person" argument for those wanting to be Atheistic Christians. We can be good without God, or so the billboards posted by atheistic organizations proclaim. Just be nice to other people, and things all fall into place.

For the person professing to be a Christian Atheist, one of the ways to avoid major neural crashes engendered by irreconcilable cognitive dissonance is to say: "Anyone who approaches the teachings of Jesus with an honest and open mind knows that the Golden Rule is the primary point and purpose of Christianity. I don't believe in all this Sky Daddy Easter Bunny Superstitious Nonsense, but the ethic Jesus taught was basically just for us to treat other people the way we want to be treated. I'm down with that, therefore, I'm a follower of Jesus who just happens not to believe in God."

I'm not about to start frothing and foaming about this perspective. I'm not going to give a long rant about not being WAAASHED IN THE BLOOOD OF JEEESUS. In fact, I'm not even going to say it's evil and damnable, because I don't think it is. Folks who live out their lives governed by an ethic of compassion and love for neighbor aren't enemies of Jesus or his followers. That's true of Muslims, Jews, and Buddhists. It's even true of atheists. When that Day arrives, quite frankly, those who just can't do the faith thing but do unto others the way Jesus taught aren't necessarily toast. We know so 'cause Jesus said so, and it's His call, not ours.

However, that does not make those folks Christian.

To be Christian, you need to be radically governed by the Great Commandment. It is our One Law, the single measure of our faith that defines and guides every other aspect of our faith. But the Great Commandment is not just "love your neighbor as yourself." It is, as Jesus taught it, far more radical than that. To be that "highest ethic" Thomas Jefferson declared it to be, it needs to be more radical. So let's take a hard look at the Golden Rule.

When you present the Golden Rule to an atheist with a chip surgically implanted in their shoulder, one of the typical responses you'll hear is, "Yeah, well, that's a really sucky morality. What if I don't want for myself the same things you want? What if you're just imposing your own sociocultural perspective of 'love' on me, and I have another perspective? What about that? Huh? Huh? That's why Jesus is a dumb loser stinkypants and you are too." They'll typically throw the word "fallacy" in there somewhere, too, because it's a Very Smart Word.

Though this could be construed as WAAAAY overthinking the Golden Rule, it actually has legitimacy philosophically. Loving others can easily be interpreted in such a way that it permits acts of violence or spiritual abuse. "I only yell at you because I know what's right for you. I'd yell at me, too, if I was doing what you're doing." In this instance, the "right" is typically an attitude that is, in fact, mediated by culture and society. Even the structures of our ethical reasoning are frequently mediated by those biases.

But the ethic that Jesus taught didn't hinge on just treating others in the way that we expect is right. That Great Commandment has two inextricably interrelated components. Love your neighbor? Sure. That's part two. But before that, we are told to "love God with all your heart and all your mind and all your soul." This theocentric grounding radicalizes the love commandment, because in giving ourselves over to that first element, a Christian experiences the Golden Rule in an interesting way.

The engagement of our whole being in the love of God has a continually iconoclastic effect. It is the great shatterer of idols, and by idols I mean the false godlings of society, culture, and self. God is not to be confused with cultic practice, or with doctrine, or with dogma. God is not to be confused with ethnic identity or political orientation or material prosperity or nationalistic pride. God...if we're being orthodox about it...cannot be conflated with any category that exists within the bounds of space and time. That orientation becomes, as Christian existentialist Paul Tillich would have described it, an "ultimate concern," one that forever drives us towards progressing and deepening our love of others.

That means, in terms of our practice of the love ethic, that the Christian is called to resist the desire to love only those who share our worldview. Christian orthopraxis requires us to apply lovingkindness in a way that is mindful of the needs and perpectives of those who are not Us. As Jesus taught it in the first century Near East, that included those who were outside of the boundaries that defined his culture. We are to love the lepers, the tax collectors, the unclean, and the Samaritans. We are to love and show kindness to those who are set utterly against us. This ethos transcends ethos itself...and as such, it's as radical a morality as possible.

Christian atheism does not get us there. If our orientation towards the numinous mysterium tremens et fascinans of our Maker is removed, then the Christian ethic is not authentically presented. What you get instead is not evil, necessarily. It may quite possibly be good.

But it cannot meaningfully claim to be what Jesus taught.

Love, Love, Love

As I traipse through my blog feeds, I make sure a take a little time for the folks with whom I disagree. From secular neoconservatives to fundamentalists to atheists, it's important to stay in touch with perspectives that challenge your own...particularly if those perspectives come from folks who are literate, intelligent, and articulate.

One that I hit a couple of times a week is Hemant Mehta's blog, Friendly Atheist. Mr. Mehta is the atheist who "sold his soul on e-Bay" a couple of years back, promising to at least attend the worship services of the faith that put in the highest bid for him. He went for a little over $500, by the way. The blog alternates between "isn't religion doofy" snark and interesting reflections on non-theistic ethics. Hemant himself seems like he would be entertaining company.

In a recent post, he put up a list one of his Christian friends had written, in which he laid out the responsibilities Jesus people have towards everyone they encounter if they expect to establish a sense of unity and gracious presence. What interested me was the response of Mr. Mehta's mostly atheistic readers to the the last question on the list:

• Do I love all beings, and if not, am I willing?

Of the three dozen commenters who responded, some noted that this ethic seemed to result in people whose lives were filled with a radiant amount of peacefulness. A larger number, particularly those who felt compelled to directly respond to the question, replied with: "No, and I'm not willing."

Recognizing that love for all beings is really, really hard for human beings, it is nonetheless the roots-rock central ethical core of Christian faith. It has it's ground in our understanding of both the nature of God and the essence of God's expectations for us. Absent that mystical ground, though, is there a basis for loving all beings...meaning one's enemy, too...in humanism? Not respecting their intellectual ability. Not tolerating their difference. But loving them, caring for them, and being disposed positively towards them even in the face of radical difference?

I think it's possible, but saw little evidence of it over at Friendly Atheist. What thinkest thou?

Atheist Theodicy is an Oxymoron

Whilst engaged in some highly entertaining back and forth about God and the nature of being yesterday, I found myself suddenly wondering about the place of theodicy in the arsenal of arguments used by atheists.

Theodicy, in the event you're unfamiliar with the term, is the indictment of the divine. Properly understood, it's a challenge issued to a god who is failing to uphold the terms of their relationship with a devotee.

Let's say you're a follower of Cthulhu. You've gotten your hands on the Necronomicon, not just any copy, but one signed at Barnes and Noble by the Mad Arab himself. After years of preparation at Miskatonic University, you've found your way to the submerged city of R'lyeh. You've waited several increasingly depraved lifetimes for the stars to align in the appropriately disturbing eldritch patterns. You utter the incantations through lips steeled with glazed madness, summoning the most vile of the Elder Gods into our plane of existence, where it can begin unleashing the waking nightmare that will consume all of being.

But when the Ancient One finally exudes through the rift, it arrives with a slightly warm sixer and asks you're up for an evening of Super Mario Party with all of the avatars of Yog Sothoth.

Of course you'd be disappointed. The terms of the agreement have been violated! Where's the madness? Where's the gibbering? Isn't there going to be any gibbering? The Ancient One hasn't held up it's end of the bargain! OOOOOH!

That is the essence of theodicy...well, if you're way too much into H.P. Lovecraft, anyway.

Atheistic theodicy generally takes the form of a riff on the problem of suffering. If God is beneficent, omnipotent, and omniscient, then, the argument goes, God is doing a crappy job. Human beings suffer. We are afflicted with wars and plagues and disasters and Glenn Beck. Why would a loving God subject us to Glenn Beck? If you expect clear and mechanistic interventions from the Creator, then you are inevitably going to be as disappointed as an evicted devotee of Creflo A. Dollar.

I understand why the problem of suffering shakes so many folks from faith. There are are range of answers to that given by the world's faiths, some of which are utterly inadequate. Blind obedience or declaring the self-evidently horrific to be somehow a manifestation of God's will are among the more feeble responses to mortal unpleasantness. The more conceptually robust answers revolve around divine inscrutability, a rejection of anthropocentrism, and the assertion of human agency in causing suffering. Both Buddhism and the sentient portions of Christianity handle the question of suffering differently, but in ways that have existential validity...if you're open-minded.

What I found myself wondering yesterday is this: is atheistic theodicy an oxymoron? Can it even exist? I find it akin to saying, "God does not exist, and He's a bastard, so you shouldn't believe in Him anyway." That isn't a coherent statement. You cannot sanely condemn a God that you don't believe exists.

To be fair, I think what atheists are doing when they surface suffering as a reason not to believe isn't theodicy at all. It's a related thing, but not really that gut-wrenching challenge born of existential anguish that comes from the heart of the suffering faithful. I've been there.

For the atheist, the problem of suffering or injustice is just a rhetorical tool, part of the explanation one gives for one's nonbelief and can present in an effort to persuade others of the validity of your position. It's a fair challenge, and one that requires an honest and respectful response, but it isn't theodicy.

It's a challenge to another's faith, not God. Creodicy, perhaps?

Atheist or Anti-Theist

I know plenty of atheists. Rolling in the circles I roll in, that's not much of a surprise. The Kierkegaardian Leap of Faith just proves too much for many folks. Unlike many other Jesus-folk, I am sympathetic to that mindset. Atheists are people too, and they can be both entertaining company and good friends.

'Course, they're all going to hell, but there's nothing wrong with enjoying their company before they are eternally immolated in the undying fires of God's unescapable wrath.

Kidding. Or...am I? Hmmm.

What strikes me, having gotten to know atheists, is that there are as many different atheisms as there are atheists. Recognizing that continuum, I've noted two polarities of type.

Many atheists are mellow. They don't believe, because they've 1) been burned by faith or 2) they have such a radically empirical view of the world that there's just no room in it for the supernatural. Whatever the cause, they don't have a chip on their shoulder about it. These are the folks who are willing to say, you know, there are many things about the teachings of Jesus that are pretty cool. But the whole package? Nope. Sorry. They just can't get there from here. Theism means...well...nothing to them. Faith is just irrelevant and/or immaterial. Slappin' that "a" prefix onto the front of "theist" means theism shouldn't factor into the equation at all. This is, to my eyes, the most authentically a-theist position, because it is non-theist.

Then there's the atheism that is more "antitheist" than "atheist". For these folks, non-belief expresses itself as a vigorous and normative opposition to all forms and manifestations of faith. It's all up in your business, relentlessly truculent and dismissive. Faith is not irrelevant for these folks. It's the gravitic center of their worldview, the enemy against which they orient their existence, the opposite polarity which they relentlessly reject yet which paradoxically defines them.

I prefer the former, although the latter can be entertaining to have around when you're up for some sparring.