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January 20 - February 3, 2018
Maybe the point is not what did or did not happen, but what is always happening.
I am mostly at peace in my home where Lucy, Jack and I play Botticelli because I was indoctrinated with knee-jerk guilt. I realize now that my parents were often right for the wrong reasons.
There are more Edens within reach because I’ve listened to my guilt, not just made excuses. Sometimes irrational guilt is all I’ve had standing between me and regret.
Maybe saying “evolution teaches” or “God says” is more or less the same thing: just another way of summing up what we know about ourselves from our collective human primate experience of what works.
Nature and nurture turn out to be interrelated. Not only do our experiences change our genes but they also change our children’s genes.
Our relationship is founded on me saying “I am so very sorry for being an asshole” and then working to change. What I fear today isn’t God’s theoretical wrath but my family’s palpable sorrow when I hurt them. That is hell in the here and now, the only hell there is. I can choose not to pass that hell on, as the epigenetic scientists confirm.
Embracing paradox helped me discover that religion is a neurological disorder for which faith is the only cure.
The theism-atheism-agnosticism trio presumes that the real question is whether God exists. I’m suggesting that the real question is otherwise and that I don’t see my outlook in terms of that trio … The real question is one’s relation to God, the role God plays in one’s life, the character of one’s spiritual life. Let me explain. Religious life, at least as it is for me, does not involve anything like a well-defined concept of God, a concept of the kind that a philosopher could live with. What is fundamental is the experience of God, for example in prayer or in life’s stunning moments.
I believe that evolutionary psychology explains away altruism and debunks love and that brain chemistry undermines my illusion of free will and person-hood. I also believe that the spiritual reality hovering over, in and through me calls me to love, trust and hear the voice of my Creator. It seems to me that there is an off-stage and an on-stage quality to my existence.
Apophatic theology teaches that the divine is ineffable and recognized only when it’s felt. In contrast to the literalistic evangelicals and Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Muslims and Orthodox Jews, some of the earliest Church Fathers were closer in their thinking to Wettstein.
St. Cyril of Jerusalem said, “For we may not explain what God is but candidly confess that we have not exact knowledge concerning Him.” In other words, the word God was to be understood by not understanding it.
My illusion of control over my life is long gone. I am part of a story; I am not the story. I’ve given up on planning. Rather, I plan while hoping that my plans won’t work.
Muslim, Jew, Hindu or Christian, you are that because of where and when you were born. If you are an atheist, you are that because of a book or two you read, or who your parents were and the century in which you were born. Don’t delude yourself: there are no good reasons for anything, just circumstances.
You will always be more than one person. You will always embody contradiction. You—like some sort of quantum mechanicals physics experiment—will always be in two places at once.
Who someone is and what they do is all that matters. This is especially true because who we are changes as we grow and as we change our minds. Furthermore, we are never really of one mind about anything. Belief is never the point—actions are. We can be of two minds about biology or God but treat everyone around us with kindness.
If we wait for correct ideas to save us—theological or otherwise—we’ll never be saved, even from ourselves. Why? Because we can never have a fully correct idea. Why? Because however we label ourselves, we are still only half-evolved primates in two or more minds and multiple moods.
I can’t objectively describe reality because I’m trapped in the moving target we call time. That’s what the word “evolution” means. The very fabric of the universe is unknowable and stranger than we can imagine and has a message for us: climb down off that high atheist, religious or agnostic pedestal!
The brain has evolved to do one thing: process our environment and give us an illusion of certainty. We are programmed by our genetic prime directive—survive. This does not equip us to be all-knowing theologians, much less philosophers. We bestow meaning rather than discover it.
In fact our psychological needs, backgrounds, wounds and pain are the real source of our so-called beliefs and why we hang on to them or reject them. In that sense the most intellectual career paths are the most delusional.
There are no objective facts, just personal histories and the coincidences of time and place seen through the lenses of short lives. Deal with it.
When we pray for Francis, Lucy and Jack open themselves to something bigger than their own concerns. Our prayers reflect a belief that the universe isn’t only about us. Maybe that empathetic concern is something real, rooted into the very fabric of what makes us human. Is the result of the prayer only about Francis’s health? Or is prayer for Francis also about the health of everyone who loves him? Perhaps the care and love we feel for Francis reflects a love that predates creation. Perhaps learning the meaning of co-suffering love is the point of the creation experiment.
I haven’t the foggiest idea what prayer does. I do know that I can’t get through my day without praying. I pray the Orthodox “Jesus Prayer” off and on all day.
So I have news for us all: it’s the entire cycle of life that counts. And that cycle is the only real “biological clock” that matters. Everything else is just a footnote.
On the other hand to the extent I choose to go, church is one of the places I may offer my grandchildren a vision of a life that is about more than status, stuff, education and money.
The only reason I still think Jesus means anything is that even the people writing the gospels disapproved of his actions.”
I should have said, like every time Jesus mentioned the Torah, he qualified it with something like this: “The scriptures say thus and so, but I say…” I should have said, “Jesus undermined the inerrancy of the scriptures in favor of his version of pragmatic empathy!” or “Every time Jesus undermined the scriptures it was to err on the side of nonjudgmental co-suffering love.
Jesus certainly was not a “Bible believer,” as we use that term in the post Billy Graham era of American fundamentalist religiosity that’s used as a trade-marked product to sell religion.
In fundamentalist terms, Jesus was a rule-breaking relativist who wasn’t even “saved,” according to evangelical standards.
Like a futurist vindicated by events as yet undreamed, Jesus’ message of love was far more powerful than the magical thinking of the writers of the book he’s trapped in. In Jesus’ day the institutions of religion, state, misogyny and myth were so deeply ingrained that the ultimate dangerousness of his life example could not be imagined. For example his feminism, probably viewed as an eccentricity in his day, would prove transformational.
Jesus believed in God rather than in a book about God.
As an ultimate fuck you to rule-keeping scripture zealots everywhere, Jesus hung out with whores. Embracing whores was a double rebuke to the Jewish scripture-thumpers because it put Jesus on the side of the pagan, prostitute-condoning Roman occupiers and made him a traitor in the culture wars of the day. Yet, the anointing of Jesus by a prostitute is one of the few events reported in all four gospels.
Jesus rejects tribalism, literalism, group identity, specific religions, and gatekeepers as well as his Jewish identity. The phrase “Salvation is from the Jews” is paradoxically a reference to his liberating departure from tribal identity in favor of common humanity. What is the implication of Jesus-centric non-theological, nondogmatic salvation? It’s the abolishing of exclusion of the other as “unsaved.”
According to Jesus, there never was and never will be a “greatest country on earth,” or a “city set on a hill” or a “chosen people.”
The Bible’s editors assembled the final canon of the Christian scriptures by about the year 400 and probably only included such stories as Jesus blessing a whore for anointing him, or meeting and talking with the Samaritan woman because they couldn’t omit them without their book losing credibility.
Jesus was such a mess! He was far less moralistic than the apostles, let alone St. Paul.
Jesus told Martha to come out of the kitchen and talk to him. Jesus’ behavior clashes with not just the Bible but also with our misogynistic culture in which women themselves even collaborate in the oppression of other women. Oppression is most powerful when internalized and self-imposed. Self-oppression (knowing your “place”) becomes a passport to acceptance by the dominant group.
Genie sometimes runs into women who behave as condescendingly to her as Sam did to me when they find out she’s “only doing” childcare for our grandchildren.
And yet, Genie’s and my happy experience aside, two thousand years after Jesus treated women as equals, countless fundamentalist American parents are preparing their daughters to forgo personal goals and accept subservient roles in marriages better suited to first-century Israel. It can seem as if Jesus failed to change anything.
For all our massive failings, Christianity redefined the classical ideal of the worth of the individual. The inclusion of “others” is the greatest ethical insight of Christianity because tribalism and excluding classes of people is the enemy of justice.
Two millennia after Jesus taught, Christ-like change is beginning to infuse the world at many levels more widely than ever before. So why does it seem as if so many Christians still fail to grasp the essential truth of our faith: inclusion and justice? Maybe our blindness started when the first Christians didn’t believe what Jesus told them about the kingdom of God: “Neither shall they say, Lo here! Or, lo there! For, behold, the kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:21, emphasis added).
Jesus built what I think of as an empathy time bomb. He lit a slow-burning fuse—then left. Whatever you believe about how Jesus left—be it via death, resurrection or flying into the clouds—what he left behind remains: the accelerated pace of the evolution of our ethical consciousness.
Essentially Jesus said: To hell with mere survival Choose to evolve into a new and better animal!
Our image of God-the-judgmental-deranged-monster badly needed fixing. Jesus came to edit our ideas. Part of Jesus’ teaching was to redirect our attention to serving a loving God by serving others. We needed to see God anew through Jesus because our conception of God, as expressed in all religious texts including in our Bible, made him, her, or it out to be a retributive fiend championing the side of his chosen.
In order to understand how to serve a God who no longer demanded sacrifice, killing and revenge, we need to listen again to Jesus’ radical definition of faith. As recorded in Matthew 25:34-40, Jesus’ updated humane God wants mercy above sacrifice and compassion above moralism.
Nineteenth-century women first gained power in nonconformist denominations by arguing the example of Jesus. They gained power in these churches before the secular society gave them the vote or modern secular feminism arose in the post-World War II period.
Any time we read the Bible to find arguments or justifications, we wallow in Christian ideology.
The call of the Enlightenment was toward a rational basis for living and thinking that held no tradition too sacred to question.
Voltaire, the French Enlightenment writer, historian and philosopher, attacked the injustice of aristocratic privilege, the brutality of war, and the dogmatic mentality of the Church. He launched his attacks by contrasting the words and ideology of the Church with those of Jesus.
Although the Enlightenment philosophers’ followers rejected the institutional Church and the brutal hypocrites who ran it, they were among the first to challenge society to actually carry out Jesus’ vision of compassionate humanism on a large, transformative scale.
As physician to King Christian VII of Denmark, he became regent of Denmark when the king’s life-long mental illness grew extreme enough to create a power vacuum. Struensee’s dramatic social reforms included universal health care, limits on the totalitarian power of the Church, abolishing torture, removing censorship of the press, revoking privileges for nobles, introducing luxury taxes to fund the care of orphans, banning the slave trade and abolishing capital punishment.
