I’ve noted in my eclectic twitter and facebook feeds a slight trend that I first noticed this past week, before Easter, during which someone commented that they are tired of being, or that they shouldn’t be ashamed of their faith and wanted to shout it out. Then, of course, someone quoted the verses where Jesus said, if you are ashamed to acknowledge me in this life then I won’t acknowledge you in the next life. That was a bit of a buzz-kill, but I still saw a few “He Lives!” that seemed to come from this initial thought that we shouldn’t be ashamed of our Faith. Is this the Christian version of the “I love you, man” that guys say to each other after watching a good football game and a few round of beer?

In Bad Faith, Part 9: He Lives … In the example of Your Day-to-Day Lives

My Jesus-Freak high school self

I poke fun because I’m that guy in high school who, with my dear Christian friends, decided one beautiful, sunny lunch break, probably around Easter time, that we needed to not be ashamed of our faith and confronted our non-believing fellow students and got all verbal with them about the gospel. I’m so thankful (and hopeful) that my fellow students might remember said incidents as just another silly adolescent not-thought-out moment. I mean, I forgive them for wanting to and/or throwing stuff at our little group after those incidents. I’ve never been particularly fond of Confrontational Christianity since then. Of course, mom would remind me that words are cheap and that actions speak louder than words. Thanks mom. Love mom’s obviousness.

Our culture is so weird where politicians feel the need to prove how qualified they are for the job by parading their family and faith out to the public, where we’re either over-sensitive or oblivious to whether we should talk about our beliefs with our neighbors, but doing anything about the disenfranchised all around us isn’t even on the agenda. I mean, part of the reason some of us go to church is to not be part of the disenfranchised and unconsciously we make such people uncomfortable to walk in the door and stink up our plush pews. We’re not mean. We just prefer an impersonal way of “dealing with those people,” through our tithes… assuming that any of that money goes any further than the pastor’s latest building project or salary. I don’t mean to be mean. I’m writing mostly to myself, in that I was a serious tither, giving my 10 percent (after taxes) from the time I first started working many many decades ago and wonder whether that money really did anyone any good. And why is god always running out of money?

I love my brother’s approach:

Too many glasses of wine, feeling love for all mankind. I know we don’t deserve this, we are all so flawed, but that is the real message of Easter. That we are lovable despite all of all of our problems. Have a wonderful Easter. Jesus is Risen, now go hide some eggs.

And as my mom would probably say, it really is all about how we treat one another, not during the special moments, but in the day-to-day moments. Now go out and hug someone who needs a hug today.

“When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee? Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee?” And the King shall answer and say unto them, “Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” Matthew 25: 38-40 KJV

It shouldn’t be too surprising that in an era and place of unbridled abundance and wealth (that is the US in the 1970s and following) that these verses would be seen as part of the claim that we deserve good things and God has to give us what we want. Of the many mistakes I’ve made in my walk of faith, having a sense of entitlement, that God owes me something, was no small source of confusion and probably one of the worst ways that I could have envisioned a relationship with the Divine. Funny that I seem to get mostly what I needed, but almost never what I wanted.

In Bad Faith, Part 7: Entitlement

The stark finger of God by altemark

It might be interesting to see the tel-evangelist and the religious huckster try to preach this gospel of entitlement to villagers in a developing spot in the world where their village is routinely wiped out every year by monsoons and flooding. Or in some South American desert community where there’s no electricity or indoor plumbing, how would they spin their message there? How does this gospel of entitlement translate in parts of the world where children catch the measles and die or where they don’t have enough food to feed them and have to watch them slowly starve to death. Conversely, how about hard-working folk who are laid-off or fired because the CEO needs to cut the budget so that he can still get his quarter-million dollar. The CEO got what he wanted, but the thousands and possibly millions who are dependent on that paycheck for their daily bread certainly didn’t. Does God only listen to the prayers of CEOs, or rich Americans?

I’m currently listening to Karen Armstrong’s The Case for God, and it seems pretty clear that one mistake I made was to assume a quid pro quo relationship with the Divine and second to that was an assumption that I could have a relationship with the Divine that was a kind of mystical parallel to having a relationship with a really powerful, important buddy. I thought I had VIP access to all the good that there was to offer because God and Jesus were my buddies. “No really, check again, my name is on the VIP list. My buddy, Jesus, said he put it there,” I say to the heavenly bouncer. Imagine my disappointment and embarrassment as I’m forced to leave the line while the bouncer lets all the hot chicks in first. Damn. Story of my life…

I know that it was confusing to my mom, a devout Catholic, that I had this expectation that not only did God hear my prayers, but that He had to give me what I wanted and also that He was in control of every aspect of my life, right down to the long hairs on my shaggy head. I’d had this “experience” as a 15-year-old and blam! I was ushered into the inner sanctum and I was privy to a level of understanding that the stupid ol’ theologians couldn’t begin to imagine. Well, 15-year-olds are always over-estimating their importance and understanding, and I wasn’t any different in that department. Sad thing was that as I grew up and began to understand that I did NOT know the mysteries of the universe, that I was unable to integrate this in a meaningful way when it came to understanding my relationship with God and the Bible. In a sense Dawkins was right, while I understood more and more of the complexity of life, my relationship with God was mostly undeveloped beyond the moment of recognition and wonder.

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I felt as a child, I thought as a child: now that I am become a man, I have put away childish things. For now we see in a mirror, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know fully even as also I was fully known. (1st Corinthians 13:11-12 ASV)

Well, it’s probably an overstatement to say that it went undeveloped because from that moment forward I struggled with my growing rational understanding of the world and this moment that changed my life. Like the Episcopal priest that my brother spoke to in my last entry, I couldn’t fully reconcile the two and instead just alternated between the two worlds and not always very gracefully. While Dawkins might say that my struggle was an irrational residual of my upbringing, Armstrong might say that my problem was that my definition of God was just too narrow and too primitive.

I’d seen a glimpse of it at Loyola Marymount when I read The Idea of the Holy, but never really moved too far beyond the “buddy in the sky” motif when I did my B.A. in Biblical Studies at Biola University. Then when I started an M.A. in Theology at Fuller Seminary it was an interesting blend between the rational and religious, but it all got cut short when I got divorced. It didn’t help that I was already too academic for my Calvary Chapel heritage, getting divorced completely knocked the wheels off of my vision for myself and ministry. And thus I abandoned all of it and except for occasionally listening to some Mark Heard or Sam Phillips I never opened my Bible or went back to church for fifteen years following the divorce.

During my fifteen year Agnostic phase I attempted to find a balance between these unmet expectations, my sense of my own responsibility for the way things turned out and trying to figure out who I was. I’d love to say that I figured it out, but that would be even more delusional than any of the foolish things I’d done as a Christian. Something was missing. A lot of time past. I had my work but… I don’t know. There was something more.

Then through an unexplainable series of events I found myself back at church, back to reading my bible and back to trying to figure everything out with my old buddy Jesus. Simply put, I’d fallen in love and there wasn’t a single damn thing about it that was right and when it all came crashing down on my head (over a Valentine’s Day weekend) I had a moment of transcendence and understanding. God was in control again and I didn’t care how anything turned out because I understood that nothing happened by chance. And I really did go through a number of “self-renovation” projects. The previous 15-years felt like I’d been standing still or asleep the whole time. I knew I had to be my best self. I knew I had to be my best self because… well, that was the problem. There was something, or actually someone who, I wanted in my life and it wasn’t happening. Christian friends repeated the verses like the ones above about how God knew my heart and wanted to give me… good things. Great, I was all for that. I knew what that meant to me, but things got a lot darker and unlike any other time in my life I learned what it meant to be completely vulnerable, to the point where a sunset would make me cry because I couldn’t be with the one I’d fallen in love with. This went on for years.

Friends and enemies around me were falling in love and getting married (and getting divorced) and I was still trying to figure out why it wasn’t happening for me. I kept the thought close to my heart that God knew what I wanted. And time continued to pass on by. It was beginning to feel like those bad old days when I began to believe that I must be doing something wrong or that there was something wrong with me. I didn’t really expect it all to be handed to me on a silver platter, but Jesus, after five years… Clearly, I’d misjudged more than a few things. Clearly I was still seeing things through a glass, darkly… So, for the second time, I closed the Book and walked away.

I know a lot of people who feel like they were rescued from horrible lives because they found God. For them life would be completely meaningless and cruelly random if it weren’t for God making everything right and loving them. I respect that. I miss that sense of knowing. I miss that sense of being connected. I don’t want to live what’s left of my life like I did during my 15-year of random wandering. I’ve learned so much, it’d be a shame for it all to be lost because it’s gone unshared and unremembered. There’s still something left undone.

Maybe the verses aren’t about some quid pro quo relationship with the Divine expressed with gifts of fishes or stones. Maybe the verses aren’t about a big buddy in the sky who wants to spoil you. Maybe it’s all meant to be an allegory about being loved and being connected to something greater than ones self. Maybe it was enough that I was loved and that in those moments I saw into Eternity, that I’m one of these weirdos who can take simple human contact and see something bigger, something that makes thoughts of entitlement feel like immature children complaining about fish and stones.

Sources:
image: Dollar sign, Microsoft.com/clipart

image: The stark finger of God by altemark. http://www.flickr.com/photos/altemark/46732233/ retrieved on 3/5/2010.

image: heart candle by joe bustillos. http://joebustillos.com/images/heartcandle.jpg retrieved on 3/5/2010

YouTube video: Sheryl Crow – Letter To God – Live. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2dwWHCc2Ak retrieved on 3/5/2010

In Bad Faith, Part 6: Is Your God a Tribal Strawman?

Had I been raised in a different community on a different spot on the globe than the language of my experiences, how I would have interpreted my experiences, would have been different. Had I not had my first experiences during the “Jesus People Movement” in Southern California in the mid-1970s then the direction of my life might have been entirely different. Instead of being a Religious Studies major at Loyola Marymount and then getting a BA in Biblical Studies at Biola University, I might have joined a monastery in Europe or Asia or entered into training to become a Mullah or Rabbi in the Middle East. I wonder, if I had taken those other paths, would those traditions have allowed me to examine their early tribal heritage and eventually find fault with systems of interpretation that don’t hold up to modern scrutiny. I guess I’ll never know. But what I do know is that, experiences not withstanding, I cannot faithfully recite any of the creeds I’ve known without massive mental re-editing. So it would seem that once I moved from “mysterium tremendum et fascinans” to interpretation or human understanding something or perhaps everything got lost in translation.

One of the beauties of Faith is that it tends to wrap all of the difficulties of life into one little package and say that all you have to do is “X” and all of these things will go away. When I was a teenager that was a life-saving moment because nothing made sense and everything I wanted to do was inconsistent with the beliefs I’d been raised with. And then, thirty-years later, when my heart was being completely broken, this divine love seemed to break through and offered me meaning and purpose. Those were difficult, life changing days. But as soon as I went from experience to interpretation it was back to nothing but difficulty, complications and failure. It was as if someone had said to me, “The good news is that Jesus loves you and has a plan for your life, the bad news is that you are still you.” Thanks. So I tussle between my thirst for understanding and rationalism and my experiences of oneness and connection.

Some time ago my brother and his late-wife were socializing with their Episcopalian priest when the priest commented to my brother, something about the difficulty of bridging the gap between modern life and Faith. My brother quipped, isn’t that the sign of greater intelligence and faith, to be able to live with the ambiguity of unanswered questions? My brother has lived a somewhat similar circuitous life of faith and rationalism. I love my brother dearly, and I’m sure that he can balance the ambiguity between the faith we were raised with and the modern contradictions we run into daily, but I’ve already spent 15-years going around saying “I don’t know” when it comes to issues of Faith. More to the point, and perhaps in spirit of his response, maybe the problem is that there are no simple answers. Or maybe there’s only a problem if one insists on a vision of God who plays favorites and orders one tribal community to commit genocide against another tribe, a God who would have a father kill his son to prove his faithfulness, a God who would require the murder of an innocent man to fulfill his need for justice. Or, like Bart Erhman‘s professor at Princeton remarked, maybe the biblical writer(s) got it (all) wrong.

When I heard religious scholar, Karen Armstrong, say in her NPR interview, that it’s a shame in our modern era that our theology is stuck in the dark ages, I had to hear more. During the interview she quipped that Dawkins’ attack on “old man in the sky” notions of God was a bit unfair, in that not all religious people hold to that view of God. But she admits that the discussion needs to be taken to a higher level where the central issues of compassion, connectedness and transcendence are not only emphasized but acted upon. If this former-nun can bring together Jews, Muslims and for god’s sake Anglicans, then maybe there’s still hope for this disenfranchised former-Jesus-freak.

NPR Fresh Air interview of Karen Armstrong Builds A “Case for God”

Sources:

flickr image: IMG_4743 by beggs. http://www.flickr.com/photos/beggs/88809549/ retrieved on 2/13/2010

YouTube video: Fallen by Sarah McLachlan. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jqps9ZdMxs0 retrieved on 2/13/2010

NPR/Fresh Air Interview of Karen Armstrong. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112968197 retrieved on 2/13/2010

The Idea of the Holy by Rudolf Otto. Available at Amazon.com

The Case for God by Karen Armstrong. Available at Amazon.com

Conversely, I love that, for the fundamental or conservative Christian, the answer to every problem faced by us is to “give it up to Jesus.” Lost your job? Give it up to Jesus! Stuck in a rotten marriage? Give it up to Jesus! Need a new car? Give it up to Jesus! It’s a powerful message, especially if you’re a teenager or a drug addict looking to leave that lifestyle. But, for all of us in between, there still seems to be something missing.

In Bad Faith, Part 5: What’s Missing?

Ironically, one of the mistakes that I made as a young Christian adult was to close off my emotions and try to be more logical because my faith told me that one can’t trust emotions. Yeah, that approach didn’t work so well for Mr. Spoke, I don’t know why I thought it’d turn out any better for moi. I tried to be logical and I wasn’t any fun to live with. Just ask my ex-wife. Now, I know that Dawkins isn’t advocating a logic-only/emotionless lifestyle, but there’s a kind of delusion to entertain the idea that human beings are going to be “logical” and “scientific” when it comes to the bigger issues in life or even in ones day to day existence. I think the fictional character, Geordi, in ST: TNG, said it best when he said that we humans go with our “gut” so much because we almost never have enough data to make the decisions that we need to make.

While it’s probably a bad sign when one is taking life-advice from fictional characters, It’s worse to pursue a lifestyle that forces one to have a binary either/or approach where one restricts oneself to either logic or emotionalism. I have to say that I’ve been turned off by the hubris I’ve seen in some skeptics when they act as if they do have all of the answers. Granted this malady is certainly not limited to skeptics, but anyone who confesses to have a scientific approach to living must begin by acknowledging that what one “knows” is a very small fragment of what can be known. Thus one should have a humble appreciation and sympathy for those who have chosen to “know” our existence using a different set of assumptions.

I find it interesting that the Christian begins with an assumption about the meaning behind existence and then interprets everything accordingly, while the skeptic begins with an assumption about the method of understanding existence and then fills in the gaps from there. I feel like the Christian has to be willing, on some level, to question the system when the evidence proves contrary and the Skeptic has to refrain from assuming that they have all of the relevant data. We all have to begin by understanding that we do not have the complete picture and that we may never have the complete picture. And so, there has to be room for differing views.

In Bad Faith, Part 4: The Evil Media

What both the Left and Right seem to forget is that the Media, especially in the form of the movie industry, is a form of banking, and it will do whatever it thinks will make money for it’s investors. Period. It rarely leads and often plays both sides of the issues because it needs to draw attention to itself, not to change things but to make money. The Media is not a perfect reflection of our culture, remember it’s first responsibility is not to reflect Reality, but to make money. And this “bottom line” mentality is not limited to the movie industry but, sadly, has become a big part of the News Industry too. Journalism has felt the pressure to sell it’s wares. We may think of Journalism as a service, but it’s a business. This is not to say that Journalism has abandoned the principles of Objectivity, but it’s more of an ideal, like how Americans try to live up to our Constitution, Bill of Rights and Pledge of Allegiance. Journalism believes in Objectivity, in part, because it’s business model requires a certain level of trust. No trust, no sales. So, at it’s core the News & Media industries are neither Left or Right. They can’t afford to be. They will follow the interests of their audiences, Left or Right, but the commitment isn’t to the politics but to the business of making money. The Media decision-makers are not pushing any position except the one that keeps them viable and better yet, more than viable.

Add to all of this, one of the dangers of our Internet era is that, just as much as we have the possibility to get our news and information from world-wide and culturally diverse sources, it’s just as likely that we will choose only sources that we agree with, creating a kind of echo chamber of information. This is the unintended result of the combination user-selected news/media feeds with user-created journalism. What does this have to do with God and Faith? Well, today it is possible to completely blanket oneself 24/7 with whatever message one wants to hear and completely blank out anything that one doesn’t agree with. For many there’s no problem with this picture except for the part where one might want or need to interact with someone not from ones own media bubble. For Christians we call that the Great Commission. For the Secularist, there is a curiosity to understand our fellow-person (especially if they don’t agree or understand us). So, how do you do that if the other person is not from your media bubble? Is there even a common media language left that you can use to reach this other person?

So, the Media is neither Left or Right. It’s a business that wants to stay in business so it’s going to be careful not to offend what it perceives to be its audience. You don’t like what’s on the air you now have at least three choices: change the channel/stream, turn the thing off, or make your own news/media organization. By the way, according to the film’s official website the film opened in limited release this past Friday, January 22, 2010. At the bottom of this entry I’ve embedded the film’s trailer and an NPR/Fresh Air interview of the Randal Keynes, the author of the book  the film is based on.

NPR Fresh Air Interview: Randal Keynes: When Darwin Is In Your Family Tree:

Sources:
* Movie poster: Creation: The True Story of Charles Darwin. http://www.creationthemovie.com/ retrieved on 1/26/2010

* Charles Darwin film ‘too controversial for religious America’ by By Anita Singh. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/6173399/Charles-Darwin-film-too-controversial-for-religious-America.html retrieved on 1/25/2010

* Image: Freedom of the Press poster by Publish! Magazine (nd).

* YouTube: ‘Creation’ Trailer. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BREvUKpZTeU retrieved on 1/26/2010.

* Randal Keynes: When Darwin Is In Your Family Tree. Fresh Air from WHYY. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122778363 retrieved on 1/25/2010

In Bad Faith, Part 3: Franky Schaeffer, Son of “Slippery Slide” Comes Clean

One of my favorite Fuller Seminary professors, Colin Brown, commented once that he didn’t think that Francis Scheaffer (Sr) read any of Kierkegaard in the original languages. Academic put-down! The Schaeffers represented a huge line in the sand between True Biblical Christianity and the various forces of liberalism, academia and secularism. After reading one of Franky’s books in the 80s I recognized that I wasn’t on the “right” side of the divide. I was too much of a rationalist, situational-ethicist and intellectual. I loved the Bible but I also recognized the cultural-historical place it came from (hint: it wasn’t Heaven). Slippery slope, indeed.

So all these decades later it turns out that all the rhetoric was mostly a sham promoted by the Christian Right, to the point that even Franky eventually couldn’t tolerate and left. What I really loved about the interview was that this was a story about Idealism, human foibles, bending the “Truth.” The forces the Schaeffers represented created a conflict that I’ve spent a lifetime contending with. It’s good to know that I’m not the only one scarred by the experience. I love the comment Franky makes during the interview when he’s asked why he hasn’t gone all the way to Atheist. He says that the patterns of his life are such that the first thing he’d do would be to pray to God to help him be a better Atheist. So human.

Sources:
Pro-Life — And In Favor Of Keeping Abortion Legal by Frank Schaeffer - NPR Fresh Air Interview. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=97998654 retrieved 1/9/2010.

In Bad Faith, Part 2: Born this Way? or This is Your Brain on God

I don’t think that I ever shared these thoughts with my fellow-believers. I just assumed that those in the midst of the experience probably didn’t analyze the phenomenon beyond a few Bible passages and whether the practice was accepted or rejected by their church. Then many years later I saw a documentary TV program where scientists were mapping the brain, using scans that looked for elevated brain activity. They found that persons in deep meditation or prayer showed elevated activity in the Temporal lobe. From what I remember, the pattern of activity was similar to those who reported stories of alien abduction. They were able to induce the “Alien” experiences in some test subjects by transmitting the pattern instead of recording it. Then one scientist, an atheist, thought that he might “see” what the religious participants in the experiment had experienced if he also used the recording harness to transmit the “religious” patterns to his brain. The scientist saw and felt nothing. I wasn’t too surprised, but it wasn’t because of any “God” thing. It might have been that his brain was just not wired to understand the “language” of religious experience that had been recorded in the experiment. According to a recent article in Ars Technica, it might indeed be something lost in translation that’s individual to everyone’s brains.

Previous studies were looking to see if there were particular areas in the brain related to religious experiences. According to the Ars article, more recent studies, conducted by Dimitrios Kapogiannis from the National Institute on Aging, didn’t find “God” areas of the brain but did find neural pathways associated to social cognitive processing that were not unique to religion. So what does this mean for the Faithful, or for the Skeptics? According to Ars Technica, it means that religion and religious experience could be experimentally addressed and studied. Thus, one of Dawkin’s demands from his book, The God Delusion, seems closer to realization: that religion can no longer claim to be entirely outside the realm of scientific inquiry. Whatever rational systems of thinking that we apply to weather, biology, physics, etc., can and should now be applied to religious experience.

The Ars article goes on to discuss how some scientists are looking at the possible connection between the emergence of language and the development of religion. Additionally, scientists are looking at the capacity that some have for intimate relationships and how this might be related to how some feel “close to God.” Conversely, they are also looking into how some individuals’ inability to form close relationships may be related to how some have no sense of there being an “Other” out there.

Taken to its logical conclusions, it might be determined that having no sense of the Divine is no different than being red/green blind. Or for the skeptics, having a sense of the divine is just like having Phantom Limb Syndrome. Thus, while science will be able to determine if an individual’s experience is “real,” two things have not been determined. One is causality: do some people have these neural pathways because they are born that way, or were these pathways developed because of their early experiences? The other thing is that brain evidence that one feels close to God neither confirms nor denies that God is, in fact, communing with the one wearing the scanning harness.

Geovanny Verdezoto can't handle his success Heartbroken young man on floor by hyperscholar

So, where does this leave us? We can see that something “real” is happening in the brains of those having religious experiences and that opens the door for Science to investigate Religion. Note that on a purely scientific level there are still a number of limits to what Science can determine if one sticks to the scientific data. There are some parallels here between this course of study and when higher critical theory was applied to Biblical Studies. The “devotional” was striped away and strenuous literary, historical and cultural research was (and still is) conducted. Unfortunately, in the long run the Faithful abandoned higher Biblical criticism to the “liberals” and academics and only the academics cared about advances being made in literary Biblical criticism (except when Erhman publishes a popular culture friendly book pointing out the blazing holes in Biblical Innerancy).

Again, where does this leave us? Well, one can’t “prove” delusion, so the skeptics need to dial it back a bit. Science that’s interested in measurable data can only say when someone is sincere about their experiences, period (I’d love to see a “sincerity readout” on the tel-evangelists, though I’m sure part of their “art” is convincing themselves about their own importance and relationship with the Divine). Second, on the other side, the faithful aren’t interested in anything that doesn’t “prove” already established beliefs, so there’s little room for real dialog here. Finally, ones receptivity toward awareness of the “Other” doesn’t seem to be universal which should change the idea that the gospel is open to everyone. At the same time this receptivity does seem to exist, whether via early experiences or “wiring” for some of us. So….

by Gastev”]

bios [bible

To be continued…

Sources:

Finding the fear and love of God inside the brain by Jeremy Jacquot for Ars Technica http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2009/10/finding-the-fear-and-love-of-god-inside-the-brain.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss retrieved 1/9/2010

image: 2008_nidcd-brain. NIH. http://www.nih.gov/about/almanac/images/2008photos/2008_nidcd_brain_hi.jpg retrieved 1/9/2010.

image: Geovanny Verdezoto can’t handle his success Heartbroken young man on floor by hyperscholar http://www.flickr.com/photos/hypertypos/3164306380/ retrieved 1/9/2010.

image: bios [bible] by Gastev. http://www.flickr.com/photos/gastev/2174504149/ retrieved on 1/9/2010.

In Bad Faith, Part 1: It’s the Accent, Isn’t It?

My brother warned me against reading this book unless I was serious about examining my faith. I can only imagine how confusing my circuitous route into and out of and then back into and later out of Faith must appear to my sibling(s). I mean, given that I went against my parents’ wishes and switched from Catholic Loyola Marymount University to Fundamentalist Protestant Biola University, and instead of getting something practical like a B.A. in Engineering I got one in Biblical Studies. This was definitely something more important going on here than a passing adolescent fad. But having gone from highly academic Loyola to wanting-to-be-more-academic Biola (in the early 80s) I learned to approach my Faith and the Bible from a more scientific/academic approach than just a devotional approach. Two of my favorite books from this era were Robert Alter’s The Art Of Biblical Narrative and Robert Mapes Anderson’s Vision of the Disinherited: The Making of American Pentecostalism. So there was always some danger that I was susceptible to things a little beyond the safe confines of devotional reading.

Fast forward twenty-eight years, divorced twenty-five years, failed MA in Theology from Fuller Seminary. second BA in communications/journalism, teaching credential, MA in Educational Technology, failed Ed.D in Educational Technology, re-located from Southern California to Central Florida, I decided against jumping back into the church thing. I needed to find some balance between my experiences of faith and the academic/scientific part of my personality. That’s when I decided to listen to Richard Dawkin’s The God Delusion. Well, actually I watched the TED video first and came away with the sense that this quiet-spoken Englishman could probably get away with almost anything because of our American stereotype that causes us to assume that anyone with said accent is obviously more intelligent than we are. Damn.

The most memorable part of the beginning of the book is the idea/quote, “we didn’t know we had a choice,” and Dawkins wanting to make the case that not believing in God isn’t something to be endured in silence. What follows is a tour de force with side trips to Einstein’s God and whether Science can say anything about Religion. The big idea of the book is that Religion is a vestigial personal/cultural remnant that’s related to the childhood belief in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. Whereas we gave up on the belief in Santa and the Tooth Fairy when we grew up from childhood, we persist in our adult years in a belief in an “Old Man” in Heaven who knows our every thoughts and has a plan for our lives. This isn’t to equate Religion with belief in Santa, it’s just that they seem to serve the same purpose and come from the same part of the human psyche, according to Dawkins.

Dawkins also wrote about his wonderful relationship with his Anglican pastor/headmaster and how that helped him feel free to explore his belief in Science and not see a lack of faith in God as if he was missing something. I have to note that there is a real cultural divide between this educated Brit’s take on Religion and my experience with American Christianity. This fact was brought home to me in a recent conversation with a coworker who was raised in the UK when the coworker commented about how he felt like the reading of Genesis by the Apollo 8 astronauts in 1968 was some kind of put on. He couldn’t see how these astronauts/scientists could seriously be reading from the Bible without a sneer on their faces or in their hearts. To which I have to say that one should not underestimate how deep the religious feelings are among Americans and, contrary to one of Dawkin’s claims, this phenomenon is no respecter of intelligence. There’s most definitely a political efficacy to the practice of Religion in the U.S. (note that there are no self-proclaimed Atheists in the U.S. Senate), but scratch under the surface and one is reminded that this continent was settled by religious refugees.

Thus, Dawkins’ solution, that we refrain from indoctrinating our children with Religion, is just plain silly to an American audience who may fully disregard their religious tenets eight-days a week, but will fully and sometimes violently defend their right to pass on their belief system to the next generation. In fact I’ve seen more than my fair share of marginal Christians reclaim their faith with the arrival of children. One might wonder if they’re not doing this because that’s how they were raised, but that’s kind of how humans do most things and is not limited to religious indoctrination.

So, Dawkins’ take is that given how out of step most religious foundations are with modern life, practitioners must be ignoring the obvious contradictions in order to maintain their belief in the wise old man in the sky. In a word, they are deluding themselves. Alas, to the faithful his words, should one bother to read all the way through this tome, won’t hit home. The skeptic/atheist will feel reaffirmed. But what about the fence-sitter, the person trying to balance a religious upbringing with life in our modern world?

I appreciate Dawkins’ experiences and thought processes. I don’t think that he has a real understanding on my particular journey. He might be right that it was my upbringing that influenced me to interpret the narrative of my life to include god. But given the enduring strength of this vestigial delusion, maybe this is more than a cultural hold-over, more than a relic mistake handed off from father to son. Maybe it’s something that we’re born with.

To Be Continued…

Having attended four private Christian universities my impression has been that there are very smart people on both side of the discussion. In fact, in the movie, Maher expressed frustration when addressing the “Truckers for Jesus” gathering that they appear to be intelligent gentlemen, but he couldn’t reconcile that with how they could believe in a literal talking snake from the Expulsion from Eden narrative in the book of Genesis. Looking for a different take on this possible conflict between rationalism and religion, I explored a book titled, “Did The Greeks Believe In Their Myths,” by Paul Veyne (1988), professor of Roman history at the University of France.

When I began this exploration I assumed a basic Western point of view, being that before the Renaissance and the following Age of Reason and Science, that the centers for learning, philosophy, government and culture were interpreted through religion and faith. Given this general understanding one might also be led to assume that the Ancients were somehow less intelligent than modern men. Stone and bronze tools versus lasers and computer-precision tools, astrology versus astrophysics, mythology versus historical critical analysis, one might see some credence to this sense of “less intelligent.” Of course all of this comes crashing down when one considers the surviving record left behind by Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, Galen the physician and the obvious brilliance of the whole chorus of ancient voices. So how did these brilliant thinkers deal with the religion and mythology of their day? For some reason the lyrics, “Same as it ever was” runs through my mind. Same as it ever was indeed, but Veyne would point out some noted exceptions.

In the opening chapters of his book Veyne (1988) noted several factors that need to be taken into consideration when attempting to consult with the Ancients. The first concept that may seem foreign to modern historians and academicians was that before the modern era, ancient historians and writers felt that it undermined their credibility if they cited sources for their stories. Veyne noted, as late as 1560 C.E., French scholar, Estienne Pasquier, was criticized for including footnotes in his writings (p. 5):

“… For the ancient Greeks, historical truth was a vulgate authenticated by consensus over the ages. This consensus sanctioned the truth as it sanctioned the reputation of those writers held to be classical or even, I imagine, the tradition of the Church. Far from having to establish the truth by means of references, Pasquier should have waited to be recognized as an authentic text himself. By putting his notes at the bottom of the page, by furnishing proofs as the jurists do, he indiscreetly sought to force the consensus of posterity concerning his work.” (p. 6)

So Pasquier’s use of footnotes ran contrary to the idea that he should have waited for his work to be accepted because he himself would be proven over time to be a valid source. Veyne compared this with the modern practice of trusting journalists without requiring them to reveal their informants. The idea of citing sources, according to Veyne, didn’t come from ancient historians but from judicial practice where trial proceedings would be cited or from theological controversies where the Scriptures were referenced. But in the case of the writings of ancient historians, which were often just the collections of local folklore gathered during the writers’ travels, Veyne quipped, “It would be futile to include the list of informants. Who would check them?” (p. 9)

Another practice that may run contrary to modern thinking was that these ancient stories were always connected with real place-names and recognizable historical figures. Mount Olympus was a real place and the locations of the graves or shrines of legendary persons were universal across the ancient world. In fact there seemed to have been an imperative that there be a story or legend behind the founding of any community generally ascribed to some legendary persons for whom the town, city or region was named.

“Indeed, what was strange in this local historiography was that is was reduced to question of origins. It did not tell of the life of the city, its collective memories or great moments. It was enough to know when and how the city had been founded. Once created, the city had only to live its life, which could be presumed to be comparable to what city life can be and which would be what it could be. It was not important. Once the historian had narrated its foundations, the city was fixed in space and time; it had its identity card.” p. 77

Thus, ascertaining the “where” of a story was completely disconnected from a judgment of “truth.” The historian Heroditus, wrote, “My business is to record what people say; but I am by no means bound to believe it” (p. 12). Where this trips up modern historians is that it’s a bit of a two-edge sword. Modern historians are used to starting with the place and date to begin the investigation. But if the tale seems to clearly be “mythical” the tendency has been to throw out the whole thing: the date, place and event. For example, historians had long dismissed the Trojan War as described by Homer, and generally threw out the place and the tale. But all of this was thrown into confusion when Heinrich Schliemann declared that he’d found the ancient city of Troy in the 1870s. So, the connection with a specific place was never part of the determination of “truth,” it’s just the way stories were told. Question then becomes whether the writers of the biblical narrative, who were contemporaries, would have operated with the same understanding of place-names. We’ll pick this thread up a bit further in this essay. Suffice it so say that unlike modern historians, establishing a story with a very real place-name was never used as a validating factor. Now as to the use of the question of “When” which generally followed the “Where” question, well, that’s another place where modern historians differ from ancient writers.

When modern readers see the words, “Once upon a time,” they automatically think, “fable, myth, fiction, not-true.” Journalists begin their investigations with the five W’s: who, what, where, when and why and if the “when” cannot be reasonably determined then the whole story is thrown out. Ancient writers, however, understood that by definition these stories took place in a time before the current “mundane” time. Again, the Ancients disconnected “when” from any verification of “truth.” And to them it seemed perfectly logical and rational to accept this “non-time” for the same reasons that modern historians would reject the entire story.

Veyne noted,

“These legendary worlds were accepted as true in the sense that they were not doubted, but they were not accepted the way that everyday reality is. For the faithful, the lives of the martyrs were filled with marvels situated in an ageless past, defined only in that it was earlier, outside of, and different from the present. It was the “time of the pagans.” (p. 17-18)

This reminds me of the phrase, “In those days,” used in the early chapters of the Book of Genesis and frequently in the Book of Judges in the Hebrew Old Testament. Using this idea of “otherness” used by contemporary ancient writers, one can guess that the idea is not only meant to designate things that happened a long time ago, but things that happened in a time that was foreign to this time. Veyne paraphrased Epicurus as writing that “men of olden times, more vigorous than those of today, had eyes good enough to see the gods in broad daylight, while now we can manage to capture only the emissions of their atoms through the channel of dreams.” (p. 99)

So, Time is useless as a measure of validity, just as determining “Where” these stories took place was treated as part of the places’ “history” in an origin-story fashion, neither confirming nor denying the validity of these stories. It’s this kind of circular reasoning that prompted Maher, In the movie Religulous, to express frustration when speaking with Francis Collins, a scientist, evangelical Christian and former director of the Human Genome Project. Collins quipped to Maher that his problem was that Maher was asking the Bible to hold to a level of historical veracity that no book from that era could stand up to. One might think that Maher might have understood some of this when he interviewed Father George Coyne, former director of the Vatican Observatory, during which Coyne pointed out (with a great chart) that religion and the Bible, more specifically, spoke for the era from roughly 2,000 B.C.E. to approximately 400 C.E. and that science has held rein over the past 400 to 500 years. I’m not entirely sure why Coyne felt that religion lost hold so early, but it might have had something to do with the formalizing of the Canon of Scripture at the Council of Nicea. But the point seemed clear that there was a wide gulf between the era of religion and the era of science and that the only conflict seemed to be when people tried to force one to speak on the other. In essence, the writers of the Bible knew nothing about the scientific method and used the conventions of storytelling of the time and that this reflected the origins of these stories beginning as an oral history. Equally, there are limits to Science if one is strict in holding to the scientific method and observational query. Just as the Ancients’ use of time and place, Maher should have understood that just because Dr. Andrew Newberg, research neuroscientist from the University of Pennsylvania, can make map and measure brain activity of people in various religious states including Glossolalia, this neither validates nor invalidates the participants’ experiences or interpretation of said experiences.

Toward the end of my Bachelor’s degree program in Biblical Studies at Biola University in 1981 I vaguely remember a few students and professors talking about something called a Midrash, that doesn’t seem to follow the definition I found in Wikipedia. What I remember was this had something to do with the kind of storytelling Jesus used in his parables where the message or emotional impact of the story held precedence over the “historical” elements of the story. Not that the storyteller would “lie” about the facts of the story, but that everyone understood that the point of the story was all that really mattered. Were there four fish and two loaves of bread or seven loaves and no fish? Who cares, the point is that the whole crowd got fed. This is hardly a scientific approach, but then it shouldn’t be, given that the scientific method won’t hold sway for more than a thousand years from the closing of Scripture and formalization of the canon of Scripture around the Council of Nicea in 325 C.E. So, should it be surprising at all that the writers of the Old and New Testament used storytelling methods that were completely consistent with storytelling around the Mediterranean Sea during that era?

While conducting research for this essay I happened upon a 2006 History Channel documentary by Jewish Canadian filmmaker Simcha Jacobovici and the producer/director James Cameron, called “Exodus Decoded.” Over the course of the 90-minute documentary, heavy in computer-generated visualizations, Jacobovici strings together the biblical story of the Exodus of the Jews from Egypt and connects the ten plagues described in the narrative with the destruction of Minoan island of Thera (now called Satorini) around 1,500 B.C.E. An undated inscription of the word “El” in an Egyptian mine, grave stones marking wealthy tombs and an ornament found in Mycenae are employed as scientific evidence that the expulsion of the Hyksos from Egypt was really about the Exodus narrative depicted in the Old Testament. The presentation is powerful and the production values are epic right down to animating the Mycenae stele to depict Egyptian chariots chasing the Hebrews and then getting over-turned during the Red Sea crossing. Too bad scholars connected with the Minoan exhibition say that the stones depict a lion hunt and that the first stone is not included or “edited” in the CG animation to show Jacobovici’s hypothesis. After reading an extensive review of the documentary by Pepperdine professor of Religion, Chris Heard on his website, Haggaion, one has to wonder at what point did Jacobovici decide to depart from the scientific method in favor of producing a slick documentary. For those who are serious about the message of the Exodus on a spiritual and academic level, how much more damage is done by a well-crafted documentary that doesn’t follow it’s own claim to be evidence based? This is not to say that science can’t be used to establish an historical basis for Old and New Testament narratives. But like Dr. Newberg’s flashing lights or energy-spikes in the neural readings, proving that there was a Moses or David or giant named Goliath doesn’t validate (or invalidate) the messages of these narratives.

So what did Veyne’s intellectual Greeks do about their own myths? Well, they did what today’s intellectual religious conservatives do: they did all kinds of mental gymnastics depending on the venue and problem they were addressing. The physician Galen, when speaking as a scholar, discounted things that could not be proven writing, “if the theorem is unrealizable, in the manner of the following statement, The centaur’s bile relieves apoplexy, it is useless because it escapes our apperception.” But when trying to win over new followers and disciples he’s willing to speak the language of the believers writing that the origin of Greek medicine was taught by Apollo to his son Asclepius. (p. 55) They understood the power of Myth in terms of social and political conventions that needed to be maintained for society to function (p. 80). They might hold to the allegorical/point-of-the-story (“Midrash”?) aspect of the stories. They might even entertain a nostalgic attitude for a Golden Age that doesn’t intersect their own non-mythical existence. But for the most part belief in the magical/mythical parts of the stories was also like today’s attitude that it’s okay for little children to believe in Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny, but anyone with any intelligence knows that these stories just aren’t true. Stories about a warrior making the sun stand still, or conquering people with a magic box, people living to be nine-hundred-years-old would have probably gotten the same “only for kids” label.

Come to think of it, perhaps the genesis of this conflict between belief and intellectualism took hold with those who insisted that the old stories, the old miracles were not something only for that time before now but are part of the Now. An expectation changed from faith and religion being a social construction or convention to being a personal relationship with the divine (which was still a social construction/convention). And because we humans are so good at pattern recognition and invention we can easily see the invisible hand of the power of everything at work in small and great ways in our lives. Of course it does help that by definition this invisible hand works in ways that are entirely beyond our capacity to fathom, there’s no real need to explain or understand anything that might appear to be inconsistent with our dearly held convictions.

On the other extreme, I’m amazed when I encounter the arrogance of some intellectuals who believe that they have a superior understanding of reality while at the same time every academic field, from medicine to astronomy to cosmology to genetics to history are all going through unprecedented revolutions where last year’s textbook and theories are having to be continually thrown out due to new discoveries. My thoughts are that in between what is understood and what is not understood there might be room for an intelligence that, just like Epicurus opined, operates just beyond our limited field of vision and visits us in our dreams. Just don’t expect me to believe in talking snakes or cheap miracle workers who seem to always be in need of donations.

References
* clipart from http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/clipart/default.aspx
* Heard, Chris (2007). Exodus Decoded. Higgaion. Retrieved 04/20/2009 from http://www.heardworld.com/higgaion/?cat=86
* Maher, Bill (2008). Religulous. Thousand Words. Retireved 04/20/2009 from http://www.religulousmovie.net/
* Veyne, Paul (1988). Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths: An Essay on the Constitutive Imagination. Paula Wissing, translator. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
* Exodus Decoded. Wikipedia. Retireved 04/20/2009 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exodus_Decoded
* Religulous. Wikipedia. Retireved 04/20/2009 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religulous

love tattoo by Jenn_Jenn (cc)

The ideal of love is it’s unconditional nature. The closest we usually come to that kind of love is the love between a parent and her child. But even that love has it’s limits, it’s conditions. I know that I’ve come up against my own limitations with a love that I thought was permanent and eternal. I thought I saw the face of God with this love and poured all that I had into it. But I was wrong. Time and trust were broken and I had to walk away. So much for the face of God.

I’m looking for a hard headed woman,
One who’ll take me for myself
And if I find my hard headed woman
I won’t need nobody else, no no no.
- “Hard Headed Woman” by Cat Stevens

I found a level of intimacy that I had never dreamed existed. The face of God. I was inspired to be my best self, not wanting to hide any part of myself but to bring all of it into full expression and creativity. Wherever I thought I lacked I set about to push through to be better, to be the best me because I was renewed by this powerful connection and boundless intimacy. Fearless, complete, committed, doubt-free, a self that I hadn’t seen in over a decade came into existence. A love of my music that had lain silent and had been a forgotten memory rose in me. I saw, I felt, I touched, I tasted, I couldn’t get enough. I became part of something much bigger than myself. The face of God. My world changed. I changed. Then I waited. And waited some more. I waited longer than I ever imagined I was capable of waiting.

He came from somewhere in her long ago,
the sentimental fool don’t see,
tryin’ hard to re-create what had yet to be created
once in her life.
She musters a smile for his nostalgic tale,
never coming near what he wanted to say,
only to realize it never really was.
- “What a Fool Believes” by Michael McDonald

Yeah, I knew better. I understood the circumstances. It all made sense. Clearly it wasn’t what I thought it was. It had been our special secret for so long but in the light of day it was something she’d rather no one else ever knew about. I wanted to shout about it from the mountain tops and she was pained to even acknowledge that i had been a college friend. How could something so powerful be so much the creation of my own head, a delusion that I never asked for? And if that were true, then did I really see the face of God or was that all wishful thinking too?

Hello. How are you?
Have you been alright, through all those lonely lonely lonely lonely lonely nights
That’s what I’d say. I’d tell you everything
If you’d pick up that telephone yeah
Hey. How you feelin?
Are you still the same?
Don’t you realize the things we did, we did, were all for real, not a dream?
I just can’t believe
They’ve all faded out of view yeah yeah
- “Telephone Line” by ELO

I wonder. I never expected for it to happen when it did. Does this mean that if some lovely with a dainty cross necklace smiles at me that I can go back to believing in the Man behind the curtain? Somehow that seems twisted. But there I was a few mornings ago, looking through the profile of one lovely e-harmonette, and the thought struck me that if this were “the one” than would I again become best friends with the Man behind the curtain? I mean, we stopped talking because for all of those years that I spent waiting I was hearing that He knows what I want before I do and wants to give that to me and the fact that it wasn’t happening must mean that A) I’m doing something wrong, B) she’s not “the one, C) Not now, or D) Any combination of A, B, or C. Eventually I began to wonder that it might be: E) there is no Man behind the Curtain.

The best proof of love is trust by dopesmuglar

And as much as I’ve spent the past year living like it’s option E, there is this part of me that needs for there to be someone there to talk to in the darkness of my own soul. At the same time, even if I were to be blessed with the mate of my dreams, how do I trust someone who stood by while my heart was slowly broken and brought to this place of doubt? I’m willing to acknowledge that I got it all wrong but where do I find the place of trust again? Needless to say, none of this is going to be attractive to anyone looking for a Christ-led home and looking for someone to love them like Christ loved the Church. Yeah. I understand the analogy but I’m not even going to pretend to live up to that expectation. I have the hair and the beard, but that’s pretty much the extent of it. Funny thing is, someone who hasn’t gone through this “intimate faith” experience or doesn’t believe in anything doesn’t seem particularly attractive to me either. Alas, I seem to have conditions piled on conditions piled on conditions in my pursuit of unconditional love. Lord help us.

So long, I’ve been looking too hard, I’ve been waiting too long
Sometimes I don’t know what I will find, I only know it’s a matter of time
When you love someone, when you love someone
It feels so right, so warm and true, I need to know if you feel it too

Maybe I’m wrong, won’t you tell me if I’m coming on too strong
This heart of mine has been hurt before, this time I wanna be sure

I’ve been waiting for a girl like you to come into my life
I’ve been waiting for a girl like you, your loving will survive
I’ve been waiting for someone new to make me feel alive
Yeah, waiting for a girl like you to come into my life
- “Waiting for a Girl like You” by Foreigner

I can’t imagine what this means. Why would I bother installing this program? As much as it represents hundreds of dollars, I’ve certainly spent at least as much over the years just on beer (though that would be a hell of a lot of beer…). It’s not about the money. I mean, I’m 2,500 miles from everything I previously knew and I’m completely free to conduct my life however I choose. So at first I chose to not associate myself with any church or fellowship. Yet after five months I find that I cannot seem to ignore my previous spiritual experiences nor play the role of a real skeptical atheist. So what should I do about this? If anything, I’m feeling the need to “be real” and not spend another 15 years in the spiritual wilderness as I felt I had done from the time of my divorce until five years ago.

But at the same time I can’t see myself professing the Apostles’ Creed without editing it down to meaninglessness. Equally I can’t ignore the “Otherness” that I sense in my own thoughts with vague memories of a kind of spiritual intimacy that was perfectly at peace with ignoring all dogma and the entirely compromised lifestyle that I was living that was complete contradictory toward my faith’s traditions. I miss that, not the compromised part. I love the community that I’ve found with my coworkers, but there are even deeper places that I’ve shared with complete strangers I used to go to church with and I can’t seem to shake that drive in my life. And this pesky bible software reminds me of this part of my life.

Maybe this is something that will come into better clarity when I’ve found someone to intimately share the journey with. But even as I write these words I know that the tendency is to go in the opposite direction and devote less time and energy to finding center and more about managing life with the other. Damn. That was a nice thought, to share the journey with someone. Alas, my experience has been that one’s partner is either completely disinterested in spiritual things or is completely invested in one particular interpretation of dogma and would see my unwillingness to “sign up” with her interpretation as a weakness. Yeah, I don’t need that shit in my life. I guess with or without a partner this is my journey to embark on.

Thus, just as I am restoring data and deciding on what to include and what to exclude on this laptop, I’m also trying to determine what to include and exclude from my spiritual understanding. As long as it’s been taking me to do software re-install, it’s a hell of a lot easier to deal with than this spiritual quandary I seem to find myself in. But i’m just silly enough to believe that i will get a handle on it… and then do the next thing. jbb

Music: “I Wish I Was a Girl” by Counting Crows on the This Desert Life CD

In the past I’ve been accused of writing things in my blog that seemed to show no regard as to whether what I wrote might be hurtful to others and in some cases writing things with the intension to hurt. Truthfully I might have written things in my blog that I was so passionate about or overwhelmed over that I didn’t or couldn’t look too far beyond my angst to realize how some might take my venting. So, it seems odd to me, in my old age, that I’m so hesitant to work out my “faith issues” here in my blog…

On one level I don’t want my dad or my old church friends to visit these pages and be left with a head-shaking “that’s too bad” feeling about me. I don’t want them to think that I was anything less than completely sincere or genuine with my expressions of faith. At the same time, I’m not like some I’ve known who couldn’t reconcile their private and public lives and so lived in fear of being “discovered.” I guess the best that I can do is to be honest and continue to work through my issues and trust that those who genuinely have my best interests will give me room to explore my life’s path even when it heads in directions that they’d rather I didn’t follow. Anyway, besides being my usual busy self, this hesitancy is why I haven’t written as much in this category of my blog as I’ve wanted to. Having now covered this part of the conversation, I guess I can move on to the other stuff like musings on the wiring of my home network or whether I should buy an Amazon Kindle. Just kidding… kind’a. jbb

Music: Mr. Blue Sky by ELO from the All Over the World: The Very Best of ELO CD

Way back in Long Beach days when sister-in-law, Connie, heard that I was interested in going back to church she suggested a church that she heard was very open to all kinds of people (she knows me well). I resisted the suggestion, mostly because, for all of my liberal tendencies, I have limited respect for those who twist the Scriptures to their favor or seem to make it up as they go along. I know, talk about contradictions. I have the utmost respect and feel drawn to Biblical studies, but I know that I don’t fit with garden-variety Bible-thumpers. Add to that, I now live in the official Bible-Belt. Damn.

So, First Congregational Church of Winter Park (UCC), walking up to the nice traditional looking brick-building I passed some choir people in robes… okay, robes. Wow. Raised Roman Catholic on the West Coast, I remember robes but since then except for a brief stint with some conservative Presbyterians, not so much. On the inside of the church it was very much the nice conservative 125-year-old community church with a raised platform for the choir and pulpits, all painted white. It also happened to be World Communion Sunday, so I was ready for the tiny bit of bread and grape juice. Did I mention that this fellowship has been together for 125-years? And unlike other “older” congregations that I’ve visited this one was well attended by people of pretty much every age-group and a lot of little kids. It’s been my experience that one sign of a healthy congregation is how well the various age-groups are represented. So healthy but what’s with the robes?

Low church/High church – I’m struck by the “modern” approach to the bible juxtaposed by the extremely traditional social structure of the Sunday service, the robes, the choir, and the hymns. At the same time my bible-believing brethren from the Calvary Chapel/Vineyard Christian Fellowship branch of the family tree seem to be shrinking. I recognized after the demise of the Long Beach Vineyard church that this business of having a church based on a familiar brand name (“Calvary” or “Vineyard”) without full-on commitment to the neighborhood where the church is physically located is untenable. Also, because the business of building community is a very big one, it can’t be done by a part-time pastor who’s main function is the Sunday sermon.

So, I come from a tradition that goes for modern music and informal services but insists on strict/literal interpretations of the Bible. But today’s service at 1st Congregational Church was right out of 125-years ago in form and function, but underneath the exterior forms the leadership understands the Scriptures to be a human book and the church should be able to be more flexible when it comes to accepting more parts of the community. In an odd sort of way they believe that the world has changed since the times of the Apostles and the church should reflect that in terms of who is “permitted” to participate (oh, did I mention that there were several female “reverends” in today’s service?), but the forms of the church structure and certainly the Sunday service are entirely traditional. Also, though the leadership makes no bones about this human approach to scriptures, there seems no lessening in their belief in the message of Jesus and the gospel in changing people’s lives and justice in the world at large. Contrary to the propaganda of the Bible-only folks, these folks are committed to the Bible and the teachings of Jesus, they just see the texts themselves to be more human and more open to interpretation (at the same time wearing the robes and singing the songs from 125-years ago). This is all a very interesting to me. Admittedly, I have a bit of a problem with the outmoded forms, but I think that there is a real connection between maintaining an affinity to “Christianity” by maintaining their traditions while remaining “flexible” with the scriptures. Hmmm, based on this reasoning, I wonder if it’s enough for me to just maintain my Jesus-esque long hair and beard?… Life is funny. jbb

Because of my religious upbringing I translated my experience of the Holy in Christian terms and that drove me in the direction of digging much deeper into the traditions and texts, to the point of crossing over from my Catholic background to Fundamentalist Christianity and earning a BA in Biblical Studies from Biola University. But I never quite fit in the confines of Fundamentalist Christianity. I was too intellectual for my Calvary brethren and too “Holy Ghost” for the traditional Biola crowd. While never questioning the reality of my experiences with such things as “speaking in tongues,” I clearly saw the psychological aspects to the practice. For me the psychology of non-verbal utterances didn’t invalidate the spirituality. Yeah, the Christians I knew didn’t want to hear about the psychology and the Intellectuals thought it was all mumbo-jumbo. Then after Biola I went to Fuller and absolutely loved the academic/intellectual study but faced a growing irrelevancy because neither my wife or my church cared one wit about what I found fascinating. When the marriage dissolved, I couldn’t make a working whole of all of these parts of myself and decided to walk away from my religious heritage. Having crossed the religious divide several times along the way, I found no need to declare the previous system a Lie or go on at great length about it being “all wrong.” I just pretended that it didn’t exist and would only revisit it when I was feeling nostalgic and then I’d put on a Mark Heard or Sam Phillips CD. Why does my story always return to this part of my history? My guess is that one thing I should learn from those 15-years “away” is that I cannot simply just ignore this part of myself. Thus, the continuing interest in Das Heilige.

My counselor during my separation and divorce, a Christian counselor, Dr. Carpenter, warned that he thought that I had the kind of personality that I could convince myself of nearly anything moral or immoral. My thought about that was I never attempted to bend the Bible to my own preferences as I’d seen many a wayward Christian do. Thus, while I felt connected to it and felt like it was part of my moral compass, I also recognized that I didn’t agree with the Apostle Paul’s condemnation of homosexuals as a whole, for example. I recognize the destructive nature that unbridled illicit sexuality, hetero- or homosexuality, can have for communities, but in drawing the line in the sand as he has, the tendency has been to condemn the whole group and the warning of illicit behavior gets lost. And while we’re on the subject, I’m not so found of this, largely classical Greek notion, that I am a tripartite being (body, soul and spirit), I am more draw to believe that I am one whole entity, that my mind and soul are materially biological, that they came into being and developed after I was born and will cease when I biologically cease. Note that I most definitely believe that something deeper is going on here beyond mere chemical reactions (which in itself are pretty miraculous). But I cannot play this game about what effects me biologically doesn’t effect me mentally or spiritually (gnosticism), or that I’m somehow not connected to what goes on around me in the physical world. I thought that it was a central teaching of the Master that when the King returns if he sees that we’ve neglected or abused the world that he entrusted to us, that there would be no reward afterwards. And how did that teaching become stripped of it’s stewardship of our relationships to all living things and become just about making converts?

I have to add that I am concerned that my friends from my previous community, City Lights Church, or my lifelong friends going all the way back to the Jesus-People days, would be disheartened at my opening disagreeing with the Bible. One dear friend said, as a joke, that she felt that I’d been led astray 20-years ago when I exposed myself to all that liberal stuff when I was a theology student at Fuller Seminary. It concerns me that my meandering heart can cause discomfort for those whom I’ve been close to, those I’ve prayed with, served the community with and revealed my personal struggles with. But this is who I am. I wish sometimes that I could be like one of my best-friends from high school who has kept to the self same faith that we professed as 16-year-olds, 34-years ago. I’m not that child any longer, but I’m still the curious one who can easily get lost in the beat and repetition of a good song but also has fond memories of reading Kierkegaard and putting my own spin on the Book of Daniel while in seminary. So, right now I have my doubts that I will ever find a “fellowship” with whom I could really be myself while at the same time feeling like I need to apologize to those whom I’ve worked with over the past five-years. I know this is not what they expected or would want from me. One good part is that the story isn’t over. Who knows what might happen next. Damn, is this what my counselor warned about, as far as my personality being too… liquid? Fuck it, if that’s who I am, I’ll own up to it. Next stop, Buddhism… Just kidding (I hope!). JBB

Music: “Take Time” by Lenny Kravitz from his “5“ CD

BTW, just in case you are not familiar with the Onion News Network, this is a parody/comedy website. But that doesn’t dismiss the actual thoughts presented in this “dramatization” of a football team falling apart because one member of the team and then eventually the whole team succumbs to despair following an existential epiphany. The comment in the piece that the only choice they have left is suicide reminded me of a comment made by Bart Erhman in his book “God’s Problem.” …

Over the past year I’ve been going through my own “existential epiphany” and one thing that struck me from Erhman’s book was that his lose of Faith made him appreciate all the more the good things that he has in his life. Instead of falling apart because this is all there is to life, he wrote that he feels all the more thankful for every day that he has here and that he feels all the more responsible to do what he can do now to help those less fortunate because this is all we really have.

creative commons by Zero_666

That’s why I called Erhman a “Voice in the Wilderness” in a previous blog entry, I identified with his faith journey and found some hope that he has made the transition with his sense of purpose intact. And maybe that’s the difference at coming to this place as a teenager/young adult versus dealing with this as a fifty-year-old. Whereas the teenager is going to rage and make a big stink because “everything they told us is a lie,” the 50-year-old is going to feel nostalgic for the connections of those former years but is going to want to focus his energy to have the good constructive connections that are going to make the remaining years of this life “good ones.” So instead of holding up in a locker room and filling pages with rambling scrawls about the injustice of it all, I’d rather go to the local pub with a friend and have a beer and just talk about life. To quote Keith Richards, “I’m happy to be here, hell, I’m happy to be anywhere.”

Music: “Ain’t So Easy“ by David and David from their “Boomtown” CD

Richard Dawkins: Militant Atheism

This second video is by another Engishman, but one coming for a very different point of view, a point of view that I more closely identify with.

Rev. Tom Honey – God as “In” and Not “Agent”

I vaguely remember studying pantheism and animism back in my more “black and white” era and rejecting the position because it didn’t seem too “Biblical” and seemed to be used by crazies to say that they were “god.” That part hasn’t changed, but my confidence about anyone’s ability to rightly divine biblical text or that the whole truth is in the text, has change.

At the same time I’m weary and untrusting of the arrogance conveyed by many skeptic who believe that all problems and solutions can be proven through rational means alone. That seems to be just the same mistake by their religious counterparts. The world/universe is much, much greater that you can even begin to understand.

So there is this part of me that wants to pray, to continue to have this intimate dialogue with the Divine but there is another part of me convinced that no one is listening. Last time I attempted to deal with this duality, over twenty-years ago, I choose to ignore the divine and just live from day to day. Over the past five years I’ve come to think that I lost a lot in that compromise, particularly my artistic passion and my connectedness with others.

I wonder if I can be like the latter speaker and appropriate my former passion for the divine with an understanding quite different from my fundamentalist roots. If there is no “Santa in the Sky” how do I direct this part of myself that senses a connection to something much bigger than myself? I rationalized it away twenty-years ago, called myself an Agnostic and wandered in the desert for fifteen-years. I want to do much better this time around, especially in view of the fact that I may not have another twenty-years to fuck around before my time on this little globe is completed. You’d think at the ripe old age of 50 I’d have a better handle on this, but I do not. I hope that I find that oasis (or build that oasis) with enough time to enjoy and share the fruit of this journey. jbb

The following link was given to me by Full Sail coworker, Linda, who was impressed with Rick Warren‘s ability to present his belief system without sounding “religious.” I appreciated that Warren seemed to respect the venue he was speaking at and addressed his thoughts as not addressing religious issues, but as human issues. Warren came off as firm but nurturing, understanding but uncompromising and very matter of fact, all hallmarks of a somewhat laid back “Seeker Sensitive” California attitude. Enjoy.

Rick Warren @ TED: Living a Life of Purpose

Dan Dennett @ TED (Feb 2006) – The Biological Evolution of Religion

Interestingly for me both of these speakers represent a bifurcating pull in my own thinking between this “matter of fact” Christianity and a more scientific, cultural-anthropology view of things…

Music: “First Prayer” by Randy Stonehill

This shouldn’t be too surprising, given that after getting my B.A. in Biblical Studies at Biola University and several quarters at Fuller Seminary as a Masters of Theology student, I enrolled at Cal State Fullerton as an Anthropology major (which I switched to Communications New/Editorial after a couple semesters). I mean, I completely concur with Warren’s sentiment that there has to be more to this life than the day to day grind. That awareness in me has always led me to pursue an intimate connection with God, whether we’re talking about the musings of a Catholic teenager trying to read the New Testament for the first time or a 40-something playing his guitar and singing with everything he has as part of the Evangelical Sunday worship service. At the same time, I’ve crossed the cultural and religious boundaries so many times in my life that, as big a picture as any belief system tries to establish, I know that it is all more bigger still.

Back five years ago after I’d been calling myself an agnostic for 15-years ago, a good friend and fellow Biola graduate said flatly that she wouldn’t accept this, that I couldn’t deny that all I’d experienced wasn’t true. And she was right. And thus I gradually entered into a second period of spiritual intimacy and learning. But at the same time I could never shake this feeling that the whole practice was just something that we all do to satiate our need to be connected to something bigger than ourselves. Of late, this “maybe I didn’t quite get this right” sense of doubt has pushed me more toward my former skeptical position. Like Morpheus at the end of the second Matrix movie, things didn’t turn out the way I thought the Oracle had pronounced them and this is forcing me to reevaluate everything. Mind you, things are incredibly good with opportunities opening for me, some might say “miraculously,” at just the right time such that some might see this turn of fortunes as a definite sign of God’s favor in my life. And quite frankly I might have agreed with that assessment except that the one person who helped set me back on the path of Faith, the one person I wanted to share this spiritually intimacy with, is most decidedly not a part of my life. And my fortunate move to Florida has ended any possibility of ever seeing the vision of love that I had with her come to fruition. Had it been otherwise and she were with me, I might very well have spent the past six weeks looking for a new church home. So, it’s very personal but it’s not about me. It’s about this emotional connection and contrary recognition that I cannot close my eyes to a bigger picture than my former Bible-quoting self could even begin to understand. I want to understand and right now I seem to have all the “opportunity” in the world to explore what these contradictory pulls mean in my life. Onward and upward. jbb

p.s. Sorry mom, she already kind’a has a boyfriend. jbb

Music: My Favorite Mistake from the album “The Globe Sessions” by Sheryl Crow

I have to say that I agree with Ehrman on this. Having trusted in my Christian faith my whole life, I can’t quite see where some other take on religion might make up for the deficiencies I sense in what I was raised to believe in. I mean, if the most strenuously scrutinized religious texts fail me how am I going to consider other texts that seem to have even more obvious “deficiencies”? This is not a criticism of other faiths as much as a confession that I’m not going to go for something just because it’s different. Thus I found it most interesting when I saw this excerpt from a film made by an Iranian filmmaker on Jesus from an Islamic point of view in an LA Times story.

Thus, according to this filmmaker’s interpretation of the Islamic texts, just before his trial Jesus was taken to Heaven to be with God and God changed Judas Iscariot so that everyone thought that he was Jesus. Therefore the man that was crucified on the cross was not really Jesus but Judas. It’s such a radical departure from my own understanding of the story that it’s too easy to dismiss it as a fairy tale interpretation. Obviously the islamic version completely undermines any redemptive value to the crucifixion of “Jesus,” contradicting much of Paul’s writings. And that alone should be enough to shrug the story aside. Problem is, regardless of which direction one chooses to go, it all comes down to ones own unprovable Faith. JBB

Baba from the album “Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie” by Alanis Morissette

I hesitated, “well, yeah.”

He looked at me, “not me,” and then he went on about “practical ministry” and not being one to spend any time on thinking. Thus my last connection seemed to snap and I felt all the more disconnected from a faith that had been one of my deepest passions for the past four years. It was all in my heart to serve, but somehow I really didn’t fit in. So I left thinking that I must be the only one like me.

Then a few weeks ago I happened to listen to an interview on NPR’s Fresh Aire podcast of New Testament scholar, Bart Ehrman, author of the best selling “God’s Problem,” and recently published “Misquoting Jesus” and I realized that there was someone else at least a little bit like me…

Music/Podcast: Bart Ehrman, Questioning Religion on Why We Suffer from the album “NPR: Fresh Air” by NPR

Technorati Tags: biblestudy, faith&doubt, video, youtube

Though our lives paths have not been exactly the same, they have been similar enough for me to recognize the force to reconcile ones passions, devotion and upbringing with the nagging realization that it’s never entirely as neatly “packaged” as our faith would have us believe. For Ehrman, it was the inability to reconcile the nagging problem of a benevolent personal God with a world full of injustice, cruelty and suffering. I just wish that my turning point could have been some noble selfless struggle. Damn.

So listening to Ehrman was the complete opposite experience, that is, instead of feeling like there’s no one out there like me, I felt like I found someone who might understand me. Here was someone who was raised in a Christian home, became a born-again Christian in his high school years in answer to personal concerns about Heaven and Hell, went to a Fundamentalist college to study the Bible and then went to pursue an advanced degree and career in New Testament studies. At the core of this pursuit was the drive for Truth, in this case, looking for the “true” or “best” New Testament texts, because if this is the Word of God, than we need to have the original words or at least the ones as close as possible to the original words. While pursuing his advanced degree he did the pastoral gig, Note that his Master’s Degree is an M.Div. (Master of Divinity) which is a pastoral/ministry oriented degree. So, right up to the point where Ehrman went to Princeton and got his advanced degrees, I was on the exact same path. And had I not gone through a divorce at that point in my story I probably would have continued to run the same path. As weird as all of this might seem, I find a sense of hope in the realization that there might be someone else out there like me, someone with a scholarly appreciation and respect for the biblical text but who is also unwilling to just go with the party-line and ignore the nagging questions. Unlike some of the professors whom I knew at Biola who left teaching and teaching at the university when their doctrinal positions came under scrutiny, Ehrman’s situation is pretty unique, being a New Testament scholar at a secular university, such that he is free to see where the evolution of his faith takes him. That encourages me to not take the hard line, either/or approach to my journey like I did when I left the church twenty-year-ago. I wish I understood where I belong in all of this. jbb

The following embedded video is the first part of a ten part lecture by Professor Ehrman. I’m actually thinking taking one his courses through the online Teaching Company

Bart Ehrman’s Stanford Speech – Part 2
Bart Ehrman’s Stanford Speech – Part 3
Bart Ehrman’s Stanford Speech – Part 4
Bart Ehrman’s Stanford Speech – Part 5
Bart Ehrman’s Stanford Speech – Part 6
Bart Ehrman’s Stanford Speech – Part 7
Bart Ehrman’s Stanford Speech – Part 8
Bart Ehrman’s Stanford Speech – Part 9
Bart Ehrman’s Stanford Speech – Part 10