Fear is that little darkroom where negatives are developed. — Michael Pritchard
Strolling through Atlanta’s airport recently, Fear assaulted me. Announcers repeated messages from the Department of Homeland Insecurity. “Guard your bags.” “Report suspicious behavior.” “The Terrorist Threat Level is Orange.”
Such announcements can only be the product of a government that’s living in sin, who does not believe in democracy. So it rules by fear. Long before 9/11, our government had this policy called “Really Bad Things Can Happen.” Keeping the citizenry off-balance (aided by its lapdog, FOXNews), it seeks our compliance. Fear is national policy.
General Douglas MacArthur said, “The powers in charge keep us in a perpetual state of fear; keep us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant sums demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real.”
The Master called Fear has led us into needless wars, multiplied enemies, gotten good religious folk all a-lather to go against their religion and kill, and helps justify a multitude of wasteful spending projects. (I feel safer, don’t you?) We don’t have a government “for” the people, but one “against” them.
***
Scene change. Forget government. Let’s think “religion.”
Fear and religion are a bad chemistry. Arguably humanity’s worst trait, fear is the foundation of so much religiosity. Religions become mad systems of anxious reward and punishment, where creation and Creator are estranged, where – like in our government –the mouthpieces of faith spout inanities to keep us spiritually off-balance.
Code Orange in airports? Where did you think they got the idea? Religion can become one long announcement to watch our spiritual baggage, suspicious faith behavior, to ever-remind us how we’re always living in some hell called Code Red.
• Satan’s out there prowling around. (Be on the watch!)
• Santa (Satan anagrammed!) informs our religions with “You better watch out!” and “Be good,” and then it’s Reward Zone; but it’s coal-fire if you’re bad!
• What you don’t know can hurt you! (Let’s invent mysterious gods and afterlives to keep people tranquilized and questions minimized.)
• Get saved! (Don’t bother finessing that salvation is more about working relationships in this life than being saved from hell-fear in the next.)
In government and religion, Fear keeps us from asking important questions. Quiet people in either domain enable the few in power to sustain and increase their control.
The God of fear is a small reflection of our fearful selves, where God’s chief intention is to reward and punish creation. While “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,” the Lord of Fear has no place in a healthy soul.
Without fear, there probably would be no religion (although there would be faith). The fear of death spawns endless varieties of gods, end-time scenarios (none of which have materialized) – and ignorance. How many times have I heard that the mind is a terrible thing in matters of faith? How many times have you heard that we are too puny and God is too big ever to comprehend faith mysteries, so shut up already?
Just believe, belong, behave, or be-damned. These four horsemen of the apocalypse are fear-enabled, and sustain so many cruelties in the name of god.
Bertrand Russell has the last word: “Fear is the basis of the whole thing – fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand in hand. It is because fear is at the basis of those two things.”
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Friday, January 15, 2010
Why Aren't We ALL Agnostics?
The Call to “Holy Agnosticism” is the Call to Faith
I don’t know beans about God. – Annie Dillard
In this space I have proposed that healthy faith include regular purging doses of atheism. We get easily barnacled up by tired beliefs, and these tie us up in knots when we try to keep believing something worn out.
Today I wish to suggest agnosticism for the same reason: the idea that we really don’t know beans about God. Some things we can know, but many more we cannot in the spiritual dimension of things. Two stories about elephants illustrate. I’ll comment after they’re told.
1 Two fleas live on the tail of an elephant. One flea is happy where it is. He has all the food and shelter he wants. He thinks he knows the elephant, though it’s only a small part of the tail. Its imperfect knowledge is nonetheless comforting.
The other flea lived with this first one, until one evening she grows discontent with the usual eating, drinking, and hanging on. She travels a far distance from the first flea. In human measurement, she travels down the tail about a foot. Wow, the environment is different: smells, tail-movement, and other vermin are all different.
She now has a doubled-up knowledge of the elephant. She returns later to report her experience of the elephant to the first. The first one disbelieves her. The second flea keeps insisting that there’s more out there to explore and to know.
2 There were six blind persons who traveled together, and they come upon an elephant for the first time. No one told them what it was, and each got positioned at one body part of the elephant. Each felt, and came away with sure knowledge about what the elephant must be like.
The person at the side of the elephant was sure it was like a wall. “No,” said the person at the tusk. “An elephant is like a spear.”
“You’re both wrong,” exclaimed the trunk-holder. “This elephant is like a snake.” The fourth one, at the elephant’s knee, concluded this animal was more like a tree.
The fifth blind person, touching ear, felt an elephant is like a huge fan. And the sixth one, hanging onto the tail, felt certain that an elephant is a rope.
***
Which flea, which blind person was (most) correct? None had faulty knowledge. But everyone’s intelligence was incomplete, and thus misunderstood. Each story character was quite sure of the certainty and veracity of their facts.
No one questions their intelligence. We feel pretty darn confident like the first flea that we’ve received adequate/accurate view of God. We may even self-congratulate ourselves on being versed in two religious traditions, like the second flea, and feel that is enough.
Or we may be like the blind who ever-so-quickly under-interpret the elephant: “mine’s the right one, once and for all.”
Everyone’s understanding of the elephant called God is partial at best, and outright wrong at worst. And so we live our lives, vote, fight, discriminate and other everyday things based on this image we carry around within us. These are necessary images, but make no mistake, they’re misunderstandings at the very best.
Every understood deity is partially known, thus an idol. Idols are images based on insufficient evidence and maintained by constant and ever-louder affirmation within a tribe of believers. They are conveniences, for we don’t explore beyond their image.
And if we think the elephant is ‘out there,’ external to us, and not internal, the idolatry worsens. The divine life is our own life. (Repeat until understood.) If that realization brings a “holy agnosticism” vis-à-vis our received idea of God, this blind flea has done his job. Next time you’re at your flea circus (religious house), remember we don’t know beans about God.
I don’t know beans about God. – Annie Dillard
In this space I have proposed that healthy faith include regular purging doses of atheism. We get easily barnacled up by tired beliefs, and these tie us up in knots when we try to keep believing something worn out.
Today I wish to suggest agnosticism for the same reason: the idea that we really don’t know beans about God. Some things we can know, but many more we cannot in the spiritual dimension of things. Two stories about elephants illustrate. I’ll comment after they’re told.
1 Two fleas live on the tail of an elephant. One flea is happy where it is. He has all the food and shelter he wants. He thinks he knows the elephant, though it’s only a small part of the tail. Its imperfect knowledge is nonetheless comforting.
The other flea lived with this first one, until one evening she grows discontent with the usual eating, drinking, and hanging on. She travels a far distance from the first flea. In human measurement, she travels down the tail about a foot. Wow, the environment is different: smells, tail-movement, and other vermin are all different.
She now has a doubled-up knowledge of the elephant. She returns later to report her experience of the elephant to the first. The first one disbelieves her. The second flea keeps insisting that there’s more out there to explore and to know.
2 There were six blind persons who traveled together, and they come upon an elephant for the first time. No one told them what it was, and each got positioned at one body part of the elephant. Each felt, and came away with sure knowledge about what the elephant must be like.
The person at the side of the elephant was sure it was like a wall. “No,” said the person at the tusk. “An elephant is like a spear.”
“You’re both wrong,” exclaimed the trunk-holder. “This elephant is like a snake.” The fourth one, at the elephant’s knee, concluded this animal was more like a tree.
The fifth blind person, touching ear, felt an elephant is like a huge fan. And the sixth one, hanging onto the tail, felt certain that an elephant is a rope.
***
Which flea, which blind person was (most) correct? None had faulty knowledge. But everyone’s intelligence was incomplete, and thus misunderstood. Each story character was quite sure of the certainty and veracity of their facts.
No one questions their intelligence. We feel pretty darn confident like the first flea that we’ve received adequate/accurate view of God. We may even self-congratulate ourselves on being versed in two religious traditions, like the second flea, and feel that is enough.
Or we may be like the blind who ever-so-quickly under-interpret the elephant: “mine’s the right one, once and for all.”
Everyone’s understanding of the elephant called God is partial at best, and outright wrong at worst. And so we live our lives, vote, fight, discriminate and other everyday things based on this image we carry around within us. These are necessary images, but make no mistake, they’re misunderstandings at the very best.
Every understood deity is partially known, thus an idol. Idols are images based on insufficient evidence and maintained by constant and ever-louder affirmation within a tribe of believers. They are conveniences, for we don’t explore beyond their image.
And if we think the elephant is ‘out there,’ external to us, and not internal, the idolatry worsens. The divine life is our own life. (Repeat until understood.) If that realization brings a “holy agnosticism” vis-à-vis our received idea of God, this blind flea has done his job. Next time you’re at your flea circus (religious house), remember we don’t know beans about God.
Friday, December 11, 2009
My Desire, My Vulnerability, My Prostitution
Reduce your wants and supply your needs. Our needs make us vulnerable enough. Why increase our vulnerability? – M. K. Gandhi
Welcome to the season where the machinery of human avarice walks and talks: Christmas. Unchecked desires stalk us, weakening our moral immune system and enabling all kinds of embarrassing acts, such as unchecked acquisition.
My thesis for this post is that we are the products of our desires, and often this means the unwitting slaves of our unexamined desires. Using street language with my students, I say, “We’re all prostitutes – every last one of us; some of us command higher prices, and some of us walk the streets.”
Desires are good only when understood how they work on us, how they get submerged into our inner souls, and then merge with thoughts and emerge as behavior. Unexamined desires are always bad. Always. There is no "Ignorance is bliss" place to stand. “The unexamined life is not worth living,” according to Socrates.
Let’s say that a particular desire influences you. It could be anything, but the Big Three are power, money and sex. However, in this case, you are blissfully unaware of this desire. For example, one could be unconsciously desirous of acceptance. Needy acceptance. And so, one goes through life stumbling in relationships because one’s unexamined neediness takes up all the oxygen. Nothing healthy can thrive. All the resources go to feeding one’s unexamined neurosis. And one wonders why one is so alone.
Buddhism is the world’s foremost faith for directly confronting desire. Its first teaching is that our #1 problem is unchastened desires. Until we solve this we will be revolving around our own self-ignorance, and such ignorance is always – at some level – freely chosen. Oh, we can rationalize it a hundred ways, but there’s always a moment when we caved, and “settled” for enslavement over freedom.
I mention Buddhism because it is perhaps our world’s most sophisticated technology to uncover desire. Becoming desireless is so important that the faith cites one’s destiny is staked upon it. Its program for becoming desireless is relentless self-examination to see how desire taints even what we think is our best. Even the desire to be a self-actualized individual can be rendered suspect because of the motives involved.
Here’s what’s at stake for us all. Proceeding through life without adequate self examination of desire renders us – as individuals, as societies, and even as nations – vulnerable. The places of our unrebuked desire map out our vulnerabilities, opening us up to exploitation. Repeat that sentence until it makes sense; it cannot be emphasized enough.
Unknown and unresolved desires are our addictions; there’s no difference. And so we go pell-mell into our world, in denial, wreaking havoc in far-flung places we understand even less than our desires, and we lose wars because we know not why we go to war. We are rendered not just vulnerable but impoverished by our desires. Plato warned: Poverty is not the absence of goods, but rather the overabundance of desire.
The person or nation driven by undisputed desires is a puppet, a non-living human-like figure. The puppet knows not what wires or strings have been inserted into its body, and so it hasn’t an inkling of who controls the business ends of those tethers. Ignorant puppets we are, denying what makes us behave as we do.
The addicted are sad because of their enslavement to desire. My desires are perhaps obvious to all (save myself). Understood desires, however, are no longer controlling addictions, but rather, tools. Desires reveal who we are, and that often must be very sad news before it becomes good.
Please feel invited to comment on the relationship between ignorance, desire and vulnerability in your own life.
Thursday, November 5, 2009
What is God?
If horses could conceive of the gods, they no doubt would conceive of them in the form of horses. – Xenophanes
Things known are known in the form of the knower, said Thomas Aquinas. His idea helps us understand “anthropomorphism” – the depiction of the non-human in human shapes, or with human experiences. My thesis here is that most everything important to us carries in it some human attribute or characteristic. Many of our activities have some anthropomorphic aspect. Some examples include:
Cloud-watching. You’ll see clouds obviously in the form or shape of things we know. David Hume agrees with Aquinas: “We find human faces in the moon, armies in the clouds.”
Movies about aliens. Usually friendly aliens arrive in human form, sporting human emotions (e.g., “E.T.”, or “Close Encounters”), and the hostile ones are more unrecognizable. They’re easier to hate.
We esteem animals as “cute” or “useful” in direct proportion to how they correspond to human understandings of these two categories. Meanwhile we blithely neglect the vast masses of the animal world because of their apparent non-human form or function.
Rule #1 in human relationships: If it ain’t inside us, we won’t recognize it outside us. If things known are in the form of the knower, then things unknown are things not recognized – data not in the form of the knower.
An important issue arises. Aquinas’ thought applies to the category of god. By definition, god is indefinable. “God” has to be so different from humans and our “stuff.” There must be a continental divide (“intellectual distance,”) between “god” and our wars, our Hitlers, our destructive passions.
Jewish and Muslim faiths are the most aware of this holy difference between the divine and human. Each faith imposes severe restrictions on depictions of the divine, so the two categories shall never suffer an identity crisis.
However, many religions in the world rather blatantly concocts recipes for divine images using human materials. We like our god(s) familiar, and so give god a family: Father God, Mother Mary, and Son Jesus.
We infuse these heavenly persons with essential human qualities. A short review of the traditional Western attributes for the divine will confirm this: all-powerful, -knowing, and almighty; loving, merciful, wise, good, beautiful, just, friendly, and even territorial. We usually see divine beings with gender (and if THAT’S not anthropomorphism, I don’t know what is!). Finally, we render this divine personage very similar to us in our dominant desires, hatreds and passions. What society feels important gets torqued into the idea of the divine. Marx is our guide here: “the ruling ideas of each age are ever the ideas of its ruling classes.” Feminist Mary Daly makes some sense: “When the male is god, then god is male.”
I’m not proposing god is female, or male. Gender is a human category uploaded into the divine. What other human categories do we confuse with the divine?
Genesis 1:26 says God made humans in the divine image, but I wonder if we’ve not returned the favor and rendered “him” in ours? Ideally, “god” is a placeholder name for our experience of the transcendent and the sublime. But when we make “him” the root of our nationalisms, or the heavenly Wanter of all we happen to want, have we not just made an idol of ourselves? When our idea of god becomes pretty much one-on-one with our own human ideas, is god really in our ideas? How different from us does god have to be, to be divine?
What is god, after all? Makes one think, doesn’t it?
Things known are known in the form of the knower, said Thomas Aquinas. His idea helps us understand “anthropomorphism” – the depiction of the non-human in human shapes, or with human experiences. My thesis here is that most everything important to us carries in it some human attribute or characteristic. Many of our activities have some anthropomorphic aspect. Some examples include:
Cloud-watching. You’ll see clouds obviously in the form or shape of things we know. David Hume agrees with Aquinas: “We find human faces in the moon, armies in the clouds.”
Movies about aliens. Usually friendly aliens arrive in human form, sporting human emotions (e.g., “E.T.”, or “Close Encounters”), and the hostile ones are more unrecognizable. They’re easier to hate.
We esteem animals as “cute” or “useful” in direct proportion to how they correspond to human understandings of these two categories. Meanwhile we blithely neglect the vast masses of the animal world because of their apparent non-human form or function.
Rule #1 in human relationships: If it ain’t inside us, we won’t recognize it outside us. If things known are in the form of the knower, then things unknown are things not recognized – data not in the form of the knower.
An important issue arises. Aquinas’ thought applies to the category of god. By definition, god is indefinable. “God” has to be so different from humans and our “stuff.” There must be a continental divide (“intellectual distance,”) between “god” and our wars, our Hitlers, our destructive passions.
Jewish and Muslim faiths are the most aware of this holy difference between the divine and human. Each faith imposes severe restrictions on depictions of the divine, so the two categories shall never suffer an identity crisis.
However, many religions in the world rather blatantly concocts recipes for divine images using human materials. We like our god(s) familiar, and so give god a family: Father God, Mother Mary, and Son Jesus.
We infuse these heavenly persons with essential human qualities. A short review of the traditional Western attributes for the divine will confirm this: all-powerful, -knowing, and almighty; loving, merciful, wise, good, beautiful, just, friendly, and even territorial. We usually see divine beings with gender (and if THAT’S not anthropomorphism, I don’t know what is!). Finally, we render this divine personage very similar to us in our dominant desires, hatreds and passions. What society feels important gets torqued into the idea of the divine. Marx is our guide here: “the ruling ideas of each age are ever the ideas of its ruling classes.” Feminist Mary Daly makes some sense: “When the male is god, then god is male.”
I’m not proposing god is female, or male. Gender is a human category uploaded into the divine. What other human categories do we confuse with the divine?
Genesis 1:26 says God made humans in the divine image, but I wonder if we’ve not returned the favor and rendered “him” in ours? Ideally, “god” is a placeholder name for our experience of the transcendent and the sublime. But when we make “him” the root of our nationalisms, or the heavenly Wanter of all we happen to want, have we not just made an idol of ourselves? When our idea of god becomes pretty much one-on-one with our own human ideas, is god really in our ideas? How different from us does god have to be, to be divine?
What is god, after all? Makes one think, doesn’t it?
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Jesus vs. Christianity: Pre-positions & Positions
Jesus called: He wants his religion back. – bumper sticker
It is better to merciful in the name of Buddha than to be cruel in the name of Christ. – Kosuke Koyama
Prepositions in English are among the last details for non-native speakers of English to master. Some never do (including native speakers too!). This post explores the difference between the prepositions “of” and “about”.
Is the religion that passes for Christianity in these parts the religion “of” Jesus, or the religion “about” Jesus? Does worship and religious activities glorify Jesus’ person, or does it seek to personify Jesus’ mind and heart in the world today?
It seems that a balance of the two is called for, but I think American Christian experience is more “about” him, not “of” him. (Your comments below should try to confirm or disprove this assertion!)
For the first two centuries of Christian history, Christians were known as Quakers and Mennonites are today: practitioners of communal property, strict moral conduct, manual labor, detachment from wealth and honors, and above all, detestation of war.
The promotion of Christianity to a state church in 313 by Emperor Constantine, strengthened and united a severely fragmented, radically diverse upstart religion that dwelt on Jesus as the Messiah. Constantine probably saved Christianity, or at least gave it a future.
In 325, Constantine called together more than 250 church leaders to hammer out what the core beliefs of the religion were – and were not – to be. This council at Nicaea changed the faith substantially and to the core. We would not recognize the pre-Nicaean versions of Christianity, I can pretty much promise you.
I cannot prove that Christianity before Nicaea was a religion of Jesus, but it certainly became more “about” him afterwards. Gone or diminished were his hard teachings; now the religion was more about HIM. Christmas and Easter became more important as worship acts than loving one’s neighbor as 1acts of worship.
Jesus’ religion was not about himself. He did not sing praise songs and worship himself. His faith was Hebrew scripture Judaism in a colonized and brutally oppressed land. His faith always sought out the stranger, the misfit, the outcast, and yes, even the enemy, in order to be converted to love by them. Not to convert them, but to be converted.
Jesus’ religion remains about transformation of self and world. If Christianity today is not about these holy tasks – if it focuses more on his person than his passion – then it is a sham.
Here’re some questions: Would Jesus be would happier if you were transformed than if you worshipped? If you loved rather than adored? Is transformation of the world (not just the self) the supreme act of worship?
Religion “about” Jesus gets into all kinds of wheel-spinner debates: Intelligent Design, homosexuality, beginning-of-life debates, prayer in public schools, inerrancy of the Bible, whether to go to war or not, and other nursery games that can occupy time and titillate the mind.
A Tony Campolo quote tests which preposition we use: I have three things I’d like to say today. First, while you were sleeping last night, 30,000 kids died of starvation or diseases related to malnutrition. Second, most of you don’t give a shit. What’s worse is that you’re more upset with the fact that I said shit than the fact that 30,000 kids died last night.
A religion about Jesus gets upset at paltry four-letter words. The religion of Jesus will be more concerned with the needless deaths of 30,000 kids.
Religion about Jesus is quite popular, but ultimately wrong-headed. The world awaits Christians to start practicing the religion Jesus himself practiced. It all hangs on a preposition to determine one’s position.
(Further reading: see the classic text on the subject, H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture.)
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
Bewildered and Bewilderning Job
Satan: “What do you think would happen if you reached down and took away everything that is his? He'd curse you right to your face, that's what.”
God replied, “We’ll see. Go ahead -- do what you want with all that is his. Just don't hurt him.” From Job 1
The gloves come off. When natural evil occurs, if God, who should know it’s coming down the pike, does nothing to prevent it, then an all-powerful God cannot be considered “good.” If God is all-good but cannot stop evil, then God is not all-powerful. Neither concept fits our classical concepts of “God.”
Job knew this contradiction in his own family and body. The Bill Gates + Mother Teresa of his day, Job had it all, and he was good. He was unique in these respects. Got it?
Before you read further, read the first two chapters of Job (I’ll wait while you do; http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Job%201-2&version=MSG has it.). Now that you have read these chapters, notice something really strange? Without telling Job about it, God and The Satan have a conversation which ends up with God entering into – not one, but two – barroom bets with The Satan.
(When I say, “The Satan,” this is the direct Hebrew translation. Not at all the Devil of the Christian Scriptures, “The Satan” is on God’s payroll, with a job description similar to an FBI sting operator.)
Back to the bets. God wagers with The Satan that Job is so good that no matter what sting operation he pitches to Job, Job’s faith and goodness will never waver.
This happens twice…
Now wait just a minute! Think about what you’ve just read. Here’s the wonderful, great and good God you may worship, love and pray to, the One we tout to our children as trustworthy and good, allowing one of His employees to throw his full bag of dirty tricks at Job. Cattle and livestock die. Shepherds die. Job’s children die. All for the sake of some capricious bet on God’s part, who, by definition, shouldn’t have to bet because He knows everything.
God places dice, and people die. Is there anything right about this picture?
Nothing is right in this picture depicted in Job. Who needs a God like this? Who would tell this story as a bedtime story to children? (And the moral of this story, little Johnny, is you cannot trust God not to throw a little evil your way for no good reason.)
Through it all, Job suffers mightily, but not in silence. There is no “patience of Job” in the book of Job. He demands what lawyers call certiori, or legal standing at a court of law. He wants to bring his case into God’s court and bring God’s motives and actions to trial. Job demands accountability, and answers from God: “What were You thinking when You made those bets?”
Job refuses to listen to his so-called friends – who still populate religious circles today – who explain Job’s problems with insipid pabulum. And in the end, God does not answer Job, but only throws him off-balance with questions that have nothing to do with Job’s questions.
Here’s the sports commentator: “God fakes! God punts! God wins!”
What is at stake here? Job, you and me – learning about God from childhood as the supremely moral and good God worthy of worship, and putting goodness into practice every time that we can – turn out to be more moral than God.
That troubles the hell out of me. You?
God replied, “We’ll see. Go ahead -- do what you want with all that is his. Just don't hurt him.” From Job 1
The gloves come off. When natural evil occurs, if God, who should know it’s coming down the pike, does nothing to prevent it, then an all-powerful God cannot be considered “good.” If God is all-good but cannot stop evil, then God is not all-powerful. Neither concept fits our classical concepts of “God.”
Job knew this contradiction in his own family and body. The Bill Gates + Mother Teresa of his day, Job had it all, and he was good. He was unique in these respects. Got it?
Before you read further, read the first two chapters of Job (I’ll wait while you do; http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Job%201-2&version=MSG has it.). Now that you have read these chapters, notice something really strange? Without telling Job about it, God and The Satan have a conversation which ends up with God entering into – not one, but two – barroom bets with The Satan.
(When I say, “The Satan,” this is the direct Hebrew translation. Not at all the Devil of the Christian Scriptures, “The Satan” is on God’s payroll, with a job description similar to an FBI sting operator.)
Back to the bets. God wagers with The Satan that Job is so good that no matter what sting operation he pitches to Job, Job’s faith and goodness will never waver.
This happens twice…
Now wait just a minute! Think about what you’ve just read. Here’s the wonderful, great and good God you may worship, love and pray to, the One we tout to our children as trustworthy and good, allowing one of His employees to throw his full bag of dirty tricks at Job. Cattle and livestock die. Shepherds die. Job’s children die. All for the sake of some capricious bet on God’s part, who, by definition, shouldn’t have to bet because He knows everything.
God places dice, and people die. Is there anything right about this picture?
Nothing is right in this picture depicted in Job. Who needs a God like this? Who would tell this story as a bedtime story to children? (And the moral of this story, little Johnny, is you cannot trust God not to throw a little evil your way for no good reason.)
Through it all, Job suffers mightily, but not in silence. There is no “patience of Job” in the book of Job. He demands what lawyers call certiori, or legal standing at a court of law. He wants to bring his case into God’s court and bring God’s motives and actions to trial. Job demands accountability, and answers from God: “What were You thinking when You made those bets?”
Job refuses to listen to his so-called friends – who still populate religious circles today – who explain Job’s problems with insipid pabulum. And in the end, God does not answer Job, but only throws him off-balance with questions that have nothing to do with Job’s questions.
Here’s the sports commentator: “God fakes! God punts! God wins!”
What is at stake here? Job, you and me – learning about God from childhood as the supremely moral and good God worthy of worship, and putting goodness into practice every time that we can – turn out to be more moral than God.
That troubles the hell out of me. You?
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Czech Republic Series - A Bone to Pick with God
Whatever you say about God you should be able to say standing over a pit full of burning babies. – Elie Wiesel
God either wishes to take away evils and is unable; or He is able and is unwilling; or He is neither willing nor able, or He is both willing and able. If He is willing and is unable, He is feeble, which is not in accordance with the character of God; if He is able and unwilling, He is envious, which is equally at variance with God; if He is neither willing nor able, He is both envious and feeble, and therefore not God; if He is both willing and able, which alone is suitable to God, from what source then are evils? or why does He not remove them? Epicurus: b.341 BCE
OK, so I preached in the Czech Republic. Big deal. I think the sermon (which you can request) did a fair job in addressing one of my life themes, and one of the gospels: You can’t rely totally on habit and custom to craft any future dealings with God.
This sermon was prepared before the visit…
…Before Auschwitz.After Auschwitz, "future dealings with God" seem an unseemly choice of words. Even "God" seems vapid, like cotton in the mouth.
Time at Auschwitz-Birkenau focused my attention on the here-we-go-again issue that I’ve addressed in the classroom and personally, academically and faithfully: theodicy. How can one call God "good" in the light of real evil? But this time it was different.
I mean this: When Harvard’s chaplain Peter Gomes starts off a new rendition of The Lord’s Prayer like this – “Our Father, Who art in Heaven (except for 1939-1945)…” – I get this.
“Where was God at Auschwitz?” is the traditional phrasing of the question, and I worry that it gets phrased so often that it’s become vapid.
It’s against the vapid that I write today. What could I preach that would not offend victims of Auschwitz with its utterly empty vapidity? “Don’t worry, in the end, God will provide an answer.” Please.
One person has suggested “The Laments” and I guess that Psalm 102 is a good place to start if one has to break a word-fast and say something, or anything.
Hear my prayer, O LORD; let my cry for help come to you.
Do not hide your face from me when I am in distress. Turn your ear to me; when I call, answer me quickly. For my days vanish like smoke; my bones burn like glowing embers.
Psalm 56:8 speaks about the faith that one’s tears are recorded in God’s scroll.
The Laments seem to be a good response, except they seek to convert the very nexus of the problem, hidden in plain sight: “God, who art in Heaven, except for 1939-1945.” For the Laments imply that only if God really knew what we were going through, that would be enough. Does that satisfy you?
As bitter as we may cry, weep, grieve, rail, tear our clothes and point to the smokestacks of Auschwitz, it seems at the end of this never-ending conversation that we are more moral than God. That somehow, God’s silence implies that the deaths of millions, at the hands of hatred, advanced the divine and inscrutable will. That a Larger Purpose is at work, and needed these sacrifices. Please. May I ask here, "Do you feel better now?" and not be dismissed?
I cannot go to Larger Purpose-land. Might as well be Never-Never Land. So a horrific agnosticism tempts me. Just throw up my hands, and say, “I really don’t know.” But this lets God off the hook. Is not “no answer” an escape hatch, wiggle-room for God? One less human being to worry God?
What can I preach in a Christian church, after Auschwitz, with a silent God with Whom I sometimes think (out of habit?) it is still worthy to contend? Is not my name Israel (“God-contender”) with a God-habit he cannot shake?
If I shake it, am I reduced to ethics? An Ethic without God? The Golden Rule spread as horizontally as I can, which sees the fellow human as no less than divine, and that how I treat others or neglect them is how I do the same to God?
Is that it? I mean, I have to leave out an afterlife! Easter! The church becomes a social service agency. Doctrine? I don’t think so. What kind of faith-life is this, where the beginnings and ends of things are less important than the here-and-now? Is this more real, more faith-full?
I can preach this, but people hate it. We don’t like to be reminded of our current obligations to do better. And is there something short-changed in Christian faith when all we are reduced to is, “Jesus loves you, and we gotta do better!”? I can ramp it up: “Jesus is every one of the victims, and the victimizers. Let’s be careful out there.” Will that ramp launch enough good news?
There’s a story out of one the concentration camps. For hours one Friday some Jewish men had argued the goodness of God from the context of their immediate life-circumstances, without resolution. When sundown came, someone said, “OK, time out. It’s the Sabbath.” And they all took off their hats and started their Sabbath prayers.
Is that a rare and deep faithfulness, or an abysmal lapse of it?
I cannot control God, and my questions here imply that I want to. God is wild and free, more so that I can say. But it seems that such freedom is purchased with the most horrible human circumstances possible.
Free Will?
There is one escape hatch here that I have not yet mentioned. Free Will. If we have it, and we are truly free, then whatever we do has no chance of being interrupted by the Interrupter upstairs. Free Will is the #1 rationale against a true theodicy where one is reduced to head banging against impossible answers. Free Will says that Hitler could have done otherwise, and people of equal free will and good will could have stopped him. Why rely upon God for that which we can and should be doing already? That question will preach, no doubt.
And if we constantly badger God to do these difficult human assignments for us – and God does – then what good is that to us in the long run? (And if we are free, then why pray?)
Free Will portrays God with hands behind her back. And the world is considered a better place because of this indeterminacy. We think of ourselves as most human when we have/exercise freedom. We think that our decisions add to God’s decisions. If you have all things created, decided, written down in ink, then human freedom is destroyed. To be free, one must really be able to choose something freely. The issue: To be free means that we introduce unintended consequences. Moral evil exists because of this freedom of creation.
Make no mistake: The free will defense questions God’s divine power. It means that God is happy with creating free agents who can choose good, and can also choose evil. Hitler is somehow allowed. The world is supposed to be a better place because Hitler is here. Or, the world is better with a devil on it, as someone said, as long as we keep our foot on its neck.
(The back-door problem to this is the foreknowledge of God. Does God know that we are going to choose something. Does God have knowledge of our future? If so, are we really free? If so, does that mean God has determined us to choose what we think we have freely chosen?)
There is no answer. And I have a head/heartache. It’s the only honest response to Auschwitz. What can I say about the dead that would not enrage by its vapid triviality?
Silence.
Well, if God does it, then I can do that, too.
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