Church as school

In her most recent post, Kim Hampton asks Are we afraid of religion? Her thoughts had been inspired by this quote from the GA-listserve: "Advocacy has always been..and will always be…at the core of UU…", and she asks, "Really? ADVOCACY has been, and always will be, at the core of UUism? Really?" I know that many UUs believe it to be. Indeed, if you read the comments to The UUA Presidential Election and The Point of Our Faith at Elizabeth's Little Blog, you'll see that there are people who get incensed at the very idea that anything else could be at the core of our religion.

I was thinking of this when I read the following passage from a story by Neil Gaiman:
Rose Walker's Journal:
I've been making a list of things they don't teach you at school.
They don't teach you how to love somebody.
They don't teach you how to be famous.
They don't teach you how to be rich, or how to be poor.
They don't teach you how to walk away from someone you don't love any longer.
They don't teach you how to know what's going on in someone else's mind.
They don't teach you what to say to someone who's dying.
They don't teach you anything worth knowing.

It struck me hard, because I had made the same list myself many, many years ago. Not in exact detail- for example I did not yet need to know what to say to someone who's dying; at that age, I was more concerned with questions like "How do I accept the responsibility for my actions without being paralyzed by fear of consequences". But the spirit of the list, including the fact that I actually wrote it down, was the same. And I knew, even at that age, that this was the purpose of religion: public schools are the schools where you learn what you need to know to earn a living; churches are the schools where you learn what you need to know to live. And I knew, even then, that the lessons that are the most important are on how to live- Simon and Garfunkel taught me that.

What I didn't know then was that there were two philosophies of religion, just as there are of schools: one teaches you answers, and the other teaches you how to find answers. Religions such as Christianity and Islam are of the first sort; UU and a number of Pagan religions are of the second sort. Or at least that's what I had thought when I first discovered, in order, Paganism and UU. But as I got to know more people in my congregation, and then people from other congregations through travel and the internet, I learned that there was a third school of thought: church was where you went to learn the status of House Joint Resolution 234, and who the committee chair overseeing it was.

I agree with Kim; I hope that the core of our church is not that third sort, "Cuz if it is…friends…we are dead." Not merely because we're not really very good at it, (though as she says, and I have written many times, we're not) but because we'll have forsaken what religion and only religion can do- help us learn how to live. There are a hundred places where one can learn about community organizing, but only one school where you can learn the things on that list- church. And if we aren't there to provide the Montessori school of religion, then where is one to go if the fixed set of answers school of religion doesn't satisfy one's soul? Do we really want a country in which the only school offering the lessons of life is the Religious right? I think that being an alternative religion is the ultimate social service we can perform.

The day we learned...

A poem by J Huger

The day we learned that
The Sun doesn't go around the Earth,
The sunset was still beautiful.

The day we learned that
Evil spirits don't make us ill,
The sick still suffered.

The day we learned that
Our hearts are not where we feel,
We were still in love.

Our world is not a conjurer's trick.
Knowing how it's done
Doesn't make the magic go away.

Wholly human

Logan Geen over at The New Unitarian Universalist has an interesting post on The Humanity of Jesus . This is an issue I wrestled with as a teenager some forty years ago, eventually deciding, in the words of former All Souls minister Ed Harris, that wholly God and wholly human was one too many wholly's for me.

For me, one of the bigger convincers was doubt. It is basic human nature to doubt- and the question of the existence and nature of God is the greatest source of doubts. Mighty cathedrals are monuments to doubt, not faith- grandeur to convince followers they backed the right horse. Even if you have no doubts whatsoever about the existence of some God, you will have doubts about your understanding of God- in the Bible, even prophets who had conversations with God had moments of doubt. Even Jesus had doubts on the way to the cross, and said "Why have you forsaken me?" while on the cross. To me, these doubts made Jesus wholly human.

But wholly God? How can God doubt God's existence, purpose, and plan? I have never said, "Me, me, why have I forsaken me?" Did Jesus, perhaps while meditating alone in Gethsemane, induce a state of autohypnosis and plant a posthypnotic suggestion to forget himself for a while to experience human doubt and fear? Why did God have to die to satisfy a law that he himself had written? I could not believe that Jesus was wholly God.

Was Jesus special? Certainly. Was he a conduit of God? Yes- as are we all. Of course, conductors come in large capacity and small, with more or less resistance... he was a transcontinental high-voltage line, where most of us are the wire that connects the battery pack in the back of the radio. But God? No. To me, there was clearly a reason the word "trinity" does not appear in the Bible- that Jesus was wholly human.

Some flaws in the Belief-O-Matic test

The The New Unitarian took the Beliefnet Belief-O-Matic test and posted his results, which inspired patter pensée to do the same. I've done this before, but decided to do it with commentary this time, as I have some questions about how they get their results. In any kind of sorting program, the choice of criteria and how heavily to weight them is crucial- in Cladistics , for example, if you count bipedal locomotion too highly, you'll have humans more closely related to ostriches than orangutans. Here are the results:

1. Unitarian Universalism (100%)
2. Neo-Pagan (94%)

Not surprising that these two are on the top; I claim them both- but I think the order should be reversed. There are two reasons why; the first is abortion. Pagans and NeoPagans tend to be as split as the general public on abortion, but I have never met, nor heard of, nor even met anyone who has heard of a pro-life Unitarian- except me. It should be noted however that I am pro-life in the moral and religious sense, but not in the political sense- I have come to believe that it is not possible to craft legislation that will not be abused by one side or the other. But I am unaware of any other UU anywhere who believes that life begins at conception.

The other dividing issue is God. Belief in a divinity is completely optional for a UU, but other than the Satanists, I have never heard of a Pagan atheist. They may argue about how many gods there are, but every Pagan I know agrees on at least one. Were I writing the test, I would weight these questions much higher in separating UUs from Pagans.

3. Liberal Quakers (91%)
4. Mainline to Liberal Christian Protestants (86%)

I can't argue with numbers 3 and 4; I get along well with Quakers and liberal Protestants. Mainline Protestans are a little more problematical- there's this "Trinity" thing...

5. New Age (85%)
6. Secular Humanism (84%)

I find it hilarious that these two are rated so closely together. While there are tolerant religious humanists, everyone I've ever known who self-describes as Secular Humanist has nothing but contempt for anything New Age- or "Woo-Woo" as they prefer to call it.

7. Mahayana Buddhism (77%)
8. Theravada Buddhism (72%)

These two look better on paper to liberal eyes than they do in practice, especially in terms of social justice.

9. Reform Judaism (70%)
10. Baha'i Faith (68%)
11. Orthodox Quaker (67%)
12. Sikhism (67%)
13. Taoism (66%)
14. Nontheist (65%)

I have no real comment for most of 9-13, but Nontheist? Personally, I'd have put that at the very bottom!

15. New Thought (64%)
16. Scientology (60%)
17. Jainism (59%)
18. Christian Science (Church of Christ, Scientist) (53%)
19. Orthodox Judaism (52%)
20. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) (46%)
21. Mainline to Conservative Christian/Protestant (46%)
22. Islam (45%)
23. Hinduism (38%)
24. Eastern Orthodox (36%)
25. Roman Catholic (36%)
26. Seventh Day Adventist (27%)
27. Jehovah's Witness (16%)

No real arguments on these, either. How about you? any surprises on your matches?

Does Satan exist?

That was the subject of an interesting debate on Nightline, here in two parts.





I rather doubt that anyone reading this blog would say that Satan exists- but it is important to understand that a majority of our fellow Americans do, and to understand what that means to them.

Police probe 'pagan' attacks on church

The congregation of a Grantown church has been alarmed by a year-long series of "pagan" attacks, according to a story in the Strathsprey & Badenoch Herald . The attacks have been in the form of messages, in red ink. Said Deacon Fishwick, "...He added: "The last one was a warning that we shouldn't bring in the authorities. It had a drawing of the all-seeing eye and said: 'We are always watching you'.
"It seems to be the work of a bit of a crackpot. They only ever pick out our church; none of the others have had this, but we don't know why.
"The notes are heathen quotations: things like 'Your days are numbered', 'Wrongs remain unrectified' and 'Judgement has been passed'."

The strangest thing about this story is that it comes from Scotland! Scotland? I mean, a psycho with an obsession about God's eye sending notes to a church for years about unrectified wrongs... that's just so Canadian!

Update
No, there's been no further news from Scotland that I'm aware of; this is an update about the post itself. I've received private comment about my oblique reference to Vancouver based church protester Kevin Annett - and now I'm told some other nutcase is claiming I was talking about him. It seems hard to credit- are there really people so starved for attention, with egos so vast that they claim any reference to a psycho must be aimed at them???

A Christmas video

This is worth 2:39 of your time:

I wish we could have done this. But hey, we have gotten a lot of good faxes sent to Washington.

More religious archeology in Turkey

"Archaeologists in southeastern Turkey have discovered an Iron Age chiseled stone slab that provides the first written evidence in the region that people believed the soul was separate from the body... The Neubauer Expedition of the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago found the 800-pound basalt stele, 3 feet tall and 2 feet wide, at Zincirli (pronounced “Zin-jeer-lee”), the site of the ancient city of Sam’al. Once the capital of a prosperous kingdom, it is now one of the most important Iron Age sites under excavation.

The stele is the first of its kind to be found intact in its original location, enabling scholars to learn about funerary customs and life in the eighth century B.C. At the time, vast empires emerged in the ancient Middle East, and cultures such as the Israelites and Phoenicians became part of a vibrant mix.

The man featured on the stele was probably cremated, a practice that Jewish and other cultures shun because of a belief in the unity of body and soul. According to the inscription, the soul of the deceased resided in the stele." Read more at Newswise .

P.S.- This is my 400th post!

Where it all began

Important new archeological digs in the fertile crescent may have uncovered the origins of both organized religion and civilization itself. "It's more than twice as old as the Pyramids, or even the written word. When it was built, saber-toothed tigers and woolly mammoths still roamed, and the Ice Age had just ended.

The elaborate temple at Gobelki Tepe in southeastern Turkey, near the Syrian border, is staggeringly ancient: 11,500 years old, from a time just before humans learned to farm grains and domesticate animals. ... This is the first human-built holy place," Klaus Schmidt of the German Archaeological Institute says in the November issue of Smithsonian magazine."

Here are stories from Fox News , and The Smithsonian .

A spiritual response to the economic crisis

While politicians debate bailouts, this pastor has advice to help the rest of us cope.

"We Lied"

Bill Maher admits tricking people into interviews for ‘Religulous’



He actually seems proud of lying and cheating to create the effect he wanted. Has he considered running for office?

In ancient Greece, soil was sacred,

says this article from Discovery News.
"Oct. 7, 2008 -- Greek temples honored specific gods and goddesses, and now new research suggests that even the dirt under such buildings held spiritual significance.
The discovery could help explain why writers like Homer and Plato wrote of "divine soil" and soil that can affect a person's soul. It may also explain how the ancients selected locations for their sacred buildings.

"Temple sites were chosen to honor the personality and aspirations of gods and goddesses, which, in turn, were shaped by the economic basis for their cults," author Gregory Retallack told Discovery News."

This analysis is based on extensive sampling of the soil beneath ancient temples, revealing geological links to the myths and attributes of the Gods the particular temples were dedicated to.

This story got me to wondering... I know a good number of UUs in the blogosphere have been involved in the building of new churches; what criteria did you use in site selection? Just whatever you could get cheap, or was it a special place meaningful to the community? How did you decide where on the plot to place the building? Was the building designed for theological symbolism, or aesthetics, or just good acoustics? I have seen so many different designs, and only rarely ever been able to talk to anyone involved in them.

And what about landscaping, memorial gardens and such? I know that traditionally, western graveyards are generally arranged so the graves face the east. Usually, Christians will tell you that's so they will see the rising sun on resurrection day, but I know the tradition is older than that. From "The Answerbag": "There are more graves that "face" East than any other specific direction, possibly more than face other directions combined. The definition of "face" is open to interpretation, as kanjalid mentions it could depend on which end the head is on. But in many 'stone age' and especially Neanderthal graves the body is laid on its left side, sometimes in a near foetal position, with the head to the north so it is facing east. Bodies have been found from later periods laid on the back, head to the north, with the head turned left or east. A very few have been found with the head south and turned right to the east. It is unknown if this reversal of head direction is significant, but there is little doubt that the face was deliberately turned to the east. ( Talk about the way we have always done it, that is a looong always,)" Was this a consideration in your design?

I am frequently asked how I can always be so optimistic

Three times in the last three weeks alone, and by family members- which was a large part of the inspiration for this post. I've been called "Pollyanna" and "dreamer" more times than I can count, but they are wrong; I can recognize evil when I see it. But still, I believe in Man. I believe because I'm a realist.

That statement makes many a jaw drop. I am often told that "reality" is that Man is part of nature, red of tooth and claw, and has the reddest teeth and claws of them all. Just look at the news, I'm told. But the "news" is not reality- it is sensationalism designed to sell a product- that is reality.

I have often touted Robert Heinlein's This I Believe . Here are some quotes:

"I believe in my fellow citizens. Our headlines are splashed with crime, yet for every criminal there are 10,000 honest decent kindly men. If it were not so, no child would live to grow up, business could not go on from day to day. Decency is not news; it is buried in the obituaries --but it is a force stronger than crime."

"I believe in the patient gallantry of nurses...in the tedious sacrifices of teachers. I believe in the unseen and unending fight against desperate odds that goes on quietly in almost every home in the land."

"I believe in the honest craft of workmen. Take a look around you. There never were enough bosses to check up on all that work. From Independence Hall to the Grand Coulee Dam, these things were built level and square by craftsmen who were honest in their bones."

"I believe that almost all politicians are honest. For every bribed alderman there are hundreds of politicians, low paid or not paid at all, doing their level best without thanks or glory to make our system work. If this were not true, we would never have gotten past the thirteen colonies."

But those words were written more than fifty years ago, and he wasn't a young man when he wrote them, I'm told- things are different today. Are they really? Consider this story , "Girl, 11, Finds $1,000 Floating in Ocean" The incident: "While swimming in the surf in Ocean City, Md., Rowan Short of Brandywine Hundred found a Ziploc bag containing two credit cards, a Pennsylvania driver's license and more than $1,000 cash." What happened? "Her mom used a cell phone to call 411, got the number of the driver named on the license, and placed a call to Elaine and Michael Chosky in Pittsburgh." They went out of their way to return it.

Of course there are a few people like that, but what would most people do? Reader's Digest decided to find out. They designed a test : they "lost" wallets- "In each we put a name, local address and phone number, family pictures, receipts -- and $50 in cash.

We dropped 120 wallets -- ten each in three large cities, three major suburban areas, three medium cities and three small towns. We left them in parking lots, malls, bus stops and on sidewalks. Then we waited to see what would happen. To each person who returned the wallet, we offered the $50 as a reward.

This was no rigorous scientific study but rather a real-life test of integrity. Would people in small towns return the wallets more often than those in big cities? Old folks more than young? Women more than men?"

The results? In one of those cities, Moncton N.B., all ten of the wallets were returned intact- and one of the honest men was a lawyer! (Paging Diogenes) People from all walks of life went out of their way to return the wallets- even homeless people and poor people with families who needed the money. Two thirds of the wallets were returned intact. When the test was repeated in America, the results were the same. In Europe, the numbers dropped, but were still more than half- and two Scandinavian cities hit 100% They repeated the tests with cell phones and got the same results. Even the 68% honesty rating reported is low in one respect: "Even those who kept the wallets still had a conscience, judging by the furtive glances and the attempts at concealment many of them made as they left the scene." They knew right and wrong; they were simply weak. I'd wager, from incidents I've seen, that if the empathy quotient had been raised- say someone crying and obviously looking for the wallet or phone- 90% would have been returned.

I'm not blind to evil; I just put it in perspective. Humankind is decent and good. Evil- even the petty evils- are the aberration, not the norm. I do not confuse results with motivations. I know it's conventional wisdom in the UU blogs that Bush is evil, but he's not; he's simply wrong. I believe that our current Presidential choices are between good and better, not good and bad. I believe in Abraham Lincoln's words, "If you tell the people the truth, they'll do the right thing." I believe that with every passing year of the information age, more and more people will become aware of more and more truths, and do more right things. I believe that a golden age of Man is no longer a pie in the sky, nor even the dreams of our grandchildren, but within the grasp of today's children, if they will but reach for it.

Go ahead and call me Pollyanna. I'm comfortable in that role.

Thoughts about "Freedom From Religion"

This is obviously inspired by my previous post, and a comment that seemed to imply that the "wall of separation" between church and state makes even military chaplains unconstitutional. No one can read the words of the founders and honestly say that the intent of the First Amendment was to drive religion that far out of public affairs. If that were the case, then government documents using such phrases as "the Laws of Nature and of nature's God", "Endowed by their Creator", "Supreme Judge of the world", "with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence", "do ordain and establish", and "In the Year of our Lord" would be unconstitutional... rendering the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution itself unconstitutional! Clearly, the intent was to prevent the government from favoring one religion over another, not to deny their existence.

My complaint goes beyond a silly lawsuit, however; I have a problem with the attitude behind it. I have a problem with people who believe that the only permissible public expression of religion is contempt for it. I have a problem with the mindset that led a popular author to say "Molesting the children wasn't as harmful as raising them Catholic in the first place." My distaste for such vitriolic, militant atheism is such that I will make an equally controversial statement: To truly achieve freedom from religion, you must give up part of your humanity as well.

I mean that literally. What C.S. Lewis said poetically- there is a God shaped hole in the human heart that must be filled with something- is now being said by biologists as well. Anthropologists long knew it; the religious drive is older than Homo Sapiens Sapiens- Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon man left evidence of religious rituals, and there is reason to believe that even earlier predecessors did too. We know now that when you say "Give me that old time religion" you are talking at least 100,000 years old.

The militant atheists say that humanity has outgrown the need for religion. Maybe so. But human beings have not. Each of us is born just as clueless as the early hominids, and has to learn for ourselves the lessons of joy and pain, love and loss, the reality of death, and what it means to be human. The first time our hearts are broken, it's as if all those millennia had never passed, because it's the first time in our universe. Our innate sense of religion is the only way we can make sense of all of it.

The only reason anyone can deny this is that western society defines "religion" only in terms of God, and a fairly narrow definition of God at that. If one defines "religion" as "an irrational devotion to something outside one's self", then all sane people are religious. And yes, Secular Humanists, I'm saying your devotion to "Humankind" or "Society" is every bit as irrational as devotion to God. There is no non-emotional, logical case to be made for it.

How can I say that? Example: give me three solid, rational reasons why I shouldn't go through life simply taking what I want. Note: the argument "because if everybody did that, society would collapse, and you'd be hurt too" won't fly for at least three reasons- first, that's also an argument for eugenics and sterilizing homosexuals and "defectives"; second, we both know everybody wouldn't do that. Lots of people genuinely enjoy raising crops and raising kids and building things- there will always be plenty of sheep; why shouldn't I walk like a wolf among them? Third, even if society could collapse, it's too big to collapse within my lifetime- if this life is all I'll ever have, why not make the most of it?

In all the decades I've asked that question, no one has ever given me an argument that didn't boil down to an appeal to a higher power, by whatever name. When a Dawkins denounces religion, all he's really saying is "My irrational devotion to an abstract concept is superior to yours"- the same as any other religious zealot. Humanity cannot be ruled by logic; logic depends upon base assumptions that cannot themselves be proven by logic. Thus the "God shaped hole". I've found something that fits mine; if you don't like it, find your own- don't try to deny the validity of mine.

Unicode

Going through a box of inherited antiques, I ran across a small book entitled "Unicode". No, it has nothing to do with early computer languages- it's a set of codes used in telegraph messages,published in 1922. These codes were used to avoid running up large fees, as telegraph messages were charged by the word- hence "Unicode", a series of words that represented entire sentences. For example, the word "Abrasi" meant "Met with an accident, boat upset, all safe". I found this fascinating, and flipped through the book to see what all kinds of situations were covered by this code, and was amused to find this one: "The improvement is not sustained" is replaced with the single word "Dogma".

Please take a few minutes

to watch this video . You might cry, but you won't regret it.

Here's one I haven't heard before

Man goes to church. Man says he was asking God to have "a real experience" while praying at church. Man says he was so consumed by the spirit of God that he fell and hit his head. Man sues church!

God is alive, magic is afoot...

Talking with some people about my post, All's right with the world" , I realized that many did not get the reference, so here's where it's from- words: Leonard Cohen; music: Buffy Sainte-Marie; from the album Illuminations, 1969:

A photograph of the soul?

So claims Dr. Andrew Newberg of the University of Pennsylvania, according to this story from the St. Petersburg Times. He uses a process called single photon emission computed tomography, or SPECT, to scan the brains of deeply religious people such as monks and nuns while they are praying or meditating, and has discovered unusual functioning of two portions of the brain while they were doing so.

"The frontal lobes got especially busy. They're the part of the brain he calls the "attention area." The meditators had clearly tapped their frontal lobes to focus on their task.

He also saw the thalamus kick in. That's a pea-sized piece of the brain atop the brain stem that, among other things, sends sensory information to the frontal cortex, where much of our heavy thinking happens. Whatever was happening in meditation, the thalamus was making it feel very real.

The surprise was elsewhere, in the parietal lobe, the part of the brain that helps us orient ourselves in relation to things around us. Newberg discovered that the nuns and Buddhists had actually shut down that part of the brain, suspending their senses of space and time. It was then that they entered the peak of their transcendent experiences — altered states of "timelessness and spacelessness."

If religious devotions are a brain function, that may answer the question I raised, Do we choose to believe?

Is morality genetic?

There is a truly fascinating article in the New York Times magazine, The Moral Instinct , that deals with the difference between morality and social customs, whether a sense of basic morality is genetic, how one tells whether a given issue is one of morality or custom, and much more. Why can't we hear more of this sort of thing from the pulpit instead?