Pagans, Cheasters, and Nones: Easter and Open-Source Religion
This coming Easter morning, many people will rise and look east. Some will go to a Christian church for their only visit this year. Many will be reminded by priests and preachers that this one day is not enough. Those strangers to churches will be telling the oldest of religious truths: it is the people, not the priests, who make the gods.
“Easter” we call the day, namesake of a deity of the Northlands, Eostre, goddess of the dawn. English speakers still call the direction she arises from “east.” She is the goddess of new beginnings and of fertility, her day celebrated as the earth comes back to life after a long winter.
The holiday (holy day) called Easter is a movable feast, tied to both the cycles of the sun and of the moon—Easter occurs on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the equinox.
Religious holidays are celebrations of recurrence. Children in the Northlands have been searching the wet, awakening grass for eggs on Easter morning for thousands of years. The celebration has spread to other lands; to other religions. To the far corners of the planet.
Nineteenth Century German philologist Jacob Grimm reported that in some remote German villages of his time people still celebrated Eostre with sword dances, bonfires, and the baking of “heathenish pastries.”
It’s difficult this time of year—at least in the top half of the Northern Hemisphere—not to think of new beginnings. Difficult not to dance just a little bit. The iron grip of the deathly ice is finally broken and life is emerging from the long-dead earth again.
This is one of only two days the so-called “C and E” (Christmas and Easter) Christians—also known as Chreasters—fill churches. There are something on the order of eighty-five million Chreasters in the United States.
Statistics indicate that less than one-quarter of US Christians attend church even once a month. But Easter brings ‘em out—even more than Christmas or Mother’s Day(!). Why? Might it be because Easter is such a blend of religious traditions?
Reflect on the potpourri of religions and cultures that make up the concept of Easter as it is celebrated in the United States today. We have a fertility goddess from Northern Europe who survived the invasion of a Southern European tradition, Christianity, based on a Middle Eastern tradition, Judaism, itself an amalgam of religious thinking from the earliest agricultural civilizations of Mesopotamia with a pinch of Zoroastrianism from a certain Babylonian captivity thrown in.
All those ideas added up to create a lunar holiday celebrating a solar god in a myth echoing human sacrifice that originated in Egyptian mythology concerning the god Osiris, a metaphor for the planting and growth of vegetation in the Nile delta.
All that adds up to Easter brunches. And chocolate.
Why Easter? Why is Easter Christianity’s greatest hit?
“Syncretism” is one of those ten dollar words that permeates theology. The word describes the human propensity for combining religious ideas from various traditions.
The poet Wallace Stevens—an atheist by the by—made a very good point when he said, “The people, not the priests, made the gods.” Yes. The people, not the priests, meld ideas to create their religions.
Reflect on one of the greatest failures of human history. In 1231 the Roman Catholic Church opened its Office of Inquisition, nowadays known as the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith. Yes, it’s still in existence. Yet, after nearly 800 years of terror and cajoling, there are more heresies now than ever.
Wallace Stevens continues to be correct: the people, not the priests, make the gods. And we the people continue to vote with our feet. And the more information that flows on our nets and our webs, the more people are going to . . . well, what are we people going to do?
Some will become Cheasters. Some double-belongers. Some nones.
Return to the case of the goddess Eostre. The story goes that Pope Gregory the Great was walking one day in a slave market in Rome. This was in the 600’s CE. Pope Gregory saw a couple of blonde slaves and asked his handlers where blondes came from. The handlers said they were Angles, which at the time meant either the English or Northern Germans. The pope was so taken with these blondes that he decided to devote his life to converting the Northlands to Christianity.
In 601 CE Pope Gregory instructed the missionaries he was sending to England with these words:
. . . the temples of the idols in those nations ought not to be destroyed; but let the idols that are in them be destroyed; let holy water be made and sprinkled in the said temples, let altars be erected, and relics placed.
For if those temples are well built, it is requisite that they be converted from the worship of devils to the service of the true God; that the nation, seeing that their temples are not destroyed . . . may the more familiarly resort to the places to which they are accustomed.
Syncretism. Gregory’s order was an act of genius. It was a strategy that led to a Christendom that included the far North. But it also introduced a blue note; a note of mystery. Were those people out in the country—“paganus,” pagans, which means “villagers” or “rustics” in Latin—were those pagans, were those people of the heath, those people of the wastelands, those heath-ans—were those away from the centers of power, away from the army and the police of the king and pope and bishop—were they really Christian? Or were they going to their old temples for other reasons?
No one ever knew for sure. And we never will know. But is it a coincidence that the largest concentration of atheists on the planet today . . . happen to live in those Northlands that Pope Gregory Christianized?
Syncrenism. The people, not the priests, make the gods. In computer speak, it’s called Open Source: people with different agendas; different talents; different points of view, all have access to a program. And the result is a better program than those developed through controlled access. Maybe that’s why Easter is Christianity’s greatest hit.
The people, not the priests, make the gods. Religions are the oldest open source software.
Let’s Agree to Agree on Subjectivity
There ain’t no answer. There ain’t gonna be any answer. There never has been an answer. That’s the answer.
~Gertrude Stein
In last week’s post I looked at one way to smooth the waters between theists and non-theists, Pragmatism. Pragmatists say, if it works for you, it’s true.
Now, I know that’s a bit hard to swallow for some people, idealists, mostly. So, allow me to try to get to the same spot from a different direction.
For an idealist, there’s something out there that’s true. Idealists will admit that we see the world as we have learned to see the world; that our seeing affects us and those around us. It affects the world. Our seeing does not, however, make the world into what we see. The world is always as it is.
For example, I may decide that the tree in front of my house is possessed by an evil spirit. I may perform various rites to exorcise the evil spirit. I may even cut the tree down and burn it, thinking that that extremity will at last do away with the demon.
Perhaps I even believe that I succeeded in exorcising the demon and feel better about it all. Whatever I think, the fact of the matter is a dead tree, not an exorcised demon. One is measurable, the other is not.
Before going looking for something. It’s good to know what you’re looking for. What do we want in a god? I suspect the answer is: meaning and purpose in human life; a moral direction to the universe where the good and bad get what they deserve; perhaps even a cheerful afterlife where everyone is twenty-five years old and we get to talk with our grandmothers . . . and hang out with Abraham Lincoln.
That sort of thing.
This is the sort of god that the mainline monotheisms at one time posited for us. It’s the sort of afterlife promised by the sort of churches I attended as a child. Then I read Sigmund Freud (as did the generation a century before me). And I began to think there is a big problem with this god concept: it sounds suspiciously like wish fulfillment. And it can’t be measured.
Mainline Christian theologians don’t paint this picture of God anymore. They have gone in two broad directions: process theology—“god” is in the processes of nature. (A topic for another day.) Or the psychological route, saying: OK, we’ve got two things here:
There is that which is inside the human brain; and that which is outside the human brain.
This is, after all, how we experience reality: the personal and the impersonal. “God” is subjective: inside the human brain. God is not in the scientifically measurable outside realm.
These theologians will argue that putting god in the category of human subjectivity is not a denigration or demotion of God. Lot’s of important things exist only in our subjectivity. For example, I have spent much of my life fighting for “justice.” (Again with the quotes!)
“Justice” is a human subjectivity. “Justice” does not exist in the outside world as a measurable thing. You can’t weigh it. Consider: “Justice” has no meaning to a crocodile. A crocodile cannot act justly, at least from a human perspective.
Is justice an insignificant or untrue concept because it is the product of the human mind? Admittedly, we can say, “That was a just court decision” or “that was an unjust court decision.” But those are instances in time. The are not the concept “justice.”
Groups of human beings agree on the subjectivity called “justice.”
And the same is true of the several concepts of God. God is a shared consensual subjectivity among various groups. A shared consensual subjectivity. We agree that our subjectivities agree with each other and that the concept “God” is this way or that way … for us. That’s why various faith traditions require creeds said aloud: they are attempting to keep the shared consensual subjectivity similar in various minds.
Now clearly this concept of God pushes the idea of human understanding beyond the true / false dichotomy. Beyond the dichotomy that objective is true and subjective is false or at least suspicious. But consider—so far as we know, human consciousness is the most complex thing in the universe. So let’s give ourselves a little credit–maybe everything isn’t a zero or a one.
Computers are better than we are at chess. But not at writing poems. Or symphonies. Everything is not zero or one. Crocodiles or rocks don’t write poetry. People write poetry. And “God” is poetry. God is a human art. Knowledge is more than information.
It may well be that “religion” or “god” or “gods” exist in the same category as we consider abstract concepts such as “justice”—in objective reality these concepts don’t exist, yet the human brain is capable of creating these concepts out of the chaotic particulars of human experience.
Fact is, no matter how many times the US Supreme Court makes a really, really stupid decision, I’m going to keep working for what I see as justice. For many people, the same is true for “God”—despite all the evidence to the contrary, it is a concept that still makes sense to them.
This is why—despite the fact that I don’t share the subjectivity called God—I don’t get angry and shout about it. It can even be fun—and instructive—to to talk over our subjectivities. We might even learn something from each other.
A Semi-Private Idaho and Life in the Goldilocks Zone
Living in your own private Idaho
underground like a wild potato
The B52s
You’ve heard about the “Goldilocks Zone,” that temperate place where H2O exists in the form of water and scientists speculate life might exist on other planets. I think a Unitarian Universalist congregation should be a Goldilocks Zone where the free exchange of ideas concerning ultimate meaning and purpose flows like life-giving water. After all, the fourth principle of the Unitarian Universalist Association is, “a free and responsible search for truth and meaning.”
Now, I know that actually the UUA principles are only agreements between congregations, underlining the right of each member congregation to respect the particular theological stance of the various congregations. But, in practice, these principles have been embraced more by individuals within congregations than between congregations, where there is pressure to conform to the franchise—a topic for another day.
I mention this because the congregation I serve, First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, has historically embraced humanism and has its own set of aspirations, the fourth of which is, to “support one another’s journey toward meaning and connection in the here and now.”
That’s a more humanist slant than the fourth principle of the UUA, but aimed toward the same ideal, a Goldilocks Zone for the free flow of ideas concerning ultimate meaning and purpose. This is the ideal. As with most ideals, the congregation falls short in reality. But reaching toward an ideal is a good thing. That’s what ideals are for—to stretch us.
Three methods help get us to the Goldilocks Zone:
Hit the pause button on being right.
Hang your inner judge and jury.
Trust everyone’s path.
Easier said than done. But one way to get there is to become a pragmatist. As in the philosophy called Pragmatism. Sure, you can remain an idealist or a cynic or whatever in other matters, but try pragmatism when it comes to creating a Goldilocks Zone.
Listen to what psychologist and Pragmatist philosopher William James had to say about that most contentious of issues, theism:
If believing as though we have free will, or as if God exists, gets us the results we want, we will not only come to believe those things; they will be, pragmatically, true.
Now, by “free will,” James meant “non-theist” according to the theological understandings of the time. In that light, consider what he said again:
If believing as though we have free will, or as if God exists, gets us the results we want, we will not only come to believe those things; they will be, pragmatically, true.
A pragmatist is a Pragmatist due to a deep skepticism concerning the human ability to ascertain ultimate truth. Since Pragmatists aren’t sure we can do that, they put air-quotes around “truth” and examine not what a truth is but how it affects human behavior.
In that light, notice what William James is saying: belief in a god or belief in no god works when it works. When it “gets us the results we want.” Whichever way we choose, the path we are on becomes “pragmatically” true.
If we can get there, we’re in the Goldilocks Zone for multi-faith communication and understanding.
This way of thinking led William James to write his great book The Varieties of Religious Experience, which makes most short lists for the greatest work of non-fiction in the Twentieth Century. And this way of thinking creates the Goldilocks Zone for both the free and the responsible search that each of us must make for truth and meaning.
Notice that this pragmatic approach accomplishes all three of my criteria for the Goldilocks Zone:
Hit the pause button on being right.
Hang your inner judge and jury.
Trust everyone’s path.
“But wait: my path is better!” Just add a couple of words to that statement: “My path is better FOR ME.”
“But my beliefs are objectively true!” No: your beliefs are objectively true FOR YOU. Both pragmatically—and scientifically—objective reality is always subject to further examination. The Pragmatists knew this in their bones.
Consider the words of a couple more great Pragmatists. Philosopher George Santayana said, “There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval by discerning and manifesting the good without attempting to retain it.”
Let it go.
Consider the words of Pragmatic philosopher John Dewey: “Growth itself is the only moral end.”
Who am I—and who are you—Dewey points out, to judge the religious and philosophical understandings of another person? Maybe you have a PhD in religious studies. That’s great. Maybe you were born UU and have a very open mind and no emotional baggage about religion. Bully for you. Remind yourself: anyone who walks into a Unitarian Universalist congregation for the first time is saying, “I need to think about this ultimate meaning and purpose stuff. I’m not satisfied with the off-the-rack, one-size-fits-all answers.”
Remember that NONE of us have the ultimate answers. The answers that work for others. I don’t have all the answers. I’m still thinking. And as a minister I get paid to think about these things. I thought about titling this, “What I Really, Really Think About God (this week).”
Try this: avoid going “underground like a wild potato.” Share your subjectivity but remember that it is a subjectivity, and we all live in some kind of private Idaho. Insisting on our own rightness leads to an icy world; saying there’s only one way leads to a steamed planet
.
The Goldilocks Zone, where the fresh water flows, is only possible when we get outside our own stuff and listen.
Seriously—Who Said We Can Choose Our Own Mysteries?
The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible. ~Oscar Wilde
There is more than one type of mystery. Some mysteries aren’t even mysterious. For example, how a diesel engine works is a mystery to many, but only those who haven’t taken the time to look at diesel engines. They are a marvel of complexity, yes. But there’s no mystery to how a diesel engine works. People design them. People build them. People repair them.
How planes fly; how battle ships float; how cereal stays fresh for months in cardboard boxes . . . none of these are mysteries to those who bother to look into them and figure out how they work.
Then there are those things that once were mysteries but aren’t any longer. How Ouija boards work, for example, isn’t a mystery. The motions are due to the “ideomotor effect.” That’s the term that a scientist, William Carpenter, coined in 1882 when he was researching how fortune-telling pendulums and dowsing rods work. He also studied the movements of tables at seances. No, the movers and shakers are not spirits. They are us, ourselves. We don’t even know it, Carpenter argued, but we unconsciously make the movements we expect spirits or magic magnetic forces to make.
How dowsing rods work is not a mystery.
But the reason that Ouija boards are not a mystery is that curiosity led someone to discover the truth. Fact is, the “ideomotor effect” is counter to the evidence of our own senses: we don’t know we are producing the movements that we think are coming from the spirit world. Our senses have fooled us.
Only a deep curiosity to solve a mystery can lead to this kind of discovery.
This is the distinction I’m searching for.
Mystery, it appears, can lead to complacence and even superstition, or it can lead to discovery.
That’s why the battle between science and religion has been so brutal for so long in the Western world. It has been twenty-five hundred years since Socrates was convicted for “refusing to recognize the gods acknowledged by the state, and importing strange divinities of his own.”
Can the gods make rain if there are no clouds? Socrates thought it’s not likely. His assertion threatened to kill a sacred cow.
Yet slowly, over time, more and more people looked at the mystery of rain and decided that perhaps the phenomenon occurred for some reason other than the actions of the gods.
It makes me wonder why the Abrahamic monotheisms—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—have been so resistant to scientific knowledge while Hinduism, Buddhism, Confuscism, Daoism, and earth-based religions have not.
Is that another one of those mysteries?
Is this resistance to science a product of these religions, or is it a product of the ways of thinking that led to these religions? After all, Socrates died four hundred years before the birth of Jesus.
Could it be that democracy is the problem?
Or perhaps patriarchal rule?
Or perhaps the very oppression itself served to encourage curiosity?
Is it a mystery? I’m curious . . .
We human beings have a sense of awe and wonder that motivates us to ask questions, that motivates us to use our imaginations and our reason. At one time, a time before microscopes and telescopes and oscilloscopes and scoping in general, stories and reason were all we had. Then we began to build instruments. Eventually we figured out why it rains.
How do we answer some of those other mysteries, question such as,
What is the purpose of the universe?
Why are we here?
What is the purpose of our lives?
Who’s in charge here?
For many people, even those living in the industrialized world, the answers to these questions remain steadfastly in the realm of superstition.
Who’s in charge here?
El?
Yahweh?
Astarte?
Quetzalcoatl?
Vucub-Caquix? (a Mayan bird god)
Gods and gods in charge of this and that, gods in human form, gods in animal form. For human beings, at one time, stories were all we had. Eventually a curious Greek named Xenophanes came along and said,
“If oxen and horses and lions had hands and were able to draw with their hands and do the same things as men, horses would draw the shapes of gods to look like horses and oxen would draw them to look like oxen, and each would make the gods bodies have the same shape as they themselves had.”
Xenophanes saw—he was roughly a contemporary of Socrates—Xenophanes saw that our stories concerning these ultimate questions depend upon anthropomorphism. We create gods in our own image. They do things that we understand. “Why would that be?” asked Xenophanes. It was a mystery.
Seriously: What is the purpose of the universe?
Xenophanes told us, 2500 years ago: even if there were a purpose, human beings would not understand it. Purpose is an anthropomorphism, a giving the universe human characteristics. We might as well ask, Does the universe yearn? Does the universe get hungry?
Xenophanes remains, whispering into our ears: the universe just isn’t human, even if we imagine a really, really big human.
Poet Dana Gioia expresses this in a poem called “Words:”
The world does not need words. It articulates itself
in sunlight, leaves, and shadows. The stones on the path
are no less real for lying uncatalogued and uncounted.
The fluent leaves speak only the dialect of pure being.
The purpose of the universe in relation to human beings is not a mystery: the universe does not need us and our endless words. As Ludwig Wittgenstein said, “If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.”
There. That is where the mystery is.
Because we need purpose, we project purpose upon the universe.
Our first job is to figure out that we do that. And then stop doing that.
Only then can we get down to a real mystery: Each of us can ask ourselves, “What is my purpose?” When each of us figures that out, we have pursued wisdom and caught up with it. Maybe even put a saddle on it for awhile.
Wisdom is knowing that me, you, all of us—nobody has a purpose . . . until we figure it out. And, even after we do manage to wrestle it to the ground and put a bridle on it once, our purpose is very likely to do a little Houdini on us. Purpose is a shape shifter, if you will. It’s a moving target in our lives.
Our own purpose is the greatest mystery. Yet, we know we’ve got it when we feel the excitement of living in this world. As Howard Thurman famously said, “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”
Seriously: who said we get to declare our own mysteries?
The age of the earth is not a mystery.
When dinosaurs existed is not a mystery.
That natural selection shaped life on this planet is not a mystery.
Just because I don’t know something—from ignorance, lack of will, or even adamant refusal to see the facts—does not make it a mystery.
As science fiction writer Philip K. Dick put it, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”
Our challenge in this world is not to create mysteries that are not there. Our challenge is to adjust to the real. And find our meaning and our purpose in the here and now.
Fallen Angels, Rising Apes, and the Knowledge of the Serpent
I.
In addition to the Unitarian Universalist Seven Principles, the congregation that I serve as minister ascribes to a set of aspirational statements that are specifically humanist. Our first Aspiration is, “To live joyfully and ethically, in loving, reverent relationship with humanity and nature.”
Why do we say such a thing?
Because we are countering a long tradition of life-denying dogma common in the Western world. Doctrines such as that of Original Sin are not an affirmation of life in this world, and, in our view, that’s the only life there is.
You don’t have to go farther than our bulletin board to see an implication of what we mean. Just now we have a poster advocating “sex-positive reproductive justice.” We are countering a culture in which sex-negative attitudes impact the fundamental rights of women.
In my blog post last week I discussed Dostoyevsky’s assertion of free will:
“One’s own free unfettered choice, one’s own caprice, however wild it may be, one’s own fancy worked up at times to frenzy . . .”
Well, it’s certainly “joyful” to do “one’s own fancy,” but such actions may not meet the ethical or “reverent relationship” criterion. Dostoyevsky’s definition of free will, the freedom to really mess things up, is a negative assertion of freedom. There’s always a the poles: Sex-negative. Sex-positive. Freedom-negative; freedom-positive. Navigating those can be problematic. And traditional Western religions are the problem, not a solution.
How to be sex-positive and life-affirming. That’s why UU congregations take OWL, Our Whole Lives education courses, so seriously. We have this “one wild and precious life,” as poet Mary Oliver puts it, and we have to figure out how to live it here, now—as ethically, lovingly, and reverently as possible.
In Dostoyevsky’s time philosophers were grappling with the implications of the discovery of Joseph Fourier, a French mathematician, who realized that the numbers of births, deaths, house fires, crimes—even the types of crimes—proved to be fairly consistent from year to year. Predictable, in other words.
This led to both the insurance industry and the field of sociology, among other things. My inability to diet and the number of people who die of heart attack and stroke each year in the United States has some connection, now, doesn’t it?
The insurance industry certainly sees a connection.
Unlike in Dostoyevsky’s time, we don’t think much about it nowadays when we hear how many Americans will die of Type II Diabetes or high blood pressure this year. Nowadays we are saturated with statistics. So much so that, with the addition of computers, we live in the next iteration of statistical analysis: “big data” or “predictive analytics.”
Netflix can tell us what movies we will enjoy with a high degree of accuracy. Amazon can send us discounts for things that the crunched data indicate we will consume next. I love a sentence I read about predictive analytics: “Analytical Customer Relationship Management can be applied throughout the customer’s lifecycle.”
Think about that: “Analytical Customer Relationship Management can be applied throughout the customer’s lifecycle.”
So when you start getting coupons for caskets . . . watch out.
It makes me want to go Dostoyevsky’s route and buy something REALLY crazy.
II.
One of the oddest things I have to deal with in multi-faith work is answering the accusation that humanists don’t have a “theology of sin.” As in, “you don’t have a theology of sin, therefore . . . you’re just not all that serious about religion.”
To which I’m tempted to say that humanism doesn’t have a theory of onomatopoeia either.
It’s not that humanists don’t understand what people are talking about when they discuss onomatopoeia, it’s just that it lies outside the purview of a humanist ethic.
It’s simply that I don’t put any credence in the idea that people are born into a “fallen state.” As far as I can see, a “theology of sin” has a lot of baggage that just has nothing to do with reality. It’s a complicated answer to a simple question: Why do people act like animals?” When St. Augustine came up with his theory of Original Sin, people didn’t know that human beings were animals. Call it self-denial. But now we do.
How could an animal that has evolved a consciousness such as we have be “fallen”?
I think that anthropologist Robert Ardrey put it best:
We were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides. (African Genesis: A Personal Investigation into the Animal Origins and Nature of Man, 1961.
Claiming that “original sin” is not a true description of reality is in no way saying that human beings are “born good,” any more than saying “I have no vacuum cleaner” means that I can’t clean my floor.
Original sin is a theological concept that serves theological ends. And it is a complex answer to a simple question that does not survive Occam’s Razor.
There’s nothing original about sin. But there is something very original about acting up to human aspirations toward ethics and compassion. We are risen apes, not fallen angels, and we are “armed killers” besides. That is a considerably clearer place to start considering how to be ethical, loving, and reverent, it seems to me.
Allow me to take a crack at a humanist theology of sin, necessarily taking into account evolution. How about this: “Sin” is a lack of cooperation with others.
Looked at from this angle, Dostoyevsky wasn’t defining free will, he was defining actions that do not take others into account: “One’s own free unfettered choice, one’s own caprice . . . one’s own fancy worked up at times to frenzy . . .”
Excessive drinking; smoking; eating too much—these aren’t “sins.” They’re merely really bad behaviors, given what we know about their outcomes. Those seven deadly sins—wrath, greed, sloth, pride, lust, envy, gluttony—they’re bad for the self and they are bad for others.
“We were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides.” Too often our incredible reason and creativity has been allowed to invent sharpened sticks . . . and a few other things to kill each other with. This is “sin”: it is a lack of cooperation and compassion for others.
Our challenge is to look reality in the face and do what we can with what we’ve got.
That tale of the Garden of Eden is a good story, but it has led to some bad behavior. Sin isn’t very original.
Allow me to take another shot at a humanist theory of of sin:
Some things, such as what have been called sins, are the default settings on the human body. The out-of-the-box model, so to speak. But every car enthusiast knows that if you want more performance, you’ve got to get yourself an after-market muffler. Human ethics are like that.
Our aspirations toward living “ethically, in loving, reverent relationship with humanity and nature” are mostly after-market add-ons.
OK. So I know that my metaphor doesn’t have the sizzle of two naked people and a talking snake. (That’s good writing!) Still, my metaphor is truer to the human condition.
We are risen apes, not fallen angels. We are prone to un-original appetites, irresponsibility, and killing. Still, we can aspire “to live joyfully and ethically, in loving, reverent relationship with humanity and nature.”
Not bad for a bunch of primates.
Sin Isn’t Very Original: Dostoyevsky and the Freedom to Really Mess Things Up
I have a terrible confession: almost all of the calories I consume in a day, I consume after 8pm.
No, I don’t cook extravagant dinners late at night. Far from it. I eat junk.
I’m not proud of it. I know that eating late at night is the worst sort of thing for my health. I have talked with my physician about it. I’ve talked with therapists. I’ve talked with nutritionists.
I have even stopped doing it for, oh, two or three days at a time.
As a matter of fact, the thought that I shouldn’t do it goes through my head each evening. Right before I head for the fridge.
And the knowledge that I shouldn’t do it . . . adds to the rush I get when I do do it.
This is a terrible confession. But you who have not sinned may hurl the first stone. Perhaps binge eating doesn’t appeal to you. OK. But something does . . .
Something you know you shouldn’t do. Bacon. Scotch. Pistachio ice cream. Gambling. Driving too fast. Drunk-dialing your ex. Sex. Drugs. Doritos.
Something.
Yes, you know you’re going to face-palm when you wake up the next morning. But you just can’t stop yourself.
Many Christians blame it on “original sin,” but a quick survey of the wreckage around us shows that sin isn’t all that original. You who have not sinned may hurl the first stone.
OK, so I know that’s not what St. Augustine meant by the “original” in “original sin.” But there is certainly a connection between those seven deadly sins—wrath, greed, sloth, pride, lust, envy, and gluttony—and the sort of thing I’m talking about. They are all things we do because they come naturally. Each is an easy answer in the immediate moment, though each is fairly clearly not good for us in the long run, if by “good” we mean . . . well, what? Our animal selves?
Why do we fall so easily into those patterns of behavior described as the “deadly sins”? St. Augustine thought that it’s because we’re born that way—we are born into a fallen world. I don’t think St. Augustine’s answer quite survives Occam’s Razor—it is not the simplest explanation by a long shot.
But the fact remains: why do we do what we know we shouldn’t do and that we know we will regret?
Despite the fact that he’s been dead for a hundred and thirty-three years, Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky still has the best explanation, I think. His insights continue to challenge our most sacred of cows.
In his time, most Europeans believed that humanity had finally rounded a corner, and that the human future would be determined by rationality and reason—the greatest good for the greatest number.
Dostoyevsky was there to say this was not the case . . . and never will be the case.
Of all the reflections on why we human beings do what we do, from philosophers to neuroscientists, Fyodor Dostoyevsky still gets my vote for the deepest insight concerning why human beings make the choices we do:
“One’s own free unfettered choice, one’s own caprice, however wild it may be, one’s own fancy worked up at times to frenzy—is that very “most advantageous advantage” which we have overlooked, which comes under no classification and against which all systems and theories are continually being shattered to atoms.”
Dostoyevsky knew that the “most advantageous advantage”—for me that’s losing twenty pounds—the “most advantageous advantage” is NOT what might be reasonable and “right.” Rather, the “most advantageous advantage” is our exercising what we see as free will—making a “capricious” and “unfettered choice.”
Dostoyevsky asked,
“And how do these wiseacres know that man wants a normal, a virtuous choice? What has made them conceive that man must want a rationally advantageous choice?
What man wants is simply independent choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead.”
Why? That’s the question we ask in those face-palm moments: Why? Why do we do that?
Philosopher Crispin Sartwell puts it this way: “When you consult your experience, the fact that you are a body is more obvious than that two plus two equals four.”
There: I think that’s it. And that’s what Dostoyevsky knew is the case: The physical trumps the reasonable. Virtue. Reason. Those don’t feel like independent choice, do they? They feel, well . . . wholesome. And wholesome, like two plus two equals four, doesn’t feel real, doesn’t feel embodied.
Isn’t the concept of original sin merely a complex way of saying that human beings are born with bodies?
And isn’t this the wellspring of so much of Western thought? Our dualism, our denial of the body?
The doctrine of original sin is all about how merely being born with a body, merely entering this world, makes us sinful. Fallen. Dirty. In need of redemption.
Well. Maybe you don’t buy that. But, when we turn the terms into “head” and “heart,” which do you think is more important? Which should predominate? Isn’t one about me staying in my chair and the other about my trip to the fridge?
Perhaps most people nowadays don’t think that the mere fact of embodiment— em-bodi-ment—the Latin prefix “em,” meaning “put into”—we perhaps don’t think that the mere fact of having a body has us on the highway to hell. But it certainly puts us in the way of some bad choices, doesn’t it?
Consider some other “em” prefixes: em-brace, em-bryo, em-barrassment. Fleshy stuff, isn’t this “em,” this being “put into”? Getting into a body appears to put us into quite a fix. I’m reminded of that Punk classic from Richard Hell and the Voidoids: “It’s a gamble when you get a face.”
I think that the most damaging idea in all of Western philosophy and religion is the body / mind distinction.
It led to the belief in a distinction between the body and the soul, which I think is a psychologically damaging and completely erroneous idea.
It led to the erroneous idea that consciousness itself is somehow distinct from the functioning of the brain.
These errors permeate Western thinking. Perhaps it’s easiest to see in the statement, “I have a body.” How could a human being possibly “have” a body? We can “have” a beer or a smoke or a snack or a new car. We can even have an opinion. But we don’t have a body: we ARE a body.
Rather than “I have a body,” the truer way to say this is, “I AM a body.”
Yes, Dostoyevsky said, people are capable of realizing the advantageous—what is good for us. But this knowledge, far from leading to rational decisions, shows us instead the way to REALLY mess things up.
I feel, as I head toward the fridge, liberated. I feel as if I were practicing free will. But am I? Or am I merely playing out my enslavement to one of the seven big sins, gluttony?
Dostoyevsky understood this dilemma. He was ruinously addicted to gambling. Still, in a world full of human beings whose actions can be predicted by statistics, what can we do? The irrational.
As Dostoyevsky had his Underground Man put it,
“The formula ‘two plus two equals five’ is not without its attractions.”
More next week . . .
Nature, Nurture, Murder: The Lessons of the Eugenics Craze
In the world of super heroes, it’s called an “origin story,” that trauma that led to the super hero being super.
Poor little Bruce Wayne watches helplessly as his parents are murdered. Superman rockets off the planet Krypton, sent away by his father moments before the planet explodes, only to find himself in Kansas where a loving couple adopts him and imbues him with truth, justice, and the American Way. Magneto and Professor X start out as just normal . . . mutants . . . but life experience sends one on to found the good-guy X-Men and the other to . . . electrical evil.
Clearly, the creators of super heroes believe that nurture trumps nature in that long debate between nature and nurture. But the more we know about genetics, the more we have to ask, is that true? Do our genes make us do it, whatever the “it” might be?
Science has been known to give us answers that we are not culturally capable of understanding. The most egregious moment of that in the Twentieth Century was the eugenics movement, that is, the belief that “better babies” could be produced by selective human breeding; and the corollary belief that those born with disabilities and those of races not of Western European origin, were inferior.
Liberal preachers preached it. Liberal people practiced it. It was part-and-parcel of the early birth control movement. And of course it led ultimately to the atrocities of Nazi Germany.
It also led, in the US, to immigration laws barring most people not of Western European origin, and the forced-sterilization of thousands of people. Proponents believed they could eradicate mental disorders though eugenics; they believed they could eradicate alcoholism. Forced sterilization for those in mental institutions was a practice upheld by the US Supreme Court. Thousands of poor people were forcibly sterilized. And the practice of requiring sterilization as a pre-condition for receiving welfare checks continued in some states into the 1970s.
Their motto was, “Eugenics is the self-direction of evolution.”
Fact is, the Nazis got many of their ideas from the United States and used the example of the US to justify their actions to other nations all through the 1930s.
Today, we know this behavior well as the rhetoric of neo-Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan, and some far-out right-wing politicians. But liberals?
I don’t want to in any way justify these beliefs. They are despicable. Yet dismissing these ideas as something from the dark past is a very bad idea. Rather, we should look to that terrible chapter of American history as a cautionary tale. Because, besides being based in the most virulent forms of racism and ableism, political progressives also saw eugenics as good science: the latest in scientific knowledge. That’s the cautionary tale: Eugenics appealed to the very people who were most open to the theory of natural selection.
Why? One reason is that they applied the idea of natural selection—still not well understood by most people in the early Twentieth Century—to an idea most Americans knew very well at the time—the selective breeding of animals. Remember the motto I mentioned: “Eugenics is the self-direction of evolution.” Nowadays most people who look at the matter know that natural selection can’t be self-selected—the time frame is way too long for human beings to affect, or even comprehend, for that matter. But, most people did not know that at the time.
Here’s how the fatal error occurred: We have cats and dogs and ridable horses because of selective breeding. People figured this out a loooong time ago. My grandparents, who could barely read and write, were experts at selective breeding. Most farmers were.
People knew that traits can be affected in a short time among animals, and so they assumed that human genetics could be affected in a short time. And that simply isn’t true—not in animals such as human beings that have long lives, anyway. Fruit flies are a different story. As is the famous case of the tube (subway) mice in London that have evolved in about a century and a half to have grey coats that exactly match the color of paint used on the bottom of the London train tunnels. But people aren’t fruit flies or mice. Scientific ideas often become dangerous when they are applied to culture or human life on a micro-level.
Remember that Charles Darwin knew almost nothing about genetics: Mendel’s work on peas was in existence in Darwin’s lifetime, but Darwin never encountered the studies.
Remember that the structure of DNA was not discovered until 1953, well after the horrors of Nazism. The first draft of the the human genome appeared in 2001.
To that we must add that the overt racist and ableist assumptions in the US at the time made for the perfect environment for the eugenics movement. Racism and ableism permeated US society—from outright segregationist to progressives to just about everybody. Heck, even the Homeopathy Society supported eugenics.
We see the same sort of misapplication of science today: Despite what New Age gurus might claim, people are not lonely because we live in an expanding universe. We can’t walk through walls because there is lots of space between atoms. We don’t vibrate with cosmic vibrations because of String Theory.
And you don’t speed up natural selection through eugenics. The time scales of the two are completely different. All these are the realm of hucksters. And, in the case of eugenics, racists.
Take away: when science appears to support your preconceptions and prejudices, watch out!
No, there isn’t really a super hero who became Spider-Man because he was bitten by an irradiated spider. But here are some things that are real science that we easily forget:
Genetic research has taught us that the entire concept of race is a fiction. A mistake. There are no genetically identifiable races. Homo-Sapiens developed along about 200,000 years ago and some homo-sapiens began leaving Africa something along about 80,000 years ago. Human generations are roughly 25 years, which means that some homo-sapiens left Africa about 3000 generations ago; other homo-sapiens, such as our Somali neighbors, left in this generation. We’re all immigrants out of Africa.
Despite what the racists of the early-Twentieth Century believed, there is no “race” in the homo-sapiens population, only separation by time and cultural difference.
You may have read that President Obama is related to Harry Truman, Dick Cheney, George Bush, and Brad Pitt. This is not urban legend. But it doesn’t prove a whole lot either, except that human beings are all related, and that we tend to notice the famous ones and not the infamous or un-famous ones.
Until everyone understands this, we will have not only the egregious lunatics such as the Neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan, but also the casual cliches that still permeate our culture and destroy the lives of too many people.
Marvel Comics
Poor little Bruce Wayne. He could have been a man of leisure. Superman might have hung out on Krypton (or at least Kansas). And there’s no telling what nature might have had Magneto and Professor X doing. As for us, we will have to continue wondering and speculating just how much of what we do is up to us and how much is up to our stars . . . and our genes. All will be well, so long as we remember humility in the face of a very large universe.
Of Time and the Nebulous
Someday, they say,
stars will stop
gelling—the
hydrogen and
helium gone.
Someday, each
star will call it
a day & go to bits.
Someday the day
will be as dark as
night, the hydrogen,
the helium snuffed.
Someday, in, oh, say,
ten billion billion years,
time will eddy & stop.
Someday deep will
call to deep with
nothing here at all.
Someday here will be
empty like there,
in, oh, say ten billion
billion years . . .
So off we go to
corral the OK.
Off we go to
fish for the net.
Off we go, a link
in the unchained.
Off we go to someday.
How Unitarian Universalists Do Church
I suppose everybody has a favorite founding document for a religion or a nation. Mine is “Farewell at Delfshaven,” a sermon given by Rev. John Robinson to a group of his Separatist congregation who were taking ship for the Western Hemisphere. Part of the sermon goes like this:
I Charge you before God and his blessed angels that you follow me no further than you have seen me follow Christ. If God reveal anything to you by any other instrument of His, be as ready to receive it as you were to receive any truth from my ministry, for I am verily persuaded the Lord hath more truth and light yet to break forth from His holy word.
The Lutherans cannot be drawn to go beyond what Luther saw. Whatever part of His will our God has revealed to Calvin, they (Lutherans) will rather die than embrace it; and the Calvinists, you see, stick fast where they were left by that great man of God, who yet saw not all things. This is a misery much to be lamented.
For though they were precious shining lights in their time, yet God has not revealed his whole will to them. And were they now living, they would be as ready and willing to embrace further light, as they had received.
The way Unitarian Universalists “do church” comes directly from the protestant movements that eventually led to the English Civil War and the decision by some of the radicals that it was perfectly acceptable to God that they supplant the aristocracy and remove their king’s head. . . Radical. It isn’t surprising that the royalty of the day weren’t particularly keen on keeping those sorts around. And perhaps it isn’t surprising that these most protesting of Protestants eventually set up theocracies and felt justified in clearing the land of its native inhabitants.
Yet these radicals—known to us nowadays as Pilgrims, Puritans, and Separatists—were up some positive things as well, such as what we call democracy. And the best of their thought is exemplified by these last words that Rev. Robinson said to members of his congregation as they sailed to England to join another group of dissenters and board the Mayflower.
These parishioners settled in what they called Plymouth, Massachusetts to build what is today a Unitarian Universalist church, which indicates that the beliefs that Rev. Robinson preached, plus about four-hundred years, equals Unitarian Universalism. The deepest beliefs of those religious seekers are the DNA of Unitarian Universalism (for good and ill).
Notice some things about this little sermon: yes, there’s the usual unfortunate bashing of other denominations—in this case Lutherans and Calvinists—but Rev. Robinson was saying two very radical, and I think positive, things.
The first is: “follow me no further than you have seen me follow Christ.” This is still an expectation in the Unitarian Universalist movement: we don’t ordain ministers and then think those ministers are somehow levitating or holy. We don’t think our ministers are special—we expect our ministers to walk the walk . . . all the time, but a minister is just like the rest of us folks.
The other radical thing that Rev. Robinson preached is the very core of the tradition: that truth continues to be revealed. Or, more radically, that we human beings continue to find more and more truth, and we must continue to modify our beliefs according to these new truths.
The Separatists did not “do church” as did most of the Christian groups of the time (and still today). Roman Catholicism had developed along the lines of the political systems of the day: emperors, kings, men in charge. Some protestant groups—Lutherans and Anglicans for example—created state religions. These groups saw themselves—dangerously as Rev. Robinson pointed out—as founded on eternal truths. This justified building hierarchies. Top down.
The Separatists, however, believed in the individual discovery (or revelation) of truth. Therefore, they could not accept hierarchy within the congregation. Each member of the congregation was on a separate path toward truth, and as likely as any other member (including clergy) to find it.
As a corollary, the churches the “pilgrims,” and eventually Puritans, set up in Massachusetts were all individual as well. Each congregation discovered truth for itself. This is one reason the Separatist movement eventually fractured into Trinitarian and Unitarian congregations.
Still today, each congregation in the Unitarian Universalist Association is on its own, to choose leaders, to find their own way toward truth. And the “power,” whatever that is, lies within the congregation, not the association of congregations.
Not an ideal way to run a collection of congregations, a “denomination,” of course, but a great way to encourage freedom of conscience and thought.
Yes, the radical protestant movements of Europe were “precious shining lights in their time,” but nowadays, the belief systems they were founded on are for the most part relics of the past, products of minds “who yet saw not all things.” And, as Rev. Robinson said, “This is a misery much to be lamented.” I, for example, as a minister, don’t use the terms “God” or “Christ” at all in my historically humanist congregation. The light has shown my congregation a different path.
That’s the genius of the idea Rev. Robinson preached: truth just keeps on coming.
Spiritual Practice for Skeptics
I tend to get it from both sides when I talk about spiritual practice: many of my fellow skeptics blanch at the word “spiritual.” And many Buddhists, Hindus, Christians, Sufis, and what-have-yous seem to think that rationality and spiritual practice are at loggerheads. But humanists value connectedness and experience wonder just like everyone else. As far as I’m concerned, that’s spirituality.
I grew up Pentecostal. The spiritual practices taught in that tradition are daily bible reading and prayer. There is much talk of “having a prayer life.” As a kid, I assiduously read the King James Version of the bible. I completed the task when I was twelve. Admittedly, I didn’t understand much of what I read, but I credit that practice with preparing me for reading Modernist literature when I got to college. What’s a little James Joyce after you’ve read Leviticus at twelve?
Along about the time I was fourteen I began questioning praying in the manner I had been taught—petitionary prayer. I decided that it was presumptuous to ask God (if that god knows all and can do everything) for anything. On the other hand, I knew then, and I still believe, it is mentally healthy to pause, consider the needs of others, and think of ways that one might help others achieve those needs. That’s another sort of prayer entirely.
Nowadays Christians have rediscovered “contemplative prayer.” It is an interesting practice. But it wasn’t much known back in the days when I was searching.
When I was twenty-two I traveled to Boulder, Colorado to Naropa Institute. I went to study at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. I went because my poetry hero, Allen Ginsberg, was there. I discovered the serious practice of Buddhism.
At Naropa, Ginsberg and Gary Snyder both taught that meditation had to be an end in itself—the point isn’t to meditate on something to write or to be a better writer. Meditation just is. The point isn’t “enlightenment.” Rather, meditation tunes the mind.
I have to admit, I’m fidgety. I didn’t meditate well then; I don’t meditate well now. The writing of poetry became for me a spiritual practice. That, to, focuses the mind and centers one in the moment. I have continued that practice through my life—through births, deaths, disappointments, divorce. Every day, I write. It is part of me. Some days it has been all I have had to keep me going.
I use tricks to keep my writing a priority. I blog. I work on a chapter of the Daodejing every day, polishing a translation I have been working on for a long time.
Most days, I also practice meditation in the Buddhist manner that I learned at Naropa, even though I’m still fidgety. I sit down, quiet the mind, watch the thoughts pass, and realize that they are thoughts. The Buddhist master Thich Nhat Hanh perhaps sums up Buddhist meditation best in his book Being Peace:
A human being is like a television set with millions of channels. If we turn the Buddha on, we are the Buddha. If we turn sorrow on, we are sorrow. If we turn a smile on, we really are the smile. We cannot let just one channel dominate us. We have the seed of everything in us, and we have to seize the situation in our hand, to recover our own sovereignty.
For me, anyway, the great Buddhist insight is that each of us has the ability to step between a thought and a reaction . . . to realize that our minds are creating stories, that these stories shape our lives, and that these stories can be slavishly followed . . . or changed.
Writing poetry and meditating have sustained me as a humanist. Sure, “spiritual” is an overused word in North American culture. But in that heap of salesmanship, there are some real gems.
