Mystical and Scientific

The author of the Gospel of Matthew reports Jesus saying, “If you welcome your sisters and brothers only, what are you doing more than others? (5:47)

Monk and mystic Thomas Merton wrote about one of his mystical experiences:

“Yesterday, in Louisville, at the corner of 4th and Walnut, I suddenly realized that I loved all the people and that none of them were, or, could be totally alien to me.” He felt, “. . . as if waking from a dream—the dream of separateness.” He goes on to say, “Thank God! Thank God! I am only another member of the human race, like all the rest of them.”

The insistence of Jesus that more than just our friends deserve welcome and Merton’s mystical insight that “none of them were, or, could be totally alien to me,” and his awakening from “the dream of separateness,” describe the truth of the human condition.

Fact is, human procreation is exponential—two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents . . . Bill Bryson did the math in his book A Short History of Nearly Everything. Twenty generations ago the number of direct forebears for each of us is 1,048,576. Twenty-five generations ago the number jumps to 33,554,432 .Thirty generations ago the number jumps to over a billion.

It is demonstrably true: no person is alien to any other, at least on a physical level.

The Cut Worm Cries Out

As part of his enlightenment, the Buddha felt the pain of the earthworms cut by plows. As in Merton’s case, the Buddha’s is based in reality—human beings and earthworms share 98% of our DNA.

Animals, plants. The earth itself. As a humanist, I’m not allowed the fiction that human beings are the crown of creation. Human beings are part of a complex web, a web we still barely understand. We ignore the other parts at our peril. We consider ourselves better-than others—be they humans, animals, plants, or the planet itself—only out of ignorance of the facts that science teaches us.

Human beings share 99.9% of our DNA with each other. All the diversity we perceive—gender; race; ability; hair color . . . what-have-you . . . it all resides in that point-one percent of our DNA.

How can a humanist not welcome everyone?

And religion, that most divisive of issues—since we view scriptures and religions as products of the teeming human brain, it’s difficult to say one is better than another. All of them paint reality, albeit with a limited palette. Religions are fun . . . as long as nobody looses an eye. Or a tooth. As long as they do not interfere with human flourishing.

And politics. Since humanists know that human beings have made it up, and that there is no “invisible hand” guiding capitalism or any other economic system, we see economic disparity for what it is—not a reward or punishment from a deity or from hard work but as the effect of many causes, mostly of human design. Politics and economics are fun. As long as nobody’s eye gets put out. As long as politics and economics do not interfere with human flourishing.

Brothers, Sisters, and Others

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Earth_Worm.JPG

Since humanists interrogate beliefs intensely—and are open to changing our beliefs when reason and evidence point in a new direction—we focus not on common beliefs but on common values.

Our highest value is human flourishing. Flourishing for each and every human being, because each has inherent worth and dignity, no matter about religion or national origin or social or economic location or what-have-you.

Humanists are human, and therefore full of prejudices, but we can’t hide behind those prejudices. If we do not welcome our sisters and brothers—and those questioning the gender binary—what are we doing more than others?”

Since religions and science are products of the human mind, one story, one truth, does not suffice—be it a scripture or science itself.

Since humanism considers religious thought as a product of the teeming human mind and human flourishing as a primary goal of human activity, our movement is uniquely able to pitch that “big tent” that Unitarian Universalists hope for. 

Authenticity or Bust

From the First Great Awakening of the 1740s that energized the North American colonists and eventually led to the American Revolution to the Transcendentalists to the Beats, Hippies, and What-Have-Yous, a frequent cry of Americans has been “authenticity.” Americans want it to be real; genuine; visceral; heartfelt; roughhewn . . . something like that.

Authenticity, I take it, has something to do with being yourself. Or finding yourself. Or getting out of your head and into your heart. Something like that.

In the US, finding one’s authentic self has often involved hitting the open road and going West. Or heading to the big city. Sometimes it’s the distance from the pew to the alter in a holy roller church. Or to the free air of an ashram after escape from the stale breath of a parish church.

It often involves both geographic space and psychic distance–the distance from of a Midwestern farm to Gay Paree or Hometown, USA to Greenwich Village or North Beach.

Whatever else it might be, it appears that the authentic self is open to new experience and fresh possibility. Open to taking advantage of options. And changing fundamental beliefs.

(It is also a marketing opportunity. The authentic individual often needs a particular look and particular accoutrements.)

Self Like a Sieve

I grew up in a farming community near the Ohio River. My parents rode farm wagons pulled by horses into the nearest town when they were kids. For those children of the farm and the Depression, the speed and power of a 185 horse power V8 Chevrolet engine on a paved road spoke to them of possibility and adventure.

My parents transformed themselves from farmers to factory workers. The sort of folks the Beats, also of their generation, found square. Authenticity, it appears, comes in many packages.

My farmer parents were what philosopher Charles Taylor termed “porous selves.” They lived fully aware of the difficulty and dangers of survival. This reinforced their faith in the Christianity of the lower Ohio River Valley.

My father was born prematurely in a two-room sharecropper’s shack. He survived because August without air conditioning is a great incubator. His family nearly starved during the Depression. Next, he survived house-to-house and hand-to-hand combat in Europe during the Second World War. Then he worked as a boilermaker, sometimes suspended high over the water, working on ships; sometimes he worked several stories up, on smoke stacks.

My parents qualified as “porous selves,” as philosopher Charles Taylor put it–the sort of people for whom life itself is as authentic and real as anybody could want. They weren’t out looking for authenticity . . . Nor did they seek new religious thinking.

As Charles Taylor puts it, “The porous self is vulnerable: to spirits, demons, cosmic forces. And along with this go certain fears that can grip it in certain circumstances. The buffered self has been taken out of the world of this kind of fear.”
http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2008/09/02/buffered-and-porous-selves/

This “buffered self,” according to Taylor, often becomes secular, or at least “believes” in received religions only insofar as they choose not to seek authenticity in that direction. “Buffered” people are free enough, in other words, from the fear of looming, immanent privation and death to–if they choose–begin examining cultural assumptions, including one’s religious ideas.

Psychologist Abraham Maslow had a similar idea, which he called a “hierarchy of needs.”

Boomers and the Big Bang of Authenticity

A very large shift in US consciousness occurred post-World War II. What became known as the Beat Generation served as catalyst. But it was more than one particular group of young people. I like Taylor’s distinction between porous and buffered because it helps grasp what happened.

Many Americans–like me–were able to move from a porous understanding to buffered understanding. Beat writers such as Jack Kerouac or Allan Ginsberg or Gregory Corso became models for our religious, spiritual, and artistic quests.

Remember what Charles Taylor said: “The buffered self has been taken out of the world . . . of fear.” Unlike my parents, I never faced starvation. Or war. Or educational deprivation. Or the feeling of being less-than because of my social location in US society.

For many like me, the Beats became models for this “buffered” sort of individualized “finding yourself.” They became the models for making choices.

Whose Yer Daddy?

Charles Taylor is trying with his distinction to explain why safety leads to secularity. Why it is that people who are not in constant want and fear choose to drop out of their childhood religions and question the norms they have been taught.

Immediately after the September 11th attacks, the churches and synagogues and mosques of the America were full. My supposition at the time was that the fear of the day would lead to a resurgence of piety of the sort that swept the nation during the Red Scare of the 1950s.

This did not happen.

As a matter of fact, the reverse has been true–attendance has dropped steadily ever since. It appears Americans felt “porous” for a short time but returned to “buffered” robustly. Why?

Perhaps it’s fairly easy to feel safe in the US of the 21st Century, despite constant low-level wars and rising debt and poverty. Perhaps a majority of Americans still feel that the likelihood of growing old is in our favor. Perhaps it’s always 9/11 now. But we have adjusted to that new normal.

After all, that “invisible hand” of Capitalism continues to pump out the calories and the iPhones.

So, we go on, wandering from one religion to another, one answer to another. We go on seeking authenticity. Whatever that means . . .

What ‘Ol Abe Saw

Moses, Jesus, Paul, et. al. as motivator. Their words as marching orders for how to live and what is right to do.

Sounds good. Yet, as he watched the bloody carnage justified on both sides by Christian theology, Abraham Lincoln perhaps said it best:

“I know that the Lord is always on the side of the right. But it is my constant anxiety and prayer that I and this nation should be on the Lord’s side.”

Which side is the Lord’s side? Or is it that God plays for both teams? Or is it that human beings are condemned to action that may or may not be “right” until God (or Satan?) sorts it out?

Cherry-Picking and Sound-Biting

This contrast came home to me during the recent fight over gay marriage in the state of Minnesota, where I live. Progressive religious leaders took a long look at the reign of the religious right in politics and decided to counter it. We took the Christian message of love and inclusion to the statehouse. I knew that we had accomplished the goal when a conservative state senator said, “This is about more than religion.”

The worm had turned. And, indeed, the right to marry is now guaranteed in the state of Minnesota.

Many of my religious sisters and brothers believe that the loving and inclusive message of their faith traditions prevailed. Don’t get me wrong—I’m all for loving and inclusion. It’s the message of Moses, Jesus, Paul, et. al. that bothers me a bit.

Weren’t we progressives cherry-picking and sound-biting as crassly as our conservative opponents?

Where were the real Moses and Jesus and Paul in all this?

Perhaps our hearts were telling us things. Perhaps our sense of right and wrong was talking, on both sides. But these sacred thinkers weren’t saying anything new that the scriptures weren’t telling Abe Lincoln and Jeff Davis back in their days of choosing who to slaughter and why based on those old writings.

Using Our Own Little Heads

This gives me pause. Are we really best served as we make decisions in the Twenty-First Century by referring to old texts and deities that pretty clearly don’t do a whole lot of clear talking?

Or might we be better served “using our own little heads”?

That’s a phrase I learned from my fundamentalist Christian mother: “Use your own little head.”

By it, she meant for teenage me to “listen to my raisin’,” another catch phrase, rather than my peers. My mother was cautioning me to use my own head. Further, at least to my future-humanist ears, she was saying that reason, not the religion in my gut, should determine my actions.

Shouldn’t reason, not the religions of our various cultural backgrounds, serve as the arbiter of public discourse and our efforts at realizing a just society?

As a multi-faith leader, I spend a lot of time saying and showing that people of diverse religious faiths can find common ground. I believe in that work.

I’m also convinced that our common evolution as cooperative and rational animals trumps the overlays of religion and culture made since our common trek from the Rift Valley began.

We are rational animals.

After all, which would you prefer as a physician, someone who feels your pain or someone who knows how to stop it? Listening to the heart is a fine thing to do. And, there’s no doubt scriptures make great soundbites.

Listening to our own heads is the hard part.

Wolf!

The Aesop fable about the boy who cried wolf has long been viewed as a cautionary tale about lying. The boy knowingly cried “wolf!” merely to disturb the villagers. The boy eventually pays the price in dead sheep when the villagers stop responding.

There is another and more dangerous way of crying wolf, however: continually calling “wolf!” because there might be one but there might not.

In this way of crying wolf, the boy is expressing his fears—his own psychodrama. He may even be utterly convinced that a wolf is threatening and nearby. He may even be imagining what a wolf attack might look like. Still, despite the boy’s true alarm, there is no wolf, and the villagers are wasting their time running to help the boy. Wasting time that would be better taken with other ventures.

It’s Not About Not Deciding

As an agnostic, I’m very aware that we agnostics are often seen as fence-sitters—the tepid ones choosing neither hot nor cold. Why can’t we just buck up and admit that we’re atheists? Or why can’t we admit that we have a soft spot for one god or another? Why can’t we just cry wolf or shut up?

Contrary to the cliche, agnosticism isn’t about not deciding. It’s about honestly facing what we know about knowing itself. It is, as the Victorian biologist, T.H. Huxley, who coined the term, said, “not a creed but a method.” (Athiesm is a creed because it is a belief, like theism.)

Agnosticism is a method that is, I believe, a spiritual practice like Christian Centering Prayer or Buddhist meditation.

When Huxley first used the word in print in 1889, he contrasted his confidence in human knowledge with that of the convinced believers. He said,

They were quite sure they had attained a certain “gnosis”—had, more or less successfully, solved the problem of existence; while I was quite sure I had not, and had a pretty strong conviction that the problem was insoluble.

So I took thought, and invented what I conceived to be the appropriate title of “agnostic.” It came into my head as suggestively antithetic to the “gnostic” of Church history, who professed to know so much about the very things of which I was ignorant.

Knowing and Thinking We Know

Gnostic in Greek means “knowledge.” In the Western world we know the term best from the early Christian movement called Gnosticism, which claimed esoteric knowledge of the workings of the universe. Such knowledge, Huxley pointed out, can be neither proven nor disproven. The Gnostics claimed to have “solved the problem of existence.” Huxley, however, wasn’t so sure of their untestable opinions. (Neither, it might be mentioned, was the Church so sure of their solution.)

In other words, Gnosticism wasn’t about knowing, it was about belief. Agnosticism is about how and what we know.

Boiled down to its simplest formulation, the way of agnosticism according to Huxley is: “do not pretend conclusions are certain that are not demonstrated or demonstrable.”

No matter how convinced you are that the wolf is near, don’t cry wolf until you see one.

This is not fence-sitting or vacillation. It is, rather, a commitment to the active search for what we can know. In this way it is much like the spiritual practice of via negativa, a method of removing those things that are not “god” in order to discover god.

Huxley, however, saw his method as a positive rather than negative path. He wrote:

. . . Agnosticism is not properly described as a “negative” creed, nor indeed as a creed of any kind, except in so far as it expresses absolute faith in the validity of a principle, which is as much ethical as intellectual. This principle may be stated in various ways, but they all amount to this: that it is wrong for a man to say he is certain of the objective truth of a proposition unless he can produce evidence which logically justifies that certainty. That is what agnosticism asserts and, in my opinion, is all that is essential to agnosticism. (“Agnosticism and Christianity”)

It’s About the Questions

Huxley made it very clear that scientific materialists don’t have the answers either. No one does. All of us find ourselves improvising with as much information as we can scramble together—as have all people for all of human history. Agnostics are committed, however, to the common human project of learning more and more. Of knowing what is actually here, not what we only imagine. This commitment requires us to have active minds engaged in continual searching.

As psychologist Ellen J. Langer puts it in her book Mindfulness, “Just as mindlessness is the rigid reliance on old categories, mindfulness means the continual creation of new ones.”

The method of agnosticism is a way of being mindful. A way of being in the present moment and making that moment an open and creative matrix.

Agnosticism is a commitment to only crying “wolf!” when such a cry will do real good.

I have to admit that the recent events in Ferguson, Missouri have triggered mostly cynicism for me. In the US we have periodic paroxysms of piety triggered by events that happen every day but occasionally “go viral” in the media. Then, the outrage subsides . . . and nothing changes.

Allow me to relate an example that went viral for a few weeks.

I was born across the river from St. Louis, on the Illinois side, the industrial side of the river where African Americans and EuroAmericans have lived since the late Nineteenth Century. The fortunes of that swath of river bank have gone up and down over the years, depending upon armament manufacture, but for the most part the region has been poor and race relations tense.

The people—black and white—who moved to the area have been mostly from rural Southern backgrounds, and the culture has long reflected that reality.

If anyone is looking for a great place to film a documentary about US poverty, I would suggest East St. Louis. But then I know that every city in the country has the scenes available there. It’s just that East St. Louis is a small town.

On July 2, 1917 an event occurred extreme even by the standards of the southern third of Illinois. As the style was at the time, the event was called the East St. Louis Riot. It was, in truth, the East St. Louis Massacre. It was a pattern replicated all over the United States—an incident occurred; whites saw the incident as a perfect excuse to teach blacks a lesson; violence ensued; outrage about the violence ensued; calls went out for change; things went back to normal; nothing changed.

But that’s my cynicism speaking, isn’t it?

This appears to be what happened: after a triggering incident, whites gathered at the edge of an area called Black Valley, the neighborhood where African Americans lived. Whites turned off the water leading into the area so that fires could not be extingushed. Then, they set fire to houses and stores.

As blacks escaped from the fire, whites shot, beat, or lynched as many people as they could.

The Illinois governor ordered the National Guard to occupy the area. When they arrived the troops aided the rioters, joining in the setting of fires and using their superior firepower to kill more blacks. (I know this bit because a member of my family was there and told the story when I was a child, in the early 1960s—I heard many such stories.)

The massacre eventually stopped because the rioters got tired and went home.

No one knows how many people died, since Black Valley was left to bury its own dead. The death toll was probably around 200.

As in the case of Ferguson, marches of solidarity with the victims spread across the US. One political cartoon from the time says it best, perhaps. A black woman is pictured imploring President Wilson—famous for his insistence upon making the world safe for democracy—”Mr. President, why not make America safe for democracy?”

Good question. And a question that echoes down the years. Why is it that we don’t make America safe for democracy?

The methods of oppression used in the East St. Louis Massacre—which continued into the 1950s—do not play well on TV, so in the television era lynchings and mass murders stopped.

Notice that when similar pictures appeared from Ferguson, Washington got busy talking about at least perhaps maybe talking about the wisdom of selling military-grade hardware to local police. (This might even change, if a sufficient number of Americans remember the images long enough to continue talking about the problem.) Remember: my forebear used his government-issued rifle to kill the people he was sent to protect.

In the television era, oppression has been for the most part more isolated—a shooting here, a Rodney-King-style beating there. Sudden, overt, isolated, and constant.

And usually not displayable on TV.

The smartphone, however, may change that. The new technology brought about the Arab Spring, and it might—it could—begin to dismantle the current US system of black oppression.

Violence against this systematic oppression is not the answer. Neither is a brief paroxysm of national outrage. The violence will stop only when we the people catch the acts and put them on television and across the web.

Racists don’t like to see themselves in action on TV. (Or, rather—they don’t like to be seen by liberals on TV.)

I can’t speak for the people across the river in Missouri, but this white guy, a descendent of Confederates and white supremacists, would like to see an end to the violence and oppression.

Marcus Garvey, commenting on the East St. Louis Massacre, perhaps said it best:
“This is no time for fine words, but a time to lift one’s voice against the savagery of a people who claim to be the dispensers of democracy.”