What is Scripture to Us?

Chapter 3   WHAT IS SCRIPTURE TO US?
Roger Ray, D.Min.

Few things are more important than transforming how we think about our inner and outer nature, and our mortality. Thus far, the Evidential Reformation has been centered in science. We desperately need our faith traditions to celebrate this momentous time. We need all the experience that the traditions can muster to guide us today. For in truth, evidence is modern-day scripture.
Dr. Michael Dowd, Huffington Post, March 2, 2012

Woody Allen once said that he grew up in such a rough neighborhood that his mother actually made a good luck charm for him out of a rifle shell.  He wore the bullet on a chain around his neck under his shirt to give him courage when facing the bullies in the neighborhood but it so happened that the bullet actually ended up saving his life.  A crazed Gideon once threw a New Testament right at him and it would have gone right through his heart but it was stopped by the bullet under his shirt.

Of course, those of us who grew up in those primitive times when the Gideons were allowed to come into public schools and make presentations to students were all too familiar with the stories of soldiers in WWII, Korea, and Vietnam who had kept a Gideon New Testament in their pocket and when they were shot, the bullet pierced the pages of the little Bible and stopped like a molten lead finger pointing at Psalm 91, "A thousand may fall at your side, And ten thousand at your right hand; But it shall not come near you."

The Christian Bible was presented to us as having uniquely divine properties.  In Jewish faith communities, the Torah was to be copied by hand and once blessed for use in synagogue, it was never to be touched by human hands again, the text became sacred and was read publicly by lectors who followed along the ancient Hebrew with a golden pointer.  In the event of a fire, or military attack, people risked their lives to rescue the Torah.

Among Muslims, the Quran is of such sacred importance that it was considered to be torture when American captors would throw a copy in the toilet in Guantanamo or urinate on it.  An idiotic, xenophobic preacher in Florida could almost start a war by threatening to burn copies of the Quran.

Christians have not historically been too far off from this level of devotion.  Many of us can remember the day when it was common for families to display a huge open copy of the King James Bible in their living room, usually sitting on a hand carved olive wood stand from Israel.  Laws existed in many states against defiling the Bible or even against putting any other book on top of a Bible.

The first little New Testament and Psalms I was given when I was eleven years old, I was told, could stop a bullet.  Even as Biblical scholarship has shined the light of reason on this ancient text, some liturgical churches still carry a copy into their solemn assemblies accompanied by incense and a processional cross.  Some communities stand when the gospel is read aloud and reply "thanks be to God" when they were liturgically informed that it is, in very fact, "The word of the Lord."

But the solemn and sacred role of scripture in society has been under attack.  In recent years, as racism, anti-Semitism, misogyny and homophobia have become socially unacceptable, the faithful have been compelled to play down or explain away the portions of the Bible that are clearly racist, anti-Semitic, misogynistic and homophobic.  What churches all of the way from fundamentalist and Pentecostal sorts to liberal main-stream denominations have been afraid to say publicly is that they simply disagree with portions of the Bible.

Maybe there was a period of time when reproduction was so vital to survival of ancient tribes that homosexual relationships were discouraged in order to promote propagation.  Perhaps in primitive agrarian societies there were reasons for patriarchal control of land and even for slavery but these attempts at white-washing the abuses of the past because they were either economically necessary or culturally expedient are, at best, embarrassing.

When we read the Bible honestly, we see that, for example, both creation accounts in chapters one and two of Genesis describe the creation of a flat earth.  The truth is that the earth is not flat.  While there are things of value to be found in those ancient and poetic accounts of creation, scientific facts are not to be found there.  In the real world, there are no talking snakes.  Women were not made from one side of a dirt-constructed man.  There is no magical garden guarded by a flaming sword and powerful angel.

It was always a mistake to turn to the Bible for information about science, anthropology, history or astronomy.  It has been a cultural resource of poetry, music, morality plays, and ethical instruction and even though we have attributed its authorship to God, or to Spirit inspired mortals, it is not even a collection of the best of poetry, music, morality plays or ethical instruction.  It contains both beautiful images of social justice, advocacy for the poor, the sick and the vulnerable but it also has its passages of undeserved homage to royalty and priests. It does, in parts, treat women as if they were property or live stock and it does disparage not only homosexuality but even some aspects of simply being a sexual human being.

Many scholars have for years tried to educate the literate public to a more sober view of the Bible as a collection of differing views of various peoples who lived over many different centuries and none of whom, as comedian Bill Maher likes to point out, had any idea where the sun goes at night.  Some of it is stunningly insightful but some of it is horrifyingly evil.  We would be crazy to try to read every part as having equal value for our time.

Some, such as the popular writer and thinker, Michael Dowd, have suggested that it is time to simply set these ancient texts aside and to focus on the facts of our scientific age as our new scripture.  Those of us who have spent our lives in the formal study of scripture hear that with all of the enthusiasm with which the wagon builders heard the sound of the first Model A coming down the road.

We have studied ancient languages, poured over ancient texts, devoted ourselves to years of challenging and complicated biblical studies to become experts in a topic that may soon leave us looking like the last nerd with a slide rule in a leather holster on our belts.  Already the Bible has the approximate value of a rotary phone to most people in Europe and the United States.  Most people can remember when they had one and they have nostalgic feelings about it but if you gave them one today they would have no use for it beyond decoration.

I still find the Bible to be endlessly interesting and I cannot even resist ordering the next new book produced by any of my favorite scholars.  And I even find the Revised Common Lectionary to be a helpful tool that I use as a personal discipline to force me to consider the preaching topics raised by this three-year cycle of prescribed scripture lessons.  For me, now just ten or fifteen years away from retirement, I no longer see scripture as an authoritative voice in my life or in the church but I find it to be helpful, in part because it is so familiar to our generation.

I need only to say the name "Noah" and a story comes alive in your minds.  I can mention David and Bathsheba and we have a shared story between us.  The passion narrative in the gospels is an archetypal story.  Who can hear the name "Judas" and not remember a former friend who has betrayed you?  Who does not know what it is to have your closest family and friends stand in the distance watching you suffer through your darkest hour without saying a word?

Our generation will never have an entirely dispassionate relationship with scripture and we will continue to use it as our common ground for study, instruction and in our rituals, in both weddings and funerals, on holidays and even most Sundays.  But this will not always be true.  Inevitably, the generations that will follow us will not spend hours and hours of their growing up years studying and memorizing Bible passages and those who will be the pastors of future faith communities will not likely feel the need to be immersed in biblical studies.

When I entered the ministry in the late 1970's, among Protestant Churches, Sunday School attendance was approximately the same as the worship service attendance.  By the end of the 1980's that ratio had changed with Sunday School attendance falling by more than half.  Many main-stream churches have given up and no longer offer religious education at all because they simply do not know what to teach and their members will no longer attend traditional classes.

The Center for Progressive Christianity is to be applauded for making a serious effort at recreating ethical religious education materials for use in progressive churches.  It remain to be seen whether or not progressive leaning parents will make it a priority to expose their children to this education.

At this juncture, we know more about what we don't want to pass along than we know with certainty what we do want to preserve for the generations to come.

Progressives make the conscious choice to abandon false certainty in favor of honest uncertainty.  For us, the only scripture that matters is the truth, wherever we can find it.  We will sometimes find our truth in science, sometimes in philosophy and sometimes in a popular song or even a bumper sticker.  As we throw our arms open to the whole world in a search for meaning, insight, honesty, we no long have a single book that will call scholars and sages to a common place where they can debate and evaluate a shared body of literature.  We are losing something as the Quran, Torah and Bible lose status in the minds of modern people of faith but we also gain a new and exciting liberty to find a new way of living, unchained from loyalty to ancient texts that polluted our lives with irrational prejudices and neurotic guilt.

We once enjoyed a certain stability in being able to say authoritatively, "The Bible says!" but to be honest that injunction has not worked well for a long time, if, in fact, it ever did.  I cannot think of a time in history when it was common for people to sell all their owned and give it to the poor nor even to predictably forgive someone seventy times seven times.

We have always had a rather cafeteria styled approach to scripture and we have not usually even chosen the more important passages to take home with us after church was over.

Our generation turns to our faith with less confident certainty but with new liberty to focus on truths that are more substantial.  We will serve more meals in homeless shelters than we will serve communion in our sanctuary.  We will dig more wells for safe water for the poor in Nicaragua and Haiti than we baptize people in solemn rituals.  We will not speak confidently of a heaven in the afterlife but we will fight with determination against the hell that is all too familiar in this world to those who live in poverty, who are refugees of wars and who live in the pollution of an economic system that trades our only planet for current profit.

The church is not being destroyed by setting aside its ancient magic and superstition, it is being set free.

What Do We Mean When We Say "God"?

Chapter 2  WHAT DO WE MEAN WHEN WE SAY "GOD"?
Roger Ray, D.Min.

Acts 17:28-29
 28For "In him we live and move and have our being"; as even some of your own poets have said,
"For we too are his offspring." 
29Since we are God's offspring, we ought not to think that the deity is like gold, or silver, or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals.

Long before our ancestors had either organized religion or organized speech they became aware of their existence and their mortality.  The anxiety produced by the knowledge that they would die provoked the original human search for meaning in existence.  Before we pretended to understand how the leaves on trees turn sunlight into sugar or how the collision of a cold front with a warm front spawns tornadoes, many things in life provoked wonder. (We moderns occasionally need to be reminded that there is a huge difference between being able to describe an event and actually understanding an event)

Looking up at the night sky, the awareness that summer will always follow winter just as the sun will always rise again demanded explanation.  In primitive cultures, the sun itself was a divine figure, as was the earth.  For them, the wind was not the result of solar heating of distant oceans but rather the breath of an invisible deity.  We experience and respond to our life through our emotions and so it was natural to assume that when the rain didn't come, or the rivers flooded, or the winter was too harsh that the gods were angry, offended or awaiting some sacrifice or devotion.

We initially conceived of gods in our own image.  Like us and like nature itself, our gods were capricious, sometimes loving and generous, sometimes jealous and vindictive.  We talked of gods who were like us, only bigger, stronger and with longer lives but with all of the foibles and appetites we experience.  So we built houses for our gods to live in.  We sacrificed food on altars to feed them, poured out wine and blood to appease them, sang songs to praise them and endured tedious rituals to satisfy their narcissistic need for attention.

But even from the dawn of civilization there were always those who felt that we were selling the divine other short by trying to turn them into men and women.  According to the writer of Acts, the apostle Paul, attempting to connect with a Greek audience in Athens, quoted a poet-philosopher, Epimenides, from more than five hundred years earlier, who said that Zeus was not dead but was, in stead, ever living and that "in him, we live and move and have our being."

Somehow there have always been some among us who could see that no religion defines God, no idol, painting, stained glass or statue could meaningfully describe God.  Yet we always feel compelled to try to express our profound existential experiences in concrete language.

We cannot avoid speaking of our lives in the language that is based in experience.  Consider the difference in the way that Paul describes his mystical experience and the way a later generation described it for him, after Paul was long dead.  In his own words, in 2 Corinthians 12, Paul says, "2I know a person in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven--whether in the body or out of the body I do not know; God knows. 3And I know that such a person--whether in the body or out of the body I do not know; God knows-- 4was caught up into Paradise and heard things that are not to be told, that no mortal is permitted to repeat." You see, Paul gives us no concrete visuals.  He knows that something profound happened to him but he resolutely avoids using language about winged angels or a giant enthroned divine king.

A generation later, Luke, writing the book of Acts to bolster Paul's reputation, describes what I am suggesting was the same experience in this way in Acts 9 (and in slightly different forms twice more in Acts 22 and 26):  3Now as he was going along and approaching Damascus, suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. 4He fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him, 'Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?' 5He asked, 'Who are you, Lord?' The reply came, 'I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. 6But get up and enter the city, and you will be told what you are to do.' 7The men who were travelling with him stood speechless because they heard the voice but saw no one. 8Saul got up from the ground, and though his eyes were open, he could see nothing; so they led him by the hand and brought him into Damascus. 9For three days he was without sight, and neither ate nor drank."

Paul's ineffable experience becomes a very concrete experience that Paul never said anything about.  And, between you and me, if Paul did have an experience like this he would nave never stopped talking about it!  But it is much the same for most of us.  We have a deeply felt experience of the presence of a divine "other" but talking about that experience is like trying to nail smoke to the wall.  Anything we say starts to limit the experience and to diminish its value.
Luke, the presumed author of Acts, wanted for his readers to be persuaded that Paul was God's chosen messenger and so he adds details intended to be persuasive that, in the light of critical analysis, should be apparently absurd.

When I started in graduate school more then three decades ago, our professors were trying to teach us to stop referencing God as being male and just that move from seeing God as a Caucasian, white haired and bearded giant in the clouds met with angry resistance.  It isn't until you say, "Oh, God is a man?  How big are his feet?  How long is his beard?" will people begin to give up on the concrete image of God as a person.  To be male rather than female implies the presence of boy parts and trying to describe those divine parts is a conversation stopper in most Sunday School classes. Some things only become obvious when pushed to absurdity.

Hopefully, the matter of God having a gender is long settled but the problem of our desire for concrete images in which to conceive of God persists.  We use images to try to express ourselves, to understand and to communicate our experiences.

When we were young, our first science teachers showed us illustrations of atoms with little colored balls called neutrons and protons and they were surrounded by brightly glowing electrons moving in predictable orbits in assigned shells around the nucleus of the atom.  In our young minds, actual atoms, if we could see them, would have looked just like this.

Of course, you cannot see an atom and if you could it would look nothing like the model and yet the model helped us to understand atoms, their behavior and nature and helped us to form a basis for talking about chemistry and biology and physics.  In fact, we would likely never have made much progress in our comprehension of science if we had not, at the beginning, over-simplified reality just to get a toehold on the initial climb up into the light of understanding.

Similarly, we began our religious education with stories about miracles, making tablets out of modeling clay to look like the Ten Commandments, and learning about anthropomorphic images of the God who defies description.  We imagined God in human form.  We created a God who feels what we feel, who understands us and yet loves us.

The dark shadows of our minds sought to resolve our feelings of guilt and fear by creating an imagined pathway out of mortality and death and into a state of forgiveness, acceptance, and even of eternal reward. Not all religions have a clear concept of an afterlife but the experience of the weak and abused filled them with a longing for some universal justice, some way to balance the scales of life.  A final judgment followed by either reward or punishment gave the poor and enslaved, the victims of abuses of power, the opportunity to believe that a loving God would eventually punish their oppressors and bless us, the righteous and deserving, with glorious reward.

Many still find faith in such a final reward and punishment in eternity so crucial to their ability to cope with the injustice of life that they are committed to religious bodies and creeds that reassure them that product of the imagination of ancient Persian slaves is literally true.
Millions are willing to suspend critical thinking to accept as evidence accounts of near death experiences of "going towards the light," seeing long dead friends and relatives and being drawn back into their earthly bodies by some medical miracle that evidently came as a surprise to their supernatural theistic image of God.  The recent popularity of Eben Alexander's book, Proof of Heaven, speaks to the desperation many feel for certainty.  Alexander is a neurosurgeon and so, he seems to speak with the kind of credibility and authority the ancients once bestowed upon their high priest.

I am unapologetically dismissive of such thinly veiled attempts at confounding readers untutored in medical jargon to give undeserved credibility to personal accounts rendered in seemingly scientific language.  I read these accounts in much the way you might hear a primitive describing a flashlight as a magical stick that has captured the sun.  That so many allow themselves to be persuaded by such obvious self-delusion is testament to how desperate we are for some hope for eternity and for justice.

Still, while we must graciously allow everyone the freedom to believe and practice as they wish as long as they do no harm to others, those of us who strive to embrace an evidence based faith should open our minds to new ways of trying to articulate a less anthropomorphic view of the divine.

Many of the scholars most dear to progressive religious thinkers call themselves "panentheists."  The term may be new to you but the concept is as old as Epimenides who conceived of God as something other than a person with a body, who was "out there" somewhere.  The ancient Hebrews resisted creating statues or images of God because God, as a spirit, could only be diminished by trying to describe the Divine in human terms.

Western religious people often looked at the religions of the east such as Buddhism or Confucianism and wondered aloud if they were really religions because they lacked a single supernatural theistic god or a clear view of heaven and hell.  Hinduism, with its many gods was even more confusing to those who ipso facto assume that monotheism is superior to polytheism.

Eastern religions were not captured by the push towards the attempts at monotheism as seen in Judaism, Christianity and Islam.  But, to be honest, no monotheism has ever succeeded in staying the course, finding it necessary to add other virtual gods in the form of demons and spirits to account for the bad things in life and could not resist creating semi-divine characters such as in the incarnation of God in Jesus or the saints to whom Catholics pray for special blessings or the angles and demons of Muslim and Jewish lore.

Much of the attraction in recent years to the Buddhist view of God is specifically because of its lack of specificity.  Buddhists teach that all that is, is connected and the divine is united with the all.  As the ancient poet said, we all live and move and have our being in God.  God is not a rock or a tree but all rocks and trees are in God.  God is not "out there" only but is both "out there" and "in here."

That Buddhists refrain from trying to describe God does not mean that they do not believe in a divine presence.  That Hindus express their understanding of the divine in hundreds of godlike images is just another way of being open to a multiplicity of existential experiences of the divine.

In fact, a persuasive case can be made for laying the blame for most religious wars at the doorstep of monotheism.  If you have a concrete world view that says, "I my religion is not only right but is so very very right that anyone who disagrees with my religion is evil and possibly even deserving to be destroyed for blasphemy" then you have the historical basis for tragic human conflict.  Even if the motivations of governments likely had little or nothing to do with religious beliefs, the hearts of believers left them vulnerable to being recruited to crusades in the name of an indefensible theology.

Paul Tillich, the famous 20th century theologian, created a great deal of public controversy when he said "God does not exist." Though many chose to interpret that as a statement of atheism what he was saying, in a very intentionally provocative way, was that God does not have a body or a place, is not a thing or a person and in that sense does not exist within time and space but Tillich was not an atheist.  He was what we now more commonly call a panentheist.

Pantheism is the belief that the universe is god but panentheism differentiates itself from pantheism because though the universe is in god, the sum total of rocks, trees, planets and stars is not, itself god.  God is all of that and something more.  And yet, almost anything we say past that starts to look like trying to nail smoke to the wall.  Use every nail in your carpenter's belt and you will still have accomplished nothing and maybe will have done a lot of damage to a perfectly good wall.

As Tillich said, God is the ground of our being though attributing anthropomorphic emotions, will, intent or even intervention in human history to God is bound to end up in error.  As one who lives and moves and has his being in God, I prefer to speak, not so much in piled up adjectives about God but in terms of how my awareness of God gives me a spiritual perspective on life.

A strict humanist, an Epicurean or libertarian may seek either exclusively or primarily to scratch his or her own itches, desire her or his own comfort and joy.  As a spiritual person, I choose to strive to feel my connection to all other people and to the earth.  That is not a natural choice.  That is a conscious choice.

A panentheist's spirituality may express itself in forms of community ritual or in choosing to avoid goods manufactured by slaves or forms of transportation that accelerate the pollution of the planet.  I will say much more about the implications of a spiritual world view in the final portion of this work but for now I am inviting you to let go of all idolatry, all anthropomorphic images of God.

Panentheism then becomes the most effective way of bringing both scientific inquiry and spiritual concerns together into a consistent synthesis.  It also allows for a greater inter-faith cooperation.  I like to introduce my students to Panentheism through Marcus Borg's book, Speaking Christian, though it is the assumed theology of such authors as Bishop John Shelby Spong, Rosemary Ruether and Sally McFague and many more.  But we also see it in Catholic scholars such as Martin Heidegger, Karl Rahner and Hans Kung.  And in the Hasidic Jewish scholar, Martin Buber, the Sufi Muslim writer, Muhammed Iqbal and Buddhists such as Alan Watts and Massao Abe.

In the hope of preserving credible, meaningful and relevant faith in the the 21st century, let's stop trying to limit God to our own religion, stop trying to manipulate the Divine into doing our bidding, punishing our enemies or rewarding our friends.  Let's take our foot off of God's throat, because, you know, God doesn't have a throat and we look pretty silly trying to hold the Spirit down.

Evidence Based Faith

Community Christian Church of Springfield
Dr. Roger Ray, pastor
Chapter 1 EVIDENCE BASED FAITH

Bertrand Russell
"I wish to propose for the reader's favorable consideration a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive.  The doctrine in question is this:
that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it is true.  I must of course admit that if such an opinion became common it would completely transform our social life and our political system."
"The room is filled with four foot tall Skrinchen," my philosophy professor asserted.  "They are," Dr. Jim Spicer told his freshman students, "invisible and without mass and they are visible only to me."  Dr. Spicer introduced me at the age of 18 to the concept of an a priori truth claim that could not be verified by any external evidence nor could the claim be subjected to any sort of test.    Though there was no way to prove that the room was not full of Skrinchen, there was also no particular reason to believe that he was telling the truth. 

Still, I knew that I would be foolish to believe that I was surrounded by these invisible beings.  It would take me another decade to have the courage to apply this same conclusion to what I had been told by my Sunday School teachers about angels, demons, a talking snake and so much more.  After years of trying to teach philosophy and religion to my own college students, I recognize the difficulty in trying to explain how a story can convey important life principles while not being either literally or historically factual.

We believe much of what we believe because our family, community, church or nation has passed along those beliefs and we would be out of sync with our world if we did not also go along.  In matters such as putting the fork on the left hand side of the plate, shaking hands with our right hands or standing for the national anthem it is just easier to go along than to demand a persuasive explanation.  But when it comes to being told that, for example, being a homosexual is a sin worthy of eternal punishment, or women cannot be leaders in faith communities, or that you must belong to one certain sect of one certain religion or become anathema to the Almighty Creator of the universe, then some critical thinking is called for.

The famous philosophical maxim known as Occam's Razor is often mistakenly used to imply that the most simple answer is likely to be the right answer.  What Occam's Razor actually says is that the solution requiring the fewest number of unverifiable assumptions is the most likely answer.  So, if I ask you if the room is full of Skrinchen and you consider that there is no detectable evidence for the presence of Skrinchen except for some facetious philosophy professor who asks you to assume that he is telling you the truth then the most obvious logical conclusion is that there are no Skrinchen present.  While you could be wrong, there is no good reason to assume that you are not right.

This becomes rather more complex, however, when authority figures, your parents, your friends and classmates are all fairly united in telling you that there are Skrinchen in the room. Then you have to be more resolved in your application of critical thinking to avoid falling in line with the generally shared faith in Skrinchen.

Of course, belief or disbelief in the existence of Skrinchen does not affect how you will live your life.  Assertions about heaven and hell, a final judgment, the nature of salvation, the definition of sin... these do matter.  In fact, they may matter more than anything else in life and yet, for the most part, there is not much evidence to substantiate these supernatural claims and attempts at giving evidence often do not stand up to critical analysis.

A pastor I know told me about a friend of his who had visited a medium when he was a member of the occupation forces in Germany shortly after WWII.  The medium had channeled the young soldier's deceased father.  The spirit allegedly told the soldier about the existence of a half brother, even revealing the sibling's name and address.  The soldier contacted the man and discovered that what the spirit had told him through the medium was true.  "How," my friend asked me, "can you explain that if there is no life after death?"

So I asked, "What did the medium tell him on his second visit?"  "Well," he replied, "he never went back again."  "Really," I asked, "For a few dollars he got to speak to his deceased father, discovered a previously unknown brother and he never went back again?"

I'm not saying that paranormal events never take place. I can no more say that there are not angels or demons than I can prove that there are not Skrinchen hiding behind every tree and rock but if a truth claim is not repeatable or testable then we cannot rationally draw any conclusions from these reported angel sightings, ESP experiences or visions.  The events may be very powerful or even life changing for the individual but their private experience remains just that:  private.  Maybe they are accurately describing an event or maybe their memories become embellished in the re-telling.  As neurologists have reported in their research about memory, repeated re-telling of a story often erases actual memories and all that a person can remember is their elaborately embellished accounts.  They are not lying about the memory.  They are giving an honest account of their memory but the memory itself has become the fictional account.

This, of course, was the problem that Paul, the author and inspiration of much of the New Testament, faced when he sought to convert the people he encountered to the version of faith that was so important to him.  He never met the living physical Jesus of Nazareth; he had to rely on his visions. Only  those who were willing to suspend critical thinking could fully accept what he had to say.  He had no more evidence to offer that Jesus was raised from the dead than Clement, the popular first century bishop of Rome, had for his insistence that the phoenix lived for 500 years and then was reborn from the decayed remains.

Like Paul, Clement tried to add weight to his claim by saying that the newly born phoenix would carry the bones of the recently deceased phoenix to a temple in Egypt where priests recorded the arrival of the bird with the bones and nest of his predecessor on the 500th anniversary of previous phoenix.  Of course, there never was such a magical bird but Clement had news of it from sources he trusted and, this may be the more important part, he believed it because he wanted to believe it.

If you want to believe that God wrote the Bible, that you have a literal soul that lives forever (even if trees, birds and bees don't) then you can find reasons that support your belief:  I prayed that it wouldn't rain on our picnic and it didn't rain.... Thank you Jesus!...too bad about all of those prayers for the end of the civil war in Syria.  Perhaps God was too busy defending picnics from rain?

While it is impossible to be free of the prejudice of preference, still, we can strive to be as objective as possible in our application of critical thinking.  One of the hazards faced by progressive religious people is that once we are set at liberty from the constraints of old creedal claims, some find themselves falling head long into seemingly more attractive and less destructive truth claims that are just as dependent upon untestable assumptions as the religion from which we have escaped.

It was bad theology that led to the Crusades, to the Divine Right of Kings, inquisitions, sectarian battles, some of which were fought on battle fields and many more divided families at the dinner table.  There is good theology and there is bad theology.  Critical thinking does matter.  Sloppy thinking leads to uncertain results. Novices who have rejected the formal religion of their youth will often cobble together a more savory concoction that they will call Buddhism or Native American spirituality, much of which they made up last week after watching a really good movie, but, to call upon Occam's Razor once more, if they are trading one truck load of irrational assumptions for a new and more exotic sounding truck load of irrational assumptions, the implications are likely to be equally unsavory.

Our preference for good manners, getting along well with others and a desire to avoid conflict often lead us to a nearly sacramental love of false equivalents.  I would invite anyone who says, "Everyone's religion is their private choice," or simply "To each his or her own," to take the time to visit their local shelter for victims of domestic violence or for teen "runaways."  In my experience, a huge portion of the teen "runaway" population did not run away.  They were kicked out of their family home because the religion of their parents kept them from accepting homosexuality, even if the homosexual in question was their own son or daughter.  The misogyny that lies at the root of a great deal of domestic violence can be traced directly to the pulpits that influence the abusers.  Mental health professionals have been trying to point out the connection between teen suicide and homophobic religious teachings for years.  Sloppy thinking doesn't just lead to unnecessary feelings of guilt and fear but there is actually a casualty count and therefore, at the risk of alienating some for appearing to be impolite and lacking in diplomacy skills, I emphatically push for my peers in the religious world to be rigorous in their scholarship and their critical thinking.

The media has largely fallen prey in the past generation to a belief in false equivalents that compels them to appear to be neutral in almost every case, giving equal time to both sides of any issue.  Sometimes, the sides are just not equal.  Note that when almost any television news outlet talks about global climate change, they will give almost equal time to climate change deniers as they give to those who warn against the human behaviors causing climate change.  Among climate scientists, there is more than a 90% consensus that it is our consumption of fossil fuels that is driving the climate change.  It should also be noted that many of the climate deniers are on the payroll of the fossil fuel industries and yet a false value placed on neutrality prevents the news media from communicating important facts relevant to the survival of our race to their audience.  We can be thankful for civility in virtually every case and yet the truth should not be sacrificed on the altar of being well behaved.

I am grateful for editors and friends who help me to see the other side of issues about which I may have allowed my own emotions or prejudices to lead me astray.  Such calls for balance and objectivity are indispensible to any sincere scholar or pastor but only in so far as they are encouraging the search for what is true and not when they are simply attempting to enforce either silence or the comfort of acquiescence to the consensus mundi.

For many in the religious community, "faith" has meant the ability to believe as being true that for which there is little or no evidence. When I would ask questions about what we had heard in church on the car ride home every Sunday, my mother would tell me, "You have to take it on faith."  For her, the ability to make your self believe totally irrational truth claims was a virtue to be acquired at all costs and every truly good person manages to do it.  So I tried.  I read the Bible over and over again.  I majored in philosophy and religion in college, went to seminary, earned a doctorate in ministry and even did post-doctoral studies and every step of the way my mother's injunction to "just take it on faith," became increasingly impossible.

I no longer associate the word "faith" with the willful assassination of my brains.  I am grateful to Karen Armstrong and Marcus Borg for recovering an older and more meaningful interpretation of faith to mean something more akin to "courage," or "commitment."  And so I invite you, my readers, to have courage as we re-think what it means to be a person of faith in the 21st century.  No longer will we accept the demand of fealty to creeds and doctrines that do not describe the reality of the world we experience.  Our religion will be a religion that allows for a spiritual perspective on what is demonstrably true.