Roger Ray, D.Min.
There are three "so's" I need answered in any research project. "What is so?" "So what?" and "So?" Tell me what the facts are. Tell me why it matters. Tell me what should be done about it.
Dr. Todd Schaible
When I was a young pastor, serving a church in Louisville, KY, I taught a small Wednesday evening Bible class in the church basement for about 25 church members. A few miles away, on the same side of town there was a very popular bar called the Toy Tiger. To boost their Wednesday evening trade, at the same time that I was leading a Bible class, there was a competition at the Toy Tiger that they called "naughty nighty night."
I would often thank the two-dozen or so members of the church who chose to attend my mid-week class for electing Bible Study over the "naughty nighty" competition. Just for clarification, one man did ask me, "You don't seriously think that going to the Toy Tiger was actually a viable choice for us do you?"
Of course, for any of my class members, the drive time would have been about the same. They were all over 21and any one of them could have made the legal choice to avail themselves of some ribald entertainment if that had been their preference. But for everyone in the room, including myself, our religious world-view did not include such entertainment as a viable option.
Though my theological education had pretty well extinguished any seriously literal view of a divine final judgment in which the fate of my eternal soul would be decided, sending me either into eternal reward or eternal torturous punishment, still, the shadow of a life time of training to believe that God, like Santa Claus, "sees you when your sleeping. He knows when you're awake. He knows if you've been bad or good," so we all inherently knew that we were supposed to "be good, for goodness sake."
We had grown up being indoctrinated into a moral universe in which the boundaries had been drawn by the Lord of the Universe from the heavens above. We didn't have to struggle with complicated moral decisions about most things because clear bright lines had been drawn centuries before and written down in a book that we were not allowed to question in any serious way.
Progressive religious leaders invite people to lead a good life for the inherent reward of leading a good life, which is a rather vague sounding invitation to those who have always assumed that the moral universe had solid, concrete boundaries with heaven on one side and hell on the other. Once the manipulative theological carrot and stick have been taken off the table, we have some serious thinking to do about who we are, who we want to be, and what is right and what is wrong.... Not because some supernatural theistic god in the clouds told us what is right and what is wrong, but rather, we are left to figure out what is, in an of itself, either right or wrong on its own merits.
I introduced this book talking about evidence-based faith. I'm advocating for an approach to religion that is based on what is known and not on what Iron Age myths and superstitions tell us about the world. Physicists sum up the entire universe as being comprised of 12 different types of subatomic particles that are held together by four forces of nature, two of which we can see at work: gravity and the magnetic force. The other two are observable only at the atomic level and they have the unromantic names of "the strong force" and "the weak force." You will never see them anyway so they don't really need poetic nomenclature but they basically hold atoms together and make them behave in a way that makes the universe possible.
Accepting this description of reality, we are all made, quite literally, of the stuff that was created in the heart of super hot stars. The 12 particles of matter and four forces of nature that give us our bodies are the same as the 12 particles of matter and four forces of nature that make up the chair you are sitting on, the bricks in walls around us, the trees, grass and streams down the road and the stars and planets in the heavens above us.
As cosmologist, Brian Swimme, as observed, "Four billion years ago Earth was molten rock. Now it sings opera." We are the product of millions of years of evolution. We are the part of the universe that can now become aware of the existence of the universe and consider its meaning.... In fact, I would argue, we create its meaning.
Here is the big shift, the breath taking, dizzying, sometimes infuriating and frightening shift..... you were taught not to question. You were taught to accept the Bible as the word of God. You were taught that America was the greatest country in the world. We were led to believe that capitalism was just a part of freedom and democracy and Christianity and that we were to defend all of the above with our very lives if necessary and to do so with virtually blind faith and absolute loyalty.
And that, men and women, is the opposite of where we are now. The old unquestioning approach to life stopped working for most of us. We read our way out of it, thought our way out of it, or we were pushed out of it through hardships and heartbreaks. For most of us, it was a combination of all of the above.
Now we understand that to really find meaning, we have to question everything. We have not thrown away our sacred scriptures but we no longer read the Bible as if it was divine legislation. Now we critically examine it. Though science, through rational thought and critical thinking, we literally interrogate the universe to find out what is and what is not true.
I remember hearing the famous psychiatrist and author, M. Scott Peck, saying that anything we cannot question is an idol and all idols are slated for destruction. We have protected our religious idols from scrutiny and preserved them into the 21st century. But no longer will we reject our gay and lesbian sons and daughters because some ancient nomadic sheepherder condemned homosexuality three thousand years ago and wrote it down in a book.
I introduced this chapter with a quote from Dr. Todd Schaible, who is the director of Burrell Mental Health. About 15 years ago I had applied for and received a grant from the Burrell Foundation to conduct a research project into methamphetamine use in the Ozarks. Todd called me into his office to talk about the project and he said to me that there were three essential questions we had to answer: What is so? So what? And, So?
That is, our research needed to discover the facts about what was leading to the rapid increase in use and addiction of this dangerous drug and further we needed to be able to clearly articulate why it mattered. We needed to be able to tell the public and the municipal, county and state governments why they should care. And finally, we needed to not just throw facts on the table. Our analysis needed to answer the question, "So what can we do about it?" What is so? So? And so what?
That conversation has never left me because I have applied it to my life as a pastor, as a journalist and as a college professor. I don't just gather facts as if I were going to print a phone book or contribute to a data-base. I need to be able to stand up in front a congregation, a classroom or write in a newspaper column or book what is factually true. Then I need to be able to say why it matters and, finally, I need to be able to say what should be done in response to those facts.
If there is a single compelling reason for me to be writing this book about progressive faith it is to answer the "so?" part of this equation. Many wonderful scholars and writers have described the reasons why we have made this dramatic shift in how we read the Bible, and what we now think about Jesus and other world religions. I am indebted to the disciplined and insightful work of Marcus Borg, John Shelby Spong, John Dominc Crossan, Karen Armstrong and Springfield's own Charles Hedrick and David Trobisch for helping us all to understand this very clear and objective approach to what were the protected idols of our faith.
They have done a magnificent job of looking at the Christian religion and helping us to see what is so. And they have done an admirable job of telling us why it matters. And yet, each of them has felt the need, as religious scholars, to hardly speak of that third "so".... They have left it to us to figure out what is the "so?" of progressive faith.
So, you are backing your car out of the driveway and you have to make a decision..... church or the Toy Tiger? More realistically, once we have been disabused of the superstitious beliefs in a supernatural theistic being who will decide right and wrong, who will send some eternal part of ourselves to either heaven or hell.... Once we are no longer captured in that intellectual and moral prison.... The question becomes: Is life to be lived for personal gratification or is there a larger purpose?
If I sit down on a park bench to eat my sandwich and a homeless hungry stranger sits down next to me, do I devour my sandwich as quickly as possible or do I divide it and share it with the hungry stranger?
Nietzsche would tell you that you are weak to even consider sharing your sandwich. Or, at least that is how Ayn Rand would interpret Nietzsche. And at least to some degree, the way our economy has been run, the way banks, corporations and, sadly enough, our government, basically makes decisions, it looks like the Objectivism of Rand's school of self gratification is being lived out against the alternative view that I would call a spiritual world view based on a global perspective on ethics.
Scientific thought deals with facts but facts alone cannot determine ethical direction. I've spent years inviting you to reject what cannot be known, what has only been presented to you as an assertion of truth. There may be angels and demons, a heaven and a hell, there may be souls, ghosts and spirits but since we cannot objectively analyze any of these things, I have repeatedly said that it is meaningless to discuss them.
But at the base line of my progressive faith, I must acknowledge that there is a truth claim. Between a life of selfish personal fulfillment, whether you find that at the Toy Tiger or on Wall Street, and a life lived to deliver the greatest good to the largest number of people is a fundamental moral choice.
The earth that once was primarily molten lava but now can rise up and sing opera, through conscious human beings, also experiences great pain and sorrow and we have the potential of experiencing deep joy and meaning.
The choice that I make..... the choice I hope that you make.... Is to answer that "so" question in a way that is not simply seeking personal gratification but is, instead, to direct your life in a way that gives the greatest good to the largest number of people.
I previously quoted Neil deGrasse Tyson, saying that we are all connected, to each other biologically, to the earth chemically, to the universe atomically. That is a scientific fact and I am choosing to credit that fact with spiritual meaning. I will honor my connection to every human being, to the earth, to the universe, by trying to reduce suffering, increase joy and to protect the integrity of life, the earth and the universe.
Owning my connection to the human race and to the earth we share, I cannot be indifferent about the fact that there are hungry people in this city, even if I am personally over fed. I cannot be indifferent about the threat of waging war, even if I am far past the age of being personally recruited into any army. The fact that I am employed does not dilute the fact that many are not. Nor does my access to health care afford me the luxury of being indifferent about those who do not receive appropriate care. The fact that my neighborhood is free of toxic wastes, that I have reliably clean drinking water and fresh air cannot make me indifferent about the poisoning of the soil, water and air on our shared earth. Being white, male, heterosexual and American does not excuse me from the need for liberation from oppression for persons of color, for women, for those of all sexual orientations and races and nations of the world. And the fact that I was free to choose where I drove my car this morning does not deny the fact that there are more than two million Americans in jail or prison right now, many of whom are incarcerated for reasons so wholly indefensible that it is a social crime for us to keep silent about it.
Once Nietzsche was freed from the domination of traditional religion, his choice did not make him the ubermensch, the superman, he thought it did. In fact, followed to the logical conclusion of selfishness and self-service, existence has no meaning at all. Nietzsche did not leave the cave of religious superstition to evolve into a super human, he left it to de-evolve into meaninglessness.
The real ubermensch, the real heroes of post-modern existence are those who choose to take their liberty in hand and to live lives of self sacrificing service, kicking at the darkness until it bleeds daylight.
