Community Christian Church of Springfield MO
Roger Ray, pastor
Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it. Buddha
What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite. Bertrand Russell
Make your own bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet. Ralph Waldo Emerson
"To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason, and whose philosophy consists in holding humanity in contempt, is like administering medicine to the dead, or endeavoring to convert an atheist by scripture."
― Thomas Paine, The American Crisis
Long before there was such a thing as Google or smart phones, I was in the habit of carrying a small leather bound notebook with me everywhere that I went. Whenever I read something, heard something, or experienced something that seemed to be a learning moment, those things that astonish our souls, that open our minds to new ideas, different perspectives on life and its meaning.
That is why that you should never loan a book to me that you ever hope to see again. If I find something useful in it, I will dog-ear the pages and write in the margins so that if you ever do get it back, it wouldn't be in presentable form.
Through the years, I have been doing exactly what Ralph Waldo Emerson suggested. I have been writing my own Bible, collecting the truths that I have encountered in poetry, literature, philosophy, music, and conversation knowing full well that I am rarely more than seven days from the next time that I will be standing in public confronted by a group of people who expect me to have something meaningful to say.
Thirty years ago, when I was ordained following eight years of higher education, I was positioned in front of my family, friends, and the members of my student church and I was given an examination by the regional minister of the Christian Church in Kentucky. And in that examination I was expected to answer in the affirmative about a long list of things such as my faith in the Old and New Testaments of the Bible as the word of God, and in my redemption in the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, and several other things that I could not now, not only not answer in the affirmative, but I am not ever certain that I could keep a straight face in the process.
I complained at the time that the church requires seminarians to spend years questioning everything, learning to critically examine every truth claim, considering contradictory philosophies, and then, at the end of all of those years, they want you to basically forget everything they required you to learn, pull your brains out by the roots, and claim to confidently believe what is evidently not true and that no one on earth could sanely claim to believe with any certainty.
The ancient creeds of the church, the accumulation of church doctrines, rules, and dictates, are not the culmination of human learning.... They are the end of learning. They are the death of reason, inquiry, growth, and discovery.
I fear that the traditional church is dying but my fear is not in the fact that the old denominational structures of religion are dying, my fear is that they may not die fast enough to get out of the way and allow something more meaningful to arise from their ashes before our civilization turns its back on spirituality entirely.
If it was not the Buddha himself, at least from very ancient Buddhist tradition, there has been an awareness that you cannot simply pass on an intact religion to a new generation. The Buddha taught that we should not take any religious book, not the Bible, the Quran, or any other religious text as if it had actually been written by God. The sacred texts of all of our world's religions are the best efforts of ancient faith communities to express what had astonished their souls, the truths that had guided them, and helped them along the way.
Though the Buddha became the founder of a religion that bore his name, he instructed his students that they should not believe things just because these beliefs have been handed down by authority figures or preceding generations but that they should look for truth by observation and analysis. Truth is not Republican or Democrat, it is not liberal or conservative, and, as Gandhi observed, God is not a Jew, a Christian, a Hindu or a Buddhist. Ultimate truth does not belong to any religion, any philosophy, or any generation.
I suspect that most of us had similarly indoctrinating Sunday School experiences in which we were encouraged if not rewarded for trying to force ourselves to believe religious claims for which there was no evidence. I'm not sure where Lewis Carol got all of his ideas, but Alice's famous conversation with the White Queen in
Through the Looking Glass sounds almost like church school when Alice objected that she simply couldn't believe impossible things. The Queen scolded her and said:
"I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."
Traditional religion rewards us for exerting ourselves to believe, but as the British philosopher, Bertrand Russell said, "What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite." We should not admire or praise anyone for believing things for which they have no reason to believe them.
The use of the word "faith" to mean believing in things without evidence is, I am convinced, a bad use of the term, but even if that is what it means to many religious people, they cannot command that their unsubstantiated convictions be shared by the rest of us. There is no more reason to believe in heaven and hell than there is to believe in Asgard or Star War's Tatooine. There is no more evidence for angels than there is for unicorns, and there is more evidence that there is a Santa Clause than there is that you have an immortal and invisible soul.... At least I have seen the Christmas presents Santa Clause left in my living room!
Yes, you have a right to believe whatever you wish about life after death, or angles, demons, souls, but you do not have a right to expect the rest of us to change school text books to reflect your flat earth beliefs or to enact laws to safeguard your prejudices about gay folks or gender roles. You have the right to believe that the sky is green and that grass is blue but you should recognize that most of the rest of us are more interested in reality than we are in your superstitions.
Now, I recognize that for many people, holding onto traditional religious beliefs, in spite of the total lack of evidence and support for those beliefs, is an important part of how they hold their world together. Some people could not face the grief they have experienced, or deal with the horrors that have happened to them, without a belief in an invisible world where things are all going to be set right again. And therein lies the challenge for progressive thinkers. Are you willing to let go of the security blanket of false certainty in order to live with the uncertainty of honest inquiry?
Thomas Paine, of the founding intellectual giants at the time of the birth of our nation, said that "To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead."
There certainly is a wide and popular strain of religion that engages in wishful thinking, irrational beliefs, magic and superstition but I want to remind you that from the time of Moses and Buddha, of Jesus and Confucius, there has also been a kind of religion that has been called a "wisdom" tradition. A tradition that is not full of creedal answers but of sincere seeking, questioning, searching for meaning and truth.
A tradition that adamantly rejects vacuous beliefs and is willing to change in the presence of new information and be willing to advocate, prophetically and even when threatened with martyrdom, for justice, liberation, truth, and towards a realization of a common humanity in which we respect life, and nature, and are enriched by art and beauty, and in which we seek to emerge from the darkness of ignorance and prejudice into the light of reason and sincere love.
It may not be politically correct to say it just this way, but, no, all religions are not the same. In The Spiral Staircase, one of Karen Armstrong's biographical works, she says very plainly: "If your understanding of the divine made you kinder, more empathetic, and impelled you to express sympathy in concrete acts of loving-kindness, this was good theology. But if your notion of God made you unkind, belligerent, cruel, of self-righteous, or if it led you to kill in God's name, it was bad theology. "
We are surrounded by bad theology.... In many of the Christian churches around us, in the extremist forms of Islam that we hear about in the news, and in the Zionist forms of Judaism too often found in both Israel and in American politics... but it is our job to seek, grow, discover, a health faith and then not simply to teach it and put it into YouTube videos and iTunes podcasts but to embody it, practice it, become it, as witnesses to a healthy faith.
In the same book, Armstrong says:
"Religion is not about accepting twenty impossible propositions before breakfast, but about doing things that change you. It is a moral aesthetic, an ethical alchemy. If you behave in a certain way, you will be transformed."
So, my friends, I invite you to keep your treasured scriptures only to the extent to which they challenge you morally and astonish your soul but then add to them the truths that discover along the way. Apply reason, critical thinking, and intellectual inquiry to your search. And then, and more importantly, have the courage to embody the truths that you discover. Do not cower or conform. Live like a prophet. Be willing to be that one-eyed man in the nation of the blind. Don't fall for propaganda whether it comes from a church, your government, or the corporate media. Think, live, be free, and be willing to be changed by the truths you discover.
You are not your parents, you are not the religion you were born into or the nation where you were born. You must be your own creation....be that person with courage and honesty.
