Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor
People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use. Søren KierkegaardFor most of the past couple of centuries, philosophy and religion have been bedfellows, at least so far as college and university campuses are concerned. During my undergraduate experience, studying in fairly small departments of state universities, there was no small amount on enmity between the two disciplines that were forced to share cramped office space with one another but it was undeniable that they were historically bound to one another.
Americans are the best entertained and the least informed people in the world. Neil Postman
Philosophers, from ancient times right up to the industrial era, wrote about religion. There were, of course, exceptions to that, but you couldn't really be a philosophy professor and not spend time in study of great philosophical works that treated religious beliefs and claims. No one would dispute the fact that my beloved Søren Kierkegaard was a philosopher but you have to admit, he was a philosopher who wrote almost exclusively about religion.
One of the sayings I was introduced to when I was just a teenager trying to find my way through those competitive department battles was this rather insulting description: Philosophers are looking for a black cat in a dark room. Theologians are looking for a black cat in a dark room that isn't there. Or put in an even more mean way, theologians make up stuff about stuff that is made up.
At their root, philosophy is a search for truth, for wisdom, for understanding. Similarly, theology is also a search for truth, for wisdom, for understanding of God. The two are very similar and really ought to work on a ball field with the same rules of inquiry, reason, and critical thinking.
What we all know, however, is that religious folk all too often abandon any rules of honest inquiry and just go off on flights of fantasy that they then try to insist that everyone else pretend to believe to be true.
At some point some ancient Persians come up with the idea of invisible, eternal creatures who look like human beings with wings. Certain sects of Judaism become infected with this idea and then Christians took this imaginary creature in hand and ran with it...listing three different ranks of angels with three types in each rank: with Cherubim, Seraphim, and Thrones at the top, the second tier featured Dominions, Virtues, and Powers, and at the bottom, closest to human beings, were mere Angels, Archangels, and Principalities.
And this is the sort of thing that makes the philosophy professors refuse to have lunch with the theology professors. In reality, angels do not exist at all, but across the hall, in the theology class, they are giving names, descriptions, and even a census count of the various choirs of angels.
In fact, in spite of the way that we tend to think of certain Muslim countries as being inhabited by religious fanatics, the United States of America has the largest percentage of people who believe in angels.... Nearly 80%....
80% of Americans believe in the literal reality of a purely symbolic religious creation while fewer than 40% believe in the science of evolution... and an even slightly smaller percent believe in global warming.
Søren Kierkegaard said that there are two ways that we can be deceived, one is to continue to believe in what is clearly not true and the other is to refuse to believe what is clearly true. It is evident that the substantive difference between a progressive approach to faith and a traditional approach to faith is that progressives are interested in discovering what it true. We are not eager to reject or dismiss traditional matters of faith but as Carl Sagan said, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
The point where my conversations break down with very many of my peers in ministry is that theology cannot properly be done simply by matters of personal preference. You may like believing in angels and demons, heaven and hell, in a giant Santa Clause in the clouds who grants wishes if you wish hard enough, but if you want a reasonable person to believe in those things with you, you are going to have to come up with some evidence, or some reason to support those extraordinary claims. In the absence of any evidence or reason for such extraordinary claims, clearly, these religious claims come closer to being the rantings of a schizophrenic than the helpful teachings of a philosopher of religion.
In fact, there was a study done recently to try to figure out why so many people seem to insist upon acting like Deepak Chopra is saying something profound.
At best, some of his alternative medicine suggestions could be called pseudoscience but an awful lot of what he says actually doesn't make any sense at all, but he uses important sounding terms and the mere repetition of some of those spiritual and pseudoscience sounding terms will make gullible people nearly swoon. He is a quack but, as long as you know not to take his health advice seriously, he is a fairly harmless quack.
What is, I believe, rather more important than the religious mythology that causes so much dumbing down in our society is the more active and present magical thinking that is political discourse.
I get very frustrated with my religious peers who insist upon doing theology by personal preference rather than by evidence but religious people are armatures at confusing opinions with facts when they are compared to politicians.
Immediately following the Paris climate conference at which President Obama agreed to several important goals in reducing greenhouse gases in our atmosphere, a number of journalists challenged him saying that a large percentage of Americans do not believe our use of fossil fuels is contributing to global warming. As if their opinions had anything at all to do with the facts.
People along the Missouri and Meramec Rivers in Missouri may not believe in flooding but regardless of what they believe about it, that is water standing up to their roofline and that is their pickup truck being washed down the street towards the dam.
Since the Isis inspired terrorist attack in Paris, the American presidential race took a decidedly different turn, with most voters citing terrorism as their primary concern going into this election year. Factually, over the past 10 years there have been about 20 Americans killed by Islamic terrorists.... About 20 people. During the same time period, over 600,000 Americans have been killed by gun shot wounds from our nearly plague levels of gun violence in America. Nearly a million have died from lack of access to proper health care because of our for-profit insurance driven health care system.
The combination of political propaganda with the sensation seeking corporate news has made our public more gullible and ill informed than the most superstitious of religious people. Our 24-hour news cycle tends to point the camera at whatever seems interesting in the moment but such media is not informative. Think about how much time and energy was wasted on trying to make Americans afraid of Ebola when it never, in fact, posed the slightest threat to us.
Ben Hecht, the 20th century screenwriter, said, "Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock." You can get hundreds of images thrown at you, but without proper context, you can really start to believe that ISIS poses a huge threat to your family's safety while never addressing the fact that the NRA members in your neighborhoods are more than 10,000x more likely to kill you or a member of your family than anyone waving a black flag in Syria.
It is alarming that more than 50% of Republican voters do want to ban all Muslims from immigrating to the United States but when you couple that with the realization that 30% of Republican primary voters think that we should bomb Agrabah, the fictional city that was home to Disney's Aladdin, then you realize that opinion and reality don't often travel in close company.
Conservative religious people believe that imaginary religious beings are flying around on wings and conservative political people believe that we should bomb imaginary cartoon cities which would give us all something to snicker about if such sloppy thinking did not end up with very many very real cities being bombed and tens of thousands of people dying from gun shot wounds, poor medical care, and poverty.
My new book should be published next month. It has been a tedious process trying to sort through more than 500 of my published essays to select a representative choir of 150 to rewrite for publication. The title of this book is Progressive Conversation but, like a lot of authors, the subtitle tells you what I really think about it. The subtitle is "Essays on matters of social justice for critical thinkers."
A reasonable person might disagree with any one of my essays on social justice. A reasonable person might disagree with any one of my sermons, but the people who just write to me and tell me, "I like" or "I don't like," or "I agree" or "I disagree," just don't understand what is at stake. That is not critical thinking. You don't create a meaningful religious life, you don't become an informed citizen, by just trying to pretend that your opinions equate to research and information.
And trust me, the priest and the politician have spent centuries refining the science of how to trick you into believing things that make you a slave to their purposes. Long before the short attention span created by the Internet, social media, and TV news, George Orwell warned:
Political language - and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists - is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give the appearance of solidity to pure wind.If Orwell could see the kind of public manipulation going on with our modern sophisticated media, I'm not sure that even he could believe it. One of my favorite internet memes of late says, "A banker, a worker, and an immigrant sit down at a table where there are 20 cookies. The banker takes 19 cookies and says to the worker, 'Watch out for the immigrant or he'll take your cookie.'"
Which is funny, except that sort of political speech seems to be working on the public! What I hope that we are offering to our community and to our nation is an engaged spirituality that does not make religion a matter of other-worldly concern, but rather seeks both to know the truth and to apply compassionate spiritual concerns to how we live.
We can strive to raise the level of public conversation to help our nation to be oriented to honesty, reality, and to address the real places where human beings are trapped in the violence of poverty and ignorance and deception.
We don't have all of the answers but this much I know, we are not afraid of any of the questions. Let's do our part to speak truth to power in 2016.
