October
2, 2016 Community Christian Church of
Springfield, MO
Roger
Ray, pastor “Beyond Logic, Our One A’ Priori Choice”
Martin Luther King, Jr. “Every man must decide whether
he will walk in the light of creative altruism or the darkness of destructive
selfishness. This is the judgment. Life’s most persistent and urgent question
is, What are you doing for others?”
I don't have any tattoos. There
are a lot of things that I want to say to the world and I admittedly walk
around in a pretty big canvas but I prefer the more changeable billboard of
ideas known as t-shirts. I have lately taken to wearing t-shirts inspired by
Neil DeGrass Tyson's website that fly in the face of irrational thinking. They
say things like "Science doesn't care what you believe," and
"science is not a liberal conspiracy." And my favorite says,
"Demand evidence and think critically."
In all of these sentiments,
those of us who promote an evidence based faith meet scientists on the field of
strict rational thought. Both the universe of science and the universe of
progressive faith want to do away with all magical thinking, sloppy thinking,
and reason denying superstition.
But I have to admit that I have
one caveat and that is in the arena of ethics. You would never morally
fault a bear getting into trash cans. Bears are large, mammalian eating
machines. That is their nature and so to a bear, a deer and a garbage dumpster
are about the same thing, a food source and we don't waste any time talking
about good bears and bad bears.
I may be more righteous in my
judgements of squirrels that insist upon taking only two or three bites out of
a dozen tomatoes in my garden but the honest truth is that this is simply the
nature of squirrels,. . . evil, malevolent, bushy tailed rodent
squirrels.
But when it comes to people,
talking about human nature is much more complex. Our instincts and the cultural
rules necessary to make living in cities possible often conflict with one
another.
A one-year-old child is a
natural human being. They are still acting on instinct. They poop in their
pants, they take what they want, they never pay for anything and they have no
regard for the comfort of those around them. They are loud, inconsiderate, and
selfish. It is also a part of human nature to love and adore these tiny
creatures because we would otherwise find a way to exterminate them.
In a very real way, we are all
born to be sociopaths but if you get some decent parenting, we learn not to be
sociopaths. We learn to share, to be aware of other people’s feelings and
needs. We try to make sure that those in our immediate tribe are healthy,
well-fed and happy but those are not necessarily natural instincts… they
reflect learned behaviors.
Sociologically, humans are,
based on our instincts, most like dogs. Dogs are social, care for their young,
have an authority pecking order in the pack, but you don't see communities of a
hundred thousand, or a million dogs.
They are pack animals, they
compete within their packs for mates and authority and different packs fight
one another for territory and resources. They have social structure but not
civilization. Our instincts could not produce a civilization. We have to be
deliberative, we have to have ethics, we have to have a deeper concern for one
another to create a civilization.
Ayn Rand, was the much loved
and hated author of novels that defended selfishness as being the only
intelligent and honest way to live. It is no surprise then than a number of
prominent political leaders have been real fans of her work. She was sort of a
modern era Machiavelli. I don’t want to go too far into the weeds with
historical references here but Machiavelli was the 15th century
Italian political writer who wrote the manual for how rulers can manipulate the
public to do their bidding.
In his day, rulers summarily
condemned Machiavelli for his cruel and unfeeling advice but they all pretty
much followed his suggestions to the letter.
Rand, Machiavelli, many right wing politicians, are able to get around
the social norm of empathy to do what is in their own best interests or,
sometimes, the best interests of their pack, their nuclear tribe, but they can
be ruthless about everyone else.
And they can do so without
misgivings because, to be honest, it is logical. If you are just looking for
facts, cold, honest, facts…. Self service has a functioning and defensible
logic to it.
Young people are sometimes
drawn to anarchical or libertarian political ideologies because they are
wanting to free themselves of the burden of empathy towards those who are not
in their own pack. A world without government, taxes, or laws sounds idyllic to
those who are not mature enough to think it through.
No one would want to actually
live in a world governed by a libertarian government, no one would want to
fight to survive in an anarchical world, but these things sometimes appeal to
the immature and the unreflective because they want to be unburdened by social
obligation…. Usually this is true while their parents are still paying all of
their bills. You can be quite the philosopher while living in your parents’
basement smoking weed… which I’m going to say is about the only perspective
from which Gary Johnson seems to make much sense.
Political pundits have lately
taken to calling Donald Trump a “sociopath.” And, again, I don’t want to go too
far into the weeds in technicality but the media tends to confuse the meanings
of sociopath, psychopath, and psychotic and they don’t mean the same things.
Both sociopaths and psychopaths
have what we call an “anti-social personality disorder.” They are not crazy but
they both have little or no ability to feel empathy.
Sometimes that is due to actual
brain injury or a matter of the way their brains work from birth but in most
cases it has to do with social conditioning and circumstances. This year’s political season is revealing
that our whole society is demonstrating a certain sociopathology or
psychopathology.
When someone who has health
insurance militantly does not want any change in our healthcare delivery system
even though that leaves millions of people without access to health care, they
are demonstrating a lack of empathy and showing us that our whole civilization
may really need to talk to a therapist.
These people are not easy to
reason with. If you have empathy, you
apply empathic thinking to every social setting. If you don’t have it, it
doesn’t make sense to you.
Over the years I have published
a lot of articles about gun control, usually on the heels of a mass shooting.
One of the most consistent responses I have received from gun enthusiasts has
been, “Why don’t we ban automobiles? More people die in automobile accidents
than die from gunshot wounds.”
It would seem to be a non-sense
argument. Cars are used to get 200
million people to work, school, the marketplace, vacations, medical care, and
entertainment every single day. Guns do not play a significant role in any
necessary function of our social order save only military and police action or
the rare person who must hunt to eat. But that does not make sense to a
psychopath because they have no empathy for the tens of thousands of people who
are shot every year. And arguing with them never produces anything because you
cannot teach a psychopath to feel empathy.
A mentally healthy gun owner
can talk reasonably about the use of gun safes, storing ammunition apart from
the guns. They can talk about reasonable restrictions on the size of the
ammunition magazine and the need for semi-automatic rifles but a psychopath
will just dig in their heels because, when you say that there are 32,000 gun
deaths per year, when you point out that more Americans have been killed by
toddlers with guns than have been killed my Isis, they just stare at you
because they feel no identity with the victims of gun violence. They just know
what they want and what they like.
Again, a psychopath is not
psychotic… they are not crazy, and they can fake loving and empathetic
relationships but those who are closest to them can usually tell that it is not
real. They can go to college, be business owners, politicians, and, in some
cases that I would not care to discuss today, they can even become the chairman
of the board of a large church…. Located at 1515 S. National Ave….. but I
digress.
A psychotic is insane but a psychopath
can be organized to a fault. Where sociopaths tend to be withdrawn and avoid
much social interaction, psychopaths want to be in charge. They can be
narcissistic and malevolent. They might even need to see their name in large
letters on the side of buildings they build even though they found ways not to
pay the laborers who built the building.
I guess I’m not being too
subtle anymore so let me just give a clear example from Monday’s presidential
debate. When the suggestion was made
that Trump might not be paying any taxes at all, his immediate reply was, “That
means I’m smart.” Sociopaths and psychopaths who walk among us, take the
empathetic values and principles of spiritual people as a sign of weakness. A
weakness to be exploited.
They literally think that it
would be ignorant not to take advantage of the people who make themselves
vulnerable. Trumps sons are big game hunters and some of us look at that and
say, “Why on earth would you want to kill a beautiful animal like an elephant
or a lion,” and they would just look at you dumbfounded and if they were
willing to speak they might say, “Because the lion was unarmed.” It is logical
unless you have learned to have feelings.
The one thing that I have to
safeguard from the surgical use of logic in religion is that at some base line,
I am asking people to choose to feel empathy. It makes the world better for all
of us, but even when it doesn’t, still, choose empathy. We have spent the
entire 8 years of our church history, cooking food and serving people who don’t
attend church here, who cannot contribute, who will not become our employees,
employers, family members or close friends. We have done it as an exercise in
compassion… so that we can feel it, so that we can get better at it.
Feeling empathy changes the way
that you see the world. It changes the way that you think. Those who have
hardened their hearts and minds against feeling can honestly feel like they are
smarter and better than we bleeding heart liberals who sometimes feel so much
that it drives us into despondence, depression, or cynicism.
Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “As
long as there is poverty in the world I can never be rich, even if I have a
billion dollars. As long as diseases are rampant and millions of people in this
world cannot expect to live more than twenty-eight or thirty years, I can never
be totally healthy even if I just got a good checkup at Mayo Clinic. I can
never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the way
our world is made. No individual or nation can stand out boasting of being
independent. We are interdependent.”
That was King’s world view. I
can say that it also my world view. But to be honest, it is not a necessary
world view from a logical perspective.
Philosophically speaking,
progressive faith rests on a single but very profound choice and it is a choice
that is not based on logic, reason, or evidence of any sort. It is a truly a’
priori choice. And this choice is this, “Do I live for my own pleasure or will
I live to make life better for others?” Even those who claim the second half of
that equation often appear to live entirely by the former. If there is any
reason at all to have a church in the future, it has to be to foster our
connection to one another in love and compassion or we are just kidding
ourselves.
