“Spirituality beyond Theism” March 19, 2017 click here to see the video
Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO Roger Ray, pastor
George Santayana “My atheism . . . is true piety towards the
universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image to be
servants of their human interests.”
Thomas Henry Huxley “Agnosticism simply means
that a man shall not say he knows or believes that for which he has no grounds
for professing to believe.”
Ann Lamott “You can safely assume that you’ve created
God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you
do.”
My homiletics professor, David
Buttrick, insisted that we never tell a joke in a sermon but in light of the
fact that Buttrick isn’t here today and in honor of this year’s observance of
St. Patrick’s Day, I want to share my favorite Irish tale with you.
An unsuspecting American
tourist walked into a neighborhood pub in Belfast where the locals were always
on the lookout for some fresh meat with whom to start a good bar fight. A local,
we’ll call him “Paddy,” sat at the bar beside him. Said hello and then asked,
“Since this is your first time here, do you mind if we ask if you are Catholic
or Protestant?”
Without hesitation, the
American said, “I’m an atheist.” Which was not a word that Paddy had heard
often. He retreated from the bar and conferred with his friends for a few
minutes and then returned. “Tell me then, if you would, is it the Catholic God
you don’t believe in or the Protestant God?”
Nothing is more obviously
hypocritical than fighting about religion. It makes no more sense than having
sex for in honor of virginity. There is a more straight forward way to say that
but even I bow to context from time to time.
If you are at all like me you
have always cringed when you heard terms on the news like “the Christian
militia” or “the Islamic army”… we turn a religious reference to Mt. Zion into
a militaristic, racist term like “Zionism.”
But in this sense, religions
give us a sense of identity before they give us a sense of ethics or even the
ability to blush. These are not good Muslims who are becoming terrorists just
as these are not idealistic Christian who don robes in the KKK.
The violence we have witnessed
around the Irish Republican Army’s bombings in England had nothing to do with
being Catholic or Protestant and had everything to do with the Irish not
wanting to be ruled by the English and if American’s can’t sympathize with that
then clearly our awareness of American history has gotten a little shabby.
One of our wisdom lessons this
morning is a quote from the Spanish born Harvard scholar, George Santayana who
considered himself to be a sort of a Catholic atheist. He rejected the faith
claims of Catholicism but admired the personal ethics and social awareness of
faith. He said, “My atheism . . . is true piety towards the universe and denies
only gods fashioned by men in their own image to be servants of their human
interests.”
And, to that, I would say, that
all religions are fashioned by people in their own image to serve their own
purposes. Still, like with Santayana, that is no reason to be entirely
dismissive or even to be blatantly iconoclastic. All of the religious texts in
the world are the distilled product of a civilization’s attempt at articulating
what they believed to be of absolute importance.
I don’t like the way they
express it in many instances but neither you nor I live in the time that gave
voice to these ancient doctrines. The belief that Jesus of Nazareth died on our
behalf to save us from judgment for our sins is, in our age, a preposterous
suggestion. To say that you are such a horrible person that God had to kill
himself simply does not make sense in our culture. Millions of people are
doggedly still trying to make it make sense but no rational person could look
at that fundamental claim and be anything but embarrassed by it. And yet, much
of the world’s most helpful ethical leadership has come from Christian
teaching.
I recently met a NASA engineer
who has been hired to do some technical work for MSU. He is a very bright
scientist, who also believes in psychics. If I knew him better, I would
probably be able to find some psychological explanation for why he chooses to
set his rational beliefs aside from time to time in order to seek the guidance
of a psychic. And he knew when I pointed out to him that psychics never seem to
win the lottery that his faith in them was not rational but it is somehow
important to him.
I don’t think that everyone who
goes to a traditional Christian Church, or to a mosque, or a conservative
Jewish synagogue are either bad people or stupid people and I strongly suspect
that most Muslims do not really believe that Muhammad rode a winged horse up to
heaven, just as I doubt that many Christians believe that Jesus walked on
water, and Jews don’t believe that Moses divided the Red Sea. They just are not
willing to suffer the cognitive dissonance of admitting to themselves or others
that they no longer believe such things.
And it certainly is not that we
enlightened 21st century folk are the first people clever enough to
get this figured out. A thousand years before Muhammad was born, five hundred
years before Jesus was born, the Greek philosopher, Xenophanes said, “The
Ethiops say that their gods are flat-nosed and black,
While the Thracians say that
theirs have blue eyes and red hair.
Yet if cattle or horses or
lions had hands and could draw,
And could sculpt like men,
then the horses would draw their gods
Like horses, and cattle like
cattle; and each they would shape
Bodies of gods in the
likeness, each kind, of their own.”
We have always made our gods in our own image. Just as it is
obviously true that if horses had gods they would look like horses, we have
endowed the gods of our creation with the values that we hold dear. The nomadic
sheep herding tribes of Palestine figured out that if they were going to
survive without killing one another that they had to have some hard fast rules: no stealing, no lying, no killing, no messing
around with your neighbor’s wives, and stop being so darned jealous of his
livestock.
God didn’t really write these rules on tablets of stone but
their society was better off, it was more stable, it was safer and they were
happier when they acted like they believed that God had written these rules in
tablets of stone.
What I believe actually motivated the creation of all of the
great world religions was a desire both to understand the meaning of our
existence and to find a way of living that helped to make our own and the lives
of others better. It is not so much true any longer, but for many generations,
parents felt compelled to raise their children in a church, even if they were
not much interested in religious stuff themselves, because they believed that
religious faith was what harnessed or civilized our more base instincts…. It is
religious guilt and fear that keeps us from stealing, lying, killing, screwing
around, and being generally miserable people.
Think about it. Very few parents every wanted their kids to be
anything more than a nominal Chrsitian. If they took it too seriously, got too
involved, or, like me, changed their major in college to religious studies,
that was not often applauded. No one really loves a fanatic of any ilk. Because fanaticism has to do with beliefs.
Fanatics have a set of orthodox religious beliefs that they generally want
everyone else to believe with them. I can’t recall which comedian first made
the observation but it seems true, that the people who are the most eager to
tell you about their religion never seem to want to hear about yours.
But here is the big division in religion that we have talked
about before: there is orthodoxy and there is orthopraxy. One is about right
beliefs and the other is about right practices. No one is ever offended by
someone who is a fanatic about being generous, about being forgiving, a fanatic
about loving is someone we generally think of as being a really great person.
I understand that to an awful lot of religious people in
traditional churches, we often look and sound like atheists. And I think that a
lot of famous historical characters from Voltaire to Thomas Jefferson, and Mark
Twain actually thought of themselves as atheists because they knew that they
didn’t fit in to traditional religions.
Once you have peeked behind the curtain of religious orthodoxy
and you have seen either that there is nothing there or that what is there
would embarrass Charles Darwin, it is impossible to unsee that. Once your mind
has been stretched to accept a new idea, it can never go back into its former
shape.
But I don’t think of myself as being an atheist, but I, like
Thomas Huxley, believe that trying to believe in things for which there is
absolutely no evidence, is a violation of reason and intellect. I have rejected
supernatural theism… I don’t believe in God as a person, not as Zeus and Hera,
not as Odin, or Allah, or Yahweh. But that does not mean that I am not in awe
of the wonder and mystery of life and the universe, that unknowable, ineffable,
deep reality, that has always been the God beyond all of the named caricatures
of human invented religious characters.
When we say,
“love is my religion” as vague as that is, I think that we are saying something
much more meaningful than when we said “I am a protestant” or “a Catholic” or
“a Baptist.” We don’t have rules written in stone but we have a passion to find
a way of living that makes rules no longer necessary.
And many of us
may still love rituals, religious symbols, songs, and holidays but cherish such
things as stones along the path that brought us to the liberty of thoughtful,
mindful living.
I started with a
tip of the hat to St Patrick’s Day…. A holiday that seems to mean much more to
American beer drinkers than it ever did in Ireland but what you might not hear
in Ireland is that Patrick was not Irish… he was English, captured by pirates
and sold into slavery in Ireland. And he was not Catholic since he lived and
died before the Roman Catholic Church ever got its formal start. I suppose that
it goes without saying that there were never snakes in Ireland so he didn’t get
rid of them but, at least metaphorically, there are a lot of snakes in
organized religion and it may be up to us to expel them from what it means to
actually be spiritual people.
Ours is no longer
a religion of beliefs, creeds, doctrines, creeds, or even of denominations. We
are free thinkers who seek to encourage one another to grow and become more
committed to a spiritual life, a life that protects the earth, defends the
weak, serves those in need, and speaks truth to power….all under a heading of
love.
