The Brave New World.4            Roger Ray      March 25, 2018
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    A computer that dispenses expert radiology advice is just one example of how jobs currently done by highly trained white-collar workers can be automated, thanks to the advance of deep learning and other forms of artificial intelligence. The idea that manual work can be carried out by machines is already familiar; now ever-smarter machines can perform tasks done by information workers, too. What determines vulnerability to automation, experts say, is not so much whether the work concerned is manual or white-collar but whether or not it is routine. Machines can already do many forms of routine manual labor, and are now able to perform some routine cognitive tasks too. As a result, says Andrew Ng, a highly trained and specialized radiologist may now be in greater danger of being replaced by a machine than his own executive assistant: “She does so many different things that I don’t see a machine being able to automate everything she does any time soon.”    THE ECONOMIST Jun 25th 2016

  

One of my earliest memories is of sitting on the basement floor of my early childhood home and watching my mother run the wash through the hand cranked wringer on the top of the washing machine. Such a machine would have seemed primitive to anyone living just ten years later but in the mid-1950’s it was a step up from a scrub board and a wash bucket. 

 

My parents did their homework by the light of oil lanterns,

they commuted to school either on foot or on horseback,

their homes were heated with wood,

and a good deal of farm life still involved milking cows  by hand and harnessing a mule to plow. 

The innovations of modernity held the promise of an easier life. Labor saving inventions allowed you to cook without chopping wood. To vacuum a rug rather than dragging it outside and beating it in the wind. I remember our first washing machine and dryer, our first dish washer, and our first microwave oven. Life, for middle class Americans, went through an evolution in the 60’s and 70’s that took a lot of time-consuming drudgery out of life and made our homes safer and more comfortable.

I was in grad school when computers became a part of a private citizen’s life. I no longer had to type my many papers with a carbon paper between two sheets of paper. No more correction tape or white out. My first computer immediately saved me about 15 or 20 hours a week of tedious work. 

But “labor saving” can mean different things. It can mean that our daily lives are less labor intensive and more comfortable and it can mean that many occupations become irrelevant. Twenty years ago, I had three secretaries managing the record keeping, finances, and communications in the church where I was the pastor. Ten years ago we were down to two and we were looking for things to keep them busy. In the life of our little church, we have never had a secretary because the internet and computer programs have made communication and record keeping so much more simple that I probably don’t spend more than a day every week doing what I used to have three full-time staff members doing. 

Automation and innovation are taking jobs out of our economy that were once assumed to be fixtures. Christmas shopping on the internet was a novelty a decade ago, now, many of you have not seen the inside of our local mall for years. When you go to the grocery store, you are more and more likely to have to either use an automated checkout register or use an ap on your phone so that you never even have to slow down to deal with an actual employee or even an automated check-out station. 

The harnessing of electricity and the invention of modern automobiles and airplanes changed the world. Then came automation in manufacturing. Then the whole world of computers and the internet. These have all brought adjustments in employment and have shifted economic resources.

President Trump has vowed to bring back coal mining jobs which necessarily means two things: the first is that Donald Trump has never been in a coal mine and knows absolutely nothing about them.

The second is that he has no idea how coal in mined now.

It is not simply that coal is being replaced by other cleaner and cheaper energy sources, but what coal that is being mined is being mined by powerful robots that can do the work of hundreds of coal miners. Those jobs are gone forever. And frankly, no one is going to miss them because they were dangerous and horrible jobs.

The problem is that no good paying union jobs have come along to take their place.

Artificial intelligence now both promises and threatens a fourth wave of major changes, changes that can usher in a time of human leisure, or it could force more people into abject poverty. What is certainly true is that we have a lot more people in the labor force than we actually need to provide food, shelter, and services to our population.

At the time of the Civil War, there were only about 30 million people in America and still the agricultural south was dependent upon slave labor to be able to feed and clothe the population. Now we have more than 10 times as many people but fewer people working in agriculture. As the population of America as grown by hundreds of millions of people, there are now fewer people living in rural Missouri than there was in 1860.

Science fiction writers tend to be the prophets of the future and they tend to see a future in one of two flavors. Gene Rodenberry envisioned Star Trek, he conceived of a world in which there was no currency. No one got paid because resources were shared as needed and everyone had everything they needed.

But, as we saw in the recent Hunger Games series, futurists much more often envision a much more bleak future. In fact, you almost never hear the word “dystopian” except in a description of some Science Fiction vision of a dire future filled with violence, poverty, hunger, and government oppression.

Innovation can give us a future in which the human mind is set free from the mundane tasks of mere survival so that we can explore space, as well as create art, music, literature, and turn our minds to creativity and imagination. Or is can give us a future in which human beings are typically more trouble than they are worth and those few who are wealthy can do everything they can to defend their wealth and comfort against the hordes of the unwashed poor until they all die off.

 

I don’t often get to agree with the Catholic pope and I kinda hate that it has to be when the pontiff is talking about poop, but, yes, the issue here is unbridled capitalism.  In defense of the pope’s honor, he was technically quoting a phrase coined by the 4^th century Greek bishop, Basil of Caesarea, but the point is that an economy that is based solely upon greed is evil and the results of it will carry the stench of hellish sewage.

Animal Farm, George Orwell’s 1945 novel, illustrated the fears Americans’ shared about the spread of socialism and communism in the early 20^th century. The very imaginative story showed how a revolution with good intentions becomes little more than a regime change, exchanging one kind of exploitative dictatorship for just a new set of dictators. If there is a moral to the story, it is saying to workers, “Be satisfied with your lot in life because if you organize and rebel, everything will end up being worse for you and other workers.”

That mentality has reigned supreme in both major political parties in the United States for almost a century. Only the desperation of the great depression and the threat of crushing poverty from WWII allowed for the creation of a social safety net of any sort in America but Franklin Roosevelt was often portrayed as being dangerously inclined towards socialism. By the 1960’s, when President Johnson tried to follow the lead of the rest of the civilized world in creating a national healthcare program, he was beaten back to the compromise of creating Medicare for the elderly, and Medicaid for the desperately poor, because insurance companies did not want to give up the profit they could make from people being sick.

The argument in Animal Farm is that socialism fails on two fronts, the first is that the powerful will always seek to claim the majority of goods for themselves, and the second, portrayed in the novel in true stereotype casting as a cat,  is that the lazy will always try to scam the system so that they can eat and be housed without providing any labor. And, any of us who have experience working with the poor know that you can find many sad examples of people who will do just that.

When I was first taking training in clinical counseling, the Bible of psychology, the DSM (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), contained a diagnosis called “An Entitlement Disorder,” which has now just been made an aspect of the Narcissistic Personality Disorder, but I think that most of us have seen it in action. It is true. Some people will scam the system to avoid work.

What is sad is that this popular prejudice against the poor and unproductive blinds people to the real scammers who are manipulating the marriage of democracy to unbridled capitalism to write themselves blank checks in the form of subsidies to already wildly profitable businesses, such as the oil and gas industry, and protection of the profits of pharmaceutical and insurance companies that profit off of illnesses.

One of President Trump’s recent screeds has been advocating the execution of drug dealers who are causing the tragically lethal opioid crisis in America. Which forces me to wonder which pharmaceutical CEO he wants to execute first?

There can be no denying that the rewards of capitalism can inspire innovation, invention, hard work, and personal responsibility. But without the balance of regulation that insure that the rapid evolution of artificial intelligence, robotic labor-saving innovation, and technological advances redound to a better life for all of humanity, then the profit motive can dismiss the value of human life in favor of the value of money.

Examples abound but moral failure of Capitalism can be seen nowhere more clearly than in the American gun industry. Folks, during this century, terrorists have killed fewer than 4000 Americans and yet the fear of terrorists has spawned exponential government spending in Homeland Security to keep us safe from this threat. However, in this century, more than a half million Americans have been killed by domestic gun owners. You are a 200 times more likely to be killed by some local gun owner than you are by a terrorist but we don’t spend a dime protecting our own against this domestic blood bath because the gun industry is protecting their profits.

Since the tragic shooting at the Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida last month, a student led protest has arisen in which teenagers are telling us that we have failed them. And we have. We have failed to sensibly curb the murder rate in our nation because we have allowed the profit motive of the gun industry to trump the value of human life, allowing more than 30,000 people to be killed every year for nothing but money.

We have allowed the most morally depraved and the most psychopathic elements of our society to insist that their right to own weapons is more important that the lives of our school children, our families, our friends.

It is worth saying it again. Unbridled capitalism will destroy this nation. The difference between the two visions of our future, either a new world of human comfort and fulfillment, or a dire and violent world filled with hunger and ignorance rests in our willingness to make morality more important than profits.

Capitalism can be harnessed to create a better future but left without regulation, without a moral compass, it turns people into the raw material of printing money. Unbridled capitalism, the ceaseless and incessant greed of it has ruined our democracy, it is driving the destruction of our environment, it has driven our prison system into a concentration camp that holds two million Americans hostage to profits. It is impoverishing our schools, and rationing healthcare, and flooding our streets with guns. We can stop this, we can change the course of history, if we want to, if only we will do it.

We need to offer a universal basic income to everyone. Yes, there will be people who will play the Animal Farm cat role but that is their problem and not ours.

We need to have universal health care and we need to make state colleges and universities tuition free. We need to change our housing codes so that all new construction includes solar panels and plans for sustainable building.

We need to leave our coal and oil in the ground and harvest the energy of wind, waves, and sunlight so that future generations can live.

And we need to get money out of government so that the NRA can be relegated to the pages of history along with ISIS, Al Qaeda, and the Nazis. None of this beyond our grasp. In fact, all of this is a part of the growing social conscience of Western Europe.

There will be several players needed in the infusion of conscience into our capitalism. It will take political leadership, education, and the networking of people of conscience in all walks of life.

I know that we seem to be small and fragile and that our future seems uncertain, but there has never been a time when America needed progressive communities of faith more than it needs us right now. The world needs for us to be courageous, prophetic, loud, and defiant because you just can’t stand idly by and hope for things to turn out well. Only your passionate involvement can keep our country from going off the rails. Together, we have hope.

“Religious Myth and Faithful Reality (From Idols to Ideas)”

“Religious Myth and Faithful Reality (From Idols to Ideas)”
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     Dr. Roger L. Ray

March 18, 2018                            Numbers 21:4-9       

⁴From Mount Hor they set out by the way to the Red Sea, to go around the land of Edom; but the people became impatient on the way. ⁵The people spoke against God and against Moses, “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no food and no water, and we detest this miserable food.” ⁶Then the Lord sent poisonous serpents among the people, and they bit the people, so that many Israelites died. ⁷The people came to Moses and said, “We have sinned by speaking against the Lord and against you; pray to the Lord to take away the serpents from us.” So Moses prayed for the people. ⁸And the Lord said to Moses, “Make a poisonous serpent, and set it on a pole; and everyone who is bitten shall look at it and live.” ⁹So Moses made a serpent of bronze, and put it upon a pole; and whenever a serpent bit someone, that person would look at the serpent of bronze and live.

We have been accustomed for many years to seeing people proudly proclaim their Christian faith by sporting an ICTHUS emblem on the back bumper of their car. The fish symbol is inspired by an early Christian symbol for the church. The Greek letters spell “Fish” but for the faithful, each letter is the first in the words “Jesus Christ, God’s Son, our Savior.”

Iconoclasm being the first order of humor, several young cynics have been seen sporting the emblem for a made-up religion that is popular as an anti-Christian evangelical backlash. This is the sign for the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Not to be outdone, South Park fans have created a Cthulhu emblem that borrows from the fish symbol but adds some of the dragon and octopus features of this mythological monster of the deep. No one does iconoclasm like South Park.

The real message of the knockoff emblems is that they are refusing to respect or to any longer show deference to ancient religions that, at least for them, no longer have any authority or influence. The cults of the Flying Spaghetti Monster and of Cthulhu are just statements of derision and a rejection of all religion.

The past generation has witnessed the excess of televangelists and millionaire mega-church pastors. They grew up in the time when the Catholic Church was sacrificing its estimable position of global influence by at first denying and then trying to hide hundreds of thousands of cases of clergy child molestation.

Whether you were a practicing Jew, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, or Buddhist, or not, our culture tended to give automatic homage to religious leaders, especially the Dalai Lama, the Pope, and to certain well known religious figures such as Billy Graham, Gandhi, and Mother Theresa. But a newly empowered and liberated generation no longer feels any obligation to feign respect for anyone or anything that does not deserve respect and, frankly, I’m on their side.

I’m still a man of the church. I am a pastor, a preacher, and a religious writer but rather than waiting for the culture to mock our ancient beliefs and texts, I think that it behooves us to lead the way in religious reform, cleaning out our closets, boldly backing up a dumpster to the garage, and getting rid of stuff that has been collecting in the churches for far too long.

When we think of religious reformation we usually think of Martin Luther’s Protestant Reformation of 16^th century fame but it wasn’t the only one and, in fact, religions are always reforming.

In the 8^th century BCE, the Israelite king, Hezekiah, led a reform in an attempt to unify the competing tribes of Judah. We have grown up with the claim that Judaism is a monotheistic religion but I assure you that it didn’t start out that way and there were a whole lot of missteps along the way to modern monotheism.

We have read the Exodus accounts of Moses creating a Jewish religion in where there was only one God and in which there were to be no images of either God or humans, not even of birds or beasts. But in the time of Hezekiah, not only were their several hilltop altars devoted to various rural gods, there was, in the courtyard of the temple in Jerusalem, a bronze snake on a pole.

This was not, in fact, uncommon in Palestine of the ancient world. It was some kind of idol that was associated with a cure for snakebites. Examples of what we somewhat derisively call the “Nehushtan” have been found in archaeological sites around the region.

There is some reason to believe that the snake on the pole was a part of the evolution of the later Greek symbol for medicine, the caduceus, a staff carried by Hermes. This may or may not be true but what I know is not true is the reading we heard from Numbers this morning. That, in a word, is fake news, written into the Biblical narrative as a plausible excuse for why there was an idol of a snake right at the doors of Yahweh’s temple in Jerusalem that people were coming and making sacrifices to. It was a way in which a “wanna-be” monotheistic culture could say, “idols? We ain’t got no stinkin idols!” when, in fact, they had several. The account of Moses being told by God to put a bronze snake on a pole is a three-thousand-year-old variant of the claim that the recent Trump tax-cut bill was intended to benefit the middle class. Both the church and the state have a very bad habit of making public statements that fit their need to feather their own nest but which have little or no basis in fact.

When the church, through misplaced devotion to ancient creeds, sacred texts, or sacraments, remains faithful to clearly dishonest and reality denying beliefs and practices, we are giving evidence to the Flying Spaghetti Monster and Cthulhu crowds. What the church and our current president often seems to miss is the very basic fact that if you want to retain credibility, you have to remain credible.

When I was serving a church in Louisville, KY, I was much more engaged in counseling than I am now and there was a psychiatrist there, Dr. Norton, who was almost a Gandalf figure in my life. He seemed to be both magically wise and penetratingly insightful. I had a very troubled teenaged girl in my congregation who seemed bent on self-destruction: constantly running away from home, and throwing in her lot with drug pushers and pimps.

I will never forget one especially poignant meeting the family and I had with Dr. Norton. The girl lied constantly, both to get out of school, and to deny virtually everything that she had ever done, and Dr. Norton said to her, “With every lie you tell, you become a little less human, a little less solid. You can literally turn yourself into an invisible ghost who has no family, no friends, no connections because no one will ever care about anything you say since it is just as likely to be false as it is to be true.”

Think about how the last year has affected all of us. Early last year we could hardly tear our eyes off of the news. We were constantly enraged by almost every crazy thing that our new President said and did, and as the months have worn on, it is not so much that we have come to accept this kind of dishonesty and insanity as the new normal as much as it is that Trump is literally disappearing before our eyes. He started out as a horrifyingly unqualified President and he quickly became an international embarrassment and now, day by day, he just seems to disappear. I don’t know about you, but I just don’t find him to be worthy of my energy, not even the energy of my disgust.

I still hope that he is impeached and, when you think about foreign emoluments, illegal collaboration and collusion to undermine an election, traitorous deference shown to dictators and murderers, I’m pretty sure that he and many members of his administration will be spending a lot of time in prison if they manage to escape a very short amount of time in front of a firing squad, but as tragic and horrible as our current state of affairs has become, I just don’t think that he deserves to be looked at, listened to, or given any credibility whatsoever.

He is a ghost, and folks, ghosts don’t exist.  

Trump has become like the tabloid papers in the grocery checkout lane… everyone glances at the headlines when you are trapped in a slow moving line but no one but the most gullible would ever buy a copy.

My fear is that the church is starting to be share that role in the minds of the kind of people who are more willing to believe in climate change than in Noah’s magical zoo boat, who believe in geology, the fossil record, and physics, than who believe in a flat earth approach to religion.

It behooves us to regularly and publicly state that we do not take the Bible literally and we acknowledge that a great deal of it is comprised of historical falsehoods and morally reprehensible teachings that deserve to be apologized for and not defended. As Dorothy Parker said in one of her infamous book reviews, “This is not a book to be set lightly aside, it should be thrown with great force.”

It is a document full of historical inaccuracies, absurd miracle accounts, fabricated characters, and a lot of misogyny, homophobia, racism, nationalism, and both cultural and religious exclusivism which has turned most mainstream churches into the equivalent of Darwin’s Waiting Room.

In the old days, people like me used to make fun of preachers who cherry picked their favorite Biblical passages but now I realize that we have to very intentionally and energetically cherry pick the Bible. To do anything else would turn us into sociopaths! In fact, in 2018, we have to cherry-pick the Bible, the newspapers, our TV news shows, and even the constitution because if the 2^nd Amendment really does mean that absolutely anyone can have absolutely any kind of gun they want, whenever they want it, then the 2^nd Amendment belongs on the trash heap with talking snakes and winged angels.

There was a time when we were told to “take it on faith” and that equated to blind obedience. That kind of unthinking devotion doesn’t make for being a good Christian, Jew, or Muslim, it doesn’t make for being a good husband or wife, or even a decent friend.

I am grateful to Karen Armstrong who writes about the practice of baptism in the early church at a time when choosing to become a Christian might also necessarily imply that you are going to be cut off from family, the synagogue, or temple, and that you immediately become an enemy of the state subject to execution.

She says that when a person was lowered into the water to be baptized that they came up shouting the Greek word, “Pistus” which King James translators usually rendered as “faith” but it implied loyalty, or commitment, or, as Armstrong suggests, “courage.” Faith was not so much blind belief as it was a courageous decision to try to lead a moral and meaningful life that rejected the worship of the Emperor and all of the violence, greed, slavery, rape, and exploitation that it represented.

Our faith tradition is not rooted in slavery, military conquest, colonialism, pedophile priests, or magical incantations and rituals. We are devoted to the teachings of the one who taught us to love our enemies and to pray for those who have injured us. We are disciples of the one who told us sell what we own and give to the poor. . . Who told us that those who live by the sword will die by the sword. Jesus told us to forgive the one who offends us, not merely 7 times, but 70 times 7!

As Karen Armstrong says, our faith is a matter of practice. You do not learn how to swim by believing in swimming. You learn to swim by swimming. You learn to love by loving. You learn to forgive by forgiving. You learn to be a good person by choosing every day to do the better thing rather than the easier thing, to be generous rather than self-serving, to consider others rather than yourself.

In these stressful days, a lot of important things have come into focus. You know that I was pretty hard on President Obama at times. He saved the banks rather than saving home owners. He tended to be pro-corporation more than pro-union, and he sure did seem to cave into military actions rather than trying to earn that Nobel Peace Prize he was given a bit too early in his career.

But I have learned something important this year. Sometimes you can’t get your priorities straight until you learn to see things in context. Obama wasn’t perfect so far as my values go, but he was a good man, an exemplary husband, a devoted father, a role model and a man we could all be proud of, and I miss that. I am not nearly so concerned about having a Republican or a Democrat or even a Democratic Socialist in the White House as I am concerned about having a good person, a good woman or a good man. As the pop song says, “Sometimes you don’t know what you got till it’s gone.”

I just want for us to get it back. I want America to have a good government and I want the Church to resume being a good Church again. I want honesty and integrity from both before they both disappear from view.