“The End of Providence”

“The End of Providence”    Nov. 25, 2018    Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

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 from Carl Dennis’s poem “Providence”

Providence seems to be one of the words

That shouldn’t be mourned as it falls from fashion.

Goodbye to the notion that whatever happens

Is meant to happen, foreseen and approved

By a thoughtful heaven. A word that’s proven

Invaluable to the privileged when they’ve cautioned

The less-than-privileged to be content

With the portion that happenstance has assigned them.

It’s the work of providence that you were born

To a sharecropping family on a hardscrabble farm,

Not to the family that owns the land.

The environmental advocacy group, Conservation International, has done a wonderful series of short videos, voiced by famous actors, to teach environmental awareness. They are masterfully produced, and beautiful to watch.

Julia Roberts is the voice of Mother Nature, Harrison Ford speaks as the oceans, Edward Norton is the voice of soil, Penelope Cruz speaks for water, and Robert Redford speaks as the redwoods. The collection is growing and well worth spending some time on YouTube being mesmerized by the whole collection. 

I especially like them because they are using these familiar and powerful voices to speak in the first person as if the oceans, the trees, the soil were speaking to us, very personally, and, with no small amount of contempt for us for pollution, global warming, and exhausting resources. Most of them assure us that the earth is eternal, but humans are mortal and that if we wipe ourselves out through ignorant abuse of the earth, that while we may be extinct, the eternal aspects of nature will go on. 

The videos are powerful, informative, and they are almost voiced as mini-sermons delivered by ancient gods, speaking to our more primitive selves who, in antiquity, really did believe that the earth was a feminine goddess, and the oceans were a male deity. Producing the videos this way speaks to a very ancient place in our unconscious memory of when we automatically attributed emotion, character, opinions, likes and dislikes to the gods and goddesses of the universe. 

We experience the world through conscious thought and we react through our emotions. Ancient people projected this same consciousness and emotional instability to the weather, the growing season, fishing, the oceans themselves, they were all gods, gods who were sometimes loving, sometimes punitive, and sometimes just totally capricious, psycho, nuts, unpredictable and inscrutable. 

The evolution from this primitive polytheism towards the claim of monotheism in the western religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam was seen as a cultural evolution away from primitive thinking towards greater levels of sophistication and awareness. However, any fare assessment of that evolution really just looks like a kind of pantheon of hierarchy. While Jews, Christians and Muslims claim to have only one god, there never has been a way to make that work perfectly. If you conceive of one true God who is all-knowing, omnipresent, omniscient being who is good and loving, then there is a whole of explaining to do as to why there are diseases, floods, droughts, earthquakes, volcanos, and hurricanes. So all of these alleged monotheisms have complicated layers of divine angels and demons, mini-gods, who account for some of the darker aspects of life. 

The movement from this ancient polytheism towards the monotheism of our time failed to actually move away from this very primitive tendency to award consciousness and emotion to the universe. 

There are wonderful exceptions we can point to through the centuries of great thinkers in all of the world’s religions who moved passed this personification of God and the universe but sitting in pews in churches all over the land this morning, and standing in mosques on Friday, and gathered in synagogues yesterday, are millions upon millions of people who still consciously project personhood onto the earth, the oceans, the weather, and matters of personal morality. They believe that history is played out to a script written by a self-conscious deity who allows us a degree of free will to see if we will do God’s bidding on our own. . . sort of a puppet-master who uses guilt and fear rather than strings. This allows people to still be invested in a rewards and punishment based moral universe but to still parrot the belief that everything happens for a reason, that God is in charge of history and that everything is working out according to a divine plan. 

And, honestly, I am sometimes conflicted about saying anything about this. I know that people use this imaginary world of belief to cope with things that are too difficult for them to emotionally process. A local pastor I know whose husband drank himself to death, copes with that horrible loss by telling herself that certain Cardinals and Robins that show up at her birdfeeder are her deceased husband coming back to watch over her. 

I have been tempted to suggest that she stop putting seed in the birdfeeders to see how concerned her late husband really is, but you will be glad to know that I have resisted that temptation. Belief in ghosts, spirits, re-incarnation, seems harmless enough if it helps some people to cope. I don’t like it when this willingness to suspend an orientation to reality is palmed off as religious belief, but it is not your responsibility to correct every stupid post you see on Face Book and it is not my responsibility to go around correcting every silly religious claim that I hear. 

But I can’t be entirely indifferent. In a very serious conversation this week with a victim of domestic abuse who has recently felt so desperate that she made a serious attempt at taking her own life, I learned that she is now deeply involved in Bible Studies with the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who are telling her that what she needs to do is to pray harder. I know that my prescription of: Stay on your meds, keep your appointments with your therapist, stay in the domestic abuse shelter, don’t have contact with your abuser, and find a job is rather more demanding than the Witnesses prescription to pray, study the Bible, and join their very controlling cult-like religion, but this is the point where superstitious religious beliefs can get a person killed. 

For those of us who have transitioned from traditional religious beliefs into a more progressive view of faith as a practice of ethical living and thinking, it seems clear that being fully oriented to reality is to be preferred to any kind of self-deception in magical thinking. For progressives, faith is a matter of deeply engaging in reality whereas much of traditional religion has to do with denial of reality and investment in an imaginary world filled with angels and demons and unseen rewards and unrelenting torture. 

In the new Robin Hood movie, released this week, the narrative has the church in league with the corrupt Sherriff of Nottingham. The wholly despicable cardinal tells the cruel sheriff, “Fear is the greatest weapon. It’s why the church created hell.”I’m sure they will get some push back from mainstream religion over that line but it was a bit of honesty in an otherwise poorly written script that critics are telling me that I did not, in fact, enjoy as much as I thought I did. Honestly, who goes to a Robin Hood movie expecting historical realism?

Our local “6 Flags over Jesus” mega-church pastor got our little community into national news once again by telling his thousands of congregants that yoga has demonic roots and if you go to yoga classes you might become possessed by a demon. I am sure that the $25 per session, stretching and exercise, classes offered at his church is demon free. Ironically, while they are opposed to yoga classes, they do offer several martial arts classes in their gym every week. More than 10,000 people who attend there are evidently inoculated against lethal levels of hypocrisy.

I see that and just feel that, once again, the world is being told that the Ozarks is just one giant “Darwin’s Waiting Room” where we sit around hoping that one day the frontal lobe of our brains will evolve. But I immediately dismissed the story because it was obviously just an attention getting device and no one on earth is dumb enough to believe in demons in 2018. Apparently, I have once again overestimated the critical thinking skills of our neighbors, as many local yoga studios announced a sudden decline in participants.

I know that most people will counsel us to say, “Who cares what other people believe?” There is no harm in thinking that your deceased love one is eating earthworms in the backyard, but it would seem to limber up people’s connection to reality to a degree that it leaves them vulnerable to being manipulated by either political or religious charlatans. 

More than that, saying that you believe in divine providence seems to allow people to let themselves morally off the hook. They don’t worry about the environment because God will take care of it. 

There are 300 mass shootings in our country already this year, but they just send thoughts and prayers because it is all up to God. We have 500 people living in the streets this winter and most off what we get from churches is thoughts and prayers.

I am unapologetically disgusted by religions rooted in beliefs. Real religion is a matter of how you live.

It is a bit frightening to realize how small we are and how big the universe is and the child within us would like to believe that there is a big God who is a benevolent Father in the clouds who is in charge of everything and that there is a big wonderful plan.

But Harrison Ford is not Neptune, he is just a Hollywood actor who got rich pretending to be Indiana Jones and Han Solo, both of whom, never existed. Julia Roberts is not mother earth. The God of the universe, that ineffable spirit that we feel but cannot describe, is not a person as we are who has a specific will that is governed by emotions, either anger or love, that’s us. If love happens, that’s up to us. If meaning happens, that’s up to us. If justice happens, that’s up to us.

We don’t care about reverencing the earth because the soil is a god, and the water is holy, and the wind is sacred. We care about protecting the earth so that plants, animals, and people can live on into the future. We are not afraid of being punished by an angry God, we’re afraid of stupidly poisoning our grandchildren! 

The goal of a spiritual life is not quiet acquiescence but a will to roll up our sleeves and keep working to make both peace and justice, not religious beliefs, but visible realities. We invite our religious sisters and brothers to join us in the real world where God has no hands but our hands, no feet but our feet, and where we have a lot of work yet to do.  

“Making Family Joyful Again”        Nov. 18, 2018   Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

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Langston Huges, Thanksgiving Time

When the night winds whistle through the trees

and blow the crisp brown leaves a-crackling down,
When the autumn moon is big and yellow-orange and round,
When old Jack Frost is sparkling on the ground,
It's Thanksgiving Time!

When the pantry jars are full of mince-meat

and the shelves are laden with sweet spices for a cake,
When the butcher man sends up a turkey nice and fat to bake,
When the stores are crammed with everything ingenious cooks can make,
It's Thanksgiving Time!

When the gales of coming winter outside your window howl,
When the air is sharp and cheery so it drives away your scowl,
When one's appetite craves turkey and will have no other fowl,
It's Thanksgiving Time!

For the past couple of years, when Thanksgiving rolled around, I have felt some homiletic urgency about correcting some of the romantic myths about the warm relationship between the early pilgrims in America and the Native Americans they encountered here. As absurd as images like this one really are, there were some instances of sharing and mutual aid between white European invaders and our indigenous Indian population but those instances were still mere prelude to the genocide that historically and factually followed. 

I appreciate the fact that you let me get some of that out of my system over the past couple of years but, as I faced the holiday this year, I realized that the myth that really haunted us was not fanciful stories about what happened three hundred years ago but the fantasy that really informed our childhood experiences had little to dowith pilgrims or Indians but more to do with romanticized expectations.

Our myths have had a distinctly Norman Rockwell influence. Christmas has its own dangerous pitfalls with unrealistic hopes for joy from receiving perfect gifts in a perfectly decorated environment but Thanksgiving is more about this . . . a multi-generational family gathered around a traditional feast. 

In this idealized image, grandma and grandpa not only are still living, but they never got a divorce. There is no drunk uncle at the table, no black sheep of the family who always messes things up for everyone. This is a holiday that is wrapped up in the hope for a loving family. I am so happy for the people who actually get to experience this. 

I can say that in my own rather Puritanical home, even though there was no wine and laughter was rare, we managed to pull off some pretty big family celebrations, the smells and tastes of which have never left me, though my grandparents, aunts and uncles are now all long gone, my parents are deceased, my sister succumbed to cancer a dozen years ago, and my older brother, with whom I celebrated several Thanksgiving dinners, voted for Trump two years ago which has hastened the disassembling of family gatherings. 

Family, for all intents and purposes, for me, is now down to just me and my daughter, Valerie, though we are fortunate to have many close friends who fill up the Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner table in enviable fashion. 

The holiday season that holds out the promise of a Norman Rockwell moment, most often fails to deliver for most people. And sometimes, it is quite the opposite. There is a myth that has long circulated among helping professionals that depression and domestic violence increase during the holidays. Statistically, it isn’t really true but anecdotally, I can give you 40 years of stories that might make you think that it is true.

Seasonal affective disorder is a real thing. As days get shorter and the weather gets cold and gray, people spend more time indoors, they miss out on the good serotonin their bodies make on long walks in the sunshine and family gatherings are often filled with the material that will keep therapists busy until May. Still, factually, the suicide rate is lower in the winter months and higher in spring and summer. Domestic violence stats actually dip down a bit on Thanksgiving and Christmas though not enough to celebrate. 

The holidays are not quite here, yet and both David, our associate pastor, and I, have been exhausted by demands to respond to domestic violence and have opened our respective homes in times of crisis. That is statistically insignificant but existentially relevant as we have had to respond to the violence, suicidal threats, and child custody complexities that come up when a family comes apart at the seams. 

Domestic violence is usually rooted in jealousy and control. Because the people we see in shelters are often poor, we tend to associate these problems with poverty. The difference is, however, we only encounter people in shelters who do not have the economic wherewithal to rent a hotel room or an apartment. The people we meet in shelters do not have a network of middle- or upper-class family members or friends who can put them in a guest room and make breakfast for them. However, it is absolutely true that domestic violence cuts across all economic, educational, racial, and national lines. 

Years ago, David and Holly were living in Cambodia trying to teach some of the most poor and least educated people how to solve problems without violence in their homes. At the same time, I was serving a large denominational church where my most frequent domestic violence calls came from a mansion where both husband and wife were physicians. Their live-in au pair would call me when the violence escalated to the point where it endangered their children.

I can’t remember how many times I pretended to just be in the neighborhood and dropped by at 11 p.m. or even after midnight so that they would not know that their babysitter had called me, but I could show up and stop the fighting. And, mind you, I am not a physician and I am getting a bit out of my lane here, but I am convinced that there is such a tight connection between our mind and our body that the cancers and heart attacks experienced in this family have always seemed to me to be at least partially a consequence of the mental illness in their family system that provoked and sustained the violence. 

Leo Tolstoy's book Anna Karenina, begins by saying:

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

In every family, there is the potential for success and there is the potential of ending up in misery, or divorce court, or a spouse abuse shelter, or, let’s be honest, a morgue. There are about 2000 domestic partner murders in America every year. One in five women report that they have been victims of domestic violence at some time in their life. Again, my own experience does not amount to statistical research, but during my time as a pastor in Kentucky, I had two domestic murders within my parish family . . . in the first, a husband shot and killed his wife, and in the second a wife shot and killed her husband. Drugs were involved in the later, and money in the former, but as Anna Karenina says, unhappy families find a host of ways to turn their lives into a hellish existence. Jealousy, control, infidelity, rape, molestation, addiction to drugs, alcohol, gambling, or shopping, hoarding, greed, dishonesty . . . all feed resentment which becomes the glacier that can freeze the most generous of hearts and the best intents of any marriage. 

What is less obvious is the kind of bonding that happens in chronically violent homes. Crisis bonding seduces victims into a nearly unbreakable bond with their abuser. It is painful to those of us who love and care for a victim when we see them returning over and over again to their abuser. The national average is that a woman will leave an abuser seven times before successfully staying away. Even in the shelters, when we finally have a woman safely housed behind secured doors, we often find them trying to sneak their abuser in for a visit.

Victims lose friends and family confidence when they have told everyone about the horrors of their abuse but then, a week later, they are back with their abuser. The national average is 7, but I have known some victims who skew those numbers by going back dozens and dozens of times. Their abusers will tell them, “No one will ever love you as much as I do,” and “You can’t survive without me.” Many will even threaten to kill their victim if they try to leave them, making it seem like it is actually safer to stay and endure the violence than to try to return to sanity. This is almost impossible to understand unless you have lived through it but the last thing a victim needs is to be abandoned or shunned by their more stable and sane friends.

None of us live static lives. For all of us, we are living in transition, as if we were forever on a moving train. We are going somewhere, either towards failure or towards success. For a family to be successful, that is, that they have meaningful, mutually supportive, and generally happy relationships, there are several factors that must be present, many of which are obvious but the one that seems to need to be said, particularly, to be said from a pulpit in church on a Sunday morning is the element of forgiveness. 

Not amnesia. Let’s make that distinction very clearly. Every abuser, almost every addict, wants amnesia from their family. They want to pretend that what happened last week or last year is now in the past and cannot be discussed and that you are a bad person if you bring it up or remember it. Forgiveness is not denial of facts. Serious forgiveness acknowledges reality and chooses not to turn past wrongs into present resentment. Forgiveness requires love and compassion but in no way is forgiveness supposed to be rooted in stupidity. 

Love and compassion are also not martyrdom. There is no merit, no heroism, no virtue in staying in a toxic relationship. When people try to draw you into a reality denying, violence accepting, self-destructive relationship, the most loving thing that you can do is to refuse to be a part of it. 

We are all on a moving train, we are just going to different places. Sometimes you have to roll through some dangerous neighborhoods to get to where you want to go but you shouldn’t get off at the “This will mess up my life” station and stay there. I have been known to just flatly tell some people, both former denominational judicatories and dating partners, “I have an honest, mutually respectful relationship to offer you. I do not have a dishonest, competitive, jealous, or toxic relationship to offer to you. So, you get to decide, do you want what I have to offer, or shall we part company?” And you would think that would be a really attractive offer but most of the time, it is not accepted. 

It is sad that many people with whom you might choose to be a professional peer, or a friend, or even a family member, only want to enter that relationship with you if you are willing to at least episodically be their victim. That that is their problem. What I am begging of you is for you to choose to go in the direction of health and happiness and never to consciously or unconsciously choose to be a victim.

And, yes, I know it is not a simple thing. The motivations of love and family are often as crooked as a cork screw and you find yourself living in a victim role without even remembering the convoluted steps that go you there. But, as Winston Churchill said, “If you are going through hell, keep going.”

In preaching, I often try to engage you in conversation by talking about the extremes. On this eve of our annual holiday season with all of its likely family gathers and office parties, I apologize for contrasting the idyllic Normal Rockwell scenes with scenes of domestic violence. The nature of my work, both professionally and in my community volunteering, brings me into much more contact with the frightening underbelly of domestic violence than most of you. For every family that gets down to fists and guns there are dozens that just quietly simmer in contempt and resentment which is, in my opinion, just another piece of the same cloth. 

Few people ever achieve the perfect family status, and no one wants to end up seeking shelter from violence, all that I’m saying is that we are all on a moving train, but you shouldn’t just jump on a train and assume that it will take you where you want to go. You have to carefully study the map, choose your destination, go to the right track and board the right train to get to where you want to be. 

There is a saying in A.A. that I love. It says: Don’t tell me how sick you have been, tell me how well you want to be. Don’t dwell on the past. Take the sweet potato casserole to your Thanksgiving Day family reunion but leave your cold resentment behind. If you get to choose between a family debate about President Trump and a backyard game of touch football, choose the football. Regardless of the choices made by your Fox News – infused uncle or your alcoholic cousin, you choose sanity. Don’t dwell on how sick your family has been. Focus on how healthy you want your family to become.

It may not entirely depend on you, but you have no idea how powerful your choices can be.

                     

“Haud Ignota Loquor” (Speak not of what is not known)     Nov. 11, 2018    

Dr. Roger Ray, pastor      click here to see the video

1.    Evolution is true.

2.    The Bible isn’t inerrant

3.    Women have the same rights as men.

4.    Homosexuality isn’t a sin.

5.    Owning a gun isn’t a God-given right

6.    America isn’t God’s chosen country.

7.    Neither Republicans nor Democrats are God’s chosen political party.

8.    The modern state of Israel isn’t God’s chosen people.

9.     Decisions about abortion should be left up to individual women.

10.  No religion has any real information about either heaven or hell.

When I was a fellow at Harvard, this was the university seal. Three open books with the letters spelling out the Latin word for “truth,” veritas. But this was not the university’s original emblem. 

If you ever visit Old Harvard Yard, you can see on the base of the statue of John Harvard the way the shield appeared a couple of hundred years ago had the three books and the Latin inscription, but you see the book on the bottom is tuned over so that all you can see is the binder and the cover of the book. Humility at Harvard is always a rare commodity, Cambridge is, as you may know, situated in the most opinionated zip code in the country. But someone, centuries ago, wanted to send the signal that not all truth is knowable. Sometimes, even at Harvard, professors and students can be wrong. There is mystery in the universe that is not known and may not be knowable. 

It is arrogant enough for a university to claim that it represents the truth because the truth is always a moving target. A sincere scientist as well as any sincere theologian, is interested in learning, teaching and expanding on what is known to be true but that means that we always have to be examining, re-examining, and often changing what we used to think was true in favor of new understandings. 

Scott Peck used to say that anything that cannot be questioned is an idol and all idols are slated for destruction. The history of science is pockmarked with instances of the academy refusing to admit new evidence because it negated past understandings, but the best of science is always ready to consider to evidence and to dismiss previous beliefs in light of new information. I have been saying for years that religion should be willing to do exactly the same but most of the universe of faith still struggles with the concept of evidence- based faith.

You would be hard put to find anyone in modern history who took the Christian faith more seriously than my old stand-by sage, Soren Kierkegaard, be he did not gladly abide fools. He said, “There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true. The other is to refuse to accept what is true.”

It is true that everything cannot be known. There is more mystery in the universe than there is certain knowledge. And there is a whole world of things about which we know a little bit, often just enough to realize how much that we do not know. 

Modern medicine, for example, has an amazing amount of information about the human body and yet, always the smartest doctor in the room, the neurologist, should almost be ashamed to go to work most days because neurologists actually know so little about the human brain. And, as Mark Twain said, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” And that is nowhere more true than in the world of religious belief.

Not to be too enamored of Latin phrases but this one hails from a poem that 

was published before Jesus was born, 

Virgil wrote in the Aeneid: “Haud Ignota Loquor” (Speak not of what is not known). Religious people tend to act like because it is religion that they can equate their interpretations of the meanings of ancient texts with factual truth. Or they will insist that because you cannot prove it to be not true that they get to insist that it is true as an article of faith. Look folks, to believe what is not known to be true is not a sign of faith, it is a sign of choosing to be kinda stupid. I could say that more politely, but I would like to be painfully clear. But as the great Dane said, you can be wrong by believing that which is not true and you can be wrong by refusing to believe what is true.

Yes, you have every right to believe whatever you want, you can believe in heaven and hell, angels and demons, you can believe that the Bible, the Quran, or the Upanishads are divinely inspired, but what reasondo you have to believe that? What evidence do you have other than childhood training and wishful thinking? If you have no reason, well, believe what you want, but do the rest of the world a huge favor and don’t talk about it.  “Haud Ignota Loquor” (Speak not of what is not known). 

But on the other hand, don’t fail to speak about what is known. I don’t even know the source for this list of facts we used as our wisdom lesson today but it is a list put together specifically for religious people who have tended to deny reality in favor of magical thinking: 

1.    Evolution is true. – Sure, we call it the “theory” of evolution but, folks, gravity is also a “theory,” and we don’t go around saying that gravity is “just” a theory. Species evolve. There is tons of evidence to support this fact and the only thing that militates against the evolution of the species is the dogged refusal of Fundamentalists to acknowledge reality. Evangelical Christianity has become what I like to call “Darwin’s waiting room.”

2.    The Bible isn’t inerrant – I am not going to spend a whole lot of time on this because I doubt that anyone in my audience needs much more evidence but from page one of Genesis, we see an account of the seven day creation of a flat earth that is covered by a solid, hence the name “firmament,” bowl that has windows in it that are opened by angels to allow the water above the firmament to fall on the earth in the form of rain. Religious scriptures do contain many laudable teachings that are often, though not always, valuable for moral instruction but not one person who set pen to paper to write the Bible, the Quran, or any Buddhist or Hindu scripture had the slightest idea where the sun goes at night. So, if you are a senator from Oklahoma, Mr. Inhofe, who does not believe that climate change is real because of something you have read in the Bible, then you just need to claim your seat in Darwin’s Waiting Room and shut up. 

3.    Women have the same rights as men - 

4.    Homosexuality isn’t a sin. - This statement isn’t as inclusive as it needs to be. There are differences between men and women. You might be able to at least historically describe differences by trends between Jews and Arabs, whites and blacks, Asians and Canadians, but ultimately, when you are talking about human rights, giving one set of rights to one race or gender is indefensible. Gay people tend to have more esthetic and artistic awareness, Asians tend to be better at math and science, white people seem to be superior in the invention of torture devices and military hardware, but these are tendencies and not indications of inherent worth. That is, you would need to produce evidence for the reason you would deny anyone equal human rights and, on that front, the jury is in: there is no rational defense for such prejudice.

5.   Owning a gun isn’t a God-given right –

Indefensibly lax gun laws have made it unsafe to go to a movie theater, a shopping mall, to high school, to elementary school, to a country music concert, to church, to a synagogue, to a yoga studio, to a college bar. Our president, who demonstrably is a total idiot and not competent to speak on any substantive issue, announced that the Synagogue in Pittsburg should have had an armed guard at the door. Well, there was an armed guard at the college bar in Thousand Oaks and he was the first person shot and killed Wednesday night when, yet another crazed gunman arbitrarily killed a dozen people. 

Other developed nations simply do not have this problem. Most developed nations have gun deaths in numbers that you can count on your fingers. The United States has over 30,000 a year. We’ve had more than 300 mass shootings this year. This is out of control and yet other nations have managed to avoid this carnage through sane, reasonable gun laws. 68% of Americans want more strict gun laws and we live in a democracy. 68% of us should be able to do what is done in Japan, France, England, Australia, Germany, and Denmark but our democracy is threatened by an oligarchy of monied interests that do not care how many tens of thousands of people are killed, from elementary school children to adults attending a Bible study. 

I get the fact that most guns will never be used in any criminal manner and that many people feel more secure when they have a gun, and many others love to hunt, and some have treasured family heirlooms that they will not willingly give up. However, in the face of 30,000 annual deaths each year, how you feel, what you like, what you prefer is not a secondary or a tertiary concern, it is an irrational denial of facts. I don’t care what you like or what you feel, you don’t get to threaten the security of worshippers, students, movie goers, and shoppers. You need to just grow up and accept the tiny size of your boy-parts and your low IQ and just deal with it. You don’t get to own weapons designed for mass killings. 

6.   America isn’t God’s chosen country.

7.   Neither Republicans nor Democrats are God’s chosen political party.

8.   The modern state of Israel isn’t God’s chosen people.

Look guys, saying that the Jews are God’s chosen people or that God blesses America in ways that are unique or different from the way God blesses Kazakhstan or Lithuania, is patently absurd. The Red Sox didn’t win the World Series because Catholic nuns in Boston area convents had placed wagers on them and spent their time in mass praying for them to win. God is not a person. People may prefer blue over red, or football over basketball, or Republicans over Democrats but God is not a “people.” Jews wrote a religious book that claimed that they were God’s favorite. Muslims wrote a book that claims that they are God’s favorite. Both were, pure and simple, exercises in nationalistic narcissism. There is no evidence for saying that there is a divine imprimatur on any nation, party, race, or government. 

As you have heard me say before, God doesn’t write books, and though I do not believe that God either wrote or inspired the Bible, I have read it and studied it for more years than I would care to admit and I assure you that no rational person could read it, take it even mildly seriously, and vote to build a wall along our southern border, take children from their parents, deny healthcare to the sick, security to the aged, or human rights to anyone. All of which makes me disinclined to take evangelicals and fundamentalists seriously as a religion. It all just looks like a cult designed to indoctrinate and defend prejudice and the sooner it goes away the better the whole world will be. That’s not just my opinion, that is factually demonstrable. 

9.    Decisions about abortion should be left up to individual women.

This is nowhere more clear than in the matter of religious views around abortion. Catholics and Evangelicals are reared to believe that a fetus in the womb is as valuable as one of the preschoolers that they very consistently demonstrate that they are willing to deny food, housing, healthcare, and education. That is to say, they assume that the welfare of children that are walking around on their own two feet are not their concern or their responsibility and all I’m saying is that a fetus in a woman’s womb is, in exactly the same way, none of their concern. 

Again, it is fine to have passionate feelings, even in the absence of evidence, about the decision to abort a pregnancy but if you have those passionate feelings and want to lower the abortion rate, you have no right to do it by taking away the rights of individual women. However, and here is the good news, just in case any of them are even the slightest bit sincere about it, we know how to cut the abortion rate in half almost immediately. We know because we have seen it happen.

During the dot-com economic bubble during the Clinton years, when jobs were plentiful, and salaries were rising, abortion went down by 50%. Women most often choose to terminate a pregnancy because they cannot afford to raise a child. When you raise the economic welfare of young women, the abortion rate goes down. It is a win-win-win program… alleviate poverty, reduce human suffering, and reduce the rate of abortion all at the same time. What religious person could oppose that? Other than Catholics and Evangelicals, I mean. 

10.No religion has any real information about either heaven or hell.

Finally, we come back to where we began. I know of no reason why anyone believes that there is a heaven or a hell. It seems like a bit of basic human narcissism to believe, without a shred of evidence, that the universe just can’t go on without any one of us. However, believe whatever you wish, just follow Virgil’s advice and don’t talk about things you can’t possibly know anything about. Don’t pass along magical thinking to your children and don’t engage in debates about matters either unknown or unknowable. 

It would be nice to think that religious images of heaven are true and that when this imperfect and pain riddled world is gone that there might be a blissful eternal existence for all of us, and our deceased pets, and maybe even for all of the fish, chickens, pigs, and cows we’ve eaten along the way…. Provided that they are willing to forgive us …. And, one some days, there would be a certain level of satisfaction in a schadenfreudesort of way, if there really was a hell because I can think of several people who kinda have it coming, and not all of them currently live or work in the White House. There is, however, no evidence for hell or karma or even divine intervention, so it is up to me to have a fully evolved faith in which I personally work, sacrifice, and teach peace, justice, equality, fairness, and mercy. 

I love the meme that proclaims that I will vote to prevent gun violence, and I will vote for transgender rights, and to protect Roe v Wade, and LGBTQ rights, for environmental concerns, civil rights, healthcare, and immigrant rights. 

But, folks, we will never vote justice and mercy into existence. Sure, voting is a part of it, but that is painfully close to offering your thoughts and prayers after a mass shooting. It is nice that compassion and empathy informs your opinions, but we need more than nice thoughts.

I will close with a favorite quote from the 19^thcentury evangelist, Alexander Campbell: To get on your knees and pray for anything that you will not then stand up and work for is an insult to God and a disappointment to yourself. 

Real religion takes place in the real world, not in the world of imagination and wishful thinking. Real faith is demonstrated by substantive action, personal sacrifice, and marrying your beliefs to your actual life. Evidence based faith does not dismiss the mysteries of the universe that might be true but it simply focuses, not on what is not or cannot be known, but on what is unavoidably true. 

The time for childish games is past. It is time for us to have a grown-up faith that makes a real difference.