“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.