Augustine, Scripture, and Science March 17, 2019 Dr. Roger Ray, pastor
(chapter 5 of Armstrong’s “Case for God”)
God had adapted revelation to the cultural norms of the people who had first received it. One of the Psalms, for example, clearly reflects the ancient view, long outmoded by Augustine’s time, that there was a body of water above the firmament that caused rainfall. It would be absurd, Augustine said, to interpret this literally. … whenever the literal meaning of scripture clashed with reliable scientific information, Augustine insisted, the interpreter must respect the integrity of science or he would bring scripture into disrepute.
Nicolina Newcombe is one of our longtime listeners and supporters. She lives in Hamilton, New Zealand. We talked on Friday after I learned of the shooting in two mosques in New Zealand that left 49 people immediately dead and nearly as many with serious wounds. She told me that the shooter, an Australian man who, because of strict gun laws in Australia, could not acquire and gun to carry out his evil plans near his home, so he flew over to neighboring New Zealand where gun laws are more relaxed because they have never had a mass shooting, on this scale, there and there is not much of a gun culture on the usually peaceful island nation. Nicolina told me that there had been a shooting planned at the mosque near her home in Hamilton but that the police had thwarted that plan. Her community gathered at the mosque in Hamilton last night for a shared memorial.
And, as any sane nation would after such a horrible event, Prime Minister Jacinda Arden vowed that their gun laws would be immediately amended to prevent another such attack. Something that Americans remain just too jaded to do.
We should, however, take note of how an elected official acts when they are not in the employ of the National Rifle Association and imagine a different America.
I’m glad that the American media has finally learned not to splash the name and picture of the shooter on the news, giving them, inevitably, the attention they crave. I’m glad that they didn’t publish his white supremacist manifesto because the reasons for his violent madness do not need to be repeated . . . that would be doing him a favor.
But the journalists let us have a little peek into his skull, enough to feel sick about it. We must never acquiesce to the unnatural and unprecedented fact that terrorists of this sort name Donald Trump as their inspiration, and even someone in Australia, celebrates America’s second amendment and the insane gun laws defended in its name. It is not normal for America to have a white nationalist president. It is not normal for racism to be defended from the oval office. It is not normal, and it must not be tolerated, and it absolutely must not be repeated.
There are myriad reasons for the frictions that have resulted in mass shootings in churches, synagogues, mosques, movie theaters, elementary schools, high schools, colleges, bars, and shopping centers. Immigration frightens some people. The diminishing majority of white people scares some. Drug use, alcoholism, a lack of education, a lack of proper mental health care, economic conditions. They are all factors which, in our own country, are exacerbated by insanely lax gun laws and a dangerously stupid, racist, president.
These past days my thoughts have been with Nicolina and the people of New Zealand, and the Muslim population there who immigrated to New Zealand to escape the violence in Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the oppression they have experienced in Iran and Saudi Arabia, only to, as Nicolina sadly observed, encounter unexpected violence in peace loving New Zealand.
As I said, there are lots of factors: race, economics, immigration, gun laws, and such, but the elephant in the room is the influence of religion and religious prejudice and that, men and women, is our turf. We may have influence on other factors, but where religion is a factor, we have responsibility to clean up our own house.
Individual soldiers in Iran and Saudi Arabia may be very invested in the subtle differences between the Sunni and the Shi’a but the real government engines that keep the conflict stirred up are concerned with money, power, and real estate. Note that Donald Trump wanted a ban on all Muslim immigration to the USA but his first trip abroad after becoming president was to go bow and kiss the rings of wealthy Saudi rulers.
He wants to build a wall to keep Latin Americans out of the USA but all of those people are Catholics and Pentecostals, very many are members of the Assembly of God. You would think that our local Assemblies leaders would screaming protests over this wall that is keeping their Christian sisters and brothers out of the USA . . . it sort-of makes you wonder why you have not heard a peep out of them . . . but cataloguing the hypocrisies of the Assemblies of God is way too time consuming and too emotionally exhausting for me to even get started on that project.
There are healthy ways of being religious and there are unhealthy ways of being religious. I am convinced that the two are polar opposites. Looked at critically, there are things about Judaism, Christianity, and Islam that are just as irrational and dangerously crazy as there is about Scientology and Mormonism but we all know people who are ardent members of Scientology or Mormonism who are good people who have managed to take the best of their religion and ignore most of the crazy stuff. Well, . . ., let me dial that back a bit . . . we all know Mormons who are good people who have managed to take the best of their religion and ignore most of the crazy stuff.
Faith that is based on inherited beliefs that are memorized by rote and institutionalized in creeds simply trains you to believe things that are absurd. And once you learn how to believe things that are obviously and clearly just not true, then you can be persuaded to do almost anything . . . to the point that we no longer even react to being lied to.
I don’t want to give Trump too much oxygen in this sermon, but I would just ask you to consider the two years we listened to him say that he was going to build a wall all across our southern borderandMexico was going to pay for it.
I strongly suspect that there were not a dozen people in America who believed that and yet, it is like being told that Moses divided the Red Sea, Jesus turned water into wine, and Muhammed rode a winged horse up to heaven. You don’t really believe it, but you know that you are supposed to believe it.
Last fall, just before the November election, when Trump was saying that he was going to get a middle-class tax cut passed in November, a few journalists challenged him, pointing out that Congress wasn’t in session and wouldn’t be until 2019 . . . there was no legislation, no talk of legislation, no possibility of legislation, and he would just say, “I’ll get it done,” which, of course, he did not, but then, no one believed it anyway.
I blame creedal religion for limbering up our society to just play along with lies. Religion should never teach people to believe in things that cannot be demonstrated to be true. We should all insist upon having an evidence-based faith.
Let me give you an example:
In the early 1990’s, when the Dalai Lama was first coming and speaking in the West, he was asked about gay rights and he very forcefully said that homosexuality was not in keeping with Buddhist tradition. That strong statement led to a much-publicized meeting he had with seven gay and lesbian people in Fremont Hotel in San Francisco. They talked with him about the medical and psychological research that supported the conviction that same sex relationships were normal, natural, and that they should not be the object of either religious or political discrimination.
After thoughtfully considering the evidence, the Dalai Lama changed his views on the matter, saying that if two people of the same sex came together by mutual consent in a loving relationship, there is no reason to be opposed to them.
Buddhism has centuries of tradition and fairly complicated teachings, but the Dalai Lama was able, through a reasonable consideration of the evidence, to do in a few hours what decades of Catholic popes and Evangelical churches have not been able to do. Faith is not a matter of forcing yourself to believe outrageous and obviously untrue things. There is no extra credit given for being dumb enough to believe lies.
And the truth of it is, the church was not always mired in this kind of creedal and Biblical literalism. Karen Armstrong is exhaustively clear in her book, A Case for God, that history has been littered with scholars, bishops, and philosophers who were not fooled by literalism in their religious faith.
No one had a bigger impact on scholarship prior to the modern era than Augustine of Hippo. The 4thcentury teacher insisted that even though the Bible clearly 
described the earth as being flat and covered by a solid bowl that separated the waters below from the waters above, that to take that literally would bring shame on the Christian faith since it obviously was not true. In the 4thcentury, Augustine knew that you had to interpret scripture in the light of science and not to make the church look stupid by denying science on the basis of revealed scripture. In the 4thcentury, Augustine was saying to the conservative evangelical crowd, “Come on guys, knock it off, you are embarrassing us.”
In the 5thcentury, no one less than the prophet Muhammed said that Jesus wasn’t really the incarnation of God because that whole idea is ridiculous. Jesus was a great religious teacher and prophet, but no human is God. Think about it. The claim doesn’t even make sense. It is poetic language at best and not great poetry.
I won’t bore you with a recitation of everyone who tried to make the world wake up to the difference between literally interpreting creedal religion and the poetic metaphor of trying to express our highest ideals in the crude container of language but over the years you have heard me quote major thinkers from Voltaire, to Thomas Paine, Soren Kierkegaard, Tillich, and Neihbur. We cut our teeth here when we started this church on books by Borg, Crossan, Armstrong, and Spong, all of whom have sold millions of books over the past few decades and yet, I am left to worry about the future of the progressive movement.
Even with all of this clear, rational, scholarly information available to people who have read the books, heard the lectures, watched the videos, but it seems like the evangelical world has a strangle hold on society that is so strong that people come down to this false dichotomy: that you either accept the whole of religion on its face as being literally true or you reject it and become an atheist.
Forgive me for quoting Woody Allen, who is, obviously, a sorry excuse for a human being, but he illustrates my point for me, so we’ll give him a moment of sunlight…. In a commencement speech he delivered years ago, he sardonically concluded by saying, “More than any other time in history, we face a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.”
The choice is not between being an atheist or a traditional evangelical. There is 500 years of great biblical, theological, and philosophical scholarship that represents the best and highest of human thought and it offers to us a rational, progressive way into a future that allows human dignity, community, sustainability, and profound scientific and technological progress to flourish.
Competing religious sectarianism is not the only cause of the mass murders we saw in mosques in New Zealand on Friday. But you cannot ignore the fact that religious fundamentalism, literalism, sectarianism, has fueled mass murders in churches, synagogues, and in mosques. It fuels racism. It emboldens xenophobia, misogyny and homophobia.
The choice for church goers is not literalism or atheism but I am willing to insist that staying the same and teaching people to believe myths and magic is not a valid choice. The ancient religions we have brought from the Middle East of long ago into the 21stcentury Western world all need to undergo a progressive reformation and they need to do it now.
To paraphrase St. Augustine of Hippo: It is time for religious people to stop being stupid.
