“A Preference for Facts”

“A Preference for Facts”         January 26, 2020          Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

click here to see the video

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”  Philip K. Dick, writer

When western civilization was emerging in ancient Greece, philosophy and math were not seen as being separate fields. Pythagoras, is someone you will read about in both introductory college philosophy classes and in geometry

Because both are foundational to the study of logic.

So, even in philosophy classes you will see some equations that look rather like algebra.  This might be a good time for me to implore our internet audience to stick with me. You good folks here in the sanctuary are basically trapped, mostly by tradition and good up bringing but it is easier to tune me out on YouTube.

The translation of this equation is “if p then q, and if q then r, therefore, if p then r. A common teaching application of this syllogism is this: the claim that all men are mortal, and Socrates is a man, therefore, Socrates is mortal. 

An aspect of logic that is applied not only in mathematics but becomes crucial to research in all fields of science, is the whole realm of trying to figure out probability.

We all know that when you flip a coin you have a 50-50 chance that it will come up as either heads or tails. However, if you flip a coin 10 times, it will probably come close to being five heads and five tails, but it won’t always be exactly that. But here is the tricky part of logic. If you flip a coin nine times, and all nine times it comes up heads, what are the chances that it will come up heads again on the 10^th time? Has the probability gone down to 10% since there have been nine heads in a row? Or 1%?

The fact is that the probability for any coin toss is 50-50 even if the previous 999 tosses had all somehow come up as heads because, men and women, coins have no memory. It may very well “feel” like it should be improbable for it to come up heads a tenth time but, and here is the point, philosophy, math, science, reality, doesn’t care what you feel. And the corollary of that is that theology doesn’t care what you believe. 

The reliability of any logic syllogism is, of course, rooted, in the reliability of the original assumptions. Therein lies the problem of conflict between the world’s religions . . . Christians have tended to believe that in some manner, God wrote the Bible. Muslims have tended to believe that in some manner, God wrote the Quran. If you start with that premise, then you are obviously going to come down to some pretty seriously different conclusions. Of course, if anyone believes that God wrote either one of those books and then you actually read those books seriously, you will likely conclude that God is quite schizophrenic. 

But once you give up on the notion that God writes books, especially particularly self-contradicting, confusing, and largely false books, then you are left with the problem of determining what to believe. Not just the question, “What is true?” but the more nuanced, “What is probably true?” Or, “How likely is it to be true?”

You will have heard either a lawyer or a philosophy professor citing the rule of logic that affirms that you cannot prove a negative. For example:

I might tell you that angels do not exist. In fact, I will tell you that: Angels do not exist. And a traditional person of faith might counter, as they often have, “You don’t know that, you can’t prove that they don’t exist.” Which is true. Unless I have seen everything that exists in all of the universe or multi-verses of speculative existence, if I have not searched every corner of existence, I cannot prove that angels don’t exist. 

However, by that logic, I could claim that unicorns are real. And none of you can prove that they don’t exist for exactly the same reason that I can’t prove that angels don’t exist. So what is reality? Is it just what we like to think?

If reality is based on my likes and dislikes, my personal beliefs and preferences, then angels can be real, and unicorns, elves, dragons, and even King Kong. For that matter there could be a mythically perfect wife or husband, or a perfect presidential candidate . . . all of which are matters of fable and myth.

Granting that it is impossible to prove a negative, then we must apply a slightly different principle to discerning, not what might be possible but what is probably true. And for that, we have our old friend, Carl Sagan for saying it very simply. “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” It could be true, for example, as some have claimed, that vaccinations cause autism or that wind turbines cause cancer.

However, there is no evidence that links vaccinations to autism and there is lots of evidence that vaccines prevent polio, measles, mumps, and rubella, along with a host of other dangerous childhood diseases. And we know that wind turbines don’t cause cancer because Trump says that they do, and we have a high probability that he is wrong about this because he is typically wrong about everything that he says. That last one is actually what is called an ad hominem fallacy in logic, but I still like saying it . . . and wind turbines don’t cause cancer.

So, the more extraordinary a claim is, the more proof we should reasonably demand for believing it. It may seem impossible that a huge aircraft made of steel and filled with people, fuel, and luggage can actually fly through the air but we have seen it, most of us have been in them, we have studied the physics of air displacement and I have even taken the training to become a pilot and have flown light aircraft across the country. 

It is an extraordinary thing to claim, and yet, in the miracle of modern flight, the evidence is in and none of us have reason to doubt it. We might very well doubt it if just one or two people claimed to have seen it or ridden in one, but we have compelling firsthand evidence. 

So, when it comes to religious beliefs, how do we approach this matter of probability and evidence? It is a vexing problem because, for the most part, the practice of religion is an invitation to assassinate your brains and believe a pre-formed set of beliefs . . . you can be a Jew or a Christian, a Buddhist or a Hindu or a Muslim, and in each instance you can break that down in many ways . . . Christians can be Catholic, Protestant, or Orthodox . . . Protestants can be Baptists, Lutherans, Pentecostals, or about a thousand variations all of the way out to the more bizarre beliefs of Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Christian Scientists. 

But what if you don’t want to just accept anyone’s pre-formed package of beliefs? What if you only want to believe what has a high probability of being true? And while there is not an “ap for that” there is a formula that is remarkably helpful.

In the early 18^th century there was actually and organization in London, the Fellows of the Royal Society, who discussed matters of philosophy and science, trying to enlarge the body of possible knowledge. A member of the Royal Society, one Thomas Bayes, a Presbyterian minister who was educated in both logic and theology, proposed what we now call Bayes theorem which attempts to put beliefs about probability into a mathematical formula, about which entire courses are taught in grad school . . . so, yes, it is both beautiful and terribly complex and yet it fits neatly onto a t-shirt, thank you Dr. Jimenez. This formula is used in all manner of scientific research but when we bring it into the realm of theology, we have to assign numerical values to the evidence that we have to support any particular religious assertion of truth. 

I fear that if I wander any deeper into the weeds here that I not only might lose my entire audience but I might become hopelessly lost myself and never find my way home, so let me sum it up this way: the probability that any belief (A) is true, is predicated on the strength of the objective evidence that can be known (B) such that the strength of our conviction about anything should be weighed strictly on the degree of evidence that we have to support the belief. 

Churches have often applauded those who have belief without evidence, in fact, there are passages of scripture that go directly to that point, “blessed are those who believe who have not seen.” I have to object. Believing without seeing leaves one on thin ice, logically, with a sketchy relationship to reality. 

The evidence for the existence of heaven or hell is based on belief with no evidence. There are those who claim to have seen angels but there are those who have claimed to have seen unicorns, the Loch Ness monster, and who claim to have endured a rectal prob on an alien spaceship, but they never have any corroborating evidence. Thousands of people have similarly described near death visions, most of which can be medically explained through oxygen deprivation to the brain coupled with an extremely active imagination and a desperate need for attention. 

The late science fiction writer, Philip Dick, provided our wisdom lesson today. He made his living writing fiction but he was very clear eyed about what is real and what is not. He said: “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”  Where now is the first church of Odin? Of Zeus? We decorate our homes with art work and images that reflect ancient Greek religions but we do not venerate those images because the beliefs once associated with them have evaporated. 

Reality, however, doesn’t need a religion to maintain it. The odd thing to me, however, is how religious people will look at facts and just say, “I don’t believe that,” as if reality was determined by whim or personal preference. Try balancing your check book that way and see if your bank is willing to bend through various beliefs about what your checking balance is.

What I am clearly rejecting is the unsubstantiated, if not magical or superstitious aspects of traditional religion but I am still here . . . I’m still a pastor because there are fact based aspects of what it means to be religious that are not only worth living for but, under the right circumstances, are worth dying for.

Where most religious people can find agreement is in the claim that real faith, whether it is Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Judaism, or Buddhism, is about love and compassion. We can’t reasonably debate the existence of souls, or an afterlife, or angels or demons, but if we are invested in love and compassion, here is what I do know:

About 1 in 5 children in the richest country in the world is growing up in poverty.

There are more than a half a million Americans who are homeless, and about a thousand of those people live within five miles of this church. We have about 50,000 suicides every year in America now and what we know about them is that almost all of those people died because they didn’t feel sufficiently connected to anyone to want to live. All of these churches and all this religion of love, and tens of thousands of people feel so unloved that they take their own lives.  We have about 60,000 deaths from drug over-doses and I’m not sure how many of them would have happened if they felt sufficiently connected to anyone in a loving relationship.

I’m not wanting to blame family members and friends for suicides and over-doses, I’m just saying, for a country that has so much religion based on love, it doesn’t look like there is enough loving going on. Which is why I keep saying that we need to get our spiritual heads out of the clouds . . . we need to stop with the magical thinking and the superstitious stuff that has eaten up so much of our energy, attention, time, and resources, and get seriously invested in what we can demonstrate to be true, real, important and necessary. 

In the past few years we have heard a lot about fake news. And, honestly, there is a lot of what passes for news that is clearly not true or is so spun up into propaganda as to be beneath our dignity. Typically, the way that propaganda works is to tell a lie over and over until, in its repetition, most people will believe that it is true. 

Trump keeps saying that the Russia investigation is all fake, even though 34 people and 3 companies have already been either convicted, indicted, or have pled guilty.

That’s just my opinion but, it if my calculations are correct here, I’m probably right. 

“The Price of Defending Whiteness”

“The Price of Defending Whiteness”        January 19, 2020   Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

CLICK HERE TO SEE THE VIDEO

Dying of Whiteness by Johnathan Metzl, pp. 3-4

"Ain't no way I would ever support Obamacare or sign up for it," (Trevor) told me. "I would rather die." When I asked him why he felt this way even as he faced severe illness, he explained, "We don't need any more government in our lives. And in any case, no way I want my tax dollars paying for Mexicans or welfare queens." 

. . . I could not help but think that Trevor's deteriorating condition resulted . . . from the toxic effects of dogma. . . . Dogma that, as he made abundantly clear, aligned with beliefs about a racial hierarchy that overtly and implicitly aimed to keep white Americans hovering above Mexicans, welfare queens, and other nonwhite others.

            

 It seems like a lifetime ago, but over the Christmas school break in 1988, my then wife and I went to visit our parents to give them some important news. We went first to Memphis to tell my in-laws that we were adopting a little girl from Korea.    

     Of course, I knew that they were racists . . . you couldn’t spend five minutes with them and not be painfully aware of that, but nothing had prepared me for the ferocity of their reaction to the news that we were going to make them grandparents to an Asian baby. I will not repeat here the racist screed that we were treated to that day but catch me alone and buy me a beer and I’ll recount the whole sordid tale.

So, when we then drove to Kentucky to tell my racist parents what we were going to do, I was better prepared to set the stage. I told them, “We are going to tell you some really good news, the best news of our lives, but before we tell you, I need for you to understand that I am going to remember what you say for the rest of my life and if you say the wrong thing, it may be something that can never be fixed.”

After I had given them the news, my father wisely just left the room to keep from

Saying the wrong thing. My mother teared up but managed to ask some basic questions about when we would get her, and what we knew about her birth parents.

When they met her, they tried to put a good face on it. My mother needle pointed a quilt for her baby bed that featured a little girl with curly blond hair, and when some weeks had past, my father hazarded the speculation, “I think there’s a lot of white in her.”

Both my parents and my in-laws were rural Southern hillbillies. To the best of my knowledge, none of them had ever known an Asian. My dad and my father-in-law had served in the military, but once the war was over, neither had ventured outside of the USA and almost never ventured outside of Kentucky and Tennessee. Why was my daughter’s race such a painful issue to them? 

She is smart, beautiful, personable, educated, successful, world traveled, and she has a ton of close friends . . . in short, not only everything that they were not, but also exactly the kind of daughter everyone hopes they will have. Which, in the end, is probably what our families feared 31 years ago. 

What I am only lately beginning to realize is that the root of racism is not so much a fear and loathing of races that are perceived as being somehow “other,” but it is actually a fear of the loss of status and privilege, the loss of a sense of superiority that comes from being white. 

I have lately been reading this book, Dying of Whiteness. It is written by a Kansas City native, Jonathan Metzl, who is now a professor of sociology and psychiatry at Vanderbilt. Being from Missouri and living now in Tennessee, he has examined the paradoxical problem of why the most ferocious white racists are almost always the people who have the least about which to feel superior to anyone. 

I don’t want to go too far down the rabbit hole here, but what has this guy so worried about racial purity? I’m not saying that there clearly wasn’t a lifeguard on duty at his gene pool, but here is the irony of the lingering racism in America . . . a hundred and fifty years after the end of slavery, fifty years after the integration of public schools, neighborhoods, and workplaces, and more than a decade after electing the first black president of the United States, how is race still a thing?

In the most recently released Star Wars movie, this Disney film proudly featured a very passionate lesbian kiss in a film that was made primarily for children . . . well, children and me. I say “proudly,” but they did cut that scene out of foreign releases of the film because, you know, Americans are so much more sophisticated than foreign audiences . . . honestly, you can’t make this stuff up. 

But why, if we are ready for this in a children’s movie do most of our neighbors here in Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Kansas, Arkansas, still flinch

when they see this? Metzl writes what, now that I have seen it in writing, should have been obvious to us all along. For those who have little else to claim as a reason to not feel inferior to the world, simply being white becomes a precious possession that many white southerners are loath to have threatened. 

I say “southerners” but it should be noted that some of the worst of race riots and racist holdout communities have been in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Massachusetts, and some of the current white supremacist activity is in Washington and Oregon, but, you know, when you hear hoof beats, you think “horses” and not “zebras.” Metzl didn’t have to travel outside of Missouri, Kansas, and Tennessee to find plenty of subjects to interview for his book. 

A hundred years ago, the first black man to earn a doctorate at Harvard, W.E.B. Du Bois, wrote:  It must be remembered that the white group of laborers, while they received a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage. They were given public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white. They were admitted freely with all classes of white people to public functions, public parks, and the best schools. The police were drawn from their ranks, and the courts, dependent on their votes, treated them with such leniency as to encourage lawlessness. 

Their vote selected public officials, and while this had small effect upon the economic situation, it had great effect upon their personal treatment and the deference shown them. White schoolhouses were the best in the community, and conspicuously placed, and they cost anywhere from twice to ten times as much per capita as the colored schools. The newspapers specialized on news that flattered the poor whites and almost utterly ignored the Negro except in crime and ridicule. (Black Reconstruction [1935], 700-701)"

Du Bois was describing the ipso facto inheritance of every white person in America. No matter how poor you may be, your kids went to the white school. And When Metz writes about Missouri, he talks about how we have made our conceal and carry, and our open carry laws regarding guns so lax that it is not uncommon to see people carrying guns in the grocery store or at Walmart but even still, when a white man does that, most people don’t react at all, but when a black man does it, someone usually calls the police. 

But the difference is that when Du Bois made these observations, he was just describing the way it was in America. But that is what made school integration such a violent and painful transformation during the Civil Rights movement . . . white people realized that they were losing their status. . . the social dividing line that made their trailer park better than the tenements in black neighborhoods was that the school bus for the white school stopped at the trailer park and not in the black neighborhood. 

But when official segregation ended in the schools and the workplace, it unofficially continued in neighborhoods and, to our shame, in our churches. As Martin Luther King, Jr. famously observed, the most segregated hour in America is 11 a.m. on Sunday morning. 

You can legislate things like removing barriers to integration in property titles, in school districts, and in employment . . . but where we want integration to happen is in our hearts and that is why bringing a little brown baby into my white family in 1989 was such an affront to our families in Kentucky and Tennessee. We broke the unspoken rule of white segregation in our families. 

Adoption is a bit of a spin of the wheel of fortune. I was at the airport in Memphis, Tennessee when Valerie arrived with several other babies from Korea. They were not all beautiful, and smart, and some of them have had some serious issues in their young adult lives. In many ways, I won the lottery that day in May in the Memphis Airport. 

The horror of racism looks so absurd because she is so beautiful, so smart, and such a nice person but that doesn’t really get at the point. Had she been unattractive, below average in intelligence, and if she had struggled with addiction or unemployment, or any of the horrible things her maternal grandmother predicted . . . I guess I’m still pretty frosted about that . . . then racism is still wrong.

The presumption of superiority based on race, skin color, nation of origin, heritage, religion, or culture, is just obviously wrong without consideration of relative beauty or grade point average. Metzl titles his book, Dying of Whiteness, because people are literally dying from their desperate hold on some sense of privilege based on skin color. 

The interviews in his book, just like the one we excerpted for our wisdom lesson today, shows how much the resistance to Obamacare and the expansion of Medicare was rooted in the fear that poor white people had that blacks, Hispanics, and immigrants were going to get healthcare at public expense. Many of these people also needed ACA insurance or Medicare, but they chose to die from their illnesses, literally as a personal sacrifice, in order to defend the false sense of superiority of their race. 

Missouri refused to expand Medicare and because of that, about 60,000 people die prematurely and unnecessarily in Missouri every year due to lack of healthcare, the overwhelming majority of whom, are white. 

This graph will be difficult for you to read from your seats but it shows how gun deaths in Missouri have shot up over the national average in the years where we voted initially to have conceal and carry laws and then to liberalize open carry laws. 

As Metzl points out, a lot of this passion about gun ownership is motivated by racial fear. But while these statistics are making people call Missouri the “shoot me state” the real climb in the numbers of gun deaths are not inter-racial conflicts or even domestic conflicts. The rise in numbers come from suicides and the rise in suicides is directly related to the number and easy availability of the guns. White fear, racial anxiety, makes them buy the guns and despair about illness, poverty, loneliness, is it too much to say, “loss of status,” causes them to turn the guns on themselves. 

These are not black people committing suicide. These are white men, literally dying of whiteness. Here are the numbers:

 We are decent people here. We have compassion for everyone who commits suicide but look at this race and gender break out. The least likely person to commit suicide in Missouri is a black woman and the most likely, by far, and the distance between them all is growing rapidly, is white guys. And they mostly die from self-inflicted gunshot wounds. 

This is not a metaphor. This isn’t symbolism. As Metzl says, “the politics of racial resentment is killing America’s heartland.” . . . Literally!

A few months ago, when I was outlining this sermon for our musicians, I made the observation that we have institutionalized racism in the current White House administration in the person of an advisor, Stephen Miller. This guy:

We believe that this same guy who produced racist content for Britebart news is also the genius behind Trump’s “Muslim ban” and his harsh border immigration policies, including the child separation policy.

I am way too mature to pull a sight gag on Sunday morning but, seriously, does this not look like photos from a Kentucky family reunion? I may have even been at that one.

But what I said in my notes to the musicians was that I was not sure that Stephen Miller would still be in the administration when this sermon rolled around in January because, after all of those emails came to light that made it so obvious what a white nationalist that he is, surely he would be removed from office by now. Tic toc, Mr. Trump, tic toc. How long does it take for you to remove someone who is so obviously unfit for office? Don’t answer that . . . I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t understand the question. The more important question is for my white peers . . . how much longer will we tolerate this? How long will we pay a crazy price to defend white privilege?

I have spent most of my life now in an inter-racial family. What I can tell you existentially is that after the first month or two, you not only forget that you are a family by virtue of adoption, you forget that you are different races until someone else brings it up. 

In one of those moments of reconciling honesty after my daughter was grown, she showed me the fake ID she used when she was in college to get into clubs where she had no business being. At the age of 19, my daughter was using an expired driver’s license of a 35-year-old Chinese woman who, I may say, looked nothing like my daughter. I asked, “This actually worked?” And she replied using the only racist thing I have ever heard her say, “Dad, you know white people are stupid.” 

I can say that I don’t typically feel very stupid, but when I read this book, I realize that white people sure can be stupid and more than that, they are being stupid in a way that is killing them . . . not really them . . . us. White people, my people, my cousins, stop being racists . . . it is killing you. And, my cousins, I know that you want to insist that voting for a racist doesn’t mean that you are a racist and I know that you would really like for that to be true. So what have you done to get Stephen Miller out of the administration? Or, is it true that voting for a racist means that you actually are a racist? 

Here is the hard news. You aren’t that special. And while there may be some really fine aspects about you being who you are, it has nothing to do with skin color so you can just give that up right now. 

In honor of Dr. King, I’ll let him have the last word today:

We really must learn to live together as brothers or we will surely perish together as fools.

“The Macro View of Economics and Time”

“The Macro View of Economics and Time”    Jan. 12, 2020   Dr. Roger Ray  

Click here to see the video

George Monbiot writing in the Guardian    Nov 14, 2016     

The events that led to Donald Trump’s election started in England in 1975. At a meeting a few months after Margaret Thatcher became leader of the Conservative party, one of her colleagues, or so the story goes, was explaining what he saw as the core beliefs of conservatism. She snapped open her handbag, pulled out a dog-eared book, and slammed it on the table. “This is what we believe,” she said. A political revolution that would sweep the world had begun.

The book was The Constitution of Liberty by Frederick Hayek. Its publication, in 1960, marked the transition from an honest, if extreme, philosophy to an outright racket. The philosophy was called neoliberalism. It saw competition as the defining characteristic of human relations. The market would discover a natural hierarchy of winners and losers, creating a more efficient system than could ever be devised through planning or by design. Anything that impeded this process, such as significant tax, regulation, trade union activity or state provision, was counter-productive. Unrestricted entrepreneurs would create the wealth that would trickle down to everyone.

By way of a “save the date” notice, I am pleased to tell you that our guest speaker for our annual conference on the first weekend of August, August 1 and 2, of 2020, will be the producer of my favorite news podcast, The Best of the Left, Jay Thomlinson. Our conference will be about the future of the news media as we see print media rapidly going extinct and the explosion of cable news and internet based sources from podcasts and YouTube are growing in influence… some of which is good, and some of which is very very bad.

I consume a lot of news. Being well informed is crucial to my job, and so I pay attention to TV, radio, print, and internet news sources to the tune of several hours a day but the most useful of my news sources is this podcast that Jay and Amanda put together twice a week because, while most of my media diet is concerned with what has happened in the past 24 hours, Jay and Amanda will produce Best of the Left episodes that pull the camera lens back to take a wide angle view of an issue. You can learn a lot about the world by drilling down into the microscopic details but you can’t really grasp the flow of history by only thinking about this past week or the last day. I really appreciated an episode Jay and Amanda produced in November of last year that looked at the rise and fall of periods of economic history between the Civil War and our current election cycle. 

Because of the way most of us are fed the news, we tend to see the political battle lines as a constant, a struggle between liberals who want a more compassionate economy that provides services for the poor and the general population, vs a more conservative view which fuels the creation of wealth through industry and investment. 

But the truth is that there are economic eras. The line between what is a moderate view and what is a radical view slowly moves through the years. If I can ask you to consider the span of time from the end of the Civil War until the present. At the end of our nation’s practice of slavery, when the whole economy of labor and production was going to have to be recreated, there was a promise made to freed slaves that they would be allowed to claim a portion of the land where they had worked, not to exceed 40 acres, and to take a mule with which to work the land. This would have given black families a fair start in the American economy.

The assassination of Abraham Lincoln, and the subsequent inauguration of Andrew Johnson brought that plan to a halt. Johnson was a southern racist who was determined to keep black people in an inferior, secondary role in America and though the extremes of his racism resulted in him being the first American president to be impeached, he remained in office just long enough to reverse much of the progress that had been won on the battle fields of the Civil War.

Slaves who had built this nation’s churches, government buildings, and agriculture were freed but left penniless, inheriting a destiny marked by poverty and violence that lasted for more than a century and the shadow of that time continues today. I am not going to talk about reparations today but if you consider the value of 40 acres and a mule, compounded by 160 years of accumulated interest, you see what the rational price tag of reparations would be. 

The industrial revolution that followed the Civil War created a lot of wealth, but it went to the owners of the industries while most Americans remained locked into poverty, especially the decedents of freed slaves. So, the “Great Depression” saw the crash of an old economic era of exploitation and deprivation. With the nation economically on its knees, we saw a new era ushered in with President Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal” which was furthered by war time spending in WWII. It was wartime demand that created a manufacturing base in urban areas which  allowed for the emergence of  stronger middle class that largely included communities of color. 

It was the rise of a black middle class, with its related increase in access to education, that fueled the Civil Rights movement, giving it educated and articulate leadership that changed the world. So, from the Civil War to the Great Depression was one economic era, then from FDR’s New Deal through the Johnson “Great Society” measures of the early 70’s was another economic era. 

It ended with two large events: the massive inflation during the Carter years and the election of Ronald Regan. The Regan Revolution brought in an era that cut taxes on the wealthy and services to the poor under a neo-liberal Keynesian economic system that rolled back regulations and began a world changing transfer of wealth from the poor and the middle class to the top of the economic pile . . . a trend that has now continued for two generations. 

All of you here can likely remember that families in the 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s often had only one bread winner and they were able to own a home and live a middle-class lifestyle. Neither of my parents had a college education and while we did not live as well as my cousins whose parents were professionals, we lived in a 4 bedroom, two bath, home in the suburbs and my dad retired at the age of 62. That was normal during the progressive tax structure in the decades following the New Deal. Since the Regan tax era, that life has disappeared and now it takes two incomes, home ownership is often a dream and retirement just about doesn’t exist.

We have reason to believe that this current economic era is dying and has been dying for a decade or more. The last throes of their death rattle is evident in the fact that this draconian world view is no longer shared by the majority of American voters. Conservative, neo-liberals have only been able to maintain elected seats in the past few years by appealing to prejudice, blowing dog whistles of racism, homophobia, xenophobia, and by ginning up fear of terrorists and immigrants. 

That coupled with seeking assistance from foreign totalitarian governments such as Russia and Saudi Arabia, while suppressing votes among the poor by Gerrymandering, removing people from the voting rolls, and making it increasingly difficult for the poor to vote. In short, Republicans have only held the White House or majorities in the legislature over the past generation by cheating. . . which would be a horrible thing for me to say in a pulpit were it not so obviously true. 

What it means to be a conservative, and what it means to be a progressive or a liberal, changes with time, as the political pendulum swings back and forth. Those of you who have studied Political Science will remember the concept of the Overton Window:  What it means to be a moderate is to be in the middle of where ever that window is in any particular time but the window is always moving, albeit slowly.

Consider this, I was born in 1956, a dozen years after the flourishing of the post-war manufacturing boom. In that year, Republican President, Dwight Eisenhower was running for re-election. This was his campaign platform:

I don’t want to take the time to read this word for word, but look at Eisenhower’s political priorities . . . as a former military general and Republican president:  worker safety, employment protections for the handicapped and elderly, unemployment insurance, pension protections, equal pay for men and women, extending minimum wage laws, fighting employment discrimination against race, gender, or immigration status, and vigorous protections of labor unions.

In 1956, Dwight Eisenhour was more progressive as a Republican than Bernie Sanders is today as a Democratic Socialist. You see how the Overton Window moves to the left and the right through various economic eras.

We see it playing out in this year’s presidential primary season. Just four years ago, the ideas that got Sanders labeled as being crazy: tuition free higher education, universal healthcare, taxing the rich, and guaranteeing a living wage, are all now mainstream ideas. They were considered to be fringe ideas just four years ago and now the same issues have gone mainstream and seem to be imperative. 

Four years ago, the Democratic Party was still locked into Regan era economic beliefs and could hardly imagine anything else as being electable . . . and maybe they were right, to a certain degree . . . I’m just saying that times have changed. 

As religious people, we have always been concerned about social and economic justice. We have always been advocates for the poor and we have done what we could to provide direct aid. We started this church 12 years ago and before we paid a dime in salaries or so much as bought a hymnal, our first project was to build a $50,000 playground for the kids who lived in a homeless shelter. Every single week and month of our existence, we have tried to raise necessary supplies for the local homeless. We have served tens of thousands of meals and distributed untold numbers of coats, sleeping bags, hats and gloves.

But folks, we always knew that this is not a solution to poverty. These efforts were always symbolic . . . momentarily meaningful to hundreds of people . . . but this is not a solution to poverty. We don’t need to raise 500 tents and a thousand sleeping bags for Springfield’s homeless. We need to change the economic system that keeps creating poverty. 

All of our years of making hamburgers and cakes, all of our efforts at feeding the hungry and getting helpful resources for the homeless was not a solution . . . no, these were exercises to foster compassion in us as much as it was to put a short term band aid on hunger and homelessness. We practiced compassion to make it part of who we are, a part of our faith, our religion, and now we come to a time when we will accept nothing less of our society, our government, our economy. 

I realize that if you just watch the news over the past few months as environmental protections have been rolled back on air and water pollution, protections for endangered species, and fuel efficiency standards, and if you just look at the micro movements of a seriously evil administration, you can feel like we have lost the moral battle for the soul of America. And I know that you may find it hard to believe me on this point, but when I step back and look at the arc of my own lifetime, the change from the era of the New Deal, to the Regan era of economic cannibalism, I see these draconian steps that Trump is taking as the last gasps of a dying empire built on Keynesian economics and a savage lack of compassion. 

There are those, especially the talking heads on network news channels and the billionaires who pay them millions of dollars to keep spewing propaganda at the voting public, who keep saying that the only way to beat Trump is to run a candidate against him who is almost like him in terms of economic policy, but who has more class and who doesn’t Tweet as much. They warn constantly that the left is in danger of wanting to go too far.

I will defer to the political insight of the smartest man alive in the world today, Noam Chomsky, who has lately said: I find it psychologically impossible to discuss the 2020 election without emphasizing, as strongly as possible, what is at stake: survival, nothing less.  Four more years of Trump may spell the end of much of life on Earth, including organized human society in any recognizable form. Strong words, but not strong enough. . . he added, The Democratic Party, in its apparent determination to kill the left wing, may very well end up ensuring a Trump electoral victory for a second time.

https://truthout.org/articles/noam-chomsky-democratic-party-centrism-risks-handing-election-to-trump/?utm_source=sharebuttons&utm_medium=facebook&utm_campaign=mashshare&fbclid=IwAR0wk4zlB8K3IQYd7HEMaNZgGFCWqGB3E-O3noVhwrmM34JijgvZCZl1VwQ

If you will indulge me a moment to wade into the weeds once more for just a moment. Economics is a kind of theology that requires more faith than most of what you would read in the Bible. But Keynesian economics is being replaced by the Modern Monetary Theory. That is, while the money supply is, in as much as it is based on available wealth, not unlimited. But it is limited only by full capacity production.

As long as we have idle manufacturing plants and unemployed people, we have not reached the maximum of wealth creation. We have more empty houses in America than we have homeless people . . . we don’t have a limit of wealth, we have a limit of compassion . . . and that is why churches exist. 

We have the resources, in terms of farmland, clay, sand, stone, cement, and labor, for everyone to eat well, be housed, educated and be medically taken care of. What we lack is sufficient political leadership and moral courage to do it. What I am trying to tell you today, in between the Overton Window,  Keynesian economics and Modern Monetary Theory, is that it is time for the economic era to turn the page of the calendar. I’m saying that the evil corruption of cannibalistic capitalism can go no further. It cannot be allowed to eat another generation. 

In the years after the Great War, J. R. R. Tolkien wrote his “Ring Trilogy,” a classic work of fiction, which, like all great fictions, symbolically told the story of the epic battle between good and evil. And as a great work of fiction telling that story, it is full of symbolism and inspiration. 

The good people of Middle Earth were threatened by the rising power of a Dark Lord who had to be stopped. The fellowship of Hobbits, a dwarf, and elf, a wizard, and a couple of brave men, set out on a treacherous journey to keep the Dark Lord from acquiring the power he needed to bring Middle Earth to an end.

In a desperate move, the fellowship took to an underground passage that took them through the deserted mines of Moria. There they came face to face with a fiery  demon of ancient days. The wizard Gandalf explained that the dwarves, in their greed, had gouged the earth too deeply, awakening an evil they could not survive.

Well, that doesn’t take a lot of excruciating interpretation does it? This economic era of capitalist cannibalism has eroded the middle class, increased the suffering of the poor, and even turned to spoil our lakes, rivers, our air, and our land, in a fairy tale of continuous economic exploitation. 

Those of us who have lived for three generations and more . . . we know how morally bankrupt this economic system is. And we know that it cannot go on any longer. 

In Tolkien’s masterful tale, the seemingly fragile old wizard makes a heroic and self-sacrificing stand on the last bridge leading out of Moria, and there he tells the Balrog that he shall not pass. 

Yes, we too face a demon resurrected from the days of the Civil War, a demon based on greed, racism, violence, war profiteering, and spoiling of the earth. And
Gandalf gives us our line . . . this year, this cycle, as this economic era comes to an end, we say to that demon, “You shall not pass.”

“The Emerging Church (from the ashes of the old church)”

“The Emerging Church (from the ashes of the old church)”   Jan. 5, 2020   Dr. Ray

click here to see the video

Bishop Oscar A. Romero

 “A church that does not provoke any crisis, preach a gospel that does not unsettle, proclaim a word of God that does not get under anyone's skin or a word of God that does not touch the real sin of the society in which it is being proclaimed: what kind of gospel is that?”

  

 

A statue of Jesus in India recently began to drip water from the statue’s toes. Local Christians thought that they were witnessing a miracle and they began to collect and drink the miraculous water, hoping for a blessing.

However, tests run on the water and an ensuing investigation from a plumber led to the discovery that the water was coming from a nearby leaking toilet . . . which would hardly deserve mention here were it not for the very clear way that it symbolizes everything that I have come to hate about traditional expressions of religion. 

The Jesus who was an advocate for the outcast and the poor, the sick, the hungry, the spat upon, and rejected . . . the Jesus who stood up to the might of the Roman occupation army to teach a message of radical compassion and paid for it with his life, in the hands of the church becomes nothing but a magical “get out of the grave free” amulet, reducing the poor, ignorant, sick, and marginalized to drinking toilet water and thinking that it is a blessing. 

I find it somewhat ironic that the Catholic Church under its first South American born pope is working to beatify Oscar Romero, calling him a saint in 2020 when the institutional church that produced Pope Francis, may have been complicit in his murder in El Salvador in 1980. When Pope Francis was a bishop in Argentina, he said little to protect the liberation theology priests of Latin America and may, in fact, have turned over names to authorities of priests to be tortured and murdered. 

If you do not know Oscar Romero’s story, I highly recommend the movie “Romero” to you. For those of you here in Springfield, I have a copy of the movie that I will gladly lend to you.  Romero was chosen to be Archbishop in El Salvador as “safe” choice. He was a theological scholar and a loyal Catholic priest who was expected to moderate the tensions between the military, the ruling class, and the poor who lived in El Salvador. 

But, I will tell you this about the progressive movement, about what it means to fall headlong into liberation theology . . . it is like pulling a thread in a knit sweater and there is not stopping place until the whole thing is unraveled. When you are in the institution, when you have been taught to drink the toilet water with devotion, once you get to look behind the statue and see where the water is coming from, your feelings about the institution can never be restored.

Please indulge me a moment to share a parable from Hindu Vedantic Philosophy:

A man was walking in the gathering darkness of late evening when he felt something brush against his leg. He looked down and saw a poisonous snake coiled by the path, and immediately he could feel the burning of venom coursing through his veins. He fell to the ground, crying out for help. 

A man with a lamp runs to his aid and in the light of the lamp, it is revealed that the coiled snake is not a snake at all, but rather, a coiled-up rope. Once the man who had been bitten saw the rope, when the truth dawned on him, he no longer felt the burning poison and his fear and dread left him. Once you have clearly seen the rope, no one could ever again convince you that it is a snake. 

Being Archbishop brought the cries of the liberation theology priests who were being beaten, imprisoned, and tortured to his ears. He got out among the people and his eyes were opened to the cruelty of the government oppression of the poor, in ways that they never were in a classroom or inside of the sanctuary of a church. 

So, when he said, “A church that does not provoke any crisis, preach a gospel that does not unsettle, proclaim a word of God that does not get under anyone's skin or a word of God that does not touch the real sin of the society in which it is being proclaimed: what kind of gospel is that?” Romero had discovered that there was a snake in El Salvador and the church had been telling the people it was a rope. 

Romero became a courageous advocate for the poor. He was a saint to the people of El Salvador, long before the Vatican found a conscience.

And so, on March 24, 1980, the government of El Salvador sent an assassin who had been trained by the United States military at Ft. Benning, Georgia, to kill Bishop Romero while he was saying mass in a small convent. All indication are that this was done with the tacit approval of the communist fearing, Pope John Paul II, who had Romero’s grave hidden so that no one could make a martyr out of him . . . the martyr Pope Francis has now made a saint, in much the same way that the American government, after spying on, jailing, beating and harassing Martin Luther King, Jr. until he was assassinated, a few years later made him a virtual American saint by naming a federal holiday after him. 

A few years ago I was asked to leave a local NAACP meeting when I pitched a fit about their proposal to observe Martin Luther King Day by recruiting young people to pick up litter by our city streets. Picking up litter is not a bad thing to do, in fact, it is a good thing to do, but I asked, “Do you think James Earl Ray shot King because he wanted to pick up trash off the streets?” 

The church, the state, the schools, tend to tame our prophets, pull the teeth from our tigers . . . we name streets in dangerous neighborhoods after them . . . make them a saint for the poor to pray to, only after we have killed him and sealed him in a grave for two generations.

A little over a year ago, Dan Goodwin, Paul Thomlinson and I spent way too much money on a nostalgia trip to go hear Elton John in concert in St. Louis. It was an amazing show. 

The aging rock star did not let time cause him to pull any punches as he pounded on his piano and sang for two hours. On the way home, the lyrics of Burn Down the Mission kept echoing in my head . . . burn down the mission, if you want to stay alive . . . For things are getting desperate in our home  Living in the parish of the restless folks I know . . . Behind four walls of stone the rich man sleeps   It's time we put the flame torch to their keep

Most days I would hear that figuratively, but I will admit that there have been times when I believed that if there really were a supernatural theistic god up in the clouds that we would wake up one day and find only smoldering, hot, greasy, places on the ground where most churches used to be. Sometimes it seems like the church is a prison that has to be burned down before people can be free to experience the truth, not just about God, but about themselves. 

Now, I have to pull the curtain back a bit and honestly tell you that I sketched out this sermon a few months ago to be a first message of the decade to hit traditional churches in the face with accusations of hypocrisy for basically giving people toilet water to drink when they are living in a world that is being turned into a cesspool through environmental degradation, and that is being taught to live with lies and corruption from our government, and to acquiesce to the violence of poverty, racism, and sexism we now face.

But as much as I want to be spiritual philosopher more than I am a commentator on current events, I would be a hypocrite if I came here today and talked about ethics as a general topic and ignored the fact that on Thursday night, what was Friday morning in Iraq, our government committed what all nations have agreed to be illegal and unethical, a state sponsored political assassination.

 The media and President Trump want for us to believe, unquestioningly, that Iranian General Qassem Soleimani, was a bad guy, maybe even a terrorist. But he was no Osama Bin Laden. He was a member of the government of Iran who evidently was uniquely good at his assigned military task. I’m not going to even pretend to put him on trial. I had never heard of him before he was killed Thursday night. He might have been an especially bad actor from the perspective of the USA, Israel, and the Saudis but he was a hero to many Sunnis in Iran and Iraq. 

I don’t want to go all legalistic on you this morning, but in 1981, Ronald Regan signed executive order 12333 stating that, “No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination.” Which was a finger pointing at the CIA telling them to stop their decades long effort to poison Fidel Castro. As a part of the civilized world, we may kill people on a battlefield, but we don’t assassinate political leaders. I hope that I am not alone among the hundreds of thousands of preachers speaking in pulpits across our land today in pointing out this criminal act carried out on our behalf.

But beyond such fine points of law and international relations, without judging whether or not General Soleimani was such a threat to world peace and stability that he needed to be killed, let’s allow ourselves a moment to ask ourselves, “Why have we been at war in the Middle East for 20 years now and in an ‘on and off’ way for 80 years?”

I’m going to boil it down to a pretty simplistic explanation. I believe that we can trace our military involvement in the oil-rich Middle East to the invention of the automobile. 

Coal powered passenger trains and electrically powered trolleys and subways began to be elbowed out as gas powered cars took their place. The economy soon began to revolve around the manufacture of automobiles, building roads and bridges, and covering the landscape and ever city intersection with gas stations and mechanics shops. 

We now burn about 150 billion gallons of gas every year, affecting the marketplace and our home budget whenever the price of gas changes. But we are sending hundreds of billions of dollars every year to oil producing countries and we can hardly stand the thought of even a temporary interruption to the flow of that fuel. 

America actually benefits by the regional disputes among oil producing nations because that gives them incentive to both produce more oil at a lower price and to buy more military hardware from us. That’s why, when Iran and Iraq were at war with each other for a decade, we watched with a certain fiscal satisfaction, playing both sides against one another. But it leaves us persistently involved in ways that is bad for us and bad for them.

There are two major divisions of the Islamic world, the Sunnis and the Shia. If I took the names off of this map, most Americans could not have told you where Syria is, nor would they know that it borders Iraq, Israel, and Jordan. And if this map were not color coded, would you know that both Iran and Iraq are majority Shia, and that Saudi Arabia is mostly Sunni and Yemen is mostly Shia?

I don’t want to say that all of the regional conflicts in the Middle East can be explained by tribal rivalries but it is not all exaggeration to say that we have now spent about $4 trillion dollars on what amounts to civil wars in which we have done nothing but make matters worse and inspired global terrorism. Yes, Sadaam Hussein was a bad man and an evil ruler. Hussein kept his Sunni Baathist government in power through cruel oppression of the Kurds and of the Shia. His government is responsible for about a quarter of a million deaths during his 24 years in power. So, we came in as liberators and in less than 20 years, we have killed nearly 300,000 Iraqi civilians trying to maintain order. As bad as Hussein was, what we have proven is that there is not a workable military solution to the conflicts within this part of the world.

But what could we do? It may not surprise you to learn that I have a suggestion.

 If America went on a wartime footing of building the infrastructure necessary to generate electricity from wind and solar sources, and we started commuting in electric cars, trains, busses, trolleys, and subways, 

Then we could stop sending hundreds of billions of dollars to this war-torn region and stop spending nearly a hundred billion every year protecting the flow of the oil supply globally. The same solution that can save our planet, can also being an end to most wars, and stabilize the global economic flow of resources. 

 And we have the added bonus of not having to deploy our American droids to assassinate anyone to maintain our access to sunlight and wind. 

You ought to expect religious people like me to be against war, assassination, and murder. And yet, when a preacher gets too far out there on these things, they might get fired, or like Martin Luther King, or Oscar Romero, they might get shot. And so, for the most part, the church is silent on matters like war, political assassination, and even on our lethal addiction to oil that keeps us from focusing on renewable energy. And if the church can remain silent when the stakes are this high, then, if I may return to my previous point, what is the use of that kind of church? . . . that kind of gospel? If that is all it is going to do, then we do need to burn them down, if we’re gonna stay alive. 

Burn them down, so that a new and more useful kind of church might rise up out of the ashes to start telling the truth in an empire built on lies.