“When the NRA is Too Liberal”

“When the NRA is Too Liberal”   Oct 25, 2020    Dr. Roger L. Ray, pastor

click here to see the video

Washington Post - By Isaac Stanley-Becker and Tony Romm  April 19, 2020 

A trio of far-right, pro-gun provocateurs is behind some of the largest Facebook groups calling for anti-quarantine protests around the country, offering the latest illustration that some seemingly organic demonstrations are being engineered by a network of conservative activists.

The Facebook groups target Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York, and they appear to be the work of Ben Dorr, the political director of a group called “Minnesota Gun Rights,” and his siblings, Christopher and Aaron. By Sunday, the groups had roughly 200,000 members combined, and they continued to expand quickly, days after President Trump endorsed such protests by suggesting citizens should “liberate” their states.

 

It has been my honor on three occasions to be escorted around Great Britain with my good friend, John Churcher, speaking in various churches and for other progressive gatherings. I love being in Great Britain but, in very many ways, England is very much like the United States with a lot of the same products and social conventions; but we are just different enough that there are certain conversations that quite predictably come up in almost every place I visit where I get to meet a new audience. 

 

One is that Brits insist that there is such a thing as “really good fish and chips.” I know my way around the restaurant industry, and I know that really good fish is served raw on a bit of rice, or it is lightly seared. OK fish is broiled or blackened, and fish that is about to go bad is battered and fried. Trust me, I’ve worked in a restaurant kitchen. And serving it in a sheet of newspaper doesn’t really change anything. 

 

But the most common topic of conversation, after the obligatory chatting about whether our president is dumber than their prime minister, is America’s fixation on guns. 

 

And they are normally quite polite about it, to the point that it seems like it is painfully difficult to form the question. “How can a country like America, so advanced in so many ways, not be able to get a handle on this problem?” There were 40,000-gun related deaths in the United States last year, more than 100,000 more received gunshot wounds. We are just three fourths of the way through the year now and it looks like we may get to 50,000 deaths this year. Literally more than the number of people who die annually in automobile accidents. 

 

Our English cousins, who birthed our language and so much of our culture, while they were famous for cruel conquest and empire building in the past, these days, they have about 50 to 60 gun deaths per year. Do you hear me? Our gun deaths are not twice as bad as Great Britain, not ten times, not even a hundred times, folks, we have nearly a thousand times as many gun deaths in the USA as they have in Great Britain. Why? 

 

It is true enough that we have a gun culture in America. Still, our depictions of the gun-slinging wild west days of America’s youth are grossly exaggerated. Then and now, media reports of high-profile events tend to make people think that these things happened all of the time. For example, Jesse James and his notorious “James Gang,” ran a 12 year-long crime spree of robberies which gave them nearly celebrity status. And they were violent but even still, in their 12 years on the run, seven members of their own gang were killed, and they may have killed ten or eleven people. By comparison, we have had more than 500 people killed in mass shootings this year and I would not be surprised if no one here could name a single incident. 

 

The media gets interested in school shootings but during the pandemic, most schools have been closed and we have had much less school violence. No, much more than our heritage of the old west, gun violence in America is more of a modern phenomenon, and, it won’t surprise you that it is largely fueled by capitalism.

 

When I was young, 50 years ago, members of the National Rifle Association actually came into our schools to talk to us about gun safety and hunting. Their message was more cautionary than encouraging. But in the past few decades, the NRA became merged with the corporate interests of gun manufacturers whose only interest was to inspire people to buy more guns. In order to sell more guns, they have worked the strings of political donations to make sure that legal impediments to buying guns were always more lax here than almost anywhere else in the world. 

 

Our gun violence is directly related to one thing. . . the presence of hundreds of millions of guns. Now, there are some examples of countries with a high rate of gun ownership but a low rate of gun death but those are typically countries with a huge tradition of hunting and usually a more sparse society. But, for the most part, countries have reduced gun violence by placing many layers of restrictions on gun ownership. 

 

I grew up around guns, but I don’t own a gun. I have known several retired military officers and none of them ever owned guns even though they had received years of training in the proper handling and care of weapons but, as three retired colonels have each explained to me: they did not own a gun because, now get this, “because guns are dangerous.”

 

So why do millions of Americans own several guns? As I have mentioned, the number one reason is because they are insanely available here as they are not anywhere else. But what is the motivation of the buyer? First and foremost, it is fear and insecurity. Sometimes that fear verges on paranoia. In fact, you can almost bet that nearly every seriously paranoid person in America owns several guns . . . that should be sobering, all on its own. But the insecurity issue is a huge driver. 

 

You know, it is my job to tell the unvarnished truth in public . . . that is literally what I am paid to do, but there are some truths that don’t feel good. But, here we go:

In our culture, women are made to feel insecure about their age and appearance in ways that men just are not. The fashion industry alone is a $2.5 trillion dollar industry globally with nearly $400 billion of that in the USA. We spend another $50 billion on makeup, a $100 billion on hair, and more than $16 billion on plastic surgery, most of which is breast implants. Women are often convinced to dislike their own bodies and so they compensate for their insecurities in ways that men just don’t… well, other than Donald Trump who evidently spends $70,000 a year on his hair, and he must have makeup delivered by the truck load. . . but he is the outlier here. 

 

Men don’t get breast implants and few wear makeup, and just look at us! We’re clearly saving a fortune by spending next to nothing on our hair and fashion. But what does a man do when he is insecure about his masculinity? How does a man compensate if he is afraid of minorities, criminals, immigrants, or if he is lacking something impressive in his underwear? Clearly, the more than $20 billion spent on guns ever year isn’t because of hunting. 

Just as a side bar, Americans spent $17 billion on ammunition during the Obama presidency because, well, you may have noticed, Obama is black. 

 

Insecurity drives the gun market and, unfortunately, men are very simple creatures. You tell them, “Carter is going to come for your guns . . . Clinton is going to come for your guns . . . Obama is going to come for your guns . . .and now, Biden is going to come for your guns . . .” Trump is stumping every day, talking about how these sadly insecure men need him to protect their 2^ndamendment rights when no one has ever come for their guns. Carter, Clinton, Obama, probably should have, but they didn’t and Biden sure won’t. That some American president is coming for your guns is the grown-up version of being so afraid of the monsters under your bed that you regularly wet your bed at night because you were afraid to get out of bed. 

 

Now, that is harsh, I know, suggesting that gun owners are grown up anxiety riddled bed-wetters, but what do they have to say for themselves? If they are collecting heavy, assault styled rifles, with large round capacity magazines, they are not hunters. How do they explain why they are collecting these military styled weapons and all of this ammunition?

 

In 1989, as sales of guns of this sort started to rise, a spurious fake quote attributed to Thomas Jefferson started to make the rounds. It claimed that Jefferson said: "The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government."

 

It seems a little crazy to think that private citizens, no matter how well armed, could actually stand up to the military power of the Unites States army, air force, or navy but, at least to some degree, it has been tried in such incidents as the Ruby Ridge shootout and the Cliven Bundy standoff in 2014. But may I ask you to consider this:

If all of these millions of guns, held by hundreds of thousands of people in case our government becomes tyrannical then why have they not done anything to liberate the children who are being held in cages along our southern border? For three 

years now, in a lawless, insane, immoral federal policy of taking children, some so young that they were literally taken from their mother’s breast, to be locked up in cages . . . and this is done to scare immigrants into not coming to the United States . . . folks, this is not hypothetical, we have the transcripts of meetings in which Trump officials verbalized the methods and intents of taking children away from parents in order to slow border crossings. What could be more immoral than that? Oh, and 

some of the kids have died from lack of medical care and some have died from lack of water and food. Many have been sexually assaulted!

 

So where is our “well-regulated militia” protecting us from government tyranny? Not once have any of these organized paranoid clans of bedwetters made an attempt to save these children so, please, let’s drop the pretense that this has something to do with liberty, democracy, freedom, or good government. That is just a lie. This isn’t about virtue. It is about fear and insecurity and a degree of selfishness that I find difficult to imagine. 

This sad little group of lost boys whose mothers didn’t love them enough to breast feed them, who dubbed themselves with the comic book title of the Wolverine Watchmen, actually were plotting to  overthrow Michigan's government and kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. Why, what would make them organize secret meetings and actually try to cook up such a horrifying plot? Because Gov. Whitmer, quite noticeably, a woman, keeps trying to put emergency measures in place to slow the spread of Covid-19. The state’s legislature and supreme court seem to be fighting her tooth and nail every step of the way, but this band of boy scout wannabes actually listed among their chief complaints for why they wanted to abduct and murder her is because she had closed down gyms. These spoiled brats wanted to overthrow their state government and commit murder to be able to get in their workouts. 

 

For many years I have believed that the National Rifle Association was the enemy of reason in America. The pandemic has, however, added fuel to the fire of gun lust and brought out of the shadows more fringe groups for whom the NRA is not pro-gun enough. It is difficult to draw direct lines from this terrorist cell to their influences but one of the biggest groups to build a coalition of what NPR has called, “similarly paranoid, uneducated, frightened white people.” is the Minnesota Gun Rights group led by the Dorr brothers who believe that the NRA stands for “negotiating our rights away.”

 

Combining a paranoid, almost anarchist world view with the worst of Old Testament restrictions that called for stoning women who were unfaithful and killing men for being gay, all of which gets wrapped up in the now infamous Q-

Anon movement which Trump simultaneously claims to know nothing about while loudly protesting that “someone has to put a stop to anti-fa” and his other imaginary boogie-men. 

 

 

Aaron, Chris, and Ben Dorr, operating under several names on social media, have managed to amass a following of at least tens of thousands of sympathizers on Face Book from which they can, with almost no capital investment, encourage and spark the kinds of militia groups who were plotting to murder Governor Whitmer and they capitalize on President Trump’s racist and xenophobic tweets and statements. 

 

They do not believe that there should be any gun laws. They believe that they should be able to own tanks, fighter jets, and shoulder fired missiles. Until the pandemic, I might have been inclined to believe that they were just someone’s crazy uncles who could spout off paranoid sounding lunacy but that they held no substantive threat. Among a population that doesn’t want to be told to wear a mask, stay home, or socially distance, these fringe groups are gaining an audience and a frightening amount of influence. 

 

Last month, in Senate hearings, the FBI director, Christopher Wray, and the Division of Homeland Security director, Ken Cuccinelli, both warned lawmakers that white supremacists, anarchists and militia-style groups pose a serious threat to Americans. Of course, the Trump administration has insisted that Wray and Cuccinelli tone down their rhetoric about these domestic terrorist groups because they are among his base of voters, but here is the thing:

 

These people are dangerous for one reason and one reason only and that is the ready availability of military style weapons and ammunition. Take that away from these hillbillies and they will have to cope with their insecurities in some other way; buy a corvette, take up collecting model trains, explore their inner drag queen and invest in plastic surgery, makeup, and sexy dresses (you had to know that I was going to work that back in), they could, for heaven’s sake, get some counseling. But the one thing they do not need is a lot of guns.

 

America has been held hostage for generations by elaborate and profit driven interpretations of the 2^ndamendment. And, in answer to my British friends who  reasonably keep asking about this matter, America has lacked the political will to fight against the tide of campaign donations from the gun lobby to do the one thing that makes sense, which is to make it illegal to sell or own assault styled rifles or large supplies of ammunition. 

 

School shootings have not sufficiently forged our will to get this simple thing done and I doubt that the Proud Boys, the Wolverine Watchmen, or the Minnesota Gun Rights group will do it either, not even if they capture and kill a couple of Democratic governors. But folks, it is time for us to accept nothing less than sanity from our next federal government. 

 

Trump gets two more months in office and after that we need to wash the White House with disinfectant and reinvest our government with something that looks and acts like responsible adult leadership. I will, in this moment, put sensible gun control on the list of things to be accomplished in 2021. Terrorists, whether they are domestic or foreign, don’t get to run this country anymore. 

Power begets Power

Power begets Power (the killing of Breonna Taylor)     Oct 18, 2020     

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

Bill Maher, Sept. 25, 2020  Real Time with Bill Maher

Power is like owning rabbits, the more you have the easier it is to get a lot more. . . When you lose power you’ve not only lost that fight you make it more likely to lose the next one. That is how power works. When Democrats lose elections, they lose the ability to appoint judges. Donald Trump has now appointed a quarter of all of the federal judges on the bench, and unlike his wives, that’s for life. In Florida the people voted to restore voting rights to ex-felons but that’s not really going to happen because Trump appointed 5 of the 6 appeals judges and they found a way to undo that. As is so often the case, make it harder for democrats to vote which means more Republican senators who appoint more conservative judges. Power is a perpetuating cycle, like when Terminators build more robots. Of course Democrats are screaming now about Republican hypocrisy over Trump filling the Ginsburg seat in an election year, “They said one thing when it was Obama and now they are saying the complete opposite, how can they sleep at night?” I will tell you how, like a baby. Because, like a baby they have no morals. And if you haven’t gotten it yet, this kind of bald faced premeditated hypocrisy should make it clear there is no catching them in an inconsistency, they don’t care, because it is all about power. The only rule the Republicans play by is “the people who win make the rules.” Power talks, losers walk. 

 

I awoke earlier this week to find myself being maligned in our local newspaper by none other than Springfield’s Catholic Bishop, Most Reverend Edward M. Rice, who called me a hypocrite and a baby murderer. 

https://www.news-leader.com/story/opinion/2020/10/03/roger-ray-abortion-column-anti-catholic-attack/3593606001/?fbclid=IwAR0ZSEuNCkMOVayjnZI4gSuAuOLZxv5LIP0ovjKtXa7cZMOcEAoCP5q0BrM

 

Let me say it before you do, “I started it.” I had published a pretty hard hitting https://www.news-leader.com/story/opinion/2020/09/25/anti-abortion-hypocrites-only-care-themselves-roger-ray/3531395001/?fbclid=IwAR2bBd5Xu-a7OvA_v5_eTCxh7L1i23APMv3_EZHAkbsD5o1wQiyL_JWrFDw

column the week before, calling out the anti-abortion hypocrisy of Republicans and the Catholic Church as we are facing the Supreme Court nomination of Amy Coney Barrett, who is almost certain to cast the deciding vote to overturn Roe v Wade, dragging the civil rights of women back by a half a century. And the hard fought for civil rights of the gay and lesbian community will not be far behind. 

 

I didn’t mean to provoke the bishop into acting an insecure, pink clad, middle school bully. I simply pointed out the indisputable fact that many Republican politicians who have made a career out of trumpeting anti-abortion rhetoric have been caught forcing aids and paramours to get abortions to avoid having their private sexual dalliances exposed. And I also pointed out the fact, and I linked the Public Broadcasting System’s 2019 documentary on the topic, that many nuns in nations around the world have been forced to be housekeepers and sex slaves for supposedly “celibate” priests who have been forced to have abortions to keep the priests from being publicly humiliated. 

 

My point, a point that I have made many times over the years, is that abortion laws only apply to those who do not have the resources or connections to get a doctor to perform an abortion secretly or to travel to Canada or France. Striking down Row v Wade will affect poor people, but it will have no impact on the wealthy or even the middle class. The hypocrisy of this is multiplied by the fact that no Republican politician and certainly no Roman Catholic bishop, has every suggested that the wealthy be charged with a crime when they return from their vacation in Paris where they terminated an unwanted pregnancy. And, in fact, the Catholic Church has gone to great lengths to cover up and protect from prosecution, the priests who have raped nuns and then forced them to get abortions. These are not opinions. These are facts. 

 

What I published were facts, media documented events of moral travesty. Did the bishop dispute the facts? No. Did the bishop show remorse for the facts? No. All religions encourage repentance for sins but the Catholic Church has institutionalized this in the confessional, the sacrament of reconciliation. But when the Most Reverend Edward M. Rice was confronted with these sordid and humiliating facts, rather than make some public confession of the centuries of Catholic sex crimes, he dismissed them and labeled me a hypocrite, a baby killer, and accused me of being anti-Catholic. And this last charge is what I want to drill down on:

 

I wrote my doctoral dissertation on monastic spirituality. I suspect that I have spent more time in Trappist monasteries than has our local bishop. I suspect that I am more deeply immersed in the ancient Catholic literature about spiritual practices than he is. For many years my former church officials feared that I might one day leave my former denomination to become a Trappist monk. I am not anti-Catholic. But here is where Bishop Rice and I differ, I don’t believe that either child molesting or the systemic rape of nuns is inherently Catholic. I can conceive of a Catholic church that does not institutionalize pedophilia or rape or forced abortions. Where Bishop Rice and I differ is that he believes that it is anti-Catholic to even mention the fact that there has been a long and sordid history of sex crimes within the Catholic Church that the Catholic hierarchy has denied, hidden, and spent hundreds of millions of dollars in avoiding the legal consequences.

Once again, Bishop Rice offers denial and childish name calling where what is needed is sincere repentance, penance, and a resolve to be a better Catholic Church. Given his lack of moral discernment, I would not allow Ed Rice to be in charge of a hotdog stand. I can celebrate the good works of the Catholic Church in addressing poverty, illness, and in advancing education and public morality but those good works do not become immunity to responsibility for rape, forced abortions, and pedophilia. It is simply tragic that even a bishop cannot see the difference between these crimes and what it means to be Catholic. 

 

But this is the problem with power, isn’t it? We have been treated this week to rants from our Covid infected president, demanding that the attorney general, Bill Barr, bring indictments against Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden, for literally no crime other than being the political enemies of a deranged president; when the laundry list of undeniable crimes committed by Trump, his family, and his minions would have made Al Capone counsel him to dial it back a bit. Power can make people feel immune to responsibility. Power can make people assume that there are rules for all of the little people but no rules for them.

This has certainly been the case in our nation’s recent turmoil about police violence and racism. There have been so many police killings of unarmed black people in America that it is seriously difficult to keep up but one of the most egregious, and that is saying something, was the murder of Breonna Taylor in March. This Louisville, KY resident was shot dead while she was still in her bed. 

I hesitate to use the normal phrase, “a comedy of errors” because this was no comedy. The police had obtained a “no knock” warrant for Taylor’s apartment by using largely false accusations. They were searching for one of Taylor’s former boyfriends who was already in police custody. So the police were there for no good reason, under false pretenses, and when they broke down the door to her apartment, Taylor’s boyfriend, a legal gun owner, responded to the invasion by firing a single shot from his gun, which provoked an avalanche of gun fire from the police who were shooting blindly and wildly into the apartment. 

 

Breonna’s death has sparked protests in Louisville and in many cities around the world. The failure of Kentucky’s first black Attorney General to bring indictments against the police officers involved has fueled the controversy which focuses not only on police violence but on the implicit racial dimensions of the tragic murder. 

 

Look, when the lights of a patrol car come on in your rear-view mirror, what goes through your mind? I can tell you, as a white guy, I think, “Rats, this is going to cost me. I’ll have to pay a fine and then my auto insurance rates will go up for the next several years.” But when a black person sees police lights in their rear-view mirror, don’t you understand that most of them immediately start thinking, “What can I do to not die today?” There are indisputable aspects of race in policing in America and it is so pervasive that it even infects black police and black Attorny Generals.

 

I’m not wanting to in any way be dismissive of the racial aspects of Breonna’s death, but I would like to draw back the lens for a moment just to mention the other aspect of this tragedy, which is the abuse of power.

This is Duncan Lemp, who was also killed by police in March while he was asleep in his bed in his own home. This murder took place in Maryland as police executed a no-knock warrant to search his home for gun violations. I am not wanting to deny the fact that race plays a role in many police killings, but I do think that we have to add some awareness that police also shoot white people, Asians, Latinex, and Native Americans, often without cause and too often with illegally obtained no-knock warrants.

 

And just like my beef with our local Catholic Bishop, many people have interpreted the demonstrations and protests which have taken place after these police murders as being “anti-police” or as failing to support our public servants who risk their lives every day to protect and serve the vulnerable, because they cannot seem to separate legitimate policing in their minds from the wanton old west habit of shooting people through windows and walls before finding out if there is any plausible reason to be shooting anyone. It is as if we tell police that they can’t shoot unarmed black people that we are saying that we just can’t have police anymore!

 

If the police have become so powerful that we cannot legally charge them with crimes or even question their conduct when they clearly murder innocent people in their sleep, then, folks, can’t you see, the police have simply become too powerful? I don’t want to live in a city where I cannot call the police if my life is being threatened. And I don’t want to diminish the social costs of the illegal drug trade, but, come on, what is with this heavily armed war on drugs? And don’t you know that wealthy white people in gated communities are more likely to have drugs in their homes than are poor black people in impoverished neighborhoods? 

 

Drug use and drug distribution are problems in America, but they are problems that call for addiction treatment. There has been no observable reduction of drug use in America as a result of the armed policing efforts of Federal, State, and local policing agencies. Please let me say that again: in spite of billions of dollars wasted on Federal, State, and local armed policing of the drug trade, there has been no evidence that it has reduced drug use at all. 

 

How long do you keep doing something that obviously doesn’t work? Breonna Taylor was just another innocent victim of an absurdly violent police policy towards drug enforcement. And it keeps happening because, . . . ok, racism, classism, all of that . . . but it keeps happening because power begets power. Because bloated police budgets and fear mongering conservative lawmakers keep fielding an over militarized police force onto our streets and accusing us of being indifferent towards crime when we question their crazy tactics. 

 

Bill Maher was right when he said on his show a couple of weeks ago that “Power is like owning rabbits, the more you have the easier it is to get a lot more.” 

I am sincerely sorry that Bishop Rice thinks that mentioning rape, forced abortions, and pedophilia makes me anti-Catholic. . .that he cannot conceive of a Catholic Church without sex crimes. I am sincerely sorry that President Trump and Kentucky’s Attorney General, Daniel Cameron, cannot conceive of a police force without unchecked violence resulting in murder. But, I can. I can conceive of a repentant Catholic Church that deserves our respect and praise. I can conceive of a law enforcement universe that serves the public interest. If Catholic Church is so powerful that it is above objectively confessing its own sins, if law enforcement has become so powerful that uniformed police officers cannot be criminally charged for even murder, then they have become too powerful. 

 

It isn’t that people in government, law enforcement, or organize religion have not been made aware of their abuse of power. It is just that they simply do not care. So, I have one thing to say: times up. If you refuse to correct yourselves, we will correct you. If you abuse power, then you don’t deserve to keep it. 

In Search of a Better American Myth

In Search of a Better American Myth    Oct 11, 2020     Dr. Roger Ray   

Click here to see the video

Yuval Noah Harari, History professor at Hebrew University, Jerusalem

We are repeatedly told these days that we have entered the terrifying new era of post-truth, in which not just particular facts but entire histories might be faked. But if this is the era of post-truth, when, exactly, was the halcyon age of truth? And what triggered our transition to the post-truth era? The internet? Social media? The rise of Putin and Trump?

A cursory look at history reveals that propaganda and disinformation are nothing new. In fact, humans have always lived in the age of post-truth. Homo sapiens is a post-truth species, who conquered this planet thanks above all to the unique human ability to create and spread fictions. We are the only mammals that can cooperate with numerous strangers because only we can invent fictional stories, spread them around, and convince millions of others to believe in them. As long as everybody believes in the same fictions, we all obey the same laws and can thereby cooperate effectively.

https://ideas.ted.com/are-we-living-in-a-post-truth-era-yes-but-thats-because-were-a-post-truth-species/

 

If you go to the bank tomorrow, you may be surprised to find that it is closed. And when you go to your mailbox, you will find it empty because October 12 is a federal holiday, Columbus Day. In this part of the world, Columbus Day is not much more than an immanently forgettable holiday celebrating the landing of a 15^th century seriously lost sailor landing on a Caribbean island that had millions of inhabitants which, in spite of the densely populated island where he landed, he claimed to have discovered. Which would be roughly the equivalent of me claiming that I had discovered the Rocky Mountains after my first trip to Colorado. 

 

For the first 400 years after Columbus’ first voyage to the Americas, not much was said about the allegedly Italian explorer sailing under the flag of Spain. In fact, Columbus was dusted off and represented to Americans in the early 19^th century after a tragic mass murder of Italian immigrants in New Orleans.

Eleven Italians were lynched when a trial failed to find them guilty of a plot to murder the city’s police chief. 

 

I am sure that you are aware that the current president’s disdain for Mexican immigrants is of a cloth with the anti-immigrant sentiments in past centuries for Irish, German, and Italian immigrants who usually came in waves when conditions in their home countries became so inhospitable that making a new start in America was an attractive solution. And, like the Mexicans who risk life and limb to immigrate, most are agricultural workers with little education and not much by way of English skills. 

 

To try to dilute this dangerous anti-Italian sentiment following this lynching in New Orleans, President Harrison, in 1892, called for a celebration of Columbus as an Italian who discovered the Americas and made the existence of the USA possible. This was both to quell tensions in America and to calm down the Italian government that was getting quite agitated about how Italians were being portrayed and treated in the USA. The idea caught on in places where there were large Italian populations and even though Columbus never set foot on what is now US mainland territory, you find statues of him in historically Italian neighborhoods as a virulent claim from the immigrant families that they discovered this place and they have every right to be here. 

While there are statues erected in honor of Columbus all through the new world, largely because he brought Spanish language and culture to take root in Central and South America, there are also a few statues and memorials like this one in Portugal because there is a strain of historical argument that Columbus was really from Portugal and that someone portrayed him as being Italian to polish his sailing credentials. In fact, one of our listeners lives in Portugal and given the conversation we had on line about Columbus the last time I mentioned him, there are people in Portugal willing to fight for the dubious honor of claiming Columbus as their own. 

 

The historical truth about Columbus is that he was an absolutely horrible human being, a cruel murderer, and a greedy slave trader who captured children to be sex slaves in Europe to fatten his own estate. All of you folks who buy a DNA test and are surprised to find that have a trace of Native American blood in you . . . yeah, that’s not a happy story. Your ancestors brought that back to America from Europe in their veins and the way they got it is an ugly story.

 

Last month, President Trump gave a speech in which he was literally demanding that schools become propaganda centers, teaching the next generation to be more proud of being American by downplaying actual history. He even specifically named the work of the famous American historian, Howard Zinn, as being someone to be removed from libraries and avoided in classrooms. I don’t know who wrote that into Trump’s speech. I am relatively certain that he had no idea who the late Howard Zinn was and I am confident that he never read his books since, obviously, Trump doesn’t read books. 

 

It was my honor to meet and talk with Howard Zinn on three occasions, the first two times, here in Springfield when he spoke at Missouri State and then returned to speak at Drury University, and then I got to have a longer conversation with him when I was a fellow at Harvard. He was such an amazing man, so insightful and so powerful in his ability to strip away propaganda and tell the truth about history that when we started this church in 2008, our very first class was led by our own Dr. David Adams as we spent nearly a year studying Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States.”

 

Trump doesn’t know much about history, but he knows that he doesn’t want you to know that Christopher Columbus was a murdering slave trader who got rich abducting native children for the sex trade. Still, the problem here is not just that Columbus was historically a bad guy, there were lots of bad guys in history and lots of dark chapters in our history of conquest, invasion, and pathological land theft on our way to being “the greatest nation in the world.”

 

The problem is that Italians picked Columbus to be the central figure in a useful myth. Myths may be based on facts or based on thin air, but myths function in society to put a spin on history, to give us self-confidence, pride, and to justify our privilege. 

In this sense, the Hebrew Bible is a perfect example of the use of myth as propaganda. The stories that were recorded while the Israelites were in captivity in Babylon described their history as being a rather testy love story between their nation and God. Their story claims that they grew as a nation while they were slaves in Egypt and that God delivered them from slavery and gave them a land of their own. There is no persuasive reason to believe that any part of that myth is based on historical fact. 

 

The Jews were one of many Palestinian tribes, fighting for control of real estate that happened to be at the crossroads of continents where empires have been fighting since humans laid down their clubs and built walled cities. I never cease to be amused by Evangelicals who have never noticed how ironic it is that the Jewish holy book, written by and for the Jews, is where they get the claim that God gave them this particular piece of real estate. 

 

I took an Israeli government subsidized trip to Jordan and Israel when I was in grad school. I was out of place on a bus full of Evangelical preachers but I was excited to see what even I, at that tender age, thought of as the “holy land.” But as we crossed the Jordan River and saw the impoverished refugee camps in the West Bank brimming with displaced Palestinians, our government guide shrugged off the obvious poverty and suffering of the camp, saying, “They don’t belong here, God gave this land to us.” The bus erupted in loud amens from the preachers on the bus and a wry grin spread across our guide’s face because he had obviously practiced and perfected that line over the years to play American preachers like a fiddle. 

 

Folks, God doesn’t work for Century 21. God no more parcels out land to one rival group over another than believing that God prefers one football or baseball team over another. Besides, apparently, God is a hockey fan. 

Religious myths and national myths help to gloss over some of the sordid details of reality. We want to think of George Washington as a courageous military leader who helped the American colonies gain freedom but we don’t want to dwell on the hundreds of slaves he mercilessly kept on his Virginia farm. 

 

While some myths just evolve in the self-congratulatory stew of civilization, many are created to promote and justify the abuses of the dominant culture. 

Rudyard Kipling’s famous poem, “The White Man’s Burden,” was written to promote our invasion and conquest of the Philippines, suggesting that just like white people had to carry blacks, Native Americans, and Latinos towards civilization, we were also obligated to care for the Philippine natives, Muslims, and Asians. As if our enslavement of Africans, genocide of Native Americans, and abusive labor practices towards Latinos was all a charitable education exercise on the part of white America. Did I tell you that I discovered the Rocky Mountains?

It is similar to the passionate support for America’s manifest destiny portrayed in John Gast’s late 19^th century painting, depicting the “spirit” of Columbia guiding the westward movement of white people, building rail roads and stringing telegraph wire as they drove the Native Americans out of their way. She carries a text book as if education was the hallmark of our conquest of lands that simply did not belong to us. The assumption was the education, agriculture, and technological advance justified genocide and homicidal land theft. 

 

But myths don’t have to be bad. If myths play a role in defining a society or given a nation certain goals to accomplish, then what we need are better myths. When I was a very little child in the deeply racist, segregated South, I sat on the painted wooden chairs of my basement Sunday School class and learned to sing the 19^thmissionary song:

“Jesus loves the little children, all little children of the world: red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight. Jesus loves the little children of the world.” And as saccharin as the notion of white Jesus holding little African and Asian kids on his lap surrounded by adoring white kids may be, it was probably the most healthy message about race that I was going to get in the first 20 years of my life. A lot better than “God gave this land to us,” manifest destiny, or white man’s burden, kinds of myths!

 

If myths can be manufactured to hold out to society to define a goal, why don’t we create a noble myth? One that doesn’t rely on genocide, racism, exploitation, or greed?

 

And it doesn’t have to be necessarily religious or having to do with nationalism. It could be about virtue. I think that we could even go back a century and grab it out of the annals of American history, to give it a good mythic ring.

 

I’m thinking of that time in 1944, when we were still up to our eyebrows in WWII when Franklin Roosevelt used his State of the Union address to try to plant a more noble vision in America’s minds than simply defeating the Germans and the Japanese. Without rattling all of the skeletons in Roosevelt’s closet, we could just take his words that described a nation on the other side of a great World War.

 

He said in that speech that America’s Bill of Rights had afforded us political rights, but they didn’t go far enough to ensure that Americans could actually pursue happiness. Happiness requires some security, some creature comfort, and a real place in society. Franklin proposed a second Bill of Rights that would be an economic bill of rights. He said that Americans should be guaranteed a decent job with a living wage, that farming should be fairly compensated, that health care, retirement and education should be available to everyone. 

 

Call me crazy but what if we tried to polish our reputation as being the greatest nation on earth by actually becoming the greatest nation on earth? What if we created a civilization that finally eradicated racism, poverty, war, environmental destruction, and class strife? 

 

We have done the impossible over and over. We harnessed electricity. We perfected the train, invented automobiles and airplanes, computers and the internet. We went to the moon and split an atom. We did great things when history brought us to the point where we could do it. Now history has brought us to a point where we actually can end poverty, make education and health care available to everyone, and finally come to accept that the whole red and yellow, black and white was much ado about melanin.

 

I’m willing to sign on to the myth of America’s greatness, I just think it is a future goal to be obtained rather than a past state of inequality to be recovered. And the great thing about this myth is that you don’t have to be convinced because you already know in your hearts that I am right. 

Faith and Probability

Faith and Probability   Oct 8, 2020     Dr. Roger Ray

click here to see the video

“Math is the logic of certainty, and statistics is the logic of uncertainty “
Prof. Joseph Blitzstein

I am very pleased to be back with you good people of Malvern though I certainly could wish to be there in person rather than on Zoom but we do what we can in the midst of a pandemic.  I want to congratulate you for  holding your progressive gathering together when you have very little institutional support for your courageous questioning of traditional expressions of faith.

My first visit with you was when you invited me to be a part of what you used to call “the Science and Faith conference.” A lot of people would assume that these two things simply do not mix well. Science is based on objective data, research, and laboratory proofs and faith is based on belief, it might be quite complex and detailed in its theology, but it is based on unknowable, unprovable, beliefs for which there is little or no evidence. 

 

Looked at that way, the two always seem to be at loggerheads. Science is a method that is constantly searching for a better understanding of what is true, so much so that no college would consider using a physics, chemistry, or biology textbook that was more than 10 years old. Science is not static, or at least it shouldn’t be. Science is always about discovery and innovation.

 

Faith, on the other hand, while it certainly has evolved generally and hopefully grown, is still typically focused on the task of not changing. While a science department would not use a ten year old textbook, the religion department of any university would assign readings from modern books while still expecting students to become quite proficient in rather ancient books, the Bible, the Quran, and their cousins. 

 

I shudder to reflect on how much of my graduate school education was focused on trying to know and understand what the original New Testament writers were trying to say, and what their first audience understood them to be saying. Who among us would want to go to a dentist whose primary proficiency was in mid-first century dentistry? Still, every minister ordained over the past millennia was expected to be an expert in an ancient book, much of which is composed of horrifying misinformation and violence. 

 

But most of us have awareness that there are very many scientists, physicians, mathematicians, and engineers who are also persons of faith. Do their minds operate in two distinctly different universes? Do they have a church brain where they accept certain “revealed” realities and a professional brain where they interrogate evidence in order to do critical thinking? Honestly, I do think that I know some of those people but the task that seems to keep cropping up in the modern era is to find a way to marry these two universes to one another. In fact, if you just do a quick search among book sellers for books with the words “faith” and “reason” in the title, you will find many recent attempts at reconciling beliefs with the critical skills of philosophy and the sciences. 

 

The reason we keep writing new books on this topic, the reason why you have felt the need to have an annual conference that either directly or indirectly tries to consider the implications of rational thought and religious practice is that a definitive and final answer is impossible to discern. 

Speaking to an audience in Malvern, it is reasonable to assume that you are either from the Church of England, the Methodist, the Catholic or the United Reform church. I’ve been there three times now and I believe that I am no longer welcome in three of those churches so if any of you have connections at the Catholic Church, you might try to warm up the priest for me a bit. 

 

But, given the history of your empire, you are seeing more and more Muslims in the United Kingdom, more Hindus, Buddhists, and others. Do you ever wonder why you belong to a United Reform church rather than a Buddhist temple? Why would you be a Methodist rather than a Hindu or a Muslim?

 

Did you ever chart out the various faiths from which you might choose and put their hypothetical truth claims to the test? Did you evaluate the evidence that supports each one and try to choose a faith based on the one that was, at least to your satisfaction, the most true?

 

Most of us in the progressive movement will have, at some point in our lives, found ourselves to be uncomfortable in our old skins that were defined by creeds and sacred texts. Most of us had to eventually move on to something else, and yet, most people basically inherit their religious affiliations from their parents, the person they married, and the culture around them. 

If you managed to move from the Methodist church to the United Reform Church, you really should not see yourself as being a pioneer or trail blazer. You really just shifted the position of your lawn chair. We tend to inherit a religion based on what the people around us believe. So, it is not much of a surprise that for most of the history of the world, Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists were identified with geography. You are not surprised to encounter a Hindu in India or a Catholic in Italy! By and large, when it comes to reasoning about faith, we have all committed the logical fallacy known as the “consensus mundi” or the “majority belief.” But what if we really thought about why we believe what we say that we believe?

 

The great divide between faith and reason is, in large part, an invention of the scientific age. Those church officials in the early centuries of the church who were trying to come up with an agreed upon list of letters and essays that would make up the authoritative collection we would come to accept as being our scripture, were certainly trying to collect reliable statements of the truth as they were able to understand it.

 

As I have written about in my book, Progressive Faith and Practice, one of the books that almost made it into the New Testament is a letter from Clement of Rome who was said to have been installed by St. Peter himself as the Bishop of the church in Rome which later Catholic historians rather liberally dubbed as being the “second pope,” a couple of centuries before there were popes. There are official reasons for why Clement was not included in the cannon of the New Testament, chief of which was that he was not personally a witness to the life and ministry of Jesus but, were that standard applied to other writers, we wouldn’t have any of our four gospels nor any of the letters of Paul either. 

 

My own suspicion for Clement being dropped from the list of approved New Testament books is because he repeated in his letter a myth about the Phoenix as if he believed that it was true. Clement wrote:

There is a certain bird which is called a phœnix. This is the only one of its kind, and lives five hundred years. And when the time of its dissolution draws near that it must die, it builds itself a nest of frankincense, and myrrh, and other spices, into which, when the time is fulfilled, it enters and dies. But as the flesh decays a certain kind of worm is produced, which, being nourished by the juices of the dead bird, brings forth feathers. Then, when it has acquired strength, it takes up that nest in which are the bones of its parent, and bearing these it passes from the land of Arabia into Egypt, to the city called Heliopolis. 

 

While the New Testament certainly contained a lot of accounts of miracles, visions, and implausible events, the people who were compiling the scriptures would not want to include a piece that was obviously malarky. Clement believed the story to be true but the world of the second century included many people who were much better traveled, and they would have known that the whole temple in Heliopolis with Phoenix remains was just not true. 

 

I have advocated for an evidence-based faith. Granting that there must be room for mystery in our understanding of the universe because we cannot know everything, I would still insist that our embrace of mystery should not be significantly different that the way that physicists and biologist embrace mystery. Humbly acknowledging that we can’t know everything, we still should try our best to avoid believing things that are not true. 

 

As Prof. Joseph Blitzstein has said, “Math is the logic of certainty, and statistics is the logic of uncertainty.” That is, in math we can be certain of singular right answers that make all other answers wrong. But math is theoretical. In the real world, we constantly deal with uncertainty, so we talk about probability.

 

I have implied that any fool knows that the account of the Phoenix is purely mythological and yet, you cannot prove a negative. I cannot know that the Phoenix does not exist in the way that I know that 2 + 2 = 4. What is the probability of the existence of the Phoenix, or of unicorns, or Leprechauns, or, for that matter, angels and demons, heaven or hell, souls, ghosts, or a supernatural theistic deity?

 

To take this seriously, I’m going to beg you to let me wander into that sweet spot where theology and philosophy merge with algebra. I’ll try to make this quick:

 In logic classes you will see some equations that look rather like algebra.  

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. 

We have a certain innate ability to judge probability, but we often believe things because we want to believe them, without giving the evidence a clear priority. We have this famous illustration from a popular comedy:

Let me illustrate how sloppy we Americans are when it comes to this:  We have just over 300 million adults in this country. The chances of winning the popular PowerBall or MegaMillions lottery is one in 175 million. . . and yet, a full one-third of Americans will tell you that winning the lottery is their retirement plan.  

Only 2 people, out of the 300 million people in the country are actually going to win the lottery. However, over 6 million have contracted covid-19, but more than half of Americans won’t wear a mask because they do not believe that they will encounter the virus. . . they are 3 million times more likely to become infected with Covid than they are to win the lottery and in convenience stores all across America at this moment, people are lining up, without masks, to buy lottery tickets. 

I know how much you enjoy hearing me talk about how stupid Americans are but 86% of the people in the UK buy lottery tickets for their one in 50 million chance of winning. The lottery, both here and there, is a form of taxation on people who did poorly in math class. To get people on both sides of the pond to be better at critical thinking about such things as our religious life, our personal finances, and our health, we need to train ourselves to be able to weight probability beyond what we want to believe is true.

 

And to help us with 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. If you have any friends who are telling you that they do not plan to take the Covid vaccine when it is available, you might want to point out to them that it was vaccines that they had years ago that prevented them from having polio or chicken pox and they might want to rethink the anti-vac propaganda they have been hearing.

And we know that wind turbines don’t cause cancer because Donald 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, 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 . . . literally inheriting your family’s or your community’s predominant faith.

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. 

You can find examples of people using Bayes’ theorem to conclude with high probability that Jesus performed the miracles described in the gospels or that Jesus rose from the dead. To do that, they are granting the testimony of the New Testament tremendous weight as evidence. If they do that in a conversation with an atheist, for example, the conversation comes to an end as soon as they insist that there is any reliable evidence at all that the New Testament is describing actual events. 

I would argue that Clement was not stupid for believing in the existence of the Phoenix. He had heard many accounts from people around him and he felt that he had it on good authority. The crucial aspect of applying Bayes’ theorem to religion, is that you have to keep questioning your prior assumptions of probability and collecting new evidence. . . which is exactly what religious people have been trained not to do!

 

As children, we were willing to begin with an assumption of high probability that our parents’ religion was reliable. When we were given the opportunity to actually read the Bible, it may have been presented to us as being uniquely evidentiary. So, we entered our young religious life with a head full of assumptions and confidence about things, virtually all of which were just wrong. Looked at critically, we had no evidence at all to undergird a supernatural theistic faith.

 

When the lights are turned on in that dark cathedral of our skull, when we realize that the truth claims of our childhood faith are vacuous, the majority of people join what my friend, Bishop John Spong, has called, “the church alumni association.” 

 

But when you walk out the front door of the church, what do you see?

In America what I see is anger boiling over in the streets. Anger about police violence, anger about chronic poverty, racism, discrimination, about the inability to get ahead, to get a decent job, to get a decent education. 

What do you see when you walk away from religion? Do you see a country that has failed to meaningfully address the current pandemic and all of the inequalities it has revealed? Do you see a world that is failing to address climate change while still pouring endless resources into preparing for the next war? Do you see obscene wealth in one part of your city and inexcusable poverty in another? 

 

Forgive me, but what the Church of England, the United Reform Church, and the Methodists have in common is that none of them are spending enough time thinking about what really matters to people of faith, which is other people. And that, my friends, may be what the dying churches of England have in common with the dying churches of America, a slow descent into irrelevance, an irrelevance rooted in magical thinking, an unwillingness to be self-critical, and an avoidance of critical thinking about what is real, what matters, what can be known about the real world. 

In conclusion, may I ask you to judge for yourselves. Who in this collection of pictures is going to make a difference in the next year? Who is a part of the solution and who is a part of the problem? And, for both my American and British audiences, I’ll tip you off that the archbishop of Canterbury is pictured here and the bishop as is the Bishop of our National Cathedral in Washington. Do you know which one is which and do you know their names and what they stand for? And maybe your answer will become evidence of my point.

Keep questioning your previous probability assumptions and continue to collect evidence. Try to make a difference.