“Belief and Faith, Myth and Sacred Narrative” June 27, 2021
Dr. Roger Ray, pastor click here to see the video
Karen Armstrong: In the Western world, a strong belief in the objective truths of religion, which are viewed as incontrovertible, demonstrable facts, is regarded as essential to the life of faith. When asking if somebody is religious, people often inquire: “Does he or she believe?” as though accepting certain creedal propositions was the prime religious activity. Indeed, faith is equated with belief, but this equation is of recent provenance. Originally the meaning of the word “faith” was akin to trust, as when we say that we have faith in a friend or an ideal. Faith was not an intellectual position but a virtue: it was the careful cultivation, by means of the rituals and myths of religion, of the conviction that, despite all the dispiriting evidence to the contrary, life had some ultimate meaning and value. The Latin word credo (translated now as “I believe”) seems to have derived from the phrase cor dare: to give one’s heart.
I don’t always allow myself to be sucked into social media debates but when I do, it is usually in a conversation about guns. A young woman that I have tried to help through some really ugly family issues that have left her and her young child vulnerable to the erratic whims of a series of bad boyfriends, has tried to convince me that her current flame is the “one.” And no one would be happier about it if I could convince myself that it was true, but their most recent posts have been about “prince charming” taking her to the gun range to help her learn how to handle the new hand gun he has given her to keep in her apartment with her severely ADD elementary school aged son who has never spent more than five minutes in my house without slipping off to find a TV remote where he can download inappropriate pay-per-view movies. Given his penchant for following the rules, I felt the need to point out to her that whenever a woman has a gun in her home, that she increases her chances of being shot and killed by 1700%.
There is a reason why America has more than 40,000 gun deaths every year and Japan averages about 7. The proliferation of guns always increases gun deaths.
Every gun owner in the world imagines themselves to be John Wick, able to kill 80 or more bad guys in a 90 minute film, while never sustaining a wound that slows him down for more than a moment. But the majority of gun deaths, as you see on this chart, are self- inflicted because there is a lot of depression among gun owners and not a small amount of drug and alcohol abuse. Suicide is the most common lethal use of a gun in America, murder is the second, accidents are third, and legitimate self defense is just a fraction of the total. And, it is well documented that there are more accidental deaths from guns than legitimate use in self-defense and last year, 220 of those were young children shooting a parent…. Usually with a very cleverly hidden gun with multiple safety features thrown in. And still, someone in the family will often insist “that gun wasn’t loaded!”
This is not a sermon about gun safety, but I want to talk about faith and belief, and it seems like this is a good example. Gun owners are a perfect example of people who passionately believe in things that are demonstrably not true. They believe what they believe about their guns because they want to believe what they believe. They believe what they believe because of how owning a gun makes them feel. An insecure man can compensate for what he doesn’t have in his underwear with what he can sling over his shoulder or put in a holster. A frightened woman can believe that she has suddenly become the Black Widow because she has a cheap handgun and 90 minutes of practice on a gun range.
Any sincere look at the facts for even five minutes will clearly demonstrate that they dramatically reduce their safety by owning a gun, but this is a matter of faith, around here, a matter of religion, and not a matter that can be affected by reason, information, or facts. They believe what they believe because they want to believe it, and they believe it because of how their faith makes them feel. Their faith doesn’t make them bulletproof but it does make them immune to facts.
As the magician, James Randi opined, “Those who believe without reason cannot be convinced by reason.” If you reach firm beliefs based on whims and preferences, hard data is not likely to change your mind.
Consider the fact that there are more than 70 million people in America who voted for Donald Trump, twice! They voted for him a second time after seeing what he did for 4 years in the White House. Now consider the fact that most of these people also own several guns. Do you feel safer?
Here in the Ozarks, where we have been in the national news a lot lately because only 30% of the people in the area have been vaccinated against Covid and we
have the highest transmission rate in the country of the deadly Delta variant of Covid, but many of our locals believe firmly that they know more than the virologists and scientists who developed the vaccine, and they would rather take their chances with the virus than with the vaccine because “they don’t know what is in it.” These same people will also line up at Sonic to buy hotdogs, but they don’t want to have something put in their body when they don’t know what is in it.
Even with our hospital Covid wards filled to capacity and ambulances speeding patients to hospitals in St Louis and Kansas City, they have faith that God will protect them and, I suppose, if God is busy, they can use their guns to shoot the virus if it tries to get into their lungs. And this, I will submit, is why the MENSA club never holds their national conventions in Springfield.
I don’t typically walk around with my views printed on my shirts, but I have made an exception during the pandemic. I have this one that says, “Science doesn’t care what you believe” as a t-shirt and as a hoodie, so that I can make this statement in public regardless of the weather.
But this is not a contest between science, facts, objective thinking in opposition to religion because, it isn’t just religion that falls prey to believing things without reason or, worse, against reason. People believe a lot of things that are false because they want to believe them, they like to believe them. But how those beliefs make them feel has nothing to do with the beliefs being true or false.
Please allow me once more to cite the Great Dane, Soren Kierkegaard, who said that
“there are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.”
Right now, all of our hospital covid wards are full. None of those patients were vaccinated, and yet, any one of them could have gone to any Walgreens or CVS drugstore in town and received a vaccine at no charge without an appointment. It couldn’t be easier and yet 2 out of 3 of our neighbors are unprotected because they have allowed themselves to believe things that are truly stupid.
In the world of religion, we talk a lot about belief and faith and all too often those words are associated with a choice to believe in things for which there is no evidence, or even to have faith in things for which there is a great deal of evidence that what they believe is not true.
Some of our favorite religious scholars, including Karen Armstrong and the late Marcus Borg, have spent a great deal of time documenting the fact that the words “belief” and “faith” should not be taken as a matter of assassinating your brains so that you can believe in things that are clearly not true.
Karen Armstrong describes early Christian baptisms in which the newly baptized was lowered into the water and when they were pulled back up, they shouted, in Greek, “pistus” which is the word we translate as “faith” in the Bible but in this context, it obviously means something like “courage” or “conviction.”
The ancient church wrote creeds to describe the Christian faith, in fact, the Apostles’ Creed in Latin begins with the word, “credo” which we translate as saying “I believe,” . . . “I believe in God the Father, Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth”….
But, again, this was not a claim in the literal facts of virgin birth or bodily resurrection. Marcus Borg insists that we should understand this creed as meaning “I belove” rather than “I believe.” Because you can love the Catholic Church for what it has meant in your life without believing that the Pope is infallible or that you have to be opposed to women’s reproductive rights. You can love your Jewish faith community without believing that God divided the Red Sea for the Israelites to escape Egypt, or that Moses caused water to flow from a rock and bread to fall down from heaven. You can love your Muslim faith community without believing that Muhammad flew on a winged horse up to heaven.
In our time, people will find the basic tenets of the Christian religion to be impossible to believe and they will say, “I have lost my faith,” but I don’t think that is a good use of that word. I don’t believe in a supernatural theistic god, or in angels, demons, souls, heaven, or hell but I believe that I am a person of faith. I don’t believe in things that I know don’t exist, but I have courage and commitment to what my religious life represents . . . justice, mercy, liberty, equality, freedom, love, unity, respect, compassion, and a cherishing of the earth itself and of all life. I have a lot of faith, but that doesn’t mean that I believe in silly things.
Christian communion, the Jewish Passover, the Muslim hajj, all symbolically reenact the sacred stories of their faith tradition, and while many Christians may take the account of the passion as being literal history, or Jews believe that the destroying angel killed the first born of the Egyptians, or Muslims may think that Muhammad made the Devil run away by throwing rocks at him, I trust that most people are engaging in a ritual to connect themselves to a faith community they want to be committed to. . . rather than believing in a powerful, evil, demon that you can throw rocks at.
A community of faith almost always has shared sacred stories, but the power of those stories does not rely on their historical accuracy. Frankly, to do so would be to embrace a denial of reality and to embrace embarrassing stupidity.
Honestly, I look forward to some Christmas in the future when I will attend a Christmas Eve service and just experience the light and darkness, the carols and lessons, the choirs and candles, but I can’t now and have not for many years because those fables were taught to me as history and they, along with a huge truck load of myths and lies, twisted my perception of reality and retarded my intellectual growth. So, I can’t hear those carols or see those decorations without some anger just yet, but I am confident that it will not always be that way.
You can love the community, the tradition, literally the bells and smells of your faith, without trying to turn beautiful stories into factual historical accounts. The progressive church can be resolved never again to pass along unbelievable myths as facts to another generation, but we can celebrate the rituals and seasons that are associated with our roots, our tribe, our tradition.
My old friend, Charles Hedrick, and my newer friend, Bishop John Shelby Spong, are both founding members of the Jesus Seminar. They are both historical and biblical scholars who have often spoken at our church because they are the kind of credible thinkers who have helped us to become who we are.
But in a private dinner one night, Bishop Spong asked me why Charlie still goes to a Baptist Church.
Because I had asked Charlie myself, many times in many different ways, I was able to tell him: Charlie long ago divorced himself from the beliefs and practices but his friends are there, and he wants to stay connected to them. He also envisions the Baptist church someday being better than what it is today, and he doesn’t want to give up on it.
Before Charlie retired to Kansas City to be near his daughters, I regularly had lunch with him at the University and he asked me once, “Why does John Spong still go to an Episcopal Church, he can’t possibly share many beliefs with them?”
Because I had this very conversation with Bishop Spong, I was able to tell Charlie, “His friends are there and he has a long history with the church that, though it has largely rejected him the way the Baptists have rejected you, but he still hopes to see it become a better church than it is today.”
Though I will never return to my mother denomination, I respect the decision that Charlie and John have made because they have chosen connection to community and I think we should all make that choice, I just needed a better community to be connected to. While we exist as a resource to thousands of listeners scattered across the globe, I encourage you not to let this YouTube or iTunes channel be your only connection to a community of faith. Find your tribe, love your tribe, try to tolerate their faults and fables, but don’t every stop hoping for them to also become better. The church needs to abandon its history of dishonesty and embrace an honest approach to life.
That’s what I am hoping for, and that is why I want to keep kicking at the darkness until it bleeds daylight.
