Demythologizing Islam

Demythologizing Islam        April 24, 2022      Dr. Roger Ray

click here to see the video

 

Reza Aslan in No God but God “Like so many prophets before him, Muhammad never claimed to have invented a new religion. By his own admission, Muhammad’s message was an attempt to reform the existing religious beliefs and cultural practices of pre-Islamic Arabia so as to bring the God of the Jews and Christians to the Arab peoples.”

 

The first time I heard one of my professors say that the Apostle Paul was a mystic, I immediately wanted to object. Sure, he saw visions, he spoke in tongues, he believed in his own “revealed” religious truths, but I didn’t think of him as a mystic. I thought of him as a legalistic, misogynist, homophobic, literalist who killed the message of Jesus by turning a message of love into a religion of guilt and fear.

 

But, at his core, Paul was a mystic. Listen to how he describes his conversion experience in his own words, in a letter he wrote to the church in Corinth: (2 Corinthians 12:2-4

I know a person in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know; God knows. ³ And I know that such a person—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know; God knows— ⁴ was caught up into Paradise and heard things that are not to be told, that no mortal is permitted to repeat. 

 

Taken at face value, Paul’s description of his mystical experience is not much different from what we have read of other mystics, even those who are Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, or Catholic. What we tend to call the “unitive” experience; a powerful but typically indescribable feeling of being united with God. A kind of personal epiphany . . . a unique but always indescribable sense of being in the presence of God.

 

But, a generation or two after Paul was dead, one of his fans, someone who certainly never met him, described Paul’s mystical experience this way, in the book of Acts:

Acts 9:3- 9  ³ Now as he was going along and approaching Damascus, suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. ⁴ He fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” ⁵ He asked, “Who are you, Lord?” The reply came, “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. ⁶ But get up and enter the city, and you will be told what you are to do.” ⁷ The men who were traveling with him stood speechless because they heard the voice but saw no one. ⁸ Saul got up from the ground, and though his eyes were open, he could see nothing; so they led him by the hand and brought him into Damascus. ⁹ For three days he was without sight, and neither ate nor drank.

 

The writer of the book of Acts, in an attempt to make Paul seem to be more impressive, more important, takes his experience which was entirely indescribable, Paul didn’t know if he was just having an out of body experience or if he was physically transported to heaven, but he heard things he couldn’t repeat and saw things he couldn’t describe. But, Luke, in a total work of fiction, concretizes Paul’s experience and literally gives it a street address and witnesses…. He was on the road to Damascus, there was a blinding light, Jesus speaks audibly to him, other people on the road also hear the voice, giving him instructions. Paul is blinded by the experience until he is healed by a Christian in Damascus. 

 

Those of you who grew up going to a Christian Church probably remember the more concrete, fictionalized version of Paul’s experience and you may have no memory at all of his own description of the experience. It is not that you had never heard it, it is just that Luke’s version is more memorable. It creates a narrative movie in your imagination. 

Paul’s own words don’t leave any muddy footprints on your brain and, in fact, they may just not make any sense, and yet, that was his honest account.

 

The task before me today is to say something about demythologizing Islam and I must apologize, once again, for using the Christian bible for my opening illustration but I trust that you can see how later generations, in a sophomoric attempt at polishing the credentials of a deceased saint, will try to add details that actually destroy the story, rather than illuminating it. 

 

If you want to understand Paul, and mind you, I am not suggesting that would be a good use of your time, but if you do, you need to read the authentic letters that Paul wrote himself and try to ignore everything said about him in the book of Acts which is, honestly, just a bit of propaganda aimed at pumping up Paul’s resume. 

 

My only point in bringing Paul up is to say that something very similar happened to the founding prophet of Islam, the sixth century Arab reformer, Muhammad. Muhammad was born in 570 a.d. in the city of Mecca, which had long been a religious and spiritual center of the Arab world. 

 

He was orphaned at an early age and was raised by relatives and given exposure to both the ways of the Bedouin desert culture and the settled city dwellers. He was a product of his environment, influenced by the many Arab religions honored in Mecca as well as Zoroastrian, Jewish, and Christian faiths. 

 

He was, however, illiterate and depended upon his wife to read and write for him. She was older and had some means as a merchant. 

Muhammad participated in the common practice of robbing caravans that followed the merchant routes through what is now Saudi Arabia. But he kept up a practice of contemplation in isolation in a desert cave. It is said that while in prayer in that cave that he was visited by the angel, Gabriel, who gave him messages from God. Muhammad memorized these messages, given to him by Gabriel, and dictated them to his wife. These writing became, for Muslims, the actual literal word of God, collected into the Quran.

 

However, like Paul, his initial experience in the cave was not quite so cut and dried. He had some kind of a mystical experience, possibly brought on by fasting and dehydration, but real or imagined, he certainly didn’t call it a conversation with Gabriel. In fact, he panicked. Like most people of his era, he believed that the desert was inhabited by evil spirits, call jin. He believed that he may have become possessed by an evil jin and he wanted to commit suicide.

 

In his distress, his wife, Khadija, sent him to visit her cousin, Waraqa, who was well versed in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, and he convinced Muhammad that what he had experienced was a visit from the angel Gabriel. It was Waraqa who announced to Khadija that Muhammad had been chosen to be the prophet to his people.

 

Muhammad’s progress, however, was rather slow. His own theology was evolving. The sura of the Quran are not organized chronologically. In fact, they are organized loosely, not by topic but from the longest to the shortest. But when you read them in the sequence in which they were actually written, it becomes evident that he started out with a more polytheistic world view and evolved into an adamant monotheist. 

His early, more poetic works, were very similar to others in his culture but he gradually grew into his own style. It should be clear that he had no intentions of starting a new religion but to reform the faith of his peers and unite the embattled tribes around a faith in one god, Allah. 

 

I have no reason to doubt Muhammad’s sincerity even if I do doubt his orientation to reality. I am reminded of what Scott Peck said about St. Joan of Arc, “You might say that she was schizophrenic, but you would be wrong to say that she was merely schizophrenic.” There was a greatness of character about Muhammad, even if he was also somewhat delusional. 

 

He reinterpreted many Jewish and Christian narratives from his distinctly Arab perspective and elevated his followers to become confident of their importance to a generous and loving God. Though not neatly expressed in a succinct way in the Quran, Muslims everywhere, from the time of Muhammad to the present, acknowledge five fundamental pillars of what it means to be a Muslim:

All five were already in practice before Muhammad in Zoroastrian, Jewish, and Christian communities but Muhammad sharpens each and gives them a distinct monotheistic focus.

The first is the declaration of faith, there is no god but Allah and Muhammad is god’s prophet.

 

The second is the obligation to pray five times a day. Earlier in his career, Muhammad was telling people to pray 50 times a day but he eventually whittled that down to something that could actually be done… 5 times a day.

 

The third is a binding obligation to charity. The fourth is obligatory fasting during the month of Ramadan. And the fifth is a requirement, if at all possible, to make a pilgrimage to Mecca. 

 

Sadly, religions always seem to become institutions. The five pillars are guides to living a life in surrender to God in peaceful harmony with others. However, religions are rarely simply a belief system. They become identified with an ethnicity, a government, and authoritative and competitive view of the world. And, as an institution, religions become inflexible and oppressive.

Westerners are often deeply offended by the way that many Muslim women are expected to, or who choose to, cover themselves entirely in a burka, or almost entirely with a head scarf, along with all of the debates about whether women can drive or travel alone. I get that. I find it offensive. However….

while we accuse them of absurdly repressing the sexuality of women, they are not wrong to point out that westerners go to horrible extremes in pushing women to be objects of constant sexual exploitation. 

I don’t think there is a defensible position on either extreme, in fact, it often seems that our cultures cannot seem to find a sane center between pornography and Puritanism, but clearly, we cannot say that Islam is alone in being wrong on this point.

 

As with other world religions, even though Islam is the most modern of the major religions, it is still mired in myth and superstition. Obviously, Muhammad did not split the moon nor did he ride a winged horse/mule to Jerusalem and then to heaven to meet Adam, Moses, John the Baptist, and Jesus, as well as God. And, more importantly, Gabriel did not dictate the contents of the Quran to Muhammad. Islam is a human invention, like all of the other religions of the world and like all of the other religions, there are good things and there are things that are in desperate need of reform. 

 

Although about 20% of the world claims to be Muslim, we associate the religion the most closely with the governments and peoples of the Middle East. Holding onto the myths associated with certain “holy sites” and disputed real estate claims, primarily focused on Israel but not exclusively so, keeps leading the Arab world and the western world into bloody confrontation.

 

This year the Muslim observance of Ramadan coincided with Easter and Passover when the temple mount in Jerusalem is so packed with pilgrims from all three faiths, tensions quickly became incendiary with the same old stories of rock throwing and Israeli police over reactions. 

 

Palestinians carry within them a huge burden of rage left over from centuries of colonization by European powers, which has only been made worse by the land theft that created the state of Israel and the way in which Israel confines and oppresses the Palestinians within their borders. So, sure, there is agitation from the Palestinians…. Every year, rock throwing, stabbing, and I have personally been on the receiving end of threats and a shoving match in the Palestinian quarter of Jerusalem when some young boys in the 1980’s assumed that because I am an American, that I was a supporter of Ronald Regan. I was saved only be being able to assure them that I hated Regan more than they did. . . which I did. Let me know if you need further details.

 

Still, even though there is Palestinian agitation, at the end of every season of conflict, the casualty count is always ten to one, injured Palestinians over Israelis. There is fault on both sides, but it is not an equal situation. It may not be that the Israelis hold all of the cards, but they at least start every hand holding three aces. 

 

There are those in the Muslim community who insist that the word, “Islam” means peace. I am anything but an Arabic scholar, but I know enough to know that is not true. “Islam” means “surrender” as in a total surrender to God. But the net effect is to say that Islam should be a religion of peace. And while the over whelming majority of the world’s nearly 2 billion Muslims are peace loving, decent people, they are not the Muslims we hear about in the news.

 

We hear about Muslim terrorists who attack the west, and Muslim factions who fight each other. You cannot blame all of the internecine fighting on Islam, and you can’t blame all of the terrorism on the religion. 

There are, as I have mentioned, centuries old colonial resentments, and anger about cultural domination of western fashions, products, music, movies, and language, all of which threaten their culture with extinction without even mentioning western military bases in their lands which is a source of constant irritation.

 

And the fighting between the major factions of Islam, Sunnis, Shi’a, and Kurds, which, at times, is religious, but it is also racial, geographical, and financial. Our nation’s longest wars have been in Afghanistan and Iraq and neither of them, in my opinion, are the major global offenders.

 

Forgive me if I am talking above my paygrade here, but, in my opinion, Saudi Arabia, the home of Mecca and Medina, is the worst, exporting both terrorists and internecine battles among Muslim states. They export the extremist form of Islam, Wahhabism, with all of its insistence on a literal interpretation of the Quran and militance against anyone who differs from them.

 

There is no pretense of a separation of church and state in Saudi Arabia, their flag contains the Muslim confession, “There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is God’s prophet.” But there is also a sword, and the sword is not symbolic.

We are focused right now on the war crimes and genocide of Russia in the Ukraine. People like me have been decrying the “kids in cages” on our boarder and our overall mistreatment of immigrants; but all the while, the Saudis maintain the practice of public beheading with a sword.

 

In March, the Saudi’s beheaded more than 80 men in a single public execution.

More than 40 of those men were from the minority Shia population. The Saudis labeled them terrorists, but I am afraid that their real crime was just being Shia. This is barbarism at an intolerable level, and it goes on year after year, while they remain in the good graces of oil burning Western democracies. In fact, we are currently asking them to pump more oil so that we can stop buying Russian oil and that is, if I may say it plainly, hypocrisy and it should stop. I will be speaking to this issue more fully in June… I know that you can hardly wait, but as Soren Kierkegaard wrote, “This must be said, so now let it be said.” Or, at least, let it be said in June.

 

The 2018 torture, murder, and dismemberment of the American journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, is all the evidence we should need to say that this flavor of violent Islam must be reformed and in spite of Donald Trump’s defense of the Saudi prince, the civilized world must stop looking the other way. You cannot claim this is not, in important ways, connected to Wahhabism, and this cannot stand in the modern world.

 

I believe that the execution of prisoners is always wrong, whether it is in Missouri, or Texas, or Saudi Arabia; but public execution by beheading is taking pride in violent and cruel execution and we should be outraged by this policy. And, it should be obvious, this sermon would get me beheaded in Saudi Arabia.

 

Islamic scholars will insist that this is not true Islam, and I agree, but the religion that promotes peace needs to be a part of the obvious reform that is needed here. 

 

I would like to conclude this series on demythologizing religion by quoting, once again, the famous scholar, Karen Armstrong, who said, “If your understanding of the divine made you kinder, more empathetic, and impelled you to express sympathy in concrete acts of loving-kindness, this was good theology. But if your notion of God made you unkind, belligerent, cruel, of self-righteous, or if it led you to kill in God's name, it was bad theology.” The 21^st century must be the century when good religion takes the stage as we usher all bad religion into the pages of a dark and shameful past.

 

Resurrecting Hope

Resurrecting Hope 

David Ketchum 

April 17, 2022 

Watch the Video HERE 

 “We’re With You”

In the late 1990s, Holly and I taught English classes during the summer semesters at a small university outside of St. Petersburg, Russia. One year, a professor joined our classes, to brush up on conversational English. Over those weeks, made longer by the famous White Nights, we had the delight of getting to know Vladimir a little more. We traded stories, and he shared books with us by his wife, who translated Russian poetry into English, and vice versa. We went mushroom hunting with his family in the grand forests north of the city, where I learned there are mosquitos that can bite through denim. But the most memorable time we spent with Vladimir was during a visit in March 2000 when he took us on a guided tour of St. Petersburg and shared stories of his youth during the siege of Leningrad during World War II. 

I had studied the siege before, but viewing it through the eyes of a man who lived through it changed everything. The city looked completely different. Somehow, we hadn’t really noticed the scars from bombs that still etched their memory into the sides of buildings. We didn’t know what it really meant for musicians, literally starving, to take the stage there in December 1942 to perform Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 7, the music broadcast across the city and to the German lines on loudspeakers as an act of defiance and resistance. We couldn’t understand the human loss behind the incalculable numbers: 872 days; more than 100,000 bombs dropped on the city; approximately 1.5 million deaths, over 600,000 from starvation; 1.4 million people evacuated (many of whom also died). Vladimir spoke about how people boiled leather bound books and wallpaper glue to make a broth to fill their empty bellies. To hear his soft voice tell these stories, we wondered at the power of the human body to hold such grief and devastation, and turn it into music, poetry, and hope. 

     We stopped at a row of apartment buildings, and Vladimir paused, the silence settling in on us as he gathered himself. This is where he lived, he explained, when a bomb fell through a few floors of the building. Amazingly, no one was killed – because the bomb had been sabotaged by factory workers. It was a simple act of resistance, probably at great risk to the workers, and it saved our friend’s life. We lingered there, in the gratitude and reverence for those who were brave enough to do whatever they could to save a life, even in the middle of a war, even at risk to themselves. We lingered in the hope that the world could be different and that we could be part of the difference. 

It’s impossible to know how often this happened, but we do know that forced labor became increasingly common in the later years of the war, and these workers had no motivation to help the Germans in the war effort. Combined with shortages of materials and poor working conditions, many bombs were defective, or completely ineffective. Richard J. Evans, writing in the New York Review, shared a similar story to that of our Russian friend: “A German bomb fell through the roof of my wife’s grandmother’s house in the East End of London in 1943 and lodged, unexploded, in her bedroom wardrobe. When the bomb disposal unit opened it up, they found a note inside. ‘Don’t worry, English,’ it said, ‘we’re with you. Polish workers.’”

“Do I Even Know Her Now?”

The world is different today, with Russia as the aggressor in a horrifying war against Ukraine. Now Russian bombs fall through Ukrainian apartments and Ukrainians flee before the violence.  As I noted during the first days of the invasion of Ukraine, the last eight years of violence in eastern Ukraine created 1.5 million displaced people. They are part of the more than 84 million “forcibly displaced people worldwide,” 26.6 million of whom are refugees who have fled their home nations. They come from around the world, but more than two-thirds are from Syria, Afghanistan, South Sudan, Myanmar, and Venezuela. (https://www.unhcr.org/refugee-statistics/ ) These statistics are a key indicator of how violent and broken our human relationships are. And the number of forcibly displaced people “has doubled since 2010,” reaching an all-time high. (https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/06/unhcr-how-many-refugees/ )

        With the invasion of Ukraine, we add the more than 4.3 million people who have fled their country. As Ella Fassler noted, this is “the largest movement of people in Europe since World War II.” (https://truthout.org/articles/grassroots-groups-are-making-aid-supply-chains-to-support-people-fleeing-ukraine/ ) And despite the heroic resistance of thousands of Russian protestors, the numbers released in March showed about 58% of Russians supported the invasion, with only 23% opposing it. 75% of older respondents supported this new war. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/03/08/russia-public-opinion-ukraine-invasion/ ) In a report by Robert Coalson for RadioFreeEurope/RadioLiberty, a 28 year old Russian woman living near the Ukrainian border protested the war and lamented her parents’ support of it:

"‘At first, her main argument was, “There is nothing we can do and nothing depends on us,”' said Yekaterina, who asked to be identified only by her first name because of her opposition to the war. ‘Later, her argument was even worse: “They asked us for help.” The war didn't shake her. It hasn't evoked any emotions in her. I was just shocked by her reaction. / ‘Now, I am asking myself, “Who is this woman?”’ she continued, noting that her mother ‘sheds tears’ over Soviet sacrifices during World War II every year on May 9, which is marked in Russia as Victory Day. ‘Do I even know her? How can a living person become so hard-hearted about a war started by her own government?’” / ‘For the first time in my life, I felt real shame and revulsion toward my parents,’ she said. ‘Since then, I have hardly spoken to them.’” (https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-war-support-putin-analysis/31749491.html )

“While It Was Still Dark”

I’ve been carrying these diverging stories in my heart, both born out of the horror and grief of war. In stories like Vladimir’s, an act of resistance and kindness crossed borders and created community in the most astounding and unlooked for of places, like a note placed inside a sabotaged bomb: “Don’t worry, we’re with you.” In stories like Yekaterina’s, we see the shadow. Saying no to the war also meant saying no to loved ones: “For the first time in my life, I felt real shame and revulsion toward my parents.” These are choices we are constantly making: how do we connect with people across differences? When is that connection possible, and when is it time to set a hard line? And how do we find and build community when we are isolated and rejected, or when we are exhausted and ready to give up – when we need community the most? 

        We feel all this deeply, circling around the question of what it means to be human. Queries like these connect us with a haunting, aching pain that echo across cultures and ages in stories and songs from around the world: how can we go on? And more especially, how can we go on when the world has found a way to make things that we thought wouldn’t - couldn’t - get any worse, worse? Just last year, one Easter ago, we were grappling with the realities of the pandemic; protesting White supremacy and police violence while watching the first days of Derek Chauvin’s trial; mourning a string of mass shootings; and witnessing the coup in Myanmar and civil war in Ethiopia, to name just a few. This year, we are still grappling with the realities of the pandemic, and  still grappling with the realities of White supremacy and police violence (police violence statistics are basically unchanged), while our attention is also turned to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and increased reports of war crimes; the Sunset Park subway attack; another week of mass shootings, leaving at least eight dead; and deadly flooding in the Philippines, to name just a few.

        We could go through the timeline and repeat this exercise, year after year. These snapshots of human suffering take us back to that haunting pain – how do we live in a world with so much suffering, where terrible things are added to terrible things? And how do we keep the possibility of change, towards life, beauty, truth, and love, alive? 

Today is Easter, and in the Easter stories, and stories like them from around the world, what is most meaningful and applicable to me is not the miracles, but the resurrection of hope. In the lectionary readings for today, Mary Magdalene runs to the tomb “while it was still dark,” at the first moment her Sabbath duties would allow. Seeing the missing stone, she assumes the worst and her already broken heart is broken even more. How could anything get worse? Wasn’t crucifying Jesus enough? So she runs to Peter and the disciples and says, “They have taken [him], and we do not know where they have laid him.” Everything is lost. There is no hope. They go back to the tomb, and Mary is left with nothing but her, “weeping outside the tomb.” Even when she sees angels, her grief is so great that she just repeats her lament: “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him." And then, standing next to the resurrected Jesus, she supposes him to be the gardener and asks where the body is. Only speaking her name brings her to the possibility of hope and gives her a new message, reconnecting her with her humanity and her community. 

        The power of connection, of speaking each other’s names in the midst of grief, is a beautifully human power. Our care and love for each other can call each other back from the edge of despair, back into community. We remember these stories, from Mary weeping at Jesus’ tomb to my friend Vladimir standing at his childhood apartment building, because we know that this is how we keep pressing forward “while it is still dark,” while our hearts are still broken, and while our hope is nearly gone. We know that the work we do for change might not accomplish anything, but we also know that doing something, even when it feels like nothing will come of it, is the only way we keep the possibility of change alive. 

Holding a Paradox

This week, I watched a video of Ukrainian firefighters rescuing a puppy that had been buried in rubble. Somehow, the dog was alive and I was holding back tears. The video hadn’t been verified, but even if it turns out to be just a story, it is the kind of story that humans seem to need to tell. We need to remember the potential for goodness is ourselves and in the world. We can still bring life out of the rubble. 

        Although not as easy to put into a cheery video, people have also been coming together in amazing ways to ease what suffering they can for Ukrainian refugees. In the early days of the invasion, many of those fleeing the violence didn’t even consider themselves to be refugees and expected to return home soon. But as the invasion has dragged on, both refugees and aid organizations began making plans for how to support them “for the long haul.” This was one of the main points of the article I quoted earlier.  Already, Fassler reported, “an informal, loosely connected grassroots aid network of about a dozen groups is working on establishing supply chains and long-term warehouse aid hubs in Moldova, Romania and Slovakia, and hope to set up hubs at halfway points in places like the Netherlands and Germany.” And other groups are organizing specifically to meet the needs of minorities that have faced discrimination during the refugee process, including Roma, Indians, and Africans, as well as LGBTQIA+ folx. (https://truthout.org/articles/grassroots-groups-are-making-aid-supply-chains-to-support-people-fleeing-ukraine/ )

Human beings are paradoxes in this way. We have the potential to commit – and keep committing - the violence that destroys people’s lives and homes and creates refugees. But we also have the potential to respond to suffering with generosity and justice, creating friendships that heal. Taylor Fairbank, the operations director at Distribute Aid, points out that the link between the two: 

“People are fleeing climate change driven by for-profit companies, or wars driven by interests of imperialist governments… .  / The West is especially complicit in outsourcing the violence that is driving its economic growth on to poor Black and Brown countries and then punishing those who dare flee to safety. So not only do we have to create a welcoming atmosphere to those who make it to our borders, but we have to support grassroots movements in our own countries and around the world that are fighting back against politicians and companies who capitalize off these harmful conditions.” (https://truthout.org/articles/grassroots-groups-are-making-aid-supply-chains-to-support-people-fleeing-ukraine/ )

This is the best meaning I can hear in the Easter story this year. We bear the terrifying potential for violence and harm of one another and the earth. We also bear the incredible potential for generosity and kindness, even in the most traumatic and difficult of circumstances. The Easter story holds this paradox. It begins with oppression and violence, with the state-sponsored murder of a human being whose crime was a fiery call to justice and whose ethic was love and compassion. It acknowledges the terror we feel in the wake of violent injustice, and it speaks to us of hope. But it is not a hope that sits back and waits. It is a hope that comes to us, even in our weariness, and says: “Please don’t give up.”

For that to work, to be sustainable, we need community. We need one another, to speak each others’ names and remind us of our humanity, and to give each other breaks to rest and regroup. Of course, we want a world where life isn’t so hard, where we get to enjoy poetry and music, gardening and good meals, without that joy being diminished by the heartbreak of discrimination, bigotry, violence, poverty, oppression, ecological destruction, and the like. That is the world we are fighting for. But until it exists, we each have to do whatever we can, both to change our communities and to encourage one another to not give up. As I learned again from Vladimir that day, outside the flats where he had survived a bomb, we live in the hope that the world can be different and that we can be part of the difference.

        Happy Easter! 

Demythologizing Earth-Based Spiritualities

Demythologizing Religion: Earth-Based Spiritualities and Naturalistic Paganism 

David Ketchum 

April 10, 2022 

Watch the Video HERE

When we left our conservative Christian denomination back in 2007, the whole world felt open to us. A lot of ideas and experiences had sparked our interest, but it had been difficult to truly explore them under the watchful gaze of those who filled the pews. We had already pushed the envelope for some time, such as when we traveled to a nearby city to attend PFLAG meetings, as well as movie nights featuring documentaries and foreign films. Although we knew it was ridiculous that activities like this were suspect, we also knew being careful was no joke. The social-controlling power of the telephone prayer-tree, for instance, was very real. Those spindly tentacles, whatever the intention, often fueled the town’s gossip. Finding ourselves free of that, we could finally try on any number of ideas, practices, and communities for size.  

        This included exploring several traditions that fell under the vague umbrella of earth-based spiritualities. I first studied neopaganism and witchcraft while living in the San Francisco bay area in the 1990s, and I felt especially interested in the neopagan vision of activist spirituality. More personally, I was drawn to these spiritual traditions that honored the natural world. There wasn’t much emphasis on nature in my childhood denomination beyond being taught that humans were created by God to take dominion of the earth, and this included destroying it for profit. Encountering traditions where belonging to and caring for creation was the basis of spirituality, rather than something that required a heated argument to justify, was refreshing. I also felt a profound relief in studying traditions that were not as invested in patriarchal and heterosexual norms. While I eventually settled into Buddhist and Quaker circles, I still feel at home with those pagan commitments to cultivating creativity and love in resistance to the more hierarchical and oppressive religions of most of our childhoods. 

An Astronomical Return

These kinds of experiences are not unique. Growing up in the 1980s, we were warned about many of these spiritualities. These popular fears were strangely exciting for many of my conservative community members, climaxing in an annual celebration of paranoia each Halloween. We were solemnly warned about getting abducted and sacrificed on some unholy altar in an isolated forest. These unfounded conspiracies excited some, terrified many, and unfairly maligned thousands. However, this delusional flight of fantasy also inspired my  friends to find books about goddess worship at the library and try out Dungeons & Dragons on the weekends. The paranoia did not seem to slow down interest in witchcraft, and it may have encouraged it. 

        Today, most of my friends either identify with atheism or earth-based spiritualities, and sometimes both. This isn’t a coincidence. Earth-based spiritualities are often a potent reminder of the tension between oppressed people and their oppressors, and especially of the possibility of power existing outside of acceptable, socially approved channels. As Vanessa Angélica Villarreal has explained: 

“Witches are feared because oppressed people with power are feared. For centuries, African, Indigenous, feminist, and folk spiritualities have suffered violent persecution and suppression for the mere accusation of ‘witchcraft.’ In the American spiritual lexicon, the witch is an amalgam of deep-seated misogyny and racism. A projection of all that is hated—sexually liberated, unmarried, aging, queer, asexual, embittered, racialized, primitive—she embodies the demonic, immoral forces that seek to tempt and take vengeance on the righteous. The witch is both the silenced, disbelieved, accused survivor and a terrifying threat to white male power—a symbolic identity that deeply resonates with women and marginalized people … .” (https://www.bitchmedia.org/article/commodification-witchcraft-sephora ) 

How much growth this resonance has led to, especially during the last fifty years, is difficult to measure. To begin, earth-based spiritualities and paganism are umbrella terms that gather together a great diversity of beliefs and cultural systems. The American Humanist  Association has listed at least nine major branches of paganism, each of which has several distinct forms. To take two examples, Neopaganism includes “Wicca -- in its many forms; neo-Shamanism; neo-Druidism; Asatru and other forms of Norse neo-paganism; neoNative American practices; the range of practices labeled ‘Women's Spirituality.’” While Meso-paganism includes cultures that have “been influenced by a conquering culture but has been able to maintain an independence of religious practice, e.g., many Native American nations.” (https://americanhumanist.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/paganism.pdf ) Although many people have identified some common values and beliefs, such as believing in the sacredness of nature, the diversity still makes it unrealistic to generalize about a single, unified movement. 

This also poses challenges when it comes to demographics. Surveys may lump anyone not affiliated with a mainstream religion into an “Other” category, and only recently has it become more common to differentiate between different earth-based spiritualities. The information we do have indicates a steady and dramatic increase in practitioners. To take one tradition as an example of this growth, Trinity College in Connecticut conducted three large surveys representing the continental USA. In 1990, the study estimated there were 8,000 Wiccans. By 2008, that number had grown to 340,000. In 2014, the Pew Research Center estimated that as many as 1.5 million people in the USA identified as Wiccan or Pagan. (https://qz.com/quartzy/1411909/the-explosive-growth-of-witches-wiccans-and-pagans-in-the-us/ ) As Carmen Fowler LaBerge tweeted in 2018, this would  mean that there were then more Wiccans than members of the Presbyterian Church (USA).

        Other indicators can be found in popular culture. For example, it’s estimated that psychic services are worth more than $2 billion dollars in the USA alone. And social media has witnessed a huge spike in content related to magic and witchcraft - by October 2021, #witchtok had over 19.8 billion views. Hopefully, we’ll continue to get more reliable demographic data in the years ahead. But, for now, what we know is that more and more people are finding meaning and support in these practices and communities. And this is no small thing, especially in light of the persecution that has historically targeted them.  

Growing Pains

        However, this rapid growth is a double-edged sword. As we’ve been emphasizing throughout these reflections on demythologizing religion, no spiritual or religious tradition is immune to human limitations or the potential for violence and oppression. So it is important to acknowledge that the rapid rise in popularity has brought with it a similar rise in awareness and criticism of earth-based spiritualities and their communities. One important example of this is, to  use Sarah Lyons’ phrase, the “co-mingling of racism and Paganism” among White supremacists around the world. 

        The decentralized nature of many pagan movements, which has been a wonderful opportunity to cultivate healthier relationships, has also made it easier for extremists, especially White supremacists, to co-opt some pagan traditions. In the USA, the National Socialist Movement is trading in the swastika for the Othala rune. And White supremacist pagans have been on prominent public display at far-right rallies and online, drawing people in with Odinist calls for “Faith, Family, and Folk.” Like all racism, these developments are horrible and horrifying. Gratefully, among those fighting back is the broader pagan community. For example, Lyons reported that:  

“They’ve formed advocacy groups like Heathens United Against Racism (HUAR) and The Asatru Community (TAC). These groups have banded together in public pronouncements: In August 2016, 43 Pagan organizations signed Declaration 127, a public renunciation of any Heathenry that promotes hatred or discrimination. Since then, that number has grown to more than 180 organizations in over 20 countries. And in 2017 TAC created 'The Shieldwall,' a manifesto compelling Heathens around the world to ‘denounce all those abusing [the Heathen] faith to spread hatred and negativity.’” (https://www.vice.com/en/article/59kq93/racists-are-threatening-to-take-over-paganism )

So on the one hand, you have many oppressed communities finally finding, not just greater acceptance, but also real opportunities to heal historical traumas, resist systemic injustice, build community and careers, and deepen and create empowering practices. But our social context is complicated, and the results of this growth are mixed. We live in a society built around exploitation that leads to widespread alienation and poor health, both physical and mental. It is also built around selling and consuming goods as the focus of life and often as a substitute for addressing injustice. To complicate things further, our society is currently mired in disinformation, lacking in critical thinking skills, and vulnerable to manipulation. This makes spiritualities that speak to that alienation and needed empowerment an ideal target for extremism, as well as commercial commodification and exploitation. This is obviously not limited to earth-based traditions, but it is perhaps the biggest challenge these communities now face. 

Spirituality for Sale

In fact, the rapid rise of earth-based spiritualities has probably made it both more tempting and easier to package and sell for a profit. This nothing new. Since at least the 1960s, we’ve witnessed the commercialization of a hodgepodge of New Age spiritualities. But it has been complicated by the fact that its consumers have often been from white, upper-middle class families. As Villarreal pointed out, 

“As a result, Indigenous, Asian, and Black spiritualities, long subjugated as witchcraft, became associated with the ‘eclectic’ practice of white witches. Today, Instagram is filled with feeds selling ritual items from culturally distinct traditions—Santeria candles surrounded by crystal grids; palo santo and white sage bundled with citrine; hands in a mudra position framing a tarot spread; a white woman in dancer’s pose with a dreamcatcher hanging from her big toe. … They replicated the existing models of spiritual and cultural theft in order to capture demand in a lucrative, trending market, demanding access to every culture’s sacred tools without regard for their history.” (op cit)

This commodification cannot be separated from the histories of colonization, issues of cultural appropriation, and our current social alienation. In Villarreal’s words, “Modern witchcraft’s fuzzy spiritual landscape recklessly grabs language and tools from different traditions meant to cope with the brutalities of empire, and reinscribes these materials with rootless woo.” (ibid) This recklessness is also driven by money, from earnest solo practitioners trying to find a meaningful way to pay their bills to frauds jumping on the bandwagon to the mass production of trinkets. And while mass production does lower the cost for the curious to give a practice a try, it also confuses and conflates unique cultures and histories. For many people, earth-based spiritualities are not even a spirituality; they are an aesthetic. 

For example, in the “Meditation, Mindfulness, and Spirituality Shop” at Gwyneth Paltrow’s company, goop, you can buy   “The goop Medicine Bag,” a collection of eight crystals “to encourage clarity, serenity, courage, creative power, and emotional strength.” It includes instructions for balancing your chakras, “benefit[ting] from their energies,” cleansing them in sage or cool water, and charging them in moonlight. But even if these vague spiritual benefits do not appeal, you should still buy the crystals. As the website encourages us: “Not of the spirit set? Test this set as a pretty addition to your workspace or vanity.” 

What goop, and most of the other companies adding stones and crystals to their catalogs, don’t usually tell you is where they come from or how they were mined.  Sourcing is murky, ranging from low-impact, family-owned mines where you can dig for a crystal yourself, to industrial mines “owned by companies with poor environmental records and a history of labor violations.” In the latter cases, crystals are often what is called a mining byproduct, an unplanned but profitable extraction added on during the process of mining gold, copper, or cobalt. And while US mines are regulated for at least some environmental and labor impacts, mines in other nations might not be. This means that the malachite stone marketed to bring you “wholeness and peace” could very well have been mined by a child as young as seven years old in the Democratic Republic of Congo. And it's very, very difficult to find out if this is the case. (https://newrepublic.com/article/148190/know-healing-crystals-come-from ) 

Cultural Appropriation 

Another impact of this recent profitability can be seen in the global demand for white sage. Smudging, the custom of ritually cleansing a space by burning a fragrant plant, was against the law until 1978, when “Congress passed the American Indian Religious Freedom Act.” Over the centuries, Indigenous people kept traditions like this alive, despite the real threat of severe persecution. Now, smudging has been co-opted, becoming so commercially popular that white sage is expensive and often difficult to find by the very people who preserved the custom – unless you are browsing the “more than 1,000 white sage products” available on Amazon.com, from incense to body creams. The profitability has driven up illegal harvesting and made getting caught worth the risk.  As Kimon de Greef reported, a pound of white sage is worth $30 at wholesale prices, with mark-ups up to double that price. That means that - “A bust of 1,000 pounds, then, amounts to $30,000 sold wholesale, or around $50,000 at market value.” This commodification is in stark contrast to traditional methods of harvesting white sage carefully and prayerfully by hand. It is then given, not sold. (https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7jkma/the-white-sage-black-market-v27n3 )

        In sum, reclaiming ancestral traditions and practices has been empowering and healing for many people who belong to historically oppressed communities. Meanwhile, commercializing earth-based spiritualities in particular has further harmed those same communities and encouraged people to reduce spirituality to consumption and cultural appropriation. As Jess Joho and Morgan Sung pointed out in their article on “How to be a witch without stealing other people's cultures” - 

“Both the past and present of witchcraft owes quite literally everything to the most oppressed groups in American history. If New Age witchcraft isn’t grounded in finally starting to do better by them, then who is modern witchcraft actually for and what does it serve instead?” (https://mashable.com/article/witchtok-problematic-witch-cultural-appropriation )

Naturalistic Paganism

I’ve prioritized issues like these because I believe they are the most pressing and important ones facing earth-based spiritualities and communities. But there is another perspective that I would like to include today that is most relevant to me personally. Back in 2007, when the world finally felt open and we felt free, we heard a radio program about the rise of witchcraft in the USA that included an interview with a scientist who was also a witch. In naturalistic paganism, he explained, rituals became an opportunity for awareness, to focus the mind and choose actions with intention. Magic operated in the psychological realm, shifting our perceptions and transforming attitudes. He also speculated about what happened during rituals from a scientific perspective, such as ritually sweeping a circle. I was fascinated by this naturalistic recasting of magic, and it helped me connect with religious naturalism more broadly. The vision is one that I think many people can understand and even appreciate. As expressed in the description of “Naturalistic Paganism” at the Spiritual Naturalist Society: 

 

  “While we find little evidence to support most of the metaphysical claims made for deities and magic, we find plenty of evidence for the capacity of Pagan myth, meditation, and ritual to affect psychology. That is why we find Pagan ways powerful. By shaping human minds, they motivate change through human hands.” (https://www.snsociety.org/naturalistic-paganism/ ) 

        This translates into a practice that views deities through the lenses of metaphor, poetry, and psychology, “and not as causal agents external to and independent of the individual.” Magic shifts from “manipulating ‘energies’ to produce effects with no known physical causal relation to the individual” to transforming your own understanding, psychology, and relationships in ways make change around you possible. Practices and beliefs are grounded in personal experience and understood through “accurate history, and mainstream scientific evidence.” And the emphasis on living responsibly resonates with many of us:

“On the one hand, naturalism grounded in scientific evidence offers a means of intellectual responsibility. Through it, we cultivate right relationship to objective reality. / On the other hand, Paganism offers a means for taking responsibility for one’s subjective experience and behavior. Through it, we cultivate right relationship to subjective reality. / Altogether, ours is a path rich with truth, meaning, and responsibility.” (ibid)

Taking time to understand earth-based spiritualities will be increasingly important, for several reasons. Even if you aren’t personally interested, you are increasingly likely to know someone who is. And you are also increasingly likely to encounter somebody looking to sell you culturally appropriated goods packaged up in a spiritual way. The more we understand these diverse traditions, the wiser we can be in supporting people that are actively making the world a better place, especially in solidarity with oppressed communities, while avoiding the consumer fads and psychological traps that trick us into helping extremists, frauds, and profiteers. Most significantly, earth-based spiritualities can provide us with correctives for our alienation from the natural world while also helping us understand and ultimately dismantle oppressive systems. And that is a vision that all of us can embrace. 

Demythologizing Christianity

    

April 3, 2022    Dr. Roger Ray

click here to see the sermon

John Shelby Spong:  You can't go to church without praying ten or fifteen times for God to have mercy on you. You can't sing "Amazing Grace" without reminding yourself that the reason God's grace is amazing is it saves a wretch like you. This self-denigration stuff - Jesus died for my sins - is nothing but a guilt message. That's the thing we've got to get out from under. That's not Christianity. That's sort of fourth-century Christianity that got turned into doctrines and dogmas that we've never been able to escape.

 

Early in the 19^th century a very enterprising young con man in New York, Joseph Smith, combined some specious archaeological theories of the day with some crass and immature theological speculation to create a sex cult that masqueraded as a new religion; a spin off from traditional Christianity. The fact that he was able to draw thousands of adherents to his new religion is a commentary on both how sexually repressed 19^th century Americans were and how gullible people can be. That it was a “thing” in that era of revivalism that saw the creation of many American denominations is not much of a surprise, but that it survived the murder of Joseph Smith, as well as any number of embarrassing revelations of what a fraud he really was, is both amazing and deeply disturbing.

The Mormon religion is not much outlined in Smith’s now famous “Book of Mormon” but his original work claimed that the lost tribes of Israel had migrated to South America and the resurrected Christ had appeared to them there. They inscribed their tragic history on tablets of gold and hid them in the Finger Lake Region of New York until an angel revealed them to Smith, and he was able to translate the ancient Hebrew by looking through two stones that he named for the Hebrew Bible’s dice, “the urim and thummim.” The story becomes increasingly obvious a con job as Smith never showed the golden tablets to anyone and he claimed to read them through the urim and Thummim while he had them in his hat. You literally can’t make this stuff up.

 

The beliefs and practices he taught were remarkably self-serving, allowing him to amass a harem of wives, numbering somewhere around 40 women, at least a couple of whom were children. 

 

Even though the mainstream of the Mormon movement abandoned polygamy a hundred years ago, there are still spin off Mormon cults that practice polygamy and one was ritually raping children as a part of their religious practices. It just doesn’t get much worse than this.

(https://www.newsweek.com/mormon-cult-leader-sex-rituals-underage-girls-god-flds-764315)

In spite of a host of embarrassing and hypocritical, racist, and, frankly, stupid teachings, still, there are 16 million Mormons in the world and some very famous American politicians, such as Mit Romney and the late Harry Reid, who evidently were and Romney is magic underwear wearing practicing Mormons. 

 

Nothing I have said about the Mormon founder, Joseph Smith, or Mormon beliefs would have been unknown to Reid, Romney, or John Huntsman or other well-educated, high-profile Mormons, and I do not doubt that many of these things would be quite embarrassing to them, but the less defensible parts of the Mormon religion are probably not what keeps them in the Mormon church. Because, folks, like remaining in your family of origin in spite of the creepy uncle and drug addicted cousins, you focus on the good, try to help out where you can, and you just don’t let your alcoholic aunt define the quality and nature of your whole family.

 

There are things about modern Mormonism, family values, community, sobriety, that they find to be meaningful and important. I have been hard on Joseph Smith and Mormonism but, honestly, you could look at the clay feet of most modern founders of cults and sects and you could find some very embarrassing things. That is one of the hazards of living in the modern era when reporters and critics can document their faults. 

 

If you looked into the roots of and the more bazaar beliefs of Jehovah’s Witnesses, Seventh Day Adventists, Moonies, or the Bahia’s movement, you can find things that would make them seem horribly silly, but then, if you have never heard of the Catholic Church and someone started telling you about their beliefs and practices, you would assume that only the most gullible and ignorant people would be Catholics, and Protestants can be just as bad or worse. You wouldn’t want to dig too deeply into the psychological speculations about Martin Luther or John Calvin either, if you wanted to take the denominations that claim them as founders very seriously. 

 

As David and I are working our way through demythologizing modern religions in this series of sermons we are in, we’re not trying to say that they all need to be carried out to the dumpster and forgotten. In each case, honesty demands that we highlight the positive aspects even as we fearlessly consider the downsides.

 

Is Christianity, taken as a whole, from Catholics and old-line Protestant denominations, all of the way through the more strange modern versions of Christianity, a good thing or a bad thing? As the largest of the religions of the world, certainly, there are some of both to be said. Christianity has given us the Crusades and genocides, it has promoted misogyny, homophobia, xenophobia, religious intolerance, and it has hidden centuries of pedophilia and domestic violence. But Christians have also started hospitals and homeless shelters, done more relief with refugees and the hungry than any other charity or religious group. 

 

It would be absurd to try to offer some kind of equation that would say that a certain number of homeless shelters might make up for centuries of misogyny and pedophilia. Christianity has been good in many ways and absolutely a nightmare in others. The question that is relevant for our purposes is just this: can you extinguish the bad things while preserving the good things? 

 

For example, for churches to continue to teach that being gay is a sin deserving of eternal punishment in hell is not a matter of opinion, it is just wrong. And, especially for the Catholic church to continue to teach that homosexuality is a sin when professionals agree that the overwhelming majority of their own clergy are gay is hypocritical at a totally indefensible level. 

 

As you have heard me quote Voltaire many times, “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” If you teach children who are getting some education in science, ancient myths about miracles, talking snakes and donkey’s, winged angels and scary demons, and the biggest of lies, belief in a literal heaven and hell, you are teaching them to deny reality, to believe in lies over facts, and when you can get someone to reject critical thinking and dabble in fairy tales, then there is no telling what they might be willing to believe, and worse, there is no telling what they might do. 

 

From time to time, one of our viewers would ask me if I would consider being interviewed for a pastoral role in their church. It plays out about the same way every time; I might consider it if I could honestly be myself, but every church would require that I be ordained in their denomination. For example, had I gone to a Presbyterian church to be their pastor, in the installation service, I would have had to stand up in front of the church and answered their formal ordination examination questions. And so, I asked this search committee member, can you imagine me standing up in front of several hundred people and being asked: 

1.    Do you trust in Jesus Christ your savior, acknowledge him Lord of all and Head of the Church, and through him believe in one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit? 

2.   Do you accept the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be, by the Holy Spirit, the unique and authoritative witness to Jesus Christ in the Church universal, and God’s word to you? 

I appreciate that they wanted to interview me, but when you look at what I would be expected to publicly swear to uphold, it is obviously impossible. When you talk about Christianity as a set of beliefs: that Jesus was uniquely God’s son and that his death on the cross won salvation, only for people who believe and confess the right things, from an eternity in a burning hell, and the potential for a beachfront eternity in paradise. . . then the whole religion is absurd. And when you add, in the second question, to affirm that and omniscient and eternal God inspired the composition of a book that was clearly actually written by many ancient authors, none of whom knew where the sun went at night, then Christianity, as a set of beliefs, is just ridiculous. 

 

And here, my friends, is the crux of demythologizing and reforming Christianity and all other world religions. It is a radical shift from beliefs to practices, from orthodoxy to orthopraxy. John Huntsman and Mit Romney are obviously not still Mormons because they hope to become gods on their own planets, or, at least I  hope that they don’t believe in their own deification, but I can understand why they are still in a faith community that teaches morality and promotes strong families. 

 

I couldn’t be a Mormon, or a Catholic, or, for that matter, a Presbyterian because, to me, the beliefs they use to define their fellowships are patently absurd. And, though I can respect a lot of their moral teachings, I find some of them to be just plain awful. No one in the 21^st century should still be mired in homophobia, but where Mormon’s are concerned, even though I don’t drink much alcohol, I maintain the right to have a beer or bit of rum on occasion, and I will continue to drink coffee and diet coke on a daily basis. 

 

But for a church to teach abstinence from alcohol or caffeine is a personal choice; but perpetuation prejudice against gays, the divorced, or people of other religions is intolerable. And even though churches like Presbyterians, Methodists, Episcopalians, Disciples, and the United Church of Christ, have made a lot of progress in their views on women, homosexuality, racism, and sexism in general, their continued insistence upon loyalty to the Bible and the anthropomorphic theology it teaches, continues to lend credence to the absolute worst aspects of modern civilization. 

Church reform that amounts to rearranging the furniture on the Titanic will not prevent the death of the church due to irrelevance and moral obfuscation. 

The popular internet meme that says, “You don’t need religion to have morals. If you can’t determine right from wrong, then you lack empathy, not religion,” is obviously true enough. In fact, traditional religions can leave you with more to unlearn than to preserve in a post-theistic way of thinking. The ten commandments were not actually carved in stone by the finger of God. The gospels and letters of Paul were not inspired by God. The Quran was not dictated by Gabriel to Muhammad. They are all of human design from a very primitive time.

 

No religion can simply hand you a set of divine moral instructions. The truth is that we are all on our own to figure out what is right and what is wrong but, knowing what is right or wrong is not really the issue. Doing what is right and avoiding what is wrong, that’s the really difficult thing. 

 

I already know how to be a much better man that I have ever been able to be. Converting from one religion to another or from one denomination to another is not what is needed for me to be a better person. Changing my beliefs would not make me easier to get along with nor more likely to change the world for the better.

 

Changing our behaviors is what a spiritual journey is about and, folks, that is much more likely to happen in community than it is if we just wish that we could be better. 

I have been a part of relief work in the poor neighborhoods of Chicago, and in the hollers of Appalachia. I have made multiple trips to New Orleans helping families and neighborhoods to recover from the ravages of Hurricane Katrina. I have been a part of expansive medical, food, education, and housing relief in the poorest regions of Central America, and locally, I have helped to pay for and build 14 Habitat Houses, and fed tens of thousands of meals to the homeless. But I have not done any of these things on my own. 

 

Almost every substantial act of compassion and generosity that I have been a part of in all of these years of my spiritual evolution has been done in community, as a part of a church in which I was encouraged and accompanied by hundreds of other people who were also trying to manage their id and bring a bit more light into the world. 

 

Because I have been a part of feeding the victims of domestic violence in a family shelter, I have also found the courage to open my home to victims and felons, sharing my own resources with those who were most in need . . and I know myself well enough to know that I never would have done that if I had not been a part of a faith community that encourage compassion and sacrifice. 

 

I don’t know if organized religion has a future. Frankly, it’s not currently looking too good. But I know this with certainty, holding onto absurd beliefs in eternal reward or punishment, trying to find all of your important truths in an ancient book, or projecting all of your hopes to an imaginary friend in the clouds is like grasping the anchor of a sinking ship in hopes that it will save you. 

 

Orthodoxy, right beliefs, will not save the church and, honestly, it shouldn’t. Orthopraxy, right behaviors, is what faith communities of all stripes have to offer to a world that is destroying the planet’s ability to sustain life while we still engage in warfare for land, temporal wealth, and power. 

 

The world still needs strong churches, it just doesn’t need any more religion.