Angels and Demons (how crisis reveals who we really are)

Angels and Demons (how crisis reveals who we really are) June 26, 2022 Dr. Roger Ray CLICK HERE TO SEE THE VIDEO “Janina turned her face away. But I watched, flattening myself against the window. As I pressed against the glass, I saw an officer make a flinging movement with his arm, and something rose up into the sky like a fat bird. With his other hand he aimed his pistol, and the bird plummeted to the ground beside its screaming mother, and the officer shot the mother, too. But it was not a bird. It was not a bird. It was not a bird.” p. 104, In My Hands by Irene Gut Opdyke The project was never finished because my writing schedule was interrupted by the events of 9-11 in 2001, but earlier that year I had been recruited to write religious education materials for Christian Sunday School youth about the Holocaust. I had visited the Holocaust Museum and the Children’s Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem once in the early 1980’s and again in the early 1990’s. But I took the first part of my writing grant to visit the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC. At the time, a part of their display was an area called “The Righteous Gentiles,” which I believe has now been re-named “The Righteous among the Nations.” It was a collection of commemorations of non-Jews who had helped European Jews to escape the Nazi “final solution.” It appealed to my mind, that for young people attending a Christian Sunday School, the best way for them to relate to the Holocaust would be to imagine the kind of role that they might have played, as Christians, had they been living in Europe during the Holocaust. To provoke them to question themselves, “What would I have done if I had been living in Germany, or Poland, or Russia, at this time.” I read several biographies of “Righteous Gentiles” in preparation. The most famous of which was certainly Oscar Schindler, about whom the award winning 1993 movie, Schindler’s List was made. But the story that has stuck with me the most clearly over these past twenty years, was the story of a young Polish nursing student, Irene Gut. Her autobiography, “In My Hands,” is one of the most compelling, yet disturbing books that you will ever read. Still, I highly recommend it. But like reading Ellie Wiesel’s book about his experience in the Holocaust, “Night,” you may find it difficult to be alone for a while after you read it. It is a war biography, and the story is horrible from its first pages. She was a 17-year-old Catholic student, when she was first recruited to care for Polish soldiers but was then she was captured by the Russian army where she was repeatedly raped by soldiers. Her account of this chapter of her life always comes back to me with nauseating clarity whenever I hear about the war crimes of Russian soldiers in Ukraine today. She was taken to a Russian hospital but even there, she was going to be sexually assaulted and managed to escape, fleeing back to her home, only to be rounded up by the Germans and sent to work in a slave factory manufacturing weapons for the war. She used her German name and her mastery of the German language to get out of the camp but she was forced to be a housekeeper for a German officer and to work in a hotel restaurant where German soldiers ate. From there, she could look out of the second story windows and see into the Jewish ghetto. Now, folks, a lot of Polish Catholics saw what was happening to the Jews. They knew about the war crimes, even if they could not yet imagine the murders on the scale the Germans were planning. But some people were sympathetic with the extermination of the Jews. Some people just tried not to think about it; tried not to get involved. Irene described a scene she witnessed from that window one day: “As I pressed against the glass, I saw an officer make a flinging movement with his arm, and something rose up into the sky like a fat bird. With his other hand he aimed his pistol, and the bird plummeted to the ground beside its screaming mother, and the officer shot the mother, too. But it was not a bird. It was not a bird. It was not a bird.” The Germans could commit such horrible war crimes because they no longer saw their Jewish prisoners as being human. They were “other,” they were “different,” and so they could be despised and literally killed for sport. Irene’s mind wanted it to be a man shooting a bird, but she kept saying to herself, “But it was not a bird. It was not a bird. It was not a bird.” I hesitate to draw to many comparisons to the holocaust because, seriously, nothing is like the holocaust. But, you know, we hear about a shooting in a poor neighborhood here in town, and we don’t react the way we would if it had happened in our neighborhood. Because the people who live in poor neighborhoods, am I going too far to say that they are somehow “other”? We read about the police breaking up a homeless encampment, and taking what belongings they have, their ID, their birth certificates, their drivers’ license, their Social Security cards, and photos or correspondence that might have held meaning for them, something that reminded them of when they too were see as being fully human. . . and the police bag all of that stuff up and throw it away. As if to make the point that the homeless are not so much people as they are vermin, a drain on social services, a blight on a neighborhood, a threat to commerce. Irene eventually becomes a freedom fighter, smuggling Jews out of detention and helping them to escape but she emphasizes that she didn’t become that person all at once. She was still a teenager, a waitress for German officers, but she had to clean their plates, and scrape their leftovers into a garbage can. She began, very timidly, very carefully, just setting aside some of the better food scraps and filling a little tin box which she would take at night and bury under the fence between the hotel and captured Jews in the ghetto. She made sure that one of the captives saw her. They retrieved the box and put the empty box back where they had found it. This became Irene’s ritual, putting food scraps under the fence every day. It was a drop in the bucket, honestly, it couldn’t have made much of a difference, but it allowed her to assuage her guilt, a bit, and, more importantly, it allowed her to continue to see the Jewish captives as being humans. She found herself being given more and more responsibility in the restaurant and when she pleaded for help, she managed to persuade her captors to let her have the assistance of some of the Jewish prisoners in the kitchen. Moving four or five people back and forth daily allowed her to raise the stakes on smuggling food, and news, and letters, in and out of the ghetto. She eventually made the very difficult decision to become a mistress to the German officer in whose home she lived in exchange for him pretending not to know that she was hiding Jews in the basement who were being smuggled out to freedom. At some point, having been raised an ardent and obedient Catholic, she confessed all of this, the stealing of food, smuggling Jews out of the ghetto, and even sleeping with the German officer to her priest who condemned all of it. He insisted that she stop helping the Jews, that she end her stealing and sexual favors which, is what made her realize how irrelevant the Catholic faith had become in war time, in the midst of a holocaust. Irene survived the war, and eventually moved to the United States and had a family of her own. She actually just died in California in 2003 at the age of 81, having remained in touch with several of the Jews she had helped to escape from certain death. Another author I read a good deal of was the Jewish psychoanalyst, Viktor Frankl, who survived the Auschwitz Nazi death camp, even though his parents, his brother, and his pregnant wife did not. I apologize for even showing you such horrible pictures of Frankl along with the emaciated bodies of the men with whom he was imprisoned but it was in this nearly dead nightmare that Frankl imagined himself standing at a lectern and delivering lectures on the psychology of the death camps. He clung to a quote from the German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, who said, “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” He saw the difference between the prisoners who had something to live for and those who did not, recognizing that focusing on the fact that the world still expects something from you kept many of them alive. Simply enduring the suffering was often not enough. We need something larger to hold onto, a family that needs you, a book that must be written, a story that must be told, some accomplishment that cannot be simply dismissed. These thoughts have lived with me since we first heard of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, with the stories of murder and rape and theft of civilians and in spite of the horror of it all, the courage and resilience that has been shown by the Ukrainian people. The war is not going well for them now and they may not be able to withstand the invading Russian armies much longer, but, you will recall, the whole world assumed that Russian would have taken the Ukraine in the first week of April and it is now late June. Frankl reflected in one of his books about his experience in Auschwitz, that Freud had believed that under the right circumstances, virtually everyone will become a monster. Given enough suffering, enough hunger, thirst, deprivation, assault, the monster in all of us appears. And, you have to admit, there is a lot of evidence to support Freud’s belief. You know, the ovens in the death camps where millions of Jews were killed were operated by other Jewish prisoners. They assisted in killing their own people in order to buy themselves a little more time, a little more comfort, better rations, better clothes. Hard times can reveal our very worst character. But Frankl noted that it could also reveal previously unknown saints, angelic human beings who would share their crust of bread with a starving prisoner, who might give up some of their own clothing or even their shoes to save someone dying from the cold. In his most famous book, the one that I wish everyone would read, “Man’s Search for Meaning”, Frankl writes: “Sigmund Freud once asserted, "Let one attempt to expose a number of the most diverse people uniformly to hunger. With the increase of the imperative urge of hunger all individual differences will blur, and in their stead will appear the uniform expression of the one unstilled urge." Thank heaven, Sigmund Freud was spared knowing the concentration camps from the inside. His subjects lay on a couch designed in the plush style of Victorian culture, not in the filth of Auschwitz. There, the "individual differences" did not "blur" but, on the contrary, people became more different; people unmasked themselves, both the swine and the saints.” Despair, depression, cynicism can be the escapes we use to avoid dealing with hard times, if we are not the one at the tip of the spear. I will confess to you, these past two years have been hard on me, psychologically, as we have endured the regressive policies of the Trump administration, which ended in a horrible and deadly pandemic in which most of our neighbors refused to be vaccinated or to even wear a paper mask to protect the lives of the vulnerable around them. We have watched our often obscenely religious neighbors demonstrating depraved indifference about the welfare of the children and the elderly around them. And even our own government seems determined to take away the civil rights of women, to cut funds used to prop up food and education programs, and to defend gun manufacturers profits even in the face of one mass murder after another, in schools, churches, shopping centers and bars. I recognize depression as if it were a person living very near to me, longing to embrace me and hold me in its frozen bosom. Soren Kierkegaard once wrote in his journal, “My depression has been my most faithful mistress. Is it any wonder that I return her affection?” I have friends who speak of moving to Canada, my old scuba buddy has often mentioned moving to Iceland, and, at times, I have considered leaving the country permanently myself. I can’t believe how corrupt our Supreme Court has become. I cannot stand the fact that our country has been so willing to go backwards in matters of race, gender, civil rights, the environment, and in economics. I fight depression with exercise, with exposure to nature, in conversation with friends whom I know I can share my concerns and I can be confident that they have similar passions. But I would be lying to you if I did not admit that none of these things work every day. I have spent sleepless nights. I have spent a day, here and there, closed up in my room away from the world and even the light of the sun, wallowing in despair. You don’t need for me to tell you how often we turn to watching sports or mindless sit-coms, or pure escapist drama, as if an English accent and period costumes can anesthetize our awareness of how much is going seriously wrong in the world. We call our escapism “entertainment” when it really isn’t, is it? It is really just distraction. As if simply not watching the news could mean that our democracy is not under the very real threat of falling into fascism at the hands of our own elected officials. Though I am always reticent to compare any current event to the whole Nazi movement and the resulting holocaust in the first half of the 20th century, none of us can escape the fact that Russia’s dictator, Vladimir Putin, is acting like Hitler and the Russian armies are committing war crimes against the people of Ukraine that are similar to what the German armies did in Poland. This is further compounded by the fact that our former president was publicly supportive of Putin as well as the violent royal government of Saudi Arabia and he was publicly envious of China’s president, Xi Jinping, who changed China’s constitution so that he could remain president for life. Something which our former president was attempting to accomplish for himself. So, yes, if you are at all awake to what is going on the world and in our own country, depression may well become your most faithful mistress. However, I don’t think that this is time to call your doctor to get your prescription for Prozac re-filled, nor simply to escape the country physically or figuratively by diving deeply into diversions. You need to realize that the future expects something of you. You have a reason to live which can empower you to survive the serious challenges we now face. As Ellie Wiesel taught us in his account of surviving the holocaust, “We cannot simply be neutral because neutrality always favors the oppressor and never the oppressed.” We are not spectators in life. We are participants, decision makers, and we can be world changers. Or, as one of my favorite internet memes says, “You can pray all you want but eventually David had to pick up a stone and act against Goliath.” Don’t simply be depressed. Be determined. Maybe even angry, but you sure can’t be neutral. Vote, and maybe even be an election judge, or campaign, or even run for office yourself. Be vocal. Be public about your convictions. Be kind but don’t play dumb to make other people feel more comfortable. Democracy with all of its freedoms and civil rights are in more danger today than at any time since the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and there will be no awards handed out for just being sad about it if we lose our democracy. Now is the time for spiritual people to be more than simply concerned. Now is the time for us to be engaged.

The Danger of Propaganda (masquerading as free speech)

The Danger of Propaganda (masquerading as free speech) June 19, 2022 Dr. Roger Ray CLICK HERE TO SEE THE VIDEO The Atlantic, April 11, 2022 By Jonathan Haidt WHY THE PAST 10 YEARS OF AMERICAN LIFE HAVE BEEN UNIQUELY STUPID The most pervasive obstacle to good thinking is confirmation bias, which refers to the human tendency to search only for evidence that confirms our preferred beliefs. Even before the advent of social media, search engines were supercharging confirmation bias, making it far easier for people to find evidence for absurd beliefs and conspiracy theories, such as that the Earth is flat and that the U.S. government staged the 9/11 attacks. But social media made things much worse. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/05/social-media-democracy-trust-babel/629369/ In 1994, when the internet, so far as the general population was concerned, was in its infancy, Vice-President Al Gore spoke at a conference at UCLA about the emerging internet, saying, “We have a dream for…an information superhighway that can save lives, create jobs and give every American, young and old, the chance for the best education available to anyone, anywhere.” Which, at a certain level, is sort of true, in spite of the fact that the information superhighway has turned out to have a number of speedbumps. It has put a lot of information at our fingertips. Not as much as we had hoped, but, still, I would hate to have a job selling sets of encyclopedias right now. But more than just information, the internet has made it possible for us to be in contact with people anywhere in the world without charges. People can work remotely, and we can find information on almost any subject in an instant, whether it is accurate information or not is suspect, but it is available. We have a university library in our home office, available at the click of a mouse. Still, this access to information has not given us the education that Al Gore dreamed of. In fact, most of the traffic on the internet is not comprised of searches for information. Most of the traffic is still pornography and social media sites, which may be, either literally or figuratively, pornography of a different sort. We use social media to spread the links to our sermons all around the globe and I can say with a high degree of certainty that without FaceBook, our church would have failed a decade ago when our primary donors began to pass away. So, I use social media a lot professionally and I very much enjoy being able to stay informed about old friends who now live far away, even if I could stand to know a bit less about what they are having for lunch. I was intrigued by an article that appeared in the Atlantic early this year in which the author, Jonathan Haidt, talked about why Americans have been so uncommonly stupid in the past ten years. If I had written it, I think that I would have gone for 30 or 40 years but I suspect that I am a good deal older than Jonathan Haidt since, these days, I’m a good deal older than almost everyone. But his point is that the advent of 24-hour cable news, social media, and the internet itself have given people the opportunity to choose what information they are willing to expose themselves to. When we hear someone say that a certain person is a “Fox News” viewer, we immediately know what kind of person they are talking about. A couple of generations ago, whether you watched the evening news on NBC, ABC, or CBS, it didn’t really identify you as being either Republican or Democrat, educated or uneducated, liberal or conservative, but folks, Walter Cronkite is dead, and it does not look like he will ever have a replacement. There is no such thing as an entirely objective news source but these days, our news sources are not only not objective, they are, in fact, rarely news. You have to be carefully discerning to suss out what has actually happened in the world without ingesting the refined sugar of the pre-digested opinions of the talking heads on TV. Social media can be even worse, disseminating conspiracy theories, propaganda, and lies to a public that is just not that good critical thinking. We self-select the people, pages, and sources we will be exposed to, which means that we are constantly seeking confirmation of what we already believe, and we often do not even allow a new idea or information that might challenge our beliefs to come into our view. We all do it, of course. Social media would destroy us if we didn’t protect ourselves from some of the vitriol and misinformation that some of our family members and contacts are trying to spread. You don’t have to rent space in your skull to your crazy uncle or some nutjob that you happened to have gone to high school with. Still, we really must expose ourselves to ideas and information that challenges our comfortable beliefs, or we will all become a little more stupid every day. Think about it, if you have not changed your opinion about anything in the past three or four years, you are already the same as dead. You have stopped thinking. I am not generally ashamed of my whole body of work, but a few years ago, I disposed of the manuscripts of my first 30 years of sermons along with the papers I wrote in grad school. They were all steps along the journey of becoming who I am but some of those intellectual detours were uninformed, immature, and just wrong enough that I didn’t want for there to be any evidence left out there. Thinking people will always change their opinions in the light of new and better information. But, of course, one of the things that religion in general has in common with the Republican party, in general, is that they would both prefer that you not think to much and that you never change what you were taught to believe. I invite you to check my sources on this, the link to the Washington Post article about this is in the manuscript of this sermon which you can find on our website, but 10 years ago, the Republican platform in Texas proposed cutting funding for all critical thinking skills education in the state. They said, and I quote: We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking, critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority. https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/texas-gop-rejects-critical-thinking-skills-really/2012/07/08/gJQAHNpFXW_blog.html This is clearly under the heading of “you can’t make this stuff up,” but the sad fact is, that if conservative Republicans want their voting public to keep voting for them, suppressing critical thinking is their only hope of survival. I don’t say that gleefully or with any personal satisfaction. As I have said several times lately, I really believe that we must have at least two viable political parties in this country and I wish that we had four or five, but the Republican Party, as it now exists under its far right and Trumpist influence, is not a viable party and it is dangerous to democracy, and it even shortens the lives of the people who listen to them. Yes, I realize that may sound like a stretch, but, once again, I will publish my sources with this manuscript: the British Journal of medicine just published conclusive studies showing that the mortality rate is higher in Republican counties than it is in Democratic counties. They don’t list the reasons, but it is not hard to come up with some very credible assumptions for why that is. Republican governors have been successful in limiting the expansion of Medicaid, they spread inaccurate propaganda about Covid vaccines, precautions, and treatments, and in spite of all of their pious rhetoric, they seem to have an affinity for heroin, fentanyl, methamphetamine, and OxyContin. . . not to mention Hydroxychloroquine or Ivermectin. And, of course, their love affair with guns is now causing more than 40,000 deaths per year. https://www.forbes.com/sites/madelinehalpert/2022/06/07/republican-counties-have-higher-mortality-rates-than-democratic-ones-study-finds/?sh=1d87e2485c6a You have a legal right to be stupid in the United States, but you should be aware that it may shorten your life. You have to know; someone has been listening to Dr. Oz all of these years. I think that Oprah owes us all an apology for ever giving that snake oil salesman a public forum. I want to reiterate, I am an old school liberal, but I do not want to see the Republican Party go extinct. I want it to evolve or at least return to its roots. Eisenhour was a Republican, you will recall. And I can tell you, as recently as 1988, when George H. W. Bush beat Michael Dukakis in the presidential election, one of my liberal friends was able to say to me, “Well, I didn’t vote for him but there is a certain reassurance we can enjoy that the country is back in the hands of the east coast intelligencia.” And yes, while I was relieved to have Ronald Regan out of office, trying to think of “east coast intelligencia” while realizing the Bush put us just one heart attack away from Dan Quale becoming president wasn’t easy, but you have to admit that Trump and Pence made Quale seem like Aristotle! But given what our country has been through these past few years, can you claim to be an intelligent person and be opposed to an assault rifle ban? We have had a million people die from Covid-19 and we are expecting a new surge of infections this fall, can you in good conscience still be opposed to expanded Medicaid or covid vaccines? To do so is almost murder through misinformation and paranoid political speech. Still, let me say it again, this is not to paint a halo over the heads of elected Democrats. I agree very much with Dr. Cornel West who went on a bit of a rant on Bill Maher’s show last Friday, pointing out that our primary and election system rarely gives us a choice between two moral or intellectual giants. West complained that our last election gave us a choice between a neo-fascist in Donald Trump and a milk-toast liberal in Joe Biden. Maher objected to West’s dismissive description of Biden as being milk-toast, but West insisted: With all of these decent people in America how do we end up with such mediocre people at the top? And I agree, from among 300 million people in America, our two choices were Biden and Trump? Barack Obama was often criticized for seeming to always think that he was the smartest person in the room but seriously, do you think that anyone has ever accused either Trump or Biden of being the smartest person in the room, even if it was Darwin’s Waiting Room? I think that Joe Biden is a decent enough sort of fellow and he has done or tried to do a lot of things that I applaud but we all know that we could walk into any Starbucks in town and find at least a dozen people who are smarter than either Trump or Biden and most of them would be more qualified to be the President. Our nominating system is absolutely horrible, which is why our health care system is horrible, and our energy distribution system is horrible, and our mass transit system is horrible. Look, I am a very educated pastor and I think that I’m a pretty good guy who has tried to do a lot of good things in the world, but it is no mystery that I am never asked to sing, even in our tiny church gatherings. I could do it, but it would be obvious to everyone immediately that I am not qualified to do it and we may as well admit it…. Just like we may as well admit that our nominating system does not deliver us a choice between two of the smartest and best candidates. And, too often, it gives us a choice between two very mediocre and unqualified candidates who are not up to managing such a demanding job. Those are just the facts, and nothing would make me happier if you could prove me wrong but you know that you can’t. When I first read this article in the Atlantic a couple of months ago, my first thought was about the people in Russia who are only exposed to one state run news source. Most Russians seem, if you can believe any opinion poll taken in Russia to be accurate, to generally be in support of Putin and his invasion of Ukraine. It isn’t just the USA that suffers from a paucity of critical thinking skills. Most Russians, just like most Americans, are willing to swallow pre-digested views without much of a filter. It is a ubiquitous problem and you have to admit that both governments and churches tend to discourage people from ever fact checking them or thinking for themselves. Our church began fourteen years ago with a small band of people who were disaffected refugees from traditional Christian Churches with a couple of inactive members of the local synagogue and some fairly confirmed atheists. We had the courage to start putting the religious beliefs we had been taught under the microscope and to slowly distance ourselves from beliefs which we could discern were simply not true. We accepted that the Bible was not written by, inspired by, nor endorsed by God but it was simply a collection of treasured writings from a distant and ancient culture which could not be taken as in any way a unique or authoritative source of wisdom. All of the writers of all of the scriptures of all religions, as I have noted many times, did not know where the sun went at night. They can hardly be counted on as a source absolute truth. We accepted the full humanity of Jesus and all other founders of religious movements, and that whatever is meant by the word “God,” it certainly doesn’t reference an imaginary friend in the clouds who capriciously either does or doesn’t grant requests, answer prayers, or deliver presents on Christmas morning. Our spirituality evolved into a community search for truth, for an ethical way of living, and a shared passion for making the world, including ourselves, better. In that same spirit, I believe that we need to put all our assumptions, political and religious, economic and social, under the same microscope. Choosing to watch MSNBC rather than Fox, as laudable as that decision is, doesn’t necessarily make you smarter and it can just make you more insufferably arrogant about your prejudices. Wannabe billionaire astronaut, Elon Musk, has publicly styled himself as a free speech advocate, threatening to buy Twitter and open the flood gates of lunacy to allow foreign bots to spread misinformation, propaganda, and hate speech, all under the banner of “free speech,” without regard for how much harm has already been done by social media being used to spread lies and really bad medical advice. Just as we have had the courage to set aside a great deal of our most treasured articles of faith when we exposed those beliefs to the light of reason and found them wanting, we have to be more concern with the search for what is true in politics, medicine, and economics than we are in just giving a platform to lies and propaganda while it declares itself to be representing free speech. I will conclude where I often begin, with wisdom from the Great Dane, Soren Kierkegaard: People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use. Let’s face it, there is no way to make America great again if we cannot first make America smart again.

“Stop Funding Terrorism” (and save the planet at the same time)

“Stop Funding Terrorism” (and save the planet at the same time) June 12, 2022 Dr. Roger Ray Click here to see the video Time, June 17, 2021 We are a conservative Republican and a progressive Democrat who disagree on a great many things. We write today, however, to highlight an area of strong agreement: a global transition to renewable energy would greatly assist in our nation’s fight against the world’s most corrupt and illicit regimes. If you could wave a magic wand, and transition the world away from fossil fuels, Americans would instantly be safer. Oil and gas development has often been associated with autocracy and corruption. Governments in countries such as Russia and Iran have used oil and gas to threaten neighbors and fund terrorism. Corruption, autocracy, and terrorism are a persistent threat to nations that stand on the rule of law, and America has long been the exemplar of the rule-of-law nation. A world in which oil and gas money has less power is a world that will likely have less corruption, autocracy, and terror. That world will be a safer world for America. Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat, represents Rhode Island in the U.S. Senate. Lindsey Graham, a Republican, represents South Carolina in the U.S. Senate. I am going to ask you to consider some ideas today that will probably initially strike you as being largely unworkable and possibly even unAmerican and certainly anti-capitalist, so I am going to ask you for the favor of your attention for a few minutes, even when you might be inclined to tune me out. I am not going to shock you initially, in fact, I am going to try to sneak up on you through historical illustrations. The idea of a transcontinental railroad was first proposed in Congress in 1845 but it wasn’t considered practical or possible at that time. But two years into the Civil War, an amazingly strange time to propose a major infrastructure project, President Lincoln signed the act that engaged two competing railroad companies to start building lines, one starting on the west coast and headed east, and the other on the east coast headed west. The rivals were richly rewarded for each mile of track they completed and no firm point for meeting was initially set, giving both companies huge incentives to build as fast as possible so that they could be paid more for having constructed more miles of railroad. Prior to constructing the railroad, it was not only time consuming and very dangerous to travel from the east coast to the west, but it was expensive, costing about $1000 even in 1860. When the railroad was finished, that passage could be accomplished in a few days at a cost of about $150. The project created jobs, especially for Civil War veterans, it created businesses and commerce and was responsible for the growth of cities and towns from coast to coast. It was expensive and it became the opportunity for all kinds of crime and exploitation, especially of Chinese labor, and it inspired the opening of several casinos and brothels here in Springfield along Commercial Street, but, in the end, the transcontinental railroad helped to save the union and brought the United States into the modern era. It had seemed like an impossible idea but once we decided to do it, we accomplished the impossible and the benefits of it changed America. In another example of America doing the impossible, when the Japanese attacked Perl Harbor, American manufacturing was making cars, toys, and home appliances but within a month of that surprise attack, President Roosevelt had established the War Production Board which was tasked with taking over American manufacturing plants and raw materials, rationing food and lots of petroleum and oil products, so that we could produce the things needed by the war effort. There wasn’t time to build entirely new and different manufacturing facilities and we couldn’t produce consumable goods while making guns, uniforms, airplanes, tanks, and ships. It was expensive and almost everyone in the country had to sacrifice a lot of comfort and consumables, but we not only provided major force to win the war against fascism but almost every field of science and manufacturing went into rapid evolution such as had never been seen before. Of course, such an effort changed the workplace, the workforce, and the sociology of the country. After the war, years of suppressed consumer demands along with advances in the manufacture and technology of the automobile, resulted in a boom in the popularity of cars so that people began to transition from train travel to the family car. 1956 is famous, partially because I was born in August of that year, but even more because that summer, President Eisenhour signed the Federal Aid Highway Act that began construction of our interstate highway system. It was a jobs bill, to be sure, but Eisenhour also wanted to make travel by automobile safer, faster, and, as an added benefit, provide for more rapid evacuation of major cities in the event of a nuclear war. Eisenhour kinda thought that way. The remnant of my family’s pre-Civil War plantation was eventually divided into three parcels of land by the construction of interstate highways through Kentucky. My family had no way to object to this economic blow because, to build an interstate highway system, land was taken for the public good. In each of these three examples, the normal rules and laws about property ownership, commerce and self-determination were suspended, for a time, in order to serve the larger good of the nation and, in many ways, the whole world. The transcontinental railroad, the wartime manufacturing necessary to win World War II, and the construction of the interstate highway system could not have been accomplished by the normal rules of the marketplace. You cannot accomplish the seemingly impossible, simply by employing old skills and habits. I hope that this fact is obvious to all of us. Major, world changing, technology improving, and global economy stimulating accomplishments call for suspending the status quo in order to achieve such important transformations. Let the people say, “Amen.” Last month, I promised you a bit of a rant about how the world was finding it difficult to wean itself off of Russian oil and natural gas. The Russian economy, and hence its ability to conduct war against her neighbors, is dependent upon income from the sale of its fossil fuels. The late Senator John McCain once called Russia, “Nothing but a gas station with nuclear weapons.” And, honestly, in lots of ways, though we often talk about Putin dreaming of re-forming the former Soviet Union, I don’t think that is what he is really interested in. Russia is no longer a big communist government trying to create equality and efficiency. It has become a kleptocracy in which Putin and a handful of necessary powerful people are exploiting Russia’s natural resources to make themselves unspeakably rich. In the early 1990’s there was a rush on college campuses to offer more courses in Russian as businesspeople set their sights on new opportunities to form alliances in Russia to open a whole new market; but corruption asserted itself so firmly in those years of “Perestroika” that almost everyone gave up on getting rich quick in a newly opened Russia. The wealth was swept up by just a few oligarchs and that is where it has stayed. I don’t think there is any nefarious idealism guiding Putin’s attempts at expansion. I think that it is much more simple. It is greed. And greed lasts longer than idealism. Even though his invasion of Ukraine has gone horribly, costing him global credibility, and using up enormous military assets and lives, my fear is that he will just hang in there, keeping the conflict going until the West gets bored with it, starts paying attention to more of the Amber Heard and Johnny Depp stories in the news, and he may take Ukraine simply by persistent terrorism. Even my typically erudite audience already has more opinions about whether it was Depp or Heard who pooped in the sheets than they know about the oil pipelines in Europe and which nations are the most dependent on Russian oil and gas. Looking back on the past century, it becomes clear that we never should have given up on trains and other forms of mass transit. Our love affair with automobiles has been disastrous for the environment and for many families’ personal economy. But you cannot change the nature of transportation and home heating energy immediately. We have known for two generations that we needed to stop using fossil fuels and to develop better, more efficient, and more affordable renewable forms of energy but we have moved in that direction at a snail’s pace. The money has been in oil, gasoline, natural gas, and, to some extent, coal. And so, big corporations, with their puppet strings tied to the governments of the world, have managed to control the evolution of energy technology so that the demand for energy keeps going up but the ways of getting the energy remained with fossil fuels. In the 1970’s President Jimmy Carter had solar panels installed on the roof of the White House. They were not great solar panels, and they were not much help, but they were a symbol, a gesture towards the future. They were an honest and much needed lesson to tell Americans that we would one day run out of oil if burning it didn’t kill us first, and that we needed to harness the power of the sun. When Ronald Regan took office in 1981, he had the solar panels taken down from the White House and people cheered that move as if giving reality the finger would suddenly increase the supply of oil. Similarly, 40 years later, when Donald Trump was elected president, he promised to restore coal mining jobs and to resist all changes towards renewable energy. C. S. Lewis said that a mad man cannot put out the light of the sun simply by writing the word “darkness” on his cell walls. But a large portion of the American public believes that if we simply refuse to give up on petroleum and coal, that it will never run out and that it won’t really kill us. Now the slow advance of technology has caught up to us. Solar power is cheaper than power produced by oil and gas. And, ironically, the new electric trucks are faster and have more towing power than their gas and diesel forbearers. The problem is, we just have not made the transition a priority. We have slow walked an evolution that is primarily needed to save the ecology of our planet, and we have delayed the cost savings of harvesting the energy that falls from the sky every day. Now we realize that virtually all terrorism that gave us 9-11, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and now the Russian invasion of Ukraine, all comes from oil and gas money. If we had paid attention to what Carter was trying to tell us more than 40 years ago, the capture of the US Embassy in Tehran might have been the last problem with terrorism we ever would have faced. Every time that you and I pull up to a gas station to fill the tank of our SUVs, we are sending money to terrorist states. Sure, some oil comes from the US and Canada, and some comes from allies, but the oil market is like one big pot. None of us knows where the gas in our cars originated with any certainty and whether it came from Iran or Oklahoma, it is still helping to prop up a market that funds global terrorism and we can and must stop that massive transfer of wealth. We can’t suddenly change our energy sources in time to make Russia leave Ukraine next month. And, as sure as I am standing here, before my daughter puts me in a nursing home, I will be getting around town in a self-driving, electric car that won’t talk back to me and tell me that I don’t need to go get an Andy’s ice cream again this evening. The question is, will that self-driving car be driving me for my pecan fudge Sundae in five years or fifteen years? How much longer are we willing to send trillions of dollars from western democracies to terrorist states every year? Should we slow walk it over the next 15 to 20 years or should we go into a war-time footing and build wind turbines, solar farms, and the necessary infrastructure of transfer lines to move electricity around the country over the next four or five years, with the kind of energy we put into winning WWII or like building the transcontinental railroad and the interstate highway system? What will Russia do over the next decade if we keep giving them tens of trillions of dollars for their oil and gas? What would it take for us to get this transformation done over the next three or four years? It could be done and it wouldn’t even be hard. We could harvest enough sunlight in Arizona and enough wind energy in Kansas and Oklahoma to power our entire nation. We just have to build the infrastructure to capture the energy and the transfer lines to move the electricity around the country. As soon as we have done this, it will start saving American households about $5000 per year. Why haven’t we done it? How can we break the political influence of the energy industry to do what we need to do to stop funding terrorism and rescue our planet from global climate change? Well, my friends, it is simple. All that we have to do is nationalize the oil and gas companies. I know that sounds like socialism, or for Fox News viewers, it sounds like communism, since they don’t know the difference, but the United States has a long history of nationalizing industries that actively work against the common good of the nation. Joe Biden proposed an infrastructure bill aimed at greening the economy which would have made a great stride in the direction of renewable energy but every Republican in the Senate voted against it, along with the allegedly Democratic senator, Joe Manchin, who, by the way receives more political donations from fossil fuel industries than anyone else in the Senate, more than $400,000 last year. Of course, even that absurd figure is less than his personal profits from his coal investments. His vote is bought and paid for. Russia is not the only kleptocracy in the world. We have to see this issue as a crisis, a crisis of preventing destruction of the environment and the crisis of future terrorism and illegal wars. During WW I, President Woodrow Wilson, in order to support the war effort, nationalized our nation’s rail roads, our phone companies, and our telegraph operators. He also nationalized all of the radio stations. They were given back after the war, but they were operated by the federal government during the war. During WW II, President Roosevelt nationalized airplane manufacture, gun manufacturers, and more than 3000 mines, along with the rail roads and a number of oil companies. Richard Nixon created Amtrak by nationalizing several failing passenger rail companies. After 9-11, President George W. Bush nationalized airline security, creating the TSA which we all still hate today. He didn’t even bother buying up the existing security businesses, he just shut them down and replaced them because it was in our national interests to do so. In 2008, with the economic crash, Bush nationalized Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to stabilize the housing industry. We could, for less money than Trump gave out as tax cuts to billionaires, buy up the entire American oil industry and start to manage them in a way to reduce fossil fuels and increase sustainable energy sources so that, in a few years, we can all go to bed in our cars and tell it to take us to the beach in Florida and just wake up, have brunch, and walk out onto the white sand beaches of the Red Neck Riviera. . . and enjoy a little Russian vodka and Russian caviar because Russia no longer has a market for their oil, gas, or coal. We can do it, and what is better, we could do it without a single Republican vote. I don’t know if Biden has the political courage to do it, but, that’s what I would do, which is why you should have elected me in 2020.

The Emperor of Ice Cream

June 5, 2022 Dr. Roger Ray Click this link to see the video One of my all-time favorite movies, one that I have forced most of my friends to watch with me more than once, is the 2005 film, Constantine, in which Keanu Reeves plays a rather complicated and difficult exorcist, trapped in the middle of a battle between heaven and hell. It is theologically rife with a combination of voodoo and Catholic myth, but I love it. But you shouldn’t assume that it has anything to do with the leading actor’s personal beliefs. On the Tonight show, a couple of years ago, Stephen Colbert asked Reeves, “What happens when you die?” His answer left Colbert speechless for a full ten seconds. Reeves says simply, "I know that the ones who love us will miss us." Which is a kinder way of expressing the rather flat-footed quote from the fallen comedian, Louis C. K., who said, “Lots of things happen after you die – they just don’t involve you.” Religious people are often shocked by such frank acknowledgments of our mortality. It is no wonder, since most of us have been spoon fed a “pie-in-the-sky” theology all of our lives. Even more progressive churches of past generations, passively repeated the grand bargain that says that if you endure enough church services, pray enough, and pay enough, if you can be good enough and avoid egregious sins, then, when you die, you immortal soul will not be tormented in hell and you may, in fact, enjoy eternal reward. We have been so trained in that kind of “carrot and stick” theology that we can hardly imagine being religious without having accepted the premise of the bargain. Sure, there is a lot of talk about “loving God,” and “loving the Lord,” but there is very little love in this equation. There is fear and there is greed, but I don’t see much love. I did my doctoral dissertation on monastic spirituality. I spent a lot of time in Trappist and Jesuit monasteries and I was deeply immersed in the literature of the historical monastic movements: The Rule of St. Benedict, The Cloud of Unknowing, The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, The Imitation of Christ, and the whole body of books by the 20th century monastic, Thomas Merton. But it was the 16th century Spanish monk, St. Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit order, who spelled out the grand bargain most clearly: “Man is created to praise, reverence, and serve God our Lord, and by this means to save his soul.” In his famous book, The Spiritual Exercises, he encourages prospective monks to “Consider also the innumerable others who have gone to hell for fewer sins than (you) have committed.” For centuries, the church successfully made millions of people afraid of going to hell, and just stated that they would live for eternity, either in bliss or in torment, based on how well they had “praised, reverenced, and served God” without ever giving the slightest bit of evidence that anyone has a soul or that either heaven or hell existed. It was the biggest “the emperor has no clothes” scheme in history and yet, very few people have been willing to say out loud what is obviously true. As my homiletics professor, David Buttrick, regularly reminded us, the mortality rate is 100%. And he was a man who really wanted to believe in life after death. He told us that he took a year off after his young son died to read everything he could find about the afterlife and, he said, he found that it was all just wishful thinking with no real substance. A fairy-tale we tell ourselves to take the edge off of our grief but no matter how many million people have been told by some pious prick, “You should be happy for your son, he is in a much better place now,” I doubt that anyone actually believed it. His son’s “better place” was at the dinner table with his mom and dad, playing baseball in the backyard with the other neighborhood kids. Lying about grief may help some people but, I think, for most of us, it is just an insult to the memory of someone we loved very much. It seems to be more respectful to simply acknowledge, as Keanu Reeves says, that we miss them very much, and not try to dismiss our grief with an obvious lie. I love the Wallace Stevens poem, The Emperor of Ice-Cream, but I have always found it odd that scholars and students spend so much time debating what it might mean. One English professor says, while there are some lines that are impossible to comprehend, that it is probably about a wake in the Caribbean where the tradition is to serve sweets to those who come to view the body and sit with the family. Honestly, I wonder if it is difficult to understand because we just don’t want to acknowledge that the only emperor, the only real authority in life, is death. The mortality rate is 100%. Stevens’ poem is full of images of things that are temporary. He says: Call the roller of big cigars, The muscular one, and bid him whip In kitchen cups concupiscent curds. Let the wenches dawdle in such dress As they are used to wear, and let the boys Bring flowers in last month’s newspapers. See, everything in the verse is an image of something that has a very short life. A cigar is finished in minutes. If you ever had the pleasure of eating home made ice cream, the only kind available generations ago before ice cream became a grocery store item. I remember those hot, humid Kentucky summer days of my youth, before air conditioning, when my dad and my older brother would take turns cranking the handle of the ice cream maker, packing chipped ice and Epsom salt around the metal cylinder in the bucket, getting the contents cold enough to freeze. But when all of the labor was done, and mom gave us all a little bowl of the frozen curds, you could literally watch it turning back into a milky soup right before your eyes. We worked so long to make it and it had to be eaten quickly or it just melted away. And the verse mentions cut flowers, which begin to wilt almost as soon as they are cut, wrapped in, not just yesterday’s newspaper, but last month’s newspaper… and item that is already dead and gone, good only to wrap up a fish or cut flowers. All things that had only a short life. And the poet utters the refrain: Let be be finale of seem. The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream. Stevens is asking us to just accept it, don’t try to deny it, don’t try to cover it up in flowery religious language. Because, the only emperor is the emperor of Ice-cream. I think that it is important for us to be aware that the current modern belief in life after death is not normative in all places at all times. In the early centuries of the Jewish religion, there was no belief in an afterlife. Even in the time of Jesus, as we see reflected in gospel accounts of the conflicts between competing Jewish sects, the Pharisees and Sadducees, there was sharp disagreement even then. Aristotle believed that life was somehow eternal, but he didn’t believe in individual immortality, more that your life force evaporates at death and is taken up into a cloud of life that rains down as trees, ducks, and people. And, as you know, there are various forms of incarnational eastern beliefs, but our western images of heaven and hell, associated with later Christianity, is not the norm. There have been critics of these issues all through the Christian era, but I believe that the 19th century German theologian, Ludwig Feuerbach, expressed it best in his book, 'Thoughts on Death and Immortality.' Sadly, because denying the existence of heaven and hell was so controversial, Feuerbach published it anonymously. I hate that there are thoughts that are censored even before they are aired. The late Scott Peck said, “Anything that cannot be questioned is an idol and all idols are slated for destruction.” I realize that most Christians and Muslims, and many Jews and Buddhists would not agree with what I am saying today but they should at least allow me to say what I believe, just as I give them the liberty to be mistaken. It is, after all, only fair. Feuerbach makes the observation that I have tried so often to point out to my religious peers: there is no evidence, that is to say, none, zip, nada evidence for consciousness apart from a body. Engels and Marx read Feuerbach’s books and said, at the time, that his book Had a profoundly “liberating effect” on him and Marx by “breaking the spell” of the Hegelian system, and establishing the truths that human consciousness is the only consciousness or spirit that exists, and that it is dependent upon the physical existence of human beings as part of nature (Engels 1888: 12–13). One of the consistent complaints that I have with my own discipline, philosophy, is that philosophers give too much importance to thinking about the possible and not enough time thinking about the probable. Anyone can say that you cannot prove that there is no heaven or hell because, in all cases, you cannot prove a negative. You cannot prove that there are no unicorns in the world, but you can say that there is no evidence for their existence and in the absence of a reason to believe in unicorns, we need to acknowledge that the probability is very very low. While it may be, in some inexplicable way, possible for consciousness to exist apart from a body, there is no evidence for it and therefore, no reason to believe that it is the least bit probable. You can’t prove that I am not Spiderman but don’t jump off of a high building in any confidence that I am going to swing down and save you because, in all probability, that isn’t going to happen. Feuerbach, by the way, had nothing to say about Spiderman. I realize that if this is the first time that you are hearing a minister say that there is no heaven or hell that it might be unsettling. It is hard to hear something that is contrary to what you have always believed and on which you have staked a whole lot of your religious faith and assumptions about existence. This is huge, and such a change is not easy; most people won’t do it, and if you do, your first feeling is a feeling of loss. If you have been raised with the whole “carrot and stick” grand bargain, it is very difficult to think differently, even though I hope that you do. Feuerbach discusses it in the impossibly difficult style of a German philosopher but, put more simply, eternity is a long time. If we did have eternal life, it would cheapen our mortal existence, making it seem to be irrelevant. In fact, we have all heard more than one preacher put it exactly that way, telling us that our mortal lives are of no importance because, what is one grain of sand when you can have the whole beach? Even the Apostle Paul says, (2 Cor. 4) that the momentary suffering we endure in this life is meaningless in comparison with our eternal home in heaven. That thinking has encouraged, not only Paul, but millions of priests and pastors to encourage people to have the commitment to stay in a bad marriage, or even to remain in slavery, but the conditions of life in this world mean nothing in contrast with eternity. Most of us have known more than one person who refused lifesaving surgery or cancer treatments because they welcomed death as a portal into a better life. . . incapable of conceiving that the universe might be able to go on without them. They really needed to have seriously considered Louis C. K.’s observation, “A lot goes on when you die, it just doesn’t involve you.” I’m saying that it is precisely because we are mortal that life is precious, sacred, even. You only have so many sunsets. There are only so many evenings when you can sit and talk with an aging parent and really get to know your own mother or father. Our children grow up, they leave home, they have careers, friends, kids of their own. I wish that I had a century to show my pre-school aged daughter the wonders of the world but, in fact, it was over in a moment, and I can never get any of those days back. Now, I wonder, why did I work so much? Why did I let so many other things crowd out that time? I stop by the tables of young parents in restaurants, especially when they are staring at their phones or getting impatient with their toddlers, total strangers, I just walk up with my white beard and thinning hair and I tell them, “Life doesn’t get any better than this. Savor every minute.” The German American poet of the mid 20th century, Charles Bukowski, said it as clearly as anyone can: We’re all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities; we are eaten up by nothing. Clearly, in light of our mortality, we should focus on what is important. We should be quick to forgive our siblings, even if they voted for Trump. We should do whatever we have to do to get conflict out of our marriage, to make the holidays absolutely super for our kids, and to put in the effort to hold friendships together. And we should do it now, now while we still can. The Buddha didn’t really say it, but one of my favorite fake Buddha quotes is, “the trouble is, you think you have time.” The truth is that the mortality rate is 100% and it typically comes much quicker than we thought it would. So, grab today with both hands and live as much as you possibly can while you can. So that when we are gone, the people who knew us will miss us.