“Faith Without Certainty”

       May 19, 2024        

Dr. Roger Ray

click here to see the video

Any decent parent knows that when their children go through that phase of being afraid of monsters under the bed that it is their job to comfort their children by assuring them that there are no monsters under the bed. I used to tell my daughter that all of the monsters are in Congress, but we never let them come to our house. You can’t start too young to let your kids know that even though there is not a monster under their bed, there are monsters in the world. 

 

But what about when the family dog dies? How many parents have tried to comfort their children by telling them, that their dog has gone to a better place? That he is happier now? Should we really do that? 

Of course, if you live in North Dakota you might try telling them, “Well, Governor Kristy Noem was driving by and you know how she can be . . . . I’m sorry, I just can’t get that story out of my head. 

 

Childhood is full of anxiety. Children are small and vulnerable, growing up in a world of giants upon whom they are entirely dependent. So, childhood is marked by imaginary monsters, their dreams are filled with chasing dreams, falling dreams, and fears of isolation or abandonment. Still, I prefer honesty. I think we can even look to Disney’s Lion King on this one, I don’t know of any child who was upset by Mufasa explaining the circle of life to Simba. 

Very honestly and factually, he explains that we are all connected. They eat the antelope but when lions die, their bodies become the grass that the antelopes eat. They are in a beautiful connection. It is sad that all living things eventually die but the molecules of their body return to the universe where, for all of time, they will reappear in many things, grass and trees, grasshoppers and birds. I wouldn’t start out with Nietzsche, kids don’t need to hear that death is what gives life meaning . . . my undergrad students couldn’t get Nietzsche so I wouldn’t expect a toddler to appreciate him but honesty, in my estimation, is better than delusion. Such things deserve a lot of delicate compassion, but I just don’t think that false comfort is a good choice, not for children and certainly not for adults.

 

Movies often become our modern myths. At one time, when almost everyone in the western world had a pretty comprehensive education in biblical stories, that common awareness made it possible for us to reference Noah, David and Goliath, Jezebel, or Elijah, and we could be confident that everyone knew the story. Now we can reference The Lion King, The Matrix, maybe Gone With the Wind, and the Wizard of Oz, with confidence that just about everyone knows the story, even though they are all fictional. 

 

I have often said that progressive religious people have given up false certainty in favor of honest uncertainty. That sounds simple but I know that it is not easy. We don’t want to live like anxiety riddled children, we crave the security that comes from certainty. Religion has far too often offered absolutes, the ten commandments, dietary laws, rigid sexual boundaries, definitions of marriage, family, and charity. 

We’ve all known people who at least talked like they took their fundamental religious training at face value and never allowed themselves to consciously question it. That, I submit, causes a lot of problems when people take myths too seriously. We watch the Lion King and enjoy the story and the music, but we know that Lions don’t really talk. Sadly, however, a lot of religious people will read the story of Adam and Eve and actually believe that snakes talk, or that they at least could talk in the way back when. 

 

Several years ago, when the large denominational church where I was the senior pastor was going through some remodeling, an artist was hired to paint a mural on the wall of the nursery. I wasn’t personally involved in the details of any of that, but I did stick my head in the door during the painting to see how it was going. 

The artist had chosen, I assume with the approval of the education committee, to do a mural of the story of Noah’s Ark. I was frozen in my tracks, even though I could remember there being a toy ark with lots of animals that went inside of it as one of the toys in the church nursery where I was a child. The story of the great flood is a horrifying story. God killed billions of people and even billions more animals, out of regret for having ever made us, but decided to save a few in a boat to start the world over again.

 

We are so comfortable with this story that we will paint a mural with smiling happy people and animals like that are taking a Sunday afternoon boat ride on the lake . . . we don’t depict the floating dead bodies all around because, at our root, conscious or not, we know it isn’t a true story. We know that it didn’t happen. So, you’re painting a mural in a kid’s room in a church, do something Biblical.

I might of gone with something like “red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight,” sort of thing. But they went for God’s mass genocide of the human race and all the animals of the earth.

 

And if you grew up in one of those churches, you undoubtably knew all of the words to the song about it:

“The Lord said to Noah, there’s gonna be a floody, floody.” Remember? The refrain repeated, “Rise and shine and give God the glory, glory,” but the verses happily recount the building of the “arky arky” and the animals coming by “twosy twosys” . . . one wonders why children don’t have more nightmares about this. It is a horrible story about a monstrous, murdering God, and yet the song ends:

“The sun came out and dried up the landy landy

And everything was fine and dandy dandy.” 

 

Forgive me but, we’re all outraged about Kristy Noem shooting her dog but we teach our children to sing a happy song about God killing 99.9999% of the people in the world? I hope that you are not offended if I ask, “What the actual hell?”

I trust that you can see, we wouldn’t tolerate this narrative for a moment around our children unless we had already realized that it just wasn’t true. In the ancient world, it was a horrifying and not a subtly threatening story, but since it is pure fiction, we can do with it whatever we want. No one really takes it seriously. . . . it’s just that, unless you are a Unitarian, you have probably never heard a minister be honest about it public.

 

A decent preacher will use stories of these grand divine events, dividing the Red Sea, the stories of Adam and Eve, the Tower of Babel, even the miraculous feeding and raising of the dead stories in the prophets, to teach modern moral lessons. 

Not many will add the footnote, reminding the congregation that these are ancient myths and not matters of historical fact, but, I hope that most people reach that conclusion even if it isn’t blatantly pointed out to them.

 

But we don’t live in an age of myths and fables . . . we have more than our share of embarrassing conspiracy theories, but we live in an age of science which has trained us to be more “fact literal” about the world. Whereas people in the ancient world did not tell and retell these ancient myths as literal history, unfortunately, modern people tend to do that exactly. We don’t tend to read ancient myths for their moral lessons, at least some religious people want to put them on the same shelf in the library as their history and biology text books . . . as we see being played out in state legislatures in red states even this spring. 

 

Science gives us a different kind of faith. I have an amateur interest in physics. I regret that I didn’t get more formal training in physics, but I love to try to catch up with new discoveries when someone is kind enough to break it down into layman’s terms. A friend recently sent me a link to an article about the possible discovery of a tiny particle that is called “the glue ball.” At the subatomic level, the universe is believed to be made up of only 12 particles of matter that are held together by four forces of nature: gravity, electromagnetism, and the weak force and the strong force. The reason why there are particle colliders around the world is so that physicists can try to break atoms apart and find these particles and observe these forces at work. The Beijing Spectrometer III is especially good at locating the meson particle which is made of a charm quark and a charm antiquark. It is in observing these particles that disappear almost as soon as they are observed is where physicists think they may have found this glue ball that helps to hold uncharged particles together in the nucleus of an atom. 

 

I can read about this research with a kind of childlike wonder but, isn’t this another kind of faith? I don’t understand it. I have no idea how particle colliders work, nor would I know what a charm quark or meson was if a bunch of them suddenly stood up in my soup. I have a tiny bit of knowledge, just enough to give me tremendous respect for the theorists and physics researchers who investigate these things. And I am willing to give them a lot of room to declare that most of the universe is made up of dark matter even though no one has ever seen dark matter and no one knows what it is, we just know that there must be a lot of dark matter because without its gravitational pull, the universe’s accelerating expansion wouldn’t make sense. 

 

I have seen evidence of gravity and electromagnetism but I take it on faith that the weak force and the strong force operate at a subatomic level . . . I can’t see them, but I accept that atoms do stick together and if they are making that happen, I am grateful.

Science attempts to learn what is true about the universe but science is morally neutral. The myths and fables of religion were never intended to tell us about physics or history, but they were intended to teach morality, to teach us how to live, how to choose to show compassion, to create the kind of civilization in which both love and justice might flourish. 

I think that Karen Armstrong is the most comprehensive and almost impossibly well informed religious scholar alive today. I highly recommend all of her books to you but just know, it is a bit like trying to drink from a firehose. But she said about religious myths: The myths and laws of religion are not true because they conform to some metaphysical, scientific or historical reality but because they are life enhancing. They tell you how human nature functions, but you will not discover their truth unless you apply these myths and doctrines to your own life and put them into practice.

 

As a progressive preacher, I keep trying to liberate religious people from taking ancient myths literally to save them from the moral pitfalls that are inevitable when people try to think that way. The constant wars between the extremists of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam is often the result of bad theology. And though we don’t hear much about it in the west, there have been horrible bloody conflicts between Hindus and Buddhists. You can look up the Black July Massacres as one example. Religion, at its best, helps us to be better people so that we can create a better society. Religion that is mired in superstition and magical thinking actually causes a lot of the problems we face in the modern world.

 

Pope John Paul II once wrote to, the director of the Vatican Observatory, that “Science can purify religion from error and superstition; religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes. Each can draw the other into a wider world, a world in which both can flourish.”

 

It has always been a mistake to think that science replaces faith or that faith must resist scientific inquiry. In the best of all possible worlds, science and faith help to guide one another. The critical thinking skills and devotion to reality inherent in science can help religion to clean house, examine our myths and free us from the grand moral failures that have cursed the human race. 

Similarly, the devotion to compassion and justice that is inherent in sincere spirituality can help to keep science from reducing life to a kind of nihilism. 

 

I have used this illustration before but please allow me to repeat it once again:

I had to leave it behind when I moved to my new home in Florida but this Ficus tree stood in my living room for nearly 40 years. I moved it outside every summer and managed to wrestle it back inside every fall, year after year. On the right you see me pictured with my lovely Korean daughter whom I adopted 35 years ago. Both she and the Ficus tree are made of the same 12 particles of matter, held together by the same four forces of nature. Their atomic composition is actually very similar, they even weigh about the same. They are both made up of atoms formed billions of years ago in exploding stars. But that is where the similarity ends. 

 

I cared for, fed, and raised them both, but there is a huge difference in how I feel about them. Physics can describe them atomically, but physics cannot measure the love I feel for my daughter. Science can describe what is, what exists, what is the substance of a thing, but spirituality brings meaning to the equation. I don’t exist in a universe of atoms, my life is lived in relationships, connection to people, nature, that is defined by awe, wonder, love, and hope. 

 

I am a pastor who does not believe in a literal heaven or hell, I don’t believe in souls, angels, and I don’t believe in a super-natural person who lives in the clouds who sometimes grants what we pray for but generally doesn’t. But I am deeply religious, not in a matter of beliefs, rituals, creeds, or sacraments, but in a passion for justice and a deep love and hope for both humanity and nature. 

 

I deeply regret that conservative Islam and conservative Judaism teaches children in Israel and Gaza that God wants them to kill each other. Just as I hate that Christians and other world religions allow their superstitions to justify misogyny, homophobia, racism, and the exclusivism that makes us value ourselves and allows us to justify indifference towards the suffering of others. 

 

I’ll close with one more quote from Karen Armstrong, this one is my favorite:

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. ”

 

Let’s use our critical thinking to interrogate our myths as we strive to become better people. I realize that traditional religious folks may find it a lot easier to give up on Old Testament myths than using the same interrogation skills on the Jesus narratives in the New Testament. Still, that may be the more important work for us as we grow past the religion we learned as children. So, I’ll be talking about the limitations on what we really know about Jesus in my talk that will be posted on June the second. 

“USA at War with Russia and Iran”

           May 5, 2024               Dr. Roger Ray

 

click here to see the video

 

President John Kennedy once referenced what he called “an ancient Chinese curse,” in a speech delivered in 1966, saying that the Chinese often cursed their enemies saying, “May you live in interesting times.” The proverb is neither Chinese nor is it ancient, but it is ironically true, isn’t it? Cursed or not, we are living in interesting times. With hot wars in Ukraine and Palestine, an almost inevitable invasion of Taiwan by China, a horrifying presidential election which could bring an end to democracy and free elections as fascism seems to be gaining an ever stronger footing in the Republican party. Technological advances in artificial intelligence and renewable energy hold both promise and dread as huge cultural changes are now on the near horizon. We didn’t choose to be born into such a volatile world but here we are. We are living in a time when moral leadership is needed more than ever. 

 

As former Attorney General, Eric Holder, recently prophetically said, “There is no cavalry coming. No miracle solution. No saviors. In the end, we, the American people - not any of our institutions - have to save our democracy by voting in defense of that democracy this fall. We are the cavalry. The responsibility is ours.” 

 

In these interesting times, institutions we once trusted, seem now to be compromised beyond redemption. One need only pay attention to the past two years of the evolution of the Supreme Court into a partisan dumpster fire to realize there is no cavalry about to ride over the hill to save democracy. The Supreme Court has sacrificed their moral credibility in service to a moronic Clementine Caligula in exchange for enthroning 16^th century Roman Catholic misogyny into law. It is difficult to believe that the highest court in the world’s oldest democracy could have fallen into such corruption, incompetence, and freedom hating ideology. But when you elect someone like Donald Trump as president, you can’t expect him to appoint great legal minds to the bench. 

I like the Turkish proverb that says, “When a clown moves into a palace, the clown doesn’t become a king. The palace becomes a circus.” In 2016 we put a lying, misogynist, con artist in the white house and now, even though he is gone, our justice system and our legislative branch are still reeling with the circus he created. I shudder to think how much more damage he could do if we screw up and give him another bite of the apple.

 

Thankfully he was out of office when Russia invaded the Ukraine two years ago, because now the world is standing on the precipice of a nuclear war, more so, perhaps, than even the early cold war days when I and my elementary school classmates were taught to hide under our desks in case of a nuclear war. 

 

Most of us initially feared that Ukraine would fall to the Russian armies in a matter of weeks if not days, but their fierce and courageous defense of their homeland has, over the passage of time, expanded the membership of NATO and made most western nations willing to inch ever closer to nuclear war by increasing the types and amounts of military aid to Ukraine. 

 

You may remember that we initially would not give them aircraft or long-range missiles because we didn’t want to escalate the war. And Putin even mentioned the possibility of using nuclear weapons to discourage strategic support of Ukraine. Repeated Russian war crimes and huge death tolls among Ukrainian civilians has emboldened the USA and NATO to step up our support of Ukraine, accepting the increased risk of what desperate moves Putin might take if he feels trapped. 

 

The media, which can rarely walk and chew gum at the same time, virtually forgot about Ukraine last fall after the Hamas terrorist attack against Israel. 

This attack that included the most barbaric elements of rape, torture, and murder of babies caught the conservative government of Israel off guard. The failure of Netanyahu’s government has caused him to try to look bold and decisive by responding to Hamas in what looks like a genocidal war against the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip. Six months later, this shocking attack on a civilian population has provoked outrage around the world, seen most recently boiling over on American college campuses. 

 

Two things can be true at once, especially in such complicated times as these. I am glad that university students are now increasingly aware of world events, and they are willing to take drastic measures to express their views. I am sorry, however, that they seem to be so opposed to Netanyahu’s tactics that they have forgotten what Hamas did to start this conflict and they are allowing Anti-Semitic fringe elements to shape their protests in a way that threatens the safety of Jewish students on their own campuses, many of whom actually sympathize with their protests against Netanyahu’s excesses. You can support Israel and not support Netanyahu. You can advocate for Palestinians without threatening to start another genocide against the Jews. 

 

Students across America have been heard to repeat the chant, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” without a sincere understanding of what that chant really means. Look, there is no way to polish this turd. This is the Jordan River and this is the Mediterranean Sea, the east and west boundaries of Israel. This chant is an antisemitic threat from Palestine that they will literally push the Jews into the sea. Attempts at insisting that it does not mean what it clearly means shouldn’t fool anyone. 

 

I am a reluctant supporter of Israel. The theft of Palestinian territory to create a Jewish homeland at the end of World War II was stupid, illegal, and based on little more than British and American Sunday School geopolitics that wanted to give Jews the Holy Land as they romantically imagined that God had given it to them three thousand years ago. 

 

In what started out as a casual conversation in a local coffee shop, got heated when an older man insisted to me that the Jews own that land because God gave it to them. Checking off another coffee shop from Vero Beach’s options where I am no longer welcome, I pointed out that it is no great wonder that the Jews wrote a book in which they say that God gave them the land but that would hardly stand up in a real estate title claim, especially since the Muslims have written a book that says that God gave that land to them. 

 

Honestly, the book of Exodus describes God as being a violent, pathological land thief. How could anyone defend that absurd claim in the 21^st century? . . . However, I could take you to a nearby coffee shop and introduce you to some people who do defend it . . . but I’ll have to wait in the car. 

I hate that I have to go back a full century to find a member of the Supreme Court that I am willing to quote in a sermon but I want to tip my hat to Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes  who said:

“I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I will give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.”

 

I realize that the news in these interesting times is draining, it is stressful, and, admittedly, it is complicated. I’m afraid that many of our college students are taking a far too simplistic view of the Palestinian crisis but you can’t really fault them when senior members of the Republican led house are daily repeating Russian propaganda, endangering the world and destroying American credibility. 

I expect more of our university students but I am at a loss for what to say about how ignorant, unAmerican, and dangerously misinformed these Republican members of congress are. 

 

Some have even repeated, on the floor of Congress, Russian misinformation like insisting that President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine was using our aid money to buy two yachts. This is obviously Russian slander but who would have believed than people who are holding elected seats in the Congress could be dumb enough to believe it?  I think someone has been skipping important briefings.

 

As many of you surely know by now, I have not been a great fan of President Joe Biden but when it comes to managing foreign affairs, we have a lot of reasons to stand up and applaud his steady hand on the wheel in the midst of complicated events to which there is no easy answer and all of the simple answers are more dangerous than the more measured approach he has taken. Everyone in the world, save only a small group of radicals in Israel, is mad about how the response to the Hamas terror attack in October has been handled but I just have not heard many people offer a workable solution to removing Hamas from power in Palestine and if you believe that Hamas should be allowed to continue to exist in Gaza then I submit that you have not studied the events closely enough. 

 

Long time listeners will recall the many times that I have said that I am so opposed to war that I am already against the next war. Honestly, that has not been much of an over statement. We never should have invaded Afghanistan, there were better ways to respond to the 9-11 attack on the US. We had little to no reason to invade Iraq and, in fact, we took away the one military check that Iran had, allowing them to become a regional exporter of terrorism and possibly a nuclear threat. That war was ignorant on every meaningful level. 

 

One of my professors at Harvard was fond of saying that if all you have is a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail. The United States has been so invested in military power that we have often acted like all we had was a hammer and I have advocated for more than 40 years that we invest more in diplomacy and less in military might. I am not a pacifist but I always kind of wanted to be one. 

 

Still, I often look at military action in much the same way that I look at a parent spanking a child. Many parents argue that spanking is the only thing that works on their kids, but I tend to think that use of violence against kids is not parenting but evidence of having failed at parenting. If beating your kids is how you hope to teach them good behavior, I think that you have already missed the point.

 

War is almost always a sign of a failure or a gross neglect of diplomacy. There were a thousand things that Israel should have been doing to improve the lot of Palestinians before the October terrorist attack, but once Hamas had done what they did, a military response was necessary. 

 

I think that the west has been disingenuous about the security of Ukraine and that we had sent a lot of the wrong signals to Russia about NATO, but once Russian armies poured over the border into Ukraine, a military response was necessary. I hate it, but without a time machine, there are not many options.

 

Hamas can only do what they do because of funding and supplies from Iran. Iran would love to attack Israel and the United States directly for both historical and ideological reasons but they know that they can’t win in that confrontation so they resort to proxies; of which, Hamas is only one. 

 

The United States now finds itself engaged in two undeclared wars. It may sound horrible to say it, but we are using Israel as a proxy to fight Iran and we are using Ukraine as a proxy to fight Russia. The world cannot afford for us to ignore the danger posed by both Iran and Russia and, selfishly, I am glad that we have found ways to do it without deploying American troops even though we must not look lightly on the sacrifices made by combatants made on both sides of these wars.

 

When I was in Thailand last winter, the beaches were full of draft age Russians who were avoiding be sent to fight in Ukraine. Many Russians who have died in the war were prisoners who Putin sends into battle, il-equipped, and sometimes even unarmed, to smoke out the positions of Ukrainian forces and to deplete their ammunition. Putin is heartless even though people like the Georgia congresswoman, Marjory Taylor Greene keeps insisting that Putin is “not that bad.” I don’t know how many listeners that I have in Georgia but I beg you, do something to get this woman out of Congress.

 

There was a horrifying block of aid by Moscow Marj and other Republican right wingers in the Congress until mid-April. House Speaker, Mike Johnson, who had previously voted against aid to Ukraine, was preventing any future aid from even being voted on until Ukraine was nearly out of ammunition and was being forced to plan a retreat. Somehow he experienced a sudden conversion. 

I’ll side with MSNBC news host, Joe Scarborough, who says of deathbed conversions, “I’ll take it.” Johnson was playing a very dangerous political game with much needed aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. I have been horrified by his willingness to put world stability at risk so that a few Republican right wingers could feel like they were “owning the libs,” but it looks like some rational thought has penetrated his lust for power. A lot of damage has been done to our reputation and the coalition of western nations was in danger of falling apart but, as I said, better late than never, so I’ll take it.

 

We have been concerned that if Russia is successful in annexing Ukraine that Putin would not stop there. But I think that the longer we keep Ukraine supplied to stay in the fight, the less able Russia will be able to invade a vacant shopping mall.

 

May I remind you that we won the Cold War, not by deploying troops and fighting but buy building up our military resources in a way that provoked the Soviet Union to do the same until they ran themselves broke and the Soviet Union fell apart without our ever firing a shot.

 

In the same way, Putin thought he would take Ukraine quickly. He was not supplied for a sustained war and the more he runs his assets down, the less capable he will be to threaten Poland or other former Soviet states. Bloomberg estimates that Russia has spent more than half of its capital on this war in the past two years. Possibly half of their armored vehicles have been destroyed. 

 

What is more, the BBC estimates that more than 50,000 Russian soldiers have been killed in this war. Uncounted thousands have been seriously injured. These losses come straight out of the demographic sector, those 20 and 30 year olds, who would have shaped Russia future. 

 

Their future scientists, inventors, business, and government leaders are now buried in Ukraine. I hate this for the Russian people but the world will be safer if this war leaves Russia incapable to menacing its neighbors again. Think of the roles played by Germany and Japan in the lead up to WWII and look what happened when those devastated nations moved past their war era madness and started to build a technological and advanced society rooted in education and business. 

 

Less than a century ago, Germany, Japan, and Italy were what Russia, Iran, and North Korea are to us today. Could we imagine a world in which Russia, Iran, and North Korea could become some of our best friends? Is it too much to hope for? 

 

Please don’t become jaded by the current state of affairs. We have been in darker places in modern memory, and I believe that with the right heart, the right moral vision, a new and better world is waiting to be born. But remember, you are the cavalry that has to make it happen.