May 19, 2024
Dr. Roger Ray
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.
