What If This Is As Good As It Gets?

September 27, 2015
Community Christian Church of Springfield
Roger Ray, pastor

Albert Einstein - I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own - a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble minds harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotisms. 

Episode seven in the Star Wars movie franchise will be released in mid-December. Don't judge me, I will be among the throngs of people of a certain age who will be seeing this $200 million reenactment of one of my favorite college memories....that seems like more than inflation since in the first movie only cost $8 million but you have to bear in mind that they are using many of the same actors they used forty years ago and there is only so much that makeup and plastic surgery can accomplish... there will be a lot of computer generated imagery in this film.

I was finishing a degree in philosophy and preparing to go to seminary when the first film was released in 1977.  I am my friends saw the film repeatedly and would sit and talk for hours about the religious imagery in the film... Obi Wan was a dying and rising savior, Luke, with his obviously Biblical name, was a disciple.... And the Force.... Well, the Force could be a bit troubling.  On the one hand, you could say it was the Holy Spirit but the constant references to dark side and a good side of the Force made it all sound a tad eastern.  No metaphor is perfect and so we continued to see a lot of what we wanted to see in the film's imagery and remained faithful fans for the subsequent films' releases that tracked the universal battle between good and evil.
My college friends and I were certainly not the only ones to see religious significance in the Star Wars saga. Unlike in the United States, in Great Britain, census forms ask citizens to identify their religion. A write-in entry was being used so often that they ended up having to add "Jedi Knight" to the religious preference form.

Ironically, what was the weakest part of the theology of the movies in those pre-seminary days is now what I find the most attractive. When, at the age of 20, I walked into that theater in Memphis, Tennessee to see the first film, I took with me a firm belief in a very specific God, who had a very specific name: YAHWEH. I believed that YAHWEH had a solitary Son and that he had primarily authored the most important and exclusively holy book in the world.

My seemingly unshakable confidence in those beliefs was soon to be undermined in the process of earning a graduate school education but the echoes and shadows of that creedal faith lingered for years. Beyond all rational thought, I held onto a belief in an invisible heavenly friend who would grant my requests if only I made my requests for the right reasons, and in the right way, and often enough, and I believed that somehow that same invisible friend would one day welcome the more vital though equally invisible part of myself into eternity when my mortal life was finished.

Even when my intellectual certainty of such things was long gone, the hope remained. Even still, some of the smartest and most academically honest people in the world, cling to the hope of some kind of eternal life.
Anyone that I would care to spend any time in conversation with has certainly given up the old concrete imagery of pearly gates and streets of gold in an exclusively Christian heaven, but still, they hold onto a hopeful belief in some kind of eternal existence. I do not want to insult that hope to take it away from anyone who either ardently believes in it or even if they simply need to believe in it to cope with personal losses of loved ones or fear of their own mortality.

I only ask that we dare to consider the possibility that our existence is, as the Psalmist says in Ps 103:

14 For God knows how we were made;
he remembers that we are dust.

15 As for mortals, their days are like grass;
they flourish like a flower of the field;
16 for the wind passes over it, and it is gone,
and its place knows it no more.

What if this life is all that we are allotted? What if, as another of my favorite movies asks, "What if this is as good as it gets?" Yes, the water and star dust of my body will go on and perhaps become a part of future rivers, animals, and people, but the essence of who I am... my thoughts, feelings, loves, and memories, will cease to be. If this life is all that we have, how then should we live?

The founder of the Jesuit order of the Roman Catholic Church, St. Ignatius of Loyola, was a 16th century reformer who was trying to save the Catholic Church from the Protestant Reformation through an ardent revival of classic Christian faith.

Ignatius, in his famous work, The Spiritual Exercises, flatly states that humans were created to praise, reverence, and serve God our Lord, and by this means to save our souls. Ignatius designed a 40 day retreat in which retreatants were to spend their days in silent reflection on their sins and to vividly imagine how many people had gone into eternal torment for sins that were not as egregious as our own, and the only way that we could avoid spending eternity in hell was to dramatically change our lives and live for Christ, who alone could save us from this fate.

Avoiding the flames of hell involved not only a life of service and religious devotion but it also involved meticulous avoidance of almost everything that was natural for humans to do.

It was the great modern philosopher, Garrison Keillor, who observed, "You can teach a bear to ride a bicycle but it always looks uncomfortable doing it and you know he would really rather be out in the woods doing what bears do." Yes, there is no animal in the world suffers from neurotic anxiety that there is a deity in the clouds above who is fiercely concerned with how they express their sexuality or with what they eat, drink, or do.

Only humans, out of fear of death, created a belief in heaven and hell and coupled that belief with a series of guilt provoking rules about denying our animal instincts.  I am certain that my mother and my Sunday School teachers never read The Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius but I am convinced that the religion that they wanted to pass along was rooted in the belief that our natural instincts, if not corrected and defeated, would lead us all into eternal torment.

Pope Francis, the most famous living Jesuit, in spite of having a much more evolved view of these things, still is basically teaching the same fundamental beliefs.  And we can all say, that a lot of good things have come from these beliefs.  We would not want to do away with all that we were taught about morality, personal restraint and responsibility, and we certainly would not want to live in a human jungle that was ruled by nothing but our more base appetites which would turn our world into a violent and competitive living hell.

If you take away notions of eternal reward or punishment, if you remove the guilt associated with simply being human... if you, with Yoda, accept that even without a supernatural theistic person, there is a mysterious Force in the universe that unites all living things. And that this Force has both a good and a dark side, then we certainly want to avoid giving into the dark side of the Force and to try to live in harmony with one another. Then what is the best way for us to live?

What I am asking you to consider is that living in a purely unrestrained way like a naked ape, leads to one kind of suffering, but also, a full embrace of a life lived, as Ignatius and my Sunday School teachers suggested, in which you put all joy and living a fully human existence in order to avoid hell and to gain heaven, leads to a pitiful waste of the only life that we know that we will ever have. Having no theology is dangerous in one way, having a sick and largely narcissistic theology, is just as dangerous in the opposite way.

My mother firmly believed that anyone who drank a beer was an alcoholic who needed to change his ways. She was absurdly puritanical about that and many other things, and yet, we all know many people whose lives have been ruined by drug and alcohol addiction or by an unquestioned embrace of their appetites in matters of either sex or materialism.

There may be some kind of spiritual existence for us beyond our mortal lives but no one, not even Pope Francis, can assure you that there is, just as I cannot be certain that there is not. But what Frank and I, and all of you do know, is that you now have this life, and it is a gift, an opportunity, a living reality that is not to be wasted, perverted, or imprisoned by either addiction or guilt.

The beat poet, Langston Hughes, said,

"Folks, I'm telling you,

birthing is hard

and dying is mean-

so get yourself

a little loving

in between."

The First Casualty in Any War is the Truth

September 20, 2015
Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor

The American people were told Saddam Hussein was building nuclear weapons.  He was not.  We were told he had stockpiles of other weapons of mass destruction.  He did not.  We were told he was involved in 9/11.  He was not.  We were told Iraq was attracting terrorists from Al Qaeda.  It was not.  We were told our soldiers would be viewed as liberators.  They are not.  We were told Iraq could pay for its own reconstruction.  It cannot.  We were told the war would make America safer.  It has not.  Ted Kennedy

In spite of upheaval in Syria, and Isis military activity in Iraq, and in spite of all of the tension around the negotiation of a nuclear non-proliferation agreement with Iran, it seems that today, this Sunday morning in mid-September of 2015, that there is no nation that the USA is about to invade. And, it seems to me, that at a moment when there are not clouds of war gathering on the horizon, is the perfect time to spend a few sane moments in reflection about war.

I would like to go on the record as being in opposition to the next war, wherever it will be. I trust my saying that doesn't shock anyone.  I am a pastor. This is a church. Religious people have been proponents of peace through the centuries when we have managed to keep our wits about us even when congregations are falling prey to the hysteria of fear generated by governments that want to go to war.

The people who profit from warfare always try to silence religious voices by telling us that we have no business commenting on politics when the business of faith has always been to protect life, to seek peace and justice, and to defend the poor and weak.

The military industrial complex makes money in both times of peace and times of war but there really is no comparison to the amount of profit they make in peace times to the money they make in wartimes.  Ammunition and equipment that is stockpiled gathers dust and doesn't have to be replaced.  Missiles that are fired, airplanes that crash, tanks that are used... they have to be replaced and that is where the profit is, as well as all of the purveyors who make uniforms, provide food, and related services to an army.

The capitalists get rich during wars and so they want the religious people to stay out of their way.  Just to be clear, the answer to their request for passive silence is, "No," or, more accurately, "hell no."

Over the past fourteen years the church has been far too silent and, when they weren't silent, that often embarrassed themselves by speaking up on the wrong side of the issue.  We began today with this quote from the late Senator Ted Kennedy, who in 2003 accused the Bush administration of lie after lie, saying that the case against Iraq was a myth cooked up in Texas to give them an excuse to start a war.

To the best on my knowledge, I was the only pastor of a Springfield church who opposed the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq and it was years before a few others began to join our all too infrequent anti-war protests. The seriousness of the deception sold to the American people through the vehicle of fear, only got worse in later years as we became unavoidably aware that it was not only an illegal war based on lies, it was also being conducted in the most immoral way possible through the unconscionable torture of prisoners of war.

We felt entirely justified in even going into nations who are ostensibly our allies to kill Osama Bin Laden because he was the mastermind behind a terrorist attack that killed more than 3000 Americans. We invaded Iraq and killed possibly more than a half a million people to get Saddam Hussein who, though he had nothing to do with the 9-11 terrorist attacks on the USA, he had been guilty of a running a brutal regime in which he had killed thousands of his own citizens....not a tenth as many as we killed but still, a horrible ruler.

Though, by comparison, the crimes of Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein may seem to pale in comparison to our own war crimes, nothing has been seriously said about putting George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and their administration on trial for treason against the American people or for war crimes.

Switzerland is not going to invade the United States and arrest or execute George Bush or Dick Cheney though there was speculation in 2011 when Bush suddenly canceled plans to speak at a conference in Switzerland that he did not go because he feared being arrested there. There are no known warrants in any nation for the arrest of either Cheney or Bush because no nation would be willing to suffer the backlash they would get from the US government but it is also true that neither Bush nor Cheney have ventured into Europe since they went out of office.

Even appearances in Canada have provoked thousands of people to show up with signs denouncing them for being war criminals.

In some cases the police have felt the need to don full riot gear to protect them from the angry mobs.

There were certainly people in the United States who wanted members of the Bush administration to be charged and made to stand trial but President Obama made it clear that he would not be seeking prosecution for past crimes though he announced with taking office that the policy of torture would end immediately.

In the past few months the American Civil Liberties Union has been asking the Obama administration to grant pardons to Bush, Cheney, and several key members of their administration.  The precedent they cite is the 1974 decision of the newly sworn in President Ford to pardon Richard Nixon who had recently resigned from the office of the President.

Ford's thinking was that the nation needed to be spared the trauma of putting a former American president on trial, but he was not willing to pretend that Nixon was innocent nor that his crimes were insignificant just because a sitting president of the United States had committed them.  Sadly, in a interview with David Frost in 1977, Nixon was still clinging to his personal belief that he was innocent when he said, "If the president did it, that means it was not illegal." But the rest of us knew that the president is not above the law and that the mere fact that Ford had pardoned Nixon, was a statement of probable guilt.

President Lincoln pardoned southern soldiers after the Civil War because the nation needed to heal. President Carter pardoned draft dodgers after the War in Vietnam because the nation needed to heal.

What the ACLU is saying is that we should not pretend that lying to the American people, the Congress, the Senate, in order to start an illegal war, and that defying Geneva Conventions of War by torturing prisoners should not be ignored.  We cannot pretend that these would be war crimes if committed by an Osama Bin Laden or a Saddam Hussein, but they are not illegal if done by an American President.

While there are certainly those in the ACLU who would like to see some of the Bush administration stand trial, the official request is that, accepting that it would be bad for the country to put an administration on trial, it is morally unacceptable to pretend that they are innocent. They are asking President Obama to:
. . . pardon George J. Tenet for authorizing torture at the C.I.A.'s black sites overseas, Donald H. Rumsfeld for authorizing the use of torture at the Guantánamo Bay prison, David S. Addington, John C. Yoo and Jay S. Bybee for crafting the legal cover for torture, and George W. Bush and Dick Cheney for overseeing it all.

Their argument is that we absolutely must not say to the world or to ourselves that torture is okay as long as it is only the USA that is doing it. Nor can we say that USA can invade a sovereign nation without just cause. To pardon Bush and members of his administration will at least acknowledge that we are a nation of laws and not of kings.

Frankly, this is not entirely satisfactory to me because as we sit here this morning there are a half a million Americans who are in prison, not because they led us into an illegal war or because they tortured prisoners but for some drug offense. Thousands of them were just kids caught in possession of small amounts of marijuana. How can their crime merit years in prison but war crimes and treason are somehow above being even mentioned?

For the same reasons that Switzerland wouldn't really arrest a former American president who happened to be on their soil, I know that members of the Bush administration who are guilty of horrible crimes will never serve a prison sentence or stand trial, but they should at least be pardoned to show that we know better than to do to Iran what we did to Iraq.

I'm not anti-American but I am anti-war. I'm not unpatriotic, I am patriotic enough to want my country to be one of the good guys.... You know, the kind of country that doesn't torture prisoners of war. I don't hate George Bush or Dick Cheney, I just don't think that they are any different from the two million Americans who did stand trial and are currently in prison for the crimes that they committed.  And that's not politics, that's just sane religion.

The Illuminative Way

September 13, 2015
Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, Pastor

Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."  Isaac Asimov
The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush.  It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment.  Robert Maynard Hutchins

Like a lot of people, I still love my home state and even though I have lived here in Missouri for 24 years, I still feel that Kentucky is my home. I love my home state, but I have to admit, it is often hard to be proud of it. I thank God for the images of Kentucky broadcast every first Saturday in May when the Kentucky Derby is run because almost every other time that Kentucky is mentioned in the national news, it undermines my claim that I am from the MENSA Club capital of the world.

Once the media is locked onto a story they seem to have difficulty in letting it go, hence we have been treated to so many stories about the ignorant shenanigans of Kim Davis, the court clerk in Rowan County, Kentucky that I have found myself longing for another story about the last horrifying thing that Donald Trump has said.

Davis not only makes my beloved Kentucky look like a grossly exaggerated version of Hee Haw, but she is simultaneously giving the Christian religion a black eye it really doesn't need right now.  Claiming her loyalty to God over the laws of mere mortals, she has resolutely refused to follow the decision of the Supreme Court in making same-sex marriages legal.

You have all seen her, by this time, I'm sure.  Evidently she has made the gay community in Rowan County so angry with her that she can't even find anyone to do her hair. Her current husband, Joe Davis, has also enjoyed the media attention, showing up on camera wearing a dirty t-shirt and coveralls and making such profound statements as:  Just because five people on the Supreme Court say so doesn't make it a law.

Clearly, neither Joe nor Kim are either legal or Biblical scholars but what has been alarming to me is that people who actually are national figures are saying things that are just as factually in error as the constitutional interpretations of Joe and Kim Davis.  Two presidential candidates, Gov. Mike Huckabee and Ted Cruz, actually showed up for her release from jail and others, including Rick Santorum and Marco Rubio, have defended her right to refuse to issue marriage licenses for same sex couples.  They keep using the phrase, "Five unelected justices," to reference the majority vote of the Supreme Court, as if to say that the Supreme Court is not, what the name clearly implies, the Supreme Court, i.e., you can't appeal their decision because there is no higher court.

There have been decisions made by the court that have seemed to me to be wrong, and sometimes even immoral, and I would be the last person to say that you don't have a right to refuse to obey a law that your conscience tells you is morally wrong, but to say that the Supreme Court, because the justices are constitutionally appointed rather than elected, does not have judicial authority, is just a denial of facts, a denial of reality, it raises stupid to the level of a sacrament.

Because we are progressives, we are disinclined to believe in things for which there is no evidence.  We talk about "evidence based faith" and I often quote philosophers who urge us to simply ignore truth claims that have no testable veracity.

I would also like to add that our perspective is not something new or unique to us. Even though the Kim Davis' and Mike Huckabees of the world may use the word "faith" to mean asserting things to be true that clearly are not true, that is not what religious thinkers have meant by faith through the centuries.

I don't often mention the fact that my doctoral research was in monastic spirituality. Over the years I have realized that no group of adults can remain awake for more than 90 seconds of me talking about this topic that has been fascinating to me. So I will be brief.

My dissertation looked at the great spiritual classics produced between the 4th and 18th centuries in Christian monasteries. I found in this literature the assumption that the spiritual journey followed three essential steps. In Latin they called these steps: the purgative, the illuminative, and the unitive.  I will give a copy of my 1999 book, Christian Wisdom for Today, to any of you who have the courage to try to read about this.  I have several copies here today and I will mail a copy to any of our internet audience who are willing to send me the $4 for postage.

But, here is my less than 90 second spiel:  For centuries the assumed path of spiritual growth started with a time of purgation... of self-denial, self-examination, of getting your appetites under control and getting out of your life those things that might prevent you from progress in the spiritual life.  The last of the three steps, the unitive, had to do with uniting with God, the contemplative, prayerful, devoted life in which the self is united with the Divine.

The middle step, the illuminative or the gaining of illumination, was about study. No matter how many religious people try to insist that faith is a matter of just believing, or more likely, just denial of reality, even the ancient monks of the Alexandrian desert, expected monks to read books, meditate, and study.  An uninformed religious opinion has the same value as an uninformed medical or mechanical opinion.

That is not to say that study makes you always right but it means that you are capable of rational critical-thinking and that you are a great deal more likely to be right.  The untutored are sometimes just inherently insightful but most of the time it amounts to what my father used to say about how even a blind hog sometimes finds and acorn.

It has to be said that there has always been a difference between a healthy religious faith and an unhealthy faith. Our most famous Missouri born theologian, H. Richard Niebuhr said, "Religion makes good people better and bad people worse."

I don't think that it was her conversion to an evangelical flavor of Christianity that made Kim Davis into such a horrifying and prejudiced human being but I do think that she has used the Christian religion in the way that a drunk uses a lamp post, for support but not for illumination.  She has used irrational, anti-intellectual, anti-factual religious claims to give her the courage to hold onto an outdated prejudice and by using religious language she has bought into a community of similarly affected supporters.

Before Davis brought a herd of reporters to rural Kentucky, I had selected this quote from Isaac Asimov as our wisdom lesson for today, because when he said that we are suffering from:  ...the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge" I felt like he was specifically describing one of the crucial problems with religion in our time.

There is lots of noise and spectacle, but not much illumination.  There is an abiding insistence that an ignorant assertion of belief is to be shown the same serious consideration as a conviction that is the product of actual study and critical thinking.

Lots of people will sometimes buy a lottery ticket if for no other reason than that it is fun to sit around and speculate about what you would do if you won...like how much of it you would give to your church and how you would keep your grown kids from finding out how much money you suddenly have.

But if you buy a lottery ticket and tell yourself that you are going to win millions of dollars in a couple of days and on the strength of that belief you go ahead and quit your job and draw out your life's savings and put a down payment on a mansion, then you are not being a person of faith, you are being irresponsible....like Sarah Palin kind of stupid.

We are people of faith who live in a world where the science of military power has grown beyond the moral reflection of the people who run our government. We are a spiritual community in the midst of a culture that is willing to continue to bolster prejudices based on misinformation, person fears, and pseudo-science that threatens our planet's environment, that places human lives at constant risk, and prevents progress towards such things as equal rights, rational gun laws, and an educational system that works.

Because we want to have a healthy spirituality then we are in favor of supporting education... higher education should be provided without charge to every person in this country because information is the ladder by which the poor can climb out of misery and into an equal place in our economy. There is nothing we can do to keep the poor in a permanent peasant class that is more effective than what we are doing now in making higher education more and more unattainable by the poor.

This is not about conservative and liberal. Science and math don't care about politics. Politicians can argue about whether human activity is causing climate change and many news agencies still insist upon giving us statistics about how many Americans don't believe that climate change is real.

What I'm saying here is that science is not concerned with opinion polls and real religion shouldn't be either.  Truth is our scripture.  Scripture was considered to be sacred because it was believed to be true.  What we must now, in turn, be able to say, is that where we find that it is not true, in the face of new information, our religion changes.  Holy books, doctrines, creeds, may not change but by not changing in light of reality, they simply become irrelevant. We are so over that stuff.

Because we want to have a healthy religious life, we want to create for ourselves and encourage and support the creation in other places of churches that throw their arms around real science, an academic approach to theology, psychology, economics, sociology and, frankly, compassion.

When politicians trumpet a fake, obviously doctored bit of video to remove funding from Planned Parenthood, where most of the poor women in this country get needed reproductive care, critical thinkers don't fall for their manipulation of the truth.... Not if they are thinking.

Conservatives can claim that raising the minimum wage will cause unemployment and making the rich richer will create jobs but the math is not on their side. Math is not conservative or liberal. Math doesn't care about politics.  Math shows that incremental raises in the minimum wage creates jobs and reduces suffering while easing the burden of state funded welfare. They can call it liberal, or socialist, or whatever they want to call it.... We just need to be sure that we are on the side of the math.

While intellect may not be the key to the Kingdom of God, I don't think that ignorance has much to offer. Reality is our creed. The truth is our Bible. Critical thinking must be our contemplative prayers for the world. Ignorance and lies are the real demons that possess our world and we are here for the exorcism.

Justice for Workers

September 6, 2015  Labor Day Weekend
Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor

When the man who feeds the world by toiling in the fields is himself deprived of the basic rights of feeding, sheltering, and caring for his own family, the whole community of man is sick.  Cesar Chavez
What does labor want? . . . We want more schoolhouses and less jails; more books and less arsenals; more learning and less vice; more leisure and less greed; more justice and less revenge.  Samuel Gompers

Unlike much of the rest of the world, the first day of May typically comes and goes in the United States without mention.  May Day, as it is called in many other countries, is a holiday to celebrate workers rights.  It was started in honor of workers who died in the Haymarket Riot in Chicago in 1886.

It was a peaceful rally in support of the then novel concept that the workday should be eight hours long. The police came to forcefully break up the demonstration but some unknown person detonated a bomb that killed seven policemen and four protesters.  Trumped up cases were brought against eight of the labor movement's leaders. Seven were sentenced to death.  The governor stepped in and, under international pressure, commuted the sentences of two of them. One committed suicide in prison rather than face a public hanging but the other four were hanged in a public spectacle.

A few years later, as May Day was becoming internationally popular, President Grover Cleveland decided to make the first Monday in September a national holiday to honor the progress won by labor unions, in part to satisfy the demands of labor and in part to keep socialists and communists from using May Day as a recruiting opportunity in America.

For most of my life, Labor Day has simply been a low attendance Sunday in church as families take a three-day weekend at the end of summer for one last trip. As an adult, though I have often been speaking on the stage at Labor Union organized picnics, that audience has almost always been comprised of either politicians running for office or representatives of the dwindling number of labor union members.

A couple of years ago, labor union membership hit a century low, and most of those who are still members of unions are public employees working for fire departments, police departments, schools, or highway programs.

The stronger unions that gave us both the 40-hour workweek and the eight-hour workday are nearly gone.  The organized efforts that raised salaries, made pensions, and health insurance, and safer working conditions a part of the ascendance of the middle class have been silenced.

Eric Liu wrote in a piece for Time Magazine:  Unions lift wages for non-union members by creating a higher prevailing wage. Even if you aren't a union member, your pay is influenced by the strength or weakness of organized labor. The presence of unions sets off a wage race to the top. Their absence sets off a race to the bottom.

This generation of workers will not get to retire after 35 or 40 years of hard labor.  They have no real prospect of a comfortable retirement, and many of them continue to fight against even national health care programs that they personally need.

Some of that is because of the failure of the church to speak up on behalf of working people.  Some of it is the fault of workers who have allowed themselves to be manipulated into anti-union sentiments that make them act in ways that hurt themselves and their own children. And, of course, there are the ever-present corporations that want to drive down wages and labor costs as if the people who work for a living were not their prospective customers that corporations need to survive!

I am not from Missouri but I have a growing appreciation for one of Missouri's favorite sons, President Harry Truman, who guided America from the end of WWII into the early 50's, when labor union membership was at its zenith, and when American agriculture became the most advanced in the world, and our middle class spread prosperity to a larger and larger portion of our nation.

Still, the techniques used in our day to manipulate voters and workers to bow to the power of the wealthy were present in his day.  I want to share a couple of minutes of a Labor Day speech delivered in 1949 by Harry Truman with you now:

Harry Truman's Labor Day speech.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/labor-day-address-at-allegheny/id257999228?i=60680272&mt=2
11:35-14:57

Truman's argument that the people are being tricked into giving up a fair wage, decent housing, and a fair deal for workers is the same plight we face now in the twenty-first century.
In spite of the fact that we sit here in this church illuminated and air conditioned by socialist electricity, we drove here on socialist roads, after bathing in socialist water, in a community protected by a socialist police force and fire department, and defended by a socialist army, navy, and air force. Virtually all of us have benefited greatly by socialist school systems and semi-socialist healthcare and banking systems and yet, in this election year, we are supposed to cringe at the word "socialism."

Men and women, in our technologically advanced nation, blessed with labor saving devices, we no longer live in a time when everyone needs to work all of the time to survive.  There are resources enough for everyone in this nation to live fairly comfortably, have a comparatively short career, and enjoy an honorable retirement.

Manufacturing and agriculture simply do not demand the number of labor hours they used to and if we are willing to live sanely, without huge profits at the top of the economy and crushing poverty at the bottom, everyone can live a decent life in this century.... Everyone!

In a way, I struggle with charity... I struggle with the fact that we keep taking groceries to Crosslines and hot food to Bill's Place because this country shouldn't have so many poor people that such charities are needed.  There should not be homeless shelters and soup kitchens in every city of our wealthy nation.  Especially in a nation where there are still churches on every street corner. Where is the message that black lives matter?  That children matter?  That workers matter? That teachers, and public servants, and the people who cook our food and mop our floors, all matter?
If they matter, why can't they get jobs? A living wage? Health care? They don't get those things because, in America, all lives do not yet matter.  We can fix this but the first step of changing this democracy into a civilization is all of us have to stop being afraid.

That is my primary wish for everyone who will hear my words today.... Just stop being afraid.

Right Speech

August 30, 2015
Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor

Before you speak, ask yourself if what you are going to say is true, is kind, is necessary, is helpful.  If the answer is no, maybe what you are about to say should be left unsaid. Bernard Meltzer

My father was a stutterer.  The professionals who study stuttering do not agree on its causes.  Some say it is a neurological problem, others say that it is environmental.  It does tend to run in families and is more prevalent in some social subgroups than others.  And generally it is a malady of childhood that resolves itself in time.

In my father's case, however, he was the only one in the family who had the problem and it got worse as he got older.  I am certain that his horrific experiences in WWII made it worse.  For him it was a nervous disorder and it was a serious handicap that made him self-conscious and held him back from having the confidence to further his education or his career.

Like the country music singer, Mel Tillis, my dad could sing without stuttering but when he was upset about something, which he was a lot of the time, he could hardly talk.

So, when in graduate school I came across research into stuttering, I was naturally very interested.  Researchers were surprised to discover that among many Native American tribes, there was no instance of stuttering and in their native languages; there was no word for stuttering.
As with anything anyone says about the Indian nations, you can't generalize the whole of what amounted to many different tribes with some unique genetic markers, but still, something that is a problem for about 1% of the population everywhere else to simply not occur in many native tribes was remarkable.

Further research indicated that the tribes where there was no stuttering that children were raised fairly permissively with no expectations placed on them for any public performance competition in speaking, storytelling, or religious rituals.  That is, kids grew up not being shamed or pressured into situations where they were judged harshly and in the absence of fear and shame, there was no halting speech, no anxiety about peer judgment or rejection.

And even those who want to insist upon a neurological explanation for stuttering have to admit that all of the effective treatments are psychological... not to say that physiology doesn't play a part but it seems evident that stuttering is just one possible reaction to a mean world.

There are lots of birds, animals, fish, and even insects that have developed language of sorts that they use in their mating rituals, in hunting, defending their territory, and even in nurturing their young.  However, humans, the most evolved and advanced of language capable beings are the only ones that have developed the ability to destroy another person's life simply through the use of language.... Which, if anyone is watching my grammar closely, might cause one to question the use of the word "evolution" in this paragraph because evolution implies improvement.  The ability to insult, slander, destroy people's reputation, rob them of self-confidence, and push them to the point of self-loathing or even suicide, can hardly be called an evolutionary advance.

Ironically, the better we have become at communicating, the more efficient we have become in using communication to hurt people.  In marriage counseling, we teach conflicted couples to talk to one another while touching one another.  The more distance there is between two people the more likely they are to use abusive, angry, or violent language.

If there is a table between you, or if one is standing on the other side of the room, the conversation is more likely to turn ugly.  It is very difficult to raise your voice when you are holding hands looking into one another's eyes.  However, turn that into a phone call, or a letter, or especially an email and things can get ugly pretty fast.

Social media sites on the internet are great for staying in touch with family and friends, showing pictures of our kids, sharing our travels and some people even feel obliged to share photos of their meals and keep us up to date on the antics of their cats.  But social media, because it is communication at a distance, is also rife with insults, put-downs, slander, gossip, and lies.

The New Testament, written two thousand years before the launching of Face Book, includes a stern warning in the third chapter of James that says that the tongue is like a small flame that can set a forest on fire. If James had only known about how you could comment on line about people's articles, or send hate-filled emails to total strangers around the globe, he might have called the tongue a flamethrower rather than a small fire.

Even humor is something we should take seriously.  Almost every joke has a victim.
We talk about negative humor but it is nearly impossible to tell a joke that doesn't come at someone's expense and the rhetoric only heats up when the brunt of our jokes is a public figure, especially a politician who is running for office.

I took as our wisdom lesson today, a quote from an unusual source.  Bernie Meltzer was a popular radio talk show host in New York during the 70's and 80's. Even though the title of his show was "What's Your Problem?"..., which, in his New York studio, could have been translated, "Hey, whatsamatta you?" he was still concerned with civility.  He said:

Before you speak, ask yourself if what you are going to say is true, is kind, is necessary, is helpful.  If the answer is no, maybe what you are about to say should be left unsaid. 

There are things that are true that are neither helpful nor kind. There is a way that you can be so right that you are wrong and one of those ways is by pushing a personal agenda in a way that harms others unnecessarily. There are times when you can be satisfied simply with knowing that you are right without trying to get your spouse to acknowledge that fact! We should not remain silent about important things out of fear but there are times when we can choose to be silent out of love or basic kindness.

We have heard a lot in this campaign year about "political correctness," and even when Megan Kelly asked candidate Donald Trump a serious question about his dismissive language about women, Latinos, and the Chinese, he dismissed the question as being just another political correctness matter and the crowd burst into applause.

And, I'll admit, as a writer and a public speaker, I also sometimes find it infuriating to be called out on what seems to me to be harmless and insignificant issues.  I got called out a few months ago for using the word "transgendered" in an article in which I was defending the civil rights of our local trans community.

Because for many people who are changing their gender identity, it is not a past tense event but an ongoing and sometimes even a fluid thing.... So they prefer to be called transgender rather than the past-tense, transgendered.  It seems a bit picky to me except that I am not a member of the trans community and so maybe I should just call them what they want to be called.

In a sermon a few years ago, I referred to a bi-racial child as being mulatto. I had no idea that the word was offensive.  In fact, it is a Spanish word that is used in Latin America where it evidently is not offensive but it is here.  Again, I am not the son of a mixed race marriage so maybe I should just not use a term that offends people who are.

After becoming a father by means of international adoption, after sleepless nights, bottles, dirty diapers, added expenses, babysitters, clothes, shoes, and even college, now and then someone will ask me, "Do you know anything about her real parents," and when they ask that all I can think of is if there is a good place to hide the body of the person who asked me that insulting question...because the two teenagers who had sex in Seoul, Korea one night 26 years ago are not the ones who folded the laundry, paid the tuition, and rushed to several scenes where she had wrecked her car....again.

People who never adopted a child may mean no harm in asking such a question but I'm suggesting that it is in everyone's best interest for them to watch what they say.

Jeb Bush got himself in trouble recently by using the term "anchor baby" in reference to the children of illegal immigrants who gain American citizenship by virtue of being born here. It's one of those messy little provisions of the American Constitution!

He tried to mend fences with the Hispanic community by saying that he really wasn't talking about Hispanics, he was just talking about Asians.... Which was a fairly incomprehensible move to me but I am no one to explain the reasoning of Republican candidates.

It even strikes a tad close to home for Louisiana governor and presidential candidate, Bobby Jindal, who was born in Louisiana to non-citizen parents who were here on student and work visas who only became citizens after Bobby was born.... Oh, and Bobby is not his real name... it is the name of his favorite character on The Brady Bunch.

His name is Piyush Jindal... that's not relevant except that I wish that he could remember to be both thankful for how he gained his citizenship and be gracious to others whose claim to citizenship is not much different.

I am, in that regard, an anchor dad.  My daughter's only claim to American citizenship is because she was adopted by an American citizen but I think that America is a much better place because she is here. I hope to be able to feel the same way about Piyush Jindal but he is testing me a bit.

You see what I meant about humor almost always having a victim?

This church came into existence with the state purpose of being a prophetic church that spoke the truth to power, as a voice for the poor and the marginalized.  We speak the truth in public protests, demonstrations, letters to the editor, and we would even in town hall meetings if only our congressman would hold town hall meetings that admitted anyone other than his donors.

The challenge I want to bring to you today is to be bold, courageous, outspoken, well-informed, and prophetic, and I am asking you to do your best to do those things in a way that is kind, considerate, even loving because this world can be so mean that it can make a child stutter, and make many more hide their gifts and their potential because they are afraid of being criticized or shamed.

We want to bring light and not so much heat into the world. We want to be the salt of the earth, not the anti-freeze in people's Gatorade. Let there be peace on earth and let it begin with us.

Who is a Terrorist Today?

August 23, 2015
Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor

"Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers." Mignon McLaughlin

It will soon be two years since this world lost one of our truly bright lights.  Nelson Mandela died as the beloved former president of South Africa, the first national leader of that country who was of black African descent.  Trained as a lawyer, Mandela worked against the colonial policies of the white minority government of South Africa.

During the sixties, when we were trying to break down the walls of segregation in our schools, neighborhoods, workplaces, and churches, in South Africa, the machinery of Apartheid was being strengthened.  Here, a majority white population was just starting to come to terms with their abuse of an impoverished and vulnerable black minority.

In South Africa, where whites were in the minority and the sheer population of Blacks was so large, the white government sought to violently and with uncommon cruelty, to keep the black majority in poverty and in submission.

Nelson Mandela's brilliant opposition to Apartheid made him a target of the government.  He was put on trial in 1962 under the charge of trying to overthrow the government.  He spent 27 years in prison on an island where the temperatures were almost always over 100 degrees.  He did manual labor in that sweltering heat and his eyes were so damaged by the bright sun shining on the rocks that he had to wear sunglasses, even indoors, for the rest of his life.

Most of his fellow prisoners died in that nightmarish place.  Mandela endured, with nothing but a bucket for a toilet, no bed but the concrete floor, he survived their brutal torture and starvation.  Peace activists around the world advocated for Mandela's release and the government finally offered to release him if he would take an oath never to resort to violence in the pursuit of black liberation.

Let me tell you, after a week on Robben Island, I would have taken any oath to get free.  But Mandela refused to swear to something that he did not mean, and he could not revoke the black African's right to fight for their freedom.

In the end, he did not have to.  When he was released, working with such amazing peers as Bishop Desmond Tutu.  In 1993 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.  In 2002, President Bush awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

You probably knew all of that but what you may not have known is that the United States kept Nelson Mandela on the official terrorist watch list until 2008.  President Bush removed him from the list to avoid the potential international embarrassment of still having him on the list when he died.

Both President Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher declared him to be a terrorist because he opposed the white Apartheid government of South Africa, and both the United States and Great Britain were heavily economically invested in South Africa.  Anyone who threatens our profits can easily be seen to be a terrorist.

Even though there were many votes in congress during the 70's and 80's to oppose Apartheid, those efforts failed, in large part due to the tireless opposition of then Congressman Dick Cheney. . . . that man has been charming for decades!

Our church is very young, just seven years old this month, but the month before we held our first service, Nelson Mandela, one of the most beloved international heroes of peace and racial harmony, was still on our terrorist watch list.

Folks, the Apartheid government of South Africa was guilty of all kinds of violence that could easily be seen as terrorism... terrorism against the majority of the people in South Africa but our government called Mandela the terrorist and supported the white Apartheid regime.

When you think about the heroes of modern times... Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Dorothy Day, the Berrigan brothers, Oscar Romero, all of these people were labeled as communists, socialists, anarchists.  All of them spent time in prison.  Most of them were tortured and several were murdered.  During their active life time, the established powers of government, banking, and even of the church labeled them as being dangerous, as terrorists, and criminals.

It is only in history that they are redeemed and remembered as being the transformative characters of our age. They had to be willing to be reviled, threatened, alienated, lied about, smeared in the media, and abused and to still stay faithful to the cause of justice and liberation.

Mandela was kept on a rock in the ocean where he was not even allowed to have access to news.

They would sometimes manage to steal a bit of an old newspaper and they passed it around among the prisoners like it was the most precious of commodities.  They wanted Mandela to believe that the world didn't care, that he had been forgotten.  They wanted him to believe that what he said, what he did, didn't matter... that no one noticed, that the world had not changed and would not change.

27 years, and he kept the faith. I can't think of anyone in the Bible whose story would compare to the story of Mandela.  He was a modern saint but to our government, he was a terrorist and we should never ever forget that.

The British philosopher, Bertrand Russell, said:  "A reasonable man adapts himself to the world, and unreasonable man insists that the world adapt to him. Therefore, all progress depends upon the unreasonable man."

The unreasonable women and men of our current history may be the ones we will later recognize as the most important thought leaders among us.  Of course, what I really hoping is that one of you will be sufficiently unreasonable that you will be that person.

I don't want to use the pulpit to encourage cynicism but I do want to foster skepticism.  I know that those two might sound an awful lot alike but I want to take just a couple of minutes to try to make an important distinction.

Cynicism can become its own reward.  Cynicism, as Father Henri Nouwen said, can paralyze an otherwise generous heart.  Cynicism can quickly excuse you from any responsibility to care.

You can decide that the church is corrupt, that politicians are corrupt, that corporations are corrupt, you can literally say, with B. B. King, "Nobody loves me but my mama, and she might be jiving too!" That gives you permission to just exit from concern.  You can stop going to church, you can stop voting, you can give in and shop at whatever store sells what you want at the cheapest price without regard for how they treat their employees or if their products you are buying were harvested or manufactured by virtual slaves.

Cynicism is the modern sacrament... you can declare yourself a cynic and official stop giving a tinkers damn about anything or anyone.

Skepticism, on the other hand, is the active employment of critical thinking.  As a teenager, I watched the evening news and when they showed President Nixon looking square into the camera and saying, "I'm not a crook," even then I was thinking, "I bet you are a crook."

I had been raised by a WWII vet who took patriotism seriously. But I read the articles written by draft protesters who were in federal prisons or who were in exile in Canada, and even as a pre-driving teenager, I could see that the war in Vietnam was being sold to my country under false pretenses.... That the people in the government were wrong and the people in prison were right.

But I didn't stop loving my country.  I didn't stop voting, I didn't stop caring, and I didn't stop working to make my country better.

When I was a child in Glasgow, KY, we had a fiery prophet as our pastor at the First Christian Church.  In the late 1950's, he was working to integrate the schools, to end capital punishment, and finally to organize labor unions in the local sewing factories.

Church members muttered about him, including my parents.  They call him a communist.  They accused him of spending more time on politics than on faith and they fired him but even as a child, I could see that he was right and my church, even my parents, were wrong.  But in honor of Brother Paul Duncan, I didn't give up on the church that fired him.  I went to seminary and I resolved to make my church better.

Cynicism gives you permission to head for the exit.  Skepticism means telling even the nation that you love, the church that you love, the family that you love, that you just are not going to believe their lies.  Cynicism gives you a reason to throw in the towel and give up, skepticism can open your eyes and give you the motivation to double down.

In 2003, I was the senior pastor at National Ave. Christian Church, and when Secretary of State Colin Powell told the United Nations that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and when President Bush was leading our country into war with Iraq, I spoke out against the war, and led public protests.

The phone rang one morning and I took the call from a dear, sweet, loving, older woman in the church who had been a faithful supporter of mine in a sometimes-unsafe church environment.  And with the sweetest of southern charm, Ann said, "Now Roger, I know that you are a very smart man but do you really believe that you know better than President Bush about whether we should go to war with Iraq."

I hesitated.  I loved Ann and she loved me.  And pride and arrogance are like cancer in the parish ministry.  After and uncomfortable silence I said, "Ann, I don't have the benefit of the classified briefings of the President but I have reason to believe that he is lying to the American people and I am confident that my position is right."

I don't want to give into cynicism.  I don't believe that our government always lies to us.  I don't believe that all corporations always decide to do what is most profitable and never to do what is just right.  And even through I have been fired and treated badly by my former denomination, I don't want to let myself dismiss the whole lot of them as being either moral cowards or mafia styled criminals.  Several of them are but not all of them.

We have reason to be skeptical when politicians want us to go to war with Iran.  They have lied to us about Vietnam, they lied to us about Iraq, and though there are things that concern me about Iran, if you wanted to put a nation on the lists of sponsors of terrorism, the USA has objectively earned a spot much higher on the list than Iran and if we are concerned about terrorism, we need to get our own house in order before we invade anyone else.

Be skeptical, but don't be cynical.  Be critical thinkers, but don't criticize if you are not willing to work to make things better.  And above all, be unreasonable people.... Reasonable people always just go along with the lies and the majority and you will never do any good that way.

The Moral Vacuum of Insatiable Greed

August 16, 2015
Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor

Mahatma Gandhi
In matters of conscience, the law of majority has no place.
John Kenneth Galbraith  The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.

On our long list of things to be mad about in the world, out of nowhere came a different kind of story that momentarily took our minds off of police shootings or unarmed black teenagers, figuring out who is responsible for creating Isis, and why we had to lose Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert in the same miserable year.  For several days, the world had a new person to hate, the previously fairly obscure Minneapolis, dentist, Walter Palmer.

Palmer actually had enjoyed a certain celebrity among big game hunters but last month he mistakenly killed one of the oldest, most rare, and most beloved lions in the world, Zimbabwe's rare black manned lion, Cecil. And though Palmer has since apologized and said that he did not know that Cecil had been lured off of a game preserve and was wearing a tracking collar, after they wounded and two days later finished killing Cecil, Palmer saw the tracking collar, cut it off and hid it in a tree.  He was then so horrified by what he had done that he, reportedly, turned to his native guides and asked if he could kill a really big elephant the next day.

It is not that anyone thought that killing Cecil was more important than recent human tragedies; it was that it just made no sense at all.  There is no friction in Minneapolis between the dentist community and the lion community.

He had to go half way across the globe, spend a ton of money, and then lure a harmless lion out into the open to shoot it.  It was an obscene act to satisfy a nearly incomprehensible and arguably mentally perverted need to kill a rare, indeed, an endangered, beautiful, beloved and majestic animal.

It is an obscenity of excess.  There is a market for rare meats around the world.  I don't know how tired you have to become of beef, chicken, and fish to feel like you need to eat a bear, or a lion, or a rhino, I know that I have not felt any such appetite.

There are of course those who see little difference between killing a cow and killing a lion and though I am sympathetic with people who are vegetarians by reason of conscience, I do think there is a matter of self-preservation involved.

For all of the fear and hype about sharks, or Ebola, or even Isis, in the past year, only one American has died from a shark attack, one from Ebola, and only one from Isis, but cows killed 22 Americans .... I'm just sayin.... Do the math. I'm just doing my part to keep Americans safe.

But there is a serious moral issue here and one that is not always easy to define or to understand.

Spiritual people of every world religion have gone through phases of emphasizing the value of self-denial, of living an ascetic life, without possessions and in an embrace of poverty.  Others have seen the accumulation of wealth as a sign of God's blessings.

The Buddha taught that the middle way is more sane, more balanced, more distinctly human.  You know me, I'm never one to praise moderation when it comes to our passions for justice and our commitment to radical compassion, but when it comes to our appetites, the middle way is clearly the lane we are looking for.

Capitalism often seems to teach that there are no boundaries.  There is an element in our society that seems to believe that more is what we are to always strive for.  Our appetites for food, sex, money, land, things, power, can run over us and turn decent people into moral monsters.

Like a lot of my peers, I have struggled with my weight for most of my adult life.  I don't feel like I am a bad person but I know when I try to fit my hips between the old theater seats at the Gilioz or at the Landers that whether I'm a bad person or not, I am a big person and I would be more healthy and more comfortable if I could be smaller.

And not to make this too personal and certainly not to invite unsolicited diet advice (which is considered justifiable cause for homicide), but I have to concentrate on the difference between wanting to eat because I am hungry and wanting to eat for the sheer entertainment or pleasure of eating.  Foods that taste good are a form of entertainment, regardless of whether my body actually needs food.

For a lot of us in the middle class, we can afford to buy virtually anything that we want to eat and so we have to make a conscious decision to eat smarter and not simply to consume because we can.
One of the most helpful continuing education events we held at the university when I sometimes teach was when we invited the poverty specialist, Ruby Payne, to come do a seminar for us.  She described the different ways in which our economic classes approach their family dinner this way, she said, after dinner:

A poor father will ask his children, "Did you get enough?"
A middle class father will ask his children, "Did you like it? Did it taste good?"
And a wealthy father will ask his children, "Did you enjoy the experience?"

For those whose lives are often marked with food insecurity, just making sure that your children are fed is a source of real anxiety.  For those who are not especially afraid of hunger are concerned with making sure that their children as having a good life and not just getting the bare necessities but are, in fact, enjoying their meals.  The wealthy might not really enjoy even good food if it is not served in an environment that is also esthetically pleasing.

All of these things have to do with how we have trained our appetites.  I eat beef and chicken but I would take no pleasure in going onto a farm and personally killing the animals that would end up in the skillet on my stove.  I don't understand the pleasure people get out of hunting but I recognize it as being a part of how humans function in the food chain and I do not judge someone who hunts for food.... Though hunting endangered species or even entirely impractical sources of meat is an extreme of appetite that we should not be afraid to label as being evil, sinful, extreme to the point of mental illness.

The Desert Fathers, the ascetic monks who lived in the Alexandrian desert in the early centuries of the Christian movement, sought to challenge the power of their appetites so that they could devote themselves to spiritual causes.  They taught that if you will not even satisfy your thirst for water, that you will never long for wine, and that if you never take your fill of bread, you will not crave to eat meat.

Many of our appetites do not have a natural stopping place.  We have to decide that we are going to be in charge of ourselves.  The Apostle Paul spoke critically, in the 3rd chapter of Philippians, of those "whose god is their belly." People who have lost all impulse control, who never willingly say "no" to any of their appetites..... a spiritual weakness facilitated in modern times by credit cards and Payday loans that allow people to indulge themselves in the present moment what they ultimately cannot afford to have.

Our society rarely questions our appetites and in fact encourages indulgence, excess, hoarding, and greed.  The liquor industry runs ads telling people to drink responsibly but they know that alcoholics purchase four out of five drinks consumed in America.  If it were not for the addicts, most beer and liquor companies would go bankrupt.  Casinos post signs encouraging people who have a problem with gambling to seek help and yet, they know exactly who is in the building, how long they have been there and how much they have lost.... If they were concerned about gambling addicts, they could easily turn them away at the door of the casino but, in fact, their bottom line is entirely dependent on addicts.

I am no prude and I am opposed to censorship in almost all forms, but I know that very many people find that they quickly move from being occasional viewers of porn to being fired for watching porn at work.  WebMD estimates that there are nearly 450 million pornography websites now which is about one for every six people who have access to the internet.  Clearly, this is not just couples trying to spice up their love life.... This is a social addiction that can hardly be seen as anything short of a malignancy.

We have advertisements beamed at us night and day through every form of media.  We are encouraged to buy, consume, indulge and to never think of the consequences to the earth, or how our excesses cause scarcity for others, or even how indulging our appetites can create an obscene and abusive industry on the other side of our consumption in which there are victims without number.

We have to be smarter than the marketplace.  We have to be more decisive than the alcohol industry, the gambling industry, the sex industry, and even the automobile and clothing industry.  We have to decide to live sane lives, balanced between necessity and obscenity.

As Gandhi said, in matters of conscience, you cannot depend on majority opinions.  There is no substitute for critical thinking, for self-examination, and for choosing to live a sober, and meaningful life that does not exploit the poor or the earth nor even the animals that share our earth with us.

Somewhere between only eating salads and indulging in an appetite for killing endanger species there is a sane place where we can all live.