“Escaping the Fowler’s Snare”

“Escaping the Fowler’s Snare”  December 16, 2018    Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

Psalm 124            click here to see the video

² if it had not been the Lord who was on our side,
   when our enemies attacked us, ³ then they would have swallowed us up alive,
   when their anger was kindled against us; ⁴ then the flood would have swept us away,
   the torrent would have gone over us; ⁵ then over us would have gone the raging waters. ⁶ Blessed be the Lord, who has not given us
   as prey to their teeth. ⁷ We have escaped like a bird
   from the snare of the fowlers; the snare is broken,
   and we have escaped. ⁸ Our help is in the name of the Lord, who made heaven and earth.

On November 30, 1954, Mrs. Ann Hodges was taking a nap on the sofa of the home she rented with her husband near Sylacauga, Alabama when she became the only person in recorded history to be struck by a meteor. It came crashing through the roof of the rural house, bounced off of a radio and struck her in the thigh, leaving a large bruise, a photograph of which was featured in Time Magazine. In some ways she was lucky, the meteor had broken into two pieces before this six-pound rock came through her roof. She was lucky that it hit the radio before it hit her, slowing it down enough not to have killed her like a giant bullet from heaven. 

The incident that made her famous probably also made her feel pretty unlucky. Billions of people, over thousands of years of history, and she is the only one who has ever actually been hit by a meteor even though several thousand rocks that weigh a pound or more hit the earth every day at a speed of about 200 miles an hour. Several cars have been hit over the years. When a large meteor breaks up in the atmosphere there can be a sonic boom that is like an explosion. The largest one we know of took place a hundred years ago over Siberia, flattening an estimated 500,000 acres of uninhabited forest. But no injuries. Just poor old Ann Hodges.

I don’t think that I have ever mentioned Ann Hodges in a sermon before, but I have told her story more than a hundred times. I use her story as a part of Rational Behavior Therapy when I am working with someone who has a severe anxiety disorder. Now, I don’t mention Ann when I am talking with someone who has a substantive reason to be anxious. I worked with a lot Vietnam vets who had PTSD when I was a chaplain in a VA hospital, my father had PTSD from his experiences in WWII. I have a good friend here in town who is currently being treated for PTSD after barely surviving a housefire that we have reason to believe was an attempted murder. 

There are a number of people among us who suffer from panic attacks and a generalize anxiety disorder that they come by based on very real experiences or fears. But many people suffer from anxiety disorders, panic attacks, or phobias that can have very serious effects on how they live their lives for no good reason at all.

Most of these are exaggerated anxieties. All of us worry when we send our kids off to college that they are not mature enough to make good decisions. 

We worry about drugs, sexual assault, or a growing tendency to cut class and keep us from finding out how bad their grades really are. But if you can’t sleep at night because your kid is away in college, then you may be allowing your fear to become exaggerated. 

I have a good friend who is so afraid of lightening that when a storm comes, she hides under the stairs until it is over. We have talked about this many times. I will tell her, don’t worry about the lightening, it isn’t going to get you inside the house. Worry about the meteors. Every hour there are more than 200 of those heavenly bullets raining down on the earth at 200 miles an hour and they can come through the roof, the ceiling, and the stairs and get you right where you are hiding. If I just say “Ann Hodges” to her, she looks at me like she is going to choke the life right out of me. 

But, seriously, irrational fears can paralyze a person. If you tell your physician about your anxiety, you will probably get a prescription for an anti-depressant, usually one of the serotonin drugs because they seem to work, at least for a while, and they have fewer side effects. However, they have a horrible rate of recurrence. That is, when you stop taking the medication, the fear comes back.

Many others will get a prescription for Xanax or some other benzodiazepine medication, which can be very helpful, but it is also highly addictive and tends to require a higher and higher dose to be effective, which almost guarantees addiction. 

Clinically speaking, the most effective treatment for anxiety disorders, panic attacks, and phobias, all of which are similar to one another, is talk therapy. Therapy that is aimed at reality orientation, perhaps desensitizing exposure to or talk about what a person is afraid of. Most therapists take a more sympathetic approach than telling people who are already terribly frightened that hundreds of meteors will strike the earth in the next hour at the lethal speed of 200 mph, but then, I am not paid by the hour and I prefer to cut to the chase. 

Most of what people have talked to me about over the years are social phobias . . . fear of public speaking, fear of the marketplace, Claustrophobic anxieties or fear of heights, of flying, or even of ladders. Children grow up with anxiety dreams about being chased, or of falling, or of monsters under the bed. Children are small and vulnerable, and their dreams betray those general fears. As they grow into their adult bodies, these unconscious fears usually just go away.

Teenagers and young adults often suffer from anxiety dreams that generally come in one of two flavors: the test anxiety dream or the dream about being naked or in your underwear in public. Both of these are fears that we will be discovered to be inadequate in some way. Again, these anxieties typically resolve themselves in your 20’s as you gain more self confidence.

Most of us grow out of those anxieties of youth but they can be replaced by fears of all sorts that we see reflected in popular movies.

Fear of ghosts 

Fear of spiders       

Some people would add the fear of snakes here, but I do not find that fear to be the least bit irrational. Rationally, I know that most snakes are not poisonious and that many are actually quite helpful in keeping down the rodent population. However, I find it best to assume that every snake is, in fact, a Black Mamba that can kill you with a single strike. 

There are irrational fears and then there are totally reasonable self-defense reflexes and that is all that I am going to say about snakes. 

A couple of months ago I got to spend four days making a silent retreat at the Gethsemane Abby in Kentucky. While there, I gathered with the brothers seven different times during the day to chant psalms in the church. The Trappists’ daily life is a constant flowing between work, prayer, study, and sleep. Spending a few hours a day chanting psalms with the community, the frequent refrain of fear verging on paranoia that is repeated in the psalms came to my attention. 

Who are the enemies who so frequently tried to ruin the life of the psalmist 2500 years ago? Some of the psalms are about foreign powers, some about abusive captors, but even granting that, a lot of them are just downright anxiety riddled about unnamed critics and enemies. 

It seems that they, like we, spent way too much of their time worrying about what people say about them or think about them.

My father was a stutterer. When he was upset or nervous, he virtually could not talk. He took public speaking classes and was prescribed what was, in those days, called “nerve pills,” usually Valium but he never got over it. I was interested then, when I encountered an article in grad school that noted that stuttering was virtually never seen among Native Americans. I later learned that it is equally rare among the Chinese.

Doctors and Psychologists sometimes battle for theories to account for this but what I knew about my father and about many others, is that he did not stutter when we sang. That seemingly subtle shift in where the language is coming from in your brain, completely eliminates the nervous disorder. But still, it seems to me that it just can’t be a physiological issue. It is an anxiety issue. It is speculated that Native Americans don’t stutter because their culture is less judgmental of public speaking. 

I don’t want to appear to be dismissive of what is a very serious problem for many people but stuttering and anxiety attacks and dreams, and many phobias and neurosis arise from caring too much about what other people think or what they might say about you. Again, this is not always true. 

I, myself, went through a period of years of disturbed sleep after having been held hostage at the end of a shot gun for five hours. I spent those hours anticipating my death every second until my form addiction counseling client got sober enough and tired enough to lay the gun down, allowing me to escape. For months, I could not close my eyes without seeing the open end of a double-barreled shot gun and the man’s bloodshot eyes at the other end of the gun. 

I know all too well how a trauma such as warfare, a car accident, a house fire, or an assault can leave you with scars that take years to recover from. But the extreme cases of battlefield PTSD and other violent events can hardly account the very high rate of anxiety and panic disorders in our culture. 

I fear that the majority come from the basic meanness of society and our innate desire to be liked. They come as ways of literally somatizing our fear of gossip, judgement, rejection. And to that, I have something I want to say to you as your pastor, as a person who cares about you and your happiness:

Don’t let your critics take either your joy or your self-confidence. When I began writing opinion columns for the News-Leader, and I wrote columns that I knew would be controversial because I wanted to stimulate thought in this very conservative city, but I was destroyed by the hate mail. I went into explosive fits of rage and horrible bouts of depression and I wanted to fight back. I said controversial things to make them think about things they didn’t want to think about, so they wrote nasty personal insults to me to hurt me. And for years, it worked pretty well. I made them think and they made me miserable. 

I finally had an editor who gave me good advice, and mind you, I have endured dozens of editors over the decades, almost none of whom had any good advice, but this one guy finally got it through my skull: Irrational criticism is the price you pay for having a public voice. 

You have to choose. Do you want to accomplish good and important things with your life, or do you want to avoid the discomfort of being criticized? Any time you light a candle in the dark place, you are not just dispelling the darkness, you are also attracting bugs. That’s just how it works.

It is not simple and it is not easy, but you don’t have to let toxic people rent space in your skull and drive you insane. You can choose to, day by day, raise the rent on those suckers until you get them out of your life.

Sure, you guys see me up here every week sharing an unvarnished 20 minute version of my views on everything but the reason that I don’t soft peddle things or stutter is because when I walk up here, I have decided to be this guy:

And you can be this guy too. 

A hundred potentially lethal meteors have struck the earth while I have been standing here talking to you. None of them hit you and probably none of the others that will fall in the next several decades will either. The things that people say about you, what they may think about you, also will not hurt you, unless you give that power to them. 

“Justifying the Inexcusable”

Dec. 9, 2018          “Justifying the Inexcusable”            Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

The late economist, John Kenneth Galbraith, said: “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.” 

click here to see the video

A decade ago, I began the habit of going out every Monday night to a local pub where an Irish band plays pretty much the exact same set of songs every week. Monday is sort of a pastor’s weekend and I found that no matter what I might be worried about, mad about, or depressed about, a couple of hours of Irish drinking songs and a couple of pints of Guinness, would at least temporarily lighten an old vicar’s heart. Over the years, different friends have joined me in this ritual so that I am never there alone. It has become an unofficial communion service for our little congregation as various members drop in to break bread, lustily sing about having been a “wild rover,” or to help raise the sails in the choruses of Irish sailing songs like, “John Kanaka.”

But, mostly, we have heard all of these songs so many times that we no longer listen, we visit with one another, make plans for the week ahead, and generally toast one another’s genius. But, I find that there is one song that never fails to demand my attention, and I will even insist that the people around me stop talking to listen respectfully if they sing The Fields of Athenry. 

The ballad tells the story of a young mother weeping as her husband is being taken away in a prison ship to Australia. His crime was having stolen corn to feed his starving family during what we Americans call the Irish Potato Famine, what the Irish call simply, “the Great Hunger.”

We know that more than a million Irish immigrated to the United States in the mid-1800’s to escape the famine. Perhaps as many as a million more died of starvation in Ireland. Millions more fled in other directions. I’ve ridden a train from Dublin to Galway and you can see that the country is still depopulated, having gone from more than 9 million before the famine to half of that in the generations that followed, never to recover. 

Potatoes were the staple food of the poor and you might wonder why, when the blight struck the potato vines, didn’t they just grow other crops? Well, they did, in fact, all during the great famine, Ireland was a major grain exporter. It is just that the grain belonged to the British, and Irish were expected to eat increasingly rare potatoes. Ships carried Irish produce to markets in England and Europe while other ships carried poor Irish farmers who had stolen grain, many off of their own farms, to feed their starving family, in chains to work camps in Australia. Many sent off on those prison ships died en route, most were never reunited with their families. 

More than 4000 ships loaded with grain left Irish ports in 1847 for England when, in that year alone, a half a million Irish died of starvation.  

Somehow, poor Irish farmers had largely accepted an economic system that locked them first into poverty and then into hunger, while they continued to labor to make distant land owners wealthy. So, when they sing Fields of Athenry, I still stop talking and I usually weep a bit for millions of lives destroyed in a truly evil economic system. And, folks, I’m not of Irish descent. My family is from England… which, in fact, makes it that much worse. (HAVE SEAN SING)

The famine lasted from 1845 to 1849 and the horrors of that time became a part of Irish self-understanding. The famine returned in 1879 but the Irish had changed in the 30 years since the great hunger. This time they revolted, refusing to be starved for British profits. That is the change in thinking that I want to talk about today. When, indeed, is enough, enough? What does it take to make the poor revolt?

It was an unguarded moment when the radical founder of the Catholic Worker movement, Dorothy Day, said, "The problem is our stinking rotten system, and our acceptance of it.” 

Most of us were reared to believe that Capitalism was just a part of the fabric of Christianity and Democracy. We believe that our constitution and body of laws make us free and independent but we also have this proverb that says “possession is 9/10ths of the law.” It is legal to use the police to protect private property, it is legal to lobby for a tax structure that taxes the rich at a rate much lower than the rate the poor pay taxes. It is legal to pay wages that guarantee poverty for your employees. You have to stop and think, who writes the laws? 

There are three lobbyists on Capitol Hill for every elected official there just for the pharmaceutical industry. How many lobbyists are there advocating for a living wage for the people who cook your lunch and mop your floors? You may remember a few years ago, about a dozen of us joined a local labor union to demonstrate for a living wage for employees at McDonalds. We picked a busy McDonalds in a very poor part of town and we showed up and encircled the restaurant during their morning rush. We didn’t block traffic, we didn’t impede business…. We’re were, after all, not exactly anarchists . . . we were mostly older citizens just saying that a wildly profitable business could afford to pay their help a living wage.

Within ten minutes there were eight patrol cars and a paddy wagon there to haul us all away if we kept anyone from getting their Egg McMuffin in a timely manner. I have volunteered with homeless programs in the same neighborhood where we have had to wait for hours for a single patrol car to respond to a violent outbreak among our clients. 

So, who do the police work for? What are the priorities of business, government, and most of the church? To defend the filthy, stinking economic system that creates and defends profit and poverty. 

This poster attempts to illustrate the various economic systems of the world, using cows, as they were explained to us when we were young:

In socialism, you have two cows and you are forced to give one to your neighbor. In communism, the state takes both of your cows and gives you some milk. In fascism, the state takes both of your cows and sells you some milk. But skipping to the end, the point of this illustration, in glorious capitalism, you sell one cow, buy a bull, multiply your herd, sell them, and retire on the profits. 

This sounds wonderful and, in fact, capitalism is an economic system that can reward innovation, hard work, frugality, investment, and intelligence. 

The problem is that most of us never owned a cow. Most of us just worked for the dairy industry. The United States does not have one economy. We have several. There are very few people who are actually a part of the capitalist part of our society. 

School teachers aren’t capitalists. They don’t own the school building. They don’t charge their students. They are employed by the state and paid through property taxes. 

Fire fighters are not capitalists. Our military works in a virtually communist system, our police work in a socialist system, for heaven’s sake folks, I am not a capitalist, I work for this little socialist collective called a church!

Do you know who is a capitalist? Only people who have capital, i.e., cows, to invest. Paris Hilton is a capitalist because she inherited ownership of a large hotel chain and several related businesses. She does not make money based on innovation, hard work, frugality, or intelligence. She makes money the old-fashioned way, she inherited it. All of the people who change the sheets at Hilton hotels, who mop the floors, carry the room service trays, work at the front desk and mow the lawn . . . they are not capitalists. They are labor. They are overhead. They are a cost of doing business and in unbridled capitalism, you are always looking for ways to cut costs and increase profits such that worse you treat the thousands of people who work for Hilton the more you are rewarding the capitalist at the top.

An economic system is just a means of distributing resources.

Imagine that 10 people are shipwrecked on a ten-acre tropical island full of fruit trees and readily available vegetation and sea food. So, after a bit of time, they divide up the island into one-acre plots and they each build their own home and develop their own gardening, hunting, and fishing regimen. It is an egalitarian society where they may trade goods or labor and everyone lives in a sustainable way on their island.

But one homeowner learns to ferment fruit juice, invites his neighbors over for 

drinks and a card game. His nine unsuspecting neighbors get drunk and lose their acres in a night of card games. The winner now tells the other nine that all of the island’s resources belong to him and they no longer own a home and that they either work for him at his whim or they can no longer eat from the island’s resources nor even drink the water. Clearly, even if they agreed to drink the fruit juice and play cards with the distiller, they would not long accept that unfair arrangement.

The difference is that most of us where born on that island and there was always just 10% who owned everything and the rest of us serve their wishes. In the mid nineteenth century, there were babies born in England who owned land in Ireland from birth. And there were babies born in Ireland who were born to work the fields for the English babies and both the Irish and the English grew up thinking that this was just how the world works. 

The system was so engrained that both the English and the Irish followed the rules of the system even as one became increasingly wealthy and the other slowly starved to death. At least, that’s how it worked in the first potato famine.   

People come to accept this. Folks, everyone here was taught in high school about the history of child labor in the United States. You know that the children of the poor were made to work in textile factories, sitting at looms and doing dangerous work, breathing dangerous fumes, and typically dying young or being seriously injured. We look back on that era with shame and with no small amount of confusion as to how it could have gone on for a hundred years in this largely Christian democracy. 

But I will tell you this, about 20 years ago I was leading a tour of a couple of dozen church members through Israel and Egypt. When we were nearing the step pyramid of Memphis, our tour bus stopped at an Egyptian rug factory. My church folk were led through the factory where hundreds of children, five, six, seven years old, sat at looms, weaving rugs. As they walked, they were told that without this work, these children would starve, and they would not ever receive training in a craft. Five minutes later, all of these good Christians were in the factory store, buying child labor produced rugs and proudly marching back to the bus with the belief that they were helping the children by buying the rugs. . . because if we did not exploit and enslave them, how would they eat?

This is not as hard as they are trying to make it out to be. Look:

Don’t ever drink and play cards with a pirate. That’s obvious, right? And secondly, don’t passively accept a filthy, rotten system that impoverishes the masses for the enrichment of the few. There is a way to make capitalism work, a way that rewards innovation, hard work, frugality, and intelligence but doesn’t starve anyone. And, it really isn’t that hard.

Our economic system has always been a blend of capitalism with socialism and maybe a bit of fascism. Darwin’s theory of evolution is not based on the strongest surviving, it is based on adaptability. A species is most likely to survive if they are able to adapt to changing circumstances. Every species is everyday faced with a choice between heading towards extinction or adaptation.

At this moment in history, the growing gap between the rich and the poor, the expanding disparity of income in America threatens to bring our culture to the brink of extinction. The invisible hand of the market will not save us. Unbridled capitalism has one goal: profit. It has no conscience and will not correct itself to improve standards of living for the poor. 

Seeing this freight train rolling down the tracks, earlier this year, the so called “middle class tax cut” actually cut taxes on the super wealthy and shifted the tax burden more squarely on the shoulders of the middle class.

The investor class, suddenly experiencing a windfall, invested in the market, largely through stock buy backs. The market surged to new heights. What no one wanted to talk about was the fact that it was surging on the strength of borrowed money and that can never work for long. In fact, I am afraid, we are already seeing necessary corrections that will exacerbate what a horrible economic move that tax cut was. There are two issues here. There is income and there is capital. 

There are people who own the cows and their income comes from their investment. Then there are the people who milk the cows, haul the hay, muck out the barn, build the fences, and work in the slaughter house, whether those people can afford to buy a carton of milk will depend, not on the generosity of the capitalist but on the legal system set in place. With the recent tax cut, the rich were rewarded and the poor were punished, but possibly even worse, the same measure that changed the way income was taxed also removed a great deal of inheritance tax. So we were not only hurt on the income side of things but we also rigged the system so that more of the capital will flow into the hands of the already rich. 

As long as the wealthy can transfer their wealth to the next generation without at significant part of it going back into the public economic arena, then we continue to stand on the tracks waiting for the hurtling train to run us down. . . because the train is coming, and the conductor is a capitalist and he isn’t going to stop for you.

In his famous book about Capital, the French economist, Thomas Piketty says, “the durability of this system depends on the effectiveness of its apparatus of justification.” However, as you know, there is no credible justification.

That is, as long as you, the voters in western democracies, are willing to be convinced that this filthy, rotten system is the only way the world can be, then there is a fairly inevitable end. Let me give you a clue:

You are not going to like it.

The yellow vest protests in Paris this week are a united reaction to a similar tax shift in France in which a tax on the super-rich was eliminated and they made up the income by adding a fuel tax to gasoline, a tax largely paid by workers and the middle class, most of whom feel that they are already being taxed into poverty.

And I want to tell you, when I wrote the first draft of this message, because I make the English sound so horrible for exploiting the Irish, even as million of them were starving to death in a mere four year period of the first potato famine, I sent my draft to my friend John Churcher, in England, and I asked him, “Is this accurate, is this fair?”  He sadly acknowledged that it was a fair depiction of a very bad chapter in English history.

A few days later he sent me an article about this woman, Priti Sushi Patel . . . and yes, her name is Priti Sushi. She is a British politician who was born, reared and educated in England but evidently has only a sketchy awareness of British history. As England is negotiating their exit from the European Union, she suggested this week that in order to put more pressure on the EU to accept more favorable terms for the English “Brexit” that they restrict food shipments to the half of Ireland that is staying in the EU. That’s right, Priti Sushi thinks that if they plunge Ireland into hunger, it will economically help England. 

Honestly, folks, you couldn’t make this stuff up. Even if her name sounds like character in an Austin Powers movie, this is not fiction. This is just a sign of how governments act when we accept this filthy rotten economic system that creates, defends, and expands poverty. 

There was a time in human history when poverty and hunger were caused by scarcity and we were always one harsh winter or one bad growing season away from being destitute. But in the presence of modern industry, advanced agricultural sciences, medicine and banking, the only reason there is still poverty is due to greed. And that, I submit, is no longer tolerable. 

“Three Deadly Sins of Public Discourse”

“Three Deadly Sins of Public Discourse”      Dec. 2, 2018      Dr. Roger Ray, pastor   

 Henry Ford,“Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably why so few engage in it.”   

   CLICK HERE TO SEE THE VIDEO

One of my guilty pleasures is enjoying my weekly dose of the New Yorker’s “Borowitz Report,” an unabashedly fake news source. A recent installment of Andy Borowitz’ humor declared:

Scientists have discovered a powerful new strain of fact-resistant humans who are threatening the ability of Earth to sustain life, a sobering new study reports.

The research, conducted by the University of Minnesota, identifies a virulent strain of humans who are virtually immune to any form of verifiable knowledge, leaving scientists at a loss as to how to combat them.

“These humans appear to have all the faculties necessary to receive and process information,” Davis Logsdon, one of the scientists who contributed to the study, said. “And yet, somehow, they have developed defenses that, for all intents and purposes, have rendered those faculties totally inactive.”

More worryingly, Logsdon said, “As facts have multiplied, their defenses against those facts have only grown more powerful.”

While scientists have no clear understanding of the mechanisms that prevent the fact-resistant humans from absorbing data, they theorize that the strain may have developed the ability to intercept and discard information en route from the auditory nerve to the brain. “The normal functions of human consciousness have been completely nullified,” Logsdon said.

While reaffirming the gloomy assessments of the study, Logsdon held out hope that the threat of fact-resistant humans could be mitigated in the future. “Our research is very preliminary, but it’s possible that they will become more receptive to facts once they are in an environment without food, water, or oxygen,” he said.

Most political satire makes fun of conservatives, usually portraying them as being both rather stupid and simultaneously fact averse. Many of you made a sincere effort at your family Thanksgiving table to reason with your Fox News infused relatives and I am willing to wager that while some are more courteous than others, that it is a pretty sure bet that no opinions were changed. 

I have relatively little exposure to right wing folks and all that I see of Fox News are the clips used in satire pieces or incredulously posted on social media, but it has always seemed ironic to me that they aim their intentional misinformation at an audience that is hungry to be misinformed but most interestingly, their style is one of constant condescension. Their target audience is certainly among the former C and D students of public schools, but they deliver their propaganda in a superior intonation that encourages their audience to refer to their A and B grade former classmates as if they were stupid. 

When they were young, they were forced into simply being the playground bullies who tried to beat up the smart students, now they are being fed a diet of lies by people who also assure them that they are now the intellectual elites. I’m serious. 

In August, Trump held a rally in Ohio in which he famously announced that Maxine Waters has a low IQ, an insult he typically reserves for women of color, but he also told his crowds not to listen to the “so called intellectual elites” because, he said to his crowd of minions, “you are the elites.” 

So, both conservatives and liberals tend to look over the fence that stands between them and convince themselves that the “others” are stupid. The ideological division in our country now rivals the days of the Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam protests of fifty years ago. 

Going to our respective corners and hurling insults at one another certainly won’t bring any healing to our torn land. We have to learn how to talk to one another ANDto really listen to one another but talking and listening has to also follow some basic rules, not just of civility but of logic. 

I will not pretend to be neutral. While I have personally been more deeply hurt by liberals than I ever will be by conservatives, that is more a function of socializing with liberals and avoiding contact with conservatives. I know that sloppy logic and mean interpersonal exchanges happen on both sides of the fence but in the current political climate, well, The Washington Post is keeping a running tally of false

or misleading statements made by the president while in office. At the end of last month, the number was up to 6,420, showing a rapid escalation in public lies since he just crossed the 3000 threshold in May. We are seeing a level of intentional deception that would make Richard Nixon look like an amateur. 

Given that public discourse has gone off the rails, I would like to take a few minutes today to put up some civil and logical guardrails to help us to begin to talk across the fence more meaningfully. 

Law professors often tell their students that they are not there to teach them the law . . . there is a thousand times too much for any one person to learn in a lifetime. Students go to law school to learn how to think like a lawyer so that they can effectively do research and engage in the justice system.

At Vanderbilt, my peers and I were told the same thing. We were to learn how to think critically, as theologians. 

We were not expected to engage in rote memorization but in critical analysis and meaningful research. There are things that an educated person might be expected to know but beyond their ability to quote either case law or scripture, the important thing to know is how to tell the difference between objective facts and total BS. 

This is, by no means, a comprehensive list but I want to talk about three pitfalls that seem to be especially prevalent in modern discourse. Don’t be put off by words like “epistemology” and “equivalency” . . . this is not as hard as it sounds. 

In philosophy, we ask the question, “How do you know what you know?” This is the question of epistemology. Do you know things because you just know them? Are they revealed truths that you simply know? If so, that is what we call a prioriknowledge.

We have recently talked about the fact that one of our local pastors has advised members of his mega-church not to take yoga classes or they might become demon possessed . . . because, in his world, things that are even in the neighborhood of Hinduism are rife with demons. A few people wrote to me in the past week, objecting to my being incredulous that there are people in the 21^stcentury who still believe that angels and demons actually exist. A couple of people told me that I was wrong, and that angels do exist. When I asked them how that they know this, they replied, “I just know it.” They may add some flourishes of scriptural references or personal experiences but since none of that is testable or repeatable, we are left with relatively pure deduction and maybe some college era pharmaceuticals. 

 The other way of knowing, we call a posteriori. This is knowing derived from experience, through our senses. In the scientific method, things are known only if they are both observable and repeatable. The people who say that they have experienced angles or ghosts or UFO’s may tell us that they have seen them, or talked to them, or possibly even endured cavity probing “medical tests” at their tentacled hands, but since we cannot examine these claims through repetition, while the individual may seem sincere and even to be a reliable witness, no one else can “know it” with certainty.

Saying it doesn’t make it so. You can believe in angels and demons, Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and the Easter Bunny… you can say that millions of people voted multiple times by going to their car and changing their hat and shirt. Telling a lie over and over again does not make it true. There has to be evidence. You can believe in an a prioritruth for your own pleasure . . . but if you want other people to believe it, there needs to be objective evidence. 

All appeals to scripture, religious visions, voices or private experiences are a prioritruth claims that have no standing in a conversation about what is actually true. 

When Trump or Rudy Giuliani or any authority figure makes claims that have no evidence to back them up, we need to treat that as having no more credibility than  what you read in a fortune cookie. In a recent interview with NBC’s Chuck Todd, Rudy was being asked why the president didn’t appear under oath before the Mueller investigation and just tell the truth so that he wouldn’t run the risk of perjury. Giuliani’s response will go down in history. For him, there are versions of truth that vary to such a degree that “truth isn’t truth.”

And that, I’ll submit, is just nuts. There are no conservative facts, or liberal facts, no democratic facts or Republican facts, there is reality and that’s where our conversation needs to take root. It is like trying to live with an alcoholic. You don’t do them any favors by either believing or pretending to believe their lies. We need to be devoted to reality. An argument is not won by simply shouting the lies more loudly. An argument is won by presenting factual evidence.

The second pitfall of public discourse I want to talk about is the one that makes me really crazy, that is the False Equivalence. When you are trying to talk about something like the fact that Trump has told more than 7000 lies in less than two years in office, conservatives will bring up the famous Obama promise that if you like your health insurance that you can keep it. The implication being that all politicians lie and so Trump’s daily totally of about 6 lies a day is just par for the course. This is factually false. Of course, it matters what a president lies about and to whom but on the whole, what we are seeing here is unprecedented, it is dangerous because it creates instability in the markets, in international relationships, and in voter confidence. What I would love to see out of Trump supporters is a public demand that he start telling the truth. 

He is a salesman, or more likely a con man, so some exaggeration and over selling is to be expected. But saying that you are, for example, protecting insurance coverage of pre-existing conditions while trying to terminate such coverage . . . that’s a deception that will have a casualty count and he should be held accountable for such stuff.

But the use of false equivalency is not typically intended to win an argument, it is intended to stop a conversation. Public outrage over the child separation policy at the Mexican border and the more recent use of tear gas on homeless families who were gathering at the fence in Mexico has elicited claims on Fox that President Obama did the same thing. 

Here is the real danger of a false equivalence: There is some similarity, some apparent equality because Obama did have a tough immigration policy and families were separated at the border when the parents were sent to a prison and we don’t typically put children in prison. But that is where the similarity ends. Obama never ordered active duty troops to the border. Obama never authorized the use of armed, lethal force. Obama didn’t use child separation to dissuade people from applying for asylum. In short, Obama’s policy was nothing like Trump’s and saying that it was is not just dishonest, it is an attempt to say that what Trump is doing is not wrong.

Again, basic honesty and decency demands that both conservatives and liberals push back on an administration that puts children in cages and uses chemical weapons on homeless children. This is too wrong to leave room for dismissal on the basis of a partisan battle. You can disagree about the solutions to illegal immigration, but you cannot rationally disagree about traumatizing children. Once you favor this kind of child abuse, you have, in my opinion, forfeited your right to participate in public discourse. You are either too stupid or too mean to be involved.

The third and last sin of public discourse I want to talk about today is commonly called “what-about-ism”. Wikipedia says that it is a variant of the Latin named logical fallacy “tu quoque”which basically translates into “you’re a hypocrite.” Which is similar to the equally familiar Latin named fallacy, “ad homonym” in which you try to dismiss an argument by attacking the character of the person who presents the argument. Again, this is not winning an argument, this is bringing conversation to a halt by changing the subject or by distraction. 

We see this a lot lately when President Trump is asked about his campaign’s fairly well documented collusion with the Russian government during the election, he responds by insisting that the Justice Department should be looking into Hillary Clinton’s e-mails or something about Bengazi. He is screaming, basically, “I’m not guilty, they are guilty!” He recently raised the ante on this argument by tweeting  out this picture that not only shows a number of his Democratic predecessors and rivals behind bars but there are at least three Republicans featured here including former FBI directors, James Comey and Robert Muller, and a member of Trump’s own administration, Deputy Attorney General, Ron Rosenstein. This is not just shocking behavior for a sitting American president, but it is also remarkably stupid. But he isn’t actually trying to make a case against these people, he is just saying “What about Clinton, Comey, Huma Abedin?” all in an attempt to get people to talk about something other than his crimes, which, in my view, certainly includes treason.

Trump has complained about the media always reporting negatively about him. He has even recently suggested that he would like to create a national media outlet that would report glowingly on his administration. 

What I am suggesting today is that we really must look at both sides of this coin. If the president wants the media to stop talking about his lies, he has the option before him to simply stop lying. Then if the media still insists that he is lying, then they really do become fake news. But we can’t hold the media at fault for fact- checking our liar-in-chief. 

But even more, I am begging conservatives and liberals to unite in honest and open conversation in which we can find common ground. Because of our polarization, liberals constantly talk about how much they despise Trump and Trump supporters feel the need to constantly defend him and trumpet what they believe are his accomplishments. That conversation is a non-starter.

I would ask Trump supporters, “Wouldn’t you like Trump better if he stopped lying? Wouldn’t you like Trump better if he didn’t collude with foreign enemies to undermine our democracy? Wouldn’t you like your president more if he did not degrade our military by forcing them to abuse children?” 

Even my best friends and most devoted supporters have every reason to ignore any political prediction I make because I have been wrong over the past 20 years much more often than I have been right; but at the risk of degrading my prognostication reputation even further, I will offer this:

 I do not believe that Donald Trump will finish his first term in office. I believe that he will be impeached.

But I do not believe that this should be the end of our two-party system, or the end of our democracy. Democrats need a strong Republican Party just as reasonable Republicans recognize that they need a strong Democratic Party. I am proposing that we try hard to meet on the common ground of a desire for a good government, the common ground of honesty, intelligence, integrity. 

We will not always agree on how to manage our nation, but we should be able to agree on being a good people who can together, create a great nation. America is not a great nation right now. It used to be a lot better, but we have allowed ourselves to fall into partisan bickering that threatens our future and has made us an international pariah. But we can do better and because we can, we must. 

 I’ll leave you with one last Latin phrase, “Illegitimi non carborundum,” which literally means, “Don’t let the sons of unwed parents get you down.”