“Could You Be A Sociopath?”

“Could You Be A Sociopath?”    July 12, 2020   Dr. Roger Ray, pastor   

CLICK HERE TO SEE THE VIDEO

Hannah Arendt (October 14, 1906–December 4, 1975) wrote in 1962, when The New Yorker commissioned her, a Jew of who had narrowly escaped from Nazi Germany herself, to travel to Jerusalem and report on the trial of Adolf Eichmann — one of the chief architects of the Holocaust.

“You are quite right, I changed my mind and do no longer speak of “radical evil.” … It is indeed my opinion now that evil is never “radical,” that it is only extreme, and that it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension. It can overgrow and lay waste the whole world precisely because it spreads like a fungus on the surface. It is “thought-defying,” as I said, because thought tries to reach some depth, to go to the roots, and the moment it concerns itself with evil, it is frustrated because there is nothing. That is its “banality.” Only the good has depth that can be radical.”

https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/02/07/hannah-arendt-the-banality-of-evil/?fbclid=IwAR2_QRBEW3eq4-YH1NnnX-9PBHz8MpRvXICd2q2cyQS4ObGQz6dmZCudYIs

In October of 1989 there was an earthquake in San Francisco and a very old part of their freeway system, the Nimitz, collapsed. 11 people lost their lives in this incident, 39 people were trapped in their cars between these pancaked layers of the freeway who were eventually rescued. 

I remember when it happened. I was living in Louisville, KY. My daughter was just 10 months old; I had a new doctorate and a challenging career and, frankly, I didn’t think about this incident for a long time. Check your own feelings about it now . . . do you remember it? Does it pull any emotional energy out of you?

A few years ago, I met a delightful single woman for dinner at a French restaurant about 50 miles west of town. She is a children’s author who lives alone on a farm in the wilds of southern Missouri. She was one of the 39 people pulled from her car from between the collapsed expressway. 

She was a college student then but after the incident, she couldn’t concentrate on schoolwork. She took the money she had for her education and found the best deal on just a tract of land that she could find and moved to live in noiseless isolation without crowded expressways and long commutes. Though she never married, never had children, she applied her considerable intellect to writing children’s books and has had a successful career. 

I was evidently neither sufficiently charming nor interesting enough to entice her to meet me for a second dinner, but we speak now and then. I called to check on her after the pandemic “stay at home orders” and she laughed and said, “I was made for this. Staying home alone is what I do.” 

I know you were not at the dinner with us that night but when you look at this image of the collapsed highways now, do you feel a little something more? Knowing that about an hour and half west of here, there is a beautiful, mature woman, who is still, in a way, stuck in her car between two giant slabs of concrete and steel? Because, folks, we do not have an unlimited supply of empathy. We can only care about so much before we become emotionally exhausted. But if you spent a couple of hours with this author, you would remember the collapse of the Nimitz Freeway and the earthquake in San Francisco in October of 1989 differently.

One of the most memorable yet disturbing moments of my graduate school education was when my counseling professor, the late Dr. Liston Mills, said to me, “You try to tell yourself that you love all of your clients but the fact is that no one actually loves more than four or five people at any time. If you are a saint, you might be able to muster the energy to love eight people. So, you have a case load of 20 clients. Which ones can you really care about?” I argued with him, of course, that’s what I did. I had more than a hundred parishioners, 20 counseling clients, a dozen family members, he just couldn’t be right. I thought he was cruel. In fact, I don’t know how that got him to smile for this photo, I had him as my counselor, advisor, and professor for 8 years and I never saw him smile. I thought, Mills can’t care about more than four or five people, but I can. 

But folks, Mills was a lot smarter than I am so don’t be too quick to dismiss what he said. You wake up every day with a certain amount of emotional energy, . . . let’s say you have a 100 units of energy that you can spend. You spend some just dealing with the people you live with getting breakfast and getting dressed. Maybe some in traffic on the way to work. Maybe some more dealing with staff and peers.

Then, imagine that you are a therapist and you have managed to make it to your desk with 80 units left and you are going to do an intake group of six new patients in the addiction treatment program, then go up to the floor and have individual meetings with patients for the next several hours. Maybe there was a suicide on the floor and the family of eight or nine people are waiting for you to go into a conference room to tell them that their dad won’t be coming home. You are going to have to borrow some of those emotional energy chips from tomorrow’s supply but then, your schedule tomorrow is going to look a lot like today’s. And when you get home, if you have family waiting for you, they will expect something from you too.

That was my job in my final year of my doctorate when Liston Mill’s was telling me that I just couldn’t begin to do what I thought I had to do everyday. I had three patients on my floor in the VA who had survived a suicide attempt. You can shoot yourself in the head and not die . . . I always had one or two of those on my floor, but I realized that I couldn’t remember their names. And I hated Liston Mills that day because I didn’t want for him to be right. . . but I knew he was.

So, you come here, and I ask you to be concerned about Trayvon Martin, Philando Castile, Breonna Taylor, Eric Garner, George Floyd. I tell you about how the Taliban shot Malala in the face, about Asian women being trafficked for prostitution in local spas and massage parlors, and I talk about the poor being manipulated by predatory lenders, and tens of thousands dying from opioid addiction. And I try to keep all of those children in dog cages, separated from their families on the boarder, front of mind. Frankly, you are brave to come back here. I ask for a lot of your emotional energy. 

I know that preachers are supposed to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, but I don’t really throw out a lot of comfort and I apologize for that. I have an assumption that spiritual people are always in training for an empathy marathon. As St. Bernard said, “I love that I may love, so that I may love.” That is, I am asking you to exercise your empathy, to make your loving heart stronger, to expand your grasp. But I know, sometimes you hear me talk about the #MeToo movement, then it is #BlackLivesMatter, and then it is #TransRights, and I’m sure that you have heard about black-trans people being sexually harassed, and so when I tell the very large and unmasked lady who is blocking the aisle at Sam’s that 120,000 people have already died from covid-19 and 2 million have been infected, when she replies with an invitation for me to kiss a frankly, shockingly enormous part of her anatomy, we can’t be too surprised. 

We started this pandemic four months ago with panic buying of toilet paper and hand sanitizer, so that those who have no empathy for others, hoarded basic necessities until our retail supply chain was literally broken. Now it is devolving into the moral battle of the wearing of masks in public to slow the spread of the virus. Those of us who have been exposed to the spiritual training of empathy, immediately accepted the expert advice to wear a mask in public but noticeably, most people just didn’t. Why didn’t they?

There was a piece in our paper this week about how retail stores are getting trapped in the middle of what has ironically become a political divide. Customers at our local sort-of-hippy health food stores, Mama Jean’s, have gotten irate at clerks for wearing masks, vowing not to return if they don’t take them off? What is that about? 

Wearing a mask may not be a panacea, while there is lots of evidence to say that they help, they are anything but a certain form of protection, but why would someone insist that others not wear one? It has, in the most mind-numbing way, become a matter of politics. 

Most of you will remember that in 1982, almost 40 years ago, someone in Chicago put cyanide in Tylenol capsules. 7 people were killed in this senseless crime, all in the Chicago area. But people all across America stopped taking Tylenol. It forced the over the counter medication industry to turn on a dime, changing how they made capsules and how they packaged them, so that now we have tamper proof seals on everything from aspirin to seasoned salt and whatever that film is that they put on my cottage cheese carton. No one ever suggested that Democrats should stop taking Tylenol, but Republicans should take two every morning. 

There was a known public health risk, everyone took precautions, the industry made adjustments and now, I’m sure, that if I hadn’t brought it up, no one ever thinks about those 7 people who died from cyanide laced Tylenol. Now, 120,000 people have died from Covid-19 and the suggestion that you wear a mask in public to protect others in case you are infected, has become a literal war, cast largely as a political left verses the political right and no part of this makes the least amount of sense. Why did we believe the experts about Tylenol but half of the country, and the majority of our locals, insist that their wishful thinking is more reliable than the advice of experts?

A sociopath is someone who lacks empathy. They will live in dangerous, sometimes violent ways, and they simply don’t care about the consequences. In grad school, I was led to believe that only 2 or 3% of society could be diagnosed as a sociopath, although, even then, we were aware than more than 25% of corporate CEOs were . . . but that is a topic for another sermon.

I famously had a showdown with the director of a Council of Churches agency that we have volunteered with for more than a decade. The last time I showed up at Crosslines to work with our team of senior citizen volunteers and I saw that absolutely no one, not staff or volunteers, were wearing masks, and I had a bit of a meltdown. I simply couldn’t believe that they expected members of my church, some of whom are in their 80’s, most of whom have underlying conditions that would make infection with the Covid virus almost certainly lethal, and the explanation I was given was that they were not required to wear them. I pointed out that it would make my volunteers 80 to 90% less likely to get the virus if everyone wore masks, and the response was an indifferent shrug of the shoulders. 

In a later email exchange, I carefully explained to the director why he is a sociopath. I have not had a reply. But if knowing that wearing a mask protects vulnerable people, cutting their risk of infection by 90% and you don’t wear one, if that makes you a sociopath then about 75% of the people who live around here are sociopaths. I want very much to go back to believing that only 2 or 3% of society are sociopaths. I don’t want to believe that most people in our community really would rather directly cause my death than to be inconvenienced by wearing a mask. 

Are they all sociopaths or are they possibly just emotionally exhausted? Maybe I’m not on their list of six or seven people that they can love today. Now, you may think that I was harsh for telling the director of Crosslines that he is a sociopath, I’m sure he thought so, but I’m not the only one to reach this conclusion.

https://www.psypost.org/2020/06/psychopathic-traits-linked-to-non-compliance-with-social-distancing-guidelines-amid-the-coronavirus-pandemic-56980?fbclid=IwAR3KjBM131TJBaKNzJpgMELK8U7pdTWWIvZy_oY9MSpg4YkIi5IUTFqHNaY

In research done by the Personality Laboratory at Whitman College, they are providing initial evidence that certain antagonistic personality traits are associated with ignoring preventative measures meant to halt the spread of the novel coronavirus. I’m not the only one who sees a connection between refusing appropriate preventative measures and sociopathy. 

Dr. Deborah Birx, the coordinator of the U.S. government’s Coronavirus Task Force, said, ‘There’s no magic bullet. There’s no magic vaccine or therapy. It’s just behaviors. Each of our behaviors, translating into something that changes the course of this viral pandemic. . .’ 

We don’t have a vaccine. We have some marginally helpful treatments, but most of what we have in the face of this pandemic is the same thing they had in the face of the Spanish Flu . . . everybody needs to wear a mask, stay home as much as possible, and keep at least six feet between you and everyone else. It is only the behaviors of the population that can alter the spread of the virus right now. And sadly, people are not generally choosing very compassionate behaviors.

The people who get it can be pretty testy about this. As this sign in a restaurant window offers, “To accommodate Anti-Maskers, we have provided a space 40 feet west where you can stare at your reflection in the window since, apparently, you’re the only person you care about.” 

I was in New York for a few days a couple of weeks ago visiting friends from there as well as from Russia and Brazil. My friend’s daughters already think that I live so deep in the Ozarks that it is still the 16^th century out here but sadly, the Ozarks was in the news several times during my brief stay. The mayor of St Louis literally provoked vigilante retaliation against Black Lives Matter protestors by reading out their names, addresses and phone numbers on the internet. 

Then when there was a demonstration on the mayor’s street, and a pair of very affluent, though even more paranoid and possibly psychopathic attorneys stood in front of their million dollar mansion pointing guns at peaceful demonstrators walking down their street. I appreciate the lawyer wearing the Hamburgler costume, I wish all lawyers would.

But then the coups de grâce was when the network news mentioned Joplin having a spike in virus infections from the meat packing plant near there and the reporter ended her report saying that the Joplin City Council voted against a mandatory mask ordinance and rolled her eyes like a teenaged cheerleader.

But, of course, as infections are going up here, our City Council is set to meet to discuss the same thing and the only question is whether Springfield will reveal itself to the world as being as stupid as our neighboring community of Joplin. Everyone knows that we should all be wearing masks whenever we leave our homes but there is an inexplicable resistance which, I have to be honest, really looks evil to me. But I don’t want malignant narcissism to be the explanation, no matter how much it looks like that. 

 In 1962 when The New Yorker decided to send the Holocaust survivor, Hannah Arendt to Jerusalem to cover the trial of Adolph Eichmann, one of the leading architects of the Holocaust, she had to sort through some very profound personal emotions about the whole thing. She concluded that she would never again refer to “radical evil” because “radical” means that it goes to the very tip of the root and she found that evil was almost always much more shallow than that. Only good, she said, can be radical because goodness requires thought, decision making, intellect, it goes deeper than evil can. Evil spreads like mold on a society, infecting it, literally ruining it, but it never goes much deeper than the surface. 

Evil, she concludes, is thought defying and in our day, we can speak of it as being fact defying. She is saying that Nazism, the kind of malice and racism that caused the Holocaust was like a fungus that spread thinly across the surface of Germany and as much harm as it did, historically speaking, it didn’t seem to take deep roots in all but the most extreme of German people. When the war was over, very few people wanted to defend the agenda of the Nazis. 

I think we will see a similar distancing of conservatives from the Trump era early next year. I am reasonably confident at this point that Trump will be defeated this November, in spite of the Democratic Party’s best efforts at losing, and if anyone knows how to throw an election, it surely is the DNC, but I think that they will oust Trump in November and we will be treated to a 2021 version of  “I was only following orders” excuse from almost every elected Republican politician who failed to find a backbone for the past four years. 

The denial of science on the part of Britain’s Boris Johnson, Brazil’s Bolsonaro, and our own accidental president, Donald Trump, has fed the virus, resulted in tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths, but on the surface, it has given hundreds of millions of people permission to simply not take the threat seriously, to avoid distancing, mask wearing, and I have to suspect, hand washing, over the past 

 several months. I don’t want to believe that most of our neighbors are evil even though they all have to know that if only they would wear a mask that they could save lives by not spreading the virus. I don’t want to think that they are all stupid, even though I have wasted precious minutes reading social media posts by people who couldn’t pass a middle school science test if it was open book and the answers were underlined, who insist that wearing a mask is either of no help or is actually harmful. 

Not that I will ever be able to believe that only 3 or 4% of society are sociopaths again. I’m afraid that I have accumulated too much evidence to the contrary in the past few months, but I do believe that there is a third option, and that is that people, by and large, are emotionally spent. They are neither ignorant or malevolent, but they just can’t love more than four or five people, and they can’t care about #MeToo, #BlackLivesMatter, kids at the border, the uninsured, the unemployed, the mentally ill, the environment, the pipeline in North Dakota, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and then wear a mask too. Most of that stuff is filed in the back of their minds somewhere along with the collapse of the Nimitz Freeway in San Francisco 30 years ago. 

What we, as spiritually oriented people must remember is that what we want from other people is not the impossible . . . we’re not asking people to try to love dozens and dozens of people, what we’re asking for is for them to change some behaviors that will help out a lot of people they will never meet and about whom they will never know anything. And, excuse me, my brothers and sisters, but don’t we know by now that we can never judge anyone into changing a behavior. 

When we make people feel stupid, or judged, or labeled, they almost always just double down on their self-destructive behaviors. People change their behaviors when they feel safe . . . people will change their minds about something when they believe it is their idea. Conservatives will never adopt liberal behaviors and views in order to satisfy the demands of liberals . . . you see that don’t you?

Right now, the world is in the midst of a pandemic which is a medical problem that causes an economic problem. But, in Britain, Brazil, and the United States, we have politicians who see this medical and economic crisis as a political problem, and they are trying to respond to it as a political problem… with the bag of tricks politicians usually use . . . propaganda, lies, and electoral suppression. We must not be drawn into their political battle. As the old saying goes, never get into a mudslinging argument with a pig . . . you will get dirty and the pig likes it. 

There are those who want for us to believe that there will be a medical resolution to the pandemic within the next six or seven months, as either a vaccine or effective treatments, or both. I hope that they are right. But the fact that there are several corona viruses and there are no effective vaccines for any of them is not encouraging. HIV is a virus and in 40 years we have not come up with a vaccine, though we have had pretty good treatments for several years.

Covid-19 may be a part of our world for a year, or two, or a decade. Church may never be the same. Concerts, restaurants, movie theaters, may never be the same. The one thing that we can do to help the world maintain meaning, joy, romance, and culture, is to change our behaviors. And, if I may quote our friends in the AA movement, sometimes you have to fake it to make it. Maybe your heart just isn’t full of compassion and empathy right now, but you can fake it until you do feel it. 

Maybe you are emotionally spent and you just can’t care about the off chance that you are asymptomatic and throwing off a deadly virus onto unsuspecting strangers, but just pretend, just play along for a minute, learn how to talk to people from six feet away, through a mask. Make it fun. Draw a picture on your mask. Buy a superhero mask. Just choose to pretend to be a better person than you are right now and if you can keep it up for a few weeks, the surprising thing is, you will wake up and realize that you are a better person and you never want to go back to being the knuckle dragging, mouth breathing, narcissist that you were before. No one really wants to be a sociopath. 

I know you may find that hard to believe, so I’ll invite you to prove me wrong. Do the right thing for a month and see if you ever really want to be who you were before. Find one that matches your eyes.

“What is the Nature of the Mystery otherwise known as God?”

“What is the Nature of the Mystery otherwise known as God?”    July 19, 2020

Dr. Roger Ray, pastor          

click here to see the video

We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many different languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn't know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see a universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws, but only dimly understand these laws. Our limited minds cannot grasp the mysterious force that moves the constellations.
--Albert Einstein 

I started my college career as a philosophy major. A fairly surprisingly large number of comedians have degrees in philosophy. And there is a reason for that. You can get a degree in something like English Literature or European History, and three or four years after you are out of school, you have pretty well forgotten everything you briefly knew in college. But as comedian Steve Martin, also a philosophy major, can demonstrate, studying philosophy will pretty much mess you up for the rest of your life. Especially if you studied this guy in the middle of this ancient Greek tryptic, Plato, whose entire body of a work consisted in endlessly long dialogues about the meaning of words. 

Being fairly exacting about the meaning of words has made me quite a misfit in most religious conversations. For a philosopher, when other people are making religious proclamations, they often sound like school children watching a fireworks display . . . everything they say amounts to “ooooooooo” and “aaaaahhhhhhhhh,” but they aren’t really saying anything. 

It’s especially frustrating to me when I have written several books that I would like very much for progressive people to read closely but not many do, and some popular gurus write books with important sounding phrases and a sort of  “self-help” kind of intonation that we have tended to call, in academic circles, a sort theological masturbation but if you demand of them, “what does that really mean?” what you find is that it is almost entirely balloon juice. . . and those books sell like hotcakes and I would be lying to you if I told you that doesn’t frost me at a very existential level. 

There are terms that are bandied about among progressives that I would like to try to define in a way that can allow us to have a meaningful conversation about who we are, what we believe, and exactly how we are different from either traditional religious people, or, for that matter, how we are different from either cabbages or kings. 

I’m going to try to hit this and move along quickly, so quickly that Plato would be embarrassed. But basically, traditional religious people are theists, they believe in the existence of a supernatural god who is, in almost every respect, a person, with emotions, a will, some scary judgements, and an episodic history of getting involved in human history. 

The presumed opposite of the theist is the atheist who has concluded that there is no reason to believe in the existence of a “divine other” and they try to avoid contact with religious people whenever possible. 

The agnostic is someone who very honestly concludes that the whole subject of god is beyond human knowledge and so, they have simply taken their playing piece off the board of religion and wish to be regarded as neutral, sort of the Switzerland of theology. 

Progressives, arising out of the academic study of religion, are often described as being post-theistic, not that they have just gotten over the whole god business, but they have gotten over the trying to force themselves to think of god in terms of being a person. Which forces me to mention two more terms . . . I can only beg for your indulgence:

Anthropomorphism is the portrayal of something, animal or mineral, as being a human when it is not. You can see examples of this, mostly in children literature, in which an animal of some sort is portrayed as speaking and wearing at least some sort of human clothing, as the Walrus in the famous poem embedded in Alice in Wonderland’s account of the Walrus and the Carpenter. 

And similarly, Personification is the portrayal of aspects of nature as being a person. The most ancient strata of religions tended to give personhood to the earth, the sun, the oceans, rivers, etc. 

Many people in our day have tried to project personhood onto Senator Mitch McConnell but I am convinced that this is a mistake. But I digress.

Portraying god anthropomorphically, as a person, with super power, eternity, being all knowing and all seeing and omnipresent, but still very human in having emotions, judgements, loves and dislikes, preferences and things about which the divine person was quite disdainful. 

This worked in more primitive societies when they assumed that the earth was the center of a fairly small universe and that people were the crowning accomplishment of creation. What frosted the church of the early 17^th century about Galileo, and it seems quite innocuous to us now, but when he reversed the assumption that the sun revolved around the earth and explained, painfully convincingly, that the earth revolved around the sun, as did the other planets, then humanity itself was dethroned and our all too small and human gods along with us. 

Galileo only opened the door to astrophysics and what followed him in successive generations of scientific inquiry revealed that the universe is incomprehensibly large and that our system of planets orbiting a star is only one of billions and billions of solar systems and that the whole of the earth is just a speck in the cosmos. 

This horrible awareness robs our human pomposity of anywhere to hang our bloated sense of our importance in the universe. As modern science engaged modern theology in dialogue, we have progressively given up on the notion that god is a superhuman in the clouds, and, I hope, we are giving up on the notion of god as a person at all. 

If I say that what god is, is simply a part of the isness of existence, not a person or an entity who has a place or a form, but a spirit that unites and animates the universe but is not conscious being who cares if you are American or Russian, gay or straight, fat or thin . . . though, having failed at a thousand diets, it starts to seem that maybe god wants me to be fat . . . but again, that is a topic for another day. 

In this, I believe that the author of the ancient book of Exodus deserves some applause. When Moses asks the deity behind the burning bush who or what that deity is, the response was simply, “I am.” 

Three hundred years before Galileo invented the telescope that got into trouble with the pope, a 13^th century German theologian, Meister Eckhart wrote, “God is not what you think or even what you believe, because God is a word unspoken, a thought unthought, a belief unbelieved. So, if you wish to know this God, practice wonder, do what is good, and cultivate silence. The rest will follow.”

You see, Eckhart was a mystic. He wasn’t the first one and thankfully not the last but he was so profound, standing, as it were, on the threshold of the scientific age, he, a Roman Catholic theologian could say, “God is a word unspoken, a thought not thought, a belief unbelieved.” Now I’m going to sound like an elementary school kid at a fireworks show….. “oooooooooo,” “aaaaaahhhhhhh.” God is not a person, a thing, an entity, but an isness, integral to existence, but neither creator nor puppet master. 

God is, to use the language of Exodus, the “I Am” about whom little can be sensibly said but Eckhart says, knowledge of God comes in three things:  the practice of wonder, a life lived in doing good, and in, well, keeping your mouth shut. . . no, that’s too harsh, practicing silence is, at its root, a practice of humility . . . don’t assume that you know stuff that you need to tell other people. Practice silence. 

The church of the past three hundred years knows more about Thomas Aquinas than it does Meister Eckhart because people like Aquinas embraced the growing wisdom of the enlightenment while fortressing traditional Christianity with academic language and purposeful defenses . . . it didn’t make him right, it just gave the church license to go on talking about heaven and hell, souls, angels, sin and tithing. 

In our church, we don’t use the word “worship” because we do not believe that there is an enthroned ego-deficit supernatural theistic god who expects to be worshipped. We don’t use the word “praise” for the same reason, there is not an ego-deficit deity enthroned in the clouds who needs to be praised. 

We don’t offer prayers of intercession because we do not believe that god is a theistic take on Santa Claus or the tooth fairy who bestows favors on those who ask in the right way or are persistent enough in the asking. We are careful about our language because we want to be careful not to perpetuate a pre-Galileo world view.  

Specifically, we are trying to foster less of the old man in the clouds image of god and more of the wonder and awe of real mysticism, not magic and not science denying, but more wonder, as Galileo said, trying to make the religious people around him understand that he was not robbing them of faith but rather gifting them with a spiritual, a mystical wonder, he 

 wrote:  The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do.

I don’t grow grapes but I trust that Galileo would allow me to appropriate his insights to say, in the midst of a pandemic, surviving a collapsing economy brought on by incompetence in high offices serving some inscrutable dynamic between Russia, China, and the USA, still, I walk into my back yard and the sun has ripened blackberries that were green and red yesterday, and tomatoes that were green and hard when I saw them two days ago are now luminescent red. 

Damn Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Boris Johnson, and Bozo Bolsonaro too, but while I was watching MSNBC, a single bean grew a vine that yields hundreds of beans. The kale I planted and have harvested twice already, keeps growing back. And, good for me, I actually like kale. I know a bit about botany and agriculture but I do not let that dampen the awe and mystery I feel every time I look at my little garden. And I will wallow in that mystic union until I am ready to leave my garden to go and fight against all forms of tyranny, fascism, racism and oppression. . . the political kind to be sure, but especially the religious kind.

Every time the church falls back into talking about an anthropomorphic god, replete with rewards and punishments and sacred texts, we are never more than a step or two away from homophobia, misogyny, classism, racism, maybe even nationalism and slavery. So I wish that progressives could get their heads straight and their language nailed down in a way that avoids that slippery slope of bad theology. 

When we first begin to leave the cage of traditional religious thinking, we don’t give up on praise and worship all at once. We don’t give up on bibles and prayers and sacraments all at once, but we try to recast them as being friendlier, kinder, less judgmental, less dominating and more liberating. But the problem is that the cage is still there.

I feel like I need to be concrete about this, but I want to be specific in the nicest way possible. When progressives fall back into anthropomorphic language about god, they may do so with a very compassionate and well-intended purpose, but they are still lending credence to the judge on the throne in the clouds.

I want to use the rather unorthodox Lutheran pastor, Nadia Bolz-Weber, as an example. I know a lot of people who really like her work and she has gained a great deal of notoriety in the progressive movement. And, clearly, she practices compassion and she preaches a psychologically aware message . . . but may I point out here that in her language, when she says, “I think God is wanting to be known . . .” that she is casting god as a person who, like you and me, has preferences and a certain relational itch. And that is just one theological twist away from saying that God wants you to do this and to not do that, to marry this person and not that person, or to be Christian and not Muslim. 

And I like Nadia Bolz-Weber and I don’t mean that she does this and Richard Rohr doesn’t, because he does and so does Robin Meyers. Again, all pillars of the progressive movement but, lacking a precision of language that I really long for. Once you give yourself permission to start telling people what god thinks, what god wants, what god likes or what god hates, you are just polishing the cage that you are going to put people back in, and simultaneously giving people to do their own projecting, announcing that whatever they like, feel, prefer, or wish is true because god told them so. What makes any one of us go “oooooo” and “aaaaahhhhh” may have more to do with, as Scrooge said, some undigested bit of potato than of spirit. We need to be clear and thoughtful about something as important as this is.

The one kindred spirit whom I have never met but whose work I admire is Canada’s Gretta Vosper. She never falls into the language of an anthropomorphic god but lately it seems like she has taken to describing herself as being an atheist. I don’t doubt that a lot of progressives describe me that way but, Gretta, I don’t think that you have to be an atheist to reject anthropomorphism. We can live with our faith in the midst of the mystery with a god who is a word unspoken, a thought unthought, and a belief unbelieved. 

One of our listeners with whom I correspond recently described himself as a Christian without Jesus, a Buddhist without Buddha, and a Muslim without either Muhammad or the Quran. I like that. We are spiritual people without creed or sacred text or sacrament. We are seekers who live in awe and wonder, and try to do good things for others, and, I hope, we try to avoid saying silly things.

I offer this message as a conversation starter, and not a conversation ending. I may not be able to reply to all of your objections or corrections but, it isn’t me that you need to come to terms with anyway. 

“Just War, War Crimes, War is a Crime, War is a Racket”

“Just War, War Crimes, War is a Crime, War is a Racket”   July 5, 2020    

Dr. Roger Ray, pastor     click here to see the video

14^th Dalia Lama – “Most of us have been conditioned to regard military combat as exciting and glamorous - an opportunity for men to prove their competence and courage. Since armies are legal, we feel that war is acceptable; in general, nobody feels that war is criminal or that accepting it is criminal attitude. In fact, we have been brainwashed. War is neither glamorous nor attractive. It is monstrous. Its very nature is one of tragedy and suffering.”

Winston Churchill did not say it exactly this way but the popular form of the comment he made in Parliament is this, “Democracy is the worst form of government except for all of the others.” Any democracy is inherently inefficient and wasteful and this appears to become increasingly true the bigger the democratic institution becomes.

The last denominational church I served was fairly large with several full-time staff members and many more part time staff and once a year we had to balance a budget that was just a few hundred thousand shy of a million dollars. We had a very aggressive outreach program that involved building a Habitat for Humanity house every year and supporting social services in a village in Nicaragua along with a lot of local poverty related work. 

But we also had a very large board that was populated by a number of well- intended people who watched way too much television. They would insist on adding or defending budget line items that sent money to their favorite charity. 

They didn’t necessarily love these charities enough to send their own money, but they loved them enough to gum up our budget writing process to insist that we send them money from the church. So, while I’m trying to make sure that we keep the feeding center that feeds 200 kids in Matagalpa, Nicaragua everyday open, they also felt the need to make sure that we supported the no-kill Animal Shelter where three or four hundred cats are being housed. This was one of dozens of line items of different people’s favorite causes.

There were some red-faced arguments every fall as these bureaucratic ego battles took place and at some point, I regularly offered, “give me a line item veto and I can balance the church’s budget in five minutes and put a good deal of money into savings” . . . an offer they never had the wisdom to grant to me. 

We like democracy because we all get a voice and even though we don’t get everything our way, we usually get at least a piece of what we want. But, when a lot of people get a piece of what they want, efficiency, thrift, goes out the window. I never suggested that we go ahead and euthanize the cats and anyone who says I did is a damned liar, however, my sympathy grew smaller every year for 16 years.

But during that time, I also served on the boards of several community agencies to include the United Way and Burrell Mental Health and the Community Foundation. Then I was often the minority voice as we looked a very big budgets in the tens of millions of dollars and had to make decisions about what programs got funded and which ones had to be scaled back. And, again, these things get very personal. If one board member is a recovering alcoholic, they are going to defend addiction treatment programs, tooth and nail. 

Another board member has a sibling in an assisted living housing program for people with special needs and for them, every other program is expendable. Still, mental health is generally under-funded and writing that budget was like trying to spread one jar of peanut butter over a hundred loaves of bread. But it wasn’t all well thought out.

Not to beat a dead horse but let me give you an example: 

This is a photo of a part of the main campus of Burrell where we built about $30 million worth of buildings that house most of our counseling, psychiatric, and child treatment programs. It is built on some of the most expensive land in the region, next to the Cox Hospital complex. We realized that fewer than 10% of our clients lived in this part of town and many had to take a series of bus trips to get to us to receive services.

90% of our local clients lived on the north side of town where land would have cost us about one-tenth of what this land cost. We could have put millions of dollars back into the services we delivered in mental health, been closer to our client base, and dramatically improved the property values and lowered the crime rate in a northside blighted neighborhood. And it is for observations like this that I am no longer on the board of Burrell Behavioral Health. 

I had my sacred cows in each program and could be quite difficult to get along with when I felt like politics or favoritism was having too much sway in the final writing of the budget. And when you start to talk about a really big budget, like a hospital or a university, and I was always on the sidelines of those battles, but a lot of the decisions about vendors, construction, legal services, auditing firms, these contracts were sometimes granted in the midst of kickbacks, bribes, and revolving door arrangements that would have embarrassed any third world dictator. 

I could be more specific, but I would almost certainly be sued if I actually said anything about Cox Hospitals granting multi-million dollar contracts on the basis of non-competitive bidding from members of their own board. Oops…. Sorry, not sorry. And, of course, while medical costs sky-rocket, our local hospitals make the same prime real estate decisions that Burrell made, which is a large part of why our healthcare costs are so high. 

I get my primary health care from a group of doctors that charge me $60 a month for everything. They are bright, professional, and caring people. And they lease office space downtown on the bottom floor of a parking garage surrounded by closed retail shops and empty warehouses. But my healthcare costs less than 10% of what most people in this area pay. This is not hard. It is just unpopular.

Generally speaking, the larger an institution becomes, the less efficient it is. Some of that is due simply to the complexity of scale and some of that is due to the greed that always creeps in when a lot of money is changing hands.  Just consider how our economy has changed during the current pandemic. 40 million people have filed for unemployment.

Many, if not most, small businesses will not survive this. And yet, the top billionaires in our nation have seen their wealth go up by 50% just in the past three months, exploiting the government spending and special demands of the pandemic.

Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and a lot of other nasty rich people whose names are not in the news as much are experiencing rapid wealth growth while tens of millions of Americans head for bankruptcy. 

That’s how our economy works though. Whenever a lot of money is being moved, the big guys step in and grab the majority of it while working class and poor people are still brushing their teeth and lacing up their boots to go to work. Now, I don’t want to go all Steve Rattner on you guys, but I have a few of charts.

This is an average municipal government budget pie chart. The big blue section is the police budget and the red section is the fire budget and this shows you what we are talking about when we talk about defunding the police. At least I am not talking about getting rid of the police force entirely but it is clear that mental health workers, social workers, the kind of people who could meaningfully respond to most of what the police are called out for, are hardly present in the budget because it is taken up, almost entirely, by the police and fire departments. 

Every mental health emergency, every public acting out of an alcoholic or drug addict, and every domestic disturbance doesn’t need two heavily armed cops to show up, and, in fact, more than a thousand times a year, that’s how someone gets shot. Save the armed cops for bank robberies and domestic terrorism but, as you have heard me say many times, if all you have is a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail. You don’t need an armed cop to give traffic tickets any more than we arm meter maids who give out parking tickets. Most police shootings happen in traffic stops. So, stop making traffic stops! You have their license number – just mail them a speeding ticket. That’s what they do in the United Kingdom and it not only works to avoid police shootings, no one speeds anymore because they know that they will get a ticket in the mail.

When an institution gets this big, it has so much power, the municipal government has tremendous difficulty in getting the budget cut to a more appropriate size in relation to the rest of the city’s needs. This is a problem that will not be fixed overnight and correcting it at all will require tremendous political will on the part of voters. As important as it is and as much as it is in the news, we’re not here to talk about police budgets, or mental health or hospital budgets. On this 4^th of July weekend, we are here to talk about the military budget. My previous illustrations were just to prime the pump so that it will be easier for you to accept that what I am about to tell you is entirely true.

When you go from the city budget to the national budget you see what an amazing problem this becomes.

The federal government will move over $4 trillion dollars this year but just over half of that is not really income and budget issues for politicians to manage. Social Security and Medicare are self-funding programs, so it is deceptive to look at our federal budget in this way. 

It makes a lot more sense to look at what we allegedly have discretion over. It is horrifying enough to realize that military and veterans spending accounts for nearly 70 cents of every federal dollar spent, but what you don’t see is how much is spent off the books… trillions spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were never even budgeted.

The scandal reported by the Nation in 2018 revealed that when the Department of Defense was finally pinned down to be audited, the auditing firm of Ernst and Young reported that they could not finish the audit because there were hundreds of billions of dollars unaccounted for and more than 16,000 pages of supporting documents had been destroyed. Please don’t let this slip passed you. This is not a matter of Hillary deleting thousands of personal emails about her yoga classes and her daughter’s wedding. This is the military hiding 16,000 pages of budget and acquisition documentation. The military has lost hundreds of billions of dollars that they cannot tell you where it went. 

You all know what it is like. You get a little refund check and you misplace it and you can’t get another one. You let a $10 bill slip out of your pocket while you are fishing for your keys in a dark parking lot. But this is what one billion dollars looks like . . . almost a dozen pallets stacked tightly with hundred-dollar bills six feet tall. How do you lose this, hundreds of times? The military industrial complex feeds on the bloated military budget that buys airplanes we can’t use, ships we will never need, and weapons systems designed to win wars like World War II when we will never fight wars like that again. 

Last spring, in a broadly reported interview, Jimmy Carter talked about a(https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/04/18/jimmy-carter-us-most-warlike-nation-history-world)

Conversation he had with President Trump. Trump was worried about China’s growing economic strength and their competitiveness on world trade. The 94 year old Carter spelled it out for him: the United States is perpetually at war and China almost never is. Carter said that the US is “the most warlike nation in the history of the world” having been engaged in conflict of one kind or another for all but 16 of our 243 years of existence. China has not been engaged in any armed conflict for more than 40 years. 

While we are losing hundreds of billions on military spending that we can’t even account for, China is building airports, housing projects, wind and solar power generation, and investing in international trade. We don’t see it so much here but I can tell you that in every Caribbean and Central American country that I have visited in the past generation, the grocery store to go to is the Chinese store, and they are backed by government initiatives to spread their language, culture, and citizens around the globe in positive and helpful ways while we build aircraft carriers that will never be used and would be useless if we tried to use them…. They are all just one drone strike away from sleeping with the fishes and every nation on earth knows it and yet the USA keeps building more of them. 

It is not an accident that I am bringing this up on the 4^th of July weekend. We tend to talk about every war as a war fought for freedom and independence. We say that every soldier deployed to a battlefield is fighting to protect our freedom. And folks, wishing that it was so does not make it so. We invaded Afghanistan because there were Taliban training camps there. The whole nation wasn’t a Taliban training camp, in fact, the military targets there that had anything to do with the 9-11 attacks on the USA were few. But we invaded, occupied, and we are still there, with the Russians paying insurgents a bounty for every American soldier they kill. But 19 years later, does Afghanistan pose a threat to our freedom and independence?  Not for nearly a generation.

Dick Cheney spun up a case for invading Iraq, though they had nothing to do with 9-11, they posed no threat to us, and their military was the only counter-balance to the growing power of Iran in the region. But what that war did was increase the value of Dick Cheney’s Halliburton stock by more than 3000%. The real reason behind almost every war is not the noble stuff they sell in the media to recruit soldiers and gain support for a war, it is to enrich those who are, generally speaking, already rich. If war was such a noble enterprise, it would be illegal to profit off of it and we would spare no expense to care for our wounded veterans but, as you know, the truth of it is the exact opposite. War kills the children of the poor on both sides of the conflict, and enriches the war profiteers. 

I briefly worked as a military journalist. I have stood on the training grounds at Ft. Leonard Wood and felt the electric passion of young soldiers as they prepared for deployment. I know that they were willing to give their lives in service to their country in defense of the values we claim to hold dear. But I’m telling you, I had a very short career as a military journalist because I could see that these young women and men were being lied to. They were willing to die in defense of freedom, but they were being sent to give up arms and legs, eyes, sanity, and their very lives for cheap oil and the profits of Lockheed Martin, Halliburton, Boeing, and Raytheon. 

War is a racket in which noble young soldiers are killed for ignoble profit and that men and women, is a fact. And listeners, you don’t have to write to tell me how angry you are at me for saying it, I have heard it many times. But the fact that you are angry doesn’t mean that what I am saying is not true. I’m not being unpatriotic. War profiteers are the ones who are not being patriotic, but they never seem to pay a price in the media.

As the Dalai Lama said, we allow ourselves to be brainwashed into believing that wars turn soldiers into heroes and that they make our nation safe for democracy.

It simply isn’t true. American democracy is in peril but not from the armies of Afghanistan or Iraq. Our democracy is threatened by Russian, Chinese, and Iranian meddling in our elections but that is a war our President has not only chosen not to fight but he has, in fact, encouraged Russian and Chinese meddling in our elections to hold onto an office for which he is not qualified and which he has already disgraced for more than three years. 

Here is the moral dilemma of our age:  If we cannot afford to provide health care to our sick, education to our young, a living wage to our workers, then what exactly are we spending trillions of dollars to defend? I’m not saying that we shouldn’t have a Department of Defense or Homeland Security, I’m just saying that they are so big that they have dominated our nation’s budget and robbed us of the things that really would make America great if we just got our priorities in order. 

I love my country, but my government is a disgrace. I respect our service women and men, but I despise the people who have sent them into battle to profit from their sacrifices. I want to be able to stand at attention for our flag, but first America is going to have to get its head straight about what it is that we really stand for.

I will close with a bit of trivia that may be news to many of you. We all know that our grand Statue of Liberty was a gift to America from France. But it was not a gift given to us at the end of our War for Independence at the end of the 18^th century. It was not given to us until the end of the 19^thcentury and it was given to honor the fact that America had finally freed its slaves. The whole association with immigration and famous poem on the base of the statue came later. The French gave us this great monument to liberty because we had finally done the right and moral thing in giving liberty to African slaves. 

This is not a difficult thing. If you want to be honored and respected, do something that is honorable and respectable. Cut the military budget and give workers a raise to a living wage. Make higher education available to the children of the rich and the poor. Give healthcare to the sick, housing to the homeless, jobs to the unemployed, and for God’s sake, pay reparations to the decedents of those freed slaves for which lady liberty holds high her torch of freedom. Oh, and not that I watch football, but give Colin Kaepernick a job in the NFL, and tear down some statue of Robert E. Lee and put up a statue of Fredrick Douglas, or even Colin Kaepernick for that matter…. Celebrate some history that is worth preserving . . . or create some history that would be worth remembering. 

It may be a symbolic gesture to take Indian murdering Andrew Jackson off of the $20 bill and put Harriet Tubman’s face on our currency, but you can’t say that it is just symbolic, or we would have done it already. There is a reason why Trump is delaying that change and the reason is we have a racist in the White House. Come on America, you are better than this. Give me something to celebrate on Independence Day. 

I have a great deal more that I want to say on this topic but I know that I have already taxed your patience and frayed your nerves and so I will end with what I think was the greatest line from all of the 9 episodes of the fictional Star Wars movies: When Luke Skywalker crash lands on the jungle planet of Tatooine, he meets a tiny alien and he tells him that he is looking for a great warrior. 

The strange looking creature was Yoda, whom Luke came to find, but Yoda is quick to correct him saying, "Wars not make one great." I want to be proud of a great America, but America is not now great. I can’t vouch for whether or not it ever was, but I know that right now it is not and that there is no war that will ever make it great again. 

The ball is in your court America. If you want to reclaim your honor, do something honorable. If you want to be respected, do the things that would make you respectable. End your ceaseless wars. Find a solution to racism. Bring an end to ignorance and poverty, and for God’s sake, elect national leaders that you don’t have to constantly apologize for. Nobody is perfect but then, nobody I can think of is as imperfect as our current president. Do better America. Be better. Earn our respect and you will have it. I am a son of the South. I am a natural born patriot. All you have to do to win me back is stop embarrassing yourself and start to do the right thing.