“Just War Theory in 2025”

“Just War Theory in 2025”              September 7, 2025    Dr. Roger Ray 

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In 1971 I rode my gold colored Huffy, three speed, sting ray bike to the Plaza Theater just off the square in Glasgow, KY to see the movie, The Legend of Billy Jack. It was a poorly done movie, but it had a big impact on me. It was the Nixon years, at the height of the war in Vietnam, and this movie ticked all the right buttons for me. It was anti-war and it introduced me to the concept of pacifism and, as a young man, it was helpful that it did so with a lot of exciting karate fights because, pacifists usually end up needing to be defended by someone who isn’t a pacifist. 

 

As an adult pastor, I have been decidedly opposed to war. I have often said that I would like to be a pacifist, but I recognize that our heavily armed world often requires a show of strength to avoid constant invasions and genocides. Still, I can remember saying in many sermons over the past 45 years that I am so anti-war that I am already against the next war, wherever it will be. 

 

We don’t know who first said it but there is a very old proverb that says, “The first casualty in any war is the truth.” From the time of wars with swords and spears all of the way up to our nuclear age, governments have used wars to distract and unite their population. Sometimes they steal land or resources in a war but that is not usually what causes it. The value of a war is often just a way to distract a population from their suffering or some political controversy and to unite them around a common enemy…. Often an absurd caricature of an enemy, built on lies and propaganda. 

In late August, my charming wife, Sunan, was finally able to move from Bangkok to our home in Florida. This has been a great source of joy for both of us and, honestly some relief to get her away from Thai television. You see, we have spent months together in Thailand, but when I have been back in the USA, we talk morning and night on the phone. She has been unemployed for the past few months, living in a house with three of her brothers in a rural province where watching TV was a primary form of entertainment. The state controlled news in Thailand contains only what the King wants it to contain and that is always praise for the king’s generosity to various charities . . . . and I am no longer allowed to ask where the king gets all of that money that he gives away . . . and no small amount of thrilling news about how bad the government of Cambodia is. 

 

There has been a dispute over the ownership of two ancient temples on the boarder of Thailand and Cambodia for a century. Sometimes, when one side or the other needs a propaganda distraction, it becomes a regional shooting war. Both temples are Hindu, neither are in use. I won’t butcher the pronunciation of their names, but the larger one’s name translates to “In Honor of the Great Chicken.” Both were built by the ancient Khmer Empire which is arguably a bit more Cambodian than it is Thai. The international court in the Hague ruled 60 years ago that the temples belonged to Cambodia. . . a decision which does not get reported on Thai TV.

 

All that they say on Thai TV is that Cambodia shot first. . . I have heard this so much from my sweet, 90 lbs, 57 year old wife that I have been afraid that she was going to join the commandos and go fight the Cambodian army. I shouldn’t make light of this, and I absolutely should not tell Sunan that she is being manipulated by the king’s propaganda . . . saying that once appears to have been quite sufficient. 

 

It isn’t like the USA hasn’t done this several times. Most of us can remember that when a security fumble in Lebanon resulted in the bombing deaths of more than 200 American service men, Reagan almost immediately ordered the invasion of the tiny Caribbean Island of Grenada, which Reagan said was being overrun by godless communists. In a classic “wag the dog move,” the invasion was ordered so quickly that our Marines didn’t have the time to find the right island. They invaded the wrong island, had to run back to their ships, and get a better navigator. 

 

This wasn’t about saving a few dozen American medical students on the island from godless communists, it was about saving Reagan from NBC, CBS, and ABC news anchors. And so it goes. Governments use war to distract and unite their subjects.

 

While I cannot rationally claim to be opposed to all wars, I still hold fast to the belief that virtually all real wars are the result of failed diplomacy. We cannot maintain peace by just refusing to fight but we can usually avoid a fight if we manage foreign affairs in a way that resolves legitimate problems without bloodshed. Some problems are easy to see coming and are preventable, but no one has a crystal ball. 

Most of us watched the build up of Russian soldiers on the border with Ukraine as a political bluff on Putin’s part. Even President Zelenski apparently believed that they would not invade. In fact, other than Joe Biden, I can’t remember anyone saying that it was really going to happen, but it happened and now I believe that it would be a tragic mistake to allow Putin to gain land or power out of this illegal war. The western world has supported Ukraine enough to keep it from falling but not enough to actually defeat Russia in what is becoming a war of attrition.

 

Folks, if I had my way, I would admit Ukraine to NATO today and pull together a united NATO army and push the Russian army back to Moscow and then demilitarize Russia because, clearly, Russia cannot be trusted. But then, I only listen to pro-Ukrainian news and Russians only listen to Kremlin propaganda. Evidently, Donald Trump mostly listens to Kremlin propaganda because he has often said that Ukraine started the war, by somehow manipulating the Russian armies into invading. 

 

Regardless of the degree to which Trump is a Russian asset, this is a real war with serious consequences. I am pacifist adjacent, but I believe that the world needs to pull Russia’s nuclear teeth, ground their Airforce, sink their navy, and disarm their army because nothing less will make the world safe. That may show how little I really know about international diplomacy, but we did it to Iraq and Iraq didn’t really do anything to deserve it. Russia is not a civilized player on the world stage.

 

This is not a comprehensive philosophy of Just War and, I still like St. Augustine’s take on this matter as well. But I offer these three points:

The primary tests of a just war have to do with having an obtainable goal that will result in fewer deaths than might reasonably lost if military action is not taken, and there needs to be a way to end the war that results in lasting peace. 

 

When Germany was defeated in World War II, we left them enough of a military to defend their borders but made certain that they could not menace their neighbors again. 70 years later, we often ask Germany to spend more on their defense, but it took a few generations for us to get to a point where we trusted Germany to play with matches again. I would love for Russia, Iran, and even North Korea to join the world of grown up, trustworthy nations but they are not there right now. Typically, the profit motive makes nations behave better than religion or military threat but places like North Korea have proven that they can endure a lot of poverty while never feeling compelled to play by sane international standards. 

 

I say all of this to work my way around to talking about the war between Israel and, well, the people of Gaza and other local neighborhoods that harbor enemies who feel justified in their not infrequent missile attacks. 

 

Like every other liberal in the world, I am horrified by the suffering in Gaza, the starvation, the violence, and the endless military strikes by Israel in the past 2 years. I am sympathetic with the call for a two state solution, giving Palestinians a peaceful path towards a meaningful existence which includes, prosperity, education, productivity, and a prospect of a happy life. It is not difficult to hate Bebe Netanyahu. Many political commentators in the USA just flatly say that he keeps up the war in Gaza, as well as strikes in Iran, Syria, and the West Bank, just in order to stay in office and stay out of prison. Maybe that is true, but take Netanyahu out of the picture and what do you have left?

 

How do the Palestinians and the Israelis get to an end of hostilities that produces lasting peace? Again, the first casualty in any war is the truth. The Israeli media does not show pictures of starving babies in Gaza. They do not report on the deaths, the homelessness, the shifting of the population from one place to another in an endless and exhausting attempt at rooting out all Hamas militants. Sure, Israel isn’t like countries like Russia or Thailand where the news is filtered. They have access to outside news sources but it shouldn’t surprise you that most Israelis don’t access those news sources.

 

Americans have the information superhighway on our cell phones all of the time but still, the majority of traffic on the internet is pornography and cat videos. Religion is no longer the opiate of the people. Now it is Tic Tok.  

 

In Israel, they don’t see the horrors in the lives of the Palestinians, they hear about their hostages who have yet to be returned to them. Do you remember how the War in Gaza started? In the fall of 2023, there had been a cease fire in place when Hamas attacked, killing 1200 Israelis and taking 251 hostages. 378 of those killed were ironically attending the Supernova peace concert. These were mostly young peace advocates who wanted to establish peace between Israel and her neighbors. Many of the young women were raped and sexually tortured. Most of the rape victims were killed in the process of the rape. One woman had nails driven into her pelvis. Another had a knife shoved into her vagina. 

 

The attack was brutal and senseless. Palestinians in the Gaza Strip are about equally divided between those who supported the attack and those who opposed it. However, many of the hostages taken on that horrible day have been housed in the homes of Palestinians and of the hostages rescued in these past 2 years, none were rescued because Gaza residents helped them or turned them over. The western media would have us to believe that there is a clear bright line between Hamas and the Palestinian residents of Gaza but reality is much more murky than that. 

 

Of the 2 million Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip, almost all of them were taught from early childhood that God wants them to kill Jews. Palestinians have, over the past three generations, become aid dependent. Nearly half of the population is unemployed, living solely on foreign aid. Many who are employed are employed by charities sent to offer aid to the poor of the Gaza Strip. 

 

What would it man to establish an independent state of Palestine if there are no jobs, no economy, no prospect of a self-supporting state? From an Israeli perspective, they see a vicious game of propaganda being played in which Hamas brutally attacks Israel. Israel retaliates. Gazans cry “foul” and beg for public attention and international aid. They then use that aid to arm themselves for the next time they will attack Israel. Is it any wonder that they are not crazy about just opening the borders to aid trucks. Where does this end? How does it end?

I have said repeatedly through the years that the Western world was wrong to take Palestinian land to create a Jewish homeland at the end of World War II. It was a horrible decision and it set up conditions for a constant state of war between Israel and her neighbors. What virtually every Palestinian wants more than anything in the world is for the Jews to go away. The phrase, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” means that they want to drive the Jews out of the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. 

 

It was wrong for European settlers to move Native Americans off of the Eastern seaboard but we can’t just push residents of New York, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Virginia into the Atlantic and give the land back to them. It was wrong for Americans to take Texas, Colorado, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and California from Mexico at the point of a rifle, but can we just give the southwest back to Mexico now? OK, I’d be willing to give them Texas but we’re keeping Colorado. 

 

We gave certain Native tribes large tracks of land to be reserved for them to preserve their culture but you can bet that if the Standing Rock Sioux started firing missiles into neighboring cities, I don’t think Americans would stand for it. If the Cherokee in Oklahoma went into Tulsa and murdered over a thousand people and took 251 hostages that they would then rape, starve, torture, and keep in underground tunnels for a couple of years, things wouldn’t be going as well as they are in Oklahoma. 

 

An Israeli officer in Jerusalem told me about 40 years ago, if the Palestinians would lay down their arms, they would be living in peace by nightfall. If the Israelis laid down their arms, they would all be dead by nightfall. That is hyperbole but it is closer to the truth than most of my liberal friends are currently willing to acknowledge.

 

Of course Palestinians deserve a homeland, but they don’t get to push the Jews into the sea to get that sliver of real estate. I am, in principle, in favor of a two state solution but the created Palestinian state has to sincerely and honestly accept Israel’s right to exist, and in spite of 80 years of rhetoric, we are nowhere near the point of saying that the population of Gaza is capable of doing that. 

 

Reporters in the west keep calling on Israel to stop the fighting. There is a simple way to do that, immediately: release the hostages who are, to this day, being raped, starved, tortured, and held in unlit tunnels in Gaza. If you can’t understand why Israel is not willing to end the war in Gaza while these hostages are still being held and tortured, then maybe you are not using your empathy skills very well. Egypt or Jordan could take in these Palestinians but they don’t want to. Do they like keeping a couple of million unemployed angry Arabs on Israel’s doorstep? 

 

If we use our influence to force a ceasefire in Gaza, open the borders to as much aid as donor nations want to send, how long will it be before the next October 7^th? What would prevent it? I’m all for peace between Israel and her neighbors and I am well aware that there have been plenty of Zionist offenses on Israel’s side as well. But where is a workable peace? 

How do you convince Israel to just lay down their defenses and live beside a neighbor whose dream it has been since childhood to carry out a genocide against the Jews? Sure, the 2020 Abraham Accords offered a framework for peace between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan but what about Palestine and Syria? Arab nations will not sign an accord while Israel is fighting in Gaza and Israel isn’t going to sleep next to a militarized Gaza. 

 

I want the war in Gaza to end as much as anyone, but I want it to end in a way that doesn’t just set Israel up for another invasion. The answer to that dilemma, to the best of my knowledge, is not currently under discussion in western media or Middle Eastern media. We have to learn to speak a common language of peace, because hate speech is keeping us in an absurdly vicious cycle of violence.

 

There are no simple answers here but that shouldn’t keep us from looking for a complex answer that has a chance of working.

 

The After-Church World

The After-Church World           August 24, 2025    

Dr. Roger Ray

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The church, as we have known it is dying. Not quickly, but the trend lines are irrefutable. Catholic mass is often still rather crowded but monasteries are closing and it is increasingly difficult to find anyone who is willing to enter the priesthood. Conservative, and especially the mega-churches still dot the skyline of many cities but many are learning that they have to stoop to fireworks shows and monster truck competitions to draw a crowd. Most mainline churches are nearly empty except for the elderly who just won’t quit. My former associate minister and I would often ask ourselves if we were just church addicts . . . it was still important to us but it seemed like most of our congregants could take it or leave it, and increasingly, they were leaving it. 

 

The old myths and superstitions that once held the church together no longer carries much creedence in the world. By and large, very few people believe that God wrote the Bible, the Torah, the Quran, or the Upanishads. We once felt that we really needed to raise our children in a religious community to give them moral training and instruction in your family’s religious beliefs, but that conviction pretty much went out with leisure suits and 8 track tape players.

 

From the days of Moses and Buddha, religions have operated around two foci which sometimes worked in harmony and sometimes worked at opposites to one another – we have always had our priests and our prophets. Priests were associated with the organization of religion and prophets were the revivalist or social critics, speaking sometimes within the faith community, and sometimes from the outside, shaking a fist at the temple or the steeple. 

 

Protestant ministers were always something of a hybrid. We have been known primarily by our preaching skills but, if you did a time analysis of what we actually do in a week, preaching was a fairly thin slice of it. Ministers have a lot of priestly roles. We are expected to preside over weddings and funerals, baptisms, and public holidays. We visit the sick, provide frontline counseling for mental health and care for troubled marriages. We are expected to be teachers, writers, administrators, fund raisers, and property managers. 

In the mid 90’s I came within a whisker of becoming the senior pastor of National City Christian Church, a huge cathedral located uncomfortably close to the White House in Washington, D.C. At the last moment I had a number of good reasons to turn down the offer of that job but not a small consideration was the fact that the administrative part of the job looked like it would take a 100 hours a week before I tried to write a sermon and I still had an 8 year old daughter at home. It was no wonder that the guy who had vacated the office had only been there for a couple of years. I was pretty sure that I wouldn’t last for 6 months. 

 

It is little wonder that most ministers get consumed by the priestly role of keeping the institution alive. In these days when people are less inclined to attend and even less inclined to make significant contributions to the church, honestly, I don’t know how they keep the lights on and keep the roof from leaking. 

In fact, many congregations have had to give up simply because the facility overhead was killing them. For me, the death of priestly role of church, synagogue, and temple is not much of a loss. People rarely get married in churches these days and even funerals and memorials are held in various public locations. I still like going to the Unitarian Church here in my hometown. I sometimes preach there when our minister is away and I appreciate its simple aesthetic beauty. We raise most of the money that it takes to keep the building by renting out the space for musical performances and when I look around the room on Sunday mornings, I realize that I am one of the younger people there and I can’t say that in many settings these days. 

 

I was never entirely comfortable in a traditional pastoral role. I kept trying to find other ways to be prophetic in a conservative world. I taught classes at a small liberal arts college, I wrote weekly ethics columns for the local paper. I published some books and did lecture tours but, in 2007, I burned my bridges with my denominational past and went to work for my favorite charity as the national director of a relief agency that did poverty related work in Nicaragua. 

 

I loved the work that we did in Nicaragua, but I quickly learned that the majority of my responsibility was in fund raising and while I had always had to do some of that in my church life, it was almost all of what I did as the director of a charity that had to find a couple of million dollars a year to keep doing the excellent work we did in Nicaragua. 

 

So, after just a year out of parish ministry, friends prevailed upon me to start a church that was free of denominational corruption where we could be free thinkers, progressives with a prophetic voice. It was an exciting experiment and more than a little frightening, starting a church without a dime in the bank, no congregation, building, or blueprint.

 

We were entirely unaffiliated, free and unscripted, but looking back on it, I can tell you that our first few months we looked an awful lot like the denominational church that we had just left the year before. I despised a lot of the fiction and superstition of the church but the language of the church was still embedded deep within me. We initially named ourselves the Community  Christian Church. We had hymns, communion, prayers, Sunday school classes and within a year we even bought a small church building. 

 

Fortunately, we attracted some very bright people who participated in our evolution. I was challenged by people who saw the disconnect between what I was saying in the pulpit and how we were being the church. I was often blinded by tradition and church nostalgia, but members of the church would ask me, “If we don’t believe in the Trinity, why do we sing a doxology?” And “If we don’t believe in supernatural theism, why do we say prayers of intercession? Why do we sing a hymn of praise?” 

 

We eventually renamed ourselves, The Emerging Church. We were no longer Christian. We rarely even referenced the Bible in our services. We eventually gave up on congregational hymn singing and communion. We recognized that our gatherings were not aimed at a supernatural deity who needed our worship, we gathered to form community, to encourage and support one another. We did service projects together. We read books and watched films, and I did my best to deliver sermons that encouraged critical and ethical thinking about current events. 

 

I still had a priestly roll in the event of weddings and funerals, and I still had to do some fund raising and property management, but most of our efforts were focused on being a community that tried to live out our spirituality in compassion for the poor and sensitivity to the needs of one another. Being prophetic, in my opinion, should not be a solo act.

 

Early in our history, my good friend, Rob Martin, put us on YouTube and iTunes and we quickly discovered a global audience which, at one time, exceeded ten thousand viewers. I often heard from listeners who encouraged me to give up on the little congregation I had in Springfield, Missouri, and to focus only on my online congregation so that I could travel and speak around the globe. But I always insisted that none of our listeners make our YouTube channel their only church. I encouraged people to find a peer group, whether it was a church, a book study, or a service group. I have never been able to believe that anyone can live out a prophetic life on their own. I need community and I believe that most of us do.

 

However, in 2020, when the pandemic hit, our numbers were legally reduced and when the pandemic was being managed by vaccines, I was reaching retirement age, and we never really reconstituted our work after that. I eventually accepted that we would give up the seated services we had held for 15 years. I moved to Florida, established this studio in my home, and we have survived on line exclusively. 

 

Most of the people I know have given up on church attendance. Outside of the mutual encouragement and organization of a congregation, very few are involved in community service. We are progressives, liberals, thinkers who can say that love is our religion . . . we believe in women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, we believe in universal healthcare, a living wage, and diplomacy over military might but we don’t do much about those things. Having prophetic thoughts is not the same as being prophetic. 

 

I miss being a part of a church that could field a team to go to Nicaragua and build little cinder block houses for the poor, that could load up chain saws and wheelbarrows to go to disaster sights and help people recover their lives. I miss standing in the serving line at a homeless shelter, serving a hundred hungry people the hot meal we had prepared in our kitchen. And I miss the courage of defiance I felt in our music, our preaching, our gatherings. 

 

The church I attend is comprised of mostly older people, maybe we are physically limited to being rather more mild than the church I remember so fondly. Full disclosure, this message was recorded in July because I am currently laid up recovering from shoulder surgery. Old age is better than the alternative but it comes with more medical issues and a lot less energy. 

 

I expect the trend towards declining churches will continue, not because we do not desperately need prophetic communities of faith but because our current generation is not disposed toward attending and volunteering in them. But as fascism is on the rise world wide and civil rights are being limited or eliminated even in the most progressive nations, I implore you to find ways in which to organize, build community, and fight back. 

A.I. and the Guaranteed Basic Income

     A.I. and the Guaranteed Basic Income

August 10, 2025   Dr. Roger Ray

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When we try to imagine what the future will be like, ten, twenty, or thirty years from now, we tend to think of futuristic novels and movies which are all necessarily in the fiction genre and while a lot of them seem to have kind of cookie cutter themes, they vary broadly. We are aware that we are in for a time of tremendous change. Climate change, whether it is politically controversial or not, is an existential reality and it will be impacting us, our children and our grandchildren in profound ways. We are on the verge of an energy and technology revolution, as we move away from coal and gasoline to electricity and hydrogen.

We are now, as we have been for my entire life, under the constant shadow of the danger of a nuclear war or a nuclear accident. We don’t train our children to hide under their school desks anymore, but the threat is more real than ever. Bombing nuclear sites in Iran is, in effect, a stalling tactic at best. The nuclear club continues to grow and it is just a matter of time before one rogue state or world power will come up with a plausible excuse to use one. 

 

The most tired of futuristic movies and books seem always to be set in a dystopian future in the wake of a natural or a nuclear disaster. Either is possible but neither is necessary to create a grim, dog eat dog, future. In fact, unbridled capitalism could be a greater threat than either environmental collapse or nuclear disaster.  

 

As the changes that will come with the growing influence of A.I., robotics, and engineering, the pathway of money will be changing. It is already difficult to recruit new drivers into training to be over the road truck drivers because those jobs will cease to exist before you could pay off your tuition loans for learning how to be an over the road truck driver. 

 

Architecture firms are shriveling up as computer programs take over more and more of what architects used to do. Journalism will be remembered as a twentieth century profession, especially as concerns print media. Entry level jobs are being  taken over by automation …. Cashiers, janitors, a decade ago it became common to see robotic floor cleaning machines in airports and big box stores, now, similar rolling robots are taking inventory and stocking shelves. A. I., robotics and automation will dramatically change the employment picture in the USA. It is already happening but what we have seen in having to check ourselves out at the grocery store is nothing compared to what it coming.

In 1952, fiction writer, Kurt Vonnegut published his novel, Player Piano, about a not too distant future in which automation had replaced the need for almost all manufacturing labor, the way that mechanization took away the need for armies of typists and telephone operators. The government instituted a couple of public works services to give menial employment to the vast numbers of unemployed people but these jobs paid very little and had even less meaning. The two were derisively called the “reeks and the wrecks.” I am thankful that even though Vonnegut was not at all religious that he created a hero in that novel who was an Episcopal minister who helped to organize a revolution against the imposition of meaningless employment on the masses.

 

In Gene Rodenberry’s vision of the future, Star Trek, earthlings had managed to evolve into an economy in which there was no money, no salaries, and no hoarding of wealth. Everyone got what they needed and everyone could pursue a meaningful career, especially those who got to go into space on the Enterprise. It would be nice to think that our culture could evolve beyond greed, hoarding, and poverty created by wealth being in the hands of the few but that begs the question about how we will guide that changes that are staring us in the face right now.

 

Automation takes over repetitive and menial jobs but it doesn’t necessarily make life easier. No one has to pick cotton anymore, something that was horrible labor just 75 years ago but the invention of combines did not mean that former cotton-picking farm hands were ushered into greater wealth an ease. The benefits of saving the back breaking labor of cotton only benefited the owners of the farms, not the workers.

 

As truck and taxi drivers are replaced by self-driving vehicles, and electric cars and trucks reduce the need for mechanics and most auto industry workers. 

When child care, cooking and elder care, landscaping and teaching and even nursing and some surgery is done by robots, who reaps the financial benefit of these changes? We are no longer talking about advancements that are a century or even a generation away. A.I. may reduce the number of jobs in America by the millions within 5 years. 

 

Capitalism has controlled our society for generations. In many ways, it controls how we live, where we live, what we eat, what we wear, and even how many children we have in our families. Fear of going broke, of being bankrupted by medical bills or a car accident, or illness, have plagued society for all of modern life. 

 

Our diet of sugar and carbohydrate rich foods is killing us, it is making us fat, giving us diabetes and heart trouble and probably is a major factor in cancer but we have gravitated to growing crops that can be planted and harvested by huge machines: sugar cane, beets, potatoes, rice, soy beans, oats, and corn . . . . all of which we should be eating less of but growing green vegetables and fruit is still labor intensive, and so we grow less of what we should eat and more of the foods that are killing us. 

 

But can we imagine a world in which capitalism did not make decisions for us about what we eat, wear, drive, and where we live and how many kids we have? How, in this time of tremendous changes in the world of labor and technology can we steer the course of humanity towards more of a Star Trek future than the dystopian future that would be shaped by the profit motive, a world where a few people are very wealthy and most people live in fear and poverty?

 

The solution is not a new idea, in fact it is a very old idea, one proposed even by the one of America’s founding fathers that I talked about last month, Thomas Paine. It is a great idea that has been experimented with, very successfully, but has never been broadly implemented. That idea is a Universal Basic Income or a Guaranteed Basic Income. The idea is this: we pay every adult in the country a sum between one and two thousand dollars a month. We couple this with universal healthcare and tuition free higher education. 

 

It is obviously an expensive proposition but here is what we get in return. We end poverty, for everyone. We do away with the fear of homelessness and hunger. We end food stamp and subsidized housing and welfare and disability checks. We give everyone the ability to survive, not luxuriously, not lavishly, not the way they really want, but it is a basic social safety net. The unmotivated might find a way to survive on their minimal income but most people would use it as a base that allows them to go to college and grad school. It allows them to pursue their dreams of being an inventor, an artist, a musician, an actor, a writer, or to give themselves wholeheartedly to a profession that might not pay well enough to have kept them previously. 

 

Alone it is not enough to pay rent in a major city but that might incentivize people to move to more unpopulated areas, easing urban crowding and pollution. It would give young couples the security to have children when they might have believed that they never could. Also, it would encourage people to return to small family farming, growing the green vegetables and fruits, we should be eating anyway.

 

This obviously would result in a huge drop in crime, and it would have beneficial effects in both mental and physical health. Folks this would make America the greatest country in the world and it would inspire other countries to do the same.

 

As the Catholic Worker movement founder, Dorothy Day, said a century ago, most of our problems stem from our acceptance of this stinking rotten system. We have accepted an economic model which allows a few people to hoard the resources which belong to all of us. A Guaranteed Basic Income doesn’t prevent the motivated from becoming rich through their genius and hard work, but it does keep anyone from living in abject poverty. Sure, we would have fewer billionaires, but we would have ended poverty. There will always be a class of people who own two, three, or four houses but we could remove the class of people who sleep in doorways, under bridges, and in public parks. 

 

Yes, the wealthy will be taxed at a higher rate to fund this but all of the money would be going straight back into the economy. A person who gets a basic monthly allowance will spend it to buy groceries, clothing, housing, and transportation, all of which serves to make the wealthy more wealthy. 

Any serious person knows that a trickle down economy has never worked. If you give the wealthy another $2000 a month, that money goes into off shore accounts and just becomes a part of hoarded wealth. But trickle up economics always works because the poor will spend that money, fueling our economy. 

 As Will Rogers famously said during the Great Depression about President Hoover’s mistakes, “The money was all appropriated for the top in hopes that it would trickle down to the needy. Mr. Hoover didn’t know that money trickled up. Give it to the people at the bottom and the people at the top will have it before night, anyhow. But it will at least have passed through the poor fellow’s hands.”

 

A.I., robotics, and automation will dramatically change our society, and it will be doing it very quickly. We have reason to fear it if we allow unbridled capitalism to reap the harvest of these changes by widening the wealth gap, creating an army of unemployed people, while increasing homelessness, illness, suicides, lowering our birth rate, and destroying any reasonable vestiges of democracy.

 

Or it can usher in the golden age of humanity in which we finally wipe out poverty and restore security and dignity to the young and the old. This shouldn’t be a hard choice and yet, the status quo has a powerful grip on our minds. I hope that our generation can rise above the cruelty of this stinking rotten system and give birth to the greatest nation ever imagined.

Reason vs. Religion

Reason vs. Religion    July 27, 2025   Dr. Roger Ray

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I have lately been re-reading the works of Thomas Paine, one of America’s founding fathers even though he was not invited to sign either the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution. Paine was a marginally educated laborer who had tried his hand at business but had failed a couple of times. But he was something of a political agitator and as such he came to the attention of Benjamin Franklin who sponsored him to come to the American colonies to work for his newspaper. He published his revolutionary views as a kind of magazine that was so broadly read that he has been called The Father of the Revolution, but he was never a part of the inner circle of the Revolution because he was a man of rather humble station in life. 

 

I wouldn’t call him a philosopher, as some people do, because, well, that is a bit of a lofty title for someone who was, in no way, a disciplined scholar. If he were around in our time, we might call him an influencer, but in his day, he was a revolutionary thinker who was not afraid to speak his mind. What has attracted me to him again was his very rational dismissal of traditional Christianity which he regarded to be mostly based on silly ancient stories that were obviously not true. 

 

Now, I consider myself to be a fairly clever person but I will confess to you that I went to grad school in 1979 pretty much believing in most of those silly stories. I might have been cynical about Eve’s conversation with a talking snake, or Balam’s conversation with his donkey, and I was pretty sure that the bits about Jesus turning water into wine and walking on the water were, at best, editorial flourishes but, the hard stuff about souls, heaven and hell, the empty tomb and the bodily resurrection of Jesus . . . I took that stuff to grad school with me and only let it go after a great deal of reading and study . . . and even still, I didn’t want to let it go. 

 

Somehow Thomas Paine managed to not only question the economic system that kept him and most of his ilk in poverty, along with the whole business about monarchy, but also the power and influence of the church, which was somehow integrated into an oppressive government, and a cruel economic system. His agitation against the monarchy and the church nearly got him arrested in Great Britain. He fled to France where, since he didn’t speak French, he was less likely to get into trouble, but he spoke English a little too well and too publicly and so he was arrested in jailed for his criticisms of Christianity. 

 

Thankfully, his political connections in the colonies were good enough to secure his release. While he was in France, both before and during his incarceration, he was working on his essay, “The Age of Reason,” which, though full of mistakes about a number of things, is a nearly miraculous piece of thinking produced by someone who did not have the advantages of some of the aristocracy that he was bold enough to criticize. By the time Paine died, only six people attended his funeral because he had been so critical of both the church and such revolutionary heroes as George Washington. 

 

I say that he made a number of glaring mistakes in his work because he worked almost entirely from memory. He didn’t have access to the internet, for sure, but in France, he didn’t even have access to a Bible or any English science books so, I believe, he can be forgiven for the more sloppy bits of his writing.

 

What draws me to him now is a certain frustration with our own age in which people seem to be so very willing to believe so many things that are clearly not true. The MAGA world is especially frustrating, a huge portion of our country that was willing to elect a felon and a known pedophile to the presidency because they thought that eggs were too expensive, but then they passively accept that the man who promised to lower prices immediately started a trade war with tariffs which are nothing but a sales tax levied on consumers, resulting in the single largest tax increase on the middle class in American history. 

 

For purely partisan reasons, MAGA folks ignore Trump’s total incompetence, his rape of the environment and alienation of allies and his love for cruel dictators, when simple and basic logic should make them repudiate him as much or more than we liberals do. It is all mysterious to me. MAGA doesn’t bat an eye when the guy who promised to deport violent criminals, rapists, and drug dealers actually goes after the guys picking our produce and loading construction trucks at Home Depot. They believed that he cared about poor Americans and would help them but instead he kicked millions off of Medicaid to give billionaires tax cuts that they didn’t need and, in most cases, didn’t even ask for and they cheer this on mindlessly . . . . 

but they get upset about the fact that his administration is not releasing the plane manifests and other details of Jeffery Epstein’s pedophile island. Did they think that he was going to release information that would incriminate Trump himself? He won’t even release his income tax returns and MAGA podcasters are upset that he won’t release evidence of his own pedophilia? Trump would fake his own suicide before he would do that!

 

But my interest in Thomas Paine goes far beyond MAGA hypocrisy. I’m more interested in how traditional religions, rife with superstition and magical thinking, have managed to make a resurgence in mainstream America. Paine makes the simple observation that the only evidence for heaven and hell, souls, and a supernatural theistic god are things written down in the holy books of Christians, Jews, and Muslims, all of which are purported to be believable because the writing was said to have been the product of people who were especially inspired by God. No evidence. No proof that these authors were anything more than either delusional or frauds. Paine sums it up saying, “for my own part, I disbelieve them all.” 

 

What was obvious to a virtually uneducated guy who made barrel staves for a living 250 years ago, continues to elude many very educated people in our age who simply never think about the silly things they claim to believe most dearly. How can that be? Paine continues, “All … churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave (human)kind, and monopolize power and profit. 

And the best part, especially for we Unitarians, Paine says, “I believe that religious duties consist in ding justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow-creatures happy.” 

 

That is not as eloquent as Voltaire nor as disarming as Bertrand Russell but, plain enough to make a thinking person from a Mormon family to stop wearing magic underwear and make Muslim’s accept that not only did Muhammed not ride a winged horse to heaven but that winged horses don’t exist, and Christians should embrace their gay family members and take some tips from them about fashion, home decoration, and hair styles. 

Kierkegaard mused, “There are two ways to be fooled: One is to believe what isn’t true, the other is to refuse to believe what is true.” Trump wants to believe that if he puts a 100% tariff on good from China that somehow China will have to pay that tariff. But, obviously, no nation can levy a tax on another nation. The tariff is just a tax paid by the consumer, so that a $50 pair of sneakers now costs $100. China may not sell as many sneakers at that price but the ones they do sell, that extra $50 is paid by the American consumer who buys the sneakers. That’s how tariffs work, whether you want to believe it or not. Facts are stubborn things . . . they don’t change because you do not like the facts or you want what some gaslighting politicians might tell you is an “alternative fact.” An alternative fact is sort of like clean coal, neither exist and both are lies told to be who are gullible enough to believe it.

 

In a recent interview, Ted Cruz was talking about the prospect of an immanent bombing raid on Iranian nuclear facilities. He said that he favored the action because he had learned in Sunday School that those who bless Israel will be blessed by God. Even his right wing interviewer took him to task on this one. Obviously, the Harvard and Princton educated Cruz doesn’t believe that God will bless America for dropping the world’s biggest bombs on Iran; he just assumes that a lot of his Texas voters are dumb enough to believe that he believes it. 

 

That the Jews wrote a book 2500 years ago that says that doing favors for Israel will bring you good luck is not a big surprise, but who in the 21^st century should really fall for that obvious ploy?

 

It is too easy, though, to wave off either MAGA voters or Catholics as being simply gullible or stupid. Countless millions of people are capable of being physicians, scientists, CPAs, and architects during their working hours and then spend their evenings and weekends diving deeply into totally absurd political and religious beliefs that cannot stand a moment of critical analysis.

I offer Sir Issac Newton as a prime example. During the Great Plague of London in 1665, Cambridge closed. So, Newton went home and lived in isolation for a year. During that year he invented calculus, he came up with the unified laws of gravitation, and he did amazing experiments in optics and light. We have Newtonian physics because Newton had to drop out of college for a year and think for himself.

But what is rarely discussed is that Newton also devoted a huge amount of time to studying Biblical numerology, assigning numeric values to the letters of the Hebrew and Greek alphabet in order to decipher what he believed to be hidden secret messages in the book of Daniel and the Revelation to St. John. Through his tedious studies he came to the conclusion that the Catholic pope was the anti-Christ and that the world would come to an end in 2060. 

 

I cannot imagine how his mind could have been captured by such drivel, but I suppose we’ll have to wait another 35 years to find out which one of us right. I don’t know about you, but I strongly suspect that my world will come to an end before 2060! But if I should make it to the age of 104, I will plan to spend a few minutes feeling embarrassed for Sir Issac Newton’s less productive period of academic inquiry. 

 

I suppose that it is safe enough to predict that the world will end some 400 years later since no one in your immediate audience will be able to fact check you, but what might Newton have given to the world if he had used his time more wisely? 

Rene Descartes gave us the famous saying, “Cogito Ergo Sum,” “I think, therefore, I am.” One of my favorite internet memes shows a bug-eyed Descartes with the caption: When Descartes discovered that people who do not think also exist!

I shudder to even try to consider what percentage of the world’s population are blinded by either religious or political deceptions or, in many cases, both but it is the job of the woke to keep trying to poke the world trapped in deception to wake up and see the light of reason. 

 

Thomas Paine certainly wasn’t the smartest man ever to set pen to paper but just imagine what our world would be like if we could just accept his simple formula that the purpose of either politics or religion is to do justice, love mercy, and strive to make others more happy.

Religion and Politics – (Just Be Nice)

Religion and Politics – (Just Be Nice)    July 6, 2025   Dr. Roger Ray

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Back in the good ol days when even state universities had a budget for inviting famous speakers to campus to expose their young audience to influential thinkers, Western Kentucky University hosted William Buckley, the famous conservative host of Firing Line, and the originator of the National Review, to speak to a packed house of teenagers from rural Kentucky. 

 

I was an 18 year old freshman in 1974 and though I had never watched Firing Line nor picked up a copy of the National Review, I was in the audience. He didn’t talk about his recent trip to China with President Nixon when these two global super powers were just starting to talk to one another. He didn’t rail against liberals, gay people, or hippies so much as he just compassionately gave a lot of young people some advice about how to live a meaningful life. 

 

I remember two things he said that evening. One was that he had no respect for anyone who slept more than five hours a night but the other thing I remember was more useful. He said, “You have been warned not to talk about either politics or religion in a polite society. The problem with following that advice is that you will never learn how to have a civil conversation about things that are as important as religion and politics.” 

 

Those were the days when Republican and Democratic members of the congress could publicly debate about the civil rights movement, voters rights, desegregation, the Equal Rights Amendment, and abortion, and at the end of the day they would collect their spouses and children, and everyone would get together for an ice cream social. 

In the 80’s, Democratic House Speaker, Tip O’Neil, and conservative icon, President Ronald Regan, had a pact that they were “friends after 6 p.m.” 

 

A correspondent once brought this up to President Obama a decade ago, suggesting that maybe he should get a drink with Mitch McConnel, to which, Obama replied, “Why don’t you get a drink with Mitch McConnel?”

I get it. I wouldn’t want to spend Happy Hour with Mitch McConnel, or Donald Trump, or, if it were even possible, Ronald Regan, but I know that somehow we have to get back to a place where we can sit down at a Thanksgiving dinner and have a polite and meaningful conversation about politics and religion, at a table where people don’t agree but where they can come to understand one another better. 

 

This week, if you pay much attention to the news, we have heard our president say boldly to loud applause that he hates Democrats. “Hates” them! For many years Americans have elected their presidents with just a 51% majority but previously, presidents would assure the public that they would be the president of those who voted for them and those who voted against him. But we have reached a new extreme of partisan division . . . and extreme in which a president can not only say that he hates the majority of Americans but in saying that, receive thunderous applause from his base. This is sad, obviously, but it may also be unsurvivable. 

 

Once public discourse becomes laden with angry accusations, hyperbole, name calling, and dismissive characterizations, people tend to become more devoted to their prejudices and rather than being shamed or bullied into changing, they tend to deepen their devotion to increasingly radical viewpoints. 

 

We Unitarians are fond of declaring that “love is my religion,” which would be wonderful if it were true, but I am afraid that all too often the larger truth is that “acquiescence is our religion.” 

 

We don’t talk about religion and politics with people who disagree with us, we just avoid potentially controversial conversations to avoid conflict. And I get that. There are times to just walk away to avoid starting an argument for which there is no meaningful end but, seriously, peace without some mutual understanding isn’t really peace, is it? It is more like surrender, or maybe indifference. Let me suggest a thought exercise.

It is a broadly known fact that 32 of the 33 western style democracies in the world have universal healthcare. The United States is the only country in that club that does not and yet, we spend more per capita on healthcare than any other nation of the world and our outcomes do not match the financial commitment we make to it. In fact, by most measurements, we come out near the bottom.

 

So, let’s imagine ourselves at a big family Thanksgiving dinner and the subject of universal healthcare comes up. I am going to insist that sick people need access to healthcare, whether it is free, or affordable, the point is, that everyone needs access to healthcare but how do we achieve that goal that has eluded us for a hundred years while most of the rest of the world has wrestled that pig to the ground?

Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, have staked out the position that we should remove the age restrictions and offer Medicare to everyone. Predictably, someone at the Thanksgiving table would quickly say that both Bernie and AOC are crazy, or communists, or radicals. Can you imagine yourself saying, “Ok, let’s assume that you are right about them. How would you suggest that we get to universal or almost universal healthcare?” 

And then just stop talking. Now, some people are ok with our current situation in which one in ten Americans have no health insurance…. More than 30 million people, and that’s without the “Billionaire Bailout” bill recently passed by Congress. I’m not sure we have anything to talk about with someone who is willing to throw 30 million people under the bus just because they like the healthcare insurance they have for themselves . . . but let’s give conservatives a chance . . . what is their plan to improve access and outcomes while keeping costs down to something like what other western democracies spend? If Bernie and AOC are crazy, what is a sane plan to accomplish this obvious civilized goal?

 

Now, here is the problem, most conservatives won’t have an answer ready because they are not used to us listening to them. We are used to condescending, name calling, and walking away in a huff, but given the opportunity to show us that they understand the problem, that they agree with the goal, let’s talk about how to get there.

 

But let me show you an issue about communication. Just as an exercise, I’m going to say a sentence and ask you, in unison, to repeat the sentence back to me, ok:

Du bist mein Engel, ich bin Wachs in deinen Händen

It is a simple sentence but because I said it in German, unless you speak German, the words did not leave any muddy footprints on the clean waxed floor of your brain. But let’s try it again, in English, just repeat in unison after me:

You are my angel. I am wax in your hands.

 

See, even though you didn’t’ know the sentence beforehand, you know the words. It isn’t hard to do in a familiar language. Now, I don’t speak German, I just had reason to memorize that sentence. You may want to know more about that but that is not germane to the subject at hand. 

 

If your mind is fed for hours a day on either Fox News or MSNBC, you may not have the ability to understand the language of the person on the other side of the fence.

I’m suggesting that at least a part of the solution to the partisan divide that is tearing our country apart, is polite conversation about important topics. But we have to try to find some common language, some common ground, where we can discuss these things, especially to discuss important issues with someone with whom we dramatically disagree.

 

I think that a huge problem about discussing religion and politics in polite society is that we are not very clear about what we mean by either of those words. I have been accused many times over the past 40 years, of preaching too much about politics but I have never been accused of bringing politics into the pulpit by a person who agreed with what I was saying.

 

If I say, as a person of faith, that empathy, compassion, are core aspects of religion and therefore, I believe in universal healthcare . . . then the only people who would say that I am talking about politics would be the people who don’t want universal healthcare. So, the word, “politics,” when it is used pejoratively, really just means, “I disagree with what you said so I don’t want you to be allowed to say it.” I want to learn how to say it in a way that invites dialogue, not in a way that just draws a line in the sand.

 

Maybe we get to universal access of healthcare through insurance companies, maybe there could be a public option, maybe we have some blending of the two, but if you just want 30 million people to be without healthcare . . . well, no one really wants to be a sociopath, right? 

 

I get so angry when those fund-raising ads come on TV from Shriners Hospitals and St Jude’s . . . both institutions do praiseworthy work, but we have to trot out little kids with cancer or grievous birth defects to beg for the money for them to get healthcare? You don’t see this kind of ad in Japan, or France, or Germany, not even in Russia, or poor countries like Thailand, Nicaragua, or Mexico because in those countries they know that a kid who can’t walk or a kid who has cancer needs to be given proper healthcare and not be used like a circus pony on TV to get donations. I believe that Americans are better than this, I just want to know what stands in the way of our humanity?

 

Not all conversations are worth having. I’m not going to give much time to anyone who is convinced that the Democrats are running a pedophile ring out of the basement of a DC pizza parlor. And, just because you have a civil relationship to offer to someone doesn’t mean that they have one to offer to you, but one thing is certain, if we avoid talking about the hard stuff, no one ever learns, no one ever changes, and we all fail.

 

Let me try a completely different illustration on you: In a plea deal, Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange has been released from a British prison where he had served nearly 6 years after having spent a decade avoiding arrest by living in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. There are those who believe that Assange was a hero of journalism and free speech and others who believe that he was guilty of some of the worst espionage crimes of this century. 

 

I have been conversations where the mere mention of his name divided the room into adamant factions. The relevant question in his case is not whether he is a really great guy or not. I don’t know anyone who wants to carry his banner in a debate about character but, was his release of stolen documents a journalistic coups, exposing war crimes and holding the American government accountable for having hidden and lied about these crimes, or is his dump of thousands of pages of classified documents a crime that placed many secret undercover agents in grave danger? 

 

Well, he did both, didn’t he? Which is more important, exposing the Obama administration’s refusal to prosecute soldiers who murdered journalists and first responders on the battlefield in Afghanistan, or leaking information that could expose undercover sources? Chelsea Manning, who provided the information to Wikileaks, and Assange have both served years in prison for this leak but the soldiers who murdered journalists and medics were not punished, and, for that matter, the New York Times and several British and European news sources that published the leaked material were not charged with any crime. How can Manning and Assange be guilty, and the media just gets a pass? 

 

I could argue either side of this issue though, as you might imagine, I lean towards supporting leaking information about war crimes in order to keep our government or any other government honest. To that point, bronze statues of Assange, Manning, along with Edward Snowden have been erected in Berlin in praise of their courage . . . Germans know about the danger of allowing a government to operate in secrecy under the cover of propaganda.

 

I have heard a number of people I really like get very mad about this issue but what I have never heard is a civil conversation among people who have honest disagreements about it. 

 

That is a conversation I would love to be a part of but to date, any attempt at discussing the facts becomes a partisan condemnation of either the leakers or the government. 

There is an anonymous modern proverb that I really love that says: We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when adults are afraid of the light. The internet will repeatedly tell you that this is a quote from either Socrates or Plato but, because it is a priority in my life to defend the corpus of Greek philosophy, I can assure you that this didn’t come from Socrates or Plato or any other ancient source but whoever said it doesn’t need a false attribution to support it because it is painfully and obviously true. The reason we can’t get some cases to trial is the same as the reason we can’t have a civil conversation about some controversial topics . . . it is because someone is afraid of the light. That, I contend, is shameful.

 

I cannot claim that I am always right, in fact, I would disagree with a number of things I have said in the past; but I can claim that I have always been honest and if a church is not willing to be exposed to an honest exploration of matters of ethics, well, who would want to attend a church that is afraid of the light?

 

When I moved here a year and a half ago, I knew I was moving to a very red state, just like the state I was leaving. So, I came here the first week I came to town  because I want to sit in a room for an hour in this deeply red state, surrounded by people who largely see the world the way that I do. I also need to feel that I am not all alone in the world. Still, it just might be that the most important messages you hear are the ones in which you had to endure a difference of opinion. Don’t only seek confirmation of your own bias. 

 

Remain willing to step into the light and heat of honest disagreement on important topics. The only way out of our current dangerous political and ideological quagmire is to engage one another in the light of honest dialogue.

My favorite British philosopher, Bertrand Russell, left us with this hope, he said:

I allow myself to hope that the world will emerge from its present troubles, that it will one day learn to give the direction of its affairs, not to cruel swindlers and scoundrels, but to people possessed of wisdom and courage. 

 

I suggest that we give ourselves to that hope. America’s democracy is seriously in danger of giving way to oligarchy and fascism because of our deep partisan divide. If we hope to remove cruel swindlers and scoundrels from power, we have to value wisdom and courage. Here is a challenge for you, celebrate this Independence Day by having a civil conversation with a MAGA supporter.