The Justice System and Our Prison Nation

Chapter 14 - THE JUSTICE SYSTEM AND OUR PRISON NATION
Roger Ray, D.Min.

When a great man like Nelson Mandela passes, it's also common to wonder if we'll ever see his kind again. But there's no doubt that the Nelson Mandelas and Martin Luther Kings and Václav Havels of the 21st century are striding among us. But you can't see it, because if he or she was shaking hands with world leaders and greeted by adoring throngs and serenaded by children's choirs, then they wouldn't be the next true Mandela or King or Havel.
No, the next Nelson Mandela of the world is rotting in a jail cell tonight, just like Mandela nearly withered for 27 years on Robben Island. Or he is on someone's terrorist watch list, or she is segregated and searched every time she travels through an international airport. Somewhere, government spies are reading the emails of the next Nelson Mandela. They are tracking his cell phone and listening to his calls, or monitoring her meetings with their undercover cops.            
-Will Bunch, Huffington Post, December 9, 2013

For the past several years there has been a very unusual cross-country bike race in France that is for prison inmates.  The "Penal Tour De France" is a program that leaves many Americans scratching their heads.  We think of jail time strictly as punishment, like societal revenge for crimes committed.  In France, however, they take a different perspective.  They are trying to figure out how to use prison time to help inmates learn how to live productive lives within the French society.

We tend to beat down our inmates.  We will not allow them to earn degrees or job certifications in prison.  We used to, but in a "get tough on crime" mentality, we do not want to give a prisoner an opportunity not afforded to people who have not been convicted of a crime.  One could argue that we should give these opportunities of education to everyone in financial need but that, evidently, would be deemed as dirty socialism rather than common sense.

If you agree with my insistence that the future of the church is dependent upon our ability to become morally relevant in society, it is quite possible that one of the primary arenas where we must turn our attention is towards the two million Americans who are currently in jail or prison.  This hidden nation within our nation may need what we have to offer the most while being the least likely ever to have contact with us.

Admittedly, the prison system does not make it easy.  In the early 1990's I tried repeatedly to set up college classes in the Federal Medical prison near my home.  Initially I was told that it would take too much staff time to move prisoners into and out of a classroom; then regulations changed around the use of Federal Pell Grants that made it impossible to find tuition dollars.

Then I applied for clearance to teach basic self-help classes in the local county jail where some inmates live for more than two years without meaningful programming.  The day of my first class there was an incident at the jail as I sat in a waiting area preparing to teach.  Two new guards had urinated on inmates through a screen in the roof of the gymnasium and the prison officials decided that it would be best not to have outsiders working too closely with convicts. I have suspected that my role as an opinion writer for the local newspaper may have increased the warden's discomfort because they really needed to keep prisoner abuse out of the media.

Far from the experience of a bicycle race in rural France, prisoners in our penal system experience violence, rape, and deprivations of every sort and are often put into situations where they have to extort money from family members and friends to pay other inmates for protection from abuse.
Once out of incarceration the humiliations can multiply.  With a criminal record it is very difficult to find employment and yet ex-cons are required to pay fees for their mandatory probation officer visits and follow up supervision.  Some even have to pay back states or communities for the cost of their incarceration.

People on parole are making many of the annoying telemarketing calls we receive because these commission sales jobs are one of the few places where they can find work.  As infuriating as these telephone interruptions can be to us, can you imagine what it is like on the other end of the line as people suffer angry verbal abuse all day long?

Not that it is easy to garner sympathy for sex offenders but may I remind you that nearly all sex offenders were once victims themselves.  They are the most likely to be violently treated in prison and the most likely to be reviled, unemployed and homeless out of prison.  Most homeless shelters will not give them even temporary shelter.

Permanently placed on a publically available sex offender list, they often cannot even live with willing family members or friends because of the reactions of neighbors.  Though we cannot afford to be too lax about the threat posed by those who are likely to repeatedly offend, we also have to do something much better than what we are doing.  If their offenses are not sufficient to merit killing them, then we must find some way to allow them to live!

Because reintegration into society has been made so very difficult, our recidivism rate is the worst in the world.  This has been complicated by the fact that the one thing Americans have been really good at is finding a way to make a profit, even in the midst of tragedy.  Building prisons and then operating them has become a huge profit center.  So much so that some states have started privatizing their prisons so that every night an American is kept in jail is another transfer of money from citizens to corporations.

When for-profit prisons are paid by volume, what possible motivation do they have to try to help prisoners to reform and succeed outside of prison?  In fact, recidivism fattens their profits and so they will do what they can to prevent education, job training, counseling and anything that might make a prisoner less likely to come back and bring more tax dollars with them.
Every nation has citizens who are entirely convinced that their own homeland is the greatest country in the world.  Americans have not only had a loudly stated conviction that ours is the greatest nation on the globe but, for much of our history, we've had the immigration statistics to back that up.

However, our dramatically growing income disparity and class divisions threaten to destroy any plausible defense of that claim. I will discuss income disparity in the next chapter in greater detail. Beyond the issue of the increasingly impassable gulf between the upper and lower economic classes that now keeps the poor in America forever poor we have the former inmate, the growing subclass in our society for whom there is little opportunity for change and even less social sympathy.
We are no longer world leaders in many categories but in one way we are unrivaled at the top of the list, but shamefully, that is for having the largest percentage of our population living behind bars. Seven out of every thousand Americans are incarcerated.

China, long famous for their government's repression of their own citizens, has an incarceration rate that is less than 20% of ours.  Vietnam has less than 10% as many citizens in jail.

How does this once great nation disown so many of its own sons and daughters?  It is, in many ways, a failure of our schools, of our economy, our families and our judicial system.  We must also say that is reflective of a failure of our churches.  In the big picture, it is a failure of our society.

There are too many drugs, not enough decent jobs, too much violence and not nearly enough love. We have too much moral judgment and not enough compassion.  We are too committed to revenge - style punishment and not enough interest in reform and recovery.

The United States is one of the only countries in the world that allows for a huge disparity in education spending based on school districts that allow the affluent areas to have well-funded schools and lock poor regions into ill-equipped, underfunded and understaffed schools.  Anyone can see that it should be the other way around.... The children of the poor need more enrichment in education than their middle and upper class peers whose families can well afford the kind of travel and cultural experiences that give their kids a leg up in life.
We have created a broken school system and a for-profit prison system that work together to fast-track kids from poor neighborhoods from school to jail a tragedy complicated all the more by race.  Even though blacks and whites use drugs at about the same rate, blacks are three times more likely to go to jail for their drug offenses than are whites.

Some of that is simple racism but a lot of it is an indication of just how corrupt our judicial system has become.  We have prided ourselves on the strength of the belief that our constitutional government creates equality in our nation.  Our courthouses are adorned with images of the blindfolded image of Justice that does not consider race, class or gender but our judicial system does not measure up to these high-minded ideals.

Howard Zinn said that our judicial system does not so much decide on who is right and who is wrong as it decides who can pay their lawyer the most.  Far too little of our justice system is engaged in the pursuit of justice and much too much of it is an institution that serves the interests of income for lawyers and profit for corporations.

There is one judicial system for the wealthy, another for the poor, and, in my experience, a third one that legal professionals use for their own issues, giving lawyers a literal court system for their own fraternity and sorority.  There could not be, in any third world country, more personal favors, disappeared tickets and inexplicably favorable rulings based on kinship and friendship than we have allowed to exist in our court system.

Somehow, over the past half century, the laudable "War on Poverty" evolved into the "War on Drugs." We were making progress in the war on poverty. We don't talk about it often enough but when President Johnson set out to substantively change the face of poverty in America it was working.

But as that movement became focused on drug abuse and all of our resources were devoted to arresting and imprisoning drug users the earlier progress was lost and we have now done something much more insidious.
Technological advances and the deportation of manufacturing jobs have left us with a surplus in our workforce.  We are removing many of the extra laborers from the pool by imprisoning two million of them and leaving millions more with a criminal record that leaves them out of competition for decent jobs.

It is no exaggeration then to say that our nation is in need of a spiritual revival.  Religious people must convincingly teach the message of compassion to our society that has far too often chosen profit over people.

We have continued to pour resources into the complete failure of the war on drugs that could be used to build up schools and fund public infrastructure projects that would pull us meaningfully into the 21st century.

Western European countries that have almost no church attendance compared to the United States also enjoy an incarceration rate that is less than a fourth of ours.  That hurts.  Why would the nation with the most churches also have the most prisons?

I cannot help thinking that traditional religion has played a role in teaching people to deny reality, disregard the aspects of our society that are seriously broken by focusing on perfection in an imagined heaven, and distracting us from the real work of loving one another.

The progressive church has a mission to tell the truth....to shine light into the dark places of our world.  If we are a prophetic church, then we must stand up to things like income inequality, unequal public schools, joblessness and a senseless devotion to the energy sources, transportation technology and foreign policy of war that really went out of appropriate implementation sixty years ago.

We can employ more people by rebuilding our infrastructure, renewing our power grid, building alternative energy production facilities and mass transit.  We can decide to fund our public schools, make it possible for the poor to attend college and make prisons places of healing and learning rather than places of rape, torture and training in how to be a better criminal.

We can decriminalize addiction and assume that anyone who says that they need a prescription for medical marijuana to cope with how crazy our country has been for the past generation probably deserves to have it and they certainly don't deserve to be in jail.

A society bent on revenge is a sick society.  A society intent on healing, forgiveness, compassion and peace is a nation that can deserve to call itself the greatest nation in the world.

Just War Theory in a Nuclear World

Chapter 13 - JUST WAR THEORY IN A NUCLEAR WORLD
Roger Ray, D.Min.



So, yes, I came to a conclusion that war cannot be tolerated, no matter what we're told. And if we think that there are good wars and that, therefore, well, maybe this is a good war, I wanted to examine the so-called good wars, the holy wars, and -- yeah, and take a good look at them and think again about the phenomenon of war and come to the conclusion, well, yes, war cannot be tolerated, no matter what we're told, no matter what tyrant exists, what border has been crossed, what aggression has taken place. It's not that we're going to be passive in the face of tyranny or aggression, no, but we'll find ways other than war to deal with whatever problems we have, because war is inevitably -- inevitably -- the indiscriminate massive killing of huge numbers of people. And children are a good part of those people. Every war is a war against children.

So it's not just getting rid of Saddam Hussein, if we think about it. Well, we got rid of Saddam Hussein. In the course of it, we killed huge numbers of people who had been victims of Saddam Hussein. When you fight a war against a tyrant, who do you kill? You kill the victims of the tyrant. Anyway, all this -- all this was simply to make us think again about war and to think, you know, we're at war now, right? In Iraq, in Afghanistan and sort of in Pakistan, since we're sending rockets over there and killing innocent people in Pakistan. And so, we should not accept that.
We should look for a peace movement to join. Really, look for some peace organization to join. It will look small at first, and pitiful and helpless, but that's how movements start.
Howard Zinn speaking at Boston University on November 11, 2009

In the 1997 film, Good Will Hunting, Matt Damon plays a young genius named Will Hunting who was working as a janitor at MIT.  At one point he is required to see a therapist, played by Robin Williams who sees the huge potential that Will has.  To open the young man's eyes to the reality of the world, the therapist suggests that Will read Howard Zinn's book, A People's History of the United States, because, he promises, it will really blow your mind.
Matt Damon's character may have needed an introduction to Howard Zinn but Matt Damon didn't.  Damon actually grew up living next door to the famous historian and he volunteered to be the voice on recorded version of the book.  I have met a lot of famous people in my life but I treasure the memory of hearing Zinn in person, first at Missouri State, then at Drury and finally at Harvard where I had the chance to meet him.

When we started Community Christian Church in 2008, the first group study we did was this same book.  We spent nearly a year discussing because we wanted to ground our shared life in the painful reality of the nation we have inherited.  Zinn died while we were still reading his book together.

The progressive movement doesn't really have a cannon of saints but if we ever do, I want to place the late Howard Zinn's name in nomination.  If, as I have suggested, the mission of the church is to speak truth to power, Zinn is certainly the best modern example of doing just that.

I have been saying that there are four primary arenas of concern for the progressive church in the 21st century.  The first is poverty and social justice.  The second is related to ending racism and prejudice.  The third is a renewed concern for caring for the environment.  The fourth has to do with advocating for peaceful resolutions of international problems and the avoidance of war.

For centuries any religious conversation about a just cause for war begins with the thinking of St. Augustine as formalized by St. Thomas Aquinas.  It is always unfair to try to condense the thought of either of these two giants of church history but for the sake of time, I will boil the tradition of just war to these three points:
1)       The war must be waged as a last resort and only by a sovereign nation.
2)       The war must have a just provocation and not be motivated by the prospect of gaining profit or power.
3)       Finally the war must be fought with a reasonable expectation of success and it must end in peace.

Every war that our nation has been involved in has been sold to the American people as having met these criteria.  We always posture ourselves as either acting in self-defense or we are carrying out a police action that stops the abuses of a tyrant. The particular genius of Howard Zinn is in taking a serious historical look at those claims and helping us to see how we have been lied to and manipulated in almost every case.

In his last major address, quoted above, Zinn talks about the use of the belief in a kind of "holy war" to gain public approval or at least acquiescence to our modern military adventures.  He describes the American Revolutionary War, the Civil War and WWII as our "holy wars" whose virtue is beyond question.  And then he goes on to question the historical memory of each.

We then use those holy wars to justify subsequent wars by comparing, for example, the Nicaraguan Contras to the freedom loving Revolutionary War soldiers of our history or comparing Saddam Hussein, or Manuel Noriega or anyone we decided to stop paying to work for us as being the same as Adolph Hitler.

Zinn points out that, yes, the Revolutionary War gave us independence from Great Britain but was that war really about equality, freedom and independence?
It wasn't for the black slaves, indentured servants, or the women or the landless poor.  No matter what high sounding ideals were articulated in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution is a document that established a white, male aristocracy in the former British colonies.

And yes, slavery was ended by the Civil War but was that war really fought to give American blacks liberty and equality?  Did they get liberty and equality at the end of the war..... or a generation later, or two, three or four generations later?

WWII did end with the defeat of fascism.  So, do we believe that fascism is now defeated?  Even our most defensible wars have a much more tarnished halo than we like to believe.  You have been told that we dropped atomic bombs on Japan to avoid the greater casualties we would have experienced by having to invade Japan.  That is an absolute lie.  We had killed a hundred thousand Japanese in Tokyo with conventional bombs just before dropping the atomic bombs.  No one ever talks about that and I suspect that most of you didn't know it.

Japan was defeated and ready to surrender before we dropped those atomic bombs.  We dropped them to show the Soviets that we had this terrible weapon and that we had the will to use it.  Do you believe that everyone in Hiroshima was an enemy to freedom and liberty?

We killed 600,000 Germans with conventional bombs, a 100,000 of whom died in a single night in Dresden.  Were all of the residents of Dresden Nazis?  The women, the children, the elderly?  Were they all Nazis?

We like to think of ourselves as liberators, defenders of justice.... We want to be that city on a hill but, in the wise words of Yoda, it is a very rare thing when wars make a nation great.

At the time the United States launched a war against Iraq, a majority of Americans had either been tricked into believing or they had tricked themselves into believing that Iraq was responsible for the 9-11 attack on the United States.

There was no connection, of course, nor were our weapons inspectors mistaken in their repeated attempts at telling the Bush administration that there were no WMD's hidden in Iraq.  It is true enough that Hussein was a bad guy but any kind of intellectual honesty compels us to acknowledge that he wasn't killing Iraqis at the rate that we did for a decade nor can we claim to have, on average, much improved their circumstances.

Earlier this month, Curtis Reeves, a 71 year old retired policeman, shot and killed Chad Oulson in a Florida movie theater because Chad wouldn't stop texting during the movie.  Now, you know how annoying it is to be sitting beside someone in a theater, or in class, or in church while they are starring at their phone and texting but whatever punishment may be appropriate for this annoyance, we're all pretty clear that lethal shooting is insane.

Somehow, we are not able to be similarly clear about when our use of military force is an insanely out of bounds response to provocation.

On September 10, 2001, there were "What Would Jesus Do" rubber bracelets being sold on the counters of book stores and gas stations all over Springfield.  In an entirely uncoordinated but massively hypocritical gesture, every one of those bracelets disappeared on 9-11 because no one wanted to ask that question anymore nor would they tolerate any corollary questions like, "Who Would Jesus Bomb?"

The moral problem for Americans was that we were not attacked by a nation.  If any country could actually have been reasonably blamed, it would have been Saudi Arabia but their government was not directly responsible.  Any reasonable military response to 9-11 would have been police action going after terror cells and training camps.

I said at the time and I am repeating now, more than a decade later, that our wars in Afghanistan an Iraq were not wars on terrorism.  They were wars of economic opportunity.  The waging of war makes some people very rich.

The flow of resources to military industrial corporations slows down when there is not a hot war or at least the threat of one.  There are thousands of examples of individual and unit courage, valor, genius and sacrifice from the battlefield.  No one should ever fall prey to the ruse that admiration for the contribution of any individual soldier must also necessitate supporting the politicians who made the decision to put that soldier in harm's way.

You will be told that if you support the troops that you must not question the war and that is an outright lie.  Sure, if I lost a loved one on the battlefield or if I had left my legs or my sanity on foreign soil then you want to believe that this sacrifice was made in cause of defending freedom.... Who wouldn't want his or her sacrifice honored with such accolades..... but what we want doesn't change the facts.

The inconvenient truth is that most wars are an economic scam.  We were told that the proceeds from the oil fields of Iraq would finance our military action there but that was never really the plan.  Already, nearly $200 billion in contracts have been given to the corporations that are involved in Iraq, with the largest winner being Dick Cheney's former employer, Halliburton.  Some very sober estimates place the actual eventual costs of these two wars at about $2 trillion.

Did we, with this huge expenditure of human life, financial and natural resources, bring an end to the threat of terrorism?
Again, in any honest estimate, we not only did not put a dent in terrorism, we have succeeded in aggravating the problem and virtually assuring ourselves of future terrorist strikes for the rest of our natural lives.

Probably every peace advocate in the world knows by heart the warnings given by President Dwight Eisenhower against the threat of our own military industrial complex.  Most of the time, people mistakenly put together pieces of two speeches delivered by the 5 star general who had become president of the United States.  Shortly after he took office in his first term, Joseph Stalin died.

It was then that he delivered a speech about the prospects for world peace in which he said that, "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.  This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people."

Eisenhower was no idealistic peacenik.  He was not advocating disarmament or pacifism.  But he was pointing out that every dollar we spend on military hardware keeps us from spending that dollar on food, medicine, education and housing.

It was eight years later that the President shocked the world by delivering a farewell speech that concentrated on a warning against the irrational military spending of a coalition between congress and the corporations that build military hardware.  He saw this threat growing larger during his presidency as the cold war sent military spending through the roof.  He saw it, but he failed to stop it.

Since Eisenhower, Republican and Democratic presidents have both found themselves incapable of reasonably curtailing the power of a congress that is controlled by military industrial interests.

Where has the church been in the midst of all of this?  Who are our prophets?  There have been a few and some of them were absolutely of biblical stature.  But for the most part, the church of the United States has been as much of a silent partner to immoral and illegal wars as were the churches of Italy and Germany during WWII.

As Thomas Jefferson famously said:
"In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection of his own." (Thomas Jefferson Writings Vol. XIV p. 119)

So here is what I have to say to the progressive church of the twenty first century.  Don't ever play the part of a whore for any despot, tyrant or lying chief executive every again.  Don't every play dumb or remain indifferent during a time when someone is trying to sell our nation another war.

And even more importantly, we must ask ourselves what peaceful measures can be taken to avoid the kinds of international hostilities that end up in war.  Wars are very rarely ideological in nature.  They are almost always economic.  Beyond all talk about radical Islam, Communism, Socialism or Fascism there is, simply, poverty.

We currently deploy an army of around 200,000 people at a cost of between one and two million dollars per year per soldier, depending upon where they are deployed.  We deploy this army to help foster global peace and stability.

Let's just imagine, just for conversation's sake, that we cut that military deployment by 75%.  We close all of the bases that were built to fight WWII, pull back weapons that we will never need and radically move our priorities away from the threat of violence and towards creating stability.

Rather than deploying 200,000 soldiers, we could deploy nearly as many teachers, agricultural specialists, doctors and engineers.  What if we make it our goal to raise the literacy rate of the world over 90%, make safe water and food universally available and to wipe out malaria, AIDS and polio?  It is reasonable to suggest that we could accomplish all of these goals for about one fourth of what we spend on the military so that we could cut our military spending in half, transform the world into a stable and safe place and still have the strongest military in the world for those instances when only a military action can do the job.

There are always people who get very rich off of wars and so the proposals I have just enumerated would not be popular on Wall Street or on Capitol Hill but if they can't find traction in our churches, synagogues and mosques then religion really is a fraud.  The program I am suggesting, of diverting military resources to medicine, education, agriculture and infrastructure is not only a workable goal that could create global stability and peace in less time than we have had troops in Afghanistan but, frankly, we would have to be crazy not to do it.

Holy Water, Sacred Land

Chapter 12 - HOLY WATER, SACRED LAND
Roger Ray, D.Min.
January 12, 2014


A tall, beautiful model strides confidently across our TV screens assuring us that coal is our friend, providing both abundant energy and economically important jobs for Americans.  Is she trying to persuade us to rush down to the mall and buy some coal?  No, but the apparent motivation for such campaign advertisements is not always the only one.  Clean coal, which is different from coal only because you say "clean" first, is a myth that the coal industry wants to sell to the voting public so that environmental concerns about the impact of coal on our water, air and global temperatures will not interfere with their profits.

But more than that, buying advertisement from corporate media is a way of protecting a vulnerable industry from unfavorable news coverage.  In the same way the hospitals run PR ad campaigns advertising the services of their physicians when most of us have little choice in which cancer service or emergency room we might go to.  We use the one that is in our insurance provider group.  But when hospitals buy up large blocks of print and broadcast advertising, they are trying to protect themselves from investigative reporting.

In some instances, where the disaster is bigger than mere bribes can manage, governments have been known to step in and silence the media rather than depending on the uncertainty of trying to buy influence.  More than a year after the damaged reactor in Fukushima, Japan began leaking radiation into the adjoining ocean water, the government passed a law preventing any coverage of the environmental risks.  The law carries a potential of ten years in prison for any journalists who actually do what we depend upon journalists to do.

It is understandable that the government has an interest in avoiding public panic but repressing important and possibly life saving information is shameful at best and more likely a kind of governmental malfeasance.

Similarly, in North Carolina and Virginia, state legislators have refused to fund research into anything related to global warming or rising sea levels as if refusing to address the science related to what is happening to their shores will somehow keep it from happening.  After Hurricane Sandy, the largest and most devastating storm in America's history hit New Jersey, that state's Republican governor began to show a great deal more respect for the more fact based conversation about how human dependence on fossil fuels is pushing our planet towards a dangerous tipping point of climate disaster.

Major world religions have had a hard time getting a handle on the topic of environmental ethics. There are a number of important explanations for our past failure, all of which are barriers we must over come.

First, western religions have been very text oriented, seeking authoritative direction from their scriptures, all of which were written in a time when the balance of power between the earth and humans was decidedly on the side of nature.  While we find examples of cherishing life, discovering awe in nature and declarations that certain rivers or places were uniquely holy, there is much more about domination and fear of nature in all of our ancient scriptures.

Progressives must get past this devotion to ancient religious literature.  We do not, for example, have to find a way to interpret the Genesis creation story to create an environmental urgency nor do we have to play fast and loose with truth claims about either Native American or Druid spirituality to insist that we will find substantive direction from these or any other ancient sources.  The motivation for trying to make the Genesis account a demand from God to care for the planet is, at one level, laudable but doing so requires abandoning our efforts at moving away from supernatural theism and the assumption that God somehow wrote the Bible.  You can certainly find examples of a more respectful approach to creation in some primitive religion sources but you can also find contradictions that would only foster more debate about issues that are, substantively, beyond debate in the real world.

The modern world is in a present crisis, not foreseen by ancient prophets or in ancient texts.  Now is a time when we must apply our devotion to both ethics and truth to join the moral will of the faith community to the information provided by environmental scientists.

Secondly, we have, at times, associated our religion with too specific pieces of land or rivers.  Poets often express more urgent truths than do our holy scriptures.  I love the line in Michael Franti's song "Hello, Bonjour" where the poet boldly states, "Every drop of water is holy water and every piece of land is holy land."  Again, the Jewish claim of a Promised Land, the Christian identity with holy sites, Hindu attribution of holy status to one river and Muslim claims to traditional governance of specific nations and holy sites undermines the larger issue that there is nothing about Jerusalem that is more holy than Lexington, KY or more sacred about Mecca than can be found in Belize City.  The Florida swamp is a part of the same earth as the Grand Canyon or the Alps.  Our reverence for one place or body of water should not be determined by tradition, or what we may have believed happened there in our own faith history but that we are a part of the earth and all of the parts of the earth are connected to one another.

Finally, there has been way too much emphasis placed on belief in an afterlife that can devalue the only world we actually know exists and whose existence we can now threaten.  Even for those who feel the need to hold onto belief in an afterlife, I would offer the corrective of Søren Kierkegaard who cautioned that there are things that are true when they are whispered that become false when they are shouted.  Belief in heaven may bring comfort to the dying and solace to the grieving but this belief has been used to dismiss efforts at saving this world because, as some legislators have asserted, God is in charge of the world and nothing will happen to it without God's approval.

From my perspective, the spiritual passion to protect our planet is also threefold.  The first is simply a reverence and awe for the creation in all of its wonder and beauty.  Henry David Thoreau was not the first to find more of the divine in nature than in church and he will not be the last.  One should not exclude the other but they should certainly be partners in inspiring and educating the spirit of both.
Secondly, environmental issues have a huge social justice concern.  Many of the major sources of pollution are profit driven industries that are choosing short-term gain over long term environmental health.  Also, the poor of every nation generally wind up living in the areas where these industries dispose of their harmful byproducts. The resources of the earth should not be the sole possession of those who have manipulated governments and banking interests into giving them exploitative rights that are, in any rational analysis, not the right of any individual or narrow interest.  We an innately understand that the air belongs to all of us but it would be helpful if we could maintain some of that sense of global connection when it comes to real estate.  As we saw in the 2004 tsunami in southeast Asia, when the rising sea level and stronger storm surges send a wall of water onto shore, in most countries, it is the poor who are living there in very poorly constructed homes who are the most vulnerable.

Finally, this is a matter of compassion for future generations.  The present generation that stands on the face of the earth does not have a right to use up the earth that will shortly be inherited by future generations.  We talk about owning land as a part of our economic and personal safety interests but how can any mortal own something that lasts forever?  We are stewards of the land and as stewards we have a much more vital interest that trumps our desire for personal profit.

This should go without being said.  What could be more obvious than the fact that we must leave behind a planet that can be successfully inhabited by future generations and yet sometimes the most obvious truths are the ones the faith community must repeat the most often and the most loudly.
It would not be difficult to become exhausted with the virtual panic in the voices of many environmental advocates.  However, we should not fail to note when we have become convinced that it needed to be done, we have been able to reverse the trends of planetary degradation.  We have been able to restore forests, clean up rivers and lakes.  We even, through individual effort and changes in governmental policies, reversed the erosion of the ozone layer of our atmosphere even though no one goes camping in the ozone layer or posts vacation pictures from there on their Face Book page.
People can, when given the correct information and the reason to act on it, stop poisoning their own habitat.  Environmentalists often look more like Michael Moore than that lady who keeps telling us that we should have more coal in our breakfast cereal because mercury poisoning isn't all that bad but we have to first choose not to be either gullible or fatalistic.

Understanding how to care for the earth is complicated and it takes an investment of energy and, at many junctures, personal sacrifice will be necessary to make the needed changes in our use of the earth.
The largest consumption of fossil fuels is expended in two arenas, the heating and cooling of our homes and in transportation and this is where we must concentrate our efforts.  It would be wonderful if we were all motivated to do the right thing because it is the right thing to do, however, human nature being what it is, doing the right thing is always a bit easier if it saves us some money at the same time.  Strengthening our conscience and protecting our financial resources are not always mutually exclusive.

Learning to recycle, to refrain from using disposable items, insulating our homes and being more cautious about the use of energy with our appliances, lights, television as well has heating and cooling can all lower our bills while acting to save the planet.  Investing in energy efficient light bulbs, water heaters and appliances have upfront costs but they promise long-term savings.

Transportation is a larger and more complex issue.  Larger, more powerful vehicles are attractive to us for comfort, safety, and utility and for reliability in inclement weather.  However, choosing smaller, hybrid or alternative energy transportation is an option for most of us and it is something we can do proactively to help conserve limited resources and to cut back on pollution.

Still, a huge percentage of the consumption of gasoline in major cities is used by drivers who are looking for parking places.  All of us have experienced sitting for long periods of time in traffic jams where there are rows and rows of cars, stopped in multiple lanes as far as the eye can see, all burning fuel while waiting to move.

The creation of energy efficient mass transit would require a sea change in priorities for nations such as ours.  We are not only accustomed to private transportation but our economy is deeply invested in the manufacture, sales and maintenance of automobiles and all of the accompanying road construction.  Both government and private corporate interests will continue to use their influence to keep Americans in cars.

Mass transit could cut down on pollution, consumption of fossil fuels, traffic accidents, the amount of land taken up in parking, personally owned garage space and the time it takes to move from one place to another.  There certainly would be a huge upfront investment to build this kind of infrastructure but that is a small concern compared to the hurdle of persuading Americans to want mass transit rather than bigger cars and more highways.

The technology exists.  Other nations have taken great strides in this direction.  All that stands between us and making huge progress in protecting both our environment and our personal incomes is the collective will to change.

The most important task of the ancient prophets, of the early church and of any meaningful incarnation of the church in the future is to speak truth to power.  Our news media is almost exclusively corporate owned and profit driven.  Even our public media is influenced by government grants and corporate sponsorship.  The church must maintain its independence from profit driven interests and even find the courage to be faithful to the truth in the face of changing public opinions.

Pastors are not environmental experts but we sure do need to expose ourselves to their research and insights.  We need to articulate a passionate, informed and prophetic message to a public that may not hear the imperative truth about our ecology anywhere else.

One of my favorite old hymns, "Once to Every Man (sic) and Nation," says, "Truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne, yet that scaffold sways the future."  I fear that too much of the main stream church is cowering in a self-defensive posture, trying to hold onto its meager existence for another generation.  What I am trying to say to you about being bold in the area of environmental activism is what William Shedd meant when he said, "A ship in harbor is safe but that is not what ships are for."  The church exists for telling the truth and given the crisis that is at hand in the environment it is past time that we stop being afraid of the consequences of being prophetic because the consequences of silent consent are surely much worse!

What Answers do We Have to Life's Big Questions?

Chapter 12    "WHAT ANSWERS DO WE HAVE TO LIFE'S BIG QUESTIONS?"
Roger Ray, D.Min.

"In music, one does not make the end of the composition the point of the composition.  If that were so the best conductors would be those that played the fastest and there would be composers who wrote only Finales.....it is a hoax, a terrible hoax.  They made you miss everything. We thought of life by analogy with a journey, with a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose at the end and we were supposed to get to that end, and the thing is to get to that end, success or whatever it is, or maybe heaven after you're dead.  But we miss the point the whole way along.  It was a musical thing and you were supposed to sing or to dance the whole way along."
                                     Alan Watts, philosopher  "On Life and Music"

One of our YouTube viewers in Florida wrote to me to ask: "I am elderly, how can I die peacefully without doctors, bright lights, and terrifying inner anxiety?" Progressives are in the business of reimagining what it means to be a spiritual person in a post-modern, scientific, information centered world but a world in which children are still born, people get married...or at least they want to where the law allows, and they still get sick and they die.

The church has historically been the gateway to life's transitions.  We bless or baptize infants, confirm or baptize young people who are coming of age and we perform the rituals around marriage and death. And as the traditional gatekeepers of these events, pastors are usually a part of people's preparations for marriage or for death, during times of crisis and of great joy.

For most of modern history the church and its clergy have offered pretty standard and predictable answers to life's big questions.  A great deal of that has been marked with humiliating hypocrisy.  We threatened even little children with the fires of hell unless they believed and behaved in just the right way and yet promised the family of virtually every deceased person that heaven awaited their departed family member no matter what kind of moral monster they might really have been.

We have allowed only persons of the opposite sex to be united in holy matrimony and we told them that they are to remain together under all circumstances until they are parted by death, as if the Lord God Almighty had some kind of sick pleasure in seeing people remain for their entire lives in meaningless or even abusive relationships.  I have felt nausea, standing in the chancel of a church asking people who are too young to know what they want to declare as their major in college to make a pledge to a living arrangement that cannot be questioned for the rest of their lives.  You only have to see what they have selected to have tattooed on very visible parts of their bodies to realize that they are not mature enough to making permanent decisions!

We have, for centuries, held out the ephemeral promise of eternity in heaven and people have taken what solace they could from pretending to believe it while doing everything possible to avoid having to test the hypothesis by actually dying.  Among the modern proverbs that I would have engraved in granite along our walls is this fundamental truth about progressive faith:  We have exchanged false certainty for honest uncertainty.

Sure, traditional religion had a clear and firm answer to most of life's questions.  The only problem is that we now realize that none of those answers were right, or at least they cannot be known with certainty.  With great faith and conviction ancient Egyptian kings had their bodies prepared so that their physical remains would be revived in the next world.  Thousands of years later their expertly preserved bodies are on display in museums all over the globe.  Neither their faith nor their magic worked.

There may be life after death but if there is no one knows anything about it and the best speculations of our philosophers and the personal testimonies of those who claim in clinical death experiences to have seen heaven (why is it that none of those people ever report on having seen hell?) can offer any objective, testable or repeatable evidence about it.  And so, while we cannot resist speculation and even hope when we are in the midst of grief for a deceased loved one, our desire cannot dictate the nature of the universe.  Hope is a good thing. Self-deception is not, however, the mission of the church.

I attended the funeral of a teenaged girl who was the granddaughter of a friend.  The girl and some other under-aged friends had taken a car joy riding in the country.  None of them having a license or driving experience, the end of their excursion was tragic and fatal for this one young women.  The family had no warning, no opportunity to even prepare for the horrifying news of the girl's death. The pastor who conducted the memorial was from a generally progressive denomination but she stood before the grieving family and confidently announced, "We do not grieve today because this young woman we have all loved is now enjoying a much better life in a much better place."

This is religious denial at its most heinously dishonest.  It not only denies all known reality it also denies the family their sacred right to grieve.  Some things in life are sad and we should not deny anyone their right to a full throated expression of their loss, their grief, and the anguish of their souls.  Grief is the logical reaction to a life cut short by untimely death.  What possible benefit is it for us to make the claim that the universe always balances the scales and makes every bad thing acceptable?  In choosing honest uncertainty over false certainty, we do not complicate the horrible losses in life with the guilt of trying, but always at least partially failing, to make ourselves believe that we should not be sad lest we appear to be doubting God.

Progressive faith is about honesty and meaning.  It is not our goal to take away spiritual comfort but to focus on the comfort of meaningful existence.  As one modern proverb says:  "Don't be afraid your life will end; be afraid that it will never begin."

Traditional religion either specifically teaches or at least emphatically implies that the whole reason for existing is to attain to eternal reward and to avoid eternal punishment.  The philosopher, Alan Watts, challenges that view with the simple observation that we do not sing a song in order to come to its end.

By emphasizing the after-life, we devalue life itself.  By telling young couples that there is an implied ultimate goal to marriage which is to avoid getting divorced at all costs, undermines the value of a day to day shared life.

Watts specifically bemoans the message that we send to our young people that implies that the goal of education is graduation.  You get a degree so that you can get a better job because, somehow, happiness is found in career success.

This, he flatly says, is a hoax and a terrible one at that.  As a professor, I get to stand in front of a room full of students who have come to study the subject that I have found to be so very interesting that I have devoted my life to the study of it.  Even after two decades of teaching, I still engage in the fantasy that this semester I am going to encounter students who will share my enthusiasm for the study of religion and ethics. Mostly, however, I encounter young adults who have bought into the hoax.  What they often want from me is three hours of college credit with a good grade for the least amount of bother possible.

I wish that I could award each student an "A" on the first day of class and then spend the rest of the semester actually engaged in active learning though I fear that I might end up spending a lot of time alone and I'm nearly certain that my university would cease assigning me classes.  What Watts is trying to say to college students and to the rest of us by extension is that we should live life to its fullest and find both meaning and joy in it as we go.  We do not live our lives so that we may arrive safely at the grave.  The late journalist, Hunter Thompson said it quite eloquently:  "Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up..."

Indeed, the only real answer to the reality of our mortality is to live as meaningfully as possible so that we may come to the time of our death as peacefully as possible.  This is not, however a matter of choosing reality over superstition.  It is also a choice of the present moment over anxiously living for an unknown future.

Buddhism teaches detachment while acknowledging that everything is connected.

That is, we are a part of the universe.  We are connected to every living thing and to ever race of humanity but suffering, anxiety, anguish comes from wanting to own, to hold onto anything or even to our own existence.  The mortality rate is 100% and as threatening as that reality can be, as soon as we accept that reality, it ceases to have so much power over us.

Should I ever marry again, I will hope that it is a relationship that will remain meaningfully intact as long as we both shall live.  I will work and sacrifice to make that come true.  I would not, however, remain in an unhealthy relationship beyond the reasonable point of becoming healthy just to avoid religious guilt or the public shame of failing in marriage.  Religious condemnation is almost always neurotic.  We need to celebrate love and promote healthy relationships, not forge chains to keep people in misery or abuse.

As I have grown older, my doctor begins to try to push me into ever more frequent and expensive medical tests to make sure that I do not have some undetected threat to my longevity.  I try to be a good patient and cooperate within reason but I recently assured him that, "I am not afraid of death."  My physician is an evangelical and the son of an evangelical pastor.  He looked at me and with an expression of shock, said, "I never hear that.  Most of my patients are in their 80's and they want me to do everything possible to make sure that they do not die.  I never hear from any of them that they are not afraid of death."  I think that is sad.

I could protect myself from any exposure to divorce by never allowing myself to fall in love again but that seems like a very bad way to approach human relationships.  Life is a gift.  Why would we squander the years of our lives trying to find some divine life-insurance that would promise us eternal resuscitation but never be able to put that product up for examination?

As odd as what I am saying will sound in the ears of traditional Christians, it is neither a new insight nor in any way unique to modern thinkers.  Among the most ancient of our shared scriptures are the musings of the philosopher who wrote the book of Ecclesiastes.  In chapter 8 the teacher advises:

8No one has power over the wind to restrain the wind, or power over the day of death; ....
15So I commend enjoyment, for there is nothing better for people under the sun than to eat, and drink, and enjoy themselves, for this will go with them in their toil through the days of life that God gives them under the sun.

I always felt that my very puritan mother was suspicious of anything that might make one happy.  Her religion taught her to live in absolute rejection of all forms of pleasure in order to gain a place in heaven.  I think that is a bad bet.

Buddhist monks practice keeping a smile on their faces as a gift that they give to the world.  Even when discussing very serious things, they attempt, as an offering to others, to maintain a very cheery appearance which, frankly, can deny even death the ability to extort misery out of us ahead of its time.  I think that the writer of Ecclesiastes is right.  We will die one day and we cannot change that fact so between now and then we should attempt to do what we can to make the world a better place, adding meaning to every day we have, and we should dance our way through the living of our lives, not rushing to the end of the song.

This is not a matter of denial but rather it is a matter of defiance.  We will not let mortality rob us of life while we are living, nor will we allow the prospect of personal failure keep us from throwing our arms open to the potential of love, joy and success.

The most popular early teacher of Buddhism in the United States was the very colorful monk, Trungpa Rinpoche.  I will end this chapter quoting what he often demanded of his American audiences:  "You cheer up.  You cheer up right now."

The Real War on Christmas

Community Christian Church        Roger Ray, pastor
December 22, 2013   "The Real War on Christmas"

Matthew 1:18-25                                  
Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah* took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. 19Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly. 20But just when he had resolved to do this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, 'Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. 21She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.' 22All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet:
23 'Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son,
   and they shall name him Emmanuel',
which means, 'God is with us.' 24When Joseph awoke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him; he took her as his wife, 25but had no marital relations with her until she had borne a son;* and he named him Jesus.

(video clip of Sarah Palin talking about her book about the war on Christmas)

It may be an oversimplification but, hey, I'm a preacher and what else are preachers really for?  Seriously, it is not far from the truth to sum up life this way:  If you are sad it is because you are thinking about the past.  If you are worried it is because you are thinking about the future.  The only time and place where you can actually be content and joyful is in the present moment, in the place where you are now.

The handwringing of conservative pendants about an alleged "War on Christmas," can be found only in the kind of sadness and anger they feel about having lost something from their personal past.  Christmas isn't what it used to be.  Fifteen years ago it would have been common for me to receive two or three hundred Christmas cards from family members, school friends, and church members.
Now, if we get one from anyone other than our insurance agent and the charities to whom we give donations, it is an anomaly.  The advent of the internet leaves most of us without an address book with real physical addresses in it and finding a postage stamp in the desk drawer can turn into a "Where's Waldo" investigation.

But Christmas has changed in other ways as well.  The world has become more polarized, more distant, less connected.  Businesses don't spend money on office parties and they don't give bonuses.  Neighbors don't know each other and are too suspicious or partisan to have an open house that might have people in your home who had political signs in their front yard this past year that were an affront to your own views.

And our world is more diverse.   For most of us, that is a good thing, ethnic, racial, religious and national diversity makes the world more interesting and it has certainly given us many better choices in our local restaurants.  But it also means that the dominant culture has to show some sensitivity in making room for our new neighbors.  Most of what the Sarah Palins, Rush Limbaughs and Bill O'Reillys are really bemoaning is the loss of an unchallenged white, Christian dominant culture.

They are grieving the loss of a past in which they indulged themselves in the fantasy, recently articulated by the Duck Dynasty star, Phil Robertson, when black people were happy being share croppers and gay people either didn't exist or we didn't have to pretend to be nice to them.  As the comedian Stephen Colbert said, "Of course blacks were happy back then, they even had their own drinking fountains."

Nostalgia is often not a longing for a literal past but for a cleaned up and sanitized past.  Like watching an episode of Andy of Mayberry set in what had to be the only small North Carolina town where there was not one single black person and where even the alcoholics were absolutely hilarious.

The dominant class in any country or century can be blissfully ignorant of those who are oppressed.  I would make the claim that I personally know more about the lives of the rural poor in Nicaragua than do two-thirds of the people who live in Nicaragua's capital city of Managua.  Truly, there are none so blind as those who refuse to see.

The progress we have made in cultural diversity has forced America's dominant culture to open their eyes and recognize that even though Catholics and conservative Protestants still make up the majority of the religious landscape in America that they can no longer push the rest of us to the margins, either to coloreds only restrooms or to go stay in the barn out back and have your illegitimate baby with the cows and sheep and all of the other livestock.

The anxiety being felt by the traditionalists is that the future will find them even more un-empowered.  Several states are now doing everything they can to either block the poor, blacks and Latinos from voting, or to Gerrymander them into majority districts so that the powerful can hold onto the throne for one or two more election cycles.  These are fear based, desperate measures that are, essentially, admissions of their eventual defeat.

People used to complain about how Christmas had been commercialized.  Sarah Palin thinks that commercialization is one of the best parts of Christmas.
And retail businesses no doubt agree with Palin.  I have no particular beef with commercialization, in part because, even as suspicious as I am of our excesses in consumerism and capitalism run amok, I recognize that commerce is the root of all productivity and the engine of our economy.  I want our economy to thrive.... I just don't want all of the profit to go to the dominant culture.

The real war on Christmas is not, in any honest biblical sense, the removal of the manger scene from the courthouse lawn or the subtle change in greetings at the cash register from "Merry Christmas" to "happy holidays."  The real war on Christmas is the adamant fight of the rich and powerful to remain in unchallenged power forever!

We do not read the gospel accounts of the birth of Jesus as if they were historical.  The stories told by Matthew and Luke are not literal accounts but they are, rather, essentially sermons...they are religious messages used to introduce their gospels.  Though we have grown up with a manger scene that tries to combine the two, they are distinctly different stories.

Matthew tells us that the holy family lived in Bethlehem where Jesus was born in their house.  They only fled Bethlehem out of fear of Herod after they were visited by some Babylonian astrologers who were apparently the only people who noticed the incredibly bazaar behavior of a star actually moving against the direction of all of the other stars in the sky and stopping over just one house.  Luke's story is equally fanciful, saying that everyone in the Roman empire had to leave their homes at the same time to go back to the place of their birth for a census, an event that would have been nationally as disruptive as if the stars suddenly began to move erratically around the sky and stopping off in small town neighborhoods.  

If you try to take these narratives literally they quickly start to look pretty stupid.  If, however, you read them in the way that Matthew and Luke meant them, they become quite powerful.

In completely different ways, both Christmas stories introduce Jesus as someone who is going to turn the world upside down.  The good news of his birth is not announced to the ruling class, or to the wealthy.  The angels didn't gather at the mall and the Magi were not giving interviews on Fox News.

In very different ways, both Matthew and Luke interpret the birth of Jesus in images that were defiant of the dominant culture.  The song Mary sang in Luke is something like the image we have recently been reminded of when Nelson Mandela was released after 27 years in prison and he stepped out into the public after sleeping on the ground and having nothing but a bucket in a cell for a toilet, after 27 years in which he was allowed only one 30 minute visit every year and could write a letter only once every 6 months.... he walked out of the prison into a crowd of supporters and raised one black fist over his head and said, "Power."

I don't read the Christmas story as a record of history, of something that happened long long ago, something that I could never see or recover.  I don't see it has a matter of anticipation of some eschatological return of Christ, as surely the Roman church intended the Advent season to be.

I read it in the here and now, in this moment, as a source of joy.... as a defiant fist raised in a nation where the poor not only are not guaranteed a living wage but where they may not even be allowed to vote next year, as if voting mattered much to the empire where, as Congressman Bernie Sanders has recently said, "No piece of legislation can be passed unless it has the okay of corporate America."

In this present moment, we read this story out here on the edge of town, below the radar of the big steeple churches.  Our congressman couldn't care less about what we think or what we need.  The Chamber of Commerce and the Council of Churches shake one another's hands and assure one another that we're just a crazy fringe group.

That's okay, because I know that the angels sang to us about peace and justice and even the stars are lining up to affirm that the weak and the powerless, the homeless, the ones who can't afford to go either to a university or to a hospital, that Jesus was born for us..... not back then, but now.... today, right this minute.

Merry Christmas.

What is So? Wo What? So?

Chapter 10 WHAT IS SO? SO WHAT? SO?
Roger Ray, D.Min.

There are three "so's" I need answered in any research project.  "What is so?" "So what?" and "So?" Tell me what the facts are.  Tell me why it matters.  Tell me what should be done about it.
Dr. Todd Schaible

When I was a young pastor, serving a church in Louisville, KY, I taught a small Wednesday evening Bible class in the church basement for about 25 church members.  A few miles away, on the same side of town there was a very popular bar called the Toy Tiger.  To boost their Wednesday evening trade, at the same time that I was leading a Bible class, there was a competition at the Toy Tiger that they called "naughty nighty night."

I would often thank the two-dozen or so members of the church who chose to attend my mid-week class for electing Bible Study over the "naughty nighty" competition.  Just for clarification, one man did ask me, "You don't seriously think that going to the Toy Tiger was actually a viable choice for us do you?"

Of course, for any of my class members, the drive time would have been about the same.  They were all over 21and any one of them could have made the legal choice to avail themselves of some ribald entertainment if that had been their preference.  But for everyone in the room, including myself, our religious world-view did not include such entertainment as a viable option.

Though my theological education had pretty well extinguished any seriously literal view of a divine final judgment in which the fate of my eternal soul would be decided, sending me either into eternal reward or eternal torturous punishment, still, the shadow of a life time of training to believe that God, like Santa Claus, "sees you when your sleeping.  He knows when you're awake.  He knows if you've been bad or good," so we all inherently knew that we were supposed to "be good, for goodness sake."

We had grown up being indoctrinated into a moral universe in which the boundaries had been drawn by the Lord of the Universe from the heavens above.  We didn't have to struggle with complicated moral decisions about most things because clear bright lines had been drawn centuries before and written down in a book that we were not allowed to question in any serious way.

Progressive religious leaders invite people to lead a good life for the inherent reward of leading a good life, which is a rather vague sounding invitation to those who have always assumed that the moral universe had solid, concrete boundaries with heaven on one side and hell on the other.  Once the manipulative theological carrot and stick have been taken off the table, we have some serious thinking to do about who we are, who we want to be, and what is right and what is wrong.... Not because some supernatural theistic god in the clouds told us what is right and what is wrong, but rather, we are left to figure out what is, in an of itself, either right or wrong on its own merits.

I introduced this book talking about evidence-based faith.  I'm advocating for an approach to religion that is based on what is known and not on what Iron Age myths and superstitions tell us about the world. Physicists sum up the entire universe as being comprised of 12 different types of subatomic particles that are held together by four forces of nature, two of which we can see at work:  gravity and the magnetic force.  The other two are observable only at the atomic level and they have the unromantic names of "the strong force" and "the weak force."  You will never see them anyway so they don't really need poetic nomenclature but they basically hold atoms together and make them behave in a way that makes the universe possible.

Accepting this description of reality, we are all made, quite literally, of the stuff that was created in the heart of super hot stars.  The 12 particles of matter and four forces of nature that give us our bodies are the same as the 12 particles of matter and four forces of nature that make up the chair you are sitting on, the bricks in walls around us, the trees, grass and streams down the road and the stars and planets in the heavens above us.

As cosmologist, Brian Swimme, as observed, "Four billion years ago Earth was molten rock.  Now it sings opera."  We are the product of millions of years of evolution.  We are the part of the universe that can now become aware of the existence of the universe and consider its meaning.... In fact, I would argue, we create its meaning.

Here is the big shift, the breath taking, dizzying, sometimes infuriating and frightening shift..... you were taught not to question.  You were taught to accept the Bible as the word of God.  You were taught that America was the greatest country in the world.  We were led to believe that capitalism was just a part of freedom and democracy and Christianity and that we were to defend all of the above with our very lives if necessary and to do so with virtually blind faith and absolute loyalty.
And that, men and women, is the opposite of where we are now.  The old unquestioning approach to life stopped working for most of us.  We read our way out of it, thought our way out of it, or we were pushed out of it through hardships and heartbreaks. For most of us, it was a combination of all of the above.

Now we understand that to really find meaning, we have to question everything.  We have not thrown away our sacred scriptures but we no longer read the Bible as if it was divine legislation.  Now we critically examine it.  Though science, through rational thought and critical thinking, we literally interrogate the universe to find out what is and what is not true.

I remember hearing the famous psychiatrist and author, M. Scott Peck, saying that anything we cannot question is an idol and all idols are slated for destruction.  We have protected our religious idols from scrutiny and preserved them into the 21st century.  But no longer will we reject our gay and lesbian sons and daughters because some ancient nomadic sheepherder condemned homosexuality three thousand years ago and wrote it down in a book.

I introduced this chapter with a quote from Dr. Todd Schaible, who is the director of Burrell Mental Health.  About 15 years ago I had applied for and received a grant from the Burrell Foundation to conduct a research project into methamphetamine use in the Ozarks.  Todd called me into his office to talk about the project and he said to me that there were three essential questions we had to answer:  What is so?  So what? And, So?

That is, our research needed to discover the facts about what was leading to the rapid increase in use and addiction of this dangerous drug and further we needed to be able to clearly articulate why it mattered.  We needed to be able to tell the public and the municipal, county and state governments why they should care.  And finally, we needed to not just throw facts on the table.  Our analysis needed to answer the question, "So what can we do about it?"  What is so? So? And so what?

That conversation has never left me because I have applied it to my life as a pastor, as a journalist and as a college professor.  I don't just gather facts as if I were going to print a phone book or contribute to a data-base.  I need to be able to stand up in front a congregation, a classroom or write in a newspaper column or book what is factually true.  Then I need to be able to say why it matters and, finally, I need to be able to say what should be done in response to those facts.

If there is a single compelling reason for me to be writing this book about progressive faith it is to answer the "so?" part of this equation.  Many wonderful scholars and writers have described the reasons why we have made this dramatic shift in how we read the Bible, and what we now think about Jesus and other world religions.  I am indebted to the disciplined and insightful work of Marcus Borg, John Shelby Spong, John Dominc Crossan, Karen Armstrong and Springfield's own Charles Hedrick and David Trobisch for helping us all to understand this very clear and objective approach to what were the protected idols of our faith.

They have done a magnificent job of looking at the Christian religion and helping us to see what is so.  And they have done an admirable job of telling us why it matters.  And yet, each of them has felt the need, as religious scholars, to hardly speak of that third "so".... They have left it to us to figure out what is the "so?" of progressive faith.

So, you are backing your car out of the driveway and you have to make a decision..... church or the Toy Tiger?  More realistically, once we have been disabused of the superstitious beliefs in a supernatural theistic being who will decide right and wrong, who will send some eternal part of ourselves to either heaven or hell.... Once we are no longer captured in that intellectual and moral prison.... The question becomes:  Is life to be lived for personal gratification or is there a larger purpose?

If I sit down on a park bench to eat my sandwich and a homeless hungry stranger sits down next to me, do I devour my sandwich as quickly as possible or do I divide it and share it with the hungry stranger?

Nietzsche would tell you that you are weak to even consider sharing your sandwich.  Or, at least that is how Ayn Rand would interpret Nietzsche.  And at least to some degree, the way our economy has been run, the way banks, corporations and, sadly enough, our government, basically makes decisions, it looks like the Objectivism of Rand's school of self gratification is being lived out against the alternative view that I would call a spiritual world view based on a global perspective on ethics.

Scientific thought deals with facts but facts alone cannot determine ethical direction.  I've spent years inviting you to reject what cannot be known, what has only been presented to you as an assertion of truth.  There may be angels and demons, a heaven and a hell, there may be souls, ghosts and spirits but since we cannot objectively analyze any of these things, I have repeatedly said that it is meaningless to discuss them.

But at the base line of my progressive faith, I must acknowledge that there is a truth claim.  Between a life of selfish personal fulfillment, whether you find that at the Toy Tiger or on Wall Street, and a life lived to deliver the greatest good to the largest number of people is a fundamental moral choice.

The earth that once was primarily molten lava but now can rise up and sing opera, through conscious human beings, also experiences great pain and sorrow and we have the potential of experiencing deep joy and meaning.

The choice that I make..... the choice I hope that you make.... Is to answer that "so" question in a way that is not simply seeking personal gratification but is, instead, to direct your life in a way that gives the greatest good to the largest number of people.

I previously quoted Neil deGrasse Tyson, saying that we are all connected, to each other biologically, to the earth chemically, to the universe atomically.  That is a scientific fact and I am choosing to credit that fact with spiritual meaning. I will honor my connection to every human being, to the earth, to the universe, by trying to reduce suffering, increase joy and to protect the integrity of life, the earth and the universe.
Owning my connection to the human race and to the earth we share, I cannot be indifferent about the fact that there are hungry people in this city, even if I am personally over fed.  I cannot be indifferent about the threat of waging war, even if I am far past the age of being personally recruited into any army.  The fact that I am employed does not dilute the fact that many are not.  Nor does my access to health care afford me the luxury of being indifferent about those who do not receive appropriate care.  The fact that my neighborhood is free of toxic wastes, that I have reliably clean drinking water and fresh air cannot make me indifferent about the poisoning of the soil, water and air on our shared earth.  Being white, male, heterosexual and American does not excuse me from the need for liberation from oppression for persons of color, for women, for those of all sexual orientations and races and nations of the world.  And the fact that I was free to choose where I drove my car this morning does not deny the fact that there are more than two million Americans in jail or prison right now, many of whom are incarcerated for reasons so wholly indefensible that it is a social crime for us to keep silent about it.

Once Nietzsche was freed from the domination of traditional religion, his choice did not make him the ubermensch, the superman, he thought it did. In fact, followed to the logical conclusion of selfishness and self-service, existence has no meaning at all.  Nietzsche did not leave the cave of religious superstition to evolve into a super human, he left it to de-evolve into meaninglessness.

The real ubermensch, the real heroes of post-modern existence are those who choose to take their liberty in hand and to live lives of self sacrificing service, kicking at the darkness until it bleeds daylight.

What Should We Teach Our Children About Religion?

Chapter 9 - "WHAT SHOULD WE TEACH OUR CHILDREN ABOUT RELIGION?"
Roger Ray, D.Min.

It happened again that a certain stranger came before Shammai and said to him:
--"I will become a proselyte providing you teach me the whole Torah while I'm standing on one foot."
(Shammai) knocked him down with the builder's rule in his hand.
(The stranger) came before Hillel, who made him a proselyte.
He told him:
--"What is hateful to you do not do to your neighbor.
That is the whole Torah. The rest is commentary. Go, learn (it)!"
                                                               From the Babylonian Talmud

Most semesters I teach a course on Western Religions for Drury University.  The course begins with Zoroastrianism and from that early Persian influence, we talk about the chain of evolution from Persia to the familiar modern religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.  I don't expect my students to remember very much about the seemingly exotic rituals and beliefs of Zoroastrianism but there is a core teaching that I hope will stay with them.

Zoroastrianism teaches that the good life is lived by having three things:  right thoughts, right speech and right actions.  I tell my classes that 2500 years of theological evolution has not added much to those three injunctions.  Like the story of the first century rabbi, Hillel, who taught a gentile that the whole of the Jewish faith is summed up in a version of what appears in one form or another in all of the great religions of the world, "What is undesirable to you, don't do to anyone else."

I think that it is helpful to be able to distill our faith tradition down to very brief proverbs.  Buddhism teaches detachment from greed and lust.  Islam holds both chastity and charity as core values.
Judaism revolves around concepts of justice and mercy.  Christianity teaches radical compassion.  But you can almost describe this sort of synopsis as being little more than "bumper sticker" spirituality.

If you ask yourself the most serious question, "What is it about your religion that you desperately want to pass on to the next generation?" you know that you need to find a way to express what we hold dear in a vehicle that will be evidently valuable and worth preserving.

It was not long after we started this church that young parents began to ask the question, "Do you offer any classes for children?"  When you don't have a denomination or a specific tradition, that's a lot harder to answer than you might think.  I ordered samples of Sunday School material from the usual suspects:  the Unitarian Universalists, the United Church of Christ, the Disciples of Christ, the Presbyterian and Methodist publishing houses and the Unity movement.  What we specifically wanted to avoid was indoctrination into any one sect and what we found in the literature of what we thought would be kid-friendly denominations were all very obviously designed specifically to indoctrinate.

Denominations are dying.  They have outlived their usefulness and yet no institution is ever willing to see it's self go out of existence without a fight.  So each denomination's materials seemed to have the underlying purpose of making sure that the children who grow up in their churches will never leave them.... A program that has failed terribly for a couple of generations but that obvious fact has not yet affected denominational publishing houses.  

Thankfully, the Center for Progressive Christianity has made a noteworthy attempt in publishing "A Joyful Path," a series of Sunday School lessons for elementary students that focuses on behaviors more than they focus on beliefs.  It is not a perfect bit of curriculum but it sure is a step in the right direction.

We want to teach ethics without either using the motivational carrot of heaven or the stick of hell.  Without either fear or guilt, without any thought of personal reward, we want to pass along to the next generation a healthy spirituality that can inspire them to grow into what we would call "good people." Though, for me, "good" is always influenced by what Leon Bloy meant when he said that any Christian who is not a hero is a pig.

We are not interested in creating Baptists or Episcopalians; we're not even concerned about whether they choose to be Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu or Buddhist.  We want to pass along the values of a healthy spiritual life, whatever that is for each of them.

We may have a valuable lesson to be learned from the church of the Reformation era when Catholics were regularly inspired by reading stories about the lives of the saints and Protestants were educated in John Foxe's Book of Martyrs.  They, of course, promoted the lives of people who died defending their virginity or in evangelical zeal but we should rehearse the lives of our modern saints who gave their lives as modern prophets of justice, tolerance, mercy and peace.

Our church is adorned with images of Martin Luther King, Jr., Gandhi, Dorothy Day, Archbishop Romero, Black Elk and Cesar Chavez.

Our children should know how Sojourner Truth fought to end slavery, how Dietrich Bonhoeffer stood up to the Nazis.  They need to know that even in the darkest days of our history, there were thinkers like Henry David Thoreau who were able to articulate a vision for how we could all be changed.

In our day we are way too interested in tearing down leaders, focusing on their clay feet, making ourselves feel better about ourselves.  But for all of the well-known faults of someone like Lyndon Johnson, our children should know how the Voters' Rights Act was passed.  They should hear about when our nation waged war on poverty before we started waging war on the poor.  We should tell stories about people like Ralph Nader and Howard Zinn who stood up to the powerful to speak the truth.

We should make certain that our children know the stories of modern saints like Martin Luther King, Jr. and Nelson Mandela.  And we should tell them the truth, not the white washed versions told only after they are dead.  Cities that now have a Martin Luther King highway never invited King to visit their communities and usually did what they could to keep him away.  He was investigated and threatened by the FBI, jailed frequently and held in contempt by many of the people who now speak of him as if they supportive of him all along.

Nelson Mandela was officially considered to be a terrorist by President Ronald Regan who resisted sanctions and divestment of apartheid South Africa.  Now, nearly a generation since Mandela was released from the prison where he was tortured and forced into hard labor for 27 years, everyone speaks of him as a modern saint but we must not forget that what made him important was not just because he lead South Africa in a peaceful reconciliation of the races.

He was in prison because he had started a militant opposition to the white government.  He was kept in prison only because he refused to renounce violence as a means of overthrowing that government.  He was nearly blinded by his 27 years on a island prison where he worked breaking rocks in heat that was often over 110 degrees but he would not renounce violence because he refused to surrender his human right to fight for freedom.

You will not hear in his eulogies today that he was a sharp critic of the racism in America and of our invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan and that he was a friend to Fidel Castro in opposition of American foreign policy.  But we should tell our children the truth.  The path to being a prophet is not simply a matter of talking about love and forgiveness even if those are our primary goals.

Jesus was a threat to the Roman Empire.... That's why they killed him.  King was a threat to American apartheid, that's why he was so often beaten and jailed.  Mandela was a threat to the economic and civil oppression of the black population of South Africa and he was thought of as a terrorist before he was thought of as a saint.

Our generation makes heroes out of rock stars and professional athletes but we tend to want to tear down spiritual leaders and political reformers.  We need to get over that.  My New Testament professor at Vanderbilt, Daniel Patte, enjoined us to "preach the church to the church."  We should tell our own stories to our children.

They were born into a world with integrated schools, integrated neighborhoods, and equal opportunity employment.  We were not born into that world.... But some of us made the world change.
Our children should know that Mel and Ruth Miller turned their own home into a miniature United Nations, adopting children of color fifty years ago when doing so meant losing friends, jobs and personal safety.

Our children who have two mommies or two daddies might assume that this is normal but many of us marched in the streets and demanded equal rights for their families and have lost jobs, friends and suffered death threats for doing so.  They should know that members of our church serve and sacrifice for the homeless, for the rural poor of Nicaragua.  They should know that in the room where they get refreshments every week that members lead meetings on week days to help alcoholics and addicts to recover their lives.

Forgive me President Kennedy, but we both curse the darkness and light candles.  Our children should know that we expect great things from them.  We want them to be happy and successful.  We want their lives to be full of joy and love but we are not raising them to be a generation of happy consumers.  We are raising them to become heroes and to do that, we must show them how it is done.