“From Common Sense to an Age of Reason”

“From Common Sense to an Age of Reason”  

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July 29, 2018  Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

Voltaire - Would it not be that which taught much morality and very little dogma? That which tended to make men just without making them absurd? That which did not order one to believe in things that are impossible, contradictory, injurious to divinity, and pernicious to mankind, and which dared not menace with eternal punishment anyone possessing common sense? Would it not be that which did not uphold its belief with executioners, and did not inundate the earth with blood on account of unintelligible sophism? Which taught only the worship of one god, justice, tolerance, and humanity?

With the help of Ben Franklin, Thomas Paine immigrated from England to the Americas, just in time to participate in the Revolutionary War. There had already been battles between the British and the colonists, but most people were not thinking about independence, just better treatment by the British crown. His face is not on Mt. Rushmore, his name isn’t even seen on the Declaration of Independence, but it is not a stretch to say that neither would have ever existed were it not for the political and philosophical thinking and writing of Thomas Paine.

He started writing letters to be published in various Philadelphia newspapers but his writing became too locutious for newspapers and he was forced to publish his thoughts in the form of pamphlets which were sold on the streets, read aloud in taverns, and, ultimately, fueled the imaginations of colonists who came to believe that they could be free from England and remain individually free in a democracy. In fact, at the time, the word “democracy” had about as negative an association as “socialism” has today, but he redeemed it in his brief work, “Common Sense.” 

America’s ideological victory in the Revolutionary War is largely traceable to Paine though he was rarely mentioned in public schools. The common history of our founding was written in a way to give almost all of the credit to wealthy colonists, as the presidency was never given to people like Paine or even to the likes of Ben Franklin. 

Still, our American revolution was a bold and fairly radical thing and a lot of its character is due to the political insights of people like Thomas Paine. Our revolution sent shock waves around the world and, in France, our cries for freedom found fertile soil. Just more than a decade after our successful liberation, a different and more far reaching revolution swept through France, prompting Thomas Paine to write a new pamphlet, one that interests me much more than the first. 

Paine wrote “Age of Reason” in response to France’s dismissal of the confines of the Catholic Church, a revolt that had been stewing in France for half a century, since the writing of Voltaire, though illegal to own, had become very popular. Where Paine’s “Common Sense” painstaking explained why “the Emperor has no clothes,” Voltaire had already explained why the “Pope has no clothes.” 

Paine opined that he had known in advance that the political revolution in America would lead, unavoidably, to a similar religious revolution which he was afraid might go too far. Of course, he was initially right but where both France and America rejected the monarchy and never looked back, both countries, after initially putting a good deal of distance between them and formal, organized religion, fell back into it a couple of times before, first France, and now the United States, began to move increasingly into secular territory.

In the later part of the 18^thcentury, it was common for Thomas Paine’s pamphlets to be read aloud in taverns. If we had the time, I would love to stand up here and read all of “An Age of Reason” to you, but for the sake of time, let me read a portion of the first chapter, oh, and be aware that for most people of Paine’s era, Islam was directly associated with Turks since the Ottoman empire included virtually everything we think of as the Middle East at that time. He writes:

I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life.

I believe in the equality of man; and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow-creatures happy.

But, lest it should be supposed that I believe in many other things in addition to these, I shall, in the progress of this work, declare the things I do not believe, and my reasons for not believing them.

I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.

All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.

I do not mean by this declaration to condemn those who believe otherwise; they have the same right to their belief as I have to mine. But it is necessary to the happiness of man, that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe.

It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime. He takes up the trade of a priest for the sake of gain, and in order to qualify himself for that trade, he begins with a perjury. Can we conceive any thing more destructive to morality than this?

It always amazes me that such plain-spoken truth was available, in print, hundreds of years ago, and yet, it seems, most of us who were reared in the church were put through the same sort of brain washing that Voltaire and Paine decried so long ago. 

Paine feared that the French, in taking church property and dismissing the clergy, might go too far and abandon all morality at the same time. It is a curious affect of the mind that religious people have that without fear of hell and hope for heaven that we would all turn into a human form of dog packs, sexually ravishing anything that we couldn’t eat or steal.

Nothing could be farther from the truth. As Voltaire pointed out, Socrates, Cicero, Marcus Aurelius, and Epictetus had morality without Judaism, Christianity, or Islam. In Voltaire’s rather pointed way, he writes in his “Dictionary” about morality:

Babblers, preachers, extravagant controversialists! endeavor to remember that your master never announced that the sacrament was the visible sign of an invisible thing; He has nowhere admitted four cardinal virtues, and three divine ones. He has never decided whether His mother came into the world maculate or immaculate. Cease, therefore, to repeat things which never entered into His mind. He has said, in conformity with a truth as ancient as the world — Love God and your neighbor. Abide by that precept, miserable cavillers! Preach morality and nothing more. 

By the way, a “caviller” in Voltaire’s parlance meant someone who was flippant and it carried some implication of being a man who had affairs with married women. How that became the name of a basketball team is more than I can explain.

Still, more than 200 years ago, in both the newly independent United States and the much more ancient nation of France, published thinkers were calling out the fake façade of creedal religions and insisting that spiritual people focus on morality rather than beliefs, what we often talk about as the primacy of orthopraxy over orthodoxy. 

I find it to be especially revealing that Thomas Paine could say that for a priest to become a priest, he or she must begin by committing perjury. That is, in order to be ordained, a priest or pastor in almost every denomination other than Unitarians and Humanists, has to stand up for an examination in front of a congregation or presbytery. 

A few years ago, I was approached by a Presbyterian church to see if they might recruit me to their pulpit. The poor fellow who was charged with contacting me sheepishly added, “You would, of course, have to be ordained in the Presbyterian Church.” So, I said to him, “Please go and read the ordination questions for the Presbyterian church and see if you can even imagine me answering them in the affirmative.” He promised that he would and that was the last I ever heard from them. Stand me up in front of a congregation and ask me if I believe the Old and New Testaments to be the inspired word of God, or if salvation was possible through Jesus Christ alone, and I strongly suspect that my answers would knock the mortar out from between Presbyterian bricks. 

Before we started our little progressive church here, I had applied to teach preaching in a religious college in New York and the president of the college enthusiastically contacted me but he also, with some trepidation, sent me the pledge that professors had to sign, something put into their charter by the wealthy donor who had started the college . . . it was the same thing . . . demanding an unwavering pledge of personal faith in the inerrancy of scripture and the exclusive hope of salvation in Jesus Christ. 

I said, “You can’t seriously expect a religious scholar to sign that?” and he replied, “If you won’t, I can find 50 other people who will before I live my office today.”

I would rather sell used cars than to betray my own conscience . . . again. Because, you know, everyone who ever stood for ordination had to go through that once. When I was young and easier to intimidate, I did it. It won’t happen again.

I did hear of one brave Presbyterian who, during his exam, was suffering an uncommonly hard grilling from a conservative and cynical old pastor, and you know, they have a book with hundreds of questions they can ask if they choose. After a long hour of insane questioning, the elderly pastor leaned forward and asked the candidate for ordination, “Young man, are you willing to suffer damnation in fighting for the cause of Jesus Christ?” And the ordinand replied, “Sir, at this point, I am willing for this entire Presbytery to be damned for the cause of Jesus Christ.”

But folks, Voltaire and Paine, with no theological training at all, could look at every priest and pastor they had ever met, 200 years ago, and know with certainty that they had lied in order to get the job. 

They had lied and agreed to help perpetuate the myths that keep the public in fear of hell and willing to suffer unspeakable manipulation in hope of getting a better deal in eternity. 

Paine rightly points out that if your career starts with a lie, your mind is already bent and from that kind of start comes all manner of social ills. Still, Thomas Paine was right to fear a radical over reaction to revealing the fraudulent myths of religion. There were the Crusades, the Inquisition, and countless battles fought between Protestant and Catholic factions, and the slaughter of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. But, in the absence of religion, there was the Holocaust, there was the Soviet and Chinese communist genocides, the Khmer Rouge, in which millions upon millions have been killed.

The issue is not traditional religion or no religion at all, it is a need for a healthy spirituality that teaches people how to be good people. If you are an ordained minister who thinks that taking children from their parents at the American border as they flee from violence and starvation is a “Christian” think to do, then you are evidence that Christianity has failed to meaningfully survive into the 21^stcentury and it is destined to take its place alongside the worship of Zeus, Odin, and Baal. Historically curious but morally irrelevant. 

In the Christian west, capitalism has been used to impoverish and enslave the masses in order to enrich a tiny ruling minority. In the largely atheistic east, communism has been used to impoverish and enslave the masses in order to enrich a tiny ruling minority. 

And we have all been asked to be willing to give our lives in wars to defend one abusive system or the other, always and in all places, to serve to enrich the ruling minority. I’m not falling for that anymore and I hope you won’t either. Voltaire and Paine called for an age of reason in which, to use Paine’s words exactly:

I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow-creatures happy.

Pride

“Pride”   July 22, 2018   Dr. Roger Ray  

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Excerpted from On The Pulse Of Morning by Maya Angelou

You, created only a little lower than
The angels, have crouched too long in
The bruising darkness,
Have lain too long
Face down in ignorance.
Your mouths spelling words
Armed for slaughter.
The rock cries out today, you may stand on me,
But do not hide your face.
Across the wall of the world,
A river sings a beautiful song,
Come rest here by my side.
Each of you a bordered country,
Delicate and strangely made proud,
Yet thrusting perpetually under siege.
Your armed struggles for profit
Have left collars of waste upon
My shore, currents of debris upon my breast.
Yet, today I call you to my riverside,
If you will study war no more.
Come, clad in peace and I will sing the songs
The Creator gave to me when I
And the tree and stone were one.
Before cynicism was a bloody sear across your brow
And when you yet knew you still knew nothing.
The river sings and sings on.
There is a true yearning to respond to
The singing river and the wise rock.
So say the Asian, the Hispanic, the Jew,
The African and Native American, the Sioux,
The Catholic, the Muslim, the French, the Greek,
The Irish, the Rabbi, the Priest, the Sheikh,
The Gay, the Straight, the Preacher,
The privileged, the homeless, the teacher.
They hear. They all hear
The speaking of the tree.
Today, the first and last of every tree
Speaks to humankind. Come to me, here beside the river.
Plant yourself beside me, here beside the river.
Each of you, descendant of some passed on
Traveller, has been paid for.
You, who gave me my first name,
You Pawnee, Apache and Seneca,
You Cherokee Nation, who rested with me,
Then forced on bloody feet,
Left me to the employment of other seekers--
Desperate for gain, starving for gold.
You, the Turk, the Swede, the German, the Scot...
You the Ashanti, the Yoruba, the Kru,
Bought, sold, stolen, arriving on a nightmare
Praying for a dream.
Here, root yourselves beside me.
I am the tree planted by the river,
Which will not be moved.
I, the rock, I the river, I the tree
I am yours--your passages have been paid.

Early in the 2015 primary season, the liberal candidate in the field, Bernie Sanders, had a rally interrupted by Black Lives Matter protestors. He was caught off guard and I was too. Like a lot of liberals, I wondered, “Why pick on Bernie Sanders?” Why wouldn’t they be interfering with a Trump, or a Rubio, or even a Clinton rally? 

Wasn’t Bernie the most likely candidate running to be sincerely sympathetic with the political issues that most affected the black community? Bernie had been involved with civil rights demonstations since 1962, and, it seemed to me, was hitting all of the health care, living wage, and justice system issues that, in my middle aged, white man’s mind, should have made him the favorite candidate to win the black vote.

And he said, in response to the demonstrators taking the stage and stealing the microphone, just what I and a lot of people so mired in white privilege and we couldn’t see the forest for the trees, “All lives matter.” All lives do matter. It seems like an inclusive, non-prejudiced thing to say. We are not trying to advocate for any kind of a reverse racism. Sure, black lives matter, brown lives matter, white lives matter. 

It seemed innocent enough but not long after that the Democratic National Committee issued a warning to all aspiring candidates to never be caught saying “all lives matter” in public. It is not that it isn’t true, it is that it shows a cultural insensitivity that is painfully insulting.

There has never been a time when the fact that white lives matter has been in question. A little white girl goes missing and the newspaper presses run hot. That white lives matter can be seen nowhere as clearly as when an attractive white woman from an affluent family goes missing. 

Let a Laci Peterson or a Natalee Holloway go missing and the TV news cycle cannot let it go. When JonBenét Ramsey is killed, the search for the killer went on in the media for two decades. Black and Latina women and girls go missing, and there is rarely more than a mention in the news. Gwen Ifell, of PBS, even coined a phrase to describe it, “Missing White Woman Syndrome.” Not that an abducted white woman is not a horrible crime, it is just that it is not one sand grain more horrible than the abduction of black or brown women, but you could not tell that from media coverage. All lives do matter, but when you say that, you are negating, diluting, dismissing the necessary proclamation that black lives also matter . . . a fact that simply is not evident in the media or in social concerns. 

At the behest of our current president, the NFL has recently enacted rules forbidding protest during the playing of the national anthem at football games.

Colin Kaepernick started this controversy a couple of years ago when he began taking a knee during the playing of the National Anthem in protest for the numbers of black people who are being killed by the police. 

He wasn’t protesting the National Anthem, though, considering that it has a verse in it that assures any blacks that if they try to escape slavery that they will be killed, but that wasn’t his issue. 

He wasn’t disrespecting the flag or trying to insult the nation. He was silently and respectfully protesting the inexplicable number of police killings of unarmed black women and men. It isn’t just that Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, Sam Dubose, 

Philando Castile, Terence Crutcher, Alton Sterling, Jamar Clark, Jeremy McDole, Sandra Bland, Walter Scott, Eric Gardner, and Tamir Rice have been so unjustly murdered, it is that the police who kill them rarely are found guilty of a crime. Try shooting a list of unarmed white people during a traffic stop for having a broken tail light and see how that goes. 

We are being asked to be outraged by this protest which has been judged to be unpatriotic. The president seems almost unable to manage his rage, screaming “get that s.o.b. off the field!” But, now, I’m no expert, but this is what looks unpatriotic to me:

Which of these looks like a betrayal of America to you?  I’m not trying to bait you here. Kaepernick kneeling in quiet protest of an unspeakably racist problem in America looks patriotic to me. After all, what is a patriot but someone who strives to make America great? Trump’s inexplicable loyalty to the media murdering, political rival assassinating, national resource stealing dictator of Russia, that seems really dangerous to me… dangerous on the level of treason. So, seriously, which s.o.b. needs to be thrown off the field? 

The mere fact that Kaepernick has not been allowed to define his own protest… he says it is about police killings but Trump and others say it is about disrespecting the flag or disrespecting our country . . . and in response to this peaceful protest, he has been unemployed for the last two years, losing nearly $30 million in income. Still, even though he is personally losing millions of dollars, he is not backing down.

May I remind you of something? During the 2016 campaign, Trump skipped a debate and held a fundraiser for Veterans in a show of great patriotism and respect for our Veterans. He got his supporters to donated nearly $6 million dollars. Months later, investigative reporters tried to follow up on which charities had been the recipients of this charity. Do you remember who had the money? Donald J. Trump! He kept it. He was hoping no one would notice. Only when he was publicly ridiculed did he actually give the money to charities. Do you see how white privilege works? Colin Kaepernick, a very wealthy black man, engages in peaceful protest of violent crimes and he is ridiculed, and his career is ruined. Trump tries to steal millions of dollars from a charity, and it hardly survived a 24 hour news cycle before we went on to something else. Something that you probably didn’t even remember, something that doesn’t even show up on lists of Trump scandals, something that would have gotten Obama or Clinton impeached, and the Donald just takes it in stride. 

A black motorist gets pulled over for having a burned out tail light and ends up dead. 

Trump, a self-described billionaire, steals millions of dollars from his poor followers who had donated to a charity . . . do you see why Colin Kaepernick was kneeling and why Marissa Johnson took the microphone out of Bernie Sanders’ hands? 

I have been known to give speeches at civil rights rally’s in the past, saying that it is fair to make everyone race for the same finish line as long as they all get to start at the same starting line. For most of America’s history, being born white meant that you were born on third base. But when you look at the way things have been playing out lately, people of color in America don’t have the same starting line and they aren’t competing for the same finish line. 

And it seems to upset people when this fact is held up in a public way. Beyond the insulting counter claim that “All Lives Matter,” another attempt at dismissing the Black Lives Matter movement was the Blue Lives Matter mantra, in support of the police who often lose their lives in the performance of their public duties.

But has there ever been any doubt that Blue Lives matter? When the police are almost never even charged with a crime when they use lethal force against an unarmed black man and if they are charged, they are almost never found to be guilty? And when a police officer does lose his or her life in the line of duty, 

There is a motorcade, the mayor makes a soaring patriotic speech, the news helicopters fly overhead and a city goes into mourning…. and I’m not saying that they shouldn’t.

I’m just asking, where is the motorcade for Philando Castile, who was shot during a traffic stop for no apparent reason? Or Walter Scott, who was shot in the back while fleeing a traffic stop. Where was the mayor at their memorials? Where were the police in their formal uniforms standing at attention when his casket passed? Yes, Blue Lives do matter and it is a tragedy when an officer of the law is killed in the line of duty but then, no one ever questioned that, did they? 

Talking to white people about white privilege is often quite similar to trying to talk to a fish about water. We have grown up in it, enjoyed it, and unconsciously benefited from it, all while insisting that it doesn’t exist. And, I have to tell you, growing up white doesn’t always feel like being born on third base. Nearly half of our white children are born into poverty. White kids sometimes live in violent, drug addicted, alcoholic, dangerous homes where they are subjected to sexual violence and deprivations of all sorts. 

And yet, you would hardly be able to find one of those deprived children who would be willing to switch skin color, with even an upper-class black kids because, consciously or unconsciously, they know that their skin color is their pass in many of life’s most difficult spots. It shouldn’t be that way, it just is. 

You remember the story about the white woman who was pulled over by a traffic cop in Georgia after dark and she told officer Greg Abbott that she was nervous because of all the things that she had seen on the news about police shooting people at traffic stops, and Officer Abbott reassured her saying, “But you’re not black. Remember, we only shoot black people. Yeah, we only kill black people, right?” Now, there may have been some bitter, gallows humor there, but the story line is familiar enough that everyone knows what he meant. And this is a guy who has been pulling people over in Georgia for nearly 30 years. He didn’t get this way just last summer. 

I know that most cops aren’t racists, and I know that most of them are not corrupt, and most don’t have serious authority problems. But I will tell you what I do believe. I believe that most of them know who the racist, corrupt, mentally unstable cops are and they almost all observe the thin blue line of silence in which they protect one another, even the ones they know good and well need to have their badge and gun taken from them. And until they do, I’m not standing up for the national anthem again. To paraphrase Forest Gump, “I’m no NFL quarterback, but I know the difference between right and wrong.” 

Black people are trying to explain what it is like being black in America. We don’t have to shout back that “All lives matter,” or “Blue lives matter.” In fact, we don’t have to say anything at all. We just have to shut up and listen. That’s an uncomfortable prescription for most of us, but it needs to happen, and we should lead the way.

Racism is not an unsolvable problem, we just have to stop being so absurdly defensive. Just give up the microphone now and then, and when someone is protesting, don’t try to tell them that they are doing it the wrong way or at the wrong time. Just shut up and listen. We can get through this together.

As Maya Angelu so beautifully said at Bill Clinton’s first innaugeration:

So say the Asian, the Hispanic, the Jew,
The African and Native American, the Sioux,
The Catholic, the Muslim, the French, the Greek,
The Irish, the Rabbi, the Priest, the Sheikh,
The Gay, the Straight, the Preacher,
The privileged, the homeless, the teacher. . .

If you will study war no more.
Come, clad in peace and I will sing the songs
The Creator gave to me when I
And the tree and stone were one.

We still look for the day when the many will become one. That is when America will be great. E Pluribus Unum 

“In This Life”       July 15, 2018     Dr. Roger Ray

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 Harper Lee,  To Kill a Mockingbird

 “Sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whisky bottle in the hand of (another)... There are just some kind of men who - who're so busy worrying about the next world they've never learned to live in this one, and you can look down the street and see the results.”

We all know the story of Ann Frank, the little German girl who was forced into hiding from the Nazis in the attic of their home in Amsterdam. We know that the family and their four friends who hid with them were found and executed but the diary that Ann wrote while in hiding is a classic that few people in the west have not read.

There is one passage in that diary that strikes me as being apropos to our current situation. She wrote: “In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again.”

We are living in a time in which we have grown tired of hearing people on the news say that what Donald Trump did today was “unprecedented.” In fact, MSNBC’s news host, Stephanie Ruhle, started to fine guests on her show $1 for every time they even uttered the word, “unprecedented,” because our president’s willingness to insult our oldest and closest allies, his willingness to ignore the very serious crimes of dictators and our most dangerous foes, as well as his whole demeanor of narcissism, greed, racism, and moronic, misspelled tweets, not only embarrasses us but it gives leaders of governments around the world reason to be quite rationally afraid. 

I was a kid in the 1960’s but I remember the turbulence of the Civil Rights Movement, the protests of the War in Vietnam, and the economic woes of serial recessions. I don’t want to exaggerate our current situation and say that it is the worst ever, but it is bad. It is the worst in a couple of generations and, I think it is safe to say that, Trump is the dumbest and most mentally unstable person ever to sit in the Oval office, and that includes the White House custodial staff. 

But, as Ann Frank said, people are basically good, and even though this present moment is revealing some of the absolute worst aspects of our national Id, I am confident, as she was, that this is just a season in history and it will pass and our society will again find our river banks and return to sanity. Peace and tranquility will return, one day, at least for those who survive this mess. 

But I took as our wisdom lesson today, this brief quote from Harper Lee’s famous 1960 novel, To Kill a Mocking Bird, in which the Alabama, depression era lawyer, Atticus Finch, explains to his daughter, Scout, why the people in their quiet little town are so full of racism and malice. He says: “Sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whisky bottle in the hand of (another)... There are just some kind of men who - who're so busy worrying about the next world they've never learned to live in this one, and you can look down the street and see the results.”

In Scout’s world, people were polite, church going, respectable folks but when a black man was falsely accused to raping a white woman, she was forced to see her town in an entirely different light. It is difficult not to vilify people for doing bad things, evil things, horrible things, but the rational truth of it is that most people are basically good, even though they have blind spots and they make bad decisions for self-serving reasons. 

I honestly don’t know who to give the credit for coming up with this observation first, but it has been said that, “A religious person will do what he or she is told to do regardless of what is right. A spiritual person will do what is right regardless of what he or she has been told.” I should add a footnote that all of us are religious sometimes, even though we strive to be spiritual. 

Harper Lee was drawing a controversial sword in 1960 when she has her character, Atticus Finch, point out that religion helps some people to be better people, but it covers up the moral failings of others . . . or possibly worse, it may even provoke them to do many more evil things because they have been told that they are right.

The physicist, Steven Weinberg, said, “With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.” The goal of the progressive faith movement is not to discard our faith heritage or to despise it but to restore it to sanity. I believe that the root of all of the world’s religions is really an ethical conversation about how to be a good and compassionate person. It is only when these ethical conversations are mixed with dogma and magical thinking that they go off the rails.

If we, something like what Thomas Jefferson did, simply take a pen knife to our Bible or any other religious book, and cut out anything about stuff that is other worldly, invisible, or based purely in magical conjecture, then take a look at what you have left. Even what remains may not be moral teachings you would want to repeat in the 21^stcentury but the great majority of it is.

The difference for us is that we want to be in dialogue with religious texts, we don’t just want to be obedient. Many traditional Christians such as Catholics, Lutherans, and Episcopalians, were raised on creeds and taught to memorize answers to a catechism. Those of us from more evangelical backgrounds had a lot more in common with Muslims, in that we were expected to read and memorize our holy books, but in all quarters there was a stated or implied insistence upon rote memorization and obedience.

You really can’t say that we don’t do much the same in other arenas of our lives. I cringe a little bit anytime someone calls me “Rev” or implies that I am a Christian because I don’t want to own the associations with those words, but I have the same reaction when someone says that I am a Democrat because at least half of what the democratic party has done in the past few years would embarrass Charles Darwin.

My former in-laws, true children of the south, were staunch members of the conservative Church of Christ and they were convinced that Baptists, Methodists, and even their cousins in the Christian Church were as hell bound as Muslims and Buddhists, but they felt the same way about being American, and more specifically, about being Republicans. They were as offended by learning that I had voted for Jimmy Carter as they were by my Disciples of Christ roots.

Dogma doesn’t teach us to think, it stops us from thinking. And that is as true for politics as it is for religion. I fear that it is probably also true for grammar, who is to say, after all, that “a lot” is always two words and never one, or that “y’all” is always slang and a sign of a lack of education? Well, ok, I say those things, but maybe I shouldn’t. 

I am not trying to make light of our current crisis, but I am making something of a faith statement in that I believe in the basic goodness of our species and this current cloud will pass, this too shall pass. People will return to sanity. The question is how can we help them to get there a bit quicker?

I am willing to be totally over most of the literature of the self-help movement of the 70’s and 80’s but if you don’t mind me snatching one little gem from the dung heap of pop-psychology:  The very popular book of the 1970’s, Dr. Eric Berne’s Games People Play, diagramed the interactions of the Id, Ego, and Super-Ego, in our relationships with one another. 

To make it a bit easier to understand, he called our three ego states, the parent, the adult, and the child. Our prejudices and immediate decisions tend to come out of our parent ego state. That is also where religious dogma lives. Our child ego state is where our fun loving, impulsive, and sometimes our needy thinking resides. Even elderly couples who have been married for many decades will sometimes speak to one another as a parent speaking to a child: “You didn’t really spend money on that did you?” or “Would you please start doing your own dishes?”

Dr. Berne asked his readers to see that the parent voice in us tries to control others through shame and dogmatic statements, and the child in us tries to manipulate through willfulness, name calling, and temper tantrums, that the only way out of this is for someone to start thinking and speaking as an adult. 

It is one thing to call our president a liar, and he is, but it is another to remain in an adult mode and when Trump says that Germany is entirely controlled by Russia because they get 70% of their energy from Russia, we can flatly reply, “No, Germany gets just 22% of their energy needs from Russia and that is just natural gas that they prefer to burning coal, which they have in abundant supply.” Also, Germany is adding more and more wind and solar powered energy sources so Russia has no hold on Germany at all. That is an adult response and if Trump or his supporters keep shouting “fake news” it is up to us not to fall into a child ego state and start arguing out of insults. The more Trump acts like a child, the more important it is for us to act like adults. 

When he says that the USA pays for 90% of Nato’s expenses, we can correct that quite factually by just saying, actually, we only pay 22%. When we shame our Trump supporting family members and friends for having voted for a child stealing, misogynistic, Islamophobic, xenophobic, moron, then we are taking on the role of a parent and that never really helps. It may feel a bit cathartic at the moment, but it doesn’t help.

You don’t speak to their child and you don’t speak to their parent, you speak as an adult to an adult, and it may take months and dozens of exchanges but the hope is that we will have more adult conversations and less name calling and shaming. 

About 25 years ago I visited a counseling client who was a patient at the Marion Center, a local mental health hospital. She had gone through a divorce and some rocky relationships and she had begun to try and manipulate everyone through attention seeking suicidal gestures that finally led to police action and a forced stay in a mental hospital. She said something to me during that visit that has stuck with me as one of the basic facts of human psychology; she said, “I have learned that if you don’t want people to treat you like you are crazy, you have to stop acting like you’re are crazy.” 

Traditional expressions of Christianity, with all of its Bible studies, sacraments, guilt, and shame, has not proven effective in stemming the tide of insanity that is pouring out of the White House and the Congress and is now spreading threateningly into the Supreme Court. Every provocative tweet, every incendiary allegation, every dishonest, narcissistic statement, invites us to get down in the mud with him and his supporters, and with good reason . . . just don’t do it. 

If shaming people for being ignorant would make them smarter, we would be living in the MENSA Club capital of the world. If provocative name calling and push back would make people be rational, Putin would be a Peace Corp volunteer and Kim Jong Un would be a hairstylist. 

But the truth is that we have some hard work and some hard times ahead of us. I wish that all Christians could get their head out of the clouds, stop worrying about

Heaven and hell and start worrying about kids getting lead poisoning from tap water in Flint, brown kids being put into kiddy prison in Texas and Arizona, and poor people dying from lack of access to health care. I don’t mind their theological diatribes on baptism, communion, and their tediously repetitious praise hymns if only they would feed the hungry, house the homeless, care for the sick, and welcome the aliens in our midst. 

You have been going to Bible studies all of your lives, and when you hear Sarah Huckabee Sanders, and Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, tell you that it is biblical to take children away from their parents, you don’t need me to remind you that the Bible in their hands is as dangerous as giving the car keys to a drunk Stevie Wonder. You know better. I know that you are basically good and that, removed from your partisan invective, that there is an adult in there that is ready to return to sanity. I just want to help to be part of the solution and not part of the problem.

Escape from suffering

Escape from suffering     July 8, 2018      Dr. Roger L. Ray

click here to see the video

(I will post the full text within the next 24 hours)

The 4 noble truths of Buddhism provide an path out of the suffering that defines human existence. Seeking the middle way is a spiritual goal that should be familiar to persons of all faith backgrounds, helping us to find a healthy way through a culture that is always pushed towards the extremes of consumerism, hoarding, addiction, pornography, and partisan bickering. 

These progressive sermons are available as podcasts at:  https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/progressive-faith-sermons/id419225485

“An American Creed”

“An American Creed”                      July 1, 2018             Dr. Roger Ray

 click here to see the video

From Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass”

"Love the earth and sun and the animals,
Despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks,
Stand up for the stupid and crazy,
Devote your income and labor to others,
Hate tyrants, argue not concerning God,
Have patience and indulgence toward the people.

Take off your hat to nothing known or unknown,
or to any man or number of men,
Go freely with powerful uneducated persons,
And with the young, and with the mothers or families.

Re-examine all you have been told
in school or church or in any book,
Dismiss whatever insults your own soul;
And your very flesh shall be a great poem…

And have the richest fluency, not only in its words,
But in the silent lines of its lips and face,
And between the lashes of your eyes,
and In every motion and joint of your body."

         I received a phone call last week from one of our listeners in Chicago. Tom introduced himself saying that he was a progressive before they were called progressives and he sent me a copy of a book he wrote 40 years ago to prove his point. And, in fact, 30 years ago, we progressive religious types were more often called “liberals” and before that we were called “academics.” I have no doubt that in a few years we will be called something else. I may more generally prefer the way that the Buddha is said to have described himself, he said that he was not a God, or a demi-god, nor even a prophet. He said simply that he was awake. 

Tom was understandably proud of having seen through the fog of religious supernatural teachings without the benefit of having gone to college or having had a mentor to help him. 

That is not a small thing to be able to say about yourself but I have made it almost a hobby to find examples this kind of awakening in literature and among the people that I meet. A last week we read a 2000 year old passage from Marcus Aurelius that revealed a very mature progressive insight and we often use quotes from Mark Twain, Thomas Paine, Voltaire, or Thomas Jefferson that reveal that a lot of people who did not spend years in seminary or a graduate school of religion were able to literally wake up from the illusions and magical thinking that have left so much of history in a fog.

For our Independence weekend, I had selected this passage from Walt Whitman’s most famous book of poems, “Leaves of Grass.” Whitman first published this collection when the United States was not yet even 75 years old, but it reflected the imagination and progressive view of religious and political liberty, and a deep respect for the rights and value of every person. I took this passage as almost a creedal statement for what it might mean to be a patriotic American:

       "Love the earth and sun and the animals,
Despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks,
Stand up for the stupid and crazy,
Devote your income and labor to others,
Hate tyrants, argue not concerning God,
Have patience and indulgence toward the people.

Take off your hat to nothing known or unknown,
or to any man or number of men,
Go freely with powerful uneducated persons,
And with the young, and with the mothers or families.

Re-examine all you have been told
in school or church or in any book,
Dismiss whatever insults your own soul;
And your very flesh shall be a great poem…

This is the America they told us about in school, isn’t it? The America that was a beacon of liberty, in which there was to be no aristocrat and peasant, and where there was to be no religious coercion, and where every person’s rights would be equally respected. 

I often run into people who act like our progressive views on faith and civics is some kind of brand new, far left, and uninformed concoction but see, this is Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, this is Fredrick Douglas, Sojourner Truth, and Susan B. Anthony. What we are trying to articulate, what we demonstrate and protest for, what we stand for, is not a new vision but it is one that is at risk. 

For people who are awake, this has been a bad week in the news. Even before Justice Kennedy announced his retirement, the Supreme Court handed down rulings that further the cause of the wealthy elite who want to break the back of labor unions to drive the wages of working Americans even lower than they already are. . . literally a political favor for the Koch brothers. And they voted to affirm the blatantly religious discrimination in Trump’s “Muslim ban,” a decision that anyone with a single freshman class in civics would know was unconstitutional but the constitution doesn’t say what it says, it says what the majority of Supreme Court Justices say it says and, right now, they are interpreting it so far to the right that it would seem to undermine the Revolutionary War and reinstitute a monarchy with its classes of lords and commoners in America. 

This week we had another mass shooting, this time at a newspaper office in Maryland. This is an example of what you have heard me say several times. . . the charged rhetoric from the right, when Trump calls journalists “the enemy of the people,” and the “lying media,” and when he points them out at his rallies and encourages people to boo and shout insults at the press, calling them “disgusting” people . . . it is not that Trump will have journalists shot, it is that their rhetoric encourages their unhinged followers to do it. 

When the President of the United States repeatedly and publicly derides the media, while praising the likes of Vladimir Putin, Kim Jun-Un, and Xi Jinping, then there will inevitably be some gun nut who takes him seriously, someone who will kill journalists. 

I have lately been reading Tailspin, a book by Yale Journalism professor, Steven Brill, about the 50 year downward spiral America has been in, abandoning the noble vision of this country articulated by Jefferson, Washington, Emerson, Whitman, Paine, and Thoreau, that has been threatened by people and politicians who want to make themselves great rather than to make America Great. 

I’m a news junky and it is tempting to focus so microscopically on the current moment that we lose sight of the big picture in which the growing influence of money in politics and the massive transfer of our nation’s wealth into the hands of the few, is a process that has been going on for a very long time. 

I don’t understand how some movies are released on Direct TV or Netflix before they are released in theaters, even when they boast a cast of big dollar talent, but the 2017 movie, Shock and Awe, is worth figuring out how to see it. It documents the journalistic work of Knight Ridder in the buildup to the war in Iraq. Knight Ridder is generally recognized as being the only news agency to accurately call out the Bush administration’s false narrative that created their case for going to war. Sadly, Knight Ridder is a news agency, not a newspaper, so their associated newspapers elected not to run most of what their excellent and courageous reporters wrote. 

I know the feeling. During 2003, I spent most of my time and energy trying to wake people up to the evident fact that the Bush administration was lying to us, and my efforts didn’t amount to much except alienating a lot of formerly supportive church members. But the New York Times eventually apologized to their readers for just printing the lies of the Bush administration rather than the honest stories written by Knight Ridder. I’m still waiting for an apology from National Ave. Christian Church but, as Confucius said, “He who waits for roast duck to fly into his mouth, waits a long time.” 

But in case anyone has forgotten, let me retrace some of these 15 year old steps. The Bush administration used the Al Qaeda attacks on the US on 9-11 to manufacture a case for invading Iraq. It was a completely spurious claim, cooked up for President George W. Bush by Vice President Dick Cheney, 

The Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, and advisor to the President, Condoleezza Rice,

and the Deputy Secretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz, and sold to the UN by then Secretary of State, Gen. Colin Powell. 

I don’t want to be melodramatic about this. . . I don’t want you to hear me as being partisan, or divisive but here are the facts, facts that I knew in 2003 and facts that virtually everyone has acknowledged for the past decade: These six people dismissed reliable intelligence and knowingly inflated what they knew to be entirely false intelligence in order to start a war with a nation that had nothing to do with 9-11 and which had not and could not attack the United States.

They lied to the American people to start a war where we still have troops engaged on the ground, 15 years later. A war that has already cost us $2 trillion dollars and in which more than 36,000 American troops have been killed or seriously injured, and, if you can stand to think about it, more than a million citizens of Iraq have been killed… a million men, women and children who had done nothing to us.

This is, in the most flat-footed, even handed, rational way of thinking, undeniably a war crime against Iraq and treason against the United States of America and yet none of these six people have ever been charged with so much as jaywalking! There are nations where they do not dare to travel because they would be arrested and charged with war crimes but here in the USA, they smile, appear on talk shows, write books, and paint while sitting in the bathtub. 

I heard Colin Powell speak at MSU a few years ago and I went fully expecting to hear him apologize for his role in selling the UN on all of the lies that let to this inexcusable war and he actually spent over an hour nearly breaking his arm, patting himself on the back for his storied role in American history. I was disgusted by Powell but even more, it has left me to wonder about the privileged class in America. . . the entitled, who, no matter what evil they do, are never charged with a crime and are never held responsible for their actions.

As soon as he took office, Obama announced that he would not prosecute the war crimes committed under the Bush administration because the nation needed to look forward and not backward. Now, folks, I can understand that when Ford pardoned Nixon, it was for the good of the country to avoid a trial that would have ended up sending a former President to prison. I am not sure that I agree with it, but I understand it.

But with two million Americans in prison for smoking pot, shop lifting, and burglary, how can you cook up a plot to waste $2 trillion American tax dollars, kill or wound 30,000 soldiers, and murder a million innocent civilians and just get book deals and six figure speaking fees? Are we a nation of laws? Is Justice blind? Or are there people who have to obey the laws or face severe consequences and another class of people who can do absolutely the most evil things done in the world today, and suffer no repercussions at all?

Am I a crazy, leftist liberal to believe that all of us are equally accountable to the law? Or am I just awake? I’m not trying to be strident about this. I think that our judicial system is out of control in being way too eager to hand out prison sentences. I wish that I could put at least 3/4ths of the people in prison on parole today. Prison should only be used to protect us from violent criminals, but these six people are directly responsible for having murdered more people than everyone we have in prison now, combined! 

And they have never been charged with a crime and for that everyone in America should be ashamed of our country. Is that too strong? Am I wrong here?

I want America to be great but I want us to be great for being a free nation, a nation that values liberty, civil rights, and has a justice system that is the same for blacks and whites, gay and straight, rich and poor, and for the powerful and for the rest of us. 

To get back to our current situation . . . Two years ago, Mitch McConnell stole a Supreme Court appointment from President Barack Obama. In an entirely unconstitutional and unethical political theft, he refused to give Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland a Senate hearing. Obama should have fought back hard but he seemed to accept it, and, frankly, most of the rest of us were passive about it because we were mistakenly confident that Clinton would win the presidential election, and when she didn’t, we were too shocked to muster much complaint. I didn’t get too excited because I thought Garland was way too conservative for the Supreme Court . . . you can mark that down in your little book as being at least one time that I was wrong. There may be other examples but I encourage you not to be petty.

So Trump was able to appoint the 49 year old, conservative darling, Justice Neil Gorsuch, to the court, giving at least 30 years to another anti-gay, anti-civil rights, pro-voter suppression, and anti-abortion voice on the nation’s highest court, and now Trump is cued up to appoint another nightmare to lock down the right-wing, anti-American nature of the court for another two generations.

Folks, I may be delusional. You will have to decide that for yourselves, but I do not see this current state of affairs through the lens of a battle between Republicans and Democrats, or between conservatives and liberals. In my mind, we are engaged in a battle for a free and democratic America. We are engaged in a struggle between those who want to take reproductive rights away from women, who want to take living salaries and job security from blue collar workers who want to take voting rights from minorities and the poor, and who have demonstrated that they are willing to literally take mothers’ babies from them in order to scare immigrants from coming to our country – we are in a struggle against vicious insanity and a morally awake America, an America about which we can be patriotic with good reason.

Now, I don’t want to be the kind of person who stands up here and wastes your time with a lot of political “woe is me” stuff, just pounding my chest over how angry I am about illegal wars, aggressive immigration tactics, and ham-fisted management of the government without giving some positive suggestions. I have a lot, but this is not a stump speech so let me narrow it down to just this immediate concern: 

Since Mitch McConnell clearly unconstitutionally prevented Merrick Garland’s rightful place on the bench, I think that Senators who are awake should make it clear that they will not vote to approve anyone Trump nominates other than Merrick Garland. 

We need to stand up for what is right and start insisting that our government do the same. And, yes, I know that it probably won’t work but that doesn’t mean that we should cave in so easily.

Secondly, we should vote this illegitimate regime out of office this fall and when we have control of the house and the senate, we should change the number of Supreme Court Justices from 9 to 13 or 15. There is nothing in the constitution about how many justices comprise the Supreme Court and if we have five right-wing justices who want to protect corporations and take rights away from citizens, we need to outnumber them with people who are more woke. 

And we need some real diversity on the court. Sure, we have some women and one sort of black guy but every single member of the Supreme Court for the past generation has been either a Catholic or a Jew and every single one of them attended either Harvard or Yale. That’s not diversity and that’s not reflective of America. 

However, I understand the value of appointed younger jurists so that they have a longer tenure on the court, but I would like to see this tactic and raise it one . . . there is nothing in the constitution that says that a member of the Supreme Court has to have graduated from Harvard or Yale or, for that matter, any law school at all.

I’d like to nominate people who might not have experience on the bench but who have shown that they have courage and that they understand ethics. 

I would like to nominate David Hogg and Emma Gonzales, survivors of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas school shooting in Florida. They strike me as being great citizens and exemplary leaders. And there might be a reason to expect sane gun laws to finally come to America.

I don’t know their names, but I would like to find a couple of the mothers of these kids who have been taken from their families and made to sleep on the floor of Trumps dog kennel prisons in Texas, I think they would make good jurors and I would have a lot more confidence in their ability to hand down decisions related to immigration than this Muslim-ban-approving-posse occupying the bench right now. 

And just to show that I can also be inclusive, I’d like to nominate one more Catholic and one more Jew . . . Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. 

Sure, they’re comedians but sadly, over the past 20 years, they have made more sense and shown more insight than any elected official, Republican or Democrat, that I have heard speak. And I can say this about them, something that I cannot say about many politicians I have ever known, I feel like we can trust them. That would make a court of 15 people and I believe it would be the best Supreme Court we have ever had. 

It has been a difficult week for people of conscience, but we are a part of a long and storied heritage of progressive people who have a vision for our nation, a nation founded in liberty and justice, and always striving for a kind of equality that we know is right, even if the world has never yet seen it. 

I refuse to give up on America. We have lost a lot of territory in the last two years but I am not ready to surrender and I pray that you are not either.

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXGUNvIFTQw)