“Philosophy of Religion”

“Philosophy of Religion” July 31, 2022 Dr. Roger Ray Click here to see the video

Martin Heidegger, “Sentiments, even the finest, have no place in philosophy. Sentiments, it is said, are something irrational. Philosophy, on the other hand, is not only something rational but is the actual guardian of reason. In making this assertion we have come unawares to a kind of decision as to what philosophy is. On what may well have been the absolute worst day in my four decades in parish ministry, I was called to the home of some close friends and church members by the police. I arrived as an ambulance was speeding out of the driveway and I was ushered in by the police who were testing my friend’s hands to see if there was gunpowder residue on his hands. His wife had attempted suicide with a pistol that my friend said that he had forgotten was on a closet shelf; but she was not dead. Once the police were satisfied that my friend had not, in fact, shot his wife, we rushed to the emergency room where we were met in the hallway by the neuro- surgeon who had been working on Marjory. The surgeon said to us, “I might be able to keep her alive, but she will have lost her ability to see or to speak, and she certainly will never walk again.” He escorted us into the emergency room where we saw his wonderful, intelligent, talented, and loving wife with two gloved nurses literally holding her brain inside her shattered skull. With all the feeling that a used car salesman might have in asking what color car you wanted, the surgeon looked at my friend and said, “What do you want for me to do?” Their two sons lived out of town, and he didn’t want to make a decision without consulting them but there was no time to make phone calls. He screamed, “I can’t play God! I can’t make a decision like this!” I was so glad that the staff could see that they needed to keep the flood of hospital chaplains away from us. And I don’t say that to diminish them. I am sure that their prayers and formulaic intonations of piety are helpful to the kind of people who hold onto that kind of supernatural theistic view of God and the world, but they would have only made this situation worse, by trying to hide a tragedy behind a vail of pious words and passages of scripture. We didn’t need for them to lead us in a prayer for a miracle and we sure didn’t need them in the ER as we watch Marjory die, telling us, “She is in a better place now.” Such platitudes would only have made matters worse. I was joined there by the hospital’s ethicist, a good friend of mine, a former Trappist monk who had earned a PhD in philosophy and now worked, not as a chaplain, but literally as an institutional philosopher helping people to grapple with complex ethical decisions. Together we assured my grieving friend that he was not being put in the position to play God. Restoring his wife to her former life was not on the menu of choices…. That might have been a “God-like” choice. But really, his only choice was to either make her pain last a little longer, a couple of weeks, at best, or to let her go now. It was still the hardest thing he ever had to do, but it wasn’t much of a decision. We agreed to let her go as quickly as possible. It was a horrible day, in every way. The whole family was deeply grateful for my having been there although, honestly, I didn’t do anything. There was nothing to be done. I conducted the memorial service in a standing room only large sanctuary for this very popular and beloved victim of suicide, surrounded by hundreds of people who obviously felt about as sad as I did. When it was all over, the hospital ethicist and I had a quiet moment together in which he made the observation, “You know, all we really do is assure people that what they already know is true and it is ok for them to act on what they know is right.” Philosophy, when it is applied in the most meaningful way, can help to clear out the rubbish of superstition and unfounded social expectations and allow us to apply reason to the most difficult moments and problems of life. Creedal religion is often basically whistling through the graveyard, trying to deny our fear, our pain, our grief. The ethicist and I both certainly represented religion in that moment, but at heart, we were two philosophers determined to simply make it safe for reason and reality to take the stage in the midst of the kind of crisis that could have gotten a lot worse if magical or superstitious thoughts were interjected. For most of the past two hundred years, colleges and universities had a department that was called “Philosophy and Religion.” They put the two together for a host of very logical reasons. Most theologians wrote and thought like philosophers and many philosophers often wandered into discussing matters of metaphysics. When I was a student in those departments, we often teased one another saying that philosophers, in their search for truth, were looking for a black cat in a dark room. But theologians, who tried to clarify the nature of God, were looking for a black cat in a dark room that wasn’t there. But finding that black cat is exactly what attracted me to the philosophy department in the first place, as a 17 year old college student raised in rural Kentucky where the only social outlets were the public schools and my family’s church. I had been taught to believe a whole lot of things that didn’t really stand up to even casual examination, and I wanted to find proof. I wanted a persuasive, believable argument that could prove that the religion that I had been brought up to believe so whole heartedly, was actually true. At least initially, to my young mind, the great philosophers were some reassurance: Anselm and Rene Descartes argued deductively in what we call an Ontological proof. That is, without resorting to any external evidence, reasoning only through logic, saying that God was that being of whom none greater could be conceived and as existence is greater than non-existence, God must, therefore exist. Anselm seemed quite bright in the 11th century, and it satisfied me as a college freshman but it didn’t have much staying power. We have a process in philosophy called, “reductio ad absurdum,” or reduce the idea to absurdity. We could ask Anselm, “What about the burrito of which none greater could be conceived?” Ontology It wasn’t as persuasive as he thought it would be. Leibniz and Thomas Aquinas took an inductive approach, offering several cosmological arguments based on observation of the known universe. At least for Leibniz, it was the simple concept of the “unmoved mover.” That is, the universe is in motion and some force must have set it in motion and we’ll agree to call that unknown force God. Aquinas, though he didn’t mention a watch specifically, basically offered several views of cosmology or teleological argument, that said, “Look, if you find a watch, you have to know that there is a watch maker somewhere.” The universe is infinitely more complicated than a watch and so it must have a maker and that maker is God. This is what many conservatives still appeal to as the argument from intelligent design. It has a certain appeal. Our air is a mixture of hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen, we have to have oxygen but if our air was just a little more oxygen rich, it would kill us, or a little more nitrogen rich, it would choke us. And our gravity is just strong enough to keep a layer of air around us that makes more meteors burn up upon entry and thick enough to protect us from radiation. Our planet is the only one in the solar system with a surface temperature that is neither too hot nor too cold to allow for life to exist. It is appealing to think that this wasn’t just chance, that the presence of water, soil, sun, all the right gases, all of the right elements to make life possible must come from divine will. However, you just have to flip it around to realize that the reason there is life on this planet and not on any others that we know of is because we have the right gases, temperature, water, soil, and sun to make it happen. If this is all a divine plan, then God would have messed up on billions and billions of other planets, only to finally get it right here…. Which is not appealing in that whole, being-none-greater-can-be-conceived of category. Philosophy provides us with the means and the methods to think about what we believe critically but it cannot provide us with certainty. You cannot prove that one religion is either right or even more right than others, either by pure reason or by an appeal to evidence. Which often does matter much to most religious people who just lift high their as yet unread copy of the Bible and declare that their interpretation of certain key passages is true, and the rest of the world be damned. In that sense, the famous TV preachers are not much different from the famous TV lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, who says “We have lots of theories about voter fraud, we just don’t have any evidence.” Quoting the Bible or any other holy book is not proof of anything unless you are willing to grant the first absurd premise that God wrote this mess. Training in philosophy makes it easier to live with ambiguity than to live with false certainty. Heidegger calls philosophy the “guardian of reason,” where no mere sentiment should be allowed to hold sway. You use logic, critical thinking, to examine your beliefs, to test your religion, straining out the magic and the superstition. But then, and I think that even Heidegger would agree, once you have the ground cleared, you bring the sentiment back into that rational universe. You take someone as rational, as smart, as Albert Einstein, and after everything he has theorized and helped us all to understand, he says: “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead —his eyes are closed. The insight into the mystery of life, coupled though it be with fear, has also given rise to religion. To know what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms—this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness.” The trend in colleges and universities over the past generation is to abolish their Philosophy and Religion departments entirely or to assign those topics either to their history or their anthropology departments. At least where I used to teach, our Philosophy and Religion department was assigned to the History department and their chair of that department just never schedules many classes in philosophy or religion and what few that you may find offered are typically only regarding eastern religions, ignoring western traditions, and Drury, I may remind you, is a church related college. I understand what has prompted this. Religion is so often an intellectual embarrassment that there is some reason to regard it as more of a historical artifact than as an operative way of understanding the world, but I am afraid that they are missing the point of why we have considered the study of philosophy and religion to be crucial to education. We are turning liberal arts colleges into vocational schools that exist only to help students to get a more lucrative job when the purpose of a liberal arts education was never intended to be vocational, it was supposed to teach students how to think critically, how to understand the world, and how to grasp the meaning of our own existence. I realize that may be too esoteric for people to consider these days. Trust me, before I shelled out tens of thousands of dollars for my daughter’s university education, I wanted to be sure that it was going to lead to a better future for her. I totally get it. And I am a big advocate for vocational education. I’m not saying that many people need to endure earning a degree in philosophy but, I am saying that there is more to life than getting a higher paying job. And, the church, the government, corporations, and even the sciences are impoverished if we lose the ability to combine critical thinking with a sense of awe and wonder about our own existence. I hope that you are never in as dramatic a circumstance as the one I described earlier but we are all mortal and life and death decisions will come to all of us from time to time. I just hope that when that moment comes, that we are all able to think beyond empty religion and far beyond the bottom line of profit and loss. To move from the absurdity of superstition to the callousness of mere economic practicality is to skip over everything that makes life meaningful. When was the last time you visited an art museum? When did you last read a book of poetry? Have you been to a planetarium since you were made to go in grade school? Do you still have a library card? How often do you attend a live concert or live theater? I’m just making the modest proposal that, in light of our mortality, you should remember that there is more to life than going to work and staring at your phone.

Religion vs Spirituality

Religion vs Spirituality July 24, 2022 Dr. Roger Ray Click here to see the video Albert Einstein: The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed. Similar to the hysteria brewed up about Y2K at the beginning of this century by people who didn’t understand computers, in 2012 there was an attempt at creating similar panic around what was purported to be the end of the ancient Mayan calendar by people who don’t understand Mesoamerican history. There was a lot of speculation that on December 21, 2012 the world would end because the ancient Mayans had ended their calendar on that date. I have no idea why anyone thought that an ancient culture’s calendar should project time into infinity or why the Mayans would be able predict the end of the world when they didn’t seem to be able to predict the collapse of their own civilization. But, for reasons that don’t make any logical sense, people tend to think that ancient wisdom is somehow superior to modern wisdom. I suspect that most of you, were brought up to believe this unquestioningly, whether your family was Christian, Jewish, or Muslim, you grew up being taught to assume that the wisdom in your ancient holy book was superior to anything else, whether it was a history book or a physics book; your holy book equated to truth. This is less so for Buddhists and Hindus who are typically more focused on practices than they are on holy writ, but still, in all of our cultures, we tend to award ancient insight with some special magical knowledge. And when the facts collide with scripture, many of us in more progressive communities, were often guilty of intellectual gymnastics as we tried to explain what this or that term actually meant in ancient Hebrew or Kione Greek. We labored over Paul’s references to homosexuality, insisting that he didn’t really mean what he apparently rather clearly said. When, what should be obvious to all of us, is that these ancients, while often producing wonderful poetry and narratives, also had very unsophisticated knowledge of science or psychology and, as Bill Maher so plainly puts it, no author of any part of these scriptures had the slightest idea where the sun goes at night. Qualitatively, if you lay the writings of Plato and Aristotle beside the content of the Bible or the Quran, it is evident that ancient Greek philosophy is a whole lot more insightful, better written, and more intelligent than anything in our holy books, but we still wouldn’t turn to Plato or Aristotle for answers to complex modern problems. I am grateful to have spent time studying the scriptures as an account of the beliefs of our ancestors and studying history can be informative about interpreting our present, but turning to scripture as a source of moral authority in the 21st century is every bit as dumb as trying to use 1st century dentistry to teach our next generation of dentists. This devotion to ancient texts is a lot of what has made modern religion so irrelevant to this generation. We are living in a time of fairly rapid decline in participation in organized religion. I don’t want to get too bogged down in graphs and statistics but let me just describe the speed of the trend. We entered this century with about 70% of Americans at least claiming membership in some kind of religious community, and in the first two decades that figure had actually dropped below half. I have not found reliable numbers more specifically looking at the effects of the pandemic, but I know that the past 2.5 years have been devastating to our Springfield congregation and I suspect that it has had a huge impact in most churches. The denomination into which I was born, boasted about 2 million members when I was a child. By the time I graduated from seminary, that was down to about 1 million. In the past few years, their active numbers have dropped to about 200,000, a tenth of what they were when I was a kid. The much more conservative Churches of Christ, have experienced about the same decline. Even Catholic Church attendance has dropped by about 20% during this century. This has been especially devastating to monastic communities, many of which are simply watching themselves decline into extinction. The decline rate has not been as great among authoritarian churches like the Catholics and the Mormons, in part because strict loyalty to the teachings of the church is demanded of them from an early age. You can typically switch from a Methodist Church to a Presbyterian Church without being disowned by your parents but leaving the Mormon or Catholic church is often a rather more dramatic departure. Catholics even have a term of disdain for free thinking members of their church, they call them “cafeteria Catholics.” That is, they may like the Catholic liturgy and even beliefs about heaven and hell, but choose to reject church teachings about birth control or abortion. You can find broad condemnation for cafeteria Catholics all over the Catholic world which insists that if you are Catholic, you have to swallow the whole enchilada. I am surprised that anyone still accepts that kind of mental imprisonment, but it happens still. The decline in church attendance has been pretty well mirrored in my own decline in respect for organized religion. My former denomination, a communion that I loved and was proud to be a part of, over the decades became a greater and greater embarrassment, with one scandal after another, making the institution’s hypocrisy impossible to tolerate. During all of these years of numerical decline, the phrase that has come up increasingly often among the unchurched is the disclaimer, “I’m spiritual but not religious.” And like a lot of popular sayings, that can mean something quite profound, or it can be a shallow statement that is drenched in so much narcissism that it basically equates to saying, “I quit going to church and started to worship myself.” To be fair, there are good and bad things about being religious, and there are some very good things about being more of a solo act in your spirituality, but there are some real vulnerabilities there as well. An old friend of mine recently reminded me of something he heard me say in a sermon about 15 years ago that seems a bit humorous to me now, but he claims that I said, “Being spiritual and not religious is all well enough except for the fact that people who are spiritual and not religious never get anything done.” Which goes to the “organized” part of “organized religion.” When I was a denominational pastor, we built a Habitat House every year. We fielded large relief teams to poor nations and poor neighborhoods, and to hurricane and tornado devastated communities. If there is anything that I really miss about my former life as a denominational pastor, it was that; joining in with a team to help a homeless family build their own home, or cutting bamboo and mixing mortar in a depression in the ground to build a feeding center for a school in rural Nicaragua. It takes money and younger and stronger volunteers to do things like that. We have about 15,000 viewers and listeners scattered around the globe, but I can’t call together 25 of them to jump in a bus and go to Appalachia with me to assist poor farmers in the Eastern Kentucky mountains. People who rant and rave about how much they hate organized religion will still take their kid to St Jude’s Hospital when they have cancer, and they never complain about the fact that they don’t have to pay for the medical miracles they receive there. I despise the opulence and wasted money of mega churches in our area, but, like most of you, whenever I am traveling abroad, I never fail to go and marvel at the cathedrals in those historical cities and what, after all, is a cathedral but a 500 year old megachurch? Religious art, music, and architecture has enriched our culture and fed our souls for centuries. Sure, it came with homophobia, misogyny, pedophilia, and patriarchy but is anyone here sorry that they are rebuilding Notre Dame after the great fire of 2019? For centuries, statesmen and philosophers have predicted the death of organized religion. They do that with good reason because of the moral and intellectual weakness of it and the growing irrelevance of it to a modern society. However, you only have to listen to the campaign ads of many of the current candidates for governor and US Senators around the country to realize that huge portion of our society is still, even in this modern era, entirely prepared to whole heartedly believe some of the dumbest stuff imaginable. So, I am afraid, organized religion, while in decline, is likely to be around for many more decades if not centuries. Increasingly marginalized and losing social influence, but stubbornly refusing to die. The Jewish, Dutch philosopher of the 17th century said of this combination of ancient religion and current law, that “Laws which prescribe what everyone else must believe, and forbid men to say or write anything against this or that opinion, are often passed to gratify, or rather to appease the anger of those who cannot abide independent minds.” We fought for marriage equality for decades against a mindless devotion among conservative to ancient religious prejudices and once equality was won, people were quietly amazed that it made no noticeable difference in their straight relationships. It was almost like getting the Supreme Court to decide that the sky is blue and grass is green. Ancient religion was wrong, modern medicine, psychology, and ethics were right. But, again, with a conservative majority on the Supreme Court, there are whispers of trying to turn the clock back and take away these rights, just as they have taken away a woman’s right to manage her own reproductive life. So, ancient superstitions and values informed only by myths have not died away from our world. The fight for reason remains. If I have not already made it very clear, please allow me to sum up by reiterating my basic complaint about what it has meant to be religious: When you try to take the wonder, the awe, the existential experience of the “I” and the “Thou” out of our awareness that we live in a holy and amazing universe and put it down in a book, a creed, a set of dogmatic beliefs and doctrines, you are necessarily killing everything wonderful about faith. You turn a living faith into a dead religion. One of my theology professors at Vanderbilt called this “trying to eff the ineffable.” You can write a poem about love, but you cannot write a prescription for love. Or as some more witty preacher put it once, “Focusing on religion over spirituality is like going to a restaurant and eating the menu.” I could go on all day about what all is wrong with organized religion but I must also add the warning that independent thinking without any accountability to a community of faith, often leads to equally superstitious thought that is different from creedal religion only in that it is so silly and narcissistic. Spiritual people can question everything, they can be free to consider anything in their search for truth. But still, like peer review in academics, I am just suggesting that in our freedom, we not lose sight of critical thinking, discernment, and the insights of scholarship. If we can approach our spiritual lives in an honest search for an informed world view, maybe we can preserve the community that we enjoyed in more traditional church life. I’m not knocking the good things that we do as individuals, but an individual cannot build a Habitat House or start a St Jude’s Hospital, and while we can demonstrate regressive government decisions on our own, it sure does have more impact if we can demonstrate with a few hundred similarly inspired peers. There are things that we can do together that we cannot do alone. So please, though I appreciate every one of our global listeners and viewers as well as our local supporters, please don’t let the content we provide be a substitute for being in community. Continue to search for your tribe. Be connected to others who will inevitably not be just like you or agree with you on everything, but with whom you share a sincere search for what is true, what is good, and what honors the grand mystery of existence.

Denial of Cultural Racism is Our Stumbling Block

Denial of Cultural Racism is Our Stumbling Block July 17, 2022 Dr. R. Ray CLICK HERE TO SEE THE VIDEO

New York Times, May 20, 2021 by Simon Romero Every morning, schoolchildren in Texas recite an oath to their state that includes the words, “I pledge allegiance to thee, Texas, one state under God.” Now, a flurry of proposed measures that could soon become law would promote even greater loyalty to Texas in the state’s classrooms and public spaces, as Republican lawmakers try to reframe Texas history lessons and play down references to slavery and anti-Mexican discrimination that are part of the state’s founding. The proposals in Texas, a state that influences school curriculums around the country through its huge textbook market, amount to some of the most aggressive efforts to control the teaching of American history. And they come as nearly a dozen other Republican-led states seek to ban or limit how the role of slavery and pervasive effects of racism can be taught. Idaho was the first state to sign into law a measure that would withhold funding from schools that teach such lessons. And lawmakers in Louisiana, New Hampshire and Tennessee have introduced bills that would ban teaching about the enduring legacies of slavery and segregationist laws, or that any state or the country is inherently racist or sexist. “The idea that history is a project that’s decided in the political arena is a recipe for disaster,” said Raul Ramos, a historian at the University of Houston who specializes in the American West. For the past 30 years, the German artist, Gunter Demnig, has been installing little brass stones in the streets of cities in Europe where victims of the Holocaust once lived. He has now installed more than 70,000 of these memorials in 1,200 different cities and towns. Each one says simply, “here lived” and the name of the person along with their date of birth and some statement of their fate. The inscription is small so that those who wish to read the name of the deceased former resident, must bow down in humble tribute. These memorials are called “stolpersteine” which, in German, means “stumbling stones,” but they are not literally something you would trip on. They are set flush with the street so you wouldn’t literally stumble on them. They are moral stumbling blocks. They are a reminder of the horrors of the Holocaust so that no one can forget what happened. (The Guardian, February 18, 2019 by Eliza Apperly) We all know of Holocaust deniers. The crimes of the Nazis were so horrible and the damage to the self-esteem of Germans and many other people in Europe who were sympathetic with their anti-Semitic prejudice, was so great that there have been elaborate attempts at denying that it ever really happened. Some claim that the accepted figure of 6 million victims is dramatically inflated. Others even deny that there were death camps or gas ovens ever used to kill Jews, and the Roma, the disabled and gay people. Say what you will about “freedom of speech,” but it is illegal to deny the Holocaust in Germany. It is illegal to display Nazi symbols or to wear a Nazi uniform or even to publish anything in praise of Adolph Hitler. Germans realized the danger of allowing people to pretend that they had not done what they very clearly did do and so there are no statues in honor of Hitler in Germany but there are many memorials to the victims of the Nazis and now these tens of thousands of reminders of specific individuals who once lived in this house or down that street. It is their hope that by remembering their true history, they will be much less likely to ever repeat it. There are resurgences of neo-Nazi movements in Germany, just as there are fascists here and around the world. There is a certain attraction to “strong man” governments when people are filled with fear and paranoia but, if you care to know enough about real history, you know it is a path we do not want to follow. Every nation has a certain amount of mythology about how they were founded and why they are one of the greatest if not the greatest nation in the world. I grew up in the 60’s with news of protests against the War in Vietnam and reports on Civil Rights demonstrations that sometimes turned into riots. I remember the assassinations of John and Bobby Kennedy, of Malcom X and Martin Luther King. I knew, at some level, that my country was being torn apart but when you got to school, and for me, in those years, it was a segregated, all-white school, what we were taught about the Pilgrims, our founding fathers, the Revolutionary War, Paul Revere, George Washington . . . it was all just wonderful, and noble, and it all served to prove how lucky we all were to be born in this amazing country. Based on my public-school education, America had never done anything wrong. We romanticized American Indians, but we never acknowledged the genocide or the Indian Removal that left only the arrow heads we found in the freshly plowed fields of the family farm as a sign that they had ever been in Kentucky. And though it may be hard for you to believe, my family even romanticized slavery. We were poor and our grandparents and great-grandparents were even more poor but there was a family mythology of wealth and prestige when my ancestors were plantation owners and slave traders. My college and grad school classes were more factual, though criticisms of American foreign policy felt suspicious to me for a long time. And, of course, most of my education had to do with theology, philosophy, and Biblical history. It wasn’t until I pretty much had my degrees in the bag that I began to pay attention to American history and my education was rather abrupt. I had a chance to hear and to meet the famous historian, Howard Zinn, at our local university early in this century. I met him again at Drury and later at Harvard where I had a chance to have a longer conversation with him. His book, A People’s History of the United States, along with James Loewen’s book, Lies My Teacher Told Me, were two of the most eye opening and painful history books I have ever read. I highly recommend them both and if you are not a big reader, there are several audio book versions that you can listen to as you drive, but, seriously, everyone should read these books. Sure, there is some disappointment about learning where all of America’s stumbling blocks have been, many of which we have known… we had to have known, but at least among white families, we never let ourselves feel differently about it than the way we had been taught. We had to know that the genocide of the Native Americans and the enslavement of millions of Africans was evil but, you know, we didn’t grow up visiting a Native American Holocaust Museum, because there wasn’t one. And we not only didn’t see monuments dedicated to slaves and their contributions to the building of our nation, our economic and military strength. In fact, most of us in the south grew up seeing monuments to the people who tried to keep African slaves in slavery. In fact, right up until recently we had people repeating the ridiculously cleaned up version of the Civil War, insisting that it was about states’ rights and that it had nothing to do with slavery. We should realize that most of our public school history books would be illegal if we had laws similar to German laws that demand the truth. People have fought to defend the placement of Confederate monuments, in honor of the “Hitlers” of our 19th Century history, insisting that no black American should take offense nor any white person with a conscience find any reason to object. However, the Confederate states actually wrote legislative statements about why they were seceding from the Union and darned if they don’t talk about slavery as their reason for their actions. Just Google “Confederate states secession statements” and your 10 second investment in research will show you what your white ancestors were fighting for. Mississippi’s document makes it unapologetically clear. It says, “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth.” To paraphrase Forest Gump, “I’m not a smart man but I know what racism is.” But all of our stumbling blocks are not always so easy to spot. A decade ago, I was asked to organize a conference for a large Unitarian Church in Florida in which Bishop John Shelby Spong and I would be the speakers and I brought Sean and Barry and other musicians from our church for this three-day event. I did not know, however, that this invitation had not actually met with the full-throated approval of the host pastor who spent most of those three days trying to make things as difficult for me as possible. Which just goes on the list of why I don’t like ministers very much but let’s not chase that rabbit right now. In one of my talks, I referenced the fact, which I had learned from the eminent American historian, Howard Zinn, that Truman’s decision to drop Atom bombs on Japan was not really about defeating Japan. The war was essentially won already. But military brass was eager to try out their new weapon in battle, albeit against a mostly civilian population, and Truman wanted Russians to know that we both had the bomb and that we were willing to use it. The host pastor shouted out in response, “That’s not true!” Obviously, he didn’t know anything about it, but like a lot of uneducated, childish adults, he didn’t want for it to be true, and because he didn’t like the historical facts, he just shouted out a total dismissal. But that is not out of character with most of America and, at some points, all of us. It is hard to stare at our Id, our moral shadow, but until we do, it is nearly impossible to not go on repeating the mistakes that we refuse to acknowledge. We really should take a lesson from the Germans and be willing to be reminded of our own stumbling blocks before we mess up again. We have lately been treated to 7 different hearings from the Congressional committee that is investigating the January 6, 2021 violent insurrection at the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C. Even though people all over the world watched this brazen attack on America’s symbol of democracy and freedom, multiple Republican politicians have tried to dismiss it, saying that it was just tourists who got a little out of hand. Like holocaust deniers, they are insisting on their spin of the facts to make themselves seem to be innocent of having tried to overthrow our American Democracy. It was shocking, 18 months ago, to see the rioters desecrating that building and actually carrying Confederate flags into the Capitol Building where they had never been seen before, not even during the Civil War. But the hypocrisy doesn’t begin and end there. What the insurrectionists would not likely have known is that this building, this 200-year-old symbol of freedom and democracy, was built by about 1500 African slaves who literally carried their chains with them as they worked to build this citadel of freedom. The argument conservatives are making against teaching Critical Race Theory in our public schools, and by that, they mean anything that mentions slavery or racism institutionalized in our government and laws, is of a cloth with the German holocaust deniers of the last century. I am simply making the modest proposal that we all stop running from the truth and stop filling our kids heads with lies that they will have to unlearn later. Because, if we want a better quality of leader than what we have seen in elected office trying to protect the Capitol rioters, then we are going to need to educate our children a lot better than those guys were educated. We absolutely need to provide the next generation with history books that tell the truth about the Native American genocide, the African slave trade, the violence against labor unions, the repression of women’s rights from voting, to birth control, to abortion. Our kids need to know about the failings of our justice system, the racial disparity in the application of the death penalty, and the incarceration of people of color for offenses that never show up in most white people’s criminal history. We need this kind of honest education for exactly the same reasons that Germany doesn’t allow people to lie about their history and why their landscape is punctuated with reminders of the moral stumbling blocks that led to the Holocaust. I don’t want people to feel badly about being Americans. I just want America to become the country that was described in my public school education and the truth is the only path to become that nation.

“We’re All Connected”

“We’re All Connected” July 10, 2022 Dr. Roger Ray https://youtu.be/xU9HfU8_2s0 Click here to see the video

From the “Charter for Compassion” The principle of compassion lies at the heart of all religious, ethical and spiritual traditions, calling us always to treat all others as we wish to be treated ourselves. Compassion impels us to work tirelessly to alleviate the suffering of our fellow creatures, to dethrone ourselves from the center of our world and put another there, and to honor the inviolable sanctity of every single human being, treating everybody, without exception, with absolute justice, equity and respect. It is also necessary in both public and private life to refrain consistently and empathically from inflicting pain. To act or speak violently out of spite, chauvinism, or self-interest, to impoverish, exploit or deny basic rights to anybody, and to incite hatred by denigrating others—even our enemies—is a denial of our common humanity. We acknowledge that we have failed to live compassionately and that some have even increased the sum of human misery in the name of religion. We therefore call upon all men and women to restore compassion to the center of morality and religion ~ to return to the ancient principle that any interpretation of scripture that breeds violence, hatred or disdain is illegitimate ~ to ensure that youth are given accurate and respectful information about other traditions, religions and cultures ~ to encourage a positive appreciation of cultural and religious diversity ~ to cultivate an informed empathy with the suffering of all human beings—even those regarded as enemies. We urgently need to make compassion a clear, luminous and dynamic force in our polarized world. https://charterforcompassion.org/charter/charter Some of you will remember me stating the self-evident truth that there are two kinds of people in the world, those who divide the world into two groups and those who do not. I personally tend towards the latter; in that I see people as being either self-centered or compassionate in their world view. You either see that you are connected to virtually everyone else and you try to live accordingly, or you ignore everyone else and try your best to live your life in a self-serving way. We have a perfect example of this in Americans’ attitude about gun ownership. Regardless of the fact that the 2nd Amendment spoke of a “well-regulated militia” something like our National Guard, and that it was included to assure slave owners that they would not be parted from their weapons which helped them to keep their slaves from revolting, gun owners cite the Second Amendment as a God-given right to own virtually any weapon they want and many of them resist even registering their guns or submitting themselves to background checks or limiting the number of bullets that they can shoot in any given minute with the toys they use to shore up their insecurities. But as our country has gone from the absurd to the insane, annual gun deaths shooting up from the totally unacceptable level of 30,000 a year to now more than 40,000, with mass murders dominating the news week after week, they are willing to accept the deaths and make symbolic gestures about how to correct the problem. We already know what works. Effective gun regulations have been put in place in every western democracy, but every gun manufacturer’s shill keeps trying to say that it is not the availability of guns, it is mental health or a shortage of hardened targets and armed guards… the old “good guy with a gun” argument. The United States is spending nearly a billion dollars a year on hardening our schools and putting armed guards on site, but it isn’t working, is it? And it isn’t going to work, is it? But they would have the society spend any amount of money to avoid them having to give up their guns. We pay millions and millions, and the death tolls keep going up. We could spend that money on an aggressive buyback program and get assault rifles and handguns out of the hands of private citizens. Australia did it after the Port Arthur Massacre, bought back 650,000 guns and they have not had another mass murder since. We know what to do, we know what works. But we won’t do it because most gun owners don’t care how many people die because they want to keep the guns that they like. If they felt compassion for all of the people who were being killed, they would give up their assault rifles and pistols, but they don’t even understand the concept of compassion. They just know that the gun they hold in their hands makes them feel better about what they don’t have in their underwear, and they don’t care how many people die. So, the old “duck and cover” black and white films that my generation had to watch as we practiced hiding under our desks to protect ourselves in the event of a nuclear war, have been replaced with every school child being forced to go through “active shooter drills” and practice barricading their classroom doors and hiding very quietly so that they won’t get shot. So, we pay billions of dollars, and traumatized millions of kids, while school shootings increase and we have to listen to self-righteous morons telling teachers that if only they were carrying a gun, that they could stop a shooter in their school and save their children. The only thing that would work would be to outlaw assault rifles and, very probably, handguns, but we will waste time and effort on everything else because the sociopaths with guns will not consider doing what is right for children, for people who attend church, synagogue, or mosque services, or a movie, or a concert, or go to the grocery store. There are two kinds of people in the world, the ones who know that they are connected to everyone else, and they try to live accordingly, and there are those who do not allow themselves to think about other people, even if they know better. Of course, we are all varying degrees of one or the other. The most narcissistic, the most seriously sociopathic usually at least care about their own children or a few friends, everyone except Donald Trump, of course. And we all experience a certain compassion fatigue. We can’t care about everything and everyone all of the time. Compassionate people at least try. The self-serving don’t even think about it. As many of you know, I have spent my time off this year on a Caribbean Island off the coast of Honduras where I was trying to improve my social life. My friend there works in an office with just three other employees, and I got to know and like all of them. But one day, in casual conversation with my friend about the woman who worked next to her, I was told that this woman, a widow with a 12-year-old daughter, also kept a household servant . . . a servant who was also 12 years old. So that every morning, she sends her 12-year-old daughter to school and the other 12-year-old in her care starts to wash the dishes, iron the clothes, and mop the floor… a real life Cinderella story. My friend saw that I was upset, and she said, “I know it is wrong and I wouldn’t do it, but it is still common here in Honduras.” Classism is pretty stark in Central America but, as an American, I don’t feel like I have much room to be critical. But child labor…. And I’ll admit, I have seen it before, in Egypt and in Nicaragua but even there, the children go to school for half of the day before they make carpets in Egypt and weave hammocks for tourists in Nicaragua …. But keeping this little girl illiterate and in service to another girl her own age in the house where she lived . . . that was a cruelty that I have not been able to let go of. But, when I had returned to the USA after that conversation, in the produce section of my grocery store, I was leaning over to pick up a watermelon when I saw the sticker . . . it was March and no one in the USA is growing watermelons in March. The label said, “A product of Honduras,” and I couldn’t buy it because, I have every reason to believe that children are employed in agriculture there. When I was a child, you couldn’t buy watermelons in March but with international trade, we have virtually all kinds of produce all year long and even though we don’t pay much for it, that low price is coming out of someone’s childhood. My Honduran friend is well aware of how a century of colonialism has broken both the economy and the culture of most of Latin America. It shows up in subtle ways. Honduras was the original Banana Republic, supplying the American demand for bananas that we cannot grow here. The Spanish word for “banana” is “banano.” Easy enough, right? But that isn’t what most people in Honduras call them. They call them “minimos” which translates as “too small.” Too small to export to American grocery stores so they are sold to the Hondurans who grow bananas for the American market and keep only what Americans won’t buy. So, I hate that Hondurans still tolerate child labor, but I know that more than a century of American economic colonialism is a part of why they don’t have enough self-respect to stop the practice. They don’t only accept that they get bananas that are too small. They somehow still accept that the poor among them also don’t deserve to be treated better. We are all connected. We won’t stamp out all inequality, but we’ll never stamp out any of it if we are not willing to allow ourselves to be aware of it, to try to grow and learn, and evolve ourselves. I’m sure that you will recognize the famous Martin Luther King, Jr. quote that says, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” If the exercise of our second amendment rights means that we have to traumatize our children and waste billions of dollars on bullet proof windows and doors and armed guards, none of which works . . . then how can you enjoy going out to the shooting range and squeezing off a few hundred rounds? I understand that most guns are never used in a mass shooting or domestic violence or suicide. Most guns are symbolic and will never be used to create a tragedy. And yet, these symbols, these toys, these phallic substitutes still end up killing 40,000 Americans every year, so the people who do keep their guns responsibly have to recognize that their access to these lethal weapons makes it possible for the people who will kill themselves or others with their guns to be able to get them. We are all connected and that means that sometimes I have to give up something that is harmless in my house because it could be lethal to my neighbor. If getting watermelon and pretty bananas year round in our grocery stores means that children are kept illiterate and their parents are kept hungry and poor in Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua, AND Texas, California, and New Mexico, then maybe our produce should cost twice as much and we can eat it less often? …. Or spend less on guns. Of course, I am saying this in a community where more than half of our neighbors never even got the Covid vaccine while the elderly and ill were dying of covid all around us. The pandemic has been the most obvious test of compassion among us and we got an “F” on that one. Maybe it snuck up on us. Maybe we’ll do better next time. But we have a long history with colonialism and guns, don’t we? Now, if I say this only to point out that there are good people and selfish people, that there are spiritual people and there are narcissists, then I would just be fueling the tendency to divide the world into two kinds of people. But, here is the crux of what I want to say today . . . selfishness, narcissism, being self-serving, is our natural state. Babies don’t wake up crying in the middle of the night because they are afraid that you are hungry, or that your tummy hurts, or that your gums or teeth hurt. Babies are, if I may say it just this way, raging sociopaths out to meet their own needs without regard for how much you need to sleep, or how much it may gag you to change their diapers. But, if we do it right, little by little, we can teach them compassion. We can take the edge off their screaming about how much they want all of the chocolate or even a new Assault Rifle, and gradually teach them to care about their siblings, maybe even their parents, and friends, and eventually, maybe even, the strangers who grow and harvest their apples, bananas, and Cheerios. Otherwise, why should I keep preaching? I am still connected to some of the old guys who live in Kentucky that I have been scuba diving with for most of the last two generations. Good guys, all of them, but good guys, some of whom, have never left rural Kentucky and, well, it sometimes shows. There have been times when we were together in the dive boat but at other times, I had to seek out my own space to avoid conversations that might make the teacher in me come out in ways that would ruin a good trip to the islands. But I have noticed over the past few years that I need to separate from them less and less, and social media has allowed me to see that they have some very progressive views, and, when I open the mail at the office, I even see donations from them to our church from time to time. I noticed on social media recently that one of my old dive buddies had reposted a ten-year-old post in which he said: Millions of Americans are now going to have to pay their health insurance instead of making me pay for it! I see things like that and, well, I’m not surprised but I still have to debate myself to see if I can let it slide or if I have to respond. Fortunately, in this case, I didn’t have to say anything. He commented on his own ten-year-old post, saying: The old me didn't care if they couldn't afford it. I didn't even care if it got so expensive that my Grandchildren wouldn't be able to afford it (which it will). The old me was stupid, greedy, and somewhat psychopathic. What he said about himself, who he was ten years ago, was ten times more harsh than what I would have said to him. And without even correcting the difference between being “psychopathic” and “sociopathic,” a distinction that may only be important to me, I had to just sit back and marvel at the transformation. I hope that listening to my sermons may have played a part in that change of spirit. He says that I have been a big influence. But the bigger issue is that he was willing to take an honest look at himself, his attitudes, and to accept new information, new ideas, and he decided to change. He is now a huge advocate for Medicare for all, for sensible gun laws, an assault rifle ban, and I have heard him say really kind things about immigrants. None of which is what we tend to associate with rural Kentucky, right? I remember going to visit a church member about 30 years ago who had stopped coming to church. She decided to be very honest with me and she just told me, “I am not going to be coming back. Life is hard and I go to church to help me to feel better but when I listen to you, I always feel worse.” I like it better when people tell me, “You really made me think today,” or “I never knew about those things before,” but she was being honest and, if I am being honest, I get it. David and I talk about hard things. David is nicer about it than I am but, at the bottom line, we are both more likely to tell folks what is going wrong than we are to sooth your anxiety and tell you that everything is going to be OK. I get it. Sometimes I feel like the mean older kid who looks into the kindergarten classroom the first of December and announces, “Santa Claus isn’t real!” I will only offer this in defense of prophetic preaching: Ben Franklin once observed that people only change when they are uncomfortable. Compassion can be taught, but teaching compassion usually means that you have to make people a bit uncomfortable first, whether you are teaching your children that they must share their toys with their playmates, or if we must realize that sometimes we need to eat the small bananas.

Government of the People?

Government of the People? By Dr. Roger Ray July 3, 2022 CLICK HERE TO SEE THE VIDEO Time Magazine BY MADELEINE CARLISLE AND JULIA ZORTHIAN JUNE 24, 2022 In his opinion concurring with the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the constitutional right to abortion established in Roe v. Wade, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that the high court should revisit all cases built on similar legal footing—including cases that guarantee the right to contraception, same-sex consensual sexual relations, and same-sex marriage. All three cases—and numerous other landmark decisions—are built upon the right to substantive due process found in the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments of the Constitution, which prohibit the government from depriving “any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” The Constitution was written eleven years after the Declaration of Independence. The Revolutionary War followed the Declaration, but the Constitution was written by some very smart and well-read men who poured their considerable intellect and training into designing a representative government that would guide a young democracy into a successful future. Thomas Jefferson was in Paris during the Constitutional convention, but he wrote a letter to James Madison saying that one generation has no right to bind the next, and therefore, he suggested, that the constitution should become null and void in 19 years and a new one be written by a new generation. That, of course, has never happened. The constitution has been amended but never replaced. I would like to suggest today that Thomas Jefferson was right, and he was right for reasons he never would have imagined. The nation in the late 18th century was already deeply divided over the issue of slavery. There were also literate women who were advocating for an equal role in society and government. Still, they had no idea how the technology of combat and communication would evolve. They hadn’t even invented bullets back then, let alone assault rifles. Our generation, our century, is bound by a constitution from a time so distant from our own that it simply does not fit. It now prevents our country from entering the 21st century with the same solutions to problems that our peers in western democracies have managed very successfully and which we seem not to even consider. I am going to try to make this brief, but while there is much to be praised in the democracy our founders birthed, there are ways in which it no longer allows democracy to flourish and, more importantly, to evolve to meet the needs of our day. I am going to point to just a few issues. First, we are the only country with an electoral college. The majority of other countries simply directly elect their head of state so that the will of the majority makes the decision. Our electoral college, once a compromise to give more political power to slave holding states, is not just an anachronism, it has become a noose around our necks, electing presidents who did not win a majority of votes, forcing the majority to live with a president selected by a minority of voters. If we had the kind of elections held in every other free nation of the world, George W. Bush and Donald Trump would never have been president. I am sure that I don’t have to spell it out for you, but Bush appointed Alito and Roberts, Trump appointed Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett, and there, my friends, is the conservative Supreme Court majority that now places most Americans at a distance from their own government. I would also add as a second criticism of our constitution that Supreme Court justices should not be lifetime appointments. Ten years would be a long term in such a powerful position. More than that and, consider, if Clarence Thomas had been forced to retire from the court in 2001, how much better off would the world be right now? It has been suggested that we set the term of any Supreme Court Justice at 18 years, allowing every president to appoint two justices in every four-year presidential term. In that way, we would maintain 9 justices but spread the selection of judges evenly among each president. For example, Jimmy Carter and Donald Trump were both one term presidents but Carter didn’t get to appoint any justices and Trump appointed three, giving us the lopsided court we have now. The third issue that I will take with our constitution is the provision that awards two senators to every state. Again, this gives a great deal of weight to votes cast in low population states and devalues the votes in high population states. There are 40 million people in California, but California gets only two seats in the senate. Two, but if you added the populations of the 20 lowest population states: Wyoming, Vermont, Alaska, North and South Dakota, Delaware, Rhode Island, Montana, Maine, New Hampshire, Hawaii, West Virginia, Idaho, Nebraska, New Mexico, Kansas, Mississippi, Arkansas, Iowa, and Nevada you still don’t come up with as many voters as California and that group of states has 40 senators. This is not representative government. This gives tremendous weight to rural and predictably much more conservative voters than the people who live in more populous states. And this constitutional flaw, men and women, is how we get some of the most embarrassing members of the Senate and they are the ones who then approve embarrassing Supreme Court nominees. Each senator from California ostensibly represents 20 million voters, while each senator from Wyoming represents about 250 thousand voters. This is so wrong it verges on being crazy. The United States is now primarily governed by a small minority of conservative rural voters who can bind the hundreds of millions of people in more populous states to exposure to guns, and they can decide who you can marry, who you can love, and when you can have children. They prevent meaningful environmental reform, energy innovation, and social progress. I know this is a lot in a short amount of time to consider but, if you take the time to check my facts, you will find that I am correct about all of this. In the past weeks, the Supreme Court has ruled against a hundred-year-old law in New York against carrying guns in public. They have struck down the fifty-year-old precedent of Roe v Wade, which guaranteed women the right to manage their own reproductive life, and they have overturned a sixty-year-old restriction against publicly led prayer in public schools. In Clarence Thomas’ concurrence with the decision overturning Roe v Wade, he made it clear that he would also like to overturn the 2015 decision to grant the right for same sex couples to marry (Obergefell v. Hodges), and even to restore restrictions on the kind of birth control methods available to married women and to restrict the distribution of birth control methods at all to unmarried women, and to revoke the right of consenting adults to have a sexual relationship . . . presumably aimed at gay couples but, it is impossible to be sure. I would remind you that in 1991, Anita Hill tried to warn us about this guy. How can the Supreme Court be so out of touch with the American people and our values? The first and most obvious reason is that the majority has been appointed by Republican presidents who were seeking to curry favor with that 20% of conservative, rural, and religiously bigoted voters that they need to ever win an election. Presidents choose jurists to nominate to the court specifically because they have a history of representing the thinking of the current president’s most supportive constituency. And, clearly, since it is a lifetime appointment, presidents have tended to nominate younger and younger jurists to extend their influence into the future. For example, Justice Clarence Thomas was nominated by President George H. W. Bush over 30 years ago. The unelected Thomas has had more influence of the shape of modern America than President Bush. I am no fan of identity politics but in a country as diverse as ours is, you could not claim that a court comprised of nine white men could have the depth and breadth of vision that we have now in a more diverse court. I was still in grade school when we had our first black justice on the court. I was in seminary when we got our first woman justice, but today our Supreme Court has a fairly representative blend of men and women, blacks, whites, and Latinx members. So, “hurray” for gender and race diversity. Also, no one can claim that there is a “black” way of being a jurist, especially if you consider the differences between Clarence Thomas and our soon to be appointed, first black woman on the court, Ketanji Brown Jackson. But when it comes to religion and education, I feel like the court just doesn’t look like America at all. The low hanging fruit here is in the realm of education. Everyone on the court has a law degree from either Harvard or Yale with the sole exception being Amy Coney Barrett who attended Notre Dame. There are 1.3 million licensed attorneys in America but less than one half of one percent of them attended either Harvard or Yale Law Schools and yet they represent nearly 90% of the members of the court. Both are great law schools, to be sure, and yet, are they the only great law schools in America? Is there a bit of intellectual incest going on here? I appreciate my own time at Harvard but comparing my classes there to my classes at Vanderbilt, I’m not sure that you could reasonably say that there was a huge qualitative superiority at either school. But you can say that one is in the south and one is in the north, and we all know that there are dramatic differences in perspective in those regions of the country. For the same reasons that we have tried to make the court a representative blend of races and genders, shouldn’t we also consider things like the region of the country they have lived in and the school where they studied law? And what is more important, some of my undergraduate school professors in state universities, who are more likely to be in touch with a broader segment of America, were brilliant and very helpful. Still, as with the matter of race, you can’t say that Harvard graduates are a legal plenum. After all, Justices Roberts, Breyer, Kagen, Gorsuch, and soon to be seated, Justice Jackson are all Harvard grads and there is a lot of daylight between those five people. Again, I have nothing against Harvard and Yale but couldn’t the court benefit from a little less intellectual inbreeding? When it comes to matters of religious affiliation, I am finding myself to be very nervously leaning towards thinking that the Catholic influence is so overstated that it is pushing the court towards a view of abortion that sounds more like the college of cardinals in the Vatican than the values of the American people. About 20% of Americans identify as being Catholic but of our current nine justices, seven of them are Catholic. Only about 2% of Americans are Jewish but we currently have two Jewish justices and nearly 50% of Americans are Protestant and until Judge Jackson is seated, none of our justices are Protestant. Granted, not all of the Catholic justices voted to overturn Roe v Wade but all of the justices who did vote to overturn this landmark decision were Catholic (a bit of a caveat for Gorsuch who was raised Catholic but currently attends an Episcopal Church). Perhaps the larger issue is, which ones were appointed by Democrat presidents, and which were Republican appointments, but still, the religious affiliation screams for consideration even though the Catholics who voted to overturn Roe v Wade were, admittedly, all appointed by Republican presidents. For the sake of full disclosure, I did publish a critical article about Amy Coney Barrett, a Pentecostal Catholic, when she was first nominated because she seemed to me to have been specifically selected to cast this vote to overturn Roe v Wade. That article earned me a blistering rebuke from the local Catholic Bishop who, for the first time in my life, accused me of being anti-Catholic. In my defense, I was right about Barrett and given the way that I am feeling today, I am starting to think that the bishop might have been right about me. The Supreme Court, in its most pure form, is intended to make decisions about the meaning and application of the United States’ Constitution. Roe v Wade was decided on a basis of a right to privacy which, legally speaking, may have been overreaching in the first place but, let’s face it, the constitution doesn’t offer any more guidance on abortion that the Bible has to say about the internet. In the matter of abortion, the constitution becomes nothing more than the black robes in which the justices are wrapped when they make decisions about what is right and what is wrong. Abortion is not so much a matter of jurisprudence as it is a concern of that branch of philosophy that deals with ethics because the primary issue that divides those who are pro-choice from those who are anti-abortion is the question of when a fetus becomes a person, or, at least, gains the legal rights of a person. Lawyers are ill-equipped to make that philosophical distinction but then, like everything else in philosophy, nothing is certain or permanent about ethics. What we should be able to say with confidence is that debate about the point at which a fetus becomes a person with protected civil rights should not be left up to any religion and certainly not to a minority religion. There is a credible debate to be had which, oddly enough, never seems to take center stage. What we have seen in the past generation is the manipulation of the political system so that a minority religious view can be institutionalized into our nation’s laws and that is something that should never happen in America. Ethics cannot be accurately determined simply by assuming that the majority opinion is correct, but you cannot seriously debate an ethical conclusion without considering the majority opinion. Thankfully, we didn’t rely on a majority opinion to end slavery or to add that first black person or first woman to the Supreme Court, but it is significant, to the degree that abortion laws affect all of us, that the majority view among American citizens is that abortion should be a legal option in most cases to all women. It should also be evident that abortion laws are much more relevant to women of childbearing age than they are to anyone else, even though the whole matter of birth is crucial to the whole of the human race, it is still women at that stage of life who must place their very lives at risk to bear a child. You can have an opinion, even a strong desire, and maybe even some vested interest, but that doesn’t equate to authority. For example, last year, my neighbor informed me that she planned to build a privacy fence that would take in about three feet from the back of my property. She even added that she already had the approval of the neighborhood association to build said fence, on my property. In this matter, my opinion in opposition to the construction of the fence had precedence over my neighbor’s personal desires or even my neighborhood association’s collective view. Because my property is clearly defined, I have sovereignty over it, to the degree that I can prevent my neighbor from building on it. My community, however, retains the right to prevent me from disposing of toxic chemicals in my yard because the whole of the community has a vested interest in not allowing toxins in the water or air of our area. My neighborhood association can also prevent me from adding a storage building to my back yard that does not meet with the approval of our architecture committee. They have that authority because I have ipso facto agreed to grant them that authority by buying into this neighborhood. You see, there are many issues about which you may have passionate opinions or concrete religious views but neither of those necessarily give you standing in the decision making about the issue. Now, when “Jane Doe” finds that she is pregnant and she does not want to carry that pregnancy to term, who has standing or a vested interest to such a degree that we are obligated to include them in that decision? If Jane is a Catholic, she may want to consider the teachings of her faith community but still, the church does not have standing any more than I have a vote in the color that some young people put in their hair (pink, purple, orange, really, must you?). I have an opinion, one that is best kept to myself, but I do not get a vote. In the contract that any of us have with a community of faith, we retain governance of our own bodies, regardless of the opinion of the faith leaders or community. The Catholic Church may even have a vested interest in the decision as the growth of any religion’s membership is more dependent on the birth rate amongst its members than it is on conversion, but still, even if the Catholic Church stands to benefit from Jane Doe having a baby, their interest is insufficient to merit a vote in whether she carries her pregnancy to term or not. And for them to even try to extend such governance of the majority who are not Catholic is tantamount to the federal government establishing a national religion and that is entirely out of bounds in America. The man who provided the sperm in Jane Doe’s current pregnancy may have a religious, philosophical, family, or, by reason of the prospect of child support payments or household expenses, a fiscal vested interest in Jane’s choice, but because the fetus is, by necessity, attached to Jane’s body, the man in this situation has no sovereignty, even if his personal finances and other emotional and faith issues are strongly held. Opinions should not become the law of the land. As Queen Calanthe famously says in the Netflix series, “The Witcher,” “I bow to no law made by men who never bore a child.” The larger philosophical question is, “How did abortion ever become a matter of legal dispute?” I had prostate surgery last year and I didn’t have to consult any government or legal authority prior to having that procedure because, obviously, it was no one’s business to comment upon. It was a decision made between me and my physician. Even if that surgery might have some impact on my ability to reproduce, it just isn’t a matter for government oversight. Why would we have ever assumed that the reproductive life of any woman was a matter calling for a governmental decision? But how might the government or the community legitimately claim standing on the abortion issue? The only standing is based on the personhood of the fetus to be aborted. We would all agree that a mother could not legally abort a child on their third or fourth birthday, no matter how much she might regret having given birth. A child, post birth, cannot be seen as being disposable. Some of the most conservative anti-abortion activists claim to feel that a fertilized egg has as much personhood as a three-year-old child has, making such contraceptive devices as an IUD untenable. Some of the most conservative Catholics even object to the use of a condom, which prevents fertilization, because they believe that the sex act either does or does not result in a pregnancy and childbirth based on the will of God and that the human actors in sex should not try to intervene upon God’s will with either a birth control pill, a condom, an IUD and certainly not a “morning after” pill. While that religious view seems to be comprised of balloon juice to me, there are those who sincerely hold this view and, as is apparent, religious views are rarely subject to review by objective facts or critical thinking. Still, it should be evident that we do not live in a theocracy and so the truth claims made purely on unsubstantiated religious beliefs cannot be granted standing in matters of law. Any individual is free to make religious values choices about their own reproductive life, diet, divorce, etc. But if a religious entity seeks to impose their values on others, well, we tried that and we still call that time “The Dark Ages.” However, we do have a real problem in determining when a fetus, a “potential” person, becomes sufficiently an actual person to have a legal right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Just as I can, even as a member of clergy, reject the standing of any faith community in making that determination, I also cannot, with any degree of certainty, say that a medical doctor, a scientist, a neurologist, or a biologist has adequate expertise to dictate the definition of personhood. These disciplines are a part of the conversation, but they cannot be granted decision making authority. Again, this is more the arena of philosophy but, once again, if you are looking for a definitive answer from philosophy, you are setting yourself up for disappointment, until you can accept the paradoxical reality that social norms change over time and in different circumstances. Granting that neither science or religion haves the authority to dictate an answer in this consideration, we are left to put the society as a whole on the spot to try to make some collective determination (hopefully in consultation with relevant professional insights). We use the term “viability” to describe the point at which a fetus can survive outside the womb without an umbilical connection to the birthing mother. That point has been moved by advances in neonatal care from 26 weeks to potentially 22 and maybe even 20 weeks. But, generally speaking, an unborn child must be umbilically connected to its mother until the fourth or fifth month of gestation. Can a credible argument be made for a fetus to claim personhood prior to the earliest realistic point of viability? Sadly, when you just throw that question out to the public, there will be those who will point to signs of fetal pain or to the appearance of a fetus at various stages of gestation. Obviously, at 3 months, the fetus does not have a lot of human-like appearance but a fetus at 5 months certainly does, but can mere appearance be determinative in this discussion no matter how many people want to make it an emotive argument? In philosophy, we call this problem argumentum ad passions, literally “argument from emotion.” This appeal is often used when there is a stark lack of evidence to support a position. It can be powerful, but it is not referenced as a logical fallacy for no reason. That a fetus might have tiny footprints may pull at our heartstrings but this has no relationship to personhood. You know, a newborn baby, after nine months of gestation, has no teeth, it cannot walk or talk, and it sure can’t get a job or a driver’s license and yet we would almost universally agree on the infant’s personhood. However, we all recognize its potential, in most cases, to become more recognizable both as a person and a member of society. While we cannot turn to a physician, a biologist, a philosopher, a priest, or a judge for a definitive answer, sadly, although they have no special expertise, because of our history of legislation and litigation, at some point, a judge will have to render at least a temporary ruling on the matter. And, of course, at this writing, the Supreme Court has hinted at a belief that personhood is present in a fetus long before it has become viable outside of the womb. Most of the citizens of this country do not agree with them. Hence, we need a judicial system that is guided more by the values of the society than by the minority view of their faith community. Now, I think it is important to grant that even the smallest minority opinion on this matter has a plausible demand to be considered. The argument from viability has a lot of weight to it because prior to that point, the fetus must be physically attached to the pregnant woman and therefore causes harm or risk to the woman and certainly limits her free exercise of her own life as it would be if she were unencumbered with pregnancy. A newborn baby is not viable in the sense that they cannot survive without a great deal of care, but that care is no longer specific to one person whose body is literally their host. But, as noted earlier, while the baby is by virtual consensus mundi, a person, this status is predicated primarily upon their potential to manifest more and more aspects of personhood over time. But, of course, the same can be said in many ways of a fetus in the second or third month of gestation. Even for those of us who would not consider that fetus to be a person, still, we cannot say that it does not have potential to become a person. It is something of a stretch but, it could also be said, that a young man and a young woman standing in line at Starbucks waiting to order their morning coffee, by virtue of the proximity of their reproductive organs to one another, have the potential of creating a fetus that could become a person. Thankfully, even the most conservative religious fanatic would not see the pheromones in the air around this hypothetical pair of strangers as being a person but, from the potential of a mating pair, to a couple engaging in sex, to a newly fertilized egg implanted in the wall of a woman’s uterus, there is the possibility of personhood looming in an undefined future. Where the debate about abortion rights remain fluid is precisely at this point. When must we, as a society, claim to have standing in the life of the fetus/person that would override the prerogative of the pregnant woman to terminate the pregnancy/life? At what point does the expectant woman’s private and personal rights necessarily become subject to the ethics of the surrounding society expressed in law? Somewhere between the couple in line at Starbucks and a baby that is now viable outside of its mother’s womb is a cutoff point where a woman can no longer make a personal choice to terminate the pregnancy. The Catholic Bishop might put that at the point of copulation and most of us would put it right at the point of viability. The ferocity of the public debate is that for many of the people who are closer to the Catholic Bishop’s perspective, there is relatively little daylight between an abortion clinic and the gas chambers at Auschwitz. Simply holding such an extreme view should not give them permission to dictate social norms, but they have to be considered and given a bit of airtime in the public deliberation but maybe only slightly more than the weight of my opinion about young people’s choice of hair color; but let’s not bring that up again. The thing we must understand about ethics is that it is a moving target. We can consider scientific information, we can weigh the insights of psychology, and even of anthropology, but, in the end, we will be forming a general consensus that will not be permanent. Consider how old a person must be in order to get married without parental consent. In the early 7th century, Muhammad, when he was in his 50’s, married a six-year-old girl. There were those among his peers who objected, and Muhammad did not sexually consummate the marriage until Aisha was nine years old, but in our universe, that is still horrible. In the late 16th century, Shakespeare plausibly wrote in his fiction play, Romeo and Juliet, about a powerful romance that involved a 13-year-old girl whose father became angry because he had arranged a marriage for her to someone other than Romeo. So, an acceptable age of marriage 1300 years ago might have been before a girl was 10 years old, slightly older in Shakespeare’s England, nine centuries later. Now, in the United States, anyone can legally marry without parental consent at the age of 18 in 49 states. . . in Nebraska, you must be 19. I’m sure there is a story there, but I have no idea what it is. We may all agree that not very many 18-year-old people, or 19 year old people for that matter, have any business getting married but we know that there is some point at which, for good or ill, people have a right to make that decision for themselves and for now, almost everywhere, that age is set at 18. But you cannot say that someone who is 17 years, 11 months, and 3 weeks old is completely incapable of marriage and that everyone who is 18 years old is entirely capable of managing marriage. We have just agreed upon a number fully accepting that reasonable arguments can be made for older or younger and that every individual case is different. Just as there is with the legal drinking age. Fifty years ago, the United States decided to peg it at 21 but not many countries agree with us. Most countries put it at 18 and a few put it at 16. These are choices made in different cultures for different reasons. None of these numbers are permanent, even if people think that they are, I assure you, they will change. We have every reason to believe that this is also true in the matter of abortion. For fifty years, women have had a constitutionally protected right to govern their own reproductive life up to a certain point of gestation and that point has differed from state to state but until last week, a woman’s civil rights were protected by the federal government. That is much less so today than it was a week ago. While we may have erred on the side of granting permission for late term abortions at some point, we are certainly now being forced to err on the side of granting personhood to a pea sized clump of cells. Rights have been taken away from millions of American women by a majority of the members of the Supreme Court whose reasons seem to be largely informed by both conservative Catholic faith and a concern about the wishes of conservative Republican voters, neither of which, I am suggesting, have nearly as much standing as both women of childbearing age or the majority of American voters. As previously noted, there are no laws that govern a man’s body, at least not unless Clarence Thomas gets his way and manages to criminalize gay sex or possibly even sex among the unmarried. There are not laws that govern a woman’s body when she is not pregnant. For example, a woman can choose to get a tubal ligation without any legal entanglements. It is only the matter of pregnancy that raises the whole private medical matter v public civil rights concern. Every society adjusts its collective views on moral norms. In overturning Roe v Wade, an illegitimate majority on the Supreme Court cut out the public’s role in discerning our norms of ethics and forced a standard on this nation of more than 300 million people without consulting us or even considering our values. So, I conclude that the government of the United States does not adequately represent the people of the United States and the gulf between the two demands correction. As previously stated, I believe that the best path to making this correction would be to provide for direct election of our president, a distribution of senate seats based on population and not on state boundaries, term limits for Supreme Court Justices, and a more equitable division of appointment of justices granting each presidential administration the same number of seats on the court. How might some of these matters be addressed? A constitutional convention would be the most effective and second to that would be a series of amendments to our 240-year-old constitution. Either of those options are very difficult because both require a political party or many states to willingly participate in losing a great deal of power. A convention can be called for, or an amendment can be proposed, either by a ¾ vote of both houses of Congress or by a ¾ vote of the state legislatures in the country. Low population states are unlikely to give up the power they have through our electoral college system, nor would they happily sacrifice seats in the Senate. Republicans would not vote to change a system which, for two generations, has allowed them to hold office without a popular vote and to exercise minority control over the majority’s moral will. Still, a constitutional convention is what I would wish for as a best possible solution; it just has little to no chance of happening. It has been popularly suggested that the President and the Congress work together, while they can, to expand the number of seats on the Supreme Court. This is the easiest and quickest way to effect real change on the court and it has been done in the past, after all, the constitution never states how many seats must exist on the high court. Still, as important as it is today, it would open the flood gates to even more expansion of the court the next time that a Republican administration is in the White House and the legislature. Granted, the Republican members of the Senate, under Mitch McConnell’s leadership, stole a nomination from Barack Obama and promised to block any nomination a hypothetical administration of Hillary Clinton might have appointed. So, Republicans have already demonstrated that they are willing to throw ethics to the wind to grab power in the judicial system but expanding the number of seats on the court would be an invitation to further partisan interference with the work of the Supreme Court. We want to stabilize the court, not turn it into a trophy to be passed back and forth between political parties. The solution that appeals to my mind, but which is rarely mentioned is the possibility of removing a justice from the court. Even a life-time appointment can be ended with proper cause. And here I need to ask you to allow me a quick footnote. As previously noted, in philosophy, we have identified several common mistakes of logic in argumentation. We give them Latin names to make them sound more important the way that advertisers use actors with British accents to make them sound more believable. But one of the most common is called ad hominem. It means literally, “attack the person” rather than the argument they present. One of the smartest members of congress, the member of congress with some of the best preparation for the job and the passion to raise the most important issues is the New York congresswoman, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. Millionaire talking heads from Fox to MSNBC like to try to dismiss her well-reasoned, well researched, and insightful ideas by simply saying that she is too radical. That is an ad hominem fallacy that any 18-year-old freshman student in philosophy should be able to spot and dismiss immediately but, in these days, when critical thinking is an endangered skill, simple name calling is enough to throw the simple minded off the sequence of an important argument. AOC has been vocal about the obvious need to rebalance the court by removing justices who are guilty of egregious professional failings. Clarence Thomas is at the top of that list because of his repeated refusal to recuse himself in cases that directly involved his wife’s probably illegal political behavior. He has literally voted on cases in which he is attempting to provide cover for his own wife. It would be difficult to have a more obvious and unacceptable conflict of interest. For very many reasons, I would say that Clarence Thomas is unfit to sit on the Supreme Court, but this single reason is so obvious that it shouldn’t take more than five minutes in each house to reach a decision to impeach him The constitution provides for the impeachment of Supreme Court justices in exactly the same way that a president is impeached. The House has to draft and pass articles of impeachment, by a simple majority, and then a trial is held in the Senate. Thomas has violated a fundamental ethical rule for any judge and so, when you are talking about a Supreme Court justice, the standard can only be, in a word, supreme. He needs to go. AOC has also pointed out exactly what I pointed out a couple of weeks ago, that Justices Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, and Barrett, all lied under oath in their Senate hearings when they were seeking Senate approval to be seated on the court. Each was specifically asked if they would try to overturn Roe v Wade and each described that landmark decision as settled law and following the principle of stare decisis, another important sounding Latin term that means that you let the decision stand, because it has become a part of the country’s understanding of what is and what is not law. These three Trump appointees were, we believe, specifically selected to overturn Roe. They swore under oath that they would not, and then, they did exactly what they had sworn that they would not. If I lied in a job interview, I would have reason to expect to be fired when my employer discovered the unethical deception. Why would a Supreme Court justice be held to a lower standard than someone who was applying to work in the food court in the mall? I think that we made a horrible mistake by being so passive when Mitch McConnell literally and unethically stole an appointment from President Obama and held it for Trump. Of course, “no drama Obama” wasn’t much help in beating the drum at the time. Now, I believe, public political pressure must be maintained to impeach and remove justices Thomas, Kavanagh, Gorsuch, and Barrett from the court, giving President Biden the opportunity to appoint four justices who will be more responsive to the ethical values of the American people. And as he selects these four new justices, I would suggest that consideration be given to those who claim no religious affiliation or at the very least, are not Catholics, and to judges who have law degrees from one of the best law schools in the nation other than Harvard and Yale. We want a Supreme Court that is comprised of the best educated, most moral, and well qualified judges and we need a court that looks like and responds to America.

Angels and Demons (how crisis reveals who we really are)

Angels and Demons (how crisis reveals who we really are) June 26, 2022 Dr. Roger Ray CLICK HERE TO SEE THE VIDEO “Janina turned her face away. But I watched, flattening myself against the window. As I pressed against the glass, I saw an officer make a flinging movement with his arm, and something rose up into the sky like a fat bird. With his other hand he aimed his pistol, and the bird plummeted to the ground beside its screaming mother, and the officer shot the mother, too. But it was not a bird. It was not a bird. It was not a bird.” p. 104, In My Hands by Irene Gut Opdyke The project was never finished because my writing schedule was interrupted by the events of 9-11 in 2001, but earlier that year I had been recruited to write religious education materials for Christian Sunday School youth about the Holocaust. I had visited the Holocaust Museum and the Children’s Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem once in the early 1980’s and again in the early 1990’s. But I took the first part of my writing grant to visit the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC. At the time, a part of their display was an area called “The Righteous Gentiles,” which I believe has now been re-named “The Righteous among the Nations.” It was a collection of commemorations of non-Jews who had helped European Jews to escape the Nazi “final solution.” It appealed to my mind, that for young people attending a Christian Sunday School, the best way for them to relate to the Holocaust would be to imagine the kind of role that they might have played, as Christians, had they been living in Europe during the Holocaust. To provoke them to question themselves, “What would I have done if I had been living in Germany, or Poland, or Russia, at this time.” I read several biographies of “Righteous Gentiles” in preparation. The most famous of which was certainly Oscar Schindler, about whom the award winning 1993 movie, Schindler’s List was made. But the story that has stuck with me the most clearly over these past twenty years, was the story of a young Polish nursing student, Irene Gut. Her autobiography, “In My Hands,” is one of the most compelling, yet disturbing books that you will ever read. Still, I highly recommend it. But like reading Ellie Wiesel’s book about his experience in the Holocaust, “Night,” you may find it difficult to be alone for a while after you read it. It is a war biography, and the story is horrible from its first pages. She was a 17-year-old Catholic student, when she was first recruited to care for Polish soldiers but was then she was captured by the Russian army where she was repeatedly raped by soldiers. Her account of this chapter of her life always comes back to me with nauseating clarity whenever I hear about the war crimes of Russian soldiers in Ukraine today. She was taken to a Russian hospital but even there, she was going to be sexually assaulted and managed to escape, fleeing back to her home, only to be rounded up by the Germans and sent to work in a slave factory manufacturing weapons for the war. She used her German name and her mastery of the German language to get out of the camp but she was forced to be a housekeeper for a German officer and to work in a hotel restaurant where German soldiers ate. From there, she could look out of the second story windows and see into the Jewish ghetto. Now, folks, a lot of Polish Catholics saw what was happening to the Jews. They knew about the war crimes, even if they could not yet imagine the murders on the scale the Germans were planning. But some people were sympathetic with the extermination of the Jews. Some people just tried not to think about it; tried not to get involved. Irene described a scene she witnessed from that window one day: “As I pressed against the glass, I saw an officer make a flinging movement with his arm, and something rose up into the sky like a fat bird. With his other hand he aimed his pistol, and the bird plummeted to the ground beside its screaming mother, and the officer shot the mother, too. But it was not a bird. It was not a bird. It was not a bird.” The Germans could commit such horrible war crimes because they no longer saw their Jewish prisoners as being human. They were “other,” they were “different,” and so they could be despised and literally killed for sport. Irene’s mind wanted it to be a man shooting a bird, but she kept saying to herself, “But it was not a bird. It was not a bird. It was not a bird.” I hesitate to draw to many comparisons to the holocaust because, seriously, nothing is like the holocaust. But, you know, we hear about a shooting in a poor neighborhood here in town, and we don’t react the way we would if it had happened in our neighborhood. Because the people who live in poor neighborhoods, am I going too far to say that they are somehow “other”? We read about the police breaking up a homeless encampment, and taking what belongings they have, their ID, their birth certificates, their drivers’ license, their Social Security cards, and photos or correspondence that might have held meaning for them, something that reminded them of when they too were see as being fully human. . . and the police bag all of that stuff up and throw it away. As if to make the point that the homeless are not so much people as they are vermin, a drain on social services, a blight on a neighborhood, a threat to commerce. Irene eventually becomes a freedom fighter, smuggling Jews out of detention and helping them to escape but she emphasizes that she didn’t become that person all at once. She was still a teenager, a waitress for German officers, but she had to clean their plates, and scrape their leftovers into a garbage can. She began, very timidly, very carefully, just setting aside some of the better food scraps and filling a little tin box which she would take at night and bury under the fence between the hotel and captured Jews in the ghetto. She made sure that one of the captives saw her. They retrieved the box and put the empty box back where they had found it. This became Irene’s ritual, putting food scraps under the fence every day. It was a drop in the bucket, honestly, it couldn’t have made much of a difference, but it allowed her to assuage her guilt, a bit, and, more importantly, it allowed her to continue to see the Jewish captives as being humans. She found herself being given more and more responsibility in the restaurant and when she pleaded for help, she managed to persuade her captors to let her have the assistance of some of the Jewish prisoners in the kitchen. Moving four or five people back and forth daily allowed her to raise the stakes on smuggling food, and news, and letters, in and out of the ghetto. She eventually made the very difficult decision to become a mistress to the German officer in whose home she lived in exchange for him pretending not to know that she was hiding Jews in the basement who were being smuggled out to freedom. At some point, having been raised an ardent and obedient Catholic, she confessed all of this, the stealing of food, smuggling Jews out of the ghetto, and even sleeping with the German officer to her priest who condemned all of it. He insisted that she stop helping the Jews, that she end her stealing and sexual favors which, is what made her realize how irrelevant the Catholic faith had become in war time, in the midst of a holocaust. Irene survived the war, and eventually moved to the United States and had a family of her own. She actually just died in California in 2003 at the age of 81, having remained in touch with several of the Jews she had helped to escape from certain death. Another author I read a good deal of was the Jewish psychoanalyst, Viktor Frankl, who survived the Auschwitz Nazi death camp, even though his parents, his brother, and his pregnant wife did not. I apologize for even showing you such horrible pictures of Frankl along with the emaciated bodies of the men with whom he was imprisoned but it was in this nearly dead nightmare that Frankl imagined himself standing at a lectern and delivering lectures on the psychology of the death camps. He clung to a quote from the German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, who said, “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” He saw the difference between the prisoners who had something to live for and those who did not, recognizing that focusing on the fact that the world still expects something from you kept many of them alive. Simply enduring the suffering was often not enough. We need something larger to hold onto, a family that needs you, a book that must be written, a story that must be told, some accomplishment that cannot be simply dismissed. These thoughts have lived with me since we first heard of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, with the stories of murder and rape and theft of civilians and in spite of the horror of it all, the courage and resilience that has been shown by the Ukrainian people. The war is not going well for them now and they may not be able to withstand the invading Russian armies much longer, but, you will recall, the whole world assumed that Russian would have taken the Ukraine in the first week of April and it is now late June. Frankl reflected in one of his books about his experience in Auschwitz, that Freud had believed that under the right circumstances, virtually everyone will become a monster. Given enough suffering, enough hunger, thirst, deprivation, assault, the monster in all of us appears. And, you have to admit, there is a lot of evidence to support Freud’s belief. You know, the ovens in the death camps where millions of Jews were killed were operated by other Jewish prisoners. They assisted in killing their own people in order to buy themselves a little more time, a little more comfort, better rations, better clothes. Hard times can reveal our very worst character. But Frankl noted that it could also reveal previously unknown saints, angelic human beings who would share their crust of bread with a starving prisoner, who might give up some of their own clothing or even their shoes to save someone dying from the cold. In his most famous book, the one that I wish everyone would read, “Man’s Search for Meaning”, Frankl writes: “Sigmund Freud once asserted, "Let one attempt to expose a number of the most diverse people uniformly to hunger. With the increase of the imperative urge of hunger all individual differences will blur, and in their stead will appear the uniform expression of the one unstilled urge." Thank heaven, Sigmund Freud was spared knowing the concentration camps from the inside. His subjects lay on a couch designed in the plush style of Victorian culture, not in the filth of Auschwitz. There, the "individual differences" did not "blur" but, on the contrary, people became more different; people unmasked themselves, both the swine and the saints.” Despair, depression, cynicism can be the escapes we use to avoid dealing with hard times, if we are not the one at the tip of the spear. I will confess to you, these past two years have been hard on me, psychologically, as we have endured the regressive policies of the Trump administration, which ended in a horrible and deadly pandemic in which most of our neighbors refused to be vaccinated or to even wear a paper mask to protect the lives of the vulnerable around them. We have watched our often obscenely religious neighbors demonstrating depraved indifference about the welfare of the children and the elderly around them. And even our own government seems determined to take away the civil rights of women, to cut funds used to prop up food and education programs, and to defend gun manufacturers profits even in the face of one mass murder after another, in schools, churches, shopping centers and bars. I recognize depression as if it were a person living very near to me, longing to embrace me and hold me in its frozen bosom. Soren Kierkegaard once wrote in his journal, “My depression has been my most faithful mistress. Is it any wonder that I return her affection?” I have friends who speak of moving to Canada, my old scuba buddy has often mentioned moving to Iceland, and, at times, I have considered leaving the country permanently myself. I can’t believe how corrupt our Supreme Court has become. I cannot stand the fact that our country has been so willing to go backwards in matters of race, gender, civil rights, the environment, and in economics. I fight depression with exercise, with exposure to nature, in conversation with friends whom I know I can share my concerns and I can be confident that they have similar passions. But I would be lying to you if I did not admit that none of these things work every day. I have spent sleepless nights. I have spent a day, here and there, closed up in my room away from the world and even the light of the sun, wallowing in despair. You don’t need for me to tell you how often we turn to watching sports or mindless sit-coms, or pure escapist drama, as if an English accent and period costumes can anesthetize our awareness of how much is going seriously wrong in the world. We call our escapism “entertainment” when it really isn’t, is it? It is really just distraction. As if simply not watching the news could mean that our democracy is not under the very real threat of falling into fascism at the hands of our own elected officials. Though I am always reticent to compare any current event to the whole Nazi movement and the resulting holocaust in the first half of the 20th century, none of us can escape the fact that Russia’s dictator, Vladimir Putin, is acting like Hitler and the Russian armies are committing war crimes against the people of Ukraine that are similar to what the German armies did in Poland. This is further compounded by the fact that our former president was publicly supportive of Putin as well as the violent royal government of Saudi Arabia and he was publicly envious of China’s president, Xi Jinping, who changed China’s constitution so that he could remain president for life. Something which our former president was attempting to accomplish for himself. So, yes, if you are at all awake to what is going on the world and in our own country, depression may well become your most faithful mistress. However, I don’t think that this is time to call your doctor to get your prescription for Prozac re-filled, nor simply to escape the country physically or figuratively by diving deeply into diversions. You need to realize that the future expects something of you. You have a reason to live which can empower you to survive the serious challenges we now face. As Ellie Wiesel taught us in his account of surviving the holocaust, “We cannot simply be neutral because neutrality always favors the oppressor and never the oppressed.” We are not spectators in life. We are participants, decision makers, and we can be world changers. Or, as one of my favorite internet memes says, “You can pray all you want but eventually David had to pick up a stone and act against Goliath.” Don’t simply be depressed. Be determined. Maybe even angry, but you sure can’t be neutral. Vote, and maybe even be an election judge, or campaign, or even run for office yourself. Be vocal. Be public about your convictions. Be kind but don’t play dumb to make other people feel more comfortable. Democracy with all of its freedoms and civil rights are in more danger today than at any time since the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and there will be no awards handed out for just being sad about it if we lose our democracy. Now is the time for spiritual people to be more than simply concerned. Now is the time for us to be engaged.