How Do We Know What (we think) We Know?

How Do We Know What (we think) We Know?  

  September 21, 2025        Dr. Roger Ray

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One of my favorite segments in Bill Maher’s “Real Time” shows is when he does his, “I don’t know it for a fact, I just know it is true” routine. Maher will say something like, “I don’t know it for a fact that Elon Musk is going to grow a moustache just to own the libs; I just know it is true.”

Or,  “I don’t know for a fact that RFK, Jr. did something weird with the body of the dog that Kristi Noem shot; I just know it’s true.”

 

Sadly, Bill Maher’s schtick is making fun of a real phenomenon which is just too common in our public discourse. People find it exciting to speculate aloud that those vapor trails we see behind high flying jets are really mind control drugs being dropped on the population or that the covid vaccine contains a tiny GPS that will allow Bill Gates to track you to the local drug den or strip club. People will say it, then repeat it with conviction, and then it is picked up by talk radio hosts, and finally it is repeated by Donald Trump on Truth Social and the next thing you know our president is telling us that it true because a lot of people are saying it. 

 

It is embarrassing that so many adults are willing to believe the most preposterous things, so much so, that a lot of us have become so cynical that we tend to not believe anything at all . . . we can reasonably assume that politicians, political parties, the news media, university professors, and the people you meet on dating sites are all liars with some barely concealed ulterior motive to trick you or manipulate you. I am much more cynical than I once was, less trusting, more suspicious . . . 20 years ago I almost always voted for whatever amendment was on the ballot, assuming that my state legislators surely know what they are doing and if they wrote up the amendment, we must need it. Experience has taught me to go to the other extreme, almost always voting no unless I have had the time to research the proposal and find that it is a good amendment. In the past few elections, I have probably voted against bridges and paved roads just out of a reflexive mistrust of state government.

 

But here is the good news, fairly reliable knowledge is not impossible. We can never be absolutely certain of much, but we can reasonably attain reliable knowledge about most of the things that affect us, though we’ll probably always have some things that we believe that we can’t prove, but we just know that they are true. For example, I have no idea whether Jeffy Epstein committed suicide in prison, I just know that the obvious coverup and official attempts at distraction make me think that he really did have incriminating evidence on a lot of powerful people, especially Donald Trump, such that I find it more plausible to believe that he was murdered rather than believe that he committed suicide, during a brief and unexplained interruption in the recording of security cameras in a prison. I don’t know for a fact that he was murdered, I just know that it is true.

A man with a long history of pedophilia and con jobs is certainly a malignant narcissist and they are unlikely to ever commit suicide, especially when they have the goods on presidents and royalty and billionaires. Still, even though a malignant narcissist is unlikely to take their own life, it isn’t hard to imagine a malignant narcissist killing someone to hide a dirty secret. You do the math. And by malignant narcissist, I mean Donald Trump. But, I’ve moved on.

There is actually a dimension of philosophy, born in the writings of Aristotle, that is devoted to how we know what we know. It is called “epistemology,” which may sound a bit daunting but, honestly, at least on the surface, it isn’t that tough. 

You may think that you don’t know what the term “epistemology” means but even the uninitiated are familiar with Rene Descartes’ most famous maxim: “I think, therefore, I am,” the famous “cogito ergo sum.” In Descartes’ Meditations he sets out to doubt everything, all of the way down to his own existence. How, after all, do any of us know that we actually exist. Many people seem to think that when they watched the Matrix that it was more of a documentary than a science fiction film. 

 

But even if we are captured in the Matrix, with a fake world being projected into our minds, still, the fact that we are aware of our own thinking is singular proof that, at least in some form, we must exist.

 

In epistemology, there are two kinds of knowing, knowing like Descartes’ Cogito is called a posterioriknowledge because it is derived from experience. All of science is predicated on this kind of knowing. The scientific method seeks to articulate facts based on observation, repetition, and analysis. The other kind of knowing is called a priori or knowledge we have before or even without experience. A new born baby knows to root for a nipple without ever having taken the class in breast feeding. 

Which is rather less impressive when you consider the construction and engineering skill of the southern masked weaver of Africa, which constructs its intricate nests out of wide strips of grass, reeds, and/or palm blades. Birds just know how to make the nest that is unique to its species, except for the dull thug birds who take other nests or just lay their eggs in another female’s nest. Still, they are born with a survival instinct which is noteworthy even if it isn’t laudable.

 

There are things we at least think we know without experience. Things that are either somehow revealed to us or revealed to someone else whom we are inclined to believe. All religions tend to fall under the category of, “I don’t know it for a fact, I just know that it is true.”

 

Religions have traditionally valued belief without evidence while science places little or no value on belief without evidence. 

Personally, I favor an evidence based faith, something I wrote about in longer form in my 2014 book, Progressive Faith and Practice.  

 

People often assure themselves and others that God has spoken to them or revealed something to them miraculously. Science dismisses such a priori evidence because it cannot be repeated, observed, or analyzed. It doesn’t mean that it isn’t true, it just means that you cannot know if it is true or not. Many people believe in ghosts because, they say, they saw one but their personal experience doesn’t pass the test of critical thinking because the experience cannot be repeated, observed, or tested. If your experience cannot be repeated, observed, and tested then, it is your belief to keep if you want but it shouldn’t be a belief to anyone else.

 

All of the Quran are sayings that Muhamad claimed were revealed to him by the angel Gabriel but no one else saw Gabriel or heard his voice. Hence all of Islam is based on the a priori conviction of Muhamad and if you are not disposed to give Muhamad that kind of credibility, the whole thing falls apart. This can be said of other world religions as well. I have received many a blank stare from someone who quoted Buddha to me when I tell them that no one wrote down any of the teachings of Buddha until Buddha had been dead for more than 400 years. That stretches credibility a good deal farther than I am willing to go. There is no historical evidence for the teachings of Buddha, there is just Buddhist tradition. It may be very helpful, very insightful, very valuable . . . but it is highly unlikely that it came from Buddha.

 

That is not to say that there is not a lot of wonderful things in the Buddhist dharma, the Muslim Quran, or the Christian Bible, it is just that none of it is supported by anything we can rationally call evidence. As existentialists often do, we just sometimes say, “It pleases me to think so,” and we leave it at that. A priori knowledge isn’t bad, just look at the nest of the southern masked weaver. I don’t know how the knowledge of how to make that nest is passed along, but, clearly, it is passed along.

 

We know from physics that everything in the world, all matter of all sorts, was created by the energy of exploding stars. Everything from earthworms to air planes is made up of the same 12 particles of matter which are held together by the same 4 forces of nature. For many years I frequently pointed out that the hundred pound Ficus tree in my living room was made of exactly the same stuff as my 100 pound daughter and yet, existentially, I knew that the two were not the same, certainly not the same value to me. I liked my Ficus tree which I kept for nearly 40 years, but I love my daughter more than I love anything, to include my own life. 

 

I don’t know that I love my daughter based on a medical test or something I can see in a microscope. I know it because I feel it, and it is as real to me as the light and heat from the sun, but I cannot prove it to you in any scientific way. Both kinds of knowledge have value and have a place in our thoughts, but critical thinking demands evidence about most things in life. 

 

What has become dangerous in our time is how “it pleases me to think so” has come to take the place of real evidence and analysis. Has, for example, Donald Trump really stopped 10 wars in the past few months? Could he find the countries in question on a map? Could he even name them? Does he think that he has stopped the wars in Ukraine and the Gaza Strip because he has told the parties to stop fighting? 

 

Are cities with black Democrat mayors really more dangerous than cities with white Republican mayors, even if these Republican run cities have murder and crime rates that are 4 times higher than the Democrat managed cities where he wants to send in the Army? It pleases Trump to think so, and it pleases the racists in his base, but that doesn’t make it so. Facts are, after all, stubborn things.

 

Most politicians lie, at least some of the time, but what is dangerous in our time is the unprecedented way in which Trump tries to bend reality to his whims. He literally tried to convince people that they were in danger from a hurricane because he drew, with a sharpie, and a weather map to extend the threat posed by the hurricane. In his second administration, he has just cut funding to the actual weather scientists who help to forecast dangerous weather. Trump fired Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. He claimed that the country's jobs reports "are being produced by Biden appointee" and were therefore suspect. She gave him a factual report with numbers that made Trump look bad so he fired the researcher who brought him bad news.

 

Good government depends on good factual information but everything Trump says is on par with your delusional aunt who talks to ghosts. The Trump administration’s plan for implementing his fascist take down of American democracy has been to “flood the field” with so many conspiracy theories, lies, propaganda, and crazy executive orders that the media can’t keep up and the voting public will just get so disgusted that they stop paying attention. This “flood the field” technique is working for them. 

 

Those of us who try to respond to the constant drum beat of idiotic claims, misinformation, and crimes are labeled as having “Trump Derangement Syndrome” suggesting that the problem is that we hate Trump so much that we are against everything that he says and does. This is just another way of evading the central fact that our president is an uneducated, low IQ, fascist who is the greatest threat to democracy since Hitler. We’re not deranged; we’re devoted to reality even though this reality is increasingly nightmarish.

 

Folks, the moon landing happened. The earth is not flat. There are no mind control drugs in the vapor trails left behind jets. Tariffs cause inflation, and can cause a major economic meltdown. The Trump “big beautiful bill” cut millions of people off of access to healthcare in order to give huge tax breaks to the richest 1% who do not need a tax break. Russia started the war with Ukraine and giving Russia Ukrainian land will only guarantee that Russia will invade other neighbors to take more territory. One need only watch the sycophantic exercise of every cabinet meeting to realize that Trump wants to be a dictator and he is appointing people to posts who are so stupid and loyal that he has no one to stop him from becoming a dictator. 

And these things, my friends, I will tell you that I do know for a fact and I hope that you also realize that they are true and that you will act on them.

 

“Just War Theory in 2025”

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

The After-Church World

The After-Church World           August 24, 2025    

Dr. Roger Ray

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

A.I. and the Guaranteed Basic Income

     A.I. and the Guaranteed Basic Income

August 10, 2025   Dr. Roger Ray

click here to see the video

 

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

 

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