Wishing You a Quiet New Year

This past year, as every previous year, I have written a lot about loud, bloviating fundamentalism. I have tried to avoid discrediting all religion when I criticize fundamentalists. But I want to take a moment to indicate that the purpose of this blog is not to attack religion as a whole but just doctrinal religions that make people think they have the final answers to every question.

Fundamentalist religions tend to be loud. Their preachers are loud and relentless. They give you no time to think for yourself and to consider possibilities other than the stark black-and-white choices they have set before you: to agree with they say (Heaven) or to doubt it (Hell). Even during times of supposedly silent prayer in a conservative church, the organ plays melodies of hymns that tell you what to think. At least that is the way it is in fundamentalist Christianity, and I suspect (without direct knowledge) the same is true in Islam.

In this sense, fundamentalist religions resemble entertainment. Many modern movies consist of nearly continuous action. If you stop for a moment to think, you might get attacked by orcs, so you have to keep slashing with your sword. That is, these movies are like video games. And, as in video games, all of the characters are unchangeably good or bad. Genre fiction also never takes time for reflection. There are movies and literary novels in which you have to think about which direction the characters will choose and in which good vs. bad is not always very clear. But these reflective movies and books make a lot less money than action movies and genre fiction.

The big churches that sell religion and the big corporations that sell entertainment do not want you to take time for reflection. Fundamentalist religious leaders worry that, if you think for yourself, you might become a Quaker (if Christian) or Sufi (if Muslim). You might be less useful of a follower, less likely to give money to a church, less likely to take up arms when called to do so. And the corporations are afraid that you might have a good time by doing something that does not require you to make a purchase.

I wish for you, in this coming year, freedom. And you can find freedom by taking time to think carefully for yourself. Walk in the woods and notice things. Shut up and listen. Read the Bible, and think about what Jesus and the prophets said rather than what the big preachers say. Do not be afraid to be alone with your own thoughts.

Christmas Message 2013

It is the Sunday before Christmas. Doctrinal churches call it the last Sunday of Advent. It’s been a while since I’ve been to church, but this does not mean I am without religious feelings and sensibilities. And I would like to share some with you.

We recently had an ice storm, which deposited about three-quarters of an inch of ice on every exposed surface except for the ground. Streets remain clear, but everything else is glazed with a layer of crystal. It is not always symmetrical; a branch may have a half an inch of ice on one side and a quarter on the other.

There is not much that we can do about the ice except, on a Sunday morning, go out and appreciate its beauty: to notice such things as the asymmetry of ice on branches. The ice transforms everything into an object of beauty. Buds, already half-swollen for spring, are encased in it. Spheres of sycamore seeds become bizarre tree-ornaments, hanging from the trees by their loose stalks. Best of all, the ice magnifies and distorts beautiful colors, such as crimson holly berries and blue cedar berries. When the sun briefly emerges from behind thick gray clouds, the world becomes a crystal palace, like the one that Lara and Yuri walked through in Dr. Zhivago. Inevitably, the music of Journey through Snow Country and Dance of the Snowflakes from The Nutcracker filled my mind. I wonder if Tchaikovsky, who was depressed and who particularly despised the Nutcracker music that he himself wrote, could have imagined that someone almost 140 years later would me walking around in Oklahoma (which did not even exist at the time) thinking of his music. I consciously invited the beauty of ice and music to fill my mind.

We could, I suppose, have gone to church to sing about and listen to sermons about doctrines. But I believe we made the better choice, to go walking in the ice with hearts open to the beauty of the thin layer of cosmos that clings to our little path of Earth.

Back at a “Bible church” of which I was a member long ago, a former missionary related a story to me. An African tribal chief had said that he knew there was a God because he could see God’s tracks, just as he knew that certain animals were present, though unseen, because of their tracks. We might say, instead of tracks, God’s phenomena—the appearance (Greek phainen, to manifest) of the unseen in the world of the seen. The missionary meant, by this, that you could recognize the presence of God because of the evidences of creationism. While I consider creation-science to be ridiculous, I have to admit that, if there is some kind of God of love, I saw God’s phenomena this morning.

Whatever beliefs you may have or lack, I wish you a time of looking for, and finding, beauty.

Atonement

It is the Christmas season, which for most people just means materialism and religious rituals and images. But for some people, religious or not, it is a time to think about “peace on Earth, goodwill toward men.” One of the main ideas in traditional Christian belief is that Jesus brought “atonement” between God and humankind. According to this view, human sin had caused a rift between God and humankind, and Jesus’ incarnation and later his crucifixion atoned for that rift.

I wondered recently what “atonement” means to conservatives. They claim to believe in the atonement brought by Jesus Christ. But what do they mean by this? They think that they obtain atonement from God every day when they pray and every week when they go to church. But then they continue doing the same evil things as they did before, the same things that the Old Testament prophets denounced, such as grinding the poor into the dust. Apparently, to them, atonement means that God forgives them in advance for whatever they might do, sort of like the pope conferring indulgences in advance for whatever rape and pillage the Crusaders might do once they reach the Holy Land.

The conservative viewpoint is very male. Males seem to be like medieval knights: they enjoy jousting with one another, pennants and draperies waving in the air, while the people around them are sick and starving. Congress (which is mostly male) recently created an artificial budget crisis, not all that different from medieval jousting matches, so that they could joust while ignoring the real problems that bring suffering to the masses. And they fantasize that females drool over their jousting sticks. Male thinking, like male reproduction, is an ugly ramming, unlike the nourishing roundness of the female body and female thinking. Conservatives, whether Christian or Muslim, generally believe in the right of males to dominate females, which includes the primacy of male ramming over female nurture. Atonement, then, to their way of thinking, must mean to wash away female niceness and replace it with male ruthlessness.

This view of atonement is completely different from the original Christian meaning, back when Christians were a little socialistic altruistic band and before Christianity became a political force.

The Real Creation Model

Most people, including most readers of this blog, think that creationism is the belief that God made all the components of the universe in perfect form just a few thousand years ago.

But that is only part of the creationist creed. There is another part, which they do not openly proclaim, but which they believe.

We all know there is a political correlation between rejection of evolution and rejection of environmentalism. I merely maintain that is correlation is real, not accidental. There is a reason for it.

The full statement of the creation model is that God made all the components of the universe in perfect form just a few thousand years ago for us to use up now.

Creationists believe that the Earth will come to an end soon, so we might as well go ahead and use up all the natural resources, like coal and fish and trees, as fast as we can. Why preserve them, only to have them burned up in Armageddon? Why preserve them, only to leave them behind in the Rapture and let damned sinners have them? Why have a livable Earth in 2100, if the end of the world will already have occurred?

A creationist said to me, several decades ago, that the basis of his belief was time. (That’s funny; I would have expected it to be God.) We know that Jesus is coming soon, he said, therefore just as the future is short so must the past be short. I thought this was rather strange, but now it makes perfect sense.

So when you look at the full statement of creationism, their opposition to both evolution and environmentalism makes perfect sense.

If you are, or know, an environmentalist creationist, all I can say is, glad to hear it. And I could have a respectful conversation with such a person. But this is clearly the exception to the rule. If anything, conservative creationists probably hate environmentalist creationists even worse than they hate evolutionists. An environmentalist creationist is embracing a burden of frustration.

The political correlation between anti-evolutionism and anti-environmentalism is real, not accidental. I believe the reason is that creationists think God made the Earth for us to use up right now. If you have a different explanation, please feel free to post a comment. If your argument makes sense, I would be glad to acknowledge it.