Transition from Fundamentalism to Agnosticism, part two

One of the books I was reading during my transition from fundamentalism into agnosticism in 2005 was Rabbi Kushner’s Who Needs God. This was exactly the question I was asking myself, and Kushner’s writing was clear and simple, so this was the perfect time to read his book. I did not need any complex theology.

I wanted to enjoy wisdom. Wisdom, I wrote in my journal, is the only pleasure worth having. One can get enough of sex, but not of wisdom, as King Solomon the sex fiend discovered with his thousand wives and concubines. And because of wisdom, every day, no matter how tired I was during my medical problems, I had a deep sense of awe, as if the whole universe were awash in holiness. Maybe it was just an altered mental state, but if so, it was a state of happiness. I had come to doubt that there was a God of love, but I wanted to live as if there was a God of love.

At the same time, I was really angry at any God who might possibly exist. Kushner asked, how can you be angry at a God you do not believe exists? But I was angry at the fact that there should be a God who, just once, rescues the world from its misery. I could not come to terms with the fact that were was not.

This entry, from 9 January 2005 and subsequent days, is transcribed almost verbatim from my journal. I might note that I wrote in huge paragraphs, which I have here broken up and, in some cases, rearranged. I have added minimal comments, in brackets.

“I begin now to read Kushner’s Who Needs God. I need a break from ancient scripture which I read, first in devotion, then wisdom, then analysis; for example, I recognized Jeremiah’s manic-depressive extremes. I need to escape not from scripture so much as from a tyranny of how humans have used it.

“God challenged Job, asking if he had measured the earth, sky, and sea and knew everything in them. Now, we have done this. We cannot any longer identify God with what we do not know. Or can we? We calculate unknowable dimensions, as if the mere calculation of them makes us their masters.

“I admit that while I was wrong about much traditional doctrine, a mystery remains to which I must be open. Kushner said scientific research is an act of religious devotion, honoring the creator of mind. I use what I write as a religious gift, not as a challenge or a reason to be cynical. Cynical means “like dogs,” happy or angry from merely immediate circumstances. I need to focus on how my work of teaching and writing are my service to God, to lay claim again on the joy of what is before me to do. Enjoy now, not some day.

“God is depicted as bringing order out of chaos, and this is what scientists, serving God even if they think they are not, are doing. My scientific work is as holy as that of a priest. Kushner wrote, “…I am saying what I think and feel to be true, not what I think God wants to hear, and I have to believe that God respects that” (p. 21). The issue is not what we believe about God but about what we do. God’s existence is now unclear to me, but I continue to act on the assumption that God is love. This is the only way [for me] to be happy. Abram did not wait for all the answers before stepping out in faith.

“Rather than asserting, I am waiting, open to insight. As Kushner says, religion is not primarily a set of beliefs but a way of seeing. It cannot change the facts about the world but changes the way we see them…Here we are. What is our purpose? Religion shows us another answer from [that of] those who say our purpose is as consumers or as party members. Big religious leaders claim more, and less; they have grandiose eschatologies, and yet they tell their followers all they have to do is to give them money…

“Once humans became [in evolutionary time] intelligent enough to see the pain and misery of the world, religion was a way to keep going without being paralyzed. As long as we insist an Almighty God is on a throne, independent, then we can wonder why he allows suffering. But if we see God as having melded himself with creation, like bacteria evolving into mitochondria or mycorrhizae integrating into plant roots, we can see that, first, God cannot manipulate everything for us, and second, no priest is closer to God than we are. God is one with his world now. That is why life is good, not mere matter and energy. This is religion, from the Latin word for connection. It is not merely the carbon cycle, not merely evolution, that connects us with the soil and trees and animals. I feel connected because I am connected.”

I will continue exploring my 2005 journal in the next entry, and I hope it helps whoever may be reading this.

Transition from Fundamentalism to Agnosticism, part one

I underwent my transition from doctrinal Christian to Christian agnostic almost exactly sixteen years ago. I had no blog at that time, so I wrote all my thoughts in a journal. I had written entries in the journal every day since 1989. I continue that journal, which now has over 11,500 entries and four and a half million words. The journal started off as a strict devotional, back when I was a fundamentalist. I am nearly a stranger now to the person I was at that time. In each entry, I studied scriptures, and then forced an evaluation of my life into a scriptural format. I seldom let my actual feelings show in those entries, since they were intended as an offering to God. But in 2005, all of that began to change. Until recently, I had not looked back at those entries. Now, I am curious about what I was thinking at that time and why. Perhaps some of this will resonate with you as well.

In case you think that religious fundamentalism is stupid and that is all there is to it, I remind you that religion is an appetite, just like the appetite for sex or food, and, in some of us, every bit as strong.

I used a strict devotional format of A (adoration), C (confession), T (thanksgiving), and S (supplication)—ACTS for short. But toward the end of 2004, my devotional format began to break down. By 2005 the ACTS structure had become “a pseudogene whose structure can be detected, sometimes and partially, in all that I write.” My daily entries became reflections of what I was experiencing, rather than what I was reading. I stopped regularly referencing Biblical passages. By that time, I had read and written about the entire Bible—as well as the Apocrypha—twice. I gradually slipped back into this practice, but not on a regular basis. My Biblical references were from the prophets, who struggled to understand what was happening on the Earth, as those whom the prophets considered to be God’s people were turning from him. I did not reread passages of doctrine and commandment. My journal entries changed from devotions to enigmas.

One major reason for the transition from fundamentalist to agnostic was that I was ill. Nearly every day, I was in a fog of tiredness, brought on by insomnia and muscle spasms that lasted nearly all night. I realized that I did not suffer nearly as much as millions of other people; but my complaint was part of a vast wave of suffering that God, if any, should hear. I felt I was going to surrender my vivid experiences into a brain-dead grayness. I literally thought I would die from the lack of sleep in a hospital. I was, at that time, on sabbatical, so I did not have a daily schedule of work, though I was writing book manuscripts, on which I put a great deal of effort. At last, I had surgery that corrected the sleep apnea. After I recovered from the surgery, I took a trip to see the desert and foothill wildflowers in Arizona and California in what turned out to be one of the best wildflower years. Thus, my rethinking of Christianity was started by personal suffering, but the suffering turned to the joy of seeing the beauty of the natural world. But, having once realized that I had been wrong about doctrinal Christianity, I did not go back to it.

Here follow (in this and later essays) some of the things I was thinking in January 2005. During my meditations, I was not talking to God, but to myself, although I liked to imagine that God was with me. Instead of holding onto God, I was letting him hold onto me, if he wanted to do so. I previously believed that God is love, but I now realized that love is God: “He exists within all processes, relationships, and situations of love.” I saw myself, and all humans, as “…protoplasm, sometimes twitching, sometimes broken, sometimes a broth for bacteria.” I decided to relax and accept the beauties of life that I could see, and listen for the “still, small voice” that Elijah found in the wilderness, “only I am not going to theomorphize it.”

I had great aspirations for myself, especially to become a well-known writer. That aspiration has not materialized as I hoped, although my five popular science books have been well received and widely read. I decided I would be satisfied to be a small plant down in the shade; it was not worth the effort and expense to try to be a tree, to be up in the light, where I might attract the attention of lumbermen.

I continued to write meditations, because I was ready to receive insights from God, though I did not seriously expect it. At the same time, I had to continue interacting with other people—my family and, once I was back from sabbatical, my colleagues and students—because I did not want to have bizarre ideas rise and grow in my isolated thoughts, “like island monsters.” (I was thinking of the strange species that evolve on islands.)

Join me in exploring these ideas born of struggle, leading away from doctrine and toward a certain measure of celebration.

Greek Mythology: Pretty Depressing, Most of It

Athena, the goddess of wisdom, committed violent and senseless acts. The king of the gods, Zeus, went around raping women, and his jealous wife Hera went around afflicting the women. Apollo, the god of Truth, was a liar. In addition to this, he loved a human woman, Coronis, but she didn’t like him, so he had her killed. And it goes downhill from there.

The human heroes, as well as the demigods, were also far from being models of behavior. Hercules, for example, was a total jerk except when he was depressed. One time he went crazy and killed his family. Then he felt such intense remorse that he forced his famous Labors upon himself. The Greek king Agamemnon sacrificed his own daughter, Iphigenia, so that the Greek ships could sail to Troy. Even after reading about it, I could not understand why Medea killed her children.

Punishments, meted by the gods upon demigods or humans, seemed random. Some, like Tantalus, deserved the eternal torture that they received in Hades. (In his case, he was eternally hungry, and fruit hung right before his mouth but moved away whenever he reached for it, forever, and he was eternally thirsty, and water came right up to his mouth, but flowed away when he tried to drink it, forever.) I think Tantalus was one of the guys who killed his children. There were a lot of those. But Sisyphus was condemned to roll the stone uphill forever from a minor infraction. The Danaïds had to carry water, forever and forever and forever, in jars with holes in them, then refill them, for reasons that were not clear to me even when I read about them. And poor Oedipus. It was apparently the whim of the gods that condemned him to kill his father and marry his mother, and not realize he was doing it. The mother of Tithonis asked that he receive eternal life. The gods granted it. But she forgot to ask for him to remain young. So, he lived forever, just getting older and older and older. He must be a pile of flesh somewhere even today; if you step in a pile of goo, it might be him. Helen was immortal unless someone killed her.

The logical Greek view of the universe, as written by philosophers, came after a long history in which people thought of themselves as part of a universe that made no sense, and could never make sense. I can imagine living in a world of Aristotle, where effects follow causes, but I cannot imagine living in the world of Homer. The gods were just like humans, some good, some bad, most of them alternately and unpredictably both. The only difference is that they were powerful and immortal. How can you even get up in the morning if you believe the world is unpredictable?

The Romans were so unimaginative that they took the whole load of Greek mythology and adopted it as their own, just changing some names, like Zeus into Jupiter, Chronos into Saturn, Hephaestus into Vulcan, etc.

There were some bright spots. You will find them in the Iliad and the Odyssey. In the Iliad, there was one brief moment of humanity, in which Achilles returned the body of Hector to Hector’s grieving father, Priam the king of Troy. And the Odyssey is stirring because, despite the stupidity of fate, Odysseus (Ulysses) never gave up his quest to return home to Ithaca and to his wife Penelope, now two decades older. Some consider the Odyssey the first, and possibly the greatest, novel ever written.

Another bright spot is that the Greeks did not yet have our modern sense of racism. Andromeda, one of the beautiful princesses rescued from sea monsters, was Ethiopian.

Against the background of randomness, the priests of the gods (especially at the oracles) could pretty much make up whatever they wanted and claim that it was the will of their particular god. The priests of Zeus would listen to the susurrus of the wind in the oak leaves to discern the god’s will. However much I love the wind in the trees, I think these priests were just making shit up.

The only thing worse than Greek mythology was Norse mythology, which was just as grim, but the gods, rather than being immortal, had to eventually die in the Götterdämmerung.

So, dear students, if you have to study Greek mythology, be prepared for some grim and tiresome stuff, except for an occasional beam of light that will enter your mind the way Zeus entered through a tiny slit into the dome where the human woman Danae dwelt.

Joseph Lewis vs. the Faith Healers

 

My previous essay was about Joseph Lewis the freethinker. I learned some important things from his published speeches, even though his anti-religious fervor sometimes got tiresome.

In the above image, Lewis is the white-haired man at the right at the dedication of a Thomas Paine statue in 1956.

Where Joseph Lewis was at his white-hot finest was when he criticized faith-healers. One of these was Jack Coe, who called together people with TB to be healed. Not only did Coe fail to heal them, but he violated quarantine by assembling so many consumptives together. Coe was earning $800,000 a year, which was a fortune back then. Lewis challenged Coe to heal a child of polio in a hospital where it could be observed; and if Coe healed the child, Lewis would donate $60,000 to medical research. (Needless to say, this didn’t happen.)

My favorite part was when Lewis lashed out against Oral Roberts, who remains to this day the darling of Tulsa, Oklahoma, where I currently live. He, too, was a faith healer. Lewis accused Roberts of malpractice because he took advantage of people when they were at their most vulnerable. It was worse than the Catholic church selling indulgences in previous centuries. He challenged Roberts: how can you prove that you represent God? And where does the money go? Roberts also had the same problem as Coe: gathering four hundred people with TB together in order to (pretend to) heal them is a health menace. The boy that Roberts supposedly cured of epilepsy—how do we know he was really cured? In fact, how do we know he was ever sick? Maybe he was just a “shill”, a fake, planted in the audience. Once again Lewis challenged the faith healer to do his work under hospital conditions, a challenge that as far as I can tell went unanswered.

I have a special reason to dislike Oral Roberts. It gets personal. My wife’s grandmother sent Roberts much of her money, and the entire family continues poor as a result. My wife is perhaps the richest of them, as a part-time librarian and wife of a middle-class professor at a small university.

However interesting it was, I got tired of Lewis’s attacks on faith healers. It sounded as if he was trying to convince Oral Roberts that he was wrong. This was, of course, impossible. It is not a matter of reason. As Gad Saad explains in his book The Consuming Instinct, faith healers are meeting the emotional needs that have been placed in our brains by evolution. Sometimes I think that Lewis’s insistence on the primacy of reason is as un-evolutionary as the faith healers’ rejection of evolution. Religion is not something that is either true or false; it evolved.

Joseph L. Lewis was the leader of the Freethinkers in America for most of the first half of the twentieth century. He was as zealous in his fight against religion as any preacher could be in support of it. I recently read a collection of his essays, which the Freethought Press put together into a book using the plates from Lewis’s pamphlets—without even adding page numbers. Much of it got pretty tiresome, especially when it seemed as if Lewis was offended by anyone around him who was religious. He wrote insulting letters to Billy Graham, and his television interviews (including on May 22, 1957, by a very young Mike Wallace) were rambling in their anti-religious assertions. Lewis wrote, “Throughout the ages religion has imprisoned and chained and stultified the brain of man.” He wrote this same idea in various ways—but almost always using the word stultified—throughout his work.

But Lewis had some good points. Religion has often held back scientific, and human, progress. He didn’t just mean evolution, about which he had relatively little to say. One of his examples was that Timothy Dwight, President of Yale College, preached against smallpox vaccination because, he said, smallpox was the decree of God. (I wonder what Lewis would think of the religious opposition to vaccination and mask-wearing today.) He also said that some religious people objected to Benjamin Franklin’s invention of the lightning rod because, they believed, lightning struck whenever and wherever God wanted it to, and intended the consequences.

Many religious people think that people without religious faith are evil. But Lewis was boundless in his celebration of Thomas Paine, who was praised by the Americans during the Revolution but vilified later for his lack of religious faith. Paine devoted himself to making life better for everyone. He even, in 1800, proposed a Congress of Nations (similar to the League of Nations and later the more-or-less successful United Nations) to prevent war. Lewis also praised Robert Ingersoll, who also dedicated himself to improving the lot of humankind. These famous freethinkers did not use their lack of religion as an excuse to take advantage of other people, as many preachers use their religion to do. It seems that most of Lewis’s work was to go around the world and preside over the unveiling of statues of Paine and Ingersoll.

Clearly, Thomas Jefferson was a freethinker. He wrote, “In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty.” Jefferson urged us to “question with boldness even the existence of God,” since, if God exists, He would be more pleased with our intelligent belief than with ignorant superstitious devotion. But when Lewis tried to prove that Abraham Lincoln was a freethinker, the result is much less clear.

Lewis brought up some good points about Biblical history being unbelievable. For example, the story of Moses. Moses led the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt, according to the Bible. But there is no record of this in Egypt. Most fundamentalists say this is because the Egyptians didn’t want anyone to know about the embarrassing Exodus of the slaves. But surely, said Lewis, the next dynasty would have written about how the preceding dynasty had messed up and allowed slaves to escape. Then, Moses came down the mountain with tablets of stone on which the very finger of God Himself had carved the commandments. When Moses saw the idolatry of the Israelites, he threw the tablets and shattered them. This seems a really odd thing to do with tablets that God Himself had written. Then Moses went back up the mountain. This time, it was Moses who carved the tablets, God just dictating, according to Lewis. This reminds me of the golden tablets of Joseph Smith, founder of Mormonism. The tablets on display in Salt Lake City are replicates of the originals that somehow mysteriously got lost. Funny how vital evidence supporting the truth of religion gets lost over and over.

Though the repetitive writing got tedious, I learned some things from reading the works of Joseph Lewis.

Want to Know Where the Bible Came From? Don't Ask a Fundamentalist

 

I recently read Whose Bible Is It? by the prominent scholar Jaroslav Pelikan. It was an interesting overview of facts that are found in many other books, such as those by Bart Ehrman. Ehrman’s books are somewhat combative, which is understandable, since he emerged from a fundamentalist background. Pelikan came from, and remains in, a scholarly environment, and he is telling the fascinating story of where the Bible came from without feeling the need to fight the anti-information crowd.

Pelikan tells of the gradual accumulation, over centuries, of the books of the Old and New Testaments, and the books that didn’t make it into either one. The Bible is not a book; it is a collection (Bible comes from the Greek word for library). Different versions of the Bible included different books, and even as late as Martin Luther there was disagreement about which books really belonged in the Bible.

One point that Pelikan made that I had not previously thought about was this. The world of the Bible, especially the Old Testament, was one totally unfamiliar to modern people. When the scriptures say that Jesus is a shepherd, modern people have no idea what a shepherd actually does. Also, people thought that diseases were caused by demons, not germs or genes; the Bible contains not a single example of a medical healing. Also, the Old Testament world was one of continual and continuous war. When the prophets longed for turning swords into plowshares, they were not just thinking about spiritual warfare within one’s spirit but relief from suffering right now. And in the New Testament, when they expected the Second Coming, they expected it right away, not in the undefined future; so much so that Paul said that we shouldn’t even bother getting married. When so many of the expectations of the Israelites and Christians failed to materialize, they had to scramble around to find an excuse for it.

Another point was that some major Christian doctrines have a very shaky Biblical basis. In one place, our modern Old Testament says, of the redeemer, “They have pierced his hands and feet.” But it could just as easily be read as, “They have mauled his hands and feet like lions.” The first one sounds like a prediction of the crucifixion, the second does not. The difference is one slight line in the text—these are Masoretic vowel points, not even letters—a yod vs. a waw, which look very similar on paper. Something important was lost in translation.

Another thing that was lost in translation was the character of Jesus. When Jesus told the religious authorities that God can make children (ben/banim) of Abraham out of these stones (eben), it was evident that He loved puns. You just can’t get this in English. Most of us realize this, although there are some churches that believe that it was the 1611 King James Bible that was inspired by God, rather than the original writings.

The Bible is not a book—or, rather, a library—to be quickly read or superficially interpreted. Fundamentalists seldom have the patience to examine closely what they consider to be the scriptures.

Department of This Can't Possibly Be True

In Oklahoma, we do things that sound like they come out of an SNL routine that was expressly designed to ridicule Okies. That is, we seem to want to create an image of ourselves that fits the widely-held stereotypes. The events I am about to describe are all exactly what you would expect from benighted rednecks, and the odds against all of these things happening at once are huge. I can only conclude that rural Okies want to make themselves look stupid. Chance cannot explain this.

All of these news items were posted on May 22, 2020. All of them occurred in Rogers County, three of them in the same town (Inola). Remember that rural Oklahoma is the buckle of the Bible belt, exactly where you would expect people to behave in a religious, even if not sanctimonious, fashion.

• First, the pastor of the Cowboy Gatherin’ Church in Inola was arrested for raping and molesting three underage girls. That’s really the name of the church. It meets either outside, amidst cattle barriers, or under the tin roof of an auction barn.
• Second, there was a fatal stabbing at a rodeo.
• Third, a man sustained burns when he set fire to his estranged wife’s house.
• Fourth (this is the only one not in Inola; it was in the Oologah-Talala school district), a former special education teacher was arrested for having sex with one of the girls in his class.

These things all fit our stereotype: fundamentalist religion, illegal sex, cowboy culture including cowboy churches and rodeos, stabbings, deadly marital strife, and arson.

If I wrote these things—separately, or together—into a novel, an editor would rightly accuse me of creating stereotypes, and ask me to remove at least two or three of them. But in Oklahoma we feed our stereotypes, and that is why all four of these things appeared in the news on the same day.

One inescapable conclusion is that the prevalence of the Christian religion does not make people behave any better. Creationists like to claim that believing in evolution will make us behave like apes. But does fundamentalism make us behave better? Are evangelicals more moral? Remember they believe they have the Holy Spirit living within them to empower them to act righteously.

Oh, and by the way, tornadoes were coming through the same day.