Why I Can No Longer Participate in Organized Christianity

I have totally discontinued any involvement with organized Christianity. I can no longer affirm any Christian religious doctrines. But that is not the main reason I no longer participate.

I cannot participate in any church that has been swept along with the blasphemous Trump idolatry. These churches—and there are a lot of them—actively contribute to the downfall of America and the collapse of any hope for freedom in the world. I don’t worship Biden, either, but nobody does. There are millions—not many millions—who believe that truth consists of whatever Donald Trump says.

When I left the church of which I was most recently a member, I did not stomp out. I merely realized that my participation was a personal and social waste of time. In this church as a whole, and this congregation in particular, there were many social progressives. But there were just enough right-wing extremists that they could sabotage any efforts of the church to accomplish anything meaningful. In particular, I remember one older man (this was back in the Iraq war days when, to conservative Christians, the core of Christianity was to believe and to do whatever George W. Bush said) yelled at our assistant pastor because the assembly of leaders had voted to disapprove of the Iraq war. She had merely reported the vote and had not expressed an opinion. Her vote was secret. This was the same man who, in a church parking lot with limited space, took up eight spaces to park his truck and fishing boat. His total selfishness was not typical of the church, but he was able to sabotage the work and sentiments of the others.

Thus, it appeared to me, Christian churches were of two kinds: first, the ones that blasphemously championed the Godlikeness of Bush and then Trump; second, the ones that got sabotaged by the blasphemers.

This does not mean that I will never “darken the door” of a church again. I imagine that, if my démenagement en France goes according to schedule, my wife and I might very well participate in a local Catholic church along with many members of our extended French family. But it will be because of our membership in that family, not because I believe any Catholic, or other, doctrine. Just as spirituality has a personal function, so organized religion has a social function.

Nor does it mean that I do not revere Jesus. But my personal religious views are personal.

Transition from Fundamentalism to Agnosticism, part eleven. What is love?

As I continued writing in my journal in April 2005, I left behind the swings from agony to ecstasy and back. Instead, I wondered, what is love? Part of it, whether the love of friends or sexual love, is vulnerability, dangling over the terror of loss. This is something that God cannot feel, and has to experience it vicariously through us. At least, that was what I thought in 2005.

I wrote on 18 April 2005: “Love is sharing pain yet seeing beauty—neither a major or a minor [musical] mode but dorian, with a sad heart but an upward gaze.

This was my new outline of God, which as I read it now just puzzles me, but I will pass it on in case it makes some sense to you. “’The God Who Let Go.’ First, regarding God: The Father, infinite, creator, now present only as natural law [acting]; The Son, embodied briefly on Earth, now present only in his words [speaking]; the Spirit, pervading the universe, the only manner in which God has been continually present [feeling]. In order to experience love, God must now vicariously share in our experiences.”

Transition from Fundamentalism to Agnosticism, part ten.

Here is what I wrote in my journal on 8 April 2005 about what Stephen Jay Gould called The Great Asymmetry:

 

“It might seem perverse to meditate upon something written by agnostic Stephen Jay Gould, but it is important to our understanding of the problem of evil. Gould called it The Great Asymmetry. Goodness and order are built up slowly, whether in an embryo, through evolution, a city, a science, or a culture of learned decencies. Evil and chaos can occur in an instant—splat, an asteroid, a riot, acts of pure evil by terrorists (their very name tells us they want to destroy, not create). The fact that most of every day in most of the world is good and orderly means that good people must, mathematically, vastly outnumber evil people. Gould did not say whether this might exceed what one would expect from evolutionary altruism. This would mean it is the reality, not just the availability, of Spirit.

“But this does not, by itself, solve the problem. There may well be an overwhelming majority of good people, but we good people are those who choose to do good without apparent heavenly help. An intricate creation of goodness collapses from a human act of evil or a natural disaster that God does not, at least, prevent… What The Great Asymmetry does mean, as I interpret it, is that many billions of people, even some who follow evil men, have opened their minds to at least a little of the Spirit. I again reflect that the cosmos is godless but permeated by love, which is where God is, not causing anything directly but making love available.”

This might be the closest thing we ever have to proof that there is a Spirit of love. It isn’t much, but I will put it out there for your consideration. I concluded, by 12 April 2005, that I should live as if God is love, whether it is true or not. This is vague but powerful. It also means that I will not live or die by any specific doctrine.

“So, what should a materialist do? Conscience, as well as altruism, evolved; we are happiest when we feed both. Even atheists are happiest when they are altruistic beyond mere calculation of possible benefits they might receive. Sex and food are appetites but so is simple niceness…knowing we are living right in the world.”

Transition from Fundamentalism to Agnosticism, part nine.

 

I wondered why I kept writing in my journal every day. Was it just a “demented polygraphia”? Polygraphia is a mental disorder in which a person must continually write everything down. I admit I fit the description of this very well. But as for my journal, back in 2005, I answered, “It is an act of faith that somebody will want to reconstruct this framework of thought…” The world is like a comet, “which swings close to God’s sun then vanishes again into deep space. The fact that I bother to think and write at all is my fundamental…faith.

“I benefit now from all the soul-building work of the past. If I look upon the world and see only dirt, I am dead and unhappy. I must continue open to inspiration. I turn in disgust from most organized religion…But I remember the powerful inspiration I felt in a field of wildflowers 37 years ago [now 54 years ago]. I reaffirmed it this spring and will keep it alive, as if there is a God, which there probably is.” I was referring to the Sonoran Desert spring wildflowers.

 

But I also wrote, on 29 March, “It is clear to me that in this world, God is not in control. He has permitted a world of natural law, with cruel consequences, a world in which His love penetrates and contradicts, in which His love is of infinite value, and in which our purpose is to oppose all that is not love, all selfishness, even indifference. It is an artificial, contrived cosmos in which God makes us see how desirable love and beauty are, because of its stark contrast with crustal movements which grind all human life as if it were not there, with chromosomal breakages, and with forces of evolution, which have produce a species both intelligent and evil. To angels, goodness is ordinary. To us, goodness is sacrificial. And even if there is not life beyond, we have been permitted to taste and glimpse what is truly beautiful.”

The next day I wrote, “I stride into the future not knowing if God will even keep me alive, but ready in case he does (and, each second, each day, people live more often than they die).” I wrote this even as my illness returned. But even then, I wrote, because of my love for the creation, I was happier than Donald Trump. Yes, I wrote that in 2005, because even back then Trump was in the news as the perfect example of total furious selfishness.

At the same time, I was reluctant to leave religion which was, I thought, a human adaptation. “Religion is our warm hut of order, agnostic freedom is the cold swirling storm.”

Transition from Fundamentalism to Agnosticism, part eight

I will post, with minimal editing, what I wrote on 15 March 2005, during my trip to see desert wildflowers. This was, as close as it is possible to determine, the exact date on which I became an agnostic.

“How can I begin to describe the beauty of the spring desert I beheld yesterday? And the greatest blessings came when I took the time to look closely, to slow down and immerse myself in it, to open myself to the Spirit.” While most people do not look closely at nature, out of a nation of 300 million, there must be a few million who do. “I must keep this in mind to counterbalance my cynicism, even though it is realistic and true…For the moment, I feel good not just about nature but even about the species of which I am a part.” I was reading a book, Evil and the God of Love, by John Hick. Hick “openly admitted ‘the fact of evil [which] constitutes the most serious objection there is to the Christian belief in a God of love.’ He calls it a fact; it is not, as Buddhists might say, an illusion, nor is it merely a form of human behavior. It is evil…Hick rejects an ‘inoffensive but unhelpful agnosticism,’ which provides ‘a perpetual burden of doubt’ to all believers, and has always done so, even back in the so-called Age of Faith. And Job’s answer, to be tremblingly quiet before God’s incomprehensible majesty, is not a solution…If God is intentionally involved in the world (and this may be his entire action), then we cannot expect God to see or manipulate the world from a cosmic viewpoint. Perhaps—I am speculating now—the Spirit Himself struggles to understand this? If so, then the Spirit’s answer is not an explanation but a delicate desert spring wildflower.”

I can remember where I was when I wrote this. I was eating breakfast in a restaurant in Yuma, Arizona. The trip I took out into the desert was spiritual as well as scientific.

The next day I wrote the following. To explore the wildflowers “was like walking in heaven. I also relived the beautiful part of my childhood,” when I walked amidst the spring wildflowers in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada.

But I continued reading and thinking about the problem of evil. The irrepressibly optimistic Harry Emerson Fosdick posed the opposite question to the problem of evil: “why is there so much inexplicable good in the world? Since the time of Fosdick, and of C. S. Lewis’s similar argument, altruism has been discovered. But it does not explain all of the goodness, greatness, our capacity for wisdom, love, science, and (what I now experience) biophilia.” This does not answer the problem of evil, “but what else can I do but stumble amidst flowers and rejoice while I can? I can rejoice in the flow of the Spirit, and say that this is the entirety of God’s work here and now. The Spirit also cleanses away the scabs of anger and the rot of selfishness.

“It does no good, Hick claims, to blame Satan, for now we just have to explain why God permitted Satan to exist, nor does it do any good to appeal to the finitude of creatureliness [only a theologian could come up with this], because even within our limits we could be good but are not. Sorry, John, but we will not reason out a solution. Our only response can be like a visitor to the desert spring, seeing a brief symphony of joy in a hard land, or a visitor to the desert summer, who can see nothing good but who must force himself to admit that life persists dormant.”

I continued to think about my deteriorating health. “There will be no miracles for me. But in the event that I survive, I will be an imperfect conduit of the Spirit, and enjoy it. God “allowed at least one species to evolve the intelligence to appreciate…that though most organisms simply decay, a few re-emerge as fossils, as objects of beauty…”

Transition from Fundamentalism to Agnosticism, part seven

 

[Rabbi] Kushner [whose book I was reading in 2005] said that prayer is just to remind us to be grateful for things, on a regular schedule, including for things it would not otherwise occur to us to be grateful for. God needs no praise, but He knows we need to feel gratitude. When I wrote about this on 7 March 2005, I felt as if I agreed with him. The answer to our prayers “is not an explanation but an experience. An often-overlooked benefit of prayer is that it changes us, so that we no longer envy the wicked.”

Three days later, I wrote, “My valleys of shadow, compared to others’, are often little mud-walled arroyos, such as I will soon see in the desert, but they seemed pretty dark to me anyway, and if you cannot climb out of them, they are deep enough.” I was already looking forward to my trip out west to see the desert wildflowers.

Transition from Fundamentalism to Agnosticism, part six

Here is a little interlude, which I needed during my heavy thoughts, and which you, the reader (if any) also need. I wrote this on 2 March 2005.

“And, finally, isn’t it past all rational solution? As I have repeatedly pondered, do I not believe in God because Dvorak did? Nietzsche had penetrating questions, or so I who have never read him am told. How to answer him? Kierkegaard’s leap? A scientist resists it but what else is there? What Mahler did was to celebrate evolution in his Resurrection Symphony. The stages of life on Earth: vegetative (second movement), animated (third movement), then to set Nietzsche to music (fourth movement), angels in heaven (fifth movement) as if it were a progression. But really it was just to put atheism and heaven next to each other, then goes on (sixth movement) to celebrate love. He listened, out in his summerhouse in the mountain meadow: ‘What the flowers in the meadow tell me,’ ‘What the animals in the forest tell me,’ ‘What the night tells me,’ ‘What the morning bells tell me,” and ‘What love tells me.’ Maybe these things all contradict one another; all we can do is listen.

 

“It helps to have friends with which to share this. Mahler had gotten over his love for Johanna Richter in the 1880s. He had a friend in the 1890s, Natalie Bauer-Lechner, who traveled with him and wrote down his thoughts. She was the one who wrote down the titles above. What was he thinking, not to embrace her after Alma Schindler had betrayed him. Ah, friendship is better than romance, as Mahler found out too late.”