The end of an experiment

If I knew a Christian who lived alone in a cave for forty years, I wouldn’t imagine him to have discovered verifiable proof of God, but I would consider it possible that his years of solitary reflection had given him insights from which I might profit. It was with a similar hope that I started attending a Bible study at an Episcopal church a few months ago. I didn’t believe the liberal claim that, although the Bible lacks literal truth, it contains unique metaphorical wisdom, but I was open to the possibility that the mature, intelligent, and educated people that make up the bulk of Episcopalianism had transcended the Bible and, working as something akin to a network of rebels within the Christian community, had gained insights that I would find useful. I also hoped that they would likewise be open to learning from me. I let them know that I was an atheist, but I neither talked about my beliefs, nor did I ask probing questions or issue challenges about theirs because I wanted to present myself in as non-threatening a manner as possible.


Three months later, I am as ignorant as when I started, and have all but given up hope that their religion has provided them with the first unique insight. The thing that I find most interesting—and exasperating—about liberal Christianity is that a liberal Christian might define Jesus as God, man, God-man, or even as entirely fictional, but he or she absolutely must hold something about Jesus, or what Jesus represents, in high esteem. Just as the Boy Scouts and Freemasons require reverence for a completely unidentified God, and AA requires reverence for a completely unidentified Higher Power, so do liberal churches require reverence for a completely unidentified Jesus. In every case, it’s not reverence for an agreed upon entity or belief that is demanded but reverence for a particular word(s), as if that alone had the power to set one apart from less enlightened mortals.

Idolatry (n) the giving of undue honor and regard to created forms.

Although I rarely heard any of my classmates say much about what they did believe, I did hear most of them imply that they didn’t believe most of what is in the creeds. I was also excited from time to time to hear a classmate express puzzlement or consternation about a Bible verse or a church teaching, but such things were never addressed by the group. For example, during the last class I attended, someone said she was finding it difficult to combine the concept of God as an entity with the concept of God as love. After a brief and (I thought) awkward silence, someone changed the subject. After observing a few such instances, I concluded that there was tacit agreement to keep the discussion at a shallow level.

In their apparent determination to ignore doubt or anything that might result in doubt, liberals and literalists are alike, but they differ in that literalists consider their faith to be inseparable from specific facts about God, whereas liberals appear to regard vagueness as what they like to call a higher form of spirituality. In practice, this means that literalistic religion is centered on content, and liberal religion on process. As to how process can exist apart from content, I—like the woman in the class—have no idea, and I doubt that liberals do either. They define God as love, virtue, evolution, a feeling of oneness, awakening awareness, the ground of being, etc. although such terms are figures of speech rather than definitions. To illustrate, if I say that dogs are quadrupeds, I have said something identifiable and verifiable about dogs, but if I say that God is the ground of being, I have simply used a metaphor to express my belief—or at least my hope—that God is providing me with the kind of support that solid earth gives a building or the kind of nurturance that garden soil gives a marigold.

In a 12/17/12 Newsweek article entitled “The Myths of Jesus,” Bart D. Ehrman trashed the historical accuracy of the gospels, after which he took Kierkegaard’s Leap of Faith across the chasm of logic by ending his article with a non sequitur:

“…for those with a broader vision…the story of the Christ-child and his appearance in the world can be founded not on what really did happen, but on what really does happen in the lives of those who believe that stories such as these can convey a greater truth.”

I wondered what he meant by “stories such as these” (there being other God-men who were born of virgins), and I also wondered what he meant by “a greater truth.” As one who lacks his “broader vision,” I had hoped in vain that, having gone to pains to attack the accuracy of the gospels, he might at least give some clue as to what he found good in them, but like other liberal writers, he proved to be a tease. Islam has its Sharia; Buddhism its eightfold path; charismatic Christianity its plan of salvation; and liberal Christianity its greater truth, but the last group differs from the rest in that they hold their greater truth closer to their chests than a poker player’s cards. What they offer instead are bromidic truths about love and justice, truths that rarely coincide with the behavior of the vengeful, intolerant, impatient, and ego-driven deity of the Bible, a deity who supports slavery, sexism, racism, blood sacrifice, homophobia, nationalism, genocide, rape, and everlasting torture. How do liberals handle such challenges to the deity of their holy book? They either interpret troublesome passages metaphorically or deny that God inspired them. They also deny that Jesus said much of what was attributed to him. They then take whatever is left and interpret it as it pleases each of them, the only requirement being that everyone think of Jesus as somehow special.

On the back of the handout for the communion service I attended were the words “...coming together...to struggle with our faith.” This and other things I read and observed led me to think of liberal Christians, not as the originators of bold new ideas, but as the last gasp of an emasculated Protestantism that has been struggling for relevance since the time of Darwin. Its few remaining adherents are now huddled behind the walls of their churches, doing their best to bolster one another up so that they might retain some semblance of a support structure that the rest of Christianity has long since abandoned. I envision them as children (sophisticated children to be sure) whose growing knowledge of how the world works has caused them to lose faith in Santa Claus. Being grieved by the prospect of Christmas without Santa, they doggedly pretend he’s real, only without the part about the sleigh, elves, reindeer, chimneys, presents, red suit, rosy cheeks, white beard, North Pole workshop, and jolly “Ho! Ho! Ho!” They replace such “obvious myths” with an unsubstantiated “higher awareness” of what the myths point to: miraculous powers, the existence of an omniscient being, the material rewards of being good, etc., yet they are left, as it were, with a superstructure without a substructure. Liberal Christianity doesn’t offer new beliefs, but a sorting through of old beliefs with the result that most have been discarded. 

I wrote a few posts back of an Episcopal priest who showed respect for my atheism by calling it “a valid spiritual path,” and I wondered in that post if I would ever be able to show respect for her path. What I’ve found is that while I very much respect her—and a few other Christians—as people of goodwill, to respect their religious path, I would have to think it was based upon truth, or at least that they were wiser or more insightful because of it, but I see no reason to believe that either is true. 

Then and now

It’s funny how many of my memories are of inconsequential things, things I never expected to remember. For instance, I’m a teenager and have gone with my father to see about a job at a bachelor’s tiny house. It’s early winter, and the man is obviously proud of his big garden of turnips, collards, and mustard greens. I picture him alone each night, eating greens, beans, salt-pork, cornbread, buttermilk, and sorghum molasses, and I think he must be the happiest man alive.

In another memory, I’m eleven, and my mother and I are sitting in her overstuffed chair watching Have Gun Will Travel. We admire Paladin because he’s tough, caring, cultured, and mysterious. I think she admires him even more than I do, but I don’t know why.

I’m eighteen, and my father and I are roofing a big house next to a playground. A girl who looks to be sixteen is overseeing the children. She is pretty and kind. I want to talk to her but am too shy.

I’m seven, and when I get off the school bus one day, I run across a ditch where a guinea hen has her nest. She flies atop my head and scratches my scalp. I scream, and my granny comes running out the screen door with a broom in her hands. I’m so surprised to see my granny run that I almost forget about the guinea hen.

I’m twelve and have traveled 450 miles alone, on a Greyhound Bus, to visit cousins in Trenton, Georgia. As the bus passes through northern Alabama, dawn breaks, and I see Sand Mountain on my left and Lookout Mountain on my right. I think they must be the tallest mountains in the world. An old man lives with my cousins. He and I sit on the porch, and talk happily about life on the road. Lookout Mountain towers before us. I’m called home early because my granny is dying. My cousin Carrie calls and says the old man is accusing her of putting broken glass in his eyes. He scratches the sockets raw.

 

I’m a small child and screaming with the pain of an earache. My mother and granny (that’s granny and me in the photo) look afraid, and it scares me. They heat castor oil and pour it into my ear. I feel better.

I’m nine and my mother has just turned the car onto US Hwy 84 on our way to town. I can’t imagine a time when I was not, so I conclude that I have always been and always will be. Then, I can’t imagine anything existing if I’m not there to see it, so I conclude that I create the world as I pass and it disappears when I’m gone. These realizations have come to me within the space of a quarter mile, and I am certain they are true.

I’m five, and my family and I are leaving the cemetery where my uncle has just been buried. I ask my father where Uncle Byrd is, and my father says he’s on his way to heaven. I immediately look out the back window so I can see him rising like a balloon.




I’m 63 and am taking dishes from the drainer and putting them into the cabinet when I have the thought that even this little chore feels like exercise. My body is hurting, my blind dog is slamming into things, and Peggy is wretchedly sick with a new cold. Outside, the air and everything it touches is cold and gray. The passing years have left me weary of counting my blessings.

Except for this morning’s memory, such fragments stand out from everything that went before and everything that came after, for months if not for years. Why? What do they mean? I’ve lived in this house for 23 years. That doesn’t seem like long, but it’s longer than I have left to live. I think that, once our bodies start to fail, most of us are simply biding time until we die. I want more, but I don’t know what more looks like, and most days I’m too tired to wonder.

5 Things: none of them about religion

Ellie has lived next door for nine years, and is like a sister. In a few months, she will move 1,000 miles away, and Peggy and I are both very sad.

Walt came by last week. He was best friends to both Peggy and me for a lot of years, but hasn’t been our friend for about eight years, and it wasn’t an amiable parting. If I hadn’t sent him an occasional email during the past eight years to ask how he was, we wouldn’t have heard from him at all. He came by to tell us that he was diagnosed the day before with malignant melanoma, the tumor reaching two inches across before he saw a doctor. Peggy and I went to the hospital today to wish him luck as he went into a hastily arranged surgery. We arrived to find his wife berating him, and his father-in-law looking like he wanted to cry. I added to the ambiance by sitting in silence reading the obituaries (as with the tombstone in the picture, many of the deceased were my age) while feeling sick, sad, and distant. Only Peggy offered any real support. 

Six weeks ago, I had sudden onset fatigue so severe that I couldn’t stay out of bed for more than an hour or two at a time. I seriously thought I might die so, not knowing what the problem was, I immediately stopped taking oxycodone, Neurontin, Ambien, marijuana, and Cymbalta (I’m back on marijuana and Ambien). In the wink of an eye, I fell over an emotional cliff. Now, I still have the chronic pain problem for which I was taking all the drugs, plus I have fatigue, fever, sweaty scalp, depression, irritability, tremulousness, scratchy eyes and throat, and a tendency to drop things. All this, and I still don’t want to go a doctor because I get tired of the same shit happening. To whit, the first doctor sends me for various tests (some of which might be dangerous), and then I get tossed back and forth between specialists (and their tests) for anywhere from a few months to a few years. After shelling out $4,000 before insurance pays the first penny, having up to three surgeries, making countless calls to insurance companies and billing offices, and being put on even more drugs, I still have the problem. If I’m lucky, it’s just not as bad as it was. Of course, by not going, I could end up like Walt. I know that, but still I don’t go.

It’s winter in Oregon. Month after month of almost nothing but gray and drizzle, except for a couple of periods during which the sky clears for a few days, bringing with it wind, cold air, and a sun that stays too near the horizon to be really cheerful. Peggy enjoys life here and has no trouble with the weather. I like many things about Oregon, but it’s only her desire to be here and the presence of a few friends that keep me.

Peggy and I getting rid of a lot of things today, mostly keepsakes. I am very pleased about this because I am finding it increasingly difficult to clean house. We celebrated our 41st anniversary in December. She has been a good wife.

You shall not lay a stumbling block for your brother*

I went to two Episcopal Circle Services (an intimate and informal communion) before I realized that each person in the circle was expected to say “Christ is here” to the next person during the passing of the bread. This posed a serious problem for me, because it’s one thing to sit and listen to words with which I don’t agree  (as I had done with many of the hymns and readings), but quite another to use them. I wrote to one of the leaders of the service about my concern, and she responded:

“We’re not talking body and blood, we’re talking heart and soul... To me, Christ is not a person’s name, but a title that acknowledges a way of being in relationship with the ineffable, and the man named Jesus was really, really good at that relationship…. I hope you’ll stay.”

  

I took her last sentence to imply that she had said all she had to say, and that it was now up to me whether this was to be my hill to die on. I told myself, “Why not just say it? I don’t know why these people regard Christ so highly, but I like and respect them; they like, and appear to respect, me; I hunger for lasting community with different kinds of people; and I feel a need for ritual and liturgy in my life; so I’ll just use the word as a metaphor for something good.” A day later, I realized that I couldn’t bend enough to do this. If the favored word were basalt, I wouldn’t have to hunt for positive metaphors (strength, beauty, integrity, solidity, patience, and regeneration), but Christ? It’s not just the harm that has been done in that name; it’s that for every good thing he reportedly said or did, he said or did something else that was confusing, nonsensical, or appalling.

I know. The word Christ is held in highest esteem by Christians, so what could be more arrogant than for an atheist to show up at a church and object to its use? First, I don’t object to others using it. Second, the order of service states that “All are welcome.” Third, in the words of one of the priests, “the service exists, for those for whom the traditional ‘father, son, holy spirit’ language just doesn’t work.” As I see it, a group of laypeople designed Circle Service with the stated intention of total inclusivity, but then erected a barrier to everyone who doesn’t revere Jesus. While it’s true that they would be fine with me transposing the word Christ to mean light, love, harmony, or oneness, the truth is that only Christians could make such a transposition. When I think of Christ, I think of a world in which millions of non-Christians—and even Christians—have been abused, oppressed, tortured, and murdered by people who acted in his name, so to imagine that I—or any non-Christian who attaches importance to words—can take the name of the founder of the Christian religion and translate it into something worthy of reverence is fanciful.

I now eat fish, but for years I was a vegetarian. One night, a friend who knew I was a vegetarian invited me to supper, put a bowl of chicken soup before me (it was a one-dish meal), and, when I objected, said, “You can take the chicken out, can’t you?” I said nothing more about it because he was an elderly, lifelong meat eater in a rural area containing nothing but lifelong meat eaters, and I wanted to assume that he was acting out of ignorance. As often happens when I go out of my way to avoid conflict by putting a less condemnatory spin on someone’s questionable behavior, I later realized that he almost surely hadn’t been that ignorant. I concluded that he most likely saw the consumption of animals as something that normal people did, and vegetarianism as a needlessly annoying eccentricity that he wasn’t about to accommodate even when he invited a vegetarian to dinner. Likewise, I’m being invited to communion at St. Mary’s, only to find that my acceptance of the invitation requires that I say words I don’t believe—words that NO non-Christian believes. Only Moslems say “Mohammed is here,” and only Christians say “Christ is here.” The people who create the Circle Service surely realize this, or at least they would if they thought about it.

I also regard their attachment to a purposefully undefined word as an example of the slippery slope that awaits those Christians who move from literalism to liberalism. I would like to think that liberalism (which has much to recommend it) will become the dominant face of Christianity, but I don’t see it happening. I think it possible that, once a literal belief in the creeds has been discarded, most people will regard the language itself as a hollow shell. Like a Christmas ornament, it might look splendid on the outside but, too little being put in to replace what was taken out, it is empty within. A century or more ago, the Unitarian Church reduced its own God-language to the status of ornaments, but since ornaments are only useful as symbols, the further they moved from valuing what the symbols represented, the further they moved from the symbols themselves. Today, Unitarians speak sparingly, if at all, of Christ or even of God. Is this where other liberal churches are headed? One might interpret a purposefully vague and open view of Christ as a sign of higher awareness, but it could also be like the tunnel with a pinpoint of light at the end that dying people see just before all the lights go out.

*Romans 14:13. The question is, am I their brother?

Three ways of thinking about God

First Version (I speak from experience)

Heaven is somewhere up above. God and Jesus have thrones, and Jesus’ throne is to the right of God’s throne. Heavenly beings stand before these thrones 24 hours a day for all eternity singing praises to God and Jesus. God and Jesus demand that we praise them, but it only counts if we want to do it. Here’s a list of what you need to do to get into heaven: praise God and Jesus everyday; do good works; get baptized by immersion (today if possible); go to a Church of Christ every Sunday; ask God to forgive you your sins throughout the day so you won’t die with any of them unforgiven. If you want to go to hell, here’s how you can do that. Die while masturbating; play musical instruments in church; become a liberal; get sprinkled rather than immersed; use the wrong number of glasses during communion; let women talk in church (including announcements and Sunday school); get divorced and remarry.

Hell is somewhere below, maybe at the middle of the earth. It’s like a big lake, only instead of being blue with water, it’s red with fire, and people writhe in this fire forever and ever, and during every second of that time, the fire is hurting them a trillion times worse than anything on earth ever hurt anyone. If you’re in heaven, you will be a trillion times happier than anyone on earth ever was, and you can even look down and see the people in hell, and they can look up and see you. Almost everyone you ever knew will be in hell, but heaven will be so wonderful that even the sight of your loved ones writhing in agony won’t diminish your joy.

Second Version (I use my own words to report what I have read and heard)

God is of another dimension, and can’t be captured within the language of this dimension, but Jesus demonstrated what our own lives could be like if we lived in constant communion with God. God can be sensed in the silence between words well spoken, or glimpsed through stories, many of which were first told around Bronze Age campfires. God sometimes shines on us through figures of speech that can only hint at his reality. When we feel love, we feel God’s presence. When we speak truth with wisdom, we give expression to the faintest whisper of God’s voice. When we experience wonder, we inhale the barest fragrance of God’s intelligence. 

God is pure joy. God is pure love. God is everything good rolled into a three-letter word. God is the ground of our being. God is that for which even atheists hunger but have no name. Within God we exist, yet God need not be conceived as all-wise, or all-powerful, or even as a conscious entity. God can simply be defined as the totality of the good that exists within every one of us, or even as the evolutionary potential of our species. We look for God in flowers; we hear God in music; we see God’s eyes looking back at us through the eyes of other people. We all came from God, and we will all return to God. Hell only exists on earth. Heaven is an awakening to universal oneness.

Third version (Again, I speak from experience)

Religion is all made up. Most people know down deep that this is true, which is why they only revere people who heard God’s voice in ancient times, while admitting that modern-day people who hear God are insane. Without God, there would be no holy wars; no genital mutilations; no prosperity gospel; no anti-science bias in education; no tax-exempt churches; no denial of global warming; no blaming sin for hurricanes and school shootings; and no soccer stadiums filled with 10,000 men who have come to watch another man decapitate a woman.

Liberal believers aren’t as bad as other believers because their God only exists as a mile-high stack of harmless metaphors. Unfortunately, their rejection of evidence and reason in “matters of faith” still puts them on the side of ignorance and superstition. When the religious right persecutes atheists for trying to keep America from becoming a theocracy, religious liberals support the persecutors by remaining silent. Fortunately, 20% of Americans no longer have any religious affiliation, and their number is growing rapidly. Most of these people still believe in what they call something, but at least they’re not trying to make their beliefs into laws. 

John Spong (pictured) is a liberal Christian whose writings I have read. His photo is by Scott Griessel.