REFLECTIONS, RESPONSES, AND THOUGHTS
FROM THE MIND OF ONE WHO REMAINS OUT OF STEP
WITH TRADITION
You must learn day by day, year by year, to broaden your horizon. The more things you love, the more you are interested in, the more you enjoy, the more you are indignant about, the more you have left when anything happens.
Ethel Barrymore
The Church
It’s a fact that I have spent my life in the South. I’m from western North Carolina, the home of Scotch-Irish and German settlers that go back to the 17th century. I’ve joked about it all my life that if the South is the Bible belt, then the arc that runs from Charlotte to Atlanta is its buckle. I grew up Baptist; does that tell you anything? I attended a Lutheran college and hold two degrees from a Baptist seminary. I earned pins that indicate 8 years of perfect attendance at my church. I was immersed in the fundamentalism of the old south and grew to detest its “holier-than-thou” attitude toward all who disagreed with its beliefs.
As I grew older I discovered that Lutherans and Methodists thought of themselves just as biblically anointed as the Baptists. They all couldn’t be right, could they? Of course they could, just ask any one of them. They’ll tell you what to think and believe. My ability to think without religious assumptions clouding my conclusions has been a source of irritation to my family and friends, as they erroneously believed their tightly held conceptions of truth were under attack. Whether it’s the “left behind” series or the Da Vinci Code, they read, ignore, and then claim they were right all along. They’ve told me that it doesn’t make any difference what new facts have been uncovered, they believe what they believe and their beliefs will not change. This attitude is pervasive from Baghdad to Atlanta among religious fundamentalists.
To me it seems kind of sad; that is, to go through life with not an original thought in one’s head and afraid to find out what the next person is thinking. The church—like a country club—demands that we believe as they believe, act as they act, and don’t accept substitutes for their version of religion and truth. The church is an institution protecting its own concocted image. Too bad most church members don’t take the time to read about the traditions and the history of the organization that controls their beliefs and offers them stability (and eternity) in a world of change. The vision of the anointed is difficult to dislodge, even when it makes no sense. I gave up on the church and other organizations when in my twenties. Politics and political- or religious-correctness, authority and control were their major aims and a freethinker and scholar could never find a place in a world that was suffocating and unyielding.
Religion
I have never been able to equate religion with the church. The church is a political organization with a religious mission. Religion, on the other hand, signifies the inner person, one’s essential spirituality. Can religion and the inner person survive without the church? Yes it can, but the church cannot survive without the religious person. The problem as I see it in America is that the church doesn’t want you to be religious; that is, religious in a purely spiritual, inner way. The church wants to control your religious experience and anything that is unprescribed is considered suspect or sinful.
Authority and control are keys to successful churches. Devotion, inner reflection, and leading a moral life are keys to religion and spirituality. I say that knowing full well that religion was redefined when Constantine insisted that religious belief be standardized into creedal statements and affirmations. Through our religious experiences we are led to believe in certain this worldly and certain other worldly things. When religious experience is standardized, it loses its individuality, its personal meaning, and life-driven purpose.
The Catholic Church isn’t the only bad boy here. Preachers and theologians of every flavor are today writing books, developing churches with standardized mission statements and purposes, and playing on human fallibility and concern for the perplexities of this life to bring them in so they won’t be “left behind,” shut out of heaven, or miss the boat of salvation. I’ll talk about salvation in a minute, but let’s finish our discussion about religion.
Anyone who wants to can speak “for God” today. It doesn’t matter who they are or what they are saying, there’s always some unthinking, scared, and fallible person there to believe them. One of them asked me this week, “Have you read the Left Behind books?” “No,” I responded. “Why not; you ought to read them.” “No,” I said. “I let God speak for God, not someone with something to sell me.” Her husband said with a voice of authority, “You ought to read them.” These are two old friends, so what can you say?
What’s going on here? Can’t a person believe and worship and have purpose without joining someone else’s bandwagon. Are we that easily sucked into “the next hottest thing,” the “next religious flavor” to be popularized by the Madison Avenue hucksters of “What’s happening next”? I’m not sure religion in its purest sense has a chance anymore. Dogma and creed, authority and control; these are the watchwords of today’s religious institutions.
Jesus
Well, I guess I had better talk about Jesus, since some belief about Jesus lies at the heart of the Christian religion and church. When I was a young lad, and even when I was in seminary, “Jesus” was thought of as “the son of God,” but not God in the true meaning of the word. The concept of the Trinity was important, but not universally so. Times have changed significantly. Without this change, Gibson’s Passion movie would not have been that important.
The cross, the death of Jesus, seems all-important to Christians today. The resurrection is also important, but not as much as his death. Forgotten are the interpretations of the first three Christian centuries—the vine, the fisher king, and the teacher. Today it’s all about salvation, which simply means the earning of a green card to get into heaven.
You think I’m kidding don’t you; well, I’m not! And here’s where the contradictions start. You can’t earn salvation, it’s a gift giving by God and exemplified in the death of Jesus, God’s son. How modern men can attach salvation to the ancient belief in a sacrificial totem beats me, but they do. Here’s the catch: it’s a freely given gift, but to receive it you have to confess your sins, state publicly that you believe God is sincere, be baptized and join the (or a) church. Seems an odd way to earn salvation?
After all, Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life, and no man comes unto the Father, except by me.” Is this what paragraph #2 means? Well, not to me. That’s simply the church’s 4th century c.e. way of establishing its importance. It’s like a statement of admissions or a passport to membership. It has nothing to do with the life of Jesus or the meaning of his teachings. That Jesus lived and died is difficult to deny in a world obsessed by religion based on his life. Is it not enough to accept the gift of salvation (truth) and model one’s life on Jesus’ moral teachings (life)?
If you want to understand Jesus, read the gospel of John 1:18 (RSV) and I John 4:12 (RSV). The message is simple: he revealed God in ethical living and the humility of his death and we are to do likewise. Here we find the purpose of Jesus and our purpose as believers—to be like Jesus means to live the truly ethical life, even when and especially when it’s tough. The Golden Rule says the same thing: use ethical criteria as revealed by Jesus for the criteria of your own behavior—nothing less and nothing more.
There is one more issue here: was Jesus really real or does the Bible create a myth to which we adhere? It doesn’t make any difference any more, because for 2,000 years the Jesus narrative has been probed, prodded, and enriched by church teaching and a Christos theology. For those who think I’m nuts, asked yourself the question of the relationship of the Jesus myth to Roman beliefs of the 4th century C.E. Because of the strength and sensitivity of our beliefs, we don’t want to know the truth about them. Can we exist in the spiritual world without an honest to goodness historical story to back them up? Probably not! To see the relationship of Jesus to the Roman pantheon of gods check this out: http://www.remnantofgod.org/images/IGC/pagan-rcc.htm
ETHICS
Nothing is dearer to my heart than the study of ethics and honest ethical living. In books like The Purpose Driven Life we find Christian purpose twisted and all tied up with theology and promoting church membership. That doesn’t cut it for me. Religion, spirituality, belief, and ethical living cannot be fully institutionalized and I personally resist this notion.
Ethics is personal and yet it is also communal. It is based on belief and principle, understood through models of good and excellent behavior, and sustained by faith and practice. But this isn’t all there is to ethics—there is another side that completes the equation. The other side I’m talking about is how we take this inner ethical dimension and share it with others. How we treat others reveals our beliefs and our ideas about religion, God, the church, and Jesus.
Do you remember the words of the hymn that says, “Love isn’t love until we give it away”? That’s what I’m talking about. Ethics is an everyday living thing; a giving of self thing; an honest and deliberate attempt to live a life of integrity as it touches the lives of others. This isn’t too tough to understand, but it’s awfully hard to live. Ethical consistency is probably the most difficult challenge we have, and none of us are perfect, but that is no excuse. You can’t say, “Well, I’m not perfect,” and use that as a mask for damnable living.
Is Christian ethics different from secular or other religious kinds of ethics? If it goes by the name of “ethics,” then it shouldn’t be any different. We can let our religion help us stay ethically consistent. On the other hand, religion’s intrusion into ethics can get quirky. Church’s and religions have a way of pronouncing some behaviors as sinful or unethical that may be unreligious but not unethical. Personally, I don’t like to mix the two. I like to keep them cognitively separate and let my spiritually aid my ethical commitments.
For me ethics comes down to living an honest and kind life—a life of moral integrity. Ethics respects others for no other reason than that they are human beings. Ethics directs us to help, support, and give to others in order to make their lives better. Look at my ethical manifesto in my ethics book for educators—here is a fuller statement of a working ethic.
The Bible
I bet you thought I would not talk about the Bible, but I must. As a seminarian, I studied the Old and New Testaments in both Hebrew and Greek. Even before that, I studied Greek as an undergraduate and had completed the four gospels and the book of Romans in Greek before graduating from Lenoir-Rhyne College in 1961. Of course, many think I don’t understand the Bible. That’s their mistake! What I don’t understand completely is the so-called “translations” that they are using. There are so many and they are inconsistent with our best Hebrew and Greek texts. The ordinary layperson doesn’t know he or she is being duped, but they are being given a particular theological brand whenever they read one of these weird versions.
The Bible gives both a historical and theological version of the early beginnings of our faith (Christianity). Written by many different men, these versions are somewhat inconsistent with each other—but that’s okay, because today not every expression of faith is identical. It’s those fundamentalists and literalists who go to the extreme to make the Bible say what they want it to say that make me sick—probably because so many people believe them. Also, today, we know that many “scriptures” used by the early church have been excluded because they were not used in the Roman church. Not every early Christian agreed and to homogenize the New Testament is a travesty.
Many have learned that they can’t make these books “walk on water,” so what do they do: they publish their own translations; at least, they call them translations. And another bizarre thing is that they carry notes at the bottom indicating differing versions, but don’t be fooled, these notes are just a smoke screen. Here’s an example: The Living Bible translates the second line of John 1:18 like this: “But his only Son, who himself is God, is near to the Father’s heart…” Neither the King James Version nor the Revised Standard Version (probably the most accurate English translation) says “who himself is God.” They say, “Who is in the bosom of the Father.” The Greek word for “bosom” is kolpon (kolpon) meaning “in the chest” or “in the pocket.” This is a direct example of making the Bible adhere with one’s theological beliefs. I guess the next thing they’ll write in is the word “trinity,” whatever that really means?
The Trinity
Well, here we are at the church’s favorite conceptualization—the trinity. Of course, the Bible talks about God, gives some details about the life and teachings of Jesus, and intertwines all of this with mention of the Spirit of God or the Holy Spirit—depends on which writer you’re reading at the time. It was natural when Constantine ordered the standardization of scripture and dogma that the church authorities would create some simple formulas to help the otherwise uneducated believer. The “trinity” was the big boy because it included all beliefs that are important to the church—belief in God, the spin they were about to put on the life and teachings of Jesus, and hold it all together with an invisible apparition that they and us are able to share. I mean, get with the message, the way God controls the world is through the “spirit,” the holy phantom that moves silently through time and place.
I like to call the “trinity” the “triangle and one,” the one being the human receptor or believer. Problem is today, the triangle and one has been reduced to one-on-one; that is, Jesus is now thought of as God and the spirit—well, the spirit is just their holy presence in our lives. Won’t to play a little religion?—your ball out. That’s not fair to the sincere believer, but I wonder what the believer believed from the 3rd and 4th century c.e. about all this stuff? Does belief have to be dogma—organized, standardized, and coerced? I don’t think that it does.
Let’s take a deeper look at all of this. You know that Christianity is an ancient religion with even more ancient roots. There are elements of totemism and animism running all through it. The ancient Greek and Roman pantheons were made up of male and female gods and even some super-doper gods. So it’s natural we have a trinity with a super-doper god at the top and a male (Logos – Jesus – meaning “the mind of god”) and a female (Sophia – spirit) just under them. Was just Jesus and the Spirit the yin/yang of Christianity—the male/female lower god? May have been and may still be. That gives a new place for women in an otherwise male-dominated religion, doesn’t it? We can’t have women in the pulpit; I forgot that Jesus was spiritually a female.
Now that I’ve pissed off everyone who reads these words,
I had better return to my painting.
It’s a fact that I have spent my life in the South. I’m from western North Carolina, the home of Scotch-Irish and German settlers that go back to the 17th century. I’ve joked about it all my life that if the South is the Bible belt, then the arc that runs from Charlotte to Atlanta is its buckle. I grew up Baptist; does that tell you anything? I attended a Lutheran college and hold two degrees from a Baptist seminary. I earned pins that indicate 8 years of perfect attendance at my church. I was immersed in the fundamentalism of the old south and grew to detest its “holier-than-thou” attitude toward all who disagreed with its beliefs.
As I grew older I discovered that Lutherans and Methodists thought of themselves just as biblically anointed as the Baptists. They all couldn’t be right, could they? Of course they could, just ask any one of them. They’ll tell you what to think and believe. My ability to think without religious assumptions clouding my conclusions has been a source of irritation to my family and friends, as they erroneously believed their tightly held conceptions of truth were under attack. Whether it’s the “left behind” series or the Da Vinci Code, they read, ignore, and then claim they were right all along. They’ve told me that it doesn’t make any difference what new facts have been uncovered, they believe what they believe and their beliefs will not change. This attitude is pervasive from Baghdad to Atlanta among religious fundamentalists.
To me it seems kind of sad; that is, to go through life with not an original thought in one’s head and afraid to find out what the next person is thinking. The church—like a country club—demands that we believe as they believe, act as they act, and don’t accept substitutes for their version of religion and truth. The church is an institution protecting its own concocted image. Too bad most church members don’t take the time to read about the traditions and the history of the organization that controls their beliefs and offers them stability (and eternity) in a world of change. The vision of the anointed is difficult to dislodge, even when it makes no sense. I gave up on the church and other organizations when in my twenties. Politics and political- or religious-correctness, authority and control were their major aims and a freethinker and scholar could never find a place in a world that was suffocating and unyielding.
Religion
I have never been able to equate religion with the church. The church is a political organization with a religious mission. Religion, on the other hand, signifies the inner person, one’s essential spirituality. Can religion and the inner person survive without the church? Yes it can, but the church cannot survive without the religious person. The problem as I see it in America is that the church doesn’t want you to be religious; that is, religious in a purely spiritual, inner way. The church wants to control your religious experience and anything that is unprescribed is considered suspect or sinful.
Authority and control are keys to successful churches. Devotion, inner reflection, and leading a moral life are keys to religion and spirituality. I say that knowing full well that religion was redefined when Constantine insisted that religious belief be standardized into creedal statements and affirmations. Through our religious experiences we are led to believe in certain this worldly and certain other worldly things. When religious experience is standardized, it loses its individuality, its personal meaning, and life-driven purpose.
The Catholic Church isn’t the only bad boy here. Preachers and theologians of every flavor are today writing books, developing churches with standardized mission statements and purposes, and playing on human fallibility and concern for the perplexities of this life to bring them in so they won’t be “left behind,” shut out of heaven, or miss the boat of salvation. I’ll talk about salvation in a minute, but let’s finish our discussion about religion.
Anyone who wants to can speak “for God” today. It doesn’t matter who they are or what they are saying, there’s always some unthinking, scared, and fallible person there to believe them. One of them asked me this week, “Have you read the Left Behind books?” “No,” I responded. “Why not; you ought to read them.” “No,” I said. “I let God speak for God, not someone with something to sell me.” Her husband said with a voice of authority, “You ought to read them.” These are two old friends, so what can you say?
What’s going on here? Can’t a person believe and worship and have purpose without joining someone else’s bandwagon. Are we that easily sucked into “the next hottest thing,” the “next religious flavor” to be popularized by the Madison Avenue hucksters of “What’s happening next”? I’m not sure religion in its purest sense has a chance anymore. Dogma and creed, authority and control; these are the watchwords of today’s religious institutions.
Jesus
Well, I guess I had better talk about Jesus, since some belief about Jesus lies at the heart of the Christian religion and church. When I was a young lad, and even when I was in seminary, “Jesus” was thought of as “the son of God,” but not God in the true meaning of the word. The concept of the Trinity was important, but not universally so. Times have changed significantly. Without this change, Gibson’s Passion movie would not have been that important.
The cross, the death of Jesus, seems all-important to Christians today. The resurrection is also important, but not as much as his death. Forgotten are the interpretations of the first three Christian centuries—the vine, the fisher king, and the teacher. Today it’s all about salvation, which simply means the earning of a green card to get into heaven.
You think I’m kidding don’t you; well, I’m not! And here’s where the contradictions start. You can’t earn salvation, it’s a gift giving by God and exemplified in the death of Jesus, God’s son. How modern men can attach salvation to the ancient belief in a sacrificial totem beats me, but they do. Here’s the catch: it’s a freely given gift, but to receive it you have to confess your sins, state publicly that you believe God is sincere, be baptized and join the (or a) church. Seems an odd way to earn salvation?
After all, Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life, and no man comes unto the Father, except by me.” Is this what paragraph #2 means? Well, not to me. That’s simply the church’s 4th century c.e. way of establishing its importance. It’s like a statement of admissions or a passport to membership. It has nothing to do with the life of Jesus or the meaning of his teachings. That Jesus lived and died is difficult to deny in a world obsessed by religion based on his life. Is it not enough to accept the gift of salvation (truth) and model one’s life on Jesus’ moral teachings (life)?
If you want to understand Jesus, read the gospel of John 1:18 (RSV) and I John 4:12 (RSV). The message is simple: he revealed God in ethical living and the humility of his death and we are to do likewise. Here we find the purpose of Jesus and our purpose as believers—to be like Jesus means to live the truly ethical life, even when and especially when it’s tough. The Golden Rule says the same thing: use ethical criteria as revealed by Jesus for the criteria of your own behavior—nothing less and nothing more.
There is one more issue here: was Jesus really real or does the Bible create a myth to which we adhere? It doesn’t make any difference any more, because for 2,000 years the Jesus narrative has been probed, prodded, and enriched by church teaching and a Christos theology. For those who think I’m nuts, asked yourself the question of the relationship of the Jesus myth to Roman beliefs of the 4th century C.E. Because of the strength and sensitivity of our beliefs, we don’t want to know the truth about them. Can we exist in the spiritual world without an honest to goodness historical story to back them up? Probably not! To see the relationship of Jesus to the Roman pantheon of gods check this out: http://www.remnantofgod.org/images/IGC/pagan-rcc.htm
ETHICS
Nothing is dearer to my heart than the study of ethics and honest ethical living. In books like The Purpose Driven Life we find Christian purpose twisted and all tied up with theology and promoting church membership. That doesn’t cut it for me. Religion, spirituality, belief, and ethical living cannot be fully institutionalized and I personally resist this notion.
Ethics is personal and yet it is also communal. It is based on belief and principle, understood through models of good and excellent behavior, and sustained by faith and practice. But this isn’t all there is to ethics—there is another side that completes the equation. The other side I’m talking about is how we take this inner ethical dimension and share it with others. How we treat others reveals our beliefs and our ideas about religion, God, the church, and Jesus.
Do you remember the words of the hymn that says, “Love isn’t love until we give it away”? That’s what I’m talking about. Ethics is an everyday living thing; a giving of self thing; an honest and deliberate attempt to live a life of integrity as it touches the lives of others. This isn’t too tough to understand, but it’s awfully hard to live. Ethical consistency is probably the most difficult challenge we have, and none of us are perfect, but that is no excuse. You can’t say, “Well, I’m not perfect,” and use that as a mask for damnable living.
Is Christian ethics different from secular or other religious kinds of ethics? If it goes by the name of “ethics,” then it shouldn’t be any different. We can let our religion help us stay ethically consistent. On the other hand, religion’s intrusion into ethics can get quirky. Church’s and religions have a way of pronouncing some behaviors as sinful or unethical that may be unreligious but not unethical. Personally, I don’t like to mix the two. I like to keep them cognitively separate and let my spiritually aid my ethical commitments.
For me ethics comes down to living an honest and kind life—a life of moral integrity. Ethics respects others for no other reason than that they are human beings. Ethics directs us to help, support, and give to others in order to make their lives better. Look at my ethical manifesto in my ethics book for educators—here is a fuller statement of a working ethic.
The Bible
I bet you thought I would not talk about the Bible, but I must. As a seminarian, I studied the Old and New Testaments in both Hebrew and Greek. Even before that, I studied Greek as an undergraduate and had completed the four gospels and the book of Romans in Greek before graduating from Lenoir-Rhyne College in 1961. Of course, many think I don’t understand the Bible. That’s their mistake! What I don’t understand completely is the so-called “translations” that they are using. There are so many and they are inconsistent with our best Hebrew and Greek texts. The ordinary layperson doesn’t know he or she is being duped, but they are being given a particular theological brand whenever they read one of these weird versions.
The Bible gives both a historical and theological version of the early beginnings of our faith (Christianity). Written by many different men, these versions are somewhat inconsistent with each other—but that’s okay, because today not every expression of faith is identical. It’s those fundamentalists and literalists who go to the extreme to make the Bible say what they want it to say that make me sick—probably because so many people believe them. Also, today, we know that many “scriptures” used by the early church have been excluded because they were not used in the Roman church. Not every early Christian agreed and to homogenize the New Testament is a travesty.
Many have learned that they can’t make these books “walk on water,” so what do they do: they publish their own translations; at least, they call them translations. And another bizarre thing is that they carry notes at the bottom indicating differing versions, but don’t be fooled, these notes are just a smoke screen. Here’s an example: The Living Bible translates the second line of John 1:18 like this: “But his only Son, who himself is God, is near to the Father’s heart…” Neither the King James Version nor the Revised Standard Version (probably the most accurate English translation) says “who himself is God.” They say, “Who is in the bosom of the Father.” The Greek word for “bosom” is kolpon (kolpon) meaning “in the chest” or “in the pocket.” This is a direct example of making the Bible adhere with one’s theological beliefs. I guess the next thing they’ll write in is the word “trinity,” whatever that really means?
The Trinity
Well, here we are at the church’s favorite conceptualization—the trinity. Of course, the Bible talks about God, gives some details about the life and teachings of Jesus, and intertwines all of this with mention of the Spirit of God or the Holy Spirit—depends on which writer you’re reading at the time. It was natural when Constantine ordered the standardization of scripture and dogma that the church authorities would create some simple formulas to help the otherwise uneducated believer. The “trinity” was the big boy because it included all beliefs that are important to the church—belief in God, the spin they were about to put on the life and teachings of Jesus, and hold it all together with an invisible apparition that they and us are able to share. I mean, get with the message, the way God controls the world is through the “spirit,” the holy phantom that moves silently through time and place.
I like to call the “trinity” the “triangle and one,” the one being the human receptor or believer. Problem is today, the triangle and one has been reduced to one-on-one; that is, Jesus is now thought of as God and the spirit—well, the spirit is just their holy presence in our lives. Won’t to play a little religion?—your ball out. That’s not fair to the sincere believer, but I wonder what the believer believed from the 3rd and 4th century c.e. about all this stuff? Does belief have to be dogma—organized, standardized, and coerced? I don’t think that it does.
Let’s take a deeper look at all of this. You know that Christianity is an ancient religion with even more ancient roots. There are elements of totemism and animism running all through it. The ancient Greek and Roman pantheons were made up of male and female gods and even some super-doper gods. So it’s natural we have a trinity with a super-doper god at the top and a male (Logos – Jesus – meaning “the mind of god”) and a female (Sophia – spirit) just under them. Was just Jesus and the Spirit the yin/yang of Christianity—the male/female lower god? May have been and may still be. That gives a new place for women in an otherwise male-dominated religion, doesn’t it? We can’t have women in the pulpit; I forgot that Jesus was spiritually a female.
Now that I’ve pissed off everyone who reads these words,
I had better return to my painting.
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