[Dialogue] RE: Dialogue Digest, Vol 15, Issue 25

[Eric Smith]

Part 1 of 3.
I find it useful to attempt to view the current caludron of religious
ideology from a broad perspective. Perhaps some useful insight might emerge
from such an inquiry. It would appear that the interaction between two
fundamental paradigms are the source of all this heat- or put another way-
combining existential (experience-based) religious perspectives with
fundamentalist (belief-based) religious perspectives creates a highly
exothermic reaction in the emotional/
cognitive/intellectual arena!

Spong articulates what I view as the essence of his message as follows (I
reiterate it here to clarify my "jumping off point):

<<The vast majority of the scientific world no longer salutes the primitive
idea that a supernatural deity who lives above the sky has guided evolution
to the glorious end of humankind and that it will go no further. Yet
frightened religious leaders now interpret that to be an assault on their
image of God. These leaders are unable or unwilling to embrace the fact that
God for most Christians is a human creation that got frozen in a pre-modern
form. The religious anxiety of our day stems from the fact that this
definition of God is dying. Conservative Roman Catholics and fundamentalist
Protestants appear to know that in the depths of their souls and so they
seek to use authority in the task of divine artificial respiration. Former
Christians also appear to know that much more consciously. That is why the
fastest growing religious movement in the western world is the Church Alumni
Association.

The crisis to which these data point is real. I, for one, am not interested
in being a part of a Christian Church that has to defend its faith against
the insights of new knowledge. Any God who has to be protected from new
truth cannot possibly be God.>>

Query: Is my decision to participate in Christianity solely contingent upon
how the Christian community (Christendom) has responded to Christian
teachings as manifested in history? In what ways does Christendom reflect
the insights and values of Christian teachings -or not? Does Christendom, as
expressed in history, validate or invalidate Christian wisdom? To what
degree is this question important or relevant? On what other basis might I
consider myself to be Christian?

To start, I would suggest that for the last century, we have found ourselves
to be living in an age of rapid scientific, technological, social and
ethical change, tension, and conflict whose pace has been phenomenally
faster than was apparent during the nineteenth century. By the conclusion of
that century, most physicists thought that almost everything in the
scientific arena was known- there were just a few minor details to work out.
Then the general and specific theories of relativity came crashing in
against this intellectual calm- followed by quantum mechanics and chaos
theory. What the bleep do we know?! This scientific and intellectual
development combined with the fast-paced technological revolution it
stimulated has sent us hurtling once and for all out of the Industrial age
into the Information age. Although some have said this transition found its
beginnings during the European Renaissance, the 20th century has been quite
a century! In that century, I would say, we have completed our move out of
the Industrial age into the Information age. Some people embrace the wonder
of change while others cower form it in fear & anxiety-based resistance that
often manifests as a bizarre compartmentalizing of reality. What
philosophical and theological implications all this has intrigues me- but
there's not much space here to go into that in detail.

My brother got is PhD in biochemistry and genetics at Cornell in the mid
eighties, has been one of a handful of principal investigators on the human
genome project world-wide- yet he is a fundamentalist Catholic! I could
never figure out how he could reconcile two such quintessentially opposing
worldviews. My brother simply sees no connection between them. Either that-
or he perhaps he was just trying to avoid conflict with his ex wife. This is
what I mean by compartmentalization- for him, science seems to live in one
box and religion and ethics live in another. On the one hand, he construes
abortion as murder (God planted that seed in the woman's womb) yet that his
livelihood virtually depends on stem cell research and Darwin's theory of
the origin of species through natural selection is beyond question!

How many other readers on this list serve have noticed similar examples of
compartmentalization in people that is just too plain baffling to make any
sense of?

This leads me to shift my inquiry altogether. I used to think that some sort
of rational debate or dialogue of ideas might shed light on the issue (let's
systematically explore the objective, reflective/reactive, and
interpretational aspects of this conundrum and come to some agreement about
what it all means for us), but now I'm not quite so convinced. I think
insight into understanding this perplexity lies in a radically different
arena.

25 centuries ago, Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, discovered through his
direct personal experience that human beings have the potential to be
immediately present to that which is eternal. Indeed, we can directly
experience the fundamental essence of life. We can cultivate mindful
awareness of our thinking, perceiving, feeling and actions. We can come to
realize that we have created stories about ourselves and about events in our
past that are distinctly separate from the events themselves. Said another
way, we can come to realize that events hold no intrinsic meaning; the
meaning that events hold is the meaning our human mind imputes to those
events. It has been said that the human brain is a meaning-making machine!

So, I have a story in my mind about who I am as a person. Events have
occurred throughout my life.  I have a whole string of stories (memories and
associations) of events from my past- and I can choose to let them be with
me now- even though the events happened in the past- or I can choose to let
them go, relegating the past to the past. It is as if through staying
attached to these stories, deluding myself that they are the same as the
events that inspired them, I carry my past into the present. But am I merely
the sum of the events of my past? If I focus on being present in the present
moment, it becomes possible to let go of clinging to these stories; I can
let them go; I can create the possibility to live in an entirely new way- in
direct response to my awareness that arises in the present moment. Herein
lies the possibility to transform into the person whom I desire to be- a
loving person who embraces all of humanity- not just people who agree with
me; not to be constrained by my regrets of the past.

Part 2 of 3 to come.


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Subject: Dialogue Digest, Vol 15, Issue 25


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Today's Topics:

   1. From the bishop-pessimistic prognostication (kroegerd at aol.com)


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Message: 1
Date: Thu, 28 Jul 2005 12:31:32 -0400
From: kroegerd at aol.com
Subject: [Dialogue] From the bishop-pessimistic prognostication
To: MICAH6-8 at topica.com
Cc: Dialogue at wedgeblade.net
Message-ID: <8C761A8F2F634B9-F8-34A at mblk-d42.sysops.aol.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"


July 27, 2005
A New Dark Age Begins

Several years ago, in a column about the harassment, removal and silencing
of Roman Catholic scholars like Hans Kung, Leonardo Boff, Charles Curran and
Edward Schillebeeckx by that church, I referred to the leader of this
"Inquisitional" mentality, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, as "the pit bull of
the Vatican." Little did I realize that this church's leadership would elect
this man Pope and install him as Benedict XVI. That action sent a signal
throughout the world that we are entering a new "Dark Age." On many fronts
this mentality, which has been building inside religion for at least forty
years, has finally broken into our full awareness.
We saw it in a document published a few years ago, written by the same
Cardinal Ratzinger, in which the Vatican declared there to be only one true
religion, namely Christianity, and only one true expression of Christianity,
namely the Roman Catholic Church. The gentle Pope John XXIII (1958-1963),
who opened that church to the accents of the 20th Century, must have turned
in his grave. Ratzinger's document went on to counsel Roman Catholic
ecumenical representatives never to refer to other Christian bodies as
"sister" churches for that implied some tacit recognition of their
legitimacy. This attitude, the hallmark of authoritarian
anti-intellectualism that historically has produced religious wars and
persecution, is now installed in the Papacy itself. It signals the dimming
of reason and suggests that Catholic Christianity has returned to the
mindset of the Inquisition.
Rome is not alone. A Danish Lutheran bishop has recently removed one of its
most creative clergy, Pastor Thorkild Grosboell, from his parish near
Copenhagen by charging him with heresy. To charge one with heresy implies
that the charging authority possesses the truth of God. Another Danish
bishop, seeing this as a public relations disaster, sought to smooth over
the conflict by offering Pastor Grosboell another chance to resume his
ministry, but only after a public interrogation in which the bishop read
parts of the Creed developed in the fourth century and demanded that Pastor
Grosboell declare, with a "yes" or "no" answer that he believes that these
words have captured the eternal truth of God. That is "Dark Age" theology.
We see the same mentality almost every day when various evangelical
spokespersons, such as Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson or R. Albert Mohler go
on national television to express their opinion that the words of Scripture
are the inerrant word of God. Their comments are frequently in the service
of opposing evolution. All of these gentlemen either ignore the last two
hundred years of biblical scholarship or they are not aware of it. Their
rhetoric does little more than give aid and comfort to uninformed members of
local school boards in the less well educated and less cosmopolitan parts of
our nation who thrive on a lack of knowledge and who want to carry us back
intellectually to the 1920's, so that once again we might put learning on
trial and convict it as we did in the Scopes Trial in Tennessee. One wonders
when the historicity of Adam and Eve might begin to be defended again by the
current ecclesiastical mentality. The Bible is so often used to perfume both
ignorance and prejudice.
If one had any doubt about this developing religious darkness, an op-ed
piece that appeared on July 7, 2005 in the New York Times removed any
lingering questions. This article, written by the Cardinal Archbishop of
Vienna, Christoph Schoenborn, suggested that evolution was "not compatible
with Catholic doctrine." This author, no secondary figure in the Roman
Catholic Church, served as the editor of the official 1992 Catechism of that
Church. Earlier in his career this man had actually defended the literal
historicity of the Book of Genesis. Adam and Eve here we come! Though the
Vatican did not officially authorize this editorial, it is well known that
Cardinal Schoenborn and Benedict XVI are very close friends and in that
Church such events are never unplanned or accidental.
Cardinal Schoenborn's argument was intriguing as he first tried to undermine
John Paul II's words spoken in 1996 that "Evolution is more than a theory."
Secondly, he sought to drive a wedge between what he called the Theory of
Evolution articulated by Charles Darwin and the Theory of Evolution that is
held by those he called "The Neo-Darwinians." According to the Cardinal, the
distinction was that evolution "in the sense of a common ancestry might be
true," but evolution as "an unguided, unplanned process of random variation
and natural selection is not." Perhaps he does not recognize that the full
title of Charles Darwin's 1859 book was "The Origin of the Species by
Natural Selection." The implication was that anything that disagrees with or
challenges the true faith of the Catholic Church could not be truth ipso
facto. That is the typical claim found in all imperialistic religious
systems. Clearly an alliance is emerging between the Vatican and the
"creationist" wing of Protestant fundamentalism.
Evolution, let it be said clearly, is no longer a debatable theory. DNA
evidence has made it very clear that all of life is deeply and historically
interconnected. Medical science assumes the truth of evolution in all that
it does. The vast majority of the scientific world no longer salutes the
primitive idea that a supernatural deity who lives above the sky has guided
evolution to the glorious end of humankind and that it will go no further.
Yet frightened religious leaders now interpret that to be an assault on
their image of God. These leaders are unable or unwilling to embrace the
fact that God for most Christians is a human creation that got frozen in a
pre-modern form. The religious anxiety of our day stems from the fact that
this definition of God is dying. Conservative Roman Catholics and
fundamentalist Protestants appear to know that in the depths of their souls
and so they seek to use authority in the task of divine artificial
respiration. Former Christians also appear to know that much more
consciously. That is why the fastest growing religious movement in the
western world is the Church Alumni Association.
The crisis to which these data point is real. I, for one, am not interested
in being a part of a Christian Church that has to defend its faith against
the insights of new knowledge. Any God who has to be protected from new
truth cannot possibly be God. If the only alternative to the traditional
view of God, that portrayed the deity as a supernatural theistic Being who
invades the world periodically in miraculous ways to accomplish the divine
purpose, is to say that there is no God, then I find that a healthier
solution. That, however, is not the only alternative. I seek the God beyond
the gods of men and women, beyond the gods of church and religious systems.
I seek the God who is not bound by those antiquated creeds and dogmas that
were hammered out in a world that no longer exists. If Cardinal Schoenborn
wants to assert that anything that conflicts with Catholic doctrine cannot
be true, or if Protestants insist that all truth is ultimately defined by
the inerrant words of a 3000 year old book, then we are back to the time
when the Christian Church condemned Galileo. Christianity lost that battle
and it will lose this one as it marches headlong into the marginalized
existence that leads to an inevitable death.
What the fundamentalists, both Catholic and Protestant, do not appear to
embrace is that evolution by natural selection is only the tip of the
iceberg that threatens their narrowly defined religious system. Once the
Darwinian principle of evolving life is fully understood, the old idea of an
original creation that is both good and finished is doomed. The
post-Darwinian scientific world almost unanimously views creation as an
ongoing, unfinished process. Therefore the suggestion that there ever was a
"fall into sin," becomes nonsense, and the doctrine of 'original sin'
collapses. The story of Jesus as God's invasion of the world to rescue us
from this fall becomes inoperative. One cannot fall from a perfection one
never had. One cannot be rescued from a fall that never happened. One cannot
be restored to a status one has never possessed. Inevitably, as this
theological house of cards falls, we become aware that the traditional way
of understanding baptism as the washing away the sin of the fall, or the
Eucharist as a reenactment of the moment when the divine rescue was
accomplished on the cross also become meaningless. The idea that salvation
was accomplished in the shedding of Jesus' blood becomes barbaric. Neither
Cardinal Schoenborn nor the Protestant "creationists" appear to understand
any of these implications in their shallow analysis of Darwinian thought. It
is a sad day for enlightened people when the leaders of major parts of the
Christian Church seek to reassert Catholic authority or scriptural certainty
by herding us back into the ignorance of yesterday.
The Christian Church has a choice to make. It will either engage the thought
of the contemporary world or it will die. The early signs are that this Pope
and the Church he represents have decided to cast their lot with the
mindless fundamentalism, which is today the public voice of Protestant
Christianity. This means that they are willing to allow their children to be
shielded from truth and insight because the God they worship is simply too
small to be God for the 21st century. A Christian Church ushering in a new
Dark Age has no future.
This frightening specter becomes very real when we recognize that this is
the kind of Christianity encouraged by members of the Bush administration.
They too are engaged in an assault on both intelligence and learning. They
deny global warming, they oppose stem cell research, they are
closed-mindedness about end of life issues, they express uninformed
negativity about homosexual persons and they attempt to blur the line
between church and state.
The clouds are darkening. The fundamentalists are now allied with the
Vatican and the present administration has given this mentality credibility
by embracing it. Is it any wonder that I fear for the Christianity that has
long nurtured me and for the country that I love.
- John Shelby Spong
Question and Answer
With John Shelby Spong
To my readers:
This week, in place of the Question and Answer feature of this column, I am
pleased to turn this space over to some of you by printing excerpts from the
incredible volume of mail I received in response to guest columnist Dr.
James Hecht's piece on the struggle in the Middle East to find peace,
entitled "Brokering the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict". That column ran on
May 18th, 2005, and if you missed it or want to read it again, subscribers
may do so by visiting http://www.bishopspong.com and clicking the "Log In"
tab. Peace in the Middle East is still elusive, but until it is found peace
in the world will remain an unfulfilled dream. Your comments were worth
sharing broadly. John Shelby Spong

Daryl Peter writes:
"I think there is one thing lacking in Dr. Hecht's argument. Did the
Palestinians aid and abet those who attempted to drive the Jews into the
sea? I think the answer is yes. What then should be their reward for such
treachery? The Arab world could easily have assimilated the displaced
Palestinians and refused. Why? It seems to me there are quite a few nations
in the Middle East who come to the table with unclean hands not just Jews
and Americans. Until the entire Arab world and especially the U.N. agree
this is a real mess and no one is guiltless can the problem begin to be
resolved."
Martin Crim writes:
"The only element Dr. Hecht left out of the equation is that evangelical
Christians form a strong pro-Israel lobby that is actually more extreme than
AIPAC. Because they see the creation of the modern nation of Israel as
fulfillment of Biblical prophecy, they are opposed to any steps toward peace
with the Palestinians if that would require giving up "Judea and Samaria" as
they call it."

Sheldon Kronfeld of San Diego writes:
"Without hesitation I agree with Dr. Hecht that the plight of the
Palestinians is one of misery, suffering, subjugation and humiliation. I
have a concern about his conclusion about where the responsibility for this
unfortunate situation lies. Nowhere does Dr. Hecht indicate that he
conferred with Israelis at all. Permit me to make mention a few of the hopes
that Israel has had with respect to its Arab Palestinian neighbors.
"We appeal.to the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to preserve peace
and participate in the building of the state on the basis of full and equal
citizenship and due representation in all its provisional and permanent
institutions."
"The State of Israel will foster the development of the country for all its
inhabitants; it will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by
the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of religion, race,
of sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language,
education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions."
The foregoing is taken from the Declaration of the Establishment of the
State of Israel, May 14, 1948.

Frank Glyn-Jones writes:
"An excellent article by Dr. Hecht. Hatred is growing all the time among
both the Israelis and the Americans. I can't see any hope of the Israelis
withdrawing from the settlements or of reverting to 1967 boundaries. Nor can
I see the USA and President Bush supporting such a move. In fact I can see
many Israelis resisting the withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. Dr. Hecht does
not mention the two million Palestinian refugees. And there are millions of
Americans who belong to the religious right who also believe the Bible says
that Israel should occupy Judea. "The problem is that all the Arab states
are weak economically. They must adopt all the tenets of capitalism,
encourage inward investment, approve interest, give rights to women, curb
the power of the mullahs and either modernize the Islamic faith or change
it. This is massive step. Perhaps one Arab nation can take a lead. But
unless they make a move in that direction, they will continue to be
humiliated and weak."

Jean Palmer from Daphne, Alabama writes:
"After reading Dr. Hecht's column I recalled my thoughts over the years
about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, wondering why our United States
government has always supported the Israeli side and seemingly neglected the
Palestinians. My thoughts centered on our collective guilt over disbelieving
the tragic Holocaust for so long. When the ship carrying refugees arrived on
our shores during FDR's presidency and was forced to turn back to Europe, it
caused me to gasp! How on earth could our country turn away refugees? Well,
it seems we did and this has perhaps caused us to overcompensate on the
Israeli side today. Having lived to the ripe old age of 71, I now know how
guilt can cause one to do a 180-degree turnaround in some cases. I have
asked myself why I was not sensitive to the issues of growing up in the
segregated south all those years. Well, I was a child, then a teenager, then
a nursing student, then a wife and a mother.too busy to think how others
were faring, in particular my African American brothers and sisters. Today,
I embrace these same brothers and sisters wherever I am in church, social
events, or anywhere else. Attempting atonement is a feeble attempt on my
part but it seems to be the best I can do. I had been hoping that after 9/11
our government would stop, think and want to know why the terrorists hated
us so much and how we might listen to their side of "the argument." So, what
did President Bush and his administration do? They began a war they thought
we could easily win; evidently thinking about how to turn the tide of Muslim
hate was never a consideration. When I think of all the Iraqi people and our
loyal military personnel who have been killed, it makes me nauseated!"

Jim High from Tupelo, Miss, writes:
"Some very interesting and informative information was contained in Dr.
Hecht's column, things that I did not know were happening in this area of
the world. Getting to the bottom of things is always important and only by
being on the ground in that place of conflict would you come to know the
actual details and truth of the situation. I appreciate this new insight.
However, it seems to me that this problem has no real solution and is
getting worse, not better, over time. I do not agree that money, which Dr.
Hecht proposes, is going to solve this religious problem. Both sides have
reasons to believe that they are right and both sides believe that "God is
on their side," whatever that means. Two vastly different peoples cannot
occupy the same ground. Even the United States cannot play King Solomon and
propose cutting this baby in half.
So what can be done? Only a complete change in the way Arabs, Jews and
Christians view God and each other will bring peace to the Middle East and
to the rest of the world. Do I think that will happen? Probably not until we
reach some other inhabited planet in the distant future, and upon arriving
inquire about their God and get the response, "Who?". None of us living
today will be around to see that and probably our civilization will not last
that long anyway. And, if our world does survive until then, the Jerry
Falwells and Pat Robertsons of that day will just try to convert them. The
strongest evidence that the God most people say they believe in does not
really exist is all the wars and conflicts fought in the name of religion.
Why would the God they believe in allow this?
"The God I believe in is in me and it fills me love, peace and acceptance
for every other thing in God's creation, living or physical. Jesus, whoever
he was, understood and acted on that belief just as I try to do. If everyone
does that, all problems of every kind would end and we would truly have the
"Kingdom of God" on earth today."

Sam Taylor, via the Internet, writes:
I appreciate Dr. Hecht's viewpoints and would like to find a way for him to
achieve broader readership. However, Dr. Hecht along with many others,
assigns a galactic importance to the Israel-Palestine issue that seems to
require more perspective than is deserved. Of a human population of 6.2
billion, those people who identify themselves as Jews make up only 14
million. Israel has a population of only 4 million, Palestine a little more.
In short, Dr. Hecht and many, many others are focusing attention on less
that = of one percent of the human population of our planet as if these are
somehow more deserving of our attention than another two or three billion
whose plight is at least as desperate. I would maintain that this is a
latent Judeo-Christian-Islamic-Mormon, etc. bias that creates this obvious
imbalance. I do not think that Dr. Hecht would subscribe to some notion that
declared all the people who were not included in this biased sample as
somehow less than human and thus not deserving our attention. But even with
this biased population, the absolute numbers of those receiving the focus
are small. How can he justify this incredible statistical imbalance?
"I am quite sympathetic to the people who suffer from the mess that
supposedly civilized nations have made (or have allowed to be made) in this
tiny corner of the world. However, I am even more sympathetic to the
enormous multiples of this small sample who continue to be neglected at the
expense of these, if you will pardon the term, "chosen" few. As a putative
Christian, who has taken seriously the leavening influence of humanism, how
does Dr. Hecht justify this dichotomy?"




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End of Dialogue Digest, Vol 15, Issue 25
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