I just finished read/listening to Karen Armstrong’s The Case for God, and like waking with memories of a vivid dream, I want to get my thoughts down before they get pushed aside by the concerns of the day.

In Bad Faith, part 8: The Case for God – Not What You Think

I think that Armstrong did such a great job summarizing the book in her NPR/Fresh Air interview that the book feels a bit ponderous. What I mean is that this is a book that one really needs to pay attention to and no play as background music (ack, stupid multitasking lifestyle). Armstrong takes the reader from the very beginning evidences of “god thoughts” found in the pre-historic caves of Lascaux, to the new-atheists like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, spending a goodly bit of time going through the Greek, Asian, and post-medieval schools of thought that may not be familiar to the reader.

So, as a former Loyola Marymount religious studies major with a B.A. in Biblical Studies from Biola University and several quarters of study at Fuller Seminary toward an MA in Theology and a piss-pour background in the Greek and Latin Classics (no ones fault but my own), I greatly appreciated Armstrong’s academic, non-polemic, recitation of pre-history and history of religion on this planet. Yeah, that’s the scope of this book. I’m very interested in her other books on Islam and Buddhism to see how deep she dives into these religions where I’m greatly lacking in my own understanding.

Thoughts that struck me as I listened to the book, mainly how every generation and every great thinker felt compelled to re-interpret God based on their own recent history, cultural and personal, and their own cultural problems. For example, how different would modern Christianity be if Augustine had not had such a problem with his pre-conversion sexual appetites, how would the relationship between God and man be cast differently if Augustine hadn’t promoted the idea of Original Sin and demonized sexuality in general, making it a sin except for the purpose of conception? What would have happened if Emperor Constantine had not chosen to use Christianity as a unify force in his divided empire, thus forcing provincial Christianity to agree on which books belonged in the scriptures, the divinity of Jesus of Nazareth and what would be orthodox and what would be heretical? How differently would history have been had Christianity remained a Jewish sect instead of a world political power? And every time there was a political or natural disaster there seemed to be gigantic shifts in thought with conservatives abandoning the silent God and liberal’s looking for a literal simplistic God to find comfort from.

The greatest error in our search for the Divine seems to be that all of us, skeptic and believer, have made the mistake of assuming that our understanding of religion and the Divine has always been the way we presently see things. Biblical inerrancy, literal divine intervention, God as a Being, the idea of One Truth, religion as belief system instead of daily practice, the after-life, rationalism versus belief: these are all tenets of faith that many of us hold onto believing that changing any one of them invalidates the whole idea of Faith. And yet, many of these ideas have a date in history when they caught on, thus showing that there was a time when people did not, for example, hold to the idea that there was only one truth or that the scriptures had to be perfect in every word and teaching. It might be surprising to some that there have been faithful Christians who do not believe that Jesus was God incarnate. I know, shock. In fact, not at all like the superstitious primitives who saw gods in every stone and stick, it may surprise some that some ancients understood that one could not reduce God to Person because God doesn’t make sense as someone like themselves only bigger.

So, are you tired of the literalistic infantile religion that you find on the TV day and night? Are you unconvinced that it’s NOT all DNA and chemical reactions? Are you tired of the petty divisive warring between small minded sects with guns? Well, then maybe it’s time, in the words of Neo, to free ones mind from narrow assumptions of ones cultural and personal past and entertain thoughts that it’s a much bigger universe than one can even understand, but that one is a part of this much bigger existence.

Also, it should go without saying that it’s long past time for fat self-absorbed Christians to get over themselves and express their beliefs beginning by welcoming a Muslim into their home and giving a good portion of their wealth away to the poor and shut the hell up until they’ve done the first things that their Messiah told them to do. Additionally, It’s past time for the faithful from all beliefs to stop letting the Fundamentalists misrepresent what the Founders of their Faith intended. Rest assured, when you kill, hate or persecute in the name of God, you aren’t speaking or acting for any god beyond your own personal sickness. And that goes for those of you who hate someone who doesn’t agree with your politics or, horror of horrors, doesn’t agree with your sexuality (or lack thereof). To use a phrase popular with a few friends, if the founders could, they’d bitch-slap these presumptive crazies. Oh wait, that’d just lend credence toward their belief in rewarding violence for violence. Oh what the hell, slap away!

god help us! Getting back to Armstrong’s book; Meaning and data, mythos and logos, it’s not a mistake that every culture has examples of this phenomenon. Funny, thinking of previous readings, it’s a bit like the left and right hemispheres of the human brain, we don’t do particularly well when only one hemisphere is “in charge.” The same would seem to be true of human cultures that advocate only one way of understanding reality, religion or secularism. As with the human mind, the two parts must communicate and influence each other or the whole will suffer and fail. Interesting. This business of God and religion is not at all what i would have at first thought.

Karen Armstrong at TED: The Golden Rule

Sources:
image: Karen Armstrong. http://shelleyadelle.wordpress.com/2009/03/26/belief-to-love-to-prize-to-hold-dear/ retrieved on 3/11/2010

image: Padre.jpg microsoft clipart

TED video: Karen Armstrong: Let’s revive the Golden Rule. http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/karen_armstrong_let_s_revive_the_golden_rule.html retrieved on 3/11/2010

        

If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father who is in heaven give good things to them that ask him? (Matthew 7:11 ASV)

It shouldn’t be too surprising that in an era and place of unbridled abundance and wealth (that is the US in the 1970s and following) that these verses would be seen as part of the claim that we deserve good things and God has to give us what we want. Of the many mistakes I’ve made in my walk of faith, having a sense of entitlement, that God owes me something, was no small source of confusion and probably one of the worst ways that I could have envisioned a relationship with the Divine. Funny that I seem to get mostly what I needed, but almost never what I wanted.

In Bad Faith, Part 7: Entitlement

The stark finger of God by altemark

It might be interesting to see the tel-evangelist and the religious huckster try to preach this gospel of entitlement to villagers in a developing spot in the world where their village is routinely wiped out every year by monsoons and flooding. Or in some South American desert community where there’s no electricity or indoor plumbing, how would they spin their message there? How does this gospel of entitlement translate in parts of the world where children catch the measles and die or where they don’t have enough food to feed them and have to watch them slowly starve to death. Conversely, how about hard-working folk who are laid-off or fired because the CEO needs to cut the budget so that he can still get his quarter-million dollar. The CEO got what he wanted, but the thousands and possibly millions who are dependent on that paycheck for their daily bread certainly didn’t. Does God only listen to the prayers of CEOs, or rich Americans?

I’m currently listening to Karen Armstrong’s The Case for God, and it seems pretty clear that one mistake I made was to assume a quid pro quo relationship with the Divine and second to that was an assumption that I could have a relationship with the Divine that was a kind of mystical parallel to having a relationship with a really powerful, important buddy. I thought I had VIP access to all the good that there was to offer because God and Jesus were my buddies. “No really, check again, my name is on the VIP list. My buddy, Jesus, said he put it there,” I say to the heavenly bouncer. Imagine my disappointment and embarrassment as I’m forced to leave the line while the bouncer lets all the hot chicks in first. Damn. Story of my life…

I know that it was confusing to my mom, a devout Catholic, that I had this expectation that not only did God hear my prayers, but that He had to give me what I wanted and also that He was in control of every aspect of my life, right down to the long hairs on my shaggy head. I’d had this “experience” as a 15-year-old and blam! I was ushered into the inner sanctum and I was privy to a level of understanding that the stupid ol’ theologians couldn’t begin to imagine. Well, 15-year-olds are always over-estimating their importance and understanding, and I wasn’t any different in that department. Sad thing was that as I grew up and began to understand that I did NOT know the mysteries of the universe, that I was unable to integrate this in a meaningful way when it came to understanding my relationship with God and the Bible. In a sense Dawkins was right, while I understood more and more of the complexity of life, my relationship with God was mostly undeveloped beyond the moment of recognition and wonder.

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I felt as a child, I thought as a child: now that I am become a man, I have put away childish things. For now we see in a mirror, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know fully even as also I was fully known. (1st Corinthians 13:11-12 ASV)

Well, it’s probably an overstatement to say that it went undeveloped because from that moment forward I struggled with my growing rational understanding of the world and this moment that changed my life. Like the Episcopal priest that my brother spoke to in my last entry, I couldn’t fully reconcile the two and instead just alternated between the two worlds and not always very gracefully. While Dawkins might say that my struggle was an irrational residual of my upbringing, Armstrong might say that my problem was that my definition of God was just too narrow and too primitive.

I’d seen a glimpse of it at Loyola Marymount when I read The Idea of the Holy, but never really moved too far beyond the “buddy in the sky” motif when I did my B.A. in Biblical Studies at Biola University. Then when I started an M.A. in Theology at Fuller Seminary it was an interesting blend between the rational and religious, but it all got cut short when I got divorced. It didn’t help that I was already too academic for my Calvary Chapel heritage, getting divorced completely knocked the wheels off of my vision for myself and ministry. And thus I abandoned all of it and except for occasionally listening to some Mark Heard or Sam Phillips I never opened my Bible or went back to church for fifteen years following the divorce.

During my fifteen year Agnostic phase I attempted to find a balance between these unmet expectations, my sense of my own responsibility for the way things turned out and trying to figure out who I was. I’d love to say that I figured it out, but that would be even more delusional than any of the foolish things I’d done as a Christian. Something was missing. A lot of time past. I had my work but… I don’t know. There was something more.

Then through an unexplainable series of events I found myself back at church, back to reading my bible and back to trying to figure everything out with my old buddy Jesus. Simply put, I’d fallen in love and there wasn’t a single damn thing about it that was right and when it all came crashing down on my head (over a Valentine’s Day weekend) I had a moment of transcendence and understanding. God was in control again and I didn’t care how anything turned out because I understood that nothing happened by chance. And I really did go through a number of “self-renovation” projects. The previous 15-years felt like I’d been standing still or asleep the whole time. I knew I had to be my best self. I knew I had to be my best self because… well, that was the problem. There was something, or actually someone who, I wanted in my life and it wasn’t happening. Christian friends repeated the verses like the ones above about how God knew my heart and wanted to give me… good things. Great, I was all for that. I knew what that meant to me, but things got a lot darker and unlike any other time in my life I learned what it meant to be completely vulnerable, to the point where a sunset would make me cry because I couldn’t be with the one I’d fallen in love with. This went on for years.

Friends and enemies around me were falling in love and getting married (and getting divorced) and I was still trying to figure out why it wasn’t happening for me. I kept the thought close to my heart that God knew what I wanted. And time continued to pass on by. It was beginning to feel like those bad old days when I began to believe that I must be doing something wrong or that there was something wrong with me. I didn’t really expect it all to be handed to me on a silver platter, but Jesus, after five years… Clearly, I’d misjudged more than a few things. Clearly I was still seeing things through a glass, darkly… So, for the second time, I closed the Book and walked away.

I know a lot of people who feel like they were rescued from horrible lives because they found God. For them life would be completely meaningless and cruelly random if it weren’t for God making everything right and loving them. I respect that. I miss that sense of knowing. I miss that sense of being connected. I don’t want to live what’s left of my life like I did during my 15-year of random wandering. I’ve learned so much, it’d be a shame for it all to be lost because it’s gone unshared and unremembered. There’s still something left undone.

Maybe the verses aren’t about some quid pro quo relationship with the Divine expressed with gifts of fishes or stones. Maybe the verses aren’t about a big buddy in the sky who wants to spoil you. Maybe it’s all meant to be an allegory about being loved and being connected to something greater than ones self. Maybe it was enough that I was loved and that in those moments I saw into Eternity, that I’m one of these weirdos who can take simple human contact and see something bigger, something that makes thoughts of entitlement feel like immature children complaining about fish and stones.

Sources:
image: Dollar sign, Microsoft.com/clipart

image: The stark finger of God by altemark. http://www.flickr.com/photos/altemark/46732233/ retrieved on 3/5/2010.

image: heart candle by joe bustillos. http://joebustillos.com/images/heartcandle.jpg retrieved on 3/5/2010

YouTube video: Sheryl Crow – Letter To God – Live. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2dwWHCc2Ak retrieved on 3/5/2010

        

So, it seems to come down to this, I’ve had these experiences, experiences that I was shocked to read about in my first year religion course at Loyola Marymount in a book by Rudolf Otto called The Idea of the Holy. The Latin phrase was mysterium tremendum et fascinans, and I completely understood what the author was talking about. I felt connected. At the same time I didn’t see visions, I didn’t hear voices, I didn’t go to another realm of reality. In fact, if it weren’t for my Catholic/Christian upbringing and a friend who was there at the time, I wouldn’t have known how to interpret these experiences. And there, perhaps, is the source of the difficulty.

image by beggs (http://www.flickr.com/photos/beggs/)

In Bad Faith, Part 6: Is Your God a Tribal Strawman?

Had I been raised in a different community on a different spot on the globe than the language of my experiences, how I would have interpreted my experiences, would have been different. Had I not had my first experiences during the “Jesus People Movement” in Southern California in the mid-1970s then the direction of my life might have been entirely different. Instead of being a Religious Studies major at Loyola Marymount and then getting a BA in Biblical Studies at Biola University, I might have joined a monastery in Europe or Asia or entered into training to become a Mullah or Rabbi in the Middle East. I wonder, if I had taken those other paths, would those traditions have allowed me to examine their early tribal heritage and eventually find fault with systems of interpretation that don’t hold up to modern scrutiny. I guess I’ll never know. But what I do know is that, experiences not withstanding, I cannot faithfully recite any of the creeds I’ve known without massive mental re-editing. So it would seem that once I moved from “mysterium tremendum et fascinans” to interpretation or human understanding something or perhaps everything got lost in translation.

One of the beauties of Faith is that it tends to wrap all of the difficulties of life into one little package and say that all you have to do is “X” and all of these things will go away. When I was a teenager that was a life-saving moment because nothing made sense and everything I wanted to do was inconsistent with the beliefs I’d been raised with. And then, thirty-years later, when my heart was being completely broken, this divine love seemed to break through and offered me meaning and purpose. Those were difficult, life changing days. But as soon as I went from experience to interpretation it was back to nothing but difficulty, complications and failure. It was as if someone had said to me, “The good news is that Jesus loves you and has a plan for your life, the bad news is that you are still you.” Thanks. So I tussle between my thirst for understanding and rationalism and my experiences of oneness and connection.

Some time ago my brother and his late-wife were socializing with their Episcopalian priest when the priest commented to my brother, something about the difficulty of bridging the gap between modern life and Faith. My brother quipped, isn’t that the sign of greater intelligence and faith, to be able to live with the ambiguity of unanswered questions? My brother has lived a somewhat similar circuitous life of faith and rationalism. I love my brother dearly, and I’m sure that he can balance the ambiguity between the faith we were raised with and the modern contradictions we run into daily, but I’ve already spent 15-years going around saying “I don’t know” when it comes to issues of Faith. More to the point, and perhaps in spirit of his response, maybe the problem is that there are no simple answers. Or maybe there’s only a problem if one insists on a vision of God who plays favorites and orders one tribal community to commit genocide against another tribe, a God who would have a father kill his son to prove his faithfulness, a God who would require the murder of an innocent man to fulfill his need for justice. Or, like Bart Erhman’s professor at Princeton remarked, maybe the biblical writer(s) got it (all) wrong.

When I heard religious scholar, Karen Armstrong, say in her NPR interview, that it’s a shame in our modern era that our theology is stuck in the dark ages, I had to hear more. During the interview she quipped that Dawkins’ attack on “old man in the sky” notions of God was a bit unfair, in that not all religious people hold to that view of God. But she admits that the discussion needs to be taken to a higher level where the central issues of compassion, connectedness and transcendence are not only emphasized but acted upon. If this former-nun can bring together Jews, Muslims and for god’s sake Anglicans, then maybe there’s still hope for this disenfranchised former-Jesus-freak.

NPR Fresh Air interview of Karen Armstrong Builds A “Case for God”





Sources:

flickr image: IMG_4743 by beggs. http://www.flickr.com/photos/beggs/88809549/ retrieved on 2/13/2010

YouTube video: Fallen by Sarah McLachlan. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jqps9ZdMxs0 retrieved on 2/13/2010

NPR/Fresh Air Interview of Karen Armstrong. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112968197 retrieved on 2/13/2010

The Idea of the Holy by Rudolf Otto. Available at Amazon.com

The Case for God by Karen Armstrong. Available at Amazon.com

        

Abandoned Christian Science Building 3 by Maxwell GS

Conversely, I love that, for the fundamental or conservative Christian, the answer to every problem faced by us is to “give it up to Jesus.” Lost your job? Give it up to Jesus! Stuck in a rotten marriage? Give it up to Jesus! Need a new car? Give it up to Jesus! It’s a powerful message, especially if you’re a teenager or a drug addict looking to leave that lifestyle. But, for all of us in between, there still seems to be something missing.

In Bad Faith, Part 5: What’s Missing?

Ironically, one of the mistakes that I made as a young Christian adult was to close off my emotions and try to be more logical because my faith told me that one can’t trust emotions. Yeah, that approach didn’t work so well for Mr. Spoke, I don’t know why I thought it’d turn out any better for moi. I tried to be logical and I wasn’t any fun to live with. Just ask my ex-wife. Now, I know that Dawkins isn’t advocating a logic-only/emotionless lifestyle, but there’s a kind of delusion to entertain the idea that human beings are going to be “logical” and “scientific” when it comes to the bigger issues in life or even in ones day to day existence. I think the fictional character, Geordi, in ST: TNG, said it best when he said that we humans go with our “gut” so much because we almost never have enough data to make the decisions that we need to make.

While it’s probably a bad sign when one is taking life-advice from fictional characters, It’s worse to pursue a lifestyle that forces one to have a binary either/or approach where one restricts oneself to either logic or emotionalism. I have to say that I’ve been turned off by the hubris I’ve seen in some skeptics when they act as if they do have all of the answers. Granted this malady is certainly not limited to skeptics, but anyone who confesses to have a scientific approach to living must begin by acknowledging that what one “knows” is a very small fragment of what can be known. Thus one should have a humble appreciation and sympathy for those who have chosen to “know” our existence using a different set of assumptions.

I find it interesting that the Christian begins with an assumption about the meaning behind existence and then interprets everything accordingly, while the skeptic begins with an assumption about the method of understanding existence and then fills in the gaps from there. I feel like the Christian has to be willing, on some level, to question the system when the evidence proves contrary and the Skeptic has to refrain from assuming that they have all of the relevant data. We all have to begin by understanding that we do not have the complete picture and that we may never have the complete picture. And so, there has to be room for differing views.

        

Some of my thinking lately has reminded me of this article that I wrote in the late 1980s about rediscovering the power and need to be emotionally alive. This article was part of a column that I wrote called “The Editor’s Wild Hair” for a little print newsletter that I inflicted upon friends and family called, “Air, Dirt & Ink.” [Sigh], the good ol’ days.

Journal Classic: Following the Logic of Feelings

Heart, why are you pounding like a hammer?
Heart, why are you beating like a drum?
Heart, why do you make such a commotion
when I’m waiting for my baby to come?
Oh heart, don’t do it if it’s not the real thing
Heart, I get so easily deceived
Heart, there is no other I can turn to
if not you, heart, then who can I believe?”
“Heart” by Nick Lowe

I vividly remember when it first happened. It was in the seventh grade when I walked up to Mary Hinck and said, “Hi,” and she said rather unfeelingly, “Oh, it’s you.” It’s like I didn’t even really know that it was there until it came crashing to the ground in front of God and everyone. Jesus, I thought, if this is what love feels like, I don’t want any part of it.

I didn’t mean that, of course, and have spent the intervening 17 years demonstrating it to no one in particular. But something very definitely changed after that first brush with emotional death.

photobooth iowans by 3Neus/flickr

So it only seems right that at one point in my life I hung around with a religious group that held to the philosophy that “feelings” could not be trusted. “Feelings, they come and go, but objective truth, now there’s the ticket.” Of course the objective truth that was being referred to here was the Bible, the Scoffield Reference Bible in the King James Version to be more specific. And Love, well that had something to do with some Greek word and God and Jesus dying and . . . (all of which of course made no sense whatsoever to my teenage mind, but who was I to scoff at the insights of my elders?).

I don’t know why I always seem to use this column to take pot‑shots at Evangelical Christianity (no doubt an unconscious attempt to pay them back for the emotional trauma and near fatal brain damage I experienced while getting my Bachelor of Arts degree in Biblical Studies). In fact, before this starts sounding too much like “Sex and the Single Brain Cell,” I have to question the wisdom of attempting an article that would argue following the logic of emotions. I mean, either you understand it or you don’t.

I guess it’s just one of those things that pisses me off. While I was playing my little religious game, going to seminary and all, reading Kierkegaard’s Either/Or, thinking about Pluralism and other “important issues,” my own wife was suffering from emotional deprivation. Perhaps this isn’t unusual for couples where one of the partners is working full‑time while carrying 12 units of graduate school course work. It’s called, “I love you, but I don’t have any time for you”—a rather mixed message.

Quite inevitably she announced to me one day at lunch, rather unceremoniously, “You know, if you were just my boyfriend or if we were just living together, I’d leave you.” I wasn’t sure I wanted to look up from the book that I was reading. I knew it wouldn’t be a pretty picture. This was not at all what I was expecting.

So off to counseling we went. A well-meaning Christian friend told me about the horrendous percentage of couples who go to counseling and end up divorced. I think she was trying to caution me against the practice. Of course she failed to mention that no one goes to counseling because things are going great. Someone in the relationship has just about had it (a la, “if you were just my boyfriend . . .”) and it’s either this or the door. No doubt the percentage would be even greater had they not at least tried counseling. Still, it didn’t sound very promising.

Once a week we’d arrive at the counselor’s office. She’d outline the gripes of the week and I’d patiently listen, mentally preparing my counter‑arguments. Then the counselor would turn to me and say, “So Joe, how do you feel about what she has said?”

“Well . . . .” Feel? Did he say “feel”? Most of the time I’d say something about the supposed logic behind my actions and nothing about my feelings. This went on for months. Then one day it dawned on me. It happened while she was complaining about her needing to use the new  Nissan sedan, which had an air‑conditioner, ’cause she had to wear nice clothes to work while me and my Levi’s could put up with the un‑air‑conditioned Toyota pickup. When it came time for my little meaningless counter‑argument I let it out. “You know,” I said rather matter of factly, “if she was convinced of my love for her or that she was number one in my life, than none of this other shit would even matter.” Opps. Did I say that? They both stared at me like one does when a toddler unexpectedly makes an adult‑like observation.

“So Joe, how do you feel about her then?” It took another five months before I could clearly say how I felt. In view of the fact that I write a column called “Sex and the Single Brain Cell,” it should be obvious that we were to become another statistic.

“Oh heart, there must be no mistake
Beware, special care, from the start
Oh heart, though I’m glad for the first bit of love to have
Be certain now, else you’re gonna break
Oh heart, motor of emotion you’ve never been like this before
Heart, at first I thought you were joking,
but I know deep down in you that you’re sure.”
“Heart” by Nick Lowe

I realize that the above narrative is a rather odd way to set up an argument in favor of following the logic of feelings. Those who consider the concept to be little more than a dangerous dose of pop psychology will no doubt feel justified. But, like I wrote before, unless you understand the concept you’ll have little appreciation for my argument (which is really no argument at all).

The reason for my sensitivity about this subject is no doubt the result of my own struggle with the concept of “feeling,” starting with the amazingly disarming question: “what the fuck do I want out of life?” Laid out like a raw nerve, the question began to unravel the reasons why, two years ago, I would have recoiled at the idea of following feeling’s leading.

Simply put, an anemic sense of self worth prevented me from thinking that I was an adequate judge for determining the meaning or direction of my own life. “What the fuck do I want out of life?” It’s just a simple question. But there was a silent yet pervasive lack of self‑trust, which perhaps extended personally and culturally to a time when authority figures were depended upon for making the decisions of life. And feelings were the luxuries of irresponsible youth and melancholic old age.

“She said, ‘you know, if you were just my boyfriend or if we were just living together, I’d leave you.’ I wasn’t sure I wanted to look up from the book that I was reading.”

Just below the surface was an ancient belief that if I were left to my own devices, judging things on the basis of what I “want,” I’d no doubt do damage to myself and evil to my brothers and sisters. This was somewhat based on a twisted application of King David’s repentant song and Solomon’s words of advice:

“But I am a worm and not a man, scorned by men and despised by the people. All who see me, mock me; they hurl insults, shaking their heads.” (Psalm 22:6,7) “Trust in the LORD with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make your paths straight.” (Proverbs 3:5,6)

Not long after the news of my marital separation broke, my well-meaning father strongly suggested that if I turned this dilemma over to Jesus than all of the fuzziness would clear up and I’d make the right decision. Perhaps. But equally possible was the proposition that I got into this situation because over the course of the last 14 years I’d “turned over” such situations to the Lord, in my own feeble way, and failed to read the writing on my own heart. Ha. How was God going to talk to me anyway except through my own heart?

A child no doubt lacks the common sense and self‑discipline to negotiate the troubled waters of life without parental instruction and example but I have, for a long time, ceased being a child. And when I turned to the judgment bench of feelings I didn’t find a power hungry madman bent on my own destruction or the lording over of the lives of my loved ones. Quite surprisingly I found a mirror image of myself, perhaps a little more insightful, perhaps a little more excitable, somewhat like a profile of ones self that until this very moment one has failed to even notice.

I took feeling’s leading and made some difficult decisions. Perhaps out an inability to read feeling’s messages or like myself, out of a lack of trust, many fake their way from sun‑up to the evening news thinking that this vague sense of dissatisfaction is all part of life. Life’s a bitch and then you die. Right?

Someone once told me that there was more to it than that. Risking the possible dissolution of our marriage, she courageously challenged me to confess what I already knew about my feelings. Among other things, this difficult experience has shown me that feelings, whether acknowledged or ignored, have a way of making themselves known.

Sources:
Following the Logic of Feelings (“The Editor’s Wild Hair” column)  by Joe Bustillos. Air, Dirt & Ink (ADI), Vol 1, Issue 4, January‑February 1988)

image: photobooth iowans by 3Neus. http://www.flickr.com/photos/motherscratcher/2267589346/ retrieved on 2/3/2010

cover image: La Estrella esperaba, pero nadie llego by Mercedes.. Life as I picture. http://www.flickr.com/photos/mercedesdayanara/366501299/ retrieved on 2/3/2010

        

A few months ago I saw this comment on my Twitter feed: “RT @vavroom: Sometimes, small minded Christianity really saddens me. (via @kubke @snowded @annemcx @euan )” – Christine Morris (@CMoz). And attached was a link to a story from the Telegraph in the UK about how a film about Charles Darwin was having difficulty finding a distributor in the US because the film’s subject, Evolution, is too controversial. The Telegraph story was written in September (2009) when the film opened at the Toronto Film Festival. What the story failed to mention was that this was one of those years when a large number of films were having difficulty finding distributors. The theory of distribution presented in the story came from the film’s producer. So, perhaps, it was economics and not the small mindedness of US Christians that was making finding a distributor difficult. As someone with a degree in Journalism and Biblical Studies I tire from hearing the Christians complain how Godless (liberal) the Press is and from the Atheists and Secularists how Christian (provincial/conservative) the Press is.

In Bad Faith, Part 4: The Evil Media

What both the Left and Right seem to forget is that the Media, especially in the form of the movie industry, is a form of banking, and it will do whatever it thinks will make money for it’s investors. Period. It rarely leads and often plays both sides of the issues because it needs to draw attention to itself, not to change things but to make money. The Media is not a perfect reflection of our culture, remember it’s first responsibility is not to reflect Reality, but to make money. And this “bottom line” mentality is not limited to the movie industry but, sadly, has become a big part of the News Industry too. Journalism has felt the pressure to sell it’s wares. We may think of Journalism as a service, but it’s a business. This is not to say that Journalism has abandoned the principles of Objectivity, but it’s more of an ideal, like how Americans try to live up to our Constitution, Bill of Rights and Pledge of Allegiance. Journalism believes in Objectivity, in part, because it’s business model requires a certain level of trust. No trust, no sales. So, at it’s core the News & Media industries are neither Left or Right. They can’t afford to be. They will follow the interests of their audiences, Left or Right, but the commitment isn’t to the politics but to the business of making money. The Media decision-makers are not pushing any position except the one that keeps them viable and better yet, more than viable.

Add to all of this, one of the dangers of our Internet era is that, just as much as we have the possibility to get our news and information from world-wide and culturally diverse sources, it’s just as likely that we will choose only sources that we agree with, creating a kind of echo chamber of information. This is the unintended result of the combination user-selected news/media feeds with user-created journalism. What does this have to do with God and Faith? Well, today it is possible to completely blanket oneself 24/7 with whatever message one wants to hear and completely blank out anything that one doesn’t agree with. For many there’s no problem with this picture except for the part where one might want or need to interact with someone not from ones own media bubble. For Christians we call that the Great Commission. For the Secularist, there is a curiosity to understand our fellow-person (especially if they don’t agree or understand us). So, how do you do that if the other person is not from your media bubble? Is there even a common media language left that you can use to reach this other person?

So, the Media is neither Left or Right. It’s a business that wants to stay in business so it’s going to be careful not to offend what it perceives to be its audience. You don’t like what’s on the air you now have at least three choices: change the channel/stream, turn the thing off, or make your own news/media organization. By the way, according to the film’s official website the film opened in limited release this past Friday, January 22, 2010. At the bottom of this entry I’ve embedded the film’s trailer and an NPR/Fresh Air interview of the Randal Keynes, the author of the book  the film is based on.

image by Publish magazine

NPR Fresh Air Interview: Randal Keynes: When Darwin Is In Your Family Tree:

Sources:
* Movie poster: Creation: The True Story of Charles Darwin. http://www.creationthemovie.com/ retrieved on 1/26/2010

* Charles Darwin film ‘too controversial for religious America’ by By Anita Singh. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/6173399/Charles-Darwin-film-too-controversial-for-religious-America.html retrieved on 1/25/2010

* Image: Freedom of the Press poster by Publish! Magazine (nd).

* YouTube: ‘Creation’ Trailer. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BREvUKpZTeU retrieved on 1/26/2010.

* Randal Keynes: When Darwin Is In Your Family Tree. Fresh Air from WHYY. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122778363 retrieved on 1/25/2010

        

By definition, this is a “first world” problem. In the news gap between CES and the Apple event next week, I’ve been thinking a lot about how I might manage my media collections between all of my computers. The buzz around the Boxee box and anticipating the need to have most of my working data in the cloud so that I can access it regardless of what computer or platform I’m using has inspired me to find a better way to work with my media. Actually this is a “problem” that I didn’t have until I moved from my one-room studio to my one-bedroom apartment and then two-bedroom townhouse. I have four macs floating around the house (and anticipate a fifth Apple in the form of an iPad-netbook-media-thingy), each with their own full copies of my iTunes library, DVDs ripped to a couple macs, and daily podcasts downloaded to all four computers. In the past I manually erased podcasts I’d already listened to on one of the four computer and my iPhone, but given how many podcasts I listen to this method is just too much work. I’d also been hoping to store my DVDs on one computer and be able to view them on any of the other devices. The upcoming release of the Boxee box has me rethinking my media sharing scheme.

Boxee Beta from boxee on Vimeo.

One of the things that I’ve learned so far is that even though I’m using fast wireless “N” and or a fast “power” Ethernet connection between the first and second floors, ripped DVDs stored on hard drives in their original Mpeg2 format won’t play across the network without lots of buffering or dropped frames. Unacceptable. I was anticipating using my PS3 as the movie/media player downstairs (still working on that), so I had previous converted some movies to mp4 and those videos seemed to play nicely across the network. So, even though I’m a firm believer in having access to all of the “extra features” that I look for with my DVDs (and how convenient they are to access using the DVD menu system), I’ll need to rip and convert my media to a more network friendly format, like mp4 (which makes each extra feature into it’s own separate video file). Grrr.

image by Joe Bustillos

I’ve played with Boxee previously, but couldn’t break away from my iTunes addiction. With the software upgrade and set-top box, I’m thinking that this might be the solution to my Internet TV/podcast thing, either the software or the set-top box. Depending on my success using the PS3 as a media player, I still might need another set-top box for the bedroom TV. I’m also thinking that I need to plug into the NetFlix thing (streaming and disc) so that I don’t find myself buying every movie I want to see. So whatever box I get needs to do Netflix, access my music and DVDs across the network and either grab podcasts off the net or the ones stored on my other computers. Having invested in the PS3, I’m aware of the problems of getting a box that isn’t as expandable to handle all of the twists and turns that tends to happen in the media market.

Sources:
* Boxee Demo. http://www.boxee.tv/box retrieved on 1/23/2010
* FrontRow image by Joe Bustillos
* Tekzilla » Episode 124: “Should I buy a Boxee Box or a Roku or Stick With My xbox?” http://revision3.com/tekzilla/veronicapc/should-i-buy-a-boxee-box-or-a-roku-or-stick-with-my-xbox-360- retrieved on 1/23/2010
* Tekzilla » Episode 121: Boxee Box. http://revision3.com/tekzilla/2010newyear/boxee-box retrieved on 1/23/2010

        

Just saw “Up in the Air,” and don’t know if I should be depressed or not. Ryan Bingham, played by George Clooney, is the quintessential road-warrior, who spends over 300-days a year business traveling and he loves it. He’s a firing expert who works for a firm that gets called in when it’s time for lay-offs. The job isn’t “fun” but he’s found a balance that works for him and it doesn’t include any relationship commitments. His foil is 23-year-old Natalie Keener, played by Anna Kendrick, who has come in to make the job more efficient with technology. She has her whole life mapped out and it’s completely the opposite from Ryan’s.

The movie is basically about life choices and the stories that we tell ourselves to make these choices work. Ryan’s life is a set package and he’s happy. But he has to contend with those around him who are convinced that he’s made a mistake by not settling down and making a lasting relationship investment. Sans the mega-frequent-flier mileage and movie-star good-looks, I seem to resemble those contentions. Alas, it’s been my observation that most of us make these life choices long before we’re even aware that we have a choice. Those first few years after high school and those first few years out of college, set us on paths that tend to be impossible to break away from. And most choose not to, and make their lives there, for good or bad. Then there are those of us who get a wake-up call and/or have a higher expectation for ourselves.

For a long time I was jealous of this one friend, a fellow Biola University graduate, who seemed to be on this straight path, right through his undergrad (in accounting), working for a Newport Beach firm and marrying the boss’ daughter. There was none of this meandering that I’d already done to that point, going from one university to the next, and several majors along the way. Then I found out some time later that he quit the firm and that he and his wife had bought a water-bed retail store. He was happy being the salesman while the wife (also an accounting grad) worked the books. Life is funny that way.

zen fountain by joe bustillos

        

I was amazed to hear the interview of Franky Schaeffer on NPR because his story was so revealing about the dangers of when sincere faith is influenced by political power and marketing. I was introduced to his writings in the early 1980s after his father had been promoted as an “intellectual Christian” and Franky continued his father’s beliefs that any step toward accepting “modern values” (particularly abortion) was a slippery slope toward liberalism.

In Bad Faith, Part 3: Franky Schaeffer, Son of “Slippery Slide” Comes Clean

One of my favorite Fuller Seminary professors, Colin Brown, commented once that he didn’t think that Francis Scheaffer (Sr) read any of Kierkegaard in the original languages. Academic put-down! The Schaeffers represented a huge line in the sand between True Biblical Christianity and the various forces of liberalism, academia and secularism. After reading one of Franky’s books in the 80s I recognized that I wasn’t on the “right” side of the divide. I was too much of a rationalist, situational-ethicist and intellectual. I loved the Bible but I also recognized the cultural-historical place it came from (hint: it wasn’t Heaven). Slippery slope, indeed.

So all these decades later it turns out that all the rhetoric was mostly a sham promoted by the Christian Right, to the point that even Franky eventually couldn’t tolerate and left. What I really loved about the interview was that this was a story about Idealism, human foibles, bending the “Truth.” The forces the Schaeffers represented created a conflict that I’ve spent a lifetime contending with. It’s good to know that I’m not the only one scarred by the experience. I love the comment Franky makes during the interview when he’s asked why he hasn’t gone all the way to Atheist. He says that the patterns of his life are such that the first thing he’d do would be to pray to God to help him be a better Atheist. So human.

Sources:
Pro-Life — And In Favor Of Keeping Abortion Legal by Frank Schaeffer - NPR Fresh Air Interview. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=97998654 retrieved 1/9/2010.

        

As a college freshman at Loyola Marymount University I recognized that there had to be at least some psychological aspect to things like Speaking in Tongues (Glossolalia) and didn’t feel that that diminished the “God” part of the behavior at all.

In Bad Faith, Part 2: Born this Way? or This is Your Brain on God

NIH by National Institute on Aging

I don’t think that I ever shared these thoughts with my fellow-believers. I just assumed that those in the midst of the experience probably didn’t analyze the phenomenon beyond a few Bible passages and whether the practice was accepted or rejected by their church. Then many years later I saw a documentary TV program where scientists were mapping the brain, using scans that looked for elevated brain activity. They found that persons in deep meditation or prayer showed elevated activity in the Temporal lobe. From what I remember, the pattern of activity was similar to those who reported stories of alien abduction. They were able to induce the “Alien” experiences in some test subjects by transmitting the pattern instead of recording it. Then one scientist, an atheist, thought that he might “see” what the religious participants in the experiment had experienced if he also used the recording harness to transmit the “religious” patterns to his brain. The scientist saw and felt nothing. I wasn’t too surprised, but it wasn’t because of any “God” thing. It might have been that his brain was just not wired to understand the “language” of religious experience that had been recorded in the experiment. According to a recent article in Ars Technica, it might indeed be something lost in translation that’s individual to everyone’s brains.

Previous studies were looking to see if there were particular areas in the brain related to religious experiences. According to the Ars article, more recent studies, conducted by Dimitrios Kapogiannis from the National Institute on Aging, didn’t find “God” areas of the brain but did find neural pathways associated to social cognitive processing that were not unique to religion. So what does this mean for the Faithful, or for the Skeptics? According to Ars Technica, it means that religion and religious experience could be experimentally addressed and studied. Thus, one of Dawkin’s demands from his book, The God Delusion, seems closer to realization: that religion can no longer claim to be entirely outside the realm of scientific inquiry. Whatever rational systems of thinking that we apply to weather, biology, physics, etc., can and should now be applied to religious experience.

The Ars article goes on to discuss how some scientists are looking at the possible connection between the emergence of language and the development of religion. Additionally, scientists are looking at the capacity that some have for intimate relationships and how this might be related to how some feel “close to God.” Conversely, they are also looking into how some individuals’ inability to form close relationships may be related to how some have no sense of there being an “Other” out there.

Taken to its logical conclusions, it might be determined that having no sense of the Divine is no different than being red/green blind. Or for the skeptics, having a sense of the divine is just like having Phantom Limb Syndrome. Thus, while science will be able to determine if an individual’s experience is “real,” two things have not been determined. One is causality: do some people have these neural pathways because they are born that way, or were these pathways developed because of their early experiences? The other thing is that brain evidence that one feels close to God neither confirms nor denies that God is, in fact, communing with the one wearing the scanning harness.

Geovanny Verdezoto can't handle his success Heartbroken young man on floor by hyperscholar

So, where does this leave us? We can see that something “real” is happening in the brains of those having religious experiences and that opens the door for Science to investigate Religion. Note that on a purely scientific level there are still a number of limits to what Science can determine if one sticks to the scientific data. There are some parallels here between this course of study and when higher critical theory was applied to Biblical Studies. The “devotional” was striped away and strenuous literary, historical and cultural research was (and still is) conducted. Unfortunately, in the long run the Faithful abandoned higher Biblical criticism to the “liberals” and academics and only the academics cared about advances being made in literary Biblical criticism (except when Erhman publishes a popular culture friendly book pointing out the blazing holes in Biblical Innerancy).

Again, where does this leave us? Well, one can’t “prove” delusion, so the skeptics need to dial it back a bit. Science that’s interested in measurable data can only say when someone is sincere about their experiences, period (I’d love to see a “sincerity readout” on the tel-evangelists, though I’m sure part of their “art” is convincing themselves about their own importance and relationship with the Divine). Second, on the other side, the faithful aren’t interested in anything that doesn’t “prove” already established beliefs, so there’s little room for real dialog here. Finally, ones receptivity toward awareness of the “Other” doesn’t seem to be universal which should change the idea that the gospel is open to everyone. At the same time this receptivity does seem to exist, whether via early experiences or “wiring” for some of us. So….

by Gastev”]

bios [bible

As brain-studies advance Science will have more to say about “religious experience,” It would be good for the Faithful to pay attention, but that’s not too likely. It’ll be left to those of us who drift between the two worlds to interpret and dig deeper into the data and ramifications of the findings, to look at whatever human meaning and significance can be gained from these studies. Even Science has to acknowledge that there is something there but what it is, well, I’ve become less likely to interpret with the Biblical goggles that I previously worn. Finally, I have to speak out against the assumption that those with the higher IQ are all part of the skeptics camp. It’s a much more complicated landscape than that. Yes, very few Ph.Ds believe in the literal interpretation of the Bible. Then again Ph.Ds don’t represent the majority of any population, so… “Truth” is not about intelligence or popularity. One must dig deeper.

To be continued…

Sources:

Finding the fear and love of God inside the brain by Jeremy Jacquot for Ars Technica http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2009/10/finding-the-fear-and-love-of-god-inside-the-brain.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss retrieved 1/9/2010

image: 2008_nidcd-brain. NIH. http://www.nih.gov/about/almanac/images/2008photos/2008_nidcd_brain_hi.jpg retrieved 1/9/2010.

image: Geovanny Verdezoto can’t handle his success Heartbroken young man on floor by hyperscholar http://www.flickr.com/photos/hypertypos/3164306380/ retrieved 1/9/2010.

image: bios [bible] by Gastev. http://www.flickr.com/photos/gastev/2174504149/ retrieved on 1/9/2010.