In Bad Faith, part 9: He Lives

I’ve noted in my eclectic twitter and facebook feeds a slight trend that I first noticed this past week, before Easter, during which someone commented that they are tired of being, or that they shouldn’t be ashamed of their faith and wanted to shout it out. Then, of course, someone quoted the verses where Jesus said, if you are ashamed to acknowledge me in this life then I won’t acknowledge you in the next life. That was a bit of a buzz-kill, but I still saw a few “He Lives!” that seemed to come from this initial thought that we shouldn’t be ashamed of our Faith. Is this the Christian version of the “I love you, man” that guys say to each other after watching a good football game and a few round of beer?

In Bad Faith, Part 9: He Lives … In the example of Your Day-to-Day Lives

I poke fun because I’m that guy in high school who, with my dear Christian friends, decided one beautiful, sunny lunch break, probably around Easter time, that we needed to not be ashamed of our faith and confronted our non-believing fellow students and got all verbal with them about the gospel. I’m so thankful (and hopeful) that my fellow students might remember said incidents as just another silly adolescent not-thought-out moment. I mean, I forgive them for wanting to and/or throwing stuff at our little group after those incidents. I’ve never been particularly fond of Confrontational Christianity since then. Of course, mom would remind me that words are cheap and that actions speak louder than words. Thanks mom. Love mom’s obviousness.

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In Bad Faith, Part 7: Entitlement

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

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?

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

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.

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.

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In Bad Faith, Part 5: What’s Missing?

Dawkins wrote in The God Delusion that all experiences of “Faith” are delusions, that there is no god out there “talking” to you. He wrote that anyone with an ounce of intelligence recognizes that there is no “man behind the curtain,” and that the stories in the Bible, for example, should have been given up when we gave up on our belief in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. It all seems very logical. But something is missing here.

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.

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In Bad Faith, Part 4: The Evil Media

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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In Bad Faith, Part 1: It’s the Accent, Isn’t It?

Over several months I’ve begun this entry at least half a dozen times, but failed to get past a few lines and embedded videos. That’s usually a pretty bad sign. In this case, however, it was more about the importance of these thoughts, compounded by my inability to successfully find the narrative. But, given my written record in this blog and its predecessors, I felt compelled to dig into this subject and try to make sense of things. Thus, I’ve decided to attempt to divide these thoughts into several parts and in each one confine myself to various books and influencers I’ve encountered over the last few years. Thus begins a series on my recent journey of Faith, that I call “In Bad Faith.”

In Bad Faith, Part 1: It’s the Accent, Isn’t It?

My brother warned me against reading this book unless I was serious about examining my faith. I can only imagine how confusing my circuitous route into and out of and then back into and later out of Faith must appear to my sibling(s). I mean, given that I went against my parents’ wishes and switched from Catholic Loyola Marymount University to Fundamentalist Protestant Biola University, and instead of getting something practical like a B.A. in Engineering I got one in Biblical Studies. This was definitely something more important going on here than a passing adolescent fad. But having gone from highly academic Loyola to wanting-to-be-more-academic Biola (in the early 80s) I learned to approach my Faith and the Bible from a more scientific/academic approach than just a devotional approach. Two of my favorite books from this era were Robert Alter’s The Art Of Biblical Narrative and Robert Mapes Anderson’s Vision of the Disinherited: The Making of American Pentecostalism. So there was always some danger that I was susceptible to things a little beyond the safe confines of devotional reading.

Fast forward twenty-eight years, divorced twenty-five years, failed MA in Theology from Fuller Seminary. second BA in communications/journalism, teaching credential, MA in Educational Technology, failed Ed.D in Educational Technology, re-located from Southern California to Central Florida, I decided against jumping back into the church thing. I needed to find some balance between my experiences of faith and the academic/scientific part of my personality. That’s when I decided to listen to Richard Dawkin’s The God Delusion. Well, actually I watched the TED video first and came away with the sense that this quiet-spoken Englishman could probably get away with almost anything because of our American stereotype that causes us to assume that anyone with said accent is obviously more intelligent than we are. Damn.

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Intellectualism and conservative religion

Is there a fundamental conflict for someone to be an intellectual and a believer in conservative religion? The recent Bill Maher film, Religulous, would have one believe that most people surrender their minds when they surrender their hearts to religion.

Having attended four private Christian universities my impression has been that there are very smart people on both side of the discussion. In fact, in the movie, Maher expressed frustration when addressing the “Truckers for Jesus” gathering that they appear to be intelligent gentlemen, but he couldn’t reconcile that with how they could believe in a literal talking snake from the Expulsion from Eden narrative in the book of Genesis. Looking for a different take on this possible conflict between rationalism and religion, I explored a book titled, “Did The Greeks Believe In Their Myths,” by Paul Veyne (1988), professor of Roman history at the University of France.

When I began this exploration I assumed a basic Western point of view, being that before the Renaissance and the following Age of Reason and Science, that the centers for learning, philosophy, government and culture were interpreted through religion and faith. Given this general understanding one might also be led to assume that the Ancients were somehow less intelligent than modern men. Stone and bronze tools versus lasers and computer-precision tools, astrology versus astrophysics, mythology versus historical critical analysis, one might see some credence to this sense of “less intelligent.” Of course all of this comes crashing down when one considers the surviving record left behind by Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, Galen the physician and the obvious brilliance of the whole chorus of ancient voices. So how did these brilliant thinkers deal with the religion and mythology of their day? For some reason the lyrics, “Same as it ever was” runs through my mind. Same as it ever was indeed, but Veyne would point out some noted exceptions.

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Conditional Unconditional Love

The ideal of love is it’s unconditional nature. The closest we usually come to that kind of love is the love between a parent and her child. But even that love has it’s limits, it’s conditions. I know that I’ve come up against my own limitations with a love that I thought was permanent and eternal. I thought I saw the face of God with this love and poured all that I had into it. But I was wrong. Time and trust were broken and I had to walk away. So much for the face of God.

I’m looking for a hard headed woman,
One who’ll take me for myself
And if I find my hard headed woman
I won’t need nobody else, no no no.
- “Hard Headed Woman” by Cat Stevens

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