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

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.

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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?

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

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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

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.

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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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Living in the Present Moment w Thich Nhat Hanh

In the midst of all of the shouting about what’s wrong with this and that and who’s to blame, in the midst of all the technological changes, it’s good to be reminded of holding onto the mindful moment in the midst of the most mundane and unimportant things in life. Thanks Seann for the reminder and link.

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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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Intelligently Confused about God

While I continue to wander about in my head about my relationship with God, I continue to have encounters with individuals on similar courses, though, perhaps heading in a different direction. For example, last night at a local watering hole, while enjoying the evening’s Monday Night Football game, a gentleman ordered up his bucket of Buds and after random chit-chat mentioned his faith and his failure to abide by the “Truth.” It was an interesting exchange over beers, ribs and NFL play-by-play. In the end he thanked me for an intelligent conversation.

Then a couple of weeks ago I got a comment on my old blog, Jacob’s Ladder (which is why the writer makes the understandable mistake that my name is Jacob. oops):

Jacob, I’m not really skilled at computer codes, etc.,so I’ll try to get on the site using anonymous. I’m Don Kimrey My blog is Scripturestudent.wordpress.com. I came upon your site thru the “Ooze” posting and your comment there. Sounds like we have some things in common. I read right many of your posts and found them interesting and, more importantly perhaps, honest. Sounds like we traveled some of the same roads, and I discovered that a disappointed idealist makes the worst kind of cynic. But I also have come to believe God’s love is constant, even when ours falters and we’re not sure which way is up. Hang in there. You seem to be quite intelligent, and I sense that you’re on an honest quest. Let’s pray for each other. Don Kimrey

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