"deciding to become human" (a short script)

This story picks up halfway through a conversation that Gabriel overheard one day as he was walking by the great banquet hall.

(muffled)

The Ancient One:... It’s not what you think.

The Woman: It’s not good down there?

The Ancient One: No. It is good. It’s just…not what you think.

The Woman: Are there not varieties and colors and scents and sounds?

The Ancient One: There are.

The Woman: Are there not challenges to overcome, lessons to be learned, ideas to be had?

The Ancient One: Oh, there’s no shortage of those.

The Woman: Then what? Do they?...(in a hushed voice) Do they not know the great song?

The Ancient One: They know it…I’m sure they know it. But they don’t knooww it. They’ve understood the melody and rhythm but not the dynamics. Sometimes I think they feel it. Crave it, even. But then when they try to play it, the instrumentation is all wrong. The timbre is too thin. They like to doodle about the various parts in their trios and their quartets but never with the whole orchestra.

The Woman: It sounds to me like they don’t know the song at all, then. These trios and quartets, do their hearts not beat? Do their lungs not breathe? Do their babies not giggle? Do their oceans not rage? Does spring not come? There must be plenty to sing about. How could they know the parts but not the song?

The Ancient One: It’s complicated. They do know it. And they don’t. They know it when they’re with their friends and with their families. They’ve formed great groups and even societies that almost seem to play a line of harmony. But they don’t really get harmony. It’s always in opposition to some other family, some other society. They play their minor third or their perfect fifth like it is the song itself. They try to drown out all the others. And so the song is lost entirely.

The Woman: Well someone needs to teach them.

The Ancient One: It’s not that simple.

The Woman: What do you mean "it’s not that simple?" What could be simpler?

The Ancient One: They think I want them to play their harmonies loudly and urgently like that. They think they have to play loudly like that in order to make a grand arrangement. All of them. Or, I guess, each of them. They each think that I care only for their own part as if it is, by itself, a symphony.

The Woman: So teach them differently.

The Ancient One: I can’t.

The Woman: Don’t be absurd. Of course you can.

The Ancient One: (in a despondent tone) I’ve tried. I’m too much for them. Too big. Too bright. Too powerful. Too…much.

The Woman: (laughing) Oh, you jest. Who could be gentler than you?

The Ancient One: It makes no difference. They fear me. I don’t mean they fear me. I mean they’re afraid. They clam up and panic and band together into pathetic little clans thinking they have to win me over to their side or I’ll crush them or something.

The Woman: So you need to come to them small...weak, even.  

The Ancient One: Do you know what you’re proposing? It’s not what you think. Down there, you’ll get sick, your skin will scar and welt. Briars and Thorns will tear and cut your body.

The Woman: I know that. You don’t think I know that? But if a thorn tears at my skin, it's been tearing at theirs as well. How can I not hurt if they are hurting?

The Ancient One: I know. I know. But they’ve made it even more complicated still. They've made it...difficult even to gather the produce of the land. They stockpile it. They obsess over it. They sell it and profit from it. They’ll tempt you to play their little games. To compete for what was once a gift.

The Woman: I know they will. But how else will they ever learn the song?

The Ancient One: There will be war, famine, disease. You’ll see entire cities leveled. Civilizations crippled by sickness. Great men will rise up. They’ll abuse and even kill their own people and then try to spread their way across creation. You’ll want to help but will be powerless to stop them without resorting to their own methods.

The Woman: (hesitantly) I know.

The Ancient One: What drives you to want to do this? Look at the paradise you’re surrounded by. Why bring this on yourself for a bunch of ingrates? Why hurt? Why mourn? Why suff…?

The Woman: Because I’m just like you!

(a long silence)

The Ancient One: Don’t think that because you’re small, they’ll be kind. When you refuse to pick a side, all sides will converge on you. Mercilessly. They’ll think that destroying you will somehow be a strength to their own side.  And what then? If they don’t know the very song that they were born to play. They don’t understand anything, don’t you see? They’ve made themselves thick with fear.

The Boy: We’ll both go.

The Woman: (swiveling in her chair) What?

The Boy: We’ll both go. If only she goes, they’ll think that she is playing for this side or that side. Then even within each side, some will say that she loves the one at the expense of the whole. Others the whole at the expense of the one. They’ll turn violent. She won’t stop them if only to keep from picking a side, so they'll eliminate her without a fight. And when they do, they still won’t get it. So what then? Who will stay there and bring them along?

(silence)

The Boy: (softer, this time) We’ll both go. Our minds are made up on this.

The Woman: Yes. We’ll both go.

The Ancient One: (voice, shaky) I know you will. I know you will.

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Bill Maher thinks I’m a hypocrite but not nearly as much as I think I’m a hypocrite (part II)

If I’m to make a conservative estimate, I’ve attended over 1,300 worship services in my life.

In my Lutheran tradition, this means that more than 1,300 times, in the presence of others, I’ve said something like these words:

“Most merciful God,

We confess that we are in bondage to sin and cannot free ourselves..."

I wasn’t really keeping track, but if I’m to make a liberal estimate, no more than 200 times, Bill Maher, in his aptly titled movie Religulous, reiterates his most forceful argument that Christians are hypocrites. Of his other two main arguments, one, clearly stated, is a truism (bad religion is bad) and the other is a non sequitur (bad religion = bad God), but I have to grant the keenness of this one very useful observation, Christians are hypocrites. He is exactly right, if a little too generous.

If we’re right that Maher publicly pronounced about 200 times that I, as a Christian, am a hypocrite, that’s about 1,100 fewer times than I’ve pronounced it.

In fact, so damning is the evidence that we as Christians are hypocrites that no one in my Lutheran tradition has bothered to cover it up. So indisputably right is Maher’s insight, that it’s a bit like telling someone twenty eight years into an AA program that he might have a problem with alcohol. It’s practically our core statement about ourselves. For Lutherans, who are arguably the denomination that is most wary of Pharisaism, not only is it a sin to sin, it’s a sin to stop sinning and so be accused of pride. To get to the point where we’re only hypocritical about our sin would be a joyous benchmark and a cause for celebration. We’re just trying to stop being so hypocritical about our hypocrisy. So deep does the assumption go that we are hypocrites, the statement that we’re “in bondage to sin” isn’t even the meat of our worship service. It’s more like a preface that we try to hammer out in the very beginning so we can move on to something that we all don’t already know.

Maher nails the matter of hypocrisy right on the head. It just takes him two hours to make the case that Sven and Agatha Ostberger of Duluth, Minnesota have already made before they’ve even turned to the right page in their hymnals on Sunday. Sometimes latecomers to a Lutheran service will lean over in the pew and ask, “What’d I miss?” and someone will dismissively reply, “Just the confession” as if to say, “You didn’t miss much, just the most obvious fact in the history of the world. We’re in bondage to sin. Resistance is futile. Yada, yada.”

It’s a level of honesty unknown to the humanist who naïvely proclaims that we’ll finally set the world right if we can just do away with all the religion.

That “we’ll finally get it right if…” is exactly the notion that Martin Luther insisted we need to give up on entirely if we’ll ever be brought to the point of faith. Far from promoting a squeaky clean image of Christianity, Luther believed that doing good things and thinking good things were as often hindrances as helps to our becoming people of faith. In fact, he believed that we had to be brought past the brink of despair in our own capacity to move beyond the hypocritical.

Luther would have agreed with Maher wholeheartedly that we need to disengage from the religion that gives us the overconfidence to say, “my team/tribe/ideology is right and we’re setting things right.” The problem is that this is easier said than done, and this religion goes by many different names, not all of them as forthright about the fact that it is, at the end of the day, the same old religion. Christianity and Islam are open about the fact that they're engaging in this sort of religion. Agnosto/Atheo/Secular-humanism less so. In the same way that alcohol has the most power over an alcoholic when he can’t admit that he has a problem, this religion has that much more power over it’s adherents when it claims not to be a religion. Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” and the Manhattan Project were set in motion by humanists who didn’t recognize a religion when they saw one.

Luther realized that, for us, the option isn't between hypocrisy and no hypocrisy. The option is between confessed hypocrisy and blind hypocrisy.

When Religulous closes with Maher’s extended diatribe, it comes clear that he is not offering an alternative to religion at all but the same old religion in new clothes. “My team/tribe/ideology is right and we’re setting things right.” I hardly have to add the subtext. One time when defining his neologism, “apatheist,” Maher went meta (ironically self-referential) and offered us this head-scratcher, “there's atheist and there's agnostic, and I'm okay with us not splitting the difference on those; if you are just not a super-religious person, you are on my team."

Perhaps, though, seeing as he’s a comedian, the irony is intentional when he suggests that the answer to the problems caused by all of our self-aware, avowed religions is an un-self-aware, disavowed religion. I can only assume.

I’m aware too that there are gobs of people who haven’t been repeating this most obvious fact since the cradle, that we are in bondage to sin and that our religions have failed to free us. For these, it might be worth Maher taking a couple extra hours to bring us to that despair in our religion which Luther saw was prerequisite to any meaningful faith.

In that case, I thank Bill Maher for the clever evangelism. Well played.

Bill Maher has taken an important first step toward faith (part 1)

This isn’t exactly “current.” These are some of my thoughts as I’ve just gotten around to watching Bill Maher’s “Religulous.”

Sometimes you can take an idea that’s very obviously stupid and repeat it enough times until people sort of forget how stupid it is. Better yet, you can voice it enough times that, by sheer volume of chatter, it becomes a very real thing, and we’re forced to deal with it as such, even if it didn’t exist in the world before you started speaking it.

This is how propaganda works. If I went up to a calm person with even a pinch of empathy and asked, “Should people A remove people B from their country,” I’d expect them to gasp and say something like, “For the love of God, no! That’s terrible!” But if it were no longer a disinterested third party, and I were instead able to convince you (not through the quality of my ideas but through the sheer quantity of times that I voice them) that the situation is not neutral but that people B is “them” and “they” are a threat to “our” way of life; regardless of whether “they” are the Jews or the Tutsis or the Infidels, history is sadly unambiguous on how this normally turns out.

Propaganda is powerful not because it’s true but because it’s persistent. It doesn’t comment on reality, as such. It creates an alternative reality through volume and urgency. One of the most dangerous examples of this in the modern world is any version of the “we got saved” theology, which exists in segments of nearly every major religion around the world and appears to be the only kind of theology available to the producers of “Religulous.”

In each of these distorted sects, it’s never really made clear why this or that action should bring one into the inner circle of this or that god, it just does. And the religions might bicker on the details of how one might get saved and might not even call it getting “saved.” All that matters is that a clear boundary is drawn between who’s in and who’s out for those of a certain insecure disposition who cling to such boundaries.   

As a disinterested third party, like Bill Maher, it doesn’t take an abnormally active mind to see how silly this is. If I were to suggest that Zeragon is the goddess of Omega Centauri and she promises eternal life to the fair creatures of her galaxy at the moment that they spin around a baseball bat ten times (or the Omega Centauri equivalent, maybe a cricket paddle?), a disinterested Milky Way dweller might respond, “Assuming all of this is true, why, pray tell, would Zeragon choose something as arbitrary as spinning around a baseball bat? Why not counting backwards from M1.111 or going on a vision journey through the edible forests of Lemda-5? But moreover, how would a god of galactic proportions communicate such a requirement to her tiny subjects?” It’s not logically impossible but still a stretch for most of us to think of a very large goddess taking the time to post very small brochures on coffee shop community boards all over her domain.

But this is not objectively any more silly than saying that a god should be swayed by the saying of 30 Hail Marys or the joining of a certain denomination that was founded in 1847 except that the chatter about these latter methods has been enough and we have enough skin in the game to believe that these are somehow less arbitrary. And it’s not just the credulous who lend these methods more legitimacy than those of Zeragon, it’s  perhaps even more the unbelievers who actually consider it worth their time to critique them.

About halfway through “Religulous,” I succumbed to the realization that I was waiting in vain for its narrator to make a critique of my own Christian tradition that I haven’t already made myself (and often much more harshly). I got the impression of someone who was just dipping his toe in the waters of a debate that has been rushing forward like a deluge for thousands of years. I realized what one of my favorite theologians meant when he talked about the “banality of modern atheism.” I found it difficult to respond to someone who was trying mightily to be disagreeable but wasn’t far enough along in the debate to really say something with which I disagree.

Maher’s critiques of “religion” (he doesn’t really have a more precise critique of this religion or that religion) are functional. That is, religion is bad because it results in bad things in the world. If such a basic critique is going to be at all adversarial rather than obvious, it requires a naïve and easily preyed-upon opposition. So Maher scours the backwoods trailers and small town magisterial buildings of the most uninformed spokespersons for the faith that he can find.

I confess that for the first twenty minutes or so I myself was naïve enough to believe that this was just the introductory stunt before we moved into the serious interviews in the halls of Harvard divinity school or, for that matter, even just the local office of your mainstream parish pastor. That latter part never came. And it’s here that Maher gets short-circuited after what is otherwise an important first step toward a vital theology

Any person of faith whose theological worldview is worth a pittance needs to start with this same qualitative critique. But where the reformer would take the next step--

If such and such religion is madness

And assuming that God were to exist, God would not be madness,

Then God must not be synonymous with such and such religion--

it’s not clear that Maher ever fully crosses the important chasm of disassociating the god from the religion, and so he gets short circuited in this invalid loop:

The religion is madness

Therefore the god is madness

The first premise is correct. Religion is madness. So it should be obvious enough that a mad religion has told us nothing about what God is or isn’t.

If we don’t hold this against him and still appreciate his one correct premise for what it is, we have still only gotten back to square one, where any commonly sensible person would’ve been before all the insane propaganda brainwashed him or her in the first place. God must not be a religion. So we can critique this religion or that religion until we’re blue in the face and still have not said the first word about God.

Put aside, for now, that the sum total of Maher’s other arguments amount to a truism (i.e. bad religion is bad) and a non sequitur (bad religion = bad God). Next week, I will write on where else we might go if, rather than short-circuiting, we use that one invaluable premise to move to what serious theologians, who were conspicuously absent from “Religulous,” call a “second naïveté.”

how Christians should relate to Muslims (hint, rhymes with 'dove')

Answering the question "How should Christians relate to other religions" ought to be the easiest thing in the world. But it has been made difficult because people typically try to answer the question without first taking two very important facts into consideration.

The first fact was put this way by Karl Barth, maybe the most influential theologian of the 20th century: humans are “idol factories.” Our brains are like well functioning assembly lines in the business of manufacturing false gods. These range from the obvious and easily dismissible (e.g. when the Egyptian Pharaoh Amenhotep IV decided one day that the sun was a god named Aten), to the less obvious but, for that reason, more powerful (e.g. money, power, status, our family or tribal identity), to what we consider to be the very opposite of an idol, and for that reason the most powerful, our religions (e.g. Christianity, Islam, Buddhism). You might be reading this thinking, “Well, yes, their religion is clearly idolatrous but not mine.” I won’t argue with you on that. But for our purposes here, put that aside and just assume that even if the one true religion were handed to us on a silver platter tomorrow by the one true God, it would be a matter of seconds before we confused the religion with the God who gave it to us. Voilà, right at that moment, we will have turned the one true religion into an idol.   

Why do people create idols? Too quickly, we might assume that it’s because we’re bad. The more fundamental answer is that it's because we're scared. An idol is simply whatever we entrust our lives to that will ultimately let us down. We create idols because the universe is dark and scary, and we either need to distract ourselves from that fact entirely or trick ourselves into believing we have an “in” that will get us out of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

Not a bad way to get by, if ignorance is bliss, except that deep down we know we’re lying to ourselves. Easy not to acknowledge it though once “religion” has glommed onto a bunch of haphazard associations in our minds like “good,” “nice,” and “righteous.” Once that has happened, we can’t for the life of us figure out why such and such religion shouldn’t be synonymous with “God” and “truth.”

The second reason that I believe our thinking is hazy when it comes to religions engaging each other has to do with the fact that, as Euro-Americans we have a reflexive distrust of simile and metaphor and all things poetic. This is a problem because, while I may be able to relate to an object by observing it, testing its properties, drawing conclusions about its make-up, relationship with a subject requires poetry. I can describe to you that my wife’s eyes are brown, but on its own, this would be an emotionally neutral fact that could do nothing whatever to demonstrate why I love her. I love her because the brown of her eyes moves me as the stone around the mouth of a cave causes one to wonder at the unfathomable mysteries within. Poetry helps me to articulate the finally ineffable power of staring into my wife’s eyes even as I recognize that she is more than the metaphor and that it breaks down eventually. In its place, it allows me to express why I love her, but it would express something quite the opposite were I to call it an objective fact that her irises are made of stone or that her head is hollow. Obviously, to do so would be to make the absurd leap from poetry to science.

But we do this all the time in our religions and no one bats an eye. What the new-age pluralist, atheist, and fundamentalist all have in common is that they all take with solemn seriousness, whether in the accepting or rejecting of it, a certain pseudo-scientific view of God. So long as they insist on taking their “science” with ultimate seriousness, none of them can ever be in loving, trusting relationship with God, the absolute subject. A subject must always be free to upset our predictions about him or her.

           

So religion, wrongly understood, is an idol, but religion rightly understood, is the poetry, the forms and figures of speech through which we grapple with a mystery. There is still cognitive content in any poem. Otherwise, there would be no common understanding of what the words on the page mean. But just defining its words will hardly even hint at the poem’s deeper significance.

I understand that many, in our pseudo-scientific culture, will tend to see the word “metaphor” as a demotion for religion (though presumably only for their own religion). But anyone who has ever been in love will know otherwise. They will at once recognize that where science deals in truths, only poetry can point us toward the Truth. And the love-struck can also accept that, not only do all metaphors break down after a point, they do nothing whatever to give us control over the mysterious reality to which they point. Metaphors are tools for apprehending the power of reality, but as sure as my wife is not made of stone, metaphors are not the reality itself. Only by idolatrously elevating my own metaphors (my religion) for God to the same level of ultimacy as God in God’s own self can I insist that there be no other metaphors.

This brings us full circle. We are idolatry factories—well-oiled machines in the business of elevating our religious constructions to the level of gods. Sometimes people take this so far that, ironically, they get very comfortable making the most complex assertions about how “Christianity” should relate to “Buddhism” but can scarcely even conceptualize something as simple as Christ relating to a Buddhist (as if it were any more clear how he should relate to a 1^st century Jew or Pagan, as he had to do many times in his life). If I can keep my own construction of choice, Christianity, in its place, then I will never make the idolatrous mistake of substituting its creeds and confessions for real, unpredictable living God.

This makes interreligious dialogue much simpler. Because I can too easily get from “I understand God” to “therefore, you don’t,” but there is no way to get from “I’m in relationship with God” to “therefore, you’re not.”