Can the Bible be saved?

It's an old book -- written as far back as the Bronze Age (1600 BCE) from tales circulating for possibly centuries before. It has an archaic understanding of biology, math and science. It reflects ageless superstitions (goats mating in front of striped reeds will give birth to striped offspring) along with plain errors about science (the sun can be made to stand still, all animal species were created at once) and the complexities of human psychology (homosexuality and cross-dressing are inherently unnatural).

It is the Bible.

Does it still have relevance? Or would we be better off without it?

The Bible's take on the origin of the cosmos and humanity is one of reasoning backward from the present -- trying to look at a clay pot and running the film backward to its baking, spinning and mining of clay from the ground. In the case of the Bible's first authors, they observed the world and noted several things. One was its vastness, danger and incomprehensibility. This was a place far beyond the ability of human beings to manufacture. Some greater being must have been involved in putting this in place. On the biological front, plants grew mysteriously from the soil. While some were inedible or poisonous, others produced fruits and nourishment. Great lights spun overhead giving light that humans required in order to hunt or till. Beasts of many different varieties were spread across (and under and above) the face of the earth. They mated, giving rise to others of their kind. Moreover, human beings were different from the other beasts. They spoke; they planned; they learned in ways that animals did not. They gave birth in pain. They preyed on one another. Unlike other animals, they fed themselves at great cost in time and energy. For the early Bible writers, this combination of a sometimes-benign creation that provided many of the conditions that humans needed to survive, pointed to a creator who had designed a cosmos with human beings in mind. The world was a place of great abundance. Fish and fowl and fruit were easy enough to obtain. The earth was (on balance) good, as must have been the intents of its Creator. Yet Man's gifts of speech, cunning, sociability and adaptability were often used selfishly and cruelly, something that was not seen elsewhere in the animal world. Man's world had been blasted. Would a provident God create a less-than-perfect world?Or was lief hard for Man as a punishment? And if a Punishment, then a Crime. And what crime more heinous and worthy of punishment than the hubris of wanted to be God? And so, Genesis began as a story of God's loving involvement in the creation of the cosmos and Man's diversion from God's purpose.

We have been living with the consequences of that story for 3700 years.

Another example. The Jesus of the New Testament clearly believes in an imminent social catastrophe that will usher in the reign of God. The proud will be cast down from their thrones. The meek will inherit the earth. Illness will be healed and death will be defeated. But no such catastrophe occurred. Sure. the Temple was destroyed in 60AD, the Roman Empire started its fall in the 5th century and countless other social rumblings and reversals have occurred in the centuries since. But the poor are still poor, the proud still cling to their thrones, sickness still holds sway over huge swaths of the planet's population, and death will claim us all, sooner or later.

What to make of a Jesus who believed in a cosmic societal realignment that never happened? Can Christianity survive a founder who bought into a world-view that has been proved wrong?

Today, when reading the insightful guesses of the Bible writers, it's easy to see the book as directly reflecting the mind of God. God creates man first, woman second. Surely this suggests dominance of men over women! The Bible tells of a world-wide flood. Surely, we should see the this flood on the landscape -- such as the Grand Canyon! Fundamentalists fall all over each other to deny the findings of science. Less-extreme believers try to paper over the book's obvious flaws to psychologizing or allegorizing its stories. The Flood story is not historical, but a beautiful tale about God's unwillingness to destroy his creation, no matter how immoral it has become.

Whether these approaches are satisfying in the long run is open to question. Literalists may eventually have to recognize that their approach is a denial of everything we know about the universe. Allegorizers may eventually see that looking for deeper meaning in Bible stories deprives them of their raw, literal power.

It's no wonder that the 21st century has become the battle ground for the many believers who wish to hold onto the idea that the Bible is true in all its particulars. Unable to distinguish discardable ancient tribal "wisdom" (like the need to keep menstruating women out of sight and off the furniture) and possible psychosocial insights about projecting your own evil on others (the parable about the log in your eye), they have doubled down. The Bible is right and evolutionists are wrong, as are the cosmologists who believe in a 13.5 billion year old universe, rater than the 600-year-old earth suggested by the Bible.

Will we eventually whittle the Bible down to the sections that make sense? And if we do, will we inevitably lose its authority? Can Jesus, stripped of his insistence that changes were coming, and his desperately hope to save a few from the coming wrath, still be considered a savior? And if so, savior from what? Is a psychologized  Bible -- its lessons coming less from the historical/scientific reality of its words than from their insights into human/divine relations -- attractive enough to hold the attention and veneration of its adherents?

For centuries, certainly among America's original settlers, the Bible has been the bedrock of social policy and the inspiration for those who have helped the less fortunate. It has inspired people to assemble into bodies that sought to legislate solutions to intractable human problems. But the Bible no longer serves that purpose. For many in the secular age, it is hardly known. For believers, more and more conservative as time goes on, its use is to enforce millennia-old prejudices -- against women, gays and the sick. Has the Bible run its course? Is its continued use an impediment to human well-being?

Perhaps the Bible's long and popular run is over. Perhaps continuing to read it is dangerous to our personal and social health. Perhaps, like an orange that has been squeezed of its last ounce of juice, it is time to throw the dried out rind into the garbage disposal.

If so, it would be a shame. There is a great deal to learn from the book -- even if that is to understand how human beings have tried (and failed) to understand the divine. How kings use God to further their unworthy schemes. How those in power use their purported relation to the divine to sway whole populations in the wrong direction. How sinners and the humble can find greatness within themselves. How even prophets and Sons of God can further goodness (= Godness?) while holding social ideas that don't stand the test of time.

Unbelievable?

OK, I confess. I haven't been to Mass in the last 3 Sundays. No special reason - just had a late Saturday night or a need to collect myself.

Just the other day, I had this strange experience. I did not know what the Sunday reading was, and I didn't much care. I had this almost out-of-body sensation of living in a world without a religious overlay. In which the myths and stories that guided my life were no longer important. As though Jesus and the gospels had lost their vitality and their pull on my soul.

I imagined a world where a forest was just a forest, not a manifestation of Creation.Where a sky was just sky, without intimations of Heaven.

Yesterday, I was picking music for my community's feast day for the Virgin. And as I considered which old chestnuts to include in the program, I wondered if I, amateur songwriter, might write up something myself. But I didn't know where I'd begin. Mary, the woman for whom the Church has sprung cartwheels in ages past, seemed to have no immediacy to me. I don't feel that I need to approach Christ through her. I don't feel that she has special powers to keep me safe, or that praying to her has special resonance with God. Any decent God doesn't need me to memorize lists of intermediaries, praying to the right one for the right cure or help with the right problem.

I did feel a bit nervous, wondering whether the heavenly host had withdrawn from me, springing back into itself like a carpenter's measure, because I had failed to do it honor or give it my attention. Was this the dark night of the soul? A transition to another level of spirituality? Or a passing perception?

I'm not sure yet.

I do know that I still carry around the lessons of the gospels -- about love of neighbor, preference for the poor, distrust of wealth, the benignity of God. But I also know that the old stories don't have the same resonance right now. Some seem downright strange. For instance, I can't get worked up about Christ dying for my sins. I guess I should be grateful, but I don't understand the problem that his death was supposed to solve. I read today about Mark Chapman, John Lennon's killer, saying that he had found peace and forgiveness in his belief in Jesus. Maybe I am hard-hearted, but I can't imagine perpetrating that crime and feeling like I could put it behind me. Tone down its horror maybe, but its after-effects would keep pace with my life, like a jogging buddy. I would never forget that I had gunned down a Beatle. For no good reason.

Neither can I get excited about Jesus being the Messiah or talking about the Kingdom of Heaven. I almost wonder if these things were just features of a strange strand of Judaism that would have died out if it hadn't been picked up by Christians. Imagine 2000 years with no one arguing whether Jesus was or wasn't the messiah. 2000 years free of pogroms and crusades. 2000 years without original sin or the Trinity or the papacy.

I feel prepared to rebuild my faith from the ground up. Community, justice and truth still propel me. The wonders of the Universe and of Nature awe me. Let's see where this takes us!

Sugar, shoot!

A nine-year-old girl in Arizona is (inexplicably) being taught to fire an Uzi. The instructor shows her how to hold the gun, then tells her how to position her feet. Clearly, the girl has no experience with guns -- not even in play. He tells her to fire one shot. She does. Then, he says, "full auto" and flips a switch on the gun. She pulls the trigger. In a blur too quick for the video camera to capture, the gun kicks to the left, spewing a torrent of bullets. Here the video ends. But the rest of the story is known: the instructor is shot in the head and dies.

Gun enthusiasts will point to the video and claim that this is an isolated incident. But this kind of thing seems to happen every day. 3-year-olds shoot their Dads (it's always Dads, isn't it?) or themselves. Little kids shoot their friends. Grown men shoot themselves in the leg or groin. Over and over and over.

There is a very vocal faction in this country that sees all of this mayhem is acceptable collateral damage in the campaign to regularize the owing and public display of firearms. I am sure that my Facebook post on the subject will get shot down (an aptly-chosen metaphor) by self-styled "patriots" who see themselves as guarantors of Americans' precious right to arm themselves the teeth.

Our Founders were rightly concerned about royal attempts to disarm them, making them unable to stand against the depredations and stupidities of empire. But today's patriots have no communal sense -- only an individualist's sense of expressing his own stunted masculinity with gun play.

The sickness in our society stems from our switch from communalism -- villagers banding together against evil outsiders -- to individualism -- the desire to show off one's macho and terrorize one's fellow villagers. We won't make significant inroads against gun violence until we address the pathology of the personal -- the unrealistic need to protect one's own, and only one's own.

As a species, we have not progressed to our current state via the efforts of individuals. No pharaoh built a pyramid. No pope built a cathedral. No mogul built a railroad. No president won a war. All of our great accomplishments from the concerted efforts of hundreds, thousands or millions of people, all working in unison toward a communal goal. The gun nut's fantasy is that a firearm will make them king of their own universe. Something that hasn't happened in recorded history, and will never happen in then future.

Rather than becoming a legend in in their own minds, guns make them the widowed, the childless, the slain and the accidental killer.

Punctured dream

Michael Brown has been laid to rest, but the controversy surrounding his death continues to smoulder. The New York Times today just exacerbated things with a piece about Brown that was fairly laudatory, except for an outrageously badly-worded summary sentence:

Michael Brown, 18, due to be buried on Monday, was no angel, with public records and interviews with friends and family revealing both problems and promise in his young life. Shortly before his encounter with Officer Wilson, the police say he was caught on a security camera stealing a box of cigars, pushing the clerk of a convenience store into a display case. He lived in a community that had rough patches, and he dabbled in drugs and alcohol. He had taken to rapping in recent months, producing lyrics that were by turns contemplative and vulgar. He got into at least one scuffle with a neighbor.

He "was no angel" --  phrase typically charitably applied to good-hearted yet deeply troubled people. Yet all Brown's devilishness came down to one disputed charge of shoplifting, smoking some pot and drinking some beers, enjoying rap and once getting into a pushing match. Sounds a lot like the story of every kid's adolescence. Sounds damn near exemplary to me for a kid who lives in an economically disadvantaged area.

The last weeks have been a circus of character assassination and withheld information. The Ferguson PD delayed releasing the name of the officer who shot Brown. They released a video, taken minutes before the shooting, that seemed to show Brown stealing cigars from a convenience store. They claimed (without corroborating evidence) that Brown was trying to get hold of the cop's gun. After two weeks, and under intense pressure, they released the incident report, with large areas blanked out. They terrorized peaceful protesters and news media with military vehicles, weapons and tactics, tear gassing people, threatening to shoot them and arresting them for taking pictures. They even http://www.mediaite.com/tv/watch-cops-physically-push-cnns-don-lemon-during-tense-ferguson-protest/, because. Well, just because.

Elements of the white community -- both in Ferguson and beyond, closed ranks behind the shooter. His story had yet to be told. Innocent until proven guilty! Brown deserved what he got (execution for a petty theft). They raised more than a quarter million dollars. Fox News circulated false rumors that Brown had given his killer a broken eye socket, suggesting a vicious fight. They claimed that  Brown had been charging his killer, in spite of stories from numerous witnesses, gathered immediately after the incident, that he had been running away from the bullets and was surrendering with his hands up. Some claimed he was crazy on marijuana. Well-known black authorities were ridiculed. Today, they claimed that an unarmed 300-pound black kid is really "armed" due to his weight and strength alone.A Facebook page dedicated to the shooter gathered ugly comments about blacks, and exonerating comments about his killer.

The old, racist machinery that justifies heinous acts against blacks is functioning smoothly in Ferguson, Missouri. It's as if it was well-oiled and ably-maintained after the Civil Rights struggles of the 1960s. No wonder some blacks continue to claim that it was never put in mothballs, but has been in active usage all these years.

We have light years to go before we reach the color-blind society that Dr. King dreamed about.

The narrow gate for science and religion

 

I'll get to the point right a way. Given what we know about cosmology, evolution and biochemistry, there are only two general explanations for the existence of God. Either the atheists are right, and there is no god needed to explain life, the universe and everything in it. Or there is a God who operates in a way that sure makes it look like he's not there!

The principle of Occam's razor tilts heavily in favor of a godless universe. Occam's razor postulates that the hypothesis with the smallest number of assumptions is likely to be right. When it comes to thunderstorms, for instance, the existence of electrically-charged clouds is enough to understand when and where lightning will strike. You can throw God in there if you will, hurling thunderbolts hither and thither, but that adds neither accuracy nor purpose to the effects of the storm.

The same goes for much of the other activity in the universe. Whether it is a rock slide (gravity) or a stellar explosion (fuel burnout and more gravity) or the variety of lifeforms (mutations and natural selection) or the origin of life itself (self-replicating chemicals), the need to throw God into the mix is unnecessary. If mutations were nonexistent or rare, you might make the argument that God is needed to stir up the gene pool. But mutations are crazy common, as are the DNA copying mistakes, chromosomal breakage and other genomic folderol that makes redheads different from brunettes and Downs kids different from non-Downs kids.

It seems that science has given God nothing to do.

There is the argument that God (through the Holy Spirit) supports existence itself, which is certainly possible, but completely unprovable. It seems to hide nod behind the darkest veil of all -- the "is-ness" of Is. But it doesn't really help we poor suffering humans to know that the God who supports existence itself allows it to bump and meander the way it does.

Still, I believe in a benevolent being who sustains us in trouble and who influences the direction of our lives. I continue to measure myself against the treasured insights and teachings of Jesus transmitted in the gospels. I see hints of God's activity in the small events of ordinary life. And I believe that my job in life is to become more loving, and to bring that love, God's love, to others.

The God who exists may or may not have a solid relationship with the Universe we see. Neither is He a distant and uninvolved. I have no idea how to combine the existence of the visible or sensible Cosmos with the justice and humanity to which God calls me. The closest I can come is to assume that God is somehow expressed in all life and all existence. That His will works unseen through countless ages and numberless populations. That this messy, death-strewn world somehow effects his desires. And that my place in that existence depends on honoring God's presence in all things and in all people.

Is that the simplest way to look at life? Does my view survive Occam's razor? I don't know. I can only take comfort in the wisdom of those who perceive the world as more complex than our senses can discern. Who see that "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

I am humbled by the majesty of the Universe and my own puniness. Perhaps God's game is to show how little we really no about him. To dethrone him from the thundercloud, the rainbow, the music of the spheres, the birth of the Cosmos is to show how incapable we are of pinning him down. Maybe that's the ultimate lesson we all need to learn: God is to big for us to label or to own.

RIP, Robin Williams

My first reaction to the news of Robin Williams' was that it was probably suicide. The signs were there. His latest series, The Crazy Ones, seemed like a tired retrofit for his manic personality. And there was always a strong strain in melancholy in his characters. Maybe the "funny" had finally fizzled for this manic, but profoundly sad man.

I have to confess that my second reaction was anger. At him. For having put his family through the excruciating ordeal of dealing with the suicide of a loved one. I knew this was harsh, but it was what I felt. How could a person not take into account the agony of his wife and kids before taking such a drastic action

As I came to think about this more, it seemed apparent that the pain of depression is greater than most people can appreciate. If the pain of a toothache can be blinding (and it only last for a few days) what must it be like to suffer the constant stab of depression -- over a lifetime? You can escape it for a while -- I supposed that may be what propelled Williams to act so manically and to drown himself in chemicals. But how long can you keep that up, even with therapy and drugs to take the edge off? In Williams case, the answer was 63 years.

The consolation of Heaven is that for suffering people like Robin Williams, there is a place where your mind can survive while shorn of the frailties and fragile design of the human brain. Robin Williams did so much good in his life, so there is no doubt that his spirit lives with God. While we recall his incredible oeuvre, and sympathize with his grieving family, he rejoice that in the arms of the Lord, he is experiencing new life where pain and tears and death are gone forever.