The Marginal Christian's Handbook.

Richard Dawkins: "The universe is queerer than we can possibly image..."

...but there's nowt so queer as folk.    My favorite "village atheist" on the limits of human perception...an argument which some people might well assert against some of his own theories. At any rate, it's well worth watching; Dawkins is always worth the time. We could all benefit from spending more time thinking about thinking, consciousness, and perception. 

Here's the blurb from the site. 

Biologist Richard Dawkins makes a case for "thinking the improbable" by looking at how our human frame of reference -- the things we can perceive with our five senses, and understand with our eight-pound brain -- limits our understanding of the universe. Think of it: We can't see atoms, we can't see infrared light, we can't hear ultrasonic frequencies, but we know without a doubt that they exist. What else is out there that we can't yet perceive -- what dimensions of space, what aspects of time, what forms of life?

Is he not listening to what he is saying or am I missing something?  Anyway, the talk is well worth hearing and can be found here at TED.   I'll have to listen to it again, after which I'll probably need to update this.

Blogcombing: "What Have the Faithful Done?"

At her excellent (HIGHLY RECOMMENDED) blog, Writing in Faith: Thoughts, Sandy Carlson has posted a beautiful, thought-provoking and very balanced note on how churches as institutions have shown that they can indeed be agents of God's grace (a point on which I've sometimes felt doubt).

I believe that institutional churches of every hue and variety can be agents of God's grace--but only if we first accept that they are very human, very flawed attempts at reaching toward a divine mystery so much greater than ourselves. Teachers come in every shape and size. Sometimes they come in hellish nightmares. So be it. The gift of these lessons is no less a blessing.  (Sandy Carlson)

She then lists 13 "acts of faith--some beautiful, some hellish--as presented by Religion and Ethics."  Read more...

Ricky Gervais, the Archbishop of Canterbury & The Nativity Story

Get Sol Invictus (The Unvanquishable Sun) by Damozel | This conversation between Ricky Gervais and the Archbishop of Canterbury has rattled a few cages and why?  Because the archbishop acknowledged what I've known since Sunday school days:  the nativity story as we "know" it is a cobbled-together story with elements of myth or legend.  Who knew?   The Telegraph reported:

His comments came during an interview on BBC Radio 5 Live with Simon Mayo yesterday. Later on in the show, the Archbishop was challenged by fellow guest Ricky Gervais, the comedian, about the credibility of the Christmas story.

It's quite clear if you listen to the conversation/read the transcript that the archbishop (NB:  I don't like him)  affirmed his belief in Christ and the Bible.   His critics don't seem to be sufficiently taking in this part:

Gervais told Dr Williams he was concerned about "brainwashing" of children who are sent to faith schools at an early age, comparing teaching that God exists to belief in Father Christmas.

Dr Williams said faith schools expose children to the full range of human experience and values and he did not believe they indoctrinated people. (Archbishop says nativity 'a legend'; emphasis added)

Part of the problem is that the Archbishop is the most diffident cleric ever.  Maybe he was intimidated by Gervais.  No doubt he's as big a fan of The Office and The Extras as I am----how could he not be?  So he didn't fight back as aggressively as he might have and he got himself as thoroughly and awkwardly ensnared as Andy Millman or Maggie ever did in The Extras..  And this all seemed to be due to simple diffidence, not to any intent on the part of Gervais to trap or trick him.    

But he said nothing that I haven't heard every educated cleric I've ever known say.  Here's the video:

Elaine Pagels talks to Salon about the Gospel of Judas.

I was so excited to see this interview.

I love Elaine Pagels. I read her book on the gnostic gospels at least once a year to remind myself not to accept with qualification the received wisdom concerning Christ, the life of Christ, his mission, and his resurrection.  The people who interpreted the Bible got the good news from sources with political as well as religious agenda.  Putting aside the question of whether the Bible should be accepted as the Word of God, direct from the source, the word of its interpreters (including the early church fathers) certainly does not.  Why don't people realize this?  And why aren't people who call themselves Christians or christians as hungry as I am to know the details of Christ's life from every possible angle? 

I know the answer, mind you:  it's because conventional Christians know so little about history, or about the state of the world during Christ's time, about his circumstances, the dangerous and unstable political situation in Judea and Galilee, or anything else that they haven't received via often unqualified Biblical interpreters that they have only the haziest idea of the man who allegedly stilled the water, walked on it, survived or was revived after Crucifixion or came back from the dead, and who referred to himself as "the Son of Man." 

They don't know the significance of his calling himself this, the difference between his calling himself the Son of Man and between those who called him the king of the Jews, or why it makes a difference what he really meant.  They don't know the significance of Pilate's writing, "The king of the Jews" on the tablet placed over his head at Crucifixion or why the priests objected to this.  They don't know the political or religious significance of his ride into the city, his driving the moneychangers from the temple, or his mission to the poor and outcast.  They don't even know that Jesus is just Greek for "Yeshua" or "Joshua."   Furthermore, they don't want to know.

And the reason they don't is that they are afraid that understanding Christ might interfere with their precious "personal relationship"-----as if human beings, gods throughout history, and God himself weren't perpetually anxious and hungry to be understood.   They want to worship him but not to understand him and are afraid of what they might find out if they let in any information that wasn't included by the very politically driven Council of Nicaea 300 years after his life ended.

"That About Wraps it Up for God, Then."

SEE RELATED ENTRY AT THE FLATLAND ALMANACK.

In one of the five volumes of  Douglas Adams'  Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy trilogy, a prominent philosopher (I forget his name) writes books proving the nonexistence of God.  (My favorite title: Who is this God Person, Anyway?)  His arguments are so flawlessly reasoned that God ends up saying "Oh, dear" and "vanishing in a puff of logic."

But the reality is that the perceptions on which faith is based are not subject to reason or reasoned analysis.   I have to laugh out loud when scientists announce that they've got reality all figured out.  They need to read Edward Abbot's Flatland. 

Look, I like Richard Dawkins.  I enjoyed The Blind Watchmaker.  I believe that most of what he says is true.  For example, this:

[quote begins from Richard Dawkins, The Huffington Post, Why There is Almost Certainly No God]

America, founded in secularism as a beacon of eighteenth century enlightenment, is becoming the victim of religious politics, a circumstance that would have horrified the Founding Fathers. The political ascendancy today values embryonic cells over adult people. It obsesses about gay marriage, ahead of genuinely important issues that actually make a difference to the world. It gains crucial electoral support from a religious constituency whose grip on reality is so tenuous that they expect to be 'raptured' up to heaven, leaving their clothes as empty as their minds. More extreme specimens actually long for a world war, which they identify as the 'Armageddon' that is to presage the Second Coming....

My scientific colleagues have additional reasons to declare emergency. Ignorant and absolutist attacks on stem cell research are just the tip of an iceberg. What we have here is nothing less than a global assault on rationality, and the Enlightenment values that inspired the founding of this first and greatest of secular republics. Science education - and hence the whole future of science in this country - is under threat.

[quote ends]

Yes, yes, and yes.  All true.  All just as terrifying to this Christian as to anyone in the scientific community and for exactly the reasons that Dawkins cites.

But he's wrong that one cannot reject the argument of creation by design and believe in a personal God.   I reject Genesis (and most of the Bible), so I'm hardly a typical Christian.  Furthermore, my notion of reality is less fixed than his.  I'd say this:  in the reality that Richard Dawkins perceives, there is almost no room for God (interesting that he left that little loophole).  In the reality that my husband Nick perceives, the same is true. 

But scientists are in their way as credulous as evangelicals are in theirs.  They trust profoundly in their instruments and in their perceptions.  They also believe in the existence of facts.

But my own training in another profession has convinced me that there is no such thing in the universe as a fact.  There are only the shifting perceptions of observers, some of whom are scientists.   I love science because every advance into understanding the universe and the stuff of which the universe is made shows that it is always altogether stranger than one can quite conceive.   Are you a human being composed of flesh and bone or are you a loosely organized mass of particles whirling at high speed in mostly empty space?  Isn't it amazing that the answer is both?  And isn't amazing that you can say "I" and tell that part of reality apart from the rest of it that isn't?

I certainly agree that religion should have no place in American politics.  The incursion of the so-called Christian Right is a development that the Founding Fathers would have deplored.  Separation of church and state ought to ensure that no religious agenda could achieve a sufficient foothold in the government to impose its will on the rest of us.   But the fact that there are people whose identity is so tied up in their beliefs about the nature of reality that they can't tell the difference doesn't prove a thing about religion in the abstract or God in the concrete. 

A note on two excellent essays by "Real Live Preacher."

                                                           

In my newest blog, I've created a category of blogs about blogs.  My first such entry was a rather lengthy note on two essays published at my favorite Christian site, "Real Live Preacher." 

In his essays (links are in the note), he discusses the problem and nature of evil.  In my blog, I reflect on his reflections and discuss my own perception of evil as the natural state of the human race as our biological inheritance. 

Jump to the note.

Quaker Meeting/Silent Worship.

The experience was extremely satisfying, actually---I did not expect it.  Usually churches make me feel uncomfortable and self-conscious---and conspicuously out of place.

After I worried that I might not be able to deal with keeping still for silent worship for an entire hour, I was rather startled at how quickly that hour passed. I was quite sorry when it ended.

I have had experience with silent meditation---I read The Secret of the Golden Flower when I was still in college and I certainly have tried from time to time to apply it---but I’ve never been good at it.

My brain carries on chattering nonsensically in the background and if I just let it go on, I soon find my thoughts, such as they are, degenerating into what Kingsley Amis refers to in one of his novels as ‘thought substitutes.’ My theory is this: if you shut the left brain down---if you can get it to shut up at all without actually going to sleep or losing consciousness---the right brain then kicks in and starts pumping out the weird images that symbolize what you would be thinking if you were thinking at all. Anyway, that’s my theory and I’m sticking to it.

Thankfully, that didn’t happen in today’s meeting.

I was surprisingly unselfconscious for someone who is basically awkward and uncomfortable with strangers. It helped that the existing Quakers don’t make a fuss over newcomers or visitors. They just smiled and nodded and accepted our presence without the sort of kerfuffle that makes me feel all hemmed in by social obligations.

The local meeting is in the process of building a new Meetinghouse, and they have sold off their previous premises to pay for it, so right now they are meeting in the homes of various members or sometimes in a local synagogue.

Anticipating My First Quaker Meeting

  Some of the Quakers I’ve met insist on being referred to as ‘friends’---cf. The Friendly Persuasion---but I like the word Quaker and its attendant associations, and the websites I’ve looked at use the term, so: Quaker, Quaker, Quaker! I pray---silently, of course---that it will work out for me.  I'm running out of options, frankly.

            And I am desperate for a place to land. I feel that religion has been inflicted on me. I started out reading the Gnostic Gospels (initially via the scholar Elaine Pagels after a conversation with my friend and associate John) and somehow something sank in and took root---exactly like that parable he told; remember? To paraphrase one of the wild-eyed fanatics from one of Flannery O’Connor’s novels, it fell into rocky soil, “ but it fell in deep.” Or to quote that Bob Dylan song, also involving rocks, “I want to let go, but I can’t let go."

But I can’t go back to a conventional church.

The last time, I looked round at all the people sitting there in rows (not so many of them either, though it’s a big church) standing, kneeling, singing, listening, and I just couldn’t see what any of it had to do with religion or with the Gospels. This is a religion about a man who wandered preaching from town to town in the hills of Galilee, then in the dust of Judea. Every word he said---and you have to do some reading on the history and the context to fully get this----subtly undermined the theocracy-loving established order and their laws and mores.

Chaotic Simplicity

[published on August 17, 2005 in "The Flatland Oracles," my previous blog]           

Today I met with one of the acting clerks for the local Quaker meeting. It’s only a small meeting at present though they are hoping to increase their membership. They’re building a new meetinghouse and in the interim, are using another church’s premises as a meeting place.   

I didn’t hear anything to put me off it. Politically liberal, check; no fixed dogma, check; social and environmentalism, check; accepting of the gay community, check. These are Liberal Quakers, so-called to distinguish them from a more conservative and evangelical branch. 

          
The person who met with me has a living room that is stark in its simplicity---all beige and wood, very minimalist, very Japanese, very beautiful. “Very Quakerly,” he said. But though the house was lovely, extremely so, traditional Quaker color schemes wouldn’t do for me, whether I become a Quaker or not. I live the simplest possible life----I don’t even own a house and don’t expect to---but I like richness and complexity in color schemes. 

My favorite painter is Matisse and I try to emulate his canvases in putting together my main color schemes. One wall of my small living room is painted the richest possible yellow, verging toward but never quite reaching orange. I made a set of shelves like the ones I had in college, melamine boards separated by what the local stonemason calls ‘decorative blocks’---but I painted the blocks in layers of paint with intricate designs ‘carved’ into the forward faces. 

"Infinite and Unforeseen." Quakers, Cathars, T.S. Eliot, and Me

    [published on August 16, 2005 in my previous blog, "The Flatland Oracles"]

A friend of mine who read a couple of my blog entries was complaining about what she called the “Christian overtones.” 

 

“When did this happen to you?” she asked. “And also, why? You didn’t used to be this way. I don’t like it.”

It’s true; I wasn’t. In college, influenced by my reading of Sartre, I was an existentialist. I believed in existential nausea, freedom, and some sort of ethical duty (I forget the source since there was no God) to live an ‘authentic’ existence in the circumstances presented to me. 

Later, when I began to read Chinese philosophy, I became interested in Taoism. Buddhism interested me as well, but I liked the simplicity of Taoism. Don’t go against the flow. Accept change; learn to flow with it. When the professor asked me on an examination to describe the central tenets of Taoism, I wrote, “This:” and left the rest of the paper blank. To the disgust of the other students, I received an ‘A.’

 I have always been attracted to cosmology. While studying Taoism, I began reading the works of the great, the very great, English philosopher and mathematician, “Alfred North Whitehead.” I wanted to write a paper on his work, but of course the true meaning of Whitehead was really very far beyond me when I was in my late teens. I’m working on it now though. I find it profound and beautiful.

 

But Christianity…..no. No, I wanted no part of it. I grew up in the Bible Belt. I didn’t like the religion practiced by a large part of my family (thankfully, not my parents or my mother’s family); I didn’t like the hypocrisy---many so-called ‘Christians’ I saw were and doubtless still are unapologetic racists, just for example---and I didn’t like the fervor or the anger. I didn’t like the suspicious and---I can’t call it hatred; it was more like dread---of the religious practices of other denominations (let alone other religions). 

Catholics were strange and exotic in my town; I remember my 11 year old cousin telling me in shock and horror that the Catholics worship the Pope and Mary. And the whole family were despondent over the fact that my family attended the Episcopal Church and were therefore ‘Whiskeypalians.’