Wrestling with Religion

  Syncretism is the blending of systems of beliefs or customs. Exclusivist religions that claim divine revelation condemn syncretism as a watering down of truth, but blending is a fact of life. Day -to-day patterns of behavior melt together where cultures touch. Centuries-old holidays and customs have forgotten origins that may be foreign to the way they are understood today. Syncretism is especially inevitable in mass conversions. When Christianity, originally a messianic offshoot of Judaism, took over the Roman Empire in the 4th and 5th centuries, pagans converted en masse. It was simple for pagans to accept belief in one supreme God (Plato did that centuries earlier), and the Jesus story resembled the myths of Orpheus and Hercules. Pagans needed only modify a few conscious beliefs floating like oil on the surface of their deeper communal assumptions while the bulk of the old faith remained in place.  Temples were retrofitted as churches, idols replaced by crucifixes. ...

Cronos (or Chronos, Time) devouring one of his children (in the Void).    You know. That Void. It popped many decades ago in my poetry and is always under my feet. It's the unknown beneath all knowns, sustaining everything until it doesn’t. I lean back on it without falling when I meditate and let past and future float over my head like wind-blown clouds. Meditation is one of those things, like exercise and a pure diet, that I’m forever tempted not to practice (pricked by a thorn in the flesh) but celebrate doing. It’s a freedom as frightening as it is fulfilling. Richard Rohr calls it “five or twenty minutes of ‘dying,’ of letting go of the small mind.” The void smells of death, black dirt at the bottom of an open grave, but it’s much more. It’s everyday lack of control, moment-to-moment uncertainty. It’s looking into chaos and trembling to know that things unseen ground all seeing. Cynically put, it’s discomfort at not being God. It is the “without form and void” out of whic...

  Wisdom and her trinity of daughters: Faith, Hope, and Love     About twenty years ago, the priest of a Catholic church in Kentucky held a series of round-table discussions about doctrine after mass. In the first few weeks, he addressed provocative questions such as the church's stance on homicide and explained its opposition to capital punishment, acknowledging that the non-violent church had been compromised after Constantine aligned it with the state. Self-defense, he said, was a moral right, but it might still be a personal sin. He might well elect not to defend himself if no innocent party were involved.      Things were going swimmingly until the subject of gender came up—referencing my wife’s involvement in an advisory committee toward an updated catechism. The draft document’s wording assumed that women would be the ones nurturing children, not men, an assumption contradicted in families we knew. In our own marriage, we'd always tried to balance du...

           When a baby is born, we can elevate the squalling, red flesh and declare with perfect confidence, "Here's another knucklehead." In the Christian vernacular, "Another sinner." He will not love the Lord his God with all his heart or love his  neighbor as himself. And even setting aside all religious lingo, from time to time he'll do bad things. It's inevitable. I say he because the sentences need pronouns and sexism beats misogyny, if barely, but ego and addiction are gender-inclusive. Sin happens. This is an undeniable basis for the doctrine of original sin . But the full-blown doctrine goes much farther. Augustine of Hippo, its principle author, taught that human nature was corrupted when Adam broke God's dietary code, creating hereditary guilt. We are all born knuckleheads as a direct consequence of one knucklehead act. This is like saying that, by running a prototype Model T into a tree, Henry Ford caused all future crashes of mas...

   It’s obvious that a check-the-box vote for Mary's son's historic existence is not what the word believe means in Acts 16:31: “Believe in the lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved.” And so, by extension, this can’t be what believe means in the creeds. In Christian mythology, the fallen angels (aka devils) believe that God exists, having been cast out of Heaven by Him. But their ability to check the "true" box doesn't imply that they're saved. On the contrary, deliberate rebellion against a God they believe in makes them more culpable. So Kierkegaard makes sense when he says that a rational proof God’s existence—even of the whole creed down to every comma—would avail nothing more than what is traditionally attributed to devils in Hell.     So what is meaningful belief? The term translated believe in English has, apparently, been so transformed as to corrupt the sense of ancient religious texts. Wilfred Cantwell Smith details this in his lecture series, B...

     If believe is understood in the sense of validating a line of the Apostle’s Creed as we would that water is wet, ducks quack, and 2+2=4, then belief based on a leap of faith is dishonest. We must at least bracket it as unproved. It seems wrong to affirm a premise (as opposed to acting on a hypothesis) just because it pleases us—even if it satisfies deep existential longings and completes our souls. Grad school professors red-inked that out of me. Truth, if we can find it, requires authority independent of our needs and desires. Of course, if we’re looking for reasons to believe in God in a true-false sense, there are philosophical “proofs," but Bishop James Pike’s theology best seller, A Time for Christian Candor (1964), summarily dismissed them: “We certainly do not claim that the existence of God can be proved” (17). I agree, but his dismissal is brusque, so I'll walk through a few odd proofs.       First, let’s dismiss a few that aren't proof...