Wrestling with Religion

      Even after I rejected the rococo supernaturalism of John's Apocalypse, I never weakened in my allegiance--the higher meaning of belief --to the brilliantly zen-like moral teachings of the Sermon on the Mount and the parables. I never doubted that, even in a Godless world, Jesus' genius defined how decent people should treat each other. This may explain why I saw the civil rights movement as on the side of the angels when it broke into the news the 1950s. When I heard about Brown v. Board of Education  on the car radio, I thought, "It's about time!" I had seen the pickup truck with wooden benches that was the "colored" school bus in Bibb County. Mother, who grew up there, told me it wasn't right. I owe that woman alongside Jesus. We were on the road to visit relatives in 1954 when decision came on the car radio as we rounded a slow curve between Alabama pastures. As the civil rights movement grew, I identified with the Freedom Riders, Rosa Parks...

      Apparently, I haven’t learned my lesson. I still understand "God" in an eccentric way debased by my Baptist upbringing. In one of the last sessions of the 4-year "Education for Ministry" (come by and I'll show you my Sewanee School of Theology diploma), we were asked to write a “knee-jerk” response to the phrase, “God shows up.” My response didn't remotely resemble anybody else's, and theirs were mostly alike. Again, I was the outsider.      I wrote that I'd love to know that God had showed up, but found "the curtain between the subjective and objective, the relative and the absolute, to be opaque." Everybody else responded, not to “God shows up,” but to "I feel a spiritual presence,” which to me is radically different because of the vast gap between what I feel and what is . If I feel something strongly--say, that Hillary will be elected President--my feeling makes me likely to be wrong. Bias clouds judgement. So a feeling of t...

    Early experiences pose questions that it may take a lifetime to answer--     I was a teenager suffering from the realization that my childhood religion was not based on real evidence—particularly heaven and the blessed assurance of it—when my father said, “I’m a Christian because my father was and he was the best man I’ve ever known.” I listened respectfully but was secretly irate. This was nonsense. How could any sane person imagine that one good person proved the truth of a system of theology? Was Papa Green an infallible seer? I didn’t think so. I was hungry for real evidence, desperate for something to cover the abyss of unknowing I was dangling over like Jonathan Edward’s spider—not suspended by an angry God, but abandoned by an absent one. Papa Green’s exemplary life proved zip. I knew this in the pride of teenage reason, and I was right, at least as I had posed the question.     A few years later when I was a young adult, my parents took me back ...

       Augustine of Hippo (354-430), the most influential Christian writer outside of the New Testament, is cited (with different emphases) by theologians East and West, Catholic and Protestant. His mother was a Christian, but the adult Augustine saw the teachings of the Persian prophet Mani as answering Christianity's failure to explain evil as well as the crude morality and the primitive God of the Old Testament. Manichaeans were dualists who bracketed evil as the work of a demiurge, the false god of the Old Testament who had trapped souls of light in a dark world of matter while the true god was a being of spiritual light.       For years, Augustine was repelled by the crudity of Hebrew scriptures revered by orthodox Christians. Reading that man was made in God’s image, he demanded, “Does God have hair and fingernails?” Grosser organs are implicit. Seeing polygamy and human sacrifice in the Pentateuch, he rejected a lawgiver less moral than a d...

  I remember when I first heard the word solipsism, signifying that we have no sure knowledge of anything outside of our own minds. This seemed an obvious tautology. We know what we know. It seems to me that anybody who rejects this modest form of solipsism hasn't thought very deeply. It doesn't deny the reality of the outside world, but notes that that world must be unpredictably different from the shadow-show that percolates through the senses and coalesces as personal "knowledge." Indeed, anything I know has been so modified by the percolation that, by the time I know any objective thing, it's something else altogether, an image. Many trivial experiences demonstrate this. For instance, the backup camera in my pickup truck shows an LED display over half of my rearview mirror. I can choose to look either at the display or through it at the reflection in the mirror. When I look at one, the other disappears. Similarly, when I drive past a detailed, multi-part r...

  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. ...