What Would You Die For?

My last blog got a bit of email regarding my assertion that I would not die for Judaism. Here are four selections worthy of further comment:

1. A life is not worth living without beliefs worth dying for. Honestly I cannot think of a single belief for which I would die. Given the right circumstances I would die to save the lives of family and friends and even strangers, but I wouldn’t die to save an idea. Why? First of all because I am not sure my ideas are right. Why die to uphold something that is false? Second, if all the people who thought some great idea were killed for thinking it, there would be no one left to think it and the idea would die. Ideas are only good if they are embodied in living bodies.

2. You insult millions of Jewish martyrs by not willing to be martyred yourself. Why is that true? How does my choosing differently than others insult them or their choice? And if choice isn’t allowed then martyrdom is meaningless.

3. When push comes to shove, you really aren’t a Jew if you aren’t willing to die for being a Jew. Given this logic there is no way to know if you are really a Jew unless someone threatens to kill you for claiming you are a Jew. Honestly, though, if someone put a gun to my head and threatened to pull the trigger if I claimed to be a Jew I would most likely claim to be a Rotarian.

4. You insult every brave American soldier in Iraq who was willing to die for their country. This argument, while totally tangential to my own, just bugged me. First of all the country wasn’t in danger from Iraq. Second, soldiers aren’t willing to die for their country, they are willing to kill for it. Dying is a risk not a reward. If dying were the point they could stay home and shoot themselves. On the contrary, soldiers do everything they can not to die for their country.

But I can top all of these critics by saying that while I may not being willing to die or kill for Judaism, I am willing to suffer eternal damnation on its behalf. After all there are many more millions of people who believe I am going to hell for being a Jew than there are people wishing to send me there sooner rather than later. Of course that fact that I don’t believe in hell may make my choice a bit easier, but still this has to count for something.

Why Do People of Faith Fight?

Why do religious people fight? It seems to me that the root cause of inter–religious warfare is to determine whose religion is the right religion. Think about this for a moment. How do you know that your religion is true and another’s false? You can’t find any objective criteria for proving truth claims made by any religion. There is no way to know if Immaculate Conception, Virgin Birth, and Original Sin are true or not. You either believe in these things or you don’t. Believing doesn’t make it true any more than not believing makes it false. So how do you know what you believe is worth believing?

There are two classic answers to this question: Either you get lots of people to believe as you do, or you kill even more people for not believing as you do. Ideally you do both.

What intrigues me is how you get people to kill for their religion. I have tried to get people stirred up enough about what I hold to be true that they might consider a march on Rome or Jerusalem or Mecca, but nobody takes me seriously. I can’t even get one of my stronger students to challenge the Dalai Lama to an arm wrestling contest. What am I doing wrong?

Is it that I believe less strongly than others? No, I am adamant about what I believe. I am certain I am right, or at least that others are wrong. Seriously, I have no doubt that Jesus is not the Son of God, Mohammed is not the Seal of the Prophets, and Torah is not the Word of God or the Jews God’s Chosen People. While I find great wisdom in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, I deny the basic truth claims of each, and would not die or kill for any of them. But then I wouldn’t die or kill for my ideas either.

Maybe that is the problem. I’m not willing to kill for what I believe, and have no desire to see anyone die for what I believe. Unless you are willing to kill and die for your beliefs no one takes you seriously.

While I can’t bring myself to do either of these things, perhaps I can get behind the idea that people who disagree with me will spend eternity in hell. I will work on this for a while and see if I can stomach condemning people to endless torture after they die. I suspect I will fail. Maybe I’m just not mean enough to be a real person of faith.

God's Babble

I find that lots of what passes for reasoned discourse in religious settings sounds like babble to me, but when it comes to actually babbling in church I’m all for it. Holy babble or speaking in tongues is real. It is a legitimate method for shifting from mochin d’katnut (narrow mind) to mochin d’gadlut (spacious mind).

When it comes to judging religious practices my concern is simple: does it work? Does it help me achieve a higher and more compassionate and just level of consciousness? Speaking in tongues does.

This past Sunday, millions of Christians celebrated Pentecost, the Christian parallel to the Jewish Shavuot. Where Shavuot recalls the giving of Torah to the Jews at Mount Sinai, Pentecost recalls the Holy Spirit inspiring the disciples of Jesus to speak in other tongues. For most Jews and Christians these are memorial days, that is they mark a time in history. But for some in both communities these are times of divine revelation.

Jews stay awake all night on the evening of Shavuot to purify and prepare themselves to receive Torah. Christians in many churches will surrender to the Spirit and speak as the Apostles spoke in languages they do not understand. For both groups the experience not only affirms the truth of their tradition’s history, but also takes that history out of the past and into the present. Revelation is not once and for all, but on–going.

I have spoken in tongues, and it is a wondrous experience. It sounds like babble to the outer ear, but the inner ear knows otherwise. Simply giving myself over to the out–pouring of sound, I felt God’s Presence surround and infuse me. I didn’t choose the “words” I spoke, and made no attempt to decipher them. The message of God’s presence was not carried by what I said, but by the very fact of how I said it.

Dr. Andrew Newberg in his fascinating study of the biology of religious experience, Why We Believe What We Believe, uses neuroimaging to show that speaking in tongues decreases frontal lobe activity, and leaves the speaker with a sense of being spoken through rather than speaking. This is precisely what I felt.

Speaking in tongues is not the same as meditation. When speaking in tongues I never lost a sense of separate self as I have in meditation, but I did loose a sense of willful self: not I, but God in me best describes the experience.

Most Christian churches do not accept speaking in tongues, but millions of Christians will continue to do so. We are hardwired for the experience of spacious mind. We long for it. We need it no less than we need food, water, and shelter. Try it yourself and see.

The Pope, The People, and Purification

The pope traveled to Brazil recently where he called the brutal evangelizing of millions of indigenous people purification, and said that the indigenous Indians had been “silently longing” for Christianity.

Really? Were they silently longing for the destruction of their culture, their autonomy, and the deaths of millions of their people? And what evil was purified by the forced conversion of millions of native peoples to Catholocism? Was giving up human sacrifice of some Indians worth the destruction of almost all Indians? Was loosing self–determination a good thing? Does humanity somehow benefit when the cultural diversity of our species is depleted? Maybe it does. Wouldn’t the world be a better place if we were all purified of our cultural differences and became Catholic? No more pesky Jews or angry Muslims. No more Hindus, Buddhists, or Zoroastrians. No more atheists and freethinkers. The purified world of the pope is simple, unified, and, not surprisingly, run by him.

Of course not everyone was happy with the Pontiff’s view of Catholic hegemony, and the pope did admit that “the memories of a glorious past cannot ignore the shadows that accompanied the process of evangelization of the Latin American continent.” Leaving aside the fact that Latin America is not actually a continent, and only the Catholic conquerors would call the invasion of the New World “glorious,” can we really sidestep the horrors of European colonization by claiming it was a shadow phenomenon?

Jesus urged his followers to carry the Good News to the world. His message was that God loves you, not that God wants your gold. To make sure people understood that his emissaries were not invaders Jesus instructed them to carry nothing with them on their journey: “no staff, nor bag, nor bread, nor money” (Luke 9:3). The pope’s glorious memory has nothing to do with Jesus, and the Catholic armies that invaded the Americas came not to preach but to pillage. They didn’t heal or purify, they raped and robbed. They came with swords and left with the wealth and the freedom of an entire civilization in their sacks. This may have been glorious for the conquerors, but not for the peoples they conquered.

Of course historians can point to similar genocidal invasions by Israelite, Muslim, and Protestant armies as well, but at least when the Queen visited Virginia recently she didn't call the genocide of Native Americans purification. Gotta love those Germans.

Religion At Its Best

I am not anti-religion; I only want to look into the nature of religion. People mistake an honest examination of religion with being anti-religion, which in and of itself tells you something very important about the nature of religion: it fears honest scrutiny. Why? Because at its heart religion is nothing but a series of propositions enforced by fear.

Think about this for a moment. Why do some people suffer from Original Sin and others do not? Is it ignorance on the part of the billion plus people who do not suffer, or conditioning on the part of the billion plus that do? Why do Jews and Muslims think God is displeased if they eat pork? Is this because they know God’s dietary predilections, or simply the product of thousands of years of enforced conditioning? Why do Tibetan Buddhists think there is merit in spinning a prayer wheel? Why do Hindus offer flowers and fruit to Ganesha, the elephant-headed God? Yes, devotees can invent sophisticated reasons to make these actions meaningful, but these are mere glosses. With or without a good reason you had best do the action because if you don’t something bad is going to happen to you or those you love. Religion is at root magic, but it could be so much more.

Religion could be a laboratory for investigating meaning, and realms of consciousness that materialist science refuses to consider. It could be a school for timeless ethical teachings freed from time–bound bias and bigotry. It could be a community where people support one another in times of pain and celebrate with one another in times of joy without blaming or theological clucking of tongues.

Religion is all this to some extent, but it is hampered by fear and conditioning. I don’t want to do away with religion I want to do away with fear and conditioning. I don’t want to do away with God I want to do away with theology. I don’t want to do away with clergy I want to do away with exploitation of the laity. And when there is no fear, no conditioning, no theology, and no exploitation there is a chance that you and I might peer directly into Reality as it is—and that is religion at its best.

Bushspeak

I can’t shake the notion that President Bush has hired George Orwell as his speechwriter. In a news conference held in the White House Rose Garden (I guess some people are promised a rose garden after all), the President commented that we can expect the coming months in Iraq to be bloody ones. American and Iraqi casualties will rise. And that, surprisingly, is the good news.

I always thought that winning a war meant our casualties go down while the bad guys casualties go up. But in the lexicon of Bushspeak the more attacks on Americans the more our strategy must be succeeding. By that logic we won’t have won until we have run out of soldiers to send into the field. Is anyone buying this nonsense?

The point of the surge as I understood it was to overwhelm the enemy and clamp down on violence, not to give the enemy more of us to shoot at and bomb with no lessening of violence. While I was not in favor of the strategy, I did recognize it as a legitimate idea.

As far as I can tell it isn’t working out the way I thought it was supposed to. Violence is up. American casualties are up. Al¬–Qaeda is thriving. How is this winning?

Bush is positioning himself for a no–lose response to General Petraeus’ report on the war this coming September. If Petraeus reports that violence is down, the insurgency is weakening, the civil war is lessening, and peace is coming then the President can declare victory for his strategy. If Petraeus reports that violence is up, the insurgency is strengthening, the civil war is intensifying, and peace is years away then the President can again declare victory for his strategy by claiming we are pocking at the eye of the enemy so, of course, they are stirred up. The President can’t lose. But the American people can.

This is why I suspect George Orwell is writing George Bush’s speeches and talking points. If you want to know what is going on in America today don’t rely on CNN, Fox News, or even NPR. Pick up a copy of Nineteen Eighty–Four.

Voting Christian

Forget about voting Democrat or Republican in 2008, I’m voting Christian. This way I know I am voting for a person of character, and, even better, a white male person of character. The Democrats are pitting gender and ethnic groups against one another. There is Senator Clinton, a white woman, and New Mexico Governor Richardson, a brown Hispanic, and Senator Obama, a Hawaiian. If I want to see a woman as president I have to vote against other groups I would like to see as president as well, like Hispanics and Hawaiians. So, rather than choose along gender, race, and ethnic lines, I will choose along religious lines. And since there are only Christians running, I will vote for the most Christian among them.

I thought it would be easier to vote for the Best Christian than to vote for the person with the best ideas. I find it impossible to discern where any candidate stands regarding war, poverty, immigration, energy, terrorism, homeland security, and the like. No one seems to gives a straight answer on any of these issues, but they are all pretty sure they are Christians. As it turns out, however, this isn’t so clear either.

Simply saying you are a Christian isn’t good enough. Mitt Romney says he is a Christian, but Rev Al Sharpton put the kibosh on that. Fred Thompson says he is a Christian, but uber-Christian James Dobson says no. Hillary Clinton claims to be a Christian, but most Evangelicals I know are not even sure she’s American. John McCain is trying to prove his Christian bona fides by showing how pro-fetus he has been in the Senate, but it doesn’t seem to be working among most Christians.

Russell Moore, dean of the School of Theology at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, says a true Christian is one who puts Jesus first and turns away from his or her own desires. But it is hard to believe that anyone who desires to be President of the United States has put away his or her own work in favor of Jesus, so maybe there are no real Christians running for office.

If this is true I am back where I started: do I vote for a woman or a Hawaiian? I just don’t know.

"Shumail the Shemale" or "Penis Politics in Pakistan"

This is going to get a bit complicated, so let’s take it slow.

Point One. Shumail Raj, a 31¬–year–old Pakistani male, used to be a female. Sixteen years ago she underwent sex reassignment surgery, and has signed a sworn statement to the Pakistani court that she is, and has been for most of her life, a he. A court-appointed panel of Pakistani doctors, however, denied his claim and said that he is a she.

Point Two. Shahzina Tariq, 26, has been a woman all her life. While her gender consistency may be laudable in Pakistan, just being a woman comes with its share of grief. In Shahzina’s case the trouble comes in the form of one of her uncles who wants to sell her off to pay for his gambling debts.

Point Three. To save Shahzina from a life of sexual slavery, Shumail and Shahzina got married a year ago. It seems that while an uncle can sell of his brother’s daughter, he cannot sell another man’s wife. And there’s the rub: is Shahzina another man’s wife, or is she another women’s partner?

Point Four. Given that the Pakistani court has ruled that Shumail, penis or no penis, is in fact a woman, and recognizing that same sex marriage is contrary to Islam, and seeing as how Shahzina’s father wants her marriage to Shumail annulled because it does violate said religion, it seems that Shahzina is once again for sale.

What is interesting of course is the fact that no one, not even Shahzina’s dad, is upset about selling his daughter into prostitution. Interesting but not surprising. When women are seen as chattel this is what happens.

So what shall we make of this? Is it simply an example of Islam’s madness? I don’t think so. The problem is not Islam but the medieval tribal mores that pass as Islam. While the case is extreme, the idea behind it, women as property, is not alien to strains of Orthodox Judaism or Fundamentalist Christianity. The problem Islam faces is trying to function under scrutiny of modern media. If there were reporters sharing the dirty sexual secrets of biblical Jews and medieval Christians we would find the same insanity.

It takes religion a long time to outgrow its tribalist mindset. Liberal and secular Judaisms and Christianities are very late on the scene, and Islam has yet to undergo such a revolution.

So we have two choices. We can invoke the Prime Directive and keep our liberal democratic noses out of another civilization’s business, or we can uphold a universal ethic and shine the harsh light of truth on all tribal insanities wherever they appear. I hope we opt for the latter. And in the meantime somebody please find a way to help Shumail and Shahzina move to Boston.

Priests or Prophets

I gave a speech this weekend that stirred quite a bit of controversy. It wasn’t that I said something new, only that I said it to people who were nowhere near ready to hear it. I spoke about the need to free religion to be what it is meant to be, a finger pointing to Reality rather than what it has become, a self-referential system of doctrines and creeds pointing only to itself.

So many people told me I had insulted them and their religion, that I began to wonder why something I say could have so much power. After all it isn’t that they believed what I was saying. When I suggested that taking the Bible literally made it impossible for us to hear the Word of God speaking in myth and metaphor, no one who was angry with me agreed with me. So why get upset?

If I were attending a speech where the speaker spoke passionately about how 2 + 2 equals 5, I wouldn’t get upset. I would simply determine that the speaker was wrong and ignore him. I wouldn’t feel that my beliefs were challenged or that my faith in mathematics was threatened. So why, if I suggest that the Virgin Birth is not biology but mythology, speaking not to a weird genetic miracle but to the fact that the birth of Jesus is the birth of the extraordinary, do I find the devout so incensed?

When I attend a talk, as I did recently, where the speaker insisted that every time God is mentioned in the Hebrew Bible Jesus is intended, I don’t believe him, but I don’t get angry with him either. My faith is too strong to be shaken by someone else’s belief. On the contrary, I am so certain of what is so, that I relish the opportunity to hear what others hold to be just as true. It seems to me that the proper response of people of faith to the insights of other faiths should be curiosity, not vitriol.

Yet after my talk, no one said to me, “I found what you said to be totally false, but it was interesting to entertain the idea for a moment,” No one said to me, “You know I hold a totally different view of things, and your comments helped me realize how strong my faith truly is.” All I got was, “How dare you!” and “You have insulted by faith and my God.” Honestly, any god that can be insulted isn't really God.

My suspicion is this: people who are upset by my humor and my message are people who are not very certain of what they believe, or if what they believe is true. They want a speaker to either affirm their beliefs or say something so innocuous as to leave their beliefs untouched and their minds untroubled.

I want to trouble your mind. I want to confound your theology. I want to point out that the Emperor has not clothes, and that God has no religion. And I want to hear speakers and read authors who will do the same for me. Religion shouldn’t be comforting but discomforting. This is the difference between priests and prophets. The priest offers comfort, the prophet only discomfort. I am finished with priests. I seek only prophets.

Walking Israel

[I wrote this last November while sitting on the steps overlooking the Western Wall of the Jerusalem Temple.]

I have just prayed at the Wall, slipping a number of tiny prayer sheets into the cracks in hopes that…

Wait a minute; this can’t be right. I don’t believe God is a being separate from the universe who hears prayers and grants or ignores our heartfelt requests. I believe God is the Source and Substance of all reality who manifests as and transcends creation.

I believe the power of prayer is its capacity to shift my consciousness from Mochin d’Katnut, narrow mind, to Mochin d’Gadlut, spacious mind; from selfishness to selflessness; from the part and partial to the whole and holy. I pray not to be heard, but to hear; not to be present to God but to be revealed as God, the One Who is all things.

I don’t believe in chosen peoples and promised lands. I don’t think God plays favorites or deals in real estate. But I do believe—no, I know, I experience— that there are certain places on this planet that hold deep promise for personal and planetary transformation and renewal. Israel is one of these places.

When I walk the streets of Jerusalem and allow the city to work her magic, shifting me from narrow mind to spacious mind, I walk with Solomon and feel the call to wisdom; I walk with Jesus and feel the call to love; I walk with Mohammed and feel the call to surrender.

When I walk the Baha’i Gardens of Haifa, I walk with Baha’u’llah, the 19th century Persian prophet, and hear the call to universal justice. When I walk the winding streets of Safed, I walk with Cordovero (1522-1570) and hear the call of the Ineffable.

For me, Israel is all about walking with God and God’s prophets. I am less concerned with the Israel of Ben Gurion and more with the Israel of Ben Abuyah (yes the first century heretic and iconoclast, there is nothing more Jewish than that). For me Israel is more about the Wall, the Dome of the Rock, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the Garden Tomb, and the Shrine of the Book than it is about politics, warfare, or the rapture.
The promise of modern Israel is the hope that it can live up to the promise of timeless Israel.

I believe that humanity is the early hours of a spiritual renaissance, and I come to Israel to hear the clock tick. I come here to be reminded of the new covenant promised by God in Jeremiah, a covenant written on our hearts revealing a God within calling us to godliness without.

I walk streets with diverse people some praying for the old times, others for the end times. I pray for the new times. So I walk and I listen and I hope that my next step will be my first step in God, with God, as God.

Religion Is Made Up

Religion is made up; all religion, not just other people’s religions.

Religion is made up. God didn’t choose the Jews, have a baby, or ask Mohammed to recite.

Religion is made up, but Reality is not. Yet religion trumps Reality in the hearts and minds of millions, maybe billions of people.

Religion is made up, but Truth is not. Yet religion blasphemes Truth with self-serving tales of power and exploitation.

Religion is made up. Once you know this it is hard to be religious. You just can’t justify all the rules and ruckus. I know because I keep trying. I keep telling myself religion matters. But it doesn’t.

You know what matters? Love matters. Compassion matters. Justice matters. Peace matters. Humility matters. Nature matters. Truth matters. Reality matters. You matter.

So what do I do when I know religion is made up? First I remember that all philosophy and literature is made up as well. Second I remember that just because Plato invented the dialogues of Socrates, and Shakespeare invented Hamlet and Lear doesn’t mean that Socrates, Hamlet, and Lear don’t speak Truth. Fiction may preclude fact, but in no way does it obscure Truth.

Religion is made up. At its best its stories have the potential to capture our imagination and feed our souls by revealing the best to which we humans can aspire. At its worst it can strip us of our humanity and invite us to make real the darkest fantasies we can conjure. Torah, Gospels, Qur’an, and Gita contain insights of such power, grandeur and wisdom that we say them come from God. They also contain the obscenely violent, misogynist, and xenophobic rants of fearful frightened men climbing to power over the dead bodies of their enemies.

We can’t free religion of either genius or madness, but we can free ourselves from mistaking them both for the Word of God. How? By realizing that religion is made up. No one goes to war over the meaning of Hamlet. No one kills another to decide whom Shakespeare loved best.

If we admit that religion is made up we can enjoy it without being abused by it. If we admit that religion is made up we can honor myth without having to flatten it into fact. If we admit that religion is made up we can shake off the fear and violence it sanctions and address its one timeless message: do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly.

I Believe in Victims; I Believe in Accidents

No victims, no accidents. That is what I heard over and again while attending a New Age fair in Atlanta, GA this weekend. The topic was the murders at Virginia Tech. The victims—oh, sorry, the volunteers—who died during Mr. Cho’s rampage had agreed to die (just as Cho had agreed to play the murderer) before they were even born in order to make some greater point that God needed made. And what is true of Virginia Tech is also true of deaths in Iraq, Afghanistan, and throughout the world. No victims, no accidents.

I believe in victims. A victim is a person who suffers from something over which she or he has no control, and for which she or he has no responsibility. Saying “I don’t believe in victims” is really saying, “You are responsible for whatever happens to you, and I don’t have to feel bad for or lend a hand to help you or anyone.”

I believe in accidents. Accidents are events that happen without intent. Note I didn’t say ‘without cause.” Everything has a cause. I knocked the class of orange juice off my writing table by accident. I didn’t intend to do it, but there were a number of causal factors in my doing it. I placed the glass too close to the table’s edge. I leaned too far across the table to grab a reference book. My elbow swung out and pushed the glass so far over the edge that gravity pulled it earthward. Lots of causes, no intent. An accident.

Intent, or rather the lack of it, is central to both victims and accidents. To say “no victims, no accidents” is to say everything that happens does so by intent. Everyone gets what they intend to get, good or bad, and there is no reason to be upset one way or the other.

One reason we believe in “no victims, no accidents” is that we, like Einstein, can’t stomach the idea that God plays dice with the universe. We don’t like chance; we want an ordered universe. But chance is not opposed to order. Toss a pair of dice one hundred times and you will get more sevens and elevens than twos and twelves. Guaranteed. What you cannot guarantee is what number will come up on any given roll of the dice.

Believing in order need not harden one’s heart to victims or close one’s mind to accident.
There are victims and we should feel deep sadness at their suffering. There are accidents and we should learn to live without certainty. Feeling sad and navigating anxiety open both heart and mind, and keep us humble. Living with reality is accepting what is, not excusing what is.

So many people I met this weekend wanted to be numb. They mistook this numbness for equanimity, even peace, even joy. They wore it like a badge of honor, a PHD in spiritual attainment. There is no suffering, there is no injustice, there is no horror. Everyone is simply playing out her or his agreed-to roles.

I couldn’t help noticing that everyone who told me this also told me that he or she had attained or was about to attain the American Dream of health, wealth, and happiness. It was clear to me that worrying about or feeling real sadness over the fate of others less fortunate then themselves was just going to muddy the waters of success, and they would have none of that. I can’t decide which is worse: a religion that robs us of mind or a spirituality that robs us of heart. Luckily in America we get to have both.

Witch Way for America

I recently read that the Department of Veterans Affairs has, after a decade of foot dragging, finally agreed to allow Wiccans who served in the US military to mark their graves with the encircled five-pointed star that is the symbol of their faith. I am happy for Wiccans and proud of America, but two ironies haunt me.

The first irony is that it took the most overtly Christian administration in American history to recognize the pentagram as a legitimate religious symbol. This is so cool, and so American. It shows what a secular democracy is all about. The Bible, of course, is not American, secular or democratic, “Thou shall not suffer a witch to live” (Exodus 22:18). Stoning and later burning witches at the stake was just doing the will of Allah, oh, sorry, YHVH, God, Jesus, Whomever. In this country burning witches is associated with Salem, MA which makes me wonder why a tobacco company would name a cigarette after it. When you light up a Salem are you symbolically reenacting witch burning?

[To find out, wrap yourself in thick iron chains and throw yourself into a lake. If you drown you are not reenacting Salem witch burnings. You are also not smoking. Or breathing. You are dead. So, on second thought, don’t try this.]

Actually the Hebrew of Exodus is a bit more nuanced than the English. It may mean, “Thou shalt not provide witches with livelihood.” In other words you don’t have to kill them, just don’t hire them. Which brings up the question why I see so many signs for local Tarot card and palm readers in my overwhelmingly Christian town. I wonder if people read the Bible, or only those parts that fit their opinions? Actually I don’t really wonder about this. I know we all edit the Bible in our own image, after our likeness, reflecting our madness, bias, and bigotry.

If you believe, as many of my neighbors do, that God wrote the King James Version of the Bible, you know that homosexuals and witches (not to mention shrimp, jumbo and otherwise) are abominations to God (see Leviticus 18:22; Deuteronomy 18:12; and Leviticus 9:12). Why focus on one and not the other two? (I am as guilty of this as the next person. I keep kosher and don’t eat shrimp.)

The second irony is that Wicca claims to be a religion whose central tenet is not harming other human beings. If this is true, what are Wiccans doing in the Armed Services in the first place? I served in the military, but my religion is not shy about smiting and fighting and marching behind a god who is a Man of War (Isaiah 42:13). Shouldn’t people whose faith tells to them to do no harm or to love their enemies refuse to serve in the military? I guess Wiccans are a lot like the rest of us: we don’t let religion get in the way of doing what we want.

Anyway, I am grateful to anyone willing to put her or his life on the line in service to this country, and I am pleased wiccans now have their religious symbol recognized by the government. I am only sad that they need to use it.

Booing the Bible

Can you imagine booing in church? How about blowing a raspberry in your synagogue or mosque? Well, that is what one Nashville rabbi is suggesting— oh, that rabbi is me; I’m suggesting we do this. For a moment I thought I worked for the New York Times. But it’s true. I think we ought to boo in church.

Imagine this: You are sitting in synagogue on a Saturday morning during the Torah reading. Imagine further that you actually understand what is being read, and, because you do, you hear the reader chanting, “When God brings you to the Land to possess it, He will thrust away many nations from before you…and you will smite them—you shall utterly destroy them… break apart their altars; smash their pillars; hack down their sacred trees; and burn their carved images” (Deuteronomy 7:1-5). And imagine that you realize that this is divinely sanctioned genocide, and that you are opposed to such genocide. So you boo the Bible. Out loud. Out loud loudly.

What would happen? They could throw you out, but so what? Your action might cause a few people to think about what they are reading and to Whom they are offering their loyalty and love. Or a rabbinic court might ban you from the community, and people will talk about what you did to deserve this. Or the rabbi might ask you why you are booing and you could engage the congregation in a dialogue about divinely sanctioned violence. Regardless of what happens you win, and, more importantly, sanity wins.

Or imagine you are in church and the reading is from the New Testament and Jesus is damning the fig tree for not bearing fruit out of season. Or he is threatening his opponents with eternal damnation. Or St. Paul is ranting about keeping women silent and in their place. And you boo. What is the worst that could happen? OK, eternal damnation, but what is the second worse?

Or imagine you are in a mosque and the Koran or imam is calling for the killing of the nonbeliever, or the fellow Muslim who believes a bit differently than the imam does. And you boo. What is the worse that could happen? OK, don’t think about that. Just boo.

Booing may be the key to freeing humanity from the insanity that passes for holiness in so many religious settings today. Booing is all-American. We boo politicians, comedians, and movie stars when they do or say things that offend us; why not boo religious texts, teachings, and teachers when they do the same? Booing what is evil or absurd in our religions might just free them and God from the madness that threatens to set the world on fire.

So here are three suggestions for fomenting a religious revolution: 1. Boo whenever you hear injustice and cruelty preached in your religious community. 2. Print and display bumper stickers that say, “Boo if you love Jesus (God, Allah, etc.).” 3. Use the video function on your cell phone to capture the mad teachings you are booing and post them on YouTube.

What do you think? Don’t boo me, now.

Lukewarm Sucks

If you ever wondered whether newspaper editorial illustrators actually read the editorials before illustrating them, wonder no more. Not that I have the answer to this question, just that it is a stupid thing to wonder about, so stop. I can tell you, however, that Web Bryant, who illustrated Michael Medved’s On Religion column for today’s USA TODAY (Monday, April 23, 2007) probably didn’t.

Medved wrote about the decision of the Jewish Theological Seminary to accept openly gay and lesbian students into its rabbinical program. The piece was called “Goldilocks’ faith serves lukewarm mush,” and Bryant was illustrating the lukewarm mush by showing us three bowls of porridge: one hot, one cold, and the other stabbed with a giant spoon sporting a large white Christian Cross. The drawing wasn’t that good, and the essay was predictable, but the Cross did make it memorable.

Michael Medved tells us he grew up in a Conservative Jewish home, but that he, two brothers, and his father have migrated to Orthodox Judaism, while another brother is a Reform Jew. Clearly the center cannot hold, which shows that Michael never read or understood Goldilocks.

In Goldilocks’ world the middle is just right not lukewarm. Goldilocks is a golden haired Buddhist following the Middle Way, or a blond Confucian adhering to chun yung, the Mean. In Michael’s world the middle is weak and wishy-washy. Choose damn you: hot or cold, hard or soft, big or small. Clearly when it comes to homosexuals Michael chooses hot, hard, and big. I don’t blame him.

I agree with Michael: “watered down versions of religious faith fail.” Where I disagree is over the implication that Reform Judaism is watered down. Today’s Reform Judaism is actually thickening up. Traditional norms, rituals, and Hebrew liturgy are making just enough of a comeback as to thicken Reform into Conservatism Lite. What I would say is that lukewarm religion fails, and that contemporary Reform Judaism is definitely lukewarm.

The original Reform Judaism of the late 19th century was ice cold. It had bite. It stood for something. You either loved it or hated it. It was either genius or heresy. Today it is long forgotten as Conservative and Reform Judaisms slowly merge into a massive blob of tasteless porridge, Orthodoxy is dynamic, creative, hot, hard, and authentic. It is also homophobic, misogynist, and medieval.

We need a new Judaism. One that is a icy alternative to Orthodoxy’s blistering heat. One that blends the Neo-Hasidic fervor of Jewish Renewal with the theological daring of Mordecai Kaplan, and the religious humanism of Martin Buber. We need a Judaism unafraid to be deeply spiritual, contemplative, postmodern, scientific, soulful, and blessedly anarchistic. We need a Judaism of which Spinoza and Einstein could be proud. We need a Judaism Michael Medved would be as passionate about rejecting as he is about the Orthodoxy he embraces. Michael is right, Goldilocks is wrong. Lukewarm sucks.

There is No Morality Without God

There is no morality without God. Without Him we wouldn’t know right from wrong, or good from evil. Millions of Americans believe this, and I am one of them.

Without God I would have no idea that it’s OK to kill adulterers, witches, and wayward sons. Without God I would have assumed that selling my daughter into slavery was wrong, and committing genocide was evil. Without God it would never occur to me that Shi’ites have a moral obligation to murder Sunnis and vice versa. Slavery, too, would have been labeled immoral in my book had I not the guidance of God’s Book.

I need God to instruct me in His ways because left to my own devices I would probably choose a more live-and-let-live lifestyle, following the advice of Rabbi Hillel, “Do not do unto others what you would not want others to do unto you.” He isn’t quoting God, just figuring things out for himself.

God also teaches us to love our neighbor and the stranger, to feed the hungry, and see to the welfare of the poor and powerless. These are great ideas, but I suspect I would have come up with these on my own. It is good to know God approves, but I probably didn‘t need Him to tell me to care for others in the first place. After all there are many godless societies that practice the Golden Rule. What they have to learn is how to wage genocide.

What I find troubling, however, is the fact that God didn’t want us to know good and evil. When Eve eats of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden she is not rewarded but punished. So is Adam for doing the same. If God wanted us to be moral He would have offered us the fruit Himself, but He didn’t. I can only draw one conclusion from this: God would rather us not be moral.

You see before Adam and Eve became moral they were naked and unashamed. As soon as they knew the difference between right and wrong they were ashamed and afraid. The fruit of the Tree didn’t supply them with moral insights, just a sense of guilt over having eaten from the Tree itself.

This is made clear when the First Folks leave the Garden and become the First Family, only to have their son Cain murder his brother Abel. If Adam and Eve knew that killing was wrong you would think they would have taught that to their kids, but Cain seems to be clueless in this regard. So the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil was really the Tree of Knowledge of Shame and Fear, and I think this is why God didn’t want Adam and Eve to eat from it.

People who are naked and fearless are rarely a threat to others. If I don’t fear you I might get to know you. True, I might not like you, but I without fear I won’t try to enslave or kill you. Fear is the root of most evil for fear drives out love, justice and compassion.

So I am glad we have God to scare us and teach us how to be scared of others. Without Him I might not hate homosexuals, be obsessed with women’s hair and menstrual blood, or hope to kill an infidel now and again. Thanks God.

What Is Spirituality?

What is spirituality? I am asked the question quite frequently, and my answer changes as I change. Which is to say, I don’t have one definitive response. But here is my answer for today:

“Spirituality” is best used as a verb rather than a noun. Spirituality is a practice, the cultivation of states of consciousness and traits of behavior that place the egoic “I” in the larger context of the transpersonal I AM. Spirituality is doing: meditating, chanting, praying, etc. The result of this doing is the maturation of “mochin d’gadlut,” spacious mind, that level of consciousness that knows all things to be part of the One Thing that is God, Tao, Allah, Adonai, etc.

Unfortunately most people use “spirituality” to refer to a feeling, though what that feeling is often differs from person to person. Regardless of the specific feeling to which one may refer, feelings themselves are fleeting. They come and go and are not directly controllable by the will. If they were you would choose to feel happy all the time, and the only people I know who are so happy are people who are ingesting products that are illegal. Since feelings are ever-changing, identifying spirituality with a fixed feeling set is setting yourself up for spiritual failure.

Luckily, spirituality is not about feeling one way or another. It is about cultivating that spaciousness of mind that allows you to feel your feelings (whatever they happen to be at the moment) without being blown away by them. When you are happy, be happy without wanting to be happy forever. When you are sad, be sad without worrying that you will be sad forever. Spirituality is cultivating the spaciousness of mind and heart that allows you to engage each moment with curiosity and compassion, seeking what is just and kind in any given situation, and doing it.

“I am spiritual but not religious” doesn’t tell me much; in fact I never really know what the person saying that really means, though I can’t help but suspect that the speaker is saying, “I would rather not do any serious practice, and am content to just grasp on to some vague feeling of something or other; but I don’t want to feel guilty about my inaction. Hence, I am spiritual but not religious.”

I don’t have a problem with people who don’t practice. I don’t have a problem with people who say they are spiritual but not religious. I just don’t expect too much from them. Of course I don’t expect too much from those who say they are religious either.

I do expect something from people who claim to engage in serious contemplative practice on a daily basis. I expect that they are continually growing in self-awareness and self-transcendence. I expect that they are continually glimpsing Self-awareness and embracing both Self and Other as the One and Only. I do expect that they are increasingly kind, just, humble, and engaged without the constrictive and conflictive baggage of a shadow-blind (and shadow projecting) ego. After all this is what spiritual practice is all about.

Coo Coo for Cocoa Christ

Remember how upset we enlightened westerns were when the Islamic world erupted in outrage over cartoon images of the Prophet Mohammed, peace be upon him? How could they get so apoplectic over an image? How could they not understand the centrality of freedom of speech to democracy, and the centrality of democracy to everything we believe to be holy? They must be so medieval; so backward; so frightened of freedom as to be unredeemable.

Lucky for us we live in the heart of Christendom where such madness could never hold sway. Unless of course you happen to sculpt a nude chocolate image of Christ crucified.

This exactly what Cosimo Cavallaro, and Italian-American artist in Manhattan did, and the response was, well positively medieval. Bill Donohue of the Catholic League called it “one of the worst assaults on Christian sensibilities ever.” Cavallaro and his wife began receiving death threats—not from irate Muslims, but from, can it be, God fearing Christians. Yes the followers of the God of Love and Prince of Peace plot to murder the Willy Wanka of Christian iconography.

Can you imagine Sam Harris, one of America’s leading atheists, threatening to kill someone for making a chocolate nude of Marilyn Murray O’Hare? Religion is the breeding ground for violent nut jobs. If Christians demand moderate Muslims decry the madness of their fanatic co-religionists, I think it is only fair that Catholics come out and disavow the dark (chocolate) fantasies of Bill Donohue, and Protestants disavow any connection with or support for the chocophobes in their midst.

Personally I like the idea of a chocolate Jesus. It certainly makes the idea of eating his body far more palatable to me. Imagine a new faith with a communion of chocolate body and hot chocolate blood.

The fact is some 15 years ago or so, I wrote a novel, never published, entitled “Play Kaddish For Me” in which the hero, a psycho-P.I., battled a bishop of a new brand of Christianity that did in fact eat chocolate Jesuses at its communions. Actually, every believer who died was turned into chocolate and eaten by loved ones at her or his funeral.

Like I said, the novel never left my computer, so the Catholic League never tracked me down, and Protestant hit squads left me alone. I always hoped to publish the story some day, but after reading about Cavallaro’s experience I will reconsider. I might be willing to die for my faith, but I have no desire to die for someone else’s.

God Redux

“The only option if one is to be true to what we know to be true is to abandon the word “God” altogether.” This from an email responding to my essay on the God of Science and the Science of God.

It seems to me that this idea is too narrow. We have, in fact, three choices: We can maintain the ancient and medieval gods of our various tribes and competing religions and allow them to take us to war over and over again. Or, we can, as the emailer suggests, abandon all notions of God and find solace in a universal scientific materialism. Or, we can, as I propose, reinvent God and proselytize with a vengeance.

I don’t think people can do without God. The idea has been around almost as long as homo sapiens sapiens, but it has not always meant the same thing. What I propose is a new vision of God, one that transcends tribe, gender, ethnicity, race, etc. One that leads us beyond the politics of piety and its toxic mix of nationalism and religion. One that does away with reward and punishment, heaven and hell, and salvation and damnation.

This new image of God will draw heavily from philosophers such as Spinoza, theologians such as Tillich, and philosophers such as Whitehead. It will be unabashedly panentheistic, seeing God as that which manifests and transcends the world open to us through our senses and machines. Such a God does indeed incarnate as man, as many claim is true of Jesus, and also as woman, roses, oceans, bees, and bedbugs. The universe, indeed the multiverse, is God’s body. And it is forever changing for God is change as well as the changeless. God is paradox, and nothing less that the tools of paradox—quantum physics and Zen koans, to name but two—can help us realize God.

The prophets of this God are people like Amma, the hugging saint of India, Ramana Maharshi, Alan Watts, Sri Aurobindo, Toni Packer, and J. Krishnamurti. Erich Fromm (To Have or to Be), Aldous Huxley (The Island), and Ken Wilbur (Integral Spirituality) will be among our pundits. Einstein, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King will be our guiding lights.

My point is simple, people need God. They need a word that reveals the greater reality in which they live. I am not hung up on the word, and one is free to use any number of synonyms, but to abandon the idea of God in hopes of creating a better world is a waste of time. What we need is a fresh and relevant God-talk. What we have is idol worship among the conventional theists, and idol bashing among the conventional atheists. Both of these are silly.

No, the fearsome god of Abraham, the god who destroys peoples and planets and who demands blood sacrifice either of sons or his, will not die overnight. But if we can powerfully and plainly articulate a vision of a truer god (God itself being beyond knowing) the old god will eventually go the way of Zeus. I only hope this happens before his followers literally love bomb us to death.

God of Science/Science of God

What can we believe? This is the question that occupies my students and myself as we enter into the final hours of the course I created called “The God of Science and the Science of God.” During the past months we read over a dozen books, watched many video interviews with leading scientists, and wrestled with questions of enduring significance. Here are some of them.

Who is the God of science? The nondual consciousness that manifests all reality.

What is the science of God? Since God is reality, all science is in a sense a science of God. In addition there are disciplines that investigate this consciousness more directly: contemplation, meditation, neuroscience, and neurotheology to name but four.

Can those of us who take science seriously believe in God? Absolutely. The universe is not a random accident but the unfolding of a universal nondual consciousness. God is that consciousness.

Is God purposeful? Yes. God’s purpose is God’s nature, and God’s nature is to manifest a universe capable of knowing itself to be a manifestation of God.

Does God have a plan for my life? Yes. God’s plan is for you to realize your true nature as God incarnate.

Does God choose one people over another? No. The idea of chosenness is a sociological fiction and has nothing to do with God.

Does God save some and damn others? No. Salvation and damnation, heaven and hell, are manipulative tools of political power and coercion and have nothing to do with God.

What kind of religion works with science? One that is not afraid of myth.

What kind of science works with religion? One that is not afraid of mystery.

Where does this leave religious believers? At a crossroads. If we choose biblical literalism over science we must live in abject fear of truth. If we choose a mythic reading of scripture we are free to blend the knowledge of science with the wisdom of faith.

What is the key ingredient to the science-religion dialogue? Humility. Humility on the part of science as it learns to respect the mystery its own methods reveals. Humility on the part of religion as it learns to free God from the superstition of our ancestors.

Does the God you find in this class transcend and even reject religion and its creeds and competitions? Yes. This class doesn’t negate religion but it demands a new understanding of it, one that overthrows the triumphalism as the heart of the three Abrahamic faiths crumbles. The question is will these faiths crumble with it?