I, Hypocrite

I got this question via email from a reader of this blog. Here is an edited version:

Honestly, rabbi, you are very hypocritical. You say you don’t believe in the traditional creator God who judges us and sends us to heaven or hell, yet you counseled that woman who feared her nonChristian loved ones were going to hell as if you did believe. Why not just tell she’s trapped in a delusion and to get over it?

One of the few things I have learned so far in my life is never to use other people’s suffering as an opportunity to push my agenda. This woman didn’t want to hear how her damning god was not God, but how her god could love her relatives enough to welcome them into heaven with her. So I spoke with her from her own perspective rather than mine. I don’t think this is hypocritical; I think it is good pedagogy.

When someone is suffering there is no point in telling them to simply stop suffering. You have to enter into their world, find out what in this world is causing them to suffer, and then offer them a way to navigate their world to alleviate the suffering.   

The Real War on Christianity

America is an ideal that can never be completely fulfilled. That’s not something to be disparaged but celebrated: we are always looking to live our values in more and more expansive ways.

One of the great freedoms that makes the United States exceptional is the First Amendment, especially the clause against the establishment of religion. It is a value under siege in our own country, often lacking altogether in many others.

Take, for example, the war on Christianity. I’m not talking about the fake war that floods the airwaves at Christmas time with pundits mistaking the separation of church and state for some Stalinist attack on Christianity, but the real war being waged against Christianity in other countries. In countries with authentic religious freedom there is no war on Christianity. The danger to Christianity (and other faiths) comes not from freedom but from the lack of freedom.

Muslim extremists in Nigeria have killed scores of Christians simply because they are Christians. Muslim converts to Christianity in Pakistan and Iran face the death penalty since conversion out of Islam is a capital offense in those countries. Indonesia has seen dozens of churches attacked by Islamists, and as Egypt and Syria move more deeply into the Islamist camp the oldest Christian communities face extinction.

But don’t imagine it is only Islam that is taking on Christianity. Hindu nationalists in India are trying to outlaw Christian missionary work, and Communist China and Vietnam are doing their best to crush their growing Christian movements. And in the Holy Land itself Christianity is caught between Judaism and Islam, each of which is determined to keep Christianity from growing.

What all of these countries have in common is a lack of religious freedom. This is not a matter of Christians being more open than Muslims, Hindus, or Americans being more open than is the Chinese, this is a matter of the United States been rooted in 18^th Century Enlightenment values and allowing those values to expand our hearts and our laws.

While too many politicians want to take us back to the 1950’s I want to go back to the 1750’s. I want to see a rebirth of the Age of Reason. Of course this was also a time of slavery and there was no women’s suffrage, and anyone who reads this blog regularly knows that is not what I am talking about. But the freedoms we cherish and seek to expand to all people have their roots in the radical ideas and ideals of the Enlightenment, ideas and ideals that are under attack today from within our own country.

There is a real war on Christianity, but not in the United States. Here we are at war with the Enlightenment, and too often that war is being waged in the name of Christianity. It is high time for us to make both wars public. And until we do we will do nothing to stop either.   

Atheists One and All

[I wrote my last post while delayed in at the airport in Springfield, MO. I managed to get from there to Chicago, and now I’m stuck here. I will post this when (if) I get home.]

I’m now stuck at O’Hare. New airport; new conversation.

“Do you believe in God?” The fellow asking me this is a Christian minister who overheard me say that I teach religion and Bible at Middle Tennessee State University.

“It depends what you mean by “God.,” I said. “If, for example, you mean a God who has a son, no I don’t believe in God.”

“Then you are an atheist, since there is no God other than God and that means the Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.”

“Far enough,” I said, “Do you believe in Krishna?”

“The Hindu God?”

“No, the Lord God of the universe, the one true God as described in the Bhagavad Gita.”

“Of course not.”

“Then you, too, are an atheist.”

It never pays to be clever. What I thought was a clear and compelling argument against theological hubris was in face an invitation to a battle of the gods.

“I’m talking about the God of the Bible,” he said.

“Why is your God more true than someone else’s?

“Because it is the God of the Bible.”

“Why is your Bible better than mine or better than the Gita?”

“Because it is the Word of God.”

“Your God is true because your Bible says he’s true, and your Bible is true because you God says its true.”

“Yes.”

“And you don’t see this as circular reasoning?”

“It is simply the truth.”

And that is why I am always wary of truth.

How Much Do Love Free Will?

Free will was a hot topic this morning. I was sitting in the Springfield, MO airport watching the news accounts of an American soldier’s murderous rampage through an Afghan village when the fellow next to me mutter, “poor bastard.” I glanced over at him and he took it as a rebuke.

“I’m not saying I don’t feel bad for the people he killed and their families, I’m only saying that we should have compassion on the guy: four tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, the guy just snapped. The system killed those people as much as this sergeant did.”

I was sympathetic to this argument, but a woman sitting to his other side disagreed. He should have gotten help if he was stressed, she said. He had choices other than killing people. Don’t make him a victim; he had free will.

I’m not one who believes over much in free will. Most of our decisions are made subconsciously, and the conscious mind only lays claim to and creates a rationale for doing what the subconscious mind already decided to do. I shared my doubts about free will, and the woman said that it is free will that makes us human; it is free will that allows us to be held accountable for what we do. Without free will, she said, we would be puppets, and life would not be worth living. That is why God gave us free will.

I asked her is she would want to live in a world where murder and war couldn’t happen?

No, she said. I want to live in a world where they don’t happen but could happen, but don’t happen because people choose not to do them.

So if some researcher developed a vaccine that we could erase the urge to kill and make war, you wouldn’t want people to take it?

She wouldn’t. It would rob us of free will, and God needs us to be free. Why? Because if people couldn’t do evil, God couldn’t punish them in hell, and if God couldn’t punish them in hell and we all went to heaven then what is the value of heaven?

In other words, I said, you prefer hell on earth—murder, war, brutality of all kinds—so that some people can enjoy eternity in heaven?

She did.

What do you think? If we could vaccinate humanity against murder and war the way we can vaccinate ourselves against polio, would you vote to use it?

Voting My Values

I believe in voting my values. That’s why I can’t vote for any of the men running for president in 2012, including President Obama. My reason? All of them oppose polygamy while Judaism supports it. How do I know? Habayit Hayehudi Hashalem told me so.

Habayit Hayehudi Hashalem (The Complete Jewish Household) is an organization promoting polygamy among Jews. According to Habayit Hayehudi Hashalem Jews suffer from an over abundance of single Jewish women and a dearth of single Jewish men. Their solution is polygamy: matching these single women to already married Jewish men. I am in favor of growing the Jewish people, so why not return to our biblical  roots and allow men to have multiple wives?

Unlike Mormons who outlawed polygamy for all time, we Jews only banned it for a short time. About 1000 years ago Rabbi Gershom ben Judah of Mainz, Germany banned polygamy, but the ban only reached as far as Germany and France, and the Jews of Spain, Italy, and the East continued the practice. Some rabbis today argue that Gershom’s ban has run out and polygamy is lawful once again; hence Habayit Hayehudi Hashalem.

If allowing and encouraging Jewish men to have more than one wife doesn’t appeal to you, I have another solution to the problem of too many unmarried Jewish women. China’s one child policy resulted in the infanticide of countless baby girls leaving China with a lot of single men and too few single women. Since we Jews have the opposite problem, why not create an organization that matches single Chinese men to single Jewish women?

Jews in China go back to the 7^th or 8^th century, so we have a history of marrying Chinese people. This may be why Jews love Chinese food, though that link may be controversial. Anyway, all I’m saying is that this is worth considering.