Christian Buddhism

I've been considering the possibility of becoming a Buddhist without leaving Christianity. I know there are a lot of people who would view this as nonsense, or even blasphemy, but I've thought for some time that the idea has merit.

Back when I was in college, I took a philosophy course in which we examined eastern religions/philosophies (there's not really a clear delineation for most of them). I found them all very interesting, but I was particularly taken by Buddhism, and even way back then, I thought that so much of Buddhist thought was rather compatible with Christian thought within the practical realm, although obviously not the theological. Still where Buddhism in its original form was essentially atheistic, believing in the non-existence of higher beings, in that gap, one could place the God of Abraham and have a pretty solid system of morality that was quite compatible with Christianity.

At the center of Buddhism was the idea of following the Noble Eightfold Path, which I present here, cribbed from Wikipedia and edited for clarity and brevity:

1. Right View: recognizing our actions have consequences, death is not the end, and our actions and beliefs have consequences after death.
2. Right Resolve: striving toward non-violence and avoiding violent and hateful conduct.
3. Right Speech: no lying, no abusive speech, no divisive speech, no idle chatter.
4. Right Conduct or Action: no killing or injuring, no taking what is not given, no sexual misconduct, no material desires.
5. Right Livelihood: no trading in weapons, living beings, meat, liquor, or poisons.
6. Right Effort: preventing the arising of unwholesome states, and generating wholesome states.
7. Right Mindfulness: a quality that guards or watches over the mind, the stronger it becomes, the weaker unwholesome states of mind become, weakening their power "to take over and dominate thought, word and deed."
8. Right samadhi: practicing meditation, culminating into equanimity and mindfulness.

While certainly there are values here that Christianity doesn’t uphold, like the avoidance of meat, they are not incompatible. Of particular importance is that all of these things are values I nonetheless hold for myself (I am a vegetarian, for instance).

As always, the thing I strive for in a post is feedback and dialogue. In this case, I would particularly like to hear from both Christians and Buddhists as to what they might think. (I don't personally know any Buddhists, but I'd like to.)

The Invention of Religion

Comedian Ricky Gervais is a funny guy, a very talented comedian, and an outspoken atheist. In his movie The Invention of Lying, there is a scene where the character he plays invents religion. If you haven't seen the movie, you have to understand the concept: the film takes place in a parallel world where humans haven't evolved the ability to lie, and Mark Bellison (played by Gervais) is the first person to ever lie. Because of Bellison's ability to lie, and everyone else's inability, every time he lies, people believe him. Eventually, Bellison tells everyone that there is a powerful man in the sky who is watching over everyone, and this man rewards good behavior in a special place after death.

It's funny, but there's something about it that bothers me. Gervais is making a statement about religion as an atheist that I don't think is true. That implied statement is that religion wouldn't exist without lying. He's suggesting that the source of all religious ideas is someone telling a lie.

(Perhaps it's important to take an aside here and talk about the nature of lying in itself. I want to distinguish a difference between lying, which is to deliberately tell someone something that one knows is false, and merely saying something which may not be true but one believes it to be a fact. Gervais and other atheists may believe that there is no God, but when a theist talks about God, they're not lying, they're talking about the truth as they see it.)

Now this is the thing, and the point of this piece: while there may be religions that started by someone telling a lie (and I can think of a few likely candidates, but I won't go there), I don't believe that that's how most religions were started, even if all religion is bunk. I can think of a lot of other ways that religion could be started, and I actually believe they are more likely.

There are a lot of variations on the idea of religion starting as the result of philosophical thought; these are not quite lies, but rather people thinking deeply about the world around them and coming to conclusions that the world is a certain way supernaturally because it somehow makes sense to them. The most simple form of this is the likely scenario of people trying to explain natural phenomena without scientific knowledge. Imagine living in a primitive society and experiencing thunderstorms. Where is that noise coming from? A lot of polytheistic religions have a god of thunder, and I imagine if you don’t know where thunder comes from, you would think there's something in the sky making that noise, and maybe it's a powerful man with a giant hammer? If you start imagining things this way, it would likely follow that you'll assign gods to other aspects of nature. There must be a god of the sun, who makes sure it shines and always crosses the sky on schedule each day. It would also make sense that there's a goddess of the moon, then. And so on and so forth, and someone eventually gives these gods names and comes up with stories about them that stick in the cultural consciousness. None of this is lying per se, but attempts to explain nature and the world around us.

I think some religions start with someone thinking that surely there must be a higher power, and surely that power must care about humankind and our moral choices. That someone puts into words a moral code, and expresses that God or the gods endorses this moral code, because of course they would. This person or persons sincerely believe this to be true. (I think we see a bit of this in already established religions, such as the many doctrines of Christianity that were established hundreds of years after Christ. Original sin? The rapture? Not in the Bible, but someone thought they made sense, so they became doctrine.) Honestly, it's a fine line here between lying (this is truth because I want you to believe it's true) and pontification (this is the truth because I am certain that it's right).

I think one can't rule out the idea of religion starting because of a person just being the right sort of crazy. There are a lot of people who hear voices in their heads, and there are certainly more than a few who decided (or the voice told them) that it was the voice of God. If they hear the voice of "God" and it's telling them things that aren't too farfetched, then when they tell other people that God is talking to them, they could easily be believed, and a religion could be born. On a similar note, a lot of people believe that those who had visions of God or something divine were either crazy or had ingested some sort of hallucinogenic substance. If their visions made some sort of sense, it could start or add to the religion of a group of people who believe in those visions.

All of the scenarios I have suggested so far have suppposed no actual supernatural intervention, but really, I don't think you can rule it out, and if you consider the supernatural, there are all sorts of other scenarios. You don't even have to get into the concept of religion possibly being true (although I of course don't rule that out either).

If there are supernatural powers out there that can influence people in some way, then there's certainly the possibility of those powers influencing religious thought. If there was a powerful being that wasn't God as westerners tend to think of him (omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, and creator of the universe), that being might nonetheless for one reason or another want to be thought of as God, and influence people to think that way. I suppose in such a case, religion is technically still a lie, but not a lie from humans. If an angel (a word that just means "messenger") came to you with a message from God, and the angel looked very impressive, you might be inclined to believe that message.

There may in fact be multiple "gods" out there vying for people's attention, and each would have a message of truth that would be different from the messages of other gods. Perhaps these messages were even actually true, but only within a specific scope of time or region. I don't know who originally came up with this idea, but many have suggested that there are many gods, and these gods get power based on how many people they can get to believe in them. (Terry Pratchett actually has a novel that is largely about exploring this concept humorously as part of his Diskworld series called Small Gods; it's a terrific novel that I think is both entertaining and thoughtful about the nature of religion that I highly recommend.) The idea seems too farfetched for reality to me, but then what about religion isn't farfetched?

There are probably many other possibilities that could account for the start of religion, but of course, there is still the possibility that one or many religions is actually the truth. Certainly all religions can't be true, because a lot of them contradict one another, but that doesn't preclude at least one being true. And just because one is true doesn't immediately imply that all others are false. As a Christian, I am of the opinion that Christianity is true, but I feel that it's implied that Judaism is also true. In fact, it may be a truism of all the Abrahamic religions that Judaism is true, since all of them build off of that foundation in one way or another.

So, are there religions that are based on a lie? Almost certainly. Are most, or even all religions based on lies? No, I really don't believe that's the case. I believe that most religions are based on people trying to have an understanding of the parts of the world that they didn't understand without religion. Some of these understandings were accurate at least in part, while many were not. But it wasn't about lying. For whatever reason, I think that's an important thing to understand.

One of *them*

I like to try and assume the best of people, even though I'm a bit of a cynic, so I'm prepared for disappointment. Sometimes it can nonetheless be a bit shocking to be let down.

There's an understanding that I have about Christianity, and--silly me!--it's based on the Bible and the teachings of Jesus. There's this idea that is driven home repeatedly by Jesus and the various New Testament writers that foundationally, Christianity is supposed to be about love.

In the gospels, Jesus says that the whole of religion can be summed up by two rules, paraphrased by me as A: love God, and B: love people. The Apostle Paul has a whole chapter about love in the letter of 1 Corinthians. The Apostle John talks extensively about how God is love and how we should be loving because of this. So yeah, love, right?

Unfortunately, in America, there's this stereotype of Christians that are far from loving. They're harsh, judgmental, bullying, and downright bigoted. I say unfortunate because I have, for a large portion of the 30 years I have been a Christian, not seemed to have met these Christians. I thought they were actually rather rare, perhaps largely living in red states. On social media, I have often assured people that these stereotypical Christians were actually a quite vocal minority who seemed larger because of how loud and obnoxious they were.

And then this week I learned something. A lot of Christians voted for President Trump. Like, not just a sizeable chunk, but a majority of them. It was somewhere in the neighborhood of 60%, actually. I had to ask myself, who are these people? They're certainly not Christian leftists like me. They're not not even conservative but reasonable people like my wife, who despite having a lot of conservative values has never voted for Trump. No, I had to face up to it: it's them. It's those kind of Christians.

They're not a minority at all. The ones who claim persecution when someone says, "Happy holidays," instead of, "Merry Christmas!" The ones who consider the unborn more worthy of life than born people. The ones who want to legislate LGBTQ people out of existence. The ones who support Israeli genocide. It's those kind of Christians, and they're actually everywhere.

Maybe I should have guessed. It's different when you're an apparently white cishet Christian yourself and you interact with these people. They can be quite charming when you're considered one of them. But how many times have I seen the mask slip, even here in very blue California? Let someone know that you support the rights of Palestinians? Let someone know you don't condemn LGBTQ people or abortion? Let someone know that you *gasp* might consider not voting Republican? The incredulity, the confusion, even the ugliness and the anger that comes out can be shocking. Often, there's even an accusation that, "You're not a real Christian!"

I was wrong about American Christians. This is who they are. With Trump in power and Republicans controlling all three branches of government, I fear they're just going to get worse, too, out of boldness.

I've said a few times, and I've heard it from others, that sometimes it's embarrassing to admit that you're a Christian in America. I feel it now more than ever. I am an American Christian, and I don't want to be. God help us.

About-Facebook

So I got "unfriended" today on Facebook. It was kind of an odd experience. I think what was particularly odd about it was that it was in the middle of a political discussion, and the person who unfriended me is someone that I find myself frequently in agreement with regarding political matters.

The place where we most certainly do not agree is in the area of religion. As I'm sure just about anyone knows, I'm a Christian. My former Facebook friend (FFF) is an agnostic, and a pretty hard-core one. Even though it was a political discussion going on with no perceptible religious undertones, my FFF took a moment to imply that my religion was a big part of the problem.

I'm having a hard time relating the story without simply copying and pasting the discussion here, but I think it's an important story nonetheless, because it largely defines the kind of person I am on a broader scale than just calling me a politically liberal Christian. See, my FFF implied that those people involved in the conversation that weren't liberals simply weren't worth the time having a political discussion with, and I disagreed. So he said he just had to unfriend me because he'd had enough of the "bullshit" that my religion was bringing on me.

I'm thinking that, given the context, he wasn't just talking about religion. Not really. After all, I'm even less of a preachy person outside of my blogging. I think the thing he had a problem with is the fact that so many of my Christian friends are (as Christians tend to be) very conservative. Yeah, he essentially said that he hates religion, but knowing him, (and I've known him IRL for over 20 years) I think the thing that really bothers him about Christianity is that so many Christians are conservative. If we all agreed with his political views and just happened to also believe in God, I'm sure he'd find Christians much more palatable. (Heck, he's put up with me just fine, so that's something, right?)

I know it's difficult to put up with people whose views you don't agree with, but this is where I know I also depart from his view, and this is the thing that, as I said, defines me as a person. I feel that shutting people out of my life because I disagree with them is just going to make the quality of my life (and maybe theirs) poorer. Just because I'm a Christian, I'm not going to forsake all my pagan, atheist, and agnostic friends. Just because I'm a Democrat doesn't mean I'm going to hate my Republican and Libertarian friends. Just because I love America doesn't mean I'm going to ignore anyone who lives outside of this country. I just believe that there's a fullness of life that you get from interacting with people whose viewpoints have the potential of broadening your own. If you only expend your time on people who have the same views as you, how will you ever learn anything new?

I guess I accept that my FFF may simply be dealing with anger issues (he also hinted at that) and just felt it was something he had to do for his sanity, but still, isn't there an easier way to deal with such things than cutting off your friends?

Answers in Genesis

I had a friend many years ago who was an atheist. That in itself is not particularly notable, as atheism is fairly common these days, and I'm sure I have many atheist or agnostic friends. What was really notable about this guy was that unlike a lot of atheists I seem to meet on the Internet, he was pretty tolerant toward theists. In particular, I once heard him make what I thought was a pretty insightful statement: that all of the major religions of the world have enough internal logical consistency to believe in them, or else they probably wouldn't exist. I think he was right.

Anyway, I felt pretty bad writing this particular post, not because of the bare fact that I wrote it, but because it seems somewhat unfair that I waited so long to write it. To some extent I do pride myself on being open-minded and fair towards all religious views, but occasionally, I realize that I've developed a bit of a blind spot when it comes to my own partiality with respect to certain religious attitudes. Shortly after writing my recent post about Orson Scott Card, for instance, I realized that if I ever got around to reading the Book of Mormon, I'd really have to be far more generous towards it than I probably would have intended to be under normal circumstances. Anyway, while I don't currently have any plans to read the Book of Mormon, I still on a regular basis write about atheism (and yes, while atheism is not a religion, it's a religious view), and a few weeks ago I had an interesting epiphany about atheism that I really should have put into writing. Well, I can console myself that few atheists are reading my blog, and probably even fewer really care.

In a certain way, it was odd that it was only just last month that I'd come to the realization that I did, since it's largely due to Richard Dawkins' book The Selfish Gene, which I read some time in the late '80s. Who knows why it would take me more than a quarter-century to put this together? I really ought to go back and read the book again.

Something that has always bothered me about Dawkins is the way he has over time morphed into a sort of crusader for atheism. Surely, the guy is a great thinker and a giant in the world of biology, but why does that make him an expert on (the non-existence of) God? To a great extent, even though I think I've come to a deeper understanding of why his studies in biology might shed some light on theological issues, I still question what purely physical biology has to tell us about spiritual matters, but no matter (no pun intended).

This is the thing, though; I've made a big deal both on my blog and in more casual conversation that I think it's a shame that many scientists can't seem to accept the possibility of the supernatural. That's certainly not to say that the supernatural has a part to play in science; it absolutely does not, by definition. My only thought was that while studying the purely natural, a person might lose sight of the possibility that there was more to our existence than that. And I consider myself a skeptic; I don't place a great deal of faith in the supernatural myself, despite being a theist. I believe there is a God, and there is a spiritual aspect of our lives, but for the most part we can live as though it were not there. What got me feeling guilty as I prepared to write this today is that I realized I was being guilty of doing the exact same thing as I was criticizing others of doing, but in reverse.

What if the parts of our existence I considered to be purely in the realm of the spiritual could actually be under the influence of purely material forces? Why not?

If the study of science blinds one to the spiritual, certainly the study of religion could blind one to the natural. There is something that I'd always felt to be lacking in atheism, but maybe it was because I'd unknowingly set the terms of the argument unfairly. The thing that atheism lacks (in my previous view) is answers. There are certain questions that it is human nature to ask, and atheism either can't seem to answer these questions, or claims that they have no answer. These questions are things like, "What is the meaning of life?" or "Is there a higher power over us?" or "What happens to our consciousness after we die?" I mean, maybe there is no real answer to these questions, but it seems so unsatisfying.

But what if I (along with others, no doubt) was insisting on spiritual answers because I assumed that these were, by their very nature, spiritual questions? What if there was a need to keep an open mind about materialism in the same way that I always felt one should keep an open mind about spiritual things? If you open up these questions to be answered in a materialistic fashion, didn't Dawkins really answer them?

In The Selfish Gene, Dawkins had a revolutionary idea with respect to biology, genetics, and evolution. (Bear with me, it's been, as I said, about a quarter-century since I read this.) It's funny, because it's one of those things that, to me at least, seems almost obvious once you point it out and explain the principle. There's a lot of misunderstanding about evolution. Does it happen to individuals or groups? Does it happen all the time, or is it a gradual process? Is it a process that has a directed plan of some sort, or is it random? Whatever the answers to these, Dawkins suggests that the real driving force behind evolution is in fact the very genes of living creatures themselves. Genes, for lack of a better verb, "want" to propagate. All biological processes on both the micro and macro level can trace back their base driving force to this fact. It's logical and inevitable on some level: as natural selection posits survival of the fittest organisms, so Dawkins' model suggests survival of the fittest genes. If a gene codes for a behavior or a characteristic in an organism that makes it more fit, then surely that gene itself could be considered fit.

But what does this mean philosophically, or even theologically? "What is the meaning of life?" Why, it's all about obeying our genes, isn't it? This is weird, since on some level this is a sort of "Well, duh," thing. If you understand that what we are and what we do is the product of our genes both on an individual level, and as a species or even an ecosystem, then doing what our genes tell us to do isn't even a choice, it's just what we are. Our genetic code is, in the end, the "higher power over us" in a very substantial way that arguably trumps anything else that might stand in its stead. Especially if you have a materialistic world-view.

Of course, maybe as a theist I still need to stress that this does leave many of those questions unanswered. There's no clue given here to the nature of a possible afterlife, certainly, but of course there may be no answer. There also is no clear indication as to what sort of moral system one should follow, but maybe morality is a separate realm from these sorts of questions. Does admitting these as potentially valid answers to great philosophical questions mean I'm advocating for atheism? Of course not, I'm still a Christian. Maybe I'm just suggesting that which is already obvious to atheists: that atheistic viewpoints have enough internal logical consistency to believe in them, or else they probably wouldn't exist. Am I right?

A bullshit free society

I recently came across the following statement in an online discussion on the topic of religion:

"I secretly dream for all religions to be eradicated so that one day we will be able to construct a bullshit free society and be able to do scientific research without being interrupted. [Religious groups] oppress, brainwash, burn for millennia, [and then say] 'We're a religion of peace now.' "

My response to this person was to take the "bullshit" sign and point it right back at his statement, following up with this explanation of how I think the world—and history—really work with regards to this issue:

What do Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism have in common? Each one, along with most other religions, is now and has always been "a religion of peace". Oppression, brainwashing, and "burning" (whatever that is supposed to be) aren't religious practices, but political practices. Religions don't do those things unless they become powerful enough that they have become political forces. When you have an institution such as the "Holy Roman Empire" as an example, it tends to be ruled by people thirsting for power rather than goodness. People of faith want to trust their spiritual leaders, but the more political clout your church/mosque/temple has, the more likely it is to attract the wrong sort of leadership. Jesus knew:

[Jesus] told them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his field. Though it is the smallest of all seeds, yet when it grows, it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds come and perch in its branches.” -Matt. 13:31-32

As skeptics have pointed out, mustard seeds don't become trees. So what is Jesus talking about? You'll find in Jesus' parables, birds are usually symbolic of evil, and I believe this story is suggesting that Jesus fully expected the church He started would be host to evil men who would use it for their own interests.

Does that mean that if religion can be a tool in the hands of evil men, we should then toss it out? Right before the parable of the mustard seed, Jesus tells another that I think is closely related:

Jesus told them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like a man who sowed good seed in his field. But while everyone was sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and went away. When the wheat sprouted and formed heads, then the weeds also appeared.

“The owner’s servants came to him and said, ‘Sir, didn’t you sow good seed in your field? Where then did the weeds come from?’

“‘An enemy did this,’ he replied.

“The servants asked him, ‘Do you want us to go and pull them up?’

“‘No,’ he answered, ‘because while you are pulling the weeds, you may uproot the wheat with them.’” -Matt. 13:24-29 (my emphasis)

In other words, churches—just like all institutions—will have some "bad seeds", but that doesn't mean you toss the good for the sake of the bad.

We actually can know that removing religion from society isn't the solution because it's been tried before, in places such as Russia. The USSR under Stalin was strongly anti-religious. This of course led to "a bullshit free society..."

Stalin created a cult of personality in the Soviet Union around both himself and Lenin...towns, villages and cities were renamed after the Soviet leader and the Stalin Prize and Stalin Peace Prize were named in his honor. He accepted grandiloquent titles..., and helped rewrite Soviet history to provide himself a more significant role in the revolution. At the same time, according to Nikita Khrushchev, he insisted that he be remembered for "the extraordinary modesty characteristic of truly great people."

...freedom "to do scientific research without being interrupted."

Science in the Soviet Union was under strict ideological control by Stalin and his government, along with art and literature. There was significant progress in "ideologically safe" domains, owing to the free Soviet education system and state-financed research. However, the most notable legacy during Stalin's time was his public endorsement of the Agronomist Trofim Lysenko who rejected Mendelian genetics as "bourgeois pseudosciences" and instead supported Hybridization theories that caused widespread agricultural destruction and major setbacks in Soviet knowledge in biology. Although many scientists opposed his views, those who publicly came out were imprisoned and denounced.

...and of course, these enlightened atheists didn't "oppress, brainwash, burn..."

Researchers before the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union attempting to count the number of people killed under Stalin's regime produced estimates ranging from 3 to 60 million.

(The above excerpts are from the Wikipedia article Joseph Stalin.)

Does that mean atheism is evil? Of course not; it means that using political means to force ideology on people—regardless of the ideology—will be unsavory, to put it lightly. It also doesn't mean that communism is a bad thing, mostly because Stalin and the leaders who followed in his office were not practicing communism. In fact, as I wrote some time ago, communism and Christianity have more in common than either is likely to admit.

The point that I am trying to make with all of this in a nutshell is that it's power that corrupts people, not religious ideology. If the day comes when (as many atheists have been suggesting for centuries to be right around the corner) religion is somehow eradicated from the earth by the cleansing light of reason, does anybody really think that there will be no more hatred, stupidity, or violence? I've got to say, even as a Christian, I find myself doubting that would be the case if the whole world were uniformly Christian.

Religulousness

Tuesday night, Bill Maher was on The Daily Show to promote his new documentary Religulous. Based on what I know of Maher, it's probably going to be a very entertaining movie, but it's probably, no make that definitely going to be extremely offensive to a lot of people. As is often customary for such talk show appearances, his visit was preceded by a showing of a clip from the movie.

In the clip, Maher pretends to be a crazy homeless person standing on a street corner, ranting about how all of us are possessed by the spirits of space aliens that were killed on earth billions of years ago by being dropped into a volcano by an evil being named Xenu. Some will of course recognize that he's really giving the foundational doctrines of Scientology, presented in a manner to make them seem extra silly. Shortly after the clip, Maher makes an interesting statement:

...[W]e laugh at this because that's the new religion, Scientology, but it's not really that weirder, more crazier than Christianity, I hate to tell you. We're just used to that one. But if someone came to you today and told you that story, you'd never heard that, and said, God had a son. He's a single parent. And He said to his son, "Jesus, I'm gonna send you to Earth on a suicide mission, but don't worry, they can't kill you because you're really me. But it is gonna hurt for a hot minute, I'm not gonna lie about that. You're gonna hate me, but it's the best thing for you, son--I mean me, it's best thing for me; I'm you, you're me! So here's the plan, son: I, God the Father, (wink-wink) I'll go down to Earth first! We'll split up the work, because we're two people! (Not really!) And I'll see if I can find a Palestinian woman to impregnate, so she can give birth to you--I mean me!" It's just the silliest thing you'd ever heard, and this is a monotheistic religion.

I'm not sure what monotheism has to do with it, but I think Maher is right nonetheless: When you really think about it, Christianity is sort of silly. Really. I mean, even the Bible says so, as a friend of mine pointed out when I asked his opinion on this. So score a point for Maher, I guess, but...a point for what?
Maher chose Christianity no doubt largely because it's the most popular religion in this country. To pick on Christianity is to be more controversial (as one potentially offends a greater portion of one's potential audience), and so often it's controversy that gets people in the theaters to watch a documentary. Actually, while I of course don't know whether it plays a role in the movie, the fact is that Maher made the statement that he doesn't think so highly of atheism either, since there's something nearly as presumptuous in claiming that one knows God does not exist as claiming to know he does exist. I'm guessing it's not in the movie, at least not much, since, despite the fact that a statement like that may be as offensive to the average atheist as the anecdote above would be to the average Christian, pointing it out doesn't tend to be quite as funny, and Maher's aim is as much to entertain as enlighten.
Scientology is easy. It really is a funny religion to just about everyone outside of it; you don't have to try so hard there. It's also a much smaller religion in terms of number of adherents. The fact is, however, that pretty much every religion has some ridiculousness to it (and I do get the impression that Maher tries to cover many different religions within the scope of the movie) and he could probably pick one out of a hat. Any one. So what's the point?
Seriously, I'm not sure where this is supposed to be going, at least so far as being informational, which one tends to expect of a documentary film to some degree. I'm finding myself once again in a position of more or less reviewing a film I have not actually seen; who knows how I end up here? I really do expect that the movie will be quite funny and entertaining, even the parts that should be offensive to me, but how is it going to enrich my life, or anyone else's?
Call me a strange theist, but isn't claiming that religion is ridiculous almost a tautology? Think about it. "Religion" is defined by Dictionary.com as "a set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe, esp. when considered as the creation of a superhuman agency or agencies, usually involving devotional and ritual observances, and often containing a moral code governing the conduct of human affairs." Basically, when we talk of religion, we're talking about things that are outside the normal, natural, scientifically observable domain of physical reality, aren't we? We're talking about a higher power, be it personal or impersonal, singular or multiple, human-like or somehow beyond our understanding; isn't such a being or beings bound to be unusual by nature? (Or should one say "by supernature"?)
It's been said before that the Bible starts to get mind-blowing only four words into it. "In the beginning, God..." One pastor I heard teaching on Genesis paused here and said, "If you can accept that much, the rest of the book is easy." It tends to be the nature of religions, with very few exceptions, to believe that there exist powers of some sort that somehow predate the existence of the universe itself. It seems to me that even without such beings actually interacting with and influencing human history, just existing is remarkable. Is it silly for God to die on a cross? Maybe, but is it more or less silly for Him to become a human? Is it more or less silly for him to interact with humans at all? Or to have created humanity? To have even created a universe in which humans come to exist? To a Christian, none of these things are unthinkable, but to an atheist, every one is just as silly as any other, isn't it? "Hey, my atheist friend, I'll admit it: the whole Jesus Christ thing is just a fable. Still, you really should consider becoming a Jew. Or at least a Deist, maybe?" That wouldn't float.
Of course, at the same time, I just don't see that this kind of thing will have much of an impact on those of us who are of the religious bent. Surely Scientologists have heard it all, over and over again. As for Christians, does anyone think that there will be too many people who won't fit into one of two groups: the offended Christians who will turn away and not even watch, and the bemused Christians who will laugh in a lightly self-deprecating manner and go on believing exactly the same as before?
That's the thing of it: Maher is right, but so what? I can't help but see this film as coming across as a sort of anti-religious The Passion of the Christ, with controversial ridicule in the place of controversial violence. The people who are going to see this film for the most part are going to be those who already believe its likely conclusions, and didn't need a hundred minutes of footage to be convinced. It will be interesting to see how well it does at the box office, but I can't imagine it's going to change the world in the slightest. (Well, it got me the closest I'm ever likely to be to defending Scientology; I suppose that's something.)

The masters of science fiction

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." -Arthur C. Clarke

I think I've finally figured out the problem with science. That is to say, I think I know what the real issue is with the public perception of science, and what it is about it that makes the average layman surprisingly loath to trust it. Let's face it; every day we're going to open the newspaper and find another story along the lines of some school board refusing to teach evolution, and the more "enlightened" among us will shake their heads and mumble something along the lines of, "Are we living in the dark ages or something?" Well, I've decided that in the end, the problem surprisingly lies with science itself, and the manner in which science by its very nature generates its own bad press.

I don't remember what it was that was simmering somewhere on the back-burners of my mind the other day as I was perusing some essays by Isaac Asimov, but maybe it will come back to me, as it had become a thought suddenly boiled over when I hit a particular sentence in one of his essays. Just in case you're not familiar with Asimov--and actually, you're probably not as familiar as you think you are even if you do know something about him--he's probably best known as a science fiction writer, but also carried on his resume a number of works of fiction in the genres of mystery and fantasy, as well as a certain amount of writing on science fact, history, and Biblical commentary. Asimov was probably my favorite author as a child, and I'd always wanted to write as well as he did, but never thought it likely. Turns out my wish may have come true: while his storytelling is superb, his essays are pretty crappy. I am in good company after all.

It's probably actually not his essay writing overall, but this particular subset. I picked up a copy of Magic: The final fantasy collection, which is a gathering together of all Asimov's "fantasy stories that have never before appeared in book form." Truth be told, even the fiction is not quite as good as his sci-fi works elsewhere, but the section of essays dissecting the nature of the fantasy genre seem to really fall short. Maybe it's just me. Actually, one of the hard things in evaluating the fiction is that not too much of it falls into the standard sort of format that one thinks of as "fantasy"; one story, a mystery involving Batman, actually has no supernatural element to it at all, so go figure.

What does all of this have to do with science, though? Well, as Asimov works his way through essay after essay of reflection on the subject of magic, faeries, mythical creatures and dashing knights riding off to slay dragons, he ends up--as a firm believer in science, and an author with a strong preference for science fiction over fantasy--taking many of these thematic concepts and relating them back to scientific principles. Science fiction and fantasy both generally involve the use of extraordinary means of meeting the protagonist's ends, but there tends to be a divergence in the nature of the means that is sometimes hard to describe precisely due to the fact that, as Clarke has said, technology can sometimes appear to be magical. Asimov points out that the real difference is that technology is something that always comes with limits, but magic much less so.

An excellent example is to think about the worlds of "Star Trek" vs. "Harry Potter". Both involve fictional means of teleportation, but there are few similarities in the workings of each. In the Trek world, teleportation is made possible through the employment of technology that requires a very large amount of energy and powerful supercomputers. Those attempting to teleport with these devices need to program these powerful computers with the particular coordinates of departure and arrival, the subjects of teleportation cannot be in motion, the teleportation device must be fully-powered and within a certain distance, and (for some unstated reason that has never made much sense to me) the operator of the device needs to know the number of people being teleported. In Potter's world on the other hand, all one needs to teleport is to be a wizard who really wants to go to a location in mind. I'm sure there are Potter fans who would take issue with such a simplification of the process, but really, I've simplified the process from both worlds.

So who is the winner? Maybe it seems like Potter is, as he needs no power source or help from a computer, has no limits on distance of travel, and can disappear at will in mid-stride while running from the hot pursuit of Voldemort. Not so, however. There are, and will always be, people who have a preference for the theoretically possible over the fantastic. After all, what good is Potter-style teleportation to "muggles" like you and me? Computers and technology, on the other hand, make amazing strides daily, and who knows? While physicists haven't yet invented the warp drive, it has been suspected that the principles of relativity actually do allow for travel faster than light speed if we could find a way to manipulate the space-time continuum. Sci-fi has a lot of big "ifs", but they're not the ridiculous imaginings of magic and fantasy, at least.

That sort of thinking is actually the smaller part of the problem of science: it's sort of a killjoy. On page 143 of "Magic", Asimov points out that the old fairy tale staple of "seven-league boots" are something for which science can't really produce an analogue. Seven-league boots are magical pieces of footwear that allow the wearer to move seven leagues (21 miles) in a single step. Asimov points out that such boots would cause the wearer to, at the pace of a brisk walk, achieve escape velocity and therefore be launched into space in a stride or two. Sheesh, Asimov, you're no fun. I'm not personally a big fan of the fantasy genre, but I think it's clear enough that we're meant to understand that magic boots, by the very fact of their being magic, don't have to concern the wearer with mundane factors such as escape velocity and wind resistance (I'm sure someone could give some very good reason why travelling at escape velocity with no protective gear would cause air friction enough to vaporize you, or at least severely chap your skin). Asimov is only trying to point out that science, unlike magic, has limits, but really the depressing thing about science is that really on the whole, science is all about telling us repeatedly that we are limited.

One of the best-known limits in science is the speed of light, but it's odd that it's so well-known. That is to say, it's not that people know what the speed of light is (I can seldom remember it off the top of my head), but they know it exists, and the one thing they really know about relativity theory is that things in the real world can't go faster than light. What does this really do for the layman, though? What possible purpose does it serve the non-physicist to know that the universe has a speed limit, especially since not a one of us will likely ever travel so much as 0.01% of that limit? It only reminds us that we do not have unlimited ability, and while this is true, it adds nothing to the human condition to know it to be so. Science doesn't care, nor should it, as it exists in a world of facts and not fantasy or feelings.

I've written before that science is not in the business of making people feel good or have a sense of self-worth, and that's why it makes for a lousy religion. "But wait," most readers will object, "science isn't a religion!" No, it's not. The bigger part of the problem of science is that despite that fact that it isn't a religion, there are an awful lot of people who treat it like one. Something else that I know I have written about many, many times is the fact that the world is full of skeptics who are more than happy to puff out their chests and declare, "We don't need God and religion to give us the answers, for science has all the answers we need!" But whatever you may feel about religion, the second part of that sentence is dreadfully wrong: science doesn't have answers, it only has theories. Wait! I'm probably not saying what you think I'm saying...

My imagination makes it hard to write this, as I know with almost every sentence I write, there is someone out there who will be reading this and saying, "What an idiot!" Maybe, but can you wait until I've had my say? I know there are a lot of creationists that love the catch phrase, "Evolution is just a theory," and of course, they're missing that in the realm of science, that word tends to mean something deeper than they give it credit. Granted. What I'm saying is that even giving it all the credit it truly deserves, it's still not the end-all and be-all of truth, because science is not a religion in very important ways that are actually its strength, but unfortunately its lesser-known strength.

The Asimov essay that boiled over that thought was one titled "Giants in the Earth", an essay on why he thinks so many cultures (including the Bible) have had myths concerning giants and other fantastic larger-than-life creatures. He gives a number of theories about why people would imagine giants, mainly focusing on people of lesser technology who marveled at achievements of more advanced societies such as the massive walls of Mycenae and the pyramids of Egypt and, not being able to fathom technology that could move such massive stones, imagine the employment of giant men or sorcerers for the purpose. In general, this is not an unreasonable theory, but I do have some issues with it, the main one being the assumption that every single example of stories about giants surely could not have simply been the result of actual, living giants. After all, Goliath was only said to be nine feet tall, and while that sounds pretty fantastical, I fail to see why there could not exist a man of that stature, or at least near that stature helped with a dash of exaggeration or rounding off to the nearest cubit. I think I may have made this exact analogy in a former piece of writing, but if a person who had never been to China or known anything about it ran into Yao Ming, he might be tempted to tell friends that China was a land populated with giants, and he would be sort of right, since there are at least a few of them.

Now, just shortly after denying that tales of mythical giants had anything to do with actual giants, and denying that tales of dragons could have anything to do with actual oversized lizards such as dinosaurs or who knows what, Asimov makes this startling statement:

"The elephant bird, or aepyornis, of Madagascar still survived in medieval times. It weighed half a ton and was the largest bird that ever existed. It must surely have been the inspiration for the flying bird-monster, the 'roc,' that we find in the Sinbad tales of The Arabian Nights."

"Surely"? Maybe Asimov had some backing for this statement, but from what I see here, it seems to be pure speculation. Why does one need to go to Madagascar to find such a large bird when fairly large birds such as ostriches and crowned eagles exist on the African mainland? The apparent assertion of a matter of speculation as bare fact is what disturbed me, and surprised me from Asimov as a supposed man of science.

Maybe it's a particular problem of Asimov's, being a writer of sci-fi and mystery, that he feels a need to see to it that loose ends are tied up into a neat little bundle. Fiction does that quite often, especially in the mystery genre. We expect when we close the book after reading the last page that even if the ending is not a happy one, we at least will have had everything explained to us, and everything will be understood. Religion (which atheists will gladly relegate to fictional status) also tends toward this sort of resolution. It tends to try to answer as many of the key philosophical questions of life as it can, and then blankets anything that wasn't covered with some panacea such as, "Well, God is working all things to the good, and He will triumph in the end." Everybody likes a happy ending.

Science may like to define limits, but has no end in itself, and never completely ties up all the loose ends. This is the true strength and power of science, but it's not a savory one. Those so-called skeptics who claim that science has all the answers are missing the true point of science: that it has no answers, only a better class of questions. The real problem of science is that people are looking for final answers, and science's disciples are more than happy to claim that they have them, despite the fact that they are (unintentionally, granted) misleading people with such a claim.

It is the nature of science's never-ending quest to question reality that what are today's scientific truths will be tomorrow's scientific misconceptions. We had nine planets, but then we only had eight. We were descended from homo erectus, but then we weren't. The smallest indivisible units in the universe were atoms, but then they were found to be made of protons, neutrons and electrons, which were later found to be made of quarks, which in turn are made of...what? To the average person, all of this sort of stuff looks like indecision: can't science make up its mind? I thought you said science had the answers? To the non-technical mind, the answers that science give look like so much magical hocus-pocus, and when Rowling tells us in book seven that wands only properly work for their true owners, yet book four is full of magicians getting along just fine with borrowed and/or stolen wands, we start to think it may all be a bunch of crap.

Science is suffering from bad press, and it's not bad press from those fools who do things like ban the teaching of evolution in schools, but from those people who say things like, "Science has given us the answer, and the answer is evolution." Such an attitude falls prey to those who object, "What happened to us being evolved from homo erectus?" or "Why do you think it is that Piltdown Man turned out to just be a hoax?" If "evolution is the answer", then like dogmatic religious zealots, the disciples of the religion of science will demand that asking more questions is inappropriate, never realizing that like Pharisees berating Christ for healing on the Sabbath, they're elevating tradition over deeper, more fundamental truths. Yes, science embraces evolutionary theory, among other theories, and as a "theory" it's actually something deeper and more well-established than just an idea of how the world might happen to work, but just as Christianity holds as an underlying tenet that "Love thy neighbor" is more important than any rules about how you run your church, science holds to an underlying tenet that above all, we must keep asking questions of our universe.

Evolutionary theory is a better theory than its detractors give it credit, and I expect it to be a part of science for quite some time, despite the fact that simpler concepts, like the number of planets we have, lasted for much shorter time than evolution has already enjoyed. But it is the nature of science that all theories are potentially only here for today, waiting for the time that they will be replaced by a better theory and discarded. The real failure of our educational system is not a failing to convince everyone that evolution or any other theory is true; after all, the greatest scientists have always been the ones who were willing to be the first to discard the failed theories of the past. No, the real failure is not teaching our children that the real strength of science and greatness of scientists was not in their determined acceptance of the status quo, but in the very willingness to go against it. Mendeleyev wasn't the first person to think of the concept of the periodic table of elements (a crude approach to modern understanding of the behavior of subatomic particles before anyone had even thought of subatomic particles), but he was one of the first people to be willing to keep pushing and questioning until scientists decided to take it seriously.

Yes, the problem with science is that we haughtily insist that people accept it as it is, forgetting that the state of science is always evolving. Religion is the one that often strives to be right without being questioned. Science? It only strives to be a little less wrong than it was yesterday, and there's nothing wrong with that.

Who wants strident?

I've started to realize that while I am often loath to comment directly on political issues, I revel in the chance to comment on political commentary. That being said, just because I carefully tread a line along the edge of a minefield doesn't mean lack of careful choosing of my words and who to share them with won't cause me to stumble and fall right in.

Yesterday, as I was sitting and enjoying my coffee and tapping out the beginnings of my previous rant not on Proposition 8, but on the manner in which others had shared and hidden their own views on Proposition 8, I happened to have a run-in with a Christian acquaintance of mine who has no qualms about freely expressing his views. Now, as I was writing about that very subject, I was hoping to confide in him what it was I found silly about the vague positioning of those on both sides of the debate, and not express my own views on the matter. (If you did read that piece carefully, you might have noticed that nowhere in the essay did I give my personal opinion on same-sex marriage; partially because that wasn't really what the piece is about, and partially because my view is complicated and nuanced, i.e. completely confused.) No matter; to him, this was a clearly "cut-and-dry thing". He rattled off factoids about biological differences between procreative and non-procreative sexual activity and the archaeological evidence for the destruction of Sodom in a much louder voice than I would have used in a public place (unless I was there to give some sort of performance, I suppose), albeit not in an outright rude manner.

It's a paradox that I inwardly wince when put in such a situation. It's a paradox because I wince for two (perhaps) completely opposing reasons: I simply don't feel strongly enough about most matters to speak out concerning them in such a fashion, and yet I'm not sure if I'm more embarrassed because I don't feel that way. Does that make any sense? What I'm saying is that when I'm sitting at the coffee shop I frequent on an almost daily basis, and the man next to me is expounding on how "two men in bed together begets nothing but carnal lust!" I'm wondering if some people I know will look over at me and think, "Why is he just sitting and listening to that hateful talk?" but I'm also wondering if others will think, "Why doesn't Brucker ever say things like that?" After all, I'm a Christian, so I'm supposed to be loving, accepting and non-judgmental, but I'm also supposed to stand up to immorality, which "everyone" knows Christians consider homosexuality to be. Where's your strident expression of moral outrage, huh, Brucker? If not on this, then on something.

Once again, I've let my intro hijack the original intent of my writing, but I think I'll let it go, because it's just as good as my original intent anyway. I was going to write on the interplay between religious belief and political belief, but that's really what this is about, isn't it? I am inclined to believe, from reading the Bible (and isn't that where a fundie Christian like myself is to get my beliefs from?), that homosexuality is in some manner not wholly acceptable to God. Yet I am also inclined, nearly if not more strongly, to believe that the government has no right to tell people how they can live their lives behind closed doors.

As I'm sure I've said before, Christians ought to give some serious thought to this, as it goes beyond the topic of sexual preference. If the government can step in and say who I can or can't sleep with, can't they also decide how I raise my children? My kids get read a Bible story every night before bed, but what if the government decided that the Bible was hate speech, and I couldn't do this? If we can't keep the government out of a same-sex couple's bedroom, how are we going to keep them out of my children's bedroom? Granted, in talking about same-sex marriage, we're talking about something public, but it's really about giving approval or disapproval of something that goes on in private. At least, I'm pretty sure that's what the supporters of Proposition 8 believe, whether they openly say it or not.

This is where I really have to laugh at myself and my socio-political schizophrenia. I'm a life-long Democrat who holds the religious views of a stereotypical Republican, often expressing a longing for communist ideals, but maybe being a Libertarian at heart. Is it confusion? Maybe, maybe not. Maybe I'm just an anarchist or something, I really don't know.

The thing that I had been intending to use as a backdrop for this piece of writing was actually once again an editorial published in Newsweek, this time written by Sam Harris. (You really ought to know who Sam Harris is, I think, so if you don't, look him up. I'll tell you this: he's an atheist that I feel a lot of respect towards.) I'm sure it's in no small way partly due to the fact that I am, after all, a Democrat, but I'm finding myself largely agreeing with his views about Sarah Palin, even some of the things he says about how it's scary to think about the country being run by someone with her religious views, despite the fact that that's the one area where I probably come closest to being in synch with Palin.

It's something I understand, and yet don't understand as fully as Harris appears to feel I should. Why is it scary that Palin has a "conviction that the Biblical God consciously directs world events"? As a Christian, it would probably be weird if she didn't think that, and really, while we're not officially a Christian nation, it's a fact of life that our country has been run and inhabited by mostly Christians throughout its history. Abraham Lincoln probably thought he was an instrument of God's will when he signed the Emancipation Proclamation, and is that so bad? Believing that God is on control of world events doesn't imply that individuals can't act on their own conscience. If that's what Harris is implying, then I don't understand why, and if not, then I guess I don't understand what. I also don't follow what is wrong with Palin asking people to pray concerning Iraq, "that there is a plan, and that plan is God's plan." Most of us Christians believe that the Biblical God is a God of peace (yes, despite detractors who point out the bloodiness of so much of the Bible and church history), and seeing that there rarely seems to be evidence for any sort of plan in Iraq, such a prayer request makes almost too much sense.

The thing of it is, our religious views are part and parcel of who we are as individuals. That goes for atheists too, who have religious views despite not having religion. If religious views are a part of individuals, then living as we do in a representative democracy made up of elected individuals, religious views are a part of our government. Now of course that means that indeed we should be interested in the religious views of the candidates we elect, but sometimes it seems like so many of us are far too interested, and place undue emphasis on the bare fact of having a view, rather than asking what the implication, if any, of that view may be. When John McCain made the announcement that Palin was to be his running mate, my initial thought was that he was trying to pick someone that would attract disgruntled Hillary Clinton supporters, this view not being mine alone, and also not being completely ridiculous, as indeed it seems to have worked on a few people. In time, I came to realize that what Palin really represents is that she is the anti-Obama. In a very odd turn of events, (to my mind at least) rather than attempting to position himself as a centrist, he's chosen a running mate that further accentuates the differences between himself and the left.

The weird thing about this is, despite being the polar opposite of Barack Obama, I truly believe that both Palin and Obama have formed their political views in no small part due to their individual faiths: and both of them are Christians! What does it really mean that this sort of thing can happen? How is it, jumping back again to Lincoln, that in the heyday of American slavery, most slave owners were Christians who used the Bible to justify slavery, while at the same time most abolitionists were also Christians who used the Bible to justify abolition of slavery? It would almost seem that either we Christians are suffering from the same sort of schizophrenia that I attributed to myself, or maybe it's just our country, which happens coincidentally to be run by Christians. Either way, there's a bit of an identity crisis at work here, and various people have various ways of dealing with it.

While Harris is pretty generous, it's not in my experience the usual case that atheists can separate out political views from religious ones. Like many Christians I know who are convinced that only the most dedicated Christians are truly fit for running out country, many atheists seem drawn to the candidate who does his or her best at taking their religious views and stuffing them down out of sight. As our national politicians do seem to be almost invariably Christians, the best they can hope for tends to be whoever is the least overtly Christian. In the meantime, those who are more outspoken about religious issues in particular over the political can use the fact of this wide diversity of ideals to argue the emptiness of Christian values. After all, if the Bible is clear in what separates right from wrong, then there ought to be no difference of opinion on what constitutes proper behavior for a Christian, even in the political arena.

While such a view may seem incharitable, it's unfortunately one that also exists within the church, perhaps most often among those I briefly mentioned in the previous paragraph. Earlier this year, I had been discussing with someone from my church the matter of Mitt Romney, and whether a Mormon (not necessarily Romney in particular) could be a suitable President. He argued strongly that no, it would be unconscionable for a Christian to vote for a Mormon. I asked him if he felt so strongly about this that he would, say, consider voting for Hillary Clinton a preferable option over Mitt Romney. He said that he hardly considered Clinton to be a Christian, so that was apparently a false dilemma. But why? What would make him believe that Clinton was not a Christian? As far as I am aware, she was raised in a Christian home, regularly attends church, and essentially does all the sorts of things that Christians are supposed to do. I never asked, so I could be wrong, but I'd be willing to guess that it essentially boils down to the fact that she's a Democrat. The "Religious Right" in the Reagan era seems to have burned into the minds of Christians and non-Christians, liberals and conservatives, Republicans, Democrats and independents that the terms "Christian" and "Republican" are all but synonymous.

It's a dangerous place to be, I think. The country seems so badly divided these days that I don't like the idea of trying to find more and more ways to pull us apart. Can't I stand together with my fellow Christians, even if many of them are Republicans and I am a Democrat? Can't I stand together with my fellow Democrats, even if I'm not quite as strongly "pro-choice" or "pro-gay rights" as most of them? Can't I stand together with my fellow Americans, even if many of them are atheists, Republicans, or even just people who don't like my taste in music? Regardless of the religious and political affiliations of our next President, regardless of the legality and morality of gay marriage, regardless of whether you believe God guides all things in every way on a day-by-day basis or you believe he's just a myth dreamed up by an ancient tribe of nomadic shepherds, we still all have to live together and share this country. We have to share the whole damned world. If we can't even talk about talking about it, how will we ever actually do it?

The book of leviticus

I'm sure I've mentioned it to everyone who knows me, and yet, I never feel like anyone knows, because in a sense, I don't even know it about myself: I am Jewish. Or am I?

See, my father was (and still is) Jewish, but my mother is not; at least not in the technical sense. For most people, this implies that I also am not in the technical sense. Yet I was raised by my father to believe that I was a Jew, and he called me one, and so I genuinely thought I was one. Anyway, a large portion of society feels that having any Jewish ancestry at all makes one a Jew.

Certainly I will always remember a moment in my freshman year of high school when I was waiting patiently behind a fellow student who was trying to negotiate another few points on his physics exam, and the instructor told him he would have to take his grade as it stood. This classmate of mine actually slapped his test on the teacher's desk and exclaimed, "I can't believe this. That's so Jewish!" This was probably the first time in my life that I lost my temper at an insult not leveled directly at me. This guy was bigger, stronger, taller, and older than me, and I saw red and gave him a shove and said, "Oh hell no! I don't know what problems you have with your grade, dude, but *I* am Jewish, and you owe my people an apology!" I don't know if I had steam coming out of my ears or what, but I've never seen someone back down from me so quickly.

But am I Jewish? I won't take anyone using a racial (or similar: sexist? homophobic?) slur around me without getting a bit ticked off anyway, but of course, this was a bit more personal. I can't help but identifying with the Jewish people to some degree, no matter what I might be told about the fact that my status as a half-Jewish, non bar mitzvah Christian puts my Jewish identity at question. Oddly, to some extent while one would expect the Torah--a document chronicling the creation of the Jewish nation and defining its laws--to give a definition of what a Jew is, really any sort of official definition has come later in extrabiblical writings.

If I stay on the originally unintentional thread of these last few musings, I suppose I would do well to mention A Jew Today by Elie Wiesel, a book of writings in which the writer explores what it means to be a Jew in 20th century America that I happened to pick up from the same used-book bin where I picked up my copy of Marx/Engels. A much larger book than the Manifesto, I haven't had time to read more than small portion of the first chapter, in which he talks about how often being a Jew means being a stranger in the gentile world, where people will always look at you as something strange and foreign. It's an uncomfortable feeling, and yet it's a feeling that the average Jew holds within themself with a great deal of pride.

A book that I did read recently that's in a very important way about being a Jew is Responsa from the Holocaust, by Rabbi Ephraim Oshry. The author details what it was like to be a Jew in Lithuania during the horror that was World War II, and how it effected the Jews of Europe. Throughout this horrible time, when the lives of European Jews were daily on the brink of total destruction, individual Jews continued to consult with their rabbis concerning how to practice their religion in the midst of persecution. If Nazis seem to be more likely to attack Jewish men with beards, should we shave them off? We only get the food that the Nazis let us have, and it's clearly not kosher meat, what can we do about that? Is it a crime to commit suicide when all indications are that you are not long for the world anyway, and the powers that be are seeing to it that every day you live is intense suffering?

It's tragic, but at the same time inspiring. These people did their best not to let their oppressors keep them from doing what they believed to be right, even seemingly little things (to a non-Jew) such as whether they should say Sabbath prayers on a Saturday when they were suffering through forced labor seven days a week. These Jews held strongly to their beliefs and identity in the face of torture and death. How many people today avoid stating their beliefs openly simply for fear of ridicule?

The thing that really struck me about these stories however, was where Oshry and his fellow rabbis allowed exceptions to general rules and where they did not. Can't find kosher food? Well, you can't starve yourself, so eat what you can. A 12-year-old boy wants to have his bar mitzvah ceremony early because he suspects he will not live to see 13? The boy seems mature and earnest in his desire, so luckily he is granted his request, and indeed he died a short time later.

But where were exceptions *not* granted? Perhaps oddly enough, in the one place that might have been the one sure-fire way to save their own lives: the rabbis never once wavered from their conviction that pretending not to be a Jew was an unacceptable compromise, although it would seem that it was for this one fact that they were being killed. Steal if it takes care of your family, kill if it's in self-defense, defy the law if you believe it unjust, and lie: lie about where you live, what you do for a living, how old you are, who's in your family, but never, NEVER lie about being a Jew.

It's a strange thing to an outsider perhaps, and it may even be strange to Jews themselves, but when all else has been stripped away, either by an evil, tyrannical government or by an individual's apathy towards the strictness of the Mosaic Law, there still remains an essential fact of identity that is central and indelible to Judaism. The Jews of Europe essentially said to the world that you could take away their beards and special clothing, take away their kosher foods and festivals, take away their temples and holy books, but you can never take away their Jewishness.

What's logic got to do with it?

I suppose I spend a lot of my spare time and energy arguing that faith is a good and rational thing. Heck, it's essentially the point of my other blog, if not expressly stated, then at least in fairly obvious subtext. I have a hard time sitting back while I hear people disparage (more or less) faith by describing it as something like "belief in that which has no evidence". I'm sure I've railed on it before, if not here then in countless other venues of public expression. And yet, I'm going to take a moment to say a few things that are a baby step if not a leap in the other direction.

I remember back in my early college days, there came a time when I began to describe myself as a Christian, although in truth, I no longer consider myself to have been one at the time. The stage of personal belief I was at was that I had recently taken the time to read the New Testament for the first time, and I was impressed with what I read. There was definitely something to Christ and his early followers, and I became convinced that Christianity was Truth-with-a-capital-T as one says, and Christians were not (necessarily) idiots following nonsense blindly.

At the same time, I remember an odd moment when I was hanging out with my Christian friends, and I saw something odd. It was one of those things you can't quite explain, you just experience it, and somehow it seems right. One of the young women in my group of Christian friends was looking at another discussing some theological point, and I saw an odd gleam in her eye. At that moment I was surprised and oddly convinced that this woman was completely insane. There was something unsettling and unbalanced in that gleam, and it gave me a thought. Maybe you have to be just a little bit insane to really, truly believe in God. Not to say that belief in God was a delusion of one's insanity, but that God, being the sort of being that He is supposed to be, so totally foreign to our mundane experiences of daily life, somehow causes a sort of mental short circuit when His presence invades our consciousness.

As I write on this, it sounds a bit in the same vein as some of my previous musings on the nature of the soul, and a Christian who followed that and understood it might think I'm talking about some sort of physical analogue to the concept of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, but that's not what I'm talking about at all. I think this sort of short circuit (if indeed that is what it is) happens quite naturally, and to people of all sorts of faith. It's related to the idea espoused above that faith is a belief without evidence, but in this case, it's belief in that which is not completely logical. We live in a natural world, how can we be completely sane and yet accept the existence of the supernatural, in whatever form we might believe in it?

Yet there is a problem coming at this from the side of the skeptics and atheists. I think atheists are quite aware of this, and in reading the above, no doubt they nod their heads and say, "Finally, this Brucker guy is making sense!" There is definitely a belief among such people that there is nothing more illogical than belief in the supernatural. Nonetheless, I would like to say (and finally come to the main point of this writing--aren't essays supposed to start with the point and expand on it instead of building to it? I'm a really crappy writer sometimes...) that this is not what I am saying at all. Despite all I have said here, I still claim that faith is not illogical.

I wish to coin a term here, sort of. It's not in the dictionary, although a search on Google turns up nearly 60,000 hits, so perhaps the idea is not so new. I believe that faith is "nonlogical". In case you don't immediately grasp the term from its own form, consider this: It's logical to believe that 1+1=2. It's illogical to believe that 1+1=3. It's nonlogical to believe that 1+1 is possibly a symbolic representation of a concept such as human relationships. "Nonlogical" is the idea that something might be impossible to arrive at through logical reasoning, yet also there is no logical reasoning that can completely dismiss that something. Faith, love, beauty: these things have a truth-value based not on scientific principles or clear-cut definitions of tangible value, but simply stand on their own.

The fact is, there are statements about the world that are simply true, and other statements about the world that are simply false, but many, many statements about the world are in a gray area in between. That fictional champion of logic, "Star Trek's" Spock once said: "Logic is the beginning of wisdom...not the end." Logic can take you far in life, but it was something I realized back in those days and still remember, that in a journey to Truth-with-a-capital-T, there comes a point where logic comes to the end of itself and says, "I can take you no further." Some people get to that point and they let go of logic's hand and walk forward into the darkness. Some people get there and insist that there must simply be nothing more. Still, logic can't really tell you which one is right, can it?

Don't fear the reaper

"If I were an atheist, I don't know why I wouldn't just kill myself," the speaker declared. People in the crowd shouted back incredulous responses, and the tone of the whole open-air discussion made a poor turn. It was years back when I was in college, and the speaker was a professional evangelist/apologeticist who at the time had a great deal to do with myself eventually becoming a Christian, despite a number of things he said that day that were offensive to many in the crowd, even myself.

The thing is, though, that particular statement did not offend me. In a way, it was something that I had contemplated myself at times. The odd thing about so many religions (and I'm including atheism under that umbrella for the sake of this discussion, whether proper to do so or not) is that from a certain perspective, it seems like suicide is the ultimate logical expression of faith. Nonetheless, as a subject that is sort of a subset of the ideas in my previous post on practical religion, it is interesting that people of just about all religions are, contrary to this, far from likely to commit suicide.

While far from the first time the concept was presented to me, the example from Buddhism may be the best. See, the central idea behind Buddhism (of the standard non-Tibetan variety) is actually a very atheistic one. An enlightened Buddhist will come to realize that God does not exist, material possessions are not important, and in fact, their own sense of self is essentially an illusion. The true goal then, is to realize that this world is nothing but illusory suffering, and to become released from it by denying its existence. The logical question that is often asked by non-Buddhists is, if the goal is to release yourself from the illusory suffering of this imagined material plane of existence, wouldn't the easy thing be to just kill yourself? After all, (non-Tibetan) Buddhists don't believe in reincarnation, so suffering would simply cease, right?

Well, the enlightened person realizes that this is false. If your material and mental self is but an illusion, then aren't you kowtowing to the power of that illusion to solve the problem by material means? Maybe if you could simply cease to live that might be acceptable, but to, say, take an illusory knife and slit your illusory throat? It's not the terminology a Buddhist would use, but that would be admitting defeat. In fact, the true Buddhas that have been enlightened realized that leaving the physical plane was not as great a thing to do as to stay and teach others that have not yet found enlightenment! Oddly enough, although this seems self-sacrificing, I wonder if an enlightened Buddhist would agree, since there is no "self" to sacrifice.

Which hints at the state of affairs for a Christian, both on an individual scale, and on a grander one. If going to Heaven to be with Jesus is the greatest thing a Christian can attain, then why not kill yourself after you give your life to Him? In the Bible, Paul addresses the matter (although the passage is not discussing suicide, but execution):

"For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain. If I am to go on living in the body, this will mean fruitful labor for me. Yet what shall I choose? I do not know! I am torn between the two: I desire to depart and be with Christ, which is better by far; but it is more necessary for you that I remain in the body. Convinced of this, I know that I will remain, and I will continue with all of you for your progress and joy in the faith, so that through my being with you again your joy in Christ Jesus will overflow on account of me." -Philippians 1:21-26

Yes, while it seems a Christian might desire to die, the fact is, we remain because there is still work to be done here on earth, and it wouldn't be right to take the "easy" way out. Some religious leaders have claimed that a suicide cannot go to Heaven, since that would be a type of murder, and one that can't be repented of. I don't think this is true, but one can see a certain arrogance in the idea of claiming to be a follower of Christ and deciding on God's behalf when it's your time to go to Heaven.

And as I said, this is also perhaps a reason for the long delay before the "second coming" of Christ. I've heard many a pastor say that every day Jesus delays His return, many, many more people have a chance to turn to Him and be saved. (It may beg the question that if indeed this is so good, why would Christ ever return? No matter for this discussion.)

A Hindu, or member of some other religion that does believe in reincarnation might also be tempted to leave a life of suffering to re-enter with a blank slate, but most belief systems that include reincarnation don't include the idea of being born with a blank slate, but must reap the rewards of your past life, so ending one life with a selfish and violent act is not likely to put you in a better place.

So, back to the atheist, the one that started the discussion. Why is it that I (and the speaker) say an atheist might desire suicide? Well, the world is full of suffering and strife (a belief common to all the religions mentioned here) and one of the main things we strive for in this life is to escape from this (ditto here). If you truly believe there is nothing, absolutely nothing in store for us after this life, then why not simply go to oblivion? I've always thought, why would an atheist be afraid of dying? Ceasing to exist couldn't possibly hurt, right?

The counter-argument that I think would be the most popular is that since there is no afterlife, then this life is all we have. Why give up everything for nothing? There seems to be some reason in this, certainly, but then, well... Maybe it's a bit of a linguistic problem rather than a real problem, but if you cease to exist, then there is no "you" to have lost any "life". Really, you can't lose your life, can you? You can only stop being you in a very final manner by cutting off your life. You don't cut it off from yourself, but from everyone else, because you're not there after life exists. So is life what you have, or what you are? Either way, is anything really lost to you?

So why do atheists not long for death? Do atheists, like Buddhists, want to keep living to spread the atheistic Gospel to the masses? Or is it merely a biological directive built into us by evolution that tells us to keep existing as long as we can, so that we can keep the chance to propagate our genetic materials in one way or another? Maybe the atheists are the right ones, and it's more straightforward to them. The rest of us need to invent reasons why we want to live, while they simply know that we want to live just because it's human nature.

You know, there's a big part of me that doesn't want to publish this post. It's probably vain conceit on my part, but I fear I may drive some atheist somewhere to kill themselves, which I certainly don't want to do. Most likely, any atheists that read this will either laugh at it, or be somewhat offended, or maybe they'll give me better answers to my questions and make me feel like an idiot (it's not hard to do, and I wish more people would tell me I'm full of it--and why--just so I know people are reading this). But whatever people do in response to this or any other blog, I hope they find a reason to live, whatever it may be.

But also, don't be afraid.

The atheist Christian?

Just a quick note to point you to the first of several guest-posts I will be making over at "Goosing the Antithesis", an atheism blog on which I have been a fairly regular reader and commentor. I have no idea why they invited me to post, nor why I accepted the invitation, but there it is.

Practical religion

People use the word "zen" a lot, usually to refer to someone being zoned out or disconnected from reality. The popular idea about zen or meditation is that it makes you passive or remote. My experience after a dozen years sitting and following my breath a little each day is that I feel more active and more connected to day-to-day life--not less. -Algernon D'Ammassa

I saw this quote recently, and it got me to thinking about an important religious issue. It's not really an issue just for Zen Buddhism or Christianity, but an issue for all religions, maybe even atheism as well. The issue is, whatever sort of spiritual/moral belief system you live under, can you say honestly that it's serving a purpose here on earth?

I remember in college taking a philosophy class on eastern religions & philosophies. At the beginning of the class, both the instructor and the textbook emphasized that eastern religions were unlike the western ones in that there was always an aspect of them that implied practical application to make life better in some way. The unsaid implication? That in Christianity, Judaism and Islam, religion is something you do one day a week and then go back to business the rest of the week as though you were no different from an atheist. In fact, you're probably worse than an atheist, because at least the atheist isn't a hypocrite for living out their beliefs at selective times.

It's that secondary implication of hypocrisy that makes me question the premise, though. If there is a chance for hypocrisy in merely living a plain day-to-day life (which seems to be widely accepted by many theists and atheists alike) then that means that those who live that way are living their religion wrong. Therefore, there is a way to live it right.

It's often attributed to St. Francis of Assisi as saying, "Preach the gospel at all times. Use words if necessary." In the Epistle of James (v. 2:18), the early church leader says, "Show me your faith without deeds, and I will show you my faith by what I do." A true Christian faith should show results in a life well-lived, and I suspect it should be the same for any faith.

And what is a life well-lived? Is it just a faith that serves itself? As the quote above seems to imply, even Zen, with its reputation for turning inward and shutting out the distractions of the world is a practice that in the end should make you more connected with the world. Christianity and so many other religions have a disappointingly spotty history of so-called believers that felt the best way to live out their faith was to coerce others by force to adhere to it. Why? So those people can in turn force others? Shouldn't there be an end goal in mind? Sure, Christianity is supposed to bring salvation, but do people really think a forced confession of faith is genuinely going to bring about a changed heart?

The short of it is, while there are those who believe that being a Christian (or other religious person) is a waste of time, I truly believe that is only the case if that person's religion is empty or misled. Christians of true faith will be found working incessantly to make the world a better place for the glory of God. Would that we all were doing the same.

Membership hath its privileges

There's an interesting facet of Christianity that I find sometimes hard to swallow on an intellectual level, despite the fact that I take it on faith. People that are not Christians, mostly agnostics and atheists, complain that it's unfair for Christianity to make the claim that it has exclusive access to Truth-with-a-capital-T. If Jesus is going to say "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me." (John 14:6) then isn't he being rather intolerant? Well aside from the fact that I don't think that this technically fits the actual definition of intolerant, and that Jesus, being God, pretty much has the right to set the rules however He wants, the thing I think this objection misses very often is the fact that Christianity is not the only religion by far that makes claims of exclusivity. Lots and lots of religions claim to be the only "true" religion, and really, it's a whole topic in itself as to why I think that's not only acceptable, but desirable in a religious practice. But this topic of exclusivity is not the "facet" that I really wanted to talk about, although it's somewhat related, I suppose.

The thing about Christianity that I was pondering yesterday evening was part of the whole, "Don't say you'll believe it when you see it, but believe and then you'll see!" phenomenon. While I believe that there is a great deal of Christianity and its doctrines that can be intellectually understood without having to be a Christian, I think all (well, perhaps most) Christians realize that there is an element of faith that only true believers have a grasp on. We evangelicals have what we like to call "a personal relationship with God." What is that, exactly? I don't think I can describe it to someone who hasn't experienced it for themself, which is too bad, since it's what's really at the heart of Christianity when you strip everything else away.

Interestingly enough, and one of the reasons it's related to the topic in the first paragraph, I found myself pondering this in the midst of reading about Zen Buddhism. I realized that exclusivity is not the only thing by far about Christianity that's hard for an outsider to accept, yet is common to many religions. What is at the center of Zen Buddhism? The experience of zen. What is zen? Well, although philosophers of various religious beliefs can talk about it at length and discuss things about zen, zen itself is not something that can be put into words, even by those who have experienced it. In fact, the inability to describe zen is an inherent property of it, the word "zen" meaning essentially "wordlessness".

Such a concept is found in the Bible in a number of ways. Paul wrote about a vision in which "He heard inexpressible things, things that man is not permitted to tell." (2Cor. 12:4) But aside from that special incident, he writes more generally and practically that "The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned." (1Cor. 2:14) There is a concept in many religions that there is just a certain level of spiritual enlightenment that only the true believers will ever experience.

Interestingly enough, I'd say that it's a belief that even some atheists harbor in an odd way. I've been told by atheists that if only I would cease to believe in God for a moment, I'd see how ridiculous the Bible and Christianity as a whole are. Perhaps they're right, but if so, aren't they essentially suggesting that there is such a thing as special atheistic enlightenment that only true atheists can experience? What a concept! (It's hardly a common view among atheists in general, though. If atheists were a religious classification as Christianity is, there would probably be as many "sects" of atheism as there are atheists.)

I'm wondering if the only point of this blog is to toss out thoughts on unanswerable questions that I'm not really asking, nor looking for feedback on. I'm not sure what my point is here in general, and it sounds like yesterday's post, with a lot of "well maybe, or maybe not". Are these facets of Christianity logically unacceptable? Yet they're used by so many. I remember the irony of once having a discussion on the value of various "ex-gay" ministries. There was a lesbian who claimed that if any of these sorts of ministries ever had any successes, it wasn't that they were turning homosexuals into non-homosexuals, but that they were turning bisexuals into operative heterosexuals. How could she be so sure? Because if they were able to be attracted to women ever, then they were simply not homosexuals, nor had they ever been. I thought this was a very familiar concept, and realized it was from 1John 2:19: "They went out from us, but they did not really belong to us. For if they had belonged to us, they would have remained with us; but their going showed that none of them belonged to us." See, there's no such thing as an ex-Christian; if a person leaves Christianity, it means they were never really a part of it in the first place.

Christianity has its particulars that are strange and hard to understand, but they don't set it apart as particularly wrong so much as just one among many belief systems. Sure, Christianity is special, but not for any of the above reasons.