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Hang It Up, Rudy

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There’s nothing more mortifying than for a presidential hopeful to generate press by attacking the patriotism of a sitting president. Rudy Giuliani’s comments about President Obama “not loving” his country are just terribly pathetic.

The Republican Party, with it’s Neo-conservative economic policies (what Reagan extolled as “trickle-down” economics) has presided over a huge transfer of wealth from the middle class to the ultra-rich (what I decry as “tinkle-down” economics). Now, the only way that I have been able to make sense of “love” is as an investment in creating power in people. Taking their money is exactly the opposite of that.

Contrast this with the centerpiece of Obama’s domestic policy: the Affordable Health Care Act. This is an investment in the people of America. It ensures that individuals can get medical care before their ailments become debilitating, and thus that they can remain active contributors to our economy. It lessens health care costs because it keeps people out of the emergency room, and thus will lower rates for everyone over the long term.

Now that – that is loving.

So why isn’t that perspective shared by Giuliani and his cronies?

There are two kinds of people: those that project themselves upon the world (narcissists) and those that allow the world into themselves (empaths). The Republican Party is beholden to the former: people that believe that whatever works for them is what is right for the country. The Affordable Health Care Act created some losers – very wealthy people that made their money by ensuring that they minimized the number of sick people on their plans. This left a back-log that has to be paid down as coverage is extended without regard for preexisting conditions. This means that, in the short term, rates will go up – particularly for those people that were on preferred coverage plans.

Giuliani represents those people, and all I have to offer is that it is un-Christian to ensure that sick people cannot rely upon society to invest in their healing. When Giuliani has the courage to recognize the inherent selfishness of that attitude, then I might have some confidence that, if elected president, he might actually love the people of this nation. And I don’t mean just the rich cronies that line his campaign coffers. I mean all of the people.

Becoming a Man in a Woman’s World

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On my fist visit to the Cathedral of our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles, I was consciously assessing the state of a community that I expected to be seized by fear. The priestly child-abuse scandal that had been papered over in the ‘70s had re-ignited. Attorneys revealed that many of the perpetrators had been hidden in the church hierarchy, and some had been allowed to resume children’s ministry. Cardinal Mahoney himself was accused of complicity, and huge financial claims were leveled against the Church.

What I discovered, as I wandered around the periphery of the celebration, was that it was infected by a subtle competition for dominance. Every member of the worship team wanted to lift the pall, to re-establish the connection to Christ, and no longer trusted the authority of the prelate. So I listened carefully, echoing back what I heard, and tried to celebrate harmony when it appeared. The cantor went and sat with the choir, and when he came back down to the podium, the competition surrendered to glorious praise.

As I wandered in the space, I got a few disturbed glances from the ushers and deacons. But the confrontation came from a middle-aged woman who, as I stood in the back enjoying the music, approached me and hissed “Say the words!”

I experienced this again when I went down to Orange County to the enormous campus of a renowned evangelist. This time I sat in the fourth row from the stage, and as I probed the spirit of the congregation, he stared pointedly at me. I stayed for a second service, this time sitting in the back rows, and he announced that he had been talking to Jesus every day of his adult life. A little non-plussed, I poked around and discovered that it was his wife and her girlfriends that were presenting the counterfeit.

I won’t assert that these incidents are typical of the “male-dominated” religions, but neither are they rare. They illustrate the temptations of maternal power. If a man and his wife become “one flesh” through intercourse, how much deeper are the bonds that link a mother and the child growing in her womb? The sin that exists in abortion is that the two spirits, rather than separating through birth, remain bound up together. Inevitably a struggle for dominance develops. Even if a normal delivery occurs, male children remain buried in a feminine psychology. This is untenable. While a woman can tell a man whether he satisfies her physical and psychological needs, she cannot connect him to the sources of spiritual strength that make it possible for those needs to be met.

Particularly in affluent communities, where housewives often find their worth measured by the strength of their children, boys face enormous challenges in becoming men. Mothers have difficulty letting their children go. I saw this manifested when I volunteered as a teacher’s aide in elementary school. I was the only father to so participate in kindergarten. I was involved in a divisive custody struggle at the time, and faced a prejudice that I was simply there for legal reasons. That was not true – I really wanted my sons to have a concrete sense of how important their education was to me. But the teachers and mothers struggled with my presence.

In my younger son’s class, lessons were tutored at tables marked by pictures. I was never assigned to the teacher’s table until I took my sons to a swim party. One of the activities was water volleyball with a huge bouncy ball. The event facilitators stood at the back of the court and, though trying to be as gentle as possible, served the ball with force that simply overpowered the kids. I finally got my hands on the thing and walked it up to the net, asking “Who wants to serve it?” Holding the ball over the child’s head, they knocked it up into the air, and the children on the other side clustered under the ball. No longer having to absorb its momentum, they knocked it back over the net. Laughter and shouting replaced the bored frustration.

When I next went in to class, the children embraced me with their hearts while the teacher read a story. The birthday girl turned around and smiled at me, and the little community of children finally overwhelmed the resistance to my presence that had been established by the mothers and teachers. I was allowed that day to tutor at the “red heart table.” But consider: only because one of the daughters let me in.

So when feminists decry the disempowering psychology of “male-dominated” religions, I get a little frustrated. Given their powerful psychological influence on little boys, maternal projections of anger towards men are a destructive burden. I would prefer that women celebrate the strength that they gain from participating in Earth- or Goddess-centered religions, thus advertising what men are missing. And I would also prefer that they celebrate the teachings of the avatars, none of whom rejected the participation of women. Even in the Hebrew tradition, a woman’s spiritual power is recognized: inheritance of the tradition is through the mother.

But the only way to make sense of the story of Abraham’s lineage is to realize that Joseph, the child left without a protector in his father’s harem, became a glorious man because his father took him under his wing. Boys need fathers, and women need to be cautious against using their children as leverage in their relationships. It leaves them with weak sons that attain independence only through rebellion, and the problems of managing the predatory women that they attract. When that consequence is recognized, it seems unfair to castigate men because husbands, spun up by sex and greed, go out into the world to plunder and pillage for the satisfaction of their wives.

Always Check with the First Guys First

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I wrote previously about the awe-inspiring intuition of Douglas Adams (see The Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything). But today, after posting my blog entry, one of my colleagues pulled the page off his Dilbert desk calendar and came to show me what Scott Adams decided to write about today.

I have this sudden urge to watch that TV show. You know, the one with the lady in the creepy black dress and the groaning butler? Not to mention that cousin with the hair growth problem.

The God Particle

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When I did my undergraduate studies in physics at UC Berkeley, the textbooks (always a generation behind) celebrated the accomplishments of great particle physicists of the ‘50s and ‘60s. The author lists on the papers, typically eight people, offered a picture of personal and meaningful participation in revealing the mysteries of the universe.

When I stood one step down on the stage at Wheeler Hall, giving my thesis adviser a height assist when passing the Ph.D. sash over my head, the realities of research in the field of particle physics had completely changed. While I had worked on an eight-person experiment, the theorists had dismissed the results even before they were published. Many of my peers worked as members of geographically dispersed teams, either national or international in scope. The design and commissioning of apparatus had become major engineering projects requiring a decade or more to complete. Some of them never sat shift to acquire data, but published a thesis based upon computer simulations of what their data would look like when (or in some cases, sadly, if) their experiment was run. They were forgotten cogs in collaborations involving hundreds of scientists.

The sociological side-effects of these changes could be disconcerting. The lead scientist on my post-doctoral research project acquired most of his wealth trading property in the vicinity of Fermilab, sited in bucolic countryside that sprouted suburbs to house the staff of engineers and technicians that kept the facility running. Where once a region could host a cutting-edge experimental facility, eventually the sponsors became states, then nations. The site selection process for the Superconducting Super Collider, the follow-on to Fermilab, was a political circus, eventually falling in favor of Texas during the first Bush administration. The project was cancelled in a budget-cutting exercise during the Clinton Administration. This left CERN, the European competitor to Fermilab, as the only facility in active development in the world, with thousands of researchers dependent upon its survival.

Obviously managing the experimental program at such a facility requires an acute political ear – not just to manage the out-sized egos of the researchers themselves, but in packaging a pitch for politicians approving billion-dollar line-items in their budgets. I watched with trepidation as every year a low-statistics survey was done at the limits of the machine’s operating range, with the expected anomalies in the data held out as evidence that there was “something right around the corner” to be uncovered if the machine was allowed to continue to operate. This happened year-after-year, and that can have bad consequences: the frustration of the funding community creates pressure that causes things like the Challenger disaster to happen.

When I left the field in 1995 (yes, 1995! And it’s still relevant!), two specific problems were held out as motivations for continued funding. First, the equations used to calculate reaction probabilities developed a serious anomaly at the energies targeted by the next set of improvements: the values were greater than unity. Since an experiment can have only one outcome, this was held out as proof that something new would be discovered. The other problem was the existence of the Higgs boson, known popularly as the god particle.

There are many explanations for that soubriquet: “God Particle”. Some attribute it to Stephen Weinberg, a theorist whose frustration with the difficulty of proving or disproving its existence led him to call it “that god-damned particle.” I had a personal view, which was that every time theoretical physics ran into a difficulty, it seemed to be resolved by introducing another Higgs-like particle. But the cynic might also be forgiven if he claimed that the Higgs had become a magic mantra that induced compliance in mystified politicians, and spirited money out of public coffers – pretty much as atheists like to claim religions do.

So what is the Higgs particle?

Why Monotheism?

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When I was in high school in the ‘70s, global politics was dominated by a penis-envy contest called Mutually Assured Destruction. The Soviet Union and the United States amassed huge stock-piles of nuclear weapons that Carl Sagan concluded could wipe out the enemy without even falling on their territory. Simply setting them all off at ground level would raise enough dust in the stratosphere to cause a global winter. The collapse in food supplies would push humanity to the brink of extinction. That the instigator of the war would share the fate of their enemy justified the acronym ‘MAD’. But there were a lot of institutions that spent a lot of money building weapons delivery systems that were faster, more lethal and more accurate – money that might have been better spent improving the educational and living standards.

While Khrushchev threatened that the Warsaw Pact would bury the West under the weight of Soviet armor (pounding his shoe on the table for rhetorical effect), ultimately it was America that buried Russia under a mountain of dollars. Remember – this wasn’t a strategic conflict with concrete goals. It was a penis-envy contest, and letting the other guy get away with more was unacceptable. So Russia bankrupted itself attempting to match the West weapons-system for weapons-system. The United States cynically engaged this policy of “escalation” in many theaters of conflict. Simply introduce more and more sophisticated weapons systems, until the enemy was financially exhausted, then bring them to the table to figure out how to make money together.

We’ve seen this same logic invade our religious arguments over the last hundred years. You know, “My God is greater than yours.” At one point, the Buddhists prided themselves on remaining above the fray, but when I went down to Deer Park Monastery five years back, the speaker was proud to observe that Buddhism had never instigated a war, unlike those Christians and Muslims. I wondered to myself whether Buddhists were running any countries, and now recent events in Myanmar seem to bear out the corrupting influence of political authority.

Religious breast-beating can be traced to theological escalation. Polytheism was accepted practice in the ancient world, and those that cultivated relationships with multiple gods would have been likely to consider themselves shorted in a relationship with a single god. What if the one god doesn’t approve of your goals? Why wouldn’t you want to bargain with another deity? The response from monotheism was often to assert that “Our one God is more powerful than all those other gods put together. In fact, our God is the god of all things seen and unseen, the creator of everything, the ultimate purpose, and look at how our warriors beat you up on the battlefield when we carry his banner!”

I am going to denounce this logic right here and now: monotheism is not the celebration of a god for the purpose of claiming his or her power. Monotheism is, in fact, the original humanism. It was to recognize: “Geez, there’s a lot of spiritual power brought forward from the past, power built up in trees and animals and fish. It’s really hard to be human in this world! Let’s band together and worship a human god, and create a place for ourselves.”

Why was this important? Because our minds are so incredibly powerful. This is recognized in Eden, where after eating of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, Adam and Eve are cast out before they can eat of the Tree of Life. Humanity has a dangerous capacity: the capacity to create ideas, which is to reorganize spirit. The serpent tempted Eve because it knew that it could assault heaven itself with that power, and that is evident in the actions of God himself in the aftermath: an angel with flashing swords is set up to prevent our return to the Garden.

It is also evident in the punishments meted out for creating the golden calf, the judgment against the kings of Israel for allowing polytheism to flourish, the scourges suffered by Ezekiel and the passion of Christ. When humanity is polluted by primitive tendencies, God insists that they be purged. This is also the purpose of the Law: animals are opportunistic and instinctual. They don’t apply abstract systems of rules to moderate their actions. Reasoning about the consequences of our actions is a uniquely human capability.

The full glory of human potential is celebrated by Christ when he announces to Peter [Matt. 16:9]:

I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.

In other words, the Apostles were trained as a corps of spiritual surgeons.

In confronting the power of this capacity, the ancient predators had only one response: keep us from banding together. This is described in Revelation, where John recounts how the dragon (the spiritual avatar of the serpent that appeared in Eden) causes humanity to pursue animal worship, and when we get over that, corrupts our religions from within [Rev. 13:15]:

The second beast was given power to give breath to the image of the first beast, so that the image could speak and cause all who refused to worship the image to be killed.

Sound like MAD, anyone? Claim that your god is the best, threaten the enemy, and bankrupt yourself spiritually.

The goal that I offer today, thus, is to put away monotheistic escalation. The ultimate nature of God is beyond our understanding. What is important is to use the divine relationship to most fully refine our human capacities. Our unique skills – the skills of understanding, imagination and creativity – must be strengthened. Ultimately, it is intended that those skills should replace the brutal urge for survival and reproductive opportunity that characterize the animal kingdom.

In guiding us to maturity, all of our great religious traditions hold that there will come an avatar who will help us bring peace and justice to the world. Their name or ethnicity is unimportant, for in that era the divine authority will be manifested in all of us.

Healing Dissension

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In the weary journey that has been this life, I have come to accept that we cannot end sin by trying to destroy the impulses that trigger it. That simply justifies their behavior. So Jesus counsels us [NIV Matt. 5:9]:

But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also.

So I have sought to join the vices to love. That strategy was held out in All the Vice of Jesus. I was pretty satisfied with my progress, and had turned my thoughts from the matter until I realized that Dissension was still at work in my life.

She kept me up all last night, from 12:30 until I rose at 6:45. Competition and fear at work, the cry of “Anti-Semitism” against the reasons for Jesus’s demotion of the Law of Moses, old family history and recent family struggle: they rolled through my mind, one after another, sometimes mixing into toxic stew, and I found myself simply reiterating: “I have so much else to be concerned with! What right do you have to burden me with these trivial complaints that are your responsibilities?”

So I lost that round. I allowed dissension to separate me from those that I seek to love and inspire.

I think of dissension as “she” because I have learned that Mystery, the woman on the red beast in Rev. 17:5, uses it as a favorite tool. Whether in debasing my relationships with younger women by imposing sex or in undermining collaboration with other men, Mystery (I could name the women, but that would be counter-productive) has inserted dissension again as an obstacle to my goals.

When things got really bad at work, I found this piece of wisdom about dealing with conflict, the goal of all dissension:

Find a mutually beneficial solution.
Adapt to surroundings.
Don’t share all your secrets.
Stand up for your dreams.
Sometimes you need to move on.

It’s that last that has come to disturb me: surrender. I have found it to be an effective solution, but a consequence has been that I haven’t been able to build upon the foundations I establish at work and home. Domineering people walk off with them.

There’s another method: dissension justifies the projection of our egos. If we don’t participate, and accept that projection without responding to its harmful intent, people become enmeshed in our love. Eventually they may realize that we can do more together than we can as individuals.

But then comes Mystery again: the quiet lurker in the backwaters of our minds who gains power by picking up the gold that dissension scatters. As we learn to work together, she’s frozen out, and the volume and intensity of her projections goes up.

Is that what I’m dealing with? The last hurrah of Mystery?

That doesn’t seem satisfying. I’d like to redeem her.

So let’s consider: if dissension motivates us to assert our egos in destructive competition, perhaps with love it becomes celebration of our differences? Maybe the answer to a charge of ill intent is to insert, at the top of the list:

Celebrate your opponent’s virtues.

Church and State

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President Obama fanned the flames of controversy when, at breakfast with Muslim leaders, he remarked that Christianity had a history of injustice that should be cautionary when characterizing movements such as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. The specific examples he cited were the Crusades, the Inquisition and slavery in America.

How does each of these examples relate to the effort to create an Islamic State in the Middle East?

The Crusades

The Crusades were a complex political effort. The laws of inheritance in Europe meant that all the younger sons of the nobility were unlanded, and thus unable to provide for a noble wife. As a result, Europe was embroiled in internecine strife, to a degree that the Papacy at one point threatened to excommunicate the nobility if the bloodshed did not cease.

In this context, the Emperor of Constantinople, in whom leadership of both Church and State were gathered, was facing Muslim aggression. Again, the politics was complex: the Emperor was a tyrant, and faced internal dissent both from Christian “heretics” and Jews. The Emperor pled to the Rome for assistance, and Urban, seeing the possibility of reuniting the two halves of Christendom, agreed. Of course, this was also an outlet for the unlanded nobility to attain honors and wealth.

The first of the Crusades was a successful military effort, but revealed its misconceived origins. The Jews fought against the Crusaders, which led to pogroms against the “elder brothers” that Europe had accepted as representatives of their nation. The castles gained were impossible to support logistically from Europe, and ruled by the most aggressive of the European knights, men who insisted on attacking passing Muslim caravans. When the Caliph refused, on Islamic grounds, to retaliate except when the raiders were attacking, he was overthrown by Saladdin, a military slave, who began a concerted effort to conquer all of Christendom.

Back in Europe, the organizational strength of the Catholic Church led to a fascination with Christian ceremony and piety among the nobility. This reached its peak in France, where King Philip decided to mount a crusade as a proof of piety. The logistics were poorly conceived, and the mission ended in disaster. The last of the Crusades, in complete contradiction of Urban’s original intent, ended with the sack of Constantinople itself.

So the lesson I see here is: don’t mix religion and politics.

The Inquisition

The Inquisition is often spoken of as a single movement, but study reveals that the character of an “inquisition” depended upon the political context.

The worst excesses of inquisition occurred when political leaders began to challenge the organizational power of the Church. Again, this was a complex problem: the Church had benefited from the instability of the European nobility, and so had acquired huge amounts of land and wealth. They used religious authority to protect those lands. As the nobility began to establish independent systems of law and institutions of learning, the more aggressive among them focused on the practical opportunity of the weak Church military. The hypocrisy of many religious leaders also led them to question the authenticity of their claim to the lands held for Christ.

The most horrific inquisitions occurred in Spain and France. Following the Muslim invasion, the crown of Spain holed up in the Pyrenees. When the Islamic world rejected scientific thinking, advances in military technology eventually gave the king the upper hand in the struggle. Sweeping out of the mountains with the fire of religious purity, the king set out to purge Spanish civilization of Muslim collaborators. As in the Middle East, this included many Jewish nobles, who had benefited by Muslim occupation. The king forced them to Christianize their names and convert. Those that did not were stripped of their titles.

The mechanisms of this inquisition were horrific, and that was recognized by the Pope. A papal decree was issued warning the king to cease the program. The king responded with a threat to reform the church in Spain with himself as its head. Rome, for reasons among which should be considered to provide relief to those under indictment, choose to retract its decree and remain active in Spain. The king pushed his advantage by posting Borgia to Rome. The methods used by Borgia to obtain the papacy reflect more the guidance of Machiavelli than Christ.

The prior situation in France was similarly complicated. The French king was in a struggle against the independent southern nobility. The region was also distinguished by its Catharism, a schismatic sect that upheld feminine spirituality and the renunciation of worldly concerns. Rome was an active collaborator in the purge of the region, but was goaded by the murder of its legate by a rebellious noble, Raymond of Toulouse. I do remark that about this time the king invaded Rome and transferred the papacy to Avignon. Obviously, the balance of power in Europe was shifting. Most Cathars chose to convert to Catholicism: those that did not were hanged or burned at the stake.

The French and Spanish Inquisitions bracketed the Medieval Inquisition. Again, this was a complicated situation. Prosecution of heresy was performed under civil as well as Church law, and Rome often found that the proceedings were manipulated to benefit the civil authorities. In an attempt to prevent executions and to ensure that heretics received correct Christian teaching, the papacy attempted to take control of prosecution of heresy. Some assert that the mission saved thousands of lives.

So the lesson I see here is: don’t mix politics and religion.

Slavery in America


Obama made the claim that Christianity was used to “justify” slavery. While not having studied the matter deeply, I have never heard anyone claim that the slave masters looked into the Bible and found a command to subjugate the peoples of Africa to slavery. Yes, slavery was mentioned as a common practice in the Bible, but it also came with injunctions against mistreatment. Sympathy and counsel to the slave is given in a charming fashion in the story of Naaman [2 Kings 5], whose humble servants convinced their violence-prone master to accept the guidance of Elisha, and thus to receive healing.

This sense of slaves as part of the owner’s family is contradicted by the zeal and determination shown by God in freeing his people from Egypt. Though jilted by Joseph and his family, who became prominent political figures in Pharaoh’s circle, God heeds the cries of the Israelites under the foreman’s lash. Obviously, God acted in a way consistent with justice.

My sense, then, is that the Bible was used to rationalize the corrupt system of slavery in the American South by those that profited by it. They were eventually beaten down, just as Pharaoh was beaten down. Of course, racism is still strong among all the survivors of that system, but Obama did not mention racism – he spoke of slavery.

So the lesson that I see here is: don’t mix economics and religion.

The Lessons of Christ


The Republican Party likes to draw upon the authority of religion in its legislative program. This has led to some interesting policy contradictions in a party committed both the Christian action and laissez-faire economics. Indiana recently passed a law allowing the state to contract with organizations that require adherence from their employees. You would think that they would prefer those institutions to demonstrate the alignment of those precepts by succeeding against all comers in the open market, and so to be uninterested in government contracts.

To the discerning reader, the Bible gives clear testimony regarding the effects of the mixing of politics and religion. Samuel counsels against the anointing of a king, but relents in a “law of natural consequences” demonstration. While the wisdom and grace of God had guided the nation through trouble unscathed, with the creation of a monarchy, the nation was riven by internecine strife, forsook its covenant, and was eventually destroyed by the Assyrians.

With the return to Canaan, the process is repeated. Jesus finally comes along to counsel “render unto Caesar” and to demolish the authority of the law that had been perverted to make wealth a substitute for actual piety. Dashing the hopes of his Apostles, he renounces an earthly kingdom and submits to destruction at the hands of the authorities of his day. His resurrection was proof that the paternity of God promises greatness that no king can equal.

Christians should understand political systems as a temporary mechanism used to protect against exploitation. Such claims always have an aura of subjectivity: the rich man confident of his contributions to the general well-being may consider taxation to be a form of “exploitation.” Conflicting claims can only be resolved face-to-face, as happened to John McNamara in India. However, when the era of Christ’s reign occurs, the openness of Christ’s heart will make resolution of these claims immediate and obvious to those involved. That era will manifest only when we stop heeding the political philosophies of men, and trust the “still, quiet voice” that talks directly into our hearts.

So the lesson of Christ is that in the face of personal weakness, attempting to legislate justice is a fool’s errand. The Christian path is to expose corruption, and then to heal the victims, thereby disempowering those that use fear to exploit the weak.

So the lesson of Christ is: don’t mix politics and religion.

The Lessons of Islam


Following the death of Mohammed (pbuh), the Islamic Ummah went through a period of upheaval as it assumed the responsibilities of state management. Corruption was rampant. The Eleven Followers of Mohammed (pbuh) tried to restore the integrity of the Ummah, but were systematically destroyed. This is the essence of the Shia-Sunni split, with the Shias coming out on the losing end of the argument. It was the Sunni Muslims in Baghdad that mounted the era of Muslim conquest, although ultimately Islam proved to be a fig-leaf for a sequence of conquerors of diverse nationalities, including Ughurs and Turks.

In the service of celebrating the martial accomplishments of the conquerors, the state-supported Imams glorified and justified their atrocities (as can also be seen in the Bible, with the Babylonian Chronicles a re-write of the disparaging Kings). These nationalist paeans are now held by some as a higher authority than the Qur’an itself, in which Mohammed (pbuh) inveighs against violence unless under immediate attack.

In the modern era, we can see the disastrous consequences of mixing politics and religion in the extremism generated by Saudi Wahabbism and militancy throughout the world when Islamic practices are enforced by the state (as by the Taliban in Afghanistan).

So the lesson of Islam is: don’t mix politics and religion.

Wisdom from the Bully Pulpit?


I obviously find Obama’s comments to lack nuance. Religious history shows that religious states always yield to corruption. Worse, ISIS doesn’t appear to have ever been a manifestation of Mohammed’s (pbuh) moral principles. However, I would agree that nations that profess to be Christian have also failed to practice the moral principles of Christ.

As a moral imperative, I’d like the President to exhort Islamic leaders to renounce state-enforced religion. And I’d like him to remind Christians that legislation of morality has an ugly history in the Bible, not excluding the crucifixion of the man we hold as our Savior.

God granted us free will. In the exercise of that will, we will make mistakes, hurting ourselves and others. This is the path of the Knowledge of Good and Evil that we choose in Eden. The greatness of our God comes in patient forgiveness and healing.

For Christians hoping for the reign of Christ, this is not an idle matter. Jesus died for our sins, but his compassion does not stop there. A sin is a sin because it leaves a wound in our eternal souls. When Jesus returns, it will be for the healing. So long as we continue to attempt to prevent sin through the coercive power of the state, his power can only be manifested against the institutions of the state.

Yes, competent administration of the state is essential, but should not be linked to manifestation of his ultimate aims, for his spirit will unite all peoples, and wash away fear with healing. Provide private support for your church and its charitable efforts among the less fortunate, and let the spread of the Holy Spirit make the state irrelevant.

Taking Up the Cross

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While Christianity is filled with joy in the certainty of Jesus’s promises, those promises are balanced with assurances that we will face suffering. In fact, suffering seems to be tendered as a condition of our Christianity, for Jesus says [NIV Matt. 16:24]

Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.

It’s hard to avoid the impression that if we don’t find a cross to carry, we can’t call ourselves a disciple of Christ.

Now the obvious thing about the cross is the pain involved. But if the experience of pain was a condition of grace, Jesus would have come into the world a cripple, and shown us how to overcome that deficit. And to be healed would be contrary to grace, rather than an act to be celebrated – as Jesus so joyfully did – as a demonstration of great faith.

So we should be cautious against ascribing a long illness as a cross to bear, nor a difficult relationship or financial challenges. Jesus presented us another tool to use in overcoming those difficulties: an openness to the unconditional love tendered from the divine source, and a sharing of its riches with those around us. It was a message of truth that both revealed our nature, and the grace of the relationship that God seeks to share with us.

It is this observation that leads us into an understanding of the metaphor as Jesus offered it. The cross was not just the place of suffering – it was a tool wielded by the rulers of the age to prevent Jesus from sharing his message. Those authorities achieved their position largely through fear. In the case of the Romans and Herod, it was fear through threat of violence. In the case of the Temple priests, it was fear gained through the threat of spiritual corruption.

To take up the cross, then, is to offer the world the experience of our love, and to be harmed by those who use fear to control those to whom we offer hope. It is to speak truth to power, to do it joyfully, and to make courage born of faith a demonstration of the weakness of our persecutors.

There is no place in which it is more important to do this than in our churches. Consider: the only direct assault Jesus mounted against the rulers of his age was against the money changers in the Temple – the intermediaries that profited by standing between the faithful and the healing love of God.

So do not make too much, fellow Christians, of finding that we have pain in our lives. That is not what qualifies us in the eyes of Jesus. We find certain grace as Christians only when our pain serves to overcome the institutions that stand against love: either the perfect love of God, or the love that we offer each other.

The Standard of Truth

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I first read F. Scott Peck, the psychologist and Christian philosopher, back in college. (Ouch! Was that really 1984?) The Road Less Traveled crystalized the wisdom he gained in trying to balance the scientific practices of one-on-one therapy with the creation of networks of support that enabled healing to become a practical way of living for the patient.

One of the greatest causes of psychological distress, as well as the greatest impediment to healing, was the simple confusion that “love” was something that the giver felt. Peck completely rejected this in the case of the confusing loss of ego boundaries that we know as romantic love, applying to this particular form of madness the technical term “cathecting.” That’s close enough to “catheter” that I find it almost repulsive.

Peck’s writing sent me off down a path of rational loving that is just terribly confusing to most people. I don’t expect to feel good when loving somebody until my love actually manifests itself in a way that means something to them. I know that I’ve succeeded in that process when they come and say “Thank-you for loving me.” Ultimately, that’s the only meaningful evidence of my love. I do still offer “I love you” to my intimates, because it’s a comforting token, but I know full well that it doesn’t give me any claim on them until they give me “thank-you” back.

The most awe-inspiring part of this process is the depth to which people reveal themselves, and the tenderness of the engagement. The experience is very much like the “cathecting” that Peck described: it’s a deep surrender of ego. It’s different, however, because I’m not projecting myself into them. I’m actually acting as a doorway of sorts, and on the other side of the doorway is God. In looking into them, I’m simply showing them how I accept God, and letting them use that as an example for their own acceptance.

This is the source of the confusion, particularly to women of child-bearing age. They think that they’re falling in love with me, when in fact what they’re falling in love with is the source of perfect, infinite, unconditional love that reaches out to them through me.

That divine love is the love that forgave Cain, the first son, for the murder of Abel, the second son. It is a love that knows no rules, no boundaries. It is the love that manifested itself on the cross in the ultimate act of forgiveness.

Are rules imposed upon us in this relationship? Only one: to humbly accept that our love can never be so perfect, and thus to surrender ourselves as the conduit through which that love flows to others.

Is that hard? Yes, it’s hard. It’s really, really hard. The reason is that, after we’ve all broken down our egos and learned to offer our hearts up in service to one another, we still have to figure out how to stay alive in this world long enough to make some progress in healing it. That means deciding what we’re going to do, and often it really doesn’t make a difference, in the big picture, whether we eat Chinese or Mexican take-out tonight. But if we all say “you choose”, then nothing ever happens. And if we always insist on making ourselves happy, then our partners will eventually get tired of never having their preferences honored.

The example might seem silly, but when you’ve got a two-career family, and job offers in two states, the decisions become more difficult and painful to resolve.

And so we look for rules – something hard and fast from God that will help us prioritize. In Judaism, those rules were pretty much designed for men (which I interpret as reflecting our weakness). Rules provide structure, and can be a useful spiritual tool. We simply stop investing our egos in practical matters, and move on to spiritual ones.

But the New Testament is about creating people that live outside of the rules, and Acts demonstrates Jesus’s success in that endeavor. After the healing of a cripple, the Sanhedrin throw Peter and John in jail, but eventually are forced to relent, because, as the Scripture says [NIV Acts 4:13-14]:

When they saw the courage of Peter and John and realized that they were unschooled, ordinary men, they were astonished and they took note that these men had been with Jesus. But since they could see the man who had been healed standing there with them, there was nothing they could say.

And so this brings me to the point of this message: the standard of truth, as Jesus always said, is the faith that gives you the courage to give and receive healing. Remember, Jesus never, ever said “I have healed you” – he always said “Your faith has healed you.” Divine love can reach out through us, but unless the target of that love accepts it, no benefit will come.

So believe in what heals you. Allow others to take comfort in the healing that their faith brings to them. And open your heart to each other so that the truth of your healing can be seen to all. For that is the testament that Christ begs for the world to see: not a labored adherence to rules and conditions, but a joyous revival of truth, hope and life in those that once suffered with lies, fear and death.

And you ministers: if you can’t offer the kind of healing described in Acts, please humble your egos to the ultimate authority when your congregants tell you that the rules don’t work for them. Just agree that they need to find a spiritual home elsewhere, and part without prejudicial words on either side.

And for those ministers with the courage to recognize that you have guided your congregation through experiences that have moved them beyond the need for rules: Well: “God Bless You!” and “Welcome to the Journey!”

What is Important About Church?

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I have been in a lot of churches, and many pastors raise the alarm that they work in communities that are turning away from God. Often this is accompanied by a call to evangelism: the members of the congregation must go out into the world to bring those outside in.

An element that distinguishes churches are the strategies they pursue as they turn outwards. Some do charitable works, some trumpet the knowledge of the Bible, some run Halloween and snow parties. The problem is that where the church was the only charitable institution in the ancient world, today the precepts of brotherly love are so firmly established that modern governments have institutionalized the provision of charity. During the Middle Ages, the Church ran all the educational institutions: today public schools provide a wealth of knowledge to our children, and knowledge that is more immediately useful in creating value in the material world. And for those who want to have fun, modern expectations for entertainment make Church-run events appear a little tame.

In this age, then, I would assert that the unique role of Church is to provide spiritual support to its members. This process is not entirely familiar to every minister. During a sermon on patience, one local pastor reported that God was “messing with him.” He had become trapped in traffic during a dragnet for a police shooter. The traffic seemed to just go around in circles with no escape, and his anxiety grew higher and higher. What I offered to him was that, under such circumstances, when people were all enmeshed in a common wavelength of fear, anger and/or frustration, I found that injecting the Christian experience of love, compassion and patience to be enormously effective.

In that practice, the concern for the lone individual is becoming trapped in the psychology of the immoral man, with their greed, lust and fear. Many churches have a “private club” of spiritually sophisticated individuals that work very hard to keep dirt out of their presence.

The problem throughout is that unless people are presented with the knowledge of Christian peace, they don’t know what they are missing. It’s really that peace that is important in the modern world, with the constant barrage of e-mails to read, decisions to make, people to see. It is only in that peace that the still, small voice of the Holy Spirit can be heard. Answers to many of life’s problems are easy to discover in that great gift to humanity: the Holy Spirit, repository of the knowledge of practical problem-solving through love.

I believe that it takes a community of caring to foster the experience of Christian peace. That’s not “peace” in the sense of “protection from trouble”, but the peace of Jesus on the cross: assailed by hatred from without, but above it all. In a Christian community, that strength and peace is shared among us in our time of greatest need. The connection to that peace becomes a reliable support for us as we navigate an unsympathetic world, and I have found it to be the thing that people find most remarkable about my Christianity.

So how do we share this experience with the world around us? By walking in it with our hearts open. Those that need peace most, when looking within us, cannot help but see Jesus there reaching out to them.