Annual Conference (AC, for future reference) began with the 42 lay candidates for Delegate to General & Jurisdictional Conference addressing the assembled laity, who numbered roughly 1,000. We each had two minutes to speak, and unlike most of the candidates I had crafted an entirely new address for this forum. I've reprinted it below for your reading pleasure. Most of the other candidates, with a few noteworthy exceptions, repeated the same old tirades, bemoaning the declining membership of our denomination and laying the blame for said decline squarely at the feet of the "ultra-liberals". The conservative bloc was out in force this morning along the sidewalks surrounding the convention center, handing out brochures and "voter's guides" to entering delegates (they're not allowed to distribute campaign literature inside the building, but no such restriction applies to the surrounding grounds). Their main concerns appear to be sexual orientation, abortion, "fiscal restraint" (keeping more money in the local churches and not sending so much to the liberally-inclined national church boards and agencies), and "fair and proportional representation" (getting more clout for the North Georgia Conference).
We cast our first set of votes for delegates (both lay and clergy) this afternoon. Unlike the lay candidates, who make their candidacy known, the clergy do not have declared candidates, and so their ballots contain all 999(!) eligible ordained elders. Results will be made known first thing in the morning, followed immediately by another round of voting. Voting rounds apparently will become fast and furious as we narrow the field of candidates and many of the slots are filled. I'll keep you posted, and will be sure to let you know if I manage to garner anything beyond the low double-digits.
Also today was the annual memorial communion service, honoring those clergy and clergy spouses who have died in the past year. Rachel and Patrick were able to join Rex and me here for that service.
And here's that speech of mine from this morning - enjoy!
Sisters and brothers, good morning! My name is Dan Browning, and I want to talk with you about my faith.
Back at our first Candidates Forum about a week and a half ago, Brother Joe Whittemore said that most all of the votes a Delegate casts at General Conference are based on his or her theology. I agree, so here’s my theology in a nutshell.
God is love. Love God. Love your neighbor. Love your enemies. Do unto others as you would have others do unto you. Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God, and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.
I am convinced that the message of the Gospel is a message of radical, abundant, sacrificial love, and one of radical welcoming and inclusion. And yes, just so you can quote me on the record, I firmly believe that this radical love and inclusion should extend fully to our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters, just as they are.
Friends, the Book of Discipline is not Holy Scripture. We change the Discipline regularly, as we grow in our collective wisdom and knowledge and discernment as the Church. We stand on the shoulders of the saints who have gone before us, and we rejoice in that, but we must not be content to live in the past. If the Church is to truly transform the world and to manifest the life of the gospel in the world - as we are called to do - then we must reclaim our prophetic voice and be willing to speak truth to power, whether that power resides in our government, our society, or yes, even in our own church hierarchy. And as we take up that sacred calling, we must always be careful to “walk humbly with our God”. Thank you.
11 June 2007
06 June 2007
Welcome to my church gang!
Because of potential updates and overhauls to our church's website, I've decided to use this personal blog site as your source for updates during the North Georgia UMC Annual Conference, taking place June 11-15. I'll be posting here frequently throughout the Conference to keep you updated on the latest breaking news from Athens. If you'd like, subscribe to the Atom feed (at the bottom of this page) to have updates automatically sent to you. If you have previously subscribed, you probably need to re-subscribe due to changes in my hosting. Or, if that's outside of your techno-comfort zone, just check back here often. Please send comments, either via this site or by email to me at danielabrowning@gmail.com. And while you're here, feel free to browse around the site for other of my musings, but be forewarned that it's not all orthodox (nor is it entirely G-rated, but it's not too bad).
As most of you know, I have placed my name in candidacy to be a delegate to the 2008 General and Jurisdictional Conferences. Since I'm being honest about my beliefs in my presentations, chances are that I probably won't be chosen by the North Georgia UMC laity to represent them, as my beliefs tend to be a bit outside of the conservative mainstream of the Conference. But, stranger things have happened. In any event, be sure to keep me and Rex in your prayers as we seek to "do the right thing" this week.
Last Saturday the Conference held the first of two Candidate Forums - this one was attended by a hundred or so delegates, and most of the Candidates. The Candidates each had two minutes to speak to the assembled delegates. As we are arranged in alphabetical order, my turn was #2 out of the 42 or so Candidates. Here's what I had to say on Saturday:
Brothers and sisters, good morning! Greetings in the name of Christ Jesus. My name is Dan Browning. I stand before you today as a candidate for Delegate to the 2008 General and Jurisdictional Conferences, and I am not here to ask for your vote.
Now, I’m not asking you to vote against me either. I say this because I really don’t think we should be treating this selection process as electoral politics, not in the way the world does elections. The work that we will entrust to our Conference’s delegates will include the crafting of faithful and just responses to some of the most pressing issues of our time: environmental stewardship and the climate crisis, the death of thousands of children worldwide daily from preventable diseases, the inequity of poverty in our own nation, the continuing work of racial reconciliation, and yes, issues of church finances and administration, and of sexuality and sexual orientation. I, for one, believe that these issues are far too important to be decided by campaign slogans and brochures and cards and letters and emails and websites, or by electioneering and voting blocs and lists of “good” and “bad” candidates.
What I am asking you to do is to pray. Pray to know God’s will. Seek the guidance of the Holy Spirit who lives and moves in and among and through us all. Use your God-given wisdom and discernment as you select delegates from among the declared candidates. I began by greeting you as sisters and brothers, because at the beginning and at the end of the day, we are all sisters and brothers to one another. Always be mindful of that. If we do that, then we truly will be able to “walk humbly with our God”. And above all else, abide in love. Thank you.
As most of you know, I have placed my name in candidacy to be a delegate to the 2008 General and Jurisdictional Conferences. Since I'm being honest about my beliefs in my presentations, chances are that I probably won't be chosen by the North Georgia UMC laity to represent them, as my beliefs tend to be a bit outside of the conservative mainstream of the Conference. But, stranger things have happened. In any event, be sure to keep me and Rex in your prayers as we seek to "do the right thing" this week.
Last Saturday the Conference held the first of two Candidate Forums - this one was attended by a hundred or so delegates, and most of the Candidates. The Candidates each had two minutes to speak to the assembled delegates. As we are arranged in alphabetical order, my turn was #2 out of the 42 or so Candidates. Here's what I had to say on Saturday:
Brothers and sisters, good morning! Greetings in the name of Christ Jesus. My name is Dan Browning. I stand before you today as a candidate for Delegate to the 2008 General and Jurisdictional Conferences, and I am not here to ask for your vote.
Now, I’m not asking you to vote against me either. I say this because I really don’t think we should be treating this selection process as electoral politics, not in the way the world does elections. The work that we will entrust to our Conference’s delegates will include the crafting of faithful and just responses to some of the most pressing issues of our time: environmental stewardship and the climate crisis, the death of thousands of children worldwide daily from preventable diseases, the inequity of poverty in our own nation, the continuing work of racial reconciliation, and yes, issues of church finances and administration, and of sexuality and sexual orientation. I, for one, believe that these issues are far too important to be decided by campaign slogans and brochures and cards and letters and emails and websites, or by electioneering and voting blocs and lists of “good” and “bad” candidates.
What I am asking you to do is to pray. Pray to know God’s will. Seek the guidance of the Holy Spirit who lives and moves in and among and through us all. Use your God-given wisdom and discernment as you select delegates from among the declared candidates. I began by greeting you as sisters and brothers, because at the beginning and at the end of the day, we are all sisters and brothers to one another. Always be mindful of that. If we do that, then we truly will be able to “walk humbly with our God”. And above all else, abide in love. Thank you.
05 June 2007
Sunday's homily
By popular demand (OK, not that popular really), I'm reprinting my homily from last Sunday's "Peace with Justice" service at my church. Certain references and names changed to protect the innocent. Comments welcome.
DB
Traditionally here at [insert my church name], [my] Class has a Peace with Justice study each spring, leading up to this Sunday, and our Class takes responsibility for designing the service and bringing the message. You might wonder how the topic of world religions and pluralism fits this theme of Peace with Justice. But really, when you think about it, religion and clashes between religions are the cause or catalyst of so much of the war and injustice and destruction in our world throughout history and even today.
Of course, it’s easy to classify religion that leads to violence and warfare as “bad” religion. Some say the answer or antidote to bad, destructive religion is NO religion. No religion, or atheism, is an increasingly popular alternative, according to today’s bestseller lists. With books by such notable authors as Daniel Dennett, Richards Dawkins, Sam Harris, and yes, Christopher Hitchens all bestsellers, one could be forgiven for thinking that there is a Great Revival of atheism sweeping across the nation.
And we all want to escape from bad religion, the accusatory kind of religion that points a finger and says, “If you don’t believe and act exactly like I do, you’re going to hell in a handbasket”. Many of you probably had some encounters, in college or elsewhere, with the guy who always tried to corner you and say “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life – have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior yet?” While YOU were trying to get AWAY from that guy in college, as many of you know, I WAS that guy.
Some of you have heard this story before, but one of the ways I began to change my beliefs away from what I now consider to be “bad religion” was when I spent a summer in Malta working on converting a bunch of Libyan Muslim college guys. But the more time I spent with them, the more I came to think “Hey, these guys seem to be doing pretty well without my Christianity – they’re trying their best to love God and love their neighbor – maybe the fact that they were born and grew up in Libya and were raised as Muslims isn’t so bad after all?”
One of the main things we’ve been studying in Discovery these last several weeks, as we examined various religions of the world, is whether there is some sort of underlying unity among these religions, or at least whether they have more in common than not. Is it possible, perhaps, that all the great religions are attempting to describe the same singular truth, and they just have different ways of going about it?
According to Buddhist teachings, the notion of separateness is an illusion altogether. This means not only that the separate religions with their separate teachings and traditions and theological statements of belief are illusory, but even that our separateness from each other and from the world around us is illusory.
But this isn’t just a Buddhist idea. Maybe you remember from one of my previous sermons, if you were one of the handful of folks I didn’t put to sleep at the time, some ramblings about quantum theory, and how everything is made of atoms, which in turn are made of subatomic particles like electrons and protons and neutrons, and protons and neutrons are composite particles made of quarks, and that the only difference between objects is how these particles are organized, put together, and which molecules they wind up forming. Furthermore, at their most basic all of these particles are really just energy, so everything we call matter is really just energy organized in different ways, all tied together in this one big underlying field.
In case you’re worried that this is just something I’ve come up with on my own, let me reassure you that I consider this to be very much in line with our United Methodist teachings. John Wesley himself taught the doctrine of prevenient grace, whereby the Holy Spirit lives and move in and among and through ALL of us, even if we don’t recognize it.
Recall the passage from Proverbs that we just read – about how Wisdom is the expression of God’s very Self: When God established the heavens, Wisdom was there. When God drew a circle on the face of the deep, when God made firm the skies above, Wisdom was right there beside God, like a master worker, and was God’s daily delight, rejoicing in God’s inhabited world and delighting in the human race. And then in the Gospel lesson, Jesus talks about the Holy Spirit being the Spirit of Truth, coming to guide us into all truth, taking what is God’s and declaring it to us. What I take from these passages is that wherever there is Wisdom and Truth, there is God.
So this idea of there being some kind of underlying unity to all spiritual seeking and wisdom isn’t just a Buddhist idea or some crazy quantum theory idea. It’s also, I believe, very much of a Christian one, at least the kind of Christianity that I consider to be “good” religion. Look at the symbols of our faith – right here on the communion table, there is one loaf. When Rex celebrates communion in a few minutes, he’ll recite those familiar words: “Because there is one loaf, we who are many are one body, because we all partake of the same loaf.”
So maybe there is something to the notion that the religions of the world are similar in value, similar in Wisdom, and their distinctive thoughts and ideas and patterns and teachings have been shaped by the cultures in which they arose. Most of us were born and raised, to one degree or another, as American Christians. Chances are, if you had been born in India, you probably would have been raised as a Hindu, and if you had been born in Indonesia, you probably would have been raised as a Muslim. Is it possible to consider that maybe these are simply various names for the attempts to grasp the ineffable, eternal common truths about the Divine?
We made some very intentional choices of songs for today’s service. There’s the word Shalom, meaning peace in Hebrew, and the word Salaam, meaning peace in Arabic. And if you were an Arabic-speaking Christian, do you know what you’d call God? That’s right, you’d use the Arabic word for God, which is Allah. So isn’t it possible that when billions of faithful Muslims call on Allah, they’re not worshiping some competing deity, but are in fact calling on the same God that we are when we say God?
As well as being Peace with Justice Sunday, today is also Trinity Sunday in the liturgical calendar. On Trinity Sunday we attempt to grasp the Christian mystery of recognizing three Persons in one, three expressions or manifestations of the triune God, and yet we still proclaim that God is one. If we Christians can call God Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, then why can’t others call God “Allah”? Does the name we human beings assign to God really matter? Does our naming of the ineffable divine somehow change its nature and character? I seriously doubt it.
Our first hymn, “Bring Many Names”, by the great contemporary hymn-writer Brian Wren, reflects this understanding: Strong mother God, warm father God, old aching God, young growing God. Notice that God is always God. The descriptions of God in this hymn are merely the author’s attempt to describe the indescribable Divine. As the saying goes, “God is one, but the sages call God by many names”.
I want to close here with some lyrics from my favorite contemporary hymn-writer, an Irishman by the name of Paul Hewson, though most of you know him better as Bono of U2. The song is called One, which is also the name of Bono’s campaign to combat global AIDS and end extreme poverty, particularly in Africa. I actually didn’t know the full background of this song until I looked up the lyrics for this sermon. As Bono describes it, and I quote:
It's a father-and-son story. I tried to write about someone I knew who was coming out and was afraid to tell his father. It's a religious father and son. I have a lot of gay friends, and I've seen them screwed up from unloving family situations, which are just completely anti-Christian. If we know anything about God, it's that God is love.
Hear these words from the song:
One love, one blood, one life
You got to do what you should
One life with each other
Sisters, brothers
One life but we're not the same
We get to carry each other, carry each other
One
DB
Traditionally here at [insert my church name], [my] Class has a Peace with Justice study each spring, leading up to this Sunday, and our Class takes responsibility for designing the service and bringing the message. You might wonder how the topic of world religions and pluralism fits this theme of Peace with Justice. But really, when you think about it, religion and clashes between religions are the cause or catalyst of so much of the war and injustice and destruction in our world throughout history and even today.
Of course, it’s easy to classify religion that leads to violence and warfare as “bad” religion. Some say the answer or antidote to bad, destructive religion is NO religion. No religion, or atheism, is an increasingly popular alternative, according to today’s bestseller lists. With books by such notable authors as Daniel Dennett, Richards Dawkins, Sam Harris, and yes, Christopher Hitchens all bestsellers, one could be forgiven for thinking that there is a Great Revival of atheism sweeping across the nation.
And we all want to escape from bad religion, the accusatory kind of religion that points a finger and says, “If you don’t believe and act exactly like I do, you’re going to hell in a handbasket”. Many of you probably had some encounters, in college or elsewhere, with the guy who always tried to corner you and say “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life – have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior yet?” While YOU were trying to get AWAY from that guy in college, as many of you know, I WAS that guy.
Some of you have heard this story before, but one of the ways I began to change my beliefs away from what I now consider to be “bad religion” was when I spent a summer in Malta working on converting a bunch of Libyan Muslim college guys. But the more time I spent with them, the more I came to think “Hey, these guys seem to be doing pretty well without my Christianity – they’re trying their best to love God and love their neighbor – maybe the fact that they were born and grew up in Libya and were raised as Muslims isn’t so bad after all?”
One of the main things we’ve been studying in Discovery these last several weeks, as we examined various religions of the world, is whether there is some sort of underlying unity among these religions, or at least whether they have more in common than not. Is it possible, perhaps, that all the great religions are attempting to describe the same singular truth, and they just have different ways of going about it?
According to Buddhist teachings, the notion of separateness is an illusion altogether. This means not only that the separate religions with their separate teachings and traditions and theological statements of belief are illusory, but even that our separateness from each other and from the world around us is illusory.
But this isn’t just a Buddhist idea. Maybe you remember from one of my previous sermons, if you were one of the handful of folks I didn’t put to sleep at the time, some ramblings about quantum theory, and how everything is made of atoms, which in turn are made of subatomic particles like electrons and protons and neutrons, and protons and neutrons are composite particles made of quarks, and that the only difference between objects is how these particles are organized, put together, and which molecules they wind up forming. Furthermore, at their most basic all of these particles are really just energy, so everything we call matter is really just energy organized in different ways, all tied together in this one big underlying field.
In case you’re worried that this is just something I’ve come up with on my own, let me reassure you that I consider this to be very much in line with our United Methodist teachings. John Wesley himself taught the doctrine of prevenient grace, whereby the Holy Spirit lives and move in and among and through ALL of us, even if we don’t recognize it.
Recall the passage from Proverbs that we just read – about how Wisdom is the expression of God’s very Self: When God established the heavens, Wisdom was there. When God drew a circle on the face of the deep, when God made firm the skies above, Wisdom was right there beside God, like a master worker, and was God’s daily delight, rejoicing in God’s inhabited world and delighting in the human race. And then in the Gospel lesson, Jesus talks about the Holy Spirit being the Spirit of Truth, coming to guide us into all truth, taking what is God’s and declaring it to us. What I take from these passages is that wherever there is Wisdom and Truth, there is God.
So this idea of there being some kind of underlying unity to all spiritual seeking and wisdom isn’t just a Buddhist idea or some crazy quantum theory idea. It’s also, I believe, very much of a Christian one, at least the kind of Christianity that I consider to be “good” religion. Look at the symbols of our faith – right here on the communion table, there is one loaf. When Rex celebrates communion in a few minutes, he’ll recite those familiar words: “Because there is one loaf, we who are many are one body, because we all partake of the same loaf.”
So maybe there is something to the notion that the religions of the world are similar in value, similar in Wisdom, and their distinctive thoughts and ideas and patterns and teachings have been shaped by the cultures in which they arose. Most of us were born and raised, to one degree or another, as American Christians. Chances are, if you had been born in India, you probably would have been raised as a Hindu, and if you had been born in Indonesia, you probably would have been raised as a Muslim. Is it possible to consider that maybe these are simply various names for the attempts to grasp the ineffable, eternal common truths about the Divine?
We made some very intentional choices of songs for today’s service. There’s the word Shalom, meaning peace in Hebrew, and the word Salaam, meaning peace in Arabic. And if you were an Arabic-speaking Christian, do you know what you’d call God? That’s right, you’d use the Arabic word for God, which is Allah. So isn’t it possible that when billions of faithful Muslims call on Allah, they’re not worshiping some competing deity, but are in fact calling on the same God that we are when we say God?
As well as being Peace with Justice Sunday, today is also Trinity Sunday in the liturgical calendar. On Trinity Sunday we attempt to grasp the Christian mystery of recognizing three Persons in one, three expressions or manifestations of the triune God, and yet we still proclaim that God is one. If we Christians can call God Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, then why can’t others call God “Allah”? Does the name we human beings assign to God really matter? Does our naming of the ineffable divine somehow change its nature and character? I seriously doubt it.
Our first hymn, “Bring Many Names”, by the great contemporary hymn-writer Brian Wren, reflects this understanding: Strong mother God, warm father God, old aching God, young growing God. Notice that God is always God. The descriptions of God in this hymn are merely the author’s attempt to describe the indescribable Divine. As the saying goes, “God is one, but the sages call God by many names”.
I want to close here with some lyrics from my favorite contemporary hymn-writer, an Irishman by the name of Paul Hewson, though most of you know him better as Bono of U2. The song is called One, which is also the name of Bono’s campaign to combat global AIDS and end extreme poverty, particularly in Africa. I actually didn’t know the full background of this song until I looked up the lyrics for this sermon. As Bono describes it, and I quote:
It's a father-and-son story. I tried to write about someone I knew who was coming out and was afraid to tell his father. It's a religious father and son. I have a lot of gay friends, and I've seen them screwed up from unloving family situations, which are just completely anti-Christian. If we know anything about God, it's that God is love.
Hear these words from the song:
One love, one blood, one life
You got to do what you should
One life with each other
Sisters, brothers
One life but we're not the same
We get to carry each other, carry each other
One
23 May 2007
Humor and what-ifs
There’s a nice piece by James Traub in last Sunday’s NYT Magazine. In it, Traub describes a conversation he had with Al Gore in the course of writing a story about him for the magazine. Check out all of the erudite references therein:
Gore was telling me about Ilya Prigogine, a Belgian chemist who won a Nobel Prize in 1977 for his insights into the thermodynamics of open systems, an intriguing subject that has very little to do with global warming. Every minute or so he flashed a microgrin at a passer-by without interrupting his oratorical flow. We had moved on to complexity theory, which Gore would really immerse himself in if only he had the time, and then to the concept of nested systems, which of course had been developed by the late psychologist Uri Bronfenbrenner.
Now go back and re-read that paragraph, except substitute the words “President Bush” for “Gore”, and read it out loud, and see if you can get to the end of the paragraph without bursting into laughter.
Alas, wherefore not Gore-Obama ’08?
Gore was telling me about Ilya Prigogine, a Belgian chemist who won a Nobel Prize in 1977 for his insights into the thermodynamics of open systems, an intriguing subject that has very little to do with global warming. Every minute or so he flashed a microgrin at a passer-by without interrupting his oratorical flow. We had moved on to complexity theory, which Gore would really immerse himself in if only he had the time, and then to the concept of nested systems, which of course had been developed by the late psychologist Uri Bronfenbrenner.
Now go back and re-read that paragraph, except substitute the words “President Bush” for “Gore”, and read it out loud, and see if you can get to the end of the paragraph without bursting into laughter.
Alas, wherefore not Gore-Obama ’08?
19 May 2007
Back to the spiritual
First, a warning: If anyone from my Sunday School class is reading this, you’re cheating by skipping ahead. However, I’ll give you extra points for initiative, so you’re OK.
I’ve recently been teasing my class with an overview of world religions, taking on one (or sometimes two) major faith traditions in any given one-hour class. Needless to say, there’s no way in hell (pun intended) you can adequately address a major religion in one hour, so it’s been a real highlight-of-highlights-reel approach (e.g., here are the five pillars of Islam, moving right along to Judaism…).
The real point of this series that I’ve concocted (yes, it’s true, I’ve just been making up the whole thing on my own) is reflected in the title of the series, namely “Religions of the World: Beyond Pluralism”. But why “beyond” pluralism? Isn’t pluralism the usual goal of liberal-minded religious folks? Don’t we want to strive for interfaith dialogue, engage in ecumenical activities, and generally try to understand each other’s traditions while remaining faithful to our own?
Well, yes and no. Yes, in that these are all good things in and of themselves. No, in that these things are not the end, but are only a point along the journey. Let’s go beyond that point – is it possible that all religions contain truth, and that none is the exclusive repository of Eternal Truth (whatever that is)? If so, then perhaps all are equally valid – and if that’s the case, then are any actually valid, since most of them claim some sort of exclusive hold on The Truth? Or are they all just grasping at The Truth, each one getting a little bit right but none having a total picture?
In order for any religion to extol exclusive truth-claims, there has to be a Truth in the first place that the religion is trying to grasp. If there’s not an underlying theological Truth, then the effort to discover it is rather fruitless. So either there is something out there, or there isn’t. If there isn’t, then maybe we should say that all religions are equally invalid. If, on the other hand, there is something out there, is it possible that all religions are equally valid, or is it necessarily true that one or more are making better truth-claims than others?
Or perhaps they’re all saying the same thing in different ways – glimpses of what many have called the “perennial philosophy”. Or, maybe there’s a portion of our neurobiology that responds to deity-worship, and religions have built up in response to this evolution-enhanced biological imperative, and pretty much any religion could fit it as long as it triggers the right neurochemical flows.
Maybe religions are just trying to explain the as-yet-unexplainable, just as they’ve always done. Before we knew about how the solar system works, religions taught that the deity made the Sun rise in the morning and set in the evening. Now we know (well, most of us, except maybe for about 30% of the Republican Presidential candidates) that the Earth rotates around the Sun. During the time that Newtonian physics reigned supreme, we were able to think in very deterministic, cause-and-effect terms about everything in the universe. Now that quantum physics has revealed the limitations of Newtonian physics, we are left with some uncertainties but we also know much more than we used to about the way the universe really works. Things that used to seem like “magic” are now explainable. Is religion just filling in the gaps of what we don’t know, and therefore shrinking as our generally knowledge expands – which explains why religious conservatives can be so frightened of scientific discovery?
OK, I’ll stop here. I haven’t answered all the questions I’ve posed (perhaps not many of them), but I have to leave something for my class to ponder over the next couple of weeks. Check back here and I’ll let you know what we decide.
I’ve recently been teasing my class with an overview of world religions, taking on one (or sometimes two) major faith traditions in any given one-hour class. Needless to say, there’s no way in hell (pun intended) you can adequately address a major religion in one hour, so it’s been a real highlight-of-highlights-reel approach (e.g., here are the five pillars of Islam, moving right along to Judaism…).
The real point of this series that I’ve concocted (yes, it’s true, I’ve just been making up the whole thing on my own) is reflected in the title of the series, namely “Religions of the World: Beyond Pluralism”. But why “beyond” pluralism? Isn’t pluralism the usual goal of liberal-minded religious folks? Don’t we want to strive for interfaith dialogue, engage in ecumenical activities, and generally try to understand each other’s traditions while remaining faithful to our own?
Well, yes and no. Yes, in that these are all good things in and of themselves. No, in that these things are not the end, but are only a point along the journey. Let’s go beyond that point – is it possible that all religions contain truth, and that none is the exclusive repository of Eternal Truth (whatever that is)? If so, then perhaps all are equally valid – and if that’s the case, then are any actually valid, since most of them claim some sort of exclusive hold on The Truth? Or are they all just grasping at The Truth, each one getting a little bit right but none having a total picture?
In order for any religion to extol exclusive truth-claims, there has to be a Truth in the first place that the religion is trying to grasp. If there’s not an underlying theological Truth, then the effort to discover it is rather fruitless. So either there is something out there, or there isn’t. If there isn’t, then maybe we should say that all religions are equally invalid. If, on the other hand, there is something out there, is it possible that all religions are equally valid, or is it necessarily true that one or more are making better truth-claims than others?
Or perhaps they’re all saying the same thing in different ways – glimpses of what many have called the “perennial philosophy”. Or, maybe there’s a portion of our neurobiology that responds to deity-worship, and religions have built up in response to this evolution-enhanced biological imperative, and pretty much any religion could fit it as long as it triggers the right neurochemical flows.
Maybe religions are just trying to explain the as-yet-unexplainable, just as they’ve always done. Before we knew about how the solar system works, religions taught that the deity made the Sun rise in the morning and set in the evening. Now we know (well, most of us, except maybe for about 30% of the Republican Presidential candidates) that the Earth rotates around the Sun. During the time that Newtonian physics reigned supreme, we were able to think in very deterministic, cause-and-effect terms about everything in the universe. Now that quantum physics has revealed the limitations of Newtonian physics, we are left with some uncertainties but we also know much more than we used to about the way the universe really works. Things that used to seem like “magic” are now explainable. Is religion just filling in the gaps of what we don’t know, and therefore shrinking as our generally knowledge expands – which explains why religious conservatives can be so frightened of scientific discovery?
OK, I’ll stop here. I haven’t answered all the questions I’ve posed (perhaps not many of them), but I have to leave something for my class to ponder over the next couple of weeks. Check back here and I’ll let you know what we decide.
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