Dan Fante and Forrest Church

These two were the subjects of interviews by Terry Gross on Fresh Air on Tuesday, September 29th. Forrest Church died on September 24, 2009, at the age of 61. He was a famous Unitarian Universalist minister, presiding at All Souls Unitarian Universalist Church in New York City for about 30 years. Terry Gross had interviewed him last year about his cancer which, at that time seemed to be in remission, but came back this year. A transcript of the interview is here.

She also interviewed Dan Fante, the writer. I don't know much about Mr. Fante, had never encountered his writing before, but she had him read a short piece he had written called "Asking." He read:

For years, I thought that talking to the gods was an exercise done privately, under unforgiving, distant stars, ridiculous unrequited prayer evoked by staring at old, cold books with mean, small print. Then I discovered that just ain't it at all. God can be found in the thank-you voice of a guy at the counter in the supermarket or the quietness of a stranger's parking-lot smile or the rattle of weeds across a dry, summer Mohave or watching my unfettered fingers jump, jump, jumping across the computer keys, deep in the middle of typing three hours' worth of unscrubbed truth. God for me turned out to be a conscious choice, a self-evoked experience, just like love.

The part about God turning out to be a "conscious choice, a self-evoked experience, just like love" really struck me and reminded me of Gordon Kaufman's similar idea. A transcript of the whole interview is here.

A Talk in Houston Tomorrow Night

The Houston Natural History Museum and the Emerson Unitarian Universalist Church are co-sponsoring a talk by the National Center for Science Education's executive director Eugenie C. Scott called "The Evolution of Creationism." Looks to be very good and she will be signing a couple of her books Evolution vs. Creationism: An Introduction (second edition) and Not in Our
Classrooms: Why Intelligent Design is Wrong for Our Schools. If you are in the area and have the time and opportunity do check it out. It will be at the Natural History Museum and you can get additional details about this talk and others in the Darwin 2009 Houston series here.

Unbelievable "Creation"

I'm a regular listener to the podcasts of "Unbelievable?" which is a show on Premier Christian Radio based in the U.K. It generally consists of a "Christian and a non-Christian" discussing some social or theological issue and I find it usually entertaining, sometimes infuriating, and often thought provoking. It's point of view is, obviously, Christian, but not just Christian but CHRISTIAN if you know what I mean. I don't know if I would go quite as far as to say that its point of Christian view is a strictly fundamentalist Christianity, but it is at least a conservative form of orthodox Christianity. Paul Tillich, Gordon Kaufman and Marcus Borg would probably not make the cut to be the "Christian" in the show. The host of the show, Justin Brierley, seems like a fairly conservative Christian, but he is also always very polite to his non-Christian guests and seems genuinely interested in getting to hear their point of view.

Anyway, this week they featured a show about the movie "Creation" (you can listen to it or download it from the Unbelievable? website). The movie sounds interesting - it is about Charles Darwin's life and his writing of The Origin of Species. It apparently talks about the the relationship between he and his Christian wife and how his theories affected it, as well as the rest of the world. Sadly enough it seemed like it was having trouble getting a distributor in the U.S. for a while, but now apparently has found one.

The episode of Unbelievable? was a bit different than the norm in that it was not so much a discussion between a Christian and a non-Christian but an interview with the author of the book the movie was based on and a discussion between Christian leaders about the movie after a preview showing. The author is Randall Keynes, a great-great grandson of Darwin, and the interview is good. I won't spoil it too much, but Mr. Keynes found some papers from his ancestor's family that shed some light on Darwin's life and wrote the book Annie's Box upon which the movie is based. Sounds like a book worth checking out.

The panel discussion was something else. It consisted of a Nicolas Beale (a "theological evolutionist" who believes evolution and Christianity are not incompatible), Steve Lloyd, of Biblical Creation Ministry - a young earth Creationist group, and an author named Charles Foster. I was a bit taken aback by Mr. Lloyd who really was a young earth creationist. He wasn't allowed to try to present his "scientific" argument for young earth creationism (Mr. Brierley noted that would be a whole different show) but he did present his theological reasons for believing in a young earth and creation - mainly that Adam's sin brought death into the world, necessitating the death and resurrection of Jesus to atone for it and conquer death, and if death and suffering had been around for billions of years previously his view of Christian theology wouldn't make sense. Mr. Foster didn't make much sense to me. I am not really sure what he thinks about evolution and theology - he just seemed to sort of ramble on for a while and I'm not sure even Mr. Brierley could figure him out.

Mr. Beale was the biggest surprise to me. He is pro-evolution, in the sense that he believes that it happened, but he really seemed to struggle to answer questions put to him about what the Genesis story means to him and his theology. He seemed to want to turn the story about the death caused by original sin to be some sort of spiritual death but never seemed to articulate what that really meant and how one would squeeze that out of the story as presented in the Bible. Maybe there just wasn't enough time for him to develop what he wanted to say, but there was all this talk about how time was not the same for God as it is for us, that it was referring to spiritual death and not physical death and so on and not much discussion of the obvious point that it is a myth and should not be taken so literally. Yes, he did say that the Bible was not a science textbook and should not be attempted to be used as such, but there was still a sense in which he seemed to need to have the story explain something about the outside world (this "spiritual death" or whatever) rather than just being able to say that the story as mythology can be valuable as a poetic work of fiction which can be used to enrich our internal lives in much the same way other great myths and literature can.

A "Postmodern" Faith

Over on the blog "Celestial Lands" (by David Pyle, a seminary student at the Meadville Lombard Theological School in Chicago) David reflects on the possibility of using postmodernism as a model to describe Unitarian Universalism. I must say I am not crazy about the use of the term "postmodern" as it seems to mean so many different things to so many people and is often used to promote a sort-of "anything goes" attitude in which all beliefs and ideas are in some sense "equal." I don't see Unitarian Universalism in that way.

I don't think Mr. Pyle does either, though. He defines "postmodern religion" in this posting in a specific way and his descriptions of the properties of a Postmodern Religion sound a lot like my vision of UUism as well. He is struggling (like all us UUs) to figure out a way to describe this faith and "model" it. That is fine, but the "postmodern" term just has so much baggage... Anyway it is food for thought and a pleasant read!

A Carl Westman Blog

There is a blog devoted to "sermons and musings" of a well-known late Unitarian Universalist minister, Carl Westman, and I thought the most recent posting, a Sermon called "Is Questioning Enough?" from 1983, was quite nice and insightful about Unitarian Universalism. And it never hurts to work in a quote from Langston Hughes.

Karen Armstrong on "Fresh Air"

Terry Gross of "Fresh Air" is one of my favorite all time interviewers and yesterday she featured Karen Armstrong on her show. A transcript can be found here and a link to the audio is here. Armstrong has a new book out called The Case for God. I enjoyed the interview in which Armstrong came out sounding very much like a Unitarian-Universalist. I am very tempted to make the book my next reading project - it sounds very much like it espouses the type of religious faith I have been writing about here for a while: pluralistic and without compromising modern scientific knowledge. I think the half of the folks who put down "none" as their religion but still hold on to some form of "God," mentioned by James McGrath today, would find her view welcoming too.

Her basic point about science and religion is that they are very different types of knowledge with very different aims and are not incompatible. Anyway, a nice interview and if I get the book and read it I'll blog on it and her ideas in more detail.

Religion and Popular Song: Evolution and Creationism

Chris Smither is an excellent singer-songwriter, possibly best known from his association with Bonnie Raitt who championed him as a songwriter early on. But I think his material from the last decade or so is his strongest. He is one of those fellows who (rather than peaking early) has gotten better, deeper, and richer by the year. He is coming out with a new album soon called "Time Stands Still." His last album, the highly recommended "Leave the Light On" featured a fun song that was a send up on the evolution/creation "controversy" that I think most UUs would appreciate. It is called "The Origin of Species." Here are the lyrics:

ORIGIN OF SPECIES

Well, Eve told Adam
Snakes? I've had 'em!
Let's get outta here!
Go raise this family someplace outta town.

They left the garden just in time
With the landlord cussin' right behind.
They headed East,
and they finally settled down.

One thing led to another:
A bunch of sons,
One killed his brother
And they kicked him out with nothin' but his clothes.

And the human race survived
'Cause all those brothers found wives
But where they came from
Ain't nobody knows.

Then came the flood
Go figure...
Just like New Orleans only bigger.
No one who couldn't swim would make it through.

The lucky ones were on a boat
Think "circus"
And then make it float
I hope nobody pulls the plug on you!

How they fed that crowd is a mystery.
It ain't down in the history,
but it's a cinch they didn't
live on cakes and jam.

Lions don't eat cabbage
And in spite of that old adage,
I ain't never seen one
Lie down with a lamb.

Well, Charlie Darwin looked so far
Into the way things are.
He caught a glimpse of God's
unfolding plan.

God said: "I'll make some DNA"
They can use it any way they want
From paramecium
Right up to man."

"They'll have sex
And mix up sections of their code
They'll have mutations...
The whole thing works like clockwork over time."

"I'll just sit back in the shade
While everyone gets laid.
That's what I call
Intelligent design."

Yeah, you and your cat named Felix,
Both wrapped up in that double helix,
Is what we call
Intelligent design.

April and the Fiction of Universal Bias

I am often amused when I see the reaction to one of April's posts - like this one, for instance. April blogs a lot about this subject and the responses are often very interesting and telling. But there is one common response that I feel compelled to comment on myself. It often happens that someone in these exchanges will start talking about "biases." The general argument seems to start something like this: everyone has a point of view, no point of view is completely objective, methods and systems are created by individuals who cannot be objective, and so no one can be completely objective and neither can any method or system. Therefore all methods and individuals are biased in some way.

I don't really have too much of a problem with that. But then it seems to be taken one step further and the assumption seems to be made that individuals and methods are equally biased. As if bias is some sort of binary system - on or off, biased or not biased and everyone is on the "biased on" switch. But this is simply not true as we know from everyday experience. I am a lawyer and we have to pick juries sometimes. While it may be true that everyone is biased in some way, that doesn't stop us from trying to pick the most objective, unbiased jury we can. If I am trying a robbery case I know that I cannot get a jury in which no one has any biases whatsoever, but I am certainly not going to put the spouse of the defendant or the brother of the victim on the jury!

April was writing about the differences in what she called "confessional" Biblical scholarship and "historical-critical" scholarship. And while folks may be right when they say that no scholar is free of bias it seems hard to me to argue that these two points of view are equally biased. Clearly what April is talking about with respect to a "confessional" scholar is one who views something like the virgin birth, or the physical resurrection, as a dogma providing a data point and has to do her or his work around that dogma. Now such a scholar will not (if he or she is smart) come right out and say that, but it does seem implicit in some scholar's work.

Some insinuate that the historical-critical type scholar that April is (and defends) just has a different "dogma" - one in which the virgin birth is precluded. That is simply not the case, however. It simply seems that way sometimes because the historical-critical scholar treats virgin births like it would any other historical claim. And under the criteria that historian scholars in other fields use on a regular basis the claim of the virgin birth is simply not credible. This is because, historians and scientists deal with claims of fact in a holistic manner - they are judged on the basis of everything we know about the world - yes, eyewitness testimony, but no, not just on whether the eyewitnesses are credible. They are judged on the strength of the evidence and on everything we know about the physical laws and order the universe seems to operate under. And when everything is weighed in there is no way that anyone could come to the conclusion that Jesus did not have a human father unless one started from that conclusion due to a religious dogma.

What April has said in this post seems uncontroversial and even inescapable to me. Maybe the "confessional" scholar and the "historical-critical" scholar both operate under some biases. But the "historical-critical" scholar is making judgments and evaluating Biblical events and claims in the same manner we evaluate all other types of claims - the "confessional" scholar is singling out Biblical claims and making arguments for them that would never be accepted in any other academic (or even professional) field. Maybe they are both biased, but one certainly sounds a lot more biased to me.

Of course, I, being married to April, might be a bit ... biased?

Interesting Article in the Wall Street Journal

Man v. God - two essays, one written by Karen Armstrong and the other by Richard Dawkins. I like most of Armstrong's article and I also agree pretty much with Dawkins up to the last two paragraphs. Armstrong's essay, however, seems closest to what I think and is pretty close to what I have been saying over the last week or so...

Religion in Popular Music: Woody Guthrie's Jesus Christ

I am a major fan of folk music and folk-influenced popular music and I thought it might be fun to point out interesting songs I've come across about religion now and then. For starters a song that most any folk music listener would be familiar with, but which continues to amaze me: Woody Guthrie's "Jesus Christ." Guthrie wrote it in the 1940 according to notes he wrote on an early manuscript of the lyrics. Woody Guthrie was deeply concerned with social injustice and the plight of the poor, and one day in 1940 Guthrie said he was thinking about how "the poor folks lived" and what Jesus would say about it if he were preaching today. This is what he came up with.

"Jesus Christ" by Woody Guthrie

Jesus Christ was a man who traveled through the land
A hard-working man and brave
He said to the rich, "Give your money to the poor,"
But they laid Jesus Christ in His grave

Jesus was a man, a carpenter by hand
His followers true and brave
One dirty little coward called Judas Iscariot
Has laid Jesus Christ in His Grave

He went to the preacher, He went to the sheriff
He told them all the same
"Sell all of your jewelry and give it to the poor,"
And they laid Jesus Christ in His grave.

When Jesus come to town, all the working folks around
Believed what he did say
But the bankers and the preachers, they nailed Him on the cross,
And they laid Jesus Christ in his grave.

And the people held their breath when they heard about his death
Everybody wondered why
It was the big landlord and the soldiers that they hired
To nail Jesus Christ in the sky

This song was written in New York City
Of rich man, preacher, and slave
If Jesus was to preach what He preached in Galilee,
They would lay poor Jesus in His grave.

Guthrie's Jesus is amazing it seems to me for the 1940s. This is decades before Pier Paolo Pasolini made "The Gospel According to St. Matthew" with it's depiction of Jesus as social crusader. Guthrie's Jesus works no miracles, and no resurrection is hinted at. Guthrie's Jesus is completely recognizable and true to his traditional depiction in many ways but is transformed to match Guthrie's own ideals and to address his contemporary concerns. His Jesus's main virtue is that he was a "hard-working man and brave." The only hint of divine transcendence in this Jesus is that the "landlord" and the "soldiers" were hired to "nail Jesus Christ in the sky." The crucifixion, in this version, makes him a martyr because he preached for the advancement of the poor, much like the union and immigrant heroes Guthrie admired so much.

The difference between those other heros and Jesus is that Jesus becomes a martyr for all the poor who fight against the bankers, the rich, and the landlords. I think the key is how Guthrie plays with time here. This is clearly talking about the Jesus of the NT, but by having him talk the "sheriff" and the "bankers" and the "working folk around" he also places him in the time of Guthrie. He is in both times and places at once and perhaps when he is "nailed to the sky" he is in all times and places at once. He becomes more than a fighter against injustice, he becomes a symbol of the fight against injustice itself - which is still relevant 2000 years later in New York City.

Being a Unitarian-Universalist

I liked the basic idea of being a Unitarian-Universalist from the start: a religious community in which you don't have to believe in the supernatural (are are allowed to if that is your thing). But I have, in my previous years with the faith, been vaguely unsatisfied with the idea that I felt I had to identify myself as a particular sub-set within Unitarian-Univeralist (Humanism). I had not really worked on what being just a plain old Unitarian-Universalist might mean. I have recently started to work that out for myself, and I posted on that earlier this year here.

Now there is probably never going to be a standard Unitarian-Universalism - a fundamental part of the religion is that there is no creed. But UUs are encouraged to develop their own spirituality and in the past I have looked on that as meaning if you are Christian to develop your Christianity, if Pagan to develop that, if Humanist, etc. But now I think of it in terms of coming up with a Unitarian-Universalism that works for me. Not a Humanist Unitarian-Universalist (though I remain a Humanist) but just a Unitarian-Universalist. The Humanist part is my philosophic identity, I suppose. Like "Democrat" is my political affiliation. But political affiliation is not the same as religious affiliation and neither is philosophic.

One of the great things about Kaufman's In Face of Mystery is that he makes it clear, repeating it often, that the Christianity he is constructing in this book is a choice. It is not a conclusion that has to be reached due to the "reality" of something "out there." It is built because he wants to build it and comes out the way it does because he makes choices that lead him there - the choices conform to observable reality (or at least do not contradict it) but the way the reality is interpreted is personal, and he admits it.

This was revelatory to me as a concept in a religion. For him to be able to say: this is how I am going to choose to shape the reality we all experience and share in for myself and it will have meaning to me, even if it doesn't have meaning for everyone. That is okay! Because religion is ultimately personal - an expression of our mysterious and unfathomable "ultimate concerns" which may be totally beyond expression but cannot be left without us trying to give them shape and expression despite that - because that is what human being seem driven to do. Kaufman gives me the best reason to retain the concept of "God" I have read - that because the history of our culture has shaped us to express our most powerful concerns in terms of "God," a word that resonates so powerfully for many of us, to give it up just because some have made it into something simplistic and supernatural is to give up something too useful. It is to give up too much.

Unitarian-Universalism seems to me uniquely suited to letting such a way of thinking about religion, and God, grow and develop, and so I cast my lot down with the UUs and look forward to seeing what happens next!

Towards becoming a Unitarian-Universalist

As the first decade of the twenty-first century went along my self-identity began to shift again from being Humanist, and a Humanist who happened to go to a Unitarian-Universalist Fellowship, towards thinking of myself in terms of being a Unitarian-Universalist.

First was meeting my wife April. April is a Biblical scholar and I was surprised when we first got to know one another that she was not an atheist. My only relationships with women previously had been with atheist/agnostic science types. I had a hard time believing, at first, that a smart scholar could also be a person of faith. We had some long discussions about it and what I learned from her was that there was more than just a fringe group of very liberal Christians out there - that there was in fact a large number of Christians to whom much of Bible could be taken as metaphor and for whom the Bible didn't have to be viewed as the inerrant "Word of God." More than that she taught be, through being the person she is and by example, that it was senseless to live your life allowing others to define your limits. I had always thought that since such a large percentage of the people I had encountered who were religious had a particular view of religion in mind when they asked me things like "do you believe in God" that I had to answer it in their terms or be hypocritical. She taught me that you just don't have to give a rat's a** about what other people think about what you believe. You have to do what seems right and works for you - if others come along for the ride, great, and if they don't that is fine too.

Once she opened up that thought to me I found my way to books that helped me think about these things in ways that worked for me. Borg and Spong were suggested along the way, but to be honest, they are still a bit too traditional for my tastes. The ones that really caught my imagination were John Hick, Paul Tillich, and , very recently, Gordon Kaufman.

I've blogged on Hick, Tillich, and Kaufman before and I will not waste much space just repeating what I said before, but I found particularly important the book The Philosophic Challenge of Religious Diversity with regards to Hick. From him I found a philosophic framework and justification for my foundation belief that religion must be pluralistic. There is an excellent on his official website called "Believable Christianity" which I find helpful too. My first encounters with Tillich were The Dynamics of Faith and The Courage to Be which I have blogged a lot on (and will continue to in the future). They presented me with ways to view Christianity that didn't conflict with my world view and (and this was the tricky part) still seemed packed with meaning and usefulness. My only problem with Tillich was that (at least in what I was reading of him) he seemed to leave little room for the type of pluralism I wanted to have as part of any religion I could wholeheartedly relate to.

Then I encountered Gordon Kaufman's In Face of Mystery and I am still mulling it all over, but it seems to have everything I was looking for in a systematic theology. It was Christian in form, did not conflict with my humanistic world view (and in fact seems informed by it), still contains meaning and value, and it acknowledges that it is a choice among many, not the only correct choice, and seems to me fundamentally pluralistic.

Next time a few words on how all of these influences seem to be leading me to a new self-identification with Unitarian-Universalism.

Unitarian-Universalism and Humanism

I was introduced to Unitarian-Universalism by a small congregation in central Illinois, The Decatur Unitarian-Universalist Fellowship. It was a congregation that reflected the national UU membership - there were Christians, Pagans, and a significant portion of humanists.

I enjoyed my time there learning about Unitarian-Universalism. I was married by the minister there and another (subsequent) minister of the same congregation performed a "blessing ceremony" for my son. It was very nice to find a religious congregation so welcoming to a "non-believer" and it was my family's spiritual home in our early years of being a family.

But all the time I was there I was conscious of being a humanist who happened to be a Unitarian-Universalist. There were some divisions between humanists, Christians, and others in the UU congregations - each group having some interests that were in conflict with the others. There was little sense of what it meant to be Unitarian-Universalist without a qualifier (at least with me - I cannot speak for everyone in the congregation of course). A crack in that appeared when President William Sinkford came to visit our congregation for an anniversary celebration. Sinkford was emphasizing the use of the "language of the sacred" in our congregations at the time and, as I had at that time become the president of the congregation, I was expected to say a few words at a gathering regarding the anniversary at which he appeared. I spoke on my feelings as a humanist about "language of the sacred" and my feeling that he was onto something important for us. I didn't really know what that something was yet, however.

What I did know was that I felt something was lacking in my self-image now as a humanist UU. I loved Humanism - still do - but I had come to recognize that I loved it as a philosophy, not a religion. There is nothing wrong with that, philosophy is a great thing and an important part of life. It was that I was interested in having a religion too - one that would be compatible with my Humanism, but would be different from it. That "language of the sacred" thing was connected somehow. But what it that meant for me would have to wait for a short while. I wouldn't start to sort it out any further until I had arrived in Houston.

The Bible as AUTHORITY

Okay, I just can't pass this up. My wife April has been posting on some interesting issues concerning women and "biblioblogging." Two recent posts "Gender Inequality: Is the Problem the Bible?" and "Gender is on my Mind" have resulted in some very strange and strongly worded reactions. The discussion began as being her thoughts on the fact that such a small percentage of the popular and visible "biblioblogs" are written by men - there is a very small percentage of women bibliobloggers on the Biblioblog Top 50 list. It then has expanded out to broader issues of discrimination against women and the Bible's role in it.

This part of the discussion has gotten a lot of reaction from the biblioblogging world that illustrates a point I was making in the last few days here. When discussing whether the Bible is a part (or even a focal part) of the problem of discrimination against women folk have argued against the Bible being the problem in at least of couple of ways.

One thing that comes up frequently is that other, non-biblically based cultures also discriminate against women so it is not just the Bible's fault. This misses the point completely - just because people find ways to discriminate against women in all cultures doesn't change at all the point that in western culture the Bible could be the means by which the discrimination is achieved and sustained. April writes "[m]y suspicion is that much of the male domination continues because deep in our communal psyche the bible reigns, where women are dominated by men from chapter 2 of Genesis, and depending on your interpretation of Genesis 1:27, perhaps even from chapter 1 itself." Other cultures have different things in their "communal psyches" that allows the domination to continue. But that is hardly unexpected - obviously different cultures would be expected to institutionalize this in different ways. We all have our own particular irrationalities to fight in our different traditions.

Another common reaction is to say that an apparently misogynist passage in the Bible doesn't really mean what it appears to say or has been simply "mistranslated" or "misinterpreted" to be misogynist. April says that "[f]or women to ever achieve equality in our society, our understanding of the bible and its interpretation must change." I think that is right and very important. The problem, it seems to me, boils down to the absurdity of saying that a book made up of a variety of books written by men over two thousand years ago is some "eternal Word of God" or "inerrant." That this book is a product of human culture is so obvious it is not worth arguing about. But it is so ingrained into our collective consciousness that this book has to be "right" or "true" that it truly infects our reason. Absurd claims and beliefs lead to equally absurd conclusions.

The fact is, it is okay to just say that in certain respects the Bible can be wrong. Dead wrong, about facts and morals, and even world views. People can read into the Bible pretty much anything they want, but think of this: if someone could prove, beyond any reasonable doubt, that the Bible truly taught that women should be subordinate would that make it true? Of course not. It would mean that the Bible was WRONG. WRONG WRONG WRONG. Why is that so hard for folk to understand? The Bible is here for us - we are not here to serve the Bible. (To paraphrase a wise saying...)

Yes, it may be that liberal Bible scholars can put together translations and interpretations that decrease the amount of misogyny therein. But there will always be ambiguity. There are enough eyebrow raising passages to keep the conservatives armed forever. This attitude permeates other aspects of our society as well. No matter what biologists say Genesis will always be there for the Creationists to obsess over. It all stems from this ridiculous notion that the Bible cannot be WRONG. April is right. That attitude simply has to change. Or else Christians end up seeming like the pointed haired boss in Dilbert:



This doesn't make the Bible useless or unimportant. The Bible will always be a classic expression of human beings trying to sort out their place in world. There are powerful stories in it and passages of great truth and beauty. But there is also a fair amount of garbage. We must learn the difference. When deciding an issue we cannot rely on looking up what men 2000 years ago wrote about it and adopting their positions as "eternal" or "objective" or "Divine." We must instead look around us and use our reason, our experience, and the knowledge and wisdom we get from all kinds of sources. These sources can include the Bible, yes, but the Bible cannot be the final word. To make our way to the future we must read it and all the other great classics of humankind, but ultimately we have to look past it. We have to grow up and set down the Book.

Update: To see the Dilbert strip in full you have to click on it. I thought the thing would scale to the size of the blog entry, but I was WRONG. (See, how hard is it to admit that?)

Humanism and Secular Humanism

I discovered "humanism" in college and was very excited to find a book at the college bookstore called In Defense of Secular Humanism by Paul Kurtz. It was exactly what I had been looking for in being, essentially, atheism plus. Plus what? Plus a positive message beyond saying "I don't believe in..." The back cover had a quote from the book that exemplified this, under the caption The Meaning of Life:

Human life has meaning on its own terms. There is no need to look outside it for success or salvation. Life is pregnant with opportunities and possibilities. We are responsible for our destiny.

That sounded pretty good to me. With chapters like "Is Secular Humanism a Positive Alternative?" and "Does Humanism Have an Ethic of Responsibility?" (the short answer to both being "yes" by the way) this book seemed to ask and help answer the basic questions I was asking myself in my early twenties. It influenced my thinking immensely and was the dominant force in my ethical world-view for many years. I read other Humanist type classics (another influential one being Russell's Why I am Not a Christian) but Kurtz's book was the first that caught my fancy and was almost by default the most influential to me. Kurtz identified as the central doctrine of humanism that "value is relative to man." (Defense p. 121, italic in original.) That was a sentiment I could appreciate though I wish he would have written it "value is relative to the human being" or some other form that would include both halves of our species.

But there were a couple of other issues that were a bit troubling too. Secular Humanism was a philosophy, not a religion which I felt at the time was a good thing. But, like atheism, it tended to define itself in many things I read, including Kurtz's books, as against theism and fundamentalist theism in particular. The first chapter of Defense was entitled "Defining Humanism Against Its Fundamentalist Critics." Another chapter was "Will Humanism Replace Theism?" Much of this was written around the idea of a struggle between reason and theism. The problem was that even to the extent that Humanism could be a positive philosophy as opposed to simply being a rejection of theism and religion in general, it was an alternate philosophy - not an alternate social tradition. (At least as I saw it.)

Secular Humanism did not produce, at least as far as I could see, much in the way of Humanist themed art and music. I loved reading about Humanism and arguing about it with Fundamentalists but I was hard pressed to find anything to sing. All the good music seemed to be written for those various religions I was rejecting. Good stories, too, were hard to come by. I held onto some of the existentialist writers (I loved Kafka, Camus and the like) but there seemed too few of them. My favorite art, music, and writing always seemed to have some connection with religion, whether it was the Catholic fantasies of J.R.R. Tolkien and Anne Rice, or the protestant popular music of Bob Dylan, or the poetry of John Milton. And these things were important to me. There was just something about having a mythology to sing and write about.

I read a lot of books about religion - I was especially drawn to so-called liberal scholars like Crossan and Pagels. And then, in the mid-90s when I was approaching the perilous age of 30, I discovered that there was something that called itself a religion, had churches and hymnals and everything, but welcomed secular humanists as part of their congregations. In fact, humanists made up a plurality (though not a majority) of their members. I decided to give the Unitarian-Universalists a try.

The Value of an Atheistic Self-Identity

In my last couple of posts I've discussed my early self-identification as an atheist. The truth is that I sustained that self-identification through most of my life. It has only really been in the last few years that I have felt an interest in a different religious identity and I am still very much in the process of sorting that change out. But the atheist identity worked for me for quite a long time. Obviously there were some virtues in it and things about that identity that I liked.

First, and most obvious, it worked for me in the sense that it reflected much better than any other religious description I knew about, what I actually believe. Once atheism became defined for me as a reaction to the conservative protestant Christianity of the Midwest it became a sane island in what often seemed to me to be a sea of absurdity in the Midwest. Some things just seemed obvious to me from the start. That the Bible was written by human beings and that all books written by human beings are fallible, for example. The idea that the Bible is "inerrant" was (and is) just a bit silly to me. Such an idea certainly has the advantage of granting authority and power to those who are considered experts in the Bible's interpretation but beyond that it has little use.

Second, I majored in physics in college and did graduate work in astronomy for a while before going to law school, and so the community I was around (physicists and astronomers) was largely atheistic and mostly for the same reasons I was. So self-identification as an atheist helped fit me in a peer group.

Third, there was a lot of bigotry against atheists and so identifying as one gave me the feel of being a bit of an "outlaw." That was kind of fun. I could feel like an outlaw without having to break any laws or do anything immoral. I have always been pretty law-abiding and rule following to the point of usually being considered quite dull. So being an atheist gave me a bit of "spice" so to speak.

Finally, it felt nice to be able to be supportive of the atheist community which was always being attacked. I joined and supported lots of causes when I was a student (like most students do) but although I could call myself a feminist I could not discuss it or approach it from the point of view of the woman, and although I supported gay rights I could only do so from the point of view of a sympathetic heterosexual. As an atheist I could support the rights of a wronged community from the inside.

But, as indicated by the ordering above, the chief reason was that it simply comported with my world view - I didn't believe in miracles, magic, inerrant literature, and infallible leaders. But sometime in my twenties I did start to feel that defining myself against what I didn't believe might not adequately describe me in that it nothing about what I did believe. It was then that I looked around for something else to call myself that would not distance myself from atheism too much but would reflect what I did believe. The first thing I found was "humanism." Next time: the humanist years.