jimrigby.org

Do people have a right to hold pre-scientific ideas? Do they have a right to teach those pre-scientific ideas to their children? Do they have a right to risk their children’s lives based on those beliefs?

My own tendency is to say adults can believe anything they want but, in contradiction to that belief, I also hold that we all have a corporate responsibility for the well being of every child. Our corporate responsibility would mean interfering in the “religious right” of parents to force their children to handle poisonous snakes, to perform female genital mutilation on their daughters, or to leave children trapped in views of the world that will make it very difficult for them to study science or views of history that treat the voices of those outside our own group as valid.

I am posing this question after reading about Herbert and Catherine Schaible who were just convicted for refusing medical treatment for their sick child. The child died. It was the second time one of their children had died as a result of their belief in faith healing. The couple defied a court order telling them to seek medical care for their children when they lost a 2 year old son after refusing medical treatment in 2009.

So what does religious freedom mean when other people are effected by our beliefs? Do any of us have a right to put others at risk, or to teach our children a view of the world will leave them little chance of joining the rest of us in making this a better world or ever having a rational thought of their own?

Fear is almost always your own energy turned in the wrong direction. When you are terrified to speak to a group, the adrenaline you feel is your own body mobilizing for the challenge. Once you get in harness, that same adrenaline will be your best friend. Fear does not arrive to undermine you, it is there to empower you so you can run faster, jump higher, or bring full awareness to a challenge. It is a great day in our lives when we stop running from fear and embrace it for what it is, our own power. As Joseph Campbell put it, “The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.”

In a recent Pew poll, 88% of African-Americans said they face discrimination in their lives. 46% said they faced a lot of it. By contrast, only 16% of white people said there is a lot of discrimination against black people, although 57% agreed there is some discrimination.

It can be frustrating trying to advocate for a fairer world when people of privilege don’t want to hear about it and feel like victims when asked to treat others fairly.

The following link may be helpful in making the situation clearer to someone who doesn’t want to hear about other people’s problems. One chart shows that the difference between the average income between a white wage earner and black has nearly tripled in the last twenty five years. Another chart shows how 1 in 15 black males is incarcerated, while only 1 in 106 white males suffer that fate. Still another chart shows that black males are 38% more likely to be executed for the crime of murder.

Some of the charts also include statistics for other racial groups. Perhaps it will be useful in helping your reluctant friends to stand in someone else’s shoes.

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/race_inequality_in_america_by_graph_crime_sentencing_income_20140217

Frank Ehman is a friend and a very wise Presbyterian minister in Flower Mound, Texas. When I’ve been in trouble in my denomination for offering grace to groups that some believed were the wrong kind of people, Frank has often called with words of reassurance.

I’m not sure I remember the specific details, but Frank once told me of a meeting he had with a very powerful member of the community when he first got to Flower Mound. It seems like this person was angry with him for being nice to a gay man, and to some others the man deemed to be “the wrong kind of people.”

Frank was new to the church, and my memory is that he invited the man to coffee, pulled out some paper and a pencil, and as if to make a list, said, “Bill, I just need to know who all I will have to hate in this town to be your friend.”

One of the wonderful things about Jewish writings is the tendency to playfulness. In the Jewish scripture, when the King wants to build God a temple, God says in so many words, “Why would I need that?”

Certainly worship is a big part of the Jewish tradition, but they are quite aware that they aren’t doing God any favors. In fact, a religion of worship that does not work for justice is depicted as repugnant to God:

“Take away from me the noise of your songs; to the melody of your harps I will not listen.

But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”

-Amos 5:23-24

The Message paraphrases Isaiah 1:13-14 as:

Quit your worship charades.
I can’t stand your trivial religious games:
Monthly conferences, weekly Sabbaths, special meetings-
meetings, meetings, meetings-I can’t stand one more!
Meetings for this, meetings for that. I hate them!
You’ve worn me out!
I’m sick of your religion, religion, religion…

To be sure, the words are a bit tongue and cheek, but they are reminder that prophets were harder on religion than most atheists could ever think of being, not because it is wrong to worship, but because radical and universal love are the one worship a loving God would seek. James put it like this:

 The worship that God wants is this: caring for orphans or widows who need help and keeping yourself free from the world’s evil influence. This is the kind of worship that God accepts as pure and good.

Worship as awe and gratitude for the gift of being is a wonderful thing. But it is very easy for religious worship to untether from nature and life and come to focus on imaginary things. The Jewish prophets had a way of reminding us that if God is love, the highest praise we can give is to love one another. So when worship became selfish, magical and pretentious, the writers of Jewish scripture with wonderful irony had God say, “Hey, don’t do me any favors!”

What would happen if, on this one day, we gave ourselves to our highest values? What if, for one day, none of us let fear make even one decision? What if we decided that we would not mistreat anyone today for any reason or reward? What if, for once, we resolved to do our duty from sun up to sunset? Imagine what it would feel like to lay our heads down tonight knowing that, whatever tomorrow brings, on this one day we had manifested fully what it means to be human.

Last night I went to Texas Bar and Grill to get a little work done before I went to bed. They have wifi there, and ever since college I enjoy a little ambient noise when I write. As I was opening my computer, a man came up and said, “I recognize your face. I know I know you from somewhere.” I didn’t want to get into a conversation so I said a stock line, “I have one of those generic faces that reminds people of someone else.” -which is completely true.

The man seemed satisfied and went back to his pool and I to my laptop. Unfortunately, the wifi wasn’t working so after my Pedernales IPA, I paid my check and was headed for the door.

I was almost out of the bar when I heard a woman calling, “Pastor Jim! Pastor Jim!” Knowing I had been “outed” as clergy in a bar, I turned to see who was calling. It was a woman who lives on the streets and who sometimes stays at our church on cold weather nights. “I never thought I would see Pastor Jim in a bar! I won’t tell anyone Pastor Jim!” She ran up kissing me warmly on my cheek.

“It’s okay,” I said, “Presbyterians can drink.” Scanning my memory I recalled that some months back I had agreed to perform her marriage on Valentine’s Day weekend, and if I wasn’t mistaken, this was the night before when that wedding would have been. The engaged couple, both of whom lived on the street, had come to church for a warm meal and asked if I would perform their marriage on Valentine’s Day. I asked them to call me so we could talk about it, but they never did.

The woman continued to hug me and kissing my cheek, and I was having trouble believing the irony of the timing. I decided not to look up to see how the rest of the bar was taking this. “Wasn’t this the weekend your marriage was supposed to be?” I asked.

“My boyfriend broke my nose” she said pointing to her face. “So I called the wedding off.” The woman looked down in a moment of sadness, but then her eyes filled with light. “Pastor Jim, this is my old boy friend! I went back to him because he treats me real good.” A tall very shy bearded man rose from his bar stool, and then looked at his feet as he took my hand. “And this is my father,” the woman said hugging an older man in a bright red cap sitting next to her.

When I eventually headed out into the night I took with me the warmth and strangeness of that moment. On what could have been a very painful evening, this woman gathered with loved ones to grieve her past, and declare her hopes for the future. The moment was almost sacramental. Like a child cuts pieces of a magazine to make a card for a parent, the sacraments arrange the shattered pieces of our past to make a Valentine’s Card for the future.

At our Bible class yesterday, we looked at the parable of the mustard seed from Matthew 13: “The realm of heaven is like a mustard seed, which someone took and planted in a field. Though it is the smallest of all seeds, yet when it grows, it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds come and perch in its branches.”

I believe religion to be a global conversation so I often ask the class to look at other world scriptures. In this case, I asked them to look at the Chandogya Upanishad of Hinduism.

“This Soul of mine within the heart is smaller than a grain of rice, or a barley-corn, or a mustard-seed, or a grain of millet, or the kernel of a grain of millet. This Soul of mine is greater than the earth, greater than the atmosphere, greater than the sky, greater than these worlds.”

In the Hindu version of the parable, a child is asked to look at a very tiny, almost invisible, Banyan seed, and then at a giant Banyan tree. The father then explains that the whole universe expresses this same mysterious interconnectedness. The “self” within us is a microcosm or seed of the whole universe. “You are that,” the father tells the son in so many words. “You must teach every being they are as well. We are branches of one vine.”

I hear both of these stories telling us that religion or faith begins small and personal, and then grows organically into a universal sense of connection with all beings. We cannot force this growth to happen. As some say in Hinduism, “the truth we cannot know, the truth we can only BE.”

I do not believe religion needs the symbol “God.” There are plenty of world religions that symbolize the cosmic mystery in other ways. But I do think it is important not to lose some things the symbol refers to. The following clip comes from an article I wrote for Alternet some years back:

“If there’s hope of saving the world from the clutches of propaganda it will not be because we refute it rationally. If we save our world it will be because we learned how to speak about personal meaning in a way that is adaptive to natural processes and compatible with universal human rights. Nothing else will do. Hegel defined religion as putting philosophy into pictures. Strange and foreboding topics like hermeneutics and metaphysics can be taught to almost anyone if they are put in story form. While it is important not to accept these images literally, it is just as important not to reject them literally.

Because life is an ineffable mystery, religion speaks in pictures and symbols. To accept or reject the symbols literally is to miss the point from two different sides. Those who fight over whether God exists are like foolish pedestrians who praise or curse a red light as they step into oncoming traffic. The question isn’t whether God exists like a brick exists, but rather “what part of our experience does the symbol ‘God’ reveal and what parts does it obscure?”

I usually stop reading when an article attacks liberals or conservatives without addressing specific policies. Any group on the face of the earth can be divided into two such poles. To claim either pole is always right regardless of the situation is as like claiming a bird has one right wing and one wrong one. Polarizing our thoughts about politics only serves demagogues who are more than happy to cast politics as a professional wrestling match between good and evil. It is very important to focus on policies not persons, lest we spend our days cheering for a good guy and booing for a bad guy, both of whom who actually both work for the rich guy.