FIRST CORINTHIANS (bookin’ through the bible 4)
[back to GENESIS]
[onward to MARK]
FIRST CORINTHIANS
You may recall that the design of this mini-course is based on the GSBTS principle (Grade School Basketball Team Selection). Last week was skeptic’s choice (Genesis), so this week we fly over the intertestamental abyss, alight at the dawn of Christianity, and let the Christian captain choose a book.
Well, the Christian captain (in the form of several moderate Christian bible study sites) wanted to start with Matthew, but the ref blew the whistle. You have to begin with a Pauline epistle since they were written over a generation before the Gospels. Otherwise you get the idea that the Gospel stories were written, then Paul spread them. The Christians’ second choice is First Corinthians, after which we’ll visit the Gospels.
THE APOSTLE PAUL MAILS HIS FIRST LETTER
TO THE CORINTHIANS—El Greco (1606)
Paul is a sure candidate for Most Influential Human of All Time. Inventing Christianity from near-scratch is a résumé-brightener if ever there was. But if we want some understanding of First Corinthians and the other Pauline epistles, there are two things we need to know:
1. That Paul wrote them a full generation before the gospels or any other surviving accounts of the life of Christ were written, and
2. That he believed the world was going to end and Jesus return within the lifetime of those then living.
We tend to read Paul through the lens of the gospels. When he says “the Christ,” we picture mangers, shepherds, loaves and fishes, last suppers, Mel Gibson’s oceans of stage blood—and we think Paul’s picturing those things, too. He isn’t, any more than P.L. Travers, in writing Mary Poppins, imagined her singing “A Spoonful of Sugar.”
“We need to embrace the fact that none of Paul’s first readers read him [as we do],” wrote Bishop John Shelby Spong in Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism, “for in their lives there were as yet no Gospels. To interpret Paul accurately, we need to put ourselves into that first-century pre-gospel frame of reference and to hear Paul in fresh and authentic ways.”
We do this lensing all the time. When Jefferson invokes a Creator endowing us with inalienable rights, we read through the lenses of subsequent history and think Why, he’s talking about the God of Pat Robertson. It would have been clear to his contemporaries that he was talking about a non-biblical god who made things, endowed rights, then turned to other projects unknown, leaving no forwarding address.
After his conversion, Paul traveled throughout the Mediterranean world, helping the fledgling church to establish itself. At one point he spent some time with the church in Corinth, not far from Athens.
Corinth was a decent-sized city of around 130,000 at the time of his visit, a place of proverbial wickedness, energy, riches, noise, home to the primary temple of the love goddess Aphrodite, which boasted 1,000 ritual prostitutes. It was the Sin City of its time. The verb “to Corinth” (Korinthiazesthai) in popular Greek meant to fornicate, as in Voulez-vous Korinthiazesthai avec moi?
Paul was in Ephesus when he heard the Corinthian church he’d just left was embroiled in a sex scandal. One of the members had had an affair with his stepmother, and the church was ready to fracture. Hence the letter’s emphasis on sexual morality. His overall purpose in writing was to set them back on the rails so they could be saved upon Christ’s imminent return.
The frantic belief that the jig was nearly up explains much of Paul’s advice to the church in Corinth. Brothers, the time is short. Those who have wives should live as if they had none. Those who don’t should not get married. This world is about to pass away (7:29 etc).
But then, weirdly, there’s a lot of long-term planning interwoven, including an exhaustive list of restrictions on women and rules for establishing a church hierarchy. Here’s A.N. Wilson’s take on that contradiction:
There are many reasons to suppose that the letters in which these [long-range plans] occur belong to a later period than Paul’s… The world which these letters reflect is not the one seen through Paul’s frantic eyes, a world about to dissolve, as Christ appears in glory above the clouds. On the contrary, the later New Testament writings seem to have settled down to the discovery that Christ will not be returning quite as soon as the Apostle predicted. They set up a ‘Church,’ with fixed officers (elders, deacons, bishops) and lay down the rules for a dull and virtuous life in which women know their place. To such a world, surely, belongs the sentence in 1 Corinthians in which we read that ‘women should be silent in the churches.’ In short, the sentence is an interpolation. (from Paul: The Mind of the Apostle)
Interpolation was the official pastime of the early Christian church. Paul’s letters passed under the editorial quills of the antisexual, body-hating, self-flagellating Church Fathers—men rooted in the dismal Greek Stoic conception that matter itself is evil and only spirit is good—in an early medieval game of Telephone.
But in addition to the misogyny and apocalyptic yearnings, First Corinthians has some really wonderful passages, mostly in Chapter 13. “When I was a child I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish things behind me” is one such. Another is this exquisite passage, which served as a reading in my wedding and millions of others:
If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.
If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.
If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing.
Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.
Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.
That the biblical passage most often heard just before husband and wife say “I do” is from a letter in which marriage is discouraged and women are told to stay silent in church—well, what’s more delicious than the ridiculous and sublime, locked in a scriptural embrace?
Paul’s true genius, according to Wilson, was mythologizing the death of one Jewish teacher to fulfill the prophetic claims of that religion, giving it new energy and relevance. He took the potential energy of the Old Testament and unleashed it by “making” it come true. In so doing, he used an insular, inwardly-turned religion to birth a universally available, all-forgiving creed and conquered death in the bargain.
No wonder the damn thing caught on.
(GAME: “Find the Bad Apostrophe in the Tattoo”)
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POSTSCRIPT
Further reading
AN Wilson, Paul: The Mind of the Apostle
John Shelby Spong, Jesus for the Non-Religious
Thirsty for more mail from the first century’s favorite epileptic?
If First Corinthians has somehow whet your appetite for Paul, read Romans next. Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians, like most sequels, can’t hold a candle to the first one; he mostly asks the Corinthians why they never answered his first letter and whether it means they’ve been seeing other apostles behind his back.
See you on December 17 for THE GOSPEL OF MARK:
Mark online
Believers on Mark
Skeptics on Mark
natural generosity
[Written for Humanist Network News, December 5, 2007.]
One of the sanest, surest, and most generous joys of life comes from being happy over the good fortune of others.
Robert A. Heinlein
Who can resist the impulse to feel all gushy and reflective at this time of year? It’s no coincidence that holidays emphasizing family and charity and peace and goodwill are sprinkled through the shortest, coldest days of the year when, by golly, we’d better have each other to turn to if we’re going to make it through. Charity is naturally born in such a season, and just about everyone gladly succumbs to the best of human impulses.
One of the parental challenges of the season is to encourage impulses like generosity and discourage selfishness, greed, and insane materialism in our children. Christians try to keep their kids focused on Jesus as “the reason for the season,” or ask them to imitate what has been called God’s “supernatural generosity.” That’s fine, I suppose, but it’s hardly necessary. Secular parents should have no difficulty encouraging perfectly natural generosity. The secret is to simply let kids be generous.
The best thing about the phrase “it’s better to give than to receive” is that it’s actually true—especially for kids. Receiving is all too familiar to them. They are constantly in the receiving role. We give them food, clothing, and everything else they need. But give kids a chance to step outside the receiving role and experience the satisfaction of being the generous one, and they vibrate with excitement. They feel grown up. It empowers them.
The best thing about the phrase “it’s better to give than to receive”
is that it’s actually true—especially for kids.
______________________________
Generosity is absolutely addicting. But to really drive the lessons home for kids, you have to make the experience their own.
Suppose your child’s school has a canned food drive for the local food shelf. Many well-meaning parents put a few extra cans in the cart during their regular shopping, then hand the cans to the kids to bring to school. It’s a good start, but the kids don’t really feel directly active in that process. They are just the link between Mom’s purchase and the school’s drive.
If instead you want them to genuinely feel the addicting “generosity buzz,” it’s best to involve them at each step. Drive them to the store, then have them take it from there.
Let the child decide how much to spend, and if at all possible, let her use her own money. The difference between Dad’s $5 and her own $5 is the difference between helping Dad be generous and being generous herself. One is passive; the other is active and addictive. Don’t even add your money to hers. Make two separate contributions if you wish.
Schools will generally provide a list of acceptable items. Let your kids go up and down the aisles and pick out the food themselves—then watch their posture the next morning as they leave the front door for school carrying bags of their own generosity.
No need to wait for school food drives, of course—your local food shelf is always happy to benefits from generosity lessons! Charities can also provide specifics about who receives donations and the difference that donations make for families in need, which helps kids to connect their giving to those who benefit.
It’s also crucial to detach generosity from external rewards. Neither schools nor parents should offer incentives for generosity, or that incentive becomes the goal. In the process, the feeling of genuine generosity is almost completely lost.
The same goes for gift giving. Try not to buy gifts for your children to give to others. Involve them in the thoughtful selection or making of gifts for friends and relatives.
Again, when it comes to gifts, we’re not working from scratch. Children love opening presents, but they are generally much more excited when someone else is opening a gift from them—especially if it’s a gift they made, or picked out and paid for, themselves.
Another good practice is to encourage children to divide their allowance or other money into three jars. No, not Jesus—Others—Yourself, but you’re close: it’s Spending, Saving, and Giving. Let the child decide how to divide the money, but let them know that something should go into each jar every time they receive money. You’ll be surprised at how their natural generosity shows up in that giving jar—especially if they’ve had the experience of active, addictive giving.
It goes without saying that there’s no better lesson for kids than seeing generosity – of time, of money, of kindness, of spirit – demonstrated firsthand by Mom and Dad. The buzz of generosity is not only addicting—it’s downright contagious.
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Parents: Looking for a non-sectarian organization to support? Consider the United Nations Childrens Fund (UNICEF), a tremendously effective organization improving the lives of children worldwide.
on borrowed memes and missed compliments
You may have seen the article in TIME Magazine about the weekly children’s program at the Humanist Community in Palo Alto, California:
On Sunday mornings, most parents who don’t believe in the Christian God, or any god at all, are probably making brunch or cheering at their kids’ soccer game, or running errands or, with luck, sleeping in. Without religion, there’s no need for church, right?
Maybe. But some nonbelievers are beginning to think they might need something for their children. “When you have kids,” says Julie Willey, a design engineer, “you start to notice that your co-workers or friends have church groups to help teach their kids values and to be able to lean on.” So every week, Willey, who was raised Buddhist and says she has never believed in God, and her husband pack their four kids into their blue minivan and head to the Humanist Community Center in Palo Alto, Calif., for atheist Sunday school.
All in all a positive piece about what seems to be a lovely program by a very strong and positive group of folks. Very few wincers in the article.
It’s unfortunate but predictable that the response in many fundamentalist religious blogs has been jeering and mockery. Albert Mohler (president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary) called it an “awkward irony.” Others have claimed that the fact that atheists spend so much time denying God is “proof that God exists,” or found the idea otherwise worthy of contempt.
I’ve looked in vain (so far,anyway — please help me out) for a Christian blog that says what I think is obvious, and what is essentially stated in the article itself: that this represents an enormous compliment from secular humanism to Christianity. Systematic values education for children is something they’ve developed much more successfully than we have. And for good reason: they’ve had a lot more time, centuries of development and refinement. We humanists have always attended to the values education of our kids, of course, but until quite recently it has mostly taken place at the family level. When it comes to values education in the context of our worldview community, Christians have had more practice. In the past generation, such efforts as UU Religious Education, Ethical Culture, and the Humanist Community program have begun closing that gap in the humanist infrastructure.
One of the most marvelous and successful programs in the world is the Humanist Confirmation program in Norway. According to the website of the Norwegian Humanist Association, ten thousand fifteen-year-old Norwegians each spring “go through a course where they discuss life stances and world religions, ethics and human sexuality, human rights and civic duties. At the end of the course the participants receive a diploma at a ceremony including music, poetry and speeches.” They are thereby confirmed not into atheism, but into the humanist values that underlie all aspects of civil society, including religion.
HUMANIST ORDINANDS IN NORWAY,
SPRING 2007
All of these secular efforts at values education can be seen as an evolution of religious practices, opening conversations about values and ethics while working hard to avoid forcing children into a preselected worldview before they are old enough to make their own choice. And though the practices themselves often have religious roots, the values themselves are human and transcend any single expression.
Instead of mocking and jeering, I’d like to see Christians recognize and accept these adaptations as genuine compliments. Perhaps the first step is for humanists to say, clearly, that they are meant as compliments. I can’t speak for the Humanist Community, nor for the Norwegian Humanists, but I can speak for Parenting Beyond Belief. The Preface notes that
Religion has much to offer parents: an established community, a pre-defined set of values, a common lexicon and symbology, rites of passage, a means of engendering wonder, comforting answers to the big questions, and consoling explanations to ease experiences of hardship and loss.
Just as early Christians recognized the power and effectiveness of the Persian savior myths and borrowed them to energize the story of Jesus, there are currently things that Christians do much better than we do. I’m preparing a post on that very topic. We should not be shy about considering their experiments part of the Grand Human Experiment, setting aside the things that don’t work, with a firm NO THANKS, then borrowing those things that work well, and saying THANK YOU — much louder and more sincerely than we have done.
Happy Birthday, Earth Kids! (Sorry Uncle Sam’s missing the party, but they wouldn’t let us kill you)
On November 20, 1989, the UN General Assembly adopted into international law the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), one of the most important and progressive documents since the invention of kids. Children born on that day finished childhood today — happy birthday, kids! — having grown up under the most comprehensive set of child protections in human history.
The CRC laid out a set of universal rights for children. Governments of countries that have ratified the CRC are required to report to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child periodically to be examined on their progress with regards to child rights in their country as specified in the Convention. In the course of eighteen years, the CRC has revolutionized child welfare around the world.
The language is simple and clear: The best interests of children must be the primary concern in making decisions that affect them. Children have the right to be protected from being hurt and mistreated, physically or mentally. They have the right to a free primary education. They should be protected from all forms of sexual exploitation, abuse, abduction, sale and trafficking. Governments must do everything they can to protect and care for children affected by war, and children under 15 should not be forced or recruited to take part in a war or join the armed forces. Stuff like that.
190 UN member countries have ratified the convention either partly or completely. Only two countries on Earth have not: Somalia and the United States.
At the time of the Convention, Somalia was riven by civil war, which may explain their failure to ratify. But what about the U.S.? Why can’t the U.S. sign a simple and effective human rights guarantee for children that is universally acceptable to the rest of the (non-Somali) world, from England to Syria to Iraq to Japan? Because American religious and political conservatives of the time saw a winning issue and organized opposition that continues to this day.
Yes, dear reader, I’m winding up a small rant. Please turn down the volume on your computer.
U.S. religious and political conservatives in the early 90s led by Pat Buchanan torpedoed our ratification of the CRC by organizing a storm of fear and ignorance. Article 14 of the Convention, Buchanan said, would forbid religious parents from raising their kids in their family faith tradition.
Here’s Article 14 in full:
1. States Parties shall respect the right of the child to freedom of thought, conscience and religion.
2. States Parties shall respect the rights and duties of the parents and, when applicable, legal guardians, to provide direction to the child in the exercise of his or her right in a manner consistent with the evolving capacities of the child.
3. Freedom to manifest one’s religion or beliefs may be subject only to such limitations as are prescribed by law and are necessary to protect public safety, order, health or morals, or the fundamental rights and freedoms of others.
Freedom of thought. Freedom of conscience. Freedom of religion. I should have known Satan was in on this!
The Vatican ratified the convention, for crying out loud, as did Saudi Arabia, Iran, and a number of other explicitly religious countries. None of them saw any threat of losing their religion, and there’ve been precious few children ripped from the arms of their devout parents by UN peacekeepers. But American conservatives are unrivaled when it comes to manipulating our fears. As a result, the U.S. stands head and shoulders above the rest of the world in our ability to fearfully wet ourselves over nothing.
The other problem for religious and political conservatives was Article 37a:
(a) No child shall be subjected to torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. Neither capital punishment nor life imprisonment without possibility of release shall be imposed for offences committed by persons below eighteen years of age.
Those bastards wanted to take away our national right to execute children! Why, they can pry the lethal injection syringe out of my cold dead hands. If pot-smoking hippie cultures like Saudi Arabia and Iran want to give their kids permission to run wild, that’s their business. Our civilization depends on our ability to kill and imprison children.
(*Sigh*)
Look, I know I’m sounding shrill. I hate that, I really do. I’d much rather provide light entertainment, but this kind of thing makes me feel like the top of my head is coming apart, and I don’t know how else to react. I’m exhausted from embarrassment over our collective decisions and actions as a nation. It just goes on and on. And when the international community is trying like mad to improve things for the next generation and the most privileged country on Earth can’t bother to join in…surely it matters enough to shout about.
Anyway, Happy Birthday to the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Thanks for the invitation. I wish like hell we could have been there.
UNICEF information page about the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child
Full text of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child
A paper on religious conservatives’ objections to the CRC
U.S. organizations endorsing the CRC, including many religious groups
What individuals can do to encourage U.S. and Somali ratification of the Convention
where thanks are due
www.asherarlin.com
Thanksgiving — one of my very favorite holidays — is mentioned twice in Parenting Beyond Belief. “There should be no difficulty in secularly observing a holiday dedicated to gratitude,” says I, in “Losing the Holy and Keeping the Day“:
We can express to each other our thankfulness for each other, for our good fortune, and for life itself. No eavesdropping deity required. There is an additional opportunity to note that the Puritan pilgrims were pursuing the kind of freedom of religious observance to which secularists should be devoted – fleeing harassment and religious persecution in England and heading to the New World where they were free at last to burn witches.
Okay, leave that part out.
The book explores the issue of gratitude a bit further, naming it one of the “Seven Secular Virtues”:
The most terrible moment for an atheist, someone once said, is when he feels grateful and has no one to thank. I suppose it was meant to be witty, but it’s pretty silly. Nonbelievers of all stripes should and do indeed feel enormously grateful for many things, and I’m not aware of any terrible moments. Whereas religious folks teach their children to funnel all gratitude skyward, humanists and atheists can thank the actual sources of the good things we experience, those who actually deserve praise but too often see it deflected past them and on to an imaginary being.
We have no difficulty reminding the four-year-old to “say thank you” when Grandma hands her an ice cream cone, but in other situations – especially when a religious turn-of-phrase is generally used – we often pass up the chance to teach our kids to express gratitude in naturalistic terms. Instead of thanking God for the food on your table, thank those who really put it there – the farmers, the truckers, the produce workers, and Mom or Dad or Aunt Millicent. They deserve it. Maybe you’d like to lean toward the Native American and honor the animals for the sacrifice of their lives – a nice way to underline our connection to them. You can give thanks to those around the table for being present, and for their health, and for family and friendship itself. There is no limit. Even when abstract, like gratitude for health, the simple expression of gratitude is all that is needed. No divine ear is necessary – we are surrounded by real ears and by real hearers.
I read recently of a woman who had lost her husband unexpectedly. She was devastated and bereft of hope – until her neighbors and friends began to arrive. Over the course of several days, they brought food, kept her company, laughed and cried, hugged her and reassured her that the pain would ease with time and that they would be there every step of the way. “I was so grateful for their love and kindness during those dark days,” she said. “Through them, I could feel the loving embrace of God.”
She was most comfortable expressing her gratitude to an idea of God, but the love and kindness came entirely from those generous and caring human beings. Humanists and atheists are not impoverished by the lack of that god idea; they must simply notice who truly deserves thanks, and not be shy about expressing it.
Group prayer of any kind, including religious grace, has always bothered me. It’s coercive, for one thing, and one person speaks for everyone, assuming a uniformity that is never really accurate. After the “amen,” I always want to submit a minority opinion: “I consent to clauses 1, 2, and 4, but dissent from 3 and 5 for reasons as follows…”
On several occasions, I’ve even seen group prayer used manipulatively (“And may the Lord bless and protect those among us who have been making unwise choices lately” [all eyes go to cousin Billy]).
BUT…the options to religious grace can bring their own problems. The old “moment of silence” can feel hollow; others can seem a bit forced (humanist meditations with Baptist intonations); while some, even if accurate, seem both abstract and forced (“thank you to the truckers and turkey wranglers and assembly-line workers”).
The best option I’ve ever heard just arrived in my inbox yesterday in the form of a short story by Wisconsin author/educator Marilyn LaCourt (The Prize, 2004):
Thanksgiving Ritual
by M. LaCourtLast year I had a wonderful Thanksgiving dinner at my friend’s house. I arrived just as we were being invited to take our places at the table and I felt a little awkward because I didn’t know a number of the other guests. I looked toward the kitchen expecting someone to bring on the food. It sure smelled good, and I was hungry.
Imagine my confusion when my host looked around the table at each of his guests and asked, “Who wants to start?”
I knew there was supposed to be food, but I still didn’t see any, not even a relish dish or a breadbasket to pass. What were we supposed to do? Pass imaginary bowls filled with imaginary mashed potatoes, stuffing, turkey and cranberry sauce? No one spoke.
Finally my host’s eyes settled on his seven-year-old niece.
Cindy stood up, cleared her throat and smiled at her brother. “Thank you, Jimmy, for teaching me to play games on your computer.”
Jimmy blushed and said, “You’re welcome.”
Eric, a nice looking young man with bright blue eyes was next. He thanked his parents for giving him his first telescope when he was ten, and for the many hours they spent encouraging his appreciation for the wonders of the universe. I learned later that Eric had been accepted into a post graduate program to study Astronomy.
My friend, Ron, the host, said thank you to his wife. “I really appreciate the way you put up with my complaining, your understanding and patience with my cause fighting. I love the wonderful meals you prepare for me everyday, your companionship and your sense of humor. Thank you for being my wife.”
Liz smiled and answered, “You’re welcome.”
I was beginning to get the picture. I had some thank-yous of my own and was getting heady with the whole idea, but I decided to watch and listen a bit longer.
“Thank you for taking care of me when I had such a bad case of flu last winter, Rose. I know how terribly unpleasant that must have been for you, and you were so kind to put your own life aside for a few days to stay with me.” Gina’s eyes were damp when she looked at her daughter. “You were such a comfort.” Then she turned to her son- in-law. “Thank you too, Karl, for fending for yourself and the kids while she was taking care of me.”
“You’re welcome.” “You’re welcome.”
Then Rose stood up and walked over to where her husband was sitting. She bent down and gave him a kiss. “Thank you, honey, for working so hard and supporting us and giving me the opportunity to be the stay at home mom I’d always hoped I could be.”
Chuck thanked his friend Bob for all the wonderful tomatoes and other produce Bob gave him during harvest time. He also thanked Jerry and Judy for teaching him how to make the world’s greatest apple sauce.
Jean thanked Patty for listening when she needed a sympathetic ear.
Juan thanked his grandmother for the loan and told her he had put the money to good use. Sonja thanked her neighbor, Dorene, for the wonderful homemade mayonnaise and other goodies. And on it went.
I was thinking about all the wonderful people I wanted to thank. I guess I was drifting off in some sort of a trance when I heard the next person mention my name.
“Thank you, Marilyn,” she said. “You helped my daughter and son-in-law through some rough spots in their marriage.”
I waved my hand in a never mind gesture. “I was just doing my job.”
Ron nearly knocked over his water glass as he stood to interrupt me.
“No, no, no. That’s not allowed.” He shook his pointer at me. “These are the rules. You only get to say ‘you’re welcome’. If you explain it away you discredit the message and invalidate the sincerity of the person saying thanks. You just got a sincere ‘thank you’, Marilyn. Now, say ‘you’re welcome’.” He sat down and fiddled with his napkin.
“Oops. I’m sorry. I mean…” I looked at the woman who’d thanked me and said, “You’re welcome.” Then I smiled at my host and hostess.
“And thank you, Ron and Liz, for inviting me to share in such a beautiful tradition.”
Ron grinned. “You’re welcome.” Liz nodded, “You’re welcome.”
It took a full thirty minutes to get around the table and all the thanks-givings. When we finished Liz excused herself to put the finishing touches on the food and Ron poured the wine.
Check out (and add to) a thread on the PBB Forum tackling the question of “grace under pressure.”
Finally, let me say THANK YOU for reading the Meming of Life — even the longer ones, like this. (Psst — this is the part where you click on COMMENTS and say You’re welcome! ) 😉
the unconditional love of reality
…CONNOR AT THE WORLD OF COKE (…after the Tasting Room)
A Christian friend once asked me what it is about religion that most irritates me. It was big of her to ask, and I did my best to answer. I said something about religion so often actively standing in the way of things that are important to me — knowledge of human origins, for example, important medical advances, effective contraception, women’s rights…the simple ability to think without fear. I gave a pragmatic answer — and the wrong one.
Not that those things aren’t important. They’re all crowded up near the top of my list of motivators. But in the years since I gave that answer, I’ve realized there’s something much deeper, much more fundamentally galling and outrageous that religion too often represents for me — something that constitutes one of the main reasons I hope my kids remain unseduced by any brand of theism that endorses it.
What I want them to reject, most of all, is the conditional love of reality.
I’ve talked to countless Christians about their religious faith over the years. I have often been moved and challenged by what their expressed faith has done for them. But the doctrine of conditional love of reality simply mystifies, offends, and frankly infuriates me.
Conditional love is at play whenever a healthy, well-fed, well-educated person looks me in the eye and says, Without God, life would be hopeless, pointless, devoid of meaning and beauty. Conditional love is present whenever a believer expresses “sadness” for me or my kids, or wonders how on Earth any given nonbeliever drags herself through the bothersome task of existing.
Whenever I hear someone say, “I am happy because…” or “Life is only bearable if…”, I want to take a white riding glove, strike them across the face, and challenge them to a duel in the name of reality.
The universe is an astonishing, thrilling place to be. There’s no adequate way to express the good fortune of being conscious, even for a brief moment, in the midst of it. My amazement at the universe and gratitude for being awake in it is unconditional. I’m thrilled if there is a god, and I’m thrilled if there isn’t.
Unconscious nonexistence is our natural condition. Through most of the history of the universe, that’s where we’ll be. THIS is the freak moment, right now, the moment you’d remember for the next several billion years — if you could. You’re a bunch of very lucky stuff, and so am I. That we each get to live at all is so mind-blowingly improbable that we should never stop laughing and dancing and singing about it.
Richard Dawkins expressed this gorgeously in my favorite passage from my favorite of his books, Unweaving the Rainbow:
After sleeping through a hundred million centuries, we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn’t it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked—as I am surprisingly often—why I bother to get up in the mornings.
I want my kids to feel that same unconditional love of being alive, conscious, and wondering. Like the passionate love of anything, an unconditional love of reality breeds a voracious hunger to experience it directly, to embrace it, whatever form it may take. Children with that exciting combination of love and hunger will not stand for anything that gets in the way of that clarity. If religious ideas seem to illuminate reality, kids with that combination will embrace those ideas. If instead such ideas seem to obscure reality, kids with that love and hunger will bat the damn things aside.
And when people ask, as they often do, whether I will be “okay with it” if my kids eventually choose a religious identity, my glib answer is “99 and three-quarters percent guaranteed!” That unlikely 1/4 percent covers the scenario in which they come home from college one day with the news that they’ve embraced a worldview that says they are wretched sinners in need of continual forgiveness, that hatred pleases God, that reason is the tool of Satan, and/or that life without X is an intolerable drag — and that they’d be raising my grandkids to see the world through the same hateful, fearful lens.
Woohoo! is not, I’m afraid, quite a manageable response for me in that scenario. Yes, it would be their decision, yes, I would still love their socks off — and no, I wouldn’t be “okay with it.” More than anything, I’d weep for the loss of their unconditional joie de vivre.
But since we’re raising them to be thoughtful, ethical, and unconditionally smitten with their own conscious existence, I’ll bet you a dollar that whatever worldview they ultimately align themselves with — religious or otherwise — will be a thoughtful, ethical, and unconditionally joyful one. Check back with me in 20 years, and for the fastest possible service, please form a line on the left and have your dollars ready.
are we normal yet?
I just had a lovely interview with a reporter from the Associated Press. That’s good enough news, of course — AP serves 1,700 newspapers and 5,000 radio and television outlets in the US alone and a lot more internationally. One AP story that mentions PBB can potentially generate more exposure than everything else we’ve done to this point.
But that’s not what has me blogging. What’s most exciting to me is the topic. The article is not about Parenting Beyond Belief. It’s not even about religion. It’s about values — in this case, specifically how to help our kids de-emphasize consumerism and greed during the holidays.
She’d get some thoughts from religious folks, she said, but it occurred to her that nonreligious parents would also have thoughts about it and strategies for keeping kids from falling into the me me me loop–and she thought I’d be a good person to address it.
I just had to agree. On both points. Heh.
This kind of thing happens all the time in the UK and elsewhere in Europe. When The Guardian in London does a story that touches on values, they check in with various reps of the national clergy, but they quite frequently also get a statement from the British Humanist Association. When I lived in London in 2004, I had to see that happen in three different stories before I stopped spraying coffee all over the paper. In Norway, I’m told, when the topic is values, the papers often get a quote from the humanists instead of the clergy. (The Norwegian Humanist Association has 70,000 members in a country with the same population as Greater Houston.)
Is it possible, just possible, that humanists in the U.S. are beginning to enter the values conversation on an equal footing? Might we even be on the verge of being considered…(I’ll whisper it)…normal?
When good people say (really, really) bad things
The angel informs Abraham that Jehovah was only kidding.
Without [religion] you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things — that takes religion.
Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg
Weinberg’s quote misses the mark only slightly. Religion is one thing that causes good people to do evil things (see Abraham’s robotic “MUST…KILL…BOY” expression above if you doubt), but there are others. Patriotism can also achieve that, as well as fear. Sept. 11 combined all three quite nicely, and we reacted by doing evil. No surprise there.
Thomas Midgley
I have a bit of a soft spot for well-meaning people who unwittingly do great harm. Just a bit. Their patron saint is surely Thomas Midgley. The Ohio inventor was a problem-solver. By keeping just one issue at a time in view, Midgley seemed able to find a solution to just about any problem. While working for GM in 1921, he discovered a way to get engines to stop knocking: add tetra-ethyl lead to the fuel. The side-effects of lead ingestion (things like insanity and rapid death) were recognized within the year, which presented GM with a serious problem: how to cover that up. Some problem-solver went to work on that one as well, and leaded gasoline remained in major production for another sixty-five years — time enough to embed toxic levels of lead in three generations of children, including me and most of you. Leaded gas is still the most common fuel on three continents.Midgley went on to apply himself to the problem of finding a nontoxic refrigerant. In 1930, that pesky problem bit the dust as well when he discovered chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs.
It’s been suggested that these two contributions qualify Thomas Midgley as the single most unfortunate organism ever to have lived on the planet.
But—and here’s the point—he meant well.
Tony Kummer
Meet Tony Kummer. Now I don’t know Tony, but I sure feel like I do. He reminds me (superficially) of one of my wife’s cousins by marriage—let’s call him Bill—a wonderful, loving guy who, like Tony, is in Baptist ministry and is a father of three in the Central Time Zone. I’ll bet Tony is just as fun-loving and well-meaning and good to the bone as Bill. He certainly seems devoted to changing the world for the better. You know, like Thomas Midgley was.
I try to keep up with parenting issues from all angles as they relate to religion, and last week, my Google Alert for the phrase “Christian parenting” brought me to Tony’s blog at “Gospel Driven Children’s Ministry.” Tony had gone through the Bible and pulled out “Bible Verses About Parents, Children, Mothers & Fathers.”
I scanned the column, unsurprised to find God (a.k.a. “male Bronze Age goatherds”) primarily interested in obedience—children exhibiting it, and parents enforcing it. But one especially caught my eye:
Exodus 21:15-17—Whoever strikes his father or his mother shall be put to death. Whoever steals a man and sells him, and anyone found in possession of him, shall be put to death. Whoever curses his father or his mother shall be put to death.
I don’t wish to give the impression that this was my first encounter with the OT, nor even with the Goatherds’ taste for killing naughty children. I’m far more scripturally literate than I sometimes wish. But I was taken aback by the fact that Tony, this smiling dad of three, simply pasted a clear instruction to kill children into a parenting column. That’s where Tony and cousin Bill decisively part company.
Why include this passage? Because, Tony later explained, “It is in the Bible and it is about children.” This and other insights were revealed in a fascinating exchange Tony had with a commenter on that blog—a mother representing the many thoughtful non-literalist Christians out there. She began like this:
Thank you for the excellent parenting tips! My daughter does hit me on occasion, so becoming aware of Exodus 21:15 was a great blessing. I’ll let you know how it goes.
Zing! Tony, to his great credit, recognized irony:
Rachel – Good point. We need to be careful about context and application. Thanks for your sense of humor.
Rachel, to her credit, did not accept that completely meaningless answer:
I know that’s the standard response, Tony, but I have no idea what “we need to be careful about context and application” means in this case. This isn’t intercropping or instructions on cleaning pots; Exodus 21:15 calls for the murder of children. There is no context in which child murder is or has ever been a moral act.
Despite my use of humor, a serious question underlies my comment: What is the purpose of including a clear exhortation to kill our children in a parenting column? Yet if you choose to remove it, what are the implications for a Bible-based morality?
This is the point when you start to feel sorry for the guy. An advocate of “Biblical sufficiency” (a Southern Baptist phrase meaning “the Bible is inerrant, and is necessary and sufficient to lead us into all truth”) has no recourse here. If Tony were a bad man, I would laugh him to scorn. But I strongly suspect he’s a good man saying bad things, which makes me squirm, and seems to makes Steven Weinberg’s point.
Here’s Tony at the zoo with his daughter (who, judging by her unsupported upright position, has not yet been disobedient):
Tony does his damndest to find his way to open air:
Rachel – I think you’re right about the context. And it is also a problem passage for people like me (who thinks God loves kids).
So why did I include it? It is in the Bible and it is about children. Honestly, I don’t have a good explanation for it. Maybe that is why I included it.
[Oh for crap’s sake, Tony! “Maybe I included it because I don’t have a good explanation for it”?? Sorry, sorry, mad at the system.]
He continues:
That chapter has more than one problem for the contemporary Christians. Like verse one about slavery and the whole eye for an eye thing.
It seems like there are at least two issues with this verse.
1. Does God have the right to make this kind of command?
2. What principle, if any, applies to Christian parents?
So he has progressed to the stage of shrugging his shoulders and tossing off empty rhetorical questions. Rachel—possibly feeling my same unease at Tony’s predicament—refuses to go in for the kill:
Thank you for that very honest answer. I struggle with these things very much and have never been the least bit satisfied with the explanations.
Tony replies with the “God-only-knows” curtsey:
Rachel – Thanks for raising the questions. A lot of times I just get used to not knowing the answers, so I stop thinking about it. I definitely welcome your questions and this conversation has helped me. At the end of the day we can only trust that God knew what he was doing when he inspired those verses.
Let me know if you make any progress on all this.
God knew what he was doing. So, then, you’re saying—go ahead and kill them? Am I getting this right? If not, what could you even possibly mean when you say God knew what he was doing when he told us to kill our children?
I’m confident that Tony Kummer and Adolf Eichmann have little else in common. But in this one disturbing instance, they are following the same corrupt line of reasoning. The only difference is that Eichmann’s orders were carried out. If millions of Christians suddenly began following Tony’s/God’s instructions, the two of them would also do well to head for Argentina. But Tony’s/God’s orders, one can only hope, have been ignored. I’ll bet Tony hopes so, too.
But WHY have they been ignored? If you say, in nearly the same breath, that everything in the Bible is the inerrant word of God, and that the Bible says to kill the disobedient child, and that Jesus himself said not to ignore “one jot nor one tittle” of Old Testament law—surely I’m not alone in finding Biblical literacy a genuine moral outrage.
Ah, but I needn’t have worried. Another commenter chimed in and cleared everything up:
I understand your confusion, Rachel, but think about where that path leads! If we can pick and choose among the Scriptures, our morality has no firm foundation.
What God has given us in Exodus and Deuteronomy is not a license to kill, but a tool for capturing the attention of our children. My children are wonderfully obedient to my husband and myself in part because I have shared these scriptures with them. They know that I was Gods instrument for bringing them into life and that he can also choose me as the instrument to send them back to him.
Children who know, with the certainty of faith, that God grants their parents the power to take their lives will never NEED to have their lives taken. That is the beauty of these commands.
What can I possibly add to that?
I know that only a tiny fraction of Christians believe we should really follow the Bible’s frequent orders to kill disobedient children, slanderers, astrologers, atheists, gays, gossips, family members with other religions, Sunday workers, drunks, gluttons, blasphemers, non-virginal brides, breakers of any commandment, and so on.1 That is my point. I am fully confident that Tony Kummer goes weeks at a time without killing anyone at all. But if he is like other literalists, he shares plenty of other scripturally-supported opinions that do genuine harm in the name of the Goatherds’ supposed authority. Tony Kummer’s body absorbed these ideas as a child, and now he’s working hard to see these toxic ideas embedded, like Midgley’s lead, in yet another generation of kids.
But enough about how we differ. We do apparently share the moral fiber to let our children live — even if, on occasion, they act like children. In recognition of our shared ground, I propose that we all join hands and declare our assent to three simple propositions:
1. Killing children, even disobedient ones, is a bad idea. (All in favor? Show of hands.)
2. Saying “killing children is a good idea” is a bad idea.
3. Declaring any book that says “killing children is a good idea” to be infallible, inerrant, or otherwise uniformly good…is a bad idea.
I’m so glad we had this chat.
1Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Matthew, Romans, i.e. both testaments. Personal favorite: Numbers 35:30–“If anyone kills a person, he shall be put to death.”
See also the work of Hannah Arendt.
BONUS: An actual Abraham and Isaac coloring page! (“Mommy, what color do you think I should use for the Daddy’s knife?”)
waking up
- October 29, 2007
- By Dale McGowan
- In morality, My kids, Parenting, values
12
To be awake is to be alive. I have never met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?
from Walden, Henry David Thoreau
I taught Chapter 2 of Walden in a freshman college seminar for years — then stopped teaching it for the last few. The students’ reaction to it depressed me. Eyes would roll, or wince, or slowly close in sleep. Though some were always reached and moved, most spent their time hating his admittedly ornate prose, ferreting out this or that hypocrisy, or answering his insights with a resounding “duh.”
I’d try to point out that worrying about the environment or about the restless expansion of unquiet civilization was far from duh-level obviousness in 1840s America. That these are now a bit more “obvious” is due in large part to cranky visionaries like Thoreau.
(Pfft. Why is it so easy to picture me, whitehaired, palsied, hands folded on a plaid lapblanket in my wheelchair, pathetically refighting old seminars with dim ghosts of eighteen-year-olds now on Medicare?)
I could go on about Thoreau — fired from teaching for refusing to use corporal punishment on his students, later jailed for refusing to support slavery and a particularly stupid war — but all of those flowed from the one thing that most grabbed me about him: he was trying as hard as he could to wake the hell up and to bring us along.
Which brings me to this alarm-clock photo:
It’s two million plastic beverage bottles, the number used in the US every five minutes.
Detail:
Closer detail:
IMAGES © CHRIS JORDAN. Used by permission.
The unreduced photo, by the way, is 5 feet high and 10 feet across. The impact in the gallery must be incredible.
The photographer is Chris Jordan, whose astonishing work draws attention to the consequences of runaway consumer culture. Take a minute to check out his website, and by all means, share it with the kids. Connor (12) was riveted, appalled, and motivated.
(Many thanks to Leslie’s Blog for introducing me to Chris’s work.)
“why does she always have to be ‘so beautiful’?!”
- October 24, 2007
- By Dale McGowan
- In diversity, My kids, myths, Parenting, values
- 17
HELEN OF TROY, looking (as usual) decidedly un-Greek
I like what’s happening to my nine-year-old middleborn, Erin B. And I don’t like what’s happening to me.
First of all: I know I’ve blogged a lot recently about bedtime myths and legends, and I don’t want to give the impression that my kids are on some force-fed diet of classic western civ. Every night I give them a choice of whatever they want to read. And for the last several weeks, the girls always yell, “Myth! Myth!” (To which I can only respond, “Yeth?”)
Last week it was Sir Gawain and the Green Knight — one of my favorite Arthurian legends, despite some admittedly strange bits. One reason I like it: I have a hunch that Gawain derives from Gowan, which is Gaelic for “blacksmith” and the root of our family name. Anyhoo, Gawain arrives in the Forest of Wirral, only days before his scheduled re-encounter with the Green Knight. Tired, he spots a nice castle and makes for it. The lord of the castle takes him in and gives him a great meal. Ahem:
After the meal was finished, the lord of the castle brought Gawain into a sitting room and sat him in a chair by a roaring fire. At last, the lady of the castle came to visit them. She was so very beautiful that she outshone even Queen Guinevere…
“Why does she always have to be ‘so beautiful’?!”
I blinked. It was Erin, her face scrunched into a frown. “Well…she doesn’t have to be, B. She just is.”
“But they always are! ALL the ladies in the myths are (in a mocking voice) ‘so beautiful’! Every one!”
Huh?? “They aren’t always…” My voice trailed off a bit in the manner of someone who realizes, too late, that he’s talking through his hat. Clearly she had noticed something I had not.
“Yes! They are! What about the one last night?” The night before we read Pyramus and Thisbe, the deep precursor to Romeo and Juliet. I reached up and pulled our condensed Age of Fable off the shelf and thumbed to the story.
First sentence:
Pyramus was the handsomest youth, and Thisbe the fairest maiden, in all Babylonia.
Hm. “Okay, so two in a row. But…”
“And Psyche!”
Hm. I flipped to Cupid and Psyche:
A certain king and queen had three daughters. Two were very common, but the beauty of the youngest was so wonderful that mere words…
Psyche Entering Cupid’s Garden
John William Waterhouse (c. 1904)
Huh. I began to search my mind, desperately, for a myth I had recently trotted before my girls in which a woman’s intelligence was praised, or her strength — something beyond her looks.
“Aha!” I said at last. “What about Atalanta? She was smart and faster than all the men!” I flipped to the page. “And her beauty wasn’t part of the story. Here: ‘Atalanta was a maiden whose face was boyish for a girl, yet too girlish for a boy.’ See?”
“Keep reading,” she said. “I remember.”
Sure enough, in the next paragraph, Atalanta, in a footrace, “darted forward, and as she ran, she looked more beautiful than ever.”
______________________
“I began to search my mind, desperately,
for a myth I had recently trotted before my girls
in which a woman’s intelligence was praised, or her strength —
something beyond her looks.”
______________________
No use going back one more night, I knew. That was the night we read about the Trojan War — starring Helen of Troy, “the most beautiful woman in all the known world.”
Holy crap!
I was about to bring up Medusa, but she’s the exception that proves the rule. According to Ovid, she was once beautiful, until she seduced Poseidon, and jealous Athena turned her into a hideous snake-haired beast. Again, looks are at the center of things.
One of the most interesting things about Erin’s exasperation is that (even by the testimony of non-parentals) she is a beautiful girl. Yet she can see that reducing a person to a single surface attribute is insulting, limiting, even when she herself has that attribute in spades. When she was not even three years old, we did a great little routine for friends and family. I’d say “Erin is beautiful and smart,” to which she would reply, without missing a beat, “An unnnnbeatable combo!”
I was proud of her for recognizing the anti-feminist vein in the old stories–and ashamed of myself for going numb to it. Why did I need my nine-year-old to remind me? There was a time when objectifying references to women made me howl. Fifteen years teaching at a women’s college will do that for you. Sure, I went to Berkeley, but it took a Catholic women’s college (yes, the irony drips) to thoroughly wake me up, to make me a feminist. I know that if I’m not outraged, I’m not paying attention. I know that.
Three days ago, I did it again. Erin walked into the kitchen wearing a fantastic American Indian costume Becca had just whipped up for Hallowe’en. So what did NeanderDad say?
“Erin, look at you! Are you gonna be an Indian princess?”
“No!” she said hotly.
“Uh…Indian maiden?”
“No!!”
“Uh…uh…a squaw?”
That’s right: I said SQUAW! I said SQUAW! Holy crap!
“DADDY!!!”
“Uh…you’re a…you’re a warrior!”
“THANK you!”
Okay. The nonviolence advocate in me winced, but the feminist in me stood tall. Almost as tall as my nine-year-old daughter.
