Thank you Jason

Thanks to Jason Sapp for the kind comment. It is always good to hear that my work has been meaningful even to people I've never met.

Despicable

Despicable

Republican politicians, or at least it’s mostly Republican politicians, have proven beyond any reasonable doubt that they are despicable political actors and deplorable human beings. They are demagogues who pander to the basest instincts of the most ignorant American voters. They wear their lack of knowledge and their bigotry on their lapels as a badge of honor. Shame on them. Shame on all the uninformed and fearful Americans who listen to them. No Syrian refugees in my state, they bray. Keep the Syrians out, they bellow. No Muslims to be admitted to the US, they holler, as though that notion weren’t just illegal but immoral as well. They know nothing of the dynamics of the Middle East. They know nothing about Islam. They know nothing about the lives of decent Muslim people whose homes and livelihoods have been obliterated and from whom all opportunity for a decent life has been taken by murderous zealots who do nothing but terrorize and destroy, often in the name of God and the great Islamic faith. These jackals of the American right have driven our political life into the gutter. They want to respond to the spilling of innocent blood with even more spilling of innocent blood. They live according to the myth of redemptive violence, a myth that leads only to more violence and can never truly solve any problem. Despicable is too kind a word for them. If I didn’t believe deeply in freedom of speech I would want to see them stopped by legal means from spreading their hatred and their lies. That’s what our American political life has come to. Ignoramuses pretending to be patriots. Bigots claiming to care about safety and security. Fools who know nothing about how violence really works—and doesn’t work. Dunces willfully blind to the way their ignorant anti-Arab, anti-Muslim vitriol aids the purveyors of hate that they think they’re opposing. And legions of uninformed Americans so unpracticed in the skills of critical thinking that they can’t see through the lies and the posturing and reject these peddlers of falsehood and hatred for the despicable asses they are.

Our democracy is being corrupted by power hungry idiots who don’t know the truth, don’t care about the truth, and are perfectly happy to corrupt the truth for their own narrow, selfish political ends. Are we going to wake up? Are we going to start to think and not just react? I hope so, but the signs aren’t good. It is hard to underestimate the intelligence not of all American voters but of a lot of them. There are easily enough ignorant and bigoted Americans that these merchants of hatred get more of a hearing than they deserve, they actually deserving none at all. Heaven help us. God help us. Lord knows we need the help.

Biblical Literalism Makes People Say Stupid Things

Biblical Literalism Makes People Say Stupid Things

There simply is no doubt that faith sometimes makes people  say stupid things. We have just seen a classic example of it. Ben Carson, the far right candidate for the Republican Party’s nomination for President of the United States, who as far as the objective eye can see has no qualifications whatsoever to be President, thinks that the pyramids of ancient Egypt aren’t tombs. He thinks the Hebrew patriarch Joseph built them as granaries.[1] I suppose that’s because it says in Genesis that Joseph, one of the sons of Jacob, was sold into slavery in Egypt by his brothers, that he rose to a position of great power there, and that he stored up lots of grain against a coming famine. See Genesis chapter 37 and 41:41-57. The contention that the Egyptian pyramids are actually Joseph’s store houses is just plain stupid. There are lots of reasons to believe that Genesis’ story of Joseph isn’t at all factual, but we needn’t get into that can of worms to see how stupid Carson’s contention is. The evidence of the pyramids themselves is indisputable. They are tombs, the tombs of pharaohs. Period. There is not a shadow of a doubt that that is true. I mean, just look at them! Look at what is, or was, in them. They’re tombs designed to facilitate the deceased pharaoh’s life in the afterlife. No reasonable person can have any doubt about that. To contend otherwise is just stupid. It can’t be anything other than stupid. It’s stupid, and that’s all there is to it.

Ben Carson, however, is not stupid. I think his politics are really bad, but he isn’t stupid. He is a retired neurosurgeon. Stupid people don’t get to be neurosurgeons. Stupid people don’t graduate college. Stupid people don’t get into medical school. Stupid people don’t complete residencies in neurology and neurosurgery. Carson did all those things. He graduated from Yale and the University of Michigan School of Medicine. He was Director of Pediatric Neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital for years. He isn’t stupid, or at least he’s not stupid about medical science and the art of neurosurgery. Far from it! But he thinks Egypt’s pyramids are Joseph’s granaries! He’s a very intelligent man who thinks a very stupid thing and is quite willing to express that stupid thing publically. What’s up with that?

To understand what’s up with that we have to look at Carson’s version of Christian faith. He is a Seventh Day Adventist. That’s a version of Christianity that arose in the United States in the nineteenth century as part of a much broader cultural effect of the Enlightenment that reduced all truth to fact. Like other conservative evangelical strains of Christianity it holds that the Bible is infallible, and it understands the Bible literally, that is, factually. Seventh Day Adventists believe that every word in the Bible is literally true, and to them that means factual. Many Christians, especially Protestant Christians, share that conviction. The literal inspiration and inerrancy of the Bible has been so widely held and taught by Christians that most of us probably don’t think much about it. He hear that someone believes those things and shrug our shoulders. We’ve heard it before. We’ll hear it again. If we share those beliefs we don’t’ think much about or react much to someone else holding that belief except maybe to be glad that they do. If we don’t, and I don’t, we don’t think much of it because it is so common among us and there seems to be so little we can do about it.

Well, belief in biblical inspiration and inerrancy may be common, but it is not something we should just ignore, That’s because it is not harmless. It is in fact very harmful. It is harmful to the spiritual life of those who hold it. It is harmful to the broader Christian tradition because it drives so many people away from the faith. It is also harmful to Christianity because it distracts Christians from the deeper truth of the faith and has them off chasing literalistic rabbits rather than living into the faith’s great spiritual depth.

And here’s another thing biblical literalism does. It makes people think and say stupid things. Literalistic religion creates a faith that cannot tolerate intellectual curiosity or inquiry. Because it is grounded not in authentic spiritual experience but on supposed facts, it cannot tolerate anything that questions the truth of those supposed facts. I have had many people tell me that they left conservative evangelical Christian churches at least in part because those churches didn’t allow them to ask questions about their faith. Spiritual truth is multivalent. It isn’t exclusive. Factual truth is necessarily exclusive, for a fact is either true or it isn’t. Spiritual truth is, indeed necessarily is, potentially true and necessarily false because that to which it points, that ultimate reality that we call God, is essentially and paradoxically the unknowable known, both being and not being at the same time. Questioning does, or at least can, drive spiritually grounded faith deeper. Questioning undermines faith that is grounded only in fact because questioning might lead to a denial of a supposedly foundational fact.

Therefore even otherwise intelligent people believe and say stupid things when they adhere to a literalistic faith. Their doing so of course requires them to engage in a lot of compartmentalization. It certainly appears that Ben Carson is doing precisely that. As an accomplished physician Carson must be very knowledgeable about medical science, and he must trust the truth of the findings of medical science. Yet he won’t let the kind of critical thinking and investigation that leads to advancements in medical science have any role in his religious faith. If he did let contemporary critical techniques influence his faith he would never say anything as stupid as the pyramids are Joseph’s grain elevators. It is such compartmentalization that makes religious literalists say stupid things.

Compartmentalization is not what God wants for us. God's dream for all people is wholeness of life, the kind of wholeness we see in Jesus Christ. An entity that is capable of wholeness but that is compartmentalized into different parts that don’t mesh and that don’t communicate with each other is broken. It is not fully realized or, to use the term for it from Jungian analysis, fully individuated. It is not, in other words, whole. It is not fully what it was created to be. So it is with humans who compartmentalize the way biblical literalists do and must. They are broken, they are not whole. They have not attained the abundant life that the Gospel of John tells us Jesus came to give us. Not that any of us attains that life fully of course. We are, after all, creatures not gods. Yet compartmentalizing our being so that our brains don’t communicate with our faith is a clear sign of brokenness. It must surely take a great deal of spiritual and emotional energy to maintain that compartmentalizing, energy that could be put to constructive not destructive uses. God calls us to wholeness of life. Biblical literalists put a significant obstacle toward getting there in their own paths, or at least they let some church leader put them there for them.

Faith doesn’t have to make us stupid, nor does it have to make us say stupid things. True faith never does. God gave us brains, and it simply isn’t possible that God doesn’t want us to use them. Any remotely properly functioning brain will know, if it bothers to know anything about it at all, that the Egyptian pyramids are the tombs of pharaohs. Whether or not they are also ancient power plants I can’t say, but they clearly are tombs and not granaries. Saying that they are granaries is stupid. An intelligent, in some ways perhaps even brilliant, person saying that they are is a sign of the worst kind of intellectual compartmentalization. I don’t hate Ben Carson, but I sure hope no one as spiritually broken as he seems to be doesn’t become President of the United States.

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[1] Not everyone who thinks unorthodox things about the pyramids is a religious literalists like Carson is. I know a woman who thinks the pyramids aren’t tombs but what she calls “ancient power plants.” Whatever her reasons are for thinking that (and I couldn’t possibly tell you what they are), they aren’t grounded in biblical literalism.