Category: Sophisticated Theology

Sophisticated theologians squabble like two-year-olds over whether divorced Catholics can get communion

October 30, 2015 • 10:00 am

I won’t belabor this matter except that the article describing it, written by Thomas Reese at the National Catholic Reporter, explicitly mentions “Sophisticated Theologians™”—that rarefied group of thinkers who always provide the Best Arguments for God.

It turns out that there’s just been a Roman Catholic Synod, one of whose aims was to decide what God wanted to do with those divorced and remarried Catholics who wanted to take Communion but haven’t gotten the proper church annulment. Catholics in that situation have sinned and are not in a “state of grace,” so they’re not allowed to nom the body of Christ or drink his blood. You can see the labyrinthine rules for Catholic Communion here, and to me they show craziness rather than Sophistication.

What did the Sophisticated Catholic Theologians™ decide about this difficult issue? What did they settle on as God’s will? Well. . . nothing. They equivocated. As Reese reports (my emphasis):

To the amazement of all, Germans reached unanimous agreement on their report that included a discussion of the internal forum.

“There must be perhaps a way of going with the people in these situations, with the priest to look if and when they can come to a full reconciliation with the church,” explained Cardinal Reinhard Marx, speaking of divorced and remarried persons. “That is the proposal.”

This unanimity was significant because in the German group were theologically sophisticated cardinals representing different points of view, including Cardinals Walter Kasper, who originally proposed the idea of the “penitential path,” and Gerhard Muller, the head of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, known to oppose that path.

. . . What is remarkable about the three paragraphs dealing with divorced and remarried Catholics is that the words Communion and Eucharist never appear. Yes, that’s right, they never mention Communion as a conclusion of this internal forum process.

So what does it mean? A conservative might interpret it as closed to Communion because it was not mentioned in the text. A liberal might interpret it as including Communion since it is not explicitly excluded in the text.

I think that the truth is that Communion was not mentioned because that was the only way the paragraphs could get a two-thirds majority. Like the Second Vatican Council, the synod achieved consensus through ambiguity. This means that they are leaving Pope Francis free to do whatever he thinks best.

So here we see God’s will—after all, if you do the wrong thing, you’re not in a state of grace and will go to hell— is decided by vote, or, in this case, not decided by vote. What many people (Catholics and atheists alike) don’t realize is how much of Catholic doctrine, which supposedly represents God’s will and decides your postmortem fate, was decided by similar votes. Here’s a passage from Faith versus Fact:

It’s not widely appreciated that much religious dogma, especially in Christianity, wasn’t even derived from scripture or revelation, but from a consensus of opinion designed to quell dissent within the church. The Council of Nicaea, for instance, was convened by Emperor Constantine in 325 to settle issues about the divinity of Jesus and the reality of the Trinity. Despite some dissent, both issues were affirmed. In other words, issues of religious truth were settled by vote. The requirement for absolving sin through individual confession wasn’t adopted by Catholics until the ninth century; the doctrine of papal infallibility was adopted by the First Vatican Council as late as 1870; and the bodily assumption of Mary into heaven, something debated for centuries, didn’t become Catholic dogma until Pope Pius XII declared it so in 1950. And it was only in 2007 that Pope Benedict XVI, acting on the advice of a commission convened by his predecessor, declared that the souls of unbaptized babies could now go to heaven instead of lingering in limbo. Given the absence of new information that produced these changes, how can anybody seriously see this as a rational way to decide religious “truth”?

In short, the Church just makes stuff up—stuff that’s supposed to affect you for all eternity. How can rational people buy it?

Karl Giberson is still fighting a rearguard battle against Adam and Eve

June 13, 2015 • 1:45 pm

The link to a new PuffHo piece by (Formerly Uncle) Karl Giberson,”Fundamentalists think that science is atheism,” came from reader Alan, who commented: “[Karl’s] still trying to deal with Adam & Eve, poor guy.” And indeed, besides flogging Giberson’s new book, Saving the Original Sinner: How Christians Have Used the Bible’s First Man to Oppress, Inspire, and Make Sense of the World, the article bemoans the Christian insistence that Adam and Eve were real folks.

First, the book, published June 9 by Beacon Press. Here’s its Amazon blurb:

In Saving the Original Sinner, Giberson tells the story of the evolution of the idea of Adam and explores how, over the centuries, we have created Adam in our own image to explain and justify our behavior. Giberson shows how the narrative of the Fall has influenced Western ideas about sexuality, gender, and race, and he argues that ongoing attempts to preserve the biblical story of creation in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary is contributing to the intellectual isolation of many Christians, particularly evangelicals—even as they continue to wield significant political power in the United States.

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And we all know the problem—or you would if you read pp. 124-131 of FvF. In brief, population genetics tells us that, over the last million years or so, the “effective” size of the human species (an underestimate of the true census size) was on the order of 12,500 individuals, with about 10,000 of those remaining in Africa and the other 2500 bravely venturing out of that continent, their descendants eventually populating the Earth. I need not point out that 12,500 does not equal two, so Adam and Eve couldn’t be the ancestors of all humanity. Nor could the eight people on Noah’s Ark.

This disparity has caused considerable theological kerfuffle, and I detail the various solutions—none of them satisfactory—in my book. Let me just say that the official position of the Vatican is that Adam and Eve really were the historical ancestors of all living humans, so the Catholic Church, on this issue as on many others, is resolutely opposed to science.

Before Giberson mentions this issue, though, he takes a lick at atheists:

Equating science with atheism is one of the most dangerous byproducts of America’s culture wars. This strange polarization portends disaster, as the country divides into factions that cannot find common ground on the way the world operates. And it goes without saying that there will be no agreement on what should be done when scientifically significant issues need political action.

It’s not a strange polarization at all, for atheism—at least the refusal to accept gods for which there’s no evidence—is a logical outgrowth of science, and explains (at least to me) why, compared to Americans as a whole, scientists are so much more atheistic. If your career depends on establishing your confidence in a phenomenon proportional to the degree of evidence supporting it, then God is a no-go. The climate of doubt that is endemic—and essential—to the scientific enterprise is a true disaster for religion. Religious people know this, and that largely explains the many ways they attack science.

At any rate, Giberson then recognizes the Big Problem: if Adam and Eve weren’t real, then neither was Original Sin, and if that’s the case then Jesus died for nothing—or for some obscure metaphor! Christians know this, and thus aren’t buying the view that Adam and Eve were simply—as Giberson’s former BioLogos pal Peter Enns claims—a Metaphorical Couple. Karl’s Lament:

Many Christians, unfortunately believe their faith requires a “first man” who sinned and brought trouble on the world (feminists can thank two millennia of patriarchy for getting the “first woman” off the hook). The central Christian theme is “Creation-Fall-Redemption”: God creates a perfect world; Adam “falls” by sinning, wrecks everything, and God curses the creation with death and suffering; and Christ redeems the world. In this picture Adam and Christ function as symmetrical “bookends”: Adam breaks everything and Christ fixes it.

. . .The conclusion is clear: The couple described in the opening pages of the Bible never existed — and thus could not have precipitated the disaster known as “The Fall.”

Without Adam, the traditional formula that has long defined Christianity must be reinvented and many Christians are convinced that this is impossible. Millions of Americans would prefer to reject science, rather than bid farewell to the first man: “The denial of an historical Adam and Eve as the first parents of all humanity and the solitary first human pair,” warns the influential and widely followed Southern Baptist theologian Al Mohler, “severs the link between Adam and Christ which is so crucial to the Gospel.”

Is there a solution? I don’t see one, for the redemptive effect of Jesus is a non-negotiable tenet of many Christians’ beliefs. Karl is also pessimistic, though he falsely imputes the problem to atheism:

But the sad reality is that this view runs through much of evangelical Christianity in America. It has taken up residence in the GOP, where denying various sciences — evolution, geology, climate science — has become a de facto requirement for election. Many evangelical colleges have it in their faith statement. Public school teachers find themselves embroiled in controversy simply teaching the material in the Biology text. Ken Ham’s entire Answers in Genesis project is based on it. The starting point for so many Christian has become the absolute truth of a particular interpretation of the Genesis creation story. And any alternative viewpoint is now understood to be a “compromise with atheists.”

Sorry, Karl, but it’s not a “compromise with atheists,” but a compromise with fact. Even if all scientists were believers, that wouldn’t make evangelical Christians accept the mythological status of Adam and Eve one whit more. And so the evangelicals will reject the science (after all, 64% of Americans averred that they’d reject a scientific fact if it contravened their faith, something that has nothing to do with atheism), while the Sophisticated Theologians™, like Enns, will continue to confect compromises that their evangelical brethren reject out of hand.

Come on, Karl—come over to the Dark Side. All you have to do is abandon One Myth More. After all, Jesus’s resurrection and virgin birth also contravene the laws of physics and biology.

A theology graduate speaks about our supposed need to learn moar theology before criticizing religion

June 6, 2015 • 11:45 am

Yesterday I posted a reader’s beef from someone named “heavymetalvomitparty,” who said that my opinions on God, theology, and philosophy were worthless since I was neither monk, priest, nor philosopher.  Be that as it may, we have a comment on the same thread by one “solnedgangman,” who wrote at length, and whose comment I decided to make into a post. It’s an appropriate reply because it’s by a theologian with at least some CREDENTIALS! This commenter also has a website, Tree of Talking:

Dear “heavymetalvomitparty,”

I am a credentialed theologian! At least, that is what I was told after graduating with my BA in theology from St. Gregory University, a Benedictine school in Shawnee, Oklahoma. Perhaps you will not accept me as an authority on theology on the basis of an undergraduate degree, given that I lack an M.Div. or the hilariously named STD (sacrae theologiae doctor, or doctor of sacred theology), though I do have two MAs and a Ph.D. in other fields. However, I can tell you that my few years at the undergraduate level was enough to divest me rather completely of the notion that theology was the study of anything solid, that there was an object to this subject. I went in a fairly faithful Catholic eager to uncover the workings of the divine and came out, on my graduation day, with an awareness that I had wasted my time completely. I enjoyed some classes. Studying scripture entailed the heady analysis of texts, while our classes on ethics and morality were headed by a knowledgable and passionate professor who was capable of taking us into some controversial territory. However, any truly challenging discussion always ended with “God said so” or “the Church said so” (both of which are simply restatements of “the Church said that God said so”). How can there be such a thing as a just war but not a just abortion? The Church said so.

What I ended up discovering is that there are no actual standards in theology. If there were, then there would be unity in the field, rather than division. Look at biology, chemistry, and physics. We consider them separate fields for the purposes of organizing a university, but they are mutually informative–in fact, we can’t really understand biology in its modern manifestation without tackling chemistry and physics. All are subject to the same universal laws because they are studying the same thing, if with different emphases–the universe itself, material reality. Contrast this with theology. Your progressive folk will claim that all religions are expressions of the same universal truth, but if so, why do they come to such different answers about the nature of that universal truth? Why, if theologians are approaching the same phenomenon, are there Christians, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims, etc.? These are not overlapping disciplines–these are mutually exclusive worldviews. Even in the “field” of Christianity, there are exclusive subsets. Your Catholic theologian believes that the bread and wine of the Eucharist become the literal (not figurative) body and blood of Christ, while the Protestant finds symbolism there. If both have open access to the same God, then that God is lying to one group or the other–or both. (And if you want my view on the Eucharist, check out this post on my own poorly maintained blog: http://treeoftalking.wordpress.com/2013/11/01/the-real-miracle-of-the-eucharist/)

My study of theology made me aware of the fact that there was no objective, empirical underpinning to the field. Nothing on which you could hang your hat. Just the promise of some hint at the divine through the contemplation of “mysteries”–or absurdities lent an air of sanctity by dint of tradition. Philosophy, on the other hand, I find very useful. My own academic work explores issues of racial violence, and I regularly reference several philosophers, such as racial theorist Charles W. Mills, or Claudia Card and Arne Johan Vetlesen, who have both done amazing work in fashioning secular theories of evil. But such philosophical work is based upon empirically derived evidence. These philosophers reference historians, scientists, psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, etc. Theology has no such grounding in the real world. Sure, some theologians have a concern for society, such as liberation theologians like James H. Cone, who provide genuine critiques of racism and inequality. But insofar as those critiques are based upon reference to some view of the divine, they are refutable by those outside that theological tradition, and thus such debates eventually devolve into arguments over some bit of scripture’s relevance to a modern issue rather than the nature of the issue itself, its real-world components. We can only solve problems we experience in this world by reference to the world, not to otherworldly spirits whose existence has never been verified.

I can add only this: QED.

More nonsense at NPR about God

April 26, 2015 • 10:00 am

I am frankly amazed that National Public Radio (NPR) would publish this mushy reconception of religion, for it’s worse than that purveyed by apophatists like Karen Armstrong. In fact, Nancy Ellen Abrams, who is flogging her new book A God that Could Be Real: Sprirituality, Science, and the Future of our Planet, was given two mini-essays in NPR to write about her book. on her book. And that book apparently re-casts “God”, sort of, as “The Emergent Complexity of the Universe in All Its Scientific Wonder” (I’ve written about her thesis before), and so she pushes not deism, but the worship of some undefined aspect of science as a god.  Indeed, her “god” isn’t even vaguely human, or sentient. This is just a semantic trick. I could consider literature or art as “god,” too, and then I could say that we have a God That Could Be Real. Or food, or wine! In fact, I’d rather worship food than the Emergent Complexity of the Universe.

Abrams’s semantic argument is simply lame, and I doubt it will convince any believers, although Library Journal extolled it like this: “A fine addition to the growing library of alternative approaches to literalism in belief, this book is suitable for academic libraries, liberal churches, and individual seekers.” Yeah, seekers!

Moreover, her argument about words is disingenuous, for it co-opts most people’s notion of what God is like (a mind without a body, and one who cares about you), and tries to show people that, despite the nonexistence of such a god, they can still have a deity—indeed, one that’s The Only Kind of God Worth Wanting.

Does that remind you of anything else—like compatibilist free will? As science has debunked our notion of libertarian free will, philosophers have diligently redefined “free will” so that we can still have it. It is a pretty exact parallel to what Nancy Allen Abrams does: she simply redefines God in the light of scientific advances so that we can still have it as well.

This bothers me a bit on personal grounds, too, for I’m absolutely sure that were I to submit to NPR a piece or two giving the thesis of my new book—that science and religion are incompatible, and attempts to turn science into religion are dumb—NPR would reject it out of hand. That station and site simply have an overweening need to osculate the rump of faith, and there’s nothing to be done about it. I can’t remember a time I’ve seen an overtly atheist piece on the NPR site. Shouldn’t they be balancing their copious coverage of religion and spirituality with alternative views? Don’t they see that nonbelief is an important trend in American culture?

But I digress. Abrams’s first piece is called “‘A God that could be real’ in the scientific universe.” Her initial point is this (Abrams’s quotes are indented):

We have to have a god because people can’t live without one. 

Does God have to be part of our understanding of the universe? No. But if scientists tell the public that they have to choose between God and science, most people will choose God, which leads to denialism, hostility to science and the profoundly dangerous mental incoherence in modern society that fosters depression and conflict. Meanwhile, many of those who choose science find themselves without any way of thinking that can give them access to their own spiritual potential. What we need is a coherent big picture that is completely consistent with — and even inspired by — science, yet provides an empowering way of rethinking God that provides the human and social benefits without the fantasy. How can we get this?

Sounds a lot like what free-will compatibilists do, doesn’t it? (That’s not a coincidence, for several compatibilists have explicitly argued that we must tell people they have some kind of free will because society will fall apart if they lose their belief that they have real agency.) At any rate, I rarely tell people that they have to choose between God and science; I think I’ve said that once in my life. Rather, I try to show them that the scientific and religious ways to discern “truth” are incompatible, and then let them draw their own conclusions.

The traditional God doesn’t fly any longer because there’s no evidence for it. 

What if we thought this way about God? What if we took the evidence of a new cosmic reality seriously and became willing to rule out the impossible? What would be left?

We can have a real God if we let go of what makes it unreal. I am only interested in God if it’s real. If it isn’t real, there’s nothing to talk about. But I don’t mean real like a table, or a feeling, or a test score, or a star. Those are real in normal earthbound experience. I mean real in the full scientific picture of our double dark universe, our planet, our biology and our moment in history.

These are characteristics of a God that can’t be real:

  1. God existed before the universe
  2. God created the universe.
  3. God knows everything.
  4. God intends everything that happens.
  5. God can choose to violate the laws of nature.

Well, at least she admits that there’s no evidence for any kind of creator God or one with any characteristics of the Abrahamic God. But she won’t stop there and just admit that she’s an atheist. No, she has to make one god further—confecting a nebulous and fuzzy god. It’s a sort-of-sciencey and emergent god, one that she tries to describe in her second NPR post, “A new way to think about God.”

I’d like to explain what Abrams means by “god,” but it’s pretty obscure. In fact, I think it’s obscure because she wants it that way (the usual tactic of Sophisticated Theologians™). Or maybe she simply doesn’t know what she’s talking about. Regardless,  I have no idea what kind of god she’s describing, except that it comports with science, it has something to do with complexity, and  that it’s emergent (a word that almost invariably means you’re in Woo-Land). But here’s how she explains it:

Almost everything we humans do collectively spawns an emergent phenomenon. So, for example, people trading things has led to the global economy, an emergent phenomenon so complicated and unpredictable that not only does no one know the rules, but the professionals don’t even agree on what the rules should be about. The never-ending effort to get people to behave decently toward one another has spawned governments. Our innate desire for gossip has spawned the media. [it goes on, but you get the point]. . .

But we humans are not just traders, moralizers and gossips. Far beneath those behaviors, so deep it distinguishes us from the other primates, is this: We aspire. We aspire to different things, but we all aspire. Our aspirations are as real as we are. They are not the same as desires, like food, sex and security. Every animal has those desires from instinct alone. Aspirations reach beyond survival needs. Our aspirations are what shape each of us humans into the individual we are. Without aspirations, we are nothing but meat with habits. We humans are the aspiring species and may have been for hundreds of thousands of years.

Well, other species also have aspirations, and often for the same things that we do: food, status, and sex. Much of that, in us as well as other species, is a result of natural selection acting to spread our genes. But, Abrams says, we also aspire to meaning, and she somehow not only finds that meaning, but turns it into God. If you really understand this following bit, your’e better than I am! (my emphasis):

Something new has to have emerged from the staggering complexity of all humanity’s aspirations, interacting. What is that something — that emergent phenomenon both fed by and feeding the aspirations of every human being? It didn’t exist before humans evolved, but it’s here now, and every one of us is directly connected to it, simply by virtue of being human and having aspirations. It didn’t create the universe, but it has created the meaning of the universe, which is what matters to us. Meaning, universe, spirit, God, creation and all other abstract concepts are themselves ideas that took form over countless generations, as people shared their aspirations to understand and express what may lie beyond the visible world. This emergent phenomenon has created the power of all our words and ideas, including ideals like truth, justice, and freedom, which took millennia to clarify in practice, and which no individual could ever have invented or even imagined without a rich cultural history that made it possible.

This infinitely complex phenomenon, which has emerged and continues to emerge from instant to instant, growing exponentially and shape-shifting, can accurately be said to exist in the modern universe. It’s as real as the economy, as real as the government. It doesn’t matter if you’re Hindu or Christian or Jewish or atheist or agnostic, because I’m not proposing an alternative religious idea. I’m explaining an emergent phenomenon that actually exists in our scientific picture of reality. You don’t have to call it God, but it’s real. And when you search for a name for it, it may be the only thing that exists in the modern universe that is worthy of the name God.

Okay, what exactly is this emergent phenomenon that Abrams is banging on about? She doesn’t explain it clearly—and if you look at the largely positive reviews of this execrable idea on the Amazon site, it appears that her readers don’t, either. Could a reader tell me what “god” she is talking about? Please? It clearly has something to do with science, and with dark energy and dark matter, issues she raised in her first post as well as the excerpt from her book that I criticized a few weeks ago. Here’s that excerpt:

The power of praying comes from daring to enter that mysterious place between the emerging God and us. But it’s not an empty space—it’s our own selves on progressively larger size scales, where we are participating in multiple emerging phenomena and creating emergent identities. As the ancient Egyptian world blended outward into the spiritual world, so does ours. And the higher our consciousness goes along the Uroboros of Human Identity, the more it blends into the emerging phenomenon of God. In tuning our ordinary consciousness in to those higher levels that we may have scarcely ever visited before, we approach God.

Theobabble!  But people apparently lap this stuff up, for it sounds profound, although I can’t see any substantive content. If I were to grade Ms. Abrams’s effort, I’d give her a D and write this in the margins of her paper: “Could you please explain exactly what the emergent God is to which we’re supposed to pray? You dance all around the issue but are never explicit. Rewrite paper and submit.”

Nevertheless—and this does surprise me—the readers on Amazon have generally rated the book highly. There are clearly many Seekers out there! Here’s part of a review by “J. Peterson” on Amazon, who gives the book four out of five stars, even though he/she doesn’t seem to fully grasp what Abrams is saying (my emphasis):

This book provoked a variety of thoughts and emotions for me, thus I judge the book a very worthwhile read.

I fully admit that I did not (and still do not) grasp all of what the author is trying to say, so I need to read it again. I can’t say that about very many books.

Some of the author’s ideas are fascinating, while others I reject. I will leave other readers to decide for themselves on these, and won’t attempt to review all of them here.

One of the ideas I liked the best was her description of “god” as an “emergent” phenomenon. Perhaps I don’t get out enough, but I was not familiar with the whole concept of “emergence.” But now that I have been introduced to the concept by this book, many (non-religious) things are much more clear. Simply put, an emergent phenomenon is one that is literally greater than the sum of its parts, e.g. a living organism is composed of unthinking atoms that individually just obey the laws of physics, but when aggregated into a human body, a totally new and wonderful thing emerges – somehow. The author’s premise is that god is also emergent, which is quite interesting. I am still trying to decide if I buy this or not, but I *am* still thinking about it.

But this is offset by a one-star review by Geoff Arnold, an atheist, who said it better than I could. (Of course, I haven’t read Abrams’s book as he has, but I’ve read the long excerpts in Salon (here and here) and her two pieces on NPR). I can’t be arsed to read the book if it’s anything like what she’s already written.) Here’s part of Arnold’s review:

Now she provides no evidence for the existence of such an entity, nor does she attempt to explain what “emergence” might involve. She seems to view emergence as a mysterious process that requires no explanation — a bit like the Gaia hypothesis, or some of Deepak Chopra’s quantum nonsense. It is, of course, nothing of the kind. Biology is “emergent” from chemistry and physics, in that the latter provide a plastic framework in which information-theoretic processes can — contingently — emerge, but that doesn’t mean that biological phenomena are epistemologically mysterious. (I pinch myself for effect.)

So by the end of the first section we have an unsupported hypothesis which seems “worthy” of the term “god”. Most theists would wonder whether an entity which is so radically contingent and highly local (in both space and time) would fit the bill; it’s hardly a prime mover, or a ground of being, or a timeless and omnipotent father figure. Oddly, Abrams seems to feel that this is a case where people should just “get over it”, and the “god” is quickly capitalized. Prayers follow; rituals are not far behind.

Now, I’m an atheist, so I find most concepts of “god” pretty much incoherent. Nevertheless, as deities go, this is a pretty unsatisfactory one. After all, one errant asteroid could wipe out all human life in a moment, and since Abrams’ god is merely an emergent property of human consciousness, bang goes god. Of course we wouldn’t be around to notice it, but it all seems remarkably parochial.

Ultimately, this book left me annoyed, almost angry. A silly piece of imagination, unsupported by any evidence, framed in language which exploits and abuses scientific thought, proposed as a replacement for conventional deities. “Could be real”. What does “real” mean in this context? We’re not told. Ultimately Abrams’ decided that she wanted to believe, and made up something that she could believe in, without any evidence. That’s silly.

Give that man a Cuban cigar! He has a long career ahead as a religion debunker.

 

The worst accommodationism EVER: Nancy Abrams says that God is naturalism (sort of)

April 6, 2015 • 2:41 pm

All the good that Salon has done by publishing the eloquent antitheist essays by Jeffrey Tayler has been wiped away for good by a new essay on the site, “You’re praying to the wrong God: What organized religion gets wrong about prayer.”  It’s by Nancy Abrams, and is an excerpt from her new book A God That Could Be Real: Spirituality, Science, and the Future of Our Planet.

Judging from this excerpt and the Amazon description, Abrams does for religion what compatibilists do for free will: she tells us that there is no anthropomorphic God who cares for each of us, but that’s okay, for she redefines God to give us The Only Kind of God Worth Wanting!

That God is the Universe, or so you might discern from painfully clawing your way through her tortured prose. But it’s more than just Einstein’s recasting of God as the wonders and regularities of the Universe. Read a few excerpts and then tell me what you think she’s trying to say. (I’m not sure myself.)

This is her first paragraph, and I’ll be damned if I know what she’s talking about:

The power of praying comes from daring to enter that mysterious place between the emerging God and us. But it’s not an empty space—it’s our own selves on progressively larger size scales, where we are participating in multiple emerging phenomena and creating emergent identities. As the ancient Egyptian world blended outward into the spiritual world, so does ours. And the higher our consciousness goes along the Uroboros of Human Identity, the more it blends into the emerging phenomenon of God. In tuning our ordinary consciousness in to those higher levels that we may have scarcely ever visited before, we approach God.

Thus we simply change our idea of God from a supernatural being to whatever fulfills our “God Capacity”:

It’s time to crack open the whole idea of talking to God. If we are in a universe now known to span more than sixty orders of magnitude, and God is emerging from the infinite interactions of human aspirations, we have to look at everything anew. We’ve already begun to do this intellectually, but can we do it emotionally? How can we step outside images of God that are many centuries deep and realize that those are only images and not reality?

 It turns out all humans have a tool that will let us do this. The perfect name for it was suggested by the psychoanalyst Carl Jung. In an interview filmed in the early 1950s Jung was asked bluntly, “Do you believe God exists?” Earlier Jung had written that all people need ideas and convictions that can give meaning to their lives and help them find their “place in the universe” (his phrase). He had written that we have the capacity to satisfy this need symbolically with a god image. He answered the interviewer by saying, “What I know is that all humans have a ‘god-capacity.’” That’s the tool. Our god-capacity.

And, apparently, we can force ourselves to believe that the Universe itself fills that “god-capacity”, which of course isn’t traditional religion at all, but to Abrams might be a good replacement (my emphasis):

There is a God that’s closer to every one of us than the air we breathe and more powerful than the zeitgeist in which our lives are planted. If we could learn from the evangelicals how to feel as though we’re really in touch with the emerging God in the ways we actually are, we could experience the joy and awe of participation in the universe and see the possibility of prayer as a cosmic blessing.

We have learned from the evangelicals in [Tanya] Luhrmann’s study that if we are motivated enough, it’s possible to train our minds to experience whatever we believe is real. What if we directed toward the real universe and the emerging God even a fraction of the effort that millions of religious people make every day to experience the presence of their image of God?

After redefining the Universe as God, she then redefines “prayer” as “contemplating the Universe” (this woman would have made a wonderful free-will compatibilist!):

It’s often said that prayer is talking to God and meditation is listening for the answer. That can be true, of course, but it’s not the only way. If we meditate on how the universe works as if we actually believed it, that would be a prayer to reality, and reality is the parent of God and everything else. This kind of prayer is a way of harmonizing oneself with the reality that can host an emerging God. We no longer live in an intuitive universe, but most of our words still refer to earthly experiences and, unless we unchain them as metaphors, these metaphors mislead us to think that they accurately reflect reality.

If we want to know how to talk to God, or how God might talk to us, we need to train our minds to live in the same universe as God. Doing so can be prayer.

. . . We’re truly participating in our universe when we come to feel in our bones that we are part of the story, thoroughly integrated into the big picture. God is emerging from us and bound into us, we know where we stand in the cosmos, and we know what we are.

. . . The galaxy is merely our local geography. There is a whole universe to re-envision, large and small, outside and inside ourselves. Expanding our consciousness to the spiritual realms of the universe is praying.

Seriously, can any thinking person take this stuff seriously? Her solution to the delusions of religion is to substitute the idea that God is really just science and naturalism, but is also more-than-just-naturalism in a way that isn’t quite clear. Will believers buy it? I doubt it? Will atheists buy it? Only if they’ve lost too many neurons.

Sure, you can harmonize religion with science if you redefine religion as science, and prayer as simply awe before the Universe. But then why use the word “God” at all, which, as Abrams knows, is loaded with emotional and historical resonance? You can also decide that “cat” is just another word for “d*g,” and then argue that Hili is a d*g, but who, given the historical use of those terms, would accept that usage? Only someone who desperatelyy wants a d*g but has only a cat.

h/t: Barry

A writer for CNN debates whether Judas is in hell

March 15, 2015 • 12:40 pm

Bloody hell, just when you think the Cable News Network (CNN) may have some redeeming features, it publishes a piece of such mind-boggling stupidity that you scratch your head in wonderment. Such a piece is Craig Gross’s new Easter lucubration, “Is Judas in hell?” Read it—it’s short. And after you do, I’ll be you’ll wonder why CNN would not only publish such a thing, but even pay somebody to write it. (If Gross wasn’t remunerated, he was still paid too much!)

First, let’s identify Craig Gross. His CNN bio says this: “Craig Gross is the pastor and founder of XXXchurch.com. He has written seven books and speaks across the country on a range of topics.” (His longer and “official” bio is here.) And Wikipedia identifies XXXchurch.com as

“. . . a non-profit Christian website that aims to help those who struggle with pornography. It targets porn industry performers and consumers. The organization describes itself as “the #1 Christian porn site designed to bring awareness, openness and accountability to those affected by pornography.”

So, as Easter approaches, the supposedly respectable CNN hosts a self-debate on whether the apostle who betrayed Jesus is in hell! Actually, Gross doesn’t think that question is answerable, or even worth considering, since it demands a certainty he can’t find. He says this:

Recently, I asked on my Facebook page: “Is Judas in heaven or hell?”

The first response was:

Judas is in hell today. He has been there for 2,000 years and he will be there forever.

There is a button on Facebook that I have started to love. It is called “unfriend.” I won’t unfriend you because you believe differently than I do, I just don’t need more theologians as my friends on Facebook who speak with such confidence when it comes to someone’s place in eternity.

A debate continues on my Facebook wall. I love how everyone is so convinced they know whether Judas is in heaven or hell.

Yet Gross speaks with remarkable confidence about other Christian stuff. I find the following passage remarkable, especially in light of what he said above (emphasis is mine):

Let me tell you a little bit about what the Bible says about Judas:

He was personally chosen to be an apostle by Jesus.

He spent 3 1/2 years traveling with Jesus.

He saw all the miracles of Christ in person.

He watched as Christ healed the sick, raised the dead and cast out demons.

In terms of experience with Jesus, whatever you can say about Peter, James and John, you can say about Judas.

On top of all this, he handled the money, which is most of the time the most trusted one in the bunch. No one suspected that Judas would betray Jesus, which tells me he was a believer.

His life was changed.

He knew Jesus personally.

In a dark moment of his life, he made a mistake. A big one. He sold Jesus out for 30 silver coins or so. The moment he knew what he had done, he felt remorse, and he killed himself.

I am not here to debate theology. The facts are the facts.

Seriously? Those are facts? Who says so? Clearly, for Gross “facts” consist of “whatever the Gospels say.” But doesn’t CNN do fact-checking?  Is it a “fact” that Muhammad traveled from Mecca to Jerusalem and back on a flying horse? That’s a belief of Muslims that comes from the Qur’an. Is it a “fact” that there was a worldwide flood that destroyed all but eight humans? That’s in the Old Testament! Is it a “fact” that Jesus came to North America, and that Native Americans are of Middle Eastern ancestry? That’s in Mormon scripture? And is it a “fact” that Xenu stored millions of people in volcanoes and then blasted them with hydrogen bombs? That’s in Scientology scripture.

Gross also says this:

Do I believe in heaven and hell? Yes. I believe one is dark and one is light, and they both last forever.

What we have here is a credulous man who passes off the most ludicrous assertions of Bronze Age mythology as “fact”, and then unfriends people who “believe” that Judas is in hell. Well, he’s a Christian, and so he belongs in that asylum.

But if I were a Christian, the answer would seem clear to me. Without Judas’s betrayal, Jesus might not have been crucified, and his whole mission—to expiate the sins of humanity—would have been a dismal failure. Judas thus played a necessary role in saving all of us, and so he should find his reward in heaven. Even Gross sort of alludes to Judas’s critical role:

We all fall short and deserve death, but because of what Jesus did on the cross 2,000 years ago, we are able to have life. And I believe that where you end up, God only knows.

(Note that it should be “only God knows” in the final sentence.) Given this role, why should Judas be eternally immolated in molten sulfur! It was predetermined that he did what he did, and what he did saved all humanity from sin—at least if they believe in Jesus as their savior.

But the question of whether Judas is in hell is far less important than this question: Why did CNN publish such a ridiculous piece?

h/t: Chris

Jesus ‘n’ Mo ‘n’ Karen Armstrong

March 4, 2015 • 6:10 am

Today’s Jesus and Mo, called “Ineffable,” takes a poke at those hypocritical Sophisticated Theologians™ who claim that we can’t say anything about God, for he’s a Great Apophatic Mystery, but then go ahead and tell us all kinds of things about who he is (loving, ubiquitous, etc.) and what he wants. (And yes, I’m talking about you, Karen Armstrong):

2015-03-04

I’ve written posts on this topic, often long ones, but I’m always amazed (and humbled) when the Jesus and Mo artist manages to make the same points in only four brief panels.

As for those Sophisticate Theologians™, they’re even worse than fundamentalists—at least in terms of intellectual honesty.