'Gpd is Not a Christian .....'

I found the following on Huffington Post. I completely agree on Tutu's point on the accidents of birth and geography. Why then are some so righteous in their faith?

The following is excerpted from the Archbishop Desmond Tutu's new book, 'God Is Not A Christian: And Other Provocations.'

This talk also comes from a forum in Britain, where Tutu addressed leaders of different faiths during a mission to the city of Birmingham in 1989.

They tell the story of a drunk who crossed the street and accosted a pedestrian, asking him, "I shay, which ish the other shide of the shtreet?" The pedestrian, somewhat nonplussed, replied, "That side, of course!" The drunk said, "Shtrange. When I wash on that shide, they shaid it wash thish shide." Where the other side of the street is depends on where we are. Our perspective differs with our context, the things that have helped to form us; and religion is one of the most potent of these formative influences, helping to determine how and what we apprehend of reality and how we operate in our own specific context.

My first point seems overwhelmingly simple: that the accidents of birth and geography determine to a very large extent to what faith we belong. The chances are very great that if you were born in Pakistan you are a Muslim, or a Hindu if you happened to be born in India, or a Shintoist if it is Japan, and a Christian if you were born in Italy. I don't know what significant fact can be drawn from this -- perhaps that we should not succumb too easily to the temptation to exclusiveness and dogmatic claims to a monopoly of the truth of our particular faith. You could so easily have been an adherent of the faith that you are now denigrating, but for the fact that you were born here rather than there.

My second point is this: not to insult the adherents of other faiths by suggesting, as sometimes has happened, that for instance when you are a Christian the adherents of other faiths are really Christians without knowing it. We must acknowledge them for who they are in all their integrity, with their conscientiously held beliefs; we must welcome them and respect them as who they are and walk reverently on what is their holy ground, taking off our shoes, metaphorically and literally. We must hold to our particular and peculiar beliefs tenaciously, not pretending that all religions are the same, for they are patently not the same. We must be ready to learn from one another, not claiming that we alone possess all truth and that somehow we have a corner on God.

We should in humility and joyfulness acknowledge that the supernatural and divine reality we all worship in some form or other transcends all our particular categories of thought and imagining, and that because the divine -- however named, however apprehended or conceived -- is infinite and we are forever finite, we shall never comprehend the divine completely. So we should seek to share all insights we can and be ready to learn, for instance, from the techniques of the spiritual life that are available in religions other than our own. It is interesting that most religions have a transcendent reference point, a mysterium tremendum, that comes to be known by deigning to reveal itself, himself, herself, to humanity; that the transcendent reality is compassionate and concerned; that human beings are creatures of this supreme, supra mundane reality in some way, with a high destiny that hopes for an everlasting life lived in close association with the divine, either as absorbed without distinction between creature and creator, between the divine and human, or in a wonderful intimacy which still retains the distinctions between these two orders of reality.

When we read the classics of the various religions in matters of prayer, meditation, and mysticism, we find substantial convergence, and that is something to rejoice at. We have enough that conspires to separate us; let us celebrate that which unites us, that which we share in common.

Surely it is good to know that God (in the Christian tradition) created us all (not just Christians) in his image, thus investing us all with infinite worth, and that it was with all humankind that God entered into a covenant relationship, depicted in the covenant with Noah when God promised he would not destroy his creation again with water. Surely we can rejoice that the eternal word, the Logos of God, enlightens everyone -- not just Christians, but everyone who comes into the world; that what we call the Spirit of God is not a Christian preserve, for the Spirit of God existed long before there were Christians, inspiring and nurturing women and men in the ways of holiness, bringing them to fruition, bringing to fruition what was best in all. We do scant justice and honor to our God if we want, for instance, to deny that Mahatma Gandhi was a truly great soul, a holy man who walked closely with God. Our God would be too small if he was not also the God of Gandhi: if God is one, as we believe, then he is the only God of all his people, whether they acknowledge him as such or not. God does not need us to protect him. Many of us perhaps need to have our notion of God deepened and expanded. It is often said, half in jest, that God created man in his own image and man has returned the compliment, saddling God with his own narrow prejudices and exclusivity, foibles and temperamental quirks. God remains God, whether God has worshippers or not.

This mission in Birmingham to which I have been invited is a Christian celebration, and we will make our claims for Christ as unique and as the Savior of the world, hoping that we will live out our beliefs in such a way that they help to commend our faith effectively. Our conduct far too often contradicts our profession, however. We are supposed to proclaim the God of love, but we have been guilty as Christians of sowing hatred and suspicion; we commend the one whom we call the Prince of Peace, and yet as Christians we have fought more wars than we care to remember. We have claimed to be a fellowship of compassion and caring and sharing, but as Christians we often sanctify sociopolitical systems that belie this, where the rich grow ever richer and the poor grow ever poorer, where we seem to sanctify a furious competitiveness, ruthless as can only be appropriate to the jungle.

QOTD - July 27, 2010

Optimism is joyful searching; pessimism is a prison of fear and a clutching at illusionary safety.

~ K.A.Brehony (thanks to @CoachCecily)

Prayer/Verse (2010)

So, here's my first edit:

O Nameless One
who beckons me
Is it you whose silent whisperings
fill my ears?
Whose presence I sense
even alone?

Who are you?
What is your name?
Where can I find you?

I daydream/envision/imagine you
not as a being
but a state of being,

Not a being
but the power that gives us being.

I shall call you the Holy One
... the Holy One
Yes, the Holy One.

You are in all
and all is within you

You suffuse all that is
and was
and is yet to be.

The ordinary and mundane,
the profound and sublime.

You are the knowing beyond me
and the knowing within me.

How shall I see you, O Holy One?
O Faceless One?

Not a particle of matter but a wave of energy?
A neural network, countless pulsing points of life?
A boundless moving mesh?
A divine web, swaying in the breeze of eternity?
With your gossamer strands
fluttering throughout and in my life?

-- from our final retreat,
"In Your Own Voice," December 9, 1995, edited July 11, 2010

Prayer/Verse (1995)

Cleaning out a closet, I found the following prayer/verse. I'd like to change a few of the words, I think.

O Nameless One
who beckons me
whose silent whisperings
fill my ear
your silken sighs
touch my cheek ...


Who are you?
What is your name?
Where can I find you?


I imagine you
not as a being
but a state of being,


Not as a particle of matter
but a wave of energy


Not a person
but a person-filled power


I shall call you the Holy One
... the Holy One
Yes, the Holy One.


You are in all
and all is within you


You are the interconnectedness
of all that is
and was
and is yet to be.


The ordinary and mundane,
the profound and sublime.


You are the knowing beyond me
and the knowing within me.


You are a neural network,
pulsing points of life,
a divine web, swaying
a mighty moving mesh


With those silken gossamer strands
kissing my life.
-- from our final retreat,
"In Your Own Voice," December 9, 1995

The little things

Poking around the web, I learned of a poet and spiritual writer named Kathleen Norris.

Here is a quote of hers that caught my attention:

"The Bible is full of evidence that God's attention is indeed fixed on the little things. But this is not because God is a great cosmic cop, eager to catch us in minor transgressions, but simply because God loves us--loves us so much that the divine presence is revealed even in the meaningless workings of daily life. It is in the ordinary, the here-and-now, that God asks us to recognize that the creation is indeed refreshed like dew-laden grass that is "renewed in the morning" or to put it in more personal and also theological terms, "our inner nature is being renewed everyday". Seen in this light, what strikes many modern readers as the ludicrous details in Leviticus involving God in the minuitae of daily life might be revisioned as the very love of God. "
— Kathleen Norris (The Quotidian Mysteries: Laundry, Liturgy and "Women's Work")

I was contemplating adding Norris's book to my Amazon Wish List for a possible Christmas gift, but I found it on Google Books. Have I mentioned recently how much I appreciate Google? See it here. I think the book in its entirety is under 90 pages.

Cooperation, evolution & morality?

Here's a thoughtful, interesting column by David Brooks, New York Times columnist:

Socrates talked. The assumption behind his approach to philosophy, and the approaches of millions of people since, is that moral thinking is mostly a matter of reason and deliberation: Think through moral problems. Find a just principle. Apply it.

One problem with this kind of approach to morality, as Michael Gazzaniga writes in his 2008 book, “Human,” is that “it has been hard to find any correlation between moral reasoning and proactive moral behavior, such as helping other people. In fact, in most studies, none has been found.”

Today, many psychologists, cognitive scientists and even philosophers embrace a different view of morality. In this view, moral thinking is more like aesthetics. As we look around the world, we are constantly evaluating what we see. Seeing and evaluating are not two separate processes. They are linked and basically simultaneous.

As Steven Quartz of the California Institute of Technology said during a recent discussion of ethics sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation, “Our brain is computing value at every fraction of a second. Everything that we look at, we form an implicit preference. Some of those make it into our awareness; some of them remain at the level of our unconscious, but ... what our brain is for, what our brain has evolved for, is to find what is of value in our environment.”

Think of what happens when you put a new food into your mouth. You don’t have to decide if it’s disgusting. You just know. You don’t have to decide if a landscape is beautiful. You just know.

Moral judgments are like that. They are rapid intuitive decisions and involve the emotion-processing parts of the brain. Most of us make snap moral judgments about what feels fair or not, or what feels good or not. We start doing this when we are babies, before we have language. And even as adults, we often can’t explain to ourselves why something feels wrong.

In other words, reasoning comes later and is often guided by the emotions that preceded it. Or as Jonathan Haidt of the University of Virginia memorably wrote, “The emotions are, in fact, in charge of the temple of morality, and ... moral reasoning is really just a servant masquerading as a high priest.”

The question then becomes: What shapes moral emotions in the first place? The answer has long been evolution, but in recent years there’s an increasing appreciation that evolution isn’t just about competition. It’s also about cooperation within groups. Like bees, humans have long lived or died based on their ability to divide labor, help each other and stand together in the face of common threats. Many of our moral emotions and intuitions reflect that history. We don’t just care about our individual rights, or even the rights of other individuals. We also care about loyalty, respect, traditions, religions. We are all the descendents of successful cooperators.

The first nice thing about this evolutionary approach to morality is that it emphasizes the social nature of moral intuition. People are not discrete units coolly formulating moral arguments. They link themselves together into communities and networks of mutual influence.

The second nice thing is that it entails a warmer view of human nature. Evolution is always about competition, but for humans, as Darwin speculated, competition among groups has turned us into pretty cooperative, empathetic and altruistic creatures — at least within our families, groups and sometimes nations.

The third nice thing is that it explains the haphazard way most of us lead our lives without destroying dignity and choice. Moral intuitions have primacy, Haidt argues, but they are not dictators. There are times, often the most important moments in our lives, when in fact we do use reason to override moral intuitions, and often those reasons — along with new intuitions — come from our friends.

The rise and now dominance of this emotional approach to morality is an epochal change. It challenges all sorts of traditions. It challenges the bookish way philosophy is conceived by most people. It challenges the Talmudic tradition, with its hyper-rational scrutiny of texts. It challenges the new atheists, who see themselves involved in a war of reason against faith and who have an unwarranted faith in the power of pure reason and in the purity of their own reasoning.

Finally, it should also challenge the very scientists who study morality. They’re good at explaining how people make judgments about harm and fairness, but they still struggle to explain the feelings of awe, transcendence, patriotism, joy and self-sacrifice, which are not ancillary to most people’s moral experiences, but central. The evolutionary approach also leads many scientists to neglect the concept of individual responsibility and makes it hard for them to appreciate that most people struggle toward goodness, not as a means, but as an end in itself.

While I'm no philosopher (and neither is Brooks), I like some of the points he makes here. I think it bears more consideration.

Natural as a tree growing in sunlight

From this website:

As natural as a tree growing in sunlight, creativity permeates our lives and the world in which we live. We cut ourselves off from its constant ebb and flow as we entrain to the rhythm of day to day affairs.

Occasionally, everything falls effortlessly into place; our thoughts, our emotions, our bodies move in sync, as if guided by some force beyond ourselves. We move to a different rhythm, the rhythm of the cosmos.

In those moments of holism, we transcend skill and create things greater than ourselves. We create as if to meet global needs, as if in collective awareness.

Often, creating is left to the "talented few," who we believe, are gifted.

In this time of change, we must reach within, find courage, and go beyond ourselves to the still point of a turning world. In that point of tension is born inspiration and every new idea.

In that still point, we entrain with the universe and break free of the bonds that pattern our lives. In the still point, we heal and recreate ourselves.

--Carlisle Bergquist, Ph.D

Growing old

I have a good friend whose father is 102 years old. I had dinner with him Saturday night. He is still mobile, able to get around with a walker and he has more moments of lucidity than confusion.

But honestly, I hope I never grow that old. Why does God allow someone to grow this old, this feeble, this vulnerable?

If you believe that in all life there is purposefulness, that God has some intent for us, then what is the purpose of this old, old man slowly shuffling through every day? Is he teaching something to people around him? Does he have things yet to learn? Is he bearing witness to something yet unseen? All questions with no answers. Only God knows.

If it were my choice, I wouldn't ever grow that old.

Credulity

defining credulity: tendency to believe readily

I'm reading an article from Salon called "Manufacturing Belief." It opens this way:

In Lewis Carroll's "Through the Looking Glass," Alice tells the White Queen that she cannot believe in impossible things. But the Queen says Alice simply hasn't had enough practice. "When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." That human penchant for belief -- or perhaps gullibility -- is what inspired biologist Lewis Wolpert to write a book about the evolutionary origins of belief called "Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast."

As a spiritual person, is credulity an advantage .... or a disadvantage?