EssaysVolume11
The Collected Essays of
Richard A. Stanford
Volume 6
Essays on Theology and Religion
Richard A. Stanford
Furman University
Greenville, SC 29613
Copyright 2022 by Richard A. Stanford
CONTENTS
NOTE: You may click on the symbol <> at the end of any section to return to the CONTENTS.
Theological Implications of ...
1. Theism
2. Atheism
3. Metaphor and Myth
4. Anthropomorphism
5. Avatar
6. Afterlife
7. Heaven and Hell
8. Where is God?
9. Simulation
10. Playing Dice With the Universe
11. God's Operating System
12. Worshiping Christ, Following Jesus
13. Altruism and Greed
14. Name Changes
15. Orthodoxy and Heresy
16. Rewriting the Jesus Story
17. Rewriting My Story
18. Theocracy vs. Democracy
19. Theology in the Postmodern Cultural Epoch
20. A New Theology for the Postmodern Era
21. A New Cultural Epoch?
22. Divine Autocracy
23. Mystery in Religion and Science
24. Post-Christian
25. The Sanctity of Democracy
26. Nation States and Nations of People
27. Deity and the Universe
28. Pantheism Issues
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<This Computer Essays>
1. Theism
God is believed to intervene in the physical aspects of the universe by exercising control, exerting influence, predestining events, or performing miracles.
A dictionary definition of intervention: a situation in which someone becomes involved in a particular issue, problem, etc., in order to influence what happens. (http://www.macmillandictionary.com/us/dictionary/american/intervention) In divine intervention, the “someone” in this definition is none other than God.
Marcus Borg characterizes the concept of an interventionist divine entity as “supernatural theism.” (The God We Never Knew: Beyond Dogmatic Religion to a More Authentic Contemporary Faith, HarperCollins, 1998) He says that the concept of an interventionist divine entity, supernatural theism, is only a small step from "deism."
Deism is characterized by belief in a deity that created the universe and established its physical laws, but then left it to "run" without further intervention. Deist ideas were popular during the Enlightenment when scientists realized that Newton's laws of motion, including the law of universal gravitation, could explain the behavior of the solar system. Borg says that in both supernatural theism and deism, the deity is "out there" (not here) and largely uninvolved with the creation.
Borg advocates “panentheism,” an experiential concept of deity in which the deity is understood to be always present "in the here and now," is continually engaged with the creation, and is readily accessible to the inhabitants of the creation.
So here are forms of theistic belief identified by Borg:
a. atheism,
the non-belief in deity and any role for deity in the universe.
b. theism,
belief in the existence of a deity.
c. deism,
belief in a deity that created the universe and established its physical laws,
but then left it to "run" without further intervention.
d. supernatural
theism, belief in a divine entity who occasionally intervenes in the
universe.
e. pantheism,
belief that the deity is the universe, or that the universe is a manifestation
of the deity.
f. panentheism,
the belief or doctrine that God is greater than the universe and includes and
interpenetrates it.
These concepts of deity could be arrayed along a continuum from Borg's concept of panentheism (continual engagement) at one extreme, deism (no involvement after the creation) at the other extreme, and supernatural theism (occasional intervention) at various points between the extremes depending on how often the deity is perceived to intervene in the creation. Beyond the deism end of the continuum would be atheism, i.e., the non-belief in deity and any role for deity in the universe. Beyond the panentheism end would be pantheism, i.e., that the universe is a manifestation of the deity.
These ideas beg some questions:
1. If more widely accepted, could Borg's concept
of panentheism counter what appears to be a latter-day drift toward the deism
end of the continuum?
2. Does the idea of an ever-present and continually
engaged deity hint at the Calvinist notion of predestination by deity of all
cosmic and human events?
3. Is the concept of an ever-present and continually
engaged deity compatible with the notion that deity accords free will to
humans?
4. Does God
work miracles for people who survive devastating tornadoes or hurricanes or
pandemics? How about those who do not survive?
5. Does God
roll dice with the universe? (Albert Einstein said that he doesn’t. Niels Bohr
suggested that he might.) Does God manipulate the coin toss at the start a
football game?
6. Does God
choose a particular team to win a football game or a person to win an Olympic
event or a candidate to win a presidential election?
7. Does God choose some people to be cured of a serious disease? How about those who don’t survive?
A "normal distribution" of something across a
population could be illustrated like this:
This is an illustration of a "bell curve" fitted to a normal distribution:
Here is the statistical interpretation of a normal
distribution bell curve:
If a population of supernatural theistic believers exhibits a typical "normal distribution," it can be represented as a symmetric bell-shaped curve centered on the population mean.
But if a larger segment of the population believes that
God is more active in the universe and performs miracles more often, the mean
will be lower and the bell curve will be skewed to the left.
Or if a larger segment of the population believes that God rarely performs miracles, the mean will be higher and the bell curve skewed to the right.
What would the supernatural theism bell curve look like if a society were populated
8.
...only by deists?
9.
...only by atheists?
10. ...only by panentheists?
12. Where
along the theism continuum is our society today?
13. And
where along the theism continuum is your own concept of God?
g. intimate
theism, belief in a “personal god”
who can be related to as a person instead of as an impersonal force, who is
ever-present in the heart and mind of the believer, whose intimate presence is
a source of comfort and strength to the believer, who is always accessible to
the believer by way of prayer, who is receptive to the believer’s petitions,
and who responds to the believer's petitions.
h. avatar
theism: In her book A History
of God, Karen Armstrong suggests that when humans impute human
characteristics to a divine entity, they create avatars of the divine entity
that they may worship and to which they may pray. (Grammercy Books, 1993.) When
worshiped, avatars of the divine entity in effect are idols. In their inability
to grasp the ultimate nature of a divine entity, most humans worship
anthropomorphized avatars of a divine entity that they then may refer to as
"God." Rather than bronze or wooden statues, anthropomorphized
concepts of a god are the idols of the twenty-first century. Since each human's
god avatar is a unique collection of anthropomorphized characteristics, there
may be as many unique avatars of divine entities as there are humans, but there
may be shared characteristics among the avatars. Humans organize themselves into
religions and denominations based upon the shared avatar characteristics.
j. collective
consciousness theism holds that God is an idea, a figment of the human imagination that has
been widely believed, desired, needed, and sought by humans through the ages.
The idea that a deity exists, if widely believed, worshiped, and prayed to, can
exert powerful effects upon human psyche and behavior. Communal worship
experiences may serve to instill and reinforce the ideology of the shared
consciousness. Humans sharing in a collective consciousness of an imagined
divine entity may feel directed or guided to be concerned about the welfare of
others sharing the collective consciousness. A collective consciousness of an
imagined divine entity implies that the divine entity resides in the minds of
those sharing in the consciousness. An imagined divine entity may seem to be
real to those who share in the collective consciousness, and may even appear
"to act" through those sharing in the collective consciousness.
k. coextensive
theism, belief that humans have
converged with deity by virtue of their extreme intimacy, and acquisition by
humans (or provision by the deity) of such extensive knowledge of the universe
that humans can exercise powers which in previous ages might have been
considered acts of divine intervention (i.e., miracles).
m. humanist
theism: Youval Harari, in this
book Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (HarperCollins, 2016, p.
221), dismisses the concept of God and the religions that worship a god. In
Harari's view, beginning in the early eighteenth century "humanism"
emerged as an effective successor religion to the various forms of theism. The
humanist religion worships humanity and expects humanity to play the part that
God played in Christianity and Islam, and that the laws of nature played in
Buddhism and Taoism. The central religious revolution of modernism was not
losing faith in God; it was gaining faith in humanity.
n. science
as religion: In his novel Origin
(Transworld Publishers, 2017), Dan Brown’s scientist protagonist foresees a
future without religions, i.e., when science has displaced theistic religions
to become the religion. "What happens next will depend on peoples' ability
to shed old beliefs and accept new paradigms,” Winston [the AI supercomputer]
replied. “Edmond [the scientist that created Winston] confided to me some time
ago that his dream, ironically, was not to destroy religion … but rather to
create a new religion — a universal belief that united people rather than
dividing them. He thought if he could convince people to revere the natural
universe and the laws of physics that created us, then every culture would
celebrate the same Creation story rather than go to war over which of their
antique myths was most accurate." (Chapter 98).
“Yes, which is why Edmond
hoped science could one day unify us,” Langdon [professor specializing in
symbolism] said. “In his own words: ‘If we all worshipped gravity, there would
be no disagreements over which way it pulled.’" (Chapter 102)
These theistic
concepts beg yet more questions:
14. Is the
experience of deity personal and intimate for you, or is it impersonal, remote,
and mysterious? Is either experience of deity good or bad?
15. Do you
worship God or your own avatar of God? So, what if you do?
16. Do you
think that God may be only a figment of the collective human imagination? What
follows if this is true?
17. Is it
possible for humans themselves to become divine, i.e., by converging with
deity? What or who would divine humans worship?
18. Might
science replace theistic
religions? How would science be revered? ...worshiped? How would scientists be
regarded?
19. Can you
envision a post-theistic world, one in which humans no longer worship gods or a
god? What might be the social, ethical, psychological implications?
20. Will
humans always need to worship something beyond themselves, be it material
(statues, icons, money, things), avatar, or divine?
Pre-scientific humans needed explanations and
attributions of natural phenomena that they did not understand. The deity
concepts of pre-scientific peoples thus might be closer to the panentheistic
end of a theistic continuum. As a society becomes more scientifically
knowledgeable and sophisticated, the deity concepts of members might progress
through the realm of supernatural theism toward the deism end of the continuum,
or even beyond into the realm of atheism. This will cause society’s theistic
bell curve to tend to skew to the right.
A dictionary definition of theism is belief in the existence of a god or gods. A theist is one who believes in the existence of a god or gods. The negative of the term, atheism, means disbelief in a supreme being or beings. An atheist is one who denies the existence of a supreme being. The term "atheism" derives from the Greek word atheos meaning "without god(s)." The earliest instances of people publicly identifying themselves as atheists probably date from the eighteenth-century Age of Enlightenment. An "agnostic" is one who simply cannot discern whether a deity exists.
The adjectives "universal" and "selective" may be used to qualify these terms. Although the term "universal theism" may lack meaning, the term "selective theism" can refer to belief in a specific god, e.g., the monotheistic God of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity (the three Abrahamic religions).
"Universal atheism" is the denial of the existence of any supreme being. "Selective atheism" is disbelief in a specific conception of a supreme being. Karen Armstrong, in her book The Case for God (Alfred A. Knopf, 2009), suggests that even the most ardent self-identified and implicitly universal atheists usually are railing against some particular conception of God, often a simplistic notion of deity as commonly depicted by televangelists. Most theists in effect are selective atheists with respect to other conceptions of God (anthropomorphized avatars) that diverge too widely from their own conceptions of God.
British comedian Ricky Gervais, a self-professed atheist, points out that selective monotheism is only one off from universal atheism:
Since the beginning of recorded history, which is defined by the invention of writing by the Sumerians around 6,000 years ago, historians have cataloged over 3700 supernatural beings, of which 2870 can be considered deities. So next time someone tells me they believe in God, I’ll say "Oh which one? Zeus? Hades? Jupiter? Mars? Odin? Thor? Krishna? Vishnu? Ra?..." If they say "Just God. I only believe in the one God," I’ll point out that they are nearly as atheistic as me. I don’t believe in 2,870 gods, and they don’t believe in 2,869. (Ricky Gervais, "Why I am an Atheist," The Wall Street Journal, blogs, https://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2010/12/19/a-holiday-message-from-ricky-gervais-why-im-an-atheist/)
Selective atheism has a long and honorable history. The Hebrew slaves in Egypt were selective atheists with respect to the gods worshiped by their Egyptian masters. Once the Children of Israel reached the "Promised Land," they were required by Yahweh to be atheistic with respect to Baal and other gods of the local tribal peoples. First-century Christians were regarded as atheists with respect to the orthodox Judaism of the day. The apostle Paul was atheistic with respect to local gods in both Athens and Rome.These ideas suggest a practical distinction between theology and mythology. My theology is what I believe to be the nature of the divine entity that I may worship. Mythology to me is what anyone else believes about deity if the belief differs significantly from what I believe. Most people today (Christian or otherwise) regard the ancient Egyptian, Greek, and Roman pantheons as populated by mythological deities. Our descendants some generations on may look back on what we believed and wonder at our "Christian mythology."
In this sense, then, most of us are selectively atheistic, both with respect to mythological deities and with respect to any currently held concepts of deity that are significantly different from our own. A Muslim may regard me as an atheist with respect to the Islamic concept of Allah. I may also be selectively atheistic with respect to some of the god concepts held by Muslims, Jews, Catholics, other Protestants, and even other Baptists.
Some twenty-first century people proclaim themselves to be universal atheists. My guess is that many are private theists who genuinely seek what is called “oneness with deity” through personal meditation, but who may not want to associate themselves with any organized religion or denomination.
The Cambridge Dictionary describes metaphor as "an expression, often found in literature, that describes a person or object by referring to something that is considered to have similar characteristics to that person or object" (https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/metaphor).
In his Church Chat devotion on Sunday, June 21, 2020, Jim Dant referred to the Trinity and Atonement doctrines as metaphors for understanding the natures of God and Jesus.
Bart Ehrman argues that soon after his death, Jesus was no longer present and his body was missing, so his followers jumped to the conclusion that he was exalted by God to divine status (How Jesus Became God, HarperCollins, 2014). The resurrection narrative thus was born out of ignorance and uncertainty concerning the absence of Jesus' body after the crucifixion.
Although neither can be verified as historically and literally true, the virgin birth and resurrection narratives are metaphors for the divinity of Jesus.
Myth as Ideology
Perhaps the most common perception of "myth" today is that of a story about an imaginary character that may have derived from some ancient context, but that no one expects actually to be true—a "fairy tale" character. A more sophisticated concept of myth, and one that often is found in religion and sociological discussions, is that of an ethos story which is retold through the generations and conveys the fundamental nature of a society and the relationships among its members. But the two concepts may merge, for example in Aesop's Fables and Grimm's Fairy Tales in which the stories employ mythical characters to relate moralisms.
The term "ethos myth" may be understood as the underlying ideology that governs the way in which society members relate to one-another. In Western cultures the ethos story myths or underlying ideologies have included individualism, democracy, capitalism, the free market, and Christianity. But of course, the ethos stories gradually change with their retellings as great social transformations ensue. Lately in American culture, the ideology of democracy has been yielding to "progressivism," individualism is being supplanted by "communitarianism," capitalism is being threatened by "statism" (a veiled term for fascism), and the free market myth is gradually succumbing to regulatory and authoritarian control. What has happened to the ethos myths of Christianity?
Dictionary definitions of myth include (1) "a person or thing having only an imaginary or unverifiable existence," (2) "an unfounded or false notion," and (3) "a usually traditional story of ostensibly historical events that serves to unfold part of the world view of a people or explain a practice, belief, or natural phenomenon" (Miriam-Webster Dictionary, http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/myth). The most fundamental question about Jesus is whether he existed at all, or was his story only a Jewish version of legends transliterated from various ancient cultures (e.g., the Egyptian goddess Isis and her son Horus)? This may suggest that Jesus is an example of definition (1).
Most of what is "known" about Jesus is found in the New Testament Gospels and in the writings of the Apostle Paul. A startling fact is that corroborating references to Jesus are virtually absent from the records and writings of non-biblical authors of the first century, C.E. With so little corroborating commentary, the Jesus story might comply with definition (2).
Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers, in their 1988 book The Power of Myth, note that myths are stories told in all societies out of their ethos, and that all myths are essentially the same at the core, but differ only in details specific to their respective societies (Doubleday, 1988, p. 14). Moyers says that "Myths are stories of our search through the ages for truth, for meaning, for significance. .... We need for life to signify, to touch the eternal, to understand the mysterious, and to find out who we are." Campbell says that "What the myths are for is to bring us into a level of consciousness that is spiritual." On this concept of myth, the Jesus story fits with definition (3).
History, Myth, and Theology
Robert Price maintains that the Jesus story began as a myth that was historicized (The Christ-Myth Theory and Its Problems, American Atheist Press, 2012). Michael Baigent argues that early Christian church leaders mythologized the Jesus narratives, with the effects both of creating an object of faith and of establishing the locus and line of authority over the emerging Christian church (The Jesus Papers, HarperSanFrancisco, 2006). Taken together, these two views imply the historization of a myth followed by the mythologization of the history, i.e., myth to history to myth.
The idea that Jesus' crucifixion, death, and resurrection was a divine plan to absolve humanity of sin was an element of the early Christian church's rationalization of Jesus' death and mythologization of the Jesus story. The myths surrounding the Jesus story eventually became theologized, i.e., accepted as religious orthodoxy. By the fourth century of the Common Era, Paul's Christ of faith bore little resemblance either to the Jesus of the Gospels or to the ancient myths that preceded the Jesus narratives. We can add another step in the progression outlined in the previous paragraph: myth to history to myth to orthodoxy.
The Christian faith and doctrine based upon them are an ethos myth story that according to Bill Moyers serves to "bring us into a level of consciousness that is spiritual." As noted by Karen Armstrong in her book The Case for God, myths are means for conveying essential truths even if they are not factual (Alfred A. Knopf, 2009). They have been important vehicles through the ages in helping humans to discern the meanings of what is transpiring in their lives. The Jesus birth, death, and resurrection stories may be theologized myths, but Jesus' moral philosophy is compelling and may be revered as an authentic code for ethical social behavior (love one's neighbor…, do unto others…, care for the poor).
The Trinity and Atonement Metaphors
By the fourth century of the Common Era, Jesus' references to a holy spirit presence had become personified into a divine entity on par with God and Jesus. The doctrine of the Trinity emerged as a compromise among the 318 bishops at the Council of Nicaea in 325 A.D. The compromise that they reached in the Nicene Creed attempted to incorporate divergent views of the nature of Jesus into a deity figure that would include all things divine to the bishops attending the Nicaea council.
The emergence of the Atonement doctrine can be seen in two books by Jack Miles. In his first book, God: A Biography, Miles examines the "person" of God from the literary perspective of character development (Alfred A. Knopf, 1995). Using the chronological book order of the Hebrew Tanakh (rather than the non-chronological order of the Christian "Old Testament"), Miles reveals a sequence in the transition of God's character from initial almighty creator of the world through stages of naivete of the human creation, intimate conversationalist, wrathful evictor from the garden, destroyer of wicked humanity, exile liberator, law dictator, disobedience punisher, mighty warrior who destroys his people's enemies and perpetrates genocide, and capricious manipulator of a human subject. After God speaks to Job, we see a gradual waning of God's direct involvement in the world as God no longer speaks with humans but communicates to them only through "prophets." Toward the end of the Tanakh we see a distant and receding "Ancient of Days" figure who doesn't engage with humanity for four hundred years.
In a sequel, Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God, Miles, harking back to the story line in his first book, perceives God to have brooded over the "mistake" of eliminating eternal life for all humans after Adam and Eve sinned by eating the prohibited fruit in the Garden of Eden (Alfred A. Knopf, 2001). But in the Christian myth story, God devised a means of correcting this mistake by coming to earth in the guise of a human named Yeshua (Jesus). In this ethos myth, the literary character of Jesus is God Incarnate, i.e., God in the flesh. By allowing God's self as Jesus to be "killed" by humans as a blood sacrifice to God's self as God in order to atone for the sinfulness of all humanity, God created a means by which humans again could achieve eternal life. In the so-called Atonement Doctrine, humans who believe that Jesus is God’s own Son, who believe that Jesus died for their sins, and who confess and repent of their sins can enjoy heavenly eternal life beyond earthly mortal life. From the literary perspective of character development, Jesus as God Incarnate is a divine being who preexisted time, who lived as a human, died, and rose from the dead, and who continues to live in judgment of the world.
4. Anthropomorphization
God is thought to be ineffable, i.e., incapable
of being described with mere human language. Ancient writers often subjected
the idea of god to anthropomorphization, i.e., imputation of human
characteristics. Old Testament writers certainly did this, and it is not
uncommon today for humans to anthropomorphize human characteristics to a
perceived divine entity. Most assumptions about the nature of a god are
anthropomorphisms. Reza Aslan, in his book God: A Human History, makes
this case using the term “humanize” rather than “anthropomorphize”:
We are the lense through which we understand the universe and
everything in it. We apply our personal experience to all that we encounter,
whether human or not. In doing so, we not only humanize the world; we humanize the
gods we think created it. (Reza Aslan, God: A Human History, Random
House, 2017, Kindle e-book location 843)
Old Testament writers characterized their god as lonely and in need of company, needy of human adoration and worship, and surprised by human infidelity when accorded free will. Jim Vincent, in his book Should the Church Abandon the Bible?, describes the Old Testament perception of God:
The God of the Old Testament is a primitive, supernatural,
anthropomorphic being who experiences a wide range of human emotions: love,
jealousy, vindictiveness, anger, pride; a God who is often ruthless and
unforgiving, savage, petty, irrational and vainglorious; in effect, a magnified
image of the sort of despotic tyrant that would have been familiar to many in ancient
times, either by repute or from bitter experience. (aSys Publishing, 2018,
Kindle e-book location 709)
These characterizations are human anthropomorphisms that are unseemly of a presumed divine creator of the universe. In his final chapter, Vincent says,
The primitive, anthropomorphic and supernatural God of the Bible is, I
believe, a stumbling block for many. The abandonment of such an image of God
would allow the church to develop an adult view of the divine. (Kindle e-book
location 4808)
Anthropomorphization has a long history, and not just with respect to divine entities. Human characteristics were imputed to animals in Aesop's Fables and Grimm's Fairy Tales. Modern humans may be influenced to regard anthropomorphization of a god as appropriate since Disney, Warner Brothers, Hannah-Barbera, and other animation studios regularly anthropomorphized their animal characters.
Although there is a natural tendency to humanize (i.e., to anthropomorphize) God, Aslan professes in his concluding chapter that
For me, and for countless others, ‘The One’ is what I call God. But
the God I believe in is not a personalized God. It is a dehumanized God: a God
with no material form; a god who is pure existence, without name, essence, or
personality. (Kindle e-book location 4679)
This may indeed be the true nature of God, but anthropomorphization may be the only way that many can attempt to gain even a partial understanding of the divine entity that they worship. Even so, the anthropomorphic characteristics ascribed to God are prime candidates to be subjected to the marginal principle in applying Ockham’s razor to the margins of a Christianity for the Postmodern era.
In her book A History of God (Grammercy Books, 1993), Karen Armstrong suggests that when humans impute human characteristics to a divine entity, they create avatars of the divine entity that they may worship and to which they may pray. When worshiped, avatars of the divine entity in effect are idols. In their inability to grasp the ultimate nature of a divine entity, most pre-Postmodern humans worship anthropomorphized avatars of a divine entity that they then may refer to as "God." Rather than bronze or wooden statues, anthropomorphized concepts of a god are the idols of the twenty-first century.
Since each human's god avatar is a unique collection of anthropomorphized characteristics, there may be as many unique avatars of divine entities as there are humans, but there may be shared characteristics among the avatars. Humans organize themselves into religions and denominations based upon the shared avatar characteristics.
In her book A History of God, Karen Armstrong suggests that when humans impute human characteristics to a divine entity, they create avatars of the divine entity that they may worship and to which they may pray. (Grammercy Books, 1993) When worshiped, avatars of the divine entity become idols. In their inability to grasp the ultimate nature of a divine entity, most humans worship anthropomorphized avatars of a divine entity that they then may refer to as "God." Rather than bronze or wooden statues, anthropomorphized concepts of a god are the idols of the twenty-first century.
Since each human's god avatar is a unique collection of anthropomorphized characteristics, there may be as many unique avatars of divine entities as there are humans, but there may be shared characteristics among the avatars. Humans organize themselves into religions and denominations based upon the shared avatar characteristics.
An avatar of a god can mean whatever the avatar creator needs for the avatar to mean. Edgar McKnight, in his book Jesus Christ Today, asserts that the reader of scripture can be an active participant in the interpretation of the meaning of scriptural texts. (Mercer University Press, 2009) McKnight concludes that Jesus can mean whatever the reader of scripture needs for him to mean, and by extension (mine, not McKnight's) this must also apply to god avatars.
Each of our personal god avatars may be a collection of wishful thinkings about what we would like for our god to be or to do for us. I can take my god to be my buddy, my friend, my co-pilot, my personal god, the lord of my life. I can ask my god to feed me, clothe me, shield me from harm, bless me ("give me a Mercedes Benz"), give me success in all of my endeavors, and direct my every step.
But is human life really like this? As an economist, I recognize that one's fortunes in life are pretty much what one makes of them, given inherited characteristics and wealth, social situation of childhood, educational experiences and opportunities, and plain good or bad luck.
These are some of the characteristics of the god avatar that I have envisioned:
I have thought God to be "omni-," e.g., omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent. While these properties may be implied in some scriptural passages (particularly in certain Psalms), these terms are not explicit in any biblical passages. Jim Dant reminds us that these terms are "hardly descriptive of the God we find in scripture.... They probably describe the kind of God we think we want, but not necessarily the God we've actually got." (Jim Dant, Finding your Voice: How to Speak Your Heart's True Faith, Faithlab, 2013, Kindle e-book location 783)
Concerning omnipresent, Marcus Borg argues in The God We Never Knew that God is not a supernatural being apart from the universe, but indeed is everywhere, including "right here," what he calls a panentheistic view. (The God We Never Knew: Beyond Dogmatic Religion to a More Authentic Contemporary Faith, HarperCollins, 1998) This accords with John Dominic Crossan's argument that Jesus' ministry taught that the Kingdom of God is near ("in the here and now") rather than something that will happen in the future. (The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant, HarperCollins, 1992)
I perceive God to be omnibenevolent in the sense that God's grace and mercy may extend to all humans without limit. "Fair" and "unfair," "deserving" and "undeserving," are purely human judgments that are trumped by God's grace and mercy.
God imbues humans with innate empathy with other humans, but God does not prevent failure of human empathy when they perpetrate harm, physical or emotional, upon other humans.
"Good" and "bad" human behaviors are human specifications that are culturally-determined and time-bound. Although some atheists have argued that God is not good, most theists (believers) understand God to be good without qualification.
God neither rewards good human behavior nor punishes bad or evil human behavior during human material life. Any rewards or punishments are levied by God upon human souls beyond the ends of the humans' material lives.
Evil as well as goodness is inherent in human nature, i.e., there is no diabolical entity external to humans or on a par with the divine entity. We are our own "devils." Pogo: "We have met the enemy and he is us."
God is "no respecter of persons" (Acts 10:34). Good and bad things happen to humans, irrespective of whether they are good or bad during their material lives. God is not biased in favor of or prejudiced against any humans during their material lives. God does not "bless" or "damn" some humans to the exclusion of other humans. Nor does God choose ("elect") some human souls to an afterlife or reward or punish them during their material lives. Humans may choose to worship and petition God for admission to a rewarding afterlife.
God is thought to "love" all beings of the universe (an obvious anthropomorphism), including both sub-human and human beings, and is assumed by believers to hope for their reciprocal love, honor, reverence, and respect.
God may have the ability to "appear" to humans in any guise chosen by God, including those specific to religions other than Judaism and Christianity.
It cannot be ruled out that God may have appeared to first-century Palestinian Jews in the guise of a human with the Hebrew name Yeshuah. God may commission selected humans ("prophets") during their material lives to convey messages to humans from the divine.
In addition to life itself, humans possess intellect to varying degrees. Life comes to an end when a human dies, at which time it may be presumed that his or her intellect also expires.
It cannot be ruled out that humans may be imbued by a divine entity with souls that exist apart from physical life and intellect. Souls are thought to be non-material essences of being that are coexistent with human physical life, may have preexisted human life, and may continue to exist beyond the end of human life, i.e., in an "afterlife." It is not clear whether intellect might survive along with the soul to an afterlife.
Ancient writings in nearly all cultural traditions make some reference to a "soul" concept. Some religions, e.g., Jainism and Hinduism, teach that all biological organisms have souls. Some religious traditions even suggest that non-biological entities (such as rivers and mountains) have souls. Medieval Christian theologian Thomas Aquinas attributed soul to all organisms but argued that only human souls are immortal. ("Soul," Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soul)
It cannot be known whether souls are sentient (i.e., possess the ability to feel, perceive, or experience subjectively) or have any ability to act in either the physical world or in an afterlife once human physical life comes to an end. Whether humans indeed have souls with any of these properties can be known with certainty only when humans depart their physical lives, only by the departing humans, and only if they do survive to an afterlife.
If humans do have souls that survive their physical lives, I would be surprised to learn that the souls have physical mass. One of Dan Brown's characters in his novel The Lost Symbol (Random House, 2009, pp. 391-395) is depicted as attempting to prove the existence of a soul by weighing the physical mass of a dying colleague in a sealed compartment immediately before and after death. A lesser weight after death would imply the existence of a soul that departs the physical body at death. To my knowledge, this fictional process has not yet been accomplished, or even attempted. Without physical mass, their physical locations cannot be ascertained, i.e., the locus of an afterlife ("heaven" or "hell") is unspecifiable and unknowable to humans during their physical lives.
Many cultural traditions include the concept of "ghosts" or "spirits" that survive physical life in some sense, and that may present to still living beings some ephemeral representation of the souls of the departed. Ghosts are presumed by some to be able to act in the physical world as well as in the spirit world. C. S. Lewis in his book The Great Divorce describes a dream in which angels entreat the ghosts of recently deceased humans to move toward and accept an angelic heavenly afterlife. (Macmillan Publishing Company, 1947) Lewis' ghosts seem to be both sentient and able to act, at least in the spirit world.
If humans do not have souls, then this can never be known with certainty by living humans. Finding no physical evidence of the existence of souls, some scientists have concluded that there is no afterlife, i.e., "when you're dead, you're dead," full stop. The message of a recent beer commercial is predicated upon this belief: "You only go around once, so get all the gusto you can!" A credit card solicitation reads, “Life is such a short little visit. We get one chance to do it well. Which is why everything that we do should be a once-in-a-lifetime experience.” As argued by John Dominic Crossan in The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant, Jesus taught that "The Kingdom of God is near" or "at hand," with implication that it pertains to this life, whether or not souls or an afterlife exist. (HarperCollins, 1992)
But there are other possible dimensions of afterlife. Until scientists discover how to extend life indefinitely, it is inevitable that human physical life must end. However, each of us lives on in the DNA that we confer upon our progeny. We also continue to live in the memories of our families and those who have known us or have learned about us even if they have not known us. And we also may continue to live in the form of any artistic expression or printed legacy that we have left for subsequent generations to encounter. These other dimensions of afterlife may influence those who continue in physical life, but they cannot otherwise be sentient or have any ability to act.
The promise of an afterlife is a critical component of classical Christian theology, but it is a belief that some people today may find difficult to accept. Many are convinced that “this life” is all that there is, and they intend to live it to the fullest. This view accords with Jesus’ teaching that the “Kingdom of God is at hand,” whether or not an afterlife exists.
Here are Ehrman's main "Afterword" points:
* Jesus preached that "the Kingdom of Heaven is near" and suggested that the righteous may enjoy an afterlife in a heavenly paradise.
* Jesus did not contend that admission to heaven depended on believing in him or that he "died for our sins." Admission would be based on one's righteousness and good deeds during life.
* Jesus taught that at the end of life the wicked would be exterminated. The body may corrupt (degrade to dust) in a grave (or in "Sheol"), but Jesus did not mention that the soul would suffer through eternity in a hell. The wicked will simply cease to exist when they die.
* The concepts of heaven and hell widely held by twenty-first century Christians emerged in the centuries after Jesus lived, and largely at the hands of the Apostle Paul.
* Twenty-first century concepts of heaven and hell are predicated on the concept of theodicy, i.e., the problem of evil and the fairness or justice of how the righteous and wicked are treated at the ends of their lives or at the end of time.
* Ehrman cannot imagine that a good and loving creator deity could also be a sadist bent on punishing the wicked through eternity.
* The concept of heaven is less irrational than is the concept of hell. Ehrman does not believe in either heaven or hell but harbors hope that there might be a heavenly afterlife for the righteous.
* While one still lives, he/she should enjoy life as much as possible and help others to do so.
* Following the thought of Socrates as recorded by Plato, death should not be feared; in a modern analogy, it will be like "going under" when an anesthetic is administered prior to a surgery. We will no longer be concerned or anxious about anything; we will have no consciousness because we no longer exist.
* We were not anxious about not existing through the millennia before we were born, so why should we be anxious about no longer existing after we die?
So, what does this mean to me personally? I find meaningful and comforting most of what Ehrman says about death and afterlife. But I would add that the anxiety about death that many of us experience may be a FOMO phenomenon, i.e., "fear of missing out" on how our spouse and other loved ones will fare after we have departed, and particularly the accomplishments, joys, failures, and sufferings that our children and grandchildren (and possibly great grands) will experience.
- Will I die? Yes, everyone who ever has lived has died; it is inevitable. However, modern science offers hints that technology may advance to enable uploading one's being (intellect, soul, spirit) into a digital environment to be stored for eternity (or until electrical power fails). Whether a digital uploaded being might be conscious and sentient is unknown.
- Do I fear death? I try not to be fearful of death, but I must admit to FOMO, i.e., fear of missing out on the future life experiences of my loved ones. I have attempted to provide for my loved ones and prepare essential information for them after I depart.
- Am I anxious about the prospect of dying? Yes, in the sense that I don't expect ever to be ready to pass on, and in the uncertainty of when it will happen. My greatest anxiety is about the process of dying. I attended the long declines and suffering of both of my parents during their final years. It would be such a gift to go quietly in my sleep or suddenly without suffering a long decline. When my physical body deteriorates far enough that I am unaware or can no longer enjoy physical existence, my anxiety may evaporate and I may look forward to passing.
- Will I go to hell when I die? I doubt it because I subscribe to Jesus' teaching that the wicked will be exterminated, and to Socrates' teaching that I will no longer exist after death, and thus have no consciousness.
- Will I go to heaven when I die? I believe that the Kingdom of God (or Heaven) exists all around us in real time, e.g., as an "overlay" to physical life for those who become aware of it. We are already here in the Kingdom of God. We are living in the paradise of this earth although humans are despoiling it at a rapid clip. This life is all that there is, but I can indulge the hope that there may be a heavenly life in a paradise after physical death.
- Did my soul preexist my physical life; will it survive my physical life? I think that it is unlikely on both counts. I am unsure even of the existence of a "soul" apart from intellect.
- Do my ancestors inhabit a "spirit world" that can view and engage my physical life? I doubt it and have no experience of it.
- After I die will I become a spirit or ghost who can view and engage with my ancestors and my descendants? I think that this is a fantasy.
- Can my earthly existence have an effect on or influence future generations? I will live on in the DNA that I confer on my progeny. Any legacy writings that I leave may be encountered by my descendants and other people, and so may influence their understanding and thinking. However, I do not expect such matter to be sentient in the sense of observing, feeling, or otherwise engaging with people in the future.
Borg characterizes the concept of a divine entity that exists apart from his creation but intervenes in the creation as "supernatural theism." He says that supernatural theism is only a small step from "deism" that is characterized by belief in a deity that created the universe and established its physical laws, but then stepped away and left it to "run" without further intervention. In both concepts, the deity is "out there" (not here) and largely uninvolved with the creation. Here is Jim Vincent’s description of the "out there" deity:
The church’s prevailing image of God is of a supernatural being who is in some way ‘out there’; a God who is separate from ourselves and the universe, who looks on benignly—or otherwise—from a distant place called ‘heaven’ and, perhaps, sometimes tinkers with his (or her) creation. Such a notion of God is intellectually unacceptable today, although I suspect that many of us find it difficult to escape from such a concept and are perhaps reluctant to do so. (Jim Vincent, Should the Church Abandon the Bible?, aSys Publications, 2018, Kindle e-book location 4820)
Borg mentions the concept of "pantheism" in which God is perceived to be coincident with the universe, i.e., the universe is God (or God is the universe). In the concluding chapter of his book God: A Human History, Reza Aslan says that he arrived at pantheism through Sufism: "In its simplest form pantheism is the belief that God and the universe are one and the same—that nothing exists outside of God’s necessary existence." (Random House, 2017, Kindle e-book location 2360) This leads him to conclude that humans are inherently divine.
Borg advocates an experiential concept of deity in which the deity "interpenetrates" the universe and is understood to be always present "in the here and now," is continually engaged with the creation (i.e., the universe), and is readily accessible to the inhabitants of the creation. This concept of deity is called "panentheism."
Borg's ideas beg the question of whether it is only a matter of degree in the difference between the concept of a deity that is present only upon occasional interventions, and the concept of one that is continually engaged and ever present. Three concepts of deity could be arrayed along a continuum from deism (no involvement after the creation) at one extreme, Borg's concept of panentheism (continual engagement) at the other extreme, and supernatural theism (occasional intervention) at various points between the extremes depending on how often the deity is perceived to intervene in the creation. Beyond the deism end of a theistic continuum would be atheism, i.e., the non-belief in deity and any role for deity in the universe.
Yet another concept is that instead of being physically apart from or within the universe, God resides in the hearts and minds of humans who believe in him. The idea that God resides in the hearts and minds of humans, if widely believed, worshiped, and prayed to, can exert powerful effects upon human psyche and behavior.
Believers may relate to one another in a sort of collective or shared consciousness (like bees in a hive or ants in a colony, or like the "Borg" in the Star Trek TV series). Communal worship experiences may serve to instill and reinforce the shared consciousness. Humans sharing in a collective consciousness of a divine entity may feel directed or guided to be concerned about the welfare of others sharing the collective consciousness. Feelings of benevolence or malevolence may extend to humans outside of the collective consciousness, and they may result in acts of kindness or hostility toward others. Those sharing in the collective consciousness of a divine entity may feel a sense of evangelical urgency to proselytize others not yet so engaged to share in the collective consciousness.
The idea of a god may have served a useful purpose for pre-Modern and pre-scientific humans who needed explanations and attributions of natural phenomena that they did not understand. The deity concepts of pre-scientific peoples thus might be closer to the panentheistic end of a theistic continuum. As a society becomes more scientifically knowledgeable and sophisticated (and thus less in need of mystical explanations and ascriptions of natural phenomena), the deity concepts of members might tend toward the deism end of the continuum or beyond into the realm of atheism.
The idea of an ever-present and continually-engaged deity suggests the possibility of continual manipulation of the creation by deity (“God is in control!”), leaving little discretion to the inhabitants of the creation, and it may hint at the Calvinist concept of predestination by deity of all cosmic and human events. This begs the further question of whether the concept of an ever-present and continually-engaged deity is compatible with the notion that deity accords free will to humans.
Bostrom posited three future possibilities for humankind, (1) that the human species is likely to go extinct before reaching a "posthuman" stage; (2) that a surviving posthuman civilization is unlikely to run simulations of their evolutionary history; and (3) that "we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation." He assessed the probabilities of the first two at nearly zero, but the third to be highly likely.
Bostrom conjectured that future (post-postmodern) computing capacity will become great enough that posthumans can conduct a virtually unlimited number of simulations of environmental and life circumstances. These simulations may be sufficiently complex and refined that they cannot be distinguished from reality. And with enough computing power it may become possible to simulate human or posthuman participants that cannot be distinguished from real humans. The simulated humans and posthumans, called "sims," might even possess consciousness so that they are sentient and self-aware, but unaware that they are not real humans. (Does this sound like the "holodeck" on the Starship Enterprise in the Star Trek TV series?)
Who would be conducting those simulations? Bostrom suggests the possibility that at least a few advanced posthumans may, for whatever reasons, run simulations of the lives of their ancestors or similar beings. Unbeknownst to us today, we may be participants in such simulations that are being run by our advanced descendants.
When I taught economics courses for undergraduate students, I designed and wrote the code to implement a number of simulation models. In a macroeconomic model, groups of three or four students role-played making government expenditure, taxation, central bank, and international trade policy decisions for countries in pursuit of economic growth. In a microeconomic model, groups of students role-played in making management decisions for companies in competition with each other for profits and market shares. As the simulation designer and digital code writer, I was acting as if "god" in creating the simulation models, determining the rules of the games, and setting (and manipulating) the parameters.
With this experience as background, another possibility comes to mind in regard to Bostrom’s paper: the world that we live in today may be a simulation being conducted by a divine entity. In this perception, the divine entity programs the simulation (i.e., writes the digital code that creates the simulation environment and establishes the rules that govern it) and can change the parameters at will (i.e., intervene or "tinker" with it). The divine entity may run digital-code simulations in order to observe how humans behave and react to changing conditions, or possibly just for the divine entity's own amusement.
The simulations may be populated by both real humans and sims, but the simulation participants may be unable to distinguish either their own or any other simulation participant's existential status. The divine programmer may even choose to play a role as a participant in the simulations. A crucial question is whether in any such divine simulation, the participants, real or simulated, may have access to the divine code writer to petition for assistance or relief from simulation adversity.
From a simulation-modeling perspective, the initial chapters of Genesis, the first book in the Bible, appear to be pre-scientific efforts to describe the divine code-writing process that created the simulation environment. The Hebrew Tanakh (to Christians, the Old Testament) book of Job may have been a divine simulation in which the simulation operator interacts with a human simulation participant.
And in the Christian New Testament, could the life of Jesus have been a divine simulation experiment in which the divine code writer becomes a simulation participant? Perhaps we today are living in one of the divine entity's simulation environments. And what if all of us are digital sims rather than blood-and-bone humans? This of course begs the question of what constitutes reality in our postmodern world.
Even if real humans inevitably must die, could a sim survive to an "afterlife" in another divine simulation?
The anthropic principle is the contention that the properties of the known universe are "just right" to allow the initiation and support of life. This principle implies that the universe was carefully designed by a divine entity. However, some scientists hypothesize that the known universe may be one of an infinite number of universes with different properties and laws of physics, and that the known universe is one (perhaps among others) that happens to have just the right properties and laws of physics to enable the initiation and support of life.
If a divine entity did indeed establish the laws of physics that govern the known universe, the divine entity must have the power to intervene in the laws, i.e., to perform what may appear to humans to be miracles. The fact that human scientists have been able to identify the laws of physics of the known universe with high degree of confidence suggests that the divine entity rarely intervenes, at least in the physical aspects of the universe.
Some of the events of the modern world that are deemed to be miracles actually may be happenings for which there are very low, but still non-zero, probabilities of occurrence. Even events with very low probabilities of occurrence still happen. For example, if there is a one-in-a-million chance of an event occurring, somewhere in a million opportunities it will occur. When it does occur, those who witness it may be inclined to call it a "miracle" and attribute it to the "hand of God."
Such happenings may be non-events. For example, in 9,999 of 10,000 similar automobile accidents in the past the driver died, but in one particular similar instance a driver survives the accident. Although the result may have been purely a matter of probability (0.01 percent), some will be inclined to regard the survival of the driver as a miracle and look for God's intent in preserving the life of the driver.
A variation on this example provides another interesting puzzle. Suppose that in 9,999 of 10,000 similar automobile accidents the driver has survived, but in one particular instance a driver dies. Again, the event occurred as a matter of probability (also 0.01 percent), but friends and family of the driver, suffering acute emotional distress, may blame God or presume that God had some particular intent in taking their loved one from them prematurely. I am skeptical that such low-probability occurrences are revelations of God’s intent or power.
Given the range of possible outcomes of any event, humans tend to focus on the worst imaginable. As suggested in Blaise Paschal’s Pensées, numbers 82-84, anxiety seems to heighten when the imagination of the possible outcomes of an event overpowers the probabilities of their occurrence. For example, the probability of an automobile accident may be quite low, but an overdue arrival of a loved one may elevate the anxiety of those awaiting the arrival out of proportion to the probability of occurrence. The uncertainty of random events with possible negative outcomes may elicit more prayer than does anticipation of events with positive outcomes and higher probabilities of occurrence.
In 1927 Albert Einstein famously argued with Niels Bohr whether God "plays dice with the universe," i.e., whether the universe is deterministic as maintained by Einstein, or subject to randomness as asserted by Bohr. ("Bohr-Einstein Debates," Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohr%E2%80%93Einstein_debates) By "deterministic" Einstein meant that it should be possible to describe any aspect of the universe by an equation.
Astrophysicist Ethan Siegel explains that today’s knowledge of quantum mechanics renders Einstein’s conclusion false. (Ethan Siegel, "Proof Of 'God Playing Dice With The Universe' Found In The Sun's Interior," Forbes, September 15, 2017, https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2017/09/15/proof-of-god-playing-dice-with-the-universe-found-in-the-suns-interior/#11803cea3b03). Random and unpredicted events do occur in the universe, but with the accumulation of enough data about similar events, scientists can estimate probabilities of their occurrence. A question is whether random events occur in the universe independently of divine causation, or are they evidence of God playing dice with the universe?
Matthew 13:33: He told them another parable. “The kingdom of heaven is like leaven that a woman took and hid in three measures of flour, till it was all leavened.”
Matthew 20:1-16: “For the kingdom of heaven is like a master of a house who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard. And going out about the third hour he saw others standing idle in the marketplace, and to them he said, ‘You go into the vineyard too, and whatever is right I will give you.’ So they went. Going out again about the sixth hour and the ninth hour, he did the same. ... "
Matthew 22:1-14: And again Jesus spoke to them in parables, saying, “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a wedding feast for his son, and sent his servants to call those who were invited to the wedding feast, but they would not come. Again he sent other servants, saying, ‘Tell those who are invited, See, I have prepared my dinner, my oxen and my fat calves have been slaughtered, and everything is ready. Come to the wedding feast.’ But they paid no attention and went off, one to his farm, another to his business, ... "
Matthew 25:1-13: “Then the kingdom of heaven will be like ten virgins who took their lamps and went to meet the bridegroom. Five of them were foolish, and five were wise. For when the foolish took their lamps, they took no oil with them, but the wise took flasks of oil with their lamps. As the bridegroom was delayed, they all became drowsy and slept. ... "
Matthew 25:14-30: “For it will be like a man going on a journey, who called his servants and entrusted to them his property. To one he gave five talents, to another two, to another one, to each according to his ability. Then he went away. He who had received the five talents went at once and traded with them, and he made five talents more. So also he who had the two talents made two talents more. But he who had received the one talent went and dug in the ground and hid his master's money. ... "
Mark 4:30-33: And he said, “With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable shall we use for it? It is like a grain of mustard seed, which, when sown on the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth, yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes larger than all the garden plants and puts out large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.”
Luke 17:20: Being asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come, he answered them, “The kingdom of God is not coming with signs to be observed, ... "
Luke 21:27-31: And then they will see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory. Now when these things begin to take place, straighten up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.” And he told them a parable: “Look at the fig tree, and all the trees. As soon as they come out in leaf, you see for yourselves and know that the summer is already near. So also, when you see these things taking place, you know that the kingdom of God is near."
John 18:36: Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting, that I might not be delivered over to the Jews. But my kingdom is not from the world.”
Except for John 18:36, these passages suggest that the “Kingdom of Heaven” is coextensive with material earth. It may be envisioned as an "overlay" to it but only for those who know of it and seek it.
An analogy that may be helpful is to think of Earth as like a computer program running in the "foreground"; it is what we see and feel happening; it is our physical reality. Heaven is like a computer program running in "background," i.e., it is there and operating but functioning without visibility to the computer user; it is a divine "virtual reality." It is knowable to believers but unknown to those who are unaware of it and do not seek it.
To extend this analogy, the Kingdom of Heaven is not like just a computer program. It is more like a computer operating system (e.g., Windows, iOS, Linux) that was designed (created) by a grand, super-intellect programmer (does this sound Deistic? the "great clock maker"?). It is running all the time but in the background to human and cosmic physical realities. It is not seen, but it is always there, out of sight, but controlling and enabling activities and functions in the foreground, i.e., human physical life and cosmic events.
The OS enables access to the grand programmer by humans who can "log onto the system" via prayer. There is no required password or any other log-on credentials than human will and desire to access.
The original creation might be designated OS-G1 (the first version of God's operating system described in Genesis, Chapters 1-2). In this original version, there is no mention of death for the human inhabitants of earth, and we may presume that initially they enjoyed eternal life.
While the
OS operates in perpetuity, we might perceive that occasionally it is
modified (or upgraded) by the OS designer who makes changes to the way
that the OS operates. The first modification of the operating system, to version OS-G2, occurred in Genesis Chapter 3 when God evicted Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. The modification to the original OS lay in God's eliminating eternal life for his human creation by limiting their life spans and requiring toil to earn their subsistence (God's imposition of economic scarcity). The Great Flood described in Genesis 6-9 might be understood to be the second modification of the operating system, to version OS-G3.
In his first book, God: A Biography (Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), Jack Miles examines the "person" of God from the literary perspective of character development. Using the chronological book order of the Hebrew Tanakh (rather than the non-chronological order of the Christian "Old Testament"), Miles reveals a sequence in the transition of God's character from initial almighty creator of the universe through stages of naivete of his human creation, intimate conversationalist, wrathful evictor from the garden, destroyer of wicked humanity, exile liberator, law dictator, disobedience punisher, mighty warrior who destroys his people's enemies and perpetrates genocide, and capricious manipulator of a human subject. These character transitions might be taken as a cumulative upgrade to version OS-G4.
After God speaks to Job, Miles describes a gradual waning of God's direct involvement in the world as he no longer speaks with humans but communicates to them only through "prophets." Toward the end of the Tanakh we see a distant and receding "Ancient of Days" figure who doesn't engage with humanity for four hundred years. This is the modification to version OS-G5.
In a sequel, Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God (Alfred A. Knopf, 2001), Miles perceives God to have brooded over his "mistake" of eliminating eternal life for all humans after Adam and Eve sinned by eating the prohibited fruit in the Garden of Eden (OS-G2). But God devises a means of correcting this mistake by coming to earth in the guise of a human named Jesus. In this view, the literary character of Jesus is God Incarnate, i.e., God in the flesh. By allowing himself as Jesus to be "killed" by humans as a blood sacrifice to himself as God in order to atone for the sinfulness of all humanity, God created a means by which humans again could achieve eternal life.
This is the great upgrade to OS-G6. Humans who confess and repent of their sins and who believe that Jesus rose from the dead can enjoy heavenly eternal life beyond earthly mortal life. In this grand operating system, Jesus as God Incarnate is a divine being who pre-existed time, who lived as a human, died, and rose from the dead, and who continues to live in judgment of the world.
The final book in the New Testament, Revelation, anticipates the "End Times" for the world and a transition to a new Heaven and a new earth. When it occurs, this upgrade might be designated OS-GFinal.
Barrie Wilson, in his book How Jesus Became Christian (St. Martin's Press, 2008), notes that although the religion called "Christianity" derives from the Jewish figure of Jesus (the Greek version of the Hebrew name "Yeshuah" or "Joshua"), it does not even bear his name.
Wilson distinguishes between the "Jesus movement" and the "Christ movement," both of which emerged during the latter half of the first century, A.D. The Jesus movement focused on the teachings of Jesus that stressed service to the poor; it attempted to remain within Judaism by observing the requirements of the Hebrew Torah.
"Christos" is the Greek translation of the Hebrew word for "messiah" that means "the anointed one." "Christ" is the Anglicization of "Christos." It is a title, not a name (certainly not Jesus' surname). Several Hebrew kings were regarded as a messiah, i.e., one who is anointed by God. The title also was taken by some of the Roman emperors.
The Christ movement followed from a vision of Jesus as a mystical "Christ" figure experienced by a Jewish Pharisee named Saul during a trip to Damascus, and from subsequent revelations by the Christ to Paul (Saul renamed). Developing apart from Judaism, the Christ movement was based on "letters" that Paul wrote to congregations comprised of Jews and Gentiles ("God fearers") in the Jewish diaspora of Asia Minor.
Paul's letters make only passing references to the historical Jesus and his teachings, and many of the passages in Paul's letters to churches in Asia Minor argue against the teachings of the Jesus movement. The evolving Christ movement rejected the requisites of the Torah and stressed faith in Christ rather than good works as taught by Jesus and required by the Torah. In the aftermath of the crucifixion, adherents of the Jesus movement (a.k.a. "the Way") were persecuted by both orthodox Jews and Pagans.
With Paul's missionary travels and letters, the Christ movement effectively escaped Judaism and gradually became a Gentile movement. The Jewish Jesus movement waned, but the Gentile Christ movement evolved into what today is called "Christianity." Wilson suggests that Christianity really should be called "Paulinity."
The subtitle of a twenty-first century book by Robin Meyers reflects the first-century rift between the Christ movement and the Jesus movement: Saving Jesus From the Church: How to Stop Worshiping Christ and Start Following Jesus. (HarperCollins, 2009)
The worship styles of many twenty-first century liturgical churches may reflect the Christ movement approach. The greater emphasis of latter-day evangelical churches on the life and teachings of Jesus and the oft-asked question "WWJD?" ("What would Jesus do?") imply that elements of the Jesus movement have survived to the present day.
13. Altruism and Greed
The Bible speaks both to altruism and to greed which stand at opposite ends of the span of human behavior. Dictionary definitions:
altruism: the principle or
practice of unselfish concern for or devotion to the welfare of others (as
opposed to egoism).
(http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/altruism)
greed: excessive or rapacious
desire, especially for wealth or possessions.
(http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/greed)
Critics of capitalism may take "greed" and "self-interest" to be synonyms, but they prefer the language of "greed" to that of "self-interest." Self-interest is an objective or clinical term, whereas greed is value laden. Greed might be understood as self-interest in the extreme, that is, without regard to the interests of others.
We might imagine a continuum with perfect altruism at one end, extreme greed at the other, and varying degrees of self-interest in between.
A "normal distribution" of something across a population could be illustrated like this:
This is an illustration of a "bell curve" fitted to a normal distribution:
Here is the statistical interpretation of a normal distribution bell curve:
For an ideal society the ALTRUISM-GREED continuum might be characterized as a normal distribution with a "bell-shaped" graph for a typical population. Around the middle of the continuum would be the majority of the population (the ninety-five percent who fall within two standard deviations of the mean) consisting of normal people who are rationally self-interested but who occasionally engage in altruistic acts. Most of us probably fall into this middle range.
Economists recognize that personal satisfaction depends upon a number of deterministic variables, one or more of which may represent the well-being of family members, neighbors, or the humanity as a whole. This means that it is perfectly rational for self-interested people to act in the interest of others. Why? Because acting in the interest of others may provide personal satisfaction!
Most humans normally expect quid pro quo when they give up something, e.g., when they pay money to buy something they expect satisfaction from what they purchase. It may be economically rational to engage in altruistic acts that involve foregone consumption possibilities. "Compensation" for such acts may be in the form of a "feel-good" effect after the fact.
Ministers may admonish congregants to “Give until it hurts!" But perhaps the admonitions would be more effective if they were to acknowledge the baser economic reality of the human condition: “Give until you feel good about your generosity!”
We Christians may not have done a good enough job in transmitting to successive generations the force of Jesus' teachings relative to the well-being of fellow humans. People have not been led (by whom? family? clergy? academy? government?) adequately to value the benefits of altruism relative to the opportunity cost of what they might have bought with the amounts given.
Back to the
ALTRUISM-GREED distribution diagram. Suppose that one’s level of altruism is
indicated by a position on the horizontal axis to the right of the MEAN
vertical on a normal-distribution bell curve. The mission of church and clergy is to encourage greater altruism
(lesser self-interest or greed) so that his or her indicator moves closer to
the ALTRUISM end of the continuum.
So where along its ALTRUISM-GREED continuum does American society fall today? My guess is that if altruism-greed ratios could be measured across the entire population, the early twenty-first century American bell curve would be skewed to the right of a normal distribution.
A popular misconception is that Jesus changed Saul's name to Paul on the Road to Damascus, but a careful reading of Acts 9 confirms that this is not true. The change from “Saul” to “Paul” occurs once Paul sets off on his missionary journeys away from Jerusalem as described in Acts 13:13: “Now Paul and his companions set sail.” It is Luke who changes Saul's name, not Jesus. (https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/no-saul-the-persecutor-did-not-become-paul-the-apostle/)
Jesus often gave his followers nicknames. He called Simon "Cephas," the rock. He referred to apostles James and John as "Boanerges," sons of thunder. He may have called Mary, his most devoted female follower, the Hebrew word "Magdal" meaning "watch-tower" in English.
Tribal gods in ancient times went by various names associated with their tribes, but it has been conjectured that some of these names may actually have referred to the same god worshiped by the ancient Hebrews. One of the names that ancient Hebrews used to refer to their god was "Y_hw_h" (Yahweh), but in fear and reverence were reluctant to pronounce this name.
The deity that we call "God" even changed his own name and used various aliases to different tribes and at different times. After Moses killed an Egyptian overseer, he fled Egypt to the "Land of Midian" (probably south of Canaan in the Sinai or trans-Jordan area) where he encountered a Midianite priest for whom he went to work and whose daughter he married. The Midianite god Yahweh instructed Moses to return to Egypt and lead the Israelites out of Egypt to a new "promised land." Since the Israelites in Egypt worshiped El and did not know Yahweh, Moses had to introduce them to Yahweh and convince them to follow him out of Egypt into the Sinai desert (the land of Midian) enroute to the Promised Land. In Exodus 6:2-3 God says, "I am Yahweh. I appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as El Shaddai [God of the Mountain], but by my name Yahweh I did not make myself known to them."
Biblical scholars have identified four principal sources for Old Testament literature: the Elohist (pertaining to the god El who was worshiped by Canaanites), the Yahwist (pertaining to the god Yahweh who was worshiped by Midianites), the Priestly, and the Deuteronomic sources. The first two were written before the Babylonian exile; the last two were written during or soon after the exile. English language translations of Old Testament literature usually represent El as "God" and Yahweh as "LORD" (all caps). A Priestly writer attempted to merge the Elohist and Yahwist identities of God by introducing the term "Yahweh El," i.e., "LORD God," that we see in the Psalms and other books of the Old Testament.
Christians today don't use a specific name for our deity. On the assumption that there is only one divine entity, English-speaking Christians have appropriated the English language common noun "god" and made it into a proper name, "God," to refer to the divine entity. Speakers of other languages likewise have made the generic word for god a proper name, e.g., Dieu in French, Gott in German, Dios in Spanish.
It is perhaps regrettable that today we do not refer to our deity by a given name or one of his ancient names because the common noun "god" converted to the proper name "God" has been adulterated by its use in common parlance expletives "Oh God!", "My God!", and similar phrases to register shock or indicate that something bad is happening or has happened. Also, the phrase "OMG!" ("Oh my God!") has become used in text messaging to indicate surprise or joy. These expletives rarely are intended to evoke anything having to do with a divine entity.
Reza Aslan, in his book God: A Human History, says that as a Sufi he worships deity without name, "...a god with no material form; a god who is pure existence, without name, essence, or personality." (Random House, 2017, Kindle e-book location 4679)
Jesus' name was changed, but not by Jesus himself. Jesus' Hebrew birth name was Yeshua ben Yossef, or in English transliteration, "Joshua son of Joseph." His (adopted) father's name was Yossef ben Jacob. The male naming convention in Palestine during the first century was to follow the given name by "ben" (son of) father's name. Females usually were identified as given name "bat" (daughter of) father's name, e.g., Myriam bat Heli.
The letter "J" did not exist in ancient Hebrew. Ari Mermelstein, a practicing Orthodox Jew, says
Jesus is the Greek name by which we know him today, but he likely was not called by the name "Jesus" during his lifetime. He was known as Yeshuah (English transliteration "Joshua"), or within his circle by a more familiar nickname "Yesu" which may have become transliterated into the Greek name "Jesus."
Christians today commonly use his Greek name rather than his Hebrew birth name because the convention likely was established in early gospels and non-canonical texts, many of which were written in Greek or translated into Greek from other languages. Johann Franck and Johann Sebastian Bach used the German poetic form "Jesu" in a number of their compositions (e.g., Bach's "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring").
"Christ" is not a name, but rather a title meaning "messiah." It would be more appropriate to refer to him in English as "Jesus, the Christ" rather than "Jesus Christ" which implies that Christ is his surname (which it is not). We often end a prayer with "In Christ's name" with the implied understanding that the messiah's name is Jesus, not Christ. It might be more appropriate to say "in Jesus' name" (or "in Yeshuah's name") since Christ is only a title, not a name.
The title "messiah," meaning "anointed by God," was applied to Hebrew kings who served to guide Israel in times of crisis. The following is an excerpt from the Wikipedia entry on "messiah":
- Jesus, the Son of God, was begotten of God and is the same substance as God.
- Because of our salvation, Jesus came down [from heaven] and became incarnate [i.e., God in the flesh, a human].
- Jesus suffered [death by crucifixion] and rose from the dead on the third day.
- Jesus ascended to the heavens.
- Jesus will come [again] to judge the living and the dead.
Bart Ehrman (biblical historian at the University of North Carolina), in his book How Jesus Became God (HarperCollins, 2014), identifies various concepts that had been advanced but were rejected at the Council of Nicaea:
- Jesus was fully human, a prophet commissioned by God to bring a message to humanity (Arius).
- Jesus was a fully-human inspired teacher, but not divine (Arius).
- Jesus was fully human, a potential apocalyptic messiah (Zealot).
- Jesus was a human who advocated following Mosaic Law to achieve salvation (Ebionite),
- Jesus was a human who was exalted to divine status upon his resurrection (earliest believers).
- Jesus was a human who was adopted by God at his baptism (Mark).
- Jesus was God (i.e., fully divine) who became human at his conception (Matthew, Luke).
- Jesus did not always exist, but was begotten of God before or at the creation of the world. (Paul, Justin Martyr)
- Jesus had no beginning, but was always part of God (e.g., the Word or Wisdom of God) (John, Paul).
- Jesus was a subordinate deity, the Angel of God, who appeared in several Old Testament stories (Paul, Justin Martyr).
- Jesus was two entities, one divine and another temporarily human (Gnostic).
- There are two separate divine entities, one of justice and the other of love; Jesus belongs to the God of Love (Marcionite).
- God is one deity in three modes (Modalist)
Another of the reputed heresies that were rejected at Nicea was advanced by an Alexandrian presbyter, Arius (256-336). Arius argued that Jesus was not divine, but was entirely mortal and nothing more than an inspired teacher. Further, Arius asserted that God was a single omnipotent deity (not a trinity) who had not incarnated into human flesh.
After the Nicene Creed was accepted and amended in the ecumenical councils, any views of Jesus that diverged from the Nicene Creed were regarded as heresy (heterodox views). Advocates of such heresies often have been vilified, attacked, and even excommunicated from the Church or from particular church congregations.
In the twelfth century, Pope Innocent III launched the "Inquisition" to root out heresies and heretical groups such as the Cathars in southern France, even executing people charged with heresy (often by burning them at the stake). The Inquisition was intensified and expanded in scope across Europe in response to the Protestant Reformation. Though its activities have softened, the institution of the Inquisition has survived into the twenty-first century as part of the Roman Curia (the central government of the Catholic Church) but now is known as the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
Needless to say, in the eyes of the Catholic Church, all Protestants are by definition heretics.
16. Rewriting the Jesus Story
Jim Dant recently preached a sermon in which he observed that people have been rewriting the Jesus story now for a couple thousand years.* Every sermon or Sunday School lesson that purports to apply Jesus' teachings or the example of his life to current situations is a de facto rewrite of the Jesus story. On a personal level, in our prayers we try to rewrite the Jesus story to fit our own perceived needs and wants.
Dant notes that the rewriting process started during Jesus' lifetime with his disciple Peter. In Matthew 16, Jesus tells (actually, foretells) the disciples that he must go to Jerusalem to be killed. Peter attempts to alter Jesus' story, saying, "This shall never happen to you." (NIV) But Jesus retains control of his own story by rebuking Peter, telling him to "get behind me, Satan. You are a stumbling block to me."
After Peter, the Apostle Paul was one of the earliest to rewrite the Jesus story. On the Road to Damascus to arrest adherents of "the Way," Paul had a vision of encountering the resurrected Jesus. But Paul did not otherwise know Jesus personally. In writing his "letters" to the Gentile gatherings ("churches") in Asia Minor, Paul contrived a Jesus story that abstracted from both his teachings and life events. In so doing, Paul initiated a new religion that we know today as "Christianity."
Some of Paul's contemporaries wrote "gospels" decades after Paul wrote his letters. These included Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and various other gospel writers whose accounts did not make it into the New Testament canon. Some of these writers may have been Jesus' disciples or otherwise may have known Jesus personally. But each wrote and rewrote the Jesus story in pursuit of specific agendas and for particular clienteles.
The Jesus story writers wrote with retrospective knowledge of what had happened during Jesus' ministry, his execution, and his resurrection. Recognition of this fact invokes the suspicion that the Gospel writers may have imbued the human Jesus with implied foreknowledge with the intention of affirming that he was in possession of divine omniscience. If so, this may constitute another rewrite of the Jesus story.
When the Israelites finally secured the "Promised Land" (Canaan) after wandering for 40 years in the wilderness, the land was apportioned among eleven of the twelve Israelite tribes, but none was allocated to the Levi tribe because Levites served as priests who would be supported by the eleven landed tribes. In Matthew 8:20 and 9:58, Jesus says, "Foxes have dens and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head." (NIV) This saying often is interpreted as referring to Jesus' poverty, but an alternate interpretation is that it is an implicit acknowledgement by Jesus that he may have descended from the Levi tribe rather than from King David. As a Levite, Jesus had no tribal land to call his home. In Matthew 22, Mark 10, and Luke 20, Jesus rewrote his own story by implicitly rejecting the contention that a messiah must have descended only from the tribe of Judah.
In the nineteenth century, Thomas Jefferson undertook a Jesus story rewrite. He used a razor to cut passages from a copy of the New Testament and pasted them to sheets of paper to compile his perceived statement of Jesus' teachings. The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth was completed in 1820. Today it is known more commonly as "The Jefferson Bible." Jefferson's compilation excluded all passages that implied divinity or suggested the supernatural, including the accounts of Jesus' miracles and the resurrection.
Prior to the turn of the twentieth century a number of Jesus story rewrites had been published with title variations on the theme of "the life of Jesus." In 1906 Albert Schweitzer wrote a historical criticism of these prior works, pointing out various shortcomings in the research approaches used. Schweitzer's book, Geschichte der Leben-Jesu-Forschung, was translated into English by William Montgomery in 1910 and published under the title The Quest of the Historical Jesus. Schweitzer's book sparked a second quest in the 1950s and a third quest in the 1980s that introduced newer methods of analysis into the question of the historicity of Jesus. All of these quests were rewrites of the Jesus story.
Twentieth century writers continued efforts to rewrite the Jesus story. Building upon recent biblical scholarship, Stephen Mitchell, in his 1991 book The Gospel According to Jesus (HarperCollins), followed Jefferson's approach. But he applied modern word-smithing technology to strip off what he identified as the Gospel writers' accretions to reveal a Jesus story that presents his essential message. It is more of a gospel cleansing than a biographical rewrite.
Around the turn of the twenty-first century, Jack Miles analyzed both God and Jesus as literary characters. In his 1995 book God, A Biography, and his 2001 sequel, Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God (Alfred A. Knopf), Miles rewrote both the God story** and the Jesus story. Miles perceived God to have brooded over the "mistake" of eliminating eternal life for all humans after Adam and Eve sinned by eating the prohibited fruit in the Garden of Eden. But God devised a means of correcting this mistake by coming to earth in the guise of a human with the Hebrew name Yeshua (Jesus). In this view, the literary character of Jesus is God Incarnate, i.e., God in the flesh. By allowing God’s self as Jesus to be "killed" by humans as a blood sacrifice to God’s self as God in order to atone for the sinfulness of all humanity, God created a means by which humans again could achieve eternal life. Humans who confess and repent of their sins and who believe that Jesus rose from the dead and is God’s own Son can enjoy heavenly eternal life beyond earthly mortal life. This atonement rewrite of the Jesus story is integral to latter-day Christian doctrine, but many modern (or postmodern) Christians may no longer find it credible.
So, I too have rewritten the Jesus story. In my Jesus story rewrite, he was a fully human teacher and philosopher who may have been tapped by God to serve as his prophet in conveying to humanity a message of universal love. He also taught that the Kingdom of God is near. Americans fought a revolution to escape a kingdom, so the term "realm" may be preferable to "kingdom." I take the Realm of God to be coextensive with my physical reality. A twenty-first century analogy is that the Realm of God is like a computer operating system that underpins and enables the apps that I am using.
In my Jesus story rewrite, Jesus survived the crucifixion and recovered enough to be seen on the Road to Emmaus, by his disciples in the upper-room and on the Galilean shore, and by several hundred other people. But even if Jesus was fully human, I cannot rule out the possibility that God may have exalted him to divine status after his execution and recovery.
17. Rewriting My Story
The point of Jim's sermon was his final admonition: Let Jesus rewrite your story. I had an immediate and negative reaction to this admonition. Why should I surrender control of my own story to anyone else, even to Jesus? Jesus set the example. He didn't surrender control of his story to any other human, not to Peter, not to the Pharisees, not to the Roman authorities, not to the Sanhedrin.
But the words and tune to Frances J. Crosby's 1873 hymn, "Blessed Assurance," began to creep into my mind:
Oh, what a foretaste of glory divine!
Heir of salvation, purchase of God,
Born of His Spirit, washed in His blood.
This is my story, this is my song,
Praising my Savior all the day long;
This is my story, this is my song,
Praising my Savior all the day long.
Perfect submission, perfect delight,
Visions of rapture now burst on my sight;
Angels, descending, bring from above
Echoes of mercy, whispers of love.
Perfect submission, all is at rest,
I in my Savior am happy and blest,
Watching and waiting, looking above,
Filled with His goodness, lost in His love.
Ah! The will of God! New Testament references to God's will are fairly sparse. In Acts 20:27 Luke quotes Paul as saying to the elders of the Ephesus church, "For I have not hesitated to proclaim to you the whole will of God" (NIV), but he does not reveal how he discerned "the whole will of God." In 1 Corinthians 1:1 and 2 Timothy 1:1, Paul speaks of being an apostle by the will of God. John quotes Jesus as saying in chapter 7:17, "Anyone who chooses to do the will of God will find out whether my teaching comes from God or whether I speak on my own," but there is no guidance here on discovering God's will. In the "Lord's Prayer" (Matthew 6:9-13), Jesus entreats the Father to let "your will be done on earth as it is in Heaven," but the nature of this will is unspecified. Does God have a generic will with respect to all of humankind, or is it specific to individual humans?
This view accords with the economist's theory that humans are driven to discover their "comparative advantages," i.e., the productive activities that they can perform at least cost in terms of what must be given up. If all were to discover and specialize in their comparative advantages and then trade the fruits of their labors with one another, the material welfare of society would undoubtedly increase.
A twenty-first century economist might recognize Paul's idea of "gifts" (Romans 12) as a first century predecessor of the modern concept of comparative advantage. Members of the "body of Christ" have different gifts, each of which contributes to the well-being of the whole Christian community. And each member can contribute the most by discovering his or her gift and practicing it to the benefit of the whole group. It is plausible to an economist that the process of discovering one's comparative advantages may serve as a vehicle for effecting divine will with respect to individual life paths.
So, does discovering God's will for my life require "perfect submission," or does God leave me to my own devices to find my way in life, perhaps by discovering my comparative advantage, or otherwise just by stumbling along? Does Jesus need to write or rewrite my story, or has God already been working in my subconscious, i.e., intervening in my thoughts, "to move me" in the direction of his will? God's intervention in one's life may be more subtle than "perfect submission" or "I surrender all" (Judson Van DeVenter's 1896 hymn).
Now that I'm 77 years old, my life story is pretty much completed, and in retrospect I can imagine points at which God may have engaged in subtle interventions to redirect my life, i.e., to rewrite my story. During the summers of my high school years, I worked at the wholesale hardware warehouse where my father was an employee. I became a pretty good hardware merchandiser during those short summers, and I contemplated a career as a wholesale hardware salesman.
During my high school years I fell under the influence of Dr. C. Earl Cooper, pastor of the Riverside Baptist Church in Jacksonville, Florida. In 1958, Dr. Cooper was called to Riverside from the Earle Street Baptist Church in Greenville, South Carolina. It was Cooper who influenced me to apply to Furman University. By the time that I matriculated at Furman University in 1961, my intent was to major in religion and pursue a suitable career. But once I started taking courses at Furman I found economics to be more to my interest than religion, and I declared an economics and business administration major during my sophomore year. This life-story rewrite was affirmed in 1965 when I was granted a National Defense Education Act (NDEA) fellowship to pursue a Ph.D. degree in economics at the University of Georgia.
I probably could have been a successful hardware salesman, at least until the big-box stores rendered independent wholesale and retail hardware distribution unprofitable. I probably would have made a terrible theologian, preacher, or missionary. I have served passably as a college-level economics professor, and this surely was my greater advantage compared to careers in religion or hardware sales. Teaching economics at the college level allowed me to rise to my level of incompetence (the Peter Principle), even if it was my comparative advantage relative to hardware and theology.
Unbeknownst to me at those times, was God rewriting my life story?
*August 30, 2020, First Baptist Church, Greenville, South Carolina.
18. Theocracy vs. Democracy
Rule by a central authority (e.g., a "strong man" or a tribal chieftain) is phenomenon dating from earliest human interaction. Democratic self-governance as envisioned by ancient Greek philosophers became dominant during the 20th century in Europe and North America. But during the early 21st century it appears that a drift away from democratic governance and toward authoritarianism is occurring on global scale.
It has been suggested (don't remember by whom) that the drift away from democracy may have been abetted by Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Islam, Christianity) that have conditioned adherents through the ages to believe in, follow, and obey authoritarian figures. Such authoritarian figures have included Yahweh (El, Allah, "God"), Moses, David, Yeshua ("Jesus"), Peter/popes, kings, Mohammad, imams, ayatollahs, parish priests, and even congregational pastors.
Religious authoritarian conditioning through the centuries has enabled divine-right monarchies and caliphates to establish theocracies as their preferred political systems. Theocracy is dictatorship by a religious authority. In the twentieth century, such authoritarian conditioning may have contributed to the emergence of secular dictators (Mussolini and Hitler were practicing Roman Catholics; Putin is a practicing Russian Orthodox).
Democracy is a political system implemented to replace authoritarian monarchial rule by the self-governance of a population. Rather than universal democracy, the "Founding Fathers" favored a representative form of democracy that would enable their class and ethnicity to retain dominance in North America. A republican form of democracy was introduced by the Founding Fathers to replace rule by a monarch with a presidential/legislative/judicial political system that implements rule by law (e.g., a constitution).
Capitalism is an economic system that entails the private ownership and accumulation of capital used to produce goods and services for profit. Capitalism usually is coupled to market economy in that resources are allocated and product is distributed via markets, and product mix is determined by product profitability. Latter-day incarnations of capitalism have become ever-more financial in character (market trading of financial instruments for profit) and divorced from actual output production.
Fascism, a.k.a. "authoritarian capitalism," is a hybrid economic system characterized by private allocation of resources and ownership of the means of production coupled to dictatorial determination of product mix (usually by letting contracts to approved private producers) and distribution of product (typically by rationing).
Lately in North America, religious authoritarian conditioning may have been instrumental in producing religio-fascistic manifestations of cult leaders who cultivate nationalistic fears by dwindling ethnic minorities who contrive conspiracy theories about ethnic replacement.
The Bible appears to presume the existence of primitive capitalism (e.g., wealthy ownership of vineyards), market economy (for resource allocation and product distribution), and theocracy (divine authority delegated to individuals, judges, kings, prophets, emperors). The fact that the Bible says virtually nothing about the possibility of democratic self-governance may imply that theocracy is sacred but democracy is not. Since theocracy and democracy are mutually incompatible, modern-day subscribers to Abrahamic religions face a choice between dictatorship {theocratic or secular) or democracy as the preferred form of political organization for their societies.
In the U.S., a substantial portion of Republican Party members are conservative Christian Evangelicals who appear to prefer a theocratic form of authoritarian governance coupled with a fascistic form of economic organization. If the Republican Party achieves dominance of the three branches of the U.S. government in the 2024 elections, a fear among proponents of democracy is that U.S. governance may evolve into what has been termed "Christo-fascism" with rule by a pseudo-Christian dictator and his party rather than by law under a constitution.
Meanwhile, a great deal of energy has been expended by the January 6 panel in the effort to prevent former president Trump from running again for the presidency in 2024. But it has been suggested (again, by whom I don't recall) that Trump served as a "useful idiot" to the rich white conservative nationalists who dominate the Republican Party. But now that his function (appointing religious conservatives to the Supreme Court) has been accomplished, Trump's usefulness to the "movers" in the Republican Party has expired and he will fade from the political scene. If so, the energy being expended by the January 6 panel may be wasted.
The residual problem is that many of Trump's Evangelical proponents, living mostly in rural America, still adhere to his MAGA claim that the 2020 election was stolen by cheating Democrats. Trump's fade from political power may open the door for a successor to carry on the white nationalist quest to avert replacement by "minorities" who are becoming the majority.
A concern is that a more capable and determined Republican, e.g., Florida Governor DeSantis, will become the Republican presidential candidate in 2024. If elected, America will have jumped from the proverbial frying pan into the fire. Christo-fascism may succeed democracy in America, whether at Trump's, DeSantis', or some other Republican's hands.
19. Theology in the Postmodern Cultural Epoch
Critics and commentators have outlined a progression of cultural epochs from ancient understandings of the workings of the world through the Medieval, Enlightenment, Modern, and Postmodern eras. The epochal progression provides historical insight into societies’ early twentieth-first century theological views.
Ancient peoples perceived that the universe was created and controlled by God (or gods), and all unexplained phenomena were attributed to divine causation. The Western Medieval worldview differed from the Ancient view in that God appeared to follow consistent patterns that became regarded as “natural law.”
The Enlightenment of the late-seventeenth and eighteenth centuries shifted understanding of causation from subjective judgment and emotion to objective reason and rationality. The Enlightenment was the precursor to the so-called Modern epoch that commentators describe as coincident with Industrial Revolution in the West and continuing to mid-twentieth century. The Modern epoch entailed the optimistic belief that the application of science and technology to industry could bring about a better world. The ideals of Modernity included equality, democracy, freedom, and human rights.
Coincident with the post-World War II transition of Western economies from primarily industrial to mainly service economies, a movement among European continental philosophers began to question the ability of industrial capitalism to continually bring about material improvement and emotional well-being for their societies. Philosophers also focused upon negatives that they perceived were brought about by industrial capitalism during the twentieth century: the Great Depression, two world wars, the Holocaust, a “cold war,” the prospect of nuclear annihilation, and ever more unequal distributions of income. By the last quarter of the twentieth century philosophers had begun to exhibit a rising skepticism concerning absolutism in science and religion.
Social commentators perceived that the cultural milieu of the late-twentieth century was becoming characterized by skepticism, ethical relativity, permissiveness, religious pluralism, and a victimhood mentality. Crime and vandalism were on the increase. Expectations were rising that government should ensure that all of society’s needs are met and that government should prevent any from suffering harm or discomfort. For want of a better term, the emerging era became known by the rather unimaginative term “postmodern” to distinguish it from the Modern epoch prior to WWII. Edward W. Younkins describes the present-day content of Postmodern thought:
Many of today's leading intellectuals are postmodernists who accede to the ideas of anti-realism, skepticism, subjectivism, relativism, pragmatism, collectivism, egalitarianism, altruism, anti-individualism, the world as conflictual and contradictory, and emotions, instincts, and feelings as better and deeper guides to action than reason (Edward W. Younkins, “The Plague of Postmodernism," http://www.quebecoislibre.org/04/041215-9.htm)
Newspaper columnists add envy, resentment, self-righteousness, and outrage to this list. Thomas Sowell says that, “There was a time when most Americans would have resented the suggestion that they wanted someone else to pay their bills. But now, envy and resentment have been cultivated to the point where even people who contribute nothing to society feel that they have a right to a ‘fair share’ of what others have produced.” (Thomas Sowell, “Dismantling America, Part II,” August 18, 2010, http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/sowell081810.php3)
A continuum between the extremes of Modernity and Postmodernity may be imagined. Not all people in Western societies have adopted philosophical positions at either extreme, but rather may be somewhere between the extremes. Conservatives and religious fundamentalists likely are closer to the Modernity extreme of the continuum. People who perceive themselves to be liberal and “liberated” from the constraints of doctrine and absolutist social values may put themselves closer to the Postmodernity extreme at the other end of the continuum.
People may find themselves gradually moving in one direction or the other along the continuum as they mature and as their social associations and perceptions change. It is likely that people of older generations may remain closer to the Modernity extreme. Those in subsequent generations may occupy social thought positions closer to the Postmodernity extreme. Great social transformations often take multiple generations to complete.
Early in the twenty-first century, Postmodernity’s extreme subjectivity, pessimism, ethical relativism, pluralistic tolerance of other religious traditions, and rejection of absolute truth seemed to produce a cultural malaise that weakened the “social glue” that binds society together.
The Pew Research Center reports that church membership in the United States has been declining during the early decades of the twenty-first century:
The Christian share of the U.S. population is declining, while the number of U.S. adults who do not identify with any organized religion is growing, according to an extensive new survey by the Pew Research Center. Moreover, these changes are taking place across the religious landscape, affecting all regions of the country and many demographic groups. While the drop in Christian affiliation is particularly pronounced among young adults, it is occurring among Americans of all ages. The same trends are seen among whites, blacks and Latinos; among both college graduates and adults with only a high school education; and among women as well as men. (Pew Research Center, "America's Changing Religious Landscape," May 12, 2015, http://www.pewforum.org/2015/05/12/americas-changing-religious-landscape/)
This phenomenon raises questions about whether Postmodernity’s subjectivity, pessimism, relativism, and quests for personal spirituality are rendering organized religions obsolete. If so, it is not certain that a call for a new theology can save “church” as a vehicle for corporate worship of deity in the twenty-first century and beyond.
20. A New Theology for the Postmodern Era
Jim Vincent calls for a new theology for the twenty-first century:
. . . unless the Christian church is able to develop a new theology that is compatible with educated, modern thought and intellectual progress, it will inevitably find itself in terminal decline. To develop such a theology the church must re-examine unflinchingly the doctrines that it has hitherto taken as 'gospel', e.g. the concept of the Trinity; the atonement for sin; justification by faith; and the exclusivity of Christianity. If necessary all of these, and more, must be abandoned. (Should the Church Abandon the Bible?, aSys Publications, 2018, Kindle e-book location 4971)
I have told my economics students that each must become his/her own economist to make their way successfully through life. In similar vein, each human must become his or her own theologian in a personal quest to understand deity and relate to it. So, I shall claim personal theological privilege to offer my vision of what, in Vincent’s words, “a new theology that is compatible with educated, modern thought and intellectual progress,” might look like.
Ockham's Razor is the principle that the simplest answer to a problem often is the true or the best solution, i.e., let the razor “cut-off” the redundant complexity. The economist’s criterion for applying Ockham’s Razor is the marginal principle. What might a new theology look like if Ockham's Razor were applied to the margins of the Christian theology complex to carve away extraneous matter, i.e., the clutter that distracts from the core of Christian theology and may entail greater costs than benefits in the postmodern perception?
In my perception, the archaic candidates that might be cut from the Christian theology complex include a multitude of Old Testament oral campfire stories that were embellished with successive retellings; the minutiae of Mosaic law; the Trinity, atonement, election, and sola fide doctrines; the messiah obsession; the virgin birth, crucifixion, and resurrection narratives; the sin-confession-repentance-forgiveness axis; and the exclusivity of the only-way mandate.
Pre-postmodern Christians often focus their personal theologies on Jesus’ lineage or the circumstances of his birth or death. The lineage, virgin birth, burial, and resurrection narratives should be understood as distractions from the message of universal love that God commissioned his Jewish prophet Yeshua to bring to humanity.
My vision of a new theology that is trimmed down to essentials to meet Vincent’s specification for the twenty-first-century postmodern intellect would include the following tenets:
- human reverence of a formless, non-anthropomorphic deity who may have played a role in creation of the universe but who is not constrained by the known universe or even the greater multiverse;
- awe and wonder of the multiverse with human acquisition of ever more scientific knowledge of it, whether provided by deity or discovered independently;
- the possibility of human communion with the creator deity;
- the humanity (i.e., non-divinity) of a Jewish prophet named Yeshua (Jesus) who was commissioned by deity to bring a message to humankind;
- an ethos myth story based upon the teachings and life example of Yeshua;
- a sole doctrine derived from the Yeshua message: to revere the deity and love fellow humans (neighbors);
- following upon this doctrine, a requisite to treat individual humans and the larger humanity with non-discriminatory acceptance, tolerance, and respect;
- also following upon this doctrine, a mission to assist and be of service to other humans; and
- a Christology that regards “resurrection” as a figurative process of transformation to a new personal outlook characterized by universal love.
Rather than a “salvation gospel,” this theology would entail a “social gospel” that may have been Yeshua’s original intent. It would not presume “justification by faith alone,” but it would insist that adherents “do good works” to and for their fellow humans. It would not turn upon confession and repentance of sin or require belief in a blood sacrifice as a condition for forgiveness of sin. It would not be based upon the death and resurrection of a savior figure. It would not insist upon being an exclusive channel to the divine. It would not promise the possibility of an afterlife to serve as an object of human hope, but it would emphasize the prospects for joy and happiness in this life.
Following Vincent’s assessment, this theology would understand much of the Old Testament matter as cherished mythological literature rather than sacred scripture. It would regard much of the New Testament matter as a contrived “Christology” that is not authentic to the life and teachings of Yeshua. And it would be largely devoid of pre-Postmodern Christian ethos myths that already have been dismissed by many postmoderns.
Such a non-exclusive theology need not entail evangelical compulsion to proselytize or share the ideology with other humans, but it should invite other humans to share its beliefs and practices. And it should include a social mission requisite for adherents to reach out with generosity to less fortunate humans in providing assistance and service to them.
A concern is whether postmodern humans would be able to revere, love, and worship such a formless deity without wanting something from the deity (i.e., a quid pro quo relationship). Petitioning a divine entity that rarely intervenes in the world may not have the desired result, i.e., prayers may appear not to be answered; coincidental with natural processes and human activity, some prayers may only appear to be answered.
It is difficult to envision how a religion that incorporates such a theology might be practiced. Without reliance upon pre-Postmodern Christian ethos myths and the promise of an afterlife, the theological substance and social mission compulsion of a new theology may be insufficient to sustain religious organizations and corporate deity worship. Such a theology may be more suitable for individual communion experience than for corporate worship experience unless corporate worship can be adapted to enable guided personal meditation in lieu of public prayer. Indeed, a personal communion experience (“oneness” with deity) seems to be what many twenty-first century postmoderns are seeking. This begs the question of whether organized churches are becoming obsolete in the Postmodern era.
Great social transformations often are not completed within a generation. The transition from the archaic Judeo/Christian/Islamic traditions to new theologies would be difficult and may involve the passing of generations who cling to archaic religious traditions, concepts, and worship modes.
A postmodern theological transformation is unlikely to come from within the professional theological establishment. Those most resistant to such transformation may be theologians, religion professors, and ministers who are deeply invested in interpreting ancient scriptural matter to their students and preaching to their congregants.
How might transition to a new theology come about? Changing postmodern perceptions of deity and the threat of institutional obsolescence and irrelevance may prompt transformation, but I think that a wholesale transition to a new theology to be unlikely. A postmodern Christian theology might emerge gradually as successive generations of pastors deemphasize and eventually drop archaic components from worship modes in their churches. If such a gradual transition occurs too slowly to forestall flight of postmoderns from the churches, the church as an organized mode of religious observance may become obsolete.
It is September 2022 at this writing. In nine more years my church, will have survived for two hundred years from its founding in 1831. Will it still be here in another two hundred years? Given the latter-day American propensity to tear-down and rebuild after a few decades, the steel, brick, and mortar of the present buildings may not still be standing in 2231.
But a church exists over time in its ever-changing congregations who may build, occupy, and replace several physical facilities. I won’t be here to witness it, so it remains to be seen by my descendants whether the church’s congregations and ministers adapted successfully to postmodern and “post-postmodern” cultural and technological changes, whatever they may be.
If not, the church buildings, if they are still standing, may have become a museum (like so many churches in Europe), a school, a civic meeting venue, or perhaps housing for a digital archive of historical religious mythology.
21. A New Cultural Epoch?
It [the James Webb Space
Telescope] will test, and possibly disprove, theories about the earliest
galaxies. But can it say anything new about god? Only if there is a religion
whose concept of god is compatible with existing astronomy and that makes
predictions that are testable via the James Webb.
--Jonathan Cardy, Jul 14,
2021 (https://www.quora.com/Will-the-James-Webb-Telescope-prove-that-theres-no-God)
In a previous essay (#20) I suggested that postmoderns likely would continue to abandon the Christian religion unless it is "cleaned up" by deletion of several incredible doctrines that have become attached to it during the past couple of millennia. But we now may have progressed beyond the so-called "Postmodern Epoch." This new "post-Postmodern" era might be termed the "James Web Space Telescope Epoch."
Astronomers tell us that there are billions of stars in our galaxy, the "Milky Way," and billions of galaxies in the universe. And there may even be multiple universes, i.e., a "multiverse." The universe that we know (because we live in it) continues to expand and occupy ever more "space." It challenges the human intellect to envision or even imagine the vastness of such space. And what does it suggest about the deity whom humans have thought to have created such a space and who they believe continues to occupy and govern it?
Ever since the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) was successfully launched from Kourou, French Guiana, on December 25, 2021, aboard an Ariane 5 rocket and successfully deployed at the Sun–Earth L2 Lagrange point on January 21, 2022, I have pondered John Cardy's question: Can it say anything new about god?
Could the universe have started itself? Can it maintain itself? Is it self-regulating? The JWST enables astronomers to peer back in time more than 13 billion years, near to the estimated occurrence of the so-called "Big Bang." And this raises a question of whether a deity was essential to the big-bang singularity that is hypothesized to have initiated the universe. While a theological answer to this question might be a resounding "Yes?", it appears that many (most?) members of the scientific community are likely to respond in the negative.
I have subscribed to the Christian religion as it derived from Judaism over the past couple of millennia, so Cardy's question for me is whether the Judeo-Christian concept of god is compatible with the JWST experience. Perhaps the question should be posed in the opposite direction: is the JWST compatible with our concept of the Judeo-Christian god? But I think that the ultimate question may be whether the Judeo-Christian god (or any other deity) even exists.
For want of a better name, I'll refer to the Judeo-Christian (J-C) god simply as "God." If God indeed exists, he/she ("he" for sake of exposition) could have interrupted the design, fabrication, launch, and deployment processes at any time. But he didn't, nor has he prevented the sharing of images captured by the JWST.
But this begs another question: who/where/what is the repository of all of the knowledge of the universe? If God himself is the repository of all such knowledge, he has gradually dribbled it out to humans over the past couple of centuries (the so-called "scientific age") and has been tolerant of human discovery and use of it.
If neither the J-C god nor any other deity exists, then there is no repository of knowledge other than the universe itself. Knowledge "lies about" in the universe, just waiting for humans to discover it, and it seems to be a human compulsion to search for and discover such knowledge.
If no deity exists, there was no divine force that might have interdicted the JWST design, fabrication, launch, and deployment processes. According to Bill Ochs, the telescope’s project manager since 2011, it represents the combined effort of about 20,000 engineers, astronomers, technicians and bureaucrats (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/12/science/james-webb-telescope-images-nasa.html). Either an existing god acquiesced in the JWST processes, or in the absence of a deity the JWST was the product purely of human effort.
So, where does this leave us? It's not possible to prove a negative, i.e., that God doesn't exist. The burden of proof falls upon the advocate of a positive assertion, i.e., that God exists. The JWST phenomenon implies either that God doesn't exist or that God exists but is tolerant of humans delving into the mysteries of the ("his"?) universe.
Scott Hershovitz, the author of a New York Times opinion piece, quotes his 4-year-old son, "For real, God is pretend, and for pretend, God is real," like Dumbledore who teaches at Hogwarts that exists only in fiction ("How to Pray to a God You Don’t Believe In," The New York Times, May 2, 2022). Can the JWST experience be reconciled to a J-C God who "for pretend" exists, but who "for real" doesn't exist?
Theology is the study and advancement of ideas about deity. Theism is the belief in a divine entity. I am not optimistic about the long-run survival of either theology or theism. Even if Christian denominations leave behind the more incredible aspects of their doctrines, increasing education and the "technification" of daily life are likely to be instrumental in the transition from the postmodern understanding of the world to a post-postmodern James Webb worldview. In this new era, people may feel less need for reliance on a divine presence in their lives, and they may find it difficult to perceive a divine authority in a vast universe depicted by JWST images.
22. Divine Autocracy
Os Guinness' book, The Magna Carta of Humanity: Sinai's Revolutionary Faith and the Future of Freedom (InterVarsity Press, 2021) is a critique of the political progressive left's fragmenting society by identifying and protesting grievances that people may suffer, but he does not offer an explicit advocacy of the conservative right.* He calls the progressive left neo-Marxism (or soft-Marxism) and identifies its antecedent as the French Revolution of 1789.
Guinness calls for an American Reformation to return to what he refers to as the "Exodus Revolution" from the Israelites' release from slavery in Egypt (or the "Sinai Revolution" from commands and laws dictated by God to Moses on a mountain in the Sinai Peninsula). Guinness identifies the Exodus Revolution as the antecedent of the American Revolution of 1776 which followed upon the religious Great Awakening of the 1730s in the British American colonies.
The Sinai Revolution is reputed to be a "revolution" because it established humans among all other elements of the creation as unique and special to the creator God. The reformation that Guinness advocates for twenty-first century American society requires the exercise of authority that only the God of the Sinai Revolution can provide to hedge in human behavior and ensure both freedom and justice.
In the Torah, i.e., the first five books of the Christian Old Testament (the Hebrew Tanach), God is represented as the ultimate autocrat, dictating commands and handing out laws intended to hedge and "guard-rail" human misbehavior. In this perception, God appointed a human, Moses, to be his on-the-ground dictator to convey and enforce his commands and laws as he led the Israelites through "the wilderness of Sin" (Sinai) to the so-called "Promised Land." Guinness notes that in the twenty-first century, American leadership in the vein of Moses and Abraham Lincoln is absent. Guinness in effect calls for a twenty-first century Great Awakening.
Moses is credited with the authorship of the Torah, but it seems more likely that the Torah was written by Hebrew priests over decades or centuries after settling in the Promised Land, and that much of the narrative and laws are ex-post rationalizations of what they and their ancestors recollected or thought had happened to the Israelites during Egyptian captivity and after their release from slavery.
Beyond the Israelites' release from slavery by the Egyptians, Guinness asserts that the Sinai Revolution enabled authority that guided personal and moral freedom for the Israelites based on God's love of his created humanity. But the extensive and detailed hedges and guardrails of the commands and laws issued by God appear to have left little room for autonomy and the exercise of will to do the "right things" and avoid uncivil behavior.
Guinness suggests that the American Revolution of 1776 is the heir of the Sinai Revolution because freedom was the goal of both, and because the "Founding Fathers" made so many references in their writings to Hebrew and Christian scriptures and concepts. But the French Revolution of 1789 appears more likely to be an heir of the Hebraic detailed law regime resulting from the Sinai Revolution. The French system of law (and its heir, the European Union system of law) attempts to codify and regulate every imaginable exception to acceptable human behavior, much like the Hebraic system of law dictated by God to Moses. In the American system of law, laws are enacted by legislature only as need is perceived. This begs the question of which system of governance and law allows greater freedom to its citizens.
The Sinai Revolution implemented autocracy with governance by an appointed dictator based upon the divine autocrat's love of his created humanity. Following the American Revolution of 1776, the founders of an experiment in self-governance established a republican form of government that implemented representative democracy as the decision-making vehicle of self-governance based on mutual respect (rather than love) of the participants. The first five chapters of the Bible appear to be an implicit advocacy of theocracy (religious autocracy) as the preferred form of human governance. While autocracy may be divinely ordained, democracy is not.
Although God is described in the Torah as covenanting with the Israelites, his "covenants" are one-sided dictations with implied threats of retribution should the Israelites violate the covenants. The U.S. Constitution adopted by representatives of the participating states is more like a multi-party covenant than the reputed covenants of the Sinai Revolution. Guinness says America needs to indoctrinate successive generations (and newly arrived immigrants) with the tenets of the American covenant (the Constitution and its Amendments), but that this process has waned during the early years of the twenty-first century.
Guinness asserts that the authoritative nature of the Sinai Revolution enables freedom based on God's love for humanity. The ancient Israelites may have so understood El or Yahweh, but it is unlikely that the Canaanites or any other tribes would have perceived him as a god of love. God is recorded in the Torah as directing the Israelites to invade Canaan, conquer it, and commit genocide to secure the land that they desired. But this perception may have been an invention by the Israelites to justify the invasion and genocide that they had committed. Twenty-first century Israelis may be attempting to exercise what they perceive to be a divinely-issued license to reclaim land captured by ancient Hebrews, i.e., to invade, conquer, and occupy land that has been populated by Palestinians for centuries.
A motto of the French Revolution of 1789 was liberté, égalité, fraternité. Guiness says that liberté, the goal of freedom, may have been inspired by the American Revolution of 1776, but he notes that égalité and fraternité precipitated the Russian Revolution of 1917, the attempted German National Socialist (Nazi) revolution of 1933-1945, and the Chinese revolution of 1949. The Nazi revolution failed with the World War II defeat of Germany in 1945. The Russian revolutuion succeeded until 1979, only to be replaced by Vladimir Putin's autocracy in the twenty-first century. The Chinese revolution thus-far has succeeded via exercise of autocracy, but in the twenty-first century it has taken on some characteristics of market capitalism without democracy.
The Sinai Revolution has succeeded for four millennia in enabling freedom to its adherents via divine love. The American revolution has succeeded for more than two centuries in enabling a modicum of freedom for American citizens via civic participation and mutual respect. It remains to be seen whether either will succeed to the twenty-second century of the common era.
__________
*Although Guinness attributes the fracturing of American society to grievances protested by what he calls the progressive left, it must be noted that the conservative right also has cultivated grievance identification and protest as a vehicle to pursue and maintain power.
23. Mystery in Religion and Science
Mystery is important to both religion and science. Religion was the first human effort at attribution of causation of mysterious events; scientific explanation to dispel mystery may be the last human effort at religion.
This essay is an exploration of religion as the pre-scientific human effort to attribute causation of events that they did not understand. Pre-scientific humans did not possess the language or concepts to explain phenomena, so they attributed causation to gods.
This essay is also an exploration of the possibility that science is emerging as a religion for many in the twenty-first century. Mystery has driven both religious attribution and scientific explanation.
Some definitions
Religion is "a social - cultural system of designated behaviors and practices, morals, beliefs, worldviews, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, ethics, or organizations, that relates humanity to supernatural, transcendental, and spiritual elements; however, there is no scholarly consensus over what precisely constitutes a religion." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion) For our purpose, the essential characteristic of a religion is human effort to attribute causation of natural phenomena to a supernatural deity figure but without explicit effort or determination to explain such causation. Mystery remains a central feature of religious attribution because it is integral to the worship of a supernatural deity.
Science is defined as “the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation, experimentation, and the testing of theories against the evidence obtained.” (https://bing.com/search?q=definition+of+science) For our purpose, the essential characteristic of science is human effort and determination to explain natural phenomena based on observation and logic, i.e., without reference to mysterious deistic causation. Mystery constitutes a challenge to scientists to dispel it.
Attribution is defined as " the act of saying or thinking that something is the result or work of a particular person or thing." (https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/attribution) For our purpose, the essential characteristic of attribution is human belief that a natural phenomenon is the result of supernatural intervention in the physical world.
Explanation is defined as "the details or reasons that someone gives to make something clear or easy to understand." (https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/explanation) For our purpose, the essential characteristic of explanation is human effort to exercise logic (i.e., to give reasons) that makes natural phenomena understandable to most humans.
The essential difference between religion and science then is that a religion attempts to attribute causation without explanation, whereas science attempts to explain causation without attribution.
Cultural Epochs
A possible dividing point between pre-scientific religious attributions and efforts to employ scientific concepts and logic to explain phenomena occurs around 1700. Beginning in the early 18th century, religious attribution began to be challenged by efforts at scientific explanation. By the early 21st century, religious attribution was still "hanging on" but losing its popularity to increasing "faith" in science to explain natural phenomena.
Commentators have outlined a progression of cultural epochs from ancient understandings of the workings of the world through the Medieval, Enlightenment, Modern, and Postmodern eras. Ancient peoples perceived that the universe was created and controlled by God (or gods), and all unexplained phenomena were attributed to divine causation. The Western Medieval worldview differed from the Ancient view in that God appeared to follow consistent patterns that became regarded as "natural law."
The Enlightenment of the late-seventeenth and eighteenth centuries shifted understanding of causation from subjective judgment and emotion to objective reason and rationality. The Enlightenment was the precursor to the so-called Modern epoch that commentators describe as coincident with Industrial Revolution in the West and continuing to mid-twentieth century. The Modern epoch entailed the optimistic belief that the application of science and technology to industry could bring about a better world.
Attributions
Pre-scientific humans sought attributions of natural phenomena that they did not understand. In his book The Invention of Christianity (The Emperor Has No Clothes Press, 2005, Kindle e-book location, 2012), Alexander Drake argues that when humans have neither science nor religion, psychological mechanisms lead them to invent new religions. If this is true, then both religions and concepts of deities are purely human inventions.
Lacking modern scientific language and concepts, ancient peoples sought attributions for events, positive and negative, that affected their lives. Positive events that improved their welfare were assumed to be caused by greater entities that were perceived to be pleased with the lesser beings. These greater entities became regarded as deities who were thanked and worshiped. Negative events may have had greater impact than positive experiences on the lesser beings’ perceptions. When something “bad” happened, they naturally assumed that the deities were angry with them. Angry gods were feared and had to be appeased.
Many tribal peoples have claimed descent from a god or gods. Vikings trace descent from the Norse “All Father God” Odin. Celts and Franks trace ancestries to Dardanis van Arcadia and onward to the mythical Greek gods Zeus, Kronos, Uranus, Aether, and Erebus. Hebrew ancestry may be traced to Hebrew Patriarch Abraham. The ancestry listing in the 3rd chapter of Luke's Gospel in the Christian New Testament follows from Abraham to Adam, and then to Adam’s creator, known to ancient Hebrews as El Shaddai (God of the Mountain), or Yahweh (LORD, usually capitalized in English translations), or Yahweh El (LORD God).
For the ancient Hebrews, the perceived alienation from their deity was manifested by natural phenomenon such as plagues, pestilences, droughts, storms, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, etc., which were attributed to deity who was presumed to be angry with humans. This alienation became understood as “sin” so that the deity had to be appeased with offerings that would elicit forgiveness or atonement (reparation or expiation for sin). The sin-atonement relationship became central to the Judaic experience of deity. Variations of the atonement doctrine have been adopted by other Abrahamic religions, i.e., Islam and Christianity. The Christian variation of atonement substitutes the death of the Christ figure as reparation for all human sins. However, Abrahamic concepts of sin and atonement did not become central to relationships between humans and deities in other emerging religions. Sin is not a prominent feature in Nordic or Greek mythologies.
Explanations
Scientists attempt to dispel the mystery of natural phenomena by attempting to explain what happens without deistic attribution. The attempt to explain may be described as "scientific method," a process that has emerged and been refined over the past several centuries. Here is a brief description of the process for two types of scientists, those who can conduct laboratory experiments, and those who cannot.
A scientist may first be attracted to a new topic by observation of some phenomenon. The scientist then hypothesizes a relationship between the object of interest (treated as "dependent variable") and some number of determinants (treated as "independent variables"). It may be possible for the scientist to design an experiment that is isolated from the surrounding environment by means of laboratory control. If laboratory control is possible, the scientist proceeds to conduct experiments in order to generate data to test the hypothesis.
But some sciences are not amenable to laboratory experimentation (e.g., astronomy, meteorology, and some of the social sciences). In those sciences, the scientist may employ inductive logic (i.e., reasoning from first observations to a generalization about them) to structure a model in which many independent variables are assumed constant. The model, including only those independent variables that are not assumed constant, may be represented in the form of verbal assertions of relationships, mathematical equations, or graphs of the equations. Once the structure of the model is in place, the scientist may employ deductive logic (i.e., reasoning from a generalization to a particular conclusion) to derive conclusions about the model. The deduced conclusions are treated as tentative hypotheses to be subjected to empirical verification.
In laboratory sciences, the natural scientist is provided with data generated by conducting experiments (stochastic processes). Experiments usually are conducted numerous times, generating enough data for a statistical inference about the validity of the hypothesis. In non-laboratory sciences, experimentally generated data are not available, so the scientist resorts to the world itself as a stochastic process. The on-going processes of the phenomenon that the scientist has determined to study produce continuing experience that can yield data as soon as they are observed and recorded.
Once adequate data are in hand, the scientist may employ the tools of statistical analysis to test the hypothesis, thereby accepting or rejecting it on grounds of statistical inference. Accepted hypotheses constitute the sought-after explanations.
Over the past four centuries, these scientific approaches have compiled a substantial body of human knowledge and technological understanding of the natural universe. During this time, the emerging methodology and ever-increasing body of scientific knowledge often have co-existed uncomfortably with ancient deistic attributions. Successive generations of the faithful have clung to attributions that were first uttered millennia ago. But with increasing education, exposure to scientific knowledge gradually has been displacing the ancient attributions.
Knowledge
Human acquisition of knowledge occurs by discovery, teaching, study, and experimentation. Can knowledge be discovered by humans apart from a divine entity, or is a divine entity the source of all knowledge (scientific, physical, metaphysical) of the universe? It cannot be ruled out that a divine entity enables the provision of knowledge to humans so that they may access and use the resources of the universe. But if a divine entity is indeed the source of all knowledge, one might wonder why the divine entity has allowed humans ever greater access to the technical knowledge of the universe? And in allowing humans to eat so freely of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, is the divine entity incurring risk that humans may use the technical knowledge to destroy the earth?
Humans through the ages have believed themselves to be dependent upon the divine for sustenance. As the twenty-first century continues to unfold, is the divine now in the process of cutting humans loose, i.e., opening the knowledge flood gates in order to allow humans to become more self-sufficient and less dependent upon the divine? Or, are humans by themselves the sole discoverers of the universe’s technological secrets?
Non-Theistic Religions
In the early twenty-first century, some non-theistic or post-theistic religions that do not entail mystery may be emerging. One such non-theistic religion centers on politics. Christine Emba, writing in The Washington Post, describes the emergence of what she perceives to be a “new religion" centering on Donald Trump:
…like many heretics, Falwell [now-deceased former president of Liberty University] and his fellow evangelical Trump apologists are on their way to founding a new religion, one in direct conflict with the old. This new religion doesn’t have much to do with Christ at all. Instead, it centers Trump as savior above any other god. A disconcerting number of self-professed Christians have transitioned from the traditionally “evangelical” ambitions of spreading the gospel and forming a personal relationship with Jesus to spreading the gospel of wealth creation and fighting the “radical left.” National identity is what ties this body of believers together, and “the wall” has become its icon of hope, pushing the cross to the side. ("Evangelicals' infallible new faith: The gospel of Trump," January 4, 2019, The Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/01/04/evangelicals-infallible-new-faith-gospel-trump/?utm_term=.ee69f59380d5&wpisrc=nl_most&wpmm=1)
Another non-theistic religion may arise in science itself. In his novel Origin (Transworld Publishers, 2017), Dan Brown’s scientist protagonist envisions a future when science has displaced theistic religions to become the religion.
"What happens next will depend on peoples' ability to shed old beliefs and accept new paradigms,” Winston [the AI supercomputer] replied. “Edmond [the scientist that created Winston] confided to me some time ago that his dream, ironically, was not to destroy religion … but rather to create a new religion — a universal belief that united people rather than dividing them. He thought if he could convince people to revere the natural universe and the laws of physics that created us, then every culture would celebrate the same Creation story rather than go to war over which of their antique myths was most accurate." “Yes, which is why Edmond hoped science could one day unify us,” Langdon [professor specializing in symbolism] said.
If Brown's vision is prescient, science may become the only surviving religion.
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24. Post-Christian
I was raised as a Christian, a Protestant, a Baptist. I was (and still am) a member of a Baptist church, but my perspectives on theology, religion, and church have changed in the past few years. I would identify a "Mens Bible Study" at my church as being most instrumental in clarifying my views and changing my perspectives.
I no longer subscribe to 2000+ year-old myths that are scientifically impossible (e.g., creation by speaking, virgin birth, resurrection from the dead, physical healing by touch or speech, substitutionary atonement of sin, trinity theism, deistic incarnation, etc.).
Religious establishment "union card holders" (theologians, professors, pastors, chaplains, rabbis, mullahs, etc.) have vested interests in promoting and advancing ancient mythological ideas. These ideas are their "stock in trade" upon which they base their theological and social programs.
A historical objective of religions has been achievement and maintenance of power over constituents (parishioners, congregants, caliphates) to control populations and physical resources, wage wars, etc.
Religious institutions through the ages have absorbed great amounts of physical and human resources, the opportunity costs of which could have been improving the physical welfare of humans.
The principal attraction of religious organizations (churches, synagogues, mosques) is community of like-minded people. But non-religious organizations compete in offering community, e.g., employment settings, clubs, pubs, gyms, sports facilities, alumni associations, retirement facilities, etc.
Religious organizations tend to impede membership diversification by attracting mainly middle-to-upper income community seekers who can afford to make monetary contributions. Lower-income people may shy from religious organizations which seek monetary contributions that they cannot afford. Jessica Grose, writing in the last part of a five-part series in The New York Times on dechurching in America*, quotes Jim Davis, Michael Graham, and Ryan Burge, authors of The Great Dechurching: Who’s Leaving, Why Are They Going and What Will It Take to Bring Them Back? (Zondervan, 2023):
Modern American churches are financially incentivized to target the wealthy and create a space where those on track feel comfortable. Biblical hospitality, though, is so much more than just throwing money at a problem, and the net result is that the average American church is not truly hospitable to the less fortunate, making them feel like outsiders in our midst.
Religious organizations tend to be elitist because of their attraction of upper-income people with similar views. Religious organizations tend to preserve ethnic and racial homogeneity because they are self-sorting, i.e., people search for and join religious organizations populated by people with similar life situations, views, and beliefs.
Although these emerging perceptions have caused me to withdraw from my church and disavow the theology underlying them, I remain conditioned morally and socially to the goals of my religious background. I still support my church's social mission to the poorer community surrounding it. In this sense, I claim to have a post-Christian perspective on my world.
*What Churches Offer that 'Nones' Still Long For
25. The Sanctity of Democracy
Hierarchical religious organizations tend to be authoritarian in governance because the ancient scriptures underlying them prescribe authority by deities, prophets, judges, popes, priests, pastors, etc. Authoritarian governance in the guise of theocracy appears to be ordained in sacred Judaic scriptures underlying the Abrahamic religions, i.e., Judaism, Islam, and Christianity.
Various concepts of direct democracy were envisioned and implemented by ancient Greek city-states:
During the Classical era and Hellenistic era of Classical Antiquity, many Hellenic city-states had adopted democratic forms of government, in which free (non-slave), native (non-foreigner) adult male citizens of the city took a major and direct part in the management of the affairs of state, such as declaring war, voting supplies, dispatching diplomatic missions and ratifying treaties. These activities were often handled by a form of direct democracy, based on a popular assembly. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_democracy)
Theocracy may be ordained in sacred scriptures as a preferred form of governance, but democracy is a human perception of governance that is not ordained in scripture. Its intellectual foundation lay in philosophical discussion. As noted by George Thomas writing in The Atlantic, the characteristics of representative democracy are contained in the Constitution of the United States of America even though the word "democracy" does not appear in the Constitution. (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/11/yes-constitution-democracy/616949/) Does the Constitution rise to the level of scripture for American citizens? If so, is democracy sacred to the American experiment begun in 1779?
This matter is of great current (October, 2023) urgency because a former president of the United States (Donald J. Trump) has been charged with undermining the very foundations of democracy in the United States.
Five crucial requisites of democracy are that
(1) all adult citizens can participate either directly or through elected representatives in determination of public policy,
(2) all voting citizens have the right for their votes to be counted,
(3) the collective will of the citizens is acknowledged as a majority of votes cast,
(4) transfer of power from a former executive to his/her successor must be peaceful, and
(5) it must be possible to adjudicate disputes in a system based on rule of law.
The alternative to rule of law is rule by a man or woman as in fascism or authoritarian communism. Alberto Gonzales, a former Attorney General of the United States, describes rule of law in a Washington Post opinion column:
Our system of government and way of life are based on the rule of law, which is the principle that every defendant in this country is judged according to proven evidence, a known and accepted set of rules, equally enforced and independently adjudicated by a neutral judge or jury. I have often reminded the public that facts drive the outcome in every prosecution. A prosecutor’s assessment of the evidence affects decisions on whether to charge on a set of known facts, and government officials under investigation, such as Clinton, often cooperate with prosecutors to address potential wrongdoing. By all accounts, Trump has refused to cooperate. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/08/08/justice-department-bias-against-republicans/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_opinions&utm_campaign=wp_opinions)
American democracy is flawed by the selection of the executive by an electoral college whose votes may not represent the majority of the citizens, by "gerrymandering" in states to prevent or minimize the votes of ethnic minorities, by efforts of an executive and attempts by electoral boards in various state to submit false slates of electors, and by an executive who has conspired with others to prevent the peaceful transfer of power to his successor.
Colbert King, writing an opinion column in The Washington Post, says that American democracy has been found strong in the transfer of power from President Trump to his successor, President Biden, in spite of all efforts by the former to prevent that from happening:
The country had been tested. A violent threat to the peaceful transfer of power had been met and defeated. The Capitol stood strong on its foundation. The Constitution held. On that Inauguration Day, democracy prevailed. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/08/04/trump-indictments-campaign-test-democracy/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_opinions&utm_campaign=wp_opinions)
But King notes that American democracy again will be tested as the former president runs for reelection while under multiple indictments for criminal activity. "Trump’s not-guilty pleas only add to this historic moment of crisis. The wheels of justice will now get road-tested in a court of law. As they should be."
In an opinion column the Editorial Board of The New York Times writes
Bedrock. It’s an apt word for a sacred responsibility of every president: to honor the peaceful transfer of power through the free and fair elections that distinguish the United States. Counting and certifying the vote, Mr. [special council Jack] Smith said [in the indictment of former President Donald Trump], “is foundational to the United States democratic process, and until 2021, had operated in a peaceful and orderly manner for more than 130 years,” since electoral counting rules were codified. Until Mr. Trump lost, at which point, the indictment makes clear, he used “dishonesty, fraud and deceit to impair, obstruct and defeat” that cornerstone of democracy. (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/02/opinion/trump-jan-6-indictment.html?campaign_id=39&emc=edit_ty_20230803&instance_id=99112&nl=opinion-today®i_id=74240569&segment_id=140987&te=1&user_id=86b0d837dd357b2a6e0e749321f6ed7f)
Following the Constitutional Convention of 1787, Dr. James McHenry wrote that a lady asked Benjamin Franklin: "Well, Doctor, what have we got—a Republic or a Monarchy?" McHenry recorded Franklin's reply: "A Republic, if you can keep it." A similar question might be posed as to the form of public policy decision making in the American republic—authoritarian or democratic?—the response being "Democratic, if democracy is respected by its citizens."
In January 1933, German President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Adolph Hitler to be Chancellor of Germany. In August 1934, Hitler was elected President of Germany in a democratic process; subsequently he was able to manipulate the democratic process to achieve authoritarian (dictatorial) control of Germany and launch a world war. It remains to be seen whether Americans respect its democratic processes sufficiently to avert the advent of authoritarian control (fascism) in the United States of America with the election of Donald J. Trump to a second term as President.
The crucial question is whether democracy is sufficiently sacred to enough of the citizens of the United States to warrant its defense and preservation in the court cases that will ensue.
As reported by New York Times columnist David French, Thomas Kidd, a church history professor at Baylor, says that Christian nationalism is an emotional or spiritual phenomenon rather than an intellectual or theological process:
“Actual Christian nationalism,” Kidd argues, “is more a visceral reaction than a rationally chosen stance.” He’s right. Essays and books about philosophy and theology are important for determining the ultimate health of the church, but on the ground or in the pews? They’re much less important than emotion, prophecy and spiritualism. ....
... arguments over the proper balance between order and liberty are helpless in the face of prophecies, like the declarations from Christian “apostles” that Donald Trump is God’s appointed leader, destined to save the nation from destruction. ....
That’s why the Trump fever won’t break. That’s why even the most biblically based arguments against Trump fall on deaf ears. That’s why the very act of Christian opposition to Trump is often seen as a grave betrayal of Christ himself.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/01/opinion/christian-nationalism-trump-renew-america.html?campaign_id=39&emc=edit_ty_20231002&instance_id=104192&nl=opinion-today®i_id=74240569&segment_id=146264&te=1&user_id=86b0d837dd357b2a6e0e749321f6ed7f
So, if David French is right, it appears that the 2024 presidential election will be a contest between Americans who regard the Constitution and its implied preference for republican governance and democratic choice as sacred, and those who hold an authoritarian and fascist belief that Trump is God's appointed leader to save America from destruction.
How serious is this matter? Washington Post columnist Amber Phillips writes in the "The 5-Minute Fix" newsletter on October 4, 2023, that "people who study systems of government ... say that the American system is not representative enough or responsive enough and that as the Jan. 6 insurrection showed, it can be bent — and possibly broken. They warn that Americans’ attachment to democracy is actually weak and that it may be only a matter of time before enough people are persuaded that there is another form of government that resonates with them." The alarming possibility is that another form of government might be Trumpian fascism.
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26. Nation States and Nations of People
My understanding of the situation in Israel in October 2023 accords with the view expressed by E.J. Dionne. Jr., in a Washington Post column dated 15 October 2023:
It’s true that years of right-wing governance in Israel, the spread of settlements on the West Bank and the assault on democracy by the Netanyahu government have altered the balance of forces on the left. Older liberals such as Biden (and, yes, I’m in that camp) have an unshakable and ingrained sympathy for the survival of a Jewish homeland in Israel, while also empathizing with the injustices and suffering that Palestinians confront. We continue to support an increasingly distant two-state solution precisely because we want the Jewish homeland to be democratic and we want Palestinians to have a democratic government of their own. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/10/15/israel-palestine-hamas-terrorism-sympathy/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_opinions&utm_campaign=wp_opinions)
The following is my brief outline of the ethnographic and political history of Israel:
The word "nation" may refer to a political entity, e.g., the nation of the United States of America. But the word may also refer to a demographic or ethnographic entity, a nation of people, e.g., the people of ancient Israel.
According to the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Jewish Tanach (a reorganized version of which is known to Christians as "The Old Testament"), both Jews and Palestinians are descendants of the founding father Abraham. In an ancestral sense they are cousins. According to the Pentateuch book of Genesis, around twenty centuries Before the Common Era (BCE), Abraham was directed by his god to emigrate with his family from Mesopotamia to the Levant, a region of west Asia east of the Mediterranean Sea.
Descendants of Abraham lived in the Levant, but they did not claim political ownership of it prior to the migration of some of Abraham's descendants to Egypt to escape drought and famine. Those immigrants at first were regarded as "guest workers" in Egypt, but eventually they became enslaved to the Egyptian autocracy and were known as Israelites (after Abraham's grandson, Jacob, renamed "Israel").
An Israelite leader, Moses, claiming to have been directed by the Israelite god El, arose to demand that the Israelites be released from captivity by the Egyptian pharaoh. Pharoah eventually released them after Egypt suffered a number of calamities ascribed to El.
Moses led the released Israelites through the Sinai peninsula and desert for an extended period, reputed in the Pentateuch to be 40 years, to a land promised to them by El at the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea. During the wandering period, the god El reintroduced himself as "Yahweh," and the Israelites began to regard themselves as Yahweh's chosen people. It is likely that other tribal peoples also regarded themselves as their gods' chosen peoples.
On the pretext that Yahweh instructed them to do so, Israelite tribes (a nation of people descended from Abraham) invaded the "promised land," committed genocide and expulsion to rid the land of its non-Israelite inhabitants, and established the first nation-state of Israel. But the genocide and expulsion failed to eliminate all of the former inhabitants who continued to reside in the region intermingled with Israelites. This suggests that the narration of the Tanach over the course of a couple of millennia may have created a cover story to justify the invasion, genocide, and expulsion committed by the Israelites in the Promised Land. In this interpretation, the Israelites claimed license from their god to invade and commit genocide.
A Babylonian invasion of the Levant in the 6th century BCE resulted in the exile of elites from the Israelite nation-state to become captives in Babylon and thus to end the first Israelite nation-state. A subsequent invasion of Babylon by Persia resulted in release of the exiled Israelites, many of whom (but not all) returned to the former Israelite land to find that it was populated both by Israelites who had not been exiled and by non-Israelite descendants of Abraham.
Over a couple of millennia, both Israelite and non-Israelite descendants of Abraham resided in the Levant region on more-or-less peaceful terms vis-a-vis one another. During this time the region was occupied and governed as a province by Macedonian, Persian, and Roman empires.
The Roman Empire itself was overrun by Vandal hordes and failed by the 4th century of the Common Era (CE). During the Roman occupation, the Israelites became known as "Jews" after one of Jacob's sons, Judah, from whom many of the Israelites had descended. The region became known as Judea, a province that the Romans called "Palestine."
During the 8th century CE, an Arabian descendant of Abraham named Mohammad became a prophet of the god called "Allah" in Arabic (El in Hebrew). Mohammad's sayings were recorded as the Qu'ran which became regarded as the sacred text of a new religion called Islam. Most of the non-Jewish residents of Palestine became Moslem (or Muslim) adherents of Islam.
Jews and Moslems continued to reside in Palestine without serious conflict until the end of World War II. With the expiration of the British Mandate (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandate_for_Palestine), Zionist advocates of a Jewish homeland proclaimed the nation-state of Israel on 14 May 1948. This set in motion a wave of immigration of Jews from many countries to the new Jewish homeland. The new state of Israel undertook the expulsion of Palestinians for which no nation-state was proclaimed. Several thousand Palestinians were massacred by the Israelis during the expulsion process. The expelled Palestinians were pushed into the west bank of the Jordan River and Gaza along the Mediterranean coast at the Sinai Peninsula. This episode appears to be a second effort to exercise a divine license to invade, commit genocide, and expel non-Jews from what has become known as "The Holy Land."
A Wikipedia summary of the recent political history of Israel follows:
The latter half of the 20th century saw a series of further conflicts between Israel and its neighbouring Arab nations. In 1967, the Six-Day War erupted; in its aftermath, Israel captured and occupied the Golan Heights from Syria, the West Bank from Jordan, and the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt. In 1973, the Yom Kippur War began with an attack by Egypt on the Israeli-occupied Sinai Peninsula. In 1979 the Egypt–Israel peace treaty was signed, based on the Camp David Accords. In 1993, Israel signed the Oslo I Accord with the Palestine Liberation Organization, which was followed by the establishment of the Palestinian National Authority. In 1994, the Israel–Jordan peace treaty was signed. Despite efforts to finalize the peace agreement, the conflict continues to play a major role in Israeli and international political, social, and economic life. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Israel_(1948%E2%80%93present))
Two Palestinian political parties emerged, Hezbollah in Syria and Lebanon that now dominates the Palestinian National Authority in the West Bank, and Hamas which has become a terrorist organization in the Gaza Strip. Hezbollah has been willing to consider a two-state solution, but Hamas has taken its ultimate goal to be the complete elimination of Israel.
During the early 21st century CE, Israeli politics drifted from center-left to far right, presently (October 2023) dominated by the Likud Party and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Right-leaning Israeli governments encouraged Israeli settlements in the West Bank and imposed inhumane conditions on the Palestinians living in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. These conditions erupted in the Hamas invasion and terrorism of southern Israel in October 2023, followed by an Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip intended to eliminate Hamas.
Israelis and their Israelite ancestors now have twice exercised their divine license to invade the Levant, in both cases to find non-Jews and non-Jewish descendants of Abraham residing there. So the questions remain as to whom the land belongs and whether occupants of any particular ethnicity have a right to expel occupants of different ethnicities or even ancestral cousins.
The Israeli-Palestinian situation in the Levant is reminiscent of the "Trail of Tears" in which ethnic Indian tribal peoples were expelled from their ancestral lands by the government of the United States and forced to travel to designated tribal territory in what today is the state of Oklahoma. The former Indian lands in the Southeast of the United States now are occupied by descendants of the European immigrants who invaded the land.
27. Deity and the Universe
Psalm 8:1. O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth. 3. When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and stars, which you have set in place, 4. what is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him? (NIV)
The New York Times' "Beginner's Guide to the James Webb Space Telescope" describes what the telescope is revealing about the universe.
The [James Webb] telescope is an engineering marvel: Its massive mirror makes it possible to collect light from the faintest objects. It has multiple ways of blocking and dissecting that light, giving us detailed portraits of distant galaxies and close neighbors alike.
....
Webb helps us know but also to “unknow”: It gives us stunning new discoveries while simultaneously challenging us to rethink and rebuild our understanding of the past. (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/11/05/magazine/james-webb-space-telescope.html?unlocked_article_code=1.8kw.jv89.i66QDSamsbbw&smid=url-share)
And now [October 2023] the European Space Agency's new Euclid telescope is beginning to send images as it is being prepared to map the universe (or one-third of it).
Launched in July, Euclid is on a quest to map a third of the extragalactic sky and to reveal how the mysterious influences of dark matter and dark energy have shaped the structure of the universe. The new images are just a taste of what scientists expect the space telescope to achieve.
(https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/07/science/euclid-telescope-photos.html?unlocked_article_code=1.80w.EJud.bQp3GaKI5wGQ&smid=url-share)
The images captured by the Webb and Euclid telescopes are of light that has traveled to us over billions of years. The telescopes give humans the ability "to look back" toward the initiation of the universe, however it happened, but this conveys only a hint of the magnitude of the universe.
The Webb and Euclid telescopes' discoveries surely have implications for theology. The images coming from the telescopes are making me ever more aware of how inadequate and archaic are our concepts of deity. Through the ages humans have personified deity by imputing human characteristics which then enabled them to claim that humans were created in the image of the deity (Genesis 1:26). In William Shakespear's play A Midsummer Night's Dream, the fairy Puck's exclamation would be an apt comment on the imputation process: "Lord, what fools these mortals be!"
In 1953 Anglican clergyman J.B. Phillips wrote a book that became very popular: Your God is Too Small. Here is the Amazon description of Phillips' book:
Your God is Too Small is a groundbreaking work of faith, which challenges the constraints of traditional religion. In his discussion of God, author J.B. Phillips encourages Christians to redefine their understanding of a creator without labels or earthly constraints and instead search for a meaningful concept of God. Phillips explains that the trouble facing many of us today is that we have not found a God big enough for our modern needs. (https://www.amazon.com/Your-God-Too-Small-Believers/dp/0743255097)
"Webb helps us know but also to 'unknow.'" The idea of a god may have served a useful purpose for pre-modern and pre-scientific humans who needed attributions of natural phenomena that they did not understand. As societies became more scientifically knowledgeable and sophisticated and thus less in need of mystical ascriptions of natural phenomena, their deity concepts needed to change. But theological change is unlikely to occur in a religious establishment that is heavily invested in the ancient theologies. Ancient ideas of God that humans continue to worship to this day still are too small.
I was raised as a Christian, a Protestant, a Baptist. During my early life I was indoctrinated with classical Christian theology. I still am a member of a Baptist church, but my perspectives on theology, religion, and church have changed. I am reminded of verse 11 in Chapter 13 of the Christian New Testament book of 1 Corinthians: "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 the ways of childhood behind me." (NIV)
I now am an old man of 80+ years. As I contemplate in wonder and awe the vastness and majesty of the universe as revealed in the Webb and Euclid images, I find myself drawn to the concept of pantheism in which God is perceived to be coincident with the universe, or the universe is a manifestation of God.
The idea of pantheism is not new. Although the term did not yet exist, the concept was articulated by philosopher Baruch Spinoza in this book Ethics, published posthumously in 1677. Marcus Borg, in his 1998 book The God We Never Knew: Beyond Dogmatic Religion to a More Authentic Contemporary Faith (Harper Collins), surveys various theologies including pantheism and a variant, panentheism. In pantheism, the deity is perceived to be coincident with the universe or to be omnipresent in the universe (imminent). Borg advocates for panentheism in which the deity is perceived to exist apart from the universe as creator and sustainer but also may be present in and engage with the universe (transcendent).
In the concluding chapter of his book God: A Human History (Random House, 2017), Reza Aslan says that he arrived at pantheism through Sufism: "In its simplest form pantheism is the belief that God and the universe are one and the same — that nothing exists outside of God’s necessary existence." Aslan says that as a Sufi he worships "...a god with no material form; a god who is pure existence, without name, essence, or personality."
Although I do not subscribe to other tenets of Sufism, I find Aslan's perceptions of deity and pantheism to comport with what I am coming to understand about deity and the universe. I now might call myself a post-Christian pantheist.
As I finish this essay, I offer as final prayer the lyrics of the first stanza and refrain of the great hymn popularized in the Billy Graham Crusades by George Beverly Shea, How Great Thou Art:
O Lord my God, When I in awesome wonder,
Consider all the worlds Thy Hands have made;
I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder,
Thy power throughout the universe displayed.
Then sings my soul, My Saviour God, to Thee,
How great Thou art, How great Thou art.
Then sings my soul, My Saviour God, to Thee,
How great Thou art, How great Thou art!
28. Pantheism Issues
As avowed in Essay 27, I have viewed with wonder and awe the images being captured by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope* and the European Space Agency's Euclid telescope**.
The wonder and awe that I have experienced could be a purely secular response that is commensurate with the atheist belief that no deity exists. I suspect that most physicists and astronomers would avoid consideration of any theological angle, but I feel that these images must have implications for theism, i.e., belief in the existence of deity.
On the chance that a deity actually does exist, the vastness and majesty of the universe revealed by the Webb and Euclid images have drawn my personal theology toward the concept of pantheism, i.e., belief that the universe is God, or God is the universe, or the universe is a manifestation of God.
But there are some pantheistic-related issues with which I still am wrestling. What might it mean, in Reza Aslan's words, to "... worship a god with no material form; a god who is pure existence, without name, essence, or personality" (God: A Human History, Random House, 2017). What does "worship" actually entail? And, more fundamentally, why do humans worship deities? Why do they pray to deities?
Worship
First, what is worship? I distinguish between internal and external worship modes. Internal worship occurs with personal acknowledgement, reverence, and veneration of a deity. It also entails intimate communion with the deity by way of listening, hearing, and private communication (prayer) with the deity. External worship takes the forms of public prayer, public statements of acknowledgement and praise of the deity, participation in collective worship events, and communication with and to others on behalf of the deity.
External worship may become audacious and possibly blasphemous if the proclaimer purports to speak for the deity or assert the deity's intents and wishes upon the pretext that the deity has revealed those things to the proclaimer. I believe internal worship modes to be authentic; I suspect that many external worship events are scripted to be heard by human audiences rather than by deity. And all too often they entail directions to the deity rather than requests of the deity.
Why do humans engage in deity worship? An economist imagines that an economic principle may apply here. Virtually all ancient theologies entail some form of a quid-pro-quo ("this-for-that") relationship, i.e., humans offer worship to a deity in exchange for whatever they want from the deity, whether physical benefits in this life, prevention of negative effects in the natural or human environments, averting the effects of a deity's perceived wrath, or admission to a heavenly afterlife. Without the possibility of quid-pro-quo exchanges, why should humans expect a pantheistic deity to engage in interventions on behalf of the humans? I can only hope that the god of the universe is panentheistic in engaging with the universe and its occupants, but in my limited experience, I cannot confirm that God intervenes in the functioning of the universe.
Discounting
If the god of the universe indeed is a panentheistic deity, there may occur a lapse of time between the offer of worship to the deity and the receipt of a benefit that has been asked of the deity. The center-piece of Christian theology that prompts worship of God by a believer is the promise of salvation to a heavenly afterlife once the physical life of the believer comes to an end. Worship occurs in the present, but the fulfillment of such a promise would be a future event for most humans with average expected longevity. In other essays I have expressed skepticism that an afterlife is a possibility. Whether an afterlife is a real possibility (or not), humans tend to discount the value of any future eventuality. Another economic principle may apply here: the present value of an expected future event is implicitly discounted in the mind of a normal human to reflect the remoteness of the future event.
Discounting may be illustrated with some simple examples using the discount formula [1 / (1 + r)] in which r is an annual discount rate. At a discount rate of 5 percent, the present value of a million dollars expected a year from now would be less than a million dollars today, calculated as [1 / (1 + 0.05)] x $1,000,000 = $952,381. At a higher discount rate of 10 percent, the present value of a million dollars expected a year from now would be even less, calculated as [1 / (1 + 0.10)] x $1,000,000 = $909,091. At a very high discount rate of 95 percent, the present value of a million dollars expected a year from now would be little more than half a million dollars, calculated as [1 / (1 + 0.95)] x $1,000,000 = $512,821. If the discount rate were zero, the present value of a million dollars expected a year from now would be the same amount (undiscounted) as it is today, calculated as [1 / (1 + 0.0)] x $1,000,000 = $1,000,000.
The size of the implicit discount rate that believers apply to the hope for admission to a heavenly afterlife likely varies with each person's expected death time horizon. A young person not expecting to expire in the near future may implicitly apply a high discount rate, say 95 percent (r = 0.95), to the expectation of admission to a heavenly afterlife some decades in the future. This implies that the promise of an afterlife may mean little to a young person. But death is a certainty for everyone who has lived. As a person ages and gets ever nearer to their expected death time horizon, the implicit discount rate likely decreases toward zero. This means that the expectation and hope of a heavenly afterlife reaches its maximum present value just before the expected death. This suggests that the hope for admission to a heavenly afterlife may mean far more to elderly people than to young people.
Even if afterlife doesn't exist, the discount rate idea may apply to the present value of anything expected in the future, including life itself and even death. Young people who implicitly apply high discount rates to their own time horizons are more likely to be willing to enlist in the military during a time of active combat than are older people who apply lower discount rates to their time horizons. The discount rate idea may apply to death as well. A young person not expecting death for many years may implicitly apply a high discount rate to their expected death time horizon and be willing to engage in risky activities in the present. Older people are likely to apply lower discount rates to their expected death time horizons, and thus to try to minimize exposure to risky activities.
Sacredness
A problem with a pantheistic theology is that the presumed coincidence of deity with the universe implies the sacredness of the entire universe. But if everything in the universe is sacred, there can be no basis for humans to identify the non-sacred, i.e., the secular. This is like the distinction between good and bad: without instances of bad there is no way to identify what is good. Judgments of good and bad are purely human intellectual and emotional constructs that pertain only to human life on the earth. The greater universe is not subject to judgments of good and bad. It is only humans who judge the existence of bad people, people who do bad things, and bad things that happen.
In similar vein, the universe is not subject to human identifications of sacred and secular. Sacred and secular are purely human intellectual constructs that pertain only to human life on earth. So, how can such concepts be reconciled with the pantheistic perception of a universe that is sacred? The sacredness of the universe would seem not to preclude the existence of bad humans (who engage in criminal behavior), bad individual human behavior (theft, fraud, murder), or bad collective human behavior (despoiling the environment of the earth).
Pandeism
In a variant of pantheism, pandeism, the creator deity is perceived to have become the universe (imminent), ceasing to exist as a separate entity after the creation process. The deistic aspect implies that the deity no longer intervenes in the universe (ceases transcendence) but leaves it to "run itself" by the laws established in the creation process. The behavior of a post-creation pandeistic universe (deity not active even though present) thus would approximate the non-existence of deity as perceived by atheists. Pandeism would seem to be ruled out by Webb and Euclid telescope images which reveal that universe change is on-going, whether by natural processes or conducted by a creator deity.
Diversity
Pandeism may imply creationism, i.e., belief that deity established diversity during the process of creation of the universe, but then allowed or caused no further change ("one and done"). Creationism does not appear to be able to explain on-going change in the universe over 13+ billion years as implied in Webb and Euclid telescope images.
In 1859 Charles Darwin published a theory of evolution (On the Origin of Species) to counter the creationist explanation of diversity. Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection was based on observations of the traits and characteristics that he observed during his voyage on the ship Beagle (1832-1835). As the theory of evolution developed over the past century and a half, a standard explanation of how animals and plants developed variety and complexity emerged: small genetic mutations accumulate over time (billions of years) to produce innovations such as eyes and wings.
I am not favorably disposed toward the creationist theory of diversity. I am inclined toward the Darwinian contention that the existing range of diversity which we observe today in nature has been the result of evolution, mutations, and natural selection over billions of years following the Big Bang. The modern theory of evolution might be compatible with panentheism if evolution is a process that is enabled and guided by deity. In his book Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea (HarperCollins. EPub Edition 2010, p. 414), Carl Zimmer makes a strong case for evolution over creationism; but he also says that
God and evolution are not mutually exclusive. Evolution is a scientific phenomenon, one that scientists can study because it is observable and predictable. But digging up fossils does not disprove the existence of God or a higher purpose for the universe. That is beyond science’s power.
Imputation
It has occurred to me that the anthropomorphic imputation of human characteristics to a deity may in fact be blasphemous to the deity if indeed one exists. Who are we humans to speculate on the characteristics of a deity? It is arrogant if not blasphemous for humans to try to describe deity, to purport to speak for a deity, or to declare the will of a deity or what a deity wants from humans on this planetary spec in the vastness of the universe.
So, perhaps I have reached the end of my quest to understand deity. With wonder and awe, I acknowledge the vastness of the universe, its sacredness, and its coextensiveness with deity. I should quit speculating on the characteristics of deity or what deity may want from me or any other humans. I shall leave it to deity, if one exists, to let me know.
*(https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/11/05/magazine/james-webb-space-telescope.html?unlocked_article_code=1.8kw.jv89.i66QDSamsbbw&smid=url-share)
**(https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/07/science/euclid-telescope-photos.html?unlocked_article_code=1.80w.EJud.bQp3GaKI5wGQ&smid=url-share).
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