Sources of Evil

Evil and Hope, part 1

I have my doubts about whether there is such a thing as evil. There is certainly harm. People do things that harm other people, that harm living beings and this earth. People are not all sunshine and light. Harm happens.

How does it happen? The source of harm, I’m going to say, is one of two general categories: either there’s a medical condition, or there’s a lack of skills.

First, the medical conditions.

Sometimes there’s mental illness that can cause a person to harm themselves and others. Antisocial Personality Disorder is now the preferred term for what we used to call psychopaths and sociopaths. People with antisocial personality disorder feel the basic emotions: anger, fear, sadness, disgust, surprise, joy, acceptance, anticipation. They do not feel the social emotions: love, guilt, shame, and remorse.

Some people are born this way: they are genetically incapable of those social emotions. Other people are born a little weak in these areas, but with the right kind of environment they can build up a capacity for the social emotions – or, with the wrong kind of environment, they can lose what capacity they had for them.

People with antisocial personality disorder show no regard for right and wrong, ignore the rights and feelings of others, tend to antagonize, manipulate or treat others harshly or with callous indifference. Without the guidance we get from guilt, shame, and remorse, and without feeling the bonds of love connecting us to others, people with antisocial personality disorder can do terrible harm.

This fits the picture of “evil,” but I don’t think it helps us any to call that evil. We need to engage with the issue to find the best treatment and social response, and labeling it “evil” doesn’t help us do that.

Of course, I need to stress that most individuals with serious mental illness are not dangerous. At the same time, there are dangerous people, and sometimes psychosis is what makes them dangerous. Schizophrenia can sometimes cause violent and harmful behavior. Bipolar disorder is usually nonviolent, but is associated with a slightly increased risk of violence.

There are a lot of ways things can go wrong with the brain.

Charles Whitman was a twenty-five-year-old student at the University of Texas in 1966 when, one August day, he climbed up the UT Tower to the observation deck, lugging with him a footlocker full of guns and ammunition. At the top, he killed a receptionist with the butt of his rifle. Two families of tourists came up the stairwell. He shot them, and then he began to fire at people below. He shot 49 people before being killed by the police. Earlier that morning Whitman had murdered his mother and stabbed his wife to death in her sleep.

An autopsy revealed that

“Whitman’s brain harbored a tumor the diameter of a nickel. This tumor, called a glioblastoma, had blossomed from beneath a structure called the thalamus, impinged on the hypothalamus, and compressed a third region called the amygdala.” (David Eagleman, "The Brain on Trial, Atlantic Monthly, 2011 Jul/Aug)

When those areas are impinged upon it can lead to very aggressive behavior, and overpowering impulses to violence and inability to regulate emotions in the normal way.

Whitman sensed what was happening to him, but couldn’t stop it. The note he composed the evening before his death related:

“I talked with a Doctor once for about two hours and tried to convey to him my fears that I felt [overcome by] overwhelming violent impulses. After one session, I never saw the Doctor again, and since then I have been fighting my mental turmoil alone, and seemingly to no avail.”

Charles Whitman had been, by all indications, a fine, bright upstanding young man. And then this tumor made him crazy violent. In that final note, he wrote:

“I don’t really understand myself these days. I am supposed to be an average reasonable and intelligent young man. However, lately (I can’t recall when it started) I have been a victim of many unusual and irrational thoughts. It was after much thought that I decided to kill my wife, Kathy, tonight... I love her dearly, and she has been as fine a wife to me as any man could ever hope to have. I cannot rationa[l]ly pinpoint any specific reason for doing this...”

Wow.

That sure sounds like evil, doesn’t it? -- chilling in its premeditation, and the calm, deliberate way he prepares to kill the woman he loves. But Charles Whitman did not suffer from a spiritual condition called evil. He suffered from a medical condition called glioblastoma.

* * *
This is part 1 of 2 of "Evil and Hope"
See also
Part 2: Evil as Lack of Skill

The Prophets and the Buddha

On Being a UU Buddhist, part 3

I am not just a Buddhist. I am a Unitarian Universalist and a Buddhist. I was born and raised Unitarian Universalist for 40 years before starting Buddhist practice. And all the while I was becoming Buddhist I was also becoming more UU than ever. I was studying our history, our polity, our theology, our congregational life -- and loving us more and more.

As a Unitarian Universalist, I learned to appreciate the Hebrew scriptures and Christian gospels, understanding when and how to treat them as allegorical, as metaphors. Fiction, yes, but like all good fiction, it tells us something true. I brought that interpretive felicity to Buddhism as well. Karma and reincarnation, for me, are metaphors for reminding us that our actions do have effects and that what we make of this life influences lives to come – not just one “next life,” I would say, but all lives to come. Every time a child is born, we are reincarnated in that child – every one of us in every child.

The thing that Buddhism doesn’t have, that none of the Eastern religions have, the thing that is vital to my faith, and the reason Buddhism alone is insufficient for me, is the prophetic tradition – the tradition of attention to social justice as an inseparable part of faith. My religious orientation is toward justice, fairness, equity. As Unitarian Universalists, our second principle is "justice, equity, and compassion." The Buddhist tradition has a lot to say about compassion; very little about justice and equity. It’s great on lovingkindness, and has very helpful practices for cultivating equanimity, which social justice activists require to ground and sustain their work, but there is very little there in the way of a tradition of engaging with the question of how society ought to be set up, what arrangement of powers and authorities would be fair and reasonable.

This has begun to change. In recent decades, there's been a lot of work developing "Socially Engaged Buddhism." But in the ancient texts of Buddhism, what “speaking truth to power” looked like was that sometimes a king would take an interest in his spiritual development and would come seeking the Buddha’s spiritual teaching.

In lands where, for millennia, the Emperor was simply the ultimate and unquestionable authority, the idea that your spiritual development also called for you to engage in questions of public policy just never arose. Western civilization, by contrast, took its shape from the interaction between two powerful and enduring traditions – call them Athens and Jerusalem.

In the millennium before the Common Era began, the Greeks developed a limited form of democracy. Along with it came public discourse about what was right and fair for the state to do. And the Israelites developed a society with a place for the prophets. The prophets of the Hebrew Bible – Ezekiel, Jeremiah, Isaiah, Amos, Hosea, and others – had a recognized role which even the king felt compelled to respect. The prophets were supposedly the mouths of God. In Deuteronomy, the Creator says,

“I will put My words in his mouth, and he shall speak unto them all that I shall command him."

Utilizing the protections of a legitimate, recognized social role, the prophets criticized their government, criticized the powerful. Our idea of speaking truth to power goes back to those prophets.

You might recall that the prophets were always warning that the wrath of God was going to befall the people of Israel for straying from the divine law. What is sometimes forgotten is that the specific divine law from which the prophets were haranguing Israel for departing was divine law about treating people fairly and taking care of the poor. Isaiah said,

“What do you mean by crushing my people, and grinding down the poor?”

He denounced judges who took bribes and failed to give proper justice in cases involving the orphan and the widow. Amos proclaimed divine judgment upon those who

“sell the righteous for silver, and the needy for a pair of sandals.”

Says Biblical scholar D.N. Premnath:

“One thing we learn from the prophets is that poverty or injustice is no accident. They knew exactly what the causes were and who was responsible for it. They did not speak in abstraction. They knew what the oppression/injustice was, and who the oppressors and oppressed were.”

Unitarian theologian James Luther Adams recognized the enduring importance of the prophetic tradition for Unitarians:

“Old Testament prophetism institutionalized dissent and criticism and thus initiated the separation of powers. The prophets said that the culture was not under the control of centralized power; viable culture requires the institutionalization of dissent – in other words, the freedom to criticize the powers that be.”

Out of Jerusalem going back 3,000 years, here’s this tradition of dissent, of appealing to an authority greater than the king to counterbalance the king’s power. Out of Athens, going back 2500 years, we have this tradition of public discourse, citizens trying to reason with each other to reach consensus, or, at least, majority agreement on what should be done.

Eastern Asia had neither of those traditions. The Emperor’s power of decree was hindered by no channel of dissent recognized as legitimate and no need to persuade anyone with reasons.

Being a Unitarian Universalist Buddhist means bringing together the practice and insight of the Buddhist tradition and the social commitments originating from ancient Athens and Jerusalem. Unitarian Universalism and Buddhism call my name, and I call theirs.

As a Buddhist, I sit. As a Unitarian Universalist, I stand.

What’s calling your name?

* * *
This is part 3 of 3 of "On Being a UU Buddhist"
See also
Part 1: A Path to Buddha
Part 2: Get a Spiritual Practice, They Said

Get a Spiritual Practice, They Said

On Being a UU Buddhist, part 2

I began divinity school at United Theological Seminary in Minneapolis, because, that year, LoraKim and I were living in Rochester, Minnesota where she was doing her ministerial internship. As per the procedure that was in place at that time, after the first year of seminary, I drove over to Chicago to be interviewed by the Midwest Regional Subcommittee on Candidacy. These regional subcommittees have since been discontinued. They were created to try to head off the problem of too many people who were just not cut out for ministry investing years of their life in seminary education, accumulating debt. The subcommittee’s job was to say, either, “Yes, we see a prospective minister here,” or “We’re concerned that that you’re pursuing a career path that’s not going to work out for you.”

As you can imagine, it’s kind of a nerve-wracking deal.

The intellectual strategy that served me just fine when I was orally defending my thesis was not what they wanted to see. At one point they asked me: “Do you have a spiritual practice?”

Before starting seminary, I had spent two years as the congregational facilitator and preacher for the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Clarksville, Tennessee. Before that, I'd served as a president of our Fellowship in Waco, Texas, as Vice President of our church in Charlottesville, Virginia and had worked as the church secretary for a year at our Nashville, Tennessee church. But did I have a spiritual practice?

I was a born-and-raised Unitarian Universalist. I had a Ph.D. I'd been a philosophy professor. I could debate about metaphysics, metaethics, metatheology, poststructuralism, postindustrialism, and postmodernism. If it was meta-, or post-, I was all over it. But did I have a spiritual practice?

Well, no, I didn't.

“Get a spiritual practice,” the committee told me. “And come back to see us again in a year.”

On the five-and-a-half-hour drive from Chicago back home to Rochester, it became clear to me what practice I would try, at least for starters.

I liked what the Buddhists said. Let me try practicing what the Buddhists practice. The idea of meditation seemed like a good one. The time had come, it seemed, actually do it.

I began the way I usually begin new things: I got a book. It told me about mindfulness, finding a posture for stillness, and what to do with my mind while being still. And what to do when my mind wandered off from doing what I had told it to do.

I started with fifteen minutes a day, and after a couple months was up to 30 minutes each morning of sitting meditation. I started going to weekly meditation group meetings and Vipassan (insight) meditation classes.

In 2002, LoraKim and I moved to El Paso, and I started exploring Zen. I had heard that there was a UU minister named James Ford who was also a Zen master. I wrote to Rev. Ford and asked his advice. He wrote back and said: “There are two times to visit many masters: at the beginning of your training, and at the end.” He listed some I could visit, and his strongest recommendation was for Ruben Habito, a Filipino former Jesuit priest teaching comparative religion at Perkins Theological School in Dallas. I visited with, and meditated with, and chanted with, and absorbed the dharma talks of Zen teachers in Las Cruces, and Tucson, and Albuquerque, and Austin, before finally going to see Ruben in Dallas. For the next 10 years, he was my Zen teacher.

Since 2001, I’ve been sitting daily, going to group meditation weekly, and going to intensive meditation retreats a few times a year. After a few years, I sewed a rakusu – a patchwork apron-like garment that symbolizes the traditional robes of Buddhist monastics – and went through a jukai ceremony in which I formally received the Buddhist precepts and was given a Dharma name: "Hotetsu." It’s basically a confirmation ritual. I was confirmed as a Zen Buddhist in 2007.

In the Buddha-Dharma, I hear recurrent echoes of the themes of the pragmatist philosophy I studied. Attachment to your picture of reality doesn’t help. Upaya (skillful means) does. Concepts are empty, yet useful within a context of a particular purpose. All things are impermanent, including the list of sentences that humans, at any given time, commend as ‘true.’ Things do not have essences or permanent, distinct identities, but are a continually shifting networks of relationships – and this includes the self. My favorite philosophy professor, Richard Rorty, taught about “radical contingency.” I discovered the Buddha also taught about this, calling it “interdependent co-origination.”

One difference, though, was that the pragmatists emphasized language and purpose. Buddhism emphasized nonlinguistic and nonpurposive presence. The path to this mindful presence is one step at a time. Language and purpose keep popping up – it’s how we were made. Notice and see through the linguistic description and the purpose it serves. Then the next one, then the next, then the next. Just keep at it. This is the path.

My parents raised me with one central value: know stuff. Now my spiritual practice is not knowing: opening myself to let each thing present itself afresh without burying it under the load of all those concepts I worked so long to acquire.

* * *
This is part 2 of 3 of "On Being a UU Buddhist"
See also
Part 1: A Path to Buddha
Part 3: The Prophets and the Buddha

A Path to Buddha

On Being a UU Buddhist, part 1

Hush, Hush. Somebody’s callin' my name.
Oh, Hush. Hush. Somebody’s callin' my name.
Hush. Hush. Somebody’s callin' my name,
Oh, my Lord, Oh, my Lord, what shall I do?
- Choir Anthem, tradidtional

What’s calling your name? What labels claim you, and do you claim? Labels can be problematic -- but they are also handy for giving shape to who we are, and how we represent ourselves to others and to ourselves. I claim the label "Unitarian Universalist," and "Buddhist." Sometimes I claim the label, "humanist." I've been called a Christian -- very rarely -- and while I'm not at pains to deny that label, it's not one that I claim for myself. There are also labels I don't really want -- like "white" -- but it's important to acknowledge. We won't get to a post-racist society by pretending we already are there. It's important that those of us who have been privileged own up to our privilege. Labels sometimes chafe, and they are sometimes diminishing or dismissive, but they can also help us know who we are.

My parents were college professors. Mom’s PhD was in physical chemistry, and she taught physics and chemistry. Dad’s field was English. His specialty was 18th-century British Literature: “The Age of Reason.” As their first-born, I imbibed their core value: know stuff. Knowledge is good. I remember that in the house we lived in when I was in 2nd and 3rd grade, Dad had a plaque over his desk, quoting Plato:

“There is only one good, knowledge; only one evil, ignorance.”

My parents were rationalist, humanist, academics. I grew up and went into the family business: being a rationalist, humanist, academic. I became a philosophy professor.

Along the way, little bits of an Eastern perspective slipped in. There was some exposure to it in my RE classes as I grew up a UU kid.

In eighth grade, I read Hermann Hesse’s novel, Siddhartha – and I loved it. The year was 1972. Some of the hippie types were into wisdom from the East, and I began to pick up on that vibe.

Later, as a college sophomore, I saw a copy of the Dao De Jing in the campus bookstore and bought it. Its opening lines told me:

“The Dao that can be told is not the eternal Dao.
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth.
The named is the mother of ten thousand things.”

This was not my father’s Oldsmobile – or my mother’s.

Despite these dabblings and the impress they made, my studies focused on Western philosophy. But my interest in philosophy was in deconstructing its own assumptions. Philosophical conundrums result from stretching concepts outside the contexts where those concepts make sense. I studied particularly the pragmatists and was something of an anti-philosophy philosopher.

I took a job in the religion and philosophy department at Fisk University. I was called upon occasionally to teach a “Humanities” course that included surveying the world religions. As I prepared for the Buddhism unit, I found many of the teachings eerily reminiscent of what I’d spent graduate school thinking about. In one of the sutras, the Buddha is presented with the sort of questions that philosophy and religion typically wrestle: Is the world eternal or not? Finite or infinite? Is the soul the same as the body or different? Does a person exist after death or not? The Buddha replies:

“Suppose a man were wounded by an arrow thickly smeared with poison, and his friends and companions, his kinsmen and relatives, brought a surgeon to treat him. The man would say: ‘I will not let the surgeon pull out this arrow until I know whether the man who wounded me was a noble or a Brahmin or a merchant or a worker; until I know the name and clan of the man who wounded me; whether the man who wounded me was tall or short or of middle height; was dark or brown or golden-skinned; lives in such a village or town or city; until I know whether the bow that wounded me was a long bow or a crossbow; the bowstring was fiber or reed or sinew or hemp or bark; the shaft was wild or cultivated; with what kind of feathers the shaft was fitted; with what kind of sinew the shaft was bound; whether the arrow was hoof-tipped or curved or barbed or calf-toothed or oleander. All this would still not be known to that man and meanwhile he would die.”

The sutra goes on to say that having any of these views -- that the world is eternal, not eternal, etc., -- precludes the holy life. The Buddha refuses to address any such question because it

“does not lead to disenchantment, to dispassion, to cessation, to peace, to direct knowledge, to enlightenment, to Nibbana.”

This fit nicely with my own anti-philosophy philosophy.

The rest of what Buddhism had to say made sense to me, too. Life has some hard stuff: we get old, we get sick, we die. Our reactivity against this reality makes it harder. Extremes of self-denial don’t help. Self-indulgence isn’t so helpful either. Take the middle way. That resonated for me because I’d always appreciated Aristotle’s point about the virtues being the golden mean between vicious extremes on either end.

After some years as a philosophy professor, I felt the call to Unitarian Universalist ministry. I wanted to work with congregations rather than classes because, for one thing, I was attracted to the prospect for long-term relationships. In the academy, you could be part of people’s growth and development, but then the semester ended and they all went away. In congregations, we get to keep on working together and learning together indefinitely.

Also: I really like that I don’t have to grade your papers. I was not very good at the whole paper-grading thing.

So off I went to seminary.

* * *
This is part 1 of 3 of "On Being a UU Buddhist"
See also
Part 2: Get a Spiritual Practice, They Said
Part 3: The Prophets and the Buddha

The God Life in this God World

God the Adjective, part 3

It seems to me that God as a noun splits us apart, creates tribal division.

God as a noun begs the question: what properties does this noun have? Is God loving or angry and punitive? Merciful or just? All-knowing or just very knowing? All-powerful or just very powerful? God the noun begs the question: what does this noun do? Does God intervene in human affairs daily? Or did God create the universe a while back, and is now watching it unfold, the way a child watches carefully laid-out dominos fall?

While God the noun has properties – leaving us humans to argue what those properties are -- God, the adjective is a property that we can pretty much agree on. Most of us can agree that life and the universe is awesome and sacred.

If God is a noun, then we must face the question of whether God is the sort of noun that the Catholics describe, or that the primitive Baptists, or the Eastern orthodox, or the Jews, or the Muslims, or the Hindu describe. If, for example, you posit God as an ultimate cause, then you can’t help but get stuck in conundrums like what caused God? In one form of Hinduism, the earth rests upon the back of an elephant. There’s a story of an Englishman encountering an elderly woman of this Hindu faith. What does the elephant stand on? he asked. The elephant stands on the back of a monkey, she answered. And what does the monkey stand on? The monkey stands on the back of a turtle, she replied. And what does the turtle stand on? he asked patiently. The turtle stands on the back of another turtle. “And what does that turtle…?” he started to ask. At that point the woman interrupted him. “From there on,” she said, “it’s turtles all the way down.”

See? That's the kind of conundrum you get stuck with if divine and holy are made into a noun. We get arguments about different conceptions of that noun.

“Do you believe in God?” is a question used to divide people. I believe in the adjectives, and they don’t divide.

I believe in green and growing, dark and peaceful, loving and kind, amazing and wonderful.
I believe in the beautiful and tragic quality of life.
I believe in religious qualities.
I believe in awesome, in grateful, in hopeful, in joyful.
I believe in full.
I believe in earthy.
I believe in wise, and compassionate.
I believe in sufficient: this life, this world, come what may, it is enough. It will do.

I believe in a god world: a world not of our own making that supports us and sustains us, which grounds us for the meaningful pursuit of ideals.

I believe in the god life, which can be experienced by people of any religion or none – a life of awareness, a life of attention to the interplay of forces, a life of deep sympathy with all of them even when it does come time to take a stand against some of them.

I believe in holy, for each breath is holy. I believe in sacred, for each step is sacred: we have but to be mindful and know it.

God the noun is an ultimate cause of things. God the adjective is a quality we can perceive of the flow of all the causal forces, none of them ultimate, interacting continuously. We experience those forces adjectivally: luminescent, transcendent.

I’ll close with three further illustrations of the importance of the adjectives. First, Tagore:

"Is it beyond thee to be glad with the gladness of this rhythm? To be tossed and lost and broken in the whirl of this fearful joy?"

Notice that it's the adjectives that convey the force of Tagore's words: glad, tossed, lost, broken, and fearful.

Second, the well-known e.e. cummings’ passage:

“I thank You God for most this amazing day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything which is natural which is infinite which is yes ...”

It’s the adjectives that carry the impact: amazing, leaping greenly, blue true, natural, infinite – and yes, which cummings is using as an adjective.

Finally, a parable from the Zen tradition.

A man fleeing from a tiger came to a precipice, caught hold of the root of a wild vine and swung himself down over the edge. The tiger sniffed at him from above. Trembling, the man looked down to where, far below, another tiger was waiting to eat him. Only the vine sustained him. Then some mice appeared and began gnawing at the vine. Just then, the man saw a strawberry growing near him. Grasping the vine with one hand, he plucked the strawberry with the other. How luscious and sweet it was!

Again, it’s the adjectives that carry the punch: luscious and sweet.

Our time here is short, before the mice hand us over to the tigers. All we can do is notice, notice, train ourselves to notice – notice the god quality in every luscious and sweet moment.

* * *
This is part 3 of 3 of "God the Adjective"
See also
Part 1: How We Argue About God
Part 2: Thinking God an Adjective

Thinking God an Adjective

God the Adjective, part 2

In the years after high school the issue in my mind gradually shifted from being about God to being about "God" – that is, from the ontological question about the way reality is to the semantic question about the way words are used. Might not the word “God” be used, not to make a controversial empirical claim about what is, but to draw our attention, as a good poet does, to certain qualities of existence – qualities which are not subjects about which to dispute, but are a felt reality momentarily overlooked?

It’s not about being convinced or persuaded. It’s not about believing. It’s about being reminded of what we already know deep down: that this present moment – if we truly show up for it – is so sweet and so delicious that we need words like “holy” and “divine” and “God” to help us notice it.

It’s not about what exists; it’s about the qualities of existence: is it wondrous, mysterious, beautiful, awesome? Those adjectives are the crux of the matter, and that’s why I suggest to you today that God is an adjective.

Glen Thomas Rideout’s poem, "god is no noun" is beautiful and evocative (SEE IT HERE) -- and it is dismissive of the idea of God being an adjective. The poem begins:

“God is not a noun and certainly no adjective.”

But I think Rideout overlooks that the qualities of things are more important than the things.

It doesn’t matter much whether it’s a house or a cave if it’s luxurious, comfortable, warm, cozy, affordable, and conveniently-located. It’s those adjectives that matter. It doesn’t matter what we say exists or doesn’t exist if whatever exists – existence itself -- is holy, sacred. “God” is an allusion to the quality that existence has when we are so fully present to it that we perceive divinity there.

Dewey and Bonhoeffer

Let me mention two writers – one of them who did not identify as Christian, John Dewey, and one who did, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. They both support this emphasis on the adjectival.

John Dewey said religion, the noun, didn’t do much for him. But he recognized the deep value of religious, the adjective. “Religious” referred to a kind of experience, a special quality that suffuses some experiences. You don’t have to have a religion in order to have religious experience.

The noun, religion, indicates some particular religion, and any particular religion carries a lot of particular baggage – doctrines, rituals, theologies, moral dictates. The religious quality in experience, on the other hand, requires no doctrines, rituals, or moral rules. A religious attitude “may be taken toward every object and every proposed end or ideal,” wrote Dewey.

When something feels profound, or moving, or like a revelation or an epiphany – while on a nature hike, or through involvement in some project – we might say “it was a religious experience!” We wouldn’t say it was a religion. An experience has religious quality when it results in adjustments to life’s conditions, orientation, a sense of peace and security. It might be brought about by devotion to a cause, by a passage of poetry, by meditation. The religious quality is a unifying, connecting quality. It re-orients us, brings a feeling of peace through awareness of interconnection with everything.

Writing along lines similar to Dewey was Dietrich Bonhoeffer -- a German theologian and outspoken critic of Hitler, imprisoned and eventually executed by Nazis. Bonhoeffer called for a religionless Christianity. Wrap your mind around that term: “religionless Christianity.” Bonhoffer wrote in a letter from prison:

“The New Testament must be interpreted in such a way as not to make religion a precondition of faith” (329).

Religion, he said,

“is only a garment of Christianity – and even this garment has looked very different at different times.”

I think Bonhoeffer had in mind the same idea Dewey had: that this noun, religion, denotes some set of doctrines and practices. No single set is necessary for giving experience that religious quality. A wide variety of sets of doctrines and practices can help cultivate the religious quality of experience.

In Bonhoeffer’s way of putting it, the religion of Christianity -- that is, the doctrines and practices -- was only a garment covering over the true Christianity beneath – a Christianity that had nothing to do with doctrine or ritual and everything to do with the experience of transcendence in our lives. Christians discarding the garment of their religion – Christians, that is, who possess “religionless Christianity” – will recognize that very different doctrines and practices – say pagan ones, or Buddhist ones – also facilitate our awareness of that which goes by many names: the oneness of reality, the divine, the ground of being, the transcendent, the awesome quality of the universe, the interbeing of everything, the interconnected web of existence -- God.

Christians discarding this religion garment, said Bonhoeffer, will cease to regard themselves “as specially favored, but rather as belonging wholly to the world” (280-81).

So that’s a little conceptual background from Dewey and Bonhoeffer.
* * *
This is part 2 of 3 of "God the Adjective"
See also
Part 1: How We Argue About God
Part 3: The God Life in This God World

How We Argue About God

God the Adjective, part 1

God is traditionally used as, thought of as, a noun. Last week I talked about "God the Verb." Today: "God the adjective." I should let you know I have no plans for sermons on "God the Preposition" or "God the Pronoun." You might have been particularly looking forward to "God the Expletive"!

Ah, expletives. Expletives do come up when we get to arguing about God. And when we tire of the bickering, we just stop talking about God – which is a shame. The argument about God starts ontological, then gets semantic. At root, however, it is neither ontological nor semantic, but tribal. Let me explain.

It starts ontological: What exists? Is there an entity that knows, desires, and creates?

To the question, "Do you believe in God?" many Unitarians long ago developed the habit of saying, “Depends on what you mean by God.” So then the argument shifts from the ontological to the semantic. What does the word “God” mean? Is it a legitimate use of the English language to use the word “God” to refer NOT to a person-like entity that knows and wants, but only to a source of beauty and mystery; a power inspiring gratitude, humility, wonder, and awe; an ultimate context and basis for meaning and value; the widest reality to which our loyalty is owed; or the Cosmos: “all that is, or ever was, or ever will be”? Can you say that there is nothing in the universe except what the scientists describe and still call THAT “God”?

Why do people get riled up over semantic arguments about the word “God” when no other semantic argument elicits much concern or passion? I think it's because the real conflict is neither about ontology nor semantics. It’s about tribe. Are you in my tribe – do you speak the tribal passwords, affirming or denying the existence of God, adopting my tribe’s definition of the word “God”? If you’re not in my tribe, then we must fight – or else avoid the subject altogether.

There are meanings of “God” acceptable within the English language that don’t mean person-like or supernatural, so I want to ask you: Do you still prefer not to use the word because of tribal identity? You don’t want anyone to think for a minute that you might be in the Woo-Woo tribe? I think, for some of us, that’s the hang-up. We’re more interested in protecting our self-identity as members of the No-Woo tribe than we are in connecting with other people through the meanings that we share: awe, wonder, beauty, mystery, source of hope and healing that we call by many names.

Let me tell you some of my history with God.

The G-word and I have had an uncertain relationship. When I was in first grade, in Pinetops, North Carolina, where there was no Unitarian Universalist congregation, the neighbor kid sometimes invited me to go along with him to his church. Several times that year, I went, and as a result of the instructions given me at that Presbyterian Sunday School, there was a brief period in my life during which I did a nightly bedtime ritual called “prayer.” “Prayer” involved asking someone named “God” to do, for various friends and relations, something called “bless.”

By fourth grade, I had left behind “that kid stuff.” I was then living in a different small southern town: Carrollton, Georgia. Carrollton didn’t have a Unitarian Universalist congregation either, but it was only an hour’s drive from Atlanta, where, sporadically, I was taken to the UU church. Soon after learning there was a word “atheist,” I decided that I was one. I made this declaration at the UU church, and no one seemed very interested. I made this declaration during lunch at my elementary school cafeteria, and a palpable buzz shockwaved through hall.

The news reached an ardent and incredulous girl a few tables over. She arose, and, flanked by a silent friend to function as diplomatic observer, came over and confronted me. “You don’t believe in God?” she asked.

“No,” I said, suddenly interested in the lima beans on my plate.

“Do you know what the Bible is?” she pressed.

I offered my considered and scholarly assessment. “Just some book by some stupid people,” I said sullenly.

She gasped. The diplomatic observer gasped. The two of them withdrew to tut-tut with others over the lostness of my soul and the rift to their social fabric that my apostasy represented.

That was the beginning of my career in theology and scriptural hermeneutics. In my remaining seven years in the town’s public school system, I ventured no further discourses on religion, but that was enough. Throughout that time I was “the class atheist.”

Back then, it was clear what “God” meant – and clear -- to me – that the universe included nothing that instantiated that meaning. Now, nothing about God is clear: there’s only ambiguity and mystery – beautiful, rich, joyous ambiguity and mystery.

The theist says there is such a thing, the atheist says there isn’t such a thing, and the agnostic says “I don’t know whether there’s such a thing or not,” – but they all pretend to know what sort of thing it is they’re talking about. The universe, however, is more amazing – life is more profoundly awesome – and the Bible’s authors, editors, and redactors were wiser and more insightful – than my fourth-grade self was prepared to comprehend.

* * *
This is part 1 of 3 of "God the Adjective"
See also
Part 2: Thinking God an Adjective
Part 3: The God Life in This God World