10 posts tagged “religion”
Objections, to President Obama’s lifting of the Bush administration ban on federal funding to international groups that perform abortions and his voicing of support for human embryonic stem cell research, seem to have set my gray matter to working and wondering in a Cartesian sense: “I think, therefore I am.”
We can philosophically fashion in our thoughts great concern for a single cell that has no capacity for thinking on its own, and at the same time register less regard for a colony of cells that shares a common skin, has a birth certificate, and does as much thinking as any of the rest of us.
However, this concern for the fate of a single cell is not necessarily extended to just any old single cell. Little mention is ever made of a single cell of the nose, toes, gonads or ovaries. The focus is confined to the fate of a single cell called an embryo---the term suggesting its potential to someday be aware all on its own.
But the concern accorded to the non-think embryonic cell is not typically extended to some equally capacious cells called egg and sperm. And even an embryo may be allowed to perish from the chemical abortion that can ensue from birth-control pills.
Please excuse some aside thinking, but can anyone explain why church pews on Sunday are no longer filled with families of nine and ten? Hum . . . and has anyone had a long wait in line at their pharmacy while right-to-life protesters demonstrate against the dispensing of murderous birth-control prescriptions? But thank God, there have been some objections voices over a new and more potent version of the pill that is provided for morning-after. As some have said: How irresponsible; if not abstinence, at least regular precaution could be taken in advance.
And while protesting in defense of embryos, we may ignore the fate of completed humans that are painfully aware of the destruction they face: from collateral damage of war, starvation in some forsaken land, disease born from eschewal of promising embryonic-stem-cell research, executions on death row that can be accommodated within our awareness, or just some near death by waterboarding.
Oh well, some must suffer that others may live until they and their gray matter are pronounced deceased---certified dead as dead may be, though many of their other cells may still be alive and kicking. Brain dead, you dead, we say.
Not that I myself may find the time to go, but does anyone know where right-thinking people will be holding their next protest or silent vigil? I’d be there, but I will most likely be at home holding my own rendezvous with hypocrisy---the partial kind.
Maybe some folks, particularly the religious right, remain ignorant of the disastrous consequence of global warming because its gradual increase is keeping them as blissfully unaware as a frog that has been placed in cold water that is gradually brought to a boil. Before the frog realizes it, he is in hot water.
It could be just a part of God’s master plan, and we are already in hell and God is gradually turning the heat up.
Does anyone know where the religious-right stands on revering the flag as an image of America?
I think we can trust that they have read Exodus 20:4 in their King James: “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.”
The only starting point for the existence of human life is the one that an individual chooses to recognize and deem to be of significance. Though bio-medical science’s capacity to indefinitely preserve life is limited, it is technologically possible to preserve it for an extended period of time.
For various reasons, sperm, egg, body parts, and embryos are preserved based upon the values and choices of those presented with the opportunity and capacity to do so. Thus, some human life forms are preserved and some are allowed to perish.
If a like-thinking religious group, legislative body, or writers of letters to the editor can in the abstract pretend to know at what stage an imagined life is important, then a woman faced with actually dealing with a life and death choice is just as morally fit, capable and prepared by God to know what she should do.
We’ve got disagreements, lots and lots of disagreements: war, wages, immigration, stem cells, abortion, and what have you?
These disagreements, mainly on how we wish to be treated and how we would treat others, reflect a difference of opinion as to the nature of man qua man. By what we do and would have others do we vote for what we are.
As a child in home, neighborhood, school and church I was taught that we humans are inclined to be good. And as I would treat others I could expect others to do the same. I was to accept that I was not perfect, but neither was anyone else; we were all sinners that needed to walk as best we could within our own shoes, and reach out and try to help any stumbling others do the same. That seemed to work well where ever I did roam, and in other places where I heard that it was not working so well, one could find the exceptions that proved the rule. We tended to look for those exceptions within the frailty of our own humanity.
This America--that I have loved, served and benefited from so greatly--has been the place well described by that poem on the base of the Statue of Liberty—the one that suggests that all mankind yearns to breathe free. Along with a lot of other people of my generation, I assumed that our nation’s greatness came from how we would treat others. And since we were brave enough to treat others as we would like to be treated they would do the same.
When I read or am tempted to unleash a hate filled comment, I wonder if my thoughts about my land have simply been delusions, or have they been reflections of the faith that the Founding Fathers had and which grew and grew because of what free people will tend to do. And are the exceptions to people’s tendencies to do good to be found only with those that live beyond the borders of our land?
Was Washington foolish at when he let a defeated Cornwallis and his troops just freely sail away, or should he have put them to the sword? He could have followed the first shot of liberty heard round the world with another blast that let all of the planet’s lessers know that we were the master race of all mankind and destined by might of arms to remain ever so. It might have made George W. Bush’s task much easier, or maybe the place from which we ruled would have long ago ceased to be.
Of course this idea that the sinful children of God can thrive by doing unto others as they would have done unto themselves can at times seem so foolish, but I have though that it is what has truly made this land of ours the home of the brave and land of the free. In the past there have been empires just as mighty and maybe even more so, but their power and certitude never made them as good and as sweet as has this loving land of ours been for me and mine.
To me it is still worth the old college try to love our enemies by doing unto them as we would have done unto us. And what would we rather lose our lives or our souls? Is this not what Sacred Honor is all about?
In the Roman Catholic Church’s hiring of shepherds, schleppers and schlemiels, aside from screening males for employment as night janitors in the novice’s dormitory of nunneries, the practice of starting screening interviews for entry into Holy Orders with a chastity-clad-deal-breaker caveat, NO SEX, may continue to foster some deviations from the straight-and-narrow path as the ordained move down the road of life, or off into a secluded lane or down a dark alley.
This is a real child not an imagined one concocted in the mind of those who would tell a woman what she must consider to be the start of meaningful life. Unlike a glob of cells that has no brain, no feelings and no awareness, this little child’s brain and total being is racked in unimaginable suffering and despair.
It costs much and is very inconvenient to concern oneself about this child and others likewise abandoned. And as these real children suffer, the most hypocritical of pro-lifers prance in demonstration of their great love for children that exist only in their holier-than-thou imaginations.
The importance of the concept of evolution to science has developed over many decades. It was only when its efficacy became important to a wide array of scientific pursuits (from genetics, to paleontology, to agronomy, etc.) that there was an understanding that it needed to be presented to young people who might contribute to an advancing scientific and technological society.
If over time intelligent design were to demonstrate a similar utility, it too would become common fare in education. However it would somehow have to first shed its non-scientific point of departure. It pulls from an apples-for-oranges bag of assertions a contention that places the “effect” before the “cause” (a priori in place of a posteriori) and presents it as being self-evident. Like all a priori concepts, intelligent design fails the test of utility.
It neither offers a foundation from which to conduct basic scientific research, nor suggests a technical application to the solution of some practical problem. “Intelligent design” is one of those circular contentions that pretend to say something by repeating the same thing in slightly different form.
In demonstration of the tautological nature of this specious concept, one might be privy to a conversation about a child’s intelligence, Johnny’s: “Johnny is intelligent.” “Oh, how do you know?” “He did well on his intelligence test.” “Oh, why did he do well on his intelligence test?” “Because he is very intelligent.” “Oh, how do you know?” “Because….”
In the field of psychological testing, the effort to measure intelligence as some kind of innate global capacity has largely given way to a more utilitarian effort to predict future behavior from a test sample of current behavior, à la aptitude tests such as the ACT and SAT. This trend might encourage proponents of intelligent design to settle on God just having a great aptitude for creating universes.
However, the words “aptitude” and “intelligent design” will not be found in the Bible. Thus, to use either of them in explanation of the creative ways of God one has to interpret Scripture in light of information obtained from non-Biblical sources.
If it is theologically acceptable to see a root for intelligent design in Scripture, it should also be Biblically sound (inerrant) to find that evolution outlined in Scripture. To this purpose one might cite Genesis 1:20-24: on the fourth day God filled the waters of earth with abundant life and then on the fifth day He had this life “creepeth” upon the land. After all, some evolutionary biologists suggest that terrestrial creatures got their start in water
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But to me, to pass science off as religion or religion off as science is wrongheaded. In addition, some of us religious folks may take offense at having our deeply held faith passed off as nothing more than a theory. But even more important it is a threat to our freedom of conscience.
Within his first encyclical since being elevated to the Chair of Peter, Pope Benedict XVI uses some words that echo the United States Constitution’s 1st and 14th Amendment guarantee of freedom from State sponsored religion. In this moving epistle on the faithful leading lives within God’s gift of love, Deus Caritas Est, the supreme pontiff writes, “The State may not impose religion, yet it must guarantee religious freedom and harmony between followers of different religions.”
Counter to this, some religious zealots are currently bent on pressuring local public school boards into requiring teachers to insert into their lesson plans a new certitude of these true believers, intelligent-design creationism. They are free to believe what they will. However, this attempt to use government to promote their religious ideology should be troubling to all people who prize freedom of conscience.
State-sponsored proselytism is a greater threat to our religious freedom than it is a mistaken sally into the domain of science. Science has and will continue to weather all sorts of misdirected and dead-ended efforts, however our freedom of conscience may not fare so well. The override of this liberty would mark the entry of our nation into an intolerant period in which all sorts of intellectual and spiritual pursuits were subject to suppression.
Government should get out of the “Holy Matrimony” business and leave its celebration to religious organizations. The First Amendment establishes that government shall “make no law respecting the establishment of religion.” Thus, sacraments and rituals of sanctification should be non-public matters and private concerns to be pursued in accord with individual conscience and proclivity.
Government does however have a Constitutional responsibility to protect the rights of consenting adults to freely enter into relational and obligatory contracts. In accord with its responsibility to keep State law from impairing this freedom, marriage licensing should be stripped of religious trappings and redefined as civil unions.
If gays and lesbians, or others, desire to extend their civil union into Sacramental Marriage, they can find a body of faith that is willing to sanctify their contractual relationship. If they cannot find one, their freedom of religion entitles them to start a denomination of their own.
Credo of Sam Osborne
Reflection in historical evolution:
Years of curiosity and more recent days spent in reading and contemplation of the origin and development of religion have led me to formulate a bit of way‑station theology of my own.
I have been greatly influenced and encouraged by Teilhard de Chardin's thoughts on the religious implications of progress in general; the Vatican's position, as voiced by John Paul II, on the scientific validity of the concept of evolution; and John XXIII and Vatican II's views on the role of progress in theology.
In reflection of the thoughts of Teilhard de Chardin, Richard Kropf writes in Evil and Evolution:
Just as the general theory of biological evolution has become the working model for the majority of modern scientific endeavor, so too I believe, as did Teilhard de Chardin, that any area of human thought, be it sociology, psychology, history, even philosophy or theology, must take the evolutionary structure of our world and our development into consideration.
My Church, which draws me to worship the God of my faith, has expressed sympathy for such a consideration. In an October 22, 1996 address to a plenary assembly of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, Pope John Paul II allowed that the theory of evolution was "no longer a mere hypothesis." He said:
It is indeed remarkable that this theory has been progressively accepted by researchers, following a series of discoveries in various fields of knowledge. The convergence, neither sought nor fabricated, of the results of work that was conducted independently is in itself a significant argument in favor of this theory.
In recognition of the evolutionary nature of faith, John XXIII, in Encyclical Pacem in Terris Paragraph 5 issued April 11, 1963, stated, "The search for truth and goodness is never a ready made nor a `once and for all' discovery but rather a growing and dynamic search in historical evolution." De Ecclesia Constitution of the Church of the Second Vatican Council in Article 8 of the Constitution of Revelation of the Church proclaims, "The Church, we may say, as the ages pass, tends continually towards the fullness of divine truth, till the words of God are consummated in her."
A Faith in Existence, Life, and Awareness
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In the beginning was the Word,
and the Word was with God,
and the Word was God.
He was in the beginning God,
and without him nothing came to be.
What came to be through him was life,
and this life was the light of the human race;
the light shines in the darkness,
and the darkness has not overcome it.
John 1:1‑5
In The Modern Temper, Joseph Wood Krutch expands on William of Ockham's 14th‑century view that man knows nothing outside of particulars to be real, and that the mind of man can therefore not know the essential and inimitable being of God. Krutch writes:
It is only when the thinker discovered how small are the things he can do that he succeeded in doing anything at all, only when he renounced the effort to find the key to heaven that he was able to keep chimneys from smoking and only after he had stopped believing in the possibility of eternal life that he learned how the gout might be prevented.
In the unending cycle of things, the reverse of Krutch's contention is just as evident. It is only after toiling‑man learned how to keep chimneys from smoking and discovered how gout might be better endured that he enjoyed enough time and comfort to focus his thinking more keenly on the root meaning of it all.
I have come to root my religious beliefs in what I know personally to be most true, the "particulars" of my life and times. I cannot accept religious contentions that require me to assume things that exist outside of these particulars or that operate in a manner separate from the ways of the present, or of the past as revealed in recorded history, scientific investigation, and common experience. Angels, evil, show‑offish miracles, and much that goes bump in the night hold no more mystery or import to me than do tricks of the sleight of hand.
Primitive understandings, misunderstandings and superstitions served early mankind's needs, but many do not fit with what we know to be true today—nor will those of today with what will be known tomorrow. Even the most sacrosanct of contentions of early believers—like the misdirected astronomy that held the earth be the center of our solar system—were but steps and missteps along mankind's path to ever greater understanding.
The relatively advanced knowledge of the present times brings to our awareness miracles of a nature different from those that were assumed in times when mankind understood little of the conditions and forces that affected life and death. Current knowledge allows us to focus our faith in miracles that are more basic, more real and more compelling—such are the miracles of (1) existence, (2) life, and (3) awareness.
EXISTENCE: It amazes me that there is a something—existence. As Irish playwright Samuel Beckett observed, "Nothing is more real than nothing." Thus for me it is easy to understand how there could be absolutely nothing, all a total void, but this is not so. There exists a universe and it is as real as nothing.
Our current understanding of this universe indicates that matter is energy, and time and space proceed in mirrored image of each other. And, all at base constitutes continuous process—cause upon cause upon more cause. Reminiscent of Ockham's observation, psychologist B.F. Skinner contended that mankind, even with the most powerful of scientific efforts, cannot know ultimate cause—such is beyond science. Although Skinner may have been an agnostic, his observation on "ultimate cause" admits the existence of an essence that precedes all. This essence and Essence of essence is God the Father of Existence. Thomist theology extracted this point of view, ipsum esse subsistens, from the Septuagint, the ancient Greek rendering of the Hebrew Scriptures and writings. Thomas Cahill in The Gift of the Jews writes, “It was this translation that Thomas Aquinas used in the thirteenth century to build his theology of God as the only being whose essence is Existence, all other beings being contingent on God, who is Being (or Is-ness) itself.” The God said to have said unto Moses, "I AM WHO AM."
LIFE: It further amazes me that within existence, there is life. It is difficult if not impossible to adequately define what this miracle of life is, but we know that it exists. Such an essence can exist in the germ of a seed that can rest there for hundreds of years and then sprout forth in new abundance. This promise of miraculous inception, conception, sustenance and renewal is Jesus Christ the Son of Life, the essential presence in the celebrated Eucharist of bread and watered wine at
AWARENESS: Atop these two miracles rests a third, that of awareness—an incomprehensible capacity to comprehend. As the great Hebrew scholar Abraham Joshua Heschel observed in MAN IS NOT ALONE—a philosophy of religion, "The most incomprehensible fact is the fact that we comprehend at all." Of what there is to comprehend, the man of science Albert Einstein said, "The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility."
We can know and know, and know that we know, but the essence and personal nature of awareness is encompassed in an ultimate understanding and persona that goes before and beyond us, the Holy Spirit of Awareness. Of sensing and experiencing this Awareness, German theologian Friedrich Benesch wrote: “The Father God lives in being; the Son God lives in creating and transforming; the Spirit God shines forth from the Father and the Son as the essential, divine consciousness.”
The Father, the Son, and the Spirit form a triune essence that makes possible all personal existence, life and awareness. This is the Great Personal Trinity that essentials the being of the children of God. This is the fount from which flows all being, love and meaning.
It is the Trinity of Existence, Life and Awareness with which I, as a person of my times, commune. This is the One I reach out to in worship services, prayers of thanksgiving, cries of anguish, periods of meditation, service to others, and moments of awe. This is who I respectfully contemplate when reading the primitive Scripture that is loosely sketched in my Bible, and when observing the Tradition that has been passed down to me by the Church.
This is a personal and essential God that lovingly gives rise to all that is personal, essential, and loving in me, and all reaches of the universe—the God of all times, and the God of these times. This is the God that I comprehend directly through enjoyment and celebration of existence, life and awareness—the God of the excitement of bright beginnings, the comfort of loving nurture, and the fulfillment of apt conclusions. This is the God of infinite grandeur whose inchoative flux is perceived as weal and woe by a limited humanity.
This is the real God evidenced by unswerving faith in what we know to be lastingly tangible and true. The One from whom cycles all that humanity embraces as most dear: love and compassion, joy and good humor, expectation and reward, dignity and respect, beauty and appreciation, peace and tranquility, and comfort and good will.
It is from the Father, with the Son and through the Spirit that we share these goods‑of‑God with friends, neighbors, loved ones, and occasional strangers. All this shared within the Wondrous Image of Certainty reflecting back to me the certainty of my own existence, life, and awareness.
In want of heat and light and good
This is the God who sustains us in our struggle over the self‑inflicted woe that we have come to call evil—evil being a lacking of good as cold is of heat, and darkness is of light. The limits of this lacking are described by Karl Rahner in his commentary on Evil and the Devil: “There is not absolute evil. All evil is finite; it is not a positive reality in itself but a want of good in an entity that remains good in its substance as coming from God and indestructible.”
The only devils to be encountered in life are the misdeeds that appear as the dark side of any of us. With mankind being a part of and not apart from the universe, the dark side of any of us is but a collecting point for bits of folly and futility that seem momentarily to impede the inherent progress of existence, life and awareness. As a St. Pogo would say if he existed, "We have met Satan and he is us." Or, as Mark 7:15 has Jesus teaching, “Nothing that enters one from outside can defile that person; but the things that come out from within are what defile.”
To paraphrase Mike Bryan from his book, Chapter and Verse, weal and woe would not exist on the planet Mars until God's children had arrived. Or as Shakespeare has Hamlet saying of the world in general and Denmark in particular, "there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so. To me it is a prison."
Finding God's good in order
Wherever there is mankind, his preference for weal over woe is the motive force in the unending and unrelenting search for meaning—a search that progressively finds new order from that which was mistaken for chaos. "Order" (which is) is the Word of God; it is the "Logos" of early Greek and "dbr" of ancient Hebrew (dabar [dbr] being a term that according to Walter Ong, in his book Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, meant to the ancients both 'word' and 'event'). "Chaos" (which is not) is but a curse uttered by mankind when confused by an unknown part of the Order of God.
As Claude Levi-Strauss observed in talks on CBS Radio in 1977 under the title Myth and Meaning and recorded in text in a book of the same title:
To speak of rules and to speak of meaning is to speak of the same thing; and if we look at all the intellectual undertakings of mankind, as far as they have been recorded all over the world, the common denominator is always to introduce some kind of order. If this represents a basic need for order in the human mind and since, after all, the human mind is only part of the universe, the need probably exists because there is some order in the universe and the universe is not a chaos.
Abraham Heschel in his study, Who is Man, says of order, "The order of things goes back to an `order' of God." Of the meaning of things, Heschel says, "Meaning insinuates itself into our existence. We cannot grab or conquer it; we can only be involved in it."
The divine insinuation of meaning is the presence of God that descends to me from the awe of Neanderthal man; the wonder of Cro‑Magnon man; the Sumerian folklore of Gilgamesh; the imagination of Akhnaton; the faith of Abraham, Moses, Peter, Paul, Mark, Justin, Augustine, Aquinas, Ignatius and Newman; the doubt of Galileo, Darwin and Einstein; and the love, respect and tolerance of Teilhard, John XXIII, and my family. This is the God that I celebrate and seek communion with through the Body of Christ, the Church, and the One found just as readily in the sharing of God's love with God's children.
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The above statement was taken from the first eight pages of my personal apologia.
