jimrigby.org

The link below will take you to the beautiful new website for Thirdcoast Activists and gives a nice summary of some of the most important opportunies for activism in Austin.

To view calendar, click here.

It’s going to be a busy weekend. We have a conference on economic justice at University Methodist church starting tonight. The purpose of the conference is described in the attached Op-ed, which is also on the editorial page of today’s Austin American Statesman. The conference is bringing in major theologians to speak about the link between faith and economic justice for the poor.

Then I’ll be speaking at a rally for women’s health care that will take place at the capital Saturday from 4-6. This should be a very powerful event with some very dynamic women leading the way.

Hopefully, by Sunday I can get a sermon together, and then in the evening there will be a vigil to advocate for sweatshop workers.

Very busy weekend, but very wonderful.

To read op-ed, click here.

Self Defense from a Fundamentalist Attack

12 Scriptures No Fundamentalist Believes

(Part 7 “Neither Jew nor Greek”)

St. Paul is viewed by many as a sexist and as a religious bully, but look at these words:

“There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Gal. 3:28)

It is important to remember that when Paul taught, the New Testament was not compiled, neither were the creeds.  So the church’s very real history of sexism and intolerance should not necessarily be projected onto Paul. It is also important to remember that not all the books that bear Paul’s name are thought to be by Paul himself. The passages telling women to shut up in church and for slaves to obey their masters do not fall into the texts most scholars can agree come from the hand of Paul himself

In my opinion, when Paul worked to spread the early faith, he wasn’t calling people to what the church has become. Instead, he was calling people to something much more profound than sectarian Christianity. It was a new vision for humankind.

To say, “in Christ, there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor fee, male nor female” makes impossible the fundamentalist claim that there are certain roles for women, or that Jews are going to hell, or that any person was born to serve another.

Let’s look at each phrase:

“Neither Jew nor Greek”  One profound way to understand this phrase is that Paul is calling us to a viewpoint beyond any nation or religion. Emerson once said that truth is not the possession of any one religion, but a certain depth in all of them.  It is possible to understand the early church as a calling people to a unified humanity. If this is true, when Paul talks about being “in Christ,” he is not asking us to join an exclusive club called “Christianity,” but to be baptized into a fundamental solidarity with humankind.

“Neither slave nor free” Could this mean that this new hope for humankind would not be built on a power hierarchy?  For many traditional Christians, the words of Paul are treated as a call into a Christian caste system where everyone has a role to play, and everyone should know their place. But “slave” and “free” were the ultimate class distinctions in the ancient world. Paul is saying in the new vision for humankind such distinctions would no longer apply.

“Neither male nor female”  Finally, Paul says, in this new vision for humankind, there is “neither male nor female,” which means the new religion will not ascribe rigid gender roles. Women are not just vessels for men to make babies with. They are complete and autonomous persons. And it should have gone without saying that if “in Christ there is no male or female,” then “in Christ” there can be no such thing as hetero or homosexual either.

Christianity was once a religion of radical human rights. Yes it was more than that, but we have made it less. The early church got in trouble for educating women, freeing slaves, refusing to serve any army and rejecting hoarded wealth. Jesus touched people with conditions that scripture said were “unclean.” Peter takes a Eunuch (who would have identical status with a homosexual in Leviticus) into the early church. Why? It wasn’t that Peter didn’t care about scripture, it was that he no longer saw people though the eyes of judgmental religion. To be “in Christ” means to stop evaluating people by their human condition and to start seeing them as they really are, your human family.

Self Defense from a Fundamentalist Attack

12 Scriptures No Fundamentalist Believes

(Part 6 “For freedom Christ has set you free”)

Most people don’t understand that scripture is a call to freedom. The Bible isn’t telling you what to do, it is telling you who you are.

Exodus is the story of a people moving from captivity to freedom.  What tradition has called the Ten Commandments were actually the principles of that freedom, for without discipline, we fall out of freedom into servitude, habits and addictions.

Galatians has been called the Magna Charta of Christianity because it is a brief and powerful call to freedom. It is the book where Paul most clearly rejects legalism. It is a furious letter accusing the early church of rejecting Jesus’ message of freedom and returning to the slavery to religious obedience. “For freedom Christ has set us free; stand fast therefore, and do not submit to a yoke of slavery.” (Gal.5.1) “For all who rely on works of the law are under a curse…” (Gal. 3:10)

By “law” Paul means the Ten Commandments and all scripture understood legalistically. Paul uses the symbol God to personalize what he is saying. He says that God does not want us as slaves. He is using the image of a parent to plant this lesson deep in our hearts.  Loving parents do not want their children to cower and mindlessly obey. Loving parents want to empower their children, but they must teach the children the disciplines that make freedom possible.

I was once doing a talk on ethics at a religious conference. When a woman in the audience figured out that I was pro-choice and supported gay marriage she began to interrupt my talk with unrelated Bible verses. She was afraid and was using the verses like nails to put a lid on the conversation. At the break, I asked her to meet me the next morning at a place we could talk more constructively about her concerns. I asked her to read the book of Galatians beforehand so she could understand where I was coming from.

The next morning I arrived ready to be peppered with Bible verses. As I got closer, I could see the woman was sitting there crying with Galatians open on her lap. I sat down by her and remained silent for some time. Finally she said, “I’ve never understood grace before.”

This woman had been raised fundamentalist. Her religion was one of fearful obedience.  She had been taught a picture of God as an parent that said loved her, but endlessly criticized her and demanded unquestioning obedience. She had never realized the abusive nature of that image. She was also realizing that the male clergy in her life had quite a bit to gain by making sure she never claimed her freedom. Long before I arrived on the scene, Galatians had convinced this woman that God does not hover overhead counting her mistakes. Galatians pictures God as a loving parent who has created us to be happy and free. Her new image of God was not a boss hovering overhead counting her mistakes, but as a proud parent cheering her on from the sidelines.

Adult ethics require that we take responsibility for our lives. Freedom is an end in itself. “For freedom Christ has set us free.” Fundamentalism wants to turn God into a boss and the Bible into a rule book. Count on it. People who lift up God as “King” will soon appoint themselves as Viceroy.

(An espresso version of my last week’s sermon)

The subject of climate change seems to hit a dead nerve with many people. We know we are headed for disaster if we don’t change what we are doing, but we are so overwhelmed by guilt and fear that lectures and statistics only drive us deeper into our numbness. Is there any way to wake us up in time?

Whenever human beings go into denial about something, there is usually a deep conflict going on far below our level of awareness. Perhaps the problems that keep us from confronting environmental degradation go much deeper than discussions of carbon foot prints. Perhaps there is a wound in our deep unconscious sense of who we are in relation to the earth. Perhaps the way to reawaken our dead nerve tissue is to reanimate our sense of belonging to the earth. Perhaps if we can feel our roots we will find the courage to make the sacrifices that will save us.

Psalm 19 is a song of the earth that says the stars make manifest their sacred source. The Psalmist says we ourselves feel that same law written within ourselves. Immanuel Kant said the same thing when he asserted that the two things that eternally fill the human mind with wonder are “the starred heavens above, and the moral law within. “ We emerge from the earth and bear its fingerprint in every part of our being.

We in the west have been taught a myth of creation that haunts theist and atheist alike. We tend to see ourselves as objects placed in the cosmos rather than emanations coming out of it. We see matter as a stupid and inert material out of which to build. If we emerge out of nature like a flower from the soil, then the universe is more that our raw lumber. It is the womb out of which we emerge at conception, it is our parent that whispers to us throughout life, and it is the home to which we return at death. Humankind is not like a tree house built upon the tree of life. Like Jesus said we are a the branches of one vine.

In speaking of entropy Jeremy Rifkin said that such basic physical laws must be felt as well as understood. Perhaps the Psalmist is saying the way to awaken our species is to sing the song of the Earth. Perhaps we need not only to preserve the species, but to dance to the pulse of life beating in the blood of a whale, in the heart of a humming bird and in us. Perhaps when we look at the periodic chart, we should not deem it a mere chemical formula, but as the sheet music of a cosmic hymn.

(The full sermon can be found at Staopen.com.)

Self Defense from a Fundamentalist Attack

12 Scriptures No Fundamentalist Believes

Part 5 “A time for every purpose under heaven”

The purpose of this series is not to attack fundamentalists. We can all be fundamentalists when we are afraid or frustrated enough. Fundamentalism is a survival technique that emerges when our landscape has changed so dramatically that we don’t feel we can cope. When our lives change too rapidly, most of us feel an urge to reduce our picture of the world into black and white simplicity. We stop wanting to learn anything new and just want to know the rules of the game. Some part of us yearns for an earlier clearer time, even if that time never really existed.

It is not easy living in Einstein’s relativistic universe. The concept of everything being relative does not sit well with our animal architecture. Like mice in a maze, we just want a set topography. Then comes creeps like Einstein and Darwin to upset our simple worldview. A shape shifting maze is our worst nightmare, so we seek out absolutes. We just want the rules to be set in stone and stop changing on us.

When times are complicated, it feels better to simplify our map of things. It feels better, but leaving details off the map actually exposes us to even greater danger. It is like closing our eyes to an oncoming wreck. For fundamentalists to deny evolution, or the continuum of human sexuality, or the relativism of the universe is all understandable. It makes the map simpler. Problem is, we don’t live on the map.

Enter Ecclesiastes, the Preacher, who tells us “there is a time for every purpose under heaven.” (Eccl. 3:1) Apparently, Ecclesiastes was aware of relativity before Galileo dropped the two balls off the Leaning Tower and began to unravel Aristotle’s simple map of things. The Preacher says there is no such thing as a rule that always applies. There is a time to build, and a time to tear down. The sixth commandment tells us never to kill, but Ecclesiastes winks and tells us there is a time for that too.

The Preacher isn’t saying that there aren’t set principles by which we can navigate through our journey, but that life is more like surfing than mechanics. A surfer has a plan in her head that she falls in and out of depending on the wave. Surfing is the art of finding your balance, losing it, and “falling” back into balance. There is a name for inflexible surfers. They are called “swimmers.”

Ecclesiastes is like the Duckbilled Platypus of scripture. It doesn’t fit into any easy system of classification. Only the Preacher would tell us that our fate is the same as animals’, and that the best we can do in life is eat, drink, work and love. Only Ecclesiastes would have a warning against getting too wise. Ecclesiastes is the skeleton at the banquet and the clown at the funeral. Only the Preacher would tell us not to make our ideas clearer than is this misty planet. Only the Preacher would tell us that to take life seriously, we must never lose our sense of humor.

In the English translation of the Bible, the prohibition against homosexuality appears very clear because of a tradition that began with the King James Version. More accurate translations have begun to correct the error, but once a tradition has been set, it is hard to undo.

When we realize that another language didn’t have a word for a topic, we have to realize that it probably didn’t have a unified concept either. In this case, some translators are taking words for male prostitutes, child molesters, fornicators, etc. and using our unified concept of “homosexual” to translate them.

A few hours of honest research would be enough to convince anyone that the Bible coudn’t be talking about a word that wasn’t coined until 18 centuries later. Unfortunately, that’s more honesty than some researchers can muster.

Self Defense from a Fundamentalist Attack

12 Scriptures no fundamentalist believes

(Part 4 “The letter of the law kills, but the spirit gives life”)

According to most forms of fundamentalism, scripture is to be taken literally. In other words, when we read the ancient poetry of Genesis, fundamentalism believes it is reading an astronomy and biology textbook as well. Luther saw Copernicus as arrogant for seeking truth outside God’s revealed word. Even today, there are fundamentalists who deem evolutionary biology not as an objective search for truth, but as an assault on their own literal understanding of the Bible.

The fundamentalist believer is supposed to hold that the Bible was dictated word for word and has endured countless translations into radically different languages and cultures over vast spans of time without any serious impact upon its meaning.

If we see a contradiction in reading scripture, as we certainly will, we are told to lie to ourselves and call our dishonesty “faith”. So, when scripture begins with two contradictory creation stories, instead of using them as two different poems about the human condition, we are to duct tape them together into one scientific version that numbs the mind and heart at once. Later, when Judas dies two contradictory deaths we are asked to, in the words of Feuerbach, “pluck out our eyes that we might see better.”

What do you suppose Paul meant when he said “the letter of the law kills but the spirit gives life?” (2 Cor. 3:6)   What do you think he meant when he told a story from Genesis, and said “this is an analogy?” (Gal. 4:24) And if the truth can put into the black and white of logical assertions, then why did Jesus teach in parables? What was his view of truth that he taught it in riddles?

The reason we cannot take the Bible literally is not only that it has been translated into vastly different kinds of languages. The reason we cannot take it literally is not only that we cannot use the vocabulary of our culture to understand a wildly different place and time.  The primary reason we cannot take scripture literally is because human language is symbolic by nature.

Human beings do not perceive our environment directly or objectively. We perceive the world through our bodies, through our memories, through our hopes and fears, and always through some cultural vocabulary. We are subjective beings down to our core. Objectivity may be a worthy goal, but it is never our foundation.

If you believe your subjective interpretation is objective, then what are you to make of it when my subjective interpretation differs from yours? If you are a fundamentalist and believe the Bible can be understood literally, then you will have to assume that I am wrong. After all, it’s perfectly clear when you look down at the page. At first, you will lovingly try to correct me, but if I persist in my error against the plain meaning of scripture, at some point you may feel the need to punish me until I repent of my error, assuring me of your love as you tearfully turn the screws.

The study of how we interpret language is called “hermeneutics,” and it is a very important art. The study of hermeneutics is an attempt to remember that we all bring filters and lenses to the text. None of us sees with the eye of God, but if we put our subjectivities together, we can share a picture of our common life vastly richer than any of us could reach alone.  But to reach such shared meaning, we have to get beyond literalism. Or, as the Bible says, “those who have ears, let them hear.”

If I am unaware that I am wearing sunglasses, it is the world that seems dark. If the world looks bright and cheery to you, I can only assume that you are lying about something so simple as the weather. Eventually, I will find other people who see the world the same way I do and we will call ourselves a denomination. At that point, our mistaken objectivity can become deadly, but it will consist of kind loving people who have no idea where the trouble is coming from.

When I started the blog I was hoping to share news stories most people don’t see in the mainstream presses. I wanted to present a viewpoint beyond the liberal and conservative dichotomy. I hoped to make it fun.

More importantly, I was hoping to widen the converstation on the nature of religion. I knew that there were many of you who had profound insights that did not fit in the immature categories available in this culture for the subject of meaning and purpose. Some of you are theists, some are nontheists, some are scientists, some are poets. I knew that the conversation could be amazing if we could find common coin.

We had built up to maybe 5,000 people a month on the site, but about a week ago something happened. Because so many of you shared articles, the site exploded. So far this month we’ve had 98,000 hits and we still have a week to go.

I’m not doing anything different so I know you must be sharing articles in ways I don’t even understand. I really believe this is a critical conversation for our nation and for our world. Because I’m still groping to figure out the basic aspects of a site, I am very aware that I owe you all a debt of gratitude for your patience, and for filling in where I fall short.  I just wanted to say “thank you.”

Self Defense from a Fundamentalist Attack:

12 Scriptures No Fundamentalist Believes

(Part 3 “The Sabbath is made for humans, not humans for the Sabbath”)

Fundamentalists often attack humanism as arrogant. In today’s scripture, we will see that Jesus was a humanist. The word “Sabbath” could either refer to an actual day, or to religion in general. One way to translate the saying would be “religion was made for human beings, not human beings for religion.”

Notice that Jesus says religion was “made”. The symbol “God” is a human image for those parts of our experience that are too large, too deep and too strange to think about. We give that mystery a face, not to capture its image, but to remember we are intimately connected to it. It is our source, our foundation, our eventual home. Our human reason bears the stamp of a cosmic source, but can never plumb its depths.

Jesus is saying that religion is the lamp but never the flame. It is an artifice to illumine and enrich human life. To paraphrase the theologian Karl Barth, religion when we reach for the mystery, revelation is when we let the mystery speak to us. Religion is the vocabularies, rituals, and practices communities make in reverential gratitude to life’s mystery.

Humanism, it is true, can be arrogant. When Protagoras claimed that “humanity is the measure of all things” he projected human subjectivity upon the cosmos. But humanism can also be the very heart of humility. It can be the recognition that we can only know reality or God within our human compass.

When fundamentalists claim that humanism is arrogant they are unconsciously masking a desire to control others. When they say the word of God is not to be questioned, they unconsciously protect their own claims about that book from critical thinking as well.  When they say God wants obedience, they unconsciously protect their own hierarchies of power as well.

So the humanism of the Bible says that God needs nothing and is not served by human hands. Jesus is saying we were not made as servants of some invisible being, but for freedom. He said, ”I came not to be served but to serve.”

The Sabbath is a call to take responsibility for our lives and for our world. The Sabbath was a warning label put on religion that told us that sometimes we would need to break the letter of the law to fulfill the spirit of the law. If an ox falls in a ditch on the Sabbath, we break the Sabbath to get it out. Jesus said if we are on our way to the temple and remember someone has something against you, leave the offering and make up with that person.  If someone is hungry and needs food, we break the Sabbath.

In the story of the Good Samaritan pious people were on their way to perform religious duties in Jerusalem, and passed by the wounded traveler so they would not be made impure. The Good Samaritan was Christ’s positive example of choosing human need over religion. Jesus said to the fundamentalists of his day, “You do not know the seasons.” He was saying that they lived by rigid rules and were causing unnecessary suffering. The music of life cannot be captured by the black and white of scripture’s sheet music.

Long before Marx or Feuerbach., Jesus was advocating humanism when he said, “religion was made for human beings, not human beings for religion.”