Here is our political plight as best I understand it. We stand very near a cliff of ecological disaster and corporate tyranny. A Tea Party candidate promises to move us three steps closer to the cliff. Republicans, who are sane but needing to hold their party together, promise to move us only two steps toward the cliff. Democrat candidates, who are also sane but need to counter the efficacy of corporate propaganda, promise that they will take us only one step toward the cliff. It is important to both vote for the lesser evil as we see it, but even more important to invent new options that our current political parties are not capable of providing. We must stay informed, vote and support our candidates, but also remember that we will eventually lose the game we are currently playing.
They understand the symbol “god” who use it to remember the mystery
which is deeper than our ultimate human values,
bigger than our widest human contexts,
and which lies ambiguously between clearest human distinctions.
They misunderstand the symbol “god” who use it
to prove a theory,
to justify a cause ,
or to replace our relationship with actual human beings.
If you will stop running from your death and look it fully in the face, you will
see only nature. The observer whom you are so afraid of losing, who believes
itself to be standing outside the currents of change, observing others come into
being and then pass, that observer is not and has never been truly separate.
What you are calling your self is but the ephemeral ripple on a timeless pond.
Lose your belief in that illusory self and you will lose your terror of death.
It is not you who look out upon nature, but nature who looks out through your
eyes.
I pledge allegiance to the flag
Because civic engagement is just too hard.
And to the Republic…
But not to the government.
One nation…
except for the liberals, homosexuals, feminists, and immigrants.
Under God
And by that, of course, I mean my own idea of God.
With liberty and justice for all*.
*Warning: some restrictions may apply.
Here down South, you often hear people saying we are socially liberal and fiscally conservative. What that means is that we care about social justice, just not enough to pay for it.
For me, religion is the appointment I make with wonder. Loren Eisley is an example of an atheist with religion. Here is how he said it:
“I am treading deeper and deeper into leaves and silence. I see more faces watching, non-human faces. Ironically, I who profess no religion find the whole of my life a religious pilgrimage.”
He also said:
“The religious forms of the present leave me unmoved. My eye is round, open, and undomesticated as an owl’s in a primeval forest– a world that for me has never truly departed.”
Some of my favorite hymns were written by atheists. For example, here is another by Loren Eiseley:
“To go off to elemental and bring back treasures. Since the first human eye saw a leaf in Devonian sandstone and a puzzled finger reached to touch it, sadness has lain over the heart of man. By this tenuous thread of living protoplasm, stretching backward into time, we are linked forever to lost beaches whose sands have long since hardened into stone. The stars that caught our blind amphibian stare have shifted far or vanished in their courses, but still that naked, glistening thread winds onward. No one knows the secret of its beginning or its end. Its forms are phantoms. The thread alone is real; the thread is life.”
I am in Kerrville this weekend for a meeting of Presbytery, which is a level of church government in the Presbyterian Church. Our church is bringing a motion that would allow local churches to use non-sexist language in every aspect of their life together. If the motion passes it will go on to our national meeting for a vote.
I have no idea how this vote will go. I’m sure most Presbyterian Churches are against sexism in the abstract, but I also know most of them do not consider their own participation in patriarchal language to be sexist. They do not understand what an important role sexist language and theology can play in matters like domestic violence, or in simply giving women a secondary role in life.
I hope the motion will pass without much discussion, but I can’t imagine the good old boys giving up such an important part of patriarchy without a fight. Stay tuned.
“The two longest periods without a minimum wage increase have both occurred since 1981. We’re on that road again with a $7.25 minimum wage since 2009. The minimum wage has lost nearly a third of its value since its 1968 high point of $10.75 in today’s dollars.”
“As the wage floor has sunk below poverty levels, millions of workers find themselves with paychecks above the minimum, but still earning poverty wages.”
“…Between 1968 and 2012, as the minimum wage eroded, the top 1 percent of households doubled their share of our nation’s income from 11 percent to 22 percent.”
“The top 1 percent took 95 percent of all the income growth from 2009 to 2012.
Today’s big business CEOs make more in a year than most small business owners make in their lifetimes.
“The disparity has doubled at McDonald’s Corp. in the last 10 years,” Bloomberg reported. “At the same time, the company helped pay for lobbying against minimum wage increases.”
“…Nearly half of America’s 50 million public school children have family incomes so low they are eligible for free or reduced lunch. The share of low-income students jumped from 38 percent of all students in 2001 to 48 percent in 2011, according to a new report by the Southern Education Foundation.”
“The Walton heirs on the Forbes 400 list of richest Americans have a combined net worth of $136 billion. Wal-Mart workers top the state lists of employees depending on the public safety net.”
-All quotes by Holly Sklar, Director of Business for a Fair Minimum Wage. To see her full article, click below.
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/10/22/206081/minimum-wage-back-to-1950-level.html
The second commandment forbids the worship of images. What can that mean but a call to reverent agnosticism?
No statue ever built can match the idolatry of a codified creed. Memorized truth is a lie. We might as well pluck out our eyes as peer thru the cataracts of a dogma. The icons of religion should lead us to the threshold of wonder and then fall away.
We have not understood Genesis until we close our eyes to the story, and open our eyes like Adam or Eve in the garden and see a blade of grass as if it were for the first time, with no memory or context but simply as a burning green fire whose name is BEING.
What Moses saw in the burning bush, what Buddha saw under his tree, the place to which Jesus resurrected and the song to which Shiva dances, are all shadows of the same fire Einstein saw dancing on his chalkboard.
Our church once invited the famed cosmologist and noted atheist Steven Weinberg to come speak. My assumption, which turned out to be false, was that he would teach our people about his own non-theistic approach to science and perhaps to human affairs. The Christian Church once refused to look through Galileo’s telescope, and I hoped this would be a chance for our church members to see that scientific honesty and religious wonder are not mutually exclusive. Instead, the time was spent with him ridiculing us for fundamentalists tenets none of us holds.
At the end of his diatribe, Joyce Sloan, a small, soft-spoken older woman stood up and asked, Dr. Weinberg, is there anything about the universe that is still mysterious to you?”
“Most of it!” he responded.
“Then what is so wrong with us using the word “g-o-d” as a symbol for that mystery?”
The nobel laurete did not have a response. He said he did not consider that to be a worthy definition of the word, “God.” Dr. Weinberg seemed completely ignorant of the fact that there are many religions in the world that aren’t theistic. His knowledge seemed limited to American Fundamentalism and he would not consider the possibility that we were using words differently. The idea that we might be speaking poetically did not seem to even occur to him.
I left his talk wishing the great scientist would test his beliefs about people as rigorously as he tests his theories about quasars. It is a false choice between rich objectivity and rich subjectivity. We can be both scientists and poets. In fact, we must bring the two halves of our consciousness together if we wish to find the wisdom and power to save our planet.