FAITH HOUSE Manhattan

It's Not All About Today

~ by Samir Selmanovic

Every morning as I step out of my apartment in Manhattan, I grab two free daily newspapers from the stand at the street corner. I then walk four city blocks to the subway station, reading while navigating my way through the crowd, and by the time I arrive six minutes later, I have read them both! It is a skill I have honed over time that integrates fast reading, selective attention, finger dexterity and navigating the traffic around me with peripheral vision only, never lifting my eyes. But this is becoming dangerous. I might knock down an elderly person, step into a construction site or get hit by a taxi cab.

And if I stop taking time to watch people, sensing their presence, and imagining where they are coming from and where they are going, I might lose my love for the city. When I come home I find my wife’s and two daughter’s heads buried in their laptops, checking their emails, text messages and Facebook accounts. I am beginning to think this diligence about knowing today’s news is not worth it.

We are continually urged to get the most from the present moment. The past is left behind and the future is unreal. And it is not only about our individual lives and families. Our economies have been oblivious to the lessons form the past and severed from the concern for the future, and have crashed as a result. But is the same self-sufficiency plaguing our religions threatening them with their own crash?

While a thoughtful critical tension with our religious traditions is a wise way to hold on to one’s past, the disdainful neglect of the tradition is not. G K Chesterton wrote these words of warning: “Tradition is only democracy extended through time. . . . Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by accident of death” (G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy).

In 25 years of religious life, I have picked up plenty of stories and personal experiences about how silly, broken or downright toxic tradition can be. It has hurt individuals, destroyed communities and alienated institutional religion from society. I once heard Christian speaker Tony Campolo quoting reformer Martin Luther quoting St Augustine who said, “The church is a whore, but she is our mother.” This statement seems painfully brash. A whore is something no one wishes to be called—or have their mother called. But the second part of the statement matches the first with its exquisite tenderness. My church is my parent who gave me life and loved me to where I am. It echoes the commandment of God, “Honor your father and your mother” (Exodus 20:12).

Our fathers and mothers don’t have to be perfect for us to honor them. They are to be respected, cared for, forgiven, healed and loved despite their apparent faults. Without those who came before us, without their love and hard work, none of us would be here. Our frustration with the past must be paired with forgiveness and our bitterness must be tempered with gratitude. We are not better. Our time to make mistakes is here and the more we fashion ourselves in reaction to the mistakes of the past, the more likely we will be reacted against by future generation.

Our disdain for the past has been matched by our disconnection from the future. After watching the documentary An Inconvenient Truth, my 11 year old asked me, “Dad, what have you done?” When I asked what she meant, she said, “When you grown ups were making all these decisions in the past, what were you thinking?” She meant, “I am scared and disappointed. Why weren’t you thinking of us, of me?”
We are leaving to them not only a planet in shambles but other things, including religion. By and large, religion today has grown impotent or destructive instead of potent and constructive. We are leaving religions that do not know how to work together to make the world a better place. Religions replicate a civilized market, peacefully and politely coexisting in competition. But like toddlers playing separately, there is no synergy.

Furthermore, much of religion has had a death-wish approach to the future of the world, counting on a Cosmic Fixer to redo the whole thing after the end of the world. Such religion has spurred—or at least failed to resist—society’s plunge into ecological disaster. More importantly, however, religion has been failing to stir human imagination about the future.

I recently spoke with Jeffrey Sacks, an author and spokesperson on issues of poverty and sustainability. He asked, “Did you notice we don’t have Ethics of the Future?” Thinking back to graduate school, I realized there was no ethical systems that asked, “How will this decision affect people who might live 200 years down the road?” People of the present are always the only consideration. Chesterton’s “democracy extended through time” has started after our past and before our future. Our locus of concern has narrowed to nothing but today—another way of saying we have become self-centered and therefore ultimately self-destructive.

But there is a way forward. First, we can live our religions in a place larger than today and for community larger than ours if we can pay tribute to our ancestors and their faith, stamina, vision and integrity. Any good we do, we do because of those who have gone before us. And if don’t know how to name and forgive the past, we will become the kind of people who will make it harder for the coming generation to forgive us.

As we pay tribute to our ancestors, we are also to bless our successors. We don’t have to understand everything they are doing, let alone control it. A new kind of Christianity by definition requires a new kind of thinking. And such innovation begins with questioning the thinking that went before. Those who are emerging will break the rules we have constructed, and produce their own theology and expressions instead of indiscriminately mimicking ours. They will take the vision to places we could not imagine and in the context we cannot understand. Yet they must be released from our expectations and given the holy burden of blessing and hope we have for them.

If God can believe in us, respect us and work with us, why can’t we do that with each other? Our boasting about the self-sufficiency of the present has taken a blow and we are yearning to have a more responsible and meaningful role in the story of God. This story did not begin only when we came on the stage and will not finish when we leave.

We have to regularly lift our eyes from the news of today and look where we are walking. Without perspective, we tend to hurt ourselves. Where we come from and where we are going is as important as where we happen to be now. In the world where economy, politics and popular culture have enthroned the opportunity of the present moment, religions can provide a conversation about our stories, ways to remember where we have been and imagination for where we want to go.

(adapted by the author from Signs of the Times, Australia)

Living Room Gathering - Moonwalk: A Mythological Perspective

April 25, 2009 | 5 PM at Intersections, 274 5th Avenue

Prelude Music: Cat Stevens “Where Do The Children Play?”

Opening Song: “Dreamer’s Song” by Phil Robinson

Welcome & Family Time

Reading: excerpt from “The Moon Walk – the Outward Journey” by Joseph Campbell (Campbell, Joseph.  Myths to Live By. Arkana, AR: Penguin Compass, 1993.)

Picture: Earthrise – William Anders, 1968

~~~
Context for Reading:
1543 – Heliocentrism! Copernicus advances theory of sun-centric system, displacing Earth
1968 – Earthrise!  William Anders takes photo of Earth rising over moon during Apollo 8
1969 – Moonwalk! Neil Armstrong sets foot on the moon
~~~

The only really adequate public comment on the occasion of the first moon walk that I have found reported in the world press was the exclamation of an Italian poet, Giuseppe Ungaretti, published in the picture magazine Epoca.  In its vivid issue of July 27, 1969, we see a photo of this white-haired old gentleman pointing in rapture to his television screen, and in the caption beneath are his thrilling words: "A different night from all other nights of the world".

For indeed that was "a different night from all other nights of the world"!  Who will ever in his days forget the spell of the incredible hour, July 20, 1969, when our television sets brought directly into our living rooms the image of that strange craft up there and Neil Armstrong's booted foot coming down...?  ..."All humanity," Buckminster Fuller once said..., "is about to be born in an entirely new relationship to the universe."

God Is Not a White Man

~ by Samir Selmanovic

Here is the video that is as comforting as it is challenging. Any thoughts? Thank you Rev. Vince for sending this to us.

Cute and Sad

~ by Samir Selmanovic

Recently I got one of the regular mailing I receive from Tanenbaum Center, a vocal proponent of the Golden Rule. Enclosed was a card that would shake any believer who still lives with an illusion that the heart of his/her religion is in its center.  It has moved to the edges, where one's religion touches the world and the other.

Answering Christian Critics of Faith House (Part 3): Great Commission or Great Invitation

~by Samir Selmanovic

A thought experiment: let’s imagine the whole world has converted to Christianity. Every group professes the Apostle’s Creed, the classic statement of Christian belief. There are no mosques, synagogues, temples, or altars of any kind—just churches. Governments are run by Christians, corporations are run by Christians, all art is Christian. Every teacher of every school is Christian, every politician of every party is a Christian, every owner of every business is a Christian, every book, every movie, every event—all Christian. A question: “How does that make you feel?”

I suspect increasing numbers of Christians feel as scared about such a possibility as everyone else would. But to be a Christian should mean to strive to make this scenario a reality. The Christians’ mandate to go to the world and convert it is based on the last words of Jesus in the gospel of Matthew. Standing on a hill with a handful of His disciples, frightened and disoriented by the swirl of events surrounding Jesus’ death and resurrection, before leaving them, Jesus finished His call with the precious words of comfort, “Go and make disciples of all nations … baptizing them … and teaching them … And surely I am with you always, to the very end of age” (Matthew 28:19,20). Christians have dubbed this call of Christ the Great Commission. No commandment can be more important. Why then inside many of us who love Jesus does something recoil against the fulfillment of this mandate?

The most obvious hesitance comes from history. Christians have had the chance to organize communities, nations and even empires, and have been found wanted. But there is a reason that goes deeper. The world is interdependent. A multiplicity of atoms and variety of life forms are necessary for our world to exist and function. Nobody has life independently. Without the intrinsic and intricate complexity of all life, there would be no life. Reality itself is interdependent diversity.  None of us simply “exists;” we all “exist with.” Cut off the “with,” and there would be no existence for anyone one of us.

Every once in a while I go to Christian conferences, places where Christian leaders explore, evaluate, and equip each other for “impacting the world.” These days, my friends and I leave these conferences increasingly empty. I think it is because we are living under the assumption that while the world needs Christians, Christians don’t need the world. There is no reciprocity or interdependence. We don’t expect to be impacted. The world and its religions have been left out of God’s consideration to give them any significant commission to us. 

Something feels utterly wrong with a claim that we Christians are in charge of God. When Jesus told His disciples “And surely I am with you always,” did He also mean “And surely I am not with anyone else”? Does my mother’s love for me depend on her withholding love from my siblings? Does God’s saving presence among us have to mean God’s saving absence among them? For Christianity to be true, does every other religion have to be wrong?

Christians and Christian churches are not exempt from the dynamics of all known existence that allows nothing to be—let alone thrive—in isolation. Instead of designating the call of Christ as the Great Commission that establishes us as brokers of God to the world and Christianity as a form of God-management system, perhaps we should embrace the call of Christ as the Grand Invitation. 

Christians are sent to the world with an extraordinary message: the self-giving God calls humanity to self-giving love! However, instead of having a commission to bring God to the world, we are invited to the world where God already is, expecting us to bless the world with our teaching about Christ, as well as receive the blessing from Christ that is already in that same world. Not only to go, but to welcome; not only to teach, but to learn; not only to give, but to receive; not only to change, but to be changed. In a Great Commission, the world needs us and we don’t need the world. In the Grand Invitation, we humbly embrace our creaturehood. The Great Commission demands conversion from them; the Grand Invitation demands transformation from us all.

In an interdependent world, truth cannot be captured, portioned and delivered, it must be experienced relationally. Christianity is a religion, a window into the kingdom of God, not the kingdom of God itself. Jesus has repeatedly called us to enter this kingdom and sit at the large table, as Ananda K. Coomaraswamy says, “not to preside—for there is Another who presides unseen—but as one of many guests.” God is greater than us! For me, the Good News just got better!

(adopted by the author from Signs of the Times, Australia, June 2008)

Answering Christian Critics of Faith House (Part 2): God Our Stranger

~ by Samir Selmanovic

Throughout the history of human interaction, we have been faced with the problem of the stranger. For every “us” there has to be “them.” To describe ourselves, we have to differentiate ourselves—me and you, kin and non-kin, friends and enemies, neighbors and foreigners. Without dividing the world, we would have no identity. Since the beginning of humanity, belonging to a group has been a matter of survival and, over the ages, multiple identity boundaries have been drawn—gender, tribe, race, religions, nations, possessions, political parties. The stranger is different from us.

We are engaged with strangers in inverse proportion to the distance that separates us. With globalisation, however, the distance between “us” and “them” has been rapidly vanishing. Through the media, in our workplace and in our families, the stranger has come close. Now, the other is not only “out there.” They have moved into our physical, intellectual and emotional neighborhoods. The distance that used to separate us is being abolished and our perspectives are changing.

In this new relationship, we are confronted not only with a new view of those we used to consider “outsiders” but with a new view of ourselves. They see in us what we could not recognize in ourselves and, when we let them, they tell us what we cannot tell ourselves. They have arrived into our daily lives with their beauty, wisdom, and vulnerabilities, as well as their suffering, grievances and aspirations. Like an uninvited company consultant who can see what the company cannot see, the stranger reveals. And that’s the problem of the stranger. To survive we need to protect ourselves from the stranger; to survive we need the stranger to help us see.

In the Scripture, this problem has been inversed and transformed into one of the most potent commandments for God’s people. While the Hebrew Bible commands, “you shall love your neighbor” only once, it commands no less than 36 times to “love the stranger.” For example, it demands, “When a stranger lives with you in your land, do not ill-treat him. The stranger who lives with you shall be treated like the native-born. Love him as yourself” (Leviticus 19:33). In the New Testament, Jesus insists the ultimate judgment of our acts will come from the way we treat the stranger (see Matthew 25:31-46). In the Muslim world, informed by the Quranic texts, one is expected to take a stranger into one’s home and treat him with honor and care no less than three days, even when one is considered an enemy. This may seem as nothing but a simple invitation to a virtue of neighborly love, but there is far more to this insistent call of God.

Abraham, the father of three monotheistic faiths, was ordained by the priest Melchizedek, an outsider to the covenantal family. Although a stranger, he was called “the priest of the Most High.” We have no idea where and how he became a priest before Abraham was called to follow God. Later, Abraham and Sarah were visited in their tent by three strangers to whom they offered hospitality, only to discover they were God’s angels. In what is generally known as the Christmas story, “wise men” from the East who look to the stars for answers—outsiders to the race and religion of Israel—after following an unusual star to Bethlehem, visited baby Jesus to confirm the identity of Jesus as Messiah. The entire history of people who follow God has been held together by the visits, wisdom and care of strangers, people who were not “us” but “them”—the other. Why the other? Why does God insist on speaking to his followers through strangers?

Because understanding our relationship and life with the Divine Other—the Holy One who will always confound us—is inextricably intertwined with our relationship and life with the human other—humanity that also confounds us. God comes in the form of and works through a stranger because the otherness of a stranger is akin to the otherness of God. The human other is a trace of the Divine Other in whose image the stranger has been made. The challenge God poses to us is to see God’s image in one who is not in our image. The less strangers we know the more truncated out vision of God will be.

The blessings and corrections of God come to us from the outside of the boundaries we have made for our groups, through those who can tell us the truths we cannot tell ourselves.  If we could know these truths on our own, they would not be strangers. Strangers bring not only danger to us, but also advice, solutions, beauty, opening for us new vistas into understanding the humanity, the world and God. But the blessing of the stranger goes deeper. When encountering another, we also encounter ourselves in a new way. Each encounter challenges our isolated and ingrown ideas and helps us become our better selves. And this is where the grand invitation of God to humanity lies: without knowing and caring for the other, we cannot know neither God nor ourselves.

Religion has been one of the most potent identity-forming mechanisms. It has bound people together in common purpose, joy and action as well as contributed to the prejudice, exclusion and violence toward the outsider. Now when globalization has turned our societies into societies of strangers, every religion has a chance to transcend its own limitations. We live in a society where relativism—claim that no differences really matter—is too weak to stop the aberrations of religious or anti-religious fervor. Mere tolerance of the other will not do. As Jonathan Sacks, chief rabbi of England, points out, “Only an equal and opposite fervor can do that. Healing . . . must come, if anywhere, from the heart of the whirlwind itself.”

We are all part of a larger web of life in which “the other” is part of our own life. Those not in our image are, however, in the image of God. In the past, the whirlwind of religious passion came from our experiences of being visited, corrected, and blessed by God. Today, God has not withdrawn Himself. He is calling us to a profound experience of meeting Him in a stranger. For those open to the strangers, the whirlwind never stops.

(from Signs of the Times, Australia, adapted by the author)

Post-surgical Reflections

~ by Bill Ashlock (see recent picture from the day before surgery), a seasoned business executive, writer, want-to-be wood turner with a passion and calling to tend God’s trees, and a great friend of Faith House. His tools include innovation, excellence, and compassion with an unending view of community. Bill lives in California and is often found in the city he loves - New York.

The idea of stepping out of the high-powered business world during a period of massive financial uncertainty to undergo brain surgery was unthinkable. Yet a few weeks ago doctors, family, and God convinced me I had to do just that. Brain tumors, even when benign, are powerful reminders about what really matters in our upside-down world.

Looking back on the journey I have taken since last July is still overwhelming. Initially, I saw the numerous barriers as uniquely mine, regulated by physicians and lengthy periods of sleep and silence. My fears, uncertainties, and doubts overwhelmed my ability to see beyond the immediate. 

As I now inch back into the world of business, it is hard to believe how much has changed in such a brief period of time. Banks, investment houses, and financial services are in a totally different place than they were before my surgery. Every financial fact I knew and depended on to guide me in my work has been challenged. I have to examine everything I knew with a fresh perspective to see what is true today. Whatever certainty I thought was with us appears to have disappeared. Nothing is certain. It is a daunting situation.

And I am not alone.

My business community in New York, like economists and business people globally, are being tested in a wholly unique way. Traditionalists are no longer sure if their traditions are to be trusted. Conservatives despair of the values being abandoned. Everyone, even progressive and liberals, are struggling to live with unending change. The future is chaotically fuzzy even to the most optimistic. The present is filled with unknowns, uncertainties, and forces outside of our control.

Where does this leave you and me? The answer is all too obvious. We are in the same place we were yesterday, a month ago, a year ago. We are living in the present moment; we cannot live in any other time. The only realty we can know for sure is what is right now.

This may not seem like much. However, it is as much as we have ever had. The wonder of today¹s chaos is that we have been forced to face how much we do not know. Yesterday we thought we knew much. It turns out we did not.

In my self-centric world, I blissfully forget that the rest of the world is walking on regardless of where I am in my recovery process. It is sadly funny. In far too many ways, I had learned to behave as if the world revolves around what is in my vision.

The reality is that we are in a boat together. Each of us knows someone who is struggling with difficulties greater than our own. Family and friends are struggling to survive day to day. Hope seems to be a slippery commodity. Support, often taken for granted, is tentative at best.

I find myself thankful for what I have, in awe of the moments in which I live, and in a place where I can help someone near me. Members of the family have reminded me that we are in a boat together. I can see God's light in the darkness.

The question for me is one of listening and responding--do I hear, am I helping? Am I making a difference in someone else¹s life? There are actions I can take. In times of such uncertainty, I can share hope. For pain, I can offer compassion and empathy. I have experienced compassion and love; I can share.

We all can.

The Fundamentalists We Need Now

~ by Samir Selmanovic

Certainty is out of vogue. Dogma is the devil. We are learning to communicate any convictions we have more tentatively; any statements we make, we feel obliged to qualify. And for a good reason. We have noticed something common to people who blow themselves up in buses or fly planes into tall buildings. Or economically colonize other countries or bomb them into submission. They are sure. The rest of us—the vast majority of people—cringe and protest.

We see violent people as having dangerous levels of certainty and conviction— fundamentalists and extremists—and ourselves as peacemakers, free to question anything and think for ourselves. But since experiencing the September 11 terrorist attacks while living in Manhattan, I am not so sure anymore. I am beginning to think neither is true: we are not free thinkers; they are not religious extremists.

First, we are all part of one of the most fundamentalist ideologies in history. Never has such a large group of people submitted themselves to a single ideology like we have. The ruling dogma of our time has become the economy. Albeit in different words, we hear this rumor of the oppressive dictatorship of the economy over all our lives. From workers in Chinese rice field to Wall Street moguls, we have become unquestioning followers. We have subjected our individual and communal lives to decisions that honor the market above any other force, the story of economic progress over any other story, corporations over any other institutions, and possessions over any other values that govern our lives. The present economic crisis now demonstrates how deep that fundamentalist devotion has been running.

During our "economic boom" virtue has morphed from something valuable in itself into a helpful strategy to overcome the cost of transactions. Relationships have become a natural network for spreading one’s influence and business. Our “free time” has become a paid-for activity. News about the world has become a form of entertainment, whose bottom line is to keep advertisers happy. Marketing strategies have molded us into consumers with a similar fantasy life. While insisting we are unique, we have been using words from commercials to describe our life dreams and celebrity personalities to describe the person we would like to marry. The millennia old concept of communal life has morphed from being a citizen to being a consumer.

Something else has happened. Across the planet, people have been discussing different scenarios of the end of the world: “Religious people will destroy us with their wars. Global warming is going to cook us all. Viruses will wipe us out. God is going to come and clean house.” But while we can imagine different scenarios of the end of the world, we are unable to imagine a more modest shift in the way we run this world. Since the fall of communism, discussion about what is going to come after modern liberal capitalism has ceased. We all agree: our view of human beings as Homo Economicus is here to stay. There is a vacuum of options in our collective psyche. We have become fundamentalists of a religion with its own dogma (“nothing is ever enough”), its own sense of belonging (industry brands), its own temples (shopping malls), its own centering meditational practices (life punctuated by commercials), its own priesthood (get-rich experts), its own sacred (accrual of personal satisfaction) and its own plan for spreading the faith (expansion of the market). Now, the economy is collapsing under the weight of our expectations, we are forced to take a break from this fundamentalism. Now we have an opportunity to see and question the dogma.

When a movement, a revolution, a religion, a country, matures and moves away from its first ideals and ability to adapt, from the ability to keep on dreaming and changing, and becomes “fundamentalist,” fear has taken a hold of the imagination. Capitalism with its initial insights into the human spirit, ingenuity, and perseverance has been steadily deteriorating into consumerist fundamentalism. We have learned to live by the fear of losing everything through some misfortune of world events, by the fear of the poor or lazy who might take everything from us, by the fear of finding ourselves among the “have nots,” by the fear of old age, by the fear of being ugly and by the fear of being alone.

So most of us watching “extremists” blow things up are not free thinkers at all. Most of us are fundamentalists of our own kind, unaware of the fact, participating in the madness of self-destruction. Moreover, our public ideology has found a way to criticize itself or laugh about itself while constantly strengthening its grip on our actual lives. We can talk as much as we want about the need to live sustainable lives, curb our desires, talk about the sacredness of the earth and learning to see that small is beautiful, as long as we—individually or corporately—don’t try to change the way we actually live. The only power that makes us change our lifestyle is—again—economic. Nothing else can move us. That’s not freedom.

But we also should consider that supposed extreme religious fundamentalists are not extremely religious at all. Their fundamentalism is much closer to consumerist fundamentalism than we think. To blow oneself up in order to wake up surrounded by sighing virgins or any other bliss expresses nothing but a desire for extreme products and services, with celestial goods instead of earthly ones. People who blow themselves up are actually people without conviction, commitment or certainty. Deep inside, they carry ambivalence about their faith. They do not trust.

And because they are not sure about their faith, they gravitate to acts of self-destruction. Because they cannot find peace with their creaturehood, they take upon themselves God’s prerogative to create or destroy life. Because they have not grasped the religious teaching of the inter-dependence of all life and the absurdity of reducing the other into an enemy, they are so detached from the image of God in themselves that they are ready to act on their self-hatred and self-destruct. They see their acts of violence as a way to push themselves over the threshold of unbelief.

At the same time, we give them a title of “religious extremists?” So what are then people like Gandhi, Martin Luther King and thousands of others who have given their lives protecting the interest of those with whom they disagree? Religious light-weights? No, people who are extreme enough, rooted and certain about something care enough to be capable of standing up to the officially promoted reality.

There is a scarcity of religious or humanist extremists willing to dissent, not so much with talking, writing or protesting, but dissenting deeply, from within. In a fundamental sort of way. It seems leaders like those who have helped humanity in the past cannot surface and lead today. Their ideas are swiftly subjugated to the unyielding master of our public ideology. First political campaigns and now the whole world runs under the banner, “It’s the economy, stupid.” If you think anything else can matter more, you are not sane enough to be trusted, we are told. United States, president elect Obama, keenly aware of these dynamics, repeatedly yet timidly warns the public, "the road before us will not be easy." Any direct appeal to values other than economic prosperity are still considered only inspirational at best and heresy at worst.

The resulting scarcity of public dreamers on all levels of civic life then creates a vacuum of imagination. In the past, the world was young and progressing. History was going on with the future wide open. Today, not only has the culture lost its critical distance from the social reality of unstoppable consumption, but most religion has lost this critical distance as well. For many of us, modern liberal capitalism has been adopted as not only one moment among many in history. It is the last one, inevitable. The current order of things has been regarded like something given to us, like a revelation, something that can’t be argued, something that we cannot change with our choices, something eternal, after which there is no future to be fathomed. 

We have grown up with a classic myth of what it means to wage war. It always meant taking the weapons, conquering the other and preserving one’s own way of life at all cost. Yet, on our interdependent planet we have no more territory left to exploit and no more wars that can be won. In this world, empathy, cooperation, and forgiveness are becoming the most potent agents of transformation.

To take the risk of refusing to reduce anyone to “an enemy,” a risk to contribute instead of just take from the world, a risk to be inter-dependent instead of self-sufficient, the risk to forgive and absorb wrong instead of retaliate, takes people with courage and strong convictions. We have to learn to measure our lives differently--find different fundamentals of life. And may thousands of new fundamentalists across the globe please step forward.

(from Signs of the Times, adopted for this website by the author)

Peanuts Theology

Thank you Lauralea for sending us this cartoon!

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Circumstancial Faith?

~ by Nathan Brown, a writer and editor, based near Melbourne, Australia. He is the author of three books, including the novel Nemesis Train.

As a believer—for present purposes, defined simply as one who believes—I have often wondered what and how I would believe differently had I been born into a family and culture with different beliefs. Obviously I believe what I believe because I believe it to include truth but would I have believed in that truth if I had not been raised and taught in the way that I have? Is what I believe so “true” that I can reassure myself that if I had not “inherited” it, I would still have searched for it, found it and embraced it?

Of course, for my belief to be of value to me, I have had to make it my own, not merely “inherit” it. In its own way, this is a kind of conversion—moving from one belief to another—but perhaps a gentler process than many. But how would that process have been different and how would it have changed the way I believe if I had come to the set of beliefs I now hold from a background further removed? Indeed, would—or even could—I have arrived at that set of beliefs?

And perhaps the most difficult decision for believers to accept is when fellow believers choose differently. So what about friends with whom I have shared various aspects of my faith tradition, experience and education but who have chosen to be less committed to it or even chosen other beliefs to pursue? What in their experience or circumstances has made the difference? Not only does it strain the friendship that has existed and had been reinforced by shared belief, it must also critique one’s own belief. Are they less committed and less focused or do they demonstrate greater courage in stepping away from the safe and the assumed? And is my belief somehow diminished without the community support offered by the formerly fellow believer?

Transcending Partisan Politics

~ Sammer Aboelela, a friend of Faith House, is Community Organizer with the NYC Community of Muslim Progressives. He also serves on the Board of Directors of Muslims for Progressive Values.

“Is there something wrong with some seven-year-old Muslim American kid believing that he or she could be President?”

With this simple rhetorical question, Colin Powell concisely expressed the frustration felt by many Americans toward the use of the American Muslim identity as a foil for partisan fear-mongering.  In case you missed it, during the lead-up to his widely publicized endorsement of Senator Barack Obama for President, Powell cited the rumor campaign against Obama, which claims him to be Muslim, as one of the factors weighing in his decision to endorse Obama over McCain.  Choosing not to simply disavow the claim of the rumor, Powell challenged the underlying bigotry by openly rejecting the notion that being Muslim would somehow disqualify a Presidential candidate.

(the whole thing is 7 minutes, Powell speaks about Muslims at 4:25 point)

As a Muslim myself, I am grateful to hear an acknowledgment of this nature from a figure such as Colin Powell, and was genuinely moved by the way he framed his message.  The optimistic image of a Muslim child hoping to someday lead our country truly caught me off-guard, as did the story Powell relayed of a young Muslim American soldier laying down his life for his country.  Through these twin images of hope and sacrifice, he was able to convey that Muslims share fundamental American ideals – a point that many of us in the Muslim community have been struggling to make for years.

Still, I feel compelled to point out one implication of the rumor campaign that I don’t believe Powell addressed directly enough.  It has become clear to me over the past several years that my religious identity is being used as a wedge to cleave many non-Muslim Americans away from their political interests.  As those Americans who would benefit more from Barak Obama’s proposed tax and health care plans choose to vote against him based on the possibility of his being Muslim, they might just be voting against their own futures, the futures of their children, and the well-being of the country at large (this is just an example of course - not a political endorsement of one candidate over another).

The price of bigotry, therefore, is not simply borne by its targets.  Indeed, bigotry is a form of self-inflicted collective punishment upon a society, and can only be effectively confronted through interdependent action and willful introspection.  As a prominent non-Muslim standing against Islamophobia, Colin Powell demonstrates this point.  For that, I thank him.

Religious News Service Features Faith House Manhattan

Pastor creates interfaith church where `Christians are not in charge’ (By Nicole Neroulias)

Leta Selmanovic, 10, helps hand out informational cards about Faith House Manhattan, a weekly interfaith gathering led by her father, Samir Selmanovic. Religion News Service photo by Nicole Neroulias.

NEW YORK -- A Christian, a Jew, a Muslim, a Buddhist and an atheist walk into a prayer meeting.

Any number of punch lines could follow, but the members of Faith House Manhattan have serious business in mind: creating a spiritual community for people from any -- or no -- religious tradition.

The fledgling group of about three dozen regular participants is overseen by Samir Selmanovic, a Seventh-day Adventist pastor for whom interfaith ideals come naturally: He describes himself as an "atheist Muslim" who converted to Christianity during his military service in the former Yugoslavia.

"I wanted to build a church where Christians are not in charge," he explained after a Saturday afternoon gathering of Jewish prayers and Beatles music. "We wanted to include all the people who have a right to belong and be partners in the discussion, not as outsiders that need to be converted, but as insiders that we need to be interdependent with."

Similar interfaith centers are on the rise across the country, according to the Pluralism Project at Harvard University, which reported a surge in the years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. There are now more than 550 such groups in America, with the largest numbers in New York, California, Massachusetts and Illinois.

In addition to easing religious tensions and encouraging joint philanthropic and community activities, Pluralism Project spokeswoman Kathryn Lohre said, these groups create new roles for women, which has been the case for Faith House.

TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE BY RELIGIOUS NEWS SERVICE CLICK HERE.

Answering Christian Critics of Faith House (Part 1): Cherishing the Gold of the Golden Rule

~ by Samir Selmanovic

We have come to a time in history when religion is involved in more killing than any time since the Crusades. According to the United States’ State Department, more than 70 per cent of world conflicts are fueled by religion. Although most of these conflicts have dynamics that are fundamentally economic, environmental or political and would have happened outside of a religious context, religion is still partly to blame. The question all religious people need to be agonizing over is “How can religion become a bulwark against violence, injustice and oppression, instead of an ally?” This question applies to our personal lives, family lives, workplace, citizenship, art, politics, everything. And no religious person can afford to ignore it.

To Christians, like to all religious people, some things matter deeply. These convictions vary in substance and expression but through their uniqueness hold our communities together. Our religious imagination spurs us to proclaim our unique message to the world and work hard to embody this message in the way we live. Yet our aspirations have not protected us from harming others. What can we do to withstand the destructive economic, environmental and political forces around us? And more importantly, what can we do to protect the world from our own good intentions?

If all we want to do is tell others what we think they need to know or change them into who we think they should be, we as Christians—or religious people in general—will inevitably stop treating people as subjects with whom we relate and begin to treat them as objects—no matter how noble our intentions. Some years ago, while pastoring a church in New York City, our cause was to reach people in the city and offer them what we have experienced as the best thing in life—God. One of the ways we did that was by organizing a series of public meetings that would convert people.

In order to accomplish this, the church board would meet regularly to discuss the strategy. Meeting after meeting however, I felt uneasy about talking of people as objects to be targeted by our efforts. However, such talk was so deeply rooted in some of the members’ psyche that none of my pleas against objectifying people came through. So I decided to bring two of these “objects” to the next meeting.

“OK, let’s discuss how we are going to convert these people in their presence,” I invited everybody. Some thought I was making a circus out of the meeting, but I persisted. For several church board members, this was nothing but a difficult evening. But for others, this experience was a door into new relationship, not only with people outside our religion but also with God. The language changed. The tone changed. The goals changed. The methods changed.

For me personally, as a Christian, everything changed. While Christ tells me to go out to the world and spread His teachings, He also teaches me that the primary way to do so is to treat others the way I want to be treated (see Matthew 7:12). This command, which has come to be known as the Golden Rule, excludes making other people the object of my best intentions. This is at least a part of the core, if not the heart, of the Christian message. I would not want to be objectified by their efforts to convert me, so they should not be my objects either.

To follow the Golden Rule, I need to learn compassion—meaning to “feel with.” As such, the Golden Rule turns the tables on many of our religious impulses. If we want them to attend our events, we must attend their events. If we want them to be spiritually open to us, we must be spiritually open to them. If we want them to change, we must be ready to change. If we want them to read our Scriptures with trust and respect, we must read their Scriptures likewise. We are interdependent.

And this can be expanded to the national and international level. Imagine all Muslims treating converts to Christianity the way they want Christian converts to Islam to be treated. Imagine Christians reciprocating. Imagine faith leaders standing up to politicians saying, “Your enemies are not our enemies. Any method you want to use on them, you will first have to use on us.”

If we want to convert people, we must be “convertible” first. Concerned believers would say that to live such open Christianity would first undermine our Christian identity and then halt the impact of Christ’s teachings in the world. I passionately disagree. To respect others, to be interdependent, to receive, to refuse to be in charge of God, to be humble and teachable by them, is to be our identity.

As we go to the world with our message, to neglect the Golden Rule would be to betray the teachings of Christ from the start. I would say that the following stands: “To be a Christian means, among other things, to seek God in the other as you want the other to seek God in you.” Just imagine, as Karen Armstrong suggests, if we would interpret the whole of our Scriptures as a commentary on the Golden Rule and read the whole of their Scriptures with Augustine’s rule of always seeking the most charitable interpretation of the text. Not only would this reflect the best of our traditions, but it would paradoxically work to preserve our own religion. 

The Dalai Lama and Tibetan Buddhism are a case in point. The Chinese government has built a train from Beijing to the small Tibetan holy city of Lhasa and has committed demographic aggression, not only by settling twice the number of Chinese in Tibet than there were Tibetans, but by opening 238 dance halls and karaoke parlors on the main street along with 658 brothels, turning Lhasa into an Asian Las Vegas. To top it off, the sacred Potala Palace, which has been home to nine Dalai Lamas, is now mockingly surrounded by an amusement park. 

And what was the response of Dalai Lama? He refused to call the Chinese an “enemy.” In fact, to preserve the value of compassion at the root of the Golden Rule, for the Dalai Lama it hardly matters whether the position of Dalai Lama, Tibet or even Buddhism continue to exist! For the sake of compassion, no sacrifice would be too great. Isn’t that what Jesus Christ was about?

And what is the result? In 1968 there were two Tibetan Buddhist centers in Western countries; today, there are 50 in New York City alone, and 200 in Taiwan. More French people call themselves Buddhist than Protestant or Jew. Not to count all the Chinese who are becoming Tibetan Buddhists.

The Dalai Lama said that calling others your enemy and calling your own people friends would be as crazy as calling your right eye your ally and your left your adversary. It used to be that victory could be identified as destruction of your enemy, but in today’s world, we increasingly have to see destruction of our enemy as destruction of ourselves. The Golden Rule is not just nice thing to practice, a mere virtue. It is a matter of survival, not only for the world at large, but for every religion that has aspirations to thrive in the future. By respecting and loving the other, we are open to the influence of The Other. Going deeper in loving God, now means nothing less than going deeper in loving all of humanity.

(from Signs of the Times, Australia, May 2008, adapted by the author)

The Power of Shared Faith

~ Kyle Fischer works with not-for-profit organizations (www.reserveinc.blogspot.com) and in music (www.endup.org). He will attend Union Theological Seminary in New York City in the fall of 2008.

Not long ago, I found myself sitting on the A train with my acoustic guitar on my lap. A man sat across from me, missing teeth and talking loudly to anyone who would listen. People kept getting up from the seat next to him. One woman hardly sat down before she stood back up again, making no pretense as to why as she moved a little further down the car.

Soon he had spotted my guitar case and started asking me questions. Claimed he used to be a bass player. I had to pull my headphones off to hear him. A couple of years ago I might have ignored him and gone back to listening to Sam Cooke, but my spiritual practice reminded me not to close myself off. So I put my headphones in my bag and practiced Christian theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer calls “the ministry of listening.”

He asked would I mind if he played my guitar? I had no reason to trust him, but then I really had no reason not to. I moved into the empty seat next to him and he strummed idly at the open strings a couple of times, not really making a chord. Then he thanked me and put the guitar back in my hands.

Without warning he produced a harmonica from his breast pocket and began to play. He wasn’t terrific but it was a nice sound, and I guessed at the chord, went with a big six-string G major. Happened to be right. Nice thing about the harmonica - they’re tuned to scale so you can’t really hit a wrong note once you’ve found the key. I played a simple chord progression and he hummed away.

I began improvising silly verses about our subway ride. He told me his name was Dr. J., so I sang, “Well, my name is Kyle and this here’s Dr. J . . .” He played his harmonica in the breaks.

“I’ve been to the Baptist Church you see,” I sang, “Dr. J’s on his way--”

 “From the Church of the Nazarene!” he hollered, finishing the line. It had not occurred to me that he too might be on his way back from church, on a Saturday, no less. It even rhymed.

We had really hit our stride now. People in our car were moving closer to hear. Across from me a teenager was videotaping us on his phone. I looked to my right and saw the woman who had moved away from him smiling, tapping her foot in time with the music.

We found a little refrain, my new brother and I, and sang our impromptu gospel song the whole way home, a gentle testament to the power of shared faith.

Live Words: A Fourfold Song

There is one who sings the song of his own life, and in himself he finds everything, his full spiritual satisfaction.

There is another who sings the song of his people. He leaves the circle of his own individual self, because he finds it without sufficient breadth, without an idealistic basis. He aspires towards the heights, and he attaches himself with a gentle love to the whole community of Israel. Together with her he sings her songs. He feels grieved in her afflictions and delights in her hopes. He contemplates noble and pure thoughts about her future and probes with love and wisdom her inner spiritual essence.

There is another who reaches toward more distant realms, and he goes beyond the boundary of Israel to sing the song of man. His spirit extends to the wider vistas of the majesty of man generally, and his noble essence. He aspires towards mans general goal and looks forward to his higher perfection. From this source of life he draws the subjects of his meditation and study, his aspirations and his visions.

Then there is one who rises toward wider horizons, until he links himself with all existence, with all God's creatures, with all worlds, and he sings his song with all of them. It is of one such as this that tradition has said that whoever sings a portion of song each day is assured of having a share in the world to come.

And then there is one who rises with all these songs in one ensemble, and they all join voices. Together they sing their songs with beauty, each one lends vitality and life to the other. They are sounds of joy and gladness, sounds of jubilation and celebration, sounds of ecstasy and holiness.

The song of the self, the song of the people, the song of man, the song of the world all merge in him at all times, in every hour.

                                ~ Rabbi Kook (1865 - 1935)

Ritual and Repetition

~ by Bowie Snodgras

A couple of weeks ago I was in Seattle for a conversation on what it means to be "Anglimergent."  Abbess Karen Ward of Church of the Apostles hosted a dozen of us to talk about the innovative "emerging" work that is happening around the country by people and communities with an Anglican bond or affection.  If you are interested in learning more about Anglimergence, check out anglimergent.ning.com. 

The night before our gathering began, I stayed at a friend's house and was reading an early-summer New Yorker magazine with a series of one-page reflections on "Faith and Doubt" when I came across one called "Counting Pages" by Allegra Goodman.  I have included the first and last paragraphs below... a beautiful reflection on being inside and just outside of religious structures.

As a young girl, I spent more time outside synagogues than in them.  Services were long, and I always found some excuse to get away.  I remember the Quonset hut where my family went to services when we first moved to Honolulu.  The building looked like a white cylinder half buried in the ground.  I remember borrowed space in a Unitarian church, an elegant old house with woven mats covering hardwood floors.  A weathered tree house sat in the branches of a large tree in the garden.  I'd leave my sandals on the grass and climb the ladder to read Wizard of Oz books.

. . . And yet, inexorably, some of my own religion rubbed off on me.  Might that be the way belief works for some people?  Not  a sudden epiphany but a long, slow accumulation of Sabbaths.  No road-to-Damascus conversion but a kind of coin rubbing, in which ritual and repetition begin to reveal the credo underneath.  As I grew older, I was drawn to poetry, and I began to study the haftarah - the weekly selection from the prophets.  As I grew busier, I began to appreciate the time away from the world.  Services became a refuge.  I did not need to rest when I was a child, because I did not work.  I did not want to come inside, because the outside world was still entirely beautiful to me.

The Other: The Origin and Meaning of the Term

~ Zane Yi was raised in the Christian tradition and is fascinated by the interplay of philosophical and theological thought through history. He teaches and studies philosophy at Fordham University, where he is a graduate student. Zane and his wife, Angela, live on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

If you’ve browsed this website, you’ve most likely come across the frequent use of the term “the Other.” You may have wondered, “What does it mean? Where does it come from?”

The term has been developed by European philosophers and came into usage through the work of Jewish/French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995), an extremely influential, some might call quintessentially “post-modern”, thinker. Levinas fought in World War II, taught philosophy at the University of Paris, and is also known for his Talmudic scholarship. Levinas’ extensive writings are permeated with this term, but are notoriously hard to digest. Here is a short overview of the meaning of the term.

According to Levinas, when we encounter another human being, the face of the Other speaks to us and ethically obligates us.

The innovative nature of this claim becomes more evident when Levinas’ thought is compared with the thought of a Frenchman that is more familiar to many people--Rene Descartes. In his quest for absolute certainty, Descartes infamously describes his method of radical doubt. One must doubt everything—the beliefs inherited from one’s parents and teacher, and even one’s own senses!  After demolishing this shaky edifice of beliefs, one can reconstruct a stable building of knowledge built from indubitable facts.

What is the indubitable and, therefore, foundational fact? Descartes claims that he cannot doubt the fact that he is doubting. “I think, therefore I am,” he purportedly claimed. Starting from this point, one begins to work one’s way to other certain facts.

Following Descartes’ lead, many philosophers seem to think that the primary task of philosophy is an epistemological or metaphysical one. What we desire most is absolutely certain knowledge. How do I know that the external world and others exist? (Believe it or not, philosophers have spent much time and energy trying to answer this question!) With the proper method of acquiring knowledge (epistemology), one can ascertain what is real (metaphysics).

Ethics, or “practical philosophy”, is a secondary concern; “knowing” (epistemology) and “reality” (metaphysics) take priority. Once we know what is real, we can find out what is good and right. Furthermore, figuring out the good and right is reduced to the derivation of principles or maxims from abstractions. 

In contrast to this, Levinas treats ethics as a "first philosophy."  According to Levinas, we are immediately aware of the Other through our encounters with him/her (and their "face") and the Other places obligations of care and respect on us, before we begin to theoretically speculate on things, people, life, truth, ourselves, or anything at all! This obligation towards the Other cannot be reduced to linguistic formulations and commands, and transcends race, gender, or religion.

Levinas’ innovative claim is powerfully illustrated by one of my professors, Merold Westphal, who uses an excerpt from Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front to help readers understand Levinas’ insight.

The following is taken from Westphal’s new book Levinas and Kierkegaard in Dialogue (p. 3-4). (The pagination is from Remarque’s book.) 

On a foray between the trenches, I have become separated from my comrades and have found refuge in a crater filled with water and mud. Suddenly a question occurs to me. "What will you do if someone jumps into your shell-hole? Swiftly I pull out my little dagger, grasp it fast and bury it in my hand once again under the mud. If anyone jumps in here I will go for him...stab him clean through the throat, so that he  cannot call out; that's the only way; he will be just as frightened as I am;  then in terror we fall upon another, then I must be first"  (184).

As suddenly as the question arises, a body falls on top of me. "I do not think at all, I make no decision--I strike madly home, and feel only how the body suddenly convulses, then becomes limp and collapses. When I recover myself, my hand is sticky and wet. The man gurgles....It sounds to me as though he bellows....I want to stop  his mouth, stuff it with earth, stab him again, he must be quite, but [I] have  suddenly become so feeble that I cannot anymore lift my hand against him"  (185).

Overcome by the desire to get away, I move as far away as possible in the shell-hole, watching and listening.  Morning comes, and the gurgling continues, drawing first my unwilling gaze and then my whole body is a crawling journey to the side of the dying man. "At last I am beside him. Then he opens his eyes. He must have heard me, for he gazes at me with a look of utter terror. The body lies still, but in the eyes  there is such an extraordinary expression of fright that for a moment I think  they have the power enough to carry the body off with them...the gurgle has  ceased, but the eyes cry out, yell, all the life is gathered together in  them....The eyes follow me. I am powerless to move so long as they are there" (187).

When I am finally able to move, I strain some muddy water from the bottom of the crater, give it to my dying enemy, and then dress his wounds as best I can. The gurgling resumes. After the passing of an eternity, the young Frenchmen passes into eternity at about three in the afternoon. "I prop the dead man up again so that he lies comfortably...I close his eyes. They are brown, his hair is black and a bit curly at the sides. The mouth is full and soft beneath his moustache; the nose is slightly arched, the skin brownish; it is now not so pale as it was before, when he was alive. For a moment the face seems almost  healthy;--then it collapses suddenly into the strange face of the dead that I  have so often seen, strange faces, all alike" (190).

Just as the compulsion to help had followed the compulsion to flee, now the compulsion to speak takes over. "Comrade, I did not want to kill you. If you jumped in here again, I would not do it, if you would be sensible, too. But you were only an idea to me before, an abstraction that lived in my mind. But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me. I thought of your hand-grenades, of you bayonet, of your rifle; now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship. Forgive me, comrade. We always see it too late...I will write to your wife" (191).

Who is the Other in a religious context? We have many terms for her. The unbeliever. The religious fanatic. The liberal. The fundamentalist. The pagan. The goy. The kafir.

Such labels are usually based on a theoretical understanding of the Other (often a misconception), but actually prevent us from a genuine encounter with her. Sadly, in the end, this only impoverishes our own humanity and our experience of the depth and power of our own religious traditions.

We know ourselves most fully in the presence of the Other.

It’s my hope and prayer that Faith House will become a place where encountering the Other, not thinking or talking about him or her or them, is “first philosophy.”

Good Atheism, Bad Atheism

~ by Samir Selmanovic

Even though there haven’t been any new arguments against the existence of God since late 18th century, atheism is hot again. The enlightenment—a powerful movement in recent centuries that helped us question superstitious stories told by our grandmother as well as theology taught by respected university professors—has triumphed. One glance at the Google News page makes this abundantly clear. Religion is not in charge of the world anymore.

However, spurred by fear of religious fundamentalism, new atheists want to go further than their forefathers. Instead of arguing about the existence of God, they are fighting against the existence of religion itself, calling humanity to brace for an apocalyptic showdown between faith and reason. 

Religion does deserve to be challenged. “Deserves” has two meanings. First, religion deserves the pain of criticism and correction because of its failures to live up to its own ideals. Second, religion deserves the blessing of criticism and correction because it has often been a precious catalyst for justice, peace and beauty in the world. Recent challenges should therefore be welcome by religious people as a chance to see, to grieve, to repent, and then with renewed wisdom act for the common good.

Atheism at its best is crucial in this process of religious renewal. With its own set of beliefs, constructive atheism—often described as humanism—sees God as a human creation and not vice versa. It therefore locates the mystery of life in this world, this matter, this humanity, as the only one we have. It insists that all religion must land on the ground where we humans actually live. Religion must learn to live on earth. If religion is not valuable on earth, it is not valuable at all.

Constructive humanism’s contribution to our life together on this planet is its insistence that every religion ought to embrace, not just its adherents, but the whole planet as their ethical community. In our newly small planet, this is not a matter of humility or virtue any more, but of survival. In this way, these atheists are like the prophets of the Hebrew Bible, calling people out of their hypocrisy toward better faith and a better world.

However, attacks that fight against all religion, instead of bad religion, are bad atheism. It reinforces the suspicion of people who cling to the status quo in religion that atheists are on a power trip of their own, on a mission to strip the world of mystery, beauty and spirit—getting rid of anything and everything that humans cannot understand, control or subjugate.

The problem with anti-religionist atheism is not that it questions the existence or character of God. It is problematic because it embodies a contempt for any faith at all—any belief or practice toward creating value and meaning for ourselves. In a recent article in the Los Angeles Times, Lee Siegel writes,

“The leap of faith is really a very ordinary operation. We take it every time we fall in love, expect kindness from someone, impulsively sacrifice some little piece of our self-interest. After all, you cannot prove the existence of truth, beauty, goodness and decency; you cannot prove the dignity of being human, or your obligation to treat people as ends and not just as means. You take a gamble on the existence of these inestimable things. For that reason, when you lay scientific, logical and empirical siege to the leap of faith at the core of the religious impulse, you are not just attacking faith in God. You are attacking the act of faith itself, faith in anything that can’t be proved. But it just so happens that the qualities that make life rich, joyful and humane cannot be proved.”

Atheistic fundamentalism is a dogmatic expression of a worldview equally capable of destroying humanity with zeal and effectiveness as any fundamentalist religion. Shutting out the spiritual, mystical, metaphorical and transcendent, atheistic fundamentalism resorts to cleaning up the world of those who disagree and creating a naked public square, devoid of any options but its own.

While philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche rightfully observed that “Every truth is a tool in the hands of those in power,” atheistic fundamentalists have come to an irrational belief that they are an exception as they are trying to sell their ideas to those to whom they so openly condescend. What can be a greater power trip than believing everyone is on a power trip except oneself? Instead of promoting a secularization that fosters religious pluralism, these atheists impose secularism—a closed worldview, devoid of the windows and doors of self-doubt and hope.

To the end of his life, Sigmund Freud was an uncompromising atheist, describing belief in God in his book The Future of an Illusion as a “collective neurosis.” But his last book was titled Moses and Monotheism, in which he suggested a surprising view about religion, recognizing the poetry and promise of religion. He argued that Judaism and other expressions of monotheism helped free humanity from bondage to the immediate, empirical world, opening up fresh and renewing possibilities for human spirit and practice. He argued that people who can worship what is presented in symbolic terms, practice the ultimate exploration of the invisible inner life. For Freud, faith in God opened a gift of inwardness and imagination.

Both faith and doubt are opposites of certainty and therefore part of the same whole that refuses to see only the obvious. To end religion, would be to end imagination.

The stingy polemics of religionists who defend religion at all costs on one side and anti-religionists on the other seem like arguments fought in an attempt to justify closing one’s ears to hearing the Other and sharing the planet with others. Both of their identities depend on a divided world. Instead of leading us to generosity and great hope toward an unknown future, and instead of enlightening and inspiring us, religionists and anti-religionists are moving us into a new dark age, both using God to bring an end to imagination.

People will not stop looking into the past and mining religion for its spiritual treasures and hard-learned historical lessons. And they will not stop organizing themselves into new kinds of religious communities. For we have learned from human history that religion does not have to be the opium, but can be the poetry of the people.

(from Signs of the Times, Australia, March 2008, adapted by the author)

"I don't know"

~ by Nathan Brown, author, Editor (Signs of the Times, Australia / New Zealand)

“One of my main efforts as a teacher has been to train people to say those (apparently difficult) words ‘we don’t know,’” commented Christian writer and long-time tutor at Oxford University, C S Lewis. Those “apparently difficult” words don’t come easily to any of us—and perhaps they are even more difficult in the mouths of people of conviction, whether religious or not.

But to admit “I don’t know” is an important spiritual discipline that we need to practice, precisely because it does not come easily. “You think that everyone should agree with your perfect knowledge,” wrote the Apostle Paul in the Bible. “While knowledge may make us feel important, it is love that really builds up … Anyone who claims to know all the answers doesn’t really know very much” (1 Cor 8:1, 2).

To some, this might seem a denial of certainty or hope. But confessing “I don’t know” does not mean we know nothing. Admitting our imperfect knowledge, our fuzzy understanding and our stuttering explanations means we do not have to force our limited knowledge and understandings to answer questions much larger than those for which they are fitted. It is an expression of intellectual, faith-filled honesty and humility that opens us to fresh possibilities.

As Paul suggests, the more we learn, the more we discover we don’t know. But this should not be grounds for either a loss of faith, or discouragement and despair. The vastness and wonder of the world and ways of God are our greatest evidence of who we believe God to be. A God merely like us, understandable by us, managed by us, is ultimately of little use to us. Instead of roadblocks to faith, the challenges of explaining God are the starting points for contemplation.

Drawing on the Jewish tradition of exploring God by intense study of the Scriptures, Rob Bell points out that “the rabbis even say a specific blessing when they don’t understand a portion of the text. When it eludes them, when it makes no sense, they say a word of thanks to God because of the blessing that will be theirs someday. ‘Thank you, God, that at some point in the future, the lights are going to come on for me.'" By doing so, they assume that what they do not know or understand is better than they could guess at or imagine and so are content—for the time being—to trust the goodness of the God they seek.

Of course, such an attitude also has practical significance.  One of the greatest challenges of reaching out to those who are hurting and sorrowing around us is our assumption that we need to be able to answer their inevitable questions. That frightens us—we might be exposed as something less than the confident person of faith we wish we were. But when we are comfortable to say “I don’t know,” we can be simply human together, sharing their pain and grief—becoming agents of hope and healing to them by our presence and openness.

When we recognize that we are able to live by faith, even amid the questions we might try to suppress within ourselves, we realize that others can also live with, learn from and even appreciate our uncertainties. Freed from our assumptions that we have to have it all “nailed down” and “together” as a complete package of faith products to market to those around us, we can be more healthily comfortable in our faith and our faithful interactions with others.

Sometimes, “I don’t know” is the best, most satisfying and honest answer to many of our questions. Indeed, this might be the secret to sustainable faith in a God we will always struggle to comprehend.

Live Words: Defending God

There are always those who take it upon themselves to defend God, as if Ultimate Reality, as if sustaining frame of existence, were something weak and helpless. These people walk by a widow deformed by leprosy begging for a few paise, walk by children dressed in rags living in the street, and they think, "Business as usual." But if they perceive a slight against God, it is a different story. They faces go red, their chests heave mightily, they sputter angry words. The degree of their indignation is astonishing. Their resolve is frightening.

These people fail to realize that it is on the inside that God must be defended, not on the outside. They should direct their anger at themselves. For evil in the open is but evil from within that has been let out. The main battlefield for good is not the open ground of the public arena but the small clearing of each heart. Meanwhile, the lot of widows and homeless children is very hard, and it is to their defence, not God's, that the self-righteous should rush.

                                                                        ~by Yann Martel

Religion and Violence

~ by Samir Selmanovic

January 21-21 Lauralea and I attended 38th Trinity Institute on "Religion and Violence: Untangling the Roots of Conflict" held at Trinity Wall Street episcopal church in New York. It was a powerful and thought-provoking event with satellite linked sites around the world. Speakers Katharine Jefferts Schori James Cone, Susannah Heschel, James Carroll, and Tariq Ramadan dug deep into the issues and provided us with opportunity to discuss, gain insight, and find hope.

I even had a chance for a conversation with Susannah Heschel whose father Rabbi Abraham J. Heschel is one of my top five all time favorite teachers, and with James Caroll whose book Constantine's Sword rocked everything I thought I knew about history of Christianity and Judaism when it came out in 2001. I was particularly interested in hearing Tariq Ramadan who did not get visa to come to the United States (for a no good reason!) and has joined us over a satellite connection. I was encouraged and inspired with his fresh interpretation of what Islam is about and his efforts in integrating its treasures with Western society. Although committed to different traditions, we felt spiritual kinship, hope pulling us like a river to the future.

Good news for all of you is that their presentations are now available on the Trinity Institute website. Just click HERE. If you don't have enough time to see everything, I would recommend these three presentations: James Carroll, Susannah Heschel, and Closing Panel.

For many of us the best part of the experience was participating in a small theological reflection group after each speaker. Seven of us from around the country that comprised our group bonded immediately as we wrestled with the issues and questions raised at the main sessions and shared our journeys, dreams, and hopes. I wholeheartedly recommend Trinity Institute conference in Manhattan. Come next year! The topic for 2009: Religion and Sustainability.

Less Anti-theism, More Humanism

~ Greg Epstein serves as the Humanist Chaplain of Harvard University. He recently agreed to write his first book, Good Without God, for William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Epstein was the primary organizer of “The New Humanism,” an international conference in honor of the 30th Humanist Chaplaincy of Harvard University, which drew one of the largest and most diverse audiences of any Humanist gathering in North American history. He blogs for Newsweek magazine and The Washington Post, and his work as a Humanist rabbi and Chaplain has been featured by National Public Radio, BBC Radio, Newsweek, The Boston Globe, The Jewish Daily Forward, and more. 

Endorsement of Faith House Manhattan:

"Faith House Manhattan is a really intriguing idea, and quite possibly a necessary one. I would encourage my fellow Humanists, atheists, agnostics and the non-religious to check it out, and to consider getting involved. Samir Selmanovic should be commended for reaching out earnestly, in respect and friendship, to our community. We secularists and freethinkers should do the same to him and to theistically-oriented Christians, Muslims, Jews and other religious people everywhere. Global warming doesn’t care what we believe or disbelieve about a god, and that’s just one of the many dangers that may doom us if we can’t figure out how to work together and care about one another despite differences. I’m hopeful this project can help build common ground and enable us to learn from one another in New York City and beyond."

Following post is adapted for Faith House by Greg Epstein, originally posted on On Faith, an online conversation about religion facilitated by Newsweek editor Jon Meacham and Washington Post journalist Sally Quinn.

Christopher Hitchens, author of the bestselling book God Is Not Great writes that "Religion is violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children."

In this quote, Sally and Jon identify a classic example of the way in which Christopher Hitchens’s approach to religion goes far beyond atheism and is really better understood as anti-theism.

While atheism is the lack of belief in any god, anti-theism means actively seeking out the worst aspects of faith in god and portraying them as representative of all religion. Anti-theism seeks to shame and embarrass people away from religion, browbeating them about the stupidity of belief in a bellicose god.

Anti-theists are often brilliant scientific thinkers. The ones I know tend to be passionately ethical in their personal lives. And as in the case of Hitchens, they can be ferociously eloquent. So why hasn’t anti-theism ever gained any real political or social power?

In most people’s minds, “religion” does not just stand merely for belief in an unseen, all-seeing deity with a baritone voice and a flowing beard. It stands for the things we hold most dear: family, tradition, and community. Memories of lost loved ones and consolation in the face of death. The organized pursuit of social justice. Not to mention music, art, architecture, and I could go on and on.

These things are all good. If you take a rhetorical blowtorch to religion without acknowledging the way it provides them, you get precisely what we have today: a nation and world where despite all our scientific knowledge, 80 to 90 percent of people say they are religious.

Now let me be perfectly clear about myself. I have zero belief in god, gods, goddesses, or any other manner of supernatural spirits. I affirm that there is one and only one world: this natural world. As far as any human being will ever know we get only one life, from womb to tomb.

My conviction that this life is all I have, however, is precisely why I don’t want to spend my days focused on the worst in religion. I prefer seeking the best in each of us. I am not an antitheist, and not simply an atheist, but a Humanist.

Humanism is the non-religious pursuit of all that is best in human life. It is based on reason, compassion, and creativity, and promotes loving and ethical connections with family, community, all human beings, and the natural world surrounding us. It is a progressive lifestance that, without supernaturalism, affirms our ability and responsibility to lead ethical lives of personal fulfillment, aspiring to the greater good of humanity.

Simply put, Humanism is being good and living well without god. And that is no small matter, because it is hard to live a good life in this world regardless of what you believe. We human beings are all so imperfect—we are hurt so easily and too quick to hurt others. We get sick and die just when it is least fair and most painful.

Ultimately, we are social animals. We need each other. Our lives are best when we take part in an ethical community that extends far beyond ourselves; for thousands of years, religion has been the best human institution at providing that community. So if all we stand for is anti-theism, we will get nowhere, even though Hitchens is right -- partially -- about the evil religion can do.

Today, the billion of us around the world who are not religious can and must join together to create a humanistic alternative to religion. And let us do so while honoring the good in those of our religious sisters and brothers who are trying to live well according to a belief system we cannot share.

For a Humanist, it is not enough to simply rage, rage against the dying of the enlightenment. Let us get involved in Humanism and make this world, though it will never be perfect, a better place.

Links to explore:

The New Humanism
American Humanist Association
Institute for Humanist Studies
International Humanist and Ethical Union

While atheism is the lack of belief in any god, anti-theism means actively seeking out the worst aspects of faith in god and portraying them as representative of all religion. Anti-theism seeks to shame and embarrass people away from religion, browbeating them about the stupidity of belief in a bellicose god.

Anti-theists are often brilliant scientific thinkers. The ones I know tend to be passionately ethical in their personal lives. And as in the case of Hitchens, they can be ferociously eloquent. So why hasn’t anti-theism ever gained any real political or social power?

In most people’s minds, “religion” does not just stand merely for belief in an unseen, all-seeing deity with a baritone voice and a flowing beard. It stands for the things we hold most dear: family, tradition, and community. Memories of lost loved ones and consolation in the face of death. The organized pursuit of social justice. Not to mention music, art, architecture, and I could go on and on.

Spiritual and Religious

~ by Samir Selmanovic

An increasing number of people identify with the statement, “I am spiritual, but not religious.” Even many of us religious people don’t exactly know how we got here, but we have to honor where our hearts have gone.

Religion is difficult. It has history—and every history has its dark ages or, at the very least, dark moments. And the entire world is the judge. Spirituality, on the other hand, is personal. It starts and ends with me. I am the judge. 

As humans we know there is more to life than what we can see and touch. That's what makes us different from other living beings. Our existence is mystical and not just physical. We are all made of this “spiritual stuff,” a dust that remembers its cosmic origins. As none of us is spared from being human, so none of us is spared from being spiritual. Spirituality is our subjective experience of our common lot of living “in between”—between dust and stardust, glory and gore, matter and spirit. Spirituality is our individual experience of the interior world we all have. 

Spirituality does not have to involve religion. It is a way of traveling freely and intimately through the journey of human life, engaging with what’s to be found there. But, the moment two people begin conversing about the meaning of their experience, the moment they begin naming experiences, thoughts, concepts, practices, convictions, anything at all, is the moment their religion germinates. We want to communicate about and pursue together what we think matters, strive for what is good, struggle against what is bad, cling to what is real and admire what is beautiful. And the moment a large number of people begin to want the same things and decide to help each other on their journeys, we have a major religion.

Religion comes from the Latin root word religio, meaning “to bind back.” We bind ourselves to what we hold as valuable and to others who value the same thing. To thrive and make a difference, every spirituality needs a community—maybe not a church, a mosque, or a synagogue as we know them, but certainly a community.

In this sense, everyone has religion. Religion will never go away, for we will always want to make our spirituality function in more than our own isolated selves. We fight over our religions because it is in religion that we fully articulate our differences. Without religion, we would be left to drift with our own meanings isolated from each other. Without religion, nothing about our inner life would be passed from generation to generation. Imagine the invention of the wheel, fire and writing, and every new generation taking up the task of inventing them again.

Spirituality, on the other hand, can be frighteningly undemanding. It can serve some kind of generic god that submits himself (or herself) to our own egos. Such a god never cuts across our will, never confronts, never frustrates, never leads us through dark places. But the world often is a dark place and, more importantly, each of us participates in making it the way it is. To change the world, one must be changed oneself, and a god who is not allowed to disagree with us cannot change us. Spirituality without religion has been as much a source of suffering as religion without spirituality.

Religion is a journey of many generations that provides us with starting point from which we can dig down to find the depth of our soul. Religious traditions—with their accumulated wisdom, practices and an extensive chart of wrong paths taken in the past—can help us stay with it until we touch the bottom, or learn to fly. Religion is here to stay, simply because human beings will always put their efforts together in making good—or evil—happen. But it is here in a religious community where a robust personal spirituality can develop and where it actually matters most. In community, our personal spiritualities cross-pollinate with one another and interact with the wisdom and strength handed down to us from our particular religious traditions. In turn, in such a community our present contribution can be shared with others and passed into the future. When our personal spiritualities are bound together, God can work through us to change each other and heal the world.

Our religions can exist for the life of the world. Our theologies can tell life-giving stories. Our communities can live out such stories. Even our organizational structures can learn (or re-learn) to be channels of systemic blessing to all of life. Like a troubled human, a troubled religion can be redeemed.

(from Signs of the Times, Australia, November 2007, adapted by the author)

Atheism At Its Best

~ by Samir Selmanovic

Atheistic Fundamentalism is atheism at its worst, a dogmatic expression of a worldview equally capable of destroying humanity with zeal and effectiveness as any fundamentalist religion. Shutting out the spiritual, mystical, metaphorical, and transcendent, atheistic fundamentalism resorts to cleaning up the world of those who disagree with it and creating a naked public square, devoid of any options but its own.

Atheism at its best is an expression of faith in humanity, even faith in religious humanity, first by asking the difficult but legitimate questions that religious people are prone to dismiss. And then by dedication to a kind of believing that is committed to denying the existence of God until a picture of “a God worth believing in” emerges. Atheism at its best is a rebellion against the god offered in the market of religions, a demand that God ought to be what God should be, if God is in fact there at all. Atheism at its best grabs us by our collars and throws us on the ground, demanding to see the righteousness we talk about, forcing us to dig deeper and harder into the best of our own religions. Atheism at its best is hanging on to the hope that our religions have not grasped reality adequately, and that there must be more to the mystery, beauty, and justice of life than what we have offered.

Judaism, Christianity, and Islam need such atheists. They have a prophetic ministry to us. For the option of believing that God is not there is always available to the world. And it sometimes makes more sense than God we are conveying to the world.

James Kavanugh is a Catholic priest, a poet and a writer.  His poem entitled My Easy God is Gone is one of the great examples of atheism at its best.  If you are a believer, I think this poem will hurt you.  And somehow help you heal. 

Milorad Kojic, a genetic scientist from Manhattan, New York, sent it to me after our conversation about "God with eyes too blue to understand" (Thank you Milo!).

My Easy God is Gone

I have lost my easy God - the one whose name
I knew since childhood.
I knew his temper, his sullen outrage,
his ritual forgiveness.
I knew the strength of his arm, the sound
of his insistent voice.
His beard bristling, his lips full and red
with moisture at the moustache,
His eyes clear and piercing, too blue
to understand all,
His face too unwrinkled to feel my
child's pain.
He was a good God - so he told me -
a long suffering and manageable one.
I knelt at his feet and kissed them.
I felt the smooth countenance of his forgiveness.

I never told him how he frightened me,
How he followed me as a child,
When I played with friends or begged
for candy on Halloween.
He was a predictable God, I was the
unpredictable one.
He was unchanging, omnipotent, all-seeing,
I was volatile and helpless.

He taught me to thank him for the concern
which gave me no chance to breathe,
For the love which demanded only love in
return - and obedience.
He made pain sensible and patience possible
and the future foreseeable.
He, the mysterious, took all mystery away,
corroded my imagination,
Controlled the stars and would not let
them speak for themselves.

Now he haunts me seldom:  some fierce
umbilical is broken,
I live with my own fragile hopes and
sudden rising despair.
Now I do not weep for my sins; I have
learned to love them.
And to know that they are the wounds that
make love real.
His face alludes me; his voice, with all
its pity, does not ring in my ear.
His maxims memorized in boyhood do not
make fruitless and pointless my experience.
I walk alone, but not so terrified as when
he held my hand.

I do not splash in the blood of his son
nor hear the crunch of nails or thorns
piercing protesting flesh.
I am a boy again - I whose boyhood was
turned to manhood in a brutal myth.
Now wine is only wine with drops that do
not taste of blood.
The bread I eat has too much pride for transubstantiation,
I, too - and together the bread and I embrace,
Each grateful to be what we are, each loving
from our own reality.
Now the bread is warm in my mouth and
I am warm in its mouth as well.

Now my easy God is gone - he knew too
much to be real,
He talked too much to listen, he knew
my words before I spoke.
But I knew his answers as well - computerized
and turned to dogma.
His stamp was on my soul, his law locked
cross-like on my heart,
His imperatives tattooed on my breast, his
aloofness canonized in ritual.

Now he is gone - my easy, stuffy God - God,
the father - master, the mother - whiner, the
Dull, whoring God who offered love bought
by an infant's fear.
Now the world is mine with all its pain and
warmth, with its every color and sound;
The setting sun is my priest with the ocean for it's alter.
The rising sun redeems me with rolling
waves warmed in its arms.
A dog barks and I weep to be alive, a
cat studies me and my job is boundless.
I lie on the grass and boy-like, search the sky.
The clouds do not turn to angels, the winds
do not whisper of heaven or hell.

Perhaps I have no God - what does it matter?
I have beauty and joy and transcending loneliness,
I have the beginning of love - as beautiful as it
is feeble - as free as it is human.
I have the mountains that whisper secrets
held before men could speak,
I have the oceans that belches life on
the beach and caresses it in the sand,
I have a friend who smiles when he sees
me, who weeps when he hears my pain,
I have a future of wonder.
I have no past - the steps have disappeared
the wind has blown them away.

I stand in the Heavens and on earth, I
feel the breeze in my hair,
I can drink to the North Star and shout
on a bar stool,
I can feel the teeth of a hangover, the
job of laziness,
The flush of my own rudeness, the surge of
my own ineptitude.
And I can know my own gentleness as well
my wonder, my nobility.
I sense the call of creation, I feel its
swelling in my hands.
I can lust and love, eat and drink, sleep
and rise,
But my easy God is gone - and in his stead
The mystery of loneliness and love!

(source: The Recovery Emporium, © Copyright -  James Kavanaugh)