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In a post titled, Does Protestantism Ultimately Lead to Atheism? T.J. Lang asserts that Protestantism leads to immoral, Satanic atheism:
The Lutheran Church he founded remained the state Church of Sweden until 2000 and was the only church allowed in the country until the middle of the 19th century. Even today, it is funded by and considered a “department” of the Swedish secular government. In fact, Catholicism was illegal in Sweden for more than a quarter of a century. At times, the death penalty was invoked for the “crime” of being or becoming Catholic. It was only dropped in 1873.
Roughly 2 percent of the population of Sweden are Catholics and Orthodox, and they are almost entirely immigrants. Given that Sweden has been influenced by only the Lutheran faith for almost 500 years, the state of Christianity in Sweden should be an indication of whether Protestantism, or more specifically, the first version of Protestantism – Lutheranism — has had a positive impact on Christianity.
Statistics regarding the state of the Christian church in Sweden are, to say the least, shocking. Today, 61 percent of Swedes officially belong to the Lutheran Church, down from 95 percent in 1972. Both statistics are misleadingly high, in part because anyone born before the year 2000 was automatically enrolled in the state church regardless of religious belief or practice. For the vast majority, membership is merely a formality and doesn’t mean much in their lives. In the 1990s, 15 percent of Swedes claimed a belief in a personal God and only 19 percent believed in an afterlife.
According to various studies, between 46–85 percent of Swedes now consider themselves “irreligious,” meaning that in their lives there is an “absence of religion, indifference to religion or hostility to religion.” According to a Zuckerman poll, the same figures for a few “Catholic countries” are as follows: Portugal: 4–9 percent, Greece (Eastern Orthodox): 16 percent, Italy: 6–15 percent. These statistics are contrasted with that of Germany, the home of Luther’s Reformation, at 41–49 percent, and the United States at 3–9 percent.
The Living Church, an independent Anglican organization, reports that only about 400,000 of the 6.6 million Swedes attend church on a monthly basis (6 percent), and only 15 percent of the members of the church say they believe in Jesus Christ. It is not insignificant that an equal number of Swedes are stated atheists: “Of the 3,384 churches in Sweden only 500 or so are used, at most, once a month.”
Fifty-five percent of children born in Sweden today are born out of wedlock as compared to 9 percent in Greece, an Eastern Orthodox country, which was never really infected with Protestantism or influenced by “salvation by faith alone.” Of course, this has a tremendous impact on the percentage of children reared in single-parent families. Twenty-two percent of children in Sweden are in single-parent situations, whereas in Italy, it’s only 10 percent.
According to an article in the Weekly Standard, “A majority of children in Sweden and Norway are born out of wedlock. … Not coincidentally, these countries have had something close to full gay marriage for a decade or more. Same-sex marriage has locked in and reinforced an existing Scandinavian trend toward the separation of marriage and parenthood.”
Of course, Sweden isn’t the only country that has been influenced by Protestantism or more specifically, the original Protestantism — Lutheranism. As such, it would be instructive to determine how Christianity in general and Christian moral values are faring in those countries.
Obviously, these statistics show that the greater the influence of Protestantism, the weaker the belief in God and the less the importance of religion in general. Other country by country statistics on issues such as abortion rates, marriage rates, cohabitation rates and divorce rates are all pretty shocking in the countries the are strongly Protestant. Obviously, Satan is having his greatest successes in the predominantly Protestant countries, and in fact, specifically in the Lutheran countries.
In a video transcript titled, Donald Trump and Atheists, Michael Voris had this to say:
The entire American electorate is in massive flux and about to undergo the most significant change in the country’s history.
If current trends hold or even accelerate by just a little, this may very well be the last election where a majority of voters will be white Christians — if not this election, certainly 2020. This is due to two large factors: the decline of the Protestant majority and the rise of the religiously unaffiliated, also known as “nones.”
The nones, at least many of them, while claiming to be “spiritual” are functionally and in practice atheists. They are a-theist not so much in their cores but in their lives, where it really matters after all. We have said at various times that Protestantism leads to atheism, and here are reports back from the political front lines proving the truth of that statement.
Up until about the past 10 years, the bulk of the decline among white Protestants was largely among more liberal mainline Protestants, like Methodists, Episcopalians or Presbyterians. Since the re-election of Ronald Reagan in 1988, their numbers have been cut nearly in half to just 14 percent of the overall population.
But more surprising, in the last 10 years, there has also been a notable decline among the more conservative branch of white Protestantism —Evangelicals. Since the end of Ronald Reagan’s last term in 1988, they have dropped from 22 percent to just 17 percent. Add both those Protestant camps together and you get just 31 percent of the electorate.
What’s driving the decline over the past generation? The rise of the younger generation, 34 percent of which identify as unbelievers — not affiliated with any religious body at all.
It doesn’t take a genius to look at the numbers here. A larger percentage of millennials — 34 percent — are unaffiliated with any religion than the the overall percentage of white Protestants — 31 percent — relative to the population. All this volatile mixture needs is a little more time, perhaps one more election cycle, before white Protestant voters lose their majority status. And then, by the time, today’s millennials are in their forties, they will be the majority — and you need to stop and think about that for a moment.
What is looming just over the horizon, politically and culturally speaking, is a nation where Christians are the minority, and cultural atheists are the majority. And this is owing precisely to the Protestant ethos of the rule of the exaltation of the individual. All of Protestantism is built on this principle — the principle of individual interpretation of Scripture, of individual personal relationship with Jesus, unmediated by the Church.
Protestantism eventually gives way to atheism, because philosophically, it is atheism. What, after all, is atheism? It is a-theism, no God. What does Protestantism, with its me-centered theology, produce? That you become your own God. You determine your morality. You determine the meaning of Scripture. You determine your own theology. There is no longer room for God, because the individual assumes the throne — kind of the working definition of atheism.
….
Both of these excerpts are from the Church Militant website
Sermon delivered by Robert Tucker at First Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Houston on August 13, 2017
Bob is a regular reader of The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser. I found his sermon to be quite insightful, so I asked him if I could post it here. Bob graciously said, yes.
INTRODUCTION
Today I will be speaking about a form of theology called Religious Naturalism. Naturalism is understood very expansively—all our perceptions, language, and values, along with all inventions and mental constructions, plus human relationships. That is, naturalism is not only a tree, but also the poet and her poem about a tree, and the desk made from the tree, the quantum theoretical understandings of the subatomic particles of the tree, and the decay, disease and death of the tree. Religion is understood as a magnificent human invention within nature, embracing all our experiences of wonder and miracle, gratitude and compassion, joy and forgiveness, and the human ability to corrupt, pervert and destroy even human’s finest accomplishments. Naturalism believes there are no substantiated reasons to view as real anything independent of the natural order, including deities. However, naturalism understands religion to be a humanly-created mental and physical part of existence that, clustered along with language and music, make up the lavish outpouring of human creativity.
For our reading today, I am using selections from Albert Einstein. Einstein had much to say about religion both in strongly denying he was a believer and also in strongly opposing the dogmatism of the non-believer:
… I am, of course, and have always been an atheist. … It is always misleading to use anthropomorphic concepts in dealing with things outside the human sphere—childish analogies. We have to admire in humility the beautiful harmony of the structure of this world—as far as we can grasp it, and that is all.
I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal God is a childlike one, but I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth. I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our own being.
What separates me from most so-called atheists is a feeling of utter humility toward the unattainable secrets of the harmony of the cosmos.
Then there are the fanatical atheists whose intolerance is the same as that of the religious fanatics, and it springs from the same source . . . They are creatures who can’t hear the music of the spheres.
To a friend who asked if the rumor were true that Einstein had converted, Einstein wrote:
It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.
Next is a quote that I will repeat at the end of this sermon since it seems to incorporate the underlying dimension of Religious Naturalism.
The most beautiful and most profound experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the source of all true science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their primitive forms—this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness.
It’s been a long time since I was an active, full-time, settled minister in a church, and I have lost touch with the individual stories of those who join liberal churches these days. Of course, there never was a cookie-cutter experience for all. Still, back when I was so involved, I found three types of experiences dominant:
What is rational about a virgin conceiving by a divine spirit, about a dead person returning to life and, then, rising to heaven? And where is heaven anyway, when, in looking up, one can only see sky—sky almost back to the Big Bang, according to the Ultra Deep Field probing of the Hubble telescope? And if God is in heaven (as Jesus states in the Lord’s Prayer) and there is no heaven, only sky, then it is reasonable to assume that there is no God that can call heaven home. When confronted with the edifice of science and reason, many religious beliefs simply crack, crumble, and come tumbling down.
One thing I did notice though, was that, from whatever unwanted baggage people escaped, they were either uninterested in or unable to assemble a new belief system. They lived with denial, often tinged with regret, disgust or anger. For those who were, or are currently, in that situation, Religious Naturalism has the ability to delightfully bind two aspects of life—science and religion—that often get separated.
You have no doubt heard the comment made by last century’s humorist and actor Robert Benchley: “There are two kinds of people in the world. Those who divide everybody into two kinds of people, and those who don’t.” Religious Naturalism is a ‘non-divider.’ It favors connections among people and ideas, both/ands rather than either/ors. In other words, Religious Naturalism has a very high tolerance for ambiguity.
One sharp religious divide is found in those who believe in God and those who do not believe in God—theists and atheists to use official theological terms. Being a non-divider myself, I have never found the argument between God-believers and God-deniers enticing enough to spend time on the debate. As a consequence, I gladly moved into a theology where my atheism and my theism cohabit, although, to be perfectly honest, when I state my position to both well-dug-in theists and atheists, raised eyebrows along with looks of disapproval-to-incomprehension are the return I get. In fact, I hesitate to use the words theist and atheist because the words immediately classify, catalog and pigeon-hole.
One cannot live in this society and not be aware of the dogmatism inherent in the ‘Jesus is the only way’ crowd. It fills churches, publications and the airways. What is less obvious, but just as real, is the dogmatism in atheists, a reality to which Einstein, more than once, points. Dogmatism is dogmatism, under whatever label, and dogmatism is persona non grata in Religious Naturalism. Religious Naturalism acts as a prophylactic against the dogmatisms of doubt as well as the dogmatisms of credulity.
Now, people can be dogmatic if they want to be, that is their choice. However, it is when they clothe their certainties, either in the piety of belief or in the reductive certainty of science, that I find myself ready to move on. So, Religious Naturalism is welcome space to avoid the dogmatisms.
When I mention this aspect of my Religious Naturalism, my credibility with scientific atheists plummets, and theists, although at first pleased, are appalled when I explain myself. Still I persist.
I find another drawback in both believers and unbelievers’ positions in the way they flatten life. They suck out the wonder in the rich tapestry of beauty, love and delight, often reducing truth to that which is dogmatically correct or scientifically verifiable. They can’t, as Einstein put it, “hear the music of the spheres.” Again, Religious Naturalism allows one’s senses, mind and imagination to be immersed in delight.
Let me now piece together Religious Naturalism, a religion containing both no God and God. I will briefly develop this thought in two areas.
PART ONE: Our Awesome Natural World
Religious Naturalism, viewing total reality in the natural world of which we are a part, encourages a particular way of looking at the world—finding the wonder and the miracles all around. In other words, if what we have is only this world, let’s delightfully make the most of it.
Religious Naturalism is religious in that, in one’s experiences, all the feelings associated with religion are generated this world—wonder and miracle, gratitude and compassion, joy and forgiveness. A way of labeling this is to use the humanly-created word ‘God,’ or better, C∞D. No person has written more pointedly of this aspect of Religious Naturalism than the English poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning in her poem Aurora Leigh:
Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God,
But only he who sees takes off his shoes;
The rest sit round and pluck blackberries
Now, attentiveness can be found in each one of the world’s religions. In the Buddhist tradition, as you may know, it is called mindfulness—although I am reluctant to simply borrow that word from that tradition, knowing that mindfulness is differently understood from the way we use it in our culture. Still, being attentive to the world around and within is a key to living rather than a kind of sleepwalking through what is mistakenly perceived as ordinary days.
There is the story of a strung-out mid-careerist who futilely tried all the advertised offerings available for healing and decides as a final effort to visit the fabled guru in the mountains. After an arduous week-long journey the supplicant arrives, sits before the guru, and locks in eye-to-eye silence, for an irritatingly long time before the guru says, “Attention.” Again there is total silence. In that silence, increasing irritation scurries around the supplicant’s mind. About to give up and leave, the guru then says: “Attention, Attention,” and again goes silent. Now anger bubbles up that the person has been played for such a fool, and the suppliant rises to leave, but the raised hand of the guru stops him: “Attention. Attention. Attention.” The man stops in his rising, pauses, slowly sits, and in silence begins his return to the humanity he had lost.
Religious Naturalism does offer us a way to be aware of, as the writer D.H. Lawrence put it, ‘the wonder that bubbles into our souls,’ or, as Einstein stated, it allows us to listen to “the music of the spheres.” Religious Naturalism pushes us to see the wonder, the miraculous, the extraordinary in the ordinary world of our living.
PART TWO: Inherited Religious Language—Virgin Birth
A second area in which Religious Naturalism brings a gift is our ability to join scientific understandings and religious convictions by shedding our dismissive response to the twisted language we have from the past, anchoring some in teeth-clenching disgust.
Now, we have all learned that a lot of bad health habits and anti-social behavior stem from past childhood trauma — verbal, emotional, sexual, physical or a combination of these. Paralleling those is the vinegary religion many learned in their childhood churches. Dealing with the religious language that rolls around in our minds is important for our current religious health, and Religious Naturalism can provide help. Two such expressions that hang around in minds and in our society and continue to cause problems are ‘Virgin Birth’ and ‘Resurrection.’
With no supernatural, only the natural, we realize that all religious language, like virgin birth or resurrection, did not drop out of the sky. They, like all words, were created by humans, and are attached to human, non-supernatural experiences. And, they are words that were already in use in the culture prior to Jesus’ life, prior to the rise of Christianity. That does not mean the words are unimportant—after all, they contain human wisdom refined over the centuries, and they continue to provide inspiration and motivation for hundreds of millions. However, the literature shows that the ancients did not have the problem with virgin birth and resurrection that we seem to have, and it is not because they were more prone to superstition than we are today.
Of course, people in ancient days knew how babies came about, but still virgin birth posed no problem—because, in ancient days, virgin birth, primarily, was related to genius, not to conception.
In the ancient world there were two other very prominent humans who were held to be miraculously born besides Jesus: Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar. What do those three humans—Alexander, Caesar and Jesus—have in common? They were individuals of such inner strength and outer power that people could not come up with a human explanation for such greatness. (We seem to have the same problem of explanation today; we don’t know how to explain the origin of genius.) The Virgin Birth of Jesus was a way of talking about the baffling, the perplexing, the mystifying, the unexplainable, the inexplicable genius of a rare individual, Jesus of Nazareth—a peasant from the backwaters of the Roman Empire who, unlike Alexander or Caesar, never led an army or ruled an empire, but who roamed the countryside for one-to-three years and was brutally killed as a criminal. Yet, he was a person whose after-death presence in people’s minds and lives continued to motivate people to reach out in compassion to the stranger and even to one’s enemy. The power of Empire could not shake off the growing influence of this individual.
If the words ‘Virgin Birth’ were used today, in the same way as they were in ancient days, we could say that Mozart was virgin born (what was the source of that incredible musical talent?), Einstein was virgin born (how could his mind roam over the entire universe in such counter-intuitive ways), and Martin Luther King, Jr., was virgin born (how could a young, newly-minted preacher in, of all places, Montgomery, Alabama, shift the focus of a whole nation?). Now, we don’t say virgin birth about these individuals, because that is not the way we use that metaphor today; however, like the ancients, we continue to stand in awe and incomprehension of the source of genius—but lack a descriptive word.
If today I said that I know a very important person who has an ego as big as an elephant, everyone would know of whom I am speaking; however, no one here would rise and run over to the nearby zoo to measure the size of an elephant. In the first century world, virgin birth was used the same way as the use of the image of an elephant. ‘Virgin Birth’ is a metaphor that was rooted in divinity because the reference to divinity was the only way to explain human genius.
Personally, I do not verbally use ‘Virgin Birth,’ but I sometimes keep the concept behind the words in mind, to remind myself of the unique and miraculous quality of each human life.
PART TWO: Inherited Religious Language—Resurrection
A second problematic religious expression is the word ‘resurrection,’ pointing to the physical coming to life of Jesus’ dead body. Once again, humans created this word; it did not drop out of the sky, and, it referred to a this-worldly human experience. Once again, it was in use in the ancient world before Christians came along.
Justin Martyr, c. 100-165, a Christian theologian who lived a hundred years after Jesus and Paul, argued: “when we say … Jesus Christ, our teacher, was crucified and died, and rose again, and ascended into heaven, we propose nothing different from what you believe regarding those whom you consider sons of Zeus.” (1 Apology. 21)
My understanding of resurrection has been greatly influenced by the German New Testament scholar Rudolph Bultmann, 1884-1976. He placed the resurrection in a context of a ‘natural’ non-supernatural understanding. Jesus lived, Jesus died, and Jesus rose again in the hearts and minds of his followers.
This insight leads me down two paths of understanding. First, there is the frequency of resurrections in our corporate life.
Today and the rest of this week, just down the road from Houston, in Memphis, Tennessee, there is a resurrection celebration taking place. It is called ‘Elvis Week’ at Graceland. Annually, some 40,000 people from all over the world drop in for a remembrance on the death of Elvis Presley. This week an additional 20,000 or so are expected because this year is the 40th anniversary of Elvis’ death. The planned activities are reminiscent of an Easter celebration in a Christian church:
Since the word ‘resurrection’ was formulated and used within our natural world, the word can also be used for a number of events of significant remembrance: our national holidays remembering those who died in this country’s wars, and the extraordinary life and too early death of Martin Luther King, Jr., remembered in February, being just two.
There is a second path to which Bultmann’s understanding of resurrection leads me. It becomes a way of talking about renewed human life—the lives that we lead following one or more of the multiple deaths we experience in this world. Let me note some of them:
I truly believe that each of us, deep down, is wounded by other people, by organizations, or by ourselves, and, I believe, we carry with us those wounds and the subsequent deaths we endure throughout our lives. The truth of this is in how quickly we can be ‘rubber-banded’ back into the emotions of earlier experiences when those remembered moments wash over us.
Yet, here we are today. We have risen from bed and placed one foot in front of the other in an affirmation of life. We are resurrected people. Resurrection is not about dead bodies coming to life or a future hope. ‘Resurrection’ is the word the ancients gave to life-affirmation in the face of our multiple deaths. Following such deaths, we move on and become centers of energy for the human future. How do we talk about such affirmation of life in the midst of death? We have the word ‘resurrection.’
As a minister I am the repository of people’s stories—stories of joy, but also stories of pain and grief, hurt and betrayal, dashed dreams and violated ideals. These stories leave me, at times, with great anger over the hurt done to people. Yet, that has never led me to become despondent or cynical. In asking why, I think it is because I stand in awe, in absolute amazement, at the way people pick up the pieces of their lives and move on, at the way they rebuild their shattered selves and, more often than I would believe possible, at the way they then reach out and become healers of others who have similar suffering. How can I feel depressed when I experience the amazing tenacity of the human spirit to embrace pain and death and to affirm life?
PART THREE: Unexplained, Non-rational and Exotic Experiences
A third area in which Religious Naturalism brings a gift is our ability to encompass the many things that happen in our world that defy easy explanation or any explanation at all. Experiences that are not common for everyone, or are differently nuanced for different people can make normal scientific or rational understanding tenuous-to-impossible. Thus, it is easy to dismiss them.
On the other hand, for believers such events can be an automatic sign of divine action at work. Religious literature and private testimonials are replete with events attributed to God’s will.
For the Religious Naturalist neither interpretation is satisfactory. Attributing an event to the supernatural is untenable, leading to automatic dismissal by scientists and rationalists. Yet, for individuals so impacted, such experiences are objectively real and often life-changing. If Religious Naturalism accepts nature (as broadly described early in this sermon) as reality, then the unexplained, the non-rational, the exotic, and the ecstatic of experiences need to find a place. There are enough unusual experiences had by rational people that they need consideration. I now mention three examples.
The first experience I want to cite is the religious conversion story of Louis Zamperini, found in both the book and the movie titled Unbroken and that of John Newton and William Wilberforce. Unbroken was one of the longest-running New York Times bestsellers of all time, spending more than four years on the Times list.
In boyhood, Louis Zamperini had been a cunning and incorrigible delinquent, breaking into houses, brawling, and fleeing his home to ride the rails. As a teenager, he channeled his defiance into running, discovering a prodigious talent that carried him to the 1936 Berlin Olympics. In 1943, as a plane’s bombardier, he crashed in the Pacific Ocean and pulled himself aboard a lifeboat. Zamperini spent almost seven weeks (47 days) in 1943 adrift on a raft, a speck of suffering in the vast sun-drenched Pacific. He was finally captured by the Japanese and placed in a series of POW camps. There he was savagely tormented and beaten by one Japanese officer. He endured. After the war, he married and lived a dissolute life of alcoholism and adultery, using both to stave off nightmares and flashbacks. At the behest of his wife he went to a Billy Graham revival in Los Angeles. There he was converted, gave up the dissolute life and, then, incredibly, following the words of Jesus, he went to Japan to forgive the soldier(s) that had so tormented him.
It is an incredible story, although my preference would have been for his conversion not to have taken place at a Billy Graham revival. That revival, that conversion radically changed his life. I cannot simply explain away or dismiss his conversion though psychological analysis, as I would have at an earlier point in my life, nor can I attribute a divine action to his conversion, as I never would have at an earlier time of my life. I am faced with the question of how to incorporate his human experience into my Religious Naturalist theology, his real conversion and his desire to meet and forgive his captors. If one is a Religious Naturalist, then one has to take seriously human experience, even when it does not fit into the neat boxes of believability that our rational minds create for ourselves.
I again reach into history for the story of John Newton, the son of the captain of an English slave ship who followed his father into that occupation. By his own accounting, he was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Africans on the passage to the Americas. However, in the middle of life, Newton experienced a religious conversion (and wrote the hymn, Amazing Grace). He devoted the balance of his life to the abolition movement. His life intersected with that of William Wilberforce, whom he, at several critical junctures, provided with the encouragement and inspiration to continue the fight for abolition in Parliament. Wilberforce, himself, experienced a religious conversion in his mid-20’s. During his nearly three decades in Parliament, he is best remembered as the person most responsible for the slave trade being outlawed in the British Empire in 1807 (which proved to be the beginning of the end for legalized slavery throughout the world).
I am not a believer in a supernatural power causing conversions. Yet, I marvel at the power of such conversions to shape individual lives and, then, at how some of those lives have a profound effect on society. And, I find the quick dismissals of the testimonies of those who have such experiences by the rationalists and scientists too dogmatic. There is a difference between one’s experience and one’s interpretation of the experience.
Let me raise one final human experience that tests both easy rational dismissal and easy supernatural explanation—Near Death Experiences (NDE). An early report of a NDE came from Plato, in the “Republic.” Plato recounts the story of Er, a soldier who awoke after being dead for 12 days, sharing his account of the journey to the afterlife. Based on a real event or not, today such experiences are the object of numerous studies, including The Immortality Project, a $5.1 million research project funded by the John Templeton Foundation. What follows is the report of a woman who had a NDE this summer.
I was asked, ‘Do you want to continue this life, or die?’ I thought, ‘What’s death?’ The Light began to show me. I knew without a doubt that death was not an ending, but a wonderful opening to my real life. I would be more knowledgeable and live in unconditional completeness and love. I remember feeling almost unworthy of such an indescribable, unconditional love. I was in awe of how much love was enveloping me.
Now, I don’t believe Near Death Experiences are proof of anything supernatural. I am an ‘atheist’ in accepting people’s divine explanations of their experiences, yet I cannot totally dismiss NDEs out of hand, since they are real experiences of real people, and a great number of people. If I had to guess, I would say the NDE’s are the product of evolution, being the way our bodies face extinction. Yet … and yet, over the years I have had conversations with too many intelligent and rational individuals who have spoken of Near Death Experiences, not kooks creating something out of whole cloth. Some have quite significantly changed their lives because of the experience. How can I not take that seriously, even if I don’t always take people’s interpretations literally?
I also refuse to do a slight of hand and sneak divinity in by making the world God (pantheism), or proposing that God is in everything (panentheism), or by stating a derivation that God is in each human being.
One scholar, sociologist Peter Burger, came up with the intriguing phrase “signals of transcendence.” He says there are human experiences that point to, but do not prove, a transcendent element in our universe. He writes about what he calls ‘signals of transcendence” in modern society – little flashes in our lives which seem to point to a transcendent reality but which does not assure one that such a reality exists.
He takes one such signal to be a mother’s love for her child, and the words ‘everything is alright’ – he thinks this is a signal to a cosmic order where everything really is alright. ‘The parental role is not based on a loving lie. On the contrary, it is a witness to the ultimate truth of man’s situation in reality. In that case, it is perfectly possible to analyze religion as a cosmic projection of the child’s experience of the protective order of parental love. What is projected is, however, itself a reflection, an imitation, of ultimate reality.’
Living in the in-between, both-and world of seeing wonder but not automatically attributing that wonder to the supernatural is a place for the Religious Naturalist.
Such experiences are not a proof of other-worldly claims, but they are a reminder that we live in a universe that is far more puzzling and unpredictable than our rational and scientific approach can comprehend. Such unpredictability can easily be found by standing on the shifting sands of reality while reading quantum physics.
As a Religious Naturalist, I take all human experience seriously, including the unexplained, the non-rational, and the exotic. Not everything, of course, but I listen carefully to the experiences that people relate and invest with conviction and transformation. Still, some line needs to be drawn between the bizarre, outlandish and wacky and the unusual—a line that defies definition. There is not time enough to list all the frauds surrounding us like a field of poison ivy.
Living in the world of the ordinary, we can find Miracles of the non-supernatural kind are all around us.
A FINAL WORD
Religious Naturalism combines naturalism—a worldview in which all our perceptions, language, and values are this-worldly, not other-worldly—and religion, our this-world experiences of wonder and miracle, gratitude and compassion, joy and, I would add, resurrection.
We have been oblivious to the freshness of each day, the wonder of everyday miracles, surprises in the wrappings of the ordinary. The conventional understanding of miracle is something that runs contrary to the rules of ordinary life. Religious Naturalism calls for a refocusing on the ordinary, day-to-day aspects and events of the world as the nurturance for life.
Virgin Birth and Resurrection are a part of our ordinary lives and are seen in the people who populate our lives. To to ordinary I would add the non-supernatural, but tantalizing, ‘Unexplained, Non-rational and Exotic Experiences’ that so many rational folk in this world claim to have.
I began with readings from Einstein. I do not know whether or not he would be comfortable with the field of Religious Naturalism. I do know that his words contain an embracing of both theism and atheism. Einstein in his words wraps science and religion together in the experience of wonder.
The most beautiful and most profound experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the source of all true science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their primitive forms—this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness.
America has flaunted its sexual immorality to the world. We’ve neglected many of the poor and suffering and are guilty of much injustice, pride and self-indulgence. We are broken spiritually, adrift morally and divided politically and racially—following whichever direction the bankrupt culture seems to drive us.
Sadly, the voices of hate have grown increasingly loud and insulting, and it was my prayer then and now that God would silence these voices like he shut the mouths of the lions when Daniel was hurled into the den.
While those hateful voices have been raised on both sides of the political aisle, we must realize that ultimately what is transpiring in our nation is an increasing hatred of God, His Word and His ways.
In my lifetime, I have never seen such blatant and incessant animosity toward Christ and His followers. We should not be surprised, because the Scripture tells us that if they hated the Lord Jesus Christ, they surely would despise those who worship and serve Him.
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So let’s be clear. While believers should never raise voices of hate against anyone, the real object of hate in our nation (that has been so blessed by God) is none other than God Himself. What has been historically called good and righteous is now called evil, and what was evil is now called good. The Bible says, “Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness” (Isaiah 5:20).
In what I can only describe as unbelievable, the Southern Poverty Law Center in Mongtomery, Ala., has labeled a number of Christian organizations—such as the Family Research Council led by my friend Tony Perkins, and D. James Kennedy Ministries-—hate organizations simply because they hold to the teachings of the Bible on key social issues like same-sex marriage. Powerful contributors to the SPLC include Apple President Tim Cook and financial services giant J.P. Morgan. The leftist-progressive media frequently reference the SPLC in their reporting.
….
We need to pray for those who hate the Gospel, those who hate the Name of Jesus, those who hate His followers—that they will come out of their self-imposed darkness and into the light of God’s forgiveness through faith and repentance in Christ, who gave Himself for our sins.
The love of Jesus is the supreme antidote against the hate of our culture. It is the love that saved us from our iniquities and will save whomever will call on His Name.
— Franklin Graham, Decision Magazine, From Franklin Graham: Hate What God Hates, October 3, 2017
I want to make readers aware of a site called Freethought Music: A Website for Atheist and Humanist Musicians, Composers, and Leaders. If you are interested in freethought music — I know I am — you will find this website helpful.
I want to say THANKS to Paul Heffron and Jerry Rauser for making me aware of the Freethought Music site.
The following graphic best describes Christian obsession with the rapture, second coming of Jesus, and the end of the world.
Evidently, the following verses are not in some Bibles:
But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only. But as the days of Noah were, so shall also the coming of the Son of man be. For as in the days that were before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noe entered into the ark, And knew not until the flood came, and took them all away; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be. Then shall two be in the field; the one shall be taken, and the other left. Two women shall be grinding at the mill; the one shall be taken, and the other left. Watch therefore: for ye know not what hour your Lord doth come. But know this, that if the goodman of the house had known in what watch the thief would come, he would have watched, and would not have suffered his house to be broken up. Therefore be ye also ready: for in such an hour as ye think not the Son of man cometh. Matthew 24:36-44
After what I thought was another failed rapture on September 23, I received the following card in the mail, letting me know why I wasn’t taken up into the clouds by Jesus.
Yesterday, I published an excerpt from an article by Air Force Chaplain Sony Hernandez — a Fundamentalist Calvinist — in which Hernandez told Christian soldiers that their duty to God comes before the U.S. Constitution. Today, church-state watchdog Freedom From Religion Foundation responded to Hernandez.
To Captain Sonny Hernandez, Chaplain for the U.S. Air Force Reserves:
Dear Captain Hernandez,
This is a response to your recent misguided rant about the “duties” of Christian military chaplains to “avoid supporting or accommodating evil.” You make it clear that by “evil” you mean the American values of religious pluralism and the constitutional right of non-Christians and the nonreligious to freely exercise their beliefs. Your ideas are unworthy and un-American.
The tirade was meant to encourage other military chaplains to follow your lead and turn their backs on the Constitution — the very document that you and they have sworn an oath to uphold and defend — by actively denigrating non-Christian service members. This is a shameful call to action that will actively undermine unit cohesion and the readiness of our armed forces.
You begin your diatribe by distinguishing between “True” Christians (those who are devoted to your interpretation of the bible and “hate the things that God hates”) and “Counterfeit” Christians (those who “appeal to the Constitution” and “support everyone’s right to practice their faith regardless if they worship a god different from ours”). You declare that military chaplains “accommodate evil” if they accommodate the men and women of our armed services who are not Christian.
Midway through your rant, you swing and miss at an incredibly easy question that you pose to yourself: “Is it wrong for a professing Christian service member to say, ‘I support the rights of all Americans to practice their faith since the Constitution protects their rights?’ ”
The easy, correct, obvious answer — the one demanded by your oath to uphold the Constitution — is, “No, it’s not wrong to support the right of free religious exercise, or any of the other rights enshrined in our Constitution.”
Your answer? “Absolutely!” Your disrespect for the very principles on which this nation was founded is appalling.
As a military chaplain you have a duty to aid our service members in the free exercise of their religious beliefs. Accommodating the free exercise of religion is, in fact, your only job. Military chaplains exist to grant our service members access to a church or religious leader of their chosen religion while they live on base or travel overseas.
While the military chaplaincy has unnecessarily expanded and in many cases now provides redundant access to Christian chaplains in areas where private Christian churches are available, the justification for military chaplains nevertheless remains rooted — tenuous though those legal roots may be — in the constitutional principle of free religious exercise. Your call to openly disregard the Constitution is particularly hypocritical, given that the Constitution justifies your existence.
You are encouraging military chaplains to abuse their government positions to promote your particular brand of Christianity to atheist and minority religious service members. This is a dangerous proposal that disrespects the constitutional separation of religion and government and undermines the well being of our non-Christian military members.
U.S. service members have freedom of religion, which includes freedom from religious promotion by the government. By conflating the difference between private belief and government action — the First Amendment only protects the former — you sow confusion and perpetuate the type of overt proselytization by military chaplains that has become far too common.
Earlier this year, the Freedom From Religion Foundation wrote to the Pease Air National Guard Base in New Hampshire after a guardsman complained to us that on-base ceremonies regularly include chaplain-led bible readings and prayer. These are not optional services taking place in a chapel; service members are often required to attend these events as part of their official duties. This is a serious violation of the First Amendment rights of our country’s service members, a violation that you appear to embrace, since it benefits your particular religion.
After bashing the constitutional rights of non-Christians, you bizarrely choose to make an appeal to the constitutional rights of military chaplains. You write, “Military chaplains are not forced to do anything that would violate what their conscience dictates,” which is poorly phrased but basically true. Military chaplains have the right to freely exercise their religion too. But they don’t have the right to force their personal beliefs on others. And they also don’t have a right or an obligation to be military chaplains. Freedom of religious belief does not include the freedom to blow off the duties you’re being paid to perform while continuing to receive a government paycheck.
Your final straw man sets up a false dichotomy. You claim that your opponents want military chaplains either to accommodate “all service members” or else “resign from the military.” There is a world of choice between these two extremes! How about we find military chaplains who are willing to preach to those who welcome them without jamming religion down the throats of the more than 30 percent of service members who are non-Christian, including the 23 percent who have no religious preference? There are indeed many atheists/agnostics/humanists in foxholes who should be protected from religious intrusion and coercion while on duty.
All servicemen and women, chaplains included, must swear an oath to support and defend the Constitution. Your recent post was meant to undermine that hallowed document and the rights it protects. You are unfit to wear the uniform and, if you had the courage of your loudly proclaimed religious convictions, you would resign immediately. Shame on you.
Yours Sincerely,
Sam Grover
Associate Legal Counsel
Freedom From Religion Foundation
Are you a member of the Freedom From Religion Foundation? If your answer is no, I encourage you to become a member today.
Let us be honest. Let us preserve the veracity of our souls. Let education commence in the cradle—in the lap of the loving mother. This is the first school. The teacher, the mother, should be absolutely honest.
The nursery should not be an asylum for lies.
Parents should be modest enough to be truthful, honest enough to admit their ignorance. Nothing should be taught as true that cannot be demonstrated.
Every child should be taught to doubt, to inquire, to demand reasons. Every soul should defend itself—should be on its guard against falsehood, deceit, and mistake, and should beware of all kinds of confidence men, including those in the pulpit.
Children should be taught to express their doubts—to demand reasons. The object of education should be to develop the brain, to quicken the senses. Every school should be a mental gymnasium. The child should be equipped for the battle of life.
Credulity, implicit obedience, are the virtues of slaves and the enslavers of the free. All should be taught that there is nothing too sacred to be investigated—too holy to be understood.
Each mind has the right to lift all curtains, withdraw all veils, scale all walls, explore all recesses, all heights, all depths for itself, in spite of church or priest, or creed or book.
The great volume of Nature should be open to all. None but the intelligent and honest can really read this book. Prejudice clouds and darkens every page. Hypocrisy reads and misquotes, and credulity accepts the quotation. Superstition cannot read a line or spell the shortest word. And yet this volume holds all knowledge, all truth, and is the only source of thought. Mental liberty means the right of all to read this book. Here the Pope and Peasant are equal. Each must read for himself—and each ought honestly and fearlessly to give to his fellow-men what he learns.
There is no authority in churches or priests—no authority in numbers or majorities. The only authority is Nature—the facts we know. Facts are the masters, the enemies of the ignorant, the servants and friends of the intelligent.
Ignorance is the mother of mystery and misery, of superstition and sorrow, of waste and want.
Intelligence is the only light. It enables us to keep the highway, to avoid the obstructions, and to take advantage of the forces of nature. It is the only lever capable of raising mankind. To develop the brain is to civilize the world. Intelligence reaves the heavens of winged and frightful monsters—drives ghosts and leering fiends from the darkness, and floods with light the dungeons of fear.
All should be taught that there is no evidence of the existence of the supernatural—that the man who bows before an idol of wood or stone is just as foolish as the one who prays to an imagined God,—that all worship has for its foundation the same mistake—the same ignorance, the same fear—that it is just as foolish to believe in a personal god as in a personal devil—just as foolish to believe in great ghosts as little ones.
So, all should be taught that the forces, the facts in Nature, cannot be controlled or changed by prayer or praise, by supplication, ceremony, or sacrifice; that there is no magic, no miracle; that force can be overcome only by force, and that the whole world is natural.
All should be taught that man must protect himself—that there is no power superior to Nature that cares for man—that Nature has neither pity nor hatred—that her forces act without the slightest regard for man—that she produces without intention and destroys without regret.
All should be taught that usefulness is the bud and flower and fruit of real religion. The popes and cardinals, the bishops, priests and parsons are all useless. They produce nothing. They live on the labor of others. They are parasites that feed on the frightened. They are vampires that suck the blood of honest toil. Every church is an organized beggar. Every one lives on alms—on alms collected by force and fear. Every orthodox church promises heaven and threatens hell, and these promises and threats are made for the sake of alms, for revenue. Every church cries: “Believe and give.”
A new era is dawning on the world. We are beginning to believe in the religion of usefulness.
The men who felled the forests, cultivated the earth, spanned the rivers with bridges of steel, built the railways and canals, the great ships, invented the locomotives and engines, supplying the countless wants of man; the men who invented the telegraphs and cables, and freighted the electric spark with thought and love; the men who invented the looms and spindles that clothe the world, the inventors of printing and the great presses that fill the earth with poetry, fiction and fact, that save and keep all knowledge for the children yet to be; the inventors of all the wonderful machines that deftly mould from wood and steel the things we use; the men who have explored the heavens and traced the orbits of the stars—who have read the story of the world in mountain range and billowed sea; the men who have lengthened life and conquered pain; the great philosophers and naturalists who have filled the world with light; the great poets whose thoughts have charmed the souls, the great painters and sculptors who have made the canvas speak, the marble live; the great orators who have swayed the world, the composers who have given their souls to sound, the captains of industry, the producers, the soldiers who have battled for the right, the vast host of useful men—these are our Christs, our apostles and our saints. The triumphs of science are our miracles. The books filled with the facts of Nature are our sacred scriptures, and the force that is in every atom and in every star—in everything that lives and grows and thinks, that hopes and suffers, is the only possible god.
The absolute we cannot know—beyond the horizon of the Natural we cannot go. All our duties are within our reach—all our obligations must be discharged here, in this world. Let us love and labor. Let us wait and work. Let us cultivate courage and cheerfulness—open our hearts to the good—our minds to the true. Let us live free lives. Let us hope that the future will bring peace and joy to all the children of men, and above all, let us preserve the veracity of our souls.
— Robert G. Ingersoll (1833-1899), Why I am an Agnostic, Page 106, 107
Lest anyone doubt how far some Evangelical churches will go to attract and maintain a crowd, I give you a recent video of The Point Church worship team singing and playing AC/DC’s song, Money Talks — much to the delight of those in attendance. I’m an atheist, but I wonder — shouldn’t music sung during church services at least be about Jesus being your boyfriend or best friend? AC/DC? I never thought I’d see the day. Something tells me my guitar-strumming sons would love playing in the Pointe’s worship band.(According to one article I read, some of the people associated with Sweetwater Sound attend the church. I suspect the Pointe has awesome AV equipment. A former friend of mine is the senior vice president — sales at Sweetwater.)
The Pointe Church, located in nearby Fort Wayne, Indiana is a generic, seen-one-seen-them-all, ain’t-we-unique-and-relevant Evangelical church. Such churches are scattered all over the Fort Wayne area, heaven-bent on attracting and pilfering Christians from other churches, people who endlessly seek the latest and the greatest.
According to The Point Church website, the church strives to be:
The seven R’s of modern Evangelical church planting. Woo Hoo! right?
Led by Ray Harris, several other pastors, and a passel of “directors,” The Pointe Church attracts a thousand people a week to their three Sunday services. By the end of 2020, the church hopes to have:
Several years ago, I wrote a post about another Fort Wayne church — Elevate City Church. What I wrote then applies to The Pointe Church today. In a post titled, The Elevate City Church Con Job, I wrote:
The dirty little secret of Evangelical church planting is that the vast majority of people who attend a new church plant come from other churches. Few people are new converts. Why? Because almost every American, especially here in the Midwest, has already heard the good news of the gospel. It is not a lack of information that keeps people out of churches. Americans are increasingly rejecting Christianity and turning to spirituality, eastern religions, or atheism/agnosticism/humanism. Why?
Evangelical Christianity is slowly dying. Instead of trying to strengthen that which remains, hip, relevant church planters start new churches. They poach the members of old, established churches and this “growth” hides the fact that the disinterested are still disinterested and they haven’t flocked to the new church. The truth is, more and more Americans think Evangelical Christianity is irrelevant. Evangelicals have a huge PR problem, and as long as their beliefs, practices, and lifestyle are tethered to an inspired, inerrant, infallible ancient book, Evangelicals should not expect the disinterested to rush to their churches on Sunday. Playing rock and praise and worship music, dressing down, getting rid of pews, and acting all hip and cool, hides the fact that the message is still the same; repent and believe the gospel or you are going to be tortured by God in hell for all eternity.
I have no objection to Evangelicals starting as many clubhouses as they want. This is America, and corporate, capitalistic, libertarian thinking dominates the Evangelical church-planting scene. They just need to understand that some of us see through the smokescreen. By all means, plant another church, convince yourself that “God” is leading you to do so, but the facts on the ground remain the same. Planting a new church will not fix what ails America. Americans no longer are buying what Evangelicals are selling. Perhaps it is time to follow the command of Jesus: go sell all that you have and give it to the poor. Perhaps when Americans see THAT kind of Christianity, they might take an interest in it. Even though I am an atheist, I can, from a distance, admire a church and a pastor which take seriously the teachings of Jesus. All I see right now is the same incestuous, irrelevant church, with a new name. It is time to burn the institutional church to the ground and start over. Or so says this atheist.
Elevate City and The Pointe are separated by ten miles of Fort Wayne interstate. Between these two churches are numerous other churches preaching their brand and version of Evangelicalism. Much like driving along one of the many restaurant rows found in Fort Wayne, cruising the streets there discloses that local Evangelicals have every type of church at their disposal. Want Wendy’s? Burger King? McDonald’s? Rally’s? or Five Guys? Local Evangelical churches are manning their grills, ready to serve up their brand of hamburger. Perhaps these churches should become IN-N-Out Burger joints — reflective of the constant stream of people in and out of their doors.
What do you think, readers? To my atheist readers I ask, if you were still a Christian, would you attend a church that played AC/DC during Sunday worship? Do you think there are lines that can’t or shouldn’t be crossed? If you are still a Christian, would you be okay with the worship team playing songs by AC/DC, KISS, or other patently anti-Christian groups? What say ye?
Note
2006 news article featuring Pastor Harris and The Pointe Church. Here’s an excerpt from the article:
Eventually, he said, those churches do move into traditional church buildings.
The Pointe Church is still an exception, because its organizers don’t plan on making it a megachurch. Ray Harris, the church’s lead pastor, said he plans to keep his church in a non-traditional building and train other pastors to start similar churches in other locations that would be affiliated with The Pointe.
‘”New Testament’ churches met in public spaces,” said Harris. “We’re in the real world on Sunday mornings, in a movie theater. Even though Fort Wayne is the ‘City of Churches,’ many people who come (to The Pointe) have never been in church but have been in movie theaters. There’s familiarity.”
Formerly pastor to students at The Chapel, a Fort Wayne megachurch, Harris said typically more than 33 percent of a church’s finances go toward maintaining a building.
“We wanted to focus on meeting people’s needs, not putting money in the bank or paying people to clean the church,” Harris said.
Although it pays rent to the Rave, the church doesn’t have to worry about the cost of heating bills or hiring someone to shovel snow, Harris said. Instead, the church already has helped some people who were struggling to find jobs and/or finance a house payment.
“It’s an economic decision for the Rave, too, because no one comes to watch movies there on Sunday mornings,” said Harris. “We fill seats when they can’t.”
In addition to the economic reasons for having a church in the Rave, Harris said the church’s goal is to help people get to the next step spiritually.
….
Ten years later? The Pointe Church has its own building located at 5335 Bass Road. So much for “New Testament’ churches met in public spaces. We’re in the real world on Sunday mornings, in a movie theater. Even though Fort Wayne is the ‘City of Churches,’ many people who come (to The Pointe) have never been in church but have been in movie theaters. There’s familiarity….We wanted to focus on meeting people’s needs, not putting money in the bank or paying people to clean the church.”
The Pointe Church has a YELP page.
Church’s Facebook page
The Pointe Church operates a three-location daycare business — Care Pointe Academy.
