Posts Tagged → religion

Top 5 Superstitions that a Progressive Christian Doesn’t Have to Believe

Since Easter is coming up and is an occasion where the supernatural traditionally plays a role, I thought I should do a top five list of superstitions that I don’t, as a Progressive Christian, have to believe in.

Coming back to church after an absence of 18 years, I wasn’t sure how I would handle the Christian beliefs that I considered rather supernatural. It was a bit like asking an adult to believe in Santa Claus.

I had the fortune of happening upon Irvine United Congregational Church, which subscribes to (very) Progressive Christianity. It’s a non-dogmatic, non-creedal church that is deeply involved in social justice issues. We are against war, support gay marriage, and are in favor of health care reform. In our area, we have a reputation for being “That Church.” Over the last few years I discovered that Progressive Christianity does not require me to give up the rational side of my mind. Here are the top five beliefs that I no longer need from my days attending a conservative Baptist church.

1. The Bible as the inerrant word of God.

The Bible should be read as literature, the same way that we do with Shakespeare. We need to understand the cultural context at the time that it was written to make sense of central, essential message in the text. Human beings wrote the Bible for their own purposes. I find it very hard to believe in a God who manipulates people like puppets and makes spelling mistakes.

2. Virgin birth

The notion that Jesus was born to a woman who had not previously had sexual intercourse is due to a translation error. The Hebrew word used to describe Mary was almah, meaning “young woman.” But in the 3rd Century CE, the Bible was translated into Greek and the word became parthenos, which means “virgin.” It’s good news to me that I don’t have to believe in something biologically improbably and likely supernatural, in order to accept that Jesus of Nazareth walked the Earth at some point.


3. Jesus arising from the dead.

The Easter story where the formerly dead Jesus leaves a tomb is a parable. The underlying message is that love and hope go on, even in the darkest hour. Easter is about resurrection, not reanimation. It’s about restoring something that that was lost, not making a former corpse walk the Earth again. It was such a relief to me that I didn’t have to believe someone came back to life (zombie, anyone?) in order to call myself a Christian.


4. Sin is breaking God’s law.

Sin is not violation of some arcane rule in the Bible or some inference from a passage in the Bible. In PXnty, sin is any action that increases emotional and spiritual  distance between a person and loving Creator.  This model is beautiful to me, because it’s so personal, subjective, and immediate. It also a definition that works through the ages. I like believing in a God who isn’t a rules lawyer, who makes decrees about corner cases, such as whether a white lie is a real lie. A God who doesn’t micromanage our lives makes so much more sense to me, as does the emphasis on how I live my life and my relationship with God.


5. Hell is where sinners are sent after we die.

If sin is an action that increases distance between a person and God, then heaven and hell are not where people go in the afterlife, but consequences of how we live in this life. Someone who commits a lot of sins will have a uncomfortable consequences to deal with, such as damaged relationships, guilt, sadness, etc. All these negative emotions are hell in and of themselves. They don’t require further condemnation from others. By the same token, heaven on Earth is not just an abstract concept, but a specific state. In the absence of sin, we can be perfectly loving, perfectly compassionate, perfectly courageous, and perfectly just.

A God who would create a place where people are sent to be tortured forever after they die is a monster, in my book. Eternity is a long time. It’s an even longer time to be boiling, freezing, whipping, or starving someone who was alive for at most a little over a hundred years. I refuse to believe in a God who uses more advanced interrogation techniques than the CIA.

Evil in the World

In Adult Sunday School, we are going through some curriculum on “Living the Questions.” The theme for this month is the question, “If God is all-powerful, all-loving, and all-good, how can evil exist?” There are a number of prompts for discussion in the material and I’ll be responding to some of them here. I’ll start with a discussion of the question itself.

I think the question starts from the wrong place. It assumes that God is in complete control of everything that happens. If this is the case, then we are simply automatons who behave in a deterministic manner. But God didn’t make us that way. We were given free will and can act any way we choose. One explanation that I have heard is that God gave us free will so that He could be loved by creations who choose to, rather than being programmed to. It is far less meaningful to hear a trained parrot say “I love you” on cue, than it is to hear a person say “I love you” with joy in his eyes.

Because God gave us free will, He doesn’t control absolutely everything. But this does not diminish his power, love, goodness, or presence in our lives. Because we have free will, we can choose good or evil. Adam and Eve were given the choice whether or not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge. Jesus was tempted by power and by the opportunity to turn away from ministry.

Evil is not a dark menace out in the world. Evil is a possibility in each one of us. Evil is an act that diminishes us as individuals or diminishes humanity as a whole. By using this definition, evil can be both small and big. It can be the resentment that we harbor against a fellow driver. It can be the atrocities committed by a warlord. The challenge for us as humans is to confront evil possibilities in the minutiae of daily life and turn away from it.

Suffering

Why is there suffering in the world? And where is God during suffering?

To build on what I have written above, there is suffering because an individual makes a choice to act in a manner that diminishes themselves, others, or the collective. God is present in the world, as He always is. We can turn to him for strength or we can turn away in anger. Author and Auschwitz survivor, Elie Weisel, was angry at good for a long time after World War II. But in order to be angry at God, one must a) believe that He exists and b) have a relationship with him. I am reminded of the poem Footprints in the Sand in which the protagonist sees her/his life flash before him as a series of footprints in the sand along the shore. The protagonist notices that most of the time there are two sets of footprints, but during difficult times, there is only one set. She/he confronts God about this disparity, and He replies:

The Lord replied, “My precious, precious child,
I love you and I would never, never leave you
during your times of trial and suffering.
“When you saw only one set of footprints,
it was then that I carried you.”

If God is present in the world, does He intervene and take direct action? Sometimes. We really like it when God’s actions are undeniable and obvious. For example, Moses and the burning bush, Joshua and the walls of Jericho, and Noah. But it’s not always the way we think He does or should. For example, the maltreatment of Job. A friend suggested the idea of “severe mercy.” God’s mercy can sometimes be severe in the sense that He can use negative events in our lives to bring us closer to Him. I’m a bit uncomfortable with this idea, but it does make one wonder. Sometimes bad things just happen. Sometimes bad things are part of God’s plan. It’s hard to know.

Does Satan get a bum rap?

Definitely. Satan is a personification of evil and distracts us from the insidiousness of the evil within. It suggests that we look outward for the cause of evil (and the solutions to it). It suggests that Satan is out there in the world and leads to counterproductive ideas like demonic possession and devil worshiping. These phenomena can be explained through much simpler mechanisms, such as our own human foibles.

Satan as a personification of evil is an oversimplification. It’s an attempt to explain the world in black and white terms, with God on the side of good and Satan on the side of evil. Things are actually much more complex. There are shades of gray and marginally better or worse choices. The personification turns Satan into a fetish, like a monkey wrench thrown into the great order of things. This concept is misleading, because it causes us to not look for the evil in ourselves.

You can’t be both Hindu and Muslim

BBC NEWS | South Asia | Islam and Hinduism’s blurred lines

This BBC news story report on a community in Rajasthan that follow both Hindu and Muslim traditions. They are nominally Hindu, but follow three Muslim practices (circumcision for the newborn male children in the community, eating halal meat and burying their dead). They have done this without conflict for hundreds of years. However, tensions are rising because there is a feeling that one must be one or the other, not both. Consequently, there are people who are “converting” to one faith or another. This is crazy.

Whenever categories are formed, there is always something left over at the end. Geoff Bowker and Susan Leigh Star wrote about this in their book “Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences.” They described the miscellaneous categories as “residual” and they are unavoidable. So this elimination of the hybrid Hindu and Muslim can be seen as an effort to reduce “otherness.” The impetus comes from both outsiders who don’t understand or want to co-opt people to their causes, and from the people themselves out of a desire to reduce ambiguity. It’s often difficult to live with a queer label that challenges basic notions about how the world is organized.