Religion is About Right Relationship with Reality, Not the Supernatural

“The most profound insight in the history of humankind is that we should seek to live in accord with reality. Indeed, living in harmony with reality may be accepted as a formal definition of wisdom. If we live at odds with reality (foolishly), then we will be doomed, but if live in proper relationship with reality (wisely), then we shall be saved. Humans everywhere, and at all times, have had at least a tacit understanding of this fundamental principle. What we are less in agreement about is how we should think about reality and what we should do to bring ourselves into harmony with it.”  — Loyal Rue, Religion is Not About God

Reality is my God and integrity is my religion. By this, I mean that what is real is my ultimate commitment and being in right relationship with reality, and assisting humanity in this process, is my calling and deepest inspiration. To be clear: I am neither a theist nor atheist; I’m a post-theist, an emergentist—a religious naturalist. The concepts of theism and atheism came into use long before we had an evidential (reality-based) understanding of how the world, in fact, came into being and before we learned that the Universe itself is creative. Given what we now know about big history, I no longer find the theist-atheist dichotomy useful. Both presuppose a trivial, unnatural God and a mechanistic Cosmos that is not itself divinely creative.

Coming into right relationship to reality is truly what it's all about in human affairs. How to most effectively do this has been the great work of every age and culture. At each stage in human evolution our understanding of how things are and which things matter—what's real and what's important—must be answered anew. Reality is, of course, experienced differently around the world and at different times in history. Life in a rainforest is different from life in the desert, turdra, or city. Life in a tribe differs from life in a chiefdom, theocracy, or empire. Not surprisingly, reality has been personified, or relationalized, differently throughout the world. Gods and goddesses in lush, tropical regions have very different personalities than those in harsh, difficult regions. Theology is a child of geography and sociology. A culture’s cosmology (how things are/what’s real) and values (which things matter/what’s important) are both derived from their core narrative or creation myth, which includes their various personifications.

All religions facilitate personal wholeness and social coherence. These two, the therapeutic and political functions of religion, together with the need to live in ecological integrity, are the three essential components of right relationship with reality.

As humanity has progressed from clans, to tribes, to chieftains and kingdoms, to theocracies and early nations, to nation states, to social democracies, each advance in complexity required a fresh understanding of what’s real and what’s important, and a new mythic story emerged to expand the in-group and provide mechanisms to ensure trust and cooperation at a wider level than before.

God is a Divine Personification, Not a Person

God is not a person; God is a personification of reality. If we miss this we miss everything! Poseidon was not the god of the oceans, as if a supernatural entity separate from water was looking down from on high. Poseidon was the personification of the seas! Sol was not the god of the sun, as if there was a separation between the two, Sol was a sacred, proper name for our primary sustenance: that seemingly eternal, life-giving source of generous heat and light that we owe our very existence to. By saying "Sol" when we looked up, we experienced Him as a "Thou" to be related to. Today we have a different subjective experience of the same objective reality. We look up and say "the sun" and think of "it" in a depersonalized way, as a thing. As Joseph Campbell, Huston Smith, Paul Tillich, and other scholars of mythology and world religions remind us, we simply cannot understand religion if we don't understand the how the human mind instinctually relationalizes, or personifies, reality. Think of the movie "Castaway" with Tom Hanks. The personified soccer ball, Wilson, was the only thing that kept Hank's character sane (sort of).

Rudolf Bultmann, arguably the most influential theologian of the 20th century, wrote an important essay in 1931 titled, "The Crisis of Faith" In it, he moves discussion of God in a modern context beyond beliefs to universal experience. (I first learned of Bultmann's essay reading Gene Marshall's, A Primer on Radical Christianity, chapter 4: "What Reality in Human Experience Do We Point to With the Word ‘God'?", which I highly recommend.) Here is a brief summary of Bultmann's argument:

IRAS: The Energy Transition: Religious & Cultural Perspectives

The Institute on Religion in an Age of Science presents

The Energy Transition Through a Different Lens

As the BP oil spill continues unabated, debate about alternative energy sources has re-ignited and spread to all arenas, from the political to the religious. This is all the more reason to note another public dialogue currently under way, with an accompanying public conference in July, which examines the latest ideas from an ethical point of view.

Exploring the energy transition from ethical, religious, and cultural perspectives will be the focus of: "The Energy Transition: Religious and Cultural Perspectives."  It will be held on Star Island, off the coast of Portsmouth, NH, July 24 - 31, 2010. Conference co-chair, Norm Laurendeau, is available to  communicate an overview of the debate from this unique lens in the coming weeks.

Engineers, scientists, ethicists, and theologians will discuss: 1) ethical and religious perspectives that can be used to guide future energy choices and 2) energy choices which, in turn, might challenge ethical and religious perspectives. The conference agenda, as outlined by the following list of presentations, begins with the science and technology of energy, shifts to ethical issues, and ends with religious and cultural perspectives on energy policy:

• • An Energy Primer: From Thermodynamics to Theology
  • Transportation: Beyond Oil to Synfuels and Biofuels
  • The Future of Biofuels: Science, Economics, and Ethics
  • Sustainable Energy Choices for Rural India: Scientific and Philosophical Perspectives
  • Renewable Energy for Sustainable Communities: Credits and Offsets
  • Conservation: Zero Net-Energy Homes for Low-Income Families
  • The Urgency of Climate Change and the Role of Renewable Energy
  • Overcoming Energy Gluttony: A Philosophical Perspective
  • Ethical and Religious Values in Energy Policy
  • From Belief into Action: How Religious Groups Can Become Energy Leaders
  • Energy Policies and Religious Values: The Reciprocal Challenges

Distinguished speakers from the public and private sectors include:  John Abraham, Purdue University; Susan Leschine, University of Massachusetts;  R.V. Ravikrishna, Indian Institute of Science; George Hoguet, NativeEnergy, Inc.; Anne Perkins, Rural Development, Inc.; Chuck Kutscher, National Renewable Energy Laboratory; William B. Irvine, Wright State University; James Martin-Schramm, Luther College; Rev. Fletcher Harper, GreenFaith; and Rev. Drew Christiansen, Editor-in-Chief of America. Co-chairs are Norm Laurendeau, Bowdoin College (also Purdue University), and Larry Rasmussen, Union Theological Seminary.

This is the 56th conference of the Institute on Religion in an Age of Science (IRAS). IRAS is a non-denominational, independent society-one of the oldest organizations facilitating dialogue on cutting-edge issues in the field of religion and science. IRAS is also the joint publisher of the journal Zygon. See further details about the conference at http://www.IRAS.org

The Perfect Storm: Six Trends Converging on Collapse

A worthy counterpoint to my last post...

By MATTHEW STEIN
Published in The Huffington Post, May 19, 2010
Original link / Readers comments (scroll down)

Failure is not in falling down, but in refusing to get up.
--Chinese Proverb

There are dark clouds gathering on the horizon. They are the clouds of six hugely troubling global trends, climate change being just one of the six. Individually, each of these trends is a potential civilization buster. Collectively, they are converging to form the perfect storm--a storm of such magnitude that it will dwarf anything that mankind has ever seen. If we are unsuccessful in our attempts to calm this storm, without a doubt it will destroy life as we know it on Planet Earth!

There is a popular saying that "the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting a different result." If we keep doing business in the same way as we have for the past century, each of these six trends will continue their steep rates of decline, collapsing the natural systems that form the foundation for our civilization and the lifeblood of the global economy. Perhaps the current Gulf oil spill is the wake up call that mankind needs to snap us out of our complacency, realize that we are soiling our nest and that continuation of "business as usual" will destroy the world as we know it? Time will tell whether we heed this warning, go back sleep once the oil spill is contained, or simply tire of the endless media coverage, numb ourselves, and set these critical issues to the side.

We already have the technology and the means to turn this dark tide, but we lack the commitment to make the hard choices and sweeping changes that are necessary for shifting the future of our world from its current course of collapse to a new course of sustainability.

The following six trends are converging to form the perfect storm for global destruction, each of which is a potential civilization buster in its own right, if left unchecked:

Doomsayers Beware, a Bright Future Beckons

By JOHN TIERNEY
Published in The New York Times, May 17, 2010
Original link (Readers' comments)

Long before “sustainable” became a buzzword, intellectuals wondered how long industrial society could survive. In “The Idea of Decline in Western History,” after surveying predictions from the mid-19th century until today, the historian Arthur Herman identifies two consistently dominant schools of thought.

The first school despairs because it foresees inevitable ruin. The second school is hopeful — but only because these intellectuals foresee ruin, too, and can hardly wait for the decadent modern world to be replaced by one more to their liking. Every now and then, someone comes along to note that society has failed to collapse and might go on prospering, but the notion is promptly dismissed in academia as happy talk from a simpleton. Predicting that the world will not end is also pretty good insurance against a prolonged stay on the best-seller list. Have you read Julian Simon’s “The State of Humanity”? Indur Goklany’s “The Improving State of the World”? Gregg Easterbrook’s “Sonic Boom”?

Good books all, and so is the newest addition to this slender canon, “The Rational Optimist,” by Matt Ridley. It does much more than debunk the doomsaying. Dr. Ridley provides a grand unified theory of history from the Stone Age to the better age awaiting us in 2100.

It’s an audacious task, but he has the intellectual breadth for it. A trained zoologist and former editor at The Economist, Dr. Ridley has established himself in previous books, like “The Origins of Virtue” and “Genome,” as the supreme synthesist of lessons from anthropology, psychology, molecular genetics, economics and game theory. This time he takes on all of human history, starting with our mysteriously successful debut. What made Homo sapiens so special? Dr. Ridley argues that it wasn’t our big brain, because Neanderthals had a big brain, too. Nor was it our willingness to help one another, because apes and other social animals also had an instinct for reciprocity.

“At some point,” Dr. Ridley writes, “after millions of years of indulging in reciprocal back-scratching of gradually increasing intensity, one species, and one alone, stumbled upon an entirely different trick. Adam gave Oz an object in exchange for a different object.”

New Atheists as Prophets: Bringing the Vatican to Justice

Paradoxically, the New Atheists are playing the traditional role of prophets—those on the leading edge who see what is real and sense what is emerging and who then speak their truth.  Prophets facilitate cultural evolution.

In speaking their truth, prophets typically do not mince words.  Disrespectful of established authorities and insitutions of their time, prophets say what few want to hear.  They make people uncomfortable.  Religious prophets of the past spoke boldly and unflinchingly on behalf of Reality personified, i.e., God.  Some of them even risked or lost their lives because of their deep moral commitment to serve God/Reality by speaking out.  Today, leaders of decidedly nonreligious perspectives are speaking boldly on behalf of their sense of ultimacy — an ultimacy discerned evidentially by the worldwide self-correcting enterprise of science.  Significantly, this sense of ultimacy is shared, at least to some degree, by religious liberals of all faiths.  But the New Atheists have stepped into the role of prophets today owing to the simple fact that we religious liberals have been too nice.  We have not been willing to risk our reputations, our congregations, our peaceful countenance.  In hindsight, we have been shown by the New Atheists to be cowards.

We liberals and progressives are so devoted to our interfaith dialogues and to respectful tolerance of others' beliefs that we have been hesitant to critique anyone's scripturally-based beliefs, worldviews, interpretations, or religious practices.  However, when the leaders of one's own faith tradition are systematically being outed for a category of sin (indeed, secularly understood as crime) that, to modern minds, is the lowest of the low, tolerance and peaceful language are dispensed with.  Consider the scathing language used by The New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd of late.  Dowd (no relation to me) is a Roman Catholic, and one with an enormous pulpit!  In the past few months, she has written no less than five searing (read: prophetic) columns against practices within her own faith tradition: "A Nope for Pope", "Should There Be an Inquisition for the Pope?", "Devil of a Scandal", "The Church's Judas Moment", and "Worlds Without Women".

Maureen Dowd is serving as a modern-day prophet.  Prophets are absolutely necessary to ensure that institutions stay relevant: that they evolve.  Without prophetic voices our institutions stagnate.  If they stagnate for too long, they degenerate, even toward the despicable.

Prophets outside the Church are also playing their role in pushing for change.  Most searingly are the attacks on religion made by the New Atheists.  Consider these words by Sam Harris in "Bringing the Vatican to Justice", which appeared today (May 12, 2010) on his Project Reason website: http://www.project-reason.org/vatican_justice/