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THE STAGES OF FAITH:
“Why Atheism Is
Passé.”
INTRODUCTION:
Last January, the buses of London featured an ad campaign on the sides
of those giant, red, double-decker buses of theirs that read:
“There’s probably
no God. Now stop worrying,
and enjoy your life.”
The ad also ran
later
in places like
Washington, D.C.,
Toronto,
and the Spanish cities of Barcelona and Madrid. The essence of the campaign was
that believing in God or not believing in God was no big deal; rather,
get on with enjoying your life.
EXPLICATION.
Now there are several things I can say
about that, and one is that it’s a huge step forward for us in the
Western world to be able publicly to discuss the issue of God as
anything other than traditional evangelical formulation. Someday, we may
even get to the point of accepting presidents who have other than
traditional religious beliefs.
I don’t know about you, but
I find so many of the religious testimonies of politicians simply
nauseating. That not only includes George W. Bush blaming his “heavenly
father” for giving the go-ahead to America’s invading Iraq, but also
Howard Dean, a former Democratic presidential candidate and chair of the
Democratic Party, claiming that his favorite book in the New
Testament was the Book of Job. As you know, no matter how
long you look, there is no Book of Job in the New Testament…which
suggested that he was simply saying it to gain points with the
religious.
Nonetheless, the ads do pose the issue
of atheism for us in a positive way. So for just a moment, let’s look at
it and see where we come out. And the first thing I would say is this:
Atheism is a way of seeing the world.
In the little booklet available free on
the table in back, I suggest that one of the ways to understand beliefs
for and against God is to imagine that there we are all on the outside
of a giant circle looking in. Each person is peering into the same
center to see what reality is. Based on their perceptions, they and we
say, “This is the way the world is.” “This is the way the world is.”
That includes atheists and theists, as well as Christians, Jews,
Buddhists, Muslims, and Whatevers.
But I would like to suggest that rather
than think of people as atheists or theists, let’s use the term,
“meaning makers.” I submit that every one of you here, regardless of how
you define yourself theistically, is really first and foremost about
making meaning out of life. And for most atheists, it means belief in
God does not do it for them. In fact, it’s a hindrance.
We also have to realize that what is
meant by the word, “God,” is not the same as it was in the past,
especially from the end of the 15th century forward. In fact,
classical atheism is most valid when encountering a “flat Earth”
understanding of the world in which the Earth is the center of the
Universe, with a heaven above and a hell beneath. Though many still hold
on to the creationism of the first book of the Bible, only a minutia any
longer believe the Earth is flat.
I remember many years ago reading the
autobiography of Harry Emerson Fosdick, a modernist Baptist preacher,
renowned for his support of Darwinian evolution and his opposition to
William Jennings Bryan. Dr. Fosdick was the first pastor of Riverside
Church in Manhattan, which John D. Rockefeller, Jr. built and paid for,
starting in 1922 and completed in 1930. A young college student came to
Dr. Fosdick for counseling saying that he no longer believed in God.
Fosdick responded, “Well, tell me about this God you don’t believe in. I
may not either.”
During Greek times 500 years before
Jesus, there were gods for virtually every single dimension of life, and
as the Apostle Paul describes in the Christian book, The Acts of the
Apostles, there also was an “unknown god” to cover any god they
might have left out.
In contrast to Greece, one of the more
brilliant tactics of Rome was that when it conquered a nation, it didn’t
attempt to do anything to change their religion. In fact, Rome built a
home for the gods in Rome called the Pantheon. “Pan”
in Greek means “all,” and theon stems from theos,
or God; thus Pantheon means a place for all the gods. It was completed
in the second century and is still standing.
It was something of a one-stop shopping center for god.
It didn’t of course include the god of
the Jews, since Jews didn’t believe in making images of God. The reverse
side of that was that Judaism rejected the other gods in the Pantheon.
So it is no surprise that when Judaism gave involuntary birth to
Christianity, it too was totally intolerant of other religions. An
outsider’s confirmation of that comes from the early 2nd
century, and the emperor of Rome known as Marcus Aurelius. He was raised
and taught by a distinguished philosopher and was himself highly
intellectual. But as one reads his Meditations, you find he has
no remorse for feeding the Christians to the lions in the Coliseum. And
one of the reasons was because they were so intolerant of the gods of
Rome.
Two centuries later, in the early part
of the 4th century, Rome declared an edict of toleration for
Christians. But it was not long afterwards when Christianity came to
possess power that they also rejected the notion that any other gods
could be worshipped…only theirs.
Once into the early modern era, we began
to make discoveries about our world that have chipped away at many of
the fundamental notions of theism: Our Universe came into being some 15
or so billion years ago with a big bang, not 6,000 years ago by the hand
of God. Our Planet Earth probably formed five billion years ago, instead
of the third day of a week of creative acts by God. Our species homo
sapiens evolved some 150,000 years ago after millions of eons of
evolution, not as the crowning achievement of creation week. Our
Universe is filled with at least a billion galaxies, and our own Milky
Way Galaxy has a billion or more stars, with Earth’s being a mediocre
planet in a very average sized solar system. In that kind of immensity,
there’s little room for thinking of Earth’s being an exceptional planet
or that what goes on here is consequential to the rest of the Universe,
as Christian or Jewish scripture propose.
Atheism was its strongest when it was
making the case for this world being so much more than the religious
myths of the world purported it to be. The notion that God has a long
white beard and is sitting on a throne zapping and blessing whom he
chooses is as extinct as the dodo bird. Atheism has made that point
clear and obvious. In so doing it tells us what the Universe is not.
That’s another way of saying that the
fight in which atheism engaged has been won. There is no curse by God
upon humankind from which, we must be saved by a blood sacrifice, either
by animals or Jesus. My point is, that’s no longer the issue. Rather,
it’s how do we live…how do we make it from Monday to Sunday?
How do we survive when we’ve lost our
job and spent our life savings? What does faith have to say when our
home is foreclosed on, and we have no place to turn. How do we go on
when our spouse or partner is no longer alive or the relationship has
ended? How?
Telling us there is no God doesn’t do
diddly-squat. Trying to get out of bed in the morning to face a
difficult and challenging day was never and never will be within the
scope of atheism. That’s faith’s job. Faith is about another dimension
to life which surprisingly enough can be accessed by practices unique to
religion, namely, ritual, music, poetry and creation of community.
By ritual,
I mean repeating acts that specifically address the human situation. In
my Christian church days, that included things like repeating the
Apostles Creed, and praying the Lord’s Prayer. For us at All Faiths, it
may be our “Hymn of Celebration” or “Joys and Concerns,” which I will
say more about later. Ritual may be the act of attending a service every
seven days – a continuation of that ancient Sabbath compulsion. It may
be shaking hands with old friends every Sunday. It may be having coffee
and cookies together. It’s the rituals of our lives that give us a sense
of groundedness in the ongoingness of life. We do these kinds of things
because they help us address the slings and arrows of outrageous
fortune. They comfort us when our comfort zone has been erased.
Secondly, we sing.
We sing because life is sweet and sunlight is beautiful. We sing because
we are the singers of life and hope and faith.
Third, we join in poetic repetition.
Poetry at its best is always more than its words or construction. It’s
one of the ways we talk about that for which we have no apt vocabulary.
Religious language is the poetry of faith. Its symbols, its myths, its
ancient stories, connect us and root us and ground us in the human
experience that stretches back into the distant mist of human evolution,
when we first began to ask what and why and who and when and where and
how.
The language of faith is never about
objective reality as much as it is an entry into the spiritual dimension
of life…to consider ourselves, others and the world of which we are a
part. Exercising our spiritual dimension enables us to part the rivers
we cannot cross and impels us up mountains we cannot climb. It gets us
up when we’ve fallen down. It turns doubt into hope, and fear into
confidence. It sees rainbows behind storm clouds and sunrises beyond
sunsets. It strengthens our insides when we grow weak on the outside.
The language of faith is always based upon the premise that we are
capable of more, that life is more than, and that together we can be a
force for right and truth.
Fourth, faith is about community…what
we are doing here this morning. Though we are not consciously aware, we
are exchanging our breathing. I’m sure you’ve seen pictures or
television shots of singers with a bright light behind them. You can see
the breath and the moisture they are breathing. We’re exchanging sounds
and looks and touch and feelings. We care one for the other. We listen.
We agree. We disagree. And that’s what community is about.
CONCLUSION.
When All Faiths first began, in the
actual services themselves, I did most of what others do now. One of the
first breaks in that pattern was when Linda Jacobs told me, “Wayne, I
would like to do ‘Joys and Concerns.’” I said, “Fine.” And for those of
you who were here, you will remember that she turned them in to an art
form that we all looked forward to each Sunday. Here’s part of one that
I found quite by accident this past week in some of my resource
materials. I took that to mean I should share it with you this morning.
From Linda Jacobs:
“Einstein believed that we were all a
part of a whole. He believed we need to cultivate compassion and an
appreciation of ourselves as part of the miraculous web of life.
“It is an important part
of this congregation that we share a feeling of connectedness. Joys and
Concerns is a symbol of that feeling. <And then Linda lighted a candle
and added: >
“I light this candle of
gratitude to you for allowing me to stand up here on Sunday mornings and
introduce ‘Joys and Concerns.’ As Steve Mullins would say, it feeds my
‘inner ham.’ Besides that I get to say the things that are on my mind.
What an honor THAT has been.
“I won’t be up here as often in the
future. You see, my cancer is back and it’s pretty aggressive. It has
attached itself to my abdomen. I am scheduled to start chemo-therapy on
Wednesday to see if that will shrink the tumors before another surgery
is attempted.
“When I’m on chemo, I can never
predict how I will feel from one moment to the next, so I will hope that
you understand if my attendance becomes rather spotty. It is a privilege
to be a small part of THIS whole.”
Last September, only weeks after she had
moved to Nashville to be near her son and grandchildren, Linda passed
on. I conducted her memorial service in the community center at Hope
Hospice in Cape Coral.
The ad I mentioned at the
first of the service read:
“There’s probably
no God. Now stop worrying,
and enjoy your life.”
While atheism has had much to offer to a
superstition filled world, we have to look elsewhere to find hand-holds
to live by. One of those is communities of faith, such as ours, which
offer ritual, music, poetry and community.
How we talk about our faith
is a very personal choice. As I’ve said in the little green cards
included in your Order of Service this morning, “We believe in the
encompassing Mystery of life, which many of us call God.” I’m one of
those. But it’s equally a principle of our life together to know that
it’s just as acceptable not to choose to do so. Which Linda did. Which
you may do as well.
Shalom. Salaam Aleikum.
Amen.
And blessed be.
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