Goines On: Heavenly Productions, Ltd.

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The psychology of “faith the substance of things hoped for” wouldn’t let go of Goines. He wondered about scientists who believe in the divinity of Jesus. Do they accept Christianity’s doctrine of salvation out of a deep need to know things beyond science’s reach, things they can then expect God to reveal to them someday?
    Remembering his college logic studies, Goines thought of another thing the writer of the letter to the Hebrews in Jerusalem could have been doing with the “faith is evidence” maneuver – establishing an axiom to throw in whenever he couldn’t prove something any other way.

Goines On: Evidence of things not seen

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Goines’ notion the day before, that faith itself could somehow seem to amount to evidence, kept nagging at him. He now remembered a Bible verse to that effect, the opening verse of Chapter 11 of a letter to the Hebrews in Jerusalem, thought to have been composed about 30 years after Jesus’ crucifixion: “...faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” – as though faith, or true-belief alone could transform a thing believed into a fact. The resurrection of Jesus, for example, which the letter writer seemed to think lacked other evidence. Otherwise, why the need for faith?

Goines On: Previous Jessica experiments

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On his walk the morning after imagining the Jessica experiments, Goines realized that, in a way, they had been conducted many times already, by religions other than Christianity that indoctrinated their followers in the same sorts of ways to believe that if they did or believed thus and so, they would be recompensed for whatever suffering, pain, injustice, or other injury afflicted them, and saved from death in the end.

Goines On: A Jessica experiment

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The day after remembering the Jesus experiment, Goines thought of a corollary, or reverse experiment, one that would seek to establish whether a stand-in for Jesus could elicit the same sort of experience. If so, then that would suggest that it wasn’t the nature of Jesus (or of his stand-in) that produced the Jesus-experience phenomenon, but something about people’s psychology.

Goines On: The Jesus experiment

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Inside the McDowell book Goines’ nephew had placed a cordial handwritten note that suggested Goines might “start with the table of contents and go to the chapters that pique your interest.” That didn’t sound too daunting, and Goines was bound to try it.

Goines On: The tome was empty

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Goines’ nephew reported that his mother was much improved, “thank the Lord Jesus for that,” and Goines had automatically said amen, for he too was glad his sister was doing better. But Goines knew that his nephew was aware he didn’t subscribe to the divinity of Jesus, and Goines felt a tinge of regret that he had said amen. Perhaps unwisely, he clarified, “I meant amen to your mother’s improvement, not to Jesus’ having anything to do with it.”

The work of my lifetime

Christian Science 
as I see it

By Cynthia Barnett

Christian Science has been in my family for four generations, but I’ve always known it would have been the right religion for me even if I had not “inherited” it. I love Christian Science because it gives me a God I can accept from both reason and revelation. Relying on it all my life for guidance, comfort, inspiration, and healing, I have not been disappointed. It works.

Third Monday with Bob Boldt

The Grand Inquisitor: 
Loosely adapted from The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky

By Bob Boldt

[This piece was written in October 2004 near the conclusion of the career of John Ashcroft. I live in Missouri, where our now ex-Attorney General’s strong imperial convictions, corruption, and even stronger religious fanaticism are legend.
    I am a believer in the concept of eternal recurrence. I have said elsewhere that I am certain that if Christ were to return to this sad world ruled by an empire that could teach even the Romans a thing or two about brutality and iron-fisted control of subject peoples, he would certainly be re-crucified.]

Thor's Day: How many folds?

How many times should you fold your toilet paper?

By Morris Dean

[Published originally on February 10 & 11, 2007, in the posts, "How many folds?" and "Should," respectively.]

We humans want answers to the important questions of life. Several years ago a success coach was addressing a large number of young professional women. The audience responded gratefully when she met their need to know how many times to fold their toilet paper, especially before a business meeting. (Twelve layers, she said.^*)

Thor's Day: Socialism and the Christian Right

How can anyone be a Conservative and follow Jesus?

By Ed Rogers

Most Christians, if asked, will tell you that Socialism is anti-religion. Some non-believers call themselves socialist without other beliefs contradicting it, but almost any conservative Christian who calls himself a socialist is snared in a dilemma.

Thor's Day: What counts as evidence…

…for the resurrection of Jesus?

By Kyle Garza

Have you heard of the massive Olympic-class ship that sank in 1898? It was the largest vessel in the ocean at the time, described as virtually unsinkable. Unfortunately, it hit an iceberg in the North Atlantic Ocean in the middle of April, and more than 1,500 of its passengers and crew lost their lives at sea.

What pain

Hogmanay 2010, revisited. I was told yesterday that my new blog picture captures me looking "pained."
    In 1965, in Edinburgh, Scotland (the city whose Hogmanay celebration was portrayed in the photo I used on January 1), as I was walking by a long mirror on a street one morning, on my way to the divinity school, I thought I recognized someone mentioned in Kierkegaard. I had a few years earlier read his essay in Either/Or titled "The Unhappiest Man," which I seem to remember he developed from reflecting on the New Testament "Man of Sorrows." I suspect that I was merely flattering myself by borrowing Kierkegaard's label from the person my mother had associated me with from my infancy. (Yes, apparently. At any rate, in our home my official baby portrait was hung alongside a representation of Jesus Christ.)

However, I seem to have been misremembering Kierkegaard's concept of "the unhappiest man," which may have had nothing to do with the New Testament. Says Wikipedia:

The third essay, called "The Unhappiest One," [even the title is apparently different from what I remembered], discusses the hypothetical question: "who deserves the distinction of being unhappier than everyone else?" Kierkegaard answers, "The unhappy person is one who has his ideal, the content of his life, the fullness of his consciousness, the essence of his being, in some manner outside of himself. He is always absent, never present to himself."

How, then, could I have been unhappy, or be unhappy now? I seem perpetually to be "present to myself"—unless I fail to understand what Kierkegaard meant by that; am I in some sense of his hardly ever present to myself at all?

Today, certainly, forty-five years later, I don't think of myself as unhappy, let alone "the unhappiest." But I do feel some of the sorrow of the world. I can't read about a newly elected congresswoman's being gunned down yesterday and six people's being dead today as a result without feeling some sadness over it. I couldn't even take bird feed out a little late this morning without feeling sorry for the birds who'd already arrived to find the feeders empty from yesterday. I can't think about even the concept of the food chain without some generalized sorrow over the profound injustice of Nature itself.
    Yet, I didn't recognize someone in pain when I posted my new blog profile photograph the other day. Since learning that to someone else I looked "pained," I've examined the photo more closely, and I think I might see something, in the set of the mouth, perhaps.
    At first, I "remembered" taking the photo on New Year's morning, by mounting my camera on a tripod and clicking a remote control, but when I got out the uncropped original it reminded me that I preferred the photos I had taken the night before by holding the camera up with my left hand and, with some difficulty (for the Nikon D60 SLR is a bit heavy), pressing the release with my index finger:
 

And here are two others, taken in the preceding minutes:
 

    From the angle, I can confirm that the camera was definitely not on a tripod. I was sitting as close as I could to the big lamp on the long, narrow library table I made years ago. No room for the tripod.
    So, it's possible that the set of my lips is just because of the weight of the camera—or perhaps a twinge of arthritic pain.
    I took the pictures on Hogmanay, New Year's Eve 2010, just before going to bed a little after eight o'clock. I think I might have been feeling the weight of the year. Something, at any rate, prompted me to do a few self-portraits, not something I'd ever done just before retiring for the day...
    ...or before retiring for the year, a year of unbroken days of sad headlines and the murderous operation of Nature.

How much do you "know about religion"?

The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, which conducted the recent "U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey," has posted a quiz to test how much we ourselves "know about religion."
    Take the quiz to find out how you compare with a nationally representative sample of 3,412 adults!

By the way, the opening statement of the Pew Forum's own report of its survey seems to support my friend Ken's observation that "no one [among the groups identified by the study] is more ignorant about religion than a Christian."
    Opens the Pew Forum report:

Atheists and agnostics, Jews, and Mormons are among the highest-scoring groups on a new survey of religious knowledge, outperforming evangelical Protestants, mainline Protestants, and Catholics on questions about the core teachings, history, and leading figures of major world religions.

For those so indifferent to religion that it might be termed a miracle that they're even reading this, evangelical Protestants, mainline Protestants, and Catholics are considered to be Christians, although that has been disputed on the basis of unfavorable comparisons of the ethics of members of these groups with the core teachings of Jesus Christ.

Moral consequence of Descartes' error

Antonio R. Damasio, in his 1994 book, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, identifies the error of René Descartes [1596-1650] as occurring a few lines after his famous statement, "I think, therefore I am." Says Damasio:

Here Descartes was after a logical foundation for his philosophy...But just a few lines below, Descartes clarifies the statement unequivocally:

From that I knew that I was a substance, the whole essence or nature of which is to think, and that for its existence there is no need of any place, nor does it depend on any material thing; so that this "me," that is to say, the soul by which I am what I am, is entirely distinct from body, and is even more easy to know than is the latter; and even if body were not, the soul would not cease to be what it is. [p. 249]

We don't need Damasio to tell us that "from [I think, therefore I am]" Descartes can know no such thing. But here's how Damasio puts it:

This is Descarte's error: the abyssal separation between body and mind, between the sizable, dimensioned, mechanically operated, infinitely divisible body stuff, on the one hand, and the unsizable, undimensioned, un-pushpullable, nondivisible mind stuff; the suggestion that reasoning, and moral judgment, and the suffering that comes from physical pain or emotional upheaval might exist separately from the body. Specifically: the separation of the most refined operations of mind from the structure and operation of a biological organism. [pp. 249-250]

None of this should be new to us, but of course to many people it is, and they reject it. They persist in Descartes' error, and perhaps even in a moral failure that derives from it:

Versions of Descartes' error obscure the roots of the human mind in a biologically complex but fragile, finite, and unique organism; they obscure the tragedy implicit in the knowledge of that fragility, finiteness, and uniqueness. And where humans fail to see the inherent tragedy of conscious existence, they feel far less called upon to do something about minimizing it, and may have less respect for the value of life. [p. 251]

I like to think that Jesus Christ's philosophy of compassion was rooted in his appreciation of this inherent tragedy. He came to be known as "The Man of Sorrows," suffering for mankind (if not also for "lesser" animals on the food chain, like my dog Siegfried and the birds whose still bodies he finds in our back yard). I would like to think that Jesus felt sorrowful for them too. My mother did, and I do.
    Alas, "The Man of Sorrows" tradition seems to refer to Jesus's personal suffering because of being required by God to "bear our griefs and carry our sorrows," being "smitten of God, and afflicted," "wounded for our transgressions," "bruised for our iniquities," and having laid on him "the iniquity of us all." And all that. Nothing to do with our actual human tragedy.
    But we know not of the actual human being, Jesus of Nazareth. We know only the fabulous creature whose life and teachings were variously described by a number of people, including quite a few who had no personal acquaintance of him, having been born after he died. As I said, I like to think that his compassion rose out of a sense of the fragility, finiteness, and uniqueness of conscious existence.

Unsettled question

One of my far-flung correspondents writes:

In 6th or 7th grade, I was asked what I would do when I die and meet Jesus. Well, obviously if I am actually face-to-face with him, then it would not be a question of believing or not. But since that little fantasy is not actually going to occur, I am not too worried about it. We will all be <ahem> dead; we non-believers won’t have the satisfaction (?) of knowing we were "right" and believers won’t have the disappointment of realizing they were wrong.
    It's not like they'd apologize for their decades of trying to proselytize us. I’m sure that if in death they could look around and see the absolute, utter nothingness, they would still find some way to rationalize that there is a God and that heaven will come, but there must be some...waiting period...or something....

Looking around in death and seeing utter nothingness sounds like an exquisitely terrifying mental hell, infinitely worse than being stuffed into an MRI tube without being told how long the procedure is going to take. Happily (so to speak), neither the believer nor the non-believer will suffer any awareness of nothingness, nor will either know which of them was right, for in death neither will be here (or anywhere else) to experience anything, any more than either was anywhere before birth to experience anything. While we don't count it sad to contemplate all of the beings who might have been born if only all of those eggs and sperm could have gotten together, our having been born brings with it the sadness of our death to come.
    But if any particular sadness of life "tipped the balance" for me it was not the sadness of any personal misfortune, but the general sadness of the food chain, the contemplation that some living creatures get eaten so that other living creatures may live a while longer. The idea that some divine being created such a world was (and remains) so utterly repugnant to me, there was no chance that I, with my exquisite sense of justice for all, could continue to believe in the supposed being who created it. For me and my belief, it's really as simple as that.
    My correspondent reminds me that it was apparently something like that for Charles Darwin, who seems to have left for the voyage on The Beagle a Christian but after seeing "the survival of the fittest" in action couldn't believe that a loving God could be behind it.

If Jesus Christ had a hole in his own moral philosophy, this might have been it. At any rate, to the best of my recollection of the Gospels, all of his reported teachings on compassion were on behalf of humans. His heart seemed not to have been broken by the sacrifice of animals on the cruel altar of worship.
    You might have thought that the Son of the Creator of the Universe wouldn't have had such a myopic, parochial valuation of Creation. Jesus seems to have been a human being even more of his times than we might have thought, however revolutionary his doctrine of human love.

If I'm a lost sheep, so are we all

A friend, frustrated by my refusals to "believe on the name of the Lord," finally just asked me:

What DO you believe in? Where does your Hope lie? And what do you believe is going to happen to your soul when you die?

I'm glad for the occasion to write about this here. As I told my friend:

In a nutshell, I trust to chance and cautious living. When we die physically, our personal identities (our consciousnesses—our "souls" if you will) go poof.

I notice now that she capitalized "Hope," and the phrasing of the question (Where does my Hope lie?) presupposes that there must be something (outside myself?) that I can trust (or hope) to fulfill my aspirations (my hopes). I don't think there is such a thing.
    My hopes are simple. I hope that I die before my wife and children. I hope that what time I have left before I "go poof" will be tolerable if not better than tolerable.
    My friend also, curiously, concluded by saying:

As far as I can tell, no one has come up with a cure for death.

While I can't be sure why she added that, it seems to suggest that her main hope might be that she will somehow survive death—since we don't have a cure for it and are, therefore, surely going to die. (I know that she trusts, as multitudes of terrified people do, in John 3:16, "...whosoever believeth in him [the only begotten Son of God] should not perish, but have everlasting life.")
    As another friend, Nortin M. Hadler, MD, writes in his indispensable book, Worried Sick: A Prescription for Health in an Overtreated America, "Even Methuselah died." By the way, he tells me that that will probably be the title of his next book; look for it from the University of North Carolina Press.
    It so happens that I've been reading another book as well (I'm rarely not reading at least two concurrently). The other book is Irvin D. Yalom, MD's latest, Staring at the Sun, whose subtitle is "Overcoming the Terror of Death." Dr. Yalom frankly acknowledges that a signal function of religion is to help people overcome that terror. It seems to serve that purpose for my friend.
    I hasten to add that I'm not reading Dr. Yalom's book as a prescription for my own terror, but because I tend to read whatever his latest is. I learned only recently that he has also published another novel, so now The Schopenhauer Cure is on my reading list. I hope to live long enough to read it.

My friend also asked me:

And where do you get that belief from [whatever I DO believe]? That is the real issue.

She didn't say why this is "the real issue," but I guess it's a reference to what is for her the obvious fact that the Bible is "the Word of God," so why am I not getting my beliefs from it?
    I replied:

Mainly I get [my] belief from having rejected all of the fantastical, wishful beliefs to the contrary.

It should be obvious what the wishful is in my friend's eschatological Christian beliefs. (I qualify the beliefs that way to exclude from this discussion the kernal moral teaching of Jesus Christ, to which I myself subscribe: have compassion for one another, you are no more deserving than the next person.)
    Actually, from observing my friend's life, I'd say that she gets something else from her religious beliefs, something not uncommon, something that I can even recognize from having experienced it myself through religious belief: something like a narcotic high. On another occasion, my friend referred to "the God that I love so much." She wrote, quoting the entire 104th Psalm, that "in the first verses you will see His Majesty and Power." My friend is clearly high on her idea of God. This is a real, present value for her.
    Karl Marx, of course, famously referred to religion as "the opium of the people," but as far as I have been able to make out he was referring to the hope of eternal life to make up for their miserable existence here on earth.
    No, this something else that religious belief can provide is a buoyant, trance-like feeling, maybe like a cocaine or a heroin high. As much as I might like to have experienced one of those highs in order to be a better witness for the simile, I have not experienced either, nor even a marijuana high. But the religion-related highs I have experienced were transporting and pleasant.
    So, why am I not swallowing any of it? Well, I haven't swallowed any cocaine or heroin either, and I didn't finish either of the two joints I was offered. I prefer what I regard as the truth to the various fantasies of resurrection, the separation of the sheep from the goats, eternal bliss, eternal fire.

A pertinent text for this preference came to hand this morning, from Maureen Dowd's November 8 op-ed piece in The New York Times. She quoted Emeric Pressburger, a co-director of the 1948 film classic, "The Red Shoes," who (says Dowd) wrote in a letter to Deborah Kerr in the early ’40s:

No artist believes in escapism. And we secretly believe that no audience does. We have proved, at any rate, that they will pay to see the truth, for no other reason than her nakedness.

I do not wish to fake an escape from the existential reality of our human condition. I prefer that reality's austere nakedness, however cold like an ancient marble statue of Venus it may be. Should I suffer inordinate physical pain in my final hours, I will more than likely be glad of offered painkillers, but I am confident that I will regard the impending poof as a blessing, nothing to be frightened of².
_______________

1. The photograph of the "lost sheep" was taken by my son in the hills above Rila Monastery, south of Sofia. I've used only a small detail from the original:
   
   
2. The title of Julian Barnes's book that I was reading at this time last year—because it was his latest book.

Jesus Kitsch

A relative of my wife's who recently learned of my "loss of faith" (as I suppose he would term it) has sent me by attachment this Owings Mills image of Jesus. (Note the NEW ART annotation in the upper left-hand corner.)

I assume that my cousin-in-law hopes thereby to restore my "lost faith"—the faith that I finally found unsupportable by reason, evidence, or expectation. His e-mail includes the chain-mail text:

He arrived this morning, we had prayer, spent some time just talking, and then he was on his way to your house.

When he gets to your PC, escort him to the next stop. Please don't allow him to sleep on your PC. [Could I keep Jesus from sleeping if he wanted to sleep?] The message he is carrying is very important and needs to go round. May God bless you as you do this—Amen.

This image of Jesus is a piece of sentimental "art" in the class of other Owings Mills pieces, such as "Sunset Grandeur," "Evening's Promise," "A Little Piece of Heaven," and "Home of Plenty" (which I quickly found on the web):

Even their titles express the sentiment, as does "Softly Knocking Jesus," which might well be the title of the religious kitsch.

Such popular sentiment doesn't claim me. I can't muster the requisite faithful response.

Praise God!

In my kitchen this evening I found myself praising God. And doing it so spontaneously I was rather surprised and had to wonder at myself. The immediate occasion was listening to some exalted string music performed by Julian Lloyd Webber and broadcast by our local classical music station, WCPE 89.7 FM, in Wake Forest, North Carolina. Praise God, indeed! Why don't I listen to more such music? Friday I had been affected similarly by a performance of Beethoven's Fifth Piano Concerto ("The Emperor") by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, under the direction of Herbert von Karajan, broadcast by the University of Southern California's KUSC over the World Wide Web.

Today was special. In the morning, out in the yard raking leaves, I felt I was in church, exciting thoughts "about God" flowing through my mind, words flowing from my muse, but nothing manic feeling about it, so stately and calm and strong.

If Jesus had ever been going to come again,
I wish He had already done it in
    A year before the one
    My parents my life begun,
So I'd not now be in the slump I'm in,
To choose Christian or other cognomen—

For God exists, and Jesus His Son,
And Prophet Muhammad's not to shun.

But how thrilling, envigorating, and inspiring the whole week! Special on several fronts. Because of the blessed approach of spring, I walked four times up and down the hill from my office to the Carolina campus (a little over a mile one way). My body has been renewed and charged, especially sexually. (In springtime a young man's fancy—and an old man's too—turns not to baseball, but to sex! Throughout my life, whenever sexual energy has been flowing, so have my mental and spiritual energy, which is the secret, if anything is, why Youie was/is for me feminine.)

And I mustn't overlook another front: the provocative comments I've received from (and made back to) Brandon and Tom and Maliha, especially when I've put into the mix with them, quite by accident (or serendipity), my beginning to read a little book by Garry Wills: What Jesus Meant. [Wills is the author also of Papal Sin, Why I Am a Catholic, Saint Augustine, Saint Augustine's Childhood, Saint Augustine's Memory, Saint Augustine's Sin, Saint Augustine's Conversion, The Rosary, and What Paul Meant.]

Reading just Wills's foreword, "Christ Not a Christian," has shaken my world.

While you may know that I need to confess that I can be overly affected by the reading of a new book (as I suppose I was by my reading of Sam Harris's The End of Faith), I do have the sense already that I (and how many millions more of humans?) have been on the wrong track in trying to whittle Jesus Christ (or, as Wills says, "Jesus-Messiah") down as just a man like us. How many times have I written on this blog lately that I didn't believe that Jesus was the son of God in some way that you and I are not?

And I've been hopping about like St. Vitus seeming to agonize over the question of God's existence. Hey, God exists. I affirm it. Jesus was His son. (I'm even going along with God's being the Father rather than the Mother.) And I affirm that Muhammad was God's authentic Messenger, maybe even (as he claimed) the Final One.

So, now, the more interesting inquiry begins:

What, if anything, are we to do in the face of the existence of God, the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and God's message through Muhammad?

How many folds?

How many times should you fold your toilet paper?

We humans want answers to the important questions of life. Several years ago a success coach was addressing a large number of young professional women. The audience responded gratefully when she met their need to know how many times to fold their toilet paper, especially before a business meeting. (Twelve layers^*, she said.)

Don't doubt that this was an important question. You too have many particularly vivid memories of a parent or a neighbor or a friend imparting some such information to yourself. I can remember clearly a college roommate's telling me what his father had told him about shaving with or against the grain of the beard and, before that, my dad's showing me how to fold...toilet paper. Oh, you don't just wad it up?

And there are other questions that don't seem so mundane. "Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?" to quote Paul Gauguin's famous painting, "D'où venons-nous? Que sommes-nous? Où allons-nous?":

We want answers to such questions. And to get them we often look for someone we trust to tell us. A Tony Robbins or a Wayne Dyer or an M. Scott Peck or Norman Vincent Peale. The last two are dead now, but they were big not many years ago. Or someone who claimed to speak for or from God, like Moses or Jesus Christ or Muhammad. Those last ones have stood the "tests" of lots of other people following them and of their having done so for a long, long time. And two 19th century American prophets, the Latter Day Saint Joseph Smith and Jehovah's Witness Charles Taze Russell, have had their respective international followers for a while, too.

Whichever source we accept is almost always one that our friends or our family or the members of our community accept. If it isn't a natural philosopher or Moses or Muhammad, but it is Joseph Smith, then it's likely the Mormons for us too.

It helps if whatever source is near to hand gives answers more or less like the ones we want to believe. In our rebellious stage, if we had one, we were disinclined to believe what our family or our neighbors believed. We left, to return later perhaps as a prodigal child, to look anew at the source familiar to our childhood and adolescence.

If we've traveled or read a bit, we may now be aware that that source isn't the only one. If it had been Jesus, it might now include the possibility of a humanist philosopher or of Gautama or Muhammad. The question may have become whether to choose one of these or...?

[more to be unfolded later]

______________
*How many folds to get twelve layers depends on whether you're using one- or two-ply paper. The speaker didn't cover this, but I've found that an efficient way to get twelve layers with one-ply paper is to

1. Unroll twelve squares (or an equivalent length).
2. Fold in half (lengthwise).
3. Fold in half again.
4. Fold over one third.
5. Fold over the other third.

With two-ply, unroll six squares and skip the third step.