The First Baptist Church of Granada Hills

            Thirty-nine years ago, Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin brought the Apollo 11 mission to its climax.  On July 20, 1969 two people, after traveling hundreds of thousands of miles, climbed out of a cramped multi-billion dollar box and walked on the moon.  The moon!  Roughly five hundred million people watched as this pair of Americans achieved one of the most significant propaganda victories of the Cold War, affirming the superiority of the free world over against its authoritarian enemies.

            But as amazing as the moon landing was in terms of its political value, its most enduring legacy is a more general one: Apollo 11 bears witness to the power of human ability. The achievement was so overwhelming, so mythical in scope, that it clearly indicated that mankind, given enough money, technology, and will, can do virtually anything.  As God is said to have remarked at Babel, “nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them.”

            This limitless horizon of possibility has filled many with a sense of optimism, and with cause.  Our march from the Stone Age to the modern day has been attended by meaningful advances in the human condition.  Each year it seems that new medicines are developed, new communication arrays are installed, and more efficient agricultural techniques are unveiled making disease, isolation, and starvation ever more distant realities.

            At the same time, though, the progress of human power has had a darker side as well.  The very same theoretical and technological advances that have given us more cures, communications and corn have also given us germ-warfare, online child pornography, and the Holocaust. Thus, while our advances may fill us with hope, our hopes must be tempered with realism.  

            T.S. Eliot once wrote that modern people occupy themselves “dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.”  Sadly, these dreams must forever remain exactly that—mere dreams.  For as history has shown, advances of all sorts are ambiguous things; great power can be used both for great good and for great evil; it’s up to the actor to decide which.  Thus goodness will always be a needful thing.

            This sobering truth—power’s inherent ambiguity—ought to cause us to examine our own lives then.  Is the world a better place because of us?  Are we using our ever-increasing wealth, talents, and influence to improve our communities?  Or are we just using our fellow men and women as so much “raw material” for the satisfaction of our own selfish and destructive desires?  Put simply, are we good? 

            A prophet once said, “the eyes of the LORD range throughout the earth to strengthen those whose hearts are fully committed to him.” (2 Chronicles 16:9)  Now, commitment to the Lord involves a number of things, but a commitment to righteousness, to goodness, is among them.  Thus, just as power needs righteousness so righteousness, it would seem, may lead to power.  Let’s then keep this relationship between goodness and greatness in mind—both when we advance personally in some fashion and, perhaps, when we want to.

          A little while back I decided that I ought to read more books that present views with which I disagree; it just seemed fair.  After all, I spend a lot of time encouraging non-believers to read Christian books and it seemed that I ought to return the favor.  With this in mind I picked up a copy of Sam Harris’ bestselling The End of Faith.
          In this book Harris outlines, in great clarity, some of the dangers that attend religious faith and does so primarily by highlighting the lowlights of the world’s most widely received “Western” religions: Christianity and Islam.  Of course, I’m no fan of Islam and I don’t really want to spend a great deal of time defending it; sufficed to say that the Koran does indeed advocate an often violent antagonism between Muslims and everyone else; whether we should simply exterminate sincere Muslims for the good of the world, as Harris advocates (page 53), is, I think, another matter. But when it comes to Christianity it seems that Harris makes a very obvious blunder, so much so that I wonder whether he is being intentionally misleading so as to advance his own argument. 
          Harris contends that when religious people do terrible things it’s because they are religious, not, that is, because they’re people.  As Harris notes, religious people tend to argue the latter: that people, even religious people, sometimes do terrible things because there is something dangerous and devious inherent in all humanity–Christianity calls it “sin”.  Of course, Harris dismisses this possibility as self-serving and evasive.  Indeed, to him all really evil things seem to be inherently motivated by religion.  But what of the great philosophically and functionally atheistic regimes of the 20th century?  Don’t these show that even irreligious people can do horrible things and that thus the fault, to quote Shakespeare’s Julius Ceaser, “is not with our stars but with our selves?”  Sorry, no dice.  These too are examples of religion.  The devotion of the Germans to Hitler? Religious! (page 100) The programs of Stalin and Mao? Religious! (page 79)  In fact, at one point Harris goes so far as to say that everyone is a product of religion, presumably making all atrocities, no matter how removed from explicitly creedal motivations, the fault of faith (page 108).  By this point it should be fairly obvious that Harris is playing a rather sloppy and dishonest shell game: people do terrible things, no person is really that far removed from religion, therefore religion is to blame for the world’s ills.  Hmm.
          Harris himself provides an excellent exception that seems to disprove his rule.  The Inquisition happened; it was bad.  But what led to it being as bad as it was?  For Harris the answer is obvious: religion, specifically the Christian religion.  If it wasn’t for Christianity the Inquisition never would have been instituted in the first place, never would have spiraled out of control, and never would have claimed the lives of so many.  But as Harris himself points out, there were massive disparities between the way that the Inquisition operated and the procedures outlined in the passages of the Hebrew Bible that were pressed into service to justify the proceedings.  Whereas Harris notes that the Inquisition accepted individual, uncorroborated accusations as evidence, confiscated the property of the accused and gave some to the accuser as a reward, and allowed the accuser to remain anonymous and uninvolved in the trial, every single one of these things was prohibited in the Old Testament.  The Old Testament is very clear that anyone accused of metaphysical “weirdness” can only be condemned on the testimony of at least two people (Deuteronomy 17:6), that the accused’s property must be totally destroyed (Deuteronomy 13:16-27), and that the ones making the accusations must themselves personally participate in the “wet work” of the execution (Deuteronomy 17:7).  Considering that Harris himself believes that people may justifiably be executed for holding the wrong religious beliefs (again, page 53) and that phenomena akin to witchcraft may indeed be real (see the article on AlterNet), the only charge that he can lay at the Inquisition’s feet without hypocrisy is that its methods were unsound and encouraged false convictions.  But as we’ve seen, its methods encouraged these false convictions precisely because they ignored the very verses they claimed to be applying.  Thus, in a very real way, it seems that the Inquisition became the monstrosity that it was precisely because the Inquisitors were inadequately religious, not excessively so.  Of course, one might think that Harris would at least mention Jesus’ preemptive prohibition of exactly this sort of thing in Matthew 13, but, rather unsurprisingly, he doesn’t.
          It’s clear that Harris is far from an unbiased observer of the misadventures of religion.  Indeed, he seems more like a zealous hater of monotheistic faith who earnestly desires to rip it up, root and branch, honesty and integrity be damned.

(The page numbers given in this article refer to the hardcover version of the book.)

          Every so often some group of researchers conducts a survey of the religious beliefs of Americans.  Generally speaking the results are predictable: most people identify with either Catholicism or one of the thirty-one flavors of Protestantism, a smaller percentage are Jewish, and a handful of people hold to other, generally Eastern, faiths.  But over the last generation or two a new demographic has arisen, a group which apparently warrants its own category: “spiritual but not religious”.

          Those who see themselves as “spiritual but not religious” generally feel that life is a wonderful and somewhat mysterious thing.  This sense of wonder and mystery is such that flat, mechanistic explanations of the world simply fail to convince. As such the minds of these individuals are open to the spiritual, that is, to phenomena and orientations which seem to participate in a larger reality than mere matter in motion. 

          At the same time, people of this sort often feel that there is something of an inherent antagonism between spirituality and religion.  Spirituality is free, it’s open-ended, it’s intensely personally, and largely private.  Religion, on the other hand, is seen as dogmatic, institutional, stale, and authoritarian.  To put it more simply: spirituality is positive while religion is largely negative.

          As a clergyman I confess that I find the above dichotomy rather misses the mark.  The difference between religion and spirituality is not one of kind but of degree.  As such the difference between the two is analogous to the difference between genuine mathematics and a vague appreciation of numbers: the former is simply a refinement, an integration, and even an advance of the latter.  Religion is merely what happens when people come together to discuss spirituality, to bring their experiences and thoughts into relationship with one another.  Religion is where the world-weary pessimism of Ecclesiastes is put into dialogue with the bright-eyed optimism of Proverbs; it’s where the cautiousness of St. James is brought into contact with the freedom of St. Paul; it’s where the fleeting glimpses of that “larger reality” are pieced together to produce a fuller and more reliable picture than any one person could hope to manage alone.

          Of course, there is still the matter of religion’s authoritarian flavor.  But given the above, is that really surprising?  Indeed, is it even necessarily undesirable?  If religion is the piecing together of a definite puzzle then certainly there are better and worse ways to assemble that puzzle.  Or, to continue the mathematics analogy, while all numbers may be equally valid, all equations are not: 2+2=4 certainly seems more reasonable than 2+2=5; would we really want to study under a teacher blind to the distinction?

          With all this said, I’d encourage the “spiritual but not religious” to reconsider institutional faith, to even give it a first-hand investigation.  Perhaps the chapels of your neighborhoods and the well-worn books they preach contain something of worth after all.  Perhaps you’ll find their ministers less overbearing than you assumed.  Who knows, perhaps you’ll even find a home.