God Is Not 3 Guys

Wealth disparity in America disturbs me more than religious wrongdoing. I’m particularly upset that our public air waves are drenched in rhetoric from the right, the tax-cutting extremists who blast social programs that make life tolerable for some of the poor. Facts I wish our media would broadcast: • Incomes in the U.S. are less equal than in Guyana, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. We have roughly the same inequality as Uruguay, Argentina, and Ecuador. Latin American incomes are actually equalizing, but inequality continues to increase in the United States. • Our income tax code essentially ignores top incomes—those making hundreds of millions, even a billion dollars a year! These billionaires are taxed at the same low rate—35%—as those making $373,650 a year, less than half a million! Our tax code fails to distinguish between them. Insane! • The richest 1 percent owns 34 percent of our nation’s wealth—that’s more than the entire bottom 90 percent, who own just 29 percent of the countr...

Easter re-imagined, April 23 Easter and Christmas continue ancient celebrations of the sun’s annual resurrection in the northern hemisphere—the winter solstice and the vernal equinox. According to Christian scholar, the Venerable Bede, who lived around 700 C.E., Easter was named after Eostre, the Great Mother Goddess of the Saxon people in Northern Europe. There were many other names for her, among them Ostara, Ostern, and Eostre. Every spring, ancient cultures around the Mediterranean celebrated fertility in ceremonies honoring goddesses with a variety of names. Some are mentioned in the Bible—Asherah, Astarte, Ashtoreth, and Anath. Modern people are more familiar with Aphrodite, well-known for her connection with fertility. My favorite non-Christian Easter story—favorite because it so perfectly balances the Christian Father-Son bias—is the one I tell in my post Easter symbolized. More about the Mother-Daughter rites in my post Pagan Easter. The New Testament, of course, doesn’t men...

Rosemary Radford Ruether, April 7. There are times I think I should just give up on the Catholic Church—I’m sure Benedict XVI wouldn’t mind. He and bishops appointed by him and John Paul II are doing their best to get rid of dissidents like me. But since the 1970s or ‘80s—I forget which—Rosemary Radford Ruether has motivated me on my path of working within the Church because she remains a Catholic and she articulates what I think and feel. My term "God talk" comes from her book Sexism and God Talk ." A premier feminist theologian, Ruether sees Catholicism as incorporating the whole Western philosophical tradition, but she grew up learning to critique it with respect while remaining a Catholic. Her mother already criticized "superstitious, dogmatic Catholicism," notes Ruether. She believes we need “autonomous bases for women’s theologizing and worship” to counter the unspoken official position that feminist Catholics are “just deviant, immoral people.” I join ...

I'm so lucky. Friends and acquaintances say they have no one with whom they can discuss deep spiritual questions. I have many such persons. Recently, a group of us met to discuss a book that fascinates, challenges, perplexes, frustrates, and satisfies us. If you've followed my blog, you've "heard" me talk about it before. To continue my mystifying description, we even said that the book is not well written—“convoluting” was one good adjective offered. And Seth uses sexist language. You know how that offends me. The book is Seth Speaks; the Eternal Validity of the Soul . Yeah, I know. You thinkers who are atheists just felt your stomach lurch on the word "soul." I'm sorry. It's not what you think. As I replay our conversation that evening, I find myself smiling. What intelligence! But, no, a different kind of intelligence from the usual meaning. What was it we were saying? Reaching toward the unreachable brings us massive presence, frightenin...

David Brooks on things spiritual --March 11 I’m intrigued by a trend in our society that no one else has noted. Stories about religion losing ground flourish in the media, but has anyone else noticed a concurrent rise of interest in things spiritual? Religious and moral disagreements—often called “social issues”—as well as deeper questions concerning spiritual reality also fill the media. Ironically, one signal of the rising interest in spirituality is louder sounds coming from atheists. How so? I’ll repeat what I’ve said often—atheists become atheists BECAUSE their spiritual integrity is offended by the flaws, foolishness, and outright corruption in religions. Atheists today force spiritual discourse past religions, past specific, narrow beliefs to a more inclusive, more eclectic, generic and secular spirituality. The latest development exciting me is a new book, The Social Animal , by David Brooks. No one better typifies the American secular and intellectual culture that is emotion...

February 20, 2011 I read—well, I stopped reading and moved to skimming and then quit altogether—reading a book that purports to be the Catholic answer to atheists. It’s not. The authors claim that atheism enables sociopathic behavior and warn that “a significant number of people” who deny the existence of God could “do terrible damage to society.” As proof they list totalitarian atheist regimes under Hitler (said to be “Godless”), Stalin, Mao Tse-tung, Pol Pot, and others. Their exaggerated charges resemble Christopher Hitchens' charges against religion in God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything . Such alarmist, one-sided observations inevitably distort reality. My greatest disappointment is the authors’ inability to transcend the traditional, primitive concept of Divinity—an individual with a humanlike mind and will. Their routine references to “Him” reduce Infinite Intelligence to human dimensions, and they assume that all atheists deny ALL spiritual reality because the...

I’ve had discussions lately with people for whom God is an anthropomorphized god. Having been conditioned to “Father” and “Lord,” it distresses them to hear more scientific, philosophical, and mystical terms for what we call “God”—Source, Consciousness, Infinity, Void, and so on. I think it gives them real pain to hear that a Christian does not pray to “The Father,” an individual being who, they imagine, rules the universe—“the big guy in the sky,” as a Buddhist Christian minster called the anthropomorphic god. “Anthropomorphic” means humanlike. Anthropomorphism attributes human characteristics to things that are not human. Children delight in stories about animals that talk, trees that walk, winds that rock, wily foxes, wise turtles, and laughing lizards. Religious mythology teems with divine beings in human form having humanlike personalities with humanlike thoughts and making humanlike decisions. We learned to scoff at pagan deities, but “The Lord” in the Bible behaves in eq...