Book Review: Reclaiming the Bible for a Non-Religious World by John Shelby Spong

Back in 2010, I reviewed a book by Bishop John Shelby Spong entitled; “Eternal Life: A New Vision; Beyond Religion, Beyond Theism, Beyond Heaven and Hell.” At the time, Bishop Spong was 79 and suggested that, despite the fact that he was fit and healthy, this might be his last book. I am pleased to say that he was wrong.

His new book is “Reclaiming the Bible for a Non-Religious World.” His stated purpose in writing it is to; “…reclaim not the literal power, but the essential meaning of the Bible in and for the non-religious world we inhabit.” His intention is that the book be used by study groups in the hope that those who engage it will have the sense of completing a major university course on the Bible. Sounds good to me!

Bishop Spong has been a popular author in the spiritual but not religious movement that has become fashionable in recent years. Unfortunately, many people who consider themselves spiritual but not religious do not have a clear definition of what that means to them. This book can help clarify that distinction.

According to Bishop Spong, religion is not about truth, it is about security which explains why religions try to offer easy, authoritarian answers to complex problems and assure people that they need not think for themselves. Rather, religion insists that all they need to do is to profess the creed, perform the rituals and be assured that they are superior to others who have not done so and will be guaranteed the ultimate security in the form of an afterlife reserved for their kind.

On the other hand spirituality invites us to “embrace insecurity and dismiss security as a vice.” This is true of any form of spirituality, Christian, Buddhist, Jewish or otherwise. His idea of spirituality is that intangible something which gives people the courage to live in an insecure and ever changing world knowing we are not alone and that we have the strength to embrace the radical insecurity of life.

This is the perspective from which Bishop Spong interprets the Bible; a collection of stories about how human consciousness has been moving along a path leading from the false security brought about by blind belief, obedience and victimization to the liberating power of personal responsibility and compassion. In the process we give up the pathological need for security and discover the positive aspects of doubt, questioning and the creative potential of chaos.

The path charted in the Bible does not move in a straight line. Instead, it weaves, gets stuck and at times backtracks. The problem for humankind is that security is seductive; magical thinking and superstition are more exciting than reality.

The Bible is a cautionary tale recounting the pitfalls and roadblocks along our evolutionary journey. It also captures the breakthroughs and shifts that led to real progress and growth. A good sense of history is invaluable in charting a way forward and Bishop Spong’s new book will help make the Bible relevant to an increasingly spiritual but not religious world.  

The Death of Bin Laden: An Opportunity to Examine Our Motivation

The world is starting to adjust to life without Osama Bin Laden. In the aftermath of the street celebrations, there have been dozens of opinion pieces, blog entries and Facebook posts on how people “should” have reacted to the news. I’m not sure that people’s feelings can be subjected to a moral imperative. We feel what we feel and in a free society, nobody else gets to control that.

Were the crowds celebrating death and extolling assassination or was something else happening? It’s not for me to say. What we can say is that Bin Laden was the face of world terrorism for over 10 years. His voice and his face appeared in repeated videos gloating over the death and destruction that he and his followers caused.

My feelings differ vastly from those whose lives were directly touched by the events of 9/11 and I do feel that the world is a better place without Osama Bin Laden. Although others might step into the position he once held, nobody will take his place. The face of terrorism has changed forever.

I am not a pacifist although I greatly respect the courage and message of non-violence advanced by Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. They along with their followers chose the route of non-violence as a way of making their respective cases in the court of public opinion which eventually won the day for them.

It was an effective and admirable strategy under those circumstances. However, self sacrifice in the name of non-violence is always a personal choice; it cannot be made for others. To say that we must never oppose evil by force in the face of a fanatical ideology that is dedicated to as much human destruction as it can bring about might be seen as a form of complicity or appeasement.

The word “evil” properly applies to Bin Laden and his followers. Unity co-founder Charles Fillmore once said that; “Evil is a parasite. It has no permanent life of itself. Its whole existence depends on the life it borrows from its parent. When its connection with the parent is severed, nothing remains.”

The parasite known as Al Qaida was slowly sucking the life out of its Islamic host. In return, it offered a perverse ideology which essentially said to their Muslim brothers and sisters that if you oppose or even disagree with us, we will kill you. After the death of Bin Laden, the parasite no longer has a visible, living face and even before that, a significant shift was taking place.

In Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, a new generation was starting to reject the parasitic ideology of death and oppression represented by Bin Laden in favor of something more liberating and life affirming. Intelligent people eventually realize that parasitic evil is always taking and has nothing positive to offer. When the host rejects it, parasitic evil ultimately collapses under its own dead weight.

What is the “proper” response from a spiritual standpoint? Our spiritual discernment must first start with a consciousness that is free from fear, hatred or a desire for vengeance. The next step is to understand that there is more than one alternative. Sometimes nothing needs to be done and indeed nothing can be done. Other times, the eventual collapse is helped along by a little nudge from the outside. And in some cases, an even larger effort is required.

Whichever choice is deemed appropriate under the circumstances, the final step and each step after that is the same as the first; to proceed with a consciousness that is free from fear, hatred or a desire for vengeance. If that means that we should stop cheering, then let there be silence.

Counting Down to 2012

Here is my bold prediction for what is going to happen in 2012; there will be earthquakes, hurricanes, tornados, volcanic eruptions, political and social unrest and lots of changes in the world. In other words, nothing much different from what has gone on every single year since the beginning of human history.

On the other hand, there are people who claim that something will occur in 2012 that will be so unique and unprecedented that it can only be regarded as the end or beginning of an age, part of some pre-determined cosmic cycle that ancient civilizations have been aware of for eons. First, there are the doomsayers who predict various catastrophes that could end life as we know it on planet earth. Then there are those who claim that 2012 will usher in something more vague and ambiguous such as a “new world age” or some kind of transformation or shift.

These predictions are based on a variety of things such as the Mayan calendar, various prophecies and events contained in indigenous mythology and folklore, messages from channeled entities, astrology and even the writings of Edgar Cayce and Nostradamus. In the January/February 2010 issue of Unity Magazine, the cover story featured an interview with author Gregg Braden whose recent book is called “Fractal Time; The Secret of 2012 and a New World Age.”

After reading the interview, I was left with far more questions than answers. I find it difficult to understand why we would decide to take indigenous mythology and prophecy literally when the Unity movement generally opts for an allegorical approach when it comes to scripture.

Mr. Braden seems to be saying these myths are authoritative because modern research has confirmed the accuracy of ancient Hopi prophecy telling of a time when the planet froze over and stopped spinning. I would love to see the research that verifies that one. Sure, we have had several ice age cycles but there is absolutely no evidence that the earth ever stopped spinning.

Consider this; I’ve checked across several sources which state that the earth’s mass is around six septillion kilograms. That’s a 6 followed by 24 zeros. At the equator, the surface of the earth is moving at a speed of around 1,000 MPH. I would be interested to hear from a physicist about the amount of energy that it would take to counteract that combination of mass and velocity and the effect it would have on the very structure of the planet itself.

Then, according to the Hindu Vedas, we are supposed to be in a “Kali Yuga” characterized by unreasonable rulers, addictions, famine, death and victimization. When has the world not been in a “Kali Yuga”?

Other support for a 2012 special event comes from Aztec cosmology characterized by cycles ending with great winds, fire from the sky and global cooling. The world has been experiencing these events in the form of volcanoes, asteroids, lightning, floods and windstorms for millions of years. These stories sound a bit mundane in the grand scheme of things.

Then we have Edgar Cayce and Nostradamus telling us that the new millennium would bring great change. So did the last millennium. Why is this one so different and why should we accept the authority of Cayce and Nostradamus? It is so easy to take ambiguous prophecies and quatrains after the fact and through a process of observational selection, find circumstances that fit and then call it a hit. Let’s hear about the many misses as well and then decide.

Anyone remember the “harmonic convergence” in 1987? That was another “new world age” event predicted by astrology and the Mayan calendar that was to usher in an era of peace and cooperation. Although nothing specific happened, people look back and say that the fall of the Soviet Union, the end of Apartheid and the reunification of Germany followed 1987 which is proof that the convergence happened.

Another name for that kind of observational selection is cherry picking; choosing the positive events after the fact in order to support a theory and ignoring the negative stuff like the earthquake that hit Los Angeles in October 1987. In 1988 the U.S. shot down an Iranian airliner killing 209 and a Pan Am 747 was blown up by terrorists over Lockerbie Scotland. 1989 brought the Tiananmen Square massacre followed by the Persian Gulf War in 1990. In other words, the world went on as it always had with delight followed by disaster.

Finally, we have something called “The Time Code Calculator” which uses a mathematical formula based on fractals to allow us to calculate when an event from the past might repeat. For example, using the December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor as a seed event, the calculator predicts future times when conditions are ripe for an attack on the U.S. Sure enough, go to the calculator at greggbraden.com, put it in mode one, input December 1941 and keep working forward from the dates you get and you will come to 2001 and everyone knows what happened in 2001. Except the calculator says June of 2001. Close enough I guess.

In the interest of science, I would like to hear some independent opinions from mathematicians and physicists. One of the keys to claiming any kind of reliable knowledge is the peer review process which is totally lacking here. In light of the devastating earthquake in Haiti in January of this year, I looked up the calculator and put in June 1770, the date of the last known quake in Port Au Prince. The closest date that came up was October 2009. Does that count as a hit? After all, it was only off by 3 months.

Every year brings with it at least one event of unprecedented significance. Attempting to rank one as more significant than another is folly. Would anyone care to argue that the holocaust was more or less significant than the abolition of slavery or that the American Revolution was a more pivotal event than the Protestant Reformation?

I’m more concerned about the fact that in the USA today, slightly more than 60% of our population does not accept the scientific validity of evolution. One of those people seems to be starting a run for President in 2012 and she also believes in demons and witchcraft. Maybe 2012 is something to be afraid of after all.

Book Review: Eternal Life by John Shelby Spong

I will be forever grateful to the Unity movement for introducing me to the writings of John Shelby Spong. He was the Episcopal Bishop of Newark New Jersey until his retirement in 2000 and has been a leading voice for progressive Christianity for over 30 years. Bishop Spong was a keynote speaker at the 2009 conference of our Association of Unity Churches International where he received the Light of God Expressing in Society Award for his work.

His books have provocative titles such as: Rescuing the Bible From Fundamentalism; Why Christianity Must Change or Die; Resurrection: Myth or Reality? and Jesus for the Non-Religious. Now we can add to that list his latest challenge to the status quo: Eternal Life: A New Vision; Beyond Religion, Beyond Theism, Beyond Heaven and Hell. This book is not for the faint of heart.

We are used to John Spong leveling devastating critiques of traditional Christian dogma with most Unity folks cheering him on. In Eternal Life, he expands his territory. Do you believe that God has a plan for your life or that the “soul” chooses your destiny? Bishop Spong convincingly argues that he is an accidental human being, not the product of anyone’s design and without any obvious preconceived purpose.

Nor does he find it reasonable to believe in any concept of eternal life where our personality carries over. That would rule out traditional notions of heaven and reincarnation. After looking into near death experiences, he remains more skeptical than convinced.

Another challenging observation he makes is that this present moment appears to be little more than the non-real instant through which the future passes on its journey to the past and concludes that it is the present that actually doesn’t exist for human beings. How will that sit with fans of Eckhart Tolle and The Power of Now?

He believes than human beings should have the personal and legal right to choose when and how to die. This decision is called a moral and ethical decision to be celebrated and lauded. He makes it clear that these are his personal views while backing them up with evidence based on a lifetime of research and experience.

His passion for the subject matter arises from the fact that he is 79 years old and facing these issues in a very real way. Although he is vital and healthy, he candidly admits that this may be his final book. If so, it will be a fitting epitaph for a man who has never been afraid to ask the tough questions about matters of faith and then follow the evidence to wherever it may lead; even it meant taking an unpopular position or abandoning comfortable but outdated beliefs.

For those who are curious about Bishop Spong’s final conclusions, without giving anything away, this quote from the book provides a hint: “Our ultimate destiny was never to be religious human beings, as we once thought; it was simply to be fully and totally human. Religion, that human activity to which we once entrusted our destiny, is now revealed only as a stage of life that had to be transcended before we could discover our destiny… It has been the human destiny to walk through the fearful and the limiting in order to discover the transcendent and the infinitely real. We had to walk through self-consciousness to discover the universal consciousness.”

Bishop Spong is a first rate scholar and his book has plenty of substance for those of us who need footnotes and an extensive bibliography. He also recounts almost his entire life story which gives the book an autobiographical flavor. He is quite repetitive about his key points which might be an annoyance to some readers but is perhaps a reasonable accommodation in our attention span challenged culture.

This is a book meant to encourage dialogue about difficult issues. For those who are ready to let go of supernatural or superstitious explanations for what happens when we die, Bishop Spong provides a basis for finding a new and more reason based approach to living and dying with a transcendent sense of meaning and purpose.

Haiti's Curse

2009 is history, a year that provided unlimited excuses for not updating this blog. In February my father died at age 91. In April we had to euthanize our 12 year old golden retriever dog. After that it was house hunting after the rental we have lived in since 2004 was put on the market. I figured we were buying at the right time and at the end of July found a home in Rocklin that was perfect for us. In September we welcomed our next golden retriever puppy, a female named Tara. Now it’s time to get back to other things, like this blog.

I am hoping to do more book and movie reviews as well as comment on other things. As I write this, it has been almost a week since the earthquake in Haiti. On the day after the quake I mentioned to my wife that I wondered how long it would take for Pat Robertson to say something stupid about the situation. Based on his past track record with 911(caused by god’s wrath against feminists and the ACLU) and hurricane Katrina, (caused by god’s wrath against gay pride parades) it should be less than a week. Try 24 hours.

According to Pat, the Haitians are suffering because they have been under a curse. Here’s the quote: "They were under the heel of the French. You know, Napoleon III, or whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, we will serve you if you'll get us free from the French. True story. And so, the devil said, okay it's a deal [...] ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after the other."

Seems they made this pact with the devil at the start of their slave revolt in 1791. Some historians mention a voodoo ceremony presided over by one of the leaders of the revolt. So let me get this straight, Pat Robertson’s god says it would have been better for the Haitians to remain enslaved than to rely on an indigenous religious practice to rally the people to accomplish the only successful slave rebellion in modern history.

It is hard to believe that in 2010 educated people still believe in demons and curses or a theistic, supernatural all powerful god-person who controls the elements and tectonics to kill people he doesn’t like. And if a few righteous people get caught up in the divine carnage, I guess we just have to consider them expendable or martyrs. An all powerful god should be able to do better than that.

A new survey by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life reports that Americans are changing religious affiliations at a rising rate. The survey also indicates that the group that had the greatest net gain was the unaffiliated. More than 16 percent of American adults say they are not part of any organized faith, which makes the unaffiliated the country's fourth largest "religious group." ....While the unaffiliated have been growing, Protestantism has been declining, the survey found.

It is easy to understand why this is happening with people like Pat Robertson as the public face of protestant Christianity in America. The real curse for Haiti came in the form of the Europeans who practiced slavery and used the Bible to justify their atrocities.

Big Brother Isn't Just Watching Anymore (He’s Inside of Your Head!)

Happy New Year everyone, 2008 is over and that means it’s time for the 2009 Weird Science awards as voted by we the people on the msn.com science and technology page. The top vote getter was the discovery of a 2,700 year old marijuana stash in the grave of an ancient Chinese shaman, a result which says more about the weirdness of the voters than the science. Other top vote getters in the silly category were a beer drinking tree shrew (notice a theme here?), a four eared cat and a see through fish created by selective breeding.

Then there was the discovery that sounded more scary than weird; “Japanese researchers have reproduced images of things people were looking at by analyzing brain scans, opening the way for people to communicate directly from their mind.” Volunteers were hooked up to a medical brain scanner and then shown black and white images. The results of the scans were analyzed by software that was able to produce replicas of the images the volunteers were seeing. Check out the story here: www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28286263/

Although the Big Brother mind reading scenario created by this technology might seem scary, the philosophical implications are intriguing. Is it possible that mind, thought and consciousness might actually be reducible to brain chemistry? If a machine can accurately capture and reproduce something that is being processed by human consciousness, what might that do to our whole concept of consciousness? Maybe it’s not so mysterious and special after all.

Research such as this is subject to peer review and it will be most interesting to see if the results hold up under scrutiny. Assuming they do and brain scanning becomes better able to detect what is going on within an individual mind, it will raise some major legal, theological and ethical questions. Is the Unity Movement prepared to address and weigh in on these questions? Better yet, why not lead the way?

It will require us to refine and perhaps redefine concepts like soul, consciousness itself and the whole notion of what it really means to be human. Little things like that. The world is changing rapidly and the major cause is our technology. It isn’t going away so we need to get going and find ways to make sure our teachings remain relevant in the midst of this kind of change. Reality marches on and we can either run away from it or embrace it. On this issue, I’m with Byron Katie, author of “Loving What Is” who said that when you argue with reality, you lose, but only 100% of the time.

Losing My Religulous

I saw Religulous over the weekend, a very funny and challenging new movie from Bill Maher skewering various forms of religious expression. Maher is the former host of politically incorrect on Comedy Central which is a good description for this movie. I can't think of too many religious groups who would be left un-offended. Maher has nothing good to say about organized religion although he had nothing at all to say about that nebulous alternative to religion called spirituality.

His primary targets are the fundamentalist branches of Christianity, Orthodox Judaism and Islam in general with a brief shot at the weirdness known as Scientology. He also takes on the Mormons who are in a category of their own. His bottom line is that we shouldn’t be looking for ways to foster religious tolerance. Instead we should be finding ways to marginalize religion and expose the irrational, anti-intellectual, violent, xenophobic, misogynistic and misanthropic tendencies of the religions he is going after.

I think Bill Maher is one of the funniest and most intelligent satirists working today and parts of the movie were hilarious. At one point he is interviewing a "reformed" gay evangelical who insists that no one is “born gay” and Maher quips; “have you ever met little Richard?” Perhaps the best moment was his interview with father Reginald Foster, an American priest serving as the Vatican Latin expert. Father Foster refuses to wear priestly garb and comes across as a happy heretic with his progressive views on various topics. Another high point was watching the former director of the Vatican observatory, Jesuit priest George Coyne, make mincemeat of the claims of creationists.

Maher makes no claim of being fair and balanced. He offers no hint of a middle ground or opposing viewpoint. That task is left to others. This movie is a polemic; his concluding words are “religion must die in order for mankind to live.” I am inclined to agree to the extent that the religion he is talking about is the kind of fundamentalism that longs for the violent end times of Revelation or is bent on world conquest and domination violently or otherwise.

The biggest problem with the movie is that it doesn’t address the issue of why religion was invented in the first place. Human beings have always been looking for answers to ultimate questions and even if there are no answers, we need ways to talk about those questions. The movie does a great job of demonstrating how dysfunctional certain religious institutions have become but offers no alternative for dealing with the big questions. Science doesn’t have all the answers either so where to from here?

One suggestion might be to allow ourselves to evolve beyond the limitations of both religion and spirituality. The fact that humankind is outgrowing the magical and supernatural doesn’t mean an end to mystery and awe. The wonders of consciousness cannot be explained by mere reduction to biological components. Evolution is demonstrating an emerging level of complexity greater than the sum total of its parts that cannot be explained by random chance.

I would imagine that many people watching this movie might feel a bit defensive. Indeed, there are many apologists responding to Maher with varying degrees of alarm and outrage. The main reason that this movie did not have me squirming is because I do not identify with any of the religious labels being targeted. So what am I you might ask? I am an integral, evolutionary humanist. Good luck with that one Bill.