These are the times that try men’s souls, Thomas Paine wrote in “The Crisis” (1776). The American Revolution was happening all around him. He understood because he was living through it that “Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered.” Paine could easily have been talking about today – and about what Vladimir Putin has done to Ukraine and to the world. These are times that try everyone’s soul. That is if you have a soul. Let’s assume you do since you’re here. How does a soulful person cope with times that try their souls?
Our original intent with this conversation was for it to be a kind of helpful “how-to-hold-fast-to-your-values” pep talk in mind-blowingly challenging times. We have no idea where this madness will end. It’s truly out of our hands – like the pandemic. And, is there anything more frustrating than the utter impotence one feels watching good people suffer live on TV while the world seems to respond with the speed of a glacier. What kind of world will this leave us in? Will there even be a world when all this is over?
One’s goal in life should always be to be a better and better person. As part of being a better person, we also should aspire to being better at the things we’re good at. Good luck finding a data set that says stasis is good for anything. Life is a little like a shark that has to keep moving to stay alive. People get rich writing books or holding seminars on how to be a better parent, a better boss, a better this, a better that.
We’re climbing onto that bandwagon here before it’s too late (we better!) How can one be a “better Christian” or a “better atheist” – aside from “believing” more devoutly in whatever one believes? Is there a do-able, repeatable process that one can follow like software instructions? Let’s start by dealing with the eight megaton gorilla in the room. The one named Vladimir…
Or, if you’d prefer to watch…
The Faitheism Project Podcast S2E13 “How To Be A Better…”
A few podcasts back, Randy’s son Lukas and my son Tristan joined us for a wide-ranging, very compelling four-way conversation about how Gen-Z-ers approach matters of spirituality, faith and lack thereof. As conversations do around here, that one got all of us thinking – Tristan in particular. And all that thinking has produced a few questions that Tristan would like to pose to Randy – mostly about faith. Tristan and his sister grew up in a home where no religion was practiced. Both my wife and I are full-on atheists. Christmas was celebrated as a Western cultural “do”. We mostly remembered also to light Hannukah candles to keep the grandparents (my parents) happy. Religious faith was seen as a kind of exotica.
Back when Tristan and Lucas were kids in high school, back when Randy was still the pastor at the Silver Lake Community Church in the Silver Lake section of Los Angeles, Tristan and Lucas were part of a weekly discussion and community service group based out of Randy’s church. Randy would invite some of the homeless men that got food from the church to talk to the group. It was quite eye opening for them – in the best ways possible. If anything, it put human dimensions to the problem, gave people with whom they’d avoided eye contact in their own neighborhood (homeless in LA is a massive problem) eyes that couldn’t be denied.
There was a religious component to the meetings but questioning that component was absolutely allowed. The point of the exercise wasn’t to push the religious aspect of Christianity, it was to push Christianity’s innate sense of community – one of its absolute strengths. We should embrace the poor because they’re part of “us”. And we could be them under just the right (wrong) circumstances. In addition to homelessness, the group talked about other contemporary (for the time) problems. I suspect that’s when Tristan and Randy’s one-on-one actually began. Today’s podcast is an extension of that – one intellectually curious young person’s curiosity about something not practiced in that young person’s home: religious faith.
If you’ve ever questioned faith – if you’ve ever questioned your own faith – this conversation will surprise you. Hey, it’ll surprise you even if you’ve never thought for two seconds about faith.
Randy and I recorded this podcast a few days before Vladimir Putin changed pretty much every conversation about everything. While we don’t reference Putin – and the pandemic raging inside his soul (if he has one) – one look at Putin sitting at one end of a very long table, his ministers at the other end shouts volumes. News reports – based on intel sources (some it seems inside the room with Putin) – say that Putin isolated himself during the pandemic. For two years, he rarely appeared at the Kremlin, keeping to his homes outside of Moscow and his massive estate near Sochi. Being president of Russia for twenty years (staying president by changing the rules on the fly) – has further isolated Putin. He trusts no one.
Talk about a “pandemic of the soul”.
Here in America, as we slowly creep back toward something akin to “normalcy” in our lives, the last two years have taken a toll. America is more violent than before the pandemic. More divided. More inflamed. With a mid-year election looming, things aren’t likely to calm down any time soon. That’s unfortunate. It’s also a challenge to us all.
We can vaccinate ourselves against COVID. That won’t keep us from catching it necessarily, but if we do catch it – and we’re vaccinated – the odds are much more likely that we’ll endure it with far fewer complications and long-term impacts. If only we could innoculate ourselves against our rage.
One way to deal with all the rage? Talk about it. Like now…
The Faitheism Project Podcast, S2E11: “Pandemic Of The soul”
Climate change… nuclear weapons… evolution… these things all are what self described “environmental philosopher” Timothy Morton, the Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University calls “HYPEROBJECTS” – a term he coined to describe entities of such vast temporal and spatial dimensions that they defeat traditional ideas about what a thing is in the first place. A very big idea about very big things. A big idea about how to think about these very big things – as in “differently”!
In his book “Hyperobjects”, Professor Morton suggests that “the end of the world has already occurred in the sense that concepts such as world, nature, and even environment are no longer a meaningful horizon against which human events take place.” Old ways of thinking about these things are proving inadequate to the task. Consequently, our solutions to these problems fail. To overcome this strain on our normal ways of reasoning, Morton argues, we must reinvent how we think about things as massive as hyperobjects.
Okay… fair enough. Now, let’s ask a question: considering things of such vast temporal and spatial dimensions that they defeat traditional ideas about what a thing is in the first place, couldn’t Christianity fit that description? Whatever traditional ideas our culture had or has had about Christianity, hasn’t Christianity – over its history – over-run those borders repeatedly? Two thousand plus years into the Christian experiment, why is there so much profound disagreement amongst Christians as to what Christianity is? Or even who Jesus was – and if that even matters.
Now that we’re thinking about it… is spirituality a hyperobject? Is religious faith itself one?
Let’s start talking – that’s provided, of course, that we can fully wrap our minds around the topic.
The Faitheism {roject Podcast S2E10 “Is Christianity A ‘Hyperobject’?”
Re global warming: “I can’t see or touch it. What I can see and touch are these raindrops, this snow, that sunburn patch on the back of my neck. I can touch the weather. But I can’t touch climate.”
“You can’t know things directly; you can only know data. That’s the foundation of modern science. Cause and effect aren’t things that churn away underneath other things. They are inferences that we make about patterns we see in data.”
“This makes modern science more accurate and honest than anything we’ve previously come up with. The thing is, statistical correlations are better than bald statements of fact that you just have to believe or face the consequences. (“The Earth is flat! God is this golden calf!”) It’s better to say that we’re 95 percent sure global warming was caused by humans than to shout, “It was caused by humans, dang it! Just believe me!”
Kant argues “there is a gap between what a thing is and how it appears (its “phenomena”) that can’t be reduced, no matter how hard we try. We can’t locate this gap anywhere on or inside a thing. It’s a transcendental gap.
Samaritans are good guys plus a little extra. They’re good guys when even good guys waver. At least, that’s how they’re depicted in the parable from whence our whole notion of “Samaritans” comes. Parables are short, direct stories – fiction – meant to make a moral or religious point. They’re fables – except fables have animals doing the storytelling and parables use only human characters.
Jesus, as we know, taught using parables. At present, 33 parables are attributed to Jesus. Let’s stick a pin in the “authenticity” question for a moment (did Jesus actually exist… did he actually say what the Gospels say he said…?) and agree that the messages contained in quite a few of the parables, when boiled down to their essence, are perfectly good ways to live one’s life.
Hey, who can really argue with “Do unto others”, right? And the notion of mustard seeds growing into bigger things? Whether you’re talking about faith or simply a great idea – the concept works. The parable makes sense. We’re not just saying that to be nice either. We really mean it.
Hey, wouldn’t it be ironic if a podcast about good Samaritans got testy? Spoiler alert – no such thing happens. But you might be surprised how much new information you walk away with having listened to this podcast. Oh… there’s us again — trying to be a good Samaritan again.
The Faitheism Project Podcast S2E9: “Is It A Bad Time To Be A Good Samaritan?”
Or, if you’d prefer to watch –
NOTES & REFERENCES
From Randy —
I think the best place to start our conversation is with a reading of the story itself. Of course, it was originally remembered and shared through an oral tradition, eventually being written in Greek, the “trade language” of the day, as a part of Jesus’ teaching in the gospel of Luke. (Mark was probably the earliest “gospel” written around AD 60. Matthew and Luke are next written sometime between 60 and 80 AD.) The earliest manuscript we have today of the story is in the Chester Beatty papyrus, which dates from around 250 AD and was a part of early Egyptian Christianity. (It is interesting to note that the Chester Beatty papyrus is both the oldest New Testament papyrus in existence and the oldest manuscript of any kind in book form (as opposed to pages) in existence today.) It is also interesting to compare the number and date of New Testament manuscripts to other resources. I have two graphs to share showing that information. All of that to say, we have as much reason to trust in the reliability of this story as we do works of Plato, Sophocles and the Illiad. So, without further ado, here is the story of the Good Samaritan from Luke 10:25-37.
25 On one occasion an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. ‘Teacher,’ he asked, ‘what must I do to inherit eternal life?’
26 ‘What is written in the Law?’ he replied. ‘How do you read it?’
27 He answered, ‘“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind”[c]; and, “Love your neighbour as yourself.”[d]’
28 ‘You have answered correctly,’ Jesus replied. ‘Do this and you will live.’
29 But he wanted to justify himself, so he asked Jesus, ‘And who is my neighbour?’
30 In reply Jesus said: ‘A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he was attacked by robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him and went away, leaving him half-dead. 31 A priest happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side. 32 So too, a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. 33 But a Samaritan, as he travelled, came where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on him. 34 He went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he put the man on his own donkey, brought him to an inn and took care of him. 35 The next day he took out two denarii[e] and gave them to the innkeeper. “Look after him,” he said, “and when I return, I will reimburse you for any extra expense you may have.”
36 ‘Which of these three do you think was a neighbour to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?’
37 The expert in the law replied, ‘The one who had mercy on him.’
Jesus told him, ‘Go and do likewise.’
Now, Alan has some background on the Samaritans and the Jews that has a direct impact on the meaning of the parable:
Key things to note:
-The parable is part of a wider discussion.
-The discussion is between Jesus and an “expert in the law” testing
Jesus With a theological question.
-Jesus and the expert agree on the first Q&A as Jesus replies with the shema and an additional command: love your neighbor as yourself.
-This leads the expert to ask an additional question of Jesus “Who is my neighbor?”
-Jump to the other end of the story (v.36) and we find that question, posed by the expert, reframed and posed by Jesus: ‘Which of these three do you think was a neighbour to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?’ This shift in the question is critical to the meaning of the passage.
-The parable takes us from one way of thinking about loving our neighbor to another.
-It does this by telling a subversive story in which the good and the bad people swap positions thus turning upside down the world of the listeners and opening (or closing) their mind to the shift in understanding about “love your neighbor as yourself.”
-Loving your neighbor is not about defining (thus limiting) who you show love to. Loving your neighbor is on you; it is about the quality of relationship you offer to others.
From Alan —
This is one of those episodes where I end up learning way more than I expect. Let’s start with who the Samaritans were. Or, ARE…
Samaritan, member of a community, now nearly extinct, that claims to be related by blood to those Israelites of ancient Samaria who were not deported by the Assyrian conquerors of the kingdom of Israel in 722 bce. The Samaritans call themselves Bene Yisrael (“Children of Israel”), or Shamerim (“Observant Ones”), for their sole norm of religious observance is the Pentateuch (first five books of the Old Testament). Jews call them simply Shomronim (Samaritans); in the Talmud (rabbinical compendium of law, lore, and commentary), they are called Kutim, suggesting that they are rather descendants of Mesopotamian Cuthaeans, who settled in Samaria after the Assyrian conquest.
Among the most significant differences between the Samaritans and the Jews is the site which they believe God chose for his dwelling. While the Jews hold that God chose Mount Zion in Jerusalem, Samaritans believe he chose Mount Gerizim near Shechem. After the Babylonian Exile, the Samaritans built a temple on Mount Gerizim, and the Jews built a temple on Mount Zion (see Temple of Jerusalem). This remained a considerable matter of dispute between the two communities, and, in the 2nd century bce, the temple on Mount Gerizim was destroyed by the Maccabean ruler John Hyrcanus (reigned 135/134–104 bce). The low esteem that Jews had for the Samaritans was the background of Christ’s famous parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25–37).
By the 20th century the Samaritan population dwindled to fewer than 200 individuals, but it grew steadily to about 800 in the 2010s. Only in recent years have men been allowed to marry women from outside the community, although women who marry outside the community remain ostracized. The Samaritans are somewhat evenly distributed between a village on Mount Gerizim, which is also the residence of the high priest, and the city of Holon, where a synagogue is maintained, just south of Tel Aviv–Yafo. They pray in an ancient dialect of Hebrew but speak Arabic as their vernacular; Samaritans in Holon also speak modern Israeli Hebrew.
Now let’s talk “parables”…
I’ve referenced THE JESUS SEMINAR here before and I’m gonna do it again. The Seminar was a group of about 50 critical biblical scholars and 100 laymen founded in 1985 by highly respected biblical scholar Robert Funk. Funk’s goal: to collectively attempt to coax out an historical Jesus from the New Testament texts – documents (not unlike the Old Testament texts that preceded them) not exactly reliable where “historicity” is concerned. But then, historicity wasn’t their point. Thus, the Jesus Seminar applied skepticism and critical analysis to the texts.
Maybe the best two songs (they’re the first two that race to mind) about how painful love can be are Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” and REM’s “Losing My Religion”. What’s interesting is that both express the nothing-else-quite-like-it pain of romantic loss as a kind of religious experience. Leonard Cohen gives love the biblical potency to “cut your hair” like Delilah betraying Samson. Peter Lawrence Buck, Michael E. Mills, William Berry & Michael J. Stipe choose their confessions from “every whisper, of every waking hour”. Nothing can blow your mind, it seems, like losing one’s religion.
Most of us meet religion as kids. That is, it’s introduced to us and we’re expected to let it in. But, what happens when the indoctrination either wears out or doesn’t work at all? Maybe you ask a question in Hebrew School or Sunday School and the answer – well meaning perhaps but unsatisfying – only inspires more (and, now, deeper) questions. Maybe some tragedy befalls you or your family and all the religious salves meant to ease your pain does nothing for you. Maybe you never had religion to begin with but you still feel a spiritual tug, but towards what? These are all the traditional places religion claimed for itself.
Let’s stop right there. What exactly do we mean by “religion”? While adherence to or membership in organized religion is shrinking in America, the amount of shrinkage and adherence isn’t uniform across organized religions. And it’s not entirely clear who the beneficiary is of religion’s loss. Atheism, while rising in America, still only clocks in at four percent of the population. Still, it’s better to be on the upswing than on the downswing – which is what’s happening to Christianity.
Okay, here’s the obvious question: WHY? And (next obvious question) what can Christianity do – if anything – to stop it?
This one means a lot to Randy (as you can imagine). He has skin in the game. Will Alan choose to be a “helpful atheist” or an unhelpful one?
The Faitheism Project Podcast, Season 2, Episode 8: “Losing My Religion”
Or, if you’d prefer to watch…
RANDY’S NOTES
Why is organized religion losing its hold? What can it do to fix itself – if anything?
Barna stats. But this is only in Western culture. Percentages in Africa as an example. If you want to sketch a “Christian” today it would be a person of color who worships in a Pentecostal church. It is in steep decline in the West but it is rapidly growing in the non-Western world.
The question is, why is this happening?
The first thing to note is that this has happened before. In fact, this has happened numerous times in Christianity, often enough to say that from an historical perspective Christianity is cyclical in nature.
This is in distinction to other world religions. Christianity shows an interest in translatability which motivates the cyclical nature. The great faiths of India have emphasized that the human sphere has no permanent significance or reality. It is all Maya. No translation needs to take place. Hinduism is far older than Christianity but it has mostly stayed in the same location. Islam is delivered in Arabic at a particular time unaltered and unalterably fixed in heaven. When Islam takes a geographical space it tends to hold it.
Jewish, to Hellenistic-Roman, to Barbarian, to Western Europe, to Expanding Europe, to Cross-cultural transmission. (6 times over the last 2,000 years)
Phyllis Tickle has developed a similar concept believing that every 500 years or so the church has a rummage sale.
What she fails to see, however, and this is directly related to our question today, is that in each case Christianity begins at a center from which it is transmitted to another culture and then the previous expression declines. So, we are in decline as the faith is expanding in the non-Western world.
The core beliefs that have made each journey are: 1-The worship of the God of Israel. 2-The ultimate significance of Jesus of Nazareth. 3-God is active where believers are. 4-Believers constitute a people of God transcending time and space.
Each time Christianity enters into an existing community it shapes and is shaped by the existing culture. Each transmission includes some aspects of the development of Christianity in the previous translation while developing new aspects according to the questions of the new culture it has entered.
What can the Western church do? Go back to the core beliefs and begin a fresh translation. That is what my virtual platform is all about.
ALAN’S NOTES
I like to think of myself as “Alan, The Helpful Atheist” where that question was concerned.
Religions are all lens salesmen. They propose that you see the world through their lens. Do that, in theory, and all your questions will be answered. It used to work for people a lot more than it does now – those leaps of faith. I suspect more people than we realize may have accepted their church’s answers to their probing questions on the outside while, on the inside, they began to draw away from their church. Because the answer didn’t satisfy.
Religion’s big problem is the very thing it touts as proof of its universal truthiness: how old it is. Actually, here in America, it’s big problem is that it’s confused the message with the messenger. Religious institutions are not the message. Don’t try telling them that however.
Here’s a link to Pew’s latest research on Religion in America and a graph illustrating how religious observance is falling while people searching for spiritual satisfaction isn’t.
American culture completely buys into the idea that one culture owes other cultures, that, say, millennials owe baby boomers respect or that boomers owe millennials nothing. But, is that just another invention – that one group, born at a particular time owes other groups born at other times something of value? Are there even really “generations” in this sense? And does any “generation” really owe any other generation anything to begin with? It’s not like any of us demanded to be here.
The idea of generations being vastly different from each other is a fairly recent invention – an outgrowth of America’s “youth culture”. Rock n roll has a lot to do with it. Baby boomers were the product of “The Greatest Generation”, the one that fought World War Two. Up until Gen Z, every generation had at least a little memory of The Greatest Generation in mind (they were everyone’s grandparents or great grandparents). Gen Z has no idea who The Greatest Generation were (except as historical figures).
What DO we owe each other – if anything? For this podcast, we have a couple of guests – Gen Z-ers to compare generational notes with a couple of boomers. Turns out? We all DO owe each other something. And it’s pretty damned important what we all owe. This one will absolutely open your mind.
The Faitheism Project Podcast, Season 2, Episode 7: “Generation Why?”
Or, if you’d prefer to watch…
Notes & Sources
Our guests for this podcast are social media influencer Karren Atacora and entrapreneur/artist Lucas Lovejoy (who also happens to be Randy’s son).
What is the Faitheism Project Podcast? In a nutshell, it’s a frank yet congenial conversation between a devout atheist and a Presbyterian pastor that seems impossible on paper and yet works! Despite coming from two seemingly diametric opposite places on the philosophical spectrum, atheist film & TV writer/producer A L Katz and Presbyterian Pastor Randy Lovejoy have maintained a conversation about religion and spirituality for almost 20 years – and now they’re inviting everyone else in to be part of it.
It’s not about “winning” the argument, it’s about hearing what everyone has to say. And once you draw a distinction between religion and spirituality, it gets far easier to appreciate the context in which we all seek higher truths. In fact, when you see spirituality and religion as separate (but related) things? You begin to discern that, in an amazing number of ways, we’re all on similar spiritual journeys. It’s merely the vocabulary we use to describe our journeys that separates us.
Got four minutes? Have a listen! We think you’ll enjoy the conversation. Hell, we think you may even want to join it. And, to that, we say “C’mon in!”
This episode of the Faitheism Project Podcast is kind of a bonus episode. A few episodes back, we talked about rituals and how rituals transcend religion. As Randy and I were winding down after the episode, we ended up adding a few insights that we hated leaving on the cutting room floor.
We think of rituals as being predominantly religious probably because rituals and rites are religious. But, anyone who’s ever warmed up before a workout or gotten ready for a date or just sat down to a day at the computer, has done those things only after going through a process of rituals first. For instance – some writers have work avoidance rituals that take longer to get through than their whole working day.
What happens though when rituals ring hollow? What does one do with or about a ritual whose value has diminished with time? Should we continue to perform rituals that don’t mean anything to us anymore? If we do, aren’t we really undermining the ritual’s integrity?
Sounds like something we should talk about. Another ritual…
The Faitheiusm Project Podcast, Season 2, Episode 6: “For Ritual Or Poorer”
A few podcasts back, Randy and I invited our sons Tristan and Lucas to join us for a conversation about where they, two Gen-Z-ers, see themselves and the state of the world today. It was a robust and intensely philosophical back and forth. We all thought of it as an appetizer. In this podcast, Tristan and Lucas return for the next course as they talk about the future and how they see themselves in it. Clearly, this is not fast food; this is a smorgasbord that’s going to take many visits.
A lot of ground gets covered in this one: investing, social conscience, quantitative easing, Good v Evil, innocence, Truth, Aristotle, Nietzsche and “2001: A Space Odyssey” all get air time. Truth and innocence especially. Hard, thoughtfulo questions arise: “What’s useful about Truth?” and “Can we imagine a world that doesn’t need a messiah?”
Let that last one sink in a little. Consider what Gen-Z is asking the Baby Boom. Is it necessarily a given that they must inherit a world that needs “saving” (and from human beings no less)? Can we be more proactive?
We won’t risk a “spoiler alert”, but if you want to feel encouraged about the future, please listen or watch.
Our young people have no delusions about the state of things and the world they will inherit from us. They recognize that we are failing to live up to our potential as humans and citizens. And they have ideas about how they might fix the messy world that’s coming at them.
The Faitheism Project Podcast, Season 2, Episode 5: “Future Shocked“
Or, if you’d prefer to watch —
NOTES & SOURCES
For a quick primer on “quantitative easing”, there’s this piece from Forbes.
Here’s the “star child” ending from Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey”.
