Darwin fish and Jesus fish: complementary, not contradictory

I drove my son to his baseball game on Wednesday night.

[TIME OUT FOR PARENTAL BRAGGING: He hit a home run. He is awesome. OK, BACK TO BUSINESS]

We pulled up at a red light behind a Toyota with a Darwin fish on the back bumper.

Photo courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/jeremymiles/favorites/

“That is excellent,” he said. (My son is all about science.)

“Have you never seen that before?” I asked.

“No, I’ve only ever seen the Jesus fish ones, but that is great. It must really irritate fundamentalist Christians, though.”

“It might,” I said.

Then, struck by inspiration, I said, “Hey, I should get one of each.”

“Oh, right. ‘Cause you’re all science and story.”

“Yes! Darwin and the divine.”

“People would just think that there were two people in the house who couldn’t agree, so they got one of each.”

“Hmmm . . . You could be right.”

My son had hit on the key issue.

He’s right. People would assume conflict. We’re still shaking off the age of reason, so people would assume these two ideas to be incompatible. It’s still a reflex in our society to separate faith and science, when they are really comfortably complementary.

More and more scientists speak openly about faith without fear of being called looney-tunes for their beliefs. More and more people in churches, temples or mosques reject calls for blind faith.

Now I think I will get a Darwin fish and a Jesus fish.

I’ll place them on my car so they kiss each other.

Creation from many perspectives

Beware of a man of one book.  —English Proverb

On this date in 1925, the state of Tennessee made it illegal to teach evolution in any state-funded school. The Butler Act stipulated that teaching about evolution would deny the factual truth of the creation story in the Bible.

(Which biblical creation story, I wonder? There are two)

This led to the famous Scopes trial and decades of debate about creationism and evolution. Even though the act was repealed in 1967, incredibly, there is still controversy about teaching the theory of evolution.

Now, 87 years later, we live in an electronically connected global village. We search the internet to enrich our imaginations with the creation stories of cultures from around the world—including those in the Bible. We read many books full of detailed scientific information about the big bang and evolution. What a wealth of resources we have to feed our full and balanced educations.

Beware of an education of one book.

This is not your parents’ religion

In September 2007, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, President of Iran, spoke to an audience at Columbia University. During his speech he said, “In Iran, we don’t have homosexuals, like in your country.”

The New York audience laughed. Ahmadinejad’s denial was laughable.

This week, some religious organizations reacted to Dalton McGuinty’s statement to the Ontario Legislature: “We’re going to require that, at every school where students request that this be put in place, they be permitted to organize themselves with a gay-straight alliance.”

In the past, several Catholic school boards have resisted such groups. This week, a Rabbi from a Toronto synagogue reacted this way: “This legislation proposes that children be indoctrinated to reject their parents’ faith and their parents’ family values, and that’s an affront.”

Their denial is laughable.

Homosexuality is. It just is. Hasn’t the denial of it has caused enough damage?

Can we stop discriminating against people for being what they were born to be?

The same major religions that denounce homosexual activity also teach that God is omnipotent and all-powerful, the creator of all. You can’t blame homosexuals in these faiths for being confused. If God created them as homosexual, and homosexuality is wrong, then it would follow that God must have messed up somewhere. There was a glitch on the assembly line.

But wait. God (the Universe, the Source, whatever you choose to call it) creates people. Humanity creates religion. Which of those two entities is more likely to mess up?

Many homosexuals find release and comfort when they embrace this simple idea. God made me, so I am perfect just the way I am. Humanity made religion. Maybe it doesn’t have all the answers.

The next generation of children will belong to a global village.

School education will only be a small part of their life learning. They will connect with people of all faiths. They will meet and love people of different sexual orientations. Their life experiences will show them that the morality of relationships doesn’t rest in gender, but in the love and compassion shared between two people, no matter what form they take.

They will see that, for too many years, major religions put the name of sin on something that is love. They will see homosexual relationships built on deep love and compassion and wonder, “How can that be wrong?”

They will see negative and damaging heterosexual relationships built on intimidation, power struggles and abuse and they will ask, “How can that be right?”

They will grow tired of watching friends die due to gender-based discrimination—whether it be honour killings or homophobia-driven attacks or suicide.

These global village children will know that basic human rights trump religious rights.

The rituals and traditions of religion provide spiritual nurture to people; traditions keep people with their faith. Many Catholics find solace in the beauty and mysticism of their rituals even though they wish that the church would ordain women and allow priests to marry. (The Catholic church demonstrates all to well the dangers of misdirected sexuality.)

But will the next generation continue to be as patient? Will they continue to live with teachings that are an affront to human rights? Perhaps they will reject their faith, as the Rabbi suggested, but it will be because damaging things bear rejecting.

Some religious organizations already get it.

On the wall of my church, there are portraits of every minister that has served since the church began almost 50 years ago. The first several frames feature black-and-white portraits of severe looking males in black robes with white collars. No same-sex marriage for those men. No ordination of homosexuals. Only by-the-book rules.

As the years go by, women appear in the frames. Smiles, too. Suits replace robes on the men. Then there is an ordained homosexual female. We have had homosexual male students and interns bless us with their gifted spirits. I have wept with joy at same-sex marriages performed in our sanctuary. Our church embraces questions and doubts, mysticism and meditation. Our church feeds the spirit without causing the damage. Our church is evolving to life, toward greater compassion for all.

If religions want to survive, they had better start constructive evolution now.

If religions want to survive, they had better start feeding the spirit without causing the damage. Humanity creates religion: we have a responsibility to shape it in a way that respects basic human rights. Let’s start now.

With any luck, the major faiths of our world will evolve so that when the next generations come along, they will say, “I am a person of faith, but this is not my parents’ religion, and that’s a good thing.”

Because we can do better than Iran.

“. . . the Christianity of the future will be mystical, or it will not be at all.”
—Karl Rahner, Catholic theologian
from Putting Away Childish Things: A Tale of Modern Faith, by Marcus J. Borg

Replace empty minds with open ones

Education’s purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one. —Malcolm S. Forbes

A teacher friend forwarded this quote to me last week. Today she begins another year of opening children’s minds.

I like the twist of this quote, because it reflects more accurately the value of education. Traditionally, we might envision our students’ heads being filled—overstuffed with facts and figures and excess formulas that flow out their ears. But really, education pries open our students’ heads to prepare them to receive and process information, and  it gives them the tools and the drive to keep learning more and more.

When I look back on my school years, I know that I have forgotten most of the facts and formulas that I once knew. I used to be able to name all the countries of the world and their capitals. I can’t do that now. In fact, I’m pressed to find some of them on a map. But I did learn how to learn, and I developed an enthusiasm for knowledge.

Knowledge breeds compassion, and as we inch up to September 11 commemorative ceremonies, our world needs that.

Today my children will head off to high school. I prefer to imagine their minds being pried open to receive and process all the amazing information out there than to picture their poor little heads aching under the pressure of too many seldom used and little understood formulas.

Doonesbury says it best, as always: http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/archive/2011/07/10

Two crazy rooms in the church lady’s house

Click on the link below to read an interesting piece by John Shore. His story takes aim at fundamentalist faith groups that are more than their sweetness and light surface.

Anyone who is a church person (and I am) should read this and ask him/herself, what’s in my back room? And will it someday destroy me?

http://johnshore.com/2011/07/11/the-two-crazy-rooms-sure-to-destroy-the-church-ladys-home/

What kind of religion is that?

We recently spent time at our cottage. It’s not as remote and rustic as some, but life is simpler there. We do have a television—one that requires you to stand up and walk over to change the channel—but we don’t have cable or satellite. This leaves us the choice of three channels.

The Sunday morning that our holidays ended we packed to leave. My two teenagers had done their part and needed to wait while my husband and I took care of the last-minute details. The kids settled in front of the television. I packed the lunches and finished in the kitchen.

As I spread tuna salad on the first sandwich, I heard the click of the dial in the adjoining TV room and the happy sounds of TVO Kids. That didn’t last long. The dial clicked again as my kids searched for more mature fare.  Then I heard the unmistakable, roller coaster, Reverend Lovejoy-esque voice of a television evangelist, from the kind of program that always ends with some version of “Please send money.”

My back stiffened, as if they had tuned into Playboy TV or one of the cruder episodes of The Family Guy.

I expected that they would ditch that channel immediately. I expected that the episode of Pinky Dinky Doo they had just left behind on TVO would suddenly become very appealing. But, no. They stayed with that channel, and they watched with anthropological interest.

From the kitchen I listened long enough to hear the cringe-inducing expressions “wrath of God,” “sin,” and “fear the Lord.” That was all within about 30 seconds. I hadn’t even finished making the first tuna sandwich, but I couldn’t take it any more.

“Guys,” I said, “I’d rather you didn’t watch that.”

My daughter called out, incredulous, “What kind of religion is that.”

We are members of a progressive Christian denomination, and my daughter didn’t recognize that version of Christianity as anything even close to what she had ever experienced.

Mistaken assumptions

I know that version of Christianity is what non-church-goers assume about me when I tell them that I go to church. The assumption exasperates me, because that version of Christianity is so different from mine as to be unrecognizable to my children.

My exasperation must be like the frustration that Muslims feel when faced with assumptions of fundamentalism and violence. Every day a billion-plus Muslims lead peaceful, loving, charitable, normal, routine, humdrum, prayerful lives. There have to be Muslim teenagers out there who, upon seeing news of suicide bombings, say “What kind of religion is that?” That version of Islam would be so different from their experience as to be unrecognizable to them.

“Normal” doesn’t make headlines

Routine doesn’t make the 6:00 news. Humdrum is not newsworthy. Exceptions to the rule get the big block newspaper print. The exceptions that make the news plant seeds that grow mistaken assumptions.

We, as individuals, can do better than that. We can recognize the “exception” for what it is and look past it to see what “the rule” is all about.