Why?

It was long, said Susan—over an hour long. But it was worth it, she said; she also said that most of the people who needed to hear it would be turned off in the first ten minutes.

I only made it halfway through….

And no, the problem wasn’t the length; the problem was the speaker, Matthew Vines. He’s 22, good-looking, articulate, thoughtful and…

…heartbreaking.

Why? Well, he has gone on a two-year quest to reconcile his—OK, our—homosexuality with the Bible. So that meant taking two years off from school—which happens to be Harvard—to read the Bible and study what biblical scholars have said, and are saying, about the Bible.

Why do all this? Because he’s a native of Wichita, Kansas, and was raised in a good Christian home. Oh, and apparently nobody was talking about homosexuality—either at home or at church. And there didn’t seem to be many gay people about, from his description; it was quite 1950’s….

OK—that’s the first problem. I am 57, Vines in 22—when I was his age, the year was 1978. Stonewall took place in 1969, and all throughout the ‘70’s the gay movement was emerging and then growing. And you’re telling me there are no gay people in Kansas in 2013? I looked it up—Wichita has 380,000 people, and is the 49^th largest city in the US. And not one of those 380,000 people is gay?

It may be that this is something that we—who have come out to our families and our bosses and to the world in general—need to remember. There are a lot of people who have never met a gay person—though they’ve met many a closeted homosexual. And there are a lot of places where being gay is…well, almost not an option.

And Wichita may be one of those places; here’s what the Wikipedia article said on Vines:

After accepting defeat in his attempt to convince his family's local church leadership that they misunderstood what the Bible states about homosexuality,[4] Matthew and his parents decided to cease their membership. Matthew reportedly is Presbyterian.[5]

Right—so that wouldn’t be a problem for me; I would have given the church “leadership” a pronated middle finger and hopped back to Harvard. But for Vines—and for many, many other gay people raised in very religious households—that wasn’t and isn’t an option. Another thing for jaded, out gay people to remember.

So Vines spent two years reading and writing, and eventually delivered the hour-long talk below. And what’s the focus? Explaining the six references to homosexuality in the Bible, and then arguing that “the Bible never directly addresses and certainly does not condemn, loving, committed same-sex relationships."

There are moving moments in the talk; as you can see in this quote from The New York Times:

“Falling in love is one of the worst things that could happen to a gay person,” Mr. Vines says early in the video, “because you will necessarily be heartbroken, you will have to run away, and that will happen every single time that you come to care about someone else too much.”

Vines then tackles the six references to homosexuality in the Bible—and that’s when it was over for me. Because we start out with the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, and then have this, from Genesis 19, about Lot and the two angels disguised as men:

But he insisted so strongly that they did go with him and entered his house. He prepared a meal for them, baking bread without yeast, and they ate. 4 Before they had gone to bed, all the men from every part of the city of Sodom—both young and old—surrounded the house. 5 They called to Lot, “Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us so that we can have sex with them.”

6 Lot went outside to meet them and shut the door behind him 7 and said, “No, my friends. Don’t do this wicked thing. 8 Look, I have two daughters who have never slept with a man. Let me bring them out to you, and you can do what you like with them. But don’t do anything to these men, for they have come under the protection of my roof.”

Vines gets down to work, busy to explain why the passage is not a condemnation of homosexuality. And here I confess—I listened, understood, and accepted the validity of Vines’ argument. I also thought it was completely crazy. Why?

Because in the entire argument, Vines never takes on what seemed to me the most outrageous part of the tale: a father perfectly prepared to throw two of his daughters to the dogs disguised as men, rather than two male strangers. Oh—strangers who are “angels” and are not on record for saying, “what the fuh, dude? You’d do that to your daughters? No friggin’ way!” and turning him to stone. (Right—I just reread the thing, and it’s possible the angels, inside, didn’t hear Lot, outside. But still….)

Look—if we are attempting to derive a moral code from this story, and if this story is indicative of the rest of the damn Bible, we’re screwed. Because as someone put it recently, the God of the Old Testament is in a really terrible mood most of the time.

The New Testament is supposed to be better—but can’t we just say it? The Bible is a morass of conflicting texts and messages written decades after the death of Jesus (in the case of the New Testament). It can be and is cherry-picked to anyone’s liking.

Vines is 22, and has spent two years of his time on this project; he has set up an organization, The Reformation Project, to attempt to change mainstream Christian churches to become more open to gay people. Had he stayed in Harvard, he would probably be graduating in six months. Instead, he has a book coming out early next year, and has created the viral YouTube video below. He’s never had a boyfriend, and wants to save himself sexually for his future husband.

Early in the 2008 Democratic Party campaign, I remember hearing a debate of democratic candidates, all of whom were asked by a member of the audience: Do you believe that every word of the Bible is true? And will you say so publicly?” “

It was delicious; it was ridiculous. The politicians weaseled—nor was it good enough to say that the Bible was the most important, the most meaningful, had been the lifeline when I was sinking in sin and despair…. No, that man wanted to know: WILL YOU TELL THE AMERICAN PEOPLE THAT EVERY WORD IN THE BIBLE IS TRUE!

They caved, of course. They had to. And so all these intelligent, bright guys with their legal degrees from Harvard and Yale looked the man right in the eye and avowed, yes—every word in the Bible was true.

My problem? When are we ever going to stop being nuts? I don’t want to go all Dawkins—there’s a lot of good stuff, like the beatitudes and the whole life of Jesus, in the Bible. But there’s a lot of bunkum, too.

And why do we have to pretend there’s not?

And why does a bright, earnest kid have to take two years out of his life in his twenties, to wrestle with the Bible, to take passages and turn, twist, explain? I looked at him as I would one of my children, and…

…my heart broke.

On Faith

I shudder to go here, because there’s no help for it—I am as unable to experience God in any of his / her various guises as a rock. And that means that I’m one of just 5% of the American population who are atheist.

Which is why I found myself watching Richard Dawkins yesterday, as I munched on a tuna fish sandwich in the café. Granted, Dawkins goes after the most extreme of the religious nuts—he tracks down Ted Haggard in Colorado, and yes, I can now tell you: it’s quite likely that the reverend was doing cocaine and call boys. Haggard, perhaps annoyed by Dawkins’s pristine Queen’s English, accuses Dawkins of intellectual arrogance.

Well, Dawkins gets around—from Colorado to the Middle East, where he interviews a Jew turned Muslim from New York. The Muslim angrily accuses Dawkins of dressing women as whores; Dawkins retorts hotly that he doesn’t dress women, they dress themselves. Not good enough for the Muslim—by allowing women to dress as whores, it’s as good as dressing them. Short version: women are chattel, to be dressed according to male dictates.

Every bush has a nut hiding underneath it, and Dawkins beats every bush. There’s the Reverend Keenan Roberts, who hit on the wonderful idea of the Hell House—a dramatic working-out of the post-life experience throughout all time of those who don’t personally accept Christ. Here’s the clip:

Oh, and here’s the description, as provided in YouTube:

Check out this "movie trailer" promo for the upcoming 2013 FIRE & THE FLAME theatrical outreach, presented by New Destiny Christian Center of Thornton, CO. This heaven and hell drama wowed audiences last year, and the spiritual impact was incredible! This year's production will feature 4 new scenes. Performances will be: Saturday, March 23 at 6pm, Sunday March 24 at 6pm, Saturday March 30 at 6pm, and Easter Sunday March 31 at 8:30am and 11am. All performances are free. A love offering will be received. Nursery available for children through 3 years of age. For more info visit www.Godestiny.org or call 303.289.1547. Senior Pastor: Keenan Roberts.   

In fact, this clip is substantially tamer than what Dawkins filmed—and Dawkins got right into it with the pastor. How old, he asks, should a child be before he is allowed to see the play—which features leaping flames and gay people groaning in agony and the devil leaping around tormenting people? And the reverend has the answer—twelve would be a good age. Dawkins protests—wouldn’t that be somewhat searing for a child’s mind? Better that, says Roberts, than growing up godless and falling into perdition.

Well, Dawkins goes through every lunatic religion and denomination—though curiously, he missed the Mormons—until at the very end, he found himself a good English Anglican, whose moderate views fell like manna in the desert.

Today, I started out watching Dawkins on the third of his series on The Age of Reason; today’s topic being the growth of “alternative medicine.” And I had just gotten to the wonderful picture of Dawkins sitting bemused and very much open-eyed as all the others in the room visualized a pearl, into which they were invited to step, and there they would find…

…their real selves!

Well, Dawkins has to find out about that, so he goes off to interview the healer, who claims to be able to alter DNA and who also informs him that most people have a double strand of DNA.

Dawkins is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford, in evolutionary biology.

He was, then, very much interested in the topic—were there people who had more or less than a double strand of DNA?

The healer doesn’t miss a beat.

“The people of Atlantis had 12 strands of DNA,” she explains.

Predictably, Dawkins goes nuts.

Dawkins thinks that reason and science are under attack, and is out to challenge all religions—on the grounds that they promote irrational thought as well as divisions.

I’m both more extreme and less extreme. Though I cannot feel God, there are people who can, and who struggle as hard as they can to live up to beliefs that are truly admirable. And these people, acting together as a community, can accomplish what I—a solitary atheist—cannot. And these people adopt a theology that is both liberating and challenging—one that could help the world, if it ever got adopted.

My friend Susan, in fact, is one such person, and sent me a clip of another such person: John Spong, a retired Episcopal bishop. Right—if I could hear God, I would hang with Spong, and his flock. Check out a clip of a remarkable man:



I said that I was both less and more extreme than Dawkins. Why? Because for every man like Spong, there are men like Scott Lively, the evangelical who has exported homophobia to Uganda and Russia. This is a level of hypocrisy and hatred that even Dawkins doesn’t contemplate. And according to Wikipedia, Evangelical Protestants make up 19% of the American population. The mainstream protestants? 15%.

So I’m on the fence. In general, I cannot enter churches, and the smell of burnt-out candles is particularly upsetting to me—I associate the smell with the end of services at Christ Presbyterian Church. I dislike seeing crosses anywhere, and especially around people’s necks. And nuns—of which we have a full convent in Old San Juan? Don’t ask….

But before I throw out the bathwater, I’d like to see if somehow, somewhere, there might be a baby….

A Man of the Word, a Man of the Lab

I used to feel bad about it—taking 45 minutes to watch a documentary, or—in this case—a debate. Why waste that time—shouldn’t I be writing? And even if what I’m watching will eventually turn into what I’m writing, I still felt guilty.

But I found the clip below riveting at all times, and especially because the “presenter” (as he is described in Wikipedia, Medhi Hasan, a devout Muslim, really takes the atheist Richard Dawkins on. In fact, it’s by no means certain who won the debate.

Highlights: at about 14:30, the following exchange takes place:

Dawkins: Do you actually believe that Mohammed split the moon in half? Do you actually believe that Mohammed flew to heaven on a winged horse?

Hasan: Yeah I do, I believe in God, I believe in miracles, I

believe in revelation.

Dawkins can’t get it—he is so absolutely committed to the scientific method and the supremacy of reason that he cannot conceive of any rational person believing the above or, later on when talking to a Christian monk, the reality of the transubstantiation.

Confession—neither can I. Although I’ve always admired Flannery O’Connor’s comment on the transubstantiation: “well, if it’s just symbolic, I say to hell with it!”

It’s clear—the debate in the video clip is 47 minutes of high speed, high-powered super trains racing in opposite directions on parallel tracks.

A little later, Hasan takes on Dawkins on the following quote:

Horrible as the sexual abuse in the Catholic church was, the damage was arguably less than the damage of bringing them up Catholic in the first place.

Dawkins adduces a letter he had gotten from a victim of sexual abuse from a priest, who had also told her that her 7-year old friend, who had just died, was then in hell, since her friend had been Protestant. The woman claimed that the sexual abuse, though bad, had not been as bad as the nightmares she had had of her friend burning in hell for all eternity.

Hasan nails him, saying that Dawkins is an empiricist—would he accept one instance of something as proof that it were generally true? The two lock horns, with Hasan pounding him with the question, at the end, “is teaching my daughter about religion and the prophet Mohammed flying to the heavens on a winged horse child abuse?” At last, Dawkins gives in: “no, it’s not.”

At the end, at about minute 42, Dawkins is asked “Would the world be a better place if religion disappeared tomorrow?”

Dawkins replies, “Ah, yes!”

Well, Hasan gets the last word, saying “goodbye and, dare I say it, God bless.”

Well, Dawkins doesn’t mind getting into a scrap or two. Yesterday, he got into a scrap by tweeting, “all the world’s Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge. They did great things in the Middle Ages, though.”

And Wikipedia states that his animus against religion is grounded on two beliefs; that religion breeds conflict, and that it encourages or justifies belief without evidence. In the case of pseudoscience—such as whatever they are calling creationism nowadays—being taught as something as valid as science, I’m totally with him. And yes, religion has brought us a bit of conflict, in the past.

And Dawkins argues—the fact that religion may inspire a person to do good is no justification for the existence of God. Ditto for the argument that it feels good to be religious, to have rituals, to meet together as a community.

And am I wrong—from a casual reading of The God Delusion seven years ago—in thinking that Dawkins sees religious belief as a cultural meme, and that it may have developed because, as children, we have an innate instinct to be obedient. That’s useful, in evolutional terms, the offspring that stays closest to the mother has a greater chance of survival than the offspring that explores, wanders, exposes himself to predators or a harsh environment.

“Give me the child until he is seven, and I will give you the man,” is attributed to the Jesuits, no slouches in the education department. It’s true, in my case. Nobody got to me in the religion business in any serious way, and it’s unlikely now that anybody will.  

OK—that’s Dawkins. What about Hasan?

Well, he’s a Shia, he believes that the path to tread is secular, not Islamist, government, and he has written, “The Iraq war was a strategic disaster – or, as the Tory minister Kenneth Clarke put it in a recent BBC radio discussion, ‘the most disastrous foreign policy decision of my lifetime […] worse than Suez.’”

OK—so far so good. He also condemned the September 11 attacks, and wondered why British Muslims are so passionate about foreign affairs, but relatively uninterested in domestic issues.

Now comes the thorny part; consider this remark in a speech from 2009:

The kuffar, the disbelievers, the atheists who remain deaf and stubborn to the teachings of Islam, the rational message of the Koran; they are described in the Koran as “a people of no intelligence”, Allah describes them as not of no morality, not as people of no belief – people of “no intelligence” – because they’re incapable of the intellectual effort it requires to shake off those blind prejudices, to shake off those easy assumptions about this world, about the existence of God. In this respect, the Koran describes the atheists as “cattle”, as cattle of those who grow the crops and do not stop and wonder about this world."[19]

Cattle? Ouch! Nor is the explanation much consolation:

“The Quranic phrase 'people of no intelligence' simply and narrowly refers to the fact that Muslims regard their views on God as the only intellectually tenable position, just as atheists (like Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris) regard believers as fundamentally irrational and, even, mentally deficient."[21] The Islamophobia Watch website argued Hasan was the victim of a "witch-hunt", writing that these allegations of extremism were "aimed at getting him dismissed from his job."[22]

As always, I’m split. I have a hard time believing in transubstantiation as a physical reality, and if I really believed that I had the flesh and blood of a Jew two thousand years old, I’d be on the church floor wretching. Can you imagine the taste? And would it have been cooked? And would the priest be offended if I asked for some ketchup with the host?

I’ve also been in the room and at the bedside when my mother died. Was it a spiritual experience?

Certainly it was powerful. It changed my life, as have other experiences not spiritual. I would call it a moment of mystery, a moment when time stopped, the world stopped—for me, at least—and some power or reality beyond anything I knew came into the room, delivered death to a woman who wanted and deserved it, and left us all stunned with wonder.