God loves diversity, why don't we?

While reading a bible study from the Greater Boston Vineyard recently, I came across this idea:

God loves diversity.

According to the story in Genesis, when God made the earth he filled it with an abundance of different things:

"Let the land produce vegetation: seed-bearing plants and trees on the land
that bear fruit with seed in it, according to their various kinds."

"Let the water teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the
earth across the expanse of the sky."

"Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: livestock,
creatures that move along the ground, and wild animals, each according to its
kind."

He could have filled the world with one kind of tree, or even with the one tree in each region that was best suited for the climate. He could have color-coded the world: evergreens for the northern and southern reaches, a soothing yellow poplar for the medians, brown sage for the hot parts in the middle. Instead, he flung color all over the place, like a hyperactive four-year-old with a new box of markers. "Plants! Trees! All different kinds! Now birds, fish, animals! And now a few tweeners! We'll call that one a platypus and that one a flying fish! More, more!" There's no sense of optimization here, no quest for the perfect answer to each question. Rather, God says, "Go to it," and lets the world figure it out.

Even when God singles out one man, one family, he still has the rest of the world in mind. He promises Abram, "Through you all nations will be blessed." God, like the sower in the parable, casts his seed widely, letting it take root where it may. He doesn't plant it in the ground in nice straight rows, three seeds to a hole; he flings it.

People, on the other hand, seem drawn to homogeneity. We want one truth, one way, one team. Everyone else is wrong. Look at the tower of Babel. Not long -- in story terms -- after God splashes diversity all over the land, people are already banding together to squelch it.

Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. As people
moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there.

Then they said, "Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that
reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be
scattered over the face of the whole earth."

One speech, one place, one religion. "Whatever else happens, we have to stick together and build a name for ourselves." Oh, and by the way, did I mention that this happened in Babylon? And if we look a little farther back, we see whose in charge there:

Cush was the father of Nimrod, who grew to be a mighty warrior on the earth. He was a mighty hunter before the LORD; that is why it is said, "Like Nimrod, a mighty hunter before the LORD." The first centers of his kingdom were Babylon, Erech, Akkad and Calneh, in Shinar. From that land he went to Assyria, where he built Nineveh, Rehoboth Ir, Calah and Resen, which is between Nineveh and Calah; that is the great city.

So really, the whole tower thing was Nimrod's idea. He drew everyone together, told them to start making bricks, and then built a monument to his religion. Sound familiar? Here, I'll give you a few hints:

• Pharoah: big fan of the bricks, forced the Israelites to build his cities, thought he was a god.
• Nebuchadnezzar: built a gold statue of himself, ordered everyone to worship it, then threw three dissidents into a furnace when they refused
• Antiochus Epiphanes: declared himself god, forbade Jewish worship in the temple, and brutally murdered anyone who disobeyed him
• Hitler: declared Aryans the master race and set out to systematically erase inferior people from the earth

Et cetera. Throughout history, this spirit keeps popping up in mankind, a desire to replace God with a man (or an idealized image of one) and then brutally suppress differences. God loves diversity, but we -- collectively and repeatedly -- despise it.

Now here's the kicker: throughout history -- and perhaps today more than ever -- people have used God as their excuse to squash diversity at every turn. The same God who threw millions of species across the planet is now used to throw people out of church because they disagree over the interpretation of a line of scripture. "Be fruitful and multiply" has become "be exactly alike or you're going to hell." We argue, picket, hate, and even kill over whose practice is most pleasing to God, and whose is abominable. God loves diversity, but apparently only if it's our kind of diversity.

I get it: unity is comforting, and conformity is safe. When you're living in the wilderness the outsider is a threat. These instincts run deep and, like our sweet tooth, they served an evolutionary purpose at one time. But why do you have to bring God into this? He made the stranger, the nonconformist, and even the atheist (whether they like it or not). Are you the only one pleasing in his sight? Did he look around at the world he had made, with all of its potential, and say, "The Baptist church is good. Everything else? Well, it was late and I was tired. Maybe those guys can straighten the rest of them out."

No, he said, "It is good. It is all very good."

Who are we to argue?

Take a Flying Leap!

I know a lot of people who base their lives upon science and knowledge. For them, empirical fact is everything. If you can't see it, touch it, and measure it, then it doesn't exist. They are, essentially, empiricists. To an empiricist, the whole concept of an intangible God who can, generally speaking, only be perceived in the mind or heart is pure foolishness. "Give me a world I can measure," the empricist says, "and let me concentrate on the problems I can see, rather than inventing new ones."

These are generally the people who, along with Steven Jay Gould, argue for keeping faith and science (or church and state) separate, with a Chinese Wall of "mutual respect" between them. "You can have your God and your wishful prayers, your emotional frenzies and hysterical healings. We'll take modern medicine, thank you, along with a healthy dose of research funding to unlock whatever secrets remain in the universe. We won't tell you whether or not God exists -- at least until we can prove it beyond a reasonable shadow of a doubt -- and you don't tell us how he made the world in six days or how he wants us to live our lives. Deal?"

Not only can I sympathize with this view, but it's my default state of mind. I am very focused on the here and now, on solving the problems that life has put before me today. If I weren't, I wouldn't be very good at my job, nor would I find myself particularly useful in general. I start with what is right in front of me, and I extrapolate from there.

You don't have to go very far from the here and now, however, before the certainty of measurement and observation start to fail you. No matter how much we learn, what we don't know still outweighs what we do by a factor of approximately a bazillion to one. Every new discovery leads to a thousand new questions. We mapped the human genome! Do we know what makes humans tick now? Can you tell me why I prefer vanilla ice cream as the base in my Blizzard, while my wife prefers chocolate? How about all of those genetic diseases: do we know what causes them now? Are the cures right around the corner? Of course not. Only foolish people (and television journalists) expect one discovery -- or one lifetime of research, for that matter -- to provide answers to the smallest questions. More often than not, we're happy just to learn how something in the universe works, never mind why.

You see, eventually all human knowledge comes to an end. We may push the boundaries -- and in this era we are expanding them faster than at any other time in human history -- but we will never erase them. At some point you will come to a place where the facts end but life continues. At that point you are left with faith, which is nothing more than reasoning in the absence of facts. Now you have a decision to make:

Where will you place your faith: in yourself, or in something bigger than yourself? In people, or in God? In what you can see, or in what remains unseen?

This decision is unavoidable, but it is not always consciously made. Some people, in an attempt to be reasonable, limit themselves to the facts. This feels like the rational, intelligent choice: if we can't see it, then we should wait and trust that someday we will. We don't need to get all weird and turn off our brains in favor of "faith" in some Man Upstairs. We can simply keep doing our research, and eventually we'll get there.

This choice is rational, it is defensible, and it is, indeed, a choice. It is not the only possible conclusion, because we have reached the end of logic. There are no more facts to point the way. There is only a vast, uncharted wilderness before us. To choose to wait for the facts is to place your faith in Science and Intellect, with all their acknowledged limitations, and to limit yourself to The Known. The Unknown remains over the horizon, and always will.

The other choice is to open yourself up to the possibility that there is something bigger than human existence, that the yearning we feel to keep searching, keep discovering, was placed into us by Someone who, like a toddler giggling in a cupboard, is hiding but wants to be found. This doesn't mean that you must renounce all intellect and empirical evidence in favor of a false religious certainty, or that the rest of life's questions must be "taken on faith." It simply means that you occasionally lift your eyes up toward the horizon and seek what is unseen. It means that, when you don't know why something happens, you are free to say, "I don't know the reason, but someday I will. In the meantime, I am content knowing that there is a reason."

Of course, this also means admitting that there is something bigger than me, which is where a lot of people get stuck. If my entire life up to this point has been based upon furthering my own existence, it's kind of scary to put that quest into a larger context. Suddenly, my needs don't seem so great after all, and it's tempting to go back to looking at the ground and pretending that the horizon isn't there. It takes a certain humility, a level of honest self-appraisal, to realize that it's probably a good thing if we aren't the ones who are ultimately in charge.

So here we stand, on the precipice at the edge of the Plateau of Knowledge, our toes dangling out over the hazy Unknown. Which way will you leap?

This isn't practice - it's the real thing

I read Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell a little while ago, and it really made me think. I like that in a book (or in a person, for that matter). He paints an interesting picture of the evolution of religion from a disparate collection of "wild memes," or folk beliefs that went through a winnowing process that only the fittest practices survived. Those practices eventually merged, according to Dennett, into the world religions that we see today, changing over time to accommodate new fads and intellectual structures and eventually forming a symbiotic relationship with the "host" civilizations that contained them. In Dennett's view, religion is a parasite embedded in the brainstem of civilization, and it's not entirely clear whether it's a benign symbiote or a cancer. I get the feeling that his opinion on that question changes based upon the latest headlines in the paper, but he clearly seems relieved to have inoculated himself against this particular disease.

I'm not going to tackle Dennett's "Evolution of Religion" theory right now, though I have a few thoughts about the bedrock assumptions behind the theory that, if changed, could lead one to a completely different conclusion than he reached. Instead, I want to address an image that came to my mind while reading his thoughts on religious practices.

Dennett divides religious practices into two categories: private and public. Private practices are things like prayer, family traditions, good luck charms, and superstitions. Public practices are communal gatherings, services, sacrifices, and other ways that a community of religious adherents demonstrate their faith or commitment to their deity. These practices can range from benign (daily prayer, chanting a rosary) to the bizarre (walking on coals, dancing with snakes) to the objectionable (human sacrifice, calls for holy war), as long as they are done in the name of a "god."

Interestingly enough, though all religious practices are carried out in the name of God (or at least, some god), Dennett leaves the actual existence of God as an open question. Since God's existence cannot be empirically proven, he says, we will leave him out of the equation. That leaves us with this picture:

I think that most agnostics would agree with this view of religion: "We don't know what's at the center, so let's just look at what happens in the church/temple/mosque and decide whether it looks like a good thing or not." And to be honest, their impression of those practices is generally pretty dim. Seen from the outside, most religious practices are either impenetrable or absurd, and the little bit that makes any sense vacillates between happy talk and condemnation. To the agnostic or atheist (or, to use Dennett's preferred nomenclature, the "bright") peering in through the stained glass window, your average religious gathering looks like a bunch of people trying to convince themselves that they're better than everyone else.

So how does it look from the inside? Well, that depends upon what's in that center circle.

For many religious people, those circles look something like this:

If you were to ask them why they do what they do, why they go to church, pay their tithes, and sing their hymns, they'd shrug and say, "It's how I was raised." They might go so far as to say, "Because it makes me feel better about my life." The reality, though, is that they see no more empirical proof of the existence of God than Mr. D, but they're hedging their bets, just in case they're missing something. For someone in this position, the practice is all there is. They say grace before dinner, they bargain with God when things get tough ("If you get me through this, I swear I'll go to church every Sunday..."), and they participate in public observances when they think that they should.

For some people, that means that they go to their religious gathering of choice on the holidays, marking the turning of the seasons with the bare minimum of obeisance to the Divine. Others, attempting to create certainty where they can't find it, pour their efforts into proving that, not only is their religion the best one on the planet, but that they are the best at carrying it out. They purchase sanctity with their public sacrifices, hoping that it will be enough, but secretly fearing that it is pointless.

And still that black hole remains. Without a solid core, the structure cannot hold so, slowly or quickly, the private practices erode. The desire for affirmation and the fear of disapproval generally keep the public practices in place for longer, but over time they too lose their meaning. The black hole feeds, the outer shell thins and cracks, and eventually it crumbles. Some people may hold out longer than others, but eventually the purpose for the practice is lost. It either fades away or turns inward upon itself, becoming its own reason for existence. Either way, it no longer does anyone any good.

So what are we left with? If this is all there is, then I'm with Captain Dennett: let's sail on into the Big Nothing and rage against the darkness as we go, but let's at least be polite enough not to try to take anyone else down with us.

But what if there's a third option? What if there actually is something at the center?

Join me in a thought experiment, if you would. Let's pretend for a moment, despite the lack of empirical evidence, that God exists. Let's pretend, also, that he's a Person and that it's possible to have a relationship with him.

Stay with me: it's only pretend, you won't get hurt...

Let's pretend one more thing. Let's pretend that this Person, this ultimate expression of being, actually likes us and wants to have a relationship with us, and has opened a pathway of some kind through the fabric of existence, a communication channel that we can use whenever we want.

What would that look like?

Suddenly, that black hole is replaced by a solid core of energy, and the structure not only holds, but it grows. Now, we have a source of energy, of purpose, that transforms a life from the inside out and extends to our relationships with others, to our community. Where before we had external practices to provide meaning and a measure for "goodness," now we have a relationship, a two-way conversation, that defines our actions and guides us toward the greater good. This kind of relationship could drive Mother Teresa to care for the world's castoffs. This energy would lead people to leave their homes and their comforts to teach in third world countries. This connection, this inside-out transformation, might even cure an alcoholic or enliven that cheerful worker who goes to his job every day and quietly tries to bring a little light and joy into his coworkers' lives. It isn't showy and it doesn't demand your attention. It just is, and that is enough.

It seems to me that, following this thought experiment to its conclusion, the defining characteristic of this setup would be peace. With this sort of connection, you would no longer need to prove yourself to anyone, because, frankly, whose opinion could compare to God's? Without that striving, people could find contentment and joy in any walk of life, could do their best simply because it was what they were meant to do, and could enjoy others' successes as much as their own. How you talked to God would become significantly less important than whether you talked to him, and what you heard would be addressed to you first and others later. We wouldn't need to tell other people what they were doing wrong; we could leave that to God, in his own good time.

It seems to me that this approach would have a lot to recommend it, if it were true. If you can hear God, then you don't need to practice; you can simply live.


I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one: I in them and you in me. May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.
- John 17:22-23

Why are we here?

Well, that's a big question to start with, isn't it? Rather vague, too. Let's try something a little more specific:

Why are we here, on this page together, right now? What's the purpose of this particular piece of virtual real estate?

That's better; I can answer that one.

This blog is here to explore what happens when you bring your mind into your faith. It's my humble attempt to explore the mysteries of life, relationship with God, and the vagaries of religion without getting too wrapped up in which religion, in particular, we're talking about. It's an extension of my own explorations into the landscape of the mind and the heart over recent years, as well as a response to two trends that I have noticed in recent years:

1. Religion, in general, appears to be getting progressively dumber
In recent years, most of the world's major religions seem to have ceded the intellectual high ground in favor of an all-out assault on the next hill over, the Moral High Ground.Unfortunately, they all seem to have different ideas about whose flag to plant there, and they are all utterly convinced that no one else has a right to that patch of land. In an effort to boost their forces, they have also formed an uneasy alliance with Politics and Nationalism, two partners who have never had any qualms about driving right over their opponents when necessary. The result is a crescendoing screech of strident voices, all bellowing that their way, and only their way, is the right one, and that all other religions, nationalities, and ideas are doomed to their particular vision of damnation. What a fun group.

As is often the case, critical thinking was one of the first casualties of this charge, since stopping to think about a weak argument has the unpleasant effect of making it look rather silly. So the leaders of the charge toward the moral high ground shout louder, crying, "Don't think, just follow! If you're not with us, you're against us!" That worked for those people whose hearts speak louder than their heads, or whose need to belong, to be "right," outweighed their desire to understand.

Unfortunately, it also excluded a whole group of people who like to know why something makes sense before they do it. As a result...

2. All of the smart people seem to have chosen the other side
Now, obviously this is a generalization, as there are some highly intelligent people of faith in the world. They just seem to be drowned out by the "Aw, shucks, God told me so" crowd. On the other hand, a recent upsurge in highly intelligent, well thought out, and in many cases, poisonously vituperative writing has brought the general condemnation of all religion to the international consciousness. When I see God is Not Great and The God Illusion on the book racks at Costco, I know that something has changed.

Who can blame them? When intelligent thinkers are pushed out of every church and mosque and told, "Your kind aren't welcome here any more," what else can you expect them to do? They put those great big brains to work and say, "You don't want me? Well, I don't need you either, or that big God fellow! If all he wants are unthinking drones, then he's welcome to them! I spend enough time with people like that at work. I don't need to spend my weekends with them as well."

And so the debate has formed, with unthinking pharisaism on the right and intellectual snobbery on the left. What's a thinking man -- who just happens to have a fairly healthy working relationship with God -- to do?

Write a blog, obviously.

So here we are. I'm going to write about faith, about thought, about a working relationship with a God who not only gave me a brain, but expects me to use it. All you have to do is read. If you like what you see, let me know. If you think I'm full of hot air, join the club, and then let me know that, too.

Let's explore together and see what we discover.

The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom, and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.
- Proverbs 9:10