Sometimes praying is more like prying.

Be careful what you share at prayer meetings.

The offer of intimate fellowship is intoxicating and can make you confess things you may regret later. If you confess anything about your lack of faith, finances, sexuality, questions… chances are that others will miraculously find out about it. Or, if the confessions are serious enough it may cost you the level of privilege that you now enjoy. Some people will not be able to help holding it against you. I compare prayer meetings to the internet… once it’s out there it’s out there and there’s no getting it back. The information you publish may be used against you.

So I just want to issue a warning. Take care with what you share.

Sometimes… not all the time but sometimes… prayer is more like prying.

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So why do people with religious experiences assert that their feelings of God’s presence are valid and believable, but when another person who has never experienced God admits this, they are told that they shouldn’t trust their feelings, the implication being that their feelings are lying to them about the reality of God’s existence and personal presence in their lives?

I’m intimately familiar with this line of reasoning. I used it.

There is no proof of God. For some reason I’ve always known that. But I’ve had experiences. These might mean something to me, but they provide no proof for others. And now, I realize, for me. In fact, I now know that our experiences can be shaped by our preconceived ideas. I respect the fact that our minds can concoct the most amazing experiential cocktails imaginable. Then these experiences confirm these preconceived ideas and construct more elaborate edifices upon them. Truly, the mind has the remarkable ability to create a closed loop of religious belief and experience that is completely convincing to the subject. These experiences I’ve had I catalog in the “Mystery” section.

These two friends will continue their philosophical discussion for a little while longer, talk about a couple of books they’re reading… one by Rob Bell and the other by Slavoj Žižek… and then they will return to work.

PS: I was interviewed by The Claremont Journal of Religion on sexuality, gender, LGBT, etc. You can read it HERE.

The online community The Lasting Supper is full of people who talk about this stuff every day with each other in a peaceful, non-confrontational space. I invite you.

I can’t count how many times I’ve heard this attitude communicated by church leaders, itinerant preachers and teachers. They don’t come right out and say this but it is certainly conveyed.

When a man or woman says something like, “God gave me a message for you”, my experience is that most people will do or pay anything to hear it. Heck, I’ve been at the receiving end of that myself.

It’s desperation. Desperation to hear from God. Desperation to find meaning and purpose. Desperation for validation. Desperation for love.

Of course, these speakers know this and milk it for all its worth.

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I applaud churches who are breaking out of their shells and affecting change in the world. May their numbers increase!

But I predict someone is going to raise the objection that it was the tortoise that won the race. But that’s a different analogy. That’s about patiently heading towards a desired goal. The tortoise wants to get there.

This is something else. This analogy is about resisting movement towards justice and equality for all. The church doesn’t want to get there.

The fact that the church has been around for two millennia might not be a testimony to its long-suffering patience. It could be a testimony to its ability to slyly avoid its own destruction by protecting itself.

The turtle’s number one defense is to retreat within its shell until trouble passes. This reminds me of the way the church deals with critical issues today such as women’s rights, racism, sexual abuse, sexuality and gender, same-sex marriage, corruption among its leaders, and so on. Rather than confront these issues head on, the usual response is, “Be patient. Let’s take this slowly. No need to rush into it. Leave it with us and we’ll look into it.”

It reminds me of the U.S. military wanting to retain the right to prosecute its own sexual assault cases rather than turn them over to civilian courts. We know how that’s going to turn out. Hardly any go to prosecution now and hardly any will in the future.

But, unlike this cartoon, the church is never fined for going too slow or taking too long dealing with abuses, inequalities and injustices within it’s own ranks or in the world. It just continues plodding along.

You know the drill.

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Some assert that the only way to God is through the church.

Some would theologize that the church is Christ’s body, and that Christ is the mediator between God and people, so those in Christ would be in the church, and to be outside the church is to be outside of Christ.

Some would insist that you cannot find God without Christ and that the church is the best guide to finding Christ and therefore finding God.

Some cannot imagine a spirituality outside of an organization.

I admire and encourage people to find their own spirituality, to discover what it means to become spiritually independent, to refuse to bow to the institutional pressure to conform to the group. Even if this group provides privileges, your spirituality may be constricted. It takes a lot of courage to do what this young woman is doing. She has decided to challenge the church’s claims.

Meet other people like her at The Lasting Supper.

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There are a lot of studies giving strong evidence that children of same-sex parents grow up well-adjusted and healthy. In fact, some studies argue that their childhoods are more positive. I’m not going to link any because there are too many to choose from. You can google it though.

I can hear the arguments of some though: Just because they’re happy does not make them right. Just because the child grows up into a well-adjusted adult doesn’t excuse the sin that got him there. Enjoying sin for a moment doesn’t justify a lifetime of it. Satan has blinded them to their sin and given them a false happiness. Like a frog slowly boiling to death in hot water, they’ve just gotten used to their sin in a sinful culture and will die. God is kind and waiting for them to repent, but at some point his patience is going to run out and then they will see the truth. So on and so on.

I just want to turn away from all that right now and say to families with same-sex parents: Happy Father’s Day! Cheers!

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Some will immediately come to the defense of the church and say that I’m painting with a wide brush.

But I challenge you to ask anyone on the street:

“What’s the first thing that comes to your mind when I say ‘church’ and ‘boys’?”

“What’s the first thing that comes to your mind when I say ‘church’ and ‘women’?”

“What’s the first thing that comes to your mind when I say ‘church’ and ‘money’?”

“What’s the first thing that comes to your mind when I say ‘church’ and ‘the poor’?”

“What’s the first thing that comes to your mind when I say ‘church’ and ‘sex’?”

“What’s the first thing that comes to your mind when I say ‘church’ and ‘other religions’?”

“What’s the first thing that comes to your mind when I say ‘church’ and ‘science’?”

I could go on. But I think you get my point.

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It is a disservice to expect people not to ask questions, to think critically, or to challenge the status quo of the popular thought of their group. It is wrong because it deprives them of real intellectual development and spiritual growth.

I think what usually happens to these people when they are confronted with a convincing truth that challenges their present way of thinking is that they revert to a childish coping mechanism of regressing into a more secure but less mature belief system. It worked before, it will work again. But it doesn’t.

The Copernican Revolution in the 16th century began peacefully enough, hardly making a ripple. But when it was realized that his theory disputed Aristotle and the church’s authoritative position then the opposition started. Even Luther scoffed Copernicus and said he’d rather believe the scriptures than “that fellow”. The scientific community, for the most part, accepted Copernicus’ theory, but the church took a long time to come around. Even Galileo with his scientific support of the theory met serious opposition. It wasn’t until Isaac Newton, who died in the 18th century, that the theory was generally accepted as true. Other theorists tried to augment and tweak Copernicus’ theory, but finally the old system of belief had to go. All of it! The house of cards, as delicate as it was, stood its ground for almost two centuries before it crashed.

I like this from Žižek:

“When a discipline is in crisis, attempts are made to change or supplement its thesis within the terms of its basic framework – a procedure one might call ‘Ptolemization’ (since when data poured in which clashed with Ptolemy’s earth-centered astronomy, his partisans introduced additional complications to account for the anomalies). But the true ‘Copernican’ takes place when, instead of adding complications and changing minor premises, the basic framework itself undergoes a transformation. So, when we are dealing with a self-professed ‘scientific revolution’, the question to ask is always: is this truly a Copernican revolution, or merely a Ptolemization of the old paradigm?” (The Sublime Object of Ideology)

I admit to you that I have lived in a house of cards of sorts. I live in them for as long as I possibly can, hanging on to any shred of belief I can muster. Finally, when it is completely obvious that it is no longer standing, then sorrowfully I come to my senses and let it go. These are traumatic times. But I don’t have two centuries to do this.

I wasn’t prepared by my earliest teachers for this. I was taught and commanded to not trust my intellect, to not lean on my own understanding, and to not ask questions that the Bible didn’t concern itself with. I was taught to neglect my intelligence. For the past several years I have been playing catch-up.

Do any of you know what I’m talking about?

(***I invite you to join The Lasting Supper, an online community I moderate where we explore and exercise these kinds of things in a non-confrontational setting.)

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Here are ten reasons to be afraid of atheists:

1. There are some pretty nasty atheists that even seem dangerous. I don’t know any personally, but I have met some online that I’m glad are at arm’s length.
2. There are some atheists who are just rude and won’t respect but attack your beliefs or rationale, which can make conversing with them very uncomfortable and confrontational.
3. There are some atheists who, because they are atheists, are by your standards going to Hell and are therefore, by your standards, children of the devil, which can make for a rather unsettling meeting.
4. There are some atheists out there who would challenge your beliefs and question your assumptions, even respectfully, which can make for a very difficult conversation.
5. There are some atheists who, just because they are atheists, will make you feel uncomfortable about your own belief system and perhaps even cause you to question it.
6. There are some atheists who are actually good people and because of this will really complicate your tidy categories of who’s in and who’s out.
7. There are some atheists who will respect your rationale but who will not recant on theirs, which will cause a critical cognitive dissonance concerning your own categories.
8. There are some atheists who, because of their quality of intelligence and character, will upset your faith and make you wonder why your God should punish such a person.
9. There are some atheists who actually appreciate and even practice religious rituals but without the attending beliefs commonly associated with them, which will confuse your religious sensitivities and boundaries.
10. There are some atheists who insist that you cannot know with certainty that there is a God and sometimes you actually feel this to be true, making them honest and perhaps even right, which will confound your definition of belief and faith and doubt and how they fit into your ideas about salvation.

I know atheists in every one of the above categories. Heck, sometimes I’m in one of all of them myself.

But other than that there’s really nothing to be afraid of.

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The book of Job is my favorite in the Old Testament. It is brutally honest. It provides no easy answers. It concludes, leaving us with life as unfathomable mystery and that we cannot possibly understand it. It admits that even though there may be meaning, we aren’t privy to it. This is life as I experience it.

The crucifixion illustrates this even more graphically. Looking back, Paul says that God emptied himself of himself and became a man. As a human being, God experiences the absence of God. God has forsaken himself. Jesus, not only God as a human being, but Jesus as a human being, actually a human being, experiences the apparent meaninglessness of life accompanied by the forsakenness of God. Jesus, fully God and fully man, both conjoined together experience the very real absence of God.

This is the Jesus I identify with because it is the fullest identification with and liberation of humanity.