[Dialogue] 3/31/2022, Progressing Spirit; Rev. David M. Felton: “Move Over Genesis"; Spong revisited

Thu Mar 31 10:52:51 PDT 2022

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“Move Over Genesis"
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|  Essay by Rev. M. David Felten
March 31, 2022
“Science is handing us an origin story,
and we’ve barely begun to understand its mythic dimensions." ~ Jennifer Morgan
As if we don’t already have enough problems in this country, the last few years have seen us slipping closer and closer to becoming a “post-truth society.” Facts just don’t seem to matter anymore. Everyone from flat-earthers to Climate Change deniers to anti-vaxxers dismiss peer-reviewed Scientific evidence as just some egghead’s “opinion.” The new mantra seems to be, tell a lie enough times and people start to believe it’s the truth.

And the status-quo inertia of most of our religious institutions is part of the problem. Long sidelined as boring and irrelevant, the mainline churches of many of our upbringings are serving primarily as crumbling hospice centers for the palliative maintenance of obsolete religious thought. On the other hand, evangelical and fundamentalist churches continue to try and outdo one another in their extreme adherence to archaic and toxic worldviews on everything from race and gender to science and history.

In both cases, low information religious enthusiasts are being exploited by unscrupulous religious leaders and politicians to promote a way of thinking that misrepresents the very fabric of reality. As many Christians are raised (along with Alice in Wonderland) to embrace the virtue of believing “six impossible things before breakfast,” they are conditioned to believe that God will love them more if they believe that God created the world in six 24- hour days, or that there was a real ark, or that Mary was a literal virgin.

In fact, the number of Americans who DO embrace a literal Genesis is shockingly high. The latest Gallup poll indicates that 40% of Americans believe that God “poofed” us into existence in our present form in the last 10,000 years or so. Many deny the theory of evolution based on a misguided belief that they have to choose between the Bible and “Godless science.” After all, as anyone who’s read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy knows, God created fossils that only SEEM to be 150 million years old. They’re really only 6,000 years old and God is testing true believers to see if they’ll believe the evidence OR the Bible.

Overall, various polls suggest that the likelihood of one’s belief in creationism (born of a literal interpretation of Genesis) increases with the frequency of church attendance — specifically at conservative and evangelical churches (the very same institutions that are the breeding grounds of post-truth favorites like “Q-anon” and “the Big Lie”).

If this kind of thinking remained isolated in a hermetically sealed silo of regressive Christian thinking, fine. But people who have been programmed to think this way have now risen to leadership positions across the country. The influence of a post-truth “Biblical” worldview has resulted in legislation that discriminates against Transgender athletes, bans classic literature from school libraries, deputizes anti-abortion vigilantes in Texas, and, in the name of “academic freedom,” attempts to put the quackery of creationism on the same level as evolution, the core animating principle of modern biology. In the last few years, literally dozens of anti-science, anti-LGBTQIA+, and socially regressive bills have been introduced in state legislatures across the country.

Punitive Means
 Most recently, Senator Rob Standridge of Oklahoma (himself a product of fundamentalist Christian private schooling) has introduced SB 1470, the “Students Religious Beliefs Protection Act.” The proposed act would allow parents to sue teachers for $10,000 (“per incident, per individual”) and be banned from teaching if they teach anything that upsets their religious students’ tender sensibilities. Anything that is perceived to have anti-religious content is suspect, especially “sciency” stuff like evolution, climate change, or the big bang. But subject matter that touches on LGBTQIA+ issues and reproductive rights are also in Sen. Standridge’s sights. Worse yet, the bill specifically makes it an offense for teachers to upset students “by commission OR omission.” That means a science teacher’s failure to teach creationism as a legitimate alternative to evolution can also lead to fines and expulsion from the teaching profession.  

To the casual observer, it’s all just one more frustrating tug-of-war between two tribes of irreconcilable world views. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Recently, hundreds of faith communities around the globe observed “Evolution Weekend” to correspond with Charles Darwin’s 213th birthday on February 12th. Coordinated by Dr. Michael Zimmerman’s The Clergy Letter Project, Evolution Weekend seeks to create a pro-science religious witness as a counter to the dominant narrative that religion is always and forever opposed to science and its discoveries. The Clergy Letter Project website has a place for clergy of numerous faith traditions to not only sign on as a supporter in principle, but to commit one’s faith community to participating in annual Evolution Weekend events. The site also includes liturgical resources, hundreds of sample sermons, and a variety of helpful links. For this year’s focus, participants were encouraged to focus on the theme, “The Pandemic, Climate Change and Evolution:  How Religion and Science, Working Together, Can Advance Our Understanding.” As a United Methodist, I’m proud to say that the United Methodist denomination officially endorses the Clergy Letter Project and its “reconciliatory programs between religion and science.”

Why a pro-science group of clergy? Because the world needs the witness of religious leaders who are humble enough to admit that 1) religions have been wrong before and 2) that science is a means to a deeper sense of spirituality.

Wrong Before 
 The practice of any religion requires it to adjust its worldview to account for reality, otherwise it’s bound to go the way of the religions of ancient Egypt or Greece. Back in the 17th century, Galileo was convicted of heresy for suggesting that the earth revolves around the sun, just like Copernicus said. “That’s not what the Bible says!”, the church argued. But guess what? Copernicus was right and the Bible is wrong (and it only took the church 350 years to admit it).

Deeper Spirituality 
 On previous Evolution weekends, my congregation has considered the humbling fact that human beings share 98% of our gene sequence with chimpanzees. Even more humbling, we share 50% of our gene sequence with bananas. We’ve learned how the creation stories in Genesis are great stories that were written in very particular times for very particular purposes – neither of which has anything to do with history OR science. And we’ve learned how trying to force Genesis to “prove” things it was never meant to “prove” is a shallow excuse for spirituality.

Then there’s recalibrating one’s worldview from the 6,000 year old literal interpretation of Genesis to the 14 BILLION year saga of “Big History.” Doing so not only grounds a person in reality, but shifts one’s awareness away from the self-centered idea that creation is “all about us.” To see ourselves as a tiny, interconnected part of a much bigger, grander, and awe-filled story is a healthy exercise in humility.

So, as we try to slow the slide into a full-on post-truth society, we need to both resist the effort of fundamentalist Christians trying to make Genesis into something it’s not and model a spirituality of embracing the mythic awe and wonder of cosmic evolution that science is revealing.

Over twenty years ago, Carl Sagan chided the religious by asking:

“How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, ‘This is better than we thought! The universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant. God must be even greater than we dreamed.’  A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths. Sooner or later, such a religion will emerge.” 

Such a religion will embrace science, evolution, and Big History as integral parts of its identity and spirituality. The 14-billion-year, science-based tale of cosmic genesis — from stardust to the formation of galaxies and the origin of life to the eventual development of consciousness is the true story of us. To paraphrase cosmic theologians Brian Swimme and Thomas Barry, we come from the stars – and the stuff we’re made up of is nearly 14 billion years old, forged over time into a unique, never-to-be-repeated expression of a Universe that is now conscious of itself. Now THAT’S a creation story.

As people of faith who take the Bible seriously but not literally, we need to have the confidence to say the Bible is wrong. It was never meant to be a science book. We need to call out those people who pervert the Bible to further wacky ideas like a flat-earth or a six-day creation or a literal flood. Jesus taught his followers to love God with all their heart, soul, strength, and MIND — even when using our minds means having to change our world view to keep up with and defend reality.For a sermon on this topic, follow THIS LINK.  ~ Rev. David M. Felten

Read online here

About the Author
Rev. David M. Felten is a full-time pastor at The Fountains, a United Methodist Church in Fountain Hills, Arizona. David and fellow United Methodist Pastor, Jeff Procter-Murphy, are the creators of the DVD-based discussion series for Progressive Christians, “Living the Questions” and authors of Living the Questions: The Wisdom of Progressive Christianity. A co-founder of Catalyst Arizona and also a founding member of No Longer Silent: Clergy for Justice, David is an outspoken voice for LGBTQ rights both in the church and in the community at large. David is active in the Desert Southwest Conference of the United Methodist Church and tries to stay connected to his roots as a musician. You’ll find him playing saxophones in a variety of settings, including appearances with the Fountain Hills Saxophone Quartet. David is the proud father of three reliably remarkable human beings. Visit his website here.   |

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Question & Answer

Q: By A Reader

Today's news is full of statements that say Christianity is dying and that is a good thing.  Can't we believe in a larger vision without losing Church and Christianity that continue to bring solace and community to so many?

A: By Gretta Vosper
 Dear Reader,The Christianity that many who read this newsletter know is one that has been expanding over time. We’ve embraced new ideas and released older ones, our understandings becoming less fixed, less exclusive. But we have watched, too, as conservative expressions of every faith have become increasingly dogmatic or entrenched in concepts that are, in our eyes, restrictive and judgmental of others.

Humanity itself is on the verge of its own demise; some scientists say we may have only eighty years before we become our own ghosts. Many who are familiar with fundamentalism may recognize and resonate with “end of times” theologies, strengthening Christianity and other religions in their most dangerous iterations as we burn our only home to the ground. Arguing a progressive form of religion against dogmatism will be of little use in these crucial years.

Rather, let’s slip under the fences built by the divisive belief systems of faith to join one another in a common field that unites us: a place where the values of justice and love, courage and gentleness, en-coeur-agement and hard work thrive and are welcome. These concepts affect us all, regardless of our religious or non-religious beliefs.

You are already very skilled at engaging beyond Christianity. Unless your understanding requires you to witness it regularly, continue, as you have been, tucking Christianity away into church events where it is welcome and expected. Leave it there and begin bringing values into more significant places in your relationships and conversations.

Ultimately, this is what I have to say to you on this matter: If you would save your belief system before you would save your neighbour, then I cannot help you. But if you would change your belief system to save your neighbour, then put your energy into saving your neighbour now and let Christianity fend for itself. It is, literally, now or never.~ Rev. Gretta Vosper

Read and share online here

About the Author
The Rev. Gretta Vosper is a United Church of Canada minister who is an atheist. Her best-selling books include With or Without God: Why The Way We Live is More Important Than What We Believe, and Amen: What Prayer Can Mean in a World Beyond Belief. She has also published three books of poetry and prayers. Visit her website here.  |

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|  Please continue to send us your feedback… we are listening. We aim to give voice to many different perspectives that are relevant and inspiring along this spiritually progressing path. We are not here to tell you what to believe or how to act. We are here to support your journey, to share and learn together.Thank you for being a part of this community - join us on Facebook!  |

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Learning to Persevere          Supreme Court nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson was asked what                                    advice she’d give to young people during her confirmation hearing this week.           
          She shed a few tears as she recalled that she’d had a tough time adjusting to                            life at Harvard after coming from a public school in Miami.  What was her                              advice?  “The first semester I was really homesick. I was really questioning,                            ‘Do I belong here?’ ‘Can I make it in this environment?’ And I was walking                              through the yard in the evening and a black woman I did not know was                                    passing me on the sidewalk and she looked at me and I guess she knew how I                          was feeling, and she leaned over as we crossed and said, ‘persevere.’  I would                          tell them to ‘persevere.’

Perseverance is certainly powerful advice for those who are facing the realities of racism, classism, and sexism in America, as Ketanji Brown Jackson did as a student (and continues to face as a judge).  However, the willingness to persevere through difficult times is something that we all must learn to embrace.

ProgressiveChristianity.org is persevering, but we need YOUR help.  We’re a small organization that strives to make a large impact and we are funded through donations.  Could you make a one-time or recurring donation to support the work of Progressive Christianity?  Even a gift of $20 would make a huge difference! 

Thank you for your generosity and for helping us persevere!

The Rev. Dr. Caleb J. Lines
Co-Executive Director
ProgressiveChristianity.org
Progressing Spirit

Help keep ProgressiveChristianity.org online and going strong - click here to donate today!

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Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited

“Think Different – Accept Uncertainty” Part VII:
The Corruption of Human Life According to the Bible

Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong
March 22, 2012In the beginning all was good, said the oldest biblical story of creation (Gen. 2:4b-3:24).  That goodness was symbolized by the portrait of life in the Garden of Eden, a garden that contained everything for which a human being could yearn.  There was ample water, fruit and vegetation.  The author of the story even asserted that this garden contained precious metals like gold and precious stones like onyx.  Exactly why this original couple might have needed either gold or onyx is not stated, but they were universally viewed as valuable so the garden was made to contain them.

The second symbol of this original perfection in the narrative was that the two human beings, the man and the woman, lived in perfect harmony with God.  This harmony was symbolized by the fact that each day “in the cool of the evening” God came out of the sky to have a daily walk with God’s friends, Adam and Eve.  In those pre-air conditioned days, God knew better than to come out in the heat of the day.  That time was reserved for “mad dogs and Englishmen!”   God ventured forth, probably with a straw hat and cane, only in “the cool of the evening.”

When God first placed the man and the woman into this garden, the author tells us, there was but a single restriction.  The first couple was to have access to all of the plants and trees of the garden save for one.  There was a tree, planted by God, known as the “Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.” The man and the woman were forbidden to eat from the fruit of this tree.  This restriction was not just divinely imposed, but it was severe carrying with it a terrible price. God had promised them that if “you eat of the tree in the midst of the garden, you will surely die!”

For a while all went well in Eden, says the text.  Human beings, however, know the lure of “forbidden fruit.”  So it was almost inevitable that one day, the woman, clearly defined by the male author of this story as the weak link in the created order, was found to be looking at this tree, perhaps fantasizing about what the fruit might be like to her taste buds.  Fantasies are often the first step toward crossing a boundary.  A serpent, the personification of all evil desires, approached Eve in this vulnerable setting.  The serpent was smart and knew just where to aim its thrust into the vulnerabilities of this woman.

“It looks tasty, doesn’t it?” said the serpent.  “Yes, Mr. Snake, it surely does!” “Why don’t you try it?” the serpent continued.  “I could not do that,” Eve replied. “God said that if we eat of the fruit of this tree, we will surely die.”

“Oh, you won’t die Miss Eve,” the snake continued, weaving the tempter’s spell,  “the reason that God has forbidden this fruit is that God knows that if you eat of the fruit of this tree, you will be as wise as God and will know the difference between good and evil.  God doesn’t want anyone to compete with the divine prerogative.”

It was a subtle temptation.  You can be more than you are, Eve.  You can be as wise as God.  So Eve thinks about it until her hubris wins out.  She plucks the fruit and bites into its substance.  Not content to be alone in this act of disobedience, she hurriedly calls Adam over and offers him a sample.  Both then eat and in that act of disobedience, this story asserts, evil is born.  The world and life itself, which were created to be good, were now corrupted, fallen.  Sin had made its entrance into Paradise and would become a constant source of corruption.  At that moment, the ancient biblical narrative tells us, the eyes of the man and the woman were opened.  Adam and Eve began to see things they had never seen before.  They discovered, for example, that they were naked and so they felt shame.  Driven by this shame they scurried to make “fig leaf aprons” to cover their exposed bodies.  Their walk with God in the cool of the evening, to which they had always looked forward with pleasure, now became a source of dread.  It is one thing to walk with a friend, it is quite another to walk with one who has become your judge.  So, as the hour of the divine stroll neared, Adam and Eve, in a wonderfully primitive and naïve way, decided they would hide from the all-seeing God in the bushes of the garden.  They had just created a game called “Hide and Seek” and had decided that God was “It.”  So into the security of the bushes they plunged.

When God arrived in the garden for the daily walk with God’s friends, God recognized that something was different.  Adam and Eve were nowhere to be seen.  So God called out to the man, who in that patriarchal era, would be perceived as the one clearly in charge, “Adam, Adam!  Where are you?”  Since this was the first time that the game “Hide and Seek” had ever been played in human history, Adam did not quite understand the rules.  So, when God called him, Adam stood up in the bushes, raised his hand and said, “Here we are, Lord, hiding in the bushes!”

“What in the world are you doing in the bushes?” God asked, before it slowly dawned on the divine consciousness that something was terribly amiss.  Then God asked, “Have you eaten of the fruit of the tree that was in the midst of the garden?”  In response to this question, the human capacity to rationalize guilt leapt into full bloom. “It was not I, Lord,” said Adam.  It was that woman.  You know, Lord, the woman that you made.”  Adam obviously wanted to include God in the guilt. The woman then in turn defended herself by blaming the tempter, the serpent.  The result, however, was obvious. The goodness of God’s creation came crashing down.  God, now cast in the role of judge, proceeds to do just that. He sentences the guilty and these punishments were used by the ancient Jews to explain observable phenomena that seemed to them to have no other explanation.  The punishment given to the serpent was that for all eternity, it would be condemned to crawl on its belly and eat the dust of the earth.  The punishment given to the woman was that she would experience the pain of labor in childbirth.  The punishment given to the man was that he would, from that day forward, have to scratch his meager living out of the ground that frequently brought forth more thorns and brambles than it did food to eat.

That was not all.  Their punishment also required that they be expelled from the Garden of Eden and thus banished from the presence of God.  They could no longer be “at one” with God, making the quest for atonement a driving human need.  Communion with the divine was broken.  They now lived in a state of alienation and since they were no longer able to live in Eden, they had to dwell “East of Eden,” to borrow a phrase from John Steinbeck.

The final punishment was probably the most terrifying.  Each of them would die.  It was, said this story, now the destiny of all living things to be finite not infinite, mortal not immortal, separated from God not one with God.  For human life death had an extra dreadful dimension. All living things die, but only self-conscious human beings know that this is their destiny and so they have to plan for it, anticipate it, and get themselves emotionally prepared for it. The ancient biblical story also says that once the man and the woman were expelled the gates of the Garden of Eden were closed and locked and an angel with a drawn sword stood at the entry, barring any human attempt to return. The corruption of human life was now complete.  No life escaped this evil.  Human beings were forever after to be born into this fallen status.  The fact that everyone died meant that everyone lived “in sin” and was, therefore, guilty.  Human beings could do nothing to overcome the fall except to wait patiently for God to come to their rescue.

Augustine thus took this ancient story and not only literalized it, but also built an entire theological system around it.  Within this theology, he would place the story of Jesus with which most of us are familiar.  This theology had several parts.  It was rooted in the perfection of God’s creation.  It assumed, however, that human beings had destroyed that original perfection with an act of disobedience.  That act had corrupted the entire human enterprise.  It was this “original sin” that stained irreparably all of life.  Original sin was passed on from generation to generation.  No one could escape it.  No one could save himself or herself from it.  All anyone could do was to wait in silence for a divine rescue, for a savior who would come from God, one who was not infected with our sinfulness, one who could redeem us from our “fall”. 

That yearning for rescue became the lens through which these western Christian Gentiles read and interpreted the messianic dreams of the Jews.   When Christianity became the established religion of that western Gentile world, it was within this theological understanding of human life that the Christ story was told.  Jesus was God’s rescue operation.  His death on the cross was the payment that God required for our sins in order to accomplish our salvation.  We developed a mantra inside Protestant Christianity that proclaimed that “Jesus died for my sins!”  The Eucharist in Roman Catholic Christianity became the liturgical reenactment of the moment when Jesus paid the price that bought us salvation, so this liturgy was referred to as “the sacrifice of the Mass.”

In time believers even developed a fetish about the cleansing power of Jesus’ blood shed on the cross.  Protestants wanted to be made clean by bathing in the blood of Jesus. Catholics wanted to be cleansed internally by drinking the blood of Jesus.  This was the way that traditional Christianity told the Jesus story.  It is still deeply implanted in our minds, in our hymns, in our prayers, in our liturgies and in our sermons.

What is wrong with this story?  Everything! It is bad anthropology and it is not true.  Can we find a new way to tell the Christ story apart from this scheme?  I hope so, for if we cannot Christianity will surely die.  We will put flesh on both of these assertions when the next installments in the series play across our computer screens.~  John Shelby Spong  |

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