One human being’s efforts may matter very little in the broad sweep of historical consequences. But large groups of humans, activated by significant inspiration, can matter very much. This is true both when our human “mattering” means great benefit to key human values and when our “mattering” means huge and tragic consequences. We are now experiencing an era of human history in which we experience many matters of “big time’ mattering. We see a climate crisis so immense that we can barely stand to face it. We see a drift toward authoritarian government that threatens to undo all that as been done toward a viable and vital democracy. We see much to be done in solidarity with women’s efforts to deliver themselves from second-class oppression and and to deliver all of us from patriarchy. We also see racial and cultural minorities treated with practices of suppression, contempt, and cruelty that shock our sensitivities to the very quick.

Indeed, the consequences rendered by deeds of the human species have become enormous. We live in an era of human life that some now call the “Anthropocene.” This name takes note of the fact that the once tiny human species has become a key planetary force—melting arctic ice, raising sea levels, reshaping the climate, multiplying extinctions, polluting air-water&soils, as well as uprooting the distribution fabrics of our societies. Our everyday historical experience is challenging us to do a better job with our now vast history-bending capacities.

Lessons from Biblical History

The prophet Ezekiel was called upon to do history-bending within a seemingly hopeless situation. He was a religious leader of the Mosaic-heritage people exiled in the land of Babylon—a strongly influential culture in contrast with the tiny and compromised kingdom of Judea in which Ezekiel and others lived before their exile. Many exiled groups simply melted into this creative Babylonian culture. Speaking in the voice of Yahweh (understood as the power of history itself), here are some of the “power words” of this wildly imaginative poet:

I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strayed, and I will bind up the crippled, and I will strengthen the weak, and the fat and the strong I will watch over; I will feed them on justice. (11:16)

These words went into the bending of history. These words not only participated in preserving the Yahwist faith during forty-seven years of Babylonian exile, they prepared the way for the rise of another prominent prophet. We now refer to this figure as Second Isaiah—a prophet whose gripping poetry spoke of leaving exile and returning home to rebuild an independent national expression of the Yahwist heritage. The Persian empire was then conquering the Babylon empire and was instituting new polices for exiled people. This unnamed prophet, whose writings appear in the last part of the scroll of Isaiah, saw the Persian emperor as a servant of Yahweh come to deliver Israel. Second Isaiah also saw these historical developments as Yahweh’s call to leave exile, return to the wreckage of the old Palestinian geography, and build a new society rooted in the long memories of this people. Here is “the voice of Yahweh” according to the poetry of Second Isaiah.

Speak tenderly to Jerusalem and tell her this:
that she has fulfilled her term of bondage,
that her penalty is paid. . . .

Prepare a road for Yahweh through the wilderness,
clear a highway across the desert for our God.
Every valley shall be lifted up;
every mountain and hill brought down;
rough places shall be made smooth;
and mountain ranges become a plane.

Thus shall the glory of Yahweh be revealed,
and all humankind together shall see it,
for Yahweh has spoken. (40:2-5)

Bending history takes place when we use our essential freedom to do for others a Second-Isaiah-type of inspiration—to do such powerful visioning through our words, our deeds, and our presence. Let us also remain aware that historical results can be achieved by ourselves and by other humans who willfully crowd out essential freedom and act from a place of inner bondage. Adolf Hitler and company bent history, even though their dreadful acts derived from a terrible bondage of soul. Hitler’s living is judged” evil” from the perspective of the realism revealed in the Jesus, the Christ revelation, the Moses of the Exodus revelation, the Buddha of awakenment revelation, the Mohammedan Qur’an revelation, and so on. These “revelations” of Profound Reality quality realism provide us with depictions of a faithfulness that allow us to see values that are given to us by realism rather than values that are simply made up to advance our egoism or preferences.

The Pit of Evil

Adolf Hitler was an intelligent and capable man who went over to the “dark side,” as we Star Was fans might call it. His extermination spasm toward the Jewish people of Europe and his invention of a mode of “total war” that he thought could not be defeated dug a horrific ditch of evil. He showed us our human capacity for evil with a vividness toward which we still close our eyes.

Nevertheless, we remain vulnerable to enchantment by leaders who are skilled in calling forth our own rebellion against living in the real world. How has it happened in Russia that a leader can get away with poisoning his political opponents? How has it happened in the United States that a president and his cronies can get away with undermining elections, selling out to foreign interests, tearing up democratic institutions, misusing the military against peaceful protesters, and sowing confusion by lying daily as if that were an acceptable way of life. And this list of “bad doings” does not include a long list of omissions and failures to face and handle a significant list of emergencies.

Perhaps the sheer foolishness of neglecting a clear scientific way of minimizing the impact of Covid-19 pandemic will discredit this administration for all time. We have experienced a US president too inept to be compared with Hitler. We might better compare him with Senator Joseph McCarthy, who has been portrayed as the most evil U.S politician until now. We can be thankful that McCarthy was never allowed to be president. And perhaps we can also be thankful for President Trump’s gross ineptitude—even as we stand in horror of how far toward fascism someone as sociologically ignorant as Trump can take our government and a significant portion of our population.

In 1851, a century before Hitler, Herman Melville wrote a novel, Moby-Dick, that gave us a classic picture of the strange charisma of a defiantly evil human being. In this novel, the evil and “charismatic” person is Captain Ahab, a ship captain who has captivated the crewmen of a whaling vessel. “Evil” in this story is symbolized by the passion of this ship captain’s murderous hatred toward a huge white whale who had taken one of his legs in a previous encounter, making him, as he called it, “half a man.” The strength of this intentional fight with the white whale fascinates the other shipmates, who are, perhaps, open to follow him based on their own fights with whatever they aren’t able to control.

The huge white whale turns out to be a symbol for that Profound Reality that never loses. In this mythic story all but one crew member follows Ahab into his fight with an unbeatable power of nature—symbolically with our own fight with the Profound Reality we may also call “God.”

Symbolized in this story is something more inclusive even than the extreme aberration of a Hitler. In this story we see the whole of industrial society in a winless fight against the vast ocean of nature. Such an enchantment with human arrogance toward the natural planet precedes the futility of Hitler’s “total war” against all human societies. We can view the Jewish people playing the role of that white whale of personal humiliation in Hitler’s imagination. A similar role is being played today in the imagination our US white nationalist authoritarians by people of color and immigrants who might vote for democracy against the white nationalism that we see tending toward its fascist fulfillment.

This essay is about being delivered from these gloomy dead ends of human living. This delivery will require a vast bending of history in some different directions through the agency of our own essential freedom.

In addition to lawless authoritarianism, we also face a new kind of total war from our current fossil-fuel companies who are waging their un-winnable fight with the atmosphere of the planet. History is always presenting us with fresh challenges, some extremely large, some quite small.

Perhaps the reality of our true nature supports the quest for justice, but justice is a gift that must be asked for with our lives. Getting justice and keeping it requires foot movements, finger movements, telephoning, organizing, e-mails, speeches, money, voting, teaching, running for office, and this list is much longer. Social justice is a contact sport, so put on your shoulder pads, your shin guards, and come to the meetings, events, or protests with your wits about you.

True justice must be defined and brought into being by those who are accessing their profound consciousness and thereby becoming the early few who use their essential freedom to bring thought and action for justice to this time, this place, and this course of events. Each doable step can bring into play the action of an ever-larger force for some massive bending of time.

Obedient Freedom Changing History

Many Christian theologians have spoken of the origin of the cosmos as a “creation out of nothing” by that totally-free, all-powerful mysteriousness, that was anciently personalized with the name “Yahweh.” The word “God” in the phrase “Yahweh is my God” means our devotion to this all-powerfulness—that is, our loyalty, commitment, dedication, and obedience. This obedience is the obedience of freedom—the obedience of being our essential freedom and the freedom to be obedient in facing the actual response-able options available to us in our time and place.

The actions done by our essential freedom in response to Yahweh our God are also “creations out of nothing” in that these choices are not being caused by any force other than our essential freedom itself. Other forces are always playing a role in our behavior, but essential freedom is one of those forces. And this essential freedom is free indeed—no moralism or dogmatic rigidity can stand in the way of the essential creativity of this freedom.

The essential freedom of the human being differs from Yahweh’s freedom in its capacity for historical results. Yahweh’s freedom is boundless, but the essential freedom of humans is limited to initiating temporal results in accordance with the temporal powers possessed by human individuals and groups. Humans bend history, but they do not control history. We find ourselves continually surprised by the results of our own actions. Yahweh, our God is the determiner of the results of our free choices. Our free choices are like petitions pushed into the face of mystery. Final results are out of our hands.

Our essential freedom draws a great deal of its boldness from our trust in the total forgiveness of all our deeds—before, during, and after those deeds are performed. After our deeds are performed, we must release them into the imagined “hands” of Profound Reality who now clearly owns our done deeds and their consequences. We cannot take back our deeds.

In the context of this forgiveness, we can take into ourselves the guilt of all the malfunctioning of our species that has led up to our current options. The boldness to take on the guilt of the entire species is made possible by the faith that all is forgiven nd that a fresh start in realistic freedom is before us. However horrific that may sound on the surface of it, being our freedom is found to be restful, even though it is certainly not “rest” in the sense of a withdrawal from the battle of living. We rest in our activism. We do not burn out. We find that our freedom is a gift that keeps on giving energy to us from that Profound Reality that we are trusting as our forgiving God.

Alongside our amazing freedom, we notice that there are other powers already in motion—material and social forces that are producing historical results along with whatever historical power we bring into play. In most cases our own human freedom can bring to the fray only a small vector of force within that vast sea of force vectors that combine to spell out the actual results. Nevertheless, historical outcomes can be bent through the agency of our human choices—real choices that are made by our own freedom. And the choices of multitudes of individual vectors of force strategically applied to real historical situations can create a true revolution in social structures.

While a million human beings acting in some sort of coordinated response have many times more temporal power than a single person, even the power of billions of humans is severely limited in relation to the vast forces of the natural cosmos. Just as the Earth swings around the sun with massive force, so also are there forces in human historical movement that simply have to be respected and worked with rather than against.

Profound Reality is manifest towards us as an unconditional Power we cannot resist, yet part of that boundless Power has been delegated to us humans. If we include the plain fact of this delegating of power to humans and to other living beings, the power of Profound Reality can be said to remains unlimited. Both the life and the freedom of all living beings remains in the overall control of this One all-powerful Power. There is no contradiction between real human power and the All-powerful Power of that Profound Reality that can be the God we obey, honor, and serve.

These awarenesses enable us to picture a human life in dialogue with Profound Reality. If we are dedicated to consciously living within the stern yet merciful realism of a dialogue with Profound Reality, then we can say that Profound Reality has become our “God”—the “focus” of our devotion. This personal devotion allows us to symbolize Profound Reality as an Infinite “Thou.” In the light of this devotion, human history becomes the story of Thou—we—Thou—we—Thou—we— . . . Thou. “Thou” has both the initial word and the final word in each human story. Yet we humans do have a role in the choreography of this historical dance, the making of this music, the authorship of this drama.

Conclusion

The prophets of the Old Testament, Jesus, and the authors of the New Testament dared to to speak for Reality to humanity and to speak back to Reality on behalf of humanity. They wrote their poetry about living within the overview of this relentlessly all-powerful Reality. Such a God-devotion to Profound Reality includes at least these three broad themes: (1) the judgments of Reality upon our inadequate customary living—calling us to a relinquishment of our clinging to obsolete and illusory ways of living, (2) Reality showing us the openings toward whole new futures for human living, and (3) Reality’s callings to us for courageous ventures into these new possibilities well ahead of the crowds. This means that however meager be our talents or skills, we may become luminaries and exemplars who are showing forth our own unique adventure into an unknown future that many may fear, hate, and oppose, and many others may honor and join. Onward ye history benders!

The post Bending History first appeared on Realistic Living.

Nevertheless, power-over is not in itself evil. Parents have power-over their children. This benefits the children, if such power is well used. Our political leaders (however they are selected) are granted power-over a wide scope of citizen life. Such political power can also be used in service of the citizenry, and such power can be misused very badly.

Power is an important factor in all social actions. As Paul Tillich spelled out in one of his most creative books, there is no Justice without Power and there is no Justice building Power or empowered Justice without Love (Tillich, Paul; Love, Power, and Justice).

Defining Power

The very word “power” includes the meaning of power-over something as well as the power to do something. The sun has gravitational power-over the Earth. The Earth has gravitational power-over our bodies. Inclusive Reality has power-over every partial reality. If we designate Inclusive Reality with a devotional terms like “God” or “Creator,” then it is clear that this Creator has power-over us and over all other creations. God is, therefore, appropriately symbolized as “Almighty.” Picturing this Almighty Creator as a character in a story or myth is poetic talk about Inclusive Reality. Such symbolic talk means that this Almighty Power of Inclusive Reality is the “God” that we have chosen to trust.

In Christian faith, the Almighty Power of Reality is trusted to be for us humans. That is what it means to say that “God is Love.” The Power we always face is for us. Realistic living is our best case option for the living of our lives. Making up a reality we like better is courting disaster. By “trust” we mean that we are willing to be submissive to being realistic rather than creating our own fabrication of Reality that we like better. Trusting in God means being realistic in our living before the All-Powerful Giver of our past, present, and future. That we humans are given a certain amount of limited power over our future does not in the least subtract from the fact that the outcomes of our acts (freely rendered or otherwise) are ultimately out of our hands.

Speaking poetically, we offer up our acts of freedom as prayers to a Power-Over us that will or will not answer our prayers of freedom in exactly the way we ask. All religious talk of an intimate dialogue with a trusted Inclusive Reality is poetry, but it is meaningful poetry about the essence of realistic living. Realistic living is an obedience to Realty—both the realism of facing our limits and the realism of engaging in our possibilities. Obedience to Reality includes accepting the gift of freedom and using that freedom in a realistic or responsible manner. And “responsibility” means something deeper than obedience to social law. It may mean creating better laws. It may mean enforcing current laws. It may mean disobeying laws when that is realistically appropriate.

Such realistic living acknowledges that our freedom is a limited power provided by the Absolute Power over which we have no control other than the limited freedom being granted to us by this Absolute Power-Over us.

Using Our Power-To Serve

Our lives are a gift of power to use in many different ways. With or without our consent, our lives are being expended day by day. Conscious living means taking in the power to expend, and then intentionally expending that power. That is, consciousness includes knowing our power, being our power, and doing our power. Like breathing we take in all the powers of our lives, and then we expend the powers we have taken in. Taking in our being born is the first taking in of our lives. Dying is the final expending of our lives. Taking in and expending is living in agreement with the truth of Reality. Our lives are given without our control. And our lives are expended with or without our intentions. Obedience to Reality includes expending our lives. We have named this intentional expending of our lives “love,” when we are willing to expend our lives for causes other than our own status, pleasure, honor, and foolish attempts at immortality.

In Luke’s Gospel Jesus is pictured as saying these last words, “Into Thy Hands I commend my spirit.” This can be interpreted to mean that the realistic person lives their whole life in the following style, “I give back all my gifts to the Giver of all my gifts—my life, my powers, my consciousness, my contributions and hopes for the future.” This giving back to the Giver of my gifts from the Giver can be seen as the basic essence of agape love, of Christian sainthood, of servant leadership in the use of my powers of life.

Such sainthood is not a stoic resignation or a fatalistic submission, but a practice of freedom—a creative, intelligent, freely selected life of service to whatever I choose to serve with my gifts in my personal, social, and historical situations of living. We can speak of being called, and we need to notice that we have always chosen our callings.

Political Power

Political power is often sought as an indulgence in pleasure, as a trophy of status, as a hope for unlimited control, as an opportunity to promote bigotry, or even as an excuse for debauchery. But it is equally possible for political power to be sought as a means of service, as a hope for having influence for good to the causes that call us. We see both of these political styles in the history of the world, often in the same person.

Political power is power-over other people and over institutions of governing, systems of economics, and modes of culture. One of the key issues that humans now face is about using well the political power that is granted to the citizenry and about granting adequate power to each and every citizen. Democracy means that political power is granted to representatives by the consent of the governed, rather than bought with money, inherited from a family, rewarded by an oligarchy, or conquered by violence? Democracy is a social process that favors consent of the governed. If democracy is truly practiced, then power is being delegated to power figures by the people who are then governed by that delegated power-over us. This citizen origin of social power has the immense advantage that citizens can insist that the power-over us is in the hands of servant leaders who serve the people who bestow upon them their political power. When these conditions are adequately met, leaders can be held accountable. If leaders fail to serve us, we replace them. And if it is big money rather than the citizens that is making the leadership choices, then we do not have democracy.

This democratic ideal is open to becoming a mere veneer on the surface of an undemocratic mode of governing. For example a particular so-called democracy can be limited to white-skinned property owners. Wars have been fought and power movements waged to extend in the U.S. political participation to people of color, women, and others. This means that democracy is always a work in process. Full democracy is always a future state. And the democracy we already have is always a fragile reality that the citizens of that democracy need to continually defend from the forces of tyranny that are constantly working to undo the democratic gains already established.

The deep reason why a fuller democracy is so threatening to some people, is that democracy means an undoing of at least 5000 years of kingly developments and practices. Similarly, fully honoring women and the feminine aspects of human consciousness is undoing at least 5000 years of patriarchal lordship over our feminine aspects. Democracy and feminism are two entangled revolutions in social practice that will not be completed in the lifetimes of anyone now living.

Sorting out the good from the tyrannical in our currently existing civilizations is a critical part of the complex social revolution that agape-care is calling upon us to support, invent, create, and finish.

Building political power-over the “maladies” of our continuing civilizations is a central factor in this planetary revolution. If we love this planet and its humans, we cannot reject embracing power-over the “wrong” directions of our societies. Rather, we must capture power-over the existing political fabrics on behalf of democracy, feminine liberation, and a long list of other malady corrections including many ecological emergencies—especially the urgent climate crisis being created by the massive burning of fossil fuels.

Building political power-over the powerful forces of reactionary revolt is the work of love. It takes love operating with power-over to create justice. We the democratically committed citizenry must hold accountable every institution of political power-over citizens—insisting upon servant leadership that serves the citizenry. Surely by now, our awakening citizens are fed up with hypocritical political non-servants who care only for their own egos and the wealth that public office can channel. We the citizens of our emerging democracies are being called to use our power-to-serve to build power-over these forces of injustice toward ever “more perfect” democracies on planet Earth.

The post Power first appeared on Realistic Living.

Central within the Abraham and Sarah stories is a story about Abraham’s journey to the top of a mountain to sacrifice Isaac—his only son, the son miraculously given to him and Sarah in their advanced age. In this strange story, Abraham is giving back the gift of Isaac, who was Abraham’s only evidence for a promise made to Abraham by the Giver of Isaac—a promise to make the descendants of Abraham and Sarah as numerous as the sands on the sea shore.

Centuries after the Exodus from Egypt, when these stories were being widely told, written, and read, this promise to Abraham was still not realized. The Hebraic people who claimed Abraham as their forefather were not yet numerous. Today, we might assume that all the Jewish people, all the Christian people, and all the Islamic people are somehow descendants of Abraham. If so, then Abraham’s descendants are indeed in the billions. All these people are not biological descendants, but they are at least people who remember Abraham and Sarah and Hagar. Only a few of these billions, however, embody Abraham’s model of sainthood.

Why should we honor the Abraham stories or his model of sainthood? These stories are fiction after all, and rather gross fiction as well. And especially, why all the fuss over this strange story about human sacrifice? Why did a fully sane and renowned 19th century philosopher and theologian, Søren Kierkegaard, write a whole book about this story?

This essay will be much simpler than Kiekegaard’s book. I am going to reflect on one idea: “Giving back to Reality all that Reality has given to us.”

Human consciousness includes both taking-in Reality and intending changes in the course of Reality—not big changes in the whole cosmic process, but quite small changes in he course of Reality, as this Real Mysteriousness is relating to me or to you about our personal destiny over which we have some real but quite limited control. Our freedom to “bend history,” as we sometimes call it, is a very important part of what it means to be a humanly conscious being.

Also, time marches on relentlessly giving back our whole lives to the Reality that has given us our lives and is still giving us life as well as taking it back. Sometimes I am glad for time to march on. Sometimes I am clinging to times that I do not want to pass. Sometimes I am glad that periods of my life are over. And sometimes I would like to go back to one or more of these past times. But time marches on. We confront giving our lives back in ways that are in accord with our preferences and in ways that are not in accord with our preferences.

Giving back our lives to the Reality that gives our lives is not about preferences. We are discussing an intentional giving of whatever has been given to us. And we are discussing giving back what we have been given within the given circumstances of the neighboring realities that are being given to us as context for the giving back of our many or few gifts to those neighboring realities.

Like Abraham and Sarah, we may have been given a son or a daughter or several of one of both. As a Christian saint, I am asked to give my descendants back to the Reality that gave them to me. If I am clinging to my children as a means of enhancing my own status or pleasure or pride or even shame, I am destroying my children as well as my role as a responsible father, or mother. Indeed, when my children have become adults, Reality has already taken them back, whether I want to give them up or not. And that is the “natural” course for all our gifts—to be given back.

If I am clinging to my vocation simply as a means of holding on to some status or maintaining my survival, I do not yet have a saintly vocation in the Abrahamic sense. To have a saintly vocation, I must pursue my vocation as an expending (i.e. a giving) of my time and energy to values other than my own needs. This giving may include some attention to my own needs. As Jesus taught his disciples, “Serve the Reign of Reality with all your gifts, and you, the servant, will also be cared for as well.“ (I have paraphrased, but only slightly.) When Jesus sent out his disciples to take the Good News to Galilean villages, he instructed them, “Take only minimum stuff, eat what they offer you, sleep where they put you. Don’t shop around for a better bed. Just give and receive the gifts given to you to keep you going with your ongoing giving.” (Again, I paraphrase.)

Luke saw clearly that Mark and Matthew before him had drawn a picture of Jesus that was to be a model for Christian sainthood. So Luke surely had in mind sharing Jesus as his model of Christian sainthood when he pictured Jesus saying these last words on the cross, “Into Thy hands I commend my spirit.” We can receive this verse as a meaning for our own death and dying: “Into the power of the Giver of my life, I give back my consciousness.” In other words, I can let Reality have my consciousness, however profound or limited that consciousness may be. In so viewing my death, I give over my entire life to the Reality that gave me all that was given to me. Reality, without me, will carry on my giving, my bending of history.

Another famous saying also applies to this perspective, “To whom much is given, much shall be required.” This lesson is the opposite of the all too familiar monopoly-game sense of things, “To whom much is given, even more shall be taken from the losers who are too poor to compete with me.” Contrary to such narcissism, “Response—-ability to God” means day-by-day, year-by-year, giving back our gifts to the Giver of those gifts. We give to the Giver by way of giving our gifts to our neighboring realities, those humans and other beings whom God also loves. This is the Abrahamic faith.

For more on these profound topics, I recommend:

The Call of the Awe: Rediscovering Christian Profundity
in an Interreligious Era

http://www.realisticliving.org/books.htm

The post Giving Back our Gifts first appeared on Realistic Living.

The Depth of Love

What Christianity brings to each social times is a depth of the meaning of the word “love” or “agape.” Such love, understood deeply, is indeed applicable to any and all times. This love is not a set of principles, but a raw attitude toward life and death. Agape love is the essence of the Christian saint. (This also applies to the Jewish and Islamic saint. Hindus, Buddhists, and others also have similar aspirations.) It is to a historically encountered Reality, that is our devotion as Christians. Reality gives us life and all the specific gifts and opportunities of our life. The Christian saint gives all those gifts back to Reality. Just as Abraham was prepared to give back Isaac who was his only son and all the evidence he had for his historical hope, so the Christian saint is prepared to give back all the gifts given to him or her. This giving back is the meaning of agape or Christian love. Everything is given back to Reality, our God. According to Luke’s’ gospel the last words of Jesus were, “Into Thy hands I commend my consciousness.” That is the meaning of death for the Christian saint: the final giving back.

The giving back of death and of our whole life does not take place only at the moment of our biological finality. As was the case with Jesus, the giving back of his whole life began in the gap between his baptism in the river Jordan (a washing or death to the whole evil era) and his vocation (continuing John the Baptist’s radical mission in Jesus’ own fresh radical way.) The 40 days Jesus is said to have spent in the desert was a time of praying through whether on not he would give back his whole being in carrying out the august calling that he saw set before him.

Giving back is the essence of love within whatever vocation in whatever era a Christian saint shows up. And “saint” here does not mean something super-duper special. A Christian saint is just some ordinary person who stops complaining about what he or she has been given and what he or she has not been given, and simply gives back to Reality everything he or she has been given by Reality. “Those to whom much has been given, much shall be required.” This old saying is a lesson about the nature of deep love.

A Christian Social Ethics for 2018

A Christian Social Ethics for 2018 begins with some deep understanding of these times. “These times” means this historical moment in its planet-wide and history-long contexts. Today, the terms “civilized,” “civil,” and “civilization” have come up for fresh definition—or perhaps we need new words altogether. Anthropologists have explored the transition from hunter-gatherer societies to civilizations as a passage through two intermediate stages: (1) Tribal societies of some complexity in agricultural or ocean-fishing abilities and (2) societies that can be characterized as chiefdoms. These two modes of being social are seen as something short of a full-blown civilization with a centralized state apparatus. The word “state” in this analysis means an elite selection of persons who politically rule the people living in a specific expanse of geography. Most of these ruled people are peasants or slaves with little political and economic power. These “underclasses” do choose from time to time which state establishment to serve or how an existing state establishment can be replaced with a “better for them” group of overlords. But until very recent times, not having overloads at all has been unthinkable within anything we have called “civilization.”

If such hierarchical order characterizes our standard definition of “civilization,” then the fairly recent developments in democracy must be seen as a type of dismantlement of civilization. What words do we use for that future post-civilization? “Eco-Democracy” has been suggested.

As civilizations have developed in the industrial period, we have seen the appearance of larger and larger middle classes. Democracy in its earliest 18th century developments was the promotion of middle class people to greater influence over the upper echelons of society through voting and other institutions of governing. Underclasses, including slaves, remained. And while royalty was displaced, there remained and still remains a continuing presence of a very wealthy and influential upper echelon of society. A full democratization of a society means more than ending slavery and giving women the vote; it includes making every member of society middle class—both ending grueling poverty and doing away with a ruling class of excessively wealthy people. This need not mean a complete equality of wealth and power, but it does mean establishing an equity of a hither-to-fore absent extent.

Such a “classless” society has not yet happened. Even moderately democratic societies are deeply threatened by reactionary movements toward authoritarianism. In Putin’s Russia and Trump’s USA, we see the presence of a retreat from democracy into oligarchical rule, or even single-ego chiefdom rule. Such un-democracy is a trend of political aspiration throughout the planet. And moving forward toward full democracy is still seen as a radical aspiration, rather than seen as a necessity for peace, prosperity, and wellbeing for this species and the needed ecological sanity for the natural planet.

In this hour of history, Christian love for humanity and the planet means embracing this aspiration for a full democracy. Steps toward this aspiration can only begin from where we now are. And this means creating a united movement devoted to next steps that 51 to 80% of the population can understand and support. Here are some of those next steps that we as a population within the United States are now relatively open to take:

The Flowering of the Women’s Movement
Dismantling Institutionalized Racism
Moderating the Climate Catastrophe
Promoting Equity in Wealth Distribution
The Democratic Overthrow of Authoritarianism
Educating a Dumbed-down Citizenry

Of course these six imperatives might be stated better, and other statements might be added to them or included within them. Nevertheless, these are necessary social ethics imperatives for every awakening citizen of the United States in 2018. By “awakening” I mean awakening to the historical reality in which we dwell. These social imperatives are more than a bit of best-case thinking about realism; from the perspective of the agape quality of Christian love these imperatives are “commands of God.”

If the word “God” is understood as meaning a dynamic of devotion attached to the historical encounter with the “un-word” that we are pointed to with the word “Reality,” then “command of God” simply means the imperative for realistic living.

The prophet of God knows that all the words with which we point to Reality are pointing to a moving target. Reality talks back to us all the time. Reality is never entirely held in our mere words. Even our best current words become obsolete. But that does not bother the prophet of God: we prophets of God know that. We know that what we spoke yesterday and what we speak today may not be good enough for what we speak tomorrow. Such is the nature of our actualization of agape in our historical moments of response.

An ambiguous progression of relative certainties is our Christian calling to social response-ability.

For more on the topic of social ethics see our 2011 book:

The Road From Empire to Eco-Democracy

http://www.realisticliving.org/books.htm

The post The Depth of Christian Social Ethics first appeared on Realistic Living.

The Primal Merging with Freedom

When we have been blessed to see beyond our self images, personality structures, and social conditioning, we discover our intentionality, our initiative, our freedom to act beyond those self-inflicted boundaries. Too easily, we tell ourselves that we can’t do what we can do. The truth is we don’t know what we can do. We think we are determined where we are not. For example, if I am by habit a shy person, I can still discover my freedom to risk myself in gregarious contact with others. If I am by habit a boisterous person, I can still discover my freedom to calm down into being sensitive to others. Personality impulses exist, but so does freedom, unless we have squelched it.

Our essential freedom does not control the future—almost always he future comes to us as a surprise. Our freedom is not absolute control, but a participant in options. And this freedom is a gift—a gift that must to be received and enacted by us. Freedom is our profound initiative to make a difference in what the future turns out to be. Our free initiatives mingle with massive forces beyond our control to form a future that is both a surprise to us and a result of our initiatives.

These initiatives can be categorized as many types—here are four types of initiative that have characterized the Christian practice called “prayer”: (1) confessing our unrealism, (2) giving thanks for our life, our possibilities, and our forgiveness, (3) making requests of Reality for our own temporal being and for its further realization, (4) making requests of Reality for specific others and for the general social conditions that care for whole groups of people as well as for the circumstances of our home and planet. Such initiatives involve more than thoughts in the mind; they are acts of inner choice. These prayerful initiations are proposals for speech and for bodily movements of action in the world. These deep interior acts of Primal Merging with Freedom are intentions to engage in real life. True prayers are internal initiatives that change my actions and thereby change the course of history through the attitudes and actions that flow from such a life of prayer.

Such prayerful initiatives access the power of our true being—a power that is not an achievement or a possession of the ego or a quality of the personality. Such freedom is a capacity for initiative—a gift given to us by the Power that posits us in being. Our access of the power of freedom is not an accomplishment, but a merging, an allowing of our awareness to merge with the capacity of freedom that characterizes our deep being. This deep initiative is a capacity to create “out of nothing” responses that have no cause except our own initiative. It remains true that many of our responses are automatic actions that derive from our genetics or our social conditioning or our personality habits. We can be surprised by the extent to which an old childhood-developed habit imposes itself inappropriately into our present living. But along with all this past-determined behavior, something more exists in our now of living. We simply ARE a capacity for uncaused initiative that no psychological theory can explain.

From time to time, our experience of this profound freedom can break through our personality habits. This radical freedom is a permanent aspect of our true being. We have no excuse for not being our freedom. Our flight from freedom is our own doing. We use that freedom to choose no longer being free. And when we deny our freedom, we become stuck with an enslaved self.

The Inherent Purity of Being Freedom

Freedom is an Inherent Purity that includes living beyond the good and evil that our minds can forge. Freedom means living beyond the stories our superego holds—our oughts, duties, customs, and morals. Freedom means living beyond the approval of our parents, offspring, friends and other social peers. Freedom means living beyond all the libraries of ethical thought, and beyond all the definitions of our dictionaries. Dictionaries are past oriented. Freedom is openness to the future, including dictionary writing. This freedom also includes living beyond all the preferences of our own bodies, minds, and habits. Our pure freedom is an Inherent Purity because it is an obedience to the true state of affairs of our profound being.

Freedom is an audacious boldness that can use our personality gifts when appropriate, but will also contradict all personality habits and values without qualms. All impulses to be righteous in terms of superego conditioning are bypassed in the act of freedom; a new form of righteousness reigns: freedom itself. That we spend most of our lives squeezing freedom into some narrow box of morality or social acceptability does not contradict the fact that a deep audacious boldness is our true being. We insist upon being guilty before our social norms rather than alive in our inherent freedom. Nevertheless, living “beyond good and evil” characterizes the real “me.” In spite of the fact that our parents, our community, our friends, our enemies teach us good and evil, we are each an audacious boldness that uses these teachings and also leaps beyond these teaching as we deem appropriate to the situation.

When we understand this truth about our true being, we can understand the story of Adam and Eve who ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and thereby experienced a fall from their authenticity—which fall, the following Genesis stories imply, results in all the estrangements known to the human species. That so-called knowledge of good and evil promising to make us divine turns out to be a deadly illusion. The snake in this story lied. The knowledge of good and evil is not a step up toward divinity, but a fall down into human depravity. The knowledge of good and evil is a forbidden food—forbidden by Reality. Our essential being is and remains ignorance-of-good-and-evil—an ignorance that is also freedom.

All our actual decisions are ambiguous. Many standards of good and evil may bring thoughtfulness to our free decisions, but contradicting values and standards are always present. We are vulnerable without any known final justification for what we do. We are choosing all by ourselves from an abyss of freedom that frightens us as much as it may also fascinate us. We are making wild leaps into unknown futures. We are making choices that are determining our own future and the future of the world. If we can embrace our fear of this gift, we can also experience its glory, its courage, its flexibility, and its knowledge of forgiveness before, during, and after we act.

The Attuned Working of Freedom

Reality is not a fixed fate, automatically working itself out like a piece of recorded music. Rather, Reality is an “open-for-options” fluidity that can work out in a large number of different ways, many of which can seem impossible or miraculous to our self-contained personality and ego establishment. It is in this sense that “Attuned Working” means living beyond fate. It means giving up all fatalism. This does not mean that we create our own reality, as so many false teachers claim. We do indeed create the worlds that our minds believe to be true, but these creations, being human made, are therefore illusory in some or all of their components. The effects of these self-created mind-worlds on the actual course of history are unpredictable and typically tragic in some way or another. These self-created mind-worlds always involve some sort of neglect of Reality, and thereby yield disappointments so extreme that despair eventually overwhelms the so-called “reality creator.” Freedom is realism, but freedom does not “create reality.” Freedom only alters reality in accord with realism. Freedom is “Attuned Working”—an obedience to realism in the real situations that we are being given and within which real situations we are called to be free.

In other words, freedom is a response to the gift of a situation with the gift of freedom to respond. In John’s Gospel, Jesus is given to say, “My Father is working still, and I am working.” (John 5:17 Revised Standard Version) Attuned Working is such working in the context of “what-is-doing” in the overall course of things. Attuned Working pays attention to what is going on, and then is obedient to that “working,” not in some robotic fashion, but as a free being attuned to the real options. Such living can be very powerful; our tiny little actions can instigate an echo from the whole of Reality.

When out of his deep awareness and honesty, Martin Luther nailed some discussion topics on a cathedral door, he could not have imagined the echo Reality would give to his action. It was as if the whole of European history turned on the pivot of this man’s persistent working. Some of Luther’s responses may not have been well tuned, but he nevertheless rang a bell of Freedom that enabled nobles and peasants to break with the stodgy traditions and the oppressive familiarities of that time and place. Many of the consequences of Luther’s actions were unintended and some may be judged tragic. Nevertheless, his attunement to what was so in his time joined with the existing trends and potentials, creating an avalanche of historical change. Luther’s Attuned Working, combined with the Attuned Working of others, set in motion a new era of human living that was less estranged from the deep truth of our true being. Freedom itself was set loose in the world.

In the lives of most of us, Attuned Working may not be Luther-level dramatic, but each of us has in our essential being this same potential for Attuned Working within the times of our lives. We are manifesting Attuned Working when we act out of our sense of how the cultural, political, and economic liberation of women is relevant for all of us in today’s world. We are manifesting Attuned Working when we act out of our sense of the relevance for all of us of the care of the Earth—its climate, its soils, its water ways, its diversity of species, and so forth. Freedom as Attuned Working means creatively living within the actual challenges of our times. Flight from these challenges is flight from Freedom; such flight is a cowardly compulsion, or a greedy obsession, or some other cop-out of estrangement from our real lives of courageous and free response within actual events.

Attuned Working can break through our personality habits as a state of being that happens to us from time to time. And we can also realize that Attuned Working is a permanent dynamic of our true being. This Freedom is given and supported by Reality; we never need to choose unfreedom. And if we do, we are dependent upon Reality to rescue us from our departure.

The post The Flight From Freedom first appeared on Realistic Living.

The differences between these three religions are important, and their historical battles in previous centuries were seriousness conflicts that smoked out deep truths and social benefits for the future of our species. But today, the overriding imperative is to honor our common humanity. This honoring includes making allies among the true followers of the Exodus revelation of realism, the Jesus as Messiah revelation of realism, and the Mohammedan revelation of realism. We can picture this companionship as three different spirit explorers staring into same deep pit of Mystery—each one telling us in a different language what they see. Like blind persons touching different parts of the same elephant, these and other vital religious heritages present different pathways to the same overwhelming, inexhaustible Mystery.

This companionship, however, does not mean watering down the depth of these prominent religious traditions into a common denominator of superficial agreements. Rather, it means seeing into the depths revealed by each of these viewpoints on the same Reality. All three of these Arabic originated faiths, have used the metaphor of “monotheism” to point to something profoundly human. This “Oneness” metaphor is not being deeply understood when we view “monotheism” as a rational doctrine opposed by other rational doctrines.

If “monotheism” only means to us a rational belief in “a supreme being” in some supernatural realm, we are stuck in an endless battle of minds. For a deeper grasp of “monotheism,” let us view it as a oneness of trust in the trustworthiness of all aspects of Reality. According to this trust, we do not face two Final Realities—one that is for us and one that is against us—one that is good to us and one that is bad to us—one spiritual and one material—or one holy and one satanic. Rather Reality is One. ”Life and death are two wings on the same bird,” said the Sufi Muslim poet Rumi. And here is the core Muslim cry (with my slight rewording): “There are no ultimate devotions worthy of the human (long pause for the “radicality” of this to sink in), save THE ONE.” And in Jewish writings, we find a similar cry: “Hear Oh Israel, your appropriate devotion is ONE.” And both Jews and Christians, rehearse this first commandment: “You shall love THE ONE, your ultimate devotion, with all your mind, with all your heart, with all your consciousness, and with all your strength.”

Since we are all temped to raise some temporal object or idea or aspect of our lives to the role of our ultimate meaning, a monotheistic path turns out to be a bumpy ride of continual humiliations and fresh becomings. But among persons who understand their monotheism deeply, we can see a common spirit among monotheistic friends operating across these ancient Jewish, Christian, and Muslim divides—a connection that theses deepest monotheists do not have with members of their own religion who are still clinging to narrow, obsolete, and perhaps bigoted forms of their respective religions.

In the rests of this brief essay, I am speaking to Christians about three flash points of an emerging interreligious dialogue and social cooperation that can and is happening among the awakening members of these three Abrahamic religions.

1. The Oneness of Devotion

At their best, all three of these religious traditions look into the same Abyss of Final Reality and see One Reality expressing itself in the manyness of temporal living. Zoroastrianism looking into the Abyss of Final Reality saw two overarching powers—one that supported progressive human values and aliveness and one that supported reactionary motifs, chaos, social corruption, disintegration, and death. Zoroastrianism is actually a form of humanism, for it is human values that actually define this so-called divine good and this divine evil seen as the twin-operation of the cosmos. So contexted, human life was seen by Zarathustra and by generations of people since as a battle between good and evil in our selves, in our society, and in our cosmos. Zarathustra launched a significant religious revolution and his insights gave power to revolutionary change to his home Persia and to societies every since. But Zarathustra in his primal devotion was not a monotheist.

Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, at their best, rejected this dualistic view of Reality. The Book of Job makes clear that “satan” is a servant of the One God, that the overall truth is that we confront One Reality in all that we like and in all that we don’t like. This mono-devotion is not a description of the final Abyss of Mystery. Rather it is a description of a devotion to that final Abyss of Mystery as we face what we don’t like as well as what we like. In both liking and not-liking, the people of this mono-devotion-viewpoint trust that this Absolute Mystery is doing what is good beyond any “good-and-evil” made up by humans.

Augustine, who defined the raw core of the Christian revelation for the following 800 years in Europe, insisted that evil is but a hole in the good, that all that happens to us has one divine meaning, evil means only our human estrangement from the good life as it is founded in Final Reality. In other words “all that IS is good.” There is no two-ness in our relation of devotion to Final Reality. Rather it is an Either/Or choice. Either we trust the whole of Reality—OR we despair over the whole of Reality, as Søren Kierkegaard also pointed out.

2. Beyond Ritual and Moral Fabrics

A relationship with the Absolute Otherness of Final Mystery has consequences in moral custom as well as in religious symbols, language, myths, and overall ritual practices. Nevertheless, morality and ritual are only the leaves on each tradition’s religious tree. These leaves may witness to the deep roots of the tree, but it is the roots, rather than the leaves, that define the essence of every religion. Each religious community, at its best, witnesses to the Spirit of a profound humanness that is aware of a Final Mysteriousness.

For example, the ten commandments that grew from the Exodus revelation were a legal summary that was created by humans and elaborated by humans for hundreds of years. This new style of social law-writing was done in the context of a common historical memory of that freely chosen and courageous Exodus from the standards of a hierarchical civilization into the raw wilderness of social creativity conducted on a very different foundation—namely, loyalty to an Absolutely Mysterious Otherness that grants humans the deep freedom to bend the course of history.

Forbidding murder, theft, and false witness were laws that flowed form this overall integrity. And such laws applied equally to rich and poor, leaders and followers, the learned and the learners. Similarly, the law that set aside one day in seven to rehearse the group memory and rest from temporal labor also flowed from this overall integrity. of trust in ONE Trustworthy Finality.

These Exodus Spirit adventurers, looking backward to the ancient stories about Abraham and Sarah, saw this pair as heros who left the Mesopotamian city of Ur, walking toward a promised land, not knowing where they were going. The Exodus people saw that this trust in Final Reality preceded the post-Exodus law writing. The radical freedom of Abraham and Sarah impressed not only generations of post-Exodus Israelites, but also the Christ-way Paul and his followers.

Paul saw afresh that the revelation of Reality’s trustworthiness precedes in time and importance the giving of legal form to the communal life of the resulting people of trust. Judaism and Christianity have a common critique of moralism, legalism, ritual bigotry, and other clinging to humanly created forms of social practice rather than to a devotion to that One Reality that gives overriding context to the creation of human social forms.

Even though Mohammed was a vigorous politician and law-writer, his religious movement, like Judaism and Christianity, was first of all a return to the primacy of trusting the trustworthiness of Final Reality. The legal forms of Islam are secondary to that trust. The poetry of the Koran is secondary to that truth. This basic relation of trust before law was fought for again and again by all three of these religious communions. Students of Luther and Calvin can see that Protestantism in its origins was most of all a restoration of trust in Reality over morality and beliefs.

3. Love of Personal Authenticity
and Love of Justice for All

The ethical basics that derive from radical monotheism includes the love of every neighboring being given to us by this One Reality. We are to love both friend and enemy, both the just and the unjust, both the in-group and the out-group, both the spiritually healed and the spiritually sick. And this includes how we are to love our own selves, both the despairing foolishness that requires repentance and the healed realism that issues in costly active love for others.

This love is directed toward the conscious realization of human authenticity in each person, but not only that. This love is also directed toward social justice for all persons, whatever their state of spirit health. Today social justice includes a responsibility for the well-being of the planet that supports all human life and livingness itself. Justice in our social forms includes seeing the critical gifts of this planet and how those gifts can be equitable distributed among humans and between humans and the other forms of livingness. Justice includes having political power equitably distributed to all members of a society. Similarly, such justice requires that cultural gifts be equitably distributed to all of us. Such monotheistic-derived justice implies a critique of all forms of racism, sexism, nativism, religious bigotry, and any other “my-group-ism” imaginable by the un-loving minds of inhuman-kind. Love of this depth and scope is the heart of radical monotheism.

Conclusion

Much more can be said about each of these topics of profound richness that are arising among the awakening Jews, Christians, and Muslims. And finding common spirit among these three Abrahamic religious communities is not the only opportunity for common spirit. Buddhist and Hindu religions in their deep forms can also be seen to overlap with these monotheists in common spirit. But that topic can server a different essay. In this spin I want only to note that the awakening members of a monotheistic religion are allies, not enemies, in this era of massive challenges to be fully human and fully just on a planetary scope.

For more on radical monotheism see this book:

The Love of History and the Future of Christianity

http://www.realisticliving.org/books.htm

The post Interreligious Relations first appeared on Realistic Living.

For example, it is certainly true that African American persons in the United States confront an up-hill slope compared to their white brothers and sisters. To even be a candidate for the office of president, Barack Obama had to be qualified way beyond the norm for this job. Though we might not support some of Obama’s policies, we had in him a superbly qualified person: a law scholar; a public speaker of Abraham Lincoln class (many of whose speeches will be remembered for centuries); a talented comedian seldom seen in public office; a person of self control, obvious sanity, and sincere intent to be a positive influence. Had he had any of the flaws or weaknesses of Donald Trump, he would never have been elected Senator, much less President. Can we imagine the response of voters, had Obama said things about women that Trump apparently got away with (at least with millions of voters)? A white man in our culture often avoids sufferings that a black person will almost certainly experience.

And this was only the beginning of the innocent suffering inflicted upon our first black president—falsely accused of not being a citizen, irrationally opposed by Republican leaders, assassination threats beyond the norm. And even all of Obama’s sufferings are less than the innocent suffering faced by every black inner city boy who is often instructed by his parents on how to avoid getting killed by the police or vigilantes walking home from school. “Black Lives Matter” is indeed a slogan that speaks to this innocent suffering.

There is no fault involved in being born black or brown or tan, so this is properly called “innocent suffering.” Women also face innocent suffering: their opportunities are still restricted compared with men of equal qualification; our culture also allows various dangers to their person (and life) that exceed those of most males. Innocent suffering is certainly endured by the poor: their pathway to success and prosperity is becoming more, not less, restricted. Gays, lesbians, and transgender citizens face innocent suffering of a most insidious form. Innocent suffering is likewise endured by the mentally ill. And we must not overlook the worshipers of a religion that is not typical in the general society. This list of innocent suffers goes on and on. Suffering of all sorts is unfairly distributed in every society, and this unfair distribution tells us much that we need to know in order to prioritize our fight for justice.

Yet, there is a problem with fully understanding the concept of “innocent suffering,” for all people suffer and no person is wholly innocent. If we view “innocence” from the perspective of not being estranged from our profound humanness, then in terms of this baseline, we are all guilty of being less than human. We are all on a journey either forward toward more authenticity of living, or on a journey backward toward more debauchery and other escapes of our essential being. “Innocent” is not the whole story about suffering.

Guilty of Despair

Innocent before some law can be fairly cut and dried. That is why we have courts and judges and juries—to figure out that sort of innocence or guilt. But on the more profound level of our being human, “guilt” means something far more basic than violation of a law. The deep refusal to live our real life is a guilt that we do not get away with, Reality catches up with us and casts us into some form of despair. We are all guilty of the suffering of despair.

Also, no one avoids the temporal sufferings of ordinary living. It is often true that suffering is about half of our lives. Pain and pleasure are both experienced by all of us. Success and frustration are both there in our lives. Both approval and disapproval come our way. Both beauty and ugliness happen to us. Our lives includes many “little deaths” to our living, as well as that final ending in total biological extinction.

And in addition to all these qualities of our temporality, we add suffering to our lives by our attitudes toward our temporal ups and downs. By clinging to these impermanent realities, we create a suffering that need not be. By hoping for things that can never happen, we create a suffering that need not haunt our lives. We can needlessly despair over anything, both our so-called “ups” as well as our so-called “downs.” Mostly we despair over our “downs”—over our loss of a mate we wanted but did not get, or had for a time and then lost—over a job we loved but cannot no longer perform—over a discovery about our own person of something we abhor. Despair is the most intolerable of all sufferings, yet most of us are trapped in some form of despair most of the time.

Despair is a suffering that Buddhist practices can assist us to heal—making us ready for the “accident” of liberation from our despair. Despair is a suffering that Christian practices also assist us to heal: this heritage calls this “accident of liberation” the “grace of God.” Grace is a happening that enables us to trust in Reality, a trust that leads to the consequences of freedom, hope, love, peace, and joy. These two religions and others have come into being because humans all face the need to heal from the sickness of despair. In spite of the fact that we all tend to avoid the whole topic of despair, we all need means of healing our despair — of getting loose from the trap of despair and finding release for our true human potentials.

And our despair is basically needless, for it is not built into the structure of the cosmos. Despair is an accomplishment of human beings. It is possible to give up hoping that our temporal lives will cease to be temporal and become lasting in the ways we wish to be “lasting.” However, that deep possibility of being reconciled with our real, authentic, essential lives is not so easy. Our despair is caused by attitudes that are deeply entrenched. If fact, most of the time we have no idea why we are in despair or what it might be that we are in despair over. Even when we do have some insight into the causes of our despair, we may still be strongly bound in clinging to whatever it is that is passing away. Such clinging makes us slaves, bound and groveling in some state of despair. And despair can be very dangerous, for it can seem to us so bad that we can choose not to live at all, rather that go on with the pain of our despair or even the humiliation of its admission and healing.

Most often we find ways of burying our feelings of despair in some form of drunkenness or debauchery or busyness. Even our most noble living may provide a way of escaping a full experience of our despair-dominated lives. But such escapes from despair do not last. Eventually we become exhausted, numb, burned-out, and thereby brought home to an even deeper awareness of our despair.

Most tragic of all, we are capable of taking on a very advanced attitude toward despair—the notion that despair is all there is to living a human life. We can simply resign ourselves to despair and thereby embody some sort of firm hatred toward human living that our despair reveals, making ourselves into a demonic force that lacks all genuine love for others or even love for ourselves—a spirit that hates the cosmos for being the cosmos, and that hates the cosmos for working in the ways the cosmos does in fact work. Such despair-sick lives take on a sort of purpose, the purpose of hating reality and evangelizing others to hate life along with us. This horrid state can endure as a sort of grim fun, until we get tired of it. We know that we can always kill ourselves when we want to quit this weird project of hate. We need not be so surprised when people actually do kill themselves and take a bunch of others with them.

Seeing clearly these consequences to which despair may lead, let us ask further about the possibility of healing despair. Paul Tillich has given us a formula for noticing this path of transformation. First, we look our despair in the face and acknowledge that we are the cause of it, that we are guilty of despair. Second, we notice that the cosmic truth of Final Reality is an acceptance of us—an acceptance of us just as we are, in spite of our self-inflicted despair. This cosmic acceptance offers to us a fresh start for our lives. And third, all we have to do right now is simply accept that fact that we are accepted. Transformation follows. However grim our despair has been, we can be and therefore act differently. We can be reconciled in our overall attitude toward everything.

“Everything” Includes
all Sorts of Suffering

There is suffering that is simply our finitude—the impermanence of every aspect of our lives—our bodies, our health, our peers, our thoughts, our feelings, our lives. This suffering of impermanence is neither innocent nor guilty: it just is. It is just part of our lives to which can be reconciled or needlessly fight against.

Policing Despair

The social role of policing might better be called protecting, for that is the positive meaning of police action, protecting us from the consequence of our despairing neighbors and protecting our neighbors from a despairing “me.” The Declaration of Independence referred to the task of policing with the poetry “domestic tranquility.” We have often developed antagonism toward policing, because we have experienced despairing police officers who are causing innocent suffering. Nevertheless, the true role of policing is to protect us, not cause us more suffering.

The laws of state power and their enforcement do not heal despair, but law enforcement can restrain the despairing from the consequences of their despair upon the rest of us. In love for ourselves and others, we can experience the call to restrain “evil,” where “evil” is defined by just law and by common-sense moral custom. We can restrain such defined “evil” along with promoting the accompanying works of love that have to do with assisting the despairing to be aware of their despair and to find the path of forgiveness that leads toward being healed of despair.

Such healing and such restraint of evil do not contradict each other: these two forms of love support each other. Healing the despairing provides society with persons who do the tasks of justice. And the application of justice can be a tutor to the despairing about their despair, which is the first step toward healing their despair.

Such a balanced understanding of the works of love protects us from seeing ourselves as guiltless avengers at war with the guilty criminals. We all despair. And we all need just applications of law to restrain us. A police officer confronts the delicate task of restraining the consequences of despair, while also noticing the humanity of the people they restrain, a humanity that always includes a potential for humanness, no matter how evil and dangerous that human may still be.

It is not a contradiction that we need to restrain criminal persons as well as treat them with the respect they deserve. Criminals deserve respect in line with the simple fact of their being born into the common life we share with them. The suffering that policing must cause a criminal is a suffering that is needed because of the sickness of despair in that criminal. No permission need be granted to the police to heap innocent suffering on the criminals they care for and protect the rest of us from.

Police work is an honest and needed profession—no less so than nurse or teacher. Each profession has its characteristic temptations. Our police need to be trained to watch out for their own need to be powerful over others, or to hate those it is safe in this culture to hate. This need for a seeming softness of spirit in our police does not contradict the need for our police to be clear, careful, and firm with the destructive consequences of the despairing. We can be thankful for our police as well as for our therapeutic and religious ministries that are aimed at making us ready for the healing of our despair.

For more reflections on these and other slippery topics see our web site:

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Too often overlooked is Niebuhr’s insight that the word “God” in biblical writings does not point to “a being,” but to “a devotion”—that the word “theism” or “God” is a devotional word, like the word “sweetheart.”  Niebuhr holds that the Hebraic Scriptures and the New Testament, as well as Augustine, Luther, and thousands of others use the word “God” to mean a devotion to a source of meaning for our lives.   Luther was very explicit about this: “Whatever your heart clings to . . . and relies upon, that is properly termed your God.”

So, if we view the syllable “theo” in the word “theology” to mean a devotion rather than a being, then “theology” might be termed “devotionology.”  “Monotheism” becomes “mono-devotionality.  “Polytheism” becomes “poly-devotionality.  And “henotheism” becomes “heno-devotionality.”

According to Niebuhr, monotheism, polytheism, and henotheism are three different devotional attitudes toward the whole of life.  I will describe these devotional attitudes beginning with poly-devotionality.

Both Augustine and Mohammed conducted a severe critique of the poly-devotionality that dominated their surrounding cultures.  Gods like Venus and Mars are about devotions to real realms of life—in this case love and war.  It is understandable that both of these devotions can exist in a single life, along with many other devotions: family, work, nation, race, sex, gender, virtue, personality, etc.  Niebuhr points out that each of these many temporal devotions can make an ultimate claim upon our lives.  And when they do, we experience our lives being torn apart among these many claims.  Perhaps we have experience this tension between our family and our work, or between other meaning-givers of our lives.   Niebuhr calls this “the war of the gods.”

Niebuhr also points out that each temporal god-devotion is doomed to disappoint us.  Each of these temporal “gods” (devotions) will disappoint us because each is temporal.  None of these “gods” can endure as an ultimate devotion.  Our family can die or abandon us.  Our work can end or bore us.  Our nation can embarrass us.  Our strong body can become old and fragile.  Any one of these god-devotions can cease to be a devotion that renders our life meaningful to us.  Niebuhr calls this “the twilight of the gods.”

Niebuhr’s radical mono-devotionality resolves these poly-devotionality short-comings.  A fully radical devotion to the ONE INCLUSIVE REALITY relativizes all the many devotions.  It provides a context of devotion within which these sub-level devotions can have a place, a place that is not ultimate, but a relative place rendered so by that ONE devotion to the Final Source and Final Terminator of all the temporal gods and god-devotions.

Heno-devotionality is an attempt to resolve the poly-devotionality short-comings, but it does so in an incomplete manner.  The “heno” idea points to a cultural pantheon like a nation or peoplehood  that holds the many devotions in some socially prescribed order.  Nativism or nationalism is a form of heno-devotionality, rather than a mono-devotionality, for it does not include a devotion to every other nation, as well as to our own nation.  Similarly, a devotion to life, the life of all animate beings, is a heno-devotionality rather than the mono-devotionality, for it does not include a devotion to the inanimate as well as to the animate, to the processes of dying as well to the processes of living.  As the Sufi poet Rumi said, “ Life and death are two wings on the same bird.”

These reflections allow us to see the fully radical nature of mono-devotionality.  Mono-devotionality turns out to be a complete form of realistic living.  To quote a phrase from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, this faith means a lived life in which “the good and the real come together.”  If something is real, it is good.  If something is going to be viewed as good, then it must be real.  “Evil” from this perspective becomes all those humanly invented value-universes of delusion, escape, and substitution for what is real.  Radical monotheism (mono-devotionality) is a radical realism of the most thoroughgoing sort.

This means that the findings of the scientific approach to truth are good to whatever extent they are real.  For example, if the evolution of life on Earth is real, it is good.  If the climate crisis is real, it is good—facing this crisis demands our full attention and our full responsibility toward ending our dependence upon greenhouse-gas-producing energy sources.  We can have vigorous debates about our various interpretations of the facts and their meaning, but making up our own facts to support our greed-based biases is selling ourselves to the dark-side.

Similarly, the findings of our contemplative inquiries into the essence of our own human consciousness is a valid approach to truth, and if such findings are true, they are good, requiring our ethical obedience and loyalty.  For example, if we find that bigotry, racism, nationalism, sexism, and other oppressive views are not in accord with our reality-based humanity, then those attitudes are a “fall” from a true mono-devotionality.  This fall does not change the essence of our true humanity, but it sets up a split in the self that we can call “despair.”  This fall is a fall into abject hopelessness, because in the final outcome, the real always wins over the fabricated.  If our devotionality is attached to the fabricated, then we are trapped in the losing side of the real drama of life.

It is not an accident that the mono-devotionality religions, at their best, have espoused and lived a thoroughgoing devotion to the Real, as well as to an unconditional love for our real selves and our real neighbors.

For more on this topic check out this longer essay:

http://www.realisticliving.org/UR4/10RadicalMonotheism.pdf

The post Mono-devotionality first appeared on Realistic Living.

We can have gut responses to our moralities. We like them. We don’t like them. We are nauseated by people to violate them. We enjoy seeing people violate them. These gut-responses are not our moralities, but attitudes we ourselves take toward the familiar moralities that our society, community, parents, or peers have taught us. Our superego, as Freud called it, is nothing else than our internalized social moralities, plus the various attitudes we take toward those moralities.

We also add to this mix rational justifications for the moralities we like and rational excuses for the moralities we dislike. But these justifications have nothing to do with the validity of the moralities. Any validity that moralities can be said to have resides in the social purpose that some society had in creating that morality. Morality rests in some socially felt need for behavioral order that was arbitrarily decided by some society. So if morality is to be realistically approved or changed, the issue is what social ordering is needed by whatever group is going to find that morality useful for its purposes.

If a particular social group is dedicated to living among one another in a realistic fashion, this dedication to realism serves as a sort of guide in the choosing of the moralities that this group selects for itself. As an example, let’s take the ten commandments, as listed in Exodus 20. I am going to word these “moralities” in contemporary speech:

1. Don’t treasure any value more than the value of Realism.
2. Don’t confuse any symbol of Reality for Reality itself.
3. Don’t superficially disregard the reputation of Reality, your primal devotion.
4. Spend at least one day in seven preparing for the realism of the other six days.
5. Honor the wisdom of your particular ancestry.
6. Don’t kill one another.
7. Don’t fuck another’s spouse.
8. Don’t steal another’s stuff.
9. Don’t get worked up for something someone else has.

These moral directives did not drop down from a heavenly realm into the minds or writing surfaces of some person or group of persons. These directives were made up by the leaders and members of a group of people who had left slavery in a hierarchical civilization and were now figuring out how to be realistic in their devotion to the Reality revealed to them in their awesome experience that a human situation can be remarkably changed by bold decisions to do so. Reality loves us, they concluded, with a freedom to be free. So let’s hang on to that, they said, and not return to those old Egyptian slave moralities. And, Moses might be said to have pushed, “ Here are some Reality recommended steps toward realistic moralities.”

The first persons who faced these new moral directives were sorely tempted to return to the moralities with which they were more familiar. Why? Because the moralities of Egypt were embedded in their superegos. To rip up an old superego and start forming an alternative superego is almost as challenging as fleeing the Pharaoh’s chariots. In the biblical narrative, it took 40 years to get those superegos re-habituated.

This fresh telling of the Exodus experience illustrates for us what all morality is like. There is no excuse for continuing with whatever morality we have. If we want to live a realistic life, we have to begin in the moral “wilderness” with the understanding that morality has no justification other than what appears to be the most realistic social patterns for our particular group of people at this particular place and time in the history of the planet.

Morality and Law

Social law is an elaboration of morality—an elaboration with enforcements and penalties. For example, the Supreme Court of the United States recently ruled as settled law the legality of marriage between same-sex couples. We have now experienced a county clerk who refused to enforce this law, citing her own morality as a reason not to do so. But for a law to be law, it must be enforced. So this clerk had three options: enforce the law in spite of her discomfort, resign her county-clerk job, or go to jail. She chose jail as a protest against this law. And she is being supported by people with like moralities. Nevertheless, the law has to be enforced; the law has no sympathy for this clerk’s morality, and there are no exceptions for her disobedience to the law. Her jail protest can be part of a movement to change the law in the minds of the nation and its courts, but, meanwhile, she personally has only the above three types of action.

It is not true, as some are saying, that her religion/morality is being persecuted. Under the U.S. constitution, she can practice any religion she wants, and she is doing so by going to jail as her “religious/moral” choice. Her religious liberty is being respected. To claim that the law has to make an adaptation to her morality is not true. For example, what if her morality included killing off Jews or blacks or Muslims, would the U.S. constitution support making an exception for that morality?

Ex-governor Mike Huckabee, now running for President of the United States, is arguing that this law is not a law because the state and county have not approved it—that this law is only the ruling of “five unelected judges.” But these carefully appointed Supreme Court Justices are the final appeal on what is to be counted as law in the United States. Huckabee’s view means that he could not take the oath of office of the presidency to enforce the law. Therefore, we should point out to voters that he is not able to take on that job, to run for it, or even to be an advisor for legal matters in this nation. A law must be obeyed until the law is changed. And the chance that this law will ever be changed is basically nil.

What can be changed is our mindset on what counts as religious protection, on how religious practices are protected by government and how governmental decisions are protected against religious tyrannies. Here are some possible guidelines: If a citizen is going to work for a public agency, he or she has to enforce the existing law, whatever be their religion or morality. If a citizen is going to sell products to the general public, they have to sell products to every member of that public, whatever be their religion or morality. Otherwise, we are allowing any individual or any religious group to tyrannize the majority.

If a law does not seem just from someone’s perspective, it can be criticized without penalty and perhaps changed in the established democratic manner, like any other law. Meanwhile the law must be obeyed or the consequences for disobedience taken. That is what it means to truly believe in a nation of laws rather than a nation of gut impulses.

These topics are more fully elaborated in these two books.

The Road from Empire to Eco-Democracy, and
Enigma of Consciousness: A Philosophy of Profound Humanness and Religion

For more information on these books and how to order them, click:

http://www.realisticliving.org/books.htm

The post So What is Morality? first appeared on Realistic Living.

I Love Politics

Ronald Reagan was wrong
to make “regulation” a curse word
and create disdain for government,
politics, and politicians.

I say, let us love politics
and piss on the private sector.

Let us make business obey the rules.
and let us create better rules—
stricter rules—and enforce them
immaculately.

If any business persists in
believing that it has “no limits,”
let us take away its incorporation.
Let us outlaw its very existence.

If billionaires insist on doing
whatever they like with the
billions that we earned for them,
let us tax them into millionaires.

And welfare?
Let us put everyone in society
on welfare.
Let us build everyone parks
and common facilities
and schools, and environmentally
clean places, and fresh air,
and fresh water, and sound ground
and nutritious food,
and safe products of every sort.

Yes, let us put everyone on welfare
by giving everyone a minimal safety net,
for all may fall, at any moment,
in this fast changing era,
into dire needs.

Yes, let us assure everyone
of a minimum of elemental support
whether they wish to work or not
whether they can work or not
whether they are sane or not
drunk or not
children or not
elderly or not

Let us decide together
county by county
what that minimum support
shall be,
and let us take pleasure
(those of us who have
more than the minimum)
in sharing our more
with those who have
less than the minimum.

And let us also honor work,
socially meaningful work.
Let us spread the privilege of work,
and let each of us be properly
rewarded for our meaningful work.
Let those who work receive more
than the minimum of social support.

But as we work for our proper remuneration,
let us not loose sight
of the truth that good work is fun,
that good work is a privilege,
the privilege of serving
our sister and brother humans
and our sister and brother living beings
with contributions
that are meaningful
to them
and therefore to us.

Work is not a curse
or a necessary evil—
the not doing of which
makes us unworthy—
unworthy of social support,
unworthy of basic esteem.

Our existence alone
makes us worthy of support.
Work, meaningful work is a privilege
and meaningful work needs
to be economically supported
so we can keep on doing
this meaningful work.

If our work is not meaningful,
if it is destructive or unnecessary,
let us refuse to do it.
Let us starve;
let us go homeless;
yes, let us even walk, rather than ride,
before we do meaningless work.

But more than that, let all of us
who have the privilege of meaningful work
make certain that no one starves
that no one goes homeless
that no one is denied the minimum
of transportation, health care
cultural enrichment, and meaningful work.

Yes, that is my politics:
PUT ALL OF US ON WELFARE,
for each of us may need it.
And let us make this welfare
an affirmation of our existence
not a disgraceful condition
or a temptation to
lazy indulgence.

And let us admit that all of us are lazy,
that all of us are indulgent,
the billionaire as well as
the impoverished dope head
roaming the streets
in a daze.

Let us admit that the
billionaire is also in a daze
the daze of having no limits.
Let us cure the billionaire
of this daze
by assisting him or her
to support the minimum
needs of everyone who exists,
as well as the needs of the Whole-Earth dynamic
that makes serving human needs
(and frog needs)
possible.

Let us convince
the billionaires
and even the millionaires
that only a small part
of their wealth is their very own
to do with whatever they like.
The rest of their wealth
is a public trust
a pool of public, not private, possibilities
which they must work out
with the rest of us.

Indeed, let us move toward
the realization that all
accumulations of wealth
are a public achievement
and a public trust
with which to serve the public
and to serve the public
as the public itself
chooses to be served.

Yes, let us piss on the private sector,
to whatever extent the private sector
does not voluntarily
abolish its private omnipotence
in public
service.

The post The Cry for Equity first appeared on Realistic Living.