Category Archives: Religion

Luck or God?

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There’s an interesting post on Freakonomics call "Luckonomics, Anyone?" in which Stephen Dubner says:

In the vast majority of the “success literature” I’ve read (including
rags-to-riches autobiographies as well as the biographies of
politicians, athletes, businesspeople, etc.) and the vast, vast majority
of the media appearances and lectures I’ve seen by successful people,
luck is almost never mentioned as a major contributor. It’s always
dedication, hard work, brilliance, grace under pressure, etc.

He goes on to say that he’s been encouraged recently to read articles in which luck is recognized as a large factor in some person’s or entity’s success.  I’ll throw my hat in the ring with Mr. Dubner and say that I firmly believe that luck, both good and bad, is a huge component of everyone’s life. 

I’d like to add, however, that I think that if you were to read interviews with many people they will attribute their success to God, Yahweh, Allah, etc.  I think they would argue that good fortune bestowed by God is not the same as good luck, or that bad luck is not equivalent to God’s wrath because the faithful basically believe that God has an active hand in their lives.  Personally I subscribe to the weather theory;  that God had an active hand in our creation, including our capacity for critical thinking and that the rest has been left up to us.

That means I do believe in luck. If my house is struck by lightning do I blame God?  No, it just so happened that my house was in the wrong place at the wrong time.  If I’m watching a baseball game and a screaming foul ball misses my head by inches but brains the minister sitting behind me do I credit God’s guiding hand?  No, I just got lucky that I was sitting in my seat and not in the seat behind me. After all if God’s hand guided the ball away from my head that means that it also guided it to hit the minister which really doesn’t make a lot of sense.

When I was a teenager I used to watch the news and see the video of mass starvation in Ethiopia and wonder, "Why would God allow that to happen?" and I’d also wonder at why I was born and raised in a rich country, never missing a meal in my life and surrounded by caring and thoughtful people.  Why wasn’t I born in Ethiopia, surrounded by starving and desperate people?  I just couldn’t buy the idea that God intentionally put children in that spot.  I still don’t buy it.

So what I do think is this: God created this universe and everything in it.  God gave human beings the ability, the right, to be free and to think for themselves and with it the responsibility to manage their little corner of the universe.  Luck, good and bad, is a result of the trials that God built into the universal order. Bad weather, bad people, bad decisions, etc. are an intentional aspect of God’s creation. It is our test to see how we use our tools, our rights, to respond to our good or bad luck, and our "grade" will help determine where we’ll eventually go when we move into the next realm. 

If you are a fortunate one do you endeavor to share your good fortune?  If you are an unfortunate one do you exact revenge on the more fortunate, or do you endeavor to change your fortunes?  Personally I feel I’ve been very fortunate in this life (one longtime friend says there must be something called "Lowder Luck" because I tend to get very lucky breaks very often) but I worry that I have not done enough to share my good fortunes.  Perhaps it is time to change that.

A Red State in More Ways Than One

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The state building codes in the United States tend to vary quite a bit, many rules changing a lot depending on the building codes for where you live. If you want to look into New York state codes because you’re going into real estate then you can find plenty of building codes resources on the web.
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Church_bodiesThe picture to the left is a map that shows which churches are prevelant throughout the US. (Click on the picture to see a larger version.)  The red represents Baptists and it’s no surprise that North Carolina, and much of the rest of the south is depicted in red.  To see different maps showing the nationwide representation for each religion go to http://www.valpo.edu/geomet/geo/courses/geo200/religion.html.

They don’t have a map for the Moravians but it would be interesting to see what a Forsyth County, NC map would look like.  I’d suspect a heavy dose of red, green (Methodist) coffee brown (my color for the Moravians).

There’s another map here that shows the percentage of all residents who are religious adherents and I was surprised to see that North Carolina is decidedly middle of the road.  When the family and I moved here the first question we were asked by anyone we met was, "What’s your church?"  It just seems like a very church-going place.  After looking at the map it seems we are on the eastern edge of the part of the state that reports 50-75% of the residents are religious adherents.  Most of the middle and eastern parts of the state fall into the 35-50% or even 0-35% range.  Not one NC county fell into the 75% or greater category.

Now if you want deep religion you should head out to Utah, west Texas, west Oklahoma, and parts of the upper mid-west.  That’s where you can really find yourself some fire and brimstone.

Ernest Angley Still At It

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When I was a kid and cable TV had yet to come to our house I used to scroll the six stations on our TV looking for something interesting to watch at odd hours.  Sometimes I came across a faith healing tele-preacher named Ernest Angley who was easily the most entertaining crackpot I’d ever seen.  I’d sit mesmerized, watching as people in 50s-era eyeglasses and polyester jumpsuits would come forward, one after another, to be healed.  The best were the ones who would get smacked on the forehead and then with knees locked fall backwards into the arms of Angley’s waiting assistants.  Even at 12 years old I couldn’t believe any sane person would fall for the act, but he was on week after week so obviously someone bought it. (Further evidence can be found in this article from 1980…in Penthouse?  Don’t worry the link goes to someone else’s archive.)

I figured Angley was either long dead or in jail but it ends up he’s in Ohio (surprised?) and is now exporting his faith healing to impoverished countries.  Oh, what a wonderful world we live in.

American Theocracy?

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Rolling Stone has a long article called "God’s Senator" that is likely to scare the bejesus out of you if you’re scared of fundamentalist Christian Senators from Kansas who have aligned themselves with powerful forces like Opus Dei and something called the Fellowship.  If half the stuff in this article is true it makes "The Da Vinci Code" seem downright realistic by comparison.

The article is a feature on Republican Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas who has been ordained as the presidential front runner by the fundamentalist Christian movement.  Normally I’d write the guy off as a quack, but the article also explores his leadership positions in groups like the Fellowship.  Here’s how the article describes the fellowship:

Seventy years ago, an evangelist named Abraham Vereide
founded a network of "God-led" cells comprising senators and
generals, corporate executives and preachers. Vereide believed that
the cells — God’s chosen, appointed to power — could construct a
Kingdom of God on earth with Washington as its capital. They would
do so "behind the scenes," lest they be accused of pride or a
hunger for power, and "beyond the din of vox populi," which is to
say, outside the bounds of democracy. To insiders, the cells were
known as the Family, or the Fellowship. To most outsiders, they
were not known at all.

The Senator also converted to Catholocism through Opus Dei, a conservative Catholic group that could probably be described using many of the same adjectives as those used to describe The Fellowship. Then there’s the "Values Action Team" which the article describes this way:

Every Tuesday, before his evening meeting with his prayer
brothers, Brownback chairs another small cell — one explicitly
dedicated to altering public policy. It is called the Values Action
Team, and it is composed of representatives from leading
organizations on the religious right. James Dobson’s Focus on the
Family sends an emissary, as does the Family Research Council, the
Eagle Forum, the Christian Coalition, the Traditional Values
Coalition, Concerned Women for America and many more. Like the
Fellowship prayer cell, everything that is said is strictly off the
record, and even the groups themselves are forbidden from
discussing the proceedings. It’s a little "cloak-and-dagger," says
a Brownback press secretary. The VAT is a war council, and the
enemy, says one participant, is "secularism."

The VAT coordinates the efforts of fundamentalist pressure
groups, unifying their message and arming congressional staffers
with the data and language they need to pass legislation. Working
almost entirely in secret, the group has directed the fights
against gay marriage and for school vouchers, against hate-crime
legislation and for "abstinence only" education. The VAT helped win
passage of Brownback’s broadcast decency bill and made the
president’s tax cuts a top priority. When it comes to "impacting
policy," says Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, "day to
day, the VAT is instrumental."

This guy is a player and he’s tapped into some powerful and monied networks and that makes the author’s analysis that "Brownback seeks something far more radical: not
faith-based politics but faith in place of politics" very frightening indeed if it’s true.

Is a Church a Church Without Churchgoers?

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The Massachusetts town of Scituate is ordering the Archdiocese of Boston to pay $42,000 in property tax since it is planning on shuttering one of its churches in town.  The town claims that since the property isn’t being used for religious services, and hasn’t been for 9 months, it no longer falls under the church’s tax exempt status.

The church claims that since parishioners have been holding a candle light vigil in the church since October in protest of the closing that it is still a house of worship.  To quote the Archdiocese’s representative:

"We certainly disagree with the position" of the Scituate tax board,
archdiocese spokesman Terrence Donilon said. "It is still a blessed
church. People are still in vigil there."

Three things occur to me here:

  1. At least the church isn’t claiming that the building is a "blessed church" in and of itself.
  2. If the Archdiocese is going to use the parishioners holding vigil as a $42,000 crutch couldn’t they at least provide a priest to celebrate Mass if not the other services the Church normally provides?
  3. Would the Archdiocese be getting this treatment if they hadn’t created the current aura of mistrust with their mishandling of the pedophile-priest scandal?

The Archdioces plans on shutting 80 churches out of 357 (over 60 have already been closed), and there are six other parishes that have parishioners sitting vigil.  The Archdiocese claims that the vigils are making it harder for them to close the churches, but they may want to re-think their position if they win their appeal of the Scituate ruling.  It could amount to quite a bit of money saved until they can dispense of the property.

Not bad for just keeping the lights on.

Reading List July 27, 2005

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Secular Humanism

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Dana Blankenhorn writes a long piece on secular humanism that touches on many topics of interest in America right now.  Intelligent design, the separation of church and state, science vs. belief, etc. As usual I don’t agree with some of what he says, do agree with much of it, and think alot because of it.

A couple of paragraphs really grabbed me.  Here’s the first:

Faith is meaningless if it is compelled. If a soup kitchen feeds you,
then demands you pray to its God in order to take that soup, is your
prayer really worth anything? If a school demands your child recite a
specific prayer, to a specific God, at a specific time, in a specific
way, where is the God in that? Where is the faith in that child?

This paragraph provoked a tangential thought process that helped me articulate my problem with evangelism. It is this:

If you need to tell me, repeatedly, why your religion (notice I said religion, not God) is so great then my first instinct is to look for its weakness.  On the other hand if while having lunch together I hear you talk about the wonderful experiences you’ve had while volunteering at your church’s soup kitchen, see your eyes light up when you talk about the great people you’ve met while building homeless shelters, sense the community you feel whenever you chaperone your church’s youth group trips, I see you as a representative of all that is good with your religion.  I may not join (do I really need to for you to have fulfilled your evangelistic mission?) but I will come to believe that your church is a true community of good, of doing what God put you, us, on Earth to do.

The next part of Dana’s post that grabbed me was this:

America is also a nation of 10,000 faiths, all actively practiced, all loudly proclaimed.

We have Bahai and Buddhist temples, Shiite, Sunni and Black Muslims.

We have Maronite and Roman Catholics, Russian and Greek Orthodox. We
have Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform Jewish temples. We have a
wealth of faiths invented right here – Mormons and Southern Baptists –
as well as churches that get by merely on their ministers’ brand name…

America is the most religious nation in the history of the planet.
We’re a Christian nation, but we are also a Buddhist one, and a Muslim
one, and a Hindu one. When God hears the prayers of America, he or she
hears dozens of languages, a great cacophony. And then there are the
atheists and agnostics who either don’t know God or don’t care.

All this is worth cherishing. All this is worth savoring. All this
is worth protecting. This is our legacy, it’s what makes us special.

My thought tangent here diverted to the damage that the exclusionary aspect of many religions is doing to our society.  If you’re not with us then you’re against us.

Those same people who stand there and proclaim the greatness of their religion also preach that their’s is the only way.  If I, or you, do not join them we will not be saved.  I will be excluded.  I am an outsider.

This kind of thinking is human in that almost all people surround themselves with people like themselves.  We fear people who are different. Unfortunately many leaders understand how to take advantage of this fear. They use this fear to manipulate us for their own ends, whether it be the furthering of their particular ideology or the gain of power and influence in the secular world.

As Dana points out, the true power of America is that we accept all faiths under our umbrella.  We recognize each individual’s right to believe in their own religion, or to not have a religion.  We are inclusive, not exclusive.   We have overcome our natural fear of "others", although it has never happened quickly (ask the Irish and Italian immigrants of the late 19th and early 20th century).

America is definitely a nation of economic haves and have nots, but it is also a nation that has led the way in offering personal liberty.  It is by nature an inclusive society.

My fear right now is of those leaders that would claim America for their particular faith.  America is NOT a Christian nation, nor a Muslim nation, nor a Hindu nation.  It is a nation that accepts all of these faiths and more.  It is a scaffold that supports all religions and none.

To close the loop let me say this:  I do not want to evangelize for America, for the same reason that I don’t want someone to evangelize their religion to me.  I want to lead my life so that I can be a representative of what is good about America.  I want my actions to speak for my belief.