Miraculously, the team @ Twitter just gave us @hope to use when we launch in March.  How cool is that???  I’d love it if you considered donating one tweet a day for @hope when we begin in a few months.

(Via Shaun in the City — The Blog of Shaun King)

(Via Commonweal Magazine.)

I can relate.  I’m reminded of Genesis 32:29 when Jacob wrestles with God.

Then the man said, “You shall no longer be spoken of as Jacob, but as Israel, because you have contended with divine and human beings and have prevailed.”

Recently, I was taken to task about the morality of homosexuality and how the Bible “clearly” teaches it’s practice is a sin.  Frankly, I never believed that and having other priorities chose not to bother examining the issue other than cataloguing some verses.  Other things are important to me in my faith journey.  But given all the proud bigotry surrounding so-called “gay marriage” and the civil rights of LGBT persons I’m seeing, I decided to give it a look see.

What the Word Is Not: A Golden Calf

As a Catholic, I come from a faith tradition that recognizes human tradition (sometimes to a fault) in the organic relationship it has with reading the Word of God in the Bible.  Proper interpretation is known by its adherence to apostolic tradition, that is the tradition of understanding God as Jesus’ apostles do.  My Protestant brethren do not necessarily see this very well.  I have heard them quote Jesus as he quoted the prophet Isaiah in Matthew 15:9 or Mark 7:7 in criticism of my church: “In vain do they worship [God], teaching as doctrines human precepts.” (Of course, they neglect to read the previous two verses which speak of hypocrites who don’t love God and who only give lip service to him, but that’s another story.)  For my Protestant brethren, it’s the Word and only the Word and the Word says so!

There isn’t problem a problem with Sola Scriptura per se but often in my experience I see my brothers and sisters conflating the Word with their interpretations of the Bible and implicitly ignoring this fact, compounding that error.  What you hear is, “I believe in the Bible” or equivalently “I believe in the Word” (which strictly speaking is not true if there is an interpretation with which they disagree).  At that point they have forged a golden calf.  Belief becomes bibliolatry.  Simply reading the Bible is an act of interpretation inseparable from us and contains all our biases.  This is why I am deeply skeptical of any person who with any certainty claims to speak with God’s voice.  I am not speaking here of confessing one’s faith only problematic utterances that omit implicitly or explicitly the important caveat: “This I believe.”  

It takes discipline to give more than lip service to the notion that the Word is beyond our understanding and that we have but a dim view in God in the Bible.  We see through a mirror darkly.  It’s hard work to believe in something ardently and yet always open to change.  We instead want the quick fix, the emotional comfort that certainty through blind faith entails.  I am not immune to this.  So when we read the author of 2 Timothy writing in St. Paul’s name:

All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for refutation, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that one who belongs to God may be competent, equipped for every good work.

Amen.  We can read into the verse that Scripture is all we need and get lazy about it.  We forget historical context is important.  What we are not often taught is that, at the time 2 Timothy was written, scripture consisted only of the Old Testament, the Septuagint as a matter of fact!  The Gospels had not been written yet, but were little more than disjointed oral stories and traditions about Jesus.  This verse is often used to make the classic appeal that the whole Bible refers to itself as the Word of God with no realization that in context, it did not.  If you ask the average Christian about this, they probably have no idea.  Theologians do.  Catholic priests do.  Seminarians do.  But rarely the folks in the pew do.  It’s problems like this that make talking about the Bible and its contents with my fellow Christians so difficult.  And this is just one tradition that goes unnoticed, invisible.

If I bring stuff like this up, I’m often met with all kinds of resistance, anger, name calling, etc.  My faith is questioned.  My love of Jesus is called into doubt.  My allegiance to Satan is implied.  Yet, all I’ve done is read the Bible as it is, in the context in which it was written.  People are invested in their traditions, they are loathe to give them up.  And that is a very human thing.  Again, I am not immune to this.  So I understand that it’s much easier to malign me or claim I’m in the thrall of all manner of delusions than to admit one’s cherished beliefs might be mistaken.

I say all this to say that things are not nearly as ironclad as is often asserted in the Bible.  God and his Word always seem to elude being boxed in.

What the Word Is: God’s Biography

So what the hell is the Bible?  For me, the Bible is to quote my Church, “the Word of God written in the words of men.”  It’s one of the central ways of getting to know God in the intimate, personal way Jesus said. A way that connoted the deep intimacy of sexual intercourse.  So, I cherish my Bibles, all of them.  They are sacred.  Not in some magical or superstitious way but in holiness, that is “set apart.”

And the Word is written in the words of men who were full human beings limited in time and space with personal beliefs, biases and understandings that are evident in the text.  That’s why the sky is a dome and the earth flat in Genesis.  This was the “scientific” understanding of its authors.

So when I go to Bible study, I have these facts in mind.  I’m looking for God to teach and correct and such but with the clear-eyed view that the Word is distorted by the words, by me.  Just as any biography can only scratch the surface of a person’s life and who they are/were or just as no words could ever fully describe my love for my wife and son, words as symbols fall short of reality.  And most importantly, symbols are not the reality.  This does not mean that symbols are less than reality.  Just as my Christian brothers are one with Christ as his body and represent him in this world, we are not Christ.  So too do I see the Bible and the Word.  It is deep intimate connection, not identity.  So I am very, very careful to separate the timeless from the time bound, the transcendent from the mundane, and frankly, the good from bad.

Homosexuality: “Clearly” a Sin

So let’s get back to “the gays.”  I want to be illustrative rather than exhaustive for the sake of brevity, but my main point can be applied to other parts of the Bible.  My point being that people who claim what the Bible “clearly says” is not so clear on further inspection.  Room for interpretation abounds.

First let me quote from the Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians 6:9 in New Revised Standard Version: Catholic Edition:

Do you know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God?  Do not be deceived!  Fornicators, idolaters, adulterers, male prostitutes, sodomites, thieves, the greedy, drunkards, revilers, robbers–none of these will inherit the kingdom of God.

and the New American Bible:

Do you not know that the unjust will not inherit the kingdom of God?  Do not be deceived; neither fornicators nor idolaters nor adulterers nor boy prostitutes nor practicing homosexuals nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor robbers will inherit the kingdom of God.

(I love the word choice “practicing homosexuals” vs. sodomites. My church is PC.  LOL)  Sounds cut and dry doesn’t it?  I mean a sodomite is a sodomite.  But remember context.  This was a letter written in the Roman empire where man-on-man sex was deeply taboo because patriarchal as the Roman’s were, they couldn’t stomach a man penetrating another in coitus.  Men should penetrate lesser forms of human being, i.e. women and boys, since the penetrator is considered dominant.  Further, this fact is implicit in the footnotes for this verse in the New American Bible:

1Co 6:9(b) The Greek word translated as boy prostitutes may refer to catamites, i.e. boys or young men who were kept for purposes of prostitution, a practice not uncommon in the Greco-Roman world. In Greek mythology this was the function of Ganymede, the “cupbearer of the gods,” whose Latin name was Catamitus.  The term translated Sodomotes [This was rendered "practicing homosexuals" in the updated text but apparently the footnote was missed in my edition.]  refers to adult males who indulged in homosexual practices with such boys. See similar condemnations of such practices in Romans 1:26-27; 1 Tim 1:10. [emphasis mine]

So we have important qualifying information about the biblical text.  Paul is literally saying that NAMBLA-esque pagan gay temple sex and those who engage in it are wrong and will not be part of God’s kingdom.  It is we  today who interpret and expand that to include, say, two men raising a family in a domestic partnership seeking to get married.

The Bible Reports: You Decide

And that is why I stand up for my LBGT brothers and sisters.  I believe such interpretation is wrong not because of bad exegesis (frankly it’s not) but because of the bigotry and hatred it engenders and gives joy to.  My Master teaches, “You shall know a tree by it’s fruit.”  The fruit ain’t good.  Because God is love and marriage is a public expression of love, to quote this verse to malign such between LGBT persons is proof enough for me that the interpretation is problematic at best, evil at worst.  We are supplanting our bigotry for the Word.  Not good.  Not good at all.

At the end of the day to quest for that Reality some of us call God is quintessentially human with all the attendant good and evil. Faith is more like marriage than some intellectual exercise (or surrender). Religion is work. Some are good at it and some aren’t.

Read it if you dare.

Evidence for a Young World:

“Here are fourteen natural phenomena which conflict with the evolutionary idea that the universe is billions of years old. The numbers listed below in bold print (usually in the millions of years) are often maximum possible ages set by each process, not the actual ages. The numbers in italics are the ages required by evolutionary theory for each item. The point is that the maximum possible ages are always much less than the required evolutionary ages, while the Biblical age (6,000 years) always fits comfortably within the maximum possible ages. Thus, the following items are evidence against the evolutionary time scale and for the Biblical time scale. Much more young-world evidence exists, but I have chosen these items for brevity and simplicity. Some of the items on this list can be reconciled with the old-age view only by making a series of improbable and unproven assumptions; others can fit in only with a recent creation.”

(Via Institute for Creation Research.)

Droppin’ Science

That said, I think it important for us to lay down a few definitions of what science and the scientific method are. According to the New American Oxford Dictionary, science is “the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment [emphasis mine].” And the scientific method is “a method of procedure that has characterized natural science since the 17th century, consisting in systematic observation, measurement, and experiment, and the formulation, testing, and modification of hypotheses [again emphasis mine].” In short, science is a method of knowing how the world works through hypotheses, proposed explanations of how the world works, and testing those hypothesis to verify them, or more rigorously show they are not falsified. As Einstein said, “No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.” (It is not a coincidence that the Age of Reason/Enlightenment also began roughly in the mid 17th century. Modern science is deeply rooted in it.)

Having Your Cake and Eating It Too

In the article, the author lays out several pieces of what he considers evidence. I want to focus on two pieces because they exemplify nicely what I think is wrong with Creation Science besides its name.

According to astronomical observations, galaxies like our own experience about one supernova (a violently-exploding star) every 25 years. The gas and dust remnants from such explosions (like the Crab Nebula) expand outward rapidly and should remain visible for over a million years. Yet the nearby parts of our galaxy in which we could observe such gas and dust shells contain only about 200 supernova remnants. That number is consistent with only about 7,000 years worth of supernovas.

And

Uranium and thorium generate helium atoms as they decay to lead. A study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research showed that such helium produced in zircon crystals in deep, hot Precambrian granitic rock has not had time to escape.[25] Though the rocks contain 1.5 billion years worth of nuclear decay products, newly-measured rates of helium loss from zircon show that the helium has been leaking for only 6,000 (± 2000) years.[26] This is not only evidence for the youth of the earth, but also for episodes of greatly accelerated decay rates of long half-life nuclei within thousands of years ago, compressing radioisotope timescales enormously.

So what could possibly be wrong here? Well, there are a few problems.

1. Selective memory. The article is selective in its use of evidence, specifically only the evidence that comports with the hypothesis: the biblical chronology of our universe is true and is thus scientifically accurate. If this is considered science, how does Creation Science deal with evidence that doesn’t go with the program? The answer is: It does not. Ironically, a Creationist has refuted this articles take on supernovae using scientific observations of supernovae remnants hundreds of thousands, even millions, of years old disproving the Young Earth theory on these grounds. Here is another by a non-Creationist.
2. Defeating Your Purpose. The “evolutionary” theory of our universe is based on physics, a study of the physical world using mathematics to represent, describe, and predict natural phenomena. What nuclear physics tells us is that it can take billions of years for supernovae to occur because that is how long it would take such massive objects as stars to burn enough of a their nuclear fuel to explode. So Young Earthers are using the remnants of well understood phenomena to “prove” the time span needed for that phenomena to exist is impossibly long. If that isn’t scientifically contradicting oneself, I don’t know what is.
3. Where’s the Beef? Under a Shell. Now the point of the article is to list some data or interpret data in such a way that the Earth can scientifically be considered 6,000 years old . Yet, this is exactly what he didn’t do. He attempted to falsify the “evolutionary” theory of our universe. OK, but the author provides no evidence whatsoever nor–and this is critical—a means of testing that evidence to support the Creationist hypothesis on how our universe was created and evolved, pun intended. Remember, science is about testing hypotheses not merely asserting their truthfulness. The Bible and the fundamentalist ideological understanding of it are all the “proof” that is needed. Now that might be good religion or pseudo-science but it is piss poor science.

Keep It Real

Again it is not my intention to disprove Creation Science. I leave that to myriad people on the Internet with the time and inclination to attempt do so. And their Creationist opponents to refute the refutations. My problem is honesty. I am a disciple of Jesus Christ which means I love truth…come what may. Creation Science is not grounded in a respect for truth, but a need to define it. And that leads to intellectual dishonesty if one isn’t careful. It is intellectually dishonest to call punching holes in a theory, however unsuccessfully, appealing to the miraculous and providing no evidentiary support for one’s own theory science. If you don’t follow the rules of science, it isn’t science. It is a sophist shell game at best and chicanery at worst.

I say faith because that is by definition belief in something impossible to prove. You simply can’t prove a negative without, dare I say it, the infinite knowledge of God. (Props to Professor Michael Eric Dyson for challenging me on my fideistic acceptance of materialism.) But that’s not the only reason why I call it faith.

The sheer arrogance of the likes of Bill Maher and Richard Dawkins is reminiscent of the Magesterium in times past and, to my regret, not so distant past. We know The Truth while the rest of the world is either deluded, stupid, or both. It’s implicit in the ideology. Even well meaning folks can’t seem to avoid it. One of the coolest people on this planet I know asked me “Why do you believe in God, Rob, you’re so intelligent?” out of genuine curiosity. Except for his atheism, he is the opposite of Dick Dawkins. (Yes, I mean the pun). At Bible study/Church school, we are going through adult catechism over the next year. It’s amazing how the ethos is identical insofar as the tendency of all too many to look down on the beliefs of others.

I love Truth and work hard at finding it but I’m not so prideful to claim it as my own. I have to be, like a good scientist would be, willing to accept that tomorrow’s discovery will turn my world upside down else I have no faith, “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”

And on that note:

I’m not an atheist and I don’t think I can call myself a pantheist. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many different languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn’t know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God.

–Albert Einstein

Amen.

What happens when faith forms the basis of a political agenda? On the one hand it can sustain through astoundingly difficult times: the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. And Lord knows, no great political movement has ever gotten through those kinds of times without “keeping the faith,” e.g. the Civil Rights Movement. On the other hand, however, it can be problematic for political discourse in a pluralistic, democratic society.
Barack Obama once gave a great speech that spelled out some of the issues. I repeat here what he said on political discourse.

Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals be subject to argument and amenable to reason. I may be opposed to abortion for religious reasons, but if I seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or evoke God’s will. I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all.
This is going to be difficult for some who believe in the inerrancy of the Bible, as many evangelicals do. But in a pluralistic democracy, we have no choice. Politics depends on our ability to persuade each other of common aims based on a common reality. It involves compromise, the art of what’s possible. At some fundamental level, religion does not allow for compromise. It’s the art of the impossible. If God has spoken, then followers are expected to live up to God’s edicts, regardless of the consequences. To base one’s life on such uncompromising commitments may be sublime, but to base our policy-making on such commitments would be a dangerous thing.

Dangerous indeed. In my discussion with my friends I sought to present commitments of faith translated into universal values, such as fairness and equality versus hypocrisy and oppression, so that I might convince them of the truth in which I believe. Perhaps I was successful, more likely I was not, esp. given the response. To God be all the glory, all the failures blame on me. What I found is that our realities are not all that common. We as Americans have a long way to go. And that means that faith continues to be at once an ally and threat to our politics.