Where was God in Aurora?

When something horrific like the shooting at Aurora, Colorado takes place, the internet quickly fills with commentary with a religious twinge based on a single question: Where was God?

That’s easy to answer when things are going well.  Athletes like to point to the heaven to acknowledge their thanks for some accomplishment, for example.  It’s not so simple when disaster strikes.

Holmes

In Colorado, 12 people died when James Holmes (right) opened fire at a movie theater.  Some 58 were injured.  Couldn’t God stop Holmes?  After all, He is supposed to be all powerful.

Weisel

Naturally, true believers argue that God doesn’t micromanage.  That allows shooter James Helms to go ahead and shoot while God mops up.  As one writer insisted, God is with the doctors and nurses, the emergency workers and so on. That was countered by another writer who insisted that he won’t pray to a God who waits until after a disaster to help.

Nobelist Elie Wiesel (left) had one answer in his book, Night, which detailed his experience as a teenager caught up in the Nazi holocaust.  He and fellow inmates had to watch the hanging of a young boy.  Asked by another inmate where God was, he answered, “There, hanging.”

At Auschwitz, one of the most notorious of concentration camps, several rabbis put God on trial.  According to Wiesel, who witnessed the trial, the small group voted that God “owed us something,” and left for evening prayer.

In reality, there are few options when God doesn’t use His supposed power to interfere in a tragedy:

  1) He doesn’t want to.  We supposedly have free will, so He won’t interfere.  That brings us back to the belief promulgated by 1500s Protestant zealot John Calvin that no one knows who is saved.  God decides.  As such, prayer has no meaning.  Neither does anything anyone does. On the other hand, if God doesn’t want to do anything in such dire circumstances, then all religion has little meaning.

  2) He wants to, but doesn’t.  That option would be worse.  It means that God simply chooses not to interfere for any plausible reason.  He doesn't like cities named for the Roman goddess of the dawn? Does He like Holmes better than the people who died?  What did the children killed there do wrong?  The whole event becomes completely inexplicable

     3) He doesn’t care.  This option continues the downward slide.  After all, if He isn’t interested in such events, what is He interested in?  People who don’t go to the theater?  People who don’t own guns?  His focus can't be on faithful believers.  After all, believers regularly are killed right along with non-believers.  That’s true in Nazi Germany and in Aurora.  Again, if God has no interest, why bother praying to a diffident deity?  We are essentially on our own.

Survivors console each other.

    4) He doesn’t exist.  This one, naturally, outrages believers. Their only choice is to credit God with stepping in after the event, for example, as a source of solace.  As any survivor of such event can testimony, there isn’t much.  Many survivors are plagued with questions about why they lived while others died.

Equally, the lack of existence resolves all the questions about why God didn’t intercede.  If there’s no God, then there’s no one to step in. 

Many people reject that, of course, citing cases like the successful landing in the Hudson River by US Airways Flight 1549 airplane in 2009.  The problem is, as Wiesel and others have noted, there are multiple cases where nothing of the sort happened.  In fact, in 2009, the year when the plane miraculously landed in the river without loss of life, there were fewer major plane crashes – a decline from 23 to 18 – but more deaths.  According to the International Air Transport Association, 685 people died in air crashes that year compared to 502 the year before.

Did God only have interest in one plane?

The truth is, of course, no one has an answer.  That’s why users of Twitter and Facebook, among other sites, continually debate the topic.  As if it mattered.  If there’s a God, He didn’t do anything about Holmes and his murderous attack.  If there is no God, there was no one to act.

The implications of that should keep all of us busy until the next gruesome event.

Long-time religious historian Bill Lazarus regularly writes about religion and religious history.  He also speaks at various religious organizations throughout Florida.  You can reach him at www.williamplazarus.net.  He is the author of the famed Unauthorized Biography of Nostradamus; The Last Testament of Simon Peter; The Gospel Truth: Where Did the Gospel Writers Get Their Information; Noel: The Lore and Tradition of Christmas Carols; and Dummies Guide to Comparative Religion.  His books are available on Amazon.com, Kindle, bookstores and via various publishers.  He can also be followed on Twitter.

You can enroll in his on-line class, Comparative Religion for Dummies, at http://www.udemy.com/comparative-religion-for-dummies/?promote=1

Church-State Battle Continues

Fr. William Lyon

With ample publicity, a Roman Catholic monsignor in Philadelphia was sentenced this week to jail for three to six years for his part in a child abuse scandal there.  A jury previously found Monsignor William Lynn, the former secretary for clergy at the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, guilty of felony child endangerment.

He is the first high-ranking U.S. religious official to be convicted of such crimes.  He will not be the last in a centuries-old struggle between church and state.

The issue did not arise in ancient cultures.  There, in Greece, Rome, Persia, Assyria and Egypt, religion and the state were intertwined, just as they are in the Muslim world today.  Julius Caesar, for example, was a priest long before he stood astride the Roman Empire.

Thomas Becket

That changed in Europe after the rise of Christianity, however, as princes and prelates fought over control. In one egregious case, in the 1100s, Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was murdered in his confrontation with the King Henry II over who had jurisdiction over clergy misdeeds.  Becket was convinced that miscreant priests (and the occasional member of the religious hierarchy) must be tried in Catholic courts. Henry violently disagreed.  Four of his knights took it upon themselves to get rid of Becket by assassinating him in a church.

His death did nothing to resolve the debate.  For centuries, the Roman Catholic Church continued to try to dictate policy to various rulers, eventually losing out to the growing public insistence of separation of church and state.  

That would appear to be the situation now.  

It’s not.  The debate over the role religion plays in daily life rolls on.  Both sides can claim victories in recent years, including Monsignor Lynn’s conviction.

For example, in Fresno, California, a court there recently granted the right of disgruntled parishioners to maintain their membership in a church after being ousted by other members.  The ruling was based on property rights: the church was owned by all members.  Therefore, the court ruled, no group of members could disenfranchise dissidents.

Opponents were appalled, insisting that the ruling gave civil authorities the power to impose church membership.

Judge Hamilton

Another judge forced the Indiana House of Representatives to drop religious prayers that endorse specific religions in favor of nonsectarian versions. Federal Judge David Hamilton (left) wrote that visiting clergy:

"...do not have a First Amendment right....to use an official platform like the Speaker's podium....to express their own religious faiths....If the Speaker chooses to continue to permit nonsectarian prayers as part of the official proceedings, he shall advise all persons offering such prayers...that the prayers must be non-sectarian and must not be used to proselytize or advance any one faith or belief or to disparage any other faith or belief....The prayers should not use Christ's name or title or any other denominational appeal."

In contrast, the Supreme Court has endorsed the public use of the words “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance.  The words were added during Eisenhower’s presidency.
 
This year, the Court went further and ruled that the government cannot get involved in personnel decisions made by a religious organization even if the employees sues for employment discrimination.

Supreme Court Justice Roberts

In his written decision, Chief Justice John Roberts (right) said that the First Amendment, which reads ”Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” bars the government from interfering with the decision of a religious group to fire one of its ministers.  “The Establishment Clause prevents the government from appointing ministers,” Roberts said, and the “Free Exercise Clause prevents it from interfering with the freedom of religious groups to select their own.”

“The Supreme Court made clear today that religion is special,” said Luke Goodrich of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a group that backed the plaintiffs in the case.

That’s what Becket was claiming nearly a millennium ago.  

The issue isn’t going anywhere despite the lack of attention paid it these days.  More Catholic leaders face civil punishments as child abuse cases pile up.  Bishop Robert Finn of the Kansas City diocese, for example, is scheduled to go to trial next month for allegedly failing to report suspected child sexual abuse. The Church tried to “punish” its own by moving suspected pedophile priests to unsuspecting diocese and covered up the scandal until the government stepped in, not just in the U.S., but in other countries.

At the same time, conservative political leaders are pushing for the insertion of more Christianity into American society, trying, it seems, to revert to the days before public pressure divorced religion from public life.  As one-time Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum noted, the idea of separating church and state made him ill.  

“I don't believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute," Santorum said in February, renewing a very old struggle.

The ancient fight is not likely to end soon. The government must prevail.  It’s vital to the survival of our nonreligious institutions.   

As the Supreme Court of Wisconsin noted in an 1890 case:  “There is no such source and cause of strife, quarrel, fights, malignant opposition, persecution, and war, and all evil in the state, as religion. Let it once enter our civil affairs, our government would soon be destroyed. Let it once enter our common schools, they would be destroyed."

Long-time religious historian Bill Lazarus regularly writes about religion and religious history.  He also speaks at various religious organizations throughout Florida.  You can reach him at www.williamplazarus.net.  He is the author of the famed Unauthorized Biography of Nostradamus; The Last Testament of Simon Peter; The Gospel Truth: Where Did the Gospel Writers Get Their Information; Noel: The Lore and Tradition of Christmas Carols; and Dummies Guide to Comparative Religion.  His books are available on Amazon.com, Kindle, bookstores and via various publishers.  He can also be followed on Twitter.

You can enroll in his on-line class, Comparative Religion for Dummies, at http://www.udemy.com/comparative-religion-for-dummies/?promote=1

Why Can’t We Make Good Decisions?

I recall reading a doctoral dissertation years ago that dealt with the history of sex.    It was not salacious, but rather an examination of how attitudes change across history.    Some eras were labeled masculine; others, feminine.  In feminine years, the Virgin Mary was increasingly venerated at the expense of Jesus while attitudes towards gays lightened.  Then, the pendulum would swing to the masculine attitude, and leaders would reject such softer views for more rigid ideologies.

At one time, the movement between one era and another were slow.  Lines between them were clearly delineated through published works, commentaries and civil actions.  That’s not true anymore.  Now, societal views swing rapidly, and, at the same time, contain strands from each side of thought.  Part of conflict today comes from the clash between these two diverse ideologies. 

I can think of several reasons why thoughts fluctuate so wildly these days.

The telegraph revolutionized communication.

For starters, communication is vastly improved today compared with even 50 years ago.  In fact, communication changed little between the time of Jesus and the development of printing press in the 1400s.  The next revolution didn’t come until the 1800s with the Penny Press, the telegraph and then the telephone. 

Today, everything is different.  The recent horrific shooting in Colorado was known around the world within minutes of the police call.  That, in turn, allows for a more-rapid dissemination of opinions.  Everyone chimed in, blaming the murders on the decline of Judeo-Christian ethics, lack of gun control or, my favorite, the absurd suggestion by Rush Limbaugh that this was a CIA practice hit.  How can that man open his mouth with both feet crammed into it?

There are also more avenues for communication. A person can be bombarded daily through any number of sources, all providing similar messages – which may or may not be accurate.

In addition, the information has to be presented in bite-sized units.  Pithy statements lend themselves to media presentation, but they fail to fully explain a person’s view.  For example, it’s easy to look at the economy and blame Barack Obama.  That’s absurd.  Few presidents affect the economy in their first term.  It typically takes at least four years for economic policies to filter through.  That’s as true for Obama as it was for Bill Clinton.  A rare exception is George W. Bush who, flushed with cash, dissipated it all in his first term and created a mammoth deficit for his successor to deal with.

Moreover, the constant calls today to “balance” the budget – ironically, mostly demanded by those responsible for the imbalance – ignores the reality that most of us are in debt.  Anyone with a mortgage or who didn’t pay cash for a car borrows money.  The only thing that matters is maintaining sufficient income to cover the expenses.  As a result, any budget discussion must include investigations into proper taxation, a topic that doesn’t seem to enter the discourse very often.

Bachmann

As another example, consider Rep. Michelle Bachmann’s well-publicized comment that she wants to end minimum wage.  I’m no fan of Bachmann, but that’s simply not true.  The Minnesota Representative and former Republican presidential candidate actually said she wants to end all regulations that interfere with job creation and examine all existing ones, including minimum wage.

She has a point on minimum wage, but only a small one.  At $7.25 an hour, it might prevent some employers from hiring someone.  On the other hand, federal statistics show that about 4.4 million Americans earning minimum wage now, representing about 3.4 percent of the workforce.  That’s little changed from two years ago when the minimum wage was $5.85 per hour.  Apparently, not many potential employers held back.  Also, people on minimum wage tend to be younger and have limited education.  They are the most vulnerable to economic downturns in this country.

Nevertheless, the sound bite doesn’t reflect Bachmann’s real suggestion for one way to deal with unemployment in this country.  

That’s equally true with most of the other claims, statements and comments broadcast in some form by the media.   Unfortunately, we don’t take the time to examine them carefully, logically and systematically before the social pendulum begins swinging in the other direction again.

Then, too, there are far more people.  There are about 7 billion of us now.  If even only 1 percent follows a particular ideology, there’s still a ton of people involved.  With communication, they can sound far louder than their comparative puny numbers.

Mostly, though, the reason why philosophies shift so radically lies in education.  People are more educated on paper.  A greater percentage of Americans hold college degrees than ever before.  In the 1940s, only 5 percent of Americans held bachelor’s degrees.  By 2002, the total was more than 27 percent, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.  And we trail many industrial countries – 40 percent of Finns, for example, have degrees.

People today are more knowledgeable.  Any question can be answered via the internet.  Information is readily available on any topic.

However, people seemed to have stopped thinking.  That’s a skill not being taught in school.  Because of the emphasis on testing, schools now teach facts, not comprehension and discernment.  The founders of this country understood the difference.  They recognized a democracy cannot survive undereducated voters.  They didn’t want the masses to vote, only landowners who, presumably, had done well enough because of their education and intelligence to comprehend complex issues.

Today, instead, people are bombarded with sound bites that fail to illuminate an issue.  It’s easier to accept the pithy comments as accurate.  It’s faster.  It’s less complicated.

Unfortunately, such limited comments create wild gyrations in opinions and interfere with everyone’s ability to make wise decisions. Logic and clear thought just aren't sexy enough.

Long-time religious historian Bill Lazarus regularly writes about religion and religious history.  He also speaks at various religious organizations throughout Florida.  You can reach him at www.williamplazarus.com.  He is the author of the famed Unauthorized Biography of Nostradamus; The Last Testament of Simon Peter; The Gospel Truth: Where Did the Gospel Writers Get Their Information; Noel: The Lore and Tradition of Christmas Carols; and Dummies Guide to Comparative Religion.  His books are available on Amazon.com, Kindle, bookstores and via various publishers.  He can also be followed on Twitter.

You can enroll in his on-line class, Comparative Religion for Dummies, at http://www.udemy.com/comparative-religion-for-dummies/?promote=1

Religion and Alcohol Find Common Ground

How do you like your religion, neat or on the rocks?

That’s the question behind a growing number of religious gatherings taking place in various bars around the country.  They are increasing popular, suggesting that the earnest folks setting up these programs may be on to something by twisting the traditional enmity between religion and alcohol. 

Women took on Demon Rum in the 1800s.

The movement to end the scourge of excessive drinking in this country began in the mid-1800s as a religious movement.  Women tired of drunken husbands banded together, initially in Ohio, to insist that the sale of alcohol end.   Powered by religious zeal, they ignored the reality that people drank alcohol in part because fresh, potable water was not readily available.  Our rivers and streams were used to carry industrial and human waste, among other pollutants, and were so befouled that it was healthier to drink fermented apple juice, beer and hard liquor.

Nevertheless, the devout souls under the banner of the Women’s Temperance Union, managed to foment Prohibition, the ban of the sale of alcoholic beverages in this country.  That approach didn’t work, of course.  People like to drink.  The Nobel Experiment, as it was called, died in 1933 after about 14 years of societal havoc. 

Since then, religion and alcohol have kept a wary eye on each other at a distance until now.

Rev. McDaniel

"There really is not a focus on drinking,” the Rev. Roger McDaniel, who runs a bar-religion program in Wyoming, told USA Today.  "But at the same time, it is a much more relaxed atmosphere than in a church basement. If I put this on in my church, I don't think we would have five or six people."

He’s got that right.  Church attendance nationwide has steadily slumped since the 1970s, according to a 2011 study by the American Sociological Association.  The research found that while 51 percent of college-educated whites attended religious services monthly or more in the 1970s, the number dropped to 46 percent in the 2000s and is still falling. 

The decline is much more precipitous for less-educated white males in the same time period: from 38 percent to 23 percent.

“Our study suggests that the less educated are dropping out of the American religious sector similarly to the way in which they have dropped out of the American labor market,” reported W. Bradford Wilcox, a professor of sociology at the University of Virginia, in an online Huffington Post article.

And where do these less-educated folks drop into?  Of course, bars. 

While the proportion of college freshmen who get blasted has dropped from 62 percent to 38 percent between 2006 to 2010, according to a State University of New York study of alcoholic beverage consumption in the U.S., about 60 percent of lower-class males drink.

The bar-religion approach may have a secondary benefit.  Members of various religions as well as atheists are actually talking convivially rather than fighting each other either verbally or physically.

Viola

In Raleigh, N.C., a young couple put together such a gathering.  “We have people who were born with a Bible in their hands and people who want nothing to do with church," organizer A.J. Viola (left) said in an on-line story.

“Regular attendees include a non-practicing Muslim and a self-described atheist who comes to support his churchgoing wife,” the article noted.

Ed Glaser, a retired telephone company employee and atheist, said that he does not come for the beer but to understand how religion affects politics. "This group of people, I think, are looking at trying to have understanding and have common ground," he said in the USA Today story. "I think this group of people is very tolerant of different perspectives."

The groups also include Muslims.

"I strongly believe in interfaith dialogue, and discussion and conversation is how we are going to come together as Americans and people of different faiths," said Mohamed Salih, who likes to draw parallels between the Bible and the Muslim holy text, the Quran, at programs he attends.

That’s a sea change from what’s happening in Nashville (left) where residents continue to fight a mosque on procedural grounds to disguise their anti-Islamic sentiments.  There’s a better chance there an arsonist will torch the place than congregants will be welcomed to the local watering hole to share a drink and a religious discussion.

As for people who argue that religion is not a good mixer for alcohol, the Rev. McDaniel has an answer: "Jesus didn't change wine into water."

Long-time religious historian Bill Lazarus, who does not drink, regularly writes about religion and religious history.  He also speaks at various religious organizations throughout Florida.  You can reach him at www.williamplazarus.com.  He is the author of the famed Unauthorized Biography of Nostradamus; The Last Testament of Simon Peter; The Gospel Truth: Where Did the Gospel Writers Get Their Information; Noel: The Lore and Tradition of Christmas Carols; and Dummies Guide to Comparative Religion.  His books are available on Amazon.com, Kindle, bookstores and via various publishers.  He can also be followed on Twitter.

You can enroll in his on-line class, Comparative Religion for Dummies, at http://www.udemy.com/comparative-religion-for-dummies/?promote=1