Orthodoxy or Orthopraxy?

Orthodoxy: Adherence to accepted norms; specifically creeds. In other words "right beliefs."
Orthopraxy: Emphasis on action/activity. In other words "right doing."

Of course beliefs and practices should go hand-in-hand but we're all human and struggle to live the best possible life according to our beliefs. So I'm interested in starting a conversation with you, my readers. What do you think is more important; right beliefs or right actions? Why?

Earlier in my life I interpreted the entire Christian faith and Bible through the lens of Ephesians 2:8 "For by grace you have been saved, through faith; and that not of yourself. It is a gift of God." But I no longer just accept what I was taught in church, I've studied and learned how to think, not just what to think.

Ephesians is credited to the apostle Paul; probably the second most influential person in Christianity (after Jesus, of course). But I no longer interpret the Bible through this lens for two main reasons:
1) Paul never met Jesus, he only learned about Jesus from the teachings of his disciples. Jesus' own teaching (up next) contradicts this idea.
2) Most Biblical scholars don't even think Paul wrote Ephesians, that it was written by someone claiming to be Paul. (This is fairly common and immensely interesting. If you want to know more about this, I highly recommend Forged: Writing in the Name of God - Why the Bible's Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are.)

So what did Jesus teach? After all the Christian faith is about following Jesus and being Christ-like.

When asked what the most important commandment is, Jesus didn't name any of the 10 commandments, he said "Love God with all your heart, all your soul and all your mind." Followed immediately by "Love your neighbor as yourself." (Matthew 23:37-39)

Jesus taught a radical message of love. You can't love anyone by just quietly believing it in your heart and never expressing that love! If your spouse says they love you but they never hold your hand or kiss you good night, you wouldn't feel very loved.

Today, I understand the Bible and more specifically the person of Jesus through the lens of Matthew 25:35-45 "For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me. Then the righteous will answer him 'Lord, when did we see you  hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and cloth you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go visit you?' The King will reply, 'Truly I tell you, whatever you did for the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.'" (repeat for those who did NOT do these things)

The best part of this description is the people who did the good deeds were surprised to learn this pleased the lord! They didn't care for their fellow man because they expected eternal reward or public recognition, they just did these things because they were the right things to do.

If you profess to love Jesus with all your heart and yet you proclaim the poor deserve their lot and refuse to help them, that is not Christ-like. If you believe Jesus died for your sins but you spend your weekends in strip clubs, that is not following his teachings.

Remember "If you love me, keep my commandments." John 14:15

So there you go, that's my opinion. What's yours?

What I do believe ...

I laid out in my previous post what I don't believe, which basically boils down to everything I was taught in various churches through my life. Many people have wrongly assumed this means I believe nothing, that I've made up my mind and declared there is no God. That's not true.

Yes, I attended the Minnesota Atheist Convention and in many ways my views are aligned with atheism. But there is a fundamental misunderstanding of what atheist means and how it is perceived - atheism like it's counterpart theism is a statement of belief, while agnosticism is a statement of knowledge. I don't believe  in the God taught by the Judeo-Christian-Islamic traditions. I think any attempt to anthropomorphize God are simply human attempts to comprehend the incomprehensible.

There is a Buddhist proverb I think explains how I understand God:

 Several blind men were gathered around an elephant and each of them ran their

 hands over different parts of the elephant. The man who felt the leg declared "an

 elephant is like a tree!" The man who felt the torso declared "an elephant is like a wall!" 

The man who felt a tusk declared "an elephant is like a spear!" The man who felt the trunk

 declared "an elephant is like a snake!"

Each of the world's religions offer truth and beauty and meaning. It's impossible to study other world religions and maintain that yours is the one true religion. I think each religion is humanity's attempt to describe their experience with something numinous. 

I believe the divine can be found within rather than without. I believe the divine can be encountered in the beauty of nature, in the moments of love between people.  I believe any religion that leads you to treat other people with love and compassion is a wonderful religion. I believe any religion that leads you to demean and abuse other people is a bad religion. 

I don't fully know what I believe. I am still searching and I don't think I will ever have a definitive answer, but that's OK with me because I enjoy the search.

What I don't believe

It's been a while since I posted anything here, so I thought I was due for a check-in.

First, my apologies to anyone who has been offended by what I've written. I never meant to persecute anyone and if you've interpreted anything I've said as persecution, I am very sorry.

That said, I will admit I was carrying around some anger for a while and poking fun at certain aspects of Christianity was very cathartic to me, after laboring under a repressive version of Christianity for years. I was angry at my church leaders who perpetuated hate, I was angry at the people who were so quick to condemn me to hell, and I was angry at myself for believing without question for so many years. What was I so angry about?

I was angry about these church teachings:
That black people are black because they are the decedents of Canaan, who committed an atrocious sin so God changed the color of his skin, and all his decedents skin so everyone else would know what horrible sinners they ALL are. That everyone who was not only NOT-Christian, but not our particular brand of Pentecostal Christianity was going to hell, a place of eternal, conscious torment. That as a woman, the thing I could do that would be most pleasing to God would be to marry a man would be my spiritual leader and submit in all things to his will. I was angry that I was taught the Bible was the infallible word of God, free of mistakes and easily understandable to all who read it. Because it turns out, none of that is true.  And not just because I don't like these things, but because these things aren't actually true according to the Bible itself. Shame on the system that perpetuates these lies because they're comforting to the masses, and shame on the masses who blindly believe these things and use them to justify their own personal prejudices and hates.

(I learned most of these at Emmanuel Christian Center. If you think I'm exaggerating, just visit the link they spell out everything they believe.)

I think because of some of that anger, I've misrepresented myself. I am not an atheist (well, I sort of am, many of you will think I am) and I don't bear any ill will toward most Christians (except those who so confidently proclaim that we can never know the mind of God, except that we know God hates gays, Hindus, people who work on Sunday, Democrats, etc.) And despite my aposty, I'm still very drawn to the Bible and Christian views. I am a philosophy nerd, I love studying world religions, and Christianity and the Bible are what I know the best. Christianity is like an amazing ex-boyfriend, the yard stick I compare all others to, but just can't be with anymore.

So with that long preamble, on to what I don't believe, and a little bit about why.

1) I do not believe in God. Yep, there it is, throw the label Atheist at me, it is sort of fitting. But look again, that is God with the capital G. The "God" I grew up with. The God who created a three tiered universe, who answers prayers, intervenes in human affairs and desires a personal relationship with us lowly humans. There is just no good reason to believe in this God. Prayer doesn't work - study after study shows that people in the hospital who are prayed for recover at the same rate as people who aren't prayed for. Maybe you feel like God has intervened in your life. I've felt that way too when I was a believer. I'm not asking you to answer the Problem of Evil because people smarter than you and I have contemplated that idea for thousands of years without coming to a satisfactory answer, but I do want you to consider the possibility that you misunderstood what happened or just made up a nice comforting story. Did God really align things just right so you could meet your spouse? That was nice of him. Why didn't he answer the prayers of a mother who pleaded for her child to survive cancer? Why didn't he answer the prayers of ten thousand starving people? Yeah, I know ... we can never know the mind of God and why He doesn't answer every prayer, we just have to be thankful when he answers our prayers. But if God is just, why would he give you beautiful weather for your family picnic, but not send some manna to a family starving to death? That is not just. So either God CAN do these things and just chooses not to, in which case he is NOT all loving. Or he CAN'T do these things, in which case he is NOT all powerful. As I've already mentioned - I'm a philosophy nerd so I've heard the explanations apologists come up with for this problem, but they just don't satisfy me at all. If this problem at all bothers you (and I will go so far as to say if the Problem of Evil doesn't bother you, then you are blind and deaf to suffering) at least be humble enough to stop publicly praising God for every little thing that happens to you that can much easier be explained by chance (did God really help you find that $20 bill on the ground? did God really remind you to run home to discover you'd left the stove on?) Neither of us have any good answer to why more than 20,000 people had to die as a result of the 2004 Christmas Tsunami and Earthquake, and neither of us have any good answer why it was not a rainy day when I got married - that's just the way things happened.

2) I do not believe in an eternal paradise or eternal torture after death. Have you ever really sat down and thought about what heaven would be like? I mean more than just how big the waterfall in the backyard would be and how you and your favorite people would ride around on unicorns (ok ... that's a holdover from MY view of what heaven would be!). If there is no sin, no sadness, no death ... is there free will still? If there is no free will, are we just happy robots? And if we have an eternity to lounge poolside, won't we get bored?  No, as wonderful as the idea of an eternal paradise where no one annoys me is ... I think this life is all there is. I can't speak further on this issue because I have no idea, I have no experience with this to go on, and science has no data on anything outside of biological death, but since I have no experience/memory of being alive before this life I can't expect to be alive after this life. I do know that the atoms that make up my body were at one time parts of stars, and will some day be parts of stars and trees and planets ... that's pretty awesome to me. In this way, I will go on forever. In the meantime, I will enjoy THIS life as fully as I can, because it's probably the only one I will have. I won't have eternity to figure out how ride a horse or paint a masterpiece, I just have this life so I plan to fully live it!  (And before you respond to this claim by referring me to books like Life After Life or Heaven is Real ... you know as well as I do that anecdotal experiences are not evidence.)

3) I do not believe Jesus rose from the dead. Moreover, I don't believe the earliest gospel writers literally believed this either. The earliest versions of Mark (the oldest gospel) ends with an empty tomb, it's a cliff hanger to be sure, but it's not a resurrection. At a later date, I plan to write about the process of midrash. In the meantime Google it. For now, it's enough for me to say that dead people don't just come back to life. But it does make for a great, symbolic way to tell a story that death has been conquered, that access to God is available to all. I think the earliest gospel writers were creating a myth. As Karen Armstrong describes it a myth is something that is true once for all time, not a lie. I think the gospel writers never intended for us to literally believe Jesus came back from the dead, that there are enough clues in the gospels to indicate this, in much the way that today's writers indicate a story is fantasy by saying "once upon a time." I promise to return to this at a later time because it's pretty critical to everything.

That's enough for now. I will return to address what I DO believe another day, and I think you'll be surprised. I've been greatly influenced in what I do and do not believe by Dr. Robert Price, Karen Armstrong, and Bishop John Shelby Spong, Each of these began their faith careers as fundamentalists and have since revised their views to varying degrees. I encourage you to read their works and diligently seek truth. We ALL spend far too much time confirming what we already believe; we could benefit from exposing ourselves to and understanding things we don't believe.

How much do you know about your own religion?

On average, Americans correctly answer 16 of the 32 religious knowledge questions on the survey by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life. Atheists and agnostics average 20.9 correct answers. http://www.pewforum.org/U-S-Religious-Knowledge-Survey.aspx

This is important to me because it illustrates what I've been trying to say, but not doing a very good job. If you don't know what other world religions teach, let alone the doctrines of your own religion, how on earth can you be so confident that you're right? 


What is so disheartening to me is the number of White Protestants who got the basic things about their own religion wrong.  33% think "Do unto others ..." is in the 10 Commandments [Jesus said it, thousands of years after Moses came down from the mountain with the 10 Commandments], 60% think Catholics take communion symbolically [the doctrine of transubstantiation teaches that the bread and wine change into the substance of Christ's body] and only slight more than half (of the protestants!)  know who inspired the Protestant Reformation.

If you scored low on this test, and especially if you scored low on your own religions questions, please do study the history of your religion. The Christian faith has not always been a monolith with a few minor differences between denominations. It seems today that many people think of the differences in Christian denominations like the difference in sports fandom - so what if I like the Vikings and you like the Patriots, we both like football, just different teams. What you really have to watch out for are those hockey fans.  But the reality is nothing could be further from the truth ... Catholics and Protestants were killing each other for centuries over things that seem so minor to us today (transubstantion, sola fide, indulgences, etc). 


For centuries theologians, church fathers and philosophers mulled over these very important issues. The idea of salvation through faith alone took a long time to be developed. Study the history of the faith, watch how the doctrines evolve, change and get dismissed. At one time in history, it was widely held that women did not have to worry about salvation, as long as they bore children, they would be saved (look it up, that's in the Bible 1 Timothy 2:15) .  


Please don't interpret this as an attack on any of you, I have a deep appreciation of all the world's religions, even if I don't believe them. But if there is one point to make it is this: 


When you claim your faith is the exclusive way to salvation because the plan is very clearly and obviously laid out in the Bible, you have failed to understand how any of these doctrines came to be. You are no better than the people who pick and choose from all the world's religions, a little of this, a little of that ... take out THAT part, maybe half of this line ....  Centuries of consideration, examination, searching, debating, voting, and bloodshed have gone into each of those tenants you hold so dear and consider self evident 2,000 years later.

The left and right need each

Moving away from religion for a while, I want to talk about something even more divisive -- politics.  But I'm not going to preach about why we liberals are awesome and those crazy conservatives should be locked away. I'm going to preach against that very notion.

Both sides of the political spectrum bring balance to the equation. The liberal brain is fundamentally different than the conservative brain. Liberals tend to be more willing to embrace change, to seek harmony and equality, and to question authority. Their houses also tend to be messier. Conservatives are more likely to embrace respect for authority and elders, to take decisive action, to preserve traditions. They balance each other out.

I once had a friendship where we trusted each other enough to tell the other when she was being an idiot. If I would complain about a situation at work that I felt was unfair, she could remind me that this is how the world works, and I can accept it and move on or I can try to fight it and be angry. When she complained about her husband doing something amazingly stupid and threatening to throw his clothes on the lawn, I reminded her that it only seems like a big deal right now and he has lots of other good qualities. Neither of us wanted to hear these things at the time, but because we both knew we were speaking from a place of love and understanding, it was just what we needed to hear.

Liberals and conservatives could learn from this model. If more liberals realized that conservatives are not gun-toting facists out to shoot everyone who disagrees with way they want the world to be, we could all work together. If conservatives could recognize that the greatest changes in history have come by challenging the status quo, we could affect change we need. We could COMPROMISE which is the essence of politics.

Lately it seems like we're getting further away from this ideal. Liberals want to rewire the Conservatives brains so they can "think straight" and Conservatives want Liberals to stop hugging those damn trees and go to church and "live right." This is not helping our nation that we all share.

If there is anything I've learned in my life it is that it is possible, and at times amazingly awesome, to hold different views and opinions as someone else and still get along. You can learn a lot from someone who doesn't think exactly like you.

It's important to call out the really big, hairy mistakes but if we can do it from a place of understanding, with the goal of creating a better world, we'd all be better off.


I know, typical naive liberal.  :-)

Freedom of Religion

I know many Christians lament our pluralistic, secular society and want nothing more than a return to the Christian days of yore. Of course, history bears out the fact that these "good old days" they pine for were from about 1950 to 1958. The founding fathers weren't religious fanatics, but whatever.

While I reject the truth claims of Christianity, I respect others who believe it. I also respect the beliefs of people who think the spirit of God can be found in nature, and the beliefs of people who think there is no God at all. That's precisely what make us such a great nation, I think. Because we have to be tolerant of other religions, other worldviews, we never get so comfortable into thinking everyone believes exactly the same thing. That kind of thinking is dangerous and leads to Sharia law.

So, the people like Christian apologist Dr. Norm Giesler really make me sad and angry. He is a fundamentalist who believes in the inerrancy of the Bible, teaches that practicing yoga and meditation is simply an open invitation to communion with demons, and actively proclaims that Christian theology must permeate every aspect of American life.

I support Dr. Giesler's freedom to believe whatever he wants, but not his insistence on being 100% correct and demanding that all others behave exactly like him.

Desmond Tutu on the Bible and Gay Marriage

I love this man, he's so humble and funny and stands for all the right things! South Africa and the world is lucky to have him.

Tutu says he still reads the Bible every day and recommends that people read it as a collection of books, not a single constitutional document: "You have to understand is that the Bible is really a library of books and it has different categories of material," he said. "There are certain parts which you have to say no to. The Bible accepted slavery. St Paul said women should not speak in church at all and there are people who have used that to say women should not be ordained. There are many things that you shouldn't accept."


In the debate about Anglican views of homosexuality, he has opposed Christian discrimination against homosexuals while suggesting homosexual church leaders should currently remain celibate.


Tutu has remarked that it is sad the Church is spending time disagreeing on sexual orientation "when we face so many devastating problems – poverty, HIV/AIDS, war and conflict."

Tutu has increased his criticism of conservative attitudes to homosexuality within his own church, equating homophobia with racism. Stating at a conference in Nairobi that he is "deeply disturbed that in the face of some of the most horrendous problems facing Africa, we concentrate on 'what do I do in bed with whom'". In an interview with BBC Radio 4 on 18 November 2007, Tutu accused the church of being obsessed with homosexuality and declared:
"If God, as they say, is homophobic, I wouldn't worship that God."

Tutu has lent his name to the fight against homophobia in Africa and around the world. He stated at the launching of the book 'Sex, Love and Homophobia' that homophobia is a 'crime against humanity' and 'every bit as unjust' as apartheid. He added that "we struggled against apartheid in South Africa, supported by people the world over, because black people were being blamed and made to suffer for something we could do nothing about; our very skins...It is the same with sexual orientation. It is a given."