we are not sofas

Unlike the biblical literalists, who protected the separate spheres by citing the damage that Eve had caused by crossing the line in the Garden of Eden, the Unitarians [of the mid-19th century] argued that God's plan was written into the world he created.  "Woman was formed to obey"...and it was her duty to minister to the needs of her family at home.  The publication of Horace Bushnell's Christian Nurture in 1847 elevated this line of defense by canonizing domestic religion.  It established the home as the "seat of religion," where mothers, anointed as priestesses, tended worshipful families at table and hearth and filled the young souls with the spirit of Christ.  As a charming vignette of the moral growth that began at home in a mother's arms, this iconography helped the liberals compete with the evangelical brothers, whose instant act of conversion has a proven appeal with the masses.  But beyond this, by setting the home apart as the "church of childhood" and woman's preserve, it reinforced the division of precincts known as the doctrine of separate spheres, strengthening men's authority in the larger church outside.

--from No Silent Witness:  The Eliot Parsonage Women and Their Unitarian World by Cynthia Grant Tucker

I'm uncertain it's possible to find anything good to say about the attitude the above describes.  That this was the predominant attitude of men, even religiously liberal men, is something we all grew up knowing, and for many of us our rejection of it may have been our first rebellion.

But that the attitude persists and, in some quarters, is actually seen itself as rebellion against the liberality of contemporary society, should be a cause for alarm and concern.  The world has always been too complex to divide it into spheres, as if each kept neatly to itself--rather than spheres the world is better described as being composed of huge, misshapen, permeable layers of responsibility, influence, and authority.  No one person can have such a field all to him or herself; everything bubbles up or drips down or slides from side to side as days pass, and to pretend that nothing within it changes--like authority, like influence, like responsibility--is to pretend our existence has been Scotch-guarded, if not since Creation, then at least since the 1950s.  

Not only is life too complex for that.  We are too complex for that.

what gives me hope

last week I was asked during a job interview what gave me hope--interview questions for ministers are a little different than for, say, retail workers--and my answer was something akin to the following but lynn margulis does a much better job of putting it together. it is knowing this that helps me to keep on keeping on when a bush is elected or a walker is reelected.

[T]he brilliant American bacteriologist Lynn Margulis has proposed that every kosmos, from the microcosmic organism on up to our macrocosmic planet, has evolved through a very long game of symbiosis, "the coming together that leads to physical interdependence and the permanent sharing of cells and bodies."  Two billion years ago, free-floating bacteria combined to form what Margulis calls "bacterial confederacies."  These confederacies gradually formed a thin membrane that held them together.  Then some of the bacteria turned into the oxygen-using mitochondria, and a command center, the nucleus, took shape.  The cell was born, or rather, self-made through what some scientists today call autopoiesis.  Then cells took up residence inside larger organisms that in turn developed into their own protective membranes.  And they are still with us.  "The descendants of the bacteria that swam in primeval seas breathing oxygen three billion years ago exist now in our bodies as mitochondria," writes Margulis...The larger flora and fauna in turn formed communities within forests and other ecosystems that also acted as even larger, self-regulating organisms.  And all of these biomes are finally protected by an even larger membrane, the atmosphere.  Margulis refers to her theory, her scientific creation story, as symbiogenesis.

--from an american gospel:  on family, history, and the kingdom of god by erik reece

despite all that's been done to it--and earth and the cosmos have done more to it than puny mortal creatures like us can do to it (although that's not to say we can't make it uninhabitable for ourselves or other creatures)--the earth and existence has carried on.  and even despite what we do to ourselves, we continue in more or less the same shape.  that gives me hope on both a species and an individual level.

did jesus die for klingons too?

this fascinates me and I've started a conversation about it in the past which I will doubtless talk about again.

"we are unfolding"

"we have the same brain as our paleolithic ancestors. some scientists believe that the religious impulse is in the architecture of our brain, a by-product of evolution. (1) we believe in god because we are evolutionarily adapted to believe in what psychologists call an agent, something independent, purposeful, and outside ourselves that could affect us--possibly in a bad way. humans who assume that it is a lion causing that ripple in the grass, rather than the wind, tend to survive longer. (2) we believe in god because we are evolutionarily adapted to create narratives and explanations. the tracks in the sand mean that a deer recently passed this way. a pool nearby means the deer might be thirsty, and if it moves here and I move there, I could be eating its leg for dinner. life isn't just a matter of chance. life is about cause and effect. (3) we believe in god because we are evolutinarily adapted, as social animals, to understand that other people have minds. we cannot see what these invisible minds are thinking or planning, but we would be wise to anticipate whether they are friendly or angry. we believe there are invisible forces in the world, invisible minds in solid bodies.

"why not, then, a mind outside the body? why not an invisible agent involved in the story of our own life? although such an idea mostly describes theism, the message is the same for pantheists. we are predisposed to believe in a meaningful, interconnected world, as well as in something outside and larger than ourselves. we may choose to believe in these things because such beliefs help us deal with grief and despair, motivate us to cohere socially, and are generally more fun and interesting than not.

"other scientists say that religion is less a by-product of evolution than an actual adaptation, furthering longer life and more reproduction. for example, religious belief may have allowed our ancestors to marshal the placebo effect offered by shamanistic healing. although scientists are not sure how the human body responds to the idea of a cure and heals itself, we know that this happens on a regular basis. ritual healing may have been particularly important when there were fewer medical options. people who inclined toward a belief in shamans, spirits, and gods--who had more of the hardwiring that promotes religious experience--better survived injury and disease and thus had a reproductive advantage.

"from then to now, the hardwiring hasn't changed. we are, of course, running new software. we read. we write. we fly through the air strapped into plastic seats, drinking diet coke. I will never see the world the way a hunter-gatherer saw it. in terms of my relationship with the earth, I am sorry about that. I feel left out. I feel incompetent. but there you go. that's history...the universe is an irreversible emergent process. we are unfolding. we are moving forward along with everything else, changing and being changed. we carry with us our past and our genetic coding. we are who we were. but we can't go back either."

--from standing in the light: my life as a pantheist by sharman apt russell

evolution and revolution, part 3

"We may remember comments from our own history, comments we heard repeatedly in the late 1960s and early 70s about our own attempts at change: evolution, not revolution. It’s not necessarily a bad suggestion, a gentle but irreversible change versus a sudden violent alteration in the environment. Its speakers had the best intentions in mind while saying it—let no one be hurt—but to mean it required forgetting that evolution works on a scale of time in which the slightest, most important changes occur at a pace at which they are unfelt and invisible to the subjects. This did not happen in Egypt. It happened over a course of fewer than three weeks. It did not happen in Tunisia, the other African nation credited with lighting the match to what has come to be called the Jasmine Revolution. The Tunisian uprising, reportedly sparked by the December self-immolation of would-be vendor Mohamed Bouazizi, led to the mid-January ouster of that nation’s president Zine El Abadine Ben Ali after twenty-three uncontested years in power.

"The Jasmine Revolution is a name, by the way, given the Tunisian protests by journalists outside Tunisia interested in developing a 'color narrative' of sometimes successful spontaneous popular uprisings in reaction to contested elections; in addition to Jasmine there are the 2003 Rose Revolution of Georgia, the 2004 Orange Revolution in the Ukraine, the 2005 Tulip Revolution of Kyrgyzstan, the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon that same year, the Kuwaiti Blue Revolution also of 2005, and the notoriously unsuccessful 2009 Green Revolution in Iran. There was also the Bush Administration’s labeling of the Iraqi elections of 2005 as the Purple Revolution, a label that was never picked up by the Iraqis, Americans, or the press. The so-called Jasmine Revolution is credited with sparking similar recent uprisings in Algeria, Yemen and Jordan.

"We cannot forget that the use of “evolution” to describe these events is not meant to somehow suggest they are bloodless or smooth. The word 'evolution' can often mask the uncountable lives lost and pain experienced by real generations of animals to develop a single useful change. Neither must we forget Human Rights Watch has confirmed at least 120 dead in Cairo, Suez, and Alexandria. I don’t know if that number includes the reported sixty-five prisoners shot in their cells at al-Qatta prison outside Cairo in the first days of unrest. Those numbers may grow. [They are now at nearly 300.] The United Nations has reported at least nearly one hundred fifty people killed and over five hundred injured during the protests in Tunisia. Great Britain’s Guardian newspaper has published the identities of over a thousand people killed or jailed during Iran’s 2009 uprising and immediately after, the most famous of which is Neda Agha-Soltan, the 26-year old music student whose cell-phone and videotaped shooting death has been called by Time 'probably the most widely witnessed death in human history.'

"We are spoiled I think by the bloodlessness of our political shifts, even one as charged as the transition from George W. Bush to Barack Obama, into thinking that other such events in other places are equally mundane. Despite the rhetoric used by Obama detractors about the tree of liberty being watered by the blood of tyrants and the multiple deaths of innocents at the weapons of various hard-right figures, including our own deaths at Knoxville’s Tennessee Valley UU Church, the United States has been blessed in recent decades with relatively painless revolutions, almost to the point where the word means nothing anymore: the sexual revolution, the educational revolution, the digital revolution, the cultural revolutions and cultural wars. We toss those sobriquets out too quickly, as if all it takes to be a revolutionary is to disagree with someone in authority, forgetful that, in a real revolution, as in real evolution, people are hurt and people die.

"But the species goes on. Despite revolutions, societies also go on. Tunisia is still a chaotic place but Tunisia continues to exist as a real entity where people eat and fall in love and sell produce and sing and are born and die. There is no telling how events will settle in Egypt and sometime soon we may look back on these days after the uprising with a wistfulness and embarrassment that we could ever be so dewy-eyed and naïve. But Egypt too remains a real place where people are dancing and singing and setting off fireworks and honking truck horns and hoping and expecting. Just as with the American Revolution, history doesn’t stop after the immediate goal is accomplished. Like with evolution, life has a tendency to continue and just because a creature develops an arched foot doesn’t mean the effects end or the problems the change was meant to remedy stop. Work continues, responsibility continues. Reflection will be good for the Egyptians and the Tunisians and for us, looking back at our own euphoria after Barack Obama’s election, to decide whether we have been guilty not of having been somehow taken in but of having too quickly excused ourselves from our responsibilities."

evolution and revolution part 2

"Equally apt was the release Friday of the results of research into the metatarsals found among Australopithecus afarensis bones in Hadar, Ethiopia. The metatarsal is a long bone connecting human toes to the base of human feet. You are probably aware of the discoveries of both hominids called Lucy and Lucy’s Baby, but I’m going to quote myself in refreshing your memories in explaining the importance of their discoveries. This is from a 2008 sermon of mine about the history of walking:

"'That our earliest known progenitor...

"The new findings of the research published in the journal Science report that the feet of Australopithecus afarensis were similar to our own. There were no feet bones uncovered either with Lucy or with Selam so scientists were uncertain, as Solnit points out, as to whether our ancestors’ feet were still accustomed to clinging to tree branches. The research team, led by integrative anatomist Carol Ward of the University of Missouri, discovered by examining the metatarsals, which predate Lucy and Selam by multiple millions of years, that the hominids 'were fully humanlike and committed to life on the ground.'

"The metatarsal itself was stiff and arched, like our own, and not flexible like an ape’s. Ape metatarsals are spongiform to allow their feet to clutch like our hands do when their prehensile toes grabbed branches. Ward writes, 'The development of arched feet was a fundamental shift toward the human condition, because it meant giving up the ability to use the big toe for grasping branches, signaling that our ancestors had finally abandoned life in the trees in favor of life on the ground.'

"Like the forebears of Australopithecus aferensis, the Egyptians are standing and walking on unsteady feet accustomed to something different. The progenitors of Lucy and Selam who were themselves our progenitors had made the fateful decision at some point to leave the shelter of trees and step out into the wide, hostile, unknown world. Similarly, the people of Egypt at some point realized they needed to leave the shelter of a political system many of them had known all their lives to step out into the wide, hostile unknowable result of changing that system. Their decision, I’m certain, is no less fateful. There is no little consequence in both cases: in our ancestors’ case, there was the awful certainty of death by long-teethed predators on the savannah. No less, for the people of Egypt, there is the uncertainty of chaos, ruled now by the Egyptian military—in which, I should note, many of them have the amount of confidence many of us would have in our own military, for good and for bad—but in the near future by whatever strong political faction, secular, religious, civilian or military or a combination, might be strongest. Fox News, for instance, fans fears that they will be eaten up by a government harnessed to the worst elements of Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, and while that’s as unlikely as a US government composed of members of Christian Identity militias and the Ku Klux Klan, it remains a possibility all the same."

evolution & revolution pt 1

after yesterday's inclusion of part of my evolution sunday sermon, I've decided to publish the rest of it in pieces and with links. today is part 1:


EVOLUTION AND REVOLUTION
A Sermon Delivered to Dakota Unitarian Universalist Church
On February 13, 2011

The images are electric. People dancing with flags. Small fireworks zipping up into the night sky. Hands high over heads that are shouting and singing. Truck horns honking. Innumerable numbers of people surrounding Tahrir Square in Cairo and in public squares in Memphis, Alexandria, and other cities, in symbolic spinning circles that mimic the spinning circles of pilgrims on hajj around the Kaaba in Mecca.

Can we imagine anything like it? Yes, I think we can. Many of us remember similar euphoria, dancing and singing and crying, over the swiftly developing ruins of the Berlin Wall. Or the joy and release of revolutions in South Africa and Czechoslovakia that left former government prisoners Nelson Mandela and Vaclav Havel as their presidents. And of course many of us felt a similar elation a little over two years ago after the results of the 2008 election were announced and Barack Obama replaced George W. Bush in the Oval Office.

Of course, I would be remiss not to refer also to the joy and elation many of us experienced at other times that didn’t turn out well. In February 1979 we watched the Shah of Iran run with his tail between his legs, defeated by the twin intensity of protests by students and religious leaders and heard the thanking of god and thanking of history; and it was only a few months later, in November, when some of those same students rushed the American embassy, taking fifty two hostages for nearly a year and a half. Some may remember the exultation when economics professor Robert Mugabe entered the President’s Palace as the first elected black African leader in the coup that replaced notorious corrupt Rhodesian leader Ian Smith; our cheers would stick in our throats within two years. And of course we all remember the images from Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China, as the students and intelligentsia there, emboldened by the success of other revolutions, occupied the Square demanding democratic and economic reforms, and the iconic photo of Tank Man, a lone protestor who stared down four tanks armed with nothing more than shopping bags; and we may remember the images from seven weeks later when the People’s Liberation Army, on orders to clear the Square, did so with bayonets and clubs and bullets, leaving an unknown number of civilians dead, their numbers estimated between eight hundred and three thousand, and countless others injured.

It’s entirely apt that Hosni Mubarak, who has ruled Egypt since the assassination of Anwar Sadat in October 1981, should find the exit door from Cairo the day before Charles Darwin’s birthday. Like everything else, political entities and societies evolve. And like evolution itself, it’s not always to the immediate benefit of the subject and it’s not always pretty. Of course, political revolution, played out in the space of years or months or, in the case of the Egyptian uprising, eighteen days, is far different than biological evolution, which takes place over a sense of scale that dwarfs our ability even to imagine it. But I think it’s fair to make a connection between the two.

what if?

this is an idea I've long considered and I intend to think in greater earnest about it after having read this essay. what would be the consequence theologically of our finding life elsewhere? not necessarily nasty or enlightened life and not even intelligent--by which we almost always mean "more intelligent than we are"--life, but life of a sort we would recognize?

this would have a tremendous impact as most faiths assume this planet is alone in the universe as a site for god's or nature's or ultimate reality's experimentation. it's a science fiction topic ripe with possibilities and I almost never see it handled in novels or movies. almost invariably extraterrestrial life is handled almost like we handle new neighbors we hadn't realized were building over the hill: surprise and then reaction to their behavior that has an impact on us.

what if the raelians and scientologists and ufo cults are right, not in their particulars, but in their generality that we share the universe with other independently developed beings? would faiths adapt, accepting these unknowns as co-existers? would the unknown itself become the new god or some aspect of a new god? or would most religions retreat into isolationism, claiming that there really isn't any other life or that it isn't important or it's a development of the adversary (as some have done with fossils)?