Perhaps some of you saw the story of John W. Worley in the New Yorker last May. Dr. Worley is a Vietnam veteran, an ordained minister, and a Christian psychotherapist who received an interesting email message in June 2001. In it one Captain Joseph Mbote, who said he had worked for the late Congolese President Laurent Kabila, asked for Worley's help in transferring some of Kabila's money from South Africa to the United States -- help for which Worley would be richly rewarded. "I can help and am interested," Worley replied, but he wasn't going to put up his own money. No problem, said Mbote, "investors" would provide the money, whereupon he sent Worley a check for $47,500. Worley called the bank where the check was drawn -- it was fake, an altered duplicate of a real check. Worley broke off contact with Mbote.
This ought to have been the end of the story, you would think. A few days later, though, Worley got another email explaining that Mbote had actually been acting on behalf of Mrs. Miriam Abacha, widow of the late dictator of Nigeria, and her son Mohammed. (Have any of you happened to get email from Mrs. Abacha?) Mbote's story had been a ruse, Mohammed explained, and because he had bungled things so badly they were stepping forward themselves. Mrs. Abacha wrote, "I learned you wanted to hear from me. Here I am. Help me." According to New Yorker writer Mitchell Zuckoff, Worley "apparently believed that he was on the verge of becoming rich while rescuing a woman in distress".
You will probably not be surprised to learn that things didn't work out for Dr. Worley. When Zuckoff spoke to him this spring he was on his way to a two-year prison term for cashing bad checks on behalf of his African friends who are now, as you might expect, nowhere to be found. Worley spent at least $40,000 of his own money and owes $600,000 in restitution for the checks he helped them cash. Nevertheless, he told Zuckoff "that he still believed that he had been dealing with the real Maryam and Mohammed Abacha."
Apart from its rather sadistic entertainment value, why am I sharing this tragic story with you today? I mentioned that Mr Worley is a Christian psychotherapist (his Ph.D. in psychology was by correspondence from the Carolina University of Theology, which now seems to be an affiliate of a Virginia megachurch), and some of his problems appear to have been related to his faith. Mbote said he had gotten Worley's name from the South African government. "When Worley attributed this improbable event to God's will, Mbote elaborated on the story to say that Worley's name was one of ten that he had been given, and that it had been pulled from a hat after much prayer by someone named Pastor Mark." "It was clear," says Zuckoff after reading all the email, "that the Nigerians were able to take advantage of his religious convictions, his stubbornness, and his desire to be a hero to Mrs. Abacha and to his family."
The question is whether this one tragically stupid man is a fair representative of the larger phenomenon we call the Religious Right. Dr. Worley was apparently well-meaning and decent, but he was led into wicked and self-desctructive acts by cynical evildoers who exploited his sincere convictions. There seems to be no shortage of cynical evildoers at the head of the Religious Right, but to what extent are those millions of ordinary citizens relatively innocent John Worleys?
If ordinary evangelical Christians are sincere in their beliefs, it ought to be possible to make common cause with them on some issues. A political party based on the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, you would think, would be more interested in feeding the hungry than in repealing the estate tax. Senator Barack Obama, for example, recently argued in a speech that secularist liberals are unnecessarily alienating potential Democratic voters by appearing to be hostile to religion, as when we object to the words "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance. Just as we distinguish between ordinary Muslims and the Islamists who demand that society be remade on Islamic lines, we can distinguish between ordinary Christians and what Andrew Sullivan calls "Christianists", who want to remake society on Christian lines. Can't we all just get along?
No, says blogger Patrick Nielsen Hayden, pointing to a New York Times story from last week about a Jewish woman in southern Delaware objecting to Christian domination of her son's public school:
Mrs. Dobrich, who is Orthodox, said that when she was a girl, Christians here had treated her faith with respectful interest. Now, she said, her son was ridiculed in school for wearing his yarmulke. She described a classmate of his drawing a picture of a pathway to heaven for everyone except 'Alex the Jew'.[...] A homemaker active in her children's schools, Mrs. Dobrich said she had asked the board to develop policies that would leave no one feeling excluded because of faith. People booed and rattled signs that read 'Jesus Saves', she recalled. [...] In his statement, Alex, who was 11 then, said: "I feel bad when kids in my class call me 'Jew boy'. I do not want to move away from the house I have lived in forever." Later, another speaker turned to Mrs. Dobrich and said, according to several witnesses, 'If you want people to stop calling him 'Jew boy', you tell him to give his heart to Jesus." Immediately afterward, the Dobriches got threatening phone calls."
If the good ordinary Christians of Georgetown, Delaware had a problem with this, the Times does not report it. One citizen told the reporter: "If they feel singled out, they should find another school or excuse themselves from those functions. It's our way of life."
It's the religion itself that's the problem, says Sam Harris. If someone sincerely believes that the only way to Heaven is through Jesus, they're not being cruel in proselytizing a Jewish boy, they're trying to save him. If the Koran is the absolute word of Allah, and the Koran says that to kill infidels is glorious, then sincere well-meaning Muslims will kill infidels. Harris equates religion (by which he means largely Abrahamic religion) with what he calls faith -- the acceptance without evidence of factual propositions about the world.
Judged in the light of reason, Harris says, these beliefs make no sense. Jesus is sort of the son of and sort of identical to the creator of the universe, and was born in a way unlike any human in recorded medical history? The Bible, at least as usually translated, says so. My consciousness, which while mysterious and miraculous certainly arises from processes going on in my body, will survive my death for me to be judged and sent to Heaven or Hell? The Bible says so. But why is the Bible the word of God? Because the Bible says so. And who is this God person anyway? You say he, or this long-dead Jesus, talks to you personally and acts on your personal requests for favors? And he thinks it's very important that the estate tax be repealed? And because God couldn't have created people to be gay, they should undergo this therapy of yours? And Katrina hit New Orleans because we didn't offer the right prayers to the god Poseidon?
We consider it impolite to make fun of people's religious beliefs. But, Harris says, these ideas are ridiculous and need to be confronted. Some are just amusing, and some are seriously dangerous. When you "respect" beliefs that are offered without evidence, you are acquiescing in a denial of reason -- a dangerous denial of reason. What do you say if someone makes a racist or homophobic remark in your presence? You may decide that you have to let it go by, but if so it's a sacrifice of your integrity.
But aren't everyone's beliefs deserving of respect? No, says Harris. If we could talk to an educated medieval European like the Doctor I just played in Macbeth, we would disagree with him about many things -- the causes and mechanisms of diseases, the structure of the solar system, the morality of bear-baiting -- and we would be right and he would be wrong. We have learned things since the Middle Ages, and we have a framework for explaining the world in terms of reason and science. Yes, we live in a pluralistic, religiously diverse society where as a matter of law and politics no one person's beliefs should be elevated above another's. But that does not oblige us to grant intellectual respect to beliefs that are unfounded.
I find myself on the spot here a bit. We in this Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence are a deliberately pluralistic community, "respecting in each other and in all the right of intellect and conscience to be free". Among us we have secularists, Jews, Buddhists, pagans, and certainly some Christians, just for starters. So do I join Harris in privileging secularism above all these other belief systems? Well, yes. I don't see any rational foundation for belief in God, Heaven, Hell, the virgin birth, astrology, reincarnation, propitiatory prayer, martyrdom for Islam, psychological cures for homosexuality, or the abolition of the estate tax. I don't demand that you agree with me as a condition of being in this society -- in particular the word "God" has so many different possible meanings that I have no problem with a lot of them. But I'm an atheist UU and proud of it.
I'm also a Christian UU, though I'm not a Christian in any sense that either Harris or Pat Robertson would recognize. When I'm explaining what Unitarian Universalism is, particularly to someone familiar with Judaism, I often say that we're "Reform Christians". Like Reform Jews, we reject those beliefs and practices we find incompatible with the modern world but reaffirm what we see as the religion's philosophical core. (Unlike Reform Jews, we no longer privilege a single religious tradition above others, but like them we grant each individual the authority to do their picking and choosing.) So I see no reason why an atheist who denies the existence of God, or a deist who believes in a God who has no observable consequences in the real world, or a pantheist who believes that God and the universe are the same thing, can't still be a Jew or a Christian. Harris disagrees there -- he thinks that in rejecting the supernatural I reject religion and faith whether I admit it or not.
What's this philosophical core I spoke of? Well, religion purports to answer questions of ethics, of right and wrong. Our ethical ideas, along with our laws, our art, and our literature have developed in a religious context. Sam Harris argues that when we reject religion in favor of reason and science we should also reject religion-based ethics in favor of a scientific ethics. Patti and I read a bit of his first attempts at such an ethics, starting from the reality of happiness and suffering. It's pretty naive, I think, but he argues that we are only beginning to understand the human mind and consciousness and that if we work at it, we can make the same kind of progress in understanding ethics that we've already made in medicine, if we get the religious baggage out of the way. He's particularly encouraged by Buddhist practice as an empirically developed, rationally defensible way of changing the way a person experiences the world.
There's a notion of "non-overlapping magisteria", popularized by Steven Jay Gould, which says that science and religion operate in different spheres and only conflict when you confuse the spheres. The blog post I mentioned earlier prompted a huge debate on the "Making Light" web site as to whether reason and religious belief can or should coexist -- here's a particularly clear statement of the non-overlapping magisteria principle from a pagan named "Carrie S":
I believe quite firmly that the sun is a large ball of plasma, 98 million miles from the Earth, which generates energy by means of fusion. I believe just as firmly that the sun is the God, who is reborn every year and ensures that life will continue by coupling with the Goddess. The one is irrelevant to the other; they don't exist in the same sphere. They don't need to exist in the same sphere. The ball of plasma is irrelevant to the God; the God is irrelevant to discussions of solar flares. Yes, it requires switching contexts from time to time, but that's sufficiently little effort that I'm willing to do it. Most scientists would argue that religious attacks on evolution cross the line between the magisteria, and many religious people would argue that Harris crosses the line when he says that reason proves the premises of religion to be false. Drawing the line offers a way to avoid conflict, as long as you have a way to draw it. Harris argues that reason now explains the physical world and offers the best hope of explaining the ethical and experiential worlds, so he would draw the line leaving nothing on the religious side. Others might draw it leaving little or nothing on the scientific side. For my own part, I put the physical world firmly on the science side, rejecting all the supernatural claims of Christianity or any other religion. Ethics for me is some mixture of tradition and analytic reason, informed by religion but not depending on it. What's left on the religious side of the line?
My answer has something to do with the music and readings I've chosen for this service. You may have noticed the G-word showing up very prominently in them, somewhat more prominently than is usual in this society. (In the choir, we joke that we're allowed to sing about God only if we do it in a foreign language.) I meant no sarcasm in choosing those pieces -- they're all personally meaningful to me as written, even if what the authors meant by "God" is very different from what I mean.
Julie Gold says "God is watching us", the psalmist says He or She is our shepherd, the gospel song says He sends His pure sweet love on the wings of a dove. Harris says that all this is fantasy. There is no rational basis or evidence for such a God. Of course, if we redefine God to have no observable consequences, then there's no evidence against His or Her existence either. I think Harris would say that the idea of a God without observable consequences is silly. I'm not so sure.
Christians seem to have trouble understanding how an atheist could have a reason to get up in the morning. It's one reason they're scared of us -- how can we have morals or ethics without God? Oddly enough, my Unitarian upbringing and my atheistic philosophical position have left me with absolutely no problem finding a reason to get up in the morning. I like my life and find it meaningful -- it may help that I've been extraordinarily lucky in my circumstances and my companions in that life. I don't think there's necessarily a void in my life that my UU religion fills, but I still like my UU religion. Part of the meaning in my life is coming here on Sunday to sing hymns, sing in the choir, share community with more-or-less like-minded people, and address the great questions through ideas both new and old.
I think Carrie S is onto something with the sun being a ball of gas and God at the same time. There is no God, but I take comfort in God' s presence. My God doesn't exist at the same time She is watching us and sends down Her love on the wings of a dove. Does that make any sense at all? Let me try to explain, though Sam Harris might not like it.
Though I've read very little about eastern religions, I've picked up some notion of the Law of Karma. (The clearest presentation of it that I know is the Dar Williams song I've chosen for the postlude.) Our actions have consequences that we can't begin to imagine. My experience as a beginning actor has brought that home to me. You don't know how what you do on stage affects what the audience sees, what your fellow actors see, or how your experience of the performance changes. But all that everyone does comes together to make a performance.
If our actions have consequences we can't imagine (and this seems to be a rational statement to which Harris could not object) then it seems reasonable that our lives have a significance we can't imagine -- maybe just in Harris' terms of the happiness and suffering of others, but maybe not. If our life is somehow a performance, does that mean that there is an audience? Logically and rationally, no. It doesn't follow from the available evidence. But I may choose, if I want, to think of the significance of my life in those terms. It helps me to explain this feeling of groundedness that I have. It tells me that what I do with my life matters.
God is watching us. Keep the faith.