Search for Decoder Rings

In the mid-1950s I was very active in the Methodist Church in my hometown in Kentucky. It was the hub of my social life and provided some grounding for me as I tried to figure out who and what I was.

In college in 1962, the Wesley Foundation, also affiliated with Methodist Church, became the hub of my social life. The grounding shifted. I started reading at Tillich and Kierkegaard and Bonheoffer and their ilk as a result of my involvement with the Wesley Foundation. I say “read at” because I was not equipped to read and understand these guys, but it seemed they had important things to say so I kept plugging away at them. I also got tuned into Hoffer as well as the beginnings of liberation theology and social justice.

Meanwhile, in my Freshman English classes I started reading at Transcendentalists and Existentialists, and going to movies that I did not understand. I did understand that they held messages that, if I could decode them, would be important.

I also spent some time in college reading at the Bible (not in Aramaic or Hebrew of course—I did not have the languages), knowing there were messages there as well, if I could decode them.

Several of my friends, the ones who weren’t majoring in philosophy or accounting, were looking into Divinity School, so I learned about Vanderbilt, The University of Chicago, and the crown jewel of the genre, as determined by the elite of Western Kentucky State College, Yale.

Since college I have read at other philosophers, the Qur’an (not in Aramaic of course), Zen, Taoism, and such, looking for codes, or at least decoder rings, while fantasizing about spending a year studying things mystical at Chicago, in Kyoto, cruising the Greek Islands, and, most importantly, spending time at Yale.

As the years passed, religion gave up on me. I maintained a belief in a metaphysical power, but its manifestation in temporal organizations created by humans ran counter to my understanding of that power.  In plain English, I fell out of love with the religions created by preachers, priests, and theologians.

I became a management professor in the early 1980s, put aside fantasies of studying the metaphysical through the lenses of the temporal,  and focused my attention on management literature, some of which purported to contain wisdom and answers. The good news was that this literature was easy to read and understand. The bad news is that is was easy to read and understand, and contained no decoder rings.

Last week I spent two days at Yale University’s Divinity School, attending a conference on “Practical Wisdom” as it relates to the application of things spiritual to the practice of management. In attendance were international CEOs and business school faculty and administrators representing fundamentalist Christians, Catholics (including Jesuits and Benedictines), Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Taoists, and a couple of Humanists. I served on a panel discussing the notion of “timeless leadership”.

The conference did not last a year, and only involved Yale, not Kyoto, Chicago, or Vanderbilt. But it was Yale.

The really important thing is that this two-day experience tied an earlier me (the searcher of the 1960s) to a more recent me (the management-professor-turned-cynic of the 21^st Century) in some satisfying ways.

There are people over the world, not just theologians and philosophers, but business people and professors as well, who continue to look for decoder rings, to search for meaning in the world into which we have been thrown. This encourages me because I believe that search forms the essence of being human.

In September I will mark 69 years on this earth, this time around at any rate. I wonder how many people live to see pieces of their earliest fantasies, especially those we have discarded, realized in their old age as a part of a pattern. I am worried that most do not. I am giddy about the fact that this kid from Kentucky did.

Talking About Religion

On March 24, 2012, a Reason Rally will be held on the Mall in Washington. Its focus is on atheism, among other things.

 Started me to wonder, again, about religion.

My parents were Primitive Baptists, although they seldom went to church. They were believers, although my daddy believed with some skepticism. “Watch them preachers,” he’d say. “If they pull their watches out at the beginning of the sermon, it’s gonna be a long one.” He also said more than once, “Watch out for preachers that pass the hat before their sermon. That ain’t right. Let me hear what you have to say before you ask me for money.”

I went to church with them a few times, but my interaction with the church came mostly from funerals. I did go to a baptism once, though. The baptismal, I guess you’d call it (where people get dunked) was in the form of a large glass tank of water behind the pulpit. My daddy wasn’t crazy about that. “If you’re gonna do it, the preacher ought to have to break the ice off Tradewater River and hold you down in it ‘til you feel the spirit.” I honestly do not know whether either of my parents were baptized.

Somehow or other, when I was about six years old I got connected with the United Methodist Church. We lived on Baptist Hill (go figure), which was about a mile or so from the church. On Sunday mornings I walked down the rock-road hill and over to Cedar Street by myself to attend Sunday school and church.

This was the start my wondering about religion.

The Providence Methodist Church provided me an opportunity to develop myself spiritually, without hell fire and damnation, without a focus on the “thou shalt nots” , but with a focus on caring, love, and spiritual development. Rice Sutherland, Wendell Johnson, an array of smart pastors, and other adults were role models.

The Methodist Youth Fellowship (MYF) provided me with a social life I would not have had otherwise. I was a shy kid, did not smoke or drink (again, go figure), did not have a car, and had no money. I was active in school during the week, but Sundays were devoted to the Methodist choir and MYF.

In my youth, I committed myself to “full-time Christian service” during several revivals. I even thought about becoming a minister—that’s another story for a later date.

In college, the Wesley Foundation became one important hub for spiritual and social development. It was there that I was exposed to Buber, Kierkegaard, Tillich. And civil rights. It was heady times.

My love affair with religion started to fall apart during my last year of college. Nothing dramatic happened. My wondering just caught up with me.

Since my experience was mostly Christian, that’s where most of my questions reside. Understand that I am not a theologian, not a divinity student. Just a wonderer.

I wonder, if God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent, how can his creations (humans) presume to speak on his behalf? Are we, the people who establish religions and sects, really that arrogant?

I wonder why Christians, who profess to believe that every single sentence of the Bible is the inspired word of God, pick and choose from among those words only those concepts and ideas that we like, or can use as tools to disparage, persecute, and in many cases, kill other human beings?

I wonder, why a lot of Christians focus only on the Old Testament from which to develop those destructive tools? Isn’t the New Testament the Bible for Christians? Didn’t Jesus condense the 10 Commandments of the Old Testament into two, each of which dealt with love?

I wonder at the amount of money collected by religious leaders, who use the money to build idols of themselves in the form of cathedrals and giant buildings and billboards with their names and faces plastered on them?

I wonder why religious sects create large bureaucratic organizations and behave as corporations focused on profits and survival of the sect?

I wonder why politicians find religion to be such a cudgel in the fulfillment of their power trips?

I wonder why religious leaders feel the need to condemn those with whom they don’t agree?

I wonder why humans feel the need to construct God in our image?

It is no wonder to me why atheism has blossomed. 

I am not an atheist. I believe in the existence of a metaphysical force that is responsible for the universes. I can’t prove it; don’t feel the need to try. Don’t think this force cares particularly (yeah, I’m being anthropomorphical—if that’s a word that can be used to talk about “the force”) whether I believe in it or not.

I don’t know about a hereafter or what the rules are for being a part of it.  I do know that treating all living things with respect and love in THIS life is crucial to my well being—again, can’t prove it, but know it.

I know that faith, as practiced, has brought peace and solace to a lot of people. And as I write, there are hundreds of “preachers” and other believers out there who are feeding the hungry and helping feed the spiritual needs and faith of people, without asking for money or allegiance.

I also know that religion, in all its sectual forms, has been responsible, and continues to be responsible, for the misery and deaths of millions of people, while breeding and blessing greed, hubris, and hate among human beings. 

I believe my daddy was right to be suspicious of preachers/politicians wearing three-thousand dollar suits and insincere smiles and uttering hate-filled words, while holding their hands out looking for ever more money to build ever bigger power bases to do ever more destruction.

My belief in God continues to be strong, even as I wonder about it. My belief in religion and its leaders has been dead and buried for a long time now.

17 Year Old Boy Meets Real World: Kentucky, 1962

In 1962, I won the Veterans of Foreign Wars’  “Voice of Democracy” award in my hometown of Providence, Kentucky. The contest required students to write speeches on the topic, “What Freedom Means to Me”. The script of that speech, which I delivered to judges, is provided below. Typos have been corrected (used manual typewriters with no correct tapes in those days); otherwise I have, with several deep breaths and a couple of tears for lost youth, provided the script verbatim.

Below that speech is a letter I received from the director of church relations of PROTESTANTS AND OTHER AMERICANS UNITED for Separation of Church and State, dated February 8, 1962. It too is copied verbatim.

I wonder what happened to that 17 year old boy?

I wonder about how quickly our idealism meets the realities and politics and religions of the world, and how we manage to maintain, react, re-adjust, re-affirm? Or do we get bitter and depressed? Or do we just keep on keeping on, doing what we always have, hoping for the best?

One of the great things about having been a teacher for so many years is that I rubbed elbows with 17 year-old college freshmen. Their idealism and naïveté helped keep me balanced. Rather than my brainwashing them, they served to remind me that I don’t have all the answers, and that fresh perspectives from naïve people keep humanity alive.

What Freedom Means to Me

The right to breathe deeply of clean, crisp air in the early morning twilight and know that I am close to God; to feel like an eagle loose from a cage and soaring over snow-capped mountains in the distant horizon. This is freedom.

To me, freedom has, actually, two forms. The first form is the natural freedom a person has. This freedom is found to a certain extent in everyone and every living thing and can’t be taken away by any one or any means. This is the feeling a person has when he is born, that he is a free man—not a dog on a chain or a puppet on a string.

It is the feeling that is responsible for the bringing about of the second phase of the term, as it was this characteristic in men that led them to seek and find the second form, which is, in my opinion, the unleashing of the inborn spirit of freedom into reality so that it can be used to its fullest extent in everyday life without fear.

Thus the two forms are interrelated and form a feeling. To this feeling there is a one-word definition that is very suitable. This word is life.

Without freedom, one doesn’t live, he merely exists, living a life filled with fear and trepidation; fearing to speak or pray. Afraid to answer a knock on a door; afraid he’ll find on the other side of that door an evil, grinning face, and a tommy-gun spitting in his stomach. Dodging from shadows; afraid to trust even your friends; cowering in fear. This is life without freedom.

Freedom is the right for me to know the God put me on this earth as an individual, different from everyone else, not as just one of a million pieces cast from the same mold. To know that I am somebody, someone that means something, not just a tool to be used until it is worn out, then cast away; thrown into a junk heap. To know this fact is freedom.

The right to get out of bed in the morning and go to school, where I have a choice of studies and a right to speak my thoughts and ideas without fear about any subject. This is freedom.

Freedom is my right to go to work knowing that I am benefitting myself and my family, not the “state” or someone sitting in a plush fancy apartment while I live in a pig-sty building with ten-inch cracks in the walls.

Freedom is the feeling within me that I can hold my head up high and not have to worship or bow to anyone. It is this same blessing, though, that gives me the right to worship God in whatever church I please or wherever I please, whenever I please, and however I please without fear, but with joy, reverence, and thankfulness.

Freedom is to me the wonderful objective that was fought for by William Penn in 1675 and by Peter Zenger in 1735. Freedom, the same blessing that was sought after and won by such men as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Munroe, the Great Emancipator Abraham Lincoln, and the countless other men and women through the ages.

To answer the question of what freedom means to me is simply to give my definition of the word freedom. Freedom is life to me; a full, happy, contented life with God, and without fear. Of course, there are days of strife for me and everyone else in the free world, as in the entire world. I, and everyone else, have certain “thorns” in my everyday life, but with these thorns comes the sweetest rose of any age. This rose is freedom, the God-given blessing which I will fight for as long as I have the faintest ray of faith in God, my country, my world, and myself.

Letter From Protestants and Other Americans United

Dear Jim:

It was inspiring to read your speech, “What Freedom Means to Me”, in the Henderson Gleaner and Journal of February 2. I wish I might have heard you deliver it.

We, who are trying to uphold Separation of Church and State and religious liberty, are encouraged to know that a teen-ager has such an understanding of the subject.

In your own grand state of Kentucky one church is exerting pressure on the State Legislature to pass a bill requiring the Protestants of Kentucky to pay $200 tuition to every child enrolled in the parochial schools and free bus transportation. This is not fair, especially when those children are taught that Protestant religions are “counterfeit”, as you will read in the enclosed leaflet, “What Do They Teach in Catholic Schools”. When something is counterfeit you withdraw it from circulation and you destroy it. I hope you will read the enclosed leaflets.

This organization is not anti-catholic, it is for Separation of Church and State. It is just as quick to call attention to Protestant violations as to Catholic.

May God bless you, young friend, and guide you always.

Sister Ethyl and the Antichrist

I grew up in small town Kentucky. When I was a kid the town was still alive and vibrant and on Saturday afternoons the two streets that comprised “uptown” were teeming with people, shopping, gossiping, going to the movies. Mr. Kelly, his body twisted from arthritis like an old, wind-blown peach tree, would sit in his red wagon, smoking hand rolled cigarettes and selling pencils.

Sister Ethyl (I’ll leave her last name out, but I do remember it) would stand at the intersection of Broadway and Main with an open Bible in her hand, preaching. The sermon I remember most vividly was a recurring one against the Antichrist. I was a kid so it took a few Saturdays of listening, some reading in my Bible and the library, and some questions to folks (most of whom seemed embarrassed by my questions) for me to figure out who she thought the Antichrist was.

It was the Pope.

It was a message that seemed well received. My town was filled with churches, but there was no Catholic church. There were no Synagogues either, but that’s another story. There were Catholics and Jews, in the town, who, I learned later, had to travel a ways to find their places of worship. I knew who the Jews were—worked for the Coopers and the Erskinds, who were very nice people and good employers—but only knew of one Catholic family. I learned about Jewish traditions at the Methodist Church. The subject of Catholicism never came up during my youth.

In the Wesley Foundation at Western Kentucky University, I found myself occasionally on a Saturday night debating (it never rose to the level of argument, I’m happy to say) whether or not Jews and Catholics went to heaven when they died. Believe it or not, these debates happened. My position was that my Bible said that Jews were God’s chosen people so why would they not go to heaven? Their response: “The Jews killed Jesus.”  My response: “No, the Romans killed Jesus.”

Luckily, my debate opponents did not get my well-intentioned but naively-counter-productive point here as we moved to the subject of Catholics. My position: “I’ve been to mass at the Newman Center and it seems not that different from the Methodist Church. Why wouldn’t Catholics go to heaven?” Their response: “Because they are not really Christians, they worship the Pope, they have their own Bible, and only Christians go to heaven.” In my ignorance I had no quick response.

Obviously, these were not the debates of theological scholars, just folks sitting around with ideas and wondering about them.

The debates were happening as John F. Kennedy was being elected as President, and as he was assassinated.

I have wondered about Sister Ethyl’s message and these debates for 50 years.

In 1970 I married a Catholic woman. When I took her home to meet family and friends, one of my best friends and mentors asked her, “Are you Christian or Catholic?” She, a military brat who did not share my stellar upbringing, was, to say the least, nonplussed.

Since then, I have worked in a Jesuit university and have come to have a deep respect for the works of Catholics, particularly in terms of social justice issues and serving the less fortunate of the world.

The Catholic Church is a large, well-run, powerful, wealthy organization with a specific, evangelical mission. The Church is compelled by its mission to recruit new members to its faith. The Church is compelled to uphold, and lobby for, its specific beliefs and tenets.

Its “CEO”, the Pope, is one of the most powerful men in the world, devout, and absolutely committed to the “rightness” of his beliefs and the church.

No one could expect this to be otherwise, except Sister Ethyl, perhaps.

I believe Catholics are Christian. I do not believe that the Pope is the Antichrist. I also don’t believe he is anything more than a powerful man in a leadership position. I don’t share his beliefs outside the social justice and service realm.

It is in this context that I’m wondering about the position of one of the GOP candidates in the 2012 presidential election.

I respect a presidential candidate who publically affirms his belief in the absolute truth of the tenets his church.

But when a presidential candidate states that Satan, in the form of folks whose ideologies and religions that differ from his, has infiltrated the U.S. using phony Bibles and theologies, I worry. When his response to these “threats” is to implicitly promise to bring the powerful evangelical businessman leader of one of the most powerful evangelical churches in the world, the political head of a powerful religious city-state outside the U.S., to the table as his partner in his presidency of the U.S., I worry a lot.

I see this candidate through the same lens I saw Sister Ethyl and my friends at Western. He has a right to his opinion, obviously. But I disagree with him just as vehemently as I did with Sister Ethyl’s Antichrist position, and my college friends’ “They ain’t going to heaven” stances.

I disagree for the same reasons: my faith, my research, my reason, and my continuing struggle against bigotry, mine and others’.

Wondering About Novelists

I read L. Ron Hubbard novels as a teenager, and was pre-audited once, while depressed in Boston, but have been neither audited nor cleared by the Church of Scientology. I read Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead in the early 1960s, and have engaged in heated arguments about value beyond their quality as novels for almost 50 years.

I’ve been wondering about these two novelists for a long time.

As I grew up in Kentucky in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, my family did not think much about novelists (although my sister’s middle name, Zane, came from a western novelist’s first name). They certainly did not say to me, “Jimmy, why don’t you grow up to be a novelist.”

Here are two examples of why Jimmy might want to consider becoming a novelist.

Example One: A major new religion, Scientology, was created in 20^th Century New Jersey by a novelist.

Novelist L Ron Hubbard CREATED A NEW RELIGION that has attracted thousands of followers from around the world. Think about that. In my lifetime, while Billy Graham, Joel Osteen, and other preachers preach about religions that were established thousands of years ago, this novelist created a new one.

Hubbard wrote science fiction novels (Battlefield Earth and Final Blackout being two of them) that sold well. Springing from those novels came self-help books, including Dianetics, a manifesto/prescription of sorts. From that scrip came Scientology, which is, I believe, the only religion invented in the late 20^th Century by a novelist.

John Travolta and Tom Cruise are just two beneficiaries of this new religion.

Example Two: A major new personal/philosophy, Objectivism, was created in my lifetime by a novelist.

Novelist Ayn Rand CREATED A NEW SCHOOL OF POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY. While other philosophers espoused philosophical tenets created thousands of years ago, related to epistemology or ethics, to students in academic institutions, Rand created a new philosophy related to the value of selfishness, preached in social and political marketplaces from the political pulpits of neo-conservatives and libertarians.

Rand wrote two major novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. From these novels, with the help of her lover Nat Branden, she created a new school of philosophy, Objectivism, which has thousands of followers around the world.

Barry Goldwater, Karl Rove, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Ron Paul, Rand Paul, and the tea party are some of the beneficiaries of this new philosophy.

So, the next time your kid asks you about possible jobs as miners, teachers, doctors, lawyers, factory workers, athletes, and the like, I wonder if you’ll say:

“Honey, why don’t you choose an exciting and rewarding career? Become a novelist so that you can create a new religion or political party. Money, power, fame, and self-fulfillment will surely follow.”

Or maybe you’ll tell your honey that you are about to start that novel you’ve been meaning to write?

Anger

I wonder why there is so much gut-wrenching anger spewing forth from religious people. Radio talk show hosts who espouse religious views, and many major religious leaders these days are filled with hate and vitriol. Why? It seems to me if I truly believe that I am among the saved, the blessed, the righteous, I would have no reason to be angry at gays, Muslims, Baptists, Papists, the Lakers, Nancy Pelosi, the NRA, heathens, infidels, or anyone else.

Seriously, why the anger?

If I truly believe that I am among the saved, the blessed, the righteous, why would I have reason to be afraid of things of the world?

I remember reading Marshall Frady's biography of Billy Graham years ago. The one section that stuck in my mind is the one dealing with a minister in the hills outside Nashville. The man drank a bit, smoked a bit, drove a beat up truck, and lived in a very modest home that he made available to anyone who stopped to talk. KKK or Black Muslim, Baptist or Quaker, atheist or deist--it did not matter. This man did not seem fearful or angry. This man opened his home. I wonder why?

I am an angry man. Haven't always been so. Don't like it. But I am. I am not a religious man.

Wonder why I'm not religious and angry?

Most religious folks I run into these days, on the streets, on TV, on Facebook are as angry as I am, or so it seems. I wonder why they are religious and angry?

And the number of guns held, and bragged about, by religious folks in their homes speaks to mass fear. I wonder why?

I wonder what it takes to get rid of the fear and anger. Are these natural states of human beings? Why would religion not help?

It hasn't.