Centre for Progressive Religious Thought(Sydney) .............Freedom to Explore............

Freedom to Explore

“Seeking and finding fullness of life beyond the beliefs and practices of formal religion”

The aim of the centre is to be a forum where ideas about progressive religion, spirituality and life’s meaning can be explored in a safe and non judgmental place by those who have not been actively involved in organized religion or those involved with organized religion, have found it unsatisfactory and now wish to explore beyond the boundaries of traditional belief.

The OBJECTIVES of the Centre are to:

Build a network of support for those who seek to discover and live by a progressive faith, sharing ideas and pursuing questions and answers. Link with other groups and centre’s of progressive religious thought.

 Create an open and welcoming community that respects the spirituality of all participants, and encourages authentic interfaith engagement.

 Promote progressive religious thought as an agent of change and renewal in faith communities and society.

 Where Do we meet?

The Centre for Progressive Religious Thought is located in “The Basement”, 22 Badajoz Road, Ryde. (Opposite Callaghan Street) Entrance is via the right hand side path. The premises are located at the first bus stop in Badajoz Road for the Sydney bus 506 travelling from the Circular Quay. Please contact Eric Stevenson on (02) 9888 5361 or 0405 758 116 for more details.

CPRT MEMBERSHIP FEES FOR 2012

Individual $20, Family $30, Concession/student $15.

These fees help us to defray costs, bring special speakers to Sydney, finance our Regional Gatherings and contribute to the organisation of national Common Dreams events.

For direct EFT or B-Pay banking: -

Account Name: - THE CENTRE FOR PROGRESSIVE RELIGIOUS THOUGHT

BSB: - 082 155 A/c No: - 83 243 0417

Cheques payable to: CPRT (Freedom to Explore). 

 CPRT Freedom to Explore.

Coordinator: Eric Stevenson Tel: (02)-98885361 Mobile: 0405758116

Secretary/Treasuer: Ken Fletcher Tel: (02) 9876 4147.

Executive Secretary: Guy Mallam

All Mail: 22 Badajoz Rd, RYDE NSW 2112

Email: cprtfreedomtoexplore@yahoo.com.au

Web Site: -http://www.cprtfreedomtoexplore.org

 OUR LATEST NEWSLETTER. Updated 29/3/2012

Centre for Progressive Religious Thought (Sydney)

Freedom to Explore 

Newsletter April, 2012

DISCUSSION TOPICS

WEA COURSE BY UNITARIAN LECTURER - REV. DR. IAN ELLIS-JONES
Our friend Ian writes, “Late last year I conducted a very popular 6-week short course at the WEA Sydney on 'The Christianity That Might Have Been.' By popular demand it is being offered again, for 8 weeks, from 11 May to 29 June 2012: 
http://weasydney.nsw.edu.au/index.php?action=course&course_action=list&cat=CULTURE+AND+SOCIETY&subcat=PHILOSOPHY+%26+RELIGION  
We cover Platonism, Neo-Platonism, the enlightened Alexandrian School of Theology (Origen, Clement of Alexandria, Philo, etc), the Mystery Religions, and much, much more. Basically, it's all about how Christianity got stuffed up, but also how the real Christianity is still with us, in various churches, centres and movements.”
 

Please Note: - The views expressed in our Newsletters are not necessarily the views of CPRT, its members and contributors. With the aim of providing the opportunity of learning what other people are saying we include articles covering a wide range of topics so everyone can make their own mind up about them.

Page 1. 

 CPRT MEMBERSHIP FEES FOR 2012

Individual $20, Family $30, Concession/student $15.

These fees help us to defray costs, bring special speakers to Sydney, finance our Regional Gatherings and contribute to the organisation of national Common Dreams events.

For direct EFT or B-Pay banking: -

Account Name: - THE CENTRE FOR PROGRESSIVE RELIGIOUS THOUGHT

BSB: - 082 155     A/c No: - 83 243 0417

Cheques payable to: CPRT (Freedom to Explore)

For membership enquiries please contact Eric Stevenson on (02) 9888 5361 or Ken Fletcher on (02) 9876 4147 or email:  cprtfreedomtoexplore@yahoo.com.au

 Send Membership fees to: Ken Fletcher, c/- 22 Badajoz Road, Ryde, NSW, 2112

April 2012 Secretary’s report.            . 

As we approach another Easter we are challenged by how we should interpret its significance in this modern world with the wealth of new knowledge available. There is still so much to learn and understand so it can be applied to everyday living. 

Our numbers continue to grow at the discussion groups as we address the challenging new knowledge of how our minds work and the history of the progress of human experience in our wonderful world. This month Guy and Rob continue their presentations on Jung and the changes in Christianity.

A reminder again that Lloyd Geering’s DVD’s are available from the Progressive Christian Network in Victoria Tel: 03 9571 4575 or info@pcnvictoria.org.au  if you are interested in purchasing them. We also have some copies available in our library as well.  

Thank you to our members and friends who have contributed to the newsletter. We like to encourage a healthy discussion and information format. Contact Eric if you have a subject you would like discussed or if you have written a summary of a book you have read that you would like to share in the newsletter.

Feel free to take up Eric’s kind offer to share the meal with him before the Wednesday evening discussion. Eric invites anyone to join him from 6:30 pm but requests you let him know by the end of the weekend before the meeting if you are coming so food arrangements can be organised.  

Thank you for all those who have sent their membership fees for 2012.

A membership form is attached to this email for those needing it and the details are repeated at the end of this newsletter.

Kind regards, 

Ken   (Ken Fletcher) 

All Mail:      22 Badajoz Rd, RYDE   NSW  2112

Web Site http://www.cprtfreedomtoexplore.org  

Email:         cprtfreedomtoexplore@yahoo.com.au 

Page 2.

A Humanist Perspective on Easter: By Tom Drake-Brockman 

Whose sins did Christ really die for? 

 Tom Drake-Brockman whom we have recently welcomed into our Discussion Group says he always had “a loathing of Christianity’s theological doctrines that emphasized primitive worship of a fearful deity, dogmatic exclusivity, irrational faith and pie in the sky obsessions with the afterlife.”  But after having abandoned Catholicism and then atheism,, secular humanism and the leftist visionary idealism of his youth, he has come to the conclusion that the four gospel narratives teach that Jesus attached, “overwhelming importance to relieving human suffering in this world” .  Jesus did so because of, “His intricate spiritual ethic of humanist compassion”.  Jesus thus did not support Christianity’s “noxious doctrines”.  Tom claims allegiance to what he calls Christian Humanism and says, “it constitutes the first real attempt at fusing Jesus, the Jewish humanist with Christ, the divinely inspired agent of God”.  

In the following edited summary of his article on the above topic, Tom is dismissive of attendance at church services when compared with the need for the delivery of compassionate activities. He deals solely with Temple related causes of the death of Jesus.  He also gives more general credence to the historicity and literal accuracy of the gospel accounts than that attributed by the Jesus Seminar. CPRT members who wish to have a say about his world view are invited to submit responses for inclusion in our next Newsletter. (Ed.)  

Tom rejects the Pauline version of Easter and claims that while Paul’s subtitutionary doctrine of salvation, “gradually prevailed over that of the original Apostles, it is their more humanist perspective that dominates the four gospels, even though they were written decades after Christ’s death.”  The priority of the disciples closest to Jesus was, “to carry on Christ’s humanist work - his compassionate care of the poor and his campaign against the corrupt Temple establishment.”

He writes, “In Galilee where Christ focused most of his campaign, there was widespread disease and rural poverty, often caused by dispossession of land. This misery was exacerbated by strict ‘purity’ rules that the religious establishment zealously enforced - rules that were based on the assumption that all who suffered adversity were being punished by God for their sinfulness. The greater the suffering, the larger the sin. Thus the multitudes enduring great hardship and physical disability were also effectively outcasts in their own land, no longer worthy to be counted among God’s chosen people. This crushing burden of guilt or ‘poverty of spirit’ compounded their dire material condition and produced a deep yearning for forgiveness. This powerful psychological need -even without divine intervention- could explain why Christ’s healing ‘miracles’ were so successful. ….The forgiveness he imparted in healing the sick was extended to all the paupers and pariahs who followed him around, exhilarating and inspiring them to retake control of their lives.

“But in what sense was he ‘shedding his blood’ for these unfortunates?  The event that triggered Christ’s crucifixion was his assault on the Jerusalem Temple. However this was not an attack on Judaism as Christians often like to portray it. By the first century, the Temple had fallen into serious disrepute. Its priests …imposed their own heavy religious taxes (tithes) on the countryside and accumulated vast land holdings by evicting small indebted farmers from their land. For the latter, now rendered ‘impure’, the only way back was to gain forgiveness through the sacrificial rites of the Temple.  But that path was largely blocked by the Temple elites who had a vested interest in perpetuating this oppressive culture of guilt. They made the sacrificial offerings expensive and the processes complicated.”   

Tom says they were, “incensed by the challenge that Jesus posed to their exclusive right to forgive sins. For Jesus not only offered a symbolic forgiveness. His healing miracles actually cured people of their physical afflictions and thereby eradicated the sin in its entirety. Here was a competing power of forgiveness that had the potential to put ‘Temple inc’ out of business. They arrested him and demanded his crucifixion.”   

“Thus in forgiving ‘the sins of multitudes’, Christ ‘shed his blood’ by compassionately responding to human suffering and searing injustice. His purpose was not to earn us a free ride to heaven. Quite the contrary- he demanded we take up our own crosses and follow him. For some that would also require martyrdom though for most, more modest expressions of compassion would suffice….. Christ made it very clear that those endowed with privilege and awareness would need to move beyond charity and confront systemic injustice, striving to ameliorate a world teeming with sorrow and pain.  If Christ were around today he would be too engaged with issues like aboriginal child protection and crimes against humanity in places like Syria and the Congo to waste time with church services.”

“On the eve of the first Easter when he sealed his fate by driving the corrupt vendors from the Temple, he did not go inside to pray or worship. Instead he proceeded to heal the blind and the crippled who were brought to him there.”  Page 3.  

GOOD AND BAD RELIGION 

Join the Conversation with  

DR. DAVID TACEY, DR. PETER VARDY AND FR. MICHAEL WHELAN 

At: - The Crypt, St. Patrick’s Church, 20 Grosvenor Street, Sydney 

10 am – 3pm Saturday, 12^th May, 2012

$20.00 ENTRY (may be paid at the door)  

Dr. Tacey will speak on “The Original Sin of Religion”.  “Christianity asks us to believe too much and some of these beliefs are spurious as facts and mythical in origin.....the original sin of the Christian faith is scriptural literalism... It is this which is dragging down a good religion.”  

Dr. Vardy, in his book “Good and Bad Religion”, argues against bad religion wherever it occurs.... “Good religions should embrace scientific discovery, promote justice, foster human flourishing and respect freedom.”   

Fr. Whelan talks about Religion being “Spiritually Incarnated”.  He says, “Within the Catholic church, to-day as in previous times, we have our share of bullying and corruption and silliness.  The danger is.... that we will abandon the public space and leave it to the ideologues and the bullies.”   

David Tacey teaches at Latrobe University and is the author of 12 books on spirituality and depth psychology.  Peter Vardy is also an author and lecturer.  He has just retired as Vice-Principal of Heathrop which is the specialist theology and philosophy college, (University of London) and has been run by the Jesuits for the past 400 years.   Michael Whelan is a Marist priest, who helped set up Spirituality in the Pub. He is currently Principal of Aquinas Academy in Harrington Street, Sydney.   

REGISTRATION IS ESSENTIAL.  PLEASE CALL OR EMAIL WENDY ROWE AT 026227 4191   

EMAIL wendy.rowe@bigpond.com    

(Bring a packed lunch or take advantage of the many small restaurants in the area) 

Page 4.

EREMOS INSTITUTE THIRTIETH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATIONS
Our friends at Eremos have sent us the following notice

In recognition the 30th Anniversary Eremos in 2012, we have many special
events planned. This email gives you a summary of those events and links to
further information on our website where you can also register for the
event or the retreat.

Events:     http://www.eremos.org.au/news/calendar

Saturday June 2 - 'When God Gets Bigger': Reflective workshop with Lucy
Abbott Tucker and Sue Dunbar
Sunday July 1 - 'Breaking The Silence On Spirituality In Australia':
Lecture and conversation with David Tacey with music by Trish Watts
Saturday & Sunday August 4-5 - 'Intensive Journal® Life Context': Workshop
with Kate Scholl

Retreats:  http://www.eremos.org.au/retreats/upcoming-retreats
Saturday 5 May, 10am-4pm, “Being at Home” - Yaraandoo, 28 Nollands Road,
Fiddletown (not far from Galston)
Saturday & Sunday 14-16 September, 30th Anniversary Eremos Retreat Weekend
“Where People, Planet and Spirit Connect.”

At Rahamim Ecological Learning Community, Bathurst.
We would love to have as many members attend this Retreat weekend as
possible. Utilising local motels as well as accommodation at Rahamim will
allow for extended accommodation.

At this point, all events, except the Weekend Retreat, are in Sydney, but
we are open to holding events in other locations if a local team comes
forward to organise. Support with speakers, facilitators and promotion is
available. Let us know if you are interested.

If you have comments about our events or would like to get involved, we
welcome your feedback. Please contact the Council chairperson, Kate Scholl,
council@eremos.org.au or ring 0425 211 065.

VOLUNTEER NEEDED: We are looking for someone who might design a flyer for
each of our events. If you are able to help, please contact Kate.

Please express your interest through the link on the website and reserve
the date in your diary.

Page 5.

A TIMELY WARNING FOR CPRT FROM ONE OF OUR OWN MEMBERS  

Are we as broad minded and inclusive of diverse views as we claim to be?  

 What follows is an email from our member, John Bunyan, written after reading our February Newsletter.  We take pride in being able to attract and publish constructive criticisms of our Centre such as John is sharing with us.  The italics in the following text are ours. (Ed.)   

 “Thanks very much for sending me the newsletter which I look forward to reading carefully on the train tomorrow. As I probably have written before, I do value the place of groups such as the Centre, and I do hear (and feel the force) of the non-realism of Lloyd Geering or Don Cupitt, etc - though not convinced. But having so much experience of narrow, intolerant religion in my own Diocese of Sydney, and being a broad churchman by conviction, I am always a little concerned when liberal Christian or liberal religious groups do not seem themselves as broad, or as inclusive of diverse views, as I should like, and when unnecessarily and to my mind unjustifiably sharp divisions are drawn by any.  But this is not in any way a personal criticism, just I hope an expression of my honest reaction to the position the Centre seems to have adopted and I hope does not cause any offence !   It is just that it seems to me that there are various ways of being a “progressive Christian” though like my namesake, I am not particularly keen, myself, on being boxed in any tight way. I certainly don’t criticise others who are happy with any special description. (If I had one it would be “culturally conservative, theologically liberal, broad church, agnostic, traditionalist, environmentalist, non-politically correct, Unitarian, Episcopalian” – i.e. “we are one but we are many”).  

 “If I have read Geering and at least quite a number of the books of Cupitt and others of that outlook, I also try to read at least a little of the best of the scholarly conservative work (e.g. in Biblical studies, that of Richard Bauckham), and certainly in between those extremes, major defenders of critical realism, and those who seek a firmer faith, and those who wrestle with the fundamental question that we can never fully answer of “how God acts”. I realise that, like everyone else, “I know in part” – and only a very small part, just as scientists can understand yet only a very small part of the universe with perhaps with much that they can never know, just as God is beyond our conceiving.    

 I am not a typical “liberal protestant”, in particular however, not least because it seems to me that much liberal Protestantism has not yet taken into account very careful modern scholarship regarding Jesus.  I don’t think Jesus himself can simply be categorised as a “liberal” in every respect. For example, I don’t think he saw his mission as anything other than one to his own Jewish people (with a few notable exceptions and in the case of one woman’s daughter, only after an offensive response). So too I don’t think he repudiated the Law, etc etc.    

 American Biblical scholars in particular do not yet seem to have taken on board the work of Jewish New Testament scholars such as David Flusser (and the recent editor of his book about Jesus), and particular Geza Vermes (let alone other British scholarship that questions, for instance, the existence of Q).  I myself think that Vermes’ two most recent major works are far more substantial and convincing than The Five Gospels of the Jesus Seminar, that is, The Changing Faces of Jesus, a study of the Gospels, and The Authentic Gospel of Jesus which is almost an instant classic- it is already out in a fine Folio Society edition! It examines the words of Jesus in all four Gospel (and in the Gospel of Thomas). 

 With Vermes I should put E.P.Sanders, The Historical Figure of Jesus which (non-Christian) Maurice Casey, N.T. and Aramaic scholar, thinks “the best single-volume life of Jesus so far written”. Maurice Casey himself last year produced his magnum opus, Jesus of Nazareth, a magisterial work which I hope will receive more attention than his earlier works which were so expensive that few read them, i.e. From Jewish Rabbi to Gentile God, and Is John’s Gospel True?  His latest work is much cheaper.  Casey challenges aspects of both conservative and radical scholarship, basing his theses on his extensive knowledge of Aramaic. He argues, for example, that St. Mark is close to the original eye-witnesses and that it dates from about AD 40 !  Like some scholars, he sees Jesus as very close to some of the Pharisees.   Of course, some challenge aspects of his reconstruction and the search for the historic Jesus and the study of the Gospels go on – for me at least always deeply fascinating.   

 John Bunyan                         Page 6.   

BOOK LAUNCH: - You Who Delight Me—by Bronwyn Angela White   

Tuesday 24th April 2012 from 5.30 pm at St Andrew’s on The Terrace, 30 The Terrace, Wellington RSVP to rsvp@steeleroberts.co.nz or phone 04-499-0044   

  
Professor JOHN DOMINIC CROSSAN’s Visit to Sydney  

John Dominic Crossan is a renowned international progressive biblical scholar.  

Nine Lecture series delivered over three days, 4 September to 6 September 2012, 10.30am to 4.30pm. Venue: Pitt St. Uniting Church, 264 Pitt Street, Sydney NSW. 

“THE POWER OF PARABLE: HOW FICTION BY JESUS BECAME FICTION ABOUT JESUS” 

v  A major Public Address exploring a Christian theology of the Bible, 7.00pm on September 7, 2012. Venue: Pitt St. Uniting Church, 264 Pitt Street, Sydney NSW. 

“IS GOD VIOLENT? HOW TO READ THE CHRISTIAN BIBLE AND STILL BE A CHRISTIAN”    

How to lodge your Registration for this ‘not-to-be-missed’ Event:    

Via Internet: Go to www.commondreams.org.au  click on the John Dominic Crossan tab and follow the links for all details about the seminar, the times, subjects covered and costs.  

Via post: Complete a Registration form and forward to: Common Dreams Common Dreams – Crossan, Pitt St Uniting Church, 264 Pitt St, Sydney, NSW, 2000. Make cheques payable to: Common Dreams - Crossan.           Maximum Registrations is 350 people.    

Please note:    

• The purchased ticket is a receipt and tax invoice.  Common Dreams is a GST   exempt organization.

• Meals, apart from afternoon teas on the full days, are not provided.

• You are encouraged to bring your favourite cushion for added comfort.

A Bookshop will be available for the purchase of progressive religious resources.   

New Articles of Interest 

Sea of Faith in Australia

Name(s) ......................................................................................................

................................................................................. Postcode…………………..

E-Mail......................................................................Phone........................

Return registration form to:

Office Use Only Amount received------------ Date received-------------Receipt No ----------

A Faithless Faith?:

Is Religion without a Supernatural Leap Valid

Steve Wilson 

This is an edited version of an address given at the Spirit of Life Unitarian Fellowship on Sunday, January 22.  Because of the inspirational nature of Steve’s delivery and his sometimes disregard for grammatical correctness I have chosen to re-work some of his notes and must therefore take responsibility for bits of the content in what otherwise is a brilliant address. I have tried to use brackets for words which I have inserted in the text.  

Is there really religion beyond faith, and if so what?

Is faith in God/a Goddess, Jesus or something similar, ...something bigger,... essential for an effective, practical, valuable, contemporary religious/spiritual life?  Is belief in something bigger... essential to religion? Honestly, seriously, is some leap of faith required?  And what does it look like when you don’t feel like you can?

It is a great question. And I ask it because we as humans –here in the 21^st Century-knowing all that we now know, and all that we don’t know...have never been in this position before.  And I ask it, because it is our question to train and churn on.  It is …. Our question to get right. I ask it because we can’t save religion from itself, and irrelevancy unless we address this question honestly and well.     

When I ask if you need faith to be religious… I suspect that many of you as good organic Unitarians are inclined to jump in with a proud, perhaps a touch indignant, “NO!” .... Right behind that proud “No” can be a very existential and practical, “Then why bother?” that deserves some real attention, and we should have a response to that earnest question of ourselves. We or at least many Unitarians have staked our very “faith,” if you can call it that, on proceeding forward without the assurance of a strict belief. I ask this question today because beyond the few of us in this room, there are millions of others who live in the world between religion and science, and need a few guideposts as to what to do with their yearning. (This is) because the world is asking, and worse, ignoring for lack of any guidance the following questions:

 What do you do, when you don’t believe the premise that there is some more perfect world or realm on which this world is modeled and to which we might be returning?

What do you do if you give up on the idea that there is a personality that cares what happens to us or me, and that there is a guiding hand or fate, and that history has a meaningful arc to it? What happens to someone religiously when you come to believe that that is “hype” and more importantly, what do you do when you are skeptical enough, perhaps even offended enough by the religious hype across the years to resist falling in line? What can keep you from giving up? The world outside these walls wants to know.   

In a world where so much of the religious heritage we inherit tells us that our faith will save us, so likely does your very own heart want to know? So what do you tell your kids about life?  What do you do when the plane starts shaking, or when the Doc thinks she found something? And you find you don’t think you believe anymore?    

The other day I stepped off the bus at Wynyard had a few minutes to kill before meeting Barbara, Colin, and Eric at Circular Quay for a trip to Fort Dennison.   I decided to step into St. Patrick’s and sat to enjoy a moment of peace. I sat in the church, and truly enjoying the colors and the space and the stillness, was taken aback by how overwhelming, how exclusive and how particular the expression of the holy was. I love Jesus, find him inspiring and heroic, but looking at him in every single image every where I turned, I found myself offended even embarrassed for him. And for me, as a person and a second rate theologian I take that feeling seriously, mostly because I know I am not alone.     

Since so much of what anyone believes theologically is autobiography projected as philosophy, I should start with me. For me theologically, the first thing that I want to say is that I think faith in “something other” helps.  I think... some grieving and some honesty as one transitions from the faith of their childhood. Gulp.  There I have said it.  I think it and I believe it. It helps to have a sense of the transcendent, because left to our own devices, without a strong other to serve as a witness, we can fall prey quite easily to a meaninglessness that we fail to address head on.    

I think belief helps because a witness, in particular a witness with a personality who cares about us and is powerful- a God for lack of a more unique term- is frankly to a finite vulnerable creature who in general hopes to extend beyond the boundaries of this life,- frankly comforting. So when the God that was either created by us, or truly is the source, the impetus for our belief goes away, it matters.  Whether we ourselves are over that question or not, it matters...How we in particular answer that question matters because whether  (or not) there is a supernatural realm of Gods or Goddesses, as social creatures meaning is socially shared and constructed, and because of that, what we stake our “faith” in will almost inevitably be shared. We care about Jesus, Buddha, and Shiva, or for that matter Gandhi, Abraham Lincoln, or Mother Theresa because we collectively participate in, share, and construct reality.    

To humans, (my)self included, who have felt intimate enough to call the speculative transcendent Father, or for that matter, Mother, Great Spirit, or even Zeus, it matters when that is shaken. For all of us, and for all those outside who have lost their first faith, let’s take a long moment of silence. But it doesn’t mean everything!  And it shouldn’t. A faith extended up to what might be the source of love, compassion, or all of creation is a wonderful thing.  If you are a person who sees God, or Gods as behind all that we see as holy.  Great!   

But for me, I believe our reverence and faith is better staked to the attributes -so often given to God- on their own merits. It seems to me that that, even more than a sermon, that answers the question of whether faith in the supernatural is required.  Today is really more about attending to the qualities (that are) granted (attributed to) the supernatural.   

Listen to the chalice lighting words we used (for this service):

 “To your enemy, forgiveness.

To an opponent, tolerance.

To a friend, your heart.

To a customer, service.

To all, charity.

To every child, a good example.

To yourself, respect.”   

The things that although we cannot see or touch we know are true.    

With all due respect to the God, I occasionally, and a third of the world fervently prays to, if that God, does not exist, does forgiveness, tolerance, friendship and charity lose its poignancy and lecture?   NO! That might be the 1st sound-bite of our effort at a faith beyond faith. A faith in God is not essential to validate the values we generally attribute to the holy.  

If that feels irreverent ask yourself this (I think a parallel with the god’s of the Greek and Roman Pantheon applies):

If we no longer worship at shrines of Venus or Mercury does that mean that beauty or speed no longer exist? Are any less real? Certainly not!   

Too often people loose faith because they hitch their faith,  their entire spiritual lives, to their belief in the existence of a God that, among other things, guides history, ...created the earth in a few days, ...or would never let bad things happen to good people, in particular Me, and are inevitably disappointed. Seriously, to me “belief” -the assertion that this or that particular thing is true, is to me a more flimsy foundation for our religious lives than traditional religion would ever want to acknowledge. See, if someone stakes their claim:

That the earth is the center of the universe,

That my particular religion is exclusively true

That religious leaders or traditions are infallible,

That the Bible, Torah, Koran was written by God,

That if you are a good person you (will) be protected.     

is not your spiritual life not put in a vulnerable place?  In this modern world of ours, Yah, I think it is. How many good hearted modern people just like us, at times have rejected hope, have rejected paying attention to the subtleties of their love?  How many good hearted people just like, perhaps you, are leery of cultivating their compassion, simply because they have lost faith in something they once asserted (was) true? Have not a lot of modern people stopped pulling their proverbial religious cart because they no longer believe in the horse? That is sad, but I think it’s right.   

We are built to be religious.  Our endless ability to pick ourselves back up after getting it wrong is astounding when you think of it. Those people, those increasing millions of people like us might benefit hearing in church that, belief is a bit overrated.  I like that... “belief is overrated.” That might be the 2^nd sound-bite line of the sermon.

It is true that what we believe truly can change us, and with it our perception of the world, which is huge.  What we believe should not be underestimated for its impact. But more often it is over-rated  because what we believe, or even that we believe does (not), will not change the nature of things. Said another way, rain dances may work, but they have never worked to make it rain.  Never did, never will.     

A mature religious life, to me, begins with our experience, our own humble experience of who we are, and what we know,  not what we speculate God to be. I don’t have to be a believer, to have the experience of the sacred, any more than all the religious people of the past did not have religious experiences because we no longer believe in their God’s. Let’s put that in our new theology.  “Spirituality begins with our experience, and is validated by our experience.” Or, you don’t have to define it correctly, to feel something. Yah, I like that.    

To me, a mature religious life, humbly knows that God may truly exist, may truly govern all eternity, or may not.  A mature religious life today, knows that we do not know enough to really know for sure. What we do know though is that we can love more or less, still ourselves more or less.

 What we do know is that our view of God and or the supernatural has always come and gone like the weather. A mature spiritual life to me knows that we are always changing our mind and getting it wrong! But (yes) we are!  As Christopher Hitchens humorously but poignantly notes, “Everybody is an atheist except for the last God.” Not another bad idea for our new theology- We always get it wrong, and yet the questions never go away.    

I think this helps us skeptics. Unitarian Thinker and Preacher Theodore Parker noted more that 150 years ago that like the weather religious opinions are always shifting, and yet that behind those constant shifts there is a true religion, a real religion that, like the broader climate, lasts. I love Parker, (who was speaking about) things like hope, love, mystery, compassion, and EVEN that yearning we call FAITH. His point (was that they) even if the faces and shapes of God always shift and are always changing, are eternal, like climate.    

Parker asks us to ask, do we revere Jesus because he was wise, compassionate, courageous, and welcoming, or do we validate compassion, tolerance, and courage because Jesus said or embodied them. The deep spiritual values are eternal, always come first.     

Is religion possible without an active faith in something transcendent? The answer to that is an indisputable Yes!  

There is enough magic right here.    

The truth is,

Our Spiritual natures pre-ceed any particular belief. 

Our Spiritual natures pre-ceed any particular belief. 

Our religious natures pre-ceed any leap (of) faith.

Always have and always will.

Binding ourselves to a path, pre-ceeds and will last longer than any one path. That’s a nice addition to a faith beyond faith repeat.   

 “The faithful” (make quotation marks) and the traditions that preserve that faith, clumsily are always at work incorporating new truths, new language, new ways of being into the old wineskins of their faith. In the same way we are imperfectly working our deeply held values and principals into a religious context that sometimes has left us clumsy language to describe it.  So both the faithful and the skeptics have their work cut out for them.  Well, so be it.   

Every Sunday here in Unitarian Churches all across the globe I need not tell you that right here, we live out our spiritual yearnings and doubts, hopes and fears, ask our questions, seek real truth, and yearn for and pursue justice without a firm anchor in another realm. So when someone asks you if you can be religious without a supernatural faith you can look at them incredulously and say, “Believe it.  I’ve seen it”.    

Ok, that is the formal end of the sermon question, but I am not exactly done.

The better question for all of us, -still faithful, still believers  or not- is this, what do I do with all I am and all I know? See, being religious, or spiritual, might be possible without the transcendent, but I do not believe it is possible or at least genuine without holding some deeply felt sentiments, without trying to cultivate certain virtues, and making some commitments. The sad news is so much of what many of us have been taught is not religion.  Religion is not what we believe, but how we live. Religion now, for it to stand the scrutiny of our world, will better serve to see its job as building people not creeds. Religion is an issue of autobiography not doctrine.    

Religion should not ask, do you believe in things you cannot really know, but “Are you fearless enough to live with integrity, but without the promise of a reward?”  Religion today should not ask any of us if we are worthy of performing a ritual, it should ask, “Are you committed and immersed enough in the ways and principals and values that you would wish to live to “be bound to something?” “Are you willing to live a life that may not be documented or witnessed beyond those ripples you obviously will leave behind with your actions, or imprinted on the hearts of those closest to you?” Truth is, our spiritual lives and churches must do (better than any creed can do) a better job of (than) comprehensively brainwashing us. better than any creed or even particular belief can. 

And, I pray, that we here at Spirit of Life Fellowship are brain-, nervous system-, and soul- washing ourselves to be the people that can really believe in peace, fight for justice, seek truth, and  live compassionately.*    

Now that we are done with the philosophical, I ask you personally, “What do you call on yourself to do faithfully?” If you’re philosophically liberated, you’re still not morally entirely free. In religious terms, more relevant than what you believe, is how you live. If you want to be religious, more than a leap of faith, I think a leap of commitment is (more relevant). So, I think the religious question, now, is not so much what you believe, but, “Are you brave and engaged and most importantly concerned enough to pick and sort and work through who it is you want to be, either with or without a supernatural parent looking over your shoulder”?    

Even, if you cannot say that you were given a duty from the great beyond, have you paid enough attention to what goes on in our little spinning green and blue planet to give yourself a job, and a blueprint, for how to live your life here now?  If you have, and mostly hold yourself to it, and love the opportunity to define your life on your terms, then you are living proof that religion is possible without a faith in the supernatural.    

So when someone asks you if you believe in a religion that is not rooted in faith, you can say, incredulously, “Believe in it?  I’ve seen it”. You don’t need faith to be religious.  You don’t need a leap to a belief that defies your reason to be spiritual, but you can’t really be fully (spiritual) either, without action and experience that binds you to if not the transcendent, the things that are most attributed to the transcendent.     

And, that is all I have to say about that.

AMEN    

* In this paragraph I think Steve was stating that either personally or through church institutions,  responsibility needs to be taken for “brainwashing” ourselves into a new and better way regardless of whether we believe in God or not.  The brain-, soul-, or nervous system-washing consists of giving preeminence over belief to a life of peace making, justice, truth seeking, and compassion. ES    

HOPING ONE’S WAY TO MEANING                                                Eric Stevenson

Brain surgeon, Dr. Charles Teo, reports that tumours kill more kids annually than any other disease and are claiming the lives of an increasing number of young people. Yet medical research to improve the quality of treatment is the least funded.  Dr. Teo has devoted himself to extending the life of patients with brain cancer using aggressive surgery.  He has also founded the Cure for Life Foundation which organised the fun run to raise funds for medical research last weekend. Dr. Teo has a hope which drives his medical and social endeavours. 

 It is that one day a procedure will be discovered which will enable him to say to his patients, “Do this and this and this and you will be cured for life.”Like most hopes, Dr. Teo’s hope was born out of crisis – the crisis of the brain cancer death toll. It meets a pressing need; it inspires the hopeless; it is realistic in the world of medicine; it elicits his full co-operation and it is open to redefinition and expansion with each new discovery in cancer research and each successful extension of the life span of his patients. That is why Dr. Teo’s hope is so meaningful Without this kind of hope, his surgical and social endeavours would be meaningless.   

And I doubt very much whether an individual or a group could perform any meaningful activity without something like it?  Hope has to do with an expectation of an ideal set of circumstances which will inspire you to keep beavering away until you arrive at where you want to be. In hoping for something I therefore have to decide initially what and where I really need to be.  Then as a rational human being I will conceptualise and act on a hope which will motivate me to strive towards that chosen destination.

For the purpose of this religious talk, we are avoiding the luxury of indulging in our wonderment concerning the sublime beauty of nature, our transcendent enjoyment of the arts, the mind blowing intricacies of micro-biology and nano-science, the expansiveness of the universe, and the sanctity of our loving relationships. All these things almost completely enrich our days. I suspect however that we also use them to avoid facing up to life’s difficulties and as the antidote for our depressive reaction to the dark side of human existence. I am not trying to placate the whingers and complainers who think the world owes them a living.   I am talking about our responses to those times when our morose spirits seem to be perfectly consistent with our broken dreams, and our unfulfilled ambitions, our dissatisfaction with our performance and our disillusionment with what is happening in the world.  I hesitate to call them depressive episodes; they often are triggers for genuine depression, but are they not more like reality responses to the world the way it is?  As stated in the reading, David Tacey disagrees. He says that our failure to give traditionally religious justification for the dark side is the cause of neurosis.  To the contrary I am suggesting there would be something wrong with us if we were not depressed by it, and that traditional religion is not a meaningful cure for our existential anxiety.  So, have we  been misguided into seeking an antidepressant for it?  Is there a more meaningful way for religion to deal with what seems to be a normal state of mind?

I think religious hope has to be like Dr. Teo’s, only a thousand times over. It is important because it is the thing that gets us out of bed in the morning and gets us through each new day. A meaningful ultimate religious hope must be based on a person’s urgent ultimate needs, not their wants.  But this Holy Grail is not to be confused with our hope. I suspect that is why so many people are standing at the bus stop of life for a bus that never comes.  It is because they have been easily tricked into wanting things and substituting those things for their hopes.  The later gospel writers of the Christian story got their ultimate hopes tangled up with their ultimate needs.  Their vain hope was that Jesus would come back again in person, in their lifetime, live his life among them and rescue them from poverty and servitude.  Like all of us they wanted their loved one back again. They also formulated their hope within parameters which we no longer believe in.  We have no theistic God, no physical after life, people don’t come back from the dead, and there is no spirit world within which to realise such desires. So our challenge in hoping our way to meaning is in firstly deciding what  are our most important and ultimate needs and then formulating a hope which can be realised and which fits within the post-modern parameters of our post-modern  world.

 “The most important things in human experience are not things”. Not even happiness if most of the things that give rise to that happiness are temporary!  Not even having popularity; those who have been betrayed, stigmatised and persecuted for swimming against the tide of greed and self-aggrandisement have achieved more for the people of this world than popularity. Not even good health; having courage in bad health is more important than that!  Not even having all our faculties;  Helen Keller went blind and said after that as a result she saw something more precious than the things of this world.  Not even Freedom from anxiety; as I have said, there would be something wrong with you if you did not feel anxious about some of the current world events....

It is what we as living conscious creatures can do with life that is the object of hope;  the object of despair is what we let life’s circumstances do to us. I think we can help each other so much in deciding what is supremely and ultimately worth wanting. It is difficult to do so,  but so special when in our searching we can share with each other our sense of loss over what we mistakenly thought were the most important things. It is so good being in this place together working through to the position of defining our priceless treasure.......When every superficial thing has been properly devalued, what do we really want to be as individuals and as a fellowship of faith around the world? I presume that it has to do with the stated Unitarian principles of valuing the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part, and  the inherent worth and dignity of every person, and standing for justice, equity and compassion in human relations. For me these principles represent the precious ingredients of  “LIFE finely tuned”.  

Those principles for living no doubt gained their sterling value for us from our cultural heritage. It therefore makes sense to go back in history to the source of goodness in whatever religious culture one belongs. So let me to go back to the very beginnings of my traditional Christian culture, to the historical Jesus who never founded a church and who didn’t think he was dying to save anybody. He left a beautiful example of LIFE finely tuned.  It ended in surrender for him and in tragedy for a minority of Jewish people who were hoping in vain for his non-material Kingdom to materialise.  His vision of an imminent realm in which love ruled was at first misunderstood by everybody with the possible exception of a prostitute.  

For all life’s mystery our ultimate hope depends on learning to value and practise the loving and compassionate ways in which LIFE* can be embraced, and to find in it something more pervasive and more purposeful than its apparent injustices and its pain, or even its un-intentional pleasures.  It seems that the first Christian communities were not established by Jesus but by people like us who were endeavouring to hope their way to meaning. It is apparent that these early grief stricken and disillusioned disciples did not renew personal contact with their friend through physical resurrection as recorded by the later writers of the gospel narrative.  They simply went on coping and living in the confidence that the abundant life which Jesus demonstrated had been “raised” to transcendent heights.  Their desire was for a fullness of living to which they could aspire and into which it was possible for them to enter.

TIME OF SILENT MEDITATION.  Let’s become more aware of  this abundant life.... Is our ultimate desire  for a world in which it can be experienced here and now? If so, where do we begin? I suggest in defining our ultimate goal we start where the original disciples of Jesus started – in our situations of crisis - when all of life’s superficialities have been revealed and stripped away. It is there that we will gain a passionate desire that has been purified and refined by the fires of desperation and by not a little suffering. It is there that we can let go of our resentments and regrets, relinquish the things that have been forcibly taken from us. and find release from the things which we have clung to for a pseudo kind of fulfilment. In order to inspire us to live life to the full, let us consider whether our hope has to be based on a realistic ideal? – an ideal which is nothing less than rational, practical, attainable, flexible and achievable?  Or can it be only some of these things?  Or none of them?  

ADDRESS PART B  It is what we as living conscious creatures can do with life that is the object of hope**. The object of despair is what we let life’s circumstances do to us. Millions of people, despairing of the means of sheer human survival have been and still are desperately reaching out for their dream of something better.  Who knows how many have already sunk into the slough of despair? But a dream has been believed in by many others of all religious backgrounds whose circumstances have almost completely overwhelmed them.  They have tried and are still trying to ‘hope’ their way above an existence which most of the time we would regard is devastatingly tragic.  They do so by believing in a real and future perfect set of circumstances for living. – if not for themselves, at least for their children.  For some it is after they die.  Their conviction is that those ideal circumstances exist. Their hope is that they are attainable and will be a welcome relief for their present dire state of destitution..  Far be it for me to  attempt to disillusion them.  We cannot dare to sit in our middle class arm chairs and tell  starving, diseased, tortured,  people around the world how to hope.  It is they if we let them who will speak to us.

Some  conservative churches dictate what one’s ultimate hope should be, and have been doing it within a set of parameters that have passed their use by date.*** i.e. that there is a space-time dimension of existence beyond the upper atmosphere in a super natural world which will be a future compensation for the pain of our present existence. It is a seductive doctrine.  It not only does not fit a post-modern world view. It also offers conditional materialistic benefits to the poor, the sick and the victims of injustice provided they keep the faith and do good - benefits which have already proven to be ultimately unsatisfying and unethical, and a phony foundation for hope.

 The early Christians’ hope was radically different.  It was that the  kind of living  exemplified by Jesus in the midst of abject poverty and servitude could be recognised and embraced universally and could be put into practice in the real world by the second coming of the Christ as soon as their God thought it was time to do it. Failing that, they eventually hoped their way to meaning by accessing the supernatural (the power of the Holy Spirit) which for us can be gospel-speak for taking personal responsibility for life .  Can we hope like that without the help of an imaginary Saviour?  I believe we can!   Don Cupitt, without attributing it to Jesus, calls it Solar Living – living like the sun which is continually expending itself, radiating its light and warmth for the benefit of all creation. (“The Old Creed.and.the.New")   

Adopting hope for the journey is extremely personal.  I venture to say that no two person’s ultimate religious hopes are exactly the same. But our united passion for fullness of life can bind us together. This is where we can begin to hope.  Assuming that all we have is life, this life, and the opportunity to live this life here and now, then all of life (including the life of the historical Jesus) becomes infinitely more precious than if it is regarded merely as a pre-cursor of eternal life or of a physical resurrection. If this life is all there is and all therefore that we can have then it has been under valued, under preserved, under protected, under cultivated, under respected, and under lived.    If only it can continue to exist, be recognised, be promulgated and exemplified as each day dawns.! Let us celebrate it with the same adoration that the Moslems celebrate Mahomet and the same reverence with which the Christians attribute to Christ.

My hope therefore is that fullness of life is “doable”. Life, as i am using the word is not the tragedies which it involves (or its joys). It is not to be confused with the nasty things which some people do with it, or how they refuse to benefit from it. It is something which persists regardless of what we think or do.  It is like a staff on which the high and low notes of a musical piece are written; it is the potential carrier of compassion and indifference, of faith and unbelief, of reconciliation and estrangement, of natural disaster and rejuvenation. If it were not valued as such people would not have anything on which to write love’s score.  Hope has to do with our determination to endure the indifference, the unbelief, the estrangement and the disaster and to believe in the persistence and achievement of reconciliation, renewal, faith and love. **** 

 * In writing this address, I have endeavoured to clarify the confusion over the common usage of the words “life” and “living”.  The popular usage for “life”(Life Mark One) is as a collective noun for the train of specific random events and the variety of circumstances involved in one’s human existence. This generally includes the self imposed or self generated ones, but more particularly, it is about the unscheduled, temporary, passing away things that happen naturally and beyond our control and without any moral judgement, and  regardless of humanitarian consequences. C’est la vie!  “Living” is used as a verb and adjective for existing under those conditions and coping with them.(Living, Mark One) Another  popular meaning of “ living” is  as an antonym for “dead”  i.e. animate, alive. (Living Mark Two)  However, there is a Life Mark Two in which “life” is also used more generically to describe the potentialities of all “Living Mark 2” things.  Life Mark 2 as I understand it is possessed by every organism which has the capacity at its optimal level of existence to be fully functioning within the boundaries of its particular species.  There is also an extension of the use of this “life” word, (Life Mark Three).  That is, by inferring that it is a kind of animating spirit -  that there is a superior or co-existent force or energy called “life” which is orchestrating the events and circumstances which I have alluded to above. We sing about it in our Unitarian theme song,“Spirit of Life”.  I have therefore endeavoured to be consistent and use Life Mark 2 and Living Mark 1 in what I have had to say. 

**In talking about an ultimate hope, I am questioning the reality of traditional religious hope involving an after life and a supernatural world. In this sense I am an “unrealist”. i.e. traditional religion’s hope is unreal. For me ultimate hope must be about how best to inspire me to reach and practise  a demonstrable and attainable goal in this present world.  The object of my hope will need to be perceived and appreciated with at least some of my faculties, or require the use of additional faculties which as yet I do not utilise. It will also be subject to progress and change with the evolution of knowledge. e.g.nano-technology and will require my full co-operation in achieving it.  

 ** *Are things really controlled by a benevolent “out there” god? Does that provide sufficient meaning for us? If not we have no recourse to hope of a supernatural something better now or beyond the grave! To be meaningful it would have to be provided by a different kind of God. Assuming that she exists she would have to be something supra intelligent and non-personal of which we cannot conceive and which we are unable to perceive with our limited and subjective human senses or communicate with in our own language. On record she does not appear to be intentionally malevolent or reliably benevolent. The big challenge about thinking like that is “what about my faith?” Can I still believe in the existence of a pervasive life force? I think we should let people believe in something like that if they choose to.  They haven’t necessarily lost their faith; they have just launched out on to the ocean of life refusing to stipulate the details of something beyond their present knowledge and experience. Much of the mystery and wonder of life which others have attributed to a personal transcendent being, they share but have chosen to live with that mysteriousness and wonderment rather than make a dogmatic statement about it.

****Our  mission therefore is so to live in hope that life, being finely tuned, will always be recognisable and valued and demonstrable among us. We are inspired by the hope that it will always be possible for us and our friends to passionately foster an enhanced sense of reverence for and admiration of all life and to promote it and live it to the full.  Our challenge, despite the threat of depression and disillusionment is to spend ourselves in preserving, cultivating, loving  and celebrating it within ourselves and all of nature. 

THE ESSAY BY HUGH MACKAY IN NEWS REVIEW OF THE HERALD, CHRISTMAS WEEKEND EDITION 

We owe the typed copy of this article on fundamentalism to one of our members who wrote, “I hope you find this article as interesting as I did.
Kind regards
John Neilson

 Where there’s faith, so too doubt

Humility is the mark of the true religious believer. The fundamentalist is corrupted by an assumption of superiority.

Fundamentalism is like a steel trap that imprisons the soul and inhibits its freedom to wonder.   Australia might be a determinedly secular society, but about 25 per cent of us will attend a Christian service of worship this weekend. Hundreds of thousands more will have participated lustily in a carols-by candlelight event.  That might say more about our tribalism than our religious faith. Most religious practice is as much about satisfying the desire to belong as the desire for something to believe in. Both desires run so deep, it’s hard to disentangle them. “A Jew goes to the synagogue to sit next to another Jew,” said the Jewish grandfather of a friend of mine, and the same is partly true for Catholics, Anglicans or, indeed, Muslims. But that’s only half the story. Most once-a-year church attenders might hesitate to describe themselves as believers, especially since atheism has become so fashionable. Yet attending church – rather than, say, going to the movies – does imply something. A yearning for belief, perhaps? Or an echo of religious resonances from childhood that cannot be denied? Or the hope that, whatever you might think about what’s being said and done, the experience itself will be uplifting? 

For more regular church attenders, Christmas is quite simply the biggest festival of the year, rich with symbolism and ritual and steeped in enduring myths and legends that – like most enduring myths and legends – have something useful to teach us. In this case, humility is the keynote.  The Christmas story is about an unpromising start (no room in the inn; Jesus born in a stable; shepherds the first to pay homage) that ultimately led to a challenge to the established order, with revolutionary consequences. It is also about the idea of an innocent and adored child destined to live a short life that will end in a humiliating execution.  We once thought it was about peace on earth, but the old King James Bible’s gloriously relaxed and inclusive reference to “peace on earth, goodwill towards men” now turns out to have been a shoddy translation from the Greek. Recent translators prefer “on earth peace among those whom [God] favours”, which is a rather more exclusive offer.  Leaving aside the nuances of rendition, the Christmas story stimulates the imagination in powerful ways, and faith is, after all, the work of the imagination. It is a creative act; a tentative encounter with the possibility of eternal verities; a reaching-out for certainties that always elude us. Faith is also about trust; about deciding to settle for answers to questions we scarcely dare ask.  

But faith can never be rooted in certainty. It evaporates under the pressure of rigid dogma. It is no basis for being judgmental, because it is about seeking, not knowing.   Certainty denies the very essence of faith. It is the impenetrability of life’s mysteries that encourages our leaps of faith, not into the unknown, but into the unknowable. That’s why doubt is the engine, the oxygen, the essence of faith. We believe (in anything) precisely because we doubt. This is the great paradox of faith: we yearn to know but cannot know, so we construct a set of beliefs – or accept a ready-made set from an established institution – to satisfy our need to make sense of what’s going on.   If it’s not religious belief, it might be astrology, “the free market”, feng shui, superstition, science, a particular psychological orientation – Buddhist, Freudian, Jungian – or a moral code we believe will make for a contented life and a better world. (None of these categories is exclusive, by the way: plenty of religious believers are advocates for other political, economic or cultural ideologies as well.)   If we knew the answers that faith supplies, there would be no need for faith. And if faith – that mystical, clouded, elusive yearning – is corrupted by the arrogance of certainty, it ceases to be faith and becomes merely delusional. 

Enter the fundamentalist.  

In the religious context, fundamentalism refers to the tradition that places “holy writ” (Bible, Koran, Torah) at the centre of its theology, and is suspicious of modern scholarship with its more liberal interpretations of religious stories. Fundamentalists worship a God that takes a personal interest in each of us, rewarding the faithful and punishing infidels either here or in an afterlife.  Within Christianity, the term “fundamentalist” arose from a movement launched after World War I by a group of US Baptists disturbed by what they saw as the inroads of liberalism into American life. They thought the idea of America as a “Christian civilisation” was an illusion and they saw a link between apparent social decline and a decline in religious observance.  So they published a series of hard hitting pamphlets under the title “The Fundamentals”. Their purpose was not only to impose a hardline literalism on biblical interpretation, but to reform American society itself by taking it back to its Puritanical roots.   That set the tone for fundamentalism as a religious movement. It has always been about more than religious doctrine and biblical interpretation; it is equally accurate to describe it as an ultra-conservative social protest movement.  

It has never been exclusively about religion. Its agenda is packed with prescriptions about the moral (especially sexual) codes we should adopt, and how we should resist the blandishments of liberalism. Fundamentalists want to replace faith with acquiescence and obedience. Of course, they will say their moral, social and even political judgments spring from their faith, but that brings us back to the central conundrum: faith and judgmentalism are the most incompatible of bedfellows.  You can recognise the religious fundamentalist by a kind of spiritual swagger. Whereas humility is the mark of the true religious believer (“I believe this, precisely because I can’t know it”) the fundamentalist is corrupted by an assumption of superiority: I know best; my beliefs are correct; if your beliefs are different from mine, then you are wrong.   Such arrogance relies on absolute certainty, which is why the fundamentalist is so reluctant to acknowledge the rather misty historical and linguistic processes that have led to particular translations or interpretations of particular passages of scripture. Matthew, for instance, works so hard at presenting his gospel story as a fulfilment of Old Testament prophecies, some contemporary scholars regard the results as strained, if not fanciful. 

 None of this is a problem for fundamentalists: the way it appears, right there in the Bible they hold in their hands, is, for them, the inspired word of God.   When people like Richard Dawkins criticise religion for its fanaticism or its blind embrace of scriptures riven with inconvenient contradictions, this is not a criticism of religious faith, per se, but of fundamentalism. The religious truth seeker, the pilgrim, yearns to see with the eye of faith but constantly falters. The famous plea from the father of a sick child healed by Jesus, quoted in Mark’s gospel, captures the idea perfectly: “I believe; help my unbelief.” That is the tension on which faith relies.  

To deny it is to move into another realm altogether, though many churches would like you to move into that realm. The fundamentalists want you to develop a conviction so strong, you lose the capacity for doubt. They don’t want you to believe; they want you to know you are right, with the same conviction you might know it is raining when you get wet.   It works for them, of course. If you’ve adopted a rigid world-view – religious, political, economic, academic or otherwise – you tend to see everything through the filter of your convictions and, not surprisingly, you see what you’re looking for. The more you use a particular theory for making sense of things, the more things seem to fit the theory.  That’s why fundamentalists feel so sure of themselves. That’s why they can’t understand how other people could fail to see things the way they do (though everyone’s beliefs look weird to the person who doesn’t share them). It’s why they eschew the mystical: they don’t want to rest with the mysteries; they want to wrestle them into submission.   Fundamentalism is like a steel trap that imprisons the soul and inhibits its freedom to wonder. It sucks the doubt out of faith and leaves a rigid shell that acts like armour. No wonder it’s so hard for a fundamentalist’s beliefs to evolve and mature: if you crack the shell, it falls apart and you’re left with nothing.  

Yet fundamentalism is on the rise in all three of the Abrahamic religions – Christianity, Islam and Judaism – with the potential for divisive and disastrous consequences. Why now?   This is one mystery we can penetrate. Fundamentalism (whether religious, political, economic or cultural) thrives at times of social upheaval and insecurity. When we are at our most perplexed or bewildered, gripped by moral panic and baffled by ambiguity, that’s when we are most vulnerable to promises of black-and white simplicity.  Given our current anxieties – global warming, international terrorism, the mass migration of the world’s refugee population, the threat of economic meltdown – it’s not hard to see the appeal in a set of beliefs that seem to offer fixed points in a shifting geo-political landscape. The Age of Discontinuity, marked by rapid and unpredictable change, was bound to be a golden age for fundamentalism.   Yet the religious practices and stories based on Christmas don’t rely for their survival on being accepted as literally true accounts of historical events in every detail. They survive because they have the power to transcend the local and specific aspects of our lives and reveal “the man within”, as the mythologist Joseph Campbell puts it.  

How, then, might we approach a festival that has become such a complex amalgam of pagan, Christian and commercial messages?   If you find yourself having difficulty with literal or quasi-historical interpretations of the Christmas story, relax: you’re in good company. Enjoy being comforted or uplifted by the familiar story and music. Sing your heart out. Focus on the inner meanings; the meanings for you. Fundamentalists might think there’s only one way to interpret the story; one way to believe. Yet they, having banished all doubt from their minds, have ceased to be believers at all.   Merry Christmas – whatever Christmas means to you, and however you choose to celebrate it. 

HITCHENS’ TWO GREAT MORAL COMMITMENTS. Scott Stephens* (Excerpts from Scott Stephens’ article in Religion and Ethics on the occasion of Christopher Hitchens’ death last month)

Let me briefly attempt to distil the essence of Christopher Hitchens, in the form of the two great intellectual and moral commitments that supplied his life with a surprising and often overlooked coherence. The first is his unwavering fidelity to justice, truth and solidarity - a kind of alternative triumvirate to the Christian "faith, hope and love" or the Jacobin "liberty, equality, fraternity," and which consistently proved more fundamental to Hitchens than any ideological alignment with the Right or the Left. In recent times, this took the form of identification with the Peshmerga, the Kurdish revolutionaries in northern Iraq and, for Hitchens, the remnant of an authentic Socialist International. His full-throated advocacy for the military offensive in Iraq was finally an expression of solidarity with the Kurds, and a determination that Saddam Hussein be made to account for the brutality the Kurds suffered at his hands.

.....There is a parallel here with Hitchens' later embrace of a flailing, uneven variety of atheism (or, as he always insisted, miso-theism, God-hatred rather than just God-denial). Rather than representing some positive, articulate position - he instead spoke of the virtue of uncertainty - Hitchens' atheism was the product of his judgment that "religion spoke its last intelligible or noble or inspiring words a long time ago: either that or it mutated into an admirable but nebulous humanism," that it had abandoned greatness, sophistication and poetry in favour of banality, stupidity, authoritarianism and even outright decadence.

One could point to numerous signs of this decline: from the hollow sanctimony and cant of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson to the idiotic mantras of religious "life coaches" and pay-per-view hucksters; from the blunting of the sharp edge of orthodoxy to the emergence of what Hitchens beautifully called a "cut-price spiritual cafeteria" where religious consumers can customize their own faith; from the versions of religious pluralism that can embrace, and therefore condone, virtually anything to the inane worship of a god who, as Hitchens put it, "would reward cowardice and dishonesty and punish irreconcilable doubt."

What is striking is that, at precisely this point, Hitchens' critique of religion is so close to that of his believing brother, Peter. To take just one example, both rage against the impotence of Anglican theology and practice stemming from its replacement of the Authorized (or King James) Version of the Bible with the New English Bible (which, as T.S. Eliot remarked, was astonishing "in its combination of the vulgar, the trivial and the pedantic"), and the Book of Common Prayer with, as Peter put it, the "vague half-hearted mumblings" of the "new, denatured, committee-designed prayers and services."

These are indications, for both brothers Hitchens, of a church that had abandoned seriousness and self-respect, that vacated its post in advance of some anticipated secular attack, and that therefore cannot be taken seriously. Paradoxically, had Christianity in the twentieth century shown its theological and political mettle, as it were, Christopher admitted that he would have had greater difficulty dismissing it. Nevertheless, an intellectually serious form of Christianity was engraved deeply, irrevocably, on Hitchens' thinking and moral formation. It guided him, however much he might have kicked against the goads. And this brings me to that second great moral commitment of Hitchens' life: his loathing of totalitarianism of every kind. As he told Richard Dawkins in his final interview:

"I have one consistency, which is [being] against the totalitarian - on the left and on the right. The totalitarian, to me, is the enemy - the one that's absolute, the one that wants control over the inside of your head, not just your actions and your taxes. And the origins of that are theocratic, obviously. The beginning of that is the idea that there is a supreme leader, or infallible pope, or a chief rabbi, or whatever, who can ventriloquise the divine and tell us what to do."

For Hitchens, the essence of totalitarianism is the utter subjugation of the will and therefore the intellectual freedom and the moral responsibility of the individual. As such, totalitarianism invariably adopts the form of politico-religious idolatry. Writing elsewhere:

"If once it was decided that the individual was of relatively little significance when contrasted to the imperatives of the collective, people would awake one day to discover that their own individuality was indeed of small account but, strangely enough, that they were also somehow compelled to exalt and worship, nay even to deify, a single isolated and enthroned person. It might be a human god produced by a history of self-abnegation like the Emperor Hirohito or it might be the product of a massified and aggressive populism like Stalin or Mao, but the pattern would be more of less the same: the less the idea of the individual was esteemed, the more likely that one individual would become promiscuously or even monstrously prominent."

It was precisely this inherent idolatrous dimension that drove Hitchens in the last few years to conflate religion with totalitarianism, to depict existence under any god as living in "a celestial dictatorship, a kind of divine North Korea" - hence Hitchens' preference for miso-theism, God-hatred, over any sort of benign a-theism. For Hitchens, everything, the entire theological-sacramental economy, is implicated in this malign totalitarian impulse, including the offer of forgiveness, much less the possibility of redemption. As he wrote in Letters to a Young Contrarian:

"Even the most humane and compassionate of the monotheisms and polytheisms are complicit in this quiet and irrational authoritarianism: they proclaim us, in Fulke Greville's unforgettable line, 'Created sick - Commanded to be well'. And there are totalitarian insinuations to back this up if its appeal should fail. Christians, for example, declare me redeemed by a human sacrifice that occurred thousands of years before I was born. I didn't ask for it, and would willingly have foregone it, but there it is: I'm claimed and saved whether I wish it or not. And if I refuse the unsolicited gift? Well, there are still some vague mutterings about an eternity of torment for my ingratitude. That is somewhat worse than a Big Brother state, because there could be no hope of its eventually passing away ... So the whole apparatus of absolution and forgiveness strikes me as positively immoral, while the concept of revealed truth degrades the concept of free intelligence by purportedly relieving us of the hard task of working out the ethical principles for ourselves."

*Scott is the Religion and Ethics editor for ABC Online. Before joining the ABC he taught theology for many years, and even did a stint as a parish minister with the Uniting Church in Australia. He has written extensively on the intersections among philosophy, theology, ethics and politics, as well as on modern atheism's dependence on the Christian legacy. Scott is also a regular contributor to The Drum, Eureka Street and the Times Literary Supplement. He has edited and translated (with Rex Butler) two volumes of the Selected Works of the highly influential philosopher and cultural critic, Slavoj Zizek.

Agnosticism, Atheism, & Deism

(Our member, John Neilson in Wauchope  relates his thoughts on this topic which he has been sharing with his friend on the internet.)

With respect to all that has been said and written on the subject, I tilt towards the agnostic theist - one who believes a God exists but does not claim to know that. (See below) On the subject of religion I am an agonistic. (a person who holds neither of two opposing positions on a topic: Socrates was an agnostic on the subject of immortality.) Here are a few quotes and definitions on some of the things mentioned in our emails.  I thought they were entertaining and thought you might like to read them as well.
 
“For after all what is man in nature? A nothing in relation to infinity, all in relation to nothing, a central point between nothing and all, and infinitely far from understanding either. The ends of things and their beginnings are impregnably concealed from him in an impenetrable secret. He is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness out of which he was drawn and the infinite in which he is engulfed.”  Blaise Pascal
 
Pascal also said, "I cannot forgive Descartes. In all his philosophy, Descartes did his best to dispense with God. But Descartes could not avoid prodding God to set the world in motion with a snap of his lordly fingers; after that, he had no more use for God.”
 
“Agnosticism is the view that the truth value of certain claims—especially claims about the existence or non-existence of any deity, but also other religious and metaphysical claims—is unknown or unknowable. Agnosticism can be defined in various ways, and is sometimes used to indicate doubt or a sceptical approach to questions. In some senses, agnosticism is a stance about the difference between belief and knowledge, rather than about any specific claim or belief. In the popular sense, an agnostic is someone who neither believes nor disbelieves there is a God, whereas an atheist disbelieves there is a God. In the strict sense, however, agnosticism is the view that human reason is incapable of providing sufficient rational grounds to justify knowledge of whether God exists or does not. Within agnosticism there are agnostic atheists (who do not believe any deity exists, but do not deny it as a possibility) and agnostic theists (who believe a God exists but do not claim to know that).”
 
Atheism is, in a broad sense, the rejection of belief in the existence of deities. In a narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there are no deities. Most inclusively, atheism is simply the absence of belief that any deities exist. Atheism is contrasted with theism, which in its most general form is the belief that at least one deity exists
 
Deism in religious philosophy is the belief that reason and observation of the natural world, without the need for organized religion, can determine that the universe is the product of an all-powerful creator. According to deists, the creator does not intervene in human affairs or suspend the natural laws of the universe. Deists typically reject supernatural events such as prophecy and miracles, tending instead to assert that a god (or "the Supreme Architect") does not alter the universe by intervening in it. This idea is also known as the Clockwork universe theory, in which a god designs and builds the universe, but steps aside to let it run on its own. Two main forms of deism currently exist: classical deism and modern deism. 

(If you are interested, John has researched the references for the above unacknowledged quotations which come from Wikipedia .Ed.) 

Michael Duffy in News Review SMH August 20/21, 2011, IN TRUTH WE’RE NATURAL BORN LIARS....If it were true religious belief is a product of evolution this could explain several features of modern life.  One is the apparent rise of mental illness, including depression.  David Tacey (in God’s and Diseases, Harper Collins} suggests the loss of religious belief is responsible for the rise in these problems.  .....We turn our backs on it (religious surrender) at our peril.  e.g the idea of the after life, so important in many religions.  If “the mind is unable to affirm any such life , we end up in a stalemate which is a source of neurosis in modern times.”  Duffy concludes, A crude secular version might go like this ; on the one hand our heads, thanks to modernity tell us there is no god,; on the other our hearts,thanks to evolution  insist we believe in god.   Some of us find no difficulty making a choice, and go with head or heart even if for some atheists the choice is a bleak one.  But others of us cannot make a choice.  .. Our minds tell us our heart is lying but the lie refuses to leave us.  

LETTER AND RECOMMENDED READING FROM CLIVE AND RUTH

The Peace Prize lecture by Noam Chomsky, “Revolutionary Pacifism: Choices and Prospects” to which Clive Norton refers is available on our web site. Clive writes: 

“You may have heard and got a transcript of the Sydney Peace Prize lecture.   It is so important that I would like to draw the attention of all CPRT participants and those on our mailing lists to it. We could not get to hear him on 3 Nov, but a friend sent us a transcript (see below).  Ruth and I found that transcript was not easy to read or comprehend in full, without actually hearing Chomsky. 

His acute analysis came alive in the ABC radio national broadcast in its BIG IDEAS series;  it is free to hear on-line @ www.abc.net.au     (One needs to hear and then re-read and re-read all he encompassed!)   Very important for it to be widely spread and discussed.”  

See the Article next: -

 2011 City of Sydney Peace Prize Lecture

The 2011 City of Sydney Peace Prize Lecture was delivered to a sold-out crowd at Sydney Town Hall on Wednesday 2nd November, by the 2011 Sydney Peace Prize Recipient, Prof Noam Chomsky.

Source: Sydney Peace BlogThursday, November 03, 2011

 Revolutionary Pacifism: Choices and Prospects

As we all know, the United Nations was founded “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.” The words can only elicit deep regret when we consider how we have acted to fulfill that aspiration, though there have been a few significant successes, notably in Europe.

For centuries, Europe had been the most violent place on earth, with murderous and destructive internal conflicts and the forging of a culture of war that enabled Europe to conquer most of the world, shocking the victims, who were hardly pacifists, but were “appalled by the all-destructive fury of European warfare,” in the words of British military historian Geoffrey Parker. And enabled Europe to impose on its conquests what Adam Smith called “the savage injustice of the Europeans,” England in the lead, as he did not fail to emphasize. The global conquest took a particularly horrifying form in what is sometimes called “the Anglosphere,” England and its offshoots, settler-colonial societies in which the indigenous societies were devastated and their people dispersed or exterminated. But since 1945 Europe has become internally the most peaceful and in many ways most humane region of the earth – which is the source of some its current travail, an important topic that I will have to put aside.

In scholarship, this dramatic transition is often attributed to the thesis of the “democratic peace”: democracies do not go to war with one another. Not to be overlooked, however, is that Europeans came to realize that the next time they indulge in their favorite pastime of slaughtering one another, the game will be over: civilization has developed means of destruction that can only be used against those too weak to retaliate in kind, a large part of the appalling history of the post-World War II years. It is not that the threat has ended. US-Soviet confrontations came painfully close to virtually terminal nuclear war in ways that are shattering to contemplate, when we inspect them closely. And the threat of nuclear war remains all too ominously alive, a matter to which I will briefly return.

Can we proceed to at least limit the scourge of war? One answer is given by absolute pacifists, including people I respect though I have never felt able to go beyond that. A somewhat more persuasive stand, I think, is that of the pacifist thinker and social activist A.J. Muste, one of the great figures of 20th century America, in my opinion: what he called “revolutionary pacifism.” Muste disdained the search for peace without justice. He urged that “one must be a revolutionary before one can be a pacifist” – by which he meant that we must cease to “acquiesce [so] easily in evil conditions,” and must deal “honestly and adequately with this ninety percent of our problem” – “the violence on which the present system is based, and all the evil – material and spiritual – this entails for the masses of men throughout the world.” Unless we do so, he argued, “there is something ludicrous, and perhaps hypocritical, about our concern over the ten per cent of the violence employed by the rebels against oppression” – no matter how hideous they may be. He was confronting the hardest problem of the day for a pacifist, the question whether to take part in the anti-fascist war.

In writing about Muste’s stand 45 years ago, I quoted his warning that “The problem after a war is with the victor. He thinks he has just proved that war and violence pay. Who will teach him a lesson?” His observation was all too apt at the time, while the Indochina wars were raging. And on all too many other occasions since.

The allies did not fight “the good war,” as it is commonly called, because of the awful crimes of fascism. Before their attacks on western powers, fascists were treated rather sympathetically, particularly “that admirable Italian gentleman,” as FDR called Mussolini. Even Hitler was regarded by the US State Department as a “moderate” holding off the extremists of right and left. The British were even more sympathetic, particularly the business world. Roosevelt’s close confidant Sumner Welles reported to the president that the Munich settlement that dismembered Czechoslovakia “presented the opportunity for the establishment by the nations of the world of a new world order based upon justice and upon law,” in which the Nazi moderates would play a leading role. As late as April 1941, the influential statesman George Kennan, at the dovish extreme of the postwar planning spectrum, wrote from his consular post in Berlin that German leaders have no wish to “see other people suffer under German rule,” are “most anxious that their new subjects should be happy in their care,” and are making “important compromises” to assure this benign outcome. 

Though by then the horrendous facts of the Holocaust were well known, they scarcely entered the Nuremberg trials, which focused on aggression, “the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole”: in Indochina, Iraq, and all too many other places where we have much to contemplate. The horrifying crimes of Japanese fascism were virtually ignored in the postwar peace settlements. Japan’s aggression began exactly 80 years ago, with the staged Mukden incident, but for the West, it began 10 years later, with the attack on military bases in two US possessions. India and other major Asian countries refused even to attend the 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty conference because of the exclusion of Japan’s crimes in Asia – and also because of Washington’s establishment of a major military base in conquered Okiniwa, still there despite the energetic protests of the population. It is useful to reflect on several aspects of the Pearl Harbor attack. One is the reaction of historian and Kennedy advisor Arthur Schlesinger to the bombing of Baghdad in March 2003. He recalled FDR’s words when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on “a date which will live in infamy.” “Today it is we Americans who live in infamy,” Schlesinger wrote, as our government adopts the policies of imperial Japan – thoughts that were barely articulated elsewhere in the mainstream, and quickly suppressed: I could find no mention of this principled stand in the praise for Schlesinger’s accomplishments when he died a few years later. 

We can also learn a lot about ourselves by carrying Schlesinger’s lament a few steps further. By today’s standards, Japan’s attack was justified, indeed meritorious. Japan, after all, was exercising the much lauded doctrine of anticipatory self-defense when it bombed military bases in Hawaii and the Philippines, two virtual US colonies, with reasons far more compelling than anything that Bush and Blair could conjure up when they adopted the policies of imperial Japan in 2003. Japanese leaders were well aware that B-17 Flying Fortresses were coming off the Boeing production lines, and they could read in the American press that these killing machines would be able to burn down Tokyo, a “city of rice-paper and wood houses.” A November 1940 plan to “bomb Tokyo and other big cities” was enthusiastically received by Secretary of State Cordell Hull. FDR was “simply delighted” at the plans “to burn out the industrial heart of the Empire with fire-bomb attacks on the teeming bamboo ant heaps of Honshu and Kyushu,” outlined by their author, Air Force General Chennault. By July 1941, the Air Corps was ferrying B-17s to the Far East for this purpose, assigning half of all the big bombers to this region, taking them from the Atlantic sea-lanes. They were to be used if needed “to set the paper cities of Japan on fire,” according to General George Marshall, Roosevelt’s main military adviser, in a press briefing three weeks before Pearl Harbor. Four days later, New York Times senior correspondent Arthur Krock reported US plans to bomb Japan from Siberian and Philippine bases, to which the Air Force was rushing incendiary bombs intended for civilian targets. The US knew from decoded messages that Japan was aware of these plans.  

History provides ample evidence to support Muste’s conclusion that “The problem after a war is with the victor, [who] thinks he has just proved that war and violence pay.” And the real answer to Muste’s question, “Who will teach him a lesson?,” can only be domestic populations, if they can adopt elementary moral principles. 

Even the most uncontroversial of these principles could have a major impact on ending injustice and war. Consider the principle of universality, perhaps the most elementary of moral principles: we apply to ourselves the standards we apply to others, if not more stringent ones. The principle is universal, or nearly so, in three further respects: it is found in some form in every moral code; it is universally applauded in words, and consistently rejected in practice. The facts are plain, and should be troublesome.  

The principle has a simple corollary, which suffers the same fate: we should distribute finite energies to the extent that we can influence outcomes, typically on cases for which we share responsibility. We take that for granted with regard to enemies. No one cares whether Iranian intellectuals join the ruling clerics in condemnation of the crimes of Israel or the United States. Rather, we ask what they say about their own state. We honored Soviet dissidents on the same grounds. Of course, that is not the reaction within their own societies. There dissidents are condemned as “anti-Soviet” or supporters of the Great Satan, much as their counterparts here are condemned as “anti-American” or supporters of today’s official enemy. And of course, punishment of those who adhere to elementary moral principles can be severe, depending on the nature of the society. In Soviet-run Czechoslovakia, for example, Vaclav Havel was imprisoned. At the same time, in US-run El Salvador his counterparts had their brains blown out by an elite battalion fresh from renewed training at the John F. Kennedy School of Special Warfare in North Carolina, acting on explicit orders of the High Command, which had intimate relations with Washington. We all know and respect Havel for his courageous resistance, but who can even name the leading Latin American intellectuals, Jesuit priests, who were added to the long bloody trail of the Atlacatl brigade shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall – along with their housekeeper and daughter, since the orders were to leave no witnesses?

Before we hear that these are exceptions, we might recall a truism of Latin American scholarship, reiterated by historian John Coatsworth in the recently published Cambridge University History of the Cold War: from 1960 to “the Soviet collapse in 1990, the numbers of political prisoners, torture victims, and executions of nonviolent political dissenters in Latin America vastly exceeded those in the Soviet Union and its East European satellites.” Among the executed were many religious martyrs, and there were mass slaughters as well, consistently supported or initiated by Washington. And the date 1960 is highly significant, for reasons we should all know, but I cannot go into here. 

In the West all of this is “disappeared,” to borrow the terminology of our Latin American victims. Regrettably, these are persistent features of intellectual and moral culture, which we can trace back to the earliest recorded history.   I think they richly underscore Muste’s injunction.  If we ever hope to live up to the high ideals we passionately proclaim, and to bring the initial dream of the United Nations closer to fulfillment, we should think carefully about crucial choices that have been made, and continue to be made every day – not forgetting “the violence on which the present system is based, and all the evil – material and spiritual – this entails for the masses of men throughout the world.”   Among these masses are 6 million children who die every year because of lack of simple medical procedures that the rich countries could make available within statistical error in their budgets. And a billion people on the edge of starvation or worse, but not beyond reach by any means.  

We should also never forget that our wealth derives in no small measure from the tragedy of others. That is dramatically clear in the Anglosphere.   I live in a comfortable suburb of Boston. Those who once lived there were victims of “the utter extirpation of all the Indians in most populous parts of the Union” by means “more destructive to the Indian natives than the conduct of the conquerors of Mexico and Peru” – the verdict of the first Secretary of War of the newly liberated colonies, General Henry Knox. They suffered the fate of “that hapless race of native Americans, which we are exterminating with such merciless and perfidious cruelty…among the heinous sins of this nation, for which I believe God will one day bring [it] to judgement” – the words of the great grand strategist John Quincy Adams, intellectual author of Manifest Destiny and the Monroe Doctrine, long after his own substantial contributions to these heinous sins. Australians should have no trouble adding illustrations. Whatever the ultimate judgment of God may be, the judgment of man is far from Adams’s expectations. To mention a few recent cases, consider what I suppose are the two most highly regarded left-liberal intellectual journals in the Anglosphere, the New York and London Reviews of Books. In the former, a prominent commentator recently reported what he learned from the work of the “heroic historian” Edmund Morgan: namely, that when Columbus and the early explorers arrived they “found a continental vastness sparsely populated by farming and hunting people . . . . In the limitless and unspoiled world stretching from tropical jungle to the frozen north, there may have been scarcely more than a million inhabitants.” The calculation is off by tens of millions, and the “vastness” included advanced civilizations, facts well known to those who choose to know decades ago. No letters appeared reacting to this truly colossal case of genocide denial. In the companion London journal a noted historian casually mentioned the “mistreatment of the Native Americans,” again eliciting no comment. We would hardly accept the word “mistreatment” for comparable or even much lesser crimes committed by enemies. 

Recognition of heinous crimes from which we benefit enormously would be a good start after centuries of denial, but we can go on from there. One of the main tribes where I live was the Wampanoag, who still have a small reservation not too far away. Their language has long ago disappeared. But in a remarkable feat of scholarship and dedication to elementary human rights, the language has been reconstructed from missionary texts and comparative evidence, and now has its first native speaker in 100 years, the daughter of Jennie Little Doe, who has become a fluent speaker of the language herself. She is a former graduate student at MIT, who worked with my late friend and colleague Kenneth Hale, one of the most outstanding linguists of the modern period. Among his many accomplishments was his leading role in founding the study of aboriginal languages of Australia. He was also very effective in defense of the rights of indigenous people, also a dedicated peace and justice activist. He was able to turn our department at MIT into a center for the study of indigenous languages and active defense of indigenous rights in the Americas and beyond. Revival of the Wampanoag language has revitalized the tribe. A language is more than just sounds and words. It is the repository of culture, history, traditions, the entire rich texture of human life and society. Loss of a language is a serious blow not only to the community itself but to all of those who hope to understand something of the nature of human beings, their capacities and achievements, and of course a loss of particular severity to those concerned with the variety and uniformity of human languages, a core component of human higher mental faculties. Similar achievements can be carried forward, a very partial but significant gesture towards repentance for heinous sins on which our wealth and power rests.  

Since we commemorate anniversaries, such as the Japanese attacks 70 years ago, there are several significant ones that fall right about now, with lessons that can serve for both enlightenment and action. I will mention just a few. 

The West has just commemorated the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and what was called at the time, but no longer, “the glorious invasion” of Afghanistan that followed, soon to be followed by the even more glorious invasion of Iraq. Partial closure for 9/11 was reached with the assassination of the prime suspect, Osama bin Laden, by US commandos who invaded Pakistan, apprehended him and then murdered him, disposing of the corpse without autopsy. 

I said “prime suspect,” recalling the ancient though long-abandoned doctrine of “presumption of innocence.” The current issue of the major US scholarly journal of international relations features several discussions of the Nuremberg trials of some of history’s worst criminals. There we read that the “U.S. decision to prosecute, rather than seek brutal vengeance was a victory for the American tradition of rights and a particularly American brand of legalism: punishment only for those who could be proved to be guilty through a fair trial with a panoply of procedural protections.” The journal appeared right at the time of the celebration of the abandonment of this principle in a dramatic way, while the global campaign of assassination of suspects, and inevitable “collateral damage,” continues to be expanded, to much acclaim.   

Not to be sure universal acclaim. Pakistan’s leading daily recently published a study of the effect of drone attacks and other US terror. It found that “About 80 per cent [of] residents of [the tribal regions] South and North Waziristan agencies have been affected mentally while 60 per cent people of Peshawar are nearing to become psychological patients if these problems are not addressed immediately,” and warned that the “survival of our young generation” is at stake. In part for these reasons, hatred of America had already risen to phenomenal heights, and after the bin Laden assassination increased still more. One consequence was firing across the border at the bases of the US occupying army in Afghanistan – which provoked sharp condemnation of Pakistan for its failure to cooperate in an American war that Pakistanis overwhelmingly oppose, taking the same stand they did when the Russians occupied Afghanistan. A stand then lauded, now condemned.   

The specialist literature and even the US Embassy in Islamabad warn that the pressures on Pakistan to take part in the US invasion, as well as US attacks in Pakistan, are “destabilizing and radicalizing Pakistan, risking a geopolitical catastrophe for the United States – and the world – which would dwarf anything that could possibly occur in Afghanistan” – quoting British military/Pakistan analyst Anatol Lieven. The assassination of bin Laden greatly heightened this risk in ways that were ignored in the general enthusiasm for assassination of suspects. The US commandos were under orders to fight their way out if necessary. They would surely have had air cover, maybe more, in which case there might have been a major confrontation with the Pakistani army, the only stable institution in Pakistan, and deeply committed to defending Pakistan’s sovereignty. Pakistan has a huge nuclear arsenal, the most rapidly expanding in the world. And the whole system is laced with radical Islamists, products of the strong US-Saudi support for the worst of Pakistan’s dictators, Zia ul-Haq, and his program of radical Islamization.  This program along with Pakistan’s nuclear weapons are among Ronald Reagan’s legacies. Obama has now added the risk of nuclear explosions in London and New York, if the confrontation had led to leakage of nuclear materials to jihadis, as was plausibly feared – one of the many examples of the constant threat of nuclear weapons.  

The assassination of bin Laden had a name: “Operation Geronimo.” That caused an uproar in Mexico, and was protested by the remnants of the indigenous population in the US. But elsewhere few seemed to comprehend the significance of identifying bin Laden with the heroic Apache Indian chief who led the resistance to the invaders, seeking to protect his people from the fate of “that hapless race” that John Quincy Adams eloquently described. The imperial mentality is so profound that such matters cannot even be perceived. There were a few criticisms of Operation Geronimo – the name, the manner of its execution, and the implications. These elicited the usual furious condemnations, most unworthy of comment, though some were instructive. The most interesting was by the respected left-liberal commentator Matthew Yglesias. He patiently explained that “one of the main functions of the international institutional order is precisely to legitimate the use of deadly military force by western powers,” so it is “amazingly naïve” to suggest that the US should obey international law or other conditions that we impose on the powerless. The words are not criticism, but applause; hence one can raise only tactical objections if the US invades other countries, murders and destroys with abandon, assassinates suspects at will, and otherwise fulfills its obligations in the service of mankind. If the traditional victims see matters somewhat differently, that merely reveals their moral and intellectual backwardness. And the occasional Western critic who fails to comprehend these fundamental truths can be dismissed as “silly,” Yglesias explains – incidentally, referring specifically to me, and I cheerfully confess my guilt.  

Going back a decade to 2001, from the first moment it was clear that the “glorious invasion” was anything but that. It was undertaken with the understanding that it might drive several million Afghans over the edge of starvation, which is why the bombing was bitterly condemned by the aid agencies that were forced to end the operations on which 5 million Afghans depended for survival. Fortunately the worst did not happen, but only the most morally obtuse can fail to comprehend that actions are evaluated in terms of likely consequences, not actual ones. The invasion of Afganistan was not aimed at overthrowing the brutal Taliban regime, as later claimed. That was an afterthought, brought up three weeks after the bombing began. Its explicit reason was that the Taliban were unwilling to extradite bin Laden without evidence, which the US refused to provide – as later learned, because it had virtually none, and in fact still has little that could stand up in an independent court of law, though his responsibility is hardly in doubt. The Taliban did in fact make some gestures towards extradition, and we since have learned that there were other such options, but they were all dismissed in favor of violence, which has since torn the country to shreds. It has reached its highest level in a decade this year according to the UN, with no diminution in sight.  

A very serious question, rarely asked then or since, is whether there was an alternative to violence. There is strong evidence that there was. The 9/11 attack was sharply condemned within the jihadi movement, and there were good opportunities to split it and isolate al-Qaeda. Instead, Washington and London chose to follow the script provided by bin Laden, helping to establish his claim that the West is attacking Islam, and thus provoking new waves of terror. The senior CIA analyst responsible for tracking Osama bin Laden from 1996, Michael Scheuer, warned right away and has repeated since that “the United States of America remains bin Laden’s only indispensable ally.”   

These are among the natural consequences of rejecting Muste’s warning, and the main thrust of his revolutionary pacifism, which should direct us to investigating the grievances that lead to violence, and when they are legitimate, as they often are, to address them. When that advice is taken, it can succeed very well. Britain’s recent experience in Northern Ireland is a good illustration. For years, London responded to IRA terror with greater violence, escalating the cycle, which reached a bitter peak. When the government began instead to attend to the grievances, violence subsided and terror has effectively disappeared. I was in Belfast in 1993, when it was a war zone, and returned a year ago to a city with tensions, but hardly beyond the norm.  

There is a great deal more to say about what we call 9/11 and its consequences, but I do not want to end without at least mentioning a few more anniversaries. Right now happens to be the 50th anniversary of President Kennedy’s decision to escalate the conflict in South Vietnam from vicious repression, which had already killed tens of thousands of people and finally elicited a reaction that the client regime in Saigon could not control, to outright US invasion: bombing by the US Air Force, use of napalm, chemical warfare soon including crop destruction to deprive the resistance of food, and programs to send millions of South Vietnamese to virtual concentration camps where they could be “protected” from the guerrillas who, admittedly, they were supporting.   

There is no time to review the grim aftermath, and there should be no need to do so. The wars left three countries devastated, with a toll of many millions, not including the miserable victims of the enormous chemical warfare assault, including newborn infants today.   

There were a few at the margins who objected – “wild men in the wings,” as they were termed by Kennedy-Johnson National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy, former Harvard Dean. And by the time that the very survival of South Vietnam was in doubt, popular protest became quite strong. At the war’s end in 1975, about 70% of the population regarded the war as “fundamentally wrong and immoral,” not “a mistake,” figures that were sustained as long as the question was asked in polls. In revealing contrast, at the dissident extreme of mainstream commentary the war was “a mistake” because our noble objectives could not be achieved at a tolerable cost.   

Another anniversary that should be in our minds today is of the massacre in the Santa Cruz graveyard in Dili just 20 years ago, the most publicized of a great many shocking atrocities during the Indonesian invasion and annexation of East Timor. Australia had joined the US in granting formal recognition to the Indonesian occupation, after its virtually genocidal invasion. The US State Department explained to Congress in 1982 that Washington recognized both the Indonesian occupation and the Khmer Rouge-based “Democratic Kampuchea” regime. The justification offered was that “unquestionably” the Khmer Rouge were “more representative of the Cambodian people than Fretilin was of the Timorese people” because “there has been this continuity [in Cambodia] since the very beginning,” in 1975, when the Khmer Rouge took over.  The media and commentators have been polite enough to all this languish in silence, not an inconsiderable feat.

A few months before the Santa Cruz massacre, Foreign Minister Gareth Evans made his famous statements dismissing concerns about the murderous invasion and annexation on the grounds that “the world is a pretty unfair place,…littered…with examples of acquisitions of force,” so we can therefore look away as awesome crimes continue with strong support by the western powers. Not quite look away, because at the same time Evans was negotiating the robbery of East Timor’s sole resource with his comrade Ali Alatas, foreign minister of Indonesia, producing what seems to be the only official western document that recognizes East Timor as an Indonesian province.  

Years later, Evans declared that “the notion that we had anything to answer for morally or otherwise over the way we handled the Indonesia-East Timor relationship, I absolutely reject” – a stance that can be adopted, and even respected, by those who emerge victorious. In the US and Britain, the question is not even asked in polite society. It is only fair to add that in sharp contrast, much of the Australian population, and media, were in the forefront of exposing and protesting the crimes, some of the worst of the past half-century. And in 1999, when the crimes were escalating once again, they had a significant role in convincing US president Clinton to inform the Indonesian generals in September that the game was over, at which point they immediately withdrew allowing an Australian-led peacekeeping force to enter.  

There are lessons here too, for the public. Clinton’s orders could have been delivered at any time in the preceding 25 years, terminating the crimes. Clinton himself could easily have delivered them four years earlier, in October 2005, when General Suharto was welcomed to Washington as “our kind of guy.” The same orders could have been given 20 years earlier, when Henry Kissinger gave the “green light” to the Indonesian invasion, and UN Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan expressed his pride in having rendered the United Nations “utterly ineffective” in any measures to deter the Indonesian invasion – later to be revered for his courageous defense of international law.  

There could hardly be a more painful illustration of the consequences of the failure to attend to Muste’s lesson. It should be added that in a shameful display of subordination to power, some respected western intellectuals have actually sunk to describing this disgraceful record as a stellar illustration of the humanitarian norm of “right to protect.”   

Consistent with Muste’s “revolutionary pacifism,” the Sydney Peace Foundation has always emphasized peace with justice. The demands of justice can remain unfulfilled long after peace has been declared. The Santa Cruz massacre 20 years ago can serve as an illustration. One year after the massacre the United Nations adopted The Declaration on the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance, which states that “Acts constituting enforced disappearance shall be considered a continuing offence as long as the perpetrators continue to conceal the fate and the whereabouts of persons who have disappeared and these facts remain unclarified.” The massacre is therefore a continuing offence: the fate of the disappeared is unknown, and the offenders have not been brought to justice, including those who continue to conceal the crimes of complicity and participation. Only one indication of how far we must go to rise to some respectable level of civilized behavior.