We know what’s happening: Chamath Palihapitiya, formerly a top Facebook executive, said with some regret, “I think we have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works. . . . No civil discourse, no cooperation; misinformation, mistruth. . . .
“So we are in a really bad state of affairs right now, in my opinion. It is eroding the core foundation of how people behave by and between each other. And I don’t have a good solution. My solution is I just don’t use these tools anymore. I haven’t for years.”
Turning it off is the extreme solution. All I’m suggesting is that we begin to meet the challenges by turning down the volume.
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God Is Expansive—Think Bigger
I am fundamentally an optimist. Whether that comes from nature or nurture, I cannot say. Part of being optimistic is keeping one’s head pointed toward the sun, one’s feet moving forward. There were many dark moments when my faith in humanity was sorely tested, but I would not and could not give myself up to despair. That way lies defeat and death.
—Nelson Mandela
Let a wave of intolerance wash over you . . . Yes, hate is good . . . Our goal is a Christian nation . . . We are called by God to conquer this country . . . We don’t want pluralism.
—Operation Rescue founder Randall Terry, August 1993
I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.
—Gandhi
I have come to believe and accept the fact that we need strengths beyond our awareness and resources to restore this country to sanity. A lot of the principles of AA are based on an individual relationship to God; the fifth step, for example: “Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.” And the sixth: “We’re entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.” And the seventh: “Humbly asked him to remove our shortcomings.”
I’m a man of faith, but I’m not a big fan of religion. I ask a lot of questions that I’m pretty confident are not going to be answered while I’m alive. The biggest one, of course, being (imagine trumpets blaring here!): Is there a God? I believe there is. But I cannot prove it to you, nor can you prove He doesn’t exist. So let me respect your point of view, and I would ask that you return the favor.
Civilizations have been debating that question long before we had an Internet. That just made it easier. The current debate between believers and nonbelievers is basically summed up as the Big Bang Theory versus Intelligent Design. Let’s say it was the Big Bang, where the world was created in a massive explosion that spewed the universe. What caused it? What existed before it went boom? Truthfully, I don’t care. On the other hand, do I really believe the world was created in seven days? Did He create using evolution? Personally, anyone who asks the seven-day question is just looking for a Twitter fight. What is a day to God? It is akin to asking whether God can make a rock so heavy that He himself cannot lift it. What is He, a bodybuilder now? Stop. I believe that God created the universe and all that is in it. What does that mean, and how did it happen? I don’t know, and neither does anyone else—not the popes, not the professors.
So much of history, literature, and the Bible I didn’t understand or appreciate until recently. I guess most of my life, when I would read the stories, I couldn’t understand how the people could be so stupid. I mean, they were just wiped out on page 1260 for what they are now doing again on page 1281. “Morons,” I always thought. Until we became those morons.
We are missing basic connections that have always brought us together. If you really want to understand the West, its culture, its systems of government, or even its art, including Shakespeare, you must read the Bible. It was the stock of everything we did, thought, and created. Almost everything we have heard our whole life came from that book, and we don’t even know it.
At their wits’ end; a two-edged sword; a drop in the bucket; a house divided against itself cannot stand; a labor of love; nothing new under the sun; fire and brimstone; fight the good fight; beat swords into ploughshares; it’s better to give than to receive; in the twinkling of an eye; the ends of the earth; at the eleventh hour; the blind leading the blind; by the skin of your teeth; to cast pearls before swine; eat, drink, and be merry; to fall by the wayside; feet of clay; a fly in the ointment; a leopard cannot change its spots; like a lamb to the slaughter; a millstone around your neck; to move mountains; the writing is on the wall.
How can we dismiss something that most have never read cover to cover and yet its words are so deeply rooted in our culture?
Imagine now what other lasting civilization building blocks are in that book.
Even if we take the Thomas Paine approach. He didn’t believe in the Bible’s being an accurate history. He didn’t believe in Jesus. But he believed in a higher being. Franklin told him that everything he could dream and do was because of the people who did believe in the Judeo-Christian teachings. It was the civilization that sprang from the true principles that allowed men to live free and in harmony with one another. It was the absence or distortions of that truth that caused chaos and death. It is why in the end, the man the world deemed an atheist risked his life to try to convince the followers of Robespierre during the French Revolution that they must not dismiss God.
Thomas Paine didn’t need to “baptize” the French. He knew that self-governance was essential, and throughout the history of mankind, when man has faith in the Judeo-Christian concept of “God” and the humility that comes from the correct understanding of the “faith,” he behaves differently and has a better chance of governing himself properly.
Without a foundation, all is fair game. What is moral? Is it more moral to kill a child with Down syndrome, as it “will have no quality of life” so others can receive food and care that we couldn’t afford due to this “useless eater”? Natural rights tell us that this is what the “pack” will do with its weakest link.
If we want to leave the Judeo-Christian world, let’s at least discuss what that means. To do so, we must first know what those truisms that built this world were and which ones have been distorted. There are indeed big problems, but there have also been things that have been achieved only in this culture. Which are the good parts that should be saved, and which need to be discarded?
What are we even shooting for? What is our goal, object, or pinpoint on the horizon we are now striving to reach? Man has always had hero stories. Even the box office is showing us how hungry we are for heroes. Iron Man, Thor, the Black Panther. Luke Skywalker is probably the most famous and sound of today’s hero archetypes. But who are the real-life heroes whom we want to emulate and foster? Can you name one? Can you identify the traits? If you can but cannot name a man who lives up to those traits who is accepted by most, can we ever achieve that goal?
We had two archetypes that we all agreed were our ultimate men, or ideal spirit or attitude. The Western world is built around these two men: a selfless lawgiver, Moses; and Jesus, the man from Nazareth. One “perfect” and the other riddled with flaws and mistakes. But through each of them we could learn all we needed to know to grow in character and strength. Because of them, we knew the difference between right and wrong at the most basic level as well as the most intellectual. These two men were the basis for what MLK said he thought all men should be judged by: the content of their “character.”
We have almost totally obliterated those images and even a basic understanding of what they meant and did. We have lost our mooring line. It is why character no longer seems to matter. Who is the archetype?
It is no wonder we are so lost. We have no North Star. There is no universally shared truth or hero stories. We are a culture that has lost its heroes, God, and even myths. As Nietzsche said to the people of the German republic as they headed toward madness: “God is dead.” However, as he and others have pointed out, “When people lose their faith in God, it isn’t that they believe in nothing; rather, they
will believe in anything.”
Churches have so distorted the message of God that most under thirty have no image of God outside a religious description. People are forgoing “God” and just trying to be better men or women than they were yesterday.
Once, years ago, I was talking to my father and I said something about God. He stopped me and said, “Before we have this discussion, Glenn, what do you mean by God?”
I didn’t understand his question. At that time I was still young enough to know everything, and everybody knows about God. “What do you mean?”
“Well,” he began, “if you say God, does that mean a Father God? Or does that mean Jesus and the Holy Spirit, too? When you say God, do you mean the God of Buddha? Or do you mean one that’s in heaven? One that created heaven and hell? What exactly do you mean?”
He was causing chaos in my mind. Obviously I’d never considered anything like that. God is God. He’s just God.
Apparently not, though. “That’s the problem. We can’t have a discussion about God using the word ‘God’ because it means too many things to too many people. You say the word ‘God’ to someone who’s been abused by a pastor and that God looks very different. God, if you want to have a fair discussion, is first cause.”
“What do you mean?”
“What started it all? All physics, all knowledge, everything breaks down fractions of a second after the Big Bang. So let’s go back to one second before; what lit the fuse? What created that?”
My father was more of a deist in a way. He did not believe in praying to God for solutions, or favors, or whatever. And I guess I didn’t either. I do now. I still go to church grudgingly. I am just not a fan of organized religion, and it is very different from my faith. Thank God, one doesn’t depend on the other.
Ben Franklin was asked as a religious trap, “Sir, what is the American religion?” He responded: “That there is a God. He is just and will judge us. Because He is just, we should serve Him. The best way to serve Him is to serve our fellow man.”
Where do I find that church? Our churches spend too much time inside their own four walls. It is time we live it.
I think this is why Christians get such a bad name. Christ’s followers rarely act like him when the chips are down. A recent Barna poll, which is a faith-based pollster, found that there was NO statistical difference between the life religious people live and non. Health, marriage, honesty, theft, sex, divorce—nothing. Except service and charitable giving. Honestly, I would rather be around a liar who admitted that he lied than one who lied about lying. WHERE ARE ALL THE HONEST LIARS?
Please don’t wrap political justifications around the Bible. Just come out and say it like it is. Nope, all that stuff isn’t Christian behavior, but I do it or I accept it because. But then don’t act all high and mighty when someone else does it.
I am a long way away from being a Millennial, but I am with them. If the people in the church aren’t doing it, there is nothing there for me to learn. I can read the book on my own or find a group of people and we can go out and serve for an hour or two. That is going to bring me closer to whatever God wants me to be than sitting in a pew just talking about it. Let’s make our prayers and time count.
I do make my plea every day, but it is never for anything specific; rather, it is simply to accept whatever happens during the day. It’s, “Let me find meaning in whatever happens.” My prayers bring me to a peaceful place within myself.
“Lord, let me accept whatever comes my way. You know what I am working toward and on; should it put me on the wrong path, close the door and change my path. Let me see the pain in others and make the time to comfort, listen, or bolster. Help me be a better man than I was yesterday. I AM open and I AM searching to see you in all people and all things today. Give me the opportunity to be reminded that I AM your servant.”
So if people want to talk about God and religion, I can do that—I can sit and talk about it with them for years, and I’ll have a great time with the intellectual exploration of what it all is and how it happened. I doubt we’ll come up with an answer. If we do, will be it right? I don’t know. Most important, it doesn’t matter. Here’s what I do know: I will die someday, and only then will it be revealed if there is an afterlife. But the faith that I have in my life it has made me a better man on earth. It has helped me on a daily basis to navigate sometimes treacherous waters.
The result of my exploration has been my faith. I don’t know the answers to all those questions; nobody does, nobody can answer them. There is a wonderfully provocative book written by Robert Harris entitled Conclave. It’s the story of the gathering of cardinals to elect a new pope. The cardinal running the conclave may be having his own doubts. The one thing he has come to fear more than anything else, he explains, is certainty. Certainty is the deadly enemy of tolerance. Even Christ wasn’t certain in the end, which is why he wondered in his agony, Father, why have you forsaken me? If there was no doubt about it all, there would be no mystery; there would be no need for faith.
While the God question isn’t going to be answered anytime soon, I have absolutely no doubt about the power and value of faith, even if trying to describe it is like picking up mercury. People tend to look at it from their own corner of the world and make it fit into their current belief system. “Faith,” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said once, giving it the broadest definition, “is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.” That is having faith, or maybe “blind faith”—believing when there is no scientific reason to do so. You believe because you believe.
That’s actually reasonably close to the religious definition, which is essentially believing something is true even though there is no material evidence to support that belief. Hebrews 11:1 explains, “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”
British journalist Andrew Brown focused on a nonreligious meaning, which is equally beneficial in overcoming an addiction: “What we all need is not best described as faith. It is simply more than can be proven by logic and science. We need to believe in things that are not entirely justified by reason, but that does not require us to embrace creeds that reason tells against. The non-religious do not find meaning, purpose and value by taking a leap into the unknown and transcendental. We find it in the beauty and joy of life, and in the empathy that makes us see the value in the lives of others too. These things are not facts captured by fundamental physics but nor are they religious mysteries to be taken on faith.”
Both faith healing and the placebo effect, in which people actually receive some positive benefits from treatments having absolutely no scientific value, also show the power of faith. If you believe, really believe, that something is true or has value, your mind is so strong that it miraculously can make it happen. Researchers have suggested a lot of explanations for that and all of them are very interesting, but the bottom line is simply this: In many cases, faith—non-religious faith—has proven to be a strong medicine.
Faith has always played an important role in step programs to overcome addiction. But a lot of those programs emphasize the difference between faith and religion. Cocaine Anonymous, for example, refers to a “higher power” in its basic tenets, but then explains that it is up to each individual to decide what that higher power is. On its website CA makes the point that “It is easy enough to confuse the word spirituality with religion. As it relates to God, Cocaine Anonymous is a spiritual program, not a religious one.”
It would have been a lot easier for me to quit drinking if I’d had some type of guarantee that something better was waiting for me when I did. You know, some kind of double-your-Jim-Beam-back if you aren’t happier. But I didn’t have that. So giving up my lifestyle required me to believe that going through all that was going to lead to something positive. The organization Recovery.org explains, “There is no point in dealing with the pain, discomfort, anguish, guilt, shame, and all the other emotions and feelings that recovery can bring if ther
e is no end that makes it worth it.”
My personal faith has sustained me through some difficult times. I have relied on it. It has served as a moral barometer. It enabled me to have a strong marriage. But it’s different from what is taught in AA. AA is very God-oriented. In AA, the function of faith, or a belief in a supreme being, is to give alcoholics something to rely on to fill the vast emptiness created by giving up drinking. Giving up your outrage is also going to leave a void that’s going to need to be filled. And it may require you to accept, on faith, that there is a real benefit to you and the country.
At another time in our history we would have had the American myth to rely on. We would have believed in the righteousness of our country and known that more was expected of us as Americans. We don’t have those beliefs anymore. We know that our government is capable of torturing prisoners, we have a president who has at best a distant relationship with the truth, we know our fellow Americans can be vicious in their personal attacks. It’s hard not to fight back, and there are times when we need something greater than our own internal fortitude to rely on.
We don’t have those basic underpinnings we once could rely on as a guide to do things “the American way,” but we still need some kind of moral foundation. We know the difference between right and wrong, between love and hate, between anger and understanding, between coldness and compassion, although too often we place them aside and focus on winning and losing, which leads inevitably to outrage. There is no winning when you fight to win. There is winning in reconciliation. There is winning in listening to one another, in being peaceful to one other. Martin Luther King Jr. was absolutely right about that: He was not trying to win anything, he was just trying to figure out how all Americans could live together, governed by the laws of the land. And through all of that he was carried by his own faith. He didn’t know what was waiting on the mountaintop, but he believed that the goal was worth fighting for. King called it reconciliation. Gandhi called it love. Jesus called it the way, the truth, and the light, but in the end it is faith.