Uncategorized – Page 3 – Intelligent Christian Spirituality

Atheists not scientific about religion

For the past few decades, atheists have been speaking freely about their lack of faith. In part they have been emboldened by two vociferous atheists. In both Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion and Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, they take the worst examples of religious folly and advocate getting rid of religion because it is an irrational curse on the human race.

There is no denying that they are both partially right: religion has been the cause of a lot of irrationalism and evil, witch-hunts and terrorism. However, there is also no denying that they are largely wrong: religion has been responsible for untold good. There is not only unhealthy religion, but also healthy religion.

As my friend Dr. Larry Cooley, a philosopher of science and religion, put it: “From a scientific viewpoint, Dawkins and Hitchens are unscientific when it comes to religion. In formulating a theory, a competent scientist tries to account for all the data.” It’s surprising that Dawkins, a respected scientist in the field of genetics, would throw out the scientific method when it comes to religion. In arguing that we should get rid of religion, both he and Hitchens have not taken into account all the data about bad science and good religion.

It would be easy to attack science based on all the evil it has brought upon the human race. Science and the technology that derives from it have brought us all manner of weapons of war: bombs, machine guns, tanks, and biological and chemical warfare. Science has been responsible for the maiming and deaths of hundreds of millions of people.

Science has also robbed people of hope for the future. I remember thinking in the 1980s that my family and I probably had no future because of the constant threat of nuclear war. Now, people in their twenties tell me they have no future because of the destruction of rain forests, pollution, and global warming brought upon the human race by science and technology: bulldozers, chain saws, cars, planes, and factories. Science is once again threatening our planet with destruction. Science has totally failed to bring us the utopia promised by the Enlightenment. One could argue that science is evil and should be done away with.

On the other hand, Dawkins and Hitchens have not taken into account all the data about good religion. The World Council of Churches and the Vatican have issued and implemented numerous statements and strategies about war, social justice, poverty, hunger, welfare, and the environment. Most universities and hospitals in the western world began under the sponsorship of Christian churches. Here in London, Ontario, for example, St. Joseph’s Hospital began as a mission of the Sisters of St. Joseph, and Parkwood Hospital began with the Women’s Christian Association. The University of Western Ontario began with Huron College, an Anglican seminary.

The whole Canadian system of universal health care happened because of the efforts of a Baptist minister, Tommy Douglas. Our legal system and moral code are based on Judeo-Christian precepts. As Michael Coren once said, “Quite simply, without Christian groups and Christian people, the social network of Canada would collapse. This is not hyperbole. Walk along almost any main street and look at the names of the houses, associations, and institutes that work for the poor.” In London, we have the Salvation Army and numerous soup kitchens sponsored by churches, and most churches educate their congregations about social justice issues and engage in charitable activities here and abroad.

Countless missionaries have brought not only religion but also education and medicine to developing countries. I think of my friend Dr. Harold Fast, a Mennonite who lived and died selflessly helping thousands of Muslims as a medical missionary in Pakistan. Save a Family Plan, operating out of St. Peter’s Seminary here in London, has helped tens of thousands of the poorest of the poor in India become self-sufficient.

On an individual level, religion has given billions of people a sense of significance, that their lives have transcendent value and meaning, that they are more than a cog in the drudgery of daily existence. Religion has brought people a sense of personal ethics, community, comfort, and hope for the future.

The problem in the world today is not science or religion. The problem, and the glory, is human nature. As human beings, we have the capacity to take these two great endeavors of the human spirit, science and religion, and make them into something very compassionate or very destructive. Dawkins and Hitchens seem to miss altogether the fact that, whether as scientists or religionists, we are capable of unlimited good and evil. Religion, at least, predicts this.

The most serious criticism of fundamentalist atheists like Dawkins and Hitchens is their inadequate scientific method: not taking into account all the data about healthy religion and unhealthy science makes them incompetent thinkers from their own scientific viewpoint.

Bruce Tallman is a London spiritual director and educator of adults in religion: brucetallman.com.

Navigating Modern Marriage: Beyond the Perfect Partner Myth

Paradoxically, the Internet, despite all its dating sites, has made it harder to get and stay married.

One site is called “Plenty of Fish.” The problem is choosing between infinite “fish” (potential partners) in the sea. People hoping to get married make a list of qualities of the ideal spouse and hunt for this mythical person on the Internet. This is making people much more choosy and less willing to accept imperfection.

Fifty years ago, there was limited choice in a spouse, and you had to work with your partner’s imperfections, knowing you were not perfect either. The present emphasis on finding the perfect mate results in people who are looking for love getting locked in the prison of their own ego.

This is the polar opposite of what marriage is about. For centuries, wedding vows involved vowing before God and other people that you would love your partner in sickness and in health, for richer or poorer, for better or worse. In other words, the wedding vows were about unconditional love, not about rejecting people who fail to meet one of the conditions on your list. True marriage is about freedom from your ego through a commitment to something bigger than your ego, that is, marriage.

God designed marriage to be two soulmates sharing life and love. So why do we so often fail at it? Why is the divorce rate for first marriages in Canada thirty-five percent and sixty-five percent for second marriages? Quite simply, marriage is one fallible human being having to cope day after day with another fallible human being. People seeking marriage should compare their lists with my lists of the hundreds of things couples fight over, from how to cut up the carrots to whether we should start having children.

All marriage experts agree there are four distinct stages of marriage: romance, disillusionment (or ‘reality check’), misery, and true love. This is not what people expect when contemplating marriage. Despite the fantasies created by the wedding industry, in marriage, you have to go through the hard stuff to get to the good stuff. You have to go through the crucifixion of your ego in misery to get to the resurrection of true love. This is normal marital reality, but the list makers will not survive disillusionment, let alone misery. They will never experience true love.

God allows conflict in marriage to challenge us to love and accept someone who is different from us, someone who is ‘other’ than our ego. To survive and thrive in marriage, you have to get out of your ego and grow in a whole list of spiritual virtues such as patience, trust, honesty, respect, acceptance, service, compassion, forgiveness, and commitment. God intended marriage to help you and your partner grow in mutual wholeness or holiness.

Unconditional love and commitment and developing these spiritual virtues is a tall order. This is where prayer and the power of God come in. You cannot do these things on your own. You must call upon God’s grace to help you love as God loves. Faith is essential for a truly fulfilling marriage.

Your spouse is made in the image of God (Genesis 1: 27-28), and since marriage is the most intimate of all relationships, the closest you get to God in the flesh is your marriage partner. The way you treat your spouse is the way you treat God. If you can’t love your spouse who you can see, how can you say you love God who you can’t see (I John 4:20)? Therefore, growing in spiritual virtues with your spouse is an essential part of spirituality. Treating the person closest to you badly is false spirituality.

If there is prolonged or severe emotional or physical abuse, neglect, or infidelity, it probably was not God’s will that the two of you be married in the first place, and you should get out. However, short of that, prayer, commitment, and counselling can overcome almost any obstacle to love.

Before and during engagement examine your partner’s character, his or her attitudes and values. If you are going to make a list do so wisely, putting at the top not how rich or good-looking he or she is, but is this a person who can help you grow spiritually? Is this someone with whom you can fulfill the goal of marriage, that is, mutual holiness, not ego-gratification? Putting spiritual growth first is foundational for a truly happy marriage.

Bruce Tallman is a London spiritual director and marriage coach. http://www.brucetallman.com  

Resolving Religious Conflict: A Path Through Faith Development

Throughout history, there have been conflicts between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam: pogroms, crusades, and jihads. There have also been conflicts within religions: Orthodox versus Reformed Jews, Catholic versus Protestant Christians, Sunni versus Shiite Muslims. Religious conflicts are often rooted, at least partly, in different stages of faith, and the cure lies in reaching the higher stages.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Dr. James Fowler of Emory University conducted the first research-based study on how faith develops. Researchers interviewed thousands of believers from all religious traditions and identified six distinct stages of faith.

Stage One, Imaginative Faith, does not cause conflict as most people pass through it by age seven. Stage Two, Literal Faith, normally extends to about age twelve. However, many adults clearly get stuck here, taking stories like Adam and Eve or Noah’s Ark as literal history rather than as faith stories meant to convey a profound theological message about fall and redemption. Since fundamentalists in any religion consider anyone who has different beliefs to be a heretic, this is fertile ground for conflict.

Most religious conflict happens between Stages Three and Four. Stage Three, Group Faith, is marked by conformity. The Stage Three motto is: “I believe it because my religious group believes it.” Faith is a simple matter of following group rules. People in Stage Three defend their own in-group, believing “my church is the only true church” or “Islam is the only true faith.” Anyone who disagrees is seen as their mortal enemy.

Usually, at some point, Group Faith gets shaken up by life’s injustices, conflicting opinions of others, corruption of religious leaders, or new teachings such as those of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), which moved many Catholics from Stage Three to Stage Four. Still, some want to revert to the 1950s when the Catholic laity was taught to “pray, pay, and obey.”

Stage Four, Personal Faith, begins when a person asks, “What do I really believe?” Usually, there are a lot of struggles as the Stage Four individual no longer believes things just because someone else says they should. As many questions arise, the Stage Four person often feels like they are losing their faith, but if they keep the essentials, they are going deeper as they begin to own their faith, not just blindly follow the crowd.

People in Stage Four may seem dangerous to the faith of those in Stages Two and Three, whereas people in Stage Four may see those in Stages Two and Three as a threat to rationality and civilization. Again, this is fertile ground for religious conflict.

The solution is to go to Stage Five, Mystical Faith, characterized by the ability to understand another person’s faith from their point of view; and paradox, the ability to simultaneously hold two conflicting points of view. This creates great respect for other traditions. For example, a Stage Five person might think that “Jesus Christ is the only way to God and yet it is quite clear to me that there are also other ways to God. This goes beyond logical reasoning, but I am willing to suspend my judgement about what God thinks about these other traditions while being committed to my own tradition.”

Finally, Stage Six, Sacrificial Faith, means that you are willing to fight to defend the foundational human right of religious freedom and even lay down your life to bring reconciliation between people with differing beliefs. This was Gandhi’s faith, who, in attempting to promote peace between Hindus and Muslims in India, paid for it with his life. A Hindu fundamentalist killed him.

To prevent religious conflict, we need to be aware that differing stages of faith often cause it. We also need to work towards Pope John XXIII’s recommendation: “In essentials unity, in nonessentials liberty, and in all things, charity.” That is, we need to strive for the highest stages where the unfathomable essence of the One God transcends all differences, and we need to be charitable toward those with differing beliefs. After all, God is exceedingly tolerant and loves everyone regardless of their faith stage.

Bruce Tallman is a London spiritual director and educator of adults in religion. brucetallman.com

The Secret: Understanding the Law of Attraction and Its Flaws

The Secret was a book by Rhonda Byrne that became a self-help phenomenon because it was cleverly mass-marketed as “the secret to life” that all the greatest people down through history have known – now being revealed to the public! It promised greatness for everyone, Oprah Winfrey endorsed it, and so it was a mega-bestseller.

The Secret is “the law of attraction” – whatever you focus on, positive or negative, you draw to yourself. In general, this law is true: if you focus on becoming a doctor, your chances of becoming one are much greater than if you focus on being an airline pilot. If you worry all the time about becoming ill, you may make yourself sick.

The problem with the Secret, from a Christian point of view, is that it takes things too far. Advocates of the Secret tell you that whatever happens to you in life, you have drawn to yourself. The underlying message is that you are totallyresponsible for your life. If you are homeless, for example, it is because you want to be homeless. It has nothing at all to do with corporations cutting wages and downsizing jobs while the government simultaneously lifts rent controls so that your income disappears while your expenses skyrocket.

This philosophy allows us to conveniently blame the victim. That way, you do not need to be compassionate towards anyone because whatever has happened to them, they brought upon themselves, whether they are refugees, battered wives, or schizophrenics.

The disturbing thing is that this philosophy also infects a lot of Christians. It’s part of the “prosperity gospel,” that is, if you have worldly success, it must be because God is blessing you, whereas if things are not going well, you must have drawn it upon yourself.

One of my directees (person receiving spiritual direction) has chronic fatigue syndrome. She has tried repeatedly to identify what sin in her past God is punishing her for but can’t come up with anything that deserves such a severe illness. She laughs, “If tomorrow they found a pill that would cure this, would that suddenly make me a righteous person?”

The Book of Job in the Jewish scriptures was meant to end all simplistic reward/punishment religious thinking. Until then, the thinking was that your external life was a sign of God’s blessing or wrath.

Job suddenly loses all his wealth and his family and becomes sick. His religious friends tell him that it must be due to some unconfessed sin in his life, but Job protests his innocence. We learn that God agrees Job is an innocent man, and there is no necessary correlation between what happens to you in life and where you stand in God’s eyes.

In the end, God reveals God’s glory to Job, showing him that there are things that utterly transcend human understanding. As John Henry Newman wrote in his famous prayer, “Perhaps my sickness serves God, though I know not how.” Perhaps our faithfulness under trials will inspire someone else to hope in God.

Jesus always struggled with the Pharisees to have them put compassion before their purity laws. His story of the Good Samaritan is a classic example of this, where the religious leaders refuse to compassionately treat a man who has been robbed and beaten because it would make them ritually impure. So, they avoid him, whereas a man from Samaria, a land considered full of heretics, goes out of his way to take care of the injured man.

At one point, Jesus says to the Pharisees, “Do you think those laborers upon whom the tower of Siloam fell were any more evil than anyone else?” Things happen that defy rational explanation. Other parts of Scripture state that the righteous can expect trials and persecution if they do not follow the crowd. Thus, virtue can actually attract suffering to us.

Job is meant to be a foreshadowing of Jesus, the totally righteous man who has the worst injustice fall upon him: being publicly humiliated and put to death as a criminal and heretic. The crucifixion is the ultimate demonstration that very bad things can happen to very good people through no fault of their own.

Being responsible for our actions is important, and the Secret has some good points, but the main problem from a Christian point of view is that it exalts personal responsibility over compassion.

Bruce Tallman is a spiritual director and educator of adults in religion. http://www.brucetallman.com.

The Historical Reality of Jesus: Myths vs. Truth

Within Christianity in the past thirty years, there have been persistent attempts to recast the basic tenets of Christianity itself. One of the most remarkable attempts came from Tom Harpur, who noted in The Pagan Christ that other cultures had myths about the dying and rising god, and therefore, the early church just made up a myth about the dying and rising Jesus.

Myths in many cultures have been powerful carriers of cosmic truths, and the early church knew this. However, according to Harpur, over the course of its first three hundred years, the church gradually came to claim that the myth they had made up was a historical reality called Jesus Christ.

My sense is that Harpur is either not being true to himself or has somehow forgotten his theological studies as an Anglican priest. Every student of Christian theology is taught that the distinctiveness of the Jewish God was that this God acted in history. One of the most dramatic examples of this was when God liberated the Hebrew slaves from Egypt. God acted throughout Jewish history from the time of Abraham to the kings and prophets.

This experience of God acting in history simply continued in the most dramatic way of all when God became human in Jesus Christ. God acting in history was not a new idea that the early church made up. The church did not try to change a myth into a reality. Rather, it proclaimed that all the myths of other cultures suddenly became a reality when Christ was born. This was Paul’s basic approach when he told the Greeks and Romans that Jesus was their Unknown God.

Harpur is right that God has always been incarnate in all of God’s creation, and therefore, there are many paths to God, but the traditional belief of the church has been that God was incarnate in a special way in Christ and therefore, Christ is a specialpath to God. This idea that the Infinite Ruler of the Universe can be in a specific location in a special way is, again, not a new Christian idea. Jews believed that God was present in a special way in the sanctuary of the temple. Catholics, Anglicans, and Lutherans have taken the special incarnation of God a step further in their belief that the cosmic Christ is incarnate in a very special way in the communion host.

It makes sense that God would not just tell us how to live, as God did in the Ten Commandments, but God would also showus how to live by becoming human. In Christ, God gave us a three year audio-visual demonstration of what a true human being is and also what God is really like.

There were many witnesses to the specialness of Jesus before, during, and after his life. First, there is the ancient scriptural record. Before the historical Jesus appeared, there were dozens of prophecies recorded in the Jewish scriptures of what the Messiah would be like: royal, suffering, and divine. Jesus fulfilled all these prophecies, particularly the ones by the prophet Isaiah, who said that a child will be born who will be called “Mighty God” and “Everlasting Father” and will have a kingdom without end (Isaiah 9: 6-8). This suffering servant will be “pierced for our sins”, but “by his wounds, we are healed” (Isaiah 53:5)

Then there is the vision of the prophet Daniel of a man who was led into the presence of God. God gave this man everlasting authority, sovereign power, and glory, and the people of every nation worshiped him (Daniel 7:13-14). There are many other Jewish prophecies like this.

During Christ’s life, he gave great and sublime teachings such as the Sermon on the Mount, in which he first focused on the nature of true happiness in the Beatitudes. The rest of Christ’s teachings also extended and completed the spirit of the Law and the Prophets.

Another witness is the astounding miracles: Jesus calming the raging sea, multiplying food for the hungry, healing all manner of illnesses, driving out evil spirits, and raising a man to life who had been dead for four days!

Even if we overlook the miracles, there is the witness of the way Christ lived. His courage, integrity, wisdom, and compassion were so complete they must have had a supernatural source.

There is the witness of the appearances of Christ after his resurrection to hundreds of disciples, and there is the New Testament record of miracles performed in the name of Jesus by these disciples.

There is also the witness of people dying for their faith in Christ, the record of all the martyrs in the early church. No one would lay down their life for some mythical human being. Then there is the record of the ongoing growth of the church through the centuries and of so many present-day martyrs.

Put all this together, and one is almost forced to conclude that in Jesus, something extremely special was going on. In fact, it all points to one reality: that God was in Christ, reconciling the world to God. In the birth of Christ, God gave us the greatest gift of all: God in the form of a human being.

Bruce Tallman is a London spiritual director and educator of adults in religion www.brucetallman.com

The Power of Wisdom in an Internet Age

Wise people value wisdom above all for it is the source of peace in the midst of information chaos. Knowledge now doubles every six months, and this overwhelming barrage of information makes it increasingly difficult to discern what has lasting value. However, by holding to principles of wisdom that have withstood the test of time, our future-shocked culture can survive.

Jesus, Buddha, King Solomon, and Socrates, all revered as exceptionally wise men of the ancient world, have some particularly relevant thoughts for our present age. They all agree that wisdom is more precious than money or anything else you could desire because it is the source of all truly good things. Wisdom, not information, is what is ultimately important.

Studying wisdom cross-culturally reveals seven key principles.

1. God Exists. Many scientists, including Einstein, believe that anyone who pursues science with their whole heart inevitably comes to the conclusion that there must exist an Intelligence behind everything that is vastly superior to the human mind.

God constitutes the source, sustenance, and goal of all things whether in the scientific age, information age, new age, or any age. The wisdom literature of western religion repeats over and over “The fool says in their heart ‘There is no God’”.

2. Accept Your Humanity. The three great monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, agree that the ancient message of the Garden of Eden remains true: all our problems begin with pride, with denying our place in the scheme of things, with wanting to be like God.

Through the Internet we have fifty million computers at our fingertips. This gives us the god-like quality of instant knowledge about anything, which can tempt us to think we have all the answers and are, in fact, God. Bloated with information, we have no room for wisdom.

False pride easily blinds us to our limitations, creatureliness, and humanness, but all major religions agree that the essence of wisdom consists in forgiving yourself for being human. If the first principle of wisdom is “There is a God”, the second one is “You are not God”. If pride causes all our problems, humility, that is, accepting our humanity, is the solution.

3. All Wisdom Comes From God. King Solomon states over and over that wisdom begins and ends with recognition of God’s supreme wisdom. You may not understand things, but God does. Similarly Socrates maintains that intellectual humility marks the first quality of the wise person: the realization that you lack wisdom and do not have all the answers. The wise listen much more than they speak.

4. All Things Pass Away Except God. Like Jesus, Buddha taught that everything passes away, and sorrow derives from putting too much stock in this world.

The epidemic of depression in our culture stems, at least partly, from ever-accelerating change in which we constantly lose people, things, lifestyles, and beliefs we had clung to. Instant access to infinite information has only sped up the change/loss process. Many find they cannot keep up.

Therefore, hold everything lightly: your health, spouse, children, friends, job, wealth, reputation, ambitions, ministry, and theology, for they all inevitably change. Wisdom teaches that true joy and peace comes from clinging only to God, for God alone lasts.

5. Purify Your Desires. God wants lasting love, truth, and peace but the commercialization of the Internet places all the treasures, pleasures, and temptations of the world before us in an unprecedented way. We must use the great gift of this technology wisely, to bring us what is truly good and life-giving rather than the ever-increasing hawking of earthly wares and human bodies.

6. Wisdom Means Compassion. Christ exhorted us to love our enemies. Similarly, Buddha stated that compassion, even for adversaries, arises when we realize the suffering of all beings. Many people have become news addicts and, through an endless parade of woe in the media, anesthetized to other peoples’ pain. However, in spite of “compassion fatigue” we still need to reach out and try to comfort those who are suffering.

7. Wisdom Sees the Oneness of All Things. Wisdom thinks constantly in terms of unity, and realizes that whatever we do to others we do to ourselves. Therefore it always strives to create community and to take care of all people, creatures, and the Earth. Social and environmental justice are natural outflows of wisdom. The information age tends to fragment people into ever smaller interest groups. We need to use the world wide web to bring people with divergent views together in dialogue.

In conclusion, there are three main ways to gain wisdom: pray for it, study it, and imitate it. Every major religion has a body of wisdom literature, a collection of reflections of its founders, greatest saints, and prophets whose lives can be emulated. In particular , we could all grow spiritually by imitating Jesus, who is considered by Christians to be the Wisdom of God in the flesh. Only by following the wisdom of the ancients will we transform the information age into an age of true peace and love.

Bruce Tallman is a spiritual director and educator of adults in religion. http://www.brucetallman.com.

Archetypes underlie all religions

Given all the religion-based conflict in the world, perhaps it would help if we tried to emphasize the similarities between religions rather than the differences tha t drive us apart and cause bloodshed. Archetypes provide a valuable common ground since they underlie all faiths.

Carl Jung, one of the great psychologists of the twentieth century, noticed that certain patterns kept coming up, not only in his patients’ dreams, but also in literature, mythology, history, religion, and daily life in all cultures and all ages.

From this he surmised that all humans must share in a level of the psyche even deeper than the subconscious mind that his mentor, Sigmund Freud, discovered. Jung called this deeper level the collective unconscious, and the contents of this part of the psyche or soul he called archetypes.

Archetypes are spiritual energy centers and part of the imago Dei, the image of God that God created in the soul, to guide us to fulfilling lives. Jung and others claim that these primordial images are like instincts in that they subconsciously control everything we think, feel, and do.

Four key archetypes that form the basic structure of the human soul in men and women everywhere are the sovereign, warrior, seer, and lover. Franciscan priest Richard Rohr, Robert Moore, Carol Pearson, Caroline Myss, Robert Bly, and others have written extensively about these four heroic archetypes.

The sovereign is the benevolent leader or person in charge, the warrior is the one who fights for goodness and justice, the seer is the wise man or woman, and the lover is the one who is passionate for others whether it is a partner, friend, the poor, or the earth.

As an example of how the sovereign appears everywhere and in every age, consider that throughout history there have been kings, queens, maharajahs, sultans, tsars, emperors, presidents, and prime ministers in various countries, as well as chiefs in native American, Canadian, Brazilian, Australian, and African tribes. The sovereign is also manifest in daily life in the chief executive officer or manager at work, or the father or mother at home.

There are also anti-heroic or “shadow” archetypes which involve complete possession or complete dispossession by the sovereign, warrior, seer, or lover. For example, if a person is completely possessed by the sovereign archetype, he or she becomes a tyrant. Complete dispossession means the person becomes an abdicator. The other anti-heroic archetypes are the sadist and masochist (warrior shadows), manipulator and fool (seer shadows), and the addict and frigid (lover shadows).

These negative archetypes, working subconsciously, can cause great misery in our lives. In fact, the whole post-911 world can be explained in terms of archetypes in the form of tyrants (George W. and Saddam) and sadists (Osama and other terrorists).

Negative archetypes can also affect church leadership in the form of bishops and priests who are tyrants ruling with an iron fist, abdicators who don’t teach justice, sadists who condemn everyone’s spirituality and morality but their own, masochists who don’t take care of themselves, manipulators who make the laity fearful, fools who subtly block the ministry of any talented lay person, addicts who abuse children for their own sexual pleasure, and frigids who are burned out, emotionally dead, and cynical.

People in archetypal roles have great power because they activate the numinous archetypal energies of our souls. This explains the aura that surrounds seers such as the medical doctor, medicine man or woman, shaman, guru, imam, rabbi, priest, or minister. This also explains why the pope and dalai lama draw huge crowds wherever they go. They have double the fascinating numinous power since they are in both the sovereign and seer role.

The Bible is eternally appealing to the human soul because it is an archetypal book, full of heroic and anti-heroic sovereigns, warriors, seers and lovers. Think, for example, in the Jewish scriptures/Old Testament of King David, Queen Esther, King Saul, Queen Jezebel, Goliath, Samson, Delilah, Samuel, Solomon, Isaiah, Ruth, and the lovers in The Song of Songs.

The New Testament likewise is full of heroes and anti-heroes. There is Peter (the spiritual abdicator and later, spiritual sovereign), Paul (the spiritual warrior if ever there was one), King Herod, Queen Herodias, Pilate (the political abdicator), centurions and zealots, magi (seers), good and bad priests, John the Baptist, Judas (the manipulator), contemplatives (lovers of God) like Stephen and John the beloved disciple, and so on.

Churches use archetypal language all the time, whether they know it or not, when they refer to Christ as priest, prophet, king, and supreme lover. Certainly he was in warrior mode when he cleared the moneychangers out of the temple, and there is a graphic, symbolic description in the book of Revelation (19:11-21) of Christ leading the armies of heaven against the forces of evil. To Christians, Jesus had the four foundational archetypes in perfection.

Since these archetypes are hardwired into the human psyche, they appear in other religions as well. No Muslim would dispute the fact that Mohammed is the sovereign leader of Islam, that he was a physical and spiritual warrior in the wars against the polytheists, and a great seer in receiving the Quran from the archangel Gabriel.

Hindus could point to Krishna as a lover when he danced with the gopi cowgirls, Arjuna as a warrior, and great seers like Sri Aurobindo, Vivekananda and others. All Buddhist monks and nuns would come under the seer archetype, and boddhisattvas would be examples of agape lovers, sacrificing their own entrance into nirvana until all sentient beings are enlightened.

Anyone interested in ministry or leadership in any religion, or in spirituality in general, would do well to familiarize themselves with the heroic and anti-heroic archetypes which have the power to fulfill or destroy any individual, religious tradition, or even whole societies.

Bruce Tallman is author of Archetypes for Spiritual Direction: Discovering the Heroes Within (Paulist Press 2005). See http://www.brucetallman.com.

On God and Suffering: Dialogue with an Atheist

After completing his PhD in religious studies, my friend Leon became an atheist!

After that, he and I got into debates over the existence of God that would rage on for whole weekends, but it all seemed to get down to the problem of suffering. Given the wonders of our world, belief in a Creator would be easy if it were not for all the suffering.

Here is a summary of Leon’s toughest questions and my best answers on God and suffering.

Leon: How can you believe in a good God when there is so much suffering and evil in the world?

Bruce: I believe good is foundational, and suffering and evil are secondary. Evil is always only a corruption of something that was originally good. For example, illness is a corruption of original health. War is a corruption of original peace. God created everything good in the beginning. Good, not evil, is the bottom line in life.

Leon: If God is the Creator, God is the cause of everything. God must, therefore, cause suffering.

Bruce: God does not want or cause suffering and evil. Secondary causes, that is, natural laws and human freedom, cause suffering. So that we would not live in chaos, God created the laws of nature, which normally serve us well.

However, nature blindly follows its laws, much as an avalanche obeys gravity, whether humans are in the way or not. Also, you can’t have true love without freedom of choice, so God created humans with free will. But sometimes, we make wrong choices and sin. If most of the suffering in the world is caused by our wrong choices, the question is not “How can God allow suffering?” but rather “How can humans allow it?”

Leon: If God does not want suffering, what does God do to alleviate it? I don’t think God cares.

Bruce: The Bible teaches us how to overcome evil and suffering by obeying God’s laws. It also teaches us that we can call upon God at any time for help with suffering and that true happiness lies in having a loving relationship with God.

Leon: But if there is a loving and all-powerful God, why would there be any suffering?

Bruce: Paradoxically, although suffering is the main reason people don’t believe in God, God is the ultimate answer to suffering. If there is a loving and all-powerful God, then suffering must make sense, although we may not immediately understand it. Trust in God’s goodness provides hope in the midst of suffering, thus eliminating the worst suffering, that is, meaningless suffering.

Leon: I still think there is more suffering than good, which disproves there is a loving God.

Bruce: Beyond foundational goodness, there is “secondary goodness”, that is, our response to suffering. This is how all the helping professions arose: medicine, law, psychology, social work, etc. All progress is a response to suffering. Good abounds, and God is in charge.

Leon: But if there is a loving God who is in charge, why would he allow suffering?

Bruce: God does not normally allow us to suffer and only allows suffering and evil so that higher values and attitudes such as humility, compassion, forgiveness and wisdom might emerge.

Leon: I still don’t see a God anywhere out there helping us with suffering. Where is God anyway?

Bruce: God is invisible, but we can see that God has created us with great defences against suffering. Everyone comes with some built-in, standard equipment: a brain, the greatest problem-solver in the world, and the human spirit, the great urge to fight against suffering.

God has also given us people who aid us in avoiding suffering and who are great supports when we do suffer: parents, spouses, and friends. Through people and angels, God either protects us from suffering and evil or helps us to get through it. God comforts us, encourages us, carries us through suffering, and works with us to bring secondary goodness out of suffering and evil.

Leon: I still don’t think God actively cares. God just sits up there and watches us suffer.

Bruce: The Christian belief is that God suffers when we suffer. If God is everywhere (including within us) and knows everything, and we are God’s children, then God knows and feels our pain. God is not some detached sky-god. The Cross is the great symbol that God suffers with us.

Leon: Suffering is so horrible, though. Life is so hard and so meaningless. What’s the point of it?

Bruce: Christ on the Cross transformed suffering, showing that suffering can have meaning. He showed us that to suffer for others is the deepest love.

Leon: I still don’t think there is any final answer to suffering.

Bruce: Often, all you can do is accompany the suffering person, not give them your answers, but if there is a final answer, it is that God overcomes all suffering in heaven forever. God gives believers ultimate and eternal joy, peace, happiness, and love. Things began as “very good” (Genesis 1:31), the end is even better, and the middle is good in spite of negative news reports. All is well that ends well, but you have to have faith to see the goodness of God in all things.

Bruce Tallman is a spiritual director and author: http://www.brucetallman.com

Is Trump or Harris Anti-Christ or Scapegoat?

Kamala Harris has been accused by Trump of being the “anti-Christ.” Subsequently, some of his followers have argued that Harris, if elected President of the United States, will be responsible for the slaughter of millions of children as she tries to get Roe vs Wade reinstated. She has also allowed millions of illegal aliens to flood across the US border, and they are all rapists and murderers.

On the other hand, the Harris camp points out that, in the Christian scriptures, the devil is called the “Father of Lies,” and Trump is seen as an unrepentant liar. He has deceived half the population of the United States with his lies, spews racism and hatred, is obsessed with power, wants to be the most powerful person in the world, and tried to destroy democracy by inciting the January 6 attempt to overthrow the US government.

In either case, although both claim to be Christian, they are promoting the exact opposite of Christ’s teaching to “love your enemies.” They both are preaching the anti-gospel by demonizing their opponents.

Rene Girard (1923-2015), a French philosopher, claimed that whenever things go wrong in a society, the political leaders will try to gain or hold onto power by scapegoating some group, that is, proclaiming the group is the cause of all the society’s problems. Therefore, the solution is to banish or kill off that group, and then all will be well again. This was Hitler’s basic strategy in the Second World War: the Jewish race was the cause of all of Germany’s problems and, therefore, must be eliminated.

“Scapegoat” is an interesting word. Its roots come from the ancient Jewish practice of, once a year, having the High Priest pray and lay his hands on the head of a goat, thus symbolically transferring all the sins of the Israelites from the previous year onto the goat, which was then banished to die in the desert. Then, everyone celebrates being cleansed of their sins – until their sins start to cause problems again.

Scapegoating works in a perverse way in any culture because it allows all the pent-up fear, anger and hatred of that culture to be focused on a persecuted and usually defenceless and innocent minority group. It also conveniently allows the persecuting group to escape looking at their own sins as the cause of the culture’s problems and take responsibility for the culture’s flaws.

The first step in scapegoating is to dehumanize your chosen enemy by calling them denigrating names such as ”anti-Christ.” So, they are both scapegoating the other party. Neither Trump nor Harris is the anti-Christ. They are limited human beings like the rest of us who are convinced their own point of view is right and simultaneously choosing not to see anything positive in their opponent.

The Trump camp has been emphasizing as their main argument that when Trump was president, there were no wars and no inflation, as if Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were personally responsible for the wars in Ukraine and Israel, and as if inflation was not a consequence of the government giving out billions of free dollars to keep the economy afloat during the Covid shutdown.

The Harris camp has been pressing as their main argument that Trump is a fascist, and if he is elected with total legal immunity, it will be the end of women’s rights and of democracy.

It is far too late, but it might have helped if both of them had meditated on and tried to follow Jesus, the ultimate scapegoat, who Christians claim took away the sins of the whole world by sacrificing himself on the cross. In this case, he is both the High Priest and victim of our scapegoating, both the G.O.A.T. (Greatest Of All Time) and the goat.

However, this approach only works if Christians do not use Christ’s redeeming work on the cross as an excuse to let themselves off the hook of owning their own sins and scapegoating as the cause of all their problems. God takes away our sins, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have to change our lives.

Christians, and all of us, need to own how often we do not love our enemies.

Bruce Tallman is an educator of adults in religion. http://www.brucetallman.com

Understanding God: Beyond Fundamentalism

Dear Friends,

On October 12 the London Free Press published my article below under the title “Broad interpretations of God are important”

It is 670 words, so when you have 2 minutes, why not give it a quick read?

Blessings and peace,

Bruce Tallman

Spiritual Director

www.brucetallman.com

Fundamentalists need a broader interpretation of God and scripture

It is important for contemporary Christians to have a broad interpretation of God, Jesus, scripture, and theology since fundamentalism can be a dangerous force in our world, denying science, evolution, vaccines, and climate change.

In this regard, it is important to understand that God is both apophatic and cataphatic. Apophatic means God is beyond human understanding, while cataphatic refers to the concrete, understandable dimension of God. The primary example is God becoming human in Jesus, so we would have some way of understanding the apophatic God.

Christians need to hold onto both these dimensions. If you lose the apophatic dimension, you can become arrogant in your certainty about God and believe you must force your narrow understanding on others. But if you lose the cataphatic dimension, God becomes completely unknowable, and you may as well stop talking about God.

A third important dimension of God is the Holy Spirit, who is incarnate in every person as love, wisdom, joy, peace, and humility. Wherever you find those spiritual qualities, whether in Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, humanists, or atheists, the divine Spirit is present, leading them to a closer relationship with God. They don’t need you to convert them, God is already doing it..

People who believe in the supremacy of scripture usually mean the supremacy of their own interpretation of scripture. So, to avoid fundamentalism, it is important to realize that scripture is interpreted in many ways.

The Bible did not fall out of the sky. It came to us through a church, and there is no historical break between present-day Catholicism and the early church. Christ gave Peter and the rest of the apostles the authority to properly interpret scripture when he said, “You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Matthew 16:18).

Catholic bishops, the apostles’ successors, then organized early church councils that decided which books should go in the Bible and which should be excluded. The New Testament is a Catholic document.

However, Catholicism recognizes the supremacy of everyone’s conscience. You should study church teaching and Catholic interpretations of scripture before making moral decisions. However, if you cannot agree in good conscience with these sources, you are free to follow your own conscience. You are ultimately accountable to God, not to the Catholic church.

Also, many fundamentalists subscribe to a narrow fall/redemption theology which many theologians now disagree with as it ignores the first and second chapters of the Bible, where God created humans and everything as “very good” (Genesis 1:31). Instead, this theology focuses exclusively on the third chapter, the fall of humans into evil, and the redemptive work of Jesus on the cross, which conquers our fallenness.

In addition to scriptural narrowness, fall/redemption theology gives us a horrific picture of God – a God who is wrathful, violent, and demands blood and death, or his anger won’t be satisfied, a god who consigns people to eternal torture if they don’t believe in this narrow theology. A different interpretation is that we create our own hell by our bad decisions.

Fall/redemption theology also lets Christians off the hook—they don’t have to change their lives to be saved. All they must do is believe in Jesus’s redemptive sacrifice on the cross. This diminishes Jesus’s life and teachings, which are often ignored, and which accounts for the hypocrisy and failure of many Christians to follow Jesus genuinely.

A poster in my home office says, “Why and from what does Jesus save us? To form a more perfect world, Jesus saves us, by example, from living only for ourselves.” This requires interaction between God and humans; we cannot do it alone.

However, as scripture says, “faith without works is dead” (James 2:17-26). God gives us faith, but we must do the work. We are saved by following Jesus’ example of loving God and others. Jesus says, “Do this, and you will inherit eternal life” (Luke 10: 25-28).

Bruce Tallman is a London an educator of adults on religion. http://www.brucetallman.com