Obama´s Spiritual Path

Barack H. Obama says his spiritual quest was driven by two main impulses. He was looking for a community that he could call home—a sense of rootedness and belonging he missed from his biracial, peripatetic childhood. The visits to the black churches uptown helped fulfill that desire. “There’s a side very particular to the African-American church tradition that was powerful to me,” he says. The exuberant worship, the family atmosphere and the prophetic preaching at a church such as Abyssinian would have appealed to a young man who lived so in his head. And he became obsessed with the civil-rights movement. He’d become convinced, through his reading, of the transforming power of social activism, especially when paired with religion. This is not an uncommon revelation among the spiritually and progressively minded…..

The cross under which Obama went to Jesus was at the controversial Trinity United Church of Christ. It was a good fit. “That community of faith suited me,” Obama says. For one thing, Trinity insisted on social activism as a part of Christian life. It was also a family place. Members refer to the sections in the massive sanctuary as neighborhoods; churchgoers go to the same neighborhood each Sunday and they get to know the people who sit near them. They know when someone’s sick or got a promotion at work. Jeremiah Wright, whom Obama met in the context of organizing, became a friend; after he married, Obama says, the two men would sometimes get together “after church to have chicken with the family—and we would have talked stories about our families.” In his preaching, Wright often emphasized the importance of family, of staying married and taking good care of children. (Obama’s recent Father’s Day speech, in which he said that “responsibility does not end at conception,” was not cribbed from Wright—but the premise could have been.) At the point of his decision to accept Christ, Obama says, “what was intellectual and what was emotional joined, and the belief in the redemptive power of Jesus Christ, that he died for our sins, that through him we could achieve eternal life—but also that, through good works we could find order and meaning here on Earth and transcend our limits and our flaws and our foibles—I found that powerful.”

Maya says their mother would not have made the same choice—but that Ann understood and approved of Obama’s decision: “She didn’t feel the same need, because for her, she felt like we can still be good to one another and serve, but we don’t have to choose. She was, of course, always a wanderer, and I think he was more inclined to be rooted and make the choice to set down his commitments more firmly…..” How does Obama´s mother and Obama´s own spiritual path and his modern progressive Christian perspective relate to your understanding of Obama and Christianity more broadly? Obama´s pastor Rev J Wright made controversial comments about “God d*mn America” that led him to leave that congregation at United Church of Christ. What does this selection here, or its original article, make you think about the significance of that act? How does Obama´s spiritual and religious experience relate to your own thoughts about your spiritual religious concerns? https://www.newsweek.com/cover-story-barack-obamas-christian-journey-92611

John Lennox: Theist, Scientist, New Atheist Adversary

Every scientist is a believer, says Oxford professor John Lennox, whose work deconstructs the atheist idea that God is not relevant anymore. In speaking with Aleteia’s Miriam Diez Bosch about his new book, Gunning for God: Why the New Atheists are Missing the Target, Lennox explains — among other things — that he is convinced that science does not resolve the problem of suffering.

Asked whether God is irrelevant in the modern, educated era, Lennox maintains that “people have not been taught anything intelligent about God. They are very interested in the origin of the universe, they are very interested in the big questions so far as they could be answered by science. But one of the results I think of the Enlightenment has been a reaction against formal religious structures, and you can understand that reaction,” he allows, “because there was a lot of evil done in the name of God.”

Still, Lennox says that interest in God, and in religion, among the young men and women he teaches “is enormous. I often expect to have one thousand, two thousand, three thousand students to listen to me talk about God because they are very interested in hearing a scientist who actually thinks there are reasons for believing in God.” The dialogue about faith and science, Lennox maintains, is often confused by language, and by assumptions that are made when the issue of “faith” comes up. “That’s a confusion of thought, because actually you might mean by Faith, ‘Faith in God’, or you might mean simply ‘faith’ — which is ‘trusting.’ If one understands the latter, then reason tells us that faith is essential to science. In the 16th and 17th centuries, modern science started in Europe with Galileo, Keppler, Newton — all of whom believed in God, and their faith in God did not hinder their science. It was the motor that drove it. “They had faith in God, in a rational intelligence, and that could led them to believe — to have faith that they could do science.”

The modern era makes a great mistake when it tries to compartmentalize science and faith and assign them to exclusive categories, says Lennox. “‘Faith in God’ and ‘Faith in science’ belong very closely together because I believe both of them are grounded on evidence … .Every scientist is a believer. I, as a scientist, believe that science can be done, I believe the Universe is rationally intelligible. There is a God behind it. I found the atheist solution actually is antiscientific.”

Asked whether the modern atheist movement, citing increasing advances in biology and bio-medical engineering, has “buried” God, Lennox said no. “Science hasn’t buried God; that’s actually a false formulation. Many people like [Richard] Dawkins and [Stephen] Hawking think that I, as a Christian, believe in that kind of God — who disappears with the advance of science. But the Bible does not start with the words ‘In the beginning God created the bits of universe I do not understand.’ It starts with the words ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,’ the whole show! So my God does not disappear with the advance of science.”

More importantly for Lennox, atheism has a glaring inability to explain or solve the problem of suffering, and offers no means of understanding suffering, which is common to every human…He says, “Atheism not only does not solve the problem, it removes it completely and destroys all categories.” …. Atheists also, says Lennox, are the ones who “tend to say that all religions are the same — but the people who represent those religions do not believe that for one moment….. “It is one of the reasons why I am a Christian, because atheism has no forgiveness, of course, and no ultimate justice…..” In addition to the original article, I have seen Lennox in youtube debates against the late C Hitchens and R Dawkins, and recommend it.

What are your thoughts in response to Lennox´s comments about people not being educated about God in the era of Science and the Enlightenment? 2) Lennox comments that faith means “trusting” and can be applied both to God and Science. He also talks about scientists believing that they can do Science. What do you think? 3) The fuller content in the original article about suffering is as follows: According to Lennox, “Atheism does not solve the problem. It does it in a way intellectually — people will say ‘that is just the way the universe is and we have to face it’ — but it does not remove the suffering. It does remove all hope because by definition atheism is a hopeless faith. “Many of my atheists friends ask me why God does not ‘solve evil’ and pain. Atheism not only does not solve the problem, it removes it completely and destroys all categories. Surely a good God could do this and that and he could have made a world in which there is no evil, of course he could, but we would not have been in it.” What do you think about suffering, theism, and atheism? 4) On the subject of taking into account the differences among religions, Lennox also said in the original text, “We do see some religious leaders who are, as you say, ‘obscuring the idea of God’ and introducing ideas that are not only get rid of God but that are dehumanizing.” What do you think about religious differences, theist takes, and atheist takes?

Ideological Atheism and Historical Jesus

A recent anti-theist commented to me, in part, "You recycle vacuous opinion devoid of supporting evidence of any kind. You reference the fictional "Jesus" without recognition that there is no historical evidence of the existence of such a man and no historical evidence of the centuries later written confused and contradictory legends of "Jesus" ever happening. The Church agrees, saying: "Our documentary sources of knowledge about the origins of Christianity and its earliest development are chiefly the New Testament Scriptures, the authenticity of which we must, to a great extent, take for granted." (Catholic Encyclopedia, Farley ed., vol. iii, p. 712)

The Church makes extraordinary admissions about its New Testament. For example, when discussing the origin of those writings, "the most distinguished body of academic opinion ever assembled" (Catholic Encyclopedias, Preface) admits that the Gospels "do not go back to the first century of the Christian era" (Catholic Encyclopedia, Farley ed., vol. vi, p. 137, pp. 655-6).

Well, congratulations, at least you´re not devoid of substantive argumentation altogether. Your presumptuousness still does you in, however, because you are ideologically motivated and careless and unsystematic in the way you try to find things that fit your preconceived notions. You confuse your categories and classes of terms, so you have to leap to conclusions to get your way instead of honestly acknowledging the parameters of your agreement and disagreement, and your stage in examining your own assumptions. In your boiling blood stereotyped antipathy, however, you will always find yourself like Wile E. Coyote and running off a cliff into the air. That´s why Therapeutic Psychology is a basic activity to pursue for personal development, along with a spiritual path. Philosophy alone does have some potential orientations that I know of in DesCartes and Spinoza, and perhaps John Locke. Perhaps the critical thinking perspective of Horkheimer and the Frankfurt School, too. But, whether or not that´s "pearls before swine" is up to you.

Getting back to your attempted argument. If you leap to your ideologically-based presumption that MY arguments are "recycled and vacuous," it won´t be long before your own cognitive dissonance begins. Watch out for your prickly boxed-in mental jailcell bars. From the get-go, you trip on your own presumptions of Jesus´ being "fictional" and unhistorical and your garbled statement about "later legends." You then treat YOUR ideological interpretation as presumptive, and actually presume that the language of the Catholic source you cite itself "AGREES" with you. You don´t seem to perceive the process of YOUR INTERPRETATION of the NON-CONcRETE LANGUAGE used in what source? A CATHOLIC one, and a generalized statement of a secondary nature in an ENCYCLOPEDIA. You take the term "take for granted" which was used without careful consideration of a variety of more rigorous perspectives, and fall into what became a trap of your own making. You´re like the anti-theist version of a very submissive Catholic congregant. Now, self-awareness and intellectual clarity grows with self-disclosure, acknowledgment, and examination of one´s own assumptions. Personally, I majored in Bio Anthropology, worked in Social Services and Financial Services, and got my masters in International Relations drawing on interdisciplinary perspectives with my recognizing the superior explanatory power of the psychosocial and microsociological in many significant categories of events. And I have long followed an interfaith spiritual path linked to Unitarian Universalism after being loosely raised an atheist/secular humanist into High School.

It is on that kind of basis that I can evaluate various issues in regarding Jesus´ historicity in ways that address various modern assumptions. So, as an ideologue, you´re in for it. However, even taking your chosen starting point, or modus operandi more likely, of a Catholic Encyclopedia and your projection fallacies of imposing your interpretive leaps, I´ll just throw a few more darts in a more empirical and more philosophically comprehensive and adequate direction.

Now, as your Encyclopedic references go, your failure to cite, say, "Enlightenment skepticism had given way to a more 'trustful attitude toward the historical reliability of the sources [...] [Currently] the conviction of (scholar EP) Sanders, (we know quite a lot about Jesus) characterizes the majority of contemporary studies.'" Holmén, Tom (2008). Evans, Craig A. (ed.). The Routledge Encyclopedia of the Historical Jesus. Now, a slightly more pointed perspective that begins to dovetail into my own is given by scholar Chris Keith, "(The historical Jesus) can be hypothesized on the basis of the interpretations of the early Christians, and as part of a larger process of accounting for how and why early Christians came to view Jesus in the ways that they did."Chris Keith (2016), The Narratives of the Gospels and the Historical Jesus: Current Debates, Prior Debates and the Goal of Historical Jesus Research, Journal for the Study of the New Testament. All your other allegations are based on faulty premises like the ones I´ve indicated,

Sean Carroll ´s Physics and Choice vs. Christian Integrity

I was just watching a 2012 debate with Sean Carroll, quite an articulate Physicist. However, he has been messing with Theism-Anti-Theism, and getting things mixed up. He was arguing in 2012 that he represents a naturalistic viewpoint, that churches have lost their moral authority, and that it is up to Science to develop an understanding and a set of answers for how people should live their lives in this world. "We haven´t done that yet," he stated. I just watched a 2017 video of a talk of his, "From the Big Bang to the Meaning of Life," in which he finishes with his big social philosophy that life is about making choices. His thoughts about life´s meaning are that "caring about other people is compatible with the laws of Physics," Physics doesn´t stop us from doing so, and is a choice. He offered an example, and he read a piece from the late Carl Sagan´s wife who wrote that the two of them avoided "illusions" like the afterlife, took care of each other and their family, and that that was "wonderful" in their time in the cosmos. The trivialization of social philosophy, and beyond that spiritual and religious philosophy, in such presentations is disturbing. I´m a Biologist and a nature lover, and so one way or another, keenly aware of the problem of unsustainable modern lifestyles and the need for social and environmental sustainability. However, Carroll certainly has found his niche in presenting the most modern understanding of the laws of Physics, which clearly hold a fascination for many people. He presents the Core Theory of the essential equations that explain day-to-day reality in quantum mechanics, spacetime gravity, other forces, matter, and the Higgs field, refers to the probablities involved, and the fact that there are no values and no judgments. He made an enthusiastic reference to scientist Michael Russell´s statement, "The purpose of life is to hydrogenate carbon dioxide." He had earlier referred to mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell´s statement that "cause and effect were not fundamental in Physics." From the point of view of social philosophy, the guy is using Physics terminology to achieve some kind of conceptual state of cleansing and surrender. It´s at that concluding point that he asserts the importance of caring for others, and choosing to do so in the limited lifespan of a human being. Now, The Tao of Physics was written years ago by physicist Fritjof Capra, who perhaps didn´t make such a direct statement about the value of caring for others. Capra did compare Quantum Physics and its insights to Eastern Religions. He also went on to explore a range of thinking in a range of disciplines, exploring at least the question of orthodoxy and alternatives to orthodoxy. His own focus became that of ecological literacy and General Systems Theory. Carroll made the point in 2017 that some bad decisions had been made, and appeared to be referring to the election of the new President of the US. If that referred to the election of Donald Trump, a profiteering corporate executive, the issue of choices and wisdom in making those choices raises important questions. While Physics doesn´t making "caring for others" incompatible with the laws of Physics, does Scientism and excessive focus on Physics to the neglect of other disciplines? Apparently so. Stanley Jaki was a physicist and historian of Religion, who studied the cognitive predicates of Science in History. Moreover, even before Newton´s great scientific breakthrough, George Fox had already made his non-University breakthrough of high integrity Christianity. He challenged social injustice, healed spiritually, and led his denomination to spread while several generations later something remarkable happened. His followers founded pioneering Anti-Slavery Societies and launched ecumenical movements to end slavery. The power and clarity of such Christian integrity maintains its clarity as leaders in crucial issues of modern sustainability include Al Gore and FD and Eleanor Roosevelt´s legacy in the UN and its IPCC, along with UNEP and other agencies.