"Family Values"

What they mean when they say "family values" - straight, white, suburban, 1950s ideals where you hid the sins beneath the veneer of civic politeness and patriotism. No gays. No trans. No uppity blacks talking about unfairness in the system. Submissive women doting on husbands. 

What I mean when I say "family values" - actual values that the Bible and other holy books espouse: kindness, patience, service, love, goodness, gentleness, love for the poor, widows, and orphans, the rich refusing to hoard up treasures on earth where moth and rust destroy.

The Grand Mystery and the Adventure of the Search

"What you say about God—who God is, what God cares about, who God rewards, and who God punishes—says nothing about God and everything about you. If you believe in an unconditionally loving God, you probably value unconditional love. If you believe in a God who divides people into chosen and not chosen, believers and infidels, saved and damned, high cast or low caste, etc. you are likely someone who divides people into in–groups and out–groups with you and your group as the quintessential in-group. God may or may not exist, but your idea of God mirrors yourself and your values." -- Jim Palmer

I noticed this quote from Jim Palmer the other day (listed among a group of other "14 things the misguided religious establishment doesn’t want you to know") and got really excited by this particular point. 

I can only "speak" for myself, but I've found this to be incredibly true in my life, both from my relationships with other religious people I have known and in my own faith as well. 

It would be easy to address the faults in others by referencing this quote, but that's not my intention. Instead, I want to mention only my own piece of timber instead of the stick in anyone else's eye. 

Rather than approaching my faith as the "get out of hell free" card or the "cosmic lawgiver" or even the "celestial lover" that have become the predominate metaphors for our relationships with the I Am (i.e., Christ/God/the Holy Spirit), my own metaphor has always been that of the great mystery, the ultimately unknown and unknowable. Now, I know the whole point of the faith is that Christ is knowable, but for my understanding of my chosen religion, no matter how well I may feel I know or know about, it is but a mere pittance and the tiniest fraction of what I could or should know. 

For me, my journey of faith is about the journey, the search for growing deeper and deeper into the great mystery. It hasn't always been so. As a child and a teenager, I was very much indoctrinated in the fear of Hell, the "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" version of the gospel. Later, in my twenties, I discovered C.S. Lewis and Mere Christianity and the books of Francis Schaeffer and embraced the faith as an exercise of the rational. As such, I embraced the world of theology and apologetics. Some time after that, I read the wonderful Singer trilogy by Calvin Miller and began to seek out the version of the Christ who was the romantic leading man for his bride (the church's role in this metaphor). 

The next step is the one that has captured my mind and ensnared my imagination for the past 20 or so years. It came from learning that none of the previous understandings fully helped me to seek the heart of God, the almighty, the infinite, the beyond creation. Finding freedom from Hell gave me little more than the need to say magic words. Apologetics and theology gave me a deeper knowledge about God (or at least what the writers I read knew or felt they knew about God). And pursuing Christ the great lover left me feeling empty as if I had only been fooling myself all those years and I was supposed to be more secure and solid on my standing, as if I could physically see, touch, hear, and know someone so beyond my ability to comprehend. 

Only by embracing the object of my religion as the great mystery allows me to embrace the journey and not become a tangle of guilt as not feeling knowledgeable enough, loving enough, following the rules enough, etc., because I can acknowledge the truth (my truth, anyway) that it's okay not to know the rules because we made them up for the most part, not to feel the tender affection of the bridegroom because I don't possess yet the ability to feel such things until I can know as I am known, not to be able to place the mystery in a box called theology and apologetics and say "this I know and it will never change."

Only by embracing the journey toward the great mystery can I come to terms with a gradually growing (but never getting beyond the simplest of childish grasping). Only by embracing that the "out there" is something that can't fully be an "in here" -- after all, even in Christ, there was still God that couldn't fit and remained as the Godhead -- and therefore something that I can't trust my senses to know or not know, to feel or not feel. 

I think this is why my writing also takes the direction of the adventure of uncovering or discovering the mystery. Because of who I am, some might say who I was made to be, my stories helped me to understand this part of me and how it relates not only to my craft as a storyteller but also my understanding of my faith. 

As I embrace the adventure of seeking to comprehend the incomprehensible, I can fully understand (finally) how to extend grace to all others on that journey (or not on that journey). A journey means each person is on their own trip and my business is my trip, not yours. It allows me to give latitude to those who may believe differently than I do, because if God is ultimately a mystery, they have as much right to try to put the mystery into words as I do. It means that I don't judge those who follow different rules because the rules come from theology and theology comes from individual and group study, and that my rules apply to me alone based on my study. It means that until the journey is over all the answers aren't found, like U2 said, "I still haven't found what I'm looking for." 

Or, as Carolyn Arends sings in her song " Reaching":

There's a time I can recall
Four years old and three feet tal
Trying to touch the stars and the cookie jar
And both were out of reach...

Well, I should not have thought it strange
That growing causes growing pains
'Cause the more we learn the more we know
We don't know anything...

So when we taste of the divine
It leaves us hungry every time...

And perhaps I never will find what I'm looking for or reach the stars and the cookie jar. At least, not until maybe I become a flower leaning towards the light, to borrow from the metaphor Dante used in Paradiso. After all, it's as good (or perhaps even better) a metaphor as any of the others I've lived under up to now.

As I embrace the journey of seeking the heart of the mystery of God, I have only one guiding law. Adapt as I follow and grow. 

As you know, I once was an evangelical megachurch pastor...

Editor's Note: This is a post from Jim Palmer, a former pastor who is currently an evangelical. While we don't hold every point listed here in common, I do think he presents a lot of information worth mulling over. 

As you know, I once was an evangelical megachurch pastor and my pastoral career stretched over many years. Eventually, I could no longer teach Christian doctrine with a good conscience and realized this teaching was not truly changing people’s lives… and so I walked away from the whole enchilada. 

Below are 14 things that the misguided religious establishment doesn't want you to know. Speaking for myself and my personal experience, I was not able to see or admit these things to myself. I truly got into ministry initially because I wanted to make a difference and help people, and I relied upon the belief-system I learned as the proper framework to achieve this. It took a lot of post-religion reflection to see the ways this belief-system was hurting people. 

I offer the below list in hopes that you might disentangle yourself from harmful beliefs and attitudes impacting your life. 

14 things the misguided religious establishment doesn’t want you to know: 

1. Toxic religion is rooted in fear, especially fear about the afterlife. It leverages the false doctrine of hell to win converts and demand holiness. The fear of God's disapproval, rejection, abandonment and punishment is another hallmark of toxic religion. 

2. Clergy have no innate authority. Holding a church leadership position or having a theological degree does not imbue a person with special divine authority or superiority. The terms "anointed", "called", or "chosen" or titles such as "pastor", "priest", "bishop", "elder", "evangelist" or "apostle" do not confer any innate authority on an individual or group. 

3. We hold sacred what we are taught to hold sacred, which is why what is sacred to one community is not sacred to another. 

4. The stories in our sacred books aren’t history, nor were they meant to be. The authors of these books weren’t historians but writers of historical fiction: they used history (or pseudo history) as a context or pretext for their own ideas. Reading sacred texts as history may yield some nuggets of the past, but the real gold is in seeing these stories as myth and parable, and trying to unpack the possible meanings these parables and myths may hold. 

5. Prayer doesn’t work the way you think it does. You can’t bribe God, or change God’s mind through obedience, devotion, or groveling. The underlying theistic premises of prayer are untenable.

6. Anything you claim to know about God, even the notion that there is a God, is a projection of your psyche. What you say about God—who God is, what God cares about, who God rewards, and who God punishes—says nothing about God and everything about you. If you believe in an unconditionally loving God, you probably value unconditional love. If you believe in a God who divides people into chosen and not chosen, believers and infidels, saved and damned, high cast or low caste, etc. you are likely someone who divides people into in–groups and out–groups with you and your group as the quintessential in-group. God may or may not exist, but your idea of God mirrors yourself and your values. 

7. Nobody is born Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Catholic, Protestant, etc. People are born human and are slowly conditioned by narratives of race, religion, gender, nationality, etc. to be less than human. 

8. Theology isn’t the free search for truth, but rather a defense of an already held position. Theology is really apologetics, explaining why a belief is true rather than seeking out the truth in and of itself. All theological reasoning is circular, inevitably “proving” the truth of its own presupposition. 

9. Becoming more religious cannot save us. Religion is a human invention reflecting the best and worst of humanity; becoming more religious will simply allow us to perpetuate compassion and cruelty in the name of religion. Because religion always carries the danger of fanaticism, becoming more religious may only heighten the risk of us becoming more fanatical. 

10. Becoming less religious cannot save us. In fact, being against religion can become it’s own fanaticism. Becoming less religious will simply force us to perpetuate compassion and cruelty in the name of something else. Secular societies that actively suppress religion have proven no more just or compassionate than religious societies that suppress secularism or free thought. This is because neither religion nor the lack of religion solely nullifies our human potential to act out of ego, greed, fear, hostility, and hatred. 

11. A healthy religion is one that helps us own and integrate the shadow side of human nature for the good of person and planet, something few clergy are trained to do. Clergy are trained to promote the religion they represent. They are apologists not liberators. If you want to be more just, compassionate, and loving, you must do the personal work within yourself, and free yourself from the conditions that lock you into injustice, cruelty, and hate, and this means you have to free yourself from all your narratives, including those you call “religious.” 

12. Religious leaders claims that their particular understanding and interpretation of their sacred books should be universally accepted. Religious leaders often say, “My authority is the Bible.” It would be more accurate for them to say, “My authority is what they taught me at seminary the Bible means.” People start with flawed or false presuppositions about what the Bible is, such as: the Bible was meant to present a coherent theology about God or is a piece of doctrinal exposition; the Bible is the inerrant, infallible and sole message/"Word" of God to the world; the Bible is a blueprint for daily living. Too often religious leaders make God about having "correct theology." There are a lot of unhappy, broken, hurting, suffering, depressed, lonely people in church with church-approved theology. 

13. If your livelihood depends on the success of your church as an organization, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that you will mostly define and reward Christianity as participation in church structures and programs. Christian living is mostly a decentralized reality or way of life, not a centralized or program-dependent phenomenon. Church attendance, tithing, membership, service, and devoted participation, become the hallmarks of Christian maturity. 

14. You are capable of guiding your own spiritual path from the inside out and don't need to be told what to do. You naturally have the ability, capacity, tools and skills to guide and direct your life meaningfully, ethically and effectively. Through the use of your fundamental human faculties such as critical thinking, empathy, reason, conscience and intuition, you can capably lead your life. You have the choice to cultivate a spirituality that doesn’t require you to be inadequate, powerless, weak, and lacking, but one that empowers you toward strength, vitality, wholeness, and the fulfillment of your highest potentialities and possibilities.

-- Jim Palmer (reposted from Facebook)

Nuwanda Forever

That moment when the conservative fundamental beliefs you grew up with tell you that you should shut up and back down and get in line...

Shooting Straight: My Welcome Message from Facebook

 (UPDATED 09/25/2023) 

READ THIS FIRST! DO YOU REALLY WANT TO SEND ME A FRIEND REQUEST? 

Going to put this here as a pinned post. Why? Because I get a lot of friend requests and I wonder (when I look at their pages) if they really read my "about" page. Particularly when they come here and want to argue. 

If you don't want to see posts about the following, you might want to rethink that friend request unless you can play nice with others and not be a jerk or troll to people on my page.

RELIGION

I believe in God. I am a person of faith. But I'm not a conservative Evangelical. I grew up Southern Baptist and even used to work for the organization at a national level, but would most likely not be very welcome in many of them now because I also believe in a woman's right to choose and the right to life, liberty, and happiness of my LGBTQIA+ friends and folks. 

I also no longer believe the Bible is an infallible document. I believe we should strive to be more like Jesus by the examples we have, whether infallible or not, and less like the American Nationalist Church of Both God and Country Inextricably Tied Together.

I don't believe I was ever called to be a Nationalist, but instead a follower of Christ without a home or country. I believe the idea that patriotism and Christianity (or any religion) should be linked is so far afield from what the founding fathers (or Jesus, for that matter) wanted and specified that both they and most religious icons would be appalled at the very idea. 

Don't get me wrong. I love my country. But I also love it enough to call it out when it's wrong and not believe that it's above reproach or even the best system ever created. I believe that doesn't make me some kind of traitor (unless you adhere to a modern sort of McCarthyism). 

In other words, I have my own personal religious beliefs, but I also believe that I don't have the right to have my country govern you by my beliefs. Nor do you have the right to have my country govern me by yours. 

Except when they intersect. 

You know, like when it comes to human rights and such. Not killing each other. Not denying life, liberty, and happiness, or the right to trials, the right to vote and have reasonable access to voting, the right to not be shot in the street by angry men with guns, or strung up without trial for looking at a white woman admiringly. You know, those things in the Constitution, Declaration, Bill of Rights, and other amendments. 

I believe that when my POV or your POV disagrees with those kinds of human rights issues, we back off and default to those certain inalienable rights instead of what we believe my God or your God had to say about any of it.

POLITICS

I believe that as we grow as a country to accept human rights and build equity to access the system equally, we need to embrace the spirit of the amendment process and change the laws so they grow with us. The founding fathers pointed us toward the future with the ability to amend the Constitution. Every step we refuse to go forward is inexorably a step backward as the rest of the world moves on.

I believe Trump was and still is a con man. I also believe too many other Republicans fear his power base, so they keep quiet even though they believe the same thing too rather than risk losing a house in the Senate or House. Cowards. I also believe that the things followers of Trump revealed about the so-called "salt of the earth" people tell us that we only THINK we've become better people as a nation. Way too many of us still live in a mindset set and solidified around the period of the Civil War. 

I've seen way too many people espouse (not in these words but these ideals) that Black and Brown and Gay people are fine as long as they don't become too public with their culture and identity and as long as they play by white, straight rules instead of expecting "the Christian nation" to accommodate them as the people they already intrinsically are or seek to repair any systemic mechanics that put them at an economic, political, social, cultural, legal, etc. disadvantage. 

I'm neither a Democrat nor a Republican. I tend to agree more with Democrat ideals now, but I'm no member of either party. I still wish we could have one big pool to vote from, rather than a single candidate from primarily two well-funded parties. 

I personally hold these truths to be self-evident that all people (black, white, brown, gay, straight, trans, poly, religious, non-religious, etc.) are endowed with certain inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. 

I believe the minute you try to trample on the rights of anyone because their identity doesn’t align with your group's viewpoint or because they were born into the wrong economic bracket or are from “one of those neighborhoods”, well, you and I are going to have a disagreement, and I'll double down in being an ally to those whose rights you're gunning for. 

I believe in the right to bear arms, but I also believe in gun control. I believe the argument for what constitutes reasonable gun control should be out of the hands of anyone funded by gun manufacturers. 

I believe there is something intrinsically flawed with our system when a black man can be justifiably shot for running away, but a white man will be chased and tackled instead if he does the same. I believe that unless Black Lives Matter, it's ridiculous to try to sell the idea that All Lives Matter any more than it's justifiable to argue that the Civil War was about whether the state's right to use slavery as a basis for the economy was a more important issue than the national need regarding the right for a slave to not be a slave at all. Just like the current argument that a state's right to ban abortion should be a more important state need than the national need for a ruling on whether or not a woman has bodily autonomy to make her own choices. 

IN CONCLUSION

I think that may have covered it all. If you believe opposite me, that's fine. You have the freedom to believe as you choose, even to embrace delusions. But if any of these things make you want to rethink "friending" me here on social media, that's okay. No hard feelings. I'd rather us deal with that now than it becomes hard feelings later. Cool? Good. 

However, if you are cool with all that, or even disagree with it but can be cool with me believing it anyway and not be a jerk here on my page, then go ahead. Click the button. Let's be friends. You're welcome here.

Yes, I Really Believe This

 I think it's the curse of the Type A people
who are drawn to becoming pastors that so
many churches skip Jesus to get to Paul,
because Type A's are far more comfortable
with the do this, don't do this rules from
Paul rather than the be this, love like this,
don't show off how religious you are of Jesus. 

Sadly, those folks often miss the point that the
reason people approached Paul for his wisdom
on matters of church leadership was that he first
modeled servanthood to them during his journeys
and didn't just come in and rattle off a
litany of do this and don't do that.  

I really believe the American church in
particular, and a theologically unprepared
at best and defenseless at worst flock,
has suffered because of that. 

Sheep and Goats Revisited

A little something I try to remember that I learned from seeing the way my granddaddy Taylor loved the children of his community where he preached. He would provide the bus for them to attend events and he would find and repair broken bicycles for any child who wanted one pretty much. 

Grandma and Granddaddy Taylor.
Marie and Rev. Mittry Taylor. 

That little something?

The division between sheep and goat here has nothing to do with having the right "code of morality" or "beliefs about moral issues" or about legislating people into living under your beliefs. Instead, it has everything to do with how much we make the choice to serve others, in particular, the desolate.

I like to believe that people who are more genuinely Christlike reach a point where that kind of choice becomes almost as natural as breathing. Conversely, I also tend to believe that people who resist service to those in need, particularly to the poor, are a lot further from the Jesus they claim to worship than they realize. 

(Matthew 25)

31 “When the Son of Man comes in his glory and all his angels are with him, he will sit on his glorious throne. 32 The people of every nation will be gathered in front of him. He will separate them as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. 33 He will put the sheep on his right but the goats on his left.

34 “Then the king will say to those on his right, ‘Come, my Father has blessed you! Inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the creation of the world. 35 I was hungry, and you gave me something to eat. I was thirsty, and you gave me something to drink. I was a stranger, and you took me into your home. 36 I needed clothes, and you gave me something to wear. I was sick, and you took care of me. I was in prison, and you visited me.’

37 “Then the people who have God’s approval will reply to him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you or see you thirsty and give you something to drink? 38 When did we see you as a stranger and take you into our homes or see you in need of clothes and give you something to wear? 39 When did we see you sick or in prison and visit you?’

40 “The king will answer them, ‘I can guarantee this truth: Whatever you did for one of my brothers or sisters, no matter how unimportant ⌞they seemed⌟, you did for me.’

41 “Then the king will say to those on his left, ‘Get away from me! God has cursed you! Go into everlasting fire that was prepared for the devil and his angels! 42 I was hungry, and you gave me nothing to eat. I was thirsty, and you gave me nothing to drink. 43 I was a stranger, and you didn’t take me into your homes. I needed clothes, and you didn’t give me anything to wear. I was sick and in prison, and you didn’t take care of me.’

44 “They, too, will ask, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or as a stranger or in need of clothes or sick or in prison and didn’t help you?’

45 “He will answer them, ‘I can guarantee this truth: Whatever you failed to do for one of my brothers or sisters, no matter how unimportant ⌞they seemed⌟, you failed to do for me.’

46 “These people will go away into eternal punishment, but those with God’s approval will go into eternal life.”

Idolizing the Words, Ignoring the Word

There is a difference between divinely

inspired and divinely copyedited/translated

across multiple languages. We would do

well to not idolize the created thing.