Tag Archives: Atheism

October

U2
And the trees are stripped bare
Of all they wear
What do I care?
And kingdoms rise
And kingdoms fall
But you go on…and on…

Yesterday was the first day of October!!! I should have spent the day thinking about all things ghoulish, ghostly, gory or otherwise Halloweenish. My Halloween costume! Getting my wife to watch at least two movies from the Halloween franchise with me again. * And of course, planning a Halloween Party!!!!

Instead, I spent the day thinking about Christian rock music, the Jesus Movement, Third Wave Pentecostalism, Neoorthodoxy, Reinhold Niebuhr, the Emergent Church movement and basically all things White Evangelicalism in the last hundred years or so.

I have not done this in a long time. And yes, it is as horrible as it sounds! 

I want to be thinking about Halloween. But this isn’t a normal Halloween. Of course, not much of anything has been normal for my wife and I since COVID. She’s a Long Hauler since June of 2020. That’s mostly her story to tell. But it has of course, effected both of us. Especially financially.

That is part of this abnormal Halloween. You see, she used to be our primary provider. On paper, it sounds like I should have a promising career by now.  I am a 46 year old white male with a Masters degree.  Instead, I have 20 some years experience in retail, with a few moments dabbling in social work, sales, call centers, factories and of course, 18 months in ordained ministry. 

You see, my two religious degrees are useful almost exclusively in fairly conservative, white Evangelical churches. But, in 2015, I was forced out of a ministry position for the following absurd reasons:

I identified as an LGBTQ affirming minister on my Facebook profile. I wasn’t even out – at least to the church – as a bisexual at that point. 

In my very first sermon there, in June of 2014, I declared that what happened to Trayvon Martin was an absolute miscarriage of justice. The senior pastor I was serving under, literally received hate mail about my sermon. 

Then, in the early days of August, 2014 I went a city council meeting where many citizens of Grand Rapids, Michigan gathered to demand that GRPD officers must wear cams when patrolling neighborhoods. This was of course in the days following the execution of  Michael Brown by police officers and the eruption in Ferguson Missouri. Many of us who gathered, were invited by the burgeoning Black Lives Matter movement in Grand Rapids.  I wore my clergy collar and I spoke on the microphone in favor of police reform. 

Finally, and this was really the straw that broke the camel’s back, I said in a Bible study that we as Christians didn’t need to fear the word myth. I taught that Myth is a sacred category amongst scholars in most of the world’s major religions. And I stated that parts of the book of Genesis are Myth; and that the Earth (and entire Universe) was billions of years old. This offended a senior member of the congregation, who then withdrew their presence and their financial donation anytime I would preach or lead an adult Bible study. 

So a few years ago, in my early 40’s, after leaving ministry, a devastating divorce, getting remarried and giving up alcohol (which was slowly destroying my life), I finally discovered cannabis! As someone who lives with CPTSD, anxiety, depression and some level of ADHD and OCD like symptoms, this was a life changing positive experience for me: mentally, physically, emotionally and yes, spiritually!

So here I am in Jackson Mississippi in October. We are here, first and foremost for a warmer climate to hopefully mitigate some of my wife’s Long COVID symptoms. Secondly, the cost of living here is much more affordable than the cost of living than in Grand Rapids.

And finally, we are here because I firmly believe in the power of cannabis to change lives for the better. It was legalized this last year, in Mississippi for medicinal purposes. So here I am with a Masters in Divinity, 20 years in retail, a few years of ministry and a few years growing cannabis and serving as a Budtender in Michigan. I think I have finally found my “calling.” or at least a career I won’t find miserable with daily demands to be spiritually and intellectually dishonest with myself and others.

It’s probably a better fit for me than any teaching role, sacred or secular. Pastoral ministry didn’t used to be such a bad gig. At one time pastors visited parishioners, hospitals, prayed with the sick and actually taught people about “godly things” like righteousness, justice, and compassion. After all, I was merely espousing basic science in that Bible study. Along with a theological framework that at one point was considered fairly conservative stuff in Christian circles. But that was before modern day Christian dominionism took complete control of nearly every last white Evangelical church in the United states, and with it, most of the Republican Party.   

A quick Google or Wiki search should suffice to illustrate to even the most unfamiliar reader, that the most prominent adherents of this grotesque, present day amalgamation of utter theological and political bullshit  include: Calvinist Reconstructionists, Charismatic and Pentecostal Christians, and the most dangerous, the proponents for a “New Apostolic Reformation.”

I have spent most of my life, as a quiet, fat, closeted queer, looking for Christ, while narrowly escaping all of these very particular fringe groups within Christianity. By the Grace of an indifferent Universe I guess?!?!?

I don’t know!?!? I am still trying to figure all of that out in therapy and daily meditation.  What I do know is that I did NOT inherit any of these particular and increasingly and purposely obtuse ways of being Christian from my mother. My mom was a tongues speaking, demon rebuking, Hell-fire and brimstone Pentecostal at one time. And she was a Reagan Republican when I was a small child!!! But by the time she died, my mom had become a moderate to progressive Evangelical (especially by today’s standards) and for better or worse, to my utter shock as a teenager, a Clinton Democrat!

I can still remember a 15 year old me, telling her I was worried she could go to Hell for voting for old Bill. But my mother never became nearly as fundamentalist or as radicalized as I was becoming at that time. I know that now. But at times in my life, I have blamed all my trauma from Christian fundamentalism all on her. I am sorry mom. 

And I am also deeply sorry that I ever introduced anyone to this toxic form of Christianity. By the time she died, my mom had told and showed me multiple times that she held out hope of Heaven for people who commit suicided (she struggled with ideation most of her life), people of other religions, and even people who reject the church. And whether proactively or inadvertently (sometimes both), she  also taught me to always question authority and at the very least, scrutinize the metaphysical claims of Christianity for your damn self!

Every time we switched churches as a child, it was because my mother had decided for our whole family that a male Pastor was preaching incorrectly or acting unjustly toward her husband, her children or others in the church who were often ignored by all but her: the poor, dirty, differently abled and mentally ill. She even cleaned house regularly for a mentally ill woman, with two rambunctious kids, a fitly house and a husband who was a self proclaimed “Satanist.” Hell, my mother was once kicked out of a Bible study for several months for asking the class if anyone else ever “wondered if the Jews were right about Jesus and that maybe, rather than the Messiah, he was himself some sort of antichrist?!?!?”

I used to be haunted, embarrassed, and worried for my mom about that particular incident, even more than I was about her voting for Bill. I had to tell myself it was her mental illness speaking in order to avoid nightmares of her being torture for eternity in Hell. Now, these are some of my fondest and most cherished moments of my mom, looking back. 

I’m not really a Christian anymore. At least in the sense that I no longer ascribe to a literal interpretation of the Nicene or Apostle’s Creeds as the only appropriate lenses for reading the Bible. But that has nothing to do with theology,  geology, archeology, evolutionary biology or any of the usual culprits blamed for people disbelieving basic tenants of the Christian faith  It’s because of 8th grade astronomy that my 14 year old son can understand.  

That’s still not why I left the church!!! As in every single time, place, religion and culture, there are both “good” and “evil” people and forces at work in every sector of Christianity. But the good folks are getting harder and harder to see and hear. They are being drowned out by this new fangled hyper conservatism that is destroying our county, and I worry could destroy our planet in the not too distant future.

However, I have already spent far too much time today thinking about religion, politics and the deep concerns that can often only be afforded by being from a Bible Belt, Middle Class, white, Christian background. 

At one point in time, there was no such thing as Christian rock music. It was birthed primarily by folks of the well meaning Jesus Movement. They were the hippie Christians that “saved my mom from Catholicism.”  In less than a hundred years, they wrote new praise and worship music (often with modern publishing rights) to usurp and in most cases, completely replace traditional hymns that were hundreds of years old and steeped in nearly two millennia of Christian tradition. They held Christian rock concerts, started Maranatha!, Vineyard Music, Hillsong and a thousand other Christian music groups, record labels, book companies and storefronts and even a film industry, complete with movies about the end of the world. 

U2’s second album was an early experiment by an already established rock band, on a major record label, to be marketed to the then  nascent, Christian music format. The album was sold in Christian bookstores. Commercially and artistically the album is a pretty weak spot in the band’s catalog. 

Still, I’ve always loved this song. It’s minor key, somber tone and lyrics with vague allusions to the Biblical Psalms, seems as good of a soundtrack as any for a cool October day. But for the first time in my 46 years of life, I have had a completely different purview for all things, Autumn, October and Halloween.  This year, I watch as “the trees are stripped bear of all they wear” and I genuinely wonder in the 90 degree Jackson, Mississippi weather if the leaves will turn colors here? Will it ever get cold enough for Hoddie Season here? Will my wife and I make it here?

In addition to my 8 years of school, two degrees in Religion and 18 months in ordained ministry, I have “served” most of my life in retail. I’ve done entry and middle level supervision in retail. And the thought of climbing the later to upper management, just to make more money sounds like a miserable, sad and wasted life. I’ve obviously retained a bit of the oft repeated concern in the passages of the Bible that money and political power corrupt. I didn’t learn that from my brushes with Third Wave Pentecostalism, Neoorthodoxy, Reinhold Niebuhr, the Emergent Church or their spiritual heir, the  “New Apostolic Reformation.”  I learned from my mom, and from 8 years, of academic training in an historic Christian tradition. Training to read the Bible through the lenses of the Nicene and Apostle’s Creeds. But most Evangelical churches don’t even do that anymore.

As I watch the church I broke apart from bend more and more towards the pursuit of money and power to the point that some self proclaimed Christians have been able to call themselves “Trump Christians” with a straight face, I can’t think of a better word to describe what mainstream, white Evangelicalism has become other than “satanic.”

While I don’t use this word to point to a “metaphysical reality,” I do use it to refer to how greed, wasteful accumulation of resources, a suspicious disposition towards all non-Christians, and a lack of love towards anyone with a contradictory life experience have combined and produced a spirit of violence and hostility throughout the white, Evangelical church in America. That “spirit” has pervaded conservative church and political culture on a global level. Scary Shit!

I think I am going to need some candy and a movie to divert my mind and heart for a few hours from the truly “evil” forces at work in our world. Forces that are trying to destroy the very fabric of a society, already daily decreasing in civility. We are already – it feels to me – are spinning way out of orbit for a world much too cold. It’s become to cold for simple things like love, mercy, compassion, embrace. White, Conservative, Evangelical Christianity hasn’t merely followed suit. It’s led the way. it feels like all of the citizens of the globe are dangling from a proverbial cliff.  And that’s scarier than anything to do with Michael Meyers.

*A combination of any of the following are acceptable: John Carpenter’s original and it’s direct sequel Halloween II, Halloween 4,5 and 6 or the Rob Zombie reboots. Unacceptable are any of the attempts to bring back Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode (H2O, Resurrection or the latest Carpenter sanctioned,  David Gordon Green mess of films).

Sleeping Queen

“What of this world
Foucault was right, we just discipline and punish
There nothing left, my head, my heart
My hands are empty, empty
My heart is empty, empty“

In a time of cultural turmoil, during a period of personal crisis, Amythyst Kiah was woke by “a siren with broken wings.” She rose up and sang this song, Sleeping Queen. It is a a song that Kiah describes as a lament. She grieves for the unjust world described by philosopher, Michel Foucault. It is the world we live in. It is a world where power is abused and the torture of human beings continues, in the name of discipline and punishment.

In a time of cultural turmoil, during a period of personal crisis, a young betrothed woman called Mary was woke by an angel. Mary rose up and sang a song of celebration. Her soul “magnifies God” and Mary rejoices about a world described by the Hebrew Prophets. It is the world we live in. It is a world where power is abused and the torture of human beings continues, not only in the name of discipline but all too often in the name of God.

Today is the third Sunday of Advent. Traditionally, the third Sunday is called Gaudete Sunday. From the Latin term gaudēte – meaning rejoice – in churches everywhere, this is traditionally a day of joy of anticipation at the approach of the Christmas celebration. During Advent, Christians traditionally focus on “three comings of Christ.” The first coming of Christ was into human history via Mary’s body and what Christians call the Incarnation. The last coming of Christ is the now ever delayed Parousia. But most importantly, on this day Christians celebrate and look forward to the daily coming of Christ into the lives of those who are “in Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit.”

I grew up in a Christian household and went to a Christian Church. But it was not a liturgical church. The Bible was “important.” But 2,000 years of Christian traditions, teachings and creeds seemed of very little, if any importance. It was not until I was in my first year as a Religion major at Calvin college that I remember hearing my first (and still the best) Advent sermon I ever heard. The Pastor’s name was Mara Joy. And she radiated with joy as she invited all of us within the sound of her voice to vigilantly watch for “the coming of Christ” into human lives each and every day. I guess in some ways. I’ve been working on this “sermon” or reflection ever since hearing that one some 15 years ago.

If you’re just tuning in, the first two weeks of Advent, we looked at some of the literary and theological parallels between the lectionary passages from the Prophet, Isiah and Matthew’s gospel. This Sunday’s Readings provide a welcome break in the alternative gospel reading from Luke: Mary’s Magnificat. It is Mary’s song of joy, exclaimed shortly after her visit from the angel, and upon her arrival in the home of her relative Elizabeth. Elizabeth is also pregnant with a slightly different kind of miraculous conception. According to the stories those babies turned out to be John the Baptist and Jesus. It’s a boy times two!

But, could Mary and Elizabeth’s conversation and Mary’s subsequent song pass the The Bechdel test? I think so! The dozen or so male pronouns in Mary’s song betrays the weakness of religious language and language in general. Whatever God is, God probably doesn’t have a penis. Right?!? And this song is not primarily about what God is going to do in her son. No! In this song, Mary recounts to Elizabeth the miraculous stories passed down through the generations about the things God has done. She sings of a God that abounds with mercy and steadfast love from one generation to another. Mary sings of a God that humbles the haughty and powerful and lifts up the downtrodden. Most of all, Mary expresses gratitude and joy God had chosen her.

Most often, pastors love to preach that Mary was surprised, honored and above all that she surrendered to the will of God. Maybe you’re like me and you’ve heard the story so many times that the scandal of it all gets a bit lost on us.

I am not talking about the silly “was she simply a young woman or a virgin” arguments. But the real scandal: Its in the song. Its in today’s story from Luke. Its a story told in song from one woman to another. It is a story about one woman being filled with God – literally.

Today, the vast majority of American Christians are heretical by creedal standards. But in 431 CE things were a lot different. In the first few centuries of Christianity, if you were a prominent Bishop and you said the wrong thing about Jesus, you could get your ass killed! Or worse, you could be condemned to eternal damnation in Hell upon death. In fact,in 431, at what today is called the “Third Ecumenical Council” of the church condemned q guy named Nestorius and all of his followers for arguing that Mary was merely Christotokos, meaning “Bearer of the Christ” rather than Theotokos, “Bearer of God.”

For Nestorius it was first and foremost a rejection of associating God almighty too closely with humanity and human flesh. This was no longer the easily digestible and intelligible stuff about Jesus having two distinct natures in one person or three distinct personhoods of the “Trinity” subsisting in one “triune” God. This was truly radical stuff about divine personhood not only dwelling in flesh, but also passing through another human body. The body of a young woman. For out of her vagina, in a “manger” presumably with blood, a placenta, and other bodily fluids on the barn floor next to some poor Bethlehem Farmer’s ox and ass, would come… God.

Mary had a dream. Amythyst Kiah had a dream. Both women in one way or another confront the difficult reality of living in a world where the bodies of women are superficially critiqued by the society around them. a society that makes false Character judgements based almost exclusively on outward appearance and what they do or don’t do with their bodies in private. One woman praises God for what she sees as God’s faithfulness in times past. This lends weight to her expression of joy and praise about what she believes God will do, in part through her.

I wish I could say the world has changed tremendously since Mary’s Magnificat. But Amythyst Kiah just wrote Sleeping Queen in 2016. She wrote it in a time where elected leaders in a “free” Republic can go on national TV and brag about what they do to the bodies of women without consent. She wrote it in a world where men still regulate what women can and cannot do with their own sexual and reproductive health. She wrote this song somewhere around the time of The Pulse night club massacre in 2016. The recent attack at Club Q exposes the dark, xenophobic underbelly of our “free” society. Its a song of Lament, yes! Absolutely! But like Mary’s, it is also a song of hope. And like Mary’s Magnificat it is a song of radical hope in the face of a cruel world. It is a world in which people still find a perverse satisfaction in inflicting torture and cruelty in the name of “justice.” In this world of injustice where it seems like Mary’s song will never come to fruition, I don’t blame Kiah for going back to sleep that day.

But still I wait fight for the world these women collectively envision. I fight for my mother who showed me by example -her words were something different – that the creative power of the “divine” and the destructive force of the “demonic” lives in each and every one of us. I am thankful to the Mother of my children, for doing that which divinity does: encompassing and bearing new life. Thank you to my daughter for teaching me that I just don’t know shit! Seriously! All the time. Thank you to Leigh and Leanne for believing in me when I simply could not. And of course, thank you to my wife, and best friend for teaching me the true meaning of love that is patient. love that is kind, love that does not brag, envy, or boast. I want to love more like her each day.

I also want to dedicate this post to the women who taught me how to sing!!! Shuhada Sadaqat, who most of my life I have known as Sinéad MF O’Connor, thank you for living! Simply put, without you and your music I might not be alive today. Your music, has been a healing balm throughout most of my life! I really, truly hope I get to meet you while we both still share air and space on this earth. I give a huge shout out to Kate Pierson and Cindy Wilson made me feel like me and my Dead Beat Club friends were going to be okay (someday). Thank you, thank you, thank you to Ani Difranco for teaching me that I didn’t have to be In or Out.

Last but certainly not least, thank you to Amythyst Kiah for this beautiful artistic statement. I hope do right by you. And I hope you have a beautiful, awesome, amazing, fanfuckingtastic Birthday! Celebrate you today! All day! And every day! Thanks one & all for reading. Until next Sunday, peace to you.

~wwb
Christian Atheist



Spitting Off the Edge of the World

“Cowards, here’s the sun So bow your heads In the absence of bombs”

This is how we got here. Karen O’s words ring out like a fierce indictment: ‘tracing the steps’ of the “cowards” that have led humanity to this precarious cliff we are coactively hanging from. The slow, smoldering movement of the synthesizer seems to invite a sense of the grandiose. As the Yeah Yeah Yeahs play on, Karen O shares vocal duties with Perfume Genius. But amidst the foreboding, there is a palpable sense of resiliency bubbling up.

This is where we are. We’re spitting off the edge of the world. It’s all come to this. The chorus washes over the listener in waves, creating a call and response effect with the main and backing vocal takes:

We’re spitting off the edge of the world (out in the night)
Never had no chance (nowhere to hide)
Spitting off the edge of the world (out comes the sun)
Never had no chance (nowhere to run)

This is where we’re going. Everything we thought we ever knew, has radically changed to bring us to what we previously thought was the edge of the world. We’ve arrive at what seems like yet another point of no return. The days at hand won’t be easy. It won’t be easy. Things may not feel normal or comfortable: “Wounded arms must carry the load.” However, hope remains palpable. The final line of this apocalyptic ballad is pregnant with expectation:

Winds from the sky (never had no chance) Will watch us rise

Karen O wears a bit of a prophetic spirit on her sleeve. Explaining the meaning of this song, she said, “Spitting Off the Edge of the World” was inspired in at least in part by the devastating impacts of climate change. . “I see the younger generations staring down this threat, and they’re standing on the edge of a precipice, confronting what’s coming with anger and defiance,” she said. “It’s galvanizing, and there’s hope there.” 

Karen O wears her prophetic voice on her sleeve. She couldn’t hide it if she tried. This is what a prophet does! They tell us where we are, how we got there and give us a good idea of what the consequences are going to be.

Long before Karen O ever sat down at a piano to compose, there was a guy – perhaps a group or “school” of guys – named Isaiah. The book of the Hebrew Torah that bears his name, conveys a very similar foreboding feeling that the world as we know it – a world of violence and mayhem is about to end. Long before Karen O longed for silence in the absence of bombs, Isiah Looked for a day when the ways of war and violence would be so passé that we can all feel comfortable melting down our tools of violence and fashioning them into tools of gardening: tools that cultivate life not death.

The human disposition of hubris and violence is so prevalent, the prognosis of our situation so unsettling, and the hope for a time of peace and rest so unwavering, that you can just about make out the mournful yet hopeful tune of a prophet regardless of time, place, culture or religion.

Unfortunately in our time, words like prophecy, even simple words like god, truth, good, evil have become so overly used as weapons, we might do better to lay them down for a time with the bombs and swords and just focus on trying to live life now.

We can all be pretty bad at that. We often live with a foot in the past, dreaming about a better future.

Sometimes it is so damn hard to just be here, right now, in the moment. The writer of the “gospel” or letter we today call Matthew was so eager for a time of peace and universal prosperity, that he used a rabbinical approach called midrash to apply a lot of Hebrew concepts to the person and work of a first century Palestinian peasant who inspired a minor uprising and was killed by the government of his time.

Writing around the time of 70 CE (about 40 years after the crucifixion), Rome’s destruction of the temple had many, Jews and Christians alike, certain that the end must be near. Matthew placed words of near certainty about the end of days in directly into Jesus’ mouth. If you go just a little further passed today’s reading, Jesus says, “this generation will not pass away until all these things take place.”

He was wrong. They were wrong. At least in the sense that Jesus is going to come back and bring us an ice cold coke from the heavenly fridge or open up a can of fiery whoop-ass on the unrighteous

So what? That’s what I said for a very long time. So fucking what? The human predicament is still the same. Still so full of violence and war. Hanging our hat on external projections in the sky doesn’t seem to help at all. In fact, focusing on “the end” whatever the hell that means, has potential to turn us all into a selfish, preoccupied noobs that only cause more pain and violence.

What would happen if we lived in the present? Religious or not? What if we learned from the hard lessons that brought us this far? What if we changed the – just ever so slightly – the orientation (or disorientation) of only focusing on the “advent” or coming of the divine into our lives in the past. Those inexplicable moments that feel, for lack of a better word, “Holy.” We sit, dream about the good old days, and wait for restoration.

But that is no way to live. Regardless of time, place, culture or religion we have often dared to hope not too much, but too little. We need to stop waiting for restoration and start living towards our own emancipation and that of the whole.

Happy first Sunday of Advent. So we are at the beginning of a long journey. If you’re not familiar with some of the words and terms that are saturated in religious sectarianism (Like advent, sin, prophecy, etc) don’t worry, if you’re interested, we should have plenty of time to explore these things together throughout the coming weeks, months., years.

We’ll see how this goes and if anybody else comes along for the ride. My name is Wayne. I’m no longer a Christian. But terms like theist or atheist no longer make sense to me (or a lot of others) in a vast universe we know to be ever expanding.

Get the baby out of the trash can, and warm up some fresh bath water. Lets explore together what to throw away and what to keep.

I’ll start with one post each week offers a reflection on at least one (if not more) of the weekly passages from the common lectionary.

I won’t always save the passages or all of my cards so to speak for last. I’m just your average former pastor and recovering alcoholic with CPTSD, Anxiety Disorder, Chronic Depression and a hope that will not let me go – gentle or forcefully – into that good night.

Instead I will offer some reflection and life stories and try to celebrate the only way the light ever comes, anew, each day and punctuated by long cold nights, and even longer seasons of darkness. Spit in the face of that darkness as we spin together at what feels and has always felt like the end of the world.

For today, you can view the lectionary passages for this first Sunday of Advent here.

~wwb
Christian Atheist