What do you want on your Tombstone?

I know. Cheesy, right? (Ha, ha. Very punny....)

More seriously, I'm thinking today about "ending well". The mother of a dear friend of mine passed away a couple of weeks ago, and I attended her memorial service at about this time last week. She was elderly, but it was still unexpected, and tough to process. The family rallied beautifully, though, and the service has had me pondering all week.

What do I want out of life? When it's almost over and I'm looking back, what will cause me to feel satisfied and fulfilled and what will cause me regret or shame? Speaking of shame, are there any boundaries around what I "should" want out of life? Is there an "ought" in here somewhere? Or am I free to just want whatever I want and be done with it?

Skipping over a lot of the Goldilocks action (trying ideas on for size...), the resolution for me is this: I have the right to want whatever I want, but I do not have the right to have someone else pick up the tab for my choices. It's up to me to make my life work on the terms I have chosen, and if life doesn't turn out the way I thought/hoped/expected it would, then I have to deal with the consequences.

I would rather not wait until the end of my road to realize I took a wrong turn. The "arrow of time" means you don't get a do-over, you don't get to just keep trying until you get it right. You get one shot, and then you move on to Whatever's Next. I don't want to have to make all my own mistakes--I'd rather learn as much as possible from others who have already been where I am now.

The only good way I can think of to do that is to find people 20 or more years older than I am (basically, a generation ahead) and find out how they're doing, especially in light of the mistakes they've made and the disappointments they've dealt with. The regrets of an older person whose life plan didn't work out (or who, having had no plan, starts asking the right questions too late), are important intel for the next generation. (So are the satisfactions of someone whose life turned out well, but they may not want the things I want or value the things I value. I'm more interested in preventable mistakes and the memes in our culture that turn out to be wrong.)

So here's my plan and some unsolicited advice for the youngers: Find older people. Ask them if they are happy. Ask them if they think their lives were lived well. Beware of the human tendency to take credit for success and shift blame for failure. If things went well, they may have just been in the right place at the right time. If things went poorly, it may be because they just flat screwed up, even if they have a list of reasons why it wasn't their fault. Ask questions like:

Is this how you thought you'd end up?
Did you have a plan, or did you just react to circumstances?
What would you change if you could?
Was there any specific decision you made that in 20/20 hindsight was (a) brilliant, or (b) awful?
Different frame: What's the best decision you made and the worst one?
If you could warn younger people of one pitfall to avoid, what would it be?
What activities and accomplishments have brought you the most real joy?

I could go on, but you get my point. Make your own list, if you want, but make a list and go find some older people to talk to. That's where I'm headed....

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Afterthought note to youngers from someone who's Not That Old, but old enough to have observed a few things:

Do not set your course according to:
1. the pooled ignorance of your peers, who don't know any more than you do, or
2. the advertising gimmicks of people who are trying to sell you things.

Find some old people. Talk to them. Better yet: Listen to them. You'll be glad you did.

Organized Hatred

Call me a cynic, but it seems to me that a lot of "organized religion" is just "organized hatred". What I mean by that is that there seems to be a kind of permission granted from on high to hate certain groups of people that are outside the 'true faith'.

It wouldn't be called "hate", of course--not by the haters. That would be too bold, too shocking. For Christians: Too obviously out of line with the clear teachings of Jesus.

The haters don't generally think of themselves as haters. They typically see themselves as just trying to do what God wants them to do, to live the 'right' kind of life, to be a 'good' person. The problems start when someone comes along who doesn't agree with your vision of the 'good' life--either because he doesn't agree on what God really wants or because he doesn't care what your God has to say at all.

What do you do with a guy like that? His example might lead other people astray, cause them to go off the rails! That would be Bad, and must be Prevented. A conflict is set in motion that will have--must have--winners and losers, and this usually leads to further escalation rather than resolution.

When one group of people attempts to impose its beliefs or lifestyle on another group, that group will defend itself, which tends to really irritate the imposing group. The imposing group--secure in the belief that its own position is the only Right one for everybody--interprets resistance to reform or conversion as further evidence of the depravity of the imposed upon group. Carried to its logical extreme, that process results in the dehumanization of the 'enemy', and provides the exemption, the free pass, that says, "You don't have to love this person. He is not lovable. In fact, he's not really even a person."

When religion is used to identify those people who are the 'enemies of God', it provides a channel for organized hatred. Jesus taught us to love our enemies and be kind to them. Carried to its logical extreme, that process results in realizing one day that you don't have any enemies....

The Second Reformation

I don't think this is original with me. What I mean by that is not that I consciously ripped off someone else's ideas, just that I'd be surprised if I'm the only one who noticed this.

It seems to me that the real driver of the Protestant Reformation was not a a theological breakthrough, but a technical one: the printing press. The technology of the press transferred power from the mystical priesthood of Rome to the professors of learning (and reading). Mainstream Protestant clergy still wear the academic robes of the scholar, and get their educations from seminaries, which are basically specialized universities. Universities are just a support system for libraries.

Run that by again: The printing press gave us books. Books are assembled into collections and collections are gathered into libraries. Academics hang out around libraries and develop universities so they can have classes to explain the books to the newbies. If the library/university is specifically interested in matters theological, you have a seminary.

The repository of the wisdom of the ages shifts from the elders of the tribe and their appointed/anointed successors to the libraries/universities and the gatekeepers that run them. Wanna get ahead, son? Get a college degree--show the world you're a learned man.

So here we are in the third millenium AD, and a most interesting thing has happened. It's Gutenberg all over again, although maybe this time it's Tim Berners-Lee and a supporting cast. The Internet has brought us another power shift, only maybe this one is orders of magnitude greater than the last one.

The telegraph, radio, and television were just the warmup. The World Wide Web is the real deal.

And you know what has happened? We don't need Ph.D.'s anymore. Anyone with a three-digit IQ and a $500 appliance can learn anything he wants to know....

Scary, isn't it? Knowledge used to be stored up and guarded by professional keepers-of-the-flame, guys who got paid to tell us what to think, what was right and true.

Not any more. Go for it. Teach yourself something. Read. Absorb. Sift. Test. Compare. Prune. Build. Trust. Discern. Challenge. Yield. Reject. Absorb. Grow. Change. Learn. Live.

Or you can just go pay someone to tell you what to think....

What is a 'heresy', anyway?...

I'm glad you asked! The word "heresy" comes from the Greek hairetikos, "able to choose". If you think about that for a minute, you might ask yourself something like, "so what's wrong with making a choice?".

I'm glad you asked! What's wrong with making a choice? Apparently everything, if you think you and your group are the UAORAW (Undisputed Arbiters of Right and Wrong). If you belong to a group that considers itself to be Right in a way that makes everyone else Wrong, then anyone who chooses to believe something you don't approve of is a heretic, and their disapproved beliefs are heresy.

Wikipedia says that Iraeneus back in the second century (this has been going on a long time...) was the first guy to really promote the idea that his beliefs were "orthodox" and anyone else's were "heresy". He even wrote a book he titled Adversus Haereses (that's right: "Against Heresies") just to straighten everyone out.

Maybe it's just me, but this seems to be an exercise in name calling. As in a shooting war, where the enemy has to be depersonalized through some kind of derogatory nickname, calling someone a 'heretic' seems to be right in there with 'son of a bitch', just a way to be offensive, to put down someone you disagree with, to give yourself permission to hate, and to stereotype the individual to the point where the individual ceases to be a real person. Jesus would love it.

There's one other thing: Notice that the guy who entertains a completely different set of religious beliefs from yours is not called a heretic. That name is reserved for people who claim to follow your own religion, but aren't doing it right ("right" in this context meaning "the way you do it"). In this regard, claims of orthodoxy and heresy look suspiciously like an exercise in branding. Maybe someone should trademark words like "Christian" or "Presbyterian", so they'd have legal rights that they can enforce against anyone who presumes to use those words without their approval.

The conundrum is the sheer number of groups out there that all think they're right and everyone else is wrong. Ten or twelve years ago I read that there were at the time something like 22,000 separate Christian denominations on the planet. Who is "orthodox" now? Not who claims to be orthodox--that's just about everyone, and not just the ones with the word "orthodox" in their brand. I mean who really gets to adjudicate what's the One True Way against which all others are measured? (And how funny is it to watch all these different groups judging each other as if it mattered to anyone else what they think?)

The lawyers might ask, quo warranto? (that is, by what warrant, or by what authority do you do this?). Jesus and his apostles had a lot to say about factions, divisiveness, the traditions of men, religious exclusion, and persecution. They had a lot to say about love, unity, brotherhood, bearing each other's burdens, praying for each other, and taking care of the needy. They did not have a lot to say about creedal conformity. They had a lot to say about Right Action and Right Motive; not so much to say about Right Doctrine. Whatever authority causes some people to think they're the Church Police, the UAORAW, it's not the teachings of Jesus or the apostles.

Bottom line is: I'm not worried about being called a heretic. Everyone's a heretic in someone else's eyes, so if you take any position at all, someone's not going to like it. And at it's etymological root, "heretic" is just another name for "free thinker", someone who is "able to choose", someone who doesn't have to be told what to think, who to vote for, what to believe.

I'm okay with that.

Why "Heresy of the Week"?

I thought I'd start by explaining the name of this blog....

In the mid-90s, I led a small house church in southwest Houston. As a volunteer teacher who had never been to seminary, and therefore never was taught the 'orthodox' interpretation of certain passages in the bible, I was naive enough to think that if I just read the scriptures in good faith, armed with a Strong's concordance and maybe a Webster's dictionary, I could get the gist of what the authors were trying to say. Silly me....

What happened often enough to become a pattern was that I would read a passage in the bible, apply ordinary reading comprehension skills, together with maybe looking up a word or two in the concordance, and then realize that the conclusions I had come to weren't exactly what I'd been used to hearing in Sunday School. I'd run these things by the group for feedback, and maybe occasionally get some correction or direction, but for the most part, I'd get something like, "wow, that IS weird...".

As a kind of joke, I took to introducing anything I knew would be sort of counter-cultural as "the heresy of the week". Can't say it really happened every week; just seemed like the thing to say. If it seemed like a biggie, I'd introduce it as the "heresy of the month", or even "heresy of the year" if it seemed really outrageous. Mostly, though, it was just the "heresy of the week".

That name stuck, and continues to crop up in my teaching--not every time I open my mouth, but often enough to constitute a pattern. This blog, then, will be a continuation of that pattern. I will share my thoughts, old and new, on life, the Christian scriptures, and current events. I'm not deliberately trying to irritate you, but don't be surprised if it happens. That's part of the pattern, too....

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