On Tolerating Bad Religion

13 February 2005

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Prayer

In many ways, we know so little. Yet we guide our lives, and our actions toward others, based on the little that we know. And sometimes we do harm, because we hadn’t understood, because we hadn’t cared, because we didn’t know the right little things.

Let us try to take an honest inventory of the little things we know, and test them with both head and heart:

When we judge and condemn others, have we understood that they, no less than we, are children of God?

If we are alienated by those who love differently than we do, have we remembered that it is often a gift to the world when we can love at all?

When we see that another’s values would not feed our souls, can we also see that means that our values might not feed theirs?

If the god of understanding were watching the way we treat those with whom we disagree, would that god say that we have really understood them?

If the goddess of love were watching, would she say that we had added to the amount of love in the world, or detracted from it?

And if all the people we most admire, those with the clearest understanding or biggest hearts – if they were watching us, would we feel ashamed, or proud?

We know so little, yet must guide our lives by the little we know. We seek ways of being and living that can make us better people, partners, parents and citizens.

Let us pray that our actions may make us agents of a deeper understanding and a broader love. For the world needs those gifts, far more than it needs our little certainties.

When we can’t respect others enough, when we can’t love them enough to bless their best intentions, let us pray for the character to treat them as we might if only we could understand them better or love them more.

We offer this prayer with honest minds, open hearts, and a grateful reverence for this amazing gift of life.

Amen.

Sermon

This starts and ends with stories.

One day the devil and one of his little helpers were sitting on a cloud looking down at the humans below, when they saw a man walking down a road who stopped, picked up something from the road, put it in his pocket and walked on.

“What did he find?” asked the devil’s helper. “A piece of the truth,” chuckled the devil.

“A piece of the truth? Don’t you want to stop him?”

“Stop him? Oh no,” said the devil. “It’s only a tiny piece of truth. Before long, he’ll turn it into an orthodoxy. And then he’ll be doing my work!”

There are ways in which that story sums up the history of almost all religions. It’s like the ancient Hindu story of the blind people and the elephant, but with a vengeance. In the Hindu story, different blind people came upon different parts of an elephant. The one who had grabbed the ear said “Why, an elephant is like a big leathery leaf!” The one who had hold of the trunk said “You fool! It’s nothing at all like a leaf. It’s like a long, thick snake!” The one who had bumped into a leg said “You’re both crazy! I have a firm hold on this elephant, and it is like a strong, rough, tree trunk!” And from behind, the one who had grabbed the tail called out “You’re all idiots. Either you’ve never experienced an elephant at all, or you’re lying. It is not a large thing at all; it is like a small, stiff rope!” And so on.

Both of these stories are immediately recognizable because they’re both about the human condition and human nature, and that hasn’t hasn’t changed much over the centuries.

One of the original sins of our species is that we will never have more than a few pieces of the truth, but we always want to pretend that we have the whole truth. It gets us into most of our problems with each other, doesn’t it?

I spent several years studying theology back in graduate school. At its best, theology is the study of those deep and abiding truths that can set us free. But mostly, it is the study of how each religious thinker managed to find one tiny piece of truth, then turn it into an idol that became the enemy of honest religion, and too often the enemy of both truth and humanity.

So the question of religious toleration is a tricky one, because there is a lot that should not be tolerated, and part of the art is learning which is which. When I went on the Internet and Googled “religious toleration,” I was drawn to two fairly dramatic sites. The first was the Roman Catholic Encyclopedia. They pointed out that we only tolerate things we think are wrong but don’t want to speak out against. So we tolerate evil. No one will say: “We must show toleration towards courage or love”, for these are both traits that we don’t tolerate, but encourage.

Not surprisingly, the Catholic Church is against “freedom of belief”, which asserts the right of each person to believe what he pleases. And they quote Pope Leo XIII’s writing on this, from 1885, where he wrote: “The gravest obligation requires the acceptance and practice, not of the religion which one may choose, but of that which God prescribes and which is known by certain and indubitable marks to be the only true one.” “In the domain of science and of faith alike,” the Encyclopedia article continues, “truth is the standard, the aim, and the guide of all investigation; but love of truth and truthfulness forbid every honorable investigator to [tolerate] error or falsehood.”

In other words, for the Catholic Encyclopedia, freedom of belief is only freedom to choose the truth, and the only religious truth is, coincidentally, owned by the Catholic Church. Well, there’s that guy picking up the tiny piece of truth, and the devil watching with delight.

Then I also came on a website called biblebelievers.org. The headline read,

“The Cult of Liberty is the Recipe of Moral Breakdown”. Beneath the headline, they said the only thing conservatives can hope for is a moral reawakening of the United States.

They were encouraged by the fact that the conservatives in power are going to “dismantle the welfare state.”

“Bravo,” they wrote. Then they asked, “But what about dismantling abortion? Gay rights? Birth control pills and devices? Sex education? Dirty movies and TV? Women’s liberation? Secular humanism in the schools? These are the true plagues of American society,” they wrote, “not high taxes or welfare, and these diseases are the effect of the general breakdown of the morals of the people. And the problem is that these infections cannot be eradicated legally and logically except by some ‘principle, a principle which restricts human freedom only to those objects which are good’.” (http://www.biblebelievers.org/)

Both these websites are variations on the stories of people grabbing tiny pieces of truth, and the myth of the blind people and the elephant. And they show why the United States of America has had freedom of belief for nearly all of its history. Each of these religious groups has picked up a tiny piece of truth, smothered it in a ton of arrogance, and each has confused truth with their own small biases.

The Catholics would be embarrassed by the hateful bigotries of biblebelievers.org, even though they share many of them. And when biblebelievers.org speaks of goodness or truth, they do not mean the kind the Catholic Church has. Back when we had British colonies here, before the Revolutionary War that gave us the right to make our own laws, almost all the colonies were examples of what can happen when these tiny pieces of truth are given the power of law.

For example, the colony of Maryland published something called An Act Concerning Religion, on 21 April 1649. In that act, they said that anyone who denied that Jesus Christ was the son of God, or denied the trinity, or said anything bad about them, was to be put to death, and their properties would all be seized by the colony.

That’s what it means to say that when people find a tiny piece of truth and turn it into an orthodoxy, they are doing the devil’s work. In fact, I would say that orthodoxies are the devil’s work, because they are always that guy picking up the tiny piece of truth wrapped in reams of arrogance, then turning it all into dogma.

The truth that can set you free

Still, I’m with the biblebelievers.org and the Catholic Church when they say that we should encourage truth but not tolerate untruths masquerading as truth. And I’m with them when they say that liberals have far too often been willing to bless anything, including things that shouldn’t be blessed. Sometimes we liberals have had such open minds that some of our brains have fallen out.

But what is this truth business – especially something like the kind of truth that can set you free?

The short answer is that that’s what all great religious teachings have always been about. The best religious and philosophical thinkers have tried to help us understand what this greater truth is like, the kind that can set you free, the only kind that should really be encouraged. But few read them.

Aristotle, as the Catholic Encyclopedia noted, taught that wisdom consisted in choosing the middle road between extremes, because extremes can be either too permissive or too narrow and brutal. The best religious teachers and prophets have always known this.

In the Qu’ran of the religion of Islam, there were no obligatory doctrines about God: indeed, the Koran is highly suspicious of theological speculation, dismissing it as self-indulgent guesswork about things that nobody can possibly know or prove. (Karen Armstrong, A History of God, p. 143) The Koran teaches that God had sent messengers to every people on the face of the earth: Islamic tradition says there had been 124,000 such prophets, a symbolic number suggesting infinitude. Thus the Koran repeatedly points out that it is not bringing a message that is essentially new and that Muslims must emphasize their kinship with the older religions. (Armstrong, p.152)

And behind Christianity was the figure of the man Jesus, who would have hated Christianity. Jesus said don’t judge. He said to treat others the way you’d want to be treated. He even said to let the wheat and the weeds grow together – which sounds far more permissive than even the cult of liberty.

The Buddha taught that when we have to choose between doing the right thing and doing the compassionate thing, we should always choose the compassionate thing. Why? Because what we think of as the right thing will almost always happen to coincide with our own biases, the little bits of truth we picked up.

Taoism has an even more subtle kind of teaching. They say everything is always in movement, either coming to be or passing away, either moving from weakness to strength or from strength to weakness. So certainty is a very weak place to be, because your next move has to be down.

And Jews have such a way of taking some lesson that sounds rigid, then soaking it in such human warmth and wit that it melts into understanding and compassion.

One of their many stories about this concerned a small village, which prided itself on enforcing the strictest kind of obedience to the Law – like that 1649 Act of Religion by the Maryland colony. The village was losing so many people it was on the verge of collapse. They couldn’t understand how they could be dying when they were so right.

So one of their elders traveled to a large town nearby, to see a rabbi who was known far and wide for his wisdom. He told the rabbi their strange plight: that they were dead right but nearly dead as a village. The rabbi nodded, and said “Your sin is the sin of ignorance. You see, the Messiah is among you, and you are ignorant of this fact.” The man returned home, hardly willing to believe this. He knew everyone in the village – after all, there were fewer and fewer of them every day – and there wasn’t anybody there who could possibly be pure enough to be the Messiah. When he told the other villagers, they didn’t believe it either.

Still, the old rabbi was famous for his wisdom, and nobody wanted to say he was a fool. So they began wondering if maybe he could be right – if old Goldberg over there could possible be the Messiah, or Mrs. Robbins. Impossible! Still, just in case, they began treating everyone as though they might be the Messiah, which means they began treating them a lot better than they had been.

You can see the end of the story coming: the village flourished, because they had let go of their tiny little truthlet and found the more difficult and more full truth, and it had set them free of their certainty, and free of their smallness.

The truth worth serving, the truth that can set us free, must first set us free from our own narrowest certainties, those certainties that would shrink the world to the size of our biases and habits. That’s the irony of places like biblebelievers.org or those passages in the Catholic Encyclopedia: while willing to fight or even kill for the truth, they don’t realize that they are among its greatest enemies – and that they make the devil laugh with glee at his newest disciples.

I don’t think any church or any religion can be trusted to know the truth when they see it, because that story of the man who picked up a tiny piece of truth and made an orthodoxy out of it – that seems to be a story of human nature.

That’s why the insights of the founding thinkers of great religions are almost always the enemies of the religions founded on them. The religion about Jesus has almost nothing in common with the religion of Jesus. Of all the people who might hate Islamic fundamentalism, none would hate it more than Mohammad. The Buddha would be at least saddened to see the rank superstition that 98% of Buddhists mistake for Buddhism, and on down the line.

You don’t let Budweiser choose the drinks, or all you’ll have is beer. You don’t let Christians define truth or no one else is safe. And when the only tool you own is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. It simply takes more and better tools to serve either truth or life.

Yet behind it all, there is still this thing called truth that is still worth pursuing, and can still set us free. But today, it seems that it must first set us free from the religions that identify truth with their beliefs, from the nationalisms that identify it with their borders, and with every other example of people doing the devil’s work by beating others to death with their tiny little truthlets. Their name is legion.

One part of the truth is that none of us will ever have it all. We are all that person who picked up a tiny piece of truth. You could say both the gods and the devils are watching to see what we’ll do with it, whether we will use it to serve the demons of our lower nature or the angels of our better nature.

So another way of looking at which kinds of truth we should encourage, which kinds we should tolerate, and which kinds we should actively oppose is by asking whether the ideals we are following make us a curse or a blessing, whether our presence here has increased or decreased the amount of understanding and compassion in the world.

There is a wonderful story about this, which comes from the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. The Unitarians want to claim him, though he didn’t think much of them, and once called them “corpse-cold.” But I don’t care what club he belonged to; I only care whether the tiny bit of truth he picked up seems worthy of the best we can be. Here is the story he wrote:

“The Friar Bernard lamented in his cell on Mount Cenis the crimes of mankind, and rising one morning before day from his bed of moss and dry leaves, he gnawed his roots and berries, drank of the spring, and set forth to go to Rome to reform the corruption of mankind. On his way he encountered many travelers who greeted him courteously; and the cabins of the peasants and the castles of the lords supplied his few wants. When he came at last to Rome, his piety and good will easily introduced him to many families of the rich, and on the first day he saw and talked with gentle mothers with their babes at their breasts, who told him how much love they bore their children, and how they were perplexed in their daily walk lest they should fail in their duty to them. “What!” he said, “and this on rich embroidered carpets, on marble floors, with cunning sculpture, and carved wood, and rich pictures, and piles of books about you?” — “Look at our pictures, and books, they said, “and we will tell you, good Father, how we spent the last evening. These are stories of godly children and holy families and romantic sacrifices made in old or in recent times by great and not mean persons; and last evening, our family was collected, and our husbands and brothers discoursed sadly on what we could save and give in the hard times.” Then came in the men, and they said, “What cheer, brother? Does thy convent want gifts?” Then the Friar Bernard went home swiftly with other thoughts than he brought, saying, ‘This way of life is wrong, yet these Romans, whom I prayed God to destroy, are lovers, they are lovers; what can I do?'” (Emerson, “The Conservative,” in The Oxford Book of Essays, p. 181)

Here is someone who worshiped something very different from the biblebelievers.org or those who wrote the Catholic Encyclopedia. The wise old rabbi would have smiled, though the devil would not. We become what we worship. If all we will ever have are tiny pieces of the truth, let us choose very carefully what we make of them.