Name change

     A few months ago the Quincy University Advancement Office helped me set up a blog on the University platform. I have friends who are Trump supporters, so I thought the blog title "Reflections from Magaland" would capture their attention. 

     Recent political events have convinced me that associating myself with the label "Maga" is not wise. I do not support Mr. Trump and never have, and think he is a dangerous demagogue. So I changed the title to "Reflections from Flyover Country." 

enthusiasm

           Emile Durkheim was an atheistic scholar who wrote some things that became very influential in the early days of the science of sociology. He did a study of suicide rates in France that was cited in sociology textbooks as a model of research. He wrote a very influential book with the title The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, published in 1911.

His book was a study of religious practices among aboriginal people in Australia. He never actually went to Australia, but he used written accounts by anthropologists of how aboriginal people lived. He came up with the following theory:

Aboriginal communities in Australia are held together by religious beliefs. Their beliefs and rituals are centered on totems, which are animals or people or objects that each group considers sacred to itself. For example, the group might consider the kangaroo sacred. The kangaroo is sacred only to that particular group. That group will not touch the animal, or harm it in any way. It will honor the animal symbolically. The group knows that other groups have different totems, and those groups  might kill and eat kangaroos, but that doesn't bother them. They are the people of the kangaroo, and for them the kangaroo is sacred.

Durkheim's theory was that the people are not really worshipping the kangaroo. They are symbolically acknowledging that something is greater than the individuals in the group. What Durkheim speculated was that what the people were worshipping was not the totem, but the group itself. It was the group that was superior to the individual, outside the individual, and demanding respect and deference. The totem could be anything. For each group of people, some object or person symbolized a force greater than the individuals in the group. Since the totem was greater than the individuals, the perception of the participants was that the totem is greater than the group itself.

What religion does for people is to provide them a symbolic way of expressing their dependence on something outside themselves. The religious attitude is "I am not master of my own universe. My universe has a master greater than me." The individualism of modern cultures teaches people to say "I am master of my own universe. There is nothing that can put limits on what I can or cannot do."

Note that in Durkheim's understanding, the individual cannot live by a religious attitude without the involvement of a group. I cannot be my own religion. I have to unite with other people, through ritual and other group activities, if I want to live with zest and enthusiasm.

The zest and enthusiasm idea was central to Durkheim's theory. Religion does not just provide limits on people. It creates moments of excitement that take people out of themselves and gives them reason to live everyday life with some excitement. Religious rituals interrupt everyday life with moments of group enthusiasm. People need that.

Our society does seem to have a lot of people who lack enthusiasm for living. People seem vulnerable to all kinds of victimization--online bullying, rip-offs in everyday exchanges with other people, violence within forms of intimate contact. There is nothing greater than the individual which can put limits on how people should treat each other. We are all our own religion. We are limitless, free, and wandering in search of enthusiasm.

Wikipedia says "The word [enthusiasm] was originally used to refer to a person possessed by God, or someone who exhibited intense piety. It implies that something outside the individual has taken hold of a person."

There seem to be moments in our society when people experience such possession. Concerts by famous musicians come to my mind. But that kind of enthusiasm is not enough to sustain everyday living. People have to go back to their everyday environments, which no longer provide weekly, even though much less intense, moments of being taken out of themselves. Just gathering among other people on a regular basis can do a lot for people. What religious communities do is to systematize such gathering and make it predictable and controllable. That is reassuring to people.

But it is on the international, geopolitical level that the absence of a sense of "something outside oneself" is most felt. When a nation or warlord does not see itself limited by something outside itself, there are no limits on behavior. International law, the Geneva Conventions, or the rules of war are no longer relevant to the group's behavior.

Durkheim's theory originally shook my religious faith. If my worship is really only worship of the group of people that surround me, is my faith based on illusion? Perhaps I am just rationalizing my own prejudices. But I reason that the sense that we humans have of a need for something beyond ourselves could be written into our constitutions just as much as my body is sustained by mechanisms written into my biology. Maybe those functions originated out of evolution, but evolution itself could have been authored by a force or being characterized by wisdom and love.

I can't prove that it was authored that way, but no one else can prove that it wasn't. I choose to believe that it was. That is my faith. That is what faith means. But it sure helps when other people share that faith with me, and share it on a regular basis.

 

A collection of essays

 

For the past several months I have been completing a history of my Franciscan province. It will soon be self-published by "iUniverse" of Bloomington, Indiana and will be available with the title "Cura Animarum: The Sacred Heart Province of the Order of Friars Minor in North America: 1858-2023." During these months I have dashed off a few short essays, which I decided to share here.

 

 

Am I a fool?

 

This whole religion business still seems farfetched. Am I a fool for keeping on doing it?

This has to be one of the questions at the back of the mind of many believers these days. We are surrounded by people who seem to be doing just fine without religion. Maybe they are "spiritual but not religious." Maybe they are just plain atheist. Whatever they are, they must think people like me are fools. People like me must be deluded, willfully self-deceived, hopelessly benighted.

Are we?

I have grown up and lived my life cradled in a Roman Catholic world. When I am in that world, all is well. But I have to venture out of that world, partly because I feel called to do that.

"Called." Who is calling?

 

Prayer

One of the central behaviors of religious people is prayer. What is prayer?

Prayer is communicating with the divine, the sacred, the ineffable (a big word which means you can't talk about something). Like all other human communication, using language as a form of involvement with another person is to engage with a partly self-made image of that person. We do not know other people completely. We know only the stories that we create out of our experience with those people, or stories about them that have been given to us by other people.

There have been more than one individual who was perceived by people as saintly, but who turned out to be an emotional and sexual abuser. Marcial Maciel founded a religious order called the Legionaries of Christ, was praised and considered saintly by no less than Pope John Paul II, but was found to be a serial abuser of young men. Jean Vanier founded an ecumenical religious movement dedicated to living with and caring for people with disabilities called "L'Arche," but was found also to have sexually abused six women over the course of thirty-five years.

We do not know the complete story of the people closest to us. Are we deceived when we experience contact with God, however we perceive God?

Our critics fault us for being too willing to accept stories that may not be true. They may go further and claim that the stories we accept are not true. What is the evidence they provide for that claim?

I assume, without consulting such critics, that the evidence they give is that people can be deceived, just as the people around the two individuals I described were deceived. But, I reply, does the fact that some of us can be deceived by some people imply that billions of us are deceived about God?

Years ago I read a little of Sigmund Freud and about Sigmund Freud. His attitude toward religious believers seemed to me to be an accusation of infantilism. He was saying to religious people, "Grow up. We all have a tendency to want to go back to the womb, where everything was warm and comfortable. That is what you religious people want to do. Be a man. Face up to the hard, cold reality." (I don't imagine him saying "Be a woman." My own misogyny shows through here.)

The advice "Grow up" is a moral injunction. What is the grounding for such an injunction?

I suspect it is the experience of most of us that as we grow up, there are times when we would like to go back to days when we were cradled in some way. But we have learned from experience that it is not good for us to try to carry out such a desire. Freud's accusation is a move in a game of one-up-manship. He is more mature than we are. He can see the world as it is. We are infantile.

 

Community

Our U.S. culture says that it is better to stand alone than to go along with the crowd. Our culture assumes that the crowd is likely to be less enlightened than the individual. The result is that we move away from any involvement that would tie us closely to a particular group of people.

Religions, by definition (the word comes from a Latin word meaning "to bind"), begin with the statement that it is better to go along with a crowd than to stand alone. So it is not surprising that U.S. culture is not friendly to religion. Our critics say that it is because we are deceived and too anxious to go back to the womb that we practice religion. We can counter that it is because we accept the value that it is better to go along with others than to stand alone that we practice religion.

There is increasing evidence that, at all phases of the human life cycle, it is better to be in relationship with other people than to be alone.

So, to answer the question that I began this essay with, am I a fool? I answer: I am living in a counter-culture. I do not accept the culture's value that it is better to be alone than to be involved with other people. The empirical evidence of social science tells me that too much individualism is not healthy.

I still admit that I could be wrong. I can be deceived as much as the followers of Marcial Maciel and Jean Vanier were. But the presence of some deceivers does not prove that everyone is a deceiver.

Faith is to know something even when you cannot prove that the something is true. It is better to live with faith than to reject any story that you cannot prove true. We all depend on testimony--we trust some people to tell us the truth when we can't prove it by ourselves.

The prevalence of "fake news" made more visible by social media has highlighted the failure of our schools to help us think critically about the trustworthiness of our information sources. We have been sold the ideas that "STEM" courses (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) should replace traditional courses in history, literature, and philosophy, and that the primary goal of a college education is to get you a good job. 

If I believe somebody who tells me that I should study engineering instead of history, why is it foolish of me to believe somebody who tells me what God is like?

Probabilism and the transgender penitent

 

I studied moral theology in the early 1960s. At that time there was an interpretation of the sacrament of "confession" that saw the priest-confessor as a judge. I think the interpretation was based on John 20:23, where Jesus said, "Whose sins you forgive are forgiven; whose sins you retain are retained." Your job as a confessor was to judge whether the penitent's sins should be forgiven or retained (not forgiven).

If the confessor was to be a judge, the confessor had to be educated to give sound judgments. Thus arose a system of reasoning called "probabilism."

The system depended on the availability of a set of moral theology authors, some of whom would say a particular behavior was permissible, and some would say it was sinful. That in itself strains credibility. How many confessors would have a shelf of moral textbooks? Confessors would not have such a shelf, but moral theology professors would, and moral theologians taught in seminaries.

When a penitent confessed that he had had a vasectomy, the confessor was to consult the shelf of authors who discussed vasectomy. If only one author said that vasectomy was forbidden, the confessor should refuse absolution. The probabilist would say that even if there are only a few authors who permit the surgery, while the majority forbade it, the confessor should still grant absolution. There would be at least some probability that vasectomy was not sinful.

Franciscan tradition favored probabilism. When in doubt, judge in favor of the penitent. That was the bottom line.

We simply do not know enough about transgenderism to make dogmatic statements about what is moral and what is not moral about it. What we do know is that there are more people who claim transgender experience than there used to be. There are people who were labeled male at birth but who experience the world from a very early age as a female would experience it. Those people tell us that they are not deliberately faking the experience, and they are not being deceived by medical people out to make a profit.

So what do we do with such people?

We wait while experience accumulates. Science moves slowly. To prove something is harmful requires much careful research done honestly. In time we will know what is harmful and what is not. But until then, we should err in favor of the person claiming to be transgender. We should honor their description of their experience. To do otherwise disrespects them. Disrespect is not loving.

To use the old language, there is a probability that accepting transgenderism is harmless, and so anyone in a position to pass judgment on it should err in favor of the transgender person. We could be wrong, but only time will tell.

Serious study of sexuality is not more than a century old. There is much that we do not know. An appeal to "natural law" is irrelevant when nature creates a condition. When that happens, our attitude should be, "Withhold judgment, wait for good research, and in the meantime do not accuse people of acting immorally."

To do otherwise makes us risk the Galileo error. The Church rushed to judgment and condemned Galileo, and it took centuries for popes to apologize. We shouldn't do that again.

 

Mr. Trump and Truth

             It all started with academics, those people who hang out in universities. I am one of them.

The academics speculated, correctly, that truth is a creation of the human mind. More accurately, it is the creation of a group of human minds agreeing on a statement or a story.

Because truth statements are human creations, they are subject to error. More troubling is that truth can so often be used as a weapon to dominate someone else. This insight has become the basis of an intellectual movement labeled "postmodernism." Postmodernism agrees with the following statement: "Whenever someone claims to be speaking the truth, look out, because that someone is angling to get power over someone else."

The statement can easily be oversimplified to saying that there is no such thing as truth. Such misinterpretation leads people to reject any statement made by academics.  

 

What is Truth?

We have to have truth. So we need a definition of truth. I go to mathematics.

In geometry, we speak of a plane as a surface with width and length but no depth. There is no such thing in reality. But the idea is useful.

The concept of god or God is useful in the same way. I define truth as "the story the way God (or the gods) would tell it."

Truth is a quality of a story. Did the criminal intend to kill the victim? We may never know, but somewhere there is a truth: either the criminal did or did not intend to kill the victim. We have a tool to try to determine which story is true, the jury trial. We know that juries can be wrong, but they are the best we have.

In other areas, science plays the same role. Is the vaccine safe? It is or it isn't. We use observation and peer review to try to determine which story is true. Those tools can be wrong, but they are the best we have.

A third source, which supplements both jury trials and science, is testimony. We accept some people's story as true because we trust those people. Jurors trust witnesses. Scientists trust other scientists. Religious people trust their faith leaders. Politicians trust their pollsters. 

Which brings us to Donald Trump.

Mr. Trump claims that the 2000 election was stolen. Either it was or it wasn't. The truth is the story that God would tell. We use science and testimony to try to determine which story is true.

We have used a combination of scientific observation of how the voting process is carried out and testimony of people who were involved in the voting process. Out of those two sources we have concluded that the story that God would tell is that the election was not stolen. We could be wrong. We have claimed to speak the truth, but watch out, we may be angling to get power over you.

The durability of the story that Mr. Trump tells is based on two things: the reality that many people do not understand the value of science, and the ease with which stories, true or false, can be propagated by social media. We combine those two facts with the danger that Mr. Trump and the people who testify in his defense are angling to get power, the power of government. He can correctly argue that people who oppose him are also angling to get power. Which is true? Which story would God tell?

 

Truth and Faith

I am a professionally religious person--I make my living from religion. My faith, Roman Catholicism, claims to speak the truth. Our claim is one of the reasons why academics say that people who claim to speak the truth are often angling to get power. We have a sad history of popes and other church leaders who have used power in very unfortunate ways.

The Catholic church leadership still uses power. If I state something publicly that goes against church teaching, I can be out of a job. That is power.

Catholic tradition has put too much weight on what we call "natural law." The term implies that there are certain stories that everyone accepts as true, and that anyone who does not accept the stories is either ignorant or is lying.

But there are no such stories. History is full of examples of stories that everyone thought were true but were later judged not to be true. One example from Christian (and Jewish and Muslim) tradition is that charging interest on loans leads to bad outcomes and is therefore evil. It was not until the 1400s or 1500s that most Christian communities accepted the alternate story: under some conditions, charging interest on loans will not lead to evil outcomes and is therefore permissible.

We are human beings, not gods. We cannot tell the story that God would tell. We can only grope towards the true story.

And once we think we have some grasp of the story that God would tell, we enrich our knowledge with our love of other people and of the creation that God has given us. We do the best we can not to use truth to get power over others.

For a fine reflection on the relationship between truth and love, I suggest reading Pope Benedict XVI's 2009 letter "Caritas in Veritate," ("Love joined with Truth"), available on the Vatican website. Benedict does not discuss definitions of truth. He asks us to reflect on the beautiful things that love can produce when it merges with and enriches truth. including scientific truth.

Website migration

 

With the help of the Quincy University Advancement Office, I have set up a website, and plan to move things from this blog to that site.

The website address is:   friarzimm.com

The website has a modified blog format. I have divided the entries into two categories, "religion" and "secular issues." Under each heading the entries are listed with the most recent post on top. The titles of the entries are displayed, and the site is more easily searchable by topic.