Metacentricities

Dr. George Tiller from Wichita Kansas, a physician who performed legal late-term abortions, often when a woman’s life or health was at risk, was shot and killed in church this morning. This is the most recent in a very long history of attacks and murders of physicians who perform abortions.

I have read varied comments on varied blogs today where people have been suggesting that this was a good thing. And I will be far from surprised if the person who is finally charged and convicted for this crime thought they were doing God’s will. What I can never figure out is how it is that people who consider themselves followers of Jesus ever find violence acceptable? I’m reminded of the post that I wrote last fall on Evangelicals and Torture. We progressive Christians are supposedly known for tossing out parts of the Bible we don’t like. My question is “what part of “thou shalt not kill” don’t you understand?” No wonder the new athiests (and others) think Christianity sucks.

And of course, like the gay marriage debate, the Biblical evidence for the idea that life begins at conception is not especially clear (it is symbolic language about God forming us in the womb,) nor are there any proscriptions against abortion in the Bible. And yet, the clearest messages from Jesus were along the lines of “love your enemy as you love yourself,” which, in the parlance of one of my favorite bumper stickers, means probably not killing them.

As a society and democracy, we have decided that when life begins is a matter for science to determine, and whether to end a pregnancy before then is a matter for a woman to decide for herself. As a fellow progressive faith blogger put it “democracy does not have an opt-out option.”

I have a friend who has a blog (called Recipes for Trouble), that intertwines life and food in a really cool way. Sometimes, since I love to discover new foods to cook, I think I’ll share them here, but I never have. Until today.

Ruth and I had a friend over for lunch, so we took the occasion as an opportunity to go to the farmer’s market that happens in downtown Oakland (at Jack London Square) on Sundays. I still can’t get used to the fact that I can get in-season fruits and vegetables at times like this, when in New England, pretty much all there is are fiddleheads, some greens, asparagus and snap peas. We got all sorts of peppers and herbs. We got two huge bunches of Thai Basil, summer squash, a lot of berries of varied sorts (strawberries, blueberries, raspberries…)

We came home, and cooked up some Rice Noodles with Thai Basil Pesto, Summer Squash and Goat Cheese, and a Mixed Berry and Mint Salad (recipes below.) As we cooked, and was oohing and aahing over our great bounty, I was remarking about how California was “Foodie Heaven.”

We had a really nice time - our friend had spent the year on spiritual sabbatical, spending time at reatreat spaces, monasteries and the like all over the world for a year, so we had a really rich time talking about all that had happened to all of us since we’d last seen each other. Ruth and I had a fun time cooking (we love cooking for people - invite yourself over sometime!)

Rice Noodles with Thai Basil Pesto

• Rice Noodles (the kind that come in a plastic package from an Asian Grocery)
• Thai Basil
• Garlic
• Salt
• Coconut Oil (optional)
• Olive Oil (or some other kind of oil)
• Peanuts

Boil some water, and place the rice noodles in the boiling water, and let them cook (a little al dente). While the water is boiling, put cloves of garlic and basil and oil in a blender or food processor, and blend until smooth. Salt to taste. Once the noodles are done, take them out and drain them, and rinse them lightly, returning them to the pot. Add in the pesto, and toss. Move the noodles with pesto into a bowl, and top with chopped peanuts.

Summer Squash and Goat Cheese

• Red Onion
• Summer Squash
• Patty Cake Squash
• Long Beans (Asian version of string beans - but you can use regular string beans)
• Goat cheese (soft flakey kind)
• Rosemary
• Olive Oil
• Salt

Sautee red onion in olive oil, add both kinds of squash and saute until close to done. Add long beans, rosemary and salt, and saute until beans are tender. At the very end, add goat cheese, stir quickly, and turn off the flame. Serve immediately.

Mixed Berry and Mint Salad

• Strawberries
• Blueberries
• Raspberries
• Blackberries
• Goat Cheese
• Mint
• Sugar

Place a layer of mint leaves at the bottom of a bowl. Add mixed berries until full. In a blender, mix goat cheese, mint leaves, sugar and some water. Blend until smooth. Drizzle fruit.

I’ve been a fan of Darwin’s ever since I read On the Origin of Species when I was a kid. I’ve even read parts of Steven J Gould’s The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. I think there aren’t really a whole lot more interesting scientific theories around (well, OK, I’ve become a recent fan of non-locality.) A while back, a couple of articles piqued my interest. The first was a story about a “scientific” study, which seems to suggest that:

… our minds are conflicted, making it so we have trouble reconciling science and God because we unconsciously see these concepts as fundamentally opposed, at least when both are used to explain the beginning of life and the universe.

I spent a good bit of time as a scientist teaching about issues related to how scientists think about a topic can influence how they ask questions, and how they analyze data. If there was ever a classic case of how the assumptions of scientists affected how they did their research, and what conclusions they came to, this is it. The scientists read students two different statements about the origin of the universe. One said that “the theories were strong and supported by the data,” and the other said the theories “raised more questions than they answered.” They were then required to do a word categorization task, while the words “science” and “God” were flashed intermittently (and too fast for the subjects to be consciously aware of.) And this is what they found:

… subjects who read the statement in support of the scientific theories responded more quickly to positive words appearing just after the word “science” than those who had read statements critical of the scientific theories. Similarly, those who read the statement suggesting that the scientific theories were weak were slower than the other group (who read the theory-supportive statement) to identify negative words that appeared after they were primed with the word “God.”

And the scientist says the following:

Preston says her research shows that a dual belief system, for instance the idea that evolution explains biology but God set the process in motion, does not exist in our brains. “We can only believe in one explanation at a time,”

Huh? Who comes up with this idiocy? Hard wired? Why couldn’t this be, for instance, a fairly straightforward demonstration of a set of cultural assumptions? And, of course, starting out with using only the words “God” and “science” and pairing them with strong vs. critical representations of scientific theories of origin is setting it all up to be oppositional and dualistic.

The second article was a report about a Vatican conference on Darwin, which had decided to add Intelligent Design to their agenda. And the article goes on to ask whether ID belongs at a Vatican conference on Darwin, and asks, in the headline, is it “culture or science?” Intelligent Design is nothing more than creationism in different clothes. There is nothing scientific about it. Both articles do the standard journalistic thing of setting science and religion against each other. The second article at least remembers to state that the official position of the Vatican is that “science and faith are compatible.”

Of course, the major culprits in this are not the journalists (they do play a role.) It’s the Young Earth creationists who insist on saying the universe is less than 10,000 years old, and all evolutionary science is either fraudulent or the work of satan, and the “new atheists,” like Richard Dawkins, who insist that the lack of evidence of God proves that God doesn’t exist.

Back to Stephen J. Gould for a moment. He  came up with something that makes a lot of sense to me. It’s called “Non Overlapping Magisteria.” It’s the idea, basically, that you don’t use the tools of one domain to look at the other. From Wikipedia:

In his book Rocks of Ages (1999), Gould put forward what he described as “a blessedly simple and entirely conventional resolution to … the supposed conflict between science and religion.”He defines the term magisterium as “a domain where one form of teaching holds the appropriate tools for meaningful discourse and resolution” and the NOMA principle is “the magisterium of science covers the empirical realm: what the Universe is made of (fact) and why does it work in this way (theory). The magisterium of religion extends over questions of ultimate meaning and moral value. These two magisteria do not overlap, nor do they encompass all inquiry (consider, for example, the magisterium of art and the meaning of beauty).”

In his view, “Science and religion do not glower at each other…[but] interdigitate in patterns of complex fingering, and at every fractal scale of self-similarity.”

I like this one. As someone who has spent most of my life with both feet deeply in both magisteria, I love that concept of interdigitation, and of no need for conflict. And sometime I’ll write a blog entry about Teilhard de Chardin, the Jesuit priest who was a paleontologist who tried to integrate the two, with interesting result.

I came upon a stray tweet from someone I follow, which lead me on a search that led to an interesting blog entry asking “Why don’t Christians count the Omer?” Counting the Omer, if you don’t know, is a Jewish tradition of counting the 50 days between Passover (the liberation from slavery) and the holiday, Shavu’ot, which commemorates the giving of the Torah to the people of Israel. If you don’t know (I didn’t,) Shavu’ot and Pentecost are on the same day.

I find the parallels really fascinating. Passover - a celebration of liberation from slavery, and Shavu’ot, a celebration of God’s giving of the Torah. Holy Week and Easter, the commemoration of Jesus’ death and resurrection, and Pentecost, the commemoration of the coming of the Holy Spirit. Of course, it all makes a lot of sense. Jesus, and all of his earliest followers, were Jews, and lived and practiced that tradition.

In my long knowledge of Jewish tradition (having grown up in Great Neck, and having had many Jewish friends over the years) and my early seminary days of learning about the Hebrew Bible, and studying Kabbalah, I have always been struck by what is (besides the obvious) the major difference between Christianity and Judaism - orthodoxy vs. orthopraxy.

“The word orthodox, from Greek orthodoxos “having the right opinion,” from orthos (”right, true, straight”) + doxa (”opinion, praise”, related to dokein, “thinking”), is typically used to mean adhering to the accepted or traditional and established faith, especially in religion.” (From Wikipedia)

“Orthopraxy is a term derived from Greek (ὀρθοπραξις) meaning “correct action/activity”, and is a religion that places emphasis on conduct, both ethical and liturgical, as opposed to faith or grace etc.This contrasts with orthodoxy, emphasizing a correct belief, and ritualism, the use of rituals.” (From Wikipedia)

So why don’t we, as Christians, Count the Omer? Of course, this is a huge theological question - why have we, in large part, completely substituted practice with belief? In some corners (not so small) of Christianity, it doesn’t matter if you preach sinfulness of gays and lesbians while having gay sex (and repenting later,) beat your wife, focus on getting rich, or kill other human beings, as long as you believe what is considered “right” you’re, in that way of thinking, going to heaven. And no manner of right action or practice, whether it be nonviolence, love, compassion or ritual or contemplation, matters, if you don’t have the right beliefs. It seems really hard for me to imagine that the one, a Jew, who said things like “love your neighbor as yourself,” and lived the life of radical compassion and love that He did, would think that made a whole lot of sense.

Progressive Christians have begun the process of moving ourselves away from orthodoxy, but I do think sometimes we suffer some of the same symptoms. As long as people think like us, they get to be counted as part of us. Otherwise, they don’t. I think Christians need a lot more orthopraxy and a lot less orthodoxy of all kinds. What’s most important to me is how I behave, how I live, and how I live out, every day, my relationship with the One I call God. So from now until Shavu’ot/Pentecost, I’m Counting the Omer, in my own way.

As is obvious, I haven’t blogged since Inaguration day, more than 3 months ago. Mostly, it’s because I’ve been crazy busy. I moved, again, within Oakland, from Fruitvale to Millsmont. I found a new business partner, and we are busily building a business. I found a new church home, and I am beginning to become involved in varied activities in my East Bay and Bay Area community. So, in some ways, I have been pretty deeply engaged with life. All good.

I do have lots to say, these days, but I seem to either expend a lot of writing/opining attention to either my professional blog, or twitter. Neither of which helps me blog on non-tech topics here. But I think that might be changing. I want to blog about Oakland, about the new-ish splintering of the progressive religious community, and my continuing engagement with Christianity, particularly in the context of my new church.

I spent the morning at a friend’s house with a small group of folks watching the Inauguration. Obama’s speech was, as usual, a call to the best of who we are, and the best of what this country means. It was moving. In going out and about today, people were smiling, wearing their Obama shirts, and feeling elated. Twitter has been abuzz with activity.

There is so much to say about what happened today. So many have said so much. Here’s a little bit of what I think this means for me.

Ever since November 7, 1972, when George McGovern lost to Richard Nixon, in a year where I was 13, and had just begun to understand what I believed in, and what was important to me, I have felt in opposition to my government, fighting against its actions, and ashamed at being an American. Ever since then, all of my political perspective and effort has been as an outsider to government, and in opposition to what did. Yes, of course, I believed in what America stood for, but I felt that not only did we often fall short, but we actively undermined those ideals time and time again.

The election of Barack Obama does not erase that history, or change everything all at once. You can’t turn a huge ocean liner on a dime. It will take time, and effort for the U.S. government, and the country at large, to truly reflect the ideals that Obama has expressed. Interestingly enough, Rick Warren, the pastor who caused such an outcry because he was chosen to give the invocation at the inauguration, said something in his prayer that I truly hope he himself listens to:

And as we face these difficult days ahead, may we have a new birth of clarity in our aims, responsibility in our actions, humility in our approaches, and civility in our attitudes, even when we differ.

Now, I feel proud to be an American, and feel like I am willing to be engaged with the government in ways that I never felt I would be willing to in the past. And, I feel like now, it’s time for me to listen to people I don’t agree with. Listen to their hopes, and their dreams, and their goals. And in turn, hope that they will listen to mine, and that we can have civil discourse and dialogue, and come to a place where we all can, in Obama’s words:

reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history; to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea, passed on from generation to generation: the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness.

I always think that I’ll get my act together and write a letter that I send out to all of my friends, that summarizes my year, etc. And I never actually get to it. So this year, I figured I’d blog it, and hopefully many of the folks I’d want to send it to will end up reading it.

It’s been a hectic year of change and upheaval. One year ago today, Ruth and I were having dinner at my parent’s house in NY. That October, we’d just moved into our house in Shelburne Falls, thinking we’d be there for a while. A couple of months later, in February, Ruth decided to move back to CA permanently, and I followed in September. Now I live in a group house with several other people, in a neighborhood in Oakland called Fruitvale.

Living in the city has its tradeoffs. On one hand, there is the lack of quiet, lots of crowds of people, and traffic. Things just take a little longer. It takes longer to get from point A to point B. Longer to park the car. Longer to wait in line for things. One has to worry about whether one’s house is locked, whether or not valuables are visible in one’s car, and be just more aware of things. But on the other side, there are tons of things to do, a virtually never-ending supply of good, cheap, ethnic restaurants, independant and foriegn movies come here first, there is a fabulous, and really diverse meditation community which I think could pretty much only exist here, and there is a general richness in the cultural landscape that I am surprised that I went without for so long.

I love it that pretty much every day (unless I stay at home) I see people around me who look a lot like me. I even see plenty of people who fit somewhere in the “african-american/queer/alternative/educated” relatively narrow cultural slice that I occupy. Seeing myself reflected back to me everyday has a value that I don’t know that I anticipated.

And besides all that happened to me in 2008, much happened in the country, and the world. We elected the first non-white president in history. We are suffering an economic collapse that may, eventually, rival that of the Great Depression. We have a lot of tough times ahead, and I know that I have my own set of interesting challenges ahead of me as well.

I hope this note finds you all in good spirits, and may peace and joy find its way to you in the coming year.

You probably heard: a worker at Wal-Mart was trampled to death (and others injured) during a mad rush on the store because of sales this Friday, the biggest shopping day of the year. Apparently, two thousand people were willing to wait in line for hours, and rush the store entrance at 5:00 am to get the best deals on plasma screen TVs and Nintendo Wiis.

I’ve been trying, ever since I heard about it, to wrap my mind around it. To understand why people are desperate enough for consumer goods that they are willing to not only wait hours in line, but trample people along the way.

Of course, I live a privileged life, comparatively. I may be losing my health insurance, but what is true is that the $200 price differential between a plasma screen TV last week, and the sale price this week isn’t enough to break the bank (although it begs the question - if it is enough, should one be buying that thing in the first place?) I also don’t have children or a partner who expect things for Christmas, so I have absolutely no externally imposed holiday shopping stress.

Given the deepening economic crisis, and impending collapse of our unsustainable system, I think maybe this should provide an object lesson to us. Is anything that anyone obtained on Black Friday worth even one death (or one injury)? Buy Nothing Day is, at least, one way to make sure you don’t get hurt while out shopping on Black Friday. But perhaps it will be a way to move us from the unsustainable path that we’ve been on, to one that is more sustainable for the future.

I’m celebrating “Buy Nothing Christmas” - a relatively new tradition that I will continue from now, forward. I try not to buy anything except food and necessities between now and Christmas, and I’ll be donating livestock from the Heifer Project in honor of family members, and creating a cool mix tape for friends. I want to celebrate Jesus’ birthday (yes, yes, I know it’s not really his birthday, but that’s for another post) in a way that he might appreciate, not in a way that I can be sure he would distain.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Proposition 8 - both before the election, and after it. In truth I have mixed feelings about the whole gay marriage thing (for example, how it happened that lesbians went from thinking it was an institution of patriarchy to something we wanted,) but that’s a different post for a different time.

I’m saddened, of course, that a lot of people in California voted to add a discriminatory amendment to the consitution. What has been troubling me lately is the response among some in the LGBT community to demonize those who voted for Prop 8 (for example, on one local e-mail list I’m on, they are being called “H8ters”, and often painted with the same brush.)

I think until we are willing to look at why people chose to vote for Proposition 8 squarely, we won’t be in a position to take right action. It’s far to simplistic to suggest that it’s simply because they hate us. And I think it’s also too simplistic to suggest that they all just listened to their pastors and were brainwashed. I’m sure that there are some people who fit in those categories, but I refuse to think that explains it all - that it explains that the majority (slim, but still) of voters in California felt strongly enough about this to vote for an amendment to the state constituion, to put their check/arrow/finger next to the line that said “Eliminates Right of Same-Sex Couples to Marry.”

Why is it that people fight against civil rights? What is it that causes them to cast ballots, or act in ways that promote discrimination? Fear is most often the motivation for treating other human beings badly. You ask: what are they afraid of? I suspect they are afraid of the same things we are: they feel their life threatened by change, and they want to have an explanation for it. They want to have a way to understand what they can do to make things better. They happen to understand it in ways that are far different than we do - but I refuse to think that most of them actively wish us harm. (Perhaps I’m naiive, but I’m stubborn.)

And, for our part, we feel scared too. We feel scared that our rights will be taken away permanently, and that our lives will be threatened. But we can’t act out of fear - we need to act out of compassion and a desire for dialogue. And, of course, we do need to act clearly and strongly to challenge proposition 8 both in court, and with another ballot measure next cycle.

I wasn’t going to blog about the election. Mostly because I don’t really have anything especially articulate to say about what happened on Tuesday that hasn’t already been said, not only about Obama’s win, but about the passage of Proposition 8 in California. I talked with my parents election night, and they said they could have never imagined a Black man as President in their lifetimes. Even I found it hard to imagine, even with Hollywood’s suggestions. And, of course, the passage of Proposition 8 is a sad counterpoint to the amazingness of Obama’s election.

But what I’m writing about is that I need something from President Barack Obama. And I need it right now.

I moved from a state that guarantees reasonably priced health insurance regardless of pre-existing conditions to a state that makes it impossible to get reasonably-priced insurance with pre-existing conditions. In California, as someone who is self-employed, It seems I can’t join a group to get reasonable coverage without getting a job. I thought that HIPPA would save me, because I’ve had coverage. But it will cost me almost 2/3 of what I pay each month in rent to get HIPPA coverage, which, at the moment, feels pretty unaffordable. And the state plan (called the California Major Risk Program) will cost only a little less (and covers a lot less, and only provides up to $75,000 in coverage.)  And as someone who has liked being self-employed, it makes me think maybe I should get a job. Or I may end up going without insurance for a while (that is, until Obama fixes things,) which feels very scary.

I have always been an advocate single payer health care, but between having a stable academic job, then living in Massachusetts, it never occurred to me that this particular situation would happen to me. It always felt a lot easier to call this system corrupt and evil, when I wasn’t caught in it. Caught in it, it feels like there is something wrong with me. The rejection letters I get from insurers make me feel like it’s my fault that they won’t insure me.

Of course, it’s not my fault. It’s the fault of insurance companies only interested in profit, and politicians without the courage to do something about it. I know fixing this is high on President-elect Obama’s list of things to do. If only for selfish reasons, I hope he gets to it sooner rather than later.