Admin: May 2009 Archives

What should be done when parents rely on religion instead of medicine to heal sick children?

I doubt that any sensible person would sanction withholding medical treatment for a sick child because of his parents' religious beliefs, especially when it's a case of life and death. So far as I know, courts have always sided for treatment. America is a secular society based on the rule of law. Priests who abuse children are not immune to civil law because they have taken vows (even though the Catholic Church for decades acted as if the clergy was immune, treating abuse cases as an "internal matter"). Christian Science is the most prominent denomination that believes in healing through faith, but they have come to terms with medicine as a practical matter in modern life.
Since the issue seems cut and dried, what is there to discuss? -- the uncomfortable shadow zone between two world views. Secular society gives special privileges to churches, and politicians cannot succeed without at least paying lip service to a belief in God. Yet as we all know, everything that God once took care of has been usurped over time. Just as we don't expect God to provide supernatural medical care, so we don't expect the deity to prevent accidents, divert natural disasters, conquer enemies, or impose divine retribution on wrongdoers. Such expectations were the norm, however, in an age of faith.

For some believers, adapting to a purely secular worldview is abhorrent, and here it is easy to sympathize. Human beings crave meaning, and that often includes a higher meaning. To spend one's life grinding away at work and accumulating possessions isn't an adequate substitute. Even a loving family and success isn't adequate. We are wired to look beyond the material world. It's been said that all the things denied or unknown to science -- beauty, truth, service, morals, compassion, empathy, justice, aesthetics, philosophy, and spirituality -- are the very things that make life worth living.

Sadly for believers who take their religion too literally, being dragged into court is backlash from wanting more meaning in their lives. They have been blinded by promises made in the name of God. The priesthood in every society has prospered on such promises, and now that religion wanes every decade, the priesthood needs miracles and Providence and divine love simply to survive. I think the trap of two worldviews won't end until we arrive at a form of secular spirituality, based on the evolution of consciousness. If someone can experience grace and divine love in their own lives, or if not those things then expanded consciousness, with or without a traditional God, the foundation for such experiences must be their own awareness. Accepting second-hand dogma, however uplifting, always leads to the kind of contradiction these unhappy medical cases exemplify.
Published in the Washington Post

The war of words between President Obama and Dick Cheney has exposed a rancorous divide over national security. Mr. Cheney states flatly that there is no middle ground on the issue. There is no such thing as being half-safe, he declares. On the face of it, his statement is nonsensical. Unless he has a way of screening the thoughts and intentions of every potential enemy in the world, we will always be half safe. But is that the real issue? Aren't we talking about our right not to be afraid as much as our right to defend ourselves? Better be safe than sorry is common sense. Better be afraid all the time is toxic politics at its worst. When the Senate voted overwhelmingly to deny funds for closing Guantanamo, they acted out of toxic motives. President Obama accused them of being irrational, and he was absolutely right.
The issue of national security was a Republican gold mine for eight years, during which time not enough objection was raised over waterboarding, domestic surveillance, and holding detainees indefinitely without bringing them to trial. The tide turned with the new President, but the underlying dilemma remains with us.
Can we be secure without resorting to fear?
The Bush administration profited from fear to a huge extent; therefore, they couldn't resist the temptation to wield it. As if the 9/11 attacks were not terrifying enough, they created bogeymen with no justification. The primary one was Saddam Hussein, who posed no threat to the U.S., had no weapons of mass destruction, and made no alliance with Al-Qaeda. But the detainees being held without trial at Guantanamo were also a bogeyman. We still have no idea who among them was or is a danger to this country, but in a massive refusal to be fair, adult, and rational, we allowed all of them to be lumped together and treated as imminent threats.
Cheney's round defense of torture is morally bankrupt, but the right wing knows -- as it knew in the McCarthy era -- that scapegoating an unpopular minority works. Fifty years ago it was Communists; now it is Muslims of any stripe, including the most harmless. We have been detaining harmless Muslims at Guantanamo for years without due process; we have also been imprisoning dangerous Muslims and others who fall between the extremes. The only way to sort them out is with fair trials, adequate evidence, and rational consideration of potential threats.
Or you can just play the fear card.
In his ongoing efforts to treat the American public as they have rarely been treated -- that is, as adults -- Obama pointed out several rational things:
- Our supermax prisons are safe. No one has ever escaped from them.
- America stands for constitutional principles.
- No one's fate should be decided by one man, even if he is President.
- The issue of releasing potential terrorists is difficult and troubling.
Notice the one thing he left out: fear. That's the difference between him and Cheney. If he didn't play the fear card over and over, Cheney's vision of national security would fall apart, just as McCarthy's argument about Communists infiltrating the federal government fell apart when he couldn't find any. The show of smoke, mirrors, and fear collapsed. In a decent moral scheme, Obama would have pointed out the cruel injustice of holding anyone in prison without charges or the chance to defend themselves. How would any of us like to be in such a position, knowing that we were innocent? It doesn't matter if the accused happens to look like a bogeyman. He's a human being and should be treated like one.

Published in the San Francisco Chronicle

This is a column about optimism and why there's reason to feel it. Over the weekend one of the news shows referred to "morning in America." That was Ronald Reagan's call to optimism thirty years ago. The country was demoralized and just beginning to come out of a long recession. The point of bringing up Reagan's slogan is that in many ways he promised a false dawn while Barack Obama is promising a real one.
Reagan's morning didn't shine on AIDS patients; he thought they deserved what they got. It didn't shine on anyone outside the right-wing agenda, so civil rights, unions, and feminists were out. So was environmentalism (what else to expect from a man who said that if you've seen one redwood, you've seen them all?) There was no light for progressivism in general. Half the reason that Obama's election felt so liberating is that the Reagan legacy of reactionary politics and exclusion was over.
That's a huge reason for optimism, but if you look globally, there are others. The right-wing agenda abroad called for free markets, unfettered capitalism, anti-Communism, and a strong military. That part of the Reagan vision is still with us, and some of it must be counted a success. There are no monolithic totalitarian governments in Russia and China anymore, whatever you think of the present regimes. The Cold War is definitively over. The mood of the world is against bullying superpowers and for nuclear disarmament. These trends may be new and fragile, but the tide seems to have turned. It has also turned against deniers of climate change and opponents of environmentalism.
An even greater cause for optimism is the rise of the dispossessed. When historians look back, this may be the dominant feature of our time. Billions of poor people with little hope for advancement now are getting a place at the table where only the wealthy once sat. I'm thinking of the so-called BRIC -- Brazil, Russia, India, and China -- whose economies have surged and will continue to after the great recession is over.
Just a decade ago, some of these positive trends weren't visible. Even now they are obscured by bad news. The bad news about AIDS in Africa, for example, obscures major economic surges in East Africa. Terrorism and the Iraq war obscure the fact that deaths in war have declined dramatically since 1980.
On too many fronts there is no morning, though. Sri Lanka, North Korea, Sudan, Palestine, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan -- the list of trouble spots always seems to replenish itself. Yet taken all together, these places of strife and oppression don't equal the enmity and danger of the Cold War. Our worst problem as a planet, sudden climate change, may serve to pull the nations together. Old systems are being shaken, and even though nationalism and militarism hold on tight, decade after decade, at least the idea of global cooperation is alive and well.
All told, I think the image of morning in the world is realistic. The good and the bad will always be tangled with one another. But compared to the false dawns that never fulfilled their promise, this dawn could transform the world far more positively than we realize. Our eyes are glued on the economic crisis, but our souls have a higher vision.

Published in the San Francisco Chronicle

Thursday is National Day of Prayer, as mandated by Congress. What should President Obama do? Should he follow tradition and sign a ceremonial proclamation? Should he follow President George W. Bush's practice of hosting a formal White House event? Should he ignore it completely?

Whether or not a national day of prayer is worthy of the name depends on what prayer is meant to be. In the Bush era, public or group prayer followed the pattern set down by Nixon in the Sixties: it was a validation of conservative values. God was for law and order and against hippies. God was against anyone who didn't believe in him, a ridiculous position when you think about it. Shouldn't God, of all beings, not need the approval of others? As long as prayer was simply a shout-out to evangelicals and supporters of the current war, I think it had little value as a national activity.

Anyway, prayer is personal to begin with. It is called upon by individuals for their own reasons, regardless of politicians who want to co-opt it.

Is there a single thing that prayer is meant to be? Many among the devout would find this an odd question, because for them the issue is self-evident. Prayer is a way to talk to God. The image is quite basic, like a telephone call. Whether God answers is exactly the same as whether the person you have dialed picks up the phone. The only mystery -- and it's a huge one -- is how to judge when God answers and when he doesn't. Is he angry or indifferent? Is he sufficiently pleased with your behavior in general? Does he deem it fit to fulfill your special request?

The human race has entangled itself fruitlessly in these mysteries for centuries, so it would be helpful to somehow get them out of the way by giving prayer a new meaning, one that doesn't depend on the fickleness of an invisible being living above the clouds. Why not consider prayer to be an action in consciousness? It may be too hard for someone in the Judeo-Christian tradition to let go of a personal (and usually masculine) God in favor of something as impersonal as one's own awareness, but I think this is where the focus should lie.

Everything about prayer happens in consciousness and nowhere else. The message is sent and received in consciousness; the results are noticed in consciousness; one's expectations, beliefs, and intentions are rooted in consciousness. Jesus proclaimed the existence of God inside each person, and "inside" means in a person's deepest consciousness. Therefore, prayer is one process: consciousness interacting with itself. Religions enforce a division between the one who prays and the one who answers, but why? Stripped of religious vocabulary, a prayer is nothing more than an intention. Either that intention comes true or it doesn't.

Once we put the issue on this basis, we can talk more rationally about how intentions come true. Does consciousness have the power to make dreams come true, to rescue people by bringing unexpected solutions, to heal illness, inspire faith, and surmount crises? A massive amount of evidence from the world's wisdom traditions says that a heartfelt intention arising in awareness possesses all these powers. There isn't space enough here to elaborate on the point at length, but anyone who delves seriously into the power of intention will come to the conclusion that having a prayer come true depends much more on the consciousness of the person who's praying than on an invisible, fickle, unknowable power who may or may not be listening.

Published in the Washington Post

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