Re-Imagine

Re-Imagine…

… no That. No Other to lay the blame upon; no Else to pine for. Only This.

… no There. No need to wander far in darkness; no search without end. Only Here.

… no Then. No past or future; no Original Sin or Great Hereafter. Only Now.

This. Here. Now

Response to Newt Gingrich; letter to Wall Street Journal

The September 7, 2006 Wall Street Journal had an op-ed piece by Newt Gingrich in which he encourages President Bush, in effect, to take the gloves and get serious about fighting terrorists. Apparently the commitment of a quarter-trillion dollars over the last five years, and the loss of nearly 3,000 American lives, has been the half-hearted work of a woos in the White House. World War III has begun, he declares, and we should do to the Muslim world what General Sherman did to Georgia and what Grant did to Richmond. My response:

Letter to the Editor
The Wall Street Journal

In reply to Newt Gingrich's editorial, "Bush and Lincoln," (editorial page, September 7): The threat to the U.S. is very real, something often dismissed by the Left. But trying to win hearts and minds with shock and awe is a losing proposition, too.

Something in our national DNA says that every challenge can be overcome with sufficient firepower. Even our social undertakings ring of the battlefield: War on Poverty; War on Cancer.... But that model has consistently failed to make the world a safer place or, incidentally, cure poverty or cancer.

Mr. Gingrich approvingly quotes Abraham Lincoln, “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present... As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew.” Amen. Firepower is the problem, not the solution. Defend ourselves we must, but we can’t bomb people until they learn to love us.

Our superior firepower, and the occasional wanton use of it by us or by our clients, is perhaps a reason the US has become a target of many. And they have learned how to use a tiny fraction of our firepower against us with crippling efficiency.

Lincoln had a subtle mind, and while appearing plainspoken he knew how to use feints within feints to bring people around to his way of thinking. That subtlety is what’s needed now.

We honor Mr. Lincoln not because he finally got a worthy general in Grant. But because even as the war wound down, he could bring empathy and magnanimity to bear as he did in his Second Inaugural: “With malice toward none, with charity for all… let us strive on to finish the work we are in… to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

Tom Mahon
Walnut Creek, Calif.

Time to let Father Abraham go

The carnage in the Middle East this summer - the latest turning in a 4,000 year old cycle of bloodshed - forces us to confront a very basic question. Is it time to abandon the Abrahamic tradition. It is - at long last - time to move on...

We are taught that Abraham-Avraham-Abram-Ibrahim is the father of monotheism – belief in One God. But along with that came the notion of Chosen-ness – One Chosen People. If there is only One God, He must be ‘Our’ God.

Abraham had two sons – he cast one out to die in the wilderness, and he tried to cut the heart out of his favored one. Yet, incredibly, the entire Western belief system looks to this filicide as “our common father in faith.” And the children of his sons Isaac and Ishmael have been locked in a dance of death ever since, with the gentile world joining this ‘danse macabre’ in the Fourth Century.

Much of the carnage in Western history come from the theology of ‘Chosen-ness.’ “We...” (insert Hebrews, Christians, or Muslims) ”are the Chosen of God.” And all three traditions have understood this more than once to be a license to kill.

Is it possible God’s words were mistranslated or misunderstood? That instead of asking Abraham to clip off the foreskin of his penis, God told Abraham to get a vasectomy: “Since you are unfit for parenthood, I will find another.”

I do not mean to be flip – these are very serious issues but I never hear them raised. A ‘cradle Catholic,’ I stopped going to Mass after 50+ years because I could no longer worship a God who “From age to age gathers His Chosen People unto Himself, so that from East to West our perfect offering is made in His sight (and all others are rejected?).”

What broken God would make all the people, then arbitrarily select only some as His Chosen, refusing all others? Such a One deserves our pity or our anger, perhaps, but not our reverence and awe.

Maybe instead of asking how to bring the children of Abraham together in peace, the better question is to challenge the entire underlying assumption of “One God and His One Chosen People.” Perhaps the notion of Chosen-ness was valuable when it was ‘our people’ against a hostile world. But now, as the song says, we are the world. And perhaps the legacy of Abraham – this theology of Chosen-ness – has become a millstone around the neck of humanity. Maybe the time has come to move beyond the exhausted Old One who said, “I will be your God, and you will be My People.”

Old Gods (or rather, old notions of God) die all the time, and new notions are born. Maybe the natural sciences now have more to teach us about the inter-being of, and harmony between, all things, from subatomic to intergalactic, than those ancient books that perhaps served their time well, but now seem to be leading us inexorably to Megiddo.

Perhaps this is why there is a resurgence of fundamentalism in all three Abrahamic faiths: it is the death rattle of a corrupted theology. The horrific events of this summer are not only the reductio ad absurdum, but also the logical outcome, of a belief system based on “One God and His One Chosen People.”

Pray for peace; work for justice.

Da Vinci’s Other Code

It’s unfortunate that so much of the discussion surrounding The Da Vinci Code has centered on whether Jesus of Nazareth married Mary of Magdala and fathered a line of children.

This is what Alfred Hitchcock called a MacGuffin – a side issue that distracts from the larger issue. In this case, how the Christian church subordinated women almost from the beginning, though rabbi Jesus treated women – even Samaritan women - as equals. In 2,000 years, the Catholic Church has not yet found ten mothers worthy of sainthood.

But Christianity behaves no differently than any other ‘religion of the book.’ Judaism and Islam likewise have a history of subordinating women, reflected in Miriam’s cry: 'Does God speak only to my brother Moses?'

This is a tragedy that many have begun to address in recent years. What has concerned me over this time is that parallel to Christianity's subordination of women, has been its subordination of the mother of all mothers – Nature herself. The belly of Mother Earth is seen as the place of damnation.

This meant that Christianity lost its voice during the two greatest developments of the last 500 years: the scientific revolution and the technological (industrial and information) revolutions.

To get a sense of how things might have been, consider the case of Leonardo Da Vinci. As a scientist, his curiosity led him to address a wide range of issues, including manned flight. In that spirit, he envisioned and drew working diagrams for a helicopter.

But Da Vinci was also in-formed with a moral compass, and so recognized that if such a machine were built, princes would use it against civilians in siege warfare. So he drew the plans, but did so using a code which took centuries to decipher. (Although the code was simplicity itself: hold the text up to a mirror and it becomes legible. The secret was hidden in plain sight.)

Da Vinci correctly understood that science is embedded in conscience, and tech-knowledge is the external manifestation of self-knowledge. In effect, he threw The Ring back into the fire before it could get out of the cave and do damage in the world. He was one of the last to act with such insight.

And because institutional Christianity — like many other religions -- had no appetite for studying nature and the appropriate use of its forces, it lost the authority to speak knowledgably regarding science and technology, or to encourage a Da Vinci-like attitude among the members.

(Ironically, the Catholic priesthood produced some great scientists, though most were silenced for their work: Roger Bacon, Nicholas Copernicus, Gregor Mendel, Georges Lemaitre, Teilhard de Chardin).

In time, Christendom became ‘the developed world’ where science and technology are preeminent, but where issues of values and appropriateness are an afterthought, if they’re considered at all.

About 2,500 years ago, in a period known as the Axial Age, people in China, India, Judea and Greece independently came up with the notion that to be happy as individuals and as a society we need to develop universal compassion. How this developed in these four regions is the subject of an excellent new book, “The Great Transformation; The beginning of our religious traditions,” by Karen Armstrong.

Whether or not we are living in another Axial Age, we are certainly living in one of those uncomfortable times in history when the old gods are dead and the new ones haven’t shown up yet. Or, more accurately, the old answers seem inadequate for the new questions.

In every other respect, the Lord’s Prayer is a wonderful expression of petition, contrition, worship and thanksgiving. But the “Our Father who art in Heaven” part is a bone that many can’t chew anymore.

When the ‘new revelation’ comes – if there is still time – it will have to cut through centuries of dogma and institutional intolerance to return to the simple, core Axial insight: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

But now, beyond seeing ‘the face of God’ in our enemy as well as our friend, as the wisest Axial thinkers did, we must learn how to see that transcendence in the blade of grass and the grain of sand. We can no longer dismiss such notions as archaic, pagan or Wiccan, but rather as the marks of true wisdom, and essential to our survival and to our sanity.

The supernatural is found within the natural. And it is a mark of humanity’s developing maturity that we understand and act appropriately on that awareness.

Ecclesiastical laryngitis that echoes the silence of Shoah

I happened to be traveling thru Europe this month and while meandering thru the alleys of Montmartre (the hill of martyrs) I was struck by how we honor martyrs of antiquity but often miss those in our own time.

If institutional religion cannot find its collective voice to challenge loudly the crimes of the Bush administration - initiating unholy war; taking from the poor to enrich the wealthy; promoting actions that poison the land, sea and sky - then at least it should hold public, interfaith services that honor our own martyrs: the soldiers of the Coalition killed or wounded in mind or body (who are not even recognized by our government), and the civilians and combatants in Iraq and Afghanistan.

We are long overdue in honoring all those innocents whose deaths have served to enrich the arms merchants, the energy providers and the bankers who are making a fortune off this moral and political catastrophe. The names of the real evildoers are hidden from us, but too often their faces are found in the front rows in our places of worship every week.

'Religion' made religion irrelevant

"Mainline Protestant and Orthodox churches have been pounded into
irrelevancy by the media machine of a false religion," said the president of
the National Council of Churches…



It’s not the media that made religion irrelevant. The media have simply
rushed in to fill the vacuum left by our archaic dogmas and religious models
that still present the sacred as bearded shepherds and angels with feathered
wings to mall-rats who wouldn’t know a shepherd if one bit them in the
ankle.

The Hebrew, Christian and Islamic testaments were written between 1500 and
3000 years ago – addressing political, economic, cultural conditions we can
no longer imagine. Any more than the ancients could have foreseen our world
today.

And while virtues like justice, mercy and humility remain evergreen and
enduring, our theology – the overarching story of the universe and our place
in it – still seeks answers to questions no longer worth asking, like the
Roman Catholic Church’s recent decision to re-consider ‘limbo.’

Our Christian belief says that to be born into the world, without being
‘born again,’ is to deserve damnation under Augustine’s notion of Original
Sin. How can we feel at peace with ourselves or others in such a nightmare
universe?

We offer symbolic blood sacrifices to appease a desert patriarch of
unconscionable capriciousness. (‘You are my Chosen Ones; the rest of you can
buzz off.’ ‘You get a winning lottery ticket, and he gets brain cancer.’)

Believers in the 21st Century must still affirm the Nicene Creed, based on
Ptolemy’s flat-earth cosmology, yet that core belief statement makes no
reference to the Beatitudes, the Great Commandment or the Farewell Blessing.

When the landscape of our faith and the landscape of the world in which we
live and work and raise our kids bear no resemblance to each other, we end
up with personal, communal and global crises of historic magnitude.
Cognitive dissonance (holding opposite views with equal conviction) may help
get us through the night; long term it leads to madness.

When the human race was young, God (who can be imagined as a loving parent,
among other things) spoke to us as any good parent speaks to his or her
child: in fable, parable, myth, allegory. But we’re getting older as a
species now. And just as a wise parent eventually puts aside Dr. Seuss and
Goodnight Moon and gives the child a chemistry set, a computer and
eventually the keys to the family Chevy, so too ‘God’ is revealed to us now
in age-appropriate language through quantum physics, chaos theory and
exobiology research, among many examples. And with the atom smasher and the
gene machine we now have the keys to drive nature at the most fundamental
levels.

But we’re not listening. Where are the churchmen who understand these
issues enough to offer competent ethical guidance on arms control or energy
policy, or to say, “See how chaos theory addresses the age-old question of
suffering?” It is not enough to say: ‘It is new; it is wicked.’

The tension created by static theologies insisting on their teaching
authority in a dynamic universe is literally tearing world society apart.
In a universe where even the best physicists can’t give a complete
description of a single atom - where the physical universe is described with
terms like relativity, indeterminacy and uncertainty - we should be very
careful when we claim that we alone possess the Truth about the
metaphysical; that because we are right everyone else must be wrong.

What moral authority does any religion have that limits the locus of evil in
the world to a 15 year old girl getting an abortion, but never excoriates
the arms merchants, the drug merchants, the industrial polluters, those who
‘game’ financial markets and destroy 60,000 hard-earned pensions with a
pen-stroke?

The United Religions is, heroically, working to end religiously motivated
violence, as the National Council of Churches works to heal divisions within
Christianity. These actions are necessary but not sufficient. The core
issue is how much longer we will limit ourselves to addressing post-modern
dilemmas with answers from ancient texts. That Bible scholars have to
struggle mightily to translate an ancient Hebrew verb in Genesis to get
“stewardship over nature” instead of “dominion over nature” in order to
confront environmental issues is an obscenity.

One of the highlights of my life was to have been a delegate at a major
interfaith gathering at Stanford in 1997. And one of the biggest shocks of
my life was, at the end of the first session, to hear one of the dignitaries
proclaim to the assembled that the common enemy of all religions is
technology itself.

I introduced myself as the representative from the Church of St. Silicon
(our holiest shrine is Stanford where the electronics revolution began) and
said if that was in fact the consensus, then it would be best to close down
now and not waste any more effort. What institution can claim relevance
that sets itself in opposition to the underpinning of modern life?

Judaism and Christianity have major celebrations in the spring - Passover
and Easter – and I expect Islam does as well. But too often these are
merely nostalgic recollections of past events, rather than ongoing reminders
of how dynamic, evolving and expanding God’s universe really is.

We constantly set out on journeys to new places, and forever come alive to
new realities. The book of understanding, knowledge and wisdom is not
closed; it’s barely been opened. Scientists and technologists understand
this – in fact, that is the act of faith that drives their work. Why is it
so hard for churchmen to acknowledge this? Resolve this tension and I
believe you’ll find religion is no longer irrelevant. And you need not
waste time confronting the likes of Pat Robertson; such men eventually push
themselves off cliffs.

Because it’s not enough to be critical and then not offer suggestions, I
have an eBook that lays out an extended attempt to resolve some of these
issues, at www.reconnecting.com. It reflects my 30+ years reading and
reflecting on the passage I went through when I left the faith-based
community of my youth and entered the engineering world of my work years.
It was not written in tablets of stone received from Sinai. It is written
with electrons which are notoriously open-ended.

Nazis, Commies and Cappies

National Socialism and Communism landed in the dustbin of history for believing that humans exist only to serve the State. Likewise, the ‘no-limits-to-free-enterprise’ Capitalists will see their brainchild disgraced for believing that humans exist only to serve the Market.

The New Feudalism

We appear to be headed into a New Feudalism. But unlike the old Feudalism of a thousand years ago, when wealth was based on land, or real property, the New Feudal order is based on knowledge, or intellectual property.

It’s ironic that in the Information Age, knowledge is becoming private property. If you can’t afford to know, you don’t deserve to know.

No one begrudges an inventor or artist a fair return on an idea. But what we’re seeing is much more. The old humanist tradition seems to be dying before our eyes. The honorable liberal arts notion of pursuing and sharing knowledge is being replaced by the courts-sanctioned ownership of knowledge.

As in the old system, few have much and many have little. The new model threatens a return to what Carl Sagan called ‘a demon-haunted world,’ where superstition, magical thinking and ignorance are honored. Gullibility replaces faith; rhetoric trumps reason; sound bytes replace critical thinking.

Too often this ignorance and superstition is promoted by our institutions – government, business, religion – wishing to keep the electorate, the consumers, the faithful in a state of suspended superstition. Literally dumb-founded. What will you do about this?

Reflecting on the Death of a Younger Brother

Timothy Kane Mahon, 1948-2006

To everything there is a season, says Ecclesiastes. Bullshit.
Last March we buried our 98-year-old mother. It was her season.
Now you’re in a morphine fog; chemotherapy and novenas equally useless. This is not in season.

Do we accept it patiently, the inscrutable act of a loving god? And so insult both men and god.
Or raise a fist to the heavens and cry, Revenge! And while we’re at it, tell the seas to go dry?
Or endure like Job, til we can suffer in silence no more?

Job asked, Where is your Justice? God bellowed, Behold my power!
Job said, Your power is evident. I asked, Where is your justice?
And with that, God is dumbstruck and never speaks in the Bible again.

What a fool I must have sounded last month, when I prattled on about the will to live.
You already knew the terminal diagnosis, didn’t you? And were too kind to shut me off.
So cruel when an oncologist is reduced to layman’s term: ‘The cancer exploded within you.’


How parallel our lives played out:
We each drifted as far as possible from our hometown,
To live by our separate seas, apart from the drifting snow.

We each enjoyed success as solo practitioners, possessing dad’s Irish way with words.
You arguing cases before the INS; me describing deeper-denser DRAMs,
In abbreviated, abbreviation-filled careers.

We’ve each remained married to lovely women for over thirty years,
And each of us watched three rugrats become splendid young men and women.
We even had common vices: short fuses, hollow legs, and no time for the company of fools.

Then with all that in common why could we never talk? Beyond the conversational.
What led up to that weekend in August ’63 when a curtain came down between us?
Lifting only towards the end, and then only some?

We were close once, eh Timmy. Tykes at the toilet bowl, sword fighting with pee streams.
I envied your natural batting stance and your cool crowd of Cub Scout cronies.
And your wit, when you told the folks that Election Day: Vote for John Kennedy or ‘that other guy.’


Once I knew, but now I feel, the pulse of the exchange between Zorba and the poet:
~ What’s the use of all your books if they don’t tell you why that good person died?
~ They recount the agony of those who cannot answer that question.

It is humbling, after a lifetime with words, to see how useless they really are.
Maybe they’re the best we have, but they’re paltry at best. It happened because it happened.
There’s a void here now, amid the noise. Beyond is silence. But I believe, no void.

Au revoir, Tim. Rest in peace. You certainly earned it.

Love,
Tom
1/6/06