purpose: to Name the world around us, within the context of an AnalysisStory [i,e., to frame a THAT] by citing & making use of a set of [THIS] (i.e., evidence: happenings in the world, personal experience appropriately reflected upon, data, research, others' analyses).
context:
this class rises up out of the ideas that Human Values & Belief Systems exist, & conflict, & make life difficult & worthwhile for us. but where do Values come from? how do they combine to create Systems of Belief? how do you manage when Values come into conflict, whether inwardly within an individual, or between two or more people, or between groups, or nations, or religions, or empires? how do we negotiate those conflicts? what narratives & analyses & names do we bring to each situation, & why did we choose to name it like that? how do we build a case that ends in a worthwhile decision? how do we earn our sentences—from observation, to analysis, to further action?
writing task
write a worthwhile argument/analysis that comes from a values conflict, inviting others to agree with you rather than with alternative analyses.
some refelctive questions to keep you thinking
What is one sentence you really really want to be true?
Why does this sentence matter to you?
How is your sentence different from something you’ve heard before? Is it new, a qualification, or a response?
Who is the community or audience you would want to believe this sentence?
What smaller claims or steps might build the path toward earning your larger sentence?: What background knowledge (history, values, justice, morality) do you need to engage with to make your case? What evidence, stories, or reasoning could help earn this sentence?
What doubts or objections might that audience have about your sentence?
What would it mean if this sentence were believed? What changes might follow?
below is a draft of an essay i am writing.
Of Doing Being Meaning
As I have stopped believing in gods, or god, or God, it isn’t a baby & bathwater type of situation. My God has been going in pieces, in fragments, bit by bit—not all at once, & not entirely; I have retained some things: I have not stopped believing, for example, in wonder, or in mystery, or paradox, or love, or meaning, or rhythms, or wisdom, or connection—though if I’m honest even these once-stories have also loosened their grips on me.
There may still be a lot of wiggle-room to believe in a God or not—but, for me, there definitely is not enough wiggle room for the God I’d once called Father, passed down to me from Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Paul, Aquinas, Luther, who brought us into being about 6,000 years ago, whose beloved creation even I am, who counted the hairs on my head, whom Kierkegaard wounded & Nietzsche killed, but who for me was resurrected in C.S. Lewis, then in the Evangelical community, keepers of the truest faith.
*****
Growing up during the 1980s, at the very end of the Cold War, I knew some things: (1) the Soviets were very bad (thank you, all of popular culture, but also especially The Late Great Planet Earth, my Sunday reading during boring sermons) & (2) Martin Luther King was very good, for he had defeated racism during the dark ages of black & white television more than 10 years prior.
One time, adults I trusted told me a story that I now tell to stand in as a microcosm of the time, for me: KGB officers raided a secret Christian church in the Soviet Union, threatening to kill anyone who did not deny Christ, while allowing the Christ-deniers to leave; when those weak had gone, the KGB closed the doors & turned to everyone (who were now waiting to die), saying, “We just wanted to worship with the real Christians.” The KGB officers then put down their guns & sang to the heavens with their fellow “real” Christians.
So I grew up with a lingering-hovering question in my heart, Would I, also weak, have denied Christ? which grew into a parallel question, Would I have had the courage to march with Martin Luther King, had I been around during his time?, such that these two questions, in my mind, became united, tangled, caught up into each other, into one ever expanding question: Am I Real?[1]
Even way back in the 1980s, then, both the Good News & “good trouble”[2] were sort of caught up together in my chest; there is an undeniable connection between the world of Being, of invisible values, of objectivity, of Up There Out There, of ideas, of What Finally Is; all this is, to my understanding, made manifest in the world of Doing, of oceans & planets, of politics & warfare, of Hollywood & Skid Row; this relationship between Being & Doing, then gives rise to the possibility of Meaning, of Ought, of Good, of Justice, of Hope. That is to say, Doing has Meaning because of Being. For decades, these connections were important to me, even essential, since even when I’ve been tempted to doubt them—& even when I’ve wanted to give up hope during my saddest most inwardly-desperate years, by replacing these connections with, say, Camus’s idea of a Being-less, Meaning-less universe’s “gentle indifference”[3]—I nevertheless have always been drawn back to the notion of Being Doing Meaning. They together just seemed to make such natural sense to me.
So I eventually welcomed certain philosophical agreements (when I was old enough to study & name them): (1) that we could know nothing without God, who is Being[4]; (2) that we (Doing) could have no morality (Meaning) apart from God (Being);[5] (3) that the moral arc of the universe is slow but bends toward justice[6].
*****
In 2009, while I was faculty at a religious university, teaching philosophy & theology & literature, we hosted a debate between one of my colleagues & the late Christopher Hitchens, about the question of the existence of God; while back then I thought the world of Craig’s arguments, today, for reasons I was probably incapable of seeing in 2009, I believe far more of what Hitchens has to say than Craig[7].
In the debate, while Craig is right to say that Hitchens does not refute Craig’s arguments per se, Craig nevertheless fails to acknowledge Hitchens’s implied underlying claim, which always seems to be just beneath his criticisms of Craig’s Christianity/theism: Even if as you say there is a God who is loving, a God who is accessible to all humankind, a God who is just, a God who loves peace—a good God at all—then your evil institutions could never know anything of that loving & good God; your arguments carry zero credibility.
The logical conclusion, then, of Hitchens’s rebuttals is perhaps not, “Therefore, a good & loving God could not exist”; nevertheless, Craig seems to be holding on only by a logical sliver, a philosophical loophole (something small enough to hide within the phrase “not necessarily”). After all, if the religious God-knowers are mistaken about their own access to God (a fact that should be clear, given Hitchens’s criticisms), then in what Real sense could God actually exist? And attached to that question is a much bigger one, which I attach a lot of anxiety to: if Hitchens is taking away Being, then how come he isn’t also doing away with Meaning?
A not-so-generous way of framing the Craig’s view, is that if God disappears, then Craig will just take his ball with him & go home. A slightly nicer way of saying it, is that Craig is guilty of using fear as evidence for God/Being—because if God disappears then so does knowledge, so do morals, so does meaning, so does love, so does anything Real—& so disappears, then, the moral arc of the universe, as well as my participation in being Real.
*****
For a few years in there, then, I’ve felt myself within a painful inward ALotOfQuestions, like a feeling low in my guts: How could Doing have Meaning without Being?
Even so, while I grant it is very tempting to follow the Being-less logic of nihilism / existentialism / absurdism / we-Believe-In-Nothing-Lebowksi, it is also as impossible to divorce myself finally from feeling that life is somehow Meaning-full.
*****
Therefore, I offer my most generous-pretty way to say what I want to believe: The size & age of the universe alone (& my size & age relative to it, which invites me, compels me, forces me to wonder about the Meaning of my own significance) is itself something to marvel at — & to worship. Just as it is, the known universe surpasses the Infinity of the ancient poets & medieval theologians. So whatever awe or power our ancestors ascribed to gods in our scriptures, to Yahweh, we can ascribe-&-more to just the size & age & diversity of the physical unrriverse; it is wider & deeper & older & more abundant than any of our imaginations, than all of them, ever, combined.
The story, then, of merelyDoing, of Doing-without-Meaning, may be all we have—but the universe also seems to echo into some kind of Meaning, even if we are the only ones writing the Meaning-story as we go. The Story of the universe, then, not only Is; & it not only Does; it also Means.
But how can we get Meaning without Being?
Maybe the universe asks itself, through us, questions of Meaning—& it writes poems, & tells stories, & shows how the world is like itself, telling itself the marvelous Meaning-story. — & so that echo — & how it echoes, & where it echoes to, & into, & within — that is where I want to rumble toward.
*****
But this formulation of Doing Being Meaning has me in a kind of feeling like I’m in a kind of dead-end, even if the dead-end is hopeful-poetic—since even if I myself am the one shaping Meaning, which way should I tell the poem to Mean, & why?
Part of me, then, needs Is God-Being Real? to be either-or, a yes-or-no, a God-is-or-God-is-not, since even the atheists can be tempted toward Nothingness. I feel the importance of this question, the urgency of it, even the anxiety of it. It is a This-or-That, perhaps, of my spiritual Lizard Brain, an extension of survival-mode, now in a mythic realm; I feel in deep need of a story of Being that allows our Doing to have Meaning. (I insist upon it. It’s the order of things.)
Am I just staring into that Meaning-less-ness, that NothingnessAbyss, that faceless universe, just to declare, in dissonance&denial, Aha! Meaning!
To declare Meaning would, though, help me justify my decades-long study of Meaning: from philosophy in college, to storytelling in graduate school, to rhetoric as my career choice, to my religion, & to my roles as son, father, husband, friend. I am covered in maybe-Meaning. I am Real in that world. Having read Dante, for example, helps me make sense of mountains, forests, all the other stories I’ve heard or told, the feeling I have of friendship with my dogs, the satisfaction of campfire conversations, looking up at the stars, & the Meaning of the transformative justice I want to belong to. I love Meaning. I need Meaning.
I am filled with a feeling I’d call transcendent, worship, awe, wonder, gutsDarklyGutsHoly, it is mystic, it is marvelous—whenever I think of how the Big & Beautiful Ideas all finally tell their Meaning along the same Way[8]. I love the universalYes of psychedelic knowledge[9]; I welcome that for thousands of years shamans knew far more than Freud ever did about the unconscious[10]; I am glad Alcoholics Anonymous leveraged William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature & the Sermon on the Mount to restore so many broken lives; I see how we all seem to be longing desperately, religiously, all sort of gurgling together, marveling around a Big Meaning-full Something, with a needing-hoping that it is we need to be Real. We are making stories of nature, founding philosophies of economics on the so-called “survival of the fittest,”always writing poems, always telling stories, always making Meaning, which gives our hope direction. But maybe “hope bases vast premises on foolish accidents, & reads a word where in fact only a scribble exists.”[11]
*****
One day, I wrote:
Jesus, are you real?
Another day, I read:
“[…] insisting on a literal belief in the Virgin birth of Jesus is very good theological symbolism, but unless it translates into a spirituality of an interior poverty, readiness to concede, & human vulnerability, it is largely a mere lesson memorized, as Isaiah puts it (Isaiah 29:13): it saves no one. Likewise, an intellectual belief that Jesus rose from the dead is a good start, but until you are struck by the realization that the crucified & risen Jesus is a parable about the journey of all humans & even the universe, it is a rather harmless, if not harmful, belief that will leave you & the world largely unchanged.”[13]
& another day I wrote:
I am a disciple of
the Way of Jesus;
Christianity is small compared
to the dreams of God.
& another day I wrote:
dear god please
be real to us because
of your beauty so
we will never feel so
frightened.
I wrestle. I reword things. I go & go. I wonder deeply. I commit myself not to a god or theology but to a Mystery. I begin again. I arrive experientially, emotionally, spiritually, to endless wrestling that the Teacher named 3,000 years ago, something I’d once memorized, but now I knew its Meaning[14]: “He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in their hearts, yet so that man can’t find out the work that God has done from the beginning even to the end.”[15]
*****
I’ll tell you, it sure would feel easier to declare Aha! Meaning!, but even spiritual denial is denial. So while I’d feel philosophically safe just to say something & hope it were Real—and while my view would even be couched in a familiar language of faith (incidentally helping me solve that “moral arc of the universe” problem, that Am I Real? problem)—would it be actually, fully, wholly honest of me?
I don’t think it would. This keeps running through my head: “The real difference between us & chimpanzees is the mythical glue that binds together large numbers of individuals, families, & groups. This glue has made us the masters of creation”[12] If that’s true, & if I’m just telling myself stories, I believe that by letting go of the Meaning-story I fear I’m also letting go of Me Being Real, a story I’m personally incentivized & invested in keeping intact.
In other words, how do I convince my deepest heart that William Lane Craig can’t, at some spiritual level, take his ball & go home?
Do I need a god of some kind, some kind of ultimate Being in order to ground the Meaning of my Doing?
*****
But maybe the problem is not the problem. The liberation theology of James Cone has taught me that the Christianity I was taught, a white Evangelical version of American Protestantism, failed to act upon the theological & existential nightmare happening before their own eyes for decades during the Jim Crow era: the killing of innocent men by being hanged from trees; they failed to recognize Christ, that is to say; they failed to be Christian in the truest sense, even while the greatest theological (white) minds of the 20th Century composed their most famous works[16]. All of my white Evangelical theological ancestors failed to mention the horror of Christ being killed, of innocents being lynched, which had currently been happening among them. Their discussions of Being and Meaning, then, of theology, had completely missed the point, blinding them from the Doing right in front of them.
Similarly, it is an existential threat, not the pondering of poems, that compels theological insights in Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower. Lauren is in a post-apocalyptic nightmare that forces her to conceive of God as Change—a practicality; a need; for what else is there but survival; to study change, then, and to learn how to shape change in response: this is the source of Meaning, it seems, for Butler.
That is to say: this science fiction is a post-apocalyptic account of how Being & Meaning (Earthseed) are co-derivatives of Doing, guided by the constant existential threat upon the characters in the novel. How will they survive? (not Am I Real?) is the driving question.
The values they (the vulnerable) discover in order to shape God, are also the core values at the foundation of Emergent Strategy[17], a growing philosophy of healing & change within social activist communities.
Ultimately, it may not be very helpful to wonder whether I am Real. That is the question of an anxious child, after all, even if it is also the question at the center of William Lane Craig’s threat to take his ball & go home. It’s all philosophy, approximations, metaphors playing dress-up, thought-disagreements between two white men at an Evangelical university back when Fox News still found it credible to wonder whether Obama’s still-new presidency warranted declaring the end of racism in America. The kinds of assertions this community finds credible demonstrates the depth of how out of touch with real questions they are; for them to hold onto the philosophical loophole, a logical sliver that without Being Doing can’t have Meaning forgets that our first ancestors’ first question was, “How do I make it through this?” which eventually became, “How do we make it through this?”
These two questions, always in tension, are enough to spark the evolution of the whole network of emotions and morals and proverbs and mysticism and laws and pantheons, to Become Meaning over billions of years, through bacteria, fungi, plants, animals, the story of survival is the story of morality, the study of change as we create and sustain the life we need to want to keep having. That is to say, maybe I had it backwards and it’s really Doing Being Meaning.
After all, context, experience, existential threat—these are what the Civil Rights Movement, the theology of James Cone[18], the life of Assata Shakur[19], the abolitionist philosophy of Angela Davis[20], the art & activism of Patrisse Cullors[21], & so on have to offer—they study Change in the face of extinction, and Shape God as they discover, “How do we make it through this?” If death gives meaning to life, then maybe the existential threat of death gives life to “Christ.” Maybe Meaning is not derived from Being, but from the Doing itself.
It is from this angle, then, & from up out of this context & questions, that I have come to study Emergent Strategy, as I see it as the philosophical outcome of so many threads of conversations. I come as a willing, wondering, worshipping non-theist, who loves poems & Meaning, who loves justice, but wants to understand it as both transcendent and concrete.
___________________
[1] The thing about the word Real is, it’s so useful, & so loose, & so easy to equivocate with.
[2] John Lewis
[3] Albert Camus, The Stranger
[4] Rene Descartes, Meditations
[5] Paul Copan, “The Argument from Morality”
[6] Martin Luther King, paraphrasing a Theodore Parker sermon
[7] It does not please me to implicate myself as having been allied with that school & worldview, but it is where I came from nevertheless.
[8] Rami Shapiro, Perennial Wisdom for the Spiritually Independent
[9] Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind
[10] Michael Harner, The Way of the Shaman
[11] John Updike, “Pigeon Feathers.”
[12] Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, emphasis added.
[13] Richard Rohr, Universal Christ
[14] Bright Eyes, “I need some meaning I can memorize,” lyrics from “Lover I Don’t Have to Love”
[15] Ecclesiastes 3:11
[16] James Cone, The Cross & the Lynching Tree
[17] adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds
[18] James Cone, Black Power & Black Theology
[19] Assata Shakur, Assata
[20] Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?
[21] Patrisse Cullors, When They Call You a Terrorist