Interviews With Br Jeremiah Part 2

Anthropomorphism isn’t limited to the physical; it also encompasses the mental and emotional. It is as much a mistake to say that God thinks logically or feels emotion as it would be to say God stands or walks or folds His arms, or spits.

After a few articles in which I have published the letters of Brother Jeremiah of the Order of Buile Suibhne (OBS). It occurs to me that you might like to know a little more about him. So I persuaded him, with some difficulty, to sit for an interview. We spoke this past November in the courtyard of the monastery.

In the first interview with Brother Jeremiah we broached the subject of why it is necessary for some of us, but not all, to lose the faith of our childhood if we are to grow into an adult faith, one that is not based in fear, even at the risk of losing it entirely. We continue with the nature of faith and the need for a more Universal approach to our concept of God.

M: If one cannot come to an adult faith without losing the childish one…
BJ: It is not for everyone. Even Jesus knew that there was one message for “the three” another in lesser depth for “the twelve” and another entirely for the “seventy and seven,”each according to the limits of his understanding.
M: In other words, the great majority are going to miss the point entirely.
BJ: Not entirely, but their understanding will be rather simplistic and puerile.
M: You have spoken quite harshly against fundamentalist religions that you called, let me see if I quote you right, “primitive, altogether lacking in complexity and nuance.”
BJ: Don’t use the term fundamentalist; it has a very specific meaning that I think has gotten lost in the term’s over use and misapplication. I use the term “primitive.” And I only object to them when their believers act badly. Look, Carl Jung postulated that every person, and every group no matter how well intentioned, has a shadow, a negative side.
M: Every positive implies its opposite. There can be no light without…
BJ: A shadow, yes. Self interest is what makes us get on in the world, but self absorption…
M: Destroys all our good intents.
BJ: Precisely. Aside from that shadow aspect of their faith, they are quite well off in their beliefs and I will not criticize them.
M: How does the shadow manifest itself there?
BJ: When they assume, quite solipsistically, that their understanding of God is the only valid one, that there is but one true religion, and they press it on others with threats of hellfire and death. Well, you see, I cannot condone that. It is so easy, because of the fervor of our faith to act out of the shadow, but it never works.
M: There is a man downtown who stands on the sidewalk with a bull horn shouting at the passers by, “You can’t get to Heaven smoking them cigarettes, you can’t get to Heaven sinning.”
BJ: I wonder… I would like to see how many people he’s really convinced that way. I suspect not very many. You see, I think that to him it’s less about potential converts, in fact it’s less about God, than it is about him being “A Good Witness,” and whether or not he actually wins any souls is irrelevant. In fact, it’s probably better if he doesn’t because then he can feel persecuted. You can’t intimidate people into faith, and it really doesn’t help to annoy them. John Dewey once said, and I do agree, that practicing virtue to avoid punishment is not virtue at all, so I wonder what virtue there might be in a group ethos the main objective of which is fear of Hell and joy in salvation from it. We all, each of us, must come to faith, we must be drawn to it not driven to it by threats or the promise of avoiding punishment.
M: And if the faith they arrive at is atheistic?
BJ: So be it; they are still children of God even if it is a God they don’t recognize. “Atheist” is such a loaded word; it comes with a lot of social baggage, most of it negative. Atheists, I think, reject the kind of God they grew up with, the anthropomorphic God of childhood. In rejecting that God, they reject all notions of God, and some do it so vehemently, as if shaking off an early betrayal, that they’ve tainted the word.
M: Christopher Hitchens comes to mind.
BJ: Who has made a career of it, it seems. I think he mistakes belief in God for the shadow of religion, but that’s okay. It’s his right. I prefer the term, non-theistic spirituality.
M: What’s the difference? The “a” in a-theist means “non.”
BJ: It’s subtle, I’ll grant, and the difference may well be semantic, but I prefer it because, while atheists reject the very notion of God, non-theistic thinking redefines God in a way that is not anthropomorphic. Theism and anthropomorphism go hand I hand, you see?
M: We think of anthropomorphism in terms of ancient gods who took on human form: Zeus with a long white beard, Athena with a shield and helmet…
BJ: Yes, yes. But, anthropomorphism isn’t limited to the physical; it also encompasses the mental and emotional. It is as much a mistake to say that God thinks logically or feels emotion as it would be to say God stands or walks or folds His arms, or spits. If God exists at all, it is obvious that God’s so-called thoughts are so far outside our own manner of reasoning that we cannot comprehend it
M: God doesn’t think in complete sentences?
BJ: ‘Fraid not, no. Those skills are only needed by those of us “who will still carry our bodies around with us because of their sentimental value.” I quote, of course.* We developed these skills because our minds needed to communicate with other minds and the only way we could do it was through the clumsy media of our bodies: voice, gesture, attitude.
M: And God has no need of words?
BJ: Nor thoughts nor passions nor anything belonging to a man.
M: That reminds me of the line from “Inherit the Wind” that goes: “God created man in His own image, and man, being a gentleman, returned the favor.”
BJ: I think that pretty much sums it up. I will tell you this: if a society changes the way it thinks about God, it changes everything in it. If the way we envision god is non-anthropomorphic…
M: Then God has no emotions, and God does not love the one thing and hate the other as we have been told?
BJ: Not in the petty human emotional sense, only in the universal sense of forward movement in harmony with all that is.
M: Some say that God can hate the sin and love the sinner.
BJ: I don’t know that that means. If the container is the thing contained, if form and content cannot be separated one from the other, if we cannot tell the difference between the dancer and the dance, then it makes no sense at all
M: One of the great issues of the day, and one that touches on this, is the one of full and equal rights for homosexuals…
BJ: I try not to be political…
M: I’m speaking in terms of spirituality. Many in the church oppose homosexuality on the grounds that it is an abomination to God, one in particular goes so far as to shout, that, and I quote here, that “God hates fags.” What you are saying makes that an impossibility.
BJ: Oh, absolutely! When I heard what they were doing I was livid.**If God were capable of being insulted, those people validating their own prejudices by projecting them onto God would do it.
M. The objection, as I understand it, is based on the eighteenth book of Leviticus in the Bible. It goes, and again I quote “Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination.”
BJ: In the 22nd verse, yes, after prohibiting your children being sacrificed to Moloch and fifteen other proscriptions; it was obviously not the highest priority, not as serious as, say uncovering the nakedness of your uncle’s wife, but just before the admonition against sex with animals. That close proximity may account for the fear in some circles that if we allow gay marriage people will then want to marry goats! HA! Look, you have to account for the context here. All of these sexual laws have one thing in common. Do you know what that is?
M: You’re the cleric.
BJ: Lineage. It was all about trying to keep the family bloodlines from becoming tangled and to make sure that no opportunity for reproduction is wasted. When Leviticus was written, the Hebrews were a tribal people, herders and farmers mostly. The social structure centered on the families. A patriarch’s holdings consisted not only of fields, vineyards, orchards, sheep and goats but of his “issue” that is to say, his sons. The more sons you have the more work gets done, the larger your herds and fields can grow and the richer you become. If a man’s wife was infertile, he took another woman who wasn’t; if a man’s brother died without issue it was the remaining brother’s duty to get children on her, all to make sure that there was plenty of issue and therefore plenty of wealth. That was the sin of Onan, you know. He was commanded to “go into” his brother’s wife, but instead of finishing the job, he “spilled his seed on the ground.” As punishment, God killed him dead. It was the first known example of a “substantial penalty for early withdrawal.”
M: That’s terrible. Shame on you.
BJ: Well, similarly, for a man to lie with another man created a drag on the economy since he would have no “issue.” He wasn’t pulling his weight, you see. No point in keeping him around.
M: So, you’re saying it was all about money?
BJ: Ain’t it always just? Essentially, these moral issues are rooted in human social considerations. Are we still Bronze Age tribesmen? No. So perhaps we need to rethink that.
M: You seem to be saying that morality is not really from God, but is rooted in the societal needs of human beings at any given time in history. “That was then; this is now.” You’re going to get a lot of push-back on that. You do realize that.
BJ: Oh, yes. But think about it. God is immortal. Of what value is morality to an entity that neither fears for the future nor regrets the past? It is our mortality, and awareness of our own death, that makes us think of those things. We may get sick ourselves and so we care for the sick. We will get old and so we care for the elderly even after their productive lives are over. We will all die and so we care for the dying and the dead. These impulses emerged in us at about the same time we began to think abstractly. We attributed them to our gods to give them authority, but morality is and always has been a human construct, and it changes over time. There are a lot of other things in Leviticus that would make Americans’ skins crawl.

Interviews with Brother Jeremiah will continue next month.

*Christopher Fry, The Lady’s Not For Burning.
**The Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas has as its motto, “God Hates Fags.”