I’ve enjoyed my New York Times subscription. Even those things with which I don’t necessarily agree (and that is the case with every publication, not just the Times) are quite well-done. I think the quality of the writing and the access its reporters are given (meaning first-hand and original research) make it well worth the 50 cents a week (for now) that I’m paying.
I’m also a big fan of their podcast, “The Daily,” which is free on line. It goes into depth on interesting topics, and I’ve found most episodes to be quite “fair and balanced.” Sensible people can probably see this without having to rely on the rantings of a blowhard narcissist who won’t settle for anything less than total agreement with his positions.
So there’s my recommendation. The New York Times and it’s “The Daily” podcast.
Every week, “The Daily” posts something called “The Sunday Read” – a reading of a long-form article published by the Times at some time over the past several years. One such article – a reading titled “The Valve Turners” from the New York Times Magazine – gave me a thought topic to ponder. The Valve Turners are a group of climate change activists who shut down pipelines at the Canadian border by breaking into emergency shutoff facilities and closing the valves.
Personally, I’m not a fan of their activities, but I’m not going to get into where I think they were wrong, because that’s not the point I gathered from it. Nor am I going to go into the fact that they were all older, white, and fairly well-off; although I think there’s something there for another thought project.
No, I was more intrigued by the spiritual aspect of it all. While the article goes into the religious background of a couple of the valve-turners, it looked at it from a “I was into it before, but was fed up with the hypocrisy so I left that crap behind” angle. The irony of it to me though was that they didn’t leave it all behind. They just traded it in for something else – another religion. And it’s close. The article tells the story of a valve-turner who alienated his family and eventually ended up divorced because he put his climate change activism – his religion – ahead of his wife and sons. This is familiar to the Christian. Jesus said “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.”
They even mimic the hypocrisy of the churches they left – coordinating their efforts on computers and through networks that rely on the very fossil fuels they condemn. Taking flights and driving their cars miles to the border to carry out their acts of protest. Living their lives in the comfort of their fossil fuel-heated homes, showering with fossil fuel-heated water, under the glow of fossil fuel-powered electric lights.
Now, I’m being extremely unfair here. I’m sure they do their best to conserve, and they have no choice in many cases. And I’m not saying their wrong either. I can see this – that they wanted to call attention to the problem, and you can see by virtue of my even typing this, they did in some way.
But what I’m really getting at here is this: we’re all spiritual beings. The Bible tells us this very thing through the words of Solomon in Ecclesiastes (3:11), “He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.” We have that sense of “oughtness” – of the way the world should be, and a sense of the spiritual because God himself has put it into us. And so, if we cannot find our satisfaction in Him, we will look for it elsewhere.
The religion of the valve-turners does that for them. It gives them a sense of purpose. But I can’t help but ask, “why?” What purpose could anyone have in thinking that it’s all gone once they’re dead? Paul says it like this: “What do I gain if, humanly speaking, I fought with beasts at Ephesus? If the dead are not raised, ‘Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.’” So, to paraphrase it for the valve-turners, “What do I gain if I shut down the Keystone pipeline? If there’s nothing of me after death, ‘Let us east and drink, for tomorrow we die.’”
While I cannot speak for the valve-turners, I suspect they suffer from a deep sense of guilt and self-hatred. They’ve taken God and tossed him aside for a religion that worships God’s creation, and because they’ve taken a part in destroying that creation (their god), they must make amends. It’s the spirituality in them that God has planted. Sadly, it will do them no good. If God does not exist, there is nothing left of them to matter. If God does exist, the path they are taking is much worse.
I can applaud them because I believe that there is indeed more. I believe strongly that we are to be stewards of God’s creation, and I can embrace them as co-belligerents in the struggle to protect the planet. But I don’t think it helpful to humor them in their true delusion – the denial of the one who created them and the very planet they worship in the first place. I can assure them all that they can both love God and take care of the planet. It’s not an “either/or” scenario.
But loving God in the first place is.
Very interesting group. Not an uncommon theme among people who’ve turned from many of the theologically based religions. There are so many atheists who practice the same religion they were practicing before. They just dispensed with God so they feel more rational. One of the most strident supporters of the religion of Atheism, Richard Dawkins, condemns Christianity for the causing so much evil in the world, as if it were the primary cause. His books stink of the religion he condemns. His arguments are combative and full of anger and hate. Just the things he says religion causes. It’s just that he has “reason” to back him up, but if you read his rational explanations, they are full of assumptions that aren’t based on reason; they are based on faith. But I think that these people are probably not that interested in helping the world. They just enjoy stirring the pot.
There is so much anger, hatred, grievance and greed in the world, and that is where the suffering begins. Wrongs cannot be righted when by such motivations. They will just be perpetuated by grievance and grief. Political and Social justice movements have become too full of these. Too much is based on narrow arguments that you have to choose either this or that as if some secular solution will fix society.
But what if the real solution is to transcend the 2 choice paradigm? To look at each situation as it arises and act in a singular way. To stop fighting out of anger. The qualities of love are patience, kindness, generosity, equanimity and forbearance, endurance, mercy, forgiveness, faith and hope. If people practiced these things, there would be no need for reform. But these are practices that transcend the worldly, where selfish desires control passions. These are the things of God. God is pure love, without ego.
I wish political and social justice movements would put love at the center. Some try. Most lose their way. But they are secular movements trying to find secular solutions to a problem of the heart, not the mind. It’s a spiritual problem. The only real solution is to change your heart with God’s love.
Yes. Everyone needs to believe in something.
Did you mean to reflect the fruit of the Spirit in your list (Galatians 5)? “the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law.”
I quoted that to someone once — I like that phrase, “against such things there is no law” — and they looked at me like I’d just walked out of a spaceship.
No, I did’t deliberately quote Galatians 5. I haven’t read Galatians in years, though I always did like that epistle. These are all things I read everywhere on my spiritual journey. The Gospels and Epistles. Buddhism. Lives of the saints. Spiritual practices both East and West. The great teachers pretty much distill it to the same basic principle…love. The problems of humanity are a heart condition of sorts. You can’t fix them with ordinary problem solving because ordinary problem solving is an attempt to fix the head, not the heart, and everyone’s head is so full of their own ideas of right and wrong, you can’t get past it. But the heart is another matter. It’s the seat of your life with God. If you can get past the selfishness that causes fear, anger, jadedness and despair, the selfishness the head keeps generating, and live in love, life is simply better. The world becomes a better, less ugly place. You can see the presence of God even when you hear on your news feed there is no God. The newsfeed is a lie. Just have to look around you, immediately around you, not some far off place where “news” is “happening”. Yes, there is pain. Yes, there is tragedy. Yes, there is suffering. I can generalize about those things all day long, or I can smile as I take my morning walk past the eagles nest and see an adult eagle tending it’s eaglets, or run back to give that parent the toy their child dropped out of wagon. Simple things that happen every day.
There was an incident the other day that showed me just where I’d like to go with my life at this point. We were driving back from the cancer clinic and someone had a big JOE BIDEN is NOT my PRESIDENT sign on their yard. One of my aims has been to let this stuff go, because it always upsets me. And I thought I was doing a good job at the time. “Let it go. There are always ignorant people who try to provoke.” etc. etc. The mind goes on…and upset kind of dropped away. But then in the evening I started thinking about it. Totally failed the test. The thing is not for me to let go of MY upset. I’ll get it right when I look at that sign, and understand the pain that is causing the person who is himself upset to put up that sign, because that sign exists because he (or she) is suffering in their life. It wasn’t about me. And when you feel that, you experience compassion. And when you experience compassion, that person is no longer someone you’ve painted as an enemy who is angering you in you mind, he or she is instead another human being on the road of life, who like everyone else loves, wants to be loved, hurts, feels happy, can be kind, can be caring. Everyone has the potential to love, but the potential has to be cultivated. Everyone has the potential to live in anger and hatred too. That is being cultivated all too much. The really funny part is where these things are being cultivated. So much of the ugliness is mass produced for general consumption. So much of the beauty and love is right at outside your door and in your neighborhood and community. I feel like such a fool sometimes for paying way too much attention to the ugliness that I’m told when the love that I can actually see is sitting right in front of me. I could walk down the street and meet that guy with the Biden sign and not know it was him. I’d say hi and he could say hi and smile and I’d never know because he’d be another pleasant person I met. Another human being. A participant in this wonderful creation God has bestowed. Just shows how the mind is deluded by what it sees when it doesn’t try to see the whole picture.
There is a zen story I like that demonstrates the compassion I’m talking about. One evening a thief entered a zen master’s hut in the mountains, looking for something to steal. The master, Ryokan, caught him in the act. What did the master do? He gave the man his clothes. “You shouldn’t go back empty-handed after coming all this way. Please take my clothes as a gift.” The master didn’t think of himself. He thought of the thief. The master didn’t discard the thief’s humanity in anger. He felt compassion for the thief, not knowing what drove the thief to do what he did, but also not assuming the thief was simply a bad person. No judgment. Just love. When the thief left, the master sat naked and looking at the full moon, said “Poor fellow, I wish I could give him this beautiful moon.” (In zen, the full moon is symbolic of enlightenment.)
I’m tired of the anger. I’m tired of the
…ugliness it produces. It doesn’t have to be that way. I can’t prevent other people from being angry or from hating, but I can try to love. All this fighting and anger and wanting to change things by social or political means without love as the motivation is like noisy gong or clanging cymbal in Corinthians. A bunch of noise. It doesn’t work, because for all the “justice” in the world, if you throw away the heart and humanity of others, treating them like an enemy with your own hatred, your “right” is not any better than their “wrong”.
This kind of activity isn’t new this millenium. Edward Abbey published “The Monkeywrench Gang” in 1975
Yeah, a lot of the stuff has been around for a very long time. There is literally nothing new under the sun. History shows that. The characters change. The methods change in appearance, but the gut level behavior and motivation does not. Now-a-days it seems to me technology has intensified the behavior, but how can I really know without actually experiencing another era. I get that feeling sometimes when I read history and try to put myself in the place of someone experiencing the telegraph, for example, for the first time.