Tag Archives: peace

Atheist’s Bible: Apocalypse

The Four Horsemen appear on the news every day: war, disease, famine, environmental catastrophe. Gee, who could have seen this coming? Whoever wrote the Book of Revelation two thousand years ago, for one. None of these things are exactly new in human experience. Since humanity decided to base our civilization on greed instead of compassion, this has been an easy prophecy to make.

The thing about prophecy is that it’s meant to scare people into changing our behavior. If it works, the direst predictions won’t come true. The prophecy makes the threat of extinction both vivid and immediate. We already know that our current path is not survivable. We just think we can keep going a little while longer, in spite of the evidence. Addicts need to “hit bottom” before they quit doing whatever is killing them. Has our society hit bottom yet?

Not the Neighborhood Watch

All our addictions – to drugs, to war, to fossil fuels, to accumulating stuff – stem from humanity’s central problem: how to keep from being ruled by the worst of us. The problem shows up in Putin’s aggression, Trump’s hatefulness, Big Oil’s continuing lies. The solution is not any single hero coming to save us. The solution is the best of us, working together.

Addicts endure going cold turkey through the love of friends and family, the encouragement of others in the same situation, and inner strength. The same things apply to all our addictions. If people can quit drinking, we can quit buying plastic junk. If one fragile, needy individual can stop smoking, this fragile, needy species can stop war.

Right now, the good guys are terribly disorganized. We’ve allowed ourselves to be separated by nationality, ethnicity, religion, gender identity. Even our do-gooder organizations are separated by the causes they support, as though peace and justice and environmental sustainability were not deeply interdependent.

National boundaries, financial wealth, and all the other barriers to our solidarity are products of human imagination. Apocalypse, on the other hand, is the furthest thing from imaginary. It will be the only reality if we remain divided behind those barriers instead of getting ourselves together.

Like it or not, this is our planet. It’s time we start owning it. Here’s another 2,000 year old prediction: the meek shall inherit the earth. If we do, it won’t be a moment too soon.

Life on the River

It’s June, so there are lots of babies. Baby rabbits, nibbling on the gardens and driving the dogs crazy. Baby ducks, gathered closely around their mothers. Baby geese, joining the honking, pooping herds in the meadows.

This year, a pair of swans nested at the confluence of our town’s river with a small stream. They spent weeks building up the nest, bending their long necks to scoop dead leaves and twigs into a pile that rose a couple of feet higher than the river surface. Once the eggs were laid, the pair took turns sitting on them. The one swimming around and noshing was on patrol. If a duck or goose or dog came too close to the nest, there would be a great loud flapping of wings, and the intruder would leave in a hurry.

Now there are four fluffy little baby swans, cygnets, visible on royal cruises with one parent ahead and one behind. Nobody messes with the swans. They can fly, but they don’t have to.

I watch the adults learn how to co-parent. Swan #1 swims quickly under the bridge, minus offspring, and then flaps its wings and rushes up the bank, rousts Swan #2 from its resting place in the brush, then swims back down the river in a big hurry. Swan #2 scrabbles down the bank, calling out this really loud noise that starts with a squeal and ends with a honk. It swims around a moment, stretching its wings and neck, and then follows Swan #1 under the bridge. A couple minutes later, here comes one of the swans with babies close behind it. I think that was a shift change and Swan #2 was yelling “Okay, I’ll be there in a minute, let me finish my coffee!”

Several years ago, the government rebuilt the old dam between the lakes our river flows through, complete with a modern fish ladder. Thanks to the ladder, the dwindling stock of alewife – a small herring-like fish that breeds here – has rebounded. The state estimates that their population has gone from 200,000 to more than 700,000.

Black-crowned night herons come for the spawning run of alewife every spring. At night, they pick a local tree to roost in, crowding the branches like big ripe fruit. The great blue and little green herons also enjoy the alewife. They’re so full, they often stop fishing to stand around and nap.

Since the state closed storm sewer overflow pipes, the painted turtles have also rebounded. They bask in family rows on riverside logs and driftwood every sunny morning, lined up by size from large to very little. When danger approaches, they plop into the water one by one, with the biggest the last to go and the first to re-emerge.

The other big change on the river is the traffic. We used to get motorboats and jet skis going much too fast, leaving wakes that eroded the banks. Then a canoe and kayak rental place opened up. During the pandemic, boating has been a great way to have some safe family fun, or just to get outside without a mask. The river is full of these little boats on every nice weekend. Although the herons don’t like being in the public eye, they haven’t gone far.

There are two big upsides to this new kind of traffic. One is that the motorboats have slowed way down. With so many kayaks, a speeding boat might run somebody over. I suspect that the boat club lawyer sent a memo.

The other upside is that now the river is known and loved by many more people. Some are bound to join the community that defends the river. The water and its woodsy banks are always in danger from pollution, garbage, and invasive species. Our wild, or wildish, places need all the friends they can get.

People have plied these waters in canoes for centuries or longer. Until this past century, the river ran through woods and swamps. Now there’s only a narrow green strip on either side of it, trees and shrubs growing thickly up the steep banks. Beyond that, in most places, small grassy areas lie between the river and the streets, houses, and shops of our town. Nothing much lives in the grass besides ticks and field mice.

The river shows many signs of abuse and neglect. Plastic water bottles and other trash get stuck in the driftwood. Lack of maintenance on the walking paths has exposed the roots of riverside trees that keep the paths from washing into the water. Maintenance and oversight are the easiest things to cut from state and city budgets.

But what a rich variety of life still manages to thrive in the river and those two narrow strips of green. Water lilies by the thousand open their fragrant white petals; small-mouth bass nestle in the reeds; dragonflies dart and hover. Once I saw an otter, undulating at the surface like a broad brown velvet ribbon.

Humans also thrive along this water. People walk, run, bike, watch birds, have picnics. A woman dances along to the music on her headset. Nobody can calculate the river’s physical, mental, and social benefits to our community. Recently, plastic lawn chairs have appeared in a few choice sitting spots. Some walkers bring bags with them to pick up litter.

This is a beautiful world. Maybe we’re learning to stop our trashy ways and cherish it. If so, it won’t be a moment too soon.

Atheist’s Bible: The Meek

I was raised Jewish. The New Testament was off limits. When I got old enough to question why, I read the books, and became – not a Christian – but a fan of Jesus of Nazareth. He was a radical poet, a superb teacher, a lyrical rabbi. His words, his stories, his metaphors, moved and delighted me in a way that rarely happened when I studied Jewish lore in the Talmud.

What was so dangerous in the teachings of this great rabbi that his work was forbidden to Jews? He taught that the most important thing was to be kind to one another, not to follow the rules. This threatened the fabric of Judaism, knitted from thousands of strands of legal arguments, meant to cover the actions of Jews at all times. If one could put aside these historic threads, one would be, in effect, naked in the world. One would be the agent of one’s own actions rather than limited by the prescriptions and prohibitions of generations of wise men.

If the meek are going to inherit the earth, we should get ourselves organized.

In a system, or an anti-system, like the one Jesus proposed, every individual would be a free actor. Such a person might or might not choose to remain in the community built for protection and survival over the centuries. The rabbis, those living encyclopedias of rules and regulations, would be no more and no less than any other people except as they demonstrated compassion towards others, non-Jews as well as Jews. All would be equal in the sight of God.

What Jesus represented was a threat to the powers that be. In his day, those were the Sanhedrin, the council of rabbis, as well as the occupying army of the Romans. In the centuries to come, they were the Church, and the priests who claimed its power for themselves, as well as nation-states. He taught that souls were equal, even the souls of small children, and of women. What glory they could claim belonged to themselves alone, for their acts of kindness, and not for their service to organized religion. To counter such egalitarianism, the Church turned the words of Jesus into mysteries that could only be safely plumbed by priests, intermediaries trained by the Church. Ordinary people could not be trusted with the Word.

Jesus trusted ordinary people. He could have remained among the rabbis, a precocious scholar, rising to be powerful and important among the established leaders of his faith. Instead he hung out with prostitutes, drinkers, and gamblers, not to mention fishermen. He believed in the meek, the gentle, the powerless. He threatened the idea of corporal power itself. If you knew that all you needed to satisfy the only true Power in the universe was compassion, you would be less likely to submit to those who rule through fear. You would be free.

Nobody who has risen through a hierarchy of power likes people to be free. What would happen if the masses of people, the lowly ones, the meek, began to see themselves as equal to those who rule them? Every person who has fought for and gained power in an organization would feel a disturbance, shall we say, in the force. The few who use force would have to recognize the overwhelming numbers of the gentle. Such a change in public consciousness would shake not only religions but nations.

The rabbis knew Jesus was a threat. All hierarchical organizations know that he remains a threat. He didn’t believe in top-down power. He tried to awaken power in the grassroots, from the bottom up. He believed in people; he exalted the meek. What he preached was neither obedience nor resistance, but solidarity, the most revolutionary concept in a world designed to keep the meek under the knee of the powerful.