My Journey - Part Two

Often, when someone reveals a break with Christianity, those who remain within the Christian fold assume that the one who left is "angry with God". Alternatively, the assumption is that the one who left the church has done so in order to be free of biblical/church restrictions on conduct and behavior. While this may be the case for some, this was not my thinking. And thinking it was, rather than an emotional reaction.

One of the positions that people take as regards to religion or faith that I cannot truly understand is a refusal to consider alternatives. "There's nothing that can shake my faith", or "nothing you can say can talk me out of what I believe". While steadfastness in the face of adversity or persecution is admirable, often it is a refusal or inability to think about what one believes. While many people have thought deeply about their faith and made reasoned decisions about it, I'm not convinced that this represents a majority.  One thing that I have long attempted to do was to question what I believed and considered possible alternatives. My leaving the Catholic Church and embracing the teachings of The Way International was a decision that I made after weighing the evidence. In retrospect I didn't have enough information to accurately form a judgement about what The Way was saying, but at the time it made sense. I wasn't mad at the Church, or the Pope or anyone or anything, I just thought The Way made more sense. Similarly, when I left The Way, I had spent a full year examining what they had been teaching and came to the decision that it no longer made sense to me. Granted, what got me started was immoral and unethical behavior by the leader and chief teacher, but in the end I would have retained the beliefs that I had learned in The Way if they still made sense.

Finally, my decision to no longer consider myself a Christian came after more thought and introspection. Once again, I wasn't mad at anyone, but had come to the conclusion that there was no reason that I could see to view the Bible as having come from God or view it as superior to any other "holy" book. At best it was a collection of books, essays and letters that reflected how various people had viewed God over the years.

Does my tendency to question and my willingness to change make me better than anyone else, or even think that I'm better than anyone else? To quote State Senator Ernie Chambers from last year's dedication of a Humanist/Atheist exhibit at the State Capitol: "It's not my place to tell you that something that gets you through the night is wrong. Everyone is entitled to have whatever beliefs help make them a better person. What is wrong is when we try to legislate some people's opinions for everybody. Then we have a problem." I may be completely wrong about the Biblical God and Christianity. Those who espouse Pascal's Wager might suggest that since I don't know, the safer course would be to believe in the Christian God. But Pascal engaged in a logical fallacy when he formulated his famous wager; it's a false dilemma - there aren't only two choice: believe in God or don't believe in God. There are a multitude of choices: be a Christian and be an atheist are certainly two among them, but there are many choices as to what kind of Christian to be; others choices include be a Muslim, be a Buddhist, be a Pagan, follow Hawaiian huna, venerate the Hindu gods, convert to Asatru and worship the Norse pantheon and on and on. So the wager doesn't really make sense.

When I finally get to the part of my journey since leaving Christianity, it will be evident that I am constantly changing, evolving and looking for more evidence.

Part Three up next!

My Journey - Part One

This journey through my religious beliefs or lack of the same has been posted before, but I thought I'd go through it again...

I grew up in a Catholic family and was pretty religious; I served as an altar boy, went to church every Sunday, prayed a lot, went to confession and thought about God and godliness quite a bit. For a long time I was unaware that there even were other religions. When I started noticing the other churches in our neighborhood I became curious. In Catholic school (which I attended through eighth grade) the view of the Protestant Reformation is skewed toward "rebellion" - these were people who broke off from the "true" church. But at some point my curiosity drove me to investigate some of these other churches, and on the surface their services didn't seem all that different from what I experienced at Catholic mass. But the fact that there were other Christians out there who were just as convinced as we Catholics were  that they had the truth was a seed that would sprout into exploration and examination of other religions.

In high school I started reading about Buddhism and other Eastern religions. Even though I still attended church I wondered, with all the diversity of religion, how I could be sure that I was in the "right" one. I was equally perplexed that no one else seemed as curious as I was.

Someone attempted to give me an answer when I was a freshman in college.

The Way International is a small Christian group that was active in my neighborhood. I was invited to one of their meetings in the apartment of two young guys and was immediately intrigued. They claimed that they could explain the bible like no one ever explained it before, reconcile discrepancies and give proof that Christianity and the Bible were true. Although initially skeptical, this was what I was looking for. If these guys could show me that Christianity and the Bible was "the truth", then I wanted to at least hear what they had to say.

I took a three-week class that they offered and was hooked. One of their main selling points was that they claimed to teach keys to interpreting and understanding the Bible so that anyone could make sense of it without the need for priests and preachers. It made sense to me at the time, even though in retrospect their research was shoddy, their handling of the biblical languages was amateurish and, despite their claims that they would teach us how to interpret for ourselves, disagreeing with the leader just wasn't tolerated. But I latched on to this group and their teachings. Even though their explanations didn't really stand up to scrutiny, no one else had ever tried to make it all fit together before.

Family members were convinced that I was brainwashed, and even considered having me "deprogrammed" at one time. Looking back over the years I reject that explanation, not because I think I was too smart to get brainwashed, but because I made the effort to think outside the box - the box of my childhood religion. I was willing to question and to consider different boxes! Granted, someone a bit more sophisticated in biblical research might have spotted The Way's weak explanations right off, but it was more explanation than I ever received at church.

The problem with The Way was that it was a cult. Now, some people define a cult as any group that teaches heterodoxy, and The Way certainly taught some non-standard views of Christianity, but when I see "cult", I mean a group that is abusive and controlling, irrespective of specific doctrine. I was involved from 1978-1983, and got back involved from 1990-2001, although I maintained a lot of the same beliefs in that seven-year gap. I ended my involvement when I started questioning what The Way was teaching.

The leader of The Way had stepped down after a sexual scandal. This caused me to wonder whether what he had been teaching was to be trusted, so I started examining everything he had taught, using The Way's own methodology for interpreting the Bible. I came up with a lot of problems. The foundational class that this new leader had been teaching deviated in some respects from what the founding leader had taught. The rationale and Biblical basis for most of these new teachings was pretty shaky. This caused me to go back and examine doctrine from before this leader had taken over, all the way back to the fundamentals, and being a little more discerning than my 19 year old self, I saw more problems than I could count. I brought my concerns to the leaders of The Way, but received no answers beyond "trust your leaders, they know what they're doing". Eventually my questioning got me kicked out of the organization.

Even though I was questioning much of what The Way had taught, I still retained faith that the methodology, the "keys to research" were sound, and that they could be utilized to arrive at the truth.

A few years before, after the death of the founding leader, there had been a schism in the ranks and many offshoots, run by former Way people had sprung up. They all used the same research keys as the original group, but, freed from the influence of central control, they all came up with different answers. My conclusion was that maybe the Bible isn't as easy to interpret as I'd been led to believe if the same study methods led to such diverse results. I took this one step further and considered, not just the many Way offshoots, but the multitude of Christian denominations, some with minor differences, some barely recognizable as being Christian, all different. I decided that anyone who thought that they had "The Truth" based on a reading of the Bible was fooling themselves. Multitudes of people had read the Bible and claimed to divine God's will from its pages, but why did they come up with so many different answers?

So, where did people get their beliefs about what they believed about God? About Jesus? From the Bible. Why did they believe that there is a God? Yes, many people claim personal visions, or feelings, that they interpret as being from the God of the Bible. I contend that without the framework and presuppositions that the Bible and its attendant religions provide, none of these personal experiences would be interpreted as from a God that they previously hadn't known about. Logically, in order to have any opinion about God that is not entirely subjective, you have to go back to the Bible.

But if I couldn't be sure about the Bible, on what basis did I continue to believe that there was a Supreme Being, Creator of the Universe? There was none. Up until then, I had accepted that premise, but no longer felt that I had any evidence that that premise was true.

So, on that day I decided to stop believing in the God of the Bible.

Many ex-Way people joined Way offshoots and continued believing the same things that they always had, just in a different organization. Some went back to their family religion. Some got involved in evangelical or fundamentalist churches. Some became atheists. At this point I was not ready to abandon belief in the supernatural, and thought that one spiritual belief was as good as another. After a couple of years of reading and talking to people with different worldviews I began identifying as a pagan. My journey from a neophyte to where I am today is another post.

Manager Part XI - Training

How do you get your subordinates out of Levels 1 and 2 and become more self directed?

(Refer to Part X http://aesduir.blogspot.com/2017/07/managers-part-x-minimizing-subordinate.html)

As a manager you can't just show up to work and expect that your subordinates will automatically aspire to Level 4 or 5 independence. You have to actually train them! And once you've trained them, you have to follow up in order to assure yourself that your subordinates really know what they're doing. Just telling a subordinate that you expect them to work independently and make their own decisions doesn't mean that they will. (And we're talking here about ability and understanding, insubordination is a completely different subject). And even after a subordinate has been instructed in the expectations of the job, doesn't mean that they have been trained. And even after you are sure that they fully understand all aspects of the job and have the ability to carry them out, being fully trained means that they are actually doing it. If you don't follow up and ensure that the work is being done you run the risk of your subordinate deciding on his own what his job should be, and that might be very different than what you expect!

Back when I managed grocery stores we had a position called Grocery Clerk. This was an entry-level position and was almost always filled by high school kids who had never held a job before. The clerks had two main jobs: retrieve carts from the parking lot and "pull cardboard". They had other duties as well, but those are the two main ones. Pulling cardboard involved methodically going through an aisle, section by section, and removing any cardboard boxes that were less than half full and then "facing", pulling all the product forward on the shelf. (This was what was called a "warehouse" store, most product was put on the shelf in the case that in came in, with the front and top cut off.) The purpose of this was to keep the shelves orderly and make it easy for the customers to see the products. Something called a "cardboard bin", a wheeled, plastic container, 4'x4'x4' was utilized to throw the cardboard in. This was mind-numbingly, boring work, but it had to be done. It was also extremely simple to master, but it was almost never done correctly.

The problem was training. What should have been done was that each new grocery clerk be teamed up with a manager for half of a shift, released for a few hours to work on his own, and then back with the manager for follow up. For the first few weeks the clerk's work should have been checked by a manager until it was assured that proper training had taken place. What did happen was that the new clerk was teamed up with an "experienced" clerk who probably was doing things incorrectly himself, ensuring that the cycle of incompetence would continue. Look in on most grocery clerks allegedly pulling cardboard and you'll see two of them strolling down an aisle, chatting (grocery clerks are almost never to be working two-by-two, pulling cardboard is a one-person job), pulling the occasional box off the shelf, without a cardboard bin, then strolling to the back room to throw out the small amount of cardboard that they can hold in their arms. And there is rarely, if ever, a manager checking up on them.

A few years ago I conducted an experiment. I watched as a grocery clerk exited an aisle that he had supposedly just got done pulling cardboard in. (He had a cardboard bin). I entered the same aisle and pulled cardboard and faced the correct way. I piled all the cardboard on the floor in front of each section and then called him back to show him what he had missed. He was not happy, but he did learn what was expected of him.

Sometimes the lesson people get from the Five Levels of Management Freedom is that everybody should be at Level 4 or 5 and that Managers are just supposed to sit back and watch everyone work. (Presumably with their feet up on their desks). That is the wrong lesson! Getting everyone to at least Level 3 and ideally Levels 4 and 5 is the goal; but how do you accomplish that goal? Not by wishful thinking or by simply telling people to manage themselves, but by putting in the hard work of training subordinates to be not just "hard workers", but independent thinkers and problem solvers.

Training can be very time-consuming, but the result is worth the time.

Religious Work-Arounds

I just finished reading an article about a New Jersey town attempting to prevent local Jews from extending their eruv.  What's an eruv you ask?  To answer that question you have to go back to Talmudic and Rabbinic law which interprets the laws and strictures in the Torah. The principle in the Torah is that the Sabbath is a day of rest and that no work is to be done on it. That sounds pretty simple, but people being people, they needed clarification, they needed a definition of what "work" included. There are thousands of words written delineating what work is, but what is relevant here is the section that defines "carrying any object from a private place (like your home) to a public place" (like the grocery store or even the synagogue) as work. "Objects" are further defined as anything other than the clothes on your back, including your house keys, pushing a baby stroller or even an umbrella. Obviously this would cause problems if strictly adhered to. A "solution" had to be found; and by "solution" I mean a way to technically observe the rule while simultaneously getting around it. This work-around involved attaching some physical extension to the home that enlarged what would be considered the "private" space. In earlier times Jews tended to be segregated from the Christians and the walls of their ghetto served to separate what was inside (private) from what was outside (public). In modern times the extension usually takes the form of wires attached to utility poles, enclosing the neighborhood, or in some cases a whole municipality. So what you have is a fairly simple commandment: "Rest, i.e. do no work", that has been complicated beyond belief, but rather than admit that the rules are ridiculous, and say "we're just not going to do it", ways to get around the rules while technically obeying them are devised. Orthodox Jews can still claim to follow The Law, while being able to circumvent it in order to live their modern lives.

Lest you think it's just those crazy Jews who do things like this, I was involved in a Christian fringe group a few years ago that interpreted a verse that said "Owe no man any thing, only to love" as a prohibition against any kind of debt. While not as labyrinthine as the Talmudic rules, this organization, The Way International, had all kinds of rules about what was debt and what was not, but were very firm about prohibiting their members from having bank loans. This obviously would cause a problem  for anyone wanting to buy a home, since it is unlikely that anyone other than the very wealthy would have enough cash on hand to buy a home without securing a loan. What some Way people did was convince a non-Way family member to buy the home and sell it to the Way family member in some complicated deal that they convinced themselves wasn't debt. I never understood this maneuver, since you were still in debt, just not to a bank. The most creative debt avoidance move that I saw involved a guy who was buying his home from his parents a little at a time. Rather than call it a loan, he called it partial ownership. If he paid them $10,000 on a $100,000 home, then he owned 10% and they owned 90%. If he paid an additional $20,000, he now owned 30% and so on. He peddled this theory to Way leadership, but we never found out how well it worked since his parents died in a car crash and he inherited the home outright.

Finally, there's the example of the annulment. Some churches are against divorce and even consider it adultery if a divorced person remarries. But there is a loophole, the annulment.  A marriage that is annulled is treated as if it never existed. While I can imagine circumstances where a church might want to make an exception to their no-divorce rule, (e.g. underage bride or groom, diminished capacity, human trafficking) I know personally of situations where an annulment was sought and granted simply to recognize a divorce and get the couple back into the church's good graces. We don't believe in divorce but we'll grant you this divorce as long as we don't call it a divorce.

What are we to make of all this? These are just a few examples that have popped up in my news feed or in conversations recently. I think that in general people like to talk the talk and put their holy books and pronouncements by holy men up on pedestals, but when it gets in the way of what they really want to do, or if it becomes inconvenient, they still want to talk the talk without walking the walk.

Lughnasadh 2017

As a modern pagan I've always made a habit of changing my spiritual outlook as circumstances change, my point of view changes, and as I see that certain things don't "work" or don't fit into reality as I observe it. I meditate and do shamanic journeying, but have come to the conclusion that it doesn't matter if what I "see" during times of altered consciousness is objectively real or "just" exists in my mind. Are the gods objectively real, or just expressions of greater truth? Who cares? How about magic? If doing a ritual helps me focus so that I can mundanely bring my will to pass, what difference does it make if it's supernatural or not?

One of the things that I'm relatively faithful at doing as part of my pagan spiritual practice is spending some time in "the woods", i.e. Wilderness Park at every one of the sabbats.  Today was Lughnasadh, the "cross quarter" day approximately halfway between the summer solstice and the autumn equinox. There's a variety of ways that modern pagans view this sabbat, one, which I subscribe to, connects it to the first harvests. It's a time when plans begin to come to fruition. If you compare the Wheel of the Year to a person's life, with either Samhain or Yule as the beginning and end, Lughnasadh is about where I am now, about ¾ of the way through a typical lifespan. And wouldn't you know it - in a lot of ways things are coming together pretty well. I live a stable, yet fulfilling life, with a great wife and pretty cool adult kids; I have a job that is challenging yet not stressful, I make a difference in people's lives a wedding minister and I am beginning to get recognition for my main creative outlet: photography. As Lughnasadh marks a time in the year where the time of planting and growth is mostly past, but there is still plenty of time to reap and to enjoy the fruits of labor, so I stand at a similar point in the Wheel of Life.

This is one of the reasons why I do these nature walks on the sabbats - I get insight into life and living. This year was no exception.