Visualizing a Healthy Planet

Modern Quakers don’t talk a lot about faith and hope, but they are an important part of our relationship to the earth and to God. Seeing the world through spiritual eyes requires that we see the kingdom of heaven both as not yet and as already here. For centuries the populations of two of the largest nations on Earth, India and China, remained trapped in abject poverty and showed no signs of progress. But in the last twenty years both these nations have experienced a huge shift which has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. When people rise out of poverty they have fewer children and they use resources more efficiently. When we visualize a healthy planet I think we want to visualize good lives for all Earth’s people. Visualize all the world’s poor finding productive jobs and being able to live decent, comfortable lives.
With the Cold War over, only the United States remains fully militarized. We spend as much on war and preparations for war as the rest of the world combined. If this changed, it would mean a huge transfer of resources towards constructive activity. At the moment about half of America’s engineers are employed designing weapons. Visualize all those engineers working steadily away at making little improvements in solar panels, electric cars, commuter trains, etc.
And we should not be afraid to dream big dreams. Imagine the Sahara Desert covered with a solar energy grid supplying the energy needs of both Europe and Africa. Imagine huge wind farms on the great plains of Siberia supplying clean energy to China and Russia. A healthy planet does not require that people go back to living in the Stone Age. The way humans live on this planet now is not sustainable. But that is because we believe we must live with war and with a huge gap between rich and poor. A world of peace and social justice would be a world of small families living in modest comfort. Such a world is not impossible in the least. It is a dream we must dream with all the passion and the faith we can muster to make it real.
The prophets of Israel looked and saw a spiritual picture of how God’s world could and would be. They visualized “every man neath his vine and fig tree” beating swords into ploughshares. Faith and hope tap into the power of God and make visions real.

A Short History of the Protestant Reformation

Human beings are evil. Everything we do is evil. Any appearance of humans seemingly doing good things is an illusion. When a person seems to be doing something good it is actually God who is doing the good act. The person remains completely evil. There is no such thing as free will which would allow people to choose to do good or choose to do evil. We are all evil and have no choice about it. Since everyone is evil without a single ounce of goodness, justice demands that everyone go to hell and suffer for eternity. Jesus however was perfectly good. He did not deserve any suffering at all because he was perfectly good. However, he did suffer and die. Now comes the really tricky part. God can now pardon any sinner he chooses to pardon because his sense of justice has been satisfied by the fact that an innocent person has been punished. Since everyone is equally and completely guilty God has no basis at all for pardoning one person rather than another. So he grants this pardon to some people for no reason at all and withholds this pardon from others for no reason at all. Those whom he pardons are those to whom he gives the “gift of faith.” (This is where it all comes around full circle.) Being given the gift of faith means God has caused you to believe the tricky part! Faith is believing what I called the tricky part. How do we know this is true? It is true because this is what Paul says in his epistles, chiefly Romans. Now Christians had read Paul for fifteen centuries before Luther picked him up and nobody ever found this doctrine in Paul before. How do we know this is what Paul meant? Well, because this is the “plain and obvious” reading of Paul and being given the gift of faith means that you do find this in Paul. Not being able to find this in Paul means you have not been given the gift of faith and so are not among the lucky to be pardoned. Sorry about that. Maybe you will just get lucky later. As one of the blessed lucky few I’ll pray for you. As for me I’m feeling really happy and relieved that I will spend eternity in paradise because I do believe the tricky part.

Focus in the Classroom

This semester I am trying two new things in my classes.

First of all, I am declaring the classroom a "technology-free" zone. While in the past I've only had a few students bring laptops, and those students have been good students who remained highly engaged in class, last semester suddenly a lot of students started bringing laptops and smartphones, using them in ways that clearly disengaged them from class discussions. It also became clear that those students missed a lot that we went over in class. So, this semester I am going to ban laptop computers, cell phones, and smartphones from class, explaining that I want us to focus on each other and on the discussion happening in the classroom.

Second, I am going to start each class with five minutes of quiet meditation. I have in the past used meditation in some classes, where it was obviously relevant to introduce students to a variety of meditation techniques. And the students have really loved this. And so now I've decided to do this in all of my classes, and for every class session, simply because it is good for us. It quiets the mind, and prepares us all to focus.

Related to both of the above, I am going to make time now and then to talk in class about how to think more consciously about how we live our lives.

I'll report back about how this goes.