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Is Rick Santorum a Pagan?

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All the press coverage over Rick Santorum’s idiotic suggestions that mainline Protestants aren’t Christians, or that President Obama isn’t a Christian, or that prenatal care increases abortion rates, or that people who favor prenatal care favor eugenics, have obscured his equally idiotic attacks on environmentalism:

Santorum said that he was referring not to the president’s faith but to environmentalism.

“Well, I was talking about the radical environmentalists,” he told Schieffer. “That’s what I was talking about: Energy, this idea that man is here to serve the Earth, as opposed to husband its resources and be good stewards of the Earth. And I think that is a phony ideal. I don’t believe that that’s what we’re here to do – that man is here to use the resources and use them wisely, to care for the Earth, to be a steward of the Earth, but we’re not here to serve the Earth.

“The Earth is not the objective,” Santorum said. “Man is the objective. I think a lot of radical environmentalists have it upside-down.”

We’ve heard a lot about Santorum’s supposed deep religiosity, but if he really believes that “man is the objective,” then it might be better to term him a pagan, or at least an atheist.  The touchstone of any religious worldview is that humanity is not the measure of all things: there are bigger and more important things in the universe than human beings, and thus that humility is part and parcel of an ethically appropriate worldview.  If that’s what Santorum means by people who believe that man is supposed to “serve the Earth,” then in fact he is attacking most major religions.

In fact, the religious idea of humanity understanding its limitations is the essential idea of being the “steward of the earth.”  In Genesis, God’s command to Adam to rule over the earth is not for Adam’s sake: it is to preserve it for God’s sake.  We are servants of a higher power, who commands us to hold something in trust for Him (Her/It: Your Mileage May Vary).  So of course we should not regard the Earth as simply something to satisfy our wants.  Being a steward is not the same as being a tyrant.  As I have written before, the Rabbis understood this: our right to rule over the Earth is only to the extent that we act as the Image of God.  Santorum might not understand this, but It Is Not About Us.

I suppose it is superfluous to add that whatever “radical environmentalism” might mean, it is nowhere to be found in President Obama’s environmental policy.  Wanting to mitigate and adapt to catastrophic climate change might be many things, but it is not radical.  Unless of course, one regards as “radical” acting upon a scientific theory that has been repeatedly proved and accepted by virtually every scientist on the planet.  Which might even be Santorum’s definition.

So I don’t know whether Santorum is a pagan, or an atheist.  What is clear is that like most of the religious Right, he’s unconversant with the most basic ideas of what he claims to be his faith.

They Tripped Through Its Wires

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What comes to mind when you hear the phrase, “The Joshua Tree”?

I’m just back from a week at Joshua Tree National Park.  I was enormously fortunate to attend a fabulous Jewish Wilderness Spirituality program of Torah Trek, the brainchild of Rabbi Mike Comins.  Comins’ book, A Wild Faith, is the fundamental starting point for examining the connection between religion and wilderness. If you are interested at all in the relationship between nature and spirituality, Torah Trek does it better than  anyone.  Highly recommended!

One strange thing jumped out at me, though, when looking at the National Park Service materials.  For the last year, the Park has celebrated its 75th anniversary: President Franklin Roosevelt created the Joshua Tree National Monument in 1936, and thanks to the efforts of Senator Dianne Feinstein, it became a full-fledged national park under the California Desert Protection Act of 1994.  So of course the Park Service, and the Joshua Tree National Park Association, produced some excellent short histories of the park and the natural history of desert wildlife.

But one thing was missing from every single document: U2, the band that brought The Joshua Tree to national consciousness.  Not in the history of the park.  Not in the descriptions of the park.  Nowhere in any of the materials.  There was even a guitar raffle – and nothing about the Irish rockers.

It’s hard to argue that the band’s album meant nothing to the status of the area. The Joshua Tree  came out in 1987, stayed for nine weeks at #1 and for 35 weeks in the Billboard Top 10.  It eventually went triple-platinum, and U2 appeared on the cover of Time magazine — only the fourth band ever to do so.  Preservationists had fought for decades to upgrade the Monument to a National Park, to no avail.  Seven years after U2, it happened.

So what gives?  How could the National Park Service write a history of a park and ignore the most important cultural event in the park’s history?

It could be simple incompetence.  But perhaps there is some bad blood here.  It should be mentioned that although U2′s members have been quite philanthropic, and Bono has done terrific work on international poverty and global debt relief, it seems as if they have had little use for the park or the area since the album came out.  As far as I know, the band members have never returned, or even mentioned the place.  The Joshua Tree was never really a living thing in the album: it was just a metaphor for spiritual desolation — a metaphor that distorts the vibrancy of the real California desert.

This past week, Rabbi Comins taught us something that will always stay with me: give back to nature what you take from it.  It provides us with sustenance, and we have no right not to repay it.  U2′s members, for all their good work (and better music), may have forgotten this (and in the case of guitarist The Edge, may be guilty of despoiling other natural wonders).  If Joshua Tree really is God’s Country, then The Holy One does not figure to be pleased.

Perspective

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For Kenneth Clark, it was ¨the greatest small painting in the world¨. It´s certainly a masterpiece - and a puzzle. Why did the Umbrian master Piero della Francesca choose around 1450 to paint an overworked stock subject, the Flagellation of Christ, in this extraordinary way?
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Should Jews Embrace the Jefferson Bible?

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A Prophet for Jews?

I was surprised and very pleased to find that Tantor Audio has recently released the Jefferson Bible on audio.  More Americans — and particularly more Jewish Americans — should get to know this work much better.

What is the Jefferson Bible?  Recall the 3rd President of the United States.

Thomas Jefferson loved Jesus.  He told John Adams that he considered Jesus’ ethical teachings to be “the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man.”  But Christianity he could have done without.  He regarded most of it as superstitious hocus pocus.  What’s an ethical deist to do?

For Jefferson, the task was clear.  After finishing up a (relatively short) work day at Pennsylvania Avenue, Jefferson literally took his razor and started cutting up the four gospels, excising everything that even hinted at Jesus’ divinity: no angels, no Trinity, no resurrection.  Then he redacted the results into a coherent narrative, producing a volume entitled The Life and Teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.  Ever the politician, Jefferson did not dare publish it during his lifetime.  But his grandson did, in 1895.  And even to this day, it’s a remarkable document: you can check it out for free online.

For Jews, the Jefferson Bible is more of historical interest.  Its teachings are, quite literally, our teachings.  It records the words and sermons of an itinerant Jewish preacher of the Second Temple period; the Sermon on the Mount may be remembered in Koine, the language of Eastern Mediterranean merchants, but it was delivered in Aramaic, the language of Talmudic rabbis.  We should be unashamed to embrace it, quote from it, and even cite it as persuasive authority as a way of interpreting the Jewish tradition. 

Put another way, the Jefferson Bible is a form of Aggadah, the homiletic and philosophical materials of the Talmud (usually contrasted with the legal materials known as Halachah).  Since Aggadah only constitutes one-third of the Talmud, it could use some topping up.   The Sermon on the Mount would make a welcome addition to the Jewish canon.

Does Jefferson’s role give these provisions any additional authority? I don’t really know. I’m a critic of Jefferson; I find him generally to be a hypocrite in politics, whose theoretical problems with slavery obscured his dedicated efforts to protect it.  But one cannot deny the man’s intelligence and fierce love of learning.  And given his undeniable importance in our nation’s history, American Jews might have a special reason for holding onto this text. 

All Judaism is syncretic.  One cannot read The Guide for the Perplexed without seeing the influence of Muslim ideas on Jewish theology.  Indeed, one cannot read Kohelet without seeing the influence of Greek philosophy.  This is no different; in the same way that Maimonides could use Al-Farabi’s intellectual authority to import his ideas into Torah, American Jews could use Jefferson’s authority to do the same with Jesus — and without in any way, shape, or form risk Christianizing the tradition.  We should be unafraid to continue what Maimonides did.

Psilocybin at the End of Life: A Doorway to Peace

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There exists an experience you can (probably) have, in a single day, that may lastingly improve your outlook on life, even if you’re in fear because the end of your life is near.  Researchers are once again using psilocybin to occasion such experiences in patients facing life-threatening illness.

Steve Ross, a psychiatrist at NYU, has written a wonderful article about it:  Psilocybin at the End of Life: A Doorway to Peace.  You may be curious to compare Ross’s contemporary snapshot with a lecture given at Harvard Divinity School by Walter Pahnke in 1968, The Psychedelic Mystical Experience and the Human Encounter with Death.

In the intervening four decades, some things have changed, presumably for the better – for example, it is no longer routine to withhold frank ‘c-word’ diagnoses and prognoses from patients.  As for making use of the potential of mystical-type experience (aka non-dual consciousness, primary religious experience) to ease a patient’s psychological distress, Rip Van Winkle’s slumber is into double overtime.

If you know of anyone who may want to participate in a study of psilocybin with cancer patients, two are now open:  the Ross team’s at NYU and a study at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore.  For the latter, need-based partial grants are available to help out-of-town volunteers with travel expenses.

 

Psilocybin and personality change

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My colleagues at Johns Hopkins have a new paper out, reporting that psilocybin, the “magic mushroom” chemical, can bring about significant and lasting changes in a key aspect of personality. This is big news for academic psychology:

A large body of evidence, including longitudinal analyses of personality change, suggests that core personality traits are predominantly stable after age 30. To our knowledge, no study has demonstrated changes in personality in healthy adults after an experimentally manipulated discrete event. Intriguingly, double-blind controlled studies have shown that the classic hallucinogen psilocybin occasions personally and spiritually significant mystical experiences that predict long-term changes in behaviors, attitudes and values. In the present report we assessed the effect of psilocybin on changes in the five broad domains of personality – Neuroticism, Extroversion, Openness, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness. Consistent with participant claims of hallucinogen-occasioned increases in aesthetic appreciation, imagination, and creativity, we found significant increases in Openness following a high-dose psilocybin session. In participants who had mystical experiences during their psilocybin session, Openness remained significantly higher than baseline more than 1 year after the session.  [from the report’s abstract]

The five domains named above constitute the widely embraced Five Factor Model of personality.  Openness, the factor showing increases in the Hopkins studies, is described as curiosity, creativity, openness to unusual ideas, openness to emotion, openness to adventure, appreciation for art, and variety of experience.  Its poles are described as ”inventive/curious vs. consistent/cautious.”

Surely there can be too much of a good thing: so “open” as to be awash in fantasy, for example, or continually overwhelmed by emotion.  But for more than a few of us, doesn’t a judicious increase in Openness sound appealing?

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“Abraham and Sarah On the Way to Costco”

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If scholars in several hundred years ever write the obituary of American Judaism, a key source document will surely be this piece from The Forward.  Its title says it all: Rabbis Go Hollywood for High Holy Day Sermon Tips: Same Rules Apply to ‘Mad Men’ Episodes and Rosh Hashanah Talks.

The piece concerns “the High Holy Days Seminar, the largest trans-denominational gathering of rabbis on the West Coast.”  And oh what a seminar it is:

“Rabbis want to be on the cutting edge,” said [seminar organizer Rabbi Jon] Hanish, who organized the Professional Writers Workshop for the August 16 seminar. Having dabbled in the movie business, Hanish attended the University of Southern California’s film school, sold a few screenplays and ran a postproduction facility before deciding to deliver sermons instead of pitching scripts. “My screenwriting classes taught me more about writing sermons than rabbinical school,” he said.

Hanish . . . by drawing on his industry ties pulled together a slew of star writers for the workshop. The impressive roster included [Janet] Leahy and colleague Lisa Albert, both writers for The AMC series “Mad Men”; Emmy- and Golden Globe-winning television writer/producer David M. Israel of Nickelodeon’s new series “How To Rock,” and Jason Katims (NBC’S “Parenthood” and “Friday Night Lights,” Fox’s “Boston Public”).

“We are all working on something,” Hanish said jokingly at the beginning of the session before directing the writers and rabbis to break into working groups of two and three.

The writers expressed some awe at the task at hand.

“The High Holy Days is like your sweeps,” Albert said, referring to the crucial weeks when TV ratings count most. “It’s like giving doctors advice just because you wrote ‘ER,’” another writer added.

…

David Weiss handed back to a rabbi a sermon whose theme was “This Is the Moment.” Words were circled on the page. He gently advised using more humor — “Top 10 lists, or taking the biblical and transposing it to the modern… you know, Abraham and Sarah on the way to Costco. Cheesy cheap tricks like that.”

It almost makes you wonder how thousands of years of rabbis could get by only on Torah.

What precisely is one supposed to feel about this?  Contempt for rabbinical programs that cannot give their charges any more than they have?  Or their admissions departments that can’t get better people?  Or the postwar generation of American Jews that hollowed out the religion so much that no one could appreciate the depth and power of the tradition?

When I was growing up, my favorite part of my synagogue was grassy area where the Sukkah would be raised every year. It was a great, leafy, glorious structure, covered with vegetables and gourds.  I loved it.  And then one year I came back from college and discovered to my horror that the area had been paved over and was now home to a gray, steel Holocaust memorial.  If that’s all you have from the tradition, and you don’t want to harp on the Holocaust, then I suppose all you have left is “Mad Men.”

I realize it’s a tough job market out there, but it seems to me that there are a few people who ought to be looking for another line of work.

 

Mushroom Myth-conceptions, Part 2

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Earlier, I posted some of the key findings of the Johns Hopkins psilocybin experiments and a condensation of the concerns and criticisms the research has drawn. I promised responses to some of those concerns; this is the first in that series.

Concern/criticism:  “What’s the big deal?  I took mushrooms, and my experience was neither ‘spiritual’ nor life-changing.”

This of course proves that not all hallucinogen experiences are profound, but not that none is.*

Why are some hallucinogen experiences recalled as life-transforming and others as trivial?  Likely because the trivial experiences involved a suboptimal dosage, ill-focused intentions, a suboptimal setting, or the wrong person. Or because even when all those things are right, any given experience may not be profound. But the research shows that well-screened and well-prepared people given a sufficient dose under good circumstances have a two-thirds or better chance of a profound experience, and a very small risk of real harm.
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Mushroom Myth-conceptions

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Last month’s report on a Johns Hopkins study of psilocybin and spirituality, of which I’m a co-author, has drawn numerous comments on blogs and on-line news articles.  A fraction of those comments have raised questions or criticisms which I’d like to try to address.  (On the RBC, see Mark’s posts and Andy’s critique.)

For those who think that substances such as psilocybin have something valuable to offer spiritual seekers, myself included, it may be helpful to reflect upon the concerns of people less invested in the subject (“disinterested,” even).  At the same time, the exercise could help clear up misunderstandings of the research or its implications.

Here’s a condensation of the issues I’ve heard raised.  I will be taking them up one at a time in forthcoming posts.  If you’re aware of other issues, feel free to add them as comments to this post.

1.  “I took mushrooms, and my experience was neither ‘spiritual’ nor life-changing.  So what’s the big deal?” (response)

2.  The studies used volunteers with a spiritual orientation, so of course they reported spiritual experiences, and so the studies prove nothing.

3.  Hallucinogens cause hallucinations; hallucinations cannot be a source of learning, healing, or betterment.

4.  Psilocybin may cause people to adopt untrue beliefs (e.g., about the nature of ultimate reality).

5.  The substance may harm some people or cause them to harm themselves or others.

6.  An enlightening experience doesn’t necessarily lead to an enlightened life.

For a refresher on the research findings, continue reading beneath the fold.

(And many thanks to Mark and to Keith for welcoming me to the RBC.)

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Magic mushrooms and non-magical thinking

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Mark’s post on the new ‘shroom study draws on many themes that those who read his work will be familiar with. Psychedlic drugs, psilocybin in particular, can be taken safely; they can produce intense experiences that positively affect mood and behavior; the side effects can be managed; it’s a shame that it’s illegal to take them even under the circumstances that make these things possible. Though it sounds as if the study had some flaws (per Hugo de Toronga’s comment at the study link above, doctor-patient interaction might have skewed the results) and though I wonder why Mark doesn’t apply to this case his usual skepticism about how legalization regimes can go wrong, I’m broadly convinced by all these claims.

What I’m not convinced by (and what he never really argues towards) is his conclusion that taking psilocybin is actually a good thing. Check out (via Kevin Drum) some of the study volunteers’ statements of what they experience after taking the drug. They seem grateful to have traveled much further down a road well worth not taking.

Here are some highlights:

 

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