thank you all for coming tonight and tonight what we're wrestling with is a big question the theme of why the bible is not the word of god begs the question who's god which god what is god and who cares anyway and perhaps in our discussion we will get into those particular questions but as a starting point again want to point out that i'm grateful to andrew and valerie for being with us all three of us come out of the same branch of christianity  and they are joining with me tonight to focus on this deeply spiritual question about authority who or what authors your life that's what tonight is really about that's what the questions really about each of us come from a narrow christian tradition that has as its primary authority the bible bible is a specific set of writings and it held authority over our emotions and our actions in other words rather than our own intellect and our own experiences rather than even trusting our own self we each come from a story that told us to conform our experience and our intellect to certain revealed truths and these truths were written in the bible and of course interpreted by clergy and each of us are alienated from that tradition each of us have taken a path out of that tradition each of us have found that such a way of life that such a story didn't work for us and it didn't answer our questions it didn't help us mature it didn't help us evolve and so this forum why the bible is not the word of god is actually about authority who or what authors you life who or what helps guide you in your behaviors your thoughts your emotions your attitudes in your daily moments for some authority it is located in an ideology for others it's in a patriotism of some sort or a loyalty that is given to a person or an idea or a tribe or a tradition others locate authorities within themselves but that simply begs the question well who are you and what has shaped you into being who you are none of us can get away from the question of what story has shaped us what authority is there in our life that guides our emotions and our intellect now historically there has always been from the beginning a tension within christianity it's a tension about power and control for some christianity is an inherited tradition they don't really think much about it it's a family and tribal tradition they've been raised in it and therefore it's true for others it's a mystical experience and it and that mystical experience is made sense of through this big overall christian story and from the very beginning there was a tension between those who were mystically and spiritually innovative and those who were rooted in the rituals that gave comfort and hope but the tension leads to problems once you gather in community for example what happens even inside a family or a network or a team or or any communal endeavor when disagreement inevitably pops up some disagreements are minor and a group particularly a small group can process it all through consensus and dialogue but as the group grows and the issues deepen the glue that holds the group together paul's out for a broker or an arbitrary who can adjudicate between factions and traditionally as you all know in the family this was who papa papa traditionally was the papa papa was the presence of authority power and control and tribally the papa became the chief the king of the great secular experiment of america was to locate authority inside the law and the constitution and that was a check and balance by the majority of those that the log constitution ruled today and this is i'm trying to make a connection here today one of the problems that we're having in our society is that we're living in a time of shattered and shredded authority the glue that held us together is coming undone now as the church grew up it also split into factions the orthodox branch located authority god if you will inside the liturgy itself and to this day if you go and you worship inside an orthodox church you'll participate in almost the identical rituals that they participated in one thousand nine hundred one thousand eight hundred years ago the wrong because that's where god is god is in the liturgy you will experience god there have been opens up and comes to earth there the roman catholic church as you know sees the rule of interpretation both of scripture in the faith they placed it into the hands of the papa the pope who then commissions his priests we call them father to be  representatives and the presence of god became located in the eucharistic sharing of bread and cup which became a spiritual communion of consuming the literal body and blood of christ magically transferring his spirit into the believer and all of this was under the authority of the papa now the protestant reformation which we all come from the word protestant means to protest rebelled against these constraints and they basically said every believer is his own home his own and they have direct access to the presence of god so truth authority was inside the believer but there was a problem if everybody has access how do you settle disagreements the protestant principle located the god's presence in the scriptural text itself the bible itself became the location of god gods even though we both developed our image of god out of the very same text so it's kind of a mess this authority question it's not an easy one to unravel but here and here is where everyone christian or not religious or not can fit into this conversation tonight you all have the same identical problem we as a nation have the same identical problem who are we as a people what are the values that us together despite our differences what authority what authorities are we willing to submit to for the good of all essentially what story are we telling ourselves that helps us all get along and that to me is at the root of this question about the bible being the word of god and so i'm going to turn it over to valerie hold and turn it over to andrew and they're just going to offer some reflections these are unscripted they know what i'm going to say i don't know what this fall during the election cycle we had a number of republican candidates who had what i would describe as rape tourette's meaning they just couldn't help blurting horrible things about rape and and you know that included our own candidate john koster who mercifully lost the election probably because of that but one of the you know and one of the people who had that condition that i describe as rape tourettes said you know basically even if even if the you know rape is this horrible thing if there's a pregnancy that comes out of it and a baby is born that something that god intended it was murdock i think who said that and i thought you know the reason they keep blurting horrible things about rape in the reason they get stuck in these awful media circuses is because they're they're trapped by their by their beliefs there are certain kinds of fundamentalist beliefs that actually bind people and so i decided to write an article about that i write for a place called alt net and the huffington post and some other places online and so i set out to write an article that i titled what the bible says about rape and rate babies and i basically wanted to make the point that when people have this view that there is an interventionist god who you know kind of who is messing around with of our affairs and who says you know like in the book of isaiah i created good and evil that they end up stuck with these beliefs that if you kind of trap them in an interview get uncovered and then they look really awful because they actually are really awful and as i was wrestling with that article i realized something about the bible that i'd never noticed before which is that there is no place in the bible that it says or implies that a woman's consent is needed or desired prior to sexual intercourse not the old testament not the new testament there are other ways that female and male relationships change over the course of time in which the bible was written and the those texts were assembled that is not one of them  and in fact if you look at the bible there are many ways and many kinds of relationships and reproductive strategies if you will that suggest that non consensual sex is both sanctified endorsed by the code of behavior that is kind of in place at the time and that god then blesses nonconsensual sex with boy babies who go on to kind of be you know patriarchs and such so you know an early example of that might be rachel and leah fighting over who is going to bear the most offspring and then when they're having fertility problems in the mandrakes aren't work roots aren't working too well sending in their servants sarah also as you know sends an hegar it never suggests that hagar has a say that right and then of course and then you know another example early on might be just than the whole notion that fathers give their daughters in marriage one of the things that happens in the old testament if you actually look closely at the old testament ethic governing male female relationships it's actually not a rights ethic like there are real there are there is an ethic in the old testament law that covers inner relationships between men and that tends to be  an ethic that is that is the kind of i think that we think of today governing relationships between equals but the relationship covering females is a property ethic actually so a female is property her role is to produce offspring of known origin if she gets raped the rapist can essentially buy her by paying her father fifty shekels and then he is obligated to keep her  if a woman on the other hand ruins her economic value by voluntarily losing her virginity and becoming then of kind of questionable emotional status and question all pregnancy status she can be killed for it so so there's the standard and the and again that is the standards that it puts women into the same category that slaves are in that livestock are in and that children are in throughout most of the biblical texts so i say that as an example of why the bible can't be the word of god and part of what happens when people engage in a process that i call bibliolatry which means making an idol out of the biblical text itself putting it on a pedestal treating it as if were not the struggling of our ancestors to understand what is good and what is real and how to live in moral community with each other but when instead they put it on a text on a pedestal and make it the bible itself an idol then it binds them to these iron age understanding's of what it means to be male and female what it means to be human what it means to be good and some very very ugly things come out of that kind of  constructed a version of christianity that stands or falls on that biblical literalism said if the resurrection didn't literally happen there is no reason for us to be here if the resurrection didn't literally happen there are parties to be had there are women to be had there are guns to shoot there are people to shoot and at the time feeling a little snarky about the whole thing i thought to myself well you know if the only thing standing between you and debauchery lechery and violence is your belief in the literal resurrection i'm really really glad you believe that i was irritated because of course i don't have to tell you in this room what he was implying about the rest of us but if you look at think about what he said a little more seriously part of what what it conveys or what it reveals perhaps inadvertently is this sense that that if you embrace this complex and and robust answer to the question of why we shouldn't be drunk and raping and killing each other there are very good reasons they're very good answers to those questions but in the context of biblical literalism you never get there how much time do i have left i when i was working on my book trusting doubt one of the things that i realized in thinking and wrestling with this question of biblical literalism is that you know i said is the is the worship of a book it's actually the worship of a communications technology the written text and if you think about human history there was a time when our best understanding of the world around us are our  metaphoric mythic epic stories were handed down by oral tradition in fact much of what's in the bible was originally handed down that way but when things were handed down by oral tradition they were free to evolve as as human society evolves as it became more complex as technology has changed as as our understanding of ourselves and each other and the world around us deepened when we when we develop the written word one of the things that happened actually is that allowed us in a sense to become developmentally arrested because the written word is static and so it allows there to become a disconnect between people's understanding of what is true and what is sacred and and the ongoing change in society and our interdependence and complexity which grows as technology changes and as people become more densely populated and so forth and and then when you have the canonization of texts right a set of texts you not only have a given text that static you have a set of texts now that is static so it says not only do we is  you know this fragment unalterable but now we've got the bible or this collection that can't be added to or deleted from and and and and then what that does is it really as i said earlier binds people to a specific set of fire of in this case iron age understandings of the world around us and goodness and and and god if if if that is kind of how you describe the ultimate reality and the ultimate goodness i get excited about the internet in part because i think one of the things that it does is it puts the conversation back in motion so that you  have the best of the written word right which is what the written word lets you do is it lets you take ideas assemble them slowly think about them in a deep way and then transmit them to people who have no physical contact with each other and who don't have the capacity to retain an oral tradition which i certainly don't have and at the same time it's fluid it's always changing and there's a whole generation of people who recognise like if you know who recognise that like you go to wikipedia and the article may not be the same from one day to to to the next in fact a static body of text is is considered a weakness they say a book is out of date the minute that it's in print and we have now developed a communications technology that transcends that so i think that that both timea again is a reminder of why the bible can't be the word of god it's so finite so it's so fine i thought it's obsolete from a technology standpoint and it also gives me hope that we are able to really put the conversation the big conversation back in motion all right so so i'm going to be a little bit contrary and also i thought i might find myself unexpectedly or in ways that i hadn't hadn't quite imagine agreeing surly with with valerie's point of view well offering a contrast to it so i also i grew up in a family in which the word of god the bible that is literally the king james version of the bible a precise precise designation of a specific translation of the bible that was made in about sixteen hundred and something like that sixteen eleven and all of the rhythms all of the rhythms of my speech all of the rhythms of my childhood would work out in the language of the king james version of the bible to the extent that senate twenty some years ago when i first came to seattle and i went to the university of washington for a couple of years i took the first ever shakespeare class i had ever taken and on the first day of class we were assigned to read one of shakespeare's plays and i took it home and i didn't understand anything that i was reading the language was if it seemed like a foreign language to me and and then on the second day of class the professor just happened to mention that shakespeare wrote most of his plays around the same time that king james version of the bible was translated and i went home and i could read every single word of every shakespeare play and i knew what the language was it was as though there was this shift at a cellular level for me that just transformed my ability to understand shakespeare so i grew up in a world in which not only the language was precise but it was dependent dependably accurate in the most scientific in the most scientific way every single word of the bible was directly specifically by god in order to communicate directly and completely with the human beings who are on who are on this planet so i also grew up in a world in which the bible was viewed as as sensually as a scientific text that is when when when who is the guy who stood on the hill and god stopped the earth from moving for about a joshua joshua stood on the hill and and in the middle of the battle god wanted to give more time for the israelites to beat their opponents and so god said alright hold up your your hand with i can't remember the story now i read about it his motion that was literally true it was a scientific observation and it was recorded in the bible and we were expected to accept and believe every single word of it exactly so that they could slaughter the enemy so here's what's interesting we all actually all of us grew up in a world in which the word belief has been given within the past couple of hundred years really only in relatively modern times a very specific meaning that it never had before the word belief today essentially means agreement or can grew in swith a certain stated set of factual declarations it me if i believe something it means somebody out there says here's some stuff here's some objective observations or here's a set of of  conclusive of conclusions you can draw about the state of the universe or the nature of reality or about what human beings are or who we are what we do and if you agree with these police then you are orthodox and if you agree with those other beliefs then you are not worth the docs or you believe in some other system of thought but there's we're still talking about beliefs here but in the bible the translation of the bible as a matter of fact the word belief came for from a root of the greek word pistis p i s t i s and it did not mean intellectual or agreement with a set of intellectual assertions it instead meant face and by faith what it meant was essentially what is it that fundamentally deeply motivates your life what is it that absolutely is at the center of who you are what is it the drives your behavior and your relate your relationships what is it that moves your passions in the deepest possible way it's interesting to me also that the first recorded instance in the history of the world when the word atheist was used it was in it in the second century a d it was used in the context of the roman empire and it was used only and explicitly to define and describe christians the reason is that for the first time somebody in the roman empire was willing to say i do literally i do not believe that caesar is the son of god the savior of the world the gospel is the good news of roman law spread through the provinces that caesar himself will be will be resurrected and will live again he is the son of god very literally all of the language that we know of today as being the language of christianity was originally the language of the roman empire in describing caesar and ironic the ironic substitution of jesus perceives or was a crime against the state atheists were people who said your version of god i think is bullshit there is a different way to understand what god is and people died for that belief in some sense i'm not at all sure that valerie for example in calling herself an atheist would agree with me but my guess is that valerie's brand of atheism is far far closer to the original definition of an atheist as someone who has a completely different understanding of what divinity or spirituality is all about than the than the prevailing culture was willing to admit and far closer to what jesus proclaimed as the word of god then many many generations of so called christians since then so my answer to the question what is the word of god or is the bible is the word the word of god my answer is actually yes and no yes and no yes in the sense that there is something unnameable something mysterious something beyond human comprehension something way outside our ability to grasp and describe an analyze and it's something that that for want of a better word we call many of us call god when i think about god i don't think actually about you know the notion that i had with god when i was growing up is this all white guy sitting in the sky on a golden throne in the middle of of a city with twelve gates with golden streets and pearly pearly walls sitting on a throne from which under which  from under which flowed the river of life and god with his great big white beard and his big white robe and his gleaming eyeballs essentially told all the rest of his you're going to hell you're going to heave n you're going to hell you're going to heaven i think that's bull loney complete and utter bull loney it's a bridge action of our need to have a father tell us what to do and who we are but i do believe that there is something that i could call god that is all about the realisation of the human imagination the set of relationships of multitude of relationships that we have each with the other and with every other single living creature in the universe and that relationship i would call god or i would call love or i would call delight or i would call possibility i don't you i could use all kinds of different words in that in the sense that i understand god by the fundamentalist that i grew up among i might be termed a fundamental an atheist but i think it's something much bigger and much deeper than that actually so when i think about the word of god i think well yes actually the bible was the word of god and so is that folding chair right there so is that light bulb up there so are you so am i so is the river that flows the door that flows into elliott bay with all of the pus till months and all of the pollution that it carries with it in fact i would say that every emanation of the physical world and every way in which that physical world is related to an unfit sickle world we're in unseen invisible world all of this all of us are in fact the word of god when we notice what is the word of god truly when we have this gargantuan universal understanding of the word of god we're somewhat closer to noticing what justice is all about and where love came from and how am i related to you and all of this is expressed in a phrase that you'll find in the hebrew bible and in the new testament and it's called the golden rule it's a common assertion of every significant spiritual tradition on earth that the essence the essence of what it what makes us worth worth caring about any of us is that we know how to at a cellular at an and essentially genetic level we know that it's important to care for your neighbor as as yourself to love your neighbor as yourself actually the whole the whole thing is love you know jesus and in his expression of the two fundamental commandments said there are two commandments that matter one is love the lord your god with all your heart mind and soul and the other is love your neighbor as yourself there are actually three commandments  in that statement one is love god whatever that is the depth of that statement is something that i can't express secondly love your neighbor i can get that a little bit more then love yourself  fundamentally i mean that for me is the hardest of the three commandments but it in some ways is the foundation of all of them because if you don't understand if you don't have the capacity the capacity to look deep into yourself and to notice the spark of divinity that is within you you can't recognise the spark of divinity that's in the river or in your neighbor whom you meet on the street downtown or in the park next door so i believe in the word of god i think part of there's a reason that we are yes laugh at people who get too full of themselves and one of the great things if you look at young people is that they're there there's a whole generation that in which the culture is very much about being able to laugh at yourself and to the point that you have people you know pompous people showing up on the jon stewart show because they may or may not actually be able to laugh at themselves but they understand that that's what the culture demands and that makes  authority harder and so i actually do have some hope not that we are ever going to get rid of authority because i think we are hierarchical beings i think we yearn for that i think that's that that when we look at the kinds of social structures that have succeeded that have survived over the years they survive because there are things built into our psyches that crave that on the other hand on the other hand there's change afoot that would suggest that the power of authority is diminished at least at this point in history and on a diminishing trajectory but i'd like to  jump in and have either you there or you take this on but part of the problem of authority is on the one hand i'm going to use occupy as an example occupy was chaos and if you went up to seattle community college particularly towards the end it was i mean people the impression i got was that the campers themselves are saying please somebody come and tell us to break these camps down and that was one of the reasons it was peaceful when they broke it down i mean it was it was hell on it was it was woodstock woodstock was great for the first day and when the drugs were flowing by the last day the third day it was you know it was hell and even as as a pastor i'm a person in authority and one of the places where i feel that is if if the if the pastor in a group now you can translate this into almost anything but i'll just translate into what i know if the pastor ed advocates the authority or the position of making sure that the whole gang is getting along what happens is when that person that facilitator so to speak doesn't do the job of making tough decisions the the those who are assembled the flock so to speak will devour themselves because somebody always wants power and the the trickiest wickets that i know of as a pastor to get through is when i'm around people either in the church or outside the church who claim and egalitarianism but what you really find out when you begin to look at the dynamics is it is the charismatic it is the persuader it is someone who has access to power that winds up taking it and pretending that they're not taking it  actually it's i actually don't think that that the role of authority is diminishing i think the locus of authority is changing that is in the in the era in the twenty first century in the era of social media and the internet and all of these new best new communications technologies that we have vailable to us it becomes ever more apparent that the locus of authority is is increasingly internal to every individual and the argument would be that that the only true story that i have or that any one of us have is the story that i can tell from my own life and my own experience and that's self evident actually i may have all kinds of opinions about you or the world or this politician or or that decision that somebody else made but the only absolute authority that i can claim is that i can tell you how i view the world i can tell you about the experience that i had when i was twelve years old when my dad beat the crap out of me and i responded feeling the following way or i can tell you about you know why did my first marriage break up from my point of view where i can tell you about how i felt when my child was born and i held a baby in my my arms for the first time who would someday call me dad i have the authority to say here's how i feel and where i came from and nobody can deny that to me in the era of social media every human being on the planet at this point is not everyone yet but at this point there are over one point one billion people who have accounts on facebook that may be horrifying but it's a characteristic of the modern world that all of us have the capacity to to express our own authority in a way that was never possible before in human history and there's an interesting conclusion that follows from that that i think is contained in a wonderful recent book written and published by a guy named harvey cox and i can't remember the name of it i think it's called the future of faith in this book harvey cox pass that there have been three epics in the history of christianity the first the first within the first few hundred years of christianity he calls the age of face and it was the it was the beginnings of christianity when there was this fresh and very new message that had been received through the works and the life in the words of jesus that was a transformation of any what anybody had thought about before about god and religion and their lives and their relationships and then there was a second age of belief that he posits essentially this the principal way in which religion christian religion was revealed or expects pressed from probably three hundred fifty a day or so right after constantius constantine's declaration of the legitimacy of christianity is the roman imperial face all the way up to you know the present day just about maybe within the last century and the third epic of christianity he calls the epic of the future which he says is the age of the spirit and it's a return to the original understanding that jesus expressed of the original wisdom of the of the message that jesus brought  through his life to the two others and the age of the spirit is expressed in the authority of the individual human being who is able to say here's who i am here's my story here is my pain here is my love here is my disaster here is the lesson that i've learned from my life and it is only the human being truly the individual who can say i love because the rest of it is an expression all of the behavior of a human society is contained in some way in the individual actions and and understandings of the people  the question why do we have fundamentalists it seems so obvious that there are flaws in that way of thinking i'm a psychologist as well as a former fundable and mentalist so i will put on both of those hats as i answer this question the core thing that you have to remember there's a couple things you have to remember but one is that our sense of reality is socially constructed that's true for all of us stu for you and i right now just as well as it is for fundamentalists and that so our community gates the flow of information it reality it kind of reality tests our ideas it kind of mirrors back to us what works and what doesn't work and when you are in a fundamentalist community one of the things that happens is that that kind of thinking very effectively gate's information flow so i have a youtube channel in which i actually just did a video about how beliefs resists change and talked about the different layers of defenses that a belief system wrecks in order to to safeguard itself but the other thing to remember is that all of us are also prone to what's called confirmatory thinking right so so and in fact so basically what that means is it's like we've got filters that instinctively allow direct barriers that forces us to construct a way of asking a question that pushes us up against the information or the evidence that what we are what we think is true might not be true because our instinct is always to to kind of seek confirmatory evidence and to under estimate the power of disconfirm atory evidence so in christianity or in fundamentalist christianity i mean  confirmatory thinking is actually often idolized it's honored there's for example a book called the encyclopedia of biblical defy bible difficulties i think it's called by a guy named gleason archer and when she starts by saying presume that the bible is the perfect in errant word of god and then you work backwards from there if you start with that assumption then you can find a way to justify rationalize excuse you know or whatever just you know kind of contort your thinking in such a way as to kind of find a way to assemble anything that seems like a discrepancy it becomes a difficulty you grow up in a system of contradictions and sometimes you're even aware of them but those contradictions are school you're not allowed to call those into question and so valerie can you tell me i'm going to put you on the spot but can you give an example of you growing up right there and we can where you're wrestling with these dilemmas like within your own family but not being allowed to do what bob did and that was he found contradictions and somehow was allowed to voice them and make those contradictions really legitimate fundamentalism they can't get that far you can't legitimize those well i mean there are even verses in the bible like a fool has said in his heart there is no god or  you know really not on to your own understanding right so so basically you're getting the message from an early age that that rationality is not to be trusted and and that if you if you cease that suffering for example suffering is one of those things that can create a real sense of contradiction whether it's your own suffering or the suffering of another person who that that seems unfair or unjustified and and there are layers of of rationalization so you know i was told that if somebody's suffering it's because maybe they they've done something wrong that i didn't know about or maybe their parents did something wrong because in that system in which children are actually possessions of parents then you can have the mindset that god punishes children for the sins of their parents in fact again there are verses in the bible that explicitly say that and we heard that when the sandy hook shootings happened right that there were people who allege that god allowed that to happen because the adults didn't allow prayer in schools or bibles in schools and god took it i mean it but so yeah so it gets to be really convoluted  i think something what's being missed here a bit is that rationalization rash rationalization or even reasoning is a relatively superficial justification of some very very deep set deep seeded mechanisms that are far below our consciousness and that essentially what we think of as our belief systems are shaped by what happens in our lives  and and is beyond our ability to sum up or understand and so we don't change our mind because something begins to be illogical to us we change our minds because something much deeper happens to us that that enables us to confront sometimes the traumas that is prevented us from being able to do that in our earlier allies or in earlier generations of our families so personally i have the questions that you talked about when i was four five or six years old and they never were fully answered and for some reason that i can't claim credit for particularly i was the only person in my generation of the any previous generation of my family going back probably a thousand years to question a set of beliefs that grew out of scots irish immigration to america in the revolutionary war and the civil war in this country in the first world war in the second world war and the vietnam war all all of the massive trauma that was visited in individual lives and in the collective life of our country and our community all of the spankings that my great grandfather got you know had something to do with the set of ideas that i ended up with when i began to really i kind of start to understand this was when you know i was doing early on some research on my book and i discovered that my great grandfather had been a leading member of the ku klux klan in texas in one nine hundred twenty one twenty twenty two is the only year in the history of texas when both has a state legislature plus the governor and one of the u s senators of from texas was open member open members of the klan majority and they're probably at their highest national influence so my quote you know i i grew up in a family who never talked about that they only talked about how wonderful it what we could be proud of our great grandfather who was this wonderful civic leader right so i grew up you know objecting to that tradition and objecting to thinking of my great grandfather as a deeply evil human being who deserves no understanding or forgiveness and then i i started doing research and found out that for the book and i found out he was born in eight hundred fifty nine at the age of four at the time when his earliest memories were being shaped he was driven with his family as a refugee from the state of missouri where they emigrated to texas having lost absolutely everything in the world at the earliest moments of his life he was witnessed him to the most horrific violence murder dest blood shed scenes his brain his brother his older brother came back from the civil war a wounded cripple and the family went from having everything and being wealthy to having absolutely nothing and scrap scrabbling for turnips and nothing else to eat for dessert or dinner and so he grew up in a in a world in which so it was a deeply terrifying painful awful awful place full of misery starvation degradation and and violence and he grew up to be perhaps unsurprisingly a baptist preacher or now how do you just how do you reckon how do you you know put those pieces together i don't think you can unless you notice the impact of trauma in the formative years of a little boy i think that i think a consciousness is something that is an emergent property of the physical world that sometimes the whole really is greater than the sum of the parts and that at i guess i'd leave it there because that beyond that i don't know what the answer is  i'm not sure that that's what is that what you said it was that there was a phrase that you just used that i thought was great it was something like say perhaps that god is emergent yeah i'm going to get this a promise is an emergent property of the physical world that's not the same thing as saying that god i'm not sure that there's a difference for me between transcendence and emergence that is there is you know the sensually what we're talking about here is is the way that change takes place and it's the way that reality is it is constructed this woman named who's written extensively about the process of social change in the meccan where the mechanism of social change and she talks about how there are essentially three stages in the in the development in in a merge and change were in how change takes place in the first is there are communities of practice who who live in a certain way act in a certain way according to  a develop a developing system of beliefs or expectations or assumptions and then begin to change where they are and who they are and then secondly in a second stage those communities of practice connect up with other communities of practice in networks and then when the number of connections between all the nodes in the network are extensive an intensive enough and take place on an enough level levels  emergent change takes place which means that something utterly unexpected that never existed before suddenly is there an example in our lifetime is the civil rights movement in the south how for generations there was a process of sub rosa change taking place before rosa parks one day stood or sat down on a on a seat on a bus and wouldn't get up what we don't know is the stories that went that went on before rosa sat down and it's that she was a civil rights organizer and worker and a con a self conscious change maker part of a network of many other change makers  through the south in both black and white communities and her act crystallized a moment of change and when i when i think about god i think that that's her act and the change that it gave rise to is a pretty good description of what god is in a in a sense god does not exist actually without there being human agents who take place in a process of emergent change and god therefore means nothing if god is not literally incarnate in in a sense that is potentially christian in all of us when when the seeds of compassion took place a few years ago i was at a prayer breakfast and both of you may have been at the same prayer breakfast that i was at with the dalai lama and desmond tutu and i was there that morning walked into the room sat down when they when they said all right everybody find a seat and sat down i just sat down in the nearest chair and only then realized a few minutes later that i had sat down in the chair that was six inches away from desmond tutu he was on the platform about this high and i was at a table right there and he gave the opening prayer and desmond tutu said i would like to reflect on the following extraordinary contradiction that we have an all powerful god the god that gave rise to and created the entire universe and yet also a god who is absolutely and completely weak and increase in capacity to do anything at all in the world so this week god this this exponentially weak god this absolutely weak god can only act through the agency of human beings who love god and love their neighbors as themselves and a couple of years ago i read a book that i loved the title of that i was reminded of by this last question the title of the book was i could not be a buddhist or i could not without if i were not a buddhist i could not be a christian and that's the kind of god that i think i could believe i to answer your question i think that the only possible solution to that is to deconstruct the bible if i could i would unwind that decision was that was made to canonize a specific set of texts to elevate them above all of the other human musings our struggles to understand what is good what is real and as i said earlier how to live in moral community with each other because i because that package contains her renda atrocities it contains justifications for genocide it sanctions things that are far worse than what barack obama is doing at a at a mythic level at the level of of legal code at the level of storytelling at all levels and it also contains some of our highest aspirations and y and models for what it means to be truly loving truly compassionate and and as long as we have the package as long as we can with that with a silver cover on it and put it on a pedestal there will always be people who who who make an idol out of the whole thing and i think that and i think that's a human norma's problem and the fact that what we see is a kind of one and the end there are there's that the power of fundamentalism right here in the university district i think is a testimony to the appeal of of that kind of thinking and that ultimately i think some i think somehow collectively universally we need to call it what it is which is idol worship it's nice to know that some of you have some more questions but andrew and valerie are going to be around for a little bit more but i thought wanted to end by just expressing some thanks to valerie and andrew for a fascinating conversation