Reclaiming Religion From The Church

About the Book

The first rule of life is "survive." And since we are necessarily social we must add the corollary, "together." All "oughts" derive from this two-part rule. Most of us understand this intuitively if not explicitly. The only issue to be resolved is how inclusive is our togetherness. Is it just our tribe, our nation, the northern hemisphere? Or, must we include the whole human family? These are the moral issues we must answer and they are empirical questions. Behavior has consequences. We have to ask ourselves, "Will such and such behaviors promote survival?" The answer can only come from the experience of the community. Present demographics will not allow us to elude the question much longer.

Church rules can be faulted on a number of counts, not the least of which is that God gave us the rules so they can't change, even when experience indicates that they should. Also, the church leaders think the purpose of the rules is to save our souls and so our life here has been seriously neglected in many respects especially for the poor and the underclass because everything is supposed to be made right in the hereafter. This I regard as backward. It affirms those who oppress the poor.

Scientists make inferences from empirical data and the results are always subject to revision. Church officials make inferences from myths and they are set in stone. A good example is the doctrine of Original Sin that is presented as an occult event that causes all our problems and about which we can do nothing. The church approved of slavery for the better part of two millennia because it was in place when the church was created and St. Augustine justified it as one of the punishments resulting from Original Sin.

Clearly, our problem is ignorance, the kind we are born with and the kind we acquire through learning falsely. I call this Ignorance II after Gregory Bateson's Learning II (learning how to learn). Ignorance II is a learning dead end, learning how not to learn. We very obviously do not always know how to act in our own best interests. Our best chance of breaking out of this mold is through sharing the best of our communal experience to discover how to act in our own best inerests in the long run. This is how to develop a proper morality, one we can all live with.

With a superior organization in place the church is positioned to unite us in the task of developing a proper morality. However, the church as presently structured can only evolve by backing into the future. It claims to already know everything that is necessary to know so it has difficulty learning, thus denying it's human origin and makeup. To change, the church requires a "spin" on history that demonstrates a development and continuity with the past instead of just saying, "We have been wrong." The People of God, the true Church, show signs of reclaiming religion through various dissident groups. These groups do not yet recognize the intimate connection between morality and survival. My hope is that this book will guide them toward that recognition.

About the Author

At 9 AM on a Wednesday morning, October 13, 1926 I came into the world in my mother's bed in the 600 block of Frenchman street, two blocks from the French Quarter in New Orleans. A midwife, Mrs. Legendre, attended my mother. I have four siblings, a brother named Ray who is three years younger, twin sisters, Joyce and Lois who are seven years younger, and Stephanie, fourteen years younger. I have eleven children from two families, nine natural and two adopted. Four girls and three boys from the first family range in age from 33 to 48. The second family, all boys, range from 12 to 17.

Illness interrupted my school career during kindergarten which put me a year behind. Then after my sophomore year in high school i stayed out a year to pay for the first two years because I went to a private school against my father's wishes. After that I was old enough to combine work and school. I couldn't go to college immediately mostly because I didn't know how the system worked. No one in my family had ever been to college. I finally got into LSU two years later where I stayed for a year. I worked two years then enrolled at Loyola in New Orleans for one semester. I tried a third time at SLU in Hammond, LA. This time I lasted less than one semester. By that time I had married and a baby was on the way.

Five years later a serious accident disabled me temporarily and I found a job as a non-certified teacher at a school that couldn't afford a real teacher. I liked teaching so well that the next year I went back to school full time and earned a BS in Education two years later. My dad who never went past the third grade and had a low opinion of school was heard to say when I graduated, "Maybe now Frank will go to work." A curious statement in view of the fact that to support my family while in college I had worked as a night watchman, 12 hours a night, 7 nights a week for 2 years.

I taught sixth grade for my first teaching assignment. I had to teach all subjects for which I did not at that time feel qualified. The next year I taught English to a group of superior seventh graders and I knew I had found my niche. The school board had other ideas; it didn't renew my contract. Next, I taught for 3 years at a private, all-boys school. My enthusiasm for that job was not reciprocated. Three years later I began a two year stint in an all-girls school. I had no problems with that administration and teaching all girls proved to be a great learning experience. This is what I always look for in a job since I had always been driven by the need to resolve a massive sense of ignorance. Still my growing family (7 children) needed more funds and a private all-boys school offered me $1000 mor than the girls' school.

Five years later another bout of disability provided an opportunity to attend graduate school. I finished work on a master's degree in sociology but I didn't apply for it. I intended going on and a Ph.D made an MA irrelevant from my perspective.

At Iowa, my next stop, I discovered Social Psychology, another name for micro-sociology. This is what I had been looking for although I didn't know it till I found it. I did not feel comfortable with the kind of dissertation the department wanted so I left citing philosophical differences. Eventually, much later, I applied to a distance learning institution which accepted all my credits and several years later they awarded me a doctorate in social psychology at age 67.

In writing the dissertation I had discovered the answer to the important question that had prompted my quest for learning, viz., What's really important? It turns out to be morality. I define morality as the rules or principle from which the rules are derived for acting with, for or toward someone. This is the most worthy and challenging subject I could study. This realization led directly to the book, Reclaiming Religion From The Church, recently self-published through Trafford in Victoria, BC.

I constantly rewrote Reclaiming... but it is out of my hands now so I am already at work on a follow-up based on what I have learned. Also I want to clarify some of the ideas that might be misunderstood the way I had presented them.

Morality has no necessary connection with religion. I'm almost tempted to say that the church has given morality a bad name because its method of teaching leaves members unconvinced but mostly because it is directed toward a life beyond this one. Morality is nothing less than the rules for survival in this world, making it a subject for everyone, in and out of religion. We obviously have yet to fashion a proper morality, one we can all live with. This is the subject of the conversation I am trying to get started. For the church perhaps I should say "trying to provoke."