Tonight, we seek to turn back the clock, so to speak, and run away from the fundamentalism that we have been taught for the last 2000 years. We seek to rehabilitate Julian, a Roman Emperor who was like a light against the darkness, and who for three years, 360-363 AD, stood against the radical exclusivity that was beginning to permeate Christianity even then. But first, to put us in the right frame of mind, here is a song for the occasion as we embark on our journey running away from Fundamentalism.
We will refer to Julian's writings on philosophy and seek to elaborate on his writings. He was seven years old when he witnessed the massacre of his entire family, ordered by the supposedly "Christian" emperor Constantius II. This must have scarred his psyche, as he came rejected all the answers that he had been taught from either Christian or Pagan and set out on his own path. From the very beginning, he found comfort in the sun; from Page 219:
...I am a votary of the Sun. Of which fact I possess the most certain evidences in my own case; but one instance, which it is allowable to adduce, is the following: -- From my earliest infancy, I was possessed with a strange longing for the solar rays, so that when, as a boy, I cast my eyes upon the ethereal splendor, my soul felt seized and carried up out of itself. And not merely was it my delight to gaze upon the solar brightness, but at night also, whenever I walked out in clear weather, disregarding all else, I used to fix my eyes on the beauty of the heavens; so that I either paid attention to what was said to me, nor took any notice of what was going on.
He goes on to construct a cosmology which is highly elegant; for instance, conventional paganism taught that Jupiter was supreme. But Julian argues that the Sun is supreme, arguing from Homer that when the Sun threatened to quit shining after Odysseus' men committed sacrilege by eating his cattle, the gods responded by punishing Odysseus by destroying all of his ships and all of his men and leaving only him alive; on top of that, he was confined on Calypso's island for several years.
The infrared spectra of dense molecular clouds provide evidence that the ices in these interstellar enviornments are often processed by ionizing radiation. In the Astrochemistry Laboratory we carry out laboratory simulations of this processing on analog materials using a variety of sophisticated instruments. These studies have demonstrated that the UV irradiation of even very simple ices can result in the production of refractory organic residues. Organics with similar spectral characteristics are seen throughout the diffuse interstellar medium. Our laboratory photolysis residues contain complicated mixtures of more complex organic molecules, including compounds that may be of great prebiotic interest, for example, compounds that form membranes and compounds that fluoresce.
The production of these more complex organics from such simple starting materials as ices of H2O, CH3OH, and NH3 is an observation of great importance. Dense molecular clouds are seen to exist throughout our and other galaxies. Thus, the processes being studied in our and other laboratories are universal ones, i.e., the universe is in some sense hardwired to produce large quantities of prebiotic organic materials. Furthermore, it is in these interstellar clouds that new stars and new planetary systems are formed. The result is the virtual assurance that when new planetary systems are formed, prebiotic organics will be present in the starting materials. If some of these materials survive incorporation onto suitable planets, they may play a key role in the start of life. This is a possiblity that is receiving a great deal of attention of late and one that is a guiding theme for many of our studies. We are currently making some very interesting progress in this area and we invite you to keep your eye on this page in the future!
Julian's belief (221) in the eternity of creation is also surprisingly close to modern science, which teaches that the Big Bang created this universe 15 billion years ago. And this is the intersection of faith and science; the question, for instance, of whether or not this universe is controlled by a god or gods is beyond the scope of science, which is based on observation. There are many other such questions as well; for instance, the question of what created the Big Bang or whether or not this is the only universe. He goes on to describe the Universe as having been created by a Supreme Good. This latter belief could be the matter of a serious debate, because this sort of naivety does not account for the presence of evil in the world. The reader is left to work out the problem for himself. Those of us who have experienced eight years of lies, torture, war crimes, impeachable offenses, and all manners of ugliness from the right might very well have a hard time with this concept.
His belief is similar to Gnosticism; however, he breaks with them in teaching that the creation is inherently good. One wonders how he himself was able to reconcile his concept with the horrors that he personally experienced as a child. For people to carry out the barbaric orders of an Emperor required a complete extinguishing of any sort of good within one's mind and requires one to totally desensitize one's self to any kind of pity or cry for mercy.
Take his personal experience of the ugliest of mankind and try to reconcile it with this passage (223), where he talks about how the sun is the visible manifestation of The Supreme Good which created this world:
For example, first take his light -- is it not an incorporeal and divine image of what is transparent in its action? And the very quality that we turn "transparence," what else is it, to speak generally, but the property that goes with all the elements, and is their approximate form? ... For the quality in question is the object of the sight alone, which is brought into play by the instrumentality of light.
We could go on and on in wrestling with Julian's writings and trying to make sense of them in light of reality as well as his own personal experiences. But the point of this whole discussion is that Julian's writings were a major challenge to the growing dogmatism of the day. Instead of having the answers all worked out, Julian advocated for a religious pluralism where people could search for the truth as they best understood it -- he even planned to rebuild the Jerusalem Temple, but he was foiled by an earthquake and died before he could begin.
So, you may ask at this point, well, what does this have to do with getting Democrats elected? My answer is that the religious fundamentalism of the day is the same kind of narrow-mindedness as the religious fundamentalism of the present day, represented by religious extremists such as Douglas Coe and John Hagee and James Dobson. They prevailed, not by the force of their arguments, but by the might of the Roman state, which was taken over by Christian fundamentalism after the death of Julian in 363 AD.
What I have to offer is this -- instead of dogma, searching for truth. Instead of the notion that one can look up all the answers in a book, I offer the notion that no authority can stand between the person in the mirror and the truth. Christian Fundamentalism, or the notion that the Bible is the sole revealed word of God, is incoherent and illogical. First of all, God is presented as all-just. But Fundamentalism teaches that only Jesus saves. But therein lies an obvious problem -- what about people living halfway around the globe around, say, 500 AD, who never got a chance to hear that some God died on the cross for their sins and that they have to accept Jesus as their savior to go to heaven? Even modern Catholicism has the intellectual honesty to teach that people are only responsible for what they are given them and not for what they don't know. Under the fundamentalist model, God is therefore not all-just, meaning that the entire case for fundamentalism is defeated.
And even the Bible itself militates against Fundamentalism. For instance, it specifically states that there will be people saved who are not Christians; Jesus, in his farewell sermon to his disciples just before his Crucifixion, states that he will judge based on whether or not one was their brother's keeper, not based on whether they recited some creed or not. And in Revelation, it promises that people from every tongue and tribe and nation will be saved. This suggests, for instance, that the Mayans will be represented in the Kingdom of Heaven as well as many other Native American tribes who died out before we discovered the New World.
Here in this country, we have the concept of separation of church and state; therefore, we have a responsibility to engage in a collective search for the truth. We don't have an Emperor or a church who has a corner on truth; we have to search for it on our own. We must partake in that responsibility or lose it. And the search has to be a process, with as few restrictions as possible. The one rule I would propose is that the search for truth be grounded in reality and that it start with these questions:
Who am I?
Why am I here?
How were we created?
How is there evil in this world?
From the standpoint of getting Democrats elected, everyone who is a seeker of truth is a potential vote. If someone is not, we don't need their votes -- bigots, assholes, and purity trolls come to mind. Nobody has all the answers -- not Julian; not even Barack Obama. Julian was done in by his own hubris; he tried to repeat the feats of Alexander the Great and Tarjan even though the Empire had long ago declined from its former glory. And while he answered Questions 1-3 very elegantly, he failed to answer #4 -- which is the task that each of us must take up.
And even Julian failed to comprehend the majesty of God in light of modern science. If the Sun is our God, then he is only one of many trillions, more than the number of specs of sand. The earth is not the center of the universe; we may very well be one of many civilizations in the Universe; there is no reason why the laws of physics that govern the creation of life can't work elsewhere given the right physical circumstances. And if the laws of physics allow this Universe to be created, there is nothing that says that such creation can't be replicated elsewhere; this could be one of many. At one time, we thought that the Earth was the only planet; now, through observation, we know most stars have planets orbiting them. Why not the same with the Universe?
