Where Angels Fear To Tread: A Truth Seeker's Journey Towards Faith, Reason and Environmental Ethics

By BRIAN ROSS ROBERTS

This work commenced in about 2002 as a personal chronicle of the author's experiences in religion and family mental illness. It soon expanded to include the origins of religion and the cases for and against Christianity. These led on to religious education, the 'greening' of Christianity and the need for updating the com

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brian Ross Roberts
• Release date: Mar 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9780995382497

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ABOUT THE BOOK

This work commenced in about 2002 as a personal chronicle of the author’s experiences in religion and family mental illness. It soon expanded to include the origins of religion and the cases for and against Christianity. These led on to religious education, the ‘greening’ of Christianity and the need for updating the commandments. Then followed sections on science and reason together with creationism and intelligent design finally consideration was given to faith, ethnicity and race, genre short on objectivity.

Appendices include major works by the author and a final chapter to update the role of religion in modern Australia. Throughout the book the author seeks to find a potentially positive role for faith in an increasingly uncertain world in which values have become blurred and guidelines for our youth are lacking.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Emeritus professor Brian Roberts (Hon. D. Litt.) had a traditional Methodist upbringing in a village community descended from the 1820 Settlers in South Africa. His original training was in Agriculture (Soil Conservation) with advanced degrees in irrigation and ecology. When at university in Natal, he let his Church attendance slip, believing that his five years at boarding school gave him a ‘credit balance’ of five years. For nearly 10 years he had little connection with religion, until his wife Margaret had to be admitted to the local Mental Asylum. The chance meeting with Reverend Emlyn Jones lead to Brian becoming Senior Clerk of the local Presbyterian Church, lay preacher and visiting churchman to Bloemfontein Coloured Community.

Having migrated to Australia in 1972, his family became active members of the Presbyterian Church in Charleville, SW Queensland. On moving to Toowoomba, the family

discontinued their Church attendance. When they moved to retire in Cairns, Brian was soon appointed to James Cook University as Adjunct Professor.

The University had become locally famous for its role in initiating the landmark Mabo Native Title Victory, lead originally by the Anglican Noel Loos on JCU staff.

Researching native title and Queensland missions, Brian progressed toward studying the role of religion in human development. With access to the New Scientist Journal he was able to dig deep into the Biology and Science of religion in the world’s great faiths. This book is the result.

WHERE ANGELS FEAR TO TREAD

A TRUTH SEEKER’S JOURNEY TOWARDS FAITH, REASON AND ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS

DR BRIAN ROBERTS

This book is dedicated to my family:

Marge, Christopher, Ritamay and Roger, who for decades have put up with Dad’s obsession with accumulating journal articles and press clippings in a never-ending weekly ritual which eventually, virtually filled our spare room.

INTRODUCTION

Readers might well ask why it is necessary to consider in such detail the religious element of our society, when the pressing need of modern nations is for practical action on environment, economics, poverty and political stability. This is an important question and the answer relates to human motivation to make necessary changes to meet the increasing challenges of the future.

In essence, our challenge is to meet the needs of an increasing global population under conditions of decreasing resources per capita and increasing pollution. Whatever technological advances are made in birth control, resource exploitation and pollution control, this life-supporting planet will require its dominating organisms to adopt a more frugal and less wasteful lifestyle. This will require a more caring and sharing population which necessarily must end luxury consumption and must embrace a new set of values which not only treads more gently on the earth, but gains its meaning and its values from non-material things. While some of us have been expounding these concepts to our students for half a century, it has taken climate change to wake Western society from their over-indulgent slumber. So why is religious consideration important? Because it directly affects the values which individuals hold and it is these that give meaning to life, which form the basis of our sense of values and thus affect our actions for change.

In attempting a treatise of this kind, the author must be aware that his choice of sources is no doubt influenced by his unconscious bias toward his preferred outcomes. Under the circumstances I have consciously tried to avoid having my judgment influenced by the disparaging criticism of Christianity by Richard Dawkins in his book The God Delusion and have been well aware of the vitriolic tone of Christopher Hitchens’ God is not Great. Both these authors, while admittedly producing best sellers, fail as a result of the way in which they start with the answer and proceed to quote selective evidence to prove their point. In Dawkins’ defence it should be added that he makes an impressive effort to demonstrate his objectivity, but his demeaning sense of humour does little to persuade the reader of his sincerity and understanding of the personal significance of faith to individuals seeking support in troubled times.

In spite of these objections I have used references from these two authors extensively but not in the way that I have drawn on Evans and his co-authors in their two volume What People Believe which is refreshingly free of a personal agenda. I have included Sant Mat as areligion, not because it is a known major force in world religions, but simply because it has been my wife’sreligion for several decades and has included not only her serious daily meditation since the 1970’s but has allowed me to live the experience of attending a Dera in Sydney where hundreds of devotees met in open question time with their Living Master from India for two full days.

As a researcher I suffer from intellectual laziness. As a result, I unashamedly use the literature searches on which others have done the primary research, i.e. of the original sources. At the same time I have a sneaky feeling that the books I read are themselves quoting second-hand from their references. Provided there are no substantial misquotations, this procedure is probably in order, although it is necessary to be aware of the biases of each author. Bias is something other people have. The reference list at the end of this work betrays the extent to which I have relied on New Scientist journal and the Weekend Australian newspaper. I regard the former as the most useful contemporary science review and the latter as the best of our national public recorders.

So what might be the purpose of this treatise? To understand religious belief? To evaluate the appropriateness of different religions for living today? To examine the credibility of Christian teachings? To appreciate the role of and need for a personal faith? To understand what gives meaning to life? To recognise and compare the good and bad effects ofreligion on society or simply to examine what it is that makes us human? Perhaps all the above and more, but in a way that finds a balance between sensitivity and honesty. I have no idea who the ultimate audience of my collected thoughts might be but I write with my boyhood and family friends in mind – a panoply of personalities who range from the sublime to the ridiculous in both spiritual camps.

It will be noted that I use the words apparently, it seems or it is said quite frequently. I do this to qualify my assumptions that the statements I’m making have been validated by the sources I use or by my own acceptance of the facts concerned. I do this because it seems rather pointless to seek absolute certainty about what is often only an opinion anyway. Indeed it can be said thatreligion can never be any more than opinion, although weight seems to be allotted to opinion according to the status of the opinionee (Jesus, Benedict, Luther, Einstein, Jefferson).

I have elsewhere (see Soul Conservation) alluded to the less than impressive contribution that Christian teachings have made to our environmental conscience, or in biblical terms, our respect for the creation. I have shown how the missionaries’ fervour for felling the holy groves of the Pagans to deprive their Gods of their forest habitat, led to the separation of Man from Nature in an attempt to demonstrate Man’s superiority as the chosen race. The arrogance and disrespect for Nature which resulted from this disaster is in sharp contrast to the earth-sensitive religions of peoples regarded by the West as primitive. Thus while Jesus himself, as one of several charismatic leaders of his day, set a fine ethical example, those who came after him soon changed the rules.

Why do I find it necessary to relate the opinions of such a wide range of writers onreligion in this personal faith-journey? In essence the answer lies in my belief that the current level of religiosity in the West will not stay at present levels. It will either decrease to close to zero as societies gain greater understanding of our universe from science, or it will increase as people find that a purely science-based rationalism leaves a great gap in their lives – what was hoped would give meaning, actually gives a meaningless existence. In addition, future generations under the increasing stress of a shrinking world may find that having a strong friend in the sky, to talk to in uncertain times, becomes a very effective coping strategy. A belief doesn’t have to be true to be comforting.

On page 11 of Appendix 2 I refer to the problems of values and meanings on the Super Highway of Information. Writers’ search for information sources has changed dramatically in the last while. Back in 1992 when Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web, he provided a directory to help searchers link unlikely topics from physics abstracts to song lyrics. As the volume of requests increased, search engines like Yahoo (1994), Alta Vista (1995) and (finally?) Google (1997) became available. Soon the quality and reliability issues became real when websites like Wikipedia (2007), or Dig and Delicious, expanded in response to crowd-sourced sites.

Kevin Ryan of Search Engine Watch says that lots of stupid people contribute (to these sites) and it’s really the antithesis to the wisdom of the crowds. So now there is a move to collaborative search engines, led by Meredith Morris from Microsoft Research, who has developed a Windows Live Messenger tool called Search Together in which searchers invite their colleagues to trawl the web together. This is just one avenue by which searchers can avoid being drowned in unwanted information in Google’s 15 billion document index. These new social tools help individuals both search and socialise according to David Robson of New Scientist Journal.

My university librarian has demonstrated to me the mind-boggling array of data bases available on line and I must admit to being somewhat overwhelmed by what came up under the key words religion, God, spirituality and faith. I hope I am forgiven for my surrender and retreat to my hardcopy sources which gave me a workable volume of sources and I apologise up front to the repetitions which I have included in the text.

Finally I should note that while writing this book, two global and one local happening occurred which are likely to encourage the frugal caring and sharing values to which I repeatedly refer. The first happening was the Global Financial Crisis; the second was the election of Barack Obama to succeed George W. Bush. The local happening was the Victorian Bush Fires which burned 210 innocent rural folks to death. I am not a prophet or the son of a prophet but I will be surprised if these three moments in time do not speed our return to basics and a permanent rethink of materialism. I expect us to look back and acknowledge that it was at these moments that the long-awaited changes began.

Since the Global Financial Crisis and Obama’s appointment, our world has been overwhelmed by a series of changes which the world has not seen before. These include the Covid 19 Pandemic, the unprecedented series of Climare Change Catastrophies World-wide, the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, the resultant Global effects on energy and food prices, and nearer to home, the greatest political change in Government in the 2022 election.

Mea Culpa

At first reading, parts of this treatise appear outdated. That’s because much of my story was written from 2008 onwards. The reason for this is that at that time there was, perhaps for the first time, a uniquely well-informed religious debate in the international Press, notably in the New Scientist journal edited by AC Grayling. I had made a special effort to capture the competing views in this once-off ‘meeting of the minds’ on faith.

Unfortunately health problems prevented me from following that body of knowledge for several years since that time. The result is that my earlier writing can confuse contemporaty readers with its use of words like ‘recent, presently, today and so-far’ without updating these beyond Part 6: Religion in Today’s Australia. Despite this shortcoming Grayling’s masterful editing of the debate presents us with a valuable chronicle of the issues, seldom contributed to by scientists.

Apart from this hiatus, the truths which I have extracted from most of my sources are timeless and offer us guideposts and logical reason which should always stand the test of time. For us nominal Christians, the Genesis and Resurrection narratives remain the core of our faith whenever challenges are made.

Brian Roberts

Cairns, Australia

2023

CONTEXT TO PERSONAL RELIGIOSITY

To appreciate the context in which this treatise on personal faith has been developed, it is useful to have insight into four documents relating to the individual concerned. Three of these documents are included in the appendices but need explanation regarding their relevance to these writings:

The first document (Appendix 1) is a list of questions from Caroline Jones of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Religious Program, used when invited to participate in an interview at the Sydney ABC studios for her program Search for Meaning. My responses to the questions are less important than the set of questions itself – mostly questions which I had never really considered, let alone be asked on national radio. A quick scan of the ABC questions suggests that there are many factors, persons and experiences which may influence an individuals’ sense of values, resultant actions and commitment to particular causes – in this case, the interviewee’s life’s work in soil conservation, resource conservation and land ethics. This list of question is recorded here so that others may consider the drivers of their own values, commitments and actions. Looking back, credit must go to Caroline Jones for getting me to ask the deeper questions (See Appendix 1) about the real meaning and spirituality of my lifelong work. To that extent, her probing into my motivations and values was responsible for this present treatise coming into being.

The second document, for which the online link is given, is a comprehensive interview with the author on his on-going contributions to Land Ethics through his writings and nationwide addresses under the Landcare banner, a movement that he was instrumental in establishing, starting in 1976. This marathon interview went over a period of days and delves into the interviewee’s spirituality as a motivating force in his commitment to Landcare and resource conservation in Africa and Australia. As in the ABC radio interview, this record for the National Library’s Oral History series, asks intrusive questions which were unexpected and thus unprepared for. As such, this interview is the only record of much of the author’s early developmental years of his Land Ethic. This interview, while it touches on the author’s values and passion for developing an Australian Land Ethic, goes beyond the general scope of the present treatise. However, of that interview, pages 13–16 and 24–29 indicate how my spiritual values and my evaluation of Christianity’s responsibility for caring for the Creation were driving what some observers called my missionary zeal for Landcare. The full interview is Ref. TRC 3279 of 6/8/96 on the National Library site for Oral History (Borshman and Roberts 51pp) which can be found at nla.gov.au. The third document (Appendix 2) is an overview of the author’s view of what is required in teaching values for a future sustainable society. This inaugural professorial lecture presented near the end of the author’s career in Toowoomba, offers a worldview of how a secular, frugal, caring and sharing society can achieve a sustainable and fulfilling future. To the extent that this third paper has only a limited religious base, it recognises spirituality and non-material values as an essential element of future well-being as an alternative to current shallow materialism. The last paper (Appendix 3) is what led to this present treatise. It was part of my autobiography (Roberts, 2008) but several reviewers suggested that it warranted a book of its own – so here it is.

PART 1:

OUR INNER SELVES

PERSONAL SPIRITUAL IDENTITY

For those beyond my inner circle of close friends who were kind enough to answer my request for critical comments on the unpublished draft of my autobiography in 2008, it may be useful to re-state my religious background.

Born and christened into the Methodist Church in provincial South Africa, I had never felt a real need for a personal God until my young wife’s very serious health problems left me alone and fearful of the great unknown. During my ensuing life, as well-being improved and self confidence grew, it would be decades before I would once more call on the Almighty. This latter occasion was the diagnosis of my only grandson with Duchenne’s Muscular Dystrophy, a fatal genetic disorder with no known cure. There has been no God of the Good Times in my life, only a God appealed to in desperate bad times.

In Son of the Veld I attempted a cursory consideration of religious faith under the heading Religious beliefs – who needs them? This coverage of the issue was inadequate and was meant simply to reflect one of the fundamental issues of my life, alongside sense of place, personal identity and the search for meaning (See Appendix 3).

It is interesting to reflect on the way in which beliefs are inculcated in us. I can clearly remember how important it was to us as a young couple, to have our children baptised when they were very young. Equally, when our son’s first daughter arrived, it was comforting to know that our son had arranged for her to be baptised, in this case with water he and I collected from a North Queensland lake. When the other grandchildren arrived, the need for baptism seemed to have waned. We still feel somewhat uncomfortable about this, having been brought up to believe that if someone dies without being baptised, their Afterlife could be severely affected.

I relate this story because it is in juxtaposition to the view that children should be given free choice and not be constrained by parent’s religious preferences. As such, the story illustrates the dilemma facing diligent parents in a very real way.

Much of my youth was spent under the Apartheid regime of South Africa. The political climate of that era was marked by the public fervour of that regime regarding the God-given right to self-determination by the dominant (not majority) race. Hitchens in his virulent attack on religions in general, maintains thatreligion-based governments insist that both public and private life must be submitted to a permanent higher supervision. He suggests that Apartheid was not just the ideology of a Dutch-speaking tribe…it was also a form of Calvinism in practice. Hitchens maintains that the Afrikaner government relied on the ravings of the pulpit to justify its own blood myth of a Boer Exodus that awarded it exclusive rights to the Promised Land. As a result the Afrikaner permutation of Zionism created a backward and despotic state….in which eventually the survival of the Afrikaners themselves was threatened by corruption, chaos and brutality. At that point the bovine elders of the church had a revelation which allowed the gradual abandonment of Apartheid. But this can never permit forgiveness for the evil thatreligion did while it felt strong enough to do so. It is to the credit of many secular Christians and Jews, and many atheist and agnostic militants of the African National Congress, that South Africa was saved from complete barbarism and implosion. While this evaluation fits Hitchens’ anti-religion quest well, its negative reference to Calvinism may be pushing causal relations too far.

I have to ask myself what type of personality takes pleasure (or is at least motivated) in demolishing the validity of beliefs that have carried his hopes and prayers through his life. It is said that what one thinks of God says more about the thinker than about God. So what does my (current) tendency toward disbelief say about my (current) state of mind or stage of life or sense of security or ego? Others might be more objective than me in answering these reflective questions but it is clear that beliefs need not be true to be comforting. My friend Granville Morgan, Presbyterian minister in Bloemfontein in the 1960’s reckoned that if the existence of God isn’t true then our discussions and actions don’t really matter and His existence is not important. However, if it is true, it is very important. Granville couldn’t see how rational individuals could be lukewarm on this central issue – either it was off or full-on. As a seeker after truth, there is nothing original in my personal questions, in fact they probably repeat what millions have asked before.

Those desiring to retain the literal truth of the Bible regularly come up against material changes in our world, often associated with technical advances. One of the better known examples of such change is human longevity, requiring the adjustment of the biblical lifespan of three score and ten years to three score and twenty-five at least for developed nations.

It was with great certainty that I agreed to the putting to sleep of a faithful old family dog who was riddled with arthritis and was going blind. I would act on the same principle for an ageing relative in similar circumstances but I am precluded by law from being part of such action. I am supposed to believe that the reason for the canine/human distinction is that the former has no soul and no Saviour. This is a pity when I compare the two as deserving cases. My loving hound