I’ve had a rollercoaster relationship with God my whole life. At times I’ve been what one would call a "devout" fundamentalist; at other times I’ve been downright agnostic. Watching an episode of "Nip/Tuck" the other day (a truly godless show if ever there was one), I found myself thinking I would have to consider atheism in order to reconcile what appeared to be contradictions in what I understand/believe about the universe.
Two recent commentaries have helped me regain my comfort with my faith, however. Both express the idea that belief systems are there to help you deal, not hurt you. That embracing your belief system can improve your life, not limit it, even intellectually.
One of the commentaries was by Harvey Fierstein on the PBS program "In the Life" :
I operate under a complicated belief system pretty much of my own device which I base on scientific laws and humanistic principles. And, all in all, it works for me. I tell you this not to seek converts or to invite any discussion of any specific religion. I just want you to know that my beliefs might seem just as silly to you as yours do to me. And that’s cool. (pdf file)
Harvey is a true Mensch in every sense of the word. If you don’t know him, I’d highly recommend any of those commentaries.
The second commentary appears in today’s New York Times. The fabulous Irshad Manji expresses dismay at how when travelling across Europe she was repeatedly asked "Why does an independent-minded woman care about God? Why do you need religion at all?" She explains in a very thoughtful way, incorporating what she sees as a hypocrisy in those questions. In a nutshell, she feels that widespread secularism is Europe’s response to the abuses of religion over the centuries. It’s primarily a defensive position. She highlights how this defensive position is feeding much of the resistence to bringing Turkey into the EU, and in doing so she rather cleverly brings us back to an eye-opening conclusion:
But is Turkey all that different from Europe?
It’s a longtime member of NATO. Its so-called Islamist government has updated the country’s human rights statutes to conform to the standards of the European Union. It’s home to an astonishingly free press. Recently, a left-wing newspaper questioned the Koran’s origins, a right-wing newspaper wrote about gays and lesbians lobbying for sexual orientation to be included in anti-discrimination laws, and a centrist newspaper editorialized that the education system should be reformed to promote diversity.
As one young Turk told me, "If Western values are tolerance, democracy, justice, equality and freedom, then I live in a Western country: Turkey." Try explaining that to those Europeans who want to impose their baggage from the Vatican onto Muslim immigrants. Their secularism can be zealous, missionary – dare I say it, religious.
But why be religious? Manji offers one of the most intelligent, reassuring answers I think I’ve ever seen:
Which brings me back to the question of why I, an independent-minded woman, bother with Islam. Religion supplies a set of values, including discipline, that serve as a counterweight to the materialism of life in the West. I could have become a runaway materialist, a robotic mall rat who resorts to retail therapy in pursuit of fulfillment. I didn’t. That’s because religion introduces competing claims. It injects a tension that compels me to think and allows me to avoid fundamentalisms of my own.
Islam today has deep flaws, and I know saying so makes me a blasphemer in the eyes of countless Muslims. C’est la vie. If they move beyond emotion, they’ll come to appreciate that for the rationalists among us, religion can be a godsend.
Fierstein, an atheist, and Manji, a Muslim, helped me see past my doubts about my religion, Christianity. Many liberals feel threatened by religion (mostly because it’s used to excuse all kinds of anti-progressive agendas). But in doing so, they’re conceeding not only the "moral high ground" in general, but also the right to insist that the values within their religion they cherish become as big a part of the national agenda as the values the conservatives cherish have. Values like peace, charity, generosity, faithfulness, and tolerance.
Coincidentally, I have been semi-joking that the past few weeks have been driving me (back) to religion. I was raised Catholic and consider myself a doubter, a questioner. But I think, because there’s too much to cope with that I have no control over, I have to despair or find hope somewhere. And flawed as it is, religion offers solace.
“Many liberals feel threatened by religion (mostly because it’s used to excuse all kinds of anti-progressive agendas). But in doing so, they’re conceeding not only the “moral high ground” in general, but also the right to insist that the values within their religion they cherish become as big a part of the national agenda as the values the conservatives cherish have. Values like peace, charity, generosity, faithfulness, and tolerance.”
I don’t understand this conclusion at all. Could you explain it better?
Personally, I don’t feel threatened by religion, I feel threatened by people who use religion as a justification for pursuing wrong-headed, ignorant, or hateful policies and goals.
I guess I am uncomfortable with people arguing public policy based on religion, because I believe we should debate policy choices but we shouldn’t debate religious choices (except perhaps in the more or less fringe examples such as animal sacrifice).
How am I conceding either the moral high ground, or the right to insist that peace, charity, and tolerance should be a part of our national agenda?
Apologies in advance for a terribly long comment…
And flawed as it is, religion offers solace.
Yes. This was driven home for me as I watched the first love of my life fight, and then lose to, bone cancer. He was a 6’3″ rough-and-tumble, thick-accented bricklayer from a small farm in Ireland and would as soon wrestle a Priest as be told what to do, but when it was clear the bone marrow transplant had failed and he should start counting his remaining time in months, he turned back to God.
At first I was surprised and somewhat disappointed (although I never let on). He had represented an “ideal” to me. The triumph of man over an oppresive religion (the stories he’d tell of the cruel Sisters in his school would make you hate anyone religious).
Within the last six months of his life (before he became totally bedridden), we were visiting a Cathedral in Southern England, and I saw him light a candle and say a prayer. It was as shocking to me as if I had watched Billy Graham enter a porn shop. Ironically, my first thought was “How are you going to deal with this, if you’re willing to abandon all you believe in the face of it?” I was angry at him, at the nuns at his hospital, at his family who I assumed had encouraged this behavior, and at God himself for humbling this man I had always considered one of the last true rebels, a true “force of nature” (he had no respect for authority whatsoever* but could charm his way out of any scrape).
But he had been humbled. The disease was excruciatingly painful, his physical strength had been sapped, and all the horribly invasive therapies had failed. He could go out fighting, or he could try and find some peace of mind and soul. Wisely, he chose the latter. I see that now.
*One anecdote (I love this story). I’ll call him “Michael” for lack of a more imaginative alias. He was flying over to visit me from London, but absolutely hated flying. It terrified him, oddly enough. The worst part was the anticipation that built up in him leading up to the take off…after that he was OK. The only way he could deal with it was to get totally drunk.
So he had his “Flight Bottle” of Wild Turkey and was happily partaking as the plane sat on the runway. Only the take-off was delayed. 2 and 1/2 hours.
As the contents of the Flight Bottle dwindled, “Michael” began to sing…and tried to convince his fellow passengers to join him. A flight attendants rushed over and pleaded: “Please Mr. McX. You’re disturbing the other passengers.” He stopped singing, smiled that disarming smile he had, and motioned her away with his hands. “Got it. Thanks.”
He reached for the flight bottle, but found, tragically, it was now empty. So he took down a bottle he’d bought from the Duty Free shop from the overhead bin.
The flight attendant rushed back. “I’m sorry Mr. McX, but you can’t open that until you arrive in America.”
Again he smiled, motioning her away with his hands, “Got it. Thanks.”
“Crack,” he twisted off the cap.
Ten minutes later two British police officers are leading him down the plane’s passageway, one trying desparely to control each of his strong struggling arms.
“Come on Mike, Come along Mike,” one tried.
Incensed by the familiarity, he flung them both off in one motion, “Don’t call me “Mike,” you f*&%ing midgets.”
I got a call from him a bit later, saying they’d thrown him off the friggin’ plane. I knew better than to ask why, but curiosity got the best of me. At the end of his tale I called British Airlines to complain; “Aren’t your people trained to recognize when a passenger is terrified of flying and help them get through it?” The very patient Manager repied “Mr. Winkleman, you weren’t there.”
“Fair enough,” I said and thanked her for her time.
Personally, I don’t feel threatened by religion, I feel threatened by people who use religion as a justification for pursuing wrong-headed, ignorant, or hateful policies and goals.
That’s a much better explanation than mine, Doh.
How am I conceding either the moral high ground, or the right to insist that peace, charity, and tolerance should be a part of our national agenda?
By letting the national dialog equate liberalism with secularism. It’s happening, and we liberals aren’t successfully stopping it.
“By letting the national dialog equate liberalism with secularism. It’s happening, and we liberals aren’t successfully stopping it.”
And many of you are in fact encouraging it.
And many of you are in fact encouraging it.
True too. Ideally, it wouldn’t be so binary though.
I remember that – before I was 10, anyway – I had an absolutely unquestioning faith that God existed.
The moment I started asking questions, of course, it went away.
When I was about 10 or 11, I decided I was going to read the whole Bible start to finish, no skipping. I didn’t, of course – not for two or three years, and even now I’m not absolutely certain that I read every single prophet at the back end of the Old Testament – but I recall distinctly reading an account of the resurrection, and realising I didn’t believe it, and it bothered me that I didn’t.
For a while. Then it dawned on me, with quiet simplicity, that I didn’t have to believe it – no more than I had to believe that Apollo really had killed Typhon at Delphi (I was also a juvenile Greek myth fan) – and, with that, the whole of the Abrahamic mythology, from Genesis up, just turned into yet another of the complicated, detailed, delightful/horrifying sagas that I’d enjoyed reading about since I was seven or eight and first discovered Kingsley’s Heroes.
As I remember it, the step from “I do believe” to “I don’t believe” took less than a week. The thinking leading up to that step, I suppose, took years, and the thinking after that step is still going on. Certainly, before I was 10, I did: by the time I was 17, I didn’t. And that was that, though a friend acutely observed many years later, “I think you wish you could and it saddens you that you can’t” (believe in God, that is).
Many liberals feel threatened by religion (mostly because it’s used to excuse all kinds of anti-progressive agendas).
I feel deeply threatened by people who hate me not because of anything I have done to them but because of who I am, or what I believe in. I feel deeply threatened by people – Muslim, Christian, or Hindu – to use their religion to excuse their anti-progressive agendas – and I am enraged by people who want to believe that Christianity means hating gays and oppressing the poor and the disadvantaged.
Finally, anyone who claims that they know the will of God and they’re going to enforce it on you whether you like it or not is a deeply scary person, whether that person is George W. Bush or Ariel Sharon* or, yes, Osama bin Laden – three people without one thing in common except for their belief that they know what God wants, and they’re willing for other people to die because of their beliefs.
But I feel deeply threatened by the people, not by the religion. I do not believe that there is any religion in the world wholly bad or wholly good: religionists may be judged by how they behave, rather than by the religion they adhere to. A murderer may claim it was the will of Christ that he should kill, but we don’t assume this means Christianity is a murderous religion, whatever excuses Christians have found in their religion to enable them to support murder.
*I may be misjudging Ariel Sharon: now I think about it, I’m not sure if he’s ever said he bases Israel’s claim on the Occupied Territories on religious tradition, or whether for him it’s simple power politics.
Public Reason
Libertarians Wilkinson and Sanchez discuss.
Liberalism is secular because the useful arguments of public reason are those arguments accessible to all. Atheists and agnostics are not without values and morals, they simply justify their values differently than the religious.
I suspect in Islam( and other religious societies) public reason could be called “secular” because arguments are derived from a large body of communally accepted knowledge and reasoned interpretation. It usually isn’t “Allah says” but “Sistani has studied and determined that the Koran should be interpreted thusly for such-and-such reasons.” And Sistani may be challenged on his fatwa. And I see no impediment to a liberal umma.
What is “secularism” anyway?
Is it the idea that no one should have religious beliefs, or that no one should try to force their religious beliefs onto others by means of the government and public educational systems?
Offhand I’d say I’m against the former but in favor of the latter.
Edward,
I understand exactly how you feel. Being very religious by nature, yet also very rational, can be a conflict.
Outside of the values and “normal” psychological benefit which you mention, it really is the case that “spiritual experiences” exist, and with practice are repeatable. An incredibly deep sense of peace, being filled with the presence of a loving, benevolent force can be felt by anyone, with the correct practices. And these “states” are some of the most profound experiences available to the human person. They feel like magic, and you can be filled with awe and reverence from them.
You can be completely agnostic about whether these repeatable “God experiences” actually prove the existence of God. (When you have theses experiences on a frequest enough basis, you don’t doubt, but you can acknowledge that, possibly, these experiences are only really cool structures in the brain being accessed – but in the midst, it’s hard to believe that.) But the experiences themselves exist. And these practices, which exist in every faith, do deeply meet that space of deep longing for a greater connection, that exists in the heart, soul, and mind, of a great majority of people
I wrote some comments about this at another location.
And that was that, though a friend acutely observed many years later, “I think you wish you could and it saddens you that you can’t” (believe in God, that is).
my head is filled with disease.
my skin is begging you please.
i’m on my hands and knees.
i want so much to believe.
– Nine Inch Nails, “Terrible Lie”
Isn’t Turkey always about a half-step away from their own military taking over or am i missing something here? That certainly doesn’t sound like any country in the EU at the present time so i can’t say that notion is valid.
We also need to affirm in this country that it is totally OK and American to choose to have no religious faith. My faith means a great deal to me but i would never condone anyone treating someone of a different faith or a person without faith as any better or worse than any other American. To do otherwise is basically religious persecution and the anithesis of what our founding fathers wanted for this country.
Which is more godless, someone who professes no faith and lives and exemplary life or a self-professed man of God whose actions don’t match his words?
Nice comments JC. And it makes me wonder who could experience a “God experience” and still go out and act intolerantly. The two seem totally incompatible to me.
Isn’t Turkey always about a half-step away from their own military taking over or am i missing something here?
Much less so now, actually.
Me, too.
Works for me.
My church pretty much stays out of government matters. It’s not that specific activities aren’t criticized, it’s that the government is viewed as a separate and secular organization. We’re also a love-the-sinner-but-hate-the-sin kind of place, although that sometimes loses something in the delivery. Just a couple of weeks ago I was in a church in the same synod in Wisconsin, and I noticed in their bulletin some bible study meeting concentrating on the sin of homosexuality. It seemed as if there was an agenda, there.
Doh allready said most of what I could contribute 😉
I am not threatened by faith of others, it is the imposing it (and the perceived accompeigning values) on others that I hate. In my environment I know many religious people, my spouse is somewhat religious, and I can understand how people can find solace in their faith. I might even envy them on occassion.
But religion for me is a private thing. Religions differ, interpretations differ, and it should have no impact on how my country is governed. Our current PM is from the Christen-Democrats, so we know he is religious. But even the Christen-Democrats have had a moslim as a representative in the government (and a hindu too in the past) and it would werk counterproductive if the PM used a lot of ‘God’ in his speeches.
I have met several religious people who feel that religion is so much the basis of their morals and their values, that they cannot truely believe that non-religious people can have high moral standards. That I take offense with, because I frankly think that my standards are pretty high whilst those of *some* religious people I know are very low in my book.
For those that are interested, a couple of links:
A link to an essay about contemplative practices from many faiths. With Christian practices for example, centering prayer, or awakening to the God within, is very useful and practical, and something I do on a daily basis. But look for yourself, and see if there is something attractive.
Also, an essay on Five elements common to spiritual disciplines that enhance consciousness.
This is important, because the conversation about faith must elevate – I mention this in my comments that I point to above, but the current conversation between atheism and Christian fundamentalism (and more importantly, Muslim fundamentalism) is so bereft of the type of mature discussion of what actually works for an authentic spiritual practice.
Luckily, signs and signals from Sistani, for one example, he seems to understand some of the natural boundaries between religion and the state.
This type of meta-discussion, meta-narrative perhaps can start to evaluate certain religious beliefs/practices as NOT authentic. This is filled with the possibility of conflict – but it is simply the case that, for example, Muslim fundamentalism (or Christian fundamentalism, but currently Muslim fundamentalism is much more dangerous), is captured by (some!) beliefs that actually undermine practices of the presence of God, and respect and humilty before the world.
This of course is all tied up with social reactions to modernity, and political powerlessness, but it is very important to note when doctrines, religious or otherwise, go “off the rails”. And it is much better when this is done from a mature and informed understanding (and not a dismissal) of the truths of religious experience.
I’m 52 years old, my loving wife is experiencing life worse than death, I don’t have many complaints otherwise. I listen with great interest other’s expressions of faith. I don’t think I’ve ever Believed. My first epiphany was the jacket of Tull’s Aqualung with ‘…in the beginning, man created God.’ And I can understand why. I almost envy those with faith. To a point I share Jesurgislac anger with those that do what they do in the name of some god. But humans will do what they do, with or without taking such liberties. (I chuckle to learn yet another way in which jes can trash our President. He never misses a beat. I cannot bring this into a liberal or conservative argument for I feel they both miss the point. An issue is either fundamentally right or wrong, for mankind or the planet on which we live. And someone has to decide. We currently live in a society where these issues are allowed to be passionately debated. We might not always. This is Edward’s thread, so I should approach it from the perspective of the little I ‘know’ about him. One must have a belief system. If the religious software isn’t suitable, then you must program ‘in house’. Then you search out those that share most of what you believe. Man has been doing this since evolution/creation, so there is probably not too much new ground. Does Blog have a point coming soon? Sadly, no.
Religion Of Peace update
Edward _ , with the help of Irshad Manji, an enlightened Turkish Muslim: Which brings me back to the question of why I, an independent-minded woman, bother with Islam. Religion supplies a set of values, including discipline, that serve as…
It’s an interesting thing about religion: it’s so bound up with morality, but such a terrible predictor of how moral someone is.
(I have a weird background here: I was raised Catholic/Episcopal/Quaker/Catholic again/Methodist/Unitarian/Catholic again/Episcopal again, and sometime within the next few years I’m going to convert to Judaism–I’ll probably do a Conservative conversion though I’ve mainly gone to Reform synagogues and will probably continue to do so. This is partly for family reasons, but if it were only for family reasons I wouldn’t convert myself, just have the kids converted.)
I agree with many liberals that it’s a dangerous force, but only because it’s a powerful force, and any powerful thing can be made to serve evil purposes. But it can serve good purposes too, and it has. The good examples are often less spectacular and epic in scale, but they absolutely should not be overlooked.
I have an unfortunate tendency to turn to it in a crisis and overlook it the rest of the time. In a way I think that’s more disrespectful than being an atheist or agnostic. It’s not that I don’t or can’t believe, it’s that I’m too lazy to work at it. In my defense, conversion to Judaism is hugely time consuming and Boston is not exactly swimming in synagogues.
I think liberals should embrace religion only insofar as they can do it honestly. Obama, Edwards, and to some extent Kerry could pull this off. Dean, quite frankly, sounded dumb when he tried. There are other sorts of moral arguments one can make, and we should make those too. There is also an old, proud tradition of the separation of church and state that has nothing to do with any hostility to or rejection of religion. The jokes comparing teaching creationism or intelligent design in the schools being like teaching about fairies and leprecauns for example–they’re tempting, but they’re also disrespectful, and no matter how much that disrespect is deserve it will simply not convince anyone. Instead we should quote Jefferson, and especially Madison.
Regarding creationism (as blogbudsman notes, it’s my post, so I can steer a bit off-thread)…having been raised in a Pentacostal (the word of God is to be taken literally) Church, there’s no end to the fun to be had debating how this or that is actually possible (who did Cain marry, for example?).
One of the reasons I bounce back and forth between being agnostic and not-so agnostic is this belief I can’t shake in how literal the Bible should be interpreted. So long as it’s considered metaphorish, I’m fine, but my Church doesn’t consider it such and attending Church (in the increasingly rare occassions I do) throws my whole sense of it out of whack. In other words, I’m rather absolute about rejecting absolutism.
Blogbudsman, does your wife believe?
I ask (see my experience in this upthread), because I suspect when I’m dealing with “life worse than death” for myself I may see the real value of religion, the way “Michael” did.
In other words, as long as thing as relatively good, it’s easy to be agnostic or lazy. I do find, however, if woken by a loud explosive noise in the middle of the night, my first reaction remains to begin praying.
It embarasses me each time (mostly because it’s usually a car backfiring), but also comforts me somewhat to know there’s something…anything…to do in the end…that might work against the odds.
But in doing so, they’re conceeding not only the “moral high ground” in general, but also the right to insist that the values within their religion they cherish become as big a part of the national agenda as the values the conservatives cherish have. Values like peace, charity, generosity, faithfulness, and tolerance.
But the validity of these values does not depend on their being derived from religious belief. Are you saying that those who cherish them only have credibility if they can claim a religious basis? That seems wrong to me.
Like other commenters, I do not feel threatened by religion. I am threatened by the too common unwillingness of religious people to admit that they might be mistaken. (As an aside, this attitude strikes me as sacrilege. Those who take this position in effect claim for themselves an infallibility that they should reserve for the divine).
I am further threatened by the notion that arguments have some validity simply by virtue of being based on religious belief. It is all very well to point out that noble things like the civil rights movement had a strong religious component. But remember that a great deal of bigotry was similarly justified, and indeed some find arguments in support of slavery in the Bible even today. Religious arguments must meet secular tests.
So why should liberalism avoid secularism? The only reason I can see is that it is politically unwise. This reflects poorly on the electorate, I think, rather than on secularism.
Religion Of Peace update
Edward _ considers religion, with the help of Irshad Manji, an enlightened Turkish Muslim: Which brings me back to the question of why I, an independent-minded woman, bother with Islam. Religion supplies a set of values, including discipline, that serv…
But the validity of these values does not depend on their being derived from religious belief.
Granted it doesn’t.
Are you saying that those who cherish them only have credibility if they can claim a religious basis? That seems wrong to me.
Er, um, Lord no!
But the debate has become rather binary in that the GOP is now considered the religious party and without embracing anti-gay or anti-choice stances, the Democrats can be true to their platform and reclaim their rightful stance as religiously tolerant by focussing on those other values in that context. It’s tricky because we also stand for the right to be nonreligious, but again the debate is so binary…
Thanks Edward_ for the Fierstein link. Brilliant. All of them.
Thanks Edward_ for the Fierstein link. Brilliant. All of them.
Yeah, we think he’s amazing.
Edward: in that the GOP is now considered the religious party
Surely not. I have yet to hear that the GOP is particularly considered to be the party representative of Jews or Muslims: nor indeed of any non-Christian faith: nor indeed of Catholics: nor indeed of many Protestants.
What the GOP is considered to be representative of is a particular kind of evangelical, fundamentalist, intrinsically-Protestant, branch of Christianity. And that is religious: but it’s not enough to make the GOP “the religious party”: it’s enough to make the GOP the party of a type of Christian whom I cannot succinctly describe without violently breaking the Posting Rules.
Many Republicans may well object to this characterization of their party, and FWIW I know that Sebastian and Slartibartfast and Von are certainly no part of this: but Republicans who do not wish to see their party permanently taken over, and assumed to endorse, the religion of this type of Christian, need to fight it, not deny that it’s happening.
Edward: about fundamentalism: I don’t know if this helps at all (a lot depends on whether you want to find a way into a particular church that requires belief in the literal truth of the Bible), but:
I always thought that it was incumbent on a Christian to believe that the Bible was composed in accordance with God’s will, since He has the power to direct its composition any way he wants. This puts certain constraints on interpretation: for instance, you can’t believe that it systematically misleads us about his will unless you’re also willing to believe that he is the sort of being who would allow a systematically misleading Bible to be accepted as his word by his church, which conflicts with the idea that he is good. And it requires that one believe that whatever is in the Bible is there for a reason.
However, none of this, as far as I can tell, requires that one believe that the Bible is literally true. There might be perfectly good reasons for God directing the composition of a Bible that is in some parts not literally true, like for instance that the literal truth of those parts was both incomprehensible to some part of the Bible’s audience (e.g., to its audience at a given time) and not relevant to whatever God’s point was. Thus, for instance, when the Bible tells us that the sun stood still (I think in the book of Joshua): I can think of lots of reasons for saying that the sun stood still, and not: the earth stopped rotating, thereby leaving people with the impression that the sun stood still, though in fact it was the earth that stood still. (Or even: God caused people to think the sun stood still though actually it wasn’t moving to begin with, and he did this by some means other than stopping the earth, which is why everything on the surface of the earth didn’t fly off into space.) Economy, for one; comprehensibility, for another. Does this in any way affect the point of the story? No. Does it call God’s goodness into question? No again.
This is not a call to mushy, anything-goes interpretation. I arrived at this view while I was Christian, partly because there were parts of the Bible that I had a hard time squaring with any remotely OK view of God (e.g., Psalm 137:9, “Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock!”, and Galatians 5:12, the meaning of which is needlessly obscured by various translations: the American Standard Version reads: “I would that they that unsettle you would even go beyond circumcision”; the King James has “I would they were even cut off which trouble you”. The actual reference is to castration.) It is possible, or so it seemed to me, to try really hard to distinguish between interpretations you accept because you wish they were true, and interpretations you accept because, however unwelcome, they seem to you to provide the best interpretation you can find. At the time, for instance, I had no idea what God thought was wrong with sex outside marriage, but I couldn’t imagine how I could possibly interpret the Bible with a straight face and conclude that he did not think it was wrong. This was not what teenage me wanted to conclude, but that was, as far as I could tell, just too bad for me.
The point being: one can take the project of interpretation very seriously, and come to all sorts of unwelcome or unexpected conclusions, without being committed to the Bible’s literal truth. And as best I can tell, it’s the idea that the Bible’s composition was directed by God, and not its literal truth, that’s essential for Christians.
This has been a lovely conversation I really don’t have anything to say except my appreciation. I’m a Buddhist, by the way.
I’d like to add my assent to hilzoy’s comment, and expand on it a bit.
What most people who read the bible don’t realize is the power of their own interpretations, the power of their own ability to create meaning, about what the bible is saying. Not only does the bible literally contradict itself at times, but if read literally, no one is actually practicing what the Bible recommends.
Take for example:
Leviticus 25:44 – Both thy bondmen, and thy bondmaids, which thou shalt have, shall be of the heathen that are round about you; of them shall ye buy bondmen and bondmaids.
Basically, it’s okay to buy slaves if they are heathens – which usually is interpreted as coming from another country.
Or:
Exodus 21:7 And if a man sell his daughter to be a maidservant, she shall not go out as the menservants do
So it is okay to sell your daughter into slavery.
Or:
Exodus 35:2 – Six days shall work be done, but on the seventh day there shall be to you an holy day, a sabbath of rest to the LORD: whosoever doeth work therein shall be put to death.
So anyone who works on the sabbath should be killed. That was Moses, by the way.
So, the important point. Anyone reading the bible is already picking and choosing what parts of the Bible to listen to, and what parts of the Bible to ignore.
That’s why the supposed “biblical admonition” against sodomy:
Leviticus 18:22 – Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination. is simply an example of this picking and choosing parts of the Bible to justify what you wish to be true.
Now again, this doesn’t mean that ANYTHING goes – some things in the bible are more important than others – but saying you shouldn’t be doing something, or should be doing something, because the Bible says so – is simply a cop out to the meaning one creates for oneself, and attributes TO the bible (although of course the meaning is usually created by the community leaders).
I ask (see my experience in this upthread), because I suspect when I’m dealing with “life worse than death” for myself I may see the real value of religion, the way “Michael” did.
There’s an interesting moment in the documentary film “Touching the Void” (which coincidentally will be on PBS on Sunday), where a mountain climber in the Andes has broken his leg during the descent of a never-before climbed peak, and after his partner’s failed attempt to lower him down the mountain from 20,000 feet or so up, lays alone, severely injured, hypothermic and abandoned at the bottom of a deep crevasse after his partner cut the climbing ropes.
The guy lived, of course (he crawled down the mountain mostly on his hands and knees) and in the film he is asked a question relevant to this thread:
The words “no afterlife, there’s no paradise, there’s no heaven. It’s just dead” succintly sum up my beliefs on the matter, but if I was in a similar situation, I’d probably take a few seconds to ask whatever gods may be for some help, because, you know…what could it hurt at that point? Get me out of this one alive and I promise I will never covet my neighbor’s ass again, or whatever.
And then I’d start crawling down the mountain.
It is difficult for me to call myself an “atheist”, because to my mind I haven’t encountered a suitably comprehensive description of what a god is to be able to say whether I believe in one or not. Folks use “god” to perform so many different functions, from creator of the universe, to final moral arbiter, to a force that guides events large and small throughout existence, to “Feeling of Presence”, to a simple conscience, and they frequently talk as if any or all of these self-evidently derive from the same source. In my experience, “god” is sort of a blank slate on which individuals and cultures can imprint all their beliefs and feelings about the world (or at least those they can’t otherwise categorize). So if I say I don’t believe in God (note how it’s never “do you believe in a god?”), I seem to be rebuking everything they believe in even if we share a great many values and opinions. This is, unsurprisingly, frequently a conversation-stopper.
Ask if I believe in the Resurrection, or in angels, or in a simultaneously benevolent, omniscient, and omnipotent god, and I can give a straight answer. And Katherine, while I as a general rule would discourage anyone from ridiculing other folks’ religious beliefs, some folks did once truly believe in leprechauns, and some folks do still believe in fairies. I think it is important for people, particularly those in religiously homogeneous communities, to understand the tremendous diversity of spiritual views throughout history around the globe. As much as any of us is convinced that our own world view is true, we can each be assured that a vast majority of human civilization is or would have been convinced that we are dead wrong on the specifics.
One of the frustrating aspects of such a discussion of belief has been the dual fronts a liberal must fight: challenged from the secular left who do not (for what ever reason) hear the same “music” as you do; and second from the right, where the ethical implications of faith are constrained to a narrow, and finally counter-productive set of policies.
It would be impossible to understand my own politics apart from the hope and ethical insight derived from my tradition. This question of hope, for ourselves, for others, for our future not only adorns a life, but embues human choices with significance. At a human level, faith or belief opens up the possibility of a narrative, of an alternative different from that of the everyday and the expected. Something else can happen, and it is worth pursuing — that is the work of faith.
And I think it impossible to conceive of belief without a personal dimension as well. It is a mistake to think of faith, religion or values as some sort of political instrumentality, a means to power. It is also about who we are, our past as much as our future. It is a narrative and an unlocking of a secret about our life and this world.
The scandal of belief is that it clothes itself in religion. I’m with Edward: rejecting belief or religion leaves us the poorer in the political sphere, and quite possibly in our personal life as well.
Here are some theological views, held to varying degrees by different Christian denominations, that I have trouble with:
1) The idea that unbeliever, or believers of different religions, are damned.
2) The idea that faith matters more than works.
3) The idea that mankind is so sinful that the only way to save us was to have God’s son tortured to death on our behalf–even willingly. I do a lot of bad things, but I don’t think I’m that bad, and I know plenty of people who I can definitively say are not that bad.
4) Papal infallibility.
5) The idea that anything that happens is God’s will, so it can’t be bad.
Most religions say that God is all powerful, all knowing, and all good. It is hard to reconcile all three views with some of the things that happen in this world. The only way that seems to work for me is that God is all good and all powerful, but he has voluntarily restricted his power by giving mankind free will and setting certain laws of nature, and he rarely intervenes in the laws of nature, and never intervenes with mankind’s free will unless they invite Him to. A power to enable, not a power to control.
If that is true, then it is perfectly possible for men to do things, and for things to happen, that are contrary to God’s will. He is responsible, in the sense that He created the conditions for those things to occur, and allowed them to happen, but that doesn’t mean He chose for them to happen.
One of the things I like best about the reform Jewish tradition is that there’s a certain amount of back-talking to God that is encouraged. The story of Abraham pleading for Sodom is approved of, the story of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son and Noah’s failure to plead for the other members of the earth are not necessarily approved of. Maybe Abraham should have tried to save Isaac; maybe Abraham was playing along and wasn’t really going to go through with it. Why did God harden Pharoah’s heart, was he just playing some kind of a game that allowed him to kill all the Egyptian first born? That can’t be right; it must be an illustration of the psychological fact that if we voluntarily harden our own hearts and choose to sin, eventually hardness of heart and sin stop being a free choice. Why did they tell us to never forget the Amelkites, is that an instruction to wreak vengeance on their children? That’s not right…Maybe it’s actually an admonition to us never to forget the weak and the old and the sick in the way that allowed the Amelkites to attack.
Etc. There’s this long heritage and tradition, which is to be learned and wrestled with seriously; a long list of mitzvot to learn and obey as much as possible, but not just obeyed without reason or questioning or testing in your individual conscience.
Here are some theological views, held to varying degrees by different Christian denominations, that I have trouble with:
1) The idea that unbeliever, or believers of different religions, are damned.
2) The idea that faith matters more than works.
3) The idea that mankind is so sinful that the only way to save us was to have God’s son tortured to death on our behalf–even willingly. I do a lot of bad things, but I don’t think I’m that bad, and I know plenty of people who I can definitively say are not that bad.
4) Papal infallibility.
5) The idea that anything that happens is God’s will, so it can’t be bad.
Most religions say that God is all powerful, all knowing, and all good. It is hard to reconcile all three views with some of the things that happen in this world. The only way that seems to work for me is that God is all good and all powerful, but he has voluntarily restricted his power by giving mankind free will and setting certain laws of nature, and he rarely intervenes in the laws of nature, and never intervenes with mankind’s free will unless they invite Him to. A power to enable, not a power to control.
If that is true, then it is perfectly possible for men to do things, and for things to happen, that are contrary to God’s will. He is responsible, in the sense that He created the conditions for those things to occur, and allowed them to happen, but that doesn’t mean He chose for them to happen.
One of the things I like best about the reform Jewish tradition is that there’s a certain amount of back-talking to God that is encouraged. The story of Abraham pleading for Sodom is approved of, the story of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son and Noah’s failure to plead for the other members of the earth are not necessarily approved of. Maybe Abraham should have tried to save Isaac; maybe Abraham was playing along and wasn’t really going to go through with it. Why did God harden Pharoah’s heart, was he just playing some kind of a game that allowed him to kill all the Egyptian first born? That can’t be right; it must be an illustration of the psychological fact that if we voluntarily harden our own hearts and choose to sin, eventually hardness of heart and sin stop being a free choice. Why did they tell us to never forget the Amelkites, is that an instruction to wreak vengeance on their children? That’s not right…Maybe it’s actually an admonition to us never to forget the weak and the old and the sick in the way that allowed the Amelkites to attack.
Etc. There’s this long heritage and tradition, which is to be learned and wrestled with seriously; a long list of mitzvot to learn and obey as much as possible, but not just obeyed without reason or questioning or testing in your individual conscience.
Well, there’s a solution to that. King James, for instance, had some interpretations in it that were…slanted, for what reason I don’t know. Political correctness? Power leverage? Take your pick. The problem in the not-so-dim past was twofold, at least: people were in general illiterate, and the Bible wasn’t available in translations that the literate could understand. You had your choice of Latin and the language of the original manuscripts (Greek, Aramaic, and I forget what else). What’s changed since then is that better translations are available (King James, for instance, is archaic to the point of being nearly incomprehensible in places), and that some denominations require their clergy to be fluent in the original languages.
So when I want a literal translation, I go to my pastor. Yes, the Bible is frequently confusing, full of apparent contradiction and sometimes inexplicable repetition. I’m still not sure if I buy the idea that the Bible is the true, literal word of God, to be taken at face value. Genesis, for instance, to be taken at face value requires that the reader believe that God is a merry trickster, making an entire universe in a week that has all the features (down to the finest imaginable detail) of something that’s tens of billions of years old. So I elect to take Genesis as sort of an allegory.
I live in contradiction, daily. But that’s faith.
wonderful post on religion by Teresa Nielsen Hayden.
Slarti, that’s a good point. IIRC, when I looked at the hebrew for the Leviticus “anti-sodomy” quote above, I was surprised to find that the prohibition seemed to be directed at sex not with “men” but with “youths”.
FWIW, Katherine, I think you’d find that sort of challenge is encouraged in many (but not all) flavors of Judaism.
It’s also educational to consider how various interpretations of the Bible have changed over the centuries, even within the Christian tradition: in the Middle Ages, it was generally assumed that the “sin of Sodom” for which the city was destroyed, was gluttony.
hilzoy – “I always thought that it was incumbent on a Christian to believe that the Bible was composed in accordance with God’s will, since He has the power to direct its composition any way he wants. This puts certain constraints on interpretation: for instance, you can’t believe that it systematically misleads us about his will unless you’re also willing to believe that he is the sort of being who would allow a systematically misleading Bible to be accepted as his word by his church, which conflicts with the idea that he is good.”
Hmmm, it seems to me there are some unspoken assumptions in that line of reasoning. To make just one point, by that same logic, God has the power to direct the composition of any holy book, therefore a good God wouldn’t allow the existence of any widely accepted book which mislead people as to his will. Nevertheless, there are distinct differences between, say, the Bible, the Koran, and the Book of Mormon. Even within christianity, there are differences between the catholic and protestant versions of the bible, or between different translations of the same bible.
You can try to avoid this issue somewhat with your qualification that you’re speaking of the belief of a christian that God would not allow a systematically misleading tet in “his church”, but I’m not convinced that really answers the problem. You’re postulating a god who created the whole world and loves all people. Why would such a god be ok with misleading some people (actually a majority of the world’s population), but not others? To an outsider with no previous conditioning, there is no reason to find one religion’s holy book more believable than another’s. In fact, most people’s religious orientation is based on the accident of when and where they are born. Edward_ is struggling with belief or agnoticism towards Christianity, not Hinduism. Meanwhile, Apu_ may be somewhere struggling with belief in Ganesh. Why would a just god allow one sincere seeker after truth to be mislead, but not another?
You can, of course, make the argument that God allows people to promulgate mistaken religions and holy books based on free will, but then why wouldn’t that free will extend to folks compiling a mistaken version of the bible?
As an atheist with tendencies towards secular Buddhism, the matter is somewhat academic to me, but if I did believe in a creator of the universe, this explains the text I would use to study his/her/its will.
Yeah, I’m know that’s true, I’ve just mainly been to a reform synagogue and known reform rabbis, and I fail to live up to the more Orthodox demoninations so completely that I feel even stupider talking about their approach than about reform Judaism.
But critical study and argument is a thousands-year-old tradition in Judaism; it long predates the existence of reform Judaism.
I’ll never cut it as an Orthodox Jew….The Conservative tradition’s fundamental approach as I understand it–that some mitzvot are more binding than others, but we say which ones, not you–makes less sense to me than the Reform approach, but in practice the individual syngagogue and rabbi matter more than which “movement” it belongs too. I plan to convert in a way that a conservative synagogue would recognize as valid, so my kids have the option. (it’s much easier for women to do this than men! but then again their kids are Jewish without them having to convert at all if the mother’s Jewish.)
two favorite lines from the Teresa Nielsen Hayden post (you’re right Katherine…it’s wonderful)
That last one reminds me of one of my pet peeves of my Church, they have a lousy sense of humor.
Very broadly speaking, there are two cultures whose people have a relationship with God I envy. Jews and Catholic Irish. Both have a sense of humor about their relationship and in a way both take on God as if he just might in some way be defeatable. The Jews take him on intellectually, while the Irish imply they’re willing to take him on physically. I adore this about both of them, and suspect God does too.
As one young Turk told me, “If Western values are tolerance, democracy, justice, equality and freedom, then I live in a Western country: Turkey.”
The gall. All countries in Europe have thriving muslim populations. Where is the Christian population of Turkey? Where are the 350,000 Christian Greeks who were living in Istanbul in 1950? They all left, driven out by the intolerant and racist society and governments of Turkey. They are still kept out by the same government. This is why Turkey does not belong to the EU. Until they have thriving religious minorities INSIDE their borders, they will never be culturally European.
Until they have thriving religious minorities INSIDE their borders, they will never be culturally European.
Er, given the situation as it exists, don’t you think a better economy (the sort joinging the EU will bring them) is the best way to entice back people of those other religions?
I’ll guarantee you that Germans, Brits, and Spaniards will invest heavily in Turkish resort towns (hell, they vacation there already).
They are still kept out by the same government.
Cite?
I don’t know if liberals are threatened by religion so much as embarassed to discuss it. The embarassment, imo, is because discussing religion entails using certain four letter words that are hard to voice in polite company without blushing. The most embarassing of these is love. Sissy-word like that is going to get you laughed at for sure. Right along with those other sissy 4-letter words like meek, kind, fair, just, help. Even their mascots are embarassing: the lamb and the dove.
The 4-letter words the religious right uses are much more macho: fear, pain, gold, rule. The wolf, the hawk, the bear.
Yeah, that was my sarcastic voice.
Good thread, btw.
Edward: it always seemed to me absolutely impossible to consider God’s creation in any detail without concluding that He has a somewhat mordant sense of humor, and would probably appreciate any backtalk offered honestly and in a spirit of (possibly exasperated) good will.
doh: Slarti, that’s a good point. IIRC, when I looked at the hebrew for the Leviticus “anti-sodomy” quote above, I was surprised to find that the prohibition seemed to be directed at sex not with “men” but with “youths”.
One of the more interesting translations of Leviticus I’ve seen argued that the “anti-sodomy” prohibition is actually a prohibition against men using the male temple prostitutes common in the Middle East at that time. [Implicit in this interpretation is that it was OK for the men to lie with the female temple prostitutes.] There are apparently a couple of key verbs that render this not-completely-off-the-wall, but my Semitic languages are too weak (i.e. non-existent) to confirm the veracity of that claim.
BTW: When I talked about more or less this subject with my (more religious) spouse, he recommended “The Adventures of the Black Girl in her search for God” (George Bernard Shaw)
Haven’t read it yet, so can’t comment upon it.
Found a descriptive link though
he recommended “The Adventures of the Black Girl in her search for God” (George Bernard Shaw)
Also recommended, where Shaw explains more explicitly what he’s getting at, the long preface to the play Androcles and the Lion.
Tnsx jes, I’ll tell him.