Archive for February 1st, 2008
I have struggled, as someone raised outside a strictly religious family, but with Christian influence, and having turned from the teachings of the faith with the idea of how to raise my own children. I do not want to bring them up under Christian theology. I do not want them to feel they are inherantly sinful, or somehow incomplete unless they accept a particular belief system, or to fear that they, or their loved ones may end up in hell (all ideas I struggled with as a child).And yet it seems inescapable to me that the young mind be raised with myth.
Our minds, particularly the minds of our children, are deeply structured on narrative–and in that sense whatever is given to them will be taken as myth. And so I shudder at the idea of raising them, in such a consumerist culture with no structural ideas as their myth. And yet even more frightening to me is the idea of sending them to ‘atheist’ or ’secular’ sunday schools (which are now popping up)–because the last thing you need is a child to develop skepticism as their myth.
Rational engagement with ideas and the development of compassion for others through understanding their choices and needs are ideals I would promote–and those are not ideals afforded by any faith (besides Buddhism) any more than they are promoted by modern day atheism which avidly declares religions to be the antithesis of science.
At the end of the day, I feel it is often lost that believing in God, or claiming that there is a God, is only as ludicrous as believing or claiming there is no God. It seems to me, lost on some secular rationalists that admitting agnosticism, in the true sense of the word, is the only “rational” claim.
February 1st, 2008
There is something bizarre, to me, about people who claim to be rational, and open thinkers who beat against the Bible and the Christian faith as if it were some kind of punching bag through which they were supposed to be able to make themselves feel smarter.
The Bible is an extremely ancient collection of written works, parts of it respected for millennia, that cannot be easily dismissed. Are there parts of it which are contradictory, or ludicrous in the light of scientific discoveries? Yes. But if you are a secular rationalist then step back and accept it for what it is–a collection of myths and stories that helped, and continues to help, various peoples and cultures around the world through times of strife and trouble when things seemed to be going so wrong in the world that nothing could make life seem worth living.
Sure, you say. But your point is that people out there take it literally! They take it seriously! Every word, you scream, they believe! And I hear you. It stresses me out too. And I’ll admit that I don’t have an answer to that, but I do have a few things to say.
1. Attempting to repeatedly prove that the arguments behind their faith are hollow will never accomplish anything. Their faith is not filling a rational need in their life. It is filling a deep spiritual one, and to take that from them is simply to open them up to the painful experience of absurdity. Only through the experience of seeing the possibility of living and enjoying a compassionate, fulfilling life outside a Christian faith could their beliefs ever be changed–and you are not working toward that end by stirring bad blood with them.
2. As long as you spend so much of your breath attacking their beliefs you are still attached to, and controlled by the role the faith has played in your own life. To actively reject Christianity, so viscerally, or even so rationally (considering it’s not a rational faith) is to accept it as a tenant to be actively argued against. It is not. It is a faith. Ignore it, if it’s not what you want for yourself.
February 1st, 2008
I am frustrated.
I am angered.
I am experiencing visceral and emotional responses to arguments that strike me as unfair, and hypocritically narrow.
It has always seemed patently ignorant, to me, to pit science against religion, or to purport it to be some important step forward we have taken from religion as we progress as a species.
As if science did not depend on leaps of faith. For science to work we need to trust our ability to perform inductive reasoning. We need to trust the theoretical choices and probability assignments we make. We need to put faith in the choices of educated individuals to hold one theory up over another. And that’s okay. That is how it works. And an argument can most certainly be made for using our competency as a species as evidence for our reasoning abilities, and the reasoning of our trained scientists.
But let us not lose sight of the parallels between choosing to hold science above all else, and to take the word of the theorist and the choice to hold religion above all else in taking the word of the theologians. There are differences, absolutely. But, there are similarities, and to deny that is arrogant and ignorant.
*I ended up here because friends of mine had joined a group about it on that evil social network we all use. And I browsed around this mixture of sometimes rational and compassionate ideals based on mindfulness and wellness yet often arrogant and pigheaded battering of the beliefs of religious others and I got frustrated. Because hypocrisy irritates me. You can be dogmatic, and fundamentalist and myopic if you want–but if you’re going to be then leave others to do the same (at least if you’re going to claim ‘rationality’ as your one of your main motivations and inspirations).
February 1st, 2008