1. The belief in hell, and the fear of ending up there.
2. Fostering a detachment from this life.
2.a. and thus justifying not caring for our planet or the life on it (including one’s own, and that of other people).
3. The acceptance of the devil or of this world as a necessarily evil place
3.a. and thus justifying the existence of poverty and inequality.
2 comments July 8th, 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.
5 comments 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.
Add comment 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).
Add comment February 1st, 2008
I just finished Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate. I had high expectations, I’ll admit. It was recommended to me, in my second year of university, during a heated debate. A few people were trying to dash my naive hopes for progress in humanity by flouting about ideas to do with self-interest and greed etc. etc. and I was grasping at trying to communicate that while I could appreciate those aspects of our humanity I felt that we had evolved the ability to understand these parts of ourselves, their pros and cons, and the possibility of growing away from the damaging ones…or something. And the one individual present who was sympathetic to my underdeveloped ideas pointed me toward this book as a place where these ideas were explored.
Sure enough The Blank Slate is a powerful argument for the reality of Human Nature, and the role it plays in the dark side of what people are capable of, but Pinker makes it clear that he points these things out not to justify them but to encourage us to learn about them so that we can better prevent crime and inhumane acts etc. It’s good. It just often left me with a bad taste in my mouth. It was almost as if while Pinker kept claiming to feel that the exposition of his ideas would mean progress, the connections couldn’t be followed through in his writing. Perhaps because despite all the work he pulled together he was working exclusively through a Western philosophical framework and that seemed to limit his ability to build on human universals he was uncovering.*
All-in-all worth the read though. Another thing I read was The Embodied Mind and it was really wonderful. It was difficult to get through at times, simply because of the density of the material, but left me with a fantastic taste in my mouth. It too was deeply concerned with elements of human nature but was more invested in the experience of rising above it (through Buddhist-esque* meditation etc). Which brings me to a quotation I found in the Blank Slate from The African Queen in which Katherine Hepburn says to Humphrey Bogart, “Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we are put in this world to rise above.”
*There are rough allusions here to something which could be taken as simply deferring to Eastern philosophy with no justification aside from its being ‘exotic’, but that is not what I mean to be doing. There is a sense in which I feel like incorporating some Eastern philosophy will be necessary to dig us out of the moralistic and spiritual hole that secular science has been digging us into. Particularly research in Human Nature is revealing more and more about the impermanence of human life and that our notion of a ’self’ emerges from activity in the body. While someone like Pinker may not mean this as a spiritually defeating idea, for alot of Westerners it has to be–Judaeo-Christianity simply hasn’t prepared us for anything like it. In order to deal with it looking to traditions like Buddhism which deal actively with the impermanence and illusion of the self may be deeply helpful.
Add comment January 9th, 2008
I just finished the most difficult essay of my academic career thus far. It wasn’t really that hard. It was just a second year paper on a Celtic myth. In fact the prof even gave us a list of questions we could choose from to answer–and as a cognitive science student I haven’t had it that ‘easy’ as long as I can remember. But it was not something I could deal with.
I never understood myths. When I was very young I could never understand the parables in the Bible. I learned in Sunday school that one of the most amazing things about Jesus was that he spoke to the people in a way they could understand—but that always confused me, because he seemed impossible to understand: “Why did he not just say what he meant?” I used to wonder. All this about seeds on paths and in thorns and in good soil, why not just talk about people who were or were not open to hearing and accepting the word of God? The Trinity was not a difficult concept for me even as a child, but Jesus’ sermons were impossible.
Then as I got older my mother used to try to share her love for Roman and Greek mythology with my brother and I. Again I was baffled. All these stories about all these people doing all these different things and I just could not understand what any of it was supposed to mean. Addition, subtraction, eventually algebra, biology and physics I could do, even philosophy and philosophy of religion—but myths, and legends no way.
Last year I took a psychology course in personality that opened my mind to a whole new world of understanding. Relatively unconventionally Jordan Peterson taught us personality from a historical perspective. In a field where many have stopped actively teaching the thoughts of Freud and Jung, Peterson took us even further back. He showed us slides of artifacts from Egypt and medieval Europe exposing us to fundamental notions underlying the religions and myths of various cultures and how they could be related to Freud and Jung and modern personality theory. He made us watch Pinocchio analytically, pausing it every few minutes to discuss archetypal characters. Peterson helped us to understand that evolutionarily speaking the mind has not changed much in the past 250,000 years—and that we have a lot more in common with the ancients or those living in the middle ages than we may have previously thought. We began to look at myths as people’s attempts to explain their experiences in life. Just like the art of today, we began to understand myths as people’s insistence to struggle to put the ineffable into words. He uncovered for us the wealth of information myths communicated to people within the societies they became popular in, as well as the wealth of information they have the potential of communicating to us if we look deep enough into them.
And it got me all intersted and stuff. So I’m trying–my damndest. And I’m learning alot. But I think Peterson’s courses on the psychology of all of this will always remain my strong suit.
Add comment January 10th, 2007
First read this. Then tell me: am I missing something? I mean, generally speaking I fall on the side against the Catholic Church, but in this case I don’t think I even understand the problem–and until further clarity is shed on the situation I am definately siding with the Church.
How could crossing yourself be provocative?
2 comments August 26th, 2006
I had an interesting day yesterday.
I had one of those days where the angst wins: where I question everything until I feel guilty and worthless in just about every facet of my life. One of those days where eventually your mind pushes your body so far that it’s all you can do to not to cry–and then suddenly you just have to give in anyway and the tears come hard.
I have had an incredable life-changing summer. I have just moved into a new home which I will share with wonderful new roommates and about which I am extremely excited. I signed up for and got into all but one of the courses I wanted for next year. I’m healthy, I have food on my plate and enough money in the bank to keep it that way.
But I hate how much stuff I own, and that my clothes and posessions don’t represent the person I want to be. I hate that I haven’t been going to yoga. I hate that I don’t eat purely organic food. I hate that I haven’t been spending any time nurturing my spiritual side in years.
It’s time to try to make some changes.
Add comment August 4th, 2006
“How lucky are we?”
“God must like us.
“I thought you didn’t believe in God?”
“…I don’t…But he still has semantic value…”
“Despite his lack of existance?”
“Yep.”
2 comments July 2nd, 2006
The Jesus Papers is a new (apparently) non-fiction book by Michael Baigent explaining that Pontius Pilot did not kill Jesus, but only pretended to, in order to pacify the angry masses that wanted him dead. …
…I don’t have much to say about that really. To me it’s much like what was in the Da Vinci code–interesting as hell*, but entirely beside the point when it comes to my faith in God and my belief about who and what Jesus was.
The reason I’m writing about it is just that I wanted to share what “The Voice” just said about it on CBC: “This pretend crucifixion is a bit of a relief, because all this time I’ve only been pretending to feel guilty for my sins.”
Brilliant, frankly. …this is me laughing heartily.
*reference not intended. It was noticed by the author during editing and removed, but has been resurrected in virtue of its ironic value
1 comment April 7th, 2006
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