Faith: a Non-Rant
18/1/10 18:08![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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jaylake's thoughtful posts about his relationship (or not) with religion and faith, and the comments there, I've been thinking a lot about the topic lately. I'm hampered by the fact that the belief I have is pretty strictly homegrown, and my tools for discussing it are, well, sort of lame.
My mother was a Nebraska Episcopalian who had a sentimental fondness for the prayer book and practices of her church, but, at least by the time I encountered her, did not seem to believe any of it. My father was raised as a Jew--but in a family of first generation Americans where assimilation was key, I get the feeling that religion was not as important as education and accomplishment*. My brother and I were raised by people who were non-believers; we were taken to a variety of services in different Christian denominations, a couple of Jewish services, and then the subject wasn't really raised again.
The result? My brother is an evangelical Christian. I am a bewildered believer in something. I identify as Unitarian Universalist, largely because they seem to accept, or perhaps exult in, people as confused as I am.
I am fascinated by what I would call the theatre of religion, by the vestments and rituals and props. Mostly I'm fascinated by Christianity and Judaism--I'm of European extraction, these were the religious structures I was earliest exposed to, and they're part of my experience. In any case, I've never confused my interest in monastic habits or the lives of saints or the rules of Orthodox Judaism with actual religion. For me, the closest I get to personal religion is a belief that there's something, an organizing principle in the universe, that I choose to call God. This God isn't particularly interested in my daily comings and goings--or yours, either. Order and chaos is more God's thing. What does this mean for me? I guess, if I had to develop a theological structure around my belief, I'd say: the universe is full of chaos. God works to make pockets of order, or rational structures like natural laws and the amazing way that the human body is put together. (Okay, and sometimes there are odd jokes like the duckbill platypus. Any God I'm going to believe in has a very large sense of humor.) I have no church, no rituals, no prayers, just this idea that making order out of chaos is a good thing, the thing we're here for. Which works for me.
Your Mileage May Vary.
But that's not what I was thinking about this morning. I've been thinking about fundamentalist non-believers. Or maybe I mean militant atheists. The sort of people who are so incensed that anyone could believe in God that they commit many of the same sins of rigidity and condescension and wrath that they are quick to decry in fundamentalist Christians. I am married to someone who is a pretty vehement non-believer. He tries--I have seen him try really hard--to believe that very smart, savvy people can believe in God, but for the most part he has a hard time getting past his own sense that anyone who does believe in God is either a) stupid or b) being deliberately obtuse or c) being somehow manipulative. When he's trying to get past his own faith in non-belief, he puts me in mind of that old Dilbert comic: "Must...control...Fist of Death..."
And he's a guy of goodwill. So isjaylake, as I think his posts have shown. But some people are so aggressively, unforgivingly rational, that they give other non-believers a bad name in much the same way that crazed ranting fundamentalist Christians do. They make the world uncomfortable for agnostics: the people who are okay with not knowing for sure. They make the world uncomfortable for nonbelievers who aren't as fervid as they are. They make me, personally, uncomfortable when they assert that religion is a drug and a snare, that belief is a sign of feeblemindedness or wickedness, that unless you can prove it it's useless.
If someone says "I love you," how do you test that? It's intangible. You can say that the person's behavior demonstrates the love--but how do you prove that love is actually what motivates the behavior? Some people act lovingly toward a spouse or child or parent because that's what they're expected to do, but their inner landscape might reveal something very different. Yet I know fervent atheists who believe in love despite the fact that they can't prove that what they may experience themselves may not be what the next guy feels. I'm not saying that believing in love, or honor, is a bad thing. I'm saying that the existence of God isn't the only intangible human beings invest their hearts in, and it would do fundamentalist atheists no harm to treat the faith of other people with the same kindness they might treat the love of those people.
At the end of Dogma someone asks Linda Fiorentino's character if she believes. "No," she says. "But I have a good idea."
*my father's teachers learned early on that he was an artist, and he missed a lot of classes in elementary, junior high, and high school because he'd be sent around to draw holiday pictures--almost always Christian holiday pictures--on the classroom blackboards around the school. When he asked his parents if this was okay they shrugged and said, "The teacher asks you to do it? You do what the teacher says."
jaylake's thoughtful posts about his relationship (or not) with religion and faith, and the comments there, I've been thinking a lot about the topic lately. I'm hampered by the fact that the belief I have is pretty strictly homegrown, and my tools for discussing it are, well, sort of lame.My mother was a Nebraska Episcopalian who had a sentimental fondness for the prayer book and practices of her church, but, at least by the time I encountered her, did not seem to believe any of it. My father was raised as a Jew--but in a family of first generation Americans where assimilation was key, I get the feeling that religion was not as important as education and accomplishment*. My brother and I were raised by people who were non-believers; we were taken to a variety of services in different Christian denominations, a couple of Jewish services, and then the subject wasn't really raised again.
The result? My brother is an evangelical Christian. I am a bewildered believer in something. I identify as Unitarian Universalist, largely because they seem to accept, or perhaps exult in, people as confused as I am.
I am fascinated by what I would call the theatre of religion, by the vestments and rituals and props. Mostly I'm fascinated by Christianity and Judaism--I'm of European extraction, these were the religious structures I was earliest exposed to, and they're part of my experience. In any case, I've never confused my interest in monastic habits or the lives of saints or the rules of Orthodox Judaism with actual religion. For me, the closest I get to personal religion is a belief that there's something, an organizing principle in the universe, that I choose to call God. This God isn't particularly interested in my daily comings and goings--or yours, either. Order and chaos is more God's thing. What does this mean for me? I guess, if I had to develop a theological structure around my belief, I'd say: the universe is full of chaos. God works to make pockets of order, or rational structures like natural laws and the amazing way that the human body is put together. (Okay, and sometimes there are odd jokes like the duckbill platypus. Any God I'm going to believe in has a very large sense of humor.) I have no church, no rituals, no prayers, just this idea that making order out of chaos is a good thing, the thing we're here for. Which works for me.
Your Mileage May Vary.
But that's not what I was thinking about this morning. I've been thinking about fundamentalist non-believers. Or maybe I mean militant atheists. The sort of people who are so incensed that anyone could believe in God that they commit many of the same sins of rigidity and condescension and wrath that they are quick to decry in fundamentalist Christians. I am married to someone who is a pretty vehement non-believer. He tries--I have seen him try really hard--to believe that very smart, savvy people can believe in God, but for the most part he has a hard time getting past his own sense that anyone who does believe in God is either a) stupid or b) being deliberately obtuse or c) being somehow manipulative. When he's trying to get past his own faith in non-belief, he puts me in mind of that old Dilbert comic: "Must...control...Fist of Death..."
And he's a guy of goodwill. So is
jaylake, as I think his posts have shown. But some people are so aggressively, unforgivingly rational, that they give other non-believers a bad name in much the same way that crazed ranting fundamentalist Christians do. They make the world uncomfortable for agnostics: the people who are okay with not knowing for sure. They make the world uncomfortable for nonbelievers who aren't as fervid as they are. They make me, personally, uncomfortable when they assert that religion is a drug and a snare, that belief is a sign of feeblemindedness or wickedness, that unless you can prove it it's useless.If someone says "I love you," how do you test that? It's intangible. You can say that the person's behavior demonstrates the love--but how do you prove that love is actually what motivates the behavior? Some people act lovingly toward a spouse or child or parent because that's what they're expected to do, but their inner landscape might reveal something very different. Yet I know fervent atheists who believe in love despite the fact that they can't prove that what they may experience themselves may not be what the next guy feels. I'm not saying that believing in love, or honor, is a bad thing. I'm saying that the existence of God isn't the only intangible human beings invest their hearts in, and it would do fundamentalist atheists no harm to treat the faith of other people with the same kindness they might treat the love of those people.
At the end of Dogma someone asks Linda Fiorentino's character if she believes. "No," she says. "But I have a good idea."
*my father's teachers learned early on that he was an artist, and he missed a lot of classes in elementary, junior high, and high school because he'd be sent around to draw holiday pictures--almost always Christian holiday pictures--on the classroom blackboards around the school. When he asked his parents if this was okay they shrugged and said, "The teacher asks you to do it? You do what the teacher says."