Religion

I grew up in a liberal Episcopal household, and though I’m not a terribly active practicer now, religion (of all faiths and denominations) can be an interesting (and at times, infuriating) topic.

Belief, faith, and the church

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Over the years, from time to time, I’ve surprised people when they find out that not only was I raised in a Christian family, but I still count many of my core beliefs as Christian. Apparently, I don’t “come across that way,” as one friend put it in high school. My primary color scheme is generally black. I listen to a lot of dark music. I’ve always run around with the alternative/gothic crowd. One of my favorite artists is H. R. Giger who’s work is extremely dark and disturbing. I have never had any problems with people believing in ghosts, magic (or majick), Gaea, or any form of “paganism” (popularly described as anything that’s not one of the major forms of religion).

On top of it all, I count my beliefs as mine, and other people’s beliefs as theirs. If they want to talk about it fine — but I’m not about to attempt to convince them that I’m “right” and they’re “wrong”, and I expect the same respect from them.

At the same time, while the base of my personal belief system is rooted in the Christian church (specifically, the Episcopal church), I certainly have my times when I struggle with it. The existance of any type of god is not always something that’s easy to hold on to, when faced with the things that go on in the world all the time. Some days I see sunbeams cutting through trees and making the golds and reds of the fallen leaves glow against the mossy ground, and it’s hard not to believe in God. I have a friend studying massage therapy and kinesthesiology, and for her, the more she learns about how the body works, how all the systems interact with each other to keep us moving, it convinces her more and more that there must be an intelligence behind it all, and helps to keep her faith in God intact. At other times, I see the atrocities committed by man upon other men, upon the world we live on, and find it very hard to believe that there can be anything “keeping an eye on us.”

It’s all part. It happens. It’s how you deal with it, and what decisions you come to, that help make up who you are — and I personally think that there aren’t necessarily any “right” or “wrong” answers to any of it.

Trains of thought like that are part of what makes finding a weblog like Real Live Preacher such a joy. Written by a Protestant minister in Texas, it’s not what most people would come to expect when reading something written from a religious point of view — funny, sometimes profane, full of both faith and doubt, very honest, and a joy to read.

I received an email from someone puzzled about the grief I experienced when I gave up on God. This person felt liberated when she left Christianity.

I understand how some would feel that way. Many of you only know Christianity from bad books, TV preachers, and the people who watch them. If that were all I knew of Christianity I would celebrate my liberation from it all the days of my life.

But I was exposed early to the real stuff — Top Shelf Christianity — Deep and Old Christianity. This kind is practiced by people who work until they stink and take life in great draughts. Their hands are as rough as their hides, and they DO their faith in secret, hiding their good works in obedience to Christ. They know how to love and be loved in return. Their laughter is loud and has its roots in joy.

These Christians don’t want your money and they don’t advertise. You will only find them if you MUST find them. These are the ones who took me to Mexico as a boy and showed me pain and joy. They hid nothing from me.

I was also blessed by being exposed to the right kind of Christian thinkers. C.S Lewis and his friend J.R.R. Tolkein. Frederick Buechner, Carlyle Marney, and Thomas Merton. Will Campbell who wrote “Brother to a Dragonfly” and Eberhard Arnold. Frederick Dale Bruner and Martin Luther King Jr.

You did understand there was more to this than religious TV and the drivel they sell in those awful Christian bookstores, right? After all, Christianity didn’t sustain itself for twenty centuries by shitting Hallmark cards before a live studio audience.

Many thanks to Boing Boing for the link.

Theologian of the Year

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I’d be interested to hear what Dad thinks of this link — ‘The Door’ magazine (who I don’t know anything about at all) chooses their Theologian of the Year:

Perilous times call for bold theology.

Let’s face it. Evil is running rampant. Terrorists strike without warning. Corporate executives defraud the public and their own employees. Politicians tear apart the fabric of national unity for their own agendas. Popular culture has become a banal river of unadulterated trash, a “hellmouth” slowly dumbing down our sense of reality. The people are paralyzed by indecision, ennui or terminal cynicism.

Meanwhile, the ozone layer is perforated, glaciers are melting, and crazies set wildfires that denude the landscape. While Generation X passes the baton to Generation Y, adolescence is still hell, AND THERE’S ONLY ONE LETTER LEFT!

We need someone who can not only deconstruct the problem of evil, but kick it’s hiney; someone with a preternatural sense of comic timing and an eye for fashion.

We need Buffy.

Dad (along with other people) has been telling me for a while just how good of a show ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ really is. One of these days I may need to see if I can rent the DVD season sets and start working my way through it. Neat article, though.

Incidentally, The Door looks like it may be an interesting site to explore — from their ‘About The Door Magazine‘ page:

We satirize something we love — the Church, and more generally people of faith — with the hope that our prodding might generate some course corrections while inducing a laugh or two…or three.

The basis for The Door‘s mission is a scriptural injunction to mock idolatry. The prophet Elijah did it best, during his contest with the priests of Baal. But an expanded discussion is found in the Talmud, that compendium of Jewish oral traditions that we find a continuing source of light on New Testament understanding. The rabbinic teachers said Israel was forbidden to mock or jeer anyone or anything except idolatry. The prescribed epithet was, “Take your idol and put it under your buttocks!”

What kind of God…?

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Thinking about the upcoming one year anniversary of Sept. 11th, Dave had this to say:

A common theme — what kind of God lets this happen. I answer that with another question. What kind of a country is so selfish that it doesn’t see that 9-11 was [the] tiniest big tragedy viewed from a global perspective. What about famine in Africa? What about AIDS? They wonder at the spiritual vision of a person who jumps from the World Trade Center to certain death, but don’t wonder about the millions of people who do the same thing with tobacco? It’s out of balance. We’re out of balance. 9-11 was, IMHO, a small upheaval in getting to some kind of equilibrium in how the U.S. participates in the world, both from the U.S. perspective, and the world’s perspective. That we got so much sympathy says how big the human heart is. That there wasn’t more celebrating in the streets of world capitals says that they forgive us for our selfish attitude, which is back in force as if 9-11 never happened.

So what was the lesson of 9-11 that the U.S. has failed to learn? I think it’s that God doesn’t think we’re as important as we do. The concept of national security is obsolete. We can’t close our borders. We live on this planet with everyone else. Global warming, AIDS, terrorism, all penetrate all borders. New York is a world city. The last gasps of isolationism will be snuffed out by more humiliation, until we get the truth, we aren’t above the rest of the world, but we are part of it.

Amen.

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Who wrote the bible?

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Here’s some fascinating stuff courtesy of The Straight Dope — a five-part series covering the primary theories on who wrote and edited the Bible. I’ve only read the first part, but plan on going through the rest fairly soon, and may want to pick up a book they recommend in the article, Who Wrote the Bible? by Richard E. Friedman. This stuff fascinates me…here’s the links:

  • Part 1: Who wrote/compiled/edited (and when) the first five books of the Bible, called the Torah or Pentateuch or Five Books of Moses?
  • Part 2: Who wrote/compiled/edited (and when) the various histories in the Old Testament (such as Judges, Kings, etc)?
  • Part 3: Who wrote/compiled/edited (and when) the various prophetic books (Isaiah, Jeremiah, etc.) and the wisdom literature (Psalms, Proverbs, etc.) in the Old Testament?
  • Part 4: Who wrote/compiled/edited (and when) the various New Testament books?
  • Part 5: Who decided which books should be included and which excluded from the Bible(s)? Why are there differences in the Bibles for Catholics, Protestants, and Jews?

Looks to be some really neat reading.

On a lighter note, they’ve also got articles on jokes in the Bible and the Church of the Subgenius. Maybe not as serious, but could be equally interesting.

Interesting and disturbing

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Now, the invention of the scientific method is, I’m sure we’ll all agree, the most powerful intellectual idea, the most powerful framework for thinking and investigating and understanding and challenging the world around us that there is, and it rests on the premise that any idea is there to be attacked. If it withstands the attack then it lives to fight another day and if it doesn’t withstand the attack then down it goes. Religion doesn’t seem to work like that. It has certain ideas at the heart of it which we call sacred or holy or whatever. What it means is, ‘Here is an idea or a notion that you’re not allowed to say anything bad about; you’re just not. Why not? — because you’re not!’ If somebody votes for a party that you don’t agree with, you’re free to argue about it as much as you like; everybody will have an argument but nobody feels aggrieved by it. If somebody thinks taxes should go up or down you are free to have an argument about it. But on the other hand if somebody says ‘I mustn’t move a light switch on a Saturday,’ you say, ‘I respect that.’

The odd thing is, even as I am saying that, I am thinking ‘Is there an Orthodox Jew here who is going to be offended by the fact that I just said that?’ But I wouldn’t have thought ‘Maybe there’s somebody from the left wing or somebody from the right wing or somebody who subscribes to this view or the other in economics,’ when I was making the other points. I just think ‘Fine, we have different opinions.’ But, the moment I say something that has something to do with somebody’s (I’m going to stick my neck out here and say irrational) beliefs, then we all become terribly protective and terribly defensive and say ‘No, we don’t attack that; that’s an irrational belief but no, we respect it.’

Why should it be that it’s perfectly legitimate to support the Labor party or the Conservative party, Republicans or Democrats, this model of economics versus that, Macintosh instead of Windows — but to have an opinion about how the Universe began, about who created the Universe…no, that’s holy? What does that mean? Why do we ring-fence that for any other reason other than that we’ve just got used to doing so? There’s no other reason at all, it’s just one of those things that crept into being and once that loop gets going it’s very, very powerful. So, we are used to not challenging religious ideas but it’s very interesting how much of a furor Richard creates when he does it! Everybody gets absolutely frantic about it because you’re not allowed to say these things. Yet when you look at it rationally there is no reason why those ideas shouldn’t be as open to debate as any other, except that we have agreed somehow between us that they shouldn’t be.

— Douglas Adams

I found this quote from Douglas Adams (excerpted from an impromptu speech he gave in 1998), and — as is typical for Mr. Adams’ writing — liked it a lot. He was a highly intelligent man, and very gifted in his abilities to communicate both serious and whimsical notions.

However, the article that this quote was a lead-in for (Richard Dawkins on Sept. 11 Religious Terrorism) I found more than a little disturbing. Not because of the fact that Mr. Dawkins’ is a self-professed Atheist who seems to be doing what he can to spread what he believes to be the truth, but by the almost frighteningly vehement and almost venemous way he goes about it. I’ve never heard of Richard Dawkins before, but from this single article he seems to me to be what could best be described as an ‘Atheistic Fundamentalist,’ in that he is so convinced of the truth of his beliefs that he not only refuses to acknowledge other people’s right to hold their beliefs, but he actively attacks them (and in doing so, attacks all religion across the board). Is it really any better that he takes such an antagonistic attitude from an Atheistic standpoint rather than from a religious one?

I can’t say as how I think so. I need to go over the article a couple more times, then may come back with something else to say about it. We’ll see.

I still like the Douglas Adams quote, though.

I don’t even know what to say to this

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God Gave U.S. ‘What We Deserve,’ Falwell Says.

Casey told me about this while I was over at his place this weekend, and I just stumbled across a news article with the details. It may be the single most disgusting and infuriating response I’ve seen yet to last week’s tragedy, and all the more so because of the people it comes from — men who claim to be spreading God’s word on earth.

I’m not even sure how to react, or what to say right off. I was amazed enough when Casey told me about it, but actually reading what those two men had to say…it’s just reprehensible. I’ll try and come up with something more substantial later.

Faith

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I have claimed to have faith in God before, but I didn’t always realize that faith isn’t faith until I can’t see the road ahead.

— Dan Sjoblom