In the past week or so, I’ve spent a good deal of time in the company of some devout Christians. It’s not something I ordinarily do – not because I go out of my way to avoid them, I just don’t tend to move in those circles.
Of course, when you start out not realising that the people you’re hanging out with are Christians, and then it slowly begins to dawn on you that they are, you quickly start to go back through your mind trying to recall whether you’ve said anything that could be construed as offensive. At least, that’s what I do.
But partly because the people I was with were cool, interesting, creative and intelligent people, and partly because we’d gone out for a drink and it was an interesting pub conversation, the caution on my part gave way to a bit of open debate.
In fact, it put me in a position where I had to really revisit what I think about God, religion and church. And revisiting it has brought further clarity.
For the record, I’m an atheist, though I do happen to think the world is a wonderful and surprising place.
As a bit of background, I was a teenage church-goer – quite serious for a while – I was in what I guess would pass for a Christian band in my early 20s (though we didn’t really flaunt that bit) and I was sort of vexed by religion well into my 20s, until I was pretty much able to shake it off entirely.
But as the central defining Western mythology, and as the provider of archetypes for pretty much everything in the art and cultural world of my experience, I think the Bible is really important. Knowing its stories is helpful to make your way in the world and understand our culture and its legal and institutional framework as well as our art and heritage – but religion itself is not for me.
Anyway – the argument went down some fairly well-rehearsed lines about the problem of knowledge and how you can be sure of things that don’t have empirical proof.
One example given was: “When you’re in a relationship do you believe your wife/partner loves you? Have you proved it? Conducted experiments? Or are you basing it on cumulative evidence of her (or his) behaviour and your instincts and making life decisions accordingly?”
Some delightful children’s drawings of a man being tortured to death
I gave it some serious thought, and my response was pretty much as follows:
I accept a lot of things. I don’t only believe things that are ‘proven’.
For instance, I believe my wife loves me – because of what she says and does, of course – but sometimes also even in spite of what she might say or do. But if I’d never met, seen, heard, touched, or genuinely communicated with her – I’d not only have significant cause for doubt – I’d be mad to imagine such a thing. And if I insisted on a personal relationship with such a ‘wife’, my friends would be right to call me delusional.
Being told by a particular cultural orthodoxy to act as if a particular intangible, ineffable being was in play doesn’t make it convincing for me. You may as well be making a case for allowing any and every possibility – the Flying Spaghetti Monster proposition, for instance.
I prefer for things of that magnitude to involve some sort of direct experience, like you get with politics, for instance. But even so, I can get down with theoretical physics. Even gravity is just a theory. But these scientific explanations are at least convincing ideas tested by people I have reason to trust, who have no particular power agenda to push and who (most importantly) would change their mind in a heartbeat if a more convincing explanation for the universe was found.
In other words, my position is not the one that demands certainty.
Religion has no such self-healing properties. Its general insistence on complete authority, infallibility, and that followers simply accept dogma – often concerning contradictory, self-serving and frequently unhelpful, antisocial things – on faith is, to me, preposterous and corrupt.
A decade in or around the church and a fairly good amount of reading and thinking has led me to no direct experience or even convincing ideas – just interesting notions and metaphors of varying quality. Some of them inspiring, some of them downright repellent.
I don’t know anyone who would attest to the divine authority of the Bible who can also reconcile the tyrannical Yahweh with the God of Love. Or who can declare a homosexual to be an abomination without judging lest they be judged. Or who can convincingly deal with the so-called ‘problem of pain’. Or who can get around these dilemmas without arbitrarily declaring parts of the Bible to be history, parts to be allegory, others to be pure metaphor and still more bits to be strictly relevant only in their historical context. It’s a complete fudge.
But essentially – and most importantly – when someone says the word ‘God’, I tend to substitute with the word ‘Magic’.
It’s a suspension of disbelief for the most unlikely of propositions, and only cultural myopia and dominant authoritarian structures allow any of us to continue to sustain them.
But I do like some of the books (Job being my favourite that made the cut – though some of the Apocrypha are also great fun) – and I enjoy having a drink and a conversation with interesting people who can sustain a good debate.
The title of this post is borrowed from the lyrics to King Kapisi’s Reverse Resistance
The one issue I have with organized religion is the fact that it’s all opinion and no reason. That means debate becomes near impossible. God is the unknown, or at least it’s a word used to describe imagined aspects of the possible unknown and yes, praying and believing it’s going to change reality is magical thinking.
Did you see Obama’s (oh no, politics and religion!) speech in Cairo recently?
http://friendlyatheist.com/2009/06/05/obamas-cairo-speech/
“And I believe that America holds within her the truth that regardless of race, religion, or station in life, all of us share common aspirations – to live in peace and security; to get an education and to work with dignity; to love our families, our communities, and our God. These things we share. This is the hope of all humanity.”
Huh? We all believe in an invisible man in the sky? ;-)
It’s a bit worrying to see such a speech in IMHO.
You might find this lecture interesting…
http://www.boingboing.net/2009/06/06/evolution-religion-s.html
Marius
The God Delusion – by Richard Dawkins. In my opinion, the best book ever written. It’s also available in audiobook format, read by Richard Dawkins. Not a week goes by that I don’t go back and re-read or re-listen to a couple of chapters. It’s thoroughly enjoyable, thought provoking and reassuring.
I have no problem with people having a belief in a religion but I do have a problem when they force beliefs on other people or when offence becomes and issue. Let’s take recent events for example where a fundamentalist Christian murdered an abortion doctor in the US. Or how about the many suicide bombers that happen in the middle east which we seem to have become numb to.
In my opinion, the bible isn’t neither a book to live by. Let’s write off the old testament for a start, but the new testament – original sin? What an evil concept.
I don’t believe in religion, but I believe in Bill Hicks:
“Eternal suffering and damnation awaits anyone who questions God’s infinite love”
Yes, there are those of us who are devout Christians and are “cool, interesting, creative and intelligent people”. I’m sure it’s surprising to many and downright shocking to some. And similarly to you, I don’t tend to hang out with a lot of atheists, but I’ve never assumed they weren’t any of the above (contrary to what many think about Christians).
Good post. I always appreciate hearing other opinions and especially from people who I’ve grown to respect in other aspects of their lives other than their theology (or lack thereof).
Thanks. Having spent years hanging out with lots of Christians and then spent more years hanging out with atheists, I’ve got to say that it comes as no surprise that there are cool, interesting, creative and intelligent people in pretty much any group of humanity you want to single out.
Though often, as with amongst conservatives and liberals, the ratio of those attributes can be quite different…
As someone once put it ‘There’s got to be something in Christianity if it’s managed to survive 2000 years of Christians…’
Fascinating stuff. I find myself more and more drawn to the nature of the conversation than the the outcome – I’m appalled by fundamentalism of any kind, whether that’s mad god-botherers who blow up clinics or Richard Dawkins being a skilled scientist but a kindergarten level theologian, throwing his toys out of the pram every time someone does something abhorrent and uses some kind of deity to justify it.
The two big problems in the conversations seem to be a) the limitations of language (we just don’t have a common frame of reference for the meaning of the words used to describe spiritual, metaphysical and religious thoughts and experiences.) and b) the adversarial nature of the set up – if I’m trying to convince you of anything, the discussion is already a negative sum – someone has to ‘lose’ in order for us to progress beyond entrenchment.
I prefer to a) not spend much time believing that the world would be a better place if people thought the way I do, b) accept that the words someone uses to describe their thoughts and experiences may not mean what I think they mean, c) observe that most of us are, thankfully, inconsistent hypocrites who err on the side of pragmatism when faced with actual situations in which our previously theoretical beliefs are put to the test, and d) I’m more interested in how someone’s world view makes them act than how they describe it. ie, given the absence of emperical verification either way, I’ll judge your beliefs on whether they make you a nicer, more open, welcoming, friendly, supportive, generous, kind person or they make you a judgemental, cynical, nasty, prejudiced arse.
The split seems fairly even on both sides – neither the faith-in-God nor the faith-in-no-God crowd have a monopoly on kindness or fuckwittage :)
As Nye Bevan said “This Is My Truth, Tell Me Yours”. :)
also of possible interest is my post and the ensuing discussion about the Atheist Bus Campaign – your post is a perfect example of the open-ended way such conversations can be enabled, without recourse to sloganeering :)
Oh dear, may I just read my comment. Please excuse the beating given to the English language, I hadn’t had a morning coffee by then. “isn’t neither”…
Even better than Dawkins is Christopher Hitchens – God is Not Great: How Religion Ruins Everything.
Best book I have EVER read, and I’ve read a LOT of books. Also available in audiobook format. Check it.
As I sit down to write this i have just turned away Jehovas Witnesses, not because of my intolerance but because of their approach to the introduction of an idea. Such forceful evangelism is unfortunately attributed all-too-often to Christianity. This is inevitably down to 2000 years of unChristian practice, which has given the world a lifetime of examples as to why Christians and their doctrines are best steered clear of.
I was brought up a Christian which made me understand sometimes more about hypocrisy than religion its self. I was alienated by restricting religion throughout my teenage years because it seemed hollow and without personal experience. A few years and teenage experiences later my once hypothetical faith was to be once again ignited.
I was lucky enough to meet a buch of Christians who were REAL people who were “cool, interesting, creative and intelligent” who loved God. I had no idea that Christians could be so genuine as they have always seemed to be the most ostracised people I’ve ever met.
“religion itself is not for me” Nor me Andrew, nor me. It has caused more pain than good. It is man’s manipulation of teaching which has destroyed the true task that religion set out to achieve. I’m part of a belief that a relationship with a creator God should not be shrunk into the confounding boxes which religion has to offer.
I’m not anti-scripture and belive that a lot, if not all, answers to life can be found in the bible, if read with the right frame of mind. But I would say I am more influenced by faith than the written word. Faith can only exist without proof. Faith can only exist where questions are left unexplained. Having said that faith without experience can seem somewhat hollow. Becoming a Christian of my own choosing is continuing to throw up more questions than answers. But answers have started to arrive in the form of personal, direct experience.
I have been in prayerful/meditative environments where seeing and experiencing the unexplainable has been a massive personal faith builder. My personal walk has taken me into places around the world where I believe I have seen “the hand of God” at work. After a few years of frustratingly searching for such experience to help quantify my faith, I have seen with my own eyes what can only be described as miracles, which I have no other explanation other than divine innovation.
Alongside the standard and well-known Love and forgiveness teaching, the miraculous is where my understanding of Jesus’ teaching has its foundations. Although there are plenty of biblical examples and teaching of healing, I find no watertight theology for it, for example why does God heal this group and not the other, at this time and not at that time. But I am fascinated with the challenge and I aim to deepen my understanding. If Christians focus on such teachings rather than unhelpful self-serving intolerant doctrines then maybe Christianity would be the testimony it was intended to be.
Aggressive views and fundamentalism “ruins everything” (Christopher Hitchens – God is Not Great: How Religion Ruins Everything). Inspiring and harmoniously revealing conversation leading to tolerant understanding and mutual respect Saves everything.
I believe in God because I observe him in everything. I also see him in conversations such as this and even in the disagreements against him. So long live the questions and debate where hopefully we can all explore and discover the fascinating things that the quest for truth may reveal.
“There is an indefinable mysterious power that pervades everything, I feel it though I do not see it. It is this unseen power which makes itself felt and yet defies all proof, because it is so unlike all that I perceive through my senses.”
Mahatma Gandhi
“Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.”
C. S. Lewis
Thanks for the really thoughtful comment, Sam. Much appreciated.
I get the sense of wonder and ineffability that you describe, but I’m not sure how you get from your appreciation of the spiritual and the miraculous you experience all around you to the Christian God – as opposed to, say, Buddhism, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism or any other system of faith.
It seems very much like your understanding of the spiritual takes place in terms of what (Christian) writer Northrop Frye calls a sense of the metaphoric – eg: we see a breathtaking mountain and in our awe, time ‘stops’. That metaphorical sense of the eternal being timelessness, rather than simply a really long time that starts when we’re dead… But it seems very much like your attribution of that experience to the frankly psychopathic Yahweh in season 1, and his later, cuddlier fatherly incarnation in season 2 is purely cultural.
Had you been born and grown up in, let’s say, Algeria – chances are you’d still have exactly those beliefs and feelings – but you wouldn’t be a Christian.
I have also seen with my own eyes things that could only be described as miracles. Or magic. Or science that I don’t understand yet. Or coincidence. Depends on how you look at it.
Simply put, human beings are ‘meaning generators’. We look for and impose meaningful connections between unrelated phenomena. We impose narrative where none really exists. We like stories. We understand things through metaphor and causality – and when we can’t find a cause, we tend to say ‘God did it’, which is just to say ‘it was magic’. It completes the picture, gives agency to something, and neatly tidies up the story. We’re great at it.
We’re so good at it, in fact, we go around killing each other rather than run the risk of having to change our minds about it.
In other words – I don’t doubt your experience for one moment. We all have that. Stuff is wonderful and amazing, and we are all connected by an indefinable power that pervades everything. But it’s not supernatural. It’s how we operate. We are creatures of metaphor, poetics, narrative and meaning.
That makes it even more wonderful and amazing. I don’t feel like I need to explain any of that away with a handy ‘Oh, God did it – isn’t he mysterious?’. To me that just sucks the joy, the mystery and the wonder and (most importantly) the discovery out of what is actually an amazing universe all by itself without having to invent fictional characters that simplify it and reduce it to moral instruction for the masses.