Fran and I had a three-hour discussion/debate about religion today while reading Dawkins’ The God Delusion and preparing for our Easter family gathering tomorrow afternoon. Two of our topics were 1) a lot of folks will go to Easter services tomorrow (or Passover recently) more from cultural habit than any sincere religious belief. Does this make any sense? Is there any honesty in it? and 2) according to many Christians (including the aforesaid Easter attenders), Quakers are not truly religious but heretical (and so Fran’s relatives hanged them in Boston). I’ll be at Meeting tomorrow morning as usual, but Easter Sunday is not a special event for Quakers. For Quakers, as a matter of religious faith and practice, each and every day should be celebrated as much as Easter. Additionally, my type of Quakers speak of the gift of continuing spiritual revelation and not of a bodily resurrection. There’s some interesting biblical support for this view, but I must say that I’ve never met anyone who would change his/her belief in the face of a close reading of the earliest texts. The texts themselves have no significance unless we find them a catalyst for spiritual growth. FOR A SUBSTANTIAL TREATISE ON MY RELIGIOUS THINKING, SEE COMMENT #2.
April 11, 2009
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To read more about Quaker theology, see Comment #4 of my post Is It Appropriate for a Catholic Instituion to Support a Military Unit on its Campus. Keep in mind that Quakers strive to be “spirit” led and then to test their leadings with their religious community. This contrasts with religious groups that require adherence to a particular creed or particular texts, or are subject to the authority of priests and ministers. See Comment #5 of same post for Karl Barth material that I find relevant. Go to http://www.peacefulways.com for links to sites that provide additional information about Quakerism.
Comment by admin — April 11, 2009 @ 10:30 pm
THE CHALLENGE OF BELIEF
In the last two weeks Fran and I have each spent, separately and in discussion together, perhaps thirty hours analyzing whatever faith and religious experience we may (or may not) have. It is a valuable exercise because although it may feel like an academic exercise at times, a close and fresh and challenging attention to religious life (lest it become rote) can help inform us about it and thereby nourish our religious life and what we can do to develop it. This can be hard and challenging work.
I am reading Dawkins’ The God Delusion and find the book to be both interesting and challenging. It makes me more aware that Quakers are an unusual religious group and differ significantly from more traditional Christian denominations. I usually don’t emphasize that fact (Quakers are universalists, after all), but Dawkins forces me to confront that fact. I believe that people should be capable and willing to speak about their religious beliefs. Quaker belief may be mistakenly seen to be about what we do not believe, when compared to claims of conventional denominations. This past Easter Sunday (Easter is traditionally an “awkward” day for Quakers at Meeting) I spoke about the miracle that somehow a group of dispirited followers of the missing teacher/Rabbi now experienced the spirit of his message and understood that the message would live and be carried on as long as people were spiritually inspired by it. The story of Jesus teaches me both by his spiritual message and by how he lived (and died) in faithfulness to his inner spirit. Jesus is a spiritually inspired and inspirational model. How do we love God? As Jesus says, to love God is to love your fellow man and woman. It never ceases to amaze me that, in my experience, the great majority of “religious” people don’t actually believe what they pretend to believe, nor do their actions accord with their stated beliefs. Why must they pretend, and pass that pretending down to the next generation as being normal/appropriate?
How many people will talk openly and honestly about their personal religious belief or lack thereof? I find it to be rare. From a strictly academic point of view, and following Dawkins’ analytic approach, I might be considered a sort of monist of the idealist variety, essentially experiential, or perhaps a two-way interactionist of the Descarte variety. (Please keep reading. I will offer a more personal and comprehensible (I hope) statement later on.) Education and seeking and testing definitely help me. Dawkins essentially disregards the first explanation, apparently seeing it as neither religious nor relevant. I now appreciate what Barth meant by describing God as “unknowable.” Trying to neatly define/describe God produces nothing but trouble, because as humans we can’t get beyond our limited sense of a supernatural existence. I find it interesting and potentially valuable to attempt an academic understanding of religion, but it is not the thing itself.
On the topic of religion and the bible, I should note that I am experienced with and use biblical language, having been raised in that tradition. I find a text criticism approach (this was the area of my father’s Ph.D.) to be valuable for my religious understanding and also interesting for what it tell us about people and the world. However I am not seeking a definitive truth/belief based on any text per se. For example, for me the “miracle” of Christmas (which can be celebrated any day or every day) was the historic revealing that the future of the world is not in the hands of kings and warriors, but potentially is in the humblest of individuals, whoever can experience a new (and evolving) understanding of the right relationship among humans and the world. This understanding and experiencing may involve suffering. The presence of kings, angels singing, etc., is not necessary for the spirit of Christmas. Setting up my old German crèche at Christmas time gives me traditional family pleasure, but I’ll readily clarify my beliefs about its significance to anyone who asks.
Dawkins states some basic requirements for belief in the Abrahamic Supernatural God
1. God must have a personal concern for individuals (i.e., be personal and not some abstract principle or natural law).
2. God offers an eternal continuation of our personal lives.
3. God practices supernatural intervention in the natural world, by overruling his “natural” laws.
Although God is personally knowable by me, it does not mean that God must be ascribed personhood, as in somehow sitting around and thinking about me and lots of other folks all at once, because he’s (sic) so smart and supernatural. That is seeing God in our own image, whereby God is a perfect model of multi-tasking. To know God personally is the only way a human can know God, because we are persons ourselves and not God. But don’t confuse my personal experience of God with calling my God a person(al) God. God is God; we are persons capable of experiencing God personally. My reader may or may not find this insightful. For me, this realization is important. I acknowledge the reality of evil and have no satisfactory answer for why bad things happen to good people.
Children’s faith in eternal life faces a big challenge when they first acquire the intellectual power to understand that dead people are not sleeping but dead, and that this will happen to them eventually. This realization scares children (and most adults).
But is an eternal continuation of my personal life (of the sort that I know and identify with at the moment) anything I would really want to experience FOREVER? Think about that. It’s hard to believe that this could be the most desirable outcome, even if it appears appealing in the short run. I don’t know what happens to my “being” after I die, but I can’t imagine a forever continuation of me as I know me, even if that were me in my happiest moments.
I don’t seek miracles of the supernatural sort. I pray by seeking guidance and clarity on how to use my mental and bodily powers as best I can. My sometimes-resultant spiritual experience and inspired resolve (known to Quakers as a “leading”) is the miracle that renders such prayer valid for me. Such experience, even when it can be correlated with our experience of observing some neural activity, is by general agreement recognized as being a quite different thing from what is called the physical world of matter.
But what am I according to Dawkins? Apparently not religious, or at least irrelevant. And based on a review of the history of the Christian church, it would seem that either I have fallen afoul of many, if not all, of the standard Christian heresies or, perhaps simpler, I would not be considered a Christian at all. The miracle is not so much what happened then, the miracle is what happens now. Do I have questions and dry periods at times…of course.
It may be helpful to expand on what I mean when I say that for me religion is ultimately “experiential” and compelling. Religious practice (e.g., Meeting for Worship, and recall that the root meaning of the word “worship” is worthy) can improve the seeking process that helps reveal this “experience.” My “still small voice” is neither an auditory command nor a flash of visible light. Nevertheless it is experienced as genuine and immediate and compelling. This might sound meager to those who are accustomed to impressive buildings and rituals and everything that is associated with a priestly hierarchy. And such rituals can be meaningful to me at times. They may be beautiful, but they are not the “thing” itself. Do you find your religious experience to be genuine, convincing, and compelling for how you live your life? That would be my first concern and identifies the basis of my faith, whatever it might be called.
It is possible that Fran and I could be participating together in some religious observance where each of us has a comparable and meaningful religious experience. The distinction would be that Fran (as a self-described atheist) would ascribe the experience to the practice itself and not to God, while I would attribute it to something outside/beyond my own mind and my physical environment. I recognize that environmental conditions and religious practice (such as spiritual seeking) can affect the religious experience. When I say I experience a “still small voice” or that prayer/seeking is like “walking with God” I’m speaking figuratively, because language is inadequate to describe/communicate the experience. Seeking discernment (including checking one’s own religious experience with reference to the experience of others) is a crucial religious process for me. One conclusion that Fran and I share is that the word “God” has so many different meanings/uses for different people that the word by itself becomes essentially meaningless and is often divisive. Also, the behavior of those who say that they believe in God often does not accord with their professed beliefs. Any claim to a belief in God is questionable if it doesn’t impact on your life (“living your faith”).
Traditional religious language, because it is familiar to many listeners, offers a useful launching place for further discussion of how I understand a religious topic. When I use traditional religious language, I often ascribe very untraditional meanings to the words. There are pros and cons to this approach. At times I might find it better to speak of “God the Unknowable” (Barth) or Unfathomable, “The Great Beyond” and “The Great Mystery.” But note that such alternative language can produce its own difficulties. To speak of the “inner light” is not to claim to thereby describe God (nor any of the God alternatives above) per se, but represents an attempt to find words for my human experience/consciousness of the Unknowable.
Paul can say:
I experience a “still small voice” and I don’t know where it comes from, but we can call it God if you wish.
Fran can say:
I experience a “still small voice” and I don’t know where it comes from, but I would not call it God.
When someone presents a view that is radically different from ours, how can we respond briefly without being disagreeable but still holding to our principles? “I don’t see it that way.”
Comment by admin — April 23, 2009 @ 10:54 am
Two comments re Dawkins and The God Delusion
1) Dawkins focus is on a fundamentalist type of Christianity. His insistence that this is the only type of relevant religious belief that exists within this tradition becomes a very irritating intransigence, for I cannot believe he is that ignorant. He does seem unaware of anything of Quakers except stereotypes.
2) Dawkins persistent snideness detracts significantly from the book. He makes great claims to function at a higher level of discourse than his detractors. So why is the following example so typical of his book? “Hartung puts it more bluntly than I dare” (p292) followed by extensive quotations from Hartung’s mocking attacks on Christianity, which Dawkins describes as being “good fun.” His attempts at Oxford cleverness often mask simple laziness on his part. An interesting book, I just think the guy’s terminally egocentric.
Comment by admin — June 10, 2009 @ 11:35 pm