Don’t ask, just believe
Louise Antony has an excellent essay, ‘For the Love of Reason’ [pdf], in Philosophers Without Gods (OUP 2007), a book edited by herself; it takes off from the difficulties she had with various religious truth claims when she was a child, and with the way adults reacted to her difficulties and persistent questions. First up is Limbo – the unfairness of it – ‘original sin’ in particular: ‘this sin that Adam committed got “passed down”…’
I found it repugnant, the idea that a crime committed by one of my ancestors could sully my personal soul. It was an idea quite at odds with the liberal, meritocratic principles to which my parents seemed otherwise to subscribe. (p. 41)
She returns to this tension frequently – the way particular religious claims and also the refusal to question such claims were at odds with principles otherwise valued by her parents and by other people. It’s one that occurs to me often too, with some irritation.
But there was something that bothered me almost as much as Limbo itself: the way grownups reacted to my questions about it. First they’d offer a perfunctory, stock, and utterly impertinent response. “The souls in Limbo don’t suffer,” they’d all say. Huh? Maybe they’re not in actual pain, like the souls in hell, or even the ones in purgatory, but these poor souls are being deprived of the Beatific Vision…So the next move would be “but they don’t know they’re being deprived of anything.” Double huh. It’s OK not to share your chocolate with your sister as long as she never finds out you have it? This “ignorance is bliss” reasoning seemed specious to me even as a small child. And it was, once again, inconsistent with the messages I got in every other, non-religious context. My father, for example, was an elementary school administrator, and he was passionate in his support for public education. He would go on and on about the need to cultivate in children – to inculcate in children – the “desire to learn.” He would have been incensed had anyone suggested that as long as an illiterate child had no conception of the pleasures of reading, it was fine to leave well enough alone.
And rightly so. Well-spotted, young Louise.
Not many adults were willing to go on to round three. They would grow impatient. “Louise,” my mother would say, “you just think too much.” Sometimes they’d get positively angry. What was the matter with me? Why did I have to argue about everything? Didn’t I realize that some things just had to be taken on faith? (p. 42)
But that’s just it, of course. Young Louise’s questions were good questions, and she was right to be worried by them and by the feebleness of the answers to them, and the fact that no better ones were forthcoming; and ‘faith’ is exactly the wrong response to troubling questions of that kind. And, as she indicates, we know that in other contexts, yet we are told to ignore what we know in this context. So we are more or less bullied into believing in a moral monster who has total power over us.
None of the nuns or priests from whom I received religious instruction were of any help on the matter of Limbo, nor, for that matter, on any of the other issues that troubled me. There was also the Trinity: how could there be “three persons in one God”? I remember trying to wrap my childish head around this “holy mystery” [So she tried various analogies – a family, a clover, moods.] Finally Sister, clearly exhausted, told me that I’d never understand the Trinity because it was a mystery of faith. Mysteries of faith are, by their nature, incomprehensible. We must simply believe them. But how can I believe something I don’t understand, I asked? “Just memorize your Catechism,” was Sister’s reply. “Belief will come.”
Belief will come, independent of the understanding – dogmatic, unreasonable, authority-dependent belief, cut completely free from understanding and genuine explanation. In short a disabling of the ability to think. This is why some assertive atheists think that religion taught to children is a form of abuse.
What I got from all of this was that thinking was fine and good, but only in its place. A little learning might be a dangerous thing, but a lot of thinking was worse. Today I am a parent, and I know firsthand the tedium and frustration of dealing with a child who won’t stop asking “why.”…But with all that said, I still, to this day, resent the way I was made to feel as a child–that my questioning was inherently bad, that there was something wrong with me for wanting things to make sense. As I’ve said, the reactions of grownups to my questions about religion were doubly distressing to me because of their dissonance with the principles adults were explicitly promoting in other contexts….” My parents and teachers, counseling me about personal behavior, stressed the importance of doing what I knew was right, regardless of what other people thought. Why in religion was I supposed to dumbly accept whatever the authorities told me?
Why indeed? And there is no good answer to that question.
I grew up in a boarding school where religion was inculcated early and inculcated hard. I had all sorts of questions, but they couldn’t be asked. No one would have answered. And so I grew up with the questions, but with a very deep seated belief in belief which dominated most of my life.
As a young teen I can still remember saying to anyone who would listen (but not to the teachers, of course); ‘If the [so-called] Virgin Birth matters, then it doesn’t really matter at all.’ My point? Well, if we are expected to believe that a virgin conceived and gave birth to a child, then what other idiocy might we be expected to believe?
Trouble is, this didn’t overcome the deeply embedded belief in belief that was laid down with such force when I was very young, and despite all my adult attempts to shake off faith, I remained captivated by religion.
It was only when my wife was dying, and the Archbishop of Canterbury opposed Lord Joffe’s bill in the House of Lord’s, that I finally gave up on religion in disgust. Anyone who could impose suffering on someone I loved so much could not claim any basis for the truth of his words. Religion then evapourated like a summer mist.
Perhaps I’m a slow learner. I don’t think so. I believe, and have believed for some years now, that I was abused as a child. No one has the right to implant uncorroborated beliefs in their own or any other child. It is an offence against human rights, as Nicholas Humphrey said in his Amnesty Lecture at Oxford a few years ago, and should be punishable at law.
I do have a question. In the online version of Louise Anthony’s interesting paper, the question is raised whether ‘he’, when referring to God, should be capitalised throughout. The answer is, ‘Yes.’ I disagree. ‘He’, when referring to divine entities, is not a proper name. Theologians very seldom capitalise it. Much less when it appears in a paper devoted to disbelief. I disagree intensely with the practice. It should be terminated.
Eric, do I remember correctly that you’d been a priest in the C of E?
I’m always curious when people relate that they lost their faith because they had to confront what seemed like a fundamental moral injustice in their personal lives. Mind you, I’m not criticizing you, but I am asking: aside from your difficulty in accepting the morality of religion when it confronted your wife’s suffering, did the plain illogic and lack of evidence contribute to your deconversion? In other words, had it not been for your experience with your wife’s death, do you think you would have seen through the bullshit?
I admit it disturbs me when people cite an experience of personal, emotional unfairness or injustice as the reason they abandoned religion. Whether or not a thing is just, or emotionally palatable, doesn’t change religion’s truth claims one iota. It bugs me that the sheer inanity and nonsensical nature of religion’s claims are not enough for many people to give it up. It takes them “feeling bad” to do it.
I hope I don’t come across as crass or dismissive, Eric. I really don’t mean to be. I’m genuinely interested in your answer.
Ah, well, Josh, it goes much deeper, of course. You might call personal crisis the catalyist which precipitated a move towards unbelief which had been taking place all my life. However, it takes some time to break with the deep embedding of childhood beliefs, laid down over a period of 12 years.
It wasn’t just a bad feeling, as you put it. It was a collapse from within of a structure that had been undermined from childhood on. I don’t understand the psychological dynamics of it. It just happened in a moment, after years of questioning and doubting belief.
I recall that the crisis in Darwin’s belief came with the death of his daughter Anne, at 10 years old, of TB. No one would think that the structure of his religious belief had not been shaken before that. But Anne’s death shook it to its foundations.
This is why I think that childhood indoctrination – and all of it is not as successful as it was for so many years in my case – is something that public authorities should take very seriously. It is an offence against the rights of children.
I don’t find your question crass or dismissive at all. Perfectly fair question.
I think I should add one more point. Religious belief is very unstable. That is why apologetics is such a vital part of evangelical belief systems. It’s not so much a matter of convincing unbelievers. Its intention is almost entirely directed towards believers, whose belief always threatens to tip over into unbelief.
That’s also why many believers speak about ‘the faith to doubt,’ so that they can incorporate doubt into the very heart of systems of belief. If it actually takes faith to doubt, then doubting faith is not only real faith, it’s courageous faith. In other situations this might be thought to be a dead end. In religion it’s the opportunity to expatiate on the values of belief, even in the midst of doubt, when ‘the dark night of the soul’ settles upon the believer. The counsel is to persevere, and to win through.
The mechanisms for preserving faith in the midst of the most agonising questioning are legion.
This is coming in installments!
While apologetics is often inner directed, believers feel a compulsion to convert others to belief. If you can convince someone else that your beliefs are true, well, then, they must be, mustn’t they?
Just think of the fillip that Tony Blair’s converstion gave to the Catholic Church in Britain! Gosh! The Prime Minister, no less! Must be true!
Cripes. . I just read my own tome. Apologies to OB and others for writing a book.
slinking away. . ..
Josh,
though I would never presume to know what went through your mind at the exact moment you describe above and how specifically it influenced you, I fail to see the crucial distinction you seem to perceive between your decision and Eric’s.
This may not be the place to enter into a detailed discussion on how our emotions relate to our rational processes (plus, I don’t have the faintest idea; one more reason not to get into it) but I often feel that many people in rationalist/humanist/atheist circles exhibit a, frankly, naive belief in our capacity to be “perfectly rational”.
Don’t get me wrong, I am very much IN FAVOR of seeing reason as an ideal path we should strive for. However, a misconception of reason as pure logical thought is not helpful. In humans reason is the process of thought that uses the rules of logic in connection with empirical input to arrive at certain conclusion SUBSERVIENT to our underlying goals and motivations, which can have the form of pure emotions, biological impulses, ideological convictions… what have you.
The overwhelming majority of people on this planet use reason in some form or another, but they seldom apply it as rigurously to the foundational assumptions of their particular worldview, i.e. the search for Ultimate Truth (whatever that may be – dangerous waters).
If you have not grown up in an environment where open inquiry into such matters is a given (which is in my eyes synonymous with a naturalistic worldview) the ONLY other way for someone to fall away from supernatural beliefs are outside influences that NECESSARILY include/cause emotional reactions, i.e. curiosity, pain etc….
I know it’s a cliché, but “nobody is an island”. All our thoughts and deliberations are CAUSAL events that have at some point been influenced from “outside”
Just my $0.02.
Don’t apologize Josh! It’s a good tome, and interesting, and part of the larger picture along with Louise Antony’s and Eric’s.
Eric, I thought the capital letter query was about God rather than the pronoun? But maybe I’m wrong – anyway I (surprise surprise) completely agree, and you’ll be happy to know that we don’t capitalize the pronouns in Does God Hate Women? Nor I don’t in my essay for Russell Blackford’s book, neither.
Eric:
Thanks for the detailed reply. I especially liked your point about faith being unstable, and apologetics being aimed at the faithful, not the unbeliever. I guess I knew that, but didn’t quite mull it over until you pointed it out.
I’m interested in what makes the difference between someone who fought to prop up the unstable until it was no longer tenable, and someone for whom the whole damned thing came crashing down in one fell swoop. There may not be an answer to that.
Marc: You make good points about the nexus between reason and emotion. But I would quibble with your statement,
“In humans reason is the process of thought that uses the rules of logic in connection with empirical input to arrive at certain conclusion SUBSERVIENT to our underlying goals and motivations, which can have the form of pure emotions, biological impulses, ideological convictions… what have you.”
See, that’s just exactly what my experience was not in the tale I told above. Reason smacked me in the face, in a very unpleasant way. I had no underlying goal that I was trying to accomplish, and I wasn’t using reason to get there. Reason used me, if you will, not the other way around.
I can imagine some plausible, if unconscious, goals I probably had in that situation:
a. Not seeing my mother as a reactionary, an enemy who hated her own son.
b. Not feeling cast adrift as my religious edifice that I’d had my whole short life crumbled.
But I couldn’t – and I didn’t – try to twist the facts around to make the obvious more emotionally comfortable. It was so stark, I literally could not do it.
That’s what interests me. Why did Eric spend long years finding ways to make the irrational plausible, and why did I not do that? Neither Eric nor I are unique; I’m sure many others have experienced what both of us have. I’m not putting a value judgment on either approach, either. I’m genuinely interested in how these differences come about.
Eric, I just realized I may have mischaracterized you. You said it only took you five minutes in the end, too. Earlier on, you spoke of moving toward unbelief for a long time, so I guess I wasn’t sure. At any rate, if I’ve put words in your mouth, mea culpa.
At age 7 or so, I was sent to a Jewish school every Saturday morning.
There was a incredible dissonance, to use Anthony’s word, between what I was supposed to learn in the school and what I already knew or thought. For example, in my home the world-view was scientific. In school they taught me that God had saved the Jews by parting the waters of the Red Sea. I already knew that miracles don’t exist. They taught me that the Biblical Patriarchs lived 700 years, while I knew that no human beings live more than a 100 years or so. So I began to have problems with the school teachers. My parents insisted that I play a double game that I didn’t understand: in Jewish school I was supposed to be a good unquestioning Jew; out of Jewish school I was supposed to have a scientific inquiring mind. In the 6 or 7 years I went to Jewish school I had countless problems with the teachers, for which my parents always blamed me. Still, I never learned the double game, and when at age 14 or so, my parents no longer obliged me to attend synagogue, I no longer went nor have I been in one since then. I can recall the look of boredom on my father’s face during religious services in the synagogue. I was equally bored, so I would try a joke, for which he would always silence me sternly. I still don’t understand him either and I suppose that I never will.
OB: “Eric, I thought the capital letter query was about God rather than the pronoun? But maybe I’m wrong – anyway I (surprise surprise) completely agree, and you’ll be happy to know that we don’t capitalize the pronouns in Does God Hate Women? Nor I don’t in my essay for Russell Blackford’s book, neither.”
Not that this is exactly familiar territory to me, but surely I am not the first to observe that of necessity (ie if the whole thing is to have any plausibility at all) God must be sexless. Neither He, nor She, but a singular, eternal and uncreated It.
The moment God is given (say male) sex, the question arises ‘what for and why?’ Where then is God’s wife, girlfriend, mistress? More importantly, where is His (or his) mother?
Being gay and knowing it at a very young age was also the thing that ultimately struck the death knell for me where religion was concerned. Nevertheless, I did not find myself so easily extricated as Josh and continued seeking different systems that might accept me.
I think de-conversion and apostasy are complicated phenomena for many who undergo them: Eric when the carpet was pulled-out from under him at his most emotionally vulnerable and stricken; Josh’s searing encounter with ignorance contradicting what he knew to be the truth about himself; my own more circuitous route…
Interestingly, my partner of 22 years NEVER believed what he was taught during 8 years of Catholic primary school, 4 years of Catholic high school and 4 undergraduate years at Catholic university. Never. It simply did not “take”. No angst, no “soul”-searching, no nothing. Religion was a mistake, a waste of time, had nothing to do with the real world so why give it a second thought? I was astonished to learn such people actually existed though Pascal seems to have been well aware of them. I can barely imagine such inherent freedom, often feeling a kind of residual toxicity still today- religion as a kind of psychological herpes. The Jesuits were right when they said “give me child before the age of reason and I will have him for life”. Child abuse indeed.
BTW: We saw “Religulous” this afternoon. I felt like I needed to take a shower afterward.
I’m sorry to inform you that God is male. He is a Father. If you ask a Mormon you will also learn that he lives with his wife on a nearby planet.
So put that in your pipe and smoke it, infidel. Obviously you’re not wearing magic underwear.*
*I got the Mormon slant(wife, interplanetary habitation and magic underwear) from Bill Mahr’s film.
“I found it repugnant, the idea that a crime committed by one of my ancestors could sully my personal soul. It was an idea quite at odds with the liberal, meritocratic principles to which my parents seemed otherwise to subscribe.”
It demands a bit of mental contortion to reconcile those passages of the Bible where modern science can shed some light and some limits, with the idea that the whole work is divinely inspired.
The above example is as good as any. For the original sin of Adam and Eve to have tainted all subsequent generations genetically, as distinct from culturally, we really need Lamarckian inheritance. The Fall and Original Sin both involve and demand the inheritance of at least one acquired characteristic. So either Lamarck is due for vindication, or the Inspirer of the scribes who wrote it all down did not know much about the workings of nature, ie of His own creation.
Or maybe the odd scribe let fly with a personal opinion or three while The Inspirer wasn’t looking.
But that only makes it worse.
Well, this is really a fascinating discussion, and I’m grateful for it. What you describe, Brian, seems to be the much more common reaction religious people have when confronted with a crisis of faith. Many more people try to find ways to accommodate the dissonance for a while, or find, as you put it, different belief systems that will accept them. I know few people who experienced what I did, so I suspect I’m the odd duck out (maybe your friend, who never believed, is one too).
I can say I think my disposition and attitude is fairly consistent. Nothing irritates me more, or makes me more likely to cut off social discourse with someone, than to observe them equivocating, rationalizing, or making inconsistent emotional pleas to bolster what they want to be true. Whether the issue is sexuality, religion, New Age nonsense, economics. . . I just can’t abide willful self delusion in the service of remaining emotionally comfortable with an evidence-free idea. Looking back at the episode I described above, it seems I’ve always been that way.
Now, that doesn’t mean I don’t have my own delusions. I’m sure I do, and I’m probably as opaque to myself as anyone. But when I recognize it in someone else, and they refuse to acknowledge making an irrational argument, that’s it for me. I am rather short-tempered by nature (not the most admirable trait, but I’m stuck with it), and I’m unwilling to dicker around with foolishness for the sake of keeping up social appearances when it can possibly be avoided. That’s one of the reasons I love reading B&W, and Ophelia’s commentary, in particular.
Wow, I think I just came off sounding crankier than I really am!
“maybe your friend, who never believed, is one too. . “
Whoops – I meant your partner. It really is time for bed.
I haven’t really taken a closer, reflective look at the collapse of my religious world. But I guess one thing that strikes me, G. Tingey, is that the religious system is not quite as closed as you make it out to be. In fact, in many respects it’s incredibly capacious, and can stretch and accommodate a vast number of transformations of traditional ideas, as well as providing room for new ways of looking at the old. So you find people like Altizer who play around with ideas of Christian atheism, or Richard Holloway, who, though no Christian now, finds something of human value in the tailings from religious mines now long since working on low grade ore.
So, religion is not quite a closed system. However Procrustean – and there are always a few people around who are prepared to call you back (often with some force) to the ‘faith once delivered to the saints,’ there is always a surprising amount of room for the thoughtful person to move around. Religions couldn’t hold on to so many bright people otherwise.
That’s where people like Dawkins (much as I enjoy his book) go off the track, because he’s just playing around on the margins of religion, and doesn’t touch its sensitive core. Christians, at any rate, spend all sorts of time playing with ideas and problems. They can even, as I did for years, question many (if not most) things at the heart of faith, and yet carry on just the same. This resilience is built into the system, and sceptical efforts like Dawkins’, interesting as they are, are only threatening to believers who think that religion, like science, is all about beliefs in gods or other supernatural beings or places. But religious language is as often used poetically and symbolically, and as such it becomes impervious to logical argument.
I sometimes visit John Loftus’s site ‘Debunking Christianity’. Here:
http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/
I even tried to read his book, Why I became an atheist. It always seemed just a bit too smug, to me, and the world of argument it inhabits seems completely beside the point for those who are beginning to have trouble with religious belief. He sounds like a fundamentalist of one sort arguing with a fundamentalist of another sort. You have to get much closer to the heart of things if you’re going to make a hole below the waterline.
Michel Onfray’s book The Atheist Manifesto cuts much closer to the bone, because Onfray understands what it is to be religious, and why being religious might be important to someone. If it’s just a matter of logic and argument that are so obviously invalid that a child in 8th grade could understand, then the real issues have not been touched. Religious people know all about the contradictions and the historical improbabilities. They talk about them all the time. They want to know what form of life you have to substitute for the one that seems to work for them. What will address the anguish of being alive in a world that does not care? For many people religions give better answers than any number of books that laugh at the illogic of the religious mind. For even they can speak the language of logic, as Alvin Plantinga makes clear.
One commonality in many people’s experiences of waking up from religious belief seems to be the experience of tragedy. My mother lost her religion when her four day old daughter died in her arms. It should have been avoided, but the problem was not picked up soon enough. No god worth loving could allow that to happen.
Eric is spot-on regarding how the religious mind works – especially the intelligent or educated religious mind. Religionists are not all Bronze-Age throw-backs.
There is lots of room to move around, especially outside the fundamentalist milieu. One can be an American Episcopalian, a Quaker, disciple of the United Church of Christ and still have doubts and permission to investigate them. And, as Eric points-out, there are plenty of theologians who realize the end game being played-out today and whose work is dedicated to the redefinition of religion as metaphor, story, and still necessary evolutionary phenomenon. Paul Tillich, Altizer (whose book “Christian Atheism” I found incomprehensible) and Don Cupitt, come to mind here.
I simply became fatigued by the mental gymnastics involved and the misunderstanding by both believer and nonbeliever of where I actually stood on the issues. There was also the guilt-by-association factor where the wild-eye religionists were concerned. THAT I could not bear.
There was an interesting rebuttal to a review of Mahr’s movie where the first critic leveled the charge that Mahr was only talking to crazies or common believers and would have got a wholly (no pun intended) different viewpoint had he interviewed actual theologians. The rebuttal pointed-out how the first reviewer was wrong in that it was the actual leaders – imams, popes, orthodox rabbis, mega-church evangelical pastors, as well as the believer in the street who gave the clearest picture of what it meant to be an actual religionist living in society. Had Mahr gone the theological route he would have wound-up depicting a rareified, academic specialty with no relevance to either believer or unbeliever nor would his film have rendered an honest depiction of the way religion actually shapes itself and wends throughout contemporary society.
The trouble with this redefinition of religion as metaphor and story is that it doesn’t touch the bulk of religion, but instead works as a kind of protective device for it. ‘God’ just isn’t a metaphor for most people who believe in it (even if a lot of people who believe in it don’t believe 100%).
‘God must be sexless’
I always refer to it as it (except when quoting or echoing or speaking in the voice of others).
Thank you to all who have posted reponses on this question; I have found the discussion interesting and educative. (does that word exist?)
There is, I think, quite a lot of evidence, from psychology,and other branches of science, that belief, per se, is universal for most people in most times and most places, whatever form it takes. We are all aware that an Encyclopaedia Of Beliefs would be a massive, and ever evolving, tome, that includes the almost reasonable to the truly bizarre. My point? I agree with Dawkins that there must be a reason for this widespread propensity for belief, and that that itself is more interesting than WHAT is believed. As a fully paid up skeptic and rationalist I recognise this tendency, to WANT to believe, in myself at times. For example, I see an incredible (truly!) feat of illusion by Derren Brown, or some other wizard, and when discussing it I have found myself dismissing other peoples explanations as nonsense almost implying that it MUST have been real. I know it was NOT real, but……how else can you EXPLAIN it? Also, as a young man I know that I believed some things which I now totally reject. It takes effort and time to overcome what I am sure is a natural part of our nature. Does anyone agree?
Dead right, Ophelia. I used to say that if anything would convince me not to be a Christian, what most Christians believe would do it. But I came to realise that even lowly I could be used as a cover. ‘Look at Eric,’ they would say, ‘if there’s room in the church for someone with as many doubts as him, there’s room in the church for you too.’
Religions almost always return to type. There’s no real evolution in religion, especially religions with canonised pieces of writing, and when push comes to shove, it’s the most primitive form of religious belief that rides out the storm. There may be evolution of a sort, but there is no evolutionary sequence. All the various species of religious belief exist concurrently. This is a sure sign that it is not a rational excercise, and has nothing whatever to do with human knowledge. That is, indeed, the trouble with interpreting religion in terms of myth, metaphor and story, because it politely papers over all the cracks, and it protects beliefs that are throwbacks to more confident times.
God may be sexless, Ophelia, and ‘it’ works for me; he (notice) is not genderless in most religions. There are gods that are ambiguous as to gender, but Yahweh, the Father of Jesus Christ, and Allah are all unreconstructedly male. In most Anglican provinces, baptism must be in terms of Father, Son and Holy Spirit; Creator, Redeemer and Sanctifier just won’t do. Somehow, genderless language does not reach beyond the barrier of the given to touch the unseen world beyond. It can be very beguiling for those who can stand up straight in the winds of doubt.
Ophelia: Eric beat me to “Exactly”.
You’ve articulated the root problem with religious revisionists (who btw, think of themselves as radicals). Their aim is to bring their faiths into the 21st century. At the same time they don’t seem to see who or what they are actually aiding and abetting in keeping the story and imagery alive on any level. Most folks don’t know a religious metaphor from a reliquary’s metatarsal. As Eric pointed out, when push comes to shove the literalists will win-out because relgion always reverts back to its lowest common denominator.
Mostly one wants to say to these folks: wake up and smell the coffee. (Am I starting to sound like Sarah Palin?) If you want poetry try Wordsworth. It’s time to grow-up.
“Educative” exists alright – but, does “it” I wonder?
Very a outpouring and informative discussion – there must be some holy spirit in the B&W water tap? :_)!
The odd thing is, I think a lot of the metaphor crowd actually think that their version is where religion will (soon) end up, if it hasn’t already. I think liberal believers wildly overestimate the numbers of liberal believers and wildly underestimate the numbers of literal believers.
The dogma of Original Sin expresses an essential truth about human nature. See Hulme’s interesting remarks on this.
“It was an idea quite at odds with the liberal, meritocratic principles”
What’s funny is she’s accepted those prinicples entirely on faith.
No, ‘the bigots are the true believers’ is a sound-bite restatement of this.
Nonsense. We don’t need dogma, or ‘original sin,’ much less the dogma of original sin, to understand that human nature has some harsh characteristics.
1) You don’t know that she has accepted those principles; she doesn’t say she’s accepted them, she says they’re at odds with other, also-favoured principles, and that her father advocates them, not that she does. 2) You don’t know on what ground she has or hasn’t accepted them. 3) Accepting particular values is a very different thing from believing in the existence of a supernatural benevolent creator of the universe.
If you want to make us repent our skeptical ways, try avoiding the sound-bite approach.
“Belief will come.”
Belief will come, of course it will – to one little questioning child – as it also will to all those wretched souls in cold Russia. The conversion of Russia, in days of yore, was a big “belief” thing on the religious agenda.
I’m not sure I catch the drift of the last part of this discussion, but I do want to remark on the idea of ‘original sin’.
Now, get this. You have to understand it in the right way. From the Christian point of view, every single one of us really deserves to go straight to hell. That’s what original sin does. There’s not a thing that we can do to change this. No amount of goodness, compassion, love, or anything else will make up for the deficit inherent in the sin we inherit with our birth. Nothing. Nada. Nichts. We are bound straight for eternal (get this… not a few hours of torture on a cross, but eternal) suffering.
And we can do nothing to stop this. All we can do is to accept God’s grace given to us in his tortured son. Now, no one has really explained how torturing Jesus makes us okay. (And, by the way, Jesus died for our Sin, not our sins – which are a byproduct of the original sin which we inherit. Have they found the gene yet?!) That’s one thing that has never been satisfactorily explained. The Atonement is the one thing that is never defined, finally, by Christian theology, though many evangelicals believe in the idea of substitutionary atonement. (Don’t ask!) All we can do is believe, and, just by believing, everything that Jesus did, whatever that is, accrues to our account. Just like that! (As I say, there are all sorts of theories, but, in the end, what counts is that mysterious thing called grace. And all we can do to deserve this is believe!)
So, no, the idea or dogma of original sin shows us absolutely nothing about human nature. We are, as Hitchens delights to say from time to time, primates, recently emerged from the jungle, with abilities never dreamed of in centuries past. Of course we get it wrong! Sometimes, we get it badly wrong. ….. which was alright, relatively speaking, of course, when all we had were swords and catapults. It’s a bit of a mixed bag, though, when you factor in things like atomic weapons, poison gas, and the other imepedimenta of modern life and war.
I’m not trying to make anyone repent skepticism, I’m suggesting skepticism be applied to faiths other than Christianity.
Carter, before we take this much further, would you care to define what you mean by ‘faiths’?
The one sound-bite I’m willing to affirm is Kierkegaard’s: “God is only mocked by believers.” Speaks volumes.
Carter writes:
“I’m not trying to make anyone repent skepticism, I’m suggesting skepticism be applied to faiths other than Christianity.”
Why, Carter? What has that to do with the discussion here? Are you a Christian resentful of the criticism your faith gets? If that’s not true, please clear it up. And use more than one sentence. If you want us to understand your point of view, don’t make petulant, one-sentence retorts like a five year old.
Just so. In fact it’s not true that Carter is ‘suggesting skepticism be applied to faiths other than Christianity’ because those drive-by shotgun remarks are far too brief and cryptic to suggest any such thing.
I always capitalize the pronoun and refer to The Lord in the masculine when debating religion online. This is for satirical reasons and as a rhetorical move.
“One commonality in many people’s experiences of waking up from religious belief seems to be the experience of tragedy. My mother lost her religion when her four day old daughter died in her arms. It should have been avoided, but the problem was not picked up soon enough. No god worth loving could allow that to happen.”
I was so saddened by this comment of Rose’s. I could just visualise the wee bairn lying there and the desperation and pain on the mother’s face as she looked on helplessly.
I read that while the Roman Catholic Church has a defined doctrine on original sin, it has none on the eternal fate of unbaptized infants, leaving theologians free to propose different theories, which Catholics are free to accept or reject.
My grandmother died in childbirth. She was eight months pregnant. The baby also died.
A major 16th-century theologian, by the name of Catejan, according to wiki – suggested that infants dying in the womb before birth, and so before ordinary sacramental baptism could be administered, might be saved through their mother’s wish for their baptism.
I know a hospital in Nova Scotia which has it on record that a still born baby should be baptised, even if, as it may be, putrefaction has set in. The only condition seems to be the degree of putrefaction based on odour. It’s a mad world.
Rose is right. Many people’s faith is shaken by personal tragedy. It’s easy to think that it should be shaken more easily than this, but it is nevertheless often the case that, until tragedy strikes, faith is the only thing holding the personality together, or, at least, it may seem that way.
Notice how long it took Louise Anthony to give up on faith, even though she was, by her own testimony, given to asking questions at a very early age. But then, of course, she grew up in an age of widespread questioning, the same sort that produced Christian atheism. Had she been born a generation earlier, she would no doubt have behaved in perfect Stepford fashion, and lived in a house all made of ticky-tacky and all looking just the same.
Louise M Antony was fortunate in her upbringing – in so far that that even though she was not getting proper answers to her questions – she had the capacity at such a young age to even contemplate going down that ‘questioning’ road. There had to have been for her – for that to occur – a secure element in her home environment.
Tragedies do act as triggers – like thundering lightning – that jolt us, we suffer great shocks – but, in the aftermath, we see the true clears colours of daylight.
Thanks for sharing your boarding school experiences, Eric, These fine establishments also shape many’s a young lad and lassie – educationally-speaking, to become greats – but in saying this the greatness was\is not always to their benefit.
“And so I grew up with the questions, but with a very deep seated belief in belief which dominated most of my life.”
One did not ever dare disbelieve belief – it was not an option – and depending on the country you lived in afterwards – you carried it with you accordingly. if you went to a country which had a different belief system – you became more strident in your belief -as this was what believing was supposed to be always about – you stood up for it like an onward Christain soldier marching on to war – or like a fan of a great football team you proudly carried the banner. I am becoming very melodramatic this autumnal day. (..)!
Thanks, Marie-Therese. I tried marching ‘as to war’ for awhile, but it never worked for me. So I decided, instead, to question beliefs, while not questioning belief itself. It’s a double-bind, even in the autumn!
However, now I do see the colours, clear as day (you spell it right!). Sometimes, now, leider, the colour is often grey, but, for all that, it’s truer colour than that of the old religious garments I gathered so tightly around me for security.
I’ve just finished reading a rather wonderful book by Alan Cromer entitled Uncommon Sense: The Heretical Nature of Science. It’s a wonderful book, but one thing that strikes me as I read it is that, in my own experience, science is not taught well. If it were, we would all be more aware of how different scientific discourse is compared to the language of the common sense everyday world, where religion seems, strangely, right at home, and how much of a discipline it is to learn to think scientifically and objectively. This is something, I think, that Louise Armstrong, much as I admire her paper “For the Love of Reason,” seems to underestimate.
The world that so many people live in is one in which science is somehow continuous with religion, but it’s not. And therein lies the problem. If we could see what an achievement scientific reason is, and how unusual it is, historically, perhaps we’d have greater respect for it, and be more ready to hold other things up to closer examination.
My hands typed ‘Armstrong’ and meant ‘Anthony.’
I want to address the issue of sudden vs. gradual deconversion.
I used to be a software engineer, and gradually I got very good at fixing bugs using “intuition”. I’d study something for awhile and suddenly KNOW, without following a detailed logical path, where the bug was, and how it came about, and when I put in test code to confirm it I was usually right.
The only problem with this scenario is that I don’t believe in “intuition”. Finally I decided that I was using knowledge that I’d acquired through experience but hadn’t quite articulated to myself.
So when one person claims a slow deconversion and another claims a quick one, I certainly am not willing to criticize the quickness claim; nor am I willing to assert that other people think the same way I do. But the “intuition” phenomenon is real, and I believe it is possible to “intuit” the lack of God based on experience that one hasn’t considered consciously.
Oddly enough, my own deconversion was long and painful. I believed in my head there was no evidence for God for quite awhile before I knew it in my gut; it took time before my “intuition” accepted it.
What is asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof.
— Christopher Hitchens
(posted at LGF)