Faith Tag Archive
Well, it has taken a few centuries but it looks like there is a small, tiny hairline fracture in the religious space-time continuum. When atheists and devout Christians can sit down together and learn from each other without dismissing or proselytizing to one another, this is news. Yet somehow, this momentous event was largely overlooked. Yet it is actually happening, albeit in a relatively small way.
Mehta, now an honors graduate in mathematics and biology, has not converted, but the two have become friends. Mehta has started his own blog (friendlyatheist.com) and travels to speak to churches and humanist organizations. He has written a book - “I Sold My Soul on eBay” - that explains why he is an atheist and gives churches advice on what it would take to reach nonbelievers.
This is not to suggest that interfaith dialogs never occur. They do. Even the Pope occasionally catches the ecumenical wave and is seen openly praying with Muslims, Jews and assorted Protestants. The problem with most of these dialogs is that no real understanding occurs. These dialogs serve some other purposes but mutual learning is not one of them.
Nevertheless, when atheists and devout Christians can actually hear what the other is saying and take some actions based on their learning, I begin to feel that there is hope for humanity. It makes me wonder if seemingly intractable problems like global warming can be solved too. In the case of Jim Henderson, a former evangelical pastor, he is learning from atheists what I suggested back in 2004: Christian marketing practices suck. They suck because they are based on the model of the ignorant savage. There are not many of us still running around the bushes. Evangelicals hoping to draw in new adherents had better understand where the modern unchurched are coming from.
As for the “friendly atheist” Hemant Mehta, he is getting an eye opening in contemporary Christianity. If he was inclined to believe that Christians are starry-eyed myopic zealots, his understanding is now clarified through actual experiences. It seems that Christians are not necessarily always studying their Bible on break, or spending their weekends knocking on doors bringing the good news to the unenlightened. It seems that Christianity does not necessarily wholly define the lives of all Christians. Who would have thunk?
If you ask me, both the religious and the non-religious should spend much more time listening to each other. Talking at each other is easy. Listening is hard. When you listen, you have to acknowledge the point of view that you are hearing. When you listen, some part of your mind must see the world through the eyes of the person you are hearing. When you listen, it is hard not to develop empathy with the person talking. The person you are tuned into is no longer objectified as the heathen or the unenlightened. Instead, they become a human being. They become personable and real.
Many issues needlessly divide us from one another, and one of our most polarizing differences is religion. I count here atheism as a religion too. I am sure many atheists will want to harass me on the point, but there are many similarities between the religious and the atheists. Christians and atheists have this in common: certainty. Christians are certain that Jesus is our Savior. Atheists are certain he is not and God is a fiction. Both are dogmatic. Only now, maybe they are a little less so than they used to be.
Here is one of life’s lessons that I fortunately learned quite early after I pulled away from Catholicism: what religion you do or do not practice doesn’t really matter. Religion is the window dressing. Values are the window itself. I am guessing that you think that Christians and atheists do not have many values in common. Guess again. Both likely have a reverence for life. Both likely believe in love, fidelity and family. Both share a passion for the truth and only differ in how the truth should be interpreted. Of course, they also have other values that are not in common. That is okay because we are all unique. We all arrived where we are at via different paths. Consequently, we are not all going to believe the same things. So of course, we are not always going to share the same exact perspectives. We are each like a unique mold of gelatin, but we are all made of same gelatin. Our mold just happens to be our path through life. We are different but simultaneously we are also the same. This is natural for us. This is the way it was meant to be!
We need to never forget this. Truly, far more commonalities tie us together than pulls us apart. Your religion, your lack of it or your complete indifference to it should not matter any more than your eye color. The world would be a less interesting place if we all had brown eyes. The same is true with our many faiths and spiritual practices. Why not embrace our differences, instead of feeling affront if your beliefs are different from mine? If we were all the same then this world would be deathly dull. You can see how exciting the world was when much of it lived under communism. Was it better when everyone lived in the same kind of drab block apartments? How much more interesting life becomes when we celebrate, respect and realize we draw collective strength because of our differences.
My inner theist almost thinks this meeting of minds between religious and irreligious must be divinely inspired. How wholesome it is. How intuitively right it is. Now what is needed is much more of the same. Let us bring many more of the churched and unchurched together. Let us get them talking in measured and respectful ways. We have nothing to fear from open and respectful dialog and everything to gain. We are simply who we are. Yet almost all of us want to be listened to with respect. When we are not heard in a respectful way that is meaningful to us, the extreme cases can end up wreaking their vengeance in horrifying ways.
Look, I know it is not easy to listen. It is as hard for me as it is for you. Nonetheless, we need to make active listening a conscious and regular habit, particularly with people we are most prone to disagree with. Let us listen to each other with a kind and open heart. Let us find common connections with each other. There may or may not be a heaven in the hereafter. However, we can all agree that there is plenty to do in the here and now to make our world much better, kinder and gentler place.
Genuine dialog is the means to achieve this end. So step one is simply this: to listen.
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May 14th, 2007 at 10:07pm
Posted by
Mark |
Best of Occam's Razor, Philosophy |
no comments
I receive a comment today from John O’Brien. It is attached to an old entry Unsaved that I made back in 2003. His questions deserve a fuller answer. I will not answer all his questions here, because I have put my thoughts in other blog entries where I touched on religion and faith. Readers are welcome to check out these entries:
I would like to preface my remarks by saying that I do not claim to have all “the answers to life’s persistent questions”, as the radio detective Guy Noir puts it. I simply have my thoughts, informed by my unique experience and through learning. I respect everyone’s religious beliefs or lack thereof. In some cases, I may profoundly disagree with your beliefs themselves, but I do respect your right to believe in anything you wish.
Conversations on matters of faith are always iffy. Often there is a subtext to such discussions. It is, “I want to keep discussing things with you until you come around to my point of view”. This more often translates into “I want you to become a Christian/Muslim/Jew/Atheist/Moonie/Mormon just like me.” There are many people out there who want to save my soul. While I respect your wish to save my soul, I do not want you to save my soul. I do not open my door to proselytizers. I avoid public discussions of faith altogether. One thing I have learned painfully about the devoutly religious (and it probably applies to me as well): if you have your mind made up about the correctness of your faith, argument cannot change it. Only those without a faith can have an honest discussion on the merits of faith. Otherwise, you come into the discussion with a profound bias.
John wonders if there are parts of the Bible that I consider trustworthy. Yes, there are parts of the Bible: matters of historical record that have been proven as a result of archeology. I am very skeptical about certain alleged events like the miracle of the loaves and fishes, but others like the Sermon on the Mount seem quite plausible, although I suspect Jesus was paraphrased. I doubt someone was standing in the crowd taking notes.
His question on what authority can be accepted in one’s life implies an absolute and external standard of reference. Clearly if you believe in God, it is easy to posit an absolute standard of reference. Clearly, the Bible is one of many out there. For myself, I do not place faith in any absolute authority, which is why I am logically agnostic. Bertrand Russell has an answer that works fairly well for me:
I am constantly asked: What can you, with your cold rationalism, offer to the seeker after salvation that is comparable to the cozy homelike comfort of a fenced dogmatic creed? To this the answer is many-sided. In the first place, I do not say that I can offer as much happiness as is to be obtained by the abdication of reason. I do not say that I can offer as much happiness as is to be obtained from drink or drugs or amassing great wealth by swindling widows and orphans. It is not the happiness of the individual convert that concerns me; it is the happiness of mankind.
John asks if I believe there an acceptable authority, either internal or external. I think we must each answer that question ourselves. As creatures of free will, we can choose to submit to someone else’s will, or we can choose to think for ourselves. I choose the latter, but I have no problem with those who prefer the former. They seem to make up the overwhelming majority.
Is there any absolute standard of life to which I can relate? I am not very sure what John means here. For myself, I notice that our universe is ordered relatively, not absolutely. Einstein’s Theories of Relativity, for example suggest that everything made of mass or energy influences everything else. As you watch a train go by and you hear the pitch of the train’s whistle change as it passes, does the pitch actually change? It depends on the perspective of who is doing the listening. To the train’s engineer the pitch does not change. To someone watching it pass, it does change. Both are true at the same time. Einstein’s general and specific theories expand this idea to all the energy and matter in the universe. If I have a small article of faith, it is that I do not think I am really separate from anything else. I think our separateness is an illusion and we are both united and separate at the same time. For me, this renders the idea of absolutism absurd. I think the universe is an organism and we are part of it. For some this suggests that each of us is part of the mind of God. For more thoughts on this, check out my entry Our Wild, Wild Universe.
I hope this answers John’s questions though. I suspect though that it will more likely leave him confused.
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June 24th, 2006 at 09:48pm
Posted by
Mark |
Philosophy |
2 comments
I have lost that Easter feeling.
When you grow up Christian, Easter is one of the two high holy days of the year, the other one being Christmas, of course. Our culture makes it impossible to escape Christmas. Ironically, I have forgotten all about Easter again this year. Had I not read about it in the paper today, I would have forgotten about it today too. Of the two Christian holidays, arguably Easter is the more important. After all, had Jesus been born and had not risen from the dead, as most Christians believe, well, he would have been just another anonymous brat born in a manger. (Of course, I have a different take on the meaning of Jesus’ life.)
If you grow up Catholic and attend Mass regularly, as I did, it is impossible not to anticipate Easter. As with Christmas, the many events that preceded it acted as a crescendo to the actual event itself. Just as Christmas is preceded by the season of Advent, Easter is preceded by Lent. When I was a wee lad, Lent meant forty-four days of denial. Now Lent usually means devout Catholics have to abstain from meat on Fridays. The Catholics who studied their Baltimore Catechisms might also spend more time during Lent devoted prayer and almsgiving. I suspect most American Catholics could not even tell you what almsgiving actually is.
Holy Week (the week before Easter) was of course a big deal when I was growing up. Mass on Palm Sunday included a procession into the church with palm fronds, reputedly reenacting Jesus’ triumphant entry into Jerusalem. Good Friday meant heading to the church to devoutly perform the Stations of the Cross. At each station, we had to ponder the horror and the sorrow that poor Jesus underwent because our nasty and pervasive sinning. Easter itself meant large crowds of lapsed Catholics at church (who would reappear on Christmas), kielbasa and eggs for breakfast (for we were a Polish Catholic family), and of course Easter eggs. In our family though, we were not talking the Cadbury kind, but actual hardboiled eggs that we painted in watercolors and placed in Easter baskets. All those eggs were very pretty to look at, except few of us liked hardboiled eggs, so they were largely left uneaten. The eggs were either gone or thrown away long before Ascension Day.
Since then of course I have spent thirty years away from Catholicism and have gone largely secular. When our daughter was a child and her grandmother was still obsessed about sending us Easter baskets, we would hold an Easter egg hunt or two. Then we simply forgot about Easter. This year was typical. As usual last week I had no idea that Easter was arriving.
Supposedly we live in a more religious and Christian country than we used to. I doubt this for we are too busy breaking Sabbath laws in the name of our real God, capitalism, to care too much anymore about holidays like Easter. I remember a time when Easter was as pervasive as Christmas. You can still find the Easter candy and Easter baskets at stores this time of year. Like Christmas presents, they tend to arrive months before the actual event.
Perhaps Easter would mean more if the date did not change every year. According to Wikipedia, Easter is calculated as follow. “The canonical rule is that Easter Sunday is the first Sunday after the 14th day of the lunar month (the nominal full moon) that falls on or after 21 March (nominally the day of the vernal equinox).” Establishing Easter as, say, the first Sunday in April might help cement the date in our minds. Since it can arrive as early as March 22nd or as late as April 25th, chances are whatever Sunday you think it is during a given year is likely to be wrong.
Given its confusing arrival date, my spiritual but not religious state, and my rather harried life, Easter tends to slip by me most years. Often it is not until I see the Easter candy discounted at the local CVS do I have a clue that I missed it again.
Perhaps I have lost something precious as a result of my secular adulthood. Some part of me does miss the hoopla surrounding Easter. The smell of burning incense in the sanctuary, the solemnity with which I did the Stations of the Cross on Good Friday and the High Masses celebrated on Easter Sunday are certainly childhood memories to treasure.
Also gone is of course my naiveté. It is strange that although Jesus reputedly was raised from the dead, only his disciples saw him. It is also curious how the legend of his resurrection grew in the telling. The Gospel according to Mark, the first gospel written, has little of Jesus’ resurrection and ascension, yet we get much longer and florid accounts in later gospels like Luke’s. It seems Jesus wanted to test our faith a bit. He was not the type after resurrection to go back to the temple in Jerusalem and allow himself to be inspected by the rabbis so there would be no doubt whatsoever about his resurrection. I guess he did not want to frighten little children or anything. Jesus was so thoughtful that way.
For me today is just another Sunday. Since the weather is nice though, I intend to celebrate Easter in my own way. While I shall not celebrate a resurrection that I do not believe actually happened, I shall get on my bike and peddle twenty miles or so on the W&OD trail. I shall enjoy the fresh air, the sunshine, the glorious flowering trees in Washington this time of year, and the intoxicating feeling of rebirth during spring here in the northern hemisphere. For me this is the real resurrection.
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April 16th, 2006 at 11:07am
Posted by
Mark |
Sociology |
3 comments
