From: Jonathan Davis (jonathan@limbicnutrition.com)
Date: Mon Sep 01 2003 - 06:13:17 MDT
Believing, Disbelieving, And Suspecting - Disordered Thoughts On
Religion (August 25, 2003 )
http://www.fredoneverything.net/Faith.shtml
We live in a wantonly irreligious age-at least at the level of public
discourse. In America the courts, the schools, and the government seek
to cleanse the country of religion. More accurately, they seek to
cleanse it of Christianity. We are told, never directly but by
relentless implication, that religious faith is something one in decency
ought to do behind closed doors-an embarrassment, worse than public
bowling though not quite as bad as having a venereal disease.
Which is odd.
I do not offer myself as one intimate with the gods, and on grounds of
reason would be hard pressed to choose between the views of Hindus and
those of Buddhists. I note however that over millennia people of
extraordinary intellect and thoughtfulness have taken religion
seriously. A quite remarkable arrogance is needed feel oneself mentally
superior to Augustine, Aquinas, Isaac Newton, and C.S. Lewis. I'm not up
to it.
Of course arrogance comes in forms both personal and temporal. People
tend to regard their own time as wiser and more knowing than all
preceding times, and the people of earlier ages as quaint and vaguely
primitive. Thus many who do not know how a television works will feel
superior to Newton, because he didn't know how a television works. (Here
is a fascinating concept: Arrogance by proximity to a television.)
It will be said that we have learned much since the time of Newton, and
that this knowledge renders us wiser on matters spiritual. We do have
better plastics. Yet still we die, and have no idea what it means. We do
not know where we came from, and no amount of pious mummery about Big
Bangs and black holes changes that at all. We do not know why we are
here. We have intimations of what we should do, but no assurance. These
are the questions that religion addresses and that science pretends do
not exist. For all our transistors we know no more about these matters
than did Heraclitus, and think about them less.
Many today assuredly do know of the questions, and do think about them.
One merely doesn't bring them up at a cocktail party, as they are held
to be disreputable.
Yet I often meet a, to me, curious sort of fellow who simply cannot
comprehend what religion might be about. He is puzzled as distinct from
contemptuous or haughty. He genuinely sees no different between
religious faith and believing that the earth is flat. He is like a
congenitally deaf man watching a symphony orchestra: With all the good
will in the world he doesn't see the profit in all that sawing with bows
and blowing into things.
This fellow is very different from the common atheist, who is bitter,
proud of his advanced thinking, and inclined toward a (somewhat
adolescent) hostility to a world that isn't up to his standard. This is
tiresome and predictable, but doesn't offend me. Less forgivably, he
often wants to run on about logical positivism. (I'm reminded of
Orwell's comment about "the sort of atheist who doesn't so much
disbelieve in God as personally dislike him." Quote approximate.)
Critics of religion say, correctly, that horrible crimes are committed
in the name of religion. So are they in the name of communism,
anti-communism, Manifest Destiny, Zionism, nationalism, and national
security. Horrible crimes are what people do. They are not the heart of
the thing.
The following seems to me to be true regarding religion and the
sciences: Either one believes that there is an afterlife, or one
believes that there is not an afterlife, or one isn't sure-which means
that one believes that there may be an afterlife. If there is an
afterlife, then there is an aspect of existence about which we know
nothing and which may, or may not, influence this world. In this case
the sciences, while interesting and useful, are merely a partial
explanation of things. Thus to believe in the absolute explanatory power
of the sciences one must be an atheist-to exclude competition. Note that
atheists as much as the faithful believe what they cannot establish.
Here is the chief defect of scientists (I mean those who take the
sciences as an ideology rather than as a discipline): an unwillingness
to admit that there is anything outside their realm. But there is. You
cannot squeeze consciousness, beauty, affection, or Good and Evil from
physics any more than you can derive momentum from the postulates of
geometry: No mass, no momentum. A moral scientist is thus a
contradiction in terms. (Logically speaking: in practice they
compartmentalize and are perfectly good people.)
Thus we have the spectacle of the scientist who is horrified by the
latest hatchet murder but can give no scientific reason why. A murder
after all is merely the dislocation of certain physical masses (the
victim's head, for example) followed by elaborate chemical reactions.
Horror cannot be derived from physics. It comes from somewhere else.
Similarly, those who believe in religions often do not really quite
believe. Interesting to me is the extent to which those who think
themselves Christians have subordinated God to physics. For example, I
have often read some timid theologian saying that manna was actually a
sticky secretion deriving from certain insects, and that the crossing of
the Red Sea was really done in a shallow place when the wind blew the
water out.
Perhaps so; I wasn't there. Yet these arguments amount to saying that
God is all-powerful, provided that he behaves consistently with physical
principles and the prevailing weather. The sciences take precedence.
Now, people who seek (and therefore find) an overarching explanation of
everything always avoid looking at the logical warts and lacunae in
their systems. This is equally true of Christians, liberals,
conservatives, Marxists, evolutionists, and believers in the universal
explanatory power of the sciences. Any ideology can probably be
described as a systematic way of misunderstanding the world.
That being said, at worst the religions of the earth are gropings toward
something people feel but cannot put a finger on, toward something more
at the heart of life than the hoped-for raise, trendy restaurants, and
the next and grander automobile. And few things are as stultifying and
superficial as the man not so much agnostic (this I can understand) as
simply inattentive, whose life is focused on getting into a better
country club. Good questions are better than bad answers. And the
sciences, though not intended to be, have become the opiate of the
masses.
http://www.fredoneverything.net/Faith.shtml
---------------
Regards
Limbic
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