Religion thrives on mystery. Questions are met with: “We are too small to understand”, “We have to trust God knows best”, such evasions. Faith is the opposite of an enquiring mind.
I think that culture of ‘don’t ask, just trust’ is especially toxic in the Catholic church, though it is inherent in all faiths. It filtered through to all parts of life. Here’s a classic example:
A child dies after a medical procedure. The parents try to find out what happened, and why. They’re met with what they describe as ‘a wall of silence’. It’s only seven years later, in court, that they get an apology and some understanding of what went wrong.
Society needs to change. We need to move away from the models we’ve worked on, many of them given to us by religion. Perhaps we should start with a culture of transparency.
“Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the discernible concatenations, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion. To that extent I am, in point of fact, religious.”
- Albert Einstein, Response to atheist, Alfred Kerr (1927), quoted in The Diary of a Cosmopolitan (1971)
I really like the way he thinks about this. The truth is, there are mysteries in this world. Perhaps it’s because we just haven’t yet discovered the answers and we will. Perhaps it’s because there really is something that’s just plain old mysterious.
Odd things happen. Like our neighbor who had stage IV cancer and was going to die. He needed a bone marrow transplant and they couldn’t find a match. Hundreds of people were faithfully praying for him. They went in to do one last biopsy and the cancer was gone. Completely gone. Weird, right? Of course the people who had been praying for him attributed this mystery to God. Others who don’t believe in the supernatural might chalk it up to a happy, rare unexplained and mysterious healing. Neither group really knows why it happened.
On this we agree: religion has been used to lie, cover up old lies, make slaves of people, abuse, torture and coersce, and to excuse all kinds of horrific things.
Transparency is good; bearing false witness causes all kinds of pain. The problem is that truth is relative. Therefore transparency doesn’t result in truth that can’t be arguable.
In my mind, to the extent that we take hold of our own beliefs so tight-fistedly that we insist on trying to make everyone around us see it the way we do, we are practicing religion whether there is a “god” involved or not. I’ve been thinking about this concept a lot lately so I am curious to say what you think about it. And please, be completely transparent. ; )
I like that quote from Einstein, though it’s caused a lot of confusion over his personal views on God.
A person who does/thinks something knowing it’s wrong but they’re going to do/think it anyway is rare, if such a person even exists. Even a thief who knows stealing is wrong will justify it in his own mind. So we’re all convinced what we do and think is right, and everyone who doesn’t do/think as we do is wrong. Admitting you were mistaken in that belief takes courage and humility. It’s a horrible experience, and more often than not is accompanied by the need to seek forgiveness – another difficult thing to do.
That is one of the reasons why people cling so tightly to their beliefs, be they secular or religious, and I wholeheartedly agree that there are people who do that. But I have a problem with the trend I’ve seen of saying: “No, I’m not religious. I have faith in Jesus/I’m a follower of Jesus.” Religion is defined as:
1. a set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe, especially when considered as the creation of a superhuman agency or agencies, usually involving devotional and ritual observances, and often containing a moral code governing the conduct of human affairs.
2. a specific fundamental set of beliefs and practices generally agreed upon by a number of persons or sects: the Christian religion; the Buddhist religion.
Technically, nobody can know anything, even that the sky is blue: you can only believe it is blue, based on your perceptions. However, there is a difference between believing Jesus rose from the grave and believing the sky is blue. And I know there are those who would start a long argument over whether this is so, but that brings in the primitive in a hut test, and I’m not interested in any discussion that gets that far removed from everyday reality.
There are indeed atheists, humanists, brights and whatever who are specifically against religion, who cling so tightly to their world view that they become very similar to religious people, but I think it’s important to not call them religious. My suggestion would be that there are fundamentalists in all areas.
As for your friend with the cancer, I am so happy for him that it’s gone. It’s like you say, we can’t know it was God, we can’t know it wasn’t. We can only know something happened which we don’t understand. In the past, people said stuff like: “We don’t know how the sun stays in the sky and doesn’t fall to earth. Therefore, it must be God.” I don’t know if you’re familiar with the term, but doing so is called ‘God of the gaps’. Where there’s a gap in our knowledge, we say, “..therefore, God”. As human knowledge expanded, the gaps decreased. People learned that way that it’s better to say: “We don’t know” rather than “God did it.” The “God did it” approach also discourages exploration and expansion of knowledge and understanding. If we already know God did it, there is no question to answer. Without questions to answer, we won’t have science. Without science, we won’t have this conversation.
Thank you as always for the careful discussion. I’m going to be thinking about all this without being able to respond! Heading back out … but it was my break to get to think a bit.
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My brother and I used to think about this together all of the time. Maybe your red is my green? We’ll never know. We’re all trained to call the sky blue, but we might each be seeing different colors when our parents train us to say, “blue,” and based off of that we begin calling everything that happens to be that same tone “blue”. Odd, isn’t it?
In that same way our parents train us what to believe around mysterious occurrences and as we grow we hopefully explore and revise, figuring out what really makes sense to each of us. Growing away from our nuclear families in our own belief systems can be an incredibly painful and humbling experience.
As to this: <> I’d like to think a bit more. I don’t know if I believe that. I’ve got relatives who go to church every Sunday because they think it’s the right thing to do, but I bet if I got them alone and asked them point-blank, “Do you believe a guy died on a cross thousands of years ago and that believing that event happened and living in the way he taught people to live is going to save you?” they wouldn’t be so quick to say, “yes”. I think a lot of people cling to ritual because it’s familiar and comforting. I think a lot of us do things just because we’re in the habit and never stop to think why we do or if we have to do it.
I really admire those who are courageous enough to step outside of what they were taught growing up and answer questions for themselves.