[Religion]
[religion] Back to pink unicorns, part 2 of 2
More on religion, politics and me, following this recent post and its rather robust comment thread, as well as part 1 of this post. This is where I want to discuss some of my own errors of thought, and try to establish how I want to redirect both my thinking and my rhetoric accordingly. Absolutely a work-in-progress, not a manifesto or a position statement, and as such subject to all the usual scrutiny, challenge and cross-questioning that goes on around here when I raise these subjects.
It’s been difficult for me to approach this, because in a very real sense, I have too much to say. Even trying to focus it down to a re-analysis of my views has been pretty challenging. I’ve had continued discussions online or in real life with some of the usual suspects, with
For reference, though I am a very strong atheist today, I was both heavily churched and Christian-educated (missionary schools in Asia and Africa) in my youth. My own church background is Disciples of Christ, with a strong leavening of Southern Baptist, and some small amount of later Episcopalianism sprinkled on for variety. This means my understanding of religion from the inside, such as it is, stems from a rather specific Evangelical Protestant perspective. Combine that with almost two decades of living in Texas as a nonreligious adult. The state is in some senses is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Southern Baptist Convention (at least so far as Blue Laws, alcoholic beverage rules, political expressions of faith and media coverage go). You can readily perceive my exposures, and my flinch points from that history.
Now, on to a rather lengthy exegesis of my reflections.
In a related vein,
My initial response to her was that from an atheist point of view, pink unicorns are no more or less trivial than God, pretty much by definition. That is the whole point of the argument, after all. I asked her how she felt about Zeus as a deity. She responded that while Zeus might be logically equivalent to a pink unicorn, he was also part of an important culture that spanned millennia and spawned much of what has become our modern world.
In other words, no matter what I think of Zeus, either as an article of faith or a nominal entity in his own right, he is an important figure, if nothing else, for purely historical reasons. This cannot be said of pink unicorns.
I make this same error when I engage with
I’m picking a fight I don’t actually mean to pick. For this, I apologize.
I do not apologize for my opinions. I don’t even guarantee not to use the term “pink unicorn” in the future. But I do need to be much more careful and deliberate in how I employ it, because the term loads the conversational dice before they can even be cast. If I want to do that for rhetorical effect, that’s one thing. But it is not productive or kind of me to trivialize the faith of others as a foundational protocol of discussion.
This leads to arguing with the wrong people, which is to say, arguing with people of faith who are willing to engage with me, to illuminate my perspective, and allowing me to attempt to illuminate theirs. Again, for this I apologize. I will attempt to remap this rhetoric in a way which engages appropriately, rather than diverting by incidental pettiness.
A term which has been tossed around in these threads, I think originating with either
I have often been critical of specific aspects of faith. The internals, if you will, of the black box. While those arguments can certainly be conducted, and often are among persons of faith, as someone who stands outside the black box of faith, they’re not my arguments to make. Or if they are, they need to be within a specific context.
I make this confusion in part because the publicly-branded elements of Christianity as presented in the media and our political sphere actually do map pretty closely to my personal experiences of religion. The same politically conservative, Southern-inflected Evangelical Protestantism that haunted my childhood is what drives Brand Christian in our national discourse. So my responses to things occur both on the political level — where I explicitly mean to respond — and on the level of my own discarded black box of faith and personal experiences, where I don’t usually mean to respond.
Another reason I make this confusion is simply sloppy thinking on my own part. As I said a while back:
I stand outside the black box of religion by deliberate self selection. [Your faith] is a private matter that has no effect on me, and is of interest to me only insofar as we are friends. What happens behind the door of your home, church, synagogue, mosque, temple or forest grove is between you, your temporal lobes and your vision of your spirituality.
I meant that very sincerely. I don’t always live up to it, especially when I respond somewhat reflexively to what I read and hear in the media.
Once again, I do not apologize for my opinions. And certes, as soon as articles of faith or doctrine enter the public square, for example as rationalization for a political stance, they do become fair game for comment. But faith in its own right is a separate topic, and one that if I’m going to criticize from inside the black box I need to do so by following the appropriate rules.
Some of the usual suspects have made some very cogent remarks on this exact topic. Especially
Again, this is sloppy thinking on my part, because I really do know the difference between Christianity as an American political and media institution, and Christianity the religion. Except for the limited basis as noted above, I won’t pretend to know Christianity from the inside, but I’m quite reasonably aware of Church history and the modern diversity of sects. I know what the Reformation was about, I know who John Calvin was, I know who John Wesley was, hell, I know who Menno Simons was. And that’s me being heavily Western-centric. There’s the whole constellation of Orthodox Christianity, not to mention the Irish Church, the Coptic Church, Maronites, and surely dozens of threads I’m unaware of. Christianity is about as monolithic as a box of random glass beads, and no less colorful and varied.
But the American political and media institution of Christianity, the public face of Brand Christian, is inextricable tied to that same politically conservative, Southern-inflected Evangelical Protestantism that in part birthed me. This is the Christianity of Billy Graham, the Moral Majority, Operation Rescue, Pat Robertson, televangelism, and the Republican Party. And because the people involved in this are smart operators, they always refer to themselves as Christians, and speak with the confidence that they represent the entire American community of faith. They’re treated as if they do in the news media, in politics, and most specifically within the Republican Party.
This is a huge branding problem for Christians who may be apolitical, socially moderate or liberal-progressive. It’s a branding problem that many of us outside the community of faith tend to reject. Why should we bother to make the distinction about a house you guys can’t keep in order in the first place, after all?
I make this mistake a lot. It’s unfair of me, assuming I want to engage people of faith. And given that I seek reasonable political solutions within a democratic framework, I have to be willing to engage people of faith. Otherwise I’m just another militant atheist shouting into the wind. Bluntly, my guys will never have the votes, so at a minimum, out of naked self-interest I must coalition with my moderate and progressive Christian friends.
In order to do that, I need to be able to make the distinction.
Per a comment by
And in the mean time, maybe I’ll also succeed in being less confusing, and not condemning with blanket labels. I didn’t create this branding problem, but in my own small way, I might help solve it.
(Note: To be fair, I recognize that atheism suffers from a similar branding issue. One I am just as powerless to alter. A topic for another time, but a real factor in many discussions.)
This is one I am not proud of, but it’s significant. I’ll probably never shed it. That means I’ll need to work harder to compensate.
Basically, since I left my early churching, I’ve never really been able to believe, at a gut check level, that faith is real to anyone. I’m such a thoroughgoing secularist that the professions of faith seem too improbable to me to be taken seriously by any intelligent person. At the back of my mind, I default to an assumption that any person of faith is either credulous fool or in on the carnie scam. There’s not much about Christianism, especially televangelism, to dissuade me from this view, frankly, so it’s easy for me to reinforce this thinking in myself on a regular basis through confirmation bias.
The point is, per my comment about the black box above, I cannot know the sincerity of anyone’s faith. If I want to engage in dialog with persons of faith, if I want to effect political changes by negotiation with people who have a faith-based position, I simply cannot allow myself to think of them as fools, even in the sly spaces of my secret heart.
Let me be clear. I don’t hold faith. I truly, at a basic level, don’t understand how anyone else can hold faith. But if I believe what I said above, that your faith is your business, then this is not my judgment to make. And if I believe that I want and need to engage with persons of faith, then this is not a judgment I have any right to make. And if I believe in the value of logos and mythos harnessed together, as I explain below, then I’m simply wrong to make this judgment.
When I make this particular error of thought, I violate my own principles, and I commit the same sort of judgment that drives me so crazy when I see it emanating from Christianists.
And this one’s wired deep in me. It’s not a cherished conviction or a strong opinion, it’s a low-level gut check. I’m an adult, intelligent human being, I can choose not to listen to that gut check. But what I need to do is maintain more mindfulness to that tendency of mine, and eschew it consciously.
That’s as far as I’ve come on the errors of thought. Surely there’s more to say, but I’ve already burned far too much wordage on this.
I’d also like to spend a little time on (hopefully) positive statements about faith, religion and public life, stemming from these same recent assessments of my beliefs and writings.
Without stepping back inside the black box, I want to spell out that I think faith is real, valuable and important. That is to say, while remaining silent on the question of the existence of God, or the objective validity of any other faith, I recognize the power faith has in society and the individual, and the value it can bring to those who hold it.
We are not rational animals. People have to be taught very carefully to reason, and it took most of human history to invent the logic chain. We do not perceive the world through an inherently rational lens, and our own emotional and mental processes are not driven by rationality, again with the exception of careful training.
In that context, I don’t think it’s reasonable or prudent to expect people to view life on a purely rational basis. Speaking explicitly from outside the black box, to me the apparent value of faith is that it can give people a framework to process those perceptions, emotions and intuitions with which we are all flooded. When its working properly, with that framework of faith one usually acquires a moral code, some ethics, and a social framework — things generally viewed as good by society.
Even more to the point, as a writer, I would be the last to deny the power of the hidden truth, the altered perception, the secrets that the wind whispers to the night-bound trees. What for me are wellsprings of inspiration are just as likely the wellsprings of faith for another.
All of which is to say, I want to say that even though I don’t understand, and overdoubt its sincerity, I have to believe that faith is real, valuable and important. The alternative is conclude that the majority of my fellow citizens and the plurality of my friends and co-workers are to a woman and man of poor intellectual rigor who have been taken in by a giant series of carnie scams. And though I sometimes speak as if I think that, I’m not willing to sign up to the proposition.
Logos is the empirical world, the logical truths, that which can be measured, distilled, analyzed. Mythos is the dreamtime, the realm of the spirit and the subconscious, that which is alogical, even atemporal. One way to think about logos and mythos in in terms of the Apollonian-Dyonisian dialectic. Mr. Spock is the apotheosis of Apollonian culture in American popular media, and he is paired with the Dyonisian avatar that is James T. Kirk. (See here for a bit more. I don’t entirely agree with the analysis, but it covers the bases.) Modern, Western culture has emphasized mythos to the significant expense of logos in many of our core social, economic and political institutions; and to some degree for good reasons. Mythos can’t file a flight plan or develop new antibiotics, for example, nor can it solve for the value of pi. On the other hand, the human mind cannot live by logos alone.
As I’ve been thinking through this topic of late, I increasingly have come to conclude that this issue lies at the heart of the argument I’m actually trying to conduct in my public discourse. I myself have often lost track of it along the way, in the process of indulging in the various errors of thought outlined above.
In a nutshell, we have a problem in modern, colloquial English. The word “truth” is used indiscriminately to refer to demonstrable assertions and objective facts on the one hand, and articles of faith on the other hand. A critical distinction between empirical reality and the longings of the spirit, logos and mythos, has been swept away for many, especially Christianists among whom the search for moral certitude stereotypically trumps any tolerance for ambiguity.
This confusion is the root of my statement, “Just because you believe it, doesn’t mean it’s true.” Except my statement misleads, because I myself am collapsing logos and mythos when I do this.
The reality is that world is ambiguous. Not at a metrics layer, where an angstrom is an angstrom and a UTC second is a UTC second, but within the realm of human experience. Our minds are complex, requiring both logos and mythos to feed our inner lives. I am a raging atheist, but I find my mythos in writing and reading. (I once told
We as a culture need to maintain the distinction, while also honoring a balance between these two forces. I as a person need to do this. A collective understanding of how matters of mythos inflect logos, and how matters of logos inflect mythos would render irrelevant much of what drives me to distraction about religion in politics. The entire societal argument about the teaching of evolution, for example, is nothing but a confusion of logos and mythos.
I can’t even begin to say how I’ll fit all this together going forward. I’m trying to adapt my thinking to my real goals — better decision making in the public square and the political sphere, and specifically decision making that’s rooted in rational analysis and policy discussion rather than Christianists myths and false certitude.
I continue see the world the way I do — via a profoundly empirical view — but I’m not out to deconvert anyone from their faith. I am out to urge people of all faiths and perspectives to see the world as it is, understand and acknowledge the consequences of their own beliefs, and work together to mutual improvement instead of the mutual detriment that Christianism (not to mention the worst excesses of other faiths) drives us toward like Garadene swine running screaming into the sea.
It’s not like I’ve got much else on my plate.
Posted: 6:00 am Mon January 18 2010 |
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Jaws
January 18th, 2010 at 10:56 amI’d like to point at a different problem in here that results in a great deal of miscommunication among those who are willing to discuss the matter: Defining “faith.” It’s one thing to admit to an “error” concerning the existence of faith; it’s another thing entirely to ascribe importance to the existence of “faith” without defining what it means.
As an increasingly strict secularist myself* I nonetheless retain something resembling “faith” in certain values: For example, that the foundation of a just society requires not just allowing for, but embracing, dissent. I can’t prove it; neither can an adherent of sharia prove the actual (not doctrinal) provenance of the law from a supreme supernatural being, thereby giving sharia a logically privileged position. Instead, too often “faith” is taken to mean the adherence to a position from religist side, but the adherence to a provenance from the secularist side. This curious inversion of meaning (and of vulnerability to specific logical fallacies) does a great deal to inhibit real communication.
So I’d like to suggest eliminating the construct of “faith” from the discussion. Whether one accepts any form of Whorf’s hypothesis or not, it’s difficult to argue that disputation over what constitutes “faith” — let alone whether that is a necessary or indeed sufficient condition — actually results in communication. Instead, although it’s a mouthful indeed, I’d suggest discussing “supernatural provenance”; and, since it is inherently neither provable nor falsifiable, I think it more accurately describes both the scope of the argument and what I think Jay is describing in Error 4 and Assertion 1; it also avoids the overly digitized argument over whether “failure to understand” necessarily allows, implies, or requires “therefore supernatural agency.”
* Careful study of the history of revolutionary movements — let alone dealing with them for one’s Day Jobbe — will inevitably push one toward either strict secularism or strict fundamendalism; the horrors one finds in the details will drive one insane otherwise. Although how one tells the difference between “insane” and “strict secularist/fundamentalist” is, itself, an interesting side issue…
Mike Brotherton
January 19th, 2010 at 12:58 amYour original post on politics is dead-on, and too many religious liberals/moderates are implicitly guilty enablers. The origin of their more societally benign beliefs and practices are not so different, and criticism in many cases is uncomfortable if carefully considered.
Also, perhaps with minor restatements, I don’t think all your “mistakes” are actually mistakes.
Celebrating belief in unprovable things undermines the reason our species and cultures have worked hard to attain. Sure, faith is real. It may well be useful to individuals and societies, but it for sure has drawbacks and should be open to criticism and recognized for what it is, and what it isn’t. Religion is merely the most institutionalized and protected form.
And I seriously have a problem with religious people raising their kids to believe things, upon threat of eternal damnation or merely ostracism from their families, that are ridiculous to believe from any rational perspective. I thank God I never had to go through your childhood, Jay.
As ever, it is important for writers to know their audiences and their goals for any given piece of writing. It’s appropriate to call anti-science Creationists idiots if the goal is to rally the troops. It isn’t if you’re trying to bring some reason and education to Creationists who might actually be open to the idea that they’re not fully informed about how science works.
While I think we should respect individual people and their right to hold any beliefs they choose, it is not at all reasonable to respect their choices or how they justify them. Religion is not a free pass on criticism, as much as the offended think it should be. Smart people believe all sorts of silly, contradictory things — I know I do — and in the end my intellectual integrity appreciates criticism, even if I am initially surly about it.
Meran
January 20th, 2010 at 12:12 pmIt troubles me that people of a Christian persuasion must always attempt conversion of the unbeliever when acceptance would be a better avenue to enlightenment.
Of course, once YOU accept their doctrines, you’re left alone; they move on to different targets.
This is my personal experience.
I see, however, that if you’re moderately famous, this attempted conversion has more “points”, so instead of giving up (like I have enjoyed), the dialogue continues.
I live my life (as do many many others) just fine without Faith. I’m good without having to have a weekly exhortation on such things, or having the threat of Hell hanging over me. Being good to others is reasonable in our human societies, and should not be only a church requirement. I’m beginning to wonder if our States are becoming just another religiosity such as Afghanistan. I’m serious about this.
Honestly, some of this need to talk of faith is unsettling: it implies illness as divine punishment. Of course, from what I understand, this is exactly in Mr Robertson’s path of philosophy. Not that I ever want to inflict listening or watching that person on myself. Those years of curious incredulity are long gone!