We take a lot of stances in life. Religion is one.
Any proclamation of allegiance to a church is so bitter an assault on my sensibilities, that I react with flight – the only acceptable course, out of the respect for one’s freedom to exercise their life choices. (Unless your church is for shits and giggles, in which case sign me up – Pastafarianism, for example).
But why? Why the bias? And why such vehement reactions to other people’s business? When our limbic systems flares to the opinions of others, that opinion either underscores or undermines some rooted belief of ours – we have a familiarity bias. We like people who agree with us and hate it when they challenge us.
My unwarranted annoyance towards the church-going folk, by that logic, stems from some underlying worldview. Here I propose an exercise of self-examination: can we excavate what causes us to love or hate an idea?
Let it be a tug of logical resilience, if you will.
Take my distaste for religion.
What do I mean by religion? Do I hold all religious practices to equal levels of animosity? Is it a particular church? The institution of organised religion based on dogma? Acting out said dogma? The moral and ethical conditions? The divine?
Well, I’d say, I don’t reject all morality posed by religion. There are many principles advocated by religious schools of thought I find agreeable, even admirable. To paraphrase the philosopher André Comte-Sponville – if Jesus found no resurrection and Buddha no enlightenment, does that render the messages of love and compassion and forgiveness irrelevant? Some values we ought to accept as truth in of themselves.
Plainly put, I like the parts of religion that I agree with. It’s the parts I disagree with that create rancour.
But why? Is it not arrogant to judge another’s values – so long as they uphold them with integrity and sincerity – as lesser than our own?
Well.. that’s true, but not all value carries the same weight. And now we’re getting into deontology territory because we’re talking about conflicting definitions of what is “good”. Let’s step aside from the debate over if one specific virtue outweighs another and go straight to the source – what is Good? And from the perspective of Judeo-Christian ethics, God is the perfect embodiment of Good.
That at least is what’s often thrown at me. But I reject it because there is no Capital-G or little g God. And here we’re getting to the heart of the issue: if I refute the very notion of the divine, unless it’s metaphorical.
So it’s about God.
Yes, I reject God. The Biblical creator-God. I might as well subscribe to the Silmarilion and worship Illuvatar. The notion of a parental creator figure responsible for existence itself is arrogant – we are but specs of dust in the grand scheme of things.
But, playing (ironically) devil’s advocate here: if Man is the outcome of happenstance, a blip in the universe who created the universe? What was there before the Big Bang?
We don’t know where everything came from. There need not be an intention behind the incomprehensible unimportance of Man. Why limit the totality of knowledge to a causal understanding of the world?
But even if I concede to the notion of a creator, the likelihood of a specific narrative being correct about a magical figure creating everything even more implausible. It is as arbitrary to attribute existence to the Abrahamic lord as it would be to the Flying Spaghetti Monster .
Yet you advocate for faith?
A little-f faith, which is perhaps even more ambiguous to define than religion. Faith in the sense that we can believe without direct evidence. Maybe one day we will understand the fabrics of reality so thoroughly that we can model every signal flowing between synapses and every movement in an atom that resulted in my sitting here, having this conversation with myself. Until then, to quote Pascal (of Wager fame), “reason can decide nothing here”, and faith is a respond to not-knowing.
But I believe without evidence that God exists. What’s wrong with that?
Nothing!
I don’t get to police your beliefs. But you also don’t get to impose your practices on to me. That’s my point – faith, spirituality, schools of thought, whatever you wanna call it, without dogma.
This is a far more permissive and palatable approach to the band spirituality occupies on the spectrum of reason. For some, faith is antidotal to the existential horrors of entropy and despair, from which there is no reprieve. It is the last preserve from an indifferent and immutable existence. If believe in something helps them and causes no harm to others, why strip that away from people?
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