From Drew Tatusko:
Jesus became a heretic to the religion of his day. Perhaps part of what he revealed is that we are all heretics in the eyes of God. This is why faith is the ground of religion, not some puppet human authority that has the gall to claim sole possession of the Truth.
An article was published on Yahoo's website today about a survey on American religious attitudes. The article begins by stating that "most Americans believe God is involved in their everyday lives and concerned with their personal well-being."
Four highlights were mentioned in the study:
A nice column by Norman Lear on religious faith appeared on the "On Faith" web site recently.
A lot of people may associate Norman Lear with certain edgy and politically charged 1970s sitcoms such as "All in the Family" or "Maude". He is probably less well known for his religious faith, but in fact he was the producer of a very short lived 1991 sitcom with a religious element called "Sunday Dinner" (unfortunately, the reason for its short duration is that it actually wasn't very funny). One feature of "Sunday Dinner" was that one of the main characters sometimes held conversations with God.
In the "On Faith" column, Lear says:
I like the metaphor of the thousand-mile river. It passes through time zones and climate changes occur along its path. Responding to the changing climate, the trees, shrubbery and vegetation along the riverbank changes also. But it is the same water responsible for nourishing every bit of growth. There are spiritual waters, call it the River of Reverence, that nourishes all of us who grope for understanding on a journey that will last all our lives and beyond.I agree with that sentiment, although, alas, I have come to the conclusion that there is no church for People Like Me.
There should be a Church For People Like Us.
By way of A Feather Adrift I found this entry by an atheist blogger who said that he respected fundamentalists more than liberal Christians because fundamentalists have a "coherent worldview" while liberal Christians are guilty of "picking various bits they like while ignoring the parts they don't care for."
This is a familiar refrain from many atheists and I have harped on this topic before ad nauseum. What some call a "coherent worldview" others would term a dogmatic, rigid, and close-minded way of viewing things. (Imagine that--developing a viewpoint based on picking what you agree with and rejecting what you disagree with! Evaluating ideas based on their merit! How reprehensible!) Some of us actually find dogmatic, rigid, and close-minded thinking to be something less than the best way of approaching the complexities of the world. Others, on the other hand, "respect" such outlooks. To each their own, I guess.
A quote from It's Really All About God: Reflections of a Muslim Atheist Jewish Christian, by Samir Selmanovic:
If God created all humanity but gave life-giving knowledge--usually referred to as "revelation"--to only some of humanity, could God in any meaningful sense be thought of as the One God and not only as a god?
Wouldn't such a god be historically or geographically local and therefore either disinterested, powerless, or in some other way incapable of giving lifesaving knowledge to all humanity? To say that God has decided to visit all humanity through only one particular religion is a deeply unsatisfying assertion about God.
I ran across another militant atheist blogger, Mano Singham, who is as misinformed as he is strident--in this case, attacking theologian John Haught as a "religious atheist" and as one who "denies god" (sic)--thus illustrating once again that those who defy misinformed stereotypes always seem to provoke the greatest outrage, and also illustrating for about the millionth time that militant atheists have pretty much the same views of religion that religious fundamentalists do.
The Onion uses satire to explain the theology of intercessory prayer.
I started to take a "Test Your Faith" quiz posted on the NPR web site that is supposed to measure how much of a doubter your are, but I found the categories and assumptions that lie behind those questions too difficult for me to relate to.
The first question, for example, asks: "Do you believe that a particular religious tradition holds accurate knowledge of the ultimate nature of reality and the purpose of human life?" To which I can only respond with questions of my own, such as: what is meant by "accurate knowledge"? Is a glimpse into some aspect of the ultimate reality the same as accurate knowledge? If two blind men have accurate knowledge of some part of an elephant, are they both right? Are they both wrong?
The second question asks, "Do you believe that some thinking being consciously made the universe?" I may not be very knowledgeable about Tillich, but even I can see a problem with that question right off the bat, since I for one don't think of God as "a" being. If I think that God as a concept belongs to a different ontological category than you or I, then the assumption behind this question falls apart, as far as I'm concerned. I notice that a lot of argumentative atheists often dismissively refer to God as "a" being whose existence cannot be proven, and I always feel that they are missing the point when they put it that way.
Question 3 asks, "Is there an identifiable force coursing through the universe, holding it together, or uniting all life-forms?" What do they mean by "force"? For example, is a creative principle the same as a force?
Question 4 asks, "Could prayer be in any way effective, that is, do you believe that such a being or force (as posited above) could ever be responsive to your thoughts or words?" Since I couldn't even accept the premises behind the earlier "being" or "force" questions, that makes things a bit difficult, and furthermore, what does the question mean by "effective" and "responsive"? Setting that objection aside, there seems to be a hidden assumption that this posited "being " or "force" might "respond" in some coercive fashion, by effecting some result that one asked for through the exercise of its power. But "response" can mean many things; after all, if I tell a friend about a tragic event in my life, my friend might respond by crying. A sympathetic response is a response, after all.
Question 12 asks "Do you believe that the world is not completely knowable by science?" Again, the question I have is, what do you mean by "knowable"?
Question 13 asks, "If someone were to say "The universe is nothing but an accidental pile of stuff, jostling around with no rhyme nor reason, and all life on earth is but a tiny, utterly inconsequential speck of nothing, in a corner of space, existing in the blink of an eye never to be judged, noticed, or remembered," would you say, "Now that's going a bit far, that's a bit wrongheaded?" I wouldn't say "wrongheaded". I can understand why people might feel that way, and I sometimes feel that way myself. That being said, I generally don't see the universe that way.
Susan Jacoby, an atheist columnist at the "On Faith" web site, describes an atheist in this way:
Today, as in the past, atheists can say only that on the basis of the available evidence, we don't think an omnipotent deity has anything to do with either the ultimate origins of the universe or the ethical dilemmas that human beings confront every day.According to that definition, a fair number of people of faith who don't believe in a omnipotent deity, ranging from bishop John Shelby Spong to process theologians, are actually atheists. Apparently they just don't know that they are atheists.
...and, naturally, he gets it wrong. Here is what Hitchens says in an interview:
I would say that if you don’t believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ and Messiah, and that he rose again from the dead and by his sacrifice our sins are forgiven, you’re really not in any meaningful sense a Christian.He sure sounds like a fundamentalist Christian at this point, doesn't he? The funny thing is that he is being interviewed here by a UU Christian, who of course doesn't fit into that stereotype at all, and when she points that out, Hitchens then responds by dismissing her faith as a "waste of time"
According to a new book, the previous pope used to whip himself "to get closer to Jesus".
If you ask me, I think that if those who engaged in self-flagellation instead spent a little more that time improving social justice for the poor and disenfranchised, they'd find themselves a lot closer to Jesus than whipping themselves would ever accomplish.
In a way, I think kind of activity is a product of the perverse notion, exemplified by such films as Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, that Jesus's suffering was in and of itself some kind of a virtue, rather than a terrible and unfortunate consequence of the power of his life and message. Perhaps one can draw a straight line from the doctrine of substitutionary atonement to people whipping themselves. Sure, I wholeheartedly agree that it was virtuous that Jesus was willing to suffer and become a martyr for what he believed in; but in no way can I see that it was a good thing that these things happened to him. The idea that God wants anyone to suffer or thinks that torture is in any way desirable--be it inflicted by Empires or by one's own hand--makes a mockery of Divine compassion.
I can see that there is value to be found in developing self-discipline and even in certain forms of self-denial. Self-denial as a growth exercise is one thing; glorifying self-torture and ritualized suffering as some kind of saintly virtue or is another thing altogether. Given all the negativity about the human body found in certain forms of Christianity to begin with, maybe this isn't surprising. Equating Mary's supposed virginity with saintliness gives the message that the human body's natural urges take us away from the Divine ideal. If you really hate the human body enough to claim that virginity is saintly, then perhaps it is a small step from that to whipping one's self and thinking that this somehow makes one holier.
The disaster in Haiti is the latest in a long line of human tragedies that have led people to question what it means to believe in God. James Wood's op-ed column in today's New York Times suggests that there are only two possible responses to tragedies like these:
either God is punitive and interventionist (the Robertson view), or as capricious as nature and so absent as to be effectively nonexistent (the Obama view).Essentially Wood assumes that God can be conceived of only in two ways--as either the omnipotent interventionist deity of Christian orthodoxy, or as the God of deism. As anyone who has read my blog would expect, I find Wood's argument to be based on a false dichotomy that ignores theologies that posit God as an active but non-omnipotent presence in our lives.
Glynn Cardy, the vicar of St Matthew-in-the-City Church in Auckland, New Zealand has not updated his blog in a long time. He has almost always had something interesting to say; he is a progressive Christian who rejects many of the dogmas of traditional orthodoxy. It seems that he has made the news internationally with a controversial billboard that I think is hilarious but which some Christians found offensive. According to the BBC, Cardy "said the aim of the billboard had been to lampoon the literal interpretation of the Christmas conception story."
He goes on to say,
What we're trying to do is to get people to think more about what Christmas is all about. Is it about a spiritual male God sending down sperm so a child would be born, or is it about the power of love in our midst as seen in Jesus?I think that for a lot of people, Christmas is about the former. I agree with Cardy; I think it should be about the latter.
John Haught describes how the process of evolution serves as the basis of a much more interesting theology than the simplistic dogma of creationism, because evolution reveals to theologians a vision of God who "wills, but does not force, truly interesting outcomes to emerge in surprising new ways."
I believe that Haught generally has denied being a process theologian, but it is clear that his views are deeply influenced by it. This business of "willing but not forcing" expresses the notion that God has not scripted the history of the universe, but rather is a non-omnipotent co-participant in its creative processes.
This point is crucial, I think, to understanding what Haught is saying. Jerry Coyne, in his atheist blog, claimed sarcastically in response to this that Haught believed that "God is just a big playwright, directing a big script that none of us will ever be able to see to its end." This seems to be actually almost exactly the opposite of what Haught was in fact saying. Scripting is one thing, Haught argues, that God does not do.
The "Russell's Teapot" comic strips often presented some rather pointed critiques of Christian orthodoxy. Unfortunately, as is often the case with atheist criticisms of Christianity, the author of that comic strip conflates a critique of Christian orthodoxy with support for atheism per se, when in fact it is possible to agree with many of those criticisms without being an atheist. In any case, from a couple of years ago, here is a comic that summarizes intercessory prayer:
The brouhaha over whether Patrick Kennedy should take communion just reminds me once again that that when churches practice closed communion the practice can and often will be brandished as a cudgel by those in power against those who don't toe the "correct" theological line.
Jesus didn't impose preconditions on who got invited to the table, and thus it is ironic that certain churches claiming to follow Jesus do just the opposite. Closed communion and the resulting imposition of gate keeping rules by religious authorities stands in stark contrast to what Jesus, who opposed the rigidity and exclusionary practices of religious hierarchy, stood for.
Carrie Prejean tells Christianity Today that breast implants are not forbidden by the Bible:
"I don't think there's anything wrong with getting breast implants as a Christian," Prejean told the magazine, which advertises itself as a publication of "Evangelical conviction."The list of elective surgeries invented long after the Bible was written and which the Bible doesn't prohibit is rather long. On the other hand, the list of biblical prohibitions (for example, in the book of Leviticus) that Ms. Prejean (along with the rest of us) ignores is also rather long. It is easy to mock Prejean here, who has made a name for herself as a spokeswoman for the bigoted Christian right, but it does raise an interesting point. When you rely on the Bible as a rigid guide to determine what is acceptable and what isn't, you end up losing your ability to think for yourself. And that's the real sin, as far as I'm concerned.
"I don't see anywhere in the Bible where it says you shoudn't get breast implants," said Prejean, 22.
Here is a quote by John Haught, taken from an interview with Amy Edelstein:
Sometimes people ask, “What is the evidence that the infinite exists?” For Augustine and for many religious people throughout the ages, the best evidence is the utter restlessness of the human heart. You could extend that also to the restlessness of the intellect itself. We all realize that no matter how much we know, there is yet more to be known; we all realize that no matter how much we get in life, how much we have, how much we possess, we are never fully filled up by it. So there is, in a sense, a God-shaped hole at the heart of our being. That’s what Augustine was saying—our hearts are restless until we rest in the infinite.
Michael Ruse, who is an atheist, argues in favor of tolerance and respect for people of faith in an excellent column that criticizes the militancy of the "new atheists", which he posted at the Guardian website. He lays out four broad reasons why he disagrees with them, and I think anyone interested in this topic will find that it makes for great reading.
I thought the following comment that he wrote in that column about the reaction he has gotten from some of the militant atheists was rather telling:
I am not whining (in fact I am rather proud) when I point out that a rather loud group of my fellow atheists, generally today known as the "new atheists", loathe and detest my thinking. Richard Dawkins has likened me to the pusillanimous appeaser at Munich, Neville Chamberlain. Jerry Coyne, author of Why Evolution is True, says (echoing Orwell) that only someone with pretensions to the intelligentsia could believe the silly things I believe. And energetic blogger PZ Myers refers to me as a "clueless gobshite" because I confessed to seeing why true believers might find the Kentucky Creationist Museum convincing. I will spare you what my fellow philosopher Dan Dennett has to say about me.When Dawkins, Coyne, and Myers use such vitriol against a fellow atheist who doesn't toe their particular party line, this shows that their brutish behavior is not directed only against people of faith, but against anyone who thinks differently from the way they do.
