Letters to the Editor
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Intolerance or Discernment?
Dom, From what I've seen in the other posts it doesn't sound like I'm the one that needs to learn a message about intolerance. You buy into your beliefs with just as much dogma as I do into mine.
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God and Gorillas - good title, but poor characterization of the story
Admittedly it's been a trying day so far, but coming across the line: "I think religion is all about emotional engagement and social action. " makes me wonder who allowed this story to be presented as about religion.
Clearly, to me and perhaps a few other people, religion, with all its flaws, is at its core about more than people or other animals' social interactions. This story may be interesting sociology, but the basic idea of the story continues to promote the unfortunate narrowing of religion as being essentially anthropomorphic. We, and the animals, are just spectators of the vast unknown. That's where the awe comes from, not from, say, empathy that some of us creatures on this earth have developed.
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You're right
And I apologize, I was more defensive than perhaps was warranted, although "Man, what version of the bible and koran have you been reading??? "Exploring ways to live together" my ass." wasn't exactly a kiss on the cheek. E-conversations are always difficult and reactionary.
As for that quote- not my best expression of an idea- I think you summed it up pretty good. More than anything, the Bible is a story of a people, and whether you beleive it was written by men or by god, it is not easy to ignore a text that has lasted more than a thousand years and outlasted more than a few political world-orders. That is not nothing. The way most (non-literalist) Christians view the Bible as a long story about the people through whom the One True God revealed himself to the world. I was trying to say that despite the God aspect of the Bible, it is a lasting account of real men, full of the real experiences and more than a few very good life lessons. Of course it is difficult to ignore the God aspect of it if you set out reading it with a hostile mindset towards the concept of God itself. As an anthropological study it is first rate material, both in its character studies and its literary depth. This side of the Bible is what most Christians choose to focus on and model their lives after. The rest is what Right Wing, NeoCon, Republican, pre-millenialist, Christo-facists focus on.
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Since this seems to have already devolved into atheists versus theists, here's my two cents
I haven't read all the letters, but looking through them, there seems to be something no one has said yet.
For many religious people, religion and experience are not at odds. These people became religious after experiencing something which they could not easily explain except in religious terms. That doesn't necessarily mean that the experience was recorded in a way which would satisfy a scientist - but then, many real experiences aren't. I have been in love. I KNOW this. I know when I am in love and when I'm not. Yet I can't prove to a scientist that I am in love. He could, I guess, measure my brain wave patterns, observe my behavior, and say, subject seems to behave in a manner consistent with the behavior of past subjects who have claimed to be "in love." But that's about as far as the present state of science would get him. I've even heard scientists dismiss love as a meaningless word used to describe the instincts which cause us to reproduce and raise our children. Okay, I'll concede that point - if our theoretical scientist first acknowledges that for the majority of people, it doesn't feel that way, and it's the hard, easily demonstrated data which appear to be meaningless and have no application to the living of everyday life.
It's not as simple as dividing people into religious and non-religious. I have known dogmatic atheists who refused to believe in God because they were raised to believe theists were stupid and they blindly followed the faith of their parents. I have known Christians who found that the evidence in their lives in support of Christianity was too powerful to ignore. And I've known the opposite - intelligent, open-minded atheists, and Christians who believe exactly what they were taught at the age when they were potty-trained, with no examination since that time. (It fascinates me that some people who would never take advice from mom and dad on how to balance a checkbook or make a potroast still think mom and dad have all the answers about God.)
I'm a Christian. I tend to mistrust the faith of any Christian over the age of 20 who says he has never questioned his faith, that he believes something "because the Bible says so" or "because that's the way I was raised." I have a few probing questions for such people: Why aren't you a Muslim "because the Koran says so"? What if you had been born in India, to Hindu parents, would you have chosen to become a Christian? Usually this gets a round of "because the Bible is the revealed word of God" and "but my parents are people of faith, not heathens." If I keep going: Why do you believe the Bible is the revealed word of God? Why do you think God loved you enough to be let you born middle-class American Protestant and raised in the One True Faith, but didn't love children of Hindu families in the same way? then the polite mask starts to drop, and this "faith" is revealed for what it is: fear, hedged around by anger.
If shining a light on your faith makes you angry and frightened, then you don't really have faith.
When I say "faith," I don't mean believing in something without cause or evidence. That doesn't seem to be the way the word is used in the Bible, either. When a woman comes to Christ to be healed and he says to her "Your faith has made you whole," I don't think he's saying that she would also have become whole if she had believed strongly enough that the squirrel in the tree could heal her. He seems to me to be saying something quite different: that she saw something about him, something important, and that she refused to be convinced by the mundanity of life around her to drop it and pretend nothing had happened. Faith, I believe, is a type of integrity, a refusal to betray revealed truth.
That's not the way many people use the word. I realize that. I especially realize that most atheists don't think that's the way most religious people are using the word. A lot of atheists seem to believe that "faith" means "voluntarily checking your brain at the door." They get mad, because it's frustrating watching other people do something so stupid. I respect that. In fact, I respect it a whole lot more than I respect "because the Bible says so and my mommy told me the Bible was the world of God."