(Props to Ursula LeGuin's The Telling for the title.) PZ Meyers has a terrific post on Christianity's sins against science over at Pharyngula. Read the whole thing, but my favorite is the twelfth sin:
XII. Faith. Faith is the greatest sin of religion. I despise it; I'm particularly appalled that it is so universally regarded as a virtue. Listen, if I ever call someone a "person of faith", you should be aware that I have just insulted them terribly. It's astonishing how easily that sails over people's heads, though.
I should think that after the Bush administration, people would be more than willing to have faith-based anything shoved back into the closet, nay, the basement, nay, the cesspool, where it belongs, but no--WaPo gives small town scold and gossip Sally Quinn a whole new section on the noxious concept. Sheesh.
Meyers is just getting started:
Faith is this amazing idea that it is a good thing to hold incredible beliefs in the complete absence of evidence to support them....
The facts and the intelligence are fixed around the theology.
.... the more outrageous the belief and the weaker the logic behind them, the stronger your faith and the more virtuous your conduct. It short-circuits everything that works in the world and puts ignorance on a pedestal.
Faith is the opposite of science, yet it is also one common element that you will always hear valued in religion. It is the number one most common excuse for holding peculiar superstitious beliefs in spite of the evidence against them, their violations of sense, and their foundation in wishful thinking and rhetorical vapor—it's the one word non-answer to every criticism of religion. Faith. You might as well just say "gullibility" or "ignorance" or "delusion"— it's all the same thing.
I used to be an agnostic, live and let live kind of guy; an Episcopalian, in fact. The Bush administration was completely destroyed my belief in any form of supernatural being in whom (or which) I may place my faith -- Since a just God would have smitten these people long ago.
So, in a way, I guess I have a lot to thank the Partei for!
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Tain't faith at all...
I hammer at this point every chance I get: those who claim faith as their righteous go-to spot do not have actual "faith"--faith isn't about insisting upon the One True Way.
Can anyone define what "faith" really is? Is it insisting on one way, or is it trusting the universe and letting go the desire to delimit its ineffable mysteries?
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Obedience
The mistake many of us make when looking at Biblical religion from a rational viewpoint is that we presume God's primary interest is in justice and fairness.
The main thing God asks of his followers, though, is obedience - and that's what causes the problem for liberal secularists. Progressive societies are founded upon the presumption of democracy and accountability, which are inconsistent with the notion of an all-powerful Supreme Being accountable to no one, demanding total obedience of those who acknowledge the Being's existence. This is where faith comes in, as without such blind fealty rational humans would find such a being too repugnant to contemplate.
Religion cannot survive without faith. The question that has always intrigued me, though, is whether or not humans can survive without faith.
...for the rest of us
...for the rest of us
Survival
Humans can't survive without water or food. After that the subjective nature of what it takes to survive or not is a matter of opinion.
Joseph Campbell, when asked by Bill Moyers about faith said (paraphrased): I don't need faith. I have experience.
For this mortaljivester, not having faith means I don't gamble, I don't drive super fast, I don't behave a certain way because some guy with the least amount of drool on his chin tells me to, I don't bow my head in solemn recognition of an entity who is supposedly "up there" when "up there" is relative to where one is "down here"--I don't do all kinds of things wherein I may require a deus ex machina to save my ass when it all goes somehow wrong. I love life, I feel pain and sorrow and loss, and bliss and love and glee, and faith does not have one hyena's hair to do with it.
If faith is some sort of "guarantee"--be it a guarantee of freedom from pain or abject suffering after the shuffling off of one's mortal coil--then it isn't faith. There is no guarantee in that wonderful Christianist
game of afterlife/post-death wonderland of glittering cruise line heaven--faith is trust, yes? In the Lord's Prayer the words "Lead us not in temptation" are directed at whom, exactly? It's not a prayer to the Dark Tempter, so what does faith have to do with pleading with your God not to fuck with you, a poor little non-powerful humanoid down here on Planet Earth? Again, that ain't faith, that's just trying to get an edge. Perhaps to think there is some great supernatural battle for one's purported soul is ego-gratifying. God wants me to be with Him...well, better work on some new material, because most of us would bore the ever-loving theological crap out of any deity worth his or her salt.
I get mad at Christianists because I think they could have done so much more with the poetry of their seemingly wacky dying-and-resurrected-god mythology. Instead they took these archetypes and turned them into Hallmark cards for schizophrenics. God loves you. God will punish you for eternity. God is the Father and the Son, but not the Mother or the Daughter. For fuck's sake, get some new writers. This story is stuck in a dead-end, and the more the True Believers back up into that dead end, the feistier they become, like cornered feral dogs. Perhaps they should be darted and released back into the wild, where they can howl at the stars as the great wheel in the sky keeps on turning.
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Hallmark cards for schizophrenics
Reading material for the Kool-Aid Kulture Klub, doubtless.
No Hell below us
Above us, only sky
No Hell below us
Above us, only sky
Tools of observation
Humans can’t survive without water or food. After that the subjective nature of what it takes to survive or not is a matter of opinion.
That "matter of opinion" is the very swamp itself. Within that swamp we have room for all sorts of gods, demons, fairies, ghost whisperers, and flying spaghetti monsters to live.
Joseph Campbell has his experience, and that's all well and good, but the real question in this matter is how one interprets their unique experience. Whether you derive your interpretive tools from scientific theorems, or religious texts, or create tools of your own, you have to trust that those tools are able to accurately interpret what you observe and experience. This trust, as I see it, is a form of faith, albeit for the non-believer something different from the blind trust in a Supreme Being held by the religious. Science has the advantage of being testable - but the religionist would argue that science is based upon a set of presuppositions not too different from his own.
MJS, let me contrast your "I don’t behave a certain way because some guy with the least amount of drool on his chin tells me to" with this statement I found at Vox Day's:
Adopting a religion's morality gives you the benefit of thousands of lifetimes worth of experience and perspective. You don't have to be super-smart, and you don't have to spend all your time thinking about morality. The work has already been done; just let the experts tell you what the correct principles are.
Most people are not terribly introspective - Americans, particularly, are so focused on action that they care little to think about why they do what they do. To me, this accounts for a big part of why fundamentalism has taken such deep root in American society. Just plug into an already established belief system, and you don't have to waste time thinking - just go out and "do", and have "faith" that your actions lead to good results. Perhaps much of the anger we have about faith would be better directed at intellectual laziness.
...for the rest of us
...for the rest of us
As the Buddha said,
it's all about actions, about what you do, not what you say (although he reserved speech as a special kind of action). If faith leads you to live an ethical and peace filled life, then good for faith.
I believe that there are beings who can be viewed as ethical geniuses - someone who sees the underlying truth of actions. It is no disgrace for those of us who might not be so well equipped by nature to follow another's lead. If that is faith, then faith is not bad.
The thing is, we can all experience the outcomes of good actions, however those actions might be inspired. The world is a reliable teacher, if a bit probablistic.
All God's children got karma, the consequences of actions, but half the time it's someone elses karma coming home to the wrong roost.
Jake
And Mithras' Heir Said:
Forgive them father, for they are intellectually lazy or incurious or both.
That sounds about right.
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