On Religion
June 23rd, 2011 § 2 Comments
“Religion is poison.”
I’ve run into a few people that believe this way, and each time I’ve thought, Maybe you’re not exploring the right religions. I’m a nonbeliever, and I agree that there are some tenets of some religions that are counterproductive and ultimately harmful to society. But I can’t categorically say that all religion is bad, and I think that those who do are proceeding from a point of, well, fundamentalism.
I was raised Quaker in rural Indiana. Although I no longer live in Indiana, I still attend Quaker Meeting. I enjoy the company, and the practice really does help me find peace. Even so, I hesitate to call myself Quaker since I struggle with faith. I have trouble really believing in a Creator God. I recognize that there’s probably something out there that is greater than the nature that we experience, and therefore supernatural by definition. The sticking point for me is the idea that there is some sort of master plan. That, I submit, is the true difference between the religious and the non-religious; the religious believe there is a God (or Spirit or what have you) with a plan. The religious believe in order. That even if God will not intervene on one’s behalf when one wants Him (Her, It) to, it’s because the nonintervention is part of a larger plan. My hangup is that I don’t believe there’s a plan to begin with. Order’s an illusion; chaos is real.
But there’s the conundrum. I believe that people of faith are happier . . . that they find more meaning in their lives and more significance in the work they do. I accept the reports tending to agree they’re more likely to pull through health crises and survive hard times with their sanity intact.
In short, I wish desperately that I did believe.
But, despite lots and lots of effort, I can’t make myself believe. I can try to convince myself, but it feels disingenuous. Like I’m lying to myself. That’s why I think Pascal’s Wager is baloney. Either you believe, or you don’t believe. If you “believe” because you think it’s in your best interest, is that really belief, or is that just going through the motions because you want the reward?
My p0int is that wanting to believe just isn’t enough. Either you’re convinced, or you’re unconvinced. There may be a middle ground, but I suspect that’s probably the product of simply avoiding the question.
In the end, I guess the trick is never to stop searching. I’m skeptical now, but I promise to continue to examine these feelings. I know that people often return to faith as they age, and perhaps I will eventually, too. Trust me: nothing would make me happier than to believe that there is Someone out there watching us and guiding us to maturity as individuals and as a species. But I can’t say I believe until I really do.
How about you? For the faithful, how do you keep your faith in the face of facts like twenty-five thousand people died of hunger today, many of them children? For the nonbelievers, do you ever struggle with unanswered questions or phenomena that might indicate there is a God?
It was a spectacularly windy day in an unspecified great plains state when I realized that I really did hope that everything is chaos, happenstance, and that when our little carbon based lives expire, that our consciousness ceases to exist. To exhale one long, last sigh and lapse into the ultimate state of apathy. Then I considered, perhaps somewhat bloodlessly, the comforting overtones of believing that there’s something which exceedes us to whom we are important, to whom we return after this set of dimensions like children crawling back into bed with an affectionate parent to escape an unpleasant dream. Or is it that we have to believe that someone else is keeping score, that all the little injusrices and major transgressions of our cultural codes will be settled, rewarded or punished, with ultimate and perfect justice? Do we need the catchall of divine justice to pretend to a concept of imperfect human justice, to sustain the struggle to make our current circumstances more fair, more tenable, until some Creator tags us out of the ring?
Lately, faith has seemed more and more arrogant, more of a flimsy way to comfort ourselves and ensure that we are not, as Blanchot so cuttingly posits, completely alone in the moment of our death. In the instant of one’s death, one is finally, completely and entirely alone, unless the is something which exceedes us and is thus a companion and greeter once biological functions have ceased.
This is not to say that I don’t long for the faith of my mother, the rock hard certainty of a zealot convert. Or even the simpler faith of my grandmother, though perhaps hers was complicated, too– how well can we ever pretend to fathom the faith of our fathers?
For my part, I wish I believed, I wish I took comfort in the community, I wish I could accept the reassurance the arguments offer for the legitimacy of concepts of justice, equality and hope. I wish I had the right kind of heart for that sort of thing, but I fear I do not.
This is beautiful, Heather, and resonates with me powerfully.