[lit-ideas] Re: Better to have had faith
- From: "Graeme Wend-Walker" <graemeww@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 27 May 2005 08:53:23 +1000
Andy:
Again, I get all this. Some people are wacky. My point was that you let
these things define religion. They just don't. You may as well say that all
people who follow soccer are hooligans, or that all scientists are
psychologically enslaved to the pharmaceutical or weapons industries.
Religion is problematic, sure. There's a lot there to interrogate. I'd enjoy
interrogating it all with you. But let's try to rise above the reductionism
ourselves, huh?
Religion (I figure) is a faculty. You've got it and you can use it well or
use it poorly. Using it doesn't have to involve actually calling yourself
"religious" or identifying with anything in particular. I suspect we're born
with a sort of "polymorphous spirituality" that gets shaped in the same way
our other faculties, potentials etc. get shaped. Unfortunately, this faculty
often gets twisted.
There are a lot of people out there who might be called "religious" in their
basic response to life but who would never call themselves that. Maybe NOT
calling themselves religious is part of the deal; the word may have specific
connotations for them from which they'd rather distance themselves. Some do
this distancing consciously, others less so. (It would be better if I'd
didn't call them "religious" either, out of respect to their religion. (It
can cause great offence.) But our culture has not evolved a terribly good
vocabulary for dealing with these things.)
Some people are "religious" in the sense of having great faith in
technological messianism; "one day science will free us," they think, "from
the pain of being human; we'll be able to upload our identities [ascend]
into a world where we can be anything we want to be [heaven]".
Others are religious in their capacity to conceive of higher and higher
degrees of inclusivity, like a violin string trying to imagine the whole
violin. Some exercise this capacity by personifying (or otherwise
objectifying) the highest stuff they can think up, or by turning it on
themselves in a courageous act of self-deconstruction, of humility.
Others, though, use it to authorise whatever it is they already believe or
want to believe, staving off the anxiety produced by genuine religious
self-confrontation (and the ordinary anxiety of being human) by kidding
themselves they've already arrived, that they're one of the elect. This
sense of certainty they get by recoiling off their own anxiety produces
those horrible, self-legitimating brain-loops you were talking about.
Those people make me puke. But you don't need religion to produce that. In
any dictatorship, for instance, you'll find the smug, self-righteous and
judgmental deriving their authority from an identification with secular
power. (With GWB you get the whole package.)
The reason I want to defend religion is that not all the people who might
call themselves religious are so cowardly, and they don't deserve to be
thought so.
Best,
Graeme Wend-Walker
From: "Andy Amago" <aamago@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: Better to have had faith
Date: Wed, 25 May 2005 22:42:02 -0400
Maybe because to me "a blinding to reality" is someone getting excited
enough about religion to take science out of schools and otherwise embrace
superstition over empirical evidence. Maybe because I saw the look on my
nephew's face as he told me about accepting Christ and how they're home
schooling to avoid contact with non-religious ideas for their kids. Maybe
I think you have to be weird to be willing to die rather than give up the
tooth fairy, er, God. Are you in the habit of taking LSD and standing on a
window ledge, so to you this is normal?
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