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What is it to be 'religious'?

22/7/2013

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In many ways my worldview and that of an intelligent humanist are not too dissimilar. I certainly am likely to find him or her more congenial intellectual company than a Bible-literalist Evangelical Christian.

And yet, despite the huge dissimilarities between us, I share one essential characteristic with that Evangelical, a characteristic that, for the militant atheist, places me irrevocably in the camp of irrational superstition. That is, of course, that I also practice religion.

Now it has been observed that one of the curiosities of our age is how militant atheists seem unable to deal satisfactorily with the full reality of religious belief, in all its diversity over time and space.  Invariably it seems they are drawn to their standard caricatures.  God cannot really be anything other than a bearded old man in the sky and theological formulations like 'Ground of our Being' get them quite angry.  

It ought be clear that any understanding of what religion is, and what it is not, has to encompass an extremely wide range of different beliefs, attitudes and practices, but nevertheless it is true that something really does link me with Buddhist, a Southern Baptist and a Jew and places me in that camp to which Professor Dawkins, for example, expresses deep and sweeping hostility.

So what is it that distinguishes a religious person?  It's not belief in a God.  It's not belief in an afterlife.  It's not rituals. It's not even the act of worship.  The Ethical Church had that. Faith comes into it but how?

I would argue that what marks out 'religionists' is they, we, believe meaning and purpose are there to be discovered. They are, in some way, intrinsic in the way things are. How they are intrinsic, is where the variety of religious belief comes in.

There is no proof for this.  There are evidences that a religious person may cite in support, and those evidences may be examined and tested and criticized, but it comes down to faith.  Faith that there is meaning inherent in the world.

Humanists, by contrast, do not have such a faith and argue that the lack of proof (indeed the lack of possibility of proof) for the hope behind faith is conclusive.  Each person, therefore, has the responsibility to create his or own purpose and whatever meaning they can invent, using whatever sources they wish, science, reason, empathy.  Of course, in theory an atheist could have no truck with any notion of meaning at all but I suspect such nihilism, whatever its intellectual strength, has very limited appeal.

This means, of course, that a humanist may arrive at very nearly the same moral and existential conclusions as I do; they may well be using many of the same sources that I take to be underlying truths, for example the Sermon on the Mount, as their building blocks to construct meaning for themselves. This is a likely scenario, for it takes a particular degree of bloody-mindedness to reject all the religiously-shaped cultural norms of the society in which you live.

So in terms of what I believe about my purpose and even how I arrive there (that is, what sources I use), I may be closer to an atheist than to a fundamentalist Christian but nevertheless, we will both find the matter of faith stands between us and regard the other's case as in that way unsatisfactory.
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The limits of humanism

20/7/2013

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The British Humanist Association website has a banner display which features a number of eminent supporters offering reasons for supporting the BHA.

Now obviously these are quotes, not arguments, yet they point to an obvious problem in trying to construct an alternative to faith, especially one based on science, whatever is meant by that.

For example, Professor Jim Al-Khalili, an eminent physicist and current BHA President states, 'Reason, decency, tolerance, empathy and hope are human traits that we should aspire to, not because we seek reward of eternal life or because we fear the punishment of a supernatural being, but because they define our humanity.

I have a strong sense of awe and wonder in the world, which my cells are so fleetingly a part of, that goes far deeper for me than anything religious faith can offer'.

Well, yes.  But hatred, malice, fear and xenophobia are also evidently human traits that also define our humanity (as in fact the best religion recognizes). So we come back to the core issue, why pick certain traits and not others?  It is not a given. It is only 'obvious' if you are approaching from a certain perspective: a perspective that has been shaped much more by centuries of culture than any scientific discoveries.


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After Life

19/7/2013

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I don't expect there to be an after-life. I try to take an Epicurean position on death.  I am not motivated by either the fear of eternal punishment or the prospect of an endless heavenly banquet, as some atheists seem invariably to associate with the religious impulse.

Indeed, like them, I do not regard these as desirable reasons for professing faith.


However, in dismissing belief in an after-life as entirely the result of such self-interested calculation, the atheists miss two important facets of such a belief.

Firstly, the desire to be reunited with loved ones.  If God is love, love is eternal, therefore death cannot end it.

Secondly, the desire to see justice done. To see those who have led a miserable life given the opportunity for joy, those who have led an unobtrusively selfless life to be recognised, and those who have hurt, manipulated and damaged others to reap what they have sown.

Indeed, I feel it is a weakness in my faith that I cannot see a way to admit even these understandings of an after-life into my theology.



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About time!

19/7/2013

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The website christianity.org.uk offers a refreshingly honest take on the claim that Jesus is God. It admits that Jesus never claimed to be God but offers the suggestion that by 'intriguing' his Jewish followers he caused them to conclude he must be.  It implies, though it has a careful line in anti-semitism to tread - that many Jews, similarly intrigued, didn't reach this conclusion.

About time!  After centuries of pointless oppression, specious argument and downright lies from representatives of the mainstream Church we get the admission that the status of Jesus is not obvious. It's a conclusion that the Church arrived at some time after Jesus's death.


It accepts that there are other ways to understand Jesus and the divine sonship hypothesis is the 'one that [some] Christians came to accept as the belief that made best sense of what had happened during the thirty remarkable years of Jesus’ life'.


It also, remarkably, accepts the wide variety and contradictory understandings of the meaning of the Crucifixion.  In the spirit of Free Christianity, it confesses that different people understand Jesus very differently. 


We haven't yet quite got there.  The website still claims that the New Testament clearly backs up the claim of divine status, whereas only the later epistles offer much support and then only if you have already accepted a trinitarian solution to Jesus.  Nor, more importantly, does it address the obvious issue that there are abundant evidences in the Gospels that Jesus was not God and, like the non-believing Jews to which christianity.org.uk refers, would have regarded such a claim as repugnant.


Still, it's a step forward. Free Christianity advances.




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Are we Brethren?

17/7/2013

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If I lived in the US there's a good chance that I'd attend a Church of the Brethren (www.brethren.org). This Church, one of a bewildering variety that came out of the Anabaptist, Mennonite tradition, shares an aversion to creeds with Free Christianity. Its emphasis on simplicity and peace, open and welcoming liturgies, and real manifestations of the priesthood of all believers also seem very much at one with the vision that is being promoted here.

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Going Forward

17/7/2013

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'Those who believe that they infallibly listen to a divine command, have nothing else to do but obey it. Those who are the mere creatures of instinct press on without misgiving. And those who suppose they follow their manifest destiny, go forward come what may!  But as for us, while we know that we must go our way, we have to learn which way is right and safe.  If we pursue the course we trod in former years, whither will it lead us? Where has it led us?  What reason have we to believe that it is the way of wisdom and the path of duty?'

From Go Forward, by Russell Lant Carpenter

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    What's here

    A quick look at the 'blogosphere' shows that the nature of the medium means it is all too easy for a 'blog' to convey the impression that its compiler is, at best, self-indulgent and verbose, and at worst, a narcissistic bore.  Religious blogs are by no means immune from this.

    However, while I shall try to avoid sharing my each and every passing thought with you, there is a use for a space for shorter, more ephemeral pieces of writing, and on this website, that's here.   These pieces are likely to be frequently revised, sometimes rewritten and occasionally removed.

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