Wrestling with Religion

  Jacob wrestles at a place he names Penuel, "Face of God" When I began posting this weekly blog, I imagined that three years would be limit, that I'd run out of material by then. I wrote a year of essays before putting anything online to shield early posts from comments. As it turns out, comments have been few and kind, so this was no problem. This post is my 155th, one short of a three-year run, the penultimate if I stop at three years. In any case, it's time to try to sum up questions I've wrestled with over the years. There can't be a much bigger question in the Abrahamic traditions than God. I am a confirmed atheist with regard to many retrograde God-concepts. I'd sooner be a polytheist than a theist in the tradition of the brutal war-god of Abraham and Moses. Before the Babylonian Exile, most Hebrews weren't monotheists, but monolatrists , acknowledging many gods but honoring only their own. It was a dogfight between their Yahweh and Baal, and Y...

Believing a thing doesn't make it true. We have to act on beliefs, but what a sweet world it would be if we all recognized (one of the few sure things) that our private, subjective belief-acts don't impose limits on the objective universe. Simple precepts: Don't believe what you think. Don't "know" what you believe. You are one drop: respect the ocean. A few weeks ago, this old Facebook post of mine came up on the annual rotation, and I reposted it on two religious opinion sites. I got a surprising number of responses and answered some of them. It turned out to be futile. Most responders weren't interested in exchanging ideas, but on attacking, even at the expense of misunderstanding. My comment particularly freaked out an apocalyptic Texan with an evangelical podcast but only one Facebook friend.  After a few exchanges, he called me "easily one of the most confused men I have ever met" (for which distinction I thanked him) and described my po...

  A  conversation last night reminded me of the hook Albert King's blues song, "Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die." A Pew Research poll last year found that 73 percent of Americans say they believe in heaven.* Of course, concepts of heaven vary, but the consensus is that it's a condition after death more desirable than mortal life. Passing moments in life may be described as "heavenly," but the gist is that mortal life in general is inferior.  This leads to the paradox that heaven-believers can be held at gunpoint. Logic tells us that, if a thug pointed a large-calibre pistol at a heaven-believer and said, "I'm going to kill you now," the heaven-believer should reply, "Oh, thank you!" If I were standing in line for a concert I wanted to attend, waiting to buy a ticket, and a somebody offered me immediate entrance, I would be pleased. If a Christian really wants to join God in heaven and has done her best to live...

  Steve Marier, on a Facebook site called "No Rules Religious Debate" (July 4, 2022), asks a question. Could any evidence convince skeptics that the Bible is true? Marier, a self-declared atheist, disputes the claim that atheists are closed to evidence. They just haven't seen the right kind. Marier uses "true" in an obvious sense that, indeed, many believers do. The Bible is "true" if passages from it can be used to establish empirical fact. This assumes that the book validates actionable facts--such as the creation of the world or the state of humans after death--in the absence of other observed evidence. An all-knowing God reveals things that its human writers couldn't personally know. Thus, the Bible is authoritative, and beliefs based on it are "true." Marier insists that the Bible might say many things that would convince him of its "truth." All kinds of statements that might prove its miraculous origins are absent. This n...

Huck Finn I read about "faith-based" organizations and wonder what that means. In practice, "faith" covers a wild array of beliefs and practices that have little in common except lack of evidence. Huck Finn said that "faith is believing in something you know ain't true." Of course, this exaggerates. You don't necessarily know  your faith isn't true. But the common denominator is that faith positions can't be publicly demonstrated. By faith, you believe what you don't know. Otherwise, it would be knowledge, not faith. We're hard-wired to care about things we can't prove, existential questions. What's it all about? What's the purpose of life? Is there anything after death? If we confine ourselves to empirical data, we get Robot B-9's   "It does not compute." In an episode of Patrick McGoohan's The Prisoner , Number Six explodes a computer by asking it "Why?" Science is unsatisfactory, suggestin...

  Harrison Road near my house--an old two-lane highway that's now a suburban traffic artery--has a posted speed limit of 40mph, but if you drive that speed, a line of cars collects behind you. Logically, speed limit ought to mean the fastest you drive, but, in effect, it means the slowest. Hardly anybody drives below 40mph on Harrison, and they're a hazard. The norm is between 45 and 50. In American culture, everywhere but in speed traps, "40" on a speed limit sign means "45 or a little faster." A Criminal Justice instructor told me that he taught this. "We don't want people staring at their speedometers." Rules of behavior seldom mean literally what they say. Speed Limit 40 doesn't mean, Drive slower than 40mph , but the logical opposite: Drive somewhat faster . A cop never tickets for 45mph, and may let 55mph off with a warning, but surely tickets 70mph. The wording is rigid, but enforcement flexes at the discretion of officers within ...

  E dward T. Hall In his 1976 book Beyond Culture, anthropologist Edward T. Hall introduces extension transference , a term that is both profound and simple. It is a doorway into the paradox of a fish asking another fish, "What is this thing they call the sea?" Extensions are things--tools, ideas, words, and customs--invented to improve survival or comfort. Once fully adopted, they tend to become invisible, "natural." Their rules function as a collective unconsciousness as we assume and obey them but barely notice them and can only haltingly describe them. The general word for the entire body of naturalized and accepted extensions of a group of people is culture.  Within the last few million years, Hall points out, the human genome has changed very little, but cultural evolution--the evolution of our extensions--has made us vastly different from remote ancestors who had only "a few crude tools and the rudiments of language" (p. 40). The extensions of our ...