![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sarkaNote: Edited to delete a few points, which, on reflection, probably need an entry of their own.
So![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
jazzqueen wrote a post. And as her philosophical posts are wont to do, it got me thinking.
Are people seriously generally of the mindset that religion is okay, as long as people, you know, shut up about it? Honestly?
Personally, I'm religious. I am a deeply and fundamentally religious person and my faith makes up a huge part of who I am. I don't talk about it much, because I've never felt the need to share my beliefs with others – I've always felt that organized religion was like being marched in formation to look at a sunset: unlikely to change anything about your appreciation of things and rather detrimental to your sympathy for other people's points of view.
My faith has very little to do with the Bible. I've read great chunks of it (not all of it, but a lot) and some of it has merit and other things don't – to my worldview at least. I believe in Jesus. Well, for me it's not a belief, per se, as his existence is a historically proven fact. Do I believe he ascended up to heaven after rising from death? I'm not entirely sure, but I'm not willing to rule out the possibility.
No, my faith differs from the basic Christian worldview in several key areas. One of the cornerstones of my approach to the world is my faith in science – but I could not hold that faith unless I was willing to take a few things as given without questioning them too much. How do we know that the ground rules we have laid down to approximate the workings of the world will still be valid tomorrow? Honestly: we don't. We simply do not hold an understanding of the world yet that allows us to prove that the world will always work the way it works today. So we take things on faith; that the scientific principle can teach us real things about the world in which we live, that knowledge is an end in itself and that the more things we understand, the better we will be able to orient ourselves in the universe.
But science can't teach us everything. There is no way to fundamentally prove the difference between right and wrong, and science, while it has its own moral code, can't help us in making moral decisions.
This is where religion comes in. Be it Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Judaism, Confucianism, Sikhism, Jainism, Sufism, Taoism, Gnosticism, Paganism, Atheism or philosophy, religion is simply a counterpart to science as a method to approach and understand the world. Some people give greater import to science, other people subjugate science to a value-based ideology.
There's nothing wrong with either approach. The fundamental problem is our inability to respect the choices other people make about which approach is more appropriate for them.
And it's certainly easier to subscribe to a belief system wholesale than to attempt to make up your own; I know this personally because there are a few issues where I keep running headfirst into a wall of my own beliefs and morals, and honestly, it would be a lot more simple to go with the flow – to be an atheist and maintain that science and rationality is the only way to go or to be a religious person and abhor the choices that science sometimes forces us to make. I can't blame people for that.
But every single one of us must sometimes come up against something that doesn't feel right; an area our basic codes of operation don't extend to, a place where we have to make a decision based on what we believe is right. Some things we just know.
And anything that helps us to figure out the difference between right and wrong can't be inherently bad, just the same way it can't always be inherently right. Eschewing other people's codes of morality as stupid or wrong, or okay as long as they don't talk about them in public, or to you, or make them an aspect of the public sphere... it goes against the very grain of what most people otherwise profess to believe in: choice, rationality and freedom.
So
jazzqueen wrote a post. And as her philosophical posts are wont to do, it got me thinking.Are people seriously generally of the mindset that religion is okay, as long as people, you know, shut up about it? Honestly?
Personally, I'm religious. I am a deeply and fundamentally religious person and my faith makes up a huge part of who I am. I don't talk about it much, because I've never felt the need to share my beliefs with others – I've always felt that organized religion was like being marched in formation to look at a sunset: unlikely to change anything about your appreciation of things and rather detrimental to your sympathy for other people's points of view.
My faith has very little to do with the Bible. I've read great chunks of it (not all of it, but a lot) and some of it has merit and other things don't – to my worldview at least. I believe in Jesus. Well, for me it's not a belief, per se, as his existence is a historically proven fact. Do I believe he ascended up to heaven after rising from death? I'm not entirely sure, but I'm not willing to rule out the possibility.
No, my faith differs from the basic Christian worldview in several key areas. One of the cornerstones of my approach to the world is my faith in science – but I could not hold that faith unless I was willing to take a few things as given without questioning them too much. How do we know that the ground rules we have laid down to approximate the workings of the world will still be valid tomorrow? Honestly: we don't. We simply do not hold an understanding of the world yet that allows us to prove that the world will always work the way it works today. So we take things on faith; that the scientific principle can teach us real things about the world in which we live, that knowledge is an end in itself and that the more things we understand, the better we will be able to orient ourselves in the universe.
But science can't teach us everything. There is no way to fundamentally prove the difference between right and wrong, and science, while it has its own moral code, can't help us in making moral decisions.
This is where religion comes in. Be it Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Judaism, Confucianism, Sikhism, Jainism, Sufism, Taoism, Gnosticism, Paganism, Atheism or philosophy, religion is simply a counterpart to science as a method to approach and understand the world. Some people give greater import to science, other people subjugate science to a value-based ideology.
There's nothing wrong with either approach. The fundamental problem is our inability to respect the choices other people make about which approach is more appropriate for them.
And it's certainly easier to subscribe to a belief system wholesale than to attempt to make up your own; I know this personally because there are a few issues where I keep running headfirst into a wall of my own beliefs and morals, and honestly, it would be a lot more simple to go with the flow – to be an atheist and maintain that science and rationality is the only way to go or to be a religious person and abhor the choices that science sometimes forces us to make. I can't blame people for that.
But every single one of us must sometimes come up against something that doesn't feel right; an area our basic codes of operation don't extend to, a place where we have to make a decision based on what we believe is right. Some things we just know.
And anything that helps us to figure out the difference between right and wrong can't be inherently bad, just the same way it can't always be inherently right. Eschewing other people's codes of morality as stupid or wrong, or okay as long as they don't talk about them in public, or to you, or make them an aspect of the public sphere... it goes against the very grain of what most people otherwise profess to believe in: choice, rationality and freedom.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-12 12:57 am (UTC)This is hard to explain, but reading Desmond Morris has helped me realize that so many things that we consider to be uniquely human could in fact be direct by-products of our animal nature. People solve moral dilemmas pretty much the same way despite their upbringing, education, religious beliefs or gender. It's part of our nature, and there's usually a pretty straight forward reason for why. If one can be bothered to look.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that I feel like I already know of a pretty good, rational theory on what it is that helps us figure out the difference between right and wrong. I don't feel the need to look to religion or spirituality to solve the problem.
But I like this perspective. I hadn't thought of it this way.
(And I came off really arrogant. Sorry... :/)
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-12 05:05 am (UTC)Biological imperative is important, I do agree, though I don't tend to assign it quite as much importance as Mr. Morris. Yes, it is true that people solve moral dilemmas in similar ways despite all their circumstances, but for me, the very notion of the concept "moral dilemma" is one of the basic differences between sentience and non-sentience. Only humans are concerned with morals. The question is therefore: What is a moral dilemma, and what is not?
And I do understand the belief system of rationality - I used to subscribe to it. Then I spent two years studying philosophy and became a very fundamentally skeptic person, which, amusingly enough, has not at all conflicted with my spirituality. (I'll explain how if you're curious, but I don't want to preach.)
What mostly annoys the heck out of me in these debates is the notion that rationality isn't a belief system, which is what most rationalists will tell you, and I find intrinsically contradictory to most of rationalist theory.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-12 11:29 am (UTC)I don't think rationality is a belief system, but I can see how it could be for a lot of people. I define belief as something that is somewhat unchanging. If you believe something to be true, to be fact, you're not likely to change that belief when faced with any indication that it might be untrue. You're going to hold on to your notion. At least, that's what I see religious people do. (Even if the Catholic church has been kind enough to admit that the earth does in fact go around the sun.)
To me, being rational is all about being allowed to change your mind if the evidence changes.
And don't worry, you don't come off preachy. I would love to hear how your skeptic isn't conflicted with your spiritualist. I find this all so interesting. I love seeing other people's point of view. I'm pretty sure if people didn't argue with me I'd just become unbearably set in my views on the matter.