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sarkaNote: Edited to delete a few points, which, on reflection, probably need an entry of their own.
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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: 2009-02-13 10:14 pm (UTC)