Religion and reason

[pat]

This my reply to this thread in this post by joedecker. I told him I would move the discussion over to my journal. I am posting it mainly because I didn't want to lose my thoughts on this subject.



Scripture teaches us to kill gays, to kill people who mix certain fibers in their clothes. Tradition concurs with the former, but not the latter. I choose reason instead, not as one of three pillars, but as the pillar.

And reason tells us that the reasons for the existence of the Levitical code have a lot to do with living in the 2nd century B.C.E. Judean desert, and most are irrelevant or harmful to life in the 21st century, and where that is the case we do not follow them. (We also look to Christ's actions and words instructing us to love our neighbors -- which means everbody.) Reason tells us that our tradition restricting the priesthood to men is harmful to people of faith of both sexes, so we have women priests. And that the tradition restricting the priesthood to heterosexuals deprives all of the church community of the gifts of those who would otherwise be great pastors and leaders, and so we have gay and lesbian priests. (I am speaking here of the Episcopalian diocese of which I am a member.)

But Scripture also tells us to care for our fellow human beings: which is why my church has people who are heavily involved in things such as Habitat for Humanity, and our diocese has a social services organization in San Jose, and why Catholic charities in the U.S. have provided a lot of help for a lot of people -- not just Catholics. Which is *not* to say that good things are not accomplished by people with no religious orientation at all, by agnostics and atheists. It's just that, for many people, altruism is not a "reasonable" position in and of itself. Left to my own devices, without some sort of moral guidelines, I'm not sure I wouldn't be a much different person, a much less caring person, in terms of how I view the world. Which may indicate a character flaw in me, I'm quite ready to concede.

A blind reliance on "reason" is as much a faith position as a blind reliance on "religion." Most of the issues that people come to blows over in this society really revolve around "reason." An argument over when life begins is not, even though anti-abortion people toss around God's name a lot, essentially a religious argument: the Bible does not tell us when a fetus is old enough to be considered a human being. It comes from people using their reason to come to different understandings of what "life" (or the potential for life) means. It *becomes* a religious argument when people buttress their positions by calling on a higher authority.

Reason will never be, can never be, objective, being limited as it is by our personal experiences. Neither is spirituality objective -- but at least most people recognize that.

You're right, that organized religion has done a lot of evil in the world. My hunch, and maybe I'm just fatalistic about this, is that a lot of that evil would have been done regardless: people who are intent on power and subjugating others will find some other organizing principle. And they will have followers who aren't bright enough not to follow.

Yes, organized religion has given us Crusades, witch-burnings, terrorists (not just Islamic ones, either) and the mess in Israel and a president who misguidedly believes he's on a mission from God.

But organized religion has also given us the Quakers, Mother Teresa's work in the slums of Calcutta, Martin Luther King and Martin Neimoller and Deitrich Bonhoffer. Many of the early abolitionists were religiously-minded folk -- a number of them preachers. And while the white churches in the South in the first half of the 20th century were, for the most part, bastions of racism, the black churches nourished the civil rights movement and gave hope to their members. On a daily basis, religious organizations give many people around the world hope and comfort.

So the answer is not to do away with organized religion -- people will just organize around something else anyway -- but for religions to recognize and cherish those who call them to account for their actions and to be willing to admit wrongdoing, ask forgiveness, and change. Which may not happen anytime soon, I recognize.

Comments

[kiya]

The way I tend to look at this:

Science, reason, these things are ways of evaluating the part of the universe that is judged by matters of fact.

Fact is not all that there is in my universe; there is beauty, there is pain, there is all of this. Religion is, as I see it, a way of evaluating things other than fact, things like beauty.

I wouldn't want to live without either.

I see a lot of people who seem to have as a matter of faith that religion does more harm than it helps; the problem I see with that is that it does not consider scale. Without my religion, I would be a crippled wreck, less equipped to deal with the world, less functional for myself or my family. I know I am not alone in this.

I not only don't think that it's appropriate to weigh however many people like me find their lives balanced and enhanced by their faith against the Inquisition, terrorists, and all of that, I don't think it's possible.

But only considering one scale strikes me as being fallacious.

[patgreene.livejournal.com]

You're right, I think, that it may not be possible to balance how many people are nurtured by their religion against the evil things done by some organized religions. For one thing, the evil tends to be more easily seen that the good.