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

[purplecthulhu.livejournal.com]

Note - I am not a USian, so some of the political issues don't work for me, but some of the ones I bring up here won't work for you either.

There is a step you're missing in the parody you're drawing here. Neither belief in a party's rectitude, or a religion's correctness, can save it from the reality of an electoral defeat, a popular uprising, or the universe working in a way that's different from what the religion claims.

Political parties, at least in my experience, have to cope with their doctrines proving unworkable - the failure of Labour's lurch to the left in the early 80s and the fall of the Conservatives in the 90s are both examples of this. Labour recovered from the early 80s, with new, centerist policies. We're not so sure what'll happen to the Conservatives.

It should also be noted that the tight relationship between religion and politics in the US make these sorts of changes more difficult there, and make your reworking of my comments more valid in a rather ironic way.

As to religion, it could be argued that some branches of christanity are manging to adapt - Pat's church's attitude to women and gays might be an example of this. But many more are suffering from an inability to deal with the way the world really works when it comes to evolution, cosmology, AIDS or the limited resources of the planet. And the damage wrought by the latter two will not be confined to those who happen to follow the handicapped religion.

This is one reason why religion unrestrained by the real world is dangerous.

[kiya]

Anything is dangerous without checking reality.

Religion isn't a special case; this is a human thing. There are humans who will glom onto whoever is most persuasive in their direction and humans who won't. They do this in religion, they do this in politics, they do this in the grocery store when trying to decide what breakfast food to buy. This is the principle upon which advertising is wrought, upon which schools of rhetoric are founded.

There are some people who do this. There will always be some people who do this. And there will always be some people who don't. Trying to suggest religion as a special or more egregious case of people who do this strikes me as being . . . well, out of contact with the real world. There are doctrinaire nitwits and people who will follow them blindly anywhere a human has an opinion and expresses it. And there are people everywhere who will say "this group doesn't have what I'm looking for" and change affiliations -- by voting, by converting, by whatever.

[purplecthulhu.livejournal.com]

But a key central aspect of many religions (and I think pretty much all until recent times) has been that questioning them isn't right. Luther started the 100 years war by asking a few questions and suggesting that things could be done better.

Yes, there are a lot of followers out there for all sorts of things. But corn flakes are a lot less dangerous thnan something that says you go to heaven if you kill the infidels. By removing the possibility for that sort of argument you'd make the world a safer and, to my mind, better place.

[patgreene.livejournal.com]

But again, there is a lot of good done by religion. Some of it is obvious, but most of it is not. Many religions stress the need for people to be good to others, and there are people who follow those precepts without thinking about it, too. In the replies to the post that spawned this post, someone observed that Islam gave comfort to people living under conditions that would cause mass riots if they took place in the U.S. They made the observation that, for every suicide bomber, there were thousands who were comforted by their faith. I think the phrase they used was "Islam has stayed more hands than it has caused to be raised in violence."

You will never "remove the possibility" for that sort of argument. You will always have people who want to "kill the infidels" -- without religion, they will not call them infidels, but traitors, or barbarians, or less-than-human. And maybe they won't promise heaven, but they'll promise glory and honor and "security" and racial purity.