Mark 9:24

[amanda]

I was wondering if I could get your thoughts regarding a verse that I came across recently. One that I hadn't previously paid much attention to.

I'm particularly interested in the father's exclamation:
Mark 9:24 - Immediately the father of the child cried out, "I believe; help my unbelief!"

What do you think the man meant when he said I believe; help my unbelief!..?

Here is the context:
4 When they came to the disciples, they saw a great crowd around them, and some scribes arguing with them. 15 When the whole crowd saw him, they were immediately overcome with awe, and they ran forward to greet him. 16 He asked them, "What are you arguing about with them?" 17 Someone from the crowd answered him, "Teacher, I brought you my son; he has a spirit that makes him unable to speak; 18 and whenever it seizes him, it dashes him down; and he foams and grinds his teeth and becomes rigid; and I asked your disciples to cast it out, but they could not do so." 19 He answered them, "You faithless generation, how much longer must I be among you? How much longer must I put up with you? Bring him to me." 20 And they brought the boy F74 to him. When the spirit saw him, immediately it convulsed the boy, F75 and he fell on the ground and rolled about, foaming at the mouth. 21 Jesus F76 asked the father, "How long has this been happening to him?" And he said, "From childhood. 22 It has often cast him into the fire and into the water, to destroy him; but if you are able to do anything, have pity on us and help us." 23 Jesus said to him, "If you are able!—All things can be done for the one who believes." 24 Immediately the father of the child cried out, "I believe; help my unbelief!" 25 When Jesus saw that a crowd came running together, he rebuked the unclean spirit, saying to it, "You spirit that keeps this boy from speaking and hearing, I command you, come out of him, and never enter him again!" 26 After crying out and convulsing him terribly, it came out, and the boy was like a corpse, so that most of them said, "He is dead." 27 But Jesus took him by the hand and lifted him up, and he was able to stand. 28 When he had entered the house, his disciples asked him privately, "Why could we not cast it out?" 29 He said to them, "This kind can come out only through prayer."

[chris]

Help my unbelief by healing my son, you hippie. A very weak brand of faith, and I'm surprised Jesus would answer it with a healing. Whatever happened to "blessed is he who does not see, yet believes"?

But I do find verse 19 to be quite funny. "How much longer to I have to put up with you shitheads? *sigh* Bring the brat here... be quick about it."

www.ichthys.com/mail-lack%20of%20faith.htm

[chris]

I just found this... this is kind of fun:

www.skepticsannotatedbible.com/index.htm

[Jeff]

Amanda,

I’ve always liked that verse. I don’t know precisely what it means, but I have definite ideas about what it cannot mean. Suppose that there is some propositional content, x. It could be anything, for example, the sky is blue. It doesn’t make much sense to say I believe x, help my unbelief about x. Inasmuch as the propositional content is known or believed, it cannot be unknown or disbelieved. This is the source of the tension in the passage, and I presume it’s what prompted your question. My interpretation of the passage claims that there is an equivocation going on here involving two senses of what it means to believe.

I read the webpage that Chris sent. It parses the passage this way: “I WANT to believe that you can do x, but I need help believing it.” The odd thing about that interpretation is that it is not literal. In fact, you only get it by denying any more literal interpretation. Thus the introduction of the figure of speech. But that’s quite ironic considering that the conflation of reason and faith is the very basis of the literalist view. They are always telling us that what Christ wants most is for us to believe that some specific propositional content is true, that by composing your mind appropriately toward these salvific semantics you will, thereby, be granted the great boon of a mansion of gold and infinite time in which to ponder your great good sense on earth. But this lunacy must be read into the NT at every turn…for example here! The basis for literalism is not a literal reading of the Bible itself.

Now, I don’t know clearly how to read this passage either. My commentaries remark that parts of this passage are found only in Mark, and that it seems to collapse two different, though similar, accounts of an exorcism. Frankly, I think the writer of Mark preserved the passage because of the intriguing remark you noted.

I think that the man is trying to say something like this, “I believe IN you, but I don’t know if I believe THAT my son will be healed. In order to believe THAT, I would have to forget my own experience of trying to heal my son myself and of the inability of your own followers to do the job. In other words, I am a spiritual follower; you’ve got me. But I have some pesky knowledge that keeps me skeptical about the extent of what is possible.”

This reading explains why Jesus could heal the boy at that point, yet could not heal in his hometown (Matt.13:58; Mk.6:4-6). It was a different kind of faithlessness there; they lacked the devotion. The father’s devotion here is apparently real. But he is wrongly disposed toward what he thinks he knows. And according to the Superpower Manual, Jesus couldn’t work the magic if the man didn’t have real faith.

That’s how I read it. And even if you think I’m wrong, it’s at least interesting that the usual contrast of faith and knowledge is so easily ignored by many fundamentalist readings.

Jeff

[Tyler]

How does this scripture alter how you behave morally in everyday life?

[Jeff]

Tyler,

Maybe I misunderstand the purpose of your question. What is it that you are getting at?*

Jeff

* My too long and perhaps irrelevant footnote:

Religion is only tangentially related to morality. I have tried to make this point before. Here is a metaphor: No one starts building a house in order to build a gable. In fact, it would even be possible to build a house without gables. But it is true that a lot of houses have them. They have them because people like the way they look and they serve a useful function.

That’s pretty much how it is between religion and morality. One could imagine a religion that avers morality. Buddhism comes very close to this sometimes. One could imagine morality that had no religious component: Deontological ethics, Consequentialsm, Virtue Ethics, etc…

So, what makes the connection between religion and ethics seem so natural? Smart people disagree about this. I will give you my own—not so smart—perspective. Religion is primarily about the quality of one’s experience. Not everyone agrees with this; there are rival purposes, e.g., religion is primarily about responding to God’s wishes in the right way. Such alternatives emphasize rules and obedience, but this is only one conception of religion, the silliest one, I’d argue. But notice, that if you go that way, morality is “heteronomous,” i.e., its rules are followed ultimately for the sake of some other purpose. Thus, morality is devalued on this conception (as well as religion), since it is not conceived as a positive force that encourages action but only as a kind of restraint.

I would get rid of both of these too narrow conceptions of religion and morality. There are Christians who conceive of both in these ways, but they are also the kind of folks who can’t see how Jesus and evolution can get along. They are the folks that Justin, Amanda, and I try to debate.

[Tyler]

So the purpose of religion isn't to alter behaviour?

[jtmx1]

In my view this is definitely NOT the direct purpose of religion, though religion does affect behavior.

[chris]

No, Tyler, the purpose is to ALTAR behavior.

Hoo-hoo! I'm here all week, folks!

[Tyler]

So, I guess you are saying, that the intent of religion is to alter and inform how you view the world?

[Jeff]

Tyler,

Below are 20 possible purposes of religion. Some are incompatible with others, and some are of a piece. Some view religion optimistically, others not so much. &c…

My purpose is just to underscore the complexity of the question you ask.

1. Truth, religion reveals special aspects of the world, e.g., the presence or nature of God
2. Communion, religion is the means of bringing man together with God
3. Self-realization, religion as a source of personal wisdom
4. Companionship, religion as touchstone for similarly minded people
5. Power, religion as a tool to enslave and dominate
6. Morality, religion as ethical code
7. Unity, religion as social glue
8. Proto-Science, religion explains the world
9. Emotional Succor (Anesthetic), religion as comfort (opium of the masses)
10. History, religion as communal narrative and myth
11. Civilization, religion preserves the essence of civilization
12. Divine Satisfaction, religion as the only means to please God
13. Litmus Test, religion as the means of dividing humans into categories
14. Protecting the Passions, religion gives an air of respectability to rank prejudice
15. Anti-religion, religion keeps the individual religious impulse in check
16. Growth, religion is the means of learning to like the world
17. Liberation, religion is the means to free us from bondage of all sorts
18. Integration, religion provides the ultimate context for all elements of individual (and collective) experience
19. TMoL (The Meaning of Life), religion gives it or is it
20. Faith, religion brings the experience of faith into the world

Of course, one could go on…

So, which one is the true purpose or group of purposes? If there was a real question or disagreement about this—and there most definitely is—how could it be settled?

Jeff

[Tyler]

What do you think?

[Jeff]

Alright Tyler, you win. Get ready for an essay. I'll try to finish it up by tomorrow.

[Jeff]

[What follows is relatively unproofed. Read it if you like. The short answer is Communion and Truth.]


I am not sure how far we can get with your question about the ultimate purpose of religion. Like any other important thing, religion serves many purposes. And which of its purposes seem important depends largely on your perspective at the moment. If you live 1000 miles from your best friends, like I do, you might start going to church again to find people who think like you, as I have recently done. If uncle Jim just died, then you might turn to religion for comfort. Religion can provide both.

But as we start to add purposes to the list, there emerges the demand for priority. You can think of this in the David Redcorn way, I suppose: “If you had to destroy either the social or the anesthetic properties of religion, which one would it be?” But really, the question is one of balance. For we are far more likely to ask whether the comfort that religion can offer must proceed through social avenues.

Additionally, there are purposes that are sometimes ascribed to religion that contradict one another. For example, the idea that religion is used to dominate others is at odds with its function as ethical code. One or the other must be abandoned.

So, what I think can be done by way of an answer is to 1) separate those purposes that are contradictory from those that are not, then 2) select the most important purposes, and 3) perhaps argue for some priorities among them. That is what I will try to do for you.

My list of purposes that I’ve already posted isn’t complete, but it does capture the most popular suggestions for the purpose of religion. I will refer to it frequently in what follows. After this initial survey is done, it would be nice to give a general description of the sort of religion that would best serve these purposes. If I have time, I might write something up later on about that.

I. The general list

The most important point for any general list of purposes, whether we are talking about religion or not, is that they must be compatible with one another. By compatible I mean that they must be logically consistent, of course. But beyond that they must also be coherent. This is a weaker condition that cannot be tested purely logically. Rather coherence is the measure of how much the individual purposes suggest one another. A set of purposes might be logically consistent but in fact unrelatable in any religion that could be practiced. For example, I think it is fair to say that religion used as a tool for Power (#5) is consistent with religion used for Unity (#7). But it is tough to think of a way that these purposes cohere very well. What kind of a society would be imagined by a religion that incorporated both ideals? Perhaps a tyranny. But is a religion that advocates such a society worthwhile? Or better, is it one that we could ever wish to be a part of? Probably not.

IA. The inconsistencies

I am just going to state these straightforwardly. If you disagree with any of them, we can debate them later. By calling these inconsistent, I am suggesting that for each pair there is a valid deductive argument from one to the negation of the other.

#1 and #9 are inconsistent
#1 and #14 are inconsistent
#3 and #12 are inconsistent
#3 and #14 are inconsistent
#5 and #17 are inconsistent
#6 and #5 are inconsistent
#6 and #13 are inconsistent
#6 and #14 are inconsistent

Now, I may have listed as inconsistent some purposes that really aren’t, but I think that it’s more likely that I’ve missed some inconsistencies. So, we have some choices to make. Purposes 1, 3, 5, 6, and 14 have multiple inconsistencies. So, if our goal is to preserve as many purposes as possible, then we should simply set aside those purposes with the most inconsistencies. But we are also constrained by coherence, and we must produce a list of purposes that give us a religion that is imaginable as both rationally and emotionally fulfilling. Given that, we realize that morality (#6) cannot be abandoned. It emerges as a key feature in every religion that has ever existed. This means that 5 (Power), 13 (Litmus Test) and 14 (Protecting the Passions) must be dropped. Dropping 5 removes the only trouble 17 (Liberation) had, so it can stay. But we still have two real choices to make: Between 1 and 9 and 3 and 12.

IB1. Truth vs Anesthetic

This is the old question: Which would you rather have the Terrible Truth or the Beautiful Lie? And I think it is clear that world religion predominately sides with the former. I know that you, Tyler, conceive of religion as a pretty (for some) lie, but that is not how religion conceives of itself. Let me take but a few examples from various religious traditions.

From the beginning oracles were sought that were reliable rather than comforting. Think of the Oracle at Delphi, which told Chaerephon that Socrates was the wisest man in Greece. This news, if we can believe the testimony of the latter through Plato, was profoundly unsettling for Socrates. He had to sift it and test it. So the core of it was its relationship to truth, to the way things really are. If its core had been anesthetic, then we should have expected Chaerephon’s and Socrates’ feelings to be pacified. But this is not what happened. And that is the usual pattern.

In the Judeo-Christian tradition, when God called a prophet, these prophets were usually scared because they were frequently killed. Isaiah was put inside a hollow log and sawed in two. Job suffered greatly as did Jonah. Nathan had to denounce his king. At issue everywhere in these stories is truth. You are free to object that religions get truth wrong. But you are not free to say that they have no concern with it. That is the biggest source of drama in the Bible. Or in any other religious writing for that matter. In the Gita, Arjuna doesn’t want Krishna to merely comfort him so that he can loose his arrows upon his kinfolk. Rather, he wants to know what is objectively good. And Krishna’s revelation of himself as Death, The Destroyer of Worlds, terrifies Arjuna. It is the truth of the revelation that allows him to act and not any comforting element. The general point here could be made in a thousand ways. For example, one of the core ideas in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave is that spiritual growth is painful. Seeing the light will hurt your eyes, especially if you’ve been in the dark for a long time. The way we explain this pain to ourselves is by realizing that it has led us closer to reality. Spiritually, things never work the other way, i.e., we never justify giving up the quest for truth because it is comforting to do so. I defy you to point out even a single story from the world’s religious texts in which this was ever praised. I’ve never read one. Many stories will speak of giving up knowing truth, but not because it gives comfort to do so, rather the standard reason is that there is a higher truth which we cannot know. For now we see as if through a glass darkly…but (and here is the key) then we shall see face to face.

IB2. Self-Realization vs Divine Satisfaction

We must be a little more careful with this one. Clearly there are conceptions of these purposes that are compatible. For example, God’s highest satisfaction is often taken to be that in which all creatures realize their true natures fully. But that is not the idea that I had in mind when I was formulating the purpose of Divine Satisfaction. Rather, I had in mind those religious views which conceive of God as demanding sacrifice, obedience, and personal debasement. Not all religions do this, of course. But when they do, they are not worthwhile. Again, this is because religious texts the world over stress the personal value of religion. Even when God/Ultimate Reality is perceived transpersonally, there is real personal value in knowing it. The Buddha is a nice example of this. So, however we conceive of Divine Satisfaction, it has a limit in Self-Realization. Our own self-nature is the limiting factor of religious knowledge and practice. God’s nature could never be the defining limit since that nature cannot, in principle, be fully known…or worse, can never be known at all but only hoped for. Insofar as we conceive Divine Satisfaction it will always be at least partially in human terms, i.e., in terms of desires, beliefs, actions, plans, etc… So, again, our own self-realization in the form of our conception of the perfectibility of human capacities is the limit.

IC. The most general list

The list of all the purposes available to potential religions must, then, omit the following:

5 Power
9 Emotional Succor
12 Divine Satisfaction
13 Litmus Test
14 Protecting the Passions

This is not to say that religion couldn’t be corrupted into serving one of these functions. But it is not the original intent of any religion to serve them.


II. The most important purposes

Beyond, consistency and coherence, there are empirical tests that we might employ to select among the purposes. These empirical tests are fundamental to any sense of importance. I’ve indicated elsewhere on the board that a sense of importance is fundamental in all evaluation. It is my contention, though I cannot argue for it here, that importance is essentially an aesthetic property. It is a kind of graded balance among competing qualities. Thus, I find aesthetic evaluations to be the basic kind of empirical reasoning. The two basic categories that reveal importance are adequacy and applicability. Adequacy is a measure of fit between a theoretical construct, like a purpose, and the phenomena it is intended to cover. Applicability is a measure of how well the construct explains other things it was never originally intended to explain. Thus, a perfectly adequate explanation would cover all the elements in the original domain of explanation and its applicability would be measured as the degree to which it allowed for or suggested similar explanations in other domains. Such an explanation could increase its importance on both counts. If any single explanation could ever cover everything it would be the most important explanation there was.

Tests for adequacy and applicability take lots of effort to apply. They require careful research and documentation. And I don’t have 10 years to set aside to compile the documentation it would take to substantiate any of the claims that I will be making in this section of the paper. Rather, I will simply argue which religious goals I think are most important by showing that we usually take certain of these to trump concerns in other areas. For example, it seems to me clear that Self-Realization trumps Anti-religion. When I think carefully through these trumps my list of the remaining purposes comes out looking something like this.

1. Truth
2. Communion
18. Integration
16. Growth
3. Self-realization
6. Morality

10. History
17. Liberation
4. Companionship

7. Unity
8. Proto-Science
11. Civilization
15. Anti-religion
19. TMoL (The Meaning of Life)
20. Faith

I’ve spit the list into three parts because as you go down the list the importance of the latter purposes is so far removed from the former that they are relatively unimportant. That is, the items in the first list I would regard as central to any understanding of religion. Those in the second list are minor factors and those in the third could probably be ignored altogether. They are not crucial to 98% of what religion actually does in people’s lives. I want to come back to this in a moment especially regarding #8, Proto-Science, because that was once a very important function of religion and now, given what we know about the world, simply cannot be.

But before I do that I want to focus for a second on the first list. I regard as core functions of religion: Truth, Communion, Integration, Growth, Self-realization, and Morality. But, the ordering of this list was quite difficult for me. How does one really decide between Integration and Growth for instance? For me the choice is the logical priority of some state from which to grow. Thus, an integration of some sort is always operative in growth. Similarly, Growth seems presupposed by Self-realization which is in turn presupposed by most conceptions of morality. But I could see how this ordering could be disputed. Second, I really have no way of knowing whether Truth or Communion is most important. And I could easily see it either way. So, I would regard this as a tie on my list. These two purposes I think are the core religious goals. I’d guess that about 60-70% of most religious beliefs and practices serve these ends.

Which brings me to my final point in this essay. And it’s really a way to set up the rest of what I hope to do tomorrow, if I have the time. Religion can no longer be considered a path toward scientific knowledge. In fact, since about 1860 it has been clear that science rules out any literal interpretation of the Bible. Of course, some Enlightenment thinkers had arrived at this conclusion on independent grounds almost 100 years earlier. What is left then is to explain what portion of truth remains for religion, if any. If, as I think, the concern for truth is one of the top two purposes of religion, and there is no truth for religion to disclose or protect, then it is almost surely a worthless activity. For if science is the source for all knowledge, then it has never shown much proof of any possibility for God’s existence, hence Communion with Ultimate Reality.

What must be done then is to clearly distinguish the kind of lived truth that I think religion can reveal from the truths of science. But this work will have to wait on a little sleep!

Jeff

[Jeff]

[Again, relatively unproofed.]

Religious Truth

I am reading this great book right now called: Fundamentalism and American Culture by George M. Marsden.
[1. www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/ReligionTheology/HistoryofChristianity/American/?view=usa&ci=9780195300475
2. www.amazon.com/gp/product/0195300475/103-8112558-4883864?v=glance&n=283155 ]

Before 1870 in America science and religion were of a piece in the Academy and on the street. The broadly Newtonian idea that if there is a law there must be a lawgiver ruled the schools. This position was supported by Thomas Reid’s common sense philosophy ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Reid ), which was something of a reaction to the naturalistic skepticism of David Hume. For Reid the existence of God should be accepted not because it is evident in itself or because it can be proved, but because “common sense” obliges us to accept it. This is a version of the argument from personal experience. In America this conclusion of common sense was everywhere reinforced by the conclusions of Newtonian science.

Darwin was the rock in the pond. No one who practiced the common sense philosophy seemed to realize how much it depended upon the biological evidence. But it did. Common sense only gets traction when there is some external evidence to bolster personal experience. But worse than this the available scientific evidence actually undermined some of the truths of faith, e.g., that the world was created in 6 days, and that man was not the accidentally by-product of blind mechanical processes but the intended outcome of Divine purpose.

We are 150 years past this crisis today, yet the reaction of the average Christian hasn’t much changed: If science contradicts the Bible, then so much the worse for science. I’ve written so much about this on the board, that I don’t know what else to say about it except that I can’t imagine that God would require us to forgo the use of Reason that She gave us. At any rate, it’s not my intention to argue that science and religion are at loggerheads. Rather, I think that, given our state of ignorance, they can get along, if only the religious would reevaluate their notions of truth. They did this in the Renaissance and wound up with a compromise with Enlightenment science. A new compromise is necessary, and has been for more than a century.

* * * *

Religion, as we know it, is inseparable from some conception of human nature. If human beings were immortal then concepts like the life eternal, moksha, and nirvana would need to be modified or abandoned. If mythical beings like angels existed then their religion would be quite different than our own. Religious claims about miracles imply some understanding of the nature of our finitude: we are especially worried abou the suffering of children (why?), we worry about blindness and afflictions of the skin, etc.. All this is revealing of a certain kind of embodiment.

Beyond this, religious claims are best understood within their actual historical and social context. For instance, Jesus’ interaction with the Pharisees can only really be understood if we know that they were the literalists of their day. If Jesus cured blindness with a shot of penicillin, we’d be differently impressed with idea of laying on hands. Religious stories are so inextricably bound up with their location in time and space.

Beyond context and embodiment, we could go further and say of religious truth that it may even be entirely personal in nature. Religion struggles to express itself in general ways. This is a problem it shares with science, with all expressions of truth for that matter. The claims of science seem true to us because we take mathematics and repeatability to be signs of truth. But both signs are unjustified in the deepest senses. The relation between abstract mathematics and reality has always been a problem. Attempts to justify it do one of two things: 1) They assume the world is fundamentally rational or 2) they assume that math is an empirical science. Neither of these assumptions can ever be proved, however. The former course asserts a brute fact about the world, and a non-rational one at that. The assumption is self-stultifying. The second course is closed for exactly the same kinds of reasons as afflict the empirical justification of science, so I turn now to that.

All empirical justifications of science rest on the idea that the future will resemble the past, and this proposition will be forever unjustified, unprovable. Ultimately science simply says that’s just how things are, so far as we can tell. And scientific methodology, for all we know, is just as bound up with the limits of time and place as religious methodology seems to be. For there is no obvious reason why conditions in our sector of the universe must hold elsewhere or elsewhen. This enlightenment assumption has always ranged beyond the immediate results of experiment, and has been increasingly seen as flawed.

I am not arguing that we should reject the claims of science. But I do think that scientific claims on the truth are generally misunderstood. And the way to approach religious truth is to see that scientific truth embodies a narrow selection of information about the universe, namely things that are both countable and repeatable. But as Einstein said, not everything that is countable is important and not everything important is countable. The same could be said, but even more strongly about repeatability. Think of it: No event is really ever wholly subsumed under any type, and so can never be fully classified as a simple recapitulation of any other event in the universe. Every right here right now is unique in some way, even if it is partially approachable through counting and memory. Think of the most important events in your life. These are generally nearly wholly unique. And when we try to repeat them, we fail. The second time you arrive at the center of the universe is either a let down or a new and different enchantment. It is not the same one with the same thrills. That is gone, if remembered and loved.

We should not reject the claims that science can give us. They must be carefully protected and cherished. Darwin’s insight is perhaps the most stunning finding in the last 1000 years. And it should be treated with the proper respect. But it does not show science to reveal more than its methods allow. 99.9% of the true propositions about the world are unknown, and worse: We don’t even have the good sense to guess at them.

I am suggesting that the real appreciation of human ignorance shows science to be a wonderful advance over ignorance. But it also allows for there to be many different kinds of truth for us to explore. Religious truth is one of these. This is not to say that religious understandings are on a par with scientific ones. The repeatability of the latter will surely cause them to be counted as knowledge rather than mere articles of faith. The methods and justifications of religious truth are distinct from those of science. So, the point must be that science and religion both ultimately lack the kind of rigorous intellectual justification that we would hope for.

Notice that part of the reason that we respect the claims of science is because they move away from the human. Science and rationality see selfishness, ethnocentrism, nationalism, speciesism, etc… as distortions of objectivity. So much so that the more mechanical our methods are, the more inhuman they are, the more we respect them. The deep reason for this, I think, is that thought itself springs from a kind of insecurity, a failure. Thought exists in order to hinder and stop action. It is a block in the road meant to draw consciousness outside itself, to make it self-conscious, as terrible a misnomer as there ever was since self-consciousness is never consciousness of the self, which is impossible. The abstract is something we access with the mind as it were. Neither it nor the empirical is seen as a product of the mind. And neither can be seen as wholly mental productions without outright contradiction. (But this is just another attempt of the mind to finally grasp and be done with a thought!) There is no adequate conception of objectivity independent of all human concerns, just as there is no conception of human subjectivity that is independent of the external world. If I confine myself to simply what I perceive, I cannot be wrong that I perceive what I think I do—though, of course, I can be wrong that my perception of objects is accurate, veridical.

We are dealing with a continuum. All truth is importantly both objective and subjective, and there is no absolute understanding of either of these terms. No method absolutely separates them. And when one looks at the extreme cases of each, one is confronted with the other. But the contrast between the terms is an important one, suggestive of different tendencies in the approach to reality. What I am doing now, writing this crazy weird essay, is my attempt to combine the best of the two methods as I see them. I reason inwardly and quickly but I try to make my results available to critique by expressing them in the trappings of reason and argument. Every one and every kind of investigation does it differently. And that is just fine. There are many approaches to the truth.

What this means for the truth is that it will never conform to a single method. There is so much of it that could be grasped, that no method will get at all of it. Science cannot investigate the moment my grandmother died. Rather, it might investigate it, but it could never disclose the most interesting and salient facts of that event.

We have denigrated and debased the human in this modern age. And when religious minds grieve about this, they express something important. How are we now to express the human? What are the modern means of coming to know the human qua human? Perhaps art is of some help. That is certainly another method, one that I have a whole lotta respect for. But truth won’t be exhausted by its methods either, especially considering that almost the whole of art has eaten itself with postmodernism. [Though this is another argument, the problem with postmodernism lies in its attempt to transcend the human, though not by mechanical means as does modern science. Rather, postmodernism looks very much medieval to me in its attempts to see things without perspective—which of course it officially denies all the while embracing all perspectives at once, an impossibility.]

When a stranger falls, we feel it. Think of the videos that David has posted on the board. Haven’t there been some that you simply couldn’t watch? And why? Take your response to this question and hold it up next to one of the deepest human experiences, the act of creating something, a poem, a painting, a song, etc… The thing I hope you see is the apparentness of the external world in both experiences. These seemingly subjective experiences are bound up with external objects. And that is indicative of a certain approach to truth, one that begins inside and works itself out like a curious worm.

* * * * *

What I’ve been trying to do here is describe the nature of religious truth. I have not been trying to give any. Neither have I tried to prescribe the exact methodology of it. These are all questions for later. Further, I have not specified the range of religious views that are compatible with the views I have expressed on the board in the last 12 hours. But I can say that certain views are definitely excluded from this vision of religion, namely any view that militantly protests a pluralist conception of truth-seeking methods, any view that claims dogma and doctrine are the highest manifestations of religion, or any view that insists that what we now know is complete. The truly religious recognize their true ignorance of most of the truth that exists, as does the honest atheist.

Jeff

[Jeff]

PS Perhaps I should add that it is no mean feat to know the deliverances of science in even one small field. It is the work of a lifetime, and it is a worthy goal. But to maintain the proper humility even after such knowing is more worthy still.

[Jeff]

PPS I wrote the essays here very quickly, and while I collected my thoughts before I did so, I did not collect my second or third thoughts about them. They are rather like the rough drafts I make of my songs: They could be greatly improved in both matter and manner, if only I had the time and energy for that kind of self-indulgence.

Still, there is one glaring error in the first essay that I would have corrected. It is this: There is no contradiction between Self-realization and Divine Satisfaction. There isn’t even a contradiction between Self-realization and Self-abnegation, provided the path of realization is toward destruction of the self, and to some degree that is the testimony of most world religions. Nevertheless, on grounds of coherence, I would argue that there is a choice to be made between a religion that focuses on God’s satisfaction and one that focuses on that of human beings. Further, I would maintain my argument that the very idea of God as desirous of Her own satisfaction rests on a rather limited conception of God. Worse, there is something Rube Goldberg-ish about a God who would create a servant to get her a cup of tea rather than simply creating the tea. She seems at cross-purposes with herself on such a conception.

While there may be no contradiction, Divine Satisfaction as the goal of religion 1) is self-defeating to some degree, and 2) does not cohere well with the more humanocentric purposes of religion.

[Tyler]

The first couple of questions that come to mind...
Why did God create?
I seem to remember quite a bit in the bible that was specifically addressed toward setting standards of behaviour. Sort of like a do / do not do list...
Isn't this a direct attempt to set and codify morality?

[Jeff]

First off, nearly everything I write on the board is just my own opinion. I have no secret access to the truth, and I don't pretend that my opinions are always stable. I like writing here, though, because I get to play with my opinions in a safe place, among friends.

That said...


1. Why is there something rather than nothing?

The average believer never asks this question. And when they try to answer it they give a variety of silly answers. Here’s proof: in.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20060714014835AA8RZHB

Perhaps this is because your question has a philosophical air about it, and the proto-scientific function of religion ranks low on the list of religious purposes. Of course, philosophers have a lot to say about it. According to Leibniz it’s the ultimate philosophical question. Heidegger agrees. And we could talk about their answers.

What’s most important is to realize that Christians themselves give a variety of answers. Here is a sampling:

A. “God's goal in creation is to glorify Herself.” This is the orthodox answer. I think it makes no sense. For as soon as Christians give it, they have to explain how it is not a selfish thing to glorify oneself. So, they say things like it is through creation that God makes Her glory known to us, and that’s a good thing. But this means that She creates in order to be known. So what’s the real goal here? Also, why is it so easy to study the creation without supposing that God exists? The orthodox answer raises all kinds of questions.

B. Process theologians, like John Cobb, posit creativity as the most general characteristic of the universe. Thus the question doesn’t make complete sense. If the ultimate categories of all understanding presuppose creativity then it will always be explanans never explanandum.

This is my favorite explanation of the origin of the universe. It’s not a dodge, so long as the theorist accepts creativity as part of the fabric of all creation, from the bottom up as it were.

C. The Christian Gnostics hold that God did not create the universe. Rather, it is the demiurge that created the world, not the redeemer God.

Finally, keep in mind that not all Christians believe the world was created. Rather, much of the language of the OT, where creationist accounts get their traction, can be interpreted as bringing order to chaos. The act of creating is really just the ordering pre-existent materials, not creation ex nihilo. This view can explain the existence of evil in the world rather easily, as God’s options in creating are limited to the kinds and properties of matter that already existed.

So, I guess my point in all this is that there is not a single view of creation among Christians and the orthodox view seems rather silly to me.

2. I never said that religion doesn’t traffic in moral codes. Rather, I said just the opposite. It does. HOWEVER, morality is not the most basic purpose of religion. I put it in my list as purpose #6, and I tried to indicate that it is indirectly justified through the purposes that are higher on the list, namely: Communion, Truth, Integration, Growth, and Self-Realization. Morality is and has always been an important part of religion. But, it is not the main purpose of religion.

The Decalogue, which you alluded to, is the means to keep the ancient Israelites in union with God. That is its direct purpose, but this union requires effort. That's where the morality comes in.

…In my view…

But, Tyler, you are quite right to argue that the moral and proto-scientific functions of religion have been taken in the past to be its highest manifestations. Especially the evangelical forms of Christianity have asserted this. I am arguing that these are unsophisticated religious views. Among the problems they create is the propagation of various kinds of moral and scientific ignorance, e.g., the ignorance associated with the denial of evolution, etc…

[Tyler]

So you are saying that the moral dictates were just means by which one can become closer in union with the Allfather? That if one were to act accordingly they would better gain insight into the nature of the All?