thread: 2006-09-08 : Picky-choosy religion, 3 views
On 2006-09-09, Eero Tuovinen wrote:
Hi,
I'm an avid reader of Vincent's, although I rarely have anything particularly meaningful to say myself, here. But with another of these religion-discussions boiling, I got inspired to write just a bit about the topic. (Religion is one of those things everybody wants to discuss given a worthwhile and secure opportunity.) I hope it's well received.
First, an impression: man, you're all religion-whacko, my American friends! I have relatively (for a secular Nordic guy) lots of friends in RL who consider themselves Christian, and that amounts to... three, I think. The great majority of people I know don't have any kind of convinction about these things. And here I'm reading posts from my favourite designers, business partners and internet friends, one after another telling how they "draw deep comfort from spirituality". Like, don't you have any secular humanists out there? That's pretty scary.
That said, let me give my own big explanation for why I haven't given mysticism (as an ingredient of personal worldview, that is) another thought for years and years. It's pretty simple, and at least it's rather different from most of this discussion. Hopefully still relevant, though.
So I was raised as an Evangelist-Lutheran the way most children in Finland are. I never, ever felt that this was a particularly religious background; I couldn't tell you if my parents take the stuff seriously for instance, all I know is that my own religious experiences as a child were entirely of private nature (apart from some emotional opportunism by the pastor of the parish now and then). We never discuss religion in my family, for instance, now that I'm "mature enough to decide for myself about going to church". As far as I'm concerned, the Finnish culture of the moment is best described as "secular, defaulting to Christian if you're interested in that kind of thing".
I went through a gradual secularisation of my ethics and worldview as a teenager, starting from the moment I got interested in the ontological side of Christianity (as in, does Jesus exist or not) and peaking in my fundamental revelation about Christianity. I'll share the latter here: Christianity is utterly irrelevant ethically, even if it might or might not have positive effects on everyday morality of it's proponents. If the only thing you're worried about is discerning good and evil (like me), then you can just forget all those myths, they don't have any logical connection to the ethical question.
Now, based on the interesting discussion here, the above probably requires some elaboration. You see, ever since casting aside the idea of belonging into the formal institution of the church (getting out was easy to rationalize, it's more money in my own pocket when I stop supporting an organization I have no faith in) I've been agnostic as far as metaphysics go. Furthermore, the justification for my agnosticism is that after careful deliberation I found that God/Jesus/Bible are utterly irrelevant for morality and ethics. Like, if you stop to think about it, what does the existence of eternal life, redemption or heaven have to do with right and wrong? My conclusion was that confusing those two is just muddy thinking, and whatever my ethics, they would need to work without resorting to the naturalistic fallacy. (I hope it's pretty clear to everybody that basing your ethics on something promised in the Bible or other religious sources is at best exactly that and at worst deduction from false axioms.) Like, if I'm to have a good reason to not chop off the heads of my family members one dark and stormy night (assuming such an urge should surprise me), I certainly hope to have something more compelling than "eternal hellfire" to keep me from doing it. An uppity and shortsighted bastard like me, the threat of punishment does nothing. I need solid ethical reasons, not a father figure taking away my responsibility.
Now, after leaving aside religion as a factor from my ethical pondering I've been pretty happily busy with uncovering the meaning of good life, good habit (in the socratean sense) and so on completely detached from mythology. Nowadays I interpret religiousity completely from the viewpoint of aesthetics, incidentally: as far as I can see, the decisions and feelings people have based on religious tradition, community and ritual are easily and satisfactorily explained via standard aesthetic theory. Theology as a subcategory of aesthetics, if you will.
Incidentally, I've been toying with the idea of getting back into the religion game during the last couple of years. I like to read religious texts of all kinds, and I admire some of the virtues and ethics outlined in different religions. So I'm naturally curious about the experience of doing some worship, you see. I'm very satisfied with the analytic approach I'm taking to the job, too: the trick in getting something good out of religion is to construct your religion to support fundamentally solid ethics. In my case I'm pretty sure those are nothing like the Christian love-fest, though; I agree with Sydney about how different religions can mold your worldview to different directions, but I have great difficulty accepting that his Christian values as enshrined in the teachings of Jesus Christ are in any way superior to some other ethical ideas when they are taken ceteris paribus, separate from the myths.
Accordingly, if I were to start some religious practice... it'd probably be something that enshrines honor, truth in action and all that romantic knightly jazz, they're all virtues I can get behind. Less of the Christian submission thing, definitely. Probably something akin to asatru, actually, except taking on an aesthetic tradition belonging to another nation is just ridiculous. So I'd probably end up with something quite close to the "old faith" of Finland, freezing my butt off in the winter night wrestling bears to regain forgotten lore (old Finnish religion was really big on lore, if you didn't know) or something like that.
So yeah, you could say that I'm considering becoming the little bathtub chemist of religion to mix up something useful for my own amusement. Amusement = something perhaps potentially useful, but by no means absolutely necessary in living a good life. I don't know, it'd probably be too much bother to figure out such a religion just for me. I'd have to become all preachy and make sure others benefit, too. The same dilemma all artists face, really: no point in creating a work if you don't have distribution worked out.
So yes, that's more or less the "Short Course to Intellectual Agnosticism", I guess. Just separate ethics and religion and relegate the latter to the realm of performance art, where it belongs. Makes life much simpler and removes the possibility of being led astray by religious authority, whether scripture, tradition or current authority figures. I'm sure you people who live every day with religious movements that have political relevancy (scary, that) have some razor-sharp apologetics against the idea. I'd love to hear them. The religious man is almost like a dying breed hereabouts, and those few I'm friends with don't really want to get into a discussion about the stuff. (Which I kinda admire for it's single-mindedness and willingness to subdue the ego; it's already been touched upon in the excellent discussion here that apologetics endanger your own faith as well.)
