thread: 2006-09-08 : Salvation, damnation, justification, a la Sydney
On 2006-09-11, Sydney Freedberg wrote:
Oh, and Meg: Lastly, Sydney, what's up with "if you were in the wrong religion"?? If this God is so picky that I need to not only belive the right things but believe them with the right people, that's just weird.
Yeah, that would be weird. Let me clarify.
Remember that "believe in" or "have faith in" is not about checking off the right ideological boxes (though, sadly, plenty of Christians throughout history have missed that point). When I say to my wife, "I believe in you," I don't mean that I'm intellectually persuaded that she exists: I mean that I think she is worthy of my trust and faith, and I believe what she says. When I say, "I believe in God," I use the phrase the exact same way.
Human belief systems, religious and otherwise, are basically attempts to answer the question, "how can I, my loved ones, and people in general be happy?" If a belief system's reply to that question boils down to, "buy more stuff!," or "kill those foreign-looking types over there," or "give us 10% of your income and let us worry about the rest," or "hold yourself aloof and pure from other, lesser people," or "marry as many of your underage cousins as possible," then I would consider it wrong, in the very straightforward sense of "if you attempt this solution, you will not only fail to make anybody happy for very long but actually make most everyone pretty miserable."
Most of the great, time-tested traditions, from Christianity to Confucianism, answer the big question with some variant of "treat other people the way you'd like them to treat you, form a community with other people of this tradition to help each other, and morally recalibrate yourself on a regular basis with personal and community rituals."
The Judeo-Christian-Islamic traditions add "...and the fundamental organizing principle of the cosmos is goodness." (I'm sure other religious beliefs have a similar clauses, I just can't speak for them with enough confidence.)
Christianity adds "...and know that you have love and forgiveness for the asking, always."
