thread: 2006-09-08 : Picky-choosy religion, 3 views
On 2006-09-12, NinJ wrote:
(Holy crap, this is a giant post. But this has been kind of bottled up while I've watched these threads grow.)
(Ben Lehman has pointed out that my relationship to Christianity is largely an emotional and resentful and not the most rational. He's partially right, so I'll keep the lid tied on.)
I don't think He is interested in bargaining with us at all, because there's nothing to bargain with on either side: We don't have anything to offer that He doesn't already have except for our love; He does not offer anything more or less than Himself. And I certainly don't think He puts a cosmic cross-hairs on specific people to prove spiritual points to those around them.
Humans bargain with God throughout Torah, even fighting with God directly. The Covenant itself is a bargain. It's how we can relate to the Universe as an integral part of it.
That doesn't mean that God is a personal phenomenon on the whole. It doesn't mean that because something gnarly happens to someone that it's because God "wanted" hir to be miserable. Misery is a function of the Universe. So is joy, and so is enlightenment.
It also doesn't mean that God does, or doesn't, love us. It's not how you relate to a hurricane, or a flower, or the Horsehead Nebula. Putting a human, emotional face on the Universe is idolatry: to say that God wants something is to make God be a person in your mind, ergo a formed thing, ergo an idol.
(This, by the way, is the source of a great deal of irritation that I have with Christians who use the word "Judaeo-Christian". There are serious differences, morally, philosophically, and theologically between the religions. "Judaeo-Christian" is a word Christians like to use to sound inclusive. Sydney, your assertion that "The Judaic-Christian-Islamic tradition in particular offers the answer, 'Okay, the universe is over, now we can start the really good stuff.'" is twaddle. The "really good stuff" in Judaism is, in no particular order, but all specifically mentioned: eating herring, fucking, dancing, contemplation, writing, planting trees you'll never see bloom, playing tambourines, getting drunk, having children, enjoying the shade, defying the authorities, dying peacefully at the end of a meaningful life. Heaven and the afterlife are great unknowns: Four have entered Pardes and returned. One died, one went mad, one left Judaism, and only Rabbi Akiva came in peace and went in peace. Try reading his work and tell me that you understand what Heaven's like.)
Eero:
First, an impression: man, you're all religion-whacko, my American friends!
It turns out, this stuff is all there, in you, and it doesn't become obvious until it's thrown into relief by contrast with other, contrary religions. Eero, religion is culture. You're a Christian, but you don't have to think about it because "most Finnish children are" raised that way.
I was one of four Jewish kids in my American public school of 1200. It made me pretty aware of the differences in values between me and my (largely, but not entirely) Catholic schoolmates. They had weird hangups about sex, but thought violence was cool and funny. They got mad that I got Yom Kippur off of school (cuz Yom Kippur rocks!!!), even though I had to take a zero for my quiz that day and they got Christmas off for free. Reading was something you were forced to do. And so on.
I visited Israel when I was 17. It meant a lot to me, standing in places that had only abstract meaning to me before. Standing at the Temple, Massada, the Negev. But ordinary Israelis aren't a religious lot. One of the reasons the Orthodoxy has such sway there is that only they care about religion; for everyone else, "of course we're all Jewish here". (We can talk about the Socialist origins of Israel later; I think the influences are linked).
Eero, you're ignoring stuff you've got that's religious in your culture, at least ethically and probably cosmologically. I'd give you and yours two generations tops before you found God in some way or another after immigrating to the US and rubbing up against the Buddhists, Evangelical Crazies, Jews, Shintoka (is that word right?), Catholic apologists, Unitarian Universalists, Satanists, Neopagans, and religiously ignorant people who make up every day of our existence here. See what the search for religious freedom (as opposed to freedom from religion) has wrought here. It's a powerful thing, it turns out, and it's often very stupid and divisive. But being dismissive of it actually doesn't help you understand the people around you any better.
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?
I dunno. Ask a Christian. Jews aren't really concerned with this stuff.
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.
There are 613 commandments in Torah. Of them, the sixth is "No killing" (right after all the stuff about God being the Lord, yeah, OK, granted. But I think you'd agree that worshipping idols is a bad idea, too). It's not there because no one wants to kill people. It's there because even the ethical need a reminder sometimes: when they're angry, when they've been driven to do it by their nation, when it's firmly rationalized. (Note that it takes about 2 pages before they break this one, big time). You don't kill your family because it's contrary to your morals. That wasn't enough to stop the rampant patricide in noble circles throughout history. Now, I'm not saying that if they'd been more religious, they wouldn't have done that, cuz that would be ridiculous. I'm saying that there's clearly more than personal morality needed to keep that kind of thing from happening, and the Torah not only lays out a moral standard, but gives all sorts of examples of failure and the consequences of those failures (and, hey, sometimes there are positive examples too).
The danger, Eero and Sydney, is when someone finds certainty in their religion. The concentration that Christianity has on belief is ??? I can't think of a polite way to say this, so assume that I like you (it's true) and that we just have a really basic disagreement about something tangential to the fact ??? psychologically dangerous, theologically flawed, and politically pragmatic; it requires you to state openly that something is true despite the evidence; why state it if it's obvious? Is the blueness of the sky an article of faith? The existence of my shoes? The fact that my ceiling is low? Certainty is an indication of contempt for the truth. It's a statment that what I want is more important than what is. And what I want is unfettered by the material reality that I can sense or reason.
To me, that's cool if you want your worldview to include things that you know aren't true. Do whatever you want! You don't need my approval. But I don't have to accept it as plausible. I don't even have to accept it as plausible to enjoy your company or other things you say because by its very nature, it's outside of my reality, except insofar as I interact with you about it.
So, you laid yourself on the line here, Sydnes, so I will, too.
My stances of picky-choosiness:
Agnosticism, to me, is a perfectly tenable perspective on the Universe. It uses Ockham's Razor to admirable effect and retains doubt as its blade.
I'm less comfortable about Atheism because it's a statement of faith in no-gods, that the Universe doesn't apply intelligence in ways and scales that we don't see (despite our intuition to the contrary). Still, it's a perspective that assumes moral agency, it assumes that cosmology and an understanding of the Universe is important, and it puts the practitioner in a position of both freedom from external constraints and a position of personal responsibility.
I'm deeply uncomfortable with a religion that requires faith, whether it be in the goodness of God or some other, practical thing, like the afterlife.
Non-cosmologically, the traditions of my branch of Judaism (brought up Reform, now pretty much Reconstructionist) inform my life deeply. Some are obvious: we celebrate Shabat every Friday night and don't do business in any meaningful sense on Saturday, and we find this profoundly helpful to our lives; we celebrate the Holy Days earnestly and with reflection; we tell our stories at festivals. Some are less obvious and exclusive: I made lox last night; I have a college education; I speak with ambivalence about theology among other Jews.
Like a lot of people here, I poked around at various mystical traditions, and they informed my mystical standpoint on Judaism, as they have in the past. I wear a Hermes earring in defiance of the tradition against marking your body and apparent defiance of the laws against idolatry, but: Hermes isn't a god. Hermes is an idea, associations between quickness of mind and the quickest of metals, and hence law, medicine, magic, writing, and trickery; I used to draw lots and lots of magickal diagrams in an attempt to see the universe like Crowley did; I've gotten wrapped up in Taoist alchemy and neopagan Celtoid stone circle stuff; I've declared myself an Atheist and been called a Chaos Magician. These things all inform my cosmology, my morality, and the traditions I will pass on. I've picked and chosen carefully, as every thoughtful Jew has done since the first Exile to Babylon 2400 years ago, from the ambivalent relationship to Greek philosophy to the almost erotic relationship with Sufism to the heavy Lutheran influence on German Jews in the 19th century, which gave birth to the Reform movement to the contemporary fraternity with Budhism.
Picking and choosing is important. It's how we evolve our practice. There are rhetorical practices built into Jewish discussion and debate that are specifically for measuring and taking ownership of new ideas from other cultures.
