thread: 2006-09-15 : Doing religion with someone can be exactly wrong
On 2006-09-15, Sydney Freedberg wrote:
Of course it's primarily for his benefit. When I pray for you, whatever God may or may not do, the one person I know benefits from it is me. Now, hopefully, I benefit in the direction of becoming a better person, one who has a stronger habit of thinking about the welfare of other people, and I end helping you in some tangible way.
"The fact that there was religion involved robbed his condolences of their value"—I find that striking. Honest question, now, not rhetorical: Do you have a threshold for when external, formalized structure becomes so prominent that it overshadows the human sentiments it was meant to support?
For example, I presume that if a non-minister, a regular unordained person, had written himself a yellow sticky note saying "Vincent's dad," and he only rememers to talk to you because he saw the note, that in itself wouldn't devalue his or her condolences for you. Conversely, if the head of fundraising for the Unitarian church were standing next to Minister Jon while he called Meg and whispered in his ear, "her husband's dad just died—ask to speak to him and say something nice—she might remember it and contribute more next year," that would devalue his condolences for me as well, I presume, for you.
But I suspect there's some line in the middle where we disagree. For example, what if Minister Jon was talking to Meg and thought, "O boy, I never said anything to her husband about his dad, I really don't have the energy to do this right now, I don't even know if I believe in Heaven anymore, but damn it, I'm still a minister for a few more hours at least, it's my job." (From your description, this is actually pretty likely to be what happened). I would still think his habit of religion had helped him here, by giving him the nudge to try to reach out to another human being when all his other habits and inclinations were saying, "don't bother." That's what I'm thinking of when I say "see how religion helps." Is this something like what you're thinking of when you're saying "'religion helps' can go to hell"?
