Religious belief

[Buster's Uncle]

There are at least three religion/faith-based threads going on right now in the OT forum at CFC. One person has been harassing me to the point where I've put him on ignore. I don't want things to get anywhere near that point here, so there will probably be times when I'll leave so I can calm down.

That's cool.  I'm sure you see that behavior's been better here than other experiences have led you to expect, but a trigger's a trigger, and we need to rule our anger, not let our anger rule us.  Taking breaks when needed is mature.

[Elok]

Re: the center, in my case that's another way of saying I agree with the left, sorta, on some things, and the right, sorta, on other things, and for the rest I have a totally different opinion from either.  I don't think any intrinsic virtue attaches to being in the exact middle between two extremes, no--but I also doubt whether any extreme short of outright fascism can ever be entirely right or wrong.  And real fascists are rare, mind you.

I'm the son of a woman who converted to Orthodoxy from Lutheranism and a man who grew up Unitarian and became agnostic (which is to say, he switched from French Vanilla to plain Vanilla).  I, along with my two brothers, was raised in my mother's faith, because my dad was never enough of a kid person to bother.  Both my parents were solidly liberal without edging over into flake territory.  My mother describes herself as a pro-life democrat, which was more or less my alignment for the first twenty years or so of my life.  Really it was a kind of tribal affiliation; I regarded the GOP with loathing not because of any policy position but because it was what our family did.  I started to realize that was a silly way to think around the time I left high school.  Also, my parents--particularly my father--taught me a rather cynical view of the world, and I learned to start applying it to Democrats as well.  I don't recall the entire history of what I thought when, but I remember feeling deeply apathetic in 2004; it seemed obvious that Kerry wasn't up to fixing W's mess, or of making any move the electorate might disapprove of.  I was never terribly enthusiastic about voting at all.

A few years later, I fell in love with and eventually married a hardcore libertarian.  I know by that point I regarded myself as no longer a Democrat, more of a dejected moderate.  That is more or less where I am now, though I might have slid somewhat to the right (don't think my wife's influence is much responsible for that, I strongly disagree with it, but I bring it up for the record).  I started trying to take my religion a little more seriously as I got more independent.  I noticed that most of the loudest voices in our culture--entertainment, academia, media--are fiercely anti-religious, and teach us to regard anyone conventionally devout as the same sort of goblin caricature I was raised to see in the GOP.  Which is not a coincidence, as all those voices are coming from the Left.  At the same time it became obvious to me that the GOP was just using social conservatives the way Democrats use black people, as a guaranteed vote they can whip up and then ignore.  Cultural momentum is against them there, and the guns and money matter more to them than the Christian horse Reagan tamed to pull their wagon.

I could go into a lot more detail, but basically I'm disillusioned with everyone.  As I've already said, we Orthodox occupy a curiously isolated position.  Until quite recently we tended to view ourselves as basically an extension of ethnic identity.  That is, the Greek Orthodox were often Orthodox because it was part of being Greek, and so on for Russians and Serbs and so on.  We've only been in this country since the mid- to late-1800s, and assimilation has been slow.  Things are starting to change, for complicated reasons.  The church is opening up to converts, and the possibility of American unification is becoming more and more real.  Which will have us finally coming into our own, albeit greatly shrunk, around the same time the Mainlines collapse and the disgusted theocons finish ditching the party that used them.  We sat out America's long Protestant-Catholic fight, we were never big enough to join the Moral Majority.  It'll be interesting to see what happens.

All this is just scratching the surface.  Perhaps you should just ask me if there's anything in particular you want to know.

[Buster's Uncle]

It's a good start - the idea is mainly to help establish a little background to help facilitate understanding.  That's a good idea for debate and it's not bad for conversation, to have an improved sense of everyone's foundation and maybe base assumptions.


Thomas is my favorite disciple.

I'm from the piedmont of North Carolina right at the base of the Appalachians, which isn't like you'd expect from TV, but not urban and no more sophisticated a culture than most rural areas.  The middle child and eldest son of a pair of Southern Baptists -a denomination also not like you'd expect from TV, although it became pretty much the way politically you'd expect under Reagan, who is in Hell now for coming into my church and corrupting it with his hateful, cynical, even Satanic, politics (corrupting churches is indeed Satan's own work, if you believe in that stuff).

Daddy's daddy was from a family so fervently Republican that it nearly cost Daddy a job at Westinghouse before I was born, administrating on some antimissile project, when the gub'ment security check turned up that he'd been voting twice - once Republican in his county of birth - Grampa, on the other hand, was a sharecropper during the Great Depression; he was a bigot and a social conservative, but knew his friend in Roosavelt2, and never told his mother he'd switched to granger politics.  So, like Elok, I grew up in a Democratic-affiliated (but not liberal) family.

I was politically aware by the time Reagan (Lord, how I spit on his dishonest, lowest-common-denominator, trash-talking, treason-committing, cynically lying memory) ran against Carter (a good man if not a great leader), and obvious empty shirt is obvious.  Thing is?  Great FAILURE of the Reagan Revolution - I'm a somewhat left-leaning centrist/pragmatist (mostly only solidly left on labor issues due to migrant worker experience polarizing me against Bossmen) on government issues, but socially/personally?  Pretty conservative/prudish.  They could have had me if they'd played their cards right, which demagoguery/talking about personal responsibility while blaming the other guys for EVERYTHING was not the right play.

I was in my church three times a week in the 80s, pretty much whenever the doors where open.  Church is community, for those of you who don't know - I wasn't really there because I was exactly hardcore with the Jesus, but more because that was where my social life was.

And Reagan came in - people started declaring for him openly, even from the pulpit.  Anyone who thought at the time that the hysteria of 14 years ago after the thing happened in New York was a bit overblown will understand me when I say there was a vibe in the air that the registered Democrats, I was one by the time this was becoming a big problem, sensed that speaking up in protest would be dangerously unwise.

Well, many of you are old enough to remember the end of the 70s and the change in the zeitgeist of the 80s - the 70s were dirty and scary, while the 80s were the "me" decade when everything got dumbed-down and unashamed of selfishness.  The Republicans, who'd been in hella-trouble after Nixon, finally got their backswing of the political pendulum -the 60s lasted a very long time- and everything got coarsened.  Jerry Faldwell is a Southern Baptist, and a denomination with a bad reputation, but that had always held up the priesthood of the believer as a central tenant, and had, therefore, been a big tent, got repulsively interested in enforcing doctrinal unity.

It wasn't politics that was the immediate precipitating incident to my walking away (there was suspicion that the choir director was homersexual, actually, and they blew the handling of it like you wouldn't believe and the church nearly split, so many people got hurt in the quarrel) but you can probably guess that all the bad actors in the incident were the exact same as the ones stumping for Reagan the loudest, and so there it is for my conclusion.

A few years later -self-isolated from my native spiritual community and so a big hole in my life- college was a bad time for me, for the mood disorder originating, and in my pain I lost faith in a God that would continence my suffering.  Screw the 'tests'.  For a few days, I was an atheist.

My position quickly evolved into a wait-and-see agnosticism, I decided most of my values, from before my church was a wing of the republican party, were good and sound.  No need to reject, mostly, or have any problem with church people, who tend to be better than average citizens outside political activity - say what you will about hypocrisy and coming short of what they profess, morally, there's an enormous huge pile of ethical teaching and good-citizenship stuff in there with the theology, unsophisticated and unreflected as much of it is.  Most of the science deniers and whatnot would have been ignorant luddites looking for a rationale without a preacher to help.  There just would have evolved another basically-conservative socially-stabilizing, progress-resisting social institution to serve the same functions in its place, believe me.  Church gives people who want it something they want that only partly has to do with spiritual faith.

I miss believing; it was a comfort, born into a cruel world only to eventually die.  I miss it, but I'll go back or not, which is more likely at this late date, on my own schedule and in my own way.  I'd like to have that talk with God first, and get the deal Thomas got.

[Lorizael]

I've told a bit of this before, but here goes. My father is Jewish but does not believe in God and my mother is Catholic but has major issues with the Church. While I grew up celebrating Jewish and Christian holidays, I received nothing in the way of religious instruction. As far as I can remember, there was never a point in my life at which I believed in any divine entity, unless Santa Claus counts.

Both of my parents and solidly liberal, but not radical by any stretch of the imagination. My mother harbors a degree of hatred for conservatives she feels are uncaring, yet she gets along well with all her significantly more devout (and conservative) Catholic siblings so long as certain subjects aren't brought up during Christmas. My father has very little patience for what he thinks is stupidity, which he tends to see in the right much more than the left.

My mother blames Reagan for the recession in the 80s that contributed to the financial ruin of my father's father's business, which my father tried (foolishly, in retrospect) to keep afloat in the 90s after my grandfather died, leading to some very bad times for my family financially and emotionally while I was growing up. I was young enough at the time that I was mostly shielded from (read: lied to about, but mostly by omission) what was happening, but there were a couple times that I came home from school and the light switches didn't work for some reason.

In addition to the above implicit influences, my parents deliberately raised their three children to ask questions, be curious, and discuss/argue. The end result is that I was brought up without religious instruction in a liberal household with a nearly built in sense of cynicism. Due in large part to the kind of existential crisis stuff brought about by my depression, I was eventually led down the path of questioning essentially everything, which culminated in a 5-week period of isolation during the summer of 2003 in which I had a series of philosophical revelations that formed the foundation of all my beliefs. (The alternative was suicide. Or probably just more misery. But at the time, I was desperate to find a reason not to kill myself.)

I have long been reluctant to talk about what actually happened during my isolation and what I came to believe then, because the reaction to my new ideas from the people close to me was almost universally negative. The gist is that I had something approximating an out of body experience (which I in no way believe was at all a supernatural thing, just a trick my brain was playing on me) that caused me to discover what I still believe are truths about the way things in the universe interact and intersect.

Over the last 12 years, one of the big ideas about my philosophy that I've tried to emphasize for the purposes of personal growth is how astoundingly ignorant I, as a single human being, must be. This caused me to slowly discard a great deal of my inherited political beliefs as I realized that I was simply not qualified to have strong opinions about certain subjects (economics is the big one).

The closest group to which I feel any sense of allegiance is the modern scientific skeptic movement, because it emphasizes the fallibility of the human mind and the care we must take when we claim to know something. I also appreciate the sentiment of transhumanism, because I believe that humans aren't particularly important in the grand scheme of things and that we should not arbitrarily limit ourselves to one way of being. Basically, I want to build a better variety of thinking stuff, which I feel is where transhumanism and skepticism intersect, and that all eventually leads down the road to me wanting to achieve omniscience.

[Yitzi]

but that had always held up the priesthood of the believer as a central tenant

Don't you meant "tenet"?  (Like canon/cannon, tenet/tenant is one of those mix-ups that really gets on my nerves.)

[Buster's Uncle]

Yeesh.  [tries to come up with a lie rationale for using that term]  Uh - typo?  Fan of David Tennant's Dr. Who?  Lots of churches rent the tent?



Lori - I just have to go there; half-Jewish/half-Catholic -- no WONDER you beat yourself up so!

Thank you, you're a great audience; I'll be here all week.

[Buster's Uncle]

I haven't been able to track down the Jesus staff/cane yet (Though I found my chainmail-making gear that's been missing for years -also, my copy of the AP Stylebook, On Religion by Marx and Engles, and the novelization of Robin and Marian) so I did the next-best thing; took pictures of the casting in lead I did of the carving, and used that to draw up a re-creation of the original.  The profile looks about right, I think, and will at least give you the idea.

My grumpy farmer secondary character, a fellow who believed in the Great Chain of Being (w/o knowing what that was) and his proper place in it, would sometimes brandish the thick cane at people like a cudgel and declaim, in his broad Suffolk accent, "An' the stamp of our Savior will be mark-ed hard all about yer person afore I'm done."

-Which leads to an interesting observation about how much art -in numerous fields- owes almost everything to the inspirational power and showcasing venue of religion.  I don't remember if I was doing renfairs yet when I carved this, or why I did a Jesus face, but I certainly made token efforts to sport a little Jesus in the show, which tended to set me apart from the other rennies, who cared about the religion more than period accuracy.  Somewhere there's a lead ring I carved w/ a (protestant plain) cross on it that I made for and sported in the show.  I will take pictures if it turns up while I'm retrieving renfair gear in daylight today.

[Elok]

Re: faith and politics, I'm ambivalent.

On the one hand, I've come to regard our current conception of church-state separation as something of a stacked deck.  As things stand, a congressman may introduce a bill based on any values whatever, and have it debated (in theory) on its merits, provided those values do not involve God.  For example, Dennis Kucinich could introduce a bill declaring cows to be people.  This is completely out of touch with what almost everyone believes, and it would be shot down, but it would not violate the First Amendment as we think of it unless Kucinich brought in whatever Space Invaders stuff he believes in.  Then it would be disqualified instantly.  That is not neutrality.  I do not think true neutrality is possible; if A sees things one way and B sees things another, the closest you can come to neutrality is a compromise, which as Lori noted is not always good.

And we don't even compromise.  This country's attitude towards religion has always been hyper-Protestant.  Religion is simply one's individual opinion, to be kept in a little box so that it does not bother others.  We pretty much take this for granted.  However, that view of religion is an extreme historic novelty--actually a distortion of an extreme historic novelty--and in its current implementation essentially requires the religious man to be a hypocrite in the name of good citizenship.  What are my religious opinions, after all?  If I'm doing it right, all my important opinions are religious.  My opposition to capital punishment is religious.  My approval of welfare programs is religious.  My belief that murder and stealing are wrong is religious.  It's all an integrated whole.  I'm sure the average secular liberal would not object to those, because he probably agrees with them anyway.  He probably wouldn't even mind if I did what MLK did and threw in some religious imagery about liberation, etc.  But if I disagree with him on anything--abortion being the most obvious--I am unjustly imposing my values on everyone else (and never mind that ALL laws impose values on those who may or may not share them).  I am allowed to exercise my conscience in the public sphere only in those areas where it happens to agree with an atheist's.

This is, to my way of thinking, ridiculous, and I see no reason why I should play a game so blatantly rigged against me.  I don't agree with the founding fathers about slaves, Indians or women, and see no reason to back up their view of religion either.  Assuming it is their view; the whole thing probably worked better when almost everyone believed in some variant on Protestantism and so the differences between them were negligible.  Today, as the secular-religious divide widens, it will only become more apparent over time that this is a game with clear winners and losers.  I don't want to stay in my box.  It's cramped in there.

BUT!

Simply voting on my own is obviously inadequate.  This is a country of more than three hundred million people.  In order to be at all effective, we would need to be organized and participate in politics.  This is basically Reagan's game, and we've seen what happens.  Corruption, perversion, and eventual reduction to a kind of spoiled political pet living off table scraps.  It's no good.  The best we can do is to keep the whole political system at arm's length--and I'm not sure if that's possible.  It's lose-lose.  My solution, for the time being, is to isolate myself and my family from a hostile world as best I can.

[Buster's Uncle]

everyone believed in some variant on Protestantism and so the differences between them were negligible

From your Orthodox seat - I imagine they tended strongly to disagree.  Outsiders see the people of faith squabble and point at all the murder in history over the most MINOR of theological differences and the atheist love to harp -and they're not wrong.  But you get in close and take the belief seriously, and what are you to do?  Lie and pretend you don't think the wrong guys are wrong?

But y'know?  My people didn't go on about Hindus, didn't say much at all about Moslems (in THOSE days), loved Jews, they rarely mentioned even Catholicism (virtually didn't know Orthodox existed, mostly) -and had nothing at all against Methodist and Lutherans and such, you're not wrong about that- but they got hot, once in a blue moon, about the MORMONS.  LDS is just different enough, and same enough, to seem a mockery and invoke an uncanny valley hostility, which can run profoundly deep, as any Mormon will tell you.

And there's a persecution complex built into the origin narrative of Christianity - I used to hear, over and over, people telling their getting-saved stories that inevitably had some bits about getting rejected and figuratively spat upon for giving their lives to Christ.  -In a county where a very strong majority, I'd estimate, was at least nominally Southern Baptist, most of the rest some other inoffensive flavor of protestant.  Never a word about what butthole thing they'd said/did to provoke those reactions (It was ignorant buttholes, always, who had the persecution stories and I'm not speculating wildly).  Feelings of persecution are built into the culture, is all, as becomes clear anytime something annoys the Catholic League man and he goes on Fox to girldog (and is not struck by lightning for saying persection while Catholic).

Church people -my mother and my brother, for example- talk about the hostility of society to the church, without owning the big current reason - Faldwell, a man both deeply deplore.  So Elok, I'm not challenging you for feelings of alienation -I can relate, being on my own, basically, politically and spiritually- but just trying to throw in that bit of perspective.  Do take the trouble to go out and vote for the lesser of two evils; it's a duty.

[Yitzi]

Re: faith and politics, I'm ambivalent.

On the one hand, I've come to regard our current conception of church-state separation as something of a stacked deck.  As things stand, a congressman may introduce a bill based on any values whatever, and have it debated (in theory) on its merits, provided those values do not involve God.  For example, Dennis Kucinich could introduce a bill declaring cows to be people.  This is completely out of touch with what almost everyone believes, and it would be shot down, but it would not violate the First Amendment as we think of it unless Kucinich brought in whatever Space Invaders stuff he believes in.  Then it would be disqualified instantly.  That is not neutrality.  I do not think true neutrality is possible; if A sees things one way and B sees things another, the closest you can come to neutrality is a compromise, which as Lori noted is not always good.

The way I see it, you can get neutrality if a bill based on religiously-motivated values is allowed, as long as those values can also be justified without religion (i.e. the bill's originator has a religious motivation for the values motivating the bill, but not a direct religious motivation for the bill itself, and someone else could have the same values for non-religious reasons), and a bill directly based on being not-religious, or on values incompatible with most religions, is likewise a no-go.

Basically, as long as you can replace "religion" with "no religion" and everything works the same, it's neutral.  (Of course, there are still some tricky parts involving treatment of religious minorities and the like, but even that could use the same standard: If everyone has a level playing field, it's neutral.)

[Elok]

I meant that the differences would not matter so much politically.  Of course they diverged strongly on matters of doctrine, but these by and large would not have divided their political opinions, with rare exceptions such as Prohibition (and extreme outliers like the JWs opposing war service, etc.).  They would have had near-identical opinions, when considered as groups, on big questions of society like marriage, education, justice, and so on.  There would have been substantial variations within groups, but I don't think that, say, Methodists as a group would have had radically different opinions from Baptists on divorce (yes, both opinions would have dismayed us, but that's beside the present point).  Their common metaphysical assumptions would have masked the fine distinctions for political purposes.

Now consider, again, abortion.  It isn't a coincidence that most devout Christians oppose it; our opposition to it goes back to the Didache in the first century.  Most modern seculars (or more casual Christians) are pro-choice to one extent or another.  This is because we have broadly different ideas about what makes human life meaningful.  The secular's idea of human dignity is rooted in an idea of human beings as rational creatures, not any idea of the soul or "image and likeness" or what-have-you.  Today, somewhat ironically, we tend to agree more on many questions with non-radical but devout Muslims than we do with atheists.  The gap between believer and non-believer is generally wider than between believers of different flavors.

As to the hostility, I think it stems in part from Falwell and company's botched theocracy, yes--but that theocracy itself was an ill-judged reaction to an increasingly post-Christian society.  Moronic and revolting as the Moral Majority was, it did not come from a vacuum.  Modern values of extreme individual liberty and utilitarianism really are antithetical to classical Christianity, or indeed any form of Christianity which could ever hope to remain viable.  There are those who say this is all just the deeper implications of the Enlightenment working themselves out.  And there are those who retort that the Enlightenment itself was just a working out of the implications of the Protestant Reformation.  I don't know enough to say for sure, but it fits with what little I do know.

Re: persecution, the common argument goes that we can't be "persecuted" because real persecution is what goes on in China or Saudi Arabia.  The common retort is to point to ISIS throwing gay people off of buildings and ask what all this gay-marriage fuss is about.    I don't know that I would call it persecution myself.  Persecution is active.  Here it's more that society has bifurcated, and as the alienation grows each side makes a bugbear of the other, and the other side controls all the dominant cultural institutions so their voice is louder.  The results are predictable, but far from the kind of targeted cruelty "persecution" implies.

[Buster's Uncle]

See my precious remarks about the political pendulum -I don't believe you recall the 70s in person- and more of the Reagan backlash was social than actually political, (with cable and computers and all muddying the issue hopelessly with the cultural change they wrought) or a man who swore in public couldn't have pulled off the Faldwell movement with people desperate for something, anything, to hold on to and believe in (politically) to save the world from the Ayatollah and disco and Gary Trudeau and gays and hippies and pron.  The left had run riot for almost two decades and frustration demanded the 'decent' people Take Back America.  They believed in Reagan, credulously against glaring evidence that he wasn't One OF Them, because they needed to believe.

I was saying at the time that Falwell would hate the theocracy he was working so hard to make - I don't know the demographics, but I think it would be Catholic if any shreds of democracy remained in there.

Fortunately, according to my pendulum interpretation of political history (and it also explains the Democrats and Republicans swapping places as the left and right parties in the 30s-40s) the Right having gone to alarming extremes increasingly for 35 years straight, now --- we're overdue for a swingback, which may have already begun.  I'll hide my guns in case Gary Trudeau comes to make Iranian hippy anal porn w/ me against my will.



Mo' of my religious art, now.  The ring was exactly where I hoped it was.  This was made off a cast I created from a plastic Green Lantern ring and simply carved, which is easy with lead.  (I also have a lead Green Lantern ring, though I never worked out a satisfactory way to make it green that didn't rub off fast when I actually wear it...)

[Buster's Uncle]

...I struck some real gold looking through all my renfair junk I hadn't touched in over 13 years, so thank God for that...

[Dio]

See my precious remarks about the political pendulum -I don't believe you recall the 70s in person- and more of the Reagan backlash was social than actually political, (with cable and computers and all muddying the issue hopelessly with the cultural change they wrought) or a man who swore in public couldn't have pulled off the Faldwell movement with people desperate for something, anything, to hold on to and believe in (politically) to save the world from the Ayatollah and disco and Gary Trudeau and gays and hippies and pron.  The left had run riot for almost two decades and frustration demanded the 'decent' people Take Back America.  They believed in Reagan, credulously against glaring evidence that he wasn't One OF Them, because they needed to believe.

I was saying at the time that Falwell would hate the theocracy he was working so hard to make - I don't know the demographics, but I think it would be Catholic if any shreds of democracy remained in there.

Fortunately, according to my pendulum interpretation of political history (and it also explains the Democrats and Republicans swapping places as the left and right parties in the 30s-40s) the Right having gone to alarming extremes increasingly for 35 years straight, now --- we're overdue for a swingback, which may have already begun.  I'll hide my guns in case Gary Trudeau comes to make Iranian hippy anal porn w/ me against my will.



Mo' of my religious art, now.  The ring was exactly where I hoped it was.  This was made off a cast I created from a plastic Green Lantern ring and simply carved, which is easy with lead.  (I also have a lead Green Lantern ring, though I never worked out a satisfactory way to make it green that didn't rub off fast when I actually wear it...)

If that metallic alloy has a high concentration of genuine lead (as in the element Pb), then I would handle it with extreme caution.

[Dio]

...I struck some real gold looking through all my renfair junk I hadn't touched in over 13 years, so thank God for that...

If you mean metallic items with a high percentage of authentic gold, than I give you a  . If you mean it in the sense of artistic or sentimental value; than I give you a  .