The Fredösphere

Churchgoers who suffer a crisis of faith when the pastor is caught in sin . . . infantrymen who are fervent in the foxhole and lax on leave . . . those (the majority) who "inherit" their fundamental theological and philosophical beliefs direct and unexamined from their parents . . . I don't get them. Oh, when it comes to a failure to live according to one's beliefs in a consistent way, that I've figured out, through repeated empirical tests. Still, my fundamental theism has never suffered a sustained crisis, and is only disturbed in the briefest episodes which are always associated with sinful behavior--that is, when aligned with short-term self-interest--and is thereby self-refuting.

Which is why I'm linking to a post by Ross Douthat, who articulates better than anyone I've found the philosophical foundation of my faith. Like anything rooted in metaphysics, it is somewhat vague and definitely narrow in its implications, but it cuts deep and, so far, has proved unassailable by experience, even by a fairly severe health crisis and the erosive workings of time.

Here's the good part, which references Bertrand Russell's famous teapot analogy, beloved by those who dismiss religion as "fairy tales":

This analogy - like its modern descendant, the Flying Spaghetti Monster - makes a great deal of sense if you believe that the idea of God is an absurdity dreamed up by crafty clerics in darkest antiquity and subsequently imposed on the human mind by force and fear, and that it only survives for want of brave souls willing to note how inherently absurd the whole thing is. As you might expect, I see the genesis of religion rather differently: An intuitive belief in some sort of presiding Agent seems to be an extremely common, albeit hardly universal, feature of human nature; this intuition has intersected, historically, with an enormous amount of subjective religious experience; and this intersection (along with, yes, the force of custom and tradition) has produced and sustained the religious traditions that seem to Richard Dawkins and company like so much teapot-worship. The story of our civilization, in particular, is a story in which an extremely large circle of non-insane human beings have perceived themselves to be experiencing an interaction with a being who seems recognizable as the Judeo-Christian God (here I do feel comfortable using the term), rather than merely being taught about Him in Sunday School. I am unaware of anything similar holding true for orbiting pots or flying noodle beasts. And without the persistence of this perceived interaction (and beneath it, the intuitive belief in some kind of God), it's difficult to imagine religious belief playing anything like the role it does in human affairs, no matter how many ancient scriptures there were propping the whole thing up.

Labels: Religion