In the spirit of some of the recent political posts, I’d like to take this opportunity to do some unscientific polling on the readership of this blog. The question is as follows:
Is your faith fundamentally similar to that of your parents?
It seems clear that family and ethnic background play an important role in the formation of a person’s views, ideas, and inclinations. Traditions are passed down from previous generations, leaving each culture with a rich variety of preferences. If I am Indian, there is a statistical likelihood that I enjoy curry. If I am Polish, there is a good chance I might like Polka music.
Should the same apply for my religion? After all, we are talking about the big questions. In many cases, we must deal in absolutes: God exists or he does not. In my view, cultural preferences need not apply.
Someone who has grown up in a happy Christian family with a loving and supportive church community might see no harm in continuing her parents’ traditions. After all, why change something if it works? The temporal comforts derived from her beliefs make them worthwhile. For many, this is entirely satisfactory.
But what about those concerned with truth? How can they ever be sure their answers to the big questions aren’t simply a result of the indoctrination they received as children?
6.7 billion people walk this planet; 2 billion of which are Christian. As hard as our missionary friends may be working, Christians must surely accept that their absolute truths would likely have been very different were they raised among the remaining 4.7.
2 comments:
Well, this is actually one of my biggest concerns lately, and I thank Nick for bringing it up.
It began for me in China when at the end of a 50 hour train ride, I finally launched into a spiritual conversation with the person next to me who happened to speak English, and suddenly the entire car was paying attention. People stood on their seats to see over the shoulders of the people who had crowded around. Scholars with beer cans and sunflower seeds, peasants with sacks of grain overhead on the shelves, smartly dressed students pausing in their texting, mothers with crying babies, all paid attention because everything that was said was translated back and forth.
And everything I said was met with a baffled, simple, straightforward, "But God doesn't exist." And I lost the debate.
I couldn't gain any ground, no matter what I said and I felt small in my belief and alone. That smallness made me realize that as much as I looked down on all of them for buying the "Chinese Communist atheistic brainwashing," I had nothing more to offer them than my own personal experience. And how does my experience differ from theirs but that I've had a different belief system plugged into my authority's downspout? I've never been outside of my faith or my upbringing. Is it even possible to be?
So this movement in my heart has been developing until now it has led me to undertake a reading of the Koran under the guidance of an Imam at a mosque here in Portland. I am hoping to analyze the level of the power of its words as compared to the power of the words of the Bible on me (even two nights ago I was reading the Sermon on the Mount and my heart quickened like it always does).
I thank Nick for this timely challenge and I hope that we can all bolster each other in this search for truth. My faith is that God is truth, the God that I've known, that I've been raised to believe in, and that I've seen in the Bible and experience. But I have come to the conclusion that I have to risk that faith at some point to truly hold it.
Incidentally, maybe I'm deluding myself but I find significance in that this concern is moving in both my heart and Nick's at the same time, even if from different perspectives.
This is Dave writing, I couldn't remember my password. Nic, thanks for the topic. I confess, though, that I'm not sure what you are implying. I agree with your assertion, that our beliefs are unavoidably situated by our geography and heritage. I'm more curious where you want to go with that.
There are a couple of threads that I want to note from our own Christian tradition that at least touch on this.
First, there is a curious passage in Amos 9:7, God is portrayed as using exodus language in describing peoples other than the Israelites, implying that Israel is not uniquely God's people. This is in the wider context of the book of Amos that begins by lambasting Israel's neighbors for sins that should have been known via natural theology. Amos certainly sees a broader perspective than the usual particularity that Israel often theologizes about.
Second, in 1 John 2:1-2, John writes an atonement theology that seems to be universalist. The whole world is saved by Jesus' death. This is particularly interesting considering that much of John's theology is very apocalyptic, dividing the world into an us/them using analogies such as light/dark, good/evil, and disciples/world. Taken at face value, which I think should be at least the first reading of this text, John seems to be saying that the world (which he states in other places rejects Jesus) is saved by Jesus.
Third, Jesus himself makes a similarly universalizing move himself in the parable of the sheep and the goats. Here it is not those who know the name of the Lord who are saved, but rather those who practice hospitality.
I've been really interested recently in Emmanuel Levinas, a Jewish philosopher, who speaks similarly in stating that the heart of religion is ethics. For Levinas, hospitality to the other is the beginning and end of both religion and ethics. This doesn't seem far off from what Jesus does in the parable of the sheep and goats.
Of course, I'm still talking from within my own religious tradition, even if I am trying to expand its boundary-making tendencies. However, I don't think this is bad. We can escape our situatedness, nor do I think we should. My own religious heritage gives me a structure by which I can understand and move within the world, no matter how marginalizing, arrogant, or misshapen Christianity has become.
Religion is for lovers, John Caputo (my new favorite author) says. I think this statement is in line with the life of Jesus. I also think this is not too far off from the early church fathers' talk of proto-Christians, such as the Greek philosophers who taught virtuous living. If, then, religion is for lovers, which, incidentally, seems to be what John says in 1 John (God is love), then I am not so concerned with what people believe as how people believe. My litmus test is not a doctrinal statement but rather how one welcomes the stranger. I take this to mean there are some "Christians" who are very far from God and some buddhists who are very near to God.
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