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On Faith and Doubt

Tuesday, May 25th, 2010

Despite the dazzling variety which makes up the universal Christian mosaic, it is my belief that all Christians can be described as either conservative or free thinking. To create a simple dichotomy I would posit the former is closed minded and the later is open minded. People of course do not fall easily into stringent intellectual boxes. In reality people will merge between the two categories or may by conservative in some regards and free thinking in others. Be that as it may, there is still some gain to be made in investigating the two camps, crude though they may be.

So what makes a person conservative or free thinking? I think it is important to establish immediately that it is not related to any certain belief. You can easily find two Christians who believe virtually the exact same thing and yet one is closed minded and the other open. The difference between theological conservatism and free thinking has everything to do with the reaction to contrary or heterodox beliefs rather than the maintaining of accepted beliefs. Hence, this analysis could quite comfortably be extended to closed and open minded people in general, however, for the purpose of this article we will narrow our eyes to the Christian prism.

It can be psychologically distressing for a person to encounter a person who fundamentally rejects an idea or ideas which you hold to be obviously true. Historically the Christian Church has something of a disastrous record stemming from its conservative tendency. The discoveries of Galileo are a case in point. Rather than being thrilled by the prospect of new knowledge, there was a knee-jerk reaction to muzzle and reject Galileo because his discoveries in astronomy contradicted certain dogma which had built up.

Although there were of course political reasons also, the crusades and the treatment of Jews by the medieval Church are also indicative of conservative Christianity. The conservative mind by nature is terrified by ideas contrary to the ones held to be true. Hence, the conservative Christian is visibly uncomfortable in the presence of Jews, Muslims and people of other or no faith. The physical violence and other persecution inflicted upon minority religions by the medieval church reveals a zealousness, not to promote or protect Christianity per se, but rather to snuff out any rival voice.

Why do conservative Christians act thus and so? Increasingly modern psychology is agreeing that the dogmatic insistence that a person’s beliefs are completely correct is not a manifestation of faith but rather of doubt. It is more or less accepted by the psychological community that when humans have a trauma which the conscious mind does not want to deal with it is pushed into the unconscious mind. When applied to conservative Christianity, the evidence appears to suggest that closed minded behaviour is a psychological mask for deep rooted insecurities. People who find it too terrible to contemplate that perhaps part or all of Christianity is wrong, comfort themselves by insisting all the more loudly that it is absolutely right and blocking voices which disagree.

So perhaps the difference between the conservative and the free thinking Christian is the ability to admit their doubts. The free thinking Christian brings their doubt from the unconscious to the conscious mind and is therefore able to deal with it rationally. As a result you get the thoughts of the French philosopher Blaise Pascal and his famous wager. A Christian free thinker is open to the idea that there may be truth to be found in other religions and there may be untruth in our own. Consequently a critical evaluation is always in play with Christian free thinkers. It is no small irony that conservative Christians will accept the fundamental shift in ideas brought about by Saint Augustine, Saint Julian of Norwich, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther or the Second Vatican Council but will reject the catalyst for all innovation and progress in Christian thought; open minded, freethinking.

It is tempting at this point to introduce a few specific topics where I think conservative Christians really need to check whether their conviction is based on reason and truth or merely dogma and tradition but I feel that may dilute what I wanted to be a simple observation about two types of Christian.

I will content myself with saying this; we are imperfect creatures with imperfect minds and we are incapable of possessing absolute truth. We are mere travellers on this planet who can from time to time glimpse perfect beauty and truth but can never be the master of it. We all have doubt. Whether we push it into our unconscious or can admit it will make us closed or open minded. We should not be ashamed of our doubt. It is part of our human condition. It does not make our faith or the truth we hold to any less real. Doubt is not a fear of commitment or the trait of a weak Christian, it is the acknowledgment of the full complexity of the Christian worldview. Free thinking Christianity is a humble admission that we may not have all the answers. The father of the sick child in Mark 9:24 put it well when with tears in his eyes he said, ‘I believe; help thou mine unbelief’.

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Schopenhauer, Animal Rights and Biblical Literalism

Saturday, May 1st, 2010

The German philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer, and New South Wales share a common birth year, 1788. By the time of his death in 1860, he was acknowledged as a skilled thinker and posthumously is viewed as one of the great contributors to the Western philosophical tradition. In 1851 he released Parerga und Paralipomena. Although it covers many areas the interest here is with his views on animals.

Here is what he says:    

Another fundamental error of Christianity is that it has in an unnatural fashion sundered mankind from the animal world to which it essentially belongs and now considers mankind alone as of any account, regarding the animals as no more than things. This error is a consequence of creation out of nothing, after which the Creator, in the first and second chapters of Genesis, takes all the animals just as if they were things, and without so much as the recommendation of kind treatment which even a dog-seller usually adds when he parts with his dogs, hands them over to man for man to rule, that is to do with them what he likes; subsequently, in the second chapter, the Creator goes on to appoint him the first professor of zoology by commissioning him to give the animals the names they shall thenceforth bear, which is once more only a symbol of their total dependence on him, i.e their total lack of rights.

It can truly be said: Men are the devils of the earth, and the animals are the tormented souls … It is obviously high time that the Jewish conception of nature, at any rate in regards to animals, should come to an end in Europe, and that the eternal being which, as it lives in us, also lives in every animal should be recognised as such, and as such treated with care and consideration. One must be blind deaf and dumb, or completely chloroformed by the foetor judacicus, not to see that the animal is in essence absolutely the same thing that we are, and that the difference lies merely in the accident, the intellect, and not in the substance, which is the will.

The greatest benefit conferred by the railways is that they spare millions of draught-horses their miserable existence.    

The first thing I would highlight is that Schopenhauer’s dismissal of ‘creation out of nothing’ must be read in its historical context. To modern ears it sounds rather weak for what is the Big Bang theory if not creation out of nothing? In Schopenhauer’s time, however, the popular arm of anti-theism supposed that the universe was itself eternal and many of the Romantic poets of the day, essentially worshipped nature. Schopenhauer, as the extract reveals, was a theist but not a Christian under any orthodox banner. He believed in a transcendent spirit of good and bad but denied their personification as G-D and the devil.

Schopenhauer’s views on animal rights cannot be seen entirely as a Christian versus non-Christian debate. On the one hand he was arguing the similarly anti-Christian Baruch de Spinoza who held rather an antithesis view on the matter. Inside the Christian world there was also a range of opinions. The Catholic canon is littered with discourses on animals and their role in the world. Many sects of the Protestant tradition held a ‘dominion over the animals’ mentality, however, this way of thinking declined rapidly in the nineteenth century. London’s Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was formed in 1841, much to Schopenhauer’s delight. Less to his delight, one imagines, would be the dominating presence of Christian ministers and lay-people in both the London chapter and the equivalents which sprang up around the world.       

I suppose what appeals to me most is Schopenhauer’s rejection of biblical literalism. Those familiar with my thoughts will be already aware that I strongly reject the literalist approach and feel the Bible needs to be rescued away from Fundamentalists. Hence, I very much see eye to eye with Schopenhauer when he insists that Genesis can not be entertained as an accurate work of science. Whatever truth lies in the Bible is surely to be gleaned through a philosophical and metaphysical prism (and it is there Schopenhauer and I part company).

To my mind, the Bible can not reasonably be called the word of G-D. It is, to paraphrase Bishop Spong, the word of men trying to reach the mind of G-D, but their humanity got in the way. The Bible contains a wealth of wisdom and, its greatest component, the philosophy of the most influential man to ever live. Be that as it may, it is pregnant with cultural and time specific bias. Modern Western cultural norms with regards to women, slavery and mental illness (i.e demon possession) are completely alien from the various historical periods when the books of the Bible were penned. To this list Schopenhauer happily adds the treatment of animals.

It is truly ironic that for Fundamentalist Christians the Bible itself has become the golden calf it preaches against. If the Bible is read blindly, as if an invisible general gave you specific orders concerning every facet of your life, it can lead only to elitism, homophobia, sexism and all shades of discrimination. It is used poorly when the intellectually lazy hide behind it as their excuse for not thinking. If, however, it is taken in proper historical and philosophical context, the Bible may just be the greatest book you ever read.        

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Pulp Fiction and the existential crisis

Monday, April 19th, 2010

Quentin Tarantino is one of the finest directors of his generation. He is an obsessive devourer of film and a dynamic creator. He has an acute talent for blending sound, colour and dialogue into a rich tapestry which both acknowledges and builds upon some of the greatest filmic traditions. His work is famous for being shocking and provocative. That said, Tarantino is not a philosopher. I do not watch his films with a curious mind seeking to expunge the syllogisms and maxims being presented. As such, I was surprised to hear a lecture in which the professor of Apologetics at Oxford, Dr  Ravi Zacharias used a scene from Pulp Fiction to illustrate how secularism, though a good thing in and of itself, has been abused and contributes to our post-modern crisis; the loss of meaning.

The scene Zacharias is taken by appears early in the film where John Travolta’s and Samuel L Jackson’s characters are driving to a location with the intent of committing a mass murder. As they drive, however, there is joviality in the car. They are calm and enjoying a casual conversation. The trip has a relaxed atmosphere despite the fact they are about to commit a shocking crime. The dialogue is as follows:

VINCENT: In Paris, you can buy beer at MacDonald’s. Also, you know what they call a Quarter Pounder with Cheese in Paris?

JULES: They don’t call it a Quarter Pounder with Cheese?

VINCENT: No, they got the metric system there, they wouldn’t know what the fuck a Quarter Pounder is.

JULES: What’d they call it?

VINCENT: Royale with Cheese.

JULES: Royale with Cheese? What’d they call a Big Mac?

VINCENT: Big Mac’s a Big Mac, but they call it Le Big Mac.

So what is going on here? Had you asked me before I would have said it is quite simple. The innocent sounding chitchat is a filmic device used in juxtaposition to the gravity of the scene about to come. Tarantino is deliberately trivialising murder in order to shock his audience and perhaps to make a comment on how society at large also trivialises murder.

Whether or not Tarantino intended it, Zacharias reads far deeper into this little piece of dialogue. The statement being made here is that cultures retain sovereignty over definition. There is no essential difference in the food but culture retains the right to define it however it pleases. Nothing has an intrinsic self but rather we confer value upon things.

This may seem an unimportant distinction when we are talking about burgers. When this theory, however, is applied to the Western secularised conciseness, the consequences become dire. If nothing has an intrinsic self anymore then good and evil can longer survive as intellectual categories. Rather than we conforming to them, they must conform to us and be watered down until they resemble nothing more than your personal preference and my equally valid preference.

What then happens to the idea of sin? It is another ontological category which cannot survive the existential blade. If cultures are given sovereignty over definition then we lose any objective point of moral value. The murderer and the rapist are no longer sinful but merely sick. And what of the myriad of smaller sins? What of the greed, lust, anger, jealousy and bitterness which manifests itself every day? When these were called sin they would produce a sense of shame. But there is no need for shame anymore, we can call these things whatever we want.

Robert Fitch put it this way in 1959, “Ours is an age where ethics has become obsolete. It is superceded by science, deleted by philosophy and dismissed as emotive by psychology. It is drowned in compassion, evaporates into aesthetics and retreats before relativism. The usual moral distinctions between good and bad are simply drowned in a maudlin emotion in which we feel more sympathy for the murderer than for the murdered, for the adulterer than for the betrayed, and in which we have actually begun to believe that the real guilty party, the one who somehow caused it all, is the victim, and not the perpetrator of the crime.”

This is the scenario facing us as we strive intrepidly to remove G-D completely from all public life and, if militant Atheists had their way, from private life also. The greatest Atheistic thinker of all time, certainly of the nineteenth century, Friedrich Nietzsche spoke very honestly about the ramifications of removing G-D from society. In his famous parable, The Madman, he commented on the death of G-D:

“Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning?”

Nietzsche recognised that without an objective point of moral reference there would be no up and down, no black and white, no right and no wrong. Because man killed G-D, Nietzsche asks, “must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?” This is the ultimate manifestation of the anti-theistic worldview which has come to dominate the academy and which is trying to dominate society at large. We have become god ourselves and we alone will decide what is right and wrong.

Looking back on the horror of the twentieth century, a century which has spilled more blood than the previous nineteen put together, I wonder what is in store for us in this new century. Can we afford to entertain a worldview which allows two young men to drive to a mass murder with no sense of shame? Shame comes from the acknowledgement of sin being committed. Sin comes from the acknowledgement of a moral code or good and evil. A moral code requires a moral code giver and only G-D is big enough to do that. Without G-D all our morals are meaningless. They are the sum total of our societal laws and cultural preferences. They are ephemeral, like the wind they are here one day and gone the next.

Have you ever seen your own heart? Anti-theistic thinkers cling blindly to the theory of a Tabula Rasa. History’s rivers of blood continually debunk this notion. The human heart is desperately wicked and longs for redemption. As long as we retain the sovereignty over definition we will never condemn ourselves. We will always make excuses and devise even more sinister ways to feed the evil which is already there. It is only when we accept G-D’s definition that we see ourselves as we truly are and can accept the truth which stands large behind every episode of human wickedness; humanity needs a saviour. 

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The absurdity of forced belief

Wednesday, April 14th, 2010

Imagine being chained to a bench in a dark, Soviet-style cell. Imagine being beaten and tortured mercilessly. Imagine being left alone for days without any human contact and then without seeming cause or reason, tortured again. You cry from agony and despair, you shriek from exhaustion and desperation, ‘what do you want from me?’ ‘What does 2+2 equal?’ ‘Four’ you mutter in confusion. ‘But let us suppose’, your interrogator continues, ‘Big Brother says 2+2=5.’ ‘What then does 2+2 equal?’ ‘Still four,’ you exclaim. The torture resumes even more intensely. ‘What does 2+2 equal?’ you are asked again. ‘Four! Five! Four! Anything you like, just stop the pain!’

This was the fate of Winston Smith, the humble hero from George Orwell’s nightmarish vision of the future, Nineteen Eighty-Four. It is well documented, of course, that with few notable exceptions, a person being tortured will do or say anything. For every Saint Thomas More, preferring to be burnt at the stake than renounce his Catholicism, there are hundreds of millions who will do anything to avoid physical pain. Even in More’s case, as Blackadder once pointed out, he must have been kicking himself as the flames licked higher that it hadn’t occurred to him to say, ‘I recant my Catholicism.’ Who of us, broken, bloodied, starving and sleep deprived would not scream at the top of our lungs, ‘yes, 2+2=5’? But even then, could any of us really mean it? Despite every sadistic, manipulative tactic, could anyone make you really believe that 2+2=5?

The Christian Church has historically held a central thesis which can be expressed by the popular epigram, ‘turn or burn.’ It is worth considering though, is this any different to Big Brother’s tactics in Orwell’s dystopia? The only real difference is that Big Brother tortures his victims immediately, the ‘turn or burn’ brand of Christianity scares its members with eternal torture in the next life. Even then, as utterly horrendous as an eternity of unimaginable torture sounds, deep in your heart, could you actually make yourself believe that 2+2=5?

To my mind, especially in post-modern times, this tactic, readily viewable in the Evangelical community, is both vacuous and self-defeating. Evangelicals will often use as a selling point that they, unlike the rest of us, know for sure what happens after they die. This ideology is drilled into the faithful; certain Heaven awaits our ranks, certain Hell awaits those who reject our message. The altar call asks, ‘if you died tonight, do you know for certain where you would go?’ They seem never to ask, ‘if you don’t die tonight, what will be the logical basis for your moral and ethical compass? On what rational grounds will you hold your belief? What will be your reason for living?’ The whole premise which keeps this maxim alive is that no one questions the essential rightness of the Church’s message and no one is allowed to even think that maybe parts or all of it is wrong. ‘I know that I know that I know’ is an acceptable argument for belief in fundamentalist circles but as Winston Smith despaired in his journal, ‘Thoughtcrime does not entail death, thoughtcrime IS death.’

The culture of thoughtcrime which permeates through so much of modern Christianity is jejune and counter-productive. If G-D is loving and just, it makes no sense to believe He sits perched on a judgmental cloud condemning people because they don’t believe 2+2=5. Why is the Church’s first reaction to demonise and discredit people like Galileo and Darwin? Where does this opposition to free thinking and intellectual exploration come from?

Let me clarify something. I do not for a minute claim that Christianity is illogical in the way 2+2=5 is. I suggest this; if your proselytising tactic is fear of torture, then it doesn’t matter what the message is. Logical or illogical, people will say anything to avoid pain in this or any other life.

The pathetic irony in all of this is that so many of the great heroes of the Christian faith were free thinkers. Many were ex-communicated or threatened for challenging the established Church. From Augustine to Aquinas, from Joan of Arc to Martin Luther, from Mary MacKillop to Jesus Christ, every step forward began with questions. Is this right? Is this fair? Is this logical? Should this change?    

If the Christian Church, in its myriad forms, is to retain any relevance and meaning in a post-Galileo world, in a post-Darwin world and in a post-Freud world, this ‘my way or the highway (to Hell)’ mentality must be turned on its head. The demand that Christianity must not be questioned should be superseded by a demand that everything be questioned. Not everything will survive. Some ideas will bleed to death under the logician’s blade. The draconian treatment of Gay, Lesbian, Bi-sexual and Trans-gender people by mainstream Christianity is one such feature which can’t survive rational interrogation. But at least the Christianity which does survive this level of intellectual critique will be strong, intelligent and full of hope. The Christianity which invites scrutiny can offer answers to a hurting world and can truly evoke Christ’s purpose, to show people how they might have life abundantly.

Does Christianity have anything to offer the world? If the answer is no then it might as well start a new crusade and use the meanest violence to solicit forced conversions. If, however, the answer is yes then the Church needs to surrender its wig and gavel and start engaging with humanity on a level playing field. Every other idea in the world submits itself willingly to intellectual evaluation, why not Christianity? Why like some celestial bully would G-D simply wave his clenched fist shouting, ‘believe or else?’ If the Church posits with humility rather than haughtiness some of the logical reasons why a world based on Christ’s principles of love, forgiveness and reconciliation may be a better one, then people may less inclined to view Christianity with suspicion and contempt.

Our intellect, our sense of reason, our powers of observation and deduction are not curses to torment us but blessings to help us. We have the ability, to think, to critique and to believe; we should do all three.

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