My claim is that for all religions which have been around for a long time, there are two levels of belief, which I will call "educated religion" (ER) and "popular religion" (PR). ER is the accurate version, but this is not saying that someone who embraces PR is not authentically religious, and it is also not to say that someone who purportedly embraces ER IS authentically religious. It depends on the individual.
Religion is not just for the educated but for anyone, and it is for this reason that religion is suspectible to vulgarization, to all sorts of add-ons and traditions that are not important in a religious sense, and often ridiculous. This is the very nature of the "popular."
What I set forth here is an explanation of a few concepts of ER, as I understand it (I did not make this up--it comes from reading ER texts in the Western tradition).
Belief: Belief in this or that doctrine is not as important as it might seem in PR. What really matters is integrity of belief. The enemy of religion is not sincere atheism, and certainly not hard science, but thoughtless worldliness. Sincere atheism, in fact, is a kind of religion, so to speak, in that the non-believer is engaged with ultimate issues (this is a definition, if you will, of religion).
Now there is a type of "smart-ass" atheism which is mere posturing, and means nothing from a religious point of view.
Faith: This does not mean believing something with no evidence. What it means is maintaining one's open-mindedness about one's religious belief in the face of what appears to be contrary evidence.
A mother loses her wonderful, promising child in a freak accident that is nobody's fault. She says to herself, quite reasonably, how could God do this? Either there is no God or he is a cruel being.
When something traumatic happens, we tend to define the entire universe based on that traumatic event. Faith tells us not to do this--or at least to try not to. Look at the big picture. Do not define the universe by one incident, or one thought, or one feeling.
However, other activities, not just trauma, can also have a distorting influence (an obsessive pleasure, for example).
Evidence: Evidence for a religious belief is not scientific. It's the sort of evidence that we use in daily life to make decisions.
Example of ER evidence: Conscience
I'm not a believer, but leaving that fact aside for the moment, the most compelling evidence for me is "conscience."
For the believer, conscience is something real, not a Freudian construct (which, after all, is also a non-scientific opinion).
How do we know for sure that conscience is real? Obviously, we don't know for sure--ER belief is not about certainty--but what we do know is that you don't have to be religious to have a conscience--indeed, often a very sensitive conscience. We can talk all we like (sometimes very glibly) about how our moral views are merely subjective or merely culture-driven, or whatever other tag of relativity you choose to use, but if someone examines their feelings in an unbiased way, I think we will find that our ideas of justice seem pretty damned real. This to me is a very telling point (if somebody doesn't feel this, of course, it would mean nothing to them. I'm assuming that most people do).
{the "argument from conscience" is elaborated very completely in the ER text, John Henry Newman's "The Grammar of Assent," which is not fresh in my mind and which I did not fully grasp anyway).
Sometimes people tend to talk about our sense of right and wrong (or, figuratively, heaven and hell) in a very one-sided fashion. "It's a way of assigning our enemies to hell," they say sarcastically. They seem not to realize that it is also a way of assigning OURSELVES to hell. ER literature is fulll of accounts of feelings of guilt to the point of deep despair ("the dark night of the soul"). Conscience is not just about judging others; more importantly, it's about judging ourselves.
So if we take conscience seriously, we realize that we live in a world that is thoroughly moral (by this, of course, I don't mean that the world is good). Now, the more I think of this, the more I find this idea rather unpleasant. I would prefer the world to be thoroughly aesthetic or something.
But what I like will not do away with these strong feelings about justice and injustice. I can't explain these feelings away with the latest fad in pop psychology.
I'll stop here.
I'll just add that "sincere atheism"--though it is to be treated with respect--is considered by ER an undeveloped or immature religious view.
This message has been edited by robinrohan, 01-06-2005 14:04 AM
This message has been edited by robinrohan, 01-06-2005 14:13 AM
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