I am a Christian. I am a religious person. In fact, wish I were more so. I wish I more religiously cared for my own mind and body; more religiously cared for my family and more religiously served my neighbors. I wish I more religiously acted on the decisions I make when I have the eyes to see and the ears to hear clearly.  I wish I more religiously practiced and acted on what I believe to be True and Good and Beautiful.  I am a religious man because I practice what I believe and only wish I were more faithful to my religion.

Perhaps obviously, I’m responding to the viral video entitled “Why I Hate Religion But Love Jesus.”  Even side from the generally false and far-too-easy accusations leveled against “churches,” the young brother’s poem is an example of what I find worst in religious practice: reactive emotionalism.  I believe I understand  what he’s reacting to. The cross-cultural, multi-ethnic, multi-generational, communal practice of Christianity is often messy and sometimes downright ugly. Yet I would suggest that the thing to do in response to poorly practiced religion is to work at practicing it well and helping others to do the same.   

Serve the poor. 
Support single mothers. 
Visit and encourage the imprisoned.  
Pray. 
Study. 
Sing. 
Heal. 

All of which are outward evidences and practices of inward convictions and beliefs

Religion is exactly that; the outward practice of my inward conviction and belief.  It is the pattern created by regularly and consistently (and communally) acting on what I believe.  Without the outward work of my life (my religion), the inward conviction I have regarding the Goodness, Truth and Beauty of God in Christ is meaningless (James 2:14-26). I practice my faith regularly and consistently instead of allowing it to be an emotionally-rooted and nearly thoughtless sequence of reactions, each with a life-span roughly equivalent to that of a YouTube video’s popularity.

This is the continuation of a conversation between myself and a friend who is an atheist/naturalist.  He and I agree on Batman and beer. We disagree on issues of religion and whether or not Chis Evans made a good Captain America. We’ll be trading questions and answers on our blogs regarding issues of atheism, naturalism and religion. Yesterday, I addressed a few side-issues in Lance’s post regarding “good.”

Now, to the main point… I originally asked “Can you describe the “good” religious faith is an obstacle to?”

You wrote… “good is what’s beneficial to us as a species”

I would agree. Yet, you have not accounted for why it would be good for humanity to survive. You assume we ought to.  In other words, at the root of your definition of “good” is an assumption about the basic value of human life; that it is worth preserving. This assumption is not arrived at by way of reason.  I would suggest that it is, in fact, the root from which reason grows and without which reason becomes every inch the terrifying tool religion or economics can be.  The brick mill owner who enslaves his workers has every reason to do so in light of the profits cheap labor helps him bring in. He does not offend reason by enslaving people.. his end is profit and cheap labor simply makes sense.  What is offended is a basic assumption of what people are worth or what people are for. People ought not be valued only for their utility. The life of a child ought not be compromised for the sake of profit. Reason does not tell me this; I assume it. And without that assumption, I can reason myself to just about anything.

You pointed out a handful of the atrocities humanity has perpetrated upon itself in your post.  All of these things are tragic for the very reason that they are a departure from basic value. In other words, if the Crusades were tragic or wrong (and I agree they were), it is because the freedom to choose is of value and was corrupted/compromised/broken.  Likewise, if Kamikaze piloting or the attaches on 9/11 are tragic or wrong, it is because human life is of value and was corrupted/compromised/broken.

If I do not make an assumption about the basic value of human life, then the only reasonable way to evaluate the goodness of Kamikaze piloting is whether or not it helps win a war. You are suggesting that, regardless of it’s strategic impact, something about using flying planes into populated areas is bad. Yet you’ve not given me a foundational reason to think so. You’ve assumed that life should be more important than that.

Alongside the travesties you cited, consider some even greater and more pervasive atrocities propagated by the species we ought to preserve…

…a species that compromises the quality of life of some for the simple or even sick pleasures of others (ex. cheap labor, indentured servitude and sex slavery.. est. 27million people worldwide).

…a species that allows half of it’s population to live in destitute poverty (est. 900mil. people without access to clean drinking water).

…a species that often takes the best of its fruits and uses them for the worst of it’s intentions (nuclear, chemical warfare).

…a species that largely disregards the well-being of the planet upon which it lives, even to the detriment of its own survival.

…a species that seemingly invents ways to hurt itself (smoking, fast food,.. Ke$ha).

What makes such a species worth preserving?

In an early episode of Battlestar Galactica (the greatest show in the history of television), one of the cylons asks a powerful question to the commander of the Galactica.  After years and years of war between cylons (created by humanity) and humanity, the cylon asks if humanity  has ever asked itself why it deserved to survive… poignantly, the commander does not have an answer.

Note that I am not at all pointing at a Divine Source for value; only that there seems to be something more basic than reason by which we come to understand, albeit incomplete, what “good” is.

Your example of helping a blind woman without having been told to contains the same assumption. You wrote… “Nobody and no deity needs to tell me that. I can figure it out for myself.” But you didn’t figure it out. “I should help blind women” is not a conclusion you came to after years of study and careful consideration of societal norms and/or cost-benefit analysis.  Something about passing up on that opportunity would offend the basic value you and I both stand on when we critique our world. We refer to the same basic value.. the same universal good.  It is when, for whatever “reason,” be it economic, religious or otherwise, one of us deviates from such that basic thing that we start to use see actions as “bad” or “wrong.”

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Question:  You wrote…“whatever is helpful for the greatest number of people is what’s good.” I honestly don’t understand this and could use an example of where or how you see this played out.  It sounds like the kind of thing that could spell trouble for minority groups like the elderly, who make up only about 8% of the earth’s population and take a great deal of money, time and energy to care for. Can you please elaborate?

This is the beginning of a conversation between myself and a friend of mine who is an atheist/naturalist.  He and I agree on Batman and beer. We disagree on issues of religion and whether or not Chis Evans made a good Captain America. We’ll be trading questions and answers on our blogs regarding issues of atheism, naturalism and religion, beginning with the question I posed to him:

You’ve stated that religious faith is bad for people. This implies some kind of good; a universal good, at that. Can you describe the “good” religious faith is an obstacle to?  Is it a universal good; can it be applied to all people?

You can read Lance’s full response here.  Below I respond to his response… 
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Lance,

There are too many points in your post to address in a single response.  Your critiques of faith particularly deserve some attention. We should plan on digging into some of them separately. For now, I am going to post one response today and one tomorrow. I will use this first post to touch on a few things I think need addressing and then tomorrow post a response regarding the original main point, which was establishing some description of what “good” religious faith keeps people from, thereby making it “bad for people,” as you stated in your intro.

Firstly, regarding the blanket/universal nature of my question: It stems from your statement that “religion is bad for people,” which is a universal statement. In fact, even your qualification that, for some people religion is only “as bad as a mosquito bite” while for others it is as bad as nuclear warfare still implies that it is always bad and does nothing to detract from the universal nature of your initial critique. I’m not forcing universality on you, just pointing it out in your own language.

Particular things I felt needed a response:

You wrote…“Reason will get us out of the messes that we’re in today – from global warming to figuring out how to get food to starving people.”

As I understand it, the issue with such things as hunger has never been the capacity or ability of humanity to deal with it’s brokenness, it has generally been a matter of care or will.  There has almost always been enough food in production to fill the stomachs of the earth’s in habitants.  Yet, providing that food for those who lack it is difficult… It would cost a great deal of time and money. The obstacle is the absence of a willingness to pay the price. “They” are not worth what it would cost “us.”

I’ll make it more personal: I could give more of my time, resources and money to/for the poor.  I could also greatly decrease my “carbon footprint” by never driving again and limiting my goings on to only a geography I can access by foot or bike. Yet, in either case, even though I know I would be maximizing my effectiveness by making such changes, I choose not to as a matter of convenience; I don’t want to… I don’t care enough… and reason cannot tell me why I should care.

You wrote…“While faith is not needed to do good, it is too easily used to justify bad.” / “faith gives people reason for doing bad things.”

I think you are talking about religious systems here rather than “faith” as an idea or a posture.  Regardless, what you are doing is paramount to blaming baseball as a sport for the poor performance of its teams. To say that people use something for ill purpose is to say something of people rather than the thing being used. We could (and should) quite as easily say the same about economics or political power.  For instance, countless young women and children are caught in slave-like jobs (if not outright slavery itself) because their cheap labor makes the way for cheap products to bring in enormous profits for the likes of WalMart or H&M.  Do we blame a general theories of economic or do we consider instead the motives and ill practices of those in the ranks of such companies?

Though I agree that evil behavior is far to often justified by religious sentiment, it seems that the propensity to do harm is prevalent well beyond religious boundaries.  In other words, we do “bad” things and then look for ways to justify our behavior. If it isn’t religion, it’s economics or something else. Again, this is more about something amiss in people than the tools we use to carry out our actions.

You wrote…  “…the problem with faith is that it actively encourages followers to not question.” // “Faith makes people stop asking questions.”

When faith if poorly executed, it does look like this. But you grossly oversimplify “faith” here.  I’d like to write a great deal more about this in future conversations but for the time being and for the sake of focus, I’ll point at a short and very simplified reflection on faith I wrote up a few months back  and hope to return to this topic later in this conversation.

Tomorrow I will return to our main point and answer the questions Lance posed in his blog:

Do YOU think that there’s a “universal good”? If so, how do you know what it is?

If there is one, then why is there so much disagreement as to what’s good and what isn’t – even amongst people of the same religion?

If it’s impossible to know for sure the mind of a being who decides what’s good and what isn’t, then how is that different from us having to figure it out the same as if there wasn’t such a being?

CMYK is a color spectrum most of us have encountered. If you’ve ever looked closely at a printed image you may have seen the tiny cyan, magenta, yellow and black dots characteristic of the CMYK color printing process. Each color is important, otherwise the printed images aren’t as vibrant as they should be. My desire with the CMY(K) project is to highlight “colors” in the spectrum of the human experience that are often regarded as too dark or even ugly when isolated. In part I’ll do this by arranging them next to  “colors” of the human experience that are more readily recognized as good, true or beautiful.

Midway through Terrence Malick’s brilliant film “Tree of Life” is a sermon in which appears the phrase “He alone sees God who sees when God turns His back as well as when He turns His face.” Those who say that God is ‘unfair’ or ‘absent’ are saying something as vital and as true as those who say that God is ‘just’ or ‘faithful.’  Therefore, experiences and expressions of disappointment or abandonment are necessary elements (colors) in a picture of the good life, rather than defects that need treatment.

Many of the songs that make up CMY(K) are stories of friends whose picture of life and God is a great deal more dappled and complicated than they expected. Some are songs for friends who no longer consider faith in God possible at all. Some are personal reflections on the facets of life that have affected these loved ones of mine.  All of them are songs that fit within the long, multicolored Christian tradition of seeing God both face to face and with His back turned.

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The first installment of this project is available now.

I met a young man in S. Carolina who had recently become the pastor of a church.  His father and grandfather had pastored churches before him.  The pastoralvocation was as much a part of his identity as his race or gender. He was made to serve God as a shepherd of people. Then, in the years following his installation as pastor, a series of tragedies had beset his family, including the death of their youngest daughter.  He told me that the truths he preached and sang were still true to him but that they did not mean what they had meant previously.

It was true that God was faithful.. but that did not mean God always protected young children from the harms of the world.

It was true that God was good.. but that did not mean God explained Himself or His ways.

It was true that God was real… but that did not mean it appeared that way.

He asked me if I would write he and his wife a song. That was almost seven years ago. It has taken me that seven years grasp a small piece of the frustration, confusion and courage he and his family were wrapped in.

I’ll sing these songs for you
But they don’t mean quite what they used to
I’ll sing these words to you
But only really cuz I’m supposed to

Her absence is a presence
Far more tangible than yours
Her silence has a volume
So much louder than your voice

You give me words to read
And yet my eyes are tired of reading
Light by which I can see
And yet I’ve grown so tired of seeing

Her life my greatest blessing
They say you give and take away
So as I gave I take away my praise

Cuz I can’t stop thinking about it
I won’t stop thinking about it

And so I run to you
If only to tell you that I’m leaving
What hope I’ve left in you
Is that you’ll finally hear me screaming

Cuz I can’t stop thinking about it
I won’t stop thinking about it
No, I can’t stop thinking about you
I won’t stop thinking about you

You can pick up the EP at iTunes.
It is also available at my web store.
For more on the whole CMY(K) project, read the artist statement.

Henri Nouwen had escaped to rest and retreat from his teaching job at Harvard. Upon arrival at the retreat center, he was sought out by a group of students who had somehow discovered he was in town. They asked the Abbot if Henri would guide them in a retreat.  When the Abbot approached Henri about their request, he declined.  Not only had he come to retreat but, Henri noted, he was not prepared to lead a retreat.

“You’ve been a christian over 40 years” the Abbot pushed back, “what preparation do you need?”

The more I am asked to teach the more I find myself spending longer hours preparing my teachings.  While there is certainly nothing wrong with wanting to do my work excellently, that isn’t always the impetus for my lengthy study.. At times I have to spend a great deal of time learning the subject matter or the text I am about to study in order that I might teach it. And when that’s the case, I think I’m missing the mark.

I’ve written elsewhere that I believe true teaching means living well and then helping others understand how and why to do the same. In that light, preparedness for teaching  has to be more than reading and then organizing slides and notes.  It has to be a purposeful transference of a changed life.

The thing this is forcing me to face is that if I must strain to pull together a teaching, I likely ought not teach whatever it is I’m wanting/trying to teach.  Because I do not know it yet. All I will end up doing in such an effort is teaching myself to cheat; to skirt around the hard work of being changed or transformed by the truth which is the sincerest foundation for true teaching.  The obvious side effect to this kind of short-cutting is that I end up passing along only a shadow of truth and nothing at all helpful.