The truth is that both religious revival and secularization are morally ambiguous processes. Both heal and destroy. We still desperately need a way of welcoming diversity that does not deteriorate into nihilism, and a sober recognition that neither religious nor secular movements are good or bad as such.And from the 3rd link:
...
I can understand the people who are encouraged by the worldwide revival of religion today. The victims of atheistic and antireligious regimes are just as dead as those of clericalist terror.
[It's a reaction to] not just the religious right, but any kind of religious institution or spokesman that is claiming more than religion can legitimately claim. I think humility ought to be one of the marks of any authentic religion. We don’t see a whole lot of humility on the part of many religious people now, or religious institutions, and I think that evokes a kind of legitimate criticism. After all, if we are talking about God, we are talking about a reality that nobody can really define — the unfathomable, the unnamable.when in history have religious leaders not been "arrogant and pompous and crazy?"
Some religious faith is indifferent to evidence, but a lot of religious beliefs are based on weighing evidence the way a jury does. Do I believe this testimony? Is this source trustworthy? Where did these documents really come from? Has science actually disproved the possibility of miracles, or simply failed to observe one in the wild?My personal faith isn't evidence based, but thinking about it it was pretty narrow-minded of me to assume that it works that way for everyone. I do think that ultimately it comes down to a question of belief. You come to a conclusion after weighing evidence, but in the end the decision comes from what you think.
And like a jury, different people will come to different conclusions, but that doesn't mean that there has been no evidence presented.
When I meet somebody who says, “I don’t believe in God,” I say, “Describe the God you don’t believe in. I probably don’t believe in that God either.”So much of what I hear from professed atheists, in terms of criticisms of religion, is so incomprehensibly far removed from my experience that it's maddeningly frustrating.
It’s too bad [that some people can't believe in anything they can't prove], because they are going to run into a lot of things in life that they can’t prove that they have got to deal with. I mean things like love, for example.Spoken like someone who doesn't quite understand that psychology and neuropsych and neuroscience exist. And that love is at somewhat measurable and will get more measurable as time goes on. And that it's still pretty fucking awesome.
I think of Richard Dawkins as the kind of Jerry Falwell of the atheists. In a way, he’s a kind of fundamentalist. I will explain why. He takes the most narrow and the most legalistic side of religion and makes that religion, and then he’s against it, whereas Jerry Fallwell takes the most legal and literalistic side, and he supports it. But in a way curiously they agree with each other....Pot, meet kettle. Kettle, meet pot.
An atheist seems to me a person who has searched out and thought about all the options and insists there isn’t any God or anything like God, and I know that and no further evidence is going to change my mind.
sotonohito, I'd have been glad to have the discussion you suggested in the first paragraph, but the rest of your post tells me, clearly, that you're not actually interested in that discussion. It's quite obvious that you've already gone and made up your mind about what kind of "faith that a religious person has in their religion." Your entire argument is fallacious. Your view on religion is based on anecdotes and straw men.Please, can you try without the condescension dripping from every word?
You're a blind man asking me what a sunset is like, waiting to jump on me with criticisms based on what you know about optic nerves and inconsistencies based on what other sunset-observers have told you.
On more than one occasion we have heard a Japanese asked by a European traveller what his religion was,—whether Buddhist or Shinto,—and have been amused at his look of blank perplexity. He could not, for the life of him, make out what the enquirer was driving at. It is the established custom to present infants at the Shinto family temple one month after birth. It is equally customary to be buried by the Buddhist parish priest. The inhabitants of each district contribute to the festivals of both religions alike, without being aware of any inconsistency. They do not draw the hard and fast distinctions with which we are familiar.From the Meiji Constitution until 1945, Shinto was not considered a religion in Japan, except by a tiny minority of evangelical Shinto priests, one of whom went to the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago-- the Americans were oblivious that he was presenting a case that Shinto should be considered religious rather than merely appearing as a representative of that category that is so obviously ubiquitous around the world. Anyway, most people disagreed. They knew what religion was, but Shinto was not included. It was just that thing that they did. Here is what a Japanese Christian wrote in 1934, hardly a peaceful time in that military period:
[It] is true that the shrines of state Shinto are the monuments and tombs of men who have rendered conspicious service for the state. In this respect they differ not at all from the Lincoln Memorial in Washington and the Cenotaph in London.There's more-- there's actually several dozen pages more, and I'll present it all next spring in Minnesota if you'd like to attend.
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posted by muddgirl at 8:33 AM on September 28, 2009 [5 favorites]