finding the good
First, an aside: I'm tempted to try to make this absolutely charming crocheted cat, despite the fact that the pattern is in Japanese. Mere language barriers cannot stop me! Also, this skirt.
I've been thinking about grace and forgiveness lately, particularly since I've been doing some forgiving this week, and have received an email that enabled me to forgive myself for some stuff. It's been a good process. I've also been thinking about the Christians in my life and reflecting on my lack of faith and where that's brought me.
I don't think it's brought me very far afield in some respects. What I see in many of my Christian friends is that they spend a lot of time thinking about how to be good people. They take that question seriously, and put effort into finding a good answer for it and then living that answer. While I don't share the same motivation for the question, I do feel that it is a very good one, and one that I continue to ask.
Actually, it's that question that led me to leave the faith. I found things in the way Christianity describes God that just didn't fit with goodness, and I didn't want to worship anything that was less than good, or (horrifyingly) evil. So I didn't.
To go back to what I was saying a few posts ago about discourses, I've also been thinking about how those bad things about the Christian God are not the whole story either. Maybe genocide is a bad thing to command, but loving your neighbour and not casting the first stone* are good things to encourage.
I've started to look at the stories differently. I've started to use my liberal arts education to look critically, and that doesn't mean just finding ways to destroy it. It means that we should be able to look at something and sort out the valuable parts and the flawed parts and take it for what it is. Looking at something critically enables us to take an ideology or theory and find the good ideas amidst the bad, and vice versa. I'm recognising that when some people say they want to be "Christlike," they are referring to the Christ in their story, the story about the perfect man, the graceful one who touched a leper* and befriended an adulteress*. Others are referring to the angry man in the temple*, full of indignation and judgement, yelling at Pharisees*, and shaking the dust from his feet* as he left a town. Their methods of being "Christlike" vary with their personal discourses about that man. Some of them, I greatly respect, though they are not my stories.
So, I'm looking and I'm finding the good again, amist that which makes me cringe. I'm looking at church movements like emergent* and liking how they use the good parts. I'm seeing people like Brennan Manning and Real Live Preacher and Annie Dillard and Joseph Girzone and thinking that such writers must be valued, disagreement with certain tenets of faith or not.
I'm talking to people who have just started with the faith, or who are reasserting it, and I am feeling no compulsion to change their minds. I am just curious about what they are finding, and happy when it helps them. I'm seeing people struggle with their faith, and remembering how bad that felt, and hoping they find their way through it. Strange days for this atheist.
*So many of my friends don't get these references. That's hard to remember sometimes. Heck, even my Christian roommate doesn't get all of them, especially if they're mixed with evangelical subculture. She's too new. Oh, and Anglican. And we thought that it was just "secular" people who didn't understand Christianese! Ha!
posted by Heather Ann @ 10:38 PM
9 Comments:
Hi - I found your page through a friend. Neat crochet pattern. Perhaps you are already familar with this, but Google language tool (http://www.google.com/language_tools?hl=en) (kind of) translates the site you linked if you try the "translate a web page" feature.
Those kitties are sooooo cute!
Heather Ann,
I've been wanting to ask you something for a while now...
How does one go from believer to athiest?
I have experienced believer to agnostic, but I still have such a problem with athiesm... it seems like just taking your faith and placing it someplace else (namely your reasoning ability).
Did you first become an agnostic (even for a short time) ... and THEN become solidly athiest? or??
Anyhow, I've read through your faith journey section pretty extensively, but didn't really find an answer to this question. Perhaps it would be a good new post? (wink wink, nudge nudge)
Miroslav, yeah, I went from Christian to agnostic (about 6 months) and from there to atheist. Mind you, that's WEAK atheism, not STRONG atheism (those are technical terms, check out Wikipedia for discussion). It's not that I can say categorically that there absolutely can't be any gods. It's that I look around at all of the available gods and think, "You know, I'm not feelin' that." So, I'm left without any. No gods = a-theism. I think I've blogged about it, so perhaps I'll find that post and add it to Faith Dissolved. You're right, I haven't updated it in a while.
Hey, if you do in fact have a post on the subject, wouldja mind shooting me the link?
miroslavsmusings[AT]gmail.com
Yeah, when I was sharing my questions, doubts and frustrations with you about my faith you were really cool about it. And when I made the decision to stick with my faith you were cool about that too. Not that I expected you to be angry with me or rant at me or anything, but in a weird sense the same I was worried about about disapointing my friends and family if I decided to leave my faith was kind of how I was worried about disapointing you if I stayed with it. but you were totally cool about it.
I think the problem with the academic study of religion is that it focuses too much on the words and literalizing them as opposed to understanding them for their intention. You cannot fully comprehend the magnitude of Christianity soley by a factual analysis of the Bible. Christianity is older than the Bible, and hence other factures have to be taken into consideration. I guess being a Catholic and a religion studies major I've been forced to study Christianity and realized that Christianity can ultimately been explanation quite gracefully with the same academic studies that are used to discredit it. The God I've studied in Christianity is all good. Jesus getting mad in the temple wasn't him being an angry human who was on a horrible pwr trip of destruction, rather but a loving God who was outranged by the sin that surrounded the Israelites. Futher, when studying Bible stories, one has to ask themselves, did they really happen? Where the written for us to take them literally? Academics can prove that facts within the Bible are contrary to one another, but was the intention for each verse to be factually acurate? One needs to loook at the history of CHristianity and the CHURCH not the Bible to decide its acuracy. After all, it was the church who canonized the Bible.
Well, anyways, just a thought. Love to hear yours.
anon: I understand that there's more to the story of Jesus angry in the temple, but I understand that precisely because I know that there's more to it than just the literal interpretation of the words. There's also how people take those words and use them, and many people take those words as justification for their judgemental and divisive attitudes.
Also, I'm coming from a slightly different perspective because I didn't grow up Catholic, I grew up Evangelical, where the idea that the Church, not God, chose the canon is anathema. From the evangelical perspective, stories are not in the Bible as fairy tales with a moral, they are there because they happened and God put them in a book for us. For people who come from that perspective, contradictions are a HUGE deal. For me, they're not, because my faith and morals no longer depend on Biblical inerrancy.
It's only because I've stepped away from inerrancy, stepped away from inspiration, that I can look at the Bible and see some good stuff in it. From the perspective that I was raised in, where it's 100% take it or leave it, no "cherry-picking", I have to leave it, because the bible isn't accurate in that way. Perhaps it is accurate in a "this is a book of stories about how we think about God" way, but not in a "and then Balaam's donkey started telling him off" sort of way.
I'm sorry, but the Balaam story is 100% true! I need it to be! I Mean it's not every day that you see God talking out of his ass! (see without that story think of how many jokes you would miss out on!)
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