Monthly Archives: September 2011

Hand-wringing over rules makes religion a source of anxiety, not comfort

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Amanda Marcotte discusses this Post Secret submission based on the famous “Falling Man” image from the 9/11 attack:

A man falling from the World Trade Center, with the caption "No benevolent God would send this man to hell for killing himself."

Amanda’s takeaway from this, which I agree with, is that this sort of hand-wringing puts the lie to the notion that religion is necessarily comforting:

I’m generally not a big fan of the notion that big lies are fine if they give people solace, even if it were true that said lies actually did.  But there’s no real evidence that the big lie of religion gives that much comfort, on the whole.  It’s far more likely to give people irrational fears and make them think uncharitable things by suggesting that it’s “god” that told them so.

Indeed, if religion leads us to analyze every action in the fear that it may have violated some byzantine set of rules, it’s not a comfort at all. Religion ceases to be a comfort when the rules themselves take precedence over the spirit of the rules – the spirit of the rules being “love your fellow humans.” When you put the rules first, you end up worrying yourself about whether or not it would be okay to lie to the Nazis about the Jews hiding in your attic. That’s an old ethics thought experiment, but it’s also one that nobody with any kind of internal moral compass whatsoever would spend more than two seconds thinking about. Whereas if your moral compass comes from an external source, you risk getting caught up wrangling with the thought, “Oh crap, this book tells me that lying is always wrong no matter what.“

I can only really speak to my own personal experience here – I won’t claim that nobody finds comfort in religion. I’m sure plenty of people do, although that has no effect on its actual truth or its ability to describe reality. But religion was an enormous source of anxiety for me as a child. When I finally gave all that up, I found that the idea of rotting in the ground after I died was far more comforting than wondering whether eternity in heaven would get incredibly boring after a while.

Pertaining specifically to suicide, I recall a time when I was in middle school, and two of my classmates approached me to ask me a question. At the time, I was devoutly, outspokenly, fundamentalist…ily religious, and while that didn’t win me a lot of friends in middle school, in this one instance it brought these two girls to me in an attempt to resolve a question that was bothering them.

One of them had an uncle who had just committed suicide. Was he in hell? They were genuinely worried about this, genuinely concerned for the fate of his eternal soul. I’m not trying to mock them; for a person who believes in both eternal souls and hell, such concern is both inevitable and humane. And they wanted to know where God stood on this whole suicide thing. I didn’t know where God stood. But I felt at that moment that making this girl feel better, easing the gnawing fear within her that her uncle was burning in hell, was far more important than holding fast to the rules.

So I told her that suicide would not send him to hell, that if he was the kind of guy who would have gone to heaven anyway, suicide wouldn’t stop him from getting there. I didn’t know if that was true; I didn’t know what I believed about it. I had never been confronted with the situation before. All I knew was that if God was a god of love, he would want her to feel better more than he would want her to hear a fire and brimstone sermon.

That doesn’t mean that we should embrace comforting lies. But if you’re going to embrace a lie at all, why would you choose the judgmental, authoritarian lies? Why spend your time worrying about whether the man in that picture is in hell? One thing that I learned as a devoutly religious person was that the “truth” that I believed in was highly malleable and subjective, contrary to the claims of an “objective morality” that Biblical literalists claim to follow. Although that realization later led me to simply discard religious doctrine entirely, at the time I at least felt that “love your fellow humans” was a given, and that one’s worldview should follow from that. If you’re determined not to love your fellow humans, your worldview is going to come out a lot uglier – and if you find that worldview of godly vengeance and retribution comforting, then you are a scary person.

In which I denounce a random upper-middle-class foible

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Only a truly cultured mind can grasp forced perspective.

I rarely blog about anything personal, but a certain classist pet peeve of mine is suddenly rearing its head again now that I’m putting myself out on the dating scene, so indulge me.

Namely this: It seems to be pretty common for upper-middle-class (and, of course, upper-class) people to declare that traveling the world is essential to being “cultured” and “open-minded.” I’m seeing this a fair bit on dating profiles lately, as I said, and that’s where it’s really irking me. Some people want mates who are well-traveled.

Fair enough. If you only want to date fellow upper-middle-class people, that’s your prerogative, but at least be honest with yourself. The failure of some of us to take a year off to backpack across Europe is not a failure of character or an expression of xenophobia; it’s simply a failure to have enough money to do that. And if you’re equating lack of money with lack of character, even indirectly, you’re being classist. Just putting that out there.

What’s funny is, I’ve always felt pretty privileged in terms of class. My family has always been solidly middle class, and as a child I never experienced want or any signs of my family experiencing significant economic distress. As an adult I’ve certainly experienced economic distress from time to time, but I’ve always had my family to fall back on, so I can’t pretend that I was ever genuinely poor. And yet even I have never been afforded the opportunity to travel the world.

Am I bitter about this? Eh, not really. Certainly not as much as I used to be. But to be frank, much of the reason I stopped caring overmuch about it was that I met enough well-traveled people over the years to become convinced that it absolutely does not – necessarily – make you a better person. One thing that became clear was that these people, in their brief glimpses at narrow corners of foreign countries, were seeing reflected in those countries and cultures exactly what they wanted to see. If they believed beforehand that America was the greatest country in the world, that Europe was a collection of stagnant welfare states, that Africa was nothing more than a big savanna sprinkled with starving villagers, or that East Asia was one big homogeneous culture, they were unlikely to return from abroad with a different, or even particularly more nuanced, impression of the world.

I’m not opposed to travel, of course, and you can certainly learn a lot if you’re willing to really look and listen, but doing so requires non-trivial effort; your tour groups and tourist traps are, like most capitalist constructs, designed to prevent you from doing that. But more importantly, don’t fool yourself that world travel is some universally accessible means of “expanding your horizons;” it is, first and foremost, a status symbol.

Are America’s blue-collar workers just too closed-minded to get paid vacation? Are they not cultured enough to have two or three thousand dollars that they can spend on a week’s stay in Italy? Or are you just perturbed at the very idea of dating a blue-collar worker, so you set up these thinly veiled filters to keep them out of your dating pool?

When you demand that your mate have traveled the world, have a little self-honesty and admit that what you’re actually demanding is a mate with a certain level of money and economic privilege. Again, you have the right to demand that; you’re just not comfortable with how shallow it would make you look.