Tag Archives: religion

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.

And Jesus said unto them, “Fuck the poor.”

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Hipster JesusShocking news:

The results from a recent poll published by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life (http://www.pewforum.org/Politics-and-Elections/Tea-Party-and-Religion.aspx) reveal what social scientists have known for a long time: White Evangelical Christians are the group least likely to support politicians or policies that reflect the actual teachings of Jesus.

Now just so we’re clear, when I said “shocking,” I meant the opposite. Let Bender explain.

It is perhaps one of the strangest, most dumb-founding ironies in contemporary American culture. Evangelical Christians, who most fiercely proclaim to have a personal relationship with Christ, who most confidently declare their belief that the Bible is the inerrant word of God, who go to church on a regular basis, pray daily, listen to Christian music, and place God and His Only Begotten Son at the center of their lives, are simultaneously the very people most likely to reject his teachings and despise his radical message.

I suppose you could make a case for strange, but it’s not actually all that dumbfounding. Christians in America are a massively privileged group, and they’re interested in defending that privilege. People who involve themselves in defending their own privilege are necessarily going to be conservative.

As many people who see Christianity from the outside (and even a few really smart people who see it from the inside) can tell, Christianity for most Christians isn’t actually a guide to how to live your life. It’s just an identity that separates them from the Others. This became true pretty much the moment Christianity went from being a religion of the oppressed to a religion of the privileged elite.

It’s funny to see contemporary American Christians compare the persecution they perceive themselves to be suffering to the feeding of Christians to the lions in pre-Catholic Rome. American Christians are impossibly far removed from those martyrs, and not just in time, but in circumstance and the level of oppression they experience (which, for a Christian in America, is virtually none, at least as far as religious oppression goes). Once Christianity became the privileged class, it started aggressively defending its privilege (see: the entire history of the Catholic Church, the entire history of American Protestantism, etc.). And that means fundamentally abandoning everything Jesus taught, because Jesus wasn’t interested in defending the privileged. So somehow the Church that hails as its savior a man who said, “The meek shall inherit the Earth” ended up building enormous cathedrals with gilded domes.

I grew up in a Protestant church in the US. I’ve heard the phrase, “I’m trying to be more like Christ every day” more times than I’ve taken a dump. And the churches where I heard those words are the churches that favor the oppression of women and non-cisgendered people, the disenfranchisement of minorities and the poor. The Christ that they claim to want to emulate offered salvation to people that these churchgoers would never want to speak to. Because if just anyone can have salvation, what’s the fun in it anymore? It’s way more self-satisfying to be in an exclusive club.