On Religion

I finished 1633, which was… okay. I mean it was mostly good, but there’s this bit where everyone’s like, “Well, Oliver Cromwell wasn’t that bad of a guy, right? Let’s downplay that ‘Irish genocide’ thing!” And I’m not comfortable with that.

I’m also reading The Ables which is about a group of kids with superpowers who are also disabled. The cover totes that the author is one of the co-creators of Cinema Sins, so I was kind of expecting a subversive genre-busting piece, which it’s really not, but it is still a good take on a preteen superhero story.

Also, you know people on Quora are really stupid?

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On Religion

On thinking about a particular religion and whether you should be a part of it, the first and foremost question on your mind must be “Is this religion true?” One would think this is common sense, but it seems as if we’ve generally forgotten it.

There is a lot of discussion about religion, about which religion one should be a part of. And a lot of those discussions seems to be ‘What can this religion do for me?’ It’s a conversation about what that religion preaches on certain issues, how its leaders have acted or reacted to the political climate, and how well they treat the people who are not in it. And these are not inconsequential issues, I think--I am not dismissing these concerns or trying to downplay that they are important. But they are not what is most important in the consideration process, and that is whether or not a religion is true.

There was an article on SyFy Wire, a publication that has recently gotten quite bad at doing anything other than publishing strange opinions pieces*, which was somehow about someone’s experience with Catholicism and then the movie Dogma, and ended arguing that Catholicism was bunk because Jesus would hate it because she liked the movie Dogma? Never mind that the film’s writer and director, though not really a model of the religion, considered himself Catholic for years after making the film, and that her argument mostly amounted to “I didn’t feel anything growing up in Catholic school, and I liked this movie even if traditional Catholics hated it.” There was no proof that God didn’t exist, there was no argument with theology, there was no citations of philosophy; it was this vague ‘gut feeling’ that because she didn’t feel magically special by anything in Catholic school that Catholicism must be false, and that she liked this one movie which satirized Catholicism so… there? I guess?

[For the atheist, this is easy. If one doesn’t believe in God, then Catholicism being bunk is the natural conclusion. But if you accept the notion that God exists, you have to do more work to prove that Catholicism is false. And people have done it (though not to my satisfaction, I’ll confess), hence the existence of the Orthodox Church, Protestantism, Judaism, Islam, Zoroastrianism, and other religions. The excuse of ‘Well I didn’t like what the people of this religion do’ is not a proof that a religion is false.]

When I was doing research for a project in one of my classes for grad school, I ended up researching several religious traditions from the Caribbean. And there was a small excerpt in which the author of one of the books said “It’s too bad that many adherents to other major religions don’t consider these to also be legitimate religious traditions!” And of course people in other religions don’t consider them to be legit; that’s the point. For many of the Abrahamic religions, which make up a good chunk of religious people in the world today, the basic guideline that the other religions are false is fundamental. Different groups of people calling themselves Christian can’t even agree if the other denominations are anywhere close to the mark.

This doesn’t mean that Christians cannot see wisdom in the philosophy of Muslims or Jews or pagans. But it means that while they may accept different parts of their arguments as true or inspired, they cannot accept the conclusion.

Marc Barnes had a point on one of his BadCatholic blog posts on Patheos in which he argued that the non-Catholic should be laughing at the Catholic for his or her belief in transubstantiation. Because in believing in the host and wine at Mass turning into the Body and Blood of Christ is a very bold claim about the nature of the universe. To paraphrase and misapply a quote by C.S. Lewis, if it is true, then it is of the utmost importance; but if it is not true, then it isn’t important at all. That being said, I take the point of view that different religious viewpoints should be respected and you shouldn’t go around laughing at people’s religious beliefs. But the point still stands that someone’s religious beliefs make a point about the universe, and it should be absurd for someone outside of that point of view to hear them and take them seriously. It’s sort of along the lines of telling people with a basic grasp of science that plants actually get energy from little gnomes in their leaves. The two contradictory beliefs cannot coexist in the same person’s mind.

I think this is the problem I have with the majority of people’s view of religion. Atheists don’t believe, and fine, you’re exempt from this. But I see people who act like their religion isn’t meant to be a part of who they are. The notion of “Everything is political” should be abhorrent to the religious person, or at least to one of the Abrahamic religions, because it means that one is viewing everything in the world--how to treat others, how to treat oneself, how to interact with nature--as being directly related to politics, instead of directly related to God. Yet instead it’s become a commonly-held mantra by the seemingly religious and non-religious alike.

No! Religion is meant to be a fundamental part of who you are. And hopefully, it is a religion that calls you to take care of your fellow human. Christians and Jews, for instance, are demanded by the tenants of their faiths to care for the less fortunate. But you do not worship politics, and you do not answer to politics. You answer to God. As Michael says in Dresden Files: this is not a democracy; we answer to a king.

“Thy will be done.” Anyone who says the Lord’s Prayer knows this line but seems to forget its relevance. I know I do sometimes. But we cannot let the matters of this world dictate our actions and our beliefs. If we are to call ourselves religious, we must recognize that there is more to the world than ourselves. Otherwise that label of ‘religious’ is disingenuous.

*No, for real. After the Detective Pikachu trailer was released, a SyFy Wire article was published with an opening line that read something like, “Well, I know we all hated that trailer but if they do all of what we’re suggesting here maybe the movie might not be so bad.” It was if someone didn’t receive the memo that the trailer was received very well upon release.