Posts
I
usually criticize conservative religion because it represents the greatest
threat, and not because, as some believe, I’m ignorant of liberal religion. As one
who would like to have some form of
religion in my life, but who long ago rejected the conservative faith of his
childhood, I have been a Unitarian; read quite a few books by religious
liberals; and was the target of my liberal sister’s proselytization efforts
for decades. My most recent book by a liberal was A Religion of One’s Own by Thomas Moore (pictured), which came out this year.
The first thing I did upon finding it at the library was to turn to the index
and count the references to God. I was surprised to find that God only appeared on pages 14-16 of the 272-page work, but this was the part of the book that I spent the most time pondering because it represents the
views of millions of religious liberals, served as a source for this post, and because I considered his other thoughts obvious.
The
virtue of conservative religion is that its meaning is clear even when its
illogical or has no basis in fact; its downside is that it leads to oppression.
The virtue of liberal religion is that its potential for oppression is low, but
on its downside, its theology is devoid of meaningful content. For example,
“Jesus
walked on water,” says something, whereas,
“The
best way…keeps the reality of God, but emptied of our ideas of who or what God
is…” is so devoid of value that I suspect Moore of writing it without reflecting upon its implications. For to believe in a God about whom one can have no conception means to believe—without the least evidence—in a God that might be good, but then again, might be evil; a God that
might be compassionate, but could just as easily be bloodthirsty; a God that
might be sentient, but could be an unconscious force, and so on down the line
through every conceivable
characteristic, including existence, because to affirm that God exists is to hold
at least one idea about “who or what God is.”
“God
is in the space between sentences. God is the unspoken and the unwritten…God is
a sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere…You look
until you see nothing tangible, and that is God.” (Moore)
What
is the difference between a God about whom nothing can be said—and therefore might not exist—versus atheism, and why pray to such a God (“I’ll
speak to God out of extreme need”), prayer being an act that surely implies belief
in a deity that is conscious, loving, powerful, omnipresent, compassionate, and
fluent in human language? Just as Descartes claimed to throw out all
knowledge except for a belief in his own existence, and from that one belief to
completely rebuild his identity as a white European Catholic male of a certain
age, height, weight, number of teeth, and so forth; I doubt Moore’s honesty when
he prays to that about which he insists nothing
can be known. Such contradictions are common among liberals.
Various
liberal churches teach a course entitled “Living the Mystery,” in seeming unawareness that its synonym would be “Living the Ignorance,” mystery being but a euphemism for not knowing. Those who use the capitalized word believe they have a greater spiritual awareness than the rest of us, but of what does their
awareness consist? I don’t know despite having tried awfully hard to find out, and
my considered opinion is that it’s simply a case of the emperor having no
clothes. Liberals themselves would see it as akin to Gnosticism—not that they
use the word—in that, if you’re on the inside of the movement, you get it, but if you’re on the outside, it just looks like silliness.
Not
every liberally religious person would agree with Moore on every point (he
doesn’t identify himself as a Christian for one thing), but all share his
vagueness. My sister often said to me, Your
problem is that you’re stuck in the teachings of your fundamentalist childhood,
and this causes you to think that either a great many things can be said about God,
or else God doesn’t exist. My response was that if some universally benevolent
being or force that is deserving of the title God really does exist, then
surely its existence would be so obvious that none could doubt it. To simply
say, as she did, that I define God as the
universal impetus toward good, and my goal is to align myself with that good,
strikes me as no different from secular humanism except in its unfathomable insistence
on retaining the word God.
Like conservative Christianity, liberal
Christianity holds to the parts of scripture it likes and disregards
the rest. For example, it’s big on the story of the Good Samaritan but silent
on “Put every man, woman, child, and animal, to the sword, but keep the young
virgins for yourselves.” How do liberals justify this? About some things, they deny
that God (however defined) really said them; others, they identify as metaphors. Fine, but how do
they know what “God” really said, or what God’s numerous genocides, wanton murders, and
other atrocities, are metaphors of. Metaphors
are only useful inasmuch as they relate to things that exist in reality, but
liberal Christians mostly use them to clarify other metaphors, and this makes
them substitutes for reality rather than definers of reality:
“What
is God?”
“God
is the ground of being.”
“What
does that mean?”
“It
means that God is the soil, and we are the seed.”
“I
still don’t get it.”
“God
is the substance in which we live and move and have our being.”
I
see no reason to think that vagueness, ignorance (aka Divine Mystery), and
endless metaphors, constitute heightened
spiritual awareness, and in every field but religion, even religious people
regard them as muddled thinking and therefore as impediments to truth. I think of liberal religion as what’s left when everything has been taken from religion
except the need to believe. By claiming that vagueness, ignorance, and
metaphor, represent spirituality, liberals
leave themselves less open to attack simply because there’s so little to
attack. Talking with them is like biting the air in that you’re free to do it
all day, but why would you? Maybe they can’t help it. Maybe there really is a
gene that tends toward religious belief and is weak or absent in those who lack
such beliefs. If so, it’s not to the blame of the one or the credit of the
other, but is merely a fact, although I would consider it a regrettable fact in
the case of believers and among those who, like myself, can neither believe nor
escape the impulse to believe if only to cope with a life of endless pain.
I
find that the only direction one like myself can go is toward liberal religion,
yet I am no more welcome there than I am among conservatives because most liberals
regard my unwillingness to use their terminology to prove that I’m unworthy. As Moore put it:
“Atheism
tends to be nothing more than yet another too-earnest religion with the added
problem of being excessively rationalistic.”
This
by the same man who believes in a God about which nothing can be said. In my
wide experience, most liberals regard atheists as excessively rationalistic based solely upon the fact that they are atheists
(agnosticism being an acceptable alternative), it never occurring to them that the
terminology might simply be different. I say this because when I get beyond the
God-talk, I find little in liberal writings with which I disagree. For example,
Moore’s admonitions to appreciate beauty, cherish the moment, help other people, and find depth in
the commonplace, are characteristics of sensitivity and maturity rather than
theism, yet he relates them to theism and believes that atheists are less than because they don’t use the
word God, a word about which he himself has such reservations that, “I sometimes
just use the letter G.” Why, having abandoned two of the three letters is he hell-bent
on keeping the third? I know it matters to him because if it didn’t, he
wouldn’t insult those who have abandoned the third, not that he thinks any more
highly of people who believe in a God whose attributes are knowable:
“We
need to grow out of that kind of religion….I don’t want to make little of God
by pretending God is a ‘he’ pulling strings in the sky. I’d rather not use the
word if it’s going to be so small and inadequate.”
Terminology
is to liberals what dogma is to conservatives in that conservatives imbue words with
meaning and require that the meaning be accepted, while liberals take meaning from
words, and require that the words alone be embraced. Frankly, I don’t much care if liberals
believe in a God whom they define as the impetus toward good, or the spirit of love,
or that about which nothing can be known.
So that I won’t portray myself as more tolerant than I am, I should add that I
can’t begin to fathom the adoration that many of them feel toward Christ, and I
find their devotion to the word God so
lifeless that it troubles me in the same way that I would find it troubling if
someone freeze-dried their dead cat, set it on a pillow, and insisted that
everyone go along with them in pretending that it was alive. Yet, we all have
our little oddities, and I wouldn’t reject them because of theirs, but they do
reject me because of mine (it’s easier to be rejecting when you’re not in a
tiny minority). I prefer liberal theism to conservative theism only because liberals
are unlikely to openly oppress me, but their contempt for atheists is no less complete. It’s
just less understandable.
