Searching for the One Truth has always been a human habit or past-time or mission call or lifepath or whatever label you want to paste on it. All of us can posit our theories on why we want our friends and neighbors to believe as we do, to hold our truths to be self-evident to all. I could certainly list a fair number of “truths” that I believe would make the human condition easier to bear, if only they would embrace my version of “truth”. 🙂
I remember a few years back, a popular author of the day, Stephen Covey, urged each of us-even ordinary individuals-to have a mission statement for our life, a one sentence line that would sum up our intent to live in the world. His book was actually quite helpful and one that I would mildly recommend to those who are striving to figure out how to cooperatively live in our world.
Is it possible? I’m not as worried as JJ is about being oppressed by the Moral Majority, but I am and always have been interested in how communities can be bi-partisan but still hold true to their belief systems. How do we raise children who truly respect other beliefs while still finding their own path? Does homeschooling help in this regard or are home educated children naturally protectionism oriented because of their parenting/schooling? Is it the end of the world because a group of good parents decide that video games are inherently unhealthy and perhaps even evil and so they ban them for their children, along with many other activities that their peers engage in on routine basis. …like the recent interest in sex-texting as a harmful use of cell phones?
I sympathize with parents who desperately want to return to a mythical land of Leave it to Beaver and Mayberry RFD with Andy Griffith glibly leading us in sugar sweet scenarios of how to raise the perfect child. But in our gut, we know the truth. If we are honest, we know that we just do the best with what we’ve got, just like everyone else. What we have here in America is great freedom, to make free choices about education, parenting styles, living arrangements, medical care, and entertainment pursuits.
None of our choices is going to scar the future generation any worse than the choices that our parents made and their parents before them. Our children will maneuver through the land-mines just like we made it through Viet Nam and the Race Riots and Burning our Bras and the Feminist Movement and Saturday Night Live and marijuana use..etc. etc. (a long line of etc’s!)
But as for keeping non partisan conversations open and engaged..we can do our best to encourage our children to actively listen to other viewpoints, not with a desire to disarm their opponent or show them the error of their viewpoint, but to truly listen. I know here that I strive to do that. I think it does little good for those of opposing viewpoints to bait their dialogue with “hooks” designed to pierce the self armour of belief. When non believers scorn those who find comfort and guidance for their life in the Bible or a religious viewpoint..then they are scorning their own free-thinking and vice-versa of course!
Because, at the base of our human search for Truth..is our search for happiness in this world. We just want that, to be happy. I propose that it isn’t the lack of available truth in the world that makes us unhappy, but our own imagination to conceive of a future where we are happy. We fight and struggle and spit out scorn and spew forth anger because we cannot imagine a future of happiness for ourselves and our world. To me, the greatest Truth in the Bible that I read, is that Jesus Christ gave us the Beatitudes and told us to …be happy. He told us His way to be happy and how we could achieve that, by loving others.
Yet, we continue to swallow the lies of the world that tell us how to be happy requires intricate contortions of our personality and actions. We must eat certain things, wear certain clothes, buy the right house, go to the right school, have children or not have them (perhaps even have them by the litter!). We refuse to create our own path to happiness and to imagine that path being achievable. I posit that the greatest problem facing our world today, is a lack of imagination in believing in happiness and our ability to create it in our own life.
So today…what leads you to your happiness? Be imaginative, use your innate curiosity about the world to seek happiness in your life. You won’t find it easily, but it’s yours for the creating.
I am so far behind the times on this texting thing. Are certain LETTERS sexy? Or do they go topless like this: 8 ? WHOOO!
J/K I really don’t get how that’s “hot” but um, whatever. I was asking my son Patrick (who goes to public school) about these reports of casual sex in the stairwells and people just getting notes about “meet me after fifth period in the bathroom” and stuff being commonplace. I think it was a Newsweek story or something. You know, in-depth reporting.
Patrick goes, “Well, *I* never got any of these notes…!”
Can I go to Mayberry now?
Yes, the truth is that places like Mayberry never really were. Or disabled people like my autistic sons would have been institutionalized for everyone else’s convenience. We still have a long way to go, though.
:), From what I read and hear reported anecdotally from Emily and her friends, yeah..sexual activity is fairly common occurrence after the age of 15 or so for public school kids. I have no personal authority to know if this is true or not, and little interest in looking up the statistics or facts. Texting is definitely a big thing in her world, but she states she has had no episodes of someone “sexting” her, but..she and I have had long conversations about the use of text messaging as avoidant social behavior …or aberrant social behavior. Just to converse about it to see what her thoughts were and to try and understand the phenomenon myself. I think it’s the equivalent to note passing, which was a big thing for my generation! Just extended. For homeschoolers cell phones have been useful for Emily and her ability to stay connected to her wide ranging network of homeschool, public school and private school friends that live in a general radius of about 2 hours drive from our house in various directions.
Part of listening is responding. If we don’t respond to the things that people say to us, we might as well have not heard them at all. Put another way, the spoken word is not a loudspeaker into which we can just shout our ideas without expecting to hear back.
I agree that we should teach kids to listen. I imagine kids become more empathetic and thoughtful humans when they get a wide experience of the world coupled with parental examples of empathy and love. Listening encourages empathy, and empathy is the only reason human ethics exist. It is the cultural adaptation that our particular kind of mammal uses to survive in a dangerous universe.
But we should also teach our kids to respond to the world, and to defend ideas that they think are worthy of defense.
“When non believers scorn those who find comfort and guidance for their life in the Bible or a religious viewpoint..then they are scorning their own free-thinking and vice-versa of course!”
I guess that depends on your definition of free-thinking. You could put it a different way and say that atheists are forced-thinkers. We are forced to believe what we believe based on the evidence of our senses and the dictates of basic logic. We are forced to believe that people who believe in God are probably wrong.
You may not be talking about me… but I think the word scorn is a little strong for how I feel about people who use the Bible as a guide.
For one thing, that implies that I look at all Christians as just one kind of person. Which is just as silly as saying that you look at all atheists as one kind of person – or that all Muslims look at all Jews as one kind of person – or that all anarchists look at all Communists as one kind of person.
I recognize that lots of Christians (maybe even most!) manage to find ways to use the Bible for good instead of evil… and they live good lives, and their lives may even be enriched by the Bible.
That doesn’t mean that I have to pretend that I think the Bible is the Best Guide for Living Ever. I don’t. As a guide for how we should live, I think it mostly sucks. I am of the opinion (ugh) that people tend to care for each other because of the inborn need to be empathetic. The best parts of the Bible happen to reflect that characteristic of humans.
That is my side of the debate, and expressing it doesn’t mean I’m “forcing my opinion” on anybody else. Nor does it mean that I don’t listen to other viewpoints.
This is why I don’t qualify my statements with phrases like “In My Opinion.” Redundancy does not appeal to me.
Similarly, people whose convictions are so weak that they fall apart and claim I’m “forcing my opinion” on them when I state my opposing case don’t appeal to me either.
Obviously, the things I say are my opinion. They are my opinion, because I believe they are true.
The only time I’ve ever felt that a Christian was “forcing their opinion” on me was when they’ve tried to make laws and rules to bolster their flawed understanding of the universe.
As long as people don’t do that, they can believe that humankind is the offspring of alien chimpanzees from the 5th dimension for all I care. But if they are going to go about talking about it… they should be prepared to defend their ideas.
Themcp said:
“The only time I’ve ever felt that a Christian was “forcing their opinion” on me was when they’ve tried to make laws and rules to bolster their flawed understanding of the universe.”
Yeah, the only time but unfortunately that is ALL the time! Not all Christians but some of them — all the time.
Right now in Florida a determined band of traditional Christian “marriage-and-family defenders” for example, won’t stop with merely legislating who can or cannot marry based on sexual orientation, and meddling with who can or should be pregnant or NOT be pregnant based on their own moral interpretations, and banning certain families from adopting based both on mixed race or NOT mixed sex factors they believe the bible forbids — now they want to make both marriage and divorce even for a stereotypically whitebread family like mine, follow their bible ideas as public policy.
yeah, JJ, it really does feel that way lately. i mostly meant in the context of conversational debate, which is where that phrase pops so often.
in fact, it is always hard for me to resist listing recent examples of Christian activists writing their moral code into laaw whenever the whole idea of who is forcing their opinion on who comes up.
i am aware that certain evangelicals are of the opinion that non-believers are trying to “force” their idea of a secular nation on Christians… but I’m not entirely sure the scale is the same.
Themcp wrote:
“You may not be talking about me… but I think the word scorn is a little strong for how I feel about people who use the Bible as a guide. ”
I wasn’t talking about you or anyone specifically and I would agree that response is inherent in any conversation.
I think that each person needs to decide what guides they use to live their life and what lifestyle allows them to find their happiness. I think the post was more about that search for individual happiness, than what I hear from both sides of the aetheist Christian divide.
And I have little desire to debate whether Christians are inherently wrong as you believe, or perhaps know something that perhaps you have not been able to perceive by your senses or your logic.
Better thinkers than I have defended both viewpoints and I lay no claim to even desiring to offer defense of my faith. In fact I have virtually no desire to either evangelize or defend or explain it, to anyone.
But I do enjoy the listening to what others have to say on the subject and I occasionally feel comfortable enough here to remark on what I’ve heard. This is my learning curve and I appreciate all comments.
Scorn was not heaped on your head and if the word choice offended you, I use my empathy to apologize. I think scorn came from having just watched Bill Mayer talk about his movie, Religiosity. 🙂
And perhaps not so obviously to my readers, I am a huge supporter of the separation of church and state, even as I am a fan of the state allowing freedom of religion to flourish in our country.
And again, I think that virtually everything that can be said on the divide between aetheist thinking and Christian belief and thinking has been exhausted. I find most of the arguments tired and renundant.
I’m more interested in how we as citizens in the 21st century find individual happiness, despite all the forces arraigned against any of us. That lack of imagination was really the point of my post. How do we imagine our future world in a way that allows the highest level of individual liberty and pursuit of happiness? Whether your happiness is founded in faith or in reason or a mixture of both.
Betty, I apologize! To you and themcp both. . . I just proved your point by getting off-track even as I meant to rise to your lovely invitation to rise above all that.
Just went back and reread your original post. I thought of a couple of ideas for constructs that lead to my happiness despite our differences:
1) the universal idea of the golden rule, not from any holy book in particular but as expressed in every philosophy and culture — I value human connectedness and all the empathy, sympathy, power of story and play Daniel Pink writes about in A Whole New Mind. So I connect and try to see good in being connected even to difficult, dangerous and intolerable people — I get germs and car crashes, taxes and fights, but the alternative human isolation is literally hell (as defined by C.S. Lewis)
2) President Obama’s example. He is thoughtful, practical and compassionate about differences and fights; he focuses on big goods and overlooks petty bads. He doesn’t seek revenge, hold grudges or naysay, etc.
This might engage imaginations across divides, too:
Unboxing Our Lizard Brains: Can You At Least Think About It?
“I’m more interested in how we as citizens in the 21st century find individual happiness, despite all the forces arraigned against any of us. That lack of imagination was really the point of my post. How do we imagine our future world in a way that allows the highest level of individual liberty and pursuit of happiness? Whether your happiness is founded in faith or in reason or a mixture of both.”
I think that the overly prominent place of religious doctrine in our culture is at the heart of this question and highly relevant? Right now, today, magical thinking prevents several friends of mine from pursuing individual happiness and liberty.
Placing the validity of religion beyond the realm of polite conversation has created an environment that actively prevents individuals from challenging that construct.
As for me, I’m not sure that our culture will ever make room for everyone to be free to pursue happiness…. until we drop from our cultural psyche the idea that the laws governing human interaction come from anywhere but here on Earth.
Hmm..lots of good thinking material from both JJ and themcp. I read both of their comments yesterday and have been thinking hard about both of them.
JJ: Loved the Lizard post when I read it last summer..:) No apologies ever needed from you here. I can’t imagine you would ever write something here that would require that. 🙂
themcp: Still thinking…don’t want to belabor or argue a point that for me and for you seems to be unchangeable and have no desire to change your thinking or mine..but..just for the sake of polite conversation, which we both value…
Your use of the word “magical” implies to me..disdain for matters of spirituality that have great value for many, including myself. I may not actively evangelize..but I do believe in that “magic”. I believe it due to my own experience throughout 55 years of living and have what I consider to be “evidence” that supports my magical thinking. But that evidence isn’t something I feel any need to broadcast or use to support or deny any other human being’s understanding of God. It’s just mine and for me, that’s all it need be. I would not be as peaceful and happy as I am without that belief, so for me to deny it, would cause me unhappiness…and thus my losing my magical faith..might make you more comfortable but not me. To deny one’s own basic core beliefs seems untenable. If it is a delusion of my thinking then nothing you say will change that.
Now..onto your concern..that religious beliefs of many Americans is denying your friends happiness and threatens the right to happiness inherent in the Constitution. It seems to be..depending upon what you are talking about, and I think it is probably the right to marry whomever you love, that we have the same problem of lack of imagination or creative thinking on the part of individuals and organizations in our country.
While I am married, and believe that marriage to be one that God intended for me to have and I do believe that, the importance of that “marriage” is only because of the religious value I place on it. Without my religious value..the other value I have in the marriage is that I value this person and wish and choose to spend each day of my life in community with him, creating and supporting our family and way of life. But if I was not a Christian then that marriage would not mean the same thing. I would still choose to live in happiness with that person, but I don’t think I would need “marriage” to further that happiness..as long as my civil rights were protected. Not being an expert in civil unions…I can’t completely say they would be, but a brief search tells me they are in my state, that I can choose at any time to appoint someone to be my legal partner, with all benefits being accrued to that person..The sanctity or faith in the relationship,the commitment of love and caring would come from the two of us, joined in family by our choice. At this time, in this state, people can do that, In fact we have been invited to just such a civil ceremony, where someone who loves the two young ladies is going to preside over their marriage ceremony. They are choosing to be married and find legal ways to cement the relationship as solid and of value. They claim they do not need a “christian marriage ceremony”, as they are not believers in the christian church. It seems fair to me, that makes sense.
Happiness isn’t given to us by another person,or the state, or a religion, or a relationship, or a job, or any other reason, it is ours to create as we see fit, or so it seems to me.
We vote with our hearts, not our minds
At Edge dot org, an article by Jerry Coyne asking: “DOES THE EMPIRICAL NATURE OF SCIENCE CONTRADICT THE REVELATORY NATURE OF FAITH?”
is responded to in a way both of you might find “true”? —
Exactly..it is about community, always has been, except for the fanatics of any movement..who have psychosis as their base of thinking. I love the community of speaking the same language of heart and faith…just as I’m absolutely sure musicians speak their language, and mathemeticians their’s…
magical thinking: the idea that a powerful being cares about who you have sex with and punishes you in the afterlife if you do it with the wrong people. i have no respect for that idea, and don’t understand why i should tolerate it just because it is encoded with a polite euphemism like spirituality.
i am capable of separating respect for a person, group, or culture from my respect (or lack of) for a particular bad idea that they happen to have.
magical thinkers would have us believe that each of their bad ideas must be protected and respected because of the sanctity of their glorious religion… and that it is plain rude to question their beliefs which, after all, came from God.
therefore, if i question one of those sacred beliefs… i am calling into question an entire way of life… and thus i am the disrespectful ass and they are the victims of my cultural insensitivity.
but the reverse is not true for me. if someone questions my opinions about, say, evolution – I categorically don’t get to pretend that these are beliefs that are sacred and therefore beyond polite conversation. or that the person doing the questioning is being somehow disrespectful to me.
Hmmm – I had a friend in junior high school who lived alone with her (very peculiar) mom, who got into astrology. I mean REALLY got into it, took intensive classes and learned to draw these amazing, incomprehensible charts etc. She was teaching her daughter to do it too, and though she wasn’t sure what to think about it all, she went along. I wouldn’t have dreamed of mocking the mom or even trying to persuade the daughter her mom was falling for magical thinking — do you know what I mean? I wasn’t that I believed it but it was interesting in a 1960s sort of way. . . 🙂
And in a college town there were much stranger things. It was all pretty live-and-let-live, except for the dominionists and bigots behind the police dogs and draft board. Those DID get disrespected.
Ever see the movie “Independence Day” btw? There’s a stripper (exotic dancer) character who’s all New Age-y about the idea of aliens and she wants to welcome them with a big sign from the top of a hotel. Her more sensible friend can’t get her to understand how stupid this is, and the dream-lover girl gets vaporized along with a whole crowd of similar wackos.
I don’t know what this means except that you cannot talk people out of crazy.
Yep. 🙂
Again, I think people are fairly ass like on both sides of the conversation about God versus no God. From my own personal observation of both sides of the continuum.
All I can be accountable for is my own opinion and how I live my life..and I still contend…that lack of respect flows both ways, and that there are thousands, nay millions of people who find great comfort in participation in religious ceremonies, traditions, faith communities and that the best answer to me, still seems to be freedom of religion, seperation of church and state, and respect for divergent belief systems. I know many Christians and religious folk who have little interest in whom sleeps with whom outside of their own marriages and relationships. And unfortunately for us, and them, accusations that they do are often made to them.
When in most of their cases, including mine, we wish to continue to believe our faith is helpful, inspiring, useful and needed in a world that always needs community.
I worked at the food bank yesterday at a local church. I contend that not only do I find faith in my faith, I find real solace there for a community that is on the brink of disaster and the churches of our community are working together to come up with valid plans that will aid those who have lost jobs, have great need and face real poverty.
I know that I see very little organized effort on the part of the secular liberal left on poverty? Perhaps I’ve missed it. And I would challenge anyone to think that Martin Luther King’s faith did not play a huge part in his lifework. I continue to claim that religious thought and practice has great merit for those who use it wisely and with compassion, not judgment.
Betty said: “I know that I see very little organized effort on the part of the secular liberal left on poverty?”
Oh, that gives me another thought! Maybe the reason conservative Christianity resists “government” so overtly (even while trying to bend it to their own religious ends) is that they rightly see it as the major manifestation of the left’s good deed-doing? And so it’s a sort of competing church in their minds, rather than a cooperating one?
I run into that attitude ALL the time, such antagonism to government doing anything to help people who really need it, and antagonism toward the poor people who would allow the government to help them, too, as if they were traitors to the faith almost.
To the Astrology example – that’s simple. Currently, no. I wouldn’t feel all that required to say something to your friend about her ridiculous belief. It isn’t all that important.
But our entire culture doesn’t use astrology as a means to squash progress, subjugate women, and justify gross brutality against people who don’t agree with us.
In that world, even if your friend practiced her own personal version of astrology that was mostly harmless… I’d feel compelled to point out that acceptance of that “harmless superstition” as a cultural norm by good people like her provides social cover for people who practice a much more damaging version.
Which is what I think of Christianity right now. Lots of Christians practice a version of Christianity which has been rendered toothless by editing the source material… but acceptance of the underlying world view (“Everything I want to do is ok, as long as I can find a way to believe that God approves.”) provides cover for people with a much… toothier… version of Christianity.
i left a comment about secular charities, of which there are a great many, but it disappeared into the aether.
In lieu of retyping it, just google “secular charity”. There are tons.
The thing about secular charities, is that they don’t necessarily paint the words “Secular Charity” on their sign. Since they don’t exist to service a particular religious view… people with a wide spectrum of beliefs participate in them.
Locally, I can refer you to Second Helpings – a good friend of mine works there.
And — let’s not forget our federal goverment and its social welfare program… how is that not an example of the secular world trying to fill a need? that’s a charity that our secular government has decided every American needs to donate to.
I’m reading another good Michael Shermer book now, called “The Mind of the Market.” Reading the prologue I see that he grew up big-time evangelical and felt called to major in theology, and chose Pepperine because it was conservative. But he was disappointed to lean later, that theology required four ancient languages (and he wasn’t even good at Spanish) so he switched to psychology and then in grad school to history — etyc etc — became a science geek and Dr. Schermer, who founded Skeptic magazine, and wrote the many books that speak to me of integrated Truth, of interdiscplinary systems thinking, such as the Science of Good and Evil and this new one I’m reading, on “evolutionary economics.”
The point of mentioning it here, I guess, is that he had more than One Truth in his life, and as he learned and grew and changed his beliefs ans understanding of the world, he never lost his good will and curiosity and compassion for understanding rather than judging . . .
Typos, ack! Shouldn’t have had that last glass of wine in front of the fire, and then tried to comment —
JJ,
I like that..”good will and curiosity and compassion for understanding rather than judging…”
Betty and themcp both might enjoy this treatise on how astrology survived Copernicus despite being debunked as any sort of “truth.” 🙂