Am I a fool?

 

This whole religion business still seems farfetched. Am I a fool for keeping on doing it?

This has to be one of the questions at the back of the mind of many believers these days. We are surrounded by people who seem to be doing just fine without religion. Maybe they are "spiritual but not religious." Maybe they are just plain atheist. Whatever they are, they must think people like me are fools. People like me must be deluded, willfully self-deceived, hopelessly benighted.

Are we?

I have grown up and lived my life cradled in a Roman Catholic world. When I am in that world, all is well. But I have to venture out of that world, partly because I feel called to do that.

"Called." Who is calling?

 

Prayer

One of the central behaviors of religious people is prayer. What is prayer?

Prayer is communicating with the divine, the sacred, the ineffable (a big word which means you can't talk about something). Like all other human communication, using language as a form of involvement with another person is to engage with a partly self-made image of that person. We do not know other people completely. We know only the stories that we create out of our experience with those people, or stories about them that have been given to us by other people.

There have been more than one individual who was perceived by people as saintly, but who turned out to be an emotional and sexual abuser. Marcial Maciel founded a religious order called the Legionaries of Christ, was praised and considered saintly by no less than Pope John Paul II, but was found to be a serial abuser of young men. Jean Vanier founded an ecumenical religious movement dedicated to living with and caring for people with disabilities called "L'Arche," but was found also to have sexually abused six women over the course of thirty-five years.

We do not know the complete story of the people closest to us. Are we deceived when we experience contact with God, however we perceive God?

Our critics fault us for being too willing to accept stories that may not be true. They may go further and claim that the stories we accept are not true. What is the evidence they provide for that claim?

I assume, without consulting such critics, that the evidence they give is that people can be deceived, just as the people around the two individuals I described were deceived. But, I reply, does the fact that some of us can be deceived by some people imply that billions of us are deceived about God?

Years ago I read a little of Sigmund Freud and about Sigmund Freud. His attitude toward religious believers seemed to me to be an accusation of infantilism. He was saying to religious people, "Grow up. We all have a tendency to want to go back to the womb, where everything was warm and comfortable. That is what you religious people want to do. Be a man. Face up to the hard, cold reality." (I don't imagine him saying "Be a woman." My own misogyny shows through here.)

The advice "Grow up" is a moral injunction. What is the grounding for such an injunction?

I suspect it is the experience of most of us that as we grow up, there are times when we would like to go back to days when we were cradled in some way. But we have learned from experience that it is not good for us to try to carry out such a desire. Freud's accusation is a move in a game of one-up-manship. He is more mature than we are. He can see the world as it is. We are infantile.

 

Community

Our U.S. culture says that it is better to stand alone than to go along with the crowd. Our culture assumes that the crowd is likely to be less enlightened than the individual. The result is that we move away from any involvement that would tie us closely to a particular group of people.

Religions, by definition (the word comes from a Latin word meaning "to bind"), begin with the statement that it is better to go along with a crowd than to stand alone. So it is not surprising that U.S. culture is not friendly to religion. Our critics say that it is because we are deceived and too anxious to go back to the womb that we practice religion. We can counter that it is because we accept the value that it is better to go along with others than to stand alone that we practice religion.

There is increasing evidence that, at all phases of the human life cycle, it is better to be in relationship with other people than to be alone.

So, to answer the question that I began this essay with, am I a fool? I answer: I am living in a counter-culture. I do not accept the culture's value that it is better to be alone than to be involved with other people. The empirical evidence of social science tells me that too much individualism is not healthy.

I still admit that I could be wrong. I can be deceived as much as the followers of Marcial Maciel and Jean Vanier were. But the presence of some deceivers does not prove that everyone is a deceiver.

Faith is to know something even when you cannot prove that the something is true. It is better to live with faith than to reject any story that you cannot prove true. We all depend on testimony--we trust some people to tell us the truth when we can't prove it by ourselves.

The prevalence of "fake news" made more visible by social media has highlighted the failure of our schools to help us think critically about the trustworthiness of our information sources. We have been sold the ideas that "STEM" courses (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) should replace traditional courses in history, literature, and philosophy, and that the primary goal of a college education is to get you a good job. 

If I believe somebody who tells me that I should study engineering instead of history, why is it foolish of me to believe somebody who tells me what God is like?