The People Journal

YOU WILL NOT CROSS!

Posted by: Cameron Montgomery on Wednesday, October 19th, 2011

“You will not cross” It sounds like a quote from Lord of the Rings when Gandalf prevents the Balrog (big bad demon monster) from crossing a narrow stone bridge in pursuit of the heros, but it isn’t. It’s from this weeks Old Testament lectionary reading.

At the end of his life, God told Moses that he “will not cross over into it.” “It,” is the land that God promised to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and their descendents. God took Moses up a mountain, and showed him the bountiful land that he was going to give to the new nation of Israel. The land God had promised for hundreds of years;

the land Moses was saved from the Nile river so that he could lead the people to,
the land that Moses stood up to Pharaoh and risked his life to get the people to,
the land that Moses put up with a bunch of ungrateful whining people to get them to, the same people Moses had to plead with God not to destroy,
the land of milk and honey.

The land Moses, “will not cross into.”

So why did God shut Moses out? There are a couple of possible explanations. The first comes just a couple of chapters earlier when God tells Moses,

“This is because both of you (Moses and Aaron) broke faith with me in the presence of the Israelites… and because you did not uphold my holiness among the Israelites. Therefore, you will see the land only from a distance; you will not enter the land I am giving to the people of Israel.” (Deuteronomy 32:51-52)

It appears that God is referring to something Moses and Aaron did while in the desert (Numbers 20:1-13), but the infraction here doesn’t seem to warrant the punishment in light of all that Moses is credited with in chapter 34. It just doesn’t seem to balance out.

It has also been suggested that Moses did not get to enter because he is suffering the same judgement as the rest of the people when they refused to trust God and enter the promised land the first time they had the opportunity. God said “No one from this evil generation shall see the good land I swore to give your ancestors, except Caleb son of Jephunneh.” (Deuteronomy 1:35) Moses also says “Because of you (the people) the LORD became angry with me also and said, “You shall not enter it, either.”” (v. 37) We may not like that explanation, but it fits with the way things often play out in the Old Testament, leaders can be held responsible for their followers and people can suffer for the choices of their leaders.

I wonder if this is really what this story is about? Is this passage at the end of the story of Moses life about why he gets shut out of the Promised Land? With the emphasis on all of the great things Moses had done and the proclamation that there would never be another prophet as great as him, it seems unlikely that the point here is his failure. On the contrary, Moses accomplished all that God had planned for him. Maybe that’s the point.

Maybe this story can remind us that life is not a goal but an adventure? What a great adventure it was; Moses faced the most powerful leader of his time and said “let my people go,” he stretched his hand out and watched the sea part, he spoke to God and God knew him by name. To be sure there were rough times; the people were always complaining, they didn’t like his wife, they didn’t like the food, and their feet were sore. The path from where we are to where God wants us to be can be long, difficult, uncomfortable, and often thankless, but Moses and the people were led every step of the way by the presence of God. Moses didn’t get to enter the Promised Land, but neither did Abraham, Isaac, or Jacob, not the way God intended.

I have often struggled with the feeling that I am working for something that is out of reach, but every now and then God shows me a glimpse of where God is leading me and reminds me that I am never on my own. As long as we walk with God, the Spirit leads us. We mess up and go on a detour now and then, and we may not get to enter the Promised Land, but we get to be part of a great adventure.

God’s people did make it to the Promise Land, just like God promised. Even though Moses didn’t, he got to be a very important part of the adventure. It’s scary sometimes, but I want to be part of God’s adventure called Ecclesiax—how about you?

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Atheism for Lent – What Will I Do?

Posted by: Jim Mondry on Thursday, April 7th, 2011

Do you feel you’re living out your Christian faith? How do you see it in action in your life? I’ve pointed this out already, but Marx’s big critique of Christianity was not about its beliefs, but in the way people of faith lived. I’ve been wrestling in my head what to do about this. I’m feeling like I’m on the edge of something, and can’t see down. I know I need to jump, but don’t know where I’m going to land.

I wrote out a list of issues that I could think of that exist in Ottawa, that aren’t talked about in the church much, to see if there was anything I could feasible do:

Homelessness, mental illness, systemic poverty, our flawed jail system, immigration issues (like immigrants not being able to get work in their field of expertise, or issues of them being away from their families), or issues in subsidized housing in Ottawa (infestations, or crumbling buildings).

These are all economic issues, because they require money. One of the reasons consistently claimed by government that nothing is done about these, is that there isn’t money, and the government would need to raise taxes to address these. Now, I struggle here, because I want to make the statement of “if the percentage of the portion of Canadians that claim to be Christians were willing to see their taxes raised to try and address these systemic issues…” as if it’s obvious to those that are Christian that we should be willing to do this, but I wonder if there are legitimate reasons that someone would claim that their taxes shouldn’t be raised to improve the jail systems, or address the poor conditions of subsidized housing. I struggle, because for so long I’ve only ever considered these as political issues, but what if there is another way?

Don Miller made the statement once to the effect of “its not the government failing these people, its the churches failing the people.” I found this quite a compelling statement. What if we as the church were willing to do more to help out these various issues, and stop looking to governments to fix them? Of the critiques of religion by Marx, he had a good answer to why we don’t do more. The first way we justify not doing more, is that we say “God is Love”, and “God wants us to live justly”, but are never willing to talk about concrete ways to live this out. There is some legitimacy behind avoiding telling people what to do, because there’s a risk that it may be wrong. The second way we may justify not doing more, is that we separate our physical lives from our spiritual lives, and suggest that all of those economic imperatives given in the New Testament are exclusively for life in heaven. I know I do the first one far more than the second, as I believe that Christianity really is intended to have something to say about how I live now.

So, I’m back with this fear of what to do. There are so many issues that exist, both locally and globally. There is far more than any one individual has any hope of doing. That, and my time is now a little more strapped having a young child around. I know I have to overcome that fear of doing something wrong. For so much of my life, I’ve been taught that “God will direct me”, and tell me what to do. In a sense when I was writing that list, I was hoping for some sort of divine revelation, but like usual it didn’t come. But, I’m beginning to believe that we have been given the ability to make decisions for ourselves, to have goals and desires. We have been given the gift of creativity. If I hope and wait for God to tell me what to do, I’m giving up that gift. If I choose to do something, I run the risk of doing the wrong thing, but at least I’m trying in some small way to create a better world.

But when I look at that list, I don’t see anything that matches up with my personal passions. So am I missing something? Or do I need to give up those passions, so I can live better?

What are the issues that you see around you? What are your passions? How are you bringing these two together to create a better world?

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Atheism for Lent – Turning ideals into ideology

Posted by: Jim Mondry on Sunday, April 3rd, 2011

How do we allow our ideals become corrupted? We all hold on to views of how the world should be, but how many of us actually work towards creating that world? I have found reading how Christianity can get turned from a revolutionary faith into an ideology that supports injustice quite enlightening.

Karl Mannheim expanded on Marx’s definition of an ideology to develop a general theory of the social uses of knowledge. For Mannheim, ideals are ideas that describe how the world should be. These ideals can have two different social uses – Revolution or Submission. Revolutionary use of an ideal becomes physically lived out, typically changing the current order of things. Submission, is intended to maintain the current social and political structures. This happens by either distracting or blinding the believers from the present reality where that ideal is not lived out, with the promise of that ideal becoming reality in the future. Mannheim describes this as an Ideology.

I believe we turn our ideals into ideologies when we only reinforce what we already believe. By doing this we negate the possibility of change in ourselves. This change may come if we realize an ideal we have is false, but it also may come when we find a disconnect between what we claim to believe and how we live. I am complicit with turning Christianity from a Revolutionary faith, into an ideology. Westphal, in Suspicion and Faith suggests several ways in which this occurs, and one of my worst offenses is that I do this by editing the Bible: I am willfully ignorant of sections of the Bible, I avoid reading sections that don’t agree with my theology, or I go to great lengths to try and interpret them in ways that do. There are sections of the Bible I haven’t read, thinking they are irrelevant, or just never got around to reading. There are passages that I find either confusing, or I find them offensive to my view of God (God commanding the Isrealites to commit genocide, for example) that I typically stay away from. Other passages, I will look at and try to understand them in a way that fits my view of God and faith (and sometimes have to jump through some significant mental hoops to do it).

Can I get beyond these self-imposed limitations on how I read the Bible? My first thought is that I need to become a biblical scholar, able to analyze the depth of the original meaning in the original language, and understanding the historical context these ideas were presented originally. While I might find that interesting, that is a significant time commitment to do it well. More importantly, that is not practical for every Christian – so what is the correct way to learn the “truth” as presented in the Bible? The current structure of the chruch is that there is one “expert” who get in front of the congregation to preach what the Bible says every week, to tell us what and how to believe. I know some people who are very happy with not having to do the work for themselves. I am not. Perhaps, I just have to accept that this is a journey, where I need to constantly revisit that which I think I know, and allow myself and my beliefs to be edited along the way, all the while facing that which I don’t understand and more importantly, that which I disagree with. What scares me though, is that there may not be a nice way to understand all these conflicting things – or more specifically that the truth is found in that conflict between the different views and interpretations.

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Atheism for Lent – Materialistic Christianity

Posted by: Jim Mondry on Thursday, March 31st, 2011

What is Jesus more interested in, your motives, or your actions? Most of the stories in the gospels seem to suggest that he’s more interested in your motives than your actions, especially looking at the way Jesus interacted with the Pharisees. I would suggest that this is more contextual than anything else though, as the Pharisees prided themselves on “correct actions”, in that they figured out a way to follow all of the Torah, and yet miss the whole point. I often wonder if in modern Christianity, we’ve allowed the pendulum to swing to the exact opposite – we all need to have the correct beliefs, but the actions don’t matter (or at least are not talked about). I know that’s not totally true, but what is talked about more in Churches these days – what is the correct way to understand a biblical passage, or what is the correct way to live that passage out?

Something I’ve heard suggested recently is the Christianity should be a materialistic religion – in that it should change your material reality, the way you make decisions and live out your life. Yet, I know I look no different than any of my neighbours or co-workers, some who are Christians, some atheists, and many who don’t follow anything particular. For a long time I believed all the right things, but in reality I’ve figured out a way to have it change just a little of my material reality, and it’s so little than no-one who knows me would be able to tell.

For Marx, he took a materialistic view of history. He was someone who rejected metaphysical ideas, and simply looked at the reality of people’s behaviours. Don Miller has become a bit of an evanglist for this type of thinking with his recent A Million Miles…book: ”a character is what he does, not what he thinks”. Here, Miller is talking about a character in a movie, and how the audience actually perceives and understands the character. When you look at a movie character, or anyone for that matter, all you can know are their actions. You aren’t privy to the discussions that go on in the head of that individual as they go about narrating their lives (unless its a bad movie with voice narration). Marx, took his idea of materialism a little further though, to suggest that a materialistic view of history was one that put economics at the basis. For Marx, morality, religion, metaphysics, politics, and law all have economic underpinnings. They are all affected by their specific place and time in history, in the class struggles, in the economic conditions of the rich and the poor. Part of me looks at that, and immediately compares it to Freud’s view that we are all fundamentally selfish – the rich want to stay rich, and the poor want to be rich. What I find interesting though, is that Marx thinks that the reason the behaviour has been selfishly motivated is not because we are all fundamentally bad (as Freud would suggest), but because the capitalist structure which we’ve lived in is what makes us do this. In a world where competition is king, and the winner is the one with the most toys at the end, its hard to really argue against the effects of the structure. So, is our religion and morality affected by our economic reality we’re living in? I would be interested to hear a good argument suggesting that they are not, but from what I understand of philosophy, it would be a difficult stance to take to say that our religion and morality are unaffected by the economic structure that we’re living in.

There’s a story told by the philosopher, Slavoj Zizek:

A man who believes himself to be a grain of seed is taken to a mental institution where the doctors do their best to convince him that he is not a grain of seed but a man; however, when his is cured (convinced that he is not a grain of seed but a man) and allowed to leave the hospital, he immediately comes back trembling and very scared – there is a chicken outside the door, and he is afraid it will eat him. “My dear fellow,” says the doctor, “you know very well that you are not a grain of seed but a man.” “Of course I know,” replies the patient, “but does the chicken?” The Parallax View

So, my religion, my beliefs, and my behaviour are all affected by my economic reality. Short of becoming an ascetic, and rejecting all property, is there away out of this? I feel like the man saying “of course I know that economics isn’t the thing I should base my life on, but does everyone else out there know it?” Is there a way for the church to help us learn to see where our economic reality is affecting our beliefs, and behaviour, and most of all rise above it? And is it possible for the church to do this honestly, as it will be other people who are struggling with the same problems making the decisions, and giving the sermons, and asking for the tithes and offering? Does this even matter – should I even worry about the economic underpinnings in my life and my behaviour? Will any of this change one decision I make?

It would be easy to point to things like “Fair-trade”, and “organic”, and all these nice labels as if they are part of the answers. What if these labels weren’t even necessary though, and weren’t used to signify privilege, but all products simply were known to be made in factories where people were paid living wages, in safe conditions, with products that weren’t harmful to either the workers, or to the end consumers? How many Christians buy Apple products, fully knowing all the issues in the Foxconn factory in China? And, I write this on a piece of electronics that I have no clue what the workers in China experienced – for all I know it was worse, all the while I’m sitting on a piece of furniture, wearing clothes that are equally dubious. Does Christianity have any role to play in any of this?

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Atheism for Lent – My God is my idealized reflection

Posted by: Jim Mondry on Wednesday, March 30th, 2011

How many ways can we create our own idea of God? Freud went to extensive lengths in his critiques to show how we create a God that will give us the ability to do our selfish behaviours that we know are wrong, either through giving the moral command to do these things (i.e. God sanctioning religious wars), or through compromise behaviour (where we buy the right to our bad behaviour).

In my last post, I mentioned that Marx was influenced by Feuerbach, who in turn was influenced by Hegel’s critiques of God and religion. Hegel’s analysis of religion led him to conclude that “[God] is nothing else than the human being, or rather, the human nature purified, freed from the limits of individual man…”. Feuerbach took this one step further to conclude that in religion we project in religion only “that which is worthy of adoration.” So, for Feuerbach, we project what is best about humanity on God.

I quickly realized that while I don’t necessarily do this to God, I do this to the person of Jesus. I have been taught that Jesus was a perfect person, had no sin, and I’ve often attributed to him that he never got angry, was always willing to serve others, had perfect patience for everyone he interacted with, and always had time for other people. I look at myself, and look at my flaws, and then draw the character of Jesus as if he was everything I wish I was. I’ll bet he was a great guitar player, and was good on a skateboard too.

I think this can get dangerous though, when we start to try and attribute other thoughts and ideas to Jesus. I was at a lecture on Religious Violence last Friday, and the speaker basically had the conclusion that Jesus was first and foremost a pacifist – he would want us to not go into war, unless it was the last and only option. This got me thinking, with this opinion, are we just turning Jesus once more into our idealized reflection? We’re living in a time when there is a lot of violence and war, and much of it seems senseless, so Jesus must be against this, right? I don’t know what Jesus thought of war – he really tried hard to stay out of political debates, and made an effort to avoid any sort of political statements, so how can I attribute thoughts and beliefs to him as to our current context? Or, I should say, I need to be careful if I try to attribute political views to him, as applied to our current context. So, if you hear me say anything during this election time about who Jesus would vote for, or who he would support, please call me on my BS.

Who would Jesus want you to vote for? Do you even think he cares?

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Atheism for Lent – Bourgeois Christianity

Posted by: Jim Mondry on Tuesday, March 29th, 2011

How has faith changed your fundamental reality? Has it changed how you live day by day? Has it changed how you see the world around you? Does it inspire you daily? I wish I could say yes to all of those questions, and while at times my faith has changed me, for the past several years my life has been essentially about working within the various church power structures to maintain things as they are (and maybe draw a few more “lost folks” back to the church if I’m lucky). My energy is spent either upholding things the way they are, or attempting small tweaks to how a service might be run, but nothing that would actually have any long term affect on anyone – especially myself.

Marx’s critiques of Christianity seem similar to much of what Freud had to say, but each one’s end goal is radically different (the book has moved on from Freud to Marx, so on I go). As I’m learning more about his critiques of Christianity and its relation to “the state”, or in a sense the various power structures of the world, it feels like it goes beyond Freud. Freud was fundamentally interested in the mind of the individual, for people to cast off their neurotic dreams and practices that help them face a miserable world, and learn to live within the crap that is reality. Freud lived with a “resigned despair” in his view of the world, in the knowledge that we are all selfish individuals if given the choice, but with the right understanding of reality and correctly placed efforts we could maybe make our lives and those of others a little better . His goal was to take people from a inconsolable misery (hence the neurotic responses to deal with the world), to a general sadness. Marx on the other hand had grander ambitions with his theories and philosophies. Marx wanted not just to change people’s belief and interpretation about the world, but ultimately to change behaviour.

Marx started his criticism of Religion and the state from the work of Feuerbach, who was a philosopher in Germany around the same time as Marx was coming up with his fundamental theories of the State and Religion (I’m going to write on something of Feuerbach’s next, but it’s not necessary for what I’m writing now). What’s fascinating to me though, was how Marx saw Feuerbach’s work as good, but essentially flawed, or more specifically limited. To Marx, Feuerbach’s critque was a Bourgeois atheism – it was all metaphysical ideas and thoughts, which had no intention of changing the behaviour of the individual and continued its support of the current power structures in place. In one of Marx’s written critiques of this he goes on to say “their atheism was more the product of bourgeois Christianity than its enemy.” Marx’s view of religion was that it was a “desperate response to genuine hopelessness, it is the diabolical creation of unnecessary hopelessness concerning the human social order”. This could be wrong, but I see his critique suggesting that Feuerbach was not in a place of desperation or hopelessness, so he didn’t need a god in response to that.

I wonder how much my personal critiques of Christianity comes from a place of bourgois Christianity? This is something I’ve struggled over: as an overprivalged, well-educated white man, I’m pretty self-reliant. The power structures (both societal and in the church) are in place to ensure that I am able to continue to provide my needs, and many of my desires. I know nothing of desperation or hopelessness in an economic sense (and, quite possibly, in any sense). So, my personal critiques come from a place of analyzing the various metaphysical beliefs, that of God, or Jesus’ virgin birth, or the afterlife, as if I have no need to think of these things since I’m so privaledged now (an oversimplification could be stated as: I don’t need a castle in the sky, becuase I have one here on earth). So any of my critiques go so far as to question the beliefs, but never so far to try to challenge any structures that are in place. I’ve never once stood up when I’m asked to do something in a church that Katie would be better at doing and say “why are you asking me, and not her? Is it becuase I’m a man?” For all in North America we like to believe that we see men and women as equal, there’s still an underlying sense of sexism (well, many people still see this, with the exception of Marget Wente). Or, I look at most of the work that I did while I was on the church board, and all I did was to try and further errect the exact same power structures that are in every other church.

I think its pretty safe to say that Jesus had a fundamentally different view of power and leadership than what Marx did. But, I know that when I have been in leadership at various relilgious groups, my effort wasn’t to try and change the way people lived. At most, it was to try and create a “meaningful space where someone could experience God”, but I don’t think this was out of an ambition for change in behaviour, but at it’s most noble was to help people have “personal transformation”, but I also think it was simply to try and increase numbers at the church/group, as if numbers were what mattered most. But, what would it look like for leaders to have an ambition for people to be fundamentally changed, in how they see the world, and more importantly how they live? It’s sure as heck easy to say, but what would it look like in real life?

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Atheism for Lent – Controlling God

Posted by: Jim Mondry on Saturday, March 26th, 2011

I’m more and more convinced that we all attempt to control God for our own purposes. This is far more than just modifying our beliefs to make our behaviour acceptable to us (compromise), or make God in our own image, but goes so far as to attempt to make us the director of God. Freud really was on to something with the following two critiques of how we attempt to control God. The following is a a summary of one of Freud’s critiques as written by Merold Westphal about one way we try to go so far as to control God:

When we combine the goal of magic, which is control of the world, with the magical character of ceremonials, we see that what is at issue in this combination of theory and practice is omnipotence and the human attempt to exercise control over whatever sacred power might exist.

Have you ever prayed to God to help you find something that you lost? I’ve done that over a lost wallet, a lost birth cirtificate, and a lost gold watch (which was my father’s). The first I found with in about 20 minutes (and proceed to thank God), the second took me a weeks to find (it had fallen behind a dresser in my room), and the third was picked up by someone else a few minutes before I got back to where it was lost, and I never saw it again.

Now, those are somewhat flippant uses of prayer, so how many people prayed after they heard about what happened in Haiti? How many prayed after they heard what is going on in Japan? Have you ever prayed for someone with a serious illness or was dying? I don’t want to dismiss prayer, but I am more and more seeing everything I’ve been taught about prayer in a light of trying to control God – God, please do what I want. When ever I pray over these things I really am ”attempting to exercise control over whatever sacred power might exist.” I am looking to use God to face a nature fully out of my control, and bring it back in line with how I think it should be. I am trying to bargin with God – if I am obediant (doing something that I’m called to do, i.e. prayer), please do my will.

Freud also sees a second way we try to control God (again, the summary is written by Merold Westphal):

One of the ways in which the faithful annihilate God’s freedom while purporting to contribute to the divine dignity is through the liturgical equivalent of the demand for orthodoxy. By insisting God be worshipped precisely through the rites that we practice and that these be interpreted only as we interpret them, we transform the covenant formula “I will be your God, and you will be my people” into a vehicle for making God our personal property… We thus become the definition of the good and the saved, making those who differ from us the wicked and the lost. If we are among those who preside over the sacramental rites of our faith we become the dispensers or withholders of divine favour.

I’ve already written how I continually do this, as if I’m the one who is able to define orthodoxy. My life as I live it validates the idea as suggested by Dawkins: “Religious Certainty is the cause of all violence”*. My certainty that I profess leads me to violent responses to those that hold differeing views from me – I try to take away their freedom to have their own ideas and opinions to try and make them believe what I believe. I don’t go so far as being physically violent, but I can certainly be quite verbally aggressive. I just hope that I can learn to hold my beliefs a little more lightly, and not be so certain. This isn’t to say I won’t believe anything, as that is an impossibility, but simply to not be so confident that I’m right, and the other is wrong.

I love how Westphal closes his chapter talking about how we try to control God: “If the god of bargins refuses to bargin, and the god of possessive monotheism refuses to be possessed, what happens to my faith?” When I first read it, I nearly jumped from my seat. I think it describes the very question I’ve been wrestling with over the last ten years – If God won’t respond to my prayers, and I can’t know the “absolute truth of God”, what am I left with? I really wish I had an answer, but I don’t know if there is one. I just hope that I can allow this critique change how I see God, and respond to God.

Is it possible to avoid the habit of trying to control God through bargining (trading obediance for sacrifice, or whatever), or through some claim to knowledge of God’s truth? What would this faith look like?

—

*I was at a lecture yesterday where that comment was attributed to Dawkins. I searched the interweb for the actual quote but was unable to find its original source. If I have it wrong, or its actually from someone else, please correct me.

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Atheism for Lent – Compromising God

Posted by: Jim Mondry on Thursday, March 24th, 2011

Do you envision God as a being that can be bargained with? There’s a story in the old testament, of Abraham bartering with God over the Cities of Sodom and Gomorrah (Gen 18). He starts with the request to save the city, and when God grants that if there are fifty “righteous people” in the city, God will spare the city. The discussion continues until God is willing to save the city for only ten people. Now, depending on your point of view, this might seem okay, as Abraham is just trying to save the lives of people who are about to be killed, but at the same time here is Abraham trying to control God. This discussion is very similar to bartering that Abraham does to buy land to bury his wife Sarah when she dies – lots of flattery. There is polite banter, each person complementing the other, all the while having clear motives behind those kind words. In some sense, I see this idea of bartering with God being extended with Jacob, who wrestles with an angel, and is then given the name Israel – Wrestles with God.

So far, so good. In the old testament though, this idea of bartering with God quickly goes bad. Saul, the first king of the Israelites, is caught bartering with God in a sense, in 1 Samuel chapter 15 . (Side note: please ignore the ethical implications of this story for a moment, to look at my point). God tells Saul to attack the Amalekites and destroy every thing of theirs (and kill all men, women, children, cattle, sheep, camels and donkeys). Saul then goes to battle, but rather than do this, he and the army keep the king alive, and kept the best of the livestock. When Saul is caught red-handed by Samuel, Saul tries to claim that he kept those things as an offering for God. Essentially, he’s trying to offer a trade to God – let me keep these spoils of war, and I’ll give you some.

Freud sees this behaviour exhibited within religious ceremonial behaviour. This would be a good example of the “compromise” characteristic of religion – twist what I believe until what I unconsiously know is wrong, is consciously thought of to be good (or at least guiltfree).

“If the violation of a taboo can be made good by atonement or expiation, which involve the renunciation of some possession or some freedom, this proves that obedience to the taboo injunction meant in itself the renunciation of something desirable. Emancipation from one renunciation is made up for by the imposition of another one elsewhere”

This renunciation typically is of one of two forms: renunciation of some possession (sacrifice or offering), or some freedom (obedience). Saul sought to make up for his lack of obediance by making a sacrifice, but in the story God rejected this.

This is something that I have caught myself doing. For many years, I did not give any offering to the church I attended, with the belief that since I volunteer so much time, it made up for that. I rationalized that since I didn’t have much money, and what I did have was going to my university education (which actually was a lie in itself, as it went more for beer and food money), it was okay not to give. I even catch myself now with a similar attitude at times. I can rationalize this well in various ways, from questioning the way the money is spent, to saying that I give to other charities, to saying that I need the money so that I can buy ethical, organic, fairly-traded goods. At least in a sense those are somewhat true, but I’m still bargaining with God – let me keep my money to spend how I want, and I’ll give You my time for Your Church.

Now, my challenge though is that its not like I can instantly change my behaviour. I know that if I changed how I gave money, it would essentially be out of my guilt for not giving. That guilt would very quickly fester into resentment, and what was supposed to be a pious act would quickly turn into a meaningless action or worse. But in all of this, am I just rationalizing my behaviour so as not to change?

I also know that I have a serious issue with the way I react to people with differing beliefs. I mentioned in a previous blog post, that I suffer from some serious ego issues where I can see myself as a defender of “true Christianity”. I think that I make a type of compromise, in that I reject this individual (do not love them as my neighbour) claiming that I’m simply trying to defend Christianity (as if my beliefs somehow made me more acceptable to God). This is complete and utter BS, but yet somehow it’s defined a lot of my behaviour and thinking over the last several years.

Do you see any compromise behaviour in yourself? What do you offer God in exchange for something else?

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Atheism for Lent – I still don’t know why I do what I do

Posted by: Jim Mondry on Wednesday, March 23rd, 2011

Every time you do a religious action, is it truely intentional? For myself, I know at times I’m participating in a religious ceremonial, and there is a clear sense of what I’m participating in, but there are often times where I simply just follow along without any sense of feeling or desire for the action. I want to expand a little more regarding what I said in my last post about the social impact on religious practices.

Now, I’m only as knowledgeable about Action Theory as the wikipedia entry and what Westphal explains, but from my understanding, there is a distinction between Motion and Action. A motion is simply a movement (i.e. if I fell down) but has no associated intention or motive. An action is distinguished in that it has intention. The same motion, though with a different intention, is a different action. A simplified example of the difference would be someone sitting on the grass at parliment hill. If it was a sunny sunday afternoon and the person was reading, we can probably gather that the intention is just to enjoy some green-space. In contrast, if someone was sitting on parliment hill with a placard, it would appear that the action is a protest. Its the same motion in both cases, but completely different actions.

Now, to draw in some religious examples, image a Sunday service. From week to week (when I’m at church anyway), you will likely see me singing at some point in the service. Same action, week after week. But, my intention is often drastically different depending on the week – sometimes I will be singing with a intention of “worship”*, other times I will simply be singing because it is the expected thing to do.

Communion is the thing I most often catch myself with drastically differing intentions. Some weeks, I’m honestly feeling some sense of guilt and so I go up to the table in a penitent sort of way (God I’m sorry for my behaviour). Many weeks though, I’m feeling a strong sense that I don’t want to go up, but I’m afraid of the social impact of not going up – will people ask why? will I have an answer? My social guilt is leading me to participate in a religious ceremonial stripping it of all meaning. The ceremonial of communion is so full of meaning, beyond that of remembrance of Jesus death, it is unfortunate that I simply am only ever associating guilt with action – but I think this really gets to the deeper truth of my understanding of “my faith” – it really is a guilt oriented piety. I either do things so as not to feel guilty from God, or from those around me.

What all this really tells me is that I’m more often worried about the ‘god’ of other people, than anything more pious.

One final thought on intention though, embedded in one of the footnotes in the book, there was a really fascinating comment about intention in a religious social context:

If the setting were a ceremonial one in which a pastor were leading his congregation in the recitation of the Apostles’ Creed, one would be less likely to accept those words as a direct expression of their beliefs… than one would in another context. That is becuase an alternative explanation is available. The conventions governing the service dictate that those words are to be said at that time and in that place.” – Wayne Proudfoot, Religious Experience, 1985

Essentially, action in this case could be understood as social conformity rather than piety. How often do you find yourself following along with the service, simply out of conformity? Can we break away from this? I wonder what a church service would look like where people were allowed to participate with what ever was providing meaning, but were allowed to not participate if the action was lacking meaning that week?

*My understanding behind the intention of worship has become more and more vague over the last few years. Suffice to say for this example, I’m attempting to connect with the words and music beyond their surface.

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Atheism for Lent – They know not what they do

Posted by: Jim Mondry on Monday, March 21st, 2011

Do you know why you perform the religious acts that you do? I have been at churches for many years that spend most sermons explaining the religious significance behind all of the various practices that the denomination performs. To suggest that there is anyone who doesn’t understand the significance of a monetary offering, or why the Eucharist is celebrated, would sound out-right ignorant.

There are four parallels that Freud sees between Religious Practices and Neurotic Ceremonials:

1) The compulsive character of the practice (i.e. the individual exhibits a conscientiousness of the practice, and there exists an anxiety accompanying any deviations, neglect or interruption in their performance)

2) Isolation of the act from other activities, making it easy to conceal from others (leaves the social behaviour unaffected).

3) The acts are symbolically meaningful, even in the details

4) Those who perform a given act in either case do so without understanding its meaning, or at any rate its chief meaning.

What struck me about this, was how true this is about my faith. Points two and three are fairly obvious, but one and four have something for me to personally explore. For a number of years, I’ve struggled with going to church. At times it’s been a real effort to drag myself out, as I really have not wanted to go. This has often been due to a wide variety of reasons, but when even I have “skipped out”, I have often had a sense of guilt. Usually if I skip one week, it’s a great feeling of freedom (picture “Homer the Heretic“), but if it goes on too long, I have a strong feeling of guilt around not going. I’m great at rationalizing that guilt – I worry that not going to church will negatively affect my spiritual life, I worry it will affect my relation to God, I worry that I may never want to go back, etc.

I’ll be honest, in that I think there is something else going on inside my head, rather than a true worry about my faith or anything so noble. How much of our Christian practices are based on a desire to be part of a community? How much is out of a desire to be obedient to our parents? (I cherry picked questions that applied to me, there are many other questionable reasons to perform religious acts)

I think personally, I worry more subconsciously about not going to church for the absense of a community to be part of. Most of my life, my friends and community have been created through faith groups. I’ve had school friends and work friends, but consistently my closest friends have been through my church. If I stopped going to church, how would I meet people to connect with? This has been such an important part of my social identity for so many years, to abandon it now would be quite traumatic.

I wonder, if somehow as a child the idea of being obedient to my parents through going to church still stands? I found odd ways to rebel as a child, but for the most part I mostly sought my parents approval through doing what was asked (though not often in a positive sense). I wonder how much of that still is affecting my decision making? What is more likely is that my relationship with my parents (one of obedience out of a desire for approval) has be transfered to “my heavenly father”, so I have the same perspective on obedience - if I don’t obey (in this instance go to church), I won’t have God’s approval. Guilt has been a driving factor in my obedience both to my parents, and in my Christian life (which is why I think Roland’s idea of “Beyond Guilt” is so profound).

What is the spiritual act that you struggle most with doing, but can’t bring yourself to give up (and tithes/offerings don’t count)? If you look at yourself honestly, why do you keep doing it? As human’s we’re great at rationalizing things, but not so good at looking underneith.

For the record, I’m not saying that I should give up going to church, but I think its important to consider that there may be negitive reasons holding me hostage. I wonder if I was able to get past those, what it would look like for me to attend?

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