tylik

So a couple of weeks ago, I, in a rather sleep deprived state (which seems to have been typical of way too much of my time recently) walked past one of the campus Christian groups, who had a table set up in the HUB, and a white board on which they'd written the question, "What is Jesus to you?". They invited me to write a response. I waved them off then, but came back later and wrote "A social radical".

And then

meowse wrote this post a few days back, which got me thinking more about to what extent I should be having a dialog with the people who attend churches and aren't otherwise part of my community. (I have a number of friends who attend churches of various sorts, but we seem to muddle on okay.) Which got me thinking about the Christian student group, and started me writing this rather long post, which I've been adding to in bits and pieces the last bit.

When I wrote that on the board, I also kind of wanted to write that the version of Jesus I found most compelling is the man, who had the courage and clarity to see through and discard many of the social conventions of his day. No cozy, normative "everyone knows that X or Y is bad and should be avoided." No complacency. Couldn't think of a way to fit it on the board, and my coherency wasn't exactly at its highest ebb, so I left it brief.

Now, I'm not saying that this is the only interpretation of Jesus. It's just pretty much the only one I've yet run into that packs any kind of a punch for me. (Well, at least in a good way.) And it made me wonder, in my bleary way, if part of the reason there's so much emphasis on Jesus as a god is that the god is a heck of a lot less threatening than the man. Gods do all kinds of weird stuff. They're gods, it's more or less expected. They can be awesome and marvelous, but... It's kind of different when a man is doing it, yes? It rather begs the question, if he can do it, why can't you? And what would that mean in this time, in this place?

(Of course, this is presupposing that Christianity is all about Jesus, and I suspect that it's not, or certainly not for everyone. My experiences with Catholicism seem to be less overtly Jesus focused -- and whatever my beefs with the Pope, I'm a big fan of Catholicism purely on the basis of aesthetics.)

Which is one of the question I suspect most of the Christians I've met who I really respect ask themselves. Or at least some variation on "what is the right thing to do, regardless of the societal norms". It's strange, in that light, to see so many Christian groups get so interested in preserving "traditional values". Oh well. Signal always gets degraded when something turns into an institution.

So I was thinking about this, and I had to ask myself if finding a community of people who were pursuing that sort of Christianity would make me more likely to be Christian. And, well... it wouldn't really. Though I'd enjoy hanging out with them, and would probably find them inspirational. (Oh, but I probably wouldn't have time to hang out with them, but that's not a religious thing.) And most of the reasons I'm not Christian apply equally well to other religions -- it's not some kind of personal gripe about Christianity in particular.

In fact, I kind of wonder how many other people run up against these things...

I guess to start out with, there's the identity politics side of things. What does it mean to be a Christian? (Or any a member of any other religious group, for that matter.) To what extent is it a statement of philosophy, to what extent a statement of belief, to what extent a social or cultural affiliation?

At this point in my life, I'm a lot more certain of being culturally pagan. Philosophically, I'm.. well to be honest I'm probably closer to a Taoist than anything else I've run across, but I'm not particularly comfortable with that as an identity, and heck, I've met at least one Quaker I've had more in common with than most Taoists. Part of this is that my upbringing made me acutely aware of being an oversized white girl, and partly this is because my pleasure in Taoists texts, especially old ones, in classical, hasn't quite been matched with my joy in a Taoist community.. In terms of belief... I have a well developed aesthetic sense. Other than that, I mostly try to avoid believing in things. I like learning things, I like understanding things... I'm not quite sure what belief adds to the picture. Especially in this weird space many religions seemed to have put themselves in, wherein having faith means that you're supposed to believe in any number of weird and random things, and disbelieve in various others.

(Just for the record, I generally feel that religion deals with innately different kinds of things than does science, and if you've set the two up to be in conflict over facts, you're pretty much already going down for the third time. They shouldn't have to be opposed, and that a lot of people think they are is a lot of what gives religion a bad name. I'm also aware that not all religious people subscribe to this kind of silliness, and I hope it is indeed a minority opinion. Though after this last election...)

In a more general sense, I feel pretty strongly that I don't know jack shit. Don't get me wrong -- while I rather suspect that compared to the things that can be known, I'll always know jack shit, I do have an almost religious belief in learning and discovering and trying to understand, and will continue to strive to increase my tiny store of approximate knowledge. There aren't a lot of things I think are innately worthwhile, but those are pretty high on the list. I also, just to be clear, think that you don't know jack shit, and indeed that not knowing jack shit is fairly central to the human condition. Almost as central as is the need to try to understand the world around us.

But I do feel a great awe and delight in the universe, and feel that, aesthetically, it's rather disrespectful to spend a lot of time and effort pretending we know a lot about parts of it when in fact we know very little. Aesthetically, again, I favor bringing a degree of humility to these endevours. Practically, I tend to suspect that starting out with a clearer idea of what you don't know might make it easier to learn new things, and all these believing in things seems like a bit of a waste of energy.

Okay, so then I come across the idea of where religious texts fit into things. Aesthetically, I've admired most of the texts of major religons I've come across. But religous texts can serve many roles... and the one I'm virulently allergic to is the idea that Truth (not the capital) can be fit into any book. Aside from the contents of any particular book (and I haven't met one yet that didn't say a few things I strongly objected to, were they to be taken literally) the whole concept really bothers me. I mean, truth just can't fit. It's like trying to fit a cedar tree into a piece of paper. Sure, you can draw a picture, but it's just not the same. To pretend it can fit strikes me as pretty disrespectful of truth.

I know different Christian groups take different stances on the exact nature of the Bible, but I haven't yet found one that didn't enshrine more that I could deal with for any book. And I like books. A lot.

Hmm. Oh, and then there are rules. Look, I think discussion of ethics is one of the more useful things religions can do in society. But, and I feel very strongly about this, I also feel that the kind of rules that one can write down, just like the kinds of truth one can write down, are pretty thin and attenuated things compared to the complexity of the world we all have to deal with. And rules are a lousy substitute for understanding, reflection, and taking responsibility for coming up with an ethical decision. I think it is the privledge and a duty of adults -- perhaps, indeed, the defining characteristic of adults -- to make ethical choices. And while I'm all for consulting other works and discussions of ethics, and so on, I feel like anyone who follows any set of rules rather than thinking through these issues on their own is abdicating their place as an adult.

(Though... we all do it, sometimes. Everything is so complicated...!)

Again, this is one of those areas where I've found many Christians who are on pretty much exactly the same page with me, so I'm certainly not saying that a property of being Christian is abdicating moral responsibility. (Though this seems to have been more or less institutionalized in some churches. I hope I am misunderstanding...) It's more one of those things that gets me confused, because most of my experience with Christian institutions, including ones that are pretty politically congenial, has involved a great deal of preoccupation about rules.

I'm not going to go into all the traditional values (of bigotry and oppression) bit. I'm perfectly willing to treat them as cultural sediment. (Though my big break with Catholicism -- as an unbaptized 6 year old -- was when I found out that women couldn't become priests.) I mean, from what I've read of the Koran, it would have to be at the top of my list, at least of the big monotheistic three... but OMG, the cultural sediment.

What's funny is that the times I've talked about these things with devoutly religious people of types usually not found in my social circles, it hasn't been a problem. I suspect that if I told them that I believed in gods and demons and so on (which I don't -- or particularly disbelieve, I'm not even sure I haven't met a few, but I certainly can't say) they'd have been a bit fruck, but somehow the more philosophical discussions seemed less threatening. *shrug*