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Anthropologist Tanya Luhrman is in the New York Times this week. She says, “We need to recognize something of what we share, and to carry on a conversation — and if we can keep the conversation going, we will, however slowly, move forward.
If we can’t, we’re in real trouble.”
She sums up her thoughts in this little bit…
Yet believers and nonbelievers are not so different from one another, news that is sometimes a surprise to both. When I arrived at one church I had come to study, I thought that I would stick out like a sore thumb. I did not. Instead, I saw my own doubts, anxieties and yearnings reflected in those around me. People were willing to utter sentences — like “I believe in God” — that I was not, but many of those I met spoke openly and comfortably about times of uncertainty, even doubt. Many of my skeptical friends think of themselves as secular, sometimes profoundly so. Yet these secular friends often hover on the edge of faith. They meditate. They keep journals. They go on retreats. They just don’t know what to do with their spiritual yearnings.
Perhaps there is hope. Good marriages work because couples learn to repair, rather than escalate, their conflicts. Same-sex marriage and abortion should not be approached by drawing a line in the sand and demonizing everyone on the other side. We need to recognize something of what we share, and to carry on a conversation — and if we can keep the conversation going, we will, however slowly, move forward.
If we can’t, we’re in real trouble.
You can read the whole article here: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/07/opinion/sunday/how-skeptics-and-believers-can-connect.html?_r=0
I’m thinking about her thoughts on this. Your thoughts?I appreciate what she’s saying here because it’s something that I said as a believer and still do as an atheist. If I didn’t believe we were able to communicate graciously and openly I would not be here on TLS.
When I consider that over 90% of the people in my life are people of faith, choosing to shut off communication would cause me to have a very empty and lonely existence. I just commented to a friend that while I no longer observed Lent, I do go through periods where I give something up for a cause or for a personal goal. As the writer above says, I meditate, journal, and I try to spend time reflecting on my day, what I used to call devotion time as a Christian. There are many things I’m honest enough to admit taking with me from religion.
What I don’t like however is that there is the occasional Church vs. The World mentality when I’m trying to engage in dialogue with my Christian friends. Their marriages are not stronger because they believe in God as I’ve seen many or them crumble. Their ideas and desires do not deserve greater attention because of their faith. When conversations about matters of ethics and morals cannot be resolved without them feeling an edge of superiority for their faith, it creates a place where were I not so secure I’d feel beneath them. An ex-pastor once told me that there would be lots of good people in hell. As if no matter what good those of us who were secular accomplished in life, we were failures bound for sorrow.
So while I’m all for keeping the conversation going, I find it hard to do so at times outside of this community. I’m not trying to make atheists of theists but have a hard time having the same courtesy given to me by some theist. That is a conversation stopper for me. So how do we fix that?
@starfielder as I read this, a conversation I had a couple of months ago came to mind. The other participants in the conversation were a fairly new casual friend I made and her best friend who happens to be a lesbian. My new friend is a devout christian and attends a nazerene church in the local area. Somehow the topic of religion and attitudes toward homosexuality came up. I divulged a little bit of where I’m coming from as a former christian turned non-theist and expressed my lamenting of the hate that is directed toward the LGBTQ community and individuals. The gay friend told me she really appreciated that, and we talked back and forth a bit about how we both just want to let people be people and have the same allowed of us, regardless of their beliefs or sexual orientation of whatever. And then it all came to a screeching halt when my christian friend decided to chime in with a couple of cliche’ responses, pointing out that she will always love her best friend, and doesn’t believe she should be hateful, but that God does hate sin and it’s clear in the bible that homosexuality isn’t okay with Him. And then she added that just because I don’t believe in God, it doesn’t change the truth that I’m not going to heaven if I don’t repent of my unbelief..but she loves me anyway.
While I value the fact that she is one of the very few christians who remain kind to me when they find out I’m not one of them anymore, I can’t help it..I got a little queaasy..and the conversation literally stopped..so yes..wow..oh my glob….
I think there is an art to listening. When I get bent out of shape from something someone says it usually has more to say about my ego and what it is attached to. Most of the time when people say something spiteful it’s because it comes from a place of fear. I will often get accused of being disrespectful of Christian beliefs, when I am relating what the Bible actually says. I got this comment from a fundamentalist believer, “Richard keeps bashing my beliefs by quoting violent texts from the Bible. He keeps misrepresenting God. Why are the moderators allowing this on a Christian forum?”
What I was quoting was god ordered violence. It is quite horrendous and most Christians don’t really read these portions of the Bible. And in this tradition Jesus is seen as the human incarnation of the god of the Old Testament. So in their minds Jesus would be the god ordering the killing of children and the raping of virgins. They figure since Jesus is god, he must have had his reasons and we won’t understand this until we get to heaven.
It scares me a bit that someone can so easily dismiss this level of violence and even imagine there might be a good reason for killing children and raping virgins. And when we look at the history of the Christian church it is paved with blood. And when you read the justifications for this level of violence in the past you find theologians appealing to these texts of god ordered violence.
I feel like this is a conversation that needs to be pressed a little harder because of the religiously motivated violence we see today. I engage in this conversation as kindly as I can without compromising the truth. And I don’t take it personally when I get attacked because I hear fear, not mean spiritedness. For a person who has engaged in a particularly fearful world view all their life, this conversation can be jarring in of itself. They will survive though.
I think it’s important to note that disagreement is not an attack.
Regrettable, I find more and more that the ones who call themselves christians seem to be the ones full of hate and judgement, anger and strife. Sad and their actions are not making people want to go to their brick and mortar houses of tithing.
@Richard I agree with you. @Ang, so true.
An interesting thing about Tanya is that she is a friend of mine. We have spent time talking about these issues. One thing I notice about her is that she is respectful and kind. She might think a notion of god is silly but she would not say so at the expense of the person telling it. I have pulled weeds with her, eaten meals with her and we were in a women’s small group for 2 years together where we explored Ignatian Spirituality. (praying with the imagination…) She has done a lot of press for her textbook. This is the first time I’ve heard her talk about this aspect of discussing the conversation of belief, non-belief, etc. with believers. I find her take on it to be spot on.
You can resolve most of that by declaring that God wasn’t actually behind any of these mass killings, and that just because the Bible said they were, it doesn’t make it so. The problem is, most Christians believe in biblical infallibility and therefore they simply cannot avoid the consequences that such a belief basically puts God in the driving seat of genocide in the Old Testament, they will usually tend to avoid such an area…
I see what people are getting at, sometimes it is just incredibly difficult to have conversation with certain Christians, and certain Atheists, because they just do not want to know about anything other than their world views, and I’ve seen people get incredibly hostile about it from both sides of the fence. Bring up the aspects of religion or God to some Atheists and its pssh don’t get me started! Bring up the concept of LGBT or abortion or the flaws in bible inerrancy to some Christians and the defensive walls immediately come up and they rant you into submission, they believe God is very much on their side.
AnonymousI love conversation. I find there are few people in this world who are talented conversationalists. Conversations involve speaking and listening. The problem is that words are coloured by our perspective, our culture, our upbringing, our surroundings, etc. When we put a bunch of words together to form a sentence it’s meaning can get lost. Just as all of those things colour or speech, it also colours our hearing. So what is said may not be what is heard and the conversation fails because the two parties can’t understand each other but neither is willing to admit that and ask for clarification.
I taught English as a second language for a summer and find it an apt example. I would be talking to a student and ask him a question. The student would reply yes, so I thought I was understood and would continue on. Later, when I would follow up, it was clear the student had no idea what I was talking about it. He just answered yes because he didn’t want to admit he didn’t know what I had said. He also didn’t want to be rude. He was Asian. I was the teacher and therefore deserved the utmost respect. It was rude to question the teacher or to tell the teacher that she was unclear. So the conversation gap existed and continued until I learned I wasn’t being understood and worked harder to be clear and to make sure I was understood before leaving a conversation.
I’m tired and that may be a bit rambling and clear, but the point being that we need to approach the conversations in this world as if we are speaking to someone of a different culture and language so that we slow down, take the time to be clear, and make sure we are understood. We may not be working with an equally respectful conversationalist, but we can’t change that. All we can do is do our part and hope that enough of us exist to keep the dialogue going.
I used to try and rehab the Bible in a similar way except you have Jesus telling us that not one point of the law will change. If we include the whole set of laws outlined in the Old Testament we have some rather horrendous value systems. I know there are a number of complicated apologetics to help Jesus only choose the good laws. Once you remove the Bible from the inerrancy mooring you create the problem of the poor communication skills of god, if god is behind the Bible at all.
I much prefer to let ideas stand on their own merit and their own demonstration of success. If the Bible is God’s word in even a mystical sense, it reveals a rather difficult to understand narrative which has created resistance among it’s proponents to most major social advances over it’s published life. While it has had its influence on western culture, I think most of that influence has been advanced through military might and fear than people being drawn to its narrative.
I do like the story of Jesus. I like how the story tells his philosophy of inclusiveness. I don’t like how he refuses to offer some explanation of himself when being tried or teaches people to turn the other cheek or states that in the end he will destroy his enemies or tells people they have to leave their families to follow him, etc. It kind of undoes his previous example. But just because I like the story isn’t enough for me to consider Christianity a basis for life. I would rather take what it has to offer that does demonstrate wisdom and leave the rest without the need to have a god behind it.
I think that as soon as we have to make sure there’s a god behind it, we get into problems.
I guess it depends on how you interpret ‘the Law’ in terms of Old Testament. I believe a lot of the law system in the Old Testament was man made and is reflexive of the time in history, we’re talking ancient societies, a lot of their practices would be repugnant to us in the 21st century. Jesus could have been referring to those laws, but he could also just have been referring to the 10 Commandments, or perhaps even a law of God that wasn’t noted down. The problem inerrancy creates is that tries to stretch the Bible into having all the answers and you thus you locate answers within it that are simply invalid and make no sense. I don’t believe God was behind the Bible at all, I think it was fully a human creation, its a natural instinct of religions to create liturgical books as a foundation for their belief system as its observed in almost every other religion, from Islam to Wicca. More importantly, Jesus mentioned nothing about the importance of keeping written records, and Christianity flourished perfectly well without any need of a Bible for over three centuries, and then you have the premise that even though the Catholic church created the Vulgate, no typical believer could read anyway, not until the Reformation came along. The Bible can be useful in that it contains the accounts of Jesus for example, but it should really only be viewed as an accessory to Christian faith, not the Holy book its perceived to be.
And you have to be careful with the records of Jesus, I believe when you locate contradictions with what he is saying for instance, love your enemies and then later on saying I will destroy my enemies, you have to mindful that there have been additions made by people, or that there have been translation issues that have not been highlighted. That’s why its so important that we have four separate accounts from four different eye witnesses, so we can through each and collaborate the major details, rather than getting caught up in the minor fuzzy details. And whereas I do agree that many have been obliged to divulge into Christianity due to fear or intimdation, its quite amazing how many rational people from different religion backgrounds have been drawn to Jesus. The likes of Ghandi and Vivekananda during the Hindu reformation, both coming from a mixed religions background and both generally rejecting the Christian religion, still were in awe of Jesus and the power and wisdom he had. Ghandi stated that the Sermon of the Mount should be a foundation for all morality or something along those lines.
I agree. There is a distinct lack of patience between people these days, particularly in regards to sensitive topics or ones that people feel strongly about. There is no desire to understand each other’s views but to simply attack because of differing beliefs and its just not productive in the slightest. There should be less shouting and more talking!
I guess I’m curious how you decide what to keep in Christianity and on what basis. I’m assuming that you consider yourself a Christian. If you don’t then ignore the following.
What makes you a Christian is what I guess I’m asking. Is Jesus really the Son of God, the product of virgin birth, and did He die for our sins? The only source of these would be the Bible from what I have studied. Maybe you don’t believe these to be true and you have a philosophy of Jesus that stands with or without Jesus.
I know that I retain some of the ideas attributed to Jesus because they work and they would be valuable whether or not Jesus even existed. I don’t consider myself a Christian because I retain these anymore than I would be a Buddhist because I retain some Buddhist ideas.
I’m asking questions at the moment about the origin of the OT Law. I can’t accept anymore that the Mosaic Law we have in the Pentateuch is what the Jews had in that time of history. I can fully accept they had something, but not that we really know just what. I’ve posted before about how a lot of what we would even recognise as Judaism dates from the time of Ezra, not Moses or Joshua. We just don’t know how much of the Mosaic Law was added by Ezra’s fellow enthusiasts. :-/
I guess my point is that the Law according to Jesus is, well, I don’t think we really know.
Wade.
I wouldn’t really consider myself a Christian in that I have rejected the majority of the Christian institution and religion but I still believe in God and I still believe in Christ. I know Jesus existed and I know that something very unnatural happened surrounding him for Christianity to have influenced the people like it did at its inception, the historian in me can validate this too. I see what you are getting at in stating that the information that we know comes from the Bible and I have already stated that I don’t believe the Bible to be the word of God, but you have to remember that the sources located within the Bible, especially those of the Gospels and the letters of Paul, were valid primary sources of the Iron Age before the church decided to pin them all together into a book and call it divine. The fact is, I’ve researched and scrutinized these sources for a long time but I cannot find too much fault with them as valid historical sources, and all these sources all collaborate to state that Jesus was killed and then he returned from the dead, and that he died to grant humanity salvation. The historical context fits in with this perspective, Christianity flourished when it shouldn’t have done. This only really scratches the surface of why I believe what I believe, but I think the Bible is both important and dangerous. Important in that it contains these key historical records of Jesus that can be validated, and dangerous in that many, many Christians hold these accounts as written by God, and thus we worship the book instead of the people talked about in the book.
Indeed! I think biblical inerrency arrived at the same time as Darwinism, and when religion was under attack and thus so was the Bible. If you enforce the idea that the Bible is the entire word of God for long enough, people start believing it to the point where they do not question it… to the point where they actually get hostile when its challenged (I’ve witnessed this myself). From then on, the church doesn’t have to worry about Christians questioning the origins of the Bible, the validity of the Old Testament accounts, because apparently it is all ‘validated’ as God’s word, case closed.
Staticsan,
I believe the “Law according to Jesus” is simplified into one and only one basic principle…Love. Jesus said if we hold to this principle of love we have kept the law even while Himself choosing to disobey and defend others who disobeyed the letter of the the old law. I agree the old covenant law represents a point in Jewish history…but I do not believe it is or ever was as God would have had it.
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