Contest #3: "I believe..." (essay)

DWill · Posted: Thu Sep 25, 2008 11:50 am Post subject:

Keeping the Faiths
DWill

I still believe in tolerance of diverse religious beliefs. I consider this to be a bedrock American value. Though we have never in reality achieved this perfect tolerance, it is an ideal worth keeping.

At least two forces threaten the existence of the ideal. The first is the erosion of the separation between church and state. For diversity to continue to flourish, there can be no official or de facto state religion. This fact—that the U.S. has never had a state religion—has leveled the playing field for all faiths, ensuring that they can thrive. Insistence that the U.S. was founded as a Christian nation and should be formally recognized as one, has grown in recent years. Last spring, we witnessed the spectacle of the two presumptive nominees for president submitting to public examination by Pastor Rick Warren. Is a religious test for public office very far away?

The other force originates in far different quarters. It promotes an idea of religious faith as sometimes dangerous and always an affront to reason. Though still much the weaker of the two forces, it has grown stronger since 9/11/01, when Islamist extremists did grave harm to our country. Though it is now imperative to take seriously the threat posed by this and other extreme groups, it is a gross exaggeration to say that religious belief itself is a moral hazard.

Religious belief is censured as irrational because some of it relies on the supernatural, and some flavors of it deny the findings of science. I realize that thresholds of arousal will differ among observers of the religious landscape. I can’t prove that I am right to be sanguine about this matter of what people believe; my threshold of arousal is high. I am not concerned at all by a belief in a God who ministers to each individual, or in an immortal soul that finds its way to heaven. I am mildly disturbed by a view of earth history that ignores the last 200 years of science, but think it best to let this go, unless creationists infiltrate the school board and try to introduce a “balanced” new biology text into the district.

We hear a lot about beliefs causing this or that harmful behavior. Not to discount the concern entirely, but does a belief ever cause a behavior by itself, except in the case of psychotic command hallucinations? In the normal brain, there is more than likely a conjunction of forces, say intense grievance over historical wrongs, simple desire for power, AND religious fervor. It will be hard to tell which force is ascendant in a given person. We do know that humans are good at cloaking their primary motives in idealistic terms. Religion is a handy source for the terms.

The vision of anti-religionists is of a world in which superstition has been swept away and reason and science reign. My reaction is that such a world appears less interesting and more lacking in diversity, a diversity that may include a measure of weirdness, it is true. I want to preserve and encourage diversity of any kind, whether of languages, flora and fauna, or human types. I envision more of a Whitmanesque world in which all difference is not just accepted but celebrated. We could do worse than to take our lead from a poet. So my vision extends beyond simple tolerance.

At the least, we should pay attention to the words of Thomas Jefferson, a severe skeptic on religion who nevertheless wished it to prosper: “But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”

Saffron · Posted: Fri Sep 26, 2008 8:27 pm Post subject:

DWill

GentleReader9 · Posted: Mon Sep 29, 2008 8:30 pm Post subject:

On Belief

The first of three definitions in my dictionary reads:

DWill · Posted: Mon Sep 29, 2008 9:37 pm Post subject:

GentleReader9 · Posted: Tue Sep 30, 2008 10:42 am Post subject:

Thanks, DWill, for taking the time to read and encourage others. You already "get" everything important I have to say, anyway. I'm glad you're here.

Saffron · Posted: Tue Sep 30, 2008 6:37 pm Post subject:

GentleReader9

Chris OConnor · Posted: Sat Oct 18, 2008 1:41 am Post subject:

Thanks for your submissions. While I enjoyed running this contest and reading the entries I now realize that we are going to have to form a Book Award committee to help me with this project. There is so much administrative stuff to do to keep BookTalk.org running along smoothly that I might be biting off more than I can chew with these contests. I will try to find a few members to help me in the future. For instance I could have used some help with reading these essays, and contacting the participants, and then finding out which free books they would like.

I am going to offer free books to everyone that participated:

Stephen Uhl
BabyBlues
DWill
GentleReader9

If you're one of these 4 people please email chris@booktalk.org with your book choice from the "Books Available For Awards" thread. Just click here to see the long list of books. http://www.booktalk.org/books-available-for-awards-t4515.html It would be wise to send me your 1st choice and 2nd choice, just in case their is a conflict with book choices. Last few times several people quickly claimed the same book. LOL


	FORUMS	ABOUT	BOOKS	VIDEOS	ADVERTISE	LINKS	BLOGS	DONATE	CHAT	CONTACT