[q] willing to grant that it's conceptually distinct from the other four, sure. I don't know about this "access" metaphor, though. I don't perceive my own religious practices and beliefs as giving me privileged "access" to God in any way.[/q]
perhaps this is a good example of how Judaism is distinct from, say, Christianity and Islam. “there is no God but God,” for one example, and I have been told, on this board, that it is simply fact that jesus was the son of god, he was crucified, died, rose on the third day, and I can choose to accept this fact or not, and that’s really it. There’s this element of “mine is the one true way” that I find really disturbing – and have written about this in other threads, and to my mind, as a “fundamentalist agnostic,” if God really is God, he’d find ways to make himself known to people in their own cultural terms – but the way it is often framed, and most often by Christians and Muslims, at least to my knowledge, is that, essentially, it’s my way or the highway.
And, to me, that does make logical sense. It really does. And it’s the logic of that component that makes me increasingly skeptical of the whole because it essentially means that the vast majority of the world's population aren’t going to be reunited with God in the afterlife (and this causes some believers angst … witness one, my BF’s parents, and two, one of my friends who is Hindu was given several concerned drunken lectures by her Baptist roommate about just how much their friendship meant and how upset she was that my friend is off to Hell).
There is also a thread in the Goal/Soul forum that talks about how difficult it can be to tell someone The Truth, and how to do it with love, for it is love that should inspire us to, essentially, convert those we care about. I am deeply troubled by this, though, again, it makes total logical sense. It reminds me when I was in 8th grade CCD and, being quite outspoken at the time especially with the very conservative young couple who were teaching the class, announcing that I refused to evangelize or, specifically, try to convert my Jewish friends. They told me that I really needed to examine my faith.
[q]I dunno, it seems to me you're conflating the overzealous aftermath with the belief itself here. It sounds like you're suggesting that Nazi eugenicists' project (for example) was rational up until some murky point at which it "became religion" for them, but then as far as religion proper goes, you seem to be suggesting that it's screwed from the beginning. [/q]
it’s not that it’s screwed, necessarily, but that the nature of religion itself is irrationality. It is. You can’t get around that. That’s what faith is. And this can inspire wonderful things, and terrible things. This doesn’t meant that religion will always be abusive, but that it’s inherent potential for abuse is simply much greater than any secularist dogma.
The Nazi example is interesting, but the eugenics project extended out of simple patriotism and, well, racism. This is also, I think, an example of where religion can, in fact, be a check on hyperrationalism (see later paragraphs). It’s been said, and I do agree with it, that the Holocaust was the ultimate deadly expression of modernism – the total suppression of the recognition of common humanity and the creation of a brilliantly effective killing machine. This came from, among many other things, a romanticist belief in notions of a pure Volk and the deification of the abilities of a particular nation, particularly in science and progress -- one only has to look at, say, Triumph of the Will to see just how much the precise, machine-like marchings of the Nazi army, combined with Hitler’s arrival from the sky via shiny aircraft in the film’s prologue to see the clear deification of science and religion, and the elevation of science to religion.
I don’t know if that answered your question, but this is a very interesting topic.
[q]Well it's gorgeously said, all right, but I can't finally agree with his analysis. Why do some religious people feel motivated to do great things and others to do awful ones? [/q]
I encourage you to read the whole thing:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/faith/interviews/albacete.html
He speaks gorgeously.
[q]Through inquiry, through skepticism, through critical thinking, but also through cultivating a sense of wonder and awe at how precious other human lives are and the gifts each one has to offer, and a sense of joy and privilege in being able to work together to heal the wounds.[/q]
to me, the manifestation of precisely this ethos – that we are all children of god, that we are all from the same source, so therefore I is I and Everything is Everything – that could convert me into a believer. I do believe that this is religion’s potential, to reminds us that, because we are all compose of the same flesh and blood and bone, we are all possessed of the same soul and spirit. There’s a line in “Contact” (a cheesy movie that I hate to love) where Jodie Foster’s character says:
[q]I... had an experience. I can't prove it, I can't even explain it, but everything that I know as a human being, everything that I am tells me that it was real. I was given something wonderful, something that changed me forever. A vision of the universe, that tells us undeniably, how tiny, and insignificant and how... rare, and precious we all are! A vision that tells us that we belong to something that is greater then ourselves, that we are *not*, that none of us are alone. [/q]
it’s a beautiful thought – and I do hope it’s true. But I’m not hopeful.
Not right now, anyway.