Seeking A Middle Ground

You should read my previous post first. Otherwise this won’t make a lot of sense. In fact, this post contains a lot of links to older posts of mine which I thought might be relevant. Feel free to ignore them.

A little disclaimer first:

I’d toyed with the idea of starting a blog for a while before Seas Too Far To Reach. After all, I have a good number of opinions on a good number of things, and like to write. But I held off, partly because I found the whole idea of blogging sort of arrogant. By writing my thoughts every week and asking people to read them, there’s a huge danger in seeming prideful: as if my thoughts were particularly valuable or groundbreaking, and worth parading to a frequent “readership”. When my posts are very critical (like the last one) and words like “brilliant” gets thrown around in response, that danger only increases. I’d hate to come off an “internet personality” who rants about things as if he has a monopoly on the truth, and expects a group of followers to agree. That’s not my intent. I’m a flawed person with flawed opinions, and don’t pretend to know any more about this stuff than you do. I’m not brilliant, just angsty and longwinded. If you disagree, tell me. We’ll talk about it.

With that said, in the last post I was very critical of some trends I see in modern day Christianity. For better or worse, that criticism is not coming from an outside perspective: I’ve lived these problems. Intellectual integrity? I can’t count the number of online “debates” I had about the truth of Christianity, where I would throw out any “fact” I could find on the internet, just hoping for a conversion. Being vindicated was much more important than finding the truth. Vilifying others? Growing up as a Republican, I thought Democrats were an evil joke and no true Christian could be one. When I got to college, all of a sudden Republicans were the joke: gun-toting old white men, every one of them! I’ve tossed aside huge groups of thinkers like they were nothing. Personal integrity? I’ve had a sad amount of it in my life. The past few years I drank, smoked, cursed, broke a good number of professed boundaries in my relationship, and most every other vice, all while pretending to be the model Christian to model Christian friends. Meanwhile, during my Freshman year of college I pretended I wasn’t a virgin so my roommates wouldn’t think badly of me. In conversations with religion-bashing guys up here, I’ve had times where I more or less denied my faith altogether; in conversations at church, I’ve backed down from my beliefs for fear of starting an argument. I’m a people-pleaser by nature, and could give you a thousand examples of my two-faced behavior.

In other words, these criticisms aren’t coming from a soapbox. When I say these are things I hate about popular Christianity, it’s because they are the largest obstacles I’ve had with faith in the past. And when I say there has to be a middle ground, it’s a desperate plea: it has to be possible to maintain the Christian faith with integrity and respect. If there isn’t, I’m lost, because I don’t want my life to be found in a lesser of two evils.

I certainly haven’t found that way yet. But I have been searching for it, and part of that means having an idea of what I think the end result should look like. After all, to take a page from Plato, how can we find virtue unless we seek it? And how can we seek that which we do not know? And if we don’t know it, how will we recognize it once we’ve found it? Here are a few characteristics I would like to see in myself, and in the church:

Genuine Belief

I’m putting this first, because it is, unfortunately, probably the most unpopular. Plenty of people will agree with my problems with the Church on an intellectual level, but the conclusion is always the same: reduce it to a strictly personal faith, turn the Bible into a good but flawed collection of aphorisms, and let it be spiritual but completely devoid of real-world implication. Or at a weaker level, become apathetic about Biblical truth: take it when you want it, but when there seems to be an unpopular opinion in it, call it outdated or ignore it completely.  More than anything, I want to avoid that. I am not looking for Deism, or some sort of aesthetic grounds for living a certain way: I’m looking for honest, Biblical Christianity. There are a few ideas (Christian Existentialism, Christian Agnosticism, Deism, etc.) which I think happen solve most of the practical issues I have with the church, but they lose too much in the process. Spirituality isn’t enough; I want something concrete.

Intellectual Honesty

Like I’ve mentioned before, I don’t think Christians as a whole are very honest about what they know and don’t know. And I can’t really blame them: I understand. Unlike my opinions on global warming or whether P=NP (it totally doesn’t, by the way), matters of faith have eternal significance. Injecting healthy doubt into that can be incredibly scary. As critical as I can be of closed-mindedness, a part of me is very jealous of the confidence I had as a kid. I may have been taught less-than-convincing arguments and misrepresented the viewpoints of others, but I was so happy and confident. Sometimes I honestly wish I could revert to that way of living, where everything was obvious and doubts were unheard of. But I can’t.

Today on my way back from class, a few of my issues with popular Christianity were shown pretty concretely. A man was standing on campus, handing out free copies of The Origin of Species: 150th Anniversary Edition. The back cover reads: “This higher-education edition of The Origin of Species is for use in schools, colleges, and prestigious learning institution.”

Today being the anniversary of Darwin’s work, I was thoroughly unsurprised to get a free copy. What did surprise me was that the introduction was written by Ray Comfort. I recognized the name; christianaudio had recently published a title on evangelism he co-authored with Kirk Cameron. (After looking at his picture on Wikipedia, I’m starting to think he may have handed me the book himself. Too bad they couldn’t get Cameron to do it: that would have been a story to tell!) Something fishy was going on. I opened it up and saw that his “Introduction” is 50 pages long: almost 1/5th the length of the book. In it he talks about, among other things: the legitimacy of Young Earth Creationism, evolution as a religious belief much like Christianity, Hitler as Darwin’s “Famous Student”, the racism and misogyny of Darwin, and ends by leading you in a prayer to accept Christ.

Talk about a sneaky tactic! If we need to resort to this Trojan Horse method of argument, we’re in a very sorry state of affairs. Can you imagine the uproar if atheists started handing out free updated editions of The Case For Faith on church campuses, with a 50-page introduction by Richard Dawkins trying to debunk it? It is a very deceptive, if not technically dishonest, thing to do. Of course, student groups on campus retaliated with their own free handout: a bookmark “to be inserted at page 59″ (the end of the introduction and start of the actual book) with sign pointing right saying “Science”, and another pointing left saying “Bananas”. And the war rages on!

I hate the idea that the church and the world of academia need to be in collision, and I really believe the best solution is to abandon the God-of-the-Gaps mentality so much of Christian Apologetics falls prey to. The strategy is simple and convincing to the masses: if science can’t currently explain it, claim it as proof of God. The problem, of course, is that science is always progressing, and what is a gap today may not be a gap in a decade. This applies to your standard Young Earth Creation figures, but even more respected thinkers of the Intelligent Design movement like Michael Behe (Darwin’s Black Box) or Francis Collins (The Language of God) are running a big risk, in my opinion. By hedging their bets on current gaps in our understanding (irreducible complexity, the lack of a Missing Link, a Boeing 747 being created in a junkyard, etc), they imply that belief in God is predicated on those things being unexplainable, and gamble against future discovery.  If history is to be any indication, that’s a poor and potentially damaging bet. If biologists were to find a way of explaining the complexity of the human genome in evolutionary terms, would Collins recant his faith? Or would we shove God into a smaller gap, and resume the tactic?

Instead, I try to attribute my belief in God (beyond faith and personal conviction, which are at the forefront) to other things which are not in the domain of natural science: the existence of anything, the presence of consciousness, the perception of beauty, etc. We live in a world which is not lifeless, and I see design in it not necessarily by the complexity of its parts, but the meaning which is abstracted above it; a meaning which, I feel, is completely neglected by naturalistic explanation. Here are more of my thoughts on the matter. I am not saying this is necessarily the right approach or only route to intellectual honesty. But it’s the one I currently take.

Peaceful Coexistence

That phrase has “tree-hugger” written all over it. Sorry. I don’t mean the kind that litters bumper stickers (the one where the C is a Crescent Moon, the O or X is a star of David, etc). Not the universal acceptance Bahai claims to have, or some sort of “every belief about anything is equally valid” nonsense. I’m only saying that we need to recognize our status, in our country and in the world. We do not live in a like-minded theocracy. We live in a world populated by many conflicting faiths, and a country whose First Amendment claims it will not respect or prohibit any particular religion. Whether or not “Christianity isn’t a religion, it’s a relationship” is your motto, we are included.

I don’t think we gain anything by shrugging off other beliefs as illegitimate and therefore not worth acknowledging. We need to show love and respect, and part of that means sympathizing with the plight of the minority. Professed Christians form a vast majority in the United States, and there is no denying that, historically, legislation has gotten through as a result of our bullying. Other people do not believe in the Christian God, and certainly don’t believe many Biblical imperatives are worth following. I think we need to be mindful of that, and be mindful of the religious freedom we value and which others deserve, in the country and in the world. I’ve got plenty of specific opinions on where to draw the line in legislating morality, and on certain recent Propositions about which the church feels strongly. But those are touchy subjects, and this isn’t the place I’d like to start arguing. My point is a much more general one: we need to truly respect other people, and that means trading the strawmen for true empathy. “Love the sinner, hate the sin” is an adage we love to throw around, but like it or not, most of the world fails to see any observable distinction between the two. That the Church is seen as a hateful place by outsiders, is a travesty. If we truly claim to represent the love of Christ, our words and actions should reflect it. Here is my vague “creed” on the issue.

Personal Integrity

The church is full of hypocrites. Anyone will admit that. And for all of the reasons people are put off by us, the strongest, by far, is our hypocrisy. The majority of people in this country will claim to be Christians, and the majority of people will not show it in any measure.

Sadly, it seems that the further you stray from the typical “fundie” stereotype, the more likely you are to throw your values out the window. It’s strange and a little ironic, but true: those of us who are turned off by hypocrisy in the church tend to respond not with devotion, but with even more hypocrisy. All of it, of course, is under the guise of avoiding legalism, or being approachable to others, or challenging the world’s notions of what a Christian is. But in the end, it’s almost always an excuse for being complacent. Somehow, it’s possible to deceive ourselves into thinking that by refusing to live by our faith in the most obvious ways, we are being good examples. We’re not.

Having integrity, to me, means two things: following your beliefs to their logical conclusions, and being entirely transparent about it. A lot of this blog has been about my (mostly failed) attempts at both. It’s still half-hearted. I’ve attempted to start by following issues of conscience (no pot, no more underage drinking, attending church weekly, etc), but I am not there yet. I’ve been going to church about 50% of the time. I’ve determined to stop drinking as a rule, but when I am urged to do it, I tend towards excuses (“I’m not feeling well, maybe later”) instead of honesty about my conviction. Last weekend, peer pressure got the best of me, and I drank anyway. All that flowery talk of following my conscience and trying to live differently, abandoned at the first sign of discomfort. That is sad. Meanwhile, I’ll publicize my faults on a blog I know 10-20 people read, but am secretly thrilled that certain friends or family members have yet to find it. That’s not sincere. Genuine transparency ought to mean there is no question as to who I am and what I believe, in any group I am a part of. I am still far from that. At the best, all of this is only a small step in the right direction. But if I delude myself with pride or a “holier-than-thou” attitude about my convictions or opinions, I’ve done more damage than good.

Accepting the Limits of our Understanding

This is an idea I’ve beaten to death on this blog, so I’ll be concise. Only to say that as far as I am inclined to be a logical person, faith in the end will involve some abandonment of pure reason. I will never systematically prove my belief as if it were a scientific theory. Neither will you. While I want to my belief to be justifiable, I don’t want it to be reduced to science. I see that as a dead-end, and the fact that some Apologists genuinely seem to think this is a worthwhile goal, is scary to me. Here’s more, if you’re interested.

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That’s it. Those are a few characteristics of the life I’d like to have — the life I’ve largely failed at making for myself in the last 20 years. It is far from a complete picture: it is a list of things which I think are necessary, but not sufficient, to living in a way which is both rational and faithful. Like most things, it is probably liable to change. But for now, this is about where I stand, and what I am aiming for.

I would love your input.

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