I remember when it was normal to drive when you had had a few (or more); you may not have been falling down, but you were impaired. Due to a successful public awareness campaign, our culture around driving while impaired has changed. Yes, there are still a few die-hards (some of them friends of mine) who still indulge in this dangerous habit, but for the most part, we, as a society, view it as a bad idea, and don't do it.
In the same way, there is an acceptance of same-sex relationships and fluid sexuality, which is something unimaginable to my teenage self. In the sheltered world I grew up in, it wasn't even talked about. Now, it is 20 years past the date of the first same-sex marriage, in the modern era, at least. (It was, naturally, practised in the ancient world long before Judeo-Christian dogma completely infested Western culture.) This cultural shift of happened so quickly as to infuriate a segment of North American society: the God-fearing "traditional" religious person.
We are still in a period when change is inevitable, and those among us who have learned to be flexible (or at least polite) in the face of radical social change have done relatively well. It's easy to criticize those who have not, from the lofty perch of our well-intentioned and well-fed liberalism, but it has been hard on the religious person. At the same time, though, I wonder if it's wise to cater to those whose ideas and traditions (mostly the latter, for if religious people were serious thinkers, they would have questioned their beliefs and dumped them long ago) prevent them from appreciating, understanding and accepting the many fundamental changes Western society is undergoing. The train has left the station; you are no longer in Witchita, and no-one really knows where the train is heading.
The religious person, if he is polite, seeks to persuade, cajole, influence, either through his words or his example, those who have left the path. Other religious persons seek to clamp down on, suppress and even destroy the person who is embracing a new culture. They are two sides of a strange coin, for whose business is it to change someone's mind, or to try to make them stop doing what you disapprove of?
Just as God is changeable: from the aggressive, capricious murderous one of the Old testament to the loving, but still pretty inflexible, God of the New, so is human society. There is no constant but change (so far).
Indeed ! Change is evolution of humankind after all !
ReplyDeleteI was thinking about this the other day. What is it about religion that bothers me so much. The phrase "if you are not part of the solution then you are part of the problem" came to mind. I don't think religion is part of the solution to any of the ills that affect society today. It's part of the problem. It perpetuates negativity and divism. It's really time to move on.
ReplyDeleteNice essay Dave...lots to chew over but for starters can we agree that religion at a certain level (perhaps the personal level alone) is worthwhile to some. The politicization of religion and its exploitation are the main problem. As humans it seem we’ve always relied on magical thinking and it’s hard to see that changing. There’s still a horoscope in the daily paper...also surprising; there’s still a daily paper!
ReplyDeleteNor are religious people a monolith and I know that’s not what you meant here. It’s important to remember that while religious people were waving the bible and fighting to maintain slavery and later Jim Crow many other of their religious brethren (and not just christians) were marching arm in arm for massive social change.
This idea of change...adaptation and evolution...the things we do best actually, is something that is so interesting to me. It’s who we are and while I’m sure you can cite many examples of stasis I still think “changeability” is how it’s always been and how it will always be. Maybe Steven Jay Gould’s notion of punctuated equilibrium works best here. Another idea: Moore’s Laws, means that change will be coming even faster in the modern world. Are you asserting that one day change will no longer be inevitable?
As you can tell, it’s hard for me to imagine how that would play out.
As for a changeable God, that’s another thing I’m not sure about. If you’re as perfect and eternal as a being can be you don’t need to change but, as I’ve long asserted, Christianity is just Judaism with a much better marketing department. Since you’re not arguing for the existence of God then what I think you’re getting at is that people changed God...after all, people invented God ;-)
People also perpetuate divisiveness and I bet that in a world devoid of religion we’d still have class, race, and 100 other things to use as separators. Lately it’s been face masks and those who’ve gotten the AstraZeneca vaccine (clotty losers!)
Thanks again for all the tasty and nourishing food for thought!
Thanks for your thoughts, Bob! I was going to reply to my brother (depinette; see above), but I'll just say that religion as a WAY to find "God", or the spirit world etc... is a powerful one. And religion, which means "that which binds us" can be powerful as a way towards social justice and the betterment of any person. What is so wrong with religion is when the ties that bind are the ties of fear of change, and hatred of the new, or other points of view.
ReplyDeleteAs for change, I try to keep an open mind, who knows? One day society may settle into a groove and things will remain stable. How can one say this is impossible?
Got it...of course it’s possible that we’ll settle into some sort of presently unknowable groove.
DeleteAs for for religion I’d say the problem is more with people than belief. We have a way of ruining things 😬
Can't resist commenting. Technology is racing ahead and humanity is surprised over and over by unintended consequences. To keep up we have to increase the pace of rethinking our models of reality. Generational change is not enough. We need to be smarter by decades, and wise enough to know that what we know is incomplete and imperfect. The notion that we will one day have things figured out is a vestige of the enlightenment. If we step back out of our subjective experience and ask how mind works, we have to admit that thought, however enlightened, is not the thing itself. It is always a an artifact of brain structure and heuristics such as abstraction, categorization, reduction and metaphor. Added to this is the dimension of collective mind mediated by art, oral and written narrative, history. recursive eisegesis, and the next wave of philosophy which always challenges the previous. Atheism is a brief hiatus between gods while we are busy reimagining reality. And by the way, let's not ignore tradition or we will wind up worshiping the Lord of the Flies. We would do better to build on tradition and not repeat its errors.
ReplyDeleteI won't clutter up with space with more ranting. But I will read more of what you have to say. Thanks to your brother for pointing me here.
I don't think it's likely that we will "have things figured out" anytime soon, or ever, but I keep an open mind on that, and on all other subjects, as much as I am able.
DeleteHave you read Montaigne's long essay "An Apology for Raymond Sebond"? It's an eye-opener.
The good news is that in almost every corner of the planet and in almost every measurable way, people's lives are improving (Covid hiccup not withstanding). Society is becoming more humanistic and less religious and as that happens people's lives get better. It's important to point out and celebrate what we have accomplished and how far we have come as Dave did so well in his post.
ReplyDeleteIf you were a whale, you might take issue with the notion that humanism was an improvement over "religion". Humanism is a model of reality that deifies the human. In that respect it is not far different from the Abrahamic faiths, although those traditions subordinate the human to God envisioned as transcendently human. That at least has the advantage of urging us to be better than human. I wonder if being human is not a self-limiting evolutionary experiment, busily engaged in extinguishing itself. Are we wise enough to survive being smart.
DeleteI expect we will extinguish ourselves one day, or will simply die out, as have other creatures who once roamed the earth. What disturbs me the most is exactly what you're talking about: wisdom, and the lack of it. And perspective, and humility in the face of the universe and our place in it.
Delete