Bastard out of the Inter-ether
Here’s an e-mail I just received:
Subject: Coco Chanel
From: David Van Virden
From: David Van Virden
…of course if you could think for yourself, you wouldn’t really need
religion, would you dear?
religion, would you dear?
out of the ether,
David Van Virden
San Francisco
Here’s my response:
Such an original thought, David! So witty and funny! And your
stupendous insight made me reconsider everything I think and
believe!
stupendous insight made me reconsider everything I think and
believe!
I’ll just note that you sound like every
other pseudo-intellectual out there on the topic of religion. Glad you can’t
think for yourself and that the thoughts in your head don’t exist.
-N
Do we really need to flame, people?
Ecto blogging software
5 November 2003 at 6:26 am.
Beyond the rather inflammatory tone, David’s comment does bring up an interesting point about how we think about religion. Does religion tell us what to think, or how to think? My sense is that his comment underscores the reality that many view religion as a source, rather than a method, of thinking, and by extension, of living. A useful distinction, I think, but one not often made [not even in the church, if the primate of Nigeria is taken as an indicator].
5 November 2003 at 10:40 am.
Alex,
Can you explain a bit more what you mean by the distinction you make between “source” and “method”? I think I know what you’re describing, but the vocabulary you’re using is somewhat unfamiliar, and I want to be sure and to know more.
On your main point, I think you’re right. I think David wasn’t actually thinking about the interesting questions behind his glib and purportedly clever “idea”. if he had been and if he had asked honestly and inquiringly about the matter, maybe I would have responded to his question. But with his ad hominem attack on me (and lots of other people by extension), he’s removed himself from the rules of discourse that I informally hold for this site. All ideas considered, but personal attacks are out.
5 November 2003 at 1:06 pm.
Regarding the question of “what” versus “how”…I think that the question might be a good jumping off point to consider the idea of “religion”…the term is an abstraction, and an often very convenient and helpful abstraction (like “spirituality”), but at some points it doesn’t help and there is a need to return to the concrete religions, or even better the concrete religious people and communities, to ask questions like Alex’s.
To be more specific, in Judaism and Christianity, while there are obviously strong patterns of method and style that recur over time, they coincide with and are related to an emphasis upon content arising from a core belief that God, as those traditions each understand God (which is not necessarily the same), at some point definitively acted, whether in giving a/The Law or by existing as/confirming the life and witness of Jesus of Nazareth. Preserving that historical content, the “what to think” of those events, plays a different role in relation to the actual thinking through and acting out of a life rooted in that content, than, say, in Buddhism, where the content itself is to be appropriated only by testing it out in one’s life and practice, leading to a way of being “religious” (quotes not to disrespect Buddhism or Buddhists, but to attend to the abstraction of the term) that is much more a question of “how” than “what.” All of this obviously makes huge assumptions that the terms “Judaism”, “Xity”, “Buddhism”, etc. mean anything coherent in the singular, yadda yadda, so I’ve been reading too much David Foster Wallace…
6 November 2003 at 8:12 pm.
David will no doubt thank me for endowing his comments with qualities they are unlikely ever to have possessed.
I’m not sure that my use of the terms source and method derives from any specific analytical paradigm (I’m sure you were dying from the suspense). On the assumption that Christianity, in the broadest terms, reflects the Bible, our practice of religion either suggests that we look to the Bible to tell us what to do and think as Christians (source), or that we look to it as providing some guiding principles in the formation of our own behavioural and social norms (method). The WWJD? school has always confounded me in this regard; does it ask us to consider what Jesus would do if he were confronted with a contemporary dilemma and were here today, or does it attempt to determine what Jesus would do if the dilemma were simply backdated 2000 years? I favour the idea that Christian beliefs help to form a method by which individuals think and act, and that the thought and action must be firmly rooted in the context within which they are to occur. The Bible itself is a historical and literary artefact (historical fiction, if one goes further), and its authority to dictate what we as Christians think or do today, is highly circumscribed by the fact that the events recounted were unique to their own time and that it is all hearsay. Beyond that, it is, to paraphrase Brian, by faith that we endow the words of the Bible with meaning and the power to govern our lives.
My point about David’s comment is that the way in which those words govern us, is subject to personal determination (which is the interesting dimension). On a more superficial level, the logical inference from his comment, is that individuals can think and act independently of paradigms. But that doesn’t happen. Everyone relies on frameworks – religion, science, even chaos has its own theories. David’s comment is problematic fundamentally – he may well be able to think on his own without benefit of religion, but he’s neglected to mention that he’s using something else to frame his thought and behaviour. He has completely missed the point that the choice is one between paradigms, not between a paradigm and none at all. He knows as well as you do what they say about people who live in glass houses; inasmuch as his comment gave rise to an interesting thought exercise, I was rather unchallenged by the prospect of debating his only too obviously flawed argument (to say nothing of its charming articulation).
A.