Getting Past One's Faith Without the Sarcasm

For over 30 years, I've been involved with Christianity, with the evangelical version in my teens and early 20s, as a Catholic fellow-traveller and then as a Catholic since 1989. Over the years, I've tried to deal with the many problems with my own faith, with the various churches, and with the problems that arise from the conflict between our modern or post-modern society in the US and the expectations or demands of Christian confession.

I'm not one who dismisses claims of miracles out of hand; one reason for remaining a Catholic for so long is that Rome is much more skeptical about miraculous claims than the evangelicals & non-modernist varieties are. I dislike the snarky attitude of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens towards all religious beliefs. The unpleasant ego-centrism of atheists in my teens was a factor in turning me towards faith; they may well be having a similar effect on others.

The attempt of anti-Christians, whether of the neo-pagan or materialist variety, to treat Jesus as a myth is wrongheaded; likewise, the attempt of professing Christians to blame Constantine or patriarchalism or something else for deforming Jesus' words & life is dubious at the very least. If Jesus had been a myth, then the Jewish people in the diaspora would have been well-informed of this fact; instead, they always regarded him as a false prophet & deceiver.

Many want to hold onto Jesus in some form or another as the center or teacher of their faith; others would like to save him from 'distortions', in the manner of Thomas Jefferson or Tolstoy. Apologists and many theologians want to keep him as the second person of the Trinity, as redeemer, as author and finisher of their faith, which otherwise would be in vain.

Whatever the benefits or the drawbacks of faith, all the prophets and divinities available in the present age are dragging us backwards and downwards. The fundamentalists of the various faiths present themselves as heroic defenders against the depraved and destroyers; moderates present themselves as keepers of the faith & purveyors of hope; progressives as those saving the good of relgion and eliminating the obscurantists.

We can't simply rip religion up from the roots; nor should we really try. Marx was correct: religion is an opiate, which means that it's addictive. As a religious addict myself, I know there is no safe dosage: one sip, and I'm off on a bender of belief. The route to my personal religious sobriety is honesty with myself, honesty with others, and a steady application to the truths which slowly dissolve the links that still grip much of the world's culture.

In the US, this means getting beyond Jesus. He's the center for all the chatter about 'Judeo-Christian values' (something that neither Jews nor Christians had heard about before they were both menaced by the tides of enlightenment). What, in fact, are the values that Jesus expresses in the gospels, and which he approved of in the scriptures he believed to be his Father's own revealed truth? How do we blinker ourselves when we try to hold in some fashion to a tangled 'tradition' whose baleful effect today is to keep believers scanning for an "anti-Christ", which necessarily prevents the vast majority of believers from seeking global solutions. Even non-believers are affected by the notion that there is an "anti-Christ" -- a co-worker told me about his teenage nephew who said he thought Obama was the anti-Christ. "And he's an ATHEIST," said my co-worker, "I told him 'You can't believe ANYONE's the anti-Christ!' "

I'm not very fond of Bill Maher either, but his point at the end of 'Religulous' is impossible for me to forget: that those of us who prefer to believe act like Mafia wives when we know how our religion has been & is being used to promote ignorance & violence & brutality.

John Stuart Mill wrote, in his essay on women's rights, that we're wrong to think that people who hold to an unreasonable position will abandon it once it's been disproven. Instead, they think there must be deeper reasons for belief -- 'The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing' as Pascal put it. It isn't disproof, then, that we need, but an application of the process that John Henry Newman described as the means by which we come to assent, by convergent probabilities. Not disproof, but many small questions, are the means by which we can free ourselves and our neighbors and our country and our world from both the cruelties of faith and from its often real, but often overstated, benefits.

We have to get on beyond Jesus.