I think I understand the appeal of Christianity. Through its ancient stories, it offers a narrative that speaks of the human condition and offers hope at the end. It gives a feeling of connection to something greater that oneself, inducing feelings of humility. It provokes feelings of awe at the majesty of the universe and provides an explanation of its existence and the meaning of ours. It provides a moral framework with common-sense advice on how to live. The sense of mystery and inner peace also seem to be important components. Many churches also provide a community of people with common goals and beliefs. I don’t think any community, such as a social group, would do. The church community seems to me, to create desirability, possibly through an assumed moral status, perhaps through the feeling of being persectuted or an outsider and the feeling that when gathered together something mystical could occur.
My difficulty is that I, and many others, get all of these things without religion or the supernatural. So why is it that some need religion and others don’t?
I do not want to suggest that those seeking religion are in anyway inferior, weaker or more illogical. Is it just a case of different strokes for different folks? That seems an unsatisfactory answer to me as it raises more questions.
Could it be that unanswered questions about existence and being leave the door open for different world views? If so, is one worldview right and another wrong? If we accept only one worldview is true, do we end up in culture wars? If we don’t believe in Truth do we become relativists? Is this an unhelpful way to look at the issue?
Ultimately, I guess, Christians believe there is a real drama being enacted in which they have a role. This is the point at which I can no longer understand.
Because religion seeks to control. If contained in the hands of unscrupulous characters, they can globalise a religion and terrorise others in the name of the God of that religion. Christianity has its fair share of this. After all, an Anglican bishop pointed slave raiders to Africa, and evangelism and conversion to Christianity was a ruse for the colonisation of Africa too
Hi Graham, read your blog post with interest. I can follow you, I believe, when it comes to understanding religion as a narrative of interpreting man’s natural existence, as practised a forum for community etc.. The underlying assumption being that religion offers something meaningfull and good, and the need to be appealing. I would like to point out that christianity does not understand itself first and foremost in terms of natural religion/theology, i.e. a belief system based on shared human experience, but on witness of (what it understands to be) God’s concrete, saving action in the world, in history. And as such, in the forefront, lies the testimonies of there having been one man who (they claim), lived, suffered , died and was ressurected. This event has been interpreted as you know in so many ways. If this man´s life and death and the unfolding drama is understood as revealing God’s relationship to man and creation as one of love – what is / would be the significance for our lives, our death, our hopes, our fears?
My point is: this testimony is an affront to the natural mind, who would believe in it, when it goes counter to what common experience tells us. The latter would rather point to a cruel God. Yet those that do, and take a chance on following in the footsteps of the risen one, testify to an experience of redemption and liberation and a sense of deeply felt personal relationship with him, in the midst of angst and suffering, persecution etc. in their life and surroundings.
Best, Jesper
Thanks for adding that extra perspective Jesper. I’ve written from a more sociological perspective and I think it will take me some time to fully process your comment. It’s the part I’ve not fully ‘got’ yet!
Our discussions have influenced the way I think about Christianity and I’m always excited about what you write.
What I fail to understand about most of your posts about Christianity is what exeactly your aim is in this pursuit or if there even is a specific point to it, or one that you can completely lay out?
Are you out to understand, explore, condemn, dismiss, what is it that you are trying to achieve here? Can you clarify that please? Why do you care so much, at all?
I’m not sure I know the answers to your questions either. But it is reassuring that you ask whether I’m out to “understand, explore, condemn, dismiss” because I hope that means that the sum of my posts do not fall neatly into any of these categories.All I can say is that I enjoy exploring ideas and by writing them it’s a way of trying them out.
As why my blog seems to have a religious focus, I’m just as unsure as you. Perhaps it’s because I live in a country where we breathe religion? Perhaps it’s because, since I was a boy, I love anything supernatural and watch a lot of horror movies? Maybe it links in with my love of magic.
I’m not too hung up on the ‘why’ question; I’m just going with it. I wonder whether answers will eventually emerge from my writing. Or perhaps I will finally exhaust my fascination and write about something else, like stamp collecting.
These last two posts are exploring some ideas to prepare me for a conference I may be speaking at later in the year.
To a certain extent I think it is probably just down to conditioning – an accident of birth for the most part. I am coming to think that no-one really needs religion, but when you are deeply entrenched in it, you imagine life without it would be empty and meaningless.
I don’t think believers are weak, either – having faith is bloody hard work!
What I don’t quite understand is why faith is so hard to let go of. Why people get so entrenched in it and so threatened by questions and doubts. I found it hard to let go myself, and yet I still don’t understand why, because from the other side now it seems so easy!
Praise the Lord. Sarah, I’m going to take the liberty of arguing with you a bit here. I was raised in an unbelieving environment and was at one time in my life a raving atheist, until the moment when I became aware of God’s existence. It is true that this awareness came about in an extrasensory manner. But the fact that I was not looking for it, nor was anyone pressuring me to do so, nor did they tell me I should expect any kind of experience of God – all of that strikes me as evidence that this experience was genuine. Of course we cannot prove it. But my life since then has had its share of moments that are best explained by the presence of a conscious Divine Being. I am sure I would find some sort of meaning to my life if some incontrovertible evidence appeared that God does not exist. I mean, most people who say they cannot live without God are really saying they can’t live without their own lives. And I already worked through that bit during my cancer episode way back when. So I’m not looking for any of the stuff that people are normally looking for when they turn to God. Indeed, I view turning to God for any other reason except God Himself as a form of idolatry. But I am getting ahead of myself… I will post the rest of this as a direct reply to the original post
Yes, I agree that having profound religious experiences is another way into religion. It isn’t just conditioning. In my own case it was a mixture of conditioning and religious experiences. I see those religious experiences in naturalistic terms now, and I understand from reading about the science of belief in God that belief is “natural” but it seems reasonable that some are more predisposed to experiencing the presence of a God than others. This could be another factor in why some are religious and some aren’t.
religion in any form without us all (and i mean every single individual) having the bare or naked knowledge about our existence in terms of origin, purpose, after death, etc is just subject to individual choice. so then you may just believe what you can or want. and for me that’s really concert. I prefer a system where every information is made clear so that we can all tell who is right and who is wrong.
So then Christianity for me is just another of the exciting escape mediums from nakedness. and that does not help much apart from giving fantasy based on ‘beliefs’.
@novisi
I do not follow what constitutes “naked knowledge” of man’s existential situation.
There appears to be quite a broad concensus on clearcut, uncontroversial “naked truth” being an illusion, prevalent in the modern era, stemming from enlightenment rationalism etc. I.e. our experience, of life, death, meaning etc. as men/women would always involve an act of interpretation, i.e. subject to language.
If you by “nakedness” refer to a desire to relate to life´s circumstances as openly as possible, I agree that is desirable. There is this widespread idea that religious people are basically small, scared people who do not dare confront life´s realities. There may be some truth in that, just as one could suggest it would pertain to some atheist positions, but it is a weird though given that religion by and large attempts to interpret these phenomena, i.e. to live with them, not avoid them. Especially from a christian and judaic standpoint, since the question of life and death is so prominent therein.
In general, I think it is good when outspokenly non-religious perspectives as well as the sciences act as a check on religion, while at the same time religion (from my vantage point Christian thought) can (and should) act as a check on other perspectives for mutually fruitful discoveries.
Jesper
Praise the Lord. I have covered elsewhere why I am not seeking God. Now let me talk about why I am. I was not seeking God when God came and found me. But I did realize the implications of God’s existence: that that means I should get in the habit of worshiping God. At the time, I thought that meant beginning to attend church regularly. And perhaps that was a good start. At the moment, I’m not doing that, to tell you the truth. Because in the meantime, I have gotten so out of the box in my thinking about what it means to worship God and only God, that it is tough to find like-minded people to worship with (which, along with mutual spiritual edification, is the point of church). I am a Christian by choice. And I would allude to Jesper’s point that Jesus’ death and resurrection provided some objective conditions for our spiritual life which go outside of our experience.
I would, however, explain those conditions very differently. The point of Jesus’ coming to earth in human form was to remove the reward/punishment issue so that we can come to God for the right reasons. See, what happens if we come to God because we want to avoid going to hell? Are we not worshiping our own desires to avoid punishment, rather than God? Or let’s say we come to God because we want to go to heaven. Are we not then worshiping not God, but our own desires for reward? I think, however, that unless that reward/punishment system is in fact objectively removed, we are fooling ourselves if we ‘just put it aside’. And God is the Ultimate Truth. So surely fooling ourselves involves going onto the wrong path – that would be a path away from rather than to God.
I am beginning lately to think that the Christian universalists (e.g. Gregory MacDonald) may well be right. That those who die, not yet having gotten free from the reward/punishment system, would then indeed end up in something called hell. The purpose of that hell, according to them, would be to burn out the spiritual impurities still existing in that person’s life, until such point as they repent of their participation in the old system and take their place in the new system – at which point they will end up in heaven. There are those who claim that if we take this tack, this could bring up the question of whether heaven is not also temporary. Blake Boles points out that while there are indicators that hell is temporary in the New Testament, there are also specific indicators (esp. I Corinthians 15) that heaven is not temporary. This is a prime example of the need to read all of the Scriptures before coming to a conclusion about what they teach – as passages that are not ‘obviously’ about the matter at hand may nonetheless have an essential bearing on it – instead of proof-texting. I am not overly fond of Boles’ manner of arguing the Universalist position, but here at least, I think he has a good point.
But again: my point is the need to come to God only for God, and not out of desire for reward or punishment – in the broadest sense of those words. It is very sad how few people who identify as Christians understand this. I think it is a huge stumbling block to those who might otherwise even be Christians. God knows it is not easy for me to remain a Christian. This issue is essentially the entirety of the reason I do not currently attend church on a regular basis.
Nevertheless, I am convinced that the Christian system – as set forth in the Bible, without reference to any tradition – is the only one that effectively, objectively removes the reward/punishment issue so that we can come to God for the right reasons – so that we can truly have only one God. This is what I mean when I claim that Christianity alone truly upholds monotheism.
Oops, correction. I mentioned the name of Blake Boles above. That should be Eric Stetson.
Hi Graham, it seems that eternity is in the heart and nature of men already. Men and women from all backgrounds have a deep sense that the spirit will live on somewhere after the body is dead. This might explain so many different religions and various attempts to be reconnected somehow to a creator with a hope of acceptance. Christians believe this “desire” is a mercy of God Himself and will only be satisfied when we have peace with Him through Christ. The “desire” allows us to search for Him even though we often substitue our longing for something more in this life with money, sex, drugs or whatever. It’s true that many things are done in the name of Christianity that do not reflect the nature of Christ. On the other hand, just because you find something in the cookie jar doesn’t mean it’s a cookie. I hope someday you meet a genuine Christian whom you will find the reflection of Christ and find an answer to what I sense is a continued search for reality. Blessings, Jon