Disappointment

I'm sure it is possible that there are many former believers who became atheists because they heard sound, logical arguments against the existence of God. But atheists are humans, and like their religious counterparts, are more often swayed by emotion. (It is the sad case, in my opinion, that atheists cannot win the battle with believers, the hearts and minds of religious people for precisely that reason --- the heart still trumps the mind for most humans. So much for the sapien in homo sapien).

The emotion that gets some believers to stop believing is anger. A dangerous emotion since it usually makes the atheist into a missionary, railing against God, religion, and anything that threatens the church and state separation. They are the mirror image of the Christian fundamentalist, and just about as scarey.

For me, the emotion that turned me from God is disappointment. As Woody Allen once quipped, God is a bit of an "underacheiver." If I were his teacher, his report card would say, "He needs to pay more attention and apply himself." There was a character in the show Babylon 5, who had just saved his true and unrequited love from what appeared to be certain death. But now as he lay dying, he reflected:

• You know, I used to think it was awful that life was so unfair. Then I thought, wouldn't it be much worse if life were fair, and all the terrible things that happen to us come because we actually deserve them? So, now I take great comfort in the general hostility and unfairness of the universe.

If God exists, and he has any control over this universe and what happens to us, I would think he should be on his knees asking us for forgiveness. Or, perhaps he hopes that we will all become atheists and therefore escape our judgement. Anyways, a generally hostile and unfair universe is infinitely more comforting than a universe with such a disappointing God in it.

Jesus Christ, meet Jack Shit

If you ask any 20 year old about what a 10 year old knows about life, the answer will approximate "jack shit". Not surprisingly, if you ask the same question to a 30 year old about a 20 year old, you'll get a similar answer. If the question was asked again to a 40 year old about a 30 year old, the answer might be, "s/he knows jack, but s/he still don't know shit."

Why does this matter? It occurred to me that if some 30 year old started telling me that I was a bad person or began instructing me one how to live, who to love, how to think, etc., I would probably tell him/her to drop dead. Now, if the traditional accounts are to be believed, Jesus was, hmmm, around 30 when he began preaching. That's not even old enough to have had a decent midlife crisis. According to the founding fathers of the United States of America (Article II, Section 1 of the constitution), he wouldn't even have been old enough to be the president. Those nation builders were on to something. My assessment is that when it came to how to live life and get along with people, Jesus didn't know shit. Not his fault though; he was young, hadn't traveled much, and had never gotten laid.

Now I have met some wise teenagers, 20- and 30-somethings. Hell, a few of them even post on this blog, and I'd like to think I was one of them (at least in my 30s). I just don't think Jesus was one of them. I'll say this for him though, at least he didn't wait around for me to tell him to drop dead.

Jesus, Muhammad, and the Buddha too

There is little in the Bible that is worth quoting, but "My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?" (Matthew 27:46) is. In the last few seconds of Jesus' life, just after he shouted out these words (assuming it happened), I would like to think that he became one of us fools too.

Moving to the Qur'an: "Why do they not study the Qur'an carefully? If it were from other than Allah/God, they would have found in it numerous contradictions." (Qur'an 4:82) I would like to think that even Muhammad himself, when he recited those words for the first time, chuckled silently, shook his head, and instead of repeating the whole shahadatayn "La ilaha illa Allah, Muhammad al-rasul Allah" (There is no god but God, Muhammad is the messenger of God) understood that the first two words sufficed: "La ilaha" (There is no god).

The Buddha said, "Believe nothing, no matter where you read it or who has said it, not even if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense." I would like to think that even Buddha himself, when he taught these words, hoped they would be the only words of his that anyone remembered.

Sometimes, I really do wish religious people read their scriptures a little more closely and a little more literally. For if there is a God/Consciousness, he has forsaken us, contradicts him/her/it-self, and makes no (pardon the pun) goddamn sense.

Oh Jesus.

Performative language and the perspective of the believer

Not so long ago, in a seminar devoted to Durkheim's Elementary Forms, a student expressed distress that Durkheim started from the position that "religious beliefs are wrong." I responded by saying that was a crude way of describing Durkheim's method: it's not that Durkheim thinks the beliefs are WRONG, but rather, it's that they are not explanatory. Rather than be a militant atheist in support of Durkheim's method, I chose to defend him based on the performative theory of language, utilizing theories of language by Austin and Crapanzano.

Crapanzano and Austin both discuss the performative function of language, as opposed to its referential or descriptive function. Both rely on Austin’s initial definition; performatives are characterized by the following: “A. they do not ‘describe’ or ‘report’ or constate anything at all, and are not ‘true or false’; and B. the uttering of the sentence is, or is a part of, the doing of the action, which again would not normally be described as saying something.” Austin’s understanding also requires that performative utterances have the first person indicative active.

What is interesting about performative utterances is that they cannot serve as a proposition in a logical argument (based on formal rules of logic). That is, one cannot base an argument upon a performative utterance, because nothing is logically constrained to follow from it in the same way that conclusions can follow from descriptive/declarative propositions, which must have either a true or false value.

Durkheim’s starting point was problematized by the aformentioned student for dismissingthe potential truth value of beliefs. If, however, we consider all religious discourse from the believer to be “performative,” in the sense that it is performed in the experience a lived religion, then all stated beliefs become performative utterances upon which logical arguments cannot be based. That is, religious beliefs when stated by the believer could be understood not simply as a declaration that “X exists” (or whatever) but really as a performance of “I believe that X exists.” In a sense, expressing the beliefs is integral to the performance of the religion as a whole. Seen from this perspective, I think it becomes all the more clear why we cannot use the content of beliefs as explanations for religion. By their very nature, they are not propositions and so no explanatory argument can be created in which actions or consequences logically follow from them.

By reorienting the perspective on belief from a description to a performance, as I did above, I think I have problematized even further the explanatory power of belief. Austin and Crapanzano, among others, highlight the performative function of language, and this is all too often ignored in the study of religion. Instead of being conceived as performative utterances, beliefs are typically taken as declarations or descriptions, which have an inherent truth value. However, if we situate them in the entire context of the lived religion, we can reorient our understanding of what beliefs are, and so understand them in a different way. Performative utterances do not have truth value in the same way that descriptive or declarative statements do, and so we do not need to get sidetracked by worrying about the accuracy of the beliefs.

I find it shocking that the question of the truth of belief is still a matter of debate for scholars of religion. Haven't we thought of more creative, useful ways to understand beliefs, other than simply grading them as true or false?

A Carpenter and His Wood

Thought of a joke. Not that funny by any means, but what the hell.

How do we know Jesus liked sex?
The last thing he did before he died was get nailed.

This is not my joke, but again, what the hell:

Why can't the Buddha clean in the corners?
Because he has no attachments.

God the Frog Smiter

So, I'm cleaning the skimmers in my pool yesterday. I see a frog there. He's belly up, but looks fat and old. He probably had a decent life and got to pass on his DNA. (Even frogs deserve to get laid). O well. After disposing of him and the leaves I see another small shiney dark green frog swimming at the bottom of the skimmer: the basket is still in my hand, so if the frog isn't careful, it will be sucked down into the pipes for about 40 ft and several right angled bends, only to be drowned in the pump. In a manner completely out of my character, I run to the shed to turn off the pump. I return to find the frog gone. I check the skimmer flap to see if he is hiding there, which is where he probably was when I first took the basket out. Nope. Damn. So, I got to the pump. Open it up. He's not in that basket either. I cannot believe that he could be liquified that quickly. He must be stuck in the pipes. I wait to see if he has the intelligence to swim in one direction of the other. Again, nope. So I close up the pump and turn it on for a minute. I then stop it, and open it up again. Lo and behold, the little bastard is in the pump. I take out the basket and dump him in the garden and he hops away. I bask in the glory of my good karma. Even God, should he exist, would have to be pleased with me. (I believe he has had a fondness for frogs ever since the plague-thing in Egypt.)

Today, I was working in my front yard and what did I see? A little shiny dark green frog squished flat just behind my driver's side rear tire. I can't be sure it is the same frog, but it sure looks like him. God, you are indeed a fucking bastard! I can respect that, especially since I suspect you never let this poor bugger get laid. I'm not sure what message you are trying to send to the frogs of this world, but clearly they need to hop their little green asses to frog-church/synagogue/temple/mosque, get down on their knees, and do some serious praying.