In addition to this photo of flowers my son's classmates helped gather (from backyard gardens for the most part) for their teachers today, I want to offer up-front-and-center this recent commentary by OvenMitt. Thank you for visiting, and for some powerful teaching.To Anonymous Poison,
My spouse is a former Laestadian; I was raised to be an atheist. I have a vivid memory from elementary school (in the 1950s) of my teacher chiding me in front of the class for saying things that implied that religion is essentially a scam to provide income and power to its leaders (I'm still shocked that she didn't pull me aside to make this correction.) I was loyal to science and reason and way more than skeptical of religion and faith: I was (in my own mild way) disdainful.
This remained my point of view for decades. Nevertheless, I got over it.
It is impossible to give too much credit to science and reason for the benefits that they bring to us in the well-fed first world, we who benefit the most from them.
Science and reason are a benefit wherever they appear, whether among stock brokers in Manhattan or shepherds in Mongolia. But, with that said, it is important to recall that science and reason are tools: they are the finger pointing at the moon. They are not the moon itself. Moreover, they have a critical and in some respects disabling limitation: they can be applied only to experience that can be shared and verified. That is where their power lies.
They work in a kind of marketplace or crossroads between people, but no one actually lives at that address, by which I mean to say that our root experience of personally being alive and our experiences of love, courage, generosity, compassion (and all their opposites) are essentially out of reach of science and reason.
If we think of our own experience of being-in-the-world as a kind of full portrait, the descriptions provided by science and reason remain stick figures. Or, one might look at it this way: A wiring diagram for a radio is not the same as listening to music.
As for factualness, for the most part, the stories provided by religion about how things work are all false. Completely inaccurate. Also, religious stories, too, are not the moon but merely the finger pointing at the moon. But the moon they point at is not some consensual reality that can be verified in public but the felt experience of our own individual lives. That is where their power lies.
Despite the annoying insistence of various kinds of fundamentalists to the contrary, the factual truth of religious stories is quite irrelevant to their value. I can't emphasize too strongly that, from my point of view, it makes no difference whatsoever whether they are factually true or not. None.
The stories offered by religion are false but have value; they can inspire great deeds and great works. One thinks of the life and work of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and he is only the most obvious example of a person whose profound faith was the foundation of a world-changing character. But, though religion may inspire some, it is clearly also not indispensable: one thinks of Andrei Sakharov, the Soviet atomic physicist and human rights dissident, who had great personal courage and commitment to human dignity and had no faith. The history of the Soviet Union is proof that an (ostensible) commitment to the rule of science and reason is no bulwark against inhumanity.
In a church basement, I remember seeing this verse from Micah posted on the wall for the Sunday school children: "...what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?"
This is valid, with the proviso that it doesn't make any difference what the subject of "require" is ("those who love you" or "your own dignity" would be fine) and it's OK to delete the last three words. If it is true that, although religion can inspire, it can be misused (and it is true), it is also true that science and reason, though they can inspire, can also be misused.
Clearly, religion and science both inspire and are misused constantly. When I hear people being contemptuous of religion or being contemptuous of science, I think that (for the most part) this is simply a symptom of fear and that this fear arose out of (sometimes) terrible personal suffering. So I always want people to step out of the fortress of disdain, which is such an isolating and ineffectual fortress. To do so is what it means in the verse where it says "walk humbly."
But I also understand that no one can make people step outside that circle. I myself was inside it for decades. For most of my life.
But I got over it.
Anyway, I want to wish Anonymous Poison the best of luck and happiness.
OvenMitt
