Godheval.net

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For those of us who grow up in religious households, we are taught our parents’ beliefs, go to their church, temple, or mosque if they have one, and are saddled with our parents morals, ethics, and any baggage that might come with it.  We take what we are given at face value, accept it as truth, due to the trust we place in those that have proven themselves by caring for us.  But unlike our natural inevitable journey into adolescence, many people never push beyond the beliefs instilled in them during childhood, they do not dare to venture out on their own, to establish their own personal religious identity.

More often than not, those who do not “progress” beyond this stage are the fundamentalists of any given theology, the hardliners, the literalists.  These are people who retain their childhood stories but never learned to look at it with grown-up eyes, to appreciate things like subtlety, nuance, multiple interpretations – like only appreciating poetry where it rhymes, rather than being able to read between the lines.

For those that do move to the next phase, however,  some rebel violently against their former beliefs and institutions – or at least the most vile version or perception of those institutions.  Perhaps they rebel due to a falling out with a parent or preacher or other authority figure.  Perhaps because of some major discrepancy between what we’ve been told to think and what we’ve reasoned for ourselves or even directly experienced.  This discrepancy usually has some noteworthy psychological impact, forcing a person not just to let go of their beliefs, but to run away from them screaming and yelling.

These are people like the militant atheists and agnostics – those for whom it is not enough to simply disbelieve, but who feel compelled to attack those who do believe. Not all atheists fit this description as I’ll explain in the third phase below. Far from simply establishing themselves as individuals “free” of religion, they feel some pressing need to return to their old beliefs and institutions with venom and fire, to criticize and belittle them.  In this way they are just as tethered to those old institutions as they always were, their identities as atheists dependent upon there being a religion against which to rebel.

Just as angry teenagers do not listen to their parents’ reasoning, their attempts to defend their choices, militant atheists do not listen to the more rational believers, the liberal theologians.  They are too busy screaming and yelling.  They need to cast religion and religious people as villains against whom they must stand in opposition.  The ironic thing is that they become the very thing that they are trying to rebel against, like the worst nightmare of any rebellious teenager – to become just like their parents.

The new atheists, who attack a repugnant version of religion, use it to condemn all religion. They use it to deny the reality and importance of the religious impulse. They are curiously unable to comprehend those who found through their religious convictions the strength to stand up against injustice…The new atheists, like all fundamentalists, flee from complexity. They can cope with religion in its most primitive and abusive form. They are helpless when confronted by a faith that challenges their caricatures.

America’s New Fundamentalists pp. 33-34

My experience with this involved some evangelicals and their implication that my mother, for her experimenting with Buddhism and other religions, would be condemned to Hell.  Another example can be seen in the movie The God Who Wasn’t There, which presented itself as a critique of religion and the Jesus myth, but by the end revealed itself to be one man’s personal vendetta against his religious upbringing and parochial school.  Much like a teenager finally getting to tell her parents all the things they did wrong in raising her.

Finally, though, the incendiary passions of militant atheism, like adolescence, are tempered through a sort of rational – rather than physical – maturity.  We learn to read religion like poetry – to understand subtlety, nuance, interpretation.  We learn that no one interpretation is necessarily right or wrong, but that they simply are.  This is not to say that we become believers again, but we no longer categorically deny the possibility – or legitimacy – of believing again.  And should we choose not to believe, we are able to make peace with religion, to reconcile our disbelief with others’ belief, to accept that disbelief is merely another interpretation of our experience.

To clarify, I do not mean to imply any qualitative difference between people at the different stages of belief or disbelief.  I do not think that people at any given stage are better than any other, no more than adults are better people than teenagers, or teenagers better people than young children.  They all simply have different ways of viewing and interpreting the world and their experiences within it.  I do contend, however, that just as adults tend to be better educated, better adjusted, and to possess greater wisdom for their length of experience, those who have progressed to the “third phase” are also wiser and better adjusted.  They are more capable of higher order thinking, more rational, more objective, and more established and comfortable within their identities.

They are independent enough to think for themselves, to make their own choices, and wise enough to look deeper into things rather than taking them at face value.  They are secure enough that they no longer need to prove themselves against the standards or norms of another.  They are grounded enough to no longer need to fly to the attack on others’ beliefs, or the defense of their own.

In short, they have grown up.

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One of the many dimensions of racism is that people of color are seen first for their race and second – if at all – for their individual merits.  Along with this also comes the idea that the actions or experiences of one African-American somehow represents all African-Americans.  For example, the more salacious behavior of some African-American celebrities – like rappers or athletes – are taken as evidence of some moral depravity inherent to their race.

It is this way of thinking that gives rise to stereotypes.  Every stereotype has some basis in reality.  But where the actions, thoughts, or experiences of an individual or even a small group of people are taken to represent the larger group to which they belong, it becomes racism.

Where an African-American watches Precious and feels some personal shame or awkwardness, especially where they are in the company of white people, it suggests that they have internalized this idea that every African-American by default represents their entire race.  Where a white person watches Precious and somehow feels more “informed” about the black experience or feels some remorse for African-Americans as a whole, only shows just how ill-informed they are for assuming that all African-American experiences are the same.

I cannot pretend as though I am unaffected by this experience.  When watching Tyler Perry’s latest movie I Do Bad All By Myself, I was acutely aware of the fact that there were white people in the audience.  Part of my anxiety stemmed from the thought that while African-American audiences were laughing “along with” the movie, white audiences were laughing at the movie, in a finger-pointing sort of way.  Somewhere in my mind I assumed that white people would walk away from this movie with the idea that they obtained some glimpse into African-American life.   And found it hilarious. Which of course, in turn, must mean that they are laughing at me. The pathology of the black experience and institutionalized racism are deeply rooted.

Tyler Perry doesn’t claim to represent all African-Americans in his films.  Rather he is crafting stories that represent particular experiences that otherwise would not be shown in predominantly white Hollywood.  Because I have had this discussion about representation and institutionalized racism – both internally and with others – I am able to assuage any feelings of anxiety after the fact. But it would seem that this conversation is not taking place nearly enough.

No one watches a movie like 8-Mile and presumes that it represents all young white men, or even all young white men who grew up in Detroit.  No one presumes that American History X reveals the typical everyday experience of white people.  No one listens to a news story about a white mother murdering her child and assumes that such a thing is commonplace amongst white families.  So why should anyone take Precious to be a representation of African-Americans in general, simply because the main character and most of the cast happen to be African-American?

Precious is only one story – an extreme case, yet a case that undoubtedly reflects or touches on the real experiences of particular individuals in this country.  At no point did Sapphire – author of the original book, or Lee Daniels – director of the film (both of whom are African-American) – state that Precious was a “black story” or representative of the African-American experience in general.

Looking at the bigger picture, the existence of this paradigm of one-represents-all suggests something even more critical.  That “blackness” – in how it purports to categorize and define a large number of diverse people – and “individuality” are mutually exclusive. It highlights the shame inherent to the black experience, instilled by the history and present reality of racism, such that one feels an automatic need to distinguish themselves and their experiences from other African-Americans who are quite unlike them.

It suggests that we – as a nation – are past due for a revolution in our way of thinking, that is one that lies outside of race, yet not without serious consideration for how race has affected and continues to influence our social dynamics.

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A world such as ours – where child slavery and the murder of innocents take place on a regular basis – cannot possibly be a reflection of a benevolent divinity.  I am willing to accept that some grandiose plan for the universe would not necessarily be to the benefit of humanity, which is only a mote in a cosmic sea.  But an all-powerful god or gods – meaning they have the power to stop travesty – cannot be said to be benevolent if they do not stop that travesty.

On the other hand – and this is the idea I am more likely to accept – is that to whatever extent god or gods exist physically or metaphysically, or any higher beings exist that have a hand in the proceedings of the universe, they are not all-powerful, not all-knowing, and are completely fallible.

And if the nature of the gods is more along the lines of what I suspect – that they are extensions of the human collective consciousness – then it makes sense that they would be imperfect.

Following this line of thinking not only allows me to reconcile the concept of conscious divinities with the reality of human suffering, but makes the god(s) seem more personable, more accessible.  Because we have that in common – fallibility.

But to think that a god or gods could be both omnipotent and benevolent is to be completely delusional or intellectually lazy.  They can be one or the other – or neither – but certainly not both.

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In fact, not too long ago, I trivialized the issue of gays’ right to marry, not because I would deny them anything, but because I also trivialized marriage.  I also dismissed the issue under the pretext that there were “more important” things to talk about.  But in truth, it is not my place to say what should and shouldn’t be important to other people, especially when I do not even have the ability to relate to their experiences.  It was not until very recently that I recognized my privilege as a straight person to even be able to take marriage for granted.

What we must remember in dismissing or downplaying the significance of marriage is that we – as straight people – will presumably always have the option of marrying or not. We can turn our noses up at the institution now, only to change our minds as we get older and – perhaps inevitably – become more conservative in our thinking.

Same-sex couples do not have this luxury. So I think, while we should continue making arguments for universal civil unions as the truly legally-recognizable social contract between partners, we should maintain some sensitivity to the privileges we have as straight people, and not begrudge anyone the desire to form that contract in the way of their choosing – be it “marriage” in some official ceremony, or civil union before a judge.

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