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Tag: faith and reason

Published on Leave a comment on Link roundup: uncertainty

Lighthouse in Bay of Fundy, Nova Scotia The Allergic Pagan - "The First Commandment of Paganism: "Thou Shalt Not Judge" (and why this is a problem)":

"I am entirely comfortable with criticizing other people's interpretations of their experiences, and I welcome people to do the same for me. That is not to say that I will necessarily always have an answer for them, but I appreciate the questioning. When done in a spirit of openness and humility, the process of question benefits both sides in the conversation, and the community as a whole."

"So long as we agree not to question or criticize one another's beliefs, we are bound to have an immature theology — one articulated in an echo chamber of our voices and those that agree with us."

Under the Ancient Oaks - "Hold Loosely But Practice Deeply":

"We start by rejecting the idea that holding the "right" belief is the most important part of religion. ... We hold our beliefs loosely. We are humans speculating about the Gods. We are mortals making guesses about immortals. We are creatures with a lifespan of perhaps 100 years trying to understand a universe that is 13,700,000,000 years old."

"Yet while we hold a belief, we explore it deeply. It is no virtue to hold our beliefs so lightly they make no difference in our lives. ... Religious certainty is for fundamentalists and fools. Hold your beliefs lightly, but while you hold them, treat them as though they were true and explore them as deeply as you can."

Shekhinah Calling - "13 Tips For Being the Best Witch You Can Be":

"Challenge all dogma, including (especially) that espoused by those whose practices look the most like yours. Explore heresies. What makes an idea threatening? Whom does it threaten? Whom does it empower? Break open the ideas that have become calcified; step into the places that others claim are forbidden. You don't have to love what you find. But how will you ever know what's there unless you take a peek?"

Numinous and Concrete - "Community Challengers":

"Challengers in our communities make us feel uncomfortable, annoyed, exposed, defensive, and sometimes even angry. That's a byproduct of their job. Their job is to point things out, to question, to bring a view that is just outside our own. ... We are not meant to remain forever comfortable in our communities. A community with no challengers is a community that has ceased to change and adapt. When we cease changing and adapting, we wither."

The House of Vines - "Just because an experience is real doesn't make it true":

"And if you're going to start meddling with your perceptions – poking and prodding and stretching reality into strange and uncomfortable shapes – the first thing you better learn is some discernment. ... Question everything, especially your perceptions, and don't rush to any conclusions based on your experiences. Just because an experience is real doesn't make it true. You think that state of oneness is the pinnacle, but what if it's actually the bottom, the most rudimentary of gates one can pass through?"

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Published on 1 Comment on Skeptical, not cynical

Sunrise over the ocean

The flip side of the "so naive" story about believers is a story about non-believers: "so cynical".

Exclamations of awe and wonder often refer to deity and divinity:

Oh my god!
Jesus!
Heavens above!
Praise god!
Amen!
Thank god!

When we see beauty so great that we lose words...
When we receive a blessing so powerful that we can't express our gratitude...
When we are struck with ecstatic realization...

... we use the language of the divine and the supernatural, having no other words big enough.

But not using the words, or not believing in what is supposed to be behind the words, doesn't mean not feeling the awe and wonder. Being skeptical about whether or not there's a creator doesn't prevent your heart from beating faster when lightening forks across the sky, or when you spot a wild deer for a breathless moment before it bounds into the forest, or when watching the sun rise over the ocean. The hypnotizing beauty of a camp fire, the pull of a drum rhythm, and a video of the earth from space can move the spirit even of one who doubts the existence of a soul.

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Published on 1 Comment on Why I won’t be blessing you when you sneeze

A black cat with glowing green eyes. "Superstition is to religion what astrology is to astronomy; the mad daughter of a wise mother." ‒ Voltaire (1694-1778).

Some say that all religion is superstition.

They can look alike. Carry a rabbit's foot or a rosary. Wish upon a star or pray to a great spirit. Knock on wood or light a candle.

They can be intermingled. If you spill salt, throw a pinch over your left shoulder to blind the devil waiting there. If someone sneezes, say "bless you" to stop the devil from claiming their freed soul. If you break a mirror, bury the pieces under a tree during a full moon to renew your damaged soul so it can fight off bad luck.

They can slip from one to the other. Black cats: sacred in ancient Egypt; bad luck now. Knocking on wood: ancient tree worshipers laid their hands on a tree when asking for favour from the spirits that lived inside it; now a superstitious knock to acknowledge luck and keep it going. Rabbit's foot: part of an ancient Celtic coming of age ceremony; good luck now.

Some say one person's religion is another's superstition, and maybe that could make for a blurry line between them. But I think the line is usually pretty clear: superstitions are driven by fear and ignorance; religions are powered by love and creativity.

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Published on 3 Comments on Our place in the cosmos – part 1

The Cat
Source: Hubblesite.org

We are the local embodiment of a Cosmos grown to self-awareness. We have begun to contemplate our origins: starstuff pondering the stars; organized assemblages of ten billion billion billion atoms considering the evolution of atoms; tracing the long journey by which, here at least, consciousness arose. Our loyalties are to the species and the planet. We speak for Earth. Our obligation to survive is owed not just to ourselves but also to that Cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we spring. - Carl Sagan, Cosmos, 1980.

A big point of this website is to explore the intersection of religion, especially Paganism, and science. My first exposure to the idea that we are made of star stuff wasn't through Paganism, though I'd been Pagan for six years or so, but in a second year university geology class. My professor taped Christmas lights to the blackboard and turned out all the lights and told us about how carbon and almost all the other elements that our world is made out of were formed in the heart of long-dead stars. He ended with the Carl Sagan quote above and I got goosebumps. I was so inspired that years later, I wrote my biggest ritual to date based on this idea: the Stardust Ritual.

Episode 123 of The Wigglian Way podcast included a review of the tv show Cosmos1. As part of the discussion, the two hosts, Mojo and Sparrow, mentioned the show's occassional anti-religion jabs and a star stuff quote:

[Stars] get so hot that the nuclei of the atoms fuse together deep within them to make the oxygen we breathe, the carbon in our muscles, the calcium in our bones, the iron in our blood. All was cooked in the fiery hearts of long vanished stars. ... The cosmos is also within us. We're made of star stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself. - Neil Degrasse Tyson, Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, episode 2, 2014.

Mojo: "... [Neil Degrasse Tyson] also mentioned that there's a good possibility that everything on the earth - everything alive - came from the stars; that we are in fact made of star stuff... does that sound familiar to anybody? That we are made of star stuff? So not only is Cosmos not disproving my religion, it's only proving it more. We've always said we're made of star stuff."

Sparrow: "Exactly. ... Science is coming closer and closer to what we believe all the time."

The idea that we're made out of stars predates Carl Sagan. Quote Investigator found uses as old as 1913 and 1918, both from science. The only non-scientific origin seems to be a "Serbian proverb": "Be humble for you are made of dung. Be noble for you are made of stars." Serbia has been Christian for a very long time, so I don't know if we can count that as Pagan origins. And that's assuming it truly is a Serbian proverb; the earliest source seems to be Guy Murchie in his 1978 book The Seven Mysteries of Life and he did not provide any documentation. It is an interesting idea that Pagans, ancient or modern, may have always believed that we're made of star stuff, but I couldn't find any proof of this. Mojo hasn't gotten back to me with his source.

Until a Pagan source can be found - and I am keeping an open mind about that - I will remain a bit disturbed by this possible re-writing of history. I know modern Pagans are not, as a community, all that good at history (you don't have to dig very deep to find people who still believe that nine million women were killed in the "The Burning Times" and in Gimbutas' ancient gynocentric civilizations), but that's all the more reason to guard against the tendency to add more unprovable or false stories to our collective history.

We can be the religion that embraces and welcomes science; the progressive, flexible, growing religion that isn't threatened by new facts or by change. I don't want science to prove my spiritual beliefs to be right; I want to take on new knowledge and incorporated it into my beliefs and rituals. And maybe that's something Carl Sagan, scientist and self-proclaimed agnostic, could get behind:

Every aspect of Nature reveals a deep mystery and touches our sense of wonder and awe. ... Those afraid of the universe as it really is, those who pretend to nonexistent knowledge and envision a Cosmos centered on human beings will prefer the fleeting comforts of superstition. They avoid rather than confront the world. But those with the courage to explore the weave and structure of the Cosmos, even where it differs profoundly from their wishes and prejudices, will penetrate its deepest mysteries. ― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

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Published on 2 Comments on Here in the middle

Screenshot of the title shot for "The Middle" TV show.

Here in the middle, we mostly don't want to have to choose between faith and reason. See, on one side, there are hard core atheist scientists telling us that there is no meaning and that the universe is just physical forces and genetic replication with blind, pitiless indifference. On the other side, there are fundamentalist religious fanatics telling us that we have to believe in a certain God in a certain way or we will be condemned for eternity. And while they yell at each other, most of us just want to get on with it.

Pie chart of American's beliefs about evolution and creationism
Gallup Poll, May 2012

I watched the opening remarks of the Nye-Ham Debate: Evolution versus Creationism but decided that my blood pressure couldn't handle the whole thing. I do find ignorance about science and how it works to be galling. When I find out that 46% of Americans believe that God created people in their current form within the last 10,000 years, that 42% of Canadians believe that people and dinosaurs co-existed, and that 66% of those polled say that literal creationism is 'definitely true' or 'probably true', versus 53% for evolution, I despair of the state of the North American educational system. However...

Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence. - Richard Dawkins

Secularism, with its moral relativism, is in direct opposition to Christianity and its absolute morality. The battle is between these two worldviews--one that stands on God's Word and one that accepts man's opinions. - Ken Ham

The anti-religious atheists and the fundamentalists have, together, set up a rigid dichotomy between faith and science. It is probably the only thing the two extremes agree on: that they cannot co-exist. And they are right; I believe the extremists on both sides cannot find peace with each other.

Here in the middle, we can have knowledge of science and still pray. We're capable of understanding fossils and the big bang and how chimps and humans are related, while still going to church, or temple, or mosque, or Circle. Some of us decide that divinity guides evolution. Some of us just figure that there's divinity and there's evolution, and we will do our best to understand both. And we get on with a life that is neither intellectually impaired (as some hard atheists would say of the religious) nor spiritually lacking (as some fundamentalists would say of secularists).

The fundamentalists on both sides think they are warring for the minds and hearts of the public. They have set up an "us versus them" situation and declared that one side must be right and the other wrong and there is no middle ground. A lot of people, confronted with having to make a choice, will choose the faith they learned first instead of the science they learned later, or will choose the comforting choice that says that there's a loving God looking out for them instead of an empty heaven, or will choose the story they understand instead of the complex and incomplete reality. Despite advances in scientific knowledge and all the information we now have at our fingertips, the percentage of adult Americans who hold Creationist views (45%) hasn't changed significantly in 30 years.

Here in the middle, standing on that middle ground that isn't supposed to exist, we don't want to be scolded and we don't need to be educated. We don't want to be threatened with hell and we don't need to take every religious story literally in order to take our faith seriously. We find ways to understand what has been explained, to explore the mystery of what hasn't been explained, and keep our minds and our hearts open. And maybe we don't feel so righteous, and maybe we're not always so sure of ourselves, but we can live with that.

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End note: I really enjoyed this post on the Nye-Ham debates from the Science on Religion blog and this post on questions we should be asking ourselves after the debate from Under the Ancient Oaks.

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