Thank you, ISiddiqui, that was very eloquent. I can definitely relate. My feeling is that prayer, meditation and text study can profoundly change a person – if they find a way to do these things with the real hope of possibly achieving profound change. Finding that hope when it went against all my previous experience is belief…I can only describe it as Grace.
I feel like there is such a failure to communicate in these threads. What does it even mean to “believe in God”? I mean, if you ask me if I believe in God…given that I spend a great deal of time praying to God and studying the word of God, I would feel kind of silly saying “no”. But if by “God” you mean the old guy with the beard on the diamond throne in the sky, who parted the Red Sea, gave his only Son to redeem humanity, carried Muhammad hundreds of miles in a single night, looks on disapprovingly while you masturbate, and/or casts sinners into a pit of eternal fire…well, no, of course I don’t believe in him, fuck that guy.
Trying to be as concise as possible, I believe that just as there are laws of physics whose validity can be objectively proven, there are laws of history which are too complex to be precisely defined and which obviously can’t be experimentally tested. I think that the same force which draws magnets of opposite charge toward each other draws humanity in the direction of increased love, peace, wisdom and justice.
I call that force God, acknowledging the negative baggage that word carries for many but unable to think of a better one. Many others would find it outrageously offensive that I profane the name of God by applying it to this vague hippie kumbaya shit. So it goes.
I think religions (broadly defined to include non-theistic ethical philosophies) are in many ways analogous to languages. They can be very different from each other, and some are clearly better than others for some specific applications. But they all do everything they need to do well enough, and beautiful poetry can be produced in any of them.
I’m thinking of this in the context of a recent thread about the term “Latinx”. Per some cite there, 97% of Spanish speaking people dislike the term. This certainly can’t be because they all firmly support traditional gender roles and heteronormativity. Rather, it’s because Spanish is a gendered language on a very fundamental level, and most people don’t want to trade in the language they grew up speaking for “Newspeak” in the name of some ideology, even if it’s an ideology they’re basically OK with.
Likewise, I can see the limitations of a tribal, patriarchal religious tradition based on animal sacrifice…but it’s a vibrant living language which people are using, and have been using for thousands of years, to say a lot of important things, including things which directly address and subvert the problematic aspects of the tradition. I want to, figuratively, stick with Spanish and its glorious, messy historic tradition rather than switch to Esperanto, which is rationally designed and based on virtuous progressive principles but has no literary tradition and doesn’t evoke anyone’s memories of mama singing to them. And I will do so while fully acknowledging that inanimate objects do not actually have genders.
My rabbi sometimes mentions “God” and then clarifies “Not the real God, I mean the character in the Bible named “God””. Both are near and dear to my heart, but I pray never to confuse them with each other. But it seems like some posters here refuse to give religious people credit for being smart enough to know the difference.
Now aren’t you glad I tried to be as concise as possible? 