One of my favorite bloggers, Dan Foster, a recovering minister but still a believer, made this comment about the process of deconstruction of one’s faith, “All the doubts and questions that I had came rushing to the surface. In truth, they had probably always been there, but I had always been so busy trying to please the Lord that I’d never stopped to address them.”
I had heard the phrase “to please the Lord” before, but this time it really resonated with my thinking. There is this “person” (has to be a person if you are having a personal relationship with it), and you call it “Lord,” and worship it. I have said many times that worshipping someone or something demeans both the worshipper and the worshipped. So, how would one characterize this relationship between the all-powerful, all-knowing “Lord” and its “beleivers?” To me it has echoes of medieval serfdom if not slavery. Serfs often tugged their forelocks or bowed when in the presence of a lord, Christians bow their heads, or get on their knees and clasp their hands. All of this seems unnecessary and eminently mockable. Remember Monty Python’s Meaning of Life sermon? (Here it is … of course:)
CHAPLAIN: Let us praise God. O Lord,…
CONGREGATION: O Lord,…
CHAPLAIN: …ooh, You are so big,…
CONGREGATION: …ooh, You are so big,…
CHAPLAIN: …so absolutely huge.
CONGREGATION: …so absolutely huge.
CHAPLAIN: Gosh, we’re all really impressed down here, I can tell You.
CONGREGATION: Gosh, we’re all really impressed down here, I can tell You.
CHAPLAIN: Forgive us, O Lord, for this, our dreadful toadying, and…
CONGREGATION: And barefaced flattery.
CHAPLAIN: But You are so strong and, well, just so super.
CONGREGATION: Fantastic.
HUMPHREY: Amen.
CONGREGATION: Amen.
CHAPLAIN and CONGREGATION: [singing]
O Lord, please don’t burn us.
Don’t grill or toast Your flock.
Don’t put us on the barbecue
Or simmer us in stock.
Don’t braise or bake or boil us
Or stir-fry us in a wok.
Oh, please don’t lightly poach us
Or baste us with hot fat.
Don’t fricassee or roast us
Or boil us in a vat,
And please don’t stick Thy servants, Lord,
In a Rotissomat.
What would the superior being get out of this relationship, I wonder? Why would it be pleased by its followers doing what they were told to do? Why would it be angry when its followers did not do what they were told to do?
I understand “following” someone you admire. There have been scientists I have had crushes on, but I wouldn’t think about gushing praise all over them. I am sure that would embarrass both of us, but here it seems to be part of the fabric of the faith.
But, but, apologists/excusigists say “He created us!’ So? That would confer some responsibility on him, responsibility for what his creations do, but upon us? “You should be grateful!” My life has many good aspects and some bad aspects and I am supposed to thank somebody for putting me in this position? Seems very far fetched to me.
To Dan’s credit, what came next was an honest reappraisal of his situation:
The church mistreated me terribly during my struggle, and after experiencing what I perceived to be a staggering lack of empathy and support, I finally resigned and walked away.
And, suddenly, I found myself in a place of terrifying doubt.
Yet, at the same time, I was free! Free from the expectations of ministry and the need to appear to have it all together. And I was free from the pressure to conform my beliefs to the faith group to which I belonged in order to find acceptance — because I no longer belonged. This was made clear to me.
It really hurt, but it came with the unexpected blessing of being in a safe place to really examine my faith for the first time in great detail, to work out what exactly I believed and why.
That last bit is something one might expect from an honest group as part of their regular processes, but people seem to need to get free of the controlling influences in order to do so. The word Islam supposedly translates as “submit.” Christianity should be so honestly named. From where I sit, it is all about power. Getting people to join a group, allows the leaders of the group to apply the rules of the group to those people … instant power, for example “What happens in Fight Club stays in Fight Club.” And behind these rules there are always punishments, which from childhood we were taught to avoid.
Power.
Apostate Muslims are to be killed, don’t you know. Violators of the rules will be beheaded or burned at the stake or branded as a lesson to others.
Uncommon Sense 
Tradition … Tradition!
Tags: conservatives, traditions
I was reading a blog post just now in which the author stated “I never felt the pull of tradition for its own sake.”
I have spent some time addressing the value of tradition. I have characterized traditions as “things we have always done that way.” And it seems to me that tradition is a way of preserving knowledge. So, I imagine a scenario in which a member of a tribe sitting criss-cross with a patch of leather in his lap and pieces of flint which he is knapping to make axes and knives and awls. A curious child of the tribe comes and sits watching him. After a time, the child is asked “Do you want to learn how to do this?” If the child answers yes, not only does he receive instruction on knapping, but also on the use of the tools so created, the value those tools have to the tribe and, if he becomes adept, he may end up being the knapper the tribe relies upon, which means he also would need to pass on the skills to the generation following him.
Tradition, that way, is an inherent good in the form of preserving important knowledge.
But tradition becomes a net bad thing when it is honored for just being. So, when automobiles came along, what happened to the traditional process of making buggy whips? When knowledge gets superseded, some arts or crafts are worth preserving, others not so much. We now have extensive electronic mechanisms for preserving and creating sounds, but there is still a need for luthiers to make violins, guitars, and whatnot.
Where it seems that we run off the rails is when we use our social structures to locking in certain skills, thinking traditions to be sacred, rather than just old and time-tested. For example we created craft guilds, not to encourage innovation or the spread of the basic skills, but more to keep “the bums out of the racket.” A practitioner not “guild-certified” could end up face down in a canal, or merely beaten to a pulp. A guild member who innovates and is using techniques not certified by the guild could be expelled, and so on. In this case “tradition” is used to protect the livelihood of the practitioners, not just as a knowledge preservation technique.
Is tradition a net good or net bad thing? Yes. On a case by case basis you can see where things go well or go poorly. The famous case of the Japanese company, maker of the first commercially produced quartz watch, approached the watchmakers in Switzerland who rejected the thing out of hand because where were the gears, where were the jewel? The advent of the quartz watch gutted the mechanical watch industry in just a couple of decades (this, in retrospect, was called “the Quartz Crisis”). Don’t cry for the tradition-steeped businesses, the survivors “retreated” into the luxury watch business and are doing quite well.) And the irony of ironies is the basic quartz time keeper was invented in the U.S. and the Centre Electronique Horloger (CEH) in Switzerland developed their Beta 1 and Beta 2 prototypes around the same time Seiko launched its first watch (the Quartz Astron 35SQ).
Today there is interest in learning traditional skills as a hobby activity as well as a business opportunity. Problems accounted in those endeavors are that fairly often the skills needed have to be rediscovered as they died out with the last remaining practitioners. Enterprising re-discoverers also look to find people who still practice those traditional skills, even though they might not have been involved in the use of those skills formally.
So, sing after me … “Tradition … Tradition!”