That Which Binds
Doug Muder in UU World magazine… I read this over and mulled it over several times before deciding that, while it is a thought provoking discussion, I’m afraid it misses the point.
Religious liberals may (or may not!) be better than either hard-core atheists or fundamentalist believers at gauging the proper importance of a “belief system” in the larger perspective of a life. Certainly religious liberalism finds virtue in tolerating and in certain cases even encouraging diverse beliefs and their corresponding systems, so that speaks to a viewpoint that downplays the importance of strictness in beliefs. I think we are right to do so in most cases (though I think we should and do agitate against destructive beliefs!).
And rigidity can be a problem. As the author says:
Carse’s description of belief systems echoes much of the atheist critique of religion: Belief systems are closed and strident, pretending to knowledge that they do not have. Lacking mystery, they do not invoke a creative response in their followers, and that makes them brittle. Belief systems—he gives Nazism and Soviet Communism as examples—seldom last a century after they rise to prominence.
Well, Nazism & Soviet Communism were not purely belief systems – they were collective behavior patterns as much as anything else – but the point has a deeper weakness than that: belief systems need not be closed or strident, and need not pretend to knowledge that they do not have. And, as to his further assertion that “there is a deeper vitality in the Christian faith, as in all the great religions, that no single belief system can fully represent,” this is neither an entirely compelling explanation for their endurance, nor an entirely admirable trait in a religion. If you don’t understand what I mean by this, then ask about it in the comments.
Overall, I think that the dichotomy between “belief system” and “religion” is a false one. Even the creedless Unitarian Universalism carries a basic ethical belief system with it, and makes room for the people to carry their own private belief systems about what is real. Every religion carries belief systems with it, and some are undeniably more ethical sound than others, and some are undeniably based on better epistemological reasoning than others.
As a result of the flaw in this dichotomy, we find some language that sounds good on the surface, but on a deeper level needs improvement to truly carry the kernel that makes it good. For instance:
The greatest threat to the believer, then, is not the unbeliever, but the religious: the person whose appreciation of mystery causes him or her to see a world larger than the one that the believer has cleaved neatly in half.
No – the greatest threat to the believer in what is false or destructive is the falsity or destructiveness of their own belief. The person who remembers the importance of a larger perspective is more likely to avoid committing themselves to a false or destructive belief, yet they are still capable of committing themselves to beliefs.
An appreciation of mystery is one important facet of life, and one contributor to a broad perspective. But it carries no guarantees with it that the perspective will be broad enough or that the beliefs formed under it will be correct.
It’s a tangled subject, and there’s more work to do untangling it than I’m up to. But I’ll quickly give my alternative on this, from a liberal religious perspective:
1) There is room for the hermeneutic of “revealed” truth alongside empirically discovered truth. However, there is no onus on any person to conform to “revealed” truth outside their own, personal convictions.
2) There are good rules for understanding reality empirically. We shouldn’t brush them aside lightly in favor of “revealed” truth.
3) The advantages of liberal religion stem from its ability to bring together in fellowship diverse people with diverse backgrounds and diverse attitudes toward the sacred. Religare, to bind together, is probably not the correct etymology of the word, but it is a very good attitude toward it.
The sense of the mysterious, the larger perspective, the flexibility in areas that allow it (and the inflexibility in areas that don’t) arise from and are nurtured by that diversity of fellowship.
The center holds, but it doesn’t necessarily hold in a center arbitrarily defined by the fashions of the extremes.
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