God is Not So Great
In an earlier post, I talk about how we can be assured that there is no God, because the design and mechanisms of nature aren't even any good- they're a deplorable tragedy. (I was DELIGHTED to see the NY Times Magazine publish an article about this very point on Sunday. Called "Unintelligent Design"- I'd never seen this pointed out in mainstream media before!) Anyway, House of Trash rightfully corrected me to say that rather than deny God, what I really should have said is that "God is not good". Which was an excellent point I should have been more clear about to begin with (and was the way George C. Williams framed his original argument). But I wasn't really familiar with any religion that DIDN'T claim "God is Great!" (Allah Akbar!) so I didn't make that clear.
Then, later, I wrote about how I don't understand how I could love the Jews so much, when they have such a ridiculous religion! WELL! I think I have since learned a little.
Here goes. I actually DON'T think the Jews even think that God is good! I think they maybe think God can be good sometimes, but is mainly pretty arbitrary and even cruel. It was Jesus who brought "the Good News"- certainly not Moses. So, I think that this leads me to believe that I actually agree MORE with the Jewish idea of God. (Though, of course I actually think that, even worse than simply "arbitrary", the forces of the universe add up to "Tragedy" is faaar more often than even on "Good" in this world, and if you don't believe me, read about what a common practice infanticide is, in countless species, including our own. Think of war, famine, think of how if you're a woman who gets brutally raped, and people find out about it, in some places you're likely to get rejected and divorced for being "unfaithful". Oh, and maybe stoned to death. Think about how most people in this world don't have a telephone, but somehow are still watching reruns of "Friends". With little blips of exceptions here and there, life is a bowl of heartbreak, toil, pain, longing, uncertainty and tragedy, and in the past it was only worse. And if it's not that tragic for you, you are LUCKY!!! (and/or blessedly oblivious.)
Anyway. It seems like many/most Jews barely even believe in God, anyway! I think the feeling is probably: "God is unknowable, but we have our rabbis who have argued about justice and morality and what humans should do." And whereas a lot of those conclusions are bunk, you also sometimes you end up with extraordinarily sophisticated views on justice and morality. You know, it's often Jews (like Daniel's father) who are very religious themselves, who argue that religion should stay out of schools! (a very impressive, very sophisticated viewpoint.) The Jews are the ones who will argue that " we must to preserve the hate groups' freedom to speak out against...the Jews!" I mean, my god. This is not an easy position to get to. It is very advanced. I mean, I even have a hard time letting go of the Death Penalty, and they were over that a long time ago (weren't they? ) But, why should we show it's not right to kill a person, by .... killing a person?
As for the meaningless texts of the Torah ("we must spill the blood of the ox"), absurd rituals (can't decide which night Passover falls on? Have it both nights!), all that. Well. I think that the rituals themselves probably don't even matter- all that matters is that the ties of the family and the community get strengthened, and for some reason pointless communal ritual and sacrifice seems quite effective for that.
Post Script:
I think that there in obeying these "ridiculous" laws, the value might be in the practicing of humility. "We know not, so we follow You", so to speak. A story: When I was selling clothes at Chanel, an orthodox Jewish woman fell in love with a long coat that she felt would be perfect to wear to her son's wedding. She had searched internationally for just the right thing, and she had found it in this beautiful jacket. She was all ready to purchase it, and happened to check the label, and noticed that the fiber content included a blend of wool and linen. Her heart sank- it was forbidden by God that she wear such a fiber combination. She asked her mother, in frustration "What is the point? Why is this forbidden?" and her mother replied "There is no point." Although there might have been historical/political reasons why this rule originally emerged, I think the idea is that following God's (arbitrary-seeming) law can be an exercise in faith. "Doing as told" might be used to show to humility to God, not in spite of the absurdity, but because of the absurdity. Incidentally, this is probably an excellent example of Zahavi's Handicap principle, which could also be called "the principle of costly authentication". Richard Dawkins discusses this at length in A Devil's Chaplain.
posted by Lizzie @ 2:03 PM
7 Comments:
You bring up some absurdities of religion, such as "irrelevant" rituals on how to spill the blood of an ox or how to determine when to celebrate certain things. I think you fail to consider a fundamental aspect of religion, which is the awe of the unknowable and faith that, though one doesn't understand the meaning, things are still rightly prescribed by an all-knowing authority.
Your discussion of religion is interesting; perhaps you can also discuss the concept of 'faith in things that are unknowable'.
First of all, thank you so much for reading and for your comment. And may I ask... who are you?! How did you find my little blog?
To your comment:
Mmm, I absolutely disagree that "things are still rightly prescribed by an all-knowing authority." I guess I should have made it more clear (and perhaps I'll edit to do so) that although the Jewish conception of an arbitrarily acting God may be closer to my own view, I still have NO reason whatsoever to believe in any all-knowing authority of any sort.
I know that people have deep feelings about awesomeness of the unknowable, but I don't share them. And I feel like instead, the awe of the unknowable pretty much inevitably turns into something I'd much prefer we avoid: the "Transcendental Temptation". (I think Paul Kurtz coined the phrase and he wrote a book on the topic. I haven't read it, but I'd like to.)
When you use the phrase "faith in things that are unknowable", you are leaving it sort of open-ended, which I think is a respectably humble position. But very, very rarely do we leave things as you are stating them- open-ended. Even in your comment (if I'm reading it correctly), you are adding "authority" and "faith" to the concept of the "unknowable". Whereas for me, I see no connection between them.
The reason I kind of resent the "Transcendental Temptation" is that as a foundation for one's viewpoint, it's quicksand. We make up stories (myths) and relationships (God the "Father") to explain what we don't know. For some reason, we humans fill in the blanks with fantasy and other-worldliness. And I think that sort of leads to a lot of personal misery. Because I think that living outside of reality ends up hurting us, more than helping us.
There is so much to know in this world that is overwhelmingly, exhiliaratingly worthwhile to learn about, that is based on rigorous research and disciplined thought! We are so fortunate to live in a time where we can know and learn so much! And these resouces, of books and critical thinking, are what I wish people would pay attention to, rather than the much more popular approach, which is to turn to exhilarating fantasy to find meaning in life.
As per my talent for nitpicking, gardanni didn't say that things are rightly prescribed by an all-knowing authority. They said you failed to acknowledge the fundamental aspect of religion which is that belief. Maybe you weren't attributing that belief to gardanni but just disagreeing with it but it seemed like you were.
Anyway if all we're talking about is the unknowable it's helpful to translate the concept into something that we don't have pre-existing feelings about in order to really think clearly about it. There are a lot of things we couldn't know, if they were true. I was in Veselka the other day and heard a couple of the staff talking about the Matrix and how this could all be a computer simulation, and by definition we wouldn't know it. look at http://www.genarts.com/karl/evolved-virtual-creatures.html
(and that's even 10 years old.) May I remind anyone who might be rolling their eyes at this point that whether or not "this" is all a computer simulation, the fact remains that when it comes down to it we really don't know what "this" is at a basic level and possibly never will. I guess maybe the idea that it's a computer simulation is just a modern way of anthropomorphizing the unknowable that's a little more accessible to modern humans. Of course, there is no reason to believe any of it, because there's no way to know it. Problem is, by definition, no explanation of the unknown has any greater chance whatsoever of being TRUE over any other, and they basically all say they are right and the others are wrong. To assert that when it's impossible by definition, they always have to resort to the idea of miracles or prophets or some kind of supernatural thing intersecting with our physical world, and thereby vulnerable to disproof. Furthermore, many of them also assert other unnecessary things about the physical world that are easily disproven - why any religion would be so stupid as to stray into the realm of the KNOWN is beyond me, but it probably has to do with the above-mentioned tactic used to compete with other religions, by getting people more used to the idea of not trusting their own common sense.
This all reminds me of the Donald Rumsfeld quote:
There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know.
People criticized him for saying that. I think that's hypocritical - that to me was one of the things he's said that made the most sense to me. You do something like that, yes there will be surprises. They should have criticized him instead for pretending to not know that there would be unknown unknowns and lying about the known unknowns that still remain today. And for misdirecting attention away from the well-understood intentions.
We are so far from understanding our own immediate world, couldn't we try to tackle that first? Maybe religion is a way of giving up on that as impossible to achieve.
Just to clarify the main motivation from my response, which after reading it I can see I didn't really communicate:
One of the and scary and challenging and interesting aspects of being human is to have the ability to understand that there are things which may be unknowable to us, yet still may be true. You can't really get away from that; it's a fact of life. Ask a scientist.
I share your rejection of religion as a way to make decisions that we have the tools to make without it. (For that, I prefer internet horoscopes and sometimes coin flipping.) Supposedly, the rejection of that sort of thing was one of the things our country was based on even though in practice it no longer is.
more...
So why do so many people care about the unknowable things at all? Aside from opportunists casting the knowable as unknowable to lie to and manipulate people, who I guess probably don't care about the unknowable really, I don't know, but the thing is a lot of people actually do. Maybe it's better for learning somehow if you always reserve the possibility that there's always one more piece of information you could get that could change everything. Maybe it's the idea of having that one last piece of information. I don't know, now I'm tired...
But back to gardanni putting quotes around "irrelevant" in the first sentence - you are nuts. Yes, in terms of history and culture it is super relevant and rich in meaning, but we are talking about religion, that people have today, right now, sitting on their toilet reading Harper's. Ok, maybe some article in Harper's is talking about where the whole ox blood two day passover thing came from... but that's still not religion, that's pop culture on the toilet, which is very relevant.
And maybe that's the point.
from House of Comments:
Maybe it's better for learning somehow if you always reserve the possibility that there's always one more piece of information you could get that could change everything.and also:
...there are things which may be unknowable to us, yet still may be true. You can't really get away from that; it's a fact of life. Ask a scientist...You're absolutely right abbout "ask a scientist." So far as I know, that attitude is a PART of critical thinking. That's why scientists call things theories- even when they've predicted something a billion times, they are wise enough to "know that they know not". John Maynard Smith, who is one of the great scientists of the last century, said on MeaningofLifeTV.com that he doesn't like to be too sure about anything- and I found this very typical of his kind, not unusual. Because it's at the heart of critical thinking.
This is important, because I think our brains polarize science into "certainty" and other things into "unknown", or unknowable and 'uncertain", and I think it's a FALSE DICHOTOMY. I just think the scientists are doing the disciplined dirty work, in a respectably dogged way. They don't get to just make shit up. They have to back it up, and be prepared to get criticized if they can't defend themselves. And this is why I like science- it's actually much more humble than a lot of people give it credit for.
OH!! That's not nitpicking, I see how I misread Gardanni after all.
Sorry Gardanni- I understand your post much better now!!!
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