In order to be a fundamentalist Christian, I would have to believe:
a) God is real
b) God is the truth
c) God revealed Himself in the Bible
e) Because a, b & c, the Bible is the true & inerrant Word of God
It seems to me the best way to defend one's faith is very simply not to. One's faith, one's 'belief system' should be lived. One's life then becomes one's testimony.
Every word that comes from my mouth is a lie to a fundamentalist Christian because it is not drawn from the Bible or necessarily from the words or life of Jesus Christ. To one of such faith, how could I but lie?
Yet, while I hear thoughts and ideas from the mouths of Christians that I find myself in agreement with (that holds true for the words spoken by Buddhists, Muslims, Hindus, bluesmen and women), certain concepts strike me as being completely insane. They strike me that way because they are regarded, to those who hold them as true, as absolute fact.
To a fundamentalist Christian, there is in fact no belief system or faith. To them, Christ's divinity and the inerrancy of the Bible are facts. A fact is a fact, not a belief. One doesn't have faith in a fact. I don't believe the earth revolves around the sun, it's simply a fact. I suppose I could choose not to believe it, but I would be wrong.
If there is any doubt about a fact, and if that doubt is common or widespread, then the fact isn't a fact. If there were to be that much doubt in the veracity of a fact, it most likely wasn't a fact to begin with. A theory is not a fact, it is a hypothesis that has not been disproven under examination.
Christianity is filled with "facts" that do not stand up to scientific scrutiny. If it were truly regarded as a faith system and not a collection of facts, it would not be required to stand up to scientific testing or any kind of proof.
If I am to have a faith, these would be my guidelines:
1) I hold these things (that are not facts) to be true. And by 'true' I mean to say they are in harmony with myself, my inner being.
2) I cannot prove the things I believe to be true.
3) If I could prove their veracity, they would enter the realm of fact.
4) The unprovable belief that is in harmony with myself is my faith.
The very notion that some of us are called to have and express a faith dismisses for me the possibility of ever surrendering myself to the fundamentalist Christian matrix. They hold their God and Bible to be fact and I can't have faith in a fact. Especially when one person's fact is another person's fiction.
Thoughts on Things in General
1 comment:
First--on the lighter side--this post reminds me of Douglas Adams's delirious riff on the Babelfish and its relationship to G*d's (non)existence (for those not in the know, the Babelfish is a creature he made up for his Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, a tiny fish that, when placed in a person's ear, allows that person to understand any language):
Now it is such a bizarrely improbably coincidence that anything so mindbogglingly useful [the Babel fish] could have evolved by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.
The argument goes something like this:
"I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."
"But," says Man, "the Babel fish is a dead giveaway isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED."
"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
More seriously, there *is* something not only obnoxious but deeply insane about the fundamentalist attitude you describe, exactly because it wildly misses the point of religion in the first place. The spiritual and the "factual" (i.e., objective and scientific) should never be confused. I remember realizing this back in my college days when, immersed in Descartes, it became painfully clear that not only was his Ontological Proof for the Existence of God a bunch of horse hockey, but his more famous argument proving his own existence ("Cogito, ergo sum" or "I am thinking, therefore I am") has a glaring hole in it since he presupposes his own existence in the premise--obviously, he doesn't know that he's thinking if he hasn't yet demonstrated that there is a him to be doing the thinking in the first place. Separate realms...some things do simply have to be taken on faith.
This also reminds me--if you'll forgive the intrusion of some vaguely New Age-y vibes--of a great and very appropriate quote from Alan Watts that I once ran across. I don't have the full thing with me, so I may need to come back later to give you the full excerpt, but the core of it is his assertion that "when myth is confused with history, it ceases to apply to man's inner life [and] the living God becomes the abstract god."
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