There’s a fair body of both social and biological science now to suggest that, however it comes about, most humans are cognitively wired to accept irrational beliefs.
But it often requires a stark level of realism to break through the mental defensive shell erected around that belief, with the end result cognitive dissonance — the emotional quaker a person goes through when they can no longer rationalize having faith in something and suddenly lose its emotional support.
A former mormon bishop once said that realizing his faith was based on lies was like having the world pulled out from under him, like he had no understanding of humanity or his role in it, for months.
Like most intelligent men who are nonetheless capable of becoming captive to faith, he’s happier since living such a strident orthodoxy, although has somewhat lapsed in that he immediately turned to capitalism as a replacement.
People: all systems of faith, economics and politics are created by us. We’re flawed, so none of them are perfect.
The question is how imperfect, or blind to those imperfections, a faithful person is willing to be. This Dallas Morning News article outlines the crisis of faith people around the world are experiencing as it becomes more evident daily that high-ranking Catholics — and quite possibly Pope Benedict himself — helped cover up, or wilfully ignored, years of system child abuse.
This guy, creepy? No way!
The article is crap, replete with specious examples of crises of faith that, regardless of the cause, have long-existed in the church. But the end result is interesting: people don’t lose their faith in a higher power, just their faith in a particular religion.
If you’re a pragmatic pluralist — someone who accepts we’ll likely never understand our origins or which side of the atheism/theism argument is correct — it’s neat to see people realizing they can use the ceremony, community and decency inherent to many moderated religions, and discard the divisive, insulating effects of orthodoxy.
This is not new. Many religions have can thank their lucky starts they embraced religion and reform early on, and consequently are represented by entire congregations of agnostic supporters. For example, there are more than 40 synagogues across North America that are home to “secular humanist judaism,” the practice of elements of the faith, but with an acceptance that religion is created by man in an attempt to understand his origins.
On the judeo-christian front, there’s unitarianism, which is rooted in the Jeffersonian tradition of taking the logical communal lessons from the Bible and applying them humanely …without arrogantly assuming a super being that looks like us (or we like him, six of one, half a dozen of the other) is in charge of everything and created it all.
A few years ago, the author and lecturer Dr. David Wulff told me it all comes down to the same thing: a need for comfort and security.
“In religion, you have a magnet that draws people together: there’s mystery, there’s the promise of a form of immortality, there is hope for solutions to complex problems,” said Wulff.
“A lot of it is very pragmatic. It’s been argued that religion is what we do when there are no real answers left. And you see that reflected all the time: when people are trapped in a mine and there’s nothing the people trying to save them can do, they pray. The fact that it’s so often ineffective doesn’t seem to matter, given the comfort that it brings them.
“I’m thinking back to a study done in the 1970s by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in which they trained interviewers to go into nine congregations and interview members to find out why the church was important to them and what about it was most important.
“And what the people kept saying over and over again was that it was the sense of caretaking, first towards the congregation by the minister, and then between the congregation itself. Whenever one of the interviewers would suggest there was something wrong with the answers, because they didn’t discuss the church’s ‘justification by faith’ doctrine, or God or Jesus, they would remark that there was no better conversation stopper than the actual theological questions.
“So despite the church’s belief that all of these important doctrines, rules, codes and traditions were important, inevitably the congregation wasn’t concerned with that. They were much more concerned with one another.”
Slightly More Upright 