The refusal to choose is a form of choice; disbelief is a form of belief. – Frank Barron
I believe. Credo. We are asked and even commanded to believe. We are lured into belief. We are believers or else we don’t belong. Without belief, we couldn’t make it through a day. Faith in The Divine, Nature, spouses, children, one’s body –such beliefs help us get through the day more or less intact. For that, we should be thankful.
Christianity and Hinduism each have strong traditions of active, industrial strength disbelief. Just as strongly as one may affirm positively one’s belief in something true, the believer has the responsibility to articulate what s/he’s not saying, what’s not true. This back-and-forth action of saying yes and no - yes to God, but no to Caesar, yes to love, but no to a sentiment that enables addictive love – is a wonderful winnowing way to enrich faith. “I believe” and “I disbelieve” are the twin chambers of the heart of faith.
Active disbelief in Christianity is called via negativa. Hinduism calls it neti-neti. Both deny something is real in reference to something that is real. Such bi-focal vision in matters of faith and practice, I think, keeps us honest. Saying “Yes” doesn’t mean much if one is not able to back it up with a “no”.
Every new theology – say, Luther’s against Catholicism – begins with a holy dissatisfaction with the status quo. Whose unity is being served? Who’s being left out? (Theology must offend someone.)
Active, faithful disbelief is not faith-denial. Rather, it is a way to faithfully refuse to allow certain things. It is an act of faith, said Tolstoy, not to believe. He called the church an “impenetrable forest of stupidity” and a “conscious deception that serves as a means for one part of the people to govern the other,”
Let me commend we get back in touch with a key portion of our lives, our teenage years. Disbelief is job one of teenagers. We often do not value these almost-adults, often because of their unique abilities to show the rest of us off as hypocrites, cartoon characters, or emperors without clothes.
We invoke this teenage spirit every time – every time – we march, protest, write letters, risk prison, rail at the White House. This … will … not … stand!! I speak of active incredulity regarding public policies that disfavor the poorest, and wars that kill more innocents than terrorists. Incredulity is the first habit of active disbelievers.
Can we do it? Most won’t. The world’s head laundry is pretty good at washing brains. It takes lots of guts to speak a faithful no, to expose that which should die from exposure. So let us get in touch with our Inner Middle Finger.
I write as a would-be faithful disbeliever, a Protest-ant, one little ant doing his protesting, his saying no. Are there other protest-ants out there? Protest-poets? Protest-artists? Protest-sleuths?
Do you, like I, dis-believe that God …
- wills war, hunger or poverty
- organizes the death of anyone, young or old.
- hates our questions and detests our doubts.
- wishes us to accept everything without debate.
- likes the status quo that denies people liberty.
- is happy with the way we treat the earth.
- approves all we have done with religion.
- speaks only through human language.
- ever gives up on us in spite of all we do, and allow to be done.
I do not believe that
- the religious house is a harbor where we can moor forever.
- death and war and disease have the final say.
- grace and justice can be forever thwarted.
I believe. Fan my unbelief. This blog is dedicated to a fiery disbelief.
LOVE the Tolstoy quotes -- can you point me toward their source? "Fan my disbelief." heh, heh.
ReplyDeleteLaura Collins
Marc, the thing you wrote that most caught my attention was the phrase about belief and disbelief being "twin chambers." I see people that are polarized and spend the vast majority of their time in only one of those chambers. To me, disbelief is only truly valuable when one then takes a stand for what one DOES believe. As you already noted, belief is similarly useful when we will stand up for what we do NOT tolerate.
ReplyDeleteWith regards to belief/disbelief in the properties of God, I'm always frustrated in conversation due to the semantics. We each have a strong notion of what "G-o-d" means, but we ignore the elephant in the room that we are all, actually, talking about different things. Or, more appropriately, different aspects of one huge concept which none of us can fully comprehend. We are like the blind men examining the elephant (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant). Is God a spear? a pillar? a wall? or something else?
ReplyDeleteIf He IS a spear, then willing war, death, punishment, etc. hating dissent and imposing strict heirarchy (your basic "war god" profile) would be His bread and butter (seems in the Old Testament He brooked far fewer "forgivable" sins).
If He is a pillar, he stands firm, yet holds the sheltering sky above our heads. He would let us make our own wars and death, but would always wish we too could stand tall, together beside Him.
If He is a wall, then our limitations are His strict laws, our attempts to overcome them are pointless blasphemies, doomed to failure.
Personally, I "disbelieve" the same points that you've enumerated, but I think I can (somewhat) understand why others might believe some of them (if God were a spear, etc.). The thing that drives me mad are the people who change their beliefs mid-debate in order to win a point (e.g. God never gives up on me, no matter how much oxycontin I swallow; but He gave up on you the instant you failed your family by bringing home less than 50,000 dollars last year).
We have been given this impossibly rare opportunity to speak to one another about God, about our universe -- it seems a terrible deceit to exchange this opportunity for a cheap chance to "win" a few arguments by condemning anyone and anything different from oneself, then wallow in self righteous afterglow.
I think God gave us the ability to be logical, consistent, brave, merciful, and understanding. I "disbelieve" that He is happy when we abuse these gifts through willful ignorance, intolerance, condemnation, and self-aggrandizement.
Choosing not to chose is a choice only logically. To be meaningful a choice MUST be intentional -- schleping into a decision doesn't count. It's the difference between simply not making a choice and refusing to make a choice - or, if you will, the difference between not believing and disbelief. Not believing--unbelief -- is a passive thing with little or no meaning. Disbelief is active and intentional and, therefore, meaningful.
ReplyDeleteRegarding "twin chambers", unbelief vs. disbelief, etc. Much can be embedded in a question. For example, asking the fairly specific question "Do you believe God punishes heretics with thunderbolts?" There may be three answers to this "Yes" (meaning "Yes, I believe He zaps them"), "No" (meaning, "No, I believe he does not zap them), and silence. What does the silence mean? Odds are good the person who is silent here DOES have a belief, and isn't really "schleping" by not stating it. He is probably confused by the implications of some of the words in the question (like "God" and "heretics").
ReplyDelete"Yes" essentially means "I have a belief (and it is the same as what you suggested)." And "No" means "I have a belief (and it is the opposite of what you suggested)." In either case, an answer is a statement of belief in one of two directions.
Accepting that a "Yes" or "No" (I think that's "Credo" or "Ne Credo") exists for every question and comprises all possible meanings is a dualism (and quite possibly an error).
Consider having this question posed to you in open court, in front of a jury of your peers: "Yes or no, are you still painfully beating your mother every day?" How do you answer? Neither "Yes" nor "No" will convey the meaning you would like (which is, hopefully, "I NEVER beat my mother!!"). A good judge won't let such a question be asked (or, at least, won't force you to answer simply "Yes" or "No"). An understanding juror will put himself in your place and realize you had no right answer available. But not every question we are asked is mediated by a good judge or heard exclusively by understanding jurors.
In this way we often manufacture conflicts of belief that don't really exist ("You're either with me or you're against me!"). We often value the false conflict more than we might value genuine fellowship.
Going back to the thunderbolt question, consider the battle of Thermopylae (most recently dramatized in the movie 300). If asked if God zaps heretics, the Spartans (and other Greeks) would say "Yes" -- that's Zeus's stock in trade. The Persians would say "No" -- Ahura Mazda is knowledge, and punishment occurs only after death. But this disagreement is MUCH more a disagreement about who "God" might be, than about whether or not holy zapping is in the forecast.
This could well be the reason a person of conviction on the subject remains silent, perhaps he can tell, be the nature of the question, that the questioner has already made some strong, implicit assumptions about who "God" is, what He can do, and how seriously He views "heresy" -- without knowing the questioner's (undeclared yet pre-judged and unchangeable) views on these deeper subjects, the question of thunderbolts is unapproachable, it is not really the question being asked at all.
Do you still ask questions which are unfairly dualistic? Yes or no?!?!
Thanks for this episode, Marc. A few nights ago I was sitting at dinner with a small group of local business owners. I don't remember how it happened, but suddenly we were all recounting the doctrines we had learned as children but now do not accept as valid. And I was reminded that being indoctrinated does not contribute either to empowerment or enlightenment -- in fact, probably stifles both. Jack Thomas in Mount Airy, NC
ReplyDelete