A friend of mine is now a Christian. She wouldn't call it that, but I would, and I don't appreciate that her new-found Christianity entails calling me "juvenile". Luckily such a remark was only inaccurate in context, and provides me with the freedom to rebel vindictively against my categorization with a pre-script jab.
Wasn't it just yesterday I was having a conversation with myself about the different varieties of Christians? I believe it was yesterday, if yesterday was the day with the very loud, very bad band playing on campus and all the student groups with their tables, trying to peddle their memberships and ideas. One of those moments where you deliberately stare at your feet because if you look up you are guaranteed to make eye contact with someone, and the odds are they're trying to give you something.
I still have one brochure from an extreme, but rather clever, Christian group on campus. Someone had drawn a cartoon about "Pavlov's frog" wherein the possibility of meaning (as in the kind that actually exists) is entertained. Very quickly the frog takes a yewey off the deep end and finds God.
I don't like the idea that God only exists at the end of a U-turn. I understand this concept in the "seeing the error of my ways" sense, and that's fine, but that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about the lack of logical connection between idea A and idea B: present something befuddling and hope the reader accepts "God" as the only possible solution. This despicable literary device is found only in the shallow waters of religious propaganda, where I hope it one day dies. A few things:
1. It's insulting to the reader's intelligence. This is enough in itself, but there's still some more ground to cover. Moving on...
2. Any spiritual view that is the product of fear, coercion, or confusion, has missed the point completely. Religious brochures may draw us in with cute frogs or peaceful pictures of sunsets on the cover, but a steaming pile of rage lies in wait for us on the second page. This hurts my feelings. Also, it makes me want to smack people, which is not a very Christian thing to do (although arguably that's exactly why I need the brochure in the first place).
3. Even if fear, coercion, or confusion is left out of the picture, I'm still a bit unnerved by the idea of convincing others to hold specific spiritual beliefs. This isn't even because I find it annoying - which I do - but because any so-called belief that would result from persuasion is, again, ingenuine. Let's just suspend our own thoughts on the matter for a second and imagine that God is very much a real person, and all that He wants is for you (yes, you!) to love Him dearly. Can you imagine how God would feel if He had to talk you into falling in love with Him? Can you imagine how you would feel if you had to talk someone else into falling in love with you? Intuitively, would any of us say that such a love would be genuine, or worthwhile, or satisfying to the one who is allegedly loved?
Maybe none of that matters; besides the fact that God isn't necessarily walking around in the flesh (at the moment or not; there are far too many bases to cover here), maybe the type of love or how it's acquired is beside the point. Maybe spirituality isn't immune to the "see what happens" methodology: try it out, see if you're better adusted. See if all this works for you. I certainly wouldn't call this a belief, though; it's adopting a series of agreeable principles.
This brings me back to a conversation I had with my friend D several months ago. I had been trying to find a way to characterize spirituality without calling into play all of those deep-seated emotions that one generally associates with the term. If spirituality really is a series of values, arbitrarily chosen or not, which produce behavior that orients oneself effectively and happily within the world... I can make sense of that. I'll tell you what I cannot do: give you a reason to hold those values that doesn't call upon their effects. I cannot do that. It's circular. Why is this is a problem? It's a problem the moment you step back and ask yourself why you want those events to occur.
I could easily appeal to the many probable reasons we have for why we behave the way we do, all of which, again, speak only to effects. Evolutionary psychology is full of explanations for cooperation. Unfortunately, it's also full of (sometimes contradictory) explanations for why we might refuse to cooperate. Why we might behave, say, murderously. It's a problem, but it isn't a problem, because that's just shuffling off our value judgments onto a convenient if untidy body of evidence. On some level it may not be inaccurate to say, "Awww, honey, I love you because I've been arrested by the same biological processes that spurred my ancestors to reproduce!" Yeah, not the sweetest thing anyone's ever heard but no one can say it's completely off the mark. It just doesn't explain everything.
Same with value judgments: you can cite potential reasons for tendencies, but what about how I feel? The sheer fact that I am aware of a social and biological impact on my behavior renders those same impacts useless as a basis for values (unless you think I'm just impossible to please. Stack that on top of my arbitrary attributes pile).
One of the problems with values, though, is that you still have to interact with other people while you're making up your mind. There are, fortunately, two solid reasons for a well-thought-out action, and those are:
1. It's good for you, and
2. It's good for other people.
Yes, I have just completely backtracked, because I haven't resolved this internally but I still need to be a halfway decent human being. Neither of these avoids the word "good" or disinvites the question "why?" but they're deliciously hard to disagree with (and that's the other thing: the end tends to be the same, no? At least usually? It's the means that are so damn confounding).
I suppose then, taking a murky trek back to religious propaganda, that the creators of such have, or should, ask themselves a few questions: Is it better to terrorize and confuse if I get people to turn to God? What are the odds that the few people I do recruit, in their terror and confusion, will spread more terror, and more confusion? Does the image of God that I want to portray condone peace and clarity? If so, why am I not sharing that image? Do I want to convince others of God, or that I'm right?
Every day I have this dialogue with myself, and every day it resolves: I will never know why I am here. I only know that I am here. What do I want that to look like?
It should look the same, either way.
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