Margaret's Bench -- June 2007
You know what drives me nuts about the recent
spate of books begging me to find salvation and give up religion
before it’s too late? Books arguing not only that God doesn’t
exist, but that religion is a greater threat to humanity than
avian flu and reality TV combined?
First, it drives me nuts that the writers of those books don’t
seem to know anything about the God I’m grappling with every
day. From what I can tell, they don’t know anything about my
religion, either, even if it happens that they were
march-stepped to Sunday School every blessed week through all
their formative years.
And second, it drives me nuts that I really like those writers a
lot. They’re smart, they’re passionate, they care about the
world. I want to be their friend. It’s fun to imagine having
them over for dinner.
But my fantasy dinner party falls apart somewhere between the
salad and the cheese, because my guests and I have this huge
chasm between us. They think I’m an idiot. And I think they’re
just playing games—constructing a straw man, pouring gasoline
all over him, and triumphantly lighting the match.
Here’s what I want to ask my dinner guests.
Do you think that love is real?
Wait. Before you answer that question, in the interest of full
disclosure, I should probably admit that I haven’t read any of
your books. I read the reviews. So here I am defending myself
against your attacks on my faith and religious practice, saying
that you don’t even know what they are, and I haven’t even read
your attacks.
So I guess we’re on fairly equal ground. I’ll just continue on
here.
Do you think that love is real?
This is not a loaded question. I’m not holding back some hidden
logic that says, if love is real, then—ta da!—the God you don’t
believe in must exist after all! I don’t believe in that
straw-brained Intelligent Designer either, so we aren’t going
there.
Do you think that love is real?
I once asked that question to a man who introduced himself to me
as a secular humanist. I’d just given a talk that took Christian
mythology seriously as a means of finding one’s place in the
cosmos, and he was in the audience. He came up to me afterward
to take issue with the whole underlying tenor of my message. He
argued that since religion deals in things that can’t be seen or
measured, religion itself can’t be taken seriously, because it
has no basis in the real world.
“Is love real?” I asked him. He looked at me a moment, then
shrugged and said, “An emotion.”
Hmmm. Isn’t it interesting that the whole God/religion problem
so often comes down to the definition of terms?
Love sparks emotions of tremendous power and variety. And yet,
when I look closely at love in my own life, I can’t reduce love
to emotion alone. And I can’t define it, either. Love exists in
relationship. Love contains intention, lives in memory, and
grows in hope.
Can we agree that love is real?
I’m alone in my studio, writing to an imaginary “you” that’s
currently morphing into whoever reads these words in the future,
so I don’t know your real answer. If you were here, we could
talk about it, and I imagine you’d have your own descriptive
phrases about love. And that we’d bat it back and forth long
enough to build confidence that, even though our experiences of
love are as individual as we are, still, we know what we’re both
talking about, and we can agree that love is real.
Which is a starting point to talking about what God, faith, and
religion are all about to me.
More on this subject at another time.
-- Margaret
A few select examples of recent titles, ending with a classic in
the field.
Atheist Universe: The Thinking Person’s Answer To Christian
Fundamentalism, David Mills (Ulysses Press, 2006).
Breaking the Spell: Religion As a Natural Phenomenon,
Daniel C. Dennett (Viking Adult, 2006).
The End Of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future Of Reason,
Sam Harris, (W. W. Norton, 2004).
The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins (Houghton Mifflin,
2006).
God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything,
Christopher Hitchens, (Twelve, 2007).
God: The Failed Hypothesis. How Science Shows That God Does
Not Exist, Victor J. Stenger, (Prometheus Books, 2007).
Letter To a Christian Nation, Sam Harris, (Knopf, 2006).
Why I Am Not a Christian: And Other Essays On Religion and
Related Subjects, Bertrand Russell, (Touchstone, 1967).
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