Delusional Blogging, Part One

As I mentioned in this entry, one of my summer projects is to read The God Delusion, as it has become increasingly apparent to me that it is going to be impossible to have a sensible conversation with goblinpaladin until I have done so.

Thus far, I have read the Preface. It is bold, and not nearly as... rude as I had been lead to expect. Dawkins is a man on a self-appointed mission. I don't think I'm going to like him and his mission, but I can hardly blame him for pursuing it.

1: What's in a delusion?

I don't mean you. You're not like that, is the common footnote to complaints about religion and religious people. I'm always pleased not to be hated, but am often disquieted by the accompanying assumption that i'm not a real Christian. Real Christians are Those People. Highly has a little bit of a personality quirk, that's all. A harmless delusion, if you will.
Religion is dangerous, highlyeccentric is not. goblinpaladin, shortly after he rescinded his declaration that I was not a 'real christian', got into an argument with a Dawkins-hating friend of ours. He went into Fanboy mode, as he does, rhapsodising about the evils of religion and the glorious vision of a world without it. (This is quite fun to watch, I recommend you get him started on it sometime.)
I'm not talking about you, he qualified. People like you and Highly... Highly's faith is beautiful. Dawkins isn't talking about you guys. He says so in chapter such-and-such. (goblinpaladin corrects himself below)
But that's not how it works. You can't say "The God Delusion" and then want to exempt those whose delusions are pretty.

The word 'delusion' in my title has disquieted some psychiatrists who regard it as a technical term, not to be bandied about...
The Penguin English Dictionary defines a delusion as 'a false belief or impression'... The dictionary supplied with Microsoft Word defines a delusion as 'a persistent false belief held in the face of strong contradictory evidence, especially as a symptom of psychiatric disorder'. The first part capures religious faith perfectly. As to whether it is a syptom of a psychiatric disorder, I am inclined to follow Robert M. Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, when he said, 'When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion, it is called Religion.' (Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, (London: Bantam Press 2006) p. 5)

This is Dawkins' own definition. The "God Delusion" is corporate. Individually, I might be a little batty, and Jerry Falwell might have been out of his tree, but collectively we have a Religion. (And am I really any less insane than Jerry Falwell? Or am just less offensive in my insanity?) Dawkins knows that. Individually, I'm unlikely to feature on anyone's Atrocity List, let alone his the tiny summary thereof , which takes up a paragraph on pages 1-2. Nevertheless, just as his imagined world without religion has no suicide bombers and no televangelists, there is no room in it for me.

There is no room in it for me and my faith. But Dawkins is talking to me.

If this book works as I intend, religious readers who open it will be atheists when they put it down. What presumptious optimism! Of course, dyed-in-the-wool faith-heads are immune to argument, their resistance built up over years of childhood indoctrination using methods that took centuries to mature (whether by evolution or by design). Among the more effective immunological devices is a dire warning to avoid even opening a book like this, which is surely a work of Satan. But I believe there are plenty of open-minded people out there: people whose childhood indoctrination was not too insidious, or for other reasons didn't 'take', or whose native intelligence is strong enough to overcome it. Such free spirits should need only a little encouragement to break free of the vice of religion altogether. At the very least, I hope that nobody who reads this book will be able to say, 'I didn't know I could.' (pp. 5-6)

My arrogant assumption that I can (and will, thank you Mr Dawkins) read this book without coming out an atheist at the other end might make me one of the dyed in the wool faith-heads. But I have picked up the book, and i don't  think it's a work of Satan. So I'm probably one of those who ought to finish this book as an atheist.

Budding evangelists will tell you that it is important to reach out to people, bring them into the Kingdom of God, save their souls. If you ask them why, you'll get a host of reasons. Jesus said so in the Bible. It brings glory to God. That sort of thing. Sooner or later, it comes back to but they need to be saved. They have sin on their souls. They'll burn in hell. Isn't it selfish not to try to convert your friends, if you know that's the way it works?
It strikes me that this argument applies doubly to athiests. I can, and do, subscribe to the belief that "all things will be reconciled to Him" sooner or later. I can, and do, figure that God is a bigger and better evangelist than any christian will ever be, and that living faith honestly is the best and truest witness, and leave the problem of conversion up to God. But Dawkins has no higher power. His critical mass of athiests, if it is to come into being, can only come into being through the work and words of individuals. He cannot simply sit by and watch an entire planet foundering under Delusion.

So, kudos to Richard Dawkins for realising that. Don't do him the disservice of reducing his mission to "he doesn't mean you". I'm sure he'd concede that some of us are more of a threat to society than others. But I will be disappointed in him if I find an exclusion clause anywhere in this book. If God is a Delusion, then we are all deluded and we none of us belong in Dawkins' longed-for world.

On the other hand, this argument means I'm not allowed to say, of assorted religious nutcases, "but that's not me". Sure, it's not me. But we have the same Delusion. One body in Christ- me and Joe Nutjob. Made extra problematic by the fact that Joe Nutjob doesn't believe we have the same delusion, and firmly believes I am the work of Satan.
*Sighs* I don't know what to do about that. Here's the point where I should say that I've vowed to fight bigotry and poor exegesis in the name of Christ. But I'm not a crusading sort of person.

(no subject)

... As to literary strategies, it is the invention of character that is most telling, and in the Genesis narrative it is God himself who is the most complex and riveting character. He seems at times to be as troubled and conflicted, as moved by the range of human feelings, as the human beings He has created. The personality of God cannot be an entirely unwitting set of traits in a theological text that declares that we are made in His image, after His likeness. There is an unmistakable implication of codependance. And it is no doubt some of the incentive for the idea expressed by the late Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel that the immanence of God, His existence in us, is manifest in the goodness of human works, the mitzvot or good deeds that reflect His nature. 'Reverance', says the rabbi, 'is the discovery of the world as an allusion to God.' And so in reverence and ethical action do our troubled, conflicted mines find holiness, or bring it into being. Recognizing the glory of God is presumably our redememption, and out redemption is, presumably, His.
-E. L. Doctorow, introduction to Genesis, in Revelations: Personal Responses to the Books of the Bible, ed. Richard Holloway (Edinburgh: Cannongate Press, 2005), p. 23.

Interesting. And pretty. Neale Donald Walsch put forward something similar (or, if he is to be believed, God explained something similar to him) in Conversations with God. Something entirely complicated and unorthodox which I didn't quite comprehend, about God realising God's selfhood through humanity or some such.

It's worth asking, when it comes to the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation: must God be unchangeable? Can God learn? It certainly looks as if Jesus of Nazareth learnt things- in the infamous Caananite Dog episode, a woman beat him in a theological argument. He chucked a tanty in the Temple (maybe for good reason, but still. That's hardly the apathetic¹ God of the early patristic theologians.)

Anyway. These are some thoughts for the evening. I will leave you with another quote from Doctorow:

Overall, the women of Genesis may be subject to an exclusively biological destiny as childbearers- theirs is a nomadic society that to survive must be fruitful- and the moveable tent kingdoms in which they live may be unquestionably paternalistic, but the modern reader cannot help but notice with relief how much grumbling they do. (p. 3)

1. apathetic: Greek term, meaning immune to pathos, or emotion. (as opposed to disinterested, its modern meaning) An apathetic God is eternal, unchanging, everything humankind is not.
ed- and also EMOTIONLESS. To say "god is love" is to assert that God is not apathetic. But doesn't that statement rest on the assumption that God is changeless? I don't know. I am a confusible person.