Faith,Wilful Ignorance and Mysterious Ways

For this post I’d like to discuss something I touched on when discussing the effects of immigration. I want to talk about having faith in the absence of specific answers, and as an alternative to bickering about things we do not and cannot know.

Faith is a tricky concept, especially when, like myself, you’ve been raised in a culture that prizes rationalism, absolute intellectual knowledge and scientific enquiry. These are all good things. As humans we are curious; we like to find out what things are, what they do, how they work, where they came from, what will happen to them if we do this or that or just leave them be.

As a species this curiosity has not only been our greatest asset, it has defined us and our development. Right from ‘If I tie these logs together, could I sit on them and float down the river?’ to ‘I wonder what happens if I mash these two lumps of uranium together?’ Our thirst for knowledge drives us.

As a result, because religion can often only be very vague in terms of certain knowledge, many people grow frustrated or disdainful of it. ‘Prove it’ is the atheist’s constant (and not, on the face of it, unreasonable) refrain. The whole study of theology is based on similar questions. Who is God? What is God? How does He work? Where did He come from? What does He want? Theology suggests various answers to all these questions. Where these answers differ we get schisms, arguments, even conflicts.

Some questions have answers that can be reasoned through, and if we have no physical evidence, we can at least demonstrate a chain of logic. There are some subjects, however, for which we cannot do that. For me, some of the hardest are well-known questions such as ‘Will virtuous non-Christians go to heaven?’, or ‘Do other religions lead to God?’

My natural sense of justice and fair play push me towards saying yes to both. Surely a life lived in accordance with the ideals of love, mercy, forgiveness and grace that Christianity preaches must count for something, even if the person in question has not explicitly accepted the grace of God.

On the other hand, Jesus seems fairly unequivocal. ‘I am the way, the truth and the life. No-one shall come to the Father except through me.’

One can tie oneself in theological and philosophical knots and say that such a person has accepted His grace even if they didn’t realise it. ‘Every good thing is done for me, even if you do not know my name’. Similarly it strikes me as horribly arrogant to state that my religion happens to be the only true and correct one, and everyone else is mistaken or misguided. It seems only fair to concede that all faiths at least point to God, even if some are distorted or only see Him very vaguely. I can perhaps say that I think mine is the clearest image of God whilst still admitting that not only are others at least partially correct but that my image is by no means perfect.

Issues of soteriology cause ructions within the church. How are people saved? How does it work? Theories abound but true knowledge is absent. This doesn’t stop serious arguments, fallings out, accusations of heresy and even persecutions.

Secular modernity disdains blind faith, and I think does so rightly. To me a faith unexamined, unquestioned, and untested is a weak sort of faith, a brittle kind that might snap at the first hint of doubt.

It’s easy (for me at least) to believe in God. It makes logical and rational sense to me. Much of traditional Christian doctrine likewise makes sense, or is at least of a kind that I am happy to believe in until I see definite evidence to the contrary.

Other questions though leave me shrugging and shaking my head, unable to arrive at an answer. The typical atheist response would be to say that these issues can be dismissed until a proper answer presents itself, but this strikes me as a kind of close-mindedness. We can dismiss the importance of the question, muttering something about ‘mysterious ways’, and this can often come across as wilful ignorance or an intellectual cop-out in place of a robust response. When used as such, the ones asking the questions get rightly frustrated.

However, I think that as a response it can be used actively as well as passively. Faith in the existence of God, or the Incarnation of whatever is one thing. There may be no scientific evidence, but I can believe the assertion anyway. Not knowing the answer, but being able to believe that even though it might not make sense to me, God knows what He’s doing, even if I can’t figure it out myself is a different and more difficult kind of faith. It’s much more like trust than belief, and as a result is much harder, especially given the human need to know how things work. I don’t know whether salvation is through election or free-will. I don’t know whether good non-Christians go to Heaven. I know what I think makes sense, but that’s not the same as knowing the answer. All I can do is believe that God is good, loving and just, that He knows what He is doing, and what He’s doing is for our ultimate good.

I don’t see this as blind faith or wilful ignorance per se. It’s not a faith unquestioned so much as a faith that doesn’t know all the answers, and is happy to admit that. A faith that is willing to trust that all will be made clear, even if at the moment I am incapable of understanding, and that I already know as much as I need to. It’s a faith that comes very hard, and can be rather unsatisfying. I’ll just have to try and deal with that, try to trust, and believe that ultimately, all will be made known.

Overwriting History

I posted some time ago about the fact that I was very doubtful of the value of prosecuting an extremely elderly woman who’d once, as a very young woman and for a short space of time, held a clerical position at Auschwitz.  I find myself thinking along similar lines now, but sort of in the opposite direction.  This is probably a bit controversial, so I shall attempt to tread carefully.

The UK Government has announced that it will officially pardon thousands of men who were convicted of homosexuality back in the days when it was against the law in this country.  Approximately 65,000 men were convicted under these laws, of whom 15,000 are still alive.

Since I’m very much in favour of equality on grounds of sexuality, and certainly don’t think that homosexuality should be illegal, I find myself in the slightly awkward mental position of nonetheless thinking that this isn’t a particularly good idea.  It smacks very much of not only wanting to judge the past by modern standards, but of wanting to reach back in time and correct its mistakes, even if only retroactively and in most cases posthumously.

I’m all for looking at the past and learning lessons from it, where possible.  We can examine with horror the idea that gay men were convicted simply of being gay, but I see no value whatsoever in retroactively pardoning thousands of men, most of whom are beyond caring in case.  At the times in which these crimes were committed, they were just that; crimes.  Should they have been crimes?  Nowadays we think not.  From the article: “Justice Minister Sam Gyimah said it was "hugely important that we pardon people convicted of historical sexual offences who would be innocent of any crime today".”  I think this is the crux.  If they were living today, they would, very rightly, be innocent of any crime.  However, they were not living today.

I am uncomfortable with what seems to me to be the arrogance (’chronological snobbery’ as Lewis called it) of riding roughshod over the values of other times.  We don’t have to agree with them (in many cases I would find it monstrous to do so), but to impose our values onto the past, I think, diminishes both the past and ourselves.

For hundreds of years, executions were legally conducted in this country.  I would see no value in posthumously finding all of our executioners guilty of murder, because we no longer consider the death penalty to be morally defensible.  I can understand that those people who are still alive and who were convicted of homosexuality have a stronger case, since those convictions could still conceivably affect their lives today, but even then it seems too much like rewriting the past to suit our own values.  Until comparatively recently, corporal punishment was considered perfectly acceptable in schools.  To my knowledge no-one is suggesting that we should round up all the old school teachers and try them for child abuse, and find all the dead ones guilty in absentia.  We now consider homophobia to be wrong, but to my knowledge this proposal does not suggest that we also try the original instigators of the anti-homosexuality laws for homophobic hate crimes.  To do so would be completely pointless.

In effect, what we’re saying with this is not simply ’We no longer think that these acts ought to be a crime’ but that ’These acts have now never been a crime, because we no longer think that they ought to have been in the first place.’

It also seems like apologising for the acts of other people.  I equally see little value in the great-great grandchildren of some colonial oppressor or other apologising to the great-great grandchildren of the people they oppressed for the things the one lot of ancestors did to the other.  You’re apologising to somebody for what somebody else did to somebody else again, and I’m not convinced of the value of it.  Perhaps if my ancestors had been tortured and persecuted I would, but it still seems to me to be a somewhat self-indulgent exercise in salving our consciences for a thing that we didn’t do in the first place.

I think that rewriting history to suit ourselves, to make ourselves feel better because we don’t happen to agree with decisions made decades before most of us were born, is a very slippery and dangerous slope.  Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it, as the adage goes, and to me this merely serves to lessen the impact of the lessons that we ought to be learning.  To my modern sensibilities, it seems absurd and unjust that people should ever have been prosecuted simply for being homosexual, but the fact that they were helps sharpens my desire to ensure that we achieve true equality in the here and now, and help stamp out this injustice in those places in which it still exists today; a job which is very far from complete.  Changing the past in this way is, if anything, a needless distraction from that job.

The Convenience, Utility and Justice of Homogenous Groups, Regardless of Size

I would ask you, gentle reader, to compare the two lists below:

List A	List B
Charles Darwin	Caligula
William Shakespeare	Elizabeth Bathory
Charles Dickens	Robespierre
Saint Peter	Adolf Hitler
Obi Wan Kenobi (Episode II onwards)	Joseph Stalin
Me	Nero
Francis of Assisi	Pol Pot
Socrates	Emperor Palpatine
William Booth	Napoleon Bonaparte
Charlemagne	Myra Hindley

The conclusions that we can draw from the scientific and wholly representative study above should be so obvious as to be hardly worth expanding on, and I imagine that you will all be taking action accordingly.  However, that would make for a very short blog post, so I’m afraid that I must insult your intelligence and act as though the above were not self-evident. 

Obviously List A consists of paragons of humanity and over-achievers in their respective fields, be that writing, discovering evolution, philosophy, feeding the poor, fighting the Sith, blogging about writing and/or theology, forming the Holy Roman Empire etc. etc.

List B consists of murderers, dictators and Sith lords; all, it must be admitted, over-achievers in their fields, but one might wish that they’d tried less hard and been distracted more easily.

The common factor is, I hope, instantaneously obvious: beards.  The occupants of List A are all bearded, while the denizens of List B are all unbearded.  At most they might have a moustache.

Now, as we all know, correlation does not necessarily equal causation.  No reasonable person would actually suggest (despite the overwhelming weight of evidence in support of the hypothesis) that beards make one good, wise, witty, and modest.  Nonetheless, it does allow one to make some generalisations that can be assumed to hold true.  If you don’t have a beard, you’re probably a murderer.  You may well have attempted, at some point in the past, to conquer Europe.  You’ve most likely tried, probably unsuccessfully, to shoot lightning from your hands and/or crush the rebel alliance.  You’ve almost certainly had numerous people executed.  Unbearded people are generally and as a rule of thumb, evil.

If you, dear reader, are yourself unbearded, please do not take offence.  Of course the above is not true of all your kind; there are, or at least there must be, somewhere, unbearded people who are good, upright individuals, even if they cannot aspire to the heights of achievement catalogued by the inhabitants of List A.  You may even be one of them, or at least it is not totally beyond the realms of possibility.  I myself don’t have anything against unbearded people; many of my best friends don’t have beards, indeed I am married to an unbearded person.

I imagine that if one were to google ‘Unbearded People’, there would be a wide variety of websites, sound-bites and memes pointing out and mocking the many shortcomings of the breed.  This is unkind, but hardly unexpected.

In the same way that one can talk about bearded people, generalisations may be made about other groups.  Religious people for example.  Although there may be a little variety within the group, nonetheless what holds true for a Taliban suicide bomber can be assumed to also apply to the denizens of your local parish church.  What can be fairly said of a Young Earth creationist can equally be said of an Oxford theology professor.  More so, what can be said of a sixteenth century inquisitor can be said of the staff of the nearest Salvation Army soup kitchen or your local food bank.  Across time and space, ‘religious people’ are as homogenous and unchanging as ‘unbearded people’ (if the latter can really be called ‘people’ at all).  By and large, they (religious people that is, not unbearded people) are ignorant, anti-intellectual and potentially violent, extremely close-minded and hostile (often violently so) to change or any suggestion that their beliefs might not be accurate.

It is extremely useful to us that such generalisations hold true.  We live in a world of convenient clumps, clearly divided into distinct colours and types.  A world of nuance and change would be far too complicated for the human mind to encompass.  I mean, yes public discourse suffers somewhat, and the divisions between groups remain the same, if not growing ever wider, like continental plates slowly and inexorably drifting apart, but what can we do but shrug and wait for our continent to take us somewhere sunny?  Not only that, but the fact that all groups are monolithic and homogenous also allows far greater accountability than would otherwise be possible, a factor which we can all agree if of the utmost benefit to the world. 

After all, since unbearded people can be classed as a distinct and cohesive whole, the actions of any one unbearded person can be fairly laid at the door of any other unbearded person.  You, humble and bare-chinned reader, no matter how innocent you may assume yourself to be, bear the weight of Napoleon’s conquests, the blood of Elizabeth Bathory’s hot-tub stains your skin, the stench of Caligula’s orgies clings to your clothes.  We more fortunate people can ask you to get your house in order and discipline your more fractious elements, and we are able to justify our mistreatment of you because, after all, many innocent bearded people suffered the depredations of Napoleon’s armies, many were oppressed by Nero’s persecutions, a great many killed during Robespierre’s reign of terror.  It is only fair, right and just that you accept responsibility for the sins of your co-barefacers and at least offer a grovelling apology, even if you can’t necessarily offer physical reparations of any kind.

I hope that you now understand, tragic and whiskerless reader, why it is that you receive so much unkindness and abuse, and accept that although it is by no means your fault per se, it is nonetheless just, fair and reasonable, and that you should accept it graciously, humbly, maybe even gratefully.  Ultimately, you have no-one but yourself and those millions of other unbearded people throughout time and space, almost entirely identical to you in all essentials, to blame.