The pointless debate

I think there are few conversations more frustrating than those about religion. Politics sometimes comes close, but it doesn’t quite make it. I’ve had many of those frustrating conversations, to the point that I thought it’s best to give up on them altogether. While avoiding them is probably best in many cases, giving up on them completely I refuse to do. I think they are important. Religion is responsible for culture, for political decisions, for making and breaking relationships, for violence, for peace and for many individual’s life experiences and perceptions. Religion has been a constant throughout human history, evolving together with our societies and with our understanding of reality. It is however one of the hardest things to talk about because, past a point, language seems to break down. Intuitions are seemingly fundamental and irreconcilable. It also just is hard. What you believe about life and meaning is by definition very important to you. It’s hard to be analytical about. It’s hard to go and challenge it. It’s scary and personal and deep and it feels like it’s yours but universally important. So I think dialogue breaks down. I’ve seen many debates and I’ve had many debates. They are almost always terrible and pointless. That’s not what I want to have here. I just want to lay out my thoughts in a way that hopefully makes sense. My goal is to help make this conversation easier. To provide some translation where I think language often breaks down between people with different views. I hope you find it interesting, worthwhile and helpful.

I grew up religious in a family that could be called by all standards a fundamentalist Christian family. It can sound a bit crazy and strange, but in truth, it wasn’t. My parents are loving, smart, well educated, balanced and reasonable. However, I grew up surrounded by a variety of people, some more “devoted” than others. My family and I were going to church every single weekend. We were studying the bible and praying together every evening. I believed the entire universe was created 6000 years ago, that God physically descended on Earth, lived, died, was revived, went to Heaven and one day, soon, he will come back for the final judgement and take us to Heaven if our hearts are pure.

As a kid, I took all of this information around me quite literally. And I think this is one of the first things that separated me from people that do stay religious. I used to like to imagine how Jesus was born, lived, healed, died and came back to life, how he’s now writing the big book of everyone’s lives and how he’ll come back. I would think about how the “final days” would come, about how the world will change and go crazy, even about how we might have to run and hide in the mountains when the Sunday Law comes about. I imagined helicopters searching for me and my family, wanting to take us and kill us or make them live as they do. I genuinely believed all this. And I was scared. Now I realise, I was probably more scared than most around me. I took this much more seriously than the rest. I still don’t really know what my parents believed back then, and it surely has changed somewhat, but they certainly shared at least subsets of my imagination.

I think this is probably the craziest thing about my religious upbringing. And thinking about it now is a bit unreal. But the rest was pretty normal. These weren’t much of a talking point usually, some people took them seriously, but I think mostly they just stuck to my young and very impressionable brain. Most of it was normal stuff. How to live a good life. What is good and bad. Where do we come from? I learnt about Jesus’s life, about how he lived and how we should live. And I learnt that I need to find Jesus in my own heart. I need to feel and create my own connection to him. This part, I didn’t quite get at the time. I tried, but I couldn’t find him there. All there was, was just good old me.

Funnily enough, I think I found him recently. Years later, after I decided that I can’t believe any of the factual things I learnt and I stopped believing in God, I think I finally found him. I think I finally understood what people meant when they were talking about looking for Jesus inside yourself and feeling your connection to him. It took me a while, but I finally understood that when I was being told that, those words were just the best attempt at capturing some wonderful aspects of human existence that are incredibly hard to put into words. Feeling that you have meaning. That you are loved. That you have a purpose beyond yourself. That you occupy your own special and unique place in the universe, only you can see it and live it. Feeling strong and at peace with everything, even death, which seems too small to end this amazing experience you are living. All these things are hard to explain. In talking about them you destroy something about them. They become way too real and even embarrassing. People don’t understand and you feel like they are stepping on something very holy to you. They are hard to explain, so “God” becomes a good word for them. Akin to love. The feeling that cannot be captured by any words. We still need a word for it. In one context, it’s love. In another, it’s God. You say “God” and other people, who also had their own experience, understand. They get it and it’s beautiful. “God is love”.

I took a bit of a leap just now. How did I get from a religious teen to the non-believer I am now? What happened? I have an older sister that I love and admire. How come she kept her faith? She is smart, loving, balanced, curious and she doesn’t see life much differently than I do. We have a lot of common ground in our understanding of the world, and we can talk about almost anything without talking past each other. How did we end up taking such different paths in our spiritual journey? I kept asking myself this question and I think I am starting to understand. I think that one of the main reasons is that she was able to understand the metaphor of religion much sooner than I was. She understood the lessons, the teachings, the beauty that is being expressed, the way it gives life meaning and structure and how it can help you be happy, resilient, strong and stable. She saw past the stories, past the words and into the meaning. I think to her they became a necessary portal into the world of meaning that lies behind them. They are true because they have meaning. They are the inevitable point that lies on the straight line from us to the beliefs that give life purpose. They are part of the making sense of life and they can’t be separated. They are an axiom as well as a direct consequence of reality. They are not something you take apart, analyse on their own, formulate precisely and try and prove or disprove. They are simply the best attempt at capturing reality, and if you approach them differently, you simply don’t get it. You don’t get the words, you don’t see the line, you’re talking about something much less important and human and concrete. You are missing the point.

I missed that point for a very long time. Perhaps I still do. It really is hard to know you are talking about the same thing as the person right next to you when talking about spirituality. I think it often happens that people talk about different things and are in complete agreement with each other, as well as talking about the same thing and disagreeing. It’s hard. But at least I know that now I understand a bit more than I used to and it allows me to talk and listen to people that believe in God (to various degrees). I used to be unable to do that. I used to look down on them and think there is nothing wise that can be said by them. I know many non-believers do this and it creates a huge divide. And both sides have something to learn from the other.

What are you? How come you have thoughts? Where do they come from? How come you disagree with yourself at times? How are you confused about yourself? Why do you sometimes feel like you are evil? Why are you sometimes strong and loving, but other times you’re weak and petty? Which one of these selves are you? Do you have free will? The list of questions goes on. We all have different answers but I can make an educated guess what yours are based on what you believe about God.

If you believe in God, you probably think you are his creation. There is a “you”, a soul, something that is somehow unchanging about you. Unchanging through all the different moods, stages of life, injuries and even death. That’s the part of you that really matters and that God gave you. And this “you” is influenced by good and evil. By God and Satan. Both are in you and have access to you and both win at times. God is love, clarity, confidence, justice, and it is all in you. Evil is hate, uncertainty, fear, selfishness and it is also all in you. These forces battle on top of what truly “you”, your soul. And this soul, this you, is the one that makes choices. You are free.

If you don’t believe in God, you probably think you are a sort of complicated organism. You have thoughts because you evolved to have them, they are useful and probably most living creatures have some sort of thoughts. It might be weird to disagree with yourself but we’re imperfect complicated organisms so these things happen. Maybe the question of “which of the selves are you” is weird. Maybe you haven’t thought about it so much. You feel like yourself at most times and that’s enough. Or maybe you did think about it more and you think it’s hard to define, but there is a sense of continuity to your experience so we can say that’s what you are. You’re probably also more comfortable with the fact that you just don’t know some of this stuff. Maybe everything just plays in your head, maybe the world started last Wednesday, nothing REALLY matters, maybe this is a simulation. That’s all weird but fun and you’re mostly fine with it.

Now, I think there is something important missing from both of these world views. It’s simply from my experience but I’m sure I am not alone in this. I think as a non-believer you might struggle with purpose. I know this myself. Even though “I am alive, I want to keep being alive and make my life as enjoyable as I can” is a pretty good purpose, I think there is more that we can feed our human brains. Reading “The Will to Meaning" by Viktor Frankl made me think about this quite a bit. I’ve found myself dreaming for some “higher meaning”. Fantasizing about fighting for something important, going to war, having something important enough to risk my life for it. I think there is freedom in having something you hold to be more important than yourself. I think we’re in a search for meaning, and if religion is not your thing, it’s genuinely difficult to find. It can definitely be done, but I think you need to spend quite some time thinking about it. And I think some ideas from religion (in general) are helpful. Looking within yourself is powerful. Knowing you are loved and important is powerful. Feeling you have a duty and purpose is powerful. True or not, feeling that is amazing. So how do you reconcile this with your objective view of the world, in which you just happen to be here, there is no objective good or bad and we’re all just some selfish organisms struggling to stay alive and avoid pain?

What about religion? What is it missing? Well, religion is by definition quite unchanging. It’s holy, your interpretation of it and your specific religion is something you hold dear and you can’t go and change stuff in it as you see fit. You must respect it as it is, otherwise, you are not a true believer. Even if parts of your beliefs are not good, make you suffer or make others suffer, you don’t have the tools to change that. It also puts you at odds with other beliefs most of the time. It can make you feel guilt, it can alienate you from friends and family, it can make you throw gay people off roofs, it can make you go to war, it can make you oblivious to the changing world and reject facts that we’re unravelling about the universe. But you need to stay true to your beliefs, or your whole view of the world might collapse.

Ironically, religion does in fact change. Look through time and see. Is your religion the same as it was 500 years ago? I bet not. Most (if not all) religions change at the same time as social norms, politics, societal and technological progress. If you disagree, please remember that a mere 300 years ago the church used to burn witches in Europe. Also, if you are honest, religion has changed for you even within your lifetime. I myself saw how the church my family is a part of has changed over my short 22 years, as well as how my family’s religion changed. While you might say that “at its core, it’s the same”, you must admit that it changes and evolves in significant ways. Which is good! I’m glad we’re no longer burning witches. But it is not good that religion must somehow lie or cover this fact up. It’s unpleasant to think about generally. It makes it less divine. This resistance to change, while it gives it some power, can also cause a lot of harm, I believe. However, I think it is quite a step forward just to realise and admit that religion can and should change. I think it can make us more humble and accepting of others. I think it can bring about more love and understanding, qualities that I see in the religious people that are honest about its changing nature.

The question remains: How can you have a strong belief that gives you meaning and power while admitting it can change and allowing it to do so? How can you be confident when you also consider the possibility you might be wrong? That, I cannot answer. But I do think it’s a very important question in one’s life. One that I am trying to answer. What I do know is that it requires both honesty and an understanding of spirituality. I believe it is possible to be honest in our enquiry about life, to not be anchored down to beliefs about reality that make no sense, but to avoid nihilism and moral relativism, live fulfilling and meaningful lives, hold values above ourselves and rejoice in our connection to the beauty we cannot understand. I’m trying to do just that. It’s hard as hell but well worth it.