There’s a lot of interesting material for discussion in a subject area we normally tend to shy away from. As a general rule, that area is not only divisive but, I would imagine for many teachers, potentially dangerous. They could lose their jobs over it, in other words. As the saying goes, you can’t argue religion or politics. In our world, we just can’t argue religion. I can’t say that I’ve talked about it all that much myself, at least here. My goal is to inform and/or entertain, not to piss people off. So I’ve avoided the subject because of all its landmines.
So much for that.
The debate world, by default, does not make arguments that appeal to religious beliefs. Our task is to employ a combination of evidence and logic in aid of reasoned discussion of issues. Religion, on the other hand, employs neither. Therefore, an appeal to religion would not result in a reasoned discussion of issues because that is not what religion is about. Religion is about faith. Faith, by its very nature, is a suspension of logic and empiricism as the mind accepts as true ideas that are not logical and for which there is no evidence. Faith, therefore, appears to be a very special aspect of human thought, because unlike most human thought, it runs on a track that accepts things unquestioningly versus a track that questions everything. Abraham’s willingness to kill his son at the command of God is one of the great examples of faith over all else. There is no way Abraham can do this without a most powerful faith (and trust) in the Almighty. This faith and trust is notably rewarded when God relieves Abraham of this burden after he has proved himself worthy.
So faith does not rely on logic. But the point is not that faith is illogical. It’s a-logical. It’s in another realm altogether. It is not measured by the tools that measure logic or facts. It is not thought of in those terms. There is much writing by religious people on this subject; there are plenty of teachings in, for example, the Roman Catholic religion on faith that are very much along these lines. Having faith asks you to accept things because you accept them. You accept them not because you can prove them but despite the fact that you cannot prove them. That’s what faith is all about.
The need to maintain faith without resorting to logic seems to apply to all religions. The study of the role of religion in human society (absent the truth of religion in human society) demonstrates a number of things, chief among them being that the vast majority of people in the world do maintain a belief in religion. We can extrapolate from this a number of possibilities. One is that people have some sort of need for religion in their lives, and therefore invent religion to fulfill that need. Another is that there is indeed a spiritual world, and the variety of religions extant in the world are our attempt to understand that spiritual world. That spiritual world is, by definition, beyond our limited human understanding, so we do the best we can trying to figure it out. Often we have what we consider divine revelations to help us along, i.e., books or signs that we interpret as the emanation of the divine. Some religions like to think that their revelations are somehow the true ones, and everyone else’s revelations are untrue. Other religions take a more ecumenical view, trusting that most revelations are indeed divine, and simply different from culture to culture because, as I said, the spiritual world, while it does exist according to their thinking, is beyond our limited human understanding. This sort of thinking leads one religion to respect another religion. Thinking that your religion is better than someone else’s religion, on the other hand, leads to things like holy wars (the ultimate oxymoron).
Faith is not only logic-defying, but deeply held. One is not a proponent of their religion at the same level that one is a proponent of, say, their local baseball team. The latter is an arbitrary commitment that can take on an appearance of depth, but is never more than just fandom, even when engaged in rabidly. There are a lot of the trappings of religion, though. One is a fan of a team for reasons that defy logic, and one supports one’s team over other teams through thick and thin. But, ultimately, it’s just being a sports fan. It is subscribing to belief in an alternate universe (sports) for the purpose of recreation or, perhaps at its deepest level, self-identification because that sport is, for the self-identifier, the key pastime. It can even be an obsession, but it is never comparable to religion even when it is metaphorically a religion. Religion holds the power of eternal life and death, of explaining the mysteries of the universe, of connecting the human to the divine. For even the biggest sports nut, none of these are possible returns on fan investment. Comparing sports fandom to religious fervor merely allows us to begin to understand the sports fan; it does not make sports and religion identical.
As I say, religion is the realm of eternal life and death, of explaining the mysteries of the universe, and of connecting the human to the divine. There can be nothing of greater importance than these ideas to the human mind. From a structuralist perspective on secular society, the hierarchy of concern is self then immediate family then extended family then friends then community, etc., in the long line of formative moral binds (although, at times, they can be juggled, for instance when a soldier gives his or her life for country). Religion is the transcendent idea preceding even the self, taking the structuralist to a level beyond secular: the divine, then self, etc., etc. By definition, therefore, nothing can be more important to the individual than religion. And religion not only tops the hierarchy, but it transcends all the other levels.
Religion, in other words—i.e., belief and faith—is, among those who possess it, an absolute primary. Is it any wonder, therefore, that we don’t want to argue about it?
[Continued next time.]
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