Unfinished Sympathy

I don't know if you usually read my blog or not. But I'm fascinated with the phenomenon of faith; why and how we believe. I wanted to try something different. I reckon all too often we keep busy, we don't often strip back belief to the core. And some of the time we forget why we ever believed. But I'm interested. Why do you believe what you believe?

This blog isn't finished. That's because you're going to finish it. Please, if you've read this far, leave a comment below. It won't take you very long. Please don't leave this page until you've written, I'm interested in what you have to say.

What I want you to do is to start your comment with: "I am a Christian because" or "I am not a Christian because" and finish the sentence. If you don't know the answer please post that. Please don't attempt to respond or argue with any other comment, just write your own.

Please post your comment anonymously, it will be more fun. Be as honest as you can, no one will know who you are. At some point I'll write my own response. But I guess you won't really know which one is mine.

Please pass this on to as many people as possible. The more responses we get, the more interesting this could be.

I reckon by the time we're finished we'll have quite an interesting blog read....

Don't Think Twice, It's Alright

Desperately procrastinating from writing what I hope will end up being more regular blog entries, I stumbled across a provocative little gem. After making about the third espresso of the day I sat down to read the BBC news feed for the fourth or fifth time and found an article titled: "Can Religion tell us more than Science". The joys of going to an afternoon Church.

It started promising and interesting. John Gray maintains that the New Atheists have kind of missed the point when showing religion to be an inadequate scientific thesis. Which I agree with. But the main opinion of his text I fundamentally disagree with. The crux of his position is summed up in the last sentence of the piece:
"What we believe doesn't in the end matter very much. What matters is how we live."

Religion, he maintains, is all about behaviour and not particularly about belief at all: "Practice - ritual, meditation, a way of life - is what counts. What practitioners believe is secondary, if it matters at all."

It got me thinking- is that really true? I realise that some of my thoughts on faith might come across a little bit that way. I think that faith is absurd and rationally inexplicable, I don't feel particularly like new atheism has much threat to my faith. But surely what we believe is vital, its central to how we act. Otherwise our actions, our behaviour might be fulfilling and enjoyable on one level but surely they're ridiculously inconsistent. I don't quite understand how we might believe without it moving us to action. It is beyond me.

Consistency is probably one of the things I value most in a person and one of the things that I think might be lacking in a lot of modern Christians. I find it troubling that someone's indifference and agnosticism towards a deity might lead them to attend worship devoted to one every week. But it scares me. This attitude towards faith is only increasing. And honestly I find it totally and utterly at odds to the teachings of Christ. It makes no sense to say "what matters is how we live", inferring that to follow Christ's teachings is somehow valuable in its own right. The idea of following the teachings of Christ without any faith, without any belief is one that I think Christ would have found utterly ludicrous. You only need to pick the New Testament up and read it (which surely is contained in the notion of religious practice) to find that belief matters.

Matthew 22:36-40. "Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?” Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

Love God, love people. That is the heart of Christianity. It escapes me how I ought to love something or some being that I don't believe in. It escapes me that my devotion and practice of daily devoting my life to Christ might be an empty gesture. It is actually pretty offensive. It is only from belief that true behaviour can stem. Sartre calls this notion 'bad faith', the idea that we pretend that we are only objects like trees and rocks. He describes a waiter who 'plays the part of a waiter', he is so wrapped up in 'being a waiter', he denies that there is any choice, any belief involved. This notion is at the heart of Sartre's account of morality.

And that strikes me as the heart of the problem of the dying Church of the UK: Apathy and inconsistency Thousands of people acting and living out the 'Christian life' in Bad Faith. Ticking the 'I go to Church' box on their conscience. They are Christians as objects, they live their lives in complete bad faith. But they never let the radical words of Jesus transform them, never let worship escape the box they put it in. They don't allow their minds to be transformed. And most of them don't have a clue what they believe.

I believe that faith can change your life. That Christ can change your life. I believe that. We might see new atheism and passionate unbelievers as a barrier to this. I don't. Dawkins might be quite an angry, influential speaker and commentator on modern religion. But at least he's consistent. At least he acts on what he believes. To be honest, good on him. And I hope that he wakes people out of apathy. Out of the lie that what you believe doesn't matter. Because it does.

Christianity needs to learn to do the same. To wake people up who are sleeping in their Churches. Who are filling pews, who have been 'living' without belief in complete bad faith. Consistency is so important at the heart of modern radical Christian living. We need to be people who are brutally consistent. If we believe that Christ's promises are true, we need to live them in our lives. If we don't, if we are feeling doubtful and far from God, why go through the motions? We need to not to sing "In Christ alone my hope is found" when we don't really believe a word of it. We need to not preach that Jesus has changed our lives if we don't think that he has. We need to learn how to be consistent. Communities of people who believe what we believe and act what we believe. There is a lie that says that putting a brave face on, of acting like everyone else is acting is the right thing to do. It is a lie that belief doesn't matter. And it is dangerous to live in bad faith. This is what Jesus says about it:

“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name and in your name drive out demons and in your name perform many miracles?’Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!’"

I find that terrifying. That is a stark warning against apathy, bad faith and inconsistency and it is one we need to take a little more seriously than we do.

Believe

I'm finding it difficult to believe recently.

Jesus doesn't offer us a theory or a proof to be grappled with and criticised. But I have a tendency to think like that. Probably something to do with studying philosophy for the last five years. The problem I find with philosophy is that it does not offer us a firm foundation to anchor ourselves on- I can spend three months debating, reading and thinking about the best model of consciousness- but my conclusion doesn't seem to have any bearing on my actual life. Outside of the philosophy classroom determinists, libertarians, sceptics, realists, logical positivists, empiricists- they all act the same. There's huge differences in their arguments and their perspectives, but it doesn't alter how they spend their Saturday afternoon or their bank balance. At least in my experience philosophy rarely has any bearing on my actual life, yet it makes some strong and demanding claims. On every level of life, soceity, medicine, science, art, perception- it has something to say. Somehow I find it difficult to ever really apply. As a philosopher I'm an ardent supporter of common sense realism, anti-scepticism, compatibilism and monotheism. None of these things change or have any effect on how I live.

Jesus claims that he comes to bring life, and life to the full. Jesus doesn't offer us a doctrine to leave in the classroom, a theory to grapple with and then get busy living. Unless belief infiltrates every aspect of who you are- how you spend your Saturday afternoon, what you do with your money, how you think, how you act- then it's not true what Jesus says.

The Church in the UK has been dormant for the last century in some cases, and despite being a 'Christian country', we're on the whole a nation of apathetic non-believing agnostics. Partly I think, because we're have been fascinated with Christianity as a concept- as basis for our laws, as a basis for state, as a concept. But Jesus doesn't give you that option. That's not Christianity.

I'm struggling to believe because I'm stubborn, because I'm lazy, because I don't allow Jesus to radicalize my very existence, to transform everything I have. It's easier to think of this is a concept to be grappled with, as an argument to be won. But let me ask you, do you really believe? Do you really believe that a God made you in his image and sent himself as a human to die? Do you really believe that the world will be restored and reconciled with its creator, and that you'll be resurrected into a perfect eternity? I'm sorry but if you really believed that, you'd do more; it wouldn't be something to be grappled with, something to prove or disprove- it would be something that would radically upset my me-centered universe.

I'm the sort of person that can't pretend very well. I don't do the whole 'Christian' thing very well I don't think. If I look like I'm not engaging with 'church', I'm probably not. If I look like I'm ready to give my life for this, I probably am.

I'm trying to challenge myself to go beyond belief. Belief is a philosophers game that can be argued for and against eternally but eventually makes little difference. I'm striving to be Christ like at the core. That's really difficult.