I want to thank Jaume for keeping the discussion about the New Atheists going on his blog. I want to keep the conversation going on my end, and I want to do that by talking about my own understanding of what faith, organized religion and spirituality are.
I buy in to Paul Tillich’s understanding of faith as ultimate concern. Faith is whatever we’re directing our lives toward. It’s a life orientation. By this definition, it’s fair to say everyone “faiths.”
As far as religion and spirituality go, I don’t see the difference. Many people see these as two different things, but it seems like a false dichotomy to me. It’s as though we’ve taken everything we don’t like about religion-spirituality and labeled that “religion,” and taken what we do like about religion-spirituality and labeled that “spirituality.”
I also see “spirituality” used to talk about the more personal and emotional aspects of religious life, as opposed to what a congregation does. I don’t really have a problem with that in as far as it goes, but it would make just as much sense to talk about “personal spirituality” and then “congregational spirituality.”
We’d be hard pressed, though, to come up with a spirituality that isn’t organized or that doesn’t rely upon organization in any way. No one creates spirituality completely on their own. It comes from a context, a context with history, language, ritual, and culture—all of which are organized in this way or that. No matter how creative and unique someone’s spirituality is, it stands on the shoulders of giants.
I’m also hard pressed to understand what “organized religion” is. Is there an unorganized religion? (That’s an honest question.) Anything that people do is going to be organized, well or poorly, deliberately or accidentally. I think what we probably mean by “organized religion” is religion organized in such and such a way, something that looks like the Roman Catholic Church, a Theravadan Buddhist sangha, or a Quaker meeting house. Saying “organized religion” allows us to single out the people doing the out front organizing as well as the way they’re doing it.
“Religion” as a lot folks use it today is a modern Western concept—and by “modern” I mean in the classic sense of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. It came from the West’s contact with colonized cultures. It was a way to draw a line around what part of those cultures were about, to make it foreign, and then to defeat it with the Christian religion. The lines they drew around what was religious and what wasn’t were somewhat arbitrary. Many colonized peoples found the concept puzzling and said that what was being labeled “religious” was just what they did, in the same sense that Americans do the Superbowl on TV, birthday parties, or trips to grandma’s on Thanksgiving.
The modern understanding of faith is just as inadequate. It understands faith to be cognitive assent to doctrines and to the organizations (there’s that word again) who proscribe them. It’s an odd definition that most humans throughout history just haven’t used.
I know that some folks will object to the way I use these terms. But I am not alone in using them this way, and many other religious liberals use them in ways like I do. I’m not required to use these terms in the way they do so, any more than they’re required to use them the way I do.
I’ll ask of those who object what I asked in my last post: Knowing that there is more than one definition of these words, why is it important to you to define them in the ways that you do? What do you get from it? And what are you missing out on? I mean these as honest questions.
This isn’t adding much to the conversation, but I associate religion with hierarchy and external authority.
I agree with Hafidha Sofia, and I think that this is a legacy of the 60s and that “spiritual counter-culture” that started in California and produced the New Age movement. Until then, in the West, religion meant institutional religion (basically, churches and synagogues). From then on, there was a rebellious and individualistic spirit that affirmed personal growth outside the framework and regulations of religious organizations.
It depends on your understanding of what “organization” is, but Sunni Islam is mostly a non-organized religion (not Shia, which is a different tradition more based upon the institution of Imamah, or religious leadership). Yes, there are orders, there are believers’ fellowships, there are prestigious clerics and legislative traditions and schools, there are political parties partially or mostly inspired by Islamic principles, but Sunni Islam as such is mostly based upon custom and tradition and social context, not upon a central authority and an organized and regulated structure. And it is the fastest growing religion in the world.
((Sunni Islam as such is mostly based upon custom and tradition and social context))
In my view this is part of what religion so dangerous. Most religions are like this. They always modify their beliefs based on current social context and justify them with appeals to tradition and custom.
Remember, Jesus was against communism and was pro-capitalism according to the Christian religious leaders of the past. Jesus was also pro-slavery. These arguments were made by christian leaders in the United States via appeals to tradition and custom through the lens of the current social context.
As far as organization goes, I would say that most non-Catholic/Orthodox Christianity also is decentralized in a similar way to your description of Sunni Islam. Especially the faster growing ones like the evangelicals.
To me the biggest problem in any of these is our psychological tendencies to be change averse, and to make decisions based on flawed heuristics. Some of the most dangerous flawed heuristics being appeals to tradition, customs, and blind unchanging absolute faith.
Jaume, I think you’re dead on when you say that it depends on what “organization” means. I see organization, albeit a more subtle kind, present in tradition and culture.
But, Mike, socialists of that same period also appealed to Christian tradition. And MLK appealed to that tradition all the time. Culture and tradition are pretty much value neutral; it’s what you do with them that counts.
Change can be creative, but it can be destructive too. The same goes for tradition. We need both change and constancy.
Well, for starters, defining faith to try to include atheists is many times the prelude to saying “I’ve defined atheists to have faith, so its ok for me to believe the most fantastic supernatural things I can think of with no evidence to justify me, and I’m on the same footing as atheists.” Whoever is saying this (if they are doing what I suggest) is actually using the “belief” definition for themself, and hoping that they won’t be criticized for it. It’s a false equivalence created by intentionally unclear communication.
Besides, there are better words that mean the same thing that you are trying to say, that don’t involve the possibility of apologetic rhetorical tricks. “Worldview” is a good one. A Humanist has a worldview that is not based on faith in a god, a theist does, but they both have worldviews. That’s much clearer. “Goal” is another one. “Life orientation” is the one you used, and that would work as well. Why toss in “faith” if you didn’t want the religious connotation that includes gods, and if you did want that, why apply it to someone who didn’t believe in them?
What am I missing out on? Nothing, since I have those other words that convey the same meaning just as well.
I agree with Citizen completely. I personally take a different tact in my personal life, calling what I have faith, and calling the “other kind” blind faith. My faith is on that deals like probabilities, the other deals in absolutes.
But I would be willing to give up the word Faith to the absolute meaning and take some of the other good words you are using Citizen.
I would put it this way. I believe there is a difference between Theistic Faith and Faith in the sense of “most probable explanation according to my evidence”. I want that difference preserved in our language because I believe it is VERY important.
Chutney: I agree with your point that the appeal to tradition/religion is done by all sides. Of course, as an Atheist I see this as evidence that appeals to tradition/religion are empty appeals, except that we should recognize that with every change there is a risk.
Citizen, so it just comes down to you not liking the word “faith?”
Mike, but know that atheism has it’s own traditions, saints and sinners. It isn’t a tradition free zone.
I dislike the word “faith” being employed in unclear, potentially misleading ways, as I explained above.
Your way of using “faith” isn’t unclear or potentially misleading?
Having traditions is not a problem. Allowing an appeal to tradition to make your decision is dangerous.
Mike, I agree with you with some qualifications. I think making a decision from tradition is fine, as long as it doesn’t outright neglect other factors and doesn’t make harm.
For example, if we decide to have thanksgiving at my family’s rather than at my in-laws’ because we always do it that way (and always do Christmas at my in-laws’), that’s a perfectly legitimate decision if it doesn’t cause harm or neglect everyone’s thoughts and feelings.
I grew up Methodist, and I still like they’re take on tradition. They say a decision should be balanced on four criteria: Scripture, tradition, reason and experience. Neglect any, they say, and you’ve made a bad decision. I have a different view of Scripture now, but I still like the principle behind what they’re saying.
I don’t insist that religious people don’t have faith, when they themselves tell me they do. That would be the functional equivalent of someone going around telling atheists that they have faith.
Which would be fine to say, even if I don’t like it or don’t agree.
I don’t understanding why “faith” is such an offensive word for you. I take you at your word, but I still don’t think I’m wronging you by saying otherwise.
The message I receive when people use words with religious connotations to describe me, a non-religious person, is this: “I have to define you according to my own worldview. I cannot understand you on your own terms, I have to redefine you so you still involve religion somehow.” Is it honestly that hard to think of non-religious people without saying things like “atheists have faith” or “atheism is a religion?” (you didn’t say the last one, but it is in the same vein.)
Okay, I think I’m closer to getting it now. It’s sounds like a matter of fairness to you.
But, yes, it is hard for me to think of folks as not “faithing,” for all the reasons I’ve tried to lay out. I think I understand why you don’t like being told you have faith in the way that it’s usually meant.
I want to make sure you know that I’m not using “faith” or “religion” in the same way they do. I don’t like the way they use them either. What I’m trying to do is take those words back.
If tradition is seen as merely past experience then by all means consider it. But if that be the case then I would take those four considerations down to two: experience and reason.
Experimental caution is good advice that could be justified by tradition. But I accept it based purely on experience and reason.
As a non theist I of course reject scripture unless it coincidently also agrees with reason and experience.
Citizen: I agree completely. I will cease to use the word faith to mean most probable.
If that’s your project, then could you please find a way to confine it to liberal religious people?
The way I see it, religious liberals need the multiple definitions of the words in order to contest more “traditional” people for understandings of religion. You don’t like the way those words are used by those others, because they exclude your understandings. Then I come along and seem like I want to uphold the traditional understanding, and that’s a problem for you.
But here’s the thing: I don’t think it does anything for me if the definition of religion is expanded, or the definition of faith is expanded. I shouldn’t have to fall into categories religious people prize to get respect. I suspect I’d go along with it if it were the only way to stop religious people from hating and fearing atheists, but it would taste bitter in my mouth, and it shouldn’t come down to that.
I’m not a part of your intra-religious competition with exclusivist co-religionists, but at the same time, I can’t ask for understanding on my own terms, and not grant you understanding on yours, even though I disagree with them.
So if you could somehow make your expanded definitions only apply to people who want and need them, not people who have abandoned the whole framework, that would really be a much better way. It wouldn’t magically create complete agreement between liberal religious people and non-religious people, but it would do something.
Mike: I am definitely with you on using experience and reason as the primary sources, while recognizing that even a stopped clock (the scriptures) can be right twice a day. I think that’s great that you are dropping the word faith in the context of “most probably.” It really is too confusing, and apologists exploit that confusion. Thank you, on behalf of all the atheists who pull their hair out when they have to explain for the fifth time that atheism is a faith in the same way that bald is a hair color!
Q: If we call a tail a leg, then how many legs does a dog have?
A: Five?
Q: No, just because we call a tail a leg, doesn’t mean it is a leg.
The odd thing about this is, if enough people — if most people — call a tail a leg, then it becomes a leg. But until then, if we go around making up our private definitions of commonly held words, then we’re just inventing word games and making it hard for other people to understand us.
Even if Paul Tillich told you that a tail is a leg, it still isn’t.
Tillich was being analytical in attempting to describe faith. He wasn’t defending faith: He was simply saying that all human beings discover themselves in the grip of ideas and commitments that are compelling to them prior to rational analysis. His definition of faith doesn’t valorize it. He says (using biblical language) that there are divine and demonic faiths, and then says (using his more existentialist language) that our ultimate commitments can be more or less deserving of our commitment.
Tillich’s analysis of faith actually helps to show why most appeals to faith are misguided. He talked about how nationalism, racism, ideology, and religious triumphalism (“my faith is better than your faith”) are idolatrous. Why? They are overly loyal to something that isn’t truly ultimate.
But he also saw that the experience of faith — the experience of feeling compelled by an ideal or commitment, including things like nationalism or even atheism — reveals something true and meaningful about human life. Our capacity to make commitments, to latch onto metaphors and ideas and models, to see our lives in the context of some larger purpose (“secular” or “religious”) is what is deepest about us.
I have not read his work. Is he defining faith as the desire for an end that comes independently of a rational analysis? Or is it the end desired that is the faith?
It could be both I suppose, faith as a verb, and faith as a noun.
Why people have faith is an interesting question, but for how people “faith” as answered by a psychologist I would suggest Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling On Happiness.
It cannot ultimately answer the question “why”, no science can I think, but it can show that a lot of aspects of the faith experience are natural consequences of the “how”.
Tillich describes faith as “ultimate concern” or as the state of being ultimately concerned. In other words, it’s a word for the existential condition of being committed to something beyond oneself. It isn’t necessarily independent of rationality, although the intensity of experiencing one’s ultimate concern usually defies a strictly rational explanation.