Michael Braun's Blog

I doubt there are many people on earth who wouldn’t identify me as critical. I have opinions on most every subject and seldom hesitate from expressing them. I like to think that most of my opinions are backed up by fact and logic, and for that reason I don’t mind at all if someone wants to challenge my way of thinking. In the end, I feel that it makes me a more thoughtful person, and more often than not, it makes me less critical. In short, argument that leads to greater knowledge increases the strength of beliefs.

Now, as most of you know, I am highly critical of religion and religious people, especially those who chose to actively talk about their faith and how it affects their daily life. I find this posturing frequently hypocritical. Thus when I meet a person like this, I try to steer the conversation towards the subject of a religion as a way of challenging the other person’s beliefs and as a way to help me understand them better. I am very willing to admit that I do not understand religion or spirituality and I like to hear other people’s takes on the matter. It’s one of the reasons I enjoy talking with Krista so much. She is quite devout, but very willing to argue for her beliefs and try to back them up with logic. I find our conversations on religion to be most enjoyable, even though we fall of distinctly opposite sides. It helps that we’re both liberal.

The daughter of family friends of my dad’s and I have been e-mailing each other regularly for the past couple of months. It’s been a pleasant exchange. Religion and faith play a large part in her life, and she is right now in England working at some sort of Christian facility serving god for a year. She frequently brings up religion and spirituality in her e-mails, working it in to many parts of conversation, especially when she writes about what she has been doing. Assuming that she wasn’t trying to convert me or something, I figured that she puts that in there because faith plays such a huge role in her life. And so, naturally, I decided to take her to task on her faith. I laid out a large number of points, doubts I had about Christianity and the logic of modern Christian faith. It was a direct questioning of faith, but also done with a kindness behind it; more of an introspective look at how I view faith than an attack against her. I raised questions about the validity of the bible, the concept of loving god the most, and the use of traditional Christian ideas in today’s society. Overall, I thought the questions were very thought-provoking and suitable for a meeting of atheists or a bible-study group. She did not have the same response.

Before you start worrying that I horribly offended her, caused her to forsake god, or make her start a crusade, her response was, in my opinion, much worse than any of those. She basically chose to actively ignore my questions. Most certainly, it is her right to do so. If she didn’t have an answer to reconciling the idea that the bible is divinely assembled but also a product of historical politics, I’m not surprised or bothered. But her response was to acknowledge the questions and then leave them by the wayside, saying that she is not a good person for debating about religion and faith. She also noted that she would never try to push her beliefs on anyone else, but I think that ignores the basic issue. If your belief exists without a backing in logic, how can you buttress that belief with further knowledge?

If we were all to start fresh, as blank slates and to set out to develop a completely new set of principles for ourselves, we would go thru life for a few years, collecting knowledge, learning lessons, gaining experience, and when those few years were up, we would sit down and think about what we have learned, what we have found to be true based on our experiences. Some of us might decide that there is a higher power, others would laugh at that idea. But we would all have our own experiences, our own TRUTH to back up our beliefs. Religion can be the same way. There is much talk in Christianity about a spiritual journey, especially for so-called born-again Christians. It’s real life experience that has lead them to believe that there is a god, that he loves us, that he sent his son to die for our sins, and that we are now saved. Sure, a lot of us laugh at that idea, but they’ve got their own experience to back it up. I’ve got no beef with that as long as they don’t try to push their believes on me and as long as they let me talk with them about what they believe.

But what good is saying that we believe what we believe with no argument or experience behind us? It’s weak, that’s what it is. It’s president Bush going to war on faulty intelligence. You go to church every Sunday, repeat what the pastor told you, believe his interpretations of the bible, and suddenly you’re drinking at the cup of lies, just like so many congresspeople and senators before the Iraq war. Suddenly, you’re just another stooge. No doubt I’ll be criticized on this later, by a religious person who both chooses not to argue or defend their faith and who says that they don’t believe everything that their pastor tells them. That’s all well and good, but then please start taking your beliefs to heart. Please start questioning what you believe, not as a way to weaken your faith, but as a way to strengthen it.

Believing what you believe is fine, but refusing to reconsider those beliefs is the ultimate sign of weakness. Whether you are scared of changing those beliefs, scared of losing an arugment, or just plain scared to actually think about what you hold most true in your heart, it’s still cowardice. Stand up for what you believe; consider it an important part of your daily life to cast down everything you think is true in your life, and then only pick back up what hasn’t broken. Those are the strongest pieces of what makes you YOU.