Religion and Criticism: How Much Is Too Much?

Right now, I should be getting ready to go back to school. I’m leaving tomorrow and yet I still have not packed everything that I’m going to need. I have chores to do before I go back. If nothing else, I could be studying for the GRE. But I have other things on my mind…

How much is too much? This is a question that I’ve been asking myself a lot lately in regards to criticism of religion, particularly Christianity. I started asking myself this question after I read Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Infidel. At the time that I read it, my interest in de-conversion was mild. It’s something I’ll probably always be interested in. It will always be a significant part of my life, but my interest in it waxes and wanes periodically. But reading the book sparked my interest again. Also, in preparing for a class I’m going to start soon, I was reading some essays on religion by Emile Durkheim. My interest flared up even more.

One of the things that Hirsi Ali and Durkheim have both been criticized for, in their times, is for saying too much about religion. The thing is that what they both say is so glaringly obvious that people tend to overlook it, but when an astute observer points it out, it can’t be ignored. It’s true and it’s there and it’s not going away. And a lot of people don’t like the fact that somebody brought it to everyone else’s attention. A lot of people get offended, even though people like Hirsi Ali and Durkheim usually don’t mean to offend. They’re just honestly asking some questions and honestly describing the world as they see it. They say what they mean with no hidden motive and no malice. It’s just that this kind of truthfulness offends some people, usually the people who would like to pretend that these kinds of truths don’t exist.

And yet these kinds of truths do exist and there’s a lot that I’d like to say about them, but I don’t know how to say it. I want to discuss things in a way that promotes dialogue between opposing sides. I’d like to discuss things in a way that can bring people together, not separate them. I’d like to discuss things in a mature and open way that brings out the best in people. I certainly don’t want to engage in name-calling or stereotyping. I don’t want to engage in what I call “pointing-and-laughing.” (You’ve seen these types of blogs or heard these kinds of discussions. They usually begin with, “Hey? Have you heard what this group who disagrees with us is saying now? Ha ha! It’s that just ridiculous? How could they think that way? Ha ha!” I do this sometimes, but I don’t want to blog like this. These kinds of discussions really aren’t discussions. They involve no explanation or criticism. There’s no attempt to understand the other side’s thinking or clearly define why someone thinks it’s wrong. It’s lazy and appeals only to those who already agree with the writer although it doesn’t even benefit those agree because it doesn’t help them reach a deeper understanding of their position. We all do it sometimes, but at the end of the day, it gets us nowhere.)

Of course, at the same time, I realize that what I want to say is probably going to offend somebody somewhere simply because some people can’t take anything objectively. Extremists and fundementalists aren’t going to like my opinions, and nothing that I say will probably change their opinions. That’s fine. But at the same time, I don’t want to come off as being opposed to all religions in all degrees. Really, as long as religious doctrines do not supercede compassion and empathy and common sense or one’s sense of self and dignity, I have no problem with religion. I am perfectly okay with religious moderates, liberals, and pluralists. I don’t want to join them, but they do not offend me, and I don’t wish to offend them.

But at the same time, I don’t want to censor myself, which is what I’ve found myself doing lately. There are some things about religion that I’ve been wanting to say, some good (The Evangelical Lutheran Church of America finally decided to ordain homosexuals! Yay!), some bad (Okay religious right, the way that you have been treating President Obama is just totally unfair), some might be offensive to some people (all evidence seems to point to the Bible being the work of men and not of divine inspiration), and some is just personal (Look, Mom and Dad, I love you very much, but…). And I mean none of this to be disrespectful. I’m not angry. I don’t have some hidden agenda. I don’t hate religious people and I don’t wish that they would shut up. I just want to say what I think without anyone, myself included, censoring what I have to say.

I just had to get that off my chest. Pretty much, what I’m trying to say is that I’d like to talk about religion and my thoughts about it more. However, I want to keep what I have to say rational, respectful, open-minded, and moderate. And above all, I don’t want to categorize people or judge people purely based on their religious affiliations. I really don’t like criticizing things. I’d rather mention the good of a postmodern existential existence than constantly gripe about the problems of religion. At the same time, though, there’s some stuff that I want to say, and I don’t want to stop myself from saying it, and if I get out of line, that’s why I have a blog. So somebody can leave me a comment and tell me why they think I’ve gone too far.

Okay, now that I’ve said that, I really need to go pack. Have a wonderful day, everyone!

Looking Back…

It’s been roughly a year since I de-converted and it’s about half a year since I’ve become an agnostic, and I’ve been thinking about some of the changes that have taken place in my life.

I’m much happier now than I was a year ago. Part of this is because I’m happier now having to bend my observations of the world to fit into the box of Christian/religious thinking, but I’m also happier because I’m no longer mad at the church.

For a while, especially in my questioning stage, I was very angry at the church. I felt that I was being lied to and that there were so many important issues that the church was turning a blind eye to. I felt as though whenever I brought up a topic like gay clergy or misogyny, I was told that those topics weren’t nearly as important as the love of God and if I just kept quiet like everyone else, my indignation about those topics would go away. I felt as though I was being kept in the cage of the Christian worldview and that other worldviews, like existentialism and pluralism, were purposefully kept from me.

And for a long while, I was angry about that. I felt as though I’d been hurt by the church, and I was anticipating that the church would continue to hurt me as I came out as a de-convert. For a while, even though I saw life in an array of colors that was much more beautiful than the narrow blacks and whites of my Christian thinking, I continued to see people in terms of black and white. I assumed that all atheists, agnostics, deists and freethinkers were the good guys out to intellectually liberate the world and all Christians were the bad guys out to keep us afraid that God might at any moment strike us down if we didn’t obey His Holy Church.

But as time has gone by, especially this summer, I’m beginning to see that people aren’t black or white, either. Yes, there are plenty of atheists, agnostics, deists, and freethinkers out there who are wonderful people, but there are some who are jerks. There are Christians out there who spout out Bible verses like they’ve been brainwashed, but there are other Christians who are thoughtful and intelligent. There are people out there, some religious and some nonreligious, who actually don’t care too much about religion and are willing to judge someone based on what kind of person they are and not on what they label themselves as. In the past year, I’ve met some people who disagree with my decision to de-convert and I’ve met some people who agree with that decision. Even better, I’ve met some people who don’t care what I call myself because they are more concerned with getting to know me as a person.

And I’m starting to try to become someone in the last type of category. I don’t want to be the sort of person who judges other people purely on labels. I want to be the kind of person who gets to know people for who they are and judges them for what they are like, not what they call themselves. I think it’s time for me to put my hurt and prejudices aside and start getting to know people as people instead of trying to fit them into narrow biases that exist in my mind but not in real life.

I’ve learned that I can be a good person without being a Christian. I’ve learned that I can love and be loved without being a Christian. I’ve learned that I can get through my daily life and plan for my future without an all-powerful God by my side. I’ve learned that believing in the goodness of human nature, believing in the Golden Rule, believing in education, and believing in myself are much stronger and much surer than believing in any particular religious dogma. Now, I think I need to learn how to see people as they really are, without the convenient boxes and categories that I’ve always relied on.

For this reason, I’ve found myself spending less and less time reading de-conversion blogs. I’m beginning to find that the ones that I still read regularly are the ones that acknowledge the complexities and ambiguities of humanity, regardless of its ideological persuasions. There’s only so many times that I can read, “Ha! Ha! The idea of a God dying to appease himself about a rule that he invented is illogical and Christians haven’t figured that out! Tee hee hee!” Now, when I think about some of the things that some Christians believe, I don’t feel indignant or disgusted. I don’t feel the need to point out exactly why they were wrong. I actually feel kind of indifferent. I mean, if challenged, I can defend my ideas, I can say why I left Christianity and why I’m much happier not being a Christian. But I don’t feel the need to point this out immediately to every Christian that I meet. Some Christians aren’t bothering anyone with their religion, so I won’t bother them. And I have no desire to ridicule their faith. Instead, I’m more interested in getting to know people on an individual level, in letting them be who they are as Christians and as just people.

This isn’t to say that I’ve totally stopped caring about religion. I’m still interested in religion. I’m still interested in the impacts that it has on the world. I’m still interested in how my religious past continues to affect my life now. But I’m no longer interested in judging people purely on the basis of their religion. I want to grow beyond my stereotypes of, “Freethinkers are kind and enlightened, Christians are rude and ignorant” because it’s not true. I want to get to know all kinds of people and I don’t want their religious beliefs to stop me from getting to know them. I’m not angry at the church anymore. I’ve seen the good it can do and the bad it can do, much like most institutions. I’m not angry at Christians anymore. They’re individual people who deserve to be judged on an individual level and not swept away in generalizations.

And I think that the reason that I’ve come to this point is because I’m happy and comfortable with my worldview as it is. I don’t feel the need to convince other people and myself that it works. I’ve seen throughout the past year that it works for me. That’s all I need to know and that’s all I need to worry about. And now that I’m more comfortable with who I am, I can reach out to other people and be comfortable with them.

Crossing the Rubicon: Wading into Religious Pluralism

(For the sake of understanding, I’m going to define some terms very quickly: Exclusivism is the view that one’s own religion is the only truth and that all other religions are false and their adherents are destined for eternal punishment. Christian fundamentalists are exclusivists. Inclusivism is the view that one’s own religion is the best way to the truth and that one’s own God is the only true God, but one admits that people of other religions might come to know this God by a means other than their own religion. A Christian who says that Gandhi will be in heaven because he was a Christian without knowing that he was one would be an example of an inclusivist. Pluralism doesn’t concern itself with whose religion is true and whose is false and focuses instead on understanding between people of varying beliefs. A Christian who visits a Jewish synagogue with some Jewish friends, attends their religious holiday celebrations, and listens to them explain their beliefs to him or her without butting in and telling them why those beliefs are “wrong,” would be an example of a pluralist.)

In the religions seminar that I took last quarter, the professor described religious pluralism as “crossing the Rubicon.” She even drew a river on the board and wrote “exclusivism” and “inclusivism” on one side of that river and “pluralism” on the other. (I love it when professors draw on the board!) She then explained what this diagram meant.

If you’re going to take an exclusivist or inclusivist view of religion, you don’t have to change what you believe too much. You still believe, more or less, that your religion is right and that everyone else’s is wrong or at least not as good as yours. Your God is still the best God and the most powerful God and you are His blessed chosen. You don’t have to question a lot of doctrine or rethink much theology. To hold these views, you don’t have to think too much about what you believe. You also don’t have to change many of the tenants of your faith.

Pluralism, though, is quite different. When you are a pluralist, you have to be able to put your beliefs aside. You have to be able to say that there is something more important than being right or being saved or being united with God in a pleasant afterlife. You have to see understanding between people as more important. You have see people getting along in this life as more important than fighting over whose God is better or whose doctrine is most true. Instead of seeking converts, you seek friends. Instead of being content with tolerance, your goal is an open-mind. And to reach some of these goals, you have to rethink some of the major tenants of your religion. You might have to question some important theology and doctrine. You might even have to decide that these goals are more important than some of the rules of your religion. When you become a pluralist, you cross the Rubicon, and you might have to leave some important aspects of your own religion behind.

This doesn’t mean that pluralists have to abandon their faith completely. Pluralism is not the same as universalism, which says that all faiths point to the same God and we will all be with this God in the afterlife, no matter what religion we follow. Pluralism is also not the same as eclecticism, which combines practices of different religions to make a whole new religion (such as Zen Buddhism, which is an amalgamation of Buddhism and Taoism). Pluralism doesn’t even have to be religious syncretism, which is the practice of different religions simultaneously, though they are not blended into one religion. A pluralist still practices his or her own religion. However, a pluralist interacts differently with those who do not follow the same religion. Instead of trying to convert them or simply allowing them to go about their religious business as long as it does not interfere with anyone else’s, a pluralist tries to understand someone else’s religion. A pluralist tries to see the world from the point of view of a person who practices this different faith. A pluralist sees someone of a different religion as one of “us” and not one of “them.” And a pluralist does not worry about whose religion is “right” or “wrong.”

Obviously, this is a very difficult mentality to cultivate. Thinking that your own beliefs are right and true and never trying to see otherwise from someone else’s perspective gives one a feeling of security. It feels safe, especially since you don’t have to question what will happen if you do try to understand people of other religions. You also don’t have to question truths that have been passed down to you in your own religion, which was set down by people much smarter than you and must be right because everyone you know has gone on for centuries without questioning it at all. You might–horror!–begin to see them as human beings just like yourself. You might be forced to admit that some of their beliefs do make sense. You also might lose your zeal to convert them to your own way of thinking, and you even might begin to wonder if all of this talk about hell is as dire as everyone makes it out to be. You might cross the Rubicon, and the other side of the Rubicon is uncharted territory. Not many people have been there; you don’t know what you might find.

As scary as crossing the Rubicon might be, I really think that it’s the best chance the religions of the world have for getting along with one another. If we could all try to understand each other’s beliefs instead of fighting about who is “right” and who is “wrong,” the world would be a much more peaceful place. The lines between “Muslim,” “Jew,” “Christian,” “Hindu,” and “Buddhist” would be blurred until we all just saw each other as people, people with a right to have their own system of beliefs. 

We also might be able to take constructive criticism from each other and perhaps improve our own belief systems as well. Instead of Muslims shouting, “Greedy materialists!” at the Christians, who merely shout back, “Oppressive militarists!” we might have Christians saying to Muslims, “You know what? We are awfully materialistic, and our greed has harmed other societies all over the world, not to mention the damage that it’s done to the environment. We really ought to go about changing this…” while Muslims say to Christians, “Yeah, we could do a better job of supporting human rights and providing freedoms to our people…” Does this kind of conversation sound far-fetched? Probably, but that’s because the understanding has got to come first. Think about it: you’re more likely to take criticism from a friend that from someone whom you view as an enemy.

I think that atheists, agnostics, deists, freethinkers, de-converts–whatever we want to call ourselves! For now, I’m going to put everyone in those categories under the label of Humanism for simplicity’s sake–have a role to play in this too. While we may not be religious, we can still practice exclusivism, inclusivism, or pluralism. There are people who think that religion should be done away with completely and we should all be Humanists, who don’t need a God to give us morality. There are people who think that religion should be tolerated and religious people should be able to go about their little rituals and prayers, so long as they don’t try to interfere with us. And then there are people who, even though they do not wish to practice religion themselves, are willing to consider the world from the point of view of someone who is religious and try to understand them.

Crossing the Rubicon can be just as difficult for Humanists as it can be for religious people. For instance, I know from my own life, that too often I merely dismiss Christians. I assume that because I used to be a Christian, I must understand all of them and know how all Christians think. This is simply not true. Though I might not want to practice Christianity anymore, I should still try to understand Christians and be willing to see the world from their perspective. I should be willing to talk to them, to find out why they believe what they believe. It’s something that I will probably always be struggling with, but that doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t try.

I would also argue that being willing to understand religious people can be a little scary for even Humanists. It involves stepping outside of the safe boundaries that we have set up for ourselves. (Yes, even freethinkers have boundaries.) We might have preconceived notions about religion that we feel safe clinging to because they give order to our lives. They allow us to classify people as “us” and “them.” We’re human and we like our neat little classifications. They make our lives much simpler.

But if we want to get along with each other, we’re going to have forget about simplicity. We’re going to have to cross the Rubicon and let it carry us away from our safe, secure boundaries. We’re going to have to be willing to redefine our views of all sorts of people. And we’re going to have to see the world in complexity instead of simple binaries of “right” and “wrong,” “true” and “false,” “us” and “them.” Maybe we will have to give up a lot of beliefs that we hold as absolute. Maybe we will have to rethink a lot of our most important assumptions. Maybe we will have to change our religions and worldviews and leave the judging up to God, if we happen to believe in God. This doesn’t mean that we have to drown all of our old views in the Rubicon. It just means that we may have to let some of them float away. But the new worldviews that we create after we’ve all crossed together could be even better than the old views that we leave behind.

Flying Pink Elephants and the Church of Good Music

So, where I last left my de-conversion story, I explained how learning about other religions made me seriously doubt that Christianity could contain the entire truth. I felt as though religion was culturally constructed and not something that was absolute. At that point in my life, though, I wasn’t ready to give up the idea of God. For a while, I was a universalist. I believed that all religions were just ways of people getting in touch with what was essentially the same deity. This deity went by different names, but I believed that all religions were just human constructs to allow people to have access to the same God.

There are some people who can just stop there. Universalism works fine for them and they are happy believing that all Gods are more or less the same. My problem with universalism was that it is very difficult to put a face on such a transcendent God. Think about it: if all of the gods from an incredibly diverse array of religions are really all just manifestations of the same God, then that God has got to be able to transcend all of the millions (billions?) of religions in the world. This God has also got to be able to transcend pretty much all of human understanding. I didn’t feel like I could grasp that kind of God. How could I pray to such a God? How could I possibly know what such a God was like?

Because knowing this God was so difficult for me, I slowly stopped praying. I went through my days and realized that I could actually get along just fine without God. And this is how I came to be an agnostic. I felt like God was the pink elephant thought experiment I’d done in a philosophy class.

The thought experiment goes like this: Suppose that there is a tiny pink elephant flying in your room. This elephant is invisible. It cannot be detected by the senses in any way. You can’t smell it, see it, hear it, touch it, taste it, or measure it. How do you know that the elephant is there? How can you interact with the elephant? You can’t. You really can’t even know that the elephant is there at all. You can’t prove the elephant’s existence, but conversely, you can’t prove its nonexistence. What do you do? Well, the practical thing to do would be to go about your life as if there were no elephant.

This is sort of the way that I feel about a transcendent God. If God transcends all human understanding, then how exactly can we interact with this God? How would we even know that this God exists? We don’t. We can’t prove this God’s existence, but we can’t prove this God’s nonexistence either. However, it seems to me that the practical thing to do is to go about life as if there were no God.

And yet, sometimes I wonder if it would have been easier for my friends and family if I would have stopped at universalism. I probably would have been more open to going to a Unitarian Universalist church, and I feel like my parents would be a bit happier if I were attending some sort of church. I’m also surrounded by a culture that declares that everyone must believe in something, even if that something isn’t the Christian God. I also feel like it would easier to break the news that I’m not a Christian to my friends. I could have told them that I at least believed in God.

I’m also wondering if I missed out on something by giving up on the Christian God and just God in general. I know that it probably has more to do with the fact that I want to make my parents happy than my actually feeling discontented with life as an agnostic. I feel like a girl who has broken up with her boyfriend and now that she’s not with him anymore, she’s remembering all of the good times and forgetting all of the bad times, which were why she broke up with him in the first place. Inevitably, I know that if I started going back to church, I’d end up just as disgusted with Christianity’s intolerance as I was before. Still, I feel like I ought to believe in something.

I was thinking about this in my car today, and I realized that I do believe in something. I am a firm believer that, no matter how bad I feel, if I listen to a good CD while I’m driving and sing along to it, I will feel better. Perhaps I could make a religion out of this belief. It chief deities will be a trinity of my three favorite singers. Since two of those three singers are women, I guess it will be a matriarchal religion. Under these three singers will be a series of lesser gods and goddesses, who are all of the others artists whose music I enjoy. This religion’s canon will be compiled of all of the songs that these artists have written. It will state that the human condition is one of joy, love, frustration, and sadness, and whatever the situation, there is a song by one of these gods or goddesses that will express exactly what the adherent is feeling.

These facetious thoughts cheered me up, but they also reminded me of something that I once wondered about religions. I once had the thought that the reason that there are so many religions might be because each individual person has their own needs and different religions fulfill different needs. Perhaps this is why Christianity works so well for some people, but Buddhism or Islam is a better fit for other people. Perhaps this is why no religion at all suits some people just fine. Just like not everyone will like the same singers that I do, not everyone is going to like the same religions and worldviews that other people share. This is why I think that it’s ridiculous to take an exclusivist view of religion. (Exclusivism is the view that only one religion has the absolute truth and that all other religions are completely false. Only adherents of the one true religion will be rewarded by God in the afterlife, and everyone else, no matter who they are or how they have lived their lives, will suffer eternal punishment.) Considering all of the different kinds of people that there are in this world, all with their individual needs and hopes and desires, there is no way that just one religion can satisfy every single person in the world.

At the same time, however, nonreligious people can’t expect that no religion will be a good fit for everybody. Some people need religion. Some people don’t. And there has to be a way for these different kinds of people to somehow get along with each other. As I said in my last post, I’d like to be part of the force that helps these people get into dialogue with each other. I’m just not sure how to do it, but any suggestions would be welcome.

Between a Rock and a Hard Place

For a while, I’ve been thinking about the dialogue, or lackthereof, between Christians and nonbelievers. I’ve also been thinking about the dialogue, or lackthereof, between people of different worldviews in general. And I’ve been thinking about my own place in what can be a dialogue but is more often just a shouting match.

And I find myself torn. On one hand, I want to connect with other people who have left Christianity. I also want to let other people who are leaving Christianity know that they are not alone. Honestly, I also just want to vent. Like everyone else who gets a blog, I think that just because I have an opinion, that opinion is worth listening to.

On the other hand, I wonder just how much good criticizing Christianity and other religions does. There is certainly plenty to criticize and when people see something going on that they believe in wrong, they usually want to explain exactly why they think it is wrong. However, I don’t know if this criticism actually promotes dialogue. It could promote dialogue between de-converts and moderate/liberal Christians, but I feel like, overall, the criticism is more likely to make Christians ignore what de-converts have to say. Nobody likes to be criticized, and people’s natural inclination is to become defensive.

So, I find myself stuck between what I feel are two conflicting needs. My higher self feels that cutting down on the criticism and trying to find more common ground between Christians, people of other religions, and de-converts, would be the best turn for this blog to take. My lower self, however, just wants to rant and doesn’t care what bridges get burned in the process. I’m not quite sure how to reconcile what I feel is a need for dialogue with a need to tell my own personal story.

Any feedback from readers would be greatly appreciated.

“By Our Love”

There is a children’s song that I used to love when I was little. It goes like this, “They will know we are Christians by our love/By our love/Yes, they’ll know we are Christians by our love.” Love, kindness, morality were all things that made me once believe that Christianity was different from other religions. Well, then I actually learned about other religions.

Ironically, religion was one of the things that drove me away from Christianity. Now, I’m not talking about religion in the sense of some of the ridiculousness of organized religion. Even a lot of Christians will admit that the institution that their faith has become is just absurd. No, I’m talking about other religions around the world–Hinduism, Mormonism, Buddhism, Wicca, Islam, Judaism and other religions that have a significant presence in our world today.

In my late teens, I experienced disillusionment with Christianity that reached its height when I was a freshman in college. At the time, I was still a Christian. I was disgusted with the bureaucracy and intolerance of the church, but I still believed that Jesus was good. His Church had just gotten corrupted, that’s all. (Now I wonder, why would an all-powerful God who wants the best for his children let His One and Only Holy Church become corrupted in the first place?) T hen, in college, I took a class on world religions.

It was a basic one hundred level class– almost everyone at the university has to take it to graduate, and I figured that it would be an easy four credits. I didn’t know when I’d signed up for the class that it was going to be one of the most significant experiences of my life thus far.

The professor was excellent. Throughout the course, we speculated on just what her personal beliefs were, but we never could figure them out. That’s how objective and unbiased she was about teaching. She presented each religious tradition in all its flaws and glories and she encouraged us to have the same open-minded attitude about religion. This didn’t mean that we had to blindly accept everything that each religion presented to us. What it did mean is that if she was able to put aside her own prejudices and accept various religious faiths on their own terms in order to understand them, then we ought to be able to do the same. She is probably the reason why I will not say that religion, for all of its faults, needs to be done away with entirely. If other religious people can show half as much respect to other religions as she did, then the world would be a much more peaceful place.

So, I tried to follow her attitude towards studying all of these world religions. I found them all fascinating, especially because I’d never been exposed to them before. In my Christian elementary and middle schools, we had only been taught about other religions so that we could see how wrong they were when compared to Christianity. In high school, in a world cultures class, we had touched on a few major world religions, but we had never studied them in depth. (We did, however, do a lot of study into the Protestant Reformation in high school. This was where I learned that much of Christian history has nothing to do with God or the truth. Instead it has to do with pleasing whatever political leaders happen to be in power at the time.) I was enthralled by the other religions.  In fact, some of them even seemed to make more sense that Christianity. Christianity lacked the humility of Taoism and the infinite number of chances you get to get this world right in Hinduism and Buddhism. It seemed to me, more and more, that every religion was merely a product of what its culture needed and believed and was not a divine and exclusive revelation from One God.

At the time, I didn’t really believe in the devil. In my earlier days as a Christian, I had believed in him, but a bout of depression combined with scrupulosity (a form of OCD in which the sufferer believes that s/he has sold her/his soul to the devil. There’s a lot of extreme guilty and obsessive repetition of prayers and other religious rituals. It’s very unpleasant, trust me!) had made led me to the conclusion that the devil was more of a metaphor in Christianity and not an actual entity. However, in opposition to the Christian argument that all other religions are just deceptions of the devil, I ask this: Then how is it possible that people who practice other religions are just as moral, if not more moral, than Christians? The Bible tells us that we will know them by their fruits, and the fruits of other religions can be just as good as those of Christianity. For instance, some Hindu temples offer food and shelter to the elderly in India suffering from poverty. The devil, as I understand him, is supposed to be a completely malevolent spirit, and yet he is providing food and a place to stay to people who would otherwise have nowhere to go. This is contradictory. One of the Five Pillars of Islam is to give to the poor, and yet, according to some Christians, Muslims are following a religion of the devil. This is also contradictory. If the Christian God commands His followers to give to the poor and just about every other world religion encourages this action also, then God and the devil seem to have more in common than one would expect, considering that one is supposed to be all good and the other all bad.

After studying all of these world religions and realizing that practitioners of other religions were no better and no worse people than Christians, I had a harder time accepting Christianity as the only truth. Religion, it seemed to me, was cultural and not eternal.

This realization didn’t cause me to give up on Christianity immediately, but it stuck with me for months after the class was over. It also made me more open to reading books like Karen Armstrong’s A History of God, which did burn the final bridge between Christianity and me. After reading that book, I was fully convinced that individual religions at least were merely human constructs. At that time, I still believed in God, but I was a universalist. I didn’t believe that one religion had the entire and definitive truth about God and the afterlife. It was a huge step for me, but it laid the foundation for how I eventually became an agnostic.

A Deconstructive Reclamation of the Postmodern Paradigm from Richard Dawkins’s “Postmodernism Disrobed” (Or, to put it without the jargon, “My Response to Richard Dawkins’s ‘Postmodernism Disrobed'”)

Okay, I will agree with Dawkins that people do like to throw the word “postmodernism” around a lot these days, especially in stuffy academic circles. Had I never traversed outside the walls of my own university, I would say that this is not true, but unfortunately I have met such people who love to throw the world “postmodern” around without the slightest interest in what it actually means. (At the Associated Writing Programs Conference in Chicago this year, I went to a panel discussion entitle “The Postmodern Poetics of Form” and heard all of the academics on the panel discuss poetic form in a way that was the complete opposite of postmodern.) And these people are giving the rest of us postmodernists a bad name. And, just to show that I do actually know what I’m talking about when I use the term “postmodern,” because I’ve done it quite a bit already, I feel like I ought to explain it right now.  

 However, I can understand why Dawkins and many other people think that postmodernism is utter nonsense. For instance, I completely agree with Dawkins that people who go around claiming that scientific formulas are inherently patriarchal have no idea what they’re talking about. Scientific formulas, I will be the first to say, are not inherently feminist or patriarchal. They simply are what they are. Now, the field of science, I would argue, is patriarchal. Any sociologist will tell you that though there is no reason why girls should not be as adept at science and math as boys, girls are given disadvantages if they want to go into a science or math related field. However, this has to do with society’s view of girls and boys and it has nothing to do with the scientific theories themselves. There has been a lot of pseudoscience that has, in the past, been propagated in order to uphold the patriarchy, but objective science has actually done feminism a favor by disproving these theories. (For instance, people actually used to believe that the uterus floated around a woman’s body and, when it reached her brain, caused her to go into hysterical fits. This was why women were seen as unable to be as rational or smart as men. Fortunately thanks to science, we now have a much more accurate view of the female anatomy and we can throw out that absurd idea.)

 Finally, I will also agree with Dawkins that people who try to make postmodernism into a science by applying mathematical equations to it are completely out of their league. Postmodernism belongs in the fields of literary studies, philosophy, art, religion and the social sciences. It is not a mathematical principle. I can’t even begin to fathom how anyone could even think of turning it into one, but, according to Dawkins, someone has. I can only say that that is completely impossible. You simply cannot do it and hope to come up with something that actually makes sense. In this understanding, Dawkins and I are in agreement.

 Okay, so now that I’ve said what postmodernism is not, let’s look at what it is. I won’t lie, it is kind of complicated, but I’ll try to break it down as best I can.

 I’ll start out with a definition. Postmodernism, as defined to me by several of my professors, is a way of viewing the world in which we admit that we cannot know the entire Truth because of the perspectives of ideologies that surround us. Miriam-Webster’s Dictionary puts it more simply by saying that it is “a theory that involves radical reappraisal of modern assumptions about culture, identity, history, or language.”

 Now, I’d better define truth. Yes, according to postmodernism, there is no one absolute Truth. Instead, the world is made up of various truths that are largely influenced by our ideologies. (And according to Wikipedia, an ideology is defined as “a set of beliefs, aims and ideas… a comprehensive vision, a way of looking at things, as in common sense…”.) These truths, though, are not scientific truths. Scientific truths are in a completely different category than the truths that postmodernism is concerned with. The truths that postmodernism is interested in are cultural or societal truths, in ideologies. (The reason that scientific truths do not fall into this category is because they are true, no matter what culture you might be a part of. The Earth rotates around the sun whether you were raised in medieval English culture, contemporary American culture, or ancient Mayan culture.) For instance, in a patriarchal society such as our own, it would be “true” that women are naturally meant to be housewives and mothers and men are naturally meant to be breadwinners and the heads of households.

 This is not to say that postmodernism throws rationality out the window. After all, if that were the case, then there would be no point in my being a feminist. Postmodernism does not say that all truths are equally valid. (In fact, it makes no judgment at all about which truths are better than others. According to postmodernism, these truth just are, and the ideologies that one ascribes to assign value to these truths.) You can still be a postmodernist and argue that your truth is the better truth. However, as a postmodernist, you would recognize that just because you might see women as equal to men to be true does not mean that everyone would agree with you that it is true.

 Postmodernism also sees these truths as human constructs. In other words, these truths are not true because they are “natural” or because some superior being, like God, decreed that they were true. They are true because humans decided that they were true. But, if humans changed their minds and decided that something different were true, well, that would become the new truth. Yes, in this sense, truth is relative. Yes, it also sounds a bit like Orwell’s 1984. But I’ll try to explain it with an example:

 In the Middle Ages, women were viewed as inferior to men. There were economic, social, and religious reasons for this and they were all relative. However, people didn’t admit that these reasons were relative. Instead, they tried to pass them off as absolute. Women were inferior because God said so. Women were inferior for some natural reason. Because women were viewed as inferior, they were treated as inferior. And, really, for all intents and purposed, they were inferior to men. Fast forward several hundred years to the feminist movement, which realized that there is nothing inherently inferior about women. Women are not inferior because God says so. There is no natural reason why women should be regarded as inferior to men. The only reason that they are seen as inferior is because people have decided that they should be. If we get people to view women as equal to men, then they will be treated as equal to men. And, for all intents and purposes, they will be equal to men. And, yes, when we change our ideological perspectives, we do have a habit of changing our histories, just like 1984. Think about history books. Just a few decades ago, the idea of including things like women who dressed up as men and joined the army during the American Civil war would have been preposterous. However, more recent history books tend to have sections about women’s roles and contributions to certain historical eras.

 So, yes, we do change things like history. However, we don’t change it in quite the same way that Orwell’s Party does. The Party completely rewrites history to suit itself. However, including, for example, a section in a history book about women’s roles during the American Civil War is not completely rewriting history. Instead, it is expanding the focus of the history textbook to include aspects of history that a more patriarchal society might have ignored. Postmodern feminists who want such perspectives included in history books are not saying that we should just invent stories about women who have made contributions to history in order to make women seem equal to men. (This is what an Orwellian Party would do.) Instead, they are arguing that women have made very important contributions to history and these contributions should be included in history books because women’s contributions to history are just as important as men’s.

 If you’ve followed me thus far and don’t have a headache yet, you’re probably wondering, What is the practical value of postmodernism? So what if truth is just a collection of whatever ideologies happen to be in vogue? Well, the practical value of postmodernism is that when we realize that many of the truths that we take for granted to be universal are, in fact, subjective, we can examine them and try to make them better. (Again, this is not to say that we completely discard logic, reason, rationality and ethics.)

 From postmodernism, we get ideas like religious pluralism, and if the religions of the world want to stop fighting with each other and regain some respect, then religious pluralism is the only route, that I can see, to accomplish this. Religious pluralism’s goal is not to assert that its doctrines are true or right. It is not concerned with absolute religious truth. Instead, its goal is understanding. For example, a Christian religious pluralist would not meet a Muslim and immediately think, “A nonbeliever! I must convert him/her! My religion is the only true religion!” The Christian religious pluralist’s goal would instead be to understand Islam, to understand why the Muslim practiced Islam, to understand the tenants of Islam, and to see the world from the Muslim’s point of view. In this sense, I would argue that religious pluralism attempts to create a feeling of empathy between people of different religions. And empathy is something that is greatly needed between religious people in the world today.

 This is only one example of the practicality of postmodernism. My feminist examples throughout have, I hope, provided another example. Queer theory and the GBLTA movement would be another instance in which postmodernism would have a practical application. Postcolonialism is another. In fact, postmodernism, with its emphases on reevaluating truths and on understanding, is applicable in just about any situation in which one comes into contact with people who are different in some way.

 What I’ve written here only skims the surface of postmodernism. People have written books on the subject and, fortunately, not all of those books are as ridiculous as some of the postmodern essays that Richard Dawkins has encountered. I haven’t even begun to describe postmodernism’s contributions to language, literature, politics, religion, and society. If you are interested in finding out more, I would recommend these websites as a start:

 http://telnet.uregina.ca/~gingrich/a400.htm

 http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/postmodernism/

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernism