Serious Problems and Pure Fantasies

Let's solve our problems by looking at the sky

I have spent some time on this blog looking what various Christian bloviators are saying on their programs because I find it instructive to know what messages others are getting that inform their understanding of the world. What narratives are woven? What "facts" are given in support of the story? How do people decide what solutions are required? What do they choose to brush aside?

Right off the bat, I find my worldview diverges from fundamentalist Christians. When I look out, I see a physical world where events and things can be good, bad or neutral. That is, there is beauty, wonder, joy, awe, fun, pleasure in things like nature, time spent with friends and family, activities we enjoy and so on. There is also illness, bad weather, sadness, disappointment, boredom, aggravation, and more. And, frankly, there are also neutral times and events that are just there and don't impact us.

When fundies look out, they see a magical world where a deity shows himself in the form of a tree or a flower and the forces of good and evil battle for people's souls. Sexual depravity is a temptation from Satan, and every action we choose is written down in some supernatural book so we can be judged upon our death.

Random Christian X living his or her life with this notion does not bother me too much. Sure, I'd love for everyone to think rationally and reject religion because there is no evidence to support its central claims. However, we live in a country which grants us the right to think and believe all manner of crazy things, a right I support even though it means wading through weird crap pretty much any day you venture onto the world wide web.

More bothersome are the bloviators with a microphone and an audience who need to remain relevant and so say all kinds of insanity about their belief about what their god wants. What this means is the airwaves are taken up with flights of fancy about wickedness because Yahweh might flex his muscle and decide to genocide us all.

In their fantasy structure of how the world works, there is one way we should all be behaving and there is one morality that is just true no matter how little harm an action might bring. A lot of things make the man in the sky sad or angry, and we should spend our precious time down here figuring that out so that we can "solve" the problem of evil and wickedness.

What I wish we could all agree on first and foremost is that there is a public morality, one in which we evaluate actions benefit or harm to others in our communities, and a private morality, one in which we feel we benefit ourselves by living by our closely held beliefs. Then, once we can properly frame our discussion, we can begin categorizing what actions we should concern ourselves with to improve society, and then we could start looking at the real problems in the economy or climate or whatever that we need to solve and how.

Let's look at the problem of poverty and the economic inequality we are currently experiencing. Instead of looking at some supernatural explanation (i.e. people in poverty deserve it because of their iniquity, a proposition that fails when you see how many rich people don't follow those beliefs and how many poor people are devout), we need to examine the physical realm. To what extent is poverty due to systemic issues around race, geographical location, lack of opportunity and other factors outside an individual's control, and to what extent is poverty the result of personal choices? Once we start determining the reasons, we can begin to examine what we should do. What policy should we craft? What problems are for society? Which for the individual?

I'm not suggesting I have all the answers. Far from it. But, these kinds of problems are complex and the determination of what we should do takes reasoned thinking. Already we humans are prone to all kinds of biases in our thinking, but religion throws another wrench into the picture.

I understand the urge of religious thinking. There is no need to search for answers any further. There is a single response which needs no evidence, no reasoned thought. For those of us not under the sway of such thinking, it can be a little frustrating. How are we going to work together to make our communities better if we cannot find common ground to even start to look at the world?