The Bull in Full

Bible Verse of the Day

From the Old Testament reading from the Common Lectionary for today, the beginning of Isaiah 60:6:

And a multitude of camels shall cover you,

(On all the blessings that will come with the arrival of the messiah)

Church overdose

So originally the plan was to follow up the "Meditations" post with a post which grew out of thoughts from reading the Sam Harris/Andrew Sullivan debate on faith.  Briefly, Harris wants to approach all faiths with a humble and open-minded but strictly rational framework, and doesn't buy religious moderates as being somehow more correct, where as Sullivan wants to defend his moderate Catholicism, but runs aground when trying to place his faith in a rational context.  My response was going to be a recounting of how a rational examination of my life led me to joining a church and at least doing a lot of thinking about religion.

However, having just attended a motherlode of Holy Week events, including something - no joke - every day since Wednesday, I'm Jesused out.  I just got back from a Ben Hur watching party, which was a lot of dumb fun laughing at the rampant homoeroticism and goofy Heston melodrama, but was also yet another round of the Passion story and the Ressurection.  I drove home desperately seeking rock and roll on the radio, preferably with some silly and uncomplicated words, and got what I needed with Zeppelin's D'yer Mak'er and John Cougar's I Need a Lover that Won't Drive Me Crazy.

I really can't think about the aspects of how my doubts about the literal veracity of the Gospels change the ethics and aesthetics of my life any more.  I just want to go backpacking.  Or go to an old time festival.  Something.

Meditations on the Cross

Late Editorial Note: I'm rather annoyed with how this post turned out.  It's not terribly sensical, rambles a fair bit, and doesn't tie up neatly into a coherent whole.  I'm leaving it because I'm not sure I'll be able to do much better if I try again, and there's some stuff here I've wanted to get down in writing for a while.  Oh, well.  Caveat reader.

As night has fallen the on the evening before Easter, I figure that trying to pound this out before running off to visit the Episcopal Church of the Advocate's Easter Vigil is as good a time as any to put these long-running thoughts to keys.  Religiously, I've spent the last couple of years reconciling my spirituality with Christiantiy.  Just what drove me to do this, and the logical process that lead to it (and yes, the decision was based strongly in rationality), is a topic I hope to cover soon, but for tonight, I want to write a little bit about coming to terms and finding meaning in Christianity's most pervasive, but often times troubling symbol: the cross.

Melancholy tiramisu

From the bulletin at the First Presbyterian Ash Wednesday service tonight:

Jesus, refuge of the weary, Blest redeemer, whom we love,
Fountain of life's dessert dreary, Savior from the world above;

For more wisecracking, and aimless rambling, see below the fold...

Harris vs. Sullivan: a faith conversation worth reading

Having commented on the Newsweek/Washington Post "On Faith" trainwreck, it's a pleasure to witness an active and lively exchange between a devout Catholic and a published atheist author on the subject of faith, atheism, reason, politics, and the interface between them.  Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation, has engaged Andrew Sullivan, author of The Conservative Soul to debate the meaning and propriety of religion in contemporary life.  Quite thankfully, the discussion has neither turned into a scream-fest like "On Faith," nor has it consisted entirely of bromides and backscratching, so afraid of devolving into histronics that nothing ever gets said.  In the exchanges so far, the disagreement has been profound, but has stayed within the bounds of respect and decorum. 

What keeps this dialog under control, I think, is the epistemological humility that each maintains.  Sullivan's most recent book is a treatise pleading for a politics based around what he calls a "conservatism of doubt," in which one may hold strong convictions, but be constantly mindful of the limitations of ones own knowledge, and proceed with care in the world of public policy.  Harris, while an atheist with more than a small share of annoyance towards religious entries into worlds that he believes should be the province of reason solely, in turn acknowledges that science, logic, and human reason do not constitute nor divulge absolute knowledge, hence any claim of certainty about the lack of an existence of God based on reason alone would be no less a self delusion than he considers faith in God. 

I find this particularly interesting, because they touch upon many of the same lines of thought that I both discovered and struggled with in the long process that lead to me finally returning to the Church.  (I finally officially joined First Presbyterian of Durham late last year.)  Reading the Sullivan/Harris exchange has made me want to write about my own experiences there, but since I seem to be running behind on everything else in my life recently, that's not likely to happen for a while.

The "On Faith" trainwreck

It's ugly, it's horrible, and it shows all of the worst things one could see coming out in the open, things I really never wanted to see.  But yet I can't look away.  As one car after another goes off the bridge into the gorge, I just can't stop looking.

It's the trainwreck that is the "On Faith" website collaboration between the Washington Post and Newsweek.  I read the Post's website relatively regularly, and they frequently have a link to the latest nonsense off the front page.  I think I would really enjoy a thoughtful and reasoned discussion of religion in the public sphere.  This is anything but.  Imagine walking into the main concourse at JFK airport, on the day before Thanksgiving, during a major snowstorm, setting up a stage and PA system, then announcing, "We'd like to have a reasoned and thoughtful discussion on religion.  So let's kick it off with a few questions: Is Jesus the only possible source of truth in the universe, or a crazed nut who's the result of mass delusion?  Discuss!"  The only thing more embarassing than calling in crackpots like Daniel Dennett to write blurbs is the comments section, which is replete with people claiming to have logically disproven God, followed by the predictable damnations, and praying for souls, and those who are certain that any athiests around must not have heard of Jesus before.

Every time I read this, of course, I think, "What a monumental waste of time and energy!  This is useless!"  And then the next day, I'm back, clicking on it once again.

There's just something about trainwrecks...