Thursday, March 22, 2007
Why We Need Religion
I believe utterly and absolutely in the truth of my faith. It is not a construct merely for the better social good. It is about God Almighty, personal, real, just. Sometimes, I think that prevents us from undertanding the role our faith plays in the greater world. We get so wrapped up in the truth and reality that we fail to see that it extends well beyond the personal.
This story from LiveScience says two really important things about that broader view.
This fact should be a filter through which we can judge good and bad religions. Good relgion will move humanity in that compassionate direction. Bad religion is often responsible for it. Secularists focus almost solely on bad religion, never realizing that without good religion they would be as, or more, insensitive to the genocide and other horrors we so easily ignore. Bad religion is not a reason to discard all religion, it is, rather, a reason to work all that much harder to pursue good religion. Without some force to move us off the dime, we will be stuck.
But this also does not bode well for the current personally focused trends within American Christianity. If our faith is just about us, we feed this tendency in our sinful natures instead of fight against it. We risk slipping, in fact may already have slipped, into greater moral neutrality, if not all the way to "bad" religion.
At best relgion begins with the personal, by virtue of our improvement we can in turn improve what is around us. But we have to work to do so, and our churches have to call us to do so.
One final comment - it is fascinating to me that this science story talks about human insensitivity to large scale death and all the while ignores it in forms like abortion, when the evidence is overwheleming that for those personally exposed to abortion, the emotional impact is overwhelming.
Related Tags: religion, genocide, faith, personal, societal
This story from LiveScience says two really important things about that broader view.
The Internet and other modern communications bring atrocities such as killings in Darfur, Sudan into homes and office cubicles. But knowledge of these events fails to motivate most to take action, said Paul Slovic, a University of Oregon researcher.Religion is a motivator in society for people to pay attention to the bigger picture, at least it should be. Religion when well done takes the strong emotional reaction we naturally have to the immediate and becomes the still, small voice urging us to look at the bigger picture.
People typically react very strongly to one death but their emotions fade as the number of victims increase, Slovic reported here yesterday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
"We go all out to save a single identified victim, be it a person or an animal, but as the numbers increase, we level off," Slovic said. "We don't feel any different to say 88 people dying than we do to 87. This is a disturbing model, because it means that lives are not equal, and that as problems become bigger we become insensitive to the prospect of additional deaths."
Human insensitivity to large-scale human suffering has been observed in the past century with genocides in Armenia, the Ukraine, Nazi Germany and Rwanda, among others.
This fact should be a filter through which we can judge good and bad religions. Good relgion will move humanity in that compassionate direction. Bad religion is often responsible for it. Secularists focus almost solely on bad religion, never realizing that without good religion they would be as, or more, insensitive to the genocide and other horrors we so easily ignore. Bad religion is not a reason to discard all religion, it is, rather, a reason to work all that much harder to pursue good religion. Without some force to move us off the dime, we will be stuck.
But this also does not bode well for the current personally focused trends within American Christianity. If our faith is just about us, we feed this tendency in our sinful natures instead of fight against it. We risk slipping, in fact may already have slipped, into greater moral neutrality, if not all the way to "bad" religion.
At best relgion begins with the personal, by virtue of our improvement we can in turn improve what is around us. But we have to work to do so, and our churches have to call us to do so.
One final comment - it is fascinating to me that this science story talks about human insensitivity to large scale death and all the while ignores it in forms like abortion, when the evidence is overwheleming that for those personally exposed to abortion, the emotional impact is overwhelming.
Related Tags: religion, genocide, faith, personal, societal
