Flirting with Faith

Flirting with Faith

Friday November 6, 2009

Mountain Advance Phase One: Fail

I am writing from a crowded Terminal A at Washington/Dulles Airport. The fact that I am here at all is a mini-miracle since my 9:25 a.m. flight out of Newark, N.J. was actually a 9:25 a.m. flight out of LaGuardia - a bit of information that would have been nice to know as Martin and I arrived at Newark (at least an hour away from LaGuardia with no traffic) just before 8:00 a.m. 

I guess it would be lovely to be one of those people who gets to write about how the Holy Spirit must have blown me out of New Jersey and across Staten Island and Brooklyn into Queens, since I made it to LaGuardia 40 minutes before my flight left. One of those heartwarming bits about how my role as a conversation starter at Len Sweet's Mountain Advance must have been ordained by Jesus himself, since I made it through security and to the gate with just enough time to grab a cup of coffee and make the flight. 

But, unfortunately, this newbie speaker has to write about Martin and I bumbling with a sub-par GPS, snapping and sniping at one another between episodes of what became a random, top-of-my-lungs, less-than-holy mantra: "I am such a ^$&@# idiot!"

So, I begin this quest first with gratitude that I did not have to go to a Plan B like driving to West Virginia or taking the flight that would have resulted in a 2 am arrival. Then with a public bit of repentance - sorry Martin. I am blessed to be married to a man who puts up with my crap. And third, I begin a firm grasp of exactly how rough around the edges I am and how much I hope to learn in West Virginia.

Time to board. 

 

Monday November 2, 2009

Monotation: One Image, One Word Meditation from Spencer Burke

I love this idea. A visual mediation with a single associated word meant to create space for personal reflection. The Polaroid Camera frame adds to the charm of what creator Spencer Burke, founder of the Ooze.com, calls a Monotation. He posts them daily at his website and makes some of the images available here for journals, notecards and other uses. Spencer has also kindly agreed to allow me to post them here from time to time: could be weekly...or as the whim strikes. 
Check out the Monotation site and let me know if you have a favorite. This one struck my fancy...


Created by Spencer Burke. http://MONOTATION.com.


Friday October 30, 2009

C.S. Lewis on Devils...


There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors, and hail a materialist and a magician with the same delight.   -- C.S. Lewis.  The Screwtape Letters.  New York: Time Incorporated, 1961, p. xxxi.


Tuesday October 27, 2009

Extreme Faith (and Extreme Skepticism) as Excess?

A frequent visitor on the blog - a vocal skeptic who has made clear a rather biting disdain for religion and the faithful - left the following comment on a post a few days ago. These thoughts on excess, standards for skepticism and the nature of belief are provocative. Would love to hear your thoughts...

Credis Dervish writes: 
we can't talk about religion without talking about excess. this doesn't mean that everyone who is religious is a fantatic. but it does mean that religious beliefs are very important to those who hold them, even if they do not make sense. indeed, people will sometimes sacrifice their lives and the lives of other people for them; their relationship to their gods can be the most important thing in their lives. by definition these supernatural forces must be more powerful than the people who believe in them. they are often perceived as both ominiscient and omnipotent.

those who do not believe in supernatural beings are struck by two things; first, that these deities seem to be, by definition, excessive - excessively punitive, excessively loving, excessively demanding, and excessively in need of people's devotion. and second, that religious believers, even moderate ones, seem to have excessive confidence in their gods, and are excessively eager to please them.

the more extreme skeptics of religion, often in rather patronizing ways, find the whole thing rather irrational. but where do the skeptics get their knowledge of what is irrational from? how does anyone know what too much belief is? it is the hope of modern liberals that we can all talk about the things that matter most to us without losing our tempers or killing people. do we believe this too much?
what mattered most to most people, until very recently, was their relationship with their gods, and gods, traditionally, have been to die for; one of the things people have been able to do, in the name of religion, is sacrifice their lives and the lives of others.

what people use their religious beliefs to do - what they do in the name of their religions - might make us wonder not simply what should we believe, but what kind of thing is a belief? clearly a belief can be something that permits you to kill people. our religious beliefs may be the tools we use to manage - to legitimate and contain - the excesses of our nature. so from a psychoanalytic point of view we don't only have to say, as freud said, that religion is for people who are frightened of growing up. we can say, though, that we have delegated to a figure called god all the excesses, including addictions and nasty habits, we find most troubling in ourselves, which broadly speaking are our excessive love for ourselves. 

god in this view carries the part of ourselves that asks too much of us, that is endlessly demanding, that wants us to be better than we are.
being excessive in words or actions, in inflammatory rhetoric or violent actions, is a form of communication. what the religious fanatic knows is just how contagious excess can be. excessive words and actions are haunting, they make one's presence felt; they make people excessive in their responses. priests, nietzsche wrote, have shown almost inexhaustible ingenuity in exploring the implications of this one question: how is an excess of emotion to be attained? if you can make people excessively emotional you can manipulate them, and one of the best ways of making them excessively emotional is to do something excessive to them. suicide bombers don't convert people, but they make the existence of their religion unforgettable, undismissible.

there is another possibility, the one that i want to end on because it seems to me potentially the most interesting, though perhaps the most daunting. this is that the religious fanatic is someone for whom something about themselves and their lives is too much; and because not knowing what that is is so disturbing they need to locate it as soon as possible. because the state of frustration cannot be borne - because it is literally unbearable, as long-term personal and political injustice always is - it requires an extreme solution.
in this account irrational behavior shows us how obscure we are to ourselves or how we obscure ourselves; how our frustrations, odd as this may seem, are excessively difficult to locate, to formulate. wherever and whenever we are excessive in our lives it is the sign of an as yet unknown deprivation. our excesses are the best clue we have to our own poverty, and our best way of concealing it from ourselves.

Saturday October 24, 2009

Lest My Spiritually Interested Friends and I Begin to Take Ourselves Too Seriously...

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Saturday October 24, 2009

Time Travel...

I was thinking about time today. How we spend it. What we do with it.  How we set priorities.  Got me wondering...1) If you could travel anywhere in the world at any time in history where would you go? 2) Why...

Wednesday October 21, 2009

Good Without God?: Atheist Advertising Campaign on NYC Subways Causes a Stir

There is much ado in some circles about a month-long advertising campaign scheduled to begin Monday. The "atheist ad", as the Huffington Post, Associated Press and others tag it poses the question: "A million New Yorkers are good without God, are you?"The campaign,...

Thursday October 15, 2009

Aging, Humility and Perspective: A Dose of Reality From An Honest 13 Year Old

My 13 year old niece posted the following note about "life going by so quick" on her Facebook status and I couldn't resist responding. Check out her reply and you'll understand why this 43 year-old titled the post age, humility...

Wednesday October 14, 2009

Must We Sacrifice Everything for Success?: Sorry Chris Brogan, I'm Not Buying It...

Chris Brogan is a thought leader in social media circles. I, like many other people interested in connecting through blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Ning, etc., receive updates and nuggets of online community wisdom from him in my email inbox once a...

Friday October 9, 2009

"We Christians are a Bunch of Scheming Swindlers." Pretty Harsh, Mr. Kierkegaard.

Picked up this quote from Soren Kierkegaard on my friend Peter Walker's blog today. For me, it dovetails with yesterday's question regarding the point at which believing may or may not become poor judgement. Kierkegaard writes:"The matter is quite simple. The Bible...

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About Flirting with Faith

Joan Ball is a professor of communication and marketing and author of the upcoming book, Flirting with Faith: My Journey from Atheism to Agnosticism to a Devoted Life. A lifelong seeker/skeptic who was raised without a prescribed notion of God, she experienced a dramatic and unlikely conversion to Christianity at age 37. She brings to the Beliefnet conversation an insider/outsider perspective on living a faith that both delights and confounds her.

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