Square-peg-in-round-hole
As I was sitting in church this Sunday morning I realized something. Listening to the sermon, which consisted of very little narrative analysis and huge chunks of square-peg-in-round-hole commentary, I realized that churches in the west, and specifically in the United States, do all the thinking for the people. There is rarely room for the listener to analyze the biblical material and independently draw conclusions. Instead, the sermons are ready to digest bites of theological conceptions, assumptions and presuppositions that are intended to be uncritically accepted. Sure, they may be true on occassion, but even if it is not entirely true or an outright fabrication the material is presented as a matter of fact. To be fair, the guest this morning, when he was about to make some creative conjectur, prefaced his statements with a clear disclaimer. I think many churches would be better of handing their congregants a jar of Gerber’s Baby Food. Of course, some may realize that I entirely side-stepped the issue of whether church should even be about biblical studies (which I’m beginning to think it isn’t), but if churches in the States are going to practice their religion in this I would think that they would want to prepare people by giving them the real, unadulterated information. Perhaps the powers-that-be feel people can’t handle the scandal, controversy, judgment, racial tensions and many other politically incorrect topics that the bible contains. And nevermind issues regarding authority, intent, authorship and other more pressing matters. With this new discovery I’ve realized that I will probably never find a church that meets this criteria. I guess this is another example of how broken things have become. Look at the effects of this game. Unqualified teachers speaking to miseducated adults about things that maybe they’ve emphasized in error or simply got wrong. And all of this the listener isn’t really in a position to question because they’ve never been properly trained or educated. Almost sounds subversive and intentional doesn’t it? It’s a sad day indeed.
It appears to me that you have identified a problem, but what is the solution. For instance, do we convince society at large that they should begin thinking critically or do we put the responsibility on the people conveying the message? If religion is to continue to serve the role of “rounding up” the masses (which I am neither advocating nor criticizing), clearly it will have to be the masses that have to change as clergy would have much to potentially lose by encouraging independent thought. If the will of the clergy were to teach, I believe that they would encourage independent thought. The only true voyage of discovery is to make the trip yourself. Most theists that I have learned from have encouraged me to investigate what they were saying, and in the end much of what they say (from a message standpoint) has stuck with me. The obvious problem with moving the solution to the masses is that the masses (I think) do not want to think critically of their belief system. For many, I believe they would not like what they find when they lift the hood. Many would lose hope in the very fiber of their existence. This raises another point, is it necessarily bad that people are willing to follow without question? As an atheist, I find that I have a moral code that I follow, regardless of who the messenger is. I also choose to follow laws, regardless of the rationality of those laws (I also break laws too, so . . . ), mainly because the person in position to convey those laws has the authority to enforce them. Many people consider their clergy to have the same level of enforcement, with afterlife punishment. They have the freedom, and the intellectual tools to make that decision and many continue to blindly follow. One could also make the argument that the impact of this problem is not the person themselves, but the impact to others which they influence. People that fall into this category also have the capacity for choice and in the end they take what is conceivably the easy way out. Maybe they are too busy with living that they cannot bother with finding truth. Maybe it is a crutch to prevent them from acting on bad impulse. Whatever the reason, ultimately it is theirs. Do not misunderstand, I agree that it is a sad day, I just do not know how we fix it.