Ben Stein is an interesting fellow. Speech writer for Nixon. Hilarious teacher of Ferris Bueller. I re-received an email recently and just got around to reading it; one which originated back in December of 2005 shortly after Mr. Stein offered a commentary on… what was it… CBS Sunday Morning. There are a few versions of the email, but I think the original commentary was pretty close to this:

Herewith at this happy time of year, a few confessions from my beating heart:

I have no freaking clue who Nick and Jessica are. I see them on the cover of People and Us constantly when I am buying my dog biscuits and kitty litter. I often ask the checkers at the grocery stores. They never know who Nick and Jessica are either. Who are they? Will it change my life if I know who they are and why they have broken up? Why are they so important? I don't know who Lindsay Lohan is, either, and I do not care at all about Tom Cruise's wife.

Am I going to be called before a Senate committee and asked if I am a subversive? Maybe, but I just have no clue who Nick and Jessica are. Is this what it means to be no longer young. It's not so bad.

Next confession: I am a Jew, and every single one of my ancestors was Jewish. And it does not bother me even a little bit when people call those beautiful lit up, bejeweled trees Christmas trees. I don't feel threatened. I don't feel discriminated against. That's what they are: Christmas trees. It doesn't bother me a bit when people say, "Merry Christmas" to me. I don't think they are slighting me or getting ready to put me in a ghetto. In fact, I kind of like it. It shows that we are all brothers and sisters celebrating this happy time of year. It doesn't bother me at all that there is a manger scene on display at a key intersection near my beach house in Malibu. If people want a creche, it's just as fine with me as is the Menorah a few hundred yards away.

I don't like getting pushed around for being a Jew and I don't think Christians like getting pushed around for being Christians. I think people who believe in God are sick and tired of getting pushed around, period. I have no idea where the concept came from that America is an explicitly atheist country. I can't find it in the Constitution and I don't like it being shoved down my throat.

Or maybe I can put it another way: where did the idea come from that we should worship Nick and Jessica and we aren't allowed to worship God as we understand Him?

I guess that's a sign that I'm getting old, too. But there are a lot of us who are wondering where Nick and Jessica came from and where the America we knew went to.

I was reading this and thinking about a couple of people I've met this semester. In class is a Muslim woman from Jordan. Upon meeting her I made the reckless (reckless, because if I had really thought about it I might have realized this) mistake of holding out my hand to shake. She introduced herself and added, "…but I don't shake hands." This week I was in meetings with a guy from back east who is (I presume) an orthodox Jew. He wore his kippah and drank his kosher fruit juice in the midst of all the rest of us, and left early for his fly-back so he wouldn't be travelling on the Sabbath. My simple point is that in watching both of these individuals, I've felt a deep level of respect for the way they shape and conform their lives to their faith. I have no problem at all feeling that the three of us are connected through a committed devotion to God. I guess I simply liked reading Mr. Stein's words this evening. I am a Christian, and I am not at all offended by head coverings, kippahs, Ramadan, or being kosher. Quite to the contrary, I am drawn to simple, humble submission to our Creator—in its various forms.

As noted previously, when I was typing my post on Plato's Dilemma, I got to the two words "be humble" and was suddenly struck by the idea of my religious faith being a metaphor for the issues surrounding Plato's Dilemma. The parallel runs something like this:

God exists. God is truth. God is knowable, but only as something unknowable; what we ultimately come to know of God is God's ultimate un-knowable-ness. So, we acknowledge that there is Truth, we acknowledge that somehow it can/should/does guide our lives, but we also acknowledge we cannot fully ascertain nor articulate it. We must address the idea of God, of relationship with God. We must decide notions of faith for ourselves. But doing so involves making claims. It involves abiding in an ideology. We cannot/should not/must not make absolute claims. We cannot say our faith is superior to another person's faith without claiming to be God ourselves, which we most certainly are not. We must not judge another. In the face of this, we form a faith of our own (as Paul said, we work our salvation "with fear and trembling") and we hold it in the utmost of humility. We know it is frail because we have worked it out. We know it is precious because God has made it so. The key comes down to holding our faith in deep, profound humility before God and other human beings.

In other words, faith involves living according to a personal ideology concerning Truth, one that we must value, therefore live by, and therefore in some way espouse for it to be a faith worth having. Yet, we cannot universally verify or validate a given faith in human terms. And, since we cannot verify or validate it, we understand that each person's humble faith is just as valid as our own. Yet from a particular point of view, to say that every faith is valid is to negate the idea of Truth, and therefore the value of faith. Plato's Dilemma.

However, after years of wrestling with this issue in terms of faiths, I have resolved it to my satisfaction with this idea of humility; with this idea that it is not the intellectual particulars of faith which make it faith. Rather, it is the heart, the spirit, the humility of the faithful which is the key. The view needs to be elaborated upon to explain well, but it is a workable solution. I like to say in metaphorical terms that we religious folks spend a lot of time arguing over what kind of clothes (causal, dress, business) we are supposed to wear in the sight of God, but God only cares about the fabric; not the style or cut of the garments. Likewise, God cares about our heart, our humility, our submission and devotion to him at a deeply personal level. I don't think God is interested in doctrine and dogma.

And so. Reading Gee's work on Plato's Dilemma, when I understood Gee's point intuitively, as if it were a long lost friend suddenly formally introduced, and when I recognized that (contrary to Gee's claim) a solution exists, and it rests in intellectual humility, I was thunderstruck by the parallel to my personal view of faith. And I had to ask myself, which is the chicken, and which is the egg? As a born existentialist, have I worked out my faith as a response to a pre-existing intuition of Plato's Dilemma, or is my intuitive grasp of Plato's Dilemma, and the solution to it that I see as perfectly natural, born of my pre-work performed in working out my faith?

An interesting question, and one that could be asked more directly by asking if my view of God, Man and faith is based largely (merely?) in my existentialist mind. At present, I would wager that both my faith, and my grasp of Plato's Dilemma, are based in my existentialist nature. Which gets back to my posts of this year regarding belief, reality, and faith. We truly believe only what are minds of capable of truly believing; we can do nothing else.

A closing point? A takeaway? I left it sitting on a doorstep in my previous post: be humble. To read, to hear, to interpret, to speak is to take a stand. Our stand may not be superior to any other. Or perhaps it may be. We may never know. This doesn't make our stand unimportant. But it does mean that we should stand humbly in a humility that recognizes it may be wrong, and in an even greater humility that recognizes it may be right.

I have no idea where I was, nor what I was reading, but two or three weeks ago I ran across a Christian's claim that "the Muslim God is not the God of the Christian." Hmmm. Well, this statement could have just as easily been made by a Muslim, or by anybody else for that matter, but I have to say that my understanding of Islam, extremely limited though it may be, is that Christians and Muslims do indeed refer to the same God. At least, certainly, if I was to sit down with a Muslim and talk about God, my underlying assumption would be that we were both talking about the Father of Abram/Abraham.

I suppose what the author of that line might have been implying is that Muslim and Christian would disagree, of course, about the idea of a trinity. But then again, so do Jews and Christians, and nobody says that the God of the Jew is not the God of the Christian. Sometimes I think that there are many things said out of pure fear and/or ignorance and/or malice.

What I was thinking, anyway, is that it's sort of a moot point for me. It seems to me that if you are a monotheist, then whenever somebody talks about worshipping the One or Supreme being, they are talking about God. That's the word I use, but the word is not magical; it's three characters of the particular alphabetic script I use, arranged in one of six possible ways. Even Paul, on Mars Hill, used this idea. He referenced a local statue labeled "to an unknown god" as an inroad to a sermon. So I see you have an unknown god. Well, let me tell you about this unknown God…

Just to clarify a little more, I understand the opinion that if you claim to worship God, but your concept of God is radically different from mine, then we are in some sense worshipping a "different" God. And I think this opinion has merit. So to be more to the point, what I am saying is that God is God irrespective of whether your idea and/or my idea as to the nature of that God is/are correct or not. God's Being does not depend upon a human's concept of God. Whatever God is, God is. And if you are claiming to worship that One Being, then whether or not any of us are conceiving correctly or not, the Being we are pointing to is still the same Being. I guess my point is simply that the Lord our God is one God. Muslim, Christian, Jew; the same Being begat us all, and the same Being is worshipped by us all. And, it's about the Being, after all. It's not about us. It is in this sense that the Muslim God is the Christian God, is the Jewish God, is the God of other monotheistic faiths.

Must it be so difficult, really, for us all to begin here?

I've had a couple of recent posts about faith, belief, reality and the like, and I want to bring them toward a conclusion. I can't say that this present post is going to follow precisely where the last one left off, but it should be close enough.

I've been talking about what I consider to be a confusion in mainstream Christianity between faith and intellectual belief, and I closed the previous post in this area with the philosophical idea that to believe a proposition p is to act is if p is true. Setting aside Pilate's question of what is truth, I tend to think that most of us adhere to this statement about belief and action; even if only by default in that it is part of our Western tradition. A simple example would be that if the weather forecast claims it will rain tomorrow, then if you believe it you will dress accordingly, carry an umbrella, or plan on getting wet. On the other hand, if you don't believe it then you will do none of these things. Your actions, even if only mental, will be in accord with your belief concerning the forecast.

So if our religion tells us that faith is intellectual belief, and if our intellectual tradition tells us that to believe is to act accordingly, then the implication is that if we have faith, we will act according to it. I'm pretty sure that plenty of preachers have used James chapter two to make this very point. Well taken. I would absolutely, fully agree that in a large and general sense, if my faith does not direct my life, I probably don't really have any faith after all. But, bear with me, oftentimes there are some serious problems with this as it actually plays out in Christian life.

No one argues that faith is important, and the "stronger" one's faith, the better. Absolutely. But, suppose that faith equals intellectual belief and so requires action in accord. Then when presented with an article of faith, for me to have faith at all, I must act in accord with the acceptance of that article. The more decisive and sure and confident my action, the party line goes, the stronger my faith. The more God is happy with me. The better my chances of Heaven. This is a strong motivation to find within myself an equilibrium between belief and action; read, my faith and my living. Striving for this equilibrium is quite complex—more complex than most care to think about. It occurs at multiple levels, with multiple articles, simultaneously. The ability to reconcile one article of faith with one action or way of being affects all the others. The quantities of articles vary from person to person, from a few to hundreds, and at the latter end of the spectrum, the mathematics are relentless. At the lowest level, the articles begin with "There is a God, yes or no?" and "Does it make a difference?" and "There is a Heaven and a Hell, yes or no?" and so forth. Obviously, what a person thinks and feels about these sets the stage for everything to come. Bluntly speaking, it's a matter of analyzing chance and probabilities with our innate human propagator/predictor. I know that sentence sounds like it comes from an engineer, but if the shoe fits, and besides, I'm convinced this is how it is. Well, almost all of the time. More on this later.

And so, in the work of trudging through all the interlinked possibilities, there are a few basic ways this all plays out in the individual person. The lines between them aren't cast in stone and there is some mixing together of them, but they're the ingredients of the pie. (1) We can work backwards from how we are willing to act, that is, how we are willing to live, and let this determine what we believe. This does reconcile belief and action, but it's a bit short of taking part in a life-changing spiritual path. If, for example, I am unwilling to give up my incessant greed for bigger and more expensive material goods, I will not allow myself to believe that the Bible calls us to do so. I will instead pluck from the Bible the idea that God wants to richly bless his children, and smile complacently at the new SUV in my driveway. Note that this now becomes a value in the mathematical analysis, and colors what I can or cannot believe a "blessing" to be. (2) We can start with belief, and claim to believe certain things, but fail (or refuse) to act accordingly. This approach has two major divisions I'll call "moral frailty" and "hypocrisy."

Moral frailty believes, and desires to submit and act according to the belief, but is unable to do so. To me, this is the authentic Christian place, and in it rests the entire concept of the Christian struggle vis-à-vis the Grace of God. I intellectually believe that God calls me to places and states of being that I am as yet unable to go, although it is my heart's earnest desire to do so. My actions and my beliefs do not match, but I am trying, because faith (note: faith, not intellectual belief) tells me that in hope, in trust, in devotion to God in all my poverty I will grow and I will progress. That in all my regrettable human failings, God's Grace is more than sufficient to cover me. Paul covers this just fine in Romans chapter seven and on into eight:

I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate... I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do… For I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord… There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus (NRSV).

As for hypocrisy, forgive me for creating a taxonomy here, but hypocrisy must be broken into two parts, both of which are types of moral fraud. The first hypocrisy is the good old-fashioned kind, of which the world (often rightly) accuses Christians. In this form of hypocrisy, the speaker claims, "I believe such and such, and/or so should you," while proudly doing otherwise because he doesn't think he will be caught, or because he thinks he has some special right to act in opposition to his claims. This hypocrisy is a blatant and public moral fraud, wherein claimed belief and action do not meet, and there is no intent to make them meet. The second hypocrisy is an inward moral fraud which says, "I believe such and such, and/or so should you," wherein the speaker believes he does, in fact, live according to the belief, but in actuality does not. While the first form of hypocrisy keeps the world from liking Christians, the second form keeps people from wanting to be Christian. After all, who likes somebody who is a phony on the outside, and who wants to become a person who is phony and self-deluded on the inside? I figure—nobody.

So. At this point, we have four possible methods for dealing with the tension between belief and action:

1. Pride: Allowing my own selfish will to determine what is believable to me.
   
2. Moral frailty: Believing, and wanting to act, but failing in human weakness.
   
3. Blatant Hypocrisy: Saying I believe but knowingly acting otherwise.
   
4. Inward Hypocrisy: Saying I believe, and mistakenly believing that I act according to my belief.
   

Like I said earlier, these are the four main methods I see, although they come mixed together in differing amounts within each of us. To my mind, number two is the truly Christian situation, and I want to note briefly that it begins to demonstrate the problem with thinking of "faith" as synonymous with "intellectual belief." Belief becomes null and void without action in kind, and therefore thinking in these terms can drive a would-be Christian crazy. It leads one to think, "Since I cannot act this way, or be that way, I obviously don't believe (read: I obviously have no faith), and therefore (yada-yada…) God will send me to Hell. But the fact of the matter is, faith is not wholly dependent on our ability to act or be a certain way, but rather in our desire and effort to do or be so. Faith is made perfect in the God in whom we have faith. Belief is often impossible because of our inability to act according to it, but faith is never confounded because God makes up for our frailties and therefore faith is not nullified by human weakness.

Almost done. Having read the previous paragraph, and accepting for the moment that there are people who have never been taught its idea, now consider the fifth method for dealing with "faith" as tension between belief and action. This is the ugly one I alluded to in my previous post on this topic. Sigh… here goes…

In this fifth method, the Christian thinks something along the lines of: "To please God, I must have faith, which means I must believe, which means I must act." I'm going to cut to the chase here and get it over with; the thing that has been bothering me for quite a while now. Consider this approach, this mindset, presented with the following combined articles of faith:

There is a God. There is a Heaven and a Hell. The saved go to Heaven. The unsaved go to Hell. Faith saves us. Lack of faith damns us. All worldly concerns are meaningless compared to gaining or losing salvation. Heaven is a better place to be than is Earth. Heaven is eternal bliss. Hell is eternal suffering. All children go to Heaven when they die. Few adults go to Heaven when they die. Murder is a sin and endangers your soul. Greater love has no man, than he give up his life for another [(by extension, his soul)]. The primary duty of a good parent, as much as it is within their power, is to lead their children to Heaven and save them from Hell.

And so I have to ask, what happens? As an answer, I give you—Andrea Yates. Now, please please don't misunderstand me. Ms. Yates' murdering of her children was an act of total insanity, embedded in what I can only call theological evil. Absolutely, without doubt. And I stand by that statement whether she was "clinically" insane or not. To murder, let alone children, let alone your own children, is pure insanity. And, it is an act of evil. However—and this is my point—in a state of being where one is fully devoted to his or her faith beyond all things, and where faith is viewed as synonymous with intellectual belief, and where it is recognized that to believe is to act, well… Ms. Yates' actions were positively, imminently, logical. What's more, in this (twisted, erroneous) view of faith, her actions were incontrovertibly acts of strong, resolute, unwavering faith on par with… well, Abram and his willingness to sacrifice Isaac. This is terribly, terribly problematic to any Christianity (or other religion for that matter) that confuses faith and belief. The Yates case is, it seems to me, the reductio ad absurdum argument demonstrating in horrific, tragic consequences the dirty little secret of the brand of Christianity in which she was immersed: it is flawed at its very core.

Lots of times "in church," we are lead to think that when we cannot believe something, that if are not convinced beyond a shadow of doubt about an article of faith, that there is something wrong with us; that our faith is weak or flawed, that we are a bad Christian or not "truly" a Christian at all. This thinking is wrong, and for the (thankfully) rare individual who falls prey to it with a full commitment, tragedy results. Evil results. There is something wrong with a system that calls "good" what logically culminates in evil. It's not a system I can accept.

So. What's this mean? It means that we who are Christians are not supposed to be convinced of certain things. We are supposed to have times of doubt. We are supposed to be frail and weak. It is necessary that we be so, in order that God's Grace may always and forever be the one Thing which perfects our faith. The power is not in our faith, but in Whom we have faith. That's a story for another post, but I want to leave with this: the Yates story really, really stuck in my gut, on a number of levels. In a nutshell, the thought I couldn't get out of my head was that she managed to find within herself, after some break with all that is holy, the will to do exactly what her religion taught her that a fantastically faithful Christian would logically do—and it could not have been any more wrong. It made me think about the basis and history of my personal faith, let me tell you. And you know what? Here's my confession. Do I really, really believe there's a Heaven just like I've been taught? Nope. I don't. I don't, and I am so very glad I don't. But you know what else? I have faith that there's a Heaven (of sorts); I really, really do. And thank God, there's a huge difference between the two.