My Faith: A Confession

[This was originally scheduled to come out in another venue. I went through long, difficult discussions with the editors, and ultimately, because it was so important to me in this case that the words remain my own, I decided to pull it (I'm usually very flexible with editors!). I sat on it for a number of months, but with the coming of the New Year it dawned on me that it might set me off on the right foot to release it here.]

*

Different people, different closets. I don't quite know how to say it delicately so I'm just going to come right out and say it. I believe in God. Apart from periodic spells of foolish pride, I have believed in God all my life. Even during these spells, I did not so much cease to believe, as turn my back on what I believed. 

As far as I'm concerned there cannot really be any concern that God does not exist. Even to see God's existence as a problem is to misapprehend what is at stake, since God just is the love, sweet and radiant, that charges through every drop and leaf and mote of the creation, always ready to be felt by anyone who is ready to believe. 

God is not male, and I cannot say 'he', however tempted I am to remain with the conventions of my beautiful language and its beautiful tradition of devotional writing. But this is a relatively trivial corollary of the more important point that God is not a being, and so also neither a monarch nor a father nor a ruler of any sort. God is love, and I can keep my love of God and have my anarchism too.

Indeed, as I see it the two not only can but must go together. To believe in God, and to feel the divine love that charges through all of creation, is precisely not to bow down, but to rejoice. The great travesty of the history of religion, and the victory of its enemies, has been to bend the idea of God to the legitimation of earthly rulers, to convince people that God is like dad, or the king, or the tyrant, but more so, and that, conversely, these mundane potentates are little reflections of God. There is none of this in my love of God, which shines out of my encounter with creatures, God's creatures, themselves having no power other than the power of their own growth and integrity, their own life, which is itself an expression of the same joy in God as my own.

To experience this joy is to know that the states of my soul and the states of infinite nature always fit, that each is an expression of the other, and so, that my death cannot be the end of anything, since nature, of which my soul was a modulation, a beautiful if dirty outcropping, will keep doing what it always does, and I, now only more obviously a convolution of nature, will flow along in streams and breezes and cosmic rays and will no longer be held up on this concern about the 'I' at all, about its finitude and its mortality. (I have just expressed a version of what is sometimes called 'monopsychism' or 'the Averroist heresy', and it is the first of a handul of heresies to which I will assent here.) 

For some centuries now, no small confusion has arisen from the fact that we talk about belief in God, rather than love of God. The two amount to the same thing, but the first of these expressions, at least since the beginning of the modern period, pushes us willy-nilly into the field of evidence and argumentation, a field where the standards of commitment have nothing to do with the issue at hand, and so not surprisingly, though for poorly understood reasons, belief in God cannot but be a failing proposition. 

But start from love, start from joy, and the demand for further evidence vanishes. To continue to make it would be like demanding to see the hormones that cause an erection before accepting that there is such a thing as eros. It would be vulgar. It is vulgar, every time we hear it from the puffed-up fools who believe they are defending the honour and integrity of something, which they also do not understand, but which they call 'science'. Science has more often than not been driven by what its practitioners have experienced as joy and wonder before God's creation. This is a historical fact, and even if you are one of the puffed-up fools who thinks belief in God deserves nothing but mockery, you cannot change this fact. 

Too often, God talk is set over against science talk, as if the one were concerned with fiction and illusion, the other with truth and reality. But this distinction presupposes an understanding of all talk as principally concerned with denoting entities in the world, and so takes those varieties of talk for which no entities are to be found as inferior or off-target. But there is another method of dividing up the different ways people talk, on which what the aforementioned fools think of as science finds itself in the undistinguished company of insurance claims and warehouse inventory lists, while God by contrast shares space, in the universe of human meanings, with music, metaphor, poetry, and dreams.

Everyone understands when God comes up in the lyrics of a Pixies song, for example. One song says, insistently, 'God is seven!', as if recalling some forgotten Pythagorean numerology, or, just as likely, deploying a Chomskyan example of a nonsense sentence.  When I hear that song, I hear something, born though it may be of irony and the exigencies of rhyme, that I can only hear as a crying out to God. Countless rock songs could be substituted here to make the same point, which is that no one who was into such a song up to the moment where God came up will suddenly throw off the headphones and declare that there has been a mistake.

In his poem 'The Angels', Rainer-Maria Rilke attributes to God a pair of 'wide workman's hands' which move through the pages 'of the dark book of the beginning'. Does God have wide workman's hands? No, and yet, if you ask me, Where is the truth to be found, in Rilke's poem, or in my 2011 tax returns?, I will answer without a second of hesitation: the poet is telling the truth, and of the two sorts of text it is only the first that can even be said to be engaging with something important enough to be called 'true' or 'false' at all. The turn to metaphor is not a turn away from truth, but a response to the difficulty of its expression.

But metaphor is not always what conveys the truth best. When Al Green sings the lines of the old gospel song, 'My God is real, for I can feel him in my soul', no proposition could be more direct, and only a puffed-up fool would seek to tell him he is mistaken. Just listen to him; he's not mistaken. And we can know this because of the depth of the feeling that motivates its expression, so much like the erotic desire we might find him singing about in the tracks that precede and follow 'My God Is Real'. Some of the most incontrovertible expressions of belief in God move in just this way, between RnB and gospel, so to speak, between different modalities of love. In this respect, Al Green positions himself in the same lineage as Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross. The expression of their love of God is the more compelling for their refusal to cordon it off from carnal love.

Much invocation of God in music and poetry is not declarative at all, but vocative; it says not that God is so-and so, it says 'Oh Lord', 'Oh my God'. (Sometimes people even say these things when they're fucking.) The puritans will tell you that this is 'swearing', that it is taking the name of God in vain. But listen attentively, openly, in the spirit of charity, and you can only understand that it is not in vain, and that we have no a priori rule to distinguish between swearing and praying.   

Are the lyrics true? (Is God seven?) Are they more true or less true than a correct inventory of the items held in a warehouse? This is an argument I am not interested in having. But I am certain that music, poetry, all those contexts in which everyone understands, whether they 'believe in God' or not, that it makes sense to invoke God: these are not to be dismissed as illusion, shadow, deceit, nor yet as distraction, playtime, divertissement, kid's stuff. An account of human life that does not include them would not amount to much. 

But enough about wrong-headedness; this is not a debate, but a confessio fidei. I am proclaiming what I believe, not beating down opponents. Opponents and sympathists alike are by now probably saying, God, God, fine. But which God? And I answer, with even more trepidation than I felt in making the initial profession of faith: the Christian God. 

But what is Christian here? So far I've only spoken in the sort of vagaries that a few hundred years ago would have found me accused of Spinozism, which is to say crypto-atheism. They were wrong about Spinoza, then, too. Spinoza believed in God, and as far as we can tell his mature philosophy was in no small measure the product of a deep interest in radical Protestant reconceptualizations of Christology. To say 'God or nature' only appears to be a reduction of God if you already hate nature; if you do not hate it, you will understand Spinoza's formula not as a reduction, but as an exaltation. Too often, to say, with Einstein, that one 'believes in Spinoza's God', is interpreted as a way of distancing oneself from belief in the proper sense, a way of sounding respectably modern while also expressing some concern that our various insurance claim forms and inventory lists are inadequate as sources of meaning. It is the high-brow way of saying one is 'spiritual but not religious'.

But I want to say something unmodern here, something that would have made sense in 30 AD. I am a Christian because I affirm the core message of the Gospels, which, I take it, is that God is love, and that therefore a life that aspires to love of all of creation is a life lived in accordance with God's law. This interpretation of what I have called the core message is one that emphasizes what is often called 'the social gospel', and that aligns itself with thinkers like Tolstoy who see Christ as a social revolutionary. From love flows the principle of unconditional forgiveness, and from this flows a commitment to pacifism which underlies all of a Christian's political commitments. To be a Christian is by definition to abhor war. It is also to abhor conventional morality, and family values (see Luke 14:26). It is not only unmodern, but untimely in any era, in 30 AD as much as today. 

The only adequate fulfillment of the core message of love, for me, is the one that, as I have already suggested, extends this love to all of creation, and not only to one's 'fellow man'. This is a challenge, since the Christian tradition, and indeed for the most part the Gospels themselves, is overwhelmingly anthropocentric. Animals come up parabolically, as representatives of singular human virtues or vices (sheep good, goats bad, etc.), but seldom as works of God in their own right. This absence is somewhat compensated in the lives of saints --Francis of Assisi, Seraphim of Sarov, Theodora of Sihla-- who retreated to the wilderness, who learned how to talk to the animals, and who, we may thus infer, understood that animals are an expression of the same divine order and divine goodness as we are. But one must go looking for these tendencies in the Christian tradition in a way that one need not in, say, Buddhism. You might now ask, Why not just be a Buddhist, then? To which I would reply: Quit joking around. I can't be a Buddhist. (I could pretend, I suppose, like many Westerners have, though they usually get tired of doing so before long.) 

I confess I do not have much of a feeling for the meaning of the crucifixion, and for the cult of death that sprang from it. My part of the four Gospels comes early on: the Beatitudes, the Sermon on the Mount; they lose me with the crucifixion. It is not that I don't believe in or understand sin: on the contrary, I find the picture of God's creation as always charged through with grace but also simultaneously tainted by sin entirely compelling. Eating, for example (as the Chandogya Upanishad, by the way, vividly conveys) is a transgression against what is eaten, against that portion of living and striving nature that you have usurped for your own living and striving, but it is by God's grace --by 'saying grace', as some wholesome folk do-- that this usurpation can be made right. Sin is pursuit of self-interested ends as if you deserved the fruits of this pursuit simply in virtue of who you are, as if God had nothing to do with it. Sin is pride, turning away from God in the belief that you have what it takes to make it on your own (one telling and somewhat archaic synonym of 'atheism' in German is Abgötterei, which translates as something like 'away-from-Goddery', 'the condition of turning from God'; atheism here is not a doxastic state about the existence of something or other, but rather an emotional state, a stubbornness). So I get sin, but I don't get what it means to say that Christ died for my sins. I just don't get it. 

I know that I am picking and choosing, and that by many standards I've failed to meet the requirements of being a Christian. Many, like those with the banners at the sports events, take John 3:16 to contain the core message of the Gospels. I also claim to know what the core message of the Bible is: love and forgiveness (1 John 4:8, 1 Corinthians 13:13, Matthew 5:38), and I claim that there is much extraneous stuff too, which can have little to do with our understanding of the essence of Christianity: the rules concerning marriage, the disregard for animals, the cosmic significance of crucifixion. How do I justify my picking and choosing? Well, who wants me to justify it? The hoarse-voiced goon at the sports match shouting about how Jesus Christ died for my sins? What concern is he of mine? 

Those who know me or have read me will probably know that I have often claimed that I am an atheist. I would like to stop doing this, but if I had to justify myself, I would say that it is for fear of being confused with that blowhard with the 'John 3:16' banner that I am unforthcoming about what I actually believe. I am infinitely closer, in the condition of my soul, to the people who feel God's absence-- the reasons for this feeling are a profound theological problem, and one might say that it is only smugness that enables people, atheists and dogmatists alike, to avoid grappling with this problem. I am with the people who detect God's hand, perhaps without even realizing it, where the smug banner-holder sees only sin: in jungle music, dirty jokes, seduction, and swearing. I am with the preacher who puts out a gospel album, then goes to prison on fraud and drug charges for a while, then puts out a hip-grinding soul album, and then another gospel album. I am with the animals, who can't even read, but can still talk to the saints of divine things. I am sooner an atheist, if what we understand by Christianity is a sort of supernatural monarchism; if we understand by it that God is love, though, then, I say, I am a Christian. 

Comments

[Jonathan]

At the risk of being trivial, the Pixies lyric in context makes a bit more sense: "if man is five [. . .] and the devil is six, then God is seven." Chain of being, etc, though I assume that you're correct about the numerology of "seven."

[Eric Walla]

Thank you for your heartfelt, deeply-engaging confession. I am sure you will get plenty of responses suggesting you have mirrored the feelings the reader holds inside (and, likewise, many that will suggest it is all smoke and mirrors). I happily fall in the former group.

One question: why the quick dismissal of Buddhism, and by extension all the remaining religions of the world? I believe you would clarify your text by saying you're not in fact dismissing the religion nor its adherents (OK, maybe the Western ones), but that your "core" is Western European and thus you resonate internally with, perhaps, the symbolism and history of thought developed over the centuries within the Christian tradition. Would this be correct? And by extension, would you posit that a philosopher arising out of a Buddhist tradition should equally feel a sense of God within Buddhism and not seek it in Christianity? I thought this the weakest argument in your fine piece, as if you wished to avoid the conversation.

It would be most interesting to hear your thoughts on this in future entries.

[Tyler Journeaux]

That was a fascinating confession. Part of me isn't very surprised, though I could never have guessed it. It simply seems 'right', seems to fit. I would love to tease you for some more of your views, but I expect that I may get that chance in time (heh, see what I did there?). Happy New years, and, in the spirit of your post, God bless.

[CarlosFM]

I think to desire for god is less of an acceptance as a it is a will to fight. Fight against the sad fact that reality is far from our ideals. Violence in man is not evil, it is simply against our hopes and dreams of how things ought to be. This imperfection has many names, "sin" being a well known one. What to do against the reality of lies, violence and ugliness? Exalt the feeling of love and claim it as a super-truth against the universe. It can be a stubborn fight, you can find yourself on the wrong side at times, but it can also be a very good fight.

I'm an atheist (what is it to feel god in one's soul when you can't feel a soul?) but I don't feel much kindship with atheist fads. They confront religious belief with reason and science, but seldomly impose such rigor in most aspects of their lives (how is it in anyway rational to drink soda or eat cake?).

I used to be much less leniant towards theism. But after seeing certain kinds of hardships in different parts of the world, what else are you to hang unto to fight against an uncaring and unjust universe?

Well I guess there are other ways. (As you can guess, yes i tried buddhism and no it didn't last very long ;) ).

[beatrice]

This is lovely. I'm especially glad to see Rilke make an appearance. As someone who feels a similar pinch between belief and disbelief (and is obligated to stew over this, as my field is theology), I've found much comfort in Rilke and have never been entirely sure why. In spite of the anthropic nature of the god who appears in his poetry, I would agree with you that this is mostly just a poet's truth telling. He speaks, often, of God's hands. But God can also become, for him, a thimble. One of the things that has always struck me about Rilke's god, however, is what we see especially in "The Book of Hours". He is not, as I read it, the orthodox Christian divine who is both omnipotent and omnibenevolent. Here, the monk who speaks to God seems also to be protecting him. He cradles him, or he worries (rather than suffers rejection) when his God doesn't respond to his solicitations. He exposes a certain divine vulnerability. If you do write more on this, I'd be interested to hear more of your thoughts on these orthodox tenets on the nature of God... especially since you confess to be someone who doesn't mind picking and choosing. And especially with regard to the problems of theodicy that they've always tended to generate. As a Leibniz scholar, how far do you follow him into the problematics of evil?

[Jay chetram]

Pure junk!!

[Jay chetram]

A vague argument for "love". Why do you assume that most Western Buddhists are pretentious? And, not serious to their commitments to Buddhist presuppositions? Your faith is simply a reflection of your Western symbolism, nothing more. I thought you were a rigourous philosopher and, couldn't wait to read your forthcoming books, but deeply disappointed.

[Jay chetram]

Totally agree with Eric Walla's comment to your piece. Why not engage with Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta philosophically? Your quick dismissal, is not productive for a philosopher.

[Jay chetram]

Your version of Christianity for the most part has been rejected by your Western Civilization. You will find a more sympathetic ear to your version in the East than your "Christian Heritage". Perhaps, the modern West would have been better had they accepted a Spinozistic view of Christianity. Buddhism and Vedanta provided richer conceptual resources for your version.

[Jay chetram]

"And by extension, would you posit that a philosopher arising out of a Buddhist tradition should equally feel a sense of God within Buddhism and not seek it in Christianity? I thought this the weakest argument in your fine piece, as if you wished to avoid the conversation."

Justin, can we please get your response to the above question posted by Eric Walla's comment to your piece?
I am concerned about your partiality with your forthcoming book on the History of Global Philosophy. I initiality thought you were the right philosopher to undertake the project on Global Philosophy, but doubts have now taken sway.

[Justin]

Jay, this is not my philosophy blog (see here: http://www.jehsmith.com/1/2012/12/this-is-not-a-philosophy-blog.html ). It is my personal blog, and what I say here has no bearing on my scholarship. As I explicitly said above, this is not an argument for a position, but a profession of faith. That's all I'm going to say on this subject for now, but I do intend to write something in the future, when I get around to it, about the way life histories and social backgrounds (including my own, which I will spell out) shape and constrain our choices in matters of faith.

[Picador]

Justin:

A wise man once said: "It seems to me that God is nothing other than the inflation to infinity of our experience of paternal authority... talk of God, as Durkheim rightly discerned, is really just talk of society. Society is God... In certain times and places, such as second-century Alexandria or nineteenth-century Denmark, philosophers have taken an interest in the concept of God, and attempted to defend it by stripping away the naive anthropomorphisms that the vulgar habitually attach to it. God, they argue, cannot be a man, let alone a man with a long white beard; God cannot really have a face, let alone a backside, even if the masses were pleased to hear that on Mt. Sinai Moses caught a glimpse of the latter; God cannot really have any human traits at all. Indeed, God cannot even be described in human language.

The problem, though, is that when these rigorous demands are pushed as far as they can go, and one by one all the features projected from human experience are stripped away, we find that not all that much is left, and the apophatic path leads us to something that looks troublingly like atheism. God is an old man on a throne or he is, quite literally, nothing."

(http://www.jehsmith.com/1/2006/08/mel_and_monothe.html)

I agreed with that man.

This is a beautiful post, and I don't mean to criticize or disagree with with what you say here, but perhaps you could let us know what happened to your understanding of what the word "God" means to take you from that 2006 position to your current stance: "God is not male... God is not a being, and so also neither a monarch nor a father nor a ruler of any sort."

Your own writings seem to provide a pretty solid reason for discarding "God" as a literally meaningless word in English, if a single writer can state in 2006 that it means X and in 2012 that it means not-X.

[Jay]

Why the Bifurcation? The analysis hinges on a bivalent mode of thinking. Perhaps, the Jain epistemogy/logic may give us a more reasonable answer to the question. However, the metaphysical realism of the Jains favour a more robust atheism.

[Elatia Harris]

A beautiful essay, Justin. Thank you!

[Mikeb]

What you've done is what many "believers" do: They define the word 'god' in the way they see fit, then claim to 'believe' in it. This is not very impressive.

I'd rather look at the evidence than listen to testimonials.

[Kris]

I liked this essay very much.
There is a detail in the part about sin that i find strange. I am not german myself, but i think the word Abgötterei simply means idolatry.

[Jim]

"I am a Christian because I affirm the core message of the Gospels, which, I take it, is that God is love, and that therefore a life that aspires to love of all of creation is a life lived in accordance with God's law."

I like this formulation, and I'm with you on the proposition that Christian faith just is the mission to love all of creation. I guess my reason for not being Christian is that I'm not sold on this ideal of indiscriminate love. The love that matters is selective in its objects. It's about celebrating the things that speak to your soul. I don't love the insurance forms or the Mel Gibson movies, and you shouldn't either.

[Taylor]

out of sheer curiosity, and therefore, no harm intended: your assertion that you 'affirm the core message of the Gospels, which... is that God is love, and that therefore a life that aspires to love of all of creation' is discordant with augustine's doctrines of war. would you then argue that his was a misinterpretation of the gospels?

[oliver broudy]

There are those among us who feel as you do, and yet do not feel the need to formalize and organize these feelings by placing them under God's rubric. So the question is: why do that? Simply to believe what one already believes more forcefully? To enhance and organize one's priorities in life? To assert something warm and glowing against the darkness? Or is it more the exercise in self-diminishment that comes with acknowledging membership in a group?

I've been wrestling with such questions for a while, now. Mostly unsuccessfully. Thanks, anyway, for a very fine essay.

[Pataphysicsofsimulacra.wordpress.com]

Crucifixion & resurrection as a devine anarchism?

I too don't fully understand the crucifixion. But the other day I "heard" a strange sound from the Gospels: Jesus promotes the authority of the Sanhedrin in Mt 5:22, but then later is sentenced by the Sanhedrin, who gets Pilate to crucify him. But then this sentence is reversed by God when God resurrects him.

There seems to me to be some kind of really anarchistic process going on here. What kind of process I don't know.

I also "hear" Jesus saying that a kingdom fighting itself cannot stand. Is God revolting against his own world of judgement? I have to think about this …

(I referenced to your wonderful confession on my blog.)

[Rambam]

"The heresies we should fear are those which can be confused with orthodoxy"

[Victor]

"Quit joking around. I can't be a Buddhist. (I could pretend, I suppose, like many Westerners have, though they usually get tired of doing so before long.) "

I've met hundreds of western Buddhists, many of whom have been practicing for decades. You'd think that by this point they'd have woken up and stopped pretending.

Sarcasm aside, (it won't do to mince words) it would seem to be an astounding hypocrisy to write so much about universal love, attack puffed up atheists who deride faith they do not understand, and then summarily dismiss the different faith of hundreds of thousands of people.

Of course I am taking your statement at face value. If this is a joke then it's an ugly one, and can be entertained all too seriously.

[Neil]

Well, I'm a radical atheist, largely because I've read enough hunter gatherer ethnography and paleoanthropology to know the persistence of a neuro-cultural survival tool when I see one.

But I enjoyed reading this post very, very much indeed, and I've been quoting it on facebook.

[Thomas 'Mash Herbert]

The thread and definition of love that runs through the entire Bible is the condescending of the monarch to an anarchist creation.

You can see this narrative right from the point of clothing Adam and Eve right after their rebellion, the particular continuous love for Israel despite their continuous rebellion, and the line of Israel (Jesus) being the very means by which the untainted love (holiness) of God can be entered into without tainting it.

The love that envelopes creation is God himself. God creates everything not out of his need, but out of his want for creation to experience God himself "love". But this love is defined, it is the love of the relationship between the members of the trinity (which is necessary for relational love to exist at all) and love directed towards his creation, and commanded to be mirrored from creation towards creation and ultimately towards God.

As you are aware the Biblical narrative portrays that this creation though created good rebelled, and thus had to be separated from God. But the very point of Christianity is to echo (1 Peter 3:18) that God despite rebellion makes the means by which this rebel creation can be brought back under the kingship of God, this is love because it is infinite condescension, service, grace.

Jesus, who the whole of creation was made through, became part of his creation, stripped of his glory, was killed by his creation for his creation to be brought back under the kingship of God.

So God is love as you say, but the point is not to strive for the love itself, but for the very source. And the model and framework of life in creation is the very same, admitting being part of creation, and demonstrating the very same condescension, service and grace towards creation: others and animals.

Love then is God himself; but within the Biblical framework can only be truly be entered into if one comes under the monarchist rule of God by admitting being a rebel and needing the condescension of Jesus, and God's work at the cross.

Anything else usurps love itself.

[Gh]

Justin, please elaborate on your dismissal of Buddhism as it's the most problematic part of an otherwise great essay. We're not joking around here.

[MikeS]

Amen to this! You have largely reflected my own beliefs. And the thing about picking and choosing? Delve into historical biblical scholarship and I think you'll find that the part that you have chosen is the authentic message of Jesus (and liberal-minded Judaism), while the cult of death is a later creation.

[Michael B.]

I really enjoyed and related to a lot of this, even when I had philosophical or theological nitpicks (but what fun would it be if I didn't?).

Since Justin doesn't seem inclined to responding to the questions about Buddhism, I'll respond with why I'm not Buddhist.

First of all, as I think Justin was alluding to, there's a lot more to traditional Buddhism than the Budd Lite that seems so popular in the West these days, which seems to be the easy and therapeutic parts of the tradition with all of the anachronistic, challenging, and difficult parts trimmed out like so much fat.

In that form, it seems to be sort of a generic spiritual Band-Aid slapped to cover the spiritual deficiencies of secular humanist atheism. That's really funny, because atheist humanism and Buddhism are pretty incompatible at a fundamental level. Humanism centers around the lives and interactions of human selves, the very selves that Buddhism rejects the existence of!

I ended up going back to identifying as Christian after lots of flirtation with various American Indian myths and neopaganism and UU and whatnot largely because in all of that I realized that faith isn't a shiny thing that you decide to either wear or not wear. It's something that seeps into you from your surroundings from a very early age and continues apace throughout your life. I was raised by two doubting but usually churchgoing parents, and my entire extended family falls basically into the same category. My entire vocabulary of faith is, while informed by as much multicultural exploration as I could cram into my head, largely that of Christianity. In my attempts to explore other traditions, it became apparent that I was bringing that latent framework with me wherever I went. So instead of running from it, I tried to figure out if there was a place within Christianity to be carved out where I could honestly and faithfully confess all my doubts and disagreements and quibbles and problems with it. I found one, and so here I stay.

[RHH]

You speak of "love of God", but I think you really mean "love of love" and are almost arbitrarily certain philosophies within Christianity as the framework to express it. Why do you need a framework to justify love? Why not just speak of love, and avoid all the misconceptions that come from attributing it to a god?

As Carl Sagan suggested, "..my proposal is that we call .. love "love" and not call [it] God, which has, while an enormous number of other meanings, not exactly [that] meaning."

[Jay chetram]

Michael B. Your response to Justin's hasty and unphilosophical dismissive attitude towards Western Buddhist is hardly a substitute. Moreover, Justin's theological view of love hardly formed the normative basis in Western Civilization. Perhaps, the East has a more sympathetic ear for Justin's view of Christianity. I am not sure traditional Christianity has the conceptual basis to support Justin's view of Christianity.

[Jay chetram]

In the name of Christianity, King Leopold of Belgium has massacred 10 million Congolese. Where is the Christian love of creation? Perhaps, the King's action is the practical result of the basic theological presuppositions of his Christian Love? The "nihilism" you have suggested in one of your response hasn't thus far demonstrated in Buddhism. Buddhism never had a King Leopold, thank Goodness.
Cheers!

[Michael B.]

Jay, this is no basis for a longer discussion as it's based in narrow understandings of both Buddhism and Christianity, but I'll address your immediate questions. King Leopold did not exploit the Congo in the name of Christianity, he did it in the name of personal wealth and exploitation. It is only very recent Christian sects such as the American Evangelical movement that promotes such ideas as that Christians who are truly "born again" stop sinning. The entire Reformation centered around the nature of Christians who commit evil. Naming a litany of evils done by Christians, even by the Church itself, does not present anything terribly new into non-Evangelical Christianity, as the subject has been long and intensely discussed even in the most orthodox realms.

As to Buddhism not having a King Leopold, this is true in so far as no Buddhist regent has invaded the Congo and induced a slavery state, but at anything beyond the strictest reading of that statement it is false. There are more examples, but the easiest one that comes to mind is the 19th century kingdom of Siam, which was thoroughly Buddhist and also imminently repressive of the ethnic groups it subjugated. (The forced migration of the Lao is but one example.)

As to this: "Moreover, Justin's theological view of love hardly formed the normative basis in Western Civilization." I can only call this an unbelievably lazy and stupid reading of Justin's post. Justin is not defending "Western Civilization." Justin is making a confession of faith. The complex development of the tenants of the church, the schisms within that church, the mystics and aescetics who withdrew from the stately life in the West, the clerics who used the church for political domination, the regents who used Christian faith to justify acts of material exploitation, and the feuding twins of the Enlightenment and the Reformation are not at all the subject of Justin's post. The question of how one interprets questions of inner faith and how one expresses that in conversation are not predicated on the Spanish Inquisition or the Crusades, for Pete's sake.

Finally, "I am not sure traditional Christianity has the conceptual basis to support Justin's view of Christianity." This is more of a sign of your limited understanding of the broad traditions that Christianity holds, not of a failure of that tradition or Justin's estrangement. Unlike my previous paragraph, this is no criticism of you -- I don't demand that everyone understands the obscure theological debates that fussed over minutia for 2000 years -- but just because your understanding is limited doesn't mean such bases don't exist.

[Jay Chetram]

Michael B. Thank you for the response and clarification, although, you could have done so without the Ad-Hominem fallacies. You also seem to have assumed that you have the privilage voice concerning both Buddhism and Christianity--maybe? first let me be clear, I highly appreciate and sympathetic Justin's "inner faith and confession". I find it admirable. My compliments also goes to your interpretation of Christianity, I only wish both yours and Justin's would have formed the standard interpretation of the tradition. My observation (which could very well be erroneous,)tells me otherwise. The religion as practiced most of its History has made "Imperialistic Demands." The great Contempletives, Mystics and Ascetics of Christianity have always remained on the fringe and perhaps, never formed the orthodxy.

In terms of Buddhism, I do not think Justin was dismissive of the Buddhist Religious and Philosophical tradition. In fact, Justin has made a subtle and vague complitment in his reference to Buddhism. However, I think Justin has made a hasty dismissal to Western Buddhist. He seems to have suggested according to his beautiful piece that Western Buddhist do not have full commitment to the tradition, and, somehow disingenuous, this is a hasty generalization on his part. I know a number of Neuro-Phenomenologist who are fully and critically committed to Buddhist presuppositions.

Moreover, your very first reference to Buddhist notion of Self/No-self is not reflective. I suggest you read Mark Siderits's "Buddhism as Philosophy" to acquire a more reflective understanding of the debate.

Finally, I highly commend Justin for his inititive to Engage with Classical Indian Philosophy (Hindu, Buddhist and Jain forms.)I think Justin has a good insight into the modes of argumentation in Classical Indian Epistemology, Logic and Philosophy of Grammar.

[Jay Chetram]

Sorry for some of the Typos I have made in the above posting. I have used my iPhone, not ideal for typing.

[Kate Donohue]

Hello,

This is the first piece of yours I have read but I'll be seeking out more. For a long time I did not know what to do with the image of the crucifixion. So I just put it off to the side. A few years ago, I heard a homily that I found really helpful. A priest recounted a conversation where a student asked him why is it important that Jesus be human and divine. The priest answered because if Jesus is divine then we can look at Jesus on the cross and be reminded that we are more than the world tells us we are. I'm not interested in the weird quid pro quo of Jesus had to die so we could go on to eternal life. But I do believe fervently that the world labels so much that is sacred as disposable. And I believe that we should look at the faces of the persecuted and disenfranchised and see God.

Thanks for a beautiful essay.

-Kate

[Jonathan Blanchard]

My understanding of the crucifixion has been deepened more recently by the realization that perhaps Jesus wasn't covering our sins before God, who has always been loving and forgiving, but turning the tables on a hierarchy of evil beings that subsist on wrongdoing. He defeated the fallen angels by accepting their full punishment and still rising again, forgiven.

[Jay chetram]

Jonathan, another set of theological mumbo jumbo. I rather not belief in such dogmas.

[Hans van Niekerk]

Thank you for this confession, Justin.

To the animal-loving saints like Francis of Assisi, Seraphim of Sarov, Theodora of Sihla, you can ad another one: St. Isaac the Syrian. Listen to these beautiful words:

"What is a merciful heart? It is a heart on fire for the whole of creation, for humanity, for the birds, for the animals, for demons, and for all that exists. By the recollection of them the eyes of a merciful person pour forth tears in abundance. By the strong and vehement mercy that grips such a person’s heart, and by such great compassion, the heart is humbled and one cannot bear to hear or to see any injury or slight sorrow in any in creation. For this reason, such a person offers up tearful prayer continually even for irrational beasts, for the enemies of the truth, and for those who harm her or him, that they be protected and receive mercy. And in like manner such a person prays for the family of reptiles because of the great compassion that burns without measure in a heart that is in the likeness of God ".

Adapted from Met. Hilarion Alfeyev’s The Spiritual World of Isaac the Syrian

[Beth]

A beautiful and courageous essay. I spent a number of years out of the church, studying Buddhism. I came back to Christianity too, for the same reasons: the truth of the Gospel message contained in the passages you cite, and my own adult understanding that the parts of Christianity that I couldn't accept were not of God, but of human beings wanting power. I continue to be enormously grateful to Buddhism, both for my ongoing contemplative practice and for what it teaches about how to live one's life with integrity and compassion. I'm also Christian because that's my culture, and the liturgy, music, and Eucharist matter to me. The basic truth is contained not only in the Gospels but within the mystical teachings of many religions but is (often) twisted or suppressed by their institutional structures, and political needs and goals.

The fact that God is Love is both the point and the reform to Judaism that Christ was making, and yet we continually try to obscure it. The whole doctrine of atonement is ridiculous, and an unacceptable add-on. If Jesus taught anything related to that, it was that God loves us anyway and unconditionally, in spite of our sins. Thanks for this post.

[Sam Torode]

Terrific-- this is the best thing I've read on faith in a long time.

[Lesley]

Justin, I was struck by your seeing the full scope of possible meaning in the death and resurrection as expressed in the doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement, which I find totally unpalatable for many reasons. But there are other ways of interpreting this, most interestingly in the multidisciplinary work of Rene Girard, which deals with the root of violence in human nature, as well as scapegoating. If you're not familiar with him, I strongly suggest making his acquaintance, perhaps starting with "I See Satan Fall Like Lightning," which is a good introduction/summation of his ideas.

[living fear free]

Thanks for sharing your confession with us. A lot of people might feel and think about God and their faith as you are. We are all different and we don't see things the way others do.

[etseq]

Well, this finally explains your homophobic rants over the last few years - only a theist would invest so much work in some bizarre pseudo-anthropological against gay marriage and then the pen some broadside against Martha Nussbaum about the value of disgust of gay sex (Leon Kass was much better). I guess God is your exemption from the naturalistic fallacy - how convenient.

I just assumed you were some leftist concern troll with the digs about rich white elitist western gays mocking the third world polygamous families and our class bias against poor cousin marriages, etc. I first read you in Counterpunch years ago sneering about Canadian liberals "gloating" about gay marriage but I just chalked it up to Cockburn's weird prolife/ anti-gay phase. You should write for spiked online - you'd fit right in with those former RCP trots turned right wing libertarians.

Enjoy your pomo mysticism