It certainly confused many of my friends… The day that I decided that there probably wasn’t a God (and that He probably wasn’t going to shoot down me with lightning) I became completely fascinated with religion. [ad#adsense250]Suddenly with the fear evaporated and some clarity on what I did believe I was just left with all these artifacts. Some of them oddball, some of them profound, but all of them quite interesting. I wondered too why people believed the things they did, why individual denominations seemed to distinguish themselves so much from each other when they (seemingly) had so much in common. I think I was trying to take a sociological approach to religion.
Recently I found someone who had considered this – and many other things – and expressed them much more eloquently than I could muster. Former Bishop of Edinburgh Richard Holloway is one of the most interesting people I’ve ever encountered. Speaking at the Sydney Writers’ Festival earlier this year, here recorded and transcribed by Encounter on Radio National:
There isn’t a real divine broadcaster, there isn’t a real God, so all this revelation that we’ve been receiving, all this talk that we’ve been doing, is us talking to ourselves. But that does not reduce its meaning or value. It’s good talk, it’s powerful talk, it’s meaningful talk. It’s us telling ourselves stories, offering ourselves narratives to try and explain the mystery of our own existence, and if you’re a wise person you’re not going to dismiss that. You’re not going to simply erase and rub out as if it lacks significance, these thousands of years of gathered tradition. You’re going to look at it, you’re going to interrogate it, because it’s telling you about you, it’s telling humanity about itself. It’s a kind of gestalt of the human condition.
It talks about Hell, it talks about the Devil, it talks about sin and temptation. And these are not supernatural realities, these are human experiences. There is a dark continent in each of us that can easily give itself to the dark side, we know that. And so interrogating these texts makes sense. Do not let them die, do not let them fade into the past like lots of other things, because we need them today. These narratives, these metaphors, these troches speak to us about the sorrow and glory of the human condition.
And then there was the idea of Ethical Religiosity that I clumisly proposed. The idea that somehow people should complement their religious beliefs with a modern compassion and decency towards other people. For Holloway the greatest danger seems to be supposing too much about God, having too much certainty and too little doubt, too little modesty. He explains:
[...] I’m a bit loose on God, I’m not an atheist, I can’t confidently say there is no God. But I’m equally allergic to people who claim to know everything about God. And one reason I call myself an agnostic is because I think it’s quite a biblical position, because certainly in the Hebrew scriptures, the greater danger was always idolatry, knowing what God was, than not knowing, which is why they didn’t even like me to use the name of God, to take the name of God in vain.
And finally:
And so given the shifting, kaleidoscopic nature of this human debate that has been going on for centuries and is likely to go on, it seems to me to be immodest to claim too much certainty for the particular notch in the continuum in which you find yourself. And one of the things I find myself doing is pleading for a bit more modesty in the way we debate these issues, a bit more magnanimity towards the people with whom we disagree.
I haven’t even touched on Holloway’s Kaleidoscope (the distinctions he makes between Strong Religion, Weak Religion, After Religion, and Absence of Religion), though it was also a great personal revelation and helped my own understanding of individuals’ relationships to, and consumption of, religion.
Download Richard Holloway’s Shaking The Kaleidoscope
Happy Sunday!
