Jane Smiley: My Reply to the Pope's Easter Message (HuffPost)

[marmar]

Jane Smiley


04.10.2007
My Reply to the Pope's Easter Message (7 comments )

The last time I wrote about religion, I got put on an enemies list by someone whose name I don't know. I was the 87th greatest enemy to America! My mother and uncle were worried that I was going to be shot, but my own view was that if I was America's 87th worst enemy, then

America had nothing at all to worry about. The thesis of my offending article was that the mental effort of reconciling all of the contradictory events and statements of Scripture is so confusing to those who believe in the literal truth of the Bible that eventually they simply have to give up trying and let ignorance prevail. This seems logical to me, not incendiary, but incendiary is, of course, in the eye of the beholder. I did not refer to the fact that any translation of the Bible is an interpretation, and in fact, the Bible in English cannot possibly be literally true, since it wasn't originally written in English, but this brings me to my present subject.
As I read various articles defending or attacking religion (they have them all the time in the Guardian), one thing I've noticed is that no distinction is made between faith and religion, when in fact they are not the same thing at all. Faith is a subjective experience of a relationship and a state of mind, while religion is a set of institutionalized forms and doctrines, and religious organizations are often in the business of making money, owning property, and making social policy. Religions depend upon individual professions of faith, but faith remains a private matter, akin to love or any other state of mind.

With these distinctions in mind, I think it is possible to understand how secularists such as myself can find religion off-putting and even dangerous.
...(snip)...

When I am asked by various religious organizations to "respect" them, I always wonder why I should respect them any more or less than any other wealthy and powerful institution. Be wary? Yes. Watch my step so that I don't incur some sort of punishment? Yes. Stay out of the neighborhood so that I might not make some foolish mistake that would lead to me getting hurt? By all means. By the same token, were I to voluntarily engage with this institution, of course I would observe their accepted forms of human courtesy. I would attempt to ascertain them and then abide by them. When I was a child learning the Nicene Creed (thinking it was a poem, not a promise or a declaration) I wore a piece of lace on my head inside the Church because not to do so would be to flout the norms of the group and the place. But I don't understand what the word "respect" means in this context. If the institution does not act in an honorable fashion, if it has a history of cruelty and inhumanity, it may arouse my fear, but not my respect. Most of the religious institutions of our day DO have histories of cruelty and inhumanity, and, in some cases, crime, but they ask me to respect them anyway, because of faith. .....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jane-smiley/my-reply-to-the-popes-ea_b_45505.html

[Wilber_Stool]

1. I had a post deleted the other day for

saying essentially the same thing. Of course, I was a little less tactful.

[Peace Patriot]

2. Well, it's a bit rambling, but she does make some excellent points--especially

as to WHY our Founders were so adamant to keep religion out of government. They were not that far removed from the European/British religious debacle that tore people apart into warring factions of the same religion--so-called Christianity--and a society that had, prior to that, exhibited such ugliness toward the Jews in pogroms and exclusion, and, had before that, engaged in bloody, rapacious "Crusades" all across Europe to Jerusalem. They knew this history. It was very present to them. So they banned it here. Call it secularism. Call it whatever you want. The First Amendment has kept religious warfare from our shores, and has made this great multicultural experiment possible.