Mandorla

Random Thoughts

Fri, 30 Jan 2009 22:36:10 GMT

I think sometimes I lack the God Gene. Then I realize that I can't quite let go of the idea of some sort of deity.

Most days polytheism seems more logical than monotheism. Like Edana said, the world is so screwed up it has to be run by a committee.

I'm not comfortable trying to assign some personality to the divine. It just is, and I am part of it, in my brain. Neither good nor evil, just like life.

And that has been your periodic randomosity.

Article

Sun, 28 Dec 2008 23:06:33 GMT

As an Atheist, I truly believe Africa needs God

Tell me your thoughts and opinions. Discussion would be awesome too.

I'm still processing it.

As an atheist, I truly believe Africa needs God
Missionaries, not aid money, are the solution to Africa's biggest problem - the crushing passivity of the people's mindsetMatthew Parris
Before Christmas I returned, after 45 years, to the country that as a boy I knew as Nyasaland. Today it's Malawi, and The Times Christmas Appeal includes a small British charity working there. Pump Aid helps rural communities to install a simple pump, letting people keep their village wells sealed and clean. I went to see this work.

It inspired me, renewing my flagging faith in development charities. But travelling in Malawi refreshed another belief, too: one I've been trying to banish all my life, but an observation I've been unable to avoid since my African childhood. It confounds my ideological beliefs, stubbornly refuses to fit my world view, and has embarrassed my growing belief that there is no God.

Now a confirmed atheist, I've become convinced of the enormous contribution that Christian evangelism makes in Africa: sharply distinct from the work of secular NGOs, government projects and international aid efforts. These alone will not do. Education and training alone will not do. In Africa Christianity changes people's hearts. It brings a spiritual transformation. The rebirth is real. The change is good.

I used to avoid this truth by applauding - as you can - the practical work of mission churches in Africa. It's a pity, I would say, that salvation is part of the package, but Christians black and white, working in Africa, do heal the sick, do teach people to read and write; and only the severest kind of secularist could see a mission hospital or school and say the world would be better without it. I would allow that if faith was needed to motivate missionaries to help, then, fine: but what counted was the help, not the faith.

Background
British missionaries plead guilty to sedition in Gambia
Soulgasms of the Christian Right
Have Pentecostalism, will travel
PROFILE: warlord who kills in name of Christ
But this doesn't fit the facts. Faith does more than support the missionary; it is also transferred to his flock. This is the effect that matters so immensely, and which I cannot help observing.

First, then, the observation. We had friends who were missionaries, and as a child I stayed often with them; I also stayed, alone with my little brother, in a traditional rural African village. In the city we had working for us Africans who had converted and were strong believers. The Christians were always different. Far from having cowed or confined its converts, their faith appeared to have liberated and relaxed them. There was a liveliness, a curiosity, an engagement with the world - a directness in their dealings with others - that seemed to be missing in traditional African life. They stood tall.

At 24, travelling by land across the continent reinforced this impression. From Algiers to Niger, Nigeria, Cameroon and the Central African Republic, then right through the Congo to Rwanda, Tanzania and Kenya, four student friends and I drove our old Land Rover to Nairobi.

We slept under the stars, so it was important as we reached the more populated and lawless parts of the sub-Sahara that every day we find somewhere safe by nightfall. Often near a mission.

Whenever we entered a territory worked by missionaries, we had to acknowledge that something changed in the faces of the people we passed and spoke to: something in their eyes, the way they approached you direct, man-to-man, without looking down or away. They had not become more deferential towards strangers - in some ways less so - but more open.

This time in Malawi it was the same. I met no missionaries. You do not encounter missionaries in the lobbies of expensive hotels discussing development strategy documents, as you do with the big NGOs. But instead I noticed that a handful of the most impressive African members of the Pump Aid team (largely from Zimbabwe) were, privately, strong Christians. “Privately” because the charity is entirely secular and I never heard any of its team so much as mention religion while working in the villages. But I picked up the Christian references in our conversations. One, I saw, was studying a devotional textbook in the car. One, on Sunday, went off to church at dawn for a two-hour service.

It would suit me to believe that their honesty, diligence and optimism in their work was unconnected with personal faith. Their work was secular, but surely affected by what they were. What they were was, in turn, influenced by a conception of man's place in the Universe that Christianity had taught.

There's long been a fashion among Western academic sociologists for placing tribal value systems within a ring fence, beyond critiques founded in our own culture: “theirs” and therefore best for “them”; authentic and of intrinsically equal worth to ours.

I don't follow this. I observe that tribal belief is no more peaceable than ours; and that it suppresses individuality. People think collectively; first in terms of the community, extended family and tribe. This rural-traditional mindset feeds into the “big man” and gangster politics of the African city: the exaggerated respect for a swaggering leader, and the (literal) inability to understand the whole idea of loyal opposition.

Anxiety - fear of evil spirits, of ancestors, of nature and the wild, of a tribal hierarchy, of quite everyday things - strikes deep into the whole structure of rural African thought. Every man has his place and, call it fear or respect, a great weight grinds down the individual spirit, stunting curiosity. People won't take the initiative, won't take things into their own hands or on their own shoulders.

How can I, as someone with a foot in both camps, explain? When the philosophical tourist moves from one world view to another he finds - at the very moment of passing into the new - that he loses the language to describe the landscape to the old. But let me try an example: the answer given by Sir Edmund Hillary to the question: Why climb the mountain? “Because it's there,” he said.

To the rural African mind, this is an explanation of why one would not climb the mountain. It's... well, there. Just there. Why interfere? Nothing to be done about it, or with it. Hillary's further explanation - that nobody else had climbed it - would stand as a second reason for passivity.

Christianity, post-Reformation and post-Luther, with its teaching of a direct, personal, two-way link between the individual and God, unmediated by the collective, and unsubordinate to any other human being, smashes straight through the philosphical/spiritual framework I've just described. It offers something to hold on to to those anxious to cast off a crushing tribal groupthink. That is why and how it liberates.

Those who want Africa to walk tall amid 21st-century global competition must not kid themselves that providing the material means or even the knowhow that accompanies what we call development will make the change. A whole belief system must first be supplanted.

And I'm afraid it has to be supplanted by another. Removing Christian evangelism from the African equation may leave the continent at the mercy of a malign fusion of Nike, the witch doctor, the mobile phone and the machete.

Tue, 16 Sep 2008 19:19:20 GMT

Anybody have any tips about how to get a well-meaning friend to stop trying to convert me? I know I can't change her fanaticism and we just plain don't bring up evolution any more, but I'd really like to stop being pressured to go to church. I mean, I completely adore her. This is the woman who came and took the soup off the stove when I took Ambien instead of a painkiller. I'm ready to beat my head against a WALL. I've tried explaining that this wasn't a light decision, and I'm happier now that I've stopped trying to find "the answer." It's just ARGH!

Guilt

Thu, 31 Jul 2008 02:53:56 GMT

My supervisor's mother died today. I was telling C at work about a book about raising your children without religion.

I feel somewhat guilty for part of me that feels I'm wanting to deprive people of the comfort they take in their religion, especially concerning death.

I'm just glad Y wasn't here to hear that particular.

It just sank in.

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 15:10:17 GMT

This is exactly what I find deplorable about organized religion. They have to have some sort of personal reward for doing the right thing. They do charity for points into heaven, they avoid murder so they don't go to hell.

I think I may be ill.

Words in Red

Sun, 24 Feb 2008 15:03:42 GMT

I admit, I'm a country fan. Some of the songs just touch on heart-strings and I can't deny the affection. Especially among those I love are Brooks and Dunn. Those men know how to work a song like nobody else.

I do love their song "Believe".
Old man Wrigley lived in that white house
Down the street where i grew up
Momma used to send me over with things
We struck a freindship up
I spent a few long summers out on his old porch swing

Says he was in the war when in the navy
Lost his wife, lost his baby
Broke down and asked him one time
How ya keep from going crazy
He said I'll see my wife and son in just a little while
I asked him what he meant
He looked at me and smiled, said

(Chorus)
I raise my hands, bow my head
I'm finding more and more truth in the words written in red
They tell me that there's more to life than just what i can see
Oh i believe

Few years later i was off at college
Talkin' to mom on the phone one night
Getting all caught up on the gossip
The ins and outs of the small town life
She said oh by the way son, old man Wrigley's died.

Later on that night, i laid there thinkin' back
Thought 'bout a couple long-lost summers
I didn't know whether to cry or laugh
If there was ever anybody desevred a ticket to the other side
It'd be that sweet old man who looked me in the eye, said

(Chorus)
I raise my hands, bow my head
I'm finding more and more truth in the words written in red
They tell me that there's more to life than just what i can see

I can't quote the book
The chapter or the verse
You can't tell me it all ends
In a slow ride in a hearse
You know I'm more and more convinced
The longer that i live
Yeah, this can't be
No, this can't be
No, this can't be all there is

(Chorus)
When I raise my hands, bow my head
I'm finding more and more truth in the words written in red
They tell me that there's more to life than just what i can see
I believe
Oh, I
I believe
I believe
I believe
I believe
I believe

The premise of the song being that the belief in an afterlife must be true. The verse that gets me is this one:

The longer that I live
Yeah, this can't be
No, this can't be
No, this can't be all there is.

What the hell do you mean, "all" there is? Can you look at this big beautiful world, a tiny speck in this vast and beautiful universe, and still call it "all?"

That's freakin' insulting to the very premise of life. How can you demean all of the universe by using such a limiting word? Man, I love you, love your music, hey, I even like that song, but....

Your short-sightedness hurts me.

More on the Crisis of Faith

Sat, 15 Dec 2007 18:29:34 GMT

I tihnk what got me the most was seeing that stupid comment "there are no atheists in foxholes." And I remembered, when I was crouched, powerless in that bunker in Kuwait, waiting to get bombed and die horribly, I didn't pray, I didn't think about god. My thoughts were 100% on those people guiding the patriot missiles that would save my life.

Crisis

Fri, 09 Nov 2007 17:07:13 GMT

I think I'm in the midst of a crisis of faith. Even admitting that out loud hurts me in a way I can't adequately describe. After reading Greta Christina's weblog, I find more and more sense in atheism. I like logic in my world, and the way the world fits together is logical. While I'm not quite ready to totally give up on faith, I think pantheism is definitely more me than anything else. The god concept taught by most world religions is not one I'd ever want to exist. The childish, selfish, contradictory god portrayed by these groups seems far more likely to take pleasure in human torment than to be benevolent.

The idea of universal interconnectedness feels right to me, feels right and makes sense. If you break things down to a cellular, molecular, atomic and subatomic level, it is all connected. And I find myself less in crisis. I find myself connecting the universal dots, following things to their logical conclusions. And I'm calm again.

Heh.

Sun, 07 Jan 2007 16:58:23 GMT

In the process of cleaning the apartment, I've made note that my text books on anatomy, medical ethics, and chemistry are on the bottom shelf of the stand I use as an altar.

Does this say anything about me?

Sun, 26 Nov 2006 06:06:01 GMT

Guide me to the path to find my perfect balance.

Introduction.

Sat, 09 Sep 2006 16:54:26 GMT

Most people on the internet know me as Shai. For quite a few years, I've been rather drifting as far as my faith is concerned. I feel it deeply, but now as I discover a local group of like-minded souls, I feel the need to explore myself and my faith more.

I want to grow.

I want to learn.

I want to be part of a group.