faith sucks, belief rules

I’ve been thinking about the concept of faith a lot lately. This is due to my recent Bart Ehrman kick. Erhman is a biblical scholar focussed on the New Testament who specializes in textual criticism, which is the art of figuring out how much of the original ancient texts are reflected in the versions we have now. I never thought about this, but back in the days of hand copying mistakes were common, and some copyists would also purposely change texts.  This means we don’t truly know exactly what was written by Plato or Confucius or, as Ehrman points out in books like Misquoting Jesus, the authors of the Christian bible.

Misquoting Jesus is a fascinating book that describes the attempts to figure out what parts of the New Testament are authentic. At times it reads like a detective novel, as he explains how textual critics compare writing styles and check other sources to figure out what is original and what was added later. Sometimes things were added long after the original documents were created - that “let he without sin cast the first stone” story is an example of that. Sometimes words were miscopied by barely literate copyists. Sometimes minor changes were made to, for example, deemphasize the role of women in the Christian religion or to deride the beliefs of competing Christian groups like the Gnostics (an interesting group who I learned about in another Ehrman book, The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot. They believed that the God of the Jews was a crazy asshole and that there is another, better, higher God to worship).

Ehrman was brought up an evangelical Christian who considered the Bible the literal word of God, but he eventually concluded the book was very much man made, and that its authors each had their own points to make. He points out that Jesus is portrayed quite differently in each gospel; he says we must respect the authors by reading each story on its own, rather than doing a Jesus Christ Superstar-style mashup.

Misquoting Jesus made me wonder if Ehrman was still a Christian after coming to understand what a mish masch the New Testament is. And in the book I’m reading now, God’s Problem, I learned that Ehrman is, in fact, an agnostic. But not, apparently, because of the conclusions that lead him to write Misquoting Jesus.

Erman begins God’s Problem by saying that he has “lost his faith,” and I found that an interesting statement. He makes it sound as though he lost an appendage, like his hand, and he still misses it. And as I thought about it I realized that while he had faith, when I believed in God as a child, I only had belief. Which is a very different thing.

I believed in the existence of God when I was young. I also believed in the existence of Santa Claus. In both cases my belief was based on the information I had been given. My parents, who I considered a reliable source, told me there was a Santa Claus. They would take on any questions I had; when I asked how he could get down our skinny chimney, they would say they left the back door open for him.

But then I discovered that not everyone believed in Santa Claus, I found the illogic of the Santa myth increasingly difficult to overlook. I expressed my doubts to my parents and they eventually admitted there was no Santa Claus.

My path with God was very similar. I believed there was an all powerful supernatural being who had created everything and was in charge of the world. I used to talk to him, either asking him for a better life or, when I was in a more charitable frame of mind, asking him to end suffering throughout the world.

By the time I was in Junior High, I discovered that not everyone believed in God, and just knowing that made me think about whether the whole God thing made sense. I concluded that it did not. I did ask the minister questions, but was unsatisfied with the answers.

Just as with Santa, I had a belief, I became more intellectually sophisticated, analyzed my belief and found it wanting, and decided to believe something different.

Erman became an agnostic not because the evidence for the existence of a savior was insufficient, but because he ultimately found he could not reconcile his faith in an all-powerful, all-loving God with the horrors of the world, both man-made horrors like war and natural horrors like disease and disaster.

I couldn’t help wonder though, why just the fact that the texts upon which his beliefs were based were an inaccurately copied set of documents written and chosen to fortify one of many competing views of Jesus.

And I realized it all came down to faith. Because faith is not contingent on anything. Once you have faith, you don’t need proof. Proof is irrelevant. Ehrman could see that the New Testament was not the literal word of God but still believed in God and Jesus, because that’s what faith is; believing regardless of everything.

Ehrman’s problem was he had faith in a very specific God. I believed in God as a child, but I wasn’t that clear on what he did. I didn’t really think about the issues of being loving and all powerful yet allowing suffering, because I was not a sophisticated nine-year-old. By the time I could think about these things, I was done with God.

God’s Problem is a book about how the bible deals with suffering, and he apparently found nothing in it that fit with his faith. His faith wasn’t, seemingly, in the God that tortured Job to win a bet with Satan, killing his family in the process, or the God who punished children for the sins of their parents. I still don’t understand why it  took him so long to reach that point, but faith is a powerful thing.

Beliefs can be changed with new evidence; faith cannot be. Yet, insisting on proof for what you believe is considered somehow petty and mean.  If you don’t believe in God, or ghosts, or psychics,  or astrology, many people will see you as a cynic with no sense of childlike wonder, as though unquestioning belief is far more admirable than trying to really understand the world through careful study and a rational exploration of factual evidence. Instead, we admire what Stephen Colbert calls “truthiness”; believing in something there is no proof for because you feel it in your gut.

People love the famous editorial in which a newspaper man tells a little girl that yes, there is a Santa Claus, even if there’s no proof, a piece wonderfully rewritten by Greta Christina as No Virginia, There is No Santa Claus, a paean to rational thought I found through a lovely post on the allure of irrational belief by my friend Tim Martin.

I don’t have faith. I don’t believe I have ever had faith. I have believed wrongly, but only because I was lacking information, or was trusting the wrong sources, or was too lazy to really consider all sides of an issue. But I can’t recall ever having blind faith in anything; I remain open to information refuting what I believe, and the model of the world I keep in my head is still constantly changing as new information arrives.

Certainly I have opinions I will not release. For example, I believe the world should devote more resources to feeding those who starve than to building weapons. This is not based on fact. Starvation is not inherently wrong, it is a natural part of nature. But I don’t think you could really talk me out of this belief - you can’t use facts to persuade me I shouldn’t worry about people starving to death. Even then, you could, if you martialed your facts, possibly persuade me that starvation is inherently unsolvable, and that attempts to feed the world would ultimately just make things worse. I haven’t heard such an argument, but I feel certain someone out there is ready to make it. And if a good case could be made, I would adjust my beliefs accordingly.

Faith is not as easy to adjust. It isn’t based on proof, so it cannot be disproved. Asking for proof is not faith, and in fact, those with faith would say wanting proof demeans faith. As Kris Kringle explains in Miracle on 34th Street, "Faith is believing when common sense tells you not to."
 
Thomas Paine once wrote that it would make no sense for God to give man the ability to reason and then insist that he not use that gift. It’s exactly the sort of reasonable statement that faith easily discounts.

While faith is portrayed as beautiful, it actually an example of man at his most primitive, the confused cave man fearfully offering chickens to unseen spirits because he just doesn’t know any better. For centuries, man has been creating something beyond faith, something much, much better, based on rational thought and experimentation. I believe that is a good thing. But I have no faith in anything.

why hyperbole is no more okay on the left than on the right

Lately, many of my Facebook friends have been posting a link to the provocatively titled essay in Jezebel, Why Rick Santorum Would Have Killed My Daughter.  It's a very interesting article, and I'd recommend reading it before you continue reading my response.

To boil it down, it is author Sarah Fister Gale's telling of how a pre-natal test saved her unborn daughter's life, and includes a picture of a very cute little girl.  Gale says  the test, called amniocentesis, saved her unborn daughter's life. She goes on to say, "If Rick Santorum had his way, I wouldn't have been able to get that test, and she most likely would have died."

As I read the article I kept expecting her to offer a quote from Santorum, or a link, or something, but that never happened.  It sounded like she was saying he wanted to outlaw amniocentesis, but Gale doesn't ever actually state what his position is.  This left me dissatisfied, so I looked at the comments to see what others had to say

One woman certainly had felt the same way.  I think her name was Barbara, although since I can't find any way to see any of the older comments I can't find what she said now.  But I remember she started by asking Gale to cite Santorum's statements, and then apparently just went off and googled his comments.

What Santorum had said was, without a doubt, moronic.  He feels, like a lot of idiot religious right wingers, that businesses affiliated with religious organizations should be allowed to customize the insurance they offer to deny approval for any procedures they might object to, such as contraception. One procedure he felt they should be able to disallow was amniocentesis, because he says it leads to abortion.  In other words, parents discover their child could be born disabled and have an abortion.

This is, of course, pretty stupid.  It's like saying we shouldn't test for cancer because it increases suicides.  The goal of medical tests is to give information, not to influence behavior.  And as another comment noted, if we allow all religions to determine what insurance can offer, Jehovah Witnesses could deny coverage for blood transfusions, which they don't believe in, and Christian Scientists could disallow everything.

So yes, Santorum is an evil idiot.  But would he have killed Gale's baby?

First off, Gale doesn't say if she got her insurance through a religious organization, so we don't know if Santorum's ideas would have affected her personally.  She does say she couldn't have afforded the test without insurance, so if her insurance had denied the test it's fair to say the child might have died.

But Santorum has not actually proposed to make amniocentesis illegal, although he may want to. And so for me, the whole "Santorum would have killed my daughter" thing doesn't totally fly.

Of course, you can make an argument that really, his policies would wind up killing some kids.  But the problem is, you can make an argument for all sorts of things.

For example, "death panels."  You may remember when idiot queen Sarah Palin said that Obamacare would lead to Death Panels that would decide who lives and who died.  It was a nonsensical thing to say, of course, since it implied that somehow we didn't already have insurance companies deciding whether to provide care to keep people alive or refuse that care.  She was describing something that happens all the time as though it was something that would be ushered in through health care reform.

But while it was misleading, it wasn't exactly untrue.  There would be people deciding whether or not to provide life-saving care.  The fact that it already is that way doesn't change the fact that it would still be that way under Obamacare and thus there would be, after a fashion, death panels.

In other words, it's not the facts so much as the implication that was untrue.

And that's how I feel about Gale's article.  You can make an argument that yes, Santorum would have killed her daughter, but it's a weak argument.  It's so weak that she didn't offer a single quote from Santorum, or link to anything he's said, because she knew the piece would be less powerful if she introduced the messiness of his actual positions over the clarity of his implied positions.

But why not call Santorum a killer?  Won't that work as propaganda, and save us from a Santorum presidency?  "Death panels" was, after all, a very effective way to undermine health care reform.

And yes, it will work, with some people.  Many  will unquestioningly accept that Santorum must want to outlaw medical procedures.  In fact, this approach is probably most effective with Santorum supporters, because they're all idiots to begin with (do I have any evidence to support that?  Just listen to five minutes of Santorum and decide if anyone who was not an idiot could possibly vote for the guy).

In other words, it will work on people who don't question, who don't ask for proof.  But for those who want more than blanket, unsupported statements, this sort of hyperbole simply makes us suspicious of everything someone says.  If you say 99 true things and tell one lie, many people will dismiss those 99 true things, because you are a liar.

Thus, beyond the morality of hurling charges of dubious merit at one's opponents, there is the risk that an important message can get lost because of a stupid, unnecessary exaggeration.  Santorum can be shown to be so horrible on so many levels, there is no need to accuse him of theoretical homicide just to make a point.