Careful Not To Confuse Fact And Faith
In airports around the country are displays from religious groups that offer help for personal, family and community problems. In one display at the Spokane airport a picture board reads: IS ANYONE OUT THERE? Pamphlets jut out of the side of the questions: Indeed, Someone is out there, that Someone is God, and He is a good Father if we will just let Him help.
For years I’ve looked at these kinds of displays, read the pamphlets, wondered over the deepening rift between prosletyzing fundamentalists (those fundamentalists for whom their creed is the superior one and no fear or hate tactic is off limits if it is a means to push their political or religious agenda) and the more tolerant American mainstream.
Recently, fogged in at the airport, I contemplated the picture board again. Isn’t the rift between the prosletyzing fundamentalists and the majority mainstream very much about whether Anyone, a Divine Person, is actually out there?
Picture a town that sits in a river valley among pine and maple trees. There has been a great deal of material wealth in the town for almost two centuries but an emptiness has grown within the spirit of the people. Over the two centuries, most of these people explored not only their traditional religion, but other religions as well. They learned in their searching that the core teachings of each religion were the same no matter where the religion came from. The striving of these searchers was to make peace between the religions, both in culture and the self.
A smaller group filled their spiritual yearnings in a different way. On a mountaintop near the town they rediscovered a Book and a Writer. The Writer was one of the most skilled and profound who ever lived. The Book was one of the most advanced, wise and complex ever written. The discoverers returned to the the town in great enthusiasm, and said nearly anything that came to their minds of a moral nature without much fear because they could find a reference, even if a one line reference, in the Book. When they couldn’t find that, they’d say, “But the Writer meant that anyway. He’s inspiring me right now as I speak.”
The group that found the book and the writer gained utter spiritual security and tried to force it on everyone else. The other group believed in the truth of insecurity. The group found the book cried, “Believe in Him, and ye shall be saved. Don’t do so, and you’ll be damned.” The other group said what Helen Keller once said, “Utter security is a s superstition. It does not exist in Nature.”
“My brother has become a born again Christian,” a client recently told me. “I can’t talk to him.”
“My parents take the bible literally,” a friend told me. “We can hardly get along.”
“My spouse became a fundamentalist. Our marriage looks like it’s over.”
Everyone reading this, whether you are a prosletyzing fundamentalist or a spiritual wanderer, has probably experienced the end of communication when one person, who claims to have God at his or her fingertips, talks about something of importance with another person, who believes that God is too vast for exact naming. We can expect more and more disconnection between the tolerant and literalist religious forces as the millenium changes. And we can expect increasing danger as power struggle between the two groups cuts people off from people.
What can we do? There is no simple answer. But I think the first thing we must do is realize that there is a group of people who believe at some pre-cognitive level that God is a Person, Male, and not at all a “free” thinker. These people have met a God for whom diversity is okay, but only up to a point; in other words, he only likes a few of his own creations. The rest of his creations will not go to heaven — they are like children a father disinherits unless they go into his business.
The believers in this group have fallen into this spiritual trap because they have confused faith and fact. They’ve made God and the Bible into facts, an act which utterly diminishes the wisdom and credibility of their beliefs to anyone who understands that belief is most challenging, and therefore most human, when it is a struggle with faith. Once something becomes a named fact, the long-term spiritual struggle has already begun its self-destruction.
Most Christians are not these people. Even many fundamentalists are not this kind of fundamentalist. But this group exists, and it is growing. How does one talk to these people? How do these people talk to the rest of the world? How do you talk to these people?
What do you think about these issues? Please write me. Let’s keep talking.
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The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Michael Gurian The Spokesman-Review