Lent: the chicken or the egg

Another thing we talked about in that Jane Austen class is the impossibility in our era of being sincere.  If you're aware of being sincere, you automatically aren't; and if you are truly being what once would have been called "sincere," it has a tendency in our postmodern world to come across as naïveté, a lack of understanding of what reality is like.  It seems sweet and maybe a little bit stupid.
 
Which is how I feel about that last post.  I don't think sincerity works too well when talking about religious issues, at least not for me.  Because there are so many ways that sincere religious belief can be used to manipulate, coerce, manage, and otherwise accomplish Bad Things.  Once you're aware of that, it becomes almost impossible to talk about what you believe and have it mean anything.

So why the hell am I writing these posts, and isn't that a good question.  But I am.  So today's topic is how you know what you believe ('you' being not you, gentle reader, but some mysterious average person out there).  Judeo-Christians and Muslims are "people of the book," although the book they're people of varies-- Christians rely on their Bible, Jews on the Tanakh and the Talmud, Muslims on the Koran/Qur'an-- and I'm not Jewish or Muslim, so forgive me if I didn't get that precisely right.  In those belief systems, especially among the conservatives, in order to define what you believe, you refer back to The Book.

Which leads to vigorous debate over the precise nature of The Book-- who wrote the text(s) and how did they know what to write?  were they divinely inspired, or writing out of their own experience? were they eyewitnesses of the events they recorded?  have the texts been edited, and if so, should we try to sift through that editing back to some shadowy "original" that pre-existed the current text?  how should the text(s) be translated? and that's just getting started.  You could go on and on, and if that stuff interests you, years of study await you.  It's a huge field.

I find it fascinating in small doses, but almost completely unrelated to what happens when I sit down and read a sacred text.  The veracity of it, the actual "factual" fidelity to some historical event, is irrelevant.  I wrote a series of posts about this a few years ago (they are here, if you want them in order, start at the bottom and read "up"), so I'm not going to belabor the point at the moment.

I learned one way of reading sacred texts when I took a (secular) university course in "The Bible as Literature" a few years ago.  The professor encouraged us to read the stories in the Bible as if they were literally stories, with God and Moses, or David and Bathsheba, or Jesus and the Disciples, as characters who exist only in the text. It's an entirely different way of reading (compared to what I was raised with).  Take a story (or series of stories) like the Israelites wandering around in the wilderness for 40 years.  We always read God in those stories as being, you know, GOD.  A pre-existing Divine Being who was the same as the "God" we sang hymns to at church, pledged allegiance to, and sang about in "God Bless America."  But if God in those passages is just another character in the story, one that has temper tantrums and gets his feelings hurt, the stories read quite a bit differently.  They're a lot more entertaining to read that way, for one thing.

Ack.  I keep getting further and further away from the point I wanted to make when I sat down to type.  Which is that I think the way I was raised to think about my beliefs is the opposite of what makes sense.  I was taught to take some external standard (the Bible, a sermon, the instructions of my parents) and match my beliefs up to that standard.  What I've come to believe is that the opposite makes more sense:  you figure out what you believe, and then find a way to think about it that makes sense.  No, that's not exactly it.  how to say this???

OK.  Take that last post.  The end of it turned out to be something I learned about accepting love, feeling loved.  The text-- the story of the rich young ruler--was a vehicle that gave me a new insight into that.  But it wouldn't have to be a text from the Bible that led to the insight.  It could be Pema Chodron, or watching Finding Nemo, or observing a friend cradle her toddler.  Heck, sometimes I think that's why I enjoy romance novels-- I  tend to define myself as not lovable, and reading a romance novel allows me to vicariously experience the feeling of being loved, breaking down that resistance to feeling loved.

I bet this isn't making the slightest bit of sense, because I can't figure out exactly what I'm trying to say, either.  It's entirely possible that this whole dang post has been just another way of saying the same thing that I said in the one on cherry-picking.  Eclectic belief systems, part 2.  *feels somewhat dejected*  I don't think I made it to the place I was trying to go.  Let me know if you have any idea, and maybe I'll try again another day.