Not The Religious Type

Before We Begin / Dan Littauer (Cambridge, MA)

Welcome to this year's 40 Days of Faith experiment! As Dave mentioned,

"The idea of 40 Days of Faith is, with a group of friends if at all possible, to see if we can help one another find some fresh encouragement from faith in a way that perhaps has been elusive for many of us."

So far, our blog has been a diverse community of passionate individuals having vibrant discussions about faith. Since the majority of our discussions have revolved around the notion of a relational God, we thought it might be fun to set aside some time to actually try to connect with that God as a community. 

For those of you who are interested in partnering with us on this journey of faith, the first step is to read the User's Manual. The User's Manual has everything you need know to get started. In addition to that, we recommend you do the following:

1. Find a few people to do this with. The blog will be fun, but it's also important to find someone you can talk with in person.
   
   
2. Invite 
God
 to 
address 
a 
major 
personal
 need.
 Ask yourself the following questions:
   
   a. What 
do 
you 
want 
God 
to 
do 
for 
you?

   
   b. What
 do
 you
 really 
want 
God
 to 
do 
for 
you?

   
   
3. Consider learning
 about
 faith
 along side
 your non-religious 
friends (or if you're non-religious, your religious friends). We'll talk more about this in future posts.

With that said, here's how the blog part of this faith experiment will work. There will be two posts everyday on the following topics:

God and the Nations. A Daily Bible Guide --The Bible has many authors and is the compilation of over 1600 years of stories of people relating to God. For thousands of years, individuals and religious groups around the world have used these stories as a way to try and connect with God. Brian Housman (our resident 'Bible Expert') kindly offered to compile a Bible Guide for our 40 Days Faith experiment. Personally, I think the Bible Guide can be a fun way to discuss these stories together, while also providing some structured guidance for prayer, if you're into that sort of thing. If you're thinking about participating in the Bible Guide portion of this experiment, I highly recommend reading Brian's Intro to The Bible Guide.

40 Days of Faith Tip  -- Here's where you come in! Each day I will be posting one person's tip of the day. The tip of the day will be someone's thoughts and experiences about these faith experiments. I highly encourage all of you to share your own tips and experiences daily under the comments. If you would like your tips to be a blog post, feel free to send them to me at dan@notreligious.org with the title "40 Days Tip."

On a side note, if you're more of the churchgoing type, a longer version of the user's manual and bible guide geared towards you is also available here.

With that said, we're looking forward to partnering with you on this exciting journey of faith!

40 Days of Faith

Hi all.  So I mentioned that we were going to take the blog in the direction of a “faith experiment” next week.  Let me explain what that’s going to look like.

We’ll return—I’d think—to our meaty, thoughtful exchanges once this is done.  But hundreds of folks I know, lots of them in the Greater Boston Vineyard, but many who are friends from all over the world, will be taking the next six weeks to see if they can help each other grow in faith, something I’m entirely a fan of.  I mentioned it to the Veritas gang last week and distributed some “getting started” materials.

The idea of 40 Days of Faith is, with a group of friends if at all possible, to see if we can help one another find some fresh encouragement from faith in a way that perhaps has been elusive for many of us.  We’ve gotten some good reports from these sorts of things in the past.  I’ll need to ask forbearance from our atheist friends and perhaps punt to the resumption of our dialogue once this season is over, because this is an experiment in, well, faith, and for many people “faith” and “God” come up in the same breath.  A number of secular friends will be joining in for this 40 Days, but if it’s too much of a reach for you, I’m totally sympathetic and, again, can only feebly say, “We’ll be back with our conversations in six weeks.” 

So, that said, here are some comments I’ve read recently about some folks’ past 40 Days experiences.

(During the last 40 Days, I felt that God) asked me to fast for my daughter, whom I had been estranged from for 8 years.  Two months after the fast, with one phone call from her we were reconciled.

During the 21 Days, I had seven very specific prayers around my business.  These were legal and tax issues that I saw no way out of, and they were enormous headaches that would cost me thousands of dollars.  During the 21 Days, I saw six of the seven resolve.  I would describe the resolutions as seeing problems simply dissolve.  It was like a rock wall just disappearing into thin air.

A few years ago we had an ectopic pregnancy—a very painful and distressing end to a pregnancy which led to our doctor saying we may never be able to have children.  (We weren’t excited about the specific medical interventions that were proposed, so) we used the 40 Days of Faith to pray (for a child).  At the end of the 40 Days, we felt God say it was time…  Nine months later our son was born and we now have a beautiful two-year-old.

Those were three of 174 such comments people gave me in the last two months.  

On this page you’ll find (soon, if not just yet) a "User's Manual" to the experience that I wrote.  If you'd prefer to read a modestly longer version aimed at churchgoers, there should also be a link to that. 

Each day, starting Monday, you'll find great tips and stories, some in video form, from 40 Days veterans.  You'll also find a short reflection on related material from the Bible, for those of you for whom that would be a help.  Each Monday afternoon, should it be of interest, you'll be able to hear some reflections from me or others directed to those at the Greater Boston Vineyard.

As the 40 Days continues, many of these entries, one hopes, will be current encouraging stories about what's happening for some folks.  I'm hoping many of those stories will be from you!

Please do push yourself to comment liberally on whatever strikes you along the way, and with whatever stories you have to share.  (I'd think that comments questioning the entire enterprise would better be saved for when our blog in its current form resumes.)

I'm really looking forward to what I hope and expect will be a fun and encouraging experience together!

“Tuesdays with Morrie” and the Life We’re Looking for

By Vince Brackett (Chicago, IL)

From Dave:

Vince sent this along this weekend, and—as someone who was an early fan of Tuesdays with Morrie yet had a similar experience as that which Vince describes—I thought he makes a very powerful point about our conversation here, particularly the "centered-set" part of it. His note was an "aha experience" for me about this and a few other things beside. See what you think!

A few weeks ago, a friend and I got on the topic of spirituality and I learned we shared a description:  Catholic upbringing where spirituality was never really explored, while at the same time always having felt an inclination toward being a person of love and doing good to others.  And like I probably would've described myself not too long ago, he says thinks he believes in God (maybe even Jesus) but that seems sort of a different issue entirely than being a person of love and doing good to others.  Since he left home for college, he tells me, he hasn't found much interest in religion because it doesn't seem relevant to the social justice issues that have captured his compassionate personality.  So, his culture is secular and that works for him and he has outlets for his compassionate personality.  Nevertheless, as I've hung out with him and his girlfriend more, I've heard them both express they're craving something more out of life and, to my mind, they're not experiencing God on a regular basis.

At any rate, I pitched Not the Religious Type to him, which he received very openly and, he tells me, he and his girlfriend have been digging.  Given spirituality and reading material were on the table, my friend also pitched a book to me:  Mitch Albom's bestseller from a while back Tuesdays with Morrie.  Of course, I had heard about it and thought only good of it as I'd known it to have touched many people.  I was sure that it would be moving and inspiring, that some of it I might respectfully disagree with, but that most of it I would be right on board with.  Yet, while I didn't show it, I just didn't think it would change my life or that I would learn anything particularly new from it.  Nonetheless, I wanted to be conversational with my friend so I set aside a time to read it.

I was struck by the fact that I was right.  It didn't change my life but it WAS moving and inspiring and I WAS right on board with most every (though not every) bit of wisdom that Albom's beloved mentor, Morrie Schwartz, shares.  It seemed totally stage 4 (if you will) with the idea that relating to people is what gives meaning to our lives.  I read it in three hours!

So how can that be?  How could something so 'right-on,' by my estimate, not change my life?  How can my friend, having read and clearly been touched by this same wisdom (as evidence of his recommending it to me), still be expressing the feeling that there might be something more to life that he's not experiencing?  How is it that so many other books before and after Tuesdays with Morrie, with similarly 'right-on' wisdom, show up on bestseller lists and Oprah's book club, only to be replaced a few months later since, I guess, people still feel the need to search?

I think the reason is that it's not the wisdom that touched me while I was reading Tuesdays with Morrie, it was the guide, Morrie, and his relationship with Albom.  The deep longing in us that is triggered by books like these is not for wisdom, but for a guide.  And if all we can get is fourteen Tuesdays with Morrie, as remarkable as that may be, it's no surprise that we'll need someone or something else soon to fill the void.  To me, regularly experiencing the living God is the only way to fill that longing for a guide for a lifetime.  Otherwise, we are existentialists:  enlightened but alone. 

“Tell Me More”

I don't know if any of you noticed the irony of our experience with the last post by Peter Bierma.

The tenor of the early comments ignored the point Peter was trying to make in order to quibble about an ancillary point…and then the train of the comments took off on that path. And then the comments ended up forming the very kind of conversation Peter was arguing against in the original post. That was a strange one.

To my mind, here's the difference we're shooting for between this site and others that comment on religion or the evils of religion. We're trying to collectively point towards something good rather than to contend with folks we differ with. That's not to say some pushback might not be needed, but it can only really work if we stick with a general posture of listening first. Many, many of you are extraordinarily good at employing the "tell me more" initial approach with folks you differ with. You're really good at making sure you understand the heart of a comment you're inclined to take issue with before you respond, and then your responses are gracious and inclusive even as you push back. I think that will be a key to us succeeding. Without that, not only will our blog be less fun (and will—truth be told, likely disappear), but it will pretty much serve no purpose I can spot—as, again, many other sites are devoted to religious/secular arguing.

The belief here is that there really is, to quote Gertrude Stein, a there there in the universe. There really is something very worth giving ourselves to discovering. And that discovery, most of us have found, takes a community to pull off. Differences in perspective in the community are all to the good—so long as we're working alongside one another and not at odds with one another.

This is the point I understood Peter to be making in his post. Some of us might take issue with his highlighting "Is it helpful?" as a new standard he's applying to his contributions to a conversation (he provocatively puts that standard even over "Is it true?"). But for our purposes, he's dead on.

I gave my Harvard Veritas talk last night, and it strikes me as related to this conversation. (And hello to any of you just venturing over to your friendly blog whom I met there. Welcome!) Pretty much the only point I was making there was this one—that there's power in diverse people working together towards a common larger goal, perhaps even a common spiritual goal. But the only way for that to work was for divergent people to agree on what they were shooting for and then to do their best to help each other get there. The antithesis of that would be for divergent people to turn on each other in hopes of vanquishing each other.

The talk seemed, for many people at least, to hit a provocative nerve. I stayed after for about an hour and half to talk with folks who stuck around, and there was a lot of conversation going on in the room. I had a comparable amount of people wondering if I was (a) a Unitarian (as to these questioners all other religious groups were about protecting their turf—as perhaps they should be?) or (b) a fundamentalist (as I told stories of an active God healing people and answering other prayers). And yet, for many people, there was a palpable buzz around the thought that one could pursue something as big as a living, personal universe with others who might not all be starting from one's starting point.

So there's our beautiful dream. Can we help each other get there?

One ground rule I'd like to set here is: If you find yourself in a dispute with one other commenter, can I ask that you drop out of the conversation after two responses to the other commenter? At that point, I'm confident you're each tracking with the spirit of your dispute—as are the rest of us. Anything beyond that I've only found to be damaging to our larger goals, as other commenters hold back from what seems to be a personal fight between two people that has strangely been conducted in a public forum. Feel free to hold your fellow commenters to this standard. There will be many other topics introduced where everyone's comments will be eagerly received. There's no real urgency to "win" any given point with any other given commenter in any given post. We're in the middle of a long, ongoing conversation.

Next week, if all goes well, we'll shift gears on the blog as we try to conduct an online faith experiment that will run coterminously with the historic season of Lent. I'm excited about it! I'll tell you more soon, but I did want to give you an FYI.

I'd very much love your thoughts on all this! That said, if the spirit of the blog I'm describing just isn't appealing or worthy to you, I'm totally sympathetic… but that is what we're shooting for.

Talk to Me... in Stage 4! / Peter Bierma (Twin Falls, ID)

Last weekend quickly turned into a surprising one for me.  After being invited to play bass at my church's youth group's annual "Snow Camp", I soon met the rest of the band.  Also, having spent my entire college career at music school I had some emotional investment in this opportunity, as well.  The performances came and went (and indeed they went well).  But, all of that paled in comparison to 2:30 a.m. later that night.

As we sat around our cabin living room chatting about various current events, awake only via caffeinated beverage, the conversation quickly turned into debate.  And it was the sort of debate where there was clearly a Side A arguing with Side B.  After an hour or so we'd accomplished very little in persuading our opponent, but our debate did seem to hint at a better conversation, one about our values and why we felt so strongly about our perspectives.  And so I piped in with that thought, and soon it was as if a giant weight had lifted in the room.  Facial expressions grew less tense, eyebrows lifted, and it was as if we all suddenly agreed on something rather important.  Suddenly we were all on the same team, even while talking about something close to heart like each other's values.

My boss had the staff read a book recently called Seven Practices of Effective Ministry by Andy Stanley, Reggie Joiner, and Lane Jones (hey, I work at a church now, what do you want??).  The book gives this tip to leaders, "When you're looking over your lesson or sermon notes, the question to ask yourself is not...  Is it true?  Is it interesting?  Is it creative?  Is it passionate?  Is it entertaining?  Instead, ask yourself, 'Is it helpful?'"  It's about sermons, yes, but it's also a bit of advice that me and the band, I think, followed in our conversation without knowing it, and with some success.

I'd say I came to faith in Jesus during a markedly "Rules-Driven" period of my life.  It was the lens through which I saw God, the world, my family, and friends.  I'd also say I'm more gifted than most of you in a frustratingly specific way: I draw people to 'deeper' conversations like flies to a hot bulb, and then, much like that analogy, I eventually kill the conversation and/or offend my convo partner by saying something totally unhelpful.  I do that better than most people I know.  What do you get with a Stage 2 conversation magnet with bad timing?  For me, someone who states what he thinks is truth at all the wrong times.  Dead flies.  So... not exactly the ideal environment for the give-and-take needed in good discussion.  Yet I at least want that good give-and-take, even if I blow it more times than not, and judging from my Snow Camp chat it would seem I'm not alone.  So, how do we get in on this, especially in the middle of highly mixed-culture environments?

I mentioned an illustration in early January on this NTRT blog that was given to me and my wife by some friends, which might get the ball rolling.  When Annie and I have a disagreement, there's a way we communicate to each other that can create, in effect, a fence between us such that we're no longer teammates; we're opponents.  And when I talk to Annie as if she's my opponent (or vice versa), we get much less accomplished, and much more hurt.  So we might continue to work out our disagreement, and we may even resolve it, but we end up with this giant fence between us.  And I'm left distant with the person I'm supposed to be closest with in my life.  So, in the end, who cares if we resolve the issue?  We're still far apart from each other.  And, if I may put it scientifically, that sucks.  I HATE it when I'm "far" from my wife in that way.  I'd rather be close to her, with issues, than far apart and, say, have the dishes done.

Experience tells me it's similar with discussions on faith, and I wonder if Stage 4 has something to offer us here.  I'd assert that this "mystical" stage is uniquely concerned with other people above and beyond the first three (criminal, rules-based, and rebellious).  And this relationship component -- if my Snow Camp trip is any indicator -- seems far more crucial in meaningful conversations than the power to persuade.  So as a way to get in on this, I can't help but wonder if it all comes down to asking ourselves first about our opinions (before sharing them, even!), "Is it helpful?"  What do you think?

Is Our Whole Conversation Bourgeois?

A couple of items to mention that might be of interest before we launch in:

First, if you're in the Boston area and have nothing better to do this Friday night, I'm speaking at Harvard's Veritas Forum.  This is a three-day event beginning tonight, with speakers you might have heard of like Lauren Winner and Shane Claiborne.  I'm holding down the fort on the Friday evening session about "A Beautiful Community" and I'm intrigued by what I'll learn (and maybe learning will happen for others beyond just me, which would be a wonderful thing).  The task given me is to pitch community and faith from a resolutely centered-set perspective...so I'll wind up and toss my best pitch and hope it accomplishes something helpful.

Second, if you'd like to hear one of my most-enjoyable radio interviews, you'll find a link to it if you click the multimedia tab, above.  (Or, heck, I suppose I could also put it right here to save you those bothersome two seconds.)  It was with a Canadian radio host named Drew Marshall, and it was nothing but fun for me to get to know Drew a bit on the interview.

One of you awesome recent commenters raised a worthy question about pretty much everything we talk about here: namely is it all pretty much useless to people with real problems in life, like living in a crack house?  Is it only of interest to comfortable people who have nothing better to do than toss around arcane philosophical questions?

I have maybe three thoughts.

First, absolutely!  Our conversation on this blog really is only for people with a specific taste for this kind of stuff.  It by and large doesn't offer any profound spiritual advice.  It doesn't get us out to work with people with real needs.  All of that, as in my case, happens far better in a church or choose-your-preferred-spiritual-community.  Some of you attend my church, so you'll know that the stuff of this blog largely never comes up at all there.  We're focused there much more on meat and potatoes faith, as lived out in a community.  This is a different deal.

Second, also touché--I can't imagine the person in a crack den who'd have any interest at all in any of this stuff, and rightly not.  Their needs are different.  At the risk of saying something that's insensitive, if this stage theory stuff has anything to offer (see the tab above on "Stage 4 Faith"), it would say that folks under that circumstance would need a profoundly stage 2 community.  I'm a huge fan of Teen Challenge, this organization that helps young drug addicts, with faith being part of their program.  They're hugely rules-bound--the men shave their heads, there are phenomenal restrictions placed on the freedom of everyone there.  But of course they are!  Being "stage 4" on our terms would be insane for them!  It's not at all what's needed.

Third, also at the risk of saying something insensitive, it does seem that this blog assumes there's some value in talking about a culture that's somewhat educated.  If, say, college-educated people largely set the agenda in this and any culture, I'd think we're wondering here if there's any value in kicking around ways that a conversation about faith could be most helpful in that world.

That's NOT to devalue ANYTHING helpful for faith that's doing anything different than this!  Almost every other faith endeavor IS doing something different than this, and three cheers for them!  Our church, for instance, has some fairly profound things going on in Liberia and the Middle East and with almost a hundred local youth, many of them being mentored towards and offered scholarships towards a college education.  My group of churches has raised a couple million dollars and put to work several hundred workers towards disaster relief in Louisiana and Texas and Iowa and elsewhere.  Hip hip hooray, and may there be a lot more where that came from!

So, yes, this blog has a very narrow focus towards something pretty different than all of that.  

So John Loftus and I Finally Did Talk on the Radio

My apologies for the lack of fresh content in the latter part of last week.  I was booked Wednesday through Friday, uninterrupted.  I can't imagine how anyone actually does pull off steady blogging as life goes on around them...

Also, several of you have awesomely sent me guest blogs.  And, everyone, please keep them coming!  I'm totally into them.  That said, to those of you who have sent them in, I'll look to get to them or get back to you.  I'm trying to maintain a flow of some indiscernible-to-the-naked-eye kind here, and I'm trying to figure out where everything fits in.

Now to the topic of the day: As I mention in the headline, John Loftus, of debunkingchristianity and author of Why I Became an Atheist: A Former Preacher Rejects Christianity and I had our long-awaited radio interview last Thursday.  The hook was "atheist turned pastor talks with pastor turned atheist."  It comes out on March 1, so I'll do my best to keep you all posted about how you can hear it.

John rightly felt a little jumped on in the interview.  It's a Christian show and it was clear that I was on friendly turf and John less so. 

He emailed me afterward with some kind comments about his experience with me and a link to his critique of my book.  If only to close the loop even as we move onto whatever we're going to move onto this week, I'll pass on not only his link, but my response, below.  (Clearly you'll need to go to his link to have context for my response.)  Also in his article, he posts another link to an exchange he and I had on his blog about whether talking about spiritual experiences might ever have value. 

Here's my response (I had some pleasantries before and after):

And thanks for thinking through my presentation of Peck’s stage theory.  As has so often been true in our conversation, I continue to find myself modestly befuddled by your response, as I wasn’t thinking I was using it to make any truth claim at all, certainly not about Christianity.  It’s a developmental theory, not an epistemological one.  As with so many things, it strikes me as something people either find helpful on those terms, as many people I talk with do, or to find it to be largely uninteresting.  But you’re the first I’ve had push back that it’s inadequate as a vehicle to press theological truth claims.  I’d think that would be a given.

You seem annoyed that I placed atheist writers in Stage 3 at one point, and I’ll happily withdraw that as anything but a “perhaps.”  Clearly I don’t know anyone’s story even along Peck’s terms and you’re certainly right that any given person, spiritually-inclined or not, could on Peck’s terms be at a number of the stages.  Conservative religious people wouldn’t all be at Stage 2 and vocal atheists wouldn’t all be at Stage 3.  Granted, those would be the stereotypes, and that may not be for no cause.  But clearly it’s an oversimplification, so point well taken on those terms.

The “Apple Game” versus the “Dell Game”/ Charles Park (New York, NY)

From Dave:

Now for a change of pace from our last thread of conversation, I’ll pass on some thoughts from Charles Park, a good friend and partner and an innovative faith leader.  Charles has a PhD in economics from MIT and has often helped me understand new things about faith or culture from a business perspective, as he does here.  Is there an approach to faith that can offer something fresh and perspective when we face strong pressure to pursue faith on conventional, but perhaps less-than-inspiring terms.  Now over to Charles.

Apple has had an interesting history as a company.  It blazed onto the scene in early 80’s with the MacIntosh line revolutionizing the PC world with the Mouse and icons.   But then the company had an identity crisis, bringing in John Sculley to run it like a ‘real corporation.’  For a while, this resulted in much greater profit for Apple as the corporate disciplines stabilized the helter-skelter creative culture of Steve Jobs.  Eventually, Jobs was pushed out by the late 80’s, as Sculley focused the company on the goal of breaking into the business PC market. 

But, this was doomed to failure, because Apple could not compete with Dell and the Wintel dominance in the business market which prized efficiency and compatibility rather than revolutionary creativity.

Apple’s core DNA never had the ability to compete with Dell, yet they were lured into that market.  Why?  Because, that’s where the big money was, that’s where the demand was.  But of course, that meant there were lots of other companies competing in that market, and only the best company suited for that environment could make a mark in the end (Dell, Microsoft, Intel…).

Apple would have been another brilliant company that blazed for a while and went out, except Steve Jobs came back in the late 90’s.  And, he focused the company on what it is good at, creating demand and markets that did not exist before.  Think of iPod, iTunes, iPhone.   These products created demand that were not there before.  And, Apple is again a force to be reckoned with, even in the PC market.

This has an application for the church world, or perhaps for all people of faith.  A church can play the Apple game or the Dell game.  A spiritual leader can go where the demand is or uncover/create demand.

In my mind, most churches run on the model of a pastor, a charismatic leader who says, I have theological training, I know the Bible, I can tell you what’s right and what’s wrong, come and learn from this church.  Most denominations run on this model, and I’m going to call it ‘the Dell game.’

The ‘Apple game’ in my mind is a spiritual leader who says, I know how you can connect to God for yourself in such a way that God Himself will teach you all truths.  In Jeremiah 31, God talks of the New Covenant where no man need teach another, ‘know the Lord,’ for everyone will know the Lord, from the least to the greatest.   In John 16, Jesus talks of the cross as the mechanism through which the Holy Spirit will come to teach us all truth, fulfilling the promise of the New Covenant.

This is why I see my job as a pastor to be creating a safe space where people can connect with God and move towards Him as the center of their lives.  Of course, there is so much to teach about conversing with God, but there is a difference between giving people fish and teaching people how to fish.

In today’s post-Christian culture especially where the predominant view of relational connection is conversations/chatting, the previous modes of restoring connection with God like the intellectual model of the reformation (understanding focused) or the sacramental approach of the high church may be missing the heart-felt needs of the post-modern secular liberal world.

So, could chatting with God be the ultimate answer for everything?

The Difference between Experience and Argument

Well, we've hit another gusher.

After our conversation about homosexuality and church of a month or so ago, it seemed to me we were unlikely to find another topic that would be as generative and contentious for awhile, but we're edging into that territory here. And, as before, it strikes me (as I believe Vinceation suggested) that this would be of interest to only a modest subset of our readers (as we see from the back and forth between only a very few of us). So most likely we'll take this as just a beat in our conversation to be returned to at some later date.

But I do think, as some have suggested, that we've hit a pretty fundamental point of disagreement, and I don't have much hope of bridging it. That said, I'm totally helped by David and others who've helped us tease this out. So, from my point of view, the most rational comment about how to regard evidence for religious experience (the subject of the last post and subsequent comments) comes from GK Chesterton a century ago in his book Orthodoxy (I quote it in my book as well).

Somehow or other an extraordinary idea has arisen that the disbelievers in miracles consider them coldly and fairly, while believers in miracles accept them only in connection with some dogma. The fact is quite the other way. The believers in miracles accept them (rightly or wrongly) because they have evidence for them. The disbelievers in miracles deny them (rightly or wrongly) because they have a doctrine against them.

The arguments against spiritual experience all head towards reductio ad absurdum, i.e., "If someone told you that Dumbo had come down from a movie screen and transported them bodily to Madagascar, would you believe them?" The point being that, by definition, spiritual experience is clearly absurd and there's, as a point of first principles, always a better explanation for them (the better explanation, as per Dawkins, customarily being delusion on the part of the person claiming it).

I'm with Chesterton that this is dogma on the part of the unbeliever—it's the starting point of the conversation rather than something argued for, which might explain why David could feel he'd carefully argued his case against religious experience and somehow the fact that he'd even tried to argue escaped me. And this is why I think we'll have a hard time bridging this. What seems obvious to one side seems perplexing to the other.

Here's my take. Experiences are not the same as arguments. To say, "The Bible is the perfectly inspired book of an only-good God" is a truth claim that is perfectly poised to be argued for or against, as many of the atheist writers do with gusto. Fair enough. But to say, as lots and lots of people all over the world in fact do, something like, "I was terribly discouraged. Nothing helped me. I tried counseling, prescription drugs and love affairs. But then I had a spiritual experience and my life has been radically better ever since" is NOT subject to the same sort of argument as the truth claim above. What are you going to say to that person? "No, you deluded fool, you DIDN'T have a spiritual experience and your life ISN'T better"? Who on earth are you to say such a thing?

Now one might still want to push back that, surely, there's another, far-preferable explanation for whatever good thing that person is claiming to be experiencing. But good luck proving that to them. Whether or not you see causality, they do, and it is, after all, their life.

To the claim that I, as someone pursuing Jesus, would discount a claim of a good spiritual experience that came from, say, a Hindu or a Muslim or whatever, I differ. I'd have no comment whatsoever except to say, wow, that's great! Anything good happening to anyone on earth strikes me as something to be celebrated. If some people are hoping to connect with such a positive spiritual experience that's so far eluded them, I absolutely have suggestions from my point of view. But I see very little upside in using those opinions to discount anyone else's experience.

Arguments are another thing. David brought up that surely, with him, I would, say, discount the central claims of something like Mormonism (that Joseph Smith had a visitation by an angel who offered him golden plates with new books of spiritual insight). On the one hand, I go back to my previous point: Who am I to say what happened to Joseph Smith during the time frame in question? I wasn't there. (I'm loathe to judge pretty much any experience, on its face, as "obviously" absurd. Again, how would I know?) Now when the claim extends that everyone on earth would be advised to follow the teachings of those golden plates, and that they clearly and helpfully supplement or correct the deficiencies of previous holy books, that's a different conversation. We've left "experience" and headed into "argument."

Faith, Atheism and…Sneering

It's seemed to me that we've entered a toxic new stage of the faith/atheism conversation, and I'd love your thoughts on this.

I had a dynamite class as an undergrad on the history of American thought from arguably the most brilliant professor I'd had to date or since, a man named Jay Fliegelman. I just loved the course and thought he was the greatest. (I just googled him to see what was going on with him, only to discover he died in 2007 at 58 of liver disease and cancer. That's a big loss.) A lot of the thought that he taught on, particularly early on (I think the time frame of the course ended at the start of the Civil War) was generated by people of faith. Fliegelman was an outspoken atheist. Yet he had such delight and passion in delving into the Cotton Mathers of the world, and I recall him describing Jonathan Edwards as something like "the most brilliant mind America has ever produced."

That sort of thing seems to be off the table for now, and I'm wondering why. We have several awesome readers of this blog who are passionate for atheism, and I know that you're smart, engaged people, so I'd love your perspective in particular (along, of course, with everyone else's).

I've been reading more books by thoughtful atheists and going to their blogs, and we seem to be in an era of monolithic sneering at people of faith. I'm sure to a great degree it goes both ways. My own chapter on atheist writers (hopefully non-sneering and titled, "Three Cheers for Thoughtful Atheism!") did have a few snide swipes in its first draft, which a helpful early reader caught and called me on, so I'm certainly not immune.

But I'm baffled. Surely none of us wants to be known for sneering, superiority and lack of charity. I mean, I think.

And yet the terms of the atheist conversation seem to be something like this. 1) All people of faith are buffoons (most, though not all, are evil buffoons), both now and throughout history. 2) This, to all clear-thinking people, is so obvious as to not have to be defended. 3) We don't count people like Augustine, Bach, Handel, Edwards, Newton, Milton, Hugo, Dostoevsky (by the end of his life, from Brothers K on), Tolstoy, Chesterton, Francis Collins, Lewis, Tolkien, Mother Teresa, etc.

I'm sure many of these defenders of atheism are super-great people in actual life. But in print they're monolithically unseemly and Jay Fliegelman, in my experience, would have abhorred this aspect of their writing, found it indefensible and crusaded against it. The key villain in rhetoric (at—not to play this card too cavalierly, but just to say—Stanford) was "setting up a straw man." Meaning the cardinal sin was to fight against an opponent of your own creating, then to knock them down easily and crow about your victory.

There's no doubt that many of these atheist writers are very sharp people. (And they could produce their own long and impressive list of atheist heroes throughout history.) Their stories, when they tell them, are often very compelling. And their passion for their arguments most certainly comes through. But surely no one would want to grow up to be like them, at least in this respect.

On this blog, we'd probably mention the eternal dynamic between Stage 3 and Stage 2. (Note the button at the top for an explanation of this.) But this seems to transcend that, to at least some degree. Maybe George W. Bush is to blame here (as a lot of these books came out with him as the bogeyman of evangelicalism). But…I'm stumped.

Tell Me More!

Thanks so much to those of you who commented on the pop culture post.

Tell me more! We had a unanimous verdict that it was a good thing for people of faith to create culture. But I'd love to hear a bit more of your thinking on why this is a good thing. Is it just that of course it's only right that people of faith would take their part in such an important endeavor? What would be your hope for the outcome of this?

And none of you (at this point) commented on the other aspect of the post: the effort many people take to be conversant with pop culture. Do you regard this as a mandate for people of faith? If so, what's the value of it? Are there costs?

My current thinking on creating culture is that we can't and shouldn't draw any direct correlation between creating the culture in question and anything particularly helpful for God happening. Culture and art tend to be too indirect for that. As one of you commented yesterday, I'm thinking that an honest effort at the art/culture in question by the person of faith would have its own reward and its own utility for the world at large. But what that is would have to play out.

So perhaps that's not the most-stirring call to the arts ever spoken, but it's where I'm at. Do you have a better one?

Pop Culture and You

It's assumed that any savvy person of faith loves pop culture. It's only those troglodytes from our parents' and grandparents' generations who didn't, and fat lot of good any of them did for God. Now had they given more love to pop culture instead of wasting their time, say, fighting the second world war…well, we could be living in a very different world today, let me tell you.

And I, in point of fact, do love pop culture. I reviewed music and movies for my college paper. I spent a decade or so as a playwright (I don't want to argue at the moment that an art form which attracts, like, twelve paying customers nationwide doesn't qualify as "pop culture"). In early dates with Grace, I spent precious time we'll never get back forcing her to work with me on precise rankings of our favorite movies not just in general, but genre by genre. (Where Wayne's World ranked is a topic for another day.

But today on our friendly blog I'd love to get your take on this. Have we overvalued pop culture? An acquaintance of mine named Andy Crouch just wrote an eloquent plea for people of faith to create art and he couldn't have a more receptive reader than I. I continue to toil away at fiction projects, waiting for the one that will hit.

But what are we hoping for from our collective savviness towards pop culture, either in terms of being conversant with it as it is or, as per Andy C., contributing to it ourselves? Here are some of the standard arguments. (By calling them "standard," I'm not saying I don't agree with them.)

1. "Pop culture" just means "how most people interact with the larger world." Presumably we'd like a God-centered worldview to at least be in the mix.
2. Look at Lewis and Tolkien! (I'm not quite sure what the next part of this point is. But we people of faith are just as proud of them as can be.)
3. American pop culture gets spread all over the world. Just think of the worldwide impact for God if people of faith are producing this stuff!
   

And here, perhaps, are some arguments that we're overvaluing this.

1. Everyone intrinsically devalues pop culture, however much they enjoy it. Just because people like to watch Lost (as I do) and it has cool, trendy, quasi-intellectual references built into it doesn't mean that anyone takes it seriously as a model for living.
2. Just look at Lewis and Tolkien! Meaning, for our purposes here, that they really do stand alone. Flannery O'Connor? Catholic, but a little too weird and artsy. Dorothy Sayers? …Who? Does anyone still read Dorothy Sayers? Anne Lamott? Great, awesome, writes directly about faith (and, so far as we know, nobody actually reads her novels), so maybe she counts. Evelyn Waugh? Martin Scorcese? (Reputed to be a believing Catholic, but who could figure that out?) I suppose you could make a strong case for Tyler Perry here, so maybe he counts on this list. All to say, we basically have three models for this point of view over the last century or so. It must be harder than it looks.
3. In terms of the prospective evangelistic value of American pop culture being spread all over the world, I return to point #1 here. Maybe people enjoy that pop culture without ever changing anything about their actual lives as a result.

What do you think? Again, I'm speaking as one who does put energy into my own pop culture savviness and who even tries, however futilely, to create some. But nonetheless, I wonder if we've pressed this point a little unreflectively.