Bleeding Fiction

It's been a long week at work, despite it having only been two days so far, so forgive me if I get a little self-indulgent. I'd said, before my Long Weekend of Getting Nothing Done, that I'd talk about my fascination with religion in another post. Welcome to that post.

First, a little bit of background. I grew up with only the barest hint of religion in my life. I come from a mixed-religious marriage (my mother's Jewish, my father's a Greek Orthodox Christian) and my parents agreed to raise my sister and I without religious bias, free to choose whichever way we wanted. So I did not go to a religious school either as my main education or supllementary to that, I did not spend my Sundays in a church, my Saturdays in a mosque or my Fridays in a synagogue. The sum total of my religious experience growing up were the Jewish high holy days (Yom Kippur, Rosh Hashanah and Pesach) three or four days out of the year, when I went to synagogue with my mother. Christmas and Easter were... decidedly secular.

So whatever religion I had, I came to on my own, and I came to it with something of a vengeance. I read books about and at least some of the scripture of every major religion (and some of the various branches thereof) by the time I was in high school. I think I was looking for meaning, for direction, purpose and morality. My parents were good parents, in their way, but they weren't so long in the whole department of actually "raising" me. That's why I never really ate as a child and spent about four years sleeping on a folded up blanket on my floor. Morality and meaning were something I had to find for myself, as I think eventually everyone does; I just didn't start with much of a framework.

Eventually I settled on Buddhism (particularly Zen) as the religion that "agreed with me the most" (as I said at the time). I "came out" as a Buddhist to my parents in my Junior year of high school. Their reaction was pretty much straight out of the comparable episode of The Simpsons, including the attempted bribery (from my dad) and the acceptance of "lip service" as good enough (from my mom).

Gradually, though, I became more interested in religion as a social structure and religion as a cultural system. Religion does strange things to people, after all, and I have friends who'll rail against organized religions because of their sins. But when you look at it, religion has been the cause of wars and terrible attrocities, but also of beautiful art and true humanity. Like any human institution, organized religion is a mixed bag. But, as Teresa over at Making Light once said "the cure for disliking organized religion is prolonged exposure to the disorganized sort." Too true; there's nothing that makes me laugh as much as a quick browse through the New Age section of the book store. Organized religion is like a game of telephone and disorganized religion is like a shouting match. The best sort of religion strikes a balance between the two.

But more than religion, even, what concerns me is its offspring, faith. Faith is fun because to remain "faith" there can be no proof. If you have direct and personal proof of the existence of God, faith becomes unnecessary. But without faith, how does the religious experience differ from the mundane? Without faith, what's the purpose of religion? This is the sort of question that forced Pascal to pose his famous wager, where he argues that you might as well believe in God because "If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing." The faithful man takes the bet. But the best part is that, by its nature, faith gets tested. Doubt, then, is just as much a part of faith as belief. Which makes religion, in the words of Rudolph Otto, a ninteenth century German philosopher, mysterium tremendum et fascinostrum, "the mystery which both draws and pushes away."

In other words, faith is a paradox and religion is a fool's game. It's a puzzle, a mystery and is unsolvable. It has no answer that man can know. Which makes is sublime and beautiful and really quite crazy. But, as Tertullian, a late second century Christian scholar, wrote Credo quia absurdum est, "I believe because it is absurd."