I'm Not Religious, I'm Just Christian

Before I say anything else, I'd like to be clear on one thing: I never have and never will ally myself with the slogan "it's a relationship, not a religion." Christianity is a religion and while it is true to say that it is also a relationship, to say that it is a relationship instead of a religion is to deny our entire intellectual heritage and our intellectual validity. If we want a seat at the table when the naturalists and postmodernists argue over the nature of evil, the existence of moral absolutes, and the purpose (or absence thereof) of life, if we want to shine a lantern amongst the philosophical will o' wisps of our age, then we must stand firm and profess boldly that the Church is all that it is and nothing less. We must not give in to the anti-intellectual fads or the connotations that secularists have pinned on to our language.

However, my attitude when it comes to being identified as a "religious person" is quite another thing. It is quite truthful and fitting that the word "religion" should be used to describe Christianity as a whole, but only occasionally would I ever admit the word "religious" to be an appropriate adjective to assign to a person. There are three main reasons for this, but first I think it is best to explain how the word can be used appropriately.

Obviously, the use of any adjective is only sensible in the presence of other possible characteristics which would exclude it; when we say that something has a given characteristic (such as the color blue), we are implying that there is another characteristic it could have had but doesn't have (such as the color red) because that role is taken up by the actual characteristic. Thus, a church service is properly called a religious gathering because it is intentionally connected to the religion of Christianity instead of being a mere party which is not consciously structured around any ideology. If written down and distributed, the sermon delivered at the service would be considered a religious speech or essay because it was openly founded on the intellectual framework of a religious worldview. An essay written by the same man for an audience of nonbelievers would not take the same ideas for granted and for this and other reasons it would not necessarily be considered a religious document (or at least not religious in the same way) even if the point of the essay was to advocate a Christian worldview.

Now my first objection to being called religious is that in at least one very important sense there is no other kind of person. A religion is a comprehensive set of beliefs which includes a supernatural understanding of the universe and typically involves reverence for someone or something. The problem is that every single person who has ever lived has had to struggle with the questions of God, life after death, and fate, not to mention the fact that beauty and ethics are also either supernatural or nonexistent. Additionally, even those who deny the existence of the supernatural still subscribe to some ideology which answers all the same questions that a religion (as a set of comprehensive beliefs) must answer. Everyone has something that they hold sacred whether it is God or freedom or science, and everyone has some definition of goodness that they hold to whether it is human empowerment or the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people or the glory of God.

You might come across people who treat these issues as mysteries and claim to be ignorant or neutral concerning them (and you may even be such a person yourself), but they are neither evidence of ideological neutrality nor an exception to a generally true rule. If you sat down with such a person, you would easily find out what they really believe by either trying to persuade them of a particular worldview or asking them a particularly radical question concerning whatever issue it is they claim to be ignorant of. In the former case you might explain to an agnostic what Hindus believe (with most agnostics I suspect that eastern philosophy would be particularly effective) and then they would probably either show interest or express distaste at certain points, thus betraying their vague but still present assumptions about reality. In the latter case if the person in question is not certain of the objectivity of moral law you might ask them if the Holocaust was an evil act---I'm sure you can imagine the results for yourself. The point of the matter is that those who don't claim to have any ideology really do have answers to the essential human questions, they just  have very vague answers along with divisions within themselves between multiple and conflicting answers. In short, everyone has some ideology and everyone is guided in their actions (or at least in how they believe they should act) by that ideology. There is still the division between those whose ideologies include the supernatural and those whose ideologies exclude it, but if the word "religious" is to be used to describe someone who is fervent in their beliefs that is really a very small difference.

Of course there is still the sense in which people use the term to describe someone who is specifically dedicated to a "spiritual" ideology rather than a secular one. The problem with this case is simply that such a usage covers too broad and diverse a group. Christianity may agree with Islam about the existence of God and the inherent goodness of that God, but they are still fundamentally opposed to each other when it comes to salvation. On top of that there is the difference between the Abrahamic religions and Hinduism, which teaches that God is essentially without any kind of personality and that everything (including all evil things) are part of Him, and it may be wondered if the rift really is any wider between the two than it is between either of them and any given secular philosophy. Add to that the fact that some religious worldviews are actually atheistic, and it is very hard to see how referring to a person as "religious" could be even remotely helpful in really describing that person.

Finally, there is the issue of behavior. In this case, one might be called "religious" because of the way in which they behave. Thus a "religious person" is someone who adheres to high moral standards. The problem is that even outside Christianity the issue of whether or not someone is a believer is determined first and foremost by what they believe and what they are trying to do. This use of the word implies a viciously legalistic attitude which is at least partially inaccurate in terms of religion in generally and wildly inaccurate when it comes to Christianity in particular. The Christian creed is founded on the doctrine that we are all evil and that we can never be justified in the sight of God except by His own death on our behalf. It is true that if we are saved we should behave better than we would otherwise, but that doesn't make falling short of God's commandments proof of hypocrisy. I once saw a scene on television in which a man said that he probably shouldn't be in a church with all the sins in his life, and I was simply shocked. If your life is full of sin (and I can guarantee you that it absolutely is) the first place you should be is a church!

It is for these reasons that I resent being called religious. It is a singularly useless term which I once used as an agnostic to say that a Christian is a certain kind of person just as a mailman is a certain type of person rather than someone engaging in the relationship for which we are all made. I'm not a religious person. I am not someone who is defined by regular church attendance. I am not a special kind of person. I am an evil wretch who knows he's an evil wretch, knows that only God can fix that, believes that God has done something to fix that, and lives in dependence on the mercy of that God. I'm a Christian.

Betrothal

I am reminded
By the idiotic grins
And the moments of sheer joy
Reminded of how she was promised to You
Reminded of how I was promised to You
Before this all began

It costs me nothing
Some money
A few years of patience
An education I would have gotten anyway
And the whole time she is eager for me as I am for her

When did I ever rescue her?
Did I ever romance her with wisdom and power?
When evil arose in her, was I there to rebuke it and war against it?

But You...
Well that pursuit is something else
You have searched
The depths of your beloved's heart
And You called her name
Before she knew it
In all the days of her life
You have provided for her

You make the storm
Sing and pound out Your love song
And hundred little things fall into place
By the authority of Your affectionate will
You come into her hidden shelter
And there attend to her

When the days turn dark
When the monsters come out
And all her friends fail her
When she is at the mercy of the merciless
Then You appear
As the utter darkness closes in
Your light flashes out
Tearing through that fearsome wickedness

When she wallows in the miseries of sin
When she turns her back on that light that once saved her
You do not give up on her
You have gone into her infernal shelter
With a word You blasted it to bits
She set her eyes on Fafnir's accursed gold
And at once you reduced it all to dust
You cut away her sin
And tenderly returned her to Paradise

Who am I
To care for Your beloved?
Who am I
To be called Your beloved?

Logic is Your Friend

In the history of popular thought there has emerged a very odd idea that logic is something cold, selfish, and oppressive. To the best of my understanding, this arose in the Romantic Period of the 19th century and became popular in the later half or so of the 20th century, but in this I may be wrong. The issue of importance is that in the imagination of modern America, the perfectly logical individual is imagined at best to be like Spock from Star Trek, or at worst to be like HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Reason is presumed to be the enemy of emotion, and if it is not completely amoral then it is at least utilitarian and as such justifies many things that are quite clearly wrong. In my response this notion, I aim not to point out that this image of logic is misunderstood while still ultimately true, but rather to show that the modern understanding of logic is fundamentally wrong. Reason is intrinsically linked to both our emotions and to morality.

To start, there is the illusion that reason is against emotion. While it is true that the two must at times war with one another, that is only when our emotions behave in unnatural (I use the term "natural" here in reference to the nature instilled in us by God at Eden, not the twisted and sinful nature which emerged from the Fall) ways or are in unnatural circumstances that pit them against what is good, and when our emotions are working as they should in the kinds of circumstances for which they were made, reason supports them. The image Plato suggested for a healthy mind was one of a chariot in which one horse was emotion, one was spirit (that is to say, energy), and the rider was reason. It is true that reason must struggle against emotion, but only insofar as emotion falls away from its own true nature and purpose.

Now to understand when logic should and should not fight against emotions, we must first understand what that "true nature" really is. Emotions can be divided pretty neatly into passions, intuition, yearnings, and hungers (it will only be necessary to discuss passions and intuition in detail since yearnings and hungers parallel them). A passion is very easily defined when we consider the root word of "pass" which appears in it, indicating that a "passion" is a "feeling that passes." It is a feeling such as anger or happiness or sadness which comes to us at one time and not another depending on our circumstances. Intuition is another thing entirely; it is a feeling which does not emerge out of our current circumstances and certain intuitive feelings cannot even be imagined to be stronger in one moment than in another. When we say that if A is equal to B and B is equal to C then A and C must be equal, we are speaking from the authority of intuition. We are also speaking from intuition when we say that killing someone else for the sake of convenience is wrong. We cannot prove that our intuition is true (and I should add that while some beliefs may become so ingrained in our us as to behave like items of intuition, they are still distinct) and if we had to go on proof we would be sentenced to never know anything. If I dismiss the laws or morality as they are presented to me through my feelings then I shall lose any concept of "right and wrong" at all, and if I do away with the laws of logic as they are revealed through my intuition then I shall never have any method by which to build up an alternative set of laws.

In terms of the relationship between passions and intuition, passion can tell me that I am sad at having lost a loved one, but only intuition can tell me that this passing is sorrowful. What's more, my passion can be a hatred for someone else who has written a better essay than me, while my intuition tells me that the essay is admirable and it is actually my bitterness than is hateful. In other words, a passion is an event within me, but intuition is more like a window or a copy of life's own constitution carved into my soul.

It will be noticed now that while logic must often struggle against our passions, it is nonetheless founded on our intuition, or rather that half of it which we call the "laws of logic." Of course, logic itself is founded only on what our intuition reveals to us, and the intuition itself never professes to be more than an image within us of something greater than and outside of us. The question still remains as to what logic says about how we should behave. As has already been mentioned, a very odd idea has gotten out which says that behaving logically means behaving selfishly or in a utilitarian way. This is odd in many ways, but one way that immediately jumps out at me is that both the selfish campaign and the utilitarian campaign face the invincible enemy that is time; the man whose first priority is survival will one day die and the state of general happiness which the utilitarian hopes to achieve can never be more than a particularly high peak among the hills and valleys of history. In any event, logic can never support selfishness because no course is ever logical or illogical except in the context of some objective good. Utilitarianism can be supported through logic, of course, but it is not the only such attitude. In fact, in like of our own biases, our inability to know what certain actions will result in, and the disastrous consequences of utilitarianism seriously carried out (namely Nazism and Communism) over the last century build a rather solid logical case against utilitarianism.

Neither is the idea that the logical man is unemotional any more weighty. While the moral side of intuition does not demand our total assent in the same way that the logical side does, we must accept that at least some of it is right or else we shall not have any morality at all. Thus, in so far as we have defined the moral items of intuition and assented to them, they must be the guiding forces in any truly rational decisions we make. What's more, they must be the guiding forces in how we react to our own emotions. If I am bitter about something that is good I must suppress my bitterness, but if I am instead happy over that good thing then logic must demand that I embrace that happiness. Even when we are fighting our bad emotions we should still be trying to encourage the good ones. As such, we find that even when logic is at war with passion, it is not trying to stomp it out so much as it is trying to reshape it into some form that is not only aligned with objective reality but is also thriving in that role.