religion and community
The Swarthmore Christian Fellowship held a meeting today, where three of its members gave a personal testimony about God in their lives. I attended out of curiosity.
As I suspected, the talks themselves were incredibly personal and moving – but also lacking in evidence. Everytime a speaker used the word “God”, you could have replaced it with “aspiration”, “motivation” or something similar. In other words, while the emotions they were feeling were genuine, they are also identically available to the nonbeliever- except with the knowledge of truth that it’s only the workings of our very complicated psychology, not anything supernatural.
At times, I wanted to get up and ask point-blank “Do you believe that Jesus was literally born from a Virgin?” Afterall, isn’t that one of the most important aspects to being a Christian? And I suspect that their true beliefs about this is a complicated amalgam of wishy-washy, poetic, metaphorical certainty and faith. But in the end, it is a perfectly plain question with a perfectly plain answer- either Jesus of Nazareth was born from a virgin, or he was not.
One thing that struck me greatly was the kindness and candor of the people there. I have been aware of the very pleasant, but sometimes saccharine, kindness of Christians, but it struck me in a new way when I experienced it myself. It is all very pleasant and nice, and made me realize that many stay faithful for the wonderful community more than anything else.
But all that nice atmosphere, kind generosity, and genuine emotions have no bearing on objective reality. For that, we must turn to dispassionate testing and observation. I think the biggest “flaw” many modern American Christians have is mixing emotional conviction with truth. Just because you “feel” something doesn’t mean it’s true. It must be verified independently.
In the end though, these people are pretty harmless. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for the religious in other parts of the world.
June 27th, 2008 at 8:24 am
You do know that there were virgin births in nature, don’t you? There was one of a shark a few months ago, but to my understanding virgin pregnancy can only bring females to the world, hence, the miracle was that Jesus was male! (just kidding)