I would be remiss if I didn’t pick up on Jennine’s response to my earlier post on how religion might usefully approached in the same way as sport. I think that I meant to point out that religion is a social and cultural phenomenon in the same way as sport is, and that we can understand them in similar - although not identical - ways. Jennine takes a slightly different perspective:
But what I want to be cautious of in a way that I don’t think Paul and Maher are, entirely, is conflating “religion” and “faith”… I agree with Maher that an intellectual grasp of religions is not sufficient to fully understand what it means to live a life of faith.
Caution is always to be recommended on the Web, and I agree completely that a purely “academic” (in the derogatory sense) approach will never lead to true understanding of something so deeply felt.
While we agree on that, I think we disagree quite fundamentally on how religion and sport look from the outside - although as Jennine says, she occupies an ambiguous position with regards to both activities due to her upbringing (which is partly my point, I think).
However, knowing people of faith who live their faith - as expressed through religion - deeply and beautifully, there is something there that I just don’t see captured in sport. And that is the relationship between a person and the divinity that they engage with. Although supporting a sports team can offer a sense of identity and community, I hope at least, that most fans understand that the team is not invested in their wellbeing. And that, at least in the Christian traditions I grew up in, is exactly what I was taught about God - that God is concerned with each person’s wellbeing, that God loves each individual and wants them to live a good life.
That may well be what people believe about God - but, just like their favourite sports team, God does appear to keep on letting them down. And yet those people keep going back for more, just like sports fans who follow their teams despite persistent losses and consistent mismanagement. It’s all about feeling connected to a higher power - whether that higher power is Yahweh or Nike.
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Interesting. I hadn’t realised until now how differently we are looking at it. Because in my head, equating sport with religion can work because the two function to create communities with rules, rituals, gathering times and places, and other signifiers of belonging. Faith I think of as an individual pursuit, practiced within or outside of a religious structure, so possibly informed by a community, but capable of existing outside of it.
So in my framing, I’d definitely see where sport and religion can be understood as sharing a higher power - that of the community, the power of belonging. I agree that they’re cultural and social phenomena with key similarities. And I guess what I see the sports fan getting out of continuing allegiance to a badly managed team is that sense of belonging - misery loves company, especially on sports radio.
The higher power the person of faith (as I understand “faith”, which may well be an entirely idiosyncratic understanding of no use to anyone else) interacts with, though, is much more difficult to grasp. I see its effects in the lives of people I’m close to, and it’s really hard to comprehend. There’s not something I can to latch on to intellectually, as there is in the religion/sports comparison. It’s entirely mysterious to me, because it involves believing that there is an omnipotent and all-loving power at work in the world despite all evidence to the contrary. And I at least have that much exposure to it (and understand that it doesn’t preclude the exercise of rationality and formidable intelligence in other areas of life) - my understanding of Maher’s article was that he believed many of his students didn’t even that, and so were only capable of trying to intellectualizing about faith, which is an extremely limited standpoint from which to approach it.
My idiosyncratic constructions of “faith” aside, this has been very interesting. I’m glad you engaged with Maher’s article, and my earlier thoughts. Thanks!
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I don’t think your construction of faith is that idiosyncratic, but I do think it’s a defense mechanism that people use to hold on to their “belief in belief” (per Dennett) in the face of secular forces. I think Maher is right that his students are pretty clueless about both faith and religion (unlike us, cough cough) but that’s simply a result of those secular forces rather than a personal failing.
And contra: do people with religious faith have any more clue about how people without any faith operate? Not from my experience commenting on religious blogs, where the fundamentalists insist on telling me what I believe and then claim I’m fooling myself when I tell them otherwise…
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I understood Maher’s concern to be that their education was failing students, which I found (having just said that I don’t know that there is much of an intellectual basis for understanding faith) odd, though not illegitimate. Although I don’t think it would necessarily be a bad thing to make future members of the diplomatic corps study psychology and neurotheology. Maybe Maher’s concern is just as much an intellectualized manifestation of the feeling of “what are we sending these fresh-faced kids with their limited understanding of the world off to do?” (also not illegitimate, but you need more words for an op-ed article).
I guess I’ve been fortunate in the people of faith I’ve interacted with, because nobody (not even my mother, who had a bit of struggle with her children’s descent into apostasy) has ever tried to tell me what I believe. I do think that some who are close to me worry that I’m leading an impoverished life (and there are times when I wonder whether they’re not right) but I’ve at least not had many direct encounters with the kind of people who refuse to accept that faith isn’t a necessary aspect of a good life.
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Although the two look alike from the point of view of social structural belonging and both involve great passions, speaking from involvement point of view, I can’t help thinking of 2 main differentiating features;
1) one would most likely follow the religion of the state and/or the family he/she is born in, the phenomenon starting at birth fortified by relevant rituals and by consequence and not by exercising his/her judgment and power of decision (which I believe a starting point of faith) while sports interest is individual, developing at a later stage of life, with just some influence of socio-cultural standing and traditions.
2) at least me, personally, I have difficulty in comparing sports - celebration of human body and its capabilities (so worldly!), with obedience to an extramundane authority who does not even have a face.
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