The White Lily (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
thewhitelily) wrote2006-11-06 02:27 am
thewhitelily) wrote2006-11-06 02:27 am
Weddings, God, and Human Nature
I went to a wedding yesterday.
Well, actually I didn’t, I just found this on my hard drive yesterday, which I’d written up months ago and never got around to posting. But in an attempt to stop myself from writing a long ranting response to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
lovecrafty’s post that manages to be part agreement, part denial, and part manifesto, I decided to seek it out and post it. So… instead, let’s imagine that I went to a wedding yesterday.
I’m not sure what my cousin, the bride, thought of my wedding, a couple of years ago, but I suspect it must have been something similar to what I thought of hers.
Do you really think that? Can you possibly, really think that?
I had a secular wedding. I cobbled together the twenty minute ceremony from bits and pieces I found on the Internet, then rewrote them, then my husband rewrote them, then I rewrote them, then he rewrote them again, until we had something that we both loved.
Since my husband and I are secular humanists, our ceremony, I suppose, was a humanist one. We vowed that although we would inevitably anger, burden, and hurt one another, doing so would never be our intent. We claimed that the fact that either of us could survive on our own made it all the more special that we were making a choice to be together. We promised to love one in many different ways, to make our lives together as friends, as companions, as lovers, as a family, and as husband and wife, and to hold on to that multi-stranded love through anything life could throw at us.
My cousin, clearly, believes something quite different. God is love. And since God is love, human beings are not love and cannot have any capacity to love. They are simply not capable of it! Instead, the most they can do is make themselves conduits to reflect God’s love to one another.
I realise that this is not the mainstream view, and the immediate response of many Christians would be “But we’re made in God’s image!” But it is a manifestation of a very commonly held view in Christianity. A view that involves thanking God for the good and blaming human nature for the bad. To a secular humanist like myself, this is the ultimate heresy, an insult to the very core of our beliefs.
My belief is that every human being holds within them the potential to make a difference with their life. That our purpose is to make sure that our contribution to the world and the lives of the people around us – however tiny in the grand scheme of things – adds up with the contribution of every other human being on this earth into a positive whole.
My grandmother, who is approaching 90, and has 6 children, thirty-something grandchildren, seventy-something great-grand-children so far, and has already started in on the great-great-grandchildren, has given her all in life and love and enrichment to those around her, even though now she hardly knows her own name. My niece Ruby, who died within hours of her birth, made a difference on this life because of the footprints of grief and joy she left on the hearts of those who loved her, even though she never knew the difference she had made. We don’t have to be aware of every contribution we make or every point at which we affect another person’s life. We don’t have to know how our infinitesimal contributions will combine with those of others to be reinforced or cancelled out or forgotten. All we have to do is try to ensure that the impact we make on the world is a positive one.
We can choose to give more pleasure and growth and enrichment in our company to our friends and family than we do unhappiness and bitterness and betrayal. We can choose to donate money or time or energy or blood to causes that we think are meaningful and worthwhile, rather than living solely for ourselves and our own selfish satisfaction. We can choose to stand up for causes we believe are just and good, and fight against those we believe are wrong, rather than letting life and the world pass us by as we hide under a cloak of apathy. We can discover things that were unknown, invent things that were previously thought impossible, or create things of beauty or elegance.
And we don't have to change the world to have an impact. We're not standing on the shoulders of giants; we're standing on the cumulative contributions of billions upon billions of midgets and offering up our shoulders to others in turn for them to climb that tiny bit higher than they could have before we existed.
The idea of having all this stripped away from us – having all the good that humans can do, all the impact we can make on the lives around us, taken away and attributed to some force apart from our own will; having that taken away, but the selfishness and the bitterness and the anger and the apathy and the hurt we can cause left behind and called “human nature” – it’s simply appalling to me.
Glorifying God for the good and blaming ourselves for the bad is just asymmetrical. It simply doesn’t make sense. If we are to take the blame for our own capacity for ill, we must equally well accept the credit for our capacity for good.
But perhaps I have digressed a little.
My six-year-old niece obviously followed at least some of the sermon, because when my sister was putting her to bed, she asked, “So was God the first one to get married?”
She was told that no, God wasn’t married. (Yes, I realise a more technically correct answer may have been that God’s married to the church. But my sister’s not a Christian either, so I think she did rather well on the whole with the simpler answer.)
“Oh,” frowned my niece and, without missing a beat, “she must be terribly lonely up in heaven all by herself, then.”
Out of the mouths of babes…
Well, actually I didn’t, I just found this on my hard drive yesterday, which I’d written up months ago and never got around to posting. But in an attempt to stop myself from writing a long ranting response to
lovecrafty’s post that manages to be part agreement, part denial, and part manifesto, I decided to seek it out and post it. So… instead, let’s imagine that I went to a wedding yesterday. I’m not sure what my cousin, the bride, thought of my wedding, a couple of years ago, but I suspect it must have been something similar to what I thought of hers.
Do you really think that? Can you possibly, really think that?
I had a secular wedding. I cobbled together the twenty minute ceremony from bits and pieces I found on the Internet, then rewrote them, then my husband rewrote them, then I rewrote them, then he rewrote them again, until we had something that we both loved.
Since my husband and I are secular humanists, our ceremony, I suppose, was a humanist one. We vowed that although we would inevitably anger, burden, and hurt one another, doing so would never be our intent. We claimed that the fact that either of us could survive on our own made it all the more special that we were making a choice to be together. We promised to love one in many different ways, to make our lives together as friends, as companions, as lovers, as a family, and as husband and wife, and to hold on to that multi-stranded love through anything life could throw at us.
My cousin, clearly, believes something quite different. God is love. And since God is love, human beings are not love and cannot have any capacity to love. They are simply not capable of it! Instead, the most they can do is make themselves conduits to reflect God’s love to one another.
I realise that this is not the mainstream view, and the immediate response of many Christians would be “But we’re made in God’s image!” But it is a manifestation of a very commonly held view in Christianity. A view that involves thanking God for the good and blaming human nature for the bad. To a secular humanist like myself, this is the ultimate heresy, an insult to the very core of our beliefs.
My belief is that every human being holds within them the potential to make a difference with their life. That our purpose is to make sure that our contribution to the world and the lives of the people around us – however tiny in the grand scheme of things – adds up with the contribution of every other human being on this earth into a positive whole.
My grandmother, who is approaching 90, and has 6 children, thirty-something grandchildren, seventy-something great-grand-children so far, and has already started in on the great-great-grandchildren, has given her all in life and love and enrichment to those around her, even though now she hardly knows her own name. My niece Ruby, who died within hours of her birth, made a difference on this life because of the footprints of grief and joy she left on the hearts of those who loved her, even though she never knew the difference she had made. We don’t have to be aware of every contribution we make or every point at which we affect another person’s life. We don’t have to know how our infinitesimal contributions will combine with those of others to be reinforced or cancelled out or forgotten. All we have to do is try to ensure that the impact we make on the world is a positive one.
We can choose to give more pleasure and growth and enrichment in our company to our friends and family than we do unhappiness and bitterness and betrayal. We can choose to donate money or time or energy or blood to causes that we think are meaningful and worthwhile, rather than living solely for ourselves and our own selfish satisfaction. We can choose to stand up for causes we believe are just and good, and fight against those we believe are wrong, rather than letting life and the world pass us by as we hide under a cloak of apathy. We can discover things that were unknown, invent things that were previously thought impossible, or create things of beauty or elegance.
And we don't have to change the world to have an impact. We're not standing on the shoulders of giants; we're standing on the cumulative contributions of billions upon billions of midgets and offering up our shoulders to others in turn for them to climb that tiny bit higher than they could have before we existed.
The idea of having all this stripped away from us – having all the good that humans can do, all the impact we can make on the lives around us, taken away and attributed to some force apart from our own will; having that taken away, but the selfishness and the bitterness and the anger and the apathy and the hurt we can cause left behind and called “human nature” – it’s simply appalling to me.
Glorifying God for the good and blaming ourselves for the bad is just asymmetrical. It simply doesn’t make sense. If we are to take the blame for our own capacity for ill, we must equally well accept the credit for our capacity for good.
But perhaps I have digressed a little.
My six-year-old niece obviously followed at least some of the sermon, because when my sister was putting her to bed, she asked, “So was God the first one to get married?”
She was told that no, God wasn’t married. (Yes, I realise a more technically correct answer may have been that God’s married to the church. But my sister’s not a Christian either, so I think she did rather well on the whole with the simpler answer.)
“Oh,” frowned my niece and, without missing a beat, “she must be terribly lonely up in heaven all by herself, then.”
Out of the mouths of babes…
It's a testament to the fact I'm in "writing" mode that I almost went back and replaced "said".
So, uh, I enjoyed this post!
Glad I got that off my chest. :D
Re: It's a testament to the fact I'm in "writing" mode that I almost went back and replaced "said".
In fact, that's an order. I want to see an update about them in the next few days!
But hey, if you feel like posting anything about breasts, I am READY with the comments!
Re: In fact, that's an order. I want to see an update about them in the next few days!
Quite coincidentally, I have indeed included a (regrettably true) comment about breasts in my latest post. Sure, it doesn't make up that large a percentage of the post, but I shall await your earth-shatteringly insightful comments with bated
breastsbreath.no subject
no subject
no subject
Christianity seems to be changing along with the world. Change is good, of course, but there are probably some things that shouldn't be changed. Of course God is love-- the essence of love. The sad thing (to me) is that more and more Christians around me seem to be seeing things as you say your sister sees them: if God is love, then we are the opposite.
If we are made in the image of God, then we too must be love. The sin, and the hurt, etc. in the world however, mean that our love is simply not as complete as God's.
Human nature is not bad in itself really. It is the choices we make. Human nature is all about choice. Without the ability to hate, to do wrong, we would not have the ability to love, or do right, and therefore, our doing so would mean nothing. It would be nothing.
Doing good, and love would not make the impact that (as you mentioned) we all make, and should make, positively.
(*ends ranting*)
Love you, Lily.
Alvin
no subject
I agree with you - it's not Christianity in general I'm ranting about (at least in this particular instance) it's the lengths to which a number of Christians I know take this philosophy.
I was shocked as well as horrified at what the minister at my cousin's wedding was saying. I wasn't expecting what he said, and I didn't straw-man him or take his opinions through to their natural conclusions even a little bit. He actually said: "God is love, therefore we are not love." Then he looked around with a kind of "duh!" expression on his face, like wasn't it obvious?
My blood started boiling right there, because that should not be what Christianity is about. It should not be what any religion whose followers have self esteem higher than a wet dishtowl, or can take any kind of tolerant view to nonbelievers is about. And it saddens me how widely this opinion's held - or at least the edges of it are held without thinking it through to what it actually means.
Gaaaargh, I'm totally in NaNo mode - a short reply just doesn't seem to be possible for me at the moment.
no subject
I used to be something of a rabid catholic, as much as a naive sixth grader can be, then I turned into something of a secular humanist, as much as a naive seventh grader could be, but now I'm something of a nihilist, as much as a naive ninth grader can be.
I do agree with (some) of your conclusions, but not with your premises, basically. But then, I've stayed up too late and I'm in a too-quiet library trying to pound my head against Zarathustra for the fourth time in as many days. :P
Anywho, to the whining: basically, it seems to me that you're basing some of your arguments based on the consequences of particular beliefs when really, consequences have nothing to do with any of the sorts of absolutes that a lot of Christians like to cling to, it's a matter of definite right or wrong, regardless of what the consequences are... and since many Christians do base their actions on a blind faith that it is in following with God's plan, and it's difficult to argue it other than to say that it's arbitrary, which doesn't mean much to them folks anyway. When you're trying to argue against a system, I'd think you should to argue it from the inside, not the outside. :P
But hey, I'm the nihilist. Feel free to ignore me, since I'm not in a very coherant mood right now. :P