talking with leaders of faith

[winterbadger]

Someone on a list I read posted a link to transcripts and recordings of a series of conversations about God that a BBC Radio 4 chap had with three religious leaders (Archbishop Rowan Williams, Professor Tariq Ramadan, and Chief Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks) earlier in the autumn.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/programmes/misc/insearchofgod.shtml

As always, I find their answers to the really tough questions are (to me) fundamentally unsatisfying and not credible, but it's still interesting to hear what they have to say.

Comments

[aitkendrum.livejournal.com]

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!!!

[winterbadger]

Happy Mew Year, from one Big Red Guy to another, and a happy new year to the Doctor and everyone's favourite HAM-loving cat! Just about two hours to go here....

[winterbadger]

that was a typo, but i think it needs to be left as is...

typing one-handed because i am now handicatted

[histoire68.livejournal.com]

Hi! Happy new year :)

[winterbadger]

Hiya! :-)

[schizokitty.livejournal.com]

Wow, thanks for the link. I get what you mean about the answers not being "satisfactory," though of all of them, I thought the Rabbi was the most convincing. I also think Humphrey's was deliberately misunderstanding the interviewees from time to time, but boy, was there a lot of weaseling going on. Not on purpose, not maliciously, I don't think, but because the person didn't really have a good answer and didn't want his religion to look bad. Every "I don't know" seemed to be qualified in such a way as to protect the religion at question from further criticism.

I believe that all these men are sincere practitioners of their faith and were not trying to propagandise, but you could see that they often were not answering Humphry's questions, not the real question. And, interestingly, I think Humphry often refused to ask the right question or to accept the occasional good answer.

As I said, the Rabbi struck me as the most convincing. He didn't so much try to apologise or excuse as to say, "look, this is what we believe, this is what we question. Your questions do not threaten my faith, but rather illuminate it." I found that very compelling.

I am always asking myself these questions about God, most particularly the one about suffering. Buddhism has helped me with a lot of it -- recognising selfish suffering, for instance -- but it hasn't really solved the problem of God. I suppose it isn't supposed to, that God/Not-God is a moot point -- but it's a question/problem I still have, so it's still something I have to work with and struggle over. Somewhere and somehow I have to find someway either to find the beginning of the answer or to find away of asking a better question.

warning: personal opinions to follow; may offend some readers

[winterbadger]

Suffering:

At this point, what hangs me up most with the different religions of the Book is that they all want people to accept the premise that God is just and fair and (at least Judaism and Christianity; I'm not so sure about Islam) that God loves his creation. Then, when it becomes manifestly obvious that painful, awful, meaningless things happen to people, they prevaricate. "Oh, God loves everyone; you just can't see how how the pointless suffering he is inflicting on millions of people really has a point, because as humans our point of view is too limited." Or "Oh, God is really entirely fair and just, but if God doesn't let human being maim and kill other human beings for their personal gratification, then we wouldn't have free will, and there wouldn't be any point in his having given it to us." To me, those are simply cop-outs, excuses to keep believing something that is manifestly untrue.

Buddhism (at least as I understand it, and with the limit that mostly what little I know is specifically either Mahayana Buddhism or Zen Buddhism) at least doesn't pretend that the world isn't full of pain and suffering. But it does suggest that the world is therefore not really real, and that full understanding and enlightenment involves perceiving the unreality of the material world. I'm one of those stubborn people who thinks that the material world is really real, not just a mysteriously synchronized illusion that we've all somehow been tricked into accepting. So Buddhism is out for me.

On the other hand, I'm perfectly happy to toddle through the world trying to live by my own personal moral code and hoping that msot other people can either manage or be forced to observe a few principles that most world cultures have managed to hammer out over the millenia, while trying to resist the attempts of people with much more restrictive and specialised moral codes to force all the rest of us to live by them.

And it doesn't take anything away from my ability to enjoy the beautiful things in the world, whether natural or humanmade, not to believe that they were are intended and fabricated by (or inspired by) some Higher Power. Nor do I think that I will miss, in moments of profound loss or pain, being told "It's all got some meaning," when I find the credibility of the tradition telling me that to be nil.