Epigraph:
And most of them follow nothing but conjecture. Surely, conjecture avails nothing against truth. (Al Quran 10:37)
Will they not, then, meditate upon the Qur’an? Had it been from anyone other than Allah, they would surely have found therein much disagreement. (Al Quran 4:83)
Source: The Huffington Post
By Alan Jones: Dean Emeritus, Grace Cathedral
There’s been a lot of talk lately about the growing number of the Nones (those who list their religion as “none”). The great army of the unaffiliated is growing. Even many of those who go to a place of religious worship call themselves “seekers” rather than “believers.” It’s my hunch that there’s something deeply important going on here. It’s not just a matter of more and more of us swimming in an ocean of doubt. It’s not so much that we doubt as that we have hit our heads against the brick wall of thinking that language has only one meaning. The trouble is that it’s difficult to figure out what has happened to us. Colliding with a brick wall befuddles the mind. One clue as to what has happened to us is the squabbling among some believers and the new crop of atheists. The disputes often read like a mud-slinging match between two sets of fundamentalists. Faith is caricatured on one side as belief in things without any evidence. The other side, in an act of suicidal defeat, cannot give any reasons for their assertions. There’s very little sense of faith being an act of trust, without which none of us can live.
I think the seekers and the nones are onto something deeply important. They’ve stumbled upon or recovered a problem with the triumph of univocal scientific language. They have an intuitive awareness that something could be true on one level and not true on another, that story-telling is integral to truth-telling. Believers have been suffering from “science-envy” for about 400 hundred years. In their lust for certainty, they wanted their dogmas to sound like scientific formulae. Both Catholics and Protestants declared and declare their doctrines as if they are literally true.
Not long ago the Pope did away with Limbo as if it were a literal place. In April of 2007 the Washington Post ran the headline: “Vatican Panel Discounts Limbo for Unbaptized.” This came as a relief to some Roman Catholic parents. The article reported: “Ann Druge grew up in a Catholic family with eight children and the haunting knowledge that a ninth was stillborn. Because the baby, named Mary Ellen, had not been baptized, she was denied a Catholic burial. “When we would go to the cemetery… we’d always stop where they threw the dead flowers. That’s where the little one was buried,” said Druge, 80, of Storrs, Conn. “My mother and father were very upset every time. She was stillborn, so she couldn’t be buried in the consecrated ground. We were told she was in limbo.” No more. After three years of study, a Vatican-appointed panel of theologians has declared that limbo is a “problematic” concept that Catholics are free to reject. Why, one wonders, insist on its literal truth in the first place? And what other dogmas might bear looking at for some revision?
What do we do in such a circumstance when things are falling apart and the old certainties appear to be crumbling, and people are retreating into private arrangements with what they take to be reality? You can’t blame those who fill in those forms with “none” and those, while sensing something important in religion, call themselves seekers rather than believers.
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