Belief Is the Least Part of Faith

[BSB]

Belief Is the Least Part of Faith
By T. M. LUHRMANN
Published: May 29, 2013

Some Sundays ago, I was part of a sermon in my university’s church. It was the kind of ecumenical church in which I’d grown up. The minister and I sat on the proscenium above the congregation and below the stained-glass windows, and spoke about the ways that evangelical Christians understood God — a subject on which I had written a book. Afterward, there was a lunch open to the community. The questions people asked as we ate our avocado-and-cheese sandwiches circled around the puzzle of belief. Why do people believe in God? What is our evidence that there is an invisible agent who has a real impact on our lives? How can those people be so confident?


These are the questions that university-educated liberals ask about faith. They are deep questions. But they are also abstract and intellectual. They are philosophical questions. In an evangelical church, the questions would probably have circled around how to feel God’s love and how to be more aware of God’s presence. Those are fundamentally practical questions.

You could imagine that if you were going to spend an hour or two each week fretting over one or the other, you might opt for the practical. This choice is more real for many evangelicals than most secular liberals imagine. Not all members of deeply theologically conservative churches — churches that seem to have such clear-cut rules about how people should behave and what they should believe — have made up their minds about whether God exists or how God exists. In a charismatic evangelical church I studied, people often made comments that suggested they had complicated ideas about God’s realness. One devout woman said in a prayer group one evening: “I don’t believe it, but I’m sticking to it. That’s my definition of faith.”

It was a flippant, off-the-cuff remark, but also a modern-day version of Pascal’s wager: in the face of her uncertainty about God’s existence, she decided that she was better off behaving as if God were real. She chose to foreground the practical issue of how to experience the world as if she was loved by a loving God and to put to one side her intellectual puzzling over whether and in what way the invisible agent was really there.

The role of belief in religion is greatly overstated, as anthropologists have long known. In 1912, Émile Durkheim, one of the founders of modern social science, argued that religion arose as a way for social groups to experience themselves as groups. He thought that when people experienced themselves in social groups they felt bigger than themselves, better, more alive — and that they identified that aliveness as something supernatural. Religious ideas arose to make sense of this experience of being part of something greater. Durkheim thought that belief was more like a flag than a philosophical position: You don’t go to church because you believe in God; rather, you believe in God because you go to church.

In fact, you can argue that religious belief as we now conceptualize it is an entirely modern phenomenon. As the comparative religion scholar Wilfred Cantwell Smith pointed out, when the King James Bible was printed in 1611, “to believe” meant something like “to hold dear.” Smith, who died in 2000, once wrote: “The affirmation ‘I believe in God’ used to mean: ‘Given the reality of God as a fact of the universe, I hereby pledge to Him my heart and soul. I committedly opt to live in loyalty to Him. I offer my life to be judged by Him, trusting His mercy.’ Today the statement may be taken by some as meaning: ‘Given the uncertainty as to whether there be a God or not, as a fact of modern life, I announce that my opinion is yes.’ ”

To be clear, I am not arguing that belief is not important to Christians. It is obviously important. But secular Americans often think that the most important thing to understand about religion is why people believe in God, because we think that belief precedes action and explains choice. That’s part of our folk model of the mind: that belief comes first.

And that was not really what I saw after my years spending time in evangelical churches. I saw that people went to church to experience joy and to learn how to have more of it. These days I find that it is more helpful to think about faith as the questions people choose to focus on, rather than the propositions observers think they must hold.

If you can sidestep the problem of belief — and the related politics, which can be so distracting — it is easier to see that the evangelical view of the world is full of joy. God is good. The world is good. Things will be good, even if they don’t seem good now. That’s what draws people to church. It is understandably hard for secular observers to sidestep the problem of belief. But it is worth appreciating that in belief is the reach for joy, and the reason many people go to church in the first place.

T. M. Luhrmann, a professor of anthropology at Stanford and the author of “When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship With God,” is a guest columnist.
A version of this op-ed appeared in print on May 30, 2013, on page A23 of the New York edition with the headline: Belief Is The Least Part of Faith.
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[BSB]

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/30/opinion/luhrmann-belief-is-the-least-part-of-faith.html?ref=opinion

[BT]

And that was not really what I saw after my years spending time in evangelical churches. I saw that people went to church to experience joy and to learn how to have more of it. These days I find that it is more helpful to think about faith as the questions people choose to focus on, rather than the propositions observers think they must hold.

If you can sidestep the problem of belief — and the related politics, which can be so distracting — it is easier to see that the evangelical view of the world is full of joy. God is good. The world is good. Things will be good, even if they don’t seem good now. That’s what draws people to church. It is understandably hard for secular observers to sidestep the problem of belief. But it is worth appreciating that in belief is the reach for joy, and the reason many people go to church in the first place.

Interesting .

[BSB]

It is interesting.

"The world is good. Things will be good, even if they don’t seem good now. That’s what draws people to church"

Which sounds like Buddhism. A lot Buddhists say that there's no difference between Christianity and Buddhism. They're both about the mind.


BSB

[BT]

I was picking up more of the shared cultural groupings and the need to be part of a larger group in pursuit of a common goal. But that concerns the practice of religion in some organized fashion and i think the commonality between Christianity and Buddhism is that you do not really need to belong to an organized faith to pursue either the teachings of Christ or of Buddha.

[BSB]

" the shared cultural groupings and the need to be part of a larger group in pursuit of a common goal. "

Well, I wouldn't discount that. But I was headed here:

"The world is good. Things will be good, even if they don’t seem good now. That’s what draws people to church"

And the Buddhas 4 Noble Truths

1. Life means suffering. 2. The origin of suffering is attachment. 3. The cessation of suffering is attainable. 4. The path to the cessation of suffering

Where does this transformation of view really occur? In the mind in both cases.


BSB

[Xavier_Onassis]

Buddhism says very little about the afterlife. Christianity makes it the focal point for all believers.

I agree that many Christians never bother with making any logical sense of the basic doctrines: Jesus is God, God said it, therefore it must be true and never questioned.

[BSB]

"Buddhism says very little about the afterlife. Christianity makes it the focal point for all believers."

In 'India' during the Buddha's time afterlife was another round of this life. Around and around people went, so it was believed. Buddhism was an answer to this never ending cycle of birth and death, and the continued suffering that went with it. The Chinese called it the Great Matter of Birth and Death. The Buddha's understanding of no-self, and his map to enlightenment, was a way of freeing oneself from that. Once enlightened, so it is believed, the Buddha never returned. So, if you could become enlightened, you to would not return. Rebirth was something to be freed from not aspired to. So, in many ways Buddhism was very much about the afterlife.


BSB

[Plane]

I always thought belief to be quite important.

This is a thought provoking article tho.

....So is a feeling of God's presence supposed to be a hive mind experience?

http://utmost.org/dependent-on-god%E2%80%99s-presence/

[Xavier_Onassis]

To many Christians, belief in Jesus is IDEALLY a hive mind experience.

Buddha concentrated on the importance of following the Eightfold Path, with the purpose of ending suffering, not so much in the afterlife, but in one's present life. His teachings took several directions after his death: Tibetan, Thai and Zen Buddhism differ quite a bit.

Christianity (notably Paul) concentrated on the importance of salvation in the afterlife and the spreading of the faith. Jesus and Paul were not on the same page, as anyone who reads the Bible critically can see.

We see no mention of Paul saying at his alleged crucifixion "Why has Thou forsaken me?", after all.

[BSB]

"Buddha concentrated on the importance of following the Eightfold Path, with the purpose of ending suffering, not so much in the afterlife, but in one's present life."

Again, to be accurate, while the Buddha's teachings were used both then and now to end suffering in this life their real purpose was to end the suffering of constant rebirth by not returning.

BSB

[BSB]

The four stages of attainment [edit]

The Sangha of the Tathagata's disciples (Ariya Sangha) can be described as including four or eight kinds of individuals. There are four [groups of noble disciples] when path and fruit are taken as pairs, and eight groups of individuals, when each path and fruit are taken separately:
(1) the path to stream-entry; (2) the fruition of stream-entry;
(3) the path to once-returning; (4) the fruition of once-returning;
(5) the path to non-returning; (6) the fruition of non-returning;
(7) the path to arahantship; ( the fruition of arahantship.


Stream-enterer [edit]
Main article: Sot?panna
The first stage is that of Sot?panna (Pali; Sanskrit: Srot?panna), literally meaning "one who enters (?padyate) the stream (sotas)," with the stream being the supermundane Noble Eightfold Path regarded as the highest Dharma. The stream-enterer is also said to have "opened the eye of the Dharma" (dhammacakkhu, Sanskrit: dharmacak?us).
A stream-enterer reaches arahantship within seven rebirths upon opening the eye of the Dharma.
Due to the fact that the stream-enterer has attained an intuitive grasp of Buddhist doctrine (samyagd???i or samm?di??hi, "right view") and has complete confidence or Saddha in the Three Jewels: Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha, that individual will not be reborn in any plane lower than the human (animal, preta, or in hell).


Once-returner [edit]
Main article: Sakadagami
The second stage is that of the Sakad?g?m? (Sanskrit: Sak?d?g?min), literally meaning "one who once (sak?t) comes (?gacchati)". The once-returner will at most return to the human world one more time. Both the stream-enterer and the once-returner have abandoned the first three fetters. The stream-enterer and once-returner are distinguished by the fact that the once-returner has weakened lust, hate, and delusion to a greater degree. The once-returner therefore has fewer than seven rebirths. They may take place in higher planes but will include rebirth in the human world at most only once more. Once-returners do not have only one more rebirth, as the name suggests, for that may not even be said with certainty about the non-returner who can take multiple rebirths in the five "Pure Abodes".

Non-returner [edit]
Main article: An?g?mi

The third stage is that of the An?g?m? (Sanskrit: An?g?min), literally meaning "one who does not (an-) come (?gacchati)". The non-returner, having overcome sensuality, does not return to human world, or any unfortunate world lower than that after death. Instead, non-returners are reborn in one of the five special worlds in R?padh?tu called the ?uddh?v?sa worlds, or "Pure Abodes", and there attain Nirv??a; P?li: Nibbana; some of them are reborn a second time in a higher world of the Pure Abodes.
An An?g?m? has abandoned the five lower fetters, out of ten total fetters, that bind beings to the cycle of rebirth. An An?g?m? is well advanced.
Arahant [edit]
Main article:

Arahant

The fourth stage is that of Arahant, a fully awakened person. He has abandoned all ten fetters and, upon death (Sanskrit: Parinirv??a, P?li: Parinibb?na) will never be reborn in any plane or world, having wholly escaped sa?s?ra.[6] An Arahant had attained awakening by following the path given by the Buddha. In Theravada the term Buddha is reserved for Siddartha Gautama Buddha, as being the one who discovered the path by himself.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_stages_of_enlightenment

[Plane]

That is interesting, and apparently very diffrent indeed from Christianity.

[Xavier_Onassis]

Buddhism says that to live a better life, you should act in a way that is logical.

Christianity says that in order to live a better life after you are dead, you have to believe that Jesus is actually the son of God, and sacrificed himself for your sins, because you are sooo sinful that only a God being tortured and sacrificed could save you. Christianity says that you were born filled with sin because some very, very distant ancestors took really bad culinary advice from a talking snake. Then, after God destroyed damn near everyone, and after many centuries has elapsed, only then does Jesus get born and saves people by sacrificing himself like a goat.  Somehow that seems less logical to me.

[BSB]

"Buddhism says that to live a better life, you should act in a way that is logical."

The Dalai Lama was asked that if science refuted a belief of his what would he do? He said he would have to go with science.


BSB