Bill, Andrew, Michael, and Gail,
I'm enjoying this conversation very much. Thanks for your thoughts.
I do try to be a "both/and" type of person rather than an "either/or" person, but often I forget. Thanks for the reminder, Andrew.
Bill, as I've mentioned before, I occasionally have very intense religious experiences myself. Awareness of an almost-tangible presence. Clear messages in almost-words. An inexplicable, overwhelming sense of well-being and peace in sometimes-catastrophic circumstances. These episodes always seem unquestionably real to me. I had them a lot as a kid. Only a few of them as an adult. Last one was about five years ago.
But I also have an MRI-documented anomaly in my temporal lobe, which is associated with
exactly these sorts of religious experiences.
Granted, the fact of a physical anomaly in my brain doesn't necessarily prove that these metaphysical experiences aren't real, just as the fact of telephones doesn't prove that our invisible communication with people thousands of miles away isn't real. As Andrew mentioned, the answer could be both/and, rather than either/or: they could be BOTH "all in my head" AND actually establishing a genuine spiritual connection. However, the either/or remains an option, too.
Although I have a wide skeptical streak, I still consider myself a person of faith. But my faith is not confidence that my personal religious/spiritual framework idea is The Right One, regarding the nature of--or even the existence of--a metaphysical plane. I will never be sure about that. But not being sure doesn't bother me. My faith is not certainty, but rather a confidence that it doesn't matter if I've got things all figured out, so long as I find the struggle to make sense of all this a useful and meaningful exercise (which I do), and that I keep trying to do what is right and just and life-affirming in real life.
I strongly agree with
James 2:4-17 (and many other social justice passages in the Old and New Testament, and my own lived experience), that belief is something you
do, not something you
think.
I know professed believers who do, indeed, walk the walk as well as talking the talk. But I also know professed believers who consistently use the social power of their religion as leverage for their own bullying, unloving agenda. And on the other hand I know atheists who live the principles of the Gospel of Love much better than I do myself. Which of these groups genuinely believes in love and justice--the cocksure theoreticians, or the actual doers? It would be nice if I could be "both/and" in that department, too, but I think it's okay to be "either/or," so long as I pick the doing over the thinking, and not the other way.
Gail--Ha! I'm with you, for the most part. I find the traditional depictions of Mary distinctly unhelpful...but her depiction in the gospels does strike me as interestingly and helpfully human. I could blather about that for quite a bit, but I've already wandered far enough off topic, so I'll just say that I love Luke's frequent repetition of the phrase "And Mary pondered these things in her heart." Yeah! Proof that Mary had a lot of trouble figuring this stuff out, too! Yet no one questions
her faith. So maybe my own cognitive dissonance is okay, too.
I also don't find it as impossible as you to think that Mary and Jesus might never have experienced sexual attraction, because I never have either--I'm asexual. (And I certainly hope for his sake that Joseph was asexual, too.)
Of course, the Church doesn't officially believe that sexual orientations exist at all, so I guess I'm immune to sexual temptation because I'm just really, really virtuous. Snort! (Virtue should require some conscious, voluntary effort, I think.)
I do think that my asexuality is a sexual orientation that I was born with, rather than a result of trauma early on. (By the time I found out what a virgin was, at age seven, I hadn't been one for years. So yeah, I've got quite a bit of baggage from growing up in a culture so eager to equate a woman's bodily integrity with her integrity of character. My childhood parish was named for
St. Agnes, for crying out loud.)
If I may digress even further, I've written a bunch of poems about how frustrating it is that all the patron saints of rape survivors (like St. Agnes) are virgin-martyrs, who nobly chose death rather than defilement. Well, great for them, but I wasn't given that choice, and even if I had been, I would have chosen life, in good conscience.
It drives me batty that even as recently as last year, when three elderly Italian nuns were raped and murdered in Burundi, their order's spokesperson insisted to the media that they weren't raped...because everyone knows that God miraculously intervenes to prevent the defilement of truly good girls.
Which is sad, because both Augustine and Aquinas acknowledged that rape
does happen to good people (both male and female), and that it is a form of torture and martyrdom, and that it does not in any way detract from the virtue of the victim. Aquinas even wrote that rape victims receive a special halo in heaven, and that a consecrated virgin who is raped is still a virgin
even if she conceives and gives birth as a result of the assault. Not is still
considered a virgin--still
is a virgin.
Which makes me think that St. Agnes and St. Agatha and many of the other famous virgin-martyrs were also raped, yet were hailed by the Church as virgins anyway to deny their rapists the power to take that honor away from them. Which, in a way, is appropriate, but the full story of what they endured would actually honor them more, in my opinion, and would be tremendously helpful to rape victims, who currently are left to think that they must have deserved it in some way, since God failed to intervene to save them.
Okay, I think I've probably set some sort of record for wandering way off topic now, so I'll stop.