This was prompted by Farfolo's "There is no God" diary.
First, my biases: I am a spiritual agnostic Unitarian-Universalist who was raised Catholic. My opinions of Catholicism are mostly negative--tempered by some great Xaverian Brothers I had at my high school.
I'm an agnostic, as I said, so this isn't going to be about whether or not God exists. I have no idea what exists.
What I want to talk about is where religion becomes oppressive. Since I was raised Catholic and most of the oppressive religious people in this country are Christian, that's where I'm going to concentrate.
So, my problem is this: where faith and the Bible intersect.
More on the flip side.
I postulate this: if you are throwing a Bible at me, you are
not relying on 'faith'. You are relying on what
you see as 'proof'. Yes, there's an element of faith in all this: faith that the Bible is the "Word of God". But, still, people who throw their bibles around need it 'in black and white'.
As far as I'm concerned, that's not faith.
There's two problems here. The first is that the Bible is so self-contradictory that to use all of it as some kind of historical record of 'God' is futile. This is why so many on the Religious Right pick-and-choose and seem to just ignore the parts that don't support their worldview. The second is that, for Christians, the Bible remains the main 'proof' of God.
Without some sort of scripture, what do you have? Blind faith. Completely blind faith.
I have more respect for blind faith than I do for Biblical 'faith'. I also have more respect for people who use the Bible as metaphor and revealing-fiction than The Word Of God--because they're just using the writings to inform their faith.
The problem is those with a biblical worldview. First of all, it's a worldview thousands of years old. Second of all, it has little to do with 'faith'. It has to do with scouring the text to reinforce your own prejudices, and then somehow connecting those prejudices with 'God'.
There are exceptions. The parts of the Gospels that purport to record 'the words of Jesus' are, to me, an exception. But they're an exception because many of them don't require faith. Jesus taught things that speak to me--an agnostic--because so many of his teachings could be interpreted in a humanistic way. There are other parts similar to this.
But so much of it, almost drowns out 'faith'. Genesis, for one. If you need proof that mankind was 'created by God', that's not faith--that's searching for certanity. Moreover, it's searching for certainty about your own importance. "See! God created us! Says so right here! We must be special!" This is the core of the creationist belief--and it has nothing to do with faith.
Too much organized religion exploits this--because too much orgnaized religion isn't about faith. It's about control. The Religious Right favors school prayer because they want my kids to pray (their kids are already praying). They want my kids to be abstinent (theirs already are, or so they think). They want to take away my right to die (they've already given theirs away). This has something to do with faith? No, it does not.
If people need signposts, that's not faith. If they need written texts, that's not faith. If they need rules and regulations--and, most especially, if they try to extend those rules and regulations to those of us who don't accept them, that most certainly is not faith.
As far as I'm concerned, the Bible is an attempt to prove the unprovable--an attempt by mere humans to explain the unexplainable. If you see it in that light, it's a valuable thing. But if you think it does prove the unprovable, well, you have no faith. Stop saying you do. Faith doesn't need proof.