John Blake of CNN asks, “Have you ‘walked the aisle’ to ‘pray the
prayer?’ Did you ever ‘name and claim’ something and, after getting it,
announce, ‘I’m highly blessed and favored?’ . . . If this is you, some
Christian pastors and scholars have some bad news: You may not know what you’re
talking about. They say that many contemporary Christians have become pious
parrots. They constantly repeat Christian phrases that they don’t understand or
distort.”[1] Making matters worse, such
Christians treat their religious beliefs as if they constitute knowledge. This,
as well as the presumed wherewithal to claim anything due from God, is highly
impious and yet the claimers are certain that
they have true belief.
For example, some Christians refer to “the rapture” without
realizing that it is out of sync with historical Christian theology before
1850. Marcus Borg, a theologian, makes the point. “’People who speak Christian
aren’t just mangling religious terminology’, he says. ‘They’re also inventing
counterfeit Christian terms such as ‘the rapture’ as if they were a part of
essential church teaching.’ The rapture, a phrase used to describe the sudden
transport of true Christians to heaven while the rest of humanity is left
behind to suffer, actually contradicts historic Christian teaching, Borg says.
‘The rapture is a recent invention. Nobody had thought of what is now known as
the rapture until about 1850,’” Borg says.[2] Representing something as a
part of essential church teaching without knowing what one is talking about
evinces the “I can’t be wrong” attitude that goes with the de facto presumption, even if implicit, of infallibility.
Conveniently, the Christians who evoke the rapture tend overwhelmingly to take
it for granted that they will be going to heaven rather than staying around to
suffer, but is not the presumption of omniscience worthy of impiety, which,
along with greed, is one of the foremost sins?
Many Christians are not aware of the effect that the pull of greed
has had through the centuries in decoupling greed from wealth—even from being
rich and yet presumed saved. For someone to say, “I name and claim this house
as mine" is really just a desire to possess it; the expression "name
and claim" is simply a subterfuge for greed (i.e., an instinctual, basic
desire for more). The
prosperity gospel, for example, facilitates or enables greed, rather than
constraining it. According to Blake,
prosperity Christians, who believe that God rewards true belief with material
wealth, “don’t say ‘I want that new Mercedes.’ They say they are going to
‘believe for a new Mercedes.’ They don’t say ‘I want a promotion.’ They say I
‘name and claim’ a promotion.”[3] However, it is impious to
claim anything, not to mention something as profane as a job
promotion. This claim itself reflects a vaunted self-importance that does not
account for the flawed nature of man.
Even rational thought, which is typically assumed to be objective,
is distorted by ideology and even religious belief. The brain is weak in
holding itself accountable, such as in adequately checking its own assumptions
(which are subjective).
Perhaps anger (i.e., emotions) can preempt the brain from
performing a check-and-balance function on its own products (i.e.,
assumptions), or, as I believe, the brain has a very weak self-corrective
feature, though higher education can strengthen it. If nothing else, in being
told, incorrect!, enough, a student
can realize just how fallible the mind is. Put another way, the ideational
products of the human mind are not as foolproof as we tend to assume. This holds when the mind enters
the religious domain too; beliefs are almost always assumed to be facts, and thus knowledge. If this were so, what use
would faith be? The religious scholar Joseph Campbell once asked a priest this
question only to find the conversation instantly over.
Euthyphro suddenly realizes he had an appointment so he scurries
away from Socrates, who has just demonstrated that Euthyphro’s certainty
regarding the ethics of turning in his own father for killing a slave is erroneous;
Euthyphro does not know what he thinks he knows. Each of us should internalize
Socratic questions, as Socrates’ goal in his dialogues is to convince his
interlocutors that they really don’t know what they assume they know. We can impose our respective wills on our own
minds to prune off branches that claim to be alive but are actually dead, for
our brains do not contain enough machinery on their own.
Unfortunately, the defense mechanisms of ideology (e.g., political
and economic) and religious belief tend to block any real self-Socratic
dialogue from occurring. I suppose this is similar to the denial in an
addiction. Are we addicted to our political ideologies and religious beliefs? Do
the beliefs we value so have too much pull in the human brain? If so, it seems
to me that we could consciously recognize this and fortify checks to counter
the defense mechanism. It is so very hard, admittedly, to keep in mind the
faith-belief dynamic as distinct when the beliefs feel like empirical facts or facts of reason (i.e., knowledge). It
is also difficult to remember to circumscribe assumptions as they are made, for
we naturally tend to overestimate what we know and thus can assume. Of
course I’m going to heaven.
