Anxiety, Fallout

Just one fabulous aspect of being Amanda is my recurring sense that I'm obligated to seek out exactly those extremes in worldview that provoke me most. Lately, I'm grappling with New Atheism on the one hand and a specific and apparently popular type of Biblical literalism on the other.

I remember now why I went to graduate school, not law school, after college: scholars are trained to frame questions and then look for answers; their arguments (should) derive from what they find. Lawyers are trained to establish what argument they intend to make and then seek out the evidence that best supports it -- or, when faced with a lack of such evidence, to do the best they can to employ the available evidence in the service of their claim.

I think this is why Dawkins' work on evolutionary biology holds up to the staunchest critics -- I don't find anyone, really criticizing his scientific writing (except for his weird pet theory of the meme) -- but his writing on God, while hugely popular, is not as well reviewed.* I say this with the caveat that I haven't yet read The God Delusion, though I plan to. From the reviews and excerpts that I've read, however, I have the impression Dawkins writes like a scholar in the fields in which he is a scholar, and probably more like a lawyer in the fields in which he has a more circumscribed frame of reference.

Dawkins' worldview, as I understand it, is irreconcilable with my own mostly because I see scientific discourse as functioning within history/History, whereas (I think) Dawkins would claim that it's totality -- that there is nothing outside of science. 

This is an impasse, I think. Were I to say that the God I believe in extends beyond science, existing both within and outside of it, and that consequently, I'm not able to produce scientific evidence for Him, Dawkins would likely say that that invalidates the entire belief.

I think he wouldn't call it special pleading because I'm not trying to argue that God can be proved scientifically, logically, or philosophically; I'm stating that I don't believe that those frameworks are all-compassing, and I believe God to be outside them. So any reasoning I have for believing in God will necessarily include "logical fallacies" like relying on my own experience as "evidence".

I get that, and I'm okay with it, but it does make me question whether Christian apologetics are ultimately helpful or not. My sense (and my Bible reading lately is heavily concentrated in the book of John) is that Jesus's vision for how we are to facilitate His reaching those around us is less discursive than apologists imagine. 

At the other end of the spectrum, I'm trying to work out specific texts in the Bible that bother me -- or rather, the various incompatible interpretations of which bother me.

Now, the Old Testament verses addressing homosexuality seem clearly to have been misinterpreted, and I don't know very many people who reference them any more, other than non-Christians who want to use them as a straw man. But while Paul's comments in Romans and Corinthians seem to me to bear on situations within the early church, none of which resemble contemporary homosexual monogamy, I know a lot of other readers do see these remarks as extending to address, and condemn, homosexual behavior generally.

A cursory browsing of commentaries on Romans 1 suggests to me that homosexuality became central to interpretations of Romans 1:26-27 relatively recently; Barth's commentary, for example, focuses on idolatry first, and the subsequent diminishing of those in question to “eroticism”, second. It did not seem to me to be focused on homosexuality specifically, but obviously, he's Karl Barth and I probably need to read the entire text more carefully. At the moment, my impression is that people started using these texts when it was pointed out that Sodom and Gomorrah left those arguing for the immorality of homosexuality on shaky ground. But I could be wrong, I guess, and it bears looking into.

I don't see how my political feelings could change, either way; it's clear to me that it's no more the place of Christianity to mandate heterosexual marriage than it is our place to mandate tithing, giving to the poor, or women submitting to their husbands, or to outlaw remarriage, adultery, or working on Saturdays. But reading actual scholars who feel this way, rather than posters to internet forums who take a Bible mandate against homosexuality for granted, might help me to understand why these people feel this way about being gay. I haven't found convincing evidence for this belief in the Bible; obviously, though some people read it differently. It might enable me to be more loving to those people if I understood better (at all) where they are coming from.

*It's also possible that people just don't like being told that the things they believe in aren't true; but I think if that were the cause, then the books would be well-reviewed by the godless scholarly types I was warned about as a child, and poorly-received by the unthinking masses flocking to religion as a source of consolation.