Why I Don’t Wear Pants at the Library, Stepfather-hood, and Some Haphazard Remarks Concerning Religious Pluralism.

I have a library now. I didn’t used to, but now I have one. I don’t mean that I lock my front door and turn the keys to start my car and drive over to a newly discovered library located in downtown Ephrata. I don’t have a favorite couch I like to sit on there, or a favorite parking spot near the entrance. The clerk and I don’t exchange knowing glances or jokes about my countless late fees.

I mean that I walk out of my bedroom first thing in the morning with my hair pointed awkwardly over my ears and simply, if not nonchalantly, step into my library. I mean I have my own private library. I mean that I can go to the library without my pants on. George R.R. Martin seems to think I can live a thousand lives before I die if I spend enough time in books, so in the interest of learning from my betters, I take his advice—only in my case I do so without pants.
  

My family and I have moved to a new crib with six bedrooms, two living rooms, and all manner of other things we don’t need yet are glad to have. The rent is good, and we don’t have enough belongings to put in the rooms.

Fortunately, however, we do have enough books—an overabundance in fact— and have made one of the living rooms into a library. Inside it are four overflowing bookshelves, a lamp, a night stand, globes, maps, and, naturally, a framed medieval ship mounted on the wall.

In spite of having lived in more places than I remember, I have never had the opportunity to have a library. And every one of my relocations has had an intellectual phase associated with it. That is, I remember what I used to think about by remembering where I read my books.

In Columbia’s Cool Beans coffee shop I studied Augustine and Plato. At Penn’s main entrance, I studied religious theory and myth theory. On my back porch with a pack of Camel menthols, I studied C.S. Lewis and J.R. R. Tolkien.

With this new house I expect I’ll look back remembering this as the time I began engaging religious pluralism. The difference now is that I have kids roaming about, asking me unrelated complex questions concerning why prince Arthur doesn’t have hair as long as Sir Gwaine or why we haven’t gone to McDonalds since yesterday.

The other difference that comes with stepfather-hood is that now I no longer look into intellectual fields with just my own interests and heart in mind. Now I have to ask at the end what I will tell my kids about religion when they’re old enough to fully understand. Well that, and what to tell them now, while they’re not old enough to understand.

One thing I won’t tell them is that religion and theology are simple. The world and its gods are not simple, only the people who worship them. My (ever ongoing) master’s degree has taught me that.

In fact, I remember my first day at Penn. I was nervous as hell. In my mind I had traveled some 500 miles to engage some of the world’s brightest minds concerning some of the most complicated topics accessible. My nervousness was silly, I realize, because I was only concerned with not wanting to seem stupid in front of people.

“You know nothing John Snow,” I should have told myself.

They were all to converge on me at once, mankind and idea alike, and I was nervous for the wrong reason. I did not expect to change as much as I should have expected it, and as much as I did. Because in most of those rooms I possessed only average intelligence, and I was definitely the least educated of the bunch. I didn’t stand a chance. I felt the shock of philosophical and religious novelty perhaps more than anyone there. In a way, you might say that my current interest in religious pluralism comes as a result of the explosion of philosophical and religious ideas entering my mind from that time period. 

Because having moved back to Pennsylvania where I grew up as a child has shown me just how small my family’s background is, and, I say this cautiously, how small their ideas are. One day I hope to write an essay entitled, “In Defense of Horse and Buggy,” to defend a culture that, at bottom, is not altogether distinguishable from Hobbiton. But though I admire much about the epistemologies of Amish folk, I have no time for such defenses today. For now it is enough to say along with Frodo and Sam that I have returned from Mordor and I cannot go back to the hobbit I was.

I’m sure many of my kin and kith would very much agree to the Mordor analogy and the effect it’s had on me.

But it’s only natural that a (former/sorta still) student of religious theory find himself confronted with religious pluralism. It’s not surprising either that as a student of philosophy I have already beheld atheism and agnosticism in all their glory, and, in a way, ‘dealt’ with them. To most of my readers ‘dealt’ will mean reviewed and refuted, but I do not mean this. I mean something more existential. That is, I have rejected them not on philosophical grounds—because it’s not clear to me that there are any— but pragmatic grounds.

   

Really, for some time now I have said something to the effect of, “atheism is the most scientifically agreeable, agnosticism the most philosophically reasonable, and religion the most ethically and aesthetically tenable.”

Because come now, let us be true to one another, many of us who believe in Christianity believe it faute de mieux. I don’t mean this logically, because to mean it logically is necessarily the case. We all opt for that worldview that seems the best option for the very simple reason that there is nothing better than the best option.

No, I mean it psychologically, where the implicature seems to be, “I’m not satisfied with the current version of theology I’m given, but what else can I do? I just wish this whole God thing made more sense.” The gospel seems better than every other worldview because at bottom I know nothing about the other world views. Jesus seems better because I live in a community of Jesus followers. For what reason would I abandon that post? Christianity seems better because I already know its theology and its rituals.

And in the case where you believe that there’s nothing especially more appealing about another worldview why bother with them? What advantage do they pose?

I like what William James says here. He makes the perfect (albeit obvious) case that some weltanschauungs, like wires, are ‘live’ while others are ‘dead’—each relative to particular individuals in particular places at particular times. To an Arab atheist, Islam is live and Christianity is dead. To an American atheist, Christianity is live and Islam is dead. To both, tribalism is dead, and to both, atheism is live. Nietzsche (and Heidegger) believe that God is dead, and everyone believes that Baal is dead.

The deadness or liveness of the weltanschaunng is directly correlative to the willingness of the agent to believe in it, and the willingness of the agent to believe is directly correlative to the social atmosphere within which they find themselves.

James’ account seems a bit overly agent-sensitive. Even still, I think I can comply with him and say somewhat reservedly that religious pluralism has moved to the rank of ‘live’ for me, just as it had in the case of atheism and agnosticism some years ago. Beforehand, religious pluralism was, I confess, simply too ‘weird’ to be taken seriously. Of course, it was only weird because my tradition told me it was weird, illogical because my tradition told me it was illogical.

In reality, it was only foreign because I wasn’t born a Sikh or in New York City, or, for that matter, Corinth or Rome. When you talk to actual pluralists you’ll find nothing even remotely weird about it. Very roughly, pluralism is to religion as agnosticism is to philosophy. It’s liberal enough to be concerned with all men and humble enough to recognize it lacks an epistemic grasp of both gods and men.

It probably also has similar flaws to that of agnosticism. And as the main problem with agnosticism is action, or rather, lack of action, so too with pluralism. What ritual, I wonder, does one participate in to the god with many faces? And how are we to ask Him, or Her, or It if we cannot identify some strand of theological truth within which to speak about this holy ‘X’? Does the holy ‘X’ speak? Does it have agency, or is it just a Oneness with being? A pluralist can’t be a compatibilist, especially when trying to combine Buddhism or Taoism with the Semitic religions. At best, a pluralist can only be an extreme inclusivist without any real theology.

Is there a way to approach religion? Religions and their theologies will want to move centrifugally, interpreting the data and phenomenon of the cosmos in light of their dogmas. Every sophisticated faith, I imagine, has its own credo ut intelligum, not just Christianity’s Anselm of Canterbury. And even for the unsophisticated ones, one week’s dive into a phenomenological text will reveal that certain types of knowledge are purely experiential. Heck, one doesn’t need books; falling in love can teach you as much. A religion believed is a religion informing your interpretation of data and phenomenon.

The alternative, perhaps, is a centripetal method, where we start with a given set of criteria and determine which God or god’s or Universal Oneness is the actual. But how do we determine such criteria? How could we possibly be objective? Are we not forced to use the very centrifugal theologies we have to guess at the attributes of the holy “X”?

Maybe we could go about it in a Heideggerian way. We would have to ‘dive into religion in the right way,’ whatever the heck that would look like.

Maybe, maybe, maybe.

To recount all of this is not to have abandoned my Christianity; it is only to mark with honesty that my Christianity is a complicated psychological and philosophical matter. The world, I tell you, is a complicated thing. The world, I say, is an aporetic cluster fuck.

And so, for me, I return to the, ‘to whom else shall we turn’ of Peter. Scholars (Coleridge?) often talk about the willing suspension of disbelief with respect to the reading of fiction stories. Readers ignore all questions of whether or not the events occurring in the story could actually happen. At the phenomenological level, belief in the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ is an analogous (and conscious) act in the face of the anti-theses posed by religious pluralism—at least in my case. The same, I repeat, applies to atheism and agnosticism.

I’m sure over the next few months I’ll overview the works of people like John Hicks and MacIntyre, or Westphal, Ricoeur, and Heidegger and come to a fresh, more comprehensive view of religion and Christianity. For the time being, I am contented with my new home, my new family, and my old—albeit reformed—faith.