An agnostic on religion

This blog post from Aaron was sitting unfinished for a while... it starts back at Easter...

We spent Easter in Ayacucho, Peru. The city's Semana Santa (Holy Week) celebration is the grandest in a very Catholic nation. The festivities last for over a week, beginning the friday before Palm Sunday, and continuing through Easter. We arrived in the city on Wednesday and started visiting the city's many cathedrals. On Good Friday, we watched, in elbow-to-elbow packed streets, a procession of hundreds of candle bearers made up of soldiers, city officials and religious leaders. A toddler on her dad's shoulders watched with us as the procession's centerpiece, a life size, bloody, Jesus statue lying in a glass coffin, was carried past while somber brass and drums played. The next day, Saturday, was a surprise - there was a small running of the bulls accompanied by drinking that lasted through the day and night. I heard one explanation that this is because God can not see you between crucifixion and resurrection... hmmm... That night, about twenty very homemade looking towers of fireworks, three stories tall and complete with hacked together pin-wheels, rockets and flying saucers, took turns showing their stuff and lighting up the main plaza. Sunday at 5am, in celebration of the resurrection, a sunrise procession carried a massive pyramidal structure, covered by thousands of candles and topped with a statue of a risen Jesus, around the central plaza while more fireworks exploded. (Ayacucho photos here: http://picasaweb.google.com/aaronboydyo/2008320323Ayacucho)

To put it simply, Holy Week in Ayacucho makes you think about religion, whether you're a worshiping believer, or, like me, an agnostic looking in, wondering what it all means.

One thing I'm pretty sure of is that there is a huge deal of misconception between people of different faiths, and certainly between believers and non-believers. Obama's speech on race a couple months ago opened an important conversation about some divisive misconceptions. Kristof of the New York Times wrote a great follow up article with the stark observation that "Much of the time, blacks have a pretty good sense of what whites think, but whites are oblivious to common black perspectives."

I think Kristof is spot on. Can similar statements be made regarding faith? Do non-believers know what believers think, and vice versa? I don't think so, though in this case the ignorance may run equally in both directions.

Here's a pretty scary statistic from a 2003 Kristof article (yeah, I like Kristof): "Americans believe, 58 percent to 40 percent, that it is necessary to believe in God to be moral. In contrast, other developed countries overwhelmingly believe that it is not necessary. In France, only 13 percent agree with the U.S. view. "

About 10 years ago I was sitting at dinner with a good friend and his family, all of whom were practicing Catholics. Somehow my own agnosticism came up, and I was asked by the mother if "I felt a hole in my life because I did not believe in God?" The question caused discomfort for most of the table. It was a terrific question for its honesty, sincerity and concern, and it demonstrated, particularly in the table-side squirming, a huge communication gap.

Being an agnostic and an engineer and having studied science, I have had many discussions about religion with non-believers. Also, I have heard the impossibility of God's existence preached with all the furor of a Jeremiah Wright church sermon. If you turn off the sound, riled up non-believers rationalizing atheism might appear just like righteous believers denouncing heathens, though I think the former smirk a bit more and the latter get redder in the face. More common than atheist rant, though, is the misconception that people who do not believe in God are more rational than those who do. It's an error that mirrors the ignorance that believers own morality.

Before spending time in South America, before meeting so many Catholic faithful, before seeing the charity, before reading the history, my strongest images of the Catholic church were its scandalous priests and the apparent hypocrisy of its centuries of wealth. I suspect (trying to find an excuse for my ignorance) this is because news loves a scandal and because the church's wealth is an easy target for non Catholics. Letting those images define the Catholic church is like letting the worst of U.S. leaders and businessmen, e.g. multinational oil barons, define us and the American Dream. I suppose every institution, religious or secular, has its extremists who pervert an otherwise good thing.

Recently, Melissa and I visited the huge Convent of Santa Catalina in Arequipa. Taking up a very large city block, it is best described as a Citadel, with huge stone walls that keep nuns from seeing the outside world. There's a little gift shop with crafts made by the nuns presently living in the remaining private section. Outside this gift shop is a sort of mission statement from the nuns. The last paragraph really struck me. It started something like (you'll have to trust that my memory has this right enough), "The purpose of our life is LOVE." Jesus Christ was not actually mentioned in the first statement. What struck me is how easily I related to this statement when the name of Jesus was removed. I wondered if the nuns had done this on purpose. The paragraph went on to explain that this love is indeed for Jesus Christ, but also for the people of the outside world, whom they are devoted to in habitual prayer. They drew more attention to love, in all caps, than to Jesus. (photos of the monasterio can be found in this album: http://picasaweb.google.com/aaronboydyo/200804100415ArequipaAndMonasterioSantaCatalina)

I'm a capitalist and an agnostic, but perhaps I have a lot in common with these nuns. At least, I'd like to think I have more in common with them than with certain secular capitalist extremists.