Some Initial Responses to Steve

So Steve at SCP has noticed my site, left some comments, and even blogged it himself. I thought, given the length of some of my more recent comments here, that I should collect some ideas and express them rather than get caught up in the back-and-forth banter of comment threads. Unfortunately, setting forth the substance of one's claims requires some sort of tedious prolegomena, so that's really all I have time for today. And before you read further, I would like you to accept that I speak a certain way I am thinking because that's how I actually think. My internal monologue really does sound very much like the following text. I'm not really that haughty; I'm just that dorky.

First of all, Steve, if you still believe in the death and resurrection of Jesus, or even just think you might, I won't say your faith is dead. I may have erred, perhaps conflated you with some of your commenters or things you've linked, so if that's the case, I'll let things lie.

Moving on, there seems to be some underlying belief that groups are intrinsically inauthentic and destructive to the nature of a person. Concomitant with this is the belief that if one holds to something with any outside influence whatsoever, the belief is inauthentic and therefore unjustifiable. You haven't said things in precisely those terms, but thus far, everything you have said has been saturated with a very American "rugged individualism" combined with a sort of existentialism that, were I more philosophically trained, I would probably be able to identify with some significant 20th century authors.

The problem is that you can never escape the group, the social context, and the external norms. You as a being are situated in a time and place, or you wouldn't even exist at all. The context of your existence shapes it, and without context, you simply don't exist. If religion is inauthentic because it is inescapably tied to and shaped by social structures and conventions, then existence itself is inauthentic. Allow me to give a few examples:

1. You probably believe that Earth orbits the sun. But do you believe this because heliocentrism is such a basic part of the fabric of our society, education, and technology, or because you personally have charted the motion of the planets and stars and carefully reasoned out that the best mathematical explanation for the perceived wandering of the planets is elliptical orbits around the sun rather than epicycles around Earth? I suspect it is because of the former, and I suspect you have never challenged this belief, nor have you ever completely removed yourself from Western, scientifically informed community so that you could draw the conclusions on your own without external interference.

2. You quite obviously think that people have the right to free speech and thought simply by virtue of being people, and that punishing someone simply because he has expressed an idea is a great evil--you've expressed this in your thoughts on churches basically not allowing certain questions to be asked by their clergy. But you think that because you're an American in the 21st century, because certain ideas of the Anglicized version of the Enlightenment permeate our existence and, at the very least, have shaped and defined our political and ethical realities almost irreversibly. You don't find those ideas in ancient or medieval societies, so it's pretty obvious that it's not the sort of thing that a person just naturally thinks independently. Your social, geographical, and historical context have shaped you into the sort of person that thinks liberty of thought is an intrinsic good, and you can't escape that context to genuinely tell me that you came to this opinion entirely on your own without the governing influence of the social norms that cause us to villify rather than reason with people who want to regulate our speech and thoughts.

Even in your new journey, you say you've put your roots into nothing, but have you really? You appear to me to have chosen to listen to voices shaped by different communities and different societies than the one with which you were most recently associated. For example, do you think any scientist is a free thinker, the captain of his own soul? You don't get to be a scientist without to some extent buying into the group, without allowing yourself to be shaped by the norms and conventions. There are assumptions of what science is, how it works, how to think, how to write, how to communicate, and so on. The same goes for any field, from philosophy to art to mathematics. There are groups, there are norms, and they shape the way knowledge is pursued, expressed, and validated. It is inescapable, because by listening to the voices of other communities, you are allowing yourself to be shaped by the same forces that shaped those voices. What's even worse is that the burgeoning field of linguistics has shown that the very language we use to communicate--and nothing is more social than language--shapes the way we think! Now how do we pursue truth without learning a language first?

Thus, I don't think it's useful at all to say "The Lutheran church is a social group, Saddleback is a social group, therefore they are basically the same and suffer from the same problem of rendering people inauthentic," because you've basically defined human existence itself as the problem and thus made it impossible to find the authentic place where you can really be you and find The Truth without all that pesky pressure of social context.