A House of Skepticism

Judah:
“What if there was something that was essentially church, but, you know, secular?”
Last summer on two separate occasions I attended church with one of my friends. Having only been to church once before, growing up in a culturally Jewish household, I was not sure what to expect. I was mostly nervous about feeling out of place. Both times I left the service remarkably affected. I was impressed and interested in how much the service centered on reflecting about how we live our lives. As an individual at the service, I was forced to reflect about the things I care about and whether I was living my life in line with them. It is easy for me to just live day-to-day focusing on the tasks in front of me, rather than thinking about the big picturet. I left both services thinking that it would be really nice to have this opportunity for reflection and evaluation on a regular basis.
While there were parts of the service that really spoke to me, I struggled immensely with the idea that there was some God underlying all of it. So many of the values and ideals that were talked about in the service spoke to me, but the underlying place that they were derived from, did not. I clashed with the idea that there were things that I was just supposed to believe in on blind faith. There had to be some way to have similar experiences or similar values but derive them from a different place rather than simply faith.
The only other time I had been to church was the summer after my my sophomore year of high school, when I was staying with a Pastor’s family in St. Vincent. For an entire week we stayed with Pastor Cupid and ran a camp for the kids in his village. Our last day staying with Pastor Cupid, we attended Sunday mass before moving on to a different community. I disagreed with most of the Pastor’s sermon and the believes he explained about heaven, hell and faith. For the next couple of days I was grabbling with the fact that while I saw these believes as misleading, without them, a lot of the good work that the pastor fostered in the community might not have occurred. I struggled with separating out the underlying beliefs, with the values derived from those beliefs and then the actual affects and impacts of that faith.
Different people get different things out of religious practice but a common thread I have noticed is trying to provide an answer to why we are here. People often turn to religion in order to guide the reason for their existence. The idea that their is no specific reason that we are here or that we do not have a specific purpose is scary. While it would be nice to believe that there was some greater order or plan for all of us, I just do not really see it. There is a quote from Ursula K Le Guin’s book The Left Hand of Darknesses that helps guide my thinking on the question of why are we here? “To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness”
After speaking about my two recent experiences with church with one of my friends, he recommend to me Sam Harris’s book Waking up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion. While, there were parts of the book that I clashed with, the book introduced me to meditation. As I was reading the book, I also downloaded the app Headspace to help guide my practice. For the next couple of months I tried to meditate once a day for ten minutes to help introduce a period of reflection into my life. Meditating helped me get better in touch with what I was thinking about, and some of the habits and patterns of my mind. I also found that meditating helped improve my ability to focus, led to me getting frustrated less often and just helped me be at ease more generally.
For a while meditation was something that I mostly kept to myself, it was not something that I shared too openly with my friends or talked about with my family. When I first told my parents about the fact that I was meditating I was pretty nervous. Reflecting on this, there was no reason for me to be nervous. My parents love it when I share anything about my life with them and honestly both of them, my Dad especially, will try and read as much as they can about anything I share with them in an attempt to relate to me. Yet, for some reason, It took me a while to bring myself to telling them about my new found habit.
When I first told them I was meditating I started by telling them that I was reading the Sam Harris book that my friend had recommended to me. I was nervous to mention this because the book is promoted similarly to a pop health book and I thought my parents would sneer at me reading such a book. While I grew up in a house that was culturally Jewish, I would say the man culture of my house was skepticism. One lesson that my parents absolutely succeeded in teaching me was to question everything. Most of my formative memories where during the George W. Bush presidency who my parents absolutely detested. They did not hold back in their believes that Bush was a liar and that he was greatly hurting the country. Growing up I easily and readily adapted their believes as my own.
When I was in the second grade it was 2004. The 2004 election represented a momentous opportunity to my parents and apparently also to me. John Kerry provided an opportunity to finally get Bush out of the White House. While an eight year old me could not tell you a single thing about economic policy, taxes, welfare, or really anything else about the country, I could tell you how important it was that John Kerry won the election. I remember sitting in math class the day after the election and our teacher Mr. Gruber announcing that Bush had won the election. I sat on the floor in the front of the class room crying for a good hour. This was not just a couple of tears rolling down my checks, I was full on bawling with my head in my hands.
That story accents both how much I internalized my parents believes but also how important my parents believes were to me. When it came to religion my parents really did not want to force anything on us. I went to a Jewish day school up until the second grade because my mother worked there. After the second grade though, even though I detested the change, My twin brother and I switched schools because our parents did not want to force Judaism on us. While both my parents at different points in their lives have found meaning through Judaism, they both absolutely detest the bureaucracy associated with it. As a child, and honestly sometimes still even now, it can be hard to separate the bureaucracy from the values or beliefs of the faith. Based on my parents, especially my dad’s detest for organized religion, I completely turned away from any sort of spirituality for a very long time.
I have wanted to write about my experience with meditation and then eventually Buddhism for a while now but have never found the proper way to tell the story. One of the things I hate the most about organized religion is proselytizing and I often am scared that I might come off like that when I take about meditation. It is extremely important to me that people find their own way to things and that they are never coerced or pressured.
I have decided that the best way to write about my experience with meditation and Buddhism is to write about a few different books that I read along the way. I am going to touch on certain passages from the books I liked, passages that maybe I disagree with and how each book played an important role in my life when I read it.
In my next post I will talk about the book I have already mentioned in this post, Sam Harris’ A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion. After that I will write about Robert Wright’s Why Buddhism is True and then move on to Stephen Batchelor’s Secular Buddhism. I am excited to finally put down my thoughts in a formal manner about something that has been such an integral part of my life over the past year.
Jen:
My immediate family and I account for 5 of the 1.1 billion Catholics in the world. Even writing that sentence, I hesitated to label myself as an explicit Christian — but my family and I are by definition all officially adult members of the Church. Organized religion is ancient and enormous and institutional and complex, and its effect on individuals can be deeply personal and formative. For many, the determinant of faith is a function with a single input: family background. We see that kids tend to derive their faith (or lack thereof) from their parents, alongside other values, political views, habits, and cultural practices (There’s at least one whole book that attempts to quantify this). My family is no exception. My mom was raised Catholic — and so were both her parents — and my dad converted shortly after marrying her. As a result, my siblings and I grew up going to church every Sunday, with mandatory bouts of Sunday school and illustrated Bibles aplenty at home. All of us have been baptized, reconciled, and confirmed. All of us have gone to Catholic school decked out in logo’d socks and colorless plaid uniforms. All of us are nominally and at-least-loosely practicing Catholics.
In the interest of full transparency, I should say that right now, Catholicism hardly enters my day-to-day thoughts, let alone dominates my way of life. Also in the interest of full transparency, you should know that my family means the absolute world to me — so, by extension, our faith does too. However contradictory these ideas seem, I think I’m learning to recognize that resolving this disconnect is a process that is essential to my spiritual and intellectual growth.
Something I loved in Judah’s post was his discussion of skepticism and how that has shaped his upbringing in the realm of religion. I think there’s a tendency to associate skepticism with cynicism and pessimism; it can be wielded as a critical thinker’s tool to strike down any ideas that aren’t perfectly harmonious with his/her existing mindset. But after reading Factfulness (by Hans Rosling) and reflecting a bit on values that meditation promotes, I think truly productive skepticism requires a lot of openmindedness. It’s impossible to have clarity in your critical thinking when you are closed off to all ideas and perspectives except those of your own. With a truly open, accepting mind, you can properly weigh outside observations, experiences, and lessons without distorting them to fit what you already think and feel. So to some extent, skepticism is a rigorous, particular type of optimism that is essential to personal growth and development.
But that’s the thing — to be a true skeptic is harder than it sounds. To abandon bias and judgment feels unnatural to most of our daily thought processes — built-in biases and snap judgment are supposedly part of what allowed our ancestors to survive (see: The Righteous Mind, by Jonathan Haidt; Thinking Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman; all of behavioral economics, a ton of modern psychology, etc.). But when working through more abstract, less survival-essential parts of our lives, like religion and personal relationships, these biases can make certain types of thoughts and interactions difficult and/or unproductive. With this built-in challenge in mind, I really love the vocabulary that frames meditation — you’re encouraged to practice curiosity and awareness. It fits a pseudo-sports-like mentality: put in 10,000 hours by practicing every day, push yourself to open your mind, and you will improve as you put in more work. That’s why I can still get excited even as my thoughts float away from me 50 times in one sitting — because last week my thoughts floated away 100 times in one sitting. So in the practice of meditation, I’ve completely embraced the idea of putting in work over time to get familiar with and grow in my thoughts, my feelings, and myself.
Pause, generalize, and reevaluate: why don’t I apply this same mentality to religion? The end goals of both can be seen as quite similar: a sense of inner peace and stability in identity, relationships, and values in the face of external uncertainty and stresses. But I’ve grown up with an incredibly passive mentality regarding Christianity. In all of the masses and Sunday school lessons, and even informal chats with friends and family, I don’t recall ever being taught to apply my critical thinking skills to the teachings of the church. Listen to the stories, follow the commandments, and don’t forget to forgive your neighbors’ transgressions — the journey to faith has always seemed like an exercise in suspending disbelief in favor of acceptance. Granted, I can speak only to my own experience, but I just think the language of the Catholic church wasn’t at all focused on sustained, effortful introspection — there was no room for skepticism in the house of the Lord.
But how can we derive anything meaningful out of ideas that we can’t think for ourselves about? How deep can your faith be if it’s based on acceptance sans critical thought? I think a ton of Christians (and other religious people) have been able to find a way to truly delve into religious thought and feelings — presumably through a multitude of ways that aren’t practiced skepticism and effortful introspection — but that feels like the right path for me to make sense of my own religious beliefs. Besides a handful of periods in which I had short bursts of searching (both internal and external), I think I am still working my way into a less passive, more intentional approach to religion. Up until this point, the most I’ve done is relegate this effort to the backlog of things to do — I often found myself just wondering whether something will happen to me that will cause me to truly embrace the teachings of the Catholic church. A big part of why my dad converted was an incredibly difficult event for which he found solace in my mom and her faith, and you hear so many stories about how a strong faith has made survival possible in the face of unthinkable adversity. But ideally my core values are a function of my own efforts and more varied experiences than a single extreme episode.
So, just to recap, I think it’s easy for me to feel disappointed that faith can mean so little to me when it is such an important part of my parents’ lives. But passive acceptance can only do so much when we’re thinking about an entire religion in full complexity. In the months, years, and decades to come, I look forward to developing my beliefs (both religious and non-religious) through introspection, discussion, and — of course — skepticism.
