Belief vs. unbelief: complacency, not religion, is the danger.

Recently, a book, an article, and an interview made me realize what an odd corner discussion about religion has been backed into. Killing the Buddha (edited by Peter Manseau and Jeff Sharlet), began as an online magazine and morphed into a book (Free Press). The title comes from a Zen story: a monk claims to have attained enlightenment; he has realized the nature of the Buddha, and a more experienced monk tells him, "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him." The point, as the editors interpret it, is that religious doctrines can stand in the way of any genuine encounter with ... what? God? Divinity? The Buddha?

The magazine (KillingTheBuddha.com) is worth checking out, and you can find some essays from the book there. It describes itself as "a magazine for people made anxious by churches, people embarrassed to be caught in the spirituality section of a bookstore, people both hostile to and drawn to talk of God. It is for people who somehow want to be religious, who want to know what it means to know the divine, but for good reasons are not and do not." It speaks of "moving past the complacency of belief ... struggling honestly with the idea of God."

The book assigns essays and stories titled after various books of the Bible to a number of writers, while the editors, under the heading "The Book of Psalms," describe a road trip across America. During it, they encounter tornado chasers, the cowboy church, Wiccans, weird preachers, and other peculiar sorts who, in the editors' opinion, say something about the state of America's sense of whatever divinity means.

The idea for the book is better than the book itself. It has some good pieces, some of them really good--A. L. Kennedy's Genesis essay is excellent and strange, and has a lot to do with what the Web site's mission is all about--and so is Michael Levy's Leviticus essay. They offer a sign of what the book might have been, as does one of the editors' pieces, an encounter with an impoverished and disturbing would-be preacher. But for the most part, the book doesn't come off, for a couple of reasons. One is a format that is usually disappointing: an editor has a bright idea--"Let's ask a bunch of good writers to write about the cardinal virtues, or the four last things, or the Ten Commandments"--and then, having commissioned the pieces, the editor is pretty much stuck with what comes back, however disappointing, unless the budget or the relationship with the writers is much richer than it usually is.

But there's another reason. While churches and religious people do have a lot to answer for, so do the people who think they can judge them. The old Bob Dylan line, "to live outside the law you must be honest," provokes among most of us a "well, duh!" response--but it isn't necessarily true that if you live outside the law (or outside a tradition) you will be honest. Dishonesty, special pleading, avoiding the really hard questions, and the inability to achieve clarity when we would like to know the way we should go, are built into every human course of inquiry. Many who feel free to judge ancient religions which have internal traditions of wrestling with deep problems, and of allowing for a serious unknowing--a willingness not to have all the answers--are themselves quite complacent and simple in their unbelief. "If God were good and loving there would be no war and my cat would not have died" ... and there goes all of monotheism. Too many of the narratives here are part of that problem.

This is also true of an essay in the spring issue of The American Scholar by Natalie Angier, an atheist who is as complacent and unquestioning in her belief as any fundamentalist. She's as tone deaf as Carl Sagan, Steven Pinker, and Richard Dawkins, and loves her surety: mocking those weak-kneed atheists who will not take on religion she says, "Science cannot definitively rule out the heaven option, with its helium balloons and Breck hair for all." Who was the theologian who argued for that? Not St. Basil the Great, I think ... maybe the author of those apocalyptic end-time stories? Was he the twin of the scientist who knew that embryonic stem cells would save us all? Or that the scientific method can tell us why I should be a faithful husband? Ideologically, he is. Both cower, like the Wizard of Oz, behind an ideological curtain. Angier is surprised, she says, whenever she encounters a religious scientist. She is one of those people who think people in previous centuries didn't understand that you couldn't have a virgin birth or rise from the dead, as if this had been assumed to be possible before science arrived. People like this have no feeling for what a symbol might indicate. If it can't be weighed, measured, replicated in a lab, it doesn't exist in any meaningful way. There is no room here for surprise, or poetry, or the challenge of a universe which is not the one you are most comfortable residing in. The limited religion of scientism is as small as any other point of view.

During a recent interview, Mariane Pearl talked about her own Buddhist belief. She is the widow of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who was murdered in Pakistan as he investigated links between Islamic fundamentalism and the terrorism that led to September 11. She spoke about the way in which she refused to allow bitterness and anger to form her responses to the murder of her husband, and in her answers to several questions from the audience she seemed to me to embody the belief she embraces in a way which revealed, among other things, what is wrong about many current approaches to religion.

Religious traditions are meant to transform us, not to affirm us as we are. There are people who believe that they can stand outside a tradition and, finding one or two elements of it difficult or impossible to accept, reject it. They should be humble enough to look at others who are universally recognized as perceptive people (Pascal, Weil, Maimonides, Dostoyevsky, Heschel, Buber, Aquinas ... the list really is endless) who take it seriously. This should lead at least to a more humble agnosticism, if not to belief.

There is also an important argument against what passes for religion. One of my seminary professors would speak of those who, by God's grace, reject what is presented to them as Christianity. When religion becomes a way of sealing us into our own sense of ourselves, without opening us up to a wider and deeper living, one which will not come without cost--without pain or even death--it deserves every bit of the bad press it gets.