I doubt I believed the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds to the standard our Youth Minister expected, but I now know my apathy made me safely unremarkable in my family’s congregation. Even deep in the American South, there is a broad ecumenical market for those who identify as Christians, but whose values and behavior are indistinguishable from those of most secular humanists. I won’t speculate on their most private, foundational beliefs on the existence of god(s), but I do know they represented the cutting edge of Christian dismissal of Old Testament law. They were (and, I suppose still are) kind and compassionate people whose personal theology would be largely unaffected by the redaction of 95% of God’s Word. The True Believer did exist within the congregation, and while their religious conviction was accommodated and even admired, it certainly wasn’t celebrated. Apart from the guarantee of weekly social engagement, congregations such as ours provided their parishioners two main services:
- Reconciling the increasingly awkward Word of God with the increasingly humane World of Man.
- Performing a predictably tedious liturgy, thus satisfying the Protestant approximation of penance.
The arrangement led me to regard religious faith much as you would a dwindling group of elderly men discussing politics: irrelevant, misinformed, and often insufferable; but weirdly deserving of accommodation and quiet respect. Following a nominal post-high school “emancipation,” I fell into the habit of attending 8:00 AM services at a Lutheran church near my college, but only when I felt The Military College of South Carolina had failed to provide the regimentation and tedium needed to develop a professionally institutionalized young man. In both my choice of schools and my Sunday morning masochism, I was semi-consciously accepting the Abrahamic assumption that the more miserable option is necessarily the more moral.
While this post is largely autobiographical, this blog will not be. My purpose is largely selfish: I want to learn how Abrahamic values, beliefs, and assumptions affect people and nations between and within the three monotheistic faiths. The partisan corollary to this objective is highlighting the striking similarities shared by theocrats across Christian, Jewish, and Islamic societies. Much of the credibility and authority of these anti-secularists relies on the (largely accepted) argument that their nation, their faith, their god is fundamentally different from and superior to that of their enemies.
It’s not, and it never was. That conflict stems from the simple, deluded belief in the existence of one god – one single, perfect god whose values and will align perfectly with his believers’ worldly interests. The resulting violence and misery is The Abraham Effect. I want to understand it, I want to describe it, and I want to destroy it.
@HumanistFury
The Abraham Effect: 