Helen Keller

We went to see The Miracle Worker last week. It was the major production at Providence College, and Kyle Burgess (semi sort of adopted son living with us: from Zimbabwe; attending Providence) played the part of Helen's half-brother.

(Kyle at Christmas)

Now Lois and I are watching the movie version on NPR with Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke. Or I should say Lois is watching and quilting, and I'm listening and typing. Even this movie, so stirring and predictable (when I have the play fresh in my mind), is hard for me simply to sit and watch. The Final Four tomorrow evening is another matter!

One line out of the play: "Obedience is the gateway to learning": one line stands in sharp contrast to what we think today about raising children. Certain strands of that older way of thinking repel me: the idea that one must break the child's will in order to train the child is not one I endorse.

We have gone to the opposite extreme today. In Winnipeg there is a group of youth who steal cars for kicks, and recently have started trying to run down pedestrians and joggers as part of the game. As we try to work out how to respond to this situation, one realizes that many factors are at work: broken families; schools that no longer engage the children involved; the factors are almost predictable.

But the courts have added their own bit of lunacy to the picture by treating the epidemic as a case of children who just need a scolding. One of my colleagues referred to the practice in New York City of treating juvenile crime more seriously: working on the assumption that, if young offenders are punished severely at the beginning, they are less likely to enter a full life of crime.

I don't know the practice she is referring to, but one sees a kind of basic logic. Children learn early and quickly. If their first lessons in crime and law is that their actions receive a light sanction, they internalize that lesson and build on it. For Helen, breaking the cycle of tantrum-enforced misbehaviour was the first step into unlocking the world for the rest of her life.

I don't know what should be done in Winnipeg to reduce car thefts. Diagnoses are easier than constructive action. But the benefit of discipline is part of the answer -- for me individually, and for the U.S. and Canada as a whole.

Sorting Out My Thoughts

Later this month I would like to take the students from a class I teach (Critique of Secular Culture) to McNally Robinson, a local bookseller, where the University of Manitoba' Humanities' Department leads a monthly discussion of ideas. According to the flier sent out by the bookseller, the January discussion is on Richard Dawkins' book, The God Delusion. (A check on the web is discouraging, giving the topic of "Food": interesting, but not as good for class discussion.)

So I do need to read the book, and I need to take such critics seriously. Before doing so (I can't get to the library before Monday), I've been re-sorting through my own thoughts on the idea that God does, or does not, exist. At one level the question is an impertinence, given my own beliefs. For me to put God in the dock (to use a title from C.S. Lewis' essays) is like the character in a book trying to investigate and judge his author, or like the figure in a painting setting herself up as critic of the artist's work: we simply are not qualified for the task.

But recognizing the hubris inherent in the task, I offer a starting thought: We are all creatures of faith. The human condition is such that the effort to learn, to know anything, requires that we assume something else. We are finite creatures probing an infinite universe (so far as our minds can visualize it). How could we possibly learn anything if we did not stand on some ground to assert it, test it, and learn it?

This idea is a commonplace: think of Kuhn's paradigms. I am following Lesslie Newbigin's observation when I say that every one who makes an assertion assumes some prior framework (or paradigm, or ground), but this is elementary stuff.

Now the point this suggests to me is this: Every one assumes some framework of ideas within which they observe Reality. (I follow Charles Kraft in capitalizing Reality when I mean that which exists in and of itself beyond any one person's perception. To refer to our perception of reality, the realities that we all have inside our head, I use the lower case r: reality.) This framework, or paradigm, is what I mean by the term "religion". In this sense the supernatural religions of the world (especially Christianity, Islam, and Judaism and some forms of Hinduism) provide a framework within which their adherents make sense of Reality. In this sense Buddhism and other forms of Hinduism, essentially philosophical and non-supernaturalistic, also provide their adherents with the means to understand reality. And in this sense Secularism, and some forms of Science, function as a religion, providing their adherents with a way to make sense of experience.

Another way of referring to the idea of paradigm is to refer to a story which we use to organize Reality. Christians tell a story of the way the world came to be, and of how we are to understand the world in which we live. Science, seen as a religion, tells its own story, excluding God a priori. What we have to do then, is compare stories (or paradigms) and see which we find most satisfactory. The canons for such comparison are ill-defined; but we serve no one well if we call thoe with whom we disagree idiots for disagreeing with us. Even the Taleban had cogent reasons for their own worldview. I believe that they are wrong in their paradigm, but I do not believe that they are simply silly.

What I want as a starting point, then, is a setting in which we can exchange and critique stories. We need neither seek to convert, nor seek to stifle, but express our own deepest understanding of Reality and search together for something better than the sword that so quickly cuts off another's expression of his/her search.

A last thought: in a comment to my last post Donna referred to the litany of wars fought on religious grounds. One can quickly compile a counter-list of wars fought on economic grounds, or for national pride, or for ethnic survival, or against those who believe in God. The list itself proves nothing. But it does help show why many people have turned against religion (even though they may act with the same violence they claim to find so horrifying). And it does rebuke adherents of different religions for their own faithlessness.

As a Christian, aware of the teachings of Jesus to love and seek peace and of the example of Jesus accepting death rather than leading a revolt against Roman power, I feel betrayed by those who go to war in the name of God. But of course I am tied to the structures within which war and violence is perpetrated. This drives me not to atheism, but to repentance and action, seeking peace in the cannon's mouth.

Jesus said that love and unity among Christians is the best evidence for God's existence and for the truth that Jesus and the Father are One. We have argued the case better than we have lived it. We can rebut the arguments of our detractors, but that counts for little if we do not also create a new litany of peace and love with our own lives.

The Future of a Delusion?

In several different settings recently Richard Dawkins' book, The God Delusion, has come into the conversation. I haven't read it, and don't know if I will. Based on descriptions of his work, I do wonder 1) why he attacks faith in God with such ferocity (pugnacity was the word used in one response), and 2) why he and others commenting on his work resent the suggestion that rejecting God also requires faith. Dawkins' faith appears to be in science. If he thought that artists or poets or other non-scientists were making truth-claims about ultimate reality, he might attack them too. I don't know of course: maybe I do have to read one of his books!

For some time now I have been profoundly convinced that all human statements about the way the world is, are really faith statements. I think that Christian faith is eminently rational; but I don't see why anyone would claim that reason forces anyone to see that God is there. I have a good friend who is a non-theist ("living with the hypothesis that there is no God"), and he is clearly as rational as I. We have made different faith choices: competing, complementary, and different.

Why should I suggest that his faith in the non-existence of God makes him a fool? Why should he suggest that my faith in the active presence of God makes me a fool? Why should either of us suggest that tolerance requires us to pretend that we don't believe, or that we act on the basis of our belief?

One blog (from The Guardian in the UK) has a Muslim responding to Dawkins. Reader after reader (I assume mostly from England) excoriated the blogger as a fool. The accepted religion of the West is modernism, seen in its empiricist/scientific form. (Christian Smith has an interesting study titled Moral Believing Animals, which tells the stories that people use to shape their lives: the modern Enlightenment story is clearly at work in the posts I read on this blog.)

I propose that fundamentalism (whether atheist or supernaturalist) is the enemy of human knowing, and that we will remain trapped in our delusions, as Freud, from whom the title of the post is almost borrowed, was trapped in his. Courtesy and courage, to speak and to hear, holds more hope than narrow fundamentalism of any kind.

So We Had An Election?

What happened Monday? The Cons won the right to a minority government? I think so. The Liberals proved that they're still there? Maybe. The staying power of candidates in the beltway in spite of the appearance of corruption is impressive. I have to wonder if the Liberals could do anything to make Toronto voters not vote for them. It reminds me of Zimbabwe, where Mugabe can unleash the army against vendors and homeless people - -and still be accepted by the African Union as the Liberator of Zimbabwe.

I am glad for a new government. The NDP is too far left for my taste; but if they come to power one day, then it will be their turn and good luck to them. I doubt that the Conservatives are dangerous as we've been told. Anyway, it's their turn now.

The youth mock votes across the country suggest intersting changes in the future. The Liberals came third, behind the Conservatives and NDP. Even the Greens got six seats. In our own Steinbach mock youth vote, the Greens pulled 16%, pushing the Liberals into fourth (Cons 61; NDP 21; Green 16; Libs 6)! This is Conservative country, so I was pleased to see a relatively strong Green showing.

Young people change. At least I did; and all the others I've known have. So the Liberals won't simply disappear; but they do have their work cut out for them. They may be back in power in two years. Who knows? But meanwhile they can reflect on the price of arrogance when in power.

So many questions are left. What will happen to people of faith in the new Canada? I don't know if the Conservative victory signals openess to faith or not; I doubt it. The only permitted faith is in secularism and the Charter. What will happen with the Rural-Urban divide? No idea. We have to come to terms with it; but I sure don't see how. Maybe if we could force everyone in Toronto and Vancouver to live for three years in the country, we could knock some sense into them. But cultural revolutions of that sort don't work. Ask Mao.

But there's no question that we have a new government, and a new set of people to make fun of and distrust. I wonder -- could one of the changes we try include restoring some sense of trust in government officials. It used to be that Canadians believed good government is impossible; we said that peace, order, and good government were not only possible, but desired. We're not so sure anymore. I don't like America-bashing; it seems like a waste of time. But idealism in government is one Canadian trait I don't want us to lose completely, following our America friends.

We had an election. Now let's see if we have a government.