In the beginning was the doing and the doing became the Word - how to say "I believe" as part of conversation

“I believe…”

      I’m going to ask you to bear with me.  There are going to be times you want to jump in and point out things that are problematic, things you don’t agree with, things that need rounding off or balancing out.  Don’t do it.  I won’t take your silence for agreement and I ask you to not take any of mine for deliberate avoidance or ‘tacit denial’.  I’m going to advance a position today that suggests that what we say takes its meaning from the conversation we are having, and that that conversation is framed within the community, culture, and ‘way of life’ we find ourselves in.  This isn’t my idea, so I am not going to build it up from the foundations.  If you fancy checking it out in detail give Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations a look. 

Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1930

The meaning I am looking for today is what we mean when we talk about our beliefs, how we understand what is said when we say “I believe…” or, I guess more often today, when we say “I don’t believe…”.

These kinds of statements, even when made in private, always have an audience, either actually there or imagined.  First off, we are saying them in a language that we have learned from others and use within a community.  

We don’t get to decide what a word means or how a language works, no matter how much we can push the boundaries of it. The more we nudge words outside their usual use the less likely our audience will understand what we mean, and the harder time we will have being sure we know what we mean ourselves.  Sound extreme?  Ask yourself how clear you are on something when you can’t share it with anyone else.  If you find yourself unable to describe it, explain it, or even show it, then you are going to have some doubts about it. 

      I spoke about nudging ‘words outside their usual use’.  We don’t learn language by understanding what one word means using a series of others.  We would never be able to begin, if that was how language worked.  We don’t learn language by clearly setting out and agreeing on terms up front; we need to already have language to be able to do that.  Rather, we learn language by doing things.  We learn to sit in chairs, to pass the sugar, to find the bathroom; and the more we do things with others the more our language grows, and the more complicated the things we do as a group, the more complicated our language becomes.  This starts right from our first words and carries on throughout our lives.  We’ve all started a new job and felt a bit lost till we were in on the buzzwords and shortenings; we’ve all taken up a hobby and at first felt bewildered by the array of new terms and phrases.  Those of us who have lived abroad and learnt a new language will recall how we moved from translating every foreign word back into a word from our mother tongue, and finally came to a place we could say and think and even feel things in the new language that we were unable to quite express in our first one. 

This fascinating book says a lot more
about how languages don't exactly match.

I’ve dwelt on this longer than I intended, but it is important because when we say “I believe...” we are saying it not just in our mother tongue, we are saying it in a certain ‘work’ or ‘hobby’ environment too.  We are saying it in the context of doing something together, simple or very complex: we are saying it in the context of doing something.  If what I am doing and what you are doing are not the same, if I am talking in terms of one environment and you in terms of another, then we may as well be talking two different languages.

      When we say “I believe…” we are conversing within a community and we are trying to do something specific within that conversation.  When we fail to acknowledge that community and to accept what is being aimed at we cut ourselves off from conversation and can only enter into conflict.  At the heart of that conflict is the need to impose on the other what we understand by the words they are using, and that need is driven by the deep desire to understand ourselves.  Socrates, in Plato’s dialogue Alcibiades I, speaks of how we see ourselves in the mirror that is the eyes of others.  Well: imposing what we want words to mean is rather like painting over that mirror with the portrait we’d like to see.  When we succeed in doing it, we harm the other and lose sight of ourselves as well.

"The Portrait of Dorian Gray" by Oscar Wilde

      If we are going to have fruitful conversations around what we believe — and even more so if we are going to build fruitful communities around what we believe — we need to learn to look into the eyes of others.  We need to realise that belief is something that isn’t about the sound of words or how we try to draw out the concepts; it’s about how we live.

In the Bible, ‘truth’ is something that is done not just said; knowing is about relationships, not just being right and being able to explain why.  I bring up the Bible here, not to rely on its authority, but because it relays thousands of years of human religious experience and because it is central to the community and culture in which many of us, myself most certainly, talk about our beliefs.  Whether we say “I believe …” or “I don’t believe …” we, here in the West, are talking in the shadow of that dominant narrative.  Our communities have splintered into smaller communities each with their own divergent stance to that narrative, but it is there for the Atheist Humanist, the Pagan Revivalist, and the Cultural Agnostic, as much as for the Roman Catholic, Protestant, or Non-Conformist.

       Acknowledging the role of language, and its reliance on communities and what we are trying to do at any given time, might sound like it is making saying “I believe...” difficult, like it’s making the conversation around that nigh-on impossible, but it isn’t.  All our language is rooted in the experiences we share, the things we can and can’t do, the world we live in as ourselves, the things we can’t change that set the stage for the things we can.  Language works, for all its nuance and contextuality, because language is how we live in a world we share.  We can say “I believe…” because of that shared world, that shared experience, that shared interplay of what we can and can’t change. 

If we put in the work to understand the conversation that is being had when we say “I believe …”, if we can hold back with pushing what we think ‘should’ be meant with the words, if we can actually engage with what is trying to be done in that moment, then we can begin to grow together and in looking into another’s eyes we can begin to see ourselves better too. 

      Belief is never purely intellectual: it is about how we live our lives, why we make our choices.  I hope we can explore that together, I hope we can share that together, and I know that if we do together, we’ll find that our language will bring us eventually more together, however much it may hold us apart for now. 

Religion isn't a provisional truth for scrutiny by a group

This is, as usual for this blog, a personal view, which should not be taken to represent the views in the round of the group of people meeting under the Unitarian banner in Ringwood.

Recently I have been interested to read What Should Citizens Believe?: Exploring the issues of truth, reason & society, by Henry Tam ISBN-13: 978-1548183103 and ISBN-10: 1548183105 published in association with Citizen Network in 2018.

The aim of the book is to share a range of ideas that can help us to test the legitimacy of our beliefs. It was written in the shadow of the hashtag #fakenews and is a very helpful study by this respected academic at Birkbeck College, University of London who is also Director of the Forum of Youth Participation & Democracy, University of Cambridge.

I have also had my interest engaged by the series of programmes currently being screened by the BBC, about a group of people holding a range of different stances on faith, undertaking a pilgrimage to Istabul, along The Sultan’s Trail.

This post brings the two engagements together, and sets them both against direct personal experience.

~~~~~~~~~

Dr Henry Tam brings this to me:

“Objectivity in discourse is only possible if people follow the principle of cooperative enquiry, which demands that … an assertion [be] judged with reference to the extent to which informed participants, deliberating under conditions of thoughtful and un-coerced exchanges, would concur.  Any provisional consensus reached by one group of individuals must in turn be open to possible revisions subject to examinations carried out with input from other groups.  The ultimate strength of any truth claim rests with the likelihood of that claim surviving the critical deliberations of ever-expanding circles of enquirers.”

Many in the Unitarian movement, to which I align myself, might agree that this mode of enquiry is something to be aimed at, though we might also agree that, in practice, little of this cooperative enquiry is being undertaken in our movement at present. 

Nonetheless, the reason there is a Unitarian denomination at all is that certain people among Church congregations throughout the centuries have not accepted dogma, as presented from the pulpit or lectern, without critique and scrutiny against the dictates of conscience.  Secretly or openly, assertions have then been tested in group discourse.  Schisms and re-groupings have then followed; and periodically, successive re-groupings have occurred, in the light of subsequent new discourse and scrutiny.

Whether we consider the present state of the Unitarian movement in UK as burgeoning or diminishing, the movement continues to encompass a healthy degree of the testing of ideas, and tends to reject superstition and modes of ritual that do not in some way focus the minds and hearts of the participants.  Ambitious and optimistic UK Unitarians would hope that our way of being a movement should also aim at rejecting arbitrary hierarchies and exclusionary habits or principles; but few would claim we have attained to that way of being, yet.

So, Unitarians are people who base their lives of spirit and faith in ideas that have been tested with others.  Then the participatory events we engage in, as congregations and groups, aim to make safe spaces for personal worship or spiritual growth, founded on inclusive, common denominators, that have been felt to adhere to broadly acceptable modes.

In short (in rather old-fashioned and very broad-brush language), it might be said that the religion of Unitarians is God-given but passed through the lens of human - and humanist - filters.  It is openly recognised that it is the people who make the Unitarian mode of religion, as experienced in groups, what it is.

So I do understand, and take part in, group critique in the determination of a provisional truth.

~~~~~~~~~

Watching the television programme Pilgrimage: the road to Istanbul, I sat bolt upright when a self-declared atheist pilgrim, in talking to the adherent of a world faith, made reference to “the imaginary people you believe in,” or some wording very similar to that.

I get so bored with misrepresentations and false assumptions and narratives about religion.

I can see that, for some people, religion is defined in terms of, “Are you Christian?  Muslim?  Jewish?  Hindu?  Sikh?” but those labels for me are merely cultural backdrops.  Every age of humankind on every continent has had its wisdom teachers, seers, seemingly miraculous characters, mystics, and more recently in relative terms, its own scriptures.  Gaps in knowledge have ever, always, been backfilled in the human imagination by the good old catch all, “It must have been God / the gods.”  Yes there are distinctions to be made between these labels to do with religion and faith, but they all fall in the same category: all these faiths’ ways of looking at things are cultural stage settings.  And that is all.

If religion were football, equivalent labels would do nothing more than say which team a person plays for.  The labels “Yeovil Town FC”, “AFC Bournemouth”, “MUFC”, “my school’s first team” etc convey nothing of the essence of what it is like to play football: what it is to learn the tools and techniques in theory, to keep personally fit, to train as a group together; what it is to feel the pre-match butterflies, to walk out onto the pitch on a rainy day, the tumble of being tackled, the pain of defeat and the joys of victory.

Football is not everyone’s game and not everyone will have developed the wealth of connotations behind the word ”football” that spring instantly to mind for others.  And that’s ok.

Well: religion is not everyone’s game and not everyone will have developed the wealth of connotations behind the word “religion” that spring instantly to mind for others.  And that’s ok too.

But when I heard what I heard on the television programme, what I first noticed was this: whilst it would not normally be considered good manners to casually say to a footballer, “the pointless exercises of competence you take part in, against other teams, every weekend,” the atheist did not instinctively feel it to be bad manners to say “the imaginary people you believe in”.

Dwelling on this for a moment, I then noticed that the words used said even more about the bad-mannered atheist.  The turn of phrase used revealed that the word “religion” had not been unpacked by the atheist, despite the fact that they were due to take part in a programme, a staged commitment, that was deliberately constructed, and planned well in advance, to explore what faith and belief, of all kinds, might be.  I was struck by how disengaged, ill-prepared, or perhaps lazy, the atheist was showing themself to be.

The atheist thought they understood the word “religion” because they already had in mind an idea of what it is, and what the doctrines of some of the world faiths are.  The atheist was treating “religion” as those ideas that Dr Tam was talking about.  I surmised that it was as if the atheist — with a certain amount of justification, I would agree — were speaking from the platform that no ever-expanding circle of enquirers in the 21st century world would be likely, in un-coerced exchanges, to concur that human persons rise from the dead or take night-time journeys in the heavens (whatever they may be) to become special categories of person with the power to intercede or intervene.  That no ever-expanding circle of enquirers would be likely, in un-coerced exchanges, to concur that there are special rituals which guarantee a secure and safe or even happy life.  That no ever-expanding circle of enquirers would be likely, in un-coerced exchanges, to concur that one group of people have got a privileged way of doing things that will stand the test of all time and be borne out in the end (whatever that might be) to have uniquely worked out how life should be lived.

I am putting words into a person’s mouth, of course.  But I do — I get so bored with misrepresentations and false assumptions and narratives that seem to be common currency, about religion.

Religion isn’t about “what it seems logical or plausible or satisfying to believe or support”; nor is it about group concurrence on provisional truth.

Religion is not a matter of reasoning; and it most emphatically is not a matter of choice.

The semantics of the word give it away: it has its roots in Latin, meaning “that which binds”  (cf “ligature”).

Religion is the stuff that ties you.  That ties you together within yourself.  That ties you to your place in the multiverse.

It’s the stuff you can’t evade.

It’s what you find in yourself when something hard, painful or uncomfortable looks you right in the eye without flinching or drawing back, and in a voice that cannot be unheard, demands of you, “Are you telling the truth?”

It’s what you find in yourself when you are hurting, are nearly broken, can’t find the way back and don’t even know how to try; when you are burning up with shame; or when you are shivering and stone cold in loneliness; and something looks you right in the eye without flinching or drawing back, and in a voice of infinite gentleness that cannot be shied away from, says, “You are seen and known; and you are loved.” 

It’s not always seen in such sudden epiphanies; binding and tying can be gentle, subtle, sneaking-up-on-you processes; but the effect is the same: religion is what cannot be evaded and it is not a choice. 

Religion is not about “imaginary friends.”  It’s about what is experienced: what ties, what challenges.  What wrecks complacency and what re-orders confusions.  What steps in as an unimagined, unexpected disruption that cannot be grasped or comprehended, and transforms, despite all frantic attempts to remain in control.

Religion is not about “making life better” or “making more sense of life” or “making me feel a better person”.  It’s about what won’t be denied.  Religion is a demand.  I recognise that it’s a demand that only a minority of people feel; but that’s alright.  Religion isn't about group concurrence on provisional truth.

The human world would not be what it is without religion.  That doesn’t mean everyone has to experience it.  The human world would not be what it is without science, technology, fine art, music, sport, poetry, even the intricacies of civil administration; and no one says that everyone has to experience, or want to be involved with, any or all of those things, either.   Nonetheless, a writer cannot help but write.  A musician cannot help but make music.  A dancer must dance. Those who are struck by religion must obey the call.

If you don’t experience religion, don’t expect to stand on common ground with those who do:  because, for those who experience religion, no proof is necessary; for those who do not experience religion, no proof is possible.