“DOES (BELIEF IN) GOD MATTER?”

 

A Sermon by the Rev. Bruce Clear

Sunday, February 22, 2009

All Souls Unitarian Church

Indianapolis, Indiana

 

 

            Take a look at my sermon title.  I wrote my sermon title weeks ago, long before I attended this weekend a production at the Indiana Repertory Theater of Dostoyevsky’s classic story Crime and Punishment.  It was quite unnerving, then, to hear the epic story begin and end with the protagonist being asked the question, “Does God Exist?”  That got my attention.  But then he replied with another question.  “Does it matter?”  That really got my attention.  Having spent multiple hours over this week composing a sermon that addressed this question that I didn’t even realize Dostoyevsky had asked, I was eager to hear the answer.  Sitting on the edge of my seat, I listened to the exchange.  “Does God exist?”  “Does it Matter?”   Answer:  “It might!” 

            “Wow,” I thought to myself.  Dostoyevsky would have made a good Unitarian minister.  Or better yet, I could have been a Dostoyevsky, but he got there first.  Anyway, I decided his answer was good, but maybe not profound enough, and certainly not long enough, to substitute for my sermon.  So you’ll get the long version of, “it might.” 

 

            The earlier reading entitled “It Matters What We Believe” has always presented me with something of a challenge to my previously comfortable worldview.  There are several different reasons for this.  In general, my idea of religious toleration is that another person’s belief system is largely irrelevant compared with his or her values that are expressed through deeds and actions.  If the person’s life is full of compassion for others, it matters little to me if he or she believes in transubstantiation of sacramental elements or whether their God is Yahweh, Shiva, or Zeus.  If their religious values inspire a sense of justice for humanity, then it is of little relevance to me whether those values are derived from the Bible or the Koran or Dr. Seuss. 

Metaphysical beliefs are interesting to discuss and inspire some of the most enjoyable parlor conversations or lively intellectual debates, but life is not about parlor games, it is about things like dignity, integrity, and character. 

            Let me approach it a little differently.  Here’s what I find quite difficult to understand.  Let’s assume there is a God who created this world.  Why would God decide that the most important of all human qualities is their metaphysical system of belief.  Why would God design a world where a person having correct belief about God has more value than if the person is a loving parent nurturing the next generation.  Or that a person being right about God’s nature has more value than being a friend to others in need.   If there is a God, I cannot conceive of God putting belief first, above every other human quality.  If there is no God, then I want to know why metaphysical belief is more important than other human qualities. 

            In other words, it’s not that beliefs don’t matter at all, but rather a person’s belief pales in significance when compared with personal values. 

 

            I have held this conviction about belief for quite some time, so this reading by Sophia Fahs has always made me just a bit uncomfortable.  “It Matters What We Believe,” she writes.  Indeed.  The problem with this reading is that it makes a great deal of sense to me, and still it seems at odds with, in fact is seems to contradict, my longstanding way of looking at life. 

 

            I’d like to say just a few words about Sophia Fahs here, not because her biography is necessarily relevant to the point of my sermon, but simply because I think her story deserves to be remembered, and therefore re-told, within Unitarian Universalist circles for generations yet to come.  Her story is in many ways all our stories.  She is one of the more interesting figures in recent Unitarian history. 

            Sophia Lyon Fahs was born of Presbyterian missionary parents in China in 1876.  While later attending college in Wooster, Ohio, she joined a student group of those who pledged themselves to train as missionaries to spread the Gospel throughout the world.  She continued her studies at the University of Chicago, where she met her husband, and later at Columbia University in New York City, when her husband worked for the missionary board of the Methodist Church.  Fahs completed her Master’s degree in education at Columbia, and wrote a book about bible study for Methodist missionaries in Africa. 

            In her graduate studies in education, but more importantly in her role as Sunday School teacher and as a mother of five children, Fahs decided that religious education needed to be much broader than just learning bible stories.  She developed curriculum that looked at the natural development of religion in children, and encouraged children to develop a questioning mind. 

            The 1920s witnessed the birth of a movement which came to be called “fundamentalism,” and Fahs became the voice of education in New York among those called the “modernists” who stood up to the fundamentalists.  She developed curricula for the most famous liberal church in America, the Riverside Church in New York, which was led by the most famous liberal minister of the time, Harry Emerson Fosdick. 

            By 1937, her work came to the attention of the Unitarians, and she accepted their invitation to be the curriculum developer for their education department.  Over the next decades, Sophia Fahs redesigned children’s education to reach beyond simple bible stories to the study of nature and science and human values.  She also wrote a half dozen books about teaching children religion.  Though by now they are out of print, I encountered these books in my own seminary studies 30 years ago, and I believe they remain some of the best and most succinct explanations of Unitarian ideas ever written. 

            In 1959, at the age of 82 years old, Sophia Lyon Fahs was ordained as a Unitarian minister by a Unitarian Church in the Washington, D.C. suburbs that had the largest enrollment of children in the country.  Though she was 82, this was not just an honorific ceremony – she had almost two decades of work left in her, until she died in 1978 at the age of 101. 

 

            Like I say, her life story may not be directly relevant to my point here, but I want to express how much admiration I have for the thinking of this religious leader who said something almost directly opposed to my own thinking.  “It Matters What We Believe,” she wrote.  I won’t repeat the entire reading here, but just to jog your memory, let me pick a brief excerpt to illustrate her point: 

 

Some beliefs are like walled gardens.  They encourage exclusiveness, and the feeling of being especially privileged. 

 

Other beliefs are expansive and lead the way into wider and deeper sympathies. 

 

Some beliefs are divisive, separating the saved from the unsaved, friends from enemies. 

 

Other beliefs are bonds in a world community, where sincere differences beautify the pattern. 

 

            And so forth. 

 

            So where does that leave my conviction that beliefs are insignificant compared with the values that one lives out in life?  Have I been on the wrong track all along?           Something doesn’t compute.  Does having the right belief trump living a good life?  If a belief in the triune nature of the godhead more important than having a heart of compassion?  What if the Hindu vision is right, and divinity is expressed in the world through many manifestations of multiple gods rather than a single one?  Does that void the good works of the monotheist who lives rightly but believes wrongly?  Must a person believe in the bodily resurrection of Jesus before their acts of goodwill can count? 

 

            Does it matter what one believes, after all? 

 

            I think there is a way to reconcile what Fahs is telling us.  What one believes is of little matter compared with how one believes.  What matters is the extent to which beliefs are held to be rigid and judgmental of others.  Beliefs have consequences, to be sure, but those consequences are governed by the degree to which the beliefs are held as dogma. 

            Fahs says, for example, that “some beliefs are divisive, separating the saved from the unsaved.”  What she means by this, I think, is that some people hold their beliefs so unyieldingly, that their beliefs become more important than respect for others, their beliefs demean others who disagree with them. 

 

            Thomas Jefferson was certainly a brilliant master of the English language, but he was not always known for his vivid metaphors.  His writing was typically quite literal in its meaning, not symbolic.  But certainly one of his most passionate topics was religious freedom, and when he wrote on that subject he wrote with great literary eloquence.  Here is what he had to say to those who would have everyone agree on religious doctrine: 

 

"Is uniformity of opinion (in religion) desirable?  No more than (uniformity of a person's) face and stature…  It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God.  It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my legs." 

 

            This identifies, I think, the point at which beliefs matter.  If beliefs do damage to others – if they become tools of division, if they cause pain in others, if they dis-empower a person’s sense of self – then those beliefs matter.  They make a difference.  Or if beliefs are healing – if they give courage and reassurance, if they honor the inherent dignity of others – then those beliefs matter.  But beliefs themselves, independent of their consequences, are empty of meaning. 

 

I think what she is telling us is that when people hold to their beliefs as strict measures of truth, suggesting that differing beliefs are inferior, then beliefs become injurious.  Holding beliefs with such arrogance does, in fact, matter, for it does real damage to society.  

            It matters not so much what we believe, but how we claim our beliefs to be true, infallible, and righteous.  When one believes with proper humility, then no injury is done – in the image offered by Jefferson, it doesn’t pick anyone’s pocket or break anyone’s legs. 

 

            Of course the most obvious religious belief is belief about God.  There is a wide smorgasbord of options one may choose about belief in God.  There is, of course, the common monotheism – with certain variations such as Trinitarian or Unitarian, of a tribal, parochial God or a universal God.  Then there are multiple gods or gods of nature.  Then there are non-believers – atheists or agnostics, or humanist whether religious or secular.  The options are almost too many to fathom, but surely the question is worth asking: does it matter what we believe about God? 

 

            This is the area in which the distinction becomes most obvious between what is believed on one hand, and how such beliefs are held on the other.  Whatever one thinks about God, one can either say, “this is what seems right to me,” without passing judgment on others, or one can say, “this is the right way for everyone to believe.”  In its more extreme form, there are those who seem to suggest that “God would approve of you, as God approves of me, if only you would believe the way I believe.” 

            It is interesting to me how often a person’s belief about God is reflected by that person’s approach to life.  Those who have an image of God as a loving and forgiving parent tend to approach other people with their own sense of love and forgiveness.  Those who are themselves judgmental and unforgiving toward others tend to follow a God of strict authority and vengeance.  Those find God to be especially concerned about issues of justice, who cares passionately for the poor or the oppressed – they tend to be drawn to such causes for human justice.  More often than not, a person’s concept of God is transparently revealed in how that person approaches life. 

            Here we can see another example of how belief in God matters.  It makes little difference whether someone believes in God compared with the way in which those beliefs are held. 

 

            I want to devote some attention to the pool of people in this world who don’t believe in a God – the non-theists – whether they are atheist or agnostic, secular humanist or religious humanist.  I want to ask the question whether their “disbelief” in God actually matters. 

            As with those who do believe in God, what matters is not whether one believes or disbelieves, but rather how that belief affects the way they live.  With Jefferson, I want to know whether that person’s belief or disbelief does injury to others – metaphorically, does it pick my pocket or break my leg? 

            In recent years, there has been an almost unprecedented publication of popular books by atheist writers, including

 

Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion,

Sam Harris, The End of Faith,

Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great, and

Dennis Dennett, Breaking the Spell. 

 

            In general, these books tend to be focused on arguing not only against belief in God, but also that belief in God is dangerous.  They identify religion as irrational, violent, racist, intolerant, and unhealthy.   In The End of Faith, for example, Sam Harris writes this:

 

“It is time we recognized that all reasonable men and women have a common enemy.  It is an enemy (that) threatens to destroy the very possibility of human happiness.  Our enemy is nothing other than faith itself.” 

 

            Richard Dawkins suggests that teaching religion to children is tantamount to child abuse, for it instills in them ignorance and bigotry.  I don’t need to continue itemizing the criticisms these writers have of religion.  It might be summarized in a comment by Freeman Dyson, a physicist who writes on science and religion, who observed

 

“There are two kinds of atheists, ordinary atheists who do not believe in God and passionate atheists who consider God to be their personal enemy.” 

 

            One cannot read the writings of these men without having a clear sense of crusade – that they a fighting a real enemy, not an imaginary God.  To them, any belief in God matters, and matters deeply, because it strengthens ignorance and superstition, and it is easy enough to identify the evils that have been produced through religious belief – from British imperialism of the 18th century to American slavery of the 19th century – from the attack on the World Trade Center to the never-ending Israeli-Palestinian conflict. 

            I’m not so sure it is fair to attribute all the world’s evils to religion, though religion bears heavy responsibility.  After all, the greatest human carnage of the 20th century came from secular ideologies – the communism of Stalin and Mao Tze Dung, and the Hitler’s Nazi party.  Nor should it be overlooked that much good is done in the name of religion – from medical aid

 

            Does belief in God matter?  Does disbelief in God matter?  Only to the extent it makes us better persons.  That, after all, is what matters. 

            If belief has no consequences, then there’s nothing to concern us.  It does us no injury.  It “neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” 

            It is the values that count, and from my measure, it is easy to find both believers and non-believers pursing good values in spite of belief. 

 

 

READING

from “Religion Without Revelation” by Julian Huxley

 

What is religion?  It is a way of life.  It is a way of life which follows necessarily from our holding certain things in reverence, from feelin and believing them to be sacred.  And those things which are held sacred by religion primarily concern human destiny and the forces with which it comes into contact.

On the other hand, all sorts of objects and ideas not in themselves calculated to arouse the religious emotion do, as a matter of fact, come to be held sacred by this or that religion, as cows by the Hindu.  The beliefs of that religion in contact with the religion with which we have grown up are apt to usurp the idea of sacredness, but I am speaking in the most general terms of this specifically religious emotion of sacredness that may be felt in relation to any object or thought, within or without the bounds of what we may be accustomed to think of as religion, within or without the bounds of any organized religious system. 

There seems to me to be three categories of religion to be considered.  The first is constituted by the powers of nature; the second by the ideal goals of the human mind; the third by actual living beings, human and other, in so far as they embody such ideals.  Had the word “God” not come, almost universally, to have the connotation of supernatural personality, it could be properly employed to denote this unity.  For what has been called “God” has been precisely this reality, or various aspects of it, but obscured by symbolic vestures.  In any case, this reality, as a proper object for religious sentiment, is something unitary and deserves a name.  For the moment I shall it it the Sacred Reality.  The precise term, however, does not matter.  What does matter is the recognition that the experience of the universe as affecting human life and therefore as invested with sanctity, is a reality, and is the proper object of religion.