Prologue: Religion, LARPing, and Comic Books
Before I get on with the points I want to make in this new series, I want to point to a couple of essays that set the stage.
The first is from the old Beliefnet blog, “Kingdom of Priests”, by author and (ugh) supporter of Intelligent Design, David Klinghoffer. I disagree with him on many points, Intelligent Design being but one, but his comparison of a convert to radical Islam and a fantasy fan is interesting. An excerpt:
An item by Marissa Brostoff at Tablet directs our attention to a fascinating and very thorough profile of the former Adam Pearlman [the young man who converted and joined Al-Qaeda] in The New Yorker, which in turns notes the peculiarly elaborate and archaic rhetorical style of Gadahn’s work as an Al-Qaeda spokesman: ”Sometimes his syntax is so baroque, his sentiment so earnest, that he sounds like a character from the Lord of the Rings.”
The Tolkien allusion caught my attention. I hadn’t previously given much thought to young Mr. Pearlman’s spiritual journey — born in Oregon, raised on a goat farm in Southern California, shy teenager, converted to Islam at age 17 — but that line about the Lord of the Rings struck me as telling. Did you ever notice the way with some converts, not just converts to any given religion but to all kinds of thought systems, ideologies, and other enthusiasms, there’s often a heavy element of fantasy role playing?
When I was a Southern California youth myself, we’d play Dungeons & Dragons, and everyone got to pick his Tolkienesque fantasy identity — wizard, warrior, hobbit, elf, whatever you like. Nerdy kids, or momma’s boys like me (there is a difference!), reveled in the chance to pretend to be someone else, a person much more exotic, interesting, and powerful. It sure strikes me that young Pearlman has been on such a trip of his own these past 13 years or more. The rest of the New Yorker profile bears this out. Fantasy role playing ran in the family.
Relatedly, in this essay Julian Sanchez theorizes about the mindset of many believers:
Fundamentalists of every sect are, pretty much by definition, strongly committed to the literal truth of all of their scripture. But the garden variety “believer,” I suspect, may often be more accurately thought of as a “suspension-of-disbeliever.”
When you think about the actual functions that religious narratives serve in people’s lives, literal truth or falsity is often rather beside the point, and yet suspension of disbelief is a necessary condition of immersion in the story. On this view, Richard Dawkins is a little like that guy who keeps pointing out that all the ways superhero physics don’t really make sense. (Wouldn’t characters with “super strength” would really need super speed as well to do stuff like punching through concrete? Shouldn’t Cyclops be propelled backwards when he unleashes those concussive eye beams?”) It’s not annoying because we literally believed the stories, but because our enjoyment depends on our not attending too explicitly to their unreality. People can, on one level, be powerfully committed to the idea that Han Solo shot first, dammit—while on another being perfectly aware that, really, nobody shot anybody, and it’s actually just Harrison Ford and a dude in a green rubber suit with some laser effects added in post production.
Fanboys, of course, know their cherished fantasy worlds are fantasy, and will admit as much readily if you press them. For many ordinary believers, I suspect the situation is closer to what I think my initial view of Sherlock Holmes probably was: I knew that Watson “was” Holmes’ faithful sidekick, and that Moriarty “was” his archenemy, but if you asked me whether I meant this “was” in the sense of a historical truth claim or only as a “truth” about a fictional narrative, I suspect I would have initially been surprised by the question, because nothing about my relationship to the narrative or my reasons for enjoying it turned essentially on whether the events it depicted had really happened.
Now as a religious person myself, I don’t think these insights invalidate religion in general or specific religions in particular. I do think they make valid points, though, and often cut closer to home than many of us would like to think. In the next post I want to look at cultural factors that set the stage for this, and then I want to look at ramifications. And by the way, Han did shoot first!
Update: A fascinating if disturbing article along much the same lines I’m discussing.
Part of the series “Religion, Role-playing, and Reality“
An item by Marissa Brostoff at Tablet directs our attention to a fascinating and very thorough profile of the former Adam Pearlman in The New Yorker, which in turns notes the peculiarly elaborate and archaic rhetorical style of Gadahn’s work as an Al-Qaeda spokesman: ”Sometimes his syntax is so baroque, his sentiment so earnest, that he sounds like a character from the Lord of the Rings.”
An item by Marissa Brostoff at Tablet directs our attention to a fascinating and very thorough profile of the former Adam Pearlman in The New Yorker, which in turns notes the peculiarly elaborate and archaic rhetorical style of Gadahn’s work as an Al-Qaeda spokesman: ”Sometimes his syntax is so baroque, his sentiment so earnest, that he sounds like a character from the Lord of the Rings.”
An item by Marissa Brostoff at Tablet directs our attention to a fascinating and very thorough profile of the former Adam Pearlman in The New Yorker, which in turns notes the peculiarly elaborate and archaic rhetorical style of Gadahn’s work as an Al-Qaeda spokesman: ”Sometimes his syntax is so baroque, his sentiment so earnest, that he sounds like a character from the Lord of the Rings.”
Posted on 27/04/2014, in comics, pop culture, religion and tagged Beliefnet, comics, David Klinghoffer, geek culture, Julian Sanchez, LARP, nerd culture, pop culture, religion, role-plyaing, society. Bookmark the permalink. 8 Comments.
The Chequer-board of Nights and Days 
Yes, Han Solo did shoot first! And when Luke Skywalker sees his father’s force ghost at the end of Return of the Jedi, he sees an old man!
Don’t get me started on all the ways Lucas screwed up his own universe in the “special editions”!
So you are a religious person who does not believe in intelligent design? How does that work? Do you believe in a literal christ but merely a metaphorical god/heaven?
Well, it’s an issue of semantics. God is intelligent—obviously–and She created–”designed”–the cosmos—so that’s “intelligent design”. I have no problem with that at all, and I do believe it. What gets called “intelligent design” in most current discourse, though, is not quite that.
A man-made beehive, for example, is—well, man-made. The bees, however, probably can’t distinguish it from a natural hive in a tree or whatnot. A natural hive and a man-made hive are obviously different, but the “obviously” refers to us, not the bees. It’s far beyond their ability to comprehend. The so-called “intelligent design” movement in essence claims that we can clearly and obviously see the Divine in specific natural processes—that we as bees, so to speak, can distinguish the natural from the man-made hive. I don’t think we can.
Of course, since God made everything, there are no “natural” beehives, to continue the metaphor. The problem is that intelligent design (henceforth ID for short) advocates grossly oversimplify things. They tend to make “God of the gaps” arguments. That means “We don’t understand X, therefore God must have directly caused X.” Obviously that’s a problem, because if we later do come to understand X, then it undermines people’s faith.
Let me change metaphors. A pinball machine is obviously man-made. However, once it’s made, it functions without direct influence from the maker. When I shoot the ball, I don’t have to imagine that somehow the maker of the machine is lurking out of sight, moving the ball and actuating the lights and sounds. It’s constructed so that it does what it does with no further assistance from the designer—and that’s because he designed it that way! Similarly, the watchmaker doesn’t have to come to my house to wind my watch (or replace its battery, if it’s electric) when that’s needed!
So ID people basically say, “Since we don’t know how X happens, that not only means that God did it, but She intervened directly to do so.” This is usually used to attack the idea of evolution. While there’s still a ton we don’t know (and maybe never will know) about evolution, no actual trained biologist, of any or no religion, doubts that evolution exists and produced the panoply of life forms we see on Earth. ID proponents, for reasons that go all the way back to the debates over Darwin’s theories, don’t like that. They feel that if God can’t be seen to intervene directly and perceptibly, She doesn’t intervene at all, which undermines the idea that She even exists. That would be like saying that if the guy who built the pinball machine doesn’t come and move the ball himself, or if the watchmaker doesn’t come to wind my watch, then no one must have made the pinball machine or the watch—they just appeared out of nowhere!
Even worse: A very small number of the ID crowd actually are biologists—Michael Behe springs to mind. However, while he thinks some chemical processes in cells must indicate direct Divine intervention (which for the reasons I explained above is problematic), he also does not doubt that evolution happened, that we and the great apes are evolutionary kin, etc. However, a lot of so-called young-Earth creationists—those who take the book of Genesis literally, and thus believe the cosmos is only about six thousand years old and reject evolution completely—use the more subtle (though still problematic) ideas of the ID crowd to argue for their beliefs—so even though Behe does believe in evolution, a lot of people use his writings against the idea of evolution. Strange, huh?
Worst of all: The ID organizations (e.g. the Discovery Institute) are bankrolled by conservative Christian organizations whose goals are not really about biology. They believe that teaching evolution undermines Christian belief, because they believe in a literal reading of Genesis. They further believe that such undermining is destroying societal morals, etc.–which in their mind means promoting feminism (which they see as bad), acceptance of LGBT people, and so on. Some of them are even more radical in that they believe that religious tolerance is wrong, and that our laws should be directly based on the Bible (Google “Dominionists”). Thus, to them, ID is not about showing that God made the cosmos, but rather as a sort of Trojan Horse to institute their social and political beliefs (Google “Wedge Strategy”).
So those are my issues with what gets called “intelligent design”. If it were just saying, “This universe couldn’t just happen—God must have made it,” then I’d have no beef with it at all. What its proponents believe and the hidden agenda they’re pushing, though, are things I’m strongly opposed to. That’s what it comes down to for me. Does that make sense?
Also–I do believe in a literal God, but by definition God is infinite and beyond all human categories. A blind person believes that color exists, but she is incapable of perceiving it. In some ways, that’s how it is with us with respect to God. God is not human, nor even a “person” in the sense in which we usually use that term (God is beyond even that). The thing is that even though no words can even come close to describing God, they’re all we’ve got. I might tell a bling person that “red” is like “hot” and “blue” is like “cold”, which wouldn’t be a bad metaphor–we think of something being “red hot”, or our faces turning blue with excessive cold–but it’s still a metaphor. After all, frozen strawberries are red, but cold, and a gas flame may be blue, but hot. So we are forced to call God “He” or “She” since all persons we know are male or female and it would thus be odd (though not any less correct) to call God “It”; but God has no gender, God is not a woman or a man or even a human. I often refer to God as “She” because I relate more to the feminine aspect of God; but God is not a woman (or man, or neuter). I’m just a blind man referring to “red” as “hot”, so to speak.
So yes, I believe in a literal God, but I don’t mean by that a big white-bearded man (or woman or animal or whatnot) on a golden throne in the clouds. Similarly, I believe heaven is real, but it’s not a place or palace in the clouds–it’s the state of being of those in unity with God.
A good book I’d suggest that treats these concepts in fictional form is the complete edition of Jonathan Livingston Seagull (no joke).
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