You're a sheep and you know it

Lauren recounted how we decided to go to a Jehovah's Witness service and how we were miraculously visited by N, our JW. N was, indeed, awkward, though not nearly as awkward as G, his friend. G just kind of looked at us when introduced and his handshake epitomized the "dead fish."

The service was mind-numbing. Lauren and I sat in the back and warbled our way through the first song. A nice, overweight woman in front of us (Lauren is right - JW girls are BBW) loaned us her song book, and all the song lyrics are pulled directly from the bible. My brain went into cruise control and I occupied myself by reading little snippets from the old testament about weird tests that God thought he needed to put people through, back when God had a very different relationship with humans (apparently).

The first speaker, who gave a 30-minute sermon, was a kind of funny old man with unfortunate hair. He got up and started talking about the world being like a chess game because we've got a king and then we've got these rooks and zzzzzzzzz ... sorry, I dozed off there for a second. Um, I think he was saying that Christ was the king but it was all backwards because the king died to save the pawns. He seemed to think it was a big deal that the game is similar to human society, as though the game and human society are of two separate realms.

Back to the JW obsession with the Bible. I was listening to this radio program last night on NPR and the guest talked about an era before Jews had a coherent view of the afterlife. Isn't it amazing that our faith is so young? Elaine Pagels has a book about Satan and how he's a recent invention, too. By "recent" I mean within the last couple of millenia, but still: our religious system has grown with our modern world. Back to the JWs: I guess I have a hard time with such reliance on the Bible when the Bible is so reflective of particular times, changing with what we need within society. It is a living book, I believe that; it is living because nothing in human society can be entombed as truth. No matter how hard we try to point to eternal truths, change is the only constant. Of course, the collected books that we have in today's Bible were pretty much settled on by (what? Nicene Council-ish? About 300 AD?) - but does that mean they haven't changed since then? I don't mean through translations, I mean that the actual content is read differently.

This is one of the fundamental truths, I guess, that I believe in: you can't stop time, and you can't decide that something is right and everything else is wrong, full speed ahead, damn all evidence to the contrary. Your belief system crumbles in the face of dissonance. And then you have to come up with new explanations, new tricks to incorporate new evidence (dinosaurs lived with humans! The grand canyon was created in the flood!), when you're really ignoring the evidence and covering your ears and shutting your eyes and screaming out "LA LA LA LA I don't hear you!" I guess this is me, child of the post-enlightenment, product of my times.

I had this big argument years ago with my friend M, about whether science was just another religion. Maybe it is. At the time, my position was that science and religion are very different, but I think I've come around to a different point of view. Science is a religion of tangible evidence. Its fetishes are calculability, prediction. I think it is wrong to point to "Darwinism" or something of that ilk and say that it's just dogma; dogma is not part of the scientific epistemology. The substance of religion is weird, but so is the substance of science; what distinguishes them is how they decide what is "real" in the world. What makes religion different from science is how knowledge is gathered - whether it is from above (over time, handed down by elders) or below (new is better, building on the past but always changing). But science is not SO different from religion, because we've seen that religion continues to change, too, to fit new information with old beliefs in ways that make sense. And, besides, I think that science, too, will be found wanting. I guess this is where postmodernists come in, and my own discomfort with what I view as overreliance on positivism within the sciences.

The point of the NPR program last night was that doubters have a role in history that is often overlooked. Our society may be overly fond of change - especially since change is commercialized, enshrined in our market system - but at least we're not just worshipping at the altar of Zeus. So I think I'm saying that Christianity might have arisen from doubt, too. Christians doubted something about the old testament, and Christianity has, in its DNA, the logic of doubt. I guess that's why we have about a million Christian sects, and they're all pretty sure of their truthiness, but they all claim to stick to the Bible. Yet another bit of evidence for my theory that the Bible is a living book (thank you, science!).

If my head explodes soon, I have only myself to thank.