The Holy Quorans

Lately, I have been wondering about whether to remain a Christian.  The evidence around us indicates that there isn’t nearly so much difference between all Christians and all non-Christians as Christian preachers try to make out, nor so much difference between all religious believers and all atheists as some atheists try to make out.  Not only European Christians like PDB11 and me, but also probably plenty of American Christians with liberal political views, probably have more beliefs in common with liberal atheists than with fundamentalist Christian Trump-supporters, for example.

PDB11 mentioned to me a question on Quora about a quiz, the Religious Values Test, which a Quoran we follow, Melissa B, had taken.  Melissa, who is a Catholic, took the test and got – Pantheist.  According to her results, she was 59.8% pro-Catholic, compared to 68.5% pro-Jewish and 65.5% pro-Hindu.  PDB11, as a Protestant, also got Pantheist, but scored 59.4% pro-Protestant, compared to 63.6% Buddhist. 

Looking at the answers posted by various people who had taken the quiz, most of them commented on the questions’ lack of nuance, and many people had had strange results that don’t reflect their actual religious faith.  The person who originally posted the question, also a Catholic, also got Pantheist, and scored 58.9% pro-Catholic, but 60.6% pro-Buddhist, 64.2% pro-Hindu, and 65.2% pro-Jewish.  (He’s Croatian, so this isn’t a reflection of popular American support for Israel.)  A man who describes himself as an incarnation of the Greek god Dionysus also got Pantheist, scoring 65.8 pro-Pagan but 70.9% Jewish and 74.5% Hindu.

As far as I can see, most theists who took the test got Pantheist, apart from one Eastern Orthodox Christian who got Eastern Orthodox Moderate, another Christian who got Universalist Christian (he speculates that by ‘Universalist’ the quiz-setter seems to mean ‘Christian who believes that different denominations of Christianity are valid’ rather than ‘Christian who believes that everyone goes to heaven’), and one Muslim who got Moderate Muslim.

As my friend Doom Metal Singer, who is a pagan, was coming to lunch today, I invited her to take the test. Here are her results:

And here are mine:

So the quiz reflected Doom Metal Singer’s views more accurately in that she is more Pagan than anything else, while mine came out as more pro-Jewish than pro-Protestant.

Quite a few of the questions (all phrased as statements which we are asked to agree or disagree with) are ambiguous. For example, ‘Protestant evangelism is dangerous’ - does that mean that it can have dangerous consequences for people being evangelised to, or that being a Christian evangelist in, say, North Korea, is highly dangerous?

One question was about whether purgatory is a real place.  I clicked ‘don’t know’ because I wasn’t sure what the question meant.  If it’s about whether I think people’s souls may undergo a process called purgatory before they are ready to enter heaven, then it might well be true – though if so, I believe that it is a process of spiritual detox and rehabilitation rather than a punishment.  But if the question meant do I think there is a physically locatable place in our universe called Purgatory – for example, that the world-building in Dante’s Divine Comedy is literally true, with Hell located in the core of the Earth and Purgatory a mountain island in the south Pacific – then no.  I think Dante would have been astonished at how many people today seem to believe literally the kind of imagery he used as a metaphor.

Some questions looked like misunderstandings of religious doctrines.  For example ‘Karma in this life is a false belief’ – I clicked ‘disagree’, not because I think there is no such thing as karma or that reward or punishment only occur in heaven or hell, but because I thought the concept of karma was that actions have consequences over the course of many lives.  It’s not a matter of expecting your good or bad actions necessarily to have good or bad consequences for you in one lifetime. I’ve often thought that, if karma does work, then the most logical way for it to work would be that we are all reincarnations of the same person.  So if you buy a hamburger for a beggar, then the good news is that when you are that beggar, you get to eat that burger.  The bad news is that when you are the cow, you get slaughtered to make the burger.

Some questions I answered as misspelled. For example, ‘The core tennants of Hinduism are evil.’ If it had been a matter of the core tenets, then I’d have to admit that I don’t know all that much about Hinduism, and it seems to include a wide range of beliefs, so maybe some tenets of some interpretations of Hinduism are damaging (and have been firmly decried by some Hindus). But that the people who make their spiritual home in Hinduism are evil? Definitely not.

The questions about Satanism leave the question: what do we mean by Satanism? One question referred specifically to Satan as seen in Christianity (as distinct from Satan in the Old Testament or Satan as seen by Satanists), but there are still different ideas in Christianity about whether Satan exists and, if so, what he means. As for people who describe themselves as Satanists - well, as far as I know, these are both people who claim to be Satanists as a way to satirise religion (like claiming to be a worshipper of the Flying Spaghetti Monster) and people who believe that Satan is misunderstood, and regard him as a spirit of freedom and nonconformity, rather than the embodiment of evil. When I have clicked on answers saying that (for example) Satan is the embodiment of evil, I mean Satan as understood in Christianity - but that doesn’t mean that I think people who describe themselves as Satanists are worshipping something evil, any more than people who describe themselves as witches are practising black magic. Plenty of them are probably more moral than plenty of people who describe themselves as Christians, as they believe strongly in respecting other people’s freedom.

On the other hand, if there are people who believe in Satan as the Devil, the embodiment of evil, and worship him by deliberately doing things that everyone considers evil, then I do think they are following a terrible religion. But I’m not convinced that they do exist - the stories seem to be the modern equivalent of 17th-century witch hunts. If anything, I would argue that the Devil used the ‘Satanic panic’ of the late 20th century to distract Christians from paying attention to real issues like poverty, greed, and environmental destruction.

Then again – that doesn’t mean that something using occult imagery can’t actually be doing something bad.  An example which PDB11 often quotes is of a child he knew who, trying to be friendly to another child, gave him a card for some trading-card game, and got into a huge amount of trouble because the card had a picture of a fiend on it, which the adults regarded as encouraging devil-worship.  But, as PDB11 says, surely the real problem with trading-card games is that they encourage consumerism, as, the more cards a child can buy, the greater their chance of winning, regardless of whether the cards show supernatural entities, cars or footballers.

A more horrific example is in one of Torey Hayden’s books, Ghost Girl, about a little girl who reported being sexually abused, apparently by a group of people making pornographic videos.  But there was no way of catching the abusers and bringing them to justice, because they were careful in covering their tracks – the films had deliberately ridiculous plots involving Satanic rituals and human sacrifice, and the children being abused were drugged before a session so that they couldn’t be sure how much of what they saw was real and how much was just part of the film plot, so that if they dared talk about what they had been through, it would sound like a fantasy.  I’m sure the abusers weren’t motivated by religious worship of the Devil – but they were certainly motivated by evil desires, whether in the form of sexual perversion or simply desire to make money by selling pornography.

Going back to the Religious Values quiz, it seems to me that most people who believe in tolerance for other religions get ‘pantheist’ if they believe that other religions may contain elements of truth, or even that people who follow other religions aren’t evil. To me, a pantheist means someone who believes that everything is God, and I don’t, which is why I don’t worship myself or nature, even though I think that both people and nature are worthy of respect. But I am a panentheist - someone who believes that God is present in everything. After all, if God exists at all, then He is everywhere, so I don’t see how He could be in, say, the air I breathe but not in the chair I sit on or the food I had for lunch.

I expect that the results I would have got as a teenager thirty years ago or a young adult twenty years ago would have been much more slanted towards ‘Protestant Christianity = true, any other religion = wrong, quite possibly evil and Satanic’.  At university, I briefly tried attending a yoga class, but was frightened off by the anxiety that, if it involved things like visualising a ball of energy inside us, it might be occult and dangerous.  I hadn’t realised how much the meditative practices of yoga can be helpful to people of all religions, including Christianity.

I don’t think I’m ready to stop being a Christian.  Apart from anything else, even as a teenager I could see that it would take at least the whole of one lifetime, if not more, to learn to follow even one religion.  (For example, I should have paid more attention to being a good host to Doom Metal Singer while she was visiting, instead of getting distracted by doing the quiz).  But if I manage to learn to listen to God, I have to accept that my ideas are likely to develop and change from the way I think now, and that practices I haven’t tried before might help me.

Maybe my New Year’s resolution should be to learn yoga.