Non Serviam. **

Was going to let it pass, but I wanted to comment on the 32-question Pew Survey on American religious "knowledge" that some are discussing, analyzing, picking over, and drawing some mighty ... judgmental conclusions on.

I know we've been trained in our better recognized academies to not put our faith in religion, and yet at the same time as a society, we've picked up a big case of celebrity Idol worship (ie/ "Obama!!! :-), unconciously perhaps, owing to the very understandable human need to find things bigger than ourselves to Believe In.

We all worship, it's just what we value that differs.

But people, people... (people!)
Drawing too much from too little in an admittedly well publicized and well funded study here?

Yes you are. (Can I get a little skepticism, please?)

Only a convert Christian believes that the points you get for faith "knowledge" -- the kind that's measurable in reading a form and filling in the best answers you can think of on the spot with the time you got -- in some way offers fair conclusions on Judgment Day (the day the 32-question test was administered. Heck, no complex essays even.).

This is why our cumulative records presumably matter -- with more weight given to a pattern of change progress over time: "where you are going" so to speak, compared to "where you were coming from" the day you first graced the Earth with your presence.

At least, that's what I've been led to believe St. Peter -- the gatekeeper, right? -- is going have on his little scoresheet, seeing whether you made the First Team immediately or not.

(Did they ask the Mormons and Jews who scored high anything about the Rock of the Catholic Church? Who the first accepted "Pope" was, perhaps? That's the problem with concluding too much based on too little: Isn't it more likely that in America today, based on sheer numbers and representation, that non-Christians know more about the ... "majority" faith than Christians know the fine print of others' myth traditions? Certainly changing, but it is what it is. And what of it?)

People can be forgiven for not knowing say, that Muslims hold the character trait of self discipline and self control in great regard. But it would help if more of us perhaps, had picked up that basic fact in our daily lives. (Or is that just the Christian in me talking, with our holding the character trait of forgiveness -- second chances/the hope of redemption -- in high regard?)

That one hit me -- in fact -- when I was loudly and aggressively playing ball in a frontyard game where you fall down or get hit with the ball but get up again across the street from a dignified Muslim family who had their windows open... I'd never make it in that faith myself, too loud and rambunctious, but behavior like that situationally can bring out the best in others. As can extending a "forgiveness" in accepting that others perhaps will never live up to your own particular faith foundations.

And what of it?

America, especially the South of William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor***, has always ... perverted the faiths, taking a bit from here and there and investing a lot of time and imagination in making the teachings fit the daily livings.

You might not like it, just as a newfound convert to a religion -- like someone grappling with a new language -- might not like all the ... "exceptions", the breaking of the otherwise solid grammatical and foundational rules to fit the situations that arise*.

You might even conclude that such perversions of the language get to be so gross as to not fit in the structure as a whole: that's not X faith branch anymore, that's so changed as to be unrecognizable under the traditionally accepted definition or label.

Fair enough. But if you truly want to understand Americans, you have to learn way more than the basic rules, or anything offered up on a 32-question test.

I just don't think you get to make -- unchallenged and unquestioned -- all these lofty presumptions based on a flimsy Pew survey, putting all faith in statistics and not looking to the individual complexities that contribute to the miraculous Whole.

Too simplistic for the facts, those known and still unknown.

--------------------


God bless, everyone,
and make it a great Thursday.

Here's an inspirational fortune-cookie for today:

"To the World, you might be one person.
But to one person today, you might be the World"

flipside:

"So get out there and Rock it, baby!"

none of this

"No one told you when to run...
You missed the starting gun."

*Heck, some might say even the President erred in picking here and there from Old and New Testaments. "I am not my brothers keeper" references a very different story than Matthew's "least of my brothers", which is more how we should voluntarily choose to help our lessers, but it's never a family or community charge. Free will and all.

That's mixing apples and oranges, the purists would say, but the President and his speechwriters took what they needed, and the allusions probably go over the majority of Americans' heads.

And what of it? If they received the message intending to be sent, like the Latter Day Saints, aren't they just building something new based on an older foundation? Quibble about the direction headed certainly, but let's not waste anymore Time or copy putting our faith in a Pew survey that might just have underlying societal motives, imagine that.

** Now how come that one didn't make the 32-trivia question list? Interesting indeed!

And where are all our statistical agnostics anyways before we dutifully surrender our traditional faiths to our paid secular brethren? Anti-fallible folks operating in the name of science and numbers can be just as mistaken -- and in a way more costly way too -- as those who practiced earlier methods of grappling to find some Truth.

*** Flannery O'Connor:

O’Connor was unsurprised by such obtuseness. “I have found,” she wrote with dry amusement, “that anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the Northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.”
...
Yet O’Connor, to her credit, took the homespun beliefs of her fellow Southerners with the utmost seriousness. Even more surprisingly, she regarded them with exceptional imaginative sympathy, seeking to portray in her fiction the sometimes bizarre ways in which spiritual enthusiasm manifested itself in the lives of people who, lacking an orthodoxy to guide them, were forced to re-create the forms of religion from scratch. As she explained in a 1959 letter:

The religion of the South is a do-it-yourself religion, something which I as a Catholic find painful and touching and grimly comic. It’s full of unconscious pride that lands them in all sorts of ridiculous religious predicaments. They have nothing to correct their practical heresies and so they work them out dramatically.

Her sympathy, she added, arose from the fact that “I accept the same fundamental doctrines of sin and redemption and judgment that they do.”