How to tell a real freethinker

[Angrboda]

Like a pupil and a teacher, theology's quest is to learn what God has to say and change ourselves in response.

I think there's actually a valid point to be salvaged here, amidst the stream of effluvium. I've come to the opinion over the past year that religion and spirituality, from my perspective, serve two somewhat complementary roles. The first is descriptive. It tells the believer how the world (supposedly) is. There's a transcendant god, sin exists and is transferred from parent to child, we will be rewarded in the next life. It also serves a role that I call proscriptive, in that it prescribes the goals and standards which we should strive to achieve in ourselves and our own behavior. Love thy neighbor. Don't tolerate evil. Or, an example from Taoism, prefer yielding to opposition and confrontation. Moreover, for me, it seems the proscriptive aspect is chosen in a medicinal way — it complements and opposes areas in which I'm weak or in need of improving. Thus if I lack compassion and empathy, I'm likely to be attracted to spiritual beliefs which emphasize the value of compassion and empathy. It's like religious and spiritual beliefs are chosen, when chosen, to fix our broken parts.

A couple of observations. It appears that most religions function very poorly or even destructively in the descriptive role. They describe things which are unverifiable, have little or no explanatory value, and tend to fare poorly under empirical examination. Worse, religions tend to dogmatize, so outdated and incorrect descriptions of reality tend to become frozen in time, and even become objects of idolization and worship themselves (e.g. sin and atonement in Christianity). Religion may perhaps be more successful in the proscriptive role, but it's quite possible it's a case of garbage-in / garbage-out; give bad people useful psychological tech, and they will use it for bad things and make a mess of it; good people the obverse. So it's not clear to me at this point whether religion has any real useful effect in its proscriptive role, nor exactly how the choice and use of it works; problematically, too, the proscriptive aspect is wedded to the descriptive aspect, with perhaps as much damage from dysfunctional description as even theoretical benefits from the proscriptive aspect.


Anyway, just something I've been lazily pondering over the past year. Comments welcome.