While I know I shouldn't be surprised, I am more than occasionally agog at the moral and intellectual blindness of those who seek to pass judgment upon the lives of others. Whether it is the fundamentalist Christian who insists that we have to believe his or her way or we are damned to hell or the ardent rationalist who insists that we subsume all of life under the banner of reason, discarding all that cannot be defended, defined, and explained through a combination of logic and evidence. That vast middle where most human beings reside - recognizing the world might be a bit more complicated than boosters and fanatics insist; happy in the muddle and contradictions and vagueness that make up their lives - has no place for those who insist that all human beings must conform to their way of thinking or they are not fully human (because they don't worship God the correct way, or they don't think correctly, or whatever).
To the fundamentalists of all stripes, there is no arguing, there is no persuasion, there is no evidence, there is no alternative. While my own concern tends to be with Christian fundamentalists, increasingly I am wearied by the intolerance of secular fundamentalists. While I recognize a legitimate gripe at some of our more, ahem, noisome fundies, the reactions provoked too often sound an awful lot like fundamentalism, with the subject changing rather than the intent.
I am an advocate of a kind of via media when it comes to matters of life, whether it is the life of the mind or the life of the spirit, or both. It seems to me that the arguments both types make - one can either be a Christian or a rigorous materialist/rationalist/empiricist but not both - is belied by the simple reality that in fact many human beings are both. Including me. I see no inconsistency in saying, "Heck, yeah, the Universe is close to 12 billion years old, maybe older, and life on earth is in a constant state of flux through the process of evolution" and "God Created the World and All that is in it." The first is a regard for the current state of our scientific understanding. The second is a faith claim about the relationship between God and the world. Those who find such a position either inconsistent or self-contradictory just don't understand we are dealing with two distinct ways of dealing with the world.
Part of being an advocate of the kind of middle ground I inhabit is recognizing the limitations inherent in all human endeavors. Science is a marvelous tool, but I dare anyone to provide a coherent argument for me to remain faithful to my wife. That is an irrational decision on my part, and I declare it so with a lot of glee. On the other hand, I also dare a fundamentalist to please explain how we reconcile the first two chapters of Genesis which are, on any reading, mutually contradictory. Rather than get bogged down in figuring things out in such ways as this, my own preference is to live my life as best I can, and make my own peace with the world and its mysteries both terrible and sublime. I choose, in other words, life over any one way of interpreting it. I leave the interpretation to reflection, and use whatever tools I see fit to do so, rather than having a previous commitment to any one way of deciding what is the only way of thinking.
In the end, while I might enjoy the occasional repartee with those who insist it's their way or the highway, my own preference is to allow them to spout off and just get on living my life.
Virtual Tin Cup
