Faith, truth and the real
Although I will be officially dis-enrolling from the Faith, when the feeling that I was done came, it was without a sense of finality. After becoming a Baháʼí in 2009, I often compared being in a religion to being in a marriage. While this analogy is quite powerful, where it does not work — and to the great credit of the Baháʼí framework — is that apostasy is much easier to undo than divorce. Put more simply, although I doubt that I will return to the Faith, I nevertheless reserve the right to reverse this decision if, for whatever reason, I again come to believe in Baháʼu’lláh.
Some of those with whom I have talked, both Baháʼí and non-Baháʼí, have been perplexed by my detached attitude about membership in a religion. It has struck them as strange, artificial, overly intellectual, cowardly — as though I want to hedge my bets — or as one phrased it, “not how religion works”. I disagree with the latter about the nature of religion. As for the other accusations, it is not that I lack strength, will and commitment; it is that my strength, will and commitment are dedicated to truth, not a specific religion.
This is not at all to suggest that being committed to a belief system is an act of self-deception or conformism. It is possible in this life to be a “truth fanatic”, such that one confronts the vast plurality of religions and, seeing their inevitable partiality and tendencies toward partisanship, denounces them all as insufficient or illusion. However, I do believe that our membership in a religion should be a function of our perception of its truth, not the other way around. It is healthy to have faith, but only if we have arrived at that faith by a sense of how deep its roots go in the earth of the real.
This is also not to suggest I, Christopher Schwartz, can ever attain truth in its completeness, or that I am priding my individual perception of truth over and above, say, the truth of revelation. What has been happening to me is that I have begun to detect a connection between the divine and our individual reasoning, by which I do not just mean our rationality, but the way in which we navigate the fullness of our createdness, our fragility and our resilience, the mortal and the immortal within us. Reasoning for me includes our emotionality, our embodiedness, our partialness.
I am still not entirely certain how to phrase the intuition, but when we use reason, we are expressing, connecting to, or in some sense implementing the divine. If, let me call it your “exercise” of the divine guides you to a revealed religion, then how is the atheist superior to you? By the very same terms, though outwardly seemingly very paradoxical, if your “exercise” of the divine leads you to atheism, then how is the theist superior to you?
While this may seem like an advocacy for relativism, that is not the case. That different perspectives can come to different conclusions using the same capacity or virtue within themselves may in a way be the divine intention. What matters is how they come to those conclusions, for there are genuine and healthy ways to do so, and there are disingenuous and unhealthy ways to do so. I will discuss this further below, when I discuss the unfortunate attraction of many Baháʼís — far too many — toward egregious skepticism and conspiracy theories about vaccines, NATO, and the like. As I will try to explain below, the problem is notreally what they believe, but why they believe, as well as the ways in which the Writings may be contributing to distorted and insincere thinking.
Spiritual Journalism 