Showing posts with label language. Show all posts
Showing posts with label language. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 18, 2013
Saturday, August 11, 2012
The Nature of Language
An acquaintance expressed some frustration that a girl he knows identifies herself as a lesbian while pursuing romantic relationships with men. This made me think, and my first thoughts are on this page.
From my perspective, language is demonstrative. It points at something: sometimes it points badly (in a way that other people have real difficulty following). If you use language too cryptically, I am left in the dark when it comes to seeing your meaning out there the real world as I experience it. You say words like 'lesbian' and I am not sure that you mean what I would mean if I used those words. I sit back and wait for more data from you (language or behavior) before deciding what you are getting at.
There is an interesting problem here: sometimes, especially when dealing with complex phenomena (like sexuality or the economy), we have a tendency to oversimplify. Words are part of that oversimplification. We use them to refer in a general way to specific circumstances that we are familiar with. Thus, one person says 'lesbian' when she means to say something like 'woman attracted to women but also to certain men, i.e. a woman like me.' Maybe for her the point is that she is not entirely straight, and 'lesbian' is the first word that comes to her mind when she wants to put a tag on that. If you listen to her carefully, notice how she uses the word (e.g. what contexts call it forth from her), and avoid projecting your own idea of lesbianism into her idea of lesbianism, then you can understand her (well enough not to be completely clueless every time she speaks about her lesbianism).
But there is this thing out there known as logic, a thing which maintains such unnatural (and in complex contexts, frankly absurd) idea that A ('lesbian') cannot be not-A ('likes sex with men'). 'Free market' cannot be 'protectionist racket.' 'Too big to fail' cannot be 'too big not to fail.' And so on. Since antiquity, there have been people who thought that words were more real than other phenomena -- that words allow us to deal directly with pure truth, unclouded by pesky empirical data (which is full of logical fallacies and paradoxes, unlike the perfect world academics have historically imagined -- a world in which A is never not-A). The great power of words is that they generalize, making individual experiences shareable across time and space. This is also their great weakness, especially when they are used to generalize a particular experience that many people have never had (e.g. being a lesbian the way my friend's acquaintance is) -- and one word is used all by itself to define that experience for everyone, everywhere (logically, A is never not-A anywhere, so we should be able to invoke it as the same thing anywhere, in any context -- people who see problems with this are just fools attracted to 'nuance,' 'paradox,' 'ambiguity,' and other namby-pamby 'unscientific' and illogical things).
But reality is beyond concepts. Things like lesbianism, capitalism, and such resist reduction to simple formula. These words point: they don't define. In the real world, people aren't either homosexual or heterosexual: we exist on a spectrum. And capitalism isn't either the best thing that ever happened to society or the worst: human social behavior, like human sexual behavior, exists on a spectrum. As long as we use language to point at material stuff that historically resists reduction to real dichotomy (good/evil, positive/negative, up/down, gay/straight, A/not-A), we are speaking descriptively, not definitively (unless we want to join the prophets who speak as morons -- prophets who exist in and out of the LDS church). We need to realize the artificiality of our language: it is emphatically not prior to the phenomena that call it forth. Reality is bigger than our reductive efforts to define it (historically: maybe one day, God will come down to earth in the form of a great scientist and give us words that define all things perfectly; it is a cool thought, and I really doubt it).
From my perspective, language is demonstrative. It points at something: sometimes it points badly (in a way that other people have real difficulty following). If you use language too cryptically, I am left in the dark when it comes to seeing your meaning out there the real world as I experience it. You say words like 'lesbian' and I am not sure that you mean what I would mean if I used those words. I sit back and wait for more data from you (language or behavior) before deciding what you are getting at.
There is an interesting problem here: sometimes, especially when dealing with complex phenomena (like sexuality or the economy), we have a tendency to oversimplify. Words are part of that oversimplification. We use them to refer in a general way to specific circumstances that we are familiar with. Thus, one person says 'lesbian' when she means to say something like 'woman attracted to women but also to certain men, i.e. a woman like me.' Maybe for her the point is that she is not entirely straight, and 'lesbian' is the first word that comes to her mind when she wants to put a tag on that. If you listen to her carefully, notice how she uses the word (e.g. what contexts call it forth from her), and avoid projecting your own idea of lesbianism into her idea of lesbianism, then you can understand her (well enough not to be completely clueless every time she speaks about her lesbianism).
But there is this thing out there known as logic, a thing which maintains such unnatural (and in complex contexts, frankly absurd) idea that A ('lesbian') cannot be not-A ('likes sex with men'). 'Free market' cannot be 'protectionist racket.' 'Too big to fail' cannot be 'too big not to fail.' And so on. Since antiquity, there have been people who thought that words were more real than other phenomena -- that words allow us to deal directly with pure truth, unclouded by pesky empirical data (which is full of logical fallacies and paradoxes, unlike the perfect world academics have historically imagined -- a world in which A is never not-A). The great power of words is that they generalize, making individual experiences shareable across time and space. This is also their great weakness, especially when they are used to generalize a particular experience that many people have never had (e.g. being a lesbian the way my friend's acquaintance is) -- and one word is used all by itself to define that experience for everyone, everywhere (logically, A is never not-A anywhere, so we should be able to invoke it as the same thing anywhere, in any context -- people who see problems with this are just fools attracted to 'nuance,' 'paradox,' 'ambiguity,' and other namby-pamby 'unscientific' and illogical things).
But reality is beyond concepts. Things like lesbianism, capitalism, and such resist reduction to simple formula. These words point: they don't define. In the real world, people aren't either homosexual or heterosexual: we exist on a spectrum. And capitalism isn't either the best thing that ever happened to society or the worst: human social behavior, like human sexual behavior, exists on a spectrum. As long as we use language to point at material stuff that historically resists reduction to real dichotomy (good/evil, positive/negative, up/down, gay/straight, A/not-A), we are speaking descriptively, not definitively (unless we want to join the prophets who speak as morons -- prophets who exist in and out of the LDS church). We need to realize the artificiality of our language: it is emphatically not prior to the phenomena that call it forth. Reality is bigger than our reductive efforts to define it (historically: maybe one day, God will come down to earth in the form of a great scientist and give us words that define all things perfectly; it is a cool thought, and I really doubt it).
Thursday, November 24, 2011
My Religion
I composed this statement in response to a series of questions posed by a Christian on one of the Mormon sites I frequent.
I see religion as a kind of poetry, an expression of human life that takes its form in gestures aimed at creating and preserving meaning. For me, there is really no hard distinction between religion and other systems of culture that encompass entire lives: religion includes politics, economics, and all kinds of culture. What is more, people are born into religions the same way they are born into language. You can learn a new language, and you can take up a new religion, but traces of the old one will be with you always (even if you don't like it: I cannot get away from the fact that I was born into twentieth-century American English; in the same way, I cannot escape the fact that I was born and raised into twentieth-century Mormonism). I think every religion, like every language, contains means for expressing human reality: as a medium of human expression, Mormonism is no truer or falser than Catholicism or Buddhism, just as English is no truer or falser than Spanish or Chinese. They are different tools for accomplishing the same purpose. Some languages come easier to some people than others, and some people prefer one to another: this is natural and good, and there is really nothing to be done about it. That said, I don't think the world would be better (or even fundamentally different) if we all spoke the same language, or professed the same religion. People would still be people, which means that some of us would use religion to express things that others would find offensive, and vice versa. The world would be a lot more boring, too, in the same way that international airports are (with endless iterations of the same stores selling the same merchandise, muting the idiosyncratic at the expense of the universal as much as possible). So I am actually glad that there are many different religions out there in the world: the ones I fear the most are those that see their mission as wiping out others. That is like wanting to cut down the rainforest in order to plant lots of soybeans: it might be profitable short-term, but in the long run everybody loses.
With that in mind, let me offer my answers to your questions.
(1) Do you see yourself living Joseph Smith's restored Christianity? Yes and no. First for the negative. After many years spent investigating early Christianity, I do not believe Smith (or any of the reformers over the centuries) has restored it. More than that, I do not believe that it is something that can be restored. I see Christianity as a bundle of competing movements that was never really united under one banner: historically, all of us claim Christ, but none of us owns him.
Now for the positive. I grew up Mormon, which means that I grew up praying (alone and with my family), singing hymns, and reading the Bible (which I read through several times on my own as an adolescent, along with the additional holy books recognized by Mormons: the Book of Mormon, the Pearl of Great Price, and the Doctrine and Covenants). When I was about eleven years old, I had a powerful experience reading the Book of Mormon: I finished reading it the first time, prayed to know whether it was true or not, and had a strong inner witness: to me, this confirmed that Jesus was the Christ, and Joseph Smith was his prophet. Since this experience, I have had a few more (including two years as a missionary in northern Spain) which have led me to conclude that my emotional witness was not indicative of objective reality. Subjectively, though, it gave me moral strength to make decisions that have improved my life, while at the same time leaving me vulnerable to some bad decisions too (like the decision to hate sexuality, and to think that confessing every sexual experience to my local bishop would help me erase this indelible part of my human character).
As a result of my experiences with Mormonism and religion in general--the good, the bad, and the ugly--I do not think that any one religion is as good as its most fanatical followers claim. I don't believe in absolute truth as something that can be expressed by human beings: we can allude to it, we can dance around it, but the moment any of us tries to define it, "amen to the priesthood or authority of that man" (from Doctrine and Covenants 121, one of my favorite Mormon scriptures). But I do believe in "continuing revelation" (as Mormons say): I think that it is important to leave oneself open to new insight, no matter what its source. Part of my personal experience growing up Mormon was embracing this aspect of the faith wholeheartedly: for me, Mormonism was never entirely restricted to the correlated, soul-destroying mush produced by LDS church headquarters. If it had been, I would probably be more of an atheist than I currently am. But the Mormons I grew up with were better than their leaders: they intuited the difference between rigid obedience to leaders and thoughtful membership in a faith community that nobody owns. (Mormonism is free from corporate ownership the same way French is: despite attempts by controlling bodies to own and define the language, it exists organically outside definition.) Also, I think there is something to the old Mormon doctrine that Lorenzo Snow expressed more or less as follows: "as man is, God once was, and as God is, man may yet become." My study of religion has led me to conclude (with Xenophanes, the Greek philosopher-poet) that we all paint God in our own image (even when we try not to). Others will disagree, and that is fine: I learn from their disagreement (and am enriched by it). Since I still embrace these (and a few other) core principles of my early Mormonism, I still feel comfortable calling myself a Mormon.
(2) Is restored Christianity important to you? Yes. I have family and friends deep inside Mormonism ("died in the wool, true blue through and through"), and at all stages of disaffection. The former see themselves as "restorationist Christians" and are quite committed to that position. I don't want to cut them entirely (as I would if at this point I decided to sever formally all ties with the church). More important, I still see myself as the same person who received a testimony of Joseph Smith at eleven years old. I don't want my family to think that I am reneging on my commitment to them, and to the values that I learned from them and shared with them, in a very Mormon context. And, to top things off, I still "speak" Mormon. My instinctive way of looking at the world is Mormon, informed by experiences with other faiths that I am still assimilating (the way I am still learning Spanish, French, German, Russian, and Arabic), but Mormon nonetheless. What is more, the Mormon I "speak" is (on my reading) an historical dialect of Christianity, in the restorationist tradition (which includes more movements than just Mormonism).
(3) Is restored Christianity important to the Mormon movement? It is important to my family and friends. This is a Mormon movement that matters to me. I am not sure how important it is to the LDS church. I used to think it was important, but then I went on a mission, attended BYU, and started understanding more things in General Conference. Today, I see the LDS church leadership as ambiguous enemies: they haven't attacked me personally yet, but they certainly could, and they assault every ideological position of mine that they can (maligning me to my family as an evil apostate). There was a time when I feared excommunication, but I have moved past that: if it happens, then I will do my best Martin Luther impression.
(4) Do you regard the Bible as just another phase that someone else went through, or is it something that you consider yourself to be answerable to? This strikes me as an unfairly loaded question, setting up a false dichotomy. The Bible for me is a collection of mythology. As a source of personal ethics, some of it is really good, like Ecclesiastes (which is my personal favorite). Some of it is OK, like the gospels (though I don't believe in miracles such as Jesus is supposed to have performed). Some of it is pure crap, like Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, and the more violent among the prophets. As a window onto the human soul, it is all valuable, and we are all answerable for what we carry inside us, including the part of us that imagines and carries out crimes while giving God the "glory." Thus, in my opinion, the Bible is really only as useful as the people who read it. In the hands of literalistic, legalistic folk (such as currently rule at LDS church headquarters), it is dangerous. In the hands of more sensitive folk, it is harmless and may even be helpful (just like other holy books, including the Book of Mormon, the Koran, the Dhammapada, etc.).
(5) Do you aspire to bringing yourself into alignment with the perspective of the New Testament, or is that phase of thinking something that is better left in the past? I see the NT as containing different perspectives, with Peter disagreeing with Paul, and other writers taking mutually opposed stances whose harmonization is a later historical development. How do I bring myself into harmony with something that lacks harmony? Putting the question in context with some analogues, how would I bring myself into harmony with Shakespeare's Hamlet? I could read it a lot, write essays about it, study it, and know a great deal about it, but in general the more I do these things the less I see the work as a univocal thing. It is like the original draft of the US Constitution, full of compromises and unresolved tensions, which are interesting without being fundamentally harmonious (the way I use the word: Heraclitus would call it harmony).
(6) Have you got a rationale or philosophy or theology that you use to validate your position? My philosophy is that I am open to anything that people want to share with me. If I can understand and apply it with good results, then I make it a part of my life. The paradigm through which I view truth is that of an ancient skeptic (think Sextus Empiricus), or cynic (Diogenes of Sinope). Modern thinkers I like include David Hume and Nassim Taleb. I am all about doubt. I think the best insights come to those least married to presuppositions about the nature of reality.
(7) Do you consider your personal outlook to be compatible with the larger Mormon outlook and official teaching? I think it could be: modern Mormonism is largely incoherent, and could evolve in many directions, some of which might comfortably contain ideological positions like mine. Right now, however, leadership is most definitely opposed to people like me. Members are ambiguous, with some tolerant or even sympathetic toward positions like mine, and others decidedly hostile. Others yet have never noticed that people like me exist.
I see religion as a kind of poetry, an expression of human life that takes its form in gestures aimed at creating and preserving meaning. For me, there is really no hard distinction between religion and other systems of culture that encompass entire lives: religion includes politics, economics, and all kinds of culture. What is more, people are born into religions the same way they are born into language. You can learn a new language, and you can take up a new religion, but traces of the old one will be with you always (even if you don't like it: I cannot get away from the fact that I was born into twentieth-century American English; in the same way, I cannot escape the fact that I was born and raised into twentieth-century Mormonism). I think every religion, like every language, contains means for expressing human reality: as a medium of human expression, Mormonism is no truer or falser than Catholicism or Buddhism, just as English is no truer or falser than Spanish or Chinese. They are different tools for accomplishing the same purpose. Some languages come easier to some people than others, and some people prefer one to another: this is natural and good, and there is really nothing to be done about it. That said, I don't think the world would be better (or even fundamentally different) if we all spoke the same language, or professed the same religion. People would still be people, which means that some of us would use religion to express things that others would find offensive, and vice versa. The world would be a lot more boring, too, in the same way that international airports are (with endless iterations of the same stores selling the same merchandise, muting the idiosyncratic at the expense of the universal as much as possible). So I am actually glad that there are many different religions out there in the world: the ones I fear the most are those that see their mission as wiping out others. That is like wanting to cut down the rainforest in order to plant lots of soybeans: it might be profitable short-term, but in the long run everybody loses.
With that in mind, let me offer my answers to your questions.
(1) Do you see yourself living Joseph Smith's restored Christianity? Yes and no. First for the negative. After many years spent investigating early Christianity, I do not believe Smith (or any of the reformers over the centuries) has restored it. More than that, I do not believe that it is something that can be restored. I see Christianity as a bundle of competing movements that was never really united under one banner: historically, all of us claim Christ, but none of us owns him.
Now for the positive. I grew up Mormon, which means that I grew up praying (alone and with my family), singing hymns, and reading the Bible (which I read through several times on my own as an adolescent, along with the additional holy books recognized by Mormons: the Book of Mormon, the Pearl of Great Price, and the Doctrine and Covenants). When I was about eleven years old, I had a powerful experience reading the Book of Mormon: I finished reading it the first time, prayed to know whether it was true or not, and had a strong inner witness: to me, this confirmed that Jesus was the Christ, and Joseph Smith was his prophet. Since this experience, I have had a few more (including two years as a missionary in northern Spain) which have led me to conclude that my emotional witness was not indicative of objective reality. Subjectively, though, it gave me moral strength to make decisions that have improved my life, while at the same time leaving me vulnerable to some bad decisions too (like the decision to hate sexuality, and to think that confessing every sexual experience to my local bishop would help me erase this indelible part of my human character).
As a result of my experiences with Mormonism and religion in general--the good, the bad, and the ugly--I do not think that any one religion is as good as its most fanatical followers claim. I don't believe in absolute truth as something that can be expressed by human beings: we can allude to it, we can dance around it, but the moment any of us tries to define it, "amen to the priesthood or authority of that man" (from Doctrine and Covenants 121, one of my favorite Mormon scriptures). But I do believe in "continuing revelation" (as Mormons say): I think that it is important to leave oneself open to new insight, no matter what its source. Part of my personal experience growing up Mormon was embracing this aspect of the faith wholeheartedly: for me, Mormonism was never entirely restricted to the correlated, soul-destroying mush produced by LDS church headquarters. If it had been, I would probably be more of an atheist than I currently am. But the Mormons I grew up with were better than their leaders: they intuited the difference between rigid obedience to leaders and thoughtful membership in a faith community that nobody owns. (Mormonism is free from corporate ownership the same way French is: despite attempts by controlling bodies to own and define the language, it exists organically outside definition.) Also, I think there is something to the old Mormon doctrine that Lorenzo Snow expressed more or less as follows: "as man is, God once was, and as God is, man may yet become." My study of religion has led me to conclude (with Xenophanes, the Greek philosopher-poet) that we all paint God in our own image (even when we try not to). Others will disagree, and that is fine: I learn from their disagreement (and am enriched by it). Since I still embrace these (and a few other) core principles of my early Mormonism, I still feel comfortable calling myself a Mormon.
(2) Is restored Christianity important to you? Yes. I have family and friends deep inside Mormonism ("died in the wool, true blue through and through"), and at all stages of disaffection. The former see themselves as "restorationist Christians" and are quite committed to that position. I don't want to cut them entirely (as I would if at this point I decided to sever formally all ties with the church). More important, I still see myself as the same person who received a testimony of Joseph Smith at eleven years old. I don't want my family to think that I am reneging on my commitment to them, and to the values that I learned from them and shared with them, in a very Mormon context. And, to top things off, I still "speak" Mormon. My instinctive way of looking at the world is Mormon, informed by experiences with other faiths that I am still assimilating (the way I am still learning Spanish, French, German, Russian, and Arabic), but Mormon nonetheless. What is more, the Mormon I "speak" is (on my reading) an historical dialect of Christianity, in the restorationist tradition (which includes more movements than just Mormonism).
(3) Is restored Christianity important to the Mormon movement? It is important to my family and friends. This is a Mormon movement that matters to me. I am not sure how important it is to the LDS church. I used to think it was important, but then I went on a mission, attended BYU, and started understanding more things in General Conference. Today, I see the LDS church leadership as ambiguous enemies: they haven't attacked me personally yet, but they certainly could, and they assault every ideological position of mine that they can (maligning me to my family as an evil apostate). There was a time when I feared excommunication, but I have moved past that: if it happens, then I will do my best Martin Luther impression.
(4) Do you regard the Bible as just another phase that someone else went through, or is it something that you consider yourself to be answerable to? This strikes me as an unfairly loaded question, setting up a false dichotomy. The Bible for me is a collection of mythology. As a source of personal ethics, some of it is really good, like Ecclesiastes (which is my personal favorite). Some of it is OK, like the gospels (though I don't believe in miracles such as Jesus is supposed to have performed). Some of it is pure crap, like Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, and the more violent among the prophets. As a window onto the human soul, it is all valuable, and we are all answerable for what we carry inside us, including the part of us that imagines and carries out crimes while giving God the "glory." Thus, in my opinion, the Bible is really only as useful as the people who read it. In the hands of literalistic, legalistic folk (such as currently rule at LDS church headquarters), it is dangerous. In the hands of more sensitive folk, it is harmless and may even be helpful (just like other holy books, including the Book of Mormon, the Koran, the Dhammapada, etc.).
(5) Do you aspire to bringing yourself into alignment with the perspective of the New Testament, or is that phase of thinking something that is better left in the past? I see the NT as containing different perspectives, with Peter disagreeing with Paul, and other writers taking mutually opposed stances whose harmonization is a later historical development. How do I bring myself into harmony with something that lacks harmony? Putting the question in context with some analogues, how would I bring myself into harmony with Shakespeare's Hamlet? I could read it a lot, write essays about it, study it, and know a great deal about it, but in general the more I do these things the less I see the work as a univocal thing. It is like the original draft of the US Constitution, full of compromises and unresolved tensions, which are interesting without being fundamentally harmonious (the way I use the word: Heraclitus would call it harmony).
(6) Have you got a rationale or philosophy or theology that you use to validate your position? My philosophy is that I am open to anything that people want to share with me. If I can understand and apply it with good results, then I make it a part of my life. The paradigm through which I view truth is that of an ancient skeptic (think Sextus Empiricus), or cynic (Diogenes of Sinope). Modern thinkers I like include David Hume and Nassim Taleb. I am all about doubt. I think the best insights come to those least married to presuppositions about the nature of reality.
(7) Do you consider your personal outlook to be compatible with the larger Mormon outlook and official teaching? I think it could be: modern Mormonism is largely incoherent, and could evolve in many directions, some of which might comfortably contain ideological positions like mine. Right now, however, leadership is most definitely opposed to people like me. Members are ambiguous, with some tolerant or even sympathetic toward positions like mine, and others decidedly hostile. Others yet have never noticed that people like me exist.
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
Myth as Language
Someone recently wrote to me about my discussion of C. S. Lewis. In responding to this person's insights, I came up with something I would like to share more generally.
Does that make my position a little clearer? I don't think I am calling Lewis (or any Christian) stupid. I think Christians are by and large good people, with good stories in a good language. But I see in us (and other human beings of all faiths) tendencies towards a kind of cultural absolutism which others use and prey upon to bad effect (in the history of the world, which it has become my job to read). For what it is worth, I have the same tendencies. So if we are fools, then we are all fools together. I have not become someone who sees other cultures as magically superior to his own: we all have human flaws that can be dangerous. But I do think that acknowledging the flaws in ourselves (as we cannot help seeing them in others) is an important first step towards getting along better with everyone (including our very selves). Moral improvement cannot really begin until we are entirely honest (at least with ourselves). For me, that means admitting that Christians (and English-speakers) are neither better nor worse than other human beings. Our story is one of many. It is not the only story in any way. It can be special because we love it, and that is enough. It does not have to be true history, or the source of imaginary superiority that we enjoy over those who have different stories. As I read Jesus (including some of the words attributed to him outside the New Testament, e.g. in the Gospel of Thomas), he was not necessarily interested in declaring himself the one true God (though some disciples were eager to claim him as such) or in founding a missionary church (though some disciples were eager for that as well). The core of Christianity, as I understand it, is cultivating love for the world (God and one's fellow human beings, which are not artificially restricted to those who speak the same language or tell the same stories). To me, this message is more important than the messenger (who may or may not have been a god on earth: why does this matter? is his message somehow false if he didn't rise from the dead or turn water into wine, etc.? I don't think so. If Lewis does, then we disagree there.)
The problem with the claim for Christ (as the one and only way to God, or the Good) is that it is not really stronger than a claim for Balder (or Osiris, or any other dying and rising god). Today we know a bit more about the gospels than we did in Lewis' day, and they are very clearly myth (just like Egyptian myth or Norse myth or any other myth). They aren't history (any more than the changing story of Joseph Smith's First Vision is). This does not mean that they do not express important human truths, but those truths are not historical (i.e. accounts of what really happened at some moment in the past) or particular (i.e. stories of a particular person doing particular things). Myths are about universal truths like love, loss, and moving on into the great unknown. They are about what happens all of the time to all of us (and each one of us).
Just like you can speak of these universal things in any language without losing important meaning (since Spanish is no truer than English or Russian or Chinese as an expression of human reality), so you can put them in any myth: they are the timeless truth; the myth is just an accidental vessel that holds them. Lewis' mistake was presuming that Christianity was somehow categorically different from other religions. It isn't. This doesn't diminish its importance: English is still important, even if it is not categorically superior to (say) Spanish (which is also important, right? why should we pretend that Spanish is inferior to English? why pretend that Christianity is categorically superior to Buddhism, Judaism, or Islam?). This doesn't mean that the real truths it teaches are not important or universal. But it does allow us to check them against other versions of themselves (as it were), and to compare our myth-makers with other storytellers out there (who may pick up on some important things that we leave out of our stories, for one reason or another).
From my perspective, Lewis just made the choice at some point to speak English (Christian), i.e. to make English (Christianity) the language through which he expressed himself. That is perfectly fine, and English (Christianity) happens to be my native language as well. But I like other languages. I don't see them as categorically inferior to mine (though there are speakers of each who claim it as the one and only true language, and treat those ignorant of it as babbling idiots, no matter how well they speak their own language; I think this is wrong).
I can make an emotionally charged argument that anyone who chooses to dismiss the Buddha or Muhammad (or Osiris or Balder) is willfully rejecting the one true prophet or the one true God. I can make an emotionally charged argument that English is the one true language, that there is no such thing as a cultured human being who has never read Shakespeare in the original. Both arguments have a gigantic flaw. They ignore the humanity of other people, a humanity evident in the facts (1) that there are many prophets and many gods (including many as good as ours), and (2) that there are many great human cultures entirely ignorant of Shakespeare (who did not live early enough to bestow his genius on the Upanishads, the writer of Ecclesiastes, the Homeric poets, or countless others widely and rightly acknowledged as having achieved high levels of culture).
What is good in my culture (English, Christianity) does not have to be qualitatively superior to what is good in other cultures. People do not have to speak my language (English, Christianity) to me before I acknowledge them as true human beings. I think even C. S. Lewis is willing to concede this on some level (with the story of the saved Calormene in the Last Battle). The only difference between us is that I see the saved Christian as being more like that Calormene: God is a mystery that all human cultures (including every form of Christianity) seek in vain to capture and own for themselves (and their little languages), but he is not ours. We can be his, but he cannot be ours. He can speak for us, but we do not speak for him. When we try to do this (speak for him), what we say has a disturbing tendency to become fascist nonsense.
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I have always thought, and think still, that it is impossible for me to escape from my past. I can respond to the past. I can grow from it, away from it even, but in the end I am always going to be a product of it.
I am a product of Mormonism. I was raised Mormon, by devout converts. I converted myself as a little boy, reading the scriptures on my own and coming up with an adolescent identity that was very Mormon. My adult identity is also Mormon: I served a mission honorably (with real intent and honest effort: I say this to talk about myself, not to denigrate anyone else); I earned my BA at Brigham Young University; I was married in the Salt Lake temple, to a woman I still love very much (more and more each day). I still construct my identity in dialogue with ideas I learned as an active, devout Mormon (e.g. the Mormon canon of scripture). Even as I have moved beyond my Mormon-ness, compelled by personal need to seek help for problems to which our culture currently lacks useful solutions, I have never transcended it completely. I don’t think I ever will. I don’t even want to.
Unlike some people, whom I in no way judge unfavorably, I don’t wake up wishing I had never heard of the church or that I could escape its influence in my life. I see the good and the bad in my own personal journey as a Mormon, and I embrace both. If I am strictly honest, I have never left Mormonism, and I don’t plan to leave. I have stepped away from the church, because I found the doctrine and practice there hurting my soul more than it healed me, but I retain many of the core values I took from my time as an active Mormon. I still believe very strongly that people require community, that we need ways to offer service (even when that service appears trivial to others or even to us), that rituals are an important constant in human life (an anchor for our wandering minds full of fear of the unknown and irregular), and that people must be free to receive new insight from their individual experience (i.e. “personal revelation”). While I am comfortable with the label atheist, I am equally comfortable with the labels agnostic, believer, Buddhist, humanist, deist, theist, Christian, and (yes) Mormon. I see religion as language. Just as I can speak various languages, I can practice many different religions (rites, ways of expressing human values, including the values we construct to respect things we don’t understand, e.g. God). One language is not categorically better than another, and the point of language is not perfect grammar but meaningful communication--and the minimization of evil (which we all know from our own experience as well as that of others around us). How you practice religion is more important to me, infinitely more important, than what religion you happen to practice. How you speak says more about your individual character than the language you happen to use. I do not write in English here because I am superior, and anything good I offer is good for a reason that transcends its being expressed in English. The world would certainly not be a better place if we all forgot how to speak any language but English.
There are things I love about Mormonism: its history contains a lot of heroism to go along with the mafia politics, bigotry, and small-mindedness, and I honor that heroism. I admire the successes of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, and I weep for their failures (the same way I do for my own). I respect the moral integrity of other Mormons, including those in power (in the church or outside it), even when I firmly disagree with some strong moral stance that they have taken (e.g. the stance that brands all explicit criticism of priesthood leaders as evil: I do not believe this, and I never will; I see it as a betrayal of everything good in Mormonism, but I respect the right of other Mormons to hold it and defend it). I still get a kick out of watching General Conference (for more than just the eye-rolls), and I think BYU represents a valuable educational experience (for me and other students, Mormon and not)--provided the administration does not curtail academic freedom there.
Even though history has separated me from full activity in the church, probably forever, I am not above making common cause with it, and I will always have a cultural affinity with people who self-identify as Mormons. I wish them and their churches well, even when they do things I would not do, say things I would not say, reveal the will of God as I would not reveal it. Like Joseph Smith, I know what I know, and I have to stay true to that (even when the church doesn’t like it).