A new reader

Who, like the rest of you, has no idea what he/she is in for, asked that I comment more on the issue of whether or not religion should be "easy" or accomodate itself to our needs & sensibilities. Given that the question was asked in the comments to my last post about Viagra making people blind, you can see why it might merit a new heading.

I believe the commenter was referring to this post, which started off as a Christmas discussion and morphed into a larger thought process on our expectations of faith. I had to reread the post myself - frankly, I forget most of what I write once it's committed to the shaky electrons that are blogger.

I can't say I've put a lot more thought into the question of how we view our various faiths. As I get older & even more set in my ways, the thoughts expressed in that post still capture what I think. From a believer's perspective, God has given us life and a set of instructions for living it - Torah, Bible, Koran, whatever. Life is a gift (though I suspect the Calvinists among us might disagree), and a gift beyond any ability humans have to repay. Thus it behooves us to follow the rules God has laid out for us to the best of our ability.

I grant you that even believers can differ about which rules to follow and what those rules mean. I still think there is a basic concept that we are required to subordinate our own desires to those rulebooks. At the very least we are expected by our faith to turn our desires towards what we are told to do.

This is a difficult thing to accept in modern America. The secularism that has invaded our nation (promoted largely by the French intellectuals, which is no surprise at all) has labeled anyone who believes to that degree a "fundamentalist." Now, I don't like fundamentalists, if that means the sort of people who at best condemn nonbelievers to hell verbally, and at worst blow babies to smithereens in the name of God. If, however, being a fundamentalist means believing that I must obey rules I don't always understand or can't intellectually explain, then hell yes, I'm a fundamentalist.

The poorly hidden subtext of the secularist, deconstructionist types is that nothing is true. Everything is relative to one's own perception, every approach is reasonable, no one interpretation is any better than any other. All well and good until one needs to make a judgement or take a stand. At those points, the secularists come back with nothing more useful than "can't we all get along?"

Truth is essential to Judaism; God Himself is truth; one song we sing says "Moses is True and his Torah is True." I believe truth is essential to Christianity as well. What it comes down to is my faith says there is a certain, known reality. It's not subject to the whims of babbling academics or the changing fads of people who think bagels & lox is a delicious snack this week. The Torah states that as a Jew I have an obligation to follow the path set for me by God. It says that path is the way for me to be successful and happy as a human - no self-defined self-actualization here, but reaching my potential through obedience to the will of God.

It's not an easy path to follow. I fall off more often than I care to remember, and God in His graciousness allows me the chance to correct my errors. Some people think my lifestyle is a burden - all these rules to follow, all these restrictions, no free will, etc. The truth is all of us are burdened by something. For some its the pursuit of wealth, power, fame, whatever. For some it's sex, for others its drugs or alcohol, food, you name it. What a person of faith does is enslave himself to God, and the argument is that slavery to God is the greatest freedom there is.

It's not freedom from thought, or freedom from responsibility as some have portrayed it. It's a matter of accepting your position in the grand scheme of the universe as subordinate to a higher power. Who will grant each of us our proper measure of success and failure, wealth and poverty, sickness and health by His own understanding of our needs. We in turn serve Him best by obeying his statutes as we are taught them, and living the life He wishes for us.

It's easy for the secularists to sit on the side and laugh at the crazy Jews or wacky evangelicals, because it makes them feel superior. But at the end of the day, who has something left to hold on to? The wacky ones, with a faith and a community that helps them weather the toughest storms, or the "smart" people who believe in nothing at all? When nothing means anything, all you're left with is words with no meaning. I don't care how smart the Noam Chomsky's of the world are, they've admitted outright that what they themselves are saying is meaningless. Why would I believe a person who tells me his word is of no value, when God tells me every letter of His word is pure truth?

I don't suggest my path is for everyone. I have no answer for the holocaust survivors who lost their faith in God - I can't say whether I would maintain my faith in the teeth of such suffering. But reward is best when it's earned. Those who want life to be easy have no understanding of how important it is that we work for our faith. We must maintain it, nurture it, question it, and affirm it constantly by regular practice. I'm not telling other people to live my way, but I do wish those who think I'm an idiot would try and do it my way and see if they have what it takes to be a God-Fearing Jew.