This is a guest question by Dr. Knight.

In several places in the New Testament, wealth is correlated with idolatry. The Book of Revelation is one example. The Gospel of Luke is another example, and you may remember how Jesus compares a rich young man to a camel and makes this sobering comment: “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.” (Luke 18:25)

So, think about it. In our world today, 30,000 children die every day from hunger and preventable diseases, and something like $386 can feed one child for a year. Given these numbers, how can wealthy people keep denying that they believe their possessions are more valuable than the lives of these children?

Or to ask the same question a little differently: Can a wealthy person truly be a follower of Jesus’ teachings?

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What if Karl Marx is right? What if religious faith really does gravitate naturally toward the covers of political zeal, sneaks up under them and turns into an iron hand in a velvet glove? Much like a man can be a loving husband on the weekends but beats his wife on weekdays. What if, more often than not, religion really is a tool of political oppression?

Merold Westphal paints such a picture of religious faith when he describes Marx’ atheism this way:

Marx could scarcely be clearer. He sees Prussia as a “police state” that is seeking to deodorize itself with the “spiritual aroma” of religion, to legitimize itself by making religion the sanction for its practices. (Westphal, Suspicion and Faith, p.143)

Clearly, Marx argues against faith from the viewpoint of a very specific experience, and we should therefore add a grain of salt to his words. At the same time, all of us have witnessed the scary scenarios where political manipulation happens in the name of religion, the way Marx describes it.

Therefore, with Marx’ warning in mind, I want to ask you the following question. As a person of religious faith, how does one take the appropriate precautionary measures to protect oneself against being manipulated into having certain political convictions “because that is how you please God”? Does one have to become an atheist for that?

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You deserve a lot of sympathy if you ever looked at yourself through Freud’s lens of suspicion. First, he says your poor ego - i.e. the real you - is barely there and definitely needs rescuing. Next he says that, if you hope for a divine rescue, you are a victim of humanity’s oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes. This is bad news and the same as saying that you are wrapped up in illusions.

Who wants to be told that he or she lives on illusions?

Granted, it can be interesting to unveil our illusions if we can point to our parents or other early caretakers and blame them for those illusions. Freud, however, still wants us to accept that regardless of what caused our illusions, they still blind us.

I know this from Westphal’s book, Suspicion and Faith, which helps us understand that Freud has a point. Our religious beliefs, Westphal agrees, is evidence that “we create God in our own image, or at least in the image of our desires.” (Westphal, 62)

Of course, both he and Freud are right!

How many times have we not believed something about God because we desperately wanted it to be true? We wanted God to think that so-and-so was guilty of such-and-such, when we had no business holding others guilty. Or we thought God was going to heal us from a certain illness, and it did not happen.

There are many examples of religious faith essentially being illusions.

Still, we may very well create God in our own image when we invest our hopes and wishes in religious beliefs. But, what if we apply some version of Pascal’s wager and respond to Freud this way:

If my beliefs about God turn out to be true, then I want to have lived my life on those beliefs. Your argument is good, Freud, but I don’t want to risk that you are also right. After all, you tell me that no matter what I wish and hope for, none of it can rise above the level of wishful thinking. So, I might just as well put all my eggs in the basket of illusory faith. Plus, how do you know that your argument isn’t just as wishful?

Now, I am interested to know whether you would say something like that to Freud. Would you risk being a wishful believer? Or would you want to pursue a Freudian rescue of the real you? It is a hard call.

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You have to love the hermeneutics of suspicion, because it makes the life of faith quite dangerous. It throws the most provocative idea right in the face of believing persons: Repent of your faith! Yes. Repent of your faith. That should make you feel like you’re standing naked. But naked before what? An empty universe?

The hermeneutics of suspicion is the basic concept of Merold Westphal’s book, Suspicion and Faith. He says it is close to being a synonym for repentance, and now that we are just a little over a week into Lent, his book becomes a very appropriate read. It entrusts us in the hands of militant atheism, which describes to us just how easy it is to become overly comfortable in our beliefs about God.

The call to repentance from my faith sounds so intriguing that I am immediately drawn to it. I do not like religious self-confidence, and I do not want to be a person who thinks she knows better. The holier-than-thou type is what I do not want to be. So, I must repent of that inclination, because it is the only way I can avoid thinking of myself as equal to God.

Still, I have a concern. If I am not allowed to talk about faith in terms of what I know about God because I am a believer, then what am I allowed to talk about? I mean, what do I have left if I don’t have my faith? I repented of it. It is now something I have relinquished. But, without my faith, what do I have left?

Maybe you can help me understand. What’s left if you repent of your faith?

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I mean, was passion ever a convincing argument for the way we should think and believe? John Caputo says yes, but I wonder if you think he is right. Come along for a little thinking and give me your honest response.

Philosophy and theology have always been companions in the quest for the answers to life’s great questions. Competing companions. With the Greeks, philosophy had the upper hand. During the pre-modern era, things turned around and theology gained the upper hand. With the arrival of modernity, they split, and a third cousin - science - soon entered the picture.

So, today we seem to have a choice between three strong alternatives when we ask the great questions. Do we give rational, religious, or scientific answers? Often we each take our pick, and then we start to compete for the last word. If you have ever heard an introduction to the conversation between philosophy and theology, or science and religion, you already know this.

If you have read John Caputo’s book, Philosophy and Theology, you also know that there is an alternative to the competition for the last word. Caputo wants us to bypass competitions for the last word and passionately engage with it all. He seems quite in love with the electricity it produces when we throw ourselves headlong into the arms of the competing disciplines.

When we do that, Caputo thinks, we create conversations that are great, perplexing, fun, challenging, conflictual, hurtful, inspiring, hair-splitting, frustrating - and always rewarding. Because they unleash impulses in us, which we did not know we possessed. They rekindle in us a passion for life that we easily lose but that we all need in order to become truly alive to ourselves.

Hence, Caputo poetically exclaims that “philosophy and theology are for wounded souls,” and make us feel “pierced to the heart by something precious, beautiful, deep, and enigmatic that leaves us reeling.” (p. 71)

In a lyrical style that makes you wonder if his iPod might not be loaded with contemporary music, he explains that for those of us who dared take on the study of philosophy and theology, we have already “suffered a blow that has destroyed our equilibrium; we have been shaken by a provocation, by something that has left us breathless, pursued by questions that we cannot still.” (p.71 John Caputo)

Not only does the study of philosophy and theology leave us haunted by questions that we cannot answer. We have - ourselves - become one big question. To put some historical force behind this point Caputo quotes St. Augustine who puts it this way: “I have been made a question to myself.” (p. 73)

All of this leads me to ask one question of you, dear Caputo: Why are you trying to seduce me with your lyrics of passion? By the end of your final chapter you have convinced me that I want to be a wounded soul. But then I remember that I wanted answers, not questions. So, now it feels as if you set me up. You lead me on in a pursuit of answers to life’s great questions, and then I end up not even knowing my own self. Why are you doing this to me, John Caputo?

This is my reaction, but maybe I am missing something. You tell me. Was passion ever a convincing argument, the way John Caputo argues?

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Today I was looking at my photos from Paris where I lived twenty years ago. I was very young then. As I was going through these photos, I realized I would appreciate Paris much more today than I did back then. Does that mean age makes us better able to appreciate life?

Could it even mean that we have a greater capacity to be happy when we are older, than when we are young? I am reading Epicurus’ Vatican Sayings and that seems to be his perspective. Listen:

We should not view the young man as happy, but rather the old man whose life has been fortunate. The young man at the height of his powers is often befuddled by chance and driven from his course; but the old man has dropped anchor in old age as in a harbor, since he secures in sure and thankful memory goods for which he was once scarcely confident of.

It is ironic to think that our happiness increases the less life we have left to be happy about. As if the meaning of life is something that dawns on us as we age. As if we are not able to be truly happy when we are young. Or as if the happiness of older age has a better quality to it.

So, I must ask this question: Is the happiness of an older person more mature than the happiness of a young person? Can you even be truly happy when you are young?

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Many philosophers think happiness is a “background condition,” and pleasure is only like sparkles against that background. Pleasure is a fleeting “foreground experience,” whereas happiness is what you really want. But, surely, you cannot be happy without pleasure, can you?

Schopenhauer agrees. He thinks pleasure is necessary in order to be happy, and he thinks there is no happiness at all, unless there is pleasure. He might even say that the more pleasure we experience, the happier we are. Here is his short formulation:

Happiness consists in frequent repetition of pleasure. (Baggini, What’s It All About, 90)

Who can deny that he has a point? If, like many philosophers, we talk about happiness as the “real thing” and something that is detached from pleasure, then it quickly becomes empty talk. It becomes an exercise in abstraction and it loses meaning in the context of real life.

But Schopenhauer could also be wrong. It may be that happiness actually is something entirely different from experiences of pleasure.

How do you feel about this? Does pleasure makes you happy?

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Some people have a strong sense of self. Or call it ego, individuality, or personal identity. What I mean is the sense of being someone with wants, desires, aspirations, and the ability to claim a place in the world. We use it to go after what we think will give life meaning. But maybe it is better to get rid of our self when looking for meaning?

That is the position of Eastern philosophies and Western psychedelia. As Julian Baggini puts it, both of these groups think the meaning of life is found by

chilling out, opening your mind, and letting go of your ego. Attune yourself to the rhythms of the universe and, assuming they are funky rhythms, “your ass will follow.” (Baggini, What’s It All About, 140)

If we want to follow this advice, we should forget about our self, detach from it, let it go, and then meaning will come to us in return. By “your ass will follow” Baggini refers to the whole person coming along and naturally finding his or her way to a meaningful life. The point is that meaning will not come to us unless we remove our self, because it stands in the way.

With this advice in mind, I want to ask what you feel would be the most effective way of dealing with your sense of self when you are looking for meaning in life.

Should you get it out of the way? Or should you apply it as well as you can, i.e. by pursuing your desires, wants, and aspirations, and by claiming your own place in life? That is, when you want to find meaning in life, what are you doing with your self?

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In response to the earlier question about God’s punishment of Adam and Eve, an astute reader asked this counter-question: “Was the reason why God kicked them out just fear?” What an interesting perspective this adds to the Biblical story about the fall. It deserves a separate reflection.

If we want to speculate about God’s motivation behind sending Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden, we cannot avoid considering fear as an option.

God might have felt that these ingenious two human beings might become too much of a challenge in the long run. Even more than a creator of the universe was ready to put up with.

Maybe we are reluctant about attaching an emotional response to God. But, if we have no problem thinking about God being angry, because human beings do not obey, why not think of God being fearful too?

What do you think, could it be that God fears human beings?

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When food scientists found out fat is bad for us, the food industry started producing a whole new product: low-fat foods. Such a thing never existed prior to that time. Since then, we have become addicted to low-fat junk food and gained, on average, 18 pounds. In this interview Michael Pollan talks about that as smart marketing.

In the same interview, Pollan also reminds us that Oprah Winfrey was sued by the food industry for saying that she would stop eating cheeseburgers:

Oprah learned about mad cow disease and said, “That’s the last cheeseburger I’m going to eat.” And the cattle futures market tanked ten percent in a day. And they came after her, because we have these things called veggie libel laws. Very few people know about them, because they don’t exist on the coasts, perhaps. But there are laws on the books in thirteen or fourteen states, mostly agricultural states, that if you impugn a food crop and damage its market, you are libel.

Thinking about these two examples, I suddenly feel exposed. I feel that perhaps Pollan and the food industry know something about my food life that I don’t know myself. And this makes me wonder who decides what I eat. Does the food industry? Do people like Michael Pollan and Oprah Winfrey? Or do I?

I therefore ask you: Do you know who puts food in your mouth, and is that how you want it to be?

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