In Good Faith

In good faith is a legal term and is used in reference to contracts, so comes up a lot in relation to business though it can also apply to things like marriage.

It means you can trust the person and not expect it to be a "deal with the devil" where you need to read the fine print extremely carefully looking for the secret gotcha clause where they screw you and where the letter of the agreement is important because the spirit of the agreement is deeply unethical and designed to shaft you and get away with it.

I've studied things like social psychology and I look at some of the practices of Christianity through that lens. I don't believe in heaven or hell as places. I think of them as states of being and anytime you are "going through hell" it feels interminable. It feels like forever.

I don't know what the original intent of confession actually was but I know some people are decent people and can be paralyzed by feeling guilty about something. Such people benefit from being told "Let it go. Try again. Try to not make the SAME mistake. Try to learn from your mistakes."

I look at language like "Everyone is a sinner." and see it as reasonable if you view sin as a mistake. It sounds reasonable if it's a form of saying "We all make mistakes. No one is perfect, not even people you personally know who seem like they always get it right. They don't."

I can also imagine it as a way of trying to talk about systemic problems such as rape culture or racism.

If the ENTIRE culture really is complicit in promoting rape, then we ALL need new practices and none of us has completely clean hands. Again, it helps to not just wallow in guilt and, instead, try to learn from your mistakes and be future oriented and intent on finding a better way.

First, that I had made this assumption that the guy must be White since nothing had been said and second that this assumption was a racist thing and it was the kind of thing that kept racism alive.

I felt kicked in the gut because I didn't think of myself as racist. I thought I had managed to not drink the koolaid while growing up in the Deep South. I thought I was better than that.

That's from a piece I wrote. It made for a very awkward evening and my relationship to this couple never really recovered.

Rather than wallow in guilt or get mad at them for not trusting a White Woman who clearly was surprised to learn they were Black and making it their job to make me feel okay about that, I accepted that there's really no fixing this between me and them and the decent thing to do is make sure I use this as a means to grow and come up with better answers and find some way to never be a part of the problem in that exact way again.

That moment burned brightly in my mind for some years and I actively sought to use that experience to become less "a part of the problem."

I suspect it accomplished something within me because I get so much hatred from people, I must be out of step with the rest of my deeply racist culture in some important way.

There is an episode of Frasier where the father talks to a guy who knew his late wife. He feared she had an affair with this man only to learn the man is gay and she was a trusted friend who knew that and it helped save his life.[1]

She was likely a homemaker. I'm a former homemaker. Homemakers have very private lives and it gives them leeway to sometimes make judgement calls because they typically don't have to justify their choices to too many other people, if anyone.

Jesus was a private person, not a person with a church title. My understanding is nothing was written down for seventy years.

He would have made judgement calls as an individual with substantial context and then people thought it was so brilliant and valuable they tried to institutionalize it. 

I think that makes no real sense and likely breaks the best part of whatever he did that was so inspiring a religion was born of it after his death.

Confession is a formalized process with strict rules. I'm NOT Catholic and have never been to confession but the movie I Confess has a priest being framed by the real killer and unable to defend himself in court because of the obligation to keep the confession secret.

That removes all common sense and destroys any intent to help some people let it go and try again because they are the type to mean well but then get paralyzed with guilt if they screw up. It makes it a gamable process where people acting in bad faith can twist it to nefarious intent and the priest has no recourse to say "No, you aren't someone who needs help letting it go because you're a fundamentally decent person. You're someone acting in bad faith who needs to be forced to behave better because you come here for the express purpose of making yourself feel fine about your intentionally depraved behavior and you do this week in and week out and it's a bastardization of the confessional."

It would be kind of like if I were Catholic and went to confession so someone could "forgive me" for assuming my husband's friend and his family were White and tell me it's understandable that the surprise showed on my face given my upbringing in the racist Deep South.

That's keeping racism entrenched by making the beneficiaries of systemic racism -- White people -- feel fine about continuing the practice "because we inherited it and didn't create it" or some nonsense.

If I really believe racism is wrong -- and I do -- that's a NO from me. I didn't beat myself up for it because I had no idea I thought that way until this incident cast light on my internal workings. But I also felt obligated to try to root it out now that I did see this idea within me and that it's racist.

If I had ever had the opportunity to appropriately explain the incident to the couple in question to try to prove to them I really don't care about the color of your skin, I would have done that.

But that's a very tall order and only happens if opportunity presents itself and still may go sideways. It absolutely doesn't happen because someone wants to insist that the person harmed is required to "understand" and make the offending party feel fine about ugly behavior.

That's just doubling down on being a racist asshole. Since I don't wish to be a racist asshole, there was no way in hell I was going to try to "explain" to the people I offended for purposes of making ME feel better about it.

One criticism I have read of Christianity is that the emphasis on being good in life to earn an eternity in heaven is a fundamentally oppressive position easily used by people in power to insist that "good people" not demand material improvements in THIS world, such as adequate pay for their work.

If your reward is in the afterlife, working for better rights or better conditions materially or justice for the people is easily dismissed as something "good people" don't concern themselves with.

Often by very wealthy people who will simultaneously pretend their wealth is evidence of their virtue and implicitly or explicitly suggest God rewards the faithful materially.

Great wealth is not objective, irrefutable evidence of personal virtue. There's a saying: He got rich the old fashioned way. He inherited it.

And plenty of wealth comes from being talented at extracting value rather than creating value. Such people typically do enormous harm to the people and the economy if they gain political power because they create rules that help them keep what they have and easily extract yet more without actually earning it or deserving it.

I look at Christianity and see some things that could have served a goal of community development but we're bastardized into something which easily serves evil, manipulative people and their ends.

The US has historically had a strong economy in part because we have a trustworthy MAIL service. Mailmen don't rifle through packages and take what they want. I've read that they do in some countries and it's a significant barrier to economic development.

Trust is essential to business and business is essential to economic development that allows a place to escape subsistence culture. 

Christianity perhaps could have fostered that but didn't. Or perhaps whatever really happened 2000 years ago could have fostered that but got twisted into something else.

I grew up in the Deep South and I'm fond of the CULTURE of the Deep South and aware that it was shaped by Christianity. I would LIKE to think Christianity has potential for good.

But what I feel it is currently best known for is aiding and abetting child molestation by Catholic priests, plus misogyny and homophobia.

Not, unfortunately, for opening doors literally and figuratively for people in need.

Footnotes

[1] It's a brief snippet at about 11.5 minutes in this clip.