choco_frosh | Realm: Religion - Subrealm: God and Internet Dating

Religion is a lot like internet dating.

That was my conclusion after I some considerable period of trying to figure out a justification for disagreeing with a particular book’s philosophy of religion, whose basic premise was that we should just forget about all the theology, and fall in love with God.

Now, at this point, you’ve probably figured out where I’m going with this, but if you’re still interested, …

So yes, falling in love is important. But normally, for love to last there are a few requirements. The object of your affection needs to be real (not just a daydream of yours), and you want to know if they’re a good person or not. And above all, you want to be loved back.
Now under normal circumstances none of this is a problem. You’ve met the person, and so you can also judge his or her character; and you can guess (or work up the courage to ask), how they feel about you.

But a relationship with God is like a relationship on the Internet.

To extend the metaphor, let’s imagine you’ve met this guy called Theo online. Theo seems really nice (if a little judgemental), and he seems into you; but the problem is that this is the Internet, and Theo seems a little to good to be true. Maybe “Theo” is really one of your friends, playing an elaborate trick on you. Or some sketchy stalker. Or maybe he doesn’t even exist at all: you’ve been fooled by a really clever AI.

Now you go out, and talk to your friends about Theo. Some of them are skeptical: they’ve heard stories about people getting burned through internet dating. One of them, though says he met him at a party one time. “At least, I think it was the same guy,” she says. “He seemed really cool, anyway.”

Under these circumstances, your natural reaction is to ask around some more: after all, quite apart from verifying whether Theo is really who he says he is, you naturally want to know more about the person with whom you’re increasingly smitten. It turns out that you hear a whole bunch of stories about people who’ve been with Theo in the past. How he bought them incredible dinners, baled them out of jail, saved them from a car accident, even bought them a whole new home.

The trouble is, all of these stories are at third hand, or from people who don’t necessarily seem too reliable. The one about how Theo bought the grandparents’ house is a family legend—but like most family legends, we might wonder whether that’s really what happened, or whether Grandpa came up with the money on his own; or else it was kinda true, but not quite. Maybe it’s all based on the children misunderstanding what happened; or maybe Uncle Mo made the whole tale up as a joke of some sort. And so it is with the other things we’ve heard. The dinner out? Well, the person was clearly head over heels in love: they might not even have noticed whether it was the Union League Café or MacDonalds. The bail? Well, yeah, but nobody actually knew where that money came from: it just got telephoned in. “Theo” said he’d done it, when asked about it—but why should we trust his word? Same with the car accident: we actually only have Theo’s word that there was even going to be a car accident. And that’s assuming it was the same guy.

So religion is a lot like internet dating: you have to rely on faith, until you can finally meet face to face. But it’s also like Internet dating in this: that the natural and sensible reaction is to try to find out more about this guy who everyone says is, like, God.

And that, of course, is theology. The process of figuring out whether it’s even plausible that this guy exists. And what he’s like: because we, like the person dating online, want to know who were dating, by fitting together the different facets of his character revealed in the things we’ve heard about him: descriptions that often seem to contradict each other. And whether, in that case, he really is all the same person. And whether he actually did what we’re told he did. Because we want to know, not only whether he exists, but whether he’s what we say he is, and above all whether he cares.

Hm. This analogy may be too obvious. Thoughts?

Meantime, this is kind of a crazy weekend. Thursday evening was spent at Sara Potter's birthday party (us, them, a lot of cake, a hyper two-year-old and a catatonic two-week-old). Yesterday my brother breezed through town: we went to the Rep to see Invincible Summer, a crazy monolog by a guy called Mike Daisey about Polish weddings, the NY subway, being a political moderate in NY after 9/11, and (by implication) whether Karl Rove and the MTA authority are due to have 10,000 pound boulders fall on their heads. This morning we got up and ate lots of pancakes, then Grace went riding and he went off to have lunch and network at Atticus, before heading off to ANOTHER (free) show in New York.
Tonight: we have people over to eat cake and play board games. Assuming any of them show up.
Tomorrow: Grace gets back from Simsbury and we try to eat dinner downtown in under an hour before going to a concert.

Needless to say, NEXT weekend will not be any less complicated.