Humility vs. Belittlement

Posted on July 24, 2003 in Agnosticism Attitudes

Kimber writes in response to an unnamed Christian who speaks of the glorious experience of “humbled and belittled by the message this man brings from God against your selfishness”:

This is just exactly what I want from my spiritual experience. To be humbled and belittled. I get enough of that from people here in this level of reality, I really don’t need it from the deity as well. How are you going to reach out to someone if you keep knocking them down with your fist? I thought the whole idea of “religion” was to lift us up, not break us down.

Personally, I have no problem with humility. Humility is nothing more than knowing our limits as human beings and being at peace with that. Agnosticism appeals to me as the most humbling approach to the whole Ultimate Question issue: how can we, who are creatures of the senses and limited to what can be perceived from this world, possibly ever know for certain whether there is a higher order of awareness than ourselves? The scientist who says that she cannot possible draw every link from the first organism on this planet to the present day or even a portion of that history approaching one percent lives this humility of which I speak. She is comfortable and accepting of his limitations. She has stretched herself as far as her mind allows (though she is always probing to see if it can go just a little farther) and does not feel shame for it. Nor does she see herself as necessarily superior to other human life, merely better trained in a proven method. Contrast this with the Creationist who claims that he can trace the whole early history of humankind by means of the Bible. This is as arrogant a claim as any made. This person can stand a strong dose of humility, a curb to the selfishness that expects that the whole Truth can be known and reduces the Universe to a leatherette book.

My views on this are well known to my readers, so I will resist the temptation to recount my amoeba parable one more time and speak of “belittlement”. I’m with Kimber on this one. Belittlement does not yield humility: it reduces the person to a sense of being that is less than what they actually are. Where arrogance breeds the belief that one can know all and do all — with or without God — this other quality — call it loss of self esteem or crippling of the human spirit — deceives us into believing that we are less than Truth-based humility requires. The mechanisms of belittlement include but are not limited to verbal abuse, torture, slavery, involuntary bondage, wage slavery (whose power depends on presenting the threat of loss of food and shelter), beating, threats of physical abuse, and murder. People have been known to enter into belittling relationships believing that they are doing so of their own free will when actually they are trapped by their prejudices, their beliefs, and what can only be described as strange visions of what it means to exist.

I take religion to mean what it means at its root: to connect. As an agnostic, I take this to mean that it connect us with the Truth — it’s a reality check. And here’s the reality check I make here: where humility aids you in gaining a true sense of yourself, belittlement merely turns you into a tool for others. The writer who Kimber castigates does not get this distinction and in his linking of the two, he further confuses a good thing with a decidedly bad one. We should know who we are and test — with the ever present possibility of failure — what we are capable of. We should not allow any person or philosophy or theology to cast us in a low place, to deny us our life experiment, to mislead us into accepting violence and abuse as part of our lives, to believe that we are less than we truly are.