Lip-Synching and Faith Shattering Experiences

My grandfather asked me if knowing that Beyonce may or may not have lip synched the national anthem ruined it for me. I am sure there are a lot of different ways we might feel about this--but my response is and was that I don't tend to expect things to be real. That is, I have to come to expect that many things (magazine covers, "reality" tv and live singing performances) are optimized. Photoshop and reality tv have so altered my (and I suspect our) sense of the real that we might need to take a second to examine our terms. What do I mean by real? How do we know what is real? These are big philosophical questions of course--but I don't want to pull out my Aristotle, if that's alright with you. So let's go with this--I think our current culture has shifted our understanding of real. The scandal of Beyonce is that we all loved it when it was real--but are unsure about how to feel when it is "less real." But what if we just consider our experience. The experience of listening to her singing was moving, exciting and thrilling. I listened to it on the radio on my way to Vermont--and sang along. So why does later information change our initial experience? Do we not trust our experience enough? Are we disappointed? Why does it need to be "real" in some particular way for us to enjoy it?

Where am I going with all this? Fair question. Here is where: how might we apply these questions and thoughts about our expectations around the "real" to God? Well--they probably don't directly. But here is my attempt. In a day and age where we are aware that many images, and sounds are not real, we still chose to believe. Even when shown the way reality is manipulated into a more presentable package (over and over again) we still are happy to enjoy the presentable package as reality. I think that this might show something about humanity's desire to believe what it experiences as real (semiotics might have something interesting to lend to this conversation. Taking it a step further, when we have this kind of blind faith (that is believing that it is real when we should know better) it is easily shattered. Beyonce's singing drama points to the fact that we need to be very thoughtful about our faith. And we need to encourage questioning, probing of our faith. I would say, we need to especially teach children how to ask questions about their fiath. When we teach children (and adults) to believe with out being actively involved in figuring out what they believe and why they believe it, they will be less likely to have a faith shattering experience.

So my Sunday night questions for you all are, what are some questions that are hard for you to ask about your faith? How do you understand the real and its relation to faith? And what is your guilty pleasure reality tv show? (mine is project runway--don't judge.)