The material in this blog is now available at amazon.com under the title: Ideas Inspired by the Qur’an.
A frame is a conceptual boundary that, intentionally or unconsciously, explicitly or implicitly, is drawn around a discourse to limit the range of ideas and images admitted to that discourse. Just as we are all naturally believers, selectively affirming the facts and values that maintain our identity and point of view, so too do we feel compelled to frame that view, to build a mental membrane around our world to keep our favoured facts and values in and the unwanted ones out.
In the same way that we rarely imagine seeing our own skins from the inside, the frames we use are rarely visible to us unless we deliberately recreate them by acts of analysis or introspection. The more comfortable we are inside a particular frame, the less likely we are to see it or even admit that it exists. Only when a frame is unfamiliar or foreign to us – usually because it belongs to someone else – does some of its outline appear, and only then are we acutely aware of how arbitrary and unreflecting a frame can be.
Consequently, the most productive arguments in theology and philosophy are those that expose and examine the basic assumptions and unmentioned starting points that constitute the frames of the discussion. A debate about the existence of God, for example, should not get under way until the disputants have clarified what each of them means by ‘exist’ and ‘God’. The latter term, in particular, might have particular connotations and emotional tones for one party that had never even been considered by the other party. An atheist, for example, might be vehemently opposed to an anthropomorphic Father-Deity and wonder why his opponent cannot see how logically absurd that image is, while the theist who equates divinity with the underlying principle of all life would be equally disappointed by the blindness of denying something so intuitively obvious. If they do not explicitly identify their different frames and clarify the definitions of the terms they are using, they could continue to talk past each other at cross-purposes until doomsday . . . only to discover that each of them was both right and wrong.
In the above examples, a frame operates at two different levels – what it claims to include or exclude, and what it effectively includes or excludes. It may claim, for instance, to include anything it defines as rational, and to exclude whatever it deems irrational. The atheist would claim that ‘God’ is excluded not arbitrarily, but rather for impeccable reasons, namely that the concept is adhered to blindly, on emotional or superstitious grounds. This assumption begs the question of how rationality is to be defined and whether ‘God’ is by definition something in which rationality plays no part. In effect, the stated frame of rationality is channeling its contents into another, unstated frame that limits the meanings of rationality and God in ways that someone utilizing other frames may be compelled to accept on the basis of this prior claim to rationality. Another implicit frame is the unquestioned legitimacy of making any form of rationality the sole determining factor in authenticating a person’s faith in or attachment to a particular concept. And a third unstated frame is the relevance or validity of the very idea of ‘choosing’ frames. The burden of calling attention to these unstated frames is left to the supposedly illogical theist, who is handicapped from the start by his/her imputed irrationality.
Conversely, a theist could develop a frame around the concept of respect for the mysterious and ineffable source of life in the universe. Anything that connotes the harmonious, nourishing, and sensitive elements of general spirituality would be admitted, but the legal, authoritative, rational, or judgemental aspects of religion jar against this reassuring side of divinity, and hence would be either excluded or ignored (the latter course being a mild way of ensuring exclusion). A certain character is associated with ‘God’, and constitutes the implicit frame that discourages strict or rigorous versions of faith. This too begs questions, such as the underlying conditions and relative importance of long-term harmony and wholesomeness, and how we decide what is reassuring when different individuals are reassured by different things. And once again, the whole question of our ‘choosing’ frames is set aside if we operate in an egocentric, individualistic, ‘freedom’-tilted framework from the start.
Can we avoid framing the points we make in any discourse? No, we cannot; every one of us, myself included, has blind spots and points of view that inevitably generate frames. All we can do is try our best to elucidate what we believe our frames to be. We have to be as thorough and honest as possible in consciously identifying the social, cultural, and spiritual backgrounds that reveal themselves, usually without our conscious assent, in what we say, think, and believe.
The GOD You Already Know 