I spoke in an earlier post about Asma’s random shots in the dark. By that I was referring to his complete failure to understand what the New Atheism is all about. He seems to think that if we could find a therapeutic religion, that didn’t have the dire consequences of the big monotheisms, that that would be wonderful, and, since these poor people struggling on the edge of survival in the developing world cannot do better than the consolation of imaginary things, we should simply accept that this is a good solution to the miseries that these people endure day in and day out.
Asma mentions Marx, where Marx tells us that religion is the opiate of the people, but he doesn’t go on, as Hitchens does, to remind us of the context of Marx’s famous and often misunderstood saying. An opiate is needed because life is miserable, and we need something to dull the pain. But the opiate is really only a way of concealing the chains that bind us, says Marx, decorating the chain with flowers in order to delude ourselves that life is okay, after all. But, Marx says, the real task is to break the chains that bind us, so that we can pick the living flower. Asma says, “Leave the people in chains, but at least leave them their imaginary garden.” The atheist says, “Let’s break the chains, and help them grow real flowers.”
I remember once, years ago, when the piece of purple prose known as Desiderata was “discovered,” it was said, “in Old St. Paul’s Church.” That too, of course, was a lie. Remember the opening words, almost designed as a “put down” of New Atheists?
Go placidly amid the noise and the haste,
and remember what peace there may be in silence.As far as possible, without surrender,
be on good terms with all persons.
Speak your truth quietly and clearly;
and listen to others,
even to the dull and the ignorant;
they too have their story.
Avoid loud and aggressive persons;
they are vexatious to the spirit.
I was visiting my father in Bermuda at the time, and he handed this to me to read, and asked me what I thought. He was obviously quite impressed by the sentiments expressed. My first reaction — and I know I disappointed him in this as in other things — was that it was anodyne. It didn’t really say anything, and it simply suggested a kind of quietism. It wouldn’t change anything. Father said he understood my point, but I’m not sure that he ever did.
Well, a lot of liberal religion is like that too. It’s a kind of polite pretence that we’re dealing with important things, while hiding behind a façade of lies. Only we won’t call them lies. We can call them metaphors, or myths, maybe even true myths. And while we won’t really “believe” what the myths tell us, we’ll somehow live our lives through them. It’s not altogether clear how this is to be done, but the idea is to live as though the myths are true – as though Jesus really rose from the dead, for example, even though we know that this kind of thing simply doesn’t happen. Paul Tillich called such pretend myths, “broken myths,” and the German New Testament scholar Rudolf Bultmann spoke of die Entmythologiserung, or, as it was called in English, demythologisation.
Of course, many people misunderstood what was being done and how it worked. In fact, in many cases it allowed clergy to go on saying the same thing that they had always said, but now to say it with a clear conscience, because, while they had continued to say things such as the Easter greeting, “Christ is Risen!” (to be answered with, “He is Risen Indeed!”), many of them had stopped believing in the physical resurrection as an historical event. But now, with demythologisation, they could say it with a good heart again, without the sense that they were misleading people — except, of course, that they still were!
Because, you see, there’s no way to tell a lie without actually lying! And the whole idea of demythologisation was simply too subtle for most people to grasp. It might have been a myth, but it was in some sense a “true myth”, and that’s really making a distinction whose subtlety defeated practically everyone who tried to use it. Because the myth, though in some sense “just” a myth, was also, in fact, powerful. It had a life-transforming ability. Bultmann was an existentialist theologian, and he believed that the kerygma — that is, the fundamental proclamation of the gospel — was in fact instinct with life-transforming power. The kergyma, according to Bultmann, was an entirely unique set of teachings which, when proclaimed, changed lives, and, in fact, in some sense achieved the new life that was represented in the Christian myth by the resurrection of Christ.
But, as I say, it was almost impossible to believe all this and not see the myths as, in fact, more than myths. That is perhaps why Mary Warnock, in her recent book, Dishonest to God, misunderstands the whole idea of demythologisation. She finds it confusing to speak in these terms.
[Paul Tillich] argued that myth could show truth, but that one should constantly look critically at the biblical myths, abandoning those whose meanign seems to have deserted them, interpreting and reinterpreting those which still had living force. Rather confusingly, this process was known as ‘demythologising the Bible’. [133]
And then she goes on to say that through this process Tillich and Bultmann and those who thought along these lines had “made the fundamentalist standpoint patently untenable, as it is for the most part today.” (133)
I think that is confusing, especially because, possibly for most people, a literal reading of the Bible is not untenable at all, and to a large extent demythologisation of the Bible enabled those for whom it was untenable to hold onto faith a little longer. And it also made it possible for clergy and other “experts” to hide from themselves and from other people what they were really up to. This is evident from phenomena such as the Alpha Course, which completely bypasses contemporary biblical scholarship and liberal theology in order to present a slimmed down version of evangelical Christianity, designed to answer all your questions about life.
In fact, I think, demythologisation was itself a myth, and not a true one. I am, I promise, coming to Philip Kitcher’s idea of religion as orientation, but it seems to me that it is almost impossible to think of religion in these terms and not, in some sense, actually to deceive oneself. For in the end, as PZ Myers says in his trenchant response to Asma (to which, incidentally, he has received a response), the question really is a very simple one: Is it true? And if it’s not true, or only pretend truth, then we have problems, because lies are destructive. I don’t think there is any way of separating religion into the good and the bad, the gentle and the cruel, because falsehood about really important things is cruel and destructive by definition, and they don’t cease being cruel just because you tell them in order to make people feel better. They may, for awhile, provide comfort. They may do it even for a lifetime. But you really have to ask yourself whether it would have been better to have lived the truth. And thinking that it’s okay to tell others lies, is making a claim to live their lives for them, and I don’t think anyone has a right to do that.
The National Lampoon’s version, Deteriorata, is much better
“I don’t think there is any way of separating religion into the good and the bad,”
—from the post “Salman Taseer is Dead”
The spiritual values may, in fact, be what is valuable about religions, and so the best thing to do with those values would be to separate them from religious allegiance,
—-from the post “JB and the new As”
“Baggini cannot reasonably pick out a little island of sanity in a mad world and then say that, if you take away what is wrong from religion — that is, all the madness — you are not left with nothing.”
“there are some things that might be desirable in religion if they could only be separated from the things that are pernicious and wrong. It is however my belief, and I think the belief of a large and growing number of atheists, that the possibility of separating the positive aspects of religious beliefs from negative and destructive aspects is either too late, or too little, and possibly both.”
“Nor do I say that you cannot separate the desirable from the pernicious,”
“Yes, Mark, that’s what you do end up with when you separate the bad from religion:”
So, three times you’ve said we can’t, and three times you’ve said we can. Hard to argue with that.
Well, Uzza, you are reading two different things. I do not think there is a way of separating good from bad religion, although I think there are possibly good things espoused by religions that can be separated from religion altogether. What I think we need to do, if we find things that are valuable in religion, is to separate from religion so that it can be used without religion’s contamination. If this was not clear before, this is what I am trying to say. But religion as a human project, it seems to me, has had its day, and needs to be surpassed by something else, by societies in which there are no religious institutions to divert, into unprofitable byways, the social project from its path. If we are really seeking justice and the good life, religious institutions, in my view, are not the way to find it. Baggini seems to want to have it both ways, to preserve the religious project, and yet to dispose of the bad aspects of religion. But I think the religious project itself is destructive. That does not mean that we cannot learn from religions in so far as, in the last two or three hundred years, they have taken on board most of the secular projects and have tried — with considerable success, I might add — to baptise them, so that now they seem to be religiously motivated. But originally they were not. If you go back to the 16th and 17th centuries, the religions played a very destructive role in society, and so they began a process of making themselves indispensable in other ways. I think we can have those ‘other ways’ without the dead weight of the past that religions carry along wth them. I will have to do a separate post on this, I think, and will get to it in the next day or two. This will take me, at last, to Philip Kitcher’s idea of religion as an orientation.
You’ve said you don’t think it’s important to define religion, which is kind of amazing but it does allow you to chase the “religion of the gaps”:
Find some thing good in religion, eg. the taoistic notion that quality of life is sacred and suffering to be avoided;
Pull out the “but I don’t call that religion” card and impose some arbitrary criteria, eg. Kitcher seems to require the supernatural.
Proceed to establish your social project, that you don’t call religion because tautologically nothing good is religious.
That’s all fine, but you’ll need to a way to defend it against those who insist on calling it the religion it so obviously is. It’ll be interesting to see what you come up with.
Uzza, I don’t think I’ve ever said it’s not important to define religion. I do think religion is usually understood to include some reference to — as Scott Atran calls them — counterfactual worlds, that is worlds that at some point conflict with what we know about the everyday world. So, yes, if there is a philosophical system, say, the Stoic system, of shaping a life, I would not call that religious. Many of the Stoics held religious beliefs, but their Stoicism was separate from and could be adopted independently of, religion. Of course, if we’re going to study religion anthropologically, we need to know what religion is, so that we don’t end up studying something else. So some definition of religion is necessary, and I work with a rough defintion of what seems to me to be religious. I don’t just pull out a card. I state my presuppositions right up front where they belong. If you want to consider Confucianism a religion, that’ s fine, for in some aspects, it does have counterfactual implications. However, there is a philosophical dimension which could be accepted as a philosophy of life, much like Stoicism. That’s all. I can add to that a reference to Stephen Batchelor’s book Buddhism without Beliefs, where he develops Buddhism, quite consciously, as a philosophical and not a religious system. There are lots of possibilities here.
You have an annoying habit of arguing with your own quoted words.
“I don’t think trying to define religion is particularly helpful”
—comment, 5 January 2011 at 09:41, post “Salman Taseer is dead. Religion killed him”
True, in that context I did not think it was particularly helpful to define religion. If you are going to study religion, then of course it is necessary, but if you are commenting on what a religious person did, where the deed was clearly based on his religious beliefs, as in the case of Taseer’s killer, it is scarcely to the point to define religion in such a way as to suggest that, after all, it wasn’t religion that was the direct cause of his Taseer’s murder, especially since his own claims, as well as the reasons that people were celebrating his action were all religious. It’s not altogether to the point to take my words out of their original context and then say I am arguing against my words.
Well. The context was your response to the direct question of what you mean by religion, a question you never answered.
The larger context was a discussion of religion where two parties clearly assign different meanings to the word, and I was naturally curious what each of them has in mind.
The larger larger context is that you speak for atheism, and it’s possible I disagree with you but I’m not sure, because we clearly don’t mean the same things by god, religion, supernatural and several other key terms.
I’m not talking to Stephen Batchelor or Scott Atran, I’m talking to you, and I had hoped to learn if our apparent disagreements were merely terminological, as is the case with Richard Dawkins, but due to your numerous contradictions and evasions I have been unable to find out, so I’m rather disappointed.
I have a couple of short comments:
1. I thoroughly enjoy your thoughtful posts & find them very thought provoking – thank you.
2. As someone who was formerly a committed Evangelical Christian, I find the idea that the Biblical Stories & core events of the New Testament can be interpreted as merely ‘High Myth’ to be quite baffling. When I point out the falsifiability of the clearly errant Biblical histories of Ancient Israel or the completely unattested “histories” of the Gospels, my more liberal Christian friends seem untroubled by these observations as these events are, in their view, merely pious and instructive myths. I don’t get the logic of this at all; but, I see that for many professing Christians, this is the only option still available to them without a complete renunciation of their faith.
PZ Myer’s quote really is worth repeating:
‘Is it true? And if it’s not true, or only pretend truth, then we have problems, because lies are destructive.’
One could add that if it ain’t true, move on to something that is.
-evan