How to Corner a Believer in Four Easy Lessons
Julian Baggini has put up his next article in his series on contemporary heathenism (h/t Mark Jones). This time, it seems to me, he has come closer to hitting the mark. He has devised a test of faith for the 21st century, “beliefs that I think would make religion entirely intellectually respectable.” What the test effectively does — which last week’s proposal of doing an online sounding of people’s beliefs simply could not do — is to separate the sheep from the goats. Baggini’s “articles of 21st century faith” force religious believers to make a choice between beliefs which can be considered intellectually respectable, and those which cannot. If they jump one way, then the new atheists were right all along to take them to task; if, however, they jump the other way, then religious faith is, after all, intellectually respectable, because, in that case, they belong to Don Cupitt’s set, and accept religion simply as a way of affirming a set of values, and religious practice becomes a way of expressing this assent and actually trying to put a particular set of values into effect. Don Cupitt, for instance, speaks often of religion as proposing a moral ideal, and the object of religion as working towards the achievement of this ideal.
So, let’s begin by quoting the entire set of four articles of a 21st century religious faith which, according to Baggini, would be entirely intellectually respectable (the acceptance of which would justify his strictures regarding the new atheists):
Preamble. We acknowledge that religion comes in many shapes and forms and that therefore any attempt to define what religion “really” is would be stipulation, not description. Nevertheless, we have a view of what religion should be, in its best form, and these four articles describe features that a religion fit for the contemporary world needs to have. These features are not meant to be exhaustive and nor do they necessarily capture what is most important for any given individual. They are rather a minimal set of features that we can agree on despite our differences, and believe others can agree on too.
1. To be religious is primarily to assent to a set of values, and/or practise a way of life, and/or belong to a community that shares these values and/or practices. Any creeds or factual assertions associated with these things, especially ones that make claims about the nature and origin of the natural universe, are at most secondary and often irrelevant.
2. Religious belief does not, and should not, require the belief that any supernatural events have occurred here on Earth, including miracles that bend or break natural laws, the resurrection of the dead, or visits by gods or angelic messengers.
3. Religions are not crypto- or proto-sciences. They should make no claims about the physical nature, origin or structure of the natural universe. That which science can study and explain empirically should be left to science, and if a religion makes a claim that is incompatible with our best science, the scientific claim, not the religious one, should prevail.
4. Religious texts are the creation of the human intellect and imagination. None need be taken as expressing the thoughts of a divine or supernatural mind that exists independently of humanity.
Baggini says that he has sent these articles to a number of atheists, agnostics and liberal believers for comment, and we will see next week what the result will be, and then, over the coming weeks, he plans to see how others respond to the articles as well.
And then, of course, we will see. The proposed survey will of course force the issue, because a response to the proposed articles, unlike the very general survey that Baggini proposed last week, will clarify what, in the opinion of those he canvasses, religious belief does consist in. As Baggini states, the point is that, as a simple matter of logic, if you cannot agree with a statement, then you disagree with it, and if you disagree with one of the articles, this is a fairly clear indication of where you do stand with respect to the content of religious belief. It’s a bit like Joshua’s “Who is on the Lord’s side?” This will get us over the hump of the casual “That’s not the God I believe in” retort that so many religious believers use as an escape clause when their belief is challenged. As Baggini says:
For instance, if you cannot say you agree that “Religious belief does not, and should not, require the belief that any supernatural events have occurred here on Earth”, then it follows that you think religion does require the belief that some supernatural events have occurred here on Earth. [my italics]
The intention, clearly, is to force the believer’s hand, and it will at least be interesting to see what the response of believers will be to having their hand forced in this way. I suspect there may still be a way in which the believer can shimmer ambiguously away, but it will be interesting to watch them do it!
There is one problem that I see, however, right off the bat. Ordinary believers will easily find themselves on one side or the other of the challenge, and may be willing to talk about it, but it may be quite another matter for a leader in the church. If you’re a liberal believer, and a member of the Sea of Faith network, for example, the articles simply express what Sea of Faith members already believe about religion. (It is perhaps not a coincidence that Baggini spoke at the Sea of Faith London Conference this year, which was held “in association with The Philosopher’s Magazine.“) So, a Don Cupitt or a Richard Holloway could easily subscribe to the articles. However, in 1994, a young priest, Anthony Freeman, was dismissed from his post as vicar of a parish in the Diocese of Chichester after publishing a small book, God In Us: A Case for Christian Humanism, which expressed precisely the kinds of beliefs that are summarised in Baggini’s articles. Having had, at the time, a diocesan role in the teaching of ordinands, he was thought unsuitable to continue in that role, and so he was peremptorily dismissed, and his license to practice as a priest was revoked (although his parishioners are said to have supported him). I too could have assented to these articles during part of the time that I was a parish priest, but I would have been very cautious about doing so publicly. As one young priest, recently ordained, said to me (some years ago) with some concern: ”If I told the people here what I really believe, they would think that I am not really a Christian.” Cornering a believer is one thing; cornering a leader in the church (or in any other religion, I suppose) is bound to be another.
There is, however, another problem. It may be possible for some members of a particular religion, say, Christianity, to accept Baggini’s proposed articles of an intellectually respectable 21st century faith, but, if a majority or a very large proportion of those who profess that religion (or part thereof) are unwilling to adopt similar articles, does it still make intellectual sense for the radical believer to continue to belong to a community where many or most members do not accept them? I do not think that it does. When Anglicans and other Catholics — that’s putting the fox amongst the pope’s chickens! — join together of a Sunday morning and recite the Nicene Creed: “We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth, and of all things, visible and invisible,” etc. what is being said and to what effect? What or who does the word ‘we’ refer to? (And what, if it comes to that, do the words ‘god’, ‘father almighty’, ‘maker of heaven and earth’ refer to?) And is its reference in any sense true? The gravitational pull of belief is towards the supernatural, and this can be nicely concealed behind all sorts of handy expressions – here is where people get to talk about the mystical, the mystery, the incomprehensible, etc. The very idea of sacred scripture implies a power beyond it that sanctifies it. Don Cupitt writes a book with the title, The Old Creed and the New, but what, given the Christian tradition, would be Christian about new creed that is acknowledged to be nothing more than human values wrapped up in a myth that was once accepted as the truth about God, the universe, and us? Much as I agreed with Anthony Freeman at the time, and much as I thought that an injustice was done to him by the Bishop of Chichester, it is not clear to me that it is possible to say, as Greta Vosper does in the title of her book, that the church can be a fellowship of those With or Without God, and that those without can use the same language as those with God, and still maintain their intellectual respectability. God is the problem — in us, beyond us, around us, makes no matter: God is the problem. And much as the liberal religious believer might like to rewrite God in terms of human values, the very meaning of the word has its own gravity, and will not let the religions go.
Nevertheless, I think that something quite interesting might come from Julian Baggini’s new throw of the dice. Considering what I said last week about his proposed survey, this at least shows some promise of producing useful results.
Posted on 21 November 2011, in Christianity, God Concept, Liberal Christianity, New Atheism. Bookmark the permalink. 26 Comments.
Interesting; fox in amongst the chickens indeed.
Though I quite agree with you that “God is the problem” along with the question of whether one can separate the wheat from the chaff and still retain the use of that term. In which regard I’ve tended to agree with Greta Vosper’s argument that:
Those who recognize the Bible’s claim to be the [literal] word of God as the monster in the tub with the baby are the ones who must throw that monster out with the bathwater. [MacLean’s, March 31, 2008].
But I noticed on her website that the Church that she is apparently affiliated with – St. Thomas’ — in Belleville Ontario – seems still to be rather heavily invested in the pomp and circumstance, the dogma of Christianity. Which seems to be very much along the line of a book by another Canadian priest, theologian, philosopher of religion – Tom Harpur, titled The Pagan Christ: quite a reasonable case, I thought, for a metaphorical interpretation even if there was an attendant emotionalism that still seems rather problematic. But, echoing Dawkins’ article on “Gerin Oil”, all of that seems to be akin to “chipping” when what really seems necessary is “cold turkey” – although that tends to produce some serious withdrawal symptoms.
But definitely a spectrum of “those who believe in God” with a great many shadings, from the fundamentalist and literalist Christian or Muslim to the “metaphorical or pantheistic [or panentheistic] God of the physicists”. Will be interesting to see whether Baggini’s efforts create a bit of a watershed, whether it spearheads a further necessary reformation.
Baggini is describing something like Unitarian Universalism, with its seven principles but no creed. I wouldn’t describe it as a religion, and it raises my hackles to hear it referred to as a faith, but my elderly mother still enjoys the services. I’m pretty sure what appeals to her is the singing and the hand-holding.
Tried to fix the html Steersman. Hope it looks the way it should.
Bad Jim. I don’t think what Baggini is doing is describing Unitarian Universalism, because UU is quite plainly deistic, and does include belief in a supernatural being, however attenuated. Baggini is describing a wholly mythic mind-set, in which religious stories are thought of as completely human stories, that only seem to be about the supernatural, but are not really so. I used to think this could work, and that a person could still be intellectually respectable in the church with this kind of Sea of Faith metaphorical theology, but I don’t think that any more. I think the gravitational pull of ‘God’ is simply to strong, and that most people who use the word, whatever they think of, think of a being who is somehow unseen and supernatural, mysterious and powerful, and that this being will, in the end, come to our rescue. I’m not sure that Baggini’s articles correct for that.
Steersman:
This is what I mean by the gravity of religious language. It has a pull towards the transcendent, the supernatural — towards superstition, in fact. And this is why I do not think that it is intellectually respectable, even if a person can take all Baggini’s articles on board, to continue taking part in activities which imply what you no longer believe. It may be a myth to a few, but to most people the realistic belief, which stood behind that pomp and circumstance, and the words that accompany it, is still, inevitably, going to be there for most people, even if only in a shadowy way, and the consequent power of the church to intrude its superstitious beliefs into the public square will be undiminished. None of this is intellectually respectable.
Well…if atheists decided to get together and create a religion — Cephalopodarianism, perhaps, or Ceiling Catechism (not to start a schism already, but there it is) — this might describe its tenets.
However, one suspects that only in the highly rarefied air of the theology chairs at ultra-liberal non-church-funded universities would one see anyone “of faith” actually sign on. And, of course, accommodationists will find this to be right up their alley. I can see Mooney nodding his head in assent right now.
Religion without the supernatural underpinning undermines the “ultimate purpose” for religion. And we all know (or should by now, because I harp on it constantly) that “ultimate purpose” is theist code for “the state of my after-death apartment”.
What Baggini is describing is kind of a Kiwanis club approach to religion — good works for their own sake. But it doesn’t work; not even for the liberally religious. And most definitely not for anyone who is a member of any religion to the right of the UUs (which is just about everyone).
I, too, will be interested in seeing the outcome of his research — not among atheists, but among theologians and believers (not a self-contained set).
BTW, and sorry for the thread hijacking: I think you’re exactly right with regard to creeds.
I went to church for years while not believing in god (as a teen; liberal Episcopalian church). And each and every time the Nicene creed came up during the service, I would mouth the words, but in my head, a long string of obscenities were recited. I count it as among my greatest achievements in life that I never uttered those obscenities aloud during services.
I couldn’t in good conscience go to any church which featured any tenet that espoused the existence of a mythical, supernatural anything. Not even for the singing and the holding hands and the coffee cake afterwards and the charity work and the warm feelings at Christmas time.
It’s a matter of integrity, not intellect. Different.
Baggini’s list divorces what he sees as acceptable religions from any factual claims about the world, but religious naturalism takes science as its epistemology and so takes nature as what there is – nothing supernatural appears or is necessary to inform religious experience or community. So it’s possible to have a reasonable, rational, and empirical religion – what Dawkins once called Einsteinian religion, in which our aesthetic and emotional responses to existence and ultimate questions are informed by the grand story of the cosmos, see http://richarddawkins.net/articles/123-religion-einsteinian-or-supernatural Spirituality can also be naturalized, although of course many will think such a project just too oxymoronic, see http://www.naturalism.org/spiritua.htm
It seems to me, at least with the people I’ve interacted with both online and off, that religious people believe that mankind is fundamentally a supernatural being. Sure, we have fleshy bits, but we also have souls and spirits that will go on after we die. Because of this, I think that very few religious believers will agree with any of the tenets that Baggini has outlined here.
As I’ve stated before, I do not believe in belief. Attempts at rationalizing religion are futile because religion is a delusion or a form of insanity within the religious person. I see no difference between humanism and Don Cupitt’s Non-Realism (or Empty radical humanism), both are respectable but ultimately (as with John Gray’s agreement with Nietzsche’s thesis) they are a symptom and a struggle of the nihilism of our age, of the decline of the Enlightenment project.
Anyone who recognizes the profound wall between ‘is’ and ‘ought’ must realize that naturalism and thus rationalism can’t save our western values, they’re destined to fall into the bonfire along with God and metaphysics.
Erich Fromm recognized Mankind as a sick or insane animal cast out from nature, building an artificial world for himself. Our western liberal ethics are not a cure but a way to cope with the insanity.
I honestly think we can ‘cure’ ourselves of our insanity, of which religion and totalitarianism are the consequences. But it means we go beyond our failing contemporary ethical baggage, to a new kind of ethics, an ethics that is not based on disguised forms of the will to power.
Egbert, why should a religious naturalism of the kind proposed by Tom Clark not work? And, why do you think that liberal ethics are nothing but a way to cope with insanity? If you look at some of the things that are being done in moral philosophy nowadays, like Derek Parfit’s On What Matters, what ethics is, and how it is done, are being clarified more and more. It seems a bit unfair simply to dismiss this as ways of coping with insanity instead of ways of trying to understand ourselves. And of course we build an artificial world — if by that you mean we are rational yet emotive animals who are inventive, creative and strive to understand themselves better, and in the process create a cultural world in which to dwell. But that in itself should not be a problem. Why should rationalism and science and liberal values all fall into the bonfire of God and “metaphysics”? I put that latter in scare quotes because, in a sense, metaphysics are inescapable if we are to talk about knowlege at all. And as to will to power — will we ever get beyond that? What we need to do — and what democratic governance has tried to do — is to take the will to power, which is simply the other side of looking out for one’s own interests, and this is an evolutionary task that all of us have been left. Liberal, rational ethics, and culture are simply ways we have of harnessing the energy of that human will, and channelling it into useful courses. There is no getting beyond it, I am afraid — that way lies Utopia and pefectionism and all those unattainable ideals that have led people to massive cruelty and injustice. Better to tame it, harness it, rather than to try to burn it all away.
Hey Eric, thanks for correcting my comment. I am happy and open minded in reading whatever anyone says about ethics, as its of particular interest to me. However, I don’t believe our yours or mine ethics are divorced from the cultures we grew up in. We are liberal (or anarchist in my case) because our culture is liberal, we are atheists because our high culture is atheistic or secular. Liberalism, as you know, is largely an extension of protestant ethics and so too is socialism and humanism.
We can even persist with the fiction that our ethics are reasoned, or based in nature or worse based in God, but the psychological truth of the matter is that we mostly learned or copied our ethics and sensibilities, and that makes us little different to any other who copied their culture with its particular brand of ethics.
We’re both wise and intelligent enough to admit this, at least I am admitting that right here. All the other rationalizations about where ethics come from, are in my mind, self-deceptions.
Since we’re mature and wise enough to be able to transcend or overcome the insanity that is the God delusion, I too think we can transcend ethical delusions, and construct something better. But not if we persist with the self-deceptions, which always trickle down the slippery slope to totalitarianism, since our super-ego unconscious is the will to power in disguise.
I actually think there is an answer for ethics outside the will to power (within consciousness itself), but I think that requires a kind of new identity. I think it follows in a similar way to the mysticism of Martin Buber, but without the God bit. That is my particular optimistic project out of nihilism, and its insanity. Of course, no one is going to understand me unless they want to escape the insanity too.
In reverse order, his points 3 and 4 are not components of religion, they are merely his personal opinion. There’s no basis for claiming that religions must not make claims about the natural Universe. Plenty of them of them do, and there’s no reason to assume a priori these claims are unreliable or even unjustified. Of course through scientific investigation, we have found that they are unreliable and unjustified, but it’s intellectually dishonest to pretend that so long as religion abstains from making testable pronouncements they are free to make as many untestable ones as they wish. The glaring failures of religion to accurately describe the reality we can discover and test is extremely germane to the question of whether religion has anything relevant to say about subjects we can’t, ranging from pronouncements on the afterlife to considerations of values and ethic.
Which brings us to point one. Shared values and ethics in not nearly sufficient to serve as the basis characteristic of religion, since that would make such organizations as the Boy Scouts or environmental groups into religions. Any useful definition of religion must include some component of the supernatural. It’s THE defining trait of these organizations. Yes, I realize there are groups like Secular Humanist who define themselves as religions despite holding no belief in the supernatural, but I reject their label. They are religions only in the sense of being legally recognized as the equivalent of a religion, much like how atheism is protected under the 1st Amendment even though it isn’t strictly a religion. When a definition of religion which mandates a supernatural component is sufficient to cover Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism,but not humanism, then I don’t think the problem is with the definition, but with trying to shoehorn a group that doesn’t belong into an otherwise comprehensive list.
I’m sure Baggini considers my defining what religion “really” is to be stipulation and not description. But the fact is by trying to remove a requirement of the supernatural from the definition of religion, he is diluting the term to such extent that it becomes virtually meaningless.
Baggini clarifies in a comment that he doesn’t want to focus on what sets religion apart from non-religion. Basically, he wants to focus on what a religion can not do if it wants to remain intellectually respectable. The thing is, for the religious believer, it *is* important that religion remains meaningfully different from non-religion. This, I suspect, is why few believers will sign on to all four statements. For example, while religion may well be primary about shared values, they’d better be *special* values, like coming from a special being, or from a special book.
Well, then Baggini’s challenge is impossible, since for a religion to become intellectually respectable it must shed everything about it that makes it a religion.
I don’t know how religion had to incorporate the supernatural. Take for example Zen Buddhism or Scientology. Are they not religions? What about the state religion of North Korea, or in other words personality cults around a state leader?
I think we see institutions and organizations and mistakenly call them religious, when they’re authoritarian political systems of exploitation. I think most of us see spirituality or private religious beliefs, as harmless, something everyone has the freedom to practice. Sam Harris even encourages his particular type of spirituality.
I still think religion is evil, but by religion I mean institutions and the authoritarian personalities that run them, not individuals with religious beliefs. I think sometimes when we use the term ‘religion’ we begin to mean different things and thus our target becomes incoherent.
I think that’s right. Even the most liberal faith traditions are faith traditions. And what is faith if not the conviction that there is something beyond nature to which we should be committed? However you speak of that something, it must, by definition, be supernatural.
And I think that Baggini is being realistic is assuming that what he’s going to get the most of is Eagletonian assertions that these are the wrong articles. That’s just the way it works.
Egbert, Buddhism can either refer to a religion or a life philosophy, depending whether the particular school contains elements of the supernatural. Many forms of Buddhism, while perhaps not explicitly theistic, do such supernatural concepts such as cosmic karma. Scientology holds that the souls of dead aliens live inside people, which is an unarguably supernatural belief. Cults of personality are cults of personality. I don’t think it’s quite as hard to distinguish a religion as you would make it seem.
And religion doesn’t have to mean different things to different people so long as we all strive to be clear. If one is only against authoritarian institutions and not irrational beliefs, then it’s common practice to declare oneself opposed to “institutionalized religion.” I don’t consider private religious belief to be harmless, so when I say I’m against “religion” I do mean all of it.
Ken Pidcock said (#17)
I’ll certainly agree that many of the traditional religions see their deities residing in or operating out of the supernatural sphere while humanity, and lesser creatures, must plod along in the muck, the natural one, and never, or hardly ever, shall the twain meet. But that view seems not all that coherent – as suggested by this passage quoted by Russell Blackford – and I still think that one can usefully talk of “God” without relying on that highly questionable dichotomy. For instance Dawkins clearly indicates what I would call a reasonable alternative:
In addition I think that the word and concept “faith” has acquired a rather bad and unfair rap, largely because of the company it generally keeps. Reminds me of the comedian Lenny Bruce commenting on the similar state of the word “motel”, there being so many bad connotations to it that, as he phrased it, he wouldn’t ask his grandmother to go to one to pick up the Gutenberg Bible. But more specifically, I think that one cannot really function unless one has some degree of faith – not in any particular supernatural deity – but simply in the values that more or less undergird civilized society.
Eric periodically talks of that general process, what T.H. Huxley called “… the ethical progress of society”, and what might be along the line of what Jacob Bronowski called the “Ascent of Man”. In Eric’s words:
And A.C. Grayling has a similar perspective:
And that seems to be the problematic tipping point, the line in the sand, the Rubicon which far too many of the religious cross with their absolutism. Purpose and “the ethical progress of society” seems a very worthwhile goal and social motivation, but the absolutism – of any sort – seems to make it pathological, to corrupt it – absolutely. Personally, I think that Oliver Cromwell very succinctly and aptly captured that sense with this statement:
H.H., I once, like you, thought the same way. I thought I understood religion as a rationalist by describing it conceptually, and therefore, people must hold such beliefs. But it’s simply not true. Religion is the unconscious psychological drives for meaning and purpose, and that falls outside of naturalism. We all have meaning and purpose in our lives, even the search for truth, or being an artist. Humans are goal orientated and are not instinctual. Get rid of religion and you end up a nihilist, but even nihilism is a willing for nothing.
But what I am against, ethically, is the submission of authority to another. Private submission to something is one thing, whether it is to God, humanism, scepticism, rationalism, science, naturalism or whatever, but submission to the authority of other people is what breeds evil.
Notice the difference between wishing to free others from submission, and wanting others to submit to one’s own form of religion. That is what makes us evil.
Egbert, while I can sympathise with this: “Religion is the unconscious psychological drives for meaning and purpose, and that falls outside of naturalism,” I disagree. I think meaning and truth can be found completely immanently. Religion is something that organises and regiments people’s experiences of “transcendence”, the sense that there is something more, and that we are not our own. Without religion those experiences would be completely random and unexplained. People try to give them a local habitation and a name by systematising them, then then we have religion. So people like Sam Harris can continue to play the spiritual game, since that is quite possible independently of religion; but once religion enters the picture, authority comes along as its accompaniment.
I disagree with Gray. He wants to think that religion is the opposite of nihilism. It’s not. Religion is, to a large extent, a form of nihilism, because it vests utlimate importance in something not of the earth, and there isn’t a shred of evidence for it. All it has to go on is a jumble of experiences that it has corralled an systematised and made prescriptives. We can do better than this. However, I am convinced that you cannot have religion, as such, though you may have a kind of uninterpreted spirituality, without authority. But then I think religion is, of its very nature nihilistic, and that is where I part company with people like John Gray. I don’t think he understands religion at all, and that is the biggest part of his problem. Religion is nihilistic, because it wants to claim that there is an ultimate meaning, and the only evidence that religion has for this is a bunch of unrelated experiences without determinate content. By forcing contentfulness upon them, religions force people to act in concert, as though there were something objective to which they owed fealty. But it’s really an intelectual scam.
As for Julian Baggini’s test. It will obviously exclude most religious people, because religion, by its very nature, points to something transcendent, something beyond the human, like all perfectionist ideals. But all perfectionist ideals are, just in their very nature, nihilistic, because there is no ultimate meaning. There are just local, temporary meanings, and until we are prepared to be content with that, and live our lives within those limits, which grow broader and broader as science progresses, we are fated to be crushed by the religious juggernauts which keep pointing beyond to the empty sky.
Eric, I wasn’t exactly sure about the meaning of the word ‘immanently’. Do we mean the same thing? I don’t know, perhaps you could (if you have the time) explain more clearly. Where I hope we can agree is that meaning and purpose are either imposed externally (for the vast majority of people) or springs internally from the creative human imagination (the few).
What I’m trying to say is that if we are interested in essentially freeing ourselves and others, we must actually free ourselves first, and then seek to diminish the authority of external systems which are imposed on others. It seems to be that your project of freeing people from religion involves a replacement in the case of naturalism. Am I wrong? Because that is essentially what I was doing beforehand, without realizing that I was being swept up by a ‘movement’ and tradition myself.
Since I think we’re both ethically minded and we’re both interested in truth, I think it’s important that we don’t promote the very thing we’re supposedly fighting against–a kind of authority that gives people meaning and purpose. This is the anxiety that I had when I felt withiin the atheist community, a realization that we were not yet among the enlightened few. That is why I stopped to think–am I free myself or under yet another delusion? I think its an important question for any atheist to ask.
You’re right to say that religion is an intellectual scam, but I think that’s exactly how intellectual or subjectivity works–there are the genuine and authentic originator of ideas and then there are the fraudsters and copiers who build up a mask of authority. The seed of religion springs from the human imagination and artists, but its the decievers and authoritarians that use it and turn it to its opposite.
Eric, may I recommend Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death? Unless you’ve read it before,I have begun reading it, and it expresses much about what I’ve been bringing up the past year in one of the clearest ways yet.
Egbert said (#22),
Where I hope we can agree is that meaning and purpose are either imposed externally (for the vast majority of people) or springs internally from the creative human imagination (the few).
I seem to recollect that someone writing from a perspective incorporating cybernetics – goal directed systems – argued that such systems – at least of a biological nature – tended to be the ones that survived and propagated – which may be of more than passing interest to those with some commitment to the survival of the human species. There was a fairly succinct example of that provided by Ben Goren on Jerry Coyne’s site. Seems to me that whether it is an emergent property or a transcendent one “purpose” is something that is rather ubiquitous if not “all the way down”.
The seed of religion springs from the human imagination and artists, but it’s the deceivers and authoritarians that use it and turn it to its opposite.
“Between the dream and the reality there falls the shadow.”
Eric, may I recommend Ernest Becker’s “The Denial of Death”?
Sounds like an interesting book though I haven’t had the chance to look into it at all yet. But offhand that denial of death does seem to be one of the essential elements of the Judaic-Christian religions at least. And it seems to have some secular echoes in what someone called the “immortality industry”, interestingly exemplified by the book (not read yet) titled “How to live forever. Or die trying”. Although I’m not at all sure that both manifestations of that “quest for immortality” don’t qualify, in H. Mencken’s words, as “puerile egotism.”
Steersman, very much so. It is, of course, a dated book but has the same thesis.
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