Category Archives: Religious thought

“Use the Myths Wisely, but Use the Myths.” Let’s think about that.

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The title comes from the last words of R. Joseph Hoffmann’s latest contribution over at The New Oxonian. Entitled, “What an Unbliever Believes,” it is, finally, a statement of Hoffmann’s considered opinion about belief and unbelief, atheism, theism and agnosticism, and especially humanism, that I have been awaiting. Instead of a broadside against the new atheists, the new atheists are mentioned in this piece — except once, to make sure we are paying attention – only obliquely. But they are there, like premonitory ghosts, being herded this way and that by the trend of the argument; and while what I will say will be critical, it is not, I hope, dismissive, because at last Hoffmann has told us what role he sees for gods, religions, belief and unbelief, realism and myths. He doesn’t say it as clearly as he might, but it’s a start.

For some time Hoffmann has been saying that the new atheists not only do not understand religion; they are simply incompetent to discuss it, because they have not accompanied the growth in religious studies over the last few decades. As a consequence, we are given to understand, without a close study of what PhD candidates in religious studies are thinking and being taught, the project of the new atheism is simply irrelevant. Usually, this is said with a hauteur which is both condescending and bitter — the response of someone who has devoted his whole life to a study of religion only to have a bunch of Yahoos come along and tell him that all that study is simply irrelevant to what they want to say. Hoffmann’s claim seems to be that, ignoring his field of the academic study of religion, the new atheists have managed to say exactly nothing about anything that really counts. This essay is the kinder version of this thesis.

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Spleen

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I suppose one must make a nod in the direction of R. Joseph Hoffmann, who has, once again, with little point or purpose, attacked and vilified some of the ”new atheists” (as they have come to be called). He even includes me, rather generously, as one of the “sidelights” of the “movement,” such as it is, and even more of an honour to be yoked with Ophelia Benson, of whom he says, with ill-humour, that she “has turned her once-interesting website (I used to contribute regularly) into a chat room for neo-atheist spleen.” In case anyone missed the point, the Oxford English Dictionary parses the word ‘spleen’ as follows:

1 a. To regard with spleen or ill-humour; to have a grudge at. Obs

b. To fill with spleen; to make angry or ill-tempered. Obs

c. To feel spleen, or deep anger. Obs

It seems fair to point out that no one, of all the names mentioned in his post, is nearly as splenetic as R. Joseph Hoffmann himself, baying raucously on the trail of the unbelieving fox, Stephanie echoing in close pursuit. (I thank Professor Myers for allerting me to Hoffmann’s embarrassing post.)

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The Religious Fringe

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In my last post — “The Right to Die and the Religious Fringe” — I decided, quite deliberately, to speak of religion as a fringe activity. In view of the large number of religious believers in Canada, and many other Western countries, this may seem to be a bit of rhetorical grandstanding, but I do not think that it is. Religion is on the fringe of life now. It has been shunted off onto a cultural siding, and that’s where it will continue to reside, because there simply is no way of providing legitimate and respectable support for religious beliefs, and, largely due to the scientific revolution that has been underway since the sixteenth century, the culture of the West, at least, but also of many other countries that are rapidly undergoing cultural change, is a knowledge culture, and no longer a culture of traditional beliefs and practices.

Religions instinctively understand that they must either be in control the culture or they will wither and die. This is why Islam and Roman Catholicism, as well as Protestant evangelicalism, are so insistent that their moral priorities be expressed in the law; for if cultures are not themselves religious cultures, where the source of meaning, purpose and social order is found in religion, then religions atrophy, they become isolated from the mainstream activities of the culture, and increasingly at odds with it. The alternative, of course, is to try to find compatibilities between religion and the culture which it can no longer direct. This expedient, while it seemed to work for awhile — liberal movements within the religions are a testimony to this partial success — is increasingly seen as merely a form of self-deception on the part of the religions, a stop-gap measure which, unless it could find a deep common source of vitality, would soon be seen to be but a temporary refuge from the storm of modernity and the progress of science and knowledge.

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An interesting quotation from Don Cupitt’s “The Old Creed and the New” and a few Sunday evening thoughts

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… religious thought is also and equally out of place in faculties of theology. Theology faculties have for the last century or two been dedicated to the pursuit of technically proficient literary scholarship and the critical-historical method. In them people write bookish books about theology, but not books of theology. Scholarly detachment and rigour demand that one must distance oneself from any serious personal engagement with the subject, and indeed many highly academic theologians are nowadays conspicuously non-religious types. Real religious thought is visceral, troubled and often disruptive, and academics regard it with great distaste. There may be a few persons of that type of the syllabus (Pascal and Kierkegaard, Unamuno and Simone Weil), but there certainly should not be any persons of that type on the faculty. … Dead and existing only in writing, some of them are fine; but alive, they are a nuisance.

There is a further complication: the ideas about religious thought that I am trying to present will as usual be regarded as highly offensive and deserving of contempt, by many senior figures. The reason is that the authorities of any great institution invariably regard themselves and the orthodoxy that they defend as the perfection of rationality and wisdom. This was amusingly demonstrated when at the end of the year 2004, a number of senior figures in the Vatican issued statements denouncing Dan Brown’s book The Da Vinci Code. One cardinal was even appointed to refute it. This popular work was enjoying extraordinary worldwide sales at the time, even though the fanciful theory it put forward, about a lineage of descendents of the union of Jesus with Mary of Magdala, was only a rehash of a similar book that had appeared twenty years earlier, called The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. One might have thought that the main thesis was too silly to deserve comment, but the Cardinals’ statement expressed something like outrage. How could it be that for millions of people the absurdities of Dan Brown’s conspiracy theory were more interesting and attractive than the faith of the Church? And one saw that the Church authorities were utterly sure of the immensely superior rationality and intellectual weight of their own position.

Suddenly, the Cardinals were funny. They really had no idea that as an interpretation of the available evidence in the New Testament and in early Christian history, orthodox Roman Catholic doctrine — with St. Peter as, of course, ‘the first Pope’ — is if anything rather less rational than Dan Brown’s theory. ‘Less rational’, because Dan Brown is at least in a broad sense naturalistic; and ‘less rational’, of course, by strict and independent philosophical and critical-historical standards. Theoretically speaking, Dan Brown’s theory, though silly, could be true; whereas the Roman Catholic faith cannot be true, because it is supernaturalist, and there is no supernatural world. What was funny was that Dan Brown’s comically bad book almost inadvertently exposed the gulf between a great institution’s solid conviction of its own intellectual weight and of the justice of its claims, and their actual hollowness and absurdity. So vast is the great institution’s self-belief that it has been quite unable to digest anything of the critical theological scholarship of the last two hundred years. [pp. 61-62]

And remember folks, you heard it here first. Don Cupitt is, if the word means anything at all, a theologian, or, at least, a religious thinker.

I’m going to put this response to a comment up here, because what I said above is too terse, and doesn’t explain what I mean, and why I think Cupitt may be important. Of course, you may disagree, but here is what I was thinking when I quoted this passage from Cupitt, and ended with my very short comment. This is an answer to Gordon Willis’s question (comment #3 below), and I guess, if it comes to that, a response to Egbert’s concerns about the credibility of secularism:

Be fair, Eric. Cupitt was a theologian. It’s been a long time since he stopped being a believer, but like a lot of people he can’t just discard all that meant so much. It happens. Life’s like that.

Yes, Gordon, that’s true. And, I guess, that’s what I was trying to say in a terse way (unusually terse for me). It’s supposed to be, in a measure, but only partly, ironical. For if Cupitt is a theologian, or a religious writer — and he does make a stab at a kind of non-theistic “Buddhism” — see his Emptiness and Brightness — then, in a sense, anyone can be a believer.

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