2 Responses to the Religion of Whatever Suits me Now

1. John Suk says:

   July 11, 2014 at 3:43 pm

   Wow. There is so much wrong with this statement that it is hard to know where to start! A good place would be Jennifer Hecht’s book “Doubt,” which is a long history of the interplay between faith in some god or another and other options, including atheism. Atheists need not be stranded in the present any more than anyone else. Their convictions have a long history. Stoics, anyone? Some forms of Buddhism? And why shouldn’t non-religious people (that is, people who don’t belong to temple or church or whatever) be connected to the present? There are other means available to connecting with history or tradition other than belonging to a religion. You can tie yourself to the past via education, art, genealogy, philosophy . . . the list is endless.
   Of course, among both atheists and xians and people of other faiths, there is a lot of amnesia about the traditions they belong to. People just don’t care or are unable to study the past, think slowly about it, make judgements about it, and apply their reflections to their own lives. But the reasons for that have nothing to do with belonging or not belonging to a church (or no church). Maybe they’re just too caught up in the fun and games of current culture, or surviving in it, or maybe they’re just spellbound by the media and never get around to thinking about who they are and where they come from and where they’re going.
   And as for ransacking religious traditions, the religious history of humanity is one of changing minds, picking and choosing beliefs, the end of old institutions and belief systems while picking up new ones. Sometimes this is a revolution (the reformation? the enforced end of European paganism under Constantine and a few other emperors?) and sometimes an evolution (the rise of synagogue-word centred Judaism?). But this is the history of religion. And religions that try to stop it tend to move quickly to persecution.
   This quote is a screed from someone who either doesn’t know history, or perhaps someone who isn’t interested in it himself, in the interest of his own narrower, parochial ideas about what would be good for people or society.
   I too wish people would all come back to church or synagogue. I think faith in God is a better option than atheism, one with more hope and one more rooted in the realities of the cosmos. But you don’t have to be religious to connect to history and the lives of those who came before us.

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   • PaulVK says:

     July 11, 2014 at 7:29 pm

     John I think your “yeah buts” are fair. The chief fault lies in the American dismissal of history which is well documented and pervasive. A well read atheist will find a lot of smart dead people to imaginatively commune with.

     At the same time I think it is also fair to note that conservative religious folks afford their dead ancestors a lot more influence and authority than most Americans. You can tell me if this is true of Canadians as well. I don’t know. Whether they do so in an irresponsible way is the judgment of the observer.

     I think that we don’t appreciate the enormous influence of the myth of progress in our thinking. The rise of science fueled technological power in the second half of the 20th century until now has inculcated in us all a deep assumption that the newer is more right. It is the epistemological expression of hot hand bias (see the wired piece on how monkeys have this too. http://www.wired.com/2014/07/monkeys-like-people-believe-in-the-hot-hand-phenomenon/) We make nitrates from the air. We can destroy the world with nukes but do so blindly with carbon. We seem to know so much more, read so much more that we imagine ourselves superior to the ancients in almost every way. We appropriate almost everything with this sort of hubris thinking ourselves on the pinnacle of everything even as we fear we can’t sustain it much longer.

     I find in my friends who don’t participate in conservative religious communities that they are nearly captive to the zeitgeist. The speed with which same sex marriage has overwhelmed the west is either a testimony to its correctness or a cautionary tail of group think. We see in the vaccination debates, however, that group think is no guarantor of veracity. We regularly find people more stupid in groups than alone, but also sometimes visa versa. Is the zeitgeist as dangerous as believing old ideas? Today’s zeitgeist is tomorrow’s old idea. We not only face horizontal diversity of opinion but vertical and as our connectedness increases we are confronted with diversity on both axes at once.

     so yes, the commenter on Dreher’s post might be too unfair with atheists but we are all struggling with how to weigh all the data.

     Thanks for your comment. pvk

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