Brave New Worldviews
by Joe Palmer
[ opinion - january 09 ]
"I am a deeply religious nonbeliever. This is a somewhat new kind of religion." - Albert Einstein
The pop-atheists, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris, have recently written best-selling books. It's hard to write a bestseller. You've got to find a hot topic and do the right thing. Then you make money, and other writers become jealous.
However, you shouldn't deny what you don't define. Faith is not religion. Religion is not faith. Today's popular atheists do not take the differences into account: belief in God, theism, is not the same as organized religion. Faith in God(s) is much deeper and older than organized religion, which is an artifact of socialization, a mixed bag of cults and corporations with fuzzy edges (for example, what exactly is an Episcopalian?). Atheism is, strictly speaking, only a meaningless concept, as meaningless as theism, as Luis Buñuel said, "I am an atheist still, thank God." You should not deny what you cannot define.
David Brooks, a conservative columnist for The New York Times, recently published an essay called 'The Neural Buddhists'. In it he wrote that it is easy to give arguments defending the existence of God against atheists like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, and he predicted that the real challenge would "come from people who feel the existence of the sacred, but who think that particular religions are just cultural artifacts built on top of universal human traits." He continued: "In unexpected ways, science and mysticism are joining hands and reinforcing each other. That's bound to lead to new movements that emphasize self-transcendence but put little stock in divine law or revelation," according to Jeffrey Kripal in The [Higher Education] Chronicle Review, 12 December, 2008.
God is hidden, the authorities and regulators are often wrong, and we are catastrophizing the planet with our machines.
Religion is communal selfishness. "Humanist" proponents of so-called "secular humanism," an approach to life based on humanity and reason, would get rid of selfishness and religion so that Paradise on Earth could be had without hocus pocus.
Ignorant evangelists have misused the terms humanist and humanism, confusing them with socialism, communism, collectivism, democracy, or egalitarianism, so that now we must speak of secular, scientific, classical, literary, evangelical, or humanitarian humanism in order to be more precise when speaking about agnostics, atheists, freethinkers, skeptics, rationalists, Big-Endians, scholars, politicians, preachers, and so on.
Secular Humanists maintain that there is so much in religion deserving of criticism that the good name of Humanism should not be tainted by connection with it. - Frederick Edwords [sic]
And to make matters fascinating the documentary film Religulous [which makes fun of religion] is at its most interesting when the attitudes of the faithful prove more sophisticated than the maker's own attitude towards religion and the people he holds up to ridicule, [Mark R Leeper] which is to say that it's a cheap shot to poke fun at religion. Of course religion and faith are absurd.
Faith, social policy, and science, the traditional solutions to our problems, have often helped us make our situation better. Today we've got to learn more about them in order to use them all together to our mutual benefit. The humanities, the accumulated wisdom of the ages, the branch of learning that includes the arts, classics, philosophy, and history are key to our salvation. Note well that "humanities" here does not mean irreligion, not at all; scratch a human and he bleeds the blood of the Lamb.
The old answers to our questions - religion, government, and technology - are no longer sufficient by themselves alone. The questions we ask today do not have simple answers. The good life could be had, we used to think, when all individuals had an equal say in the decisions affecting them. We thought that our world was simple enough for each person to be fully represented. We were all broad minded then, convinced of the merits of universalism, respecting everyone's religion as good enough for them, but not as true as our own faiths. We all trusted in science and material progress that we believed was making life better and better every day in every way. We kept religion, government, and science in their places to our own satisfaction.
But that was in a simpler world, a world of gods, steam engines, and coal-oil lamps, a world without electricity and clean water. We now ignore the mythology and art of religion at our peril, for religion remains the primary determinant of most people's behavior. People think and act according to the ways their particular cultures have taught them. Religion, "a big story," is situated at the controlling center of every way of life. It swings elections, foments revolutions, and enthuses terrorists.
All people believe in what they absorb and are taught, in something, whether history, science, the Dharma, Nature, or God, or combinations thereof. Faith is a favorite phantom, a way of holding off the madness, a necessary symptom of the sickness of the mind apprehending reality.
The non-specific American faith is a Gnostic creed stressing knowledge of an inner self that leads to freedom from nature, time, history and other selves. Every American assumes that God loves her or him in a personal, intimate way, and this trait is the bedrock of our national religion. [Publishers Weekly]
Irreligion, the denial of religion, explains the modern neurosis, the fact that in spite of our profound personal freedom, we remain miserable, suicidal, destructive, savage, animalistic, in a word, human.
In seeking a religion without politics, we must go back again to the new old world view wherein time is seen as an illusion hiding the unity of everything. We must read Thomas Merton, Aldous Huxley, Walker Percy, and the Bhagavad Gita. We must meditate on Samsara and Nirvana.
Science and religion both assert the same thing: the Universe operates according to rules and that those rules can be discerned. Both science and religion are wrong. You cannot get to a place where you can make out the rules from there.
Politicized religion is without doubt part of mankind's curse. However, religion is not faith. Religion is a group of people doing something together that hurts other people, for absurd reasons. Faith, on the other hand, is the hope or conviction that Jesus loves me, or God has a plan, or Allah is great, or escape from sorrow will come, or that Nature absorbs evil illusions.
Religion is a ditch to hide in with other people. People used to be afraid of God, so they huddled together in fear; now they are afraid of germs and atomic radiation, so they watch television to help them ignore pandemics and the countdown to Armageddon.
Faith, however, is belief in the sacred in spite of the clergy or the scientists. It is knowing that something made the maker, that some first cause set it all in motion, perhaps for some purpose even though we cannot know what the purpose might be. Faith is what keeps us going. We may believe in our part in the improvement of mankind, in the future, or in the strength of our football team, or in our chances of making money, or in falling in love, or in personal vindication, approval, and success, or in the principles of scientific endeavor to show us the way and the truth.
Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying. - Arthur C Clarke
