Religion – Page 14 – Maverick Philosopher

Progressivism as Religion: Peter Berkowitz on Ronald Dworkin

Here. Excerpt:

For Dworkin, the meaning of religion consists in “two central judgments about value” that he believes religious people — theists and some atheists — regard as objectively true. First, “each person has an innate and inescapable responsibility to try to make his life a successful one: that means living well, accepting ethical responsibilities to oneself as well as moral responsibilities to others, not just if we happen to think this important but because it is in itself important whether we think so or not.” Second, “what we call ‘nature’ — the universe as a whole and in all its parts — is not just a matter of fact but is itself sublime: something of intrinsic value and wonder.”

If this is what Dworkin maintains, then his characterization of religion leaves a lot to be desired, to put it mildly. This is obviously NOT what the meaning of religion consists in on any adequate understanding of religion. Religion cannot be reduced to axiology. True, the religious will accept that there are objective values and disvalues. But such acceptance, even if necessary for being religious, is not sufficient.

All or most of the following are beliefs essential to anything that can be legitimately called a religion:

1.
The belief that there is what William James calls an "unseen order."
(Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 53) This is a realm of absolute
reality that lies beyond the perception of the five outer senses and their
instrumental extensions. It is also inaccessible to inner sense or
introspection. It is also not a realm of mere abstracta or thought-contents.
So it lies beyond the discursive intellect. It is accessible from our side via
mystical and religious experience. An initiative from its side is not to be
ruled out in the form of revelation.

2.
The belief that there is a supreme good for humans and that "our supreme good
lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves" to the "unseen order."
(Varieties, p. 53)

3.
The conviction that we are morally deficient, and that this deficiency impedes
our adjustment to the unseen order. Man is in some some sense fallen from the
moral height at which he would have ready access to the unseen order. His moral
corruption, however it came about, has noetic consequences.

4.
The conviction that our moral deficiency cannot be made sufficiently good by
our own efforts to afford us ready access to the unseen order.

5.
The conviction that adjustment to the unseen order requires moral
purification/transformation.

6.
The conviction that help from the side of the unseen order is available to bring
about this purification and adjustment.

7.
The conviction that the sensible order is not plenary in point of reality or
value, that it is ontologically and axiologically derivative. It is a
manifestation or emanation or creation of the unseen order.

In a word, Dworkin's characterization leaves out Transcendence; it leaves out what is absolutely central to religion, namely, the conviction that there is a transcendent dimension, an "unseen order," (see #1 supra) and that adjustment to this order is essential to human flourishing (see #2 supra).

What Dworkin has delivered is a miserable leftist substitute for religion. Being a leftist, he of course cannot value or perhaps even understand the genuine article; but he at least could have had the intellectual honesty not to try to redefine something whose definition is tolerably clear. Berkowitz has it right:

. . . Dworkin redefines religion to conform to his progressive sensibilities. What he presents as the offering of an olive branch to believers may seem to a person of faith, with justice, as a hostile takeover attempt. The steps by which Dworkin appropriates the religious label for his own left-liberal and atheistic outlook provide a case study in how the progressive mind, under the guise of conciliation, seeks to command the moral high ground exclusively and discredit that which differs from it.

"Hostile takeover" is right. Berkowitz also perceptively notes that

Dworkin also overlooks a formidable problem latent in his sanctification of the progressive perspective. If progressivism counts as a religion, then enacting the left-liberal policy agenda would seem to represent an establishment of religion in violation of the First Amendment.

But of course progressivism is not a religion, but an anti-religious political ideology. Nevertheless, one can and must ask: if it is wrong for the State to impose religion on its citizens, why isn't it also wrong for the State to impose leftist ideology on its citizens as it now doing here in the USA?

I take a stab at this question in Separation of Leftism and State.

Stephen “God is not One” Prothero to Speak at Arizona State University

Details here. What follows is an excerpt from a 2010 post:

Religions: Problems, Solutions, Techniques

Simplifying a four-part
schema employed by Stephen Prothero in his God Is Not One (Harper,
2010, p. 14), I propose, in agreement with Prothero, that each religion can be
usefully seen as addressing itself to a problem; offering a
solution to the problem, a solution that also constitutes the
religion's goal; and proposing a technique for solving the problem and
achieving the goal.

This post will consider five
religions and how the simplified Prothero schema applies to them.

For Christianity, the problem
is sin, the solution or goal is salvation, and the technique is some combination
of faith and good works. (14) For Buddhism, the problem is suffering, the
solution or goal is nirvana, and the technique for achieving nirvana is the
Noble Eightfold Path. (14) Prothero's main purpose in his book is to stress the
differences between religions. That is the point of the silly title, "God is
Not One." Obviously, God is one by definition; it is the conceptions of God
that are various. It is also a bad title because Prothero's topic is religion,
not theism. Buddhism, after all, is not a theistic religion. But let that
pass. I can't fault the man for wanting to attract buyers with a catchy title,
one reminiscent of Hitchens' God Is Not Great. The schema makes clear
the differences between these two great religions:

Are Buddhists trying to
achieve salvation? Of course not, since they do not even believe in sin. Are
Christians trying to achieve nirvana? No, since for them suffering isn't
something that must be overcome. (15)

If salvation is
salvation from sin, then of course Prothero is right. Sin is an offence against
God, and in a religion with no God there can be no sin. Nevertheless, I am a
bit uneasy with the starkness of Prothero's contrast. The Buddhist too aims at
a sort of salvation, salvation from all-pervasive suffering. To use 'salvation'
so narrowly that it applies only to the Christian's religious goal obscures the
commonality between the two great religions. I should think that some
soteriology or other is essential to every religion. A religion must show a
way out of our unsatisfactory predicament, and one is not religious unless one
perceives our life in this world as indeed a predicament, and one that is deeply
and fundamentally unsatisfactory, whatever the exact nature of the
satisfactoriness.

Read it all.

I also quote Prothero in On Religious Pluralism and Religious Tolerance wherein I land some hard blows on Sam Harris.

Outside Help

The religious realize not only that they need outside help to live aright, but also that they need outside help to achieve this realization.

Hitchens on Conversion

Christopher Hitchens, Mortality, Twelve, 2012, p. 91:

If I convert it's because it's better that a believer dies than that an atheist does.

Witty unto the end. But in the end, what does wit get you? One last vain flash of brilliance and then extinction — or judgment.

Overbelief and Romans 1: 18-20

I met with S. N. in Tempe yesterday for philosophy and chess. While we were talking about overbelief, it occurred to me that Romans 1: 18-20 is another good example of overbelief. Now there is an issue that the budding theologian S. N. made me aware of, an issue that the philosopher in me desires to set aside, namely, the question whether St. Paul is speaking in his own voice in the passage in question. That is indeed an interesting question, but my concern is with the argment that the passage embodies, regardless of who is making it. I will write as if Paul is speaking in his own voice. If you disagree, substitute 'pseudo-Paul' for 'Paul.'

I will first give my reading of the passage, and then explain how it connects with William James' notion of overbelief. (I understand that the term 'overbelief' surfaces first in Matthew Arnold who supposedly derives it from Goethe's use of Aberglaube. My concern is solely with James' use of the word.)

The Pauline Passage

Rather than quote the whole of the Pauline passage at Romans 1: 18-20, I'll summarize it. Men are godless and wicked and suppress the truth. What may be known about God is plain to them because God has made it plain to them. Human beings have no excuse for their unbelief. "For since the creation of the world, God's invisible qualities — his eternal power and divine nature — have been clearly seen,
being understood from what has been made . . . ."

Paul's claim here is that the existence and nature of God are evident from creation and that unbelief is a
result of a willful turning away from the truth. There is no excuse for unbelief because it is a plain fact that the natural world is divine handiwork. Now I am a theist and I am sympathetic to Christianity. But although I have one foot in Jerusalem, the other is planted firmly in Athens. And so I must point out that to characterize the natural world as 'made' or 'created' begs the question in favor of theism. As begging the question, the Pauline claim about the evidentness of the world's being created offers no support for theism. It is an analytic proposition that there is no creation without a creator. So if the heavens and the earth are a creation, then it follows straightaway that a creator exists.

But is the world a divine creation? This is the question, and the answer is not obvious. That the natural world is a divine artifact is not evident to the senses, or to the heart, or to reason. Of course, one can argue for the existence of God from the existence and order of the natural world. I have done it myself. But those who reject theistic arguments, and construct anti-theistic arguments, have their reasons too, and it cannot fairly be said that what animates the best of them is a stubborn and prideful refusal to submit to a truth that is evident. It is simply not evident to the senses that the natural world is a divine artifact.

I may be moved to marvel at "the starry skies above me." This was one of two things that filled Kant with wonder, the other being "the moral law within me." But seeing is not seeing as. If you see the starry skies as divine handiwork, then this is an interpretation from within a theistic framework. But the datum seen can just as easily be given a nontheistic interpretation.

If the atheism of some has its origin in pride, stubborness and a willful refusal to recognize any power or
authority beyond oneself, or beyond the human, as is plainly the case with many, it does not follow that the atheism of all has this origin.

It is all-too-human to suspect in our opponents moral depravity when we cannot convince them. The Pauline passage smacks of that all-too-humanity. There are sincere and decent atheists, and they have plenty of excuse for their unbelief. The best of them, if wrong in the end, are excusably wrong.

Overbelief in the Pauline Passage

Here is my working definition of 'overbelief' based on my reading of William James: an overbelief is a belief arrived at by reading out of an experience more than is contained within it.

We experience the world as existent, as beautiful, and as orderly. But we don't experience the world as divine handiwork any more than we experience it as the work of Satan contrived to fool us into taking it to be real when it is not, and seduce us with its beauty and order. That the world is divine handiwork is therefore, by the above definition, an overbelief.

That is not to say that it is false. It is to say, as S. N. pointed out yesterday, that the belief is undetermined by the experience. Overbeliefs are undetermined by what we actually and literally experience. (Admittedly, it is a tricky question what exactly we literally experience: do I see my car, or only the front of my car? Do I touch my cat, or only the fur of my cat? I see a green tree, but do I see that a tree is green? Do I even see a green tree? I see an instance of greenness and an instance of treeness, but do I see that the two property-instances are compresent?)

That the world is divine handiwork is an overbelief. That doesn't make it false or even unreasonable. Indeed, overbeliefs are unavoidable. As James writes,

These ideas [overbeliefs] will thus be essential to that individual's religion; — which is as much as to say that over-beliefs in various directions are absolutely indispensable, and that we should treat them with tenderness and tolerance so long as they are not intolerant themselves. As I have elsewhere written, the most interesting and valuable things about a man are usually his over-beliefs. (The Varieties of Religious Experience, Penguin 1982, p. 515, orig. publ. 1902)

Unusual Experiences and the Problem of Overbelief and Underbelief

One day, well over 30 years ago, I was deeply tormented by a swarm of negative thoughts and feelings that had arisen because of a dispute with a certain person. Pacing around my apartment, I suddenly, without any forethought, raised my hands toward the ceiling and said, "Release me!" It was a wholly spontaneous cri du coeur, a prayer if you will, but not intended as such. I emphasize that it was wholly unpremeditated. As soon as I had said the words and made the gesture, a wonderful peace descended upon my mind and the flood of negativity vanished. I became as calm as a Stoic sage.

That is an example of what I am calling an unusual experience. Only some of us have such experiences, and those who do, only rarely. I never had such an experience before or since, though I have had a wide variety of other types of unusual experiences of a religious, mystical and paranormal nature.

A second very memorable experience occurred while in deep formal meditation. I had the strong sense that I was the object of a very powerful love. I suddenly had the feeling that I was being loved by someone. Unfortunately, my analytic mind went to work on the experience and it soon subsided. This is why, when the gifts of meditation arrive, one must surrender to them in utter passivity, something that intellectual types will find it very hard to do.

The typical intellectual suffers from hypertrophy of the critical faculty, and in consequence, he suffers the blockage of the channels of intuition. He hones his intellect on the whetstone of discursivity, and if he is not careful, he may hone it away to nothing, or else perfect the power of slicing while losing the power of splicing.

Now suppose one were to interpret an experience such as the first one described as a reception of divine grace or as the answering of a prayer by a divine or angelic agent. Such an interpretation would involve what William James calls overbelief. Although the genial James uses the term several times in Varieties of Religious Experience and elsewhere, I don't believe he ever defines the term. But I think it is is keeping with his use of the term to say that an overbelief is a belief arrived at by reading out of an experience more than is contained within it.

Similarly, if I came to believe that what I experienced in the second experience was the love of Christ (subjective genitive), that would be an overbelief. The experience could not be doubted while I was having it, and now, a few years after having the experience, I have no practical doubts about it either: I have the testimony of my journal account which was written right after the experience, testimony that is corroborated by my present memories.

Unfortunately, experiences do not bear within themselves certificates of veridicality. There are two questions that an experience qua experience leaves open. First, is it of something real? Second, even if it is of something real, is it of the particular thing the overbelief says it is of?

Suppose a skeptic pipes up: "What you experienced was not the love of Christ, you gullible fool, but a random electro-chemical discharge in your brain." But of course, that would be wrong, indeed absurd. The experience was certainly not of that. The experience had a definite and describable phenomenological content, a content not describable in electro-chemical or neural terms.

Indeed, it is arguable that the skeptic is trading in underbelief, a word I just now coined. [Correction, 11 July: James uses 'under-belief' on p. 515 of The Varieties of Religious Experience.] If an overbelief is a belief arrived at by reading out of an experience more than is contained within it, then an underbelief is a belief arrived at by reading out of an experience less than is contained within it, or reading into it what manifestly is not contained within it.

Pounding on such a boneheaded skeptic, however, does not get the length of a proof of the veridicality of my experience.

We are on the point of becoming entangled in a thicket of thorny questions. Are there perceptual beliefs? If yes, are they not overbeliefs? I see a bobcat sitting outside my study and I form the belief that there is a bobcat five feet from me. But surely that existential claim goes beyond what the experience vouchsafes. The existence of the cat cannot be read off from the experience . . . .

Or is it rather underbelief if I refuse to grant that seeing a bobcat in normal conditions (good light, etc.) is proof that it exists in reality beyond my visual perception?

Should we perhaps define 'overbelief' and 'underbelief' in such a way that they pertain only to non-empirical matters?

Furthermore, is an overbelief a belief? Might 'over' function here as an alienans adjective? Beliefs are either true or false. Perhaps overbeliefs are neither, being merely matters of attitude, merely subjective additions to experiences. I think James would reject this. For him, overbeliefs are genuine beliefs. I'll dig up some passages later.

Sam Harris, you may remember, holds that the nonexistence of the self is something that one can learn from meditation. But he too, I should think, is involved in overbelief. One cannot observe the nonexistence of the self. Harris' belief goes well beyond anything that meditation discloses. The self does not turn up among the objects of experience as a separate object. Granted. It doesn't follow, however, that there is no self. To get to that conclusion overbelief is necessary, along the lines of: Only that which can be singled out as an object of experience exists or is real. How justify that on the basis of a close inspection of experience? It is sometimes called the Principle of Acquaintance. Are we acquainted with it?

The irony shouldn't be missed. Harris, the febrile religion-basher, embraces a religious overbelief in his Buddhist rejection of the self. Buddhism is a religion.

C. D. Broad on Religious Experience

The following is reproduced from Keith Burgess-Jackson's weblog:

[W]hen persons without religious experience regard themselves as being on that ground superior to those who have it, their attitude must be treated as merely silly and offensive. Similarly, any theories about religious experience constructed by persons who have little or none of their own should be regarded with grave suspicion. (For that reason it would be unwise to attach very much weight to anything that the present writer may say on this subject.)

(C. D. Broad, "Arguments for the Existence of God, II," The Journal of Theological Studies 40 [April 1939]: 156-67, at 159 [italics in original])

Sam Harris on Rational Mysticism and Whether the Self is an Illusion

London Karl brings to my attention an article by Sam Harris touching upon themes dear to my heart. Harris is an impressive fellow, an excellent public speaker, a crusader of sorts who has some important and true things to say, but who is sometimes out beyond his depth, like many public intellectuals who make bold to speak about philosophical topics. (But Harris is surely right clearly and courageously to point out that, among the ideologies extant at the present time, radical Islam is the most dangerous.)

In Rational Mysticism, Harris responds to critic Tom Flynn and in doing so offers characterizations of secularism, religion, and rational mysticism:

I used the words spirituality and mysticism affirmatively, in an attempt to put the range of human experience signified by these terms on a rational footing. It seems to me that the difficulty Flynn had with this enterprise is not a problem with my book, or merely with Flynn, but a larger problem with secularism itself.

As a worldview, secularism has defined itself in opposition to the whirling absurdity of religion. Like atheism (with which it is more or less interchangeable), secularism is a negative dispensation. Being secular is not a positive virtue like being reasonable, wise, or loving. To be secular, one need do nothing more than live in perpetual opposition to the unsubstantiated claims of religious dogmatists. Consequently, secularism has negligible appeal to the culture at large (a practical concern) and negligible content (an intellectual concern). There is, in fact, not much to secularism that should be of interest to anyone, apart from the fact that it is all that stands between sensible people like ourselves and the mad hordes of religious imbeciles who have balkanized our world, impeded the progress of science, and now place civilization itself in jeopardy. Criticizing religious irrationality is absolutely essential. But secularism, being nothing more than the totality of such criticism, can lead its practitioners to reject important features of human experience simply because they have been traditionally associated with religious practice.

The above can be distilled into three propositions:

1. Secularism is wholly defined by what it opposes, religion.

2. Religion is irrational, anti-science, and anti-civilization.

3. It would be a mistake to dismiss mysticism because of its traditional association with religious practice.

Harris continues:

The final chapter of my book, which gave Flynn the most trouble, is devoted to the subject of meditation. Meditation, in the sense that I use the term, is nothing more than a method of paying extraordinarily close attention to one’s moment-to-moment experience of the world. There is nothing irrational about doing this (and Flynn admits as much). In fact, such a practice constitutes the only rational basis for making detailed (first-person) claims about the nature of human subjectivity. Difficulties arise for secularists like Flynn, however, once we begin speaking about the kinds of experiences that diligent practitioners of meditation are apt to have. It is an empirical fact that sustained meditation can result in a variety of insights that intelligent people regularly find intellectually credible and personally transformative. The problem, however, is that these insights are almost always sought and expressed in a religious context. One such insight is that the feeling we call “I”—the sense that there is a thinker giving rise to our thoughts, an experiencer distinct from the mere flow of experience—can disappear when looked for in a rigorous way. Our conventional sense of “self” is, in fact, nothing more than a cognitive illusion, and dispelling this illusion opens the mind to extraordinary experiences of happiness. This is not a proposition to be accepted on faith; it is an empirical observation, analogous to the discovery of one’s optic blind spots.

To continue with the distillation:

4. Meditation, defined as careful attention to conscious experience, is the only basis for sustainable claims about subjectivity. There is nothing irrational about it.

5. Deep meditation gives rise to unusual, and sometimes personally transformative, experiences or "insights."

6. One such "insight" is that the "sense of self" or the "feeling called 'I'" can disappear when carefully searched for.

7. The sense of "self" is a cognitive illusion, and can be seen to be such by empirical observation: it is not a proposition to be accepted on faith.

There is much to agree with here. Indeed, I wholeheartedly accept propositions (1), (3), (4), and (5). Of course, I don't accept (2), but that is not what I want to discuss. My present concerns are (6) and (7).

Let me say first that, for me, 'insight' is a noun of success, and in this regard it is like 'knowledge.' There cannot be false knowledge; there cannot be false insights. Now does deep meditation disclose that there is, in truth, no self, no ego, no I, no subject of experience? Harris does not say flat-out that the self is an illusion; he says that the "sense of self" is an illusion. But I don't think he means that there is a self but that there is no sense of it in deep meditation. I take him to be saying something quite familiar from (the religion?) Pali Buddhism, namely, that there is no self, period. Anatta, you will recall, is one of the pillars of Pali and later Buddhism, along with anicca and dukkha.

So I will assume that Harris means to deny the the existence of the self as the subject of experience and to deny it on empirical grounds: there is no self because no self is encountered when we carefully examine, in deep meditation, our conscious experience.

It seems to me, however, that the nonexistence of what I fail to find does not logically follow from my failing to find it.

It may be that the self is the sort of thing that cannot turn up as an object of experience precisely because it is the subject of experience.

Here is an analogy. An absent-minded old man went in search of his eyeglasses. He searched high and low, from morning til night. Failing to find them after such a protracted effort, he concluded that he never had any in the first place. His search, however, was made possible by the glasses sitting upon his nose!

The analogy works with the eyes as well. From the fact that my eyes do not appear in my visual field (apart from mirrors), it does not follow that I have no eyes. My eyes are a necessary condition of my having a visual field in the first place. Their nonappearance in said field is no argument against them.

It could be something like that (though not exactly like that) with the self. It could be that the self cannot, by its very nature, turn up as an object of experience, for the simple reason that it is the subject of experience, that which is experiencing.

It is simply false to say what Harris says in (7), namely that one empirically observes that there is no self. That is not an observation but an inference from the failure to encounter the self as an object of experience. It is an inference that is valid only in the presence of an auxiliary premise:

Only that which can be experienced as an object exists.
The self cannot be experienced as an object.
Therefore
The self does not exist.

This argument is valid, but is it sound? The second premise is empirical: nothing we encounter in experience (inner or outer) counts as the subject of experience. True for the standard Humean and Buddhist reasons. But we cannot validly move from the second premise to the conclusion. We need the help of the auxiliary premise, which is not empirical. How then do we know that it is true? Must we take it on faith? Whose faith? Harris's?

My point, then, is that (7) is false and that Harris is operating with a dogmatic, non-empirical assumption, the just-mentioned auxiliary premise.

Harris needs to be careful that in his war against "absurd religious certainties" he does not rely on absurd dogmatic certainties of his own.

For a more detailed and rigiorous presentation, see Can the Chariot Take Us to the Land of No Self?

The Devirilization of Priest and Liturgy in the Novus Ordo Mass

I would like to return to the practice of the religion of my youth, I really would. Nothing of the usual sort holds me back: not the sex monkey, not illicit loves or addictions, not worldly ambition or the demands of career, not the thoughtlessness of the worldling mesmerized by the play of transient phenomena, not the Luciferian pride of a Russell or a Sartre or a Hitchens, not the opposition of a wife: mine is a good old-fashioned Catholic girl who attends mass on Sundays, ministers to the sick, and embodies the old-time virtues.

Philosophical and theological questions and doubts are the main impediments to my return.

But the trashy Vatican II 'reforms' run a close second. These are well-documented in Fr. Cipolla's erudite The Devirilization of the Liturgy in the Novus Ordo Mass. Excerpt:

. . . in the Novus Ordo rite of Mass the Liturgy has been effeminized. There is a famous passage in Caesar’s De bello Gallico where he explains why the Belgae tribe were such good soldiers. He attributes this to their lack of contact with the centers of culture like the cities. Caesar believed that such contact contributes ad effeminandos animos, to the effeminizing of their spirits.

[. . .]

In its Novus Ordo form . . . the Liturgy has been devirilized. One must recall the meaning of the word, vir, in Latin. Both vir and homo mean “man”, but it is vir alone that has the connotation of the man-hero and is the word that is often used for “husband”. The Aeneid begins with the famous words: arma virumque cano. (“ I sing of arms and the man-hero.”) What Cardinal Heenan presciently and correctly saw in 1967 was the virtual elimination of the virile nature of the Liturgy, the replacement of masculine objectivity, necessary for the public worship of the Church, with softness, sentimentality and personalization centered on the motherly person of the priest.

But not only the Liturgy has been devirilized; the priests have been too. The priests of my youth were manly men. But this soon changed in ways that are well known.

There was something profoundly stupid about the Vatican II 'reforms' even if we view matters from a purely immanent 'sociological' point of view. Suppose Roman Catholicism is, metaphysically, buncombe to its core, nothing but an elaborate human construction in the face of a meaningless universe, a construction kept going by human needs and desires noble and base. Suppose there is no God, no soul, no post-mortem reward or punishment, no moral world order. Suppose we are nothing but a species of clever land mammal thrown up on the shores of life by blind evolutionary processes, and that everything that makes us normatively human and thus persons (consciousness, self-consciousness, conscience, reason, and the rest) are nothing but cosmic accidents. Suppose all that.

Still, religion has its immanent life-enhancing role to play, whether true or false, and one would have to be as superficial and ignorant of the human heart as a New Atheist to think it will ever wither away: it inspires and guides, comforts and consoles; it provides our noble impulses with an outlet while giving suffering a meaning. Suffering can be borne, Nietzsche says somewhere, if it has a meaning; what is unbearable is meaningless suffering. Now the deep meaning that the Roman church provides is tied to its profundity, mystery, and reference to the Transcendent. Anything that degrades it into a namby-pamby secular humanism, just another brand of liberal feel-goodism and do-goodism, destroys it, making of it just another piece of dubious cultural junk. Degrading factors: switching from Latin to the vernacular; the introduction of sappy pseudo-folk music sung by pimply-faced adolescents strumming gut-stringed guitars; leftist politics and political correctness; the priest facing the congregation; the '60s obsession with 'relevance.'

People who take religion seriously tend to be conservatives and traditionalists; they are not change-for-the-sake-of-change leftist utopians. The stupidity of the Vatican II 'reforms,' therefore, consists in estranging its very clienetele, the conservatives and traditionalists. The church should be a liberal-free zone.

Now go read Cipolla's outstanding article.

How Some View Religion

Religion is for old women, children, and womanish men. Without this clientele it would wither away. It is for the weak. The strong are able to face life without its false comforts and childish superstitions. It is used by priests and other religious professionals to exploit the gullible. It is a form of social control, an opiate that renders people accepting of their lot and subservient to the rulers of this world. It is indistinguishable from superstition and an enemy of science and enlightenment.

It would be an interesting exercise to write similarly onesided paragraphs about government, science, philosophy, poetry, chess, evangelical atheists, and so on.

From Religion to Philosophy: A Typology of Motives for Making the Move

People come to philosophy from various 'places.' Some come from religion, others from mathematics and the natural sciences, still others from literature and the arts. There are other termini a quis as well. In this post I am concerned only with the move from religion to philosophy. What are the main types of reasons for those who are concerned with religion to take up the serious study of philosophy? I count five main types of motive.

1. The Apologetic Motive. Some look to philosophy for apologetic tools. Their concern is to clarify and defend the tenets of their religious faith, tenets they do not question, or do not question in the main, against those who do question them, or even attack them. For someone whose central motive is apologetic, the aim is not to seek a truth they do not possess, but to articulate and defend a truth, the "deposit of faith," that they already possess, if not in fullness, at least in outline.

2. The Critical Motive. Someone who is animated by the Critical Motive seeks to understand religion and evaluate its claim to truth, while taking it seriously. To criticize is not to oppose, but to sift, evaluate, assay, separate the true from the false, the reasonable from the unreasonable. The critic is not out to defend or attack but to understand and evaluate. Open to the claims of religion, his question is: But is it true?

3. The Debunking Motive. If the apologist presupposes the truth of his religion, or some religion, the debunker presupposes the falsehood of a particular religion or of every religion. He takes the doctrines and institutions of religion seriously as things worth attacking, exposing, debunking, unmasking, refuting.

The apologist, the critic, and the debunker all take religion seriously as something worth defending, worth evaluating, or worth attacking using the tools of philosophy. For all three, philosophy is a tool, not an end in itself.

The apologist moves to philosophy without leaving religion. If he succeeds in defending his faith with the weapons of philosophy, well and good; if he fails, it doesn't really matter. He has all the essential truth he needs from his religion. His inability to mount an intellectually respectable defense of it is a secondary matter.

The critic moves to philosophy with the option of leaving religion behind. Whether or not he leaves it behind depends on the outcome of his critique. Neither staying nor leaving is a foregone cnclusion.

The debunker either never had a living faith, or else he had one but lost it. As a debunker, his decision has been made and his Rubicon crossed: religion is buncombe from start to finish, dangerous buncombe that needs to be unmasked and opposed. Strictly speaking, only the debunker who once had a living faith moves from it to philosophy. You cannot move away from a place where you never were.

4. The Transcensive Motive. The transcender aims to find in philosophy something that completes and transcends religion while preserving its truth. One way to flesh this out would be in Hegelian terms: religion and philosophy both aim to express the Absolute, but only philosophy does so adequately. Religion is an inadequate 'pictorial' (vortstellende) representation of the Absolute. On this sort of approach all that is good in religion is aufgehoben in philosophy, simultaneously cancelled and preserved, roughly in the way the bud is both cancelled and preserved in the flower.

5. The Substitutional Motive. The substitutionalist aims to find in philosophy a substitute for religion. Religion, when taken seriously, makes a total claim on its adherents' higher energies. A person who, for any reason, becomes disenchanted with religion, but is not prepared to allow himself to degenerate to the level of the worldling, may look to invest his energies elsewhere in some other lofty pursuit. Some will turn to social or political activism. And of course there are other termini ad quos on the road from religion. The substitutionalist abandons religion for philosophy. In a sense, philosophy becomes his religion. It is in her precincts that he seeks his highest meaning and an outlet for his noblest impulses.

Some Questions

A. What is my motive? (2). Certainly not (1): I seem to be constitutionally incapable of taking the religion of my upbringing , or any religion, as simply true without examination. I can't suppress the questions that naturally arise. We have it on high authority that "The unexamined life is not worth living." That examination, of course, extends to everything, including religion, and indeed also to this very examining. Note that I am not appealing to the authority of Socrates/Plato since their authority can be validated rationally and autonomously.

Certainly not (3): I am not a debunker. Not (4) or (5) either. Hegel is right: both religion and philosophy treat of the Absolute. Hegel is wrong, however, in thinking that religion is somehow completed by or culminates in philosophy. I incline to the view that Athens and Jersualem are at odds with each other, that there is a tension between them, indeed a fruitful, productive tension, one that accounts in part for the vitality of the West as over against the inanition of the Islamic world. To put it starkly, it it is the tension between the autonomy of reason and the heteronomy of obedient faith (cf. Leo Strauss). Jerusalem is not a suburb of Athens.

Nor do I aim to substitute philosophy for religion. Philosophy, with its "bloodless ballet of categories," is not my religion. Man does not live by the discursive intellect alone.

My view is that there are four main paths to the Absolute, philosophy, religion, mysticism, and morality. They are separate and somehow all must be trod. No one of them has proprietary rights in the Absolute. How integrate them? Integration may not be possible here below. The best we can do is tack back and forth among them. So we think, we pray, we meditate and we live under the aegis of moral demands taken as absolute.

This theme is developed in Philosophy, Religion, Mysticism, and Wisdom.

B. Have I left any types of motive out?

Man’s Greatness Deducible From his Wretchedness

Blaise Pascal (1623-1662):

Man's greatness is so obvious that it can even be deduced from his wretchedness, for what is nature in animals is wretchedness in man, thus recognizing that, if his nature is today like that of the animals, he must have fallen from some better state which was once his own. (Pensées, Penguin, p. 59, #117, tr. Krailsheimer)

"What is nature in animals is wretchedness in man." That is a profound insight brilliantly expressed, although I don't think anyone lacking a religious sensibility could receive it as such. The very notion of wretchedness is religious. If it resonates within you, you have a religious nature. If, and only if.

Man's wretchedness is 'structural': man qua man is wretched. Wretched are not merely the sick, the unloved, and the destitute; all of us are wretched, even those of us who count as healthy and well off. Some of us are aware of this, our condition, the rest hide it from themselves by losing themselves in Pascalian divertissement, diversion. We are as if fallen from a higher state, our true and rightful state, into a lower one, and the sense of wretchedness is an indicator of our having fallen. Pascal writes that we "must have fallen from some better state." That is not obvious. But the fact remains that we are in a dire state from which we need salvation, a salvation we are incapable of achieving by our own efforts, whether individual or collective.

How do we know that? From thousands of years of collective experience.

The Essence of Religion

There is more to a religion than its beliefs and doctrines; there are also its practices. They, however, are informed and guided by certain constitutive beliefs. So the importance of the latter cannot be denied. Religion is not practice alone. It is not a mere form of life or language game. It rests, pace Wittgenstein, on claims about the nature of reality, claims which, if false, render bogus the practices resting upon them. In this post I present some characteristic beliefs/convictions that provide the scaffolding for what I take to be religion. As scaffolding they are necessarily abstract so as to cover a variety of different religions.

Anything that does not fit this schema I am not inclined to call a religion in any serious sense. I may be willing to negotiate on (4) and (6). (If Buddhism is a religion, it is a religion of self-help, at least in its purest forms.)

1. The belief that there is what William James calls an "unseen order." (Varieties of Religious Exerience, p. 53) This is a realm of absolute reality that lies beyond the perception of the five outer senses and their instrumental extensions. It is also inaccessible to inner sense or introspection. It is also not a realm of mere abstracta or thought-contents. So it lies beyond the discursive intellect. It is accessible from our side via mystical and religious experience. An initiative from its side is not to be ruled out in the form of revelation.

2. The belief that there is a supreme good for humans and that "our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves" to the "unseen order." (Varieties, p. 53)

3. The conviction that we are morally deficient, and that this deficiency impedes our adjustment to the unseen order. Man is in some some sense fallen from the moral height at which he would have ready access to the unseen order. His moral corruption, however it came about, has noetic consequences.

4. The conviction that our moral deficiency cannot be made sufficiently good by our own efforts to afford us ready access to the unseen order.

5. The conviction that adjustment to the unseen order requires moral purification/transformation.

6. The conviction that help from the side of the unseen order is available to bring about this purification and adjustment.

7. The conviction that the sensible order is not plenary in point of reality or value, that it is ontologically and axiologically derivative. It is a manifestation or emanation or creation of the unseen order.

Jerry Coyne on Religion as Child Abuse

Coyne writes (emphasis added):

Dawkins has taken flak for characterizing religious indoctrination of children as “child abuse.” Well, look at this picture and deny it. [The picture depicts a young child holding a sign that reads: Behead all those who insult the Prophet.] True, it’s not the same as beating or sexually molesting one’s child, but the brain of this boy is being warped and twisted by vicious Muslim ideology. What hope does he have when he grows up?

This also shows how crazy it is to characterize Islam as “the religion of peace.”

Somehow—and this will never happen, of course—it should be illegal to indoctrinate children with religious belief.

This is pretty feeble stuff for someone who supposedly can think. First of all, Coyne speaks of religious indoctrination and belief as such and in general, without qualification, making no distinctions among different religions or different beliefs within a given religion. Suppose a child is made to memorize the Ten Commandments and the Beatitudes. That surely counts as religious indoctrination. But is it child abuse? Obviously not.

A second point is that Coyne and his New Atheist ilk make no distinction between religious ideology and nonreligious ideology. Radical Islam, if not Islam itself, is a murderous religious ideology, and Coyne is quite right to protest its characterization as the "religion of peace." But Nazism and godless communism are also murderous ideologies whose doctrines justify mass murder. According to the Black Book of Communism, communists murdered approximately 100 million people in the 20th century.

Think of all the 'red diaper babies.' I wonder if Coyne and his ilk would protest their indoctrination as child abuse. If not, why not? Why is indoctrination in radical Islam worse than indoctrination in Naziism or communism? Why the selective outrage? If the genus extremist ideology is the problem, why attack only one of its species?

I admit that there is something unseemly about criticizing a man like Coyne. It's uncomfortably like rolling a drunk or beating up a cripple. Nasty work, but somebody has to do it. Here is further evidence of what a fool this man is.

But even worse than Coyne and Dawkins on the topic of religion as child abuse is the noxious A. C. Grayling.

We can be happy that the New Atheism has lost its mojo and is on the way out if not already dead.

Schopenhauer on Islam, “The Saddest and Poorest Form of Theism”

Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, tr. E. F. J. Payne, vol. II (Dover, 1966), p. 162. This is from Chapter XVII, "On Man's Need for Metaphysics" (emphases added and a paragraph break):

Temples and churches, pagodas and mosques, in all countries and ages, in their splendour and spaciousness, testify to man's need for metaphysics, a need strong and ineradicable, which follows close on the physical. The man of a satirical frame of mind could of course add that this need for metaphysics is a modest fellow content with meagre fare. Sometimes it lets itself be satisfied with clumsy fables and absurd fairy-tales. If only they are imprinted early enough, they are for man adequate explanations of his existence and supports for his morality.

Consider the Koran, for example; this wretched book was sufficient to start a world-religion, to satisfy the metaphysical need for countless millions for twelve hundred years, to become the basis of their morality and of a remarkable contempt for death, and also to inspire them to bloody wars and the most extensive conquests. In this book we find the saddest and poorest form of theism. Much may be lost in translation, but I have not been able to discover in it one single idea of value. Such things show that the capacity for metaphysics does not go hand in hand with the need for it . . . .