You're spot on Steve. Who is it that said "If God didn't exist, we would need to invent him."? Two of the young and very smart fellows I follow on YouTube, Joseph Foley and Rudyard Lynch, deal with this matter often. Foley approaches it as an intriguing and haunting question, Lynch as a certainty. I agree with Rudyard Lynch. Although I believe without effort in an ultimate reality that is intelligent and purposeful, "God", I sometimes struggle with believing all the claims the Church makes in his regard. Nonetheless, the conviction that the cosmos, and all of us in it, are in good hands, keeps me sane and helps me to seek virtue in my personal life. History and human experience seem to point to most of us needing some kind of religious outlook. I can't imagine how a democratic republic could function if the majority of its citizens were not actively seeking the good, the true and the beautiful, and were not rooted in some kind of transcendent metaphysical view of life.
"the conviction that the cosmos, and all of us in it, are in good hands, keeps me sane and helps me to seek virtue in my personal life"
I think this is the thing I miss most about religion, even if I'm convinced that it was ultimately an illusion without evidence. I want to feel like I'm not the last word in my own life, which often feels totally out of control. I want to have a higher power to call on to help in times of need. I just wish that there were one that actually showed benevolent responses to such requests.
It's the conundrum that the society finds itself in. Probably the greatest experiment, in terms of sheer ambition (or cheek, if you prefer) that the entire slew of American experiments has ever tried to achieve -- to establish an ordered public, shared morality that is not based on any religious or theistic belief.
[Sorry for the length of what follows ... probably it touches on too many points.]
Critics of that perspective will quibble that Buddhism provides a moral framework in Asian societies and is not a religion or a theism. My response to that is simply that the claim doesn't stand up to the experience of seeing Thai or Vietnamese or, for that matter, practiced syncretistically with their home-grown animist religion of Shinto, Japanese people behaving as they do in Buddhist temples. It's not Abrahamic monotheism, no, but it's a religion in its "home countries", and functions as such, in the sense that even when quite a few people aren't "true believers" it forms the moral framework for a culture that is widely shared, for better or worse. Western Buddhists like to claim otherwise, because many of them are avowedly secular, but that isn't the history of Buddhism, and it isn't how Buddhism has been experienced in its home countries at all.
China can be argued to be different due to Confucianism being a primary, non-religious, source of public and personal morals and virtue, but even if that case holds (and it has a lot of water to carry, indeed, in light of the weighty impact of Buddhism on moral ideas in China as well, especially when intertwined with the native Taoist spiritual tradition), it is of zero help to the West, because regardless of the fact that the Confucian tradition is technically secular, it is venerated, culturally, to the same degree as a religion is, more or less, in other cultures due to its great antiquity and the continuity of its influence on Chinese culture, through the present day, again seen as part of a syncretistic scheme together with Buddhism and Taoism. It's inapposite to the situation of the contemporary West -- going back to our own classics (as some have proposed) to kind of create a neo-classical source of a newfangled shared secular morality for the West is of no great help, because as Hart has pointed out, in our culture, unlike in China, these classics have been nuked from orbit countless times by subsequent philosophers for the most part -- there is simply no going back to them as a consensus basis for anything. And creating a consensus -- about anything at all, let alone something as controversial and weighty as what agreed moral norms should be beyond some kind of watered-down least common denominator (what we have now) -- in the midst of a wildly pluralistic society is virtually impossible.
My view of our current situation, pace Holland, is that we are getting by on the fumes, the epistemic wake (if you will), of the dying Christianity in our culture, such that the values and norms that Christianity emphasized are still kinda sorta present in many ways (but waning in many other ways) due to inertia, and the recency of the passing of Christian belief. It's hard to say how long this period of being able to ride in the wake of the old religion will hold up, as the old religion itself continues to fade, but in the meantime we are living on these fumes. That won't last forever, though.
So, I dunno. I don't see the way out of this for the West. There is no going back, either to classical philosophies or, I think for the culture as a whole, en masse, to Christianity, either. And creating something new is unlikely as well given the extreme challenges for that posed by our wildly, uniquely pluralistic culture. I don't know the way out of this box. I suspect we will therefore lurch along, groping.
I agree, by the way, with Weinstein, more or less, in his basic idea. But I suspect he overestimates the possibility of this being realized for Christians, because he is Jewish, where a space has been created for being a "secular, unbelieving Jew who still observes some Jewish practices as a way of maintaining a connection with their ethnic background and tradition". Christianity, by sharp contrast, is not like that -- it's a religion based, for the most part, on belief, such that when the belief falls away, generally the practice does as well. There are exceptions for ethnic forms of Christianity (including, ironically, Scruton's skeptical Anglican praxis), but not, in general, for most of American Christianity.
Another great comment, thank you. I find nothing to disagree with here. Having married into a Chinese family, I've seen that vestigial, quasi-religious role Confucius has up close. At least on the older generation of Chinese who are not complete and total products of the CCP. I have no idea what the younger Chinese think. My father in law was born in 1932, so he was from a different era.
If there's no way out of this for the West -- as you say, and I suspect -- then what happens next? What plausible path do we follow, and for how long, before the natural numinous instinct boots back up?
I dunno. I do think that the idea of a "new religion" coming into being, which works like the old ones (with shared beliefs about things unseen and so on) will be hard to do in the current era. Religions are ... messy in their formative years. The old ones benefit from having much of that messiness fairly well-obscured by the passage of long periods of time, despite the best efforts of academics to un-obscure them (most of which are based on reasoned speculation of one kind or another in any case). Trying to form a new "old type" religion today, with the kind of real-time scrutiny exerted by today's digital panopticon, seems like it would be very hard to do.
It's conceivable that some kind of techno-materialist shared "naturalistic belief system" would come to be shared more broadly, as seems to be hoped by the intellectual/academic crowd, but I'm personally skeptical that would have any significant impact on the masses. It certainly hasn't so far, in terms of performing the "functions" done by the "old" religions, like shared meaning, shared values, shared morals, shared identity. Not among the masses at least.
David Bentley Hart wrote an article about this subject as well, it's called Christ and Nothing. I believe it can still be read at First Things. He basically writes about how Christianity pushed out all of the former gods, and there is no going back, but the modern world is pushing out Christianity which leads to nihilism. I'm not the most academic guy, there's a lot more to it than that, but you get the idea. Your article reminded me of it.
You sound like Roger Scruton, the English conservative writer who was active in his Anglican church, to the point of playing the organ for services. However, he seemed to have taken it all with a grain of salt, and mostly regarded it as the beneficial tribal ritual of his people.
In the meantime, Diwali-tide in Morrisville will be here before you know it!
What we have here, Steve, is a "free rider" problem. Many people intuit that society benefits when the other guys are Christians, but they aren't particularly interested in being themselves. That is the strange place we find ourselves. So, speaking as one who is "shoudering the load," I am thinking "in what way does my being a Christian change my beharior." I have shed a lot of bad habits. That kept me on the planet longer than I would have otherwise stayed, and it kept me married and available to help my family and others. So I am shouldering my load, for my benefit, the family's, the nation, and whomever else I manage to help.
I read the earlier embedded entry. I think God did help you break out of your low point. You're sort of setting up "terms of endearment" for God that He's not going to like. You cannot approach God the way you're approaching Him. I cannot identify, I'm sorry, I'm too trained in the Carmelites now to be able to think the way you're thinking. It's like a kid somehow--a kid that says "you know, Mom, I would have loved you if you'd appraoched me in a certain way, and spoke to me in poetry, given me certain kinds of phenomenal thrills." Yes, faith is a gift, but God also said "seek and you will find." I sought, I found, and at a level I was NOT expecting. It took YEARS--because I was quite ambivalent and also because from about age 14-22, I became hostile to God. I fell out, didn't like Christians and wasn't interested. Then I started reading C.S Lewis (dangerous to staying out of the faith, he has converted millions) and encountered Christians whom I admired and who invited me back (they were Prots, by the way).
Ex ante, God wills all men be saved. Ex post, no. I think that's fair. Christ dying on the cross knew "all will not be saved, even though I gave my all."
I think I stay out of the church biz and personnel more than you, on purpose. I avoid a lot of involvement with the priests, even though I admire and love them (the good ones, and yes, there are some very good priests--take the set of exorcists for starters (Fr. Chad Ripperger, Fr. Vincent Lampert, Fr. Dan Reehil, Fr. Carlos Matins, and Monignor Stephen Rossetti). Read the lives of the saints. Were these people demented? No, a bad tree cannot produce all that good fruit. These exorcists really really get down and dirty in the mud with the penitent, get mud and filth thrown at them (phyically, spirituall), get spat on, swung at, seduced (attempts rebuffed by God's grace), insulted, exhausted to try to free someone from possession of the devil. What a miracle! And it takes a long time to free someone from true possession, apparently, especially nowadays.
So, I'm not as theologically sophisticated as you are (not by a country mile), cannot write as well as you do, am not as smart as you, and also haven't had your painful upbringing (neurosis inducing) nor that awful stuff your priest did to you when he refused your children receiving the sacraments. You see why I stear clear of real close interaction with the church? To avoid an episode like that with the refusal to baptise an infant. I mean, this is incredible. I do not want to see the priests' feet of clay. This is not exactly "head in the sand" Catholicism. It's self-preservation. Yeah, I know about all the abuse scandals. Those priests are going to be in big trouble. There are people called to fight these things, they're not me. I cannot be the one, for instance, who investigates child porn cases. I'll become unhinged, I become morose and start crying and fainting on the bed in despair. But there are people who ARE called to that. I am called to do other things for God. Would I intervene to save a child? Yes, and I did (from a realtives neglect) and I lost a lot a family for helping bring in outsiders to stop the neglect. I knew I'd pay that price (shunning) and said "okay, I'll take the punishment to save the kid from the neglect and abuse." Lost a lot of family from that, and I mean FOREVER. So I don't always "take a pass." I know when and what I can shoulder. I can shoulder being cancelled to save a kid from abuse and neglect (related, but even unrelated). But I cannot get into the nitty gritty of priests raping little boys in confessionals. I want the police called in.
So, wandering all over the place.
So, circling back, yeah, I've known several people who had no faith and were fine. They were kind, decent, honest people. But that is not the case for a significant share of humanity (including me)--either due to weakness, or a tragic character flaws, the "curbing force" of religious rules and the threat of displeasing God are a needed braking mechanism. Fear of the Lord is beginning of wisdom. Servile fear is sufficient for salvation, but it's not necessary. We can obey God out of pure love (like Therese). Just pick up the newspaper--full of people who went beserk, because "no God, no virtue." We need God's grace to be good, generally. He wills it. He wants our love. He wants to keep us company, and give us counsel, give us love, consolation, laughs (God is very funny, and He knows exactly where one's funny bone is). Here has been my request to God: for once, I'd like to make you laugh--and I do think I managed once or twice to make God laugh, but sometimes it was a little hard to laugh along (until afterward, free of the immediate embarrassment, then one can have a "retrospective laughter" at one's own foibles).
I find God to be really loving, kind, but yeah, strict about some things. He's strict with me in certain regards. So what about homosexuality? I've given it to God. I tell people "don't do it," invariably (yes, girls have come to me for guidance, quite out of the blue, and I think I've talked them out of it, taking hours and hours to counsel them). I'm grateful gave me some "thou shall nots" that went directly against my nature. (I'm having a problem in the sweets department, however--work in progress.) If God asks one to do something, He supplies the necessary grace. Are we going to fall and sin and fail, still? Yes. I do not beat myself up about it. I accept that I'm human and error-prone in certain habitual ways. And then I get up, go to confession, dust myself off, and try try again.
Hope all is well in NC with family. We are fine. I'm trying to prepare for events--hopefully, there will not be events. I don't like the way the two wars are going. I don't like the assassination attempts, particularly their being met with an attitude "oh, that guy has it coming." These are dog whistles that continuing in these murderous efforts are understandable and will be considered heroic.
Good reflection.
Glad to read that you’re sifting through your prior life. Wheat from chaff, not babies and bathwater.
You're spot on Steve. Who is it that said "If God didn't exist, we would need to invent him."? Two of the young and very smart fellows I follow on YouTube, Joseph Foley and Rudyard Lynch, deal with this matter often. Foley approaches it as an intriguing and haunting question, Lynch as a certainty. I agree with Rudyard Lynch. Although I believe without effort in an ultimate reality that is intelligent and purposeful, "God", I sometimes struggle with believing all the claims the Church makes in his regard. Nonetheless, the conviction that the cosmos, and all of us in it, are in good hands, keeps me sane and helps me to seek virtue in my personal life. History and human experience seem to point to most of us needing some kind of religious outlook. I can't imagine how a democratic republic could function if the majority of its citizens were not actively seeking the good, the true and the beautiful, and were not rooted in some kind of transcendent metaphysical view of life.
"the conviction that the cosmos, and all of us in it, are in good hands, keeps me sane and helps me to seek virtue in my personal life"
I think this is the thing I miss most about religion, even if I'm convinced that it was ultimately an illusion without evidence. I want to feel like I'm not the last word in my own life, which often feels totally out of control. I want to have a higher power to call on to help in times of need. I just wish that there were one that actually showed benevolent responses to such requests.
It's the conundrum that the society finds itself in. Probably the greatest experiment, in terms of sheer ambition (or cheek, if you prefer) that the entire slew of American experiments has ever tried to achieve -- to establish an ordered public, shared morality that is not based on any religious or theistic belief.
[Sorry for the length of what follows ... probably it touches on too many points.]
Critics of that perspective will quibble that Buddhism provides a moral framework in Asian societies and is not a religion or a theism. My response to that is simply that the claim doesn't stand up to the experience of seeing Thai or Vietnamese or, for that matter, practiced syncretistically with their home-grown animist religion of Shinto, Japanese people behaving as they do in Buddhist temples. It's not Abrahamic monotheism, no, but it's a religion in its "home countries", and functions as such, in the sense that even when quite a few people aren't "true believers" it forms the moral framework for a culture that is widely shared, for better or worse. Western Buddhists like to claim otherwise, because many of them are avowedly secular, but that isn't the history of Buddhism, and it isn't how Buddhism has been experienced in its home countries at all.
China can be argued to be different due to Confucianism being a primary, non-religious, source of public and personal morals and virtue, but even if that case holds (and it has a lot of water to carry, indeed, in light of the weighty impact of Buddhism on moral ideas in China as well, especially when intertwined with the native Taoist spiritual tradition), it is of zero help to the West, because regardless of the fact that the Confucian tradition is technically secular, it is venerated, culturally, to the same degree as a religion is, more or less, in other cultures due to its great antiquity and the continuity of its influence on Chinese culture, through the present day, again seen as part of a syncretistic scheme together with Buddhism and Taoism. It's inapposite to the situation of the contemporary West -- going back to our own classics (as some have proposed) to kind of create a neo-classical source of a newfangled shared secular morality for the West is of no great help, because as Hart has pointed out, in our culture, unlike in China, these classics have been nuked from orbit countless times by subsequent philosophers for the most part -- there is simply no going back to them as a consensus basis for anything. And creating a consensus -- about anything at all, let alone something as controversial and weighty as what agreed moral norms should be beyond some kind of watered-down least common denominator (what we have now) -- in the midst of a wildly pluralistic society is virtually impossible.
My view of our current situation, pace Holland, is that we are getting by on the fumes, the epistemic wake (if you will), of the dying Christianity in our culture, such that the values and norms that Christianity emphasized are still kinda sorta present in many ways (but waning in many other ways) due to inertia, and the recency of the passing of Christian belief. It's hard to say how long this period of being able to ride in the wake of the old religion will hold up, as the old religion itself continues to fade, but in the meantime we are living on these fumes. That won't last forever, though.
So, I dunno. I don't see the way out of this for the West. There is no going back, either to classical philosophies or, I think for the culture as a whole, en masse, to Christianity, either. And creating something new is unlikely as well given the extreme challenges for that posed by our wildly, uniquely pluralistic culture. I don't know the way out of this box. I suspect we will therefore lurch along, groping.
I agree, by the way, with Weinstein, more or less, in his basic idea. But I suspect he overestimates the possibility of this being realized for Christians, because he is Jewish, where a space has been created for being a "secular, unbelieving Jew who still observes some Jewish practices as a way of maintaining a connection with their ethnic background and tradition". Christianity, by sharp contrast, is not like that -- it's a religion based, for the most part, on belief, such that when the belief falls away, generally the practice does as well. There are exceptions for ethnic forms of Christianity (including, ironically, Scruton's skeptical Anglican praxis), but not, in general, for most of American Christianity.
Another great comment, thank you. I find nothing to disagree with here. Having married into a Chinese family, I've seen that vestigial, quasi-religious role Confucius has up close. At least on the older generation of Chinese who are not complete and total products of the CCP. I have no idea what the younger Chinese think. My father in law was born in 1932, so he was from a different era.
If there's no way out of this for the West -- as you say, and I suspect -- then what happens next? What plausible path do we follow, and for how long, before the natural numinous instinct boots back up?
That's the big question, isn't it?
I dunno. I do think that the idea of a "new religion" coming into being, which works like the old ones (with shared beliefs about things unseen and so on) will be hard to do in the current era. Religions are ... messy in their formative years. The old ones benefit from having much of that messiness fairly well-obscured by the passage of long periods of time, despite the best efforts of academics to un-obscure them (most of which are based on reasoned speculation of one kind or another in any case). Trying to form a new "old type" religion today, with the kind of real-time scrutiny exerted by today's digital panopticon, seems like it would be very hard to do.
It's conceivable that some kind of techno-materialist shared "naturalistic belief system" would come to be shared more broadly, as seems to be hoped by the intellectual/academic crowd, but I'm personally skeptical that would have any significant impact on the masses. It certainly hasn't so far, in terms of performing the "functions" done by the "old" religions, like shared meaning, shared values, shared morals, shared identity. Not among the masses at least.
So I dunno. It's a conundrum, I think.
David Bentley Hart wrote an article about this subject as well, it's called Christ and Nothing. I believe it can still be read at First Things. He basically writes about how Christianity pushed out all of the former gods, and there is no going back, but the modern world is pushing out Christianity which leads to nihilism. I'm not the most academic guy, there's a lot more to it than that, but you get the idea. Your article reminded me of it.
It makes complete sense.
You sound like Roger Scruton, the English conservative writer who was active in his Anglican church, to the point of playing the organ for services. However, he seemed to have taken it all with a grain of salt, and mostly regarded it as the beneficial tribal ritual of his people.
In the meantime, Diwali-tide in Morrisville will be here before you know it!
What we have here, Steve, is a "free rider" problem. Many people intuit that society benefits when the other guys are Christians, but they aren't particularly interested in being themselves. That is the strange place we find ourselves. So, speaking as one who is "shoudering the load," I am thinking "in what way does my being a Christian change my beharior." I have shed a lot of bad habits. That kept me on the planet longer than I would have otherwise stayed, and it kept me married and available to help my family and others. So I am shouldering my load, for my benefit, the family's, the nation, and whomever else I manage to help.
I read the earlier embedded entry. I think God did help you break out of your low point. You're sort of setting up "terms of endearment" for God that He's not going to like. You cannot approach God the way you're approaching Him. I cannot identify, I'm sorry, I'm too trained in the Carmelites now to be able to think the way you're thinking. It's like a kid somehow--a kid that says "you know, Mom, I would have loved you if you'd appraoched me in a certain way, and spoke to me in poetry, given me certain kinds of phenomenal thrills." Yes, faith is a gift, but God also said "seek and you will find." I sought, I found, and at a level I was NOT expecting. It took YEARS--because I was quite ambivalent and also because from about age 14-22, I became hostile to God. I fell out, didn't like Christians and wasn't interested. Then I started reading C.S Lewis (dangerous to staying out of the faith, he has converted millions) and encountered Christians whom I admired and who invited me back (they were Prots, by the way).
Ex ante, God wills all men be saved. Ex post, no. I think that's fair. Christ dying on the cross knew "all will not be saved, even though I gave my all."
I think I stay out of the church biz and personnel more than you, on purpose. I avoid a lot of involvement with the priests, even though I admire and love them (the good ones, and yes, there are some very good priests--take the set of exorcists for starters (Fr. Chad Ripperger, Fr. Vincent Lampert, Fr. Dan Reehil, Fr. Carlos Matins, and Monignor Stephen Rossetti). Read the lives of the saints. Were these people demented? No, a bad tree cannot produce all that good fruit. These exorcists really really get down and dirty in the mud with the penitent, get mud and filth thrown at them (phyically, spirituall), get spat on, swung at, seduced (attempts rebuffed by God's grace), insulted, exhausted to try to free someone from possession of the devil. What a miracle! And it takes a long time to free someone from true possession, apparently, especially nowadays.
So, I'm not as theologically sophisticated as you are (not by a country mile), cannot write as well as you do, am not as smart as you, and also haven't had your painful upbringing (neurosis inducing) nor that awful stuff your priest did to you when he refused your children receiving the sacraments. You see why I stear clear of real close interaction with the church? To avoid an episode like that with the refusal to baptise an infant. I mean, this is incredible. I do not want to see the priests' feet of clay. This is not exactly "head in the sand" Catholicism. It's self-preservation. Yeah, I know about all the abuse scandals. Those priests are going to be in big trouble. There are people called to fight these things, they're not me. I cannot be the one, for instance, who investigates child porn cases. I'll become unhinged, I become morose and start crying and fainting on the bed in despair. But there are people who ARE called to that. I am called to do other things for God. Would I intervene to save a child? Yes, and I did (from a realtives neglect) and I lost a lot a family for helping bring in outsiders to stop the neglect. I knew I'd pay that price (shunning) and said "okay, I'll take the punishment to save the kid from the neglect and abuse." Lost a lot of family from that, and I mean FOREVER. So I don't always "take a pass." I know when and what I can shoulder. I can shoulder being cancelled to save a kid from abuse and neglect (related, but even unrelated). But I cannot get into the nitty gritty of priests raping little boys in confessionals. I want the police called in.
So, wandering all over the place.
So, circling back, yeah, I've known several people who had no faith and were fine. They were kind, decent, honest people. But that is not the case for a significant share of humanity (including me)--either due to weakness, or a tragic character flaws, the "curbing force" of religious rules and the threat of displeasing God are a needed braking mechanism. Fear of the Lord is beginning of wisdom. Servile fear is sufficient for salvation, but it's not necessary. We can obey God out of pure love (like Therese). Just pick up the newspaper--full of people who went beserk, because "no God, no virtue." We need God's grace to be good, generally. He wills it. He wants our love. He wants to keep us company, and give us counsel, give us love, consolation, laughs (God is very funny, and He knows exactly where one's funny bone is). Here has been my request to God: for once, I'd like to make you laugh--and I do think I managed once or twice to make God laugh, but sometimes it was a little hard to laugh along (until afterward, free of the immediate embarrassment, then one can have a "retrospective laughter" at one's own foibles).
I find God to be really loving, kind, but yeah, strict about some things. He's strict with me in certain regards. So what about homosexuality? I've given it to God. I tell people "don't do it," invariably (yes, girls have come to me for guidance, quite out of the blue, and I think I've talked them out of it, taking hours and hours to counsel them). I'm grateful gave me some "thou shall nots" that went directly against my nature. (I'm having a problem in the sweets department, however--work in progress.) If God asks one to do something, He supplies the necessary grace. Are we going to fall and sin and fail, still? Yes. I do not beat myself up about it. I accept that I'm human and error-prone in certain habitual ways. And then I get up, go to confession, dust myself off, and try try again.
Hope all is well in NC with family. We are fine. I'm trying to prepare for events--hopefully, there will not be events. I don't like the way the two wars are going. I don't like the assassination attempts, particularly their being met with an attitude "oh, that guy has it coming." These are dog whistles that continuing in these murderous efforts are understandable and will be considered heroic.