The religion of atheism
Apr. 13th, 2008 01:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fpbThere is one tremendous and widespread mistake about atheism: that is, that it is not a religion - that it somehow even opposes religion. Many of us, including many Christians, accept this claim implicitly, using the nouns "atheism" and "religion" as opposites. But that is about as wrong as to say that a shark is not a fish, because you cannot have one in batter with chips on the side. It is mistaking the most frequent and visible externals with the essence.
Why should atheism not be a religion? Because it implies no worship, no dogmatic faith, and no supernatural being? Religion is not essentially above any of these things, unless we commit the egregious category mistake of equating religion with Christianity. Religion is not about worship; it is not about belief; and it is not about God or about supernatural entities. For if we had to accept any of these three descriptions, we would have to rule out, among many other systems, Buddhism. Buddhism defines itself as atheistic and godless. Buddhism is not about worshipping anything: in point of fact, it is so little interested in worship that, wherever it goes, it allows previously existing systems of divine cult to continue unhindered. It is not about belief: a Thai Buddhist monk once asked me during a debate not to use the word “faith” of Buddhism, preferring to call it “wisdom”. And Buddhism is certainly not about any supernatural being. The Buddha is no more supernatural than you or I: he is simply man having achieved everything man can achieve by patient intellectual discipline and self-cleansing – like Plato’s Socrates. That is, the admiration he receives would not be different if nobody had ever heard of any such thing as gods. It is as the greatest of human heroes, achieving by his own effort and insight a level of spiritual perfection that cannot be surpassed, that he receives the tribute of enormous statues and works of art of any kind; not unlike the way that four Presidents and one Indian chief were carved into American mountains, not because they had anything divine about them, but because these men, as men, appear to patriotic Americans to tower over the rest like mountains.
Gods are unnecessary to Buddhism. Their existence is taken for granted, but the religion would lose little if their existence were denied. A Buddhist may even resort to some divine being for power, but he will not think of focusing his spiritual life on them. The point is that the spiritual perfection achieved by the Buddha and sought by his disciples is entirely non-personal. Buddhism cannot believe in any God as perfection, because in its system, personality is the denial of perfection. The gods it does accept are mere beings of power.
That is why it preserves the cults of earlier religions: it accepts the power of their gods, but only their power. Spiritually, it regards them as inferior in degree and kind to the human Buddha. In Buddhist writings, Brahma, who to the Hindus is the very image of Godhead, the animating soul of the world and Self of all that is, is a figure of the world in need of Liberation, begging the Buddha to set out on his career of preaching and save human beings: even Brahma, that is, is radically degraded.
And yet the commonsense of mankind has always agreed that Buddhism is a religion. It was as a religion, as a religious competitor, that an unholy alliance of Brahmins and Muslim invaders swept it out of its Indian homeland. (By unholy alliance, I do not mean that at any point any Brahmin leader sat down with any Muslim khan and actually planned the extermination of Buddhist monasteries; I mean that there was a converging interest between the invaders and the ancient religion of the land, and therefore the actions of Brahmins and Muslims objectively co-operated in the destruction of Indian Buddhism.) It was as a religion that Indian, Chinese and Japanese Emperors built it splendid temples, carving whole hillsides in the shape of the Enlightened One. It is as a religion that the Christian West has faced it, either in the form of faddish showbiz adhesion (even to the extent of actors, singers and models wanting to be married according to a “Buddhist wedding rite” – there ain’t no sich thing) offering some sort of spiritual escape in a world where the rigours of Christianity are not welcome, or in the serious form of intellectual and spiritual confrontation between Western and Eastern mysticism. When Buddhism, in turn, looks for interlocutors and opponents in the West, it does not look for them in the schools and the universities, but in the churches. And if Buddhism is not a religion, what is it that two billion human beings hold as spiritual truth in opposition to undoubted religions such as Christianity, Islam and Hinduism?
No: Buddhism is a religion. And if Buddhism is a religion, then religion is not primarily about God, worship, or faith. Western atheists, and westerners in general, only think so because the religion of their ancestors places a highly personal God, with a human face, at the centre of the universe; because it exists in the form of worship of this God; and because it places faith in Him very high in the order of virtues – “And now there are only three things that will last for ever, and they are faith, hope and love; and the greatest of these is love.” The great philosopher Karl Popper fell a victim to this sort of mistake: he thought Plato irreligious because Plato treated the popular stories about gods with no respect. Of course, Plato's religion was not primariy about such things at all - it was about the everlasting reality of the Ideas and their procession from Zeus - and to call him irreligious because he regarded this or that myth as a concoction created to fool the people is like calling a devout Protestant irreligious because he is not impressed by the blood of St. Januarius.
What, then, do religions have in common, if not gods or worship or faith? Or, to put in another way: how, on what grounds, does Christianity confront Buddhism? How does Islam confront Buddhism? How did Hinduism confront Buddhism before Buddhism was exterminated in India? How do the religious systems of China and Japan confront Buddhism? The answer in all cases is: as a way of describing existence. As systems about “life, the universe, and everything”. Religion is a philosophy of existence. Catholic Christianity demands a certain kind of cult, involving a certain kind of sacrifice; but it demands it because it holds a particular view of existence. This view involves the existence of a God with particular characteristics, the fact that the universe depends on this God for existence, and a particular view of God's relationship with mankind. All of these are parts of its description of reality - including both the idea and the description of God - and all the ritual and religious activities implied by Catholicism depend on its view of the world. Likewise Buddhism is an account of existence, including such a thing as a transmigrating soul, but no such thing as an ultimate God; and the ritual and religious activities it demands depend on its picture of existence. The picture of existence, the philosophy of existene, is everywhere the primary fact, which motivates all others.
To show the importance and significance of philosophical doctrines of existence in religious systems, let’s talk about the just-mentioned idea of creation. Most religions, apart from Islam, do not believe in “creation” in the sense of “creation out of nothing”, although many handbooks of comparative religion sloppily call “creation stories” what are really stories of re-creation, of the re-ordering of a previously existing, and indeed eternal, material universe. Both Buddhism and Hinduism believe in the eternity of existence, as did all Greek philosophical/religious systems, and the religion of ancient Egypt. Creation is nothing but a Christian idea, followed by Islam, and anticipated by certain strands of Hebraism. (Though by no means all. The Book of Genesis, which is a synthesis of two different pieces of pre-existent Jewish sacred writings, has both: its first chapter has the Spirit of God hovering over a pre-existent primordial mass which it simply puts in order, while its second chapter clearly describes creation out of nothing.)
Now what this means is that everything that exists depends upon the assent of God for its existence, in effect owes not only its form, but everything that makes it, to one single source – and that source a personal one, a will, an assent. (Thomas Aquinas once pointed out that, though a beginning in time is a part of the Christian faith, it is nevertheless possible to conceive of a universe that is infinite in time and that nevertheless depends upon the will of a transcendent God for its existence.) In Christian philosophy, we owe not just our life, but our being, to the fact that the God in three Persons made a conscious decision, something that can actually be compared to a human decision, to create; and that He could have decided otherwise . This creates a bond of dependency. God is as responsible for our being as our very parents, only even more so. And this involves two specific emotions, gratitude and love. Indeed, it can involve the opposite. I have known people who hated God because they hated their own existence. But Aristotle, who regarded God as the Soul of the World rather than as its ultimate creator, would not have known what any of us meant, either by thanking God, or, like Byron, by rebelling against Him. The great philosopher once remarked that we would think it rather strange to hear of someone loving Zeus. It is a Christian reaction, impossible in Hinduism or Platonism or Buddhism. And because of this personal link and sense of gratitude or otherwise, the Christian tradition involves a whole way of speaking of God which makes no sense whatever in Buddhism or Islam. A Buddhist who heard you speak of “Man’s quest for God”, which is a commonplace of Western pseudo-religious talk, would look at you blankly, or simply reinterpret your statement within his/her own categories, understanding it as “Man’s quest for Liberation” and removing the intensely personal emotion of the Christian and post-Christian world altogether. A Muslim would regard it as a self-indulgent religious frippery; God, he would say, is the one who is to find you - and when He does, God help you! Such difference does a difference in abstract doctrine make.
Before I go on, I want to add that the idea of gratitude for existence strikes me as one of those points at which the Christian revelation appears so entirely natural, so suited to reality as we experience it, so relevant to our lives and our feelings, as to give emotional and possibly even logical support to the faith itself. To love is natural, and to be grateful for what you love seems to me such a natural development that a religion that does not allow us to feel that gratitude seems to me deficient in the primary appreciation of reality. That is why that tremendous outburst of gratitude for life and breath, Beethoven’s Ninth, says so much to me. Western atheists of the monistic-materialist kind, as it has long been pointed out, are particularly unfortunate in this. They are no less than the rest of us the heirs of a tradition of emotional connection to the fact of existence; yet they find themselves in the emotionally unsatisfactory place of having to be grateful only for lesser things. I can be grateful to Beethoven for this or that masterpiece; but, if I were an atheist, to whom would I be grateful for Beethoven? Thankfully, I know exactly Who to thank.
If, then, religion is primarily a philosophy of existence, then monistic materialism certainly is a religion; and it is for this reason, too, that I feel nothing but contempt for Wicca, as for Asatru, James Hillman’s post-Junghianism, and all the other neo-paganisms. They do not even begin to claim that they have any real view of existence; all they say is that their message will suit people’s psychic inner realities, that is, that it will make them feel better. I regard all these neo-paganisms as religious masturbation. The person who moves from Wicca to atheism has taken an enormous step forwards in terms of intellectual responsibility, honesty, and religious truth.
Monistic materialism, on the other hand, is religious in everything except its outer trappings. Its own discourse about itself, its use of language, its relationship with the world, are all typical. To begin with, the claim of monistic materialism is historical: its main doctrine is that “today” – in the eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth, twenty-first century – we can no longer believe what our more ignorant fathers believed. Our time has received a newer and more advanced revelation of the nature of reality, which overpasses and replaces theirs. But this is the claim of all the world religions, from Zoroastrianism to Buddhism to Christianity to Islam. There always is a point in which a “true” doctrine about the nature of the universe is reached, which is bound to replace all the previous ones, which are either insufficient (doctrine of the earlier religions as praeparatio evangelica; Muslim view of “peoples of the Book”; Buddhism) or positively wicked (Zoroastrian view of the religoin of the Divs; occasional Christian claims that all previous religions except Hebraism were ran by demons; Muslim view of jahiliya). This is an inevitable by-product of the growing consciousness of civilized man that history is a real and a changing force. Not all great religions share this feature: those which do not arise from a reform or historical revelation – Hinduism, Taoism, Confucianism – do not postulate a similar break. But it is certain that the break in question is a religious phenomenon.
Another religious feature of monistic materialism, which arises from the same root, is its implicit demand for exclusiveness. To be what is normally called an atheist does not allow you to entertain any opposing view of reality. This is easily understandable: the only justification for such a historical movement of reform is that it represents a genuine advance in our understanding of reality – that its claims are true, or at least truer than any other – and that, therefore, to entertain the possibility of opposite claims is to slide from the better to the worse. Western Atheists make a claim to intellectual clarity and focus that demands that they should not allow their intellects to be fuddled by the claims of what they call “religion” – that is, all religions which are not theirs. Many of them would feel something like guilt if they found themselves drawn, on any grounds (e.g. emotional) to any other religion; especially to the bête noire, Catholic Christianity.
This is reflected in the way monistic materialism speaks of itself, a way which, incidentally, has effectively taken over our culture. In ordinary discourse, and, as I hope I am making clear, very much against the logic of the facts, the word “religion” is generally used as the opposite of the word “atheism”. This use is strictly comparable to the early Christian use of the word “pagan”, village-dweller. Christianity came into the world in opposition to a multiplicity of cults. When it gained political, social and intellectual victory, it invented a term for the opposition that greatly simplified matters: it labelled them all as "village practices" paganism (from pagus, that is the kind of village that is too small to have an autonomous existence or to count even as a small town). All of them, from the superstition of an Egyptian villager to the lofty philosophy of Plotinus, were no more than country stuff, fit only for ignorant and backward people left behind by the progress of knowledge. And in exactly the same way, just as Christianity labelled or libelled all other religions as “village practices”, so too monistic materialism labels all competing views of the world as “religion” - irrational, backward, unscientific. The exclusion is on exactly the same grounds: times have moved on, leaving the "ignorant, backward and easily led" believers in "religion" to toy with their village superstitions. Please reflect on the fact that these usages both tend to treat the highest achievements of the human mind as no less superstitious and irrational, ignorant "village practices", as real rustic superstition. Socrates and Plotinus are no less pagan than the ignorant rustic leaving a sacrifice to his village god; and Beethoven composing the Ninth Symphony and the Solemn Mass is as much under the grip of superstition as the most ignorant Neapolitan waiting for the blood of St.Januarius to liquefy.
Inherited pietas and native respect towards things that are instinctively experienced as great do not allow most atheists to push this way of speaking and thinking as far as it should logically be pushed; but the terms require it. If Beethoven was serious, as he certainly was, when he solemnly declared, as the very climax of his symphony and indeed of his career: Brüder! Überm Sternenzelt/ Muss ein lieber Vater wohnen!/ Ihn stürtzt nieder, Millionen?/ Ahnest du den Macher, Welt?/ Such Ihm überm Sternenzelt!/ Über Sternen muss Er wohnen ("Brothers! Above the canopy of stars, there must dwell a loving Father! Do you knee before Him, millions? Do you feel the Maker, world? Seek Him above the stars' canopy; there, above them, must He dwell!") - then Beethoven was promoting superstition, and, to be blunt, wasting his talent in a bad cause. To any coherent atheist, this is at best a piece of historically-determined nonsense, the superstitious transfer of a father-figure into the top of the world; that was how the Soviets of old used to present it, as soon as they realized that they could not altogether get rid of religion in all the culture they lay claim to. That, above all, is the implication of the use of the word "religion" to oppose "atheism".
To sum up my argument, the opposition “atheism/religion” is false. Far from being linguistically neutral, is a particularly fraudulent piece of linguistic imperialism. Atheism is not the opposite of religion, any more than Christianity is the opposite of religion. The effect of this false opposition, bought like a pig in a poke by the whole of contemporary culture (including even C.S.Lewis and not a few churchmen!), is to cast the whole intellectual past of man into the shadow of one tremendous new revelation; which is exactly what the world religions, from Zoroastrianism on, did.
Atheism, in fact, what some silly people describe as humanism and some pedantic ones as monistic materialism, is utterly and totally a religion. It declares that a certain way to think of and describe reality is correct, or at least closer to the truth than any other; it makes a clear and definite statement about reality. And there is this too, that it carries the emotional corollary of rejecting all other competing theories, and often of experiencing them not only as mistaken but as temptations.
Why should atheism not be a religion? Because it implies no worship, no dogmatic faith, and no supernatural being? Religion is not essentially above any of these things, unless we commit the egregious category mistake of equating religion with Christianity. Religion is not about worship; it is not about belief; and it is not about God or about supernatural entities. For if we had to accept any of these three descriptions, we would have to rule out, among many other systems, Buddhism. Buddhism defines itself as atheistic and godless. Buddhism is not about worshipping anything: in point of fact, it is so little interested in worship that, wherever it goes, it allows previously existing systems of divine cult to continue unhindered. It is not about belief: a Thai Buddhist monk once asked me during a debate not to use the word “faith” of Buddhism, preferring to call it “wisdom”. And Buddhism is certainly not about any supernatural being. The Buddha is no more supernatural than you or I: he is simply man having achieved everything man can achieve by patient intellectual discipline and self-cleansing – like Plato’s Socrates. That is, the admiration he receives would not be different if nobody had ever heard of any such thing as gods. It is as the greatest of human heroes, achieving by his own effort and insight a level of spiritual perfection that cannot be surpassed, that he receives the tribute of enormous statues and works of art of any kind; not unlike the way that four Presidents and one Indian chief were carved into American mountains, not because they had anything divine about them, but because these men, as men, appear to patriotic Americans to tower over the rest like mountains.
Gods are unnecessary to Buddhism. Their existence is taken for granted, but the religion would lose little if their existence were denied. A Buddhist may even resort to some divine being for power, but he will not think of focusing his spiritual life on them. The point is that the spiritual perfection achieved by the Buddha and sought by his disciples is entirely non-personal. Buddhism cannot believe in any God as perfection, because in its system, personality is the denial of perfection. The gods it does accept are mere beings of power.
That is why it preserves the cults of earlier religions: it accepts the power of their gods, but only their power. Spiritually, it regards them as inferior in degree and kind to the human Buddha. In Buddhist writings, Brahma, who to the Hindus is the very image of Godhead, the animating soul of the world and Self of all that is, is a figure of the world in need of Liberation, begging the Buddha to set out on his career of preaching and save human beings: even Brahma, that is, is radically degraded.
And yet the commonsense of mankind has always agreed that Buddhism is a religion. It was as a religion, as a religious competitor, that an unholy alliance of Brahmins and Muslim invaders swept it out of its Indian homeland. (By unholy alliance, I do not mean that at any point any Brahmin leader sat down with any Muslim khan and actually planned the extermination of Buddhist monasteries; I mean that there was a converging interest between the invaders and the ancient religion of the land, and therefore the actions of Brahmins and Muslims objectively co-operated in the destruction of Indian Buddhism.) It was as a religion that Indian, Chinese and Japanese Emperors built it splendid temples, carving whole hillsides in the shape of the Enlightened One. It is as a religion that the Christian West has faced it, either in the form of faddish showbiz adhesion (even to the extent of actors, singers and models wanting to be married according to a “Buddhist wedding rite” – there ain’t no sich thing) offering some sort of spiritual escape in a world where the rigours of Christianity are not welcome, or in the serious form of intellectual and spiritual confrontation between Western and Eastern mysticism. When Buddhism, in turn, looks for interlocutors and opponents in the West, it does not look for them in the schools and the universities, but in the churches. And if Buddhism is not a religion, what is it that two billion human beings hold as spiritual truth in opposition to undoubted religions such as Christianity, Islam and Hinduism?
No: Buddhism is a religion. And if Buddhism is a religion, then religion is not primarily about God, worship, or faith. Western atheists, and westerners in general, only think so because the religion of their ancestors places a highly personal God, with a human face, at the centre of the universe; because it exists in the form of worship of this God; and because it places faith in Him very high in the order of virtues – “And now there are only three things that will last for ever, and they are faith, hope and love; and the greatest of these is love.” The great philosopher Karl Popper fell a victim to this sort of mistake: he thought Plato irreligious because Plato treated the popular stories about gods with no respect. Of course, Plato's religion was not primariy about such things at all - it was about the everlasting reality of the Ideas and their procession from Zeus - and to call him irreligious because he regarded this or that myth as a concoction created to fool the people is like calling a devout Protestant irreligious because he is not impressed by the blood of St. Januarius.
What, then, do religions have in common, if not gods or worship or faith? Or, to put in another way: how, on what grounds, does Christianity confront Buddhism? How does Islam confront Buddhism? How did Hinduism confront Buddhism before Buddhism was exterminated in India? How do the religious systems of China and Japan confront Buddhism? The answer in all cases is: as a way of describing existence. As systems about “life, the universe, and everything”. Religion is a philosophy of existence. Catholic Christianity demands a certain kind of cult, involving a certain kind of sacrifice; but it demands it because it holds a particular view of existence. This view involves the existence of a God with particular characteristics, the fact that the universe depends on this God for existence, and a particular view of God's relationship with mankind. All of these are parts of its description of reality - including both the idea and the description of God - and all the ritual and religious activities implied by Catholicism depend on its view of the world. Likewise Buddhism is an account of existence, including such a thing as a transmigrating soul, but no such thing as an ultimate God; and the ritual and religious activities it demands depend on its picture of existence. The picture of existence, the philosophy of existene, is everywhere the primary fact, which motivates all others.
To show the importance and significance of philosophical doctrines of existence in religious systems, let’s talk about the just-mentioned idea of creation. Most religions, apart from Islam, do not believe in “creation” in the sense of “creation out of nothing”, although many handbooks of comparative religion sloppily call “creation stories” what are really stories of re-creation, of the re-ordering of a previously existing, and indeed eternal, material universe. Both Buddhism and Hinduism believe in the eternity of existence, as did all Greek philosophical/religious systems, and the religion of ancient Egypt. Creation is nothing but a Christian idea, followed by Islam, and anticipated by certain strands of Hebraism. (Though by no means all. The Book of Genesis, which is a synthesis of two different pieces of pre-existent Jewish sacred writings, has both: its first chapter has the Spirit of God hovering over a pre-existent primordial mass which it simply puts in order, while its second chapter clearly describes creation out of nothing.)
Now what this means is that everything that exists depends upon the assent of God for its existence, in effect owes not only its form, but everything that makes it, to one single source – and that source a personal one, a will, an assent. (Thomas Aquinas once pointed out that, though a beginning in time is a part of the Christian faith, it is nevertheless possible to conceive of a universe that is infinite in time and that nevertheless depends upon the will of a transcendent God for its existence.) In Christian philosophy, we owe not just our life, but our being, to the fact that the God in three Persons made a conscious decision, something that can actually be compared to a human decision, to create; and that He could have decided otherwise . This creates a bond of dependency. God is as responsible for our being as our very parents, only even more so. And this involves two specific emotions, gratitude and love. Indeed, it can involve the opposite. I have known people who hated God because they hated their own existence. But Aristotle, who regarded God as the Soul of the World rather than as its ultimate creator, would not have known what any of us meant, either by thanking God, or, like Byron, by rebelling against Him. The great philosopher once remarked that we would think it rather strange to hear of someone loving Zeus. It is a Christian reaction, impossible in Hinduism or Platonism or Buddhism. And because of this personal link and sense of gratitude or otherwise, the Christian tradition involves a whole way of speaking of God which makes no sense whatever in Buddhism or Islam. A Buddhist who heard you speak of “Man’s quest for God”, which is a commonplace of Western pseudo-religious talk, would look at you blankly, or simply reinterpret your statement within his/her own categories, understanding it as “Man’s quest for Liberation” and removing the intensely personal emotion of the Christian and post-Christian world altogether. A Muslim would regard it as a self-indulgent religious frippery; God, he would say, is the one who is to find you - and when He does, God help you! Such difference does a difference in abstract doctrine make.
Before I go on, I want to add that the idea of gratitude for existence strikes me as one of those points at which the Christian revelation appears so entirely natural, so suited to reality as we experience it, so relevant to our lives and our feelings, as to give emotional and possibly even logical support to the faith itself. To love is natural, and to be grateful for what you love seems to me such a natural development that a religion that does not allow us to feel that gratitude seems to me deficient in the primary appreciation of reality. That is why that tremendous outburst of gratitude for life and breath, Beethoven’s Ninth, says so much to me. Western atheists of the monistic-materialist kind, as it has long been pointed out, are particularly unfortunate in this. They are no less than the rest of us the heirs of a tradition of emotional connection to the fact of existence; yet they find themselves in the emotionally unsatisfactory place of having to be grateful only for lesser things. I can be grateful to Beethoven for this or that masterpiece; but, if I were an atheist, to whom would I be grateful for Beethoven? Thankfully, I know exactly Who to thank.
If, then, religion is primarily a philosophy of existence, then monistic materialism certainly is a religion; and it is for this reason, too, that I feel nothing but contempt for Wicca, as for Asatru, James Hillman’s post-Junghianism, and all the other neo-paganisms. They do not even begin to claim that they have any real view of existence; all they say is that their message will suit people’s psychic inner realities, that is, that it will make them feel better. I regard all these neo-paganisms as religious masturbation. The person who moves from Wicca to atheism has taken an enormous step forwards in terms of intellectual responsibility, honesty, and religious truth.
Monistic materialism, on the other hand, is religious in everything except its outer trappings. Its own discourse about itself, its use of language, its relationship with the world, are all typical. To begin with, the claim of monistic materialism is historical: its main doctrine is that “today” – in the eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth, twenty-first century – we can no longer believe what our more ignorant fathers believed. Our time has received a newer and more advanced revelation of the nature of reality, which overpasses and replaces theirs. But this is the claim of all the world religions, from Zoroastrianism to Buddhism to Christianity to Islam. There always is a point in which a “true” doctrine about the nature of the universe is reached, which is bound to replace all the previous ones, which are either insufficient (doctrine of the earlier religions as praeparatio evangelica; Muslim view of “peoples of the Book”; Buddhism) or positively wicked (Zoroastrian view of the religoin of the Divs; occasional Christian claims that all previous religions except Hebraism were ran by demons; Muslim view of jahiliya). This is an inevitable by-product of the growing consciousness of civilized man that history is a real and a changing force. Not all great religions share this feature: those which do not arise from a reform or historical revelation – Hinduism, Taoism, Confucianism – do not postulate a similar break. But it is certain that the break in question is a religious phenomenon.
Another religious feature of monistic materialism, which arises from the same root, is its implicit demand for exclusiveness. To be what is normally called an atheist does not allow you to entertain any opposing view of reality. This is easily understandable: the only justification for such a historical movement of reform is that it represents a genuine advance in our understanding of reality – that its claims are true, or at least truer than any other – and that, therefore, to entertain the possibility of opposite claims is to slide from the better to the worse. Western Atheists make a claim to intellectual clarity and focus that demands that they should not allow their intellects to be fuddled by the claims of what they call “religion” – that is, all religions which are not theirs. Many of them would feel something like guilt if they found themselves drawn, on any grounds (e.g. emotional) to any other religion; especially to the bête noire, Catholic Christianity.
This is reflected in the way monistic materialism speaks of itself, a way which, incidentally, has effectively taken over our culture. In ordinary discourse, and, as I hope I am making clear, very much against the logic of the facts, the word “religion” is generally used as the opposite of the word “atheism”. This use is strictly comparable to the early Christian use of the word “pagan”, village-dweller. Christianity came into the world in opposition to a multiplicity of cults. When it gained political, social and intellectual victory, it invented a term for the opposition that greatly simplified matters: it labelled them all as "village practices" paganism (from pagus, that is the kind of village that is too small to have an autonomous existence or to count even as a small town). All of them, from the superstition of an Egyptian villager to the lofty philosophy of Plotinus, were no more than country stuff, fit only for ignorant and backward people left behind by the progress of knowledge. And in exactly the same way, just as Christianity labelled or libelled all other religions as “village practices”, so too monistic materialism labels all competing views of the world as “religion” - irrational, backward, unscientific. The exclusion is on exactly the same grounds: times have moved on, leaving the "ignorant, backward and easily led" believers in "religion" to toy with their village superstitions. Please reflect on the fact that these usages both tend to treat the highest achievements of the human mind as no less superstitious and irrational, ignorant "village practices", as real rustic superstition. Socrates and Plotinus are no less pagan than the ignorant rustic leaving a sacrifice to his village god; and Beethoven composing the Ninth Symphony and the Solemn Mass is as much under the grip of superstition as the most ignorant Neapolitan waiting for the blood of St.Januarius to liquefy.
Inherited pietas and native respect towards things that are instinctively experienced as great do not allow most atheists to push this way of speaking and thinking as far as it should logically be pushed; but the terms require it. If Beethoven was serious, as he certainly was, when he solemnly declared, as the very climax of his symphony and indeed of his career: Brüder! Überm Sternenzelt/ Muss ein lieber Vater wohnen!/ Ihn stürtzt nieder, Millionen?/ Ahnest du den Macher, Welt?/ Such Ihm überm Sternenzelt!/ Über Sternen muss Er wohnen ("Brothers! Above the canopy of stars, there must dwell a loving Father! Do you knee before Him, millions? Do you feel the Maker, world? Seek Him above the stars' canopy; there, above them, must He dwell!") - then Beethoven was promoting superstition, and, to be blunt, wasting his talent in a bad cause. To any coherent atheist, this is at best a piece of historically-determined nonsense, the superstitious transfer of a father-figure into the top of the world; that was how the Soviets of old used to present it, as soon as they realized that they could not altogether get rid of religion in all the culture they lay claim to. That, above all, is the implication of the use of the word "religion" to oppose "atheism".
To sum up my argument, the opposition “atheism/religion” is false. Far from being linguistically neutral, is a particularly fraudulent piece of linguistic imperialism. Atheism is not the opposite of religion, any more than Christianity is the opposite of religion. The effect of this false opposition, bought like a pig in a poke by the whole of contemporary culture (including even C.S.Lewis and not a few churchmen!), is to cast the whole intellectual past of man into the shadow of one tremendous new revelation; which is exactly what the world religions, from Zoroastrianism on, did.
Atheism, in fact, what some silly people describe as humanism and some pedantic ones as monistic materialism, is utterly and totally a religion. It declares that a certain way to think of and describe reality is correct, or at least closer to the truth than any other; it makes a clear and definite statement about reality. And there is this too, that it carries the emotional corollary of rejecting all other competing theories, and often of experiencing them not only as mistaken but as temptations.
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A few questions
Date: 2008-04-14 03:45 pm (UTC)Do you admit that, unlike purple galaxies, any entity defineable as God is certainly a part of such a picture? (Purple galaxies may or may not exist without great alteration to the picture of existence as such; the existence and qualities of God, on the other hand, are surely inevitably and immediately relevant to it.)
Do you admit that the motivating principle behind all honest religious practice is the idea the religion has of existence?
Do you admit that, therefore, the motivating core, the thing without which religion could not exist, is not the ritual, the practice, but the philosophy of existence?
Do you admit that monistic materialism (to give it its philosophical name) is a perfectly valid philosophy of existence, that can be taken as credible, defended in argument, and even used as a base for action?
Finally, do you understand what I mean when I say that the job of defamation carried out by early Christians against competing religions when they called them "village practices" ("paganism") is the same in kind as that carried out by atheists when they claim to oppose "atheism" to "religon"?
Re: A few questions
Date: 2008-04-14 04:22 pm (UTC)I suspect that even less intelligent human beings have a philosophy of existence, even if they remain mostly unaware of it, but essentially, yes.
Do you admit that, unlike purple galaxies, any entity defineable as God is certainly a part of such a picture? (Purple galaxies may or may not exist without great alteration to the picture of existence as such; the existence and qualities of God, on the other hand, are surely inevitably and immediately relevant to it.)
With qualification; inasmuch as any reasonably complete philosophy of existence has to include a physics as well as a metaphysics, the existence of something so very contradictory to physics as we know it should be part of such a picture, but that's quibbling, really, especially over a throwaway example. Your underlying point here I certainly admit.
Do you admit that the motivating principle behind all honest religious practice is the idea the religion has of existence?
I agree.
Do you admit that, therefore, the motivating core, the thing without which religion could not exist, is not the ritual, the practice, but the philosophy of existence?
I agree.
Do you admit that monistic materialism (to give it its philosophical name) is a perfectly valid philosophy of existence, that can be taken as credible, defended in argument, and even used as a base for action?
It is. I would, however, stipulate that not all atheism is monistic materialism.
Finally, do you understand what I mean when I say that the job of defamation carried out by early Christians against competing religions when they called them "village practices" ("paganism") is the same in kind as that carried out by atheists when they claim to oppose "atheism" to "religon"?
I believe so, yes. However, I think this conflates two different positions both of which could be described as opposition. A firm adherent to monistic materialism is, in effect, taking up a position equal and opposite to that of theism in asserting that the evidence demonstrates that his philosophy of existence, which includes no God, is correct. I would admit that that can be considered a 'religious' position, although really I think what's called for is a word that describes faith-based/unprovable positions so asserted that includes both it and theistic religions to properly describe both; given the origin and use of the word "religion", I don't think it fits the purpose very well. But in this case, I would agree that this is defamation in that sense and kind.
The other position, which is mine and I believe that of many other atheists, is that while I believe my philosophy of existence is as close to correct as I can make it, given the evidence available on which to base it, the evidence available to me is finite and non-conclusive in many areas, and thus the resulting philosophy is necessarily also incomplete and non-conclusive. This isn't the same as the agnostic position, because I have no reason to judge the question unknowable, but the current evidence also is insufficient to judge the question either way. I consider this an atheist position, because the rules of logic require me not to assume existence without evidence, but it's also, I would say, opposed to both religion, in its common sense, and to the type of atheism described above; both of them are making assertions about the concept of God that are unprovable by the evidence. I would describe that, effectively, as a middle position between the two beliefs.
Re: A few questions
Date: 2008-04-14 05:01 pm (UTC)However, I disagree with you that there is a difference between your assumption of atheism on the evidence - changeable on the production of more evidence - and faith. Faith does not mean believing the impossible - the proper word for that is "moronism". Faith means overcoming the doubt that is an inevitable concomitant when dealing with ultimate matters; a doubt which is first and foremost a doubt "of the instrument", that is of our own ability to properly assess such things and come to credible conclusions. How could such things as you or I comprehend the meaning of existence? Nonetheless, the question asks itself to us in a hundred different ways each day, and we make our decision based on our best possible understanding. Speaking as a historian, the evidence for Christianity is overwhelming, better than that for almost any historical event before the invention of the press. And if we trusted evidence implicitly, we would all accept the narratives that bring it to us. However, many of us do not; not for the failed nineteenth-century attempts to deny the historicity of the New Testament, but out of something much more basic of which the school of Tubingen is nothing but a modern outgrowth. It is not radical disbelief in God either. Nobody who is not a complete fool would deny that, assuming such a being as God, all sorts of supernatural oddities are perfectly possible, and that, on its own assumptions, the New Testament narrative can make sense. What really defies belief is that the narrators should really have meant what they said. The first recorded opponent of the Gospel narrative, Celsus, did not actually declare that the Gospels were an imposture or a legend; he challenged the witnesses. A Roman court, in his time, would never have accepted the testimony of a bunch of women (he relies pretty heavily on his contempt for female testimony), and it is pretty clear that it was the hysterical stories of the women that set off a firework of delusion and possibly deception among the disciples, deprived as they were of their leader. What this means is that to accept the Gospels as a historical source, as I do because of my work, is not enough: you also have to accept that that source speaks - what we call "Gospel truth". And that means relying on the testimony of other human beings like yourself. It is a "doubt of the instrument".
Oh, and with reference to my original first point - by "decently intelligent", I meant "anyone above the level of a vegetable".
Re: A few questions
Date: 2008-04-18 02:47 pm (UTC)That is an excellent and key question in this topic. While we may find agreement that, as philosophies of existence, religion and atheism may co-exist in isolation, we must not ignore the cultural dynamics. The comparison between, for example, Sagan and Dawkins is an excellent point on which to focus. We (general) often focus on the egregious violence committed against the early Christians by the Roman government, but it must be emphasized that the punishments were for the crime of refusing to acknowledge and participate in the rituals of the state religion. History is rife with similar examples of religious violence. We should not be surprised that Dawkinsesque rhetoric is taken in that light.
The conflict I see is in the unconscious comparison between acquired and revealed. Christianity starts as a revealed (holy text, catechism, etc.) belief system; modern paganisms start as acquired (i.e. experiential) belief systems. Again, consider: one does not discover on one's own that a person named Jesus was the son of God, preached a radically new message for his time, and was executed-resurrected-ascended to heaven on behalf of humanity, then suddenly meet others who have the same belief. At some point well beyond our lifetimes, Wicca may morph into a revealed belief system, and arguably is already somewhat down that path. But, as a subset member of "paganism", it remains a belief system that one can at least to a certain point discover for one's self.
Another point of conflict is mythos. Christianity (and other belief systems) have established mythos that define the belief system in a sort of feedback loop. Wicca has a short list of core beliefs, but no unifying mythos. From where I sit, you are making the mythos mistake: you see unification structure in some religions, and failing to find it in paganism make the fallacious comparison underlying your (unfortuante, grin) usage of "religious masturbation". I would expect pagan reconstructionists to recognize this, since their effort is primarily focused on learning the original mythos and attempting to work it into contemporary contexts.
My rebuttal would look something like this: You expect a religion to partake in an established, revealed mythos that provides easily recognized structure and continuity. Modern pagans approach mythos as individuals, discover like-minded fellows with whom to form community and joint exploration, and acquire their beliefs as part of their journey.
That there are exceptions to my generalizations is stipulated. I do not believe they necessarily invalidate the abstract level of my argument.
Re: A few questions
Date: 2008-04-18 04:19 pm (UTC)Re: A few questions
Date: 2008-04-18 06:28 pm (UTC)Criticizing a belief system in terms of one's own belief system is invalid. It becomes a projection of one's beliefs onto the mythos of the "target", giving utterly predictable, false results like "modern pagans don't have a unified creation myth, therefore they are not a religion."
I don't mean to put words in your mouth. I do mean to reject the notion that Christian apologia has much credibility when it criticizes other belief systems. I apply the same standard to my fellow pagans when they engage in Christian bashing, and I reject the same from Dawkins and his "talking snake" snark.
Re: A few questions
Date: 2008-04-18 06:46 pm (UTC)Re: A few questions
Date: 2008-04-19 02:01 am (UTC)Re: A few questions
Date: 2008-04-19 02:01 am (UTC)Re: A few questions
Date: 2008-04-19 03:22 am (UTC)Re: A few questions
Date: 2008-04-19 08:13 am (UTC)Re: A few questions
Date: 2008-04-19 07:41 pm (UTC)