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| quote: | Originally posted by woscar
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Well, I was bored during a seminar. I wrote it in a hurry but I think I was able to make the main point clear:
“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus” – St. Paul ”Oi, what if I don’t want to be one in Jesus Christ?! Sod off!” - Not even a bit saintly Lira
The reason why I don’t think we’re necessarily better off without religion, though I’m happy myself without it, is because (1) it doesn’t entail from the denial of the existence of God that all aspects of religious thought are going to crumble afterwards, so even if we did get rid of religion, no utopian age would ensue; and (2) the option to live a godless life is mine and mine only – if everyone else had the same goals I have, then it would follow that I’d wish everybody became an atheist. This actually gives me a much harder problem to deal with: What goals should be worth pursuing? I’ll talk about the endurance of religious ideas in a secular environment first, and then I’ll tackle the problem of what goals are worth our time.
Scepticism has its limits: even Pyrrho of Elis, the great ancient sceptic who doubted nearly everything there was under the sun, is said to have chased down a cook after he served a bad meal to his guests – so he didn’t doubt there was a cook, a bad meal, guests, and a sense of shame for having served his guests something that barely counts as edible. Doubt comes when our beliefs do not seem to work in the real world: Let’s say I believe God exists. I don’t just imagine there’s an entity G – I assign a set of values and traits to this entity: He may be omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient, all-loving, or if I want to go for something really pessimistic, He’s just a cruel bastard having a laugh at our expense. Now let’s say someone hundreds of years ago believed (s)he received a message from this entity G which says we should not kill one another (let’s call it rule R1). Society takes this as one of its tenets and organises itself around similar principles, namely R2, R3 up until Rn. As these rules become deeply ingrained in social life, they’re slowly taken for granted. Now let’s say this entity G never existed – does it make all these rules void? No, not at all, it just opens makes them more vulnerable to criticism, otherwise you’d come to the bizarre conclusion that just because the entity G said we shouldn’t kill one another (R1), the absence of this entity G allows you to gleefully engage on a killing spree. You may even point out that this belief was around long before anyone claimed to bring a message from the aforementioned higher power, but this needn’t be the case. R3 could be a very accurate scientific predicted that turned out to be spot on – like how to cure all kinds of cancer. Would it be desirable to ignore this rule just because there’s no entity G? After centuries of social practice, would you even be able to tell the revealed rules from the former ones apart?! That’s unlikely, unless you’re a very good historian.
Now back to the real world: Harris, Dawkins, Hitchens, and I don’t believe in God. Does that mean any of us managed to break up completely from our Christian past? Not really, and this is what bothers me about their approach. “Catholic” comes from the Greek word “Katholikos” meaning “Universal”. Everyone is free to become a Catholic and, for a while, it was widely believed that we’d all be better off being Catholic anyway because it would be the right path to salvation (perhaps most Christians nowadays subscribe either to some inclusivist view that says they’ve got the best path but other religions are quite good approximations, or pluralism, which says different religions offer equally effective paths to salvation, but this trend is quite recent in Christian thought). I agree with John Gray when he says there’s something very similar going on when atheist proselytisers tell us how amazing the world would be if we all ditched God. However, the reason why I feel the need to break up with their tradition is not because I think religion offers any sort of path to salvation, much less a true insight to whatever it is they are on about. I just don’t think everyone is out to seek the truth, or the natural truth at that (by natural I mean the truths about the natural world as opposed to a supernatural one). Some people would rather be happy than skilled at manipulating things in the world, the problems of having we all live under the same rules in a democratic society notwithstanding.
In this sense, as I posted in that thread about God, as religion has its dogmas, the enlightenment has what I call rational axioms, namely “You shall be rational” and “You shall rely on evidence-based knowledge, not on faith-based knowledge”. As an heir of the enlightenment, that’s how I live. However, I’m hard-pressed to justify my adoption of these axioms: You can only justify rationality THROUGH rationality (it’s not rational to be irrational), and once you try to explain that we should rely on experience because it’s proven to be more effective, we need to keep in mind that it is experience itself that taught us to guide ourselves by evidence. Both justifications require a lot of skill out of this circularity.
So, in the end, if I had to set the one goal I wish we all shared, it wouldn’t be the pursuit of happiness, the search for truth (I don’t even believe in a Truth anyway), or anything of that sort. I just think the liberty to do whatever we want without imposing our goals on everyone else should be the one axiom we ought to keep. Because, that itself, ironic though it is, is something that doesn’t just concern us, but the humanity as a whole.
CORe Version: Unlike S.E. Cupp, I don’t think there’s anything desirable about the Christian right. Unlike Harris, Dawkins, and Hitchens, I don’t think atheists need to save the world deconverting everyone. It’s fine to criticise religion, but simply because they’re sets of beliefs, not because we need to save the world from some sort of religious alienation or whatever. I’m no bloody Hegelian.
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