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Is Life a Tale Told by an Idiot? Probably.
My favorite political commentator, Dennis Prager, recently argued (Explaining the Left) that the hard political Left in the US and most intellectuals in Europe have abandoned traditional religions. To replace what they’ve abandoned, they’ve adopted a false religion of left wing political activism. Prager’s thesis makes a lot of sense to me.
Unhappily, Prager’s unflattering portrait of the Left’s lack of religious affiliations also describes me. That is, what he says of the Left—they have no God, believe most of the Bible is myth, and that death brings oblivion—is what I believe.
I’m uncomfortable, as you might imagine, being an ally of the Left. I want to be with you who believe. But I can’t. If there is such a thing as a religious bone, I lack it. My mom and dad also lacked that bone.
According to Prager, my life should be bereft of meaning. I have no religion and I don’t even have the Left’s politics to fall back on. (I’m even tepid in my right wing politics.) Yet I find life full of meaning. How can this be?
This way: When I was younger, I found significant meaning in teaching, writing, and helping to raise my kids. Now retired, I even find meaning in the commonplaces of daily life: sweeping the porch, doing my crosswords, feeding Ebbie the cat, walking in the evening with Bob the dog. These things are enough for me.
But even if I didn’t find meaning in the pedestrian, the meaning that my wife Marie 💕 lends to my life would be enough.
All well and good. It’s not hard to find meaning in life. Almost everyone does. It’s so easy, we hardly give it a second thought. Those whose find their lives empty sometimes check out of life early. I don’t blame them. If I felt my life was meaningless, I would probably check out early too.
Oddly, though I don’t agree with my favorite philosopher Dennis Prager in this matter, I happen to agree with my least favorite philosopher, the existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre: “Life has no meaning a priori,” Sartre says, “It is up to you to give it meaning.”
Would my life have more meaning if I had a religion? Perhaps. On a trip to Japan a few years back, Marie and I came across a shrine featuring rows and rows of little dolls, probably a thousand of them. Each doll, I was told, represented a dead child. Buddhist mothers and fathers visit these shrines every so often, where they change the little clothes of the dolls that represent their children. I have no doubt that the parents find that modest religious rite not only gives comfort to their lives, but also gives meaning to the loss of their child. We like to think that death makes sense.
There is something else in Prager’s thesis that I also disagree with. This is the idea that society would splinter and degrade without the support of religion. In that, he agrees with the Russian Christian, Fyodor Dostoevsky. Ivan, Doestoevsky’s atheist antagonist in The Brothers Karamazov claims that if there is no God, there are no rules to live by and no moral law to follow—and everything is permitted. Dostoevsky suggests that if Ivan’s philosophy ever became a society’s prevailing philosophy, things would fall apart and “mere anarchy,” in Yeats’ famous phrase, “[would be] loosed upon the world.”
Dostoevsky and Prager needn’t have worried. There are a host of forces outside religion to keep our passions in check and go to support a lawful society. For one thing, those who don’t fear God do fear going to jail. That is a powerful deterrent.
Other non-Christian forces keep us striving for the good. Plato, Aristotle, Zeno and a host of other pagan philosophers may be dead, but their ideas continue to form a part of the culture that we swim in.
And of course, atheists, pagans, and believers alike learn from Jesus, the greatest teacher of them all. The moral law that is taught every Sunday permeates our society and therefore becomes a part of the moral universe, even for non-believers.
For that reason, I’m a enthusiastic supporter of religion, especially the Judeo-Christian variety. There is no doubt in my mind that religion not only improves our moral life, but it also increases social stability and helps to ameliorate our base instincts.
Would I be more moral if I were a believer? Probably not. It’s true, as you probably suspect, that I don’t feel the weight of sin, and I have only a small conscience. But I and other non-believers live in a world of moral imperatives that was created by Jews, Christians, pagan philosophers, atheists, teachers, Boy Scout leaders, and others. All of those influences encourage me to refrain from lying, to contribute to charities, to be nice to people, and so on.
One of those moral imperatives encourages me to be nice to animals. My cat Ebbie is wracked with arthritis in these her latter days. So a few months back I built a little bench for Ebbie so that she could step up more easily into her litter box. (As you might expect, I’m fond of that passage in the Bible where the Deuteronomist commands Jewish farmers to unmuzzle the mouths of their oxen as the animals work. Unmuzzled, the oxen can then eat as they help thresh the farmers’ grain.)
I’m not the greatest moral exemplar of our species. I’m probably somewhere between St. Francis of Assisi on one side, Hitler on the other. My Christian wife is more moral than I am, more generous, and more forgiving—though I’ve always thought that her moral superiority is the result of her sex and her nature rather than her religion.
I even pray occasionally, though I’m almost certain that my prayers waft up and disappear into the ether, unheard and unacknowledged. Prayer is a form of meditation for me. I send my prayers upward. That’s enough for me.
So how do you and I differ in the way we lead our lives? Are you nicer to your spouse, steal less often than I do? Riot and burn cars fewer times than I do? Give to beggars more than I do? I bet you don’t treat your dog and cat as well as I do.
How would my life be different if I were a believer?
Most people on this site are probably religious. Religion and the Right (the two R’s) just seem to go together. I’d like to hear from you. Would your life be less rich without religion? Could you be moral without religion to support your behavior? Or would your life remain much the same?
Are there any others out there in Ricochet land like me? Chime in. I don’t like to feel alone.
Published in General
I think Lewis stole the term from an Anglican divine of the sixteenth and or seventeenth century. He (Lewis) was ambivalent about the word “Mere,” saying (in the Four Loves,) that one should be cautious about its use because it’s a “dangerous word.” So I presume he chose it, and uses it, carefully and with a specific purpose.
I’m trying to unwrap this in my head and for the life of me… I just can’t.
First off: Sam is culturally Jewish – but Jews in America inhabit a peculiar position in the sense that they are routinely offered the branch of Christianity merely by dint of immersion in the predominantly Christian American culture – as are the secular. We the secular are inundated by Christian messaging which is part of the cultural water which Christians swim in. Much like fish, Christians don’t know they’re wet and take for granted that this water is just what you’re supposed to be breathing, which explains the eruptions of outrage which come about when that default assumption is challenged in even mild ways.
That also doesn’t mean that Sam ought not bring up such arguments again precisely because we know a considerably greater amount now than we did a hundred or thousand years ago by default.
There’s some interesting social science which posits that the children of parents who are of different faiths tend to exhibit more skepticism or are frequently agnostic/atheist. One possible explanation for this might be frustration, but it seems more likely that the ability to hold two mutually exclusive premises in your mind simultaneously (and not suffer crippling cognitive dissonance) grants you a sort of “outsider status” which enables you to assess such claims at face value – and let’s face it: for all the parts that matter, you’ve imbibed the Christian narrative pretty completely. That makes it impossible for you (and, I admit, for me) to be genuinely objective about it.
But looking at their own faith from the perspective which they view others’ faiths is something which Christians don’t seem to do well… because the other people’s water is somehow wetter than ours.
Neither Prager nor I argue that atheists can’t be moral — good people living good lives. That’s a straw man.
That blacks (ostensibly) are more “Christian” and more likely to commit crimes speaks to the degradation of black (American) culture that came with the Great Society, don’t you think?
And that addresses my point. You and Shermer and other prominent atheists find your atheism “works” for you. But, it’s a disaster for average people under sway of secular cultural forces, both personally and for society at large.
Amen to that.
Darn, I did it again. I wrote a post that elicited responses that are smarter and more well informed than what I wrote. You know you make me look bad, don’t you? But you apparently don’t care about my feelings.
In another post awhile back, I told you to stop that. If you must respond, dumb it down for the sake of my ego. I’m looking at you, GrannyDude, Simon, Shawn, She, Walton, Mrs. Toad, et. al.
In straight pool, a hustler who plays beneath his skill is laying down. That’s what I want all of you to do: lay down.
Them’s fightin’ words….
I know exactly how you feel. The members here are astounding in terms of the depth of their knowledge and expertise. :-)
Increasingly, I find that Prager merely pays lip service to that statement. After mouthing that platitude he then goes on to lambaste secular people as contributing to the decline of society. I mean, not for nothing, how is my married household (both highly educated and successful) with three children who will attend college and continue those traditions “destroying western civilization”?
The answer is: the two are not mutually inclusive. Secular =/= destruction of society.
It merely means that religiosity is not an inoculant to acting badly. At least, it is an insufficient condition to prevent it. Look at the example of 90+% Christian Rwanda: over the course of a few months, a million or so people were hacked, burned or shot to death in a nation more Christian than America; the greatest gout of mass-killing that has been seen in modern times, arguably.
Look at the Lord’s Resistance Army. Are they also not “true Scotsmen?”
Values matter a great deal more than religiosity or what faith you practice.
This seems incredibly demeaning to average people. The notion that “average people” require the threat of the Celestial Dictator in order to behave well is an implicit admission that totalitarianism might be desirable or even laudable… at least, it is for them.
I don’t regard myself as some sort of Super-man. I have foibles just like everyone else, but it also seems to me that when faced with difficulties I rely upon entirely rational or explicable values in order to find my way through them.
Prager is right that many people regard God some sort of Celestial Butler. But my argument isn’t even with those people, who are out of their minds.
I don’t think this is a good logical deduction. According to Pew Research, only 8 out of ten Blacks say that religion is important in their lives, 3/4 pray at least once a day, and only half attend church services. This leaves literally millions of Blacks outside this fold, and I seriously doubt that many of the criminals are religious people. The number of people who commit crimes, even in the Black community, is a small percentage.
Crime is almost unknown among Mormons, Amish, and Orthodox Jews. (I am sure there are others)
You could argue that the overall religious feeling in the Black community should permeate most of their community, but there are huge cultural differences between Blacks who live in suburban or rural areas as opposed to Blacks living in the inner cities. And even in the inner cities there are huge differences with respect to law and order.
http://www.pewforum.org/2009/01/30/a-religious-portrait-of-african-americans/
The vast majority of African-Americans live in cities. They are, by definition, almost solely urban.
I’m also very familiar with the Pew Religious Landscape Survey, having cited it repeatedly as a fascinating insight which punctures many people’s presumptions about American Religious life. Here’s what it has to say about African-American religious practice:
There may be other subgroups which closely resemble African-American attitudes towards religion, but they are, on average, clearly far more observant than the average American and at least as observant (as a group) if not moreso than the most readily identifiable religious group in the country (Evangelicals.) They clearly differ in other respects, which is why this particular data point is interesting.
roflm[redacted]o.
I think, technically, this comment is a bit of a CoC violation, but since I did redact part of it, I’ll leave it for now.
I would like to push back on this just a skosh.
Sure: the backstop of law enforcement serves as a strong deterrent… but I would argue that its deterrent effect ironically works most strongly on people who were unlikely to break that norm in the first place.
Clearly, the thought of “jail” is insufficiently strong to prevent the most determined violators from carrying on, but it’s also arguable that such people similarly view the prospect of eternal or cosmic punishment as hazy, indistinct and rather unintimidating. Even the prospect of the Death Penalty seems insufficient for the incorrigible.
Perhaps they’re less risk-averse. Perhaps they’re sufficiently egotistical as to not think they’ll be caught or that they’re smart enough to talk their way out of it. Whatever it is, it seems inarguable that a certain cohort of society will, for whatever reason, break society’s rules no matter what the prospective punishment.
The flip side of that argument is that society would be ungovernable or chaotic if the only thing holding people back from engaging in mass criminality is the potential for punishment. Clearly, things like “conscience” and Adam Smith’s dictum that people desire “both to be loved and to be lovely” are sufficiently strong to hold most people back from what otherwise might be their worst instincts.
Good post. I really don’t have time to deal with it today, but it is too important: I struggle with many of the same things but from the opposite point of view. I am a believer, but I have a problem with the way a lot of absolutist doctrines are put forth. Not that I don’t believe the doctrines are absolute, but we seem to put them out with a lot of baggage and spend a lot of time unnecessarily kowtowing..
If there is a God, He is part of the reality we swim in. If he is important, you would expect to see evidence of His existence. If we matter to Him you would expect Him to have reached out to us. People may not believe in the revelatory importance of scripture, but it sure looks like someone is reaching out to us. The fact that society works better when we follow lives that at least mimic the virtues presented in the ten commandments, it seems to lend some credence the idea that they are evidence of a fundamental reality that includes the God that handed them down. When the world views of Plato and Aristotle, in which things make sense because they arise from the orderly mind of a creative God, are fundamental not only to science , but to the theology of Augustine and Aquinas, it seems to provide powerful evidence of the reality of God’s existence and the need to take Him seriously.
That having been said, sometimes it seems like God should be more like gravity or the second law of thermodynamics; of critical importance to the universe, but not something that should necessarily be front and center every moment of our lives. Yes, being a believer is a matter of choice, a choice that we must make over and over again, multiple times every day. There is evil in the world and the day may come when I have to choose to deny what I now claim to be true, or suffer death for the truth, but I am not sure it follows from that that every day life has to be suffused with such drama. Yes, there are those whose conversions stories are dramatic tales of salvation, but I haven’t walked that path, do I need to suffuse my life with the same drama? Should I have raised my kids in that mold? Is there a place for living a life just as you have described yours, but based upon the knowledge of the existence of a creator God and an acknowledgement of Him as one’s lord and master?
I have more to say but I am running out of space and time. There should be a good joke in that.
Oh, I wouldn’t want Sam Harris to stop doing what he does.
I would be fascinated to see what he’d come up with were he to enter an M.Div program at a seminary and try wrestling with the big boys. I’d bet it would be awesome.
Anyway, I enjoy his writing and his interviews (and yours, if it comes to that). And I should say that it is quite possible I’ve missed some of his more sophisticated and penetrating analysis?
The mistake that I think atheists make (it was my mistake too, so no judgement here) isn’t so much their dismissal of, say, the Bible. It is their dismissal of human beings. I don’t mean that atheists are merely unkind. They are also incurious and closed-minded and thus…how shall I put this? Stupid.
Maybe that’s too harsh a word. And not quite accurate, either…hmmmn.
I have an image of Sam Harris as one of those guys who stands around in a museum rolling his eyes and irritably declaring that Vermeer is boring. And yet…why is he still in the gallery? Indeed, whether this is his intention or not, by arguing with religion for the past two decades or so, he has been voting with his feet (or pen) for the proposition that God is worth attending to; that religion matters.
We can’t all be interested in, let alone deeply educated about, everything. There are lots and lots of subjects I have only enough knowledge of to get myself into trouble (over the past few years, many Ricochetti have helped to reveal these lacunae, to my embarrassment!) I have learned , albeit late in life, to recognize that when a whole lot of human beings find value and fascination in what seem to me to be incredibly boring subjects—Atonal music for example, or theoretical math—the lack is probably mind. If I find myself getting annoyed by, rather than indifferent to, such fascination (how can you call that awful noise music? or how can it be math if there aren’t even numbers? ) surely it means that, for some reason, I’ve got skin in the game.
You, dear Majestyk, do seem to have skin in this game. You seldom pass up an opportunity to challenge the assertions of Christians (you seem less quick off the mark when it comes to Jews, but that may be my misperception and/or projection). Religion matters to you.
No, I’m not accusing you (or Sam) of being an inchoate Christian nor do I have designs upon your immortal (or mortal) soul. I think you’re excellent the way you are and besides, God in God’s wisdom makes a lot of demands on me (along “love-God-love-your-neighbor” lines) but not through me, if you see what I mean; so no proselytizing.
YES!
I think the connection isn’t between being religious and being the perpetrator of crime. I think it is between religiosity and being the victim of crime: A neighborhood with a high murder rate will also have a high rate of grief and suffering
A profound loss—the death of a son to murder would do it—does tend to focus ones mind on the big questions. This isn’t just the “atheists in foxholes’ thing—it is a feature of the experience of grief.
You know how the Buddha said “life is suffering?” He meant that our suffering is the inevitable result of clinging to what is ultimately evanescent—everything and everyone we love is impermanent. We will lose what we cannot bear to lose, and there will be no choice but to bear it.
I remember thinking about this in Seminary, because so many of my fellow seminarians had, like me, taken a big hit one way or another. Death of a child, death of a spouse, losing both parents in a single year or both breasts to cancer, losing everything one has worked for to alcoholism, having a happy marriage suddenly dissolve before one’s eyes… I began to think of these as forcible un-attachments.
Because I work with grief-stricken people, I have seen a lot of forcible un-attachment, enough to know that human beings respond to tragedy in identifiable ways. One, of course, is to try to get away from the pain (we all do a bit of that, and go figure!), generally by clinging even harder to what remains to us. But the other is to go toward the pain, to wrestle with it as Jacob wrestled with the angel of God, to not let go until the blessing is there to catch us.
There are certainly plenty of people in inner-city urban black communities who are doing the get-away-from-pain thing. But there are others who are—I’ve been blessed to meet a few spectacular examples —who are wrestling the Angel.
I think his work on Neuroscience has contributed more to the corpus of human knowledge and is considerably more important.
That’s just like, your opinion, man…
But in all seriousness: how am I supposed to assess this? Is “incurious and closed-minded” a synonym for “skeptical and hard-nosed” when it comes to absurd claims that people make uncritically about dead people getting up and walking around, or the spontaneous rearrangement of molecules by miraculous means?
If that’s the case, then I plead guilty.
However, it’s fair to point out that I’m equally skeptical (and particularly brutal) about claims of Paradise, 72 Virgins and being fed honeyed cakes next to a river of wine for all eternity as well. Or New-World Jewish Tribes seeing Jesus. Or Celestial Marriage. Or the Galactic Warlord Xenu and body thetans. You too share those skepticisms as I’m certain your ecumenicism only goes so far. One of us is being consistent and the other, inconsistent.
I try scrupulously to be fair about these things, but if you feel like I pick on Christians unduly, all I can say is:
Well, it’s sort of central to life in our nation, and particularly given that we are surrounded by Christians. My family is full of them. Yeah. Hard to get away from it.
Aside from that: It matters to me because I would prefer that we all share a common set of facts from which we can derive values. When one side of the argument says that my lack of a psychic relationship with a cosmic Jew is endangering the pillars of Western Civilization, it gets my attention. I want to know specifics.
If I were to say that even though I don’t believe in God, I nonetheless act in a fashion mostly indistinguishable from most Christians, would that ease people’s fears? Apparently not. Are moral seculars to be treated with suspicion and contempt for not living down to stereotypes?
Bring it!
I’m down with that my Brother.
Not cool. LRA had nothing (as in nada) to do with Christianity.
I think they would dispute that. Aside from that: the same argument could be made about Islamic terrorists. Do they too have nothing to do with Islam vis a vis its peaceful practitioners? Without engaging in mind-reaiding, I think we have to take people at their word when they claim to be part of a thing and the reasons behind what they’re doing.
But there are plenty of other ethnic, religiously motivated groups and insurgents to choose from. The IRA. The Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda. The Serbs and Croats in the former Yugoslavia. All of these situations involve Christians acting in a pretty monstrous fashion to (sometimes) other Christians and in some cases other non-Christians.
All I’m saying is that people frequently treat their Christian identity as another sub-identity to their larger super-identity; one which becomes subordinate to the larger cause when the chips are down.
It certainly can be a synonym for that, although—if I may say so— being skeptical and hard-nosed about absurd claims is hitting an awfully small nail with an awfully big hammer.
Do you really have relatives who want you to believe that dead people get up and walk around?
I can think of a few dead people I wish would get up and walk around, and quite a few that I’m glad have not done so…which always seems to me the best argument against resurrection: what good did it do anyone to have Lazarus resurrected after three days in the tomb? That’s a real question—not “did it happen” but “what was the point?”
Whether you are a skeptic or a believer (or both, as I could claim to be) the least interesting and (IHO) fruitful way to read the Bible is as a biology or physics textbook. It’s a question of genre, or rather of genres: there’s poetry, history, gospel, folktale, proverbs, instructions for building a temple and song lyrics in that anthology, but no recipes for chocolate cake and no E=MC2.
Maybe the next time a relative demands that you believe that all humanity is descended from two people, one of them formed from the rib of the other, you could ask them why this is important? If the only answer is “because that’s what the Bible says” (it doesn’t) then it might not be worth continuing but you might get something a little more interesting if you look for meaning.
As you probably know already, back in the day, when Williams Jenning Bryan defended against the teaching of evolution in the schools, his concern wasn’t about facts, it was about meaning, and the way Darwinism and the findings of Mendel were being used to validate eugenics and racism. That was—God knows—a valid concern given how the Nazis would take this “settled science” to what they saw as the purely logical and rational conclusion.
In the 1920s, “we” also knew more than we’d known a hundred or a thousand years before.
Probably not so much as one might think.
Douglas Murray is interesting on this score. Though he is, himself, an atheist (I think that’s how he’d describe himself) and is certainly very cognizant of some of the …ahem..difficulties posed by religion past and present, he also feels that Jewish and Christian religion are inextricable from Western civ and that, indeed, the fading-out of Christian faith has left a vacuum that an unabashed and muscular Islam is bound to fill.
“Being a good person” doesn’t seem quite able to compete, in part because—again—human beings are called (or wired) to seek, grasp and encode their perception of that which was known to our ancestors as it shall be known to our descendents…by the name of God.
Or Allah, if you prefer (or maybe, depending on where you live, even if you don’t).
The difficulty, of course, is that you can’t make yourself believe something that you simply don’t believe and—since lying is one of the things neither God nor secular good-person-ness is down with, you shouldn’t.
Yes. They’re called “Christians.”
Matthew 27:51:
Many Christians believe this to be the literal truth. I’m not sure why (or if) you disagree with them. I don’t think this is a straw man argument either – they loudly and proudly proclaim that they believe this actually happened.
But is there something contained therein which is useful to us, aside from being aesthetically pleasing? It may as well be a nice novel with an overriding moral message, then. Perhaps it could provide an explanation of the germ theory of disease? Maybe an explanation that mentally disturbed people aren’t in fact inhabited by devils or spirits? Far from it, it says the opposite in most cases.
The problem with this complaint is that your perspective on this may well be novel among Christians. This is supposed to be the literal word of God – much of it inspired by him if it wasn’t exactly dictated by him to its authors.
Compare with the Koran, which was supposedly delivered to the illiterate prophet Muhammed via automatic writing. The Bible is an anthology; a work of many hands over the course of a millennium whose contents weren’t issued to us on a plate from the heavens with “authoritative version issued for immediate release” stamped on it. It was the work of a committee, which is to say it is a camel…
Even if you assume the committee’s hand was guided by the almighty, do you think something of substance could have made it into Rev. 0, or at least something which would indisputably place it in the realm of divine inspiration?
I rather doubt that Douglas’s answer to radical Islam is “radical Christianity” in turn.
The answer to that problem is less, not more radicalism.
Late to the party, Kent, but I have to say: In your earlier career of teaching and writing, in raising a family, in persevering in love and commitment – not to mention your phenomenal woodworking – and your unconditional bonding with Bob. You are acknowledging the Good, True, and Beautiful in your life. (Even if you don’t follow the path(s) others have taken.) Sorry to tell you this, but you’re more like “us” than you think. :-) Keep living, loving, and learning: You’re pretty doshgarned good at it, I think.
But it’s a pretty great camel.
It’s not that novel. I did manage to get ordained, after all, and it’s not like I’ve been hiding my light under a bushel.
When my book Here If You Need Me was about to be published, I did actually have a few moments where I worried that people I worked with would read it, the scales would fall from their eyes, and “Arghhh! you’re a heretic!”
Instead, I got very nice letters (and, later, e-mails) from full-on born-again Christians, Catholic priests, atheists and everything in between saying that what I said—give or take a small heresy—made sense to them.
This has been my experience preaching in a wide variety of churches and church-like setttings (e.g. synagogues but not, obviously, as the rabbi, and Catholic churches without being the priest): I’m always exactly what I am, and it’s always received with generosity and, insofar as I diverge from dogma, a kind of loving forbearance. (God’s not done with any of us yet!)
The exception are Unitarian Universalist (that is, my) Churches which—though they are completely fine with atheism and secular morality—get extremely hinky about conservatism or anything that smacks of conservatism, meaning that because I tend to say approving things about men (esp. cops) and occasionally express skepticism about abortion or global warming, vigorous condemnation is called for. I may wind up being excommunicated. Go figure.
Now that I think of it, the only other places I’ve been loudly and aggressively condemned as what was, in effect, a heretic were in completely secular environments, generally college campuses.
So I, too, am a product of my experiences bad and good. Christians (even the fundamentalist ones) have been much, much nicer to me than putatively secular moralists of the left-wing variety.
Obviously. Otherwise people wouldn’t still read it, preach from it and do their best to understand and abide by it.
So there’s the vote count. Also, to my continual surprise, it is useful to me.