Atheism is Just the Beginning
Nietzsche once called Christianity Platonism for the masses. For some time now we’ve been trying to figure out — unsuccessfully — what’s atheism for the masses. Atheism is ungodly dry. But so, we are warned, is organized religion! The stale ceremonies; the obtuse rituals; in a world of diverse diversities, of particular persons with spontaneous passions, organized religion should persist at best, we are assured, only as one of many choices, as voluntary and contingent as any other of our social relationships. Which is as much as to say organized religion should be disorganized.
I don’t want to be glib about the real difficulties facing organized religion, or the real drawbacks. But I do want to suggest that what bothers many about organized religion is not so much the organization but what it’s organized around.
Consider Andrew’s recent post:
I finally read Hitch’s book on God a little while before my breather. I’m relieved to say I liked it much more than I was expecting to. A huge amount of his criticism of organized religion over the centuries is surely valid. I feel no hesitation in agreeing. […] Sam Harris is even more compelling an atheist to me, because of his obvious fascination with meditation, consciousness and truth. I’m not the only one to notice Sam’s spiritual side – he is, in fact, one of the more self-evidently spiritual people I’ve ever met. Here’s Stafford Betty in the Jesuit magazine, America:
Harris has kept company with contemplatives, men and women who know how to stop the whir of their own thoughts and tiptoe into an awareness that completely transcends their own puny egos. Paul Tillich called this the ground of being, and contemporary Buddhist writers, with whom Harris is in particular sympathy, use that phrase too. What does this ground of being feel like? Catholic mystics like Father Keating and Bede Griffiths, O.S.B., conceive of it as a joyous, compassionate, loving, powerful, boundless, light-filled reality that can be known intimately in the private sanctuary of their own mind. Leading American Buddhist teachers like Surya Das and Thubten Chodron would not disagree. Would Harris object to such a conception?
Forget Harris: would I? Consider Tocqueville:
Not content with the discovery that there is nothing in the world by one reaction and one Creator, he is still embarrassed by the primary division of things and seeks to expand and simplify his conception by including God and the universe in one great whole. If one finds a philosophical system which teaches that all things […] are only to be considered as the several parts of an immense Being who alone remains eternal in the midst of the continual flux and transformation of all that composes Him, one may be sure that such a system, although it destroys human individuality, or rather just because it destroys it, will have secret charms for men living under democracies. All their habits of mind prepare them to conceive it and put them on the way toward adopting it. It naturally attracts their imagination and holds it fixed. It fosters the pride and soothes the laziness of their minds.
Of all the different philosophical systems used to explain the universe, I believe that pantheism is one of those most fitted to seduce the mind in democratic ages. All those who still appreciate the true nature of man’s greatness should combine in the struggle against it.
Tocqueville knew what a thin gruel was scientific rationalism for the anxious democratic soul, which oscillates helplessly between emotional ambition and emotional sloth, between agitation and torpor. Joy without boundaries, accessible a la carte in your own Self, is as commodious for the Self-aware ‘puny ego’ as the titillating suggestion of love-based community that makes for organized pantheism. Eros lo Volt! Tocqueville didn’t quite glimpse how central would be a personal relationship with a pantheist God. But it seems to me that atheism is today largely a means, not an end; the idea that God isn’t anything readies the restless soul for the message that God is actually everything.
Yet here’s the catch: if God is everything, God is anything. Pantheism issues a standing invitation to create one’s own table of values. The only obstacle is a lack of ambition — the soft despotism of low expectations. And quite contrary to Tocqueville’s worry, Americans are more independent and self-creative than ever. The government is an atrociously large and meddling thing, but an omnicompetent tutelary state it ain’t. Our appreciation for that other boundless immanent experience — not of love but power — stokes a longing for aristocratic experiences of emotional distance that interact ambivalently with our democratic experiences of emotional solidarity. We’re developing a strange hybrid in America, a cross between the neo-Nietzschean virtuoso of the self and Nietzsche’s own despised practitioner of ‘European Buddhism’, the religion of pity. Organized religion, with its strictness about the nature of God and our relationship to Him as His creatures, has ambivalences of its own. But it stands against a certain kind of slippage that leads practical democratic moralists from atheism to pantheism to polytheism.
1) i know i tend to belabor this point, but in terms of psychology for most humans these distinctions are irrelevant on the level of psychological conceptions. i think that needs to be kept in mind when projecting macro-level inferences from micro-level theological shifts (the implication being that at the deep level religiosity for most people doesn’t differ much no matter the avowed theology).*
2) tocqueville seems to have been wrong about the united states, right? the churching of america by finke & stark implies that the power of organized religion & orthodox christianity waxed steadily from the founding until the 1960s. and the emergence of the expectation of the american president being an orthodox christian in a populist sense seems to be coincidentally concomitant with the spread of suffrage, no?
* note that the dominant strain within hinduism is ultimately pantheistic, but the immediate proximate manifestation for most hindus is theistic devotionalism. and hindus do seem to exhibit a strong sense of right & wrong, though obviously there are differences on the margins from westerners.
— razib · Apr 7, 02:20 AM · #
Is there any evidence for “a certain kind of slippage that leads practical democratic moralists from atheism to pantheism to polytheism” beyond the single example of Sam Harris?
— Bryan · Apr 7, 02:57 AM · #
A lot of Americans somehow believe, if only at a very glib, intuitive level, that pantheism and Christian devotional theism can somehow coexist. The soul can remain individuated after death, while the cosmos is still a big groovy all-encompassing swirl that includes God and galaxies and ME ME ME. I don’t think Tocqueville counted on the ability of Americans to store these mutually exclusive ideas in their heads as “well” as we do.
— Matt Frost · Apr 7, 03:02 AM · #
“Is there any evidence for ‘a certain kind of slippage that leads practical democratic moralists from atheism to pantheism to polytheism’ beyond the single example of Sam Harris?”
How about Andrew’s adoring description of Harris as “one of the more self-evidently spiritual people I’ve ever met,” or the assumption that Andrew presumably shares with his readers that the best kind of atheist is one who has pantheistic superpowers?
— Matt Frost · Apr 7, 03:05 AM · #
“I don’t think Tocqueville counted on the ability of Americans to store these mutually exclusive ideas in their heads as “well” as we do.”
right.
two points. cognitive psychology seems to suggest
1) lots of cognition is implicit. we don’t have reflective access to it.
2) lots of cognitive process are operationally modularized (distinct) and relatively encapsulated (not well integrated).
one thing i have to add: sam harris is pretty intellectually vacuous. he has a very weak grasp of basic scholarship; though he’s good with zingers and rhetorical tricks aimed to reassure teenage atheists. IOW, he’s the atheist josh mcdowell.
— razib · Apr 7, 08:23 AM · #
“the atheist josh mcdowell”! Now that’s a blurb!
— Michael Simpson · Apr 7, 01:28 PM · #
A lot of Americans somehow believe, if only at a very glib, intuitive level, that pantheism and Christian devotional theism can somehow coexist.
As does the Catholic church, according to official church doctrine.
— Freddie · Apr 7, 01:56 PM · #
“How about Andrew’s adoring description of Harris as ‘one of the more self-evidently spiritual people I’ve ever met,’ or the assumption that Andrew presumably shares with his readers that the best kind of atheist is one who has pantheistic superpowers?”
But Andrew is a Christian, so this seems to be evidence that organized religion is prone to the same “slippage.” Of course Andrew, like Sam Harris, is one person, so the evidence is pretty thin.
Anecdotally, I’ve met more atheists who are strict scientific rationalists than I have atheists of the Sam Harris type—and a LOT more people who belong to traditional denominations but hold the “pantheist” worldview.
— Brendan · Apr 7, 02:19 PM · #
I read the bit about Christianity being “Platonism for the masses” in one of Matthew Arnolds’ essays – did he get it from Nietzsche or is the quote actually come from Arnold?
Religion doesn’t have to be organized to be religion. It doesn’t need well reasoned theology or formal doctrine. In fact through most of human history it had neither. For example, I think from a pre-christian perspective, how we treat movie stars and celebrities would have been seen as religious worship.
— hybrid · Apr 7, 03:14 PM · #
I have many a bone to pick
with all three major patriarchal monotheism
there’s not much sacred to my view
about the politicized “religions”
I have described myself
both as patheist and pagan
and nothing is more sacred than
Nature taken as a whole
from the cosmos
down to the minutest wavicle
— suzanne · Apr 7, 04:07 PM · #
The notion that organized religion is somehow ‘fixed’ is denied by history. Jesus preached love and forgiveness but the Church that arose in his name has practiced inquisitions and crusades. Moreover, the recent rampant pederasty which has occured under that Church’s ‘moral leadership’ has even twisted the meaning of ‘love’ and forced us to realize that ‘forgiveness’ has to be conditional or else it becomes enablement.
Any organization that substitutes authority for objectivity must degenerate morally. And an absolutely powerful God will have a church that is absolutely corrupt. Nor is this something that happens only as aberration, only after centuries. Take a look at the earliest sections of the Bible, and in the Penteteuch we see God demanding that Abraham sacrifice his only son, and later not just approving but commanding his ‘Chosen People’ to slaughter every man, woman, and child in the ‘Promised Land.’
It is under polytheism that we recognize that there are other spiritual beings whose eminence is equal with our own and who must therefore command our respect. Note that it was under the Enlightenment, when the West rejected Biblical Christianity and revived the Greco-Roman tradition, that the concept of human rights was enshrined in our Constitution.
— imp · Apr 7, 04:40 PM · #
“For example, I think from a pre-christian perspective, how we treat movie stars and celebrities would have been seen as religious worship.”
it’s only a piece of the puzzle. when is the last time someone made a burnt offering to a celebrity? or refused to say their name aloud because it was taboo? if religions phenomena is a synthesis of normal human cognitive processes you’ll see slivers of “religiosity” laying about in most human activities. but we shouldn’t confuse the fragments for the phenomenon itself.
“Note that it was under the Enlightenment, when the West rejected Biblical Christianity and revived the Greco-Roman tradition, that the concept of human rights was enshrined in our Constitution.”
there sorts of generalization are tendentious. after all, some of the enlightenment thinkers espoused a ‘deist christianity’ which rejected what they perceived to be a greco-philosophical overlay upon genuine ‘primitive’ xtianity (which was minimally supernatural of course).
— razib · Apr 7, 04:54 PM · #
Huh????
— John · Apr 7, 09:22 PM · #
That pantheist/Catholic thing threw me for a loop too. I assume “panentheism” is meant, which is quite different from pantheism.
St. Paul’s approving quotation of a pagan poet who said, “In Him we live and move and have our being…” does have a panentheist ring to it, though orthodox believers would probably have numerous qualifications to add. I would welcome a clarification from the poster who brought it up.
— Kevin J. Jones · Apr 7, 10:13 PM · #
I meant “coexist” in one person’s head, not on the planet. I think that’s the source of the confusion.
— Matt Frost · Apr 7, 10:14 PM · #
<i>Tocqueville knew what a thin gruel was scientific rationalism for the anxious democratic soul, which oscillates helplessly between emotional ambition and emotional sloth, between agitation and torpor.</i>
If you really think this is true – that scientific rationality has nothing to offer the human “soul” – then I challenge you to <i>get involved in science.</i> Your local university needs people to help with research, I’m sure, and you don’t need to be a scientist to do it. Get involved with discovery. Get involved with hypothesis testing. Get involved with the <i>significance</I> of learning about how the real world <I>actually works.</i> It’s been the most rewarding experience of <i>my</I> life, certainly.
You’ll see that it’s <i>religion</i> that’s the “thin gruel”, that to append a magic sky man is to gild the lily of the universe; that to propose a soul eternal is to gild the lily of the magnificent, thinking human body. My invitation to people on the fence about religion is to stop gilding lilies. It would take you a thousand lifetimes to understand the inner workings of what’s going on in a mere cubic meter of the world around you. If you think science and rational inquiry into the natural world lacks something, it’s only out of a deep, deep ignorance of the wonders science has unlocked.
— Chet · Apr 7, 11:38 PM · #
Since Vatican II, official Catholic doctrine is, and I quote, “There are many paths to the sacred.” If that’s not pantheism, I don’t know what is. It’s not well known, but them’s the facts.
— Freddie · Apr 8, 02:19 AM · #
I don’t know or care enough about Vatican II to comment in any informed manner, but if that’s pantheism, I don’t know what isn’t.
— Matt Frost · Apr 8, 02:58 AM · #
Well played!
— Freddie · Apr 8, 01:21 PM · #
Ditto to Mr. Frost on that one …
— John · Apr 8, 03:30 PM · #
Catholic Natural Law theology teaches that the divine order is accessible to reason. Therefore “the sacred” is accessible to those of all creeds. Which isn’t the same thing as saying that all religions are equally true.
— Andy · Apr 8, 04:35 PM · #
http://meaningoflife.tv/video.php?speaker=albacete&topic=death
— Freddie · Apr 9, 08:08 PM · #