And hence it has made me wait for two hours to post this (and there’s a lot I was hoping to get to today, too…)
Anyway, I know that religion is far from a popular topic on this blog, but here goes:
Over the weekend, Barbara O’Brien posted a most intriguing essay at Glenn Greenwald’s place. It’s been done to death all over the internet, with some extremely smart people weighing in both pro and con. The nugget of O’Brien’s argument, if I read it correctly, is essentially this: secular leftists are blind to the reality that liberal Christians can do good things in the world, because religion is not tied to the fundamentalist fringe that often gets chiefly represented in this country. In other words, she’s asking for secularists to tolerate the religious. Which is not a position I’m interested in disagreeing with.
But then her argument starts to get very strange, starting with this line:
“But the problem isn’t with religion. The problem is that, somehow, we’ve allowed religion to be defined by the stupid and the warped, resulting in stupid and warped religion at war with all things rational and humane. But religion doesn’t have to be that way.”
I am not sure if I agree with this (except the part about warped religion being at war with the rational and humane) at all – I would argue that religion turns the rational and humane into the stupid and warped, but that is for another day and time. Either way, the essay goes on a tangent about why non-Western, non-dogmatic religions are much better than not, because they realign themselves when reality proves them wrong (O’Brien is a Buddhist). I say this is a “tangent” because it does not add anything to the discussion of religion and politics in America, where there is a distinct paucity of Buddhist elected officials. Perhaps it is true that non-fideistic (faith-based) religion is not/should not be objectionable, but America is a fideistic country. Besides this, she completely ignores that the current focus of debate is not whether or not Americans should be Christian, it’s whether or not America itself should be Christian, which is a profoundly different idea.
From here, her argument never really recovers; she tries to argue that Christianity is ideally a non-fideistic religion, but how she expects a theistic religion with a personal God to be non-fideistic is completely lost on me. (The non-wankery version of that: it looks like she wants Christianity to be about Jesus’s command to love everybody, which is sound, without all the messiness of God and miracles and communion and divinity, which is unsound).
But despite her argument’s weakness, it is a generally thought-provoking and well-built piece (and yes, I agree that Christianity looking more like Buddhism would be an improvement), but for me it really does founder on two points: her claim that religion is morally neutral and het contention that non-fideistic religion is best viewed as a symbolic language used to understand the world just like science:
“For this reason, the language of the world’s sacred texts is more often representational than literal, and most scriptures are meant to be read as allegory or myth rather than as God’s FAQs. Some religious traditions regard their deities not as meddling invisible super-persons but as something more like Jungian archetypes. Even the God of monotheism is viewed by some monotheists as an allegorical creation meant to represent something beyond understanding and ordinary existance; the ground of being, for example. Karen Armstrong points out that science also uses mythological language — e.g., ‘Big Bang,’ ‘black hole’ — for realities that dangle just outside the scope of most human cognition.”
This is absurd. To call cosmology “mythological” because there are words used to simplify it for laymen is intellectual dishonesty of the highest order. Cosmology, unlike mythology, is based in observation and empiricism. Science in general is not a way of understanding the world so much as it is a way of describing the world.
And as to the idea that religion is neutral, I affirm that it is undesirable per se to hold beliefs which are false. To quote H.L. Mencken:
“Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration – courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and, above all, love of the truth.”
To repeat what many others have said, I don’t hate the religious, and I don’t want to see them dead or barred from public service or what-have-you; but I do hate their religion, and I’d like very much to see them cured of it.