What does religion mean? It’s a question that Lofton’s work hinges on. The message of Oprah usually gets described as spiritual, and spirituality and religion are kept separate by most religious studies scholars. The word “religion” is roughly defined as a belief in a superhuman being. This belief includes practices and worship. There was a time, religious historians say, that religion was easy to pinpoint because people were defined by their beliefs, practices and traditions of worship. Now, with the sheer number of people and faiths intermingling, believers are consumers of religion. “As this consumerizing process evolved, the contents of religion have become less otherworldly and more tied to behaviors and thinking associated with the secular work of business, sports, entertainment, and healthcare,” Porterfield and John Corrigan write in Religion in American History (Blackwell Publishing 2010).
There are some who say religion no longer exists in the way we knew it before the turn of the 20th century. They say our actions and traditions are not tied to a belief in a higher power, and are not governed by religious law. This argument says we live in a secular era. Then there are those who say we live in a post-secular era, where religion is not gone, but has been re-integrated into our lives after our secular phase. But there is also the cultural preoccupation with self-help mantras and yoga that are examples of something undefined––spiritual maybe––or vaguely religious. Like living a life according to Oprah’s likes and dislikes. Lofton argues that religion is not gone, but that it changed in direct proportion to our consumer behaviors, and that ignoring these vaguely religious preoccupations would be a misevaluation of contemporary religion.
We no longer count on a community to provide the context in which we can be recognized; we can be anywhere and continue to act like ourselves. Whereas the horizons of local familiarity once limited what we could imagine for ourselves, modern life has situated us in broader “abstract systems” — standardized ways of doing things and ubiquitous cultural reference points, universally recognized procedures and authorities. Tradition — “how things are done here” — has been fatally disrupted. We can enter an elevator in any city or an Italian restaurant in any American town and understand what to expect and what to do. And thanks to the universality of money and the pervasive norms of capitalist market exchange, we trust we don’t need a personal relationship with a pub owner to get a pint.
One of my consistent criticisms of the SNR crowd is that their disposable, buffet-style beliefs often fail to be genuinely transformative, instead reinforcing a hyper-individualistic consumerist identity sorely in need of questioning. I don’t suggest that things were better or more genuine when religion was the unquestioned background to that community context within which we used to define ourselves, of course. But I do have enough respect for that aforementioned transformative potential to feel that something important may have been lost when our middle-class educated suburban professional lifestyles became the uncritically accepted norm around which our beliefs have been arranged like so many shelf decorations. To get Nietzschean about it for a moment, it’s hard to imagine placid Oprah-style affirmations ever profoundly inspiring someone to create great works of art, say.
He also says it is “laughable” that Fabio Capello’s side are still rated amongst the favourites to win major tournaments, and believes the Three Lions will not do so until it starts to mirror the selfless ethos of World and European champions Spain.
“It was a frustration for us United lads,” he added of spending time in camp with other players.
“When there is a simple pass of 10 yards, they might try and smack it 80 yards. They will do things to try and get themselves noticed. If you look at the Spain team now, they all seem to play for each other. There isn’t one of them who would try to do something in a game that doesn’t suit the team. And that could happen over here. If you look through our teams, there are loads of technically brilliant players but for some reason when we go on to the international scene, we don’t look like that. We’re the favourites every time and we probably will be next time. I think it is quite laughable. It is just the mentality of English people, we think we are going to win everything.”
The logic seems impeccable, I suppose: take the best individual players from the best club teams in the best domestic league in the world and put them all together, and something magic has to happen. Yet England consistently disappoint on the international stage. Football is a strange game like that.
I remember, funny enough, a British coach from my youth soccer days who used to holler at his players whenever they’d start sending too many long passes through the air: “NO BOOM-BALL!” When I’d go to state team tryouts, the best players and coaches all stressed the importance of making short passes on the ground to keep control of a game. Even American youth teams knew that much, is what I’m saying. But one of the most annoying things about watching English professional games is the number of times they turn into a series of long passes being sent sixty or seventy yards through the air, only to get knocked down and sent back the other way, repeated ad nauseum. The English sure do love the typical tall, strong striker who can win headers off of long passes, but it’s a low-probability attack, and Scholes is right: with the success of not only the Spanish national team, but their domestic teams like Barcelona, stocked with small, quick, technically flawless players, you’d think the Brits might start catching on sometime.
Whatever kind of bizarre ideal one may follow, one should not demand that it be the ideal, for one therewith takes from it its privileged character. One should have it in order to distinguish oneself, not in order to level oneself. […] Whereas: true heroism consists, in not fighting under the banner of sacrifice, devotion, disinterestedness, but in not fighting at all – “This is what I am, this is what I want – you can go to hell!”
So let’s rise up against the tyranny of the “like” button. Share what makes you different from everyone else, not what makes you exactly the same. Write about what’s important to you, not what you think everyone else wants to hear. Form your own opinions of something you’re reading, rather than looking at the feedback for cues about what to think. And, unless you truly believe that microblogging is your art form, don’t waste your time in pursuit of a quick fix of self-esteem and start focusing on your true passions.
And please, despite what I said earlier, do not +1, tweet, StumbleUpon, like or comment on this article. You’ll only be making it worse.
In the last couple months, I’ve gotten a both a Twitter and blog link from a much bigger blog, as well as a couple of my posts being linked on Facebook and StumbleUpon. I certainly appreciate that something I wrote inspired someone else to want to show it to others, but I have to admit that it was an unsettling feeling to look at site stats for the week and wonder if I got re-routed into someone else’s account by mistake. I can accept that my small handful of regular readers are just warped individuals with terrible taste and a lot of time to kill at work, but if I ever got inexplicably popular, I’d start to worry that I might have to slip away quietly in the night to start a new blog under a different pen name. Never fear; you all are the inner circle. My posse. My peeps. My homies. I’d surreptitiously let you know where to find me should that ever become necessary. But please, try not to tell your friends about me. If you absolutely feel compelled to quote me, pretend you don’t remember exactly where you read it. Keep me safe from prying eyes. I work best toiling away in anonymity.
The battle with aging is akin to that between Heracles, the hero of Greek mythology, and the multiheaded Hydra. Each time Heracles hacked off a head, two more would sprout in its place. Likewise, the old man successfully treated for prostate cancer may not long afterward stagger back into the physician’s office with macular degeneration and dementia. Such piecemeal approaches to treating age-related illness have undoubtedly improved late-life health to an extent and they have increased life expectancy. This, again, is something to celebrate. Yet in the long run a more powerful way to protect against age-related disease would be to intervene in the aging process itself. This would provide protection against the full spectrum of age-related illnesses. Returning to our classical illustration, to really defeat the diseases of late life we need to strike at the heart of the Hydra of senescence: the aging process itself. But is this actually where biogerontology is headed?
Most parents tell kids, ‘You can do anything you want, you can quit any time, you can try this other thing if you’re not 100 percent satisfied with the other.’ It’s no wonder they live their lives that way as adults, too.” He sees this in students who graduate from Swarthmore. “They can’t bear the thought that saying yes to one interest or opportunity means saying no to everything else, so they spend years hoping that the perfect answer will emerge. What they don’t understand is that they’re looking for the perfect answer when they should be looking for the good-enough answer.”
The message we send kids with all the choices we give them is that they are entitled to a perfect life—that, as Dan Kindlon, the psychologist from Harvard, puts it, “if they ever feel a twinge of non-euphoria, there should be another option.”
We’ve all heard of various candidates for the most distinctive quality that separates us from other animals. But the idealistic belief that we can ever create a world free of pain, dissatisfaction and death (leaving aside whether we even truly understand what we’re asking for) has to be a serious contender. I would say that the crucible for any experiential philosophy is how well it equips you to realistically and gracefully deal with the inevitability of suffering.
I’ve never understood the appeal of Slavoj Žižek, whose main talent appears to be to take any topic, no matter how straightforward, and obfuscate it with meandering pseudo-intellectual bafflegab. He’s like Yakov Smirnoff without the hilarious jokes or penetrating insights. I admit I haven’t read much of his stuff (for the aforementioned reasons), and I’m willing to be proven wrong about this if someone happens to know of a particularly brief and brilliant article of his that I absolutely must read, but as it stands, oy vey.
Ahahahahaha. I’ve always had much the same reaction, but never got around to articulating it. Thanks to John for saving me the effort.
No fact summarizes my argument more succinctly than this: The fastest growing category of American religion, particularly among young adults, is “spiritual but not religious.” That the land of the free gave birth to such a designation makes perfect sense, and those who identify with it should not be dismissed as frivolous or noncommittal, as certain critics have contended. They are, for the most part, serious questers who are not inclined to take on faith either religious dogma or facile secularism. They are mystics and idealists who also happen to be rational, pragmatic and independent.
They are, for the most part, privileged enough to have been raised and educated within a, uh, “facile” secular society that provides them the opportunity to subject metaphysical beliefs from around the world to rational scrutiny in pursuit of a Western concept of objective truth independent of the cultural and familial ties that might otherwise bind them to an ideal of obedience. They are often confused dilettantes who use those exotic beliefs to adorn an all-too-ordinary egocentric consumer perspective that goes unquestioned. I’m just saying.
Wilde said that most of us live lives of quiet desperation. It’s a good observation, and in my opinion it’s the best reason to do whatever it is we choose to do with our lives. You spend so much time on the job you hate, listening to the boss who treats you like shit, and wondering why you bother to get out of bed anymore. So if you want to spend your time writing the great American novel, building birdhouses, attending Star Trek conventions in animal-themed S&M gear, or touring the country in a van with a band no one has ever heard of to play before tiny audiences, so be it. There are always risks, ranging from simple embarrassment to bodily harm depending on the nature of your pursuits. Hell, having any pursuits at all is a risk. Why not get a second job or work harder at your first one instead of wasting your time telling jokes at the Comedy Pouch in Possum Ridge, AR or playing math rock at the 4th Street Vomit Bucket in the worst neighborhood in Newark? Well, not only are some things more important than being practical, but what could be more practical than doing whatever is necessary to make yourself feel like your life is worthwhile? It’s OK to remind yourself that you’re not quite as worthless as the world makes you feel, even if there are considerable risks and opportunity costs involved.
Life is glorious and vibrant and joyous at points, but it is essentially tragic. That’s not a unique David Simon perspective. That’s the perspective of anyone who contemplates anything as simple as mortality. You’re gonna die, and everyone you love and care about is gonna die. Life is finite. Some of them are gonna die too soon, and some of them are gonna die with things unsaid and things unfinished. And if you look at life in a fair and accurate context, you see that it is often deeply tragic, regardless of how well or poorly you live portions of your life — and certainly some people get luckier than others.
Germany’s Green Party is worried about the health risks of sex toys. Dildos and vibrators contain dangerously high levels of phthalates and other plasticizers, which can cause infertility and hormone imbalances, they claim. Now the party wants the government to take action to protect the 20 percent of Germans who use sex toys.
Because dildos and other sex toys are widely used in Germany, the Greens see the issue as a problem for society as a whole. While children’s toys are subject to strict regulations that allow only the smallest percentage of plasticizers, a 2006 study by the Öko-Test consumer magazine found that sex toys contain high quantities of the chemicals. Plasticizers comprised up to 58 percent of materials used in such products, the magazine wrote. More than half of the vibrators examined by Öko-Test contained so many toxic substances that they failed the test entirely, it said.
Not that anyone asked me, but I’m a bit alarmed that only 20% of the population uses them. I keep hearing about these degenerate European welfare states, but I would at least expect to find that each household contains government-issued sex toys for each person living there; otherwise, what is socialism for?
Savage’s straight-talk approach has an intuitive appeal: our culture places a huge premium on honesty, or at least on confessional, therapeutic, Oprah-fied admissions. We are told to say what is on our minds, so why not extend that principle to sex? Why not tell your spouse everything you want, even if that includes wanting another person? My sense is that this kind of radical honesty may work best for couples who already have strong marriages. Where there is love and equality and no history of betrayal, one partner asking if she can have a fling may not be so risky. Her partner either says yes, and it happens, you hope, with only the best consequences; or the partner says no, in which case their relationship endures, maybe with a little disappointment on one side, a little suspicion on the other.
That is the ideal situation. What if the revelation that a partner is thinking about others creates a shift, one that plagues the marriage? Words have consequences, and most couples, knowing that jealousy is real and can beset any of us, opt for a tacit code of reticence. Not just about sex but about all sorts of things: there are couples who can express opinions about each other’s clothing choices or cooking or taste in movies, and there are couples who cannot. I don’t mind if my wife tells me another man is hot, but it took me a long time to accept her criticism of my writing. We all have many sensitive spots, but one of the most universal is the fear of not being everything to your partner — the fear, in other words, that she might find somebody worthier. It is the fear of being alone.
I’m skeptical of making an absolute out of any generally good principles, honesty included. People who proudly describe themselves as “brutally honest” only make me think that they’ve found a way to be supercilious about being a self-centered, inconsiderate blowhard. So I have no problem with the idea that each of my loved ones has some sort of sensitivity that requires certain things to go unsaid. Kindness sometimes trumps honesty. And not only that, but not every fleeting thought or impulse is worth voicing, let alone acting upon. It’s great that we have the privilege to customize our comfortable lives to such exacting specifications, but you’re not really being deprived if you can’t have absolutely everything you think you want.
The modern concept of the immortal soul is a Greek idea, which owes much to Pythagoras. Before that, most ancient civilizations thought that man had two kinds of soul. There was the “free-soul”, which represented the individual personality. And there were a number of “body-souls” which endowed the body with life and consciousness. For the early Greeks, for example, human nature was composed of three entities: the body, the psyche, identified with the life principle and located in the head; and the thymos, “mind” or consciousness, located in the phrenes, or lungs. During life, the thymos was regarded as more important but didn’t survive death, whereas the psyche became the eidolon, a shadowy form of the body. This distinction was not maintained beyond the sixth century B.C., when the psyche came to be thought of as both the essential self, the seat of consciousness and the life principle.
…Both Socrates and Plato shared Pindar’s idea of the divine origin of the soul and it is here that the vision took root that the soul was in fact more precious than the body.
…In fact, life after death, resurrection, judgement, heaven and paradise were all Zoroastrian ideas first, along with hell and the devil.
I just like knowing who to squarely blame for things like this.
“For all of the Catholic Church and its horrible faults, and there are many”—here, Egginton ticks off a list that includes the Church’s restricting a woman’s right to choose an abortion and proscribing condom use during the AIDS crisis—“I love the ritual of the ceremony, the smell of the incense, the stopping of time. Even though I’m a liberal and often progressive in my thinking, I’m impressed with the anchor of time that is part of religion.” It’s been more than 20 years since he took confession, but he’d like to try it again soon, he says. “I could see putting myself before the question of guilt and forgiveness.”
I wasn’t finding much of value in this article about William Egginton, but man, I just had to stop and marvel at such a potent mixture of self-unawareness and fortunate privilege. Yeah, sure, if you’re a woman, a homosexual, or a sub-Saharan African with AIDS, you might lack the necessary perspective from which to appreciate the pageantry of the Church. But if you’re a white male professor in America, you can wax rhapsodic about perverts in gowns waving incense burners and chanting in dead languages while still being taken seriously as a voice of reason. Nice work if you can get it.
This would be a typical response from the atheist scientist who is not spiritual when I ask, “So how do you answer questions that have to do with the meaning of life, big questions such as why are we here, what’s the purpose of my life?” They would answer, “I don’t think those are important questions to be asking.” Those questions just don’t matter. It wasn’t that they had an answer that was different from the general public. They just didn’t think those were important questions. Now, the atheist scientists who are spiritual would give answers to those questions, and they would give them through the sense of being spiritual. They would talk about how they found awe and beauty in nature, they found awe in the birth of their children, they found awe in the very work that they do as scientists. They just couldn’t see that as being explained only by science—there has to be something else out there beyond themselves. But then they did not see that as being God, or needing to name it as theism of any sort.
So what should people take away from your study?
Many of these scientists who are atheists are not hostile to big questions of the meaning of life. I thought there would be scientists who were religious. I thought there would be probably a lot fewer scientists who were religious than people in the general public who are religious. None of those findings were surprising. But this spiritual atheist finding has really been surprising to me personally.
Yes, this is another installment of “the utterly vapid meaninglessness of the word “spiritual”. But you know what makes people hostile to the “big questions of the meaning of life”? The understanding that there is no one-size-fits-all “meaning of life”. The question itself betrays an inherent confusion that wears just a mite thin after, oh, about the thousandth repetition. What’s the meaning of your life, other than annoying me with facile generalizations about people who supposedly walk around all day thinking of art, music and love in terms of subatomic particles? (Thank you, Martin Figura.)
