February 2025

The Significance of This Fight

By in atheism, religion

Rachel Lu:

There are obvious benefits to a rejuvenated religious landscape. Maybe people will be happier, less lonely, and better able to form healthy families and communities. That, in turn, might diminish the attraction of less-healthy fixations, from violence to porn to unhinged social causes and political ideologies. Perhaps we could even expect more moral rectitude from our politicians and cultural influencers! Dare to dream.

It seems strange to me how often arguments for religious belief, particularly Christianity, rely on this sort of instrumental reasoning. Go to church! It’ll lower your blood pressure, give you an expanded social network, and who knows, maybe you’ll even meet that special someone! Okay, but aren’t you supposed to believe in this stuff because it’s true? Wasn’t that the original point? Does anyone want to try to make that argument anymore? Don’t get me wrong, I have no desire to encourage true-believing fanaticism or aggressive proselytizing, but as a happily-unchurched person and the target for this type of pitch, I have to say, you sound tentative and unsure about what you’re trying to sell me. I don’t sense any strength in an argument that starts off on the back foot.

Having presented his arguments for the basic rationality of religious belief, Douthat goes on offense more aggressively with a chapter on religious experience. The world, he contends, is not at all “disenchanted.” Again he spreads his net wide, discussing a range of supernatural or mystical phenomena: visions, charismatic raptures, naturally inexplicable events (miracles?), and near-death experiences. Offhand, this might seem like one of the easiest chapters for the skeptic to dismiss. Almost all of these occurrences are anecdotal, subjective, and prime fodder for hoaxes or embellishments. Douthat acknowledges this, but still raises some thought-provoking points. The one that most stuck with me concerned near-death experiences, which have been reported by people across many different countries and cultures. There are some fascinating similarities in the various accounts, and while one could hypothesize that this is just a bracing byproduct of almost dying, there is something rather strange about that. Why would people so frequently have intense, lucid experiences at precisely the time when their brains are barely functioning (to the point where some were ruled medically dead or believed to be dead)? Is it not reasonable to see this as at least some evidence that there might be something waiting for us on the other side?

“Something” waiting for us? What if we just wander aimlessly around Hades as restless shades? Would anyone be excited about that? This reminds me of Schopenhauer’s quip that if people had to choose between believing in God or believing in personal immortality, they’d take the latter in a heartbeat. More specifically, it illustrates my long-standing opinion that with religion, as with most complex subjects, people are using motivated reasoning to argue for several unexamined assumptions at once without even being aware of it. Seriously, what if there is a God or gods, but no souls or afterlives? What if there is an afterlife, but it’s just a variation on our current confusing existence, and God never makes an appearance to clarify anything? What if, as people like me suspect, there is a form of immortality, but without personal memory, like Aldo Leopold’s atom X? Logically, and evidentially, these options are no less viable. Ah, but none of this is about logic or evidence to begin with.

I’m sure there will be plenty of examples of people who were raised without religion who take it up as adults. That’s just human nature, to keep wandering back and forth in search of the grass than which there is none greener. But they’ll eventually encounter the same implausibility that has sent many people in the opposite direction. It may be good, it may be beautiful, but is it really true? And what happens when the impulse for truth has also proved to be a life-preserving power?

What Hath Dawkins to Do With Wokism?

By in atheism, ohferfucksake, religion

Sometimes I envy the stupid their certainties. The midwit moron hath said in his heart, “Post hoc ergo propter hoc,” and who can deny the satisfaction he receives from reducing complex phenomena down to a Twitter-friendly slogan?

“New Atheism” was a media phenomenon. Like everything else created and nurtured by journalists and media-savvy intellectuals, it was a narrative. Whether narratives are true or not is never important. They exist to give vacuous people something to chatter about until the next narrative comes out. But okay, fine, let’s humor this idiotic statement. How did New Atheism travel back in time to create identity politics, or postcolonialism? How did it create the Great Recession of ’07-’08, and by proxy, a large class of disaffected, downwardly-mobile young adults who channeled all their angst into the status competition we call wokeness? How did it inform Barack Obama’s “whole of society” approach to social change? What did it have to do with the new social media platforms that allowed performative radicalism to become trendy among a younger generation? Here we are, following the baby-boomer template to the letter. We had our cultural revolution, which is — right on schedule! — petering out into Manson Family-style cult psychosis. The energy behind the street protests and riots has dissipated. We’ve had a Republican Restoration. I suppose millennials are going to rediscover New Age navel-gazing next, and maybe there will be a trans Jonestown or something. None of this is new. All of this was done sixty years ago, and with better music. Doesn’t this strange cultural repetition suggest something much more fundamental than a passing media fad from the mid-’00s?

Religious, i.e. Christian, belief has been declining in the US for decades. Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens and Harris were the fleas riding on the back of an elephant, getting credit for steering it. If anything, most of the liberals and leftists who would later become woke attacked New Atheism at the time for being Islamophobic, or even neoconservative, thanks to Hitchens’ and Harris’ support for the Iraq war. But sure, people just stopped believing in God around 2006 because of a couple of bestselling books, and wokeness was the inevitable consequence. I wish people had the decency to be embarrassed when they say something so goddamned stupid in public.

If the Rule You Followed Brought You to This, Of What Use Was the Rule?

By in extraordinary popular delusions, foolosophy

If the care of the young and the temporarily sick left much to be desired in some areas, then the care of the permanently physically or mentally disabled was arguably even more deficient. Again, it has to be stressed that the principles were highly laudable, in total contrast to the Nazi policies of ‘euthanasia’ (actually murder) for the ‘unproductive’ or those who were allegedly ‘burdens on the state.’ The GDR was committed to high ideals in this area.

— Mary Fulbrook, The People’s State: East German Society from Hitler to Honecker

The historian Tom Holland recently became the subject of a social media hatestorm over an old tweet in which he said that the authorities responsible for ignoring and covering up the Rotherham scandal had acted from noble motives. To be fair to him, he was simply noting the irony, unlike Fulbrook, who seems to think that communist tyrannies should be awarded some kind of meaningless points because they supposedly “meant well.” This is a widespread delusion, of course, which is why communist iconography and slogans are seen as little more than bad taste or youthful folly, whereas swastikas are horrifying, full stop.

Many years ago, I read a book by Steve Hagen, a Buddhist author, and one part of it in particular has always stuck with me:

It is enough to simply act based upon what we see. When we pay attention to our actual perceptions instead of our concepts — our hopes, our fears, our goals, our desires, our individual and cultural stories — then no prescription or set of commandments is necessary. Action that grows out of seeing is naturally responsive and appropriate to the situation, whatever it may be. This means you’re not clinging too tightly to your cherished beliefs and opinions. You’re ready to toss them when you notice they don’t work, when you notice they’re a source of pain and anxiety. The focus always comes back to just becoming awake — and once again, becoming awake. This is how we’ll save ourselves, save the world, save the environment. Just this, and not another idea, not another best-laid plan.

My twenty-something self, infatuated with concepts, was frustrated by this, wanting clear answers and directions, but the fact that I could never simply dismiss it as obscurantist mysticism suggests that some part of me recognized the sagacity of it, even if it took a while to grow capable of fully grasping it.