{"id":5502,"date":"2013-03-31T21:24:13","date_gmt":"2013-03-31T21:24:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meeseeks:5080\/blog\/?p=5502"},"modified":"2013-03-31T21:24:13","modified_gmt":"2013-03-31T21:24:13","slug":"belief-as-end-point-not-starting-line","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/2013\/03\/belief-as-end-point-not-starting-line\/","title":{"rendered":"Belief as end-point, not starting-line"},"content":{"rendered":"

The New Statesman<\/em> asked several famous people about what atheists could learn from religious believers, here<\/a>.\u00a0 Particularly interesting were the responses of Francis Spufford and Karen Armstrong.\u00a0
\nSpufford:<\/strong><\/p>\n

When Thomas Paine was dying in Greenwich Village in June 1809, two Presbyterian ministers popped by to suggest that he would be damned if he didn\u2019t affirm his faith in Jesus Christ. \u201cLet me have none of your popish stuff,\u201d he said firmly. \u201cGood morning.\u201d Score one to Paine for exiting the world without compromising his convictions, yet what he said had made, on the face of it, no sense.
\nFaith in Christ as the path to salvation isn\u2019t \u201cpopish\u201d in the sense of being particular to Roman Catholicism. Paine was speaking to a pair of impeccable Protestants. What he was doing here was to act as a very early adopter of a perception that would influence later atheist understandings of the world enormously. He was suggesting, in one charged and revealing insult, that the original Protestant critique of Catholicism should be extended to the whole of historic Christianity. All of it should be reformed away; all of it, absolutely all of it, deserved the contempt that zealous Puritans had once felt for indulgences and prayer beads and \u201cpriestcraft\u201d.
\nThis post-Christian puritanism, largely oblivious now of its history, is highly visible in the New Atheism of the 1990s and 2000s, and especially in Richard Dawkins\u2019s The God Delusion<\/em>. Strange indifference (except at the margins) to all religions except Christianity? Check. Sense of being locked in righteous combat with the powers of darkness? Check. Puritanism, it turns out, can float free of faith and still preserve a vehement world-view, a core of characteristic judgements. The world, it says, is afflicted by a layer of corrupting gunk, a gluey mass of lies and mistakes that purports to offer mediation between us and meaning but actually obscures it and hides the plain outlines of that truth we so urgently need. Moreover, this hiding, this obscuring, is wilful and culpable, maintained on purpose for the benefit of hierarchs, bullies, men in golden hats everywhere. It is our duty to take up the wire wool of reason and to scrub, scrub, scrub the lies away. For no mediation is necessary. We may have \u2013we must have \u2013 a direct vision of the essential state of things. We must see the world as if through pure, clear water, or empty air.
\nIt is reassuring, in a way, to find this ancient continuity at work in the sensibility of Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett and Jerry Coyne. It kind of makes up for their willed ignorance of all the emotional and intellectual structures of faith (as opposed to the will-o\u2019-the-wisp \u201cpopery\u201d in their heads). Dawkins may be showing indifference to every word ever written about the differences between polytheism and monotheism when he declares that Yahweh is the same as Odin, and that all he wants \u201cis one god less\u201d \u2013 but he is also keeping up a 400-year-old campaign against idolatry. That distant sound you hear is Oliver Cromwell applauding.
\nHowever, the project is impossible \u2013 as impossible for the New Atheists as for every previous builder of a purified New Jerusalem. Direct, unmediated apprehension of truth is not available, except in the effortful special case of science. That gunk the New Atheists scrub at so assiduously is the inevitable matter of human culture, of imagination. People secrete it, necessarily, faster than it can be removed. Metaphors solidify into stories wherever the reformers\u2019 backs are turned. We\u2019ll never arrive at the Year Zero where everything means only what science says it should. Religion being a thing that humans as a species do continuously, it seems unlikely that we\u2019ll stop, any more than we\u2019ll stop making music, laws, poetry or non-utilitarian clothes to wear. Imagination grows as fast as bamboo in the rain. The world cannot be disenchanted. Even advocacy for disenchantment becomes, inexorably, comically, an enchantment of its own, with prophets, with heresies and with its own pious mythography.
\nI think our recent, tentative turn away from the burning simplicities of The God Delusion<\/em> (and the like) represents a recognition of this. Alain de Botton\u2019s discovery in religion of virtues and beauties that an atheist might want is an anti-puritan move, a reconciliation of unbelief with the sprouting, curling, twining fecundity of culture. I don\u2019t expect the puritan call will lose its appeal to the young and the zealous, but maybe we are entering a phase of greater tolerance in which, having abandoned the impossible task of trying to abolish religion, atheists might be able to apply themselves to the rather more useful task of distinguishing between kinds that want to damn you and kinds that don\u2019t.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Armstrong:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Most of us are introduced to God at about the same time as we hear about Santa Claus, but over the years our views of Santa mature and change, while our notion of God often gets stuck at an infantile level.
\nAs a result, \u201cGod\u201d becomes incredible. Despite our scientific and technological brilliance, our religious thinking in the west is often remarkably undeveloped, even primitive, and would make Maimonides and Aquinas turn in their graves. They both insisted that God was not another being and that you could not even say that He (ridiculous pronoun!) existed, because our experience of existence is too limited. God, said Aquinas, is Being itself (esse se ipsum<\/em>).
\nThe biblical God is a \u201cstarter kit\u201d; if we have the inclination and ability, we are meant to move on. Throughout history, however, many people have been content with a personalized deity, yet not because they \u201cbelieved\u201d in it but because they learned to behave \u2013 ritually and ethically \u2013 in a way that made it a reality. Religion is a form of practical knowledge, like driving or dancing. You cannot learn to drive by reading the car manual or the Highway Code; you have to get into the vehicle and learn to manipulate the brakes. The rules of a board game sound obscure and dull until you start to play, and then everything falls into place. There are some things that can be learned only by constant, dedicated practice. You may learn to jump higher and with more grace than seems humanly possible or to dance with unearthly beauty. Some of these activities bring indescribable joy \u2013what the Greeks called ekstasis<\/em>, a \u201cstepping outside\u201d the norm.
\nReligion, too, is a practical discipline in which we learn new capacities of mind and heart. Like premodern philosophy, it was not the quest for an abstract truth but a practical way of life. Usually religion is about doing things and it is hard work. Classical yoga was not an aerobic exercise but a full-time job, in which a practitioner learned to transcend the ego that impeded the ekstasis<\/em> of enlightenment. The five \u201cpillars\u201d or essential practices of Islam are all activities: prayer, pilgrimage, almsgiving, fasting and a continual giving of \u201cwitness\u201d (shahada<\/em>) in everything you do that God (not the \u201cgods\u201d of ambition and selfishness) is your chief priority.
\nThe same was once true of Christianity. The Trinity was not a \u201cmystery\u201d because it was irrational mumbo-jumbo. It was an \u201cinitiation\u201d (musterion<\/em>), which introduced Greek-speaking early Christians to a new way of thinking about the divine, a meditative exercise in which the mind swung in a disciplined way from what you thought you knew about God to the ineffable reality. If performed correctly it led to ekstasis<\/em>. As Gregory of Nazianzus (329-90) explained to his Christian initiates: \u201cMy eyes are filled and the greater part of what I am thinking escapes me.\u201d Trinity was, therefore, an activity rather than a metaphysical truth in which one credulously \u201cbelieved\u201d. It is probably because most western Christians have not been instructed in this exercise that the Trinity remains pointless, incomprehensible, and even absurd.
\nIf you don\u2019t do religion, you don\u2019t get it. In the modern period, however, we have turned faith into a head-trip. Originally, the English word \u201cbelief\u201d, like the Greek pistis and the Latin credo<\/em>, meant \u201ccommitment\u201d. When Jesus asked his followers to have \u201cfaith\u201d, he was not asking them to accept him blindly as the Second Person of the Trinity (an idea he would have found puzzling). Instead, he was asking his disciples to give all they had to the poor, live rough and work selflessly for the coming of a kingdom in which rich and poor would sit together at the same table.
\n\u201cCredo ut intellegam<\/em> \u2013 I commit myself in order that I may understand,\u201d said Saint Anselm (1033-1109). In the late 17th century, the English word \u201cbelief\u201d changed its meaning and became the intellectual acceptance of a somewhat dubious proposition. Religious people now think that they have to \u201cbelieve\u201d a set of incomprehensible doctrines before embarking on a religious way of life. This makes no sense. On the contrary, faith demands a disciplined and practical transcendence of egotism, a \u201cstepping outside\u201d the self which brings intimations of transcendent meaning that makes sense of our flawed and tragic world.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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