Does religion matter anymore?

Why does religion matter? Should we even take it seriously? The modern scientific worldview doesn’t, so why should we?

Huston Smith’s Why Religion Matters is not a defense of Christianity. It is a defense of the very idea of religion, which he defines as a belief in transcendence: that there is something beyond this material world, and it matters whether you let this other world into your life.

It’s a good book, but Smith gets off to a bad start when he argues for what he calls the traditional worldview (this world is not all there is) by saying that “the finitude of mundane existence cannot satisfy the human heart completely.” (p 3) All this shows is that we are needy creatures who want more than there is. The human desire for transcendence doesn’t prove that something beyond the material world exists, but only that we wish it so.

Myth and truth

Smith gets serious when he argues that belief in the traditional, non-scientific worldview, in which we experience this world, as well as another that transcends it, leads to a better life. In other words, we fulfill our human nature most fully when we recognize that while the traditional religious stories are myths, the truth beyond words that these myths express allows us to feel at home in the world. We can feel that we belong here. The alternative view, that each of us is but a tiny bit of matter in an endless universe, is not only hard to bear. It makes life less interesting, exciting, and fulfilling. We are creatures of narrative, and telling stories (myths) is how we make ourselves at home. The God myth (my term, not his) is a much better story than the story than this is all there is.

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Elaine Pagels, Why Religion? A fine but flawed book

Elaine Pagels, Why Religion? A fine but flawed book.

A recent (2018) book by Elaine Pagels, Why Religion?, has garnered great reviews. It’s a brave book, telling the story of the death of her six-year-old son from a long illness, and then her husband in a hiking accident, both in the space of about a year. It’s been almost thirty years since these tragedies, and the reader gets the sense that it took her this long to tell the story. Or rather, to weave her story of loss together with the place of religion in her life, and our collective lives.

I admire the book, but I have a problem with it. She seems unaware that people who are not well-off and famous might have a different experience of loss. She aims to be realistic about the politics of religious belief, but perhaps there is also a politics of loss, or better a political economy of loss. About this she says not a word.

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Basics of Bonhoeffer

Basics of Bonhoeffer. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was not a systematic thinker, and I’ve had difficulty finding the themes that connect his thought. One problem is that his early writings, such as The Cost of Discipleship, differ from his latter writings, especially his Letters and Papers from Prison, written in the two years between his arrest and murder by the Gestapo when his link to the plot to assassinate Hitler was uncovered.

I’ve focused on his Letters, which ask how a Christian is to live in a world that barely pretends to believe in God, a question that has become more pressing in recent years, at least in the Western world. I believe these themes summarize the thought of the mature Bonhoeffer, who died at the age of 39. To speak of the “mature Bonhoeffer” who died so young might sound silly, but by then he had been a mature thinker for years.

An earlier post addresses The Cost of Discipleship; another post addresses his “religionless Christianity.”

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The Unknown Thomas Merton

The Unknown Thomas Merton. In the late 1940’s, 1950’s and 1960’s, Thomas Merton was the most well-known and admired Catholic monk in North America. Seven Story Mountain, his autobiography written while he was still young, was one of the best-selling books of 1949, going on to sell over four million copies. It has never been out of print. During his lifetime he published over 70 books. He belonged to the Trappist order, remaining at the Abbey of Gethsemani, in Kentucky, United States, from 1941 until his sudden death in 1968 at 53 years. In his later years he became interested in Zen Buddhism. It was at an ecumenical conference in Bangkok that he was accidentally electrocuted. *

A lonely man

These facts tell us virtually nothing about who he was, nothing interesting anyway. Merton’s mother died when his was six, and his father died when he was sixteen, leaving him well provided for. Even before his father’s death he was raised by a series of relatives and at boarding schools. During his entire life Merton never worked for wages, but there are more important things in life than money, such as a stable home and loving parents. Merton had neither.

In a previous post I discussed Merton’s mystical version of Christianity. This post tries to figure out who he was as a man. The simplest and most important thing to say is that he was terribly lonely, longing for love. His solution, which never really worked, was to abandon himself to God, thus eliminating his needy self. One of his biographers writes that “when the Gethsemani gates closed behind him, Merton tasted freedom even though he was within four walls.” (Shaw, loc 925) If we can understand that, we can understand Merton.

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Thomas Merton is wrong: Christian mysticism is a bad idea

Thomas Merton is wrong: Christian mysticism is a bad idea.

Thomas Merton was a great proponent of ecumenism. For Merton, all religion, East and West, sought the same thing: unity with God. He was also a beautiful writer. Nevertheless, it seems to me that he got something fundamental wrong.

The goal of Christian mysticism is to find unity with God. Solitude, contemplation, self-denial and often silence all aim at the emptying of the self in order that we might be filled with God. But what if the goal of unity is the wrong goal? The proper Christian goal is faith in God and following the teachings of Jesus Christ. Chief among Christ’s teachings is loving and caring for other people.

Whatever unity with God that is necessary in order to feel fulfilled is achieved through the eucharist (communion). We partake of the blood and body of Christ, and so incorporate his body into ours, and our body into the membership in the church. What else is needed? What else is there? *

Contemplation is about the self, not God

If this is so, what purpose does the contemplative search for mystical unity with God serve? I think it serves solely the need of the individual, and little to do with a greater unity with God. What if instead of the word “unity,” I substituted “a feeling of belonging to God’s world because I am one of his creatures.” Putting it this way is more long winded, but it says all that need be said. The search for wholeness is a search for self, not God.

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Camus’ absurdism lacks imagination

Camus’ absurdism lacks imagination.

Camus insists that he is an absurdist, not an existentialist. OK, but it is important to figure out what he means. Camus thinks a Christian can be an absurdist. I don’t. I do think that absurdism is the leading alternative not only to Christianity, but religion.

Religion is said to be based on faith, as it is. Camus’ absurdism is based on a particular heroic ideal, a man who faces the truth head on, as if it were that simple. All quotations are from Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays unless otherwise noted.

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Did Camus want to be baptized?

First a discussion of the religious beliefs of Jean-Baptiste Clamence in Albert Camus’ novel, The Fall. Then a discussion of Camus’ request to be baptized according to Howard Mumma in Albert Camus and the Minister. There is a connection. It has to do with faith.

The Fall, Camus’ last novel, is set in Hell. Well, not exactly. It’s set in Amsterdam, where the canals are laid out in concentric circles. That and the foggy atmosphere are both intended to remind us of Dante’s circles of Hell. Mexico City, a bar in the inner-most circle of hell is where Jean-Baptiste Clamence holds forth. He is the novel’s only speaking character, and we must not take him literally. He would have us think he is in a type of Hell, but he may be playing games with the reader, and himself.

I won’t summarize the book. The only thing you need to know is that Clamence was a wealthy and successful Parisian lawyer and all-around good guy (lawyer and good guy are not automatically antonyms). After a series of minor mishaps, culminating in the not so minor mishap of ignoring a drowning woman’s cry, he exiles himself to one of the seedier bars in Amsterdam, where he tells his tale to any who will listen. His goal, it seems, is to justify his drinking and whoring by constantly pointing out how bad he is. An odd strategy, designed it seems to preempt judgment.

About Christ’s guilt

Clamence tells us that not only is he guilty, but even Jesus Christ was guilty, merely by being born in a certain time and place. Consider the massacre of the innocents, in which Herod orders all male children in Bethlehem under two to be killed in order to avoid a prophecy about the “King of the Jews,” who he believed threatened his throne (Matthew 2:16-18). Wasn’t that the sadness one sometimes sees in Jesus?

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Did Albert Camus believe in God?

Of all the existentialists, Camus came closest to believing in God, becoming closer in his later works. Camus would object to two parts of this statement. He objected to being labeled an existentialist, preferring the term absurdist. And he would say he was not close to God. He admired (and once said “loved”) Jesus Christ.*

Since Camus did not believe in an afterlife, what I mean by “close to God” and what most Christians believe is quite different. Yet, even with all these qualifications the statement stands. Certainly, he has been many Christians’ favorite atheist, primarily because he was comfortable with religious language and imagery. For Camus, “it is possible to be Christian and absurd.” (Sisyphus, p 112) All one has to do is disbelieve in an afterlife.

Most Christians, perhaps all, would reject this possibility, but in a time of militant atheism like our own, there is a vast difference between Camus and someone like Richard Dawkins. Camus had sympathy and respect for Christianity, above all for Christ. I think that is the best way of putting it.

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