Several people, including Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Jordan Peterson, and Douglas Murray, have floated the idea that the malaise of the West is caused largely because the decline of religion has taken away our sense of meaning and purpose. Hirsi Ali, for example, has written and talked extensively about how embracing Christianity alone can help stave off the forces that threaten to destroy Western civilization, and names three: Putin, Chinese Communism, and global Islamism. It is these forces that brought her to abandon atheism, embrace Jesus, and cure her depression.
Now I’m not sure how the rest of us can embrace Christianity and its tenets—Hirsi Ali, for instance, believes in the Resurrection—if we’ve already rejected them for one of the many reasons (for me, the lack of evidence) that people give up or reject faith. How can you force yourself to believe this stuff? Hirsi Ali apparently has, but I think she’s an outlier. As Nineteen Eighty-Four shows, it takes a lot of societal change and pressure to make people believe things that don’t make sense.
At any rate, the meme of the “god-shaped hole” in our lives—the supposed lack of purpose and meaning that accompanies atheism—appears to be making a comeback. But in earlier posts (here and here), I asked readers where they found their own “purpose and meaning”, and the near universal response is that we don’t get it from the outside, but make it ourselves. That seems about right to me. (For another critique of the “we need god to fill that lacuna” trope, see here.)
In the long Quillette article below, which is worth reading, author Matt Johnson looks at this claim in detail, and finds it severely wanting. It’ll take some time to read, but has a lot of ideas you may want to absorb. Click the screenshot to read.
Johnson’s quotes are indented, and I’ll give the topics bold headers (flush left):
The Problem: Liberalism and secularism are said to leave us groping around spiritually, looking for meaning. Johnson concentrates on The Christianity Solution, but also talks about liberalism itself as a filler of The Hole. I won’t deal much with the liberalism stuff, as Johnson assumes that many afflicted with Lack of Meaning are already liberals. Here’s Johnson on suggestions about what can fill The Hole.
There are different expressions of this belief. In an article for the Spectator, journalist Ed West discusses a phenomenon he describes as “New Theism”—an intellectual movement pushing back against the rising secularism in Western liberal societies. In a recent essay for Quillette, the historian and author Adam Wakeling describes this phenomenon as “political Christianity,” which he defines as the belief that “Western civilisation has Christian foundations, and returning to those Christian roots can help protect Western values today.” Wakeling challenges both of these beliefs and argues that the “success of our civilisation rests on the pillars of Enlightenment thought: constitutional government, secularism, science, the rule of law, and human rights—not on belief in the supernatural or in any specific set of ancient myths.”
. . . New Theists don’t just believe that the Judeo-Christian tradition is the cornerstone of Western civilisation, they also argue that secular liberalism leaves people bereft of community and a sense of meaning and purpose. New Theists like author and psychologist Jordan Peterson, conservative intellectual Douglas Murray, author and activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and historian Tom Holland all argue that the decline of Christianity will lead to nihilism, new forms of political tribalism, and a profound sense of spiritual emptiness in Western societies.
, , , New Theists believe traditional monotheistic religion is the only belief system that satisfies our need for meaning. [JAC note: Islam is also monotheistic, but you don’t see the New Theists touting Muslim belief.] In the absence of religion, Lefebvre says liberalism can serve this purpose. For [David] Brooks, just about any fervently held belief besides liberalism will do. All these beliefs share the conviction that Western liberalism has been hollowed out by the decline of religious faith. They don’t just seek to fill the hole in their own souls with religion or some other existential doctrine—they assume that all their fellow citizens share their spiritual yearning.
But if Christianity is a source of purpose, meaning, and solace, why is it declining everywhere? (In my view, it’s because if you’re getting better off materially and physically, as most of us are, the less you need a God to appeal to.) Some data:
The New Theists, Brooks, and Lefebvre all agree that there’s a crisis of meaning in liberal societies. This view has become increasingly common as Western countries have gone through a period of rapid secularisation in recent decades. In 2000, 86 percent of Americans reported that they were Christian. Since then, the proportion has collapsed to 68 percent. Other indicators of religiosity have plummeted as well—while nearly two-thirds of Americans said religion was “very important” to them in 2003, 45 percent now say the same. Church membership was around 70 percent in 2000, but it’s now 45 percent. Since 2007, the proportion of Americans who say they’re atheists, agnostics, or “nothing in particular” jumped from 16 percent to 28 percent.
A similar trend is sweeping Western Europe, which has seen significant declines in Christian belief. In Belgium, 83 percent of respondents to a Pew survey say they were raised Christian, but just 55 percent remain Christian. Many other countries have followed a similar trajectory: 79 to 51 percent in Norway, 67 to 41 percent in the Netherlands, 92 to 66 percent in Spain, 74 to 52 percent in Sweden. Every Western European country Pew surveyed followed this trend.
This is a problem, for why would people give up a belief if doing so plunges you into despair, anomie, and, say some, an abandonment of moral standards? Of course the morality/Christianity connection is dubious, as plenty of atheists are moral, and plenty of them, including John Rawls and Peter Singer, have written about how we can get morality from secular rationality alone. And you probably know the problems with asserting that morality comes from Christianity (especially the Bible). You have to cherry-pick the Bible to get a morality that we can hold today, ignoring things like acceptance of genocide and slavery, as well as Jesus’s command to leave your family to follow him. Further, as Johnson points out, history shows that the Enlightenment and its accompanying moral virtues came from rejecting Christianity, leading us to. . . .
The role of secularism in giving us morality:
There’s a reason Holland redefines humanism and secularism as Christian concepts. Criticism of religion played a major role in the development of Western liberal democracy, a historical fact that’s difficult to reconcile with his view that the West is fundamentally Christian. The word “Enlightenment” doesn’t appear once in Holland’s attack on humanism. While he briefly mentions Voltaire, he only does so to claim that the Western tradition of criticising religious authority can be traced to Martin Luther rather than the progenitors of Enlightenment humanism.
It’s true that Voltaire and Martin Luther were both critics of the Catholic Church, but the Protestant Reformation launched a century and a half of religious bloodshed in Europe—one of the great episodes of religious violence that Voltaire reacted against. The Thirty Years War directly or indirectly killed as much as a third of Central Europe’s population. This was also a period in which people were routinely tortured and killed for being insufficiently pious, worshiping the wrong God, or conducting scientific research. It’s no wonder that major Enlightenment figures such as David Hume, Baruch Spinoza, and Voltaire were such stern critics of religion, nor is it a surprise that the American Founders consulted their arguments and determined that a secular republic is the best form of government.
In the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom—which laid the foundation for the First Amendment to the US Constitution—Thomas Jefferson condemned as “tyrannical” the idea that a citizen must “furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors.” Citizens’ “opinions in matters of religion,” he wrote, should in no way “diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities.”
In fact, although many people attribute the rise of the Nazis to Hitler’s atheism, that doesn’t wash, as most Nazis were Christians. And there’s this:
Despite Nietzsche’s proclamation that God was dead in the late 19th century, there was no great movement away from Christianity in Germany prior to World War II. Immediately after the Nazis seized power in 1933—and less than a week after Hitler banned all non-Nazi parties—the German government signed a treaty with the Vatican. (The Catholic Church didn’t have an especially inspiring record on fascism elsewhere in Europe, either—Pope Pius XII supported General Francisco Franco during the Spanish Civil War and blessed his regime in 1948.) In a March 1933 speech, Hitler described Christianity as the foundation of German values. While it’s true that Hitler made this claim for political reasons and despite his own animosity toward Christianity, it demonstrates that he believed he had to appeal to the Christian faith of the German people.
Germany is the birthplace of the Protestant Reformation—one of the most significant events in the history of Western Christianity. It has as much of a claim to being a country forged by the Judeo-Christian tradition as any other in Europe, perhaps even more so. And yet, this rich Christian history and the presence of millions of Christians on German soil offered no bulwark against the descent into Nazism. New Theists attribute every Western achievement to Christianity and blame the West’s most cataclysmic failures on atheism. This is no surprise, as they have engineered a worldview in which everything moral is by definition Christian, and everything immoral is anti-Christian. But this obvious deck-stacking requires them to ignore the horrors of the distant past—the Crusades, the Inquisition, and 150 years of religious warfare in Europe—as well as the not-so-distant past.
There’s more, but the New Theism has also made a claim that renders the “god-shaped-hole hypothesis” worthless, making it untestable. And that claim is this: “Well, even if atheists are moral, and find meaning and purpose outside Christianity, the morality and purpose they have derives from the fact that the West was Christian for many years.” Using this argument, you can attribute anything good in the modern world to Christianity. But good things have happened in non-Christian countries, too, including India and, of course, Israel.
Johnson touches on this untestability, but I’d like to see more written about it by others.
For Holland and other New Theists like Peterson, the secularism of early liberals like Hume, Spinoza, Voltaire, and Jefferson is a mirage—no matter how ferociously they criticise Christianity, they’re inescapably Christian. Just as Holland says Christianity is responsible for liberalism, human rights, and even secularism, Peterson credits Christianity with “Western values, Western morality, and Western conceptions of good and evil.” Peterson says the “fundamental tenets of the Judeo-Christian moral tradition continue to govern every aspect of the actual individual behavior and basic values of the typical Westerner.” He even argues that it isn’t possible to be a genuine atheist and live an ethical life.
Note how Peterson asserts that Christianity still “governs every aspect of the individual behavior and basic values of the typical Westerner.” Can that be disproven under the views of the New Theists? If you think that America, for example, is built on Christian values, then why doesn’t the palpable rejection of religion by the Founders, as they drew up their plans for American government, disprove it? No, it can’t be disproved because the New Theists are, like Hirsi Ali, True Believers. If they’ve found meaning in Christianity, then somehow it must also undergird all of our lives, and the lives of Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, and other Founders. (If they thought Christianity was an essential social glue, why did they explicitly leave it out of government?) Of course they can always make up untestable claims to support that: the Founders were raised in a milieu of Christianity!
Which brings us to the final topic:
Where do we get meaning and purpose? Of course there are real people who claim (and mean it) that the meaning and purpose of their lives comes from Christianity. And some of them will be right, but there are also a lot of “nones”, and I haven’t seen them running around killing, raping, and stealing. Further, the countries of Northern Europe, like Sweden and Denmark, are almost completely atheistic (though people go to church for ceremonial reasons), and yet they are some of the most “moral” countries in the world. The New Theists, of course, will attribute this to these countries’ “Christian background”. But ask any regular Joe or Jill (not the Bidens!), or any Dane or Swede, what the purpose or meaning of their lives are, and see what they say. Johnson hits the nail on the head when he avers this:
There’s an assumption at the heart of liberalism: purpose is what we make it. While many of liberalism’s critics insist that there must be some top-down source of purpose in contemporary democratic societies, this contradicts essential liberal principles like freedom of conscience, self-determination, and pluralism. But the idea that there’s no fundamental source of purpose or meaning in life can be destabilising, which is why it has always generated such powerful resistance.
and his last sentence:
. . . Liberal ideas and institutions like the rule of law, property rights and contract enforcement, and freedom of expression and conscience deserve much of the credit for the health, prosperity, and autonomy we enjoy today. The one thing liberalism can’t provide, however, is a sense of meaning and purpose—that’s up to us, and the responsibility of making our own meaning is a small price to pay. For many, it isn’t a price at all.
It sure isn’t a price for me. I never worry about whether my life has “meaning and purpose.” I just do the things that I find fulfilling.
Although I’m absolutely confident that Christianity and Judaism are on the way out, for the time being New Theism is having a bit of a resurgence with the popularity of people like Peterson and Hirsi Ali. You can see this in the tremendous applause that Hirsi Ali got when she had a discussion with Richard Dawkins about her newfound Christianity. Dawkins’s claim that for him the value of life was empirical discovery and science couldn’t stand up to Hirsi Ali’s claims that we need Christinaity as a bulwark against the Dark Forces that besiege us. This doesn’t comport with the rise of nonbelief and the growth of “nones” (those who embrace no formal religion). How those lacking belief nevertheless can wildly applaud those who find meaning in Christianity can, I think, be attributed only to what Dan Dennett called “belief in belief.” That is, of course, the view that “I don’t need religion, but society needs it as a form of social glue to keep us together.” This is also known as The Little People Assertion.
That claim, in centuries to come, will be proven wrong. Unfortunately, none of us will be observing it from above!
This has all been fully explained in John C. Wathey’s books, “The Illusion of God’s Presence”, and “The Phantom God.”
You can find a good interview with him on Seth Andrews’ YT channel, “The Thinking Atheist”.
That’s nonsense. One can live a much happier, productive and meaningful life without any religion, especially Christianity.
I would suggest that if they insist that Christianity is “source of purpose, meaning, and solace” why are they saying Judaism doesn’t fulfill one’s life. Isn’t that anti-Semitic?
Also which of the 1200 different denominations of Christianity in the US is the best for a meaningful life?
My take is that religion is appealing because it makes life seem simpler than it actually is. Ambiguity and uncertainty of meaning and outcome makes some people anxious and depressed. A nice package deal of belief like religion sorts that out a bit. I suspect all the rest is window dressing, no matter what the religion/worldview. Other people can find meaning in exploring the universe, connecting with family and friends, and enjoying the fruits of our evolved existence.
And don’t forget heaven; I think that is the foremost appeal of most religions (or at least the religions that have a “heaven”). Oblivion is very difficult for the majority of humans to accept, thus heaven was created to fill the horror of “gone forever,” and it also became a reward that the religionists are granted upon death. I agree that religion makes reality simpler (think Creationism vs. Evolution) but in this case, oblivion is much simpler than a place like heaven.
When I was a child, I remember feeling quite unnerved at the idea of going to heaven for all eternity; as an adult, I can’t say I find the idea any more appealing.
If you have a decent imagination, “living” (after death?) for eternity is one of the craziest concepts humans have come up with. Unnerved is a good adjective. Religion is a shallow model of how to live a life in the 21st century. We know so frickin’ much! All of it without the help of religion.
I suspect that rather than a “God-shaped hole,” what we are seeing is a “history-shaped hole.” The “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go” crowd of the 60s and 70s was all too successful, and the entire Enlightenment project appears to have fallen away.
Now we have only the Great Whine, the elevation of identity-based grievance to the center of endeavor. We’ve lost the unifying historical continuum that so spectacularly served us before, and instead of standing on the shoulders of giants to reach for the stars we kick those giants in the face and cast them aside, re-writing them as evil twisted dwarves as we wallow in resentment and guilt.
I very much agree with this comment.
+1. The general term for this rejection of history and continuity is “queering”.
+1 John
Adding my +1 to this excellent comment
I have no problem with Hirsi Ali, Murray or Holland getting from Christianity what consolation they can for the trials and tribulations of life. Where I draw the line is at anyone insisting that I have to do so as well. And I draw a double line at anyone trying it on with our children.
Religion should be an activity for consenting adults in private.
Agreed. And I feel the same way about the State.
All aspects of social organization and interpersonal interaction is the business of consenting adults making voluntary contracts with each other. When some of those adults make some contracts that they foist onto others without their consent, they are just as guilty of coercion as the New Theists.
This is why I am an anarchist.
And before you say, “but how can you have social cohesion without a State?!” Reflect on “but how can you have morality without religion?!”
I don’t think morality is a good metaphor for social cohesion. One is subjective and personal; the other is objective and interpersonal. Interpersonal differences can lead to violence, and the first function of the state is its monopoly on violence. Collective management of that monopoly through democratically elected government seems like the least bad solution. That’s why I’m not an anarchist. Plus I don’t look good in black.
Ah yea that’s where I disagree, and happily it’s in a very narrow place: social cohesion CAN be subjective, when you associate freely and consensually in voluntary patchworks. It’s only “objective” when you are forced into involuntary, top-down organizations where the “objective” part lives a layer above you.
Bottom-up, spontaneous orders are voluntary and subjective (and both personal and interpersonal). Truly free markets are one example. Complex, adaptive evolutionary systems can be seen as another example when you look at them the right way.
But we don’t have to agree here, that’s fine. As long as we agree to disagree and not enforce, with violence, that the other adopt our opinion 🙂
I very much agree with that 😉
The “god shaped hole” assertion reminds me of a past online discussion with a Calvinist “presuppositionalist” who insisted that everyone knows that a god exists, no matter how many people replied testifying (joke intended) to their lack of belief. There seems to be an inability to put oneself in another’s shoes, even for the sake of argument, on the part of many theists.
That’s a lot to unpack, but at the bottom of it all is a lie, that the moral advancement we call The Enlightenment was somehow based on Christianity. It absolutely was not! Sure, the Enlightenment thinkers came out of a European culture soaked in that ol’ time religion, but you’ll note that it only emerged after (and in spite of) ten centuries of Christian domination. The Enlightenment was clearly in opposition to Christianity.
I just ran across an excellent essay by Richard Carrier, contrasting the pronouncements of Moses coming down from the mountain, with those of Solon, the author of the constitution of Athens of 594 BC.
Carrier’s article was written in 2000 (he must have been just a kid!), and it concerns attempts to post the Ten Commandments (well, some made-up pastiche of various translations thereof) in public places. It’s long, but well worth reading.
America was founded on the precepts of Solon, not Moses!
America was founded on the precepts of Solon, not Moses!
If only the MAGA cult would believe the truth…even the majority sitting on SCOTUS don’t know the history of the Constitution and our Founding Fathers. It’s pretty shocking when you realize that.
There is no archeological evidence for the Exodus, Moses, etc. The 10 commandments were meant for rulers control the masses.
Jesus was just another ‘carrot and stick’ program for the masses. Christianity is a morbid death cult – why would anyone include that as a purpose.
Curiosity about our amazing world and the Universe is a most fulfilling purpose.
It is wonderful that Christianity, having fought so hard against the Enlightenment, now turns round and claims that the consequent values really were Christian all along. Bloody hypocrites.
A bulwark against the Dark Forces that besiege us? Christianity is a dark force.
Yes, Richard. That steams my blood frequently. Christ clappers claiming enlightenment values and priorities are “actually” Judeo-Christian is nonsense and the classic hide-the-ball logic.
The Enlightenment was (as I put it in an article comparing religion to a mental illness some years ago) the defanging, castration and taming of the wild irrationality of religion.
That annoying fellow Ross Dotard of the NYTimes is a showman of this trick and Jordan Peterson is a master of it. They vex me.*
D.A.
NYC
https://democracychronicles.org/author/david-anderson/
*Any excuse to use the word vex. 🙂
+1
(Peter): My wife and I were organizers of Contra Costa Atheists and Freethinkers (CCAF), an atheist Meetup group with more than 400 members in the San Francisco Bay Area (2011~2023). One of our best-attended events in 2012 featured Richard Carrier in person.
I’m certainly not a historian, but I found his presentation — “Hitler Was Not An Atheist: The Evidence Of The Mysterious ‘Table Talk’ ” — persuasive.
Although Carrier got into trouble for supposed sexual misconduct, it seems that he ran into more trouble for having some opinions and/or behaviors that ran counter to what was then called the “Atheism Plus” movement — which, in retrospect (at least to me), had many of the hallmarks (and excesses) of today’s “social justice warriors.”
The god-shaped hole is what lets in the light of reason.
That “hole” is simply the human ability to speculate on what makes the world go round, based on evidence available to the individual. Since it’s hard to control a bunch of people having different worldviews, authorities made sure early on to package them for the masses. Now we have science and reason instead.
Except that Hitler was also not an atheist! The Nazis were indeed Christians (Himmer declared that: “I have never tolerated an atheist in the ranks of the SS. Every member has a deep faith in God”), but Hitler was just as much a theist (perhaps of a weird sort, departing from mainstream Christianity).
There’s not a single quote where Hitler espouses atheism, and lots and lots were he espouses theism. Just for example (from Mein Kampf):
“And so I believe to-day that my conduct is in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator. In standing guard against the Jew I am defending the handiwork of the Lord.”
Some might try to argue that this was just for public consumption, and that he was secretly an atheist, but there is no evidence for this at all.
The labelling of Hitler as an atheist derives from the aftermath of the second world war, when the Western allies were still near-universally Christian and, to them, the word “atheist” denoted “bad person”.
Atheists in Nazi Germany were treated like Jews.
The SS belt buckles were engraved with Gott Mitt Uns – God with Us.
Hitler was Catholic.
L
Summary here:
https://oxfordre.com/religion/display/10.1093/acrefore/9780199340378.001.0001/acrefore-9780199340378-e-680?d=%2F10.1093%2Facrefore%2F9780199340378.001.0001%2Facrefore-9780199340378-e-680&p=emailAqCaRWBh%2Fmjqk#:~:text=Ultimately%2C%20there%20was%20no%20such,of%20the%20Wilhelmine%20and%20Weimar
The belt buckles of the pre-Nazi German army had “Gott mit uns”, as did German coins, and the tradition was kept on in Hitler’s army (except for the newly created Luftwaffe).
It’s astounding how all sides in so many wars always believed that the Christian God was on their side.
Here’s a list of Hitler’s positive quotes about religion. He was no atheist.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/08/23/list-of-hitler-quotes-he-was-q/
As the article said, he might have been catering to other people’s desires to hear him praise religion. He sure never went to church. If he was religious, wouldn’t you have expected him to go to church at least once as Fuhrer?
If he’d gone to church as Fuhrer it would have amounted to tacitly accepting their spiritual authority over him, whereas he thought that the churches should be subservient to him. Rejecting church authority is not the same as rejecting religion or theism, indeed he seemed to have regarded himself as sent by God to the German people.
Yes. There was a German word used by the Nazis for that not-so-very Christian, at least neither catholic not protestant, but certainly not atheist theism: “gottgläubig”.
‘Meaning and purpose” are overrated. I simply go about my business.
These are definitely NOT the droids you’re looking for.
Speaking of which: if (and when) AI robots take over the Earth,
will they want to pray that they be wafted up to heaven to bask in the
glory of Jesus and the Big G when their bodies are hoisted on to the
scrap heap prior to recycling.
Robots need not pray — “heaven” is in the cloud. Their bodies, be they humanoid in form or just circuits in a server farm, are temporary vessels. Artificial intelligences might be immortal in that they could “reincarnate” indefinitely.
In the meantime, of course, we have new human overlords in the form of rightwing meat puppets in the U.S. Supreme Court.
One of the atheist twitter accounts spent most of (I think) Wednesday tweeting various claims of one religion or another, with the punch line “as every other religion also claims that” for every particular claim of a unique property of $RELIGION$.
This is another claim of uniqueness that every religion would be able to to make – it it were worth the electrons or ink it takes to duplicate. Unfortunately, it’s not worth the effort of duplication, let alone refutation.
As you’d say of politicians, “Well they would say that, wouldn’t they?”
From the outside, Islam, Christianity and Judaism are indistinguishable in substance. Which makes the never-ending wars of hair-splitting all the sadder and more hilarious.
I don’t know if Ankhenaten’s outbreak of monotheism in the 18th (17th?) Dynasty of Egypt was actually the origin of monotheism, which the alleged “tribes of Israel” copied during their alleged “servitude”. If any of that happened. Call me when there is some unambiguous archaeological evidence, with at least pottery, and preferably isotopic dating to back it up. I won’t hold my breath – the 19th (18th?) Dynasty history-erasers were pretty efficient, motivated, and much closer in time than our researches to any potential evidence. Plus, they could bribe (with torture) any servant witnesses.
Prediction – the slaughter of one monotheism by another (indistinguishably indifferent) monotheism will continue with unrelenting enthusiasm tomorrow, and for the foreseeable future. It’s the human thing to do. Anyone want to take that bet? And the widdershins woad-rubbers will fight the turnwise woad-rubbers until the last woad plant is burned!
It seems to me the issue is not religion. It is that religions of all sorts as practiced traditionally involve people coming together and socially associating (at church, temple, a mosque, etc.). The decline of religion means the decline of a major route of this kind of association. Couple this with other routes that have been blocked (the decline of social trust in general which lead to people of different socioeconomic strata more frequently living in the same locations, lack of mandatory military service, etc.) and the rise of people finding on-line communities which detrimentally end up as social media echo chambers), and indeed people’s feelings of isolation, loneliness and depression will increase.
This may be true for society, but not for me. Aside from my wife (and her children and relatives), I have few friends in person, but I now always have some rewarding associations online, though they may be “serial associations” as my interests change.
I never feel lonely, as I feel connected to a grand human endeavor — the scientific exploration of the universe, unrestrained by supernatural superstitions.
But this is now seriously threatened, of course, by the U.S. Supreme Court and the increase in so-called “populist” forces around the world, which have been stoked by misinformation and propaganda from autocratic regimes.
Same here…but for many this seems to be true.
👍🏻
There’s also the fact that countries with weaker social safety nets tend to be more religious and vice versa (as in the Scandinavian countries).
I don’t know the answer to this, but here is a question: Within those religious countries, which also tend to be traditional in ethos, is it possible that the dominant view is to “take care of one’s own”? Meaning, that the responsibility to look after others is thought to reside closer to home or within one’s smaller social group rather than in a distant bureaucracy? If so, then one would expect stronger ties to kin and neighbors.
By “distant bureaucracy,” do you mean a government that has a safety net for the less fortunate?
(I’m not being sarcastic. I’m just in favor of that kind of government.)
Within Islamic countries, the extended family tends to be the safety net for most, and families can be very extended, yet closely genetically related there (high proportion of cousin marriage over centuries), and with very little individual freedom. In some, religious do-goodery associations take over the safety net function the state neglects, which is one if the reasons Hezbollah is so popular among its clientele in Lebanon. Religious welfare organizations are also a big thing among Orthodox Jews, despite their profiting from help from the secular states they live in.
Christianity, via the catholic ban on cousin marriage, together with even older European traditions of outmarriage (even in the archaeological record, now that we have ancient DNA!), led to greater solidarity among and more contacts between non-related people in the West. Robert Putnam showed how Churches in America in the 1950s and 1960s used to foster contact between people of different social strata and the contacts there helped kids from less fortunate backgrounds.
Bertrand Russell has an amusing anecdote in one of the volumes of his autobiography in which he reprints a letter sent by Will Durant to numerous public figures around the world, asking where they got their sense of meaning and purpose. Durant proposed to compile a volume of answers as a kind of guide to life for lay people.
Russell was appropriately dismissive of Durant’s project, and replied – I’m writing from the memory of reading this 50 years ago – that he saw no particular meaning or purpose to life apart from basic survival and reproduction, and that he derived his own personal sense of satisfaction from defecating twice daily “with unfailing regularity.” Apparently, Durant did not use Russell’s response in any volume he later compiled.
Hirsi Ali has been an employee of American Enterprise Institute ever since she immigrated to the US.
I have commented previously that if she ever drew a parallel between the authoritarianism of Islam and the authoritarianism of Christianity, that they would dump her like a box of hot rocks.
She knows, believe me, who butters her bread.
L
+1
Also, she has a partner who recently came out as a “we need Christianity for our societly”-Christian too.
I must say that I agree that there is a god shaped-and-sized hole in my psyche. Though I do not know how one attributes a shape to something with no size due to nonexistance…..
I teach with people that follow this crap, and truly believe that DJT was sent by a literal, tangible, in fact there watching us god, the father of and one with jesus, and do everything they can to avoid crossing the line to actionable practice in the classroom. Including a biology “teacher” (undergrad In Micro and Genetics, for f*ck sake, from a reputable accredited institution) who denies evolution and believes wholeheartedly that vaccines cause all manner of ill and are a communist plot.
What exactly is the purpose that only god – and the only the Christian god – can provide? To go to heaven and sing his praises for all eternity?
The US State Department reports that, according to a 2022 poll of the independent Levada Center, 71% of the Russian population is Orthodox Christian, while only 15% claim to have no religious faith. This has held steady since Pew did a survey showing that, between 1991 and 2008, the percentage of Orthodox Christian believers surged from 31% to 72%, while the numbers not identifying with any religion plunged from 61% to 18%. Was this a religious revival in a formerly atheistic state? (Few of them attend church.) Did tens of millions of people who previously found “meaning and purpose” in themselves suddenly find it in the Christianity of pre-Soviet, Czarist times? Or, perhaps, has claimed membership in Orthodox Christianity become part and parcel of Russian identity?
The previous social security in the sense of secure jobs and basic provisions including healthcare disappeared and made room for the worst kind of dysfunctional robber capitalism and male life expectancy plunged. Meaning and purpose in being a part of supposedly the world’s most progressive society including its rituals also disappeared. Lacking that, old style nationalism and religion resurged.
Great post – I bring a couple quotes to check out (I’m not arguing here):
“It is charged against me that I am against property, that I am an atheist. Both charges are false.”
-Speech given on December 4, 1938
quoted in
The Speeches of Adolf Hitler
H. Fertig, 1969
April 1922-August 1939
en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler#1938
“Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
-John Adams
Letter from John Adams to Massachusetts Militia
11 October 1798
… in other realms, after reviewing Hume – who has some interesting writing on atheism that should be interesting -, Rousseau, etc, I’ve just learned about and am starting to look into Scottish Common Sense Realism :
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_common_sense_realism
Oops – I wrote “interesting” twice in the the same sentence.
#FindTheErrorInThisSentence
Our church-state separation – in the face of very high religiosity – is the secret sauce of the USA’s success in the modern world.
Religious types talking about “a Christian society” remind me of the Islamosphere -which is not a successful model by any metric. Note that in Islam there is no separation between mosque and state. Even in “secular” or ba’thist states which pretend there is sometimes.
My greater concern is – along the lines of Ayan but not as far extreme as her – secular “religions” are filling the hole of irrationality and must be countered in the way religion has been. There’ll always be something dumb which would end in disaster (communism for awhile) for the “brights” to fight.
Keep up that fight non-woke fellow atheists.
D.A.
NYC
https://democracychronicles.org/author/david-anderson/
“Keep up that fight non-woke fellow atheists.”
All anyone has to do is keep on going one god further – and that god might in fact be the Ouroboros of society and the self.
#Gnosticism
#Hermeticism
#Theosophy
It strikes me that the people advocating for Christianity as a source of meaning and social cohesion are doing so in an era where Christianity has already been ‘tamed’ almost to the point of irrelevance. When Europe was still largely Christian, religion was the source of much of its social division. The Thirty Years War, the most destructive war in European history, was fought over different flavours of Christianity.
Meaning? Purpose? I have no time or patience to be preoccupied with other people’s anxieties -I just get on with living my life.
I wanted to say this the other day to Chuck.
It was in the vain of being an adult and having little use, holding zero value for myths, legends, gods, fairytales, as a system for meaning, purpose and guides.
It is the maturing culture of humanity driven by science, reason, a revelation of a shared humanity that is slowly degrading religion, not to mention glaring contradictions, fallacies, hypocrisy, of the current batch of gods you could choose from.
I frame “adult” here in this way. Growing up, leaving childlike fairytales, toys, games, stories, and deal with reality. It amuses and horrifies that grown old males, (usually) some with silk slippers, beards and holy grabs masquerade that have never become fully fledged adults. Which is another illusion on top of another, they look adult.
Ok so power is a motivation, like “Lord of the Flies”, children playing or more, behaving like adults.
Google:
a person who is fully grown or developed.
“children should be accompanied by an adult”
I am unconvinced that everybody has a ‘hole’ wanting filling by meaning and/or purpose, let alone a Religion.
Indeed, from an evolutionary viewpoint, if the ‘want for meaning and purpose’ has a genetic component you might expect a range of degrees of ‘wanting’ playing out in a population with evolutionary processes determining the fitness of individuals. So celibate people do not (generally) pass on their genes and those who do not practice (modern) birth control pass on many copies.
But I argue that the ‘wanting hole’ is a biological and social construct. That some people think it is God shaped is one environmental input out of many to the evolutionary processes. The ‘wanting hole’, in those that feel it most keenly, is like an undeveloped lot – and there are lots of people trying to develop it to their tastes, whether religious, ideological, or to sell used cars.
I think you make an important point. As an anthropologist who has worked with small-scale societies for the past 45 years, and who has studied many others, I have never found that the obsession with meaning and purpose we see in complex societies is present in those small-scale societies. Emile Durkheim made a version of this point in the late 19th century with the somewhat exaggerated observation that in hunter-gather and horticultural societies, everyone has the same role as everyone else (sex/gender roles being the exception to this), and simply fulfilling that role is the start and finish of anything like “purpose” or meaning. “Religion” in such societies tends to be something like animism, local spirits, shamanism, etc, without obsessing about meaning and purpose.
Rather, the fixation on meaning and purpose seems to emerge with a certain level of social complexity, and might be a product of what Marx referred to as alienation in the context of what Weber saw as the growth of bureaucracy, and more recently Graeber critiqued as “bullshit jobs”. Religious beliefs play a different role in such complex societies, but that does not make religious beliefs more valid or true.
Alec Ryrie claims that the problem of evil/suffering was seldom used to argue against God until the 20th century. There were few pain killers, suffering was a natural part of life, and you had to put up with it.
I’m not sure what your comment has to do with mine, but one of the core arguments using the problem of evil against the existence of god was David Hume’s indirect inductive argument in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779).
To me, this thesis about the god shaped hole is essential a rationalisation of a sense of defeat, when it comes from former atheists or former naturalists, or former secular liberals (in the historical sense of the word).
It’s more or less: “Let’s face it: religion has not gone away; it’s alive and kicking more than ever; and we have to pick sides.”
It may be a somewhat honest position from these people. But it boils down essentially to a sense of defeat.
I’m not talking about Jordan Peterson, here. I’m talking about the “left wing” of the New Theists.
But religion, at least in the West, is NOT “alive and kicking more than ever.”
> But religion, at least in the West, is NOT “alive and kicking more than ever.”
I believe that is a lie we like to keep telling ourselves.
I live in an officially very secularised country. I see religion seeping everywhere, through every pores of society. I’m perhaps more sensitive to that than others given my personal background (educated by Jesuits at Sainte-Geneviève in Versailles), but I do think people should acknowledge where religion rears its head instead of pretending it does not exist and everything is explained away by poverty, education or whatever.
We are voting, here, today. Our far right party is explicitly of a monarchist and theocratic heritage. The enlightenment has not laid down very deep roots since Spinoza, and the backlash is coming.
We are seeing young people much more brazenly showing off their attachment to catholicism, nowadays. The explanation is very easy: competition with islam, and people wanting, now, to play the religion card too.
Atheists like me are slowly being squeezed out of the political spectrum by both political sides, which has started to fuse with religious identity. It’s very hard not see it. Or, rather, it’s very easy to keep lying to ourselves.
> We are voting, here, today. Our far right party is explicitly of a monarchist and theocratic heritage. The enlightenment has not laid down very deep roots since Spinoza, and the backlash is coming.
In fairness, France has an especially ugly history here. During the revolution, all clergy were forced to swear an oath to the new constitution, and among those who refused hundreds were murdered with more going into exile. At times, it looked like Christianity would be outlawed altogether. Catholics were needlessly turned into enemies of the state, and as you know there was debate well into the 20th century on whether they could be loyal citizens.
(I used to know traditionalist Catholics, including some in France who were not opposed to Vichy’s government. This is not intended as a defence of their anti-enlightened attitudes.)
@mdap
Yes. France has an ugly history. The point being: when you wish to enshrine freedom of conscience and religion in a country like England who had a civil war between protestants and catholics, you end up with a country where talking about religion is more or less ok-ish, in a parliamentary system.
When you murder all the protestants as done here during the Saint-Barthélémy, you end up having only catholics. And when the high nobility starts refusing parliamentary monarchy out of pig-headedness, you end up with an insurrectionist republic; and, as the whole point is to get out of theocracy, you murder the priests. Simple as that. Because there are no counterweights like England had, with two competing religious parties.
You had only one religious party, and it had to end.
Perhaps Iran will go down the same kind of internal blood bath at some point. I see two many parallels.
If you know the history of France, you should know that all of this is not to be taken lightly at all. For 250 years, we have more or less shut down religious expression because of precisely that past, on both sides (and I stress that: secularism has blunted **both** expression of religion and of intellectual atheism). The illusion is believing that all this has gone away, just because we stopped talking about it from the period from the Liberation to the Bataclan. It merely went underground. And now, it’s revenge time.
When all of that resurfaces, it will be a blood bath. Our hardcore catholics are no better than the hardcore antireligious that you seem to loathe. And add our muslims on top of that ? Some of whom (and I stress “some”) want to replay the War of Algeria ?
Sorry to be blunt, but when I see ISIS beheading people, I have a nasty thought in the back of my head: compared to our scientific and methodic use of the guillotine, these terrorists are amateurs. The guillotine had to be moved around in the streets of Paris because of the smell…
I know our hardcore right. I know our hardcore left. And I believe that underplaying the role of religion is a dangerous illusion in which we are sleepwalking.
It has not left the west. It went underground.
Anyway: we’ll know at 20:00 french time…
Theists don’t have an answer for the problem of evil, and atheists don’t have an answer for the problem of lack of meaning and purpose. I can make a list of things that give meaning and purpose to my life, but a Christian can say, “We have all those meanings and purposes too, but that’s not what we’re talking about: believing in God gives you hope, that you don’t have.”
Another problem is, without a religion, how are we going to stop the growth of Islam in the West? We’ve already lost freedom of speech.
The question of filling ‘the G-d shaped hole’ within the human condition is whether a ‘christianity’ that is an all too human theological construct is able to do so? And this discusion wouldn’t even exist if that ‘hole’ had already been successfully filled! Thus this failure begs the question: does theology only exist because nothing has been revealed except maybe the extremes of hubris and vanity within a Fallen human nature. Was it not writen: ‘All is vanity all is chasing after wind’ and who could this refer to other then those that have convinced themselves that they have comprehended the mind of G-d? It is thus no wonder that hole remains.
Very annoying how rosy the picture of Christianity (and the Middle Ages) has become among the “serious” atheists of today, who are naturally eager to distance themselves from everything the New Atheists have done. It’s certainly an over-correction.
Nobody ever took the Bible literally, I am told (only New Atheists and so-called fundamentalists like white Evangelicals do). And Muslims don’t either, why would you even think that?
Surveys of the Nones shows many are leaving religion because they no longer believe in Christian religious dogmas. And many are leaving due to Christian nationalism and bigotry, especially of gay – lesbian issues. Especially Generation Z. Z has 9% self identifying atheists and 9% agnostics. Twice the incidence of disbelief as Americans averages. Exposure to Bible problems on the net probably plays a big role here. Many people no longer believe the God of Bible or Quran. But believe in some vague higher “spiritual power” or “spiritual force”. That includes 23% of people claiming to believe in God. 19% do not believe in God but 9% of those do believe in some higher power. Pew Research, What Americans Believe About God. Something odd is going on few seem to be noticing.
Entropy is the natural order of the universe. Life is the momentary departure from the natural order brought about the energy of the sun and planetary resources, oxygen, carbon dioxide, water, minerals. The purpose of life on this planet is to help defy entropy, is to create, create art, create food through agriculture to keep life going, to work building infrastructure for life, houses, places for defying entropy. And not the least to raise the next generation for fight against entropy.
https://politicsofthelastage.blogspot.com/2024/04/the-meaning-and-purpose-of-life-all-life.html
Since what another person believes is not subject to proof, what Ayaan Hirsi Ali (or anyone else) does or does not believe rests on her word.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=tWOZi_OUQL8
Here is a video of Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins. Hitchens and Dawkins are truly amazing!!! ✨✨
I don’t think religion is necessary after all. ❤❤🐱