Not long ago I mentioned that The Free Press had published a weird piece extolling religion: an atheist beefing that she really missed the goddy parts of Christmas even though she wasn’t a believer. She needed to go to church. With that, I wondered whether softness on religion was becoming part of anti-wokeness, or at least that news site.
Now, with the publication of a new longer piece, The Free Press has buttressed my speculations. For this article not only names and tells the stories of a number of notables who decided to embrace religion (largely Christianity), but also implies that there are good reasons for them to do so. Mostly it’s the “God-shaped hole in our being”: the dubious idea that humans have an innate—and perhaps evolved—need to find a divine being to worship and give then succor. Indeed, several people (including Ayaan Hirsi Ali, whose embrace of Christianity we’ve discussed before) explicitly mention that religion is what gives their life meaning.
If that is the case, good for them. But of course many of us find meaning and purpose without religion. Indeed, as I’ve argued, people often don’t go out looking for meaning and purpose to their lives, but simply enact their lives in a way that winds up giving them meaning and purpose. Those things can be found in children, family, friends, activities (be they physical, intellectual, or humanitarian) and so on.
The biggest issue with this article, though, is that it is completely devoid of any evidence for the truth of the tenets of religion. It’s touting faith as a balm for wounded souls, and, so the narrative goes, one should accept God to get cured–regardless of whether what you believe is true. Indeed, it quotes Andrew Sullivan on the advantage of not having to have good reasons to believe:
The question swirling around all the new believers was: Were they true believers? Or was their conversion mostly or entirely utilitarian—driven by a desire to push back against the forces of technology and secularism and wokeness and an increasingly militant Islam? Did they actually believe that Jesus Christ was the son of God and that he had died for our sins and was resurrected? Or did they think that was a nice story that we should tell ourselves because it encouraged people to treat each other better—because it was a kind of cultural bulwark? And did it really matter in the end?
Andrew Sullivan, the writer and podcaster, suggested this might not be easy to answer. “The feeling”—of believing—“will vary,” Sullivan, a Catholic, told me. “Sometimes, there’s no feeling. Sometimes, you’re overwhelmed. The point really is to escape feeling as such—our emotions are not what prove anything.”
“The genius of ritual is that it allows us not to articulate our feelings,” Sullivan said. “It allows us to express our faith through an act.”
Well, I don’t find that “genius”. If your faith depends on believing that Jesus died for our sins, was bodily resurrected, and then became the only route to Heaven, then you bloody well better have good reasons for thinking that. It was the achievement of New Atheism to show that peoples’ reasons are not good ones. If your eternal life (and its location) depends on believing the truths espoused by your faith, it’s salubrious to have chosen the right faith. But people don’t worry about that; they usually assume the faith they were taught as children.
Click on the screenshot below to read the piece, or find it archived here.
Here are the names in each of the “I found God” anecdotes. Excerpts are indented; bolding is mine:
1.) In the beginning, Matthew Crawford believed in nothing.
“The question of God wasn’t even on the radar,” the best-selling author told me.
. . . .“A lot of very thoughtful people who once believed reason and science could explain everything—why we’re here, what comes after we’re gone, what it all means—are now feeling a genuine hunger for something more,” he said.
“There has to be a larger order that comprehends us and makes a demand on us,” Crawford added. “It’s clear that we can’t live without a sense of meaning beyond ourselves.”
Has to be? Why? And of course if you find “meaning and purpose” in things like friends, family, work, and avocation, then that is a “sense of meaning” that doesn’t need the supernatural.
2.) But something profound is happening. Instead of smirking at religion, some of our most important philosophers, novelists, and public intellectuals are now reassessing their contempt for it. They are wondering if they might have missed something. Religion, the historian Niall Ferguson told me, “provides ethical immunity to the false religions of Lenin and Hitler.”
Again, we are supposed to believe that these important intellectuals might have missed out by neglecting God. But the effects of religious belief give no evidence for the truth of its tenets.
3.) In February 2024, podcaster Joe Rogan, in a conversation about the sorry state of America’s youth with New York Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers, said: “We need Jesus.” Not five years earlier, Rogan had hosted Richard Dawkins on his show and poked fun at Christians.
Why Jesus? Is there evidence that he was who he said he was, and that believing in Jesus is the only way to heaven? Maybe we need Muhammad or Buddha.
Anyway, many of us don’t need Jesus.
Note the swipe at Dawkins. The article makes fun of New Atheists throughout; it’s almost like that contempt was ripped from Pharyngula. There’s even a section called “The Rise and Fall of the New Atheists”. Well, New Atheists aren’t writing their books any more, as they’ve had their say, but the decline of faith in the Western world (not just the U.S.) is sufficient evidence that the anecdotes of this article go against a trend of decreasing religiosity.
4.) In April, the comedian Russell Brand—who has emerged in recent years as a voice of the counterculture and amassed an audience of more than 11 million on X—announced that he was about to be baptized. “I know a lot of people are cynical about the increasing interest in Christianity and the return to God but, to me, it’s obvious. As meaning deteriorates in the modern world, as our value systems and institutions crumble, all of us become increasingly aware that there is this eerily familiar awakening and beckoning figure that we’ve all known all our lives within us and around us. For me, it’s very exciting.”
It’s almost as if his social-media following validates his beliefs. And again, why Christianity? How does Brand, who I thought was smarter than this, know that Christianity is the religion with the “right” claims? Why not Islam or Judaism?
5.) In May, tech mogul Peter Thiel, who had espoused a vague spirituality and had been friends with the late French philosopher and religious thinker René Girard, came down unequivocally on the side of God. “God has some kind of a plan for history,” Thiel said, while being interviewed by a pastor at a former church. “Maybe it’s a hidden plan; it’s a secret plan. He has a plan for your life.” It was a remarkable moment: One of the gods of Silicon Valley, who had long argued that technology could cure death, was now saying that there was one true God, and that human beings were human—limited, mortal, at the mercy of larger forces.
How certain Thiel is about the existence of God! But what is his evidence? And what is this evidence of a “plan for history” and a “plan for your life”? Thiel is just making this stuff up, spinning his wheels.
6). Then in July, Elon Musk—the former “atheist hero,” the king of electric vehicles and space exploration, the champion of free expression—sat down with Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychologist who has studied the intersection of religion and ideology, to discuss God. “I’m actually a big believer in the principles of Christianity,” Musk said. Soon after, Musk took to X to pronounce that “unless there is more bravery to stand up for what is fair and right, Christianity will perish.”
Note that Musk said he believes in the PRINCIPLES of Christianity, not the actual factual assertions of the faith. Do those beliefs include the principle that if you don’t except Jesus as your savior, you’re going to fry eternally? What about the principle that it’s okay to have slaves, so long as you don’t whip them too hard?
As for Jordan Peterson, what he believes about Christianity is so confused and incoherent that I cannot take his “religion” seriously.
There are more like this, includiong Paul Kingsnorth and Jordan Hall, but again, they are just conversion stories, and say nothing about the truth of Christianity. And for every believer cited I could dig up someone who either gave up faith or refused to adopt it, as shown by the growth of “nones” in America. If it’s a war of anecdotes, the nonbelievers win (see below).
But we’ve neglected the prize specimen of conversion, former atheist Ayaan Hirsi Ali. She was deeply depressed, and nothing worked to help her. Until she found Christianity.
7.) In 2022, she started to come around to the idea of Christianity, going to church, thinking, reading: Who was this Christian God? And what was the nature of one’s relationship with him? How did that change you?
Then came Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023.
The attack was proof, like the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States, of everything she had long believed about Islam. She was horrified, but she was also amazed by the Israelis’ conviction. “What I find with my Jewish friends was this blind faith in Israel and the existence of Israel—there will be a Zionist movement, there will be a home for the Jewish people,” she said. “They are immersed in these biblical stories. It’s a story of faith.”
In November of that year, Hirsi Ali published an essay, “Why I Am Now a Christian”—a response to Bertrand Russell—in UnHerd. “We can’t counter Islamism with purely secular tools,” she wrote. “To win the hearts and minds of Muslims here in the West, we have to offer them something more than videos on TikTok.”
The essay triggered an avalanche of conversations in the independent media universe—including a book, which she is now working on, and a debate, in June, between Hirsi Ali and Dawkins in which she argued that Christianity is a bulwark against “the cult of power, Islamism.” The debate felt like a kind of bookend to the four horsemen meeting in Hitchens’s apartment in 2007.
Well, yes, Christianity could make you resist Islam (note that religion is being divisive here), and if it cured Hirsi Ali of her depression, then I won’t fault her for accepting it, so long as she believes its tenets, which she says she does. Here’s the debate between Dawkins and Hirsi Ali. The audience is clearly on Hirsi Ali’s side, but the existence of God can’t be decided by a vote, and of course atheists are generally seen with suspicion compared to lauded “people of faith”. I have always found it curious that it’s considered praise to say someone is a “person of faith”. It could just as well be said that that is a “person of delusion.”
Another argument for religion adduced in the piece is that religion inspired great art, including all the religious paintings before artists discovered apples and flowers, as well as cathedrals and great music. This is in fact true, for surely we would have no Notre Dame or Chartres without Christianity. (I’m not so sure about music and painting.) But again, Islam too has inspired fantastic architecture as in their many lovely mosques (e.g., the Taj Mahal), as well as painting, and music (well, until recently). But again, none of this attesta to the verity of the revelations given to Muhammad.
And let’s get back to Dawkins:
Dawkins underscored that he, like Sam Harris, is still very much an atheist. He did not see any contradiction in saying, as he had to Rachel Johnson on the Leading Britain’s Conversation (LBC) radio show, that he was “happy” with the number of Christians declining in Britain and that he “would not be happy if we lost all our cathedrals and our beautiful parish churches.”
“The tendency you’re talking about,” he told me, alluding to Hirsi Ali, “is, I think, mostly people who don’t necessarily believe Jesus was the son of God or born of a virgin, or rose from the dead, but nevertheless think that Christianity is a good thing, that Christianity would benefit the world if more people believed it, that Christianity might be the sort of basis for a lot of what’s good about Western civilization.”
And yet, Dawkins did admit he was worried about losing the world that had been bequeathed to us by Christianity. “If we substituted any alternative religion,” he said in his April interview, “that would be truly dreadful.”
It wasn’t just about the danger of what was coming. It was about what we were losing, or might lose.
“Some of the greatest music ever written is church music, music inspired by Christianity,” he told me, echoing Roger Scruton. J.S. Bach would never have composed his Mass in B Minor—with all those violins, cellos, sopranos, and tenors weaving together, pointing us toward the heavens—without the divine, he said. Nor would Dostoevsky, as Paul Kingsnorth said, have written The Brothers Karamazov had he not been a believer. Had the world not been changed in countless unbelievable ways by that art? Had that art not changed us?
When I mentioned Dawkins’s distinction between cultural and theological Christianity to Kingsnorth, he said he thought Dawkins was deliberately sidestepping a deeper conversation about the nature of belief.
I can’t agree fully with Richard about Christianity having bequeathed us a world we want to live in. We can’t run the experiment, but what kind of world would we have if religion had never arisen? We wouldn’t have cathedrals, but perhaps rationality and science would have taken hold a lot earlier, and surely a lot fewer people would have died in the many religious wars. (They’re still dying in droves, by the way: Jew against Muslim, Sunni against Shia, and so on.)
All I know is that I can’t force myself to believe, to condition my life, on something like this unless I know it is true. And because I see no evidence for a God, much less for the truth of any religion, I cannot force myself to believe. I consider myself a cultural Jew, but my life wouldn’t be that much poorer if I was purely secular. It is very convenient that believers say they don’t need no stinkin’ evidence, for they get to believe and don’t have to explain why they believe beyond “it makes me feel good.” Like this, from Jonah Teller, a New York Catholic priest:
Father Jonah thought that a new fervor, a more authentic connection to the faith, was emerging out of the loneliness of the last few years. There was a “genuine happiness” that he could feel at Mass, “an excitement, a love.”
It wasn’t that complicated in the end. It was, he said, a kind of turning away from a radical atomization. “The world many people have grown up in is one in which you have the ability to be your own God,” said Father Jonah. “You should have it simply because you want it, whatever it may be. Or not have it, and that can include your own existence—a rejection of simply being.”
But the fact of our existence is a testament to God’s love for us, he said. “We are always wanted,” Father Jonah said. “We are always loved. This is the most important thing. God is not a mindfulness hack or a wellness exercise. It’s not—‘I found this ethical system that gets results, and therefore, I will choose it.’ It’s not a choice. It’s an encounter with an actual, personal love.”
Father Jonah’s evidence is this: we exist, therefore God, and not just God but the loving Christian god. Does God love the Covid virus and mosquitoes, too, which also exist?
I am not going to go into detail about how faith is declining throughout the West, but here are some data from the Gallup organization. Click each graph to see the report
x
From Pew Research:
and from Open Culture:
Look as you will, all you will find is a continuous decline in religion in America over the last 100 years. But it’s not just America: read the Wikipedia article “Decline of Christianity in the Western World.”
This trend, of course, is downplayed in the article, with only a brief mention about the increase in “nones” under the Hirsi Ali section, but that’s about it. Yet given this trend, in 200 years believers in America will be quite rare. Religion will never disappear, of course, but its decline has been discussed by Steve Pinker in his book Enlightenment Now. with religion adduced as an anti-Enlightenment force throughout history.
But why is the Free Press running pieces like this? I have no idea, and can guess only that Bari Weiss, the editor, is herself religious, a believing Jew. I would love to hear her discuss the reasons for her faith, and why she rejects Christianity as a personal religion. But I haven’t seen that.
ONE MORE POINT: To those who think that societies can’t function well without religion, I have a one-word response: Scandinavia.
They are afraid of death.
I think you nailed it. Isn’t ascribing “meaning” to life because of religion just a tacit admission that one is afraid that there’s nothing more than this little life we live out on this little rock?
I agree. If there was no death, I bet we wouldn’t have religion.
It is true that the nearness of death, as Dr Johnson put it, “concentrates the mind wonderfully.” And this is true for atheists as well. Having had two prolonged near-misses in the last few years has made me re-examine my position, but I’ve emerged in the same place: I simply cannot pretend to believe something that is impossible. Sometimes I envy those who bring themselves to believe comforting nonsense, and I am more tolerant of them than I used to be. Perhaps shamefully, I am coming a little closer to the seeing the benefits of ‘belief in belief’ for those who have been termed the little people. And maybe that is the driver behind the Free Press’s promotion of Christianity, as a bulwark against Islam that will also protect Judaism.
+1 re prolonged near-misses and tolerance. Following my recent prolonged near-miss I joined an ongoing discussion group around issues of death and dying. I’m a firm atheist, and really for the first time listened seriously to the experiences of a wide range of believers. It eventually dawned on me that their respective epistemologies provide for them as strong a warrant for the truth of their beliefs as my rational Enlightenment one does for me, 𒂃. I continue to believe that the evidential basis for their views is slim-to-none, but evidence is my thing not theirs.
That’s why men who are married chase women – because they fear death (according to Rose Castorini in Moonstruck).
Yes, but then Ronnie told Loretta that we are supposed to fall in love with the wrong people and mess up our lives.
I think both are true.
And he had bad luck!
I asked Grok to refresh my memory on three specific lines, here was the answer:
“Do you love him, Loretta?”
“Ma, I love him awful.”
“Oh, God, that’s too bad.”
I was indoctrinated as a small child. I began my effort to throw off both the un-facts and the intense ‘feelings’ of their mythos.
One priest told me not to think.
I thought about that, and it was the final straw. It takes a lot of power to look away from their pitch, and instead trust one’s own mind to look at reality.
Ayn Rand’s metaphysical foundation helped. It is the most mocked axiom in intellectual history.
Existence exists, and only existence exists. We are existents in existence; we do not create reality with our thoughts. The universe is outside of us, and when we die it will continue on as if we never lived.
As for meaning, a quest to “find” it shows the person is on the wrong track. You won’t find it; you have to make it.
As if you were God.
Quite right; +1
I like lots of church architecture–especially cathedrals–but I’m not at risk of losing my lack of faith. It’s quite important, in my never humble opinion, to distinguish between some of the benefits of belonging to a religious community–a social network, a place to engage in rituals if you need that, etc.–and the foolish, unfounded, and sometimes dangerous beliefs in bizarre and untestable “powers.” To say nothing of adopting new “woke ideology” religions. I’m sure disappointed in FFRF, as I said in my own blog today–Letters to a Free Country. Thanks for what you do, Jerry C.
Nicely put, Ed. My feelings exactly.
Faith is declining in the west, and I expect that trend to continue. And yes, for reasons that are unclear, some public intellectuals seem to be having second thoughts. I’m always disappointed when I see it. Call me lacking in depth, but I don’t see all the fuss about searching for “deeper meaning.” It seems like a waste of time and a pathway toward making stuff up.
Just when the woke battles look like they’re going well we have Big Names banging on about how great it is to worship crosses, stones and books.
F*** the Friday, Saturday and the Sunday people. Even the big shots (Russel Brand is a generational grifter fool and Theile… ugh.. where do I start)?
It is like whack a mole against idiocy.
D.A.
NYC
Yes, and the idiocy mole seems to have 6×10^23 members.
Ha! Good one!
In the battle against Progressivism, I find myself more sympathetic to Christians, recognizing that, given the chance, they will try to impose their beliefs, too. For now, though. . . .
Um… I was accosted this morning, during my two days of actual vacation this year, at my front door, at the hour of 7:30AM (I went out to feed the feral-ish cat that lives on my porch) by the roughly monthly visit from the local christian center reps.
For now?? Always. I have no sympathy.
(there are a number here that do this. THe christian center, the muslim center, the witnesses, the evangelical lutherans, and a few others. I can’t go a week…. THey do not respect no soliciting signs, no trespassing signs, do not knock registration, or any other form of go the f*** away.)
At least I can tell the JWs I have not refrained from blood (I think bone marrow stem cells count) and so I am a lost cause.
When I have the time and am feeling sufficiently passive-aggressive I lead off by telling them they shouldn’t waste their time with me because I’m an atheist so am not a likely prospect. Those who rise to that challenge deserve what they then get….
My late brother-in-law, who lived alone, always invited them in for a chat and fed them to keep them there. By the time they escaped they were cured of ever going near his house again.
When Evangelicals or JW’s show up at my door, I cordially tell ’em I’m a Pastafarian, and that I worship the Flying Spaghetti Monster. It’s a lot of fun to see their reactions!
The enemy of my lesser enemy is my friend?
I can’t say I’m surprised by the Free Press running such a piece. I am not impressed by this outlet, as they claim to be oh so heterodox, but almost always seem to end up on the right-wing side of things (and I’m someone who despises left wokeness). Perhaps we’ll see something a little different in the coming years, with the entire federal government controlled by right-wing ideologues with a madman sitting atop it all.
Indeed. If you’ve perused their comment sections, you’ll see that their subscribers are 95%+ “populist” Trump voters. Thus, Bari needs to pander to this cohort… Audience capture is real.
Spot on. Bari herself seems to be a kinder, gentler Ben Shapiro type. She’s a fairly conservative Jew who appears to mostly agree with the drivel she publishes, but she also knows her audience and wouldn’t tolerate any suggestion that perhaps the Right is not obviously superior to the Left, so she dare not raise the issue. See the Ben Shapiro – Sam Harris debate about the election and Bari’s doomed attempt as moderator to suggest that Sam was making some good points while all the comments were “Ben owned him! Sam’s a lost cause. He has TDS “
Bari Weiss makes no bones about leaning to the right. I don’t view the FP as a liberal source and disagree with plenty of their articles.
‘Twas ever thus. There has never been any and never will be. But this fact won’t stop them from continuing with the god-blathering.
I am pleased by the decline in church attendance. But sadly I don’t think this solves the problem of the absence of critical thinking in the population. Atheism seems to be a conclusion that can be reached by means that don’t involve a demand for evidence or a commitment to facts.
It’s straight up pandering, a response to the new economics of media.
(The) TFP article coming as it did in the midst of the FFRF debacle and resignations was almost too much to bear. I did not even send Jerry a WTF email making sure he saw it because I did not want to distract from the very important FFRF interactions. The TFP article was particularly disturbing to me because I had just begun refreshing myself on Bari’s chapter on antisemitism from the left in her important book, “How to Fight Anti-semitism” published in 2019 just after her former Pittsburgh shul was shot up and congregants murdered. I had thought that the Enlightenment thinking of the past few centuries was allowing the human race, at least in the West, to heal and grow. First Islam and Oct 7 with all the mainstream media distortions…and now this from TFP. Please keep the elixir breadth and depth of WEIT available to your worldwide audience.
I agree. I had so much hope for The Free Press under Bari Weiss. But, alas, maybe my optimism was premature.
My recommendation: Scroll past the articles you don’t like. The FP publishes many points of view. See Joe Nocera’s two articles of today and read the negative comments.
I did read some of the comments and I started to think that maybe the people sounding like die hard Trump supporters who do not allow anything remotely negative about Donald are maybe trolls trying to chase people from TFP? But, on the other hand if they just are extreme right types maybe they will help usher in a Democratic comeback the way the far left helped Trump?
Every time a poll or survey appears in the UK showing that ever-fewer people are going to church, you can rely on some member of the clergy sticking their neck out to assert that many folks are still spiritual, on a journey, looking for answers, etc. It’s all whistling in the wind. This article seems to be in the same vein.
A particularly absurd assertion is the one about Christianity having inspired great music, as if that means it must be true. Yes, Bach was at his inspired best in the B Minor Mass. But he was equally inspired when he composed his suites for solo cello, which have no religious connotation at all. (I might add that the St John Passion contains some equally sublime music, but also a lot of ugly anti-semitism). And if Christianity had never existed, a genius of Bach’s calibre would have drawn inspiration from elsewhere.
I might add that, of the many daft things Peter Thiel has said, asserting that God has a plan for us all is one of the daftest. In retrospect, one of the things that started me on the road to non-belief was being told that God had a plan for my life. Even when I was about 12 years old, my immediate reaction was ‘How dare he!’ It’s been downhill ever since.
🙂🙂
“This article seems to be in the same vein.” Yes, well noted: Bullseye.
Thanks for you comment! As a classical music lover, I am frustrated when I see Bach being bandied about. People mention him when they try to say Christianity has inspired great music–but the list of sublime pieces having no connection to religion is so long as to make the Bach issue almost an exception. Heiliger dankgesang is no homage to the Jesus. Schubert’s string quintet does not celebrate our Holy Mother or other claptrap.
Not that I disagree with your comment. I very much like it. Yet Bach himself said he wrote music ‘soli Deo gloria’ and did so for both Protestant and Catholic services; and cellist Steven Isserlis in his book on the sonatas finds Bach’s god’s glory well-woven into this ‘absolute’ music!
Truth is one important thing – but they also generally do not say if or how this whatever-it-is works, and the consequences.
Beware as well : not all atheists go one god further. Which god? Themselves – theosophy – Gnosticism – and so on. Arguably worse than theology.
Maybe like the old saying:
you can’t win
you can’t break even
you can’t get out of the game
(credited to C. P. Snow or Allen Ginsburg)
The “all the lovely cathedrals” , music, etc arguments for religion don’t impress me.
Before the modern era the church was the ONLY game in town – it had almost all the money and power. Any creativity would exist resting in religious nonsense bc there wasn’t much else!
Plus… without monotheism East Asia has a rich and deep culture.
We can well do without “faaaith”. Especially in the last few hundreds of years and in the future.
As for Ayan – usually religious belief tracks negatively with IQ so I’ve made a life project of noticing exceptions to that rule: the smart religious people. I’ve found almost all of them have had some life deranging tragedy and horror, enough to warp one’s universe in their backstory.
That USUALLY applies to childhood trauma but in Ayan’s case I’d argue 25 years of being chased by jihadis, even as an adult…. well that’d warp me I’m sure.
Her allusions to adult onset alcoholism suggest she was pretty desperate psychologically. So I give her a mulligan.
And these “new” people of faith uniformly don’t impress me. Sullivan is an example.
D.A.
NYC
I agree about Ayaan. I had no idea about much of what she’s gone through (even after reading her books).
I have to say, I am impressed by Andrew Sullivan. By his honesty. By his willingness to discuss controversial ideas. By his compassion for and civility towards those he disagrees with. And his willingness to confront his critics every week (his dissents sections).
But when he brings in his Catholic beliefs, it does grate a bit. But remarkably, he seems well aware of how they clash with many of his other stances. He’s a complicated guy; and I don’t say that about many people. I disagree with him plenty.
I think you are off base here and any IQ trend is uninterpretable due to lower IQ groups skewing numbers.
I would also argue you make the same error many others do by discounting the profound effect of social factors. The desire to be part of a specific group of believers is a prerequisite for acquiring belief by former nonbelievers (from what I have read). As well as a major determinant of being able to leave a belief group one may have lived their entire life with.
Academics who acquire belief are lamented here but I suspect many (Templeton Foundation grant recipients for example) are trying to resolve the cognitive dissonance resulting from social influences conflicting with their critical thinking and insight talents.
Regardless, denigrating any believer will only reinforce the social influences already at play. Labeling them damaged, calling them stupid, and never ever trying to understand will definitely inspire them to cut all family and social ties and come running! (Apologies for the sarcasm in that last sentence but you might want to avoid those with which such ploys actually work)
Russell Brand and Joe Rogan gave up atheism? I guess that means I have no choice but to convert as well.
LOL
Mary Poppins said it…
“a spoonfull of sugar helps the medicine go down”
Yukky life needs a sweetener!
Religion’s hole is not an empty space, religion IS the hole. And it’s very deep as in our past, not something we can shake off easily (as we know) like our insatiable desire for sugar.
Yes some ARE having a bad time of it but I like to think that is why we are here a t WEIT to try and make it better by understanding, reason, science and truth.
Whenever I read articles like this one I like to keep asking myself if truth is at all relevant to their main points. Add “God doesn’t exist, but …” or “Christianity is false, and yet …” before the assertions about the need for meaning, the experience of the divine, or the cultural benefits of the sacred and is there really anything I truly disagree with? Does “I would love to be as happy as that person over there” followed by “I’m practicing the techniques and believing the beliefs and now I AM as happy as that person over there” shake any of the rational arguments against religion being literally true? No …and no.
I think that in the end it comes down to needing the sort of intellectual integrity where you can call a spade a spade. That may not be as fulfilling as being able to fall back into the spiritual cushion of “We are always wanted, we are always loved” or having faith in faith, but there’s value there. If you “can’t organize a society on the basis of atheism” you can’t organize a society on the basis of the false, either. Truth will out. This I believe.
Yes. I keep wanting to say to these people, just stop rationalizing and spinning yarns to justify yourself, stop being so much in thrall to what you so desperately want to be true, stop ignoring the need for evidence for anything claimed as truth. A spade is just a spade, and you may not like spades but please learn to handle your emotions and stop trying to claim the spade is really some guy hanging on a cross.
You can’t organize a society on the basis of atheism? Apart from being an absurdly conclusory statement, what in the world does that have to do with justifying belief in a supernatural god? And organizing society around a myth administered by self-appointed power brokers is not exactly a utopian ideal.
Well said.
Yes, good points, but if you are living your life in expectation that you will go to heaven, and thus have to live a certain way and keep certain customs, you will have a life different from that of an atheist. I never worry about going to heaven, church, or pleasing the whim of some god.
All the lovely cathedrals and music… what about Stonehenge? Or Buddhist temples, or Mayan Temples and so on.
The search for meaning arising from architecture? I guess we should look at Bauhaus Architecture or Brutalism…
Over the holidays I had a convo with a relative who has “found Jesus”. He grew up without any religious instruction and was a kind of default atheist, whereas I and my siblings had all gone to Catholic schools from kindergarten through high school (all of us are atheists now!). So since he really wanted to talk about his new faith, we listened but started peppering him with questions on the specifics.
As in…why Jesus? What were his thoughts on the Trinity? How does one get to heaven (by faith alone for instance?) What is his conception of the afterlife…does Hell really exist for instance? Is the host a communion actually the body of Christ, or just a symbol?
It became abundantly clear that he had no idea of the specifics of the religion he had converted to or the history of Christianity. He didn’t even know, for instance, that Protestants and Roman Catholics use different Bibles. He found most of our questions about doctrine irrelevant to his new faith, frankly.
I think that a lot of folks have a very vague idea of Christianity as a feel-good religion with Jesus as a nice, laid-back hippie God. Protestant, Catholic, Greek Orthodox…whatever man just be cool with Christ brah.
They have no knowledge or interest in the details of the various Christian doctrines or the very mixed and violent history of the Christian faith.
When I was a kid we moved several times and my parents would have to choose a new church for Sunday attendance (during the school year only). They would choose whichever local Presbyterian or Methodist church had the best choir for my mom to sing in.
Nobody ever brought up Luther, Wesley, or Calvin, not even the ministers. Points of specific doctrine seem largely irrelevant to the casual worship of the Protestant Christian God, for a lot of people.
Orthodox, Roman Catholic and Evangelical Baptist types notwithstanding.
FWIW, I prefer Charles Wesley’s hymns, so my pick would be Methodist.
Absolutely! Best hymns! I still enjoy the good hymns very much and can sing them from memory!
At one point, my parents moved to rural Minnesota (from just outside of St. Paul; the house I grew up in). They joined a Wisconsin Synod Lutheran church. It was insanely right-wing, political, and anti-intellectual. (The pastor once said to the women’s group, making sure my Mom could hear, “People shouldn’t read lots of books and think they’re smarter than other people” — while my Mom was reading a book nearby. That almost got her to quit!)
But the worst was pretty much the tunes chosen for the hymns. Some WS Lutheran official combed the world archives of hymnals and chose the worst, the deadest, the most drear tunes to include in their hymnal. Gaaah!! Just pathetic and awful.
I think their philosophy (if it might be called such) was aligned with the old joke about Puritanism: “The sneaking suspicion that someone, somewhere, might be having fun.”
Deep down, Christians just want to have a cool imaginary friend who will do occasional favors and get them into heaven. That’s the core appeal of Christianity to the masses.
+2
+1
Religious faith is a placebo. There is a huge shelf of ideas to swallow. Take your pick. Results may vary.
So Ferguson says religion “provides ethical immunity to the false religions of Lenin and Hitler” and Thiel says “God has some kind of a plan for history.” But Communism was also predicated on having a plan for history! Turns out religion won’t stop you from falling for BS. And Nazism was eagerly accepted by Germans who still believed in Christianity, just as Hitler still believed in God.
Also, aside from Ali and Ferguson, are any of the people mentioned in this article proper intellectuals or deep thinkers? Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson certainly aren’t.
The argument that we should look upon Christianity benevolently because it’s given us so much great art is bogus. First, if Christianity guarentees great art, why are today’s Christians producing so little of it? Second, anyone who regularly goes to museums knows that Christianity produced plenty of kitsch and bad art. (All those sugary paintings of the simpering virgin and her child!) In reality, human creativity will seek any outlet or patron it can find. A Roman bathhouse, like those of Diocletian or Caracalla, was as much a masterpiece of architectural creativity as a church (or skyscraper like the Empire State Building), and the techniques developed for them were used for buildings like Haghia Sophia. Artists don’t need religion to create art, just resources, funding, and something they can pour their creativity into.
“Artists don’t need religion to create art, just resources, funding, and something they can pour their creativity into.”
Exactly. And I would add, freedom from persecution.
While some artists may have been “inspired” by religion, there is also no question that religion substantially limited what could be produced as art. Creating something that a someone in a bad mood might denounce as blasphemous, or otherwise “displeasing to god”, could see you tortured or killed, even if their reasons for doing so were not truly religious.
It always strikes me, when I hear this “but what about all the beauty religion has brought?” argument, that without religion people would be inspired by other things and produce other great art. The creativity of people would still be there wanting expression. As Jerry said, the experiment hasn’t been run. We don’t know that, absent religion, there would be an artistic void. There might have been something better.
And, because people not burdened by religion would have fuller bellies, they’d be more inclined to pursue art.
Agreed. There may not have been cathedrals, but there would have been great music and art. Or so I think.
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This piece from The Free Press rubbed me the wrong way. Perhaps someone can remind Theil and Musk that it is harder for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle. When they make a vow of poverty and devote themselves to bettering the lives of the most needy, I might take interest in their spiritually. “They are known by their works.”
I have come to believe that humans have evolved to belive in the supernatural. If our society continues the drift towards “none”, I wonder what will influence people’s moral values and fill the need to believe. Religion has traditionally been a primary source of value, of course both admirable “do unto others” and horrible such as promoting violence. Something though will fill the void. I hope it is Enlightenment thinking but I am not so optimistic.
I think they’re running these pieces just as a way to broaden their scope a bit.
The article did get quite a few comments. So there must be some demand.
They said that they were aiming for a million subscribers and apparently have just reached that.
I think that’s all there is to it.
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And Bari is a believer (though I don’t think Nellie is). She does lean towards religion, generally (IMO). Hence articles like this one.
If Bari is a believer she’s certainly not a dogmatic one or she wouldn’t be married to Nellie!
So I don’t think there’s a danger of them using religion to justify socially conservative positions.
I suspect billionaires like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk have found religion because it elucidates their wealth — I’m great and wealthy because god did it.
No, they still think they did it. They don’t really want to cede too much credit to god, most of it needs to stay with them. They believe that they’re more talented that everyone else. It’s just that god loves them more because they’re special. They’re god’s chosen.
That may go in circles a bit, but I think that’s what is in their heads.
One thing that struck me about Peter Savodnik’s piece is that it completely evades the burning question of how theistic beliefs can be consistent with intellectual self-respect. I get the impression that at the center of every story of an “intellectual” who “finds his way to God” there is one or both of two things: (1) vague mumbling about experiences of the transcendent (David Brooks’s recent piece in the New York Times, not mentioned in the article, could be used to illustrate this pattern) or (2) disenchantment with one’s former tribe of unbelievers leading one to affiliate with the tribe of believers. In fact, I am not sure that any of the “intellectuals” discussed in the article are believers at all. The inclusion of Richard Dawkins, because he describes himself as “culturally Christian,” is particularly strained, as Dawkins makes clear that his attitude toward religious beliefs has not changed in the least.
I recall the FP also published an article about the Washington state (?) high school football coach who, despite many efforts at accommodation, insisted on praying at the 50 yard line after every game, and of course implicitly encouraged his students to do the same. That article painted him as some sort of free speech hero, not the Christian hypocrite that he actually was.
But just like the FFRF, I find it difficult to support any organization that blatantly disregards reason. So now the FP is just a source of Christian apologia.
“So now the FP is just a source of Christian apologia.”
I would not say this at all. But they do publish many points of view. I’m fairly certain that they regard this article as reporting. Bari and some of the others are believers. I think they are trying to fight some kind of rearguard action against the demise of religion in the USA.
That’s silly (to me) but there’s a lot of good stuff at the FP. I often (figuratively) shake my fist at some of their writers (the smugness of Niall Ferguson is really grating, for instance) but I don’t want to live in an echo-chamber. I want to read many different points of view. I am definitely to the left of many of the contributors at the FP. But I want to hear them anyway.
I agree; I still read the FP and they have some good stuff. I just wonder if this osculation of faith is the harbinger of a trend.
Ugh, that would be sad if it is a harbinger.
I don’t want to live in an echo chamber, either. But the kind of religious crap that the FP espouses tells me that their thinking caps are not working very well. So if they are not focused on trying to find truth, then why waste my time on them?
Currently, such postings are pretty rare. If becomes a major trend, it will affect my reading habits.
More on the changing religious landscape. So sad:
https://abcnews.go.com/US/churches-fight-stay-open-attendance-dwindles/story?id=116905100&utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
Bari Weiss tweeted this 4 days ago “ “It is the light of Jewish teaching that the menorah recalls, as well as the very story of the endurance of the Jewish people. For there is no greater evidence of the God of the Jews that only one people has endured with the very same faith, the very same worldview, the very same values, the very same language, the very same land—while the empires that tried to destroy them found themselves destroyed instead. To light the menorah on the eighth night, to remember a flame that burned so much longer than it ought, is to remember a people that outlasted all others, because they were tasked with proclaiming truths that illuminated humanity.’”
I know she is an opponent of identity politics, but umm……..
Oy vey! I did not see that! It is The Argument from Persistence.
Oldest story in history – the rich and powerful (Musk, Thiel, Trump) placate the religious because there is no easier means of garnering support from a huge swath of the community who are single issue advocates – Jesus. Easiest grift of all time. I’ve never understood how Christians square their support for Trump – an immoral adulterer/ creep/sexual assaulter/liar with their faith and the example of Jesus. How can they find the religious claims of these people even remotely credible? Hence their reputation for gullibility and/or dishonesty. The US electorate cares more about their money than than they ever have for their God.
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No one deprecated religious hypocrisy better than Gibbon in Decline and Fall:
‘The various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people, as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrate, as equally useful’ (vol. 1, ch. 1).
I left a few comments on that article at the FP.
Nothing new. Same old tropes. Meh. Wasted more time in exchanges with theists. Will I never learn? I guess I can’t let some BS stand unchallenged.
My favorite reply from a theist:
Which reminded me of this bit by George Carlin:
Thanks as always for being the voice of reason! When I read it the other day it really felt like a time warp back to the early 2000s. Heard all this before and often with more interesting arguments. I think the FP like any maturing media org is gonna have hits and misses and this was just a weak miss. Would be cool to see you are Sam write a rebuttal for them
“Would be cool to see you a[nd] Sam write a rebuttal for them”
Agreed. I bet Bari would publish it.
Sam already has two installments online:
Letters to a Christian 1
Letters to a Christian 2
I am now coming to the opinion that people don’t know that Science can give meaning to life, among other things. I won’t go to extreme position of Science worship , just short of it. Why not ? Science is ideally truth worship. Religion also is after idealism but with idealism of illusions.
I would any day prefer idealism of Science-based truth
Most religious believers and proponents of faith do not fully accept the absurd foundations of Christianity. Yet, lacking the courage to confront this directly, they redirect the criticism they harbour for their own beliefs onto others. Figures like Richard Dawkins become easy targets—not because he is absurd (far from it), but because his arguments are compelling. He exposes the fragility of their ideas, provoking anger and leaving attack as their only defence.
The Christian myth has undeniably shaped Western civilization, leaving behind immense cultural and historical treasures. As an Englishman, I live near a church built in the 900s, and the church where I was christened, dating back to the 1200s, stands less than ten miles away. Though profoundly non-religious, I find these buildings breathtakingly beautiful. Their longevity is a testament (pun intended) to the care and reverence invested in their construction and preservation. No other structures of comparable age survive in the area, suggesting that Christianity played a pivotal role in their endurance.
If European history over the last 2,000 years had unfolded without Christianity, much of our cultural richness and moral framework might not exist. Yet, it is equally plausible that another belief system or ideology could have filled this void, offering even greater beauty, justice, or progress. We can only speculate.
Regardless, none of this excuses the fact that Christianity is built on the flimsiest and most implausible foundations imaginable. Deep down, most Christians know this. Attempts to glorify faith and persuade the credulous to embrace the irrational represent the waning influence of a belief system that has outlived its relevance. Education, science, and free thought are—at last—prevailing.
Disbelief, after all, cannot be suspended indefinitely.
RE Arguments about what religion has brought; Notre Dame, great awe inspiring works of religious art etc.
For me, this always skips so many things taken for granted. You are reading this on an incredibly complicated device. Across something called the Internet. Go see some of the fabrication plants that make this possible and the science behind them. Go catch a plane. Stand near a suspension bridge spanning multiple km or an enormous sky scraper. Use your eyes to watch the ISS traverse the sky at night. Excepting Musks recent espousings, his SpaceX in 2024 caught one of the biggest rockets we have ever launched when it returned from space.
No amount of religion would have brought us those things. And many have arrived in spite of it.
Dr. Coyne, in your recent posts about the Freedom from Religion Foundation, you described wokeness as a new type of religion. I agree with that hypothesis, and you should be aware of a corollary to it called the Substitution Hypothesis. The Substitution Hypothesis says that because the tendency to be religious has a moderate heritable component (studies typically place its heritability at around 0.4), if you try to eradicate traditional religion in a society that recently was highly religious, such as the United States, it won’t truly become less religious. Instead, some other quasi-religious belief system will inevitably rise to fill the void left by traditional religions.
I consider this is strongest argument for why societies such as the United States are better off with traditional religion than without it. The Substitution Hypothesis says that when a society begins to believe fashionable unjustified ideas such as that it’s beneficial for minors to have permanent sex reassignment surgery, it’s partly a consequence of abandoning its earlier unevidenced beliefs in ideas such as that Jesus was God incarnate and that he rose from the dead. The argument is that when one looks at the decline of traditional religions such as Christianity and Judaism, one has to also look at what’s been substituted for them, and the change overall wasn’t an improvement.
About a year ago there was a video interview between Peter Boghossian and Richard Dawkins where they discussed this idea, and Dawkins seemed to find it persuasive. Dawkins says at one point, “so if you’ve got to believe in a delusion, if there’s some law that says there’s a certain quotient of deludedness that everybody’s got to have, some are more harmless than others.” Here’s the most important exchange:
Boghossian: “So I no longer think it’s true, I used to think it’s true, if people just stop believing the silliness, all of a sudden we’d have a flourishing of rational human beings that engaged each other in proportion their beliefs to the evidence, but the last decade has shown that that’s monstrously false. In fact, the last decade has shown that we now have wide-scale institutional capture of our institutions, particularly our academic institutions. I’m specifically referring to the United States, but I’m also referring to here, we went to Goldsmith’s and did some videos the other day, and places where the ideology has seeped in, and I’ve been thinking about, like how do you create a prophylactic to prevent an institution from succumbing to what’s morally fashionable, you know, to succumbing to the new religion? (There’s a bit more that he says, but I’m at the recommended length limit for comments here.)
Dawkins: “Well, if you’re right about the Substitution Hypothesis, that’s a very pessimistic conclusion. My whole life has been devoted to the idea that you simply argue in favor of evidence-based beliefs, and I suppose I’d take a rather take it or leave it attitude. I mean, this is what the evidence shows, why don’t you believe it? But if you’re right about the Substitution Hypothesis, then I’m rather inclined to give up, and I don’t know how to cope with that. I used to think the one thing that would make me want to die would be if I found myself in a world were I was surrounded by people who no longer believed in evidence, and believed in something else other than evidence, somehow felt contempt for evidence, and I hope we’re not approaching that now. I mean, none of my friends are like that.”
If you’re interested in watching the entire interview, it’s here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MfBLPuwwdoc
I can’t ridicule. In middle age, I embraced Christianity. If you had asked me why, I’d have offered multiple arguments about needing a deontological foundation for moral virtue, and on and on. I later realized that I just wanted the respect of Christians, and I imagine that’s much of what is going on here. Especially in an increasingly, for intellectuals at least, right wing culture. I think of it as Franco-ization.
The “God-shaped hole” argument is congruent to other kinds of subjectivism that academe has made fashionable in the last few decades: trigger warnings and so on; self-identity (a wallaby is anyone who says it is a wallaby); the pronoun fetish; and the post-modernist doctrine that analysis of empirical evidence is “just another narrative”.
How does anyone take these sorts of things seriously? Maybe there has been a decline in commonplace analytical thought. Once upon a time, young men (at least) often messed around with their automobiles’ engines. Once upon a time, you could build an electronic device with a Radio Shack kit. No more. Now, everything functions through the utterly mysterious workings of microchips exported from Taiwan, “cards” of which are swapped in and out of devices instead of repairing them. Contemporary “repair” specialists specialize mostly in such operations—-swapping circuit cards into the appropriate card-shaped holes. Empirical analysis at this level has faded from ordinary experience and culture.
We can cancel all gods but we can’t cancel the human emotion we get when experiencing the sacred as we define it. Gods, new babies, the groups we identify with, our core beliefs: elements of lots of factors can elicit the emotion we get when we encounter something sacred. Is belief in one or more gods the most negative idea on the list? I don’t know but I doubt it. Sacred ideologies and group memberships coupled with the desire for another group’s resources are amongst the factors that have unleashed horrors throughout history. Gods are just one of the ideas in that mix.
Re CULTURAL CHRISTIANS………………..
“Christmas Message from the Editor What I learned about Christianity from a visit to the Louvre with my baby.
By Claire Lehmann • 24 Dec 2024, QUILLETTE”
COMMENT:
These are understandably admirable sentiments from our fearless Founder, of one of the best on-line forums for relevant worldly discussions in these always testing times.
But it tables the problem, dilemma of the Cultural Christians, raised lately by Jerry Coyne [“Why Evolution Is True”], eg citing R Dawkins as a “CC”, because he loves the sacred music!
Thus we don’t need the Christian Church to teach us the Beauty of Mother and Child. Or more generally of the value of Love, or of Beautiful Music.
As if you need the Church to remind us of the most compelling self-evident truths for humanity, if only you open your eyes, timeless UNIVERSAL truths.
No. The Church is conflicted and darkly.
They are shamelessly appropriating, exploiting these core human values for partisan self-gain, in olden times to behave appallingly [Crusades, inquisitions, witch burnings, pogroms etc], and badly even in very recent times like their chronic, feet dragging closed eyes to sexual abuse of children by their employees.
Let alone neo-Soviet Russia beating the s…. out of Ukraine in the name of their variation on the Church.
The Church’s self-serving hypocritical celebration of these values reminds us that historically the Church has been a steadfast opponent of Liberalism across millennia, a reactionary leader in the long, painful violent journey towards free thinking, open minded, tolerant, secular, constructive institutionally organised democratic freedoms.
The myriad Tom Hollands and dour JPs sprout blind nonsense in their claims for Christianity as a bedrock for constructive freedoms, liberal democracy.