Yesterday we saw Ross Douthat helpfully advising New York Times readers how to find the “right” religion (nonbelief doesn’t count as faith); and today we find the Free Press touting religion by showing how “finding God” transformed the lives of nonbelievers for the better. (Note the implication that God is out there to be found!)
Rather than discuss the waning of religion in the West—something that Douthat avoided, too—Savodnik, an editor of the Free Press, simply tells the stories of a few notables who became religious and how much solace the conversion gave them. These are anecdotes, not a documentation of either the waning of religion or the overall benefits of religion to society. But, added together, they paint a picture of religion as something that people need, and something that will fill our “god-shaped” hole—our need to believe in the supernatural to give meaning to our lives. As I’ve said, I have no doubt that some people really can be helped by believing; Ayaan Hirsi Ali, whose crippling depression was cured by embracing Christianity, comes to mind. But what these anecdotes don’t convince me of is that we all need religion and would be better off following the people in the article (except for Dawkins).
Further, the piece doesn’t address the problem of forcing yourself to believe something that you’ve already rejected as false. I am not sure how Hirsi Ali, a former atheist, got herself to believe in the reality of Christianity (the status of Jesus as God/Son of God, the Resurrection, etc.), but of course people who reject something can really come to believe it if it’s important to believe it. (See Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.)
The notion that this article is slanted towards getting people to believe is buttressed by its unfair and snarky treatment of Richard Dawkins, an atheist who is lumped in with the “believers’ just to show how hollow his idea of being a “cultural Christian” is.
Why am I highlighting this article, as I did Douthat’s yesterday? It’s because I sense that vocal liberals are now trying to push belief on the rest of us, asserting that our lives are empty without faith. I’m not sure why that’s true, and will let the readers give their hypotheses below. The Free Press may be soft on religion because its founder, Bari Weiss, is an observant Jew, and her partner, Nellie Bowles, converted when the got married. But that’s just a speculation. However, I’d expect a journalistic venue that touts rationality to at least counter an article like the one below with one showing how intellectuals benefited by giving up their belief in God.
Click the headline below if you have a subscription, or find the article archived here.
I’ll just list the nonbelievers or “searchers” whose lives suddenly improved when they settled on a given faith, and then add a quote from the article. Note that the photos of the converts (and Dawkins, too) are surrounded by halos. First, the point of the article:
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.”
There is something inevitable about this reassessment, Jonathan Haidt, the prominent New York University psychologist and best-selling author, told me. (Haidt’s books include The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.) “There is a God-shaped hole in every human heart, and I believe it was put there by evolution,” he said. He was alluding to the seventeenth-century French philosopher Blaise Pascal, who wrote extensively on the nature of faith.
“We evolved in a long period of group versus group conflict and violence, and we evolved a capacity to make a sacred circle and then bind ourselves to others in a way that creates a strong community,” Haidt told me.
Ferguson added that “you can’t organize a society on the basis of atheism.”
“It’s fine for a small group of people to say, ‘We’re atheist, we’re opting out,’ ” he said, “but, in effect, that depends on everyone else carrying on. If everyone else says, ‘We’re out,’ then you quickly descend into a maelstrom like Raskolnikov’s nightmare”—in which Rodion Raskolnikov, the protagonist of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, envisions a world consumed by nihilism and atomism tearing itself apart. “The fascinating thing about the nightmare is that it reads, to anyone who has been through the twentieth century, like a kind of prophecy.””
I’m surprised that Haidt, whose religiosity I don’t know, would tout religion here and in other places. I thought he was more rational than that. And Ferguson’s claim that atheist societies can’t function because of nihilism is flat wrong. Look at Scandinavia, for crying out loud!
On to the believers:
Matthew Crawford. He was a “a searcher” who converted to the Anglican Church after he met an Anglican woman (whom he later married) while giving a talk in a church. He says this of being an Anglican:
“I liken it sometimes to a psychedelic experience,” Crawford said. “You feel like you’ve gained access to some layer of reality, but you just weren’t seeing it.” He meant God, but he also seemed to be talking about his wife.
“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.”’
Yes, but that “sense of meaning beyond ourselves” can include our love of friends and family, our work, our avocations, and, for me, science. You don’t need God to get a “sense of meaning.”
Joe Rogan and Russell Brand.
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.
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.”
I guess the Jews, Hindus, and Muslims are deficient because they don’t, according to Rogan, need Jesus. As for Brand, well, he’s a loose cannon and I take no lesson from his conversion.
Jordan Peterson. What can you say about a guy who can’t even explain clearly what he believes? Now, however, he’s decided that God is “hyper-real”—whatever that means.
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.”
Then, last month, Peterson’s book We Who Wrestle with God: Perceptions of the Divine was published. Peterson had always avoided saying whether he believed in a higher power. Now, sporting a jacket emblazoned with the Calvary cross, he was pushing back against the new atheists. “I would say God is hyper-real,” Peterson said in a recent interview with Ben Shapiro promoting the book. “God is the reality upon which all reality depends.”
I’d like to ask Dr. Peterson why he is so sure that there even is a god. But all I’d get was his usual preparation of word salad.
Paul Kingsnorth. Here’s another searcher who found “true” religion: Romanian Orthodoxy after he was at first a Zen Buddhist and then a “neopagan”:
When I asked Kingsnorth why he embraced Christianity after having steered clear of it for his entire life, he said it wasn’t a “rational choice.”
“If you ever meet a holy person, you look at them and you think, Wow, that’s really something—you know, I would love to be like that,” he said. “How does that happen?”
“The culture,” by contrast, “doesn’t have any spiritual heart at all. It’s as if we think we can just junk thousands of years of religious culture, religious art, religious music, chuck it all out the window, and we’re just building and creating junk.”
He said the story we’ve been telling ourselves for the last 100 years or so, of endless progress and secularism and the triumph of reason, is now “at some kind of tipping point.” Our great “religious reawakening” is just people “finding their way back to something that they never expected to find their way back to.”
Here we have another person asserting that we’re at a “tipping point”. Perhaps that’s true, but what’s the evidence? And, if we advance in rationality and discard religion, that doesn’t mean that we have to chuck out all the art and music that was inspired by religion. Modern art and music are not inspired by religion, and yet the culture survives. You can admire Chartres without having to be a Christian. Yes, it’s a beautiful testament, but one of a pervasive delusion.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali. We’ve hear her story before: first a Muslim, then an atheist and then, after severe depression, found relief in Christianity, and embraces its empirical tenets, like the existence, meaning, and resurrection of Jesus.
Quotes:
Hirsi Ali recalled a conversation she had with the British philosopher Roger Scruton shortly before he died in 2020. “I was telling him about my depression,” Hirsi Ali said of Scruton, who belonged to the Church of England, “and he said, ‘If you don’t believe in God, at least believe in beauty.’ ” Mozart, opera, church hymns—they were a way out of the dark, she said. She couldn’t help but be moved by something Scruton said: “The greatest works of art have been inspired by some connection to God.”
Scruton is dead wrong here. What was Picasso’s or Monet’s connection to God? They were atheists! See a longer list here. And you can find a list of atheist composers and musicians here; they include Bizet, Ravel, Saint-Saëns, Shostakovich, and Verdi. And don’t forget that before about 1850, nobody would admit that they were atheists, so the list is surely longer. Scruton is simply full of it. But I digress; back to Hirsi Ali
“It’s been a year, 15 months”—since embracing her new faith—“and I still feel almost miraculous,” Hirsi Ali told me.
On September 1, Hirsi Ali and Ferguson and their sons were baptized. “I had a spiritual void in my life, and Ayaan certainly did,” Ferguson said. “Her discovery of a Christian God saved her.”
When I asked Hirsi Ali and Ferguson whether their faith was real or just a political balm meant to combat the “cult of power”—whether they were, as Dawkins said, “theological Christians” or a “cultural” ones—they said their faith was “genuine.”
I do believe them, and I’m find with Hirsi Ali embracing Christianity if it helped relieve her crippling depression. But I don’t like her proselytizing about it, implying that others might find similar relief.
Jordan Hall. Another searcher who felt empty but filled his god-shaped hole by joining the Swannanoa Christian Church in North Carolina.
The emptiness he’d spent years fleeing was not just his emptiness, as far as he could tell. It was society-wide.
“We’re actually facing a clear and present danger,” Hall said. “It’s cultural termination, and it’s almost certainly going to come to a catastrophic end soon.”
He meant plummeting birth rates, imploding families, relationships that were pale shadows of real relationships—digitized friendship and love as opposed to genuine interactions between people who actually care about and know each other. “The horrifying brokenness of people.”
Well, you could say this about nearly every era, so the times we’re going through (with a lot of the horror that we face caused by religion) does not suggest, at least to me, that religion will fix the world. What religion? Islam? Christianity? Judaism? Or will the world be better if everyone embraces the faith they find congenial? That hasn’t worked so well if the world really is broken?
Finally,
Richard Dawkins, who also sports a halo:
The piece does everything it can to make Dawkins not only look bad, but also look as if he’s a quasi-Christian:
When we spoke—via Zoom, Dawkins in a brightly lit room at home in Oxford, England—he was a tad irritable. He was in a navy blazer, and there was a wall of books behind him, and he seemed a little exasperated with all the God talk.
Dawkins had created a furor when, in the midst of the often violent, pro-Hamas demonstrations in London and New York and elsewhere, he appeared on a British radio program and called himself a “cultural Christian.” He went on to say, “I sort of feel at home in the Christian ethos, I feel that we are a Christian country in that sense.”
“I rather regret” having said all that now, he told me.
Yes, he caused a furor, but I don’t mind much. I am, after all, a cultural Jew, even though I’m not in a Jewish country. It’s just the tribe you belong to, just like the country you belong to, and you don’t have to believe a word of religions tenets, as neither Richard nor I do.
And the rest:
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.
“As far as he’s concerned, it’s just chemicals in the brain,” Kingsnorth said of Dawkins. “But the reason religion persists is people keep having experiences of God, and Dawkins doesn’t seem to want to deal with that.”
Admiration for the artistry of churches, mosques and religious paintings does not constitute support for a psychological need to be religious, much less for the truth of religion. Seriously, Richard should write an essay about that misconception, which I call “The Argument from Cathedrals.” And I bet the “alternative religion” he’s thinking about is probably Islam. I wouldn’t want to live in an America that had been founded by Islamists rather than Christians, either, but that speaks to how the religions make people behave rather than to their truth.
As for Kingsnorth, he’s just wrong: religion is indeed chemicals in the brain. And really, the “experiences of God” that people have consist largely of what you get from being proselytized. There are many ways one could show the existence of God (stars spelling out Christian words, prayers being answered for Christians alone, etc.), but people’s “experience of religion” is not convincing evidence, especially given the way that people become religious. Have you ever seen something like this?
These people are having “experiences” of god so intense they’re speaking in tongues. (I love glossolalia!). This is social contagion, and you can see similar things at football games.
Again, I’m floating the idea that liberals and intellectuals are pushing the idea that we have to go back to religion for our own and society’s good. I don’t know why—perhaps because times are rough now, and God is the Biggest Coughdrop. But times will get better, and religion, at least in the West, will continue to wane.
Mark 10:21, Luke 12:32-33, Luke 14:33, Luke 18:23, Matthew 19:20-21, Matthew 6:24-25
Sell all you have and give to the poor. Jesus commands, you obey!
Christians: “We didn’t mean that God!”
Acts 4:32-36 God commands Christians live as Christian communists. See Acts 2 42-46 also. Matthew 6:5-6. No public praying! Not in our schools, opening sessions of Congress or on the 50 yard line. It is time to tell these Christianity peddlers, follow the commands of God and Jesus or shut up.
Waiting for Acting President Musk to follow those commands….
I think a clue to this spate of intellectuals “reassessing” their contempt of religion is to be found in Niall Ferguson’s claim that religion is an inoculation against “false religions.” He specifically refers to Hitler and Stalin (of course), but for many left-of-center the false religion they have in mind is evangelical Christianity, favoring a “true” Christianity (moderate/progressive) that they think they possess. It’s a response to fears of Christian nationalism (They don’t have “true” Christianity). The idea gets expressed ad nauseum these days by those on the Left who like to offer their interpretation of Jesus’ teachings (it’s all peace and love and evangelicals aren’t living up to their own creed). It’s an attempt to hold the moral high ground often afforded religious belief and their status as intellectually superior to the rubes on the Right.
Mmm. Dawkins’ and PCC(E)’s honesty – as to the cultural dimension of religion – are refreshing and necessary.
I’ve been listening to really religious folks, including Peterson, and I think where they are coming from has something to do with grappling with human nature. Nietzsche (“God is dead” – the idea of a universal truth had become unbelievable (source: Google AI)) also comes to mind for some reason.
The ways in which our emotions and desires regularly get the best of us and push us into trouble – and how to handle external temptations away from “The Good”. Ancient religious practice was crude at this – modern practice might be “defanged”. But they might have some insight at times (random e.g. Parable of the Talents). Not sure if those stories require supernaturalism to make their points – perhaps it is no different from using characters in modern stories as models, etc.
Ummm…. [ ..]
Hoo boy what a topic!
I suppose that H.sapiens, after ~200,000 years of inventing gods to believe in, could well have a ‘god-shaped hole.’ Filling it may well feel good, but says nothing about the underlying truth of what you fill it with! This is a variant of the little people argument, and perhaps might be looked at as the modern equivalent of Seneca saying “the rulers think it useful.” Beliefs adopted for their utility rather than out of conviction are like Soma, which as Huxley wrote, has “All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects.”
Religion offers hope. That’s all I think it does.
When people say they believe in God, they should be asked to define what they mean by God. Many people over the years have tried to pin down Jordan Peterson on what he means by “God”, and as to date I have not heard him utter a response that makes any sense to me (he seems to enjoy this ambiguity though and it may be deliberate).
Fundamentalists on the other hand tend to be very clear on what they mean by “God”. And atheists can also be coherent on this….for instance I can give you several definitions of “God” and why I don’t believe in any of them.
But the vast majority of people are in what might be called the Mushy Middle. They have barely thought about what they mean by God, and if pressed, will stammer something about a “higher power” or “being at one with the Universe.”
To the former, I say my higher power is my wife. To the latter, I say don’t really have a choice about being in touch with the Universe, as it comprises reality!
Also forgets one little detail that the Universe can and will crush a human, and in fact will crush every human eventually or at a whim. So believing in it as benevolent — and kindof nice — forgets the Boxing Day Tsunami and every other natural disaster. “People prefer to believe what they prefer to be true.” Also listen to what George Lakoff says about supposed human rationality that is not as rational as we fancy ourselves to be.
People who were raised with religion might be tempted to revisit it in times of stress or when confronted by hopelessness and despair. I don’t think that people are at their intellectual best under such stressful circumstances, so I can accept that they may return to religion because it offers familiarity, comfort, and a sense of belonging. I would be more interested in knowing how many intellectuals who were not raised with religion at some point nonetheless turn to it for meaning. My guess is that there are very few. My thesis (for what it’s worth) is that intellectuals may return to religion when under stress if it offered comfort at some point in the past, but that intellectuals who never felt it as a source for comfort would not look to religion for help.
“God is the Biggest Coughdrop”!
“Ferguson added that “you can’t organize a society on the basis of atheism.””
Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark seem to achieve that just fine.
Exactly!
Japan does a bang up job also I’d say (as a former resident of there).
In fact, widen the aperture here and we see that the more holy and religious a country is the more wrecked, poor, and dysfunctional it is. (US is the main exception).
The connection is amazing – works in nearly all contexts: bad metrics go up in lockstep with religious observance.
One of PCC/Es books deal with that, or a lecture maybe.
D.A.
NYC
Add China. Bing: “China is officially an atheist nation, and the ruling Chinese Communist Party promotes atheism as the ideology. While there are state-sanctioned religious affiliations such as Buddhism, Islam, Catholicism, Protestantism, and Taoism, the overall religiosity in China is relatively low.”
Conversations like this always bring me back to what Kurt Vonnegut said many years ago: “Every time I see someone running back to religion I think ‘there goes somebody who’s sick and tired of being so goddamned lonely’.” And that’s pretty much it I think. Kurt wrote about loneliness a lot. And as an avowed atheist he nonetheless advised anyone suffering from loneliness to join a church. I loved the guy, love him still. He had a good heart to go along with his insight and wit.
I myself feel tempted sometimes to take his advice, though I’m not sure I could fake it with the theological stuff I have never bought. And as always I can’t get past the stumbling block of being comforted by God, personally, while looking out at the world and seeing no sign of Him in preventing the many and constant atrocities and tragedies unfolding every day and everywhere. Where innocence, as my hero Robert Ingersoll put it, is no shield against tragedy and injustice.
So it goes.
Oscar Wilde wrote: “One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing.” I feel much the same about the preposterous self-regarding vapourings of these media pundits. I never had much time for Peterson or Brand, but the spectacle of some of the others jumping on this bandwagon actually makes me think less of them.
Haha! That’s a great line from Wilde.
Another great turn of phrase is “The Argument from Cathedrals.” Combining these two ideas, I recall Wilde once having said he had considered converting to Catholicism because of the sublimity of said cathedrals.
Of course, the problem with most if not all of these conversions and reassessments (as is pointed out several times) is that these religious claims/utterances are untrue. If it makes you happy, good for you, but I find this celebratory high-fiving a tedious form of wishful thinking.
“If it makes you happy, good for you”. Indeed. But keep it to yourself; and don’t think you are remotely justified in forcing it on other people. Especially children.
As has often been said, religion should be an activity for consenting adults in private.
Being an atheist is like being a Bills fan. Not for the faint of heart. I suspect that it’s hard for people to grapple with the reality of an indifferent universe. Sure is horrifying to me. Still, I take no prisoners. If you’re an intellectual and you can’t confront an indifferent void, I’m better than you. Might not get the Super Bowl, but I have this victory.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali was on the Winston Marshall podcast last year discussing her conversion. On that occasion she discussed her pre-Christian state basically in terms of her becoming an alcoholic through the stresses of her life and this embrace of Christianity being her route out of that. It certainly reminded me of other situations where religion (or “giving yourself over to a higher power”) is a kind of last resort solution for some people suffering from addictions.
The factual basis of the religion doesn’t seem connected with the benefit that such individuals might find. Even Scientology has something of a positive reputation for helping people escape drug addiction.
It seems to me that this is all something of a placebo effect that in the current discussion is happening to people who have known for years what a placebo is but have now convinced themselves that THIS particular placebo is the one thing that does work. Ayaan may believe in religion now but she doesn’t seem to be advocating for others to choose just any religion, i.e. Islam.
She seems (or rather seemed) a smart intelligent person and yet as is the case with all those who have found their way from disbelief to religion, she is unable to articulate a convincing reason why another non-believer should follow her path.
My personal experience in times of difficulty has been of Christians praying for me, followed by unconvincing explanations as to why I shouldn’t expect the prayers to work. One senior minister in the Methodist church insisted that it was literally the most powerful thing he could do; when I later asked him if he had seen any result, as I couldn’t discern any myself, he thought I was being facetious.
It seems to me that hoping for help or support from well-meaning people who sincerely believe that an omnipotent being has a plan for your life, is guiding their actions and is listening to – although not answering – their prayers, is something of a crap shoot.
Re Peterson’s “hyper-real” god, if one takes this word-salad seriously then one should also consider that Hyperrealist art uses techniques for constructing works that look even more real than photographs do; so in that sense the usual gods are definitely hyperreal.
More hype than real
Bari has been not so secretly religious for a long time. I was pretty anti-her but softened due to her strong defense of Israel. After that she and I part ways.
The others?
Meh. Jordan P. is bright but often deranged lately.
Russel Brand is a conman’s conman, a probable rapist and almost certainly a psychopath. He’s in my RFK trash can of garbage.
Next?
Oh. Arron Rogers. Really? I always thought they let him play football or something as some kind of affirmative action program for the intellectually disabled.
Trying to shoe-horn Dawkins into that bunch is not honest. Unfair to Richard, taking his quotes out of context.
Ayan and Niall F. have many other issues in their lives. They’re right on many things but not on this.
Like the host here and many/most? of our friends here at WEIT, and myself: there’s no hole. And if there were it wouldn’t be in the shape of the nonsense of Iron Age (or subsequent) fairy tales.
D.A.
NYC
“..the shape of the nonsense of Iron Age fairy tales”: Good one, David!
Random thoughts..
Although I don’t think of the Free Press as being “pro-religion” or that this article represents their position (maybe I’m wrong), I think it would be great if PCC(E) or Dawkins or Pinker touched base with them and contributed a balancing perspective.
Maybe these are cherry-picked examples in FP article.
There is a tendency to just pick the items out of any religion that fit particular needs like comfort and community and late-stage Anglicanism is more metaphorical truths.
Iain M. Banks wrote a number of science fiction books exploring a future society (the “Culture) that was atheist but well-meaning.
People who have a God-shaped hole in the head enjoy making bad arguments.
When Niall Ferguson claims that without religion we will turn into a society of nihilist murderers, he’s really proclaiming his own psychopathy. Most members of a social species as intelligent as humanity would hardly abide living in a society where random murder was acceptable.
Ferguson claims that without religion humanity will fall prey to Nazism (which was practiced by mostly be Christians) or Communism (which took root in countries with parasitic churches). But what about modern secular societies, which enjoy living standards far beyond those of religious ones? Do we really wish to return to the days when governments were openly religious and waged war on anyone who didn’t believe in their specific creed?
Paul Kingsnorth, who will undoubtedly have moved on to a new religion in a few years, thinks “the reason religion persists is people keep having experiences of God.” I guess belief in aliens persists because people keep getting anally probed by them! The reason religion persists is because people are not 100% rational, because they’re often indoctrinated in childhood, and because societies with weak social safety nets leave the poor with little other comfort. The Free Press thinks religion is on the rise because a few second-rate intellectuals have turned to God. But they did so because they’re second-rate intellectuals!
To add to the Nazi-Christian connection, here are notes taken by an observer of a 1933 conversation Hitler had with Bishop Berning and Monsignor Steinmann in 1933:
“Theme—common struggle against liberalism, socialism, Bolshevism. Conversation had very friendly tone. Hitler also says he will take no steps against the Jews that the church has not taken in 1,500 years. Not opposed by prelates of the church! Hitler says he is a Catholic and states discussion with Poles imminent, we need obedient soldiers—hence religious schools!”
(Quoted in “God’s First Love: Christians and Jews Over Two Thousand Years”, by Friedrich Heer)
This vitiates Ferguson’s ridiculous idea that religion prevents people from falling for “false” religions like Nazism. In reality Christianity was all too happy to back up the Nazis in the fight against “godless Bolshevism.” It embraced a cure as bad as the disease.
Furthermore, Christianity’s history with Jews and heretics demonstrates how Christian societies have always persecuted those with different religions. Even the USA, for so long dominated by Protestants, only relaxed its prejudice against Jews and Catholics after secularization had set in. The last thing our country needs is more Christianity.
“The Free Press thinks religion is on the rise because a few second-rate intellectuals have turned to God. But they did so because they’re second-rate intellectuals!”
Brilliant!
Hitler was a gnostic. Gnosticism is a temptation into cult religion. The Christian church was an obstacle to the “Third Reich” :
“Our epoch will certainly see the end of the disease of Christianity. It will last another hundred years, two hundred years perhaps.”
“I shall never come personally to terms with the Christian lie. In acting as I do, I’m very far from the wish to scandalise.”
“But I rebel when I see the very idea of Providence flouted in this fashion.”
“So let nobody waste prayers on me that I shall not have asked for. If my presence on earth is providential, I owe it to a superior will.”
“But I owe nothing to the Church that traffics in the salvation of souls, and I find it really too cruel.”
-Adolf Hitler
Source : Hitler’s Table Talk
‘Seriously, Richard should write an essay about that misconception, which I call “The Argument from Cathedrals.”’
This must be carefully distinguished from “The Argument Ex Cathedra.
LOVE all these comments! Very edifying and inspiring. Thank you all!
It’s not god-shaped holes in the heart, it’s nonsense-shaped holes in the brain.
I suspect we all have them to a degree.
Russell Brand’s conveniently timed “come to Jesus” moment brings out the cynic in me, but of course it shouldn’t be questioned: https://archive.is/Q2xet
“Religion is just chemicals in the brain”. But so is everything else. Everything you think or experience, from understanding of physics to appreciation of the beauty of nature, has a correlate in “chemicals in the brain”. (I am not arguing for religion here BTW)
Regarding Peterson, I have often found his “word salads” confounding but in a recent interview with a British podcaster he finally did answer the question of what he means by the word “God”. He said he means the foundation of all experience as well as “The Good” or the highest aspiration humans can have in terms of doing good for oneself and others.
I don’t think most non-religious people have a “God-shaped hole”, but evidently some do. I myself have seen cases of people who were borderline psychopaths turn almost saintly after “finding Jesus”, so although a delusion it does sometimes do some good for some people and for society. I remember reading a biography of Augustus which described how although Augustus was not himself religious, he promoted religions because he thought them good for society and social cohesion. One religion he criticized was Judaism because he found its insistence on only one God insulting to those who believed in other Gods.
I thought that this was a bad (and uncharacteristic) article for the FP. I think that it is part of their commitment to airing all sorts of ideas.
I eft some negative comments on it.
I don’t think it’s representative of the FP in general. Bari Weiss is fairly religious however and certainly has a soft spot for religion. I’m pretty sure she believes in the purported “god-shaped hole” and that religion helps make people moral.
Since their successful launch and expansion, their headlines have become more bombastic, which I don’t care for, and more triumphal about right-wing politics and I also don’t care for that. (They’ve always been center-right; and I read/listen because I want varying viewpoints.) In particular, Batya Ungar Sargon has become such a Trump fan-girl that she’s hard to take seriously.
I also do not like their recent graphic re-design. They are successful enough to hire professional designers now. With the result that it has become more like every other website: flashy and harder to navigate to content.
Thank you Jim. You said that very well. I have had pretty much all those same thoughts recently, and even alluded, though not as clearly as you, to them in a comment on this website a few days ago soon after I had cancelled my wapo subscription of many years.
I am quite prepared to accept (if proven) that a ‘yearning for spirituality’ may be genetically determined as an adaptation for ‘bigger’ communal life. If true then some people will have bigger yearnings than others and some may have none at all. Different cultures may well respond differently to these yearnings.
Unfulfilled yearnings might be characterised as a ‘hole’. The religious industries have been busy monetising and weaponising filling that hole to suit their own purposes (sometimes well intended) – but there is no natural circumstance that that obliges the hole to be god shaped.
Perhaps we should argue that the yearning hole is natural philosophy shaped? It makes as much sense.
Some of these new believers have done awful things. Hirsi broke up a marriage to get her husband. Brand allegedly sexually assaulted people and treated his first wife horribly. Musk also treated his first wife horribly and is an aloof, absent dad among his many other sins. If they are true believers, especially Christians, they should publicly be repenting their sins.