DWill wrote: by defining God as external consciousness, the against side created a "so what?" that killed them right there.
To no good purpose, either. Their only mode of confronting the proposition seemed to be to claim that consciousness is required for thinking, learning, etc. None of which strikes the average Westerner as being at all relevant to a discussion of God.
I have never read any of Chopra's stuff, but to me his pronouncements seem to suffer more from translation difficulties (he seems never to have gone to the trouble to understand how Western, objectivity-based discussion works, I suspect because his clientele want the feeling of escaping from it) than from vacuous "deepities".
DWill wrote:The for side's position that we can get along without God wasn't probed by the opponents. Might we be missing something essential if our answer is to kick spirituality out of the picture? That was an opportunity lost.
And how. Much of American discussion of workplace styles, child-rearing, etc. revolves around a supposed dichotomy between emotion and reason, and seems completely uninformed about the spiritual, which is the meeting ground and marriage of the two.
DWill wrote:I'm even a little cranky about the assumption of our moral evolution. I wouldn't have minded a good conservative take on how far we've come as a species. Who is meant by this morally advanced "we?" Are we so sure that we might not have become less advanced on some dimension?
Interesting. I come down on the side of moral evolution, but you are right to question that. We have gained in our ability to view things dispassionately, and certainly have improved technically. I don't just mean the technical side of material life, though that does matter. We now routinely raise children without corporal punishment, for example.
But the kinds of problems Robert points out also matter. Our lives are more disconnected and anonymous. Family life centers around options and activities, but builds in less time for intergenerational nurturance (though possibly more time per child, which matters). We have rising rates of anxiety disorders and other mental illness among college students, as the pace of economic competition has increased the stress of trying to achieve. The "thick" interactions that David Brooks lamented may be declining.
DWill wrote:Harry Marks wrote: If the community agrees that such people "deserve punishment" (like Harvey Weinstein being shunned) whether in the afterlife or not, then such a God (enforcer) is being embodied. And is that something we need? You tell me.
Yes, we do need an enforcer. Since the time of Hammurabi, the law has slowly taken the place of the enforcer god, at least temporally.
I tend to agree that some enforcement of the rules is important - by secular authorities. I don't just think the enforcer God is bad theology, I think enforcement as Ultimate Concern is socially corrosive. (Our Ultimate Concern, which organizes our other values, is our god.) Rather, punishment needs to be within a context of relationship and caring, even for the evildoer. The mass incarceration crisis of the 80s and 90s demonstrates the problem with "law enforcement" in an impersonal and even hostile framework.
DWill wrote:I think it's the idea of the enforcer God that is particularly dissonant for today's secularists and the liberal religious wing. It's why Pat Robertson sounds so incredibly out of it when he says God made the ground quake in a state with liberal abortion laws.
Yes, the God of the Gaps makes a terribly arbitrary and unreliable enforcer.
DWill wrote:My feeling is that we skeptics often assume that not much needs to be said about love, forgiveness, reconciliation, perhaps because if religion would just get out of the way, our moral auto-pilot would take us where we need to get to.
Ta-Nehisi Coates was a good antidote to such blithe optimism. A small gang decided, for reasons we are not told, to knock him down and stomp on his head. His father said, regarding a bully, "You fight him or you fight me." A considerable portion of society has been denied the social peace which allows "auto-pilot" to do a reasonably good job. And perhaps because we see it as someone else's problem, a considerable portion of society blames the victims and refuses to see the injustice creating such a divide. So I would question whether our moral auto-pilot is actually doing such a great job.
DWill wrote:Harry Marks wrote:But fundamentalists and anti-theists have succeeded in defining an Abrahamic God as primarily jealous and punitive, with little understanding of the full range of relationship expressed even in the OT writings.
I was saying that, just for clarity of purpose, the "God" in the proposition should have been a director God, since this is how God is still generally understood. But certainly you're correct that many of us, being somewhat put off by the Bible, have a superficial knowledge and appreciation of it.
I was once enamored of a girl raised as an atheist Jew. I was astonished how much she, though highly intelligent and precocious, was ignorant of religion. Of course I am the opposite extreme, having been saturated in religious talk from a young age and devoted considerable time in my adult years to furthering my acquaintance.
I would even go so far as to question whether "director God" is still how God is generally understood by the religious. Certainly there is a lot of traditional Biblical exegesis that fits in that category, yet the categories used by Oprah's panelists are much closer to what is understood by the clergy and preached from the pulpit, in a wide swath of Christianity and Judaism. The "Jesus as friend" theology is coming to dominate the "Jesus as good luck charm" theology among evangelicals. And people in the pews really do try to create an account of things in their head, even if most don't have the confidence to explain it to others. So they are hearing Jesus as friend and it resonates.
DWill wrote:Robert Tulip wrote:
This is the key evolutionary adaptation of the Sermon on the Mount, that divinity operates on the morality of forgiveness not revenge. The evolutionary point is that humans come to embody God as we live by mind rather than instinct.
The story of Jesus Christ is about overcoming the intuitive instincts in the Mosaic Law that equate justice with revenge, aiming instead for a consequentialist ethic where the results of our action are the key criterion of moral validity.
I like that. Harry has said, though, that the OT isn't quite so concentrated on revenge, though the vengefulness of God gets the most play with readers unsympathetic to the Bible. If you add the focus on justice that is probably given more attention in the OT than the NT, the OT doesn't look so much like an atavistic relic needing to be superceded. Certainly the Jews would agree.
Absolutely. By the time of Jesus, notions such as stoning adulterers, much less violators of the Sabbath or stiff-necked sons, were pretty much set aside in Jewish culture. I'm not too acquainted with the specifics, but I understand that Philo of Alexandria and Rabbi Gamaliel, to take a couple of prominent examples, taught a very enlightened version of Torah.
If there was much vengefulness left in rhetoric about God I would guess it concentrated on enemies such as the Romans or Antiochan Hellenes. John the Baptist, for example, who seems not to have been one to pull punches, seems to have talked about the problem people being "burned up like chaff" (or similar sentiments) rather than about vengeance.
DWill wrote:I've always liked Robert Wrights's dictum that religions aren't what their leaders or scriptures say they are. We have to look "on the ground" to see the ways the religion is being lived, which from a point of view of strictness would often be judged inconsistent with what's on paper.
Good observations, although the relationship between practice and the "official doctrine" is an endlessly fascinating subject for me. The recent revelations about predatory priests really seem to have changed views about the whole question of the church's authority, with a consequent shift in how seriously to take "strictness." Many catholics seem to have been hanging on almost entirely for the sense of structure and clear boundaries, so it makes me wonder what is left for them.
DWill wrote:Harry Marks wrote:It may be true that we build up skills that can be used without reference to the transcendent or the absolute, but Christian philosophers believe that the transcendent and the absolute are incorporated directly into the structure of these advanced skills.
The transcendent or absolute could be part of the language needed to employ the skills. I'm not sure about this, but if I try to call to mind more technical terms used in sociology, psychology, and counseling, I get more of an impression of jargon and faddish usages. Of course, there is Christian counseling, which I know nothing about. One image people have of it is that the counselor would remind the counselee of what God has made clear. But I suspect there is more to it than that, and it could be that faith-type language and shared assumptions make the work more effective.
Well, I do have the impression that faith language plays a role. I know a few Christian counselors, though none who define their practice that way. They still seem to work mainly with conceptual structures from psychology, but the orientation would be different in treating judgments about extramarital affairs, for example, as a given - something to ask forgiveness for, not just to be managed in a "well-adjusted" way. Not sure, really. Now I am curious to ask them about what difference it makes.
DWill wrote:Harry Marks wrote:To give a simple example, it was inevitable that countries with democracy as a core value, such as England and the U.S., would reject slavery. Why? Because the basis for choosing democracy is justice,
Interesting...I at first was surprised at the statement, given that in the U.S. slavery was going strong long past the time of its abolition in Europe, some of whose countries were democracies, but not all. If not for one man very determined to preserve the union, slavery might have existed in the South in 1900 (and long beyond?) Looking at the modern persistence of slavery in China and India (a democracy but caste-bound), your theory may have merit.
You raise a good question, since the South managed to preserve a system of racial oppression right through to the 60s despite democratic language and governmental structures. I take that as a measure of how powerful tribalism is, and how ingrained was the conceptual apparatus to maintain the privilege of the rich despite democracy within the white communities. But I may simply be overestimating the power of cognitive dissonance to goad people into holding each other accountable.
DWill wrote:Yet wouldn't you have to agree that morality is independent of God? I don't think it works in this instance to say that God is not God but is rather an insight, so morality is dependent on this insight we have renamed God.
I don't have any trouble saying that morality embodies the spirit that is God. But that has worked in times and places with little reference to a deity, e.g. China for millennia, and so I am doing more to explain to myself what is valuable in the tradition than to express a need for explicit acknowledgement of God.
Robert Tulip wrote:Yes, that is a good criticism of supernatural faith. But the implicit idea that somehow innovative science can produce workable community ritual and local identity is ridiculous. Religion is good at ritual and ceremony, as Confucius noted.
Ritual and ceremony are ways of representing to ourselves the solemnity of, e.g. marriage. There was a time it would have been natural to invoke hidden supernatural powers to be part of the representation (the spirits of ancestors, in the case of the Chinese) but there is nothing about the supernatural which is required for this to be effective and embody the sacred.
Lincoln claimed that the sacrifice of the soldiers at Gettysburg had "hallowed" the ground, and so it did. Note that he invokes transcendence (some values matter more than any amount of other, lesser values) and the absolute (if you are willing to risk your life for something, you are clearly not dabbling in it or trying it out to see if you like it.) Scientists can believe in such things, but not as a matter of scientifically confirmed fact.
DWill wrote:Robert Tulip wrote:Imagining that science produces a sufficient moral framework is a recipe for serious psychological problems. Even science has its myths, such as the one displayed here that somehow religion will become obsolete. Religion needs to be reformed to make it rational, not abandoned.
I share your skepticism that getting religion out of the way will make everything all better by itself. The other part on the need for religion to be rational we've discussed before and had differing views. Maybe the problem is: what does rational mean?
The effort to make our religious conceptualizations more coherent internally, and more consistent with what reason tells us, has been going on for a long time. India and Israel certainly dove deeply into that, and to some extent the Greeks and Chinese (though their philosophers moved away from the supernatural almost from the beginning). The thing to remember is that rationality is a means, not an end.
DWill wrote:I'd go so far as to say a belief is not in the category of the rational at all; it always involves something that we may feel we know but cannot prove, such as that democracy is the best government to live under. There is also a large element of aspiration and inspiration here that is an essential part of religion. Without that element, conferred in large part by the very unrationality of key statements, religion doesn't exist.
I guess I see this. I am not entirely comfortable with "feel we know but cannot prove" as a criterion, but I certainly agree that is involved. For me it is fundamental to acknowledge that we are processing questions of value, as captured by "aspiration and inspiration," in your statements.
DWill wrote:Accepting pluralism of metaphysics is another, more challenging one.
Yes and no. Our society allows people to live side by side with some believing in reincarnation, some in praying five times a day toward Mecca, and some believing both of those will go to Hell after they die. I suppose that is challenging, but we have more or less gotten the hang of it.
I think even most fundamentalists are aware at some level that their metaphysics is a way of communicating the solemnity of their values. When I was given reasons for disputing other faiths, growing up, it was not on the basis of revelation but of practice: Hindus use reincarnation to justify caste oppression, Muslims (and Mormons!) allow polygamy, etc. But also, Catholics worship statues (i.e. idols), and believe you can just do the sin knowing you can confess it and have it absolved. The metaphysics do enter into the arguments.
DWill wrote:If particular notions of God or what God does are allowed to be called subjective, then the fierce tribal pride of possessing the true knowledge is threatened. I think the direction that Harry, and I think Robert, indicate--that systems not be based in subjective, unprovable metaphysics, but in emotional and psychic needs that are truly universal--is the better way to go whether or not it actually holds up as religion.
In that way, the larger cultural dialogue which is concerned with the same values questions can be engaged and brought into the discussion. The thing to do with those who don't accept the subjectivity of their metaphysics is to approach the question only indirectly, to the extent possible. There are cross-currents within a faith just as there are within a single individual's values, and one can generally appeal to the parts which already acknowledge common values. Most fundamentalists can manage a certain acceptance of subjectivity in their hermeneutic for interpreting scripture, for example, so they can be talked down from the kind of absolutism which is ready to kill you for their faith.
DWill wrote:geo wrote: One person may derive great spiritual comfort and inspiration from his/her “God” and another may find equal comfort from the arts or from nature or from being with loved ones.
I guess the comfort side is important; however, if we analogize literature with religion we won't emphasize comfort very much, but rather something different--maybe inspiration, maybe insight through empathy, but maybe even
discomfort and unsettling of certain complacencies. With religion, too, the challenges and difficulties can be emphasized, and perhaps they even should be in order to avoid the harmful certitudes we often mention.
This strikes me as a well-formulated response. From early times literature has sought comfort more through catharsis than through building solidarity, but it does tend to build the solidarity of shared values by invoking them and illustrating them. Nihilistic or completely incoherent worldviews don't tend to make for very interesting stories, although we have some modern examples such as "Game of Thrones" who probe our values from a very cynical perspective on the use of power.
Music has more of comfort in it, including the comfort of commonality. Art moves between the two poles: representation for purposes of examination; but also engagement of human commonality by evoking the wonder of life.