Read this phenomenal (yet accessible) essay by Roger Scruton (a scary/brilliant conservative thinker and polymath) in the British magazine Prospect (h/t: The Misfit).
It captures what strident atheism misses about the human need for myth, for ritual -- and for violence, to which religion is "not the cause ... but the solution," a kind of drawing off of the poison of resentment that infects every human attempt to live in society.
Scruton points out that the likes of Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris have said nothing that Enlightenment thinkers weren't saying 200 years ago. But whereas contemporary atheists blame religion for a host of society's ills, thinkers like Hume, Voltaire, Diderot and Kant peeked behind the curtain to try to understand why the human psyche needs and creates religions. Scruton says their conclusion, on the whole, was that religion didn't create these ills, it's an attempt to address them.
Scruton quotes Hegel on the story of Adam and Eve: the Fall from Grace is "not just a contingent history but the eternal and necessary history of humanity." We are in equal measure freed and made to suffer by our grasping for knowledge. From the moment of birth, we begin to learn, and we begin to resent what we cannot know or have. Suffering, and the attempts to both understand and vanquish suffering through myth-making, begin here.
In other words, Scruton says, "a myth does not describe what happened in some obscure period before human reckoning, but what happens always and repeatedly. It does not explain the causal origins of our world, but explains its permanent spiritual significance."
Religion is an attempt to see from the edge of existence, to celebrate its mysteries and to vanquish its agonies. Too often religion's attempts to draw off poison have only succeeded in poisoning (Crusades, the Inquisition, Islamic fundamentalism), but Scruton notes that "the violence comes from another source, and there is no society without it since it comes from the very attempt of human beings to live together. The same can be said of the religious obsession with sexuality: religion is not its cause, but an attempt to resolve it."
Scruton's piercing conclusion:
"The rational person is not the one who scoffs at all religions, but the one who tries to discover which of them, if any, can make sense of those things, and, while doing so, draw [off] the poison of resentment."
Go read.
--T.A.
What is this "poison of resentment?' And why don't I have it?
Posted by: michael Reynolds | August 15, 2007 at 02:27 PM
Oh, you do. We all do. Yours, however, expresses itself in humor and irony, whereas mine expresses itself mostly in blank verse.
Posted by: david | August 15, 2007 at 02:32 PM
I'm not sure you'll believe this, but I actually can't believe how great my life is. It could go bad on me in a heartbeat, but right now I just feel lucky.
Posted by: michael Reynolds | August 15, 2007 at 02:46 PM
You don't sound unhappy to me. You sound funny (as in ha-ha) and a little irritable. Those are both qualities I admire, and ones that can be found in happy and unhappy people alike. It's good you're happy. Spread it around a little, will ya?!
Posted by: david | August 15, 2007 at 03:01 PM
could it be that violence is the animal instinct that comes to the surface and religion is the rational force that keeps it in check. Most wars dealt with greed on one side or the other, where does this fit in?
Posted by: perplexed | August 15, 2007 at 05:49 PM
Perplexed: interesting to think of religion as a rational force. It's not entirely restrictive, either: its mystical elements can lead one to extremes, which can spill over into any number of excesses.
But at its heart is (or should be) what Heschel called "radical amazement," that force propelling us toward full celebration and realization of our living-ness. This is, like most other forms of amazement, an exploitable resource.
Posted by: david | August 15, 2007 at 05:55 PM
David:
I think it's genetic or something. I'm cranky but weirdly happy. Kind of surprises me, honestly.
Posted by: michael Reynolds | August 15, 2007 at 07:06 PM
it makes you wonder who started with the extremes, it certainly has modified itself into a much different purpose than it was originally intended.
Posted by: perplexed | August 16, 2007 at 10:19 AM
David , what role does intelligence play in religion. Interpreting and having an open mind certainly propel you forward in a quest for knowledge. When you limit your thinking, don't you trap yourself in a circle?
Posted by: perplexed | August 16, 2007 at 12:30 PM
perplexed:
Intelligence isn't merely cerebral and doesn't merely exist in the rational.
In one sense a circle is finite: its space is bounded. In another sense, a circle is infinite: its closed shape is suggestive, in many cultures, of eternity and infinity itself.
As the Chinese poet and warrior Lu Chi said, "In a single yard of silk, there is infinite space."
Posted by: david | August 16, 2007 at 05:03 PM
Hi, Im from Melbourne Australia. The poms have an appropriate word for Scruton's left brained scribblings BOLLOCKS.
It was all an expression of his own left brained doubt mind.
The mind that mis-informs all of the usual philosophical & religious chit-chat that goes on these days.
There was no evidence whatsoever of a Spiritually informed religious consciousness in that essay---none, zero, zilch!
Posted by: John | September 07, 2007 at 12:47 AM