Bill Vallicella has just published a sharp, brief post about the confusion that atheists and many leftists (a Venn diagram with a large intersection) share about the nature of religion, and the nature of the human need for it — which ultimately cannot be satisfied by material or social goods.
We read:
Leftists, and atheists generally, typically have a cartoon-like (mis)understanding of religion.
No higher religion is about providing natural goodies by supernatural means, goodies that cannot be had by natural means. Talk of pie-in-the-sky is but a cartoonish misrepresentation by those materialists who can think only in material terms and believe only in what they can hold in their hands. A religion such as Christianity promises a way out of the unsatisfactory predicament in which we find ourselves in this life. What makes our situation unsatisfactory is not merely our physical and mental weakness and the shortness of our lives. It is primarily our moral defects that make our lives in this world miserable.
We lie and slander, steal and cheat, rape and murder. We are ungrateful for what we have and filled with inordinate desire for what we don’t have and wouldn’t satisfy us even if we had it. We are avaricious, gluttonous, proud, boastful and self-deceived. It is not just that our wills are weak; our wills are perverse. It is not just that our hearts are cold; our hearts are foul. You say none of this applies to you? Very well, you will end up the victim of those to whom these predicates do apply. And then your misery will be, not the misery of the evil-doer, but the misery of the victim and the slave. You may find yourself forlorn and forsaken in a concentration camp. Suffering you can bear, but not meaningless suffering, not injustice and absurdity.
Whether or not the higher religions can deliver what they promise, what they promise first and foremost is deliverance from ignorance and delusion, salvation from meaninglessness and moral evil. No physical technology and no socio-political restructuring can do what religion tries to do.
Describing the horrors of 20th-century Utopian schemes in his book Leftism Revisited, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn quotes (indirectly) Vasily Rozanov:
“The deeper reason for all that has happened is that vanishing Christianity has created enormous cavities in the civilized world and now everything is tumbling into them.”
Read Bill’s piece here.
4 Comments
I’m reminded, as I often am, of Schopenhauer’s dialogue “On Religion.” Bill is Demopheles! To quote:
> Demopheles: “Religion is the metaphysics of the masses; by all means let them keep it: let it therefore command external respect, for to discredit it is to take it away. Just as they have popular poetry, and the popular wisdom of proverbs, so they must have popular metaphysics too: for mankind absolutely needs an interpretation of life; and this, again, must be suited to popular comprehension.”
To which, much later in the document, his counterpart responds:
> Philalethes: “You are certainly right in insisting on the strong metaphysical needs of mankind; but religion appears to me to be not so much a satisfaction as an abuse of those needs.”
Though he goes on to make assertions too strong in support of this argument, and eventually retracts it.
See: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/10833/10833-h/10833-h.htm
For my part, I think (as Schopenhauer himself thought) that Philalethes is ultimately correct, but that one can’t expect too much of the masses, so one must come to understand Demopheles’ position. (And Bill’s!) Let them have their folk metaphysics and hopes for cosmic justice — but let it do as little harm as possible.
Thanks, Malcolm, for introducing me to Bill Vallicella.
Hi bacrul, and nice to see you here.
Well, the whole point of Bill’s piece is that there’s nothing else that can genuinely satisfy those needs. After a long lifetime of secular materialism — during which time I mastered (and wielded) all the arguments against belief — I’ve come to agree.
FJD,
You are very much welcome. I’m very glad to have known Bill all these years, and I’ve learned a lot from him.