Religion as a form of education The following essay is a good start toward making the case that there is substance to religious faith -that is, substance for educated people. The point is not elitism vs. the rabble. But the point IS that religion without serious thought is a dubious enterprise even if it may produce real social good. Still, while it is impossible for me not to find a measure of enthusiasm for the essay, there are several things missing. Here is a worthwhile attempt to make religious faith relevant for educated men and women, which is its focus, but when all is said what is left unsaid -probably because the writer is clueless about such matters- is what is most important. Religion is two things : (1) some kind of faith experience, and (2) a worldview that can -and I think should- rise to the level of philosophy. Religion also does several things and in so doing provides utilitarian value: Unfortunately "true believers" along with Atheist critics of religion share one thing in common, both miss point #2 entirely and also miss the further point that religion has pragmatic value. For both kinds of people religion reduces to faith experience -whatever that may be. Here is where Charles Murray's essay has its greatest value.The following quote deserves emphasis because it is critically important : Taking religion seriously means homework.
Regrettably this is manifestly NOT how the majority of nominal believers in doubtless every religious tradition see things. For them no homework is necessary whatsoever, or -at best- what passes for homework is simply more and more "study" that consists of supplements to devotionalism, such as reading the Bible not for its historical information value or to reflect upon the conceptual bases for its moral teachings or the philosophy behind the sense of higher purpose it imparts in various passages, but merely to affirm what one already believes. In the process all of the myths that are part of the faith "package" are reflected upon again and again as if these cherished stories deserve to be taken as literally true rather than as highly instructive metaphors. The result is childlike or even childish faith, with questionable intellectual value. And it is that kind of faith that is rejected and often ridiculed by the cognoscenti. What is the alternative ? From the standpoint of several religions, not quite all faiths as a matter of fact, there decidedly is a serious form of faith that does demand a lot of hard thinking, a lot of soul searching, and considerable intellectual effort. And for me this is what religion is mostly all about. This approach can be called "religion as a form of education." The other form of religion may be characterized as "religion as devotion." Yet it must also be said that religion-as-education is rather pale and lifeless if it does not include religion-as-devotion even if NOT as its center. The devotional dimension of religious faith, it has been my experience, has serious limitations. The problem is its simplistic worldview and the simplistic ideas that derive from that worldview, ideas that do not prepare believers for much of anything by way of problems we all encounter in life. This said, there certainly can be value -which may well be very important in a good number of instances- simply from devotion, that is, sincere belief in core teachings of one's faith, for a Christian, to use this example, from belief in the living presence of Jesus. Indeed, sometimes this is profound. Tolstoy understood this very well; so did Francis of Assisi, and so did Mother Teresa. You can say the same for Christians who have given their lives as martyrs while serving as missionaries, or as medical professionals serving the poor, and the like. We owe much to the Salvation Army, to Catholic Charities, and to aid groups like Operation Blessing, precisely because of the "devotional" Christians who make these groups possible. And there are parallels in various other faiths, certainly among Jews, but also among Hindus and even -at necessarily small scale- among Zoroastrians. Among Buddhists it takes the form of the Red Swastika Society, which is sort of their version of the Red Cross although it also features a major educational component. This derives from the strong emphasis in Buddhism on education per se, which Buddhists see (most Buddhists anyway) as intrinsic to their religious tradition. Hence my personal involvement with Shingon Buddhism, whose founder, Kobo Daishi, created the first form of public education in Japan over a thousand years ago. Obviously -one would think it is obvious- it would be foolish beyond belief to be dismissive of any of this. Which, however, the Left regularly does as a matter of its version of normality. As if to say : "Who cares about Catholic social services for destitute families or Protestant help for the homeless? To hell with all of that, all religion is worthless crap." However, there nonetheless is a major problem with devotional faith. Among other things it leaves aside the basic question: Why this religion rather than that one? Why be an evangelical Christian and not a Russian Orthodox believer? Why be a Baptist or Presbyterian or Methodist and not a Zen Buddhist or Hindu or Taoist ? This leads to considerations of community and heritage. The Left also ignores these factors reflexively as if they simply do not matter. The Left was not always so grossly indifferent, of course. Quite the contrary, the Left I was part of in the 1960s was often very much religio-centric, hence the undeniable fact that the perennial Socialist Party candidate for president, Norman Thomas, was an ordained Presbyterian minister and the fact that Martin Luther King was an ordained Baptist minister. While on the margins, there also was participation in the broad counter-cultural movement that overlapped with the Left in the form of a Zen Buddhist celebrity, Alan Watts, and your pick of Hindu swamis those years, some of whom (thinking of the Aurobindo people) were strongly education focused even if, yes, some swamis like the Maharishi whom the Beatles thought so highly of back then, were frauds. In any case, the Left of that era definitely had an important religious dimension. That is just about all gone now. Abetted by, on the Right, the Libertarians, who also (for the most part) regard religion as stupid and contemptible. Which has not always been true for Libertarians, either, even HL Mencken sometimes was very sympathetic to religious people and their ideas, but speaking of what Libertarianism now actually is. The problem with devotion-centered faith is that it often (very often) is intellectually vacuous, hopelessly unsophisticated, and utterly naive. But there is no reason for this to be true -for anyone. There also is another fact to consider: What, precisely, should we make of our heritage ? The answer for the Left and for many Libertarians is that we should forget and even reject our heritage. The faith and Christian ideas that motivated our Founding Fathers, and Abraham Lincoln, and -yes, indeed- even Frankin Delano Roosevelt, none of that matters and its all poppycock. After all, to take Christian faith seriously means taking the Bible seriously, and the Bible clearly (I think for damned good reasons) is fiercely anti-homosexual and is thoroughly pro-family. And the Left rejects these viewpoints adamantly. The Left is pro-homosexual and basically anti-family. Hence the war of the Left against religion and, in education, its war against the study of history -in the process producing a nation with Alzheimer's disease at massive scale, that is, a nation without a functional memory. Alas the Right plays into the hands of the Left precisely because, in the realm of religion, where it has taken a stand, it has little or no use for the life of the mind and because it treats intelligent faith as unwanted and an evil. And so we end up with laughable beliefs, like creationism, which no educated person can take seriously, and we end up with a view of the Bible in which serious study of history is not even a factor despite the fact that the Bible is an historical book that needs to be interpreted historically in order to get any kind of overall accurate meaning from its pages. All of this is suggested in Murray's essay, or at least it is if you have sufficient background to fathom what his comments really imply. What is faith ? For me it is a springboard to philosophy, to history, to the arts, and it requires some serious grounding in the social sciences and psychology to understand all of its many dimensions. Are religious myths true ? Dietrich Bonhoeffer did not think so. And you'd be hard pressed to find a better example of a committed Christian, someone who fought against Hitler and the Nazis and witnessed for Christ and paid for his trouble with his life. He didn't care if the myths were not literally true because they reflected truths that did not depend on magical thinking. Religion, at that level, calls us to be the best we are capable of being, to have the deepest possible integrity, to speak the truth, and to give a damn for other people. Billy ============================== American Enterprise Institute Taking Religion Seriously By : Charles Murray April 18, 2014 The following is an excerpt from Charles Murray’s new book, _The Curmudgeon's Guide to Getting Ahead: Dos and Don'ts of Right Behavior, Tough Thinking, Clear Writing, and Living a Good Life._ (http://www.aei.org/book/socie ty-and-culture/the-curmudgeons-guide-to-getting-ahead-dos-and-donts-of-right-beh avior-tough-thinking-clear-writing-and-living-a-good-life/) If you are a high-IQ recent graduate from a top college or university, here is where you probably stand when it comes to religion: It’s not for you. You don’t mind if other people are devout, but you don’t get it. Smart people don’t believe that stuff anymore. Perhaps you are explicitly an atheist. Even if you are an agnostic, you don’ t spend much time worrying about God, because there’s no point. If a God exists, it cannot be the kind of God who has anything to do with this flyspeck world, let alone with the lives of the individual human beings on it. I can be sure that’s what many of you think because your generation of high-IQ college-attending young people, like mine 50 years ago, has been as thoroughly socialized to be secular as our counterparts in preceding generations were socialized to be devout. Some of you grew up with parents who were not religious, and you’ve never given religion a thought. Others of you went to Sunday school as a child (I’m going to use the Christian context in this discussion) and went to church with your parents in adolescence, but left religion behind as you were socialized by college. By socialized, I don’t mean that you studied theology under professors who convinced you that Thomas Aquinas was wrong. You didn’t study theology at all. None of the professors you admired were religious. When the topic of religion came up, they treated it dismissively or as a subject of humor. You went along with the zeitgeist. I am describing my own religious life from the time I went to Harvard until my late forties. At that point my wife, prompted by the birth of our first child, had found a religious tradition in which she was comfortable, Quakerism, and had been attending Quaker meetings for several years. By the early 1990s, I was occasionally keeping her company. That was 20 years ago. Since then, my wife has become an increasingly serious Quaker. I still describe myself as an agnostic, but I’m shakier in my nonbelief. Watching her has taught me some things that I pass along to you with the recommendation that you don’t wait as long as I did to get serious. Taking religion seriously means homework. If you’re waiting for a road-to-Damascus experience, you’re kidding yourself. Taking one of the great religions seriously, getting inside its rich body of thought, doesn’t happen by sitting on beaches, watching sunsets, and waiting for enlightenment. It can easily require as much intellectual effort as a law degree. Even dabbling at the edges has demonstrated the truth of that statement to me for Judaism, Buddhism, and Taoism. I assume it’s true of Islam and Hinduism as well. In the case of Christianity, with which I’m most familiar, the church has produced profound religious thinkers for two thousand years. You don’t have to go back to Thomas Aquinas (though that wouldn’t be a bad idea). Just the last century has produced excellent and accessible work. But whomever you read, Christianity considered seriously bears little resemblance to your Sunday school lessons. You’ve got to grapple with the real thing. A good way to jar yourself out of unreflective atheism is to read about contemporary science. The progress of science from Copernicus until the end of the 19th century delivered one body blow after another to simplistic religious beliefs. First, it turned out that the earth wasn’t the center of the universe. It wasn’ t even the center of our solar system. Then the Newtonian laws of physics set up the image of a clockwork universe that didn’t need a God to make it run. Then Reason with a capital R was enthroned during the Enlightenment, in direct conflict with the intrinsic nature of religious faith. Then Darwin destroyed the creation myth. Then Freud destroyed our confidence that we were autonomous beings and told us that faith was nothing more than wish fulfillment. But in the late 19th century quantum physics was born, and with it began the story of an underlying physical reality that was not only stranger than we knew but stranger than we could have imagined. That story is still unfolding — dark matter is just one of the mysteries left to be solved, and entanglement is now accepted as proven with no one having the slightest idea how it works. The 20th century also revolutionized our understanding of the universe and its origins. Suppose at the beginning of the 20th century an astronomer had announced that the universe began with a big bang in which space, time, and the raw materials for the stars and planets suddenly emerged out of a timeless, spaceless singularity. He would have been laughed off the platform, because obviously what he had done was drape scientific language over the creation story in Genesis — “And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.” But it turns out that my imaginary silly astronomer was right. That’s how the universe really did get started. After the Big Bang became accepted science, astrophysics began to calculate the infinitesimally small probability that any Big Bang would produce a universe capable of sustaining life — so infinitesimally small that the theory of multiple universes has become the necessary default explanation. Unless you posit multiple universes (and a whole lot of them too), either we are a one-in-a-billion chance or some power created the universe explicitly so that it would produce life. It sounds weird, I know, but check it out. Just Six Numbers by Martin Rees, Britain’s Astronomer Royal, who is not himself religious, is a good starting point. The more you are around people who are seriously religious, the harder it is to think there’s nothing to it. I say this mostly out of my wife’s testimony, because she has been around some impressive examples, but to some extent from my own experience. You will encounter people whose intelligence, judgment, and critical faculties are as impressive as those of your smartest atheist friends — and who also possess a disquietingly serene confidence in an underlying reality behind the many religious dogmas. They have learned to reconcile faith and reason, yes, but beyond that, they persuasively convey that there are ways of knowing that transcend intellectual understanding. They exhibit in their own personae a kind of wisdom that goes beyond just having intelligence and good judgment........ -- -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. 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