First, I should put out there that I was raised Christian, and now consider myself a Humanist.
That said, I am not really that impressed with Humanists, because as a group, they have a long way to go. They are primarily intellectuals out to prove how smart they are. To someone who believes in religion, they would rather say, "let me prove how you are wrong" rather than "let me help you transition to a better paradigm in life."
Perhaps my attitude towards helping others leave the hindrance of religious belief is based in my Christian upbringing. Here is an important point: religions serve valid functions, and to attack them without offering useful, fulfilling replacement will never work. Furthermore, a belief structure cannot grow if it only attacks without offering replacement.
I am not a Unitarian, because although I believe all the religions perform valid functions in their adherents' lives, I cannot embrace those religions; I can only look at them to see what positive aspects they may have. In this respect, the new amalgam would allow patently absurd belief structures, but only in the sense that they are experimental, and a periodic assessment of their usefulness would occur.
3 comments:
Hi Jim,
You say religion performs many useful functions, I assume on the social as well as personal levels. Without challenging that notion - it certainly enjoys a very broad consensus - I wonder if I could encourage you to enumerate in future posts what you see those functions as being? This blog seems to be directed toward an audience of freethinkers, and if what freethinkers lack is a viable alternative to religion, maybe we could really benefit from some discussion of what qualifies as one.
Because as you know, I happen to be one of those foam-mouthed atheists who can't figure out for the life of him what religion is good for. And I'd be happy to be edified!
Well, to start with, there are weddings, funerals, coming of age ceremonies, and see the other post on Mormons.
I had to join the military to experience life outside of the Midwest. I suppose if I had been Mormon, I could have gone on a mission instead, though I don't think they get to choose where they go; I think the elders decide.
I think a period of exploration and "service" is a nice transition between youth and adulthood. For wealthy people that's college, for Mormons it's the mission, for me it was the military (and then college, and then...)... Religion can get you out of military service if you claim to be a conscientious objector, but you have to be affiliated with one that has that as one of their tenets (or an optional tenet).
Oh, and freethinkers don't really need an alternative -- what needs to be created is a less dangerous religion for people who do need religion, and it can be as strict or lax as necessary to accomodate a broad range of citizenry, as long as it siphons off suicide bombers and abortion clinic bombers, and all those people who need to be fanatical to the death about something. Feed them a different drug.
I agree about the importance and usefulness of everything you cite - the ceremonies that mark life's progress on the one hand, and the value of what one could call a rite of passage, a mission, or even a vision quest on the other.
But what stands out for me about these things is that there's nothing *necessarily* religious to them. They're social, and surely the social and the religious are often coextensive. But whenever I've tried to float my pet theory out there, which is that the function of religion is *entirely* social, I get smacked down pretty angrily by religious people.
In other words, it seems most humans do harbor some need to entertain metaphysical propositions. And they get real mad if you say there's no need to do so, or that we'd all be better off with some kind of replacement religion which retains the social but junks the metaphysical.
Anyway, I'm still working to understand the enduring appeal of belief (or belief in belief, to use Daniel Dennett's term). My current project in that vein is to read Stephen Prothero's "Religious Literacy".
So far it hasn't been helping.
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