Monday, January 9, 2012 at 8:33AM | in Religion Adolescent dreams
Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks takes down atheism:
I never understood why it should be considered more courageous to despair than to hope. It takes courage to hope; it doesn't take courage to despair. Freud said that religious faith is the illusion — the comforting illusion — that there is a father figure. But a religious believer could say to Freud that atheism is the comforting illusion that there is no father figure and you can get away with whatever you feel like doing. So I don't know why atheism is somehow considered more heroic than theism; I call that an adolescent dream.
And then he proceeds to give a poignant defense of religion as something more than right living:
I once defined faith as the redemption of solitude. It sanctifies relationships, builds communities, and turns our gaze outward from self to other, giving emotional resonance to altruism and energising the better angels of our nature. These are some of the gifts of our encounter with transcendence, and whether it is love of humanity that leads to the love of God or the other way round, it remains the necessary gravitational force that keeps us, each, from spinning off into independent orbits, binding us instead into the myriad forms of collective beatitude. A society without faith is like one without art, music, beauty or grace, and no society without faith can endure for long.
The enduring value of religion is not that it helps us to live better lives as individuals. (There have been plenty of virtuous non-believers). It is that it helps us to live better lives together.
Monday, January 9, 2012 at 8:33AM | in Religion 
Reader Comments (3)
Impressed that you feel strongly enough about this to post twice!
While it's true that atheists resort to the father-figure argument, I think it's more as an explanation of why people would believe in religion even if it isn't true. Obviously whether believing in God is more or less comforting than not believing isn't particularly interesting in a discussion of which is closer to the truth. (So, point taken, I'll personally drop the religion-as-comfort argument when defending atheism.)
As for the benefits of religion, my view is not that religion hasn't helped - I think it has evolved in a very sophisticated way to help societies deal with collective action problems. But I also think the same of the caste system in India (and of marriage for that matter). The fact that they have been useful along the course of social evolution doesn't mean they should continue in the same shape (and on that point I suspect you agree with me). So as long as we're open to constantly re-evaluating which bits are useful and which are holding us back, and avoiding dogmatism and scriptural orthodoxy, then I have no fundamental problem with religions as institutions.
Thanks for posting Geoff, I always enjoy reading your thoughts.
Thanks as always for posting your reflections, Munir. I've been thinking I should title the atheism-related postings "Munir bait".
And thanks for alerting me to the double posting. Some glitch in the system...
I'm not sure that Sacks is making Durkheim's argument that religion exists out of social necessity, as you seem to suggest (or maybe it is you who is making the argument). In fact, I think that functionalism is pretty limited explanation for religion as a social phenomenon because it emphasizes the importance of ritual over knowledge -- and the latter I consider more central to what religion is about. Religion tries to sort out how scripture gets translated in the contingent world, and it's generally imperfect and an approximation of an ideal. And for this reason I like Sacks' analogy of religion like a gravitational centre. It pulls us together and brings us closer to an ideal way of living, but we never reach the centre. We're all hovering around on the outside, but somehow the point of orientation allows us to create coherence and order in our social lives.
So I guess aside from the question of personal belief, I think we are in agreement about religion as social institutions. Believe you me, I'm not in favour of them all. There's nothing terribly holy about what the ayatollahs in Iran are doing to their people.
No need to explicitly flag as Munir-bait, my mind retitles these posts as such automatically. (Someone's gotta stand up for the little guy!)
You sound perhaps surprised that I'm making the case for religion as primarily a social institution that serves a functional role. But as a nonbeliever, I'm not sure what other explanations are plausible.
For example your gravitation analogy to me totally works. If you think of the possible lives to be lived as represented on a 2D plane, then each religion picks a spot on that plane and tries to get its adherents to gravitate around that spot. Having a focal point, and sharing this orbiting experience with those around you certainly can provide some meaning, some balance, some coherence. But if someone disagrees that this is the right spot to be orbiting around then it's back to your split between ritual and knowledge. The benefit's all in the ritual.
(Not to belabour the point, but for any such system to work, believers of a particular religion of course must think that what matters most is knowledge, not ritual. But that doesn't change the analysis of how someone from outside the religion views it.)