We don't need religion to save America, strictly speaking (insofar as it relates to doctrinal practices), but we sure as hell DO need faith. More than ever, we need humility, gratitude, awareness and reverence. Too many "educated" people shun God because they focus on the harms done, often in the distant past, in the name of faith. They …
We don't need religion to save America, strictly speaking (insofar as it relates to doctrinal practices), but we sure as hell DO need faith. More than ever, we need humility, gratitude, awareness and reverence. Too many "educated" people shun God because they focus on the harms done, often in the distant past, in the name of faith. They equate religion with being stiff, intolerant and small-minded, and imagine that the faithful exercise their belief primarily in a punitive fashion. Of course, such examples exist, and surely in the past were far more prevalent, but these are the fault of man, not God. It's ok to be uncertain, and it's only human to doubt - that's why it's called the "mystery of faith". But the rights we enjoy in Western, Judeo-Christian culture all spring from the belief in the divinity of man. We possess these unalienable rights because humans are different than the rest of the animal kingdom - we are children of God, created in his image, and thus are divine. Freedom of thought, speech, conscience . . . all those hallmarks of our culture which provide the medium for humanity to flourish are our divine inheritance. Reason, empathy, the idea of the human soul - all gifts from a kind and loving creator. The Founding Fathers didn't just hint at these ideas, they said, quite out loud in the Declaration of Independence "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That part about being "endowed by their creator" is kind of a dead giveaway. The Constitution lays-out the structure of government specifically to "secure the blessings" of this divine liberty. And though they separated church and state pretty clearly, they were quite explicit that such freedoms could not be sustained in the absence of faith and the role it plays in public morality. I am religiously non-practicing, i.e. don't go to church, have certain doctrinal quibbles with mainstream religion, etc. But I am a man of faith. I dont understand how you can't be. I am surrounded every day by miracles beyond my comprehension, by beauty so profound that it sits like a weight upon my chest, and by forces so vast and immutable that I am reduced to nothing. Nobody has an adequate explanation of "how" or "why", we're just left to marvel.
Judeo-Christian tradition is not an interpretive backdrop to the Constitution or a just, orderly society, it is the wellspring. Everything we have flows from the central premise. To reject that, like rejecting God, is extraordinarily arrogant and thoughtless. When faith is in short supply, man is bound to suffer
So we can't be free unless we have faith in what precisely? A God? A set of principles?
And prescribed by whom or what? One can't answer those questions without specifying a religious content with which I am free to disagree, and it is precisely that freedom that forms the core of our Constitutional republic. Your requirement of faith as a precondition of our political system is just a warmed over version of precisely the error Johnson identifies.
Faith was a precondition of the establishment of our republic (see John Adams, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” But see the fact that most of the Founding Fathers were Deists) and is essential for its continued health and prosperity, but that doesn't mean that everyone has to go along with it. What has been built here by people of faith can and does accommodate those who believe otherwise. I'm on no way arguing for a "state religion" or anything of the sort. As far as I know, however, commandments 6-10 of the chart toppers provided my Moses still stand as good law (1-5 being more related to God staking out his territory). All these freedoms we talk so breezily about were directly attributable to rights bestowed by God. Ironically, people today have the luxury of being Godless because of those rights. Athiests and non-believers aren't deserving of punishment (hell, I'm married to one), and certainly not state sanction, but the failure to recognize and/or appreciate the fact that faith in God allows others not to believe if they so chose is a yawning gap in those who run down faith as small or anachronistic. I think its a losing proposition for both the individual and greater society, but I can't force anyone to believe. I just think its an error of epic proportion.
And history demonstrates conclusively IMHO that religious belief of any type is a mistake of epic proportions, both for the individual and for political society. We will all be vastly better off when we stop relying and needing to rely on metaphysical support for living an ethical and good and politically positive life. The metaphysics do nothing good.
When Newton uncovered that there is a perfect proportionality between the weight of an object and the speed that it falls, he found yet another example of what he called God. But he was Christian and that was the only real name he had for this. How do we know numbers really always work to describe the real world? Yes it is faith but a very different category of faith than the faith that murder will take you to heaven. So there is the real trick. Son of Sam had faith he had to kill kids in parked cars, Sam the dog told him so. How is that faith different than the faith that E = mc2... ALWAYS?
Great response. Knowledge as justified true belief is the conundrum of it all isn't it? Plato came up with this and it always hinges on the what we mean by justified. Yes, Kierkegaard says to have faith is to surpass justified belief; faith is an infinite act of free will. But do not overlook that Kierkegaard also says you cannot get to this infinite subjective faith (the Religious stage) until you have first gone through the stage of justified true belief. Faith comes after reason not before reason. Science does not answer the problem of despair and sickness unto death, the sickness of the alienated soul. That is the moment of the leap of faith beyond belief! You simply cannot science your way to God for Kierkegaard.
Salvatore, you write that we - everyone - needs faith in a "kind and loving creator". I assume that you believe this god exists, rather than us having faith in the existence of something which does not exist.
Many people believe that it is righteous and necessary to worship whatever god or gods they believe in. Yet, for thousands of years, all this human effort into understanding "god" (whatever it means to each individual) has produced a great deal of disagreement, argument, conflict, harm and death.
The "kind and loving creator" you seem to believe in, if he exists, still controls the universe he made. If so, we are his pets. There's no evidence that such a "kind and loving creator" went to any effort in many moments of impeding grave disaster, such as by orchestrating a minute or so blanking out of concentration for the bombardiers of the planes which dropped their hideous weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We think dimly of anyone who ignores his or her pets.
You think we should all believe in, and perhaps worship, this "kind and loving creator".
I think Jesus was right to found a religion on the basis that there is something beyond physical life which expects the best of us. But the theology, or numerous branches of theology, he gave rise to - like all theologies - is gravely mistaken because there is no such "kind and loving creator".
There may well be a creator. If so, then he, she or it doesn't give a rat's arse about humanity or any other species. The dinosaurs were doing fine until an asteroid ended their party. The same could happen to humans, though our demise is more likely to be nuclear war. Intolerable, life and soul crushing, suffering is not just the result of human malevolence, carelessness or moral failing, as some believers like to emphasise. It happens naturally - natural disasters and numerous other horrors, not least pandemic diseases and neurodegeneration (dementia) which would be rare if people supplemented enough vitamin D3 to run their immune systems properly: https://vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/#3.3.
If there was a kind and loving creator who wanted or expected some or all humans to know him - and perhaps to worship him - he would not be so cruel and obscurantist as to expect humans to correctly derive such clear and important knowledge from thousands of years of raucous debate, often based on nothing more than little scraps of tatty scripture.
The fact that some elements of Christianity were directly valuable to the best elements of Western civilisation, and that the clear-headed rejection of other elements of it were also decisive in building the best of what we have now, does not mean at all that any of these beliefs have a basis in fact.
They could still be effective in building a good civilisation in their adoption, or in rejecting them, if they are entirely fictitious, but widely believed to be true: myth which is widely believed to be concrete reality.
Many people are so desperate to imagine a Big Daddy uber-Chieftain who will look after them and their family in this life and in whatever follows, that they invent such characters and base their lives around such beliefs.
Likewise the fact that Christianity or any other religion provides meaning in many people's lives, which tends to prevent them from seeking meaning in Wokeness (such as being an "ally" of some marginalised group, writing or reposting something on social media to make the world a better place by inducing guilt in those who they think should feel guilty) does not mean that those beliefs were correct, or that any or all of the meaning believers derived from their religion was good, or bad (however judged). It just means that people's often intense need to fill a meaning gap in their life was fulfilled, at least in part, by one of these recognised religious belief systems rather than the recent Woke / progressive mashup social contagion which grew out of leftist politics and post-modernism.
I have no idea how the universe came into being. No-one has any knowledge of why there is anything at all, anywhere - any universe (time, dimensions, gravity, electromagnetism, the perplexing wavelike properties of matter which allow so-called fundamental particles to assemble as stable atoms and molecules, plus whatever gives rise to energy / matter) or any creator which could create what we observe in the universe. But here we are! And - as you write - there are many wonderful and indeed gorgeous aspects of life and our universe, along with extreme horrors.
I think there is something beyond the physical which we are already part of, which loves us and expects the best of us, and that attempts to guide us. However, it is obviously not the creator of the universe. If it was, it would intervene from time to time: It would care for its pets. It doesn't do this, so it is not the creator. I guess it emerged as part of who we - and surely other species - are.
Most people are not at all interested in such a cosmology or framework for thinking about life and whatever lies beyond our physical life. It lacks the high drama and all-powerful, all-protecting, love, wisdom and guidance which comes with belief in in a big-boss daddy of all who loves and protects us.
Freud describes the God you describe as a pathological illusion and I agree with Freud on this. Daddy God is not God but a destructive illusion we create to deal with our mortality and to justify our murderous desires. That God should have died when Nietzsche said so, but it persists in many sick religions. The question is whether life is good and what sort of god would embrace life? Is there order in the universe or is it random and disordered. Physics suggests order, and order suggests life is a good thing: an exquisitely, if very fragile and temporary, ordering of star dust indeed.
Thank you, PSW. That’s very kind. I have to give TFP a big round of applause. Where else could I expound on what faith means to me without looking like the skunk at the garden party? TFP broaches topics that actually matter, rather than wallowing in guilt porn over non-issues like “climate change” or those poor Hamas members.
Very well said. I would add, however, that We need to look much more closely at our faith in theological terms, not merely according to the faith demanded by our religious tribe. Which truths are self evident which are not?
But that is not mere faith. There is good reason that we each have a natural right to life, liberty, property etc. Those ideas are all derived from our ideas about a well ordered universe. Thomas Jefferson also said and did some things we mostly disagree with for good reason too. God is the source of logic, reason and truth. God does not cower before reason! We should always say "amen" after we mathematics and physics.
We don't need religion to save America, strictly speaking (insofar as it relates to doctrinal practices), but we sure as hell DO need faith. More than ever, we need humility, gratitude, awareness and reverence. Too many "educated" people shun God because they focus on the harms done, often in the distant past, in the name of faith. They equate religion with being stiff, intolerant and small-minded, and imagine that the faithful exercise their belief primarily in a punitive fashion. Of course, such examples exist, and surely in the past were far more prevalent, but these are the fault of man, not God. It's ok to be uncertain, and it's only human to doubt - that's why it's called the "mystery of faith". But the rights we enjoy in Western, Judeo-Christian culture all spring from the belief in the divinity of man. We possess these unalienable rights because humans are different than the rest of the animal kingdom - we are children of God, created in his image, and thus are divine. Freedom of thought, speech, conscience . . . all those hallmarks of our culture which provide the medium for humanity to flourish are our divine inheritance. Reason, empathy, the idea of the human soul - all gifts from a kind and loving creator. The Founding Fathers didn't just hint at these ideas, they said, quite out loud in the Declaration of Independence "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That part about being "endowed by their creator" is kind of a dead giveaway. The Constitution lays-out the structure of government specifically to "secure the blessings" of this divine liberty. And though they separated church and state pretty clearly, they were quite explicit that such freedoms could not be sustained in the absence of faith and the role it plays in public morality. I am religiously non-practicing, i.e. don't go to church, have certain doctrinal quibbles with mainstream religion, etc. But I am a man of faith. I dont understand how you can't be. I am surrounded every day by miracles beyond my comprehension, by beauty so profound that it sits like a weight upon my chest, and by forces so vast and immutable that I am reduced to nothing. Nobody has an adequate explanation of "how" or "why", we're just left to marvel.
Judeo-Christian tradition is not an interpretive backdrop to the Constitution or a just, orderly society, it is the wellspring. Everything we have flows from the central premise. To reject that, like rejecting God, is extraordinarily arrogant and thoughtless. When faith is in short supply, man is bound to suffer
So we can't be free unless we have faith in what precisely? A God? A set of principles?
And prescribed by whom or what? One can't answer those questions without specifying a religious content with which I am free to disagree, and it is precisely that freedom that forms the core of our Constitutional republic. Your requirement of faith as a precondition of our political system is just a warmed over version of precisely the error Johnson identifies.
Faith was a precondition of the establishment of our republic (see John Adams, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” But see the fact that most of the Founding Fathers were Deists) and is essential for its continued health and prosperity, but that doesn't mean that everyone has to go along with it. What has been built here by people of faith can and does accommodate those who believe otherwise. I'm on no way arguing for a "state religion" or anything of the sort. As far as I know, however, commandments 6-10 of the chart toppers provided my Moses still stand as good law (1-5 being more related to God staking out his territory). All these freedoms we talk so breezily about were directly attributable to rights bestowed by God. Ironically, people today have the luxury of being Godless because of those rights. Athiests and non-believers aren't deserving of punishment (hell, I'm married to one), and certainly not state sanction, but the failure to recognize and/or appreciate the fact that faith in God allows others not to believe if they so chose is a yawning gap in those who run down faith as small or anachronistic. I think its a losing proposition for both the individual and greater society, but I can't force anyone to believe. I just think its an error of epic proportion.
And history demonstrates conclusively IMHO that religious belief of any type is a mistake of epic proportions, both for the individual and for political society. We will all be vastly better off when we stop relying and needing to rely on metaphysical support for living an ethical and good and politically positive life. The metaphysics do nothing good.
I’m all for ethical, good and politically positive life. Thx!
When Newton uncovered that there is a perfect proportionality between the weight of an object and the speed that it falls, he found yet another example of what he called God. But he was Christian and that was the only real name he had for this. How do we know numbers really always work to describe the real world? Yes it is faith but a very different category of faith than the faith that murder will take you to heaven. So there is the real trick. Son of Sam had faith he had to kill kids in parked cars, Sam the dog told him so. How is that faith different than the faith that E = mc2... ALWAYS?
Faith is not the same as justified rational belief. Indeed, it is precisely the opposite. See Kierkegaard.
Great response. Knowledge as justified true belief is the conundrum of it all isn't it? Plato came up with this and it always hinges on the what we mean by justified. Yes, Kierkegaard says to have faith is to surpass justified belief; faith is an infinite act of free will. But do not overlook that Kierkegaard also says you cannot get to this infinite subjective faith (the Religious stage) until you have first gone through the stage of justified true belief. Faith comes after reason not before reason. Science does not answer the problem of despair and sickness unto death, the sickness of the alienated soul. That is the moment of the leap of faith beyond belief! You simply cannot science your way to God for Kierkegaard.
Salvatore, you write that we - everyone - needs faith in a "kind and loving creator". I assume that you believe this god exists, rather than us having faith in the existence of something which does not exist.
Many people believe that it is righteous and necessary to worship whatever god or gods they believe in. Yet, for thousands of years, all this human effort into understanding "god" (whatever it means to each individual) has produced a great deal of disagreement, argument, conflict, harm and death.
The "kind and loving creator" you seem to believe in, if he exists, still controls the universe he made. If so, we are his pets. There's no evidence that such a "kind and loving creator" went to any effort in many moments of impeding grave disaster, such as by orchestrating a minute or so blanking out of concentration for the bombardiers of the planes which dropped their hideous weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We think dimly of anyone who ignores his or her pets.
You think we should all believe in, and perhaps worship, this "kind and loving creator".
I think Jesus was right to found a religion on the basis that there is something beyond physical life which expects the best of us. But the theology, or numerous branches of theology, he gave rise to - like all theologies - is gravely mistaken because there is no such "kind and loving creator".
There may well be a creator. If so, then he, she or it doesn't give a rat's arse about humanity or any other species. The dinosaurs were doing fine until an asteroid ended their party. The same could happen to humans, though our demise is more likely to be nuclear war. Intolerable, life and soul crushing, suffering is not just the result of human malevolence, carelessness or moral failing, as some believers like to emphasise. It happens naturally - natural disasters and numerous other horrors, not least pandemic diseases and neurodegeneration (dementia) which would be rare if people supplemented enough vitamin D3 to run their immune systems properly: https://vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/#3.3.
If there was a kind and loving creator who wanted or expected some or all humans to know him - and perhaps to worship him - he would not be so cruel and obscurantist as to expect humans to correctly derive such clear and important knowledge from thousands of years of raucous debate, often based on nothing more than little scraps of tatty scripture.
The fact that some elements of Christianity were directly valuable to the best elements of Western civilisation, and that the clear-headed rejection of other elements of it were also decisive in building the best of what we have now, does not mean at all that any of these beliefs have a basis in fact.
They could still be effective in building a good civilisation in their adoption, or in rejecting them, if they are entirely fictitious, but widely believed to be true: myth which is widely believed to be concrete reality.
Many people are so desperate to imagine a Big Daddy uber-Chieftain who will look after them and their family in this life and in whatever follows, that they invent such characters and base their lives around such beliefs.
Likewise the fact that Christianity or any other religion provides meaning in many people's lives, which tends to prevent them from seeking meaning in Wokeness (such as being an "ally" of some marginalised group, writing or reposting something on social media to make the world a better place by inducing guilt in those who they think should feel guilty) does not mean that those beliefs were correct, or that any or all of the meaning believers derived from their religion was good, or bad (however judged). It just means that people's often intense need to fill a meaning gap in their life was fulfilled, at least in part, by one of these recognised religious belief systems rather than the recent Woke / progressive mashup social contagion which grew out of leftist politics and post-modernism.
I have no idea how the universe came into being. No-one has any knowledge of why there is anything at all, anywhere - any universe (time, dimensions, gravity, electromagnetism, the perplexing wavelike properties of matter which allow so-called fundamental particles to assemble as stable atoms and molecules, plus whatever gives rise to energy / matter) or any creator which could create what we observe in the universe. But here we are! And - as you write - there are many wonderful and indeed gorgeous aspects of life and our universe, along with extreme horrors.
I think there is something beyond the physical which we are already part of, which loves us and expects the best of us, and that attempts to guide us. However, it is obviously not the creator of the universe. If it was, it would intervene from time to time: It would care for its pets. It doesn't do this, so it is not the creator. I guess it emerged as part of who we - and surely other species - are.
Most people are not at all interested in such a cosmology or framework for thinking about life and whatever lies beyond our physical life. It lacks the high drama and all-powerful, all-protecting, love, wisdom and guidance which comes with belief in in a big-boss daddy of all who loves and protects us.
Freud describes the God you describe as a pathological illusion and I agree with Freud on this. Daddy God is not God but a destructive illusion we create to deal with our mortality and to justify our murderous desires. That God should have died when Nietzsche said so, but it persists in many sick religions. The question is whether life is good and what sort of god would embrace life? Is there order in the universe or is it random and disordered. Physics suggests order, and order suggests life is a good thing: an exquisitely, if very fragile and temporary, ordering of star dust indeed.
Robin -thank you for your thoughtful comments. I'll respond in kind when I have a few free minutes to address you points appropriately.
Wow, beautifully said Salvatore.
Thank you, PSW. That’s very kind. I have to give TFP a big round of applause. Where else could I expound on what faith means to me without looking like the skunk at the garden party? TFP broaches topics that actually matter, rather than wallowing in guilt porn over non-issues like “climate change” or those poor Hamas members.
Very well said. I would add, however, that We need to look much more closely at our faith in theological terms, not merely according to the faith demanded by our religious tribe. Which truths are self evident which are not?
Thank you for your comment. Per the self
Evident truths, I don’t know on which side of the ledger they all land, but I’m more than content with the ones in our national charter.
But that is not mere faith. There is good reason that we each have a natural right to life, liberty, property etc. Those ideas are all derived from our ideas about a well ordered universe. Thomas Jefferson also said and did some things we mostly disagree with for good reason too. God is the source of logic, reason and truth. God does not cower before reason! We should always say "amen" after we mathematics and physics.
And a hearty Amen to you. Thank you