Rootsie

Religion's insight that human beings are essentially flawed gives it the edge over secularism, writes Nicholas Buxton
Reprinted from: http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1646099,00.html

It is a secularist article of faith to maintain that religion will soon be eliminated as a by-product of "progress". Since there is no reason to suppose that life has some overarching meaning, the notion of a benevolent God who intervenes in history on our behalf is basically nonsense and should be abandoned.

Atheists complain that religion proposes unprovable accounts of life and death. But this is uninteresting. Death is obviously a fact, but how we make sense of that fact is not the sort of question that could be subject to "proof" any more than a painting could be judged "wrong". Insights into human nature derived from the plays of Shakespeare may be equally "unprovable", but that doesn't mean they're not meaningful, useful or true. The atheist's first mistake, then, like the fundamentalists they often object to, is that they completely miss the point. Faith has nothing to do with certainty: it is not a set of closed answers, but rather a series of open questions with which to engage.

As it happens, I acknowledge the possibility that the universe may be meaningless and human life pointless. But this leads me to draw quite the opposite conclusion regarding religion. Rather than rejecting it - on the basis that it must be manifestly untrue for claiming that, in spite of all appearances to the contrary, life does in fact have a meaning and a purpose after all - I recognise that life's potential for meaninglessness requires us to give it a meaning it would not otherwise have. This is the function of religion. Indeed, even at a mundane everyday level, everything we do is done for a supposed reason, and fits into a story about what we are doing and why we are doing it. In short, we cannot just "do" or "be", like sheep wandering aimlessly across a field with no sense of where they are going or why. To be self-aware is to be intentional, it is to attribute significance to our actions; and that implies explanation, the notion of a reason or a purpose to account for the experience of that awareness. The alternative is nihilism. If we truly believed that life was meaningless, we would have no reason to get up in the morning - ultimately, the most rational thing to do would be to jump over the edge of a cliff. In other words, religion is our way of making sense out of nonsense, necessary precisely because life, in and of itself, may well be meaningless. To be religious is simply our way of expressing what it means to be human; we could no more cease being religious than cease being artistic or political.

The second mistake secularists make is that they fail to acknowledge the foundational assumptions - "dogmas" by any other name - underpinning their own worldview. As John Gray has argued in Heresies, many secular ideologies, such as Marxism and liberal humanism, are essentially theological narratives in structure and function, though arguably less coherent. Marxist notions of historical inevitability, or the assumption that democracy is a universal norm, are just forms of Christian soteriology dressed in secular clothing. When it comes to ethics, secularists are forced to assert that we behave morally and responsibly because it is "human nature" to do so. But what do they mean by human nature? This abstract notion is no different from a religious absolute, and performs exactly the same role in the sentences in which it is used as "God" does in the sentences in which He features.

Secularism has a more worrying implication, however. Without religion's insight that human beings are essentially flawed, we lose all checks on our hubristic pride, and risk making a false god of our own scientific genius, even though there is no evidence to support the belief that society advances in tandem with science. While I don't deny the reality of religiously motivated violence, the fact is that for much of the last century, atheist regimes pursuing enlightenment ideals inflicted massive suffering on their own people. Perhaps we'd actually be better off if we were all a bit more, rather than less, religious.

Rootsie:

This article highlights the diseased nature of Western discourse, under the sway of a religious tradition that assumes human nature to be evil and fallen and dependent on redemption from a supernatural entity, catapulting violently to the polar opposite 'humanistic' idea that humanity is all powerful. O yeah, and that human existence is meaningless so hey, anything goes.

You'd think there were no other notions and traditions kicking around. How about the oldest and longest-held idea, that humans are 'divine' in essence, and 'divine' in reality to the degree that they align themselves with the natural order of cosmos and Earth? The answer to Western arrogance is not Christian capitulation to a flawed and dangerous view of 'human nature' and essential human helplessness.

ALL of the disasters unfolding every day have their source in this false dichotomy.

This article defines the word 'essentialism.' These cranky Western constructs are universalized as 'human' ideas. There are many humans who reject them utterly.