Part 3 of 4 on Atheism
In the previous two posts we spoke about Atheisms intellectual hypocrisies, but what about cultural atheism ? Stephen RL Clarke remarks,
“Those who don’t believe in, or don’t worship, the gods of a particular tribe may still have gods, ideals and rituals of their own.
In times past to be atheistical was simply to be irreligious, impious. Piety lay in respecting the authorities of our day, and our ancestral traditions. Religion lay in obeying both moral and ritual requirements (not always easily distinguished). It might require us to respect, even if not obey, a child, a stranger, a sacred spring, a healthy animal. All such presences impose themselves upon us: showing contempt for them, our ancestors supposed, would earn the anger of more powerful gods.
Obviously, those who pretended to swear by gods in whom they did not believe, and whose judgement they did not fear, could not be trusted to keep their vows."
Obviously, those who feared no immortal judgement could not be expected to treat suppliants or other powerless strangers well. Obviously those who thought that the only good was pleasure, the only evil pain, were defenseless in the face of threats and bribes.
‘Theism’ was not a theoretical position, but a practical determination to acknowledge what was sacred in our lands and tribes. It was not – and is not – merely an explanatory hypothesis, but an inspiration.
In Durkheim’s words, ‘the real function of religion is not to make us think, to enrich our knowledge, nor to add to the conceptions which we owe to science others of another origin and another character, but rather, it is to make us act, to aid us to live’. This isn’t the whole truth about ‘religion’ (as Durkheim himself acknowledged), but it is a central truth.
We cannot simultaneously say – as mainstream atheists say - that there is no objective, rationally obligatory way of life and thought, that ‘right and wrong’ are only ‘social constructions’, and that our way of life and thought is obviously right! Or rather (since this is exactly what so many people say) we cannot say this without self-contradiction.
A really radical, nihilistic atheism denies that anything is sacred – not even that shibboleth of liberal modernism, the ‘happiness’ of the greatest number (in practice, the health and pleasure of the greatest number of human beings in a particular political region). ‘Human beings’ are only the current survivors of the hominid branch of mammalian evolution, with no special claim on the cosmos and no intrinsic value as ‘images of God’. Many of those who think that they are ‘atheists’ somehow retain a conviction that ‘human health and happiness’ – though perhaps not human life – is so obviously a good that everyone (every rational being, that is) must immediately acknowledge it. Lacking any reason to believe that each human life is sacred this conviction easily mutates into some form of collective hedonism, modified – as before – by an insistence on knowing and telling the Truth .
A really radical atheism might prefer to remodel all our habits, all our customs, in the expectation that a properly scientific outlook will be able to devise a coherent plan of life acceptable to all (or at least to themselves), once we have broken free of the demons of our past: a project that Edmund Burke rightly deplored when it was initiated by French lawyers! ‘When ancient opinions and rules of life are taken away, the loss cannot possibly be estimated. From that moment we have no compass to govern us; nor can we know distinctly to what port we steer’.
And those who think that they are ‘properly scientific’ may be as self-deceived as any prelates who suppose that they are true Christians!"
Clark is correct, indeed, the Enlightenment myth of an “age of reason” was about “freedom”, to liberate us from any notions of divine or natural law that might place unwelcome constraints upon our wills, Christendom was just as rational, it simply served different basic commitments.
But language, conscience, rationality, will, freedom, meaning, personal identity, and purpose — the distinctively human attributes — have metaphysical character not privy to calculative reasoning.
Reducing ethical reasoning to technocratic rationalism, we cut off access to our wisdom traditions.
Moral value is something real, if we deny this we sever reason from reality, from Truth & Goodness, from culture & tradition, it is to banish the human from thought itself, thus reason becomes simply a will to power….as the murderous ideologies of the past century attest to.
Nicholas Lasch says,
"In this twilight of the twentieth century, we need urgently to understand how little the destructiveness of gods and demons is diminished by denying their existence or by clothing them in ‘secular’ and hence (supposedly) more innocuous descriptions."
Clarke ends saying, "Modern atheists have also inherited a strange combination of ideas: on the one hand, the ultimate cause and context of all things is infinite and incomprehensible; on the other, human intelligence can be expected to be raised so far as to speak and act for all things, but perhaps on the condition that it abandons or transforms its own ‘primitive’ or ‘animal’ nature. This is what marks such atheism as a specifically Christian heresy, of a kind that would not easily arise even in other Abrahamic traditions, let alone Hindu or Chinese.”
And this is echoed by John Milbank : "Whereas the Enlightenment sundered reason from reality, logic from feeling, and culture from nature, in religion Reason itself is incarnated & sustained in a certain corporate presence of ritual, symbolic expression, practice, association, contemplation and intellectual reflection.
But they do this not on the basis of calculation, but rather as a matter of instinct and commitment. Yet throughout history this instinct has proved more rational than the operations of a coldly detached reason and has engendered everywhere a civilising effect.
For this reason, not only is the modern secular person already a cyborg, she is also inherently schizophrenic…. "
In 1978 the Berkeley molecular biologist Gunther Stent published a book called “Paradoxes of Progress,” in which he wrote that “the most meaningful [contemporary] definition of progress can be made from the purview . . . of the will to power”; but, he added, “it is a totally amoral view of progress, under which nuclear ballistic missiles definitely represent progress over gunpowder cannonballs, which in return represent progress over bows and arrows.”
Aeschliman writes about just that HERE,
"Reductionism and the will to power (libido dominandi) are closely related, epistemologically and ethically, amounting to what T. S. Eliot called a degrading, schizoid “dissociation of sensibility”: We reduce realities (including human beings) to their manipulable and exploitable physical features in order to dominate them: we reduce thou to it, persons to things, ends to means, subjects to objects, essences to existents, mind to matter, spirit to flesh, reason to sense experience.
Rationality, conceptualization, volition, and language itself are irreducibly metaphysical: For those who refuse to see this, Socrates lived and died in vain. The current reductionist rampage and regime is an obscene, transgressive violation of the greatest insights and products of the Western (and world) mind, spirit, and imagination in philosophy, ethics, literature, architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and humanistic discourse itself. It justifies the worry of the great Dutch cultural historian Johan Huizinga (1872–1945) that the anti-metaphysical animus of modernist culture is fundamentally dehumanizing and disintegrative, an “abolition of man” (to use Lewis’s phrase).
The militant partisans of “the secular border patrol” would do well to consider that when the metaphysical or religious dimension and horizon of human persons, societies, and cultures are denied, ignored, scorned, or attacked, there is no clear warrant for peace and goodwill on earth, which are hardly the “natural” attributes of human beings. Glenn quotes the English Labour-party politician Roy Hattersley (an atheist) as adding that “if suffering human beings have to wait for atheists and agnostics rather than religious believers for help, they are likely to wait a very long time.”
Hart's “governing conviction” is that what our new atheists regard as modern progress in the direction of rational liberation is itself a reactionary superstition. The modern Enlightenment has actually been a rebellion against the whole truth about our natures, about who we are, and about the true source of our freedom and dignity. And that rebellion has been not so much radical as selective and self-indulgent. By compassionately privileging personal freedom and human rights over what they believe they know through science, the new atheists remain parasitic on the key Christian insight about who we are. Their attachment to the humane virtues makes no sense outside the Christian claim for the unique and irreplaceable dignity of every human person. That claim is completely unsupported by either ancient (Aristotelian) or modern (Darwinian) science. The sentimental preferences of our atheists are really those of a Christianity without Christ.
It was Nietzsche who prophesied that our fading, subjective experiences of dignity, freedom, and love have a very limited future as merely beneficial illusions
Hart reviews In The Enchantments of Mammon, How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity by Eugene McCarraher, HERE
Like MacIntyre, McCarraher “is impatient with those tedious modern dogmatisms that masquerade as deliverances of enlightened and disinterested rationality. He too finds the modern displacement of any moral grammar based on the cultivation of virtues by a fragmentary ethos of private values, public platitudes, and voluntarist individualisms a depressing reality. He too laments the reduction of ethical reasoning to little more than assertions of the will and celebrations of private property as the supreme index of the good.”
The enlightenment, modern capitalism, “Instead, is another kind of religion, one whose chief tenets may be more irrational than almost any of the creeds it replaced at the various centers of global culture.
Rather than a sane calculation of material possibilities and human motives, it is in fact an enthusiast cult of insatiable consumption allied to a degrading metaphysics of human nature. And it is sustained, like any creed, by doctrines and miracles, mysteries and revelations, devotions and credulities, promises of beatitude and threats of dereliction.
McCarraher urges us to stop thinking of the modern age as the godless sequel to the ages of faith, and recognize it instead as a period of the most destructive kind of superstition, one in which acquisition and ambition have become our highest moral aims, consumer goods (the more intrinsically worthless the better) our fetishes, and impossible promises of limitless material felicity our shared eschatology. And so deep is our faith in these things that we are willing to sacrifice the whole of creation in their service. McCarraher, therefore, prefers to speak not of disenchantment, but of “misenchantment”—spiritual captivity to the glamor of an especially squalid god.”
Elsehwhere Hart writes,
"What distinguishes modernity from the age of Christendom is not that the former is more devoted to rationality than was the latter but that its rationality serves different primary commitments”
All reasoning presumes premises or intuitions or ultimate convictions that cannot be proved by any foundations or facts more basic than themselves, and hence there are irreducible convictions present wherever one attempts to apply logic to experience. One always operates within boundaries established by one’s first principles, and asks only the questions that those principles permit.”
…it is only that Christianity expressly forbids the various evils that have been done by Christians, whereas democracy, in principle, forbids nothing (except, of course, the defeat of the majority's will).
The Age of Enlightenment—considered in purely political terms—was itself merely the transition from one epoch of nationalist warfare, during which states still found it necessary to use religious institutions as instruments of power, to another epoch of still greater nationalist warfare, during which religious rationales had become obsolete, because the state had become its own cult, and power the only morality.
...surely the belief that moral principles are only a combination of evolutionary epiphenomena and sentimental predilections must weaken the will to seek the good, and a whole culture that truly came to believe that all moral choices are merely personal preferences might find that the inventiveness and spontaneity of the liberated will are capable of just about anything, and responsible to nothing. After all, it is not as if the lessons of modern history have given us no cause for apprehension on that score.”
So much of what we imagine to be the testimony of reason or the clear and unequivocal evidence of our senses is really only an interpretive reflex, determined by mental habits impressed in us by an intellectual and cultural history. Even our notion of what might constitute a “rational” or “realistic” view of things is largely a product not of a dispassionate attention to facts, but of an ideological legacy.”
But we are anything but rationalists now, so we no longer need cling to the pretense that reason was ever our paramount concern; we are today more likely to be committed to “my truth” than to any notion of truth in general, no matter where that might lead
The myth of “enlightenment” served well to liberate us from any antique notions of divine or natural law that might place unwelcome constraints upon our wills; but it has discharged its part and lingers on now only as a kind of habit of rhetoric. And now that the rationalist moment has largely passed, the modern faith in human liberation has become, if anything, more robust and more militant.
What I find most mystifying is the strange presupposition that a truly secular society would of its nature be more tolerant and less prone to violence than any society shaped by any form of faith. Given that the modern age of secular governance has been the most savagely and sublimely violent period in human history, by a factor (or body count) of incalculable magnitude, it is hard to identify the grounds for their confidence.....the modern secular state's capacity for barbarism exceeds any of the evils for which Christendom might justly be indicted, not solely by virtue of the superior technology at its disposal, but by its very nature.
...surely the belief that moral principles are only a combination of evolutionary epiphenomena and sentimental predilections must weaken the will to seek the good, and a whole culture that truly came to believe that all moral choices are merely personal preferences might find that the inventiveness and spontaneity of the liberated will are capable of just about anything, and responsible to nothing. After all, it is not as if the lessons of modern history have given us no cause for apprehension on that score.
Can one really believe—as the New Atheists seem to do—that secular reason, if finally allowed to move forward, free of the constraining hand of archaic faith, will naturally make society more just, more humane, and more rational than it has been in the past? What evidence supports such an expectation? It is rather difficult, placing everything in the scales, to vest a great deal of hope in modernity, however radiantly enchanting its promises, when one considers how many innocent lives have already been swallowed up in the flames of modern “progress.”
At the end of the twentieth century—the century when secularization became an explicit political andcultural project throughout the world—the forces of progressive ideology could boast an unprecedentedly vast collection of corpses, but not much in the way of new moral concepts. At least, not any we should be especially proud of.
So, how do political systems use atheism to control; the sheep ? See HERE in part 4
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