The interesting question is why is America still so fiercely religiouis.

I particularly connect to Steve Antinoff’s here (he who caused me to take on Les Miserables from this site). I am grateful that Chris you posted it here.

That is to say also that the discussion did not evoke or provoke any defensiveness in me (which is good) except that I found myself asking why atheism has to be an enemy, or a threat. But Steve Antinoff answers that very well: atheism is not, not at all.

Chris asked the good question- why the three Abrahamic faiths are at each other. Without listening again, I believe he also asked why they have not been able to bring peace on earth. I was born into one of them ( Judaism, the orthodox version) and from what I know of the other two I would say that is because they have been more at war with each other and either struggling to survive or out to keep gain or force believers. They have become part of the political struggle for supremacy-ultimately clouding over the perennial truths of all faiths where we would all meet and lay down arms. So ot be honest it was hard for the participants to say whether religion with it’s divisions has brought more harm or good to this world. They got that point out of the way almost instantly and steered more towards faith or “pre-religion” (not post-religion or atheism).

Religion, to my mind, ought to bring spiritual elevation and community, which it does somewhat. Early indoctrination from being born into one religion or another short-circuits or hampers ( makes difficult) any real evolution towards one path or another. So I see that as a problem. But Joseph Campbell said choose one and go with it ( as opposed to what he did- compare them all to arrive at the perennial truths) and you will arrive at that place.

Of the three Abrahamic religions, I would say from the most neutral place in my mind, that Christianity, or the teachings of Jesus ( love) has or had the most promise. I am with Joseph Campbell (and I think Emerson ) for whom Buddhism, it’s wisdom and practice, was the way to peace and happiness.

I want to add a little passage from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “English Traits.” He recounts a discussion with his buddy Thomas Carlyle concerning the state of science – or at least the learned discourse concerning science:

“For the science, he had if possible even less tolerance, and compared the savants of the Somerset House to the boy who asked Confucius ‘how many stars in the sky?’ Confucius replied, ‘he minded things near him:’ then said the boy, ‘how many hairs are in your eyebrows?’ Confucius said, ‘he didn’t know and didn’t care.’”

Personally, when I read this I’m reminded of guys like Dennett and Dawkins…guys who I believe are obsessed with counting how many hairs are in our eyebrows – and thus possess a deep faith that therein lies the only meaning of life. My response to the eyebrow calculations of these men is – I don’t know and I don’t care.

I would love to hear a conversation among sociologists (without a proselytizer in the mix) to discuss the rise of religious fundamentalism and the rise of capitalism as symptoms of a bigger problem with society.

It is possible that God has nothing to do with such things and never did.

http://meaningoflife.tv/video.php?speaker=albacete&topic=complete

He goes on to say that it’s important to think about these things but ultimately life is about enjoyment (going to the movies, ext.).

This theory especially struck me when I watched Daniel Dennett’s interview.

http://meaningoflife.tv/video.php?speaker=dennett&topic=complete

Mr. Dennett appears to me a somewhat humorless man, a man boxed in (and subsequently jaded) by an idea. He steadfastly refuses to leave room for any mystery and listening to him I’m reminded of Kirilov in “Demons,” a man whose devotion to an idea keeps him in his own room obsessing – and ultimately on a downward spiral.

I find it a conceit on Mr. Dennett’s part…this notion that all mystery has conveniently been eradicated during Mr. Dennett’s lifetime, and by the way (if we follow this logic) due in large part to Mr. Dennett’s work.

As Mr. West says in this program Human beings are going to treasure something. These guys like Dawkins, Hitchens, and Dennett, do you really want to share in their treasure? Is there any chance a shine will emanate from their treasure…with enough illumination to allow us to commune in a ceremony of dance? Cuz I like to dance.

What I’m trying to say is if someone made a movie out of Mr. Dennett’s theories, I’m sure I’d fall asleep in my popcorn.

http://www.theconnection.org/?p=2021

Rorty did well to piss people off on either side of the religion/science debate, himself arguing with Dennett years before the self-identifying atheist gang:

http://www.theconnection.org/?p=1491

Like John Dewey, Rorty thought that the quest for certainty in philosophy had become a surrogate for the authority of religion. Cornel West, writing about Rorty in his book “The American Evasion of Philosophy,” brings Foucault in to supplement his genealogy of pragmatism and ends with suggestions about a form of “prophetic pragmatism.” The book begins with Emerson, fittingly, selecting great passages Harold Bloom would celebrate. Of course, Nietzsche also heard Emerson, as we all hear Nietzsche. Neither are dead. Cornel West’s characterization of the decentering of epistemology in philosophy by both is apt in terms of the Foucauldian relation of power and knowledge. Rorty is the great hero here, he saw science and religion as together “on all fours.” The trouble is, once you give up on metanarratives, you see the the university as guilty of not producing enough critical citizens, and manufacturing too much consent — creating a privileged class for the newspapers to collect and sell to the advertisers, as Chomsky would say. So here we stand, back with Emerson. Why Emerson? Because he demands an idiosyncratic curriculum, because each of us has a rich attic to ransack. Is there anyone living in body to provoke our intuitions?

Jacques Ranciere must be your next guest Mr. Lydon. For “The Philosopher and His Poor,” for “The Nights of Labor,” but mostly for “The Ignorant School Master: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation.” Ranciere, channeling Joseph Jacotot, writes that “it’s precisely because we are all equal by nature that we must all be unequal by circumstances.” Is this not the grand message, the contingent acknowledgment; not what you’re working for, but what you’re working from? What America has in common with it’s European roots is the Romantic praise for Authenticity. Harold Bloom takes from Emerson the notion of the Anxiety of Influence when we find Emerson saying in the American Scholar, “Genius is always sufficiently the enemy of genius by over-influence.” Ranciere: “This is the true modesty of ‘genius,’ that is to say, of the emancipated artist: he employs his art, all his power, to show us his poem as the absence of another that he credits us with knowing as well as he.”

Jacques Ranciere is alive. I want to hear him speak with Chris Lydon about intellectual emancipation.

“Atheism is the shadow or dark side of the highest perception of God. Every formula we frame about God, though always true as a symbol, becomes false when we accept it as a sufficient formula. The Atheist and Agnostic come to remind us of our error.”

Assuming neither is a misattribution, I’d be curious to know what connection Aurobindo and Tillich had. It’s a pretty close paraphrase.

(WRT Armstrong, and especially her latest, hasn’t she simply reinvented UU?)

Chris,

It was an excellent program. thanks. Mr West is a trip. Thinking during the discussion not always good enough, though. Why call the ineradicable hunger for transcendence “faith?” (As Mr. Cox does.) Why not call it hunger? Hunger/longing for something which transcends the finite, the finite which leaves us dissatisfied, does not imply that something exists.

There are religions of Self-awakening, like Zen, not only religions of faith. When the 9th century Chinese Zen master Shih-t’ou awakened, he exclaimed: “There is no self; there is nothing that is not the self.” To reduce that wondrous realization to Judeo-Christianity is the very imperialism your guests decry.

I also find your phrase “post-atheist” glib. I stand with Kirilov. Atheism in the best sense and faith will battle it out in human culture for a the foreseeable future, won’t they? Has Karen Armstrong really ended that? The key to what I still would like to call spiritual atheism is not whether God exists for believers. God does not exist for the millions of us whose struggle to be human must be undertaken without God. That struggle is just as heartfelt and valid at it is for believers. Mr. Cox’s citing of Tillich’s definition of atheism to set up his: “the God atheists don’t believe in I wouldn’t believe in either” (which I have heard before) is, frankly, crap.

No atheist I know begrudges any believer his or her belief.

I was very impressed by Ms. Gordon. Niebuhr liked to quote a reviewer from the Times Literary Supplement of his “The Nature and Destiny of Man that “Original Sin is the only empirically verifiable doctrine of Christianity,”

“Spiritual Atheism” is coming out as a book in a couple of months. Ms. Gordon would not like it, I assume; it is “private.” Except that the most private dilemma of millions of human hearts strikes me as not private at all, if it besets millions. Ethical and political concerns do not exhaust religion. The individual torment has need of being addressed too, doesn’t it?

When I lived in Rome in 1998-99, my landlady was a harpsichordist. Occasionally, on Sundays, she invited me up to her garden for tea with some of her musician friends. Among them was a Czech violinist, who my landlady described as the greatest violinist in Italy. You immediately sensed that here was a formidable and serious man. I felt wet behind the ears in comparison. My landlady introduced me as a writer. I was embarrassed, but he asked me what I was writing about. I stumbled out, in my awful Italian: “The religious impulse in a world without God.” When he said, gravely: “”This is our situation!” {Questo e nostro situazione), I knew I did have something to write about,

Your friend always,

Steve