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May. 13th, 2007 11:22 amA few months ago Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris tossed out a couple of wonderful broadsides against religion with their books The God Delusion and Letter to a Christian Nation, both of which basically took the reader to task for demanding that others remain silent when they mouth delusionary claims about their beliefs and their gods.
There were a lot of dismissive reviews of the books, the most common of which went something like this: "Dawkins and Harris are attack a kind of religion that is unsophisticated and immature and not really religion as it is practiced. They are not generally appreciative of the deep mysteries of belief, like questions about the ground of being, the experience of the numinous, and so on. Dawkins and Harris provide no comfort to those who remain confronted with the very question of existince itself."
There has been a lot of hand-wringing on the naturalist side of the aisle. Mostly because the response is this: What does that mean, anyway? 'Ground of being,' 'Experience of the numinous'? Aside from being strong evidence that the human brain has some pretty weird pathways wired into it, how can we claim that trying to universalize these emotional experiences into something fundamental to the fabric of the universe is unfounded.
The other problem is that most of these people are lying. Dawkins and Harris are attacking the most common form of religion there is, the one practiced daily by most of America and, I bet, most of the world. For the naturalists, though, there's been a rather difficult question: what is the dividing line that separates the theologians who diss Harris and Dawkins for their 'lack of sophistication', and the people who simply hate Harris and Dawkins for daring to confront them at all?
It's animism.
The gulf between Bishop Shelby Spong and Ted Haggard is wide, but the hard line between them is the animist line. Haggard believes that the universe is inhabited with a spirit that pays attention to him and will act in its interests, whatever they happen to be. Spong doesn't.
Rejecting universal animism is a pretty clever strategy: it allows the proponent to declaim all interest in questions that science might answer and instead allows the proponent to argue in favor of a fundamental reality that can only be described in terms of personal experiences. It completely withdraws from the God in the Gaps argument by claiming there are no gaps that we can see.
It allows the "sophisticated" argumentors to tell the less sophisticated, "Don't worry, we've got them atheists on the run," when in fact all they've done is deploy the word salad to obscure the fact that underlying everything is an epistemology of evasion, violations of the razor, and a lack of anything approaching knowledge. They're engaging in the Courtier's Reply, which is meant to bamboozle both the secularists and the animists. The theology in which they engage is an esoteric, academic pursuit far, far removed from the daily practice of religion as practiced by their animist power base.
The unsophisticated animists reward the theologians for their duty as gatekeepers (while the smarter among them set up their own set of gatekeepers to make sure that the non-animists don't start to proclaim too loudly their belief that their god isn't really active or interested in the world) and this defense-in-depth of vacuous reasoning and poor excuses for the profound lack of universality among religions (and theologies) persists.
There were a lot of dismissive reviews of the books, the most common of which went something like this: "Dawkins and Harris are attack a kind of religion that is unsophisticated and immature and not really religion as it is practiced. They are not generally appreciative of the deep mysteries of belief, like questions about the ground of being, the experience of the numinous, and so on. Dawkins and Harris provide no comfort to those who remain confronted with the very question of existince itself."
There has been a lot of hand-wringing on the naturalist side of the aisle. Mostly because the response is this: What does that mean, anyway? 'Ground of being,' 'Experience of the numinous'? Aside from being strong evidence that the human brain has some pretty weird pathways wired into it, how can we claim that trying to universalize these emotional experiences into something fundamental to the fabric of the universe is unfounded.
The other problem is that most of these people are lying. Dawkins and Harris are attacking the most common form of religion there is, the one practiced daily by most of America and, I bet, most of the world. For the naturalists, though, there's been a rather difficult question: what is the dividing line that separates the theologians who diss Harris and Dawkins for their 'lack of sophistication', and the people who simply hate Harris and Dawkins for daring to confront them at all?
It's animism.
The gulf between Bishop Shelby Spong and Ted Haggard is wide, but the hard line between them is the animist line. Haggard believes that the universe is inhabited with a spirit that pays attention to him and will act in its interests, whatever they happen to be. Spong doesn't.
Rejecting universal animism is a pretty clever strategy: it allows the proponent to declaim all interest in questions that science might answer and instead allows the proponent to argue in favor of a fundamental reality that can only be described in terms of personal experiences. It completely withdraws from the God in the Gaps argument by claiming there are no gaps that we can see.
It allows the "sophisticated" argumentors to tell the less sophisticated, "Don't worry, we've got them atheists on the run," when in fact all they've done is deploy the word salad to obscure the fact that underlying everything is an epistemology of evasion, violations of the razor, and a lack of anything approaching knowledge. They're engaging in the Courtier's Reply, which is meant to bamboozle both the secularists and the animists. The theology in which they engage is an esoteric, academic pursuit far, far removed from the daily practice of religion as practiced by their animist power base.
The unsophisticated animists reward the theologians for their duty as gatekeepers (while the smarter among them set up their own set of gatekeepers to make sure that the non-animists don't start to proclaim too loudly their belief that their god isn't really active or interested in the world) and this defense-in-depth of vacuous reasoning and poor excuses for the profound lack of universality among religions (and theologies) persists.
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