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Many Christians have no doubt been puzzled by reading frequent reports of strange paranormal happenings: telepathy, prophetic dreams, ghosts, near-death.
Table of contents
- Supernatural
- From Christian creators
- The Battle Between Good and Evil
- The Battle Between Good and Evil
- What scares the new atheists | John Gray | World news | The Guardian
Supernatural
Who is to say our star-siblings are morally compromised and in need of spiritual redemption? Maybe they have attained a more perfect spiritual existence than we have at this point in our development. Many faiths require specific rituals associated with spiritual experiences Credit: Getty Images. On Earth, this kind of cognition is at best a few million years old. The education will go quite the other way. There is no need to imagine that God reveals the same truths in the same way to all intelligent life in the Universe.
Other civilisations could understand the Divine in their own myriad ways, all of which could be compatible with each other. But what about the divisions between faiths? How would the discovery influence religious identity? In attendance are an intelligent alien species named Bublas, who have traveled from a faraway star named Rigel. The Jews at the conference are bewildered by the physical appearance of the Bulbas, what with their gray spots and tentacles.
A Rabbinical court is called to think about how Jews should respond to their new visitors. What happens, they ask, if some day humans come across alien creatures who want to be Jewish? The Bulbas belong in the second group. The comedy of the story is heightened by what we recognise as a certain tribalism inherent to religion.
The announcement of any identity has the potential to split the world into groups: us and them. But when religion is involved, that separation takes on a cosmic dimension: us and them, and God is on our side. This has always been one of the challenges of cross-cultural conversion, which is often tasked with negotiating, though not dissolving, such boundaries. A sense of location is also critical to many religious practices - meaning that those beliefs could be bound to life on our planet Credit: Getty Images. Perhaps this is a bigger challenge to Judaism and Islam than it is for some forms of Christianity, which place less emphasis on daily rituals than other religions.
Think of Islam, which requires its adherents to take up embodied behaviors throughout the year. Unlike Christianity, whose founder eradicated the necessity of location for religious experience, Islam is a very placed religion. Prayers are said facing Mecca, at five specific times throughout the day, and are physicalised through bowing and kneeling.
Fasting is required at specific times, as is a pilgrimage to Mecca for all Muslims who are able. Contemporary Judaism, however, is not as dependent on location as Islam, given its tragic history with exile and diaspora. What, then, would it take for an alien to be considered a participant in an Earth religion? What would she be required to do? Pray five times a day? Would she have to be baptised? Receive communion? Build a tent for Sukkot? This means that the Christian ideal of love requires us to battle against both pride and fear, to combine humility with courage. According to Kierkegaardian theology, fearful religion is sinful religion.
These two brief examples suggest that the Christian tradition has the resources not only to recognise the dangerous consequences of fear, but to scrutinise them closely and provide a spiritual response to them. However, this is not the sort of perspective that Russell was prepared to explore in his philosophical work.
From Christian creators
He was certainly unwilling to invoke the Christian doctrine of original sin — presumably because it was closely associated with the Victorian moralism that, to Russell's disgust, lingered long into the 20th century. But his atheist disciples may be surprised to discover that privately Russell found some meaning in the concept of sin.
In his autobiography he describes a visit in to a small Greek church, where he became aware within himself of "a sense of sin" which, to his astonishment, "powerfully affected" him in his feelings, though not in his beliefs. If Russell had followed Kierkegaard in paying more heed to such "feelings", he might have come closer to understanding that fear is a religious problem, and not just a problem with religion.
Topics Philosophy How to believe. Philosophy books Religion Books Religion World news comment. Reuse this content. Order by newest oldest recommendations. When they assert that science can bridge fact and value, they overlook the many incompatible value-systems that have been defended in this way. There is no more reason to think science can determine human values today than there was at the time of Haeckel or Huxley.
None of the divergent values that atheists have from time to time promoted has any essential connection with atheism, or with science.
The Battle Between Good and Evil
How could any increase in scientific knowledge validate values such as human equality and personal autonomy? The source of these values is not science. In fact, as the most widely-read atheist thinker of all time argued, these quintessential liberal values have their origins in monotheism. The new atheists rarely mention Friedrich Nietzsche, and when they do it is usually to dismiss him. The reason Nietzsche has been excluded from the mainstream of contemporary atheist thinking is that he exposed the problem atheism has with morality.
The question is which morality an atheist should serve.
The Battle Between Good and Evil
Among other things, the universal claims of liberal morality become highly questionable. Awkwardly for these atheists, Nietzsche understood that modern liberalism was a secular incarnation of these religious traditions. As a classical scholar, he recognised that a mystical Greek faith in reason had shaped the cultural matrix from which modern liberalism emerged.
Some ancient Stoics defended the ideal of a cosmopolitan society; but this was based in the belief that humans share in the Logos, an immortal principle of rationality that was later absorbed into the conception of God with which we are familiar. Nietzsche was clear that the chief sources of liberalism were in Jewish and Christian theism: that is why he was so bitterly hostile to these religions. He was an atheist in large part because he rejected liberal values. To be sure, evangelical unbelievers adamantly deny that liberalism needs any support from theism.
If they are philosophers, they will wheel out their rusty intellectual equipment and assert that those who think liberalism relies on ideas and beliefs inherited from religion are guilty of a genetic fallacy. Canonical liberal thinkers such as John Locke and Immanuel Kant may have been steeped in theism; but ideas are not falsified because they originate in errors.
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The far-reaching claims these thinkers have made for liberal values can be detached from their theistic beginnings; a liberal morality that applies to all human beings can be formulated without any mention of religion. Or so we are continually being told. The belief that the human species is a moral agent struggling to realise its inherent possibilities — the narrative of redemption that sustains secular humanists everywhere — is a hollowed-out version of a theistic myth. The idea that the human species is striving to achieve any purpose or goal — a universal state of freedom or justice, say — presupposes a pre-Darwinian, teleological way of thinking that has no place in science.
Empirically speaking, there is no such collective human agent, only different human beings with conflicting goals and values. Instead, they have fashioned many ways of life. A plurality of moralities is as natural for the human animal as the variety of languages. At this point, the dread spectre of relativism tends to be raised. Well, anyone who wants their values secured by something beyond the capricious human world had better join an old-fashioned religion. If you set aside any view of humankind that is borrowed from monotheism, you have to deal with human beings as you find them, with their perpetually warring values.
Humans are like other animals in having a definite nature, which shapes their experiences whether they like it or not.
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No one benefits from being tortured or persecuted on account of their religion or sexuality. Being chronically poor is rarely, if ever, a positive experience. Being at risk of violent death is bad for human beings whatever their culture. Such truisms could be multiplied. Universal human values can be understood as something like moral facts, marking out goods and evils that are generically human. Such values are very often conflicting, and different societies resolve these conflicts in divergent ways. The Ottoman empire, during some of its history, was a haven of toleration for religious communities who were persecuted in Europe; but this pluralism did not extend to enabling individuals to move from one community to another, or to form new communities of choice, as would be required by a liberal ideal of personal autonomy.
The Hapsburg empire was based on rejecting the liberal principle of national self-determination; but — possibly for that very reason — it was more protective of minorities than most of the states that succeeded it.
What scares the new atheists | John Gray | World news | The Guardian
Protecting universal values without honouring what are now seen as core liberal ideals, these archaic imperial regimes were more civilised than a great many states that exist today. For many, regimes of this kind are imperfect examples of what all human beings secretly want — a world in which no one is unfree. The conviction that tyranny and persecution are aberrations in human affairs is at the heart of the liberal philosophy that prevails today.
But this conviction is supported by faith more than evidence. Throughout history there have been large numbers who have been happy to relinquish their freedom as long as those they hate — gay people, Jews, immigrants and other minorities, for example — are deprived of freedom as well. Many have been ready to support tyranny and oppression.
Billions of human beings have been hostile to liberal values, and there is no reason for thinking matters will be any different in future. Today this a forbidden thought.