Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
I might be happier and have better manners
if I thought I were descended from the emperors of China,
but no effort of will on my part can make me believe it,
any more than I can will my heart to stop beating.
Steven Weinberg
There exists a tradition of "revolt against reason", of which we find accents in as different authors as Pascal and Nietzsche,
and which rejects the preceding discussion entirely, willingfully admitting there are no rational arguments in favor of religion,
and that in the end it is nothing but a personal choice.
One can believe, even if it is absurd, especially if it is absurd.
Or it is an engagement, a lifestyle - one does the "gestures of belief", prays and implores,
and one ends up believing. This kind of attitude has become ever more popular with the rise of "postmodernism"
and, more generally, the idea that what is important is not to know if what one says is true or false,
or even that the distinction between true and false makes no sense.
What matters are the practical effects of a belief or the social role it plays in a given group.
In the most extreme postmodern variant of this tradition,
the problem of contradiction between different religious beliefs doesn't pose itself.
One resorts to the doctrine of multiple truths, being that mutually contradictory ideas can be simultaneously true.
One believes in heaven and hell, another inreincarnation, a third practices New Age
and a fourth thinks he has extraterrestrials among his ancestors.
All these views are "equally true" but with a qualifier of the kind "for the subject who believes it" or "within his culture".
I can only share the feeling of astonishment of many orthodox believers with regard to this multiplication of ontologies.
As it is useless to attack that kind of positions with rational arguments,
I will content myself with two remarks of moral order. Firstly,
this position is insincere and one can note this by choices in daily life:
when one has to choose a house, buy a car, choose a therapy,
even die-hard subjectivists will compare different possibilities and will try to make rational choices.
It is only when we turn ourselves to "metaphysical" questions, which have no immediate bearing on our life,
that everything becomes a matter of desire and subjective choices. Secondly,
this position is dangerous because it underestimates the importance of the notion of objective truth,
independent of our desires and choices:
when there is no objective criterion available to decide between contradictory opinions,
only force and violence can settle the disputes. In particular, on the political level,
truth is a weapon the weak have against the strong, not the other way around.
Finally, Steven Weinberg makes a perspicacious remark concerning religious subjectivism:
"Very strange, that the existence and nature of God and grace and sin and heaven and hell are not important!
I would guess that people do not find the theology of their own supposed religion important because
they cannot bring themselves to admit that they do not believe any of it."
The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness.
To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition
is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions.
The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo,
the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.
Karl Marx
Before proceeding further, an ambiguity in terminology has to be lifted:
the attitude defended here, which rests upon the limits of knowledge to which humanity has access
is often considered as a form of agnosticism rather than atheism.
With respect to them, he is actually, like everybody, atheistic.
But this is a confusion: e.g., the pope does not say he is agnostic concerning the gods of Olympos.
Idem for all African, Polynesian, etc. religions.
In fact, the most orthodox theologians will agree with me about 99% of existing or once existing religions.
Nobody ever disproved Aphrodite. In reality, there are two kinds of agnostics:
on the one hand, those who notice there is no worthy reason to believe in any kind of divinity
and use the word agnostic to designate their position, which is not really different from atheism.
No atheist thinks he has arguments disproving the existence of divinities.
He simply notices, faced with the multiplicity of beliefs and opinions,
that one has to sort things out and saying there is no reason to believe in the existence of some being
boils down to deny its existence.
But others declare themselves agnostic because they think the arguments in favor of deism are not entirely convincing,
or they make a distinction between religions of antiquity and contemporary religions,
and this attitude is indeed very different from atheism.
Notice also that the phenomenon of belief as such is practically independent from the pseudo-rational arguments discussed above.
The overwhelming majority of people embracing a faith do not do it because they are impressed by the anthropic principle,
but because they respect the traditions in which they have been brought up,
are afraid of death or find it pleasant to imagine an omnipotent being is protecting them.
This explains why religious intellectuals are often "atheists"
in the sense that they reject the reasons to believe of most of their coreligionaries.
The ideas developed here seem to go a bit too much upstream of the weak consensus which governs contemporary thought.
Did religion not become inoffensive? Why criticize it?
One can roughly classify the religious attitudes according to an orthodoxliberal axis;
when we move along this axis, we go from a dogmatic and literal belief in certain sacred texts
to positions which are ever vaguer and defended with less and less vigor.
The damage caused by these variants of religion is of course different.
It is the dogmatic variant which does the greatest harm, which imposes barbarian morals,
functions as *** for the people and, opposing genuine believers to infidels, encourages various conflicts.
It is this variant which dominates in the third world, but not only there.
Concerning the liberal variants of religion, they "sin" in two ways:
one is to deliver indirectly a pseudo-justication to the more naīve and dogmatic variants of religion.
Theologians, especially the more sophisticated ones, give an intellectual baggage to priests
who maintain the faith of their followers. Whether one wants it or not,
there exists a continuity of ideas which connects the apparently most opposed wings of the Church.
The other "sin" is to encourage a certain intellectual confusion.
To quote what Bertrand Russell said in another context, the modern religious attitude
"thrives upon the errors and confusions of the intellect. Hence it is led to prefer bad thinking to good,
to declare every momentary diculty insoluble, and
to regard every foolish mistake as revealing the bankruptcy of intellect and the triumph of intuition."
The attitude of secular people with respect to religion is equally surprising:
as religion became ever more fuzzy and vague, the secular opposition followed suit.
In the name of a will to dialogue and respect,
we arrive at a point where we do not state what we think anymore.
But the true respect departs from a clear affirmation of the positions of both sides,
and dialogue cannot be based on a vague humanist consensus occulting, in bioethics for instance,
the profound differences opposing morals based on utilitarianism and revelation.
With the downfall of Marxism, the political critique of religion has considerably weakened.
In part because Marxism itself edified a certain number of dogmas.
But one should not forget that what matters in atheism is the sceptic attitude on which it is founded.
And that the political critique of religion should go well beyond the critique of the support of the Churches to the established power.
We should put the critique of religion as alienation in the daylight again.
And the critical attitude vis-a-vis so called revealed truths can and should extend gradually to any "abstraction"
which are nothing but human constructions but which, once reified,
impose themselves to humans as exterior fatalities which prevent them from becoming masters of their fate:
God, the State, the Nation, or more recent ones, Europe or the Market. In any case,
the critique of religion remains an irreplaceable step in the transformation of this vale of tears into a truly humane world,
ridden from its gods and masters.