Tag Archives: Religion

Reason, Prejudice, Passion, Pessimism

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Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837) was a great Italian poet. He was also one of Western civilization’s great pessimists. Below is an 1821 extract from his Zibaldone di pensieri (“Commonplace Book of Thoughts”):

The power of nature and the weakness of reason. I’ve said elsewhere that for opinions to have a real influence on people, they must take the form of passions…. One could quote endless examples to demonstrate this point. But since all opinions that aren’t, or don’t seem to be, prejudices will have only pure reason to support them, in the ordinary way of things they are completely powerless to influence people.

Religious folks (even today, and maybe more these days than ever before, in reaction to the opposition they meet) are more passionate about their religion than their other passions (to which religion is hostile); they sincerely hate people who are not religious (though they pretend not to) and would make any sacrifice to see their system triumph (actually they already do this, mortifying inclinations that are natural and contrary to religion), and they feel intense anger whenever religion is humbled or contested.

Non-religious people, on the other hand, so long as their not being religious is simply the result of a cool-headed conviction, or of doubt, don’t hate religious people and wouldn’t make sacrifices for their unbelief, etc., etc. So it is that hatred over matters of opinion is never reciprocal, except in those cases where for both sides the opinion is a prejudice, or takes that form.

There’s no war then between prejudice and reason, but only between prejudice and prejudice, or rather, only prejudice has the will to fight, not reason. The wars, hostilities and hatreds over opinions, so frequent in ancient times, right up to the present day, in fact, wars both public and private, between parties, sects, schools, orders, nations, individuals—wars which naturally made people determined enemies of anyone who held an opinion different from their own—only happened because pure reason never found any place in their opinions, they were all just prejudices, or took that form, and hence were really passions.

Poor philosophy then, that people talk so much about and place so much trust in these days. She can be sure no-one will fight for her, though her enemies will fight her with ever greater determination; and the less philosophy influences the world and reality, the greater her progress will be, I mean the more she purifies herself and distances herself from prejudice and passion. So never hope anything from philosophy or the reasonableness of this century.

About 100 years later, William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) expressed a similar thought in The Second Coming:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

In the 21st century, nobody believes in pure reason anymore. The question now is whether the more reasonable have enough passion to counteract the less reasonable. Leopardi would have been doubtful.

Note: the Leopardi quote is from a New York Review of Books blog post that is much less interesting: http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2013/oct/17/headline-headaches/

The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought by Susan Jacoby

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According to The Great Agnostic, there were two great opponents of religion and proponents of naturalism in American history: Thomas Paine and Robert Ingersoll. Strangely, hardly anyone today has heard of Ingersoll. (For that matter, few Americans today know that Tom Paine had anything to say about religion.)

Robert Ingersoll was a world-famous lawyer and lecturer who lived from 1833 to 1899. He was considered perhaps the greatest orator of his day. He had an extremely successful career traveling all across the country, lecturing to large, appreciative crowds, among whom were many ordinary, religious Americans. He was a member of the social and political establishment, but his public statements opposing religion insured that he never held political office.

In Susan Jacoby’s words, Ingersoll “explained the true meaning and value of science … in a more understandable fashion than any scientist, even the brilliant popularizer Thomas Henry Huxley … Second, Ingersoll made the connection between repressive religion and everyday burdens and injustices as no one had before him.” 

Among the targets of Ingersoll’s scorn were slavery, capital punishment, the subjugation of women, debtor’s prisons, the mistreatment of animal and Social Darwinism. He believed that “there were no social injustices in which religion did not play a major role” — for example, in the belief that the existence of the poor was God’s will, and the idea that men should exert authority over women. 

Jacoby suggests that Ingersoll’s primary purpose was to remind his countrymen that the United States was founded by men who rejected the idea of theocracy: “the glory of the founding generation was that it did not establish a Christian nation”. Ingersoll rejected all supernatural explanations for human behavior and the world around us, while hoping that science and reason would eventually lead us to a world of peace, justice and prosperity. Quoting him: “Man through his intelligence must protect himself. He gets no help from any other world…. Let the ghosts go. We will worship them no more”.

Ingersoll came to be known as the “Great Agnostic”, even though he saw no significant difference between agnosticism and atheism. It isn’t clear why his fame diminished over the years. Although his collected works comprise 12 volumes, perhaps his written words weren’t as powerful as his oratory. Maybe if he had written a good summary of his views, he would be as famous today as Thomas Paine is for writing “The Age of Reason” (which, unfortunately, isn’t very famous at all).

One of the virtues of The Great Agnostic is how it shows that our current cultural battles over religion are hardly new. The 19th century featured the same kinds of conflict, on topics like evolution, birth control and government support for religious education. We haven’t made as much progress as we should have. If there had been someone with Ingersoll’s convictions and abilities speaking out during the 20th century, and now in the 21st, we might be a better country today.

Revelations: Visions, Prophecy and Politics in the Book of Revelation by Elaine Pagels

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Revelations isn’t really a book about the Book of Revelation. Professor Pagels devotes her first chapter to that spooky entry in the New Testament, but then veers off into discussions of the history of the early church. Nevertheless, she argues that the Book of Revelation was written around 90 C.E. by an itinerant preacher known as John of Patmos (not, as some believe, John the Apostle). 

John of Patmos was a Jew who believed that Jesus was the Messiah. According to Professor Pagels, he wrote the book as a piece of anti-Roman propaganda, in response to the fact that Rome had colonized Judea and destroyed the temple in Jerusalem. The Romans are the villains in the Book of Revelation. The number 666 is probably a numerological translation of the full Latin name of the emperor Nero.

The author of the Book of Revelation borrowed from earlier prophesies in making up his particular story of the Beast, Armageddon, etc., for example, the prophesies of Isaiah, Jeremiah and Daniel. And there were many other writings that claimed to be divine revelations. Most of these differed from the Book of Revelation — they were usually concerned with how to be saved, not with the end of the world. 

Unlike its competitors, the Book of Revelation became an official part of the Bible when the New Testament was codified in 325 C.E. It appears to have been included for political reasons. It was useful to the men who were organizing the Catholic Church to have a story that could be used against their political enemies, i.e. the Christians that church leaders like Irenaeus and Athanasius considered to be heretics. The early leaders of the church were a quarrelsome, unprincipled bunch who did whatever was necessary to suppress opposing views.

This is a depressing book. Generations of innocent people have been scared and even scarred by a horror story that purports to describe a coming apocalypse, albeit one with a happy ending for a few true believers (us, not them). To borrow from Nietzsche: “What cruel and insatiable vanity must have flared in the soul of the man who thought this up”. (8/24/12)

On the Genealogy of Morality by Friedrich Nietzsche, translated by Maudmarie Clark and Alan J. Swensen

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On the Genealogy of Morality (more often translated as “On the Genealogy of Morals”) is Nietzsche’s attempt to explain why many of us subscribe to Judeo-Christian morality, and why we’re wrong to do so.

The book is divided into three treatises. In the first treatise, Nietzsche argues that there was an ancient distinction between “good” and “bad”. “Good” referred to the powerful, i.e. the nobility; “bad” referred to the weak, i.e. the slaves. Then Judaism and Christianity popularized a new distinction, replacing “bad” with “evil”. “Good” people were now those who followed strictures like the Golden Rule and evil people were those who didn’t. Judeo-Christian morality embraces ideas like compassion for the weak in place of respect (including self-respect) for the strong. It is “slave morality”.

The second treatise describes the origins of punishment in the ancient relationship between creditor and debtor and the subsequent creation of the guilty conscience. God was erected as the ultimate creditor to which we owe absolutely everything. We are not worthy. We feel guilt. Nietzsche says that having a guilty conscience is a kind of sickness. We should accept the fact that we all have a fundamental “will to power” or, what he says is an equivalent phrase, an “instinct for freedom”. If we suppress our will to power, if we do not act as we will, our internal energy bursts forth in other ways. We become sick. We suffer. 

According to Nietzsche, bad conscience should really be wed to “the unnatural inclinations, all those aspirations to the beyond, to that which is contrary to the senses, contrary to the instincts, contrary to nature, contrary to the animal — in short, the previous ideals which … are hostile to life, ideals of those who libel the world” (section 24).

Not everyone recommends reading the third treatise. It is an extended rant concerning the ill effects of religion as practiced by the “ascetic priest”. To quote Nietzsche: “the ascetic ideal and its sublime-moral cult, this most ingenious, most unsuspected and most dangerous systematizing of all the instruments of emotional excess under the aegis of holy intentions, has inscribed itself in a terrible and unforgettable way into the entire history of man” (section 21). But not all is lost: “It is from the will to truth’s becoming conscious of itself that from now on — there is no doubt about it — morality will gradually perish” (section 27).

Nietzsche apparently believes that the will to power or instinct for freedom is such a large part of human psychology that it is foolish to deny it. In order to live good, healthy lives, we need to create our own morality, one that meets our need for power and freedom, if we are capable of doing so. This does not necessarily mean that we must treat other people badly. We just have to remember that we should always come first. It isn’t surprising that this philosophy appeals to some people, since it is awfully one-dimensional. Fortunately, cooperation, compassion and even altruism are natural too.  (4/2/12)

Saving God: Religion After Idolatry by Mark Johnston

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Johnston tries to determine what God would really be, not the God necessarily worshiped by Judaism, Christianity or Islam. He develops the idea of the actual Highest One as “the outpouring of Existence Itself by way of its exemplification in ordinary existents for the sake of the self-disclosure of Existence Itself”. The teleological “for the sake of” is difficult to understand, which Johnston acknowledges, since he is suggesting a completely naturalistic view of existence. His view is panentheistic: God is wholly constituted by the natural realm.

Johnston’s argument leads to an extended discussion of how existence presents itself to us, how we are samplers of Presence, not producers of Presence. He rejects the idea that we perceive the world via representations in our minds. Perception is of the world itself. He concludes by suggesting that we survive death by identifying ourselves with the people who live on after us, an idea that must be discussed at much greater length in his slightly more recent book “Surviving Death”.  (5/7/10)