Saturday, March 7, 2015

An Atheist Search for God

From Salon.

From this article, I'm quite interested to read the rest of Nancy Ellen Abrams' book.

What she describes is much along the lines of the sort of spirituality I look for, and try at times to articulate. I hesitate to bring in the words "religion" and "God" for the result. I find those terms so tied to, and evocative of, anthropocentric monotheism and its history that I despair of re-purposing them for something so different, so much more honest and better. (Whereas some people find the word "spirituality" irredeemably cheapened by kitsch, New Age uses.)

Others (besides Abrams) disagree with me.  Alfred North Whitehead held on to it, for instance, while dismissing the Abrahamic religions (and others) as "the last refuge of human savagery".  He speaks in Religion in the Making about the religion and the gods we've had so far as being humanity's savage prehistory of the real religion to come. (I'd have to read back through the work to find the exact quote.)  Sadly, those who appropriate Whitehead have not learned from him and have used him as "inspiration" for a lot of Protestant treacle.

There is a lot of very substantial beauty that comes as an somewhat incidental by-product of traditional religion. Sacred music and church architecture, for two examples. But the aesthetic appeal of the beliefs, and the texts in which they are expressed, are surpassed by innumerable orders of magnitude by the beauties of the natural world, on this earth and in the wider cosmos. Do not worship and obey. Instead, wonder and learn.


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