Paul L. Caron
Dean





Sunday, October 27, 2024

Slog, Sacrifice, And Religion

Dispatch Faith:  Slog and Sacrifice: You Don’t Have to be Religious to Appreciate What Millennia of Religion Have Given Us., Jonah Goldberg (The Dispatch):

Dispatch Faith“Religiously informed culture,” Kevin Williamson recently wrote, “is another way of writing ‘culture.’” ...

Even the supposedly religion-free zones of modern life—science, law, Harvard faculty meetings, etc.—would not exist but for the Judeo-Christian foundation they stand upon. If a religion-free society is a garden, you can pluck virtually any flower from the soil and find long religious roots dangling below. (Indeed, to strain the metaphor further, some of the plants in the garden are more like potatoes or turnips than flowers in that they’re nearly all religious root, with the bits breathing secular air little more than a hint of what lurks below.) Human rights, universal equality, the sovereignty of the individual, higher education, and scientific inquiry—even the idea of secularism itself—are products or byproducts of Jewish and Christian thought.

For instance, Western science flows straight out of the Abrahamic revolution. “Postulating a single creator for the entire universe,” writes Walter Russell Mead, “leads to the belief that the universe is predictable and rule driven.” Therefore, the universe outside of our heads is discoverable and knowable through investigation. The scientific method has many catalysts —from alchemy to dye-making to the necessities of war—but even these things had religious aspects, and the systemization of science itself was the product of religious scholastic orders and institutions (like Harvard used to be). Modern astronomy is largely a Christian invention. (Yes, the Chinese had astronomers, too. But when they discovered that the Christians were better, they imported Jesuits to jobs the Chinese couldn’t do.) 

Or take the ideal of “universal brotherhood”—i.e. Equality. It’s a Christian idea flowing straight out of Paul’s exhortation to believers in Christ: “You are all sons of God.” And Paul, a heretical Jew, owed much of his thinking to his religious upbringing. You could argue that the idea of the right to follow your conscience started with Socrates—though given how things ended for him, that’s debatable. But the idea of conscience—conscientious objection to war, civil disobedience, etc.—became a thing thanks to folks like Aquinas and Martin Luther.

I suppose it’s possible that there could have been an alternative timeline where we got driverless cars and microwave ovens, democracy and the Bill of Rights, without Abraham and his theological progeny. But the indisputable fact is that we didn’t. And remember, God gave us plenty of time to figure this stuff out without Him. Our best guess is that Homo sapiens first appeared around 300,000 years ago. For about 285,000 years, humans had free rein to come up with a religion-free, rational, system of organization. Never happened. That’s in part because religion—or religiosity—is a human universal. One explanation for this is that religion is an evolutionary advantage, encouraging cooperation and self-sacrifice for the good of the group (or gene pool). There are other explanations. But, again, the important point is the past happened the way it happened.

Just as the life you’ve already lived—so far—can’t be changed, so too with all the lives that came before us. The past only happened once. There are no do-overs. Sure, you can rewrite the past, but the rewrites don’t change the reality. The culture we have is a culture created by religion and, occasionally, by opposition to religion (but even that opposition gives religion a major role in the process, like an activating agent or the sand that prompts the oyster to make a pearl). And that goes for atheism and science as much as it does for literature and music. The rights you enjoy today were put on paper by a bunch of men who believed those rights stemmed from the fact that we got them from a “creator.” That may bother you, but the facts don’t care.

Now, I could go on, but I think it’s more important to note that none of this “disproves” atheism or proves the existence of God or the divine truth of Christianity or Judaism. It’s not only possible to enjoy the fruits of religion without subscribing to, appreciating, or even being aware of the religious motivations of those who cultivated those fruits, it’s literally the unfolding story of the last few centuries. You don’t have to believe that your rights are God-given, but the belief that your rights are a gift from God is why we eventually got rights. The Protestant work ethic is often credited with the invention of capitalism (I think the case is often overstated), but you can be a full-throated capitalist without being a Protestant, never mind a Puritan. Socialism was a Christian invention—or at the very least the first versions of socialism were invented by Christians for Christian ends—but we’ve learned the hard way that you can be a socialist without believing in God or caring about Jesus’ teachings (or without actually caring about human equality). Similarly, you can use electricity without agreeing with Michael Faraday about Sandemanianism. ...

Everywhere I look, right or left, up and down, I see people who think the nation they’ve inherited is something to resent. The sense of entitlement—the very opposite of gratitude—derives from various forms of utopianism, including the personalized version of it we might call narcissism. After all, not all utopianisms are about creating a perfect world for everybody. Some people just want a perfect world for them or their tribeRegardless, the utopians see all that is good as contemptible in the reflection of their personal idea of perfection. All the work that went into getting us here is taken for granted, and the prosperity and freedom we enjoy is proof that “the system” has failed them because it hasn’t provided them with enough, while it has provided others too much. Systemized envy is a metastasizing cancer in American life eating holes in our souls. Science cannot fill such voids, but religion can. And so can a little gratitude for the difficult slog and sacrifice made by others to get us here. 

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