Atheist Advocacy
I’m becoming ever more interested in advocating the cause of atheism in America. Especially when I read quotes like this one from Katherine Harris:
We have to have the faithful in government and over time, that lie we have been told, the separation of church and state, people have internalized, thinking that they needed to avoid politics and that is so wrong because God is the one who chooses our rulers.
and when I see polls that report 53% of Americans say they would not vote for an atheist (10% more than the group that wouldn’t vote for a homosexual!). Maybe Obama knew about these figures when he joined Trinity United Church.
I acknowledge that being atheist is only like being a racial minority to the degree that intelligence is heritable. Regardless, I am starting to feel oppressed to the point that I think we need stronger atheist advocacy groups in this country. And with end times theology increasingly shaping American foreign policy, our safety may depend on it.
Prostrate Yourselves! (On religious self-indenture)
In The Gay Science, Nietzsche writes of “Unconditional Duties”:
All those who feel they need the strongest words and sounds, the most eloquent gestures and postures, in order to be effective at all…talk of “duties,” and actually always of duties that are supposed to be unconditional. Without that they would lack the justification for their great pathos, and they understand this very well. Thus they reach for moral philosophies that preach some categorical imperative, or they ingest a goodly piece of religion….Because they desire the unconditional confidence of others, they need first of all to develop unconditional self-confidence on the basis of some ultimate and indisputable commandment that is inherently sublime, and they want to feel like, and be accepted as, its servants and instruments.
Two years prior, in 1880, Dostoevsky published The Brothers Karamazov, whose famous chapter “The Grand Inquisitor” ruminates on a very similar theme. In this intensely ironic parable in which the Grand Inquisitor addresses Christ, Dostoevsky writes:
In place of the rigid ancient law, man must hereafter with free heart decide for himself what is good and what is evil, having only Thy image before him as his guide. But didst Thou not know he would at last reject even Thy image and Thy truth, if he is weighed down with the fearful burden of free choice? They will cry aloud at last that the truth is not in Thee, for they could not have been left in greater confusion and suffering than Thou hast caused, laying upon them so many cares and unanswerable problems.
The Grand Inquisitor informs Jesus that the Church has had to perfect his work by adding to it the kind of spiritual bondage that allows people to live untroubled, in service to commandments that are — on the Church’s authority — inherently sublime.
These passages share a subtext, namely this: that religion functions primarily as a means to negate the fundamental freedom that comes with existence, because that freedom is too heavy for most to bare. By its simple imperatives, its categories of good and evil, it lifts from its adherents the burden of being arbiter of their own lives.
I agree that religion so functions, but is that necessarily cause for contempt? The inability of the average human to deal with the complex ambiguities of life is independent of religion; if he had not this mechanism of self-indenture, he would devise another. In light of this, it might be inevitable for there to exist various ways for us to indenture ourselves (indeed there are others besides religion, capitalism for one). But religion goes further. Not only does it enslave, it claims to exalt. It claims to empower as it thrives on subjugation. It demands respect for the ignoble task of making the feeble-minded absolutely certain of truths that do not exist.
I have to side with Nietzsche in contempt of religion; not only does it feed the “will to ignorance,” but it deceitfully claims to do the opposite. If we are going to throw ourselves into bondage out of some profound ennui, we should at least be honest with ourselves about it (cf. Heidegger’s Being & Time). Digging deeper into this honest interpretation of life may lead us to better understand the very condition in which we find ourselves — questions and answers over which religion pretends to have ultimate authority.
The End of the Return of History
…and the Death of the Throwback to Positivism.
Robert Kagan has been all over the media promoting his new book, The Return of History and the End of Dreams (dun dun dun…!). Based only on hearing him speak, I think I agree with the central thesis of his book, which is totally contra his earlier thought and pronounces a shocking death sentence to neoconservatism. Turns out democracy is NOT the inevitable manifestation of the perfect movement of history. (!) What a hilarious revelation, ironically reached five years after the inevitable movement of history accidentally moved the American military into Iraq! Mr. Kagan has finally realized, after founding the Project for the New American Century with William Kristol and laying various other groundwork for the divine global democratic nirvana that he envisioned after the Cold War, that we’re not living in 1880s Europe and history is not driven by teleological forces. “The End of Dreams” is apt — indeed, history has ended his.
Congratulations to Mr. Kagan for catching up with 1960s social theory. What he thinks of as “The Return of History” is, to me, the end of the return of history. Namely, it is the end of that return to the positivism of the Modern period — called neoconservatism — in which history was considered a science and liberal democracy as a force akin to gravity in the holy evolution of society. While the rest of the neocons continue on in their solipsistic worlds, at least Kagan is a realist enough to see the failure of his experiment in the science of history and accomodate his worldview accordingly.
