Infantile Atheism

Madalyn Murray O'Hair (1919-1995) is commonly associated with the Supreme Court case that struck down official prayer in public schools. However, her case, Murray v. Curlett (1963), which ended official Bible reading, followed Engel v. Vitale (1962), which had already prohibited official prayer. Nevertheless, she became associated with the whole business, certainly without any regret, and in 1964 was labeled by Life magazine as "the most hated woman in America." Her personality did not help in that regard, since her statements and language were furious, blunt, and vulgar. She had no respect for any religion or religious figure whatsoever and avoided any euphemisms in expressing her attitudes.

I used to see the headquarters of the "American Atheists" organization on Hancock Drive in Austin, Texas, with some frequency. The sign featured her logo in the form of a stylized atom, which presumably was meant to express the scientific and rational basis of atheism -- a conceit common to atheists. The office was near the movie theater where I originally saw Star Trek, the Motion Picture in 1979, and also close to one of the Casita Jorge's restaurants, which I also patronized frequently in 1979, since I lived nearby. O'Hair was occasionally featured on the local news in Austin, for instance cursing and fulminating against the Pope. Since, as most Texans tend to think, Austin was a hotbed of "Godless atheism," her treatment in the media there was generally friendly to neutral. I had no particular interest in meeting her, and never did.

In 1995 O'Hair, her son Jon, and her granddaughter (adopted as a daughter) Robin, were kidnapped and murdered by a former employee of the Atheists, David Roland Waters. Although, with some success, Waters tired to make it look like the O'Hairs had voluntarily disappeared with organization funds, he eventually was arrested and prosecuted for the murder. In 2001 he led police to their buried and dismembered bodies. Meanwhile, O'Hair's son, William J. Murray, had become a Baptist in 1980 and was furiously repudiated and permanently estranged from O'Hair. He was suspicious of the "disappearance" and prodded the police to investigate at the time when their attitude seemed inappropriately complacent.

While it is tempting to think that O'Hair's personality or ideology had something to do with her end, it is unclear how this would have made her vulnerable -- although apparently it did anger Waters that O'Hair had denounced him in the press for a previous theft against the Atheists. But persons of much kindlier and pious personality have become victimized by career criminals like Waters, and we might even have expected someone as cynical as O'Hair to have been more on her guard. Be that as it may, it was all an ugly and horrific end to the lives of O'Hair and her family. The uncharitable are free to find darker symbolism.

When I became involved with the Libertarian Party in 1992, I met someone who had actually worked for O'Hair. He told an intriguing anecdote. O'Hair was visiting New York once, while Ayn Rand was living there, and thought it might be interesting to visit her, as a fellow atheist. Rand refused to see her. It is barely possible that Rand did not know who she was; but it seems more likely that, while Rand was indeed an atheist, it was more of a peripheral concern with her, merely a corollary of her overall system. But atheism was the central concern of O'Hair, who probably wasn't interested in Rand's larger philosophy and may actually have been unsympathetic with Rand's political and economic ideas. Although Rand could be a fierce and dictatorial personality, in public interviews she tended to argue patiently and earnestly, while O'Hair's personality was more consistently abusive, in private and in public. Perhaps that also turned off Rand.

The contrast between the two is revealing. O'Hair's atheism was clearly personal at a very deep level, and her campaign against religion was something that she may have seen as the key to all human evils. Rand, although definitely an atheist, and in no way inclined to acknowledge the reality of such things, comes off as the greater soul. We could conceal the paradox behind a term like "magnanimous" (magna anima). Rand wasn't actually always magnanimous, but she certainly had a larger vision of life and was able to inspire serious devotion in a large circle of followers. And she knew that there was a lot more wrong with the world than religion, especially as she was acutely aware, as a witness to the Russian Revolution and an enemy of Communism, that most of the mass murder of the 20th century was committed by atheists.

O'Hair's attitude is something like what we also get with the more recent members of what is now called "the New Atheism," such as journalist Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011), author of god [sic] is not Great, How Religion Poisons Everything [2007, note], and biologist Richard Dawkins, author of The Blind Watchmaker [1986] and The God Delusion [2008]. These two, with Daniel Dennett [Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, 2006] and Sam Harris [The End of Faith, 2004], have been called the "Four Horsemen of the New Atheism" [note].

Stephen Hawking also seemed to have come out as something of an atheist [The Grand Design, Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, Bantam, 2010]. Yet one thing that all these figures have in common, from O'Hair to Hawking, is the relative shallowness of their ideas, the intellectual foundations of which only poorly reflect the history of philosophy or of religion, or even the nature and history of science. In both O'Hair and Hitchens in particular, despite the larger horizons and frequently sensible revisions of Hitchens' views, there is a sort of childish petulance to it all, relying on clichés and stereotypes that, although often with an element of truth, nevertheless are irrelevant to the more basic questions and issues.

Thus, one thing that intrigues me about this tradition of atheism is its almost infantile nature -- although the response of actual theists is often all but equally unsophisticated and/or sophistical. "Infantile," indeed, although perhaps too harsh and dismissive for some, is a characterization that I do not hesitate to attribute to an even earlier example of disillusionment with religion, Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), and his " Why I am Not a Christian." I don't think that Russell had the slightest idea what Christianity was about -- nor what any religion would be about. Like the later atheists, Russell then exhibits a naive and really childish confidence in the profound and salutary nature of science and logic. What may be more accurate is that Russell displayed all the confidence of his Victorian class and time, displaced, in characteristically English eccentric fashion, into foolish, selfish, and trivial convictions, presented with all the eloquence, erudition, and wit by which he was armed in his traditionally rigorous 19th century education. Even such education could also be quite shallow in its own way; but, unlike modern education, it rarely left people unable to express themselves [note].

What we often see in these forms of atheism is the sophistry of false dilemmas. Thus, another elder scion of modern atheism, Jean Paul Sartre, famously asserted that, "Without God, all is permitted." This was supposed to be a quote from Dostoyevsky (1821-1881). But Dostoyevsky had actually said that "Without immortality, all is permitted," and this was asserted in order to repudiate materialism, since Dostoyevsky was a serious Christian [note]. Be that as it may, the point of either assertion would be that without religion, there would be neither a standard nor an ultimate sanction for wrongful actions. But this can be expressed without Western religion or even theism, since the form the principle would take in Indian religion, in Hinduism, Buddhism, or Jainism, is that without religion or immortality, there would be no karmic recompense. I suspect that the Western atheists, beginning with a mild Victorian racism in Russell, have no respect whatsoever for anything in Indian religion or philosophy; and the whole doctrine of karma is probably regarded as beneath even refutation. Either way, neither the argument of Dostoyevsky nor that of Sartre is cogent or valid. For his own purposes, Sartre accepts a premise that is false to start with.

Now, Sartre's Existentialism at least faces and tackles the moral questions involved, however inadequately, which is something I cannot say is reflected in the statement by psychologist Elisabeth Cornwell at the top of this page (from materials at the Center For Inquiry, Los Angeles): "Non-believers know that meaning in this world is of their own making and not dictated by a higher being..." -- which implies the false dilemma of meaning based either on a "higher being" or on "their own making," but not on something else. If the "meaning" she speaks of means a system of value that includes moral value, then, if this is truly of "their own making," everyone will have their own morality as well as their own "meaning." And, clearly, my own morality is something I cannot simply impose on you, even if your "morality" is to secure the survival of the Master Race (die Herren Rasse) by exterminating the racial Untermenschen of Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, etc. The bien pensant liberal recoils at the possibility of their allowing Nazis to have their way -- this just isn't done on a politically correct college campus -- but we are not reassured when Nietzsche is invoked by many such people as a moral authority in the matter.

To be sure, the apologetic for Nietzsche tries to twist him into a good harmless progressive, but the hollowness or bad faith of this is exposed when trendy "Theory" finds no basis for human relationships apart from power -- a power that we want to belong to "us" (socialists, nihilists) rather than to "them" (capitalists, Christians). Since the whole system of "Theory" is a strategy to avoid ad rem argumentation about morality, politics, or economics, typically substituting ad hominem arguments (against "race, class, and gender" enemies), it is all a tissue of sophistry and dishonesty -- with more than a touch of the childish or infantile petulance that I have already noted -- a childishness we otherwise see in contemporary culture when someone like Congressman Barney Frank can forcefully deny making statements that he has just been shown making, on video. This is well beyond ordinary levels of political mendacity and foolishness. The statement by Cornwell, although typical of "humanistic" ethical thinking, is completely innocent of and oblivious to the problem of the basis of moral and then legal obligation. If we all already get along with each other, then perhaps we can just make up our own "meaning," but things in life such as dispute, conflict, crime, war, etc. require something more.

The manifest ignorance and absurdity of Sartre's pronouncement is evident when we reflect that he ignores one of the oldest and best known theories in Western philosophy: Plato's Theory of Forms. For Plato, meaning, value, and morality exist independently of any god or Deity, and this is quite characteristic of Greek philosophy in general. The Theistic principle that moral obligation exists because of the Will, command, and authority of God suffers from the paradox that such a thing must be entirely arbitrary and irrational, unless a standard of right and wrong or good and evil exists independently of God -- which the Theist does not want to allow. From the moment that Socrates got Euthyphro to answer that the pious is loved by the gods "because it is pious," the whole weight of the Greek philosophical tradition would be contrary to the notion that the pure and bare authority of a deity establishes the content of meaning or value. And when theists argue that we must obey God because he made us, I begin to suspect that their level of moral understanding is no less infantile than that of the atheists -- they otherwise are not likely to accept that might makes right or that a child is obliged to commit crimes when ordered to do so by a parent [note].

Mediaeval Christian theology, of course, became founded more on the metaphysics of Aristotle than of Plato. But this is not much help. Aristotle's God is impersonal and does not perform miracles or intervene in Nature. More significantly, Aristotle's God is not concerned or involved with matters that are of ethical or prudential interest to human beings. While someone like St. Thomas Aquinas must imagine a God who drops down and delivers the Law to Moses on Mt. Sinai, this is wholly inconsistent with Aristotelian metaphysics, where God, as pure form and pure actuality, actually and literally does not have the power to do anything that he is not doing already. St. Thomas did not have a metaphysical patch to alter this basic structure. He ignored it, as Thomists and other theologians have done since, leaving Catholic theology, at least, on an incoherent ontological foundation. At the same time, St. Thomas also believed in Natural Justice and Natural Law, to which we have access through Reason; but, again, Aristotelian metaphysics does not back this up, especially when Aristotle argued that the word "good," the most general term for positive value, does not even have a universal and unique meaning -- in sharp contrast to what Socrates and Plato believed.

An impersonal, nontheistic standard of value is common outside Western religion. In Hinduism, the eternal and impersonal Vedas are the basis of dharma, moral and social duty, while in Buddhism, the Dharma, the moral and soteriological teaching of the Buddha, is also eternal and impersonal, although this can also be conceived as the "Dharma Body" of the Buddha. But the Buddhas are not gods in Buddhism, especially because the gods of Hinduism are still there in the religion, along with gods picked up in China and elsewhere in Buddhist lands. It's just that the gods are not very important. Human beings, not the gods, are in the soteriologically advanced position. In Confucianism, the Mandate of Heaven establishes the standard of right and wrong; and although Heaven, , is sometimes thought of as a God, the Confucian conception is impersonal, in a system where Confucians often did not believe in immortality -- and might be rebuked for that by the Hung-wu Emperor. Otherwise, Chinese gods, , are of mostly popular origin and are judged and governed, for moral worthiness, by the Chinese Throne like other subjects of the State.

While atheists are relatively unconcerned or unaware of the metaphysics behind God in Western religions, they typically haven't the foggiest idea how that works elsewhere. In Chinese religion as in Buddhism (and Jainism), deities or their equivalent are often supposed to have originally been human beings. Their apotheosis is the result of their moral practice and wisdom. We don't get quite the same thing in Hinduism, but then the wild card there is that the oldest deities of the Vedic religion are now found with a status little better than in Buddhism. Instead there is a Supreme Being: Brahman. But how that Being is conceived varies wildly across the varieties of Vedanta. An impersonal Being of "unqualified" Advaita Vedanta is even more inactive and remote than Aristotle's God, with none of the moral content of the Confucian Heaven.

The personal God of "qualified" Advaita Vedanta nevertheless is a pantheistic conception identical in nearly every way to the ontology of God in the philosopher Baruch Spinoza. Yet commentators on Spinoza often fancy that, as his God is identified with Nature, it is therefore a thinly veiled assertion of atheism. Spinoza's God is indeed impersonal -- although with the attribute of thought ontologically equal to physical extension in space, and supplemented with an infinite number of other attributes that are unknown to us -- and so perhaps it is an arbitrary decision that the Brahman of the Vedantin Ramanuja should have been seen by him as the personal Sectarian Deity Vishnu. Indeed, the popular and philosophical level of Hinduism that is theistic or devotional breaks down into at least three sects, Shaivism, honoring Shiva, Vaishnavism, honoring Vishnu, and Tantrism, which may be derivative of Shaivism but becomes the independent worship of the Goddess, Shakti. A Hindu Monotheist thus has the unique choice of One God among three different alternatives, with the choice also of a system, Dvaita Vedanta, that is starkly pluralistic. Its God is ontologically independent of souls, matter, and the world, unlike the Monistic or Pantheistic Advaita systems that are more intriguing to a Western audience but actually less popular in India.

Perhaps the atheist is impatient with all these possibilities. They are, after all, all irrelevant when we have the firm common sense and rationality of science (as Roy Beaumont used to say). But this is where the atheists draw comfort from some of the most shallow and complacent metaphysics of all -- a very naive materialism. I have considered this in some detail elsewhere and so do not need or wish to go over that ground again here. It is noteworthy, however, that the heaviest blows against materialism in the 20th century have been delivered, not by philosophy or religion, but by science itself. The Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics, proposed by Niels Bohr (1885-1960), although metaphysically poorly motivated in some respects, represents a stark anti-realism that merely bewilders the physicists and philosophers who literally appear not to have the philosophical background to address it properly. It has proved easier just not to worry about it and to lapse back into a naive materialism.

Stephen Hawking displays some acute knowledge of the history of philosophy. In A Brief History of Time [1988], he invokes St. Augustine to endorse the proposition that time itself begins at the Creation and that it is senseless to think of time existing previously. This reflects Hawking's own insight that, while it has been common to describe Einstein's theory of space as positing a continuum that is "finite but unbounded," i.e. space does not have an edge but all paths ultimately return on themselves, this had not commonly been done with time. Once we apply the same "finite but unbounded" principle to time, perhaps using imaginary numbers, then paths in time return on themselves also, eliminating the possibility of time before the Big Bang or after the Big Crunch -- i.e. the ultimate gravitational collapse of the universe. A gravitationally closed universe, however, is something that now does not seem to be the case. This rather changes the whole premise of the business, and it may make Hawking's theory irrelevant.

But Hawking continued to prefer closed universes, which are philosophically more satisfying, and he was then saying that the absence of time before the Big Bang means that there is no God. That would have been a surprise to St. Augustine, for perhaps the Bishop of Hippo did not understand the meaning of his own argument. That is possible, but Hawking's change of heart, if that is what it is, seems based on a bad premise, i.e. that for there to be a God, there must be a Creation, and that for there to be a Creation, there must be Creation in time on a continuum that stretches before and after the point of Creation. This is very dubious, to say the least. Obviously, if St. Augustine agreed that time did not exist before the Creation, then he entertained the logically inoffensive notion that time and the universe were created together at the Creation. I don't think that Hawking has shown how this is inconsistent. Indeed, in the Middle Ages there were many doctrines of Creation in which God is not in time and in which the whole act of Creation is outside of time.

This goes back to Aristotle, whose universe was eternal and whose God existed for no reason that had anything to do with temporal Creation. Aristotle did argue that God was the "Prime Mover," but this did not mean that he started motion at some point in time -- it was an artifact of Aristotle's physics, which held that for motion to continue, a mover had to keep pushing. But this already undercuts Hawking's idea that without temporal Creation, there is no need for God -- even though Aristotle's argument fails, of course, with the fall of his physics. But it gets worse. When Plotinus took over Platonic and Aristotelian metaphysics, he interpreted Creation to be the ontological "emanation" or "declension" of an eternal universe from his own impersonal, Aristotelian God, coupled with the Good of Plato and the One of Parmenides. This Neoplatonic metaphysics persisted right into Islamic philosophy, where the doctrine of the eternity of the world was ultimately regarded as incompatible with Islamic doctrine and the philosophers, the falâsifah, , were accused of heresy or even apostasy. But since there is no logical objection to the Neoplatonic doctrine, it again undercuts Hawking's notion that there can only be a God if there is Creation in time. I seriously doubt that Hawking is even aware of the Neoplatonic part of the history of theology, despite its length (from the 3rd century to the 12th, at least). But that is not unusual given, not just the Modern, but even the traditional neglect for Late Antiquity.

But it is a little paradoxical that Stephen Hawking was making pronouncements about the existence of God at all. He was already on the record as a Positivist:

I take the positivist viewpoint that a physical theory is just a mathematical model and that it is meaningless to ask whether it corresponds to reality. All that one can ask is that its predictions should be in agreement with observation. [The Nature of Space and Time, Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose, Princeton University Press, 1996, pp.3-4]

This would suspend judgment on all metaphysical questions, which would leave Hawking in no position to even address questions about whether space, time, and the world, let alone God, are real. Perhaps, like a lot of people who think they are setting aside metaphysics, he just couldn't help it. Whether he had actually changed his mind about Positivism, or about St. Augustine, or had somehow forgotten himself, I can't say.

But Hawking was at least better informed about the history of science than some atheists. Thus, in A Brief History of Time, Hawking pointed out that there was no observational evidence against Ptolemaic astronomy, except that the apparent size of the Moon does not change as it should if were orbiting on an epicycle. The problem was not resolved by Copernicus, who still had the Moon orbiting on an epicycle -- something that would persist until Kepler worked out that the orbits are ellipses rather than circles. What is generally not recognized is that the argument against Heliocentric astronomy was securely founded on Greek physics and not on astronomical observation at all. The physics did not change until Galileo.

It is thus charming to find Christopher Hitchens saying:

Augustine was an self-centered fantasist and an earth-centered ignoramus: he was guiltily convinced that god cared about his trivial theft from some unimportant pear trees, and quite persuaded -- by an analogous solipsism -- that the sun revolved around the earth. [op.cit., p.64, boldface added]

If Hitchens is going to call one of the great and formative minds of Western Civilization an "ignoramus," perhaps he should have checked that the charge was not going to rebound onto himself. Anyone at the time, indeed anyone until Galileo, who had some understanding of the evidence, would have been neither an ignoramus nor a solipsist to believe that the sun revolved around the earth. Hitchens, who wishes us to see him as a paragon of reason, knowledge, and science, exposes his own lack of knowledge and understanding of the issue he is writing about with such evident certainty and abusive self-regard. We also might note that the world would be better if everyone guilty of petty theft, let alone grand theft, was as remorseful as Augustine.

But Hitchens' ignorance of relevant history does not stop there:

It is not the fault of men like Peter Abelard if they had to work with bits and pieces of Aristotle, many of whose writings were lost when the Christian emperor Justinian closed the schools of philosophy, but were preserved in Arabic translation in Baghdad and then retransmitted to a benighted Christian Europe by way of Jewish and Muslim Andalusia. [p.68]

Now, if what Hitchens says is true, then presumably today we possess "many" works by Aristotle in Arabic and not in the original Greek texts. Can Hitchens not be aware that this is false? That there are no such works? In other words, Hitchens is so eager to accuse "the Christian emperor Justinian" of actually destroying the texts of Aristotle, that he doesn't pause to reflect that texts were not destroyed, but are readily available today, as they had been lovingly preserved, in Justinian's day and later, and conveyed to Latin Europe (Francia) in the Renaissance and even earlier. If Abelard himself only had "bits and pieces of Aristotle," it is because he mainly lived at the beginning of the 12th century, just as the translation projects were beginning, either from Arabic or from Greek.

Also, although Justinian to his discredit did close Plato's Academy in Athens, because it was dominated by pagans, he did not close "the schools of philosophy." The equivalent of a University already existed in Constantinople, transmitting all of Classical learning, and it would thrive for centuries, providing the very Greek texts upon which the later (9th century) translations into Arabic would be based. If Justinian had destroyed the texts of Greek philosophy, there would have been nothing left for the Arabs to translate (except for a few previous translations into Syriac). Hitchens has therefore written something that he wants to be true, to make his case against religion, even though minimal knowledge and reflection would contradict it. Is this not characteristic of some kind of dogmatism, of which Hitchens is eager to accuse religion? Is not this the sort of thing that, in Hitchens' words, "poisons everything"? Has he not become, after a fashion, the very thing he is explaining to us that he hates? But perhaps Hitchens can be forgiven here for an oversight that is actually more general, that "Christian Europe" includes the Orthodox world of Romania, i.e. the "Byzantine" Empire, where the heritage of Classical Greek learning, pace Justinian, was not lost and even major Churchmen ordered de lux editions of Plato.

Given the evils of dogmatism, intolerance, oppression, and war that someone like Christopher Hitchens details in his condemnation of religion, we might infer that atheism would liberate humanity from all such problems. However, the 20th century witnessed a number of officially atheistic political regimes, including a couple of the largest nations on Earth, Soviet Russia and Maoist China, which not only engaged in the extensive practice of dogmatism, intolerance, oppression, and war, but which carried out mass murder on a colossal scale, with at least 80 million deaths credited by R.J. Rummel to Josef Stalin and Mao Tse-tung alone [Death by Government, Transaction Publishers, 1994]. If this was how atheism was supposed to improve the evils effected by religion, it all got off to a very ugly start.

Actually, it started a good deal earlier. After the critique of religion during the Enlightenment, with pretty much the same evidence and arguments that we have seen more recently, together with the brilliance of the écrasez l'infâme campaign of Voltaire, a greater wit than any subsequent atheist, this was all supposed to bear fruit in the French Revolution, where Reason alone was to be worshiped. Yet one of the truly great scientists of the age, Antoine Lavoisier (1743-1794), was executed, reportedly with the pronouncement of the judge, La République n'a pas besoin de savants ni de chimistes, "The Republic has need of neither scientists nor chemists." Such verdicts of "Reason," which chalked up thousands of deaths in the aptly named "Terror" of the French Revolution, became distressingly common, on much larger scales, in the later Revolutions of Russia, China, and other Communist lands. These attitudes are by no means gone, as American Universities are now the scenes of persistent attempts to suppress free speech and silence political dissent. At least Christopher Hitchens wanted no part of that, recognizing tyranny for what it is, but then he could not blame it on religion either.

The truth is that the evils detailed by atheists in religion are by no means unique to religion but are simply characteristics of human nature. In the absence of traditional religion, they are easily displaced into an equally dogmatic, intolerant, and oppressive political moralism, about which some atheists are often strangely complacent, despite many others being fully alert to the danger (including the essentially atheistic "Skeptics" associated with the Philosophy Department of New York State University at Buffalo, such as Barry Smith). Even as contemporary fundamentalist Islâm is reverting to Mediaeval savagery, in vindication of every atheist critique of religion, anti-religious and totalitarian ideology is running wild in American "education." Of course, the politically correct refrain from criticizing Islâm, since the real enemies of truth and progress are America and Capitalism, and there is great joy in smearing criticism of Islâm as "hate speech" or racist "Islamophobia," which ought not be allowed. But it is reasonable to suppose that the "New Atheism" has arisen in the first place because the embarrassment of Soviet atheism is gone and contemporary Islâm clearly represents some of the worst that atheists have ever expected of religion. Part of the honesty of Hitchens was his anger that "progressives" would become apologists for Islâm as they have (such as journalist Nathan Lean in The Islamophobia Industry, How the Right Manufactures Fear of Muslims [Pluto, 2012] -- where, of course, all that one need do to fear Muslims is watch the news -- including the recent Boston Marathon bombings, where, to the distress of the Left, the perpetrators turned out to be Muslims, again, rather than Tea Party Patriots).

As the urge to dominate others undergoes metamorphosis from religion to politics and back, and we often see modern attacks on religion as a way to destroy private life, promote the power of the state, and remove children from the influence of their parents, it becomes clear that the moral and political problems faced by humanity are not due to religion. Of course, if religion has no other purpose, there is no remaining role for it. What that role that would be, I have discussed on several pages, e.g. here. Atheists don't need to care about any of that to be good people. But they do need to get a life.

Other people are no longer attracted to traditional Western religions but find themselves looking for something. Buddhism may be sufficiently different and appealing, or the curious may become involved in some creative thinking and innovation in religion. This is no less than what we should expect. Religion has never stayed the same, and although many religions like to think of themselves as eternal and unchanging, this is not what we see in history. Mainstream religions may try to adapt by giving in to trendy social fads, but this often obscures their religious message and appeal, reinforces the replacement of religion by politics, and forfeits their appeal by denaturing them. Other seekers decide that, rather than going East, they need to go back in time, recovering the ancient religions with whose disappearance something essential was lost. Unfortunately, just as the interest of Westerners in Buddhism sometimes looked like the application of the Protestant Reformation to the traditional religion (giving rise to Theosophy), the "something lost" may be suspiciously conformable to the trendy social fads just noted, and the "revived" practices may look more than a little ridiculous to outsiders. Every year, wanna-be Druids show up at Stonehenge (whose origin was unrelated to Celtic religion), and "Wicca" is now a popular movement founded on the notion that what Christians called "witchcraft" was simply the survival of the older religion that venerated Woman and the Earth (Gaia).

Neo-paganism, however, has not always taken an edifying form. Although atheists and others may treasure the accusation of the Nazis being good Christians -- with Playboy magazine solemnly asserting that Hitler was a Catholic (although I've never noticed that there were any priests, Confession, or Last Rites in the Führerbunker) -- in fact the Nazis were much more interested in a Germanic neo-paganism, which already had a background from interest in the Occult (such as we see fictionalized in the movies Raiders of the Lost Ark [1981] and Hellboy [2004]) and in the Vedic religion of India, where the name and form of the Swastika was actually borrowed. The Indian connection had a deep and serious foundation in German scholarship, for instance in the pronouncement of Max Müller (1823–1900) that the height of human intellectual achievement stretched from the Upanishads to Immanuel Kant. However, although providing much grist for later German racial theories about the "Aryans," Müller himself settled in Oxford, translated the Critique of Pure Reason into English, was of liberal mindset about, for instance, the British presence in India, and in general was appalled at the development of racist ideology based on his work. However, that did not stop it from happening. Even today, contemporaries with some apparent involvement in India and interest in neo-paganism, such as Mircea Eliade, are vulnerable to accusations that their parallel concerns involved a deeper sympathy with the Nazis.

The real problem with neo-paganism, however, is that the details of the ancient Middle Eastern and European religions, in terms of cult practice, consciousness, and belief, are in great measure lost, rendering the true religions effectively unrecoverable both in practice and in principle [note]. A lot of it ends up looking like play-acting, and politically correct and silly play-acting at that. It is also something that may render the naive vulnerable to the deceptions and the exploitations of dishonest cults. Nor is it obvious that we want various known practices of ancient religion revived. I have not seen that the modern worship of the Mother yet involves the participation of self-castrated priests -- a conspicuous feature in the Roman world, whose public performance today most people would find quite alarming. Yet sometimes we even find the complacent contemplation of human sacrifice, as in the absurd and offensive The Wicker Man movies [1973, 2006].

But there is no doubt that even this kind of thing is part of a sort of Research and Development process in the history of religion. The atheists of a century ago would of course be astonished that religion has survived at all, much less that something like Militant Islâm might be threatening the world with Nuclear War. But this does mean that the evolution of religion, any more than that of politics, is not something safe and comforting. Prophets are often angry, and even Jesus got worked up about the moneychangers in the Temple. And it means that the future of religion is unpredictable. Pliny the Younger, who asked the Emperor Trajan what to do about the Christians in his jurisdiction of Bithynia -- people who were often called "atheists" for not honoring the traditional gods -- certainly would have been astonished to learn that two hundred years after his death, the Emperor himself would be a Christian. In 2012, the United States almost got a Mormon President, even though that Church was one of the scandals of the 19th century and still perplexes, outrages, or amuses many outsiders. So, although "belief in God" seems to be in decline in Europe and America, and one poll said that 60% of Jews do not believe in God, religion nevertheless seems to be alive and well, in ways that defeat the expectations both of atheists and also of Popes.

God after Kant

Why I am not a Christian

Why I am a Platonist

Bertrand Russell's "Why I Am Not a Christian"

Philosophy of Religion

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