I don't wish to reduce or trivialize questions about life's meaning. But the exalted talk of cosmic enchantment and meaning tends on both sides to conceal the fact that what most people desire fundamentally is not metaphysics or enchantment, but feeling loved, being significant in someone's eyes in god's if in no-one else's , a secure group identity, and hope for betterment, if their lot is misery or devastating poverty. Let me take as an example of this lapse Christopher Hitchens's secular vision.
Atheists, he observes, have no need to proclaim their rectitude, fight over holy ground, or grovel and wallow in their unworthiness. They have art and the great works of literature to console them. And then, in an outbreak of utter silliness, he continues, "we can counterpose a leisurely or urgent walk from one side of the library or the gallery to another, or [go] to lunch with an agreeable friend, in pursuit of truth or beauty.
Do I need to mention that the hotspots of religious growth are in Africa, South America, India and the Islamic crescent, mostly among the poor and uneducated? For the philosophers we know as the classical Empiricists, the evidence of the senses was the foundation of knowledge. Contemporary empiricism has mostly discarded the focus on subjective perceptual experience but continues to insist on the foundational role of evidence gained through observation and experimentation.
In other words, in this view, substantive knowledge of the world can only be acquired through empirical enquiry, the best examples of which are the systematic sciences, but not excluding historical and related researches. If you want to know what the universe is like, what happened in the past, how the mind or a society functions, you investigate, probe, experiment, interrogate nature.
You search for evidence that rationally confirms or falsifies theories. But you do not, as John Locke said, entertain "any proposition with greater assurance than the proofs it is built upon will warrant.
Positive evidence for these claims is extremely feeble. But that doesn't always deter the religious. A couple of years ago, the distinguished lawyer and Jesuit Father Frank Brennan, reviewed some of the atheist literature filling the bookshops at the time.
For these authors, there is nothing beyond that edge because it is not knowable, though each of them occasionally lapses into a yearning for the transcendent or at least the numinous. The religious person embraces the mystery of what lies beyond the abyss of death, the dark, the unknown and the other.
Beyond the edge of the knowable, is mystery, "the abyss of death, the dark, the unknown, the other. But that, of course, is just a precious conceit. Leaping blindly into the abyss is not a substitute for understanding, no matter how profound the yearning in your heart. Really, Brennan should have said, "ignore the mystery. To count as a Christian, say, in any reasonably orthodox sense, is to assent to a great deal of dogma about creation, the Resurrection, post-mortem life and so on.
It is the great affliction of the seriously religious that they cannot in their hearts say, "I don't know. But the empirically-minded atheist and secular humanist must also concede ignorance. I do not mean about the existence of god, for that matter seems to me settled - there indubitably is no god though we could be wrong. I mean conceding ignorance about religion - whether a world without religion would be better than one with it.
We ought not to pretend to know the answer. For my part, I insist on religion's many intellectual and moral vices. But I have suggested earlier that religions can satisfy profound emotional needs, many of them fundamental. And now I would add that no-one really knows whether these satisfactions can be relinquished without dire consequences, especially for those I described - in a sympathetic, Fanonian phrase - as the wretched of the earth.
From the fact that religion is an evil it does not follow that the world would be a better place without it. Far from religion benefiting societies, as the "moral-creator socioeconomic hypothesis" would have it, popular religion is a psychological mechanism for coping with high levels of stress and anxiety — or so he suggests. I've long been interested in Paul's work because it addresses a whole bunch of fascinating questions — why are Americans so religious when the rest of the developed world is increasingly secular?
Is religious belief beneficial to societies? Many believers assume, without question, that it does — even that there can be no morality without religion. They cite George Washington who believed that national morality could not prevail without religions principles, or Dostoevsky's famous claim actually words of his fictional character Ivan Karamazov that "without God all things are permitted".
Then there are Americans defending their country's peculiarly high levels of popular religious belief and claiming that faith-based charity is better than universal government provision. Atheists, naturalists and humanists fight back claiming that it's perfectly possible to be moral without God. Evolutionary psychology reveals the common morality of our species, and the universal values of fairness, kindness, and reciprocity.
But who is right? As a scientist I want evidence. What if — against all my own beliefs — it turns out that religious people really do behave better than atheists, and that religious societies are better in important respects than non-religious ones, then I would have cause to rethink some of my ideas. This is where Gregory Paul and his research come in. I have often quoted his earlier, , research which showed strong positive correlations between nations' religious belief and levels of murder, teenage pregnancy, drug abuse and other indicators of dysfunction.
It seemed to show, at the very least, that being religious does not necessarily make for a better society. The real problem was that he was able to show only correlations, and the publicity for his new research seemed to imply causation.
If so this would have important implications indeed. In this latest research Paul measures "popular religiosity" for developed nations, and then compares it against the "successful societies scale" SSS which includes such things such as homicides, the proportion of people incarcerated, infant mortality, sexually transmitted diseases, teenage births and abortions, corruption, income inequality, and many others.
In other words it is a way of summing up a society's health. The outlier again and again is the US with a stunning catalogue of failures. On almost every measure the US comes out worse than any other 1st world developed nation, and it is also the most religious. For this reason Paul carries out his analysis both with and without the US included, but either way the same correlations turn up.
The 1st world nations with the highest levels of belief in God, and the greatest religious observance are also the ones with all the signs of societal dysfunction. These correlations are truly stunning. They are not "barely significant" or marginal in any way.
The reason why we have over 1 million religions in the world is because of sin. What mankind needs, is not religion — but at his core, man needs a genuine relationship with God. Someone once said to me that there are 2 kinds of problems in the world. The greatest commandments that Jesus gave us pertain first to our love for God and secondly to our love for our neighbor.
With or without religion every human being is a sinner and every human being is capable of deceit and wickedness. Many religions exist in the world but we are not called to be religious. Instead we are called to have a relationship with God and love God and to love our neighbor. Jesus Christ was crucified on the cross for our sins so that we may be reconciled to God. John says: But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, to those who believe in His name: who were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.
No one comes to the Father except through Me. Therefore life is not about religion or the lack of religion. True life is about having a genuine relationship with God through Jesus Christ. You must acknowledge that you are a sinner and that you therefore need Jesus in your life. God wants you to decide to follow Him and to make Jesus the Lord of your life. God will forgive any sin that you have done because Jesus died for ALL your sins and to set you free from the bondage of all types of sin in your life.
You must believe that Jesus is the ONLY way by which you can have everlasting life and escape from eternal separation from God. You must believe that Jesus died on the cross for you and resurrected from the grave. I thank You that You died on the cross for me and resurrected so that I may have life through You. In a word, they ignore the ongoing psychological functions of religious beliefs, practices and institutions.
For example, they ignore the way some religious beliefs sustain and are sustained by unconscious dependencies on parents, or the way religion can satisfy various liberally distributed narcissistic, hysterical and obsessional needs. And there's worse. Most religions entertain the conceit that only they can endow human life with meaning and purpose. This admirable end is allegedly achieved by situating human life in a larger scheme of divine purposes.
Atheism, religions contend, bestows only futility and despair. Hence, it is common for divines and some philosophers to link the malaise of meaninglessness - supposedly novel to our age - to the eclipse of transcendence, to the disenchantment of the world consequent on the loss of faith. To satisfy this human longing for meaning and purpose, some atheists propose that we find enchantment and meaning in science and discovery, in art and the magnificence of the natural world.
But once again, in so doing they miss the mark as comprehensively as do the religious. I don't wish to reduce or trivialize questions about life's meaning. But the exalted talk of cosmic enchantment and meaning tends on both sides to conceal the fact that what most people desire fundamentally is not metaphysics or enchantment, but feeling loved, being significant in someone's eyes in god's if in no-one else's , a secure group identity, and hope for betterment, if their lot is misery or devastating poverty.
Let me take as an example of this lapse Christopher Hitchens's secular vision. Atheists, he observes, have no need to proclaim their rectitude, fight over holy ground, or grovel and wallow in their unworthiness. They have art and the great works of literature to console them. And then, in an outbreak of utter silliness, he continues, "we can counterpose a leisurely or urgent walk from one side of the library or the gallery to another, or [go] to lunch with an agreeable friend, in pursuit of truth or beauty.
Do I need to mention that the hotspots of religious growth are in Africa, South America, India and the Islamic crescent, mostly among the poor and uneducated? For the philosophers we know as the classical Empiricists, the evidence of the senses was the foundation of knowledge. Contemporary empiricism has mostly discarded the focus on subjective perceptual experience but continues to insist on the foundational role of evidence gained through observation and experimentation.
In other words, in this view, substantive knowledge of the world can only be acquired through empirical enquiry, the best examples of which are the systematic sciences, but not excluding historical and related researches. If you want to know what the universe is like, what happened in the past, how the mind or a society functions, you investigate, probe, experiment, interrogate nature. You search for evidence that rationally confirms or falsifies theories.
But you do not, as John Locke said, entertain "any proposition with greater assurance than the proofs it is built upon will warrant. Positive evidence for these claims is extremely feeble. But that doesn't always deter the religious. A couple of years ago, the distinguished lawyer and Jesuit Father Frank Brennan, reviewed some of the atheist literature filling the bookshops at the time. For these authors, there is nothing beyond that edge because it is not knowable, though each of them occasionally lapses into a yearning for the transcendent or at least the numinous.
The religious person embraces the mystery of what lies beyond the abyss of death, the dark, the unknown and the other. Beyond the edge of the knowable, is mystery, "the abyss of death, the dark, the unknown, the other. But that, of course, is just a precious conceit. Leaping blindly into the abyss is not a substitute for understanding, no matter how profound the yearning in your heart.
Really, Brennan should have said, "ignore the mystery. To count as a Christian, say, in any reasonably orthodox sense, is to assent to a great deal of dogma about creation, the Resurrection, post-mortem life and so on.
The root cause of many problems in the world is the human condition or the sinful nature of man. Think about it for a moment: If religion did not exist — would people really stop killing each other? Would the stealing, the lying, the promiscuity or the hatred really and truly stop if there was no religion? What is The Condition of Mankind? Romans For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God Jeremiah The heart is deceitful above all things, And desperately wicked; Who can know it?
Matthew For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies. According to the scriptures, man is a sinner and his heart is desperately wicked. The reason why we have over 1 million religions in the world is because of sin.
What mankind needs, is not religion — but at his core, man needs a genuine relationship with God. Someone once said to me that there are 2 kinds of problems in the world. The greatest commandments that Jesus gave us pertain first to our love for God and secondly to our love for our neighbor.
With or without religion every human being is a sinner and every human being is capable of deceit and wickedness. Many religions exist in the world but we are not called to be religious. Instead we are called to have a relationship with God and love God and to love our neighbor.
Jesus Christ was crucified on the cross for our sins so that we may be reconciled to God. John says: But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, to those who believe in His name: who were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. No one comes to the Father except through Me. Therefore life is not about religion or the lack of religion. But a world where people can accept and live with different sets of rules, certainly is possible.
To give an example: Western medicine in many fields is powerful, but Eastern medicine offers a different approach. An approach that is effective in many fields too. Already both approaches are merging, though their basics the rules are very different, a dual approach dominated by medicines and a holistic approach. Than you end with practices like torturing, holy wars, wars on terrorism etcetera. If killing all competitors would lead to a stable environment for billions of ages, than evolution would have no problem in selecting the kill-behavior.
But until now kill-behavior seeking conflict never worked, and resulted in unstable environments. There are effective ways that always involve some kind of cooperation. Its our behavior that adapts, whatever the name.