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Notes -
Brief thoughts on religion
My mother is a devout practicing Catholic. I have never once had the courage to tell her that I stopped believing in God long ago. She’s asked me a few times over the years if I still believe; presumably it’s apparent from my disinterest in the Church that I don’t. I just lie, I tell her “yes of course”, and that’s the end of it, for a time. I hate thinking of what it will be like to face her on her deathbed. I’m sure she’ll ask me again, at the very end - will I still lie? I don’t want to inflict that kind of pain on her. I can put on a boisterous face in my writing at times, but when it comes to anything that actually matters, I’m a coward. (Writing is the medium most closely associated with subterfuge, with masquerade, with the protean synthesis of new identities - in no other instance can we so directly assume a voice and a habit of mind that is not our own.)
I seem to no longer be capable of approaching religion as anything but an aesthetic phenomenon. I admire religions the way you might admire clothes in a shop window; I judge them by how well they comport with my own notions of how reality should ideally function. There is something primally compelling about Judaism; what other god has commanded such authority? What other god has commanded such, not only fear, but such intellectually refined fear, a fear that carries with it all the oceanic vastness and eerie serenity of the desert’s evening sky? Christianity too is fascinating, as possibly the most beautiful and compelling image of humility and forgiveness in world history. Here we have the physical incarnation of the Hegelian thesis of the contradiction inherent in all things (“that terrible paradox of ‘God on the cross’”). It’s a shame about the ending, though; it smacks of a heavy-handed editor, as though the Hollywood execs thought the original idea was too much of a downer for a mass market audience. Things should have ended on Good Friday - “God is dead and we killed him” - that’s how you have a proper tragedy and proper pathos, only then do you have the ultimate sacrifice and the ultimate crime.
My only experience of religion now is through the collection of dictums and niceties. Lacan: “God is unconscious”. Derrida: “The only authentic prayer is one that you expect will not be heard”. Little bits of “insight porn” that make me go “ah, that certainly is how things should be! Wouldn’t it be lovely if that were true!” But can I actually believe it’s true? Probably not.
One of my favorite commentators (a lapsed Catholic himself, incidentally) on Lacan once relayed an anecdote:
Now that’s the kind of God that I could get on board with believing in! The God of the signifier, the God who turns everything upside down. Ancient commentators, in traditions as diverse as neoplatonism and Buddhism, recognized a problem: if God is perfect, unchanging, atemporal, mereologically simple, then how was it metaphysically possible for him to give rise to this temporal, dynamic, fallen, fractured creation? How did The One give rise to The Many? The orthodox answer is that “He did it out of love”. An alternative answer, whispered in heretical texts and under hushed breaths, is that it may not have been under His control at all. There was simply a “disturbance” in the force - nature indiscernable, source unknown (perhaps it’s simply built into the nature of things?). If I worship anything, it is The Disturbance. (Zizek gave a beautiful example of this - there was a scene in a horror film where a woman dropped dead while singing, but her voice didn’t stop, it just kept ringing out, disembodied. This is only momentarily shocking, something you as the viewer recover from rather quickly. But contrast this with a ballet where the recorded music stops playing and the dancers just keep on dancing, in complete silence - they don’t stop. There’s nothing supernatural about this, it’s perfectly physically realizable. But it’s far more unnerving, it feels like something that you simply shouldn’t be watching. This is The Disturbance, the Freudian death drive.)
I don’t think I’m alone in not being able to take the whole thing seriously. Statistics about declining church attendance have been cited ad nauseam; the few times I did attend mass in the last few years, the crowd was decidedly elderly. The burgeoning tradcath revolt among the Gen Z dissident right smacks of insincerity; they pantomime the words and rituals, but there’s no genuine belief. Andrew Tate’s conversion to Islam is an aesthetic-cum-financial move. Contemporary neopaganism is definitely an aesthetic phenomenon first and foremost (not to mention a sexual one - blonde 20-something Russian girls dressed all in white frolicking on the open fields of the steppe is a hell of a weltanschauung).
I’ve probably given the impression that the aesthetic is somehow opposed to the religious - that its purpose is to supplant authentic religious feelings as a synthetic substitute. Unable to believe in the old religions as we once did, we cast about and find that aesthetics is the next best thing, so we convert the church into a gallery and deify the Old Master painting (or, to use a more contemporary example, the TikTok influencer) instead of the body and blood. But nothing could be further from the truth. Authentic aesthetic feelings are, in a sense, the natural product of the religious sentiment. Art has been intimately tied up with magic since its inception, art as quite literally a summoning ritual, a protective charm to ward off bad luck, an offering to the gods. The separation of the priest, the witch doctor, and the poet is a relatively late historical development. Many of the earliest cave paintings were secluded in unreasonably deep parts of the cave, almost impossible to access, the only way to get there was by crawling on your stomach through dark narrow passageways where you could have easily risked injury or death - what would have driven people to do that, what purpose did they think they were fulfilling, why did they perceive a necessary link between art and trauma?
Attempts to give art a rational “purpose”, saying that it “teaches us moral lessons” or “provides entertainment”, all sound so lame because they are so obviously false. The purpose of art is to bring us into communion with The Beyond - that’s it, that’s the long and short of it. To make art is to attempt to do magic, and to be an artist is to be a person who yearns strongly for this Beyond, at least on an unconscious level. If the artist does not ultimately believe in the possibility of transcending this realm, he simply dooms himself to frustration - but the fundamental animating impulse of his actions does not change. The aesthetic is what remains when the vulnerable overt metaphysical claims of religion have been burned away: under threat of irrationality, I am compelled to reject God, free will, and the immortality of the soul, but you cannot intrude on the private inner domain of my sentiment and my desire.
It is here that I would like to begin an examination of the question as to whether the aesthetic feeling too, like the properly religious feeling before it, could one day decline into irrelevance; whether the conditions might one day be such that its last embers are extinguished. There are indications that this may be the case. But it would be unwise to attempt to answer this question without a thorough historiographical and empirical preparation. After all, we are far from the first to raise this question - it was already raised as early as ancient Rome (in a fictional novel admittedly, known as the Satyricon, but, fiction always draws from something real):
I don't remember where I first heard it, but something that stuck with me about a lot of the LARPer wing of TradCaths who are making "endeavoring to be more Catholic than the Pope" a byword instead of a gag, was the observation: if your God hates all the same people you do, you aren't really religious, you just have an imaginary friend.
Some of the best examples of this are the Millenial/Gen-Z Catholic YouTubers who post video monologues with clickbait thumbnails and have been cycling through the zesty topics of Porn, Exorcism, and anti-Feminism recently.
But I guess they have a point - The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius mostly involve sitting quietly for several hours. There can't possibly be an audience for that
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Definitely a poignant rule of thumb. I’d expand it to a general principle. For instance, “If your ecology says your opposition’s economic industrial activity is what threatens the survival of the Earth’s biosphere, you don’t have a science, you just have a political sci-fi novel.”
Very similar! I'm perpetually skeptical of Environmentalists who want to restrict things that they never wanted to do anyway.
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The history of art makes the most sense if you consider that its purpose is benefit, and this includes the feelings of awe and reverence. Biblical stories are painted because they are always didactic. Statues of the Virgin Mary are crafted so that women have an aspiring figure. Churches are patterned after nature and cathedrals remind us of the cave and the tree. Prehistoric man contemplated in a cave, drawing the figures of nature, and historic man contemplates in cathedral, with drawn figures of human nature. Prehistoric man cut off his finger at the loss of his child in the first religious ritual; historic man, in the last ritual, sees the Son of God cut, and the Father’s finger extended from the heavens.
All of this has a benefit. Hell is painted in such a way that we ought to fear it. The Last Judgment shows us the most salient image of the eternal and timeless choice of good versus evil, not just occurring in the Life to Come but occurring every day. The problem with “art is about the beyond” is that it is ambiguous (at best) and can excuse art that has no benefit. I’m sure modern architects have used this term while they erect their monstrosities that make everyone unhappier.
Religion, too, should chiefly be understood by its benefit. God is love insofar as love is beneficial. God is fearsome insofar as fear is beneficial. To the proud, God humbles, and the lowly He exalts. To the blind he gives sight, but to those who claim they see perfectly he blinds. God is benefit, the beneficent.
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I'm not a priest nor an apologist, but this reasoning seems incomplete-
Love is partially the answer, but as you observed it is rather incomplete. The traditional Catholic response is that free will and original sin, which causes suffering, is part of His divine plan of giving people free will and the autonomy to disobey him. Imagine for a second that you have no choice but to worship a deity, is that actual worship? Is following a law with a gun pointed to your head a good law? Free will and its consequences of suffering ultimately stems from the truth is that adoration without choice is not worship.
I understand your conflict about Christianity, but it seems a lot of your conflict comes from the popular social media representation of Catholicism. CS Lewis points this out in the Screwtape letters:
This quote also addresses the next thing you mentioned - the declining attendance and participation of the Church. I agree that it is a sad state of affairs that church attendance is largely the invalid and the old. However, I also see it as a chance for the Church to realign itself to church teaching instead of chasing the leaving masses. The 'trad catholic' you see and push against online is, as you see, disingenuous tik tok coomer bait for lost meant to spend their simp bucks on their OF equivalent. However, I see the performative aspect is rooted in a desperate desire to get back to the Church forms that go back to its foundation. Even though the pope has been cracking down on Latin mass, I highly suggest trying to attend one in your area if it is still allowed to be performed.
From what I've read of your criticism, your problem is the state of your local church and the online personas that 'promote' it rather than church teachings or doctrine. I would argue that if you think the church is so lacking in direction, volunteer and participate in your church as much as possible! I am a big believer of being the change you want to see in the world, where you see decline, I see opportunity (if I have time, I currently am pretty swamped).
Maybe because these aren't the purposes of art? Art's primary goal is communication. To convey an idea or thought that words fail to fully transmit. Beethoven's 5th symphony communications the light triumphing over darkness. The Sistine chapel exists to celebrate and communicate the love of the divine Christ. One of the reasons why I'm somewhat okay with AI taking over productive is because it will fulfill the commercial and consumptive aspects of art, leaving the artists who are looking to express and idea that is difficult to put into words.
Can you expand how the failure of the artist leads you to compelled to reject God? I fail to see the logical connection there, but I may be misreading something.
Unlike you, I am not particularly worried about the end of the Church, but actually rather hopeful that the 'decline' of the current church is a rejection of the modernizing reform from Vatican II and for the church to find its way to better represent the core beliefs of the church. Catholicism has been historically persecuted and actively hunted for long stretches of time, so the latest pushback against the church is nothing new and in the long term not something I find particularly disheartening.
This word makes me nervous.
At the most simplistic level you get the sorts of awful things that go on in high school English classes, where students decode the "symbols" of the text, which is how you end up with nonsense like "the message of Hamlet is that revenge is bad". Well why didn't Shakespeare just come out and say that? Why go through the trouble of making up a whole story? It makes the artist out to be some kind of lunatic. I think we're in agreement that this is no good.
But even this idea of "communicating things that can't be put into words", I think it still doesn't capture the magnitude of what goes on in authentic creativity. I think it makes the process too subjective - it conjures images of like, the artist just has a feeling one day, or comes up with a thought, and thinks "ah, it would be nice to communicate this".
Derrida gave a lovely description of what he felt when he was writing Of Grammatology:
I think moments of genuine creativity always have this sort of texture - this feeling that you've discovered something that is common property.
That would be a catastrophe.
(At the very least, artists don't experience commercial art as a burden that's keeping them from making "real" art - they need the money! And they're very happy to get paid for something they enjoy doing anyway! Take commercial art away and they still need to find some way to make a living.)
Sorry if I was confusing here. I didn't stop believing in God because of art or aesthetic considerations or anything like that. I stopped believing in God because of a confluence of philosophical arguments - the conceptual incoherence of "free will", severe difficulties for substance dualism as a philosophy of mind (would it necessarily violate the causal closure of the physical? how does it handle hypothetical split-brain cases?), and in general the alleged evidence for religion not passing the "smell test" and having a similar epistemological profile to other discredited phenomena like ESP and cryptids.
I've softened on some of these considerations over the years and I'm willing to keep an open mind. But those were my initial motivations at any rate.
I don't see any reason why Christianity would necessitate either of these. I'm personally pretty uncertain about the latter (I have no good model of what a soul would involve/not involve (and what would be materially handled), but I also really don't understand consciousness, which I definitely have), and I definitely reject the first (at least, if we mean libertarian free will), and that seems perfectly compatible with Christianity. In fact, I think the net evidence from the scriptures definitely leans against libertarian free will.
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Counterargument: you are going to die, the concept of caring about truth more than happiness is incoherent in a world without objective value, and so you really ought to cleave yourself to whichever tradition forms the greatest happiness in yourself and your loved ones. The Good is always and forever sovereign over the Truth because it is only via the Good that we care about the Truth, and indeed, we can dwell endlessly on how the Genesis narrative presents this, and how our goal is really a renewal of paradise (from the Persian word walled garden)
I think that's a complex issue and the proper response varies on a case by case basis.
I will note though that I only have so much control over my beliefs. I can't just will myself to believe that modus ponens is false, or that I don't exist, or that people can fly. There's a give and take with what the world imposes on me by force.
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Art isn't for communicating information, it's for communicating viewpoints, "what-it's-like-to-be"s. If I write a song true enough, I can make you feel for a minute what it was like to be me losing my wife. (I can't actually do that, but some people can.) The only purpose of art is to make us feel less alone, which is why AI art is a contradiction and is fake and gay.
Adding onto this, I will be interested in AI art on the day that it becomes like-something to be an AI, and those AIs create art to express what that's like to us. I'm looking forward to that very much, but I don't expect to see it in my lifetime.
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If the Deity had created us such that we would always freely choose to love and worship the Deity, it wouldn't be an impingement on our free will, anymore than the Deity creating us without the ability to teleport is robbing us of our right to "choose" not to teleport.
I think that situation is different. I actually agree that If the Deity had created us such that we would always freely choose to love and worship the Deity, it wouldn't be an impingement on our free will. But I think creating us without the ability to teleport is actually a larger impingement, assuming it was ever an option.
The difference is, we want to be able to teleport, whereas beings engineered to love a deity wouldn't want to not love the deity.
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One is constraining what you can think and the other what you can do no? I can't really think of any other desire or valuation (whatever mental category worship falls into) that can't conceivably be negated, though maybe somebody could suggest one. It would be odd to have one where there really is no choice.
There are probably thoughts human minds cannot think, though obviously I can't think of any. I don't think it really makes a big difference though. Why would constraining thought be an unacceptable restriction on free will but not constraining action? When it comes to human government, thought-control is considered especially bad (hence Orwell), because controlling what someone thinks is impossible for a human dictatorship, so one that even attempts it is proving itself to be insanely megalomaniacal. But for God, who already controls everything, there doesn't seem to be much of a difference.
The squared-circle is the most common example, but then I am sort of thinking about it already and if I turn mad I might worship it.
A Christian might correct me here, but I think the answer is that what you can or cannot do in this temporal world is simply unimportant compared to what you do in your soul. And so we have free will in the things that matter.
This is my impression of how the trinity doctrines came about.
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Thought control isn't really considered bad. Its just called different things depending on whether we think it's good or bad. Orwellian Thought Control is considered bad primarily because the party fails to control the thoughts of the lead character effectively. If the party had aligned its citizens more effectively, there would be no dissatisfied human to relate to. We'd just be reading a story about a Drone going about its day. At the very least it would look much more like Brave New World.
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About a week ago, I read some of the Old Testament for the first time since childhood. One idea which stuck out to me is that if you took this setting and removed God from the equation, none of this would make sense. I'm not talking about blatantly mystical things like the Great Flood or Eden, but rather the full world in which the Old Testament takes place -- a world of constant cruelty set against the endless desert sands and mysterious starry skies, and ancient genealogies with white-beareded men who appear as old as the world itself. Maybe God didn't strike down Sodom and Gomorrah, but city-wide destruction and mass rape and incest were evidently common in the ancient world, and you can feel this need to rationalize the ancient world and make it less tragic is a very strong theme in the Old Testament. Without God, it's something like a living nightmare.
When life gets really bad, we open up to religion in surprising ways. Best analogy is like... we're all houses built on shitty foundations. Sometimes a storm comes and chips at our eaves, but we repair it and we're fine. It's not until your entire house tumbles down that you can replace the foundation for a better one. Religion generally takes hold in moments of immense weakness, and makes us far stronger for the remainder of life. Zoomer tradcaths really are just larping because they haven't had that moment yet. It can only be a LARP until that happens, IMO. Faith isn't really irrational so much as sub-rational.
Some of the best commentary on dealing with (especially) old Testament literalism is from David Bentley Hart. The long and short of it is that the Old Testament should be read similarly to how The Odyssey and The Iliad are read. It's a highly stylized, almost poetic epic tale that uses vibrant language and imagery to convey its points. It's not a blow by blow catalog of facts. Add on top of this the translation-upon-translation issues and you can account for the fact that 900 year old men were popping out kids left and right when they weren't running away from Rapin'Burg after the Slip-'N-Slide from the sky overflowed.
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This is a pretty silly summarization. People become religious under stress since they're grasping at straws for any modicum of control they can find, and the only one they've got is hoping placebos work. Keeping on those placebos afterwards is somewhere between neutral if they otherwise keep their behavior the same, to severely negative if they e.g. think prayer is more powerful than medicine
I mean, n of 1 here, but I became religious slowly over the course of years and it all started by getting deep into analytic philosophy and rationalism in an attempt to merely "be better at thinking." I'll spare you my
superherointernet warrior origin story, but my path to Christ started in a firmly modern, PMC, intellectualist garden.The ironic part is that I also agree with you. Use whatever version of "no atheists in foxholes" aphorism you want, but it is true that a lot of people turn to religion in types of trouble. You can cope by gesturing at placebo and self-serving cognitive biases if you like, but doesn't it remain knee-slappingly silly to imagine the idea of someone shouting "I"D BETTER UPDATE MY PRIORS" when they're on a plane with two blown engines.
I find this a bit hard to take seriously. It's like if somebody told me they spent a lot of time analyzing economic models, and in the end they're now certain that Soviet Communism is the only correct choice. I don't know you're specific path, but option 1 is that you believe the superstitious parts of Christianity, in which case your attempts to be better at thinking is severely misaligned. Option 2 is that you believe in some watered-down deistic form of "cultural Christianity", and are arbitrarily ignoring the vast gulf between your beliefs and what most actual Christians believe.
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It seems like you've never been around an intelligent religious person before. "Thinking prayer is more powerful than medicine" is not a problem that comes up. These people are essentially like you and me, except they have resolute moral standards and a shocking tolerance for hardship. Call it a placebo all you want, but don't allow yourself to forget: The crucial part of the "placebo" is that it actually works.
This might sound a bit snide, but "intelligence" and "religiosity" tend to be anti correlated. This applies to both the baseline question of "are you religious, yes or no", as well as for level of zealotry. I'm sure I've met quite a few intelligent religious people, but religion hasn't been a big part of their lives and they're mostly watered-down deists.
Every lie incurs a debt to the truth.
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That's all irrelevant because groups that lucked into right beliefs thrive, those that had bad luck die out.
Thus over time, the rules of the groups that survive start to look pretty wise.
If you accept this idea, what does that tell you about religion's irreversible decline then?
That the groups that dropped religion are in the process of dying out, through hilariously low birthrates.
Ah yes, the "by 2300 we'll all be Amish" idea. Somehow I doubt this will come to pass.
I don't think by 2300 we'll all be Amish. I do think that by 2300 there will be practically no seventh-generation secular humanists, though.
Does it matter that much? Memes have the nice ability to travel between and across generations.
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Most of the fertility rate collapse happened while the US was highly religious.
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Things have changed. Industrial revolution, science, you ever heard about those ?
It's all irrelevant now. The bleeding edge of humanity is close to fulfilling their purpose which is bringing into being a mechanical civilization that's going to replace our own. Logic of economy and competition will then ensure our gradual deprecation.
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Brings to mind Eliezer Yudkowsky on Rationality: "No one begins to truly search for the Way until their parents have failed them, their gods are dead, and their tools have shattered in their hand." So it seems this is hardly directional.
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