What God Don't You Believe In? And A Few Other Ideas On A Recent Article

I started reading this article,  Has Boston Given Up on God?  by Erick Trickey expecting it to be something like what I found it was, a "Surrender Dorothy" on religion, though that's not all it was.  It is worth reading, but worth reading with several doses of salt.

The first load of salt came in me realizing for Trickey "Boston" means, pretty much the elite private schools in Boston and Cambridge and, when I checked every named person to see what their credentialing institutions were, I got this list with, you guess, Harvard being the one most commonly found in the CVs of those, Jewish, Atheist, Christian, Universalist, "none".   The complete list I complied for those who aren't shy about saying where they went to school is

Harvard
Yale
University of Chicago
Tufts
Brandeis
Stanford
Boston University (NOT a public university, in case someone might not know and the author teaches "magazine journalism" there.)
Cardinal O'Connor Seminary (the pedophile defrocked priest John Geoghan is mentioned in passing)
and on the CV of a single person, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Notice a pattern?

I would have a lot to say about the many things said in the article.  While it's certainly true the pedophile scandal is responsible for some reduction in church attendance at Catholic churches, I think the fact that it's coming off of several decades by two of the most anti-pastoral Popes and the many equally anti-pastoral bishops and cardinals they appointed has a lot to do with it too.  As well the seriously depleting effects of there not being enough unmarried men who feel called to the vocation of priests and the resulting closure of parishes (in many cases to also pay out compensation to the victims of pedophile abuse) has more than a little to do with that.   When they closed the old church in my town, opening some bull-shit new church in a new "parish" that covers about eight towns, a lot of people who had been life-long church goers stopped going.  Two of my sisters stopped going and both of them had been lectors at mass. As that one thing in the article shows, you'd need to have more space that this long article takes up to cover even that one issue.

But one of the biggest problems with most journalistic treatments of religion is that they take the same view of it that this article does, a determinedly elitist notion which the large majority of people don't participate in and either don't know about or don't care about.  I don't think

Other Churches have other issues.  Perhaps more on that later:

I can say the most interesting thing I found in the article was this.

Like Bethel AME, other congregations are also trying to welcome people alienated from religion. At Temple Israel of Boston, the largest Reform Jewish synagogue in New England, Senior Rabbi Elaine Zecher says many members don’t believe in God. “But then I would say, ‘Well, what God don’t you believe in?’” she says. “Is it a theistic God that is looking down on us? Is it the kind of God that is manifest in the way that people interact with each other? Is it a kind of God that is the still, small voice within us that is likened to our conscience?”

Which encourages me to look more into the problem of what Elizabeth A. Johnson calls either "classical theism" and in another book "modern theism" which is the same thing but put more in terms compatible with a so-called enlightenment conception of reality.   I think Rabbi Zecher puts her finger directly on the formally defined reason that so many people have given up on God, it is because both their own traditions and educations and also the general culture have led them to believe that the very limited, very unbelievable God of theism is the only way to think about God.  I once heard a Unitarian, of all people say that he always asks atheists who aggressively assert that they don't believe in God what they mean by "God" and inevitably he could tell them that he didn't believe in that God, either.

See the earlier post from this morning for more of the critique of theism. 

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The article starts characteristically enough at MIT with a well worn path to who I find to be the rather annoying, well known humanist chaplain Greg Epstein, who I think is part of the bogus club that Sherwin Wine started, though I haven't looked it up to see if that's the case. 

I have to say that I've been thinking more about how funny it is for atheists who reject God on the basis of God being an illusion created by people, a projection of human personality, that "man created God in his own image" then go and put Humanity in the role of God.  But my bigger problem is that I think even with the best of intentions such "Humanism" is bound to be even less effective than real Judaism or Christianity or Islam when it comes to making society less depraved than materialism inevitably leads it into being.  And there was this passage:

Kevin Frazier, 25, a master’s student at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government attending a Saturday-morning yoga class at Aeronaut Brewing Co., says he was raised Presbyterian but left religion behind as a college student after studying Northern Ireland’s Troubles in Belfast with a human-rights organization. “I think I walked away from religion because I think religion divides people,” he says. He’s still guided by the Golden Rule, and by political philosopher John Rawls’s theory of justice: “If I were randomly going to be placed in someone else’s shoes, that’s how I should think through a decision.”

To start with the problem isn't the adoption of "The Golden Rule" by a contented grad-student or contented college grad in general, it's whether or not a secular adoption of it is effective in action, in the real lives of those who may hold it as an apothem to mouth on occasion.  That's a big enough problem when those who say it believe it is The Law of God expressed in abbreviation.  I'm not convinced that a secular adoption of it as a slogan will have even that mush of a diluted effect across society. 

I will forego extensive commentary concerning the graduates of his university and the Kennedy School, though he should probably watch out for the flying beams that could get into his eyes from hanging out there.  The place is an establishment training ground for the degenerate ruling class.

And I wonder if young Frazier ever asked him about the divisive effects of secularism, of economics, of business, of sports fandom, of Ivy League snobbery and a myriad of other things which the boy probably has not chosen to have any problem with in the way that he decided to impose on all of religion.  I would say that one of the reasons that that is imposed as a fatal flaw on religion when it isn't in any other area of life is because religion is, in fact, probably in the large majority of cases the least divisive thing in life.  Religion, itself, generally has no power to make that kind of thing effective.  The Troubles in Ireland were far more based in ethnic and political and economic resentments than in religion.  If it was a problem with religion, why didn't those extend to the whole of England which is hardly uniform in its religious make up or, in fact, any land.  I doubt there are many places in which there is more peaceful coexistence among religions than in New England.  What makes this particular often heard claim in this article are these two paragraphs.

When Catholic priests do tackle civic issues in Boston today, Kendrick says, they’re more likely to do so in interfaith groups than they used to. “Now,” unlike in the past, he says, “there’s a sense that if you want to do something interfaith, there will be priests present. Because there’s no longer an arrogance. There’s a sense that they now understand that we’re all in this together.”

and

For strength in numbers, Bethel joined the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization, a coalition of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim congregations that speaks out on issues from criminal-justice reform to healthcare to affordable housing. “Now, to move major issues, you need a larger tent, a larger coalition—and even deeper kinds of organizing techniques and political engagement,” Hammond says.

So, which is it?  Religion is too powerful when it is divisive and sectarian or it is more powerful when it is ecumenical, working on an interfaith basis?  Because you don't get to have it both ways.  Though having it all ways has never been a problem for the writers of these kinds of articles, so long as it comes out with religion losing to the "Humanists" and their allies.