Huh, that old line, again. That religion is a crutch for the intellectually crippled, it's childrens' stories for people who are afraid of death, afraid of the dark. Though we have fundamentally different views on some things I liked John Lennox's answerwhen a Brit reporter asked him to respond to one of the pop atheists of the 00s saying religion is a fairy tale for people who are afraid of the dark, "Atheism is a fairy tale for those who are afraid of the light."
But this is an aspect of popular atheism needing to always have it both ways, "religion is people telling themselves what they want to be true" and "religion keeps people from doing what they want to do." I'd say atheism, like bad religion is people telling themselves what they want to hear. But, then, fundamentalism is how most atheists and many non-believers insist religion be seen as being, the boundaries they're comfortable with it fitting into.
The total contradiction in the two statements never seems to occur to those who constantly need to tell themselves they are smarter than the large majority of people. And as religious requirements become more and more a matter of requiring people to do what they don't really want to do and not doing what they want to do, that contradiction grows ever stronger.
Walter Brueggemann in The Prophetic Imagination lays out the extraordinary insights of the Mosaic tradition* as both a liberation from the whole host of evils done to people - and as explicitly stated in the Scriptures, to animals and the very environment that they all depended on - but also a lot about the difficulties that liberation entailed. All through the First Testament** people are told the consequences of not following that path of liberation. The evils of the later kings of the Children of Israel and the falling away of, especially, the priestly and aristocratic class that arose after they demanded a monarchy, comprise most of the Jewish scriptures, one of the greatest collection of documents ever assembled.
People are constantly told in The Law that doing things they want to do will lead to evil. In our own time, like it or not, the very same thing is said by people like Dr. Fauci and, no surprise to anyone who studied the record of human folly in the Old Testament, an effectively disastrous number of people go with what TV and hate-talk-radio and hate-talk-internet have told them to ignore or not believe. And the results are terrible, especially in places like the United States, like in Britain, even as in that imaginary land of modern-sciency-"enlightenment" Sweden.
The rugged ("manly") pose that is encouraged in pop-culture, in modernist kew-elness, in the media, is the easy way out based in people frivolously, irresponsibly and stupidly doing what they want instead of doing what they should do.
In thinking about a family member who is about to be exposed to the very potential, rationally considered certain super-spreader event of reopened schools, I realized that for all her faults she is a good embodiment of the free generosity that is one of the ultimate requirements of courage in that tradition, the tradition of the widow who gives her last two-cents to the poor box, as contrasted to the one who lights a lamp so she can find her lost silver coin. Though both require courage to live that way, the one who has given her last cents to the poor has to have a kind of courage that those of us enslaved by the fear of being without can only consider. She has always driven me crazy with her profligacy but along with that she has always been very generous. That generosity has meant that she can't afford to take what would be her last year of retirement off, she needs the money, but she can also not stand the thought of abandoning the students. She may well die from it, I'm not entirely sure I'll volunteer to step as I normally might because if I get it, I am pretty confident I will die from it. Especially during the height of allergy season. I have been meditating on how to face that when, not if, it comes to that. I hope I choose to expose myself but I can't guarantee I've got that kind of courage.
It is notable that the entire career of Moses, from having to flee for his life after he killed the Egyptian who was beating a Jewish slave to the end of his life when God allowed him to look over into the promised land, he was on the run. In taking up his responsibility to lead the Children of Israel out of slavery, he became a nomad facing the same hardships in the wilderness that the Children of Israel couldn't cope with. And he was the one responsible for bringing them all there.
Likewise, Jesus, born into the lowest stratum of the Roman imperial regime, left his home to become homeless, asking his closest, named followers to leave their homes and professions and families to go with him when doing that was far more dangerous than most of us could cope with. And Jesus did so to support and extend those same teachings from Moses. Even most of his followers in the past two-thousand years have not been able to really put into practice what is required because we are too cowardly, too cautious, too self-preserving to do what we would really need to do to put those teachings into practice in the world.
None of this is cowardly, the macho posturing that is held up as courage is what is cowardly. Atheism is so much easier than this. Any chance taking in going with it is taking a chance of what is presumed can be had with the practices of materialist-scientistic atheism. Following the morality of the Jewish tradition - Christianity and Islam being part of that tradition - takes entirely more courage than that. It's what I believe Jesus meant by saying that those who belived without seeing were blessed.
* In re-reading the book and the passages in those very early writings that contain them, I have a lot more of a feeling that the teachings that are attributed to Moses are, at least originally, the insights of one person, no doubt expanded in the oral tradition by people who were taught his original insights and who took them seriously enough to both try to live them and to consider their meaning in the context of their ambient social and physical conditions.
** I prefer the term to "Old Testament" but like "BC" and "BCE" I'm not bothered enough with the traditional terms to avoid them. I sometimes use the one I figure will bother those I might like to bother the more. After the terrible events of the mid-20th century scientific dictatorships, people who take the Christian tradition seriously should consider always taking the chance to point out that in no place did Jesus say that the Mosaic Law was invalid, in fact when, in the parable of Lazarus and the rich man, as Lazarus reposed in the bosom of Abraham the rich man was told that his brothers had Moses as their guide and they weren't going to get the Jacob Marley's gift of a warning of the consequences of not following it leading to the purgatory flames of hell. Jesus and Paul, certainly the author of the Letter of James considered The Law as still good advice to follow.
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