IF LIKE ME YOU HAD NOT heard this, I'm very grateful to Michael Sean Winters linking to the Reverend Lillian Daniel on the boring "spiritual but not religous" crowd. He linked to it in response to that story about the "Humanist" (read "atheist") Chaplain at Whor . . ., uh, Harvard I wrote about the other day.
Harvard University, once the intellectual bulwark of Calvinism, has named its first atheist as chief chaplain, Greg Epstein. According to this profile in The New York Times, the choice reflects the fact "dozens of students whom Mr. Epstein mentors have found a source of meaning in the school's organization of humanists, atheists and agnostics, reflecting a broader trend of young people across the United States who increasingly identify as spiritual but religiously nonaffiliated."
Yuck. I am with the Rev. Lillian Daniel of the First Congregational Church in Glen Ellyn who told Loretto Sr. Maureen Fiedler what she thought of the "spiritual but not religious" crowd. Daniel said, "On airplanes, I dread the conversation with the person who finds out I am a minister and wants to use the flight time to explain to me that he is 'spiritual but not religious.' Being privately spiritual but not religious just doesn't interest me." I couldn't agree more, but listen to the whole 2012 interview: Daniel is incisive and hilarious.
I'd never heard the nine-year-old piece and, though it was disappointingly short, it was to the point and the point was sharp and merciless. And it was funny. I agree with everything in it, especially her points that
a. their inevitable claim that they find their g-d in nature, as if those who are in churches don't, as if the entirety of scripture doesn't, literally from the beginning of it in Genesis till the end in John the Divine look to nature for God, the creature of nature.
b. find old, ancient, religious traditions and churches "boooorrring" with all of the many, varied, at times conflicting and deeply thought and felt and challenged and (sometimes) resolved thinking and reflections on lived human experience on such things. They find that enormous range of human reporting "booorrrrring!" but find their make-it-yourself substitute, springing from their very own forehead like some bogus Athena as a mirror of their ego to be utterly fascinating.
DANIEL: Often some shallow combination of exercise and caffeine, coffee shops as spiritual community, hikes as pilgrimages, The New York Times as sacred text, and sunsets—don’t ever forget the sunsets. These people are always informing you that they find God in the sunsets. Well, excuse me, as if people who go to church didn’t see God in a sunset. You know, my take is that any idiot can find God in the sunset. What is remarkable is finding God in the context of flawed human community, and a tradition bigger than you are with people who may not reflect God back to you in your own image.
Part of the nature of religion, so much beat up on in our society, part of the nature of religion is that it delivers a message that is like sandpaper against the culture of narcissism. It is not all about you and, no, you cannot make it up. The beauty of a long tradition is that it is bigger than anything we can do by ourselves.
c. literally everything else she says.
That quote is taken from an old PBS report on Daniels and what she has had to say on the topic that is worth reading, in lieu of a transcript of the radio piece.
That quote sums up so much of why the culture of modernism, the "enlightenment" hates religion so much, why they must attribute all kinds of evils to it that are more accurately and more importantly attributed to other things like the desire to accumulate and concentrate wealth and power - the ultimate motive of the many sins of organized religion as well as the secular world. If they can blame the source of the message that the ultimate reason for life and living is not selfishness, they can get on with their narcissistic pleasure without any trouble. It's not as if the entirely secular evil doers are going to be much inconvenienced by it. Which also accounts for the counterproductive to impotent results of the materialist-atheist-scientistic "left."
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