often reveals an even deeper grounding in “unreason.”13 But a closer look reveals the same split within most specific religions, between the reasonable and unreasonable, the fairly probable and logical, and the questionable presuppositions or “dumbing down.” Criticism by the learned outstrips the masses, and as Western cultural critic, Jacques Barzun observed that many realize the present Western culture has exhausted its possibilities under the present configurations of ideas, especially in its valuations, resulting in “decadence.”14 Or, in philosopher Richard Rorty’s terms, the culture’s “final vocabulary” has reached its limitations as a tool for relating to our present needs and understandings. There remains a choice of either finding new tangents from our present, meaning new vocabularies and unique combinations of ideas or even new ideas, without thinking they must serve some higher purpose15 —or its opposite, described by Barzun, as malaise or boredom. But these learned voices have little effect on the huge religious institutions with their presumed Absolutes, undergirded with power.
The advances in technical knowledge in our world seem to have outstripped human knowledge of, if not also deep concern for, each other. Science has supplied to technology the ability to harness powers before which humans used to grovel helplessly. Human life has been extended significantly by modern medicines, and human labor is being progressively replaced by automated or robotic labor, even by artificial intelligence. Many nations have joined the industrialized countries in co-operatively addressing the world’s most challenging issues and problems, and the comforts of human existence have become potentially more universal if still lagging behind what it should have realized in fact. But there is more to life than externals, as the Dalai Lama has emphasized; even the “inner” person that must be nourished so it will provide an equilibrium and contentment—which seems to be needed not only by those who are the marginalized in societies, but especially by those who find themselves not completely satisfied with their positions of external privilege and extreme wealth. In the affluent United States, deaths by opioids, gun deaths, and car accidents continue to slaughter more than 110,000 residents each year, a horrendous statistic not changed by “thoughts and prayers.” Racial preference changes immigration policy to inhumane practices in a nation among the “most religious” in the world.
The newest technological toys or “things” or hyped forms of superficial amusement can only distract from a consciousness of lack of meaning for so long. It was theologian Paul Tillich’s explicit quest for meaning in a meaningless world that gained him such a following in the mid-twentieth century. But theologian Dorothee Soelle sensed that the situation in pockets of the capitalistic world was potent cynicism, even what she called “structures of cynicism,”16 far beyond a slipperiness of meaning. Many of these recent technological innovations appeal to our autonomy and enable us to be more self-sufficient, but the consumerism or appeal to “have” outstrips our identity of “who” we are, as we are torn between the superficiality of having “things” to excite our autonomy but feel a need for security, which the religious Absolutes offer. Curiosity can create Angst; release of Angst in security can cost one one’s freedom.
We who have lived through World War II to witness what some regard as the two most inhumane acts on masses of innocent people in recent human history—the Holocaust, and the nuclear bombs dropped on Japan—find the combination of religious resentment and racism rising to obscene levels in our twenty-first century, trying to justify any means to its desired end. But the end is not a reconciliation between different peoples, not a greater tolerance of difference, but a continuing sore that festers and infects human society, mixing religion’s absolutism with racist identities, justifying it by retrospective appeals to ancient ideologies, ancient people, and utopian schemas. The only answer to such use of religious absolutism is a genuine pluralism, accepted heterogeneity and globalization with authentic equality of voice. The fragile thread of a sense of unity that binds people to each other seems extremely narrow and exclusive, though there are moral voices against our vices.
How Can One Think or Speak of, or Relate to the Absolute?
Although perhaps few religious people today would identify themselves as “religious,” it is not uncommon for them to speak of “belief,” “faith,” or “spiritual” as designating only what people in their particular religious group have or are, and to figure that all others must therefore have no belief, faith, or no spirituality at all. So, assuming the worst of nonbelievers and despite the issues, the religion sticks with its Absolute and does so often with the sacrifice of real autonomy. Especially in the United States, as Richard Dawkins has noted in The God Delusion, religious people seem to have the advantage of being exempted or shielded from criticism, unlike many other countries, as though they had a belief worth protecting which others do not.17
Yet ironically, a trend has given to these most conservative religious in the United States a new identity largely of their own choosing, ironically a present identity that includes the role of “victims.” They have fought secularism and relativism for the past fifty years as strenuously as they fought Darwinism and Catholicism for the century before. When they discovered the secular nature of our government, which cannot simply relinquish its unity of the whole to adopt the theocracy these “victims” desired, they rekindled the earlier myth of the nation’s religious (that is, Christian) founding,18 even revising history as needed, and considered all those who differed as “infidels,” “atheists,” “agnostics,” and “secular humanists,” accusing the latter of hijacking the true government.
Many nonreligious in the United States, however, view themselves merely as inquisitive and questioning, as autonomous or “freethinkers,” or as skeptics or agnostics, and for any number of different reasons simply elect not to belong to a specific religion, as Susan Jacoby observes.19 Dawkins perhaps read this religious advantage too broadly since adherents of non-Christian religions in the United States certainly have neither experienced that same exemption from criticism, suspicion, or discrimination nor have they received the billions in tax dollars from the government for their religious schools as have the Christian groups since the Everson case in 1947. Such is the history of “established” religion even if unrecognized or denied by recipients of the public funds.
If we were to examine what the words really mean, there would not be such a clear-cut division between the “believers” and “unbelievers.” It would not carry a religious presupposition as its adjective. Every human believes many things, some more fervently than others, some with less credibility or reason than others. To “believe” does not rule out reason, but is a posture equivalent to “trust.” Humans, like animals in general, learn who, when, and what to “trust” through experience and empirically determined events. As they mature, they rely less on authorities of their past and more on their own experience and judgment as they decide what or who they can depend on as regards their future as they assess their past and present. They learn to trust their senses and reason more than imaginary causes, effects, or irrational presuppositions. That is humanization or interdependent human maturation.
Religious “faith,” in contrast, is often defined precisely in the terms used in the famous canonical book of Hebrews in the Christian Bible, as “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction [or ‘evidence’] of things not seen” (Heb.11:1). Of course, one often hopes for some state of being that is not presently visible, but even those imaginative pictures usually consist of representations of visible things we have experienced. When one’s life is based on that which is “not seen” in the sense of “never seen” or never being perceptible, but nevertheless “hoped for,” and that is absolutized, the visible world and its “appearance” drops in value or falls into disrepute, just as it did with Plato. The visible is seen as only an inferior copy or imitation of reality, thus reversing any common understanding of the word “reality.” The irony, however, is striking that Plato used the visible or appearing world in the bright sunlight, in his “allegory of the cave” to illustrate freedom from ignorance. If the eternal Forms were not the visibly appearing world, then remaining in the darkened cave should have been the answer, to not see the truth but only somehow to feel it in that
