A few weeks ago, I wrote about Paul Kingsnorth's "wild Christianity," and I identified him as a religious atheist. We then had a brief exchange in the comments to that post. I thought I should reproduce that exchange here:
Paul said:
A religious atheist? Blimey. Now I've heard everything.
I'm flattered to be written about, but you're quite a way offbeam here. And I'm certainly not 'selling spirituality' to anyone. Otherwise I'd probably be running expensive courses or monetising some Youtube videos or something. I'm just trying to make a living with my writing, as I always have, so that I can feed my children.I'll plead guilty to being bourgeois though, and probably being at least partly liberal, even as I can see the great holes in the whole worldview.
By the way, I never 'knew' that Wicca was true. I always doubted it, as it happens. I did think - and still do - that Zen contains great wisdom and truth about the reality of the human mind. But Christ came to me unbidden, and there was no denying what happened or what it meant.
Of course, writing about any of this is a risk, and possibly a foolish one. It is common to be misunderstood.
All the best,
Paul K
Larry Arnhart said:
Paul,
Why do you refer to the stories about Colman as "legends"? Certainly, Fahey suggests that as legends these stories should not be taken as historically accurate. Do you agree?
If so, are you suggesting that the stories in the New Testament about John the Baptist and Jesus are legends, and thus not historically accurate? If you believe that the Biblical stories about Jesus are psychologically satisfying but not historically accurate, that's what I call religious atheism. This would make you like Nietzsche's Zarathustra who was said to be "the most pious of all those who do not believe in God."
Why do you refer to the stories about Colman as "legends"? Certainly, Fahey suggests that as legends these stories should not be taken as historically accurate. Do you agree?
If so, are you suggesting that the stories in the New Testament about John the Baptist and Jesus are legends, and thus not historically accurate? If you believe that the Biblical stories about Jesus are psychologically satisfying but not historically accurate, that's what I call religious atheism. This would make you like Nietzsche's Zarathustra who was said to be "the most pious of all those who do not believe in God."
On March 6th, Kingsnorth posted the following comment:
Of course I don't believe the life of Christ is a "legend." I'm a baptised member of the Orthodox Church.
I would suggest before attacking other Christians that we all ought to make something of an effort to find out what they believe, rather than relying on our own suppositions and prejudices.
I would suggest before attacking other Christians that we all ought to make something of an effort to find out what they believe, rather than relying on our own suppositions and prejudices.
I will accept this as Kingsnorth's clarification of the original article, in which he identified the stories about Colman as "legends," and he spoke about the New Testament stories about John the Baptist and Jesus as if they were at the same level as the legendary stories about Colman.
So now, he is saying that stories about saints like Colman are only "legends," but stories about Jesus in the New Testament are not just legends but historically accurate.
How did Paul decide that the miracles attributed to Colman were only legendary, while the miracles attributed to Jesus were historically true? He doesn't explain this.
2 comments:
1. “Atheist" seems to generally be taken to be a term like "Communist" or "Nazi," referring to someone who is full of hate or fury, and who is working to attack or overturn social, cultural, & social norms.
2. So the term "atheist" is generally rejected even by people (like Jordan Peterson, I think) who view religion as a purely natural phenomenon that has beneficial or necessary psychological and social effects.
3. The difficulty of pinning down or using such terms as “theist,” “atheist,” and “agnostic” is seen, I think, in the case of Charles Darwin. Darwin seems to be widely interpreted as an agnostic or atheist, or at least a non-theist, or at least not a traditional theist in the Christian tradition.
4. I propose that Charles Darwin slipped into a supernatural way of theorizing. I propose that he did this in his book DESCENT OF MAN, when he asserted that all the varieties of biological beings, EXCEPT ONE, are under the control of the laws of biology (those laws being the law of scarcity, the law of natural selection, the law of the struggle for existence, etc., as laid out in his book THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES). In Darwin's DESCENT OF MAN, the one biological being, the one GREAT EXCEPTION of the earth, which is not under the control of the laws of biology, is the "civilised races” of man.
The "civilised races" of Darwin excludes "savage races" of man such as the naked Fuegians who Darwin observed in South America, and seems to also exclude most or all of the working class people of Great Britain. Certainly, all of Darwin's fellow university educated men of England were included in the "civilised races."
5. So, I propose that Darwin, in declaring that the British (and probably German and French) upper class people are above the laws of biology that ruled the lives of the "savage races" of man and of all other biological beings, had slipped into a sort of super-(above) natural thinking, and has done so because such thinking was widespread and practically “de rigueur” among the people of his social class.
6. When he was thinking about publishing his theory of evolution, but hesitating, Darwin wrote to his friend Hooker that it was “like confessing a murder.” He was worried that his theory would in fact “murder” God for many or most thinking people, and that was in fact the result after Darwin did publish his theory. But having done that, Darwin, I speculate, could not also bear to kill off the conceit of grandeur of the aristocratic or otherwise upper-class people of Europe. He had to live with those people! He was one of them! His wife and children were part of that class.
7. Recall that in the final paragraph of THE ORIGIN, right after describing the brutal, violent “war of nature,” Darwin philosophizes that “there is grandeur in this view of life.” Grandeur in the brutal, bloody “war of nature”? Really? But even at the time of the writing of THE ORIGIN, I speculate that Darwin was imagining that this “war of nature” produced the grandeur of the upper class “civilized races” of man, among whom the laws of biology no longer operated and among whom the war of nature no longer waged. Ah, grandeur indeed! If it were only true!
8. Darwin’s concept of an already extant civilization of above-nature (supernatural) “grandeur” among his upper class fellows seems to have a lot in common with Karl Marx’s vision of a future global communist society in which men would no longer struggle against each other and scarcity would not exist.
7. Darwin’s divide between the “civilized races” of man and the “savage races” of man, besides its seeming slouching toward supernaturalism (above nature-ism), seems to me to be similar to Aristotle’s divide between Greek citizens like himself and the majority of people who are (Aristotle said) “natural slaves.”
Alfred Russel Wallace argued that the theory of natural evolution could not explain the moral and intellectual capacities of human beings, which could only be explained by some spiritual or supernatural power. Darwin explicitly rejected this. He saw that the moral and intellectual capacities of human beings could emerge through the joint action of natural selection and cultural evolution--or what today we might recognize as gene-culture coevolution. There is no need for a supernatural special creation, although Darwin was open to the possibility of God as First Cause of the laws of nature, which allows for the theistic evolution of the Biologos folks.
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