Anonymous asked:
Who said anything about shams?
The insistence on the primacy of belief over action isn’t necessary. Look at the Jews. How much does it matter whether a Jew is religious? A Jew who doesn’t believe in God can still go through the motions of Judaism. A Protestant who doesn’t believe in God, on the other hand… what motions are there to go through? Maybe he takes his children to church, but that’s about all there is, and that’s understandably rare. Who wants to sit in a hard bench for a few hours on Sunday morning and listen to some boring rand talk about God?
The big issue for Protestants is that people lose faith. They’ve been looking for solutions to that. Books don’t seem to work. Personal charisma… well, look at the Pentecostals. That didn’t turn out so well. And there’s plenty of room for scam artists, which you don’t want either.
Now, let’s say you have someone who was raised atheist, but whose absence of faith starts to crack. How do you get him? You don’t want there to be too high an inferential distance. Maybe he decides that God exists, or that there’s historical evidence for the Resurrection, it doesn’t really matter what it is, but if Christianity is alien to him, he’s going to be confused. Maybe he’d feel too awkward to go to church, maybe he’d worry about social pressure, whatever. You’re likely to lose him. But if he’s already going through the motions, it’s just a change in brain states.
And let’s say you have someone who was raised Christian, but ended up losing faith. What do you think happened there? There were some articles about this a while back, I think one was in the Atlantic, I’ve never been able to find it, but the point was: you might think people become atheists because of intellectual arguments and so on (if you haven’t accepted that intellectual arguments don’t mean all that much to most people), but what it usually comes down to is that they lose respect for their church. They think the people at the top of it don’t take it seriously or don’t care, they don’t get anything out of it, that sort of thing.
I’ve seen it happen. When I was about eleven, my mother got it into her head to start going to church – an awful ultra-liberal church for aging hippies, of course, because she’s an aging hippie. Used to be a commie, still basically is, went to the USSR even, darkly hints about having had friends who got up to some real darkside shit in the ‘70s, all that. Anyway. I was the only person in that building under 50. I slept through everything. I didn’t give a damn, and they weren’t trying to get me to. Then one day they brought in an old hunchbacked black woman with a lisp to lead everyone in a round of Kumbaya. Really. They lost half their people that day, including us. We didn’t switch churches. We stopped going entirely. I doubt we were the only ones. Now she gives me nü-atheist tracts every Christmas.
But what happened to get a commie to go to church? She decided I ought to be familiar with the music. In other words, she went to church – and made me go to church – because there was a secular component that she, even as an atheist, could respect. And then there wasn’t.
(But she’d been apologizing for the low quality of the music there for a while before the Kumbaya incident. Straw, camel.)
In the ideal Calvinist theocracy, your brain states are between you and God. What’s between you and society is your participation in the rites. The Jews seem to get this right. So does the American civil religion. You celebrate Independence Day and Thanksgiving and so on even if you don’t care about the government, and you familiarize yourself with the Constitution even if you’re a monarchist. You go through the motions regardless of your brain states, and you know what the motions are about. Thanksgiving is an annual celebration of a good harvest in Plymouth after Squanto taught the Pilgrims how to grow corn. Independence Day is about the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Everyone knows that. It’s taught in schools, it’s on TV, all that. So do the Japanese. Does religion even exist in Japan?
So you have general participation in the rites, and you make sure everyone knows what the rites are about – and the evangelicals get that part. They’ve been saying ever since the decisions came down that it’s a big fucking deal that the Court doesn’t want the public schools touching anything that smells like Christianity and doesn’t want the government putting up statues of the Ten Commandments, that Christmas and Easter are getting secularized, and so on – and they’re right. If the mechanisms by which the meaning behind the rites is explained to the general population are lost, the inferential distance is increased. But on the other hand, if you make it look like you want to affect people’s brain states, you run into problems. And if the thing can’t command respect – if the churches are ugly, if the music is shit, if the rites are tedious, if the general level of civilization is low, that sort of thing – you lose completely.
To answer your question in a sentence: in the ideal Calvinist theocracy, the concept of ‘sham’ doesn’t even apply.
(this sparked a lot of good discussion but it got really long so I’m just reblogging the original)
This was really interesting because the role of belief in religion is something I’ve thought about a lot. I was pretty Catholic until age 16. I really liked Catholicism but I couldn’t deal with the belief part–I remember hearing a reading in Mass about Thomas doubting that Jesus had risen from the dead, and feeling terrible because I found the whole resurrection thing a bit implausible and obviously that was Wrong.
When I told my mom that I didn’t want to go to Mass anymore because I was an atheist, she responded, “What you believe is your own business! That doesn’t mean it’s okay to stop going to Mass.” I found this very confusing at the time.
I had a mild nü-atheist phase that I got over by 19 or so, and now I daydream about getting married in a church and having my kids baptized and being a ~religious but not spiritual~ Catholic. But like … atheism is still a sin, at Mass you’re still supposed to stand up and profess publicly that you believe Jesus rose from the dead on the third day which feels pretty weird to me. I’m not sure how to be Catholic in an authentic way without believing.
(I’m jealous of people who were raised Jewish–it seems easier for them.)