response to ivan's critique
A compelling response to Ivan's famous critique of the alleged goodness of God in Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamosov. I have a feeling I wouldn't get along very well with the article's author -- seems like he'd be quite the social conservative type -- but I confess that I found his analysis quite illuminating. And I also confess that Ivan's critique has troubled me for years and was, indeed, one of the reasons I'd settled on atheism a number of years ago. Lately, I've felt much less settled on atheism, so perhaps I've simply stumbled across the article at a time when I feel more inclined to give it a charitable reading . . .
I still don't believe Dostoevsky's maxim that "without God, everything is permitted", however. I still side with the Enlightenment in this sense: I really do believe, however naively, that cultivating reason leads us in the direction of living more humbly and compassionately, whereas God is more often than not used as an -- or, perhaps, the -- excuse to committ the very kinds of atrocities that so disturbed Ivan.
The change in my thinking, I suppose, is that I'm starting to believe that authentic religion -- that is, religion which hasn't been twisted to suit base political aims that are fundamentally antithetical to the "reverence for creation" and humility which I expect that most religions, to some degree, attempt to instill -- and reason can actually complement one another quite well, that the alleged war between them is merely a convenient strawman for dogmatists on both sides.
3 Comments:
I must say I'm glad that you have come to that understanding. That view is so central to my life right now that it is gratifying that others can reach the same conclusion. There's volumes I could say on the subject so I'll leave it at that.
I did want to mention that one key thing is that even when religion is the excuse for atrocity, that religion is rarely the reason. A professor whose name escapes me did a lengthy study on suicide bombings from the '80s to the present. His findings were that removing an occupying force was the common denominator between almost all bombings and that religion only came up when the religion of the occupying and the occupied were different.
Thank you for the comment, Guru. I think that you make an important distinction -- religion as excuse vs. religion as actual reason. I suppose one could assert the following: acts which can be justified solely through appeal to religion are rarely, if ever, authentically religious acts (rather they are political, sadistic, or . . . but not religious).
Of course this raises the spectre of Kierkegaard's infamous reading of the Abraham and Isaac story -- namely, that the moral authority of the authentically religious transcends and can even contradict the realm of the ethical. I've never been sure what to make of this. I suppose this is where I have to acknowledge myself as a Christian -- I believe that an act can legitimately suspend the ethical if and only the essence of the act is Christ-like love/agape. Which, paradoxically, would mean that Abraham still wasn't justified in his action . . . unless one posits that the difference the appearance Christ makes on this particular aspect of the historical-religious scene is precisely that the Agape replaces whatever preceded it as the basis for a religious suspension of the ethical . . . i.e., though Abraham's action wouldn't be justified post-Christ it would have been justified in the pre-Christian era.
The idea that ethics are impossible without God is an odd one. If actions are performed solely for some reward, they really aren't ethical at all (we could imagine an extremely evil person doing them). It seems to be that all true good relies not on faith in God but rather on an intuition of interconnectedness.
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