Why Religion Matters: The Fate of the Human Spirit in an Age of Disbelief
It is the last Sunday of the month and so I am moving into my exploration of religion, making this weeks book Why Religion Matters: The Fate of the Human Spirit in an Age of Disbelief by Huston Smith. So let’s do this.
Now, I had initially planned to read a different Huston Smith book this week but then found this one and thought….yes. Why does Religion Matter? Why should we care. I…am not entirely sure Smith answered the question. Let’s go back to the beginning with that idea.
So, Mr. Smith was born to Christian Missionaries in China in 1919, and religion was part of the air he breathed from the day he was born. And I have no doubt he was a genuinely good man…was because he passed away in 2016. The challenge with this book is…I am fairly certain, without looking too deeply into his biography, that he was a professor of the American University system. What makes me say that? He spends the first half of the book trying to justify the existence of religion to post-modernist philosophy. So he’s trying to explain to the people who run the universities why his passion and meaning is relevant into the 21st century.
Which…I mean, this is a philosophical bent who believed when Clinton said “It depends on what the meaning of is is” was a profound statement, and not the political dodge it was. Because post-modernists try to erase the meaning of all language.
He bends mental gymnastics trying to show that post-modernists have contributed anything other than confusion to the world, granting them the civil rights movement as a win and abolition of slavery…which completely erases the contributions of the very religionists who directly contributed to both of those, namely John Brown, the abolitionist who led the abolitionist rebellions in Bleeding Kansas in the 1840’s, a solid 60 -80 years before post-modernists starting spewing their bullshit upon the planet, and of course the inestimable Reverend Martin Luther King Jr, arguably the greatest voice of the Civil Rights movement, who was decidedly NOT a post-modernist.
But, when you owe your fealty to the university system of 20th century America, which blindly embraced post-modernism, you pretty much have to bend the knee and kiss the feet of the blessed saints Michel Foucault and Jean Paul Sartre. And it’s ESPECIALLY interesting how much he danced around this, given that he ENDS the book with how some of the premier scientists of the 20th century, everyone from Albert Einstein to Werner Heisenberg to J. Robert Oppenheimer….all quoted various religious scriptures in their lives, and acknowledged that there is something completely ineffable about the universe.
Now, having ranted on that topic, what did Smith do well with trying to explain Why Religion Matters.
He did a decent job explaining why religion has steadily been shunted to the background, likening religions loss to a tunnel, composed of equal parts Scientism….not to be confused with Science; Higher education…which was interesting as he recognized that higher education is a contributing problem to the loss of religion in the 20th and 21st century, but failed to make the connection with post-modernist takeover of higher religion and that loss; the Media, and how the media has mocked religion for the better part of a century, going back to the Scopes trial in 1925, and ending with The Law….while Congress may make no law abridging freedom of religion, that means the individual states can and have, he points out the Native American churches fight with I think it was Oregon who banned the use of Peyote, and the US Courts supported the State!
So, I know that Christians have been screaming about a war against Christmas for…god years at this point, but Smith does make an interesting case for ALL religions being under attack….well, except possibly Islam. We all know that following Charlie Hebdo, Islam is untouchable.
And I very much liked how he describes four spiritual personality types: The Atheist, The Polytheist, The Monotheist, and The Mystic. So what does he mean by each of these?
Well, Atheist…he breaks down in Greek, the prefix a means negation: the gnostic knows, the agnostic does not know. Atheism does not know God. The Atheist’s view stops with what is known, and does not allow for what else is out there that is not known yet. It’s a very narrow world view.
The Polytheist…Smith was a I believe Methodist minister, but you can tell he has mad respect for polytheists. Which in his definition is not just someone who believes in many gods, like pagan or heathen religions, but someone who considers the animating force in all life and sees the spirits in all life. As Smith explains “ The Polytheist accepts everything the Atheist takes to be real and adds spirits to it. It is as if the Polytheist were to say to the Atheist, “I see everything you tell me to see. It is only what I see in addition and you do not see that divides us.”
The Monotheists are only slightly more advanced than the Polytheists. As Smith says, polytheists see there is good and evil all around. The monotheists see this too, but believe the good is winning.
The Mystics…I feel like we should all strive to be mystics. As Smith explains, “Value increases as we mount the four levels. The atheists world contains very little value….In sharp contrast, the polytheist’s world teems with value. The monotheist’s believe good has the upper hand….in the Mystic’s worldview, evil drops from the picture and only good remains. There is only God.”
Can you imagine what a blessed world we would all live in if we all only saw the good in each other and only saw the good in the world around us?
This book was a mix bag for me. I think religion does matter because I think it helps us all find meaning in the world around us. He compares the mental and spiritual state of the world as being bookended with two extreme philosophies, the first being Plato’s allegory of the Cave, wherein people are chained their whole lives in a cave and their whole truth is only what is described to them by others, rather than seeing the whole world for what it is…so living in the dark, with only half assed shadows and faulty descriptions to guide us. This is the first bookend. The other, to the far extreme of the philosophical bent, is Friedrich Nietzsche’s madman, running through the streets screaming God is dead! The post-modernists believe this. Which is why I am dismayed by how much time he spends defending postmodernism. Especially as he pulls no punches when decrying equally the horrors of fascism and communism.
I think he would have done better to spend more time explaining how religion helps keep people in the darkest times from drowning in nihilism. Like Viktor Frankl, like Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn, hell even like Jesus himself, who if my half assed remembering of bible stories read while waiting at the dentist office when I was kid is correct, says that he never stopped believing in God our Father, even as he hung dying on the cross. Religion matters because it helps you see the light in the darkness. And I can’t help but feel that, while Smith mentions the old testament, and God saying Let there be light…and there was light….and he saw that it was good….Smith spent so much time trying to apologize to the post modernists for his continuing belief in God, that he failed to explain to those searchers after truth why their own search was not futile.
