Ex Cathedra

Greta Christina has an article about what a perfect world would look like.

Do atheists want to sit around bitching and moaning forever, throwing the occasional snark bomb at fundies, or do we want to accomplish something? Given that the current state of affairs, the Corporate States of Jesusland, is awful, what would a better country and world look like?

Greta has some pretty good answers.

Perfect world 1 is that religion simply fades away and disappears. Perfect world 2 is that religions and religious people become tolerant and learn to leave other people the hell alone. For some pretty good reasons, she thinks perfect world 2 is unlikely.

Me too.

I was just reading a history of agnosticism by Bernard Lightman. I’m beginning to understand that liberal religion (a religion that doesn’t want to convert you or kill you) simply doesn’t hold up. Unless you reduce your favorite god to just one more creature in the world, then you can’t know anything about that god by observation and reason; and the god you get from pure reason is so abstract, it barely makes it all the way up to deism, much less theism . The best way, perhaps the only way to know anything about gods (unless you’re a Roman Catholic and are satisfied with Pius X’s encyclical which looks suspiciously like “because I said so”) is through revelation. Since revelation isn’t susceptible to reason, or it hasn’t been so far, revelation is either wholly true or wholly false. Fundamentalism, though I admire neither its exegetical methods nor its practice as a religion, has integrity in that one thing: revelation is either wholly true or wholly false. Cherry picking ends up with a bucket full of cherries, plums, peaches, and dog turds. What’s more, it’s never been done twice with the same results.

If you can show me a god that is susceptible to being known about in the ordinary way that’s an actual god or a god that can be known through pure reason that can actually do something and can exist outside the human mind or the “noumenal world,” (wherever the hell that is), I’ll be pleased to reconsider. But for now, put me down for “wholly false.” The disconnect between dealing with things in the real world and dealing with revealed things is just too jarring. Maybe trying to reconcile the two into one way of looking at the world is too hard.

So, just as Greta said, for different reasons, the halfway house of liberal religion is too hard to build. And as people read their “inerrant” bibles and conclude “this is stupid,” the easiest place to go — perhaps the only posssible place to go — is all the way out.