This post continues is third part of a series of posts reviewing John Water's book, Beyond Consolation.
It would appear, at first glance, that the unfettered ‘rationality’ that disposes of God and mocks at trusting faith is true enlightenment. Our emancipation from the shackles of believing faith is liberation. After all, isn’t religion always something imposed by authority and tradition? Certainly, as Waters writes, that is the assumption of our secular/agnostic age. Religion moulds, distorts and brainwashes; it is an inherited manacle that ought to be dispensed with. As such, enlightenment and liberation is construed as the ‘rational’ disposal and rejection of religion, that which formerly imposed a benighted ignorance upon us. Religion, especially Christianity, is therefore often caricatured as being intellectually naïve, a belief that rests on no solid evidence; pure fideism and credulity. However, as Waters points out:
“…my religious belief is my very being, my relationship with the entire order of reality. I am connected to everything that ever was and ever will be. I am alive in infinite time and space, which eventually converge in what cosmology calls space-time. This incomprehensible reality is what keeps me alive, keeps me connected, keeps me charged with the human appetites – for hope, beauty, truth, justice, happiness, love, good – for what is called God. This condition pre-exists me. I cannot shake it off. I can deny it, but that won’t change my fundamental structure in nature, which is dependant, which is created, which is charged with a unique destiny, and which is fundamentally mysterious, perhaps most of all to myself” (pp.32)
Fundamentally, as Waters writes, we are contingent, dependant creatures. We are irrevocably shaped by three undeniable truths; we are created (brought into being by a Cause outside of ourselves), dependant (at any given moment we are utterly dependant for our existence on a multitude of factors we are largely unconscious of; molecular and chemical mechanisms, the physical laws that govern reality and so on) and mortal (everyone of us will die; we are transient beings who will pass out of existence.) Religious faith recognises these inviolable truths and it provides us with the vocabulary to effectively articulate and understand them. Our condition of dependency and connectedness to all things pre-exists us, so to speak. We cannot shake it off or liberate ourselves into independence and autonomy. No matter how technologically advanced or ‘liberated’ or ‘rational’ we become, we remain created, dependant, mortal creatures.
We cripple ourselves when we jettison the language of religious faith, for only it can properly understand the human condition in all its frailty and mystery. It connects us to a reality in a way that the straitened, limited, narrow vocabulary of clinical ‘rationality’ never can. Waters notes:
“…It is as if the words to hope with have been stolen from under our noses. There are other things you could say: that we have lost some or all of our faith, or innocence, or gullibility; that we have freed ourselves from the tyranny of imposed superstition; that we are more realistic than our ancestors were. But you also have to conclude that we have become more limited…that our capacity to think of ourselves and our total relationships with time and space has been reduced to ways that render us less happy, less peaceful and oddly enough or perhaps not, less free” (pp.37)
As we pick apart the fabric of Christian faith we have inherited we do not realise that we throttle something vital to our humanity. In the wake of the loss of something so vital, we are left with an alternative account of reality that sources our freedom and significance solely in the material world. As a result, our sense of personal significance, worth and purpose is supplanted from the realm of our relationship to the eternal God. No longer are we defined by what Martin Buber called the “I-Thou” relationship, the transcendent, interpersonal union between man and God. Rather, we become increasingly defined by “I-it” relationships. Having jettisoned a vision of reality that sees all things as charged with the grandeur and presence of the unseen God, we are left with a vision of reality that views matter and chance as the base ground of all things. As such, there is no “Thou” who sustains all things; nothing can mediate the presence and glory of God to us anymore.
What we engage with, then, on a day-to-day base, is purely material. On the basis of a purely scientistic, materialist account of reality even the individual human being is the sum of matter-plus-energy-plus-chance. Of course, we cannot live with such an inadequate view of the human being. We remain haunted by a sense of our own personal significance and worth. Now, the devotion and communion that was reserved at one time for the eternal infinite God is channelled toward ideals (generally the secular, liberal ideal of tolerance) or perhaps, scientific methodology and theory and so on. An ideal or theory is an “it” and so fundamentally cannot slake our profound thirst for communion with a personal and ultimate God who is a “Thou”. As such, in the wake of the “death of God” we are inclined to imbue secular ideals with characteristics that belong only to a personal being. The loss of a religious vocabulary that formerly framed our day-day reality in the context of the infinite and the eternal is a loss that ultimately corrodes and impoverishes our concept of the human being. A culture based on a purely materialist account of reality no longer affords us a way of seeing ourselves as we really are.
Waters suggest that contemporary social discourse is underpinned by a subtle pincer movement that often goes unidentified:
“…Religion, the means by which we once achieved a semantic accommodation with total reality, has been discredited, by a pincer movement between the reductions and abuses perpetrated in the name of religion and the opposing reaction from outside. One side claims the franchise on redemption, the other victory over unreason; but the vast bulk of modern populations are, as a consequence, left unable to claim either. Stripped of their language of absolute reality, our cultures begin to squeeze and oppress us in ways we are incapable of perceiving. What we have lost has been a loss to ourselves, to our essential humanity, and yet we have been persuaded to read it as a liberation…Because we have created for ourselves a culture that in so many ways denies our humanity, we have, each one of us separately, become trapped in a terrifying avoidance of the most unavoidable fact of life: that death is certain…A culture that denies this reality is, to say the least, unkind to those who inhabit it” (pp. 40)
We live in a culture that has unmoored itself from a vision of reality that could accommodate and neutralise the terrifying fact of death: the terminus of all life, the event that signals the swift end of all that we cherish. Death spells despair for a vision of reality that insists that human significance is rooted solely in the material world. Even the atheist feels the keen pinch of nostalgia for a vision of reality that assures the human soul that death has not got the last word. After a debate in UCC with the well-know atheist thinker Peter Atkins, Waters writes:
“As we walked across the campus afterwards, I jokingly said to him that it was somewhat ironic, given his vehemence in the argument, that of the two of us, I alone had a chance of being vindicated. He asked me what I meant. I said, ‘If you’re right, neither of us will ever know, whereas if I’m right, we’ll both know.’ He laughed, fell silent for a moment and responded: ‘It’s much worse than that, I’m afraid, because if you’re right, I’m going to be very happy!’" (pp. 113)
And yet, the insistence remains; our secular/agnostic mindset convinces us that life beyond death is a myth to be debunked at all costs. Tune in to the next post to see how Waters demonstrates that, in fact, the atheistic concept of extinction at death and the prospect of a waiting nothingness beyond death are wholly illogical. Despite their intrinsic irrationality, such beliefs are touted as unquestionable orthodoxy and the epitome of good sense, the ‘rational’ alternative to a naïve belief in everlasting life.
Sincerely,
The Scribbling Apprentice
No comments:
Post a Comment