Nones don’t get hung up on whether a religion is “true” or not, and instead subscribe to William James’s maxim that “truth is what works.” If a certain spiritual practice makes us better people — more loving, less angry — then it is necessarily good, and by extension “true.” (We believe that G. K. Chesterton got it right when he said: “It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.”)There are a couple of problems here. One is that the "truth is what works" maxim could mean something fairly specific in a party-line scientific worldview: purported explanations of the world had damn well better be able to actually explain the world, as we observe it, or they're not true. Richard Dawkins likes to use this principle against various fundamentalist religious types, or a certain kind of "relativist" who disputes the notion of any real "truth": when you're at 30,000 feet being hurtled through the sky in a tiny little metal container, it's true that the theories of aerodynamics that predict that a plane with appropriately-shaped wings will be able to fly. Likewise, flu vaccines are based on the predictions made by evolutionary theory, and they work and fundamentalists who "don't believe in" evolution are typically perfectly happy to make use of the fact that they work. Alternately, "the truth is what works" could mean, "one ought to believe whatever it will make one the happiest to believe." This is a very different statement, but it sort of feels like that's the use to which the idea is being put in the above paragraph: who cares if it's true, as long as it makes us feel good to believe in it?
The more serious category confusion is, as I see it, related to this ambiguity. The thing as to which the author is urging pragmatism of this form, that we should like something if it "makes us better people — more loving, less angry," is "spiritual practices." That's different from beliefs. As an atheist who wishes people would stop believing, groundlessly, in some sort of creator-god, I have zero problem with meditation, or yoga, or self-reflection. As to these things, yes, if they make you a better person, more loving, less angry, or however you want to define utility in this context, go right ahead and more power to you. But we're not talking about religion, or at least, we're not talking about theology. In fact that might be a good way to draw the distinction: theology versus spirituality. Religious authorities try to talk about spirituality a lot, and therefore they get people to think that spirituality is an inherently religious concept, and that we atheists are rejecting it as well as theology. We're not, although some of us don't love the word "spirituality." (Personally, I'm fine with it, for basically intranaturalist reasons.)
Theology is a very particular thing. It is, among other traits, a question of objective fact, in theory at least. The two central questions of theology are "is there a god?" and "what happens when we die?" There are, in principle, answers to these questions, answers which are unambiguously (again, in principle) right and which are right for all persons at all times, because they're not about people, they're about the world. The second question is fairly self-explanatory; the first gets confused because people define the word "god" differently from one another. Some people define "god" to mean, ultimately, the laws of physics, because those things are so cool as to evoke a kind of reverent wonder, which like spirituality is the kind of thing religious types have conned people into thinking is the exclusive provenance of religion. If we use "god" in this kind of bland way, then the question is trivial. The kind of "god" as to whom the question is the most interesting is typically an intelligent creator god, plus or minus the ability to meddle in temporal affairs in ways that violate the ordinary laws of physics. (Again on intranaturalist grounds, I have problems with both of these ideas, but that's a different blog post.) If we're talking about this kind of god, though, we again have a simple factual question to which the answer is either "yes" or "no."
Specific theologies will make more concrete factual claims. Certain kinds of Christianity claim that the world was created about 6000 years ago. This is a factual claim, and the fact that the people making it will refuse to acknowledge any evidence to the contrary (i.e., god put those dinosaur bones there to test our faith) does not change this. The claims that Jesus was born to a virgin, turned water into wine, and rose from the dead are all factual claims. They're either true or false; if there were video-tape of the happenings in Judea circa 2000 years ago, we could answer them up or down.
Now the author of this article might not be claiming that we should apply the "truth is what works" maxim to issues of factual belief. Perhaps he only means it in the non-controversial (well, to most atheists anyway) idea that so-called spiritual practices are good if and only if useful. But if he does mean to apply this notion to properly theological questions of fact, then it's a much more radical claim. Do we normally assert that it is good and proper for people to believe factual claims that are in fact false? Or that, in "choosing" which factual claims to believe, we shouldn't care which of those claims are true, but rather only which ones will make us "better people" for believing them? It is precisely this sense in which Richard Dawkins calls belief in god a "delusion," because some people do claim that we should believe it without caring whether it's factually correct, i.e. that we should delude ourselves into believing it. There are fairly good pragmatic reasons for not deluding ourselves in general: if we will ever be called to act upon our factual beliefs as to a certain question, and those beliefs are false, we will tend to get worse results than we would if we had true beliefs.
I suspect that the author of this piece does not ultimately disagree with me, or at least not much. I imagine neither of us is all that fond of religious authorities telling people what to believe, or whom to hate, or whom to kill. Neither of us is particularly receptive to the notion that you cannot have morality, or spirituality, without believing in a certain version of the Judeo-Christian mythology. We both like the Dalai Lama, his affable demeanor, and his pro-kindness philosophy. (Incidentally, if kindness is really the entirety of your religion, then again we're not talking theology and one could say it's not really a religion.) We like rationalism and dislike "raw superstition." (That line would seem to indicate that he's with me about not holding delusional factual beliefs.)
I do think, however, that he likes various ways of defining the theology out of the word "god" much more than I do, and ultimately that's the problem. Using "god" to talk about spirituality, as opposed to theology, confuses the discourse. It helps the religious authorities perpetuate the lie that, in order to have any appreciation of the human spirit, you need also (profess to) believe in a certain set of factual claims, for which there is no evidence, and pay attention to what these specific authorities tell you to do or to believe. The kind of "straightforward, unencumbered, absolutely intuitive" so-called religion this guy is asking for (and incidentally, not all of us love Apple as much as he seems to) would probably have very little theology in it, and be almost entirely spiritual and philosophical. But the thing is, when you take the theology out of religion what you're left with is atheism! And atheism allows us to enjoy the spiritual benefits of yoga, or the philosophical teachings of a Mr. J.H. Christ, without believing in the theological claims Hinduism/Buddhism or Judeo-Christianity, in much the same way that patients can get benefits from a sugar pill even if they know it's a placebo.
So what's the problem with calling all of this stuff religion, and trying to use the word "god" to describe it? Well, it makes it easier for the kinds of religious leaders that we both dislike to claim for themselves a mandate to represent 93% of the populace. That gives these people power and respectability, and allows them to cast those of us who speak out against their ideologies and influence as "radicals" and, in the words of this article, "angry atheists." (Of course we're angry! Have you seen what organized religions do to the people of this earth? If you're not outraged, you haven't been paying attention.) It allows those people to perpetuate the myth that, unless you support their establishments, you can't believe in love or fate or wonder or mystery, that you have to take a nihilistic view of life and the universe unless you profess belief in their capital-g God. This is an enormous social problem! If all of the "nones" that this guy is talking about would just come out and say, yeah, we're atheists, but that doesn't mean we're materialist reductionists or that we want to destroy all notions of morality or whatever other horrible things atheists are supposed to want, that would probably go a long way toward creating a culture of straightforward, unencumbered, intuitive spirituality and philosophy that celebrated doubt, encouraged experimentation, laughed often and well, promoted rationalism, and made us better people, more loving, less angry. We wouldn't even have to tear down all of the churches, since some of them are very nice buildings that could be used for other things, even perhaps for spiritual and philosophical things. But that will never happen until people who don't believe in the theological claims of any of the sundry major religions start admitting that they are atheists, and that their spirituality and philosophy are not religious.
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