Maverick Philosopher

Idolatry and Atheism

Substack wanted me to re-post this entry from four years ago. 

Share an old post

You originally published "Idolatry and Atheism" 4 years ago. Consider sharing it again with your readers. Sharing relevant old posts is a great way to engage your audience who might not have seen them already without having to create new content.

So I did despite the fact that they miscounted: it was only three years ago. No matter, it still reads well and speaks truth.  See if you don't agree.

Earth Day 2024

Substack latest.

Idolatry, Desire, Buddha, Causation, and Malebranche

Substack latest.

Does causation have a moral dimension?

This upload was 'occasioned' (all puns intended) by my meeting with the amazing Steven Nemes yesterday at Joe's Real BBQ in charming old town Gilbert. Among the topics we discussed were idolatry, desire, and Buddhism.

He strode up, gave me a hug, and handed me three books he has recently published. A veritable writing machine, he's out-Fesering the phenomenal Ed Feser. And it's good stuff. I dove into his  Trinity and Incarnation this morning and will be discussing in future posts the shift in his views from orthodox or what he calls catholic (lower-case 'c') Christianity to a position reminiscent of Advaita Vedanta he calls "Qualified Monism."

Pet Love as Idolatry?

Problems of attachment and grief.

Substack latest.

The Paradox of the Misanthropic Naturalist Animal Lover

Top of the Stack. It concludes:

You may recall the case of  Timothy Treadwell, who camped among grizzlies, and whose luck ran out. 

In an Outside article, the author, Doug Peacock, reports that Treadwell "told people he would be honored to 'end up in bear scat.'" And in his last letter, Treadwell refers to the grizzly as a "perfect animal." There are here the unmistakable signs of nature idolatry. Man must worship something, and if God be denied, then an idol must take his place, whether it be nature with its flora and fauna, or money, or sex, or the Revolution, or  some other 'icon.'

Deny God, devalue man, and end up bear shit. Way to go 'man.' 

Simone Weil on False Gods

Over at Substack. If you haven't made the acquaintance of Simone Weil, may I introduce you?

Can an Atheist be an Idolater?

Substack latest.

Simone Weil on False Gods

Despite her infuriating extremism, Simone Weil may well be the purest incarnation of religious sensibility in the twentieth century. "It's not up to us to believe in God, but only not to grant our love to false gods." As Weil understands, essential to genuine religion, though not exhaustive of it, is the realization that nothing here below can satisfy us, and that the things we zealously pursue as if they could satisfy us are false gods. The following statement of Weil's is exactly right:

First, not to believe that the future is a place capable of fulfilling us. The future is made of the same stuff as the present. We well know that what we have that is good, wealth, power, esteem, knowledge, love of those we love, prosperity of those we love, and so on, does not suffice to satisfy us. But we believe that the day when we will have a little more, we will be satisfied. We believe it because we are lying to ourselves. For if we really think about it for a while we know it's false. Or again if we are suffering affliction, we believe that the day when this suffering will cease, we will be satisfied. There again we know it's untrue; as soon as we have gotten used to the cessation of suffering we want something else.

More here.

A Cure for Infatuation?

One of the very best is marriage. 

Infatuation is a form of idolatry that cannot last long in a marriage. Marriage cures it. That's an argument for marriage. There was no cure for Don Quixote's romantic fantasies because their object, the fair Dulcinea del Toboso, existed only in his imagination.*

But while infatuation lasts, it is blissful. One is made silly, often harmlessly so. One walks on air and can think of nothing but the beloved. The moon hits your eye like a bigga pizza pie. The world starts to shine like you've had too much wine. So smitten was I in the early days of my relationship to the woman I married that I sat in my carrel at the university one day and just thought about her for eight hours straight when I was supposed to be finishing an article on Frege. Life is both love and logic. But sometimes hot love trumps cold logic.

The best marriages begin with the romantic transports of infatuation, but a marriage lasts only if the Rousseauian transports are undergirded by good solid reasons of the big head without interference from the heart or the little head. The love then matures. Real love replaces illusory idealization. The big head ought to be the ruling element in a man.

It takes an Italian to capture the aforementioned romantic transports, and Dean Martin (Dino Crocetti) does the job well in the schmaltzy That's Amore. 

Il Mio Mondo is a good expression of the idolatry of infatuation.  Cilla Black's 1964 rendition of the Italian song is You're My World.

But whence the idealization, the infatuation, the idolatry?  And why the perennial popularity of silly love songs? What we really want in the deepest depths of the heart no man or woman can provide.  That is known to all who know their own hearts and have seen through the idols.  What we want is an infinite and eternal love.  This infinite desire may have no object in reality. Arguments from desire are not rationally compelling.

But given the fact of the desire, a fact that does not entail the reality of its object, we have what we need to explain the idealization, the infatuation, and the idolatry of the sexual other. We substitute an immanent object for Transcendence inaccessible.

_____________________________

*The great novel of Miguel Cervantes is a work of fiction. And so both Don Quixote/Quijote and Dulcinea are fictional characters. But the first is posited as real within the fiction while the other is posited as imaginary, as Don Quixote's fiction, even if based upon the posited-in-the-fiction real Aldonza Lorenzo. Herewith a bit of grist for the mill of the philosophy of fiction. The real-imaginary distinction operates within an imaginary construct.

 

The Idolatry of the Transient

It is because we want more than the transient that we cling to it, as if it could substitute for the More that eludes us. And so in some we find an inordinate love of life, a mad clinging to what cannot last and which, from the point of view of eternity, ought not last. I have Susan Sontag and Elias Canetti in mind.

The mature man, at the end of a long life, having drunk to the lees the chalice  of mortal existence, ought to be prepared bravely to shed the mortal coil like a worn-out coat and sally forth into the bosom of nonbeing, or into regions of reality glimpsed but not known from the vista points of the sublunary trail the end of which is in sight.  

An Excuse for Idolatry?

The Transcendent being inaccessible, we accept substitutes.

Berdyaev: Communism as a Form of Idolatry

David Horowitz, Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey, Touchstone, 1997, p. 55:

After the Russian Revolution of 1905, the philosopher Nicholas Berdyaev analyzed communism as a form of idolatry in a way that proved to be prophetic. Berdyaev traced the origins of what he called the Marxist “heresy” back to the tower of Babel. In that story, people had tried to achieve their own redemption — without a transcendent God — by building a ladder to heaven. Communists had a similar ambition. They had projected onto fallible beings godlike powers that would enable them to overcome their human fate. In do so, Berdyaev warned, the communists had created demons they would not be able to control.

"Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread"

This is another topic that it would have been great to discuss with Dale Tuggy during his visit thereby bringing my supposed 'gnosticism' into collision with his supposed 'spiritual materialism.'  The problems are very difficult and I do not claim to have the answers.  The first thing and the main thing, as it seems to me, is to cultivate a deep appreciation of the issues and their difficulty.

.................................................

I tend to look askance at petitionary prayer for material benefits. In such prayer one asks for mundane benefits whether for oneself, or for another, as in the case of intercessory prayer. In many of its forms petitionary prayer borders on idolatry and superstition, and in its crassest forms it crosses over. A skier who prays for snow, for example, makes of God a supplier of mundane benefits, as does the person who prays to win the lottery.  Worse still is one who prays for the death of a business rival.  When Paul Tibbets, Jr. took off in the Enola Gay on his mission to Hiroshima in August of 1945, a Catholic priest blessed his mission, petitioning God for its success.  I'll leave you to think about that.

Perhaps not all petitionary prayer for mundane benefits is objectionable.  Some of it simply reflects, excusably,  our misery and indigence.  Did not Christ himself engage in it at Gethsemane?  But much of it is objectionable.  What then should I say about the "Our Father," which, in the fourth of its six petitions, appears precisely to endorse petitionary prayer for material  benefits?

The other five petitions in the Pater Noster are either clearly or arguably prayers for spiritual benefits.   In a spiritual petition one asks, not for physical bread and such, but for things like acceptance, equanimity, patience, courage, and the like in the face of the fact that one lacks bread or has cancer. "Thy Will be done." One asks for forgiveness and for the ability to forgive others. One prays for a lively sense of one's own manifold  shortcomings, for self-knowledge and freedom from self-deception. One prays, not to be cured of  cancer, but to bear it with courage. One prays for the ability to see one's tribulations under the aspect of eternity, or at least with the sort of detachment with which one contemplates the sufferings of others. 

The fourth petition, "Give us this day our daily bread," translates the Biblia Vulgata's Panem nostrum quotidianum da nobis hodie which occurs at Luke 11:3.

At Matthew 6:11, however, we find Panem nostrum supersubstantialem da nobis hodie, "Give us this day our supersubstantial bread." 'Supersubstantial' suggests a bread that is supernatural, beyond all sublunary substances, and beyond all creatures. To ask for this heavenly bread is to ask for a 'food' that will keeps us spiritually alive.

For a long time I perhaps naively thought that 'daily bread' had to refer to physical bread and the other necessities of our material existence.  So for a long time I thought that there was a tension, or even a contradiction, between 'daily bread' and 'supersubstantial bread.'  A tension between physical bread and meta-physical bread. 

But one morning I stumbled upon what might be the right solution while reading St. John Cassian.  The same bread is referred to by both phrases, and that same bread is spiritual or supersubstantial, not physical.  'Supersubstantial' makes it clear that 'bread' is to be taken metaphorically, not literally, while 'daily' "points out the right manner of its beneficial use." (Selected Writings, p. 30)  What 'daily' thus conveys is that we need to feed upon spiritual bread every single day.  On this reading, the fourth petition is as spiritual as the others, and the whiff of superstition and idolatry that I found offensive is removed.*

This reading also has the virtue of cohering nicely with Matthew 4:4 according to which man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.  Man lives, not by physical bread, but by meta-physical 'bread.'

"Give us this day our daily bread" is thus a request that we be supplied on a daily basis with spiritual bread that we need every day.  And since we need it every day, we must ask for it every day. But who needs it?  Not the bodily man, but the "inner man" says Cassian.  The inner man is the true man. 'Inner man' is a metaphor but it indicates a literal truth: that man is more than an animal. Being more than an animal, he needs more than material sustenance. 

Addendum on the Literal and the Metaphorical

Here is a question that vexes me.  Are there literal truths that cannot be stated literally but can only stated or gotten at metaphorically?  Can we state literally what a man is if he is more than an animal? Or must we use metaphors?

"Man is spirit."  Isn't 'spirit' a metaphor?  "Man has a higher origin."  'Higher' is metaphorical.  "Man is made by God in his image and likeness."  Aren't 'made,' 'image,' and 'likeness' metaphors?

I once heard a crude and materialistic old man say that if man is made in God's image, then God must have a gastrointestinal tract.  I tried to explain to the man that 'image' is not to be taken in a physical sense but in a spiritual sense.  But I got nowhere as could have been expected:  anyone who doesn't understand right away the spiritual sense of 'made in God's image' displays by that failure to understand an incapacity for instruction.  It is like the student who doesn't get right away what it means to say that one proposition follows from another, and thinks that it refers to a temporal or a spatial relation. 

The question is whether the spiritual sense can be spelled out literally.

___________________

*  For Simone Weil, "Christ is our bread." We can have physical bread without eating it; we cannot have spiritual bread without  'eating' it: the having is the 'eating' and being nourished by it. This nourishing is the "union of Christ with the eternal part of the  soul." (Waiting for God, p. 146) The fourth petition of the Pater Noster, then, is the request for the union of Christ with the eternal part of the soul. It has nothing to do with a crass and infantile demand to be supplied with physical food via a supernatural means.

Patriotism and Nationalism: Dispelling Some Confusions

Robert F. Gorman:

St. John Paul II, addressing the themes of nation, nationality, and patriotism, stated: “It seems that nation and native land, like the family, are permanent realities. In this regard, Catholic social doctrine speaks of ‘natural’ societies, indicating that both the family and the nation have a particular bond with human nature, which has a social dimension.” Contrasting patriotism to nationalism, he noted that the former “is a love for one’s native land that accords rights to all other nations equal to those claimed for one’s own. Patriotism, in other words, leads to a properly ordered social love.” Nationalism, on the other hand, privileges one’s own country and thus can be a disordered and unhealthy form of idolatry.

There is a sense in which nationalism privileges one's own country, but it is a perfectly innocuous privileging.  That one's country comes first is as sound an idea as that one's family comes first: each family has the right to prefer its interests over the interests of other families.  If my wife becomes ill, then my obligation is to care for her and expend such financial resources as are necessary to see to her welfare.  If this means reducing my charitable contributions to the local food bank, then so be it. Whatever obligations I have to help others 'ripple out' from myself as center, losing claim to my attention the farther out they go, much like the amplitude of waves caused by a rock's falling into a pond diminishes the farther from the point of impact. Spouse and/or children first, then other family members, then old friends, then new friends, then neighbors, and so on.

The details are disputable, but not the general principle.  The general principle is that we are justified in looking to our own first. 

The main obligation of a government is to protect and serve the citizens of the country of which it is the government. It is a further question whether it has obligations to protect and benefit the citizens of other countries.  That is debatable. But if it does, those obligations are trumped by the main obligation just mentioned.  I should think that a great nation such as the USA does well to engage in purely humanitarian efforts such as famine relief.  But such efforts are supererogatory.

Can nationalism  "be a disordered and unhealthy form of idolatry"?  As opposed to what? An ordinate and healthy form of idolatry?  Idolatry is bad as such.  And I am sure the author would agree, and that if he had been more careful he wouldn't have written such a bad sentence.

Why should nationalism lead to idolatry?  Does putting one's family first over other human groups lead to the idolatry of one's own family? No.

"America first!" is a special case of 'Country first!"  But there is nothing idolatrous about the former or the latter.  Every country or nation is justified in preferring its interest over those of other countries. The reference class is countries, not everything.   An enlightened nationalism does not place country over God, thereby making an idol of country.

Note the order of the words in pro deo et patria.

The opposite of nationalism is globalism or internationalism whose main inspiration in the last couple of centuries has been godless communism which better earns the epithet 'idolatrous.' 

Earth Day 2018

Maverick Philosopher loves Earth with an ordinate love but doesn't celebrate anything as politically correct as Earth Day.  Maverick Philosopher celebrates critical thinking.  So he refers you to William Cronon's The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.  A rich and subtle essay.  Excerpt:

Many environmentalists who reject traditional notions of the Godhead and who regard themselves as agnostics or even atheists nonetheless express feelings tantamount to religious awe when in the presence of wilderness—a fact that testifies to the success of the romantic project. Those who have no difficulty seeing God as the expression of our human dreams and desires nonetheless have trouble recognizing that in a secular age Nature can offer precisely the same sort of mirror.

To put (roughly the same)  point with aphoristic pithiness: Nature for the idolaters of  Earth is just as much an unconscious anthropomorphic projection as the God of the Feuerbachians.

Thus it is that wilderness serves as the unexamined foundation on which so many of the quasi-religious values of modern environmentalism rest. The critique of modernity that is one of environmentalism’s most important contributions to the moral and political discourse of our time more often than not appeals, explicitly or implicitly, to wilderness as the standard against which to measure the failings of our human world. Wilderness is the natural, unfallen antithesis of an unnatural civilization that has lost its soul. It is a place of freedom in which we can recover the true selves we have lost to the corrupting influences of our artificial lives. Most of all, it is the ultimate landscape of authenticity. Combining the sacred grandeur of the sublime with the primitive simplicity of the frontier, it is the place where we can see the world as it really is, and so know ourselves as we really are—or ought to be.

One recalls the case of Timothy Treadwell  who camped among grizzlies, and whose luck ran out. This piece from Outside magazine tells the grisly tale. 

In the Outside article, the author, Doug Peacock, reports that Treadwell "told people he would be honored to 'end up in bear scat.'" And in his last letter, Treadwell refers to the grizzly as a "perfect animal."

There are here the unmistakeable signs of nature idolatry. Man must worship something, and if God be denied, then an idol must take his place, whether it be nature, or money, or sex, or the Revolution, or some other 'icon.'

The Paradox of the Misanthropic Naturalist Animal Lover

In the Judeo-Christian tradition, man and man alone among living things has a higher origin and a higher destiny. Made in the image and likeness of God, and the only creature so made, he comes from God and is called to return to God for his ultimate felicity and fulfillment. He is, to be sure, an animal, but one called to theosis and thus an animal qualitatively different from every other type of animal. 

In that now languishing tradition, man had a calling, a vocation.

But God is dead, culturally speaking, at least among the the elites of the West, and since 1859 the qualitative superiority of the human animal is no longer much believed in. Man is back among the animals, 'in series' with them, just another product of evolution, whose origin is measly and whose destiny is extinction.  Man on a naturalist construal is at best quantitatively superior to his non-human progenitors.

Now consider a naturalist about the human species who is also a misanthrope and an animal lover. He hates man while loving animals even though he holds that man is just an animal. He hates man because he is destroying the earth and the flora and fauna upon it.

There is something paradoxically selective about our naturalist's misanthropic love of animals. He is out to save the whales but doesn't give a rat's ass about prenatal human animals . . . . He loves animals except for the species of animal of which he is a specimen.

The misanthropy goes together with nature idolatry.

Unable to worship God, and unable to appreciate man's greatness, he makes a god of nature and its irrational beasts.

You may recall the case of  Timothy Treadwell, who camped among grizzlies, and whose luck ran out. 

In an Outside article, the author, Doug Peacock, reports that Treadwell "told people he would be honored to 'end up in bear scat.'" And in his last letter, Treadwell refers to the grizzly as a "perfect animal." There are here the unmistakable signs of nature idolatry. Man must worship something, and if God be denied, then an idol must take his place, whether it be nature with its flora and fauna, or money, or sex, or the Revolution, or  some other 'icon.'

Deny God, devalue man, and end up bear shit. Way to go 'man.' 

Is 'Trumpism' a Heresy?

This is so stupid as to be beyond belief:

President Donald Trump exudes an ideology of "America first." There's only one problem for orthodox Christians, however -- the nation may never come first, because in first place must always be Jesus Christ and his Gospel. In that sense, "Trumpism" is actually a heresy.

Exudes?  Does the author know what this word means?  Misuse of language is a tell-tale sign of a 'liberal.'

I hope to say more later, but for the nonce, the following must suffice.

America First has as as little to do with national idolatry as it does with chauvinism or nativism or isolationism or racism. The basic idea is that the main obligation of a government is to protect and serve the citizens of the country of which it is the government. It is a further question whether it has obligations to protect and benefit the citizens of other countries. That is debatable. But if it does, those obligations are trumped by the main obligation just mentioned.  I should think that a great nation such as the USA does well to engage in purely humanitarian efforts such as famine relief. Such efforts, however, are secondary and arguably supererogatory.

See my America First for the fuller statement of which the foregoing is a slightly redacted excerpt.

Related articles

Is He Your Prophet?

Earth Day 2015: Earth as Idol

Maverick Philosopher doesn't celebrate anything as politically correct as Earth Day.  Maverick Philosopher celebrates critical thinking.  So I refer you to William Cronon's The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.  A rich and subtle essay.  Excerpt:

Many environmentalists who reject traditional notions of the Godhead and who regard themselves as agnostics or even atheists nonetheless express feelings tantamount to religious awe when in the presence of wilderness—a fact that testifies to the success of the romantic project. Those who have no difficulty seeing God as the expression of our human dreams and desires nonetheless have trouble recognizing that in a secular age Nature can offer precisely the same sort of mirror.

To put (roughly the same)  point with Maverickian aphoristic pithiness: Nature for the idolaters of the earth is just as much an unconscious anthropomorphic projection as the God of the Feuerbachians.

Thus it is that wilderness serves as the unexamined foundation on which so many of the quasi-religious values of modern environmentalism rest. The critique of modernity that is one of environmentalism’s most important contributions to the moral and political discourse of our time more often than not appeals, explicitly or implicitly, to wilderness as the standard against which to measure the failings of our human world. Wilderness is the natural, unfallen antithesis of an unnatural civilization that has lost its soul. It is a place of freedom in which we can recover the true selves we have lost to the corrupting influences of our artificial lives. Most of all, it is the ultimate landscape of authenticity. Combining the sacred grandeur of the sublime with the primitive simplicity of the frontier, it is the place where we can see the world as it really is, and so know ourselves as we really are—or ought to be.

Related: Timothy Treadwell and Nature Idolatry.  (Treadwell was the romantic fool who camped without protection among grizzlies in Alaska, thought it acceptable to end up bear scat, and did, along with his girl friend.)

Idolatry and Atheism

If God exists and you worship anything in his place, then that thing is a false god and you are an idolater.  But if God does not exist, and you worship anything at all, then you are also an idolater.  For idolatry entails worshipping something unworthy of worship, and if God does not exist, then nothing is worthy of worship. 

Now atheists typically pride themselves on 'going one god further.'  Thus they typically say to the Christian,"You reject all gods but the Christian god; we just go one god further." So, consistently with his atheism, an atheist cannot worship anything.  If he makes a clean sweep with respect to all gods, then he cannot make a god of sex, power, money, science, the Enlightenment, the state, the withering away of the state, the worker's paradise, the atheist agenda, nature, himself, his mortal beloved, not to mention golf and Eric Clapton.

A consistent atheism may prove to be  a difficult row to hoe.  The atheist will be sorely tempted to fall into idolatry, making a god of nature, for example, as some environmentalists do, or of science, or of the enlightenment project, or of the 'crusade' against Christianity or religion generally.  He must also avoid nihilism, the denial of value to everything. The atheist must find meaning in a world in which nothing is absolute, nothing holy, nothing worthy of total commitment.  Nice work if you can get it.

Can one live a meaningful life without God and without idols?  Without an Absolute and without illicitly absolutizing anything relative?  I don't know.  I suspect the atheist will fall into some sort of idolatry and end up worshipping nature or the state or something else obviously unworthy of worship.

Can an atheist live life to the full, keeping up the strenuous mood, falling neither into idolatry nor into nihilism? William James (1842-1910) would, I think, demur.  In  "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral
Life,' we read:

The capacity of the strenuous mood lies so deep down among our natural human possibilities that even if there were no metaphysical or traditional grounds for believing in a God, men would postulate one simply as a pretext for living hard, and getting out of the game of existence its keenest possibilities of zest.

Related articles

The Atheist

The New Atheism is Old Hat

Overbelief and Romans 1: 18-20

Religion and Superstition

Julian Baggini asks: Can a religion survive being stripped of its superstitions?

Baggini does not tell us explicitly what he understands by  'superstition,' but the context suggests that he takes the term to apply to any and all supernatural elements in a religion, whether these be beliefs, practices, or posits such as God and the soul.  The supernatural, in turn, is anything beyond or 'outside of' the system of space-time-matter, or anything that makes reference to such things.   God conceived of as a bodiless person, as in mainstream Western monotheism,  would then count as a supernatural being.  Accordingly, belief that such a person exists would count as a superstitious belief, and prayer in all its forms (petitionary, intercessory, contemplative, etc.) would count as a superstitious practice.

Supposing (counterfactually) that this is true, one might be tempted to make the journey to the East in quest of a religion free of superstition.  One of Baggini's points is that Buddhism as actually practiced by millions is rife with it, as witness motorized prayer wheels, etc.  Baggini's main thesis is that a religion stripped of supernatural elements ceases to be a religion.  A Buddhism naturalized, a Buddhism disembarrassed of all such elements, is no longer a religion but something acceptable to secularists and atheists, "a set of beliefs and practices to cultivate detachment from the impermanent material world and teach virtues such as compassion and mindfulness." 

Baggini's claim is that what is specifically religious about a religion are its superstitious beliefs, practices, and posits.  To put it another way, every religion is essentially superstitious.  But of course 'superstitious' is an adjective of disapprobation: a superstitious belief is  a false or groundless belief; a supersitious practice is one that is ineffectual; a superstitious posit is one that does not exist.  So in claiming that religion is essential superstitious, Baggini is claiming that it is essentially false, ineffectual, and devoid of reference to reality.

Of course, I disagree.  For one thing, I reject what Baggini assumes: naturalism.  But I also disagree because he rides roughshod over a fairly elementary distinction.

There is religion and there is pseudo-religion.  Superstition is pseudo-religion.  That adherents of religions are often superstitious in their beliefs and practices is undeniable.  But to the extent that they are superstitious they are pseudo-religious.

Let's consider an example. A believer places a plastic Jesus icon on the dashboard of her car. It seems clear than anyone who believes that a piece of plastic has the power to ward off automotive danger is superstitious. A hunk of mere matter cannot have such magical properties. Superstition in this first sense seems to involve a failure to understand the causal structure of the world or the laws of probability. A flight attendant who attributes her years of flying without mishap to her wearing of a rabbit's foot or St. Christopher's medal is clearly superstitious in this first sense. Such objects have no causal bearing on an airplane's safety.  It is magical thinking to attribute to bits of plastic and metal the powers the superstitious attribute to them.

But no sophisticated believer attributes powers to the icon itself, or to a relic, or to any material thing qua material thing. The sophisticated believer distinguishes between the icon and the spiritual reality or person it represents.  

Well, what about the belief that the person represented will ward off danger and protect the believer from physical mishap? That belief too is arguably, though not obviously, superstitious in a second and less crass sense. Why should the Second Person of the Trinity care about one's automotive adventures? Does one really expect, let alone deserve, divine intervention for the sake of one's petty concerns? How can religion, which is about metanoia -- change of mind/heart -- be justifiably hitched to the cart of the mundane ego?

I don't think it can be denied that much petitionary and intercessory prayer is superstitious.   Someone who prays to win the lottery is superstitious  as is a person who, upon winning, exclaims, 'There is a God after all.'   The nauseating egotism of such a remark is antithetical to genuine religion.  But suppose I pray for a friend who has contracted a deadly disease.  I pray, not for some divine intervention into the course of nature, but that he be granted the courage to endure his treatments, and should they fail, the courage to accept his death with hope and trust and without rancour or bitterness.  It is not obvious that such an intercessory prayer (or a similar petitionary prayer should I be the sick man) is superstitious despite its invocation of a transcendent power to grant courage and equanimity.  'May the Lord grant you peace' is a prayer for a spiritual benefit.  Unless one assumes naturalism -- which would be question-begging--  there is nothing obviously superstitious or pseudo-religious about that.  An even better example would be, 'Let me see my faults as clearly as I see the faults of others.'  Such a prayer is a prayer for the weakening of the ego and to that extent not motivated by any crude materialism.

The sophisticated non-superstitious believer is not trying to achieve by magical means what can only be achieved by material means; he is aiming to achieve by spiritual means what cannot be achieved by material means but only by spiritual means. Perhaps we can characterize superstition as pseudo-spiritual  materialism.

Getting back to the icon on the dashboard:  what if the icon serves to remind the believer of her faith commitment rather than to propitiate or influence a godlike person for egoistic ends? Here we approach a form of religious belief that is not superstitious. The believer is not attributing magical powers to a hunk of plastic or a piece of metal. Nor is she invoking a spiritual reality in an attempt to satisfy petty material needs. Her belief transcends the sphere of egoic concerns.

To sum up.  Assuming that religion necessarily involves supernatural elements, religion and naturalism are incompatible.  So if naturalism is true, then religion is buncombe, a tissue of superstitions.  But there are powerful reasons for rejecting naturalism.  In any case, that all of religion is bunk is rather hard to swallow given its prevalence and usefulness.  (Here one can mount a pragmatic argument premised on the consensus gentium.)  It is a good bet that there is something true and right about a cultural and a symbolic  form that has won the adherence of so many distinguished people over all the earth in all the ages.  But if we are to make sense of religion as a cultural form that has a core of rightness to it, then we need the distinction between religion and pseudo-religion (superstition) -- the very distinction that Bagini clumisly rides roughshod over.  (Can one ride in a clumsy fashion?)

Companion post: Grades of Prayer

 

Idolatry and Iconoclasm: A Weilian Meditation

In one of its senses, superstition involves attributing to an object powers it cannot possess. But the same thing is involved in idolatry. Someone who makes an idol of money, for example, attributes to it a power it cannot possess such as the power to confer happiness on those who have it. So we need to work out the relation between superstition and idolatry.

What is idolatry? I suggest that its essence consists in absolutizing the relative and finite. To make an idol is to take something of limited value and relative being and treat it as if it were of unlimited value and absolute being. Practically anything can be idolized including pleasure, money, property, name and fame, another human being, family, friends, country, the Party, the Revolution.  There are theologians who idolize their idea of God.  

Money, for example, is instrumentally good, and undeniably so. I think it is a plain mistake to consider money evil or the root of evil, as I  argue in Radix Omnium Malorum. But its value cannot be absolute since money is relational in its very nature as a means to an end.

To idolize money, to pursue it as if it were a thing of absolute value, is to commit a philosophical mistake -- even if there is no  God. For only something absolute is worthy of worship, and money is   not absolute. If there is no absolute reality, then nothing is worthy of worship and everything should be treated as relative and finite  including one's own life. If there is an absolute reality, God for example, then everything other than this absolute reality should be treated as relative and finite.

If there is no God, then idolatry is a philosophical mistake. If there is a God, then idolatry is both a philosophical and a religious mistake, and as the latter, a sin.  Man is both an idol-erector and an idol-smasher. Our setting up of idols is rooted in a deep spiritual need to worship, honor, respect, and glorify. We need to look up to something.  But we are limited sense-bound creatures who tend to  latch onto foreground objects in the mistaken hope that they can satisfy us. We think a job, a house, a man, a woman, will satisfy us.   What we want they can't provide, but failing to realize this we succumb to the illusion of attributing to them powers to satisfy us that they cannot have. What is romantic love if not the illusion that possession of man or a woman could make one completely happy?

Idolatry gives rise to iconoclasm. Idol-positing leads to idol-smashing. What is revealed as hollow and unsatisfactory is destroyed in the name of the truly valuable. Both our tendency to erect idols and to smash them derives from our being oriented to the Absolute, our being unsatisfiable by the merely finite. Idolatry is the mistake of absolutizing the relative, infinitizing the finite. Iconoclasm tries to undo the mistake by destroying the would-be absolutes in the name of the true Absolute. It runs the risk, however, of falling into nihilism.  In the twilight of the idols there arises the specter of nihilism, a specter which, despite all his heroic efforts, Nietzsche could not lay.

In Gravity and Grace (Routledge 1995, p. 53), Simone Weil writes:

     Idolatry comes from the fact that, while thirsting for absolute
     good, we do not possess the power of supernatural attention and we
     have not the patience to allow it to develop.

What Weil is saying is that the absolute good is accessible only to inner listenting, inner passivity, an attentive stillness of the mind and heart. But cultivating such attention demands a patience we do not possess. So we create idols to do duty for the transcendent and inaccessible Absolute.

True religion is actually the enemy of idolatry and superstition. One who worships the true God sees the finite as finite and is secure against the illusion that the finite is ultimate. The true religionist is a bit of an iconoclast and indeed an atheist since he denies the God made in man's image. As Weil puts it, "Of two men who have no experience of God, he who denies him is perhaps nearer to him than the
other." (p. 103)

Pet Love as Idolatry? Problems of Attachment and Grief

I buried my little female cat Caissa at sunrise this morning in a beautiful spot in the Superstition Mountains in the same place where I buried my male cat Zeno in October of 2002.    When I buried Zeno, just before leaving the burial site, I prayed, "May we love the perishable as perishable and not idolatrously, as if it were imperishable."  I recalled and repeated the thought this morning.  I think it is important to reflect on the moral and spiritual dubiousness of any excessive love of the finite and transient, especially if the object of one's love cannot reciprocate it except in a highly attenuated and analogous manner.

Related to the idolatry question is the question of attachment. Attachment breeds suffering.  This is not an argument against any and all attachment, but it is an argument against excessive attachment.  One must keep within bounds  one's attachment to what must perish.  A whole-hearted love of what barely exists is surely a mistake.  There is such a thing as inordinate attachment.  Compare Simone Weil: "The objects of our love barely exist."  She's a Platonist, of course, and so if you do not share the Platonic sense of the relative unreality of the transient you are not likely to accept her or my line  of thought. 

How can attachment to something be inordinate?  It is in ordinate when it is out of proportion to the reality/value of the object of attachment. My cat, for example.  I would not be grieving now if I were not attached to my cat, and the question arises whether my attachment is within proper bounds.  If the attachment is within proper bounds, then the grief will be as well.

To hazard a definition of grief:  Grief is a mental state of intense sadness brought about by the death or absence of something, typically animate, to which one has become strongly attached.  In typical cases, grief arises from a physical separation, often abrupt, from an object to which one is mentally attached.  But if the beloved withdraws her love, while remaining physically near, can the lover be said to experience grief?  Or is it a necessary condition of grief that the beloved dies?  Can one experience grief at a state of affairs that does not involve the death or destruction of a particular sentient being such as a pet or a child or a spouse?  "I am grieved at the transitoriness of things," Nietzsche complained in a letter to Franz Overbeck.  Can a fundamental metaphysical structure of the phenomenal world be an object of grief?  Yes, insofar as the transitoriness of things entails the death of sentient beings including those sentient beings to which one becomes attached.  But something less grand than a fundamental  metaphysical structure of the phenomenal world could be the object of grief, e.g., a state of war at a given time and place. So perhaps we should say this:

Grief is a mental state of intense sadness brought about by (i) the death or absence of some particular thing, typically animate, to which one has become strongly attached; or (ii) the unrequiting or withdrawal of the love of the beloved; or (iii) some general circumstance that entails the death or destruction or emotional withdrawal of beings, typically sentient, to which one has become strongly attached. 

I began by speaking of attachment to pets and how it ought to be kept within bounds.  But attachment to persons must also be kept within bounds.  There is an old song by the 'British invasion' artist, Cilla Black, You're My World.  "You're my world, you're every move I make; you're my world, you're every breath I take."  This is romantic nonsense whether or not God exists. The nonexistence of an infinite good could not possibly justify loving a finite good infinitely.  If another human being is your very world, then I say you are succumbing to idolatry even if there is nothing genuinely worthy of worship. 

For characterizations of idolatry, see the Idolatry category.

It is true that that to live is is to be attached: there is no (normatively) human life without attachment.  There are forms of asceticism which seek to sever the root of all attachment, but such a radical withdrawal from life amounts to a refusal to learn its lessons, lessons it can teach only to those who participate in it.  So just as there can be inordinate attachment, there can be inordinate nonattachment.  Nevertheless, no one can live wisely who gives free rein to his attachment, investing the loved object  with properties it cannot possess.

We try to be satisfied with finite objects, but we cannot be, at least not completely or in the long run.  (I should argue that we could not  be satisfied even by an unending series of finite goods.)  Can we adjust our desire so that it will be satisfied by the finite?  Can we learn to accept the finite and not hanker after something more?  Can we scale back or moderate desire?  Not if it is the nature of desire to desire the infinite.  If this is the nature of desire, then it must always and everywhere fall into idolatry in the absence of an infinite object.  The only complete solution to the problem of the insatiability of desire by the finite, given the nonexistence or inaccessibility of an infinite object,  would then be the extinction of desire.  See Buddhism category.

But one could also take the insatiability of desire by the finite as a premise in an Argument from Desire for the existence of God or the Absolute Good.  Schematically: (i) The nature of desire as we humans experience it in ourselves is such that, ultimately, nothing finite can satisfy it completely; (ii) even though the fact of a particular desire by X for Y is no guarantee of the availability of Y to X (Stranded Sam's need/desire for water is no guarantee that he will receive the water he needs/desires), the general fact that there are desires of a specified sort is good evidence of the existence and availability of objects what will satisfy the desires. Therefore, (iii) there exists and is available an Object that will satisfy the desire that is insatiable by any finite object.

That desire is ultimately desire for something beyond the finite is indicated by the fact that when a beloved animal or person dies, the void one experiences seems infinite or indefinite: it is not the mere absence of that particular animal or person.  It is more than a specific absence one experiences in grief, but an absence that is 'wider' than the absence of a particular cat or woman, a sort of general emptiness.  It is the nullity of all things that one experiences in intense grief over the absence of one particular thing.  When a parent loses a child, it is not merely the son or daughter that he loses, but the significance and value of everything. 

This suggests that love of a finite object is at bottom love a of an Infinite Good, but a love that is not aware of itself as a love of such a good, but misconstrues itself as a love wholly directed to a finite object and satisfiable by such an object.  Otherwise, why would the void that is experienced when a finite object is taken away be experienced as a general void as opposed to the specific absence of a particular person, say?  One invests a finite object with more reality and importance than it can carry, which fact is made evident when the object is removed: the 'hole in one's soul' that it leaves is much bigger than it.

These ruminations are of course Augustinian in tenor.  See his Confessions, Book IV:  "For whence had that former grief [the one concerning his friend who had died] so easily reached my inmost soul, but that I had poured out my soul upon the dust, in loving one who must die, as if he would never die?"

The inordinate love of the finite leads to inordinate attachment which then issues in inordinate grief when the object of attachment is removed, as every finite object (including one's own body) must eventually be removed.  We fill our inner emptiness by becoming inordinately attached to objects that must pass away.  When such an objectof inordinate love is taken away, our inner emptiness is brought out of its concealment.  Augustine again: ". . . unjustly is anything loved which is from Him, if He be forsaken for it." (Pusey tr. 57-58)

We ought to love the finite as finite, without investing it with more reality and importance than it can bear.  We ought to love the finite in God, but not as God.   Trouble is, the the finite is all too available for our love and soon elicits an illicit and inordinate love, whereas God or the Good is largely absent and all too easy to doubt or deny.

That's our predicament.

 

Earth Day 2010

Maverick Philosopher doesn't celebrate anything as politically correct as Earth Day.  Maverick Philosopher celebrates critical thinking.  So I refer you to William Cronon's The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.  A rich and subtle essay.  Excerpt:

Many environmentalists who reject traditional notions of the Godhead and who regard themselves as agnostics or even atheists nonetheless express feelings tantamount to religious awe when in the presence of wilderness—a fact that testifies to the success of the romantic project. Those who have no difficulty seeing God as the expression of our human dreams and desires nonetheless have trouble recognizing that in a secular age Nature can offer precisely the same sort of mirror.

To put (roughly the same)  point with Maverickian aphoristic pithiness: Nature for the idolaters of the earth is just as much an unconscious anthropomorphic projection as the God of the Feuerbachians.

Thus it is that wilderness serves as the unexamined foundation on which so many of the quasi-religious values of modern environmentalism rest. The critique of modernity that is one of environmentalism’s most important contributions to the moral and political discourse of our time more often than not appeals, explicitly or implicitly, to wilderness as the standard against which to measure the failings of our human world. Wilderness is the natural, unfallen antithesis of an unnatural civilization that has lost its soul. It is a place of freedom in which we can recover the true selves we have lost to the corrupting influences of our artificial lives. Most of all, it is the ultimate landscape of authenticity. Combining the sacred grandeur of the sublime with the primitive simplicity of the frontier, it is the place where we can see the world as it really is, and so know ourselves as we really are—or ought to be.

 

Simone Weil on False Gods

Despite her infuriating extremism, Simone Weil may well be the purest incarnation of religious sensibility in the twentieth century. "It's not up to us to believe in God, but only not to grant our love to false gods." As Weil understands, essential to genuine religion, though not exhaustive of it, is the realization that nothing here below can satisfy us, and that the things we zealously pursue as if they could satisfy us are false gods. The following statement of Weil's is exactly right:

First, not to believe that the future is a place capable of fulfilling us. The future is made of the same stuff as the present. We well know that what we have that is good, wealth, power, esteem, knowledge, love of those we love, prosperity of those we love, and so on, does not suffice to satisfy us. But we believe that the day when we will have a little more, we will be satisfied. We believe it because we are lying to ourselves. For if we really think about it for a while we know it's false. Or again if we are suffering affliction, we believe that the day when this suffering will cease, we will be satisfied. There again we know it's untrue; as soon as we have gotten used to the cessation of suffering we want something else.

More here.

Environmentalism as Green Socialism and Nature Idolatry

From Jeffrey T. Kuhner, The War on Capitalism:

Environmentalism has very little to do with protecting the environment. It is green socialism. Its objective is to achieve what red communism couldn't: the conquest of capitalism. Instead of central planning and a command economy, we would have a highly regulated, highly taxed bureaucratic corporatism that would stifle economic growth and individual initiative.

Beginning in the 19th century, much of the Western intelligentsia lost faith in God. The 20th century saw numerous attempts - Marxism, fascism, national socialism -- to construct a society without God. They failed. Now the West's liberal elites are seeking to infuse the radical secular project with new meaning and purpose -- man's salvation through the worship of Gaea, Mother Earth.

The green movement is a form of pantheism. It hopes to sacrifice prosperity, abundance and wealth at the altar of a false god.

Mr. Obama is its prophet of doom. And America is its victim.

Timothy Treadwell and Nature Idolatry

In the weight room one day I made the acquaintance of a man from Alaska.  I steered the conversation onto Chris McCandless and others of the wild and crazy crew who seek Something More in the last American frontier. My interlocutor was not familiar with the McCandless story, but he reminded me of the case of Timothy Treadwell, who camped among grizzlies, and whose luck ran out. This piece from Outside magazine tells the tale. And here is his final letter.

In the Outside article, the author, Doug Peacock, reports that Treadwell "told people he would be honored to 'end up in bear scat.'" And in his last letter, Treadwell refers to the grizzly as a "perfect animal." There are here the ummistakable signs of nature idolatry. Man must worship something, and if God be denied, then an idol must take his place, whether it be nature with its flora and fauna, or money, or sex, or the Revolution, or the crotch-grabbing one man melting pot, or some other 'icon.'

Addenda, 19 August: 

1. Theists need to consider whether they are worshipping the true God or a theological fabrication.  There is the almost irresistible tendency to identify God with one's conception of God.  But the two cannot be the same.  There are various conceptions of God, some better than others; but God is obviously not a conception.  It is easy to succumb to the worship of a product of  the human mind, whether it be an individual product, or a collective product such as the conception authorized by a particular cult or church.

2.  The knee-jerk use of 'icon' throughout the media is a good indicator of contemporary idolatry.  What we need is a new iconoclasm.  Memo to self: develop this 'stub.'

Idolatry, Desire, Buddha, Causation, and Malebranche

What is idolatry? I suggest that the essence of idolatry lies in the illicit absolutizing of the relative. A finite good becomes an idol when it is treated as if it were an infinite good, i.e., one capable of satisfying our infinite desire. But is our desire infinite? That our desire is infinite is shown by the fact that it is never satisfied by any finite object or series of finite objects. Not even an infinite series of finite objects could satisfy it since what we really want is not an endless series of finite satisfactions -- say a different black-eyed virgin every night as in popular Islam's depiction of paradise — but a satisfaction in which one could finally rest. "Our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee." (Augustine) What we really want, though we don't know it, is the absolute good which is goodness itself, namely God. This idea is common to Plato, Augustine, Malebranche, and Simone Weil.