21st Century Religion

   The Philosopher's Beard blog has a fascinating essay on present-day religion and its discontents. The great thing about this kind of discussion is that it clarifies for me my feelings and views on religion in the west - here, the Judeo-Christian view:

Once upon a time religion was in the world and made the world. Religion made the messy chaotic world legible to human understanding and amenable to human purposes. It fixed things in place, like the stars in the sky and the distinction between men and women. It ordered the flux into the cycle of life: the turning of the sun, seasons, and harvests; birth and death. It explained and justified the social order: why one man is born to wealth and power and another to be a serf. It told us with all the force of a mighty and all-encompassing metaphysics what our lives really meant, and how we should act, think and feel. But no more. Religion has been brought low by its old enemies, philosophy and politics. Religion persists and is even popular. But it is now in the mind, a matter of personal belief projected outwards. In short, religion is now secular.

    I focus here on the trajectory of the Abrahamic style of theological religion (other forms of religiousish behaviour require their own accounts). This kind of religion rests on a metaphysical unification of the divine, the social-order, and nature. It gives us an enchanted world and a guarantee that we know our true place in it. The enemies of theological religion have always been philosophy and politics because both present inherently secular ways of grappling with the nature of the world that bypass religion. Their rise has shattered both enchantment and Truth. Religion still creeps about the place, but in a thoroughly subordinate role.
Indeed, this explains what has happened to religion in the west, and the current frenzied attempts to recall the unified view the past (read, Medieval Europe) offered. Still, as he points out, this attempt is doomed: modern philosophy and science has replaced this all-encompassing role with a more coherent and accurate view of how the world works. In this secular age, belief has been fragmented and individualized - even the fundamentalists are affected (thus their rigidity).

But what we have gained from the loss of unified view where belief was felt as well as known, is, in my view, the possibility of a grander and deeper (and more accurate) experience of reality. It has opened us up to many other possibilities for our worldviews and spiritual experience. I can, for instance, investigate Buddhism without fear of official punishment for heresy or civil prosecution (a "religion" which eschews rigidity and forced unity and actively seeks out and accommodates "chaos"). I can also express my sexuality without the fear of religious-inspired persecution (oppression, imprisonment, torture, the stake). I rejoice in the downfall of the Judeo-Christian hegemony and its reduction to creeping about the place in a subordinate role! Who needs dictatorship and mind-control? We are now free to investigate reality without the blinkers and bridle of religion.