atheism for lent, day 19: covid edition, pt. 4

Today’s AfL content is a seminar by Dr. Peter Rollins, introducing us to the coming week’s topic: a Functionalist Critique of Religion. This would be the negation of religion, the atheistic critique. So far, we’ve had:

• Week 1: affirmation of God as an existing being (life; God is alive) — theism
• Week 2: negation of God as an existing being (death; God is dead) –atheism
• Week 3: negation of negation, taking on all the atheistic arguments at their most mature (undeath; God is both alive and dead; zombies!) — theistic atheism

This has been one full dialectic turn. Now comes Week 4, the second turn of the dialectical dial, in which the negation of negation is the new affirmation that requires a new negation. We’ll be starting with Ludwig Feuerbach, a German anthropologist and philosopher who, Peter says, is the bridge between Hegel and Marx.

Feuerbach is kind of the first to systematically negate the mystics, saying that God and religion aren’t an unknowable out there but a reflection of ourselves. Therefore, says Feuerbach, the predicates (adjectives, descriptive phrases, characteristics) are what’s really important — because most religious people don’t have the ecstatic experiences of the mystics; most religious people need the attributes they ascribe to God: mercy, compassion, love, kindness. Get rid of God, you get rid of humans’ understanding of their own essence, which they have transferred (projected) onto “God.”

If I’m understanding Peter correctly, Feuerbach considers “God” as a sort of mirror of humanity: if we think it’s important to love others, take care of the poor, and fight for the oppressed, then we will have a God who advocates love, cares for the poor, and defends the oppressed. If we hate a certain demographic — say, oh, I dunno, trans folk — then we will have a God who considers that group of people an abomination.

It goes back the idea that whatever we verbally and vehemently advocate or reject is actually a reflection of what we love or hate within ourselves.

“Public intellectuals on YouTube are usually non-dialectic thinkers.”

–Dr. Peter Rollins,
Atheism for Lent,
03/12/2023

A non-dialectic thinker believes: “Side A is all x and Side B is all y, and the side I disagree with must be eliminated.” This type of thinking refuses to see that the thing they disagree with (or even hate) actually resides within them; what they hate is actually a part of themselves they refuse to acknowledge and deal with.

But a dialectic thinker recognizes how both Sides are intertwined in many (possibly inextricable) ways. Once the dialectic thinker identifies this, they can stop fighting themselves and start living in reality.

It’s the difference between swinging from one extreme to another (non-dialectical) and finding healthy, realistic balance (dialectical). In Feuerbach, you find this balance by putting yourself out into the world, — see yourself and judge and understand — then taking yourself back into yourself in acceptance. A dog can’t take a step back and ponder what the essence of dogness might be — but a human, thinking dialectically, can take that step and think about the essence of being human, specifically the essence of that particular human’s self.

Feuerbach says that this is what we do with God: we take a step back and place all of our highest qualities onto God — and if we’re doing it right, we examine and then take those qualities back into ourselves (dialectical). Peter doesn’t say this, and I don’t know if Feuerbach goes into it, but if Mr. Firestream is right, then I think that’s what we do with Satan, too: we take a step back and place all of our lowest qualities onto Satan…and then refuse to take them back (non-dialectical), thereby refusing to acknowledge that essence of ourselves so that we don’t have to deal with that particular truth about ourselves.

In this view, the concept of “Satan” is a technology for avoiding Reality.

Feuerbach didn’t advocate abolishing religions. He called himself “a friend of the theologians.” To him, “God” represents all the vast and glorious potential of humanity, crystallized in a form we can comprehend, which we can then take back into ourselves and live into, creating a new and more beautiful humanity. This is the baptismal water becoming real living water that people can drink, the bread and wine becoming real bread and real wine. Theology dies and then resurrects in a new, wholly tangible, wholly living way.

As far as Feuerbach is concerned, none of us can know ourselves without this process. “I am not who I think I am. I am not who you think I am. I am who I think you think I am.” I construct myself through the experience of being looked upon by you. Who I am, I construct by gazing at the mirror of the other’s face. To Feuerbach, religion is necessary for us to have any idea whatsoever of who we are. Religion is to humanity as the parent is to the child.

Karl Marx, who’s not included in this year’s AfL, critiqued Feuerbach by saying that God and religion can’t tell us about our timeless, eternal essence. Instead, religion is an encyclopedia of the world we live in, an encyclopedia that dons a halo and claims “this is how it’s always been and how it should always be.”

So far, parts of Feuerbach ring true to me…but so does this part of Marx.

The plot sickens.

This week, we will also be looking at Sigmund Freud, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Emma Goldman. They all believe that religion has a function, though not all of them believe that function be to beneficial. They see religion as an avoidance of confrontation with our own freedom. Sartre says we are responsible for everything we believe and everything we do — and since this is a huge burden we don’t want to shoulder, we create religion to carry it for us.

Here, religion is an escape from the responsibility of choice. If we hear “God” telling us to kill our child for the sake of “God,” we still have to make a choice whether this is an angel or a demon and whether we will obey or resist. Either way, we must wrestle with our freedom.

Freud sees religion as an obsessional practice that gives comfort, a public and shared form of obsessive-compulsive ritual. Goldman says religion is nothing but a method for oppression and control. De Beauvoir considers religion an arena in which emancipation and equality are possible, but only on a spiritual or non-tangible level; it never transfers to actual freedom and equitability. Schopenhauer examines religion as a metaphor, a sort of metaphysics for the masses, a shortcut to deeper philosophy without having to go through thousand-page tomes and university-level philosophy courses. What’s important is that the people teaching it (pastors) don’t take it literally but don’t let the congregants know that their noble life is built on a lie.

Chris E., a fellow AfL’23 participant, points out Voltaire’s famous saying: “si Dieu nous a faits à son image, nous le lui avons bien rendu.” This translates as: “If God made us in his image, we have returned it to him.” Basically, God made humanity in his image and we, gentlefolk that we are, have been returning the favor ever since. Voltaire also said that if God didn’t exist, it would be necessary to invent God. There is a need, and we fill it with the Reflection Of Our Essence, which is “God.”

Everything this week is a negation of the mystics: the stuff the mystics think is unimportant, is; whey they think is important, isn’t. I’m excited about this week (as excited as I can get while lost in covid-fog), and also quite a bit intimidated. We shall see how it goes!

XOXO (through a mask, from inside quarantine)