{"id":1146,"date":"2003-05-16T13:52:41","date_gmt":"2003-05-16T17:52:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2003\/05\/16\/1146.html"},"modified":"2003-05-16T13:52:41","modified_gmt":"2003-05-16T17:52:41","slug":"conservative-tenet-12","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2003\/05\/16\/conservative-tenet-12\/","title":{"rendered":"Conservative Tenet # 12"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Your Humble Blogger will get back to the rambling, links, and general Tohu Bohu soon; now it's time for the Conservative Tenets<\/a>\n\n

12. The essential role of religious feeling in man and organized religion in society.\n\n

As usual, we start with definition time: essential, in this case I take to mean (a) positive, and (2) inevitable. That is, our Conservative believes that all men are religious, or, as the Buffy guy said, there are no atheists in Fox shows.\n\n

I don't necessarily believe that religious feeling is essential to humans. I know a few atheists, and I have no reason to believe that they are shamming. I've read plenty of stuff by atheists, and some of it seems reasonable, and sincere, and human.\n\n

Digression: Have you ever wondered who the liberal atheists were that the Religious Right used to rail against in the Eighties and Nineties? Wendy Kaminer<\/a>, herself an atheist, noticed that all her lefty Cambridge (Mass) friends were churchgoers, and that the leaders of the left (such as the Rev. Jesse Jackson<\/a>, Tikkun<\/a>'s Michael Lerner, or Mario Cuomo) were all conspicuously religious. Eventually, in a very entertaining essay, she decides that the Right were fighting a hundred years behind, against H.L. Mencken, G.B. Shaw, and Mark Twain. End Digression.\n\n

Anyway, the question about whether religious feeling is good for people is, as far as I'm concerned, open. I am a believer myself, and it works for me, and there are many others for whom it works as well. There are lots of others, for whom religious is a spur to violence and intolerance, and yet others for whom religious feeling is not strong, and spurs them to nothing much. I can't say I'm a better person for my religious feeling; although I do try to use my religion to improve myself, in an alternate universe where I remained resolutely atheistic, my Science Fiction Twin might well have been more successful at it.\n\n

The role of organized religion in society is equally open to question; certainly, organized religions have spurred masses to both magnificent achievements and abominable atrocities; balancing one against the other, to paraphrase Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., is like trying to figure out whether ice cream cures the clap (OK, it isn't, but I came across the line today, and adore it).\n\n

Is it wimping out to say that religious feeling in man, and organized religion in society are unlikely to be essential in the sense that one can't imagine a functional human without religious feeling or a functional society without organized religion, and that they are likely to be helpful in some cases, harmful in others, and is generally unpredictable and ineffable?\n\n

Thank you,
\n-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Your Humble Blogger will get back to the rambling, links, and general Tohu Bohu soon; now it’s time for the Conservative Tenets 12. The essential role of religious feeling in man and organized religion in society. As usual, we start…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[201],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1146","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-navel-gazing"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1146","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1146"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1146\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1146"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1146"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1146"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}