Who's fueling America's Wrong Wing? We are. The bullies are using us, distracting us from creating genuine possibilities. Evil is real. It silences us or forces us into passivity. It requires and feeds upon our reactive opposition. The alternative is to laugh at evil-doers' lies and crude authoritarianism. Choose to question and engage. Create and sustain alternatives.
Master of the history and philosophy of religion, James Carse offers these revolutionary insights in The Religious Case Against Belief. Accept his invitation to rethink the relationship between religion and belief and you won't be comfy. You'll be alive.
Jim Carse is not naive about the strengths of what we're up against. Belief systems are self-consistent, certain, comforting and totally closed to external logic or experience. They include any idea or practitioners laying exclusive claim to "The Answer," any dogma that's definitive -- certain, repressive and dogmatic -- rather than generative. His list of examples is long, but here's a start: Nazism, Maoism, Serbian nationalism, American triumphalism. People can choose to believe, or not.
"Isn't that religion?" you might ask. No! he asserts. Genuine religion is about questions, not answers. It invites us to get on with living in the face of an unknowable future -- and the genuine discomforts of uncertainty. It eschews absolutes. It is ineffably beautiful while keenly attentive to suffering. It attends to what's behind language and therefore unspeakable.
This approach to life, Jim Carse believes, accounts for the deep longevity of genuine religions which evolve across millennia and cultures.
Mystery and wonder are what Jim Carse offers. He invites us to be visionaries and poets. (Poets are never believers, he says, the end of poetry is poetry itself!) I'm as charmed as I am informed by his flesh-and-blood examples all the way back to Plato-the-teacher, with his absolutes, in contrast to the braver alternative -- that of student -- exemplified by Aristotle. Who but James Carse would have Aristotle respond to Plato and his dreary cave-world of certainties with, "Phooey!"?
More examples: Jesus and his early followers meant their "new testament" to be generative, not definitive. Or consider warring beliefs among scientists over the "does too/does not" about, among other things, "God". Knowledge has little influence over beliefs, Jim assures us. Better to go for "higher ignorance."
Prof. Carse says that the Gospel writer who has Jesus say "Know the truth and the truth will set you free," was wrong. Instead: "What will set you free is not truth but truthfulness."
* We recorded a third "Paula Gordon Show" with Professor Carse while we were "on the road again" across New England this summer, producing 12 new hours of programming. Between now and when we get this new material ready for you, check out our two earlier "Conversations" with Dr. Carse, and hundreds of other informative, important programs, at PaulaGordon.com.
* James Carse published his deeply influential _Finite and Infinite Games_ in 1968. Happily, it's never gone out of print and if its numbers were aggregated would by now be a major bestseller. In making his case against Belief, he's practiced what he preached, opening a way for all to win.