And yet Richard Dawkins was surely onto something when he sought to shake religious traditions by their metaphorical lapels and demand that they explain what exactly they are doing when they use religious language. Is it history, proto-science, poetry or something else entirely?
What a silly question. It’s religion. That’s like asking if art is science or history. Things don’t have to be other things; they can be their own things, you know. This absolutist tendency towards reductionism is probably going to be the death of us, since it strips all the nuance out of life.
In the words of GK Chesterton “Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all”. Of course it is. Dawkins just can’t seem to grasp that. At all. So he denounces and dismisses and embarrasses himself. Although he seems to have mellowed a little with age and dropped the peevish nastiness of old.
For liberals, classical and woke alike, the sacral simply does not compute.
William Amos
1 year ago
“And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.”
The everything became a something, became a living man, and dwelt among us conversing, eating, breathing, talking and healing.
That is it. That is Christianity. To fall short of that is Arianism, to exceed it is Gnosticism.
The confusion or elision of God with his Creation is a very old and very persistent heresy. But anyone who opens their Bible on regular basis will be well armed to recognise it when they see it.
Perhaps the most telling thing about Alan Watts (something his fans choose not to discuss) is his dependence on alcohol in his later years. Had his pursuit of enlightenment been a success I doubt if he would have needed to seek euphoria from booze.
As for the nature mysticism of Kingsnorth and Shaw – is religion now to be curated as a form of refined taste to be savoured by a discerning cultural elite?
Indeed. I have a friend – now in his eighties – who actually knew Watts in his West Coast days. One of a breed now almost entirely gone. He used to attend talks that Watts gave from his houseboat home. He said that Watts was hopelessly addicted to alcohol, though a spellbinding talker. So what good does rarified insight do you, if you feel so uncomfortable in yourself that you can’t get through the day sober?
It does bring to mind the notorious Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (aka Osho) who in his later years needed regular doses of nitrous oxide to maintain the feeling of enlightenment. His spellbound followers (I knew a few) were convinced he was a channel for god-like spiritual powers.
and his followers convinced themselves he was doing that to mock American acquisitiveness (“He was, like, trashing the whole materialist capitalist system”).
I get this, but it assumes that faith and spiritually enlightened pursuits are somehow supposed to provide a total escape from all of life’s problems and uncertainties, which isn’t the case.
Watts was an entertaining talker with lots to offer and practises like meditation and communal faith can have real practical benefits, but there is no final answer to life’s ups and downs, or a person’s individual limits.
Plus alcoholism can be very insidious in the way it takes over.
Absolutely, there is no final answer to life’s ups and downs, though many seekers after ‘Enlightenment’ seem to believe that. once attained, it is a permanent condition. Alas it is but a glimpse, which may have a lasting effect, but like everything else in one’s experience, does not endure.
Problems begin when pursuit of the spiritual becomes mingled with psychotherapy. Consider C G Jung’s Analytical Psychology. With its focus on ‘self-actualisation’ it is more a quasi-spiritual cult than a method of healing psychological trauma.
I would hope that there is a total escape from all suffering. And that not having to be a piss-head to live an ordinary life was a pretty early and elementary step towards that.
I don’t know about Shaw, but that is far from Kingsnorth’s purpose.
dasnandakishor.108
1 year ago
It’s no surprise that precisely Watts and Kingsnorth speak of rewilding Christianity yet have both, at the same time, embraced Orthodoxy. This makes their approach more grounded on tradition, unlike previous experiments which might have had their time and place but, as the author points out, turned out to be unsustainable in the long run.
How can one rewild Christianity?. What a presumption. True faith is in accordance with the bible and not subject to man’s ideas. If Christians become weird they have not fully understood the bible.
Don’t forget Holy Tradition. Holy Tradition is the life of the Holy Spirit in the Church. The first Christians did not have a New Testament and had to rely on what the Apostles and the Seventy taught. Heretics have created all sorts of bogus stuff using the Bible. We have to have instruction to interpret it correctly.
I think you mean SHAW and Kingsnorth. But your point is well made.
AC Harper
1 year ago
There are certainly quite a few people who experience “a powerful sense of numinous presence, within nature… “. That is a fact.
What you attribute that sense to is something else entirely and may, or may not, exist. People do tend to feel strongly about the explanations for their experiences though.
I feel a powerful sense of creation that makes me thank God for it even to the point of writing prose about it, but I worship the creator and not His creation.
Which side of the fence would you climb down from if required?
Adam M
1 year ago
This is nice little article. I like many others, became fascinated by thinkers like Watts and McKenna in my late teens / early 20’s but as I grew older started to see the limitations of their philosophies. I think Watts was incredibly gifted but became too attached to the pervasive new age ideas of his time. I found listening to and reading Watts profound in the short term but unable to help me in longer term endeavors.
I think the instincts of modern religious thinkers like Peterson, Sheldrake and Kingsnorth are better, in trying to nudge people back to a less institutional and formal version of Christianity. But without loosing its conservatism and preventing too much ingress of circular eastern religious thought.
Peterson and Sheldrake have helped to decouple science from the latent scientism, that has led many astray philosophically/theologically. Laying the ground to reintroduce them to Abrahamic theology. Sheldrake being in some sense a disciple of Griffiths.
While Kingsnorth, in impressively plain speaking but sophisticated terms. Has plotted a course for liberals to channel their environmentalist yearnings back into a more spiritual and less radical practice.
Johan Grönwall
1 year ago
Reason Christianity is dwindling is that the age of scripture and religious gurus has ended. Humans are no longer in need of guidings coming from the outside but can instead find meaning by connecting directly with the source. Just light a candle and invite Light. Trust that you are an equal and have the same right to peace as any angel does. Help will come.
James Anthony Seyforth
1 year ago
We have to accept that Watts and his like are very unique, just like the Daoist sages, we find they are beyond anything we can really comprehend as a single human being, or they are simply not your average human being. Much like Chuang Tzu is beyond belief but is exhilarating an stilling, Watts is a kind of watery wild mess, quite literally with his alcoholism and his deep dissatisfaction with commitments, but his never ending ability to inspire and play that hide and seek himself is wonderous.
Ultimately these unique people were here to remind of us of the magic of the cosmos, of life and of silence… but what we ought to be attending to ourselves, using their unique fuel and imagination, is community, seeing and hearing the arts, learning and creating in science and philosophy, and finding peace in a disgruntled, bent up world; these things still kind of existed in droves,whilst Watts spoke of his wild things, now we have an ever widening gulf of culture which he could only imagine was coming.
So, can Christianity or any Western institution still do that to our psyche, where is the evidence in countries such as England or UK in general, where is the uniting power to create community and creation? I don’t see it.
Simon Blanchard
1 year ago
Entertaining piece. I think I’m right in saying every human civilisation that ever existed has followed some form of deity. I suspect that belief in a god and an afterlife is an evolved trait in humans because it would have conferred resilience in times of hardship. In itself it’s probably harmless, but of course – humans being humans – it was utilised by the clever seeking to exploit the easily led. Which brings us to where we are today. I’ve said it before, but we’d have been better off sticking to venerating Mother Nature and marking the movements of the moon and stars.
Communist ones do not. And they now have 70+ years of continued existence if you look at China. A hundred or more if you include ones which are no longer Communist.
That excludes those who say Communist leaders and heroes are worshipped in a ‘godlike’ way, which even if true,doesn’t quite get there as a form of equivalence to a religion.
Nature worship wouldn’t have given us the Protestant Work Ethic. It’s fine to look back, but also to note that nature worship has subsisted on a large scale, virtually nowhere, for a reason.
Wicca, which tried to ‘revive’ it in England – off the back of unanswered questions about whether there was anything to revive anyway ?- doesn’t look like it’s going to make it.
Daughter of atheists, “saved” when young, later New Age and now kind of Buddhist, I greatly enjoyed this chronicling of spiritual seeking and explication of what a “wild” Christianity (not simply self-indulgence) might mean. Good questions, left open-ended, which I take as a sign of wisdom. Thank you.
Last edited 1 year ago by Colorado UnHerd
N Forster
1 year ago
Watts was a drunkard, a womaniser, a chancer and a sophist. And he appeals to such people.
I find it quite sad to read about people continually hopping from one flawed paradigm to another, as this article illustrates. Woefully misrepresenting Dawkins doesn’t help either, as if through a lens made deliberately opaque by their own failures.
There’s really no need. I’ll yield to no-one in terms of the absolute sense of the spiritual beauty of being alive. There are hints that some of those the author refers to may have felt it too, but then they ruin it (and themselves) by trying to conceptualise it before suffering paradigm failure. Again, really no need.
That latter point is the source of a great deal of human misery. When will we learn to stop beating ourselves up with it all?
“I’ll yield to no-one in terms of the absolute sense of the spiritual beauty of being alive. There are hints that some of those the author refers to may have felt it too, but then they ruin it (and themselves) by trying to conceptualise it before suffering paradigm failure. Again, really no need”
This is beautifully put and, putting all labels aside for the moment, is also the argument of the Christian classic The Cloud of Unknowing and the starting point of all Christian Mysticism.
As the nameless Midland monk and master of prayer put it : “He can certainly be loved, but not thought. He can be taken and held by love but not by thought.”
What if our fallen intellect, however, finds it too hard to sustain that level of (dis)engagement and so the immaterial sent us a material figure for our eyes to rest upon.
In any event, the final frontier, it strikes me is not ‘out there’ but ‘in here’. Where the immaterial meets the material.
Last edited 1 year ago by William Amos
George Scipio
1 year ago
Humans evolved to live in bands which through language shared beliefs about phenomena they did not comprehend, such as stars, thunder, sudden death, etc. The bands were hierarchical by age and experience — older people had more authority. Often a single person became revered. People dreamed about people who had died — where were they? In an “afterlife”? People sometimes had overwhelming experiences in nature, to which they ascribed huge significance or “meaning”. They taught what they believed to their children, usually within a framework of cause and effect. Something must be “causing” the lightning, etc. Some people were better at stories that explained mysteries. Slowly, all over the world, belief systems crystallised into what some people call religions. All societies have or have had one. Religions cannot be tested — just take it leave it, no matter how nonsensical the assertions. No religion can possibly be true.
Watts and other 20th century Western mystics like Douglas Harding were quite well known in the mid century. Their quests for meaning make good stories, like old stories of the saints. But they were all driven by despair at the obvious collapse of Christianity into being just another belief system. Watts died addicted.
So everyone is asking the wrong question. The real question is not whether any religion is true. The question is why do we have religions. It’s remarkably easy to answer. Now we know that meaning, phenomena, “spirituality” (a kind of feeling), etc., are all essentially empty, “just there!” as Bertrand Russell is supposed to have said, we can relax and enjoy the bizarre, horrific and enchanting dance called “life”. To do so, it’s advisable to find codes of ethics and practices that help reduce suffering and stick to them. Or — life’s a beach and then we die.
Well articulated. “True” seems to me not a useful measure in ultimate matters, though, associated beliefs being unfalsifiable, whether religious or secular (ethics). In practice, “useful” or “helpful” — to self and others — seems a better measure, and might or might not have a religious aspect.
Whenever I hear anyone use terms like “it’s advisable to” I am always put in mind of C.S. Lewis’s quote, “You can shuffle “I want” and “I am forced” and “I shall be well advised” and “I dare not” as long as you please without getting out of them the slightest hint of “ought” and “ought not.”
There’s no morality without reference to a Creator, and no meaning without pursuit of Him. At least Watts was pursuing, or was at some point in his life, before being derailed by Appetite.
Andrew Boughton
1 year ago
Whatever experience lies beyond doors of perception, I certainly like the idea of a Protestant church service with less of whatever pervades it now, and more something else. Maybe include anecdotes from the service in Huxley’s Crome Yellow, or other works beyond the Bible. Like many, I much prefer a good Catholic service, even the formal service seems more natural and real, and that simple gesture at the end, of turning to embrace your fellows on either side does more to make me appreciate religion than just about anything else. Simple.
Sandy Cotton
1 year ago
The notion of wild Christianity is appealing to me but the idea that a turn to Orthodoxy is the way to go is muddleheaded if not moronic at best given on one hand the actual politics of Orthodoxy in the real world today and the over imaginative and implausible fabrication of its pristine past in so called Celtic Christianity.
Keith Merrick
1 year ago
“putting your great and ancient ear to the dark soil of circumstance and listening”.
I would love to find some deeper way of living, probably what some people call ‘spirituality’, and I’m sure I can’t be the only person who finds the modern world a bit rubbish. However, I can’t honestly claim to understand what the above sentence means. It’s certainly poetic but I’d gladly sacrifice the poetry for some plain prose if it would aid understanding.
The fact that such spiritual ideas, like religious texts, are only ever written in a fancy prose style makes me suspect that there is perhaps nothing to them, something that would become evident if you said it in so many words. Perhaps we all have to get used to the idea that life really is this ‘thin’ and tinny.
“Obedience of a Christian Man” by Tyndale is as plain as it comes – especially in criticism. I have heard that Luther’s writing wades into the realm of the obscene in its earthiness though i haven’t read anything by him.
Alix Daniel
1 year ago
Interesting article, thank you Christopher. I have one question though. Did Richard Dawkins ever admit a world with no god would be immoral?
Total misunderstanding – Dawkin’s superficiality was not recognised by large numbers of particularly young people – and he lead them astray.
Rae Ade
1 year ago
Any chance that Right Wing Hippie can do a weekend essay on what they thought of the preceding week’s articles?
Nicholas Taylor
11 months ago
If the world, however complex, is purely material, and however chaotic it appears, is rational, then ‘utter receptivity to the divine’ is listening to one’s own perceptions. Thus ‘the divine’ is necessarily circular, for where else will one find perceptions of anything? “The opposite of faith is not doubt but certainty” says Anne Lamont, but that is a bit of a play on words, and I don’t think it goes far enough. To define ‘receptivity to the divine’ as ‘faith’ is for me a sticking point, because faith by definition squeezes out perceptions, leaving no content whatsoever. The opposite of faith is reality.
Jerry Carroll
11 months ago
As the old gospel song goes, “Gimme that old time religion, it’s good enough for me.”
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And yet Richard Dawkins was surely onto something when he sought to shake religious traditions by their metaphorical lapels and demand that they explain what exactly they are doing when they use religious language. Is it history, proto-science, poetry or something else entirely?
What a silly question. It’s religion. That’s like asking if art is science or history. Things don’t have to be other things; they can be their own things, you know. This absolutist tendency towards reductionism is probably going to be the death of us, since it strips all the nuance out of life.
In the words of GK Chesterton “Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all”. Of course it is. Dawkins just can’t seem to grasp that. At all. So he denounces and dismisses and embarrasses himself. Although he seems to have mellowed a little with age and dropped the peevish nastiness of old.
Dawkin’s world is so very very narrow. Can you put it on toast? Then it doesn’t exist.
Man, think of all the things which you can’t put on toast: axle grease, tyrannosaurs, molten sulfur, Marmite…
“It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.” That’s certainly true of political thought.
It’s not sufficient for our thoughts to bear a relation to reality that they be logical, but it is necessary.
Logic and rationalism are left-brain snares for the smug. So is scientism.
For liberals, classical and woke alike, the sacral simply does not compute.
“And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.”
The everything became a something, became a living man, and dwelt among us conversing, eating, breathing, talking and healing.
That is it. That is Christianity. To fall short of that is Arianism, to exceed it is Gnosticism.
The confusion or elision of God with his Creation is a very old and very persistent heresy. But anyone who opens their Bible on regular basis will be well armed to recognise it when they see it.
These were exactly my thoughts. Anyone, who feels like they need to add anything to Jesus is clearly not saved. Many are called, but few are chosen.
Saved from what?
What purpose is served by arguing with someone’s faith?
Satisfying pride and vanity.
Perhaps the most telling thing about Alan Watts (something his fans choose not to discuss) is his dependence on alcohol in his later years. Had his pursuit of enlightenment been a success I doubt if he would have needed to seek euphoria from booze.
As for the nature mysticism of Kingsnorth and Shaw – is religion now to be curated as a form of refined taste to be savoured by a discerning cultural elite?
Indeed. I have a friend – now in his eighties – who actually knew Watts in his West Coast days. One of a breed now almost entirely gone. He used to attend talks that Watts gave from his houseboat home. He said that Watts was hopelessly addicted to alcohol, though a spellbinding talker. So what good does rarified insight do you, if you feel so uncomfortable in yourself that you can’t get through the day sober?
It does bring to mind the notorious Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (aka Osho) who in his later years needed regular doses of nitrous oxide to maintain the feeling of enlightenment. His spellbound followers (I knew a few) were convinced he was a channel for god-like spiritual powers.
Here is a man who was so spiritual he owned 93 Rolls Royces.
Haha
and his followers convinced themselves he was doing that to mock American acquisitiveness (“He was, like, trashing the whole materialist capitalist system”).
Osho: the original New Age hipster. “I’m only defrauding my devoted followers ironically.”
I don’t know why I bothered to even read the article.
Quite simply – he was onto the wrong track.
I get this, but it assumes that faith and spiritually enlightened pursuits are somehow supposed to provide a total escape from all of life’s problems and uncertainties, which isn’t the case.
Watts was an entertaining talker with lots to offer and practises like meditation and communal faith can have real practical benefits, but there is no final answer to life’s ups and downs, or a person’s individual limits.
Plus alcoholism can be very insidious in the way it takes over.
Absolutely, there is no final answer to life’s ups and downs, though many seekers after ‘Enlightenment’ seem to believe that. once attained, it is a permanent condition. Alas it is but a glimpse, which may have a lasting effect, but like everything else in one’s experience, does not endure.
Problems begin when pursuit of the spiritual becomes mingled with psychotherapy. Consider C G Jung’s Analytical Psychology. With its focus on ‘self-actualisation’ it is more a quasi-spiritual cult than a method of healing psychological trauma.
Self actualisation was Maslow. Does it fit with Jung?
“does not it endure?” It may not endure, but it may.
I would hope that there is a total escape from all suffering. And that not having to be a piss-head to live an ordinary life was a pretty early and elementary step towards that.
Why would you hope that? Seems glib.
Alcoholism is inherited. It’s possible for someone to have something of value to say and be personally flawed.
I don’t know about Shaw, but that is far from Kingsnorth’s purpose.
It’s no surprise that precisely Watts and Kingsnorth speak of rewilding Christianity yet have both, at the same time, embraced Orthodoxy. This makes their approach more grounded on tradition, unlike previous experiments which might have had their time and place but, as the author points out, turned out to be unsustainable in the long run.
How can one rewild Christianity?. What a presumption. True faith is in accordance with the bible and not subject to man’s ideas. If Christians become weird they have not fully understood the bible.
Don’t forget Holy Tradition. Holy Tradition is the life of the Holy Spirit in the Church. The first Christians did not have a New Testament and had to rely on what the Apostles and the Seventy taught. Heretics have created all sorts of bogus stuff using the Bible. We have to have instruction to interpret it correctly.
I think you mean SHAW and Kingsnorth. But your point is well made.
There are certainly quite a few people who experience “a powerful sense of numinous presence, within nature… “. That is a fact.
What you attribute that sense to is something else entirely and may, or may not, exist. People do tend to feel strongly about the explanations for their experiences though.
Yes, indeed. I also feel a powerful sense of gastrointestinal discomfort after I eat onions and peppers, but I don’t wax poetic about it.
I feel a powerful sense of creation that makes me thank God for it even to the point of writing prose about it, but I worship the creator and not His creation.
Which side of the fence would you climb down from if required?
This is nice little article. I like many others, became fascinated by thinkers like Watts and McKenna in my late teens / early 20’s but as I grew older started to see the limitations of their philosophies. I think Watts was incredibly gifted but became too attached to the pervasive new age ideas of his time. I found listening to and reading Watts profound in the short term but unable to help me in longer term endeavors.
I think the instincts of modern religious thinkers like Peterson, Sheldrake and Kingsnorth are better, in trying to nudge people back to a less institutional and formal version of Christianity. But without loosing its conservatism and preventing too much ingress of circular eastern religious thought.
Peterson and Sheldrake have helped to decouple science from the latent scientism, that has led many astray philosophically/theologically. Laying the ground to reintroduce them to Abrahamic theology. Sheldrake being in some sense a disciple of Griffiths.
While Kingsnorth, in impressively plain speaking but sophisticated terms. Has plotted a course for liberals to channel their environmentalist yearnings back into a more spiritual and less radical practice.
Reason Christianity is dwindling is that the age of scripture and religious gurus has ended. Humans are no longer in need of guidings coming from the outside but can instead find meaning by connecting directly with the source. Just light a candle and invite Light. Trust that you are an equal and have the same right to peace as any angel does. Help will come.
We have to accept that Watts and his like are very unique, just like the Daoist sages, we find they are beyond anything we can really comprehend as a single human being, or they are simply not your average human being. Much like Chuang Tzu is beyond belief but is exhilarating an stilling, Watts is a kind of watery wild mess, quite literally with his alcoholism and his deep dissatisfaction with commitments, but his never ending ability to inspire and play that hide and seek himself is wonderous.
Ultimately these unique people were here to remind of us of the magic of the cosmos, of life and of silence… but what we ought to be attending to ourselves, using their unique fuel and imagination, is community, seeing and hearing the arts, learning and creating in science and philosophy, and finding peace in a disgruntled, bent up world; these things still kind of existed in droves,whilst Watts spoke of his wild things, now we have an ever widening gulf of culture which he could only imagine was coming.
So, can Christianity or any Western institution still do that to our psyche, where is the evidence in countries such as England or UK in general, where is the uniting power to create community and creation? I don’t see it.
Entertaining piece. I think I’m right in saying every human civilisation that ever existed has followed some form of deity. I suspect that belief in a god and an afterlife is an evolved trait in humans because it would have conferred resilience in times of hardship. In itself it’s probably harmless, but of course – humans being humans – it was utilised by the clever seeking to exploit the easily led. Which brings us to where we are today. I’ve said it before, but we’d have been better off sticking to venerating Mother Nature and marking the movements of the moon and stars.
Communist ones do not. And they now have 70+ years of continued existence if you look at China. A hundred or more if you include ones which are no longer Communist.
That excludes those who say Communist leaders and heroes are worshipped in a ‘godlike’ way, which even if true,doesn’t quite get there as a form of equivalence to a religion.
Nature worship wouldn’t have given us the Protestant Work Ethic. It’s fine to look back, but also to note that nature worship has subsisted on a large scale, virtually nowhere, for a reason.
Wicca, which tried to ‘revive’ it in England – off the back of unanswered questions about whether there was anything to revive anyway ?- doesn’t look like it’s going to make it.
Exactly.
Daughter of atheists, “saved” when young, later New Age and now kind of Buddhist, I greatly enjoyed this chronicling of spiritual seeking and explication of what a “wild” Christianity (not simply self-indulgence) might mean. Good questions, left open-ended, which I take as a sign of wisdom. Thank you.
Watts was a drunkard, a womaniser, a chancer and a sophist. And he appeals to such people.
It is rather amazing what some people will do to get laid.
Yeah, I mean, seriously: sophistry? What was the guy thinking?
I like you. You don’t need the damned LSD.
Like the blind following the blind?
How do you know who he appeals to?
I find it quite sad to read about people continually hopping from one flawed paradigm to another, as this article illustrates. Woefully misrepresenting Dawkins doesn’t help either, as if through a lens made deliberately opaque by their own failures.
There’s really no need. I’ll yield to no-one in terms of the absolute sense of the spiritual beauty of being alive. There are hints that some of those the author refers to may have felt it too, but then they ruin it (and themselves) by trying to conceptualise it before suffering paradigm failure. Again, really no need.
That latter point is the source of a great deal of human misery. When will we learn to stop beating ourselves up with it all?
“I’ll yield to no-one in terms of the absolute sense of the spiritual beauty of being alive. There are hints that some of those the author refers to may have felt it too, but then they ruin it (and themselves) by trying to conceptualise it before suffering paradigm failure. Again, really no need”
This is beautifully put and, putting all labels aside for the moment, is also the argument of the Christian classic The Cloud of Unknowing and the starting point of all Christian Mysticism.
As the nameless Midland monk and master of prayer put it : “He can certainly be loved, but not thought. He can be taken and held by love but not by thought.”
What if our fallen intellect, however, finds it too hard to sustain that level of (dis)engagement and so the immaterial sent us a material figure for our eyes to rest upon.
In any event, the final frontier, it strikes me is not ‘out there’ but ‘in here’. Where the immaterial meets the material.
Humans evolved to live in bands which through language shared beliefs about phenomena they did not comprehend, such as stars, thunder, sudden death, etc. The bands were hierarchical by age and experience — older people had more authority. Often a single person became revered. People dreamed about people who had died — where were they? In an “afterlife”? People sometimes had overwhelming experiences in nature, to which they ascribed huge significance or “meaning”. They taught what they believed to their children, usually within a framework of cause and effect. Something must be “causing” the lightning, etc. Some people were better at stories that explained mysteries. Slowly, all over the world, belief systems crystallised into what some people call religions. All societies have or have had one. Religions cannot be tested — just take it leave it, no matter how nonsensical the assertions. No religion can possibly be true.
Watts and other 20th century Western mystics like Douglas Harding were quite well known in the mid century. Their quests for meaning make good stories, like old stories of the saints. But they were all driven by despair at the obvious collapse of Christianity into being just another belief system. Watts died addicted.
So everyone is asking the wrong question. The real question is not whether any religion is true. The question is why do we have religions. It’s remarkably easy to answer. Now we know that meaning, phenomena, “spirituality” (a kind of feeling), etc., are all essentially empty, “just there!” as Bertrand Russell is supposed to have said, we can relax and enjoy the bizarre, horrific and enchanting dance called “life”. To do so, it’s advisable to find codes of ethics and practices that help reduce suffering and stick to them. Or — life’s a beach and then we die.
Exactly.
Well articulated. “True” seems to me not a useful measure in ultimate matters, though, associated beliefs being unfalsifiable, whether religious or secular (ethics). In practice, “useful” or “helpful” — to self and others — seems a better measure, and might or might not have a religious aspect.
Whenever I hear anyone use terms like “it’s advisable to” I am always put in mind of C.S. Lewis’s quote, “You can shuffle “I want” and “I am forced” and “I shall be well advised” and “I dare not” as long as you please without getting out of them the slightest hint of “ought” and “ought not.”
There’s no morality without reference to a Creator, and no meaning without pursuit of Him. At least Watts was pursuing, or was at some point in his life, before being derailed by Appetite.
Whatever experience lies beyond doors of perception, I certainly like the idea of a Protestant church service with less of whatever pervades it now, and more something else. Maybe include anecdotes from the service in Huxley’s Crome Yellow, or other works beyond the Bible. Like many, I much prefer a good Catholic service, even the formal service seems more natural and real, and that simple gesture at the end, of turning to embrace your fellows on either side does more to make me appreciate religion than just about anything else. Simple.
The notion of wild Christianity is appealing to me but the idea that a turn to Orthodoxy is the way to go is muddleheaded if not moronic at best given on one hand the actual politics of Orthodoxy in the real world today and the over imaginative and implausible fabrication of its pristine past in so called Celtic Christianity.
“putting your great and ancient ear to the dark soil of circumstance and listening”.
I would love to find some deeper way of living, probably what some people call ‘spirituality’, and I’m sure I can’t be the only person who finds the modern world a bit rubbish. However, I can’t honestly claim to understand what the above sentence means. It’s certainly poetic but I’d gladly sacrifice the poetry for some plain prose if it would aid understanding.
The fact that such spiritual ideas, like religious texts, are only ever written in a fancy prose style makes me suspect that there is perhaps nothing to them, something that would become evident if you said it in so many words. Perhaps we all have to get used to the idea that life really is this ‘thin’ and tinny.
“Obedience of a Christian Man” by Tyndale is as plain as it comes – especially in criticism. I have heard that Luther’s writing wades into the realm of the obscene in its earthiness though i haven’t read anything by him.
Interesting article, thank you Christopher. I have one question though. Did Richard Dawkins ever admit a world with no god would be immoral?
This Dawkins quote might give you an idea:
Which is why many people suggest he has not understood meaning of the scriptures he criticises.
Total misunderstanding – Dawkin’s superficiality was not recognised by large numbers of particularly young people – and he lead them astray.
Any chance that Right Wing Hippie can do a weekend essay on what they thought of the preceding week’s articles?
If the world, however complex, is purely material, and however chaotic it appears, is rational, then ‘utter receptivity to the divine’ is listening to one’s own perceptions. Thus ‘the divine’ is necessarily circular, for where else will one find perceptions of anything? “The opposite of faith is not doubt but certainty” says Anne Lamont, but that is a bit of a play on words, and I don’t think it goes far enough. To define ‘receptivity to the divine’ as ‘faith’ is for me a sticking point, because faith by definition squeezes out perceptions, leaving no content whatsoever. The opposite of faith is reality.
As the old gospel song goes, “Gimme that old time religion, it’s good enough for me.”