Raphael wrote: ↑Sat Feb 25, 2023 2:23 pm
I'm currently reading
Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt, by Alec Ryrie, which is, interestingly enough, a history of Western atheism (and related ideas) that is quite fair-minded despite being written by a religious believer (Church of England).
Finished it. Very interesting, although it's a bit disappointing that it mostly ends in the late 17th century, with just a few afterthoughts on 20th and 21st century atheism.
One surprising thing reported in the book is that, in 17th century England, some people apparently ended up with a quasi-unbelieving or almost-atheist stance
precisely because they took their faith really seriously, a lot more than "ordinary" churchgoers did, and therefore ended up going in directions in which these "ordinary" churchgoers would not have gone.
For instance, some people who were raised as the one or other kind of Calvinists, starting out with the Calvinist doctrine of Predestination, ended up being completely convinced that they themselves
couldn't possibly be among the Elect, that they themselves were certainly so wicked that they just
had to be predestined to eternal damnation - and some of those whose thoughts and feelings followed that line ended up thinking that for them, there was no point in practising religion in any way, since it wouldn't save them anyway.
A fairly high number of the people who thought along those lines seem to have been women. Now, Ryrie doesn't say this, but from a modern feminist perspective, that's completely unsurprising: if you have a religious patriarchy that constantly tells women that they are weak, inferior, sinful, unworthy, worthless, and so on, some of those women will end up believing that. And some of them will end up believing it really intensely.
Another group of people whom Ryrie mentions are people who took religion so seriously that, if they were to practise religion, they first wanted to be absolutely sure that they knew exactly how to practise it
properly, exactly the way God intended - and since some of them could not find any certainty about how to properly practise religion, they ended up not practising religion at all.
The one time in the book that the author's own religious bias shines through is when he describes Pascal's Wager as "a logically watertight reason to believe", which of course it isn't.
One of the most interesting parts of the book is the last subchapter of the last chapter, "
From Jesus to Hitler", where Ryrie presents his own theory about why Christian observance in so many parts of the Western World collapsed in the decades and generations after World War 2: It's supposedly because the war itself was such an intense experience that for many people, Christianity as the dominant belief system was replaced with a kind of instinctive anti-nazism. To quote:
As well as being the most catastrophic war in human history, the Second World War and in particular the Nazi genocide was the defining moral event of our age, which reset our culture’s notions of good and evil. By the early twentieth century, Christianity’s only undisputed role in Western society, its raison d’étre, was to define morality. This is precisely what it failed to do in the Second World War, the modern era’s most intense moral test. It failed not only in the sense that many churches and Christians were to a degree complicit with Nazism and fascism, but in the wider sense that the global crisis revealed that Christianity’s moral priorities were wrong. It now seemed plain that cruelty, discrimination and murder were evil in a way that fornication, blasphemy and impiety were not.
Or, to rephrase the next pages in the book, after the war, instead of approaching moral questions by asking themselves, "what does my church teach about this?" or "what does the Bible tell me about this?", people often, at least subconsciously, asked themselves "What Would Hitler Do?", and then tried to do the opposite. And when the moral demands of that new paradigm were in conflict with traditional Christianity, many people either broke with Christianity outright, or at least radically reinterpreted it.
I'm not at all sure that I find this theory convincing, but it's certainly food for thought, IMO.