Category: Faith

A reader writes:

You’re going to get into trouble using Einstein to justify religious faith, doubt, and awe of mysteries. He specifically addressed these points:

"A religious person is devout in the sense that he has no doubt about the significance of those superpersonal objects and goals which neither require nor are capable of rational foundation."

[Einstein, Nature 146 (1940), p. 605]

"What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of ‘humility.’ This is a genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism" – cited here.

"It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it. " 

[Albert Einstein (1954) From Albert Einstein: The Human Side, edited by Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffman, Princeton University Press.]

Well, I cited him not to defend my own faith, but to defend the reasonableness of a "modest defense of mystery." I stand by that.

A reader writes:

Your latest essay back to Sam Harris coincided with the arrival here at home of a CD of Anton Bruckner‘s 2nd symphony, conducted by the late Carlo Maria Giulini, performed by the musicians of the Weiner Symphoniker. Among classical music fans, the Guilini/Weiner version of the 2nd is something of a gem. Bruckner (1824-1896) is often noted for being a devout Catholic from a small town in Austria, and both items show through in his music. He dedicated his last, unfinished, still magnificent symphony No. 9, "to my beloved God."

I write about this because your dialogue with Sam and several of the more astute and moving reader responses have made it clearer to me than ever that my deep love for a good deal of classical music, and of Bruckner’s music in particular, shows where much of my Catholicism "went": it sort of sublimated from its solid, early forms of devotion and practice as a child and adolescent (in a large, extended Irish-French Catholic family) — to a transcendental, aurally carried experience and communion; religious practice sublimated into musical meditational forms. Listening, playing, brings the same awe that you’ve written about and hinted at visually in the several pictures that have accompanied your essays on faith and the unfathomable.

Richard Osborne believes that Giulini and Bruckner’s shared Catholicism is a big part of their unusually strong concert:

"Giulini is a believer, a committed Catholic. Those who have worked with him have rarely been in doubt that here is a man, in tenor Robert Tear’s memorable phrase, under ‘the clout of God.’ Walter Legge … talked of Giulini being surrounded by "a radiant nimbus." He also referred to him as Saint Sebastian, the suffering one. Tear saw this quality at first hand: ‘Sometimes you felt music-making was something of a hair-shirt to him. The music was too beautiful to endure because what was coming through was getting closer to this vision of "the cymbol clash" with God as Elgar once put it. And the closer Giulini got to this the more painful the experience became.’"

Music is not a hair shirt for me: I’m too much the Irishman for whom it is a sentimentalist’s airy feast. Between Bruckner and Giulini we have the prophet of the divine aural spark, and a great priest of a conductor to lead the enactment of the sacrament.

I do like it that most of this music is wordless; it keeps the theologians at bay.

My own taste in music is also, I realize, skewed toward believers. Tallis, Byrd, Messiaen and Tavener all speak to me as musical vessels of the divine. But unlike my reader, I don’t see music as an alternative to faith – but as one sublime expression of it. If only the hierarchy of the church were able to channel these immense cultural resources toward a reinvigorated and thoroughly modern Catholicism. But they seem more concerned with enforcing sexual strictures.

(Photo: the interior of Washington’s national cathedral by Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty.)

Beliefnet has an engaging interview with John Edwards and his religious faith here. Money quote:

"It’s important to – or at least in my case, to have a personal relationship with the Lord, so that I pray daily and I feel that relationship all the time."

"Allowing time for children [in school] to pray for themselves, to themselves, I think is not only okay, I think it’s a good thing."

"I do believe in the separation of church and state. But, I don’t think separation of church and state means you have to be free from your faith."

I believe all three things. I’m happy to hear a Democrat say it. And notice this isn’t Christianism. He is speaking of his faith, not his politics. And he understands the importance of putting clear sky between the two.

"I fear for the future of authentic faith in our country. We live in a time when the common man in our country is thoroughly influenced by the current climate in which the cultural and educational elite propagates an anti-Christian message… Is it any wonder then that the spiritual condition of our country is of little concern to those who don’t even educate their own children about true Christianity? Their conduct reflects their absence of concern, not only for the state of Christianity in their own country, but also for the need to communicate the message of Christ to those in other parts of the world who have not heard this truth.

Some might say that one’s faith is a private matter and should not be spoken of so publicly. They might assert this in public, but what do they really think in their hearts? The fact is, those who say such things usually don’t even have a concern for faith in the privacy of their interior lives. If you could see their hearts, you would find no trace of authentic faith. God has no place among the sources of hopes, fears, joys or sorrows in their lives. They might be thankful for their health, success, wealth and possessions, but they give no thought to the possibility that these are all signs of God’s provision. If they do give credit to God, it is usually done in some perfunctory way that reveals that their words have no sincerity.

When their conversations get really serious, you will see how little of their Christianity has anything to do with the faith taught by Jesus. Everything becomes subjective. Their conduct is not measured against the standard set by the gospel. They have developed their own philosophies, which they attempt to pawn off as Christianity," – William Wilberforce, "A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians in the Higher and Middle Classes of this Country Contrasted with Real Christianity" (1797).

Today is the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade by Great Britain. It took America a little longer. The Dish will offer up a series of posts in commemmoration today.

One of the problems of the weakening of traditional religion is the emergence of fake religions. Michael Burleigh’s book on "Sacred Causes" links the rise of pseudo-religions like Soviet Marxism and German Nazism to the vacuum created by declining traditional religious commitment in twentieth century Europe. There’s a useful summary of the book in today’s WSJ. (The book, alas, is not Burleigh’s best.) But this is not, I think, a defense of some of contemporary American evangelicalism, let alone contemporary Wahhabism or Salafism. Some strands of today’s American evangelicalism are as phony and as fake as any atheistic alternative from the last century. The "Prosperity Gospel," for example, is not Christianity. It’s a form of capitalist self-help under-pinned by emotional manipulation, legitimized by the patina of Christian scripture. Similarly, a Christian faith that is primarily about politics and social policy is not authentic faith either: it’s Christianism, not Christianity. That’s one reason, I think, that non-fundamentalist Christians should stay in established traditional churches and resist the fundamentalist onslaught. Institutions matter. Religion matters. A society that severs the two is prone to dangerous bouts of ill-considered zeal and far-too ideological politics. We’re not there yet. But the danger signs are flashing red.

Hitch turned me on to the work of Jerry Weinberger and his ravishingly subversive book on Ben Franklin. If you have a few minutes this holiday Monday, take a look at this essay on Franklin that Weinberger wrote for The New Atlantis. It’s on the very subject that Sam Harris and I have been discussing: whether science can or should supplant religious faith in the conversation of mankind. Weinberger suggests that Franklin was both an unabashed technophile and scientist who yet believed that science would never – and should never – replace the mystery that is at the core of religion. Money quote:

Ultimately, Franklin concluded that rationalistic science could never prove the believers wrong. He also concluded that the rationalists were unlikely to admit to this fact. They turned out to believe in their rationalism as fervently as the believers believed in their miracles, especially the miracle of conscience, or of the voice and spirit of God moving within. Moreover, if one were to push this fact in the rationalists’ faces, they could get just as angry as believers about challenges to their faith. Franklin, it turns out, was a freethinking critic of Enlightenment freethinking.

The conventional and current take on Franklin—that he was a pragmatic moralist and serious Enlightenment Deist and eventually an American patriot—is flat wrong. The recent chorus of Franklin biographers, including academic historians such as Gordon Wood, H. W. Brands, and Edmund Morgan, has been bamboozled by Franklin’s ironic literary style, and tone-deaf to Franklin’s radical, philosophical, deadpan sense of humor.

Franklin was no Deist. He was no pragmatic moralist. And he wasn’t really “The First American.” Franklin was, rather, the first American Baconian. He was also a profound philosopher, deeply skeptical of religion (especially the metaphysical conceits of Deists) and of our everyday moral intuitions. He was also profoundly skeptical of the intellectual foundations of rationalism and the Enlightenment. And he was, to put his politics in a nutshell, a political constructivist and libertarian. Franklin was not as American as apple pie, but he was as American as the corndog.

My kind of guy. Read the whole thing, including an elaborate fart joke from one of America’s founding fathers.