Choosing Submission

James Wood reviews a new collection of essays on "The Joy of Secularism":

[M]any religionists assume that life without God would be life without meaning. Where secularists cherish autonomy and choice as qualities that make life meaningful, religionists often emphasize self-abnegation and submission to a higher power. This would appear to be a wide gulf. But [philosopher Philip] Kitcher suggests that religionists and secularists actually agree about how to create meaning in a life.

Many believers think of their submission to God not as compelled, he points out, but instead as "issuing from the choice of the person who submits." Life develops meaning because someone identifies with God's purpose. This identification must spring from an act of evaluation, a decision that there is value in serving a deity whose purpose is deemed good. Believers, then, make an autonomous choice "to abdicate autonomy in order to serve what the autonomous assessment has already recognized as good." Both atheists and believers are involved in making independent evaluations of what constitutes life-meaning. They draw different conclusions about what that meaning is, but they go about finding it in similar ways.

Richard Brody connects God to art:

Art is the closest thing that atheists have to religion, and it’s the devotion to art that ought to help an atheist temper his disbelief with fascination. I’m an atheist, a secularist, a materialist—and I refer often to God, heaven, and the soul, for the same reason that I talk about Hamlet, Oz, and the Id: namely, they are ideas of vast, epochal, and fecund imaginative power. God is the main character of those very good books that may well be The Greatest Story Ever Told, and to ignore them because of their religious import is as silly as dismissing Homer as a pagan cultist; to dismiss them for the uses made of them is as odd as disdaining Shakespeare because of a dull English class. And the imaginative sympathy that lets a Democrat enter the mind of a Republican or grant a believer insight into the secular experience, or vice versa, is one of the essential elements of art.

(Photo of a baptism in Italy by Luca Vanzella)