from The Encyclopedia of Religion

"To say that man is homo religiosus is not to say something 'nice' about him."

(a throwaway line in Vol. 9; see also the entry for homo reliogsus in Vol. 6 )

Faithlessness in fiction

Few things rile my impatience as the assertion that atheists can't be people of deep thought and values.

Randy Boyagoda, chair of English at Ryerson University, has written an essay for First Things which more or less accurately identifies the waning of explicitly Christian voices in contemporary literature:

I always have ready some recommendations of current writers who take the life of faith seriously in their work—the novelist Marilynne Robinson, the poet Geoffrey Hill, assorted scholars and reviewers writing criticism—but I realize they have a point. While religion significantly matters in minor literary contexts today (as with the eccentric popularity of Amish romance novels) and in vulgar commercial contexts (as with Dan Brown’s books), serious literary fiction largely occupies its very own naked public square, shorn of any reference to religiously informed understandings of who and what and wherefrom we are, which represents a marked break from centuries of literary production informed by Christian beliefs, traditions, and culture.

(Emphasis mine.) There's an absolute ecology of unexamined, and I'd say indefensible, assumptions underlying the idea that identifies deep and thoughtful "informed understandings of who and what and wherefrom we are" exclusively with religiously informed understandings. The unexplored alternative to this idea is that certain author and artists may, by dint of the depth and richness of their understanding, have had to abandon "religious" (read: theistic) framings of the world. This is not a negligence on their part, but a feature of their engagement with reality as it comes. 

Boyagoda has a more sympathetic case, a less privilege-blind case, if he were using the word "religious" to encompass nontheistic worldviews, such as those aligned, e.g., with deep ecology or religious* humanism; but I see no evidence that he is doing so. Very well; we carry on with our own work in the larger pluralism outside the purview of sectarian commentary. You can be sure that the forthcoming companion site to Pen & Anvil's secular imprint, Secular Age, will do diligent work in focusing attention on new books from secular thinkers, and in promoting awareness of the many ways an atheistic worldview may nonetheless have consort with things infinite.

(I encourage anyone reading to recommend in the comments below any authors or books who are exemplary in this respect.)

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* How good if it were more widely understood that the term "religious" can apply with equal usefulness to wholly nontheistic and materialistic traditions such as "religious humanism." Alas, most readers see "religion" and think a god-belief of some kind is involved (the case of some kinds of Buddhism not much changing these facts).

Belief: Important, though grossly over-emphasized

I often remind people (theists, atheists, allies, assholes, anyone who needs reminding really): You know I'm an atheist. But, now that you know that, how much do you know about me? Exceedingly little.

Anthropologist T. M. Luhrmann, author of When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship With God, musters the same point in her guest column for The New York Times titled "Belief Is the Least Part of Faith":

If you can sidestep the problem of belief — and the related politics, which can be so distracting — it is easier to see that the evangelical view of the world is full of joy. God is good. The world is good. Things will be good, even if they don’t seem good now. That’s what draws people to church. It is understandably hard for secular observers to sidestep the problem of belief. But it is worth appreciating that in belief is the reach for joy, and the reason many people go to church in the first place.

Luhrmann calls it the problem of belief, and I agree that belief is a problem, though not just because it represents a barrier toward a feeling of community or unity among persons of different ethical and doctrinal commitments -- as a believer in materialism and rationalism, I think it is ethically urgent that we cultivate as widely as possible the practices of skepticism, irony, and empiricism, so as to fortify our culture and body politic against attractive but untrue and dangerous memes.

However: Luhrmann's purpose in his column is not to problematize belief, but to problematize the emphasis on belief as a sticking point of contention between believers and secularists. I agree fully with her perspective in this regard, and would offer this as a take-away:

The epistemic position any person stakes out on the question of theism (or any question of doctrine) is a small aspect of the much larger and manifold state of identifying with a particular worldview tradition. Far more important than what is believed, is how the belief is arrived at (a measure of warrant); whether the belief is consistent with other beliefs held by the believer (a measure of rationality); and which behaviors are engendered by that belief (a measure of moral merit). There are a great number of beliefs I as a staunch atheist hold, which are utterly unrelated to my view on existence of divinities.

My ethical commitments, in other words, like those of believers and nonbelievers of all sorts, have a relationship TO my faith outlook... but cannot, and should not, be reduced TO the fact of my belief or nonbelief. The human epistemic machine, with all its moral and philosophical sub-systems, is far too complex to be so reduced.

These facts should be known widely, since they have direct bearing on the way we interact with persons who identify with faith or philosophical traditions other than our own.

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NB: Luhrmann notes "As the comparative religion scholar Wilfred Cantwell Smith pointed out, when the King James Bible was printed in 1611, 'to believe' meant something like 'to hold dear.'" Quite so. Etymologically, the Germanic verb "to believe" can be thought of as "to be-love": "to love so as to live by." This word-fact should douse the torches of all those atheists who decry "belief" as an act of intellectual weakness. (Though the worst of the rhetoric is focused tightly on the intellectual treason of "faith"). Let the warning be: Semantic arguments may by semantic means debunked.