Here we are on Good Friday, and the big story is Pope Francis telling an atheist journalist that he is not that into Hell. Writes George Neumayr,
However, in my judgement, what the pope is doing is destroying the Catholic Church as an institution where people go to get an answer to the "meaning of life, the universe, and everything" in the felicitous phrase of Douglas Adams.
Ever since the Axial Age, humans have approached this problem through the cultural notion of a God that cares about good and evil.
(Did you know that before the Axial Age gods did not care too much about good and evil? A good place to start is Homer's Iliad. Those gods were playing politics, using humans as their chess pieces on the chess-board of the plains of Ilium).
The reason that gods suddenly became interested in good and evil in about 600 BC was that the "informal social control" of the village was breaking down as humans started moving into larger, and more impersonal communities. That's from sociologist of religion Rodney Stark.
But Rodney Stark has also analyzed the workings of what we might call the religious marketplace. What do believers want, and what do religious entrepreneurs offer them?
The answer is that people want a religion that enacts the drama of good and evil, but they want it tailored to their specific needs. Some people want a very strict and demanding religion; others want a medium strict religion (and this is the sweet spot where most people live); some people want a very liberal religion. In times of trouble, people tend to want more strict religion. That is why, for instance, western New York State during the chaos of building the Erie Canal was called the "burned over district" and birthed a lot of religious movements including the Church of Latter Day Saints.
There is a tendency for religious entrepreneurs -- the Wesley brothers, Joseph Smith & Co -- to start fairly strict religions. There is also a tendency for religious bureaucrats to gradually ease up on the strictness of the church they direct. This is because, like all bureaucrats, religious bureaucrats tend, over time, to focus on the emoluments and perquisites of office rather than the actual mission of the church.
So it makes complete sense that during our lives the Catholic Church has de-emphasized the strictness of good vs. evil. But there is a problem, according to Rodney Stark. When ecclesiastics liberalize their churches and soften their doctrine the believers tend not to like it, and the ecclesiastics pretty soon start preaching to empty churches. On Rodney Stark's view this is exactly what happened to the Catholic Church after Vatican II. Used to be that both clergy and laity were enthused by the specialness of their faith: the priests and nuns in their distinctive uniforms and status, the laity in their strict requirements for fidelity and observance.
Now, if you believe in the ideas of Rodney Stark you would think that, if the Christian churches are relaxing their religious discipline, then something would be likely to come along and fill in the gap left by the churches that were reducing the level of enthusiasm for the drama of good and evil. And of course this is exactly what has happened. The Gospel has been replaced by the Social Gospel. The moral drama of personal good and evil has been replaced, especially for educated people, by the moral drama of social good and evil, the plight of the poor, inequality, and the blight of capitalism.
There are many people that assert that the secular movements of the last two centuries are not religions, but I am not one of them. All these movements -- from the Jacobins of the French Revolution to the Communists of early to mid 20th century to the postmodernist SJWs of today -- are all running religions, that are intensely concerned with the moral drama of good vs. evil.
For instance, you may be concerned with the violence of Good Friday, the sacrifice of the Son of God in expiation of our Sins, and the almost melodramatic resolution of the Passion of Christ on Easter Sunday when Christ rises again from the dead. But surely the secular-religious passion of AntiFa, the anti-gun movement, and the campus SJWs show that ideological passion is alive and well, and that all over the world, people are motivated by the passion to fight for good against evil.
You might think, for example, that martyrdom is a dead-end. But in fact people are highly motivated to become martyrs. We see that in the Islamic movement -- and we see it with the mass shooters. Hey, the easiest way to go down in history is to get your 15 minutes of fame with a semi-automatic assault rifle.
And the proof of this is the reverse of it. During the Great Purges of the Stalinist Soviet Union, according to Alexander Solzhenitsyn, one of the most effective ways of breaking down non-believers was to tell them, in the isolation of the interrogation room, that they would disappear without a trace so they might as well give in and confess. This tactic did not work for religious believers, who already knew that they would go to Heaven.
For me, the current moral drama of the left and the SJWs is a dead end, for the simple reason that it has not confronted the "indirect social control" culture of the market economy. In my view, the true religion of today must blend the good vs. evil culture of the monotheisms with the "service is perfect freedom" culture of the market. For this is the basic proposition of the market economy. Think of some service, some product that other people want, and deliver it. Deliver it not just to your tribe, your clan, but to all the people, all over the world. What a concept!
So my idea is that the Religion of the Future must blend the women's culture that is best adapted to the culture of informal social control with the men's culture that is best for running the culture of formal social control with the impersonal culture of indirect social control that comes with the market and its prices.
Hey, it should be no problem. We will wake up on some Sunday soon and find that we have all risen as if from the dead and that all the world is new again.
But I wish that Pope Francis were a sadder and wiser man.
In an interview with the Italian journalist Eugenio Scalfari, Pope Francis declared that the unrepentant don’t suffer in hell but simply “disappear.”Of course, nobody really has a right to be scandalized by this. The Catholic Church operates as a "magisterium" which means more or less that what the pope says goes. So if the pope says that you don't get to burn in Hell for your sins but instead disappear into oblivion, hey, that's the plan.
However, in my judgement, what the pope is doing is destroying the Catholic Church as an institution where people go to get an answer to the "meaning of life, the universe, and everything" in the felicitous phrase of Douglas Adams.
Ever since the Axial Age, humans have approached this problem through the cultural notion of a God that cares about good and evil.
(Did you know that before the Axial Age gods did not care too much about good and evil? A good place to start is Homer's Iliad. Those gods were playing politics, using humans as their chess pieces on the chess-board of the plains of Ilium).
The reason that gods suddenly became interested in good and evil in about 600 BC was that the "informal social control" of the village was breaking down as humans started moving into larger, and more impersonal communities. That's from sociologist of religion Rodney Stark.
But Rodney Stark has also analyzed the workings of what we might call the religious marketplace. What do believers want, and what do religious entrepreneurs offer them?
The answer is that people want a religion that enacts the drama of good and evil, but they want it tailored to their specific needs. Some people want a very strict and demanding religion; others want a medium strict religion (and this is the sweet spot where most people live); some people want a very liberal religion. In times of trouble, people tend to want more strict religion. That is why, for instance, western New York State during the chaos of building the Erie Canal was called the "burned over district" and birthed a lot of religious movements including the Church of Latter Day Saints.
There is a tendency for religious entrepreneurs -- the Wesley brothers, Joseph Smith & Co -- to start fairly strict religions. There is also a tendency for religious bureaucrats to gradually ease up on the strictness of the church they direct. This is because, like all bureaucrats, religious bureaucrats tend, over time, to focus on the emoluments and perquisites of office rather than the actual mission of the church.
So it makes complete sense that during our lives the Catholic Church has de-emphasized the strictness of good vs. evil. But there is a problem, according to Rodney Stark. When ecclesiastics liberalize their churches and soften their doctrine the believers tend not to like it, and the ecclesiastics pretty soon start preaching to empty churches. On Rodney Stark's view this is exactly what happened to the Catholic Church after Vatican II. Used to be that both clergy and laity were enthused by the specialness of their faith: the priests and nuns in their distinctive uniforms and status, the laity in their strict requirements for fidelity and observance.
Now, if you believe in the ideas of Rodney Stark you would think that, if the Christian churches are relaxing their religious discipline, then something would be likely to come along and fill in the gap left by the churches that were reducing the level of enthusiasm for the drama of good and evil. And of course this is exactly what has happened. The Gospel has been replaced by the Social Gospel. The moral drama of personal good and evil has been replaced, especially for educated people, by the moral drama of social good and evil, the plight of the poor, inequality, and the blight of capitalism.
There are many people that assert that the secular movements of the last two centuries are not religions, but I am not one of them. All these movements -- from the Jacobins of the French Revolution to the Communists of early to mid 20th century to the postmodernist SJWs of today -- are all running religions, that are intensely concerned with the moral drama of good vs. evil.
For instance, you may be concerned with the violence of Good Friday, the sacrifice of the Son of God in expiation of our Sins, and the almost melodramatic resolution of the Passion of Christ on Easter Sunday when Christ rises again from the dead. But surely the secular-religious passion of AntiFa, the anti-gun movement, and the campus SJWs show that ideological passion is alive and well, and that all over the world, people are motivated by the passion to fight for good against evil.
You might think, for example, that martyrdom is a dead-end. But in fact people are highly motivated to become martyrs. We see that in the Islamic movement -- and we see it with the mass shooters. Hey, the easiest way to go down in history is to get your 15 minutes of fame with a semi-automatic assault rifle.
And the proof of this is the reverse of it. During the Great Purges of the Stalinist Soviet Union, according to Alexander Solzhenitsyn, one of the most effective ways of breaking down non-believers was to tell them, in the isolation of the interrogation room, that they would disappear without a trace so they might as well give in and confess. This tactic did not work for religious believers, who already knew that they would go to Heaven.
For me, the current moral drama of the left and the SJWs is a dead end, for the simple reason that it has not confronted the "indirect social control" culture of the market economy. In my view, the true religion of today must blend the good vs. evil culture of the monotheisms with the "service is perfect freedom" culture of the market. For this is the basic proposition of the market economy. Think of some service, some product that other people want, and deliver it. Deliver it not just to your tribe, your clan, but to all the people, all over the world. What a concept!
So my idea is that the Religion of the Future must blend the women's culture that is best adapted to the culture of informal social control with the men's culture that is best for running the culture of formal social control with the impersonal culture of indirect social control that comes with the market and its prices.
Hey, it should be no problem. We will wake up on some Sunday soon and find that we have all risen as if from the dead and that all the world is new again.
But I wish that Pope Francis were a sadder and wiser man.
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