I’m actually in a strong rationalist community which you might say offers the social benefits of a church. I certainly feel “part of something.”
What I valued (still do?) about religion wasn’t actually the community, so much, or states of religious transport, which I never experienced. It was history, tradition, membership not just in a “group” of my choice but a nation of my birth, the purely intellectual pleasure of reading in a different language and becoming knowledgeable and learning things by heart, and a sense of reverence or propriety, a feeling that I was safely doing the right thing. I miss all that, sometimes acutely.
And the thing is, a lot of atheists (and people in general) actively dislike precisely the things that I like. I’ve met a lot of people who dislike ethnic affiliation. I’ve met a lot of people who are temperamentally irreverent, and have mostly negative associations with “obedience” and “propriety.” And practically everyone I know—atheist or not—hated Hebrew school/Sunday school, detests memorizing, and doesn’t have even an aesthetic or literary feeling for the Bible. I probably can’t get atheists to share those things with me. It’s an unsolved problem.
For what it’s worth, I still get a kick from time to time out of being able to recite long passages of Hebrew and engage in pilpul with my Jewish geek friends (both frum and otherwise), despite in no meaningful sense remaining a practicing Jew.
I also get a kick out of being fluent in Spanish and I’ve been known to enjoy hairsplitting discussions about Buffy the Vampire Slayer and reciting long passages of scripts of plays I performed in. I also get a huge thrill out of being able to recite the first sentence of the Oddysey in Greek. None of this has anything to do with religion or atheism, admittedly.
All of which is to say I suspect you can probably find atheists (both strong-sense and weak-sense) who share your appreciation for history, tradition, shared birthright, the intellectual pleasure of memorization, and learning foreign languages.
The comfortable feeling of safely believing the proper things, on the other hand… yeah, that one will be more of a hard sell, at least to talk about. (You will find many people in sufficiently large soi-disant atheist communities who enjoy this feeling, of course, like any other group of humans, but they probably won’t admit to it and may well get upset at the suggestion.)
To my mind, actively endorsing and championing beliefs that are popular in one’s community has many of the same issues as passively believing them. If everybody agrees about everything important, something is screwy.
And the thing is, a lot of atheists (and people in general) actively dislike precisely the things that I like.
I can definitely register the affirmative on this. Personally, I made a conscious decision to stop identifying as Jewish, back when I was attending Brandeis University, because I found the group dynamic (perhaps they would have called it solidarity, but I perceived it as bias) downright oppressive.
The feeling generalizes to most sorts of traditions. For instance, I have a hard time understanding why one would want to affiliate with a particular style or branch of martial arts given the option of a syncretic approach like Jeet Kune Do.
My impression is that lots of religiously moderate individuals also didn’t like their Hebrew school/Sunday school etc. so that’s not unique to atheists. At to literary feeling for the Bible, I don’t know how someone who is educated wouldn’t have a fair bit of that other than simple emotional reaction because of the damage that religion has done to society. I’d have to wonder if those people have read Samuel or the first few chapters of Kings or Ruth for example. Maybe tell them to read it as they would read Greek mythology and evaluate the literary merit as if it were from a no longer extant religion?
I think I wasn’t clear enough. My point wasn’t to bash other atheists.
Basically where I was going with this was to add my own experience, and to say that what people get out of religious observance can be more complicated than just social capital. I don’t think secular social organizations have to be at all “church-like” to provide community benefits. And correspondingly I think that the non-theological things people like about religion are not exactly summed up by “community.”
Also, I personally am in a weird position because lots of people (understandably) don’t share my tastes. I get why some people are enthusiastically anti-tribal; it isn’t me, at the moment, but I can see it and respect it. I also understand (though can’t actually imagine being this way myself) that most people dislike memorization and rituals performed just so. And it is weird but true in my experience that most folks (religious or not) can’t actually “get” any kind of sense that the Bible is literature of some value. It’s an aesthetic response and when it doesn’t go through, it doesn’t go through.
Personally, I turned to the bible after becoming acquainted with several other strains of mythology, and with the intention of treating it in the same manner, but I found myself intensely disappointed by its literary qualities. There were plenty of other writing flaws, but I felt like the core of it was that monotheism simply doesn’t make for as good story dynamics.
Please remember that what you read is a hatchet job of translation. The original is poetry, and it was poorly translated. I find myself quoting from the bible much less in English, for that reason. (I think a lot of biblical quotations are often appropriate: e.g., when I’m frustrated with something obviously petty, I use the Jonah quotation of “Better I die than live”, because it’s got the exact self-awareness that I need)
When I read Bible verses in English, I often suffer almost physical pain at the awkwardness. At “Song of Solomon”, this increases to actual physical symptoms, after which I closed it and never tried SoS in English again...
I suggest that there never was any “original,” even in Hebrew. Rather, there were many contradictory oral, and later, written fragments, later amalgamated and integrated into a canon that no doubt continued to change even after it claimed to be unchangeable.
As I understand it, the King James Bible is a rotten translation (it’s admittedly a translation of a translation). However, at least according to The Story of English, it was composed “so that it would not only read better but sound better.” I suggest that, within the context of English-speaking culture, it was a success—and it has itself become canonical.
I’m actually in a strong rationalist community which you might say offers the social benefits of a church. I certainly feel “part of something.”
What I valued (still do?) about religion wasn’t actually the community, so much, or states of religious transport, which I never experienced. It was history, tradition, membership not just in a “group” of my choice but a nation of my birth, the purely intellectual pleasure of reading in a different language and becoming knowledgeable and learning things by heart, and a sense of reverence or propriety, a feeling that I was safely doing the right thing. I miss all that, sometimes acutely.
And the thing is, a lot of atheists (and people in general) actively dislike precisely the things that I like. I’ve met a lot of people who dislike ethnic affiliation. I’ve met a lot of people who are temperamentally irreverent, and have mostly negative associations with “obedience” and “propriety.” And practically everyone I know—atheist or not—hated Hebrew school/Sunday school, detests memorizing, and doesn’t have even an aesthetic or literary feeling for the Bible. I probably can’t get atheists to share those things with me. It’s an unsolved problem.
For what it’s worth, I still get a kick from time to time out of being able to recite long passages of Hebrew and engage in pilpul with my Jewish geek friends (both frum and otherwise), despite in no meaningful sense remaining a practicing Jew.
I also get a kick out of being fluent in Spanish and I’ve been known to enjoy hairsplitting discussions about Buffy the Vampire Slayer and reciting long passages of scripts of plays I performed in. I also get a huge thrill out of being able to recite the first sentence of the Oddysey in Greek. None of this has anything to do with religion or atheism, admittedly.
All of which is to say I suspect you can probably find atheists (both strong-sense and weak-sense) who share your appreciation for history, tradition, shared birthright, the intellectual pleasure of memorization, and learning foreign languages.
The comfortable feeling of safely believing the proper things, on the other hand… yeah, that one will be more of a hard sell, at least to talk about. (You will find many people in sufficiently large soi-disant atheist communities who enjoy this feeling, of course, like any other group of humans, but they probably won’t admit to it and may well get upset at the suggestion.)
I agree that there’s an actual problem with the “safety” of passively believing what one’s told and I don’t actually want that part back.
To my mind, actively endorsing and championing beliefs that are popular in one’s community has many of the same issues as passively believing them. If everybody agrees about everything important, something is screwy.
I can definitely register the affirmative on this. Personally, I made a conscious decision to stop identifying as Jewish, back when I was attending Brandeis University, because I found the group dynamic (perhaps they would have called it solidarity, but I perceived it as bias) downright oppressive.
The feeling generalizes to most sorts of traditions. For instance, I have a hard time understanding why one would want to affiliate with a particular style or branch of martial arts given the option of a syncretic approach like Jeet Kune Do.
There is something appealing about identifying as part of a ethnic group. Tribalism is natural after all, we’re built for it.
The 12 Virtues of Rationality is a great thing to learn by heart and recite daily I think.
My impression is that lots of religiously moderate individuals also didn’t like their Hebrew school/Sunday school etc. so that’s not unique to atheists. At to literary feeling for the Bible, I don’t know how someone who is educated wouldn’t have a fair bit of that other than simple emotional reaction because of the damage that religion has done to society. I’d have to wonder if those people have read Samuel or the first few chapters of Kings or Ruth for example. Maybe tell them to read it as they would read Greek mythology and evaluate the literary merit as if it were from a no longer extant religion?
I think I wasn’t clear enough. My point wasn’t to bash other atheists.
Basically where I was going with this was to add my own experience, and to say that what people get out of religious observance can be more complicated than just social capital. I don’t think secular social organizations have to be at all “church-like” to provide community benefits. And correspondingly I think that the non-theological things people like about religion are not exactly summed up by “community.”
Also, I personally am in a weird position because lots of people (understandably) don’t share my tastes. I get why some people are enthusiastically anti-tribal; it isn’t me, at the moment, but I can see it and respect it. I also understand (though can’t actually imagine being this way myself) that most people dislike memorization and rituals performed just so. And it is weird but true in my experience that most folks (religious or not) can’t actually “get” any kind of sense that the Bible is literature of some value. It’s an aesthetic response and when it doesn’t go through, it doesn’t go through.
Personally, I turned to the bible after becoming acquainted with several other strains of mythology, and with the intention of treating it in the same manner, but I found myself intensely disappointed by its literary qualities. There were plenty of other writing flaws, but I felt like the core of it was that monotheism simply doesn’t make for as good story dynamics.
Please remember that what you read is a hatchet job of translation. The original is poetry, and it was poorly translated. I find myself quoting from the bible much less in English, for that reason. (I think a lot of biblical quotations are often appropriate: e.g., when I’m frustrated with something obviously petty, I use the Jonah quotation of “Better I die than live”, because it’s got the exact self-awareness that I need)
When I read Bible verses in English, I often suffer almost physical pain at the awkwardness. At “Song of Solomon”, this increases to actual physical symptoms, after which I closed it and never tried SoS in English again...
I suggest that there never was any “original,” even in Hebrew. Rather, there were many contradictory oral, and later, written fragments, later amalgamated and integrated into a canon that no doubt continued to change even after it claimed to be unchangeable.
As I understand it, the King James Bible is a rotten translation (it’s admittedly a translation of a translation). However, at least according to The Story of English, it was composed “so that it would not only read better but sound better.” I suggest that, within the context of English-speaking culture, it was a success—and it has itself become canonical.
I might have found it more aesthetically pleasing in the original Hebrew, but I had more complaints about the content than the prose.