theisms

Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath;
We have drunken of things Lethean, and fed on the fullness of death.
Laurel is green for a season, and love is sweet for a day;
But love grows bitter with treason, and laurel outlives not May.
Sleep, shall we sleep after all? for the world is not sweet in the end;
For the old faiths loosen and fall, the new years ruin and rend.
Fate is a sea without shore, and the soul is a rock that abides;
But her ears are vexed with the roar and her face with the foam of the tides.
O lips that the live blood faints in, the leavings of racks and rods!
O ghastly glories of saints, dead limbs of gibbeted Gods!
Though all men abase them before you in spirit, and all knees bend,
I kneel not neither adore you, but standing, look to the end.

I’m a fourth-generation atheist.1 That’s one reason I completely failed to understand religion until I was 20, when I visited the Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral randomly. It’s a cruel structure, giant spikes on top and dimly-lit brass torture inside. Random stained glass often not depicting anything. It’s my favourite church; it is honest about housing a death cult; it captures a neglected part of the essence of Christ: being Metal.

But there in the foyer of the great hell hall was… a nice stall run by the Liverpool Catholic Women’s League, selling homemade jam and so on. Staffed by the kind of stout cardigan lady I recognized from Women’s Institute coffee mornings and that one friend’s grandmother.

How, I wondered, do such ladies persist with domesticity and normality when surrounded by this uberbrutalist Vatican II architecture?

Never mind that: how did they ever persist with the horror and vertigo and absurdity of their post-Semitic Platonist egalitarian spandrel in any church?

I realised that they manage by compartmentalisation; inherited memetic immunity. That we tortured god to death is not really thought about - many don’t know the fundamental dogmas - reading the bible seems fairly rare. Instead, in the foreground is chitchat, coffee, charity, and plodding, safe Victorian hymns. The blood does not mean blood to them, whatever the catechism has them say. It’s a social scene, a life-structure, and a comfort first, not necessarily a propositional creed. Religious, but not spiritual. 6

So not really theism. Previously, I had been reducing religion to doxastic theism, and, often, doxastic theism to fideism or fundamentalism or supernaturalism and redneck jihadism.7

(I was, at 20, just wise enough to catch myself before I made an equal and opposite error, that of just ignoring literal theism; I could easily have reduced religion to nonpropositional coreligionism. But no: there are the community fiends and the philosophical doxastic theists I knew from the debates.2 Obviously these are ideal types and many people are some of both.)

A third category are the political theists: think Thiel or Vance or Hirsi Ali.8 They see religion as a necessary corrective to man’s dark nature, who fear conservatism rampaging without empathy and principles like those religion was supposed to instill; the ones who believe faith is salutary whether or not they have it themselves; and separately also the ones using the community theists as a ladder.3

So: the coreligionists, the theologians, and the politicos.4

It took me another 10 years to examine atheism with similar deflationary clarity. What are our equivalent ideal types?

• Community atheism: there are some tiny explicitly atheist scenes - Humanists, Assembly but the real manifestation of this is implicit: just fitting-in into intellectual (i.e. liberal) culture. Avoiding seeming cringe by being too sincere or too metaphysical or too grand narrative, or else living out your trauma from being forced to attend religious stuff as a child. Also Reddit.
  
  There is a taboo in e.g. British public and professional life about bringing it up.9 In Estonia proselytizing on the doorstep is seen as not just annoying but offensively invasive, an abuse of politeness and privacy and autonomy.5 I claim that the social justice wave of the eC21st was neither capital-R-religious nor atheistic (it mutated until it could move any host), but it certainly occupied the space that social atheism could have.

• Philosophical atheism: the adoxastic kind you know. Debunking and denouncing, Dawkins and Hitchens, Reddit and LessWrong. We adore the oldies - Diagoras, Lucretius, Knutzen, Hume and d’Holbach, Shelley - so brave, they were so original, they sacrificed so much - but the new ones fell, partly because of their weakmanning, partly because sincerity became cringe, partly because the American religious right lost some of its supremacy and cohesion making organised atheism less urgent, partly because the grotesques of the war on terror made the Left want to defend Muslims.

• Political atheism: Again, this would mean believing it is good to not be religious. The Communists were this: religion as the opiate of the masses, which they were best served going cold turkey off of, so that the pain of life would agitate and mobilise them to true consciousness.
  
  Hard to think of many current examples, partly because the evidence is mildly against instrumental atheism, and atheists feel compelled to pay more lip service to evidence (since what else can they rest upon?). Clearly this is different in China.

The above very basic understanding helps me put up with religion, which is good because it means I have more friends / am less of a dickhead. (I still believe, though, that theism is a mistake, lightly immoral like littering; and a damn shame in an intelligent being; and to be tolerated rather than approved-of.10)

But I appreciate the three types as a common way to be nice, thoughtful, or prudent. Go forth and chill.