Carl Van Doren (1885-1950)
Let us be honest. There have always been men and women without the gift of faith. They lack it, do not desire it, and would not know what to do with it if they had it. They are apparently no less intelligent than the faithful, and apparently no less virtuous. How great the number of them is it would be difficult to say, but they exist in all communities and are most numerous where there is most enlightenment. As they have no organization and no creed, they can of course have no official spokesman. Nevertheless, any one of them who speaks out can be trusted to speak, in a way, for all of them. Like the mystics, the unbelievers, wherever found, are essentially of one spirit and one language. I cannot, however, pretend to represent more than a single complexion of unbelief.
The very terms that I am forced to use put me at the outset in a trying position. Belief, being first in the field, naturally took a positive term for itself and gave a negative term to unbelief. As an unbeliever, I am therefore obliged to seem merely to dissent from the believers no matter how much more I may do. Actually I do more. What they call unbelief, I call belief. Doubtless I was born to it, but I have tested it with reading and speculation, and I hold it firmly. What I have referred to as a gift of faith I do not, to be exact, regard as a gift. I regard it, rather, as a survival from an earlier stage of thinking and feeling: in short, as a form of superstition. It, and not the thing I am forced to name unbelief, seems to me negative. It denies the reason. It denies the evidence in the case, in the sense that it insists upon introducing elements that come not from the facts as shown but from the imaginations and wishes of mortals. Unbelief does not deny the reason and it sticks as closely as it can to the evidences.
I shall have to be more explicit. When I say I am an unbeliever, I do not mean merely that I am no Mormon or no Methodist, or even that I am no Christian or no Buddhist. These seem to me positively unimportant divisions and subdivisions of belief. I mean that I do not believe in any god that has ever been devised, in any doctrine that has ever claimed to be revealed, in any scheme of immortality that has ever been expounded....
Commentary
By Morris Dean
I too haven't been happy that the usual terms for my positive belief are negative: unbelief or atheist or non-believer. Parallel terms for believers as characterized by Van Doren might be irrational, unreasonable, anti-factual, non-fact-based, unscientific, anti-intellectual, unskeptical, unquestioning, or non-thinking. There may be more negative terms for believers than for non-believers...Hey, that's consolation!
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Copyright © 2013 by Morris Dean
| Please comment |
Unlike Mr. Van Doren, I would make a distinction between belief and faith. If we're talking about belief (Moses crossing the Red Sea, the Virgin Birth, etc.), then I didn't believe any of that since my teens, so it doesn't take a Columbia University professor to convince me. The fact that some people still use these myths to justify wars, inequality, land grabs, etc., is indeed a serious problem.
ReplyDeleteFaith is a much trickier issue. Although faith is often associated with the beliefs of various religions, genuine deep faith transcends any religion, and people who tap into this (call it universal consciousness or whatever you wish) through prayer, meditation, reflection, etc., "are essentially of one spirit and one language." My father, badly wounded and a German POW, relied on prayer (deep, not rote) to sustain him for the rest of his life. He never encouraged me to be a Christian but he encouraged me to pray for the psychological (for lack of a better term) benefits it would provide. There is still much we need to understand about this "awareness" (again for lack of a better term) -- something Mr. Van Doren, ensconced in his well-stocked library during both World Wars and the Depression, perhaps didn't grasp.
Anonymous, it is good to know that prayer helped your father survive being a wounded POW. Out in the real world, however, are "deep" prayer, meditation, etc, of any real importance? Or are they just as much a waste of time as religious-based prayer?
ReplyDeleteIf one is locked in a POW cell in a foreign country, and there is literally nothing to be done except wait and hope, then by all means pray to pass the time - if that is works for you. Or write a novel in your mind, or fantasize about spending a wild weekend with a hooker - just do whatever works best for your mind, because as long as someone else has the key to the cell, and you are in a compound surrounded by guards and barbed wire, your mind is all you have control over.
Was it prayer that saved and sustained your father, or was it something else - like luck, perhaps? On 9/11, or the Titanic, or any other disaster, there are lots of people praying - some live, some die. Ditto for POWs, some made it, some didn't. Did prayer or faith of any kind really make any difference, or is that just a myth the survivors manufacture to explain or feel better about the situation?
Over the eons, people of all cultures have looked for something in which to believe, simply because they didn't want to face facts. Go back to the mythical "Valkyries" of the Vikings, for example. It started simply enough, ravens flocked to battlefields to feed on dead warriors - why wouldn't they? People didn't want to face that fact so they endowed the ravens with the power to choose who went to Valhalla. When that wore thin, along came the myth of the Valkyries as buxom maidens riding in the clouds choosing the valiant to reside with them in Valhalla, and share mead, and...well...maybe a few wild nights and weekends.
That is a lot to go through to help people feel better about needless death after the fact, instead of putting the effort into avoiding the killing in the first place. Just as "deep" prayer and meditation seem a lot of time spent helping people deal with failure, instead of putting the time and energy into avoiding failing in the first place.
Is that like: "Go in the name of God and slay your enemy!"
ReplyDeleteAnd most times it is "even if they believe in the same god, and look just like you." The desperate search for a reason to kill those who live just the other side of the hill, or across the river, is something to behold. Of course, Moses and his band of murderous psychopaths set the tone for that. Compared to them, the Charles Manson bunch seem barely more menacing than Cub Scouts.
ReplyDeleteAnd not so unlike the Nazis-- they recorded in detail each murderous act. Bad on one hand, but you need to give them credit for being true believers; because only true believers can be so wrong and believe they are so right.
ReplyDelete