Religion - Bad Ideology?

Bad Ideology

“Most religion is just bad ideology”, so writes Richard King (Weekend Australian 15-16 July), reviewer of Terry Eagleton’s “Materialism” and Roger Scruton’s “On Human Nature”. My immediate reaction to this opinion is to ask, what lasting values are found in ideology, per se, and how does one know good from bad? Shakespeare’s Hamlet declared “there is nothing good or bad”, its all in the mind, as this reviewer seems to confirm.

One a conservative and the other a Marxist, Scruton and Eagleton are sharply divided in their respective ideologies, although there are areas of overlap in the two political systems they represent. Both have an interest in questioning the veracity of religion from an atheistic point of view, and this leads to the observation: “(the new atheist's) . . . criticism of religion is motivated by the enormous claims it makes for itself and the damage it inflicts as a consequence”.

Ultimately, is "religion" about itself, or about God? about who/what this God is? about a  transcendence that defies definition? about the intuitions that have asked these questions since time immemorial? The real damage comes when men want to play God (“mouths set in the heavens, their tongues dictate to the earth”) and to take control over the affairs of others in the name of religion. The reality is God alone controls the universe with inexorable patience and infinite tolerance. Unconstrained by time (chronos) since existing in all time (kairos), not limited in space as men are, spirit permeates everything: a mere “moment”, God’s time, is immeasurable; just a moment is all 'time'. (2 Peter 3.8).

The gulf that separates believers who hesitate to make claims for themselves and the institutions that carry the banner is the other reality, overlooked by secularists: faith is beyond categories of interpretation. Hope is not denied, whether flight into the unknown or just a dream of completeness. No wonder the “new atheists” (a semi-official new religion) cannot cope with the fact that the old religion's - Christianity - veracity is founded in something more than a thought, more than just an intuition, but in a person worthy of trust. Faith is a gift available to every human being without discrimination or favor; so too the thought, so too the dream. That most choose to reject it, or at least ignore it, preferring to muddle through life without a guide, is hardly the fault of a religion that strives for understanding.

King’s assertion that its the thought that counts - mere opinion - does little more than affirm the tenet that relational grace is “given, not achieved”, mediated to the world by those prepared to wait (“the voice of prayer is never silent, nor do the praises die away”). Ultimately this waiting spirituality is not about us or about time/space phenomena, but about that “most ancient of mysteries”, Life itself. Wounded like the Patriarch Jacob, at the Jabbock, we may not ask its name, but the struggle is still ours. “Writing a life is another story. Incompletion” (Paul Ricouer: “Memory, History, Forgetting”). If this is confusing “a metaphorical view of the world with . . . how it really is”, just another “category mistake”, is there a better redemption in secularism’s hubris, its idiosyncratic pretentions, dreams of universal freedom and happiness? If religion were indeed the opiate of the masses, as Marx claimed, then so be it.   But, wait, there is more!

Life, as in love, is a battlefield and useless denying the casualties because the collateral damage is palpable, as human vulnerability deems it so ("who would survive", asks the Psalmist, "if you should mark our errors?"). “Damage”, as Proust implied, is written into the nature of things, however Proust also inserted an important caveat: “of love”, he said, “we can speak and behave (with) indifference only if we are not in it”. To think otherwise is to “condemn ourselves to a dream world . . . the real world is a battlefield”. (Clive James, “Gate of Lilacs”). 

Authors such as Eagleton and Scruton make their indifferent judgments of religion as outsiders, they are are not in it. What they miss is the "logic of superabundance": under the sign of forgiveness, "release from the imprisonments of mammonism, eye-for-an-eye morality, and blame; restoration to a capacity for acting . . . you are better than your actions" (Paul Ricouer). Here is Christ's new commandment to love in the economy of superabundance; in contrast to the "logic of equivalence" - the golden rule "do unto others . . . ".