Here’s philosopher Mark Johnston to the rescue, with Saving God: Religion After Idolatry, a book published last year by Princeton University Press. It has met a warm, unusually wide reception; in The New Yorker James Wood called it “the non-fiction book I most enjoyed this year,” and it’s slated to wrangle an award at the American Academy of Religion meeting this November. In the elegant, one-page preface, Johnston spells out what we have to hope for, which tantalizingly coincides with what so many of us need:

One kind of ideal reader would be an intelligent young person who is religious, but feels that his or her genuine religious impulses are being strangled by what he or she is being asked to believe, on less than convincing authority, about the nature of reality.

What follows, true to his promise, speaks to the best features of the late-adolescent imagination, the mind of that crucial time when many people end up forming their lifelong religious commitments, hardly ever with the care and prudence such commitments might seem to call for. Somewhere between an academic monograph and a manifesto, Saving God alternates from epic, not-quite-substantiated pronouncements to obsessively-precise tangents. Either it’ll change your life or (to use Johnston’s words, not mine) waste your time.

The gist is this: most of what goes by the name of religion is really idolatry—especially the appeal to supernaturalism. The only kind of God that satisfies the ancient claim of being the “Highest One” is a God of this world, offering no selfish fantasy of paradise in the next. This God is perfectly in tune with the immanent, Carl Sagan-ite account of science, yet one can also find information about Him in scriptures and religious traditions, selectively read. It’s a God that calls to mind, for instance, Spinoza’s “God or Nature”; J. N. Findlay’s 1948 paper claiming that the object of the ontological argument for God’s existence must be something higher than the God of religion; and sociologist Philip Rieff’s critique of the gods we invent to serve our own desires—religious, clinical, and otherwise. The second half of Saving God features a series of technical moves that, as best I can gather, is an attempt to squeeze some kind of Heideggerian phenomenology into the back door of analytic philosophy, which in turn makes room for introducing a close-to Hegelian view of God as Being’s self-disclosure to beings in history—yada, yada, yada.

All this is to say (and here I am imitating Johnston’s alternating rhetoric referred to above) that God is here and now, not beyond. Inscribed in all the fluff and error of religion—even in the story of the Christian Passion—there are basic truths about the universe and the Mind that pervades it which philosophy, fortunately, has the means to extract.

I noted recently the use of this strategy of “truth-ing mythology” by Aristotle in the Metaphyiscs, the use of popular religious tradition as a bearer of hidden truth. Aristotle takes the belief that the planets and stars represent the eternal gods of myth to be the relic of a truer, ancient knowledge that the stars are actually eternal godlike orbs—not capricious Zeus and Hera, but geometric and impersonal. It’s a plausible conclusion for the fourth century BCE, though one rendered utterly false by modern astronomy; the stars are old, we now know, but they’re not eternal. Close, Aristotle, but no cigar.

It raises a troubling question for any such attempt: how can we be sure where mythology ends and true philosophy begins?

I’d like to carry this point forward with Johnston’s book further than I did before (distracted as I was by a reverie on the mythology of war). This same move of Aristotle’s is deeply-seated in the history and habits of how liberal-minded scholars study and think about religion today; Saving God is only the latest example. I previously mentioned the Eranos set: Eliade, Jung, and Campbell. But then there’s also Thomas Jefferson clipping away at his Bible, Ludwig Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity, and Paul Tillich’s God as Ultimate Concern. Each took religious tradition as a thing which now needs to be translated and, most of all, extracted from. Each, in retrospect, can look rather silly and shortsighted—if not quite with the flat wrongness of Aristotle’s astronomy, at least as a mythology in its own right. If Jesus were just Jefferson’s moral teacher, everything else he said would’ve made him a lunatic. Feuerbach’s ideas took hold nowhere more than in the doctrines of Marxism. And Tillich’s eloquence aggravated and empowered the populist anti-modernists he meant to supplant.

One can see the appeal of going with Aristotle, with Johnston, with a reinterpretation by philosophy. I’ve done so myself sometimes. It offers both freedom of mind and the resources of tradition. It holds out the possibility of a necessary about-face, a brilliant and startling move that can change everything, saving God enough that God might be able to save us. But it’s not as easy as it looks. A few generations can pass and you’ll find yourself in error like Aristotle, or spouting mythology in your own right like Jung. Plus, philosophy is nearly always the occupation of but a few, who run the risk of losing track of what religion really is and means for most people in the rest of society.

If one is to take these risks, though, it’s hard to find an attempt that better satisfies the pressing need to reconcile science, human responsibility, and our debt to religious heritage than the brand of transcendence Johnston outlines here: “this world properly received.”

The latest entry for your New Atheist library is Rebecca Newberger Goldstein’s 36 Arguments for the Existence of God, which I review today at The American Prospect. Thanks to an elaborate marketing campaign, the book has been reviewed just about everywhere by now, yet I’m still ambivalent about its significance. Though I enjoyed it, that’s perhaps only because I happen to be obsessed with arguments for the existence of God—my friend Gordon Haber’s very different review at the Forward has some truth to it too. In any case, Goldstein’s book is one more chance to say, as Darwin did so famously and so eloquently, “There is grandeur in this view of life.”

????What is it like to be a New Atheist—one of those irascible preachers of reason, those “militant” purveyors of populist non-belief like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens? Most people don’t bother to ask, because they think they already know. Either it’s a depraved and pathetic existence, buoyed (especially in the notorious case of Hitchens) only by excessive drink or else suffused in a nearly mystical state that frees one (as it seemingly does Dawkins) enough from dogmatic noise to revel fully in the grandeur of the scientific imagination. Either way, it’s an inhuman caricature.

Few are better placed to set the record straight than Princeton-trained philosopher and novelist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, whose new novel tells the story of a suddenly rich and famous “atheist with a soul,” a psychologist of religion named Cass Seltzer. In the years since Dawkins’ The God Delusion set the tone for allegedly soulless atheism, writers including Ronald Aronson (Living Without God) and Greg Epstein (Good Without God) have scrambled the epithet Goldstein grants Cass. But Goldstein’s credentials to speak—through her character—for the New Atheist soul are particularly strong. She’s a friend of Dawkins, an advisory board member of Sam Harris’ Reason Project, and the wife of Steven Pinker, the New Atheists’ go-to evolutionary psychologist. Like him, she has a post at Harvard. Best of all, she’s a genius—at least according to the venerable MacArthur Foundation, which awarded her its “genius grant” in 1996. This should be a particularly important distinction among New Atheists, because what drives everyone crazy is how annoyingly brilliant they all seem to think they are.

Continue reading at The American Prospect.

Today at The Immanent Frame, I have the pleasure of sharing a conversation I had with Ann about her new book, as well as her distinguished new role as president of the American Academy of Religion.

NS: Like your plans for the AAR, Religious Experience Reconsidered attempts to expose humanists and social scientists to new approaches in the study of religion. What obstacles need to be overcome?AT: There have been certain problems in the study of religion that we keep coming back to and gnawing on without being able to solve very well. One is the relationship between experience and what we call religion; another is whether, when you’re defining religion, it is a unique—or sui generis—thing apart from other things; and a third is the threat of reductionism. All of these have been inhibiting our ability to bring scientific approaches to bear on the study of religion. What I try to do in this book is to open up pathways that will make it easier to engage the scientific literature on the study of the mind without simplifying the conceptual framework in ways that would frustrate scholars of religion. What I’m working on is just one possible avenue for doing this, but however we do it, we have to responsibly connect the study of religion to other disciplines. Humans are biological beings; we’re cultural animals, as one psychologist puts it. We therefore have to take our biology into account, as well as culture, and the way the two have interacted over the course of human history.

Mr. Hook, who describes himself as a “socially omnivorous urban dandy,” began this “passion play for the non-believer” with a story of loss of faith: the memory of telling a seven-year-old boy that Santa Claus doesn’t exist and subsequently watching him fall into a two-week depression. “We had made his world smaller,” Hook remembers. He devised this lecture, following the suggestion of Rainer Maria Rilke, to “restore enchantment to the world.”

Hook promptly proceeded to a Wikipedia-style historical sketch of the origin of the idea of Santa Claus, followed by a 12-minute original anthropological video of actual, believing children articulating the substance of their Christmastime convictions. These two accounts were utterly at odds. The children didn’t hesitate to delve into amazing speculations about how Santa may have once been an ordinary man, or preceded the evolution of the human race, or came from a supernova-ed star long ago. None of them, significantly, were willing to either question their belief in Santa or to prove it—aside from the testimony of having seen him at school or the remains of his nocturnal deliveries at home. As Hook pressed them from behind the camera to explain, the children only became firmer in their self-assurance.

Read the rest at RD.

My present travels in Costa Rica with the photographer Lucas Foglia, through a sequence of chance connections and exaggerated truths, landed us the opportunity to be in the press section at today’s meeting between (Nobel laureate) President Oscar Arias of Costa Rica and the two contenders for the presidency of neighboring Honduras. We understand our work here more under the auspices of art than plain reporting—to the point that we ultimately thought more about the press corps gazing upon the performances than the content of the acts themselves, whose Spanish we couldn’t fully understand anyway.

This was the scene: reporters gathered in a cordoned-off half-block of street in front of Arias’s house, with all their thick wires, cameras large and small, questions, computers, recorders, hook-ups, makeup, grumbles, and banter. There was a stage set up at the front of our pen, by the entrance to the house, surrounded by potted plants and guarded by tourist police in white shirts armed only with the friendliest-looking of clubs. Most press stayed all day, mainly waiting from morning through evening. We arrived in mid-afternoon. Not long after, at the back of the press area, on the opposite site of the press section from the prepared stage, a cluster of protesters arrived, bearing flags and banners in revolutionary red, shouting familiar slogans. There was a charge to the rear, pulling correspondents from their posts at the presidents’ stage. I joined.

Dozens of bored reporters finally had something to do, fixing their lenses and microphones and adrenaline on the passionate ones making so much noise through their loudspeakers. Against militarism. Against the powers that be and their inexhaustible corruption. One dressed as Che. An effigy burned. I let my voice recorder take in a speech from one of the ringleaders, far too fast for me to understand. I took too many pictures that have already been taken before in countless places, at countless protests. My hope was to find somewhere its unique vitality, doubtlessly somewhere, awaiting its capture by a sympathetic observer who could make this event really exist by recording it, by broadcasting it, by turning it from what it was to what it represents.

On the other side, the large, immovable cameras still awaited the presidents. They fixed on an empty stage, or on the door from which these men would emerge.

Will this sacred dissent be heard over the decorous speeches, I wondered? They were loud. We, among our cameras and our wires that ran under us like roots in a forest, were huddled between two competing performances, each competing for its presence in the final ontology of that moment. According to research I’ve seen in cognitive science, while people may be able to talk abstractly about the possibility of simultaneous things, “in fact” (says the science) no—in the intuitive processes of human minds, only one event can happen at any given time and be an event, fully. As gatekeepers of event-ness in media culture, the cameras adjudicated a contest of two events, one on either side of the street.

Each had its violence, each had its peace. On one side, a gracious act of conflict resolution among the heads of inevitably murderous states (even, one way or another, military-less Costa Rica). On the other, a riotous cry for an end to injustice and bloodshed.

But I should have expected what happened. Well in time for the actual arrival of the men, as I listened to (and recorded) a long speech about the tragedy of politics from a Honduran photographer, the protests calmly faded away. I didn’t see if it was police or simply being finished that did them in, though I suspect some eerie combination of the two. The air was clear and quiet for, not too long after, the arrival of the powerful.

We stayed only for the appearance by Roberto Micheletti, the leader of the Honduran coup, flanked by Arias. Micheletti spoke—something about elections and the rule of law—but I watched Arias intently. He has a wonderful expression on his face, apparently always. So sad, so stern, so mournful. Whatever he is, for whatever it could possibly be worth, he does look like he carries all the suffering of the world in his expression, as one perpetually in the presence of futility, either right there before him or, at least, during a fleeting moment of progress, in the corner of his eye.

But I don’t know if that’s worth anything at all. I didn’t even get a good picture of him. And I still have to read all the papers to figure out what’s (really, factually, politically) going on, and who I think is on the brave side of right and peace and justice, which is the only peace. On the evening Costa Rican newscast, it goes without saying, only one of the two performances appeared. Only one event, apparently, really happened.

(Photos and video are mine, not Lucas’s, by the way.)

Atheists have an image problem. According to a study led by University of Minnesota sociologist Penny Edgell, published in 2006, Americans have a lower opinion of them than homosexuals, Jews, Muslims and African-Americans. They can’t get elected to political office, and most people view them as outsiders. Yet the disdain is comparatively quiet and abstract, rarely erupting into palpable conflict. Part of the reason may be that nobody seems to know who atheists are, including atheists themselves.

I’ve really been enjoying the Belief section lately—highly recommended. Be sure to catch Simon Critchley’s ongoing series on Heidegger’s Being and Time.

A psychologist, an astrophysicist, and, um, a “neurotheologist” take the stage in a Brooklyn art gallery, alongside donation-priced beer, to talk about science and religion. That should about cover the bases, right? Time for some good, scientific answers for a change?

Last night, Brooklyn’s second-favorite online magazine it has never heard of (look out for #1), Gelf, hosted a “Geeking Out” event with an all-star cast: Yale psychologist Paul Bloom, Mario Livio of the Space Telescope Science Institute, and Matthew Alper, author of the beloved psycho-spiritual ah-ha journey The “God” Part of the Brain. (I discuss Alper briefly in Search here. He told me at the event that, actually, he’s now “retired” from all this stuff in order to devote himself to screenwriting.) Each got up for a few minutes, glossed over the sexiest points of their latest books (on sale in the back), and submitted themselves to the mercy of questions from graduate students and other young, lost souls.

“I guess it’s because I just turned 31,” said a fellow I spoke to with dusty blond hair and a newfound urge to suss out whether he’s an atheist or an agnostic.

There were, inevitably, some points of contention. A big back-and-forth with Alper—who didn’t seem much aware of the ongoing debates on the subject—about whether religiosity was really an adaptive trait or an evolutionary accident. And then some disagreement with Paul Bloom about whether moral disgust is a trustworthy sensation. Still not sure if God exists, though when Bloom asked, most people raised their hands saying He doesn’t.

“You’re all freaks,” he said, popping up the slide saying that 96% of Americans believe in the man upstairs.

Feeling a little deja vu? Wasn’t it just the other day that Meera reported at KtB on another high-powered, open-ended science-and-religion melee? And haven’t I been going to these things all the time for years? When are these folks finally going to settle this thing so we can get back to our own prayer beads and laboratories and be happy?

Perhaps the misunderstanding that gives rise to such intransigence—such deathlessness—in these questions began to reveal itself at the outset of Mario Livio’s talk, as he stood before a projection of the cover of his recent book, Is God a Mathematician?

“This is not about God,” he said. Hmm, that’s right. Earlier, he had insisted to me that he is not a science-and-religion person.

So what were we talking about again?

The only explanation that makes any sense, though, is that I actually see them all. My eyes catch every plate that’s convenient to see. They send the signal to some quiet corner of their brain, some place where secrets, if necessary, will be kept. There, the images can be processed. The tri-states are filtered out, as are all others that have not been old homes. When a plate switches the nostalgia subroutine, yes, bing, pow, the plate seen becomes a plate noticed. And I’m overcome by the sense that home isn’t so far away and, hey, maybe this is home too.

My grandfather collected license plates. He’d lived in dozens of places, but by the time I came around, his were mainly from Colorado. Once he gave me one or two, and I loved them. I guess I probably got this funny little license plate brain department from him.

Over the years I’ve used the season of Lent as a sort of laboratory for experiments with truth. Perhaps that’s not the most properly penitential way to go about these 40 days of fasting, which should be more outwardly directed than inwardly, calling us out of ourselves to service, repentance, giving, and recognition of our own fragile contingency.

My experiment this year was going vegan—eating no animal products at all, whenever possible. And this isn’t the first time. I did it also one Lent a few years ago along with several of my then-housemates, all of different faiths. That time, for me, it was difficult. Of all things, I couldn’t stop missing cottage cheese and probably splurged like crazy when Easter came.

This year couldn’t have been more different. I never once missed not being able to gobble down a slice of pizza or guzzle a glass of milk. A few baked goods with eggs in them might have been tempting, but that’s as far as it went. In fact, I loved being vegan. I’m not quite attentive enough to my body to know the difference in that regard (so brainwashed with Platonic-Pauline flesh-hating as I must be by now). But in my heart, I suppose you would have to call it, it gladdened me enormously not to be consuming the produce of other creatures. Closer, eating felt, to the hope of living nonviolently in the world.

The difference, undoubtedly, was all in the preparation leading up to this Lent. First, of course, was the not-so-subtle nudging from my mother over the preceding few months. For nutritional reasons above all, she has taken dairy out of her diet and has been rather evangelical about the idea. Intellectually, the nutritional reasons don’t do much for me, but more subconsciously, maternal pressure does wonders.

Along with that came some conversations with my former UCSB colleague Aaron Gross, a remarkable scholar and activist. For the Brooklyn Rail, I covered the launch event for his organization, Farm Forward, which is working to end factory farming. Aaron brought to my attention the deep moral and ecological bankruptcy of the animal farming industry—even to the point that the infrastructure no longer exists for truly sustainable practices at a large scale if someone wanted to try them.

Trailing on that, then, came more conversations with my friend Bryan, a fellow writer and passionate environmentalist. While my tendency is always to come at difficult social problems with novel, Yankee-ingenuity approaches, he puts his trust in simplicity and restraint. Not enough people today are willing to recognize, as Bryan does, that technology will not save us until we save ourselves. The upshot of his attitude is: we have to treasure the things we need and happily put aside the things we don’t. For him, this is less a matter of personal discipline than plain sense.

Comparing this year to the last time makes me realize how much preparation matters. It made the difference between 40 days of exhausting torture and 40 days of happy sacrifice. Actually, preparation is what Lent itself is all about—building ourselves in anticipation of the resurrection at Easter, ensuring we can experience, as fully as possible, its meaning. To those who would say that people are nothing but gut-level, instinct-processing machines, this Lent gave me an answer. Yes, perhaps we are gut-level, instinct-processing machines, but we are also much more. What we learn, think, and discuss matters enormously. Through these, guts and instincts can be calibrated and satisfied—not even necessarily through some dualist super-mind from outside, but by the resources our desires themselves have at the ready. The desire for compassion happened to have been built up strong enough by my friends, in this case, to overcome the desire for cheese.

Lent is over, and I guess I’ll be going back to my usual leniency: most-of-the-time vegetarianism, though this time with most-of-the-time veganism added on too. If there’s one thing I’d like to share about this experience, it goes to those who, when I said I was going vegan, said, “Oh, I could never do that.” Yes, you can, and a zillion other things. We can change the way we live, together and with the planet. It just takes preparation.

At the confluence of second-wave feminism and post-Freudian psychohistory, the mid-twentieth century saw a great burst of scholarship on images like these: the Great Mothers, the goddesses of wisdom and guile, the powerful matriarchs. These, the story goes, fell victim to the patriarchy of monotheistic religion (particularly Nicene Christianity) and were lost to the West, the lands of chivalrous knights, repressed popes, and femininity enslaved.

Through these figures, feminism found a prehistory. Its radical critique became more conservative than thou, a calling-back to those enigmatic epochs from which the stone and clay fragments came. The future no longer needed to be conjured out of thin air, for now feminism had a past to ground its future.

But who are these women? Do we know them, really? Are the psychohistorians correct? Scholarly whims can always change their tune—and in this case, often they did. Upon such rocks the future might be betrayed as well as built. Wouldn’t it be safer to make our revolutions ex nihilo, out of certainties in our hearts, rather than the vagaries of artifacts?

Eve ate of the apple and shared it with Adam, the apple that gave them knowledge of good and evil. Before you ask, Why Eve? (that important feminist question) ask, Why the apple? An apple isn’t some ancient flash drive upon which data might be stored. It contains no knowledge. Its contents download to the digestive system and only reach the brain when thoroughly rendered. Why, again, like the figurines, the object? Why are we so unable to conceive of new futures without entrusting ourselves to objects?

The objects, after all, have a life of their own.