“Behind this vague tendency to treat religion as a side issue in modern life, there exists a strong body of opinion that is actively hostile to Christianity and that regards the destruction of positive religion as absolutely necessary to the advance of modern culture.”
— Christopher Dawson
My Comment:
As I’ve written, I am an agnostic and a skeptic….not so much about God, as about language. Which means, I read Dawson or Voegelin, with as much attention (or inattention) as I read Marx. The latter does not seem any more “scientific” than the former to me. Indeed, the only thing that makes something a religion is the hostility to opposition that adheres to it. [correction: this is an overstatement. It should read “one of the things that make something a religion.”] From that point of view, most of those who believe themselves to be actively hostile to “god” and “religion” are actually devout believers – their temperament is exactly like the rabid fundamentalists they denounce.
I, on the other hand, believe myself to be a Christian agnostic and a Christian skeptic.
How can I subscribe to such a contradiction in terms? [For those unfamiliar with theology, there are many leading theologians who are quite skeptical or even unbelieving in “god”].
For me, it is not a question of lacking faith in God. That is quite a simple-minded kind of contrarianism.
My heresy is a little deeper. I lack faith in language. I have no faith in words as a fixed repository of meaning.
As for “god” – the conventions and symbols one grows up with can never really be uprooted and it seems wiser and truer to accept them as equally the outgrowth of the mind as logic or empiricism. If I must confess disbelief in “god,” then I must confess it equally in “man,” “truth,” “justice” or “logic,” “you” or “me.”
What naive empiricists never realize is that what endows facts with their “factuality” is the “mind.” There is no escaping that.
Not do we have to go from naive empiricism to naive idealism, i.e., we don’t have to leap from “just the facts, ma’am” to “Just my opinion.”
Instead, we continually adjust our thoughts and subjective experience to the hard edges of facts so-called, to the limitations of objective experience. We do that through the refinement of our language. We continually reflect the tension of existence in a conditional, fractured, and fluctuating reality through language that expresses the contradiction and paradoxes inherent in our existence as mind-body.
In that spirit, I have no problem with affirming:
Credo in unum Deum, Patrem omnipotentem, factorem caeli et terrae, visibilium omnium et invisibilium…..