For a while now, with the goal to continue these Monday religion posts, I've aimed to read next a book by a Catholic scholar about Thomas Aquinas. My reason is I've observed a trend of classical monotheists who imply or outright claim that non-monotheists don't really understand monotheism and it's their ignorance that causes them not to be monotheists. So it shouldn't surprise you to know that I'm a little fearful of the next assignment; I'm expecting it to be an endeavor of antagonism, one full of clearly's, in fact's, and obviously's I don't find clear, factual, or obvious.
In the meantime, A World Full of Gods continues to inspire me with new writing topics each week, enough so that I'm having to pace myself with the reading part to avoid backlogging the writing part. My enjoyment of the book comes despite my disagreement with the author, which I've come to realize is high praise of a writer's skills. Most people can write appealingly to readers in agreement; it's the ability to write appealingly to those who disagree that takes the most skill and is something worth aspiring to.
Early in A World Full of Gods, Greer claimed the core difference between polytheism and monotheism (and between polytheism and atheism) is that polytheism alone ranks experience above theology (and philosophy). In short: polytheism gives the benefit of the doubt to nearly all claims about the gods—even claims that on the surface conflict with each other. I've come to think of this as that P's believe it when they see it,
whereas M's (and A's) see it when they believe it.
Greer takes this another step further and says most seemingly conflicting claims about the afterlife are true, too. Can souls live on after the body's death? Yes. Can souls reincarnate? Yes. Can souls become spirits that interact with the living? Yes. Can souls be brought back to life after death? Yes. Indeed, it's exactly the diversity of near-death experiences, as well as experiences of apparitions and of children with previous-life knowledge, that make a diversity of afterlives plausible.
Greer has written many books about the occult, so I'm not surprised he takes deathbed phenomena seriously. I don't. But though I usually find such talk about souls and the afterlife nonsensical according to my own Story of Materialism, what's interesting here is a greater point implied by polytheism's afterlife-diversity: polytheism is not a religion in search of a problem to solve.
Much of what a religion has to say about life is implied by what it says about death. These days most religions in the world, from Western monotheisms to Buddhism, claim there's an improvement to be had by dying and therefore that there's a fundamental problem with living. Polytheism—or at least classical polytheism, with its broad beliefs in the afterlife—does not make this claim. According to polytheism, some individual humans may find themselves in trouble from time to time, maybe even most of their lives, but other individuals may be in no trouble. To the polytheist, religion may help people with their problems, but its purpose isn't salvation because people, as a whole, don't need saving.
To some extent, this resonates with me. In the last few years—long after I graduated college, I might add—has it been pointed out to me how unthinkingly teleological most modern thought is, from the most devout of monotheists to the most devout of atheists. The case of salvation is no different. There can be an essential problem with humanity only if humanity ought to be doing or being something different than it currently is. This presupposes an objective viewpoint. But if our planet's ongoing evolution is purposeless then humanity is what it is,
so to speak, and it has no essential problem—only
our individual, misguided expectations placed upon a finite existence.
3 comments:
Hi Craig, one of the problems I have with the Materialist view (aside from it being false :)) is the utilitarian or aabsolutely subjective lack of morality that results. See what you think of this recent blog post that I read today: http://www.scifiwright.com/2011/09/whether-secularism-implies-moral-subjectivism/#more-4090
What book on Aquinas are you going to read? I recently had it suggested to me to read the "Summa of the Summa," obviously a shortened version of St. Thomas's great Summa Theologica. I also have another reference for you...something I have not read in many years, and now need to re-read, but may stand in dialogue with your polytheist author...a chapter from Chesterton's The Everlasting Man http://www.worldinvisible.com/library/chesterton/everlasting/part1c4.htm
Josh— Thanks for the link. Suffice it to say I agree with the blog's author that secularism is incompatible with objectivity.
However, one thing that gets me about these kinds of debate is their inherent irony. We enlightened folk engage in such discourses, hoping to pin down Truth and Justice by typing our words into our laptops and spreading them far and wide on the Internet, whose underlying materials and energy are made available by who-knows-how-many-hours of Third World labor. These debates are today dominated by the minority of the world's population who control most the world's resources, similar to how the ancient Greeks hoped to pin down Truth and Justice all while their ample philosophizing time was made possible only by huge numbers of slaves.
Josh, again— This link I did follow and read fully. Chesterton's main point in the chapter, that polytheists are really monotheists but with some tall tales, is a point Greer addresses. Basically, Greer's point is something like: No, we polytheists really do believe in many, distinct gods—neener-neener! Indeed, what stops someone from claiming Chesterton is really a polytheist in monotheist disguise, what with his saints and popes and martyrs? Evidence. But as for Chesterton's evidence, which consists of a few examples of “savage” polytheists who believed in divine unity, I'm reminded of the North American Indians after the arrival of the Europeans in the 15th and 16th centuries.
European diseases wiped out numerous Indian tribes without those tribes having contacted Europeans directly. What happened is the diseases passed from Indian to Indian, and thus in some areas the diseases spread faster than the Europeans. One example on a large scale is what happened to the Mississippian mound-builders, a civilization covering much of what now is the US Southeast, some of whose tribes' contact with early Spanish explorers caused the whole civilization to collapse within decades. Thus, later European explorers came upon numerous ruins in places they nor any other European had ever been. Indeed, many previously settled areas of North America were unpopulated by the time explorers reached those areas. From the explorers' perspective, North America was largely vacant and unowned. But from our modern perspective, the explorers' perspective is incomplete.
Is Chesterton's perspective similarly incomplete? Possibly. Similar transmission patterns may have occurred with Western religious ideas as did with Western diseases, causing indigenous peoples' religions to put greater weight on concepts of divine unity. I don't know this topic well enough to say one way or the other. What I do know is today there remain no untainted savages in the world. Even in the remotest of equatorial jungles kids wear T-shirts emblemed with Chicago Bulls logos. How far back in time must you go to find untainted savages? Did the explorers and missionaries ever meet them and record their ideas? I'd like to know what historians and anthropologists of differing religious backgrounds think of these questions.
As for the Aquinas book I intend to read, it's titled Aquinas and is by Edward Feser, a Catholic professor of religion whose feisty blog I found two links away from Greer's. Feser's fight is with atheists, which I am one, and particularly with know-it-all, “evangelizing” atheists, which I am not, at least so far as how I think most people should avoid atheism.
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