Miles Kimball: Secular Humanism and Universalist Unitarianism
June 7, 2015 12:21 PM   Subscribe

Teleotheism and the Purpose of Life - "Please give this sermon a try. I think it has much in it that will be of interest to a wide range of readers: philosophy, cosmology, evolutionary theory, and science fiction, as well as theology. And nothing in it depends on believing in God at all." Abstract: As an enlightened form of atheism, I turn to teleotheism. Teleotheism is the view that God comes at the end, not at the beginning, where I am defining “God” as “the greatest of all things that can come true.” In this view, the quest to discover what are the greatest things that are possible is of the utmost importance. The best of our religious heritage is just such an effort to discover the greatest things that are possible. (via; previously)
posted by kliuless (33 comments total) 18 users marked this as a favorite
 
It's good to think sensibly about purpose and ultimate meaning. But cobbling up a rationale for saying you still believe in God doesn't look a good start. You have to suspect a degree of bad faith; he knows that what he's talking about isn't really God.
In the second place, I think it suggests he doesn't ultimately get the bloody essence of religious faith. This lukewarm ethical meditation isn't it; the real thing is terrifying fire from heaven, utter certainty, the rending of the veil. With real faith, the fact that it's fucking mad is a feature, not a bug.

Ymmv, etc
posted by Segundus at 12:47 PM on June 7, 2015 [4 favorites]


"And nothing in it depends on believing in God at all."

It just depends on believing in good.
posted by TwelveTwo at 12:47 PM on June 7, 2015


I think it suggests he doesn't ultimately get the bloody essence of religious faith. This lukewarm ethical meditation isn't it; the real thing is terrifying fire from heaven, utter certainty, the rending of the veil.

I would modestly suggest that your conception of religious faith is not particularly comprehensive, and that there are legions of Quakers, Unitarians, Episcopalians, &tc. who would politely but firmly disagree with you.
posted by percor at 12:53 PM on June 7, 2015 [23 favorites]


And when you're done watching this sermon, you can listen to, uh, his a cappella rap explaining economics to children.
posted by escape from the potato planet at 12:58 PM on June 7, 2015


Possibly the oddest thing about this sermon is the degree to which, having cited -- or at least mentioned -- quite a number of writers, some quite venerable, it leans by far most heavily on Dinesh D'Souza. Even if it disagrees with him more than it doesn't, this is a peculiar choice, as while he may not be the very least respectable of those mentioned he's certainly very near the bottom.
posted by George_Spiggott at 1:00 PM on June 7, 2015 [2 favorites]


I think it suggests he doesn't ultimately get the bloody essence of religious faith. This lukewarm ethical meditation isn't it; the real thing is terrifying fire from heaven, utter certainty, the rending of the veil.

If you define the only true religious faith as an utter abandonment of your rational facilities, then don't be surprised when most smart people reject it.

I don't agree that that's what it must be, and as a UU, I'm glad I have a religion that agrees with me.
posted by Myca at 1:01 PM on June 7, 2015 [4 favorites]


People define religion in different (and contradictory) ways. Kimball's welcome to his definition. Personally, I consider my Humanism nonreligious and not spiritual. I'm not sure whether Kimball would consider my atheism enlightened or unenlightened. I don't really think of my worldview in terms of enlightenment so much as trying to be decent and respect the rights and dignity of others. I can't, as Kimball asks, "envision the greatest good that we can imagine." I can strive to do better and help others do better. For me, part of doing better means finding ways to productively engage both those who think about meaning in religious terms and those who think about it in nonreligious terms.

In this vein, I prefer Felix Adler's welcoming pluralism of Ethical Culture to a UU approach that describes meaning as religious and spiritual and expects others to describe meaning as religious. To be clear, not all UUs use such an approach, but many do. Adler considered Ethical Culture "religious to those who are religiously minded, and merely ethical to those who are not so minded," which respects both those who consider themselves religious and those who do not without insisting that one group's terminology be valued over the other.

One difficulty when it comes to (re)defining religion and deity is the potential for misunderstanding when talking to audiences that use more widespread, traditional definitions. Atheist minister Gretta Vosper talks about this semantic confusion:
If I do not believe in “the big guy”, I cannot think of a single reason why I would want people to think that I do. And so I continue to challenge those in The United Church of Canada who do not believe in “the big guy” to use language that clearly describes what it is they do believe in. When clergy obfuscate, we do more than just talk a fuzzy theology in a messy church kind of way. They allow others to interpret their words in ways that they do not mean them.
Maria Greene of the UU Humanists reflects on the "language of reverence" controversy within UU in the early 2000s. Her essay does a good job highlighting the divergent ways terms are used, explaining the unintended negative implications some of these usages have for atheists, and proposing ways to maintain healthy pluralism within the non-creedal institution of a UU congregation. A couple excerpts:
Modern science continually shows the interdependence and inseparability of our rational and emotional sides. That's a very dry way to put it, but modern Humanists know how to laugh, to cry, to sing, and to express awe and are increasingly comfortable doing so, often (link is external) in groups (link is external). Yet most of us do not embrace terms like "spiritual", "religious", and "faith" to describe what we do and it is condescending to say this makes us immature....

I am a None -- if you ask me, "What is your religion?", I will answer, "None". To paraphrase James Croft (link is external), Unitarian Universalism may consider itself a religion but it is not my religion even though I am a UU Humanist. Similarly, I do not like the phrase "Religious Humanism" and prefer Humanism with no adjectives because my experience causes me to equate religion with belief in the supernatural.... Because I value "the free and responsible search for truth and meaning", I respect others who have come to different conclusions than me, including Humanists who consider themselves religious. I find the different perspectives interesting and enriching, and I enjoy engaging with everyone about their searches. Most importantly, I recognize my fellow UUs as allies in the vast amount of like-doing and like-acting that is required to make this world a better place. This is more important to me than differences in (a-)theology.
posted by audi alteram partem at 1:44 PM on June 7, 2015 [13 favorites]


terrifying fire from heaven, utter certainty, the rending of the veil

I think you're thinking here of magic, not religion. I suspect that were you to run this phrase by any sequence of randomly selected people, drawn from the pool of religious people all over the world and throughout human history, you wouldn't be able to get as far as the third person before finding someone who'd disagree that it accurately describes their own feelings about their religious impulse.
posted by Ipsifendus at 2:43 PM on June 7, 2015 [3 favorites]


Michael Pirsig (Zen/Bike-fixin') wrote another book after Zen, called Lila, and he postulated dynamic quality as the prime mover, the pre-intellectual awareness of 'better' that then gets other patterns hung upon it.

Dynamic quality in his reading is that moment of insight, the catch of breath at a beautiful sunset, the scientist's 'huh... what if...', the bliss of a monk, the Tao, &c.

It really does make the universe fall into place with a satisfying 'click', while following Occam's Razor and only postulating the smallest allowable entity (since dynamic quality is essentially the notion of 'better', and everything from a human to a protozoa knows what 'better' is).

It's also god with the serial numbers filed off, while leaving religion and all its prosyletising holy-warring gubbins as a static social pattern.
posted by Sebmojo at 2:44 PM on June 7, 2015 [2 favorites]


Surely Dynamic Quality comes before "that moment of insight, the catch of breath at a beautiful sunset, the scientist's 'huh... what if...', the bliss of a monk, the Tao, &c." Isn't that the key to the evolution of what we consider our consciousness or reflective, considerate faculties?
posted by bird internet at 2:54 PM on June 7, 2015


You have to suspect a degree of bad faith; he knows that what he's talking about isn't really God.

Isn't this what philosophers do all the time? Whither Spinoza?
posted by Apocryphon at 3:08 PM on June 7, 2015 [1 favorite]


I was intrigued when I saw that Dinesh D’Souza had written a book attempting to defend Christianity against my favorite authors. Instead of talking past each other, a believer in the Biblical God and nonbelievers were in a real dialogue!

Could only get halfway through. This muckety-muck reminded me of why I hated sitting church.
posted by bonobothegreat at 3:16 PM on June 7, 2015


"In my own view, we are lucky this time to have three potential presidents [Hilary Clinton, Barack Obama and John McCain], each of whom would be a credit to our republic as its leader. "

One of these things is not like the others -- that is, credited with attempting to put Sarah effing Palin in the White House.

"There are many voices that are less temperate than D’Souza. "

Given that D'Souza declared Obama to be a Marxist Kenyan anti-colonialist, the author has really narrowed the field -- even less temperate?

You can stop there and save a lot of wasted time. This guy is an idiot.
posted by JackFlash at 3:24 PM on June 7, 2015 [4 favorites]


Capitalism desperately requires the theory of evolution, just as the medieval order required religion. As Constantin Brunner puts it:
Monism and theory of evolution and progress—these sound just as plausible to contemporary man as did formerly creation, last judgment and bliss in the hereafter. His latest faith in perfection and becoming-better-and-better is nothing but a sheer reversal of the former dogma of original sin and of the depravation of mankind. And of God, the 'Eternal', by whom the world was said to be 'created', they have made the 'eternal creating world' which, creating ever more sublime things, will finally create the God. Pitiful reason that sees God or the world as eternal and which better 'understands' a creating world than a created one! Perhaps only because it replaces the word 'to create' by the word 'to evolve' and imagines the evolution to be extremely slow. Evolution from chaos perhaps, but a chaos so diluted as to resemble the perfect nothing and yet it is that something from which everything evolves! The old God of religion was a master who succeeded to perfection in everything on the spot anno mundi I; the new one, with his evolution, makes nothing really right, and although he makes it ever better and better, he never makes anything perfect.
Socialism must reject the the theory of evolution if it hopes to succeed.
posted by No Robots at 3:30 PM on June 7, 2015


How do you square that with the fact that many of the most cutthroat capitalists on the planet also publicly espouse one of several religions that reject the theory of evolution?
posted by Countess Elena at 3:52 PM on June 7, 2015 [1 favorite]


Socialism must reject the the theory of evolution if it hopes to succeed.

You are Russell Brand and I claim my £5.
posted by acb at 3:54 PM on June 7, 2015 [4 favorites]


Whither Spinoza?
OK. Can someone explain to me what this construction is supposed to mean? "Where is Spinoza?" What?
posted by thelonius at 4:23 PM on June 7, 2015


Now that I think about it, I'm convinced that this sermon has the same ending as Asimov's "The Last Question".
posted by George_Spiggott at 4:29 PM on June 7, 2015


Capitalism desperately requires the theory of evolution [...]
Socialism must reject the the theory of evolution if it hopes to succeed.


Really? Bees, symbiotes like mitochondria, meta-genes altering the flow of mutation to phenotype, the pretty much complete abandonment of the Central Dogma: modern biology has depth and variety infinitely greater than these two naively simple models and entirely sufficient to contain them both.

To the extent than proponents of each claim support from biology for their toy system, it simply means they don't really know much biology.
posted by freebird at 4:34 PM on June 7, 2015 [3 favorites]


Socialism must reject the the theory of evolution if it hopes to succeed.

Whatever, Trofim.
posted by Pope Guilty at 5:17 PM on June 7, 2015 [1 favorite]


When Marx said religion was the opiate of the masses, he was really referring to how people used religion to cope with the misery in their lives. He wasn't condemning religion per se but he was condemning the conditions that made this religion necessary. What he postulated was an "evolution" to an economic system where each was able to live the life they desired, free of the misery and hence free of the need for that opiate called religion. So I guess Marx is maybe an example of moving to the better. And without god.
posted by njohnson23 at 5:27 PM on June 7, 2015 [2 favorites]


Evolution is no more a barrier to socialism than gravity is a barrier to building skyscrapers. It's a natural condition which must be understood and contended with. Indeed, without a clear understanding of the natural evolutionary nature of unregulated economic systems (eg towards greater and greater concentration of capital), practical and useful policies to institute desirable egalitarian societal conditions cannot be developed.
posted by tspae at 6:51 PM on June 7, 2015


Whither Spinoza?
OK. Can someone explain to me what this construction is supposed to mean? "Where is Spinoza?" What?


"Whither" is not "where", it's "To where?" It's whence in the opposite direction.

In this colloquial phrase I've always assumed "Whither X?" means roughly "What's going to happen to X?" (e.g., here, are we going to toss out Spinoza for having bad faith?)
posted by mark k at 11:00 PM on June 7, 2015


Religion is like love; if there's no possibility of it hurting, you haven't really got it, however much you may wish or need to pretend you have.

the greatest of all things that can come true

What's that going to be like? A world where everyone can have a cup of tea and a bit of a chat?
posted by Segundus at 2:01 AM on June 8, 2015 [1 favorite]


Let me put it another way.

If God is the greatest of all things that can come true, then we and our descendants can build God and Heaven.

To take as your God something you made up yourself is idolatry, and it poisons the soul. The fact that in this case it poisons it with triviality really doesn't make it any better.

Legions disagree, no doubt.
posted by Segundus at 2:15 AM on June 8, 2015


thanks mark k....this has genuinely been puzzling me for a long time
posted by thelonius at 5:23 AM on June 8, 2015


To take as your God something you made up yourself is idolatry, and it poisons the soul.

speaking of modern day secular sermons isn't that like DFW's this is water address on idolatry and hubris? if the remedy is thoughtfulness and empathy (as say PKD and vonnegut also suggest) i don't really see that as being trivial? clichéd maybe! :P
posted by kliuless at 8:38 AM on June 8, 2015 [3 favorites]


Dynamic quality in his reading is that moment of insight, the catch of breath at a beautiful sunset, the scientist's 'huh... what if...', the bliss of a monk, the Tao, &c.

Yes, but aren't these examples of judgments that are crammed with cultural baggage and prejudices, rather than objective instances of an impersonal "dynamic quality" that is independent of culture? The catch of breath at a beautiful sunset is a legacy of Romanticism in Western culture; societies outside of the West might view sunsets as neutral, non-inspiring, or boring. The bliss of a monk--if we're talking about Buddhist monks, for example--can be a new age-y interpretation of a mental state that isn't blissful or enraptured, but simply subsumed in deep concentration (samadhi). In both cases, the Western observer misconstrues his or her own cultural prejudices as instances of a "dynamic quality" that is presumed to be universal.

In fact, you might be able to build a case that the "dynamic quality" that moves protozoa and all natural phenomena to instigate change is, if looked at objectively and neutrally, nothing more than the actions of entropy.
posted by Gordion Knott at 9:22 AM on June 8, 2015 [1 favorite]


Capitalism desperately requires the theory of evolution

And yet the economics of Capitalism (especially the neoliberal variety) relies on a set of beliefs that are antithetical to biological views of economics (ecology) and probably life on this planet. What's that about?

"Evolution" in this context appears to be just a flag to wave at things you're against, and not a useful idea with empirical and historical grounding. Are you sure you don't mean "progress" or "growth"?
posted by sneebler at 9:52 AM on June 8, 2015


Marx lays the foundation for a rational, non-evolutionist biology built around the concept of the Gattungswesen (genus-essence). He writes:
Man is a [Gattungswesen], not only because in practice and in theory he adopts the [Gattung] (his own as well as those of other things) as his object, but – and this is only another way of expressing it – also because he treats himself as the actual, living [Gattung]; because he treats himself as a universal and therefore a free being.
The theory of evolution rejects the concept of Gattungswesen, and thereby destroys the spiritual connection between man and nature. It makes man and the whole of nature into mere instrument. Alienation is inflicted not just on man, but on all life forms.
posted by No Robots at 10:35 AM on June 8, 2015


To take as your God something you made up yourself is idolatry, and it poisons the soul.

I agree. It's better to adopt a god somebody else has made up. That way you can pretend it's plausible.
posted by dashDashDot at 7:41 AM on June 9, 2015


I don't disagree with the idea that alienation is inflicted on all life forms. But saying "the theory of evolution" rejects Gattungswesen doesn't make sense: all science rejects Gattungswesen, or at least has nothing to say about it. There's a difference between actual Biology and speculation by well-informed, intelligent thinkers like Marx.

Why is Marx the authority for these ideas? What about Darwin himself, or Maturana and Varela? Or Emerson?

And then we proceed to Socialism must reject the the theory of evolution if it hopes to succeed. No, Socialism needs to learn some basic biology. We're all in this together.
posted by sneebler at 8:04 PM on June 9, 2015


all science rejects Gattungswesen, or at least has nothing to say about it.

Science has taken a wrong turn on this. As Feurbach says, "Die Wissenschaft ist das Bewußtsein der Gattungen" [Science is consciousness of the genera].

Why is Marx the authority for these ideas?

He is just one voice on this matter. I have mentioned Brunner, who provides the fullest development of this line of thinking. Darwin did not hold to the idea of Gattungswesen. Autopoiesis is a promising field of inquiry. I hope it is able to persist in face of the criticism levelled against it. Ultimately, it must embrace the idea of Gattungswesen or it will be overcome by evolutionist thought.
posted by No Robots at 9:20 AM on June 10, 2015


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