Karl Popper on Religion

[Odin]

(07-24-2016, 02:05 AM)Eric the Green Wrote: "Orthodoxy" is almost always wrong, and it's amusing that Douthat takes for granted that there is actual virtue in it. No, orthodoxy is just what you were warned about above. It is assumed to be true just because it was taken as true in the past. It is deference to authority, just because it is authority.

"American patricians, and particularly those situated in the Northeast, did not reject orthodoxy, they “dismissed” it “as something unworthy of an educated person’s intellect and interest.” While religion and spirituality were acceptable, “All Serious People understood that the only reason to pay attention to traditional Christianity was to subject it to a withering critique.” Orthodoxy gradually slipped into irrelevance. As Douthat observes, “among the tastemakers and power brokers and intellectual agenda setters of late-twentieth-century America, orthodox Christianity was completely déclassée.” "

If Christian orthodoxy cannot withstand scrutiny, is deserves to wither and die.

"as Douthat points out, transcendence is exactly what people want."

Yes, and that can only be satisfied by mysticism, NOT orthodox belief.

"Similarly destructive is our culture’s spiritual turn inward as the path to salvation. “The God within,” as Douthat calls it, is essentially “do it yourself religion.” Citing Elizabeth Gilbert’s abysmal book Eat, Pray, Love, in which the author tries to find inner harmony by abandoning her family and running off with a new man in the name of the “divinity within,” Douthat shows that much of contemporary “spirituality” is an apology for the proposition that “all religious traditions offer equally valid paths to the divine; all religious teachings are just ‘transporting metaphors’ designed to bridge the gulf between the finite and the infinite; [and that] most religious institutions claim a monopoly on divinity that they don’t really enjoy.” For Americans “awash in spiritual choices,” the cherry-picking, make-yourself-feel-good spirituality of the inner self contains substantial sway. However, in the search for existential meaning, turning inward is counterproductive."

Nope. It's where it's at. A religion that you don't "do yourself," is phoney and non-existent.

"From Gilbert to Oprah, the feel-good theology of “inner fulfillment” rests on the assumption that “the beatitude is constantly available,” that is, “Heaven is on earth, ‘God is right here, right now.’” It is the language of theology applied to pop psychology. It is a pick-and-choose faith based in nothing but individual preferences, whims, and desires."

God IS here now; beatitude IS constantly available. This is just the truth, whether one "desires" it or "prefers" it or not. In many cases this truth is found by managing or transcending "desires and whims."

"It deserves a place on the bookshelf of anyone interested in the redemption of the American idea, and more broadly, a reinvigoration of the Western cause."

Re-invigoration of the Western Cause may be accepted by those who wallow in traditional values without self-examination. But Jesus was not the only fount of it; so was Socrates, who said "an unexamined life is not worth living." It is Douthat who is phony as a $2 bill, because he knocks what Socrates (and Jesus) recommends. The Western cause is justly passe and dying. We may be interested in our nation's success and welfare, but that can only be gained by doing the right things. And that means that first, we recognize that we are citizens of the world. And of GOD. And to deny that God is everywhere, and in every person and living thing, as Douthat does, is to deny that the real God exists, by trying to put God in a box. That's like saying that the infinite is finite, or that eternity will come to an end.

Orthodoxy is what you get when the followers of some great person focus solely on the person's words "as truth" rather than the truth behind the words. And this isn't just with religion. Aristotle was the Western intellectual tradition's first great rational empiricist, but his followers then turned Aristotle's own theories into dogma and forgot about his method. Most Marxists have turned Marxism into a secular religion with the "revolution" as a secular apocalypse.