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In Bad Faith: What's Wrong With the Opium of the People

par Andrew Levine

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For readers interested in political theory and political activism, as well as anyone puzzled by the persistence of theistic conviction in the modern world, this critique of religious belief provides insightful analysis.nbsp; In light of rational standards for belief acceptance that are universally acknowledged in enlightened circles, theistic convictions are deeply problematic. Thus it is not surprising that some of the most important heirs of the Enlightenment tradition--Ludwig Feuerbach, Émile Durkheim, Sigmund Freud, and Friedrich Nietzsche--wondered, implicitly, why belief in God persists and even flourishes among those who should and in some sense do know better. This book provides fresh insight into the work of those thinkers by reflecting on the explanations they proffered and on their explanatory strategies. For all their many differences, their respective explanations share a common core and are driven by a similar (largely unelaborated) normative commitment. On Levine's account, believers today believe in bad faith--in other words, they evince a fundamental intellectual dishonesty. If only for this reason, they merit reproach, even in the comparatively rare instances when "faith perspectives" do more good than harm. From this standpoint, the author reflects on the liberal turn in the so-called Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) and depicts liberal religion as a vehicle of exit for those who implicitly acknowledge the untenability of the beliefs they profess, yet are unable or unwilling to face this reality squarely. He argues that liberal religion is therefore a transitory phenomenon, albeit one that has survived for a long time and that is not about to expire soon. Levine then faults the religious Left on this account, arguing that even in those historically rare conditions where bad faith motivates welcome political engagement, it is nevertheless undermined by its deep inauthenticity.… (plus d'informations)
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Andrew Levine not only supports what scholars of religion call the "secularization hypothesis," according to which religions are in a gradual and global state of social decline, but he also subscribes to what one might term a secularization agenda: approving that decline and hoping that it proceeds swiftly. In this brief volume, he traces a line of investigation through a set of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Continental thinkers: Feuerbach, Durkheim, Nietzsche, and Freud. The question at issue for these four presumes the falsehood of conventional religion, and seeks to understand why it persists.

Although I was in many respects entertained by and sympathetic to the treatment of the nineteenth-century figures, there was little new to me here. The one point in this book where I actually felt I was getting some fresh education was in Levine's history of the emergence of liberal Judaism (175-180). This passage was set within a more general chapter on "The Liberal Turn" that provides accounts of liberalizing developments in Protestantism, Judaism, Catholicism, and Islam.

The focus is exclusively on the European history of religion, along with its radiation to colonial and post-colonial environments. The book has nothing useful to say about Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, Hinduism, or other religions outside of the "Abrahamic" traditions. At several points it offers and uses an explanation of Deism that seems to make theism a specialization of the more general Deist principles (20, 130). While this might be a way of characterizing their relationship in the logical space of theology (with credit to Ioan Culianu for that paradigm), it is misleading in terms of their genealogy and intellectual history. The Deist creed--to which hardly anyone any longer subscribes as such--was an early effort at liberalizing Western religion, a fact which is obscured in this book where it ought to be highlighted.

Categorically hostile to religion, Levine is willing to dismiss all mystical experience as pathology. In this, I think he errs. For example, he takes drug-based instances of religious ecstasy as demonstrating that mystical raptures generally have "no cognitive import" (120). The fact (supported by drug evidence) is that mystical experience is not theologically probative. However, the similarities and interplay between religious and psychopharmaceutical phenomena are worth more serious consideration. Ethnobotanical theories of religious origins are not trivial, and lie well beyond the Feuerbachian and Freudian concepts of god-formation.

The moral of Levine's story is that full secularization--the extinction of religion--is needed and inevitable, but may not come soon enough. The engaging and somewhat ironic dimension of his analysis is that the liberalized religious communities will be the hardest to break of their delusions, weak tea though they may be. Liberalism may serve as a vaccine against the godlessness needed to achieve human freedom.
3 voter paradoxosalpha | May 4, 2018 |
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For readers interested in political theory and political activism, as well as anyone puzzled by the persistence of theistic conviction in the modern world, this critique of religious belief provides insightful analysis.nbsp; In light of rational standards for belief acceptance that are universally acknowledged in enlightened circles, theistic convictions are deeply problematic. Thus it is not surprising that some of the most important heirs of the Enlightenment tradition--Ludwig Feuerbach, Émile Durkheim, Sigmund Freud, and Friedrich Nietzsche--wondered, implicitly, why belief in God persists and even flourishes among those who should and in some sense do know better. This book provides fresh insight into the work of those thinkers by reflecting on the explanations they proffered and on their explanatory strategies. For all their many differences, their respective explanations share a common core and are driven by a similar (largely unelaborated) normative commitment. On Levine's account, believers today believe in bad faith--in other words, they evince a fundamental intellectual dishonesty. If only for this reason, they merit reproach, even in the comparatively rare instances when "faith perspectives" do more good than harm. From this standpoint, the author reflects on the liberal turn in the so-called Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) and depicts liberal religion as a vehicle of exit for those who implicitly acknowledge the untenability of the beliefs they profess, yet are unable or unwilling to face this reality squarely. He argues that liberal religion is therefore a transitory phenomenon, albeit one that has survived for a long time and that is not about to expire soon. Levine then faults the religious Left on this account, arguing that even in those historically rare conditions where bad faith motivates welcome political engagement, it is nevertheless undermined by its deep inauthenticity.

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