Godless Christianity and the Philosophy of Yes.

This is remarkable listen

Mary Hynes of CBC Radio One's Tapestry talks to Richard F. Holloway, the former Bishop of Edinburgh for the Scottish Episcopal Church. Holloway's progressive views caused him to resign from his position in 2000, especially in light of his 1999 book, Godless Morality: Keeping Religion out of Ethics, which makes a very convincing argument that religion often interferes with human impulses towards love and compassion. Holloway now is what most people might call an atheist, but he himself uses the term "after-religionist", which, of you listen to him, you'll understand the difference. He also gets into a the philosophy of "Yes". Anyways, a couple quotes, though really, listen to the whole thing if you have the time. It's beautiful.

If you don't have time to listen to the whole thing, I transcribed some of the best bits below:

Holloway on the problem of rigidity in organized religion:
"One reason I’m glad I’m a former bishop because I no longer have to be defending an 'official truth'. I was getting in that kind of position toward the end of my time of a bishop, realizing more and more that I simply wanted not to have the last word said on any of this—as though it could be said—but to make the church a fellowship of exploration. Which is why I started saying, to me religion is poetry, it’s metaphor, it’s art, it’s imagination. It’s not science, it’s not explanation. Let’s enjoy it—it’s at its best when it’s being like that. Natually that upset a lot of people, and I got denounced, and it upset me because I’m not a cruel person, I don’t think, and I knew that I disappointed people.

But I think some of that’s died down a bit, and in recent years I’ve mellowed a little bit. I feel less anger, because what got to me was not so much the philosophical certainty, as the moral cruelty that was a consequence of some of the philosophically certain positions. Because if you believe you’ve got the final word of God, and God hates faggots and doesn’t much like women the consequence of that is that you promote cruelty to some people, and I’m sorry, I can’t cope with that. And of course a lot of Christians agree with me about that, because they’ve changed their minds about women— took us 2,000 years, but we got there. We changed out minds about gays.... It took us 1,800 years to change our minds about slavery—that apparently was mandated by God. So we know this happens and therefore I think a lot of people are living a much more improvisational version of Christianity. They’re doing kind of ‘theological jazz’ rather than playing from hymns ancient. Isn’t that life? I’m listening to you, you’re listening to me, I might change your mind, you’ll change my mind. If you simply banged your text out and I banged my text out, there’s no meeting, there’s no music."

Hynes: "We interviewed a guy who was a religious writer, and he found that he lost his faith much further down the road than most people. And he said the distressing thing to him, to have come to a place of full atheism, was: no one has my back. He had grown up thinking that there was a divine presence who, in some cosmic sense, had his back. Covered for him. In some way, there was some cosmic protection. And he felt stripped bare…. I guess I come to you as a former bishop on that front, not so much for your own experience, but what your counsel would be to someone in that position. You must have met a lot of people in that position over the course your career.

What do you say to someone who says, “I’m bereft. I used to believe, and now no one has my back?"

Holloway, tenderly: "I know. I know. He’s left home. And we all have to. You could psychologize it into separation anxiety and all of that, and of course you may actually even be able to ease the 'no one' bit, because I do not think you can absolutely demonstrate the 'no one', the ' Nobodaddy', the 'no-God'. And I think that part of the trouble with the debate in our culture right now is that it's too harsh and it's too certain. The atheists are just as unfeeling and unkind as the virulent theists, and the thing is intrinsically much more uncertain than that.

But I would say to the person that if that has become their reality, then they have to say yes to that reality, because the unreal life is impossible, because you can’t live in castles in the air, because there’s not basis to them. And it may well be that one of the things he’s having to go through is ownership of his own autonomy—he’s left home, he’s on his own.

There used to be a phrase in ’50s and ’60s theology: “man come of age”—it was associated with the great Dietrich Bonhoeffer. There was that whole notion that we should no longer have a theology that infantalizes the human, we should have a theology that makes the human adult, and is responsible for decisions, and that there’s no kind of metaphysical insurance. There’s no daddy that’s going to rush into the playground and rescue us—we’re on our own. It can make for a lonely universe, except that we have one another.

We have our astonishing artistic creations, we even have religious longing still. I still get a lot out of religious music. I still think there is something reaching towards something in that kind of music that I can say yes to. But ultimately if you believe in a Godless universe, there’s no one there but us, then, that is the reality. You have to grow up, straighten your shoulders, and deal with it. And sometimes you just have to be tough and brave."

Bonus quote from Holloway's writing:

"Paradoxically, it is scripture itself that calls us to overturn scripture; it is the witness of the living word of Jesus that challenges us to follow the logic that scripture was made for humanity and not humanity for scripture."