Get The Gavel<\/p>\n
A weekly SCOTUS explainer newsletter by columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr.<\/p>\n
By high school, I had discovered a predilection for Nietzsche\u2019s \u201cThe Genealogy of Morality,\u201d believing that many of society\u2019s shortcomings were the direct result of Christianity\u2019s \u201cturn the other cheek\u201d mentality, which seemed to me to be the antithesis to the establishment of justice.<\/p>\n
By 18, I had gone through 12 years of school without ever once having encountered religious texts, doctrines, or ideas in a positive light. Reared on the scientific method, I saw the universe as a series of models: Mathematics could explain the optimal number of people to date before settling down, and cost-benefit analysis could calculate whether having children was worth the carbon footprint. I aligned myself with atheist intellectuals \u2014 Sam Harris, Robert Sapolsky, Christopher Hitchens \u2014 whose frameworks I believed would help me best make sense of our complex world. <\/p>\n
Around that same time, I was assigned books from the Old Testament in my freshman literature seminar and learned to look at the Bible as a collection of stories that had informed the development of literary history rather than as a religious text to be taken seriously. That same year, the election of Donald Trump caused me to roll my eyes once more at religious fanatics who were blindsided by some words written in an old book. <\/p>\n
It might not have been until my early 20s that I first directly interacted with anyone who held religious sensibilities. I had met secular people from religious backgrounds, but I had never encountered anyone who believed any of the words printed in the Holy Bible or who spent their weekends at church or a synagogue. And I distinctly remember the first devout Catholic I had ever had a conversation with, because he did not strike me as your typical Catholic at all: He was raised by Buddhist parents in Hong Kong and converted to Christianity after becoming convinced that Christianity would bring him closest to \u201cthe Truth.\u201d <\/p>\n
I was puzzled. How could someone with whom I had just spent 30 minutes arguing about creationism possibly have any sort of stake in \u201cthe Truth\u201d? But my new friend \u2014 who likely believed that I was going to Hell for my atheism \u2014 wanted me to be open-minded. As he saw it, I might never believe in the same version of reality that guided his day-to-day experiences, but I could certainly find value in many of religion\u2019s moral teachings. <\/p>\n
I was skeptical. My idea of religious morality had always come from Nietzsche \u2014 the philosopher who believed that religion was a system designed to glorify meekness and guilt while stifling human potential. What could religion possibly have to teach me about morality? <\/p>\n
But my friend recommended that I read C.S. Lewis\u2019s \u201cThe Screwtape Letters\u201d \u2014 a book he believed would speak to my English-major sensibilities \u2014 and I decided to humor him. <\/p>\n
\u201cThe Screwtape Letters\u201d is an epistolary novel written from the perspective of Screwtape \u2014 one of Satan\u2019s senior demons \u2014 to his nephew Wormwood, a novice demon who is assigned an unnamed \u201cPatient\u201d to lead away from God and down the path of temptation. Though I went into the book with an open mind, I was initially unconvinced that I would find anything to relate to in its pages \u2014 my way of life was so vastly different, after all, from that of someone like C.S. Lewis, a devout Anglican convert whose world was populated by formal theology and Latin quotations. But the further I read, the more I forgot that the book had anything to do with God or the Devil or Christianity at all \u2014 Lewis was simply proposing a philosophy for how to live well. <\/p>\n
In one letter, for instance, Lewis, speaking through the voice of Screwtape, explores the idea that doing nothing is worse than doing something actively evil, because it suggests an utter absence of purpose. How many times have we gleaned similar prescriptions from studies demonstrating the harm, for instance, of scrolling for hours on end through social media? In another letter, Lewis critiques the modern obsession with constant change and progress, arguing that such a fixation can lead to restlessness and dissatisfaction. Wasn\u2019t I witnessing this very phenomenon at Columbia University, where students lost nights of sleep and popped Adderalls just to chase the latest thing to add to their resume? <\/p>\n
And in my favorite letter, Lewis underscores the ideal of love as self-sacrificial, rooted in action rather than in fleeting \u201cromantic\u201d emotion. The strongest relationships were based not on passion but on commitment \u2014 and I had seen this play out in the loving household that I came from. These were not solely \u201cChristian\u201d beliefs \u2014 these were ideas that anyone could adopt to live a better life. <\/p>\n
After finishing \u201cScrewtape,\u201d I grew fascinated by the development of religion in our society. I read Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine and began to see their ideas crop up in day-to-day life \u2014 even in many of the tenets of secular humanism that I had so deeply idolized from childhood. I didn\u2019t believe that Eve had been created out of the rib of Adam or that Adam had been created in the likeness of God, but I sure as hell believed in something like sin \u2014 the idea that some actions, such as murder, were categorically immoral.<\/p>\n
In abandoning religion, we \u2014 the secular rational humanists of progressive dogma \u2014 might be missing a large chunk of the puzzle of human existence. Religion, after all, is a set of narratives that grapple with morality \u2014 ideas that teach us to discern right from wrong. Today, when we are in desperate need of societal harmony, borrowing ideas from religious morality systems can help many of us avoid falling into depression, raise our children in stable two-parent households, and promote learning over violence. Such values are not arbitrary \u2014 they are ideas that have kept many societies from devolving into anarchy. They are the values that have upheld civilizations for centuries \u2014 and perhaps even made them possible.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m still far from religious, but I\u2019ve come to appreciate the moral architecture that religion provides in a stable society \u2014 and I believe that it deserves a place in contemporary life. After all, are those of us who turn up our noses at religious people any better than the same religious people who reject evolution or believe in the afterlife? We secular humanists might have lots to teach creationists, but they have plenty to teach us. Perhaps true enlightenment lies not in rejecting tradition, but in rediscovering the wisdom buried within it.<\/p>\n
This is part of a series from Globe Ideas about how people change their minds. If you\u2019d like to write about a book or film or other work that made you reconsider your point of view on an issue, we\u2019re accepting submissions at ideas@globe.com.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Get The Gavel A weekly SCOTUS explainer newsletter by columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr. By high school, I had…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":25775,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[1022,171,22839,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-25774","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-ideas-cover","11":"tag-united-states","12":"tag-unitedstates","13":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114769452292432705","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25774","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25774"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25774\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25775"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25774"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25774"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25774"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}