Time asked an interesting question on last week’s cover: “What if there’s no hell?” Was this supposed to be one more thing to worry about?
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As it happens, I’d just finished reading a book that grapples with the idea there’s neither hell nor heaven nor even God. Obviously, this isn’t a new idea, and Douthat wasn’t making an empirical case for hell, simply observing that a sophisticated set of metaphysical suppositions should find a place for it. But the charm of The Age of Doubt: Tracing the Roots of Our Religious Uncertainty is that it returns us to Victorian England, when the absence of God was a new idea—a new idea, at any rate, to a number of intelligent people raised in the Anglican Church who would happily have continued subscribing to their realm’s official faith if science hadn’t lately posed so many inconvenient contradictions.
And we bask in our “spirituality.” David Brooks took his turn at bat in the Times on Good Friday. He’d just seen the new Broadway hit musical The Book of Mormon and thought it was wonderful. Its message was that religious doctrines tend to be rigid, silly, and harmful, but religion itself “can do enormous good” so long as people don’t take the doctrine literally. For “all religions ultimately preach love and service underneath their superficial particulars.” The Book of Mormon teaches this lesson so triumphantly, Brooks wrote, that it took him a while to realize it isn’t true. For “vague, uplifting, nondoctrinal religiosity doesn’t actually last,” he observed. “The religions that thrive have exactly what ‘The Book of Mormon’ ridicules: communal theories, doctrines and codes of conduct rooted in claims of absolute truth.”
To save lost sinners such as me:
If Anne Brontë, who died of tuberculosis at 29, had lived in our era instead of hers, and if she’d hankered for a soul mate, she might have shown up on the Reader‘s Matches site describing herself as “spiritual, not religious.” It’s a popular choice; for a long time I’ve wondered if it’s either a pickup line or an attempt to hang on to faith by a fingernail.
At the moment he’s reading The Meditation Year, a book that says “it is possible to learn to meditate without becoming part of any particular faith,” and assures readers, “you will learn meditation easily and experience the benefits quickly. All the meditations in this book are safe and easy to practice.”
