If religion were true

[rug]

May 26, 2017
by Alan Duval

I am spending much of today and tomorrow with my daughter, celebrating her 11th birthday. And on Sunday I’m supporting my partner in her first ‘strong woman’ competition (lifting 55kg sandbags, and even heavier stone blocks, flipping 100-200kg tractor tyres, etc.). As such, I have no time to research and write a post, today (or this weekend), so I thought I’d post a favourite quote from H P Lovecraft that I was caused to remember today.

This quote is elegant in its simplicity and devestating in its implications:

"If religion were true, its followers would not try to bludgeon their young into an artificial conformity; but would merely insist on their unbending quest for truth, irrespective of artificial backgrounds or practical consequences. With such an honest and inflexible openness to evidence, they could not fail to receive any real truth which might be manifesting itself around them.- "H P Lovecraft, in ‘Against Religion: The Atheist Writings of H P Lovecraft.’

I said in a prior post that rote-learning was necessary when it came to religious instruction, because you could not derive the contents of the Bible (Qur’an, [insert religious text here]) from personal experience, though you could, if you tried hard enough, explain personal experience in light of the Bible.

If you happen to be a believer, can you argue against this quote in a cogent fashion?

If you are an atheist, what are your thoughts on the quote itself (or Lovecraft himself, if you prefer)?

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/tippling/2017/05/26/if-religion-were-true/

[vlyons]

1. My religion is true.

I'm a Buddhist. My "religion" is more a psychology of how the mind works and an ethical code of conduct than a "religion" as Westerners understand that word. Anyone can use reason and some observation and contemplation to discover what the Buddha discovered. With practice, anyone can use reason to see that all component things are impermanent. With reason and practice, anyone can live a happier life by being kind and generous, than by being angry, hateful, and greedy. The Buddha instructed us to find our own path to liberation from suffering. Buddhists don't proselytize. People have to ask for dharma teachings and then choose for themselves to practice mindfullness.

[rug]

2. There's certainly more truth in your post than in the Lovecraft quote.

[guillaumeb]

3. What Lovecraft calls "bludgeoning into artificial conformity"

could also be used to describe formal schooling, or almost any form of socialization. So would Lovecraft have preferred that all humans be raised with absolutely no outside supervision?

My feeling is that Lovecraft's quote reveals far more about Lovecraft's personal feelings about religion than it does about religion.

[rug]

4. That's often the case.

[guillaumeb]

5. If one were to raise a child following Lovecraft's ideas,

would the child be allowed to "discover" how the world works through experimentation? Would the child be forced to learn the language of the parent, more bludgeoning, or would the child be allowed to discover her/his own natural language as she/he was discovering natural law?

Quasi-Libertarian foolishness. As a philosopher, Lovecraft was an excellent writer of fiction.

[Bretton Garcia]

6. Lovecraft gave us a variation of the Argument from Design

Which is widely accepted by many religious folks.

"Design" argued that we can know there is a God, by noting the impressive complexity of the universe and the things in it.

Extending this, some might suggest that we can know more specific things about what God wants, by looking at what the universe favors. How the "things he has made" are ordered. What things seem to work in this universe, and which things are not so "fruit" ful.

[Jim__]

7. Im an atheist and Im not sure what Lovecraft is trying to say.

The excerpt is fairly short and it may actually be embedded in a larger text that clarifies his statement.

I’ve known a lot of religious people. I’m not sure if Lovecraft means to imply that all religious people bludgeon their children, but I don’t believe that I’ve known any who did. In general, I don’t believe a parent has to bludgeon their children to get them to accept the parents’ narratives about life. Children seem to naturally accept these narratives and, usually, conform to their parents’ wishes. Artificial conformity? I’m not at all sure what that is. I’m not sure what an artificial background is either.

For a parent who believes in a religion that teaches there is a life after death, a life that can be either one of eternal rewards or eternal suffering, the consequences for a child that refuses to adhere to the tenets of the religion could be eternal punishment. Any parent who loves their child would have to respect that possibility. Maybe Lovecraft doesn’t consider that a “practical consequence”. Again, I’m not sure exactly what he’s trying to say.

An openness to evidence is certainly a desirable trait. However, the world we live in is fairly complex, and the evidence that we encounter can lead us to contradictory conclusions. It takes a lot of effort to disentangle the “real truth” from the apparent truths that various evidence leads us to, tremendous effort and, based on our historical experience, a substantial intelligence. So much effort and intelligence that most of us accept as truth those things that our society has concluded are true rather that try to work through the evidence on our own.

I don’t find the quote, as given, particularly insightful.

[rug]

8. I know Lovecraft only as a writer of horror and "The Call of Cthulhu".

Apparently that quote is taken from a collection of his writings on atheism.

Here's another quote, from a 'Letter to Robert E. Howard in Selected Letters 1932–1934':

"All I say is that I think it is damned unlikely that anything like a central cosmic will, a spirit world, or an eternal survival of personality exist. They are the most preposterous and unjustified of all the guesses which can be made about the universe, and I am not enough of a hairsplitter to pretend that I don't regard them as arrant and negligible moonshine. In theory, I am an agnostic, but pending the appearance of radical evidence I must be classed, practically and provisionally, as an atheist."

It's a conventional enough statement on atheism. His other statement though is moving to the less grounded position of antitheism with the usual claims, not that there is no god(s) but that religious belief is the resusult of indoctrination or force or bludgeoning or stupidity or psychosis, et cetera.

They are clearly two different statements. But, as you say, it's simply an excerpt without context.

[Bretton Garcia]

9. Jim: your statement sounds about right in some ways.

Based on his very brief quote, I probably shouldn't say much. Likely though, his goal is to suggest that if you look at the universe, it doesn't back what the Bible claims, often.

But if I was speaking to a religious audience? I'd say it suggests that if there is anything like a God out there, than looking at his universe should tell us what he is like. But in that case? What we see is not really much like the biblical God at all.

In fact, Lovecraft seems to be rightly saying that what we see is far more like a rather neutral nature. And not much like a God at all.

And therefore? Religious parents should back off noticeably, in their religious indoctrination of their children.

As many have.