[Serious] The Humanities

[Belacqua]

How can we possibly determine what whether religion’s influence and contributions to the human experience are a net positive one?

We can't, of course. We have no alternative history to compare it to. It's the only history we have. 

That's why we have to look at it as objectively as possible, and using our very limited judgment, which has been formed by our own unprovable value commitments, try to be fair. 

I understand that I come across on this forum as a defender of religion, but that's only because I refuse to accept the default view here that religion is always and only oppression. (With the occasional damned-by-small-praise admission that it provides comfort to those who need a crutch.) There is a story, structured like a myth, which prevails on forums like this one, sometimes tacitly and sometimes explicitly: "All was in darkness and tyranny as religion was over the land! And lo! There was Galileo! And there was Darwin! And science brought light and freedom! And more science means more light and freedom! And religion is always and only allied to Darkness!" Extreme ideology like this damages our historical understanding. 

 
As Gae mentioned, people have been making secular art since before religion, and will continue after. 

I hadn't seen that. It's a typical Gae sort of argument, misusing the words and opposing something I've never said. 

There is no secularity in the absence of religion.* What he probably means is that there was art which was not explicitly illustrative of that society's dominant religious view. Of course that's true. 

Yet all art in a society reflects to some degree the dominant framework which that society has for understanding the human world. There was plenty of secular literature in the Middle Ages, written in the Romance languages, about warfare and romance. Every bit of it is framed in the values of the Middle Ages, even (or especially) when it works to oppose those values. There is plenty of Byzantine art which depicts hunting scenes or attractive ladies -- not pictures of saints -- but that doesn't mean that any Byzantine person could conceive of the world outside of the era's conceptual framework, which was dominantly Christian. 

It usually pays to look for the subtext or underlying assumptions in these non-religious works. Romance literature, while not explicitly Christian, would have been impossible in a non-Christian context. Just as modern fantasy movies pretend to be timeless, but turn out on examination to illustrate and justify modern American assumptions about how the world works. Pre-Christian works like the Odyssey are entirely embedded in the values of their times. 

I don’t think a secular framework rooted in empathy and caring for the well-being of others is a terrible place to start. 

I hope that such a framework is possible someday. Though individuals today may or may not value those things, the messages we get through the media are often very different. I also suspect that things like "empathy" are too abstract to stick with people. Such things need embodiment in a story or larger framework to have force. 

*about "secularity":

The word [saeculum] had various shades of meaning. Originally, it had signified the span of
a human life, whether defined as a generation, or as the maximum number of
years that any one individual could hope to live: a hundred years. Increasingly,
though, it had come to denote the limits of living recollection. Throughout
Rome’s history, from its earliest days to the time of Constantine, games to mark
the passing of a saeculum had repeatedly been held: ‘a spectacle such as no one
had ever witnessed, nor ever would again’.32 This was why Augustine, looking
for a word to counterpoint the unchanging eternity of the City of God, had seized
upon it. Things caught up in the flux of mortals’ existence, bounded by their
memories, forever changing upon the passage of the generations: all these, so
Augustine declared, were saecularia – ‘secular things’.