Is life more satisfying as an atheist or religionist?

[Belacqua]

1a) Then we agree that I am right to say that it is false to believe that the best cultural works are religious.

So I guess the questions is: Do I agree with the proposition "The best cultural works are religious." 

I'll go back to what I typed at the beginning: "Like it or not, the best of the arts in Europe was Christian for a very long time." 

So whether that coincides with the much more general term "the best cultural works" I'm not sure. It would be difficult to count up the number of cultural works produced in Europe, it would be difficult to specify which ones are in the category "best." And, as I said earlier, there are many works which, while not explicitly religious, would not exist without the religious roots and background in which they were produced -- so which side would get to claim those works I'm not sure. 

So for example, when Pope or Milton refer to angels, they do so while embedded in a very old cultural tradition, and their readers know what sort of thing they are referring to. But Rilke also gives some importance to angels in his work, without having that cultural framework to rely on. So do his angels count as religious work? Do we have to know what precisely his beliefs were on the day he wrote those poems? The line between religious and secular seems fuzzy to me. Likewise, when he writes about how the experience of beauty inspires an epiphany about the way in which one must live one's life, this is a late example of an old tendency, going all the way back to Plato's description of the Form of Beauty being an eternal and divine inspiration, which filtered through Christianity for centuries. So which list Rilke goes on to might not be clear cut. 

And as I mentioned, in Japanese literature, a traditional poem about autumn leaves, while making no explicit reference to Buddhism, is nonetheless so deeply rooted in Buddhist thought that it would be oversimplifying to say that it is simply "secular." 

1b)  I'm not sure I'd even go so far as to say the majority of great works are religious.  I appreciate that many are, because of history, but the majority?  I'm not convinced.  The amount of art, film, music, literature produced the recent past is enormous.  

Again, I typed earlier: "I'd say this is true of cultural products [which are atheist] from our own time. Recent novels, movies, etc., are unlikely to be religious unless they're specifically aimed at that market. 

But most of the painting, sculpture, literature, architecture made for beauty, and music in European history was religious. There were of course exceptions -- for example, romance novels all through the Middle Ages, or palace architecture. But little of this is of a quality that compares to the religious. And much of it is so closely adjacent to religious themes that it wouldn't exist without the religious culture of which it was a part. So the morality expressed in secular romance novels, or the gothic style used in palaces, are simply secular expressions of the religion of the time. 

Shall we play the game?  I'll start a thread where we simply name great cultural works in turn.  You are restricted to only explicitly religious works, like the Sistine Chapel ceiling, the King James Bible, and Bach's StMatthew Passion, and I am restricted to everything but such, like The Raft of the Medusa, Hamlet, and Mozart's The Magic Flute etc.  I think most people will greatly prefer to live the rest of their lives with only the contents of my list, but I may be surprised.

I'm not going to play, though I see your point. 

I do think that our contemporaries would tend to prefer non-religious works, because they tend to be less interested in religion. Even those who call themselves Christian will find Dante difficult. His work requires effort. But this says more about modern people's taste than about greatness in cultural works. Popularity is not in itself a sign of greatness. 

Granted, "greatness" is not an objective quantifiable category. I do my best to avoid it when teaching, in favor of more specific adjectives.