Here’s a fascinating piece from what’s becoming a favourite blog: Greta Christina wondering “If You Weren’t An Atheist, What Would You Be?” She considers four religions: the Quakers, Judaism, Baha’i, and Wicca ((But not Buddhism. Perhaps, like Sam Harris, she doesn’t really think of it as a religion.)), and realizes:
I’m finding this a fascinating exercise. For one thing, it keeps leading me back to atheism. Every religion I look at has some reason why it just doesn’t work.
But it’s also interesting because of the clues it’s giving me about what I’d like to see in the atheist movement — about what’s missing in my life that religion traditionally offers and that I’d like to find elsewhere.
Uh-oh – are we going to get Harvard-style humanism? I have very mixed feelings about that. But no. She looks at the kinds of things people get out of religion, and religious community, and realizes that she already has various ways of fulfilling each of them:
So maybe this vague yearning for some atheist equivalent of church doesn’t make sense. In the same way that I stopped trying to get all my emotional needs from one Capital R Relationship, maybe I should stop looking for one place to meet all my needs for shared epiphany and transcendence.
Maybe that one place is just my life as a whole.
Amen to that (if you’ll excuse the terminology).