Today's poem, from Emily, is pretty direct. It opens with an apparent declaration that turns out to be misdirection. Going to Heaven! But then, in the last stanza, I'm glad I don't believe it...
For it would stop my breath,
And I’d like to look a little more
At such a curious earth!
I am glad they did believe it
Whom I have never found
Since the mighty autumn afternoon
I left them in the ground.
She's earthbound and proud of it. So are the loved ones who've gone on before her earthbound, literally. Tucked under. Sown in leaves of grass, as the other great gray poet of demos put it.
But she's also glad, for the sake of their temporal happiness, that they did believe they'd be going up and out on wings of angels.
On my reading, that makes Emily a candidate for the secular humanism and a soft atheism Philip Kitcher models. We're about to pick up his Life After Faith in A&P, which opens with a nod to Willy James's repudiation of "fervent unbelief": He believes in No God and worships him.
Kitcher is Dickensonian and Jamesian in rejecting belief in god and heaven personally but defending it for those who find a value for life in it. That's friendly atheism, and perhaps some would call it tender-minded. I just call it civil and pluralistic. Also melioristic, insofar as such beliefs release in many their best constructive energies for making this earth better while they can.
Kitcher conversed a few years ago with the late Notre Dame philosopher and Stone curator Gary Gutting about these issues, making the case for soft atheism.
The “soft atheism” I defend considers religion more extensively, sympathizes with the idea that secularists can learn from religious practices and recommends sometimes making common cause with religious movements for social justice...
Refined religion sees the fundamental religious attitude not as belief in a doctrine but as a commitment to promoting the most enduring values. That commitment is typically embedded in social movements — the faithful come together to engage in rites, to explore ideas and ideals with one another and to work cooperatively for ameliorating the conditions of human life. The doctrines they affirm and the rituals they practice are justified insofar as they support and deepen and extend the values to which they are committed. But the doctrines are interpreted nonliterally, seen as apt metaphors or parables for informing our understanding of ourselves and our world and for seeing how we might improve both...
To sum up: There is more to religion than accepting as literally true doctrines that are literally false. Humanists think the important achievements of religions at their best — fostering community, articulating and supporting values — should be preserved in fashioning a fully secular world.
Sounds a lot like the views of another Gary I know, whose refined Methodism strikes me (like the best Pragmatism) as a humanism too.
This conversation, like so many in the late lamented Stone series, exemplifies moral dialogue at its best. It's what Kitcher meant when he said recently, speaking of his new book Moral Progress, that "the source of moral authority is collective," not coercive or supra-human.
And it shows that "listening to one another is incredibly important." That means listening to one another's words as well as to our hearts.
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