After World War I, their lands were divided up between Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Turkey. The Kurds, who share ethnic and cultural similarities with Iranians and are mostly Muslim by religion (largely Sunni but with many minorities), have long struggled for self-determination. But the truth is, ideologically and politically these are very, very different systems. right now, yes, the people are facing the Islamic State threat, so it’s very important to have a unified focus. Hen we refer to all Kurdish fighters synonymously, we simply blur the fact that they have very different politics. Utopia is a secular paradise, which, as Tocqueville knew from his knowledge of history and human nature, turns into dystopia (not his word). Carl Becker’s Heavenly City of Eighteenth-Century Philosophy reminds us that the Enlightenment did not so much reject religious feeling as displace it to the earthly realm. Of course, many of the philosophes were deists, but their deism conflated creation with the creator, and whatever hope they felt was directed toward the possibility of establishing an earthly paradise. Tocqueville did not know existentialism, but he did know the Enlightenment and its animus against institutional religion. As conditioned beings, we can only hope to modify and reshape conditions, but not recreate ourselves ex nihilo (out of the abyss). For the godless existentialist (there are also religious existentialists), transcendence means a kind of self-creation, which from a religious perspective is blasphemy or heresy. The first sentence reads like an anticipation of existentialism-with its confrontation with the abyss (“a natural disgust for existence”) and its drive to transcend it. I am not a believer, and I do not think of my disbelief as a result “of moral violence exercised on own nature.” Yet I find this passage from Tocqueville compelling. Would he say that he had committed “a sort of moral violence” upon himself? The evidence of Tocqueville’s life does not make him out to be much of a believer. Disbelief is an accident faith alone is the permanent state of humanity. Only by a kind of aberration of the intellect and with the aid of a sort of moral violence exercised on their own nature do men stray from religious beliefs an invincible inclination leads them back to them. Religion therefore is only a particular form of hope itself. These different instincts constantly drive his soul toward contemplation of another world, and it is religion that guides it there. I begin with Alexis de Tocqueville’s comment from Democracy in America: Alone among all the beings, man shows a natural disgust for existence and an immense desire to exist: he scorns life and fears nothingness. They are of course incapable of seeing the fanatical motes in their own eyes. What has provoked me as an agnostic to defend the existence of religion (without embracing it)? First is its legacy in literature and the arts and, second, the tone deafness of neo-Darwinians who see nothing in the religious life except superstition and fanaticism. The prevalence of fundamentalism in various forms, particularly in its fanatical and murderous manifestations both in the developed and the developing worlds, would seem to be a caution against the embrace of religion. Because for most of my life I thought of myself as an atheist (and in certain moods still do), I never imagined that I would find myself a defender. It is a difficult time for a rational defense of religion. Religion as a Form of Hope: Reflections by a Lifelong Agnostic Eugene Goodheart ▪ Fall 2009 Religion as a Form of Hope: Reflections by a Lifelong Agnostic
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