David Breeden is speaking all week about the common task.

Transcript:

Hello, I’m David Breeden. I’m Senior Minister at First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, and this is Coffee and Wisdom, when we try to think about where religion and philosophy has been and where it is and where it might be going. This week we’ve been looking at something I’m calling the Common Task. That’s been looking at some ideas about what will happen when the Western world goes into secularity, when most people become secular. There has been a lot of angst and discussion around those questions. And so I’ve been trying to think this through a little bit. Just as a quick recap, yesterday I brought up the idea from Alec Ryrie, who is a professor with the ideas of Protestantism, probably the greatest scholar in the world at the moment on Protestantism anyway. His latest book is called Unbelievers, an Emotional History of Doubt, in which he says, “In light of all this history, the secular surge of our own times does not represent any kind of intellectual breakthrough. Instead, in the wake of two world wars and social revolutions which followed, our society no longer measures its morals by the old religious yardsticks.” Now, in his book Protestants, and in this book, he does trace the ideas of agnosticism and atheism all the way back into the Middle Ages and says, wait a minute, this is not really an intellectual movement so much as it is a movement of people rethinking how their morality and ethics comport with ideas that are in Christian religion. “Most of us,” he says, “…from the Middle Ages to the present, have always made the great choices— about our beliefs, values, identities and purposes— intuitively and emotionally with our whole selves. That applies to religious faith, which, as we all know, is often chosen for instinctive, inarticulate, intuitive reasons, but it is just as true of unbelief.” Again, undercutting the idea that unbelief or secularity is about making choices that are in some way rational, that are reading books on atheism and that kind of thing. No, probably not so much, because those books didn’t even exist when this movement began in the Western world that he traces. Yesterday, I asked some questions based on these ideas. Is religious thinking a different way of thinking from other ways of thinking? If so, how is it different? And if not, what is it like in other forms? And also I mentioned yesterday one of the central philosophers of secularity and religion, Charles Taylor, a Roman Catholic Canadian philosopher who talks about the “social imaginary,” which by which he means it’s “a matrix or web of stated and unstated assumptions that create the illusion of a particular society.” When we talk about “American society,” it is the social imaginary of American society that we are discussing. Yes, that varies among individuals. But there are certain strands that we pull together and say this is what American society is like. So my question: Are religious and secular imaginaries fundamentally different? superficially different? Or not actually different, but expressed in very different ways? I think this is a very central question. As a humanist myself, I really don’t see a huge difference between religious and secular thinking in terms of moral and ethical terms. So how does this happen? Well, my answers are that religious thinking is intuitive and emotional. Alec Ryrie, the professor, said this, and I think he’s absolutely right. But I also think what we call reason and rationality are also intuitive and emotional thinking. In addition, religious is, in fact much older than any human religion that now exists.