Tag Archives: Noah Millman

An interesting debate about the nature of religion

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It didn’t start out that way. Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry posted the following:

To have a religion is to hold a belief about metaphysics. Either you believe that Allah is God and Muhammad is his Prophet or you don’t. If you do, and you eat pork, this will not make Muhammad more, or less, the Prophet. The two things aren’t related.

He was questioning the relationship between religious belief and “action,” specifically the question “why do you, as an X (say Christian), do Y?”

Noah Millman responded with the provocatively titled post, “When I was in school, I cheated on my metaphysics exam: I looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me.”

Millman points out the priority, for most of the world’s religions of “orthopraxy” over “orthodoxy;” that is to say one’s actions, especially ritual actions are what make one a Hindu, or Jew, to take two examples.

In Gobry’s response, he says:

But here’s the thing: the subtext to this entire debate is really the question: “Does (my particular) religious belief make people a better people?” “And if so, to what extent, and how, and why?”

To the first question, my answer is a resounding yes.

What is one’s true self?

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Josh Knobe wrote a piece on the New York Times in which he asked “How is one to know which aspect of a person counts as that person’s true self?” He begins with the example of Mark Pierpont, a Christian who was deeply involved in the ex-gay movement, even though he had to repress his own sexual desires for men. Eventually, Pierpont came out. Knobe uses his example to ask which was Pierpont’s true self, the one that had gay desires, or the one that sought to live according to the “Christian values” he held dear. Most of us would probably say that one’s deepest desires are a reflection of the authentic self, but Knobe wonders. For philosophers, he says, “what is most distinctive and essential to a human being is the capacity for rational reflection.” Knobe has put his ideas to test in the emerging field of experimental philosophy.

His essay has received considerable discussion on the web. A thoughtful perspective is offered by Noah Millman that what is important to recognize is that the conflict within the self is real; perhaps, in fact, the authentic self is conflicted.

This week, I was having a beer with a parishioner and our conversation turned to Augustine. Perhaps it was because I had recently read Knobe’s piece, but as we talked, I was put in mind of Augustine in Confessions, as he tries to deal with his divided will in the moments leading up to his conversion:

The mind commands the body and is instantly obeyed. The mind commands itself and meets resistance. The mind commands the hand to move, and it so easy that one hardly distinguishes the order from its execution. Yet mind is mind and hand is body. The mind orders the mind to will. The recipient of the order is itself, yet it does not perform it. What causes this monstrosity and why does this happen?