Suffering and the Personal Need for Religion

In the Buddhist tradition there's this idea that it's important to understand that life is fundamentally about suffering. And once you accept that core truth about life, it opens up the possibility for you to attain specific virtues, like compassion that would enable you to lead a good life. Similarly, in the Christian tradition, one lesson that suffering can provide us is that we are vulnerable creatures, that we need other people, that we're fundamentally interdependent. That insight is a valuable lesson that suffering can teach you.

Healing 2.0: What We Gain from Pain - Hidden Brain 

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But as I read some of the criticism, it struck me that the Hirsi Ali path as she described it is actually unusually legible to atheists, in the sense that it matches well with how a lot of smart secular analysts assume that religions take shape and sustain themselves.

In these assumptions, the personal need for religion reflects the fear of death or the desire for cosmic meaning, while the rise of organized religion mostly reflects the societal need for a unifying moral-metaphysical structure, a shared narrative, a glue to bind a complex society together. 

Where Does Religion Come From? 

By Ross Douthat

New York Times, Nov. 15, 2023

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From its 18th- and 19th-century origins, the project of skeptically deconstructing the New Testament, in search of a “Historical Jesus” distinct from the Christ of faith, has often combined two distinct arguments. First, it has attacked the pious assumption that the Gospels must be factually inerrant, perfectly historical, accurate in every detail and pellucid in the doctrines they imply. Second, it has moved from identifying specific problems in the texts, tensions and apparent contradictions and arguable mistakes, to arguing that all the problems are evidence that the Gospels must have been mostly composed long after the fact, as theological texts rather than historical records, with relatively thin connections to the events that they describe.

A Naïve Reading of the Gospels May Be Just What Christianity Needs

By Ross Douthat

New York Times, April 6, 2023

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In her 2009 book “Enfleshing Freedom,” the theologian M. Shawn Copeland traces Western Christianity’s entanglement with colonization, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, Native genocide and other societal evils that find justification in “compromised Christian thinking about the meaning of human being.” Distortions of Scripture aid and abet these sins against our fellow human beings. In Genesis, after Ham sees Noah naked, Noah curses Ham’s son Canaan — falsely identified by later interpreters as a progenitor of Egyptians and other dark-skinned people: “Cursed be Canaan! The lowest of slaves will he be to his brothers.” The curse of Ham was used for centuries in defenses of slavery — enslavement, so the argument went, was the lot and inheritance of Black people.

Why Do Evil and Suffering Exist? Religion Has One Answer, Literature Another

By Ayana Mathis, Nov. 19, 2023, New York Times

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To have a perspective of practice, where you really just really deeply accept yourself as you are. As a flawed human being. Like the rest of us, like all of us.

The Paradoxical Nature of Suffering talk by Geoff Dawson, December 1, 2022, Ordinary Mind School of Sydney