The Theotard Backlash

Karen Armstrong is a former nun and a theological liberal who has been making the media rounds lately to promote her latest book, The Case for God. I have not read the book yet. But her ideas are already out there, and I must respond to those ideas.

Basically, you have fundies who believe in the old time religion, and secularists like me who don't. But there is a third option--theotardation. A theotard is someone who blends the hipness of science with a quasi-spirituality. In other words, scientific facts are embraced along with religion. In short, this liberal religion is one that is corrected in the light of scientific discovery. I consider it akin to smokers living on nicotine patches or heroin addicts on methadone.

Liberal theology is stupid. The flaw in it is epistemological. It allows room for faith which is a blank that can be filled in with whatever you like. God is a blank piece of paper ready for whatever religious Rorschach splatter believers care to sling at it. As long as you don't make any claims that bear on the material world, this new religion will pass all scientific tests because science is ultimately concerned with material reality. In short, the only flaw of fundamentalism is that it makes claims about material reality.

At this point, we find ourselves in a philosophical debate over the nature of truth. I define truth in terms of my epistemology which asserts that whatever exists in reality is true. God does not exist in reality as far as the evidence goes, so there is no point to that mystery. Religious practice is simply a mystical state no different than taking a hallucinogen. Do these things exist? Only in your mind and perhaps the mind of Carlos Castaneda.

The reality is that people like Armstrong have been educated and saturated in religious worlds and institutions and cultures they simply cannot abandon. They make no pains to correct their fundamentalist peers on the errors of their ways. It is my belief they do this because they make their living from religion. To abandon this religion is to also abandon a steady paycheck. So, these people become modern day gnostics. They are essentially atheists, but they lack the courage or the finances to cut the religious umbilical cord.

I am all for the study of religion as a subject of anthropology, but I see no purpose whatsoever in religious practice. An atheist who prays is like a teetotaler who drinks. You can't be both. Theotards attempt to thread the needle on this. They try to live in both worlds and draw the ire of both upon them.

Either religion is true, or it isn't. Religious people who wake up from their delusions should do the intellectually honest thing and find a new way to make a living. This might involve food preparation or the lifting of heavy objects, but these occupations have superior advantages over religious work. They actually benefit other people, and they are honest.

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