Then I came on The Straight Dope to see what people had to say about it because surely these posts would have made it onto the Dope. But after two unsuccessful searches I decided to post it myself. I don’t have any eloquent, intellectual things to say about it. The angrier I get about a subject the less effectively I can string together words to quell the thing that made me angry. It’s rather frustrating really. So I put these articles to you dear Dopers so as to spur a debate about Miller’s statements.
The blog post is a bunch of vague complaints with no insight or analysis, and the follow-up post is more of the same but with a whiny, defensive tone. He says s-not-r “offers no positive exposition or understanding or explanation of a body of belief or set of principles of any kind.” Of course he doesn’t seem to have asked any of these people what they think - he just asserts that they’re uncommitted narcissistic whiners who want everything to sound nice and won’t take a stand on anything. If he’d done some interviews or research he could have produced something useful, maybe, but instead it’s just a rant about kids today. I agree that s-not-r produces plenty of annoying mumbo-jumbo but I don’t think institutionalized religion is more respectable because it’s older, institutionalized, and deeply tied to Western culture. My general view of it is that s-not-rs make up their views as they go and institutionalized religion is a combination of making it up as you go and dogma based on material that someone else made up hundreds or thousands of years ago.
Seconded. Its even more annoying cause he actually asks these things as rhetorical questions in the article. Instead of asking them rhetorically, why not go actually ask someone that classifies themselves as “s-not-r”? Maybe he’ll disagree with their answer, but that would at least give him something real to rant against, instead of just making strawmen.
In anycase, basing ones religion on a personal relationship with God outside the dogma of a formal Church goes back to 1517, and was the basis for a lot of Dissenter groups in the 17th century onward. Its not exactly a “kids these days” sort of thing.
I like the one commentor who wondered when Miller would be writing a similar post about the “Religious but not Spiritual”. Whatever can be said about those who classify themselves as “s-not-r” (and I agree with Marley23 that Miller doesn’t provide much insight into them), it’s clearly a position taken in reaction against organized religion for it’s lack of spirituality (i.e. the charge–true or false–that organized religion is hypocritical). It would have been interesting if Miller had explored this reaction more rather than writing off the s-not-r’s to a simple lack of conviction.
Not a very well-argued piece, I agree, but I tend to give the spiritual-not-religious crowd less leeway than I do adherents of organized religions. Being (say) Islamic or belonging to the Roman Catholic Church indicates taking part in a shared culture; one submits to its authority, engages in its prescribed rituals, risks the opprobrium of its community when failing to do so. Such factors influence — drive — behavior.
On the other hand, someone who self-identifies as spiritual but not religious (or who chooses to convert to a cult or obscure religion) acts against these behavioral drivers. But despite being willing to examine religiousness critically, they nevertheless conclude the truth of something silly or even irrational. They give up the arguably good parts of religion (e.g. shared norms, local safety nets) and keep the (again arguably) bad ones.
In practice, those who are “spiritual” in a new-agey sense usually seem rather gullible to me.
Which is exactly why I’m a little more favorably disposed to the s-not-r crowd. I don’t trust those institutions at all and I think their authority and opprobrium frequently support or bring about harmful and irrational behavior. As the blogger notes, s-not-rs are generally disorganized, which means they’re less likely to cause big problems.
I agree with the general gist of the comments, but the first blog post is kind of the norm. Nowhere in it does he consider what might be true.
I’m neither spiritual nor religious personally, but I think there may be two reasons people are spiritual but not religious. In both, they’ve looked at the claims of religions in a free and fearless environment and found them wanting. Miller doesn’t seem to consider that. One group might feel pressured to be spiritual, since that is almost religious, while not actually being spiritual, and the second group might feel a spiritual need not filled by demonstrably incorrect and untrustworthy religious institutions. Neither position is wishy washy.
In the second post he says something about those who reject the “facts” of religion not addressing the “facts” of spirituality. But I’ve seen few people claiming any facts about spirituality. Saying one believes that there is a reason for everything is a far cry from claiming Jesus rose or that a historical person named Moses was given the law.
I take your point, but the “spiritual but not religious” crowd is perfectly willing to embrace Jesus… on their OWN terms, of course. They’re happy to treat him as an ancient hippie who just llllluuuuuved everybody, and thought we should all just do our own thing.
An “S But Not R” adherent doesn’t typically say “Buddha was good, but Jesus was bad.” Rather, he/she will tell you that Buddha and Jesus were really (despite all evidence) kinda the same thing.
The"S not R" crowd has no intention of DOING anything unpleasant that Jesus told them to do, or of refraining from anything pleasant because Jesus told them it was wrong. They may embrace Buddha because they THINK (wrongly) that Buddhism doesn’t entail prudishness or asceticism. Those folks are flabbergasted when they read what the Dalai Lama has to say about sex!
I’ve brought up this term here before, but I think you’ll find that MOST Americans, regardless of what religious tradition they were brought up in, can now be classified as Moralistic Therapeutic Deists.
I tend to agree with Mr. Miller that ‘S-not-R’ is a sort of lazy unwillingness to take a hard look at the real alternatives (what I will term “rational atheism” vs. “faith-based beliefs”, with my obvious bias showing). At least that seems to be part of what he is saying.
So ‘S-not-R’ isn’t really a stand on the existence of any deity or accuracy of any religious tenets, it’s not really a stand on anything, it seems to be a vague “There’s something bigger than me out there, I don’t know what it is, but I believe in it” approach. I, too, have little respect for this flabby set of views, they seem to me to be a big cop-out.
But Mr. Miller makes much too big a deal of it. I really doubt that it is much more prevalent in the past 20 years than it was in, say, the 60’s and 70’s, that were rife with that sort of counter-cultural clap-trap.
To Mr. Miller I would say: Don’t get your knickers in such a twist about this, you’re making way too much out of it.
Roddy
p.s. to the OP, I am not understanding why these posts make you so angry. Please explain.
I suspect the opposite is true- it means more “I want the comfort and assurance of my childhood faith… I just don’t want to follow any of my old faith’s rules.”
To me this question boils down to the drive being examined by Neurotheology, or the Evolutionary Psychology of Religion, or any of a dozen other attempts to examine Religion as an emergent property of either human physiology or culture, sometimes both. When 90%+ of a species shares a trait that trait must be considered either adaptive or linked with an adaptive trait.
Young people still feel this biologically driven spirituality, but they have been exposed to enough education and reasoning processes, and they respect science as a epistemology, so they can’t accept bronze age myths anymore, but they still need something. The growth of “Spiritual but not Religious” seems to fill this gap.
Oh bullshit. That’s the standard Christian go-to phrase wrt anyone not appearing in church on the regular. Why can’t it mean “I see that some people find value in clinging to certain beliefs and I support them in this pursuit though I don’t subscribe to any particular belief system myself.”
To me religion acts to destroy one’s relationship with God or the devine or the spiritual. One must forgo any formal structured religion, and believe in something above all that is guiding one personally and that personal guidance is the ideal for humanity.
Why is that sad? Churches usually represent their teachings as eternal, but that’s plainly not true. Churches respond to market pressure, too; if people don’t want a god that torments people for all eternity for petty reasons, then they won’t get that god.