Simone Weil and Ludwig Wittgenstein. 

Two thinkers on religion I find worth reading and thinking about, though not without an alert, critical mind. Here is what they share, I believe:

·         Religion is at bottom an attitude towards life, existence, the universe, reality. ‘Attitude’ in the older sense e.g. a person sitting in a certain attitude, or the attitude of a compass needle – not so much a consciously held attitude / belief. Here is a passage from Wittgenstein that illustrates this: “My attitude towards him is an attitude towards a soul. I am not of the opinion that he has a soul. . . . .”  The context is being with a person in pain: we respond or automatic ways, given our culturally and biologically deeply ingrained attitudes about what it can mean for a human being to be in pain.

·         A religious attitude is formed around limit experiences and cultural deposits of these: joy over the birth of a child, wonder over the world, terror over death or sudden destruction, despair, deep love, the feeling of being absolutely safe, the inability to believe in utter meaningless, the beauty of a just action, etc. Religious attitudes are those that let affirmation in, even in the face of strong doubt or counter-evidence.

·         A religious attitude is not in the world; it is a light, or a way of seeing the world as a whole – ‘the world of a happy man is different from the world of an unhappy man.’ The world of facts is the same; it is the light in which one sees it that makes the difference. The attitude is like a light – only physical things are reality, but they only have value and meaning – or not – in and through an attitude. An attitude is like a criterion for judging the value and meaning of that which is real.

·         Does the attitude connect with anything outside the mind and the world – ‘anything’ in quotes since we cannot speak of that ‘anything’ in the same sense we speak about anything in the world. Is the light a projection from our deep wishes or is it a leak from another realm (or both)? There is no observer evidence that can be conclusive. It might be wishful thinking, or some evolutionary mechanism, or it might be a leak from another realm. It is deep in one’s inner life that one begins answering this question, and not from a scientific point of view.

·         A religious attitude is bound with ecstasy – literally a standing outside the self, the everyday self of wanting, having, getting, desiring things like money or the pleasures that money can buy; the self that compares itself to other selves and competes for social prestige, etc. From the point of view of the religious attitude, the things valued by the worldly self are qualified, relativized, or devalued. The life of ego consciousness – ‘the fat, relentless ego’ – is seen as inauthentic. A higher self, or soul, takes root in conscious experience. Compassion is central to most religious attitudes – a form of the recognition of the worth and reality of that which is other to the ego.

A Few Quotes from Weil

To say that the world is not worth anything, that this life is of no value and to give evil as the proof is absurd, for if these things are worthless what does evil take from us?

The good is the only source of the sacred. There is nothing sacred except the good and what is relative to the good.

A hurtful act is the transference to others of the degradation which we bear in ourselves.

All sins are attempts to fill voids.

The only way into truth is through one's own annihilation; through dwelling a long time in a state of extreme and total humiliation.

It is an eternal obligation toward the human being not to let him suffer from hunger when one has a chance of coming to his assistance.

We must prefer real hell to an imaginary paradise.