Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
Your final choice is Religion Is Not About God, by Loyal Rue.
I like this book’s title, which is itself a proposition. It is already making a statement, and I think it is a true statement. The book is an attempt to explain why people need religion, why it arose in the first place and what vital needs it nourishes. The explanatory model he employs comes from evolutionary psychology. He is trying to account for what, if any, is the adaptive purpose of religion. Why does almost every society, as soon as it gets to a certain level of complexity, construct some sort of religious mythology, one which merges both cosmology and morality? He locates religion’s origins in our need to feel both personally whole and part of a cohesive society. He goes through each of the religions – Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism – and tries to show the conditions of society in which these religions arose and why they served such a strong adaptive purpose so that they continued to be felt for millennia to be absolutely necessary and true. These were highly successful mythologies – that is the word he uses – because they answered to central goals in living lives that felt more whole and more socially coherent.
And then he asks the question whether the world’s religions are still serving that twin adaptive purpose or have they become counterproductive, and, if they have, what is to take their place?
Tying together all these books, fiction and nonfiction, is the theme of reason and its possible limitations. Spinoza thinks there are no limits on reason. Reason can do it all. But the other four books offer well-reasoned challenges to reason’s hegemony.
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Rebecca Newberger Goldstein graduated from Columbia University, receiving the Montague Prize for Excellence in Philosophy, and immediately went on to graduate work at Princeton University, receiving her PhD in philosophy. While in graduate school she was awarded a National Science Foundation Fellowship and a Whiting Foundation Fellowship. As well as her teaching work she is also a writer whose novels and short stories dramatise the concerns of philosophy. Goldstein’s writings emerge as arguments for the belief that in our time fiction may be the best vehicle for involving readers in questions of morality and existence. She says imaginatively inhabiting other lives, which is what we do in literature, can induce a great moral growth.
