There are two main arguments about religious beliefs. One is about whether they are factually true—whether you really will go to Heaven or Hell, or to a reincarnated new life, when you die, for example. The other is about whether religious faith is a good thing regardless of whether it is true. Many lack religious faith and regret the lack.
THIS LIFE: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom by Martin Hägglund (2019) Is aimed at unhappy disbelievers. He made the case that you can be a better and happier person without religious belief than with it
Hankering for Heaven or Nirvana won’t free you from the pain and risk of life, Hägglund wrote; it is better to face the fact that this life is all you’ve got, and to make the most of it.
Secular faith is the faith that your finite life really is worthwhile, despite its risk and pain. Spiritual freedom is the power to choose what makes your life meaningful.
Your life’s meaning can be devotion to your loved ones, to a vocation or avocation or to work to make the world a better place. It evidently goes without saying, because Hägglund doesn’t explicitly say it, that it does not include devotion to money, power or sex, drugs and rock-and-roll.
I sometimes talk to people who tell me they’re spiritual, not religious. I tell them that I myself am not spiritual at all. They often tell me that actually I am spiritual, even if I don’t know it or won’t admit it.
Hägglund did the same thing in reverse. He argued that religious people who try to make the world a better place really are more secular than religious, because they care about this world rather than the hypothetical next world.
He began by writing about the great Christian writer C.S. Lewis and his grief for the death of his wife, Joy Davidian. Lewis confessed in A Grief Observed that his Christian religious faith did not console him or shield him from the pain of the loss of his beloved.
Friends tried to tell Lewis that he and his beloved would meet again in Heaven, but, as he pointed out, there is no support for this idea in Scripture. The whole point of Heaven is that it would be qualitatively different from Earthly life, not a continuation of it.
Lewis believed that an endless continuation of earthly life would eventually become unbearable. As he remarked somewhere, all that is necessary for Hell is eternal life, plus human nature as it is. He thought Heaven must be some sort of timeless transcendent state of being beyond out comprehension.
Hägglund argued that the desire to exist in a timeless transcendent state makes this life meaningless, because nothing in this life would count compared to that. He said the same is true of use of Buddhist meditation practice or Stoic philosophy to cultivate a serenity that makes you indifferent to the pain of loss. Hägglund said the price of that is to never care deeply about anything or commit strongly to anything. He thinks that is an unworthy way to live.
The conflict between this world and a transcendent hope are shown in the life of Saint Augustine, he wrote. Augustine’s Confessions show his struggle to free himself from caring about things in this world so that he can devote himself exclusively to God. Augustine even worried about whether church music would cause people to come to church to enjoy the music rather than pray to God.
Hägglund contrasted Augustine with writers such as Marcel Proust and the contemporary Norwegian writer, Karl Ove Knausgaard, who treasure and lovingly describe the ordinary details of life.
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