Disputes over the truth or falsehood of religion(s) always have a certain odd inanity to them, because all of the actual arguments in regular use are old and simple and tedious – often they’ve been advanced and counter-advanced for literal millennia, and even if not they always feel like the sort of thing an undergrad gets extremely excited about for a week or two
Teapots orbiting the sun, maybe sometimes a noble lie is better than the truth, if you really believe in X why don’t you believe in all its implications, where does value come from if it’s all atoms and the void, yadda yadda – it’s not that any of these are dead in the water discursively, or lacking in human resonance, it’s just that we’ve heard them all before oh so long ago, we even got tired of hearing them oh so long ago, and whatever it is that is making us have this argument, it can’t be that we find it fascinating to go over this undergrad shit one more time, now can it?
… and so everyone is open to the charge that they are fixating on some bit of undergrad shit that would ordinarily be beneath them, and must be fixating on it for personal reasons and not for its value as a pearl of pure reason, and what a waste, to see a person reduced to this obsessive reiteration of some bit of undergrad shit, what a sad waste indeed.
– except we know that we are not having this argument because we are so fascinated by this or that bit of undergrad shit, come on, we know that. We know we are all trotting out the undergrad shit again “for personal reasons.” The reason we are trotting it out again is that we cannot seem to understand each others’ personal reasons.
And it would be so nice to just talk about this freely and openly, as about any other personal matter, without the protective shield of the argument, which is always beneath all of us. (And yes, this applies just as well when the argument is something about the insufficiency of mere reason – did you think that wasn’t familiar undergrad shit, too?) It would be so nice. But for some reason this route is blocked to us, and must be forever blocked to us, and so we can only engage in these repetitive bouts, each clinging to the argument, as our forefathers have, yes, for millennia
and sometimes we will even include the fact that this is all undergrad shit as part of the argument, as our forefathers did (Chesteron did it better than we ever will), and still we are doing this, as it has been done for millennia, even though when you think about it that’s really quite sad, and quite pathetic
but for some reason, the other route is blocked to us
I would say that by the standards of religious debates, the rationalist approach “we can appropriate religious rituals without believing any of that” is fairly new. Or rather, not exactly new - communists have been doing that for a hundred years - but the part where people are self-aware about and recognize that emotional needs that drive people to religion are legitimate and need to satisfied instead of hand-waved, and where they don’t deny that what they’re doing has religious undertones and is specifically designed as such - that part is fairly new; communists get really upset when you point out that they’re literally worshiping mummies.
This is exactly, explicitly, what Reconstructionist Judaism has been doing since its inception. You can make an argument that it’s what the Romans were doing with the imperial cult.
Not much that’s new under the sun.