Posted by:
Human
(
)
Date: July 01, 2024 06:36PM
“My childhood, which was a happy one, was spent in the command economy of evangelical Christianity. Life was centrally planned; all negotiations had to pass by Jesus’s desk. Sometimes it seems that my childhood was the noise around a hush, the hush of God. And at times an actual hush: I recall episodes when my parents talked quietly and on their own about someone they knew who had “lost his faith,” and the solemn vibrations that would fill the house at these times, as if a doctor were visiting. Similarly, my childhood was marked by the deaths of friends of my parents who were members of their congregation, people for whom the full evangelical panoply—prayer, the laying on of hands, anointing with oil—did not seem to have worked.”
—James Wood—
—The Broken Estate: Essays On Literature and Belief—
A happy Mormon childhood doesn’t avert us from an adult atheism any more than a miserable Mormon childhood guarantees it.
The essay the above quote comes from, the concluding essay of one of the best selections of literary criticism available in English, begins like this:
“‘As soon as a religion seeks help from philosophy, its doom is inevitable,’ wrote Heinrich Heine, in his vibrant, playful little book Religion and Philosophy in Germany. ‘Trying to defend itself, it talks its way further and further into its perdition. Like any other absolutism, religion must not justify itself.’ Heine was right.”
FAIR doomed LDSinc, although Peterson and the boys could never understand this. Their work caused not a few happy believers to turn into doubters. I know when I turned to them, in an attempt to remain ‘in the fold’, I was only nudged out even further.
Human, nonetheless still feeling the hush…