Reddit reviews Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics

>What are some good resources to learn more about our faith

Learn some history. Modern History and Not so Modern history.

Also, anything by father barron. He has some great movie reviews: https://www.youtube.com/user/wordonfirevideo

I have a book you'd enjoy, fellow Catholic.

https://www.amazon.com/Bad-Religion-Became-Nation-Heretics/dp/143917833X

Here's some books I found useful when trying to understand this issue:

In my opinion, the best book on the topic is Ross Douthat's Bad Religion. It goes through the recent history of American Christianity, but does an especially good job describing Catholicism. Douthat is a columnist for the New York Times, and a faithful Catholic. He's one of the best reporters on the Church alive today.

If you want to hear from the left, check out Practicing Catholic by James Carroll. I know he's not super popular on this thread, but I think it's instructive to learn about how all relevant groups reacted to a historic event.

I had been awake for all of five minutes when I wrote that. Sorry it was so terce.

So, back at the beginning of the 20th century, when Freud was doing all his work, the pathologies he and other analysts would see were all the classical ones - ones driven by the repression of the id by an inflexible and authoritarian superego formed from highly disciplinarian parents enforcing Victorian morality. From between WWII to the 1970s this had completely changed. Those sorts of pathologies were no longer seen in any great quantity - what was filling up psychologists' offices were narcissism and borderline personality disorder - both formed from a deeply wounded sense of self caused by early rejection of affection from the parents (who were giving the child everything he asked for but were too wrapped up in their own desires and pursuits to give the one thing needed: affection) which is compensated for by the formation of an imaginary parent who is omnipotent and never rejects the child, and that gets absorbed as part of the sense of self in the superego. So, instead of a nation of repressed Victorians, we have a nation of people who are so self-absorbed they do not even recognize other people as "other", but instead as extensions of themselves who exist only to give them what they want - but it is a self-centeredness built on a real lack of self-esteem and self-image, one that craves validation and affirmation because of the mortal fear of rejection and abandonment. Anything less than total affirmation is interpreted as rejection and that is responded to by an unbalanced and unstable emotion response - reason is turned off totally; the magnitude of the emotional response (primarily anger, anxiety, and depression) is too big to handle.

This isn't a description of some people in the culture. This is a description of the culture as a whole. It causes several effects, notably a society where image is everything - reality has become illusionary partly because it is mediated to us through symbolic images, but also because the people's focus is completely inward. Everything is image and all image is reduced to spectacle. Which makes us, in every social situation (and even alone) self-conscious at all times of the image projected by what we say, do, think, feel, and how we appear. Relationships fall apart because everyone is just using the other to validate themselves, while simultaneously denigrating those whose validation is so craved, and all while fearing, dreading, and expecting ultimate rejection. All institutions that would enforce any sort of restrictions on the id are vilified - because the only reaction possible is anger of incredible magnitude. That doesn't mean we are anti-authoritarian, quite the contrary. This is a culture that is highly authoritarian; looking for secular powers larger than ourselves that can defend our right to do whatever we want, whenever we want, however we want; and that will silence (and enact vengeance upon) anyone who would dare to tell us that isn't OK - that is in other words just a projection of the omnipotent parental image subsumed in the superego. Which ultimately leads to quasi-fascist thought control - the motivation behind it being fundamentally irrational, the response is thus unmeasured. And if this is how it was pre-facebook, image what it is now.

How that leads directly to our current "atheist" culture is easy to see. We are a people with no room for any god other than ourselves. We will brook no one who seeks to assert the authority to tell us how to live, as that feels like the very primal rejection that is driving the entire psychology - the only response that can be mustered is self-hate mixed with blinding anger at the one responsible for making us feel it. Instead we want comforting images and illusions (reality not being real) and simple validation of anything and everything the id craves.

This, of course, implies a completely materialist outlook, as things and stuff is all the id can see. There is no place for another world as that would necessarily lead to postponing gratification in this life for the sake of the next, and denying our thirst for impulsive, immediate gratification is the one thing we cannot handle. It implies a morality that can have one and only one precept: "don't be a dick" as it is often worded. The only thing you CANNOT do, ever, is make someone feel bad about themselves. Because we internalize that to ourselves - as we already see all others just as extensions of ourselves, and so we internalize their rejection as our own. This mentality cannot emotionally even begin to comprehend the actual concept of sin - the emotions turn on too strong before the intellect can even start to grasp it.

As for "materiel deism" I was searching for the term Ross Douthat used for it in Bad Religion. The term he a usually used (I had to look it up) was "moral therapeutic deism" (which is inherently materialist, so my mistake was still kinda accurate). To quote Douthat:

>According to Smit and Denton, the "de facto creed" of America's youth has five main premises. 1. "A god who exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human life on earth." 2. "god wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and most world religions." 3. "The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself." 4. "God does not need to be particularly involved in one's life except when God is needed to resolve a problem." 5. "Good people go to heaven when they die."

>Smith and Denton dub this theology Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. It's a resonant term but not an entirely accurate one. Therapeutic this religion certainly is, but "Deism" suggests a distance between God and man, and a sense of divine detachment from the affairs of the world, that the teenagers in the survey don't actually seem to accept. Indeed, the sociologists acknowledge as much, writing that "the Deism here is revised from its classical eighteenth-century version by the therapeutic qualifier, making the distant God selectively available for taking care of needs..." God is something like a combination of Divine Butler and Cosmic Therapist: he is always on call, takes care of any problem that arises, professionally helps his people to feel better about themselves.

>The theology's supposed "moralism" meanwhile is astonishingly weak. The God of MTD "is not demanding" the author's note. "He actually can't be, because his job is to solve our problems and make people feel good." Therapeutic religion doesn't call its adherents to prayer or repentance, to works of charity, or even the observation of a Sabbath. Instead, being a moral person "means being the kind of person that other people will like," which is to say pleasant, respectful, well-behaved, and nondisruptive. Niceness is the highest ethical standard, popularity the most important goal, and high self-esteem the surest sign of sanctity.

So, that certainly covers the "spiritual but not religious" part of the "nones". And it should be obvious that the God of this theology is just the narcissistic superego writ large, the morality is the same as that driven by a society rife with BPD, and the goal - to project a pleasing image and thus be well-liked - the same as that which is driven by narcissism in an illusionary, image-driven world. Turning that to its atheistic side is astonishingly easy as the "God" here is just one's own self anyway. This "Deism" is inherently atheistic in a fundamental way, despite all its talk about "God".

/Sorry for the typos. Wrote this on my phone. I'll clean it up later on my laptop.

Edit: One thing to add, where I disagree with Douthat: MTD actually IS highly moralistic, it is just that its morslism is very different from the norm. It ignored or validates absolute debauchery, but you even think about breaking the one single cardinal rule of "be nice" then the reaction is immediate, violent, and vindictive at a level commiserate with the inquisition. Look at the Firefox CEO thing. It isn't enough to disagree, or even to win the issue. Because he was on the "wrong side" by having an opinion that appeared (from a certain point-of-view) to be "mean" and "not nice", he had to be destroyed, personally. Vengeance at violating the MTD morality must be satisfied.

I saw this on nytimes.com and thought, oh, this should be good (/s), and then I saw Ross Douthat was the writer. I doubt he's pro-choice.

Has anyone read Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age? I picked it up last week to start exploring his concept of the “buffered self” which helps explain the decline of the church in the West. I’ve read some other books on the topic (like Joseph Bottum’s An Anxious Age and Ross Douthat’s Bad Religion), both which offer some interesting ideas as to what caused the decline overall. There’s certainly a lot to explore, though given how complicated it all is.

Ross Douthat explores this topic less, uh.... how to put this charitably... clumsily in his book "Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics."

He doesn't come out and call this sort of thing "atheism", but it is heresy that is out of step with most of Church history.

http://www.amazon.com/Bad-Religion-Became-Nation-Heretics/dp/143917833X