{"id":32210,"date":"2015-08-02T04:00:23","date_gmt":"2015-08-02T08:00:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=32210"},"modified":"2019-05-19T11:47:08","modified_gmt":"2019-05-19T15:47:08","slug":"camille-paglia-on-atheism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/08\/02\/camille-paglia-on-atheism\/","title":{"rendered":"Camille Paglia on atheism"},"content":{"rendered":"

From the second part of the Camille Paglia interview<\/a> in Salon<\/em>:<\/p>\n

I regard [Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and the religion critics] as adolescents. I say in the introduction to my last book, Glittering Images<\/em>, that \u201cSneering at religion is juvenile, symptomatic of a stunted imagination.\u201d It exposes a state of perpetual adolescence that has something to do with their parents \u2013 they\u2019re still sneering at dad in some way. Richard Dawkins was the only high-profile atheist out there when I began publicly saying \u201cI am an atheist,\u201d on my book tours in the early 1990s. I started the fad for it in the U.S, because all of a sudden people, including leftist journalists, started coming out of the closet to publicly claim their atheist identities, which they weren\u2019t bold enough to do before. But the point is that I felt it was perfectly legitimate for me to do that because of my great respect for religion in general \u2013 from the iconography to the sacred architecture and so forth. I was arguing that religion should be put at the center of any kind of multicultural curriculum.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m speaking here as an atheist. I don\u2019t believe there is a God, but I respect every religion deeply. All the great world religions contain a complex system of beliefs regarding the nature of the universe and human life that is far more profound than anything that liberalism has produced. We have a whole generation of young people who are clinging to politics and to politicized visions of sexuality for their belief system. They see nothing but politics, but politics is tiny. Politics applies only to society. There is a huge metaphysical realm out there that involves the eternal principles of life and death. The great tragic texts, including the plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles, no longer have the central status they once had in education, because we have steadily moved away from the heritage of western civilization.<\/p>\n

The real problem is a lack of knowledge of religion as well as a lack of respect for religion. I find it completely hypocritical for people in academe or the media to demand understanding of Muslim beliefs and yet be so derisive and dismissive of the devout Christian beliefs of Southern conservatives.<\/p>\n

But yes, the sneering is ridiculous! Exactly what are these people offering in place of religion? In my system, I offer art \u2013 and the whole history of spiritual commentary on the universe. There\u2019s a tremendous body of nondenominational insight into human life that used to be called cosmic consciousness. It has to be remembered that my generation in college during the 1960s was suffused with Buddhism, which came from the 1950s beatniks. Hinduism was in the air from every direction \u2013 you had the Beatles and the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Ravi Shankar at Monterey, and there were sitars everywhere in rock music. So I really thought we were entering this great period of religious syncretism, where the religions of the world were going to merge. But all of a sudden, it disappeared! The Asian religions vanished \u2013 and I really feel sorry for young people growing up in this very shallow environment where they\u2019re peppered with images from mass media at a particularly debased stage.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From the second part of the Camille Paglia interview in Salon: I regard [Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and the religion critics] as adolescents. I say in the introduction to my last book, Glittering Images, that \u201cSneering at religion is juvenile, symptomatic of a stunted imagination.\u201d It exposes a state of perpetual adolescence that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,11,13],"tags":[447,1288,360],"class_list":["post-32210","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media","category-religion","category-usa","tag-atheism","tag-camillepaglia","tag-christianity"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-8nw","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32210","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32210"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32210\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32211,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32210\/revisions\/32211"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32210"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32210"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32210"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}