DAVID BROOKS VICTIMIZED BY MEDIEVALISM

       New York Times opinion columnist David Brooks and University of Chicago graduate (BA) has written a great deal in the public arena and now has revealed his spiritual evolution from agnostic to man of faith.  Faith came to him, he writes, through “numinous experience...moments of awe and wonder...”  He writes about moments of transcendence at the foot of a New England mountain and at Chartres Cathedredal in France.  I have stood at the foot of a mountain in New England, and in fact lived on a mountain in Vermont; and I’ve visited and written about the cathedral at Chartres.  I can imagine what Brooks must have felt at these times, but being as I am anchored to the earth I cannot be driven to awe and wonder as numinous experiences.  They did not open up vast mysteries for me as they did for Brooks.  He explains this in terms of “the emotions we feel when we are in the presence of a vast something just beyond the rim of our understanding.”  And then comes the “mystical revelation” on a New York subway car when Brooks has a “shimmering awareness” that all the people around him “had souls.”  And then in a leap of pure unadulterated unreason he concludes that if people have souls there must be a soul-giver.  And now, the former agnostic (which shows he had not yeat reached the age of reason) hungers for an unseen but real (???) God.  He describes the “faith” he feels as “the longing for the holy ,” “a nice kind of longing to have.”  As I have written elsewhere: What species are theologians like Hans Küng (1978) who claim that prayer, sacrifice, and bending in awe before God are compatible with reason? Critical skeptical realism does not offer believers the “rock like, unshakeable certainty on which all human certainty could be built” that guides theologian Hans Küng’s need for God. Here I announce an anarchist motto: Ni Dieu, Ni Maître! Prostrating yourself before God makes it easy to prostrate yourself before human dictators. The height of worship is the lowest level of self-esteem.  David Brooks has shown himself to be living with a medieval worldview and unaware that individual experience is a useless guide to how the real world works.  He is a victim of the illusion of the transparency of introspection and the fallacy of transcendentalism.  

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/19/opinion/faith-god-christianity.html

 


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