A.N. Pryor's Dialogue

In A.N. Pryor's dialogue on religion, Psychoanalyst says something very interesting, something I think is worthy of a bit more inspection.  He says:

Only in this way are genuine atheists made. Atheists by pure persuasion are usually, perhaps always, afflicted with a guilty conscience; the urge to believe is still in them, and they either try to quench it by becoming violent or unfair in their attacks on religion, or try to satisfy it by inventing milk-and-water religions like that of Modernist here, using religious language to describe anything they find impressive or moving or mysterious. Barthian and Catholic may be mad, if you choose to use the word that way; but there are many worse forms of insanity, even among atheists.

Psychoanalyst thinks that everyone has an insatiable urge in them to believe; whether it be to believe in God, or the supernatural, or that which can not be seen is hard to say. Generally, he thinks this feeling results in belief in God. You can not escape the feeling, it seems.  The atheist by pure persuasion is the one that when driven to crisis is forced to see the roots of his beliefs; he sees that his beliefs simply come from this inner urge to be religious not from any true God or created desire from God.

What I find most interesting is the result of the urge to believe.  It can result in belief, clearly. It can also result in non-belief, such as the purely persuaded atheist cited from Psychoanalyst above. The result of the purely persuaded atheist can result in unfair attacks on religion.  This is not so hard to believe when you consider the works of men like Richard Dawkins, who have moved away from the polite discourse of Bertrand Russell and into an über-Nietzsche like snarkiness that discards all religious feeling or sentiment and declares the religious person insane or stupid.

With that said, none of these are nearly as interesting or though provoking as what Psychoanalyst says of Modernist. He says he is one who uses "religious language to describe anything they find impressive or moving or mysterious" and calls his religion essentially watered down. Ouch. What is most compelling is that he does not lump the Modernist in with the religious.  Instead, if you look at the syntactical form, you see instead that Modernist has been labeled an Atheist by Psychoanalyst himself (also an atheist). It takes one to know one, right? It is reminiscent of Donagan, way back when in the semester, speaking of the demythologizing of religion. There's a point at which Scripture loses it's authority to a group of people and they then demythologize religion so much so that it ceases to be religious at all and instead becomes more of a social organization united in faithless social justice or 'religious talk'. Psychoanalyst says they call anything they find especially moving or mysterious religious, which doesn't seem far off from the truth.  I wonder if Psychoanalyst would not accuse the Modernist of a functional pantheism. Again, not unlike Donagan, I find Pryor's describe here (via Psychoanalyst) of Modernist to be especially damning to the point of saying you would be better off abandoning religion altogether and being a purely persuaded atheist, than to be a Modernist (aka Mainline Protestant, Liberal Protestant).