Philip Roth on religion

[NikolaiI]

Life is but a veneer. The soul is that within us which is sleeping, it is like buddha-nature. Buddha-nature is real. There are many different layers of being. Different levels of consciousness.

[Morten]

Life is but a veneer. The soul is that within us which is sleeping, it is like buddha-nature. Buddha-nature is real. There are many different layers of being. Different levels of consciousness.

Whatever you say.

[NikolaiI]

I didn't mean to hi-jack your thread. I apologize.

[blazeofglory]

From his lovely little novel Everyman:

"Religion was a lie that he had recognized early in life, and he found all religions offensive, considered their superstitious folderol meaningless, childish, couldn't stand the complete unadultness — the baby talk and the righteousness and the sheep, the avid believers. No hocus-pocus about death and God or obsolete fantasies of heaven for him. There was only our bodies, born to live and die on terms decided by the bodies that had lived and died before us. If he could be said to have located a philosophical niche for himself that was it - he'd come upon it early and intuitively, and however elemental, that was the whole of it."

In fact today religions have harmed us more than it has done anything good. Indeed in some religious books there are good points, of course there are moral stories, ethical anecdotes, prayers and sermons yet see how holders of particular religions are fighting to prop up their particular sectarian opinions or ideologies.

[Drkshadow03]

In fact today religions have harmed us more than it has done anything good. Indeed in some religious books there are good points, of course there are moral stories, ethical anecdotes, prayers and sermons yet see how holders of particular religions are fighting to prop up their particular sectarian opinions or ideologies.

And these battles aren't happening outside the religious sector? It seems to me human beings always find reasons to fight and prop up their opinions or ideologies. In the secular world, they just call it political ideology.

[a lost weekend]

And these battles aren't happening outside the religious sector? It seems to me human beings always find reasons to fight and prop up their opinions or ideologies. In the secular world, they just call it political ideology.

Well, politicians in secular societies don't ('far as I'm concerned) strap bombs to each other or chop off one another's heads.

[Drkshadow03]

Well, politicians in secular societies don't ('far as I'm concerned) strap bombs to each other or chop off one another's heads.

Nope, they just occasionally throw you in the gulag or commit mass murder through other sometimes "legal" means. There is many an atheist/atheistic political ideology that has killed swarms of people in the name of that ideological beliefs (Communism anyone?).

Certainly, it is fallacious to claim atheism caused these people to commit atrocities as many conservative pundits attempt to do, but it is not fallacious to demonstrate that in fact people can kill for many other reasons besides religious devotion.

[blazeofglory]

From his lovely little novel Everyman:

"Religion was a lie that he had recognized early in life, and he found all religions offensive, considered their superstitious folderol meaningless, childish, couldn't stand the complete unadultness — the baby talk and the righteousness and the sheep, the avid believers. No hocus-pocus about death and God or obsolete fantasies of heaven for him. There was only our bodies, born to live and die on terms decided by the bodies that had lived and died before us. If he could be said to have located a philosophical niche for himself that was it - he'd come upon it early and intuitively, and however elemental, that was the whole of it."

I have not gone through that book at all, and I would like to read that. Maybe I will get something intellectually thrilling in that book. In point of fact I too think that in history I have read instances of people misusing religions and now we all are not unfamiliar with cases of fundamentalism in religions.
Hitler too defined religions in his own narrow vocabularies.

Of course there are some points in religions, good points indeed, and we really can benefit from them, But more often religions have been taken to misuse or they are used for violent purples.

[Ron Price]

I notice it has been more than 3 years since anyone has posted in this thread.-Ron Price, Tasmania
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AUTOBIOGRAPHY: Philip Roth and Me-A Personal Retrospective

Philip Milton Roth(1933-) is an American novelist who first gained fame with his 1959 novella Goodbye, Columbus. The book was an irreverent and humorous portrait of Jewish-American life and it earned him a National Book Award. I was only 15 at the time, in grade 10 in a small town in southern Ontario, had just joined the Baha’i Faith, and only read what I had to. I memorized everything on the curriculum and its several syllabi because that was the way, then, to get the highest possible marks at high school. I was an ace in my studies as well as in baseball, even a home-run king back in the pee-wee baseball league.

In 1969 Roth became a major celebrity with the publication of the controversial Portnoy's Complaint the humorous and sexually explicit psychoanalytical monologue of "a lust-ridden, mother-addicted young Jewish bachelor," filled with "intimate, shameful detail, and coarse, abusive language." By 1969 I had had my own experiences of lust as well as psychiatry due to my bipolar disorder. But I was no longer a bachelor, having got married in 1967. That same year I moved to Baffin Island to teach Inuit children.

Since those late 1950s Roth has become one of the most honoured authors of his generation. His books have twice been awarded the National Book Award, twice the National Book Critics Circle award, and three times the PEN/Faulkner Award. He received a Pulitzer Prize for his 1997 novel, American Pastoral, which featured his best-known character, Nathan Zuckerman, the subject of many other of Roth's novels. His 2001 novel The Human Stain, another story of Nathan Zuckerman, was awarded the United Kingdom's W.H. Smith Literary Award for the best book of the year.

Roth’s fiction is set frequently in Newark New Jersey. It is known for an intensely autobiographical character, for a philosophical and formal blurring of the distinction between reality and fiction, for a "supple, ingenious style," and for its provocative explorations of Jewish and American identity.(1)

Since those late fifties and late sixties, I have become a successful, but quite ordinarily ordinary, teacher and lecturer of my generation. I have received no honours for my writing although, in the last three decades, I have written and published several million words. My writing is also intensely autobiographical, but the main character in my writing is me and I do not blur the line between reality and fiction. I would like to think my writing is, like Roth’s, supple and ingenious in style and provocative in its explorations of life, mine and society’s. I would like to think that, but I must leave such judgements to readers.-Ron Price with thanks to (1) Charles Simic, “The Nicest Boy in the World,” The New York Review of Books, 9 October 2008.

I’m intensely autobiographic, too,
Philip; but I go about it in a very
Different way that you. And fame
is not part of my story…..my life-
narrative…..We go after reality in
our own unique ways and I went
after it in writing much later in life
than you. I was just getting into my
profession in my twenties and you
were on your way to fame and glory.

You wrote about Jews you had known,
but always adopted a strong atheist
position; we all go down different
roads, eh Philip: have you ever heard
of the Baha'i Faith, a new world religion?

Ron Price
12 November 2011