Via Jerry Coyne, a long piece at Quillette by Matt Johnson: Liberalism and the West’s ‘Crisis of Meaning’, subtitled “Many liberals are strangely eager to concede that liberal societies are morally and spiritually bankrupt without religion to give life meaning.”
This is an enduring topic, triggered here by a recent David Brooks column in NYT (which I discussed here).
No time to read it just now. But a couple quick comments: some who address this topic think that Christianity is the only thing that can fill this “god-shaped hole” as Coyne puts it; but that’s probably because we here in the West don’t see similar arguments that only Buddhism, to take a random example, can provide the meaning of life (by people who are just as sincere as the Christians are). Second, this worry strikes me as a simple failure of imagination, and a lack of knowledge about the world outside their own tribe. Third, which is to say, this isn’t about religion, or theology, or which of the many of those is correct; it’s basically an issue of psychology and human nature.
