Sometimes they admit it. Sometimes they admit, “no it’s not just practice, it’s not just being good – it’s belief.” The Spectator does.
It is certainly the case, as AN Wilson says in a Spectator review, that, until relatively recently, religious ritual did include unbelievers as a matter of course since those rites focused on participation rather than subscribing explicitly to a creed. But the ‘consoling subtle or just charming rituals’ of religion that Mr de Botton would like to co-opt for unbelievers are not, I’d say, detachable from the beliefs that inspired them. It’s a little like saying that the music and poetry of love are too charming, too consoling to be confined to those who love and should be extended to those who have never been in love or who find themselves incapable of it. The benefits of religion flow, I’d say, from the things believers believe.
We agree with you, except that we think that most of the benefits aren’t really benefits. We think believing there is an omnipotent being who wants us to believe it exists but refuses to give us any good reason to do so is not a benefit but a mind-impeding device.
Christians believe in the brotherhood of man, for instance, because we believe in the Fatherhood of God, or its feminist equivalent.
But believing in the Fatherhood of God entails believing that the male sex is the better one. The brotherhood of man is not entirely a benefit to women. “Its feminist equivalent” is a throwaway phrase which makes little dent in the existing patriarchal arrangements.
And so on. We can go on for hours in this vein. But the point is, they think what we’ve always said they think: that the beliefs do matter and that they do take them seriously.
There is no doubt that orthodox Christian doctrine is deeply sexist. It originates from a society where to sacrifice one’s only begotten son was the greatest sacrifice anyone could possibly make. Apart from the God sacrificing Jesus, this is the sacrifice that Abraham is asked to make and he is praised for his readiness to do so. However God steps in and prevents the sacrifice, but when Jephthah sacrifices his daughter, God does not step in, presumably because daughters have less value than sons.
I find it hard to believe that many believers don’t realise this at some level. Maybe there are some really stupid ones that don’t, but it seems kind of obvious to me.
Well… we WILL go on for hours in this vein, won’t we? 🙂
But yes, there’s nothing accidental about “brotherhood” or “Fatherhood” in any way. There is no “feminist equivalent” involved. There is blatant inherent sexism in Christianity, and in all of the Abrahamic religions, and in most if not all of modern society. It is unavoidable if you’re even remotely aware of reality.
To the other issue… de Botton is barely a millimeter away from the theologians with their “sophisticated theology” that hoped to satisfy the criticisms of rational people and dismiss the criticisms of Dawkins in particular. In both cases, there is an attempt to divorce theology from the actual beliefs of actual people with their butts in the pews every Sunday morning. It is dishonest to claim that Christians don’t believe in some manner of Biblical literalism on the big claims of their religion, or that you can somehow remove the ritual from the belief and have it mean anything to a nonbeliever. Just nonsense all around, from start to finish and frop top to Botton… if you’ll excuse my pun.
Until fairly recently both in Europe and America, attendance at religious ceremonies was legally required for everybody. It wasn’t until the 18th Century in Britain (and colonies) and the 19th Century in most Catholic countries that there were legal penalties for not attending church services.
“Christians believe in the brotherhood of man, for instance, because we believe in the Fatherhood of God, or its feminist equivalent.”
Where is the least shred of evidence that the one flows from the other? It’s well-sounding but null theistbabble.
No, this is a bad analogy — and one that will be used against the atheists. He’s comparing a specific belief or experience to an emotion. If someone finds the music and poetry of love to be “charming” and “consoling,” then I think that means they would have to be capable of love at some level. Otherwise, it would leave them cold. And someone could certainly enjoy and feel akin to music, poetry, or other works of art about a particular situation they’ve never been in. You can cry over Sophie’s Choice even if you’ve never had children, or been in the holocaust.
The feelings and emotions that are involved in religion are analogous to the common feelings and emotions we have in human relationships and earthly experiences. Religion doesn’t get dibs on them. That was one thing that bothered me about De Botton’s desire to “imitate religion.” Whenever something religious is capable of appealing to atheists, that can only be because it’s gone into our territory. The ground is in humanity, not God. They’re co-opting the natural world.
The parts that specifically need belief in God, will not appeal to atheists.
All theistic, supernatural belief systems are hierarchical, and the cosmos is a fundamentally moral cosmos. You have some moral Being or Force or Essence at the top, and then lower moral levels beneath it. Since the levels are only discerned through “spiritual” means, there are no objective rules which say or mandate what is on what level. You can easily run a hierarchy through humanity and divide them however you please: saved vs. damned; enlightened vs. unenlightened; men vs. women; race vs. race; chosen people vs. everybody else. Hell, you can use special religious ways of knowing to discover moral distinctions of basic divine worth between people with different colors of hair if you want.
It’s a hierarchy — it divides everything by essence. Invisible, intangible, untestable, oogly-boogly essence. Anything goes.
Ideals of human equality can only be firmly built from a bottom-up perspective, where we all recognize ourselves as from the same species. Otherwise, you have a Parent deciding which children are more like the parent and which are not. Clearly, all humans being part of the same “family” does not prevent clear divisions between who goes to heaven and who goes to hell. Trying to establish “equality” on a supernatural basis is pointless: all faiths are equal to each other from an objective and earthly point of view.
Sastra: that’s so well-put, particularly when you say “Whenever something religious is capable of appealing to atheists, that can only be because it’s gone into our territory.” You’ve helped me crystallize some thoughts I’ve been mulling-over for a while. Thank you!
“And someone could certainly enjoy and feel akin to music, poetry, or other works of art about a particular situation they’ve never been in. You can cry over Sophie’s Choice even if you’ve never had children, or been in the holocaust.”
Yes, but it’s strange, isn’t it, that we can be so moved by specifically religious art without sharing any of the religious beliefs that they expound or represent or believing that they are real in any sense. Bach’s Passions, for example, can move an atheist to tears and I don’t think you can really be moved by them without understanding and responding to the subject matter as well as just the music. I seem to recall a discussion of this on B+W before. What is happening when an atheist is so deeply touched by Donne’s religious poetry, for example, or Eliot’s? How can we be so moved to the point where these artworks are often central to our lives when the content matter should strike us as meaningless, babble, nonsense? It is a conundrum.
@7: is the concept of “fiction” really so strange to you? We can also be deeply moved by the meeting of Achilles and Priam at the end of the Iliad, even though those people never existed. Humans like stories. Some stories have gods in them, others don’t. Stories don’t have to be historically true to be emotionally resonant.
It’s not the same though SAWells, when we are being moved by religious art we are responding to intellectual or ideological positions hat we reject, not simply a human drama. It is strange. Why should Donne’s meditations on sin be moving to people who consider the idea of sin meaningless.
Torquil Macneil, its difficult to say what exactly people are responding to when they respond to art. Most people can learn to write a fugue in the style of Bach, but writing one that is worth listening to is another matter. Bach himself thought it was all down to hard work. But there can be no doubt that religions take advantage of these responses and suggest that the Almighty is the real cause. It is also possible for them to pick the most effective examples; Palestrina wrote hundreds of setting of the Tridentine mass but only a handful of them are regularly performed today.
@9: still not seeing why anything about this is strange.
Oh, but do they really? Are you quite sure no counter-examples exist? Likewise,
strikes me as less than impressive.
Stories, music, poetry, dancing etc appeal to something in humans. What and why is an entirely different question. Here’s my similarly well-founded assertion: That effect has absolutely nothing to do, à priori, with religion. Any similarities are probably due to religion’s appropriation of those established neuron paths inherent to the human brain. How’s that on toast?
Torquil:
Therefore, it’s strange?
I suspect it would become less strange to you if your thinking were less mystical; the subject matter is fiction, and fiction (whether religious or otherwise) can evoke emotional responses.
(You might as well say opera music wouldn’t be as moving if one didn’t know the storyline; probably true, but hardly mysterious)
I don’t think that the responders have understood my point or perhaps I didn’t make it very forcefully. I am not claiming tat religious at is unique in its power or that our responses to art are all otherwise comprehensible, I am wondering how it is that we can be deeply moved by a meditation on specifically religious themes and feeling if we reject all of those ideas and even emotions as meaningless or, at best illusory. Would it be possible, as an analogy, to be deeply moved by a poetic meditation on, say, the agonies of failing to lie up to the expectations of Stalin, even if it were written wit great skill if we consider the prescriptions of Stalin to be ludicrous or worse?
Take these lines of Done. How can an atheist for whom at least two or three of the terms Donne uses here are, in an important serious sense, meaningless (we recognise they have historic meaning but don’t recognise any content in ‘sin’ and ‘grace’ for example), find this moving and significant. And yet we still do:
“But let them [the dead] sleep, Lord, and me mourn a space,
For if above all these my sins abound,
‘Tis late to ask abundance of thy grace
When we are there; here on this lowly ground
Teach me how to repent; for that’s as good
As if thou’hadst seal’d my pardon with thy blood.”
Torquil Macneil: we are moved, we respond emotionally because that is the point of art. That’s what it does. And great artists are very good at doing it. It doesn’t really matter that much what the music/poem/painting/movie is about, or if the subject matter is real or made up. And no, you don’t always have to know/understand what it is about – I’ve been moved to tears by songs I’d never heard before, in languages I didn’t understand, and by abstract paintings without having any(conscious) idea what it was of/about. In a way, we are responding to the artist’s feelings – not necessarily what they’re actually feeling, but what they are expressing through their work. In a sense, listening to music or reading a poem is a form of social interaction.
Torquil Macneil #14: Thank you for those examples 😉 Yes, I might very well find the Stalinist poem moving – because even if Stalin’s prescriptions are meaningless to me, the poet’s agony is not. And Donne expresses emotions (including, but not limited to, pain, guilt and the need to submit to a strong father-figure) in a very moving way indeed. No, “sin” is not anything real, but because Donne thinks it is, it is “real in its consequences” – including the poem’s effect on me.
I remember coming across Donne’s ‘Wilt thou forgive that sin where I begun’ a few years ago and being moved to tears by it. I, too, have puzzled over why I am moved by religious poetry, in particular that of Milton, Donne, Herbert and Vaughan, but particularly in the cases of the latter three men (and yet more particularly Donne and Herbert) they are such wonderful dramatists in brief, and I think that what one is responding to is a convincingly created situation in which a figure one likes,and sympathises and identifies with, even though one does not share his beliefs (and may in fact strongly dislike them),is passionately involved and speaks with what comes across as profound sincerity. There are as a matter of fact some religious poems of both Herbert and Donne that I very much dislike and leave me cold: some of Herbert’s more abject performances and, for example, Donne’s ‘Batter my heart, three-person’d God’; not to mention Crashaw’s ‘Mary Magdalen’s Funeral Tears’, of which it might be said, following Wilde on the death of Little Dorrit, that anybody who can read it with a straight face must have a heart of stone – there is plenty of bad religious poetry about (just read a few 19th-century hymns, and I can’t stand Eliot’s snobbish religiosity), for poetry is not good because it is religious. But in the end I think that what is happening is no different from what is happening in other poems that move me to tears: Ben Jonson’s ‘On my first sonne’, for example, or the 20th-century Scottish Gaelic poet Sorley MacLean’s great elegy ‘Hallaig’, or Paul Celan’s ‘Todesfuge’ (of which the best English translation remains that splendid poet Christopher Middleton’s), or Tu Fu’s poem on the destruction of his country. As for the Matthew Passion, well, the story of the death of Christ is in many ways a very moving one, and if it is told well, and if the music is profoundly imagined as Bach’s is, then one may well be moved to tears, as I also am by the requiem Verdi (a ‘freethinker’) wrote after Manzoni’s death, and in particular by the place where, in a brilliantly imagined dramatic situation, individual souls plead to be saved amidst the thunder of the Dies Irae chorus. But these are not, because they are religious, better or more moving works than, say, ‘Hamlet’ or ‘Lear’.
…and according to the bible one of the first two brothers on earth killed the other.
Tim, The Dies Irae is actually a much more powerful poem in the original Latin than in the standard translations, and Verdi’s setting reflects this. For instance the first two lines:
are usually rendered in English something like:
However favilla are not just any old ashes, they specifically refer to the ashes of a funeral pyre. This is made specially significant because of the Roman Catholic dogma of the resurrection of the body and the traditional belief that once a body had been reduced to ashes it could not be re-assembled. This is incidentally why heretics and witches are burned but traitors are (only) hung drawn and quartered. This leads to the usual “dogma creep” in that there now has to be an explanation of how martyrs who are burned to death enter heaven. Enter the dogma of “baptism of fire” according to which God replaces the martyr’s body at the last moment with a substitute one and he/she only appears to be burned to death.
This was also the reason for the Church’s traditional opposition to cremation. Then suddenly in the late 20th century the discovered that God was after all quite capable of doing things hitherto thought impossible and cremation became OK.
Joe: “if you’ll excuse my pun”
I’ve found it’s impossible to resist. I am a bad person. But I’m an atheist, so we knew that already. 😉
Tim: “I, too, have puzzled over why I am moved by religious poetry”
But as you point out, not all religious poetry. Good art is good art, and there is no reason why good art should not be moving.
I get exasperated with some of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poems eg “Pied Beauty”. They start out with a wonderful account of nature, lovely imagery, and then end with a dull anti-climactic thud of how we should thank God for it.
@Tim Harris – I enjoyed your post but it’s Little Nell, not Little Dorrit, whose death arouses mirth.
Torquil MacNeil #14 wrote:
I think it’s because even ‘specifically religious themes and feelings’ have strong analogs to what we experience on earth. Emotions aren’t illusory. The child who has been naughty, the lover who sacrifices, the community which stays together, the friend who remains true, the parent who leads, chides, puts up with abuse — and is eventually rewarded with unconditional love — are all recognizable. Harm, love, despair, forgiveness, respect, loyalty, striving: I think we respond to those human themes no matter how deeply they’re imbedded into some story or metaphor we don’t think is literally true.
The religious keep accusing the atheists of not understanding metaphor and symbol, of taking religious beliefs so literally. I think it’s the other way around. Is the concept of “sin” — doing an undeserved wrong or being less than our ideal — really so foreign to our lives that only believing that it’s a thing, a supernatural essence, makes sense?
Torquil’s right, we have had this discussion at B&W before, possibly more than once. It’s a good one though, so always worth coming back to.
I know one previous one started with a post of Nigel Warburton’s, asking whether atheists are at a disadvantage when it comes to religious art. The example I thought of was a painting of Rembrandt’s of Jesus’s re-appearance to a few of the disciples at an inn, usually in English called The Supper at Emmaus. It’s very moving despite total nonbelief.
But magical reunion-resurrection stories are very moving (if they’re any good), despite nonbelief.
Donne on sin doesn’t grab me much, but his “Batter my heart three-personed God” does. Go figure.
What do Christians make of atheist poems, I wonder eg Larkin’s “Church Going”?
A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognized, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.
That’s about as respectful an atheism as you could find.
So, Torquil’s point is that Christians can’t find the Old Testament moving because it was written by Jews about Judiasm?
Or the the Illiad is meh if you don’t bow down to classical deities?
Wha?
Karen Armstrong wrote about this in “The Case for God”, how the words we translate as “faith” now, once used to be understood as “trust” and not “belief”. Also the “mysteries” were called that because, in current vernacular, “you won’t understand until you do it”. Many rituals were about performing the ritual, sometimes over and over. You didn’t have to really believe.
I think we’ve all experienced this simply by partaking in traditions. if you partake in a tradition you may experience some good feelings of togetherness or some other feeling, without necessarily having to believe anything.
of course, many of us were outsiders, like me, and many traditions just makes us feel removed rather than part of a group. So maybe we need to make new ones, or find people like us.
(comment cut off): But yes once you don’t believe, and also, after reading her book, reading more about the brain and how it works, how we can manipulate it, it’s hard to partake in any ritual, because you know “i am being manipulated”
So while I do pine for meetings on ethics on sunday mornings, i do NOT pine in any way for new rituals to manipulate me or my emotions.
Well the Latin word “fides” can mean “trust”, but the modern word “faith” has the same double meaning, as in “I have faith in you”. In religious contexts it normally means “belief”. However “mystery” as it is used in Christian theology is a translation of “mysterium” which specifically refers to a religious or sacred mystery. The Latin for a common or garden mystery is “arcanum” from which we get the word “arcane”. So the Blessed Karen has got this one wrong.
Pluto’s, I know – I think the Spectator piece was directed at Armstrongian practice-not-belief orthodoxy. I think she talks a lot of nonsense, myself!
Oh, dear: Little Nell and not little Dorrit – and I perpetrated the mistake on the eve of Dickens’s 200th birthday (if Google is to be believed)! Well, it’s sackcloth and ashes for a week…
What moves me in that Donne poem that Ophelia is not fond of is the line when Donne admits to his fear of death, his fear of being abandoned, of perishing ‘on the shore’, his doubt.
As for ‘butter my heart’, I confess to finding the idea of being ravished by God rather alarming; there are people I might enjoy being ravished by, but God’s not one of them.
Oh but having God butter your heart might be really thrilling…or alarming. One of those.
Heehee
Both atheist accommodationists and religious liberals persist in asserting that religion is at its core inclusive and friendly, and want to go back to the “good old days” when *everyone* participated. Based on my experience, having grown up in the 1960s in the only Jewish family on a predominantly WASP street, I have to say that they have no clue as to what really was going on. For me as a Jew, the story of the Last Supper or the Passion, might as well have been the Illiad (or Lord of the Rings). As far as participating in rituals, I vividly remember when I was about 8, my Brownie (ie Girl Scout) pack was in a parade on Sunday morning which (rather to my surprise) ended up at a church service. Of course, everyone else knew what was going on, but I was terrified and had no idea what to do (and subsequently mortified when it seemed that all the other girls knew that they were supposed to have a nickel to put into the collection plate, but I had nothing).
That reminds me of a horrible experience I had some time in the early 90s. I went with a friend (at her suggestion) to an amateur performance of “Annie” in some remote part of the city, and it was ok, or not too bad…but then after the curtain calls all of a sudden the guy who played Daddy Warbucks (who was someone I’d known slightly at work a few years before) came forward and started giving some Christian spiel. It turned out to be some kind of churchy bait-and-switch thing. I was livid. My friend wasn’t best pleased either, but she wasn’t outraged the way I was. I thought and still think it was disgusting; there was no warning of any kind, and if there had been I wouldn’t have gone. Euchh.
Many years ago when I was a student a very attractive young lady asked me if I would like to go to a free concert with her. Well that wasn’t the sort of thing I was in the habit of refusing. There were a couple of nondescript bands playing cover versions of things then the main act came on playing their own stuff. It wasn’t that interesting but it was free. However suddenly they stopped and the singer said “Now I want to talk to you all about Jesus.” So I said “This is where I leave” and got up and left. The young lady did not want to leave so I left her there. I distinctly got the impression she knew all along what was going to happen. But why didn’t she tell me? I might still have gone out of curiosity if nothing else. Anyway she wouldn’t talk to me afterwards, she would literally cross the street to avoid me. I still don’t know if it was out of embarrassment or if she thought I was an agent of the Devil.
Bernard — perhaps she would have been embarrassed to be seen talking with an agent of the Devil?
Getting back to Torquil MacNeil’s point — the thing is, we’re atheists. Yes, we can be moved by, say, the image Mary at the foot of the Cross, just as we can by the death of King Arthur, or Madama Butterfly’s suicide. They’re all made-up stories, but they’re skillfully made up to play on the feelings we all have in common, and they’ve stood the test of time.
“What do Christians make of atheist poems, I wonder eg Larkin’s “Church Going”?”
Well with that particular poem Rosie they quite often cope by claiming it is a Christian poem. It drove Larkin nuts.
@PeterN
Yes, religious imagery and stories are often exploring common emotions but there is something else in that many of them are exploring specifically religious (usually Christian) concepts, concepts that have no meaning at all outside of religious ideology and they still have power to move us. I can’t think of an analogy. It is as if we could be deeply touched by a love poem that is based entirely on an exploration of the phrenological character of the loved one. I find that impossible to imagine unless I believed in the truth or meaningfulness of phrenology.I can imagine a properly funny poem on that subject but not a properly touching one because most of the terms would be gibberish.
Perhaps, Torquil, it would help if you gave some examples of some ‘religious imagery and stories’ that explore ‘specifically religious (usually Christian) concepts, concepts that have no meaning at all outside of religious ideology and…still have power to move us’. I would say that Herbert’s ‘Love bade me welcome’ might be a good example, but again I would say that the dramatic situation is so well realised that we understand the feelings of the protagonist and feel them with him, even though we are not Christian, for one thing, surely, about religious ‘concepts’ – those that exist outside the abstract realm of theology – is that they are very corporeal and of the world. I live in Japan, and a writer I love is Basho, whose work is steeped in Buddhism… Art is not illustrated theology or religious philosophy…
Well Buddhism is a bit different because it isn’t really a religion, but I agree that a lot of what we are moved by in religious art are the human emotions and longings that are represented. But sometimes it goes beyond this. why is this so moving for an atheist:
The Lord’s my Shepherd, I’ll not want.
He makes me down to lie
In pastures green; He leadeth me
The quiet waters by.
My soul He doth restore again;
And me to walk doth make
Within the paths of righteousness,
Even for His own Name’s sake.
etc etc, you know how it goes …
The language is beautiful but not detachable from the sentiment which is, to an atheist, pretty much non-sensical or, at worst offensive. The whole sentiment of that poem/prayer is explicitly religious and makes no sense outside of a specific religious monotheistic context, does it? Look at that second stanza. Could anyone in the pre-Christian era have made head or tail of it? I don’t think so. Maybe these words, images and cadences are buried deeper in the culture than we sometimes think, taken in at the breast, and so they tug at a wire that we hardly realise is there to be tugged. But I grew up without religion surrounded by people without religion and in a society where no adult would openly admit to being religious without embarrassment, so it must be very deeply buried. It still perplexes me this.
“Many years ago when I was a student a very attractive young lady asked me if I would like to go to a free concert with her.”
When I was a student this tactic was used a lot by the Revolutionary Communist Party with some success. One very beautiful and tebbly tebbbly well-spoken communist used to come regularly to our house to discuss the merits of Trotsky with the most dyed-in-the-wool, reactionary-conservativ, Yorkshire-borne engineering student you can imagine. I can’t think she really believed he was promising material and he never budged ideologically although they went on several dates. Mind you, he was pretty hot stuff too despite (ahem) the macho swagger so this may have been a case of the biter bit.
Torquil – The Lord’s My Shepherd is about comfort and protection. A child could say it about their father. It seems the tropes are about shepherding – “the still waters” are the only kind of water that sheep will drink from, for instance. The second verse you could apply to a child who wanted to be good to please their parents.
However from my rudimentary knowledge of pre-Christian poetry I can’t think of anything in Latin or Greek that strikes that particular note.
I don’t think it is about those things, Rosie, I think it is about a spiritual relation with a creator God, and I see it making any sense otherwise. ‘My father is my shepherd, I shall not want’ just about makes sense, but ‘he makes me down to lie in green pastures’ just doesn’t make any at all, except in a very creepy way. The second stanza is not anything to do with pleasing a parent or even a jealous God , it is about the healing of the soul through righteousness and it is all nonsensical outside of a Christian (or, at any rate, Abrahamic monotheist) frame.
I can’t imagine what a Roman would make of it ‘Paths of righteousness’ indeed, they would think we were mad.
“The Lord is my Shepherd” is Psalm 23 it is pre-Christian.
You will find in virtually all cultures the idea of some kind of guardian spirit, who may be an ancestor or some kind of god. Children often have imaginary friends. My mother told me that she used to talk to my father after he died as though he were there since it comforted her to do so, and she felt, somehow, his presence even though she knew this wasn’t really so. I really don’t think there is some sort of impossible or extraordinary imaginative leap to make before being moved by Psalm 23, which is about a relationship of trust with an invisible and powerful being.
I don’t want to get into defining what is and what is not a religion. Perhaps you might read Whitehouse or Boyer. Suffice it to say that Buddhist concepts, or rather Buddhist sentiments about life, not unnaturally inform literature in countries where Buddhism has been strong.
And I cannot see what is ‘creepy’ about ‘He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.’
The speaker is implicitly comparing himself to a sheep, who is being cared for by a loving shepherd. ‘Green pastures’ are attractive and fruitful places (they are not arid deserts), as are gentle streams and quiet ponds. As I said, the psalm is about a relationship of trust, and I do not think people from non-Abrahamic cultures would find it difficult to understand the poem or to enter into it imaginatively. I really cannot see what the problem is. As for the Romans, they after all became Christian and so took on the burden, so to speak, of the psalms and presumasbly understood them. If you want to go into genuine cultural (and religious) differences, then compare the Homeric hymns to the psalms; or look at the Bhagavad gita, or read other portions of that wonderful epic the Mahabharata, some of which I find extraordinarily moving.
One thing that I would add, in connexion with Psalm 23, is that, in comparison with, say, the Homeric hymns, there is a great sense of an intimacy, one might almost say, of friendship with the god, which is something that also informs Herbert’s and Donne’s best religious poems; that sense of intimacy is very moving. There is also the near sexual intimacy you find in the poems of St John of the Cross, a kind of intimacy you find also in some of the shamanistic ‘Nine Songs’ that are the well-head of Chinese poetry, poems that I find extraordinarily moving. And, incidentally, since we are on the subject of religious poetry, I see no reason to think that Milton’s insistence, in Paradise Lost, that his poetry is dictated to him by a Muse, that in spirit he ventured ‘down the dark descent’ in order to describe Hell and reascended with difficulty,cannot be compared with the kind of shamanic, and simultaneously poetic, journey undertaken by the first Chinese poet whose name we know, Qu Yuan.
The creepy thing about the shepherd metaphor is when one realizes that the shepherd is taking care of the sheep mostly so he can eat them or sell them for someone else to eat, not because he wants them to live long and happy lives. (Lest someone accuse me of insufficiently wooly thinking, I did say “mostly”.)