I can't believe all that stuff
A French philosopher wrote that if he could choose a worldview to be true he would choose Christianity. Then he wrote the sentence that most of my friends would sign.
By Sovandarapor (James) Kong · · Nondual
Chapter 13 of 18 in Ninety minutes with a swami
Swami Sarvapriyananda read a popular history of Western philosophy by Luc Ferry, the kind of book that sold so well in France that it got translated, and he remembers one passage from it more than the rest.
Ferry divides Western thought into four phases. Greek, Christian, Enlightenment, and now the postmodern one. At the end he asks himself which of these he would prefer to be true, if he were allowed to choose. The answer, as the swami recalls it, is unhesitating. The Christian one. And then the second half. But I cannot believe it. After the Enlightenment, after everything that has happened since, standing where we stand, I cannot believe all that stuff.
The swami treats that as the most honest sentence in the book, and as the exact shape of the question he is asked most often. There are more agnostics and atheists alive now than at any point in history, he says, and at the same time there is an obvious hunger, not for religion exactly, but for the thing religion was for. He distinguishes the serious seekers from the New Age fog, and says plainly that the serious ones have been turning to Advaita and certain schools of Buddhism for a century because those traditions do not require the belief that Ferry could not manage.
I found the passage uncomfortable because it describes me and most people I know. Sitting in Phnom Penh with a pagoda at the end of the street, monks passing the gate at dawn, I have often thought it would be a better life to believe what my neighbours believe, and I have never for one morning been able to. Nice if it were true is exactly the feeling. It does not come with an off switch.
The swami's answer to Ferry is the subject of the next piece, and it is not what I expected. It is not a clever argument that makes belief unnecessary. It is an instruction about what to do with your hands.
For now I wanted to record that a philosopher of the Sorbonne and a monk from Calcutta read the same sentence and took it as the starting point rather than the end.