DeepSummary
Matthew Sitman interviews Sarah Jones about her essay 'An Atheist Reconsiders God in the Pandemic'. They discuss Jones' religious upbringing in a fundamentalist Christian household, her eventual atheism, and her experience reconsidering faith during the isolation and trauma of the COVID-19 pandemic. Jones describes feeling a lack of meaning and community during lockdowns, as well as confronting mortality when she became severely ill.
Sitman and Jones explore how the pandemic disrupted religious rituals and community for believers, while also prompting nonbelievers like Jones to yearn for spiritual meaning to make sense of widespread death. Jones found solace in left-wing political solidarity, though she acknowledges its potential to become dogmatic. They analyze C.S. Lewis' perspective on science filling the 'God-shaped hole' in a crisis.
The conversation touches on Jones' changing relationships with doubt, institutions like churches, and figures like Dr. Fauci during COVID-19. Ultimately, while not returning to faith, Jones gained insight into the human need for ritual, meaning, and community in the face of mortality - needs she has tried to meet through her values and activism.
Key Episodes Takeaways
- The COVID-19 pandemic prompted atheist writer Sarah Jones to reconsider the role of religious faith and the existence of God while grappling with isolation and confronting mortality.
- Despite yearning for spiritual meaning during lockdowns, Jones did not return to religious belief but rather found community and purpose through left-wing political solidarity.
- Jones cautions against dogmatism in politics just as she rejects it in religion, advocating nuance while passionately pursuing her values and understanding opposing views.
- The pandemic disrupted religious rituals and communities for believers while also prompting nonbelievers to seek spiritual meaning and grapple with existential questions around death.
- C.S. Lewis' perspective that science can become a 'God substitute' during crises resonated with Jones' experience of people venerating figures like Dr. Fauci amid COVID's mass death.
- Jones found solidarity with her religious parents who, like her, experienced isolation from community along with a need for ritual when confronting mortality during the pandemic.
- While maintaining her atheist, materialist worldview, Jones gained insight into the human needs faith can fulfill through community, ritual and grappling with life's biggest questions.
- The pandemic intensified rather than resolved Jones' search for meaning without supernatural belief, reinforcing her conviction that 'the stakes are really, really high' in this natural world.
Top Episodes Quotes
- “I didn't really find that sense of meaning, that transcendence, if you want to call it that, until I became more affirmatively a leftist as opposed to a liberal. And then I started to find it in the notion of solidarity as this feeling of comradeship that transcends borders, that transcends, you know, hopefully gender, racial divisions. The idea that we're supposed to be united in a common struggle for a better, fairer world, to me, that that ended up taking the place of religion and ritual in some sense in my life.“ by Sarah Jones
- “I think it's possible to be a person of conviction, to be passionate, to be convinced of something without being dogmatic about it, without demonizing people, isn't quite the right turn of phrase, but with, you know, sort of maintaining an emphasis on reaching out to people you might disagree with instead of just sort of painting them as the enemy, which I think fundamentalists are really quick to do.“ by Sarah Jones
- “I don't believe in a God still, which means that I'm a materialist. I don't believe in anything supernatural. And as I say in the essay, we're it, as far as I'm concerned. So the stakes are really, really, really high, as high as they could possibly be. And I think that's just the fact of the matter. I think that's just how it is.“ by Sarah Jones
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Episode Information
Know Your Enemy
Matthew Sitman
10/16/21