Lecture on the Need for Religion in a Globalized World

Key Question: Why Do We Need Religion?

• Central Question: How do we succeed as human beings?
• Thesis: Great world religions offer compelling ways to answer how to succeed in the task of being human.

Speaker's Personal Experiences

1. UN Talk on Reconciliation (9/11)
   • Topic: Faith bringing people together.
   • Contradiction: Faith was part of the cause for 9/11 attacks.
2. Dubai Global Agenda Council Meeting (Post-Financial Crisis)
   • Focus: Financial regulation, economic growth, inequality.
   • Missing Element: Addressing the dark force of desire that fueled the crisis.

Two Experiences and Their Lessons

• Failure of Institutions: Inability to address human desire and flourishing.
• Religion Gone Homicidal: Religion meant to answer the good life question, instead causing harm.

Introducing Nietzsche's Concept of Nihilism

• Friedrich Nietzsche: Known for criticism of religion.
• Two Types of Nihilism:
  1. Religious Nihilism
     • Ascetic: Fleeing ordinary life for transcendence.
     • Imposing meaning: Crushing the energies of life.
  2. A-religious Nihilism
     • Last Humans: Oriented towards pleasure, living a 'couch potato' existence.
     • Aggressive: Bending world to their purposes (e.g., Wall Street wolves).

The Struggle Between Nihilisms

• Conflict: Fundamentalists (imposing meaning) vs. Libertarians (seeking pleasure).
• Cycle: Fundamentalists becoming libertarians and vice versa.
• Nietzsche's Metaphor: Camel (bearing weight) → Lion (roaring and freeing) → Child (living in the moment).

Proposed Solution: Unity of Meaning and Pleasure

• Problem: Meaning without pleasure is crushing; pleasure without meaning is empty.
• Solution: Found in God conceived as Love.

Relationship with God Enhances Life

• Paul Bloom's Book (How Pleasure Works): Pleasure from essences/relationships attached to things.
• Gift from God: World as a creation and gift from God.
  • Importance of gifts lies in their relational nature.
  • Loving God transforms the world into a sacrament of the relationship between God and the individual.

Conclusion

• Unity of Meaning and Pleasure: Achieved through belief in God as Love.
• Overcoming Nihilisms: Properly understood religious faith can resolve the struggle between fundamentalist and a-religious nihilism.
• Importance of Religion: Religion matters in today's world to provide this unity.