Honest Doubt Part 11 - Embracing Uncertainty

This was about the romantics - Keats and Shelley, although it begins with a brief mention of Blake.

At this point in the story there appears to be a lot of variety in responses to new views of God. As has been mentioned earlier, it seems natural for religious views to multiply and vary - perhaps we should always be wary of the word "natural", but within the society of the 18th and early 19th century where people were being encouraged to think for themselves, to be individuals - produce unique creations - it was certainly the right environment for different responses to arise to religion.

This was by no means a simple yes or no to God. To some extent the problem with the series is that it takes a very specific view of the Christian God and then asks what the history was of doubts about this particular conception of God. Whereas clearly there have been many ways of picturing God and what ultimate reality is like, and what we are getting in these programs is the variety of answers people were coming up with.

It wasn't like Blake who made up his own religion - although he was a particularly severe case - but I can think of Wordsworth for example who has this idea of our pre-existing our time on earth as souls in heaven, we come down to earth "trailing clouds of glory" and our time here is a forgetting of what went before.

This comes from Plato but Wordsworth is playing with ideas and mixing experiences he has had with different streams of religious thought.

What seems strange is how this variety and mix of religious views failed to carry through - secularism in society is a general distrust and distance from any religious view. At the present time with the program we can see different religious ideas flourishing - most enlightenment philosophers for example believed in God, just not the traditional Christian God.

It seems likely that at other times in history, this type of religious questioning would have seen the rise of a new religion, it seems like the birth of some new set of beliefs, but instead it seems to have produced a dull repetition of a very unadventurous orthodoxy from the few combined with general indifference from the many. I wonder if the following programs with explore how that happened.