Toward Attention

Public Orthodoxy and Private Heresy

From a New York Times article (here):

When religious commitments are more comprehensive and religious institutions more resilient, faith is more likely to call people out of private loyalties to public purposes, more likely to inspire voters to put ideals above self-interest, more likely to inspire politicians to defy partisan categories altogether. But as orthodoxies weaken, churches split and their former adherents mix and match elements of various traditions to fit their preferences, religion is more likely to become indistinguishable from personal and ideological self-interest.

Interesting.

"More Fundamental and Ultimately More Fateful Issues"

I was reading a review of A People Adrift, and the reviewer I was reading wrote this about the conservative--liberal divide in the Roman Catholic Church in the US after Vatican II:

each side feels beleaguered by the other which feeds an undue emphasis on contentious aspects of church life or teaching at the expense of more fundamental and ultimately more fateful issues.

Those lines should be engraved in gold on wooden  plaques and placed in prominent positions everywhere in every major institution in the world.

Atheist For Secularism and Against Political Atheism

With Western Easter fast approaching, you can be sure that there will be many people who wail about those Christian elements that remain in the public square, those others who actively seek to promote and enlarge the non-Christian elements of the "holiday," and yet others who aren't interested in complaining or re-emphasizing but in actively militating against eliminating and ridiculing every element of the Christian faith. I don't think it will necessarily be as bad as all that, but as with every year, there will be some of it. Anticipating that, here is a video below:

Damage

I read here just now about a woman trying to figure out how and what to raise her children as, religiously speaking. Interesting musings. I know at least three families who've tried this. It failed every time. Not sustainable as any coherent practice with any intelligible depth of meaning or feeling, compared to community or institutional religion. Religion is about meaning, and is communal: isolated idiosyncratic religious gestures that occur outside of a grammar and a tradition of encountering God or a god are doomed to shallowness and extinction.

That's not what's interesting, however. What's interesting is how much damage people inflict when they are religious people, but bad people.

The religious abuse of children is, in a certain respect, like the sexual abuse of children in one possible consequence that is analogical: whereas sexual abuse can damage a person's ability to enjoy, or even engage in, sexual relations, religious abuse can damage a person's ability to enjoy, or even engage in, the religious dimension of life.

Look at the number of atheists and agnostics (and almost-atheistic or almost-agnostic liberal religious folk -- liberal religion is largely akin to the small tree one holds tightly onto in defiance of the hurricane that threatens to sweep one away) that come from abusive religious environments.

Religion, History, Science Truth

I thought that this article by Ward was a simple, good, superficial overview.

Frederick Beiser on Hegel's Reception of Spinoza

In Frederick Beiser's marvelously-written book on Hegel, there are two paragraphs (bear with the first one to get to the second one) that reinforce my suspicions about the political motives present in the Protestant spirit from the beginning: or rather, it confirms my suspicions that the spirit of Protestantism tends towards a kind of political religion; or rather, that the spirit of Protestantism as a cultural movement always had a kind of political dimension to it that controlled other dogmatic concerns. It seems that the only way that this political tendency can be stopped from overturning traditional dogmas and from seeking its natural end is by other factors arresting it or steering it differently. 

What did Hegel and the young romantics get from Spinoza? What they saw in him was first and foremost his attempt to rationalize religion. Spinoza's famous dictum deus sive natura, his identification of God with the infinitude of nature, seemed to resolve the conflict between reason and faith that had preoccupied philosophers and theologians throughout the Enlightenment. Spinoza's dictum divinized nature as much as it naturalized the divine, and so it seemed to make a religion out of science, a science out of religion. If God were the same as "the one and all" -- if the divine were the creative force of nature, the dynamic unity behind all its laws -- then there would be no reason to oppose reason and faith. Instead, the objects of religion and science would be one and the same. The case for Spinozism seemed only strengthened by the weakness of its traditional rivals, theism and deism, which, by the end of the eighteenth century, were on their last legs. Theism not only rested its case on miracles, which were hard to square with science, but it also suffered greatly from the new biblical criticism. For its part, deism had simply collapsed under the relentless barrage of Hume's and Kant's criticism of the traditional proofs of God's existence. Only Spinoza's pantheism did not seem in danger of such obsolescence. The reality of Spinoza's God was as palpable as that of nature itself. Rather than being a mysterious spirit, like the God of traditional theism, or an irrelevant abstraction, like the God of deism, Spinoza's God is the whole of nature, and so equally present within everyone alike. Since we are all modes of the single infinite substance, we only have to reflect upon ourselves to find the divine within us.

It is important to see that the romantic attraction to Spinoza was not only religious but also political. To understand these political factors, it is worthwhile to keep  in mind a famous remark of Heinrich Heine: that pantheism had always been the secret religion of Germany, the faith of its cultural underground. Heine knew whereof he spoke. Since the end of the seventeenth century in Germany, Spinoza had become the patron saint of radical Protestants, of all those discontented reformers who accused Luther of selling out to the princes and betraying his two grand ideals: religious liberty and the priesthood of all believers. These radicals embraced Spinoza for a variety of reasons, all of them perfectly Protestant. They saw Spinoza's separation of church and state as a guarantee of religious liberty; they embraced his critique of the Bible because it freed Lutheranism from its biblicism, its deadening emphasis upon the letter as a rule of faith; and they loved his pantheism because it seemed to justify the equality and priesthood of all believers. After all, if God is infinitely present within everyone alike, we are all equal; and then there is no need for a priest or spiritual authority to mediate our relationship with God.

Only God can Be a Basis for Morality?

I've read/heard before that agitating and anxiety-induced chatter about how "without God we will have no moral ground" etc., and I've read/heard atheists and agnostics skewer it as though it rendered Christian commitment ethically vacuous (claiming that (A) if anyone does that, they're not thinking or acting morally, that (B) religious folks in fact borrow their morality from somewhere else and that (C) if (B), that this shows that the argument that "only a god (even God) can secure/provide our moral verities" is both false and insincere). It's not really difficult to refute it.

I guess it just strikes me as a bizarre (and Modern) argument, and at variance with both the Church's traditional approach to/understanding of the relation between common ethical precepts and intuitions and the Church's ascetical teachings on one hand, and the general sensibilities of the actually religious that I know on the other hand, whether Jews, Christians, Sikh, or Hindu of various sorts (I live in New England, so this may be a demographic peculiarity).

It seems to me that moral intuitions are common to all of us, and that we each and all have a conscience (or almost all of us, the overwhelming majority), not just the religious. It becomes more acute through training, consciously moral choices or through neuroses. It can get dull through the same (substituting "amoral" for "moral" in the choices). It strikes me that this common feature of our humanity will be interpreted by religious folks -- or let's keep it more specific, traditional Christians, Orthodox and Roman Catholic -- one way (who may then say that their ethical commitments are clarified and strengthened by religious experiences, and who thus perceive and interpret all ethical intuitions as having God, as the Good, as their proper end), and by agnostics and atheists another way (a pragmatic consideration, empathy, selfish interest, an evolutionary "program," mere convention, etc.).

I dunno, I'm just a guy with a keyboard, but it seems to me that this ambiguity is where our attention should go, and that we shouldn't waste it on those who make claims like "God (or Religion, or the Bible, or whatever) is what morality is based on." I was actually surprised to read that someone I respect, who is much more intelligent and cultured than I, was citing this claim seriously, even if it was only as a mirror to reveal other political postures as like unto it.

I am surprised by how often I've heard this claim refuted recently. I don't ever really hear it advanced, though I know some people do. It strikes me as a fundamentally eccentric claim.

Son of Hamas

There is a book that I've been interested in reading called "Son of Hamas." GQ did an interview with the author here.

Kolakowski on Spinoza

Expounding Spinoza, at one point in his book Why is There Something Rather than Nothing?, the Polish Philosopher Leszek Kolakowski writes:

God is beyond time; if He existed in time, He could not be fully perfect, for He would have to mediate His relation to Himself through memory of what was past and anticipation of what was to come. [p.108]

Well-said.

Vietnamese Jesus Statue

I am conflicted about this.

At first I thought "the man can't imaginably need a 40-foot statue on a bluff for devotional purposes. If his statue was 10 feet tall -- even 15 -- I can't imagine this kind of opposition and resistance." But then James kindly corrected my hasty skim-read of this article, and noted that the statue is 7 feet tall. Which makes all opposition to his statue look much, much more pathological than the worst conceivable pathology-born motivation for erecting it in the first place -- and that's only positing a pathological origin for the Jesus statue for rhetorical purposes, to show how absurd the whole thing is, and not because I'm convinced that the statue's presence has its origins in a pathology.

It's not OK to destroy someone's personal property just because you object to it or its "content." This must be stopped. Especially when it's barely taller than the average human being.

In the same vein, it's definitely not OK to impose zoning laws on someone just because they want to put up a statue of Jesus. It's not a flaming penis or anything. If it's actually unsafe, however (i.e., if it's liable to fall on a road underneath), that's another story. It's not. It's on the water.

The public square does not need to be stripped of every expression of religion, either. That's absurd, and very un-liberal.

However, using the public square as a billboard for one's religion seems like an abuse of the public square and of the Lord's Name and Image. There are legitimate ways to express one's devotion in the public square. This statue, however, only being 7 feet tall, can't reasonably be claimed to be a billboard.