Forgiveness

 9/16/2021--On this day of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, we secularists should ask, how do we find forgiveness? Yes, we can ask the person we have wronged, and in the Jewish tradition, one must do that. But, the tradition does not expect this always to be successful. One need only ask forgiveness a specified number of times--any more than that is considered an act of violence.

And even when the wronged person forgives, that is not perfect forgiveness. We still know and they still know. 

And anyway, what secularist do you know who even thinks about how he or she wronged someone.

No, secularism has a long, long way to go before we can have a flourishing secular civilization. Psychiatry is not a substitute for introspection. And that introspection is going to have to be really searching. 

When I practiced Judaism, I used to feel on Yom Kippur that the whole sin thing was overdone. (Except on rare occasions when my failures in personal relationships were too obvious to ignore). Now I think that we do violence all the time to everyone around us. But we mostly keep it hidden. We don't love properly. We are envious. We are vain. 

This I think is to be human.

This most generalized falling short of living rightly is what we most need forgiveness for. 

Only religion offers that kind of forgiveness so that we really can start over tomorrow.

How will secular life deal with this?  

 

Lale Gul Wants to Lie on the Beach in a Bikini

8/14/2021—Lale Gul is a young Dutch novelist who has broken with the traditions of her Turkish immigrant family and has written a fictional account of her journey to secularism. The New York Times ran a story about her today. She says, “I’m done hiding. I don’t believe in God and the religious and cultural rules that were set for me.”

To say I sympathize would be an understatement, since the same thing happened to me. To say I understand would be a gross overstatement since her family now shuns her and she has received death threats. Leaving liberal Judaism in America is a very different matter. People do it every day and often don’t even notice.

But there is something Gul does not yet understand. She will. Secularism is empty and dangerous. Plenty of young women have come to various forms of harm from wearing a bikini. I’m not speaking about rape, though that does happen. I’m talking about Gov. Cuomo and everything his behavior represents.

Eventually, secular culture will deal with its sexism and indeed is in the process of doing so right now.

The emptiness is something else entirely.

Islam is not just rules, but a way of life—a story of the universe. What is the secular way of life? What is its story of the universe?

So, Lale Gul, welcome to secularism. But I’m afraid you will find it is not all it’s cracked up to be.

The Startup Wife Shows We Need Help With Our Spiritual Infrastructure--This Week's Column

 8/3/2021--This week's column in the Pennsylvania Capital-Star is about Tahmima Anam's new novel, The Startup Wife, and what the book tells us about religion in America. 

How to Respond to Anti-Semitic Attacks--This Week's Column

 6/23/2021--My column this week in the Pennsylvania Capital-Star was scheduled to be about how to respond to anti-Semitic attacks. Before it appeared, the Jewish Federation issued a warning about harrassment and a possible attack this month in Pittsburgh. I was unaware of these incidents, but of course they sharpen the need for a response. We can all wear a kippah. This is from the column:

Anti-Semitism threatens us all. We are all Jews.

Just as police violence against persons of color is not just violence against them but against us all, just so here. As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., taught, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

Happy Easter

4/4/2021—C.S. Lewis used to say that Christianity is one great miracle. This is true and important because it measures the difference between religion and the secular very precisely.

Lewis meant the incarnation, not the resurrection, but they are all one story, as he also said. The divine comes into nature and then rises, bringing nature, including us, with it.

I have a stubborn streak—like Dr. McCoy in Star Trek. I cannot accept miracles—any interruption in the usual causal natural processes.

This is not a logical position. The Big Bang was a miracle. We don’t really understand anything about it. So, I have to admit that I don’t want to accept the possibility of a miracle.

Nor is this really experiential. I have experienced inexplicable interventions in my life—spiritual events without any sensible explanation other than divine action. But forgiveness of sin is not a miracle.

Accepting this stance as a choice not to believe is helpful because I now have no reason to look down on religious believers. We have all made commitments, just different ones.

The argument for the resurrection rests on a lot of evidence actually, not the least of which is the fact that 20 or 30 years after the death of Jesus, Jews are eating pork—about as likely as the Taliban putting on cocktail parties.

But it’s not for me. Nor for many others. In fact, we now live in a secular culture.

The question going forward is a simple one—how to build secular civilization instead of the mess America is now. The answer is simple too but hard to do. First decide what flourishing secular civilization has to be—it has to be hallowed. (Hence the blog and book). Second make peace with religion as part of the resources to do that. (Hence American Religious Democracy), Third, accept that building secular civilization is a communal task, not an individual one. (Hence Church, State and the Crisis in American Secularism). Fourth, commit to a positive view of the universe as the basis of secular civilization—my upcoming book. Fifth, design a new secular life—with an eye toward calendar, the ritual of daily life, prayer and repentance. (my next book) Finally, adopt love as the basis of all life. This last step brings the secular right back into the neighborhood of religion.  

Merry Christmas to All

 12/25/2020--Merry Christmas to all, especially to all of us nonbelievers. Christmas is the message of new hope that we need. Now if only we could frame myths for our own time.

The One Religious Question Barrett Should Not Have to Answer

10/7/2020--this week's column in the Pennsylvania Capital-Star. Let's see if the Dems read it.

Happy New Year

 

9/20/2020— Today is the second day of Rosh Hashanah in the Jewish calendar.I have not been able to write High Holy Day blog entries for a few years. This year was no exception.

But I would like to mention that one of the difficulties in establishing a really satisfying secular life is the absence of holy days.

For a Jew, the month before the High Holy Days, Elul, is one of introspection in preparation for the holiday period.

Then, there is the sense of possible new beginnings in the New Year itself.

When does the secular person engage in such introspection? When is the possibility of new beginning really present?

For us, one day tends to be like another.

It is not a problem yet solved. In fact, it is not yet a problem seen as a problem.

The National Day of Prayer for the Coronavirus

5/5/2020—Three weeks ago, there was a national day of prayer for victims of the virus. The Proclamation was issued on Saturday, March 14, right after President Trump’s issuance of an national emergency declaration. You could say that it was at that moment that the President finally realized how serious the virus was.

Was there ever a proclamation taken less seriously? It was a busy time. Friday was the last time I would meet my classes in person. That Monday I began to teach to an empty classroom with my stuffed animals.

The world has changed quite a lot for everyone in these past three weeks. As of this morning, there have been over 300,000 cases and over 8000 deaths attributed to COVID-19.

So, maybe I overlooked the national day of prayer because I was so distracted. But, until yesterday, I did not know such a thing had happened. I only found out because of a snarky tweet by Richard Dawkins, pointing out that deaths only began to climb right after the Day of Prayer.

Here we have the real proof that God is Dead. This invocation was a perfect example of what is called in law, ceremonial deism. This is a reference to God that no one takes seriously as a theological expression. No one expected anything from God. No one thought God had anything to do with the virus.

My column this week is about the virus’s meaning. And I suggest three possibilities. One is materialism—the virus doesn’t mean anything because there is no such thing as ultimately meaning anything. The universe is random forces and matter.

The second is a new view of nature as alive. The virus is part of nature’s story. Maybe the virus is a natural feedback loop preventing temperature rises.

The third is the traditional monotheistic view. But what would that be? Something this stupendous would have to be the work of God. Jonathan Rosenblum points out that this viruses that jump from animals to humans could be a divine “hint” that we are losing our humanity. That kind of thinking is a still-functioning monotheism.

But, mostly, we invoke God just to say we will be OK. This is not nothing, but it is close.

Secular Responses to anti-Semitic Violence

12/29/2019—This is not a blog entry about gun control. Of course it is morally permissible to kill someone who enters your home with a machete. And, since we live in a world where people enter your home with a machete, some people will want to have a gun for self-defense.

That said, it is jarring to read the response of Randy Barnett, the great conservative jurisprudential thinker, to the attack on a Jewish Hanukah celebration in Monsey, New York.

New York needs to join the 40 CCW states and pass “shall issue” concealed carry laws and Jews need to arm up & train. It’s not going to be a perfect solution, but nothing is perfect. As a Jew, this is one reason I both own and have my CCW permit, though I don’t *need* it—yet.

Randy thinks of himself as shooting someone who is threatening him or someone else. I doubt he thinks that doing so would traumatize him for life—-or, he might say, it would still be better than being dead.

I feel the same way. As I wrote above, this is not an entry about gun control.

But, now I think about the Hasidic Rabbi—-Chaim L. Rottenberg-—in whose home the attack took place. Is it so clear that he would want to shoot the man who entered his home with murderous intent?

For a secularist like me, death is the end. So, it is senseless to worry about tainting your soul with a violent but morally justified act to prevent being killed.

But, if I thought I would stand before God to account for all the actions of my life, then it would not be so clear. To kill to prevent others from being killed? Yes. To prevent my own death? Maybe not.

It is worth mentioning that this is exactly the kind of thinking that drove Zionists crazy during WWII and its aftermath. They were looking to create a society of Jews who would be able to act to defend themselves. And the policies of the current State of Israel are evidence that they succeeded. Israel is certainly a normal State in terms of self-defense.

The world cannot understand religious belief. This was shown in the general amazement at the reaction of the Amish to the murder of five children in Lancaster County in 2006.

Well, I can’t either. Not really. Let’s just say that the world will not be redeemed by more concealed carry gun permits.

But the world might be redeemed by something very different.

Happy Thanksgiving

11/28/2019--Happy Thanksgiving. This is the holiday that has successfully made the transition to secular expression. And, unlike Christmas, it has done so with its soul mostly intact. It is a holiday of giving thanks and of being thankful. No wonder modern capitalism has no interest in it and just wants to get on with shopping.

But the holiday is also acceptable to secularism because it makes no demand on us to change. If anything, it is a celebration of what we are today. Gratitude is undoubtedly a religious expression, but it pales before Teshuvah--repentance. The high holy days, or lent, of any of the periods of self-reflection and prayer have not made the leap to secular cultural expression. They are what we most need today.

So, Thanksgiving is religious enough to challenge us only a little--too much for capitalism's taste--but not enough to really help us.

Enjoy your turkey.

What is the Point of this Column?

11/22/2019—Blanch Vivion Brooks wrote a column today in the NY Times, entitled We Need a Religious Left.

Sure we do, for the reasons she writes and for many more besides.

But, what is the point of saying so if we don’t have one? People do not leave religion—or even just have no contact with it—out of choice. It happens organically. Many members of this generation just don’t believe in God. You can point out that this has bad effects as much as you like. You can’t manufacture belief.

I left Judaism because I no longer believed in God and because I was becoming more and more irritated at the manifestations of belief I encountered in synagogue. That is not a criticism of believers. But what is beautiful to them is just infuriating if you don’t believe.

Anyway, I was told that my seething anger was the least religious comportment imaginable.

It was time to go.

And if you tell me that actions like mine undermine social life, just what am I supposed to do about it? I already know that this is the case.

Maybe a column like this can help convince secularists that religion is a good thing very often. That would be helpful.

But it can’t bring back religion. Faith does not work that way.

All the Justices Get Religion Wrong Again

6/23/2019--One secular critic wrote that at least the Supreme Court in The American Legion v. American Humanist Association case did not accept the idea that a cross can stand as a symbol for all the dead, including Jews and other non-Christians and nonbelievers. That idea was the great threat.

The fight over the cross became a substitute for fights over the Pledge of Allegiance. It was as if the cross would be forcing a dead nonbeliever to endorse Christianity.

So, why not just put up symbols that everyone accepts? Because they don't have power.

The great thing about the endorsement test, now on its way out, is that it asked the right question. Is government endorsing religion? If government is endorsing something else, the Constitution is not violated. And the reasonable oberserver is the one to ask.

People don't realize that the reason we are filled with despair and anger is that we no longer have a story that promises peace. Religious stories promise peace. But many of us, and the culture as a whole, no longer accept them. And that is true of the religious people too. They no longer accept their own stories, which is why so many religious people are filled with anger and despair too.

When government uses religious symbols to tell stories of peace, the symbols should be constitutional. And if they are using religious symbols because they are familiar to everybody, that should not be a problem. The reasonable person has to see that the government is not endorsing the sectarian aspect of the religious symbol but its attempted universal message.

What the Supreme Court Should Have Said, But Didn't, in the Maryland Cross Case

6/22/2019--This is the op-ed I wrote last March for the Washington Examiner in the Cross Case decided this week. The cross stayed, as predicted. There was no majority opinion on how to approach religious imagery in the public square. (This is a repeat of the March 21 blog entry since this is the time people are interested in the case.)
*****************************************************************************************************
The World War I memorial cross in Bladensburg, Md., isn’t going anywhere. That was clear from the oral argument in The American Legion v. American Humanist Association. The Supreme Court may even be unanimous that the cross can stay on public land.

That is not surprising. The cross is an almost hundred years old WWI memorial without further religious reference. Crosses have symbolized the dead of the Great War since John McCrae’s epic 1915 poem, "Flanders Fields."

What matters is how the cross stays — do the justices add to American divisions, or do they begin the process of healing?

Thanks to President Trump, there is now a pro-religion majority on the court. That majority could abolish the requirement of a secular purpose in Establishment Clause cases — the Lemon test — and substitute a no-coercion test. This would be seen as a big win for one side in the culture wars.

The treatment of religion as an either-or proposition goes back a long way. The legal theorist Ronald Dworkin once asked whether America would be a religious country tolerating non-belief or a secular country accommodating believers. This is like asking who’s the real American.

These cases pit believers against nonbelievers because the Court has never asked seriously what secular meaning a religious symbol can have. Religious symbols don’t just endorse sectarian commitments, after all. They can just as clearly stand for a whole set of other commitments.

The national motto, "In God We Trust," for example, certainly refers to the God of the Bible for the monotheistic believer. But it also means that we live in a trustworthy universe and not in chaos. That is the reason why John Dewey, not himself a religious believer, never gave up using the word "God."

Those Ten Commandments displays that so often end up in court remind the religious believer that God is the foundation of human law. But they also proclaim that law must serve a higher truth. These monuments reinforce Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s teaching that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice. These displays are as much a rebuke to value-free originalism as they are to materialism.

To uphold religious imagery for its common, secular meaning is not to bring back the much-derided “ceremonial deism,” which claims that religious symbols no longer have religious meaning. Nor is it equivalent to the sanitized claim that religious imagery symbolizes a “religious heritage,” as if religion is now just a curiosity for museums.

It is rather that the real division in this country is not between religion and irreligion but between those who see meaning and purpose at the heart of the universe and those who do not. Religious symbols communicate very well on this level to believers and nonbelievers alike.

America is well on its way to becoming a secular society. The question is, what kind of secular society are we going to be? The opioid crisis, the spike in suicides, the general hopelessness and anger in American society, point toward a secularist nihilism. We will just have to get used to the idea that we are alone in an indifferent universe.

But there is another possibility. We can be secularists who still embrace transcendent norms.
Government should not be neutral with regard to the question of meaning. It should endorse cosmic purpose. It should proclaim hope. Religious symbols are not the only way to do that, but they do represent one way.

Any judicial decision in favor of religion versus non-religion will only be temporary. It will ensure that some future secular majority will insist on a naked public square. But a decision that fills that public square with common meaning for all of us can endure.

The justices have a choice. They can participate in, and further, our divisions or they can help us find common ground and healing. It depends on how they rule in favor of the cross.

Building Cosmopolis

4/29/2019—I will have a conversation today with Michael Shermer, the author of The Moral Arc, and other books, for the Bends Toward Justice Podcast Series. Michael is a ferocious critic of irrationalisms of all kinds, right and left, from climate change denial to anti-vaccine people.

But Michael does have a particular critique of religion, which he repeatedly emphasizes.

From the perspective of doing something about irrationalism, this inordinate concern about religion is really counter-productive. There is so much good work about the meaning of God that does not involve miracle or any other interference with the laws of nature discovered by science—I am thinking here of David Bentley Hart, for example—that you have to ask someone like Michael, why pick a fight?

This leads to a larger question—how does someone like Michael actually engage irrationalism?

I hope to ask Michael about Bernard Lonergan, the Canadian Jesuit who died in 1984. Lonergan was the author of, among other books, Insight and Method in Theology. Lonergan was very interested in the kind of decline that we are experiencing now. He suggested that part of the response has to be cosmopolis, which is discussed here. Mark Miller describes cosmopolis as “a redemptive community that would motivate people on a cultural level instead of attempting through economics or politics to impose new social structures.” This community is not one that occupies a particular geographic area or is composed of any one profession or discipline. It is a loose formation of people from different walks of life who all see and confront the decline that is all around them.

Cosmopolis differs from the current opposition movements against President Trump. It does not have a program in that sense. It does not look for redemption from any such quarter. Its main focus is on the clarity of thinking. Even that, however, is a misleading formulation because, for Lonergan, thinking includes a form of life in Wittgenstein’s sense. It is as much a matter of character as of cognition. One could say that only a certain kind of person in a certain social context is really adequate to the emergency in which we find ourselves.

My question to Michael is, how to build cosmopolis? I don’t believe that the current form of criticism that Michael practices helps us get there. Dr. King was a person who could build community. Even if the moral arc is entirely a human creation, it still requires community. Secularism is really bad at this. But religion is really good.

More Religious Violence

4/21/2019--On this Easter Sunday, another reminder of violence perpetrated in the name of religion--this time in Sri Lanka. All religions perpetrate violence these days. I presume the bomber of a mosque in New Zealand on March 15, described as a white supremacist, was a Christian. Hindus oppress Muslims in India. Buddhists in South Asia do, too.

But violence perpetuated by Islamic radicals surpasses all the rest. One day Islam will suffer from this violence as Christianity did earlier in world history--by a wave of secularism. No one is going to put up with killing innocent people in the name of God forever. Eventually, whole societies revolt.

Chris Hitchens is smiling.

The Universal Christ

4/7/2019--I wonder sometimes why my Christian and Jewish friends don't live fuller, more meaning-filled lives. After all, they believe in a wonderful reality of hope and love that I don't inhabit. Or don't inhabit fully.

Richard Rohr's book, The Universal Christ, is an introduction into everyday mysticism that attempts to capture just such experiences. We can be on the bus and suddenly we become award of the presence of God--aware of a hidden depth of reality right there.

The process philosopher Alfred North Whitehead taught that we were always perceiving God but that religious experiences were just that constant awareness occasionally coming into conscious awareness.

The point of hallowed secularism--this blog, my book, my hope for the future--is that this consciousness of the depth dimension of life, as described by Rollo May, could be a common inheritance.

Secularists just don't tend to talk about these things. That is part of the reason that secular life is so flat and unsatisfying. You need mystery and depth to live.

Rohr is a panentheist. I am seeing myself more and more as that.

Here is a review of Rohr's book.

When Cynicism Came to the West

3/31/2019—Peter Sloterdijk, the German philosopher, wrote in Critique of Cynical Reason in 1987—1987!—that cynicism came to the West through the Enlightenment’s critique of religion:

“I maintain that this enlightenment theory of religion represents the first logical construction of modern, self-reflective master cynicism.”

That critique had two parts. Ordinary people believed the myths and constructions of religion and tried to live by them. Political and religious leaders, and philosophers, on the other hand, did not, and used these religious teachings to keep themselves in power and enforce an oppressive status quo.

If you listen hard enough, you will hear in this critique the very way we today treat our opponents. Pro-life critics talk about Planned Parenthood being in it for the money. Representative Omar’s comment about the Benjamins can be put there, too.

Roberto Unger once criticized this kind of cynicism as failing to capture the consciousness of people we claim to be describing and understanding. We may think they are fooling themselves, but they undoubtedly believe much of the things they say. It may even be that they don’t act consistently with the beliefs they profess. But even that is a long way from the bitter cynicism of the critique.

And it suggests projection by the critic. After all, says Sloterdijk, the one who sees such cynicism is the master cynic. Does this mean that the critic does not believe in what he or she professes?

The Power of Truth

3/3/2019—Why is it the Democrats cannot quite clear themselves of the charge of infanticide? The real reason is that human life begins at conception. There is no line after that one that makes any sense.

An abortion decision that centered on the life, health and safety of the pregnant woman would still be possible. But not abortion on demand, which is the problem. The issue is terminating a pregnancy that is just not in the person’s plans, but is otherwise no threat.

A lot of the issue here is sexism. The father’s life will continue more or less unaffected. Her life will radically change. If this were different, there would be much more support for abortion. But less demand for it, too.

Matters are quite otherwise with same sex marriage. Here the religious teachings are arbitrary and everyone can see it, which is why there is no longer any support at all for criminalizing this “sin”. Try that experiment with adultery and you will see that people will say it would be a bad idea to criminalize it, but there is still some support for some kind of legal sanction—a penalty in the divorce, for example.

I hope gay Methodist believers will stay and make the denomination throw them out. It may not happen. But even if it does, it will be homicide and not suicide.

Conservatives are always going on about traditional morality. But gay relationships are not actually immoral. Those other teachings are about practices that actually are, even though the teachings are rigid—-most sex outside marriage is exploitive and that which is not is often on the way to marriage and always went on.

So, life and love are the truth. When we go against them, we always run into difficulties. That is the power of truth.