6/26/2011—Douglas Laycock, professor of law at Virginia, is a great man. He is particularly a great man in the field of church and state. His terms dominate discussion in legal circles about religion in the public square and religious liberty generally.
But Douglas Laycock shares a trait with most law professors. He does not feel enough responsibility for the political health of America and he does not think hard enough about the relationship of his constitutional understanding to that political community.
I say that because of Laycock’s answer to criticism of his position on “under God” language in the Pledge of Allegiance [from 89 Texas Law Review 949]:
“[T]his is a wholly academic discussion. ‘[U]nder God’ in the Pledge is not going away. Forced to consider the issue by Michael Newdow's first lawsuit, I gave the principled answer that the current Pledge is unconstitutional. But nothing good can come from Newdow's litigation, which is many decades premature. The nonbelieving minority is not yet large enough or influential enough to have such a politically aggressive claim taken seriously. If Newdow ever gets the Supreme Court to consider his claim on the merits, he will almost certainly lose, and the opinion may do much broader damage to Establishment Clause doctrine. If he were to win, the victory would be Pyrrhic, leading to a constitutional amendment, widespread defiance of the Court, or both.
My amicus brief in Newdow, to be reprinted in volume 4, was an attempt at damage control. I made the argument for why the Pledge is unconstitutional, not in any hope of winning, but hoping only to get the Court to take the issue seriously and write a more cautious opinion. And then I suggested a way to uphold the Pledge that would do the least damage to surrounding doctrine. I am not campaigning to amend the Pledge. Here too, the perfect should not be the enemy of the good.”
Here is a good man gone terribly wrong. “Not yet large enough”. “Decades premature”. Does Laycock understand the implications of this language? We are to have decades of political strife over God. We are to have elections over whether God should be banished from the public square. Doesn’t Laycock understand the damage this will do? It is a perfect recipe for demagoguery, especially as the nonbelieving majority grows almost large enough to succeed.
This is Ronald Dworkin’s question all over again: are we going to be religious or secular? We just cannot be forced to answer that question. And if law so forces us, then law must be changed.
Laycock would say that none of this is his fault. He is not campaigning to amend the Pledge.
But it is his fault and that of others like him. He is the expert telling secularists that the Pledge is unconstitutional.
Undoubtedly there are times when the proper interpretation of the Constitution leads to political strife. Even long-term strife. Maybe Brown v. Board of Education was such an example.
But such a situation is rare. Why must God be interpreted in this way? Laycock’s position means that the Declaration of Independence is constitutionally suspect today. Can that really be right? Isn’t the Declaration the norm? It seems to me that the responsibility of every constitutional interpreter is to explain why public reading of the Declaration is constitutional. Laycock has not worked hard enough for peace. And his hiding behind “principle” is abdication.
Showing posts with label Hallowed Secularism and the Name of God. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hallowed Secularism and the Name of God. Show all posts
Sunday, June 26, 2011
Saturday, April 16, 2011
The Importance of Objective Morality
4/16/2011—On April 7, at Notre Dame, Sam Harris debated the philosopher of religion William Lane on the topic of whether God is the source of morality. (report here from Notre Dame magazine). For my purposes we learn two things from this debate, regardless of the answer to the question. The first is that some secularists think it very important that there be something objective in morality, that not everything we call right and wrong be merely a matter of opinion, time and culture. Second, we learn that religious believers do strongly associate God with the concept of objective morality.
Since these two propositions are at the heart of Church, State, and the Crisis in American Secularism, I believe I won this debate.
The idea that “one Nation under God” can actually have the public meaning of one Nation subject to moral norms—and conscious of that fact—is not a dream or a fiction. It is a message embedded in that formulation. So, if it is an important message, why not allow government sometimes at least to put it that way?
[I must add that I think of “God” as a symbol of our belief that justice and other values are real, that is objective in some sense. If we think of God as a being who “made” objective morality and guarantees it, as William Lane seems to suggest, then we have the odd problem of whether God is himself subject to the moral norms that he created. Or, as Abraham asks God in Genesis, shall not the Judge of all the world do right? (or better in the Hebrew, shall not the Justice of all the world do justice?)]
Since these two propositions are at the heart of Church, State, and the Crisis in American Secularism, I believe I won this debate.
The idea that “one Nation under God” can actually have the public meaning of one Nation subject to moral norms—and conscious of that fact—is not a dream or a fiction. It is a message embedded in that formulation. So, if it is an important message, why not allow government sometimes at least to put it that way?
[I must add that I think of “God” as a symbol of our belief that justice and other values are real, that is objective in some sense. If we think of God as a being who “made” objective morality and guarantees it, as William Lane seems to suggest, then we have the odd problem of whether God is himself subject to the moral norms that he created. Or, as Abraham asks God in Genesis, shall not the Judge of all the world do right? (or better in the Hebrew, shall not the Justice of all the world do justice?)]
Thursday, December 30, 2010
What Does “one Nation under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance Mean?
12/30/2010—Happy New Year to you all.
During exam grading time, professors catch up on their reading, which in my case includes back issues of the New York Review of Books. Back in November, Geoffrey Wheatcroft reviewed two books criticizing the American war on terror: The Irony of Manifest Destiny, by William Pfaff and The Icarus Syndrome, by Peter Beinart. (review here).
Both books criticize the arrogance of American foreign policy, but Wheatcroft is clearly of the view that Pfaff has been mostly right about everything for a very long time. For example, Pfaff opposed the war in Vietnam, saw early on the weakness in the Soviet system, criticized the “ideology of national triumphalism” especially after the fall of the Soviet Union (he called for reduction in American military forces) and does not believe in the enormity of the Islamic radical threat. Pfaff has been right time after time.
What is the role of religion in our misguided foreign policy? Pfaff calls our current path “the secular utopian ideology of promoting universal democracy” and Pfaff traces its roots back to the religious exceptionalism of the American founding that has always assumed there is a unique American virtue. So, you could blame our hubris on our biblical heritage.
But here we return to the phrase “one Nation under God”. Clearly the phrase can mean precisely that America is uniquely God’s instrument. That is what George Bush, for example, believes. However, “under God” can also mean, and always also did mean, subject to God, subject to divine judgment if we contravene God’s will. And in our arrogance and violence, we can be seen to be doing exactly that. We have in that understanding a powerful resource of critique, one that would speak to religious believers otherwise tempted to worship the State (at least in its wars).
I have not figured out why global warming does not strike religious believers as God’s punishment for the misuse of His creation out of greed. That is exactly how a Reinhold Niebuhr would have seen it. Maybe we need more religion in the public square, rather than less.
During exam grading time, professors catch up on their reading, which in my case includes back issues of the New York Review of Books. Back in November, Geoffrey Wheatcroft reviewed two books criticizing the American war on terror: The Irony of Manifest Destiny, by William Pfaff and The Icarus Syndrome, by Peter Beinart. (review here).
Both books criticize the arrogance of American foreign policy, but Wheatcroft is clearly of the view that Pfaff has been mostly right about everything for a very long time. For example, Pfaff opposed the war in Vietnam, saw early on the weakness in the Soviet system, criticized the “ideology of national triumphalism” especially after the fall of the Soviet Union (he called for reduction in American military forces) and does not believe in the enormity of the Islamic radical threat. Pfaff has been right time after time.
What is the role of religion in our misguided foreign policy? Pfaff calls our current path “the secular utopian ideology of promoting universal democracy” and Pfaff traces its roots back to the religious exceptionalism of the American founding that has always assumed there is a unique American virtue. So, you could blame our hubris on our biblical heritage.
But here we return to the phrase “one Nation under God”. Clearly the phrase can mean precisely that America is uniquely God’s instrument. That is what George Bush, for example, believes. However, “under God” can also mean, and always also did mean, subject to God, subject to divine judgment if we contravene God’s will. And in our arrogance and violence, we can be seen to be doing exactly that. We have in that understanding a powerful resource of critique, one that would speak to religious believers otherwise tempted to worship the State (at least in its wars).
I have not figured out why global warming does not strike religious believers as God’s punishment for the misuse of His creation out of greed. That is exactly how a Reinhold Niebuhr would have seen it. Maybe we need more religion in the public square, rather than less.
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
How is Reality God-Like?
11/16/2010—I did not know it when I wrote a recent blog post below about how reality is God-like, but there had been an argument about something like this in the public arena in 2007. Kelly O'Connor responded on The Rational Response Squad (a very good atheist blog) to a piece by Dinesh D’Souza in the Christian Science Monitor defending Kant’s view of the limits of reason in the Critique of Pure Reason that there is more to reality than the five senses can know. The senses cannot ascertain the validity of metaphysical truth. O’Connor asks, reasonably, how can we know what we cannot know?
Now, I don’t know Kant well or really at all (only secondary sources). But I do understand how the believer can experience reality is such a way that it shows the presence of God. It is because reality is God-like.
Consider Martin Luther King Jr.’s statement that the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice. Obviously Reverend King was thinking of the book of Exodus. African-Americans were like the slaves of Egypt. They were condemned to slavery for 400 years before God liberated them. King had faith that the same would happen here and to an extent it did (freedom did not solve all of the Israelites’ problems either).
The same is true for forgiveness of sin and the divine call to act for justice. Indeed the same is true for the belief that there is such a thing as justice. All of these are realities for the religious believer because, believing in God, they all actually happen. That may be why Kant thought religion to be rational.
Reality is structured in such a way that it is as if God exists. I don’t believe God exists because I don’t think unembodied will and intelligence is possible. But having been brought up in intense religion, I still experience reality as if God exists. And it is irrefutable experience.
Now, I don’t know Kant well or really at all (only secondary sources). But I do understand how the believer can experience reality is such a way that it shows the presence of God. It is because reality is God-like.
Consider Martin Luther King Jr.’s statement that the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice. Obviously Reverend King was thinking of the book of Exodus. African-Americans were like the slaves of Egypt. They were condemned to slavery for 400 years before God liberated them. King had faith that the same would happen here and to an extent it did (freedom did not solve all of the Israelites’ problems either).
The same is true for forgiveness of sin and the divine call to act for justice. Indeed the same is true for the belief that there is such a thing as justice. All of these are realities for the religious believer because, believing in God, they all actually happen. That may be why Kant thought religion to be rational.
Reality is structured in such a way that it is as if God exists. I don’t believe God exists because I don’t think unembodied will and intelligence is possible. But having been brought up in intense religion, I still experience reality as if God exists. And it is irrefutable experience.
Thursday, November 11, 2010
So, What About God?
11/11/2010—Happy Veteran’s Day. Pittsburgh still has the parade, but most people seem distant from the reality of the service of those who risk their lives every day in the armed forces. Thank you to all veterans.
My colleague Robert Taylor is now reading Hegel with me at the same time we are investigating Emil Fackenheim and the Talmud. Robert is pressing me to be much more direct about God. So, here goes.
It is obvious that there is a mysterious “more” to reality that simple materialism does not capture. We feel this dimension when listening to great music or poetry or feeling love—or awe. These experiences are not the result of bad wiring in the brain. They correspond to something real.
Nevertheless, these reactions and what they refer to do not repeal the laws of science. Will and intelligence do not exist independently of matter. Therefore, there cannot be anything like the God of the Bible.
That does not mean the Bible is wrong exactly. Rather, the biblical writers might have been describing the “more” in certain mythic and anthropocentric terms. Their error might simply have been over specification. For example, reality might favor the slave over the master without a God existing who “led the slaves out of Egypt.”
Reality can be God-like without there being a God. The description of God as having commitments, like a person (opposing gay marriage, for example), was always a kind of heresy.
My colleague Robert Taylor is now reading Hegel with me at the same time we are investigating Emil Fackenheim and the Talmud. Robert is pressing me to be much more direct about God. So, here goes.
It is obvious that there is a mysterious “more” to reality that simple materialism does not capture. We feel this dimension when listening to great music or poetry or feeling love—or awe. These experiences are not the result of bad wiring in the brain. They correspond to something real.
Nevertheless, these reactions and what they refer to do not repeal the laws of science. Will and intelligence do not exist independently of matter. Therefore, there cannot be anything like the God of the Bible.
That does not mean the Bible is wrong exactly. Rather, the biblical writers might have been describing the “more” in certain mythic and anthropocentric terms. Their error might simply have been over specification. For example, reality might favor the slave over the master without a God existing who “led the slaves out of Egypt.”
Reality can be God-like without there being a God. The description of God as having commitments, like a person (opposing gay marriage, for example), was always a kind of heresy.
Thursday, August 12, 2010
The Death of Christopher Hitchens
8/12/2010—The news of the terminal illness of the noted atheist Christopher Hitchens has brought out an old Christian-influenced heresy. This misunderstanding can be seen in the following quote from a story in The Independent: “To the question that each interviewer was bound to ask an orthodox atheist such as himself – is this the time to reconsider your views on God? – he offers a categorical reply: no.”
OK. So, good for Christopher Hitchens not to abjectly surrender his beliefs when confronted with a death that is, after all, inevitable for everyone. I presume that Hitchens like the rest of us has thought about his death before now.
The question is, though, why is his impending death thought to be a time to rethink God? Two obvious answers: to save his life from cancer or to go to heaven rather than hell.
As to the first, such a thought is beneath contempt. There are millions of faithful Christians and other religious believers dying from cancer right this minute. Nowhere does any creditable religion promise medical miracles. And if God lets some people off the hook and not others, then he is no God worth believing in. That is not the end to death that Christianity is promising.
As to the second, why should there be any necessary connection between belief in God and an afterlife? The Hebrew Bible is quite clear that humans just die. Abraham is not promised life after death. He just dies. His justification lies in history—his descendants will be a blessing to the world. Hitchens presumably has that belief now, in a form, in the truth of his writings.
Even the New Testament, despite some suggestions to the contrary, does not speak of heaven but of resurrection. The thought of most of the writers is clearly that we die and at some near future time, Christ will return on the last day and that all will be resurrected and some saved and some judged. In other words, Hitchens will still be dead for now.
Damon Linker of the New Republic was closer to the mark when he wrote of someone perhaps feeling on his deathbed “for the first time in his life the call of God”. In other words, the announcement of my terminal illness marks the proper moment to rethink my life in order to be sure. It is the call to ultimate seriousness. It isn’t ultimate vulnerability. Or, even if it is, God is no life preserver. I remain vulnerable.
Socrates called philosophy preparation for death. And Heidegger insisted on holding onto the truth of my death. The tragedy of terminal illness for most of us is not that we die but that death reveals how we have wasted our lives. And no conversion can alter that.
OK. So, good for Christopher Hitchens not to abjectly surrender his beliefs when confronted with a death that is, after all, inevitable for everyone. I presume that Hitchens like the rest of us has thought about his death before now.
The question is, though, why is his impending death thought to be a time to rethink God? Two obvious answers: to save his life from cancer or to go to heaven rather than hell.
As to the first, such a thought is beneath contempt. There are millions of faithful Christians and other religious believers dying from cancer right this minute. Nowhere does any creditable religion promise medical miracles. And if God lets some people off the hook and not others, then he is no God worth believing in. That is not the end to death that Christianity is promising.
As to the second, why should there be any necessary connection between belief in God and an afterlife? The Hebrew Bible is quite clear that humans just die. Abraham is not promised life after death. He just dies. His justification lies in history—his descendants will be a blessing to the world. Hitchens presumably has that belief now, in a form, in the truth of his writings.
Even the New Testament, despite some suggestions to the contrary, does not speak of heaven but of resurrection. The thought of most of the writers is clearly that we die and at some near future time, Christ will return on the last day and that all will be resurrected and some saved and some judged. In other words, Hitchens will still be dead for now.
Damon Linker of the New Republic was closer to the mark when he wrote of someone perhaps feeling on his deathbed “for the first time in his life the call of God”. In other words, the announcement of my terminal illness marks the proper moment to rethink my life in order to be sure. It is the call to ultimate seriousness. It isn’t ultimate vulnerability. Or, even if it is, God is no life preserver. I remain vulnerable.
Socrates called philosophy preparation for death. And Heidegger insisted on holding onto the truth of my death. The tragedy of terminal illness for most of us is not that we die but that death reveals how we have wasted our lives. And no conversion can alter that.
Friday, July 6, 2007
Hallowed Secularism and the Name of God
7/6/2007--In the novel, City of God, by E.L. Doctorow, which, regular readers of this blog know, forms the foundation and guides the development of Hallowed Secularism, the rabbi Sarah Blumenthal gives a sermon, a d’var Torah, based on Exodus 19-24. This portion of the Torah is the setting for the revelation on Sinai, including the Ten Commandments. After describing the new and unique “ethical configuration for human existence” that Sinai expresses, Sarah refers to the “human scriptural genius” that formulated the Commandments. Then she continues, “We could make the case then for God’s presence after all in the humanly written Bible. The Lord, blessed be His name, as my Orthodox colleagues say [she smiles]…being what impels us to struggle for historical and theological comprehension.” Sarah also refers to God as “the Creator”.
The “smile”, the self-conscious smile, perfectly sums up the spiritual crisis of liberal religion in America, especially Judaism. As I heard a rabbi in synagogue say earlier this year, “God, whatever we mean by that… .” This crisis will be fatal unless solved.
The problem is God. But it is necessary to formulate the question that would solve the problem. The question for someone like Sarah is not the one we think it is. The question is not whether God exists. Sarah is not a nihilist. She is not a materialist. She believes that the Old Testament--the Torah--tells the truth of reality. So, we may say Sarah is a believer in God. God exists.
The question is, what is the nature of God? Specifically in the context in the novel, the question is, whether God is the sort of [X] about which one may legitimately say, “May his name be blessed”. The crisis that the smile expresses is Sarah’s unwillingness or inability to formulate the question cleanly and begin to struggle with it. This makes her reference to “the Creator,” suddenly with no ambivalence at all, ridiculous and unconsciously self-serving.
What Sarah probably believes about the nature of God is that God is not a being. And she probably believes that God does not act in ways that set aside normal, physical, that is, scientific, laws. In fact, God probably doesn’t “act” at all. That is the wrong word to use about God. But all this is a beginning, not an end. We must push beyond what we think we know. We must keep the question of God open and in front of us, never imagining that because we are secular, we are atheists.
None of this is new. Thomas Aquinas has already pushed ahead of us and waits to be of help. In The Names of God, Aquinas asks, “Whether this name God is a name of a nature, or of the operation?”—the very question Sarah is trying to ask.
The “smile”, the self-conscious smile, perfectly sums up the spiritual crisis of liberal religion in America, especially Judaism. As I heard a rabbi in synagogue say earlier this year, “God, whatever we mean by that… .” This crisis will be fatal unless solved.
The problem is God. But it is necessary to formulate the question that would solve the problem. The question for someone like Sarah is not the one we think it is. The question is not whether God exists. Sarah is not a nihilist. She is not a materialist. She believes that the Old Testament--the Torah--tells the truth of reality. So, we may say Sarah is a believer in God. God exists.
The question is, what is the nature of God? Specifically in the context in the novel, the question is, whether God is the sort of [X] about which one may legitimately say, “May his name be blessed”. The crisis that the smile expresses is Sarah’s unwillingness or inability to formulate the question cleanly and begin to struggle with it. This makes her reference to “the Creator,” suddenly with no ambivalence at all, ridiculous and unconsciously self-serving.
What Sarah probably believes about the nature of God is that God is not a being. And she probably believes that God does not act in ways that set aside normal, physical, that is, scientific, laws. In fact, God probably doesn’t “act” at all. That is the wrong word to use about God. But all this is a beginning, not an end. We must push beyond what we think we know. We must keep the question of God open and in front of us, never imagining that because we are secular, we are atheists.
None of this is new. Thomas Aquinas has already pushed ahead of us and waits to be of help. In The Names of God, Aquinas asks, “Whether this name God is a name of a nature, or of the operation?”—the very question Sarah is trying to ask.
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