6/18/2014—Karl Barth once said, I can only repeat myself. Of course, he had a deep reason for saying this—he was simply witnessing in different ways to the self-revelation of God in Jesus Christ as God for us. So, it was always this story—what other story could it be?
I am also going to repeat myself. If you search this site for the phrase Wars of Religion—the endless fighting primarily between Catholics and Protestants in Europe that occurred between the beginning of the Reformation in 1517 and the Peace of Westphalia in 1648—you will find that since 2009, I have pointed out the similarity between that era of religiously motivated war and the current violence in Islam. The sectarian slaughter in Iraq between Sunnis and Shiites, makes that analogy quite clear.
But I have been utilizing that analogy for a different reason than just suggesting that there has been violence in Christianity also. Rather, I have been looking at the consequence of the Wars of Religion. That consequence is often told in American law—exhausted by the Wars of Religion, people decided on two responses that turned out to be related. First, the separation of church and state, which took different forms. Even in countries that maintained established churches formally, the rights of citizens and the business of government were no longer wrapped up with religion. Second, more generally, secularization. Essentially, after the Wars of Religion, people decided they could not trust Christianity. Christianity had proved to be a problem for humanity rather than a solution.
And so it will be with Islam. First, Muslims will decide that political life has to be separated from religion. Muslim countries will still be Muslim, but political life will be taken away from the clerics. Second, more Muslims, especially among the young, will question whether Islam could really be true, when its most committed followers are engaging in cold blooded murder.
How long does this take? Consider how Europe looked in 1648, compared to 2014. How long did the process of separation and secularization take? For Islam it will be much faster. I bet the trends will be evident by the end of this century.
Showing posts with label The Sources of Secularism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Sources of Secularism. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 18, 2014
Thursday, March 26, 2009
The Economic Failure of Our Religions
3/26/2009--In the book Hallowed Secularism, I suggested that one of the reasons that secularism is growing is that religion has failed the tests of modernity, including the acceptance of science, the role of women and the treatment of gays. I still think that is the case, but there is another feature that may be more important, the failure of Our Religions to address the need for a new worldwide economic system.
Beset by cultural issues, especially those relating to sex, the religious voice on the current economic downturn has been muted. At the G-20 meeting next week, there will be talk of restructuring the world’s economy, but it will be technical and political: the role of the dollar as reserve currency and the place of the United States.
The real issue will not be addressed: Has this recession finally put an end to the exclusive capitalist model of development? Since socialism has never succeeded, is some third way possible? The Catholic Church used to talk seriously about that very topic, but now all we hear about is condoms.
We can do better as a species than the dogged road of unsustainable consumption. But until Our Religions get serious about economics, there will not be a contrary voice at the world financial table.
Beset by cultural issues, especially those relating to sex, the religious voice on the current economic downturn has been muted. At the G-20 meeting next week, there will be talk of restructuring the world’s economy, but it will be technical and political: the role of the dollar as reserve currency and the place of the United States.
The real issue will not be addressed: Has this recession finally put an end to the exclusive capitalist model of development? Since socialism has never succeeded, is some third way possible? The Catholic Church used to talk seriously about that very topic, but now all we hear about is condoms.
We can do better as a species than the dogged road of unsustainable consumption. But until Our Religions get serious about economics, there will not be a contrary voice at the world financial table.
Monday, March 23, 2009
Another Reason to be Secular
3/23/2009—Want another reason why the young are turning away from religion? Look no further than the New York Times story on March 22, in the Week in Review Section. The story tells how Orthodox Jewish influence is growing in the Israeli army and how its teachings influenced some military in the Gaza fighting: A Religious War in Israel’s Army, by Ethan Bronner.
Some of the damning facts are not really in dispute. In Israel the ultra-Orthodox are exempt from military service. But modern Orthodox are not. As leaked by Dany Zamir, an investigation of alleged army atrocities in Gaza, including unecessary civilian deaths, revealed testimony like the following:
“the rabbinate brought in a lot of booklets and articles and their message was very clear: We are the Jewish people, we came to this land by a miracle, God brought us back to this land and now we need to fight to expel the non-Jews who are interfering with our conquest of this holy land. This was the main message, and the whole sense many soldiers had in this operation was of a religious war.”
The military’s chief rabbi, Avichai Rontzki, publicized this slogan from a classic Jewish source: “He who is merciful to the cruel will end up being cruel to the merciful.”
There is a religious left in Israel that argues against these interpretations of the Jewish tradition. But, from the point of view of the young, who needs a religion that can be interpreted to promote hatred and violence? Better to be secular.
Some of the damning facts are not really in dispute. In Israel the ultra-Orthodox are exempt from military service. But modern Orthodox are not. As leaked by Dany Zamir, an investigation of alleged army atrocities in Gaza, including unecessary civilian deaths, revealed testimony like the following:
“the rabbinate brought in a lot of booklets and articles and their message was very clear: We are the Jewish people, we came to this land by a miracle, God brought us back to this land and now we need to fight to expel the non-Jews who are interfering with our conquest of this holy land. This was the main message, and the whole sense many soldiers had in this operation was of a religious war.”
The military’s chief rabbi, Avichai Rontzki, publicized this slogan from a classic Jewish source: “He who is merciful to the cruel will end up being cruel to the merciful.”
There is a religious left in Israel that argues against these interpretations of the Jewish tradition. But, from the point of view of the young, who needs a religion that can be interpreted to promote hatred and violence? Better to be secular.
Monday, February 23, 2009
The Decline of Islam
2/23/2009--At the height of the Wars of Religion, in the 16th and 17th centuries, it would have been difficult to predict that these wars, in which religious belief was so important, would become the beginning of the Great Secularization of the West. But the story was not surprising in retrospect. The conflicts between Catholics and Protestants delegitimized religion. People began to feel that if this is what religion led to, it might be better not to be religious and to limit the influence of religion.
Something similar may happen in the Muslim world and more quickly than one might think. The victory of conservative Islamic forces, including the Taliban, in Pakistan’s Northwest region has led by all reports to the demolition of over one hundred schools for girls. This one symbol is likely to delegitimize Islam as a normative force among young Muslims, and not just women.
Of course, this one interpretation of Islam is by no means dominant in the world. But that is not the point. Neither was the killing in Europe normative. Rather, when injustice is perpetrated in the name of religion, the norms that become the standard for the future are no longer those of religion. They come from elsewhere.
Most people in the world will see hostility to the education of women as intolerable. This act of destroying schools is nothing like the burqa, which some women choose as an antidote to Western sexism. This act is the unmasking of religion as injustice.
Something similar may happen in the Muslim world and more quickly than one might think. The victory of conservative Islamic forces, including the Taliban, in Pakistan’s Northwest region has led by all reports to the demolition of over one hundred schools for girls. This one symbol is likely to delegitimize Islam as a normative force among young Muslims, and not just women.
Of course, this one interpretation of Islam is by no means dominant in the world. But that is not the point. Neither was the killing in Europe normative. Rather, when injustice is perpetrated in the name of religion, the norms that become the standard for the future are no longer those of religion. They come from elsewhere.
Most people in the world will see hostility to the education of women as intolerable. This act of destroying schools is nothing like the burqa, which some women choose as an antidote to Western sexism. This act is the unmasking of religion as injustice.
Thursday, December 11, 2008
The Firing of Don Guter
12/11/2008—The rest of the world is unaware that here at Duquesne University School of Law, the Dean, Don Guter, was summarily fired yesterday. No reason was given. Dean Guter did not deserve to be fired. The law school is doing very well on his watch and there is no unmentioned scandal going on. President Dougherty just wanted his own person in as dean. Guter was too independent in his judgment. This is not big news. Things like this happen all the time.
But this is a Catholic Law School. Not only that, but we hear all the time about Duquesne’s “mission”, to serve God by serving students.
I make the point in the book Hallowed Secularism that one of the reasons for rising secularism is that religious institutions do not behave as well as secular ones. That is not always true, but it is true here at Duquesne. When it happens, religion itself suffers. Religion is made to look ridiculous in the eyes of the non-religious world.
Karl Barth once said there is the church of Esau and the church of Jacob. There is the man-made church institution and then there is the representative of the holy spirit--verily God’s representative on earth. It isn’t fair to expect religious institutions to be better than human beings tend to be.
That is true but it is not the point. I would like to see the representatives of Our Religions under the weight of representing God. I would like to see them always asking themselves, what will the nonreligious think if we do a certain questionable thing? This is the way that Jews used to ask, what will the goyim think?
I wish President Dougherty had said to himself before he acted, I had better be especially sure and especially just, because not just my reputation will suffer if I am wrong. Nor just the reputation of Duquesne University. But God’s reputation will suffer. And it has.
But this is a Catholic Law School. Not only that, but we hear all the time about Duquesne’s “mission”, to serve God by serving students.
I make the point in the book Hallowed Secularism that one of the reasons for rising secularism is that religious institutions do not behave as well as secular ones. That is not always true, but it is true here at Duquesne. When it happens, religion itself suffers. Religion is made to look ridiculous in the eyes of the non-religious world.
Karl Barth once said there is the church of Esau and the church of Jacob. There is the man-made church institution and then there is the representative of the holy spirit--verily God’s representative on earth. It isn’t fair to expect religious institutions to be better than human beings tend to be.
That is true but it is not the point. I would like to see the representatives of Our Religions under the weight of representing God. I would like to see them always asking themselves, what will the nonreligious think if we do a certain questionable thing? This is the way that Jews used to ask, what will the goyim think?
I wish President Dougherty had said to himself before he acted, I had better be especially sure and especially just, because not just my reputation will suffer if I am wrong. Nor just the reputation of Duquesne University. But God’s reputation will suffer. And it has.
Monday, July 30, 2007
The Sources of Secularism: Our Religions
7/30/2007--Our Religions have failed and are failing two great tests in our day: the role of women and the rights of homosexuals.
In only a small fraction of Our Religions are women and gays treated as genuinely equal to heterosexual men. In liberal religious pockets, women have achieved almost full equality in the ministry and administrative leadership. This is true in the Episcopal Church, for example, but even there, there is tension over the role of women within the greater Anglican community. The more telling example is that women cannot be priests in the Roman Catholic Church. In terms of the rights of gays, an even smaller pocket of liberal religious groups perform gay marriages and truly accept homosexuality.
Of course, it is not for me or anyone else to tell the Catholic Church whether women ought to serve as priests or whether gay marriage should be recognized. But the right of Our Religions to believe what they believe is not what’s at issue.
For many people, including me, it is obvious that women and men are equal in any sense relevant to religion. To anyone like me, excluding women or limiting their role is just prejudice, no different from a rule excluding blacks from leadership positions. So, it is just impossible to take Our Religions seriously when the role of women is even an issue.
What is even worse, from the point of view of the religions of the Book, Moses, Jesus and Muhammad must be regarded as rather advanced, even revolutionary, in their views of the role of women for their time. For their followers to be less radical in attitude is intolerable.
Take for example the exclusion of women from becoming Catholic priests. This is often said to root in Jesus’ own selection of twelve men to be Apostles. But the Apostles weren’t just men. They probably were not dark skinned. Yet no one would think that Africans are excluded from the priesthood. Nor were they maimed, which was an important ritual point in Jewish law. Jesus simply could not have selected a disabled person as an Apostle because of the opposition of people at that time. Nor were any of them illegitimate. That also was not a minor point, for the status of illegitimacy would have excluded an Apostle from many homes. Yet, obviously none of this is considered a restriction today on who may be a priest.
The prejudice against homosexuals is even greater. Many religious people regard homosexuality as objectively unnatural. But we now know that homosexuality is rather common in nature and has always been present in human society as well. Jesus never condemned homosexuality. The matter never came up. But why should the Book of Leviticus be invoked against homosexuality when it is never invoked against eating ham and shrimp, which of course were also condemned in the Old Testament?
The prejudice against gay people in Our Religions has had the tragic effect of turning many gay people against religion itself. Obviously this is not the intention of any religious leader regardless of his opinion about gays. Nevertheless, we are all responsible for the consequences of our actions. It seems to me that the contribution of these failures of religion to the growing secularization of our time, especially among the young, who do not share these prejudices to the same extent as their elders, is a judgment against Our Religions.
There are other failures by Our Religions. For one thing, Our Religions are contributing to the problems of the world in both obvious and subtle ways. The obvious ways are fanaticism and violence. In the struggle between Israelis and Palestinians, the more religious you are the more likely you are to support violence and to refuse to consider compromise and the needs of the other party. The drive for “Greater Israel, including Judea and Samaria” and the commitment to Jihad are religious commitments. Conversely, the more secular you are, the more willing you will be to seek peace and risk your own interests to attain it. These are gross generalizations, but I think in the main, they ring true. There are justifications for an atheist like Hitchens to write a book attributing the problems of the world to Our Religions. Obviously, young people look at these things and many turn away from religion.
A more subtle point is that Our Religions have often lost the heart of their own message and have become a part of the problem, even if they are not the most significant part. Bill McKibben makes this point in his book, Deep Economy.[1] McKibben points out that most Christians in America believe that the saying “God helps those who help themselves” can be found in the Bible. Actually the phrase originated with Ben Franklin and it expresses an individualism that is at odds with the Bible in general and with Jesus’ message in particular.
This is just one example of how tame Christianity and Judaism have become in the face of capitalist organization of the world. Our Religions are just important enough to be a source of conflict among people, but have not been radical enough to be the source of transformation they were meant to be and have been in the past.
Part of the reason that Our Religions have not convinced the young that they are the new future is that they have been either asleep or defensive in the face of a new and more vigorous atheism. Religion doesn’t have to be ridiculous but it often is because new thinking doesn’t enter the houses of worship. Theologians have dealt with the issue of miracles from the perspective of modern man, for example, but you won’t hear their message in most churches or synagogues. Our clergy are generally both timid and smug, an odd combination.
Even the bold clergy who reinterpret for their flocks, tend to do so in post-modern irony, without the passionate commitment that originally gave our holy texts life. It is not helpful to hear the words “whatever you think that means” after invoking God. We don’t have a lot of Sarah Blumenthals in our pulpits.
There are many exceptions to these criticisms, of course. But it is fair to say that they do not contradict the rule. One consistent exception is the very liberal, politicized religion of certain Unitarian congregations. Here is where you can find gay ministers and consistently caring congregants. Maybe this will be a model in the future. For me, the problem here is that religion really is more than politics, which is why the politics religion gives birth to can be so shockingly original. This form of politicized religion to me is not hallowed and therefore, although I usually agree, I don’t trust it.
[1] Deep Economy:The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future (Times Books 2007)
In only a small fraction of Our Religions are women and gays treated as genuinely equal to heterosexual men. In liberal religious pockets, women have achieved almost full equality in the ministry and administrative leadership. This is true in the Episcopal Church, for example, but even there, there is tension over the role of women within the greater Anglican community. The more telling example is that women cannot be priests in the Roman Catholic Church. In terms of the rights of gays, an even smaller pocket of liberal religious groups perform gay marriages and truly accept homosexuality.
Of course, it is not for me or anyone else to tell the Catholic Church whether women ought to serve as priests or whether gay marriage should be recognized. But the right of Our Religions to believe what they believe is not what’s at issue.
For many people, including me, it is obvious that women and men are equal in any sense relevant to religion. To anyone like me, excluding women or limiting their role is just prejudice, no different from a rule excluding blacks from leadership positions. So, it is just impossible to take Our Religions seriously when the role of women is even an issue.
What is even worse, from the point of view of the religions of the Book, Moses, Jesus and Muhammad must be regarded as rather advanced, even revolutionary, in their views of the role of women for their time. For their followers to be less radical in attitude is intolerable.
Take for example the exclusion of women from becoming Catholic priests. This is often said to root in Jesus’ own selection of twelve men to be Apostles. But the Apostles weren’t just men. They probably were not dark skinned. Yet no one would think that Africans are excluded from the priesthood. Nor were they maimed, which was an important ritual point in Jewish law. Jesus simply could not have selected a disabled person as an Apostle because of the opposition of people at that time. Nor were any of them illegitimate. That also was not a minor point, for the status of illegitimacy would have excluded an Apostle from many homes. Yet, obviously none of this is considered a restriction today on who may be a priest.
The prejudice against homosexuals is even greater. Many religious people regard homosexuality as objectively unnatural. But we now know that homosexuality is rather common in nature and has always been present in human society as well. Jesus never condemned homosexuality. The matter never came up. But why should the Book of Leviticus be invoked against homosexuality when it is never invoked against eating ham and shrimp, which of course were also condemned in the Old Testament?
The prejudice against gay people in Our Religions has had the tragic effect of turning many gay people against religion itself. Obviously this is not the intention of any religious leader regardless of his opinion about gays. Nevertheless, we are all responsible for the consequences of our actions. It seems to me that the contribution of these failures of religion to the growing secularization of our time, especially among the young, who do not share these prejudices to the same extent as their elders, is a judgment against Our Religions.
There are other failures by Our Religions. For one thing, Our Religions are contributing to the problems of the world in both obvious and subtle ways. The obvious ways are fanaticism and violence. In the struggle between Israelis and Palestinians, the more religious you are the more likely you are to support violence and to refuse to consider compromise and the needs of the other party. The drive for “Greater Israel, including Judea and Samaria” and the commitment to Jihad are religious commitments. Conversely, the more secular you are, the more willing you will be to seek peace and risk your own interests to attain it. These are gross generalizations, but I think in the main, they ring true. There are justifications for an atheist like Hitchens to write a book attributing the problems of the world to Our Religions. Obviously, young people look at these things and many turn away from religion.
A more subtle point is that Our Religions have often lost the heart of their own message and have become a part of the problem, even if they are not the most significant part. Bill McKibben makes this point in his book, Deep Economy.[1] McKibben points out that most Christians in America believe that the saying “God helps those who help themselves” can be found in the Bible. Actually the phrase originated with Ben Franklin and it expresses an individualism that is at odds with the Bible in general and with Jesus’ message in particular.
This is just one example of how tame Christianity and Judaism have become in the face of capitalist organization of the world. Our Religions are just important enough to be a source of conflict among people, but have not been radical enough to be the source of transformation they were meant to be and have been in the past.
Part of the reason that Our Religions have not convinced the young that they are the new future is that they have been either asleep or defensive in the face of a new and more vigorous atheism. Religion doesn’t have to be ridiculous but it often is because new thinking doesn’t enter the houses of worship. Theologians have dealt with the issue of miracles from the perspective of modern man, for example, but you won’t hear their message in most churches or synagogues. Our clergy are generally both timid and smug, an odd combination.
Even the bold clergy who reinterpret for their flocks, tend to do so in post-modern irony, without the passionate commitment that originally gave our holy texts life. It is not helpful to hear the words “whatever you think that means” after invoking God. We don’t have a lot of Sarah Blumenthals in our pulpits.
There are many exceptions to these criticisms, of course. But it is fair to say that they do not contradict the rule. One consistent exception is the very liberal, politicized religion of certain Unitarian congregations. Here is where you can find gay ministers and consistently caring congregants. Maybe this will be a model in the future. For me, the problem here is that religion really is more than politics, which is why the politics religion gives birth to can be so shockingly original. This form of politicized religion to me is not hallowed and therefore, although I usually agree, I don’t trust it.
[1] Deep Economy:The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future (Times Books 2007)
Saturday, July 28, 2007
The Sources of Secularism: Globalization
7/28/2007--There are two related meanings of globalization. The most common meaning is an economic one. Since the fall of communism in the 1980’s, a world-wide capitalist economy has been growing. In this one-world, capital is largely free to move around the world. Labor is less free to move, but since production moves so freely, jobs can go to the workers rather than workers having to seek out the jobs. Americans call this process outsourcing and it is an enormous force in the world economy.
The currency of this one-world capitalism is consumption. The economic well-being of everyone depends on consumers everywhere continually buying an increasing mass of products. And these products are becoming the same all over the world.
The other meaning of globalization is more cultural than economic. Globalization also refers to the interpentration of the cultures of the world. Through all sorts of exchanges, not just economic, all the peoples of the world are in closer contact than ever before.
How might globalization lead to secularization? There are two aspects to this. First, there is the content—the ideology—of this globalized culture. It is a secular culture. Second, and more subtle, there is the pressure of relativism that globalization brings.
First, what is this new world culture about? It is basically a consuming and producing culture. So, what people learn from it is materialism. Globalization is not in any sense a spiritual awakening.
Secularization also comes from the general loosening of cultural ties that happens with movement of various kinds. The Indian computer worker who spends time in Seattle, for example, away from home and family, may no longer see the need for worship. Or the associate who is sent by a law firm to Tokyo for an extended period may not bother with church. Although these sorts of movements do not ensure a weakening of religious commitments, they make that more likely than it would otherwise be.
The secularizing effect of the other form of globalization—cultural contact—is quite different. The issue becomes one of religious skepticism based on anthropological relativism. Historically most human beings knew mostly their own kind and certainly did not know that much about the traditions of other and different kinds of people. When we learn that all cultures have their religious traditions, the effect can be dramatic.
Globalization disrupts our religious certitudes by bringing us into contact with different cultural and religious traditions. Philip Kitcher in Living with Darwin describes what often happens next:
"As understanding of the diversity of the world’s religions increases, it’s hard for believers to avoid viewing themselves as participants in one line of religious teaching among many. You profess your faith on the authority of the tradition in which you stand, but you also have to recognize that others, people who believe very different, in compatible things, would defend their beliefs in the same fashion. By what right can you maintain that your tradition is the right one, that its deliverances are privileged?"[1]
This problem also beset Pem in City of God, when he asked in a sermon, “But how do we distinguish our truth from another’s falsity… ?”[2]
The more we know of other religions, the harder it is to believe that the one we grew up in happens to be the ultimately right one. But the matter is even worse than that. For not only do we now know that there are sincere believers in other, and different religions, but we also know that our own tradition, especially if it is Christian, could at various points have gone in different doctrinal directions. The Gospel of Thomas, for example, could have been admitted into the Canon. It is clear that the Old Testament was put together out of different and identifiable sources. In other words, our religions are man-made.
The response from many people to all this knowledge is that all religions are basically the same. But what is that “same” that all religions are supposed to be? For many people, that similarity comes down to something very innocuous, like “be a good person.” Thus is born a dull secularism, which is out of touch with any deeper possibilities of human life. No religious tradition, nor for that matter much truth of any fundamental kind, can be embraced out of such thinking.
[1] Kitcher, at 141.
[2] City of God, at 14.
The currency of this one-world capitalism is consumption. The economic well-being of everyone depends on consumers everywhere continually buying an increasing mass of products. And these products are becoming the same all over the world.
The other meaning of globalization is more cultural than economic. Globalization also refers to the interpentration of the cultures of the world. Through all sorts of exchanges, not just economic, all the peoples of the world are in closer contact than ever before.
How might globalization lead to secularization? There are two aspects to this. First, there is the content—the ideology—of this globalized culture. It is a secular culture. Second, and more subtle, there is the pressure of relativism that globalization brings.
First, what is this new world culture about? It is basically a consuming and producing culture. So, what people learn from it is materialism. Globalization is not in any sense a spiritual awakening.
Secularization also comes from the general loosening of cultural ties that happens with movement of various kinds. The Indian computer worker who spends time in Seattle, for example, away from home and family, may no longer see the need for worship. Or the associate who is sent by a law firm to Tokyo for an extended period may not bother with church. Although these sorts of movements do not ensure a weakening of religious commitments, they make that more likely than it would otherwise be.
The secularizing effect of the other form of globalization—cultural contact—is quite different. The issue becomes one of religious skepticism based on anthropological relativism. Historically most human beings knew mostly their own kind and certainly did not know that much about the traditions of other and different kinds of people. When we learn that all cultures have their religious traditions, the effect can be dramatic.
Globalization disrupts our religious certitudes by bringing us into contact with different cultural and religious traditions. Philip Kitcher in Living with Darwin describes what often happens next:
"As understanding of the diversity of the world’s religions increases, it’s hard for believers to avoid viewing themselves as participants in one line of religious teaching among many. You profess your faith on the authority of the tradition in which you stand, but you also have to recognize that others, people who believe very different, in compatible things, would defend their beliefs in the same fashion. By what right can you maintain that your tradition is the right one, that its deliverances are privileged?"[1]
This problem also beset Pem in City of God, when he asked in a sermon, “But how do we distinguish our truth from another’s falsity… ?”[2]
The more we know of other religions, the harder it is to believe that the one we grew up in happens to be the ultimately right one. But the matter is even worse than that. For not only do we now know that there are sincere believers in other, and different religions, but we also know that our own tradition, especially if it is Christian, could at various points have gone in different doctrinal directions. The Gospel of Thomas, for example, could have been admitted into the Canon. It is clear that the Old Testament was put together out of different and identifiable sources. In other words, our religions are man-made.
The response from many people to all this knowledge is that all religions are basically the same. But what is that “same” that all religions are supposed to be? For many people, that similarity comes down to something very innocuous, like “be a good person.” Thus is born a dull secularism, which is out of touch with any deeper possibilities of human life. No religious tradition, nor for that matter much truth of any fundamental kind, can be embraced out of such thinking.
[1] Kitcher, at 141.
[2] City of God, at 14.
Thursday, July 26, 2007
The Sources of Secularism: Science
7/26/2007--The scientific account of the world has been proved to be true. Physical forces, not God’s hand, keep the stars and planets moving in their orderly paths. The earth is very old. Life has evolved according to Darwinian theory. Even the Big Bang can be explained scientifically, sort of. As Pierre Laplace reportedly suggested to Napoleon, we have no need of God to explain anything in nature.
Why is the success of science a threat to Our Religions? Why can’t religion be in charge of morality, on the one hand, and science be in charge of material life, on the other? Even many atheists admit that moral values can be real and enduring. In a Newsweek debate about the realness of God, Sam Harris, representing the atheist side, said: “I'm not at all a moral relativist. …I think there is an absolute right and wrong.” So why not divide the spheres of life: material life on the science side, morality on the religious side, with history split between them? This sort of division is what liberals in America have been suggesting for years—that religion is a private matter and that it should have no role to play in public life.
The problem is that this limit on religion is absolutely not the way the Bible sees things. God must be Lord of morality, history and nature. This is why God begins as creator in Genesis 1:1. God is Lord of history in Exodus, the book in which the slaves are freed from Egypt. And God is Lord of morality in the Prophets, for example in Amos’ condemnation of the rich merchants: “Hear this, O you who swallow up the needy, so as to destroy the poor of the land.” This is a very crude division--actually God is Lord of all three aspects of reality everywhere in the Bible. But you get the idea.
The God of the Bible is in charge of everything. And this God is not remote. He did not just start things at the Big Bang and then let everything unfold. In Christian dogma, God sends his son to bring salvation to all human beings. In the Jewish view, God enters into a covenant with Abraham so that the Jewish people will bring a blessing the world. These are plans by an all-powerful, and loving, being.
There have been suggestions that other religions might be less resistant to the claims of science than are the Biblical religions. The Dalai Lama, for example, certainly is more open to the claims of science than are most representatives of the religions of the Book: Christianity, Judaism and Islam. In his book, The Universe in a Single Atom, the Dalai Lama is careful to concede that scientific findings that have been verified are simply true and trump any religious dogma to the contrary. But this admission turns out to have its limits. This is how George Johnson put it in his review of the book in the New York Times, speaking of the Dalai Lama:
"But when it comes to questions about life and its origins, this would-be man of science begins to waver. Though he professes to accept evolutionary theory, he recoils at one of its most basic tenets: that the mutations that provide the raw material for natural selection occur at random. Look deeply enough, he suggests, and the randomness will turn out to be complexity in disguise - "hidden causality," the Buddha's smile. There you have it, Eastern religion's version of intelligent design. He also opposes physical explanations for consciousness, invoking instead the existence of some kind of irreducible mind stuff, an idea rejected long ago by mainstream science."
So it is fair to say that the scientific revolution is a challenge to all of Our Religions to a greater or lesser extent.
Why is the success of science a threat to Our Religions? Why can’t religion be in charge of morality, on the one hand, and science be in charge of material life, on the other? Even many atheists admit that moral values can be real and enduring. In a Newsweek debate about the realness of God, Sam Harris, representing the atheist side, said: “I'm not at all a moral relativist. …I think there is an absolute right and wrong.” So why not divide the spheres of life: material life on the science side, morality on the religious side, with history split between them? This sort of division is what liberals in America have been suggesting for years—that religion is a private matter and that it should have no role to play in public life.
The problem is that this limit on religion is absolutely not the way the Bible sees things. God must be Lord of morality, history and nature. This is why God begins as creator in Genesis 1:1. God is Lord of history in Exodus, the book in which the slaves are freed from Egypt. And God is Lord of morality in the Prophets, for example in Amos’ condemnation of the rich merchants: “Hear this, O you who swallow up the needy, so as to destroy the poor of the land.” This is a very crude division--actually God is Lord of all three aspects of reality everywhere in the Bible. But you get the idea.
The God of the Bible is in charge of everything. And this God is not remote. He did not just start things at the Big Bang and then let everything unfold. In Christian dogma, God sends his son to bring salvation to all human beings. In the Jewish view, God enters into a covenant with Abraham so that the Jewish people will bring a blessing the world. These are plans by an all-powerful, and loving, being.
There have been suggestions that other religions might be less resistant to the claims of science than are the Biblical religions. The Dalai Lama, for example, certainly is more open to the claims of science than are most representatives of the religions of the Book: Christianity, Judaism and Islam. In his book, The Universe in a Single Atom, the Dalai Lama is careful to concede that scientific findings that have been verified are simply true and trump any religious dogma to the contrary. But this admission turns out to have its limits. This is how George Johnson put it in his review of the book in the New York Times, speaking of the Dalai Lama:
"But when it comes to questions about life and its origins, this would-be man of science begins to waver. Though he professes to accept evolutionary theory, he recoils at one of its most basic tenets: that the mutations that provide the raw material for natural selection occur at random. Look deeply enough, he suggests, and the randomness will turn out to be complexity in disguise - "hidden causality," the Buddha's smile. There you have it, Eastern religion's version of intelligent design. He also opposes physical explanations for consciousness, invoking instead the existence of some kind of irreducible mind stuff, an idea rejected long ago by mainstream science."
So it is fair to say that the scientific revolution is a challenge to all of Our Religions to a greater or lesser extent.
Tuesday, July 24, 2007
The Sources of Secularism: Science, Globalization and Our Religions
7/24/2007--A massive shift is occurring at the beginning of the 21st century in which millions of people are moving away from the religious traditions of their cultures into the technological/commercial inferno we can call secularization. By and large this is not a good thing for people. Yes, many people are liberated from barbaric traditional practices and gross superstition. And secularization brings medical marvels and sometimes economic prosperity. But not always and at great cost.
The cost does not really matter because the trend seems to me to be permanent. In fact the trend seems to be growing. Secularization did not begin in the 20th century and it will not end in the 21st century. I imagine its victory, in the sense that secularism will no longer seem even to be significant--it will just be the way things are--sometime after 2100.
What makes the process of secularization seem inevitable is that it works at the level of what is believable. According to the political philosopher Eric Voegelin, epiphanies—revelations of the truth of order—occur throughout history, from Genesis through Buddhist teaching to Christianity, and in many other manifestations. Each new revelation succeeds to the extent that its symbols express the “ ‘common sense’ of a period, that is, its ability to speak not in a distant-alien idiom but with an ‘authority commonly present in everybody’s consciousness.’”[1] Secularism today captures our common sense of how things are. This is the same idea that Pope Benedict intends when he writes that the heart of the Christian message--that God allowed the healing of man through the death of his Son—“no longer seems plausible to us today.”[2] It isn’t so much that we deny these as that they don’t seem possible and therefore do not really challenge us at all.
The unreality of Our Religions is what has happened to me and perhaps to you. At one time I was a believer--more or less--a liberal Jew. Then, at a certain point, it took too much effort to listen to words that could not be true. And the worst part of this process, the part most revealing of how cut off you are from your tradition, is that you don’t even feel you have lost anything. It is true that Soren Kierkegaard wrote of “the leap of faith” as the basis for religious life and I suppose that the message of salvation has always seemed unlikely. Nevertheless, I simply can no longer believe, at least not in the old way.
Our Religions do not disappear in this process. In fact, they remain robust, first in opposition to secularism and then later in dialogue with it. Most people will probably remain believers in every generation. The deterioration of religious civilization takes a long time. I am certain that in the period after 2100, when I have said the triumph of secularism will be complete, Judaism, Christianity and all Our Religions will still be present and viable to many. But they will be secondary to the culture.
This event, the displacement of Our Religions, although it will take place gradually, will signify a new era in human history. Whatever you may think of secularism today, I assure you that religion is still primary. The religious struggle against secularism is still ongoing. When it ends, the world will look quite different.
[1] Fred R. Dallmayr, Margins of Political Discourse, 77 (SUNY Press 1989)(quoting from Eric Voegelin’s Search for Order).
[2] Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth, 159 (Doubleday 2007)(trans. Adrian J. Walker).
The cost does not really matter because the trend seems to me to be permanent. In fact the trend seems to be growing. Secularization did not begin in the 20th century and it will not end in the 21st century. I imagine its victory, in the sense that secularism will no longer seem even to be significant--it will just be the way things are--sometime after 2100.
What makes the process of secularization seem inevitable is that it works at the level of what is believable. According to the political philosopher Eric Voegelin, epiphanies—revelations of the truth of order—occur throughout history, from Genesis through Buddhist teaching to Christianity, and in many other manifestations. Each new revelation succeeds to the extent that its symbols express the “ ‘common sense’ of a period, that is, its ability to speak not in a distant-alien idiom but with an ‘authority commonly present in everybody’s consciousness.’”[1] Secularism today captures our common sense of how things are. This is the same idea that Pope Benedict intends when he writes that the heart of the Christian message--that God allowed the healing of man through the death of his Son—“no longer seems plausible to us today.”[2] It isn’t so much that we deny these as that they don’t seem possible and therefore do not really challenge us at all.
The unreality of Our Religions is what has happened to me and perhaps to you. At one time I was a believer--more or less--a liberal Jew. Then, at a certain point, it took too much effort to listen to words that could not be true. And the worst part of this process, the part most revealing of how cut off you are from your tradition, is that you don’t even feel you have lost anything. It is true that Soren Kierkegaard wrote of “the leap of faith” as the basis for religious life and I suppose that the message of salvation has always seemed unlikely. Nevertheless, I simply can no longer believe, at least not in the old way.
Our Religions do not disappear in this process. In fact, they remain robust, first in opposition to secularism and then later in dialogue with it. Most people will probably remain believers in every generation. The deterioration of religious civilization takes a long time. I am certain that in the period after 2100, when I have said the triumph of secularism will be complete, Judaism, Christianity and all Our Religions will still be present and viable to many. But they will be secondary to the culture.
This event, the displacement of Our Religions, although it will take place gradually, will signify a new era in human history. Whatever you may think of secularism today, I assure you that religion is still primary. The religious struggle against secularism is still ongoing. When it ends, the world will look quite different.
[1] Fred R. Dallmayr, Margins of Political Discourse, 77 (SUNY Press 1989)(quoting from Eric Voegelin’s Search for Order).
[2] Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth, 159 (Doubleday 2007)(trans. Adrian J. Walker).
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