The Heart of Hallowed Secularism

6/4/2016--I'll be traveling some in June, but I will try to be more faithful in blogging. For my term as Associate Dean at Duquesne Law School is ending and my life in thinking is about to begin again.

This last week I spoke to a group of civilians--non-lawyers--about Judaism as part of a class on Comparative Religion. At the same time, I submitted a proposed paper to the Association of Religiously Affiliated Law Schools to speak at their meeting in September. These two matters come together for the future.

The issue is American Democracy and what is wrong with it. Why are we so angry and disappointed? Some say the reasons are material, but I believe the reasons are basically spiritual. We are a people who are lost. We no longer get our orientation from traditional religion, but we have no substitute. Most secularists--people who don't go to Church or Mosque or Temple or Synagogue--and some who do, subscribe to a worldview that is a dead end. They think they are rationalists--hence the Reason Rally today in Washington.

But they are not rationalists--they are a kind of materialist. They reject God for the silliest reason: that he is invisible and inexplicable. Well so is quantum entanglement.

I am what you might call a minimal materialist. I reject God as a being. But of course all thinking religious people reject God as a being also.

The heart of my alternative to God as a being is hallowed secularism. Secular because there cannot be a quasi-physical realm like a heaven where spirits act like people. Hallowed because this reality is holy--the missing ingredient at the Reason Rally.

My hero is Sarah Blumenthal from the book, City of God, by E.L. Doctorow. Sarah is a liberal rabbi and gives a talk. God is something evolving, she says. And what about humans? We live out a teleology that gives one substantive indication of itself--that we live in moral consequence.

There you have the future of secularism--teleology and moral consequence. Teleology: this reality is not an accident. Yes, it has random features. But look at humans. We are the universe becoming aware of itself. No mere materialism can capture that. And we know what it means to live a moral life. That means that morality is real--not a matter of opinion. So much flows from that.

Of course we disagree in the present about moral questions. But we do a really good job historically in figuring out the right answers to moral questions.

But, shockingly, I could almost describe Judaism as a teleology of moral consequence, too.

The Atheist Wars

Little did I suspect last Sunday, when I posted here concerning the violence of the secular that there would be a political back and forth over which “side” is responsible for the violence of the Tuscon shootings. Jared Loughner, the apparent shooter, does not seem to have been either religious or a self-proclaimed atheist. My point in the blog had to do with “secular politics,” which is what our political system is, even though of course, religious believers participate. The question for me has to do with the assumptions of political life. Are we self-interested, rational consumers or are we at least potentially something more?

But on Tuesday, Lauri Lebo weighed in on Religion Dispatches to the effect that conservative religious groups were blaming atheism for the shootings ("New Theory for Tuscon Tragedy: Blame the Atheists”). As one person put it, "‘It's actually very simple,’ [Ted] Shoebat was quoted in Special Guest’s promotion, 'When God is not in your life, evil will seek to fill the void.’"

The irony of all this is that secularists like Christopher Hitchens and Mark Lilla have argued for years that religion in politics leads to violence and the only way to have peace in political life is to strictly limit the role of religion in the public square. Lougher reminds us that When God is not in your life you may turn to violence and that when God is in your life, you may also turn to violence.

So we really should step back and not criticize the “other side” for now doing what “our side” has been doing all along. No one has a monopoly on violence. No one has yet figured out how to build a just and peaceful world.

What Makes Hallowed Secularism, Secular?

6/20/2007--After reading the blog entry for 6/19/2007 I am tempted to ask, since this writing is so God-intoxicated, what makes secularism, secular? The answer is not that the secularist does not believe in God, because what is meant by that statement is part of the work that hallowed secularism does. The secularist comes to see that what he or she does believe about reality is what some religious believers call “God”. So, the secularist and the believer may agree about God, in part. The secularist begins and ends with this world and this world very much in the state in which we know it ordinarily. That is not the same as materialism since the world as we ordinarily know it includes many intangibles, like ecstasy and the number 2. But secularism does exclude in principle happenings outside the usual scientific laws. This is different from the believer like Maimonides who concluded that God chooses to act within physical laws. For the secularist there are no miracles in principle and if we want to know what the physical laws of the universe are, we turn to science rather than religion. This insight does tell us something about the nature of God because there could not be the sort of God who has the capacity to do things in the physical world outside its physical laws. The deeper difference between secularism and biblical religion, however, is not the issue of miracles, but what this difference says about death. In secularism, death must be the end of existence and must be unalterable. And somehow that blunt fact must be consistent with the nature of God. I will add here that some secularists, including me, regard death as positive rather than negative, but since there is nothing we can do about death, there will be secularists on both sides of that issue. This view of death is obviously inconsistent with Christianity, in which the victory of God in Jesus overcomes death. It is inconsistent with any notion of a new age after resurrection or any apocalyptic belief. Strangely, it is not inconsistent with the Old Testament, in which Abraham and Moses both die (and mostly everyone else) and are never promised any sort of eternal life beyond the blessing of their descendants. I don’t want to make too much of this, however, as if this view of death were a difference between Christianity and Judaism. By the time of the end of the Old Testament period, the prophets were using messianic imagery, which of course is where the New Testament gets it from. The Pharisees of Jesus’ time had already linked resurrection of the dead to the advent of the Messiah, which is why Jesus is the “first fruit”, and not the exception. Therefore, the end of death is a Jewish concept. Plus, in Genesis itself, death enters the world as something quite unnatural, which one would expect God eventually to fix. So, the secular view is not that of Judaism, which on this crucial point is akin to Christianity. If we believe that death is the end and will always be the end, we are secularists. It remains to be seen, however, what kind of secularists we are.