Secular Right

Possibly the most annoying explanation for Western Europe’s ‘birth dearth’ is the claim that it is the product of some sort of profound spiritual malaise. Allegedly doomed by their secularism to an endless arid despair, Europeans are, it is sometimes suggested, too consumed with ennui, misery and themselves to bother with reproduction. To describe this argument as nonsense is to insult nonsense.

In fact the decision to have fewer children is simply a by-product of modernity, although ‘simply’ is not really the word to use: A fascinating piece by Anthony Gottlieb in the Economist magazine’s Intelligent Life shows us just how complex this topic can be. Most interesting of all, perhaps, is one idea that he cites, the notion that “having families can incline one to religion”. I’m not sure that I buy that (and, wisely, Mr. Gottlieb doesn’t come down on one side of the fence or the other), but, not for the first time, it got me to wondering what (if any) evolutionary function religion might fulfill. That’ll be food for thought for me amid the turkey and mince pies, but in the meantime, merry Christmas, one and all.

From his blog:

Firing off his cap pistol in the enfeebled War against the War on Christmas, Jay Nordlinger, sounding like one of Cal Thomas’s old cardigan sweaters, simpers, “Two seconds ago, ‘Merry Christmas’ was about the warmest, nicest, most joyful thing you could say to someone. Now, it can be borderline hate speech.”

Oh please. Stop with the dearie-me hokum. I was out in the heathen streets of Manhattan yesterday and heard Merry Christmases being exchanged between shoppers, sales staff, pedestrians, parents and children without anybody blowing a whistle for the constable or falling face first in the filthy snow with stricken indignation. I don’t for the life of me understand why certain conservatives seem determined to sprout a bristle tail if somebody wishes them Happy Holidays (instead of M C), acting as if this were a weaselly euphemism meant as a slap in the face of the baby Jesus in the manger. Considering how eerily, bleakly empty so many of the streets and stores were yesterday on the final weekend before Christmas, I suspect shoppers, salespeeps, and store managers alike have larger worries on their minds than which holiday greeting would cause the least abrasion.

I’m all for Merry Christmas, but I do wonder what the reaction would be to widespread use of “Eid Mubarak.”

Just checking in here. Poor Bradlaugh is in total lockdown under drop-dead date for delivery of book manuscript to publisher, Jan. 5th. Blogging activities & all other, except biological essentials, suspended for duration …

However the pagan deities must be served. Trip this evening (12/23) to Smith Haven Mall (Long Island) for last-minute gift shopping with fambly. Hung out in Barnes & Noble while kids chose gift books. Got stuck at “Spirituality/Religion” section. OMG.  The Secret & innumerable ripoffs …
The Purpose-Driven Life  & ditto … Face to face with the HUGE market for this smiley-face sprituality … That’s us, that’s homo sap.  Ignore it at your (political) peril.

Rick Warren?  Looks like good guy to me.  U.S.A. needs someone to represent the “ceremonial deism” that our public spectacles demand.  Must be elooquent, white, masculine-looking., not too obviously sectarian.  Warren just the ticket.  Bradlaugh endorses Warren.

Now please excuse.  Friend gifted Bradlaugh with Laird’s Applejack liquor.  Revelation!  Cares forgotten.  Merry Christmas to all.

From two New York Times articles on the Bernard Madoff fraud:

As it does each day, the Yeshiva [University] community has turned to religion for strength, and to help shepherd it through a crisis

Rabbi Shalom Carmy, chairman of the Bible and Jewish Philosophy Department, flipped through Genesis the other day looking for a passage, a sliver of spiritual truth, to guide students in a time of introspection. He stopped on the story of Jacob and his willingness to risk his life to ensure the integrity of his earnings.

“The righteous guard their money more than their body,” he said in explaining the lesson he extracted. “If you make money honestly and if you’re holding it in a trust for people, you have to be very careful.”

Rabbi Blech, for his part, turned to the Ten Commandments, noting that some focus on a person’s relationship with God, others on relationships with fellow human beings. He said that “both tablets are equally important.”

And:

In addition to theft, the Torah discusses another kind of stealing, geneivat da’at, the Hebrew term for deception or stealing someone’s mind. “In the rabbinic mind-set, he’s guilty of two sins: one is theft, and the other is deception,” said Burton L. Visotzky, a professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary.

“The fact that he stole from Jewish charities puts him in a special circle of hell,” Rabbi Visotzky added. “He really undermined the fabric of the Jewish community, because it’s built on trust. There is a wonderful rabbinic saying — often misapplied — that all Jews are sureties for one another, which means, for instance, that if a Jew takes a loan out, in some ways the whole Jewish community guarantees it.”

Several rabbis said they were reminded of Esau, a figure of mistrust in the Bible. According to a rabbinic interpretation, Esau, upon embracing his brother Jacob after 20 years apart, was actually frisking him to see what he could steal. “The saying goes that, when Esau kisses you,” Rabbi Visotzky said, “check to make sure your teeth are still there.”

The press’s animosity towards religious belief is a fundamental tenet of the religious conservative movement. “We’ve seen what we feel is a clear rise in hostility [to religion] among our institutions — political institutions and media institutions,” Craig Parshall of the National Religious Broadcasters said last week in a classic statement of the conceit.

I am puzzled by this conceit, because I have yet to see a news story that subjects core religious belief or practice to anything remotely resembling skeptical questioning. Instead, the media treat every supernatural claim with kid gloves.

The following recent articles from the New York Times and Los Angeles Times on the Mexican cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe are typical. A caption to the Los Angeles Times photo montage reads: “A woman prays at Our Lady Queen of Angels Church in Los Angeles, where the faithful gathered to celebrate what Catholics believe was the Virgin [Mary’s] appearance to native Mexican St. Juan Diego in 1531.”

This caption is actually unusual in using the moderately distancing “what Catholics believe.” But would a story about a recent sighting of Abraham Lincoln at a Los Angeles K-Mart, say, leave the matter with a “what Lincoln fans believe was Lincoln’s appearance to party faithful?” Unlikely. The allegation of Lincoln’s presence would be balanced at the very least by something along the lines of: “There has been little independent verification of this claim, however.”

Now, it is the case that the liberal media are contemptuous of the social stances currently atop the Religious Right’s political docket—opposition to abortion, gay marriage, and stem cell research. But those positions are not inherently religious. There are secular grounds for opposing gay marriage or abortion. Only by making those issues synonymous with religion itself can the claim be sustained that the media is hostile to religion. The Religious Right often seems to make just such a totalizing claim for itself; to my surprise, much of the media and political establishments let it get away with this strategy. They refer to the Religious Right as “values voters,” as if the Religious Right are the only people who possess values and as if abortion and gay marriage are the only salient values.

To be sure, the press also opposes prayer in schools by wide margins. But school prayer is a case of religion making a claim for dominance in the public sphere; one can oppose school prayer on constitutional grounds without casting the slightest doubt on the existence of a benign, listening Deity or on the myriad religious practices which supposedly get the attention of that Diety. On those matters, the press remains assiduously silent. Perhaps such silence is perfectly proper. But it is anything but disrespectful.

Heather, I’m not at all surprised by the phenomenon that you see either as ‘dissonance’ or an ‘unconscious’ mitigation of an older, sterner rule book. Think of (many) religions as being, in some ways, like the US constitution. There are some believers who will be ‘strict constructionists’ and others who will see the sacred writings of their faith as something similar to the ‘living constitution’.

 As for the question of why some religious folk do not do more to try to save their more irreligious friends from hellfire, I’d think that the doctrine of free will has a great deal to do with it, along with simple good manners, a belief in a merciful God, the power of prayer and the temptation of redemption.

For what it’s worth I did, way back when (well, law school), once ask a devout friend of mine whether he thought that I was hellbound. A nice, kindly fellow, he was (rightly) a little pained by the directness of my question (we were in England after all), but politely and sadly replied that my somewhat lackadaisical approach towards religion did indeed carry with it a distinct risk of brimstone. Some churchgoing, he felt, would be in order. It might, he thought, lead to a kinder, gentler final destination. We both then returned enthusiastically to our drinks – and I to my plans for a spectacular deathbed conversion.

Christopher Hitchens accuses Rick Warren of bigotry for believing that Jews will not go to heaven (thanks to Wally for the link). Hitchens’ condemnation strikes me as unduly harsh. I don’t think it’s fair to label a theological position as bigotry simply because it does not conform to secular principles.

But here’s another possibility: Do modern Christians still believe with the same fervor as in the past all those unyielding doctrines of eternal damnation for the unbaptised and unconverted? They sure don’t act as if they do. If they really were convinced that their friends, co-workers, neighbors, and in-laws were going to hell because they possessed the wrong or no religious belief, I would think that the knowledge would be unbearable. Christians surely see that most of their wrong-believing personal acquaintances are just as moral and deserving as themselves. How, then, do they live with the knowledge that their friends and loved ones face an eternity of torment? I would expect a frenzy of proselytizing, by word or by sword.

In previous centuries, when religion had the upper hand, religious differences meant more. But ours is a world dominated by the secular values of tolerance and equality. Either believers live with an extraordinary degree of cognitive dissonance between the inclusive values of their society and the dictates of their religion, or they unconsciously mitigate those bloody-minded dictates as atavistic vestiges from a more primitive time.

I wonder which it is.