{"id":1359,"date":"2009-01-22T09:05:32","date_gmt":"2009-01-22T17:05:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/secularright.org\/wordpress\/?p=1359"},"modified":"2009-01-22T09:07:06","modified_gmt":"2009-01-22T17:07:06","slug":"neither-a-borrower-nor-a-lender-be","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/neither-a-borrower-nor-a-lender-be\/","title":{"rendered":"Neither a borrower nor a lender be"},"content":{"rendered":"

It all comes from you, it all belongs to you.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Pastor Rick Warren\u2019s inaugural prayer<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

The Christian world-view holds that all human virtues are a loan from God.\u00a0 The secularist responds: \u201cQuite the opposite.\u201d\u00a0 Compassion, love, and mercy are human predicates; we confer them on God<\/a>. Human beings are the sole source of meaning in the world; history is our story, not God\u2019s story, as Rick Warren has it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Many believers assume that this human-centric sense of life must lead to nihilism.\u00a0 \u201cSecular humanism\u00a0 . . . founders on its own perception of the meaninglessness of human life,\u201d writes Michael Novak in No One Sees God<\/strong>.\u00a0 I\u2019m puzzled by this stance.\u00a0 The world is awash in meaning, more than anyone can possibly take in.\u00a0 I don\u2019t need God to be slain by the exquisiteness of Don Giovanni or a Chopin nocturne.\u00a0 If life\u2019s beauties, conflict, and cooperation leave believers looking elsewhere for significance, it is they, not skeptics, who live in an empty world.<\/p>\n

But Warren\u2019s speech reminded me of one important power of religious rhetoric that is not easily replicated in a secular setting: divine petition.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cGive to our new president Barack Obama the wisdom to lead us with humility, the courage to lead us with integrity, the compassion to lead us with generosity,\u201d Warren said.<\/p>\n

Such public pronouncements are not mere empty gestures.\u00a0 We cannot take the continued strength of our values for granted; they need to be reinforced in public as well as private settings.\u00a0 Invoking God as the external source of those values is rhetorically and grammatically efficient; we can direct our wish towards someone with the power to grant it.\u00a0 One could rewrite Warren\u2019s optative to remove its purported target\u2014\u201cMay our new president Barack Obama possess the wisdom to lead us with humility, the courage to lead us with integrity, the compassion to lead us with generosity\u201d\u2014and perhaps that does the trick.\u00a0 The rewrite, which is a common enough form, does raise the question, however, who we think will fulfill our hope.\u00a0 In truth, it is the president himself who alone possesses the power to act with humility, integrity, and generosity, but saying so directly in such a setting is a bit awkward.\u00a0 Maybe it is enough to simply express the hope for such noble behavior in a general way, thus putting the stamp of\u00a0 public approval on the values being affirmed.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But there is another problem.\u00a0 Without officially-designated God-channelers, who should issue such public blessings?\u00a0 Can one public official do so for another?\u00a0 We have decided that preachers carry the moral authority to speak for the whole; it\u2019s not obvious to me who stands in their place without the concept of God.\u00a0 These are social problems, not theological ones.\u00a0 But I find them puzzling.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It all comes from you, it all belongs to you. (Pastor Rick Warren\u2019s inaugural prayer.) The Christian world-view holds that all human virtues are a loan from God.\u00a0 The secularist responds: \u201cQuite the opposite.\u201d\u00a0 Compassion, love, and mercy are human … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":50,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[71,183,147],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1359"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/50"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1359"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1359\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1366,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1359\/revisions\/1366"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1359"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1359"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1359"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}