{"id":2399,"date":"2009-08-02T15:58:19","date_gmt":"2009-08-02T23:58:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/secularright.org\/wordpress\/?p=2399"},"modified":"2009-08-02T15:58:19","modified_gmt":"2009-08-02T23:58:19","slug":"beer-summit-theology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/beer-summit-theology\/","title":{"rendered":"Beer Summit Theology"},"content":{"rendered":"

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. concluded the Beer Summit on a far more gracious, even presidential, note<\/a> than President Obama.\u00a0 Gates had the courtesy to acknowledge, however belatedly, that \u201cpolice officers put their lives at risk to protect us every day.\u201d\u00a0 Obama said nothing <\/a>about the police, even though he had previously fit the Gates incident into the ACLU\u2019s master narrative about a national epidemic of biased policing.\u00a0 In his post-summit official statement, however, he pretended that the controversy could be deflated back to a matter between two individuals and disposed of with nearly meaningless platitudes.\u00a0\u00a0 His silence about anything policing-related carefully let stand his previous allegation that \u201cblacks and Hispanics are picked up more frequently and often time for no cause.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Obama\u2019s embrace of activist-generated misinformation about the police, which I contest here<\/a>, here<\/a>,\u00a0and here<\/a>, will be the most damaging consequence of Gates-gate, one with the potential to erode the public safety gains in minority neighborhoods achieved over the last fifteen years.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I was struck nevertheless by the sudden infusion of God talk in Gates\u2019 post-beer statement:\u00a0<\/p>\n

Let me say that I thank God that I live in a country in which police officers put their lives at risk to protect us every day . . . .<\/p>\n

Thank God we live in a country where speech is protected, a country which guarantees and defends my right to speak out when I believe my rights have been violated . . . .<\/p>\n

And thank God that we have a President who can rise above the fray, bridge age-old differences and transform events such as this into a moment in the evolution of our society\u2019s attitudes about race and difference. President Obama is a man who understands tolerance and forgiveness, and our country is blessed to have such a leader.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I suspect that those activist conservative believers who argue for American exceptionalism and the essential role of faith in American life will not necessarily agree that we have God to thank for Obama\u2019s election.\u00a0\u00a0 Conservative and liberal believers undoubtedly loop each other like a double helix in their clairvoyance regarding the beneficent workings of God in the world.\u00a0 But if Reagan or Palin are the answer to prayers, why not Obama, too?\u00a0<\/p>\n

I am puzzled as usual, however, by the implications of such an interpretation of human experience as Gates here proposes.\u00a0 If it\u2019s God to whom an individual American owes thanks for the good fortune of living under a stable, constitutional government, why doesn\u2019t God confer such a benefit on Africans or the Burmese?\u00a0 An African baby no more deserves his birth circumstances than an American baby deserves his.\u00a0 If we\u2019re all guilty of original sin from conception on, why are the consequences so much more severe for some people than for others?\u00a0 Predestination doctrine tells us to just shut up and accept such blatant injustices as the way that God does business, but I do not consider it an advance for human understanding to replace a medium-sized conundrum with a gargantuan one.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Many believers view the randomness of fate as the enemy of meaning.\u00a0 In No One Sees God<\/em>, Michael Novak writes: \u201cThe unbeliever submits to randomness while the believer submits to the inscrutable will of the Creator.\u201d\u00a0 Without faith in a supervening divine order, Novak and others argue, humans must live in an absurd universe.\u00a0\u00a0 Such a view has it exactly backwards.\u00a0 It\u2019s the religious alternative to randomness that is absurd, indeed, too horrible to contemplate.\u00a0 It is a random roll of the genetic dice that determines whether one child is born with the full complement of human faculties, while another lacks part of her brain or harbors a genetic defect that will kill her before she is six.\u00a0 Undirected fluctuations in the earth\u2019s tectonic plates dictate whether an earthquake will wipe out whole families in this poor village, while sparing the next\u00a0 village over.\u00a0
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0
\nThe believer, by contrast, has no out from absurdity.\u00a0 He must come up with an explanation beyond randomness for the daily massacre of the innocents, because his world is, as Novak emblematically puts it,\u00a0 \u201cunder the direction of a loving, personal God\u201d who \u201csees everything,\u201d knows each of us \u201cby name,\u201d\u00a0 and shows his \u201ccare every day.\u201d\u00a0 It is for the believer, not the unbeliever, to give a reason based in logic or desert, and consistent with his idea of a loving God, for why this little baby has no arms or this young father will die prematurely of lymphoma.\u00a0\u00a0 No one has ever succeeded in doing so.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m all for gratitude and thanks for the countless unmerited blessings of our lives, but let\u2019s try to direct them at the right source.\u00a0 The human passion for justice is gradually shrinking the territory over which blind randomness once ruled.\u00a0 Medical researchers work tirelessly to ensure that all children have a fair shot at a normal human life.\u00a0 To lessen the number of orphans and widows, engineers fortify buildings against random \u201cacts of God,\u201d as common parlance and insurance premia have it.\u00a0 Agronomists develop pest-resistant crops, to guard against the famines that have plagued humanity throughout history.\u00a0 And as for the blessings of ordered liberty that Gates rightly celebrates, those are human achievements that we can either strengthen or destroy.\u00a0 Gates\u2019 generous outreach towards the police is an admirable example of how to shore up the precious rule of law.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. concluded the Beer Summit on a far more gracious, even presidential, note than President Obama.\u00a0 Gates had the courtesy to acknowledge, however belatedly, that \u201cpolice officers put their lives at risk to protect us every day.\u201d\u00a0 … 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":[93,228,297,38,299],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2399"}],"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=2399"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2399\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2401,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2399\/revisions\/2401"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2399"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2399"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2399"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}