{"id":2526,"date":"2009-08-17T07:48:03","date_gmt":"2009-08-17T15:48:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/secularright.org\/wordpress\/?p=2526"},"modified":"2009-08-17T07:50:10","modified_gmt":"2009-08-17T15:50:10","slug":"icons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/icons\/","title":{"rendered":"Icons"},"content":{"rendered":"

My post <\/a>on Mary\u2019s visit <\/a>to New York has drawn rebuke (here<\/a> and here<\/a>), and for good reason: its tone was clearly self-indulgent and insensitive.\u00a0 I apologize and thank\u00a0Joe Carter and Tom Piatak for their civility\u00a0 in responding.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But however poorly phrased, the post was an honest cri du coeur.\u00a0 (Not that I\u2019m claiming that honesty justifies every callous indiscretion.)\u00a0 I don\u2019t think that I\u2019m the only person to have ever been mystified or at least unpersuaded by the use of idols.\u00a0 Mr. Piatak and Mr. Carter may have so absorbed secular tolerance that they would see in a Yoruba tribesman\u2019s devotion to his wooden Juju simply a wonderfully diverse manifestation of human spirituality.\u00a0\u00a0 But many missionaries have demurred from a tribesman\u2019s claims about the role of his ancestor\u2019s effigy in maintaining civil order and protecting the tribe.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Mr. Piatak points out the magnificent artistic legacy of Catholic practice.\u00a0\u00a0 No argument there; I am hopelessly indebted to the great Masses, as well as to Bach\u2019s Lutheran works.\u00a0 Shallow baby-boomer snake-oil offers no competition to these inestimable treasures or to the ethical and intellectual tradition of Christianity.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Mr. Piatak also observes that people have committed great acts of heroism and compassion inspired by Mary worship.\u00a0\u00a0 People have also wreaked cruelty and destruction motivated by Catholicism and almost every other flavor of faith and non-faith.\u00a0 None of this tells me whether the supernatural tenets of any given faith have sufficient empirical support to justify rational adherence to them.
\n\u00a0
\nMr.\u00a0 Carter writes:<\/p>\n

If Marian devotion is indeed similar to believing in the healing power of crystals or the predictive power of entrails, then Mac Donald would be warranted in her disrespect.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The gratitude for the innumerable blessings of our life that is directed towards Mary\u2019s image is admirable.\u00a0 Her image is also approached as a means of intercession.\u00a0 I would wager that Marian devotion has an identical track record to crystals and other forms of talismanic power in protecting worshippers from the vicissitudes of fortune.\u00a0\u00a0 For every remembered moment where a prayer seems to have been answered, there are countless other instances where nothing happened or worse: where innocents trapped by earthquake, fire, hurricane, flood, or landslide were not pulled out alive or where cancer, plague, or a genetic abnormality claimed its victim, despite the fervent prayers and petitions of worshippers.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But I don\u2019t want to fetishize the fetish.\u00a0 Believing that human affairs are \u201cunder the direction of a loving, personal God\u201d who knows each of us \u201cby name\u201d and shows his \u201ccare every day,\u201d as Michael Novak puts it in No One Sees God, strikes me as equally contrary to the daily experience of innocent human suffering, whether that belief is directed to a wooden image or no image at all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My post on Mary\u2019s visit to New York has drawn rebuke (here and here), and for good reason: its tone was clearly self-indulgent and insensitive.\u00a0 I apologize and thank\u00a0Joe Carter and Tom Piatak for their civility\u00a0 in responding.\u00a0 But however … 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":[228,304,38],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2526"}],"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=2526"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2526\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2532,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2526\/revisions\/2532"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2526"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2526"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2526"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}