The Honor Of God

Randal Marlin at Mercator : http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/a_secular_age/A Secular Age is a huge and hugely interesting work by Charles Taylor, a Canadian who has been called ” the most interesting and important philosopher writing in English today”.  It deals with some of the most important issues of our time. What place is there for the contribution of religious ideas, notably belief in God and God’s word, to our public discourse about social policy? It is a feature of contemporary existence that arguments based on biblical sources or pronouncements from the Vatican tend to be treated today as more or less inadmissible in serious academic discussion. They may be used for adornment, but not as proper authority standing alone; serious work has to be couched in secular language.

I have certainly found in a lifetime spent in academic philosophy that professional manners require that while faith can serve as inspiration, whatever it inspires has to pass through a secularising filter before it can be acceptable as a contribution to philosophy. So, for example, arguments about ethics and social policies relating to abortion cannot, in serious discussion, rest on religious authority.

But is it right that this should be so?

Charles Taylor’s book does not, as far as I can tell, give a direct negative answer to this question, but in a magisterial tracing of the many currents of thought that have led to our “secular age” he does retrieve the sense that this might be an open question. The central aim of his book, as he himself expresses it, is “to study the fate in the modern West of religious faith in the strong sense… the belief in transcendent reality, on the one hand, and the connected aspiration to a transformation which goes beyond ordinary human flourishing on the other.”

Books attacking belief in God are best-sellers, and religious belief and practice have been on the defensive for many decades. What Taylor argues well is that the current impulses toward the marginalising of religion stem from a distorted idea of the respective roles of religion and science in the development of our current mind-set, or more particularly, our “social imaginary”, which he defines as the set of shared ideas that tell us how to relate to others and what things are possible to be accomplished.

According to the simplistic narrative he attacks, science has been responsible for all that is good and progressive in the modern world, while religion has offered a series of superstitions and roadblocks in the way of science. Opposition to Copernicus and Darwin are only two of the more conspicuous examples.

This narrative obscures many vital pieces of a more complicated, but more accurate, story of the roles of religion and science in the path from an age of faith to that of secularised reason. The fuller narrative, Taylor argues, needs to take account of the way in which religious belief inspired the search for scientific truth, and the way in which both religious and atheistic thinking produced internal struggles, strands of which impacted on the other group.

Fundamentalist Christianity has its counterpart in fundamentalist atheism, each side convinced of its own truth and closed off from admitting any possibility of truth on the part of the other view. Yet when their truth claims are put under the microscope neither side is entitled to the certainty it professes.

Taylor gives many examples of atheistic dogmatism from French and Russian revolutionaries, but I’ll add to his collection the brouhaha over the famous 1925 Scopes “Monkey” trial (to which Taylor alludes, though without developing the example) in which a biology teacher in Tennessee was prosecuted (successfully) for violating a statute against the teaching of evolution. Secular thinkers cheered the defeat accorded fundamentalist Christianity in the court of public opinion. But few of the cheerers know that the book at the centre of the debate, A Civic Biology was gravely defective in treating as scientific fact the superiority of the Caucasian race and promoting eugenic views based on bad science.

Among the especially valuable concepts Taylor employs, I would highlight his expression “exclusive humanism”. All too often, we accept the term “humanism” to mean ethics without God, and since one can have a highly laudable ethical set of views while not including belief in God, this acceptance seems reasonable.

But Taylor rightly notes that for the most part what is laudable in humanism is also compatible with belief in God. Moreover, belief in God gives a special incentive to love and make sacrifices for our neighbour. So we need to distinguish a humanism that includes belief in God from one that doesn’t, instead of freighting theism with all the bad things that have come out of it, while according it none of the good.Once we focus on the question: “What is it that disbelief in God makes possible that belief will not allow?” we may find that the humanism in question becomes less appealing. Using the word “humanism” to describe beliefs that more accurately warrant the term “exclusive humanism,” gives an unwarranted advantage to the unbeliever.

Throughout the book, Taylor produces arguments to show that ethical advances have been generated by religious believers and are not simply the result of atheistic materialism.

We moderns are able to think about our individuality and our autonomy differently from the world before Rene Descartes and the rise of rationalism. Hence God is often viewed as subject to laws perceived as necessary by the rational self. The God of Abraham yields to scientific necessity, and Deism results. The world is created like clockwork. It’s not a great step from there to wondering why God is needed at all, if science can tell us all we need to know.

Taylor traces many strands of thinking that result in our contemporary outlook. He is particularly interested in how it came to be that debatable matters came to be one-sidedly settled, not only in the minds of the intellectual elite, but also in the thinking of the masses. Those with a Christian training will recognise the old phenomenon of believing what one wants to believe, captured in Luther’s notorious saying, “reason is a whore.” Popular culture extols the kinds of things and way of life that Christianity treats as turning us away from God.

Atheism leaves us with a bleak world when we contemplate our death. Scientific materialism gives us a disenchanted world, along with the benefits of removing superstitions. Some poets sought refuge in nature and beauty. The French writer Albert Camus gives us one outlook in the stubborn refusal to accept the comforts that belief in transcendence provides. Taylor looks at many of the different responses to both theism and atheism in a sympathetic way, but always with sufficient appreciation for the attendant difficulties so that no final answer to the meaning of life emerges.

A recent visit to St Petersburg and the wealth of inspired art in the basilicas, particularly the Church of the Saviour of Spilt Blood, has reinforced my impression that Taylor has his finger on the pulse of our times. Russia has lived through an atheistic Communist phase and has rediscovered its inspirational roots with a new reverence for the treasures of its Orthodox past. Reverting to the name St Petersburg is one indication of this. But the Russian Museum also emphasises religious themes. It acknowledges the oppression of the serfs, but avoids any sense that the Revolution brought a new lasting vision. The invasion of capitalism has not succeeded any better, and one senses a search for a new vision, combined with an openness not seen for a long time.
This is a magnificent, very important study. It has its drawbacks, such as untranslated words, repetition, presumptions about the reader’s background knowledge, etc. The length is daunting but there is an excellent index, and Google can help a lot with the rest. There are so many sources enriching this work that it may be idiosyncratic to suggest some absences, but I did feel the book would have profited from a glance or two at Kierkegaard, Levinas and Jacques Ellul. There’s also a letter by Nietzsche in which he confesses to admiration of Christianity but finds it too difficult. These other sources would reinforce Taylor’s history of our social imaginary. The upshot is that this social imaginary needs to be examined and re-examined in the light of how it came to be what it is and where it is.

Randal Marlin teaches philosophy at Carleton University in Ottawa.

Fascism Has Come to Canada

“The state dismisses the spiritual authority and usurps its role. In history this is called ’statism,’ better known as fascism,” writes editor of Catholic magazine

By John Jalsevac

TORONTO, June 6, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - In a scathing editorial in the most recent issue of The Catholic Insight (CI), Fr. Alphonse de Valk, the editor-in-chief of the magazine, argues that the ideology of the “divinization” of the state that has historically been called “fascism”, is fast encroaching on the rights and freedoms of religious believers in Canada.

De Valk bases his argument on the increasing number of instances where Canadian citizens are being forced to choose between their religious beliefs and the dogmas of the state.

It is a situation with which De Valk is himself intimately familiar. Currently his magazine is the defendant in an expensive and drawn-out human rights complaint. De Valk and Catholic Insight are being accused of having done nothing more than stated traditional Christian teaching on homosexuality - the very same “crime” that other religious citizens in Canada have been found guilty of and punished for by the state’s human rights commissions. 

De Valk begins his editorial by quoting a recent piece from REAL Women’s magazine, which said that in Canada in the very near future “adoptions, social services such as nursing homes, religious-based schools, marriages, employment conduct, etc., carried out by religious organizations will be held to secular standards, not religious ones.”

“One reason for this development,” says the editor of CI, “is the demand of homosexual activists that everyone conform to their vision of equality rights.  So much for the argument that legalizing same-sex ‘marriage’ would be of no concern except to homosexual activists.”

Already in Quebec, observes Fr. De Valk, the Department of Education is replacing Christian ethics in schools with a course that teaches that Christianity is but one religion amongst many others. In so doing, he says, “the state dismisses parental rights and the formative role of Christian culture, and replaces it with secular sociology….In history this is called ’statism,’ better known as fascism.”

In another recent case, the Ontario Human Rights Commission ruled that Christian Horizons, a Christian charity that ministered to the seriously handicapped, must stop requiring its employees to sign a Lifestyle Agreement that would have held employees to traditional standards of Christian morality. Commentators on the decision, lamented Fr. De Valk, including Lorne Gunter of the Edmonton Journal and Nigel Hannaford of the Calgary Herald failed to recognize “that the citizen should honour both state and God.”

“By presenting state and God as equal opposites between whom we must choose, Gunter and Hannaford appear to accept the fascist order whereby the state tells the citizen what he may and may not do, think, and write.”

This view, says Fr. De Valk, is in direct contradiction to Judeo-Christian teaching, which has always said that the state is a tool made to serve man in order to bring man to God. “Man is made by God and for God. The state is the servant of man, a mere instrument, to help him in this world.” To divinize the state, to make of it the supreme arbiter of what its citizens may do or say or think, goes against the entire Judeo-Christian tradition.

Fr. De Valk then goes on to quote from one of the most powerful sections of Pope Benedict’s address to the United Nations at length.

“Human rights, of course,” said the Holy Father at that time, “must include the right to religious freedom, understood as the expression of a dimension that is at once individual and communitarian - a vision that brings out the unity of the person while clearly distinguishing between the dimension of the citizen and that of the believer….It is inconceivable, then, that believers should have to suppress a part of themselves - their faith - in order to be active citizens. It should never be necessary to deny God in order to enjoy one’s rights. The rights associated with religion are all the more in need of protection if they are considered to clash with a prevailing secular ideology or with majority religious positions of an exclusive nature. The full guarantee of religious liberty cannot be limited to the free exercise of worship, but has to give due consideration to the public dimension of religion, and hence to the possibility of believers playing their part in building the social order.”

Fr. De Valk concludes his editorial by observing that, as the Holy Father intimated, believers do indeed play their part - an extremely significant part - in building the social order. “For example, through their influential and generous involvement in a vast network of initiatives which extend from Universities, scientific institutions and schools to health care agencies and charitable organizations in the service of the poorest and most marginalized.”

He concludes, “Refusal to recognize the contribution to society that is rooted in the religious dimension and in the quest for the Absolute-by its nature, expressing communion between persons - would effectively privilege an individualistic approach, and would fragment the unity of the person.”

Read Fr. De Valk’s editorial, “Fascism Has Come to Canada”:
http://catholicinsight.com/online/editorials/article_820.sht…

Life Site News: >>>>>   http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2008/jun/08060607.html

Plato’s plan of taking children from their parents so that the state can control their socialization has few contemporary proponents. (There are, however, many fellow travelers in the educational establishment and so-called helping professions.) Nonetheless, I think we can see the tyranny of the political in our times. Much like the current abortion regime and the slavery jurisprudence of the antebellum era, proponents of gay marriage imagine that they can redefine inconvenient, permanent realities and remove traditional barriers to the relentless human desire to get what we want. The idea that “bride” and “groom” are not gender specific is a current sign of the absolute triumph of the political will. When we accept that judges and legislators possess the power to define the meaning of marriage, then it’s hard to imagine what would limit the state’s power to redefine social reality other than “personal autonomy,” which turns out to be no limit at all, since everything is desired by somebody somewhere. For all we know, Leona Helmsley wanted to marry her dog.

In short, Farrow is concerned that our present culture of tolerance is quite capable of laying the foundations for the politicization of culture. It seems counterintuitive, but the worry has been central to modern conservatism. Edmund Burke saw that revolution motivated by the unattainable ideal of equality would destroy the deep, pre-political social mores that restrain the will, including the political will; and this restraint is essential for the preservation of liberty. Our contemporary cult of tolerance differs from older fantasies of equality, but the notion that we can accommodate everybody’s desires is just as unrealistic.

Of course, we don’t actually accommodate–and we can’t. As we deconstruct social norms for personal life (and sexual relations are just part of this process), other, more violent and crueler forces take their place. Thus our current situation: a raw system of economic reward and punishment keeps most moving in a socially productive direction, with therapeutic professionals to help manage the occasional dysfunctions. For the rest we have well-armed police forces, prisons, and court-administered “family law.” This shouldn’t surprise us. Human beings cannot live together without a felt force of restraint. What should worry us is the migration of that force outward and into the hands of political actors.

—–R.R. Reno is features editor for First Things and professor of theology at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska.