While watching the second part of the PBS special God in America last night, I was struck by how blindly drawn to certainty a large segment of the country has always been. Better to be dead right than maybe wrong. Both sides of the Civil War believed God was on their side, but as Lincoln concluded, both could not be right and possibly neither was. Then Lincoln went from being Deist (God set in motion this mechanism called life) to Evangelical (God told me what to do) in a sudden revelation which resulted in the Emancipation Proclamation, the just cause the North needed to win the war.
America pretends to have one God but in practice has many. There are personal gods, sectarian gods, and secular gods. What the people who believe in them all have in common is a faith that their god will deliver “the good” and sometimes the goods.
For many the belief starts with absolute trust in a text. The trust is so absolute that every word in the text is sacred. Even though the text has been translated and modernized over time, every word somehow remains sacred to those who buy into fundamentalist teaching. This tendency to see certain texts as sacred (Bible, Torah, Koran) helps explain how some also view The Constitution as a static document to be preserved at any cost as opposed to a living document that is subject to adjustment according to the needs of the people and the times. Literal interpretation of texts, it is assumed, requires no interpretation. It is simply ingesting. You swallow whole, never chew.
This tendency or proclivity to absorb wholly and directly is carried into our economic lives as well. There are those believe in the Market as if it were a god. Just trust in the Market to take care of business. We need not any tinkerers or adjusters or certainly not any government bureaucrats messing with our god. In God We Trust to these purists means In Market We Trust.
America has had an element that wants to purify or sanctify something ever since the Puritans landed in 1620. It also has had an element that has always felt uncomfortable in the stiff clothes of doctrinaire thinking and texts. Printed words and human institutions are not chiseled in stone. They are created by man, not dictated by God to man. God has never exclusively endorsed a specific text as his word and has never left a note to say he had.
Belief is a “time out” from thinking. It is the product of the anti-intellectual’s unwillingness to venture into the arduous world of reason. It is the surrender to assumption and blind belief, not the victory of truth.
True believers are inevitably skeptical of science because science is so skeptical. Science has hypotheses and theories, probability and statistics, not absolute truths. It is the very uncertainty of science that horrifies the true believer. We can’t trust science to give us truth on a platter, only carcasses of old ideas left on the dissecting table and new theories tentatively offered in their place. How messy and unsatisfying it all is.
On the other hand, moderately religious people who focus on service and helping the needy are good to have around. They keep their religion to themselves and simply do good deeds. There are no strings attached to their efforts.
However, our nation suffers from an inordinate lack of faith in the power of reason to sort out our difficulties. Instead, we have our centers of power polluted by a preoccupation with preponderant principle over pragmatic progress. Some true believers are paralyzed with fear because they consume the fast food of facile belief containing empty spiritual calories rather than exercise their mental capacities toward solutions. Thinking is hard work, but a certain portion of America has always shunned it because it might disturb the literal narrative it has always blindly trusted.
However, the chief reason Americans hang onto their beliefs is the ever broadening heterogeneity of the country. We have always been a nation of immigrants and continue to be so. We are also the most religiously diverse nation in the world, but unlike the foods we bring to the American table, we do not embrace each other’s religions the way we enjoy each other’s ethnic dishes. New foods are a lot more digestible; new beliefs are not.
True believers see other beliefs as a threat to their own, not a complement. It leaves them “thinking” that they must reinforce their own beliefs rather than question them. The notion of turning to reason simply does not occur. It’s in a different realm of being.
Meanwhile, absolutist belief will continue to be the sacred cow that wanders through and disrupts American progress such as stem cell research while engineers of growth elsewhere in the world (China, India, for example) will pass us on their freshly constructed by-passes and freeways. Their de facto separation of church and state will trump our de jure separation any day now.
Showing posts with label absolutes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label absolutes. Show all posts
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
Thursday, July 22, 2010
Monotheism and the Culture of Absolutes
I have been reading James Joyce’s Ulysses with a small group of retired men in the small western town of Crestone, Colorado. Crestone used to be a mining town in the 19th Century. Today, it is the locus of spiritual retreats representing most of the world’s religions. Some of the men have connections with one or more spiritual organizations while others do not. The discussions have turned out to be one of the highlights of each week for all of us.
Because the novel follows loosely the story of ancient Ulysses (or Odysseus, if you use the Greek rather than Latin name) the notion that man, in ancient Greece, interacted with many gods and often found himself in conflict with them or having to please more than one made life more complex and confusing at times. Seldom did ancient man find himself serving or reacting to one god alone. He had to adapt to the demands of various gods as he encountered them. Man had to be flexible and inventive in order to survive his hostile world. His religion reflected that “reality.”
Today a large percentage of the world has concentrated the powers of the gods into a single entity, a single god. Although there are a variety of those single gods, for the most part the monotheisms (Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, for example) believe in a sole god. They believe their god is the only god, and that any others are either imposters or nonexistent. They may tolerate the existence of someone else’s god, but they do not believe in it.
What happens when you put all your spiritual “eggs in one basket “is you make yourself vulnerable to the concept of the Absolute. One way becomes the only way. Things become black and white, good and evil, right and wrong. Power gets concentrated into an absolute power. Once this concept of the absolute takes root, it is able to spread to all other spheres of thinking. An absolute religious god can give rise to an absolute economic or social one. The mind set can be transferable. This notion is the thesis of a great little classic by Eric Hoffer called The True Believer.
The founding fathers of America saw this problem of concentrated religious power. They saw that America was composed of all sorts of religious sects, many of them allegedly escaping persecuting regimes in Europe, but in reality they themselves were often so “pure” in their beliefs and practices that they had little tolerance for any other beliefs. Even Roger Williams’ colony of Providence Plantations which opened its doors to Jews as well as various Protestant sects would not admit Papists (Catholics). (Ironically, it turns out Catholicism is the major religion represented in Rhode Island today.)
Most of the founding fathers were, to one degree or another, Deists, a term which is foreign to most 21st Century Americans. Deists were not Christians. Deists believed that a supreme being created the universe but that by using reason and the observation of nature man could ascertain truth without the need of faith or organized religion. While the Deists were technically monotheists, they did not organize and codify around that concept to the extent that a hardened religious doctrine evolved from it, as has happened with orthodox aspects of monotheistic religions. In other words, it was a way of thinking about the world rather than a doctrine. Those founders who either claimed to be Deists or were influenced by Deism were Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, James Madison, possibly Alexander Hamilton as well as less famous figures like Cornelius Harnett, Gouvenor Morris, and Hugh Williamson.
In short, fundamentalist Protestant thinking did not play a major role in the construction of the U.S. Constitution. It was reason that dominated the discussion. The whole balance of powers and checks and balances that were woven into that document was intended to ensure that no concentration of power could take place in any branch of government. Absolute power of any kind was something to be avoided or held in check.
Today in America there are no dominant religious gods except perhaps in the Bible Belts of the South. As an example of how the South is different, the Texas state school board just recently decided to subtract Thomas Jefferson from the list of influential figures that inspired revolutions in the 18th and 19th Centuries because he introduced the phrase “separation of church and state.”
During the 19th and 20th Centuries the Protestant god dominated the country and was used to inspire such fervors as Manifest Destiny in the 1840s and 1850s and Prohibition in the 1920s and 1930s. In the 1950s Joseph McCarthy latched on to an issue which initially and fervently appealed to his fellow Roman Catholics: the communist witch hunt. That issue brought the 20 percent of Americans who were Roman Catholic into the mainstream of religiously inspired causes embraced by a large segment of the Protestant mainstream and paved the way for the country’s acceptance of its first Roman Catholic President, John F. Kennedy in 1960.
However, although there are no nationally dominant gods, that does not prevent groups of Americans from promoting their gods as absolutes whenever possible. Whether it is the god of fundamentalist Christianity, the god of free enterprise, the god of government regulation, the god of anti-abortion, or the god of medical marijuana, America is full of folks who try to push their gods to dominance. Therefore, the founding fathers knew what they were about. Let us hope that this cauldron of vigorous monotheisms can still be transformed into a melting pot of ideas and a living, responsive but responsible set of laws rather than reducing itself to a one stock soup of narrow belief.
Because the novel follows loosely the story of ancient Ulysses (or Odysseus, if you use the Greek rather than Latin name) the notion that man, in ancient Greece, interacted with many gods and often found himself in conflict with them or having to please more than one made life more complex and confusing at times. Seldom did ancient man find himself serving or reacting to one god alone. He had to adapt to the demands of various gods as he encountered them. Man had to be flexible and inventive in order to survive his hostile world. His religion reflected that “reality.”
Today a large percentage of the world has concentrated the powers of the gods into a single entity, a single god. Although there are a variety of those single gods, for the most part the monotheisms (Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, for example) believe in a sole god. They believe their god is the only god, and that any others are either imposters or nonexistent. They may tolerate the existence of someone else’s god, but they do not believe in it.
What happens when you put all your spiritual “eggs in one basket “is you make yourself vulnerable to the concept of the Absolute. One way becomes the only way. Things become black and white, good and evil, right and wrong. Power gets concentrated into an absolute power. Once this concept of the absolute takes root, it is able to spread to all other spheres of thinking. An absolute religious god can give rise to an absolute economic or social one. The mind set can be transferable. This notion is the thesis of a great little classic by Eric Hoffer called The True Believer.
The founding fathers of America saw this problem of concentrated religious power. They saw that America was composed of all sorts of religious sects, many of them allegedly escaping persecuting regimes in Europe, but in reality they themselves were often so “pure” in their beliefs and practices that they had little tolerance for any other beliefs. Even Roger Williams’ colony of Providence Plantations which opened its doors to Jews as well as various Protestant sects would not admit Papists (Catholics). (Ironically, it turns out Catholicism is the major religion represented in Rhode Island today.)
Most of the founding fathers were, to one degree or another, Deists, a term which is foreign to most 21st Century Americans. Deists were not Christians. Deists believed that a supreme being created the universe but that by using reason and the observation of nature man could ascertain truth without the need of faith or organized religion. While the Deists were technically monotheists, they did not organize and codify around that concept to the extent that a hardened religious doctrine evolved from it, as has happened with orthodox aspects of monotheistic religions. In other words, it was a way of thinking about the world rather than a doctrine. Those founders who either claimed to be Deists or were influenced by Deism were Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, James Madison, possibly Alexander Hamilton as well as less famous figures like Cornelius Harnett, Gouvenor Morris, and Hugh Williamson.
In short, fundamentalist Protestant thinking did not play a major role in the construction of the U.S. Constitution. It was reason that dominated the discussion. The whole balance of powers and checks and balances that were woven into that document was intended to ensure that no concentration of power could take place in any branch of government. Absolute power of any kind was something to be avoided or held in check.
Today in America there are no dominant religious gods except perhaps in the Bible Belts of the South. As an example of how the South is different, the Texas state school board just recently decided to subtract Thomas Jefferson from the list of influential figures that inspired revolutions in the 18th and 19th Centuries because he introduced the phrase “separation of church and state.”
During the 19th and 20th Centuries the Protestant god dominated the country and was used to inspire such fervors as Manifest Destiny in the 1840s and 1850s and Prohibition in the 1920s and 1930s. In the 1950s Joseph McCarthy latched on to an issue which initially and fervently appealed to his fellow Roman Catholics: the communist witch hunt. That issue brought the 20 percent of Americans who were Roman Catholic into the mainstream of religiously inspired causes embraced by a large segment of the Protestant mainstream and paved the way for the country’s acceptance of its first Roman Catholic President, John F. Kennedy in 1960.
However, although there are no nationally dominant gods, that does not prevent groups of Americans from promoting their gods as absolutes whenever possible. Whether it is the god of fundamentalist Christianity, the god of free enterprise, the god of government regulation, the god of anti-abortion, or the god of medical marijuana, America is full of folks who try to push their gods to dominance. Therefore, the founding fathers knew what they were about. Let us hope that this cauldron of vigorous monotheisms can still be transformed into a melting pot of ideas and a living, responsive but responsible set of laws rather than reducing itself to a one stock soup of narrow belief.
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