The Optimism of Religion Is A More Promising Framing For Making Progress Towards Equal Justice Than Secularism

In Wisdom is a spirit
intelligent, holy, unique,
Manifold, subtle, agile,
clear, unstained, certain,
Not baneful, loving the good, keen,
unhampered, beneficent, kindly,
Firm, secure, tranquil,
all-powerful, all-seeing,
And pervading all spirits,
though they be intelligent, pure and very subtle.
For Wisdom is mobile beyond all motion,
and she penetrates and pervades all things by reason of her purity.
For she is an aura of the might of God
and a pure effusion of the glory of the Almighty;
therefore nought that is sullied enters into her.
For she is the refulgence of eternal light,
the spotless mirror of the power of God,
the image of his goodness.
And she, who is one, can do all things,
and renews everything while herself perduring;
And passing into holy souls from age to age,
she produces friends of God and prophets.
For there is nought God loves, be it not one who dwells with Wisdom.
For she is fairer than the sun
and surpasses every constellation of the stars.
Compared to light, she takes precedence;
for that, indeed, night supplants,
but wickedness prevails not over Wisdom.
The Book of Wisdom 7:22-30

Notice to start with, that Wisdom is a Woman.

This passage was part of the Catholic liturgy on November 16th, I made a note to myself to write a post about it, then I unwisely lost it and just found it again.  It was tempting to begin with a long account of an argument I got into with a callow old atheist at Media Matters, one in which it took me several days to realize he was arguing out of atheist blog posts that didn't know much of anything about such things as the difference between The Apocrypha and apocryphal gospels, the fact that Protestants, Orthodox and other Christians didn't depend on the Council of Trent to codify the Biblical canon(s) of various churches.  I tracked that bit of ignorance back to Wikipedia during the brawl.

But what I really wanted to note was how much more optimistic, in every way, the conception of wisdom in the Hebrew scriptures is, how much more of a value it places on wisdom and the nature of it than the materialist, scientistic, atheist view of intelligence and consciousness is.  How Wisdom, in this passage, is identified as the organizational principle and origin of the material universe as well as everything else, the instrument of the creation.   Compare that to the currently popular view of intelligence and consciousness as a problem for atheists to explain into insignificance or nonexistence because they cannot reduce those, as experienced by human beings, into elementary particles and gravity.  That is an ongoing project of atheists since well before the 19th century and though idiots scribbling popular books about Lucretius will identify it as some great cultural breakthrough into some fashion based view of "modernism" it cannot be done without coming up with something that demotes consciousness and intelligence into meaninglessness.

I don't remember which historian it was who noted that, contrary to current popular conceptions of things, that the early history of Christianity was the replacement of a pessimistic, negative paganism with the same kind of optimistic positive view of things that this passage represents.  The Christian view of life, derived from the Jewish view of life, elevated the status of people, including women, especially including Children from objects exploitable for use, into persons of entirely different status.  That was the meaning of The Gospels, the extent to which future Christian authorities and figures deviated from that was, generally, the extent to which they regressed to an anti-Christian, materialistic, view of human beings as objects for use and disposal.   There can be little question that if Christian leaders and rulers had stuck with the elevated, egalitarian view of poeple as rightly the possessors of rights and the receivers and givers of justice, there would be no negative association with the word "Christian".

Today's Catholic liturgy is named The Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe, which must be something fairly new because I don't remember it when I was younger.  What is striking about that is that the liturgy doesn't include weighty assertions of the supremacy of Jesus Christ, no involved theological discourses on the greatness of the Christ,  it includes the famous Gospel reading from Matthew 25 in which it is stated that people will be judged on how they treat the least among us.

For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, a stranger and you welcomed me, naked and you clothed me, ill and you cared for me, in prison and you visited me.

And note that last one, in particular.  Prisoners, which would have béen understood to not have comprised, exclusively, those considered the deserving poor, but some of the worst criminals there were, people who did terrible things, committed terrible sins as well as those unjustly put there.

What a different view of the universe, of the human species than one based on survival of the fittest, in which the weak, the downtrodden, the mentally ill, etc. were to be wiped out on the basis of optimizing reproductive advantage and what is considered fitness.  Those, the least among us are given the status as deserving the same treatment that God would be given.  I don't know of any secular, any atheist political theory that takes such an elevated view of human beings, especially the least among us, or which is so liable to produce egalitarian democracy and justice as that.