The Irony Of Secularism Being Held As Something Sacrosanct And Above Critical Analysis - Hate Mail Wrap Up

IF YOU'VE READ MUCH of what I've posted here, you will know that I have gone from skepticism about the so-called "enlightenment" which turned science from a method to find a few things about physical objects out into an ideological framing as a substitute for the religion that, at least in the latter day framing of those self-declaring enlightened ones, it replaced.  Or will, any day now.  While the cover story is that the light of science and the reason that those who rejected religion replaced it with was all explaining and all sufficient for not only understanding general descriptions of some of the simplest aspects of some of the simpler or simplified objects that could be observed, and with that would come the creation of a heaven on Earth, things didn't turn out that way.     

As no one who was honestly thinking about what science is and what it can do should ever have been unscientific enough and irrational enough to have ever said, never mind fallen for. The allegedly scientific regimes that have so far existed, from the French Revolution to the enduring Marxist states have been horrific hells. Their scientism endures, their materialism endures, whatever of Marx was a shadow of egalitarian religious morality was the first casualty as they found they could go from "socialism" to capitalism on steroids, grinding workers and the poor into raw materials of profit as the most ruthless of capitalists.  

In dealing with the claims of not only the ignorant scientistic boobs online but even some very sophisticated physical scientists, the bizarre notions as to what science was and was not, what it could do and what it certainly couldn't do, it's clear to me that no one should get a BS in any topic of science without a very serious knowledge of that being demonstrated.  The philosophical ignorance of scientists is a serious lapse, especially, so I read, in those who speak English though I think it's more extensive than that.  It's as clear to me that, given the role that the dismal "science" has played in that, scientists and science faculties around the globe should demand and enforce the removal of that label from economics, all of the "behavioral sciences," sociology and the other pseudo-sciences because they are not, never have been and never will be sciences but people stupid enough to believe they are, as judges, "justices" and politicians do, are friggin' dangerous.  

In the recent posts I've done about the problem of alleged "rights" and the real rights that living beings have, I've pointed out the role of the secularism which was the "enlightenment" solution to governments in a religiously and a-religiously pluralistic society and the consequences of that since every scheme of secularism I've ever looked into comes with the down-playing of morality and, as the scientism of a secular society develops, abandonment of the moral basis that equality and democracy require.*  

It is certainly not taken seriously when it is replaced by the secular-legalism that is what has really replaced Abrahamic belief in morality in the United States in the post-WWII era.  In that a dangerously vague notion of "rights" has replaced the more stringent moral demands that society and the state deliver equal justice which results in material and experienced equality.  The origin of that replacement of legalism for the moral basis of equality and democracy is related to but somewhat separate from the problem of scientism mentioned above.  In the elite, college-credentialed mainstream that substitution has always been going on since before the Revolutionary War and the establishment of the government, that elite, such as filled the leading roles in the law, in politics, in the clergy, even.  The devolution of liberal Calvinism into Unitarianism in much of New England came with a good part of that to the extent that when they came to establish what would become the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, they set it about as far from Harvard as they could manage within the state so as to lessen the influence of that devolution, at least that's what I've read being claimed about it. I like that story so I'm inclined to believe it.

But I think in 2022 to quibble about the influence of university based downgrading and bashing of the morality taught by Jesus, Moses, and the other Prophets is to focus on what is a minor influence compared to the glitzy, mind-bending, mind-monopolizing influence of mass media in the 20th century.  The more serious replacement for revealed religion than scientism is that old foil of it, Mammonism.  What, when media was something like a traditional American liberal novel like Uncle Tom's Cabin which could influence the moral sensibilities of mid-19th century America in favor of the abolition of slavery has, when it is shown on screens 24-7 and eats up most of whatever conscious life many if not most Americans have, apart from driving and work, the media is the predominant determinant in whatever results there are.

The results are not good.  

If it does not determine how most people think, it certainly heavily influences how they think and how an effectively destructive margin of them will tend to vote.  It's possible that the results, especially bad ones, in the actual experienced life of many People will have some power to overcome the oligarchic favoring propaganda of the entertainment they consume or the news, in rapidly descending power to move the nation.  Entertainment as a determinant of how the majority of Americans think is much more powerful than the bypassed "news" which consumes far less of most peoples' time.  Reagan and Trump are products of entertainment media, which should tell you something important.   

Whatever pitiful and often discrediting results "religious" broadcasting has, it will be mainly through them adopting the methods and practices and structure of entertainment programming, the differences not being denominational but media format.  There is the variety-show-night-club on-air "church," the home-shopping and infomercial, the pseudo-moral struggle of football or hockey or professional "wrestling" or the soap-opera. I think that is a modern version of the bizarre mixing of pagan-medieval Feudalism with tales and legends of quasi-religiously ordained knights and kings and a rigid class system that infected medieval Christianity and still has some sway, leading to a large amount of the discrediting as churches were identified with and became "kingdoms of the earth."

For example, it's no great mystery as to why the putrid billionaire-multi-millionaire financed astro-turf of "traditional Catholicism" is intent on turning the liturgy back into an incomprehensible medieval spectacle with Latin text, the most extreme of operatic garb such as the drag-queen outdoing Raymond Burke favors and absolutely no moral content except to despise and exclude LGBTQ+ and Catholics who divorce and remarry which, oddly, doesn't seem to exclude the likes of the Gingriches from the thing.  Critical as I can be over the self-hating excesses of many of my fellow gay males, especially in porn, I can't but be suspicious of anyone for whom "morality" means primarily nosing into the sex lives of others to find fault (or into the shopping cart of someone on food stamps). The fans of Pope Francis-hating trad-catholicism which is probably strongest in the media-addled United States imagine a golden age of Catholicism which never was, as seen on TV and in the movies.  A similar description with other details could describe any large influential right-wing religious operation.  The fact is that for the past fifty years the media has overwhelmingly presented that kind of thing as "Christianity" entirely ignoring real Christianity, whether Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox or unaffiliated.  It is no wonder that the generations most fed that, in their total ignorance of anything more authentic as Christianity, don't want to have anything to do with it. I don't want to have anything to do with it, either.

Comedy as a means of mocking and degrading anything that needs to be taken seriously is among the worst in that, even among some of those who should certainly know better.  In comedy, getting the laugh trumps everything and there is nothing like kicking religion around for that.  In that venue, it's the safest of powerless punching bags as that very unfunny comedian George Carlin settled on. Perhaps it is an indication of the nihilism that is an inevitable consequence of the down-grading of morality under a vague and general downgrading of any morality that costs you something, Trumpism certainly is and it began as a form of lite comic entertainment sharing the outrageous excessiveness that what passes as comedy consist of, today.

But, since just about anyone in the media was credentialed by and, to some extent, indoctrinated at a university or more, the influence of the general college and university culture on that, it is certainly a part of the whole thing.  That lecture by Walter Brueggemann on "Slow Wisdom" is about the best presentation of the collusion of universities and the culture of the "enlightenment" in our amorally corrupt liberal democracies in crisis I've ever heard.  If it's a choice of him or Hauerwas, Brueggemann is the more essential to listen to.  

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In Defense of Theology

I have long been tempted to write about the differences between the Black Liberation Theology of a James Cone and the Womanist theology strongly associated with Dolores Williams that has, to some extent, been critical of his focus on the resurrection power of suffering and martyrdom but I'm not qualified by my identity to do that discussion. I wish someone admiring both sides would or someone would point me to it.  Theology, unlike science, is not a producer of generalized universal descriptions and predictions and should not be attempted to come up with a universal system of thought.  The experience of a James Cone gives his view of Black Liberation theology a prophetic power which is no less than the prophetic power of the Black Women who do Womanist theology.  I've found both of those have more to tell a gay male quasi-Catholic than I could ever get to even if I had been smart enough to start when I was a lot younger than I did.  And things that are far more hazy and even confusing, which I'm sure is partly due to who I am and who I am not.  I can say the same thing about reading the Catholic Karl Rahner or even the quasi-theology of Marilynne Robinson.

The same could be said of many other present day and earlier theologians, many of whom disagreed with each other, some on some very basic things.  The reason for doing or reading theology isn't to come up with an accurate measure of abstracted, generalized objects in space or the possibilities of making atoms and molecules form new substances, it is to address real life that is far too complex for science to deal with.  In that it is far closer to egalitarian democratic politics than it is to science.  I think the framing of the enlightenment that opposed religion to government was wrong, I think the real problem is how to make the two work together to produce a world where people do to others what they would have done to them. If you were able to produce a political and legal system which both compelled people to do to others what they would have done to them, if you had a general culture in a society in which that was the primary focus and agreed to goal, equality and democracy would be the consequence.  If Christians or any other religion had done that among themselves, it would be seen as the greatest advance in human history, no secular ideology would have been able to touch it in terms of credibility or respectability, the ancient Athenians would have been seen for the oligarchic gangsters they were, the Roman Republic for the same thing.

Of course you have to start out with that intention in both or it won't work but the enlightenment model doesn't do that any better so its failure to produce what the age of alleged "Christendom" didn't and which liberal democracy certainly doesn't would seem to require us to going back to the idea of egalitarian reciprocal moral obligations which was never really tried in any but the earliest period of Christianity and, from what evidence we have, not universally successfully then, either. Paul, James, etc. had to exhort their followers and fellow Christians to do that in the earliest days.  I agree with Stanley Hauerwas and others that the Constantinian co-opting of the Christian Church was a disaster for the moral character of Christianity, one which we have not, yet, overcome on anything like a sufficient basis.  

* Equality is the foremost guarantee of a decent society, a decent life, a decent government. Nothing that doesn't strive for physical, social and economic equality should ever be considered a democracy.  It is a shame that that old Greek word which began as the name for a government of male oligarchs from old families should have ever been adopted for the striving to make a government in which all are equal and expected and required to do to others what they would have done to them.  Perhaps as an indication of just how unscientific the study of political-economics is, those who adopted that word and continued to use it for something supposed to be quite different didn't notice the discrepancy.  Really equal in effect is either what American Democracy will be or it will be just another variation on the kind of gangster governance favoring the few which Republican-fascists and Trumpians and the majority on the Roberts Court want it to be.  What I'd guess most people in TV, the movies and the radio want it to be, a few wishy-washy egalitarians in front of the camera and as writers, excepted, a little.  As someone pointed out the other day, American conservatism has never, ever, been egalitarian and so was never genuinely democratic.

UPDATE: Re-reading the above, I wouldn't be surprised if the "trad-catholics" had their way that they would eventually overturn the reform that came as late as Pius XII in which the Gospel was read in the vernacular so that those attending mass could understand it.  I'm pretty sure that the financiers of that heresy would figure out that they didn't want Catholics hearing, from time to time, that they were to not worship Mammon, that line about camels passing through the eyes of a needle, doing to the least among you, etc.  They and those addled cultists they've gulled through the network of the wicked Mother Angelica and other neo-fascist Catholic media are truly sinister, as the number of really evil Republican converts to it will indicate.  They've already gotten a majority on the Supreme Court through the Federalist fascist Society.  I pray good Pope Francis will live long enough to appoint smarter Cardinals of good will who will elect the next Pope who will continue his attempt to make Catholicism more Christian than his two immediate predecessors left it. Though I would expect there will be a major schism as the billionaires take their captive church out of it.