THE PASSAGE from Abraham Joshua Heschel's essay, No Religion is an Island I took out for my first post on it begins where I left off, I've got some things to say about it.
The Psalmist's great joy is in proclaiming : "Truth and mercy have met together" ( Ps. 85:11 ). Yet so frequently faith and the lack of mercy enter a union, out of which bigotry is born, the presumption that my faith, my motivation, is pure and holy, while the faith of those who differ in creed - even those in my own community - is impure and unholy. How can we be cured of bigotry, presumption, and the foolishness of believing that we have been triumphant while we have all been defeated?
One thing that jumps out this morning is that Heschel pointed out that it isn't only between different denominations that give rise to a lack of mercy giving birth to bigotry, it is also found within denominations and within congregations. That gives lie to several of the commonly recited condemnations of religion, that it fosters and requires uniformity of belief, that it requires uniformity of expression and that it isn't open to that freedom of thought that so many of the opponents of religion assure us is a delusion of folk psychology.
Since I'm going down my own memory lane this morning, the time in the early 00's when some online self-styled village tap room atheist "free thinker" made the statement that "science had proved free will was a myth" was one of the turning points in my thinking on these things. What, I wondered, were we all doing there whining and complaining about the loss of democracy if it was all based on a myth. Within two years I became convinced that these questions are a lot more important and explained for more of the total failure and impotence of the secular left than they did about minds and consciousness. From that imitation of a bold barroom atheist one afternoon in the 00's, all of this started for me.
But Heschel as theologians and honestly concerned believers in The God talked about in the Scriptures do, he concentrates on things that are far more important than those entertaining academic questions that secularism demands are all important.
Is it not clear that in spite of fundamental disagreements there is a convergence of some of our commitments, of some of our views, tasks we have in common, evils we must fight together, goals we share, a predicament afflicting us all?
As clear as global warming, the obscene and growing wealth gap under the instrumental reasoning of modernism, the rise of neo-fascist, neo-Nazism under the reign of free speech, free press relieved of an obligation to not lie, let's not forget nuclear extinction and a thousand other ancient and modern depravities, it's inescapable that fight against evils and predicaments, the goals that Heschel points to not being fun or diverting or the kind of thing that those trained by modern education to not value more than their entertainment, religion is going to be the only thing that moves societies toward their solution, the only thing that contains the idea that there will be consequences and that other people are more important than our pleasures. Secularism can't even enforce a belief that our own posterity is more important than that, Mammon certainly doesn't contain it. Entertainment might present a false possibility of the kind of enlightened dictators, movie and novel saviors that in real life are rarer than Seaborgium. And as reliably durable. It's clear that many highly educated Americans believed in such enlightened dictatorship even as the evidence showed that wasn't only a lie but one of the biggest lies with the highest body counts in human history.
We seldom put modernism, secularism to the kinds of tests that religion is put to in terms of credibility of results and when that is done the issues are defined and the deck is stacked against religion and for modernism and secularism. Those are the rules of that game as played among the respectable and credentialed just as they were when the disreputable prophets made their critiques of the rulers of Judah and Israel. There is a lecture by Brueggemann on that which I'm very tempted to transcribe and turn into a series but which I'll link to for now.
That is the real heart of the matter, as real as the cry of the Children of Israel in their slavery and oppression which is the central core around which all of the Scripture, Jewish and Christian and, so Islamic, is built and against which all of the opposition to it is set.
I will try to post on Heschel's essay every day until I get to the end of it. I'm not as good at doing these series as I once was.
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