Religion As An Activity Engaged In By Consenting Adults In Private

Philip, “consensus” is not the same as “fact” … otherwise, Galileo would have been wrong.

From evolution to climate change, I see secularists playing the role of the Catholic Church in today’s version of the Galileo drama … a belief that we KNOW, even though we CAN’T know the whole story because of the time scale involved … and that those who Know have the right to declare those who disagree as ignorant, simply because they refuse to confess that they Know.

It is a convenient tool to discredit those who one might disagree with on other issues … especially when one desires to sit with the Cool Kids at lunch time, and be thought of as “cool” and “enlightened” and “intellectual” themselves.

But it is not truthful.

@ RTR: well, I have no idea what The Truth is, or even if there is such a thing.Scientific knowledge in general is not predicated on absolute certainty but on empirical testing and convergent scientific evidence. So we are dealing with probabilities, rather than certainty (if only religion could open itself up to this sort of reasoning!). All the evidence we have, across biology,paleontology, genetics,ecology, etc, point to the conclusion that all life on Earth is related by common descent. I would say that it is now incontrovertible. But thats not to say that there aren’t disagrements about the finer points.
I know nothing about climate change. P

Religion and traditional values can be revived. But it will take the following:

o Conservatives abandoning public schooling (at all levels) and create and run schools and learning centers they can run their own way, with conservative morality.

o Conservatives building a much bigger media system–for communication, news, comment, and entertainment.

o Conservatives ending the fraud of the normal “gay” and building up a conservatively grounded psychological/mental health system. (www.narth.com)

o Conservatives bringing psychotherapeutic services and family life coaching to all sectors of society. Self-control is an emotional as well as an intellectual matter. Narcissism often runs deep, and has to be treated skillfully.

o Conservatives fostering a culture of chastity for singles and developing lots of ways for chaste singles of all ages to find and get to know each other.

o Conservatives building up our private sector forces in social work, criminal rehabilitation, foster care/adoption, adapted employment for the noncompetitive, and so forth. Society needs to know that the conservatives have the help that really helps.

o Giving our successful efforts a lot of publicity. Making sure Republican politicians and other leaders are talking about our good work.

Interesting historical observation-

The social mores of today quite closely resemble those of Regency England. Regency England was followed quite closely by none other than the Victorian Age, when Europe (led by those stuffy, prudish, arch-social-conservative English) technologically leapt ahead of preceding generations and took over most of the rest of the world.

People who think that progressing from our current licentious era to one of more traditional values is unlikely or impossible just don’t read their history very carefully.

Modern Europe’s influence is on the wane, perhaps terminally. The rest of the world will become ever more important, influential, and ready to question Europe’s recent adventures in social engineering. It’s just as likely — perhaps more likely — that the social consensus that emerges will resemble what the majority of humanity has always held, rather than the ideas of Europe in its decline. Honestly, what conclusion should the rest of the world draw, when it compares the dying Europe of today with the rising, dynamic Europe of the 19th century?

It would be interesting to try to somehow find a way to get beyond assertons about the reason(s) for the rise of “aggressive secularism” and to try to use the scientific method to identify the reasons why people have left the churches, and to quantify which reasons have had the most impact.

A few different reasons have been asserted in the article and ensuing discussion.

So far, no one has mentioned some of the (additional) reasons that were important to me, as someone who grew up as a very devout evangelical, who then identified as secular for a while, and who is now a (very, very, liberal) Jew (who doesn’t take scriptures as historic or scientific fact). Here are some of my reasons:

1. The arrogance: Having to believe that I knew more than any obviously kind, smart, conscientious non-Christian person,and that I had nothing to learn from them spiritually but they had everything to learn from me.

2. The dissonance: Explicit directions from God in the Torah and Jesus in the New Testament to do things that as far as I am concerned are obviously “sinful,” “evil,” or just manifestly wrong. I’m too lazy to get the citations but the religiously knowlegeable here will remember that in Exodus God tells Moses to commit genocide against the inhabitants of Canaan, and that Jesus tells people to “hate” their father and mother. (For those of you who are inclined to rescue the text through exegetical contortions, that may work for you but it doesn’t for me.) Not to mention the (to me) unrelentingly violent, vindictive, and hateful God depicted in the book of Revelation. And I am well aware that other religions have “texts of terror” (as some scholars have called them)>

3. The sexism and the racism. As a young person in my twenties, I actually did try to find my way back into Christianity through various venues…at one point I was attracted to Catholicism, despite the male only priesthood, becuase of the racial diversiy of the congregations where I lived at the time (compared to the informally segregated Protestant congregations). But when I heard the priest say, basically, that women are to men as humans are to God, that was a bridge too far. I walked out and never looked back.

From descriptions of Silver’s classroom I’ve read elsewhere, I think she crossed the line into proselytizing.

As a Jewish kid, I had an elementary school teacher whom I knew was a devout Christian, who was also a great teacher. However, she gave my home address to members of her evangelical church, who came often to my house in between the time I came home from school and when my parents came home from work. They left Bible tracts, which seemed foreign and absurd to me. Initially I hid them from my parents because I didn’t want the teacher to get into trouble, and when I did tell my parents about the visitors, I didn’t tell them they were sent by my teacher.
We stopped answering the door, and one day my brother made a mound of the Bible tracts they had left and set it on fire in front of our house just before the evangelicals arrived.

Overheard in a coffee shop: Swedish single women are free to pick a boyfriend for what they are rather than their income because the state guarantees their standard of living. So a possible nuance to Berger’s hypothesis is that any threat to the welfare state — e.g., religion — is a threat to their freedom to pick a near-do well or a Bohemian as a boyfriend. And you can take that to the bank!

It should be, but if you look at the leftist response, seen in several places on this thread, it won’t be.

Part of the problem is one of omission. Many churches, especially conservative ones, staked SO much of their credibility on sex that they lost the ability to discuss other aspects of society. Poverty, racism, greed, war, inequality, many of these issues were ignored by churches.

And we found that there was nothing wrong with being gay. Nothing wrong with sex before marriage (proper and responsible precautions). We DID see the conservative churches siding with those who oppressed blacks all the while shrieking about sex.

So it’s not sexual ethics, but the fact these churches have made themselves irrelevant. Now that they have, hostility to regulation of personal behavior is an inevitable outcome.

Wow! What a wonderful range of views. With 66 comments, this is the largest response I’ve seen so far. I feel as though I’ve stumbled onto a giant cock tail party. I’m in agreement with George Bernard Shaw’s comment, when told that people at dinner parties in polite society didn’t discuss politics, religion, or sex, that those are the only topics worthy of discussing. And Berger and commenters here have not disappointed, with many being interesting and informative and enlightening reads.

From my perspective, Wig Wag is correct about her general comment (Berger writes the most interesting blog) and his specific comment (Berger has bigger fish to fry). In a word, Berger is interested in the curiosities of human behavior all along the biographical progression of life (hence the title of his text book, “Sociology: A Biographical Approach”). From his Sociology of Knowledge standpoint, he is interested in everything that passes for knowledge and why. The key words are “passes” for knowledge and “why”. Thus, nothing is left out nor locked up in separate drawers.

This is why It seems to me that those overlaying strict “I know” about Berger in their critiques miss the fine tuning Berger brings to this exploration of what he finds curious abd why, causing me, as a newbie, to scratch my own curiosity and look up his first blog essay of July 9, 2010, (I’m tempted to say something about its proximity to July 4th, but I’ll resist).

It was helpful. Having read his recent memoir and other works such as Pyramids of Sacrifice (an exploration of the socialist and capitalist development models), The Capitalist Revolution and The Homeless Mind, I have a better understanding of his sociological map than I do of the various cognitive maps of contributors. The anonymous aspects of many contributors also clouds the various social and political “locations” that may or may not help interpreting their contributions better as well.

The “big curious” in this essay are three, as I understand the essay:
(1) the attorney “compared the treatment of his client’s religion with measures of disease control. This is not an attitude one would expect to find in a Western democracy. It is curiously reminiscent of policies toward religion in Communist countries and toward non-Muslims under Islamic rule.
(2) that the survey data shows love-they-neighbor” Christian churches identified “with intolerance and repression.”
(3) his curiosity leading him to this thesis: “American secularism is in defense of the sexual revolution.”

What wonderful responses from so many. Much to ponder and consider, and much to look forward to in future essays and responses, especially when coming back to Berger’s key question expressed in his recent memoir, “What is an acceptable model of development?” (p. 129).

From his global comparisons and “the weight of evidence” from his research, he writes that “I came down clearly on the side of capitalism as the only viable model of development” (p. 135), that has raised more people out of poverty than any other. There is relevance here to the sexual revolution.

His other major change of mind, again based on the weight of evidence, he no longer adheres to the secularization theory (p. 135), that although “modernity produces pluralism, pluralism does not necessarily produce secularity” with no “world view” able to be “taken for granted” and that “individuals have to choose among the different world views,” some of which will be religious, and that, in fact, “in most of the contemporary world they are” (p. 99).

As I wrote in my late response to his Jan 23rd essay, humanism and sociology and religion are not, in Berger’s view, in any way mutually exclusive. In my late response to his January 16 essay, I used Berger’s thought experiment of what would a Martian think and ask about the nature of our society on their first visit to our planet.

That leaves me to be a Martian and ask (be curious) as to the various responses to this essay to Berger’s “sociological hypothesis” that “The new American secularism is in defense of the sexual revolution.” I’ve had a number of young ladies knock on my door with various petitions related to various environmental and other Oregon causes (so far, all liberal). When they bring up “liberation of women” and comments like “our turn,” I deliberately ask Martian-like questions, but only as an information seeker, not as a debater (they are not convertible).

What surprises me is their almost complete unawareness of the difference between women liberated in this country and not liberated in so many others, combined with their inability to grasp that women, in the days of nursing one, having a second tug on their skirt, with a third growing in their uterus, not to mention short life spans for men and women, there was not much room for other activity in the “man’s world” and “woman’s world.” They still speak resentfully of being oppressed rather than celebrate being liberated by modern technology (birth control) and liberal social mores (hooking up, living unmarried without Scarlet Letters around their necks).

Much research has gone into demonstrating the negatives involved for many in this ideology of the sexual revolution. In their book “Red Families v. Blue Families,” Naomi Cahn and June Carbone argue that however their attempt to navigate post-sexual revolution America without relying on abortion, there is a divergence by education and class, influencing how abortion seems, both morally and practically, to have “the big secret…[that] very few are willing to discuss … that abortion rates do seem to correlate with greater commitment to marriage.” So, “In conservative communities, the hardening of anti-abortion attitudes may have increased the acceptance of single-parent families. And by contrast, in less conservative communities, the willingness to accept abortion has helped create more stable families. Of the “40 percent of children now born to women who aren’t married,” the majority are non-elite, non-college educated. The majority of elite women with college education abort and wait for marriage and thus have far rewer babies out of wedlock and thus do not go on to raise them as single mothers but wait to raise them in marriage. Very curious indeed.

An even greater curious part of this aspect of the sexual revolution, according to sociologists Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker, in their “Premarital Sex in America,” is that “the evidence of religious influence on sexual decision-making is slim,” making it very secular indeed, suggesting Berger is spot-on when he says “the new American secularism is in defense of the sexual revolution

What is missed by many in the responses to this blog essay “religion as between consenting adults,” is Berger’s sense of humor. My sense is that he is chuckling a great deal reading these responses. He famously wrote in the 1960s, that things “should not be taken so seriously that they preclude the capacity for laughter.” And 35 years later he wrote a book entitled, “Redeeming Laugher.” Any who have read his books know about his sense of humor. The “chastity belt” usage was his sense of humor kicking in. His placing the Silver incident in the “Burnt-Over District” signals the wide range of understanding that he has of the various “revolutions,” and that he clearly understands what Shaw meant when Shaw wrote “there is only one religion though there are a hundred versions of it.” The phrase by Catholics is that “all roads lead to Rome.” That was common term in the BCE period and referred to the Roman road system throughout the empire all leading back to the center of their empire: Rome. The Roman Catholic church appropriated everything about new lands, and thus uses it to suggest all religions come back to the center: Rome.

Thus for us, where will our curiosities take us as we attempt to unravel how do we bring all of the “One Way” political and religious roads to engage progress (whether regarding technological advances or regarding an ideology about the evolution of human beings) to bear for the best development in terms of society, technology, bureaucracy, and governing, especially in the areas of education, jobs, housing, and governing?

It’s really simple: Ms. Silver doesn’t have to “stop being a Christian” when she comes to school… but when she comes to school, her personal views on religion are not to be discussed or displayed via posters or prayer boxes. The *same* rules go for an atheist teacher (unless we’re okay with a “God is fake” poster in some classrooms), so she is clearly not being discriminated against.

Also, the “militantly secularist” student and the “militantly secularist” organization defending them don’t appear to be forcing atheistic values on anyone, they are merely supporting the Constitution (no establishment, anyone?) and the rule that public entities should not promote any single religious viewpoint over others.

Don’t forget that if Ms. Silver wins her battle, somewhere in the U.S. we will have a “God is fake” poster on the wall, a prominent Quran on the bookshelf, and a Book of Mormon on a desk, and Wiccan tracts on a table, and you won’t be able to remove any of them. Beware of what you ask for!

It isn’t a question of Government overreach for the teacher to be told not to preach to her children. If I walked into a classroom and ‘Allah is the answer’, ‘Vishnu loves you’ or any other religious nonsense was being forced on me I would complain too… And I imagine that most Americans would vociferously complain if the religion was not Christianity. The point is, children are obliged by law to be in that class to learn about factual events and concepts, the teachers totally unfounded hypotheses on how the World came into being does not fit under that category and its totally inappropriate for her to be using her position to force her beliefs on people.