Religion and Politics again
The following is a response to an article of Olga Bonfiglio published on Common Dreams website, where she asks, "Where was God at Virginia Tech", then procedes to offer a series of inanities breathtaking in there flight from the world. The original discussion can be found at:
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/05/07/1018/
Two things: First, I don’t know why the question “how can I believe in God..?” has anything to do with the Virginia Tech massacre, except to those already in the midst of a religious crisis. Second, even granting the legitimacy of the question, one would be hard put to find a convincing argument answering it anywhere in the subsequent text. Telling us to buck up, don’t give up, come together to create a new world, are all lovely and useful sentiments, but biological imperatives urge them quite as forcefully as moral or religious ones. I fail to see, also, how calling Cho insane -- which he clearly was -- involves one in a process of denial. As he had been hospitalized involuntarily as a “danger to himself or others,” surely advocating from the knowledge of his insanity for a strict regime of background checks that would keep guns out of the hands of those with similar mental health problems is not a form of despair or denial. Or is this word policing, where “insane” is deemed impolite, even though it points to large scale, observable, public truths. The rush these days to drag God or -- worse -- religion into every public forum bodes ill for our democracy built -- despite what the religious right wrongfully assumes -- on secular, enlightenment values. Hilary and Obama may enjoy wearing their faith on their sleeves; perhaps it makes them feel like good, upstanding parts of the believing majority. It does nothing to further human understanding or reduce misery in the world, too often the direct result of religious fanaticism. Why this article even appeared on Common Dreams -- a progressive POLITICAL site as far as I understood-- is beyond me. Politically, Virginia Tech ought to make us question public policy on guns; politically, it has nothing to do with God. God is in his heaven; everything is decidedly NOT all right with the world, and it’s up to us to fix it, not by sublimating our anger but by taking the energy it generates into direct public action. Why should we not be angry when the Brady Laws, no longer in force, might well have stopped this young man? It is condescending in the extreme to talk of people who “go on with their lives without thought or reflection” in the face an event of this kind. Who are they? Not, as far as those that I know, people who, not having a Teddy Bear god to hug themselves to sleep at night, have to actually DO something: write to their representative, or newspaper at the very least. I love long walks, and take one daily with my dog. It’s for me; it’s for my dog; it’s our time. It will not, however, change the world, no matter how many nice thoughts I have during my reflections. If to terrorism or mass killing all progressives can offer is “coming together to transform our communities”, we should all expect the right wing loons to keep winning public office. Facing the Taliban and Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan we should have hunted them down and utterly destroyed them instead of getting into the very foreseeable (and foreseen) mess in Iraq. That the administration, full of religious fervor, failed to accomplish that could well result in a Taliban-like regime controlling Pakistans nuclear weapons. Squishy feel-goodism is not going to unburden us of Sunni fanaticism. Our neighborhoods need transforming, but it will take more than a virtuous private affect to accomplish that; it will take public action and a renewal in public policy toward the needs of ordinary citizens. The psychologization of the progressive left (see The Human Condition of Hannah Arendt) has left it increasingly ineffective for several decades now. The public realm is about action that can be taken together, about policy; it has nothing to do with and nothing to say to private feelings or private faith. Those things may determine where we stand on an issue; they are not the issue itself and should interest no one but a psychological voyeur. Let’s leave God out of public debate. The history of his inclusion therein is drenched in blood. Those interested in the problem of evil under a good god might want to read Voltaire’s poem on the Lisbon earthquake of 1755. Here are four lines, translated (sorry) by me; “Of the whole I am but a meager part,True, but the animals, condemned from the start,All sentient beings, born beneath the same decree,Live in suffering and die, alike, like me.”We don’t need theology to tell us that human suffering must move us to compassion to be useful. Of itself, suffering is random and banal. Making it narcissistically meaningful affords us consolation, but unless that moves into the world through increased compassion, the world experiences none of its saving potential. It is we who are in the response, at least as much of it as it is given to humankind to see.
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/05/07/1018/
Two things: First, I don’t know why the question “how can I believe in God..?” has anything to do with the Virginia Tech massacre, except to those already in the midst of a religious crisis. Second, even granting the legitimacy of the question, one would be hard put to find a convincing argument answering it anywhere in the subsequent text. Telling us to buck up, don’t give up, come together to create a new world, are all lovely and useful sentiments, but biological imperatives urge them quite as forcefully as moral or religious ones. I fail to see, also, how calling Cho insane -- which he clearly was -- involves one in a process of denial. As he had been hospitalized involuntarily as a “danger to himself or others,” surely advocating from the knowledge of his insanity for a strict regime of background checks that would keep guns out of the hands of those with similar mental health problems is not a form of despair or denial. Or is this word policing, where “insane” is deemed impolite, even though it points to large scale, observable, public truths. The rush these days to drag God or -- worse -- religion into every public forum bodes ill for our democracy built -- despite what the religious right wrongfully assumes -- on secular, enlightenment values. Hilary and Obama may enjoy wearing their faith on their sleeves; perhaps it makes them feel like good, upstanding parts of the believing majority. It does nothing to further human understanding or reduce misery in the world, too often the direct result of religious fanaticism. Why this article even appeared on Common Dreams -- a progressive POLITICAL site as far as I understood-- is beyond me. Politically, Virginia Tech ought to make us question public policy on guns; politically, it has nothing to do with God. God is in his heaven; everything is decidedly NOT all right with the world, and it’s up to us to fix it, not by sublimating our anger but by taking the energy it generates into direct public action. Why should we not be angry when the Brady Laws, no longer in force, might well have stopped this young man? It is condescending in the extreme to talk of people who “go on with their lives without thought or reflection” in the face an event of this kind. Who are they? Not, as far as those that I know, people who, not having a Teddy Bear god to hug themselves to sleep at night, have to actually DO something: write to their representative, or newspaper at the very least. I love long walks, and take one daily with my dog. It’s for me; it’s for my dog; it’s our time. It will not, however, change the world, no matter how many nice thoughts I have during my reflections. If to terrorism or mass killing all progressives can offer is “coming together to transform our communities”, we should all expect the right wing loons to keep winning public office. Facing the Taliban and Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan we should have hunted them down and utterly destroyed them instead of getting into the very foreseeable (and foreseen) mess in Iraq. That the administration, full of religious fervor, failed to accomplish that could well result in a Taliban-like regime controlling Pakistans nuclear weapons. Squishy feel-goodism is not going to unburden us of Sunni fanaticism. Our neighborhoods need transforming, but it will take more than a virtuous private affect to accomplish that; it will take public action and a renewal in public policy toward the needs of ordinary citizens. The psychologization of the progressive left (see The Human Condition of Hannah Arendt) has left it increasingly ineffective for several decades now. The public realm is about action that can be taken together, about policy; it has nothing to do with and nothing to say to private feelings or private faith. Those things may determine where we stand on an issue; they are not the issue itself and should interest no one but a psychological voyeur. Let’s leave God out of public debate. The history of his inclusion therein is drenched in blood. Those interested in the problem of evil under a good god might want to read Voltaire’s poem on the Lisbon earthquake of 1755. Here are four lines, translated (sorry) by me; “Of the whole I am but a meager part,True, but the animals, condemned from the start,All sentient beings, born beneath the same decree,Live in suffering and die, alike, like me.”We don’t need theology to tell us that human suffering must move us to compassion to be useful. Of itself, suffering is random and banal. Making it narcissistically meaningful affords us consolation, but unless that moves into the world through increased compassion, the world experiences none of its saving potential. It is we who are in the response, at least as much of it as it is given to humankind to see.
posted by Lawrence Austin at 11:19 PM
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