Obama at Notre Dame

At Notre Dame, Obama Defends His Abortion Stance - NYTimes.com

President Obama directly confronted America’s deep divide over abortion on Sunday as he appealed to partisans on both sides to find ways to respect one another’s basic decency and even work together to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies. As anti-abortion leaders protested his appearance at the University of Notre Dame, the nation’s storied Catholic university, Mr. Obama defended his support for abortion rights but called for more “open hearts, open minds, fair-minded words” in the debate that has polarized the country for decades.

Well, Obama got it right on this one, though the persisting Religious Right won't be convinced and Progressives will make a show of yapping and whining. Embedded in the political rhetoric was the hard kernel: abortion is a moral issue about which rational, educated, informed people of good will disagree. Pro-choice advocates aren't baby-killers; pro-life partisans aren't out to enslave women.

Will Obama succeed in de-politicizing abortion? I doubt it. It would mean winding back 30 years of history, during which the personal became political and economic issues were eclipsed by Culture Wars. During that time conservative Evangelical Protestants who ignored abortion as a "Catholic thing" during the run-up to Roe v. Wade got on board with the pro-life agenda in order to form a political alliance with Catholics and Progressives made abortion a litmus test because fighting for "women's right to choose" was easier than fighting for affirmative action to end sex segregation in the labor force--and, of course, more sexy.

But, who knows? Then we were riding high and could afford to worry about "lifestyle issues." Now the economy dominates everything and the lower classes, dangling over the abyss of unemployment and forclosure, don't have the leisure to worry about the rights of stem cells.

Obama did good. The Religious Right rump will keep waving signs showing dismembered fetuses and conventional feminists will froth at the mouth about his support for abortion reduction but most Americans will support him.

The Next Christendom

Amazon.com: The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity: Philip Jenkins: Books

Fear of Islam is peaking, fueled by reports that the religion is burgeoning in numbers as well as militancy. Jenkins grants that Islam is indeed booming but marshals the evidence that today's largest religion, Christianity, will grow exponentially, too, and will remain the faith of the largest proportion of humanity. But the Christianity of 2050 will be very different from that molded by the 1,300 years during which Christianity was the faith of a rapidly developing Europe. The new Christianity will be liturgically anarchistic compared with the staid services of white, upper-middle-class people today. It will be overwhelmingly the faith of poor nonwhites living south of Europe, the U.S., and present-day Russia, and it won't reflect the values of the wealthy global north. It will revive Christianity's root emphases on healing and prophecy because its adherents will resemble the poor and oppressed who first embraced the redemption, the healing, and the blessing that Jesus promised.

I've been reading this book which is a wonderful read but remarkably depressing. In addition to making a compelling case that Christianity will become the religion of the barbarians, Jenkins argues en passent that the barbarians will take over, through immigration and outbreeding.

If that's correct it's the end of the Roman Empire. The effete secular Epicureans of the near-sterile Senatorial class bewailing the decline in standards while the barbarians sack Rome. Aging Europeans (and Americans) will be swamped by young immigrants from the Third World breeding innumerable children. The barbarians--the brutal beasts who beat up women and whose life's goal is to fuck and impregnate as many as possible--will win. The illiterate, superstitious barbarians who join the church because it promises healing and material benefits will remake it in their image.

I'm not entirely convinced this will happen because the sects that working class strivers, including immigrants, join are potent forces for social mobility--and even in the US, social mobility is a lot better than it was 1500 years ago. So our barbarians will be civilized--develop habits of thrift and prudence, make money and see to it that their kids are educated. Those kids will establish half-way covenants, and their kids will be completely assimilated and secular. It took 1000 years to civilize the northern European barbarians but these days it only takes three generations to make a gentleman.

Still it's lousy either way. Either you have religion preserved under the auspices of barbaric holy rollers, the end of the Enlightenment and of liberal Christianity, or you have the inevitable march of secularism, with only a brief pause for the time it takes the barbarians to become civilized. I suppose that if I had to choose I'd pick secularism over a return to barbarism.

Jenkins is certainly right in noting that the charismatic Christianity that flourishes in the Global South and amongst immigrants to the Global North is closer to the Christianity of the New Testament than the respectable, institutionalized European version, which is dying out. But this kind of authenticity has never interested me.

Why, I wonder are we stuck with Hobson's choice between liberal, increasingly anti-religious secularism and a Christianity that is becoming increasingly conservative by attrition as the educated, liberal elite abandon religious practice altogether? Why didn't Christianity go the way of Greek religion which evolved into a system of cults and practices that could accommodate everyone from upper crust Epicureans who regarded the gods as no more than allegorical figures, monotheists who regarded them either as manifestations of the one God or lesser, semi-divine beings, and illiterate peasants who worshiped the stones and stocks at the boundaries of their fields?

Some guesses. Christianity was from very early on doctrinal: it included a package of beliefs which, over time, were made more specific. To be a Christian was, minimally, to sign on with those beliefs. In spite of the fact that according to one poll a small but significant proportion of self-identified Christians of various denominations say they don't believe in God, the idea that one would identify as a Christian and take part in liturgy without believing seems pointless given this understanding of religion as fundamentally doctrinal and liturgy as an expression of doctrine.

Moreover, religious practices have become divorced from civic and patriotic celebrations in a way that no one until recent times could have imagined. Anyone can participate in the civic events but participation in liturgy is, at least in theory, reserved for those who have made a doxastic commitment. Historically, as the requirements for orthodoxy grew increasingly stringent, fewer and fewer people could conscientiously commit to orthodoxy. In the past this was the root of sectarianism. And it was a matter of dumb luck which sect ended up setting the standard. In the East, Orthodoxy became the orthodoxy by a fluke. If Constantinople hadn't hung on until the 15th century, long after north Africa and Asia had fallen to the Turks, Monophysitism or Nestorianism might have been the orthodox industry standard in the East.

Currently however the response of most dissenters is not to form sects or alternative churches but to drop religious practice altogether. Since citizens don't, as a part of their ordinary civic involvement, need to participate in religious rituals, and since they see no point in doing so, they drop out.

The trend is self-perpetuating. As dissenters, skeptics and merely nominal Christians drop out of the Church, the Righteous Remnant becomes increasingly homogeneous and conservative, socially as well as theologically--and off-putting to still more people. So the Remnant becomes still smaller and more intense. Churches become sects; civic religion is replaced by secular myths and celebrations; the gathered church becomes the paradigm. Secularism becomes inclusive while Christianity becomes increasingly exclusive.

In the ancient world strict secularism was anomalous: the officially polytheistic religious establishment, such as it was, could accommodate almost anyone including Epicurean materialists, monotheists and animists. Now secularism is inclusive while Christianity is strictly defined and exclusive, no longer a cultural default, so you don't get fellow-travelers.

So now you have evangelical mega-churches operating as self-help programs for the neo-barbarians, promoting a socially conservative agenda. Their version of Christianity is srictly defined and, as I learnt in a "church planting" class I took, the expectation is that the "seekers" who come to investigate are expected to become "fully devoted followers" in 6 months to a year. Meanwhile, mainline churches have become activities centers for the elderly.

In the end neither will survive. The elderly will die off and the next generation of oldsters--my generation--who dropped out of the Church 30 years ago will find other ways to occupy their time. The barbarians amongst us, the immigrants and indigenous lower classes, will become civilized and secular. And the Global South will become civilized and secular in a century or two, once they get on track economically. That's the way Christianity ends--not with a bang but with a whimper. Not because an enlightened public no longer has any use for metaphysics but because churches have effectively abandoned metaphysics--because conservative churches offer little more than self-help programs, puritanical ethics and social control, and because mainline churches offer nothing.

How Do Americans Really Feel About God? | The American Prospect

[T]he Pew Forum looked at 'the fluidity of religious affiliation in the U.S.' and found that roughly half of U.S. adults have changed religion at some point in their life. Further, the number of Americans who identify as unaffiliated with a particular religion -- now hovering around 16 percent -- has grown more rapidly than any other religious group in recent decades. In recent years, the story of American religion has been hyped up in fire and brimstone thanks to our previous president, a self-proclaimed born-again Christian, and the massive evangelical movement that influenced him to enact policies that were consistent with religious perspective: the global gag rule, abstinence-only sex education, and marriage-promotion programs, just to name a few. But those days are over...Americans are testing the waters of a new kind of religious complexity. This isn't the New Age spirituality of The Secret or the rabid atheism of Ivy League intellectuals. It isn't the over-the-top bar mitzvah or quinceañera. This is the steady, patient movement of citizens who are searching for the center again, Americans who want to believe in the goodness of a country and its people, folks who are affiliated with fairness and kindness over any one institution of worship...Strangely, Barack Obama's election was the closest thing to a religious experience that I've ever had. My faith was renewed in a country that, at times, has felt beyond saving. My heart swelled with the sense of interconnection that I've only heard described in spiritual terms. I certainly don't think he's a god, but I do think that the hope and sense of responsibility and community that he's been able to inspire in people is profound.

The Pew Forum report linked in the article notes also that the unafilliated are not only the fastest growing "religious group" but the one with the highest attrition rate: more than half of all individuals who were raised unaffiliated become affiliated. And I'm one of them.

Maybe that's why it's so devilishly hard for me to understand the widespread animus against religion--Christianity in particular. Whatever is the problem?

As far as I can see there are 3 problems:

• The exercise of political power by churches and religious lobbies, particularly in the interests of promoting socially and politically conservative agendas.
  
  
• The affirmation and promulgation of false beliefs.
  
  
• The promotion of implausible and unduly restrictive moral rules, especially regarding sexual conduct.

Even so, it's still hard for me to understand. As the article notes, the political power of the Religious Right has been broken. They had a 30 year run--now it's over. And they didn't accomplish much of anything. Row v. Wade stands; Iowa has legalized gay marriage; campaigns to mandate the teaching of "intelligent design" in the public schools have flopped; and, when it comes to the alleged rights of stem cells, most Americans frankly do not give a damn.

Still, the New Atheists and their followers are vexed and urge constant vigilance. Those Fundamentalists could come back in force at any time and, some urge, apparently rational liberal Christians are just "enablers." They cite the Crusades and the Inquisition to make the case that religion--Christianity in particular--is a politically potent, destructive force.

I wonder how many could explain what the Inquisition was or even answer a multiple choice question about the approximate date of the First Crusade, or what it was supposed to accomplish: 8th century, 12th century, or 16th century? The whole campaign to defend the Enlightenment against incursions by militant Fundamentalists seems awfully like the Reds-under-beds scare during the Cold War.

As for the affirmation and promulgation of false beliefs--who cares? While I was grading my logic yesterday morning I was listening to a Sunday Morning TV show about the latest fad for "cleansing" which is supposed to leech out poisons from the body through the ingestion of godawful concoctions laced with hot peppers, and enemas. Devotées swear by it, though there's no empirical evidence that it does any good. Religious belief is surely no more harmful than this nonsense or any of the other health fads and therapies Americans consume. And surely religion, at least religion of the mainline Protestant variety, is less harmful than than the anti-vaccination movement or the campaign against genetically modified foods or, for that matter, the Mars-Venus literature.

So I, as a Christian, believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and Jesus Christ as his only son, our Lord, and the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. Big deal. That's metaphysics. I know metaphysicians who believe that tables and chairs don't exist and others who believe in Platonic forms, sets, numbers and propositions do, and many, including me, who believe that denizens of merely possible worlds exist. So what? We all have arguments, none of which are conclusive, and many of us are likely wrong. But our ontological commitments are harmless. No one bothers with us and there's no reason why they should or, arguably, why they should bother with people for believing in an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent God with his suite of angels, archangels and all the company of heaven.

I suppose the real issue is sex. Christianity, at least officially, mandates restrictions on sexual activity. Popular culture defines human worth in terms of sexual attractiveness and sexual activity. This at least is the way it was in the wake of the sexual revolution when I came of age. I diligently strove to have sex with as many men as possible and managed to achieve double digits though not, I think, triple digits.

But how many Christians take their churches' official doctrines regarding sexual expression seriously? So whatever is the problem? More generally, why should anyone worry about churches' official doctrines concerning any moral issues since churches don't have the power to enforce them and most adherents don't take them seriously. They're pleased when their churches endorse moral views they hold on independent grounds but ignore moral injunctions they do not endorse.

So why did I, like most others who were raised unchurched, become religiously affiliated? What interested me were the aesthetic elements broadly construed, mysticism and metaphysics.

If I had been born later, or further to the west, I doubt that I'd ever have developed the slightest interest in religion. If I grew up amongst megachurches meeting in auditoriums, where people sat in theater seats listing to Christian soft rock and therapeutic sermons I would never have been attracted.

But I grew up amongst brownstone churches filled with dim religious light, vibrating with the numinous. And I was in training to be a musician: I sang the Mass in Latin, and the Te Deum and Magnificat, in innumerable classical settings. The People of the Land in my neighborhood were Italian Catholics and I grew up with Mediterranean Folk Catholicism--which I envied. I am hard-wired for high church: Anglo-Catholicism opened its gaping maw, swallowed me up, smirked and burped. I just plain love churchiness and all religious stuff--the buildings, the music, the smells and bells, the Prayer Book, and all the gee-gaws and frou-frou.

I was also interested in mysticism, something that went beyond the heart-swelling "religious experience" the author describes, something that has little to do with any sense of "interconnection," hope, responsibility or community. I suppose I can understand those sentiments but they've never really interested me much. I was after an acid trip. That churchy stuff did it for me--and still does.

Finally, I find the metaphysics intriguing--in particular the doctrine of the Trinity and the Real Presence doctrine, on which I write. Is it true? I don't know, any more than I know whether any of the other metaphysical commitments I've taken on, to four-dimensionalism, the existence of possible worlds or mereological universalism (the last currently under reconsideration), are correct. But I've plonked for them and will defend them, unless I become convinced otherwise. Maybe most importantly I simply like working on these issues.

I doubt that I'd have become interested in religion if I were raised affiliated and ground through the whole regime of church and Sunday School as a child: smarmy Jesus and sentimental Jesus stories, construction paper projects, niceities and moralizing. It's drivel but it's harmless drivel. Whatever is the problem?

The Way We Live Now - Kindergarten Cram - NYTimes.com

The Way We Live Now - Kindergarten Cram - NYTimes.com

Jean Piaget famously referred to “the American question,” which arose when he lectured in this country: how, his audiences wanted to know, could a child’s development be sped up? The better question may be: Why are we so hellbent on doing so?

Easy answer. Because the US is a high-risk, high-stakes casino that is ostensibly a fair meritocracy. We have the highest Gini coefficient in the civilized world and the most meager social safety nets. And we do not believe that it is feasible to provide decent lives for all. There will always be losers, we believe, and so we're desperate to make sure that our kids aren't amongst them.

Given the way the system works, this means pushing kids ahead of the curve fast since, at every stage of the game children will be (officially or unofficially) tracked and have to perform ahead of their peers to get onto the fast track for the next stage which will solidify their advantage. At every stage advantages and disadvantages accumulate and the gap between the minority groomed for success and the throwaways grows. It may be possible to get off the dummy track but at every stage it becomes harder and less likely.

By high school students are irrevocably sorted into those who are groomed upper middle class lives--placed in AP classes, sent to science fairs, and pushed into the "leadership roles" in student government and extracurricular activities that will get them admitted to "good colleges"--and the rest who are kept occupied, disciplined and controlled. Students on the disciplinary track conclude, with good reason, that school is nothing but a kind of jail and simply want out. They see no connection between education and future benefits because for them there is none.

Parents don't want their kids on that track with good reason. I was on it and it was miserable. I saw the smart kids at a distance, the Rah-Rahs who wore madras, who were in "advanced classes," on student council and in various clubs, who were lauded as National Merit Semi-Finalists at school assemblies. I knew some of them from orchestra--another one of the extra-curricular activities that would look good on their college applications. But they weren't in my classes, where students resented being in school and the ethos was passive-aggressive, where teachers' primary concern was keeping us quiet and preventing us from chewing gum.

No one ever talked to me about college, or encouraged me to do extra-curricular activities, or expected me to do well, or even expected me to be interested in what I was ostensibly supposed to learn. School was just a dull job we had to do, like the jobs we would get when we graduated. I sometimes think that the real purpose of the regime was teaching us how to cope with boredom to prepare us for boring drudge work.

Of course we go hellbent for leather to speed up development so that at every stage kids will get into the top quintile, to keep them from being tracked into the kinds of classes that not only stifle ambition but kill any interest in intellectual activity.

Those yuppie parents who push their kids to read at 3 and fight to get them into the "best" pre-schools, are behaving rationally. As long as there's an educational tracking system which feeds into what is, contrary to our official ideology, the most rigid socio-economic tracking system in Global North parents will clamor for kindergartens where 5 year olds are drilled to pass tests.

Op-Ed Columnist - Defecting to Faith - NYTimes.com

[A] study entitled “Faith in Flux” issued this week by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life questioned nearly 3,000 people and found that most children raised unaffiliated with a religion later chose to join one.

I'm one of those and suppose I'm typical of most who

said that they first joined a religion because their spiritual needs were not being met. And the most-cited reason for settling on their current religion was that they simply enjoyed the services and style of worship.

But I'm not particularly sympathetic to Blow's reductivist conclusion that

As the nonreligious movement picks up steam, it needs do a better job of appealing to the ethereal part of our human exceptionalism — that wondrous, precious part where logic and reason hold little purchase, where love and compassion reign.

At the crudest level, why should "the nonreligious movement" have to do this job? Why don't people just visit churches, go to services, support churches that maintain the buildings and run the services, and believe whatever they please? There's a good reason for this: "the nonreligious movement" doesn't do architecture. And, for all that an increasing number of American yuppies regard themselves as Buddhists, they don't build temples.

I suppose the deeper question is that of why we don't think that visiting churches, participating in services and maintaining buildings isn't good enough. I just finished reading a great read: Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion, describing the conversion of Europeans to Christianity. What did that conversion mean for the Goths and Britons, the Anglo-Saxons, Franks and Lombards and, in the end, the Wends and Lithuanians? Initially, at least, it meant little more than conformity to a practice--churchgoing and following various rules for social organization. Why don't we think it's good enough that we participate in religious practice and support the institution that makes them possible, whatever we believe?

For myself I have no interest in the Church as "community." If I had any interest in "community" I would certainly not look for it in any church. Church people are not my kind of people and I want nothing to do with them. But I love the buildings, the services and the music, and I like participating anonymously, alone in a crowd.

Alone in a crowd is my kind of "spiritual" experience--walking through a farmers' market, as I did this morning. I like people as "background." I like participating in crowd scenes where I don't have to make contact with anyone but can just appreciate them as throbbing Life. In the same way, I like going to church so long as I don't know anyone and can participate impersonally as part of that impersonal Life. I don't want anything to do with them personally and certainly don't want to be a member of the "community."

Is this really so terribly queer? I don't assume that everyone is like me. But I see no reason to assume that no one is--that no one but me has that interest in the impersonal numinous, in church buildings, services and ceremonies in which one can participate anonymously as a a mere part of the crowd, submerged in the seething mass. That seems to me the religious impulse at its core: to recognize that one's life makes no difference, that one is of no significance or worth, that in the grand scheme of things one is of absolutely no consequence.

But so much for metaphysics. Why should the "non-religious movement" pick up steam? If it does, what will it provide? Buildings? Art? Mythology?

Blow, and others who write on this, are not among us who were raised without any religion. They were ground through the regime of churchgoing and Sunday School, raised in worlds where there was an obligation to believe and those who couldn't manage it were in some sense failures or, in any case, untrustworthy.

I was brought up to believe that religion was, at best, a mechanism for keeping "uneducated people" in line and a comfort for the elderly facing death. I was taught that all religious belief was superstitious and that any interest in religion was morbid and "sick." Blow just doesn't get it, doesn't get what it is like to be brought up secular. For me, and I suspect other like me, religion is a guilty pleasure--one of those forbidden things like sex that deliver big thrills. And for me at least it isn't the believing that delivers the thrills but the buildings and services, the business of organized religion, the outward and visible signs.

I can read the handwriting on the wall. Organized religion will collapse and, I believe, we'll all be the poorer for it. Because organized religion is not a matter of doctrine or moral rules, as those who were raised with it believe, but a matter of art, architecture, mythology and ritual. For most, that has been poisoned by dogmatism and puritanism so, to the extent that they have an interest in "spirituality" they will look for it in "the non-religious movement"--which has nothing to offer.

I still don't get it. De facto churches don't require loyalty oaths and can't enforce moral commitments. There are no gatekeepers. Anyone can go to any church and enjoy the service with no questions asked. Why don't people questing for "spirituality" just do church and ignore the stupid things that clergy say--like everyone else?

1. 

Iceland

At the Polls, Icelanders Punish Conservatives - NYTimes.com:

With about a third of the final vote counted late Saturday, it seemed that the country’s leftist caretaking government would be formally voted into power, with the Social Democrats projected to gain 22 seats and their partners, the Left-Greens, appearing to gain 13 seats in the 63-seat Parliament. The conservative Independent Party, ousted after a wave of demonstrations in January, was projected to gain just 14 seats with less than 23 percent of the vote, down considerably from its total in 2007.

I spent 3 weeks in Iceland in 2002 when my husband had a heart attack flying back from England and the plane was re-routed to Reykjavik.

It was September, and I liked the weather--cool, windy and unpredictable. But it was terrifically expensive and I thought the architecture was perfectly awful. I couldn't connect to it because it wasn't on my Culture Tree and, after 3 weeks, I got sick of fish. Tomatoes were more expensive than caviar: I hadn't realized before then how much I craved fresh veg.

I stayed at the Salvation Army Hostel--http://www.hostelz.com/hostel/29706-Salvation-Army-Guesthouse --highly recommended! It was populated by backpackers and skinflints, mostly from Scandinavian and German-speaking places, and the showers worked! Hanging out in the smokers' lounge I got a intriguing picture of their views of Americans and, even more interesting, the British--like my husband. It was fascinating to discover that they regarded Brits sort of peripheral Italians: as one put it, "Nothing works, and they don't work." In my experience this is true--and I approve.

I did not approve of the Icelandic language. A book I got declared cheerfully that most Icelandic verbs were irregular. Also, they have case endings, which I detest. I thought that with English, a Germanic language, and a little German I might have a shot. But, forget it. I went to the University to see if I could make contact and do a little work but I couldn't even find the philosophy department. Even technical terms and the names of academic disciplines are strictly Germanic and completely unintelligible. I only found out later that philosophy was not "philosophia" or anything like that but "heimspeki"--very interesting, I guess it means "worldview."

Negotiating Reykjavic I realized what it must be like to be an immigrant in a place where one couldn't even read the signs--having to ask people everything, being dependent on the good will of others. Of course, they all spoke English. But I hated having to ask. In France and Italy I could get around, but this was perfectly awful. I only realized that English was really a Romance language when I went down to breakfast at the Salvation Army Hostel. There was coffee--good coffee--and a couple of pitchers labeled "mjolk" and "surmjolk." I immediately poured the surmjolk into my coffee making the perfectly reasonable inference that it was cream, the top of the milk--sur-milk. It wasn't.

There's no punchline to this story. I'm glad the Icelanders are keeping the faith and keeping the red flag flying. Having spent that time in Iceland I feel a connection--I know Rekjavic really well because I've walked all around it and follow Icelandic politics a little. Anyplace we go marks our souls, I think. But this place was seriously alien to me, even more so because it was so near yet so far--a first world country populated by white folk, where I didn't stand out, but in some way I can't even articulate more alien to me than Kenya, which I hated but where I felt in some strange way more connected.

Christian Political Activism

The FundamentaList (No. 77) | The American Prospect

The Times' Frank Rich, in his gloating obituary of the anti-gay-marriage movement, got a little ahead of himself on Sunday. Rich is right that, as Paul Waldman demonstrated last week, public opinion is trending toward legalization of marriage equality. Still, fundamentalist religious movements should never be counted out of American politics. Nor should their gentler cousins, whom the new president has embraced, be written off.

When I was doing theology, as an undergraduate, pietism was demonized. Authentic Christianity, we were told, was worldly, socially engaged and of its very nature political. Good liberal Christians recognized that true religion was a matter of acting politically in the secular city for the good of the other. Community organizing was a religious vocation and street demonstrations were liturgy. Conservative Christians, were wicked, irresponsible navel-gazers, obsessing about individual sin and selfishly cultivating a "personal relationship with Jesus" instead of working politically to establish the Kingdom of God on earth.

Then the conservatives went political. They captured the media, demonstrated in the streets and worked politically for social change. And liberals were horrified.

I used to be outraged by the endless moralizing about social engagement. Now I've mellowed out and suppose I understand the liberal moralizers' motives better. Churches are full of nice people who want to "do for" others, want to be useful and virtuous. Most have the idea that virtue consists in personal niceness and conventional charitable activities. Liberal clergy, surrounded by all these nice people, were trying to get across the message that there was no bright line between personal niceness and charity on the one side and political action on the other. Giving to charity and dispensing sandwiches to bums on grates is good but working politically for a more just society where there aren't any bums on grates is all of a piece with that and, arguably, more efficient. Working politically for social justice is a religious duty.

I'm fine with that but don't think that it's the essential business of churches to do either--particularly when it undermines the provision of specifically religious goods and services. Ideally churches shouldn't do either charity or political action: promoting the general welfare is the business of the state and political action is the job of political organizations. The poor are always with us, and there will always likely be dysfunctional people who hang around churches for both material and emotional handouts. But comes the Revolution most will be taken care of by the government and secular social service providers. To the extent that Christians are committed to "doing for" others, particularly others who are less well off, they should support that Revolution not only to establish more efficient mechanisms for making people better off but to relieve churches of the burden running do-good programs.

So now the fundamentalists are running, and financing, political campaigns to stop gay marriage and other social arrangements they find offensive, while liberal Christians are campaigning for gay marriage and a variety of other worthy projects. I agree with the liberals about the worthiness of these projects but don't think that it's the business of churches to promote them. Liberal churches' promotion of gay rights achieves nothing: no one cares whether the Episcopal Church blesses same-sex unions or whether liberal churches support any of the items on the menu of good liberal causes (which I myself support). No one takes their smarmy moralistic twaddle seriously--or should. All they've done is undermine their institutions.

On the bright side, the conservatives will sink themselves by opposing gay marriage and abortion and by taking the losing side on a variety of other social issues. They will not get their agendas through--the Zeitgeist is against them--and will only discredit themselves. Good!

The pity is that by campaigning for these moral and political agendas, liberal or conservative, churches will only undermine themselves and have fewer resources to devote to the provision of specifically religious goods and services.

Agnès Poirier: French students have reinvented the art of demonstration | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk:

This beautiful square, right in the heart of Paris, opposite the city town hall, has been chosen by protesters to stage a ronde des obstinés, loosely translated as the hard-headed round. They've been walking in circles for two weeks, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. They may be hundreds, or just a dozen in the dead of night, but the walk keeps going round. They were the first surprised to see that it should keep going, that neither rain nor cold could hamper their newly set perpetual motion. What are they protesting against? The rushed and ill-conceived university reform wanted by the Sarkozy government which would, in the words of a university professor, transform knowledge into commodity, students into clients, professors into service suppliers and universities into enterprises seeking profits at all costs.

Let's do it here!

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Eliot, T.S. 1917. Prufrock and Other Observations

In the room the women come and go Talking of Michelangelo.

A few weeks ago I visited my undergraduate alma mater, where I got a rather haphazard, mediocre education--even thought I didn't know it at the time.

Some of the science programs were serious and decent. Science majors graduated and got jobs in labs, went on to graduate programs or medical school. But most of us were majoring in humanities and the general assumption seemed to be that we were there strictly for cultural enrichment. There was never any talk about careers or graduate programs: that was considered crass. Faculty seemed to assume that we would be taken care of: guys would go into the family business or get jobs through connections, and women would marry guys who worked in the family business or got jobs through connections. Some wouldn't even make the pretense of working: they would be "sportsmen" and ladies-who-lunch.

The goal of the philosophy department was to prepare students for careers as upper crust faux-intellectuals. We were there learn how to make conversation about Ideas and chat about interesting "philosophies"--to be polished, finished and groomed for polite society, where it was important to have things to say about Art, Literature, Philosophy and Current Events.

This wasn't so hot for me because I went to college to train for a philosophy professor job. I only found out that I hadn't gotten the training I needed when I got to grad school and was slammed.

Now that I'm an academic myself I wonder why faculty at my alma mater went along with this or why faculty anywhere would voluntarily join the race to the bottom. I suppose the thought is that we in useless humanities disciplines need to sell ourselves by making out that we provide the veneer of civilization, teach students to make conversation about Ideas and inculcate "values" so that the students we credential for upper middle class sales and office park jobs will be able to make conversation about Art, Literature, Philosophy and Current Events as popularly understood and be nice people.

But why would we go along with this? We go though the whole agonizing business of grad school, fight it out in a miserable job market, sacrifice wealth and security, because we love our chosen fields, because we want to do research and teach--like the emaciated Clark of Oxenford, riding his miserable old nag, who would gladly learn and gladly teach. We have tenure--the license to pursue research were it leads us and to teach students as we think right, to show them the wonders of our chosen fields and the pure glory of the life of the mind (as it used to be called). Why do we sell out to provide entertainment, to pander to parents and cater for student's adolescent whims, to give our customers what they imagine philosophy is rather than what we know it to be, which is immeasurably more interesting?

I'm both puzzled and outraged as I see my colleagues going this route, promoting the kinds of junk that parents imagine "philosophy" is and which students, in their immaturity and ignorance, find interesting. We discover that students are interested in this, that or the other kind of bullshit, so that is what we provide. And no one outside of our profession knows any better because they think philosophy is bullshit anyway. We're employed to provide the Discovery Channel version of philosophy so that students can make what passes as intelligent conversation and those who are on board with the agenda think this is astute, cynical and terribly clever: we will feather our nest, add positions to our department, get perks.

But for what? If we wanted this stuff we'd have gone into investment banking

Parable

Suppose you are a smart high school senior interested in astronomy. Heading for college you look for schools with programs in astronomy, astrophysics and strong physics programs that look suitable. You discover that one of these places has a big program in astronomy and offers an undergraduate major. You apply, are accepted, and go to that college.

Now as it happens a few years earlier some members of the physics department came to the conclusion that astronomy just didn't sell. Lots of students were vaguely interested in star-gazing, but very few had the math skills to do astronomy or had any interest in developing them, and none had any real interest in going onto grad school in the field. So members of the department decided that in order to get additional positions and build their department they needed to revamp their program and offer more user-friendly courses.

So, as faculty retired or moved on, they started filling slots with new faculty whose interests were congenial to a greater number of students--including "cosmic studies scholars" and astrologers. By the time you get to this college, most members of the department are astrologers. There are courses in astronomy, physics and math but most of the courses the department offers are on casting horoscopes. The department is proudly pluralistic: it supports work in all star-related studies, including both astronomy and astrology.

Well, what do you know. You don't know much about astronomy: you're a student--you came to this college to learn about it. So you take some courses in physics and math as required, and a bunch of astrology courses, and do well. In your senior year, you have a chat with the chair about graduate programs. He suggests that you consider going into a terminal MA program to prepare for graduate work in the field.

The department at this college it turns out, is geared up to offering the kind of courses that will appeal to students who don't have any serious interest in the sciences. It is not expected that majors will continue on to grad school or pursue astronomy professionally. The aim of the department is to offer students something along the lines of the Discovery Chanel: the kind of thing the general public thinks of as science, with beautiful computer graphics in vivid color and interesting facts about the history of astronomy, without any tedious technical details--Science Lite.

This has worked out very nicely for the department: it's added new positions. But it's not so hot for you: you assumed that successfully completing an undergraduate major would prepare you for a PhD program in the field.

Of course most students who take courses in a field are not going to pursue that field professionally. But it seems to me that even if they don't, they should be getting the real stuff--not astrology, and not even the Discovery Channel. And majors should be getting the real stuff. If a department is committed to offering user-friendly entertainment or edification, it should make that clear and certainly not offer a major.

AIG bonuses | Salon

The right's brain trust is yelling that the tax is a bill of attainder that will scare off 'the investor class,' but GOP politicians, facing pitchfork-waving mobs who want to string up that 'investor class,' have stopped following orders. The pearl of Alfred E. Neumann wisdom from the right, priceless in its political tone-deafness, is the repeated assertion that bonuses must be paid to retain 'the best and brightest' executives. The best and brightest? Would that be the frauds and mountebanks who made gazillions of dollars on three-card-monte credit default swaps that destroyed the U.S. economy? For Americans who are warming themselves by burning their worthless 401Ks, like the starving artists at the beginning of Puccini's 'La Boheme,' the idea of rewarding these geniuses is like giving a raise to the navigator on the Titanic. This long-overdue outburst of populist rage could mark a decisive shift in Americans' attitudes toward income inequality.

Right. Populist rage and pitchfork-waving peasants. But who was responsible for this mess in the first place if it isn't the peasants who are now wielding those pitchforks?

Don't blame firms: their business is, of their essence, to maximize profit. Don't blame Wall Street fat cats: they were no more greedy than anyone else--they were just in a better position to satisfy their greed. By pure moral luck the rest of us are Cromwells innocent of our country's blood. Truth--which of us wouldn't do the same if we were in their position? People want to get as much money as they can given the amount of time and effort they're prepared to put in. There are a few kids who want to so Teach for America or go into the Peace Corps and more who say they want work for a better world, but there are very few who want to make a career of it.

Blame the voters who kept conservatives in power and pushed the country hard right. It's government's business to promote the interests of its citizens by regulating the activities of the country's self-interested agents--including firms. Citizens cannot expect firms to behave nicely: as near-omnipotent, necessarily self-interested agents they must crush any lesser being if that is in their interest. If citizens object to being crushed their only recourse is to rely upon the state to control powerful private interests on their behalf. If voters don't give the state that power then they have only themselves to blame if they get crushed.

But what were those proletarian Republicans thinking? I doubt that they were even thinking about the possibility that more powerful agents might crush them. Some were even so vain as to imagine that there were no more powerful agents than they.

They were thinking about how they could--and would--crush people further down the pecking order. They wanted to beat up on the mythic Welfare Queen who was living in luxury at their expense. They were persuaded that government as such favored people who were beneath them at their own expense. So, out of what they supposed was self-interest, they wanted government shrunk and drowned in the bathtub.

And now, mirabila dictu, ask not for whom the bell tolls: it tolls for thee. It was the deregulation and pro-business policies the Republican "base" favored that screwed over that Republican base: the white working class.

So, of course there is a volte face. Now they see that their social superiors are screwing them over and recognize that government can act in their interests so they call on government to regulate, nationalize or control big business and punish the fat cats who screwed them over. They're even prepared to sacrifice the maltruistic pleasure of screwing over others in order not to get screwed over themselves: self-interest trumps sadism.

No one dares to say that it was the lower classes who are responsible for this mess. We need their support and if pitchfork-waving populism gets them on board, that's great. And of course we good liberals are all prissy about "blaming the victim." And some of us still harbor that undergraduate Marxist romanticism about the working class, who were supposed to be "interesting" and "real"--not hypocritical, materialistic and phony like our parents.

But the bottom line for anyone honest and willing to do the calculation is that it was the lower classes who made 30 years of conservative misrule possible and destroyed the economy. They were the ones who were stupid enough to get mortgages they couldn't carry. They were the ones who imagined that they were rich because they could get go into debt to buy expensive, worthless crap and positional goods, and so supported policies that favored the rich. They were the ones who wanted to screw over the poor--until they discovered that they were poor and were getting screwed over themselves.

God is a Utilitarian!

Public Discourse, More Government, Less God: What the Obama Revolution Means for Religion in America, by W. Bradford Wilcox
A recent study of 33 countries around the world by Anthony Gill and Erik Lundsgaarde, political scientists at the University of Washington, indicates that there is an inverse relationship between state welfare spending and religiosity. Specifically, they found that countries with larger welfare states had markedly lower levels of religious attendance, had higher rates of citizens indicating no religious affiliation whatsoever, and their people took less comfort in religion in general...How do we account for the inverse relationship between government size and religious vitality? As Gill and Lundsgaarde point out, some individuals have strong spiritual needs that can only be met by religion. This portion of the population remains faithful, come what may. But other individuals only turn to churches, synagogues, temples, and mosques when their needs for social or material security are not being met by the market or state...At times of high insecurity, such as the current recession, religious demand goes even higher...This is why, even though Obama’s audacious agenda might provide short-term relief to the economic and social challenges that now beset us, over the long term the Obama revolution is likely to erode first the religious and then the civic and moral fabric of the nation.

Here we have the true conservative argument. The welfare state is bad for religion because it makes people better off. Cut-throat capitalism promotes true religion and virtue by making people miserable, thus providing opportunities for forebearance, compassion and charitable giving.

So much the worse for virtue. If this is what virtue is all about then we're better off in a world where it can't exist--where people are secure and happy and so there isn't any need for charity or compassion. We don't imagine that there's some redeeming benefit in there being paraplegics and amputees so that we have the opportunity to design better wheelchairs and shouldn't think that poverty, misery and pain have value insofar as they provide opportunities for the cultivation and exercise of virtue.

Augustine said that in this world, after the fall, non posse non peccare, but in Heaven non posse pecare. How is this supposed to work? If intentions matter from the moral point of view this means that in Heaven we will somehow be blocked from forming bad intentions. But then what happens to free will? We got ourselves to Heaven by exercising it. God gave it to us knowing that it was dangerous because, presumably, the immeasurable benefit of free will outweighed any risk. Now we get to Heaven only to be deprived of it?

No! It is impossible to sin in Heaven because there no one can be harmed. You can have the most evil intentions in the world and act out of the deepest malice. Do what you will you can't hurt anyone because they are all invulnerable beati, tenured for eternity. By the same token it is impossible to be virtuous since there is no one for whom one may feel compassion, no one who can be an object of charity, no dangers in the face of which one may show courage and no tests of fortitude. Heaven is beyond good and evil.

It is therefore easy to understand the nature of Hell. If your intention is to do harm, you will be eternally frustrated because no one in the afterlife can be harmed. They can only, by the grace of God in conferring on us free will, harm themselves. So you can will to do harm even though in having that desire you harm yourself. It's also easy to understand why Hell can't be permanent. Eventually every soul must get it. Origen was a universalist, but so was Gregory of Nyssa and other unquestionably orthodox theologians.

But God must be a utilitarian, or at least a consequentialist--otherwise non posse peccare means monkeying around with people's intentions and so undermining free will.

The Politics of Possible Worlds

Talking Business - It’s Not the Bonus Money. It’s the Principle. - NYTimes.com

Most people still don’t fully understand what, exactly, Wall Street did that caused so much trouble for the country and the financial system....[W]ords like “off-balance-sheet vehicles” and “mortgage-backed securities” don’t have much meaning for most of us. What we understand is greed — which, ultimately, is what Mr. Smick was talking about as well. For most Americans, big bonuses and corporate jets and office remodelings become a kind of stand-in for the real sins of the bankers. They signify what people hate about Wall Street.

But why didn't we figure this out sooner? For 30 years we loved Wall Street and applauded corporate greed. And the biggest boosters were the proles who became the Republican base. When Democrats proposed programs to help "working families" Republicans rallied the troops by accusing them of instigating "class warfare"--and the peasants came out with their pitchforks to defend the interests of corporate fat cats. Even in the wake of economic collapse, when banks were foreclosing on their trailers, the trash rallied behind Joe the Plumber, who was outraged by Democrats' proposal to raise taxes on the $250,000 a year he expected to clear from a plumbing business he imagined buying.

Of course Joe was no plumber. He was an unlicensed handyman, just scraping by, who would never be in a position to buy a lucrative plumbing business or earn $250,000 a year and likely knew it. But like his supporters, he was besotted by the vision of another possible world where he was on top of the heap and rushed to the defense of his other-worldly counterpart.

Fed on "The Lives of the Rich and Famous," soap operas, romances and tabloid accounts of celebrity affairs, the lower class junk people live counterfactually. Like the fat housewives who worshipped Princess Di, they don't resent elites whose lives are immeasurably better than theirs in virtue of plain dumb luck because they imagine that those are lives they could have lived, and defend to the death the right of others to live those lives--even at their own expense.

During the campaign, Democrats of the reality-based persuasion pointed out that the program they proposed would actually benefit Joe--not realizing that actuality was completely beside the point. Living counterfactually, wannabe plumbers, Diana worshippers and the rest of the lot, lost in logical space, were delighted that corporate CEOs, entertainers, professional athletes and princesses, whose counterparts they shared at remote possible worlds, enjoyed vast wealth and privilege.

Even Americans whose transworld aspirations were modest were modally confused. They imagined an America of family farms and small towns where neighborly druggists, insurance agents and grocers ran friendly Main Street businesses and family doctors made house calls. When Bush campaigned against an inheritance tax that would not affect the majority of Americans, cashiers and truck drivers living in suburban subdivisions rushed to his defense, fearing that this "Death Tax" would make it impossible for them to pass family farms to their children.

There is however just so much satisfaction we can get out of our counterparts' lives because possible worlds are causally isolated. What happens at those worlds of small towns and family farms, and at worlds where our counterparts are plumbing moghuls or princesses, doesn't affect us. What happens here does and now we feel the pain. Now we resent the greed of actual Wall Street money-jugglers who wiped out our actual 401Ks

Why did it take so long?

The Church of Obama: Just For You

Matt Frei: Taming the cyber beast | Comment is free | The Guardian

The Clinton White House leaked like a sieve. The Bush White House circled the wagons and lived in a bubble; it turned loyalty into a test of service and largely disdained the clutter of opinions from the world outside 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. If the last year is anything to go by, the Obama administration will be a curious mixture: it too will demand absolute loyalty and discretion from its staff while feeding the hungry cyber-masses with the impression of involvement.

I wandered into Obama's campaign website once looking for information about a volunteer training program for a friend that I'd heard about through my local Democratic Party organization. I never found it but by the time I had managed to extricate myself from the site I had given the Obama campaign my cell phone number and signed on to a special interest email list. I searched through page after busy page of slick web design without finding what I needed until I was so overwhelmed by the links, hype and innumerable options for social networking that I left in a state of near panic.

It reminded me of the time, at a conference in China, a group of us went to the Old Silk Market in Beijing (pictured above). It was jammed with shoppers, merchandise of every kind, and aggressive shopkeepers hustling tourists. By the time I managed to squeeze my way back to the edge of the crowd I was panicked. Once I broke free I ran the last lap at top speed to my friends who were waiting at the exit laughing: they'd been through it too and knew exactly how I felt.

I never went back to the Obama site but Barak kept in touch with innumerable emails and text messages that occasionally came in the middle of the night but more often during one of my logic classes, invariably while I was doing a especially intricate proof on the board.

The email list was worst of all. List members, at least those who posted, were convinced that they were on intimate terms with Obama, that he followed discussion on the list (or, at least, that his inner circle did and reported back to him) and looked to them for advice.

I couldn't imagine why. Manifestly there were millions of participants in Obama's social networking structure: we were just numbers. I've never minded being just a number--in fact I rather like it. What I definitely don't like is bogus intimacy--strangers with whom I do business addressing me by my first name and customized junk mail. At the Silk Market stall keepers adopted the same tactic: they assured me that they were giving me special deals because I was special--"five dollah, just for you, no, four dollah, four dollah--and just for you."

Lots of people must like it because if they didn't employees wouldn't be trained to use client's first names and junk mail wouldn't be personalized, but I can't imagine why: it seems so obviously patronizing, manipulative and humiliating.

I especially hate programs aimed at giving clients a sense of involvement by loading them with busywork. In my church this was called "empowering the laity." The assumption was that the laity were at lonely and loose ends, didn't know what to do with themselves, felt useless, isolated and of little worth. The church give them tasks to do which would get keep them occupied, boost their self-confidence, make them feel needed, and create the sense of involvement that would keep them in the fold. When I was involved in the church growth business it was a commonplace that no matter how enthusiastic new members of a congregation were they would never stick beyond a few weeks unless they were hustled into organizations and activities. Religion was ephemeral--sociability was the eternal verity.

It was a complete fake. Every profession is a conspiracy against the laity--the clerical profession in particular. Laypeople were never be heard and the only work we got to do was donkey work. Most weren't even trusted with that. Important donkey work was done by paid staff. Laypeople were given busywork and pretend work.

So, at one particularly painful vestry meeting the Junior Warden, whose titular responsibilities were grounds and facilities, told a long story about his research in local ordinances to determine whether the church door could be tethered by a spring so that it would close of its own accord or whether it had to stay open to comply with handicapped access regulations. Of course, the church employed a facilities supervisor, overlord of 4 Mexican sextons, who looked into such matters and made decisions about the disposition of doors. The Junior Warden was just being allowed to play pretend.

I found it humiliating and find the whole Obama cult creepy for the same reason. I voted for an ideology and a program: for more social safety nets and less military adventurism, for a more activist government, for the agenda of the left. Obama was the icon of that program, the button you pushed to get it. As a voter, I made my goals for the country known by pushing the Obama button.

I'm no expert. I don't know how to implement the objectives of the left, I don't understand the means to the ends I support, or the details and, frankly, I'm not interested. I just want a result. I want that program to pop out of the black box of government and don't want to know what's going on inside. So I'm glad that Obama has appointed a team of experts and technocrats to work on those details inside the black box. I don't want to be involved. What I resent isn't beng locked out of the black box but these attempts to create the illusion of involvement.

People of normal intelligence can't really believe that Obama or his advisors are really paying any attention to what they say and, if they don't, I can't see how they could fail to be outraged by this humiliating, patronizing treatment--the hype, manipulation, vacuous slogans, contrived sentimentalities and pieties, and slick packaging.

I suppose if the church didn't exist it would have to be invented

Eat Shit, Caroline
Caroline Kennedy, mommy wars, New York Times | Salon Life
In this past Sunday's New York Times Magazine, contributing writer Lisa Belkin made a comparison between the plight of Caroline Kennedy, a New Yorker who never committed to a particular career path and is now hoping Gov. David Paterson will appoint her to Hillary Clinton's Senate seat, and Whitney Hoffman, a mother who has stayed at home with her kids for more than a decade, worked on a variety of professional projects, but is now nervous about how to return to the workplace full-time. Responding to critics' cries that John F. Kennedy's daughter is inexperienced and unqualified for the Senate job, Belkin links Kennedy's quandary to that of the many former professional or professionally educated women who were part of what Belkin dubbed the "opt-out revolution" five years ago, some of whom are now trying to make their way back into the ranks of the gainfully employed.

Woozy, woozy, girlies. You wanted your 13-year Mommy "Sabbaticals" and now you want to jump off into good jobs? No sympathy for me. I have three kids and took off exactly one week with each of them--the same time my husband took off. I have never done anything for or with my kids that a "traditional" male wouldn't do: I was a female father. I have no sympathy for women who want to be Mommies.

As if that weren't bad enough, here is Caroline Kennedy who not only wants to jump back into the labor force after assing around for all her adult life, but wants to be a senator. Give me a break. Caroline didn't have to opt out: she had the money to buy half a dozen nannies and other servants to do the mommy work and housework for her. But of course, why should she bother? If you've got money you don't have to work, so why bother working? And if you're a woman you can always make smarmy noises about doing your mommy jobbie--and get kudos for it.

You pays your money and you takes your choice. It's not easy to behave like a man if you're a woman: I didn't have the support services my male colleagues had. They could just roll out of bed, grab a cup of coffee and get to their 8 am classes. I had to get the kids dressed, pack little lunches for them and get them to childcare because, unlike them, I didn't have a wife to do it. But I did it.

If women want to opt out that's fine with me. As long as they don't expect to opt back in again.

Apologies: I quit smoking on the 1st and at this point I hate everyone and the entire universe. But, even in the best of circumstances, I don't think I'd be favorably disposed to Caroline Kennedy--a rich brat with an inflated sense of entitlement.

Humanist Pseudo-Church

Humanist Parents Seek Communion Outside Church - washingtonpost.com

Dozens of parents came together on a recent Saturday to participate in a seminar on humanist parenting and to meet others interested in organizing a kind of nonreligious congregation, complete with regular family activities and ceremonies for births and deaths...People often ask, "How do you expect to raise your children to be good people without religion?" said Dale McGowan, the seminar leader and author of "Parenting Beyond Belief." He suggested the retort might be something like, "How do you expect to raise your children to be moral people without allowing them to think for themselves?" He advocates exposing children to many religious traditions without imposing any. At the seminar, Andrea Proctor was thrilled to meet another mother who would like to start a group of parents and children meeting weekly or biweekly. "We just put a huge pool in our back yard," Tony Proctor said. "We might have to start humanist barbecue pool parties."

So, why don't they just go to church and just not believe it? What's the problem?

These made-up semi-religions never thrive. I suppose part of the story is the fact that they're intentionally contrived. Secular people see that churches have products on offer that meet important secular needs--social involvement, rites of passage and social control (aka "values")--form social organizations, concoct rites of passage, and establish programs to train their children.

But I don't think that's the whole story. The cult of Serapis was concocted but within a generation devotees, and others, were convinced that it was of high antiquity. Mormonism was completely made up but immediately dug in and Mormons are now a virtual ethnic group.

When religion is alive you don't get humanist pseudo-churches. Where religion as a social institution is alive everyone knows the myths, participates in the cult and talks the talk, regardless of what they believe. Some are enthusiasts and some are skeptics but most are indifferent and take the cult as part of the fabric of social life. What did the Greco-Roman pagans believe by the first centuries AD? Lots of different things, but even Epicureans and skeptics participated in the traditional public cults. They didn't establish metaphysically detoxified cults with secular barbecues in place of sacrifices to the gods.

Humanist pseudo-churches only arise when religion collapses--when the language and myths are no longer current, when the cult dies out and religion is privatized as a matter of conviction--a package of beliefs and moral commitments. Then secularists sort through the wreckage to salvage the bits they think are worthwhile and refurbish them.

But by then there isn't much market for these spare parts or the pseudo-churches constructed out of them because by then a variety of secular institutions that satisfy needs for social contact, rites of passage, holidays and customs, and social control are well established. Kids are socialized in pre-schools and play groups, and in all manner of organized activities in which middle class parents enroll their children. There are innumerable secular social activities, civic organizations and opportunities for volunteer work for adults and a secular liturgical year that includes Super Bowl Sunday, Fourth of July, Halloween and Thanksgiving. Christmas has been thoroughly detoxified: Santa, Rudolph, snowmen and candy canes have driven out shepherds, angels and Baby Jesus. Maybe most importantly, religious belief and behavior is no longer required or expected: people no longer feel that they ought to be dressing up and going somewhere on Sunday mornings.

Who are the minority who seek out secular churches and Sunday schools? I suspect they're people in transition, people who come from religious families or live in subcultures that haven't yet become thoroughly secularized--people who feel they should be dressing up and going somewhere on Sunday mornings, and who feel defensive about their lack of religious convictions. The article notes:

A recent study found that many Americans associate atheists with negative traits, including criminal behavior and rampant materialism.

How many Americans? Which Americans? Not Americans I know. In my world the very word "atheist" sounds peculiar because atheism is the default, something hardly worth mentioning. Theism is anomalous. No one I know feels he ought to be dressing up and going somewhere, other than brunch, on Sunday mornings and no one has any interest in secular pseudo-churches. Church-going is just not done. The Americans I know associate religious believers with of negative traits, including ignorance, bigotry, prudery and political conservatism.

So, in my world, I'm on the defensive. Coming out at work I was immediately branded as a member of the "Forces of Reaction"--in precisely those terms. But certainly the New Atheists protest too much.

A room full of concertedly nonreligious people has its idiosyncrasies. At the seminar, someone sneezed, and there was a long silence -- no one said "Bless you" or even "Salud" or "Santé." For sale were T-shirts saying "98% Chimpanzee" or showing a tadpole with the words "Meet Your Ancestor." There were also children's games from Charlie's Playhouse, a Darwinian toy company, illustrating the process of evolution.

Jesus, do they also censor swearing? "Meet Your Ancestor"? Why not "2 + 2 = 4" or, better, "Pi = 3.1416..." since, as I understand it, some cranks once tried without success to get the Biblical figure, 3.0, accepted as the value of Pi? I went to an ordinary public school and watched TV. I saw innumerable films at school and educational TV shows as a child showing Life emerging from the primordial soup as lightening struck the primitive oceans and lungfish crawling out onto the land.

This is what everyone got as part of elementary education and popular culture and was never intended to Make A Statement in the way that the T-shirts and Darwin-toys are. If there were fundamentalists around I suppose they compartmentalized it--the Garden of Eden and Noah's Ark, life emerging from the primordial soup and lungfish. It simply wasn't an issue.

So, by the time humanist pseudo-churches emerge from the ruins of ordinary religion, there are few takers. This secular faux-religion is parasitical on real religion, emerges when religion is dying out and then dies with it.

Wither Feminism?

We are a group of professionals from various disciplines who study women's place in the economy. We are collecting signatures to a letter to President-Elect Obama concerning jobs for women at the following site. Please go there to sign and forward it to people who would like to join in the effort. http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/genderequity

A while ago I was invited by a colleague to be on a panel discussing "Feminist BS." I did my research and, armed with the latest data on discrimination, sex segregation in the labor force, and male-female wage gaps, sallied forth to enter the fray.

The venue, as I discovered, was a small theater with black walls and various avantgarde accoutrements. The panel consisted of me and another female academic, an extremely tribal gay guy and the drama critic of the local PBS radio station who was dressed in a witchy/ethnic outfit I suspect she ordered from the Pyramid Collection. The topic, it turned out, was whether feminism as a theatrical style was out-dated. My data fell flat and I felt like a fool.

I never realized that feminism was a "theatrical style" in the first place. I thought it was all about sex segregation in the labor force, male-female wage gaps and, more generally, eliminating gender-based constraints, restrictions and expectations that limit the choices of both men and women. I thought it was about removing unnecessary restrictions and providing more real options for everyone.

Feminism as a theatrical style is certainly bs and so, I believe is feminism as the ethic of care, the exultation of the Eternally Feminism, and Goddess worship, feminism as the Battle of the Sexes and feminism as the Solidarity of the Oppressed. Feminism is about jobs, wages and opportunities.

That is what this petition is about. Please sign at http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/genderequity. Here is the text:

To President-Elect Obama:

We applaud your intention to establish a sizeable and productive program that will help to stimulate the economy, and that will provide improved infrastructure for the country. However, we are concerned that, unless specific steps are taken, your program will provide jobs almost exclusively for men. Women are 46 percent of the labor force. Their unemployment rate is rising with that of men. Moreover, many millions of women are raising children without a husband or partner, and unemployment for them will mean great deprivation, and possible homelessness, for them and their children.

We suggest three lines of action that will insure that women get a fair
share of the benefits from your program:

1. Revive and enforce the Labor Department regulations that require government contractors to institute affirmative action plans that provide a share of the jobs for women and minorities. Closely monitor the contractors for compliance.

2. In connection with the infrastructure projects, institute apprenticeships, and insure that at least one third of the positions go to women.

3. Add projects in health, child care, education, social service that will both provide jobs to women, and also provide needed services to them.

It's Official: Mainline Protestantism is Dead

The Associated Press: Obama defends choice of pastor for invocation

The selection of Pastor Rick Warren brought objections from gay rights advocates, who strongly supported Obama during the election campaign. The advocates are angry over Warren's backing of a California ballot initiative banning gay marriage. That measure was approved by voters last month. But Obama told reporters in Chicago that America needs to "come together," even when there's disagreement on social issues. "That dialogue is part of what my campaign is all about," he said.

Who is supposed to be "coming together" here? Presumably the secular urban-coastal elite and the megachurch trailer trash. This pick establishes non-denominational fundamentalism as our semi-official state church. The assumption is that for Americans who are religious at all, this is the industry standard. Mainline churches are marginal and their members are invisible--to few to count for political purposes.

Granted, there are many times more of these "evangelicals," non-denominational or otherwise, in the US than Episcopalians, who now represent fewer than 1% of the population. But it isn't size that matters. It's inclusiveness--the difference between a gathered church or sect, where participation assumes commitment, and a civic religion.

Civic religions are public institutions like libraries, schools and parks. There is no expectation that people who use the facilities will buy in. You can visit a church as a tourist or go to cathedral Evensong as a concert-goer, and that is perfectly ok. No one expects you to progress to membership.

But even soft-core evangelical megachurches like Warren's are quite a different thing. They aren't public facilities citizens use on their own terms. If you go to a service, or "concert," the expectation, even if it is not always met, is that you are a "seeker" soon to become a "fully devoted follower" who will join one of the many cell groups and, if gay, will join a group devoted to changing your sexual orientation.

Imagine No Religion

Group plans to sue city over removal of controversial billboard - San Bernardino County Sun

RANCHO CUCAMONGA - A Wisconsin group advocating the separation of church and state plans to sue the city for playing a role in the demise of a billboard on Archibald Avenue and Foothill Boulevard. A billboard with the message 'Imagine No Religion' by the Freedom From Religion Foundation was taken down by sign company General Outdoor less than a week after it went up. The move came after the city told the sign company it received 90 calls of complaint against the sign. Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-president of the organization that bills itself as an association of atheists and agnostics, said a complaint might be filed today.

I don't have to imagine no-religion: I was brought up with it so it's hard for me to understand why the New Atheists and their followers are so keen to promote it. What do they imagine a No-Religion world would look, and feel, like?

I can easily imagine it--a world of unrelieved sterility and vulgarity, where quack therapies and secular sentimentalities occupy the role of religion, shopping malls replace cathedrals, commercial festivals from Super Bowl Sunday to a religiously detoxified Christmas Shopping Season mark the liturgical year and centuries of sacred art that were once accessible to the general public are relegated to museums and concert halls. Why on earth do they want this?

We're more than half way there so you'd think they'd know better. One of my more enterprising neighbors has already put up his Christmas display, featuring illuminated candy canes and reindeer, including Rudolph with his glowing red nose. The centerpiece is a six-foot-tall inflatable snowman. I can't understand why this is preferable to a creche with shepherds and angels. Maybe in a century or two the myths of Santa and his helpers, Frosty the Snowman and Rudolph will mellow out and inspire high art. Somehow I rather doubt it.

I suppose I'm being unfair to atheists here. Most have no problems with religious art and support the preservation of church buildings as museums of culture and secular temples to civic virtue--like the Paris Pantheon (above), which operated briefly as the Church of St. Genvieve before it was reconstituted as a patriotic monument and mausoleum.

I had great hopes for France before my first visit to the Continent last winter. I could, after all, conjugate the verbs and had a wonderful time brushing up on my French at our local branch of the Alliance Francaise. And the Pantheon was an interesting piece of architecture--in a frigid, self-conscious, monomaniacal way. After seeing it though I never wanted to go anywhere near France again.

The Pantheon reminded me of my mother, who admired Napoleon, was a great fan of the metric system, and thought it would be a good idea to number the days of the week instead of naming them. She detested what she regarded as impractical, childish nonsense, including holidays, presents, family meals, vacations, ceremonies of any sort and every kind of religion. We were organisms and that was that. This may be true, but I don't see why believing it should make us better off.

In the Pantheon there was a Foucault Pendulum swinging from the dome. There were video machines with educational tape loops in French and English about Foucault's life and work explaining how Foucault, "whose only faith was in Science," had used his Pendulum to demonstrate that the earth rotated on its axis--presumably refuting benighted Christians who thought otherwise. They showed the Pendulum being hung and described how it was attached to beams above the interior dome through a hole made by poking out the eye of God represented on it. Mother, and I suspect the New Atheists, would have loved it.

It's a losing battle, and I realize that. The churchy world I always fantacized, with churches and shrines, where people stopped to light candles and mumble the quick prayer, processions in the streets and a thousand lovely legends, ceremonies and customs current, never really existed. The little bit of that fantasy that we've got is almost gone. I still don't understand why people don't want it, why they think poking out the eye of God in the name of Science contributes to human wellbeing or why they imagine that the frigid sterility of the Pantheon should be a source of joy and liberation.

Family Values

Why churches fear gay marriage | Salon News

While conservative churches are busy trying to whip up another round of culture wars over same-sex marriage, Rodriquez says the real reason for their panic lies elsewhere: the breakdown of the traditional heterosexual family and the shifting role of women in society and the church itself. As the American family fractures and the majority of women choose to live without men, churches are losing their grip on power and scapegoating gays and lesbians for their failures.

Churches have a vested interest in supporting sex roles and the "traditional family." Traditional women are the backbone of the church and historically, in the US especially, people go to church "for the sake of the children."

Working women don't have the time to work for the church or the motivation. In the past, churches provided educated, energetic women with a venue in which they could do jobs in which they could organize, manage, play with significant sums of money and exercise authority--work that was not available to women in the secular world. Now that women get responsible, interesting positions outside the church, they have little reason to make alternative careers in church volunteer work.

Churches serve the interests of traditional women. For men, and working women, church-going is a hassle: after the work week they want to sleep in, lounge around in grotty old clothes and relax. For stay-at-home moms churchgoing is a break in their routine: a chance to dress up, get out of the house, and socialize with other adults. For older women, who have made careers of "doing for" their families, the church affirms the worth of the caring work and gives them opportunities to do more caring work once their husbands and children are no longer around to do for.

Churches not only provide opportunities for "caring work"--they valorize traditional femininity. Playing to their "base," they flatter traditional women who have invested their lives in doing for their families by identifying caring work as the epitome of Christian virtue. But the more they promote traditional femininity, the business of caring, the more they turn off women who are not invested in doing for their husbands, children or others and want no part of caring work or traditional femininity.

Rodriguez has not got it quite right. He suggests that Christianity needs to be feminized:

The desert religions -- Judaism, Christianity and Islam -- are male religions. Their perception is that God is a male god and Allah is a male god. If the male is allowed to hold onto the power of God, then I think we are in terrible shape. I think what's coming out of Colorado Springs right now, with people like Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, is either the last or continuing gasp of a male hierarchy in religion. That's what's at stake. And women have a determining role to play.

I don't know about Judaism and Islam, but Christianity is already too feminized, and is becoming even more so as non-traditional women, and men, drop out leaving the church to traditional women and and churches cater increasingly to their smarmy sentimentalities and taste for caring work.

Churches have evolved to satisfy the interests of traditional families: they provide activities for traditional women and sell themselves as socializing agencies for the young. When young adults postpone marriage and child-rearing or forgo it altogether church membership declines. When women enter the labor force and, more particularly, when they enter as full-time careerists, churches lose support. Perhaps most importantly, when the traditional family ceases to be the norm and loses prestige, the Church, whose fate is inextricably linked with the traditional family, loses prestige.

Gay marriage is a symbolic blow to the ideal of the traditional family as a cultural norm and that undermines the prestige of the Church. Materially, if fewer individuals form traditional families, churches lose membership and support. They have every reason to be worried.

Raised on the Dick and Jane readers, I yearned for what I thought of as a "real Dick and Jane Family." By the time I got married, at 22, I was desperate. I wanted a suburban house furnished with a husband, three kids, a dog and a cat. I wanted to get into what I thought of as the World of Sunshine, the 1950s sitcom world, where Young Families went on picnics, had family meals, and went to church. I wanted to be a soccer mom.

I got it, and loved every minute of it. During summer vacation, when I would drive my kids around in my van and people thought I was a real soccer mom--a housewife--I was tremendously proud: I had made it, I felt, into the Dick and Jane world.

Everyone I knew thought I was nuts. If there was one thing they wanted to avoid, or at least postpone, it was the suburban family life that I was desperate to get. Most people I knew never got married, and most who got married never had children. They wanted to live in Manhattan or San Francisco, work in publishing, journalism or the arts, live in lofts, go to concerts and to the theater, try out restaurants and engage in various urban entertainments. They regarded life in the 'burbs as boring, declasse and certainly not the thing for people like us.

I could easily understand the resentment of red-state, church-going Nascar Dads and Soccer Moms. They recognized that there was an urban coastal elite who thought the Dick and Jane life they chose to live was ridiculous and were contemptuous of them. And they believed that the progressive policies this elite promoted, including gay marriage, would make it difficult to get or maintain the Dick and Jane life, and squeeze them out. So, in California, they voted for Prop 8, which was represented not as anti-gay but as pro-family.

Most had nothing against gays and opposed anti-sodomy laws as invasions of privacy; most supported civil unions. They simply wanted affirmation that the Dick and Jane sitcom life was the good life, that it was the norm, and that it wouldn't be taken away from them. And churches supported Prop 8 de jure because they regarded homosexuality as a sin but de facto because Dick and Jane families were their bread and butter.