The slippery slope.................

Religion begins by offering magical aid to harassed and bewildered men; it culminates by giving to a people that unity of morals and belief which seems so favorable to statesmanship and art; it ends by fighting suicidally in the lost cause of the past. . . . Institutions which were at first in the hands of the clergy, like law and punishment, education and morals, marriage and divorce, tend to escape from ecclesiastical control, and become secular, perhaps profane.  The intellectual classes abandon the ancient theology and - after some hesitation - the moral code allied with it; literature and philosophy become anticlerical.  The movement of liberation rises to an exuberant worship of reason, and falls to a paralyzing disillusionment with every dogma and every idea. 

-Will and Ariel Durant, The Story of Civilization: The Renaissance

pillars.....................

 Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens.

-George Washington, from his 1796 Farewell Address letter

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Goodness.......................

Human goodness is widely distributed, and I have no respect for religious people who cannot see this. . . . Religion, as I explain it there, is a principled opposition to the will to power.  Faith is about the forms of gracious coexistence that abjure the use of power. 

-Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning

came naturally...................

      Religion played a central role in his life and his thinking, as it would in the Revolution.  It was no accident that so many Boston town meetings were conducted in houses of prayer, or the republicanism, as envisaged in Massachusetts Bay, traced the independent-minded, egalitarian, community-based lines of Puritanism.  Men who preferred a church without a bishop came naturally to the idea of a state without a king.

-Stacy Schiff, The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams

fun with languages..................

 We have here, in other words, a unique phenomenon in the history of religion: a religion whose sacred texts are written in what to its founder would have been a foreign and largely unintelligible language.

     Had the languages in question been closely related, part of the same linguistic family, this might have been of little consequence.  But first-century Greek and Hebrew were not just different languages. They represented antithetical civilisations, unlike in their most basic understanding of reality.  In terms of the last chapter, Greek philosophy and science—the Greece of Thales and Democritus, Plato and Aristotle—was a predominantly left-brain culture, the Israel of the prophets a right-brain one.

-Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning

in relationship................................

       That means that the original basis of Abrahamic monotheism remains, whatever the state of science.  For religious knowledge as understood by the Hebrew Bible is not to be construed on the model of philosophy and science, both left-brain activities.  God is to be found in relationship, and in the meanings we construct when, out of our experience of the presence of God in our lives, we create bonds of loyalty and mutual responsibility known as covenants.  People have sought in the religious life the kind of certainty that belongs to philosophy and science.  But it is not to be found.  Between God and man there is moral loyalty, not scientific certainty.

-Rabbi Jonathan Sacks,  The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning

Partners............................

 . . . religion and science are to human life what the right and left hemispheres are to the brain.  They perform different functions and if one is damaged, or if the connections between them are broken, the result is dysfunction. . . .

     Science is about explanation.  Religion is about meaning.  Science analyses, religion integrates.  Science breaks things down to their component parts.  Religion binds people together in relationships of trust. Science tells us what is.  Religion tells us what ought to be. Science describes.  Religion beckons, summons, calls.  Science sees objects.  Religion speaks to us as subjects.  Science practices detachment.  Religion is the art of attachment, self to self, soul to soul.  Science sees the underlying order of the physical world.  Religion hears the music beneath the noise.  Science is the conquest of ignorance.  Religion is the redemption of solitude.

-Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership:  Science, Religion and the Search for Meaning

Inadvertently.................ah, history

 Deprived of French help, on December 28, 1783, the Turks officially acknowledged the loss of the Crimea.  Exclaimed on observer, "The Russian state has spread out like ancient Rome."  Indeed, Catherine's swollen dominions now stood larger that the entire Roman Empire at its height.

     But there was a price to be paid for this brash expansion.  For one thing, Catherine's actions had inadvertently opened the wounds of religious wars that would one day cross borders and carry over into a new age.  For another, the Crimea remained a boiling stew of biases, prejudices, and fierce hatreds.  In the years that followed, while annexation was one thing, actually extending Russian control over the region remained an exasperating business.  Russian forays into the area known as the Caucasus were especially riddled with troubles—in 1785 a rebellion broke out among a deadly mix of Chechens, Avars, and other tribes.  Descending down from the mountains, a shadowy leader wrapped in a green cloak and espousing a mystical version of Islam proclaimed a Ghazavat, or holy war, against the Russians.  With dauntless flair and lightning strikes, this self-anointed "Sheik Mansur" led a coalition of mountain tribesmen that harassed and tormented the Russians with guerrilla warfare, laying the seeds for a conflict that still sputters today.

-Jay Winik, The Great Upheaval: America and the Birth of the Modern World, 1788-1800

"apocalypse was in the air"..........

As traditional faiths are waning, environmentalism is coming to resemble a faith for the new age.  Christianity offered guidance for how one should live and conduct one's personal affairs in a manner pleasing to God, but the green movement seeks to steer people to a life in better harmony with nature.  Environmentalism, said Joel Garreau, has become "the religion of choice for urban atheists."

     Like medieval Catholicism, the green faith foresees impending doom caused by human activity.  To people in the Middle Ages, wrote Barbara Tuchman, "apocalypse was in the air."  The Final Judgement, brought on by human sin, was not only real but imminent.  St. Norbert in the twelfth century predicted the event would come within the lifetime of his contemporaries.  Similarly, the environmental movement—whether religious, scientific, or leftist—routinely traces a direct line from human materialism to looming catastrophe.

-Joel Kotkin, The Coming of Neo Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class

an intensifying reaction.............

   It was not the same Paris that he had known in the crowd-ruled days of '92 and '93.  Ever since the fall of Robespierre in '94 the capital had followed the countryside in an intensifying reaction—religious and political—against the Revolution.  Catholicism, led by nonjuring priests, was regaining its hold upon a people that had lost belief in an earthly substitute for supernatural hopes and consolations, for sacraments, ceremonies, and processional holydays.  The decadi, or decimal day of rest, was increasingly ignored; the Christian Sunday was flagrantly respected and enjoyed.  France was voting for God.

-Will & Ariel Durant, The Age of Napoleon, describing Paris in 1797

higher aims......................

 

Milton's allegory is not just a portrait of our kind; it is an invitation to kindness.  It shows us what we are and what we must live up to.  And it sets a standard for art.  Take away religion, however, take away philosophy, take away the higher aims of art, and you deprive ordinary people of the ways in which they can represent their apartness.  Human nature, once something to live up to, becomes something to live down to instead.  Biological reductionism nurtures this "living down," which is why people so readily fall for it.  It makes cynicism respectable and degeneracy chic.  It abolishes our kind—and with it our kindness.

-Roger Scruton, On Human Nature

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Everything you wanted to know...........

 ...............but were afraid to ask about Pakistan.

Pakistan was originally imagined as a utopian project alongside other 20th century nationalisms created from the wreckage of European empires, in this case, the British Raj. In its early years, the country did benefit from an esprit de corps that allowed it to consolidate a relatively capable state from a fractious population consisting of refugees andeven managing to outperform India economically for many years. This relative economic success, or at least ability to keep pace, helped feed a brash and confident Pakistani nationalism that defined the country’s identity for decades and was symbolized byiconic institutions like its once-proud national airline and armed forces. . . .

At the root of Pakistan’s many crises is the issue of elite capture of the state and economy. A study in 2021 by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) highlighted the level to which Pakistan’s economic system has been turned into a machine for extracting subsidies and other perks for the country’s elite at the expense of the vast majority of its citizens. Unlike many other developing countries, Pakistan is a consumption-based society that spends lavishly on elite consumer goods and pricey defense systems rather than investing its capital in productive industries necessary for future growth. Among the beneficiaries of Pakistan’s kleptocratic economic system are a small handful of corporate and political power brokers, the country’s class of large feudal landowners, and its sprawling military establishment – the latter which serves as the guarantor of Pakistan’s national security while also doubling as its largest corporate conglomerate and real estate developer.

the shadowed wonder and wildness.........

       The hyper-rational objectivity behind a great deal of contemporary techno-science could only have arisen in a civilization steeped in a dogmatic and other-worldly monotheism, for it is largely a continuation of the very same detached and derogatory relation to sensuous nature.  If in an earlier era we spoke of the earthly world as fallen, sinful, and demonic, we now speak of it as mostly inert, mechanical, and determinate.  In both instances nature is stripped of its generosity and prodigious creativity.  Similarly, the utopian technological dreaming that would have us bioengineer our way into a new and "more perfected" nature (or would have us download human consciousness into a "better hardware"), like the new-age wish to spiritually transcend the "physical plane" entirely, seems calculated to help us hide from the shadowed wonder and wildness of earthly existence.

-David Abram, Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology

Paint the stars................

Starry Night Over the Rhone   Oil on canvass    1888

 When I have a terrible need of - shall I say the word - religion, then I go out and paint the stars.

-Vincent van Gogh

European history is so fascinating......

      By autumn 1558 when Elizabeth came to the throne, Philip II [Spain] and Henry II [France] had begun their peace negotiations.  Military operations had ceased, and both realms were determined to make a lasting peace primarily due to their own financial chaos and religious strife in the Spanish-held Low Countries and France.  Besides, Philip had wars of religion he was fighting against the Turks in North Africa and the western Mediterranean, and internally against the Moriscos in Spain.  The last thing he could literally afford was to fight a powerful Catholic monarch like the King of France.  For Philip, matters of religion always took precedence over temporal matters, and it was essential that Catholic governments unite against the very real expansionist threat of the Turkish Empire and the spread of Calvinism.  Elizabeth and Cecil, who both had known Philip well when he had been king consort of England, did not need to listen to the incessant distortions swirling on the winds to know that the greatest danger they faced would be a Catholic League against a Protestant monarchy in England. . . .The potential treat of an invasion from France, or from the French in Scotland, was very real, and the only way Elizabeth saw to forestall this was to pander to Philip's paranoia.

-Susan Ronald,  The Pirate Queen:  Queen ElizabethI, Her Pirate Adventurers, and the Dawn of Empire

Wishing and hoping..........................

 When we agree to live simply, we have little to protect and no desire for acquisition, even for acquisition of any “moral capital.” When we imagine that we are better, holier, higher, more important to God than others, it is a very short step to “justified” arrogance or violence toward those others. It is almost inevitable, in fact, and we are witnessing today how it manifests itself at every level of our societies. If we could eliminate such manufactured and desired superiority, religion might finally become nonviolent in thought, word, and deed. 

-Richard Rohr, as cut-and-pasted from here

Ah, history......................................

      At the turn of the sixteenth century, most of the era's expanding empires faced the same challenge:  minority rule.  Whether in the Americas or in Asia, small bands of military elites conquered vast new territories, thereby gaining the right to rule over huge populations.  The ascendent Muslim Mughals, for example, moved south from Central Asia to India, where they governed an enormous restive population of Hindus and other non-Muslims.  The Aztecs, in their conquest of the Yucatan peninsula, ruled over peoples who shared neither their culture nor their worldview.  And European global expansion in this period brought the continents's armies face to face with peoples they had never before encountered, in places they did not fully understand.  These early modern empires changed the ethnic, linguistic, economic, and religious landscape of the world, creating new cultural synergies and new political possibilities even as they foreclosed others.

-Alan Mikhail. God's Shadow:  Sultan Selim, His Ottoman Empire, and the Making of the Modern World

Ed. Note:  The context for the paragraph above was the author's acknowledgment that much of the early Muslim Ottoman empire was populated by Christians, with Muslims being the ruling minority.

Science...............................

Science tries to answer the question: ‘How?’ How do cells act in the body? How do you design an airplane that will fly faster than sound? How is a molecule of insulin constructed? Religion, by contrast, tries to answer the question: ‘Why?’ Why was man created? Why ought I to tell the truth? Why must there be sorrow or pain or death? Science attempts to analyze how things and people and animals behave; it has no concern whether this behavior is good or bad, is purposeful or not. But religion is precisely the quest for such answers: whether an act is right or wrong, good or bad, and why.

"We keep, in science, getting a more and more sophisticated view of our essential ignorance."

-Warren Weaver

A civil religion.................

But Williamson has more in common with President Trump than she — and indeed many voters — might admit, and it’s not just that both have used personal celebrity as a springboard into politics. At their core, both are also prime representatives of one of the most important and formative spiritual trends in American life: the notion that we can transform our material circumstances through faith in our personal willpower. Trump’s authoritarian cult of personality and Williamson’s woo-inflected belief in the power of “self-actualization” both come from the quintessentially American conviction that the quickest and surest route to Ultimate Reality can be found within ourselves. . . . 

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On the surface, Americans are more religiously divided than ever. White evangelicals overwhelmingly support Trump; meanwhile, the ranks of the religiously unaffiliated, who tend to lean left, continue to grow. But many Americans of almost every political and spiritual affiliation share the inheritance of New Thought ideology: a distrust of institutions and experts, a reliance on personal intuition and feeling, and a conviction that “self-actualization” will lead inexorably to a bigger house, a better job, a banging body.

While it’s highly unlikely that Williamson will win the Democratic presidential nomination, her presence on the campaign trail, and Trump’s presence in the White House, serve as reminders that the ethos of Quimby and Peale thrives on both sides of the political aisle.

It may not be the “oneness” Williamson has in mind. But it’s the closest thing we have to a civil religion.

-Tara Isabella Burton, as cut and pasted from here.   Read the whole thing.

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On religious toleration......................

     Madison, half Mason's age, improved his language, proposing a crucial change to the clause on religious liberty.  Mason's draft, reflecting a hundred years of liberal thought going back to John Locke, called for "the fullest toleration in the exercise of religion."  Yet this did not seem liberal enough for Madison.  Toleration implies those who tolerate: superiors who grant freedom to others.  But who can be trusted to pass such judgments, even if the judgment is to live and let live?  Judges may change their minds.  The Anglican establishment of Virginia, compared with established churches in other colonies, had been fairly tolerant—except when it hadn't, and then it made water in Baptists' faces.  So Madison prepared an amendment.  "All men are equally entitled to the full and free exercise" of religion.  No one could be said to allow men to worship as they wished:  they worshipped as they wished because it was their right as men.  Madison's language shifted the ground of religious liberty from a tolerant society or state, to human nature, and lifted the Declaration of Rights from an event in Virginia history to a landmark of world intellectual history.

-Richard Brookhiser,  James Madison