Jim's Mailings

Sectarianism and Secularism

I had to go to the encyclopedia and dictionary for this one. Actually Sectarianism is really belief that a given sect is pre-eminent, which is what each of the other sects also believe, and in truth is what happened when man built the Tower of Babel. Have we not learned a thing in the past 3000 plus years? Now to the sources

The acknowledgment of religion or religiousness as valid
Traditional justifications
Religion as pointing to an ultimate power, being, or value

More generally, persons who are outside the particular religions and who have nevertheless acknowledged religion as significant often seem to base their views on a fundamental feeling of absolute dependence. The grandeur of the universe, the character of the moral struggle, reflections on human nature, and an awareness of moral values inspiring men to reform society have all joined together to point men to an ultimate power or being —a "power, not ourselves, which makes for righteousness," according to the 19th-century English poet Matthew Arnold.

The fundamental difference in the latter part of the 20th century between the secularist and the religious person most likely has been between someone who takes a narrower and someone who takes a wider view of humanity. That there is an acknowledged need in modern times to give a moral direction to technology seems to many to bring with it the need for a religious view of the universe, even though they may not themselves be adherents of a particular religion. From EB 2003

And to the Jun 13 edition of the Cleveland Plain Dealer "Crushed between the bureaucrats and the theocrats>>>>
by CRISPIN SARTWELL
Recently I was interviewed by a filmmaker who's working on a documentary about American philosophy. He asked me the big, hard, obscure questions about the nature of the American spirit, about the great themes of American history, about what makes America distinctive.
I have tried to answer such questions before. But this time, as I ran through them, I was seized with nostalgia for the mere existence of questions: The idea of America is more and more retrospective, a survey of something of great value, now lost to history.
The first thing we might think about is the content of American mythology, which has its basis in reality: a celebration of the frontier where there is no structure of authority; of the outlaw; of Clint Eastwood's man with no name; of the gangster from Al Capone to Snoop Dogg; of political radicals such as Emma Goldman, H.L. Mencken, Abby Hoffman and Barry Goldwater; of pointedly distinctive artists from Robert Johnson and Hank Williams to Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol.
But as time goes on, we have fewer and fewer figures capable of real boldness or defiance or self-reliance: We worship bureaucracies and their leaders, bureaucracies and their products. Our frontier is the cubicle.
Surely, we have to understand the vision of America — its imaginary essence, its function as a symbol — in terms of individuality and freedom. The radical Protestants who fled England and Europe believed that each person had his own relation to God, unmediated by the Catholic Church or the government of England. Each person was answerable to God only as God expressed Himself in that person's conscience.
This is the motivation for the First Amendment, with its insulation of individual conscience, expression and religion from state interference. This radical religiosity and the idea that it entailed radical liberty were the position of abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison and John Brown.
This independence of spirit from institution was secularized in the work of the greatest American intellectuals of the 19th century, Ralph Waldo Emerson and his best friend Henry David Thoreau. As Thoreau asked in "Civil Disobedience. Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward.”

The individualism that Emerson famousiy set out in the essay "Self-Reliance" — perhaps the greatest statement of what America means — is not an individualism that tries to disconnect people from one another or from the world: It's quite the reverse. It celebrates the life of each thing as essential in the life of all things. But that entails that each person ought to be free to become himself.
There are two opposing forces between which this America has been crushed. We might call them quasi-communism and quasi-fascism. (Actual communism and fascism would require more clarity than most of us now possess.)
The social programs that grew exponentially with the New Deal — and the huge bureaucracies needed to fund and administer them — are almost self-evidently good: feed the poor, house the homeless, care for the elderly, eliminate bad products from the marketplace, ensure our health. But of course, they are destructive of self-reliance. And they permeate America with state power.
Americans are now processed by state educational institutions into a fundamental unanimity that revolves around the simultaneous muttering of cliches: Even "believe in yourself is an invitation to witless conformity; even reading "Civil Disobedience" — a text no American educator could possibly accept — is rendered empty by its institutionalization. Our devotion is only to standardized tests and standardized minds.
That's the quasi-communism. The quasi-fascism was brought home to me last Week when I revisited my hometown, Washington, D.C. It was bristling with barriers, cameras, security forces. The capitol must be the most surveilled and policed city in the world. To call that the symbol of human freedom is laughable.
At every turn — from its Patriot Act to its overwhelming propensity to secrecy to its use of the term "homeland"— the Bush administration is intent on reducing freedoms and increasing state power. Even its theocratic wing has a grim fascistic flavor. Texas governor Rick Perry signing a law against gay marriage at an evangelical church is telling you one thing: We have established evangelical Christianity as the state religion.
America is dead, and really no one seems to be mourning. At any moment, we will be as thoroughly bureaucratized as France and as theocratic as Iran. If there is any enthusiasm for — or even understanding of — what makes America distinctive and valuable, it is not currently visible on our political landscape.
In our pathetic little world, some people — Hillary Clinton, maybe — want to shape your mind and then take care of you; others — Alberto Gonzales — want to watch you all the time and then intern you. But no one wants you to be free.
>>>>>Sartwell, who writes daily at eyeofthestorm.blogs.com, teaches political science at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa. (Creators Syndicate)
Contact him at:
c.sartwell@verizon.net

posted by James E. Opfell @ 7:31 PM