Furthermore, in every nook and cranny left by organized faiths, all manner of unconventional spiritual and mystical practices are booming. There are more occult healers than medical doctors in Russia, 38 percent of the French believe in astrology, 35 percent of the Swiss agree that “some fortune tellers really can foresee the future,” and nearly everyone in Japan is careful to have their new car blessed by a Shinto priest.
Jamie Smith or both more religious AND less
A Conversation I Very Much Want to Avoid
If last week I said a conversation on racism wasn’t nearly enough. This week I face the fact that a conversation about torture is something I want to avoid.
Last week I had to face the hard fact that if God is to save us from the sin between us, Jesus must save me from the sin within me. The dark truth about myself is that I’m selective about the sin I want to be delivered from. Some sins I like. Some sins I believe I need. I not only trust in myself more than I trust in Jesus, I also trust in some things, some ugly thing more than I trust in Him.
The Senate Torture Report
The New York Times Editorial board had this to say about the report.
We have not always agreed with Senator Dianne Feinstein on national security issues like wiretapping, but the California Democrat who heads the Senate Intelligence Committee has displayed commitment and courage in the investigation of the illegal detention, abuse and torture of prisoners by the Central Intelligence Agency.
Realizing she had one last chance to get this report to the public before Republicans take over the Senate, Ms. Feinstein released a summary of the findings despite heavy pressure from Republicans and the White House to withhold it. She and her aides deserve enormous credit for their five-and-a-half-year struggle.
Sadly, that is pretty much it on the disclosure front. In post-9/11 America, when it comes to momentous matters of national security, democratic tradition and the rule of law, there is precious little disclosure and no justice and accountability. It’s a bipartisan affliction.
Of course there was a partisan political firestorm around the report. Blame Bush. Blame Cheney. Blame Obama. By virtue of the change of administration in 2008 this seems to be plenty of bipartisan blame to go around, but unlike the sin of the week last week, racism, the self-righteous accusations have definitely been more muted. Why?
Is Torture Always Wrong? Are We Sure? We Look To Each Other
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From this range of writing, a broad consensus emerges. Buddhism, as a nontheistic belief system, would be largely unshaken by the discovery of intelligent life on other worlds. Among Christians, the Vatican’s long history of adjusting itself to the findings of modern science would lead Catholics to be relatively unfazed. More literalistic Protestants — especially evangelicals of various stripes — would have a much harder time of it, while certain sects with origins in 19th-century America (Seventh-Day Adventists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons), which already have folk beliefs about the existence of life on other planets, might actually thrive.
Before the Culture War
Combatants in civil wars are usually relatives, fighting over something both sides wish to share. George Marsden without addressing it directly attempts to trace back the roots of the present culture war to the time when cousins were allies fighting common foes.
When Americans chart the times of the second half of the twentieth century the calendar is less than helpful. The 50s lasted 20 years, from 1945 to 1965, or World War II to Vietnam, and the 60s from 1965 to 1975. Of the two the “60s” get all of the attention. Protests, hippies, drugs, war, fighting the man, finding yourself. Marsden wants to pause the lefty Boomer nostalgia trip or the religious right grudge match to ponder how the 60s got started, for a historian in the 50s of course.
According to Marsden the seeming utopia of the 50s was not as settled as Happy Days remembers it. It was an age of imagined continuity with America’s Enlightenment founders.
My argument is that the mainstream thinkers of the 1950s can be better understood if we see them as standing in far more continuity with the cultural assumptions of the founders than would be true of most mainstream thinkers today. At the same time, the discontinuities between their assumptions and those of the founders were formidable. Consequently, their hopes for providing a common ground for a cultural consensus could not be long sustained.
They took for granted as self-evident many of the founders’ assumptions regarding human freedom, self-determination, and equality of rights. In fact, their hopes for strengthening the American “consensus” were built around the faith that America could be united on the basis of these evolving shared ideals. They also shared with eighteenth-century leaders a confidence that rational and scientific understandings were essentially objective and therefore should be normative. Most of them believed that applying natural scientific methods and empirically based rationality to understanding society was one of the best ways to promote human flourishing.
Marsden, George (2014-02-11). The Twilight of the American Enlightenment: The 1950s and the Crisis of Liberal Belief . Basic Books. Kindle Edition.
The public intellectuals, mostly WASP or Jewish, were anxious about the consensus that seemed so solid. These anxieties would germinate and seed the social upheaval of the 60s.
When the consensus culture collapsed in the 1960s and 1970s, taking with it all but the vestiges of the old Protestant establishment, that collapse initiated, among other things, a religious crisis. 9 Formal recognition of Christianity, as in public school prayers and observances, declined at the same time. There were tumultuous changes in mores and a questioning of the shared patriotism that had characterized the 1940s and 1950s. This combination led at first to a cultural backlash, and then, by the later 1970s, to the rise of the religious right and the initiation of the culture wars. Although I do not attempt a full account of these developments here, I do offer an overview to illustrate how they may be illuminated by viewing them in the context of the demise of the consensus culture of the 1950s and the rise of the idea of taking back America by restoring a lost “Christian consensus.”
Marsden, George (2014-02-11). The Twilight of the American Enlightenment: The 1950s and the Crisis of Liberal Belief . Basic Books. Kindle Edition.
Marsden’s Narrative Continue reading
How Obama Backed Impunity For War Crimes http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2014/12/10/why-arent-the-torturers-in-jail/
