Church and State
I've been trying, really trying, to see if I
could formulate something useful to say about Religion, God etc. on the Liberal
side of the American Aisle. It hasn't been
easy.
Mind you, it'd be easy enough for me to
state what I believe about belief, or to make any one of a number of rhetorical
or argumentative points. The trouble is, while they're all sterling pieces of
innovative reasoning, succinctly and elegantly expressed (of course), I didn't
see any that would stop the bellerin'. or do anything more than start them
bellerin' at me. So I've put things down and erased them
repeatedly.
That's when I realized
something: that almost all my barbs and sallies are aimed at
moving people to a position of
ignorance.
So
let's talk about that.
Shakespeare to
the contrary, ignorance is no fun at all. It's dangerous, it's empty, and it
may, just may, be the fount of fear in a conscious being. It's the other side of
thinking: I previously went on at length about the pleasures of knowing--not
knowing brings the equivalent pain. And the terrible thing is, a state of
knowing must be preceded by a state of not-knowing, or else what you've got
isn't knowing at all. I am more than I
was has to be preceded by, not just
I am less than I shall
be, but a simple, terrible
I am
less. There is something missing in
me.
Nobody wants to feel that way.
Nobody. That is both why people retreat into belief AND why people restructure
science to include certainty. A soul-penetrating vision, no matter how shaking
and shattering (and life-changing) does remove that ignorance and turn it into
bliss--and so does a vision of Science that merely involves piling more things
on top of other things until the Pyramids are dwarfed and the big tower actually
does reach the heavens.
But most
religions that aren't simply excuses point out, and point out strongly and with
vehemence, that a contact with God, the Divine, the Spiritual, or the Infinite
does not remove ignorance: if anything, one's ignorance is vastly enlarged. The
assertion that there is a realm of the spirit merely gives one a whole new
universe of things not to know. And by the exact same path, real science, while
piling data upon data, merely continues to point out the deeper ignorance we now
possess. Science has designed itself to seek out how things work, and with
astounding success, and we are taught all sorts of processes that explain all
sorts of other processes. But: we are taught that an electron has a negative
charge and a proton a positive charge. But if you ask what is the difference
between a positive charge and a negative one--we don't know. We are taught that
when a photon hits an electron in an atom, the electron moves into a new
orbital--but if you ask what the mechanism is by which the energy is
transferred--we don't know. And we're not even talking about the exotica of
physics. The jump from a vision of God to an assertion that you know the will of
God and every aspect of God's design is just as stupid and dangerous as looking
at the accomplishments of Science and jumping to "I know what the universe is."
And the big point i want to make is: it's
the same
mistake.
Ignorance,
painful and scary though it is, is absolutely necessary. God's speech to Job is
an argument for ignorance; Jesus's preaching about "I was hungry and you fed me
not," answered by the plaint "How were we to know it was you?" makes the point,
"You
don't. You don't know who you're dealing with
when you meet another--so treat them as you would your greatest friend and most
honored teacher."
So as not to make
this an entire book, let me focus down to how ignorance relates to morality and
politics. Here's the statement i want to make, and is, i think, the basis on
which we should move: Practical
consequences are a bad basis on which to act, and on which to found principles
of moral and political action--because we don't know what those consequences
might be. If you know perfectly well what the
Jews are, as the medieval Church did, and as Hitler did and as Stalin did, then
you can go ahead and kill them all, because the consequences are what you want.
And you can drain swamps and murder the indigent and bind women to the kitchen
and paint watch faces with radium, because you see what the consequences are.
The Golden Rule makes absolutely no sense when you know what you want and just
how to get it.
But Science shows us a
world of vast complexity, and Jesus shows us a world in which God can come and
ask us for a quarter--and the Practical is as unreachable as the Sure. The
principles of moral and political action cannot come from divine revelation any
more than they can come from inexorable scientific dialectic. When we don't know
the consequences of our actions, either physical/sociological/ecological or
eschatological, other principles must be used. Kindness, tolerance,
receptiveness, care and gentleness--none of these make sense if you know the
novel you're in. But wrapped in the terrible ignorance of the world--that's a
different story.
There are all sorts of
scientists out there who despise religions because they make all those arrogant
leaps about the True Nature of things, illegitimately throwing a big bearded old
man into the picture where there's no evidence for him. They're right in
that.
There are all sorts of religious people
who despise scientists because they take their big mechanical construct and
arrogantly assume that's all there is, saying that jet planes and computers show
there is no God. They're right in that,
too.
Because both these sub-groups are
in retreat from the terror of ignorance. And both these false certainties, by
the testimony of history, let cruelty and worse in by the side
door.
We hold these truth to
be self-evident, that we as humans are incompetent to judge the worth of other
humans, and that to deprive others of life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness is both arrogant and stupid. Care and Prudence dictate that we try to
treat all people on terms of respect and kindness, and that the systems we set
up should embody those principles as far as we are able. And most important,
when things stop working well, it's incumbent on us to change
it.
In the name of
Almighty God (or maybe not), we here highly resolve.
Posted: Wednesday - February 21, 2007 at 04:04 PM