Tuesday, June 5, 2012
Texas Rangers June 5 2012
Two questions: Can anybody on this team pitch? Can anybody on this team hit? Last night they were nearly no hit in a game where Oakland (yes, Oakland) scored eight runs in the first inning. A good team is going to get blown out once in a while over 162 games. But lately, if I didn't know any better, I'd swear I'd pulled a Rip van Winkle and it was the Cowboys scores I was seeing,
Monday, June 4, 2012
Change the Course of History
In light of the post on the overuse of the word "tragic," this is in the same vein.
So often the phrase is used "x changed the course of history." Is this really true? More importantly, is it really possible? When an individual changes direction, or course, that person still has an idea of where he is going. But in history, do we know where we are going? Do we know the result? A person or an event can affect history, they can have an impact on it, but can they change the direction? Only if we know what that direction would be without the actor. Put another way, a river runs in a certain direction. A natural phenomena (such as an earthquake) or a man-made phenomena ( a dam) will change the course of the river. Another example is the Dallas White Rock Marathon. Organizers have changed its course several times in recent years. You can't change the course of history without a time machine.
So often the phrase is used "x changed the course of history." Is this really true? More importantly, is it really possible? When an individual changes direction, or course, that person still has an idea of where he is going. But in history, do we know where we are going? Do we know the result? A person or an event can affect history, they can have an impact on it, but can they change the direction? Only if we know what that direction would be without the actor. Put another way, a river runs in a certain direction. A natural phenomena (such as an earthquake) or a man-made phenomena ( a dam) will change the course of the river. Another example is the Dallas White Rock Marathon. Organizers have changed its course several times in recent years. You can't change the course of history without a time machine.
Thursday, May 31, 2012
Tragic
Death is less noticeable when it occurs privately and piecemeal. In time of peace we can pretend, almost successfully, that it is only a regrettable accident, which ought to have been avoided. If a wealthy old gentleman of ninety-two suddenly falls dead of heart failure, the papers headline the event: "Tragic Death of Millionaire"; and we feel quite astonished and indignant that anybody so rich should be cut off in his prime. With all that money available for research, science should have been able to solve the problem of death for him. If we do not think this, then why use the word tragic about a death so clean, painless, and mature?
-Dorothy Sayers. "Problem Picture" in The Whimsical Christian. (134)
-Dorothy Sayers. "Problem Picture" in The Whimsical Christian. (134)
Wednesday, May 30, 2012
Slavery and the Constitution
Regardless of how events played out, sectionalism and slavery are key to understanding the major debates and compromises in Philadelphia during the summer of 1787. Slavery, of course, did not precipitate every division at the convention, nor was every debate that did not include slavery trivial.
But in the central role it played, the weight of evidence leads inescapably to the conclusion that the Constitution was drafted by highly pragmatic men who were pursuing limited and self-interested goals. Philosophical concerns seemed to play only a minor role in the proceedings, and only then with but a few of the participants. Nonetheless, for all that, precisely because the delegates in Philadelphia were pragmatic, and were there to represent specific, parochial interests. They were able to draft a document that was workable, adaptable, and able to survive challenges that could never have been imagined in 1787. It is distinctly possible that had idealism dominated in Philadelphia, American democracy would have failed.
-Lawrence Goldstone. Dark Bargain: Slavery, Profits, and the Struggle for the Constitution. (195)
But in the central role it played, the weight of evidence leads inescapably to the conclusion that the Constitution was drafted by highly pragmatic men who were pursuing limited and self-interested goals. Philosophical concerns seemed to play only a minor role in the proceedings, and only then with but a few of the participants. Nonetheless, for all that, precisely because the delegates in Philadelphia were pragmatic, and were there to represent specific, parochial interests. They were able to draft a document that was workable, adaptable, and able to survive challenges that could never have been imagined in 1787. It is distinctly possible that had idealism dominated in Philadelphia, American democracy would have failed.
-Lawrence Goldstone. Dark Bargain: Slavery, Profits, and the Struggle for the Constitution. (195)
From Dorothy Sayers
Creed of St. Euthanasia
(commonly called the Atheneum Creed)
I believe in man, maker of himself and inventor of all science. And in myself, his manifestation, and captain of my psyche; and that I should not suffer anything painful or unpleasant.
And in a vague, evolving deity, the future-begotten child of man; conceived by the spirit of progress, born of emergent variants; who shall kick down the ladder by which he rose and tell history to go to hell.
Who shall some day take off from earth and be jet-propelled into the heavens; and sit exalted above all worlds, man the master almighty.
And I believe in the spirit of progress, who spake by Shaw and the Fabians; and in a modern, administrative, ethical, and social organization; in the isolation of saints, the treatment of complexes, joy through health, and destruction of the body by cremation (with music while it burns), and then I've had it.
-Dorothy Sayers. "Selections from the Pantheon Papers." in The Whimsical Christian. (10)
Texas Rangers May 31 2012
The Rangers were hammered by the Mariners last night ending a four game winning streak but there is still good news. The bats seem to have come out of hibernation. Both Nelson Cruz and Mike Napoli appear to be back on track. Neftali Feliz went on the DL but the team signed Roy Oswalt formerly of Houston and Philadelphia. We have now reached a point where top players (including pitchers) want to play here. They love the chemistry. The irony is that the Phillies put Roy Halladay on the DL yesterday. I bet there is some cursing going on in the city of Brotherly Love today.
Thursday, May 24, 2012
Peter Berger on Religious Liberty
In recent discussions of the place of religious liberty in the American polity, a number of people have argued that religious liberty is the first liberty, that it is the foundation, the fons et origo, of all the other rights and liberties. I for one agree with the basic proposition, and I do so for one, overridingly important reason- the polity that recognizes religious liberty as a fundamental human right thereby recognizes (knowingly or unknowingly) the limits of political power.
It is easy to see why this should be so. At the core of man's religious quest is the experience of transcendence, the encounter with a reality that is "totally other" than all the realities of ordinary life. And a necessary consequence of this encounter is that all the ordinary realities, including the most imposing and oppressive ones, are relativize. In the realm of human institutions, none is the more imposing and (at least potentially) more oppressive than the polity, especially in its recent embodiment as the modern state, which is a historically unprecedented agglomeration of power. This characteristic, of course, is manifested most terrifyingly in the modern totalitarian state, but all contemporary states, even the most democratic ones, possess instruments of power that would have made the most awesome tyrants of antiquity green with envy....The state is a very serious business indeed, deadly business (for in the end every state, even the most peaceful one, rest on the power of the sword), and those who represent the state take themselves very seriously. That is why the state wraps itself in religious or quasi-religious symbols, why it fosters solemn ceremonies, and why the refusal to be serious about the state is everywhere a punishable offense (from lese majeste to contempt of Congress). Given all this, it should not surprise us that there is a built-in tension between the institutions of political power and the religious quest that tends toward relativizing them.
This has always been so. The holders of political power have always tried to contain the potentially subversive force of religion by controlling religious institutions. Most of the time they have been successful in this, but ever again there appeared religious spokesmen- emissaries of transcendence, if you will- who refused to play the role of legitimators of the political status quo. The power-holders naturally took a very dim view of these troublemakers and frequently employed very disagreeable methods to deal with them. The more tyrannical the ruler, the more urgent was the need to shut up the troublemakers....
It is precisely in this quality of relativizing, unmasking, debunking the pretensions of human power that we can see the deep affinity between the religious and the comic, between the prophet and the clown. The prophet proclaims that God laughs at all the kings and emperors of the earth; the clown makes a joke and reveals that the emperor has no clothes. No wonder then, that tyrants are afraid of prophecy and of jokes. No wonder that the tyrants of modern totalitarianism, very logically, have been equally assiduous in controlling the institutions that (heaven forbid) may bring forth prophets as they have been in persecuting anyone who dared to make jokes about their grimly serious agendas. And this is why churches have become the last refuge of dissenters in all totalitarian societies, and why the same societies have produced a luxurious growth of underground humor....
A believing Jew or Christian can put this insight into a theological proposition: redemption will one day be perceived as an immense comic relief, and even now, in an as-yet-unredeemed world, redemption can be anticipated as a healing joke. Yet I am certain that my views about the primacy of religious liberty in a catalogue of liberties would remain the same if tomorrow I should lose my faith and should redefine myself as an agnostic. As an agnostic I would also be concerned that human existence not be confined in the prison of ordinary reality, and even if I would be unable to make positive affirmations about the nature of that which transcends our ordinary lives, I would not want steel bars to be imposed on every window that might, conceivably, open up on unthought-of possibilities. In other words, there is a secular argument to be made for the primacy of religious liberty, as there are secular reasons for the democratic option against the totalitarian temptations of our age.
This points us to a paradox, which is particularly relevant to current debates over the meaning of the First Amendment in the United States. Without going into constitutional and juridical ramifications of this issue, it seems to me that there is a distressing triviality about much that has been said about a "secular purpose" in this or that activity of religious institutions, including some things that have been said by the Supreme Court....To be sure, there is a "secular purpose" served if a church runs a soup kitchen, an orphanage, or even (though this is more doubtful) a university. But the most important secular purpose any church can serve is to remind people that there is a meaning to human existence that transcends all worldly agendas, that all human institutions (including the nation-state) are only relatively important and are ultimately not to be taken seriously, and that all worldly authority (even that of the Supreme Court of the United States) is disclosed to be comically irrelevant in the perspective of transcendence.
Here, then, is the paradox: religious institutions serve their most important secular purpose precisely when they are least secular in their activities. Society, under certain circumstances, can easily dispense with church-operated soup kitchens or universities. Society can ill afford to lose the reminders of transcendence that the church provides every time it worships God. The protection of religious liberty serves the purpose of this ultimate anamnesis, which ipso facto protects the possibility of laughter and the wondrous mystery of the human condition.
I do not share the view that democracy is the noblest form of government, even less the Wilsonian messianism that would see the United States as the providential instrument by which democracy is to be imposed on every nation on earth (a messianism, incidentally, to which the American right is as prone as the American left- the two only differ as to which recalcitrant countries are to be the objects of the democratic crusade). Rather, I am inclined to agree with Winston Churchill that democracy is an appalling business- until one considers the alternatives- or at least those that are available under modern conditions. The modern state, for reasons rooted in its very structure, contains the impulse to expand into every nook and cranny of society. The totalitarian state is, of course, the apotheosis (I choose the word deliberately) of this impulse.
Democracy provides the only half-way reliable institutional mechanisms to curb the totalitarian impulse. It does not do this because of its ideology: As J. L. Talmon has convincingly shown, there is such a thing as "totalitarian democracy," at least in the sphere of ideas (Jacobin in its original version), sometimes (alas) in the sphere of facts. But the core of Western democracy, and certainly of the democratic experiment of the United States, is the institutionalizing of limits on the power of government. Political scientists have defined democracy in different ways; most come down to two key elements- regular elections and some sort of bill of rights. In other words, democracy seeks to ensure (not sporadically, but through predictable institutions) that the rascals can be thrown out from time to time and that there are certain things that they cannot do while they are in.
Democracy (not as an idea, but as a functioning political reality) is based on suspicion and irreverence- which is precisely why it is the best shield against the totalitarian project, which demands faith and veneration. Any democratic constitution must say to the state, repetitively and insistently, "Thus far, and no farther!" Every protection of political liberties and of human rights, of course, does just that. The recognition of religious liberty, as a fundamental and irrevocable right, does it in a fundamental way. Religious liberty is not one of many benefits that the state may choose to bestow on its subjects; rather religious liberty is rooted in the very nature of man and, when the state recognizes it, the state ipso facto bows before a sovereignty that radically transcends every worldly manifestation of power. For the religious believer, of course, this is the sovereignty of God; for the agnostic it will be the sovereignty of that mystery of man's freedom.
These considerations have very practical implications for many of the controversies currently dividing American society. We have reason to be grateful that this society is democratically governed, that controversy is possible and indeed protected, and that by and large religious liberty is secure. However, it would be very foolish to overlook the totalitarian tendencies even within this society, some of them very much present in issues touching on religious liberty. I do not have the time to spell this out; suffice it to say that one of the hallmarks of the totalitarian process is always the urge to drive underground the metaphysical propensity in man to banish transcendence from the public square (except in the domesticated form of established or civil religion), and to make all of social life subject to the trivial worldview of a functional rationality. Put simply, the totalitarian project requires a world without windows; the defense of religious liberty is the counterproject of keeping alive a sense of the wonder of our condition.
But how does fundamentalism fit into this picture? The problem, of course, is that one man's fundamentalism is another's self-evident truth. Depending on where you happen to live, the word may evoke Communist Party officials trying to preserve Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy, ayatollahs putting women behind veils, or born-again seminary trustees firing professors for not teaching that Moses wrote the Pentateuch. I happen to live two blocks from the Charles River; when I hear the word "fundamentalism," I think of my academic colleagues and neighbors whose unbending convictions and self-righteous intolerance of heretics are fully up to ayatollah standards (though, thank God, they lack Ayatollah means of enforcement). Perhaps we can be satisfied here with an ad hoc definition of fundamentalism as any all-embracing system of belief held with rigid certitude and coupled with the moral assurance of one's right to impose it on everyone else. Fundamentalism thus understood, whatever its ideational content, will always be an enemy of religious liberty; always and everywhere, it can only flourish behind tightly shut windows; and wherever it sees an open window, it is under the urgent compulsion to slam it shut.
It is undoubtedly correct to say that, through most of human history, the content of most fundamentalisms has been religious. The reasons can be explained, but this coincidence between religion and fanaticism must be a source of sorrow for any religious believer. It is a source of sorrow for me since I believe that not only is it possible to be religious without being fanatical, but that genuine religious faith precludes fanaticism. In the contemporary world too, sad to say, there has been a notable upsurge of religious fundamentalisms. The most dramatic cases of this, of course, are Islamic and Protestant fundamentalism, both enormously powerful forces cross-nationally and both (though there are very important differences between them) capable of inspiring large numbers of people to make radical changes in their lives. Other religious traditions, however, have shown themselves capable of very similar outbursts of unlovely and at times homicidal fanaticism....
Those who regard Protestant fundamentalism in this country as constituting a comparable danger to pluralism and to civic peace are unconvincing, but let it be stipulated that there are situations in America too where religious liberty is threatened by religious fanaticism (I would certainly think so if I were a seminary professor about to be fired for teaching modern methods of biblical scholarship, though, even in my distress, I would console myself with the knowledge that my persecutors cannot call upon the police to assist them).
All the same, it seems to me that the most pervasive fundamentalisms facing us here are secular ones. Politically, they are both of the left and the right. In the milieu of the "new knowledge class" in America, it would be unnecessary to go on about the right (as when, in an act he himself modestly described as one of courage, the former president of Yale University denounced the Moral Majority- at Yale). In this milieu there is bemused contempt about the "superstitions" of religious fundamentalists, such as their belief that the Bible is literally inspired or that prayer can cause miracles.
As a theologically liberal Lutheran, I must confess that I find the first proposition very improbable and that I am inclined to skepticism about any concrete specification of the second. But among the cultured despisers of Jerry Falwell and his cohorts it is widely believed that the Soviet Union has changed fundamentally because it has the first leader with clothes that fit, that the establishment of racial quotas is a means toward a race-blind society, or that a six-month fetus should have a legal status roughly comparable to a wart. It seems to me that here we have "superstitions" greatly more dangerous than those found in the Protestant hinterland. It is the values and the prejudices of the knowledge class, not those of Reverend Jerry Falwell, that today shape important policies, are enacted into law, and define what is culturally acceptable. It is primarily against them, and not against the subculture of conservative Protestantism, that religious liberty must be protected. It is precisely the knowledge class that today seeks an "establishment of religion"- that is, the imposition through state power of its particular worldview and morality- and which interferes with the "free exercise of religion" of those who disagree with its ideology.
The social psychology of all fundamentalisms, religious or secular, holds no great enigmas. Its core motive is what Erich Fromm called "the escape from freedom"- the flight into an illusionary and necessarily intolerant certitude from the insecurities of being human. In all likelihood this motive is age old, but it takes on a special force under the circumstances of modernity. Indeed there would seem to be a dialectical relation between the multiplication of choices brought about by modern pluralism and the flight into a once-and-for-all choice posited as an absolute. The affirmation of religious liberty, by contrast, is finally grounded in the refusal to participate in this flight into fanaticism. Once again, it can take a religious or a secular form: the latter will be a stoic acceptance of uncertainty; the former is based on the recognition that faith does not require false certitudes, that it can even live with doubt. This is why the fanatic cannot laugh (an incapacity he shares with the totalitarian); faith, on the other hand, opens up the possibility of laughter at the most profound level- the laughter that participates, in anticipation, in the joyful play of the angels.
-Peter Berger. "Afterword" in Articles of Faith, Articles of Peace. (114-121)
This has always been so. The holders of political power have always tried to contain the potentially subversive force of religion by controlling religious institutions. Most of the time they have been successful in this, but ever again there appeared religious spokesmen- emissaries of transcendence, if you will- who refused to play the role of legitimators of the political status quo. The power-holders naturally took a very dim view of these troublemakers and frequently employed very disagreeable methods to deal with them. The more tyrannical the ruler, the more urgent was the need to shut up the troublemakers....
It is precisely in this quality of relativizing, unmasking, debunking the pretensions of human power that we can see the deep affinity between the religious and the comic, between the prophet and the clown. The prophet proclaims that God laughs at all the kings and emperors of the earth; the clown makes a joke and reveals that the emperor has no clothes. No wonder then, that tyrants are afraid of prophecy and of jokes. No wonder that the tyrants of modern totalitarianism, very logically, have been equally assiduous in controlling the institutions that (heaven forbid) may bring forth prophets as they have been in persecuting anyone who dared to make jokes about their grimly serious agendas. And this is why churches have become the last refuge of dissenters in all totalitarian societies, and why the same societies have produced a luxurious growth of underground humor....
A believing Jew or Christian can put this insight into a theological proposition: redemption will one day be perceived as an immense comic relief, and even now, in an as-yet-unredeemed world, redemption can be anticipated as a healing joke. Yet I am certain that my views about the primacy of religious liberty in a catalogue of liberties would remain the same if tomorrow I should lose my faith and should redefine myself as an agnostic. As an agnostic I would also be concerned that human existence not be confined in the prison of ordinary reality, and even if I would be unable to make positive affirmations about the nature of that which transcends our ordinary lives, I would not want steel bars to be imposed on every window that might, conceivably, open up on unthought-of possibilities. In other words, there is a secular argument to be made for the primacy of religious liberty, as there are secular reasons for the democratic option against the totalitarian temptations of our age.
This points us to a paradox, which is particularly relevant to current debates over the meaning of the First Amendment in the United States. Without going into constitutional and juridical ramifications of this issue, it seems to me that there is a distressing triviality about much that has been said about a "secular purpose" in this or that activity of religious institutions, including some things that have been said by the Supreme Court....To be sure, there is a "secular purpose" served if a church runs a soup kitchen, an orphanage, or even (though this is more doubtful) a university. But the most important secular purpose any church can serve is to remind people that there is a meaning to human existence that transcends all worldly agendas, that all human institutions (including the nation-state) are only relatively important and are ultimately not to be taken seriously, and that all worldly authority (even that of the Supreme Court of the United States) is disclosed to be comically irrelevant in the perspective of transcendence.
Here, then, is the paradox: religious institutions serve their most important secular purpose precisely when they are least secular in their activities. Society, under certain circumstances, can easily dispense with church-operated soup kitchens or universities. Society can ill afford to lose the reminders of transcendence that the church provides every time it worships God. The protection of religious liberty serves the purpose of this ultimate anamnesis, which ipso facto protects the possibility of laughter and the wondrous mystery of the human condition.
I do not share the view that democracy is the noblest form of government, even less the Wilsonian messianism that would see the United States as the providential instrument by which democracy is to be imposed on every nation on earth (a messianism, incidentally, to which the American right is as prone as the American left- the two only differ as to which recalcitrant countries are to be the objects of the democratic crusade). Rather, I am inclined to agree with Winston Churchill that democracy is an appalling business- until one considers the alternatives- or at least those that are available under modern conditions. The modern state, for reasons rooted in its very structure, contains the impulse to expand into every nook and cranny of society. The totalitarian state is, of course, the apotheosis (I choose the word deliberately) of this impulse.
Democracy provides the only half-way reliable institutional mechanisms to curb the totalitarian impulse. It does not do this because of its ideology: As J. L. Talmon has convincingly shown, there is such a thing as "totalitarian democracy," at least in the sphere of ideas (Jacobin in its original version), sometimes (alas) in the sphere of facts. But the core of Western democracy, and certainly of the democratic experiment of the United States, is the institutionalizing of limits on the power of government. Political scientists have defined democracy in different ways; most come down to two key elements- regular elections and some sort of bill of rights. In other words, democracy seeks to ensure (not sporadically, but through predictable institutions) that the rascals can be thrown out from time to time and that there are certain things that they cannot do while they are in.
Democracy (not as an idea, but as a functioning political reality) is based on suspicion and irreverence- which is precisely why it is the best shield against the totalitarian project, which demands faith and veneration. Any democratic constitution must say to the state, repetitively and insistently, "Thus far, and no farther!" Every protection of political liberties and of human rights, of course, does just that. The recognition of religious liberty, as a fundamental and irrevocable right, does it in a fundamental way. Religious liberty is not one of many benefits that the state may choose to bestow on its subjects; rather religious liberty is rooted in the very nature of man and, when the state recognizes it, the state ipso facto bows before a sovereignty that radically transcends every worldly manifestation of power. For the religious believer, of course, this is the sovereignty of God; for the agnostic it will be the sovereignty of that mystery of man's freedom.
These considerations have very practical implications for many of the controversies currently dividing American society. We have reason to be grateful that this society is democratically governed, that controversy is possible and indeed protected, and that by and large religious liberty is secure. However, it would be very foolish to overlook the totalitarian tendencies even within this society, some of them very much present in issues touching on religious liberty. I do not have the time to spell this out; suffice it to say that one of the hallmarks of the totalitarian process is always the urge to drive underground the metaphysical propensity in man to banish transcendence from the public square (except in the domesticated form of established or civil religion), and to make all of social life subject to the trivial worldview of a functional rationality. Put simply, the totalitarian project requires a world without windows; the defense of religious liberty is the counterproject of keeping alive a sense of the wonder of our condition.
But how does fundamentalism fit into this picture? The problem, of course, is that one man's fundamentalism is another's self-evident truth. Depending on where you happen to live, the word may evoke Communist Party officials trying to preserve Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy, ayatollahs putting women behind veils, or born-again seminary trustees firing professors for not teaching that Moses wrote the Pentateuch. I happen to live two blocks from the Charles River; when I hear the word "fundamentalism," I think of my academic colleagues and neighbors whose unbending convictions and self-righteous intolerance of heretics are fully up to ayatollah standards (though, thank God, they lack Ayatollah means of enforcement). Perhaps we can be satisfied here with an ad hoc definition of fundamentalism as any all-embracing system of belief held with rigid certitude and coupled with the moral assurance of one's right to impose it on everyone else. Fundamentalism thus understood, whatever its ideational content, will always be an enemy of religious liberty; always and everywhere, it can only flourish behind tightly shut windows; and wherever it sees an open window, it is under the urgent compulsion to slam it shut.
It is undoubtedly correct to say that, through most of human history, the content of most fundamentalisms has been religious. The reasons can be explained, but this coincidence between religion and fanaticism must be a source of sorrow for any religious believer. It is a source of sorrow for me since I believe that not only is it possible to be religious without being fanatical, but that genuine religious faith precludes fanaticism. In the contemporary world too, sad to say, there has been a notable upsurge of religious fundamentalisms. The most dramatic cases of this, of course, are Islamic and Protestant fundamentalism, both enormously powerful forces cross-nationally and both (though there are very important differences between them) capable of inspiring large numbers of people to make radical changes in their lives. Other religious traditions, however, have shown themselves capable of very similar outbursts of unlovely and at times homicidal fanaticism....
Those who regard Protestant fundamentalism in this country as constituting a comparable danger to pluralism and to civic peace are unconvincing, but let it be stipulated that there are situations in America too where religious liberty is threatened by religious fanaticism (I would certainly think so if I were a seminary professor about to be fired for teaching modern methods of biblical scholarship, though, even in my distress, I would console myself with the knowledge that my persecutors cannot call upon the police to assist them).
All the same, it seems to me that the most pervasive fundamentalisms facing us here are secular ones. Politically, they are both of the left and the right. In the milieu of the "new knowledge class" in America, it would be unnecessary to go on about the right (as when, in an act he himself modestly described as one of courage, the former president of Yale University denounced the Moral Majority- at Yale). In this milieu there is bemused contempt about the "superstitions" of religious fundamentalists, such as their belief that the Bible is literally inspired or that prayer can cause miracles.
As a theologically liberal Lutheran, I must confess that I find the first proposition very improbable and that I am inclined to skepticism about any concrete specification of the second. But among the cultured despisers of Jerry Falwell and his cohorts it is widely believed that the Soviet Union has changed fundamentally because it has the first leader with clothes that fit, that the establishment of racial quotas is a means toward a race-blind society, or that a six-month fetus should have a legal status roughly comparable to a wart. It seems to me that here we have "superstitions" greatly more dangerous than those found in the Protestant hinterland. It is the values and the prejudices of the knowledge class, not those of Reverend Jerry Falwell, that today shape important policies, are enacted into law, and define what is culturally acceptable. It is primarily against them, and not against the subculture of conservative Protestantism, that religious liberty must be protected. It is precisely the knowledge class that today seeks an "establishment of religion"- that is, the imposition through state power of its particular worldview and morality- and which interferes with the "free exercise of religion" of those who disagree with its ideology.
The social psychology of all fundamentalisms, religious or secular, holds no great enigmas. Its core motive is what Erich Fromm called "the escape from freedom"- the flight into an illusionary and necessarily intolerant certitude from the insecurities of being human. In all likelihood this motive is age old, but it takes on a special force under the circumstances of modernity. Indeed there would seem to be a dialectical relation between the multiplication of choices brought about by modern pluralism and the flight into a once-and-for-all choice posited as an absolute. The affirmation of religious liberty, by contrast, is finally grounded in the refusal to participate in this flight into fanaticism. Once again, it can take a religious or a secular form: the latter will be a stoic acceptance of uncertainty; the former is based on the recognition that faith does not require false certitudes, that it can even live with doubt. This is why the fanatic cannot laugh (an incapacity he shares with the totalitarian); faith, on the other hand, opens up the possibility of laughter at the most profound level- the laughter that participates, in anticipation, in the joyful play of the angels.
-Peter Berger. "Afterword" in Articles of Faith, Articles of Peace. (114-121)
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