THE MOST IMPORTANT WORD IN THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE IS \u201cCREATED\u201d<\/strong>: So Upturned Earth picked up<\/a> my \u201cno such thing as a secular reason\u201d post, which is good\u2026 because that was a ridiculously sloppy post<\/a>, and I knew it at the time, and I\u2019m grateful for the nudge to clarify and maybe push the conversation forward. Or, at least, be sloppy in different ways.<\/p>\n This is a post whose structure owes too much to Rube Goldberg. I\u2019m going to try to sort out the parts so that they make sense, but there will be a bit of looping back and forth, for which I Apologize in Advance. It\u2019s also way too long. Hilariously, I\u2019m reading The Imitation of Christ<\/em> right now, in which the basic message is, \u201cHave you considered shutting up?\u201d So take this for what you paid for it.<\/p>\n First off, I think the argument comes in three parts (at least!). 1) There is no secular philosophy.<\/strong> And here, I totally didn\u2019t follow through on my promise of controversy! All I could offer was the weak, \u201c\u2026philosophy at its best takes part in the same eros as religion\u2026\u201d. And even that should probably be \u201csister\u201d rather than \u201cthe same.\u201d<\/p>\n I really like this comment<\/a>, and I think its phrasing gets at some of the central issues. While I think love of Christ is a lot <\/em>more than \u201ccomprehensive doctrine,\u201d Catholicism also does seem to be the kind of thing we mean when we use that clunky unaesthetic phrase, so I can roll with the phrase for the moment.<\/p>\n My real thing, in these posts, is that there are two levels of question: a) What is justice? and b) Which kinds of answers to a) are secular? And both <\/em>are eventually going to implicate your underlying \u201ccomprehensive doctrine,\u201d if someone pushes you hard enough. Both <\/em>are eventually going to require you to come clean about whom or Whom you love. You can\u2019t get out of the religious implications of a) by switching to b). I will track you down!<\/p>\n 2) The things we can discuss in purely secular terms aren\u2019t the things we\u2019re really fighting over.<\/strong> For this, I\u2019ll go to the wall\u2013I think this is a basic, obvious, and important truth about contemporary American politics.<\/p>\n Think of it this way: Recently we\u2019ve seen a lot of fairly pathetic attempts to argue that socialism plus legal abortion is America\u2019s best hope of reducing the abortion rate. (Of over a million a year<\/em>, just by the way.) This is an attempt to circumvent first-things politics in favor of we-can-all-agree-that politics.<\/p>\n And yet\u2026 would anyone <\/em>accept this if the issue were child abuse? Would anyone really say, \u201cWell, we all want to reduce child abuse, and I have this study saying that laws against child abuse don\u2019t actually prevent it, whereas rich people [a) beat their children less or b) don\u2019t get written up by CFS as often] so really we need to focus on the economy, and forget about the child abuse laws!\u201d?<\/p>\n Or\u2026 work with me here\u2026 would your views of the underlying issues maybe, a little bit<\/em>, affect your judgments both of the evidence about expedience vs. moral-legislation and of the relative importance of expedience vs. moral-legislation? In other words, I\u2019m pretty sure you\u2019d be both more skeptical that the expedience argument was true<\/em>, and more skeptical that it was the best <\/em>way to address child abuse.<\/p>\n So yeah: No matter how hard you try to avoid moral politics, it just keeps happening.<\/p>\n 3) Therefore, make your political\/moral\/ethical points as intensely <\/em>as possible, even when that requires sectarian language.<\/strong> This is another place where my initial post was really weak. I basically said, \u201cUse sectarian language when it will work, and not when it won\u2019t!\u201d This is the reverse of the Sorites Paradox problem faced by my interlocutors.<\/p>\n Basically many of them say, \u201cYou can use sectarian arguments, but only when there could maybe be secular reasons in there somewhere.\u201d But who decides which reasons are sufficiently secular\u2013and why?<\/p>\n If I can dredge up one atheist who thinks we need to keep \u201cunder God\u201d in the Pledge of Allegiance because it reminds us to be humble, even though (let\u2019s say; I\u2019m making this up) 99% of the people who want the phrase in the Pledge are God-fearin\u2019 believers\u2026 is this an acceptable public-square sectarian argument? How many atheists do I have to convince of any particular position (from \u201cgay marriage is an oxymoron\u201d to\u2013what should be far more controversial\u2013\u201chuman nature has no history\u201d) before it\u2019s sufficiently secular? How many atheists before it\u2019s Febreezed?<\/p>\n And which sects and anti-sects are sufficiently far apart? If a Cat\u2019lick and a Prot agree on something, is that no longer sectarian? What about a Catholic, a Jew, and a Muslim? How close to \u201c\u2026walk into a bar\u201d territory do we have to get before an argument is considered broadly-enough-accepted?<\/p>\n (Does it matter if the Catholic is Camille Paglia, the Jew is Naomi Wolf, and the Muslim is Irshad Manji? Because I bet I could get that <\/em>lot to agree to some whacked-out things.)<\/p>\n If it\u2019s, \u201cI know it when I see it,\u201d well that\u2019s fair enough, but it\u2019s hard for me when I see something different. If you think \u201cnature\u201d or whatever is a Jesus word that contaminates your pristine politics, I really need you to argue for that (and try to convince me on my ground from your premises, the same way I\u2019m doing from my side) and not just assert that I\u2019m out of bounds for saying the taboo word. <\/p>\n I need you to tell me what makes your abstractions boringly obvious and mine scarily sectarian, and so far, no argument I\u2019ve seen has convinced me that this can be settled a) without reference to metaphysical beliefs or b) faster than we\u2019d settle things if you just let me argue politics in whatever way comes naturally.<\/p>\n This is an especially knotty problem for my opponents because my whole claim is that our culture conditions us to find some claims obvious and other claims risible, and those divisions don\u2019t match up well with the truth<\/em>. But I\u2019m going to deal with the cultural-blinders problem in a moment, and tackle the parallel problem in my own position first.<\/p>\n In my first post, it sounded like I was basically saying, \u201cYou should only use sectarian arguments if they\u2019ll be convincing to people outside your sect!\u201d This is an obviously silly thing to say to people who lack the Second Sight. It would be better to say that you should seek to express your beliefs in ways which should <\/em>be, or maybe which you might expect <\/em>to be, compelling outside your sect. (In other words, yes, I should\u2019ve been more hardcore about the fact that sectarian arguments are valid.)<\/p>\n Pretty obviously, this is as true for atheists as for believers. The most difficult, but maybe also the most fruitful, way to do this would be to seek places where what you love matches up with what your opponent loves, and work from this shared beloved to a consensus on what that love requires.<\/p>\n IF MEN NO LONGER KNOW WHAT THEY ARE LOOKING AT, THERE MAY BE OTHER UNICORNS IN THE WORLD YET\u2013UNKNOWN, AND GLAD OF IT<\/a>.<\/strong> My whole point here, I think, is that what is controversial is not some kind of objective fixed point. Different things are controversial at different times. If I can\u2019t tell natural law from \u201clet\u2019s do it like they do on the Discovery Channel,\u201d does that really mean we have to ditch the concept of human nature entirely? <\/p>\n (I use that example for two reasons: a) I really <\/em>can\u2019t fathom natural law, as a thing, and generally think it assumes way too much cultural consensus on teleology to be useful for us; and b) I agree with the Straussian critique that modernity is defined by the loss of a belief in a teleology of the natural world, and therefore loss of the belief in human nature\u2013pretty sure this is coming from Natural Rights, Natural Right<\/em>, though it\u2019s been over a decade since I read it\u2013and you can\u2019t go home again, and that\u2019s bad<\/em>. In other words, \u201chuman nature\u201d is a concept I find both necessary and deeply problematic. It\u2019s one place where I find it really hard to negotiate the tensions between contingent, changing culture, and unchanging truths.)<\/p>\n Here, let me try this another way, a story I\u2019ve told before: Before I became Catholic I went on a trip to Italy with my high school\u2019s Latin class. One of my more striking memories from that trip is of a church with a huge statue of Saint Sebastian stretched out across the ceiling of the church. Like seriously, you look up, and the guy\u2019s practically dripping blood in your face.<\/p>\n And I was revolted. In fact, all <\/em>depictions of St. Sebastion repelled me. They all seemed so fetishistic, so much in love with suffering, so intensely what I was trying to escape in myself. (\u201cRelativism means never having to say you\u2019re sorry.\u201d) I just literally could not see a St. Sebastian as artistically valid or interesting; my only response was rejection.<\/p>\n That changed after I converted. I started noticing St. Sebastians which were genuinely sublime. Not all of them, obviously; but it was an iconography which had been opened up to me. Or I had been opened up to it.<\/p>\n There are a lot of different possible interpretations of this change. <\/p>\n You could say that a work of art which requires the viewer to be Catholic already is a smaller <\/em>work of art than one which commands a more universal audience.<\/p>\n You could say that I should\u2019ve been open to more kinds of beauty and sublimity before I converted.<\/p>\n You could say that I should\u2019ve become a Christian sooner.<\/p>\n (You could say that there might be a tradeoff between universality and intensity, which would make the first possible interpretation perhaps less helpful.)<\/p>\n But I think unless you take the first interpretation wholly <\/em>uncolored by the others, you should be able to recognize that there\u2019s a place for rhetoric\u2013political imagery, and political reasons\u2013which may attract some outsiders and repel others, but which is explicitly embedded in a particular and controversial religious tradition.<\/p>\n I THINK I\u2019VE GOT THE ALIAS\u2013ALIAS!\u2013THAT YOU\u2019VE BEEN LIVING UNDER, GLORIA<\/strong>: This is a minor point, but maybe it\u2019s worth saying: If you get people to stop talking about the sectarian reasons for their moral and ethical beliefs, you won\u2019t actually cauterize their faith. You\u2019ll just force all of us\u2013atheists, believers, croyantes<\/em>-on-cold-nights\u2013to hedge and fudge and talk around what we really mean to say.<\/p>\n Think about the bad-faith accusations in this claim:<\/p>\n \u201cThe idea here is to strengthen Jewish identity, but you can\u2019t do it in an open way because you run afoul of the law,\u201d said Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of the Union for Reform Judaism and a critic of Hebrew charter schools. \u201cSo you end up having rabbis and Jewish educators involved, and in all probability promoting Jewish commitment is exactly what they are looking to do, but they can\u2019t do it openly. It simply will not work.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n