{"id":55146,"date":"2014-10-15T00:30:37","date_gmt":"2014-10-15T07:30:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/markshea\/?p=55146"},"modified":"2014-12-28T20:44:16","modified_gmt":"2014-12-29T03:44:16","slug":"on-secularity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/markshea\/2014\/10\/on-secularity.html","title":{"rendered":"On Secularity"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

A reader writes:<\/p>\n

Does it seem to you that many liberals arguing the loudest for the separation of church and state are really arguing that the state adopt their religion, secular humanism? Religion is not a closed category.\u00a0 A \u201creligion\u201d is any system or scheme of morality. \u00a0Anytime someone advocates something as \u201cthe right thing to do\u201d or just or fair, the assertion is based on the speaker\u2019s morality and thus based on the speaker\u2019s religion.\u00a0 A person may adopt a particular system in total and such people are called fundamentalists.\u00a0 In my experience, far more people adopt a buffet approach to their religion, taking bits from various sources.<\/p>\n

Secular humanism has enjoyed (and is enjoying) power because it has avoided being called what it is \u2013 a form of religion.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yeah. \u00a0As I\u2019ve pointed out in this space, it\u2019s not the case (as Christians sometimes foolishly argue) that atheists or secularists are \u201cimmoral without religion\u201d. \u00a0Indeed, most atheists are *intensely* moralistic people and never more so than when raging righteously against the sins of theists. \u00a0They are not immoral, they are moralistic shoplifters<\/a> who are\u00a0stealing a transcendent basis for their moral proclamations from the theism of the Judeo-Christian tradition<\/a>. \u00a0And, as you note, they are choosey shoplifters who just take the bits of the Tradition they like, often being complete unaware of the fact that the moral points they mysteriously regard as \u201cself-evident\u201d are not at all self-evident to those who do not benefit from the huge patrimony of the Christian Tradition<\/a>.<\/p>\n

That said, Catholics should not fall into the opposite trap of despising the idea of the \u201csecular\u201d altogether as many Fundamentalists do. \u00a0\u201cSecular\u201d is, paradoxically, a *Church-invented* idea that respects the fact that, in the words of the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church<\/a>, \u201cRespect for the legitimate autonomy of earthly realities prompts the Church not to claim specific competence of a technical or temporal order\u201d. \u00a0 The Church takes seriously that God is the Author of secondary causes that have their own autonomy invested in them by God. \u00a0So the Church does not try to micromanage how politicians, plumbers, scientists, actors, farmers, and a host of other experts in specific fields do their business and, indeed, defers to their expertise when they are speaking from their field of competence. \u00a0Problems only arise when some expert in a particular field attempts to make their particular field the All Explaining Theory of Everything and shove God out of the picture to worship their field as an idol. \u00a0It matters not which creaturely thing the zealot seeks to worship (and candidates from the state, the sciences, sex, the arts, finance, and a host of other human activities are always being put forward by zealots), no creature can replace God or satisfy our souls. \u00a0So the problem is not secularity or humanism per se (indeed, Christianity is the most intensely humanistic faith in the world since its foundational belief is that God *became* human). \u00a0Rather it is the exaltation of the man over God and the attempt to expand the secular to exclude God from the picture that is the problem. \u00a0But the answer is not to expand God to exclude the secular and the human. \u00a0Rather it is to maintain the sane balance of the Church: respecting what is properly secular, but remembering that human dignity is rooted in the Creator who became human himself and died and rose to redeem man.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A reader writes: Does it seem to you that many liberals arguing the loudest for the separation of church and state are really arguing that the state adopt their religion, secular humanism? Religion is not a closed category.\u00a0 A \u201creligion\u201d is any system or scheme of morality. \u00a0Anytime someone advocates something as \u201cthe right thing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":92,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[8],"class_list":["post-55146","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-mailbag"],"yoast_head":"\nOn Secularity<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"A reader writes: Does it seem to you that many liberals arguing the loudest for the separation of church and state are really arguing that the state adopt\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/markshea\/2014\/10\/on-secularity.html\" \/>\n<meta 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