Fascinating article, posted on another thread by someone I have bookmarked. I agree totally with the article.:
God Bless Atheism'
By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Tuesday, April 6, 2004; Page A21
On Monday, our family asked why this night was different from all other nights as we celebrated Passover at the home of Jewish
friends.
There was nothing unusual in this. In Seders of their own, millions of Jews around the world did exactly the same thing. But we are
not Jewish. We are Catholics who are celebrating Holy Week.
Our story might typically be used to tell a self-congratulatory American tale about the triumph of religious liberty and pluralism. But
some serious believers, and also some principled atheists and agnostics, might view our evening differently.
I could imagine an orthodox believer -- Christian, Jewish or Muslim -- wondering how committed we really were to our own faith. I
could imagine the atheist pointing to our shared celebration as evidence that religious faith is, for many, not a matter of genuine
conviction but of sentiment, friendship and family ties.
There are easy replies to such skepticism, including the command shared across many traditions to love both God and neighbor.
This implies -- does it not? -- a respect and, yes, a love for those who seek God in different ways.
But the orthodox believer and the atheist both have a point in challenging our facile answers. That's why, in this week of all weeks, I
treasured the New Republic's ironic cover line: "God Bless Atheism." Inspired by the recent Supreme Court argument over the
words "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance, Leon Wieseltier, the magazine's literary editor, praises atheists for taking the
question of God's existence so seriously that they force believers to do the same.
If the basis for religion "is not an intellectually supportable belief in the existence of God," Wieseltier writes, "then all the spiritual
exaltation and all the political agitation in the world will avail it nothing against the skeptics and the doubters, and it really is just a
beloved illusion." He goes on: "There is no greater insult to religion than to expel strictness of thought from it." Wieseltier makes
clear by implication why it is easy for the nonbeliever to insist upon religious freedom and pluralism. Since the nonbeliever sees
faith as an irrational "preference" among many other preferences, government has no business privileging one preference over
another.
The believer's basis for supporting religious freedom will necessarily be more complicated because the believer, by definition,
sees faith not as a "preference" but as truth.
The believer can certainly support religious freedom on pragmatic grounds. History has shown that the alternative is chaos,
persecution, war and mass murder. But it is also possible for the believer to be intellectually rigorous and still acknowledge a debt
to the Enlightenment, to the Age of Reason -- and, yes, to atheists.
All religious traditions interact with their times. Some reject the spirit of their times. Some are swallowed up. Most traditions survive
by finding a balance between preserving their integrity and adjusting to new revelations.
The Enlightenment waged war on the imposition of religion through force, and many religious traditions (notably, after some
struggle, my own Catholic Church) eventually adapted to the lessons it had to teach.
But the Jesuit theologian David Hollenbach puts an interesting twist on that adaptation. Religious liberty, he argues, must be rooted
not merely in "tolerance" but in what he calls "intellectual solidarity."
Tolerance, he notes, is "a strategy of noninterference with the beliefs and lifestyles of those who are different or 'other.' " That is the
classic Enlightenment view. Intellectual solidarity demands more, he says. It "entails engagement with the other . . . in the hope that
understanding might replace incomprehension and that perhaps even agreement could result."
Those who subscribe to various faiths and to none agree to put their own understanding of things at risk, "to listen as well as to
speak, to learn from what they hear, and, if necessary, to change as a result of what they have learned."
Those who believe they possess truth should not fear entering what Hollenbach calls "a community of freedom." Doing so is not a
sign of intellectual fuzziness or a lack of faith. On the contrary, it means embracing the very "strictness of thought" that Wieseltier
rightly demands of believers. It is only in dialogue with others that our faith is tested, our ideas made explicit, our errors corrected.
And that is why I thank my friends who invited us to join in solidarity with them to recall the Exodus story and to reaffirm the quest for
human freedom that it celebrates.
postchat@aol.com
© 2004 The Washington Post Company |
