The recent comfortable theism of many philosophers

Reviewing notes on Frye's diary and life at University of Toronto in the 1950's I learned that the Religious Knowledge course had been required in each of the four years of the undergraduate degree.  The concepts of "communication" and "media" were taking shape and there were departments of Ethics.  Bioethics was being invented.  J.L. Synge was in the Physics Department.

Here in America, more than 50 years later, each time I read thinly veiled revelations of personal theism in the works of aging philosophers I bristle: the tendency of these sometime theologians manqués is to offer the insight, the hard-won understanding, that this dilemma or that dilemma now facing us has arisen due to The Enlightenment or The Age of Reason.

But here in America, outside of academe, you feel that we are only one small step from blaming all of our ills on the freethinkers, the atheists and their unrelenting, creeping socialism.  In a country with state highways and a federal interstate system and a federal post office, these "socialist" hate-mongers might be considered the lunatic fringe.  But they believe in the physical resurrection of the damned and eternal hellfire.  We may be in the last days.  One can readily imagine a day when an exposed agnostic will only manage to keep her retirement room at the Community Christian Retirement Center if she can prove that she had been baptized or that at least one parent had a true church funeral with officially sanctioned if not licensed prayers both in the obsequies and the interment and that a like funeral has been pre-paid for herself.

The present obstacle is the foolish claim that atheism is itself a religion and that agnostics are simply too confused to be able to name their religion.  The shrewd Pentecostal churches carefully rename their new and larger sanctuaries "Community" and "Alliance".  Young converts may never even come to know who was John Wesley, his bother or the Methodists.  Speaking in tongues and laying on of hands leave us ill-equipped to form opinions about the billing of health insurers for chiropractics, naturopathy or to judge the the tax status of the brazen Scientology.  The next President of the United States may be unable to say whether she is Arminian or Calvinist but only that she is Bible-believing.

When Franz Brentano first took issue with pronouncements of Rome we were still far from the physical ascension of Mary, Mother of God and partner in the Mystic Union.  The expanding Marial cult worldwide is mistakenly viewed as a gender correction, a reassertion of the female, the Venusian.

One hope in America is that non-religious Jews will affirm their cultural heritage and social identity without bending to the weight of nostalgia, grief, regret and disappointment.

The current neglect of the philosophers Susanne Langer and Karl Jaspers has seemed to be symptomatic.  Recent volumes by Charles Taylor have no attention to Hans Jonas.  The Jonas renunciation of Heidegger -attacked by Arendt before we knew of her on-going affair with the master - is an incident in recent history of thought and reflection in America which should give pause:  renunciation of Heidegger being more grievous than mere atheism - as grievous as the efforts to build a philosophical anthropology as free of theistic presuppositions as it would be free of naive scientism.

The Catholic Church, quietly embracing evolution as a fact and setting aside creationist geological claims and intelligent design engineering claims, is correct in thinking that the soul and the trinity stand untouched.

Charles Taylor has had the temerity to report the canard that American Christians may be the object of discrimination, at a time when talk of church activities is the norm in America at the gym, at the mall and most anywhere else.  In Memphis and in Minneapolis, people are more likely to invite a new acquaintance to their church than to their home.  Corporate managers routinely let drop conversational openers in brief weekly chat sessions with employees, testing the waters very shamelessly with mew employees - most will respond, few will object.  Cubicles in high tech all over the country sport calendars for Missions in the Dominican Republic, images of their family church drawn by their children at Sunday school or at their denominational academy.  Are they concerned that so few malls include a chapel?

-- "What are you doing on the weekend ?
-- "Well, after church on Sunday, ... "

-- "How's it going?"
-- Great actually!  You know I usually have Bible study on Wednesday night, but last night ...

Add invitations to attend this Church basement fund-raiser or that ... these candies from this Church youth group or that.  Your child will have a music recital?  Expect it to be in a church.

Charles Taylor, at home at U Chicago and Harvard, commentator on the western world, and yet so appalling ignorant of the American reality.  Has he never arrived at an American high school on "rally around the flag" day?

And when you do visit the home of some new acquaintance in the USA, whether it is the picture of Jesus on the wall or the embroidered prayer hanging in the kitchen ... most often you will know where you stand: alone.

It is said that atheists are the most hated persons in America.  They are the group identified as that from which Americans would not want to gain a son-in-law or daughter-in-law.   The best predictor that an American first marriage which has lasted two years will  later end in divorce is regular religious attendance by both partners in the faith to which both were born (except for African Americans.)  Even if the explanation proves to be that women in these cases tend not leave the marriage, it remains an indicator of the impact of religion in America.

But few Americans actually know an atheist, let alone tolerate the company of an atheist.  Agnostics, fine.  Depressed?  A church will be part of the answer.  Alcohol an issue? God will be part of the answer.

It has been my experience that in the case of Pentecostals such as Palin, children can be denied visits with non-Pentecostal cousins if there is a risk of any discussions of dinosaurs, dinosaur posters or just playing with toy dinosaurs.

As a boy in a Canadian public school in Saskatchewan I would watch as the lone Jew and the lone Jehovah's Witness left the classroom before the weekly Bible lesson given by a preacher from the Salvation Army (Alexander School, North Battleford, Saskatchewan, 1959-63.)  Years later in a federally funded French school in Regina, Saskatchewan, my two oldest children and the one Moroccan Jew were the only ones excused in the entire school from weekly catechism classes.  Those children were the children of federal bureaucrats serving in government.  This is not France.  This is North America.

It is undeniable that churches played a key role in the undermining of the East German regime.  It may also be undeniable that Joan Baez played a key role in Havel's new Czechoslovakia - but that would not vindicate her music or ensure its place in a musical canon - not even for the Czechs.  Jazz was also important in Saint Petersburg under Communist repression.

In the history of American politics it remains unclear how Lincoln, surely a free-thinker, escaped the scrutiny of the press.  A Jew will be President of the United States long before an atheist.  A woman will be President of the United States long before an atheist.  A Moslem will be President of the United States long before an atheist.  A Chinese American - even if homosexual or transgender - who at least has an interest in Buddhism will be President long before an atheist.  These simple predictions few would contest.  America is one nation under a god.

The current scientific view is that religion is an integral feature of both culture and society (some Korean villages free of deities were anomalies somehow caused by that very integral function -  and the limited number of missionaries in the field in any one decade.)  I say "the current scientific view" because it is now the prevailing view of the social sciences.  It is not merely empirical: it is now sound theory. Secularization is out. Religious realism is in. That realism may soon find new support in neurology and the physiological basis for both faith and superstition.  Freud told Binswanger something similar about his "basement" - only in this case the neurosis will be health.

Here is a thought: when neurology finds the basis for religious experience of the cosmic "other" but does not find that same nexus of excited pathways in chimps or dolphins, will they then have been proven not to have a soul?

Given the current status of a feature of human life as fundamental as consciousness in the philosophy of mind, this facile theistic pandering by philosophers in the public eye is very troubling (Colin McGinn is a notable exception) - more troubling than the rampant mechanistic behaviorism against which philosophers such as Taylor fought (and which died out not because of theism and teleology but because the doctrines grew more uninteresting and their proponents retired - a social phenomenon - harmless even though embarrassing to recall.)

But I still recall the uniformed Salvation Army preacher in the classroom. Very clearly. And the modification of the Pledge of Allegiance to include "under God".  No state religion will be required - only a rejection of Jefferson's intention and Jefferson's explication as a basis for interpreting the First Amendment.  A Supreme Court which has already intervened in a presidential election without setting precedent and which indicates that precedent is merely that, precedent, is not reassuring.  This is the America that could not ratify an Equal Rights Amendment by 1982 and which nearly developed "neutron bombs" during that very ratification drive - and may yet free its citizens to own assault rifles again.  Any atheist in America could rightly feel uneasy and uneasy for her children.

A President who as a mayor thought that banning books was a test of loyalty for a town librarian may be naming Supreme Court justices after 2012.  It is not unreasonable to feel concern, if not alarm.  That demagogue calls for revolution, yet another tells millions that the nation is in imminent danger.  A "news" service broadcasts alarmist claims of impending doom - daily - and the need for Americans to wake up and do something.  As if this large, complex modern nation could address its problems and challenges without a "big" government with a budget in trillions.

In an America in which the Church of Scientology can intimidate the IRS into granting tax-free status, I would suggest that most anything is possible in the name of religion, whether that be a Constitutional Amendment to ban gay marriage or mandate life terms for even non-violent pedophiles (the latest television witch hunt, catching up under-age teens in its net.)  This is a nation in which in one state it is legal to marry a 14-yr old girl and in another sexual contact with that 14-yr old could mean a lifetime branded as a sex offender.  Imagine the day when telling a child that God does not exist becomes legally defined as ritual child abuse.  That would be this very America.  All that needs to be demonstrated is that belief in God is the cultural, linguistic, ethnic, social and psychological norm and we will require only a little research by neurologists with PET scans for the case for mandated theism to be made.  This will not be established religion, but scientific fact. Belief in God, not the Church.  One State, under God.  Now go pick your church.  Your non-denominational community church.  If Palin is the new model of the Bible-believer, no theology will be required and no establishment clause offended.  The credo is that simple: free exercise of the one true religion.

It is not enough to claim that such a fool could never become President in an age of mass media and the internet.  One did.  He served two terms and made appointments to the the Supreme Court.  Without the distractions of 9/11 and war in Iraq, one can wonder what direction the country might have taken.  Remember: that President believed that God wanted him there and that God would guide him and show him the way right into the Iraq war which his father had failed to prosecute to it natural end.  Lacking any plan to handle the disaffected and unpaid Iraqi military - let alone to secure the stockpiles of Iraqi munitions - many young Americans had to die for the simple choice of a fool for a president and an even bigger fool for vice-president.  Remember: the bulk of road side bombs - the improvised explosive devices - used artillery shells from stockpiles not secured while a boob who had evaded military service was declaring that the military job was done.

It was clearly possible that McCain/Palin would win in 2008 and that the elderly President would succumb and leave a nit wit as President.  Even a Dan Quayle had legislative experience.  Palin could have been President of the United States and she may yet be President Palin.  Even a Joe McCarthy never got this close to power or ever had this chance at power.

One thing that the apologists for God may have right is the critique of "progress".  Taylor goes so far as to mock British fair-play.  Concerning the bombing of of Wuerzburg or the sinking of the General Belgrano or the decision to go to war in Iraq, we can agree that Great Britain has often displayed something other than a sense of fair play.  But for atheists in Anglo-America, the sense of fair play is about all that we can count on.  And to survivors of tyranny in China, Germany and Russia, that must make us look like fools.

Three strands here: vague theism, a scientific basis for theism and the reach of a fundamentalist Christianity which - in actual practice - is dogma almost devoid of theology.  A bit like Communism without the dialectical materialism and related scientistic baggage only scarier for being so familiar and so readily embraced by the demagogues in the news industry.  This brand of fundamentalism may prove to be more of a danger than any fundamentalism in Islam.

Perhaps I am mistaken and this is such some revivalist cycle here in America and the scare will pass.  But if not here, then quite likely in some nation such as Uganda.  A recent post at a news feed showed puzzlement over the opportunities for missionaries in the predominantly Catholic Philippines - not a puzzle when you realize that for these Christians, the Pope in Rome is the Anti-Christ.  Conflict over Pentecostal conversions in India is a real problem.  It could be a tremendous problem if the Communist Party were to collapse in China.

The socialism of Charles Taylor - like the peculiar Canadian "Social Credit" dogmas - were doctrines preached in Canada by Baptists and related preachers.  The more recent political ambitions of Pentecostals in Canada rival only those of one other sect: the Scientologists in the US and France.

Of course there is always the other danger: mass hysteria concerning Free Masons did once spawn a political party in the USA.  Part of the hysteria in that case was the problem of "identifying" Masons - rather like "witches" and "communists" in that regard.  My personal answer for the new Fundamentalists is satire.  But I do remember that a program such as "The Daily Report" of Jon Stewart was unthinkable when I was a child.  Ah, yes: progress.