By the way, I’m back from vacation and trying to recover. Insert interjection of your choice here.
WaPo decided to take another look at that phenomenon of being secular and found someone who seems to think they’ve found a flaw:
Another book, “Secularism: The Basics,” out this month from Georgetown University professor Jacques Berlinerblau, focuses on political secularism and argues that while Americans may be growing less religious, their government and courts are becoming less secular. The gap, he says, inflames culture-war debates in areas such as vaccine exemptions, LGBTQ rights and government funding for religious schools. Unchecked free exercise of religion, Berlinerblau argues, deprives religious minorities of equal protection under the law.
And the United States, he says, is way behind in developing a secularism for the current era.
“There has been no innovation in secular thought in 50 years, few new policy ideas,” Berlinerblau said in an interview. “There’s no coherence, no leadership, no central movement. They can’t articulate what they want it to do.”
Well, I would hardly call secularism a coherent movement, since it’s defined by its lack of central organizing principle, aka the divine. Some of the secular simply want the abuse of themselves to stop, some still want the spiritual, whatever that might be, without the organized religion, while others reject the entire basis of the divine, and yet others, such as myself, simply refuse to come to the final conclusion. This last indecisive group are known as agnostics, at least in my mind.
But I think, after some sensibly drawn-out debate on the matter, the secular would come to the conclusion that they would like to see the power structures with which humanity is inevitably saddled to be unavoidably linked with, and measured against, reality.
After all, we look around and see folks swearing fealty to divine creatures for which there is little evidence of existence, and that evidence is dubious in the extreme. We see folks loudly proclaiming one day that Covid is a hoax, or nothing to worry about, and the next day the owner of that big mouth is rushed to a hospital with, yes, Covid. We know people who’ve lost family, friends, and enemies to Covid, and still stubbornly turn their heads to other explanations, then they themselves go to the hospital, barely able to draw that breath necessary to deny the reality of Covid.
And all of that seems most likely to be caused by their emotional need to hold a position of some prestige and prominence. I don’t believe in Covid, and that makes me better! is the implied message. In their community, that marks the Covid-disbelievers as a prominent member. Remember, being an apostate makes you shit, so, along with some other motivations such as retaining friends, even if they’re frightened, they stick to their public beliefs and actions, because that brings them prestige and position.
Do I have data to prove this? No, it’s conjecture, based on the actions and utterances of anti-vaxxers, as well as members of QAnon, and a few other groups that dispute conventional explanations of what we all see. The motivation towards power, prestige, and wealth in human societies is incredibly important and underestimated, especially by those who put great value on facts and truth.
Because they – and ME – tend to be quite naive about anti-vaxxers, those of QAnon, and so many other silly damn groups.
