Faith...................

 

      Tolstoy searches in science, philosophy, wisdom and reason and finds no answer to convince him that life is worth living.  Science answers many questions, but not the one that obsesses him.  He sees too that meaning does not lie in something superadded to life: possessions, achievements, honours, awards.  Those are externalities, gift-wrapping, not life itself.  The answer that eventually came to Tolstoy was religious faith.  'No matter what answers faith may give, its every answer gives to the finite existence of man the sense of the infinite—a sense which is not destroyed by suffering, privation or death.'  Faith, he said is a force of life.  'If a man lives, then he must believe in something.'  If that something is finite, it will not ultimately satisfy him, since everything finite eventually perishes.  The only thing worth believing in is the infinite.  And, 'Without faith it is impossible to live.'

-Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership:  Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning

Religious freedom, or not...............

 

............More stuff I never learned as a history major:

     In 1768, with dissenting religion continuing to grow, the Anglican establishment—both a political and religious entity—resorted to arrests.  Baptists faced the brunt of arrests.  By the time of the American Revolution, more than half the Baptist ministers in Virginia had been jailed for preaching without a license or disturbing the peace. (Some ministers responded that they had a license from "King Jesus" and recognized no other authority over their calling.) . . .

     Facing the most formidable military of the eighteenth century, and with dissenters accounting for 20 to 33 percent or more of Virginia's white population, patriot leaders realized quickly that they needed dissenters' support in the war effort. (Government documents noted, for example, the need for support from those marksmen in the heavily Presbyterian Shenandoah Valley with the extraordinarily accurate long rifles who eventually mad up the core of Daniel Morgan's riflemen at the Battle of Saratoga.)  This recognition led to a remarkable negotiation—support for the war effort being offered by dissenters in return for religious freedom.

     Dissenters' earlier pleas for some limited relief were replaced by demands for equal treatment: an end to the church tax; an end to Anglican control of marriage, orphans, and poor relief; exemption from military service for dissenting ministers.  Religious freedom was tied to the sought-after support for the war.

-John A. Ragosta, from his essay, What Does the American Revolution Mean to Me? in The American Revolution at 250: Twenty-Four Historians Reflect on the Founding

the important provinces..............

 

Like so many people wedded to the nineteenth-century view of science, Dawkins overlooks the nineteenth-century reaction—which said, "Wait a minute: science is not the only way to pursue knowledge.  There is moral knowledge too, which is the province of practical reason; there is emotional knowledge, which is the province of art, literature and music.  And just possibly there is transcendental knowledge, which is the province of religion.  Why privilege science, just because it sets out to explain the world?  Why not give weight to the disciplines that interpret the world and so help us to be at home in it?"

-Roger Scruton, On Human Nature

On Europe and ..........................

 

.................................the U. S. of A:

You do not spend 276 years obsessing over something you merely dislike. That is the behaviour of someone working through a deeper anxiety.

worship....................

 

He asked my religion and I replied 'agnostic'. He asked how to spell it, and remarked with a sigh: 'Well, there are many religions, but I suppose they all worship the same God." This remark kept me cheerful for about a week.

Bertrand Russell, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell

dogmas.....................

 

Truths turn into dogmas the instant that they are disputed.  Thus every man who utters a doubt defines a religion.  And the skepticism of our time does not really destroy beliefs, rather it creates them; gives them their limits and their plain and defiant shape.

-Gilbert Keith Chesterton, Collected Works, Volume 1

from first page to last...........

 

His life shows, the Yale scholar A. Whitney Griswold has noted, "what Puritan habits detached from Puritan beliefs were capable of achieving."

     He was also far less inward looking than Cotton Mather or other Puritans.  Indeed, he poked fun at professions of faith that served little worldly purpose.  As A. Owen Aldridge writes, "The Puritans were known for their constant introspection, fretting about sins, real or imaginary, and agonizing about uncertainty of their salvation.  Absolutely none of this soul-searching appears in Franklin.  One can scrutinize his work from first page to last without finding a single note of spiritual anxiety."

-Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

beyond.......................

 

. . . he was a prophet of tolerance.  Focusing on doctrinal disputes was divisive, he felt, and trying to ascertain divine certainties was beyond our mortal ken.  Nor did he think that such endeavors were socially useful.  The purpose of religion should be to make men better and to improve society, and any sect or creed that did so was fine with him.

-Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

less daunting...........................

 

History is a tale, Franklin came to believe, not of immutable forces but of human endeavors.

     This outlook clashed with some of the tenets of Calvinism, such as the essential depravity of man and the predestination of his soul, which Franklin would eventually abandon as he edged his way closer to the less daunting deism that became the creed of choice during the Enlightenment.  Yet, there were many aspects of Puritanism that made a lasting impression, most notably the practical, sociable, community-oriented aspects of that religion.

-Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

and no solution in sight.............

Politics is about power, and at the heart of the Abrahamic vision is a critique of power.  Power is a fundamental assault on human dignity.  When I exercise power over you, I deny your freedom, and that is dangerous for both of us.  The opening chapters of Genesis are about the abuse of power.   Cain murders his brother Abel, and two chapters later we read, "The Earth was corrupt in God's sight and was full of violence" (Genesis 6:11).

      Abrahamic monotheism is based on the idea that the free God desires the free worship of free human beings.  The historical drama of the Bible turns on the question of how to translate individual freedom into collective freedom.  How do you construct a free society without the constant risk of the strong dominating and exploiting the weak?  That is the issue articulated by the prophets, and it was never completely solved. 

-Rabbi Jonathan Sacks,  The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning

The slippery slope.................

Religion begins by offering magical aid to harassed and bewildered men; it culminates by giving to a people that unity of morals and belief which seems so favorable to statesmanship and art; it ends by fighting suicidally in the lost cause of the past. . . . Institutions which were at first in the hands of the clergy, like law and punishment, education and morals, marriage and divorce, tend to escape from ecclesiastical control, and become secular, perhaps profane.  The intellectual classes abandon the ancient theology and - after some hesitation - the moral code allied with it; literature and philosophy become anticlerical.  The movement of liberation rises to an exuberant worship of reason, and falls to a paralyzing disillusionment with every dogma and every idea. 

-Will and Ariel Durant, The Story of Civilization: The Renaissance

pillars.....................

 Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens.

-George Washington, from his 1796 Farewell Address letter

via

Goodness.......................

Human goodness is widely distributed, and I have no respect for religious people who cannot see this. . . . Religion, as I explain it there, is a principled opposition to the will to power.  Faith is about the forms of gracious coexistence that abjure the use of power. 

-Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning

came naturally...................

      Religion played a central role in his life and his thinking, as it would in the Revolution.  It was no accident that so many Boston town meetings were conducted in houses of prayer, or the republicanism, as envisaged in Massachusetts Bay, traced the independent-minded, egalitarian, community-based lines of Puritanism.  Men who preferred a church without a bishop came naturally to the idea of a state without a king.

-Stacy Schiff, The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams

fun with languages..................

 We have here, in other words, a unique phenomenon in the history of religion: a religion whose sacred texts are written in what to its founder would have been a foreign and largely unintelligible language.

     Had the languages in question been closely related, part of the same linguistic family, this might have been of little consequence.  But first-century Greek and Hebrew were not just different languages. They represented antithetical civilisations, unlike in their most basic understanding of reality.  In terms of the last chapter, Greek philosophy and science—the Greece of Thales and Democritus, Plato and Aristotle—was a predominantly left-brain culture, the Israel of the prophets a right-brain one.

-Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning

in relationship................................

       That means that the original basis of Abrahamic monotheism remains, whatever the state of science.  For religious knowledge as understood by the Hebrew Bible is not to be construed on the model of philosophy and science, both left-brain activities.  God is to be found in relationship, and in the meanings we construct when, out of our experience of the presence of God in our lives, we create bonds of loyalty and mutual responsibility known as covenants.  People have sought in the religious life the kind of certainty that belongs to philosophy and science.  But it is not to be found.  Between God and man there is moral loyalty, not scientific certainty.

-Rabbi Jonathan Sacks,  The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning

Partners............................

 . . . religion and science are to human life what the right and left hemispheres are to the brain.  They perform different functions and if one is damaged, or if the connections between them are broken, the result is dysfunction. . . .

     Science is about explanation.  Religion is about meaning.  Science analyses, religion integrates.  Science breaks things down to their component parts.  Religion binds people together in relationships of trust. Science tells us what is.  Religion tells us what ought to be. Science describes.  Religion beckons, summons, calls.  Science sees objects.  Religion speaks to us as subjects.  Science practices detachment.  Religion is the art of attachment, self to self, soul to soul.  Science sees the underlying order of the physical world.  Religion hears the music beneath the noise.  Science is the conquest of ignorance.  Religion is the redemption of solitude.

-Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership:  Science, Religion and the Search for Meaning

Inadvertently.................ah, history

 Deprived of French help, on December 28, 1783, the Turks officially acknowledged the loss of the Crimea.  Exclaimed on observer, "The Russian state has spread out like ancient Rome."  Indeed, Catherine's swollen dominions now stood larger that the entire Roman Empire at its height.

     But there was a price to be paid for this brash expansion.  For one thing, Catherine's actions had inadvertently opened the wounds of religious wars that would one day cross borders and carry over into a new age.  For another, the Crimea remained a boiling stew of biases, prejudices, and fierce hatreds.  In the years that followed, while annexation was one thing, actually extending Russian control over the region remained an exasperating business.  Russian forays into the area known as the Caucasus were especially riddled with troubles—in 1785 a rebellion broke out among a deadly mix of Chechens, Avars, and other tribes.  Descending down from the mountains, a shadowy leader wrapped in a green cloak and espousing a mystical version of Islam proclaimed a Ghazavat, or holy war, against the Russians.  With dauntless flair and lightning strikes, this self-anointed "Sheik Mansur" led a coalition of mountain tribesmen that harassed and tormented the Russians with guerrilla warfare, laying the seeds for a conflict that still sputters today.

-Jay Winik, The Great Upheaval: America and the Birth of the Modern World, 1788-1800

"apocalypse was in the air"..........

As traditional faiths are waning, environmentalism is coming to resemble a faith for the new age.  Christianity offered guidance for how one should live and conduct one's personal affairs in a manner pleasing to God, but the green movement seeks to steer people to a life in better harmony with nature.  Environmentalism, said Joel Garreau, has become "the religion of choice for urban atheists."

     Like medieval Catholicism, the green faith foresees impending doom caused by human activity.  To people in the Middle Ages, wrote Barbara Tuchman, "apocalypse was in the air."  The Final Judgement, brought on by human sin, was not only real but imminent.  St. Norbert in the twelfth century predicted the event would come within the lifetime of his contemporaries.  Similarly, the environmental movement—whether religious, scientific, or leftist—routinely traces a direct line from human materialism to looming catastrophe.

-Joel Kotkin, The Coming of Neo Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class

an intensifying reaction.............

   It was not the same Paris that he had known in the crowd-ruled days of '92 and '93.  Ever since the fall of Robespierre in '94 the capital had followed the countryside in an intensifying reaction—religious and political—against the Revolution.  Catholicism, led by nonjuring priests, was regaining its hold upon a people that had lost belief in an earthly substitute for supernatural hopes and consolations, for sacraments, ceremonies, and processional holydays.  The decadi, or decimal day of rest, was increasingly ignored; the Christian Sunday was flagrantly respected and enjoyed.  France was voting for God.

-Will & Ariel Durant, The Age of Napoleon, describing Paris in 1797