Fascinating article. It reminded me of a C-Span lecture by Dr. Benjamin Wiker for his recent book Worshipping the State: How Liberalism Became our State Religion, which has been discussed at RC.org in the past. This is also a good time to revisit Wiker and take a fresh look at this theory about secular religion. BR ===================================== W Post Steve Jobs: Prophet of a new religion (http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on-faith/steve-jobs-prophet-of-a-new-religion/2013/08/20/0ca29178-09d6-11 e3-89fe-abb4a5067014_story.html#)
By Jeffrey Weiss| Religion News Service, Updated: Tuesday, August 20, 2013 < RNS () — The new movie about Steve Jobs is short on anything explicitly religious. Like its main character, however, it’s got a thread of transcendence running through it. The truth about Jobs and religion may be that, in this arena as in others, he was ahead of the cutting edge. < The film isn’t making the purists happy, in part because it takes too many liberties with history. But it’s not a documentary. I’ll go against many of the reviews and say that Ashton Kutcher does a pretty good job at representing the personality found in Jobs’ speeches and in what has been written about Jobs — particularly in the massive authorized biography by Walter Isaacson. One quote in that book, from one of Jobs’ old girlfriends, pretty much captures the character in the film: “He was an enlightened being who was cruel,” she told Isaacson. “That’s a strange combination.” The movie gives some sense of a man who could be impossibly inspirational — able to get more from people than they’d imagined. And also an irrational boor. Apple insiders famously had a phrase to describe the effect that Jobs could have on people: the “reality distortion field.” Which sounds like the power wielded by a biblical prophet, no? And his creations were described (and derided) in religious terms: the Jesus Phone, the Jesus Tablet. The Economist once ran a cover with an image of Jobs with a halo. New York magazine ran a cover of Jobs with the headline “ iGod.” Jokes have been made — some more pointed than funny — about the resemblance of Jobs and Apple customers to a religious “cult.” (For the record, Apple is not a religion. No faith was ever needed to understand the superiority of the Mac.) And Jobs’ feet of clay extended well past his knees — more akin to the Bible’s Abraham or David than Jesus or any New Testament apostle. While some people have criticized the new movie as hagiography, Jobs’ flaws get plenty of airing. His womanizing, his denial of his own daughter, his willingness to mix it up in the corporate snake pit — all on screen. So what did Jobs have to do with religion trends? He was an exemplar, an icon of one of the hottest. For all the debate about what is really the “fastest-growing religion” in America, the data is pretty conclusive: If “None of the Above” had a headquarters, its membership would only be exceeded by the Catholic Church. (Of course, to paraphrase the old Groucho Marx line, these folks would never join a faith that would have them as members.) About one in five Americans answer survey questions on whether they belong to a religious group by saying “none of the above,” which has earned them the nickname “nones.” But most of them say they believe in something that doesn’t fit in any of the standard dogmas. God, prayer, heaven, angels — most of the nones check off one or more of those boxes. That’s where Jobs lived, too. Early in the movie a young Jobs, while on LSD, hears Bach emerging from a wheat field. He stands and conducts, clearly transported into some deeper connection beyond the visible plants and earth. That happened. Also in the movie, there are hints at Job’s seeking after Eastern religious beliefs. And his frankly nutso diets that he figured helped purify him. Though the movie doesn’t say so, this spiritual searching followed a childhood of more conventional religion. His parents attended a Lutheran church. And so did Steve, according to his biography, until he bumped up against theodicy when he was 13. Theodicy is the attempt to explain how an all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good deity could allow so much human suffering. For Jobs, the question was about children starving in Biafra The pastor’s answer didn’t satisfy Jobs. So he never went back. Various accounts of his life describe his eventual link to Zen Buddhism. Apparently he took from Zen an appreciation of simplicity and minimalist design, if not the removal of attachment that Buddhist enlightenment is supposed to bring. Instead, Jobs was a “none” before anybody knew what that meant. As he told Isaacson not long before his death: “I’m about fifty-fifty on believing in God. For most of my life, I’ve felt that there must be more to our existence than meets the eye.” But he turned to his own intuitions, not the dictates of any particular religion. That belief in intuition manifested itself in what he did with Apple. Lots of other people were better than Jobs at hardware and coding. Job’s magic was in setting a vision, a philosophy, and then driving the material experts into creating stuff that matched his vision. But people who devise their own dogmas can fall victim to the same kinds of ills found in established faiths. In Jobs’ case, he may have believed his own hype about distorting reality. When he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, his doctors wanted to operate immediately. They figured they had a good chance at saving him. Jobs, however, went with his intuition, into fad diets and “holistic” woo-woo that did him no good. By the time he agreed to the operation, the cancer had metastasized and it eventually spread beyond where medicine could help. Doctors differ about whether the delay made a difference. A few weeks after his death in 2011, a New Yorker cover showed Jobs standing at the heavenly gates, with St. Peter checking him in using an iPad. A few weeks later, author Eric Weiner wrote an essay for The New York Times. He and other “nones,” he wrote, were hunting for a new way to connect with religious ideas and values: “We need a Steve Jobs of religion. Someone (or ones) who can invent not a new religion but, rather, a new way of being religious. Like Mr. Jobs’s creations, this new way would be straightforward and unencumbered and absolutely intuitive.” That was surely one of the many projects Jobs had actually pursued through most of his life. Had he lived longer, who knows? The Steve Jobs of religion may have been Steve Jobs. ------------------------- Who is trying to jive whom? Jobs clearly was a genius at business, anyone who disputes this proposition would be an idiot. But obviously he was a second-rate religious thinker. What could anyone have expected? For understandable reasons he put almost all of his time into his company. However, that means he did not spend significant time thinking about religious issues, that is, doing the necessary research and then thinking about religious issues -otherwise simply thinking about something and all you get is a rehash of popular concepts and assumptions and platitudes that happen to be in your memory at a given time. To accomplish much of anything, in any field, requires research. And Jobs was not about to give religious issues that kind of attention even if, in his past, years and years in his past, the opposite might well have been true. BR comment ========================= The Catholic Thing Worshipping the State _Worshipping the State_ (http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2013/worshipping-the-state.html) (http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2013/worshipping-the-state/print.html) (http://www.thecatholicthing.org/component/option,com_mailto/link,aHR0cDovL3d3dy50aGVjYXRob2xpY3RoaW5nLm9yZy9jb2x1bW5zL zIwMTMvd29yc2hpcHBpbmctdGhlLXN0YXRlLmh0bWw=/tmpl,component/) Review by George J. Marlin May 1, 2013 By George J. Marlin Wednesday, 01 May 2013 _Worshipping the State_ (http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2013/worshipping-the-state.html) (http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2013/worshipping-the-state/print.html) (http://www.thecatholicthing.org/component/option,com_mailto/link,aHR0cDovL3d3dy50aGVjYXRob2xpY3RoaW5nLm9yZy9jb2x1bW5zL zIwMTMvd29yc2hpcHBpbmctdGhlLXN0YXRlLmh0bWw=/tmpl,component/) By George J. Marlin Wednesday, 01 May 2013 The prime objective of secularists in modern times has been to “free” us all from the influence (The burden, they’d say) of Christianity. Just how they have gone about destroying that influence on the course of human affairs is ably described in Dr. Benjamin Wiker’s new book _Worshipping the State: How Liberalism Became our State Religion_ (http://astore.amazon.com/thecatthi-20/detail/1621570290) . Wiker, who has taught at Franciscan University and Thomas Aquinas College, holds that the raison d’être of secular philosophers’ has been to reduce Christianity’s hold on Western culture, and either to subordinate the Church to the state or to establish a rival civic religion that would make the Church irrelevant – or impotent. In Wiker’s telling, it was Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527) who “invented the absolute separation of church and state that is the hallmark of liberalism.” His hope was to deny the Church any moral power and to subordinate it to the secular sovereign. Machiavelli insisted that for a prince to survive he must “learn to be able not to be good,” hence he must be free from the moral restraints the Church imposes, even on a head of state. Machiavelli does argue, however, that the ruthless prince should appear pious and if necessary use the Church to control the unenlightened masses. Twenty-three years after his death, Machiavelli’s notions on the relationship of state and Church were utilized at the Peace of Augsburg (1555). The European monarchs agreed to a compromise known cuius regio, eius religio, “ whose realm, his religion.” Each state was to determine its own established Church. The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), author of Leviathan, built on Machiavelli’s political philosophy to undermine the “seditious” influence of religion. Hobbes, Wiker points out, “concluded that the political problem was the existence of any notion of religion independent of the political power. . . . Christianity itself had to be reformed in a Machiavellian way so that it would support the state rather than continually challenging it.” Hobbes, the first proponent of the totalitarian state, dismissed the Church ’s doctrine of sin insisting: “there was no sin and no right and wrong until the sovereign declares them to be so.” Natural rights do not come from God, but from the state. If there is to be a Church, it will be state controlled. Dr. Wiker persuasively arguers that modern liberals adopted Hobbes’ notion of “moral relativism, and of an entirely secular materialistic foundation for politics.” The difference? Instead of the sovereign king determining what is right or wrong, the sovereign individual would define his own values. The next philosopher to advance the case for the secular state was Benedict Spinoza (1632-1677). The leaders of his Jewish faith excommunicated Spinoza, primarily because he was a pantheist who “makes a god of this world and thus completely undermines the entire Judeo-Christian understanding of reality that flows from the creator – creature distinction in Genesis.” In Spinoza’s view, the secular state is the “greatest manifestation of the divine.” A state-sponsored church would be available merely to promote the agenda of the state to the “plebs,” the dumb common people. Such a church would be dogma-free and its core belief would be reduced to “ love of neighbor,” in other words being nice. By love, Wiker writes, “ Spinoza meant minding one’s own business, not bothering others but just getting along – in a word, tolerance. . . .Spinoza enshrines doctrinal tolerance as the supreme virtue in the established secular liberal church.” While Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Spinoza encouraged the sovereign to use the Church to achieve secular goals, it was Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) who held “that Christianity is wholly incompatible with the new secular order and . . . must be superseded, replaced by an entirely new religion completely defined by the secular political project.” For Rousseau, there is no “Body of Christ” only a “Body Politic.” He called for a pagan civil religion that requires the complete devotion of its citizenry. The basis of his radical egalitarian religion is tolerance. Sexuality is liberated from Church restraints; marriage is not sanctioned by God but is defined by the state in a civil contract. According to Rousseau, “whoever dares to say there is no salvation outside the Church should be chased out of the State, unless the State is the Church, and the prince is the pontiff.” Wiker concludes that these four philosophers laid the groundwork for the liberal secular revolution in the United States. Their joint influence has reduced morality to hedonism, bodily pleasures. Rights have been redefined as desires. Evil is the result of a bad environment, not inherently wrong choices. Wiker rightly asserts that in the United States, “secular liberalism has definite moral beliefs, quite different from Christian morality, which liberals are trying to impose by governmental force: contraception, abortion, infanticide, sexual libertinism, easy divorce, the continual redefinition of marriage, euthanasia, and so on.” The Obama Administration’s move to force the Church to provide insurance coverage for contraception and abortion is just the most recent example of the state attempting to impose its views in the name of “tolerance.” Dr. Wiker proves that ideas do indeed have consequences. In the secular state, freedom no longer means choosing what is right or just; it now means doing whatever one feels like doing. The act of choosing is all that matters. Choosing in itself becomes the ultimate value. Without absolute truths to measure actions, willingness becomes willfulness. What is an irrational action in Judeao-Christian teaching has now been elevated to a necessary principle. ========================================= The problem in the following mostly perceptive article is that the author assumes that the only thinkable choices are "puritanic" Christian morality or utter nihilism. There is also the assumption -and it is just that, an assumption not based on research- that all Pagans were much the same and that all of the anti-Pagan myths we have learned from youth are somehow true, when, in fact, they are not. It is easy enough to think of societies that allow for all kinds of heterosexual forms of behavior but that do not tolerate homosexuality. Like early medieval Christian Europe with its acceptance of concubinage, like 19th century Mormon Utah and polygamy, like Paul in first Corinthians 7 : 36-38 discussing cohabitation between Christian men and women even though he recommended marriage, and on and on. So there are problems with the review, but otherwise it makes some valid points. BR ----- Human Events Worshipping the State By: _Benjamin Wiker_ (http://www.humanevents.com/author/benjamin-wiker/) 3/25/2013 Author and speaker Benjamin Wiker, Ph.D. has published eleven books, his newest being _Worshipping the State: How Liberalism Became Our State Religion_ (http://www.amazon.com/Worshipping-State-Liberalism-Became-Religion/dp/1621570290) . His website is www.benjaminwiker.com *** As the Supreme Court hears arguments for and against gay marriage we might stand back from the whole judicial fracas and ask ourselves a larger and hopefully more startling question: “What is the government doing deciding what marriage is?” This is really two questions in one. First, how did it come to be that we, as a culture, are in a position where something seemingly so natural, something that existed long before any governments were around, is now up for debate? Second, why is it that we would look to a branch of the government to settle that debate? The answer to the first question is rather complex. For centuries (not just decades) liberalism has been picking away at the Christian foundations of Western culture. Liberalism is, in essence, a secular and secularizing movement; it is historically defined by its opposition to Christianity. Wherever secular liberalism spreads, Christianity recedes. Look at Europe. Christianity defined marriage by what we might call radical monogamy: a life-long, entirely exclusive union of one man and one woman. No sex before marriage. No concubines. No polygamy. No divorce (except for infidelity). No homosexuality. No fiddling with little boys. The pagan Roman culture into which Christianity was born smiled on sex wherever, whenever, and with whomever it occurred. Marriage was an important social institution in Rome, but it was not defined by radical monogamy. Concubines? No problem. Sex with your male and female slaves? No big deal. Divorce? Happens all the time. Got a favorite boy? Don’t we all. Like pornography? We’ll paint the walls of your villa next week. (http://www.humanevents.com/2013/03/25/god-gay-marriage-and-the-imperial-court/300x250_worshipping_the_state/) Homosexuality was as widespread in Rome as it was in Greece [false] , and, yes, in Rome there was gay marriage. Right at the top of society. The emperor Nero married one Pythagoras, and we have reports of other such unions. That was the marital, sexual status quo of the society into which Christianity was born. As Rome fell, and Christianity rose, the Christian understanding of sexuality and marriage transformed the Roman Empire—proto-Europe, we might call it. With that transformation the radical monogamy of Christianity became the social, moral, legal standard, so normal that it was regarded as natural. It is only because Christianity won out over pagan Rome that we are having arguments about marriage today. If Christians had been summarily extinguished by imperial Rome, radical monogamy would have disappeared with it, along with opposition to homosexuality. Christianity’s radical monogamy is indeed based in nature, in the obvious complementarity of the sexes, male and female. But admittedly it asks a lot of nature, pushing beyond mere convenience, and upwards to perfection. In a very real way, Christianity asks more of marriage than mere mortals—in all our weakness—have the power to give. But that is, in fact, a central doctrine of Christianity: we are fallen and need God’s grace to do what is truly good, truly right. Modern liberalism, arriving on the scene, said “no” to Christianity. “No” in the secular sense of denying the existence of God, and hence of the whole social, moral, legal apparatus of Christianity. But also “no” in the allegedly humanitarian sense—Christianity asks too much; it sets the bar for sexuality and marriage too high. And so liberalism said, “Radical monogamy is too much to ask. Loosen up the strings on sexuality and marriage.” The sexual revolution is the loosening up of strings—so loose, in fact, that we have returned pretty much to the situation of ancient pagan Rome. So, that’s the answer to the first question. We are debating what marriage is, and considering instituting gay marriage, because history has run a great arc. De-Christianization has led us right back to pagan Rome, to the good old pre-Christian days when sexuality was free to run wherever the passions led it. The re-affirmation of homosexual marriage just completes the historical arc. Now for the second question. Why are we looking to one branch of government to settle the issue of what marriage is? Historically, liberalism is a top-down revolution. It uses the power of the government to reform society—through control of public education, through the courts, through executive orders, through bureaucratic agencies. All organs of the state. Liberals look to the state, in the way that Christianity looks to the church—as the institution responsible for evangelizing society. When persuasion doesn’t work (through public education or media propaganda), they resort to the blunt use of judicial fiat. That’s why liberals want the Supreme Court to redefine marriage in Hollingsworth v. Perry. But that makes it, at the same time, an issue of church and state—the secular state saying to the Christian church, a very imperial “We say that marriage is this. You will affirm gay marriage. You will bend the knee before the state.” And that just means, “Christians, you will bend the knee before liberalism. ” -- -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
