Uh-oh. For a moment there, I thought I was going to have to agree with David Brooks, and then I’d have to retire from the internet and live in a cave and flagellate myself until the stupidity was purged. He has written a column in which he says secularism has to be more than simple rationalism, and the opening had me worried that it was going to sound like my schtick:
As secularism becomes more prominent and self-confident, its spokesmen have more insistently argued that secularism should not be seen as an absence — as a lack of faith — but rather as a positive moral creed. Phil Zuckerman, a Pitzer College sociologist, makes this case as fluidly and pleasurably as anybody in his book, “Living the Secular Life.”
But I needn’t have worried! The rest of the column sinks into reverential glurge as he uses that idea of a positive atheism as an excuse to tediously flog us all with his special brand of pastoral dimness. He’s trying to smugly tell us that religion has done all the work for us, so being secular is re-inventing the wheel, and gosh, you guys must be willing to work really hard if you’re willing to duplicate everything religion already does.
As he describes them, secularists seem like genial, low-key people who have discarded metaphysical prejudices and are now leading peaceful and rewarding lives. But I can’t avoid the conclusion that the secular writers are so eager to make the case for their creed, they are minimizing the struggle required to live by it. Consider the tasks a person would have to perform to live secularism well:
Get ready. Here comes his list of “tasks”.
Secular individuals have to build their own moral philosophies. Religious people inherit creeds that have evolved over centuries. Autonomous secular people are called upon to settle on their own individual sacred convictions.
Those religious creeds aren’t particularly moral, although it is nice of him to admit that they did evolve, rather than being granted to us by a divine hand. So religion has baggage: stoning for adultery, raging homophobia, justifications for murder, xenophobia, pointless dietary restrictions, etc. It seems to me to be a real advantage to discard that.
Also, notice that phrase: moral philosophies. Philosophers have been wrestling with morality for longer than Christianity has been around, so ditching the dogma of religion does not leave us bereft of philosophical support. We don’t have or want sacred convictions: we want ideals grounded in reality.
This is such a common elision. You’ll often see religious people blindly seque from “being Christian,” for instance, to “being moral,” without realizing that those are two completely different things.
Secular individuals have to build their own communities. Religions come equipped with covenantal rituals that bind people together, sacred practices that are beyond individual choice. Secular people have to choose their own communities and come up with their own practices to make them meaningful.
Oh, no! You mean secular people aren’t stuck with the groups they are born into, but are free to associate with people whose values better reflect their own? Yes, we have the privilege to build our own communities, rather than being trapped in the tar pit of tradition. This is one of the most wonderful aspects of secularism for many people, because, face it, your “covenantal rituals” are often used to bind people to assholes.
Secular individuals have to build their own Sabbaths. Religious people are commanded to drop worldly concerns. Secular people have to create their own set times for when to pull back and reflect on spiritual matters.
Wait. Stop. Why do we need “set times” to pull back from work? Why do we need to reflect on these non-existent “spiritual matters”? Why do we need to do things your way?
I get time off at Christmas because the religious history of our country insists on it. I don’t have any spiritual needs to be met, especially not needs on a Christian timetable, but I’m able to relax and think about my interests, which are not godly, whenever. I intend to ‘celebrate’ Easter by attending a science-fiction convention. My family and I try to get together once a year, usually in the summer, without any kind of superstitious pretext. This is no hardship.
Brace yourself. The flood of Brooks’ bullshit is about to become epic.
Secular people have to fashion their own moral motivation. It’s not enough to want to be a decent person. You have to be powerfully motivated to behave well. Religious people are motivated by their love for God and their fervent desire to please Him. Secularists have to come up with their own powerful drive that will compel sacrifice and service.
Ugh, no. We don’t need love for an invisible man to motivate us; how about instead being motivated by love for the very real human beings around us? How about redirecting that natural desire for service to helping people who need it, rather than trying to please an imaginary creature? Especially when that imaginary creature, by your own holy books, will not be satisfied with anything less than an eternity of servile worship.
I have a little more respect for believers than Brooks does. I believe that many of them are honestly motivated by a desire to help others, and find happiness in making sacrifices that create joy in people, and that is a good thing. But what I also see is a criminal perversion of that desire by religion, which twists people’s good motivations, trapping them into toiling for the church and the priests, rather than aiding the needy; that lies and distorts, and tricks people into thinking they are doing good by dispensing dogma, when they could be giving others what they actually need. The classic example: sending Bibles to disaster victims.
It seems to me that if secularism is going to be a positive creed, it can’t just speak to the rational aspects of our nature. Secularism has to do for nonbelievers what religion does for believers — arouse the higher emotions, exalt the passions in pursuit of moral action. Christianity doesn’t rely just on a mild feeling like empathy; it puts agape at the center of life, a fervent and selfless sacrificial love. Judaism doesn’t just value community; it values a covenantal community infused with sacred bonds and chosenness that make the heart strings vibrate. Religions don’t just ask believers to respect others; rather each soul is worthy of the highest dignity because it radiates divine light.
Oh, fuck that noise. Yes, atheism has to stir the passions to broaden its reach, but we’re not going to do it by selling lies to the people. The appeal of atheism is its truth and honesty, that rather than making up a lot of superstitious bilge and asserting that it is truth, we’ll instead give people the tools to think and learn and test reality for themselves. And as part of that, as part of the truth of human nature, we will not deny love and community, and we’ll respect others because they are our fellow human beings, not magical glowing soul-spirits. People are bones covered with bloody meat and sweaty hairy skin — learn to love that rather than your silly fictional luminescing ghost-thingies.
The only secularism that can really arouse moral motivation and impel action is an enchanted secularism, one that puts emotional relations first and autonomy second. I suspect that over the next years secularism will change its face and become hotter and more consuming, less content with mere benevolence, and more responsive to the spiritual urge in each of us, the drive for purity, self-transcendence and sanctification.
The drive for purity: one of the most odious aspects of religion. Instead, recognize that there is no pure anything, and that what is important about human beings is their diversity. Living life is about getting messy.
The drive for self-transcendence: you don’t get that by chanting in a corner or taking DMT. That’s how you get the illusion of transcendence. If you want to become something more, the path involves learning, not prayer.
The drive for sanctification: what the fuck is that? I have no interest in becoming sacred or saintly. Saints are boring and deluded, used as tools to sucker the gullible deeper into a net of lies, so no thank you.
Look, that stuff Brooks wrote is just the usual Brooksian babble, in which he dips into his thesaurus looking for lots of words that reflect piety and devotion and other such godly pissiness, and he’s using them to bash secularism under the guise of giving patronizing advice. Just say no: atheism is not going to evolve into another religion, no matter how often the religious use that claim to insult us.
I don’t know why he dabbles in this matter.
What is this “spiritual urge in each of us”? I don’t even know what people mean when they say “spiritual” and I certainly know I don’t drive for purity, self-transcendence and sanctification. Those seem like meaningless feel-good terms as well. What does it mean for a person to be “pure”?
He says that like it’s a good thing.
Actually, ethics are much easier without religion. If my two driving principles are empathy and sympathy, well, that’s pretty easy. If I have to take religion’s road and decide which gender is the “right” one, or who can eat what, or what parts of bodies have to be covered, or what sex acts between consenting adults are “bad”….that’s where you get mired down in a morass of nonsensical bullshit.
Many Christians have thought you could best see that divine light radiating from those who disagreed with you by setting them on fire.
You spend too much of your precious time (and bodily fluids?) fisking this schmuck. Don’t you have better things to do?
It sure sounds like someone who is willing to buy an inferior, deeply flawed, stale product in that store right around the corner because the store with the good stuff requires taking the car out of the garage, and driving there…ugh….
Hey! Not just bibles–solar powered talking bibles! http://freethoughtblogs.com/cuttlefish/2010/01/19/starving-have-a-bible/
(see the comments there, too; to be overly fair, it seems the people of Haiti actually requested the bibles–which still leaves religion as a whole responsible for a waste of resources, but spreads the blame around a bit.)
Your concern for DB is noted.
We need a good laugh every now and then and the silly, inane, and ill-thought out presuppositional fuckwittery of DB is always good for a laugh. As the prayer says, grant me stupid enemies.
Secularism is a political philosophy, which is a kind of ethical philosophy. It is not even in the same category as metaphysical beliefs like atheism or theism (or naturalism or supernaturalism). That’s why religious people can be secularists, and it’s why the distinctions Brooks tries to conjure up between them (by conflating secularism with atheism) are so pathetically incoherent. It’s also because Brooks has a habit of saying incoherent bullshit whenever it suits him, but that’s sort of beside the point.
After all these years, I still cannot believe this man has a regular column in the New York Times. His writing style is painfully boring; his thoughts are shallow and uninteresting. Brooks is one of many reasons I let my digital subscription lapse. Life is too short to consume his drivel—though I always appreciate a good fisking like this one. *applause*
It’s all very well him telling secularists that we need to work on these virtues which he alleges religion instills. Be nice if he could point to evidence that religion is any more successful at instilling them though, instead of merely asserting it.
I was just thinking about that this morning– the relationship of religion to drugs. If the neurologists are correct then drugs are just replacements for natural neurochemicals which we take to short circuit the path to whatever state of mind we’re looking for.
It makes sense that religions would either ban drugs or prescribe them for their own purposes. If your religion proscribes alcohol for instance along with other drugs then the only legal way to get high is to bang your head on the ground five times a day or climb into some hypoxic tent or sniff some incense, whatever it takes to get that transcendent feeling.
Brooks:
Because it’s not real morality if it’s not difficult. Secularists rarely make up ridiculous restrictions on masturbation, or eating shrimp, or sleeping in on Sunday. Where’s the useless guilt about breaking rules that don’t hurt anyone and go against human nature?
Yoda’s version is better, and that is still the ropier end of the newage-y drivel that infests Starwars. And at least Yoda had the redeeming characteristic of being a magic-wielding legendary warrior. All Brooks seems to have is a black belt in patronising codescension.
Shorter Dave Brooks- non-religious people should strive to be just like religious people. Has it every occurred to this numbskull that non-religious people might already be better people, without having to go through a religion-like rigamarole?
This is actually a core reason why religious morality so often goes off the rails. If you’ve convinced yourself that doing X pleases god, then you’ve got no motivation to ever change, no matter how many people ask you, tell you or beg you to stop.
And god will never show up to tell you that you’ve got it wrong, so there’s no room in the system for correcting mistakes. Once you’ve taken the wrong turn, it’s a straight run towards atrocity.
“You have to be powerfully motivated to behave well.”
Really? Would he perhaps be talking about the people who say they wouldn’t know not to rape, murder, and pillage without religion telling them not to (except for when religion tells them those things are OK)? ‘Cause maybe I’m defective in some way, but I don’t find that whole ‘how not to be a horrible human being’ thing to be all that hard.
Sure, David, but can’t we just, you know, live our lives?
As though your average religious—or nonreligious—person is deeply concerned with his or her moral philosophy, reflecting on it daily, drawing strength from
it, and so on.
Aren’t most of us—religious and atheist alike—just trying to get on with it?
There are a whole lot of people in prison who claim to be religious. How’d that pleasing god thing work out for them?
Yeah, and that “fervent desire to please Him” ends up being quite unpleasant for other people.
Ugh. It’s that whole “sin nature” thing. Humans are inherently evil and therefore need a dictator to tell us how to behave or we’ll club each-other to death over the last remaining potato.
I just threw up in my mouth a little.
yet another: “Atheism needs to be just like a religion. Religion has done so much FOR us, atheists have done NOTHING. Worship your non-existent god thingy. Atheists are off the path and Gawd tells ME to bring such waywards back onto the path.”
Okay, Mr. Brooks, doesn’t your Religion tell you “love your fellow man as you love yourself”? I know it does, it’s right there in that “biography” of that Jesus/god/person.
*cough* *cough* *cough*
Hope they’re payin you (Brooks) for those screeds only the hatefuls read.
This kind of argument just boggles me. If we as a group really do need sabbaths, then we can construct some. I think you can make the argument that the weekend is a sabbath constructed to meet the needs of two groups of people who claim to be following the same book exactly to the letter but can’t agree on what their book says. It’s a prime example of society correcting for a failure of religion. And don’t get me started on morality. Religion is a colossal failure as a moral force. Secular societies are more, not less moral. The drive to be moral is a primary argument against religion.
Brooks is not a Christian.
Wouldn’t there be more selfless love involved if people were doing good for its own sake, and for the sake of those who benefit, without any concern about receiving approval from some reward-giving punishment-meting Higher Power?
Someone who feeds the hungry to feed the hungry instead of to please their parents is higher on my moral list.
As always, I’m terrified that yet another religious believer apparently thinks that not treating other people horribly is an enormous struggle.
It is telling that he thinks that people need to be “powerfully” motivated to behave well, when all the available evidence that we have suggests that for humans the default instinct, which requires no motivation whatsoever, is to behave reasonably well, and it requires additional motivation to behave badly.
He’s basically assuming original sin is real.
Yep, thesaurus writing at its dreariest. But also, just plain BAD writing. And the logic would be shabby had it been applied to any other issue. Oh the French have to INVENT ways to enjoy summer afternoons, not having baseball. Oh pedestrians must try so much harder to get to the 7-11 at the end of the block, not having a car. Oh book readers must spend time learning to read that television watchers needn’t worry about. Oh Democrats must really be committed to developing policy based upon facts while Republicans can relax and be told what to think by Rush Limbaugh. Black people must STRIVE to get mortgages approved while white people have a tradition of mortgage approval to be comforted by.
It could not be more vacuous and self-serving.
Ah, the old “I have to behave good otherwise daddy/mommy will punish me” level of morality, most people seem to be able to outgrow that around age four, including religious people. Brooks seems to be stuck there.
This is what is called an intellectual, people. Slow clap.
Lykex — “And god will never show up to tell you that you’ve got it wrong…”
Perhaps the scarier part is that their god does show up (in their heads, of course) telling them that they are right or what to do. People do some terrible things because god told them to.
Or, as the FSM put it:
Rationality alone may not be enough to create a fulfilling life, but even if we grant that, rationality and reality are fundamental to my life. Possibly Mr. Brooks doesn’t need reality, but I do
.
I can’t believe Brooks actually said:
It’s amazing how hard it is for beings that “radiate divine light” to handle basic moral questions. Won’t someone please think of the radiators!
In summary: A sanitized personal code of ethics and blind deference to the religious authorities who hand extend it to you is superior to any amateurish attempt at self-reflection.
argumentum ad pabulum
(Note to self: preview before posting)
Religions have philosophies that have been evolving over centuries, sure, but most of them have been evolving without selection pressure for aquiring truth, human happiness, and basically anything else that actually matters.
Meanwhile, what we usually just call philosophy has itself been around for thousands of years, and has had at least a bit more selection pressure to aquire those things. So we aren’t starting at square one. We’re starting far ahead of the major religions, actually. They are lagging behind us. And we can make even more progress too.
Brooks must have a warped definition of what it means to behave well if it requires powerful motivation. Wonder where that comes from.
Yes it is.
Fuck you David Brooks.
My, he messed up early. Sacred convictions? No. Ethics, principles, morals, yes. Committing to thinking about things, always, yes.
llamaherder @39
Actually I have to agree with Brooks for a tiny sliver of a second here: You can’t just “want” to be a decent, you actually have to try to do things to be a decent person. Just wanting something isn’t enough, you actually have to follow through and try to do it. Of course working and applying effort and trying to be a decent human being is quite enough thank you very much David Brooks.
Of course when the best I can say is that one small sentence is semantically accurate it tells me that Brooks is full of it.
omnicrom @42
He’s claiming that wanting to be a decent person won’t motivate someone enough to actually follow through.
I’m contradicting him, because he’s wrong.
Speak for yourself, David. When empathy is present, it’s one of the most powerful forces in the world, at least for me. And even if I’m not currently empathizing with someone, that empathy can help construct a moral system that I use to guide my actions.
Fear of some divine punishment for an action has a number of degrees of separation from the action itself. How is that going to be a stronger motivating force, unless you are so perpetually terrified of this far-off consequence that your mind treats it as a direct consequence? The scope is grander, but it’s so grand as to be incomprehensible.
How many people do you actually know, David, who truly have this fervent love for an absent deity? The vast majority of Christians, I’d imagine, don’t. The closest they come is vague positive or negative feelings while sitting in the pew at church. Fear and love of God is only a powerful motivator in theory; in practice, only the people who practically obsess over religion get anywhere close to what you’re describing.
All things in moderation….
http://www.dogonews.com/2011/5/15/why-ultra-clean-water-is-harmful-to-your-health
Chris J @ 44:
I shouldn’t be, but am always surprised that those defending religion sidestep the only actual motivation in religions: fear. Fear is a lousy basis for any philosophy, and an even worse basis for motivation. Fear drives the ugliest emotions in people, there’s never a good result. Even in the more liberal versions of various religions, fear is still the primary factor: “oh, you’ll be separated from God’s love!” yada, yada, yada.
Losing that instilled fear can take a very long time (I had it seriously instilled from a young age). The fear of god, the fear of punishment, the fear of torment, the fear of hell, it just goes on and on. It took me much too long to actually realize that fear of going to hell was not a sound basis for a belief in a god.
David Brooks: too cool to know the difference between secularism and atheism.
I never understood why being concerned with “worldly” things was so bad. Honestly– even if you truly believe that your time on Earth is but a waystation, a short stop before eternal bliss, why is it so bad to concern yourself with matters of the world while you are living on it?
ScarletRevenant: Well, if you start enjoying worldly things, you might notice the bishops had an awful lot of worldly things, and you didn’t.
Now sit down and go back to your “virtue” of poverty!
@Caine:
I really want to ask Brooks if he’d rather be in the hands of a person who truly empathizes with him and doesn’t wish to cause him any harm but doesn’t particularly fear any punishment beyond self-driven guilt, or someone who fervently believed they would be punished direly in the distant future for causing any harm while not particularly caring personally whether harm was caused or not.
Even if each motivation was powerful enough to prevent any harm, I know who I would choose in a heartbeat, and for the same reason that religious folks are so drawn to the idea of an all-loving deity that cares deeply and personally for them.
Christians would probably tell you that their motivations aren’t of fear but of love, but that just means that they’ve sought to emulate their deity by fostering empathy in themselves. The empathy is the important part, not where it came from, and it’s the thing that David is calling “mild.”
I agree. Wanting = being motivated. If you want to be good, that simply means you have the motivation to be good. What else is there to say? Well, David Brooks always has more to say, way past the time he should’ve stopped talking….
He thinks there ought to be some extra oomph of “power” which does the trick, specific to religious believers in the ways he outlines, but that’s nonsense.
If there’s some extra bit that’s beyond wanting to be good or decent (and in this context, note that he is talking about “motivations” not “results”), then presumably the only thing he could be doing is identifying religiosity/piety to the extent it is not coupled with anything like a moral concept. If it had anything to do with goodness/decency, there would be no point in saying wanting goodness/decency is insufficient. That’s a problem because nobody is morally obliged to be pious, to be preoccupied with and bewildered by superstitions, to project their concerns for people onto some other “authority” like a deity, or generally to even express themselves or their experiences using the kinds of bullshit that make David Brooks feel comfortable. He can of course articulate such a request if he likes, as he does here, but that is not a reasonable demand to make of a political or moral philosophy. But he will still get paid, whether or not anything in his bullshitty book report is reasonable or has any relevance to anyone except people exactly like him. So I guess everyone’s happy.
Secularists have to come up with their own powerful drive that will compel sacrifice and service.
How about my purely selfish desire to live in a community where people treat each other nicely and honestly, and where I’m respected and allowed to be who I want to be? That’s not something I “came up with;” it’s a need I’m practically born with, and can’t deny. That’s why I continue to try to pay all my overdue bills, rather than take the less stressful path of just letting every thing slide.
Sparkling won’t be enough either. We need more power!
Caine what he is talking about without saying it is fear. That is the strong motivator needed to get humans to go against their own natures. The fear you left out was the underlying fear of abandonment that permeates the practice of religion. You must follow all the petty rules and conventions or you may be abandoned by your entire social group as unworthy.
You must keep your doubts and your difficulties with them secret any outsiders are a threat to your safety. Belief is a way to stop thinking which stops the chance to doubt which would get you abandoned and cast out.
When I stop to look and think about say the vastness of what we see of the Universe of stars and galaxies I get an exalted feeling. When I realize that the matter all around me and my very body was formed in stars like I can see and over time produces this biology that is looking at them I would have to say that I would have a hard time describing it any differently than what is described as transcendent.
I pity people like Brooks their world is so small and constrained.
uncle frogy
It sure sounds like someone who is willing to buy an inferior, deeply flawed, stale product in that store right around the corner because the store with the good stuff requires taking the car out of the garage, and driving there…
I’m almost certain he’s really talking to people who think that way, and not to actual secularists. He’s trying to scare ordinary people with the prospect of hard work and responsibility so they’ll keep on clinging to religion for another generation or so.
“Christianity doesn’t rely just on a mild feeling like empathy”
Wait, empathy is only a “mild” feeling? Maybe for him.
Sorry if this has already been mentioned, I didn’t read the comments cos time is money, folks
Brooks:
Hey, why stop there? Secularists will also need to develop new architectures for the buildings in which they carry out secular stuff. They will need to develop secular vestments and special secular hats. They will need special secular greetings and secular food restrictions. Naturally, they will have to make up a new set of strongly held secular beliefs with no basis in fact, and become very irate when these beliefs are questioned or contradictions are pointed out. Did I mention how important it is to make some of the beliefs contradictory?
Man, all this secularism is making my head spin. I think I’ll just go back to church now.
Seriously, it is a strange argument. Brooks seems to believe that people must adopt all the trappings of religion whether or not they are religious. And why? Because David Brooks said so, I guess. No more Bobos in Paradise. Elder Brooks has sent us to purgatory.
For some reason I found it apropos that the Brooks column (at least in my browser) had a link to The hazards of do it yourself orthodonture. Note: this is a more serious concern than the hazards of declaring yourself a secularist without first deciding when your sabbath is going to be, and I do not recommend going to YouTube for tooth-straightening advice.
There is also nothing new about Brooks’s viewpoint. Apologists for religion have always claimed, after exhausting every other argument, that taking away religion will leave a deep spiritual and moral void (much like the gap between your front teeth that cannot be fixed with a rubber band from Office Depot but only by relinquishing your autonomy to a qualified orthodontist).
One thing that seems wrong about this is the suggestion that you need thousands of years to pile on traditions and rituals. Every year brings new cults, and they seem to have no difficulty in coming up with all kinds of zany and onerous requirements for their followers. If a group of “secularists” wanted these things, they’d come up with them.
The other thing is that history is full of creative people who have been expected to follow religious requirements and could just never manage to do it, or rebelled against the very idea. Part of secularism is the rejection of tradition for its own sake. It may give a lot of people a sense of warm fuzzies and community, but for others it is a slow suffocation.
Honestly, I have trouble believing that for all his talk, David Brooks is particularly traditional. He’s a celebrity pundit, with a weekly gig on NPR and elsewhere. He may not be partying like a rock star, but I doubt he gives a lot of thought to whether he keeps to social conventions. That stuff is for the little people.
So to get to the point, shorter Brooks would be: Without religion, how would we keep the rabble from getting uppity?
I can’t help recalling Brooks bragging that a republican senator at a dinner “had his hand on my inner thigh the whole time.” [Google does, too]
If only there were some neurological phenomenon that could somehow cause a person to feel an echo of the pain of others and feel motivated to do something about it. However, as self-righteous libertarians and supply-side Christians have informed us, such a thing does not and cannot exist and is merely the emotional manipulations of Cultural Marxists.
Empathy is a mild feeling? My dear Mister Brooks, did you ever consider the fact that your inability to connect with empathy is not universal, and that a lot of people actually find it to be a quite powerful group of emotions?
As man invented all religions and their included morality, I fail to see how atheists or secularists would have the slightest problem with morality. Been there done that.
On the plus side, we secularists already have a country and a fine Constitution to go with it. Doesn’t David Brooks know that the U.S. is a secular government? Is he suggesting a religious government is superior or is it just individuals?
“Secular individuals have to build their own moral philosophies.”
They have been busy doing so since at least Jeremy Bentham 200 years ago.
“Secular individuals have to build their own communities.”
Some may wish to do so, but not me. I am perfectly fine in an otherwise totally religious community. The secret? The (religious) folks in my town accept who I am, including my atheism.
“Secular individuals have to build their own Sabbaths.”
Done so since more than 30 years. Saturday is my day without obligations. Reflecting on spiritual matters however is an obligation I have done away with even longer ago.
“You have to be powerfully motivated to behave well.”
Bakunin answered that one about 150 years ago: “I only can be free if all people around me are free.” Substitute free with happy and you have a powerful motivation. Brooks doesn’t think that powerful? Says a lot about Brooks, not about me.
“arouse the higher emotions, exalt the passions in pursuit of moral action”
What are higher emotions and exalted passions?
“it puts agape at the center of life, a fervent and selfless sacrificial love.”
Agape certainly is not at the center of my life for two reasons:
1. For me to be happy and free (see above) there must be some equilibrium between my interests and the interests of the people around me. Agape disturbs that equilibrium and hence leaves people unhappy.
2. Fervent and selfless sacrificial love is typically always demanded from others – and mostly women. Folks like Brooks who propagate it almost always are very bad at expressing it themselves. They use it as a tool to get what they want at the expense of others – mostly women. There are exceptions – christians who do practice agape. But I have always suspected that there was some self interest involved anyway. From a first hand witness (my great aunt) I have it that Albert Schweitzer did not practice agape in Lambarene. He did great work, but the opportunity to rule as an absolute dictator satisfied a selfish need of his.
If Brooks needs entheogens, his beef is with the DEA and the U.S. Congress, not with us.
Some people do need set times to take a break—thinking of a freelance writer who said that the great thing about working for yourself is that you can declare a holiday whenever you want, but the problem was that he hadn’t done so in seven years. But there’s no reason that it should be the same day for everyone, or the same frequency.
Just saw this article posted to Jezebel. Seemed very relevant to the discussion here. So here’s the link:
recommended
You know, there are fetish video sites that cater to that desire perfectly well.
So is this what Brooks is saying? It’s all about the Essence of Purity, Purity of Essence, Peace on Earth, OPE, PEO, EOP, POE, and our precious bodily fluids, as General Jack D. Ripper said to Group Captain Lionel Mandrake. Sounds like Merkwurdigliebe to me.
well If a senator did indeed keep his hand on Brooks inner thigh all through dinner and Brooks did not say anything he liked it (I do not really believe that he did) or he will accept any the crossing of his personal boundaries for some reason. His politics indicate he grovels before the authority of the powerful so it appears he may do that in his personal life as well, if the story is to be believed.
and he is someone a pundit I should listen to?
uncle frogy
Azkyroth, #66:
I’m fairly sure fetish sites exist for watching coffee blow out of someone’s nose. If I’d known your comment was coming, I could have made some money!
Let me just second the OP and almost everything in the comments. :-)
This, on the other hand, is just nonsense. Tap water is almost perfectly pure (…OK, maybe not in parts of the US, but…) – there’s in effect no difference between that and triple-distilled water; osmotically it’s all the same.
Pure water doesn’t taste bitter either. It’s tasteless.
The person who died from died from drinking too much tap water. In the US.
Essentially, his argument comes down to “But secular people have to *think,* and that’s hard!”
He doesn’t seem to understand that this is a feature, not a bug. Many of us are secular because we *want* to think about these things. We want to play a role in defining moral philosophies, in creating functional and happy communities, in helping humanity move forward. We don’t want prepackaged answers handed to us, and we certainly aren’t willing to settle for pat answers that we *know* are wrong simply because they are traditional.
All he has done here is demonstrated a complete failure to understand a secular mindset.
Secularists have been building, teaching and *writing down* better moral philosophies for at least hundreds of years before Jesus was an imaginary twinkle in his imaginary father’s imaginary eye.