to a scheme that can be registered by the demons that read it, enables a person to” think the thought for the first time in your life.” (p. 118)
42. In Barzun’s description of the early twentieth century as it discovered the “absurd,” this stimulated his potent analysis of “relativism” as people make a caricature of it, thinking they have to have an “absolute,” in which he illustrated that human judgments always must involve a certain relativism, and that does not imply sheer chaos or the demise of all moral standards as some like to suggest. Ultimately, he suggests a better word than “relativism” would be “relationism,” which is precisely what I am suggesting throughout this book; “relation” as basic as “space” and “time” in Kant’s schema, though Kant failed to place it there. See Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence, pp. 760–63.
43. It is for this reason that Nietzsche insists that if there is any “redemption,” it would have to be redemption of the whole. Nothing else makes any sense. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, pp. 251–53; Twilight of the Idols, p. 501.
44. Martin Marty cites the work of both Harold V. Bennett and Gordon W. Allport to describe this apparently natural but quite immoral treatment of the “stranger”—applying it to conflicts between religious groups, in which the elite pass laws which appear on the surface to be benevolent to the stranger, are actually geared only to “the self-interest of priests and prophets” and hostility and even extermination of the stranger can appear a solution to the apparent conflict. Marty, When Faiths Collide, pp. 49–54. This is what I mean in suggesting how easily the “us vis-à-vis them” morphs into an “us vs. them.”
45. Richard L. Rubenstein, After Auschwitz: History, Theology, and Contemporary Judaism, Second Edition (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).
46. Jones, The End of White Christian America.
47. Soelle, Choosing Life. But also Political Theology (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1974), pp. 102–03 where she relates Dostoevsky’s “Parable of the Onion.”
48. His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Ethics for the New Millennium (New York: Riverhead Books, 1999), esp. chapter 4.
49. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, pp. xvi, 177, 189–92, but also 92–96, 120–21, 148, 157, 160, 173. In this sense, he says “the fundamental premise of the book is that a belief can still regulate action, can still be thought worth dying for, among people who are quite aware that this belief is caused by nothing deeper than contingent historical circumstance.” (p. 189)
50. Famous Christian ethicist of the first half of the twentieth century, Prof. Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971), illustrated this “subterfuge” people use in justifying inequities in life; that those with less must in some way deserve it or simply are inadequate to being entrusted with more wealth or opportunities. Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1960). The profundity of many of his insights makes this book of his as relevant today as it was originally.
Inflexible Faith in the Absolute
The Burden of the Loss of Self
If it is true that “religion” carries within it a belief or commitment to something that is regarded as Absolute, since “absolute” connotes unlimited, undetermined, perfect, unchanging, self-contained or independent of everything, immeasurable, even incomprehensible, then the question arises as to how such an element, idea, or being can be compatible with the relativity, limitedness, and change of human life? Would it not require and/or impose the same on every otherwise relative being, since if it did not, it would not really be Absolute? That is, would not the Absolute swallow up everything within itself, so there would be nothing else? And never would have been anything other than the Absolute. Obviously, religious people do not usually push it that far. But if they do not, then its absoluteness is lessened or lost and it is only super-relative after all?
Yet if people still regard it as the Unquestionable, Incommensurable, and Unconditioned, as pastors, priests, gurus, imams, theologians, and so forth continue to speak of it, does not such thinking itself create an irresolvable tension between Absolute and relative that could produce terrible cognitive dissonance, inner turmoil, giving one a choice between ignoring it so as to preserve one’s self in its relativity, or to capitulate and quit thinking for oneself or acting as if one has some freedom? So if the Absolute cannot logically be real as long as anything in existence is relative since that would annihilate all individual or relative elements as an imploding great black hole, it nevertheless remains still a possible state of mind of humans propagated by religious leadership that is unhealthy if not powerfully self-disintegrating.
This psychological problem or burden was expressed profoundly by cultural historian and critic, Susan Jacoby, in her Strange Gods: A Secular History of Conversion, where she wrote, “When one is raised in a religion that issues orders about the most trivial as well as the most important activities of daily life, leaving for any other faith—much less abandoning religion altogether—is an earthquake in which the ground never stops shaking.”1 Jacoby saw the problem even without using the word “absolute” as I am.
The point finds an example in John Updike’s novel, In the Beauty of the Lilies.2 Reverend Clarence Wilmot made a discovery that radically changed or ruined his life. As he saw it, he lost his faith. He did not want to. He did not choose it. But it happened. On that hot summer afternoon in 1910, about the same moment when actress Mary Pickford, filming a movie, at age seventeen, fainted on horseback, Clarence Wilmot, in his rectory at the Fourth Presbyterian Church in Patterson, New Jersey, “felt the last particles of his faith leave him.” (5)
As he also came to the realization that he could not be dishonest about it without losing himself, he struggled with the question of how and when to tell those who must know. Not all clergy alumni of Princeton reached this point, he knew, but that was no consolation. He had read deeply and widely from the theology, philosophy and science of the nineteenth century—Ingersoll, Hume, Darwin, Newton, Semler, Wellhausen, Nietzsche, and others, and had reached the conclusion that “there is no God.”
In retrospect he now impugned the motives of his professors at Princeton for hiding the truth, for having vested interests in propagating a hoax that was as untrue as Mayan, Egyptian, or Polynesian religions and priesthoods. To his dismay, he found no relief when he disclosed his problem to his wife. He insisted to her that it was not a matter of having mere doubts, but rather he had a conscious disbelief. Clarence simply could not accept this biblical God and His alleged tyrannical dealings with humanity or all the constipated doctrines that flew in the face of modern science. It was not that he hadn’t given the ministry a chance and many fruitful years of his life, as had his faithful wife. But he felt compelled to be honest, which meant resigning from the ministry.
His wife’s reply was that resignation was not necessary, that “reason isn’t everything” (61), so he shouldn’t expect to understand it all. Rather he should stay with it and pray. So he did for a while. But Clarence’s pulpit performance became ever more pitiful in the ensuing weeks, as he and his wife both felt its multifaceted problems.
Resignation required that he first have an appointment with the moderator of the synod who was a younger clergyman. After the interview, the answer he now received was that the Book of Discipline’s causes for demission were not really met in his case, so before he could be demissioned, he must fill the pulpit for one more year in the hopes that he would regain his faith.
But,
