rebirth

If being born again is good, why would we limit ourselves to a once-and-for-all experience of it? Why can't we be reborn every day even? Every new day requires a renewal of outlook so that we don't limit ourselves to old beliefs about ourselves and about what we are capable of. Being open to new possibilities requires that we make active choices to be welcoming when opportunities present themselves. Allowing inertia to make choices for us is to be asleep and barely alive. We need to bestir ourselves. We need to disrupt the status quo. We need to question what we've been told. We need to question inadequately examined beliefs we have adopted. 

If being born again is to have any meaning at all, shouldn't it introduce something new instead of merely leading to compliant acceptance of an outdated belief system? We celebrate the new life that children bring into our midst, so why is it often so hard for us to embrace that gift of new life and see it for what it is? If being born again would actually resemble literal birth, shouldn't it be bursting with new possibilities instead of merely being about becoming obedient to authority?

There is an unfortunate attitude toward children that often accompanies traditional religious beliefs. That attitude takes many forms, but at its essence it is about caring more about getting them to fit in than about truly appreciating who they are and the freshness their lively presence introduces. Some Christians talk about the necessity of breaking the will of their children. That approach to parenting is consistent with the doctrine of original sin, which teaches that human beings are born sinful and that our only chance for being saved from our sinfulness and its consequences is through the grace God.

I have all kinds of problems with the idea of original sin, but the point I want to make here is that we should be less concerned with taming children and more with fostering their giftedness. We have more to learn from them than they have to learn from us. We can teach them how to do some things that are generally helpful, but they keep us on our toes and remind us of what is most important.

Left to our own devises, most of us as adults naturally choose what we are used to over disruptive change. We equate wisdom with prudence. We get more conservative as we grow older. I find that rather sad. It feels like acquiescing to a so-called life that is dead to itself. How wise is that? How smart is it to deprive ourselves of the best of what life has to offer? What do we gain by avoiding risks at all costs if the main result is dying a thousand figurative deaths before arriving at the literal death that we fear so much.

However, rejecting the life that comes with each present moment in order to protect a life that we will never really live is less about conscious choice than it is about seemingly innocuous (and perhaps even ostensibly sensible) failures to show up. Which brings me back to the theme of being born again. Most of us would benefit from being born again if that is understood as a return to a childlike relationship with life in all its fullness. 

toward a warmer secularism

Many secular-minded individuals are rather hypocritical in the way they demand tolerance but often don't practice it themselves. Religion per se is not the enemy. Making religion the enemy only adds to the problem. The problem is that modern society tends to be inhospitable. Its being inhospitable is the inevitable byproduct of cultural collisions. We are thrust together with people we don't understand. Many of their values are alien and even contrary to ours. It is hard to be sympathetic toward cultures that condone so-called "honor killing" for example.

Secularists obviously don't want to make de-conversion a mirror image of conversion. What we can do though is provide viable alternatives. Secularism tends to be relatively impoverished emotionally. It is easy to understand why so many otherwise quite sensible people feel drawn to religion. I believe that if there were more emotionally warm secular alternatives, religion would lose much of its draw.

We are heirs to a splendid legacy that we have inherited from brave pioneers who were guided by a vision of a world that would be guided by reality-based reasoning. Many of those pioneers underestimated the difficulties their successors would encounter. They had their own difficulties with their superstitious contemporaries, but they believed that reason would eventually triumph once enough people began to get a taste of freedom. Theirs was a worthy vision that can still inspire us even though we seem further away from its realization than ever. 

The revolutionary thinkers whose legacy is constitutional democracy understood some of the inherent dangers and thus put safeguards in place, but who among them could have imagined their baby growing up to choose Donald Trump as its president. We seem to have made a wrong turn somewhere along the way, but I don't think we did it on purpose. Perhaps the greatest factor in our ending up where we are is backlash.

It might seem strange that there are a lot of people who honestly believe that political correctness is the source of all our problems, but it is not so strange if we view it in context. It is a solipsistic conflation of feelings and beliefs. They feel put down, and they, not wholly without warrant, believe that their being put down says everything about the extent to which democracy has been undermined.

Their (solipsistic) inability to imagine democracy as anything other than people like them getting their way creates a no-win situation for everybody. They would rather steer the ship into the rocks as one big "f*** you" than accept the imperatives of a culturally pluralistic democracy, and everybody is paying the price now and probably will for years to come.

How do we recover from this cultural, social, and political crisis? How do we calm the storm created by backlash? How do we recapture a vision of a truly inclusive civil society? What is the message that we can put on the banners that we would raise high?