The teacher in question claimed to have been fired in retaliation for threatening to invoke the Americans with Disabilities Act rather than relying on the internal procedures her church requires. Her duties had involved teaching religion as well as secular subjects, and leading her students in daily prayer; she argued however that the school also hired lay teachers to perform the same functions (though only when a called teacher like herself was unavailable). This had been enough to persuade a lower court to allow her suit;  the Supreme Court overruled that decision.

All authorities seem agreed that there is a ministerial exemption; the question was how broadly it extends. A church obviously has to be free to choose and dismiss its own priests, pastors etc in accordance with its own principles, or freedom of religion is seriously impaired. On the other hand an electrician or house-painter employed (or seeking employment) by a church probably should have the same rights as one employed (or seeking employment) by anyone else. The present case clearly fell somewhere between. Given the religious nature of at least some of plaintiff’s duties, the Court’s decision makes sense; so does the Court’s reluctance to draw a clear line for future cases. (In concurring opinions, Justice Thomas suggested that churches should be able to decide for themselves who is a “minister” under the exemption – raising the specter of “called janitors;” while Justices Alito and Kagan more sensibly prefer looking at the functions served by an employee regardless of whether the word “minister” or any special “ordination” procedure is used. – But then the Courts would have to decide just what functions specifically count as “religious.”)

I remember once reading a discussion (on some site or listserve) among Missouri Synod Lutherans – the very denomination to which Hosanna-Tabor belongs – regarding the propriety of the modern tendency to label all sorts of church functions “ministries.” Some felt that this was in derogation of the importance of the pastoral office. On the other hand legal considerations were part of the mix also, a desire to immunize the church as much as possible against government intrusion.

Anyway, as I’ve said, given the facts of the case I am inclined to agree with the Court’s decision.

At the same time, it is a long-standing thought-experiment of mine – nothing more, I recognize the historical and cultural reasons why it would never be tried in reality – to try to imagine how we could get all the results we really want from the 1st Amendment without using the word “religion” at all. It has always seemed to me that the abuses we look to the religion clauses to prevent could be dealt with just as well under freedom of speech, press, association, equal protection, and the right to privacy. And what exactly makes an “establishment regarding religion” any worse than an official establishment regarding some secular political party or ideology, such as we have seen in the last century in the Communist countries for instance? My intent is not to restrict “freedom of religion” but to extend exactly the same freedom to activities and motivations we consider “secular.”

So how does this notion of mine apply to the Hosanna-Tabor case? Easily enough, I think. Instead of a “ministerial exemption,” why not just say that whenever people form an organization to promote any cause, they have to be allowed sufficient discretion to make sure their leaders and spokespeople are committed to sincerely representing it? PETA should be free in its employment practices, at least regarding leadership positions, to discriminate against carnivores and fur-wearers! How, I wonder, is this different from a church having the right to demand that its ministers be true exemplars of their faith?

Like just about everyone, my first reaction on reading the story was along the lines of  “%R@$ idiot!!!” Then when I saw the follow-up article (here) I realized that it could  have happened to anyone under similar circumstances: the fellow was using a new iPhone his company had just given him in exchange for his old Blackberry; he did in fact “turn it off” before the concert, but didn’t realize there was an alarm already set to go off even in “silent mode.”

Something similar, though much less dramatic, happened when I got my first cell phone. I’d gone into a meeting, carefully turning the ringer off beforehand; someone called, and sure enough the ringer didn’t ring, but when the person left a message the phone started beeping to let me know I had a message. Why on earth would the designers of the thing not just assume that if I wanted the ringer off, I wouldn’t want any other call-related sounds either?

Since then whenever I’ve gotten a new phone I’ve tried to figure out as soon as possible how to turn off all the sounds it is capable of making, rather than just rely on the most obvious setting on the incorrect assumption that “common sense” applies to the geekocracy. Luckily I learned the lesson without too much embarrassment, unlike the Philharmonic’s “Patron X.”

To sum up: Mitt seems to think of  himself as the kind of candidate who dominated Republican politics in the era from McKinley to Hoover: one who believes, as Coolidge said, that “the business of America is business.” I could also cite the Eisenhower cabinet member who said “What’s good for General Motors is good for the United States,” except that Romney’s position on the auto industry bailout needs some interpretation…

Unfortunately for his prospects, no Republican has won the Presidency since 1928 as a pure business-first candidate. Eisenhower won as a moderate who accepted the New Deal; Nixon, Reagan and the Bushes won by appealing to the sorts of sentiment that McKinley disdained and let Bryan represent, the fear (aggravated by the events of the 1960s) of urbanisation and cosmopolitanism and immorality among the young…

The closest thing since the Depression to a GOP national victory based on economic issues was 1980; but Carter did not run as FDR, nor Reagan as Hoover. Reagan won on an economic platform that his running mate, a far more traditional Republican, had previously derided as “Voodoo.”

If in the course of the year the economy starts looking so bad that Romney can run by just pointing at it, and not going into his own ideas of what to do about it, he may well win the Presidency. If not, probably not.

In days to come I plan to blog more regularly than I’ve done recently. I’ll look in on the campaign again from time to time, but will continue to address my broad range of interests.

Thanks for looking in!

To me it is a reminder that the alliance we have come to take for granted between religious conservatism and laissez-faire capitalism is a fairly recent phenomenon.

Less than a century ago William Jennings Bryan, who in Vachel Lindsay’s words “scourged the elephant plutocrats” throughout his career, and most famously at the Democratic convention of 1896 where he proclaimed the following -

There are two ideas of government. There are those who believe that if you just legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, that their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous their prosperity will find its way up and through every class that rests upon it.

- ended his days in Tennessee prosecuting a certain John Thomas Scopes.

William McKinley (with whom Karl Rove liked to compare George W. Bush, himself taking the role of sidekick Mark Hanna)  beat Bryan twice for the Presidency precisely by letting him have the Bible thumpers and xenophobes who had until then tended to vote Republican, appealing instead to the urban and largely immigrant masses in the Northeast and Midwest who, however severe their own issues with the plutocracy, saw no place for themselves in Bryan’s rural Evangelical  vision of America.

So what changed? Several things, I think.

First the New Deal of the 1930′s. It addressed the grievances of all who suffered most from the Depression, and at first it drew their support whatever their regional or demographic background; but after a while the buildup of Federal bureaucracy which it required left Bryan’s old Western constituencies feeling that Washington had become at least as hostile to their vision as Wall Street had been.

Then the Cold War: with Stalin’s Communism as a universally acknowledged enemy, which threatened capitalism and religion both, people came to feel that both were somehow on the same side, both part of the America that needed to be defended.

The articulation of a rigorous but “Big Tent”-ish conservative ideology in the 1950′s, most eloquently by William F. Buckley; Barry Goldwater’s luring  Southern whites away from populism by linking it with Civil Rights; finally the great parental freakout of the late Sixties – all these things combined to produce the constellation of political forces that seems to us so natural.

So I am not at all surprised by occasional signs that like all composite things, it is prone to decay…

I still don’t think it was a foregone conclusion; if Gingrich had found a way to counter the negative ads in Iowa, or if he had sunk farther faster and left the field clear for Santorum, we could still be looking at a triumph of the hard right. But the combination of luck and megabucks at Romney’s disposal seems to have turned the trick for him.

Which means we can look forward to a whole year of Gail Collins, one of my favorite newspaper columnists, reminding us at least once a  week of the time Mitt drove to Canada with his dog on the roof of the car.

Oh well.

As I had suspected, the relationship between “free will” and “determinism” is  not simply one of antithesis. I was never persuaded by those who purported to see a defense of “free will” in the apparently anti-determinist findings of modern physics; it seemed to me that quantum randomness is not quite the thing most people mean by “freedom.” Merely showing that there is a built-in unpredictability to all things, including my choices, doesn’t make me feel free in any meaningful sense; it just means that rather than an inexorable divine will or scientifically analyzable machinery, I am at the mercy of a kind of cosmic coin toss. I, and I suspect others, actually feel most in control of our actions precisely when our choices are rooted in a chain of causality; for this is when we act most deliberately, with a knowledge of what motivates us and what effects we are likely to produce. Richard Double is particularly good at charting out the various options: freedom-only-if-no-determinism, freedom-only-if-determinism, freedom-in-either-case, freedom-in-neither-case… and showing the flaws in all of them. (His position is one of “metaethical subjectivism,” holding that “freedom,” and moral concepts generally, do not refer to objectively real entities, but are no less important for that; and I am inclined to agree.)

Dennett’s book makes a useful contrast between (a) the “freedom” that philosophers fight about and (b) the “freedom” that the rest of us fight about. “Metaphysical freedom,” he says, is not something we really need to bother with, we can get on with our lives quite well without it; political freedom is a very different matter, and much more heat than light results from letting the passions properly associated with the latter spill over into discussions of the former.

When we see philosophers stumble over themselves and talk past each other, I find it useful to see what the terms they are fighting about mean in ordinary life, in contexts where we all seem to know what they mean even if we don’t think much about their precise definitions. “Freedom” in ordinary usage seems to have to do mainly with ability to act on our desires, beliefs, felt needs, whatever motivates us, without certain kinds of restraint. What kinds of restraint? Apparently not physical limitations, individual or general; my lack of wings doesn’t take away my “freedom” to fly. (We may say that a bodily disorder impedes someone’s “freedom of movement,” but this isn’t “freedom” in the hot-button sense of the word.) The restraints that people fight over are restraints imposed by other people. Moreover, they are restraints that are felt to be somehow illegitimate; parental authority over small children is generally accepted, as is the right to keep others off one’s own property. Illegitimate restraint can be by the arbitrary will of some individual, a random thug with a gun for example, or it can be more systemic – and here’s where we get into trouble, such as a good deal of the polarization of American politics today. A lot of people – conservatives, libertarians, economists of a certain stripe – seem to consider a wide range of governmental actions to be illegitimate arbitrary restraints on “freedom,” while accepting economic restraints, resulting from “market forces,” as part of the  natural order of things; while others of us see government (ideally) as a natural function of our social nature, and concentrations of economic power as impositions of an alien will. Although I definitely identify more with the latter camp, my point here is not to argue the point, but simply to characterize the difference. (Here’s a post I found this morning that illustrates my side of it nicely, a response by a liberal blogger to a conservative economist on the question of wage differentials according to gender.)

But for all our differences about what kinds of restraint are legitimate, all who fight for “freedom” in the real world take for granted our starting point as individuals who have desires, felt needs, beliefs, motivations; where these things come from is not in question. It is only when we do start to question it that we get into metaphysical territory, and “freedom” seems to be not merely endangered in practice, but problematic in its very nature; because the very thought that our desires come from somewhere implies that there is something prior to us, whether a God or a machine or a coin-toss, that produces them, and this makes us seem radically dependent on whatever (or Whoever) we think that is. And for this there is no cure, because like it or not, our lives are rooted in a chain of events that way way precedes us. To have absolute “metaphysical freedom” would mean being a God… the “freedom” we can hope for in life is the freedom that comes from living in a social order that allows us a reasonable scope to act on our decisions however we came by them, and a reasonable assurance that our essential interests will be protected against whatever interferences our society regards as illegitimate.

The caption on the wall said the artist created “experiences,” that all visitors were invited to walk through the curtain, to push the strings of beads aside and feel them, to animate the artwork, become part of it, make it part of them.

I walked away, with studied indifference, thinking I was thus making a statement of my own.

Then curiosity drew me back to the wall caption. Something had caught my eye in the artist’s bio, I think it was the word “Cuba,” and I wanted to know more.

It said the artist had died. Young, not yet 40. (Of AIDS, I was to learn later.)

So I said what the hell, I should not so blithely say no to a dead man. I walked through the bead curtain, and back again, and felt a strange sense of peace…

I seem to have been absent when the “gift of faith” was given out. I’ve never felt I even knew just what it is, or how it works, or why it is supposed to be good for me.

To the Dawkins school of atheism, “faith” is simply a failure of rationality, a shared delusion, a dogged persistence in erroneous and unsupported opinion. I know it can’t be that simple. There are far too many clearly intelligent, sane, rational people out there who not only profess a “faith” but claim it to be central to their lives, who say it gives meaning to everything else that they think or do.

I accept that.

I just don’t get it.

Some defenders of religion at times argue that everyone has some kind of “faith;” we all believe the sun will rise tomorrow, that the floor will hold our weight when we get out of bed and stand on it. This is clearly a non-starter. For one thing these “beliefs” are supported by specific past experiences, in a way that religious propositions are not, at least for most of us. (I’ve written elsewhere of people who claim specific “spritual experiences” as the basis of their faith; I am more concerned here with the majority – in my experience – of religious adherents, who make no such claim.) Of course there are philosophers who will argue for the logical inadequacy of any inductive conclusion, but that’s beside the point too; if you set the bar high enough no one can claim to “know” anything, but no one religious or otherwise really lives like that.

But my main objection to those who make the “sunrise” argument is that they  seem to want it both ways. They clearly don’t really feel that their religious faith is as ordinary and everyday a thing as the argument makes it sound, they feel it is very important to have the right faith, the right kind of faith, so they must think there is something special about theirs, so let’s talk about that rather than pretending it’s just like standing on the floor in the morning.

So what is it? The most liberal of religious folk seem to want to separate the idea of “faith” from any specific doctrine. This is what my UU friends do when they say we are a “faith tradition” as much as any other. I’m not persuaded that we can speak of “faith” as something without propositional content, a general positive attitude towards life for instance – hey, I’ve got that, lots of us have it at least part of the time, but to most people who claim a “faith” it means faith in something. What? It varies. So how does “faith” tell you what to have faith in?

The most promising approach to a definition equates “faith” not so much with opinion, as with trust. I am not talking so much about those who call it “trust in God” or some such; this presupposes that you already have an opinion about there being this or that God. My question is how you get that opinion, and what makes it seem like more than just an opinion.

But I once attended a talk by a Catholic theology prof who put it in terms of trust in other people, starting with childrens’ reliance on their parents, and then extending to broader circles of people until finally, if one is a good Catholic at least, one comes to have the same trust in the Church, its leadership past and present, its “deposit of Faith.”

This I can understand. I can even understand why I don’t have it and feel OK without it. When I was a child I learned early on that I could count on my parents’ intentions, their eagerness to do the right thing by me, their love, but not on their necessarily knowing what they were talking about; this realization has stayed with me throughout my life, and has carried over to my attitudes towards what all others say to me. I can easily separate whatever positive feelings I have towards people from my evaluation of the fact-content of what they say… Maybe there’s something about other people’s upbringing, their emotional or intellectual development, which makes the difference.

There was a fine piece on Richard Dawkins in the NY Times last week.

I really do agree with the man on more issues than not. Where I part company is with his reduction of religion to a mere set of indefensible fact claims – in effect taking the word of the fundamentalists for what religion is, and not looking further. I oppose the dogmatic, traditionalist, authoritarian side of religion as much as anyone, but I know far too many people for whom membership in a faith community has been a source of companionship, emotional comfort, advice and assistance in the everyday business of life, encouragement to be the best person they can be, a metaphoric language with which to express parts of themselves otherwise unexpressible, any of a number of things which do not at all require an insistence on the supposed objective truth of any doctrine. One might say we can get these things perfectly well without supernatural beliefs; but where in fact do we get them? I applaud those humanists who are trying to join forces to do good works in the world and build a real sense of community among themselves; maybe they’ll succeed in becoming a real presence on the world scene, but they haven’t yet. Historically the churches are where people have gone for these things.

I myself am a hyperactive member of a Unitarian Universalist congregation; UU tries to be all the good things a church can be while at the same time not imposing any sort of creed. Many of us call UU a “religion,” a “faith community,” but others of us think we have gone beyond anything that those terms imply.  Personally I do not consider myself religious or spiritual, but I do like church a lot; not just my own UU but the various Christian churches I go from time to time and which friends of mine belong to. And I’ve enjoyed the study of other religious traditions as well, and occasional attendance at their ceremonies; Judaism, Buddhism and Hinduism in particular. I feel my world would be a poorer place without these things. Each one in its own way reveals some unique facet of the human spirit.

The other day ISKCON put on a nice festival on Boston Common; there were people chanting on a stage,  displays illustrating various topics of their faith, free prasād (food previously offered to Lord Krishna) and more secular snacks for a dollar or two. Sure the basic repeated chant of just three of the thousands of possible Divine Names can get tiresome to an outsider, but there’s more too it than that, lots of bits of India’s cultural history are conveyed along with the chanting.  I love this sort of thing and I’m glad they’re in town.

I see religion as a sort of art form. An art we make in community, with our own lives as the raw material. As with any art form there are many possible styles and genres, from the rigidly conservative and formalistic to the flamboyantly original and eclectic.

Enough for now.

Seems Zuckerberg decided we all needed a new “experience” so he took away the “Recent News” option from the News Feed and made everyone put up with his algorithm’s notion of what we were likely to find interesting; also he added a ticker-thingy on the right that shows you everything your friends do, things they like on the walls of people you’ve never heard of… A whole lot of my friends have been spending untold hours trying to figure out how to undo or bypass all this or if it’s finally time to migrate to Google+ (which co-incidentally became available to the general public that very day).  On top of that there’s a new FB Timeline thing in the works, which some of my friends find exciting but others see privacy problems with, as usual…

So I went on Google+. I hadn’t been  planning to, because it seemed more complicated, with asymmetrical relationships (“circles”) rather than just mutual “friend”ing, and would take time to figure out; moreover it will undoubtedly take some time before it acquires a sufficient population and level of activity to be really competitive with FB. But I figured, if I’m going to have to climb the learning curve like Sisyphus anyway whenever Zuckerberg decides to change everything, why not try out the alternative.

Sure enough, G+ is more complicated, and doesn’t really have anywhere near the level of activity of FB; but I’m supporting it anyway, because at least it means there’s competition. All social media are probably trending in the same overall direction but at least I don’t want it all controlled by one visionary megalomaniac. Sure they’re all out to make money, they’re all using us as bait for advertisers, but plain greed you can at least negotiate with; visionary megalomania, not so much.

I see one drawback is I can’t have WordPress automatically send my blog posts to G+ like it does with Twitter and FB; I’ll have to link each item individually. It seems WP wants to, but Google’s grand vision is against automated postings. Oh well.