There are a lot of flavors of meaning-finding out there...religion certainly qualifies. So do politics, a career, etc. I find meaning in my wife and family and friends, and in the larger picture, in my city and country - I don't need a religion to teach me their importance, don't need a certain sect of that religion to teach me how to behave towards them. And I believe this world is what we get - ain't nobody more aware of the present moment, of making wise decisions today, than someone who thinks these four score years are the sum total. Arguing that those who do not share Christianity with you somehow "live where time lacks 'weight and meaning'" is about 180 degrees off.

...the past and present can be dis-valued in favor of the better future that's coming sooner or later. What is heaven if not a "better future that's coming sooner or later"? That better (or unimagineably worse) future has been religions' stock-in-trade since about the dawn of man...

...and don't forget, religion itself is often the first cousin to barbarism and totalitarianism. Christianity less so than some others, sure, but anything that gives meaning can be and has been corrupted into barbarism and tyrrany.

I too have seen both sides of the fence, but have come to a quite different conclusion...I have no problem with religion - I do think it's a force for good. I could certainly see myself embracing it again someday. But I don't think the arguments in favor of it include a lack of tyranny committed in its name, its superior focus on the present, or its meaning-finding-locus.

I'm not trying to say that ONLY Christians "live where time lacks 'weight and meaning.'" I'm pretty sure I did NOT say it. If I gave that impression I'm sorry.

But lots of people (including many who go to church on Sundays) live otherwise, and that's the thing that puzzles me. Or rather, I'm puzzled that they seem content with it.

Gotta run; I'll touch your other points later...

I'm back, but about to dash off again.

I should just add that these things interest me because I'M the totalitarian-type around here. (You Ethan are probably by nature far saner than I.) It makes perfect sense to me to think that if we only eliminated the worst 20% or 30% of the population, this would be perfectly justified because the world would be a much better place.

My conservatism teaches me that this would not in fact work. (So scumballs everywhere can breath a sigh of relief. You are safe.) But a certain part of my nature is coldly utilitarian, which makes being either conservative or Christian more exciting than they would be otherwise.

John,

You write in the main post, "It's the supine sleepiness that many people seem to have that bewilders me. I can just imagine certain people I know looking at me with puzzlement and saying 'Why do you care about this?'"

I think you'll find your answer in the previous sentence: "Newman, clearest of all thinkers, might say, 'It's not hard to believe such-and-such, it is hard to imagine it.' That's often true."

Newman hits the nail on the head. People of the sort you know who find your beliefs unfathomable find them unfathomable precisely because they are so hard to imagine. Christianity is for many of us too good to be true, and therefore suspect. (And I think for "many of us" you can read "most of us", which explains why so many people are only "nominal" Christians, myself included.)

Like any alert person who lived through the farce called "the 1970s", I have a an allergy to centralized anything, and to people who claim to have "inside knowledge" of how the world works.

In the realm of politics, that takes the form of my aversion to political Taylorism, a hobby-horse I've ridden here many times. (And thanks go to Annoying Old Guy, who grasped in a comments section a few entries back what I was only groping for.)

In the realm of religion and things spiritual, my skepticism takes the form of suspicion about what various churches preach. I'm willing to concede what generic monotheism holds to be true, but Christianity..... it seems a bit much.

And so..... if so many of your friends and neighbors seem so supinely sleepy, John, it may be that they've had one god (The Plan, and its attendant cult) shattered by the events of the '70s and '80s, and they're not willing to commit to anything ever again, especially so in the case of one (Christianity) that is so.... well, otherworldly... and so counter-intuitive.

Yeah, and if by chance your faith in the "god of the plan" has NOT been shattered, then you know that the plan has everything covered, and you don't need to worry! Actually I suspect that many of those who have lost faith in the plan still think there IS a plan, and that things will be OK as long as they don't (like Wile E. Coyote after running off the edge of a cliff) look down....

I do have to say that the mode of thought one might call "intuitive" (or "common sense," or "conventional wisdom") is not useful in thinking about God, or anything supernatural. The one thing no system of thought can do is stand outside itself and validate itself. In this case it is comparable to asking common sense to judge Quantum Physics.

If I try to sell you a certain bridge, and you say "it seems a bit much," that's meaningful since you have a common sense appreciation of what works in the world around you. If I pass on to you some secret mystic knowledge given me by the Angel of Fire, "it seems a bit much" is—counterintuitively—not a sensible reaction, since I'm proposing something from a realm you presumably don't have common-sense knowledge of. (Although you might have common-sense knowledge that I'm a notorious liar or con-man, which it would make sense to use.)

Well, I think I can say with confidence that you're not a notorious liar or con-man, John. :)

It's just that it's been said by various philosophers that we human beings are dim, blurry copies of God, not in any physical sense, necessarily, but in a mental or psychological sense.

In keeping with that line of thought, my experience of human nature inclines me to view Christ's message with a heaping helping of skepticism. Not that His message cannot possibly be true, but that it seems awfully damned unlikely. Like I said, it's too good to be true, and having been played for a fool once already in matters of the heart in this world, I'm reluctant to be played for a fool again, especially in connection with a Person who, by definition, can't be seen or heard or felt.

OK, so I'm a cynical bastard, at least for today. [wry smile]

That's the point I'm trying to make in connection with your friends and acquaintances. It's not that they're utterly unresponsive to the things that fill you with wonder. It's just that, having been deceived once, they're in no mind to be deceived again. At least, that's the way I'd bet.

"having been played for a fool once already in matters of the heart in this world, I'm reluctant to be played for a fool again..."

If I was the one who was saying that, would you tell me that I'm acting wisely? Would you advise me that the smart move is to grow a hard shell and become cynical?

"too good to be true". I can see how you might think that in regards to "The World to Come." (Of course there is that little matter of Purgatory.) But really, it still seems a bit too good to believe...to me also.

But for this world mostly what you get promised is difficulty and grief. "Take up your cross and follow me..." That's sure not what the con-man says. (There are those who preach a different line, but I consider them flaky out-riders.) Even in our own safe and sheltered country one is really being asked to grow up, which is a painful thing that way too many people are avoiding. Think about The Church teaching that sex is a beautiful and holy thing------but only in marriage, and you don't get to use the Undo Command. "Too good to be true" isn't what pops into my mind...

(Does anybody recollect the quote, by a woman saint [Catherine of Siena??] who is talking to God, and God tells her he doesn't have many friends, and she says something like, "Well, considering how you treat them I'm surprised you have any at all.")

Christ was a god-man. Have there been other god-men or is he unique. Hindus have a lot of god-men and still many living but the sayings and doings of Jesus are unique. The Hindu god-men do not compare.

Since God apparently wishes that people turn to him with love, we shall not be shown clear signs.

I only read the excerpt, so perhaps I misunderstand, but if Chaput is saying that democracy and free enterprise are Utopian, I don't think he's right.

They are imperfect vehicles for the Christian values he discusses. Both are primarily oriented towards choices made in the present. Both evolved out of respect for the free will of individuals, with the implicit understanding that those choices will sometimes be wrong, and sometimes evil.

Unlike other systems, democracy and free enterprise give meaningful weight to the choices individuals make in every moment of their lives. Whatever optimism they entail is based in Judeo-Christian cultural confidence. We believe that we are made in God's image, and that if we strive to do right, he will shine his light on the path before us.

Lyle,
I don't think he, or rather Bernanos is saying that they are utopian per se, but that as "ideological systems" they can be like that. I don't think this is actually true. Neither are "ideological systems" in the way that marxism is. Nobody's trying to build the "New Capitalist Man."

But the unfortunate fact is that they are at least as corrosive as any totalitarian system, and the fact that much of the change that happens is voluntary rather than ordered by a commissar is small comfort to an onlooker like Bernanos.

This happens to be something I'm very aware of. I'm in favor of capitalism and democracy, but always heartbroken by all the old and beautiful things (and people, and souls) that get smashed. I've even described the freedom and Globalization we are trying to unleash on Iraq as analogous to a Neutron Bomb, in this case killing a dysfunctional culture while leaving the people alive.

Unfortunately, another lesson Drucker taught is that in developed countries there are only two ways the decisions can be made, by the marketplace or by the state. Both have their drawbacks, and so the world has been writhing and twisting for centuries trying to find some "third way," or happy medium. But there is none...

For a good read try his Adventures of a Bystander, especially the chapter on the amazing Polyani family, a clutch of brilliant intellectual siblings who all dedicated their lives to solving this conundrum...

Bisaal, you are right.

It's harder for us to appreciate just how unique he was, because now if anyone invents a new religion, they adopt and adapt things from Christianity, and so we see Christianity as "just another religion" like Islam or Mormonism or those Korean things. They are all copy-cats.

But in the 1st Century no one had seen anything like it, and Romans accused Christians of being "atheists," because it didn't even look like a religion to them.

And, once it became legal, Christianity adapted for its worship the buildings and ceremony of the Roman law courts, because no religion of the time provided a template. (Except in some ways the Synagogue.) Now we think of a "basilica" as the expected place to worship, and a procession with a sacred book to be read to the whole community as normal. We can't imagine how odd it once was.

John,

I certainly would not now advise you to grow a hard shell and become cynical, but I would have ten years ago. All I'm trying to get across to you is that some of your friends and neighbors are in some sense "walking wounded", and are not beyond salvaging. It just has to be done in the right way, though what that is, I don't know.

I think Lyle has it about right, based on my "take" on the whole article. Archbishop Chaput seems to view our present prosperity, with all its toys and diversions, through the same "eyeglasses" as do the secular enviromentally-minded moral scolds who keep telling us to think "small is beautiful". Rather than rail against Western consumerism, the Archbishop should be thinking up ways to make it serve God's ends. How exactly he is to do that, I don't know. Certainly not by making the Church "relevant"-- that's been tried before, with disastrous results. But one of the good things about our present (since 1900) prosperity is the increasing amount of free time we have. What the Church needs to do is to get people thinking about Christian virtues, or at least about Godly and ungodly things, and our expanding leisure time is an opportunity for the Church, not an obstacle in its way.

Yeah, I know..... Easier said than done.

In the department of theological quibbles: I find Archbishop Chaput's invocation of the Devil as an agent in the doings of the world rather grating. There's enough evil in the human heart to explain the horrors of this world. To ascribe them to the Devil is to edge towards the old heresy of Dualism, and is in any case a cop-out. My faults and sins, manifold as they are, are my own damned fault, and no one else's. Somehow, I don't think God will buy the line, "But the Devil made me do it!" :)

Well, he's not saying consumerism is bad, he's saying it's a distraction from what's important.

And it is. I could argue exactly the same in a purely secular context—most of my blogging is a plea to people to focus on what's important (mostly read by people like you who are already focused, but at least I try) and while I think many people are acting wrong-headedly because of leftish thinking, there's also the 90% of the population that just doesn't pay any attention to war/politics/change at all. They certainly seem distracted by something.

The devil isn't an agent, he's a tempter. And it's obvious that we are all tempted all the time. Chaput's argument would be the same if he just said "We are tempted to believe that history is a single, determined mechanism, etc..."

Bad ideas pop into our consciousness (at least mine) with startling ease, good ones need to be press-ganged out of the rabble and driven forward into battle with the lash. If one believes that there really are supernatural realities, then the Devil as tempter is a reasonable hypothesis. And it may be very helpful to people to visualize the world, and their own mind-space, as a battleground.

But I'm sure Chaput and you are in perfect agreement that the line, "But the Devil made me do it!" is never an excuse.

And Hale, you have a message of importance too, about Taylorism. And are we all too distracted to listen? Looks like it to me.

No, John, I don't think we're more distracted nowadays than, say, our grandparents or great-grandparents were 100 or 150 years ago. They had Harper's Illustrated and penny-dreadfuls and what-not; we have iPods and the Internet and TV and radio. They only difference between us and them is that we have more free time to devote to the distractions.

They were too busy keeping the wolf from the door with 72-hour workweeks in the city or sunrise-to-sunset days on the farm to do more than look at Harper's Illustrated or to read the penny-dreadfuls. And so I suspect that they dwelled on the Eternal about as much as we do.

I think it only seems like they spent more time on such weighty matters because only the better parts of their popular culture were preserved for us to see, either accidentally or deliberately. (Do you really want future generations to know that you were fond of your various guilty pleasures? I thought not. *chuckle* Me neither. I spend waaaaay too much money and time on manga. Far better for future generations to think that people like me read only Winston Churchill or C.S. Lewis. *wry grin*)

Guilty pleasures? Moi? C'est impossible.

My entire life is an edifying panorama of rectitude and honorable high-mindedness...