04/05: Balancing Secularism and Religious Tradition
Category: Religion & Public Policy
Posted by: A Waco Farmer
This succinct and insightful Tocqueville comment from a recent thread merits attention:
Guest Blog: Tocqueville
People of faith should acknowledge that the countervailing force of secular thought has been an important corrective to the excesses and blindnesses of religious believers. But ardent secularists have their own blindnesses and excesses, among which is their failure to see how much their own conceptions of justice and human dignity rely upon the very religious traditions they reject. Secularism alone cannot suffice to address the largest questions about human existence.
Accordingly, secularists should aim at a reasonable modus vivendi with the believers around them, rather than to invest themselves in pointlessly polarizing struggles over the Pledge of Allegiance or faith-based initiatives and in complaining, absurdly, that America is becoming a theocracy. If they save their criticisms for the things that matter, they will be heard.
Guest Blog: Tocqueville
People of faith should acknowledge that the countervailing force of secular thought has been an important corrective to the excesses and blindnesses of religious believers. But ardent secularists have their own blindnesses and excesses, among which is their failure to see how much their own conceptions of justice and human dignity rely upon the very religious traditions they reject. Secularism alone cannot suffice to address the largest questions about human existence.
Accordingly, secularists should aim at a reasonable modus vivendi with the believers around them, rather than to invest themselves in pointlessly polarizing struggles over the Pledge of Allegiance or faith-based initiatives and in complaining, absurdly, that America is becoming a theocracy. If they save their criticisms for the things that matter, they will be heard.
~Tocqueville
an okie gardener wrote: