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The Row Boat"Had we but world enough, and time..." *
When God or Justice Became a Dilemma4/04/2008 09:47:16In her useful if somewhat trite article on OpenDemocracy, Tina Beattle argues that debates about religion vs. reason are a mere "smokescreen" for more critical debates about "global power and justice." As someone concerned with both debates (and often thinking of the first as a guilty pleasure), her question is close to my heart. Wait a second, one might say, I thought God was justice! I call "trite" to the point that it labors the usual mudslinging against the New Atheist crowd, as well as tiring invocations of "postmodernism." Nevertheless, in effect, she points to an important truth: the New Atheists' idea that a wonderful new order of secular ethics will reign with the collapse of religion is a kind of idolatry at worst and wishful thinking at best. She is just being redundant to push the point that religion does good things as well as bad, and also to argue that "reason" is not a self-sustaining alternative. But the strange implication that the question of religion may not be the important one stands out. It would sound like Marx except that it comes from someone who obviously considers religion to be important. Do problems of justice trump religious problems to the point that we can no longer argue about the existence of God without distracting from pressing questions of justice? So far as I am a religion writer, I would be out of work. |
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