Civil Matremony

I basically agree with Mark Kleiman here on the question of gay marriage and Obama's stance on the same. Mark's short summary of Obama's position is

since gay marriage is bitterly controversial among various religious groups, and the state doesn’t need to take a position with respect to that controversy, it shouldn’t.

Which works well enough as a summary, although I would say that there are a few more wrinkles to the issue. And, as the commenters noted (go check the link) there are important issues of language, which are not easy to resolve.
Basically, there are, potentially, two aspects to "marriage". One is the legal status, defined by the state, the other is the religious sacrament of Holy Matrimony. The state should have virtually nothing to say about the later. If a group of poeple choose to form a social network in which they will perform ceremonies for one another only under certain conditions, that should be their business, the state should not intervene. The legal status, however, the status defined by the state, should be inclusive, people should be able to enjoy that status without discrimination. I believe Obama's position does no more than recognize that this is the case.
Now that does still leave one problem, which is somewhat thorny. Having read the comments to Mark's piece I see reasons for both sides. Namely, which of these two conditions gets the term "marriage". I'm inclined to leave "marriage" with the religious ceremony and have civil union work for the legal status. But, as I said, read the comments to see the opposite view.
I think ultimately this conflict is resolvable and either choice will work.

Creation Care

This NYT article discusses the existence and influence of the evangelical environmental movement. The existence of these folks is a very good sign for a number of reasons.

Adding strength and influence to the environmental movement is a good thing. It has been weakened considerably during this administration. Much of The Republican War on Science deals with the weakening of regulations and agencies aimed at protecting the environment. Strengthening the environmental movement is a good thing.

The evangelical groups will add new perspectives and new outlooks to the environmental movement. This can only serve to improve the movement in nearly everything it does. I've written a lot here about the nature and value of critical review and that one essential component is a diverse group of independent reviewers. The evangelicals will add diversity and are certainly independent of the existing environmental movement.

This will help break down the false dichotomy between the religious and the liberal points of view. For far too many years liberals have acquiesced in this division which has put too many people with liberal sympathies into the conservative camp. The polarization of the nation that many complain about is in part due to this overly simplistic division. Including these folks in the liberal coalition, even if only on this one issue, is all for the better for liberalism and for the country.

This could help restore the acceptance of scriptural and religious references as a means of communicating ideas. Citing scripture to argue that because it is written there it must be true, is, I believe a mistake and a disservice to both religion and the country. However, many true things are described well in scripture and many people are best persuaded by reference to those passages that do describe true things well. That usage of scripture should not be discouraged, although unfortunately it has.

As an extension to the last point, this could help in a revival of liberal theology. Not much is heard in the national debate from a theological and a liberal position. I believe that that is unfortunate and that liberals and Democrats would do well to correct that error.

Evolution and Religion

I just came across this article on the Catholic Church and the Theory of Evolution. As it states the Church, and indeed the current, fairly conservative, Church sees no conflict between Christianity and Evolution. In the ongoing public debate on evolution and creationism one of the most persistent, and most misleading, claims of the creationists (here I do include the proponents of Intelligent Design with the creationists) is that there is an inherent conflict between religion and evolution. While it is true that many specific religious sects have a profound problem with evolution, there is no inherent conflict between the two. If, as the article clearly shows, the Catholic Church can coexist with evolution, then clearly it is possible to be a religious evolutionist.

The article also goes on to point out that

indeed, one can go back nearly 1,500 years before Darwin and find St Augustine of Hippo, the most commanding intellect of all the early doctors of the Church, teaching a doctrine of evolution in the early 5th century. In one of his greatest works, De Genesi ad Litteram, he stated that God did not create an organised Universe as we see it now, but in the beginning created all the elements of the world in a confused and “nebulous” mass. In this mass were the mysterious seeds of the creatures who were to come into existence.

Augustine’s thought does therefore contain the elements of a theory of evolution, and even a genetic theory, but does not have natural selection. St Augustine has always been orthodox. He did not foresee modern science in AD410, but he did have an extraordinary grasp of the potential evolution of scientific thought. Cardinal Poupard’s address to the journalists should not be seen as a matter of the Roman Church changing its mind and accepting Darwin after 145 years.

The faith of the Roman Catholic Church has therefore been truly religious and in accord with evolution for the entire history of the Church. To claim that evolution is inherently anti-religious is therefore a towering absurdity.

But this raises a further question with regards to the ongoing political debate about evolution and creationism. It has been shown that the Catholic Church has been both religious and in accord with evolution for over 1500 years. Given this, how can we place any trust in the honor and integrity of those who claim today that evolution is inherently anti-religious. Any person saying so must either be dishonest or profoundly ignorant of the topics being discussed. In either case, such an individual should be given no credence whatsoever.

Use of Religious Language

This morning on Air America's Morning Sedition I caught part of the interview with James Traub discussing his Sep. 18 NYT Magazine article on Bono (read it here). The bit that really caught my ear was a story from the article about an interview Bono had with Jesse Helms, yes the Jesse Helms former Senator from North Carolina. Bono was making an appeal for aid to Africa and getting nowhere when he decided to change tactics and took to quoting scripture. The change on Helms was enormous ending with Helms giving Bono a hug and a blessing (I kid you not, read the story) and promising to do whatever he could.

This confirms an idea that I've long been toying with and is, I think, important in understanding the difficulty Democrats have in getting out our message. I wrote about this once before here. It is a normal part of our discourse to cite some literary or artistic example to help explain a point. One might cite Romeo and Juliet when discussing the mindlessness of a feud or one might cite Les Miserables when discussing the need for justice to be tempered by mercy. This is done not because you believe that whatever the author wrote must be true, but rather because you believe that the author has done a particularly fine job of discussing some true thing, and that this thing is true for reasons independent of the author having written it. While it is certainly true that some people do try and insist that scriptural references must be true simply because they are scriptural, I really believe that even for most people who are religious, citations of scripture are done more for the literary reasons I've discussed above than from an argument of pure authority.

Some elements of the right do argue for a strictly literal interpretation of scripture and that Religion and this sort of fundamentalist mind set are necessarily one and the same. This is a wrongheaded viewpoint and one which serves the interests only of the authoritarian right. Unfortunately, in my opinion, the left, to a very large degree, accepts this relationship. I do not understand why the left does so as it is a completely wrong viewpoint and seems to be entirely to the disadvantage of progressive politics and ideas. Furthermore, there are a large body of people who respond to ideas only if they are expressed with reference to scriptural stories.

As a consequence of rejecting religious language entirely left fails to communicate with this group. However, many of the members of this group are by nature a great deal more sympathetic to liberal causes than was Jesse Helms. Were the left to speak to these people in scriptural language on issues of poverty and the like, much support could be found. Not only is this group not hearing the liberal message, but the only folks who are talking to them are the bigoted, racist, homophobic, anti-feminist authoritarian right wingers. There are many people in the religious community who are not by nature attracted to this bigoted authoritarianism, but the only people who speak their language are the bigoted authoritarian.

We do not need to all become true believers, and lord knows we should not every pretend to hold beliefs that we do not. But many in the religious community would respond to the liberal message if folks could present the liberal message with reference to scriptural stories in exactly the same way you might do so with reference to Dickens or Hugo.

Religious language

Just some thoughts on the role of religious language in politics. (Taken from a comment I posted on DailyKOS.)

I am very strongly in favor of separating church and state. When it comes to the 'supernatural', I'm not sure how to describe what I believe. However, I have always found the language of Christianity, or at least the parts of Christianity I was brought up with, to be an excellent means of describing what I believe with regard to morals, my responsibilities and how a person should act. We Democrats have been too unwilling to even tolerate religious language in political discussions and that is a mistake. For many people, religious language is just the natural language of moral and ethical discourse. It is primarily used as metaphor for understanding ethical issues. The religious language is not used to require that you believe exactly as they do to discuss the issue or even to accept their conclusions. To put it another way, for many people the use of religious language is not unlike the way you might use Tolkein's LOTR to illustrate some issue of morals or ethics. In that example you do not expect the other person to 'believe' in Middle Earth. It is true that in the case of people using religious language the person doing so most likely 'believes' in the religion in a way you don't with regard to Middle Earth. Nonetheless, it is often the case that person using the religious language is primarily trying to get across some moral or ethical concept, wether or not you believe in the underlying religion and it is sufficient for you to respect the metaphor and respond to the metaphor.

Another very important point comes in regard to religion and how it relates to the 'reality based' and 'fantasy based' communities. In my opinion the major debate going on today is between these two concepts. For those of us based in reality, evidence comes first then conclusions, for the fantasy based folks it's the other way around. The reality based version has brought us science and prosperity and longevity and the fantasy based method has been uniformly disastrous throughout history. There is also a division between the religious and the non-religious. It is however a huge mistake to think that the two divisions overlap exactly. There are plenty of religious people who are reality based and also a goodly number of secularists who are fantasy based. For a long time many secular folks have made the enormous mistake of talking as if all religious folks must be irrational and fantasy based. This is wrong and has been a major help in getting far too many of the religious folks support people like Bush. We need to stop making this mistake.

One last thing, as this is already quite long, about the use of religious language. There is another reason to make greater use of it that has nothing directly to do with religion. People often expect to here things using certain terms or metaphors and give greater regard to any statement made in the 'correct' form over one made in another way. I came across an example of this in a forum that had nothing to do with religion when I once met Walter Alvarez (he of 'asteroid impact killed the dinosaurs' fame). The importance of using some particular phrasing came up in his efforts to convince physicists in the validity of his theory. Now you need to understand that, for whatever reason, we physicists do not say that one thing is ten times greater than another, we say that it is "an order of magnitude" greater. I'm not sure why we do this, but we do. Walter stated that "physic sits did not start taking my theory seriously, until I stopped saying factors of ten, and started saying orders of magnitude." Now, I think it's clear that this is not a religious thing, but simply an idea sounds more serious to a physicist if you use the phrase "orders of magnitude". Likewise, to many people claims about the nature of ethics or morals sound more serious if you use the correct religious terminology and metaphors.