Audacity of unbelief
I wanted to say a bit more about that passage from Obama’s Audacity of Hope that Rieux quoted yesterday.
And yet for all her professed secularism, my mother was in many ways the most spiritually awakened person that I’ve ever known. She had an unswerving instinct for kindness, charity, and love, and spent much of her life acting on that instinct, sometimes to her detriment. Without the help of religious texts or outside authorities, she worked mightily to instill in me the values that many Americans learn in Sunday school: honesty, empathy, discipline, delayed gratification, and hard work. She raged at poverty and injustice.
I wish he had managed to say that without presenting it as somehow at odds with secularism, and for that matter without calling it “professed” secularism as if his mother had been either fake or wrong. I wish he had in fact said emphatically that his mother’s attributes were and are entirely compatible with secularism. He could even have said that religion is often at odds with for instance kindness or honesty, not in a random way but as part of its nature. Religion can be punitive, and it can be deceptive or evasive.
Most of all, she possessed an abiding sense of wonder, a reverence for life and its precious, transitory nature that could properly be described as devotional. Sometimes, as I was growing up, she would wake me up in the middle of the night to have me gaze at a particularly spectacular moon, or she would have me close my eyes as we walked together at twilight to listen to the rustle of leaves.
Again – entirely unsurprising. I spent a large chunk of pre-dawn time just this morning staring at a particularly spectacular moon – it’s full, so it was low in the west at 5:30 a.m., and the clouds had parted, so it was reflected in Puget Sound. I listen to leaves; I stare at eagles perched in trees over my head; I stop dead when I hear the chatter of a hummingbird, to look for it and then watch it when I’ve found it. That has nothing to do with religion. It is compatible with religion (though not the contemptus mundi kind) but it is in no way dependent on it.
I really, really wish Obama could have discussed the issue without patronizing his mother’s non-theism.
It’s worse than that. It’s a sickening few pargrphs and I hope that there is a larger context in his book which can excuse it.
Otherise maybe it’s only fluff as part of his running for office.
“Professed,” as if deep down she were a true believer. Now, as for our President’s “professed” Christianity…someone might have some fun with that.
Stuff like this is part of the reason I probably wouldn’t vote for him again if given the chance. That and DADT. When you’re commander in chief there’s a lot more you can do then the few ‘concessions’ he’s gotten for gays and lesbians. He may be better then what’s across the isle but that doesn’t make him good.
Isn’t that interesting how many things can be spiritual? I suppose that’s not too surprising with a word that can be used for anything one cares to. I would describe his mother more as an aware and curious women who wasn’t afflicted with the blinders of religion.
I think the most offensive part of this is that he assumes his mother’s characteristics would match those of a religious person. If only her ‘abiding sense of wonder’ was common in theists, and not the mind-numbing, curiosity-killing ‘everything has a purpose’, ‘God works in mysterious ways’, and ‘we weren’t meant to know such things’.
Yes, the passage can, and probably would, be interpreted by most readers as saying that his mother may not have believed in God, but she sure acted as if she DID — so that’s okay. A real atheist would be neither moral nor capable of feelings: one should judge individuals on their actions, though, not their beliefs. How tolerant. Sort of.
It’s like Obama hypothetically writing “And yet despite his black race, my father was one of the most hard-working and honest men I ever knew.” It wouldn’t sound like he was refuting racists, but basically agreeing with them — by arguing for an exception to a general rule.
So I guess his mom was “spiritual” … and his father was “white on the inside.”
Re-reading the excerpts Ms. Benson posted I can almost see President Obama trying to workout which rendition of his late mother would make her seem more acceeptable to the spirituality crowd. It’s almost like a check list. Getting intuned with nature. Using religious jargon to describe entirely nonreligious acts.
Jesus I can’t believe I bought into this guys hype.
And “secularism” ?
The word does not even mean what he is using it to mean i.e. non-belief, even (shock horror) ATHEISM!!!!
No it looks as if he didn’t want to come right out and say his mother was an atheist. That’s unwomanly and unmotherly, I suppose.
I don’t believe in this woman. She woke him up to look at the bloody moon. Name a child who would be able to cope with that. Was she crazy? I suspect that she is a creation of Obama’s, based partly on fact and partly on his felt need to present whatever image of himself he feels to be credible. No doubt there’s a real woman in there somewhere. This is really depressing. I’ll shut up.
OK, I’m going to be contrarian here.
How is that not a wonderful tribute to a secular upbringing? – and not necessarily the best way –. It takes real nerve to say that in this culture. Would it be better if he had left out the professed? Yeah, sure. But you’re going to pillory him for it? Jesus fucking christ.
Speaking for myself, I have no objection to the “professed”. It seems a perfectly proper use of the word to me in its context. She professed (overtly, or expressed implicitly in her life) a secular outlook. My worries are about what he is doing to his mother. And why he needs to belong to something his mother would shudder at, and why his mother’s being the way she was is supposed to justify this in some way. I think it’s all about good feelings and good impressions, and nothing to do with good reasons.
Obama is nothing but a huge disappointment to me. I think, rather his mother would have made a better president.
The passage Ophelia quotes is classic Obamaspeak. Both sides of the fence are being played. Secularists (he hopes) will read it as an endorsement of secularism, while religionists (he hopes) will note that he, in so many words, equates things like “love,” “kindness,” and “charity” with being “spiritually awakened.” (Note that he doesn’t seem to think those things are necessarily encompassed in “secularism.”) The use of language makes it so that he can’t really be pinned down either way. He never really says that you don’t need religion to teach a kid morality, but he never really says that you do. Remember that this man’s training is as a constitutional lawyer. He has constructed his prose here so that everybody—secularists and religionists alike—can make an interpretive case that he’s on their side. I
“He has constructed his prose here so that everybody—secularists and religionists alike—can make an interpretive case that he’s on their side.”
Tried to, anyhow. I wonder if it falls as flat for theists as it does for atheists.
Is it too much to expect that a legal scholar and law professor understand what secularism is? So, his mother was a secularist but he’s not? Doesn’t that make him a theocrat? What middle ground is there?
“When you’re commander in chief there’s a lot more you can do then the few ‘concessions’ he’s gotten for gays and lesbians.”
To be fair, he has done much better recently with his refusal to defend DOMA and USDOJ’s assertion that sexual orientation deserves strict scrutiny. If his first six months had been as good as the last six months, in terms of support for LGBT stuff, I’d feel great.
The trouble is that he spent his first year in office being very slow and tepid about it, and the second year spending forever to repeal DADT, which is just about the least popular and politically safest possible thing to do for gay people. And he did so while fighting the Log Cabin Republicans’ court case about it every step of the way (and while defending DOMA in multiple district courts). Given that, I have rather low confidence in a DOMA repeal or passage of ENDA. Get back to me in another six months and maybe I’ll be more optimistic, but I’m certainly not right now.
More on topic regarding atheism ‘n stuff: Obama is taking more or less the standard stance of Democrats in public office. Freedom of religion is good, but that’s in part because faith and spirituality and all that sort of thing is also supposed to be good (they are just good on a personal conviction/fuzzy community sense, rather than in a political theocratic sense, and theocracy would get in the way of that). The way to handle nonbelievers is at best to claim that they have some kind of faith and spirituality that makes them “normal” people, or at worst to regard them like people who have some kind of emotional disturbance, like we’re depressed or bipolar or have PTSD or something.
It’s a fundamentally intolerant stance, but sadly it’s a widely tolerated, and to most non-non-believers totally invisible, intolerant stance.
“Is it too much to expect that a legal scholar and law professor understand what secularism is? So, his mother was a secularist but he’s not? Doesn’t that make him a theocrat? What middle ground is there?”
Right. I’m not sure I get this secularism=atheism shtick that’s so popular nowadays. It’s like the stigma associated with “atheism” has contaminated the word “secularism” and now they are both bad (although atheism is still “dirtier”).
Secularism = not supporting preferential treatment towards one sect! The opposite of secularism is sectarianism, not belief!
When I was growing up, secularism was always presented to me as a perfectly normal and apolitical sort of positive value (like “democracy” or “freedom of speech” or “civil rights” or “fair and impartial trial”). It’s only within the last five years or so that I’ve begun to realize that people actually seriously treat it as if it was a public endorsement of atheism (which it can’t be, as that would defeat the whole point!). Did I just have my head in the sand regarding that, or is this relatively recent?
<blockquote>Julian: Stuff like this is part of the reason I probably wouldn’t vote for him again if given the chance. That and DADT.</blockquote>
If you hadn’t voted for Obama the first time… would you have DADT now?
No, you wouldn’t. And if you vote for somebody else next time, DADT will go away.
I really, really want to know: what makes you think that Obama could have gotten more than he got? Are you a policy analyst with more than one PHD? Can you count votes in Congress better than Reid and Pelosi? Do you have polling company that tells you Americans are secretly incredibly liberal?
Or did you just want Obama to force progressive policies on the country, regardless of what the public wanted. Do you think the office of president is supposed to be a dictatorship? Are you upset that Obama isn’t Bush in liberal colors?
I think the last must be true. I cannot actually believe that any human being is as fucking stupid as you pretend to be; I cannot believe any sentient creature would actually vote for the destruction of their own interests solely out of spite because they didn’t get everything they wanted; I cannot believe any progressive would be so dismissive of the little justice we have managed to obtain for LBGTs as to throw it all away because they didn’t get their goddamn pony.
You are just a Republican troll masquerading as a progressive. Now that you are unmasked, you can quit pretending, and just go away, please.
I agree that would have made a better book.
But it would have made him a non-contender for president.
Which would you rather have? A cool book by Senator Obama, or DADT repealed by President Obama?
Maybe after he’s done being leader of the free world, he can look into leading some atheist organization. That would be really cool. Until then, though, I kinda think it’s important that we’re not being called non-citizens. You know?
Sorry this is slightly off topic, but I wanted to bring this to the attention of everyone. It’s Karen Armstrong on a Swedish-Norwegian talk show ‘skavlan’ as she calls new atheists ‘fundamentalists’.
See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4Vw0UqVXBc @ 7:30
@Yahzi
Do you even know how gay and lesbian servicemembers will be treated under the new policy? Or was being able to say DADT has been repeled all you were looking for? Some of us were hoping for actual gains and scraps off the master’s table.
“values that many Americans learn in Sunday school: honesty, empathy, discipline, delayed gratification, and hard work”
This is the part that gets up my nose. Where’s the evidence that sunday school is anything but detrimental because it reinforces christian bigotry and insularism? For the rest I’m with Ken Pidcock – well said Ken!
One thing all the Obama bashers might want to ponder is that the year 2009 was NO time for a president to be doing aything other than working on the economy in the wake of the total fucking mess that the republicans left him. Maybe that explains his “tepidity” that first year……
To be fair, there is at least one alternative to secularism and sectarianism – “don’t care”. I guess there would also be “keep quiet about it and hope nobody notices”.
these two passages from Audacity of Hope were favourites of mine. i agree that yes, he did patronize his mother, but emerging from a life lived in religious pursuits, I coming as I was from the opposite end of the spectrum thought his words very courageous. they dared and challenged me to think of new ways of looking at the world.
Any American politician who wishes to survive electorally is best advised not to offend the sensibilities of the religious mainstream. So the above passage yields the moral high ground to those in it. It’s as if Obama said ‘despite her prosthetic leg, my mother became an Olympic sprinter.’ She did not have the natural moral advantages that come with being a Christian, and yet she still qualified! (Might even make it into Heaven!) How good is that?
I had a mixed day yesterday. Early in the morning I read a rather inspiring piece (written from an atheist perspective) by Johann Hari on the ‘myth of the panicking disaster victim’ and the altruism displayed by people of all cultures in the context of natural disasters like the recent Japanese series. I found it spiritually uplifting. Then I accompanied my wife to our local Presbyterian church and sat through one of the most turgid and spiritually bankrupt services I have ever been to. Quite a contrast.
http://johannhari.com//2011/03/18/the-myth-of-the-panicking-disaster-victim-and-why-we-should-be-inspired-this-week
I’ve noticed that thing about altruism in disasters, more than once. Disasters can heal deep political divisions – like the ones in Turkey and Greece a decade or so ago. Greece rushed to the aid of Turkey, then later, the other way around.
And when the Nimitz freeway collapsed in the San Francisco area quake in 198-whatever it was, people on the street below raced to climb up on the structure to try to rescue people. That’s a poor neighborhood.
Yes Ophelia. It was commonly said during the Cold War that what was needed to end it was a Martian invasion. That would have given West and East a common (rescuing) cause.
People do not need the fear of eternity in Hell or the hope of eternity in Heaven in order to be altruistic.
I agree with Yahzi. For those who will not vote for Obama, good for you. I hope you enjoy the republican who is elected and reinvigorates the christian agenda. Just because Obama is not what progressives hoped for does not mean the alternative is better. And, as a progressive, I can tell you that many progressives are NEVER happy with the democratic president of the day.
But in the real politic of America, you elect and re-elect the best you can, because most americans are NOT progressive, and america will never elect the more progressive candidates. Just will not happen. Sadly. But there it is. So we elect the best person we can and hope we can incrementally make progress.
Otherwise, vote republican and you can still complain for 4 years, but at least you will have something to really complain about.
@Locutus
So if America will always be in theloving embrace of homophobia and the religious right, what’s the point of voting at all? Correct me unless I am very much mistaken but the point of getting involved in campaigns and politics is help mold the country. And I thought it was generally agreed (at least by the gnu crowd) concession after concession to your enemies is the wrong way to go about that.
Next time Obama visits the UK I intend to show him a spectacular moon.
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm…
GordonWillis said that waking up a child to see the moon is silly or unlikely and didn’t believe the mother.
Well I checked with a friend an indeed she has done the exact same thing. More than once. And she is quite sane.
Just FYI.
http://whatthefuckhasobamadonesofar.com/
Nobody here is suggesting concessions to the enemy. Several us, however, are suggesting concessions to reality.
When presented with a choice between a centrist and a right-wing fascist genocidal theocratic loon, it is progressive to vote for the centrist.