Good morning,
THE DANGERS IN THE WORLD ARE SERIOUS BUSINESS
One need only read Max Boot’s recent column in the Washington Post to understand how delicate post-war stability is and the threat of another Trump presidency presents. Here are his opening words:
“If you want to know the differences on national security between Democrats and MAGA Republicans, it all boils down to one word: Helsinki.
Five years ago, on July 16, 2018, President Donald Trump met in the capital of Finland with Russian President Vladimir Putin. There he delivered what Sen. John McCain called “one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory.” Standing next to Putin at a news conference, Trump refused to condemn Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election or even to admit that it had occurred. This came a little more than a year after Trump had attended a NATO summit in Brussels at which he refused to affirm the alliance’s Article 5 collective security guarantee. (He later reluctantly endorsed Article 5 but continued to criticize the alliance relentlessly.)
…President Biden visited Helsinki for a very different purpose. He came not to kowtow before Putin but to stand up to him — and not to undermine NATO but to strengthen it. This visit was meant to celebrate Finland’s recent accession to membership in the alliance, and it came shortly after Biden’s attendance at a NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, where the alliance showed greater unity than at any time in recent history. Ukraine did not get a timeline for joining the alliance, but Sweden broke through the Turkish roadblock to its membership, and the allies signaled resolve in aiding Ukraine and bringing it closer to the alliance.”
RELIGION WITHOUT EXTREMES
We are living in an increasingly secular world, and one that is more relative in its morality. Curiously, the lack of religion is not the absence of a greater power. God is substituted with something else. One benign example of a religious substitute (which can coexist with religion) is mindfulness and meditation. Of course, isn’t the act of worship in a communal setting a form of meditation for those unpersuaded by the existence of a supreme being?
An important lesson that religion teaches is limits on human power. Religion provides stories of humility. Moses displays has anger and that doesn’t work out well.
What has happened now is that the void of religion and community is substituted with religious fervor for certain beliefs (guns, pronouns, etc.) and, more dangerously, religious conviction to a tribe or to an individual. How else can one explain the MAGA support for Trump in the face of what looks to the evidence to be serial criminal behavior?
Curiously, religion has been working hard to meet secularists and relativists “half way.” Where religions used to be rigid and demanding, most have gone through centuries of reformation that has offered multiple ways of finding common purpose in a community of shared values. That said, there is a “counter-reformation” in our nation that seeks to impose strict religious dogma through religiously-informed legislation and a stacked Supreme Court that seeks to impose its religious world view (particularly on questions of life and death) on all of us.
I’m not going to take up the argument that religion is a necessary requirement for individuals and societies (although I think the argument can be made), but its absence is creating a void that will be filled in by something else. That something else seems to be a religious belief and unwavering faith in political positions, political tribes, and demagogues. I worry.
Have a great day,
Glenn
We should all be worried.
Interesting thoughts on how our increasingly secular society leaves a vacuum, vulnerable to opportunistic and dangerously destructive ideologies, replacing what religion (at its best), has provided for shared universal values for the higher good of society and all its members.