From the mind of Maggi
Maggi Dawn has a couple of posts this week that struck me. The first, a quotation from the recent winner of the Templeton Prize for ‘Progress toward research or discoveries about spiritual realities’, Charles Taylor, includes the following analysis of the well-known aphorism “there are good people who do good things and bad people who do bad things, but for good people to do bad things, it takes religion.”
On one level, it is astonishing that anyone who lived through a good part of the 20th Century could say something like this. What are we to make of those noble, well-intentioned Bolsheviks, Marxist materialist atheists to a man (and occasional woman), who ended up building one of the most oppressive and murderous brace of regimes in human history? When people quote this phrase to me, or some equivalent, and I enter this objection, they often reply, “but Communism was a religion,” a reply which shifts the goal-posts and upsets the argument…
any set of beliefs which can induce decent people, who would never kill for personal gain, to murder for the cause, is being defined as “religion.” “Religion” is being defined as the murderously irrational.
Pretty sloppy thinking. But it is also crippling. What the speaker is really expressing is something like this: the terrible violence of the 20th Century has nothing to do with right-thinking, rational, enlightened people like me.
Arrogance can creep up disturbingly easily when discussing moral matters. Which leads neatly into this second quotation, from Maggi herself wondering why she (as so many of us) ends up writing a lot more than she means to when talking about deep issues.
The great 20th century protestant theologian, Karl Barth, was far more verbose and abstract than I shall ever be, and I take heart from him when I think I’m getting too involved in complexities of words and thought. But I take heart even more from this little anecdote. Someone once asked Barth whether he could sum up his whole theology in just a few words. Barth paused for a moment, and then replied, “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.” When words get too much, I always remember that.
pax et bonum
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