God's Still DeadMark Lilla doesn't give us enough credit for shaking off the divine.

Remarks from the Fray:

If we go back to the seventeenth century, we see the debate about human nature and divine law goes a little deeper than just shock and revulsion at the devastation wrought by 30 years of theo-military conflict. Besides Hobbes we have figures like Pufendorf and Grotius trying to work out a unified theory of state power; indeed, it was here that the need to justify the nation-state as an historical entity and all the corresponding political "pattern-making," in the form of natural law theory, originated. More than war, it was the rise of scientific thinking, entailing the ability not merely to reflect (upon) nature's sublime unity-in-diversity, but to manipulate it, to make it an instrument of human agency, which provided the crucial shove in the direction of a new attitude toward social power. Scientific thinking created the idea that man could be the master of his own fate, without reference to divine guidance. Hence the Faust myth, indicative of the extent to which the laboratory was wrapped up in an aura of magical potency.

Human agency is the impossible idea here, either a salve or a cruel illusion to beings seeking to "liberate" themselves from any hierarchical, "slavish" chain of blind obedience. Scientists, and both Marx and Freud considered themselves to be such an exalted type of thinker, look to nature to discover patterns, rather than to the heavens to find them revealed. But that doesn't mean that a natural pattern, once located, is any more fungible, that one is any less constrained to follow the rules derived from such patterns.

What kind of liberalism, then, would English atheism have us observe, as to our political "practices"? Hitchens' own practice seems to consist merely in raising up an indignant hand and uttering a stately "no" to whatever seems most oppressive to his own instinctive intellectual habits -- fundamentalism, totalitarianism, "theotropism." Merely negating one principle, however, does not obviate the need, indeed, the inevitability of another arising to take its place. He's enough of a dialectician to have realized that.

Science has done far more to shape the modern world than religion. Foucault, among others, tried to describe myriad ways in which "reason" has come to exert a behavioral control as thorough as anything pettifogging clericalism ever did. If "liberation" is your goal, one could almost hope to be confronted with the heavy hand of totalitarian, or at least authoritarian oppression. Then at least one knows right off what one has to say no to, where the path of rebellion lies.

Hitchens' career, and especially his recent success as Scourge of Fundie Terror, indicates a felt need to keep re-discovering and then building up the meance of a return to a pre-modern, purely religious social hierarchy. What results, paradoxically, is a remarkably complacent world view. As long as the idea of religion is out there, to counterbalance and "frame" the reality of secular modern culture, we can take comfort in the notion that we are "resisting" it by "acting a negative," by simple declarations of unbelief. It's an attitude one might therefore call "pietistic."

But it has little to do with the underlying intellectual and economic drives of modern life. Modernity, founded on scientific thought, which is absolute (even, yes, "totalitarian") in its demand that analytical thought capture and process nature's embedded data for the purpose of creating ever more powerful human-directed social "patterns," this modernity is too active, activist, busy, aggressive to be bothered with any merely moral reflection on the blessed absence of the Divine. Perhaps this goes some way to explain how it's possible for Hitchens to feel like a rebel even asmenace he espouses a politics which reaches for cultural inspiration back to an attitude of the most intensely passive reaction.

--MarkEHaag

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Liberal theology and liberation theology are two different understandings with distinct histories and views.

Liberal theology did, indeed, grow out of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and was the purview of European white males. Influenced by Darwin's theory of evolution, liberal theologians believed that humankind was continually making progress, evolving and advancing in knowledge and in conquering the unknown. Science and technology were understood by liberal theologians as the means of God toward a world where industrialization and mechanization would produce an easier life for all. Government existed to foster this progress.

Liberal theology was in many ways shattered by the first and second World Wars, in the face of which few could believe that humankind was making progress. Fragments of this turn-of-the-last-century worldview still remain, and I would suggest that atheist free-thinkers are at least cousins to the liberal theologians.

Liberation theology grew from the indigenous populations of Latin America formed into base communities who, through their study of the Bible, were formed by the Exodus story of Moses freeing the slaves from Egypt. From this, liberation theologians believe that God has a preferential option for the poor. Even in the New Testament true religion is defined as the way one treats the least, the last, the lost, and more specifically, the widows and the orphans. From this belief, communities formed by liberation theology exist to "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable". Liberation theology is found also among African Americans, Koreans, Feminists and other groups drawn to the challenge that the worldview offers to the status quo. The Roman Catholic Church has actively sought to quash these base communities because as they sought to challenge the powers-that-be they often became tied to rebel groups influenced by Communism

--ghiarev

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