The pluralism puzzle
Garvey, John
refugees, such as Jose Humberto Santacruz, never get beyond the airport. Santacruz's grandmother, in a letter to the Salvadoran Minister of Justice and Public Safety, asserts that her grandson...
...The Ayatollah has very clear and definite answers to those questions, and we do not envy Iran...
...But after years of feeling that it was right for me to remain Catholic and take what I could from Orthodoxy, I realized that I had to be in communion with the Orthodox church...
...This was not a matter of leaving Catholicism, which I love, but a matter of becoming Orthodox...
...Butbefore long, the INS discovered Walter and sent him back to El Salvador...
...Religious and philosophical questions are, at some crucial points, central to political considerations...
...Of several minds: John Garvey THE PLURALISM PUZZLE WHEN OUR DEEPEST BELIEFS HAVE TO SURFACE JB / HERE IS NO LIFE without I prayer," says the Russian philosopher Vasilii Rozan0v...
...Santacruz's grandmother, in a letter to the Salvadoran Minister of Justice and Public Safety, asserts that her grandson was deported from the United States, and Customs records show that he arrived in San Salvador, but he has not been seen since...
...Today's mood has been compared to the mood of Europe during the time of the bubonic plague...
...or rather, in dealing with them it will impose the dark side of secularism...
...Luis and his brother Walter were able to escape from the army and find their way north to the United States...
...That's your opinion...
...The only apparent value is that whoever has power now has assumed the right to do absolutely anything to hold onto it...
...over the years I found in Orthodox spirituality and liturgy something which I could find nowhere else, something I need...
...Christianity's loss of power must not be seen as a punishment for past sins, as if good deeds would have been rewarded with more power, but as a part of the Christian vocation...
...Without prayer there is only madness and horror...
...Belief is no longer attached to respectability, or to political power, and this is as it should be...
...The Orthodox church is not without institutional problems - - those problems kept me from joining for a long time...
...If it is intrinsic, if human life is important simply by virtue of the fact that it exists, you imply that value is given...
...Many opponents of abortion are advocates of capital punishment, and many proponents of abortion on demand are opposed to the death penalty...
...President Duarte himself became the object of renewed death threats by the Secret Anti-Communist League upon announcing his intentions to hold talks with the guerrillas...
...the same thing is true, fortunately, of secular humanists...
...The most moving accounts of modern Christianity have come not from places of power but rather from places where power has been stripped from people, from poor nations where some Christians have thrown in their lot with the poor, or from Soviet labor camps where people suffer for their beliefs, or from Nazi concentration camps...
...Despite this and other cases well-documented by the ACLU, Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights Elliott Abrams continues to assure members of Congress that Salvadorans who are deported have nothing to fear...
...This gesture would support the recent call by both sides of the conflict in E1 Salvador to "humanize the war" and would fulfill our country's obligations under the Geneva Convention, as well as our duty as a spiritual and moral people to protect those fleeing war and persecution...
...His "The Road from Hiroshima" on National Public Radio was recently awarded the Colorado Art of Peace Award...
...The future of the human race has been tied to the nation-state in an obscene way...
...Secularism was in part a reaction against religion's dark side, the equation of Christianity with citizenship, and it freed Christianity...
...I believe it is right to let readers of this column know about this, so that you wilt at least know the perspective from which I write...
...Here the problem is that we have no clear sense of human sacredness, and even the best secular ideas are violated...
...Luis Antonio Garcia was walking out of a movie theater one Sunday afternoon when government soldiers pulled him and a random assortment of other passers:by into a waiting pick-up truck...
...Where it attempts to gain power or to make good things happen through force it moves away from the possibility of this learning...
...The dark side of the form of Christianity which allied itself with power was what happened to Jews and heretics and those whose politics or religion (sometimes the two were inextricably bound together) conflicted with the politics of the empire or the "Christian nation...
...And this freedom has forced Christians to see the dark side of much Christian history...
...If there is no divine giver or value, if what matters ultimately is the way we regard one another and all value is to be found in that mutual regarding, the pro-choice position makes absolutely good sense...
...Becoming Orthodox was the result of some twenty-one years of moving in that direction...
...They are whether we like that fact or not...
...Secularism has at one and the same time freed belief, and limited its shared meaning...
...But if life's value is not given solely by human beings, it has an other-than-human source...
...Although secularism has freed Christianity, it contains partially realized and as yet unrealized dangers...
...The denial of this reality reminds me of a wonderful line from the movie Atlantic City...
...you're entitled to it," says our secular society...
...The great problem of pluralism is that there are some abolutely essential questions with which pluralism cannot deal...
...I don't believe in gravity," she says...
...The affirmation of the importance of human freedom has been a good thing, and the Enlightenment ideal of the "rights of man" is one of the finest things which has happened to the human race...
...One way to oppose this is, of course, to meet power with power...
...Although newly elected President Napoleon Duarte has made a genuine effort to meet with the families of the disappeared, and death squad activity has to some degree been curtailed, the violence in El Salvador continues...
...Some of the most important questions we face cannot be answered within the only framework we have given ourselves for answering them, the legalistic and political one...
...In order to insure the survival of particular governments and ideologies, we have given ourselves the ability to destroy every human life...
...A pluralistic society works very well, where day-to-day decisions are involved...
...DENNIS BERNSTEIN AND CONNIE BLITI" (Dennis Bernstein is a free-lance writer and radio journalist...
...This latter point of view is a secular one and cannot be accepted by believers, just as the belief that values have a more than human source cannot finally be accepted by secular people...
...It is a good thing that the only good reason to be a believer today is because you believe...
...JOHN GARVEY p OSTSCRIPT: Recently I became a member of the Orthodox church...
...The problem a believer faces is that belief has been made a subjective thing in a pluralistic society...
...If it were not for the existence of Orthodoxy I would gladly remain a Catholic until death...
...But 14 December 1984:677 secularism's anthropocentric idolatry and its assumption that spirituality is finally irrelevant are dangerous...
...Presently enjoyed by Ethiopians, Poles, Lebanese, Ugandans, and Afghanis, this status grants refugees permission to stay in the United States until such time as it is safe to return to their homeland...
...The problem believers face is that where solutions are imposed in a pluralistic society they are likely to be imposed with a bias towards secularism...
...What is important here is to see that what we believe about the nature of human life does in fact have a social importance...
...In its loss of power this form of Christianity has learned something about what really sustains human beings...
...Commonweal: 678 We are building a very fragile bridge across a chasm which may not have a far side...
...What sort of creature, with what sort of destiny, is a human being...
...but there is an added insanity here, as if Damocles were holding the sword by a thread over his own head...
...He was trained and sent into military duty...
...Many of the returning young men are considered to be deserters since they have fled the forced recruitment of the Salvadoran army or, in some cases, the guerrillas...
...At the international level there is a similar problem...
...if you believe that human beings are the ultimate source of value and valuing, then the morality of abortion or capital punishment shifts...
...Questions of this sort are usually considered to be politically irrelevant, in that they involve matters which we have agreed to leave out of the democratic political process...
...A given value implies a giver -- a divine one...
...Secular humanism is a Promethean religion in which the human control of the universe and the ultimate value of human choice are affirmed as the highest goods...
...Connie Blitt is an independent film and video producer...
...An empty-headed young woman is talking about her view of life...
...They are right to argue that it is not a denominational one, though denominations obviously have a place in the,debate...
...A couple of cases in point are the debates over capital punishment and abortion...
...Someone who tries to base his or her life on the conviction that we are called into being by what Dante called "the love which moves the sun and other stars" is faced with a system which necessarily regards this as one of many opinions, and can regard it as no more than that...
...I have pointed out elsewhere that it comes down to the question of where you believe human value comes from...
...The problem is that some of our most important public problems do involve the way we regard these questions, and the decisions which are made about them reflect systems of belief, whether those beliefs are explicitly acknowledged or not...
...bullet wounds and signs of strangulation...
...My column here will continue, but the editors and I agreed that you should know about this...
...Soon after his return, his body was discovered by the side of the road, marked by...
...It does make sense to say that whether or not the life in the womb is human, it is not a person in any interesting sense of the word until it is the sort of being to whom others can meaningfully relate...
...The Salvadorans are rapidly becoming a people without a homeland...
...When I first discovered Orthodoxy I found that I had no doctrinal disagreements with it, whereas I did with Catholicism, .as profoundly good and sustaining as Catholicism was (and is...
...Instead of punishing further the peasants who have already suffered great trauma, as well as those good Americans willing to risk their security and comfort for others in desperate need, why not grant the Salvadorans and other Central American refugees Extended Voluntary Departure status...
...Unitarians tend to be pro-choice...
...But it might be more effective to reveal, as much as possible, the religious nature of secular humanism, and the ways in which our values form our approaches to social questions...
...If on the other hand you believe that values are a human symptom, then the value of a human life depends upon its being welcomed by the human community...
...I do not mean to imply that we are all consistent here...
...Contrary to the claims of many prolifers, abortion is a profoundly religious issue...
...Even those not specifically targeted for death, live amid great risks...
...These major questions involve our image of humanity: What is the human race for...
...It is there, whatever anyone thinks of it...
...The social attitudes of believers are not, unfortunately, always consistent with their beliefs...
...Catholics tend to be pro-life...
Vol. 111 • December 1984 • No. 22
