A President, not a Chief Theologian

How do we think we know what is right?

As children, our parents usually do that job: father figures and mother figures, we call such people. For many of us, we never stop looking for authority figures; parental types, "strong leaders", gurus, philosophers, religious leaders, God.

That is to say, on e of the ways of dealing with hard questions is to turn to an authority, somewhere, for the answers.

It was in the late 1700s, in Europe and here, that we turned a corner. It was called the Enlightenment. It was the realization that people had brains, and could figure things out. How old is the earth? Not 6,000 years or so, as we had been told by religious authorities, but incredibly old. We figured out that life itself is part of an evolution of the whole universe.

To put it plainly, we began to trust human reason. We have brains! We began to trust our own intelligence. We established secular schools and universities, and tried to understand everything, because we believed we could. We learned how to say, "I don't know! Yet!" But we know we can!

To be secular is to turn from asking for answers to looking for answers. The answers have to make sense, because we have sense. It is to grow up. To begin to doubt what we have been told and to think about it.

It isn't a solitary, individual exercise. We share what we know, test what we think we know and what we are told. Is that reasonable? Can we do better? Is there a better answer?

The authorities are gone. They are not really gone, but they are losing their authority. Faith has to submit to reason, else it is just an authoritarian demand.

We have to talk about what is right, and what is wrong. We work it out, try it out, and think about it some more. No more truth on a silver platter! No more revelations from on high. The words chiseled on stone after a thunderstorm on Mt. Sinai were pretty good, but they were just received wisdom. When we say that we hold these truths to be self-evident, we only mean that they look pretty good.

When Thomas Jefferson said that he had sworn, on the altar of God, eternal enmity toward every form of tyrrany over the mind of man, he wasn't talking about God. He was talking about using our heads. He was talking about human reason. He helped draft our Constitution.

We aren't nominating a Chief Theologian; an authority figure. We are talking about using our heads.

Comments

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