The title quotes the pointed question asked by Hobbes in the 43rd Chapter of Leviathan. Here is the whole passage, where it is being asked:
“But if teaching be the cause of faith, why do not all believe? It is certain therefore that faith is the gift of God, and He gives it to whom He will. Nevertheless, because to them to whom He gives it, He gives by the means of teachers, the immediate cause of faith is hearing. In a school, where many are taught, and some profit, others profit not, the cause of learning in them that profit is the master; yet it cannot be from this inferred that learning is not the gift of God. All good things proceed from God…”
There is no reason for me to argue against Hobbes’s faith-based assertion that because all good things are from God, and faith in God is a good thing, faith is the gift of God to those who believe. My point is that this is only one half of the story. The other half is the central part about any great religion: It is cultivated as a national/cultural tradition in children from early on as an integral part of their cultural upbringing. What Hobbes calls “teachers” is in fact not a question of schooling only, but of the whole complex of factors that must never be underestimated and can never be overestimated.
Even though religion is effectively banned from the American public school classrooms, I would not go so far as to say that America has become religionless as a result. Strong family traditions support the survival of religious identity in individuals and in certain cultural groups, even though society in general has become forcibly secularized. What is happening in Russia and in the Moslem world today only proves the necessity of religion as the main instrument of social/cultural self-identification of the individual, whenever he is seen or striving to be seen as part of a group. This is another salient point, of course. Whenever religion serves as a means of such cultural identification, it becomes an integral part of nationalism, like in today’s Russia, or else it itself becomes the banner, like in the Islamic nations today, where even the proverbially-secularistic Turkey has felt the inner thrusts of her global identity, through her predominant historical religion.
Which leaves us, of course, with our last question, where it is impossible to disagree with Hobbes. The faith in the philosophical God, as subtly different from the cultural God, is certainly His great gift to man!
“But if teaching be the cause of faith, why do not all believe? It is certain therefore that faith is the gift of God, and He gives it to whom He will. Nevertheless, because to them to whom He gives it, He gives by the means of teachers, the immediate cause of faith is hearing. In a school, where many are taught, and some profit, others profit not, the cause of learning in them that profit is the master; yet it cannot be from this inferred that learning is not the gift of God. All good things proceed from God…”
There is no reason for me to argue against Hobbes’s faith-based assertion that because all good things are from God, and faith in God is a good thing, faith is the gift of God to those who believe. My point is that this is only one half of the story. The other half is the central part about any great religion: It is cultivated as a national/cultural tradition in children from early on as an integral part of their cultural upbringing. What Hobbes calls “teachers” is in fact not a question of schooling only, but of the whole complex of factors that must never be underestimated and can never be overestimated.
Even though religion is effectively banned from the American public school classrooms, I would not go so far as to say that America has become religionless as a result. Strong family traditions support the survival of religious identity in individuals and in certain cultural groups, even though society in general has become forcibly secularized. What is happening in Russia and in the Moslem world today only proves the necessity of religion as the main instrument of social/cultural self-identification of the individual, whenever he is seen or striving to be seen as part of a group. This is another salient point, of course. Whenever religion serves as a means of such cultural identification, it becomes an integral part of nationalism, like in today’s Russia, or else it itself becomes the banner, like in the Islamic nations today, where even the proverbially-secularistic Turkey has felt the inner thrusts of her global identity, through her predominant historical religion.
Which leaves us, of course, with our last question, where it is impossible to disagree with Hobbes. The faith in the philosophical God, as subtly different from the cultural God, is certainly His great gift to man!
No comments:
Post a Comment