The Invisible Library

The Secular Outpost reviews a fascinating new book, The Secular Bible: Why Nonbelievers Must Take Religion Seriously, by Jacques Berlinerblau.

Berlinerblau premis is that Secularists don’t take religion seriously:

Today’s secularists too often have very little accurate knowledge about religion, and even less desire to learn. This is problematic insofar as their sense of self is constructed in opposition to religion. Above all, the secularist is not a Jew, is not a Christian, not a Muslim, and so on. But is it intellectually responsible to define one’s identity against something that one does not understand? And what happens when these secularists weigh in on contentious political issues, blind to the religious back-story or concerns that inevitably inform these debates?

It’s a bit of a generalization but he has a point: Sometimes, for some of us, we define ourselves by what we aren’t. I disagree that we need to take religion as serious as the true Believers would like. That gives the fundies too much leeway. If we start granting their beliefs prima facie value, they have enough wiggle room to build their usual wicker traps, “But you agreed that the Bible has some validity, and God wrote the Bible, therefore you admit there’s a God!”

But that’s not really what Berlinerblau is suggesting, which makes this book sound all the more intriguing:

Jacques Berlinerblau suggests that atheists and agnostics must take stock of that which they so adamantly oppose. Defiantly maintaining a shallow understanding of religion, he argues, is not a politically prudent strategy in this day and age. But this book is no less critical of many believers, who–Berlinerblau contends–need to emancipate themselves from ways of thinking about their faith that are dangerously simplistic, irrational and outdated.

To this, I wholeheartedly agree. You must know your enemy and why they believe the crazy ass shit they do. You also need the scholarly tools to pick those irrational beliefs apart, leaving the rational though dodgy bits intact so that, eventually the believers begin to doubt their long held superstitions and reject them on their own terms. That’s how you help people see the light without being thought of as an asshole. But to suggest that Secular thought is in some sort of crisis, as Berlinerblau does, is a bit of a stretch. Tanner Edis, from the Secular Outpost made a similar point:

So I’m not sure about secular thinking about religion being in a state of crisis. I don’t want to deny that Berlinerblau has a valid point, and that it would be good if there was more explicitly secular reading of the Bible going on. This would have immense practical value, and it might even help break the isolationism within religious studies. Nevertheless, there’s a lot more secular thinking about religion going on that Berlinerblau does not recognize. And in this wider context, I suspect that a certain lack of interest in the Bible is more understandable.

still, it sounds like a fascinating book and will be added to my Amazon wishlist, forthwith.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 5th, 2006 at 6:04 am and is filed under Politics, Religion, Culture War, Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.