[Buddha-l] secular religion

[John Whalen-Bridge]

No one on list would have a problem with "civil religion," right?
Perhaps because the term is more specific. I do remember, with just a
touch of transcendent awe, the "Democracy Shrine" just out side the
principles office of my high school.  Some want to use constitutional
means to make burning the American flag something like sacrilege. "The
violation or injurious treatment of a sacred object."  And for some
voting has become an act of faith, in more than one sense.... Less
ironically, a writer like Ralph Ellison, in the vexed conclusion of
INVISIBLE MAN, seems to have been torn by a desire to attack (secularly
defined) institutionalized racism but a severe inhibition about
attacking American ideals as such, which Invisible Man and Ellison as
well both which to preserve.  

I guess we could avoid the either/or idea and ask, a tad more
nondualistically, HOW religiousity and secular life are intertwined in
various ways.  I would agree that a phrase like "secular religion"
creates confusion, even though the varieties of phenomena that the
phrase vaguely gestures toward are all apparent to anyone looking in
that direction. But Hitler, flag-burning, the awe some people feel about
celebrities, the consummatory moments of experience ironically indicated
in a Don DeLillo novel--these are all very different things, and the
phrase "secular religion" hardly seems to designate a coherent group.

I used the word "nondualistically," so don' say I wen' off topic lah.

JWB/ Singapore 


quotation to which this posting has responded:   {Richard Hayes:  I was
merely pointing out how the word "secular" has been used in religious
literature. It is very common to see references to secular religion, and
it yields neither paradox nor oxymoron. I'm sure one could define both
words in such a way as to make "secular religion" seem
self-contradictory, but there is no need...}
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