God says stop! and listen...to a podcast.

Well, my commute was about an hour today due to a wreck on the Neuse River bridge, but it let me listen to a good podcast that tied together a lot of things I've been thinking about a lot recently. Speaking of Faith interviewed Harvey Cox on the on the divide between religion and atheism. Cox is a theology professor at Harvard who is most famous for writing a book in the 1960s about the growing secularism in America and recently teaching a course on morality and Jesus which hundreds of Harvard undergrads take electively every year. Some thoughts:

• He and the host speak about Richard Dawkins and Christophjer Hitchens (whose book God is not Great I recently read). The host says she hasn't interviewed them for the same reason she didn't interview Jerry Falwell: they have all the answers already. I was struggling with how to write a book review on it, so I'll leave it at that. He has some correct points that religion has done some bad things, but overall the book is divisive and hateful. I take the Niebuhr approach "Religion is both necessary and dangerous" or as one my favorite authors, Bruce Feiler, said in "Where God was Born", that the only answer to fundamentalist religion is moderate religion. People are jerks, but that does not necessarily make all religion bad. Cox says you can be very highly educated and also be very strident and also close out of your discourse important issues, which are current and new forms of thinking, and really not be in touch with the current state of the dialogue. That's what bothers me about them. They really don't seem to be interested or don't have the time or the discipline to engage or to tune in to this really quite remarkable, new series of conversations that's going on.
• He speaks about a need of a basic religious education, as I read recently about in"Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know and Doesn't", which was a good book but pretty long for it's basic idea: so much of our society uses religious ideas and language, that since we don't know anything about religion it makes us bad citizens. It was written by a Harvard religion professor, Stephen Prothero. Cox was asked to teach a class on Jesus and Moral Reasoning as one of 35 elective ethics classes (Harvard students must take one.) There is a book based on the class that I'd really like to read now.
• He speaks about how the Market has replaced God in America, following the 60s. This was very convicting, particularly how some of the language we use echos the language used of God in the Bible, and went along with Colossians Remixed, which I read and reviewed earlier this year. Cox on reading financial literature such as the Wall Street Journal: that we have a kind of a confidence, indeed, faith that the market will solve things, or at least many people have that, I don't have it, maybe you don't either, that you just leave it to the market. It will allocate things and in the long run, maybe the very long run, it will all come out fine. Just don't tamper with this, what Adam Smith called the invisible hand...

Anyway, interesting stuff...worth a listen in my opinion.