This is Religion?
by
Rabbi David Eidensohn
Religion
is very important to Americans. According to the latest poll from Gallup [Gallup
Poll Vault Sep. 2-4, 2002 www.gallup.com]:
"Currently, 65% of Americans say religion is very important in their
lives, while 23% say it is fairly important and 12% say it is not very
important." Gallup adds, "The results of this question have been
fairly consistent since 1978, with the percentage saying 'very important'
varying by just 13 percentage points over 24 years." The problem is,
"so what?" Is a country with a majority of adults refusing to marry
(only 49% marry), half of first marriage ending in divorce, and a growing
refusal to marry and to have children, a religious country?
One area where religion and secularism
clash is abortion. According to CNN (September 12, '02) the American College of
Obstetrics and Gynecology says, "About half of the 6.3 million annual
pregnancies in the U.S. are unintended. Emergency contraception holds the
potential to cut this figure in half, which could substantially reduce the U.S.
abortion rate of one in four pregnancies."
What
kind of country has half of all pregnancies unintended, and a quarter of
pregnancies deliberately aborted? Were the 65% of Americans who feel that
religion is "very important" insensitive to creating life and
destroying it? What kind of religion allows people to act this way about
creation?
Only
12% of Americans feel that religion is "not very important." This is
incredible. The media and educational establishment are anti-religion, even
anti-family. ABC television is suffused with dysfunctional families and gay
shows, but has no normative family programs, as Maureen Dowd told us in the New
York Times. If ABC makes money by mocking family, it has succeeded with the
masses of Americans. Are these people not religious?
Obviously,
the G-d of America doesn't live in the family and home. ABC is the pagan master
of our evening hours, and there is no religion there. In our personal lives, we
do what we want, and abortions and unintended pregnancies abound. When it comes
to sex and pleasure, there is no religion. What then is our religion all about?
In recent years, even the medical establishment, once conservative, has
embraced the Gay cause and attacked biblical family values. The American
Psychological Association even produced the infamous Rind study that purported
to show that pedophilia is not necessarily inimical. This followed upon the
American Psychiatric Association's statement in its DSM-IV diagnostic book,
that a child molester was psychologically normal as long as his actions did not
produce "clinically significant distress or impairment in social,
occupation or other important areas of functioning." This produced a
response by NARTH (NARTH Bulletin August 2002: The Pedophilia Debate::Linda
Ames Nicolosi): "In other words, a man who molested children without
remorse, and without experiencing significant impairment in his social and work
relationships, could be diagnosed by a clinician as a 'psychological normal'
type of pedophile." Yes, Linda, that is what America's psychiatrists
believe. Despite this, 65% of Americans feel that religion, and certainly
family, are "very important."
The Gallup Poll showed that most Americans appreciate religion, most of
them very much so. It did not, however, prove what religion people embraced,
and surely, most of them are not biblical people in the old fashioned sense.
The
Talmud recognizes that there is a G-d of the intellect, and we have no trouble
with that. This G-d is there whenever we ring the bell for service or
salvation. He is kind, a loving Father, and dealing with Him is profitable. On
the other hand, there is the G-d of family and mundane life. This is trouble.
Can we have G-d looking over our shoulder while we cook the books in our
businesses? Can we have G-d watch a furious fight with our spouse? Can we have
G-d around when we are too tired and grouchy to notice our children? Can G-d
sit on the sofa with us when we watch dysfunctional families on ABC? Thus,
"The Way of the World precedes the Torah." Only when G-d has molded
us into human beings by our family and social life can we approach the G-d of
the intellect. The G-d of family is the G-d of the "way of the world"
meaning this world, not the next. Americans have no use for such a G-d. They
want religion and they want the next world, but this world is something else. A
study of scientists showed that many atheists believed in the Future World. Get
rid of G-d in this world and do your thing, but make sure He is there to give
you Paradise when you die. This is the G-d of the Next World, not This World.
Interestingly, religion is increasingly important in this world.
Biblical people not only have better health than secular people, but they have
healthier families. Religion can help with the children, keep them off drugs
and away from deadly sexual practices. Someone said: "Once people came to
religion for the Future World. Now they come to religion for This World."
Let's look at family from a financial perspective.
Zogby (August
20, 2002 http://www.zogby.com/news/ReadNews.dbm?ID=612)
tells of the crisis elderly adults face with health care, and the problems
children face with old parents. "Where will elderly parents live?"
Zogby asks. There is a crisis for the elderly throughout America, as rapidly
rising medical costs cannot be paid with existing savings and government
outlays. According to Washington Post columnist David Broder, states face bankruptcy
if they assume health costs of the elderly. The reality therefore is that
elderly people cannot afford to pay others costs that can run to $150,000
dollars a year for full care and $18 an hour for an aide. In a secular culture,
parents and children are usually estranged; parents, in the Zogby study, say
they don't want to move in with children. Children, on the other hand, know
that there is no alternative, and assume that parents will move in with them.
The Ten Commandments tell us, "Honor your father and mother." Secular
people have another command: "Be faithful to your needs." Translated,
this means, "Everybody else can bug off." A secular parent once
berated her young son for disrespecting her. He relied, "Mother, you had
me in a moment of passion." Nowhere is the divide between the religion and
the secular as visible as with family. Succeeding in family requires
self-abnegation and prayer, and secular people are not prepared for either one.
Americans don't have G-d in their homes, only in their places of worship. A
home without G-d has no place for elderly parents, and don't the elderly
parents know it.
How
can the vast majority of Americans say that religion is very important, and yet
ignore it in their homes and personal lives? All people have a soul, but not
all are prepared to accept a personal G-d. Others feed their soul with other
fare.
A major sexologist said that, "auto-eroticism is
spirituality." Another said that unsafe sex, whereby homosexual men
"ride bareback" and infect others with HIV or get it themselves, is
coherent. The homosexual value system, he explained, prefers pleasure to a long
and healthy life. This is a rational choice. Pleasure can also be a religion,
especially if it is addictive and compulsive. Surrender to something stronger
can be a religion, even if the stronger thing is our inner helplessness and
destructive. Freedom to be strong and not weak in the face of doing something
that can kill you with AIDS is for many gays a transcendent experience. Sexual
pleasure defines them. When challenged for their pedophilia, some gays replied,
"We are what we are."
Despite other "religions," including an interest in the
religion of Star Trek, the religious side of America is entrenched with the
Sinaitic G-d. When a Federal Court recently ruled against the mention of G-d in
the Pledge of Allegiance, the entire Senate, controlled by the Democrats,
marched outside and pledged it, mentioning G-d. Although for a century
secularism constantly gained on religion and deprecated it, today science is
revealing another face. Scientific studies prove that religion is important for
people's health. Many scientific studies about "near-death"
experiences, the latest a serious research project done in the Netherlands,
showed many people died and whose brains were completely dead could remember
clearly everything spoken while the doctors brought them back to life. What was
listening and remembering? Obviously, there is more to man than a lump of
neurons. We have souls.
Science itself, seeking truth with modern physics, has produced answers
that are so obtuse that only the computer can keep track of them. We can assume
that if computers were people, they would blush when they declared their
results. The great physicists tell us that anyone who studies modern physics
and does not become dizzy does not understand modern physics. As science speaks
in transcendent terms and refuses to reveal Truth intelligibly, it reveals the
importance of religion; secularism declines and religion ascends.
Perhaps Americans have
come to G-d and religion because they accept the teaching of Einstein and
Relativity that the universe came from a Big Bang that defied normative
physics. Obviously, this is Creation. The G-d of Creation, however, wants to be
the G-d of family and life. Until America realizes that, its religion will lead
to extinction.
The soul inside of us that drove us to
respect religion cannot find peace in family. Why? America destroyed religion
in this world, the "way of the world that precedes the Torah," because
it forced women from the home. In a country where only 14% of women are full
time housekeepers and mothers, there is no family, only hasty meetings of
people starving for what America refuses them. The economic issues, the
enormous consumption that requires two pay checks, the terror of downsizing, of
losing a job when you hit fifty are the barriers to a religion of the family.
Until we allow family to survive, and until we allow men to support families
and women to raise children, our families will be as artificial as our
religion.