"Go and do likewise"

After a few attempts to find God — even getting baptized at age 12 — in my senior year of high school I realized I couldn’t reconcile my empirical inclinations with books written two thousand years ago. I decided I was an atheist and have never doubted that decision even once.

I went through an edgy atheism phase where I would argue with believers, but after a while I realized that belief is not and never will be rational. There are good evolutionary arguments that it’s baked into our genes.

A more recent realization is that, thanks to ~150 known cognitive biases, most beliefs of any kind are irrational. I am as irrational as everyone else.

Nonetheless, irrational is not the same as useless. I know people who get great benefits from their religious faith. Sometimes I wish I believed because it’s clearly working out for them.

For example, my high school friend, Courtenay Budd. Her recent post about meeting a kind stranger at the DMV goes from a fun, feel-good story to a reminder that Jesus isn’t just an icon of martyrdom, but a moral force who makes demands of His followers.

I cannot help but think here of Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan, how he tells the story about someone who was very much an outsider, whose culture was considered unacceptable by those first hearing the story. But the unacceptable one, the outsider, came to the aid of the insider, whose plight had been roundly ignored by other insiders. It was the outsider, not the insider, who did the uncomfortable, inconvenient, risky, sacrificial thing.

Jesus leaves us with this command: “Go and do likewise.”

A grimmer example is Andrew Egger in today’s Morning Shots newsletter about a horrible shooting at a Catholic mass for children. He reminds us that politics is not and never can be a substitute for grappling with the death of innocents.

[Prayer] fixes the mind not on one’s ever-present political opponents but on the sufferers, in a discipline of sorrow and solidarity for those whose lives have been shattered by yet another attack. Dashing to social media to fire off hot takes after a tragedy feels good because it feels like doing something. But sometimes suffering with those who suffer is the only real thing you can do.

And here’s David Brooks on a recent Conversations with Tyler:

[T]here’s an attachment theorist named John Bowlby who said that all of life is a series of daring explorations from a secure base. That secure base for most of us is a secure attachment to mom and dad, a secure devotion to a specific place, the place that’s sacred to us. Assured devotion to our nation and confidence that our nation stands for something good. Secure implantation in, as I said, a moral order.

I think that secure base for a lot of people has been destroyed. Families are less healthy than they were. Communities are less healthy where the moral order has been taken away, so that we privatize morality. It’s every man and woman for herself.

Privatized morality is one of those phrases that is obviously true once I hear it.

I am deeply skeptical of the “common good conservatism” espoused by conservative thinkers like Adrian Vermeule and Patrick Deneen. But the problem of declining spirituality it purports to solve is observed on all sides. Here is John Ganz , a leftist, commenting on the deranged online response to Cracker Barrel’s logo change.

It’s tempting to look down on people for this, but on further thought, it reflects a deep spiritual poverty in our country. The right is capitalizing on this spiritual poverty, both politically and literally, and saying, “Yes, theyyyyyyyy are taking yourrrr beloved things.” This forecloses anybody asking whether we might deserve more. An actual small town in America might have problems with drugs, unemployment, it might be reduced essentially to a ruin, but as long as Cracker Barrel or the equivalent exists, people can feel okay about the country.

In the same interview with Cowen, David Brooks spoke briefly about an organization he started called Weave, which he describes as a “social fabric project.” Its purpose is to ground citizens in the places they live, and to re-weave the social fabric of the community.

While I still can't find my way back to the gospels, I am convinced by believers that I do have a challenge in front of me. How can I do my part to weave the social fabric? What is my secure base? How do I respond to suffering? And what does it mean for me to go and do likewise?

I am thankful to the believers.