| | The Birds and the Elephants
A friend of mine, in many ways a more orthodox objectivist than myself, told me that he had his son baptized Catholic because he has not attended one secular marriage that he has not found hokey. Perhaps one must be raised within such a tradition in order to have such a feeling. My friend, raised Catholic (as I) advised me that it was Catholic school itself that made him an atheist. I went to public school, and became an atheist only after reading Rand for the first time - one week after reading the Virtue of Selfishness. (Both of us are atheists, neither is an anti-theist.) It is a truism grounded in some truth that all Catholics, even the lapsed, are baptized, betrothed and buried in the Church.
I would not, (with thanks to Luke for his not un-solicited prompting,) include the habit of tooth brushing under the same concept of the rite of marriage. I would define a ritual as a formalized expression of the acknowledgement of an existential value. Whereas a work of art recreates a reality, a ritual acknowledges the spiritual value - the sanctity - of a reality. Art and ritual would both be aesthetic phenomena.
Current secular rituals include the pledge of allegiance, the playing of the Star Spangled Banner, or Hail to the Chief, marriage, frat-boy hazing, and the various appurtenances of an athletic match - a fact which the nihilistic forces of P.C. anti-mascot agitators know instinctively and detest viscerally, but would unlikely identify explicitly. The same reason leads gay activists to seek not only the private sanction, but also the unconstitutional state sanction of not a contract, but a ritual - a religious blessing. Neither kashrut nor sharia nor gay marriage has a right to claim the legal sanction of the state.
Ritual is not, if I may dare say it, an unmixed blessing. Ritual cleansing and self-abuse become ends in themselves for the flagellant or the obsessive compulsive. The disturbing symptoms of each seem to demonstrate a biological basis for ritualized behavior. Such behavior may have its origins in the sublimation of the urges that drive grooming, (tooth brushing?) nest-maintenance, predator evasion, mating displays and other activities subject to Lorenzian displacement.
Hijacking the rituals of an existent tradition such as Catholicism would seem to be inappropriate for avowed atheists. Yet Rand was both married and laid to rest in the same way as a Christian or a Jew. And not in the same way as a muslim or a Jainist. I am not aware of any treatment of this topic from the standpoint of rational egoism. Even birds court and elephants mourn. Men too should have their rituals.
Ted Keer, 09 October, 2006, NYC
© Theodore Keer, 2006. All rights, save those waived here, are reserved by the author.
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In America, religion is relatively nonmystical. Religious teachers here are predominantly good, healthy materialists. They follow common sense. They would not stand in our way. The majority of religious people in this country do not accept on faith the idea of jumping into a cannibal’s pot and giving away their last shirt to the backward people of the world. Many religious leaders preach this today, because of their own leftist politics; it’s not inherent in being religious. There are many historical and philosophical connections between altruism and religion, but the function of religion in this country is not altruism. You would not find too much opposition to Objectivism among religious Americans. There are rational religious people. In fact I was pleased and astonished to discover that some religious people support Objectivism. If you want to be a full Objectivist, you cannot reconcile that with religion; but that doesn’t mean religious people cannot be individualists and fight for freedom. They can, and this country is the best proof of it.
