"Religion gave us not just an afterlife, but a beforelife, too. God creates people as souls first and then gives them physical shape."

"'Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,' God says to Jeremiah (Jeremiah 1:5). 'Your eyes saw my unformed body; all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be,' David says to God (Psalm 139:16).... Well, if you believe that people exist before they exist, that they’re waiting out there with God somewhere before they are 'heaven sent' into someone’s womb, then of course you’re going to put the needs of that (still pure and precious) person ahead of the needs of the (sinful) womb-holder.... To those of us who don’t believe in God, this sounds fantastical... Human lives, when seen this way, inhabit a strange kind of solidity even in the abstract: Before they live — even if they never live — these people were meant to be.... Reasonable people can disagree about when a developing fetus has rights that must be considered. And people who are happily pregnant might assign complete personhood to a pea-size clump of cells from the moment the pregnancy is confirmed. But how we feel about that clump is not the same as how it feels....  [E]veryone who asks how abortion advocates would feel if they had been aborted, as if unborn people hover about ruing their nonexistence — remind us that religion is driving our abortion debate. Religion — not reason and not compassion for people who already exist in this earthly realm." 

Writes Kate Cohen in "'How would you feel if your mother had aborted you?’ Easy. I’d feel nothing" (WaPo).

I'm just blogging, not writing a book, so I'm not going to engage with all of that. I will only make a few points:

1. If you don't believe in any world beyond our world, it's indeed easy to say you'd feel nothing if you were aborted. But what's the answer to the question what would you feel if you — you who who believe only in this life — were murdered? You get the same answer: Nothing! 

2. The belief that there is no life beyond this life is also a religious belief. You might want to stand apart from the openly religious people and claim that you — and not they — have true reason and true compassion, but you too are engulfed in belief.

3. I subscribed to the Disney Channel so I could watch the Beatles documentary, but I've used my access to check out some other things, one of which was the 2020 animated film "Soul." This film shows a man who gets off track to the afterlife and finds his way into the place where souls are formed before they can make their way into bodies. It's not presented within a specific religion's framework, but it's an extensive visualization of life before birth:

The filmmakers animated the souls featured in the film in a "vaporous", "ethereal", and "non-physical" way, having based their designs on definitions about souls given to them by various religious and cultural representatives. At the same time, they did not want the souls to look overly similar to ghosts, and adjusted their color palette accordingly.... Animators created two designs for the souls in the film; one for the new souls in "The Great Before", which animation supervisor Jude Brownbill described as "very cute, very appealing, with simple, rounded shapes and no distinguishing features just yet", and one for mentor souls, which do feature distinctive characteristics due to having been on Earth already.

This was a big Pixar film designed to appeal to everyone, not just believers in conventional religions that have doctrine relating to the creation of souls. 

4. The desire to believe in soul is very deeply embedded in the human mind, and if you're a person of reason and compassion, you should not find it easy to slough off.

What should sound weird?

I'm reading "Amanda Gorman showed us how civic ceremonies can have prayer without invoking God" by Kate Cohen (WaPo): 

Hearing a grown-up ask God for something should sound as strange to me as hearing him plead with Santa or Superman. “We seek your faith, your smile, your warm embrace,” should sound weird. But it doesn’t. I was raised in America, where pledging allegiance “under God,” spending money stamped with “In God We Trust” and ending speeches with “God Bless America” are so automatic that “gracious and merciful God” sounds like “blah blah blah.” 

But is “blah blah blah” what we want from our ceremonial language? Leaving aside constitutionality — as, unfortunately, the courts continue to do — unless every American actually believes that we need to ask a supernatural being for help, then appealing to God robs these prayers of their rhetorical power. Either because they sound meaningless or because what they mean, fundamentally, is that He is the agent of change, not we.

Cohen argues that there are ways to elevate and solemnize civic occasions that don't use God. As you can tell from the title of her column, Cohen indulges in the adoration of the young woman who read a poem at the inauguration. I did not read or listen to this poem so I have nothing to say about the poet other than that the people who are overly enthused about her feel patronizing — if not idolatrous — to me. Which is why I didn't watch. I didn't want to be soppy or judge-y.

But Cohen's point is that the poet was able to use words like "The new dawn blooms as we free it" and "there is always light" to create a religion-y vibe. So there is a way, if that's what we want and need. Leaving God out is what Cohen says she needs "to make eternal truths shimmer." 

But verbiage like "new dawn blooms" and "there is always light" would in time sound just as "blah blah blah" as "gracious and merciful God." It's a government ceremony. It doesn't really matter. Find your deep inspiration away from government. That's the real separation of church and state. 

I've got another example of the eco-shame-contortion genre.

Yesterday, we were looking at "How Guilty Should You Feel About Your Vacation?/And what can you do about it?" by Seth Kugel (in the NYT), which I called "a terrible, execrable column." And today, I'm confronted with another example of what I'm going to recognize as a genre because I'm expecting to see more and more of these awful columns. Progressives who want to claim that they are good when it comes to the problem of climate change want to resist what it really means for them as they live in this world with their desires and comforts and money and longing for their little corner of luxury. What's really causing them anxiety is flight shaming.

From today's example of the genre, "Most of us are hypocrites on climate change. Maybe that’s progress," Kate Cohen (in WaPo).

Greta Thunberg puts most of us to shame. The 16-year-old Swedish climate activist is en route to the U.N. Climate Action Summit in New York, on a two-week, comfort-free journey by solar-powered sailboat. She doesn’t fly, because flying is bad for the climate. She helped popularize the Swedish movement of flygskam, or flight shaming, which asks Swedes to travel according to their beliefs....

That is to say: Don't fly. Come on. If you believe what you say you believe, you know damned well that you should not fly. Not for business. Not for pleasure. Nothing! The world is at stake. Stop. Just stop. But no. Articles must be written, and I intend to become a connoisseur of this ludicrous genre.

Greta’s like an emissary from the future calmly stating that now is the time to panic. Who could argue with that? Not me. I recently swore off plastic straws on account of my own 16-year-old’s disapproval, even though his straw-shaming (sugrörskam?) consisted only of a single, sharp “Mom!” and a slow, disappointed head shake as I plucked my absolute-last-plastic-straw-I-swear from a coffee shop counter. If Greta were my kid, I’d be a vegan now, too.

If you can't argue with that, what are you doing? It sounds like arguing with that. Or are you saying you know perfectly well that your behavior is immoral — no argument there — it's just that you're choosing to do it anyway?

But she’s not my kid. So although I believe that climate change is an urgent threat, I travel and eat without thinking much about my carbon footprint. According to Greta, I’m probably not evil; I just don’t know better: “People keep doing what they do because the vast majority doesn’t have a clue about the actual consequences of our everyday life.” That’s not quite right; we do have a clue. But believing one thing and doing another is how most of us behave.

You're not thinking much, but you are thinking out loud. In WaPo. And presumably not ashamed to say what you are saying.

The article goes into an anecdote about her father buying an SUV, even though he cared about the environment. He'd indulge himself unless the government outlawed SUVs, and he'd be happy to vote for someone who'd outlaw SUVs. The idea is don't ask people to be moral; impose what you think is moral on everyone. Cohen gave her father a hard time about his attitude:

"At one point in Betsy West’s and Julie Cohen’s new documentary 'RBG,' NPR correspondent Nina Totenberg claims that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg 'was doing something that was incredibly important to American women.'"

"At the end of 'RBG,' I was still struggling to figure out what Totenberg meant when she said 'something.'.. . West and Cohen certainly believe that Ginsburg is a significant figure, but the evidence they present is ultimately unconvincing.... Throughout the documentary, West and Cohen seem uninterested in undertaking a complex analysis of Ginsburg’s life and work... Various interviewees mention that Ginsburg has a unique ability to cross the political aisle and work with justices who hold opposing views. As proof, they point to her longtime friendship with the late, very conservative justice Antonin Scalia. For many of the interviewees, this is nothing short of a miracle. One of the interviewees claims that Ginsburg is an extraordinary individual because most liberals 'do not have friends who are right-wing nutcases.'...  For West and Cohen, however, Ginsburg’s legacy... is manifested in the pop culture productions Ginsburg has inspired.... West and Cohen seem particularly enamored with Kate McKinnon’s impersonation of Ginsburg; they show the same SNL skit three times during the documentary. Towards the end of the film, West and Cohen screen the sketch for Justice Ginsburg herself, and they ask her what she thinks about it. Ginsburg finds McKinnon’s acting humorous, but concludes that the impersonation doesn’t reflect anything about her at all."

Writes Amir Abou-Jaoude at The Stanford Daily.

The movie "RBG" has a 94% positive rating at Rotten Tomatoes.

ADDED: Here's the one negative review listed at Rotten Tomatoes, from James Berardinelli: "RBG isn’t worth the time and effort of seeking out in a theater unless you’re a die-hard RBG fan. Little in the film can’t be found in Justice Ginsburg’s Wikipedia entry; it functions more as a straightforward (and sanitized) biography than a probing or intriguing examination of one of the nation’s most influential judicial voices."

But you shouldn't look for a movie to be what it's not trying to be. I get the sense, even from Berardinelli, that the movie isn't trying to enlighten us about the work Ginsburg has done, but that it is examining the popular culture, the effect of the idea of Ginsburg on people: "In assessing Ginsburg’s current role on the Court and how she has become a larger-than-life figure to young, socially liberal voters, RGB finds its soundest footing. It shows dozens of memes, talks to several influential under-30 figures, and puzzles over how a tiny, seemingly meek old woman could have become a hero to her granddaughter’s generation."

Here's the poster:



Is there any serious inquiry into the human psychological need for heroes and icons and the adoration of the dissenter?