In a moving and confusing op-ed ("Have Faith in Love") Eric Lax (not Jewish, but is the author of "Woody Allen: A Biography") argues that love is, or ought to be, greater than faith.We say confusing because we see religion as a public corporate entity and we see love as a personal bond of individuals.
Yet while we don't follow his logic, we do admire Lax's sentiments.
2 comments:
Lax is thoroughly misinformed and logic or the supremacy of logic is hardly his strong suit, hence in confusion he dwells and God's good name he uses in vain. The greater sin, greather than time wasted, is his usage of confusion to not take responsibility for his personal understanding of faith.
Is another's love ungodly? How can love of god, and god loving that which is hers and of her, be ungodly?
A recessive understanding of love, sees love as a labyrinthe, of endless dead endings, and occasional roses handed along the journey.
God's love is a path towards wisdom.
God is also truth.
Women get pregnant, carry and bear children, and have mammaries to feed them. There is nothing equal or fair about the burden of human reproduction. This not Moses’ fault, nor is it the Pope’s, Mohammed’s, Buda’s, Confucius’ or Aristotle’s. What is discretionary is how children are raised once they are born.
Every thriving, successful, enduring nation, culture, civilization over the past 2000 years has had strong cultural, moral, mythical, religious, and legal practices that kept biological families together (marriage), and that made fatherhood as important and imperative a relationship to a child as motherhood. The fifth commandment is “Honor your father and mother”
But we in our enlightenment have thrown that all away, and consider such sentiments as paternalistic, chauvinistic, homophobic, heterosexist, intolerant, pathological, evil.
Here at a time when raising a child has never been harder, cost more, take as long, been as complicated, more children are being raised in single family homes than ever before, mostly by women. We have made fathers optional accessories, of dubious value and think this is liberating, empowering, tolerant, wise. Gay marriage is a continuation and extension of this perspective: Biology doesn’t matter. Read “The Incredible Shrinking Father” by Kay S. Hymowitz.
But Daniel Patrick Moynihan said:
“From the wild Irish slums of the 19th century Eastern seaboard to the riot-torn suburbs of Los Angeles, there is one unmistakable lesson in American history: a community that allows a large number of young men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future - that community asks for and gets chaos.”
Somewhere within us is the truth, and we are going to find out.
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