SOME GOOD IDEAS HAVE BEEN AROUND A LOT LONGER THAN ONE MIGHT THINK
Posted by the Bekka
"Some time ago, after the Supreme Court decision on prayer in the public schools, a so-called patriotic women's organization - I forget which one - bitterly attacked the decision as antireligious. They were in favor of 'spiritual values,' they said, whereas the Supreme Court was destroying them.
"I am very much in favor of a clear separation of church and state, and my reaction was automatic: I disagreed with the women's organization. But then something happened that set me to thinking for many months. It dawned on me that I, too, was in favor of spiritual values and that, indeed, my researches and theoretical investigations had gone far toward demonstrating their reality. I had reacted in an automatic way against the whole statement by the organization, thereby implicitly accepting its erroneous definition and concept of spiritual values. In a word, I had allowed these intellectual primitives to capture a good word and to put their peculiar meaning to it, just as they had taken the fine word 'patriotic' and contaminated and destroyed it. I had let them redefine these words and had then accepted their definitions. And now I want to take them back. I want to demonstrate that spiritual values have naturalistic meaning, that they are not the exclusive possession of organized churches, that they do not need supernatural concepts to validate them, that they are well within the jurisdicion of a suitably enlarged science, and that, therefore, they are the general responsibility of all mankind. If all of this is so, then we shall have to reevalute the possible place of spiritual and moral values in education. For, if these values are not exclusively identified with churches, then teaching values in the schools need not breach the wall between church and state."
-Abraham Maslow, in Religions, Values, and Peak-Experiences, published in 1964.
Posted by the Bekka
"Some time ago, after the Supreme Court decision on prayer in the public schools, a so-called patriotic women's organization - I forget which one - bitterly attacked the decision as antireligious. They were in favor of 'spiritual values,' they said, whereas the Supreme Court was destroying them.
"I am very much in favor of a clear separation of church and state, and my reaction was automatic: I disagreed with the women's organization. But then something happened that set me to thinking for many months. It dawned on me that I, too, was in favor of spiritual values and that, indeed, my researches and theoretical investigations had gone far toward demonstrating their reality. I had reacted in an automatic way against the whole statement by the organization, thereby implicitly accepting its erroneous definition and concept of spiritual values. In a word, I had allowed these intellectual primitives to capture a good word and to put their peculiar meaning to it, just as they had taken the fine word 'patriotic' and contaminated and destroyed it. I had let them redefine these words and had then accepted their definitions. And now I want to take them back. I want to demonstrate that spiritual values have naturalistic meaning, that they are not the exclusive possession of organized churches, that they do not need supernatural concepts to validate them, that they are well within the jurisdicion of a suitably enlarged science, and that, therefore, they are the general responsibility of all mankind. If all of this is so, then we shall have to reevalute the possible place of spiritual and moral values in education. For, if these values are not exclusively identified with churches, then teaching values in the schools need not breach the wall between church and state."
-Abraham Maslow, in Religions, Values, and Peak-Experiences, published in 1964.
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