The Wisdom to Know the Difference

God grant me the Serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
the Courage to change those things I can,
and the Wisdom to know the difference.
(Reinhold Niebuhr 1892-1971)


And the wisdom to know the difference?
Freedom, control and the sociology of religion - 2002 Presidential Address
Sociology of Religion, Fall, 2003 by Eileen Barker

The sociology of religion has long been concerned with issues of freedom and control. At an ontological and somewhat speculative level, there have been numerous treatises on whether it is the lot of individual participants in a society to be active actors ruling their own destinies or merely passive recipients, subject to the vagaries of social forces. More empirically, the concern has been evidenced by work at individual, group and societal levels on, respectively, subjects such as brainwashing, mind control and/or mental manipulation; types of authority wielded by religious leaders and institutions; and/or the regulation and control of religions by states. Some of us have been particularly concerned with recent developments in post-communist countries, and that is the subject on which I chose to concentrate when selecting the contributors for this special edition of the journal.

We have, however, still a long way to go in understanding the processes that broaden and narrow our ability to determine (in both senses) the patterns of our lives. With one or two notable exceptions, our work has tended to focus on static situations and has been restricted to, a series of particular, discrete circumstances. We have, for example, confined our findings to statements such as:

In situation A (when, say, a small religious group is in a closed
environment, cut off from the rest of society) freedom and/or
control has tended to be advanced or curtailed according to
some unspecified, non-comparative scale.

Or:

In situation B (when, say, there is a strong relationship between
the state and one traditional religion) the freedom and/or control
of co-existing minority religions has tended to be diminished
according to another unspecified and non-comparative scale.

Such conclusions do, of course, provide us with important and useful information. There does, none the less, seem to be a paucity of empirical studies that embrace a wider frame of reference. That is, there is relatively little work that, systematically,

(a) compares types and degrees of freedoms between, say, the Amish, Roman Catholics, Buddhists and Unificationists--let alone the Amish in nineteenth century Canada; the Catholics in fifteenth century Italy; Buddhists in seventeenth century Thailand, and Unificationists in twenty-first century Japan.

(b) examines the dynamics of a process in which A moves to B and then progresses to C--when, for example, freedom is decreased through an increase in the number and application of regulations, but this results in a reaction that overthrows the regulating authority, thus resulting in (perhaps) greater freedom.

(c) explores the complexities of situations in which one person's or group's liberty depends on curbing the liberty of other persons or groups.

(d) pursues the empirical relationships involved in the philosophically familiar distinction between "freedom from" and "freedom to."


To read more, see: http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0SOR/is_3_64/ai_109568880/pg_1


How come it's always America concerned with this?
Anyway.....
http://rfdblog.com/2007/03/wisdom-to-know-difference.html