Volu m e II - Purdue University Calumet

participates in our own self-identification into exclusionary groups. Social and cultural groups that indulge
in extreme rhetoric, whether internally and or publicly, incite defensive emotional reactions from those
who have been “otherized.”
As I asked earlier, why are we drawn to this sort of rhetoric?
Becker says we are this way out of our fear, and our human nature. If we can recognize this, why do
we continue to participate? The philosopher and ethicist Lloyd Steffen believes that we face and on-going
choice in our religious behavior. The destructive option in religion is the alternate choice to life-affirming
religion. He explains that the destructive choice our actions within religion is appealing because it is natural
and easy to drift into equating ultimacy, which is our natural belief in something transcendent beyond
ourselves, with absolutism, and absolutism makes little demands on our reason and intellect. Steffen says,
“Absolutism is so powerful that it can authorize evil acts, suppress moral critique, and then motivate people
lured to act by goodness to conceive their evil act as good” (Steffen 34). Operating within absolutism, we
can feel comfortable in the certainty of having religious decisions made by others, or other’s interpretation
of our traditional religion.
Steffen identifies our passions as a potential entry into making destructive choices in religion,
explaining that passions concentrate value and give depth of meaning to life, and we humans have a need for
meaning and value. We unfortunately also have a tendency toward overvaluation: of objects, people, or
our ideas of ultimacy. Some overvaluation is acceptable, but passion unchecked by reason leads us into
fanaticism. If morality is the object of our overvaluation, this leads us into moral absolutism, the pursuit of
which can be all-consuming, but is emotionally satisfying since it provides us the security of conceptual
rigidity, that is, we no longer need to think for ourselves, and our actions are automatically pre-justified.
This pursuit of an absolute duty is not duty called for by reason, as moral duty should be, but
absolute unthinking duty. Thus, our will and ability to reason and take responsibility for ourselves is
eroded, and our reason is eventually destroyed. Steffen defines fanaticism as “aiming at perfection in
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