Frank Sinatra's views on organized religion were decades ahead of his time

[DAME]

This one has been going around but I really enjoyed reading it.


http://deadstate.org/frank-sinatras-views-on-organized-religion-were-decades-ahead-of-his-time/

[darquegk]

I'm not sure that "ahead of his time" is quite right... what he is espousing is pretty standard quasi-Christianity, quasi-Deism of the Founding Fathers "Jesus was pretty rad but I don't know if that made him magic" school.

What makes him of his time, or even a classicist, and not "ahead of his time" is that he doesn't espouse any sort of anti-theism, nihilism or moral relativism, which are the marks of the current overarching Humanist "movement." Not of humanism, atheism or agnosticism, but of the press-backed, flashy, organized version thereof.

Sinatra suggests that faith may be a virtue, that the Sermon on the Mount (which, if you are not Christian in some way, sounds much like self-defeating anti-selfness) is a solid moral center, and that morality as it is conventionally understood both exists and is a good, universal thing. Few outspoken humanists today would say such things even if they believed them, because times have changed and the movement has become more outspokenly argumentative and confrontational, to the aggravation of believer and more mellow humanist alike.

But what I think we must take away from this is the idea that Sinatra was very much an intellectual. His beliefs and his nonbeliefs were carefully thought out and defended, and (at least in part with an editor's help) he is able to speak, debate and philosophize in the now-mostly-dead "Playboy Prose" that defined several generations of art and culture journalism.