House of Eratosthenes

It would be awfully cool if the progressives among us were to view new social programs with the same suspicion, paranoia and scorn they so regularly thrust upon creches in courthouses & pledges-of-allegiance in schools. Jamie Jeffords tries to make sense of it all:

I would speculate the divide is a result of the differing view of government. For progressives, nothing is above government, so religion must be given a subordinate position. Conservatives do not have this problem. The issue may go deeper. There is also a notion that enlightenment and intellectualism are mutually exclusive from religion. That is just old fashioned arrogance. It cannot be dismissed, however.

As do I:

Some thoughts:

Atheists and secularists insist the statement “atheism is a religion” is as risible as “bald is a hair color” — heard that one before? It makes a lot of sense, until you start to ponder how the universe was built. To the atheist, the faith placed in the not-a-religion eliminates all possibilities save for one, and the one possibility looks more like a miracle than a scientific theory. Event 1, nothing; event 2, something complicated, bizarre and not quite specified, event 3, miraculous result. So atheism plus explain-how-we-got-here equals something I, for one, am very comfortable calling a religion.

Thought two: How we got here, is a much more important question to good governance than mere theoretical exercise. You make reference to a dichotomy involving whether religion should be subordinated to government. If there is any possibility to a competent mind at all that there might be a sentient and superior force involved in putting us here, then subordinating religion to government makes no sense at all. If we were put here, we must have purpose; where there is purpose, there has to be a will; and unless that purpose has changed from what it once was, then that will must lead to an expectation. Government, by its nature, has expectations too — if we are to erect a government that makes contrary expectations on us, then abiding by the law(s) becomes an exercise in abject futility, and mankind itself becomes a perversion.

Point three: The possibility that atheism is, after all, a religion, arouses another possibility that those who are trying to secularize the government, are the ones who are trying to establish a theocracy. Whether they know it or not.

That sign-off is a reference to a specific issue, which is teaching evolution and/or Creation in the public schools. Ever see Inherit The Wind? It’s about a real court case involving a penalty for teaching about evolution. Got that? They were deciding whether evolution should be allowed to be taught in the schools. And that Spencer Tracy, he seems so reasonable.

Fast forward forty-five years after the movie was made, and eighty years after the events took place, and the public hearing is on exactly the same issue but the so-called “law” says something completely different — now we’re deciding whether any alternatives should be allowed in the schools.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is an encroachment into a government by an order attempting to establish a state religion. A successful encroachment, and a successful establishment. This is how liberalism works in general; it acts like it’s on the defensive, fighting for its sacred right to express, for its very life. And as the years tick on by, you see it persecutes any & all challenging ideologies exactly the same way it once claimed it was being persecuted.

Back in Sunday school they used to tell me about God & Jesus being kind of like a compass, or a map — you’re lost in life without them. I never did understand the wisdom of this until I saw liberals work away at things. The things they do, are 180 degrees off course from where they say they’re going…where they seem to think they are going. The persecution thing is just one example of this. They talk a good game about building a new society, a wonderful society, based on tolerance and acceptance. But their most zealous acolytes are so bitter, resentful and angry; they wouldn’t know what tolerance was if tolerance ran up and kicked ’em square in the ass.

They want to be the only game in town. On each question, on each issue, on each matter of any public policy. And then they want to make everything that has to do with the living of life, a matter of public policy.

To me, the words “atheism,” “Libertarian” (note the capital L), and “progressive” all describe variations on a theme: they’re just a set of attitudes with a label attached to make them seem intellectual.

It’s easiest to see with progressives, of course, since they’re both the shrillest and the least effective — the obvious, direct, first-order outcomes of their policies are so often diametrically opposed to those policies’ intents that the word “results” is almost absent from their vocabularies. But atheism works similarly…

Mini-autobiography time: I used to be an atheist. I suspect that my “conversion” to atheism was typical for dreamy, bookish, inexperienced adolescents — a hefty dose of theodicy combined with an intro to anthropology course. This led to an infatuation with Nietzsche and plenty of Foucauldian “everything’s just about power, man!” -type noodling. Had I actually read Foucault at the time, and continued to bang my highchair obnoxiously about it for the next few years, I’d have tenure by now.

Unlike most adolescents, though — and here I certainly include the tenured, who, in the liberal arts at least, are more or less professional adolescents — I actually started thinking through the implications of this once I stopped patting myself on the back (stopping took a few years, as anyone who knew me in undergrad can attest). I actually read Nietzsche instead of just carrying his books around, and started really pondering the question “how should I live?” This didn’t lead me back to organized religion –I call myself a halfassed theist, for the record — but it did teach me that uninformed, sneering condescension is no way to go through life (needless to say, I’ve been a conservative ever since).

I actually do have a point in all this, by the way, and here it is: I think this is why liberalism and atheism go hand in hand. For one, both are status markers of Smartness — liberals are “Smart” (since conservatives are stupid), and atheists are “Smart” (since what’s dumber than an evangelical Christian?), so liberalism and atheism go together like Brad and Angelina. But on a deeper level, I think lots of atheists realize that the question “how should I live?” doesn’t admit of too many non-religious answers. (I don’t think it admits of any, actually, since even things like Buddhism and Greco-Roman philosophy is chockablock with unprovable assumptions that one must, as it were, take on faith). Since progressivism is nothing if not a set of rules about living, it reconciles its followers to life…

…which, of course, is exactly what they say religion does for believers, those sheep, who don’t have the courage to admit that the Bible is all a bunch of fairytale hooey. Personally, I dig the symmetry of all this.
- Severian | 12/17/2010 @ 11:18
The “separation of Church and State” is one of the most wrongly interpreted bits of our Republic.

Church Religion

Church = An Establishment of Religion, much as

Olive Garden = Eating Establishment

Catholic Church = Establishment of Religion
Methodist Church = Establishment of Religion

See how that works? It was to keep a particular church hierarchy from obtaining the coercive power of government. The second half (“or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”) meant that the coercive power of the government likewise couldn’t be used to suppress the free exercise of religion.

It didn’t mean religious concepts should never be mentioned in public, or referred to in laws … because the Founders themselves referred to God in public and in matters of government repeatedly. Truth be told, right or wrong, in their culture-centric view, I doubt they meant anything outside of the Judheo-Christian family. Back then, I doubt they thought it worth clarifying.

If the first amendment said “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of food”, I doubt we’d have the same people decrying laws having anything to do with food. But all it really means is that The Olive Garden can’t become the official Restaurant of the United States of America, and it can’t have any laws passed to give it special treatment over, say, Applebees.
- philmon | 12/17/2010 @ 22:15

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Recent

Items of Interest

Monthly Archives

What They Say

Links

Conservatives, Liberals, Christianity and GovernmentFriday, December 17th, 2010

Conservatives, Liberals, Christianity and Government
Friday, December 17th, 2010