Posted on 05/08/2004 4:33:06 PM PDT by UnklGene
The slippery slope of secularism -
Posted: May 8, 2004 -
By Rabbi Daniel Lapin © 2004 WorldNetDaily.com
Have you ever tried to slow down your car by applying the parking brake? No, I'm sure you haven't. But if you did try, you would be surprised to discover that it has virtually no effect on your speeding car, whereas the lightest tap on the foot brake immediately diminishes speed. This is why on the one or two occasions when you drive off without remembering to release the parking brake, you drive three blocks before noticing the warning light. However, with your foot on the regular brake the car won't budge. Yes, that regular foot brake is a far stronger device than your parking brake. This is called Newton's First Law of Motion.
That great scientist observed that it is far easier, which is to say it takes far less energy, to keep a stationary car immobile than it is to bring a moving car to rest. Thus a relatively weak parking brake is quite sufficient to keep a parked car stationery even on a hill, but to bring a speeding car to a standstill at the red light you need to stomp on a powerful foot brake.
Sir Isaac's First Law of Motion is hard at work here in the United States. As a moving car resists efforts to modify its movement, so does a human system. If a society is trending in a certain direction, absent any countervailing forces, it will generally continue in the same direction.
For some period of time, and we can debate whether it is 50 or a hundred years, America has been trending secular. Prior to that time, being wise and educated meant knowing God. That is why most universities and schools of earlier periods were established and attended by religious Christians. The same is true in Jewish history. Until the 19th century, education and knowledge were inseparable from religion. Even the etymological origin of the word "secular" is linked to the Hebrew word for a fool.
This obvious link between God and education was clearly recognized in the wording of that great document that accelerated the westward expansion of the United States, the Northwest Ordinance of July 1787, which included this phrase:
"Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged."
It never occurred to Thomas Jefferson and the other authors in the Congress of the Confederation that schools would not teach religion and morality and certainly not that one day American schools would proudly proclaim themselves free of religion and morality.
Archimedes once said, "Give me a place to stand and with a lever I will move the whole world." Why did he include "a place to stand" in his pithy little aphorism? Why didn't he make it even pithier by saying merely, "With a lever I could move the world"? Obviously because when one pushes against something without a firm and immovable platform on which to stand, one's effort results in a reaction. Instead of moving the world, no matter how long his lever, Archimedes would have succeeded only in propelling himself backwards. A firm base allows one to apply the action. Without it, one's effort merely produces a reaction that will slide one backwards. This is Newton's Third Law of Motion.
Trying to become educated without first acquiring a foundation of moral certainty is futile. It resembles trying to push a Zamboni machine off an ice rink while wearing dress shoes. One would only slip and slide, make a lot of noise and fall on one's face. Thus it is in our universities, the institutions in which we exert most effort from the shakiest of platforms, that we frequently find moral distortion and embarrassing foolishness.
Are secular fundamentalists stupid or of low intelligence? Of course not. Conservatives making this claim betray misunderstanding of how secularism insulates even smart people from reality. Even a genius is handicapped if he has been deprived of a religious education. He uses logic like a witchdoctor might use a computer – as a type of totem rather than as a tool.
Each passing year we slide further down the slippery slope of secularism, and each passing year we are a little less educated and perhaps a little more foolish. Each passing year makes is harder to reverse or even slow the trend, because as Newton explained, societies, like vehicles, tend to continue doing whatever they are doing. It is no accident that like most brilliant and educated men of his day, Sir Isaac Newton, was a deeply religious man. Perhaps he became the 17th century's teacher of gravity, motion and calculus precisely because he stood on the platform of the moral absolutes of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
I suggest slowing the slide down the slippery slope of secularism by firmly placing our feet on the brakes. Let us put down our foot and confidently contradict every smug secularist we encounter who tries to confuse faith with superstition and religion with ignorance. Instead of compartmentalizing faith and isolating it from education, we ought to recall the words – awareness of God is the foundation of wisdom. At the very least we can oppose today's intense cultural hostility toward biblically based faith.
It has been prophesied that all of the religious churches will become apostate and that there will be a world government and a world church as the final judgment nears - looks like the Bible is going to prove itself right even as those who pooh-pooh it help fulfill it...
And how exactly do you propose to check the growing Atheism? Shall we bring back burning people on the stake?
There is no doubt about this. Moral absolutes are essentially the same in every world religion. This is not a sectarian issue. It is a theism issue.
And in the real world
1) Atheist/Agnostic are ~15% of the population yet make up just 0.2% of the prison population
2) From 1991 to 2001, The Number of the non-religious doubled in number while at the same time the number calling themselves Christians declined by 10% this decline in Christianity is especially seen in young people.
Yet the even though the younger generations are the most unchristian violent crime rate has declined through this period, as well as The pregnancy rate for unmarried women has continuously declined through the 1990s and the abortion rate dropped by about 25 percent for both married and unmarried women through the 1990s , The teen Pregnancy Rate Reached a Record Low, More Teenagers are saying no to sex and Drug use by teenagers continues to decline.
So sorry there is no correlation between being religious and morality.
As a country and civilization, we reject religion and the moral absolutes it teaches as our foundation with great peril and risk.
Modern day Japan is for all practical purposes an Atheist country yet their society seems to be doing fine. Compare them to very Christian countries like those in Latin America whose societies are in constant chaos and turmoil.
The same will happen in America, As Christianity fades we will be fine.
The only alternative to accepting these universal moral absolutes is "every man for himself". "What I think is true for me, and what you think is true for me". Moral relativism. And you know where that quickly leads? Dog eat dog. The bigger, stronger dog dictates to the smaller or less numerous or powerful dogs. That's all.
Give me a break, Just because you personally need to fear being punished to keep you in line that doesn't mean other people do.
Judaism has never been simple or clear; being Jewish today in Europe means many things, and with this magazine, we attempt to do justice to this vivid diversity. For example, in this issue we cover a controversy currently raging in Poland. Shoshana Ronen, an Israeli living in Poland for the past seven years, provoked strong reactions to her polemic against the return of Polish Jews to Orthodoxy, which was published in Poland's largest daily newspaper, "Gazia Wyborcza". Konstanty Gebert, editor-in-chief of the Polish-Jewish magazine "Midrasz", responds to Shoshana Ronen by pointing out what we can learn from Israeli intolerance. The fact that Ronen denies the Orthodox Jewish way of life any right to exist shows how wide the gap between secular and orthodox Jews has now become.
http://www.hagalil.com/golem/jewish-identity/editorial-e-99.htm<>
sichlut — foolishness
http://www.familybible.org/Glossary/S.htm
We believe you [i.e., God] are that thing than which nothing greater can be thought. (160)
This is Anselm's famous statement about God. It is either to be understood as a statement of God's essence, or as a statement about an essential property of God from which many other essential properties are to be deduced. The expression "can be thought" is not meant as in the psychological sense, but as a limitation on possibility: God is that for which it is impossible that there be a greater being in any respect.
But when the fool hears me use the phrase
"something than which nothing greater can be thought"
he understands what he hears ... .
So the fool has to agree that
the concept of something than which nothing greater can be thought
exists in his understanding (163, 173)
The word "fool" is not to be understood in its modern sense. Anselm means an atheist by this term. This usage derives from the Bible, in which the Hebrew word translated as "fool" denotes a morally deficient person, rather than someone who is stupid in the intellectual sense.
http://www.stats.uwaterloo.ca/~cgsmall/ontology1.html
Einstein, as everyone knows, made everything relative.. . . and I relish it
Yet the conundrum works the other way, too. Did Freud expel enough followers to found all the world's religions? Perhaps he kept trying to preserve a fellowship of words and inquiry, when it was turning rapidly into a doctrine. The narrative of recognition, refusal, and self-acceptance has to be retold every day, or it becomes a lie. As a secular Jew, I can expect that retelling. In the shifting mirror or the eye of another, an identity is born.
http://www.haberarts.com/jew.htm
redmoonrising ... christian aside
sichlut (foolishness)
sikhliyut (rationality)
http://www.heartofisrael.org/languages/hebrew/glossary.htm
While the Western world has consisted of many Christian countries and consists today of many secular countries, only America has called itself Judeo-Christian. America is also unique in that it has always combined secular government with a society based on religious values.But what does "Judeo-Christian" mean?
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0304/prager_2004_03_30_04.php3
Nevertheless, I speak of a deep-set tendency to valorize—to use a favorite word of founding father Mircea Eliade—description over advocacy and object-level argument. But not everyone need be restricted to description and anti-advocacy prejudice. Thus there is irony—and a lesson to be learned—from the ethnocentrism of projecting such descriptivism on a political culture with a different history of relation with religion.The lesson is that the ‘‘religious’’ as marked off by American professionals need not be roped off from responsible and legitimate argument and that ‘‘religious’’ advocacy in politics is not everywhere eo ipso wrong.
There is just nothing similar to the writings of the Hebrew prophets of the Bible in Islamic literature, whether Qur'an, hadiths, or sirah (lives of Muhammad). These demonstrate a very close and affectionate relationship between Israel and its God, God the loving, often chastising parent who nevertheless mourned over His people and promised them redemption. There is nothing like Isaiah's, "When Israel was a child I loved him; out of Egypt I called my son," or "Come now, let us reason together," (which would suggest a level of closeness and intimacy with God that would never be permitted in Islam--Allah would never condescend to reason with His slaves). Instead Allah of the Qur'an simply literally blows away those who refuse His message and goes on to the next people.I've already gone on much too long, but I wish there was some way to get more of that intimacy into the Qur'an and less legalism and threats. I guess in this I am influenced by Christianity, but I don't think it's too much to ask for.
http://www.secularislam.net/archives/000046.html
"FOOL""1. one who is lacking in reason, or the common powers of understanding; an idiot; an imbecile. [Now Rare.] <--------why, then, is this #1, I wonder? :-)
2. a person with little or no judgment, common sense, wisdom, etc.; a silly person; a simpleton."
Like a genuine Jew, I would answer the question of .the timid by a counter-question. There is a vast literary storehouse filled with treasures; the key the Hebrew language, is in our guardianship; have we a right to throw the key into the ocean of oblivion, and deprive the world of the enjoyment of those treasures? More than that; when we have ceased to be the efficient guardians of our treasures, of what use are we in the world? I feat that in the case of such flagrant dereliction of duty the twentieth century will have in store for us not a Ghetto but a grave.
http://www.wzo.org.il/en/resources/view.asp?id=1621 -- A Century of Jewish Thought (Henrietta Szold)
The OED would beg to differ:
[In branch I, a. OF. seculer (mod.F. séculier), ad. L.sæcul , f. sæcul-um generation, age, in Christian Latin ‘the world’, esp. as opposed to the church: seeris
SECLE ,SIECLE . In branch II, directly ad. L.sæcul , whence mod.F. séculaire (which has influenced some of the uses in Eng.). Cf. Sp. seglar, secular, Pg. secular, It. secolare.]
Quite so - "to bind" is perhaps a better rendering.
Anyway, the world is full of people who would put faith and reason at odds - not all of them are athiests, as you note ;)
Subjective reality :-)
Oh, puh-leaze.... If you think that is the "only alternative", then you clearly haven't even bothered thinking about the issue very much.
Clearly, what you don't know (or misunderstand) about atheists would fill volumes.
I would like to believe you but there is no "They", Only one of those links the prison one goes to what you could call an Atheist site (Though it's really more an anti-scientology site than an atheist one). The other links goto 2 religious sites, FEMA, The CDC and newspaper articles posted here on Freerepublic, Hardly what you would call "Atheist Handbook" sites.
If you really did check the links you would know this, Instead it's obvious because they don't fit your narrow worldview you didn't look at them or write anything and you just mistakenly assumed they were all atheist sites.
So quit posting links that screw up peoples' computers.
The link works fine from my end, I have no idea what you are talking about. Even though it's on an Atheist site the stats come from the Dept. of Corrections
I'm not going to take the time responding to Atheist Handbook crap,
I thought you did???
and you can take your proselytizing somewhere else.
Pot Kettle Black
But no proselytizing here, Just pointing out with actual facts that your assertion that people without Christianity are somehow less moral is wrong.
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