Posted on 04/08/2010 4:08:30 PM PDT by Walter Scott Hudson
Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other. — John Quincy Adams
At this point in our series on atheism as a political movement, having spent ample time demonstrating both the appropriateness of criticizing religious belief and the status of atheism as belief, we come to the heart of the issue. The endgame, according to English philosopher Colin McGinn, is the achievement of "post-theism." McGinn defines post-theism as "the healthy state of mind where you’ve put all that [God stuff] behind you."
"We can’t do that yet," McGinn bemoans, "because there’s lots of religion in the world, and lots of bad results of it. To me, the ideal society would be the one where the question of religion didn’t really arise for people."
What would such a world look like? In the final half of the viral internet film Zeitgeist: Addendum, Jacque Fresco of the Venus Project delivers a bold vision of an emergent post-theistic society. "We would declare all the earth’s resources the common heritage of all the earth’s people," he told a New York audience earlier this year. The mission of the Venus Project is "to create a society of such abundance [through technology] that everything would be available without a price tag, and without submission to employment." It is a world built upon the premise that the only sins are scarcity and execlusivity. "If you eradicate the conditions that generate what you call socially offensive behavior, [that behavior] does not exist," said Fresco. "You might say, ‘Well, isn’t that [behavior] inborn?’ No, it’s not."
Fresco's colleague Roxanne Meadows goes into further detail:
What we want to do is eliminate the causes of the problems, eliminate the processes that produce greed, and bigotry, and prejudice, and people taking advantage of one another... eliminating the need for prisons and welfare. We’ve always had these problems because we’ve always lived within scarcity, and barter, and monetary systems that produce scarcity.
"It’s going to take the redesign of our culture, our values," says Fresco. "And it has to be related to the carrying capacity of the earth."
Fresco insists he is not advocating communism. However, it is telling how he proposes bringing this post-theistic Utopia about. "The [current] system has to fail, and the people have to lose confidence in their elected leaders," Fresco says in Zeitgeist. The narrator puts it another way. "We have to alter our behavior to force the power structure to the will of the people (emphasis added)." This has the trademark twang of the progressive gospel increasingly familiar to viewers of Glenn Beck. It requires, as part of its "redesign" of our culture, a devaluation of individuals and surrender of inalienable rights.
"When we understand that it is technology, devised by human ingenuity, which frees humanity and increases our quality of life, we then realize that the most important focus we can have is on the intelligent management of the earth’s resources," concludes the narrator of Zeitgeist. Implicit in the concept of intelligent management are intelligent managers. Conspicuously missing from the Venus Project's Utopian vision is any indication of who these managers would be. One thing is for sure; if you happen to be Christian, it will probably not be you. Fresco declares, "If you give everybody a right to their own opinion, it becomes damaging." Some animals would have to be more equal than others.
Here we arrive at the thesis of this entire series. Authority is necessary. Any intellectually honest examination of the human condition will conclude so. Under the authority of God, liberty is possible. Without God, there can only be variations of authoritarianism. A reader we will call "Max" unwittingly demonstrates this point:
[Faith] is a decidedly non-scientific way of approaching life, and clearly has some horrifying consequences in an era where we have weapons of mass destruction in the hands of people who think that our existence on earth is merely the blink of an eye, and that the truly meaningful existence comes after this life. As [prominent atheist author Sam] Harris points out, a disturbing percentage of Americans truly believe that the world is going to end in less than a century, which utterly diminishes any incentive to improve human well-being on earth today (emphasis added).
Max's concern, shared by Harris and many others, is that those who believe nature to be in a state of sin will not act to improve upon their terminal condition. This concern is understandable and largely justified. Indeed, those of us who believe we are not of this world do not aspire to cure all its ills. This is because we do not believe ourselves capable of addressing the root problem - deviation from holiness. The logical conclusion of the theist is not to panic regarding the ills apparent in nature, because we know there is an Authority in ultimate control. The logical conclusion of the atheist is that man must perpetually "progress" and "improve" in an evolutionary manner consistent with their understanding of nature, a conclusion which necessitates the suppression of those thwarting said progress. These two paradigms are the emerging political dichotomy. They cannot be reconciled. But it is incumbent upon both to accurately understand the other.
The goal of the theist and atheist is the same; they disagree as to the means. In a twist of scripture which would make Jim Willis proud, Fresco responds to the Christian doctrine of a heavenly hope by saying, "You forgot the Lord’s prayer. ‘Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.’ There’s no business up there, no private ownership, no money; and that’s what Jesus said." Fresco is right! His idea of a resource based economy is essentially no different than the teachings of Jesus regarding how we ought to live, with one crucial difference. In the kingdom of heaven, God is the intelligent manager. Without the Lord, man will lord over man with inevitably tragic results. For even if Fresco is right, and scarcity is the source of all our ills, and even if technology and cooperation might provide us with abundant resources, can it keep a man from coveting another's wife?
More to follow...
Part II: No Escape From Belief
The only kind of atheist that will exist if Islam ascends to world power will be a dead one.
Just another run of the mill socialist, nothing to do with being an atheist other then using it as an excuse.
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