Posted on 11/17/2003 6:02:20 AM PST by Tribune7
The idea that he is a devotee of reason seeing through the outdated superstitions of other, lesser beings is the foremost conceit of the proud atheist. This heady notion was first made popular by French intellectuals such as Voltaire and Diderot, who ushered in the so-called Age of Enlightenment.
That they also paved the way for the murderous excesses of the French Revolution and many other massacres in the name of human progress is usually considered an unfortunate coincidence by their philosophical descendants.
The atheist is without God but not without faith, for today he puts his trust in the investigative method known as science, whether he understands it or not. Since there are very few minds capable of grasping higher-level physics, let alone following their implications, and since specialization means that it is nearly impossible to keep up with the latest developments in the more esoteric fields, the atheist stands with utter confidence on an intellectual foundation comprised of things of which he knows nothing.
In fairness, he cannot be faulted for this, except when he fails to admit that he is not actually operating on reason in this regard, but is instead exercising a faith that is every bit as blind and childlike as that of the most unthinking Bible-thumping fundamentalist. Still, this is not irrational, it is only ignorance and a failure of perception.
The irrationality of the atheist can primarily be seen in his actions – and it is here that the cowardice of his intellectual convictions is also exposed. Whereas Christians and the faithful of other religions have good reason for attempting to live by the Golden Rule – they are commanded to do so – the atheist does not.
In fact, such ethics, as well as the morality that underlies them, are nothing more than man-made myth to the atheist. Nevertheless, he usually seeks to live by them when they are convenient, and there are even those, who, despite their faithlessness, do a better job of living by the tenets of religion than those who actually subscribe to them.
Still, even the most admirable of atheists is nothing more than a moral parasite, living his life based on borrowed ethics.
(Excerpt) Read more at worldnetdaily.com ...
(1) Nothing at all would change in terms of our formal governmental arrangements and institutions. The government is prohibited from establishing a state church – enforcing the Establishment Clause continues the prohibition.
Some people – myself included -- would argue the federal government has effectively established a state church, despite the clear constitutional prohibition – by exclusively promoting secular humanism, and banishing all competing doctrines from the public arena.
Under a system of liberty of religious expression, there would be greater diversity of viewpoints in the public square, and I consider that a wonderful thing. Monolithic Left Progressivism has had the monopoly on ideological fashion for far too long by now, and this has had a poisoning, corrosive effect on the social fabric that has bled over into frank corruption at every level of society.
Christians may be a majority in this country; but Christianity itself is divided into many different sects and confessions; plus we have Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Jains, Sikhs, etc., etc., comprising our body social and politic. No way Christians are going to conspire together and plot against every one else, or try to “shove their doctrines” down other people’s throats. Speaking as a Christian, all I want is to be free to love and worship God, as He sees fit to call me so to do. I want to see respect for my religious symbols, just as I respect the religious symbols of other people.
(2) Though I strongly doubt much if anything would change in our political institutions, I think a flourishing of religious practice and belief would have salutary effects on society. It strengthens souls and it strengthens commitment to family, community, and nation. Society, as Plato observed, is Man written in larger letters. If personal morality and responsibility spread more generally throughout society, then that society is a far stronger, stable, and peaceful one.
(3) Religious belief is a sure-fire inoculation against the wooly-headed maunderings of our modern-day secular prophets of the Progressive Left. If you believe in God, then you cannot believe in Karl Marx. And if you believe in God, you cannot believe the following, excerpted from the Communist Manifesto:
“In one word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your property. Precisely so; that is just what we intend.
“From the moment when labor can no longer be converted into capital, money, or rent, into a social power capable of being monopolized, i.e., from the moment when individual property can no longer be transformed into bourgeois property, into capital, from that moment, you say, individuality vanishes.
“You must, therefore, confess that by ‘individual’ you mean no other person than the bourgeois, than the middle-class owner of property. This person must, indeed, be swept out of the way, and made impossible.
“…Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists.
“On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form, this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among proletarians, and in public prostitution.
“The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital…we destroy the most hallowed of relations, when we replace home education by social….
“But you Communists would introduce community of women, screams the bourgeoisie in chorus…nothing is more ridiculous than the virtuous indignation of our bourgeois at the community of women which, they pretend, is to be openly and officially established by the Communists. The Communists have no need to introduce free love; it has existed almost from time immemorial.
“Our bourgeois, not content with having wives and daughters of their proletarians at their disposal, not to speak of common prostitutes, take the greatest pleasure in seducing each other's wives. (Ah, those were the days!)
“Bourgeois marriage is, in reality, a system of wives in common and thus, at the most, what the Communists might possibly be reproached with is that they desire to introduce, in substitution for a hypocritically concealed, an openly legalized system of free love. For the rest, it is self-evident that the abolition of the present system of production must bring with it the abolition of free love springing from that system, i.e., of prostitution both public and private.
“The Communists are further reproached with desiring to abolish countries and nationality…. The working men have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got….”
By the way, this is Karl Marx’s “Ten Commandments”:
1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
5. Centralization of credit in the banks of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6. Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state.
7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state; the bringing into cultivation of waste lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
8. Equal obligation of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.
10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children's factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc.
It is the same “Ten Commandments” that Left Progressives everywhere admire. To empower these ideas (and notice how many have been empowered already, and are continuing to strengthen in power!!!), religion must “wither away,” like the State; for religion is the single biggest obstacle there is to the realization of Utopian, totalitarian dreams….
Which is why the Left in America – who sit on our courts and in our Congress – is so hostile to God and the Churches. Where God rules, they cannot. Period. And they know it.
It's really that simple.
GETMAIN, what your question really boils down to, it seems to me, is: To what final authority do human beings seeking to live their lives in a system of ordered liberty and equal justice appeal to, when the public discourse is as "disordered" as ours now appears to be?
Do you want to trust the judges? Or do you want to trust the people?
Myself, I'd put my money on the people, if I were inclined to gambling (which I am not). When it comes to life, people tend to be the "real experts"... or so it seems to me. And it seems to me there are many viewpoints to recognize and reconcile, so that a just polity may exist in the first place.
Would you rather live in a science lab, or in some itinerant abstraction perpetrated by the fervid mind of, say, Noam Chomsky? Or a just civil order constituted in individual liberty, personal responsibility, self-government, and equal justice?
On any fair reading of history, one would conclude that acts of suppression of religion everywhere and everytime give evidence of a totalitarian act in progress.
Fact is, GETMAIN, I don't disagree with the current system. The current system, in its political dimension, is defined by the Constitution of the United States of America.
What I disagree with is the historical and jurisprudential revisionism that has recently been applied to it, by "legal positivists" and other professional destructors of human meaning. (Check out Sandra Day O'Connor these days if you need a case study.)
. That, and "shoot from the hip" legislation to curry favor with narrowly-defined support groups.
We see this sort of thing in politics. We see it in corporate boardrooms. We see it in academe. We see it in the mass meida and the public discourse more generally, notably including the Hollywood phenomenon, et al.
Go figure, dude.
Earlier you pinged me for my views on the subject and I had bookmarked it for meditation. Frankly, I lost track of it until you posted your thoughts on the subject!
All I have to add is that the Supreme Court has increasingly misinterpreted the First Amendment establishment clause as a freedom from religion rather than a prohibition on the establishment of a state religion.
If they had kept faith with the Founders intentions, I believe the following would have happened:
2. Students would have the right to speak a prayer at football games, graduation, etc. (the Santa Fe decision)
3. The Newdow decision in California (the 'under God' prohibition in the pledge of allegiance) would have been the reverse.
4. Private religious schools would have access to publicly funded facilities for the learning impaired, etc.
tpaine: Catch 22. -- You're the crazy irrational athiest if you cannot see the world through the eyes of their god.
But the Jews did not believe that he had been blind, and received sight so they asked his parents, "is this your son, who was born blind?" How does he now see? And his parents answered, "We know that he is our son and that he was born blind, by what means he now sees, we know not, he is of age; ask him. So they called the man that was blind . . . What did he do how did he open your eyes? I told you already, and you didn't hear: do you want to hear it again? Here is a marvelous thing, that you don't know where that man is from, but he has opened my eyes . . . Since the world began it has never been heard that any man opened the eyes of one that was born blind. If this man were not of God, he could do nothing.
The Scientologists would leap at the chance to be publicly funded.
I imagine most all religious schools would love to be publicly funded; however, if the Supreme Court were to stick with the establishment clause as it was intended by the Framers - I suspect none of them would receive such funding. However, the public facilities which are available to public schools would also be available to religious schools IMHO, i.e. neutral to religion, neither establishing one nor interferring with any.
As I recall, religious students who need extra assistance from publicly funded specialists have to walk outside of the religious building (despite the weather) to meet the instructor on "non-religious" ground. If the judiciary wasn't so obsessed with protecting the public from religion, the instructors could go inside the building to give the religious students the special help they need.
Anyway, that's my two cents...
Believe it or not, tpaine, but you will always and forever be on my dance card. So please do feel free to cut in, any time you feel like it.
Sorry to arrive late to the party, but the contention that it is only in religion today that the belief one has a right to use force, especially government force, to impose beliefs (or practices based on beliefs) is belied by the simple fact of abortion-killing.
Cordially,
Though it's besides the point, government force is used to protect this form of imposition of beliefs by use of lethal force, as well as many other beliefs as well. That's all government is after all. It is nothing but force.
Cordially,
the contention that it is only in religion today that the belief one has a right to use force, especially government force, to impose beliefs (or practices based on beliefs) is belied by the simple fact of abortion-killing.
Our government is ~forcing~ women to have abortions? -- Weird idea. tpaine
You left out a few key words of context. Context determines meaning.
No, in this case the words I 'left out' changed nothing, as you can see above, -- when they are put back, no meanings were changed at all.
I was replying to the contention that "it is only in religion today that the belief that one has a right to use force [xxx xxxx]...to impose beliefs or practices based on beliefs."
You left out "government force" were I inserted the x's.. Now ~that~ changes your context.
If abortion killing is not an ultimate imposition of force based on some belief, I don't know what is. I was NOT saying that government (at least not in this country) is forcing people to commit abortions.
Thus you have no point.. Government force is not being used to encourage abortions.
Though it's besides the point, government force is used to protect this form of imposition of beliefs by use of lethal force, as well as many other beliefs as well.
That sentence is meaningless hype & babble. No one is 'imposing beliefs' by a "use of lethal force".
The assertion to which I responded was, "...it is only in religion today that the belief that one has a right to use force ..."
I did leave out the phrase "government force" for purposes of clarity because the grammar of the sentence indicates that the phrase, "...especially government force" is one part of the greater class of the aforementioned "force", notwithstanding the adjective, "especially". Therefore my deliberate omission in that regard does nothing to change the meaning, but since I anticipated your response I included my second paragraph addressing the omitted clause regarding government force. So when you say:
Thus you have no point.. Government force is not being used to encourage abortions.
I never said they did. I simply contradicted the universal assertion that it is only in religion today that the belief one has a right to use force. That proposition is self-evidently false. If any further proof were needed, all one needs is one exception, and abortion killing is one such exception. If killing a preborn child is not a use of force, nothing is. Government force itself is another such example, a force that has nothing to do with religion.
Cordially,
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