Posted on 12/19/2007 5:48:59 AM PST by SJackson
Last week, New York Times columnist Roger Cohen wrote a column titled "Secular Europe's Merits," in which he explained why he prefers the secularism of Europe to the religiosity of America.
To his credit (other New York Times columnists do not generally agree to debate anything they write -- Paul Krugman, for example, has refused to discuss his new book on liberalism with me), Cohen agreed to come on my show, and proved to be a charming guest.
A distinguished foreign correspondent for Reuters and the International Herald Tribune, Cohen nevertheless betrayed what I believe is endemic to those who favor Europe's secularism to America's religiosity -- emotion rather than reason.
Here are some of the points from his opinion piece followed by my responses.
Cohen: "The Continent has paid a heavy price in blood for religious fervor and decided some time ago, as a French king put it, that 'Paris is well worth a Mass.'"
There is no doubt that Western Europe abandoned religion and opted for secularism largely because of the blood spilled in religious wars, just as it abandoned nationalism because of all the blood it spilled in the name of nationalism during World War I.
However, Cohen and others who argue for a secular society ignore the even heavier price in blood Europe has paid for secular fervor. Secular fervor, i.e., communism and Nazism, slaughtered, tortured and enslaved more people in 50 years than all Europe's religious wars did in the course of centuries.
This point is so obvious, and so devastating to the pro-secularists, that you wonder how they deal with it. But having debated secularists for decades, I predicted Cohen's response virtually word for word on my radio show the day before I spoke with him. He labeled communism and Nazism "religions."
This response completely avoids the issue. Communism and Nazism were indeed religion-like in their hold on people, but they were completely secular movements and doctrines. Moreover, communism was violently anti-religious, and Nazism affirmed pre-Christian -- what we tend to call "pagan" -- values and beliefs.
In fact, the emergence of communism and Nazism in an increasingly secular Europe is one of the most powerful arguments for the need for Judeo-Christian religions. Europe's two secular totalitarian systems perfectly illustrate what G.K. Chesterton predicted a hundred years ago: "When people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing -- they believe in anything."
Cohen: "The U.S. culture wars have produced . . . 'the injection of religion into politics in a very overt way.'"
Cohen gives no examples, and though this charge is constantly repeated by many on the left, I have yet to figure out what exactly these critics mean. Do they mean, for example, that those who deem abortion immoral and wish to ban it (except to save the mother's life or in the cases of incest or rape) have injected religion into politics? If so, why is this objectionable?
What are those who derive their values from religion supposed to do -- stay out of the political process? Are only those who derive their values from secular sources or their own hearts allowed to attempt to influence the political process? It seems that this is precisely what Cohen and other secularists argue. But they are not even consistent here. I recall no secularist who protested that those, like the Rev. Martin Luther King, who used religion to fight for black equality "injected religion into politics in a very overt way."
The leftist argument against religious Americans' "injection of religion into politics" is merely its way of trying to keep only the secular and religious left in the political arena -- and the religious right, primarily evangelical Christians, out.
Cohen: "Much too overt for Europeans, whose alarm at George W. Bush's presidency has been fed by his allusions to divine guidance -- 'the hand of a just and faithful God' in shaping events, or his trust in 'the ways of Providence.'"
Cohen and his fellow Europeans sound paranoid here. President Bush has invoked God less than most presidents in American history, and the examples Cohen offers are thoroughly innocuous.
Cohen: "Such beliefs seem to remove decision-making from the realm of the rational at the very moment when the West's enemy acts in the name of fanatical theocracy."
At least in my lifetime, it is the secular left that has embraced far more irrationality than the religious right. It was people on the secular left, not anyone on the religious right, who found Marxism, one of the most irrational doctrines in history, rational. It was only on the secular left that people morally equated the United States and the Soviet Union. It was secular leftists, not religious Jews or Christians, who believed the irrational nonsense that men and women were basically the same.
It is overwhelmingly among the secular (and religious) left that people have bought into the myriad irrational hysterias of my lifetime -- without zero population growth humanity will begin to starve, huge mortality rates in America from heterosexual AIDS, mass death caused by secondhand smoke, and now destruction of the planet by man-induced global warming. It is extremely revealing that with regard to global warming scenarios of man-induced doom, the world's most powerful religious figure, Pope Benedict XVI, has just warned against accepting political dogma in the guise of science. We'll see who turns out to be more rational on this issue -- the secular left or the religious right. I bet everything on the religious.
There is no question but that most religious people have irrational religious views. However, as I wrote in my last column, theology and values are not the same. I am convinced that the human being is programmed to believe in the non-rational. The healthy religious confine their irrationality to their theologies and are quite rational on social issues. On the other hand, vast numbers of secular people in the West have done the very opposite -- rejected irrational religiosity and affirmed irrational social beliefs.
The heart of religion is morality, what is right and wrong. It is nearly impossible to escape morality when defining public policy. They can deny all they want, but secularists inject just as much religion into the political discussion as any evangelical Christian.
because in their own little world, these secularists beleive they are God. and how dare they let something be grater than them.
anytime i talk to an athiest, i always ask them what the date is? and when they answer..i ask how they like that. follow a dating system based off Jesus Christ.
Cohen makes the same mistake that so many on the left make. He starts with ideas that are incorrect...
bttt
What day of the week is it?
anytime i talk to an athiest, i always ask them what the date is? and when they answer..i ask how they like that. follow a dating system based off Jesus Christ.
_____
I’ve never met an atheist that denies the Judeo-Christian foundation of western culture. Have you?
I would think that most atheists to whom you pose the above question shake their head as they walk away from you, wondering the purpose of your complete non-sequitor.
Isn’t the IRA a product of “secular Europe”?
The year 2011 is dead; long live the year 2012!
I like Dennis Prager. He is a pretty smart guy and generally right on the issues.
But here he makes the classic mistake of equating secularism with socialism leaving out the really successful secular system: capitalism. This is your basic red herring/paper tiger argument that compares the damage done in religious wars with the damage done in fighting against the Nazis and the Communists. What it is ignores is the non-wars between cooperating, secular or at least somewhat secular, capitalistic countries. And I include the U.S. in that latter category. The U.S. conduct of business and mutual defense is not based on our religious beliefs at all. For example, what do we have in common with the Japanese and Koreans in the religious realm? The answer is nothing. We have an agreement to trade and provide mutual defense. We don't fight them despite the fact that we do not share religious beliefs with them - it is a purely secular arrangement and is based on a common belief in the principles of capitalism more than any other philosophy.
Sorry Dennis, you are just dead wrong on this one.
You are 1) comparing apples and oranges, and 2) changing the subject.
1) Capitalism is not per-se secular.
Capitalism addresses only the economic aspects. You can be a Nazi capitalist. All capitalism changes is how you address economic risk, not how you order the rest of (and the larger part of) the lives of the citizenry.
You can also be a Christian capitalist. Capitalism flowered in the Christian world.
2) Whether or not capitalism is successful, it doesn't change the fact that secularist wars killed a lot of folks. On the religious side, the fact that Tibetan Buddhism didn't do wars, doesn't change the fact that Arabian Islam does.
...he is just the most ruthless and meanest on the block.....always willing to murder any who would oppose.
No I'm not.
Secularity is simply the state of being separate from religion. The only connection that I see between Christianity and Capitalism is that they co-exist and that Capitalism generally does better co-existing with some religions than with others.
So I declare that Capitalism is just as secular as Nazism and Communism. It doesn't depend on religion. It doesn't need religion. It doesn't address religion. That is what secular means and you cannot exclude Capitalism from the list of secular philosophies no matter what you think.
So I will stand by my statement that it is not secularism that kills people in wars - it is socialism and the coercion that is inherent in trying to impose that ugly philosophy on human beings. Lenin didn't just kill Christians and Jews. He killed people who refused to give up their land. Hitler didn't kill Christians but he killed Jews, just like the Islamics want to do today. What is is so secular about that?
My point restated: Countries who trade with each other and provide for a common defense under a secular Capitalist arrangement do not go to war with each other. Don't blame Secularism as a way of defending the brutality and death that religion has brought and continues to bring to the human race. Blame Socialism and (these days) Radical Islam.
Allies don't go to war with each other most circumstances. And the phrase 'a common defense ...' cuts a pretty narrow slice of history, like only the 'NATO' countries? They have a lot more in common that just capitalism.
Not the happiest of examples, actually - that was Henry IV of France in 1593 to explain why he shifted from Protestantism to Catholicism. It may actually be apropos in a way Cohen didn't mean - our candidates are never so devout as when they're running for office.
I'm not entirely certain that transitioning from killing one another over religion to killing one another over ideology constitutes much of an improvement, actually. Despite the hoo-hah over the topic America is a very long way from a theocracy, and I think that Prager is correct in pointing out the level of concern over the Influence Of The Christian Right has reached the level of insensate paranoia over on the Left. This happens when you begin to believe your own hype.
Nevertheless, aggressive secularism in the form of multiculturalism has drawbacks in precisely the same areas as aggressive theocracy, which is one sign that it has attained a religious status of its own. One has a difficult time differentiating between strictures in public comment based on heresy and strictures on it based on "hate-speech" laws. But at the present time the Inquisition appears to be strictly a secular phenomenon. I'm not sure that's an improvement either.
It may be a narrow slice of history but it is a true slice. The wars that have caused death of millions arise from:
a. Religions fighting religions or everybody else.
b. Socialists fighting everybody else or occasionally each other.
Secularism has NOTHING to do with it. Prager is simply wrong.
What’s the body count for Planned Parenthood?
Secularists presume that if Christianity goes away, so goes the influence of religion in any form.
What they fair to realize is that Islam is waiting in the wings. Wonder how well they’d function with their idealism in that kind of world?
Prager's arguing that religious America hasn't been more violent or dangerous than Europe was in its most secular of centuries.
Cohen made the assertion that American-style religion was more dangerous than European-style secularism, and so far as I can tell, Prager proved him wrong -- Stalin and Hitler arose in Europe, not in America.
If he goes further and says that secularism as such and in itself has been more dangerous than religion, that's debateable, but he also shows Cohen's trick of defining communism and fascism and nazism as "religions" for the sham that it is.
But Prager may go wrong elsewhere: today's Western Europe is an exhausted society.
Arguably a vital, active society may be more dangerous than one that's become tired out and lost the will to assert its values.
Of course, the problem with that is that weak societies may be dangerous precisely in their weakness and inability to defend themselves.
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