Posted on 12/01/2001 10:28:24 AM PST by Brian Kopp DPM
By Gary L. Morella
I have a question for those who believe that the atheistic worship of the state is to be recommended over an appreciation of a "higher" or "natural" law as the foundation for the rights that government ought to secure for the common good.
Natural law can be readily appreciated in the American experience, given the preamble to the Declaration of Independence: "When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary ... to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them ..."
Natural law is something above power or force that gives content to the notion of justice. This notion suggests that there is a higher law by which the positive law of the state is to be measured and judged. Slavery was ultimately abolished in America because of the recognition of this "higher law."
Thomas Aquinas sets the most famous variation of this approach in his Summa Theologica. His natural law is a participation in the wisdom and goodness of God by the human person, formed in the image of the Creator. It expresses the dignity of the person and forms the basis of human rights and fundamental duties. This was the approach later used by Martin Luther King, Jr. in his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," which contains references to Aquinas.
Simply put, what has state worship done for us lately? We only have to look at recent history for an answer. We saw the deaths of six million Jews and 20 million Ukrainians in the concentration camps and gulags of Hitler and Stalin, respectively. Today, we see the killing of 40 million innocents in what should be their safest place of refuge, their mothers' wombs.
If the state is the final arbiter of the law, the sole dispenser of rights, we're in big trouble, given the lessons of history. The state can easily take these rights away with catastrophic consequences. This is inevitable when each man is a universe unto himself, courtesy of Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which ignored a very important question: What happens when each citizen's "personal universe of rights" collides with another's? In the absence of some absolute, immutable, higher law, knowable through reason and not just faith, we're left with anarchy.
But more to the point, the traditionally recognized goal of a respected political regime is the common good. Does killing our children when they're most vulnerable and promoting aberrant behavior that leads to physical ruin meet that goal?
The fact is that ignorance of the necessity for human law to be rooted in the natural law has led to the major ills plaguing society today. This has nothing to do with theocracy. It has everything to do with common sense and the rule of right reason. This is obvious to any Christian who knows that God's supreme gift to us was the opportunity to choose him freely.
Interestingly, those decrying theocracies have no problem accepting a "state religion of amorality," which is promoted by demagogues who won't stand for any opposition. This is the current state of affairs in a "politically correct" but "morally bankrupt" America for which we can thank the example of the former "adolescent-in-chief," whose main claim to fame was making the country more comfortable with its vices.
In other words, when one can accept the simplest of eccentricities, such as Jesus claiming to be Son of God, one has gone far ahead of the others in terms of conveying an infinity of messages and themes - as simple minded Christian may be to some people's point of views.
After all, Christians do speak in tongues, because Christians have been taught that they have no idea of the greatness that they wield in their own simple minded eccentric acceptance of Jesus as Son of God - an essence of freedom through acceptance at the very least of eccentric claims, claims that give deep meaning to life.
That is why I claim no art is superior than others. Quite the contrary, some of the most primitive arts of children demonstrate far better meanings because they are devoid of tyrranical inhibitions, or their cousin obsessions. It makes their art eccentric treasures that no market, nor ideology and rule can force us away from.
That is essentialy why I have a problem with the atheism, because atheism does not see the need for God or any other eccentric belief in society, while any sane society should be founded on such freedom of eccentricity. Indeed, America under an exclusivist God is not an America that would crusade in the name of the exclusivist God, it only is an America that glorifies freedom, eccentricity and individual belief.
I do not believe that an atheist government would show the same glorification of freedom, since atheism is an anti-thesis in itself of eccentric spirituality. There maybe forms of more tolerant atheism but then those would fall in a spiritual kind of atheism and would ultimately involve progressist superstitions and ultimately questions about God - and it would hardly fit atheism. Atheism in effect becomes stubborn, unforgiving and destroys any meaning in life IMHO.
You made this statement, didn't you? 118 posted by tpaine
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To: tpaine
Yes. The statists to whom the author refers, and therefore to whom I refer, are not your usual posters on FR.
119 by p2bRC
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Yet here you are, still claiming that some here are 'typical atheists', - are they also typical statists?
[Quite a large tar brush you've been wielding. - It fairly drips with fundamentalist hypocrisy.]
No, my reference to "typical atheist" is directly related to the comments of Mr. Morella, in bold below, my emphasis, not his.
----- Original Message -----
From: Gary Morella
To: Dr. Brian Kopp Sent: Thursday, December 06, 2001 7:30 AM Subject: What I think of the elf, Carson. Post this on the site for me, would you, Brian.
I sent some personal correspondence to Mr. Carson inviting him to dialog with me concerning his difficulties with my piece on atheism. I have yet to receive a response in the form of arguments from Mr. Carson along these lines. I stand by everything that I said and maintain that Mr. Carson is in no position to criticize something whose context is unknown to him. In the course of that welcomed private invitation to dialog, without the benefit of cheerleaders from a website which detracts from a search for the Truth, which is a Somebody, not a something, - the main reason why I don't waste my time posting to websites, I was told that Mr. Carson posted what I understood to be my private correspondence with him on the New Republic site. I find this inherently dishonest on his part, which begs the question of how can such an individual be trusted? And if you can't be trusted, how can you be believed?
The title to my piece is totally correct. You can't have it both ways. Something cannot "be" and "not be" at the same time in the same place, a fundamental philosophical principle. You cannot nuance atheism. At its core, it's unbelief in God. If you worship the state, implying that the state is your "god"; you are not worshipping THE God, Who if He forget us for a picosecond, we would cease to exist. And please don't say just because someone labels himself in a pro-Christian fashion, that somehow makes him a believer. That is nonsensical. All you have to do to see that is the hypocrisy of so-called Christian politicians who can't even bring themselves to overturning a veto of the infanticide of partial birth abortion. These people are, above all, atheists. How can you claim belief in God while concurrently violating His Fifth Commandment? Actions speak louder than words. The extent of your belief is demonstrated by your example. To imply that somehow your faith can be checked at the door when you enter public life ignores the value of your faith in perfecting you, in an Aristotelian sense, to a common political good, leading ultimately to your final telos in a metaphysical sense, your final end, the summum bonum. This value of faith was recognized in my referenced Preamble to the Constitution by our founding fathers.
Accordingly, I repeat. What HAS atheism done for us lately, other than to cause misery and death on unimaginable scales to use the examples that I did in my op-ed? Moreover, what has atheism EVER done for us? Those questions were directed to a group of local [State College PA] hateful atheistic Christophobes who would have us believe that the regrettable excesses of Christendom, rightfully condemned in the recognition that all men sin, somehow exceed that of their atheistic counterparts - a contention which is ludicrous in the extreme given 1) the examples of nonbelief of Hitler as explicitly described in the only papal encyclical written in German, Mitt Brennender Sorge, from Pius XI in 1937, 2) Stalin, and regrettably, 3) a politically correct America that has completely lost its moral compass to the point of promoting aberrant behavior in an affirmative action civil rights sense, redefining traditional marriage in the process by adding three genders to the two of Genesis, and sanctioning the unrestricted killing of innocents in what should be their safest place of refuge, their mothers wombs for specious reasons of reproductive rights.
What about the rights of those children? I'm reminded of a clever pro-abortion professor who started a class presentation with slides of cells at fertilization, and at subsequent stages of development. At each stage he asked his class sarcastically, "Does this look like life to you?" He continued on in this fashion until some enterprising student politely interrupted him and asked if he could run the slides in reverse starting with a picture of himself.
If there are those on the New Republic website that have difficulties with these truths, there is not a whole lot that I can do about that other than to continue to proclaim them in a world that doesn't know the difference between right and wrong, a world that teaches our children that there is no such thing as right and wrong in a situational ethics sense, which is no ethics sense at all in that life and death questions are immediately compromised. Their New Godless Republic becomes indistinguishable from the most virulent forms of Marxist socialism, something very prevalent in our schools today thanks to the legacy of Dewey and Co. I for one am not going to sit on my hands, suffering from a paralysis of analysis leading to an apathy where talk is cheap. I can't do that for the sake of my children and grandchildren. Moreover, my Catholic faith will not allow me to do that. And I haven't as evidenced by my website.
For Jean-Paul Sartre in "Existentialism and Humanism," there is no eternal truth because there is no divine mind to think it. It was Sartre who provided a basis for the non-Naturalism of moral judgments, a deep reason why "Is can never ground an Ought." An atheist like himself, Sartre observed, has to be thorough-going. If God is dead and out of the picture, with Him must go everything that assumes His existence. Sartre felt that those who thought God could be excised and the world and society would still look basically the same are simply foolish.
The theist or believer holds that human beings are creatures of God. One could consider creation analogous to the human artisan who fashions something for a purpose, a useful or good purpose else quality control dictates that it be discarded. The artisan's work is what it is because of this purpose that is the work's nature and, as such, a means for evaluation of the work. If man is an artifact of God's, man has a nature that provides a measure of his action. Acts that thwart his nature, i.e., acts that are unnatural, are bad, those that fulfill its potential are good. There is this criteria of good and bad action antecedent to a person doing anything at all. He will be good if he fulfills the purpose his Maker has embedded in him, and bad if he does not.
In a Godless world there are no natures because there is no divine artisan. Consequently, there are no guidelines one must consult before acting. One is free to do whatever he wants. His is a total freedom which is not a freedom measured by what he is or what he is designed for. This is Sartre's warped view of the world. One's initial glee that with the dropping of all constraints life is a "bowl of cherries" is dispelled by Sartre's gloomy description of what absolute freedom is like. There are no excuses as there is nothing to diminish our responsibility for what we do. This becomes a freedom too far which man is condemned to. Anything is permitted if God doesn't exist. Many have taken the Sartrean or Nietzschean route looking at the implications of man not having a nature or a destiny or any basis at all in the way things are for appraising them one way or another. This nihilistic mentality takes the form of modernist slogans such as "there is no such thing as right or wrong," "don't impose your morality on me," "I'm OK, you're OK," "reproductive rights," "get out of my bedroom," and one of my personal favorites, "get your rosaries off of my ovaries." This madness has resulted in a juridical devolution that allowed a so-called "c"atholic, and I use the term loosely, Supreme Court justice to declare that each of us has the right to define the universe as he wishes, to determine the point and purpose of our reproductive system, to approve or disapprove of abortion. In short, anything goes. The Supreme Court de facto by this decision has made universal emotivism the law of the land leaving unanswered the question of how long can any society endure or stave off anarchy on such a basis.
How does all this translate to the essence, existence questions? From Sartre's standpoint, for the theist, essence precedes existence as theists see God as a creator and His creation as possessing the nature God gave them, a nature which provides a gauge of the possessor in terms of seeking the good. Contrast this with the atheist who eliminates the Creator resulting in no essence thereby providing no antecedent guide for action. The statement cannot be made that one ought to do something which is a function of a human nature which can be appealed to for judgment reinforcement. Absent a nature, what we are is defined by the acts we perform - existence preceding essence.
Jacques Maritain in "Existence and the Existent" countered Sartre with another look at Thomas Aquinas. Maritain described two fundamentally different ways of interpreting the word existentialism. One being to affirm the primacy of existence, but as implying and preserving essences or natures, and as manifesting the supreme victory of the intellect and of intelligibility which is what he considered authentic existentialism. The other being to affirm the primacy of existence, but as destroying or abolishing essences or natures, and as manifesting the supreme defeat of the intellect and of intelligibility. He called this "apocryphal existentialism," the current kind as practiced by Sartre and company, an existentialism which no longer signifies anything at all. He reasoned that, if you abolish essence, or that which esse posits, by that very act you abolish existence or esse. These two notions he held are correlative and inseparable defining an existentialism that is self-destroying.
The existentialism of Sartre in which the primacy of existence is asserted is paid for by the abolition of intelligible nature or essence - "the" characteristic of the atheistic existentialism of today. This finite chaotic existence of subjects devoid of essence, the atheistic option, is foisted on mankind resulting in a radically irrational world making a succession of absolute and irrevocable choices which involves it irretrievably in a morass of ever-new situations which are unresolvable. The supreme irony is that the atheists demand absolute choices as a function of moral relativism, not of universal, absolute, immutable laws predicated on the natural good. Consider the following scenario.
Atheists have no problems with the notion that there are no absolute truths, i.e., everything is relative, because absolute truths have a religious connotation which they would be very uncomfortable with.
Imagine someone arguing that human dignity is not absolute, but merely relative. There are two replies to such relativism, one theoretical and the other practical. First, a relativist actually makes an absolute claim in stating that "everything is relative."
Not only do relativists theoretically contradict themselves with their own first premise, they contradict themselves in practice. As Peter Kreeft notes, "The relativist lets the cat out of the bag when you practice what he preaches, when you act toward him as if his own philosophy of relativism were true. He may preach relativism, but he expects you to practice absolutism." (Ref the "absolute" rights to desecrate the Mother of God such as happened at Penn State a few years ago.) Kreeft gives the example of telling his relativist students that all women in the class will flunk. Given their relativist premises, the students have no argument to make against so blatantly unfair a practice. Who are they, after all, to IMPOSE THEIR BELIEFS ON HIM?
Now apply this reasoning to the dignity of all human life. Many today wish to apply relativism to the value of human life, arguing that manhood is not absolutely, but only relatively, applicable to all human beings. But the lines drawn in such application, based on convenience, are completely arbitrary. If someone tells you that life is complex and demands such arbitrariness, you could ask him, "so does that mean that you wouldn't mind if a thief, faced with the 'complexity' of his own existence, decides to draw some arbitrary lines and steal your wallet?"
No one in his right mind stands for the relativistic view of human dignity when it comes to his or her own human dignity. Each of us - even the hardened secularist who preaches relativism - instinctively recognizes that our dignity as persons implies certain moral absolutes of behavior. These moral absolutes are a function of the Natural Law, without which anarchy exists.
I repeat a question which is never answered. What keeps said atheistic, relativistic society from deciding that a certain group is undesirable and thus can be eliminated for the good of the whole? It's happening in Holland with Euthanasia which started out as physician assisted suicide, evolved to voluntary euthanasia, and now is pure and simply involuntary euthanasia. Are people worthless because they are old? Tell that to Pablo Casals who was a virtuoso cellist at 90. It's happening to millions of babies in the womb - the holocaust of our time with the blessings of an activist judiciary who usurp the legislative branch of government by making laws instead of interpreting them contrary to the tenets of a Constitution which, if it means anything, must remain static to give any kind of meaning to "separation of powers."
Just who would you appeal to in a Godless society when the knock arrives at your door and you're told, it's time for you to meet the great nothing? Surely, even atheists would hold that you have some rights? But what happens when those rights are perceived to be yours alone and the appeal for your life is taken as FORCING YOUR BELIEFS DOWN SOMEONE ELSE'S THROAT. What do you do in such a situation?
The bias of contemporary existentialism is to manage at all costs to make atheism livable no matter how ridiculous the consequences. The question of what if by chance that could not be managed does not even arise. It is deliberately squashed and forbidden for very good reasons - a little thought easily proves its illogic. The straw that breaks the camel's back is that Sartre declares himself firmly optimistic, leaving the tragic sense to Christians. There is nothing equal to the stature of a Nietzsche and his disciples whose most original and highly appreciated contribution of their existentialism to our age, per Maritain, is the renunciation of any measure of grandeur.
Intelligibles are objects of thought. The metaphysician knows that his task is to search for the ultimate foundation of the intelligibility of things as of every other quality or perfection of being. He finds it in pure Act, and understands that in the final analysis there exists no human nature if the divine Intellect did not perceive its own Essence, and in that Essence the eternal idea of man, not an abstract and universal idea as our ideas are, but a creative idea. Maritain says "that a philosopher is not a philosopher if he is not a metaphysician." This would seem only logical since philosophy is a search for the truth and if the search leads to a capitalized version of Truth, i.e., Perfect Truth, what better vehicle for bridging to the supernatural, to theology, than metaphysics. To constrain a philosophy to the natural realm when it leads elsewhere is bad science by any definition. You don't say to the mathematician, "sorry, you cannot extend Newtonian mechanics to N or curved space because we won't let you." That would be an absurdity which is the correct descriptor for Sartrean existentialism.
Maritain goes on to describe the original error that underlies all the modern existentialist philosophies. "Ignorant of or neglecting the warning of the old scholastic wisdom, that 'the act of existing cannot be the object of a perfect abstraction,' these philosophies presuppose that existence can be isolated. They contend that existence alone is the nourishing soil of philosophy. They treat of existence without treating of being. They call themselves philosophies of existence instead of calling themselves philosophies of being." This reduces to the realization that the concept of existence cannot be detached from the concept of essence. These are inseparable in that they make up the same concept, albeit varied, of being which precedes the judgment of existence in the order of material or subject causality, with the judgment of existence preceding the idea of being in the order of formal causality.
Metaphysics uses the concept of existence to know a reality which is not an essence, but is the very act of existing. Existence cannot be detached from essence as it is always the existence of something, of a capacity to exist. It is the primary source of intelligibility for Maritain, but not being an essence or an intelligible, this source has to be super-intelligible. Maritain asks "why should it be astonishing that at the summit of all beings, at the point where everything is carried to pure transcendent act, the intelligibility of essence should fuse in on absolute identity with the super-intelligibility of existence, in the incomprehensible unity of Him Who is?"
Maritain describes Thomism as an "existentialist intellectualism" which, coupled with Thomas's insistence on the primacy of the speculative, illustrates the essential difference which sets this philosophy apart from contemporary existentialism that is false because it denies speculation in favor of action and confuses knowledge with power.
Thomas teaches that in every authentically moral act, man, in order to apply the law, must grasp the universal in his own singular existence where he is alone face to face with God. The contemporary atheistic existentialists, on the other hand, reject the ethical universal along with all essence. They repudiate it, moreover, dismiss it out of hand and believe that if there were a system of moral rules, those rules would automatically apply to particular cases making a mockery of all morality. What the liberal ideologues have done is to suppress generality and universal law with the end result that liberty, their battlecry, is suppressed. This in turn suppresses reason. I'm reminded of an old game show of the 50s-60s called "Truth or Consequences." The title is apropos today. We don't want the truth; the consequences are Planned Parenthood vs. Casey where freedom for the autonomous unencumbered self is confused with license as every man becomes his own god, creating his own universe. The fact that said universes invariably collide was totally ignored by the majority of our illustrious Supreme Court justices.
Feuerbach declared that God was the creation and the alienation of man; Nietzsche proclaimed the death of God. They were the theologians of our contemporary atheistic philosophies. Evidently, it never occurred to them why would someone invent an immutable, omnipotent, omniscient, all-merciful, all-just because mercy without justice has no meaning, eternal God when the inventors would bear equal responsibility for obeying Same and suffer the same consequences for disobedience. No one would invent a God like that; you would invent a "feel-good" god to make you comfortable with your vices - a god in a constant state of evolution as a function of man's increased technical prowess. This god exists today where faith is watered down so as not to offend the sensibilities of modern man whose self esteem must survive at all costs. The question must be asked, "why were Feuerbach, Nietzsche, Sartre and their disciples so bitter?" The answer is simple. If man is not known to God, if he only has the experience of his personal existence and his subjectivity, then he also has the experience of his desperate solitude. He longs for death and beyond with total annihilation the only thing left for him. Everything linked to the combat for the salvation of self resembling a posture of faith has disappeared. The soul has been evacuated. With it went the sense of sin and the dignity of the existent with the grandeur of its liberty. "The nothingness in the existent has been replaced by the nothingness of the existence," per Maritain. In short, misery loves company with this sorry trio having many companions today. I close with the words of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, one who experienced the modernist "virtues" of atheism firsthand in the Soviet gulags. "The material laws alone do not explain our life or give it direction. The laws of physics and physiology will never reveal the indisputable manner in which the Creator constantly day in and day out, participates in the life of each one of us, unfailingly granting us the energy of existence. To the ill-considered hopes of the last two centuries, which have brought us to the brink of nuclear and non-nuclear death, we can propose only a determined guest for the warm hand of God, which we have so rashly and self-confidently spurned."
Best regards, New Republic and Mr. Carson.
Gary L. Morella
You fulfill your role as a typical atheist quite well. Regards.
202 posted by proud2bRC
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To: proud2bRC
"But indeed most statists are atheists." You made this statement, didn't you?
118 posted by tpaine
------------------------------------------ To: tpaine
Yes. The statists to whom the author refers, and therefore to whom I refer, are not your usual posters on FR.
119 by p2bRC
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Yet here you are, still claiming that some here are 'typical atheists', - are they also typical statists?
[Quite a large tar brush you've been wielding. - It fairly drips with fundamentalist hypocrisy.]
203 posted by tpaine
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To: tpaine; elfman2
No, my reference to "typical atheist" is directly related to the comments of Mr. Morella ----
--- Your continued attempts to implicate Morella in your flat statements is ludicrous. You wrote the words at #202, and those earlier quoted in my post #118. What the author raves about is immaterial.
-- Pretty strange to see you deny what you obviously wrote.
It looks like Morella's simply setting up an out for himself so that he can be excused from having to ever address my original criticism. The last sentence that I ever wrote him was the only one that addressed this subject, "If you prefer to not become a member of Free Republic please be aware that I may post any relevant correspondence of ours to that thread." Starting off a reply with that accusation is pretty desperate,... and pitiful.
3-4 times I directed Morella to post #146 where I laid out the problem with his essay and specifically asked for a succinct reply (bold facing that word.) I repeated it so many times because I knew he would think his best option would be to try to obscure the failure of his premise in a long rambling diatribe, ignoring the fundamental problem laid out in that post. I was right.
Don’t you see Brian, that's not the behavior of "men with good intentions"! That's why I'm so short with the guy. The signs have always been there. This is the clincher. If you have even a little bit of objectivity and honor left in you, you'll see it too!
I skimmed about 30% of Morella's 3515 word temper tantrum and didn't find any reference to the question for debate that I set up in #146, only of tired platitudes and redirection. I'm not interested in reading more Morella.
Perhaps Morella really believes that thing really was a reply. Maybe he's that blinded by his fanaticism for his ideology. But more likely, some part of him knows that he has a MAJOR failure running like a fissure through the foundation of his reasoning in this article, and he's having a cow trying to hide it from everyone, perhaps even himself.
Morella has taken the coward's way out so far. And we're likely never going to see a succinct reply to my very specific question in #146.
This isn't an argument for anything. Most proper skeptics (which a great many atheists are), don't trust ANYTHING, which is arguably a rational position. Trust in God is as an arbitrary position as trusting in Hitler, and neither helps most people.
Honestly, I would imagine that every person on this thread has quite a bit of objectivity and honor, in their own fashion. I apologize for implying otherwise.
With that said, I must bow out of this debate. Morella is a close personal friend, and as such I cannot objectively defend him or his statements here from his critics, at least not with charity, given the type of attack.
I also know that his schedule is grueling, both his work duties and his further graduate level studies in philosophy. He has neither the time nor the desire to participate in ongoing forum discussions, either on FR or elsewhere on the internet, and I should not have involved him in this thread.
Debating the relative merits of atheistic philosophy is not my own area of expertise. My own subject area is the morality of reproductive technology.
Good day. You have won the debate. God Bless you.
Never trust an atheist...whether it be to keep private email private, or anything else on the long sliding scale of morality. My point was that men of good will don't publically post email that they have been explicitly told was not to be made public. Men of good will do not break simple codes of conduct such as this just to win a point of debate, and in order to call in all their fellow apes with whom they desire to thump their chest at their perceived victory.
"Typical atheist," i.e., typical idiot for whom good form and decency mean nothing, especially if they can use their breaking of another man's explicit requestin order to mock that which they have neither the intellect nor the academic level to understand.
I understand better the atheists on FR after this thread. I assumed atheists here would be a notch above the average atheist with whom I have conversed. I was sadly disappointed. I should have known better than to assume there was any such beast as a true conservative atheist. I have yet to find one that breaks free of their own caricature. Including here.
Prophetic, I shoulda shut up after that post... oh well
--- Honesty is usually blunt. Glad to see you finally decided it's also a good policy.
Never trust an atheist...whether it be to keep private email private, or anything else on the long sliding scale of morality.
--- You call that honesty, I call it a disgraceful generality, a slur on people you simply choose to misunderstand. -- For shame.
My point was that men of good will don't publically post email that they have been explicitly told was not to be made public. Men of good will do not break simple codes of conduct such as this just to win a point of debate, and in order to call in all their fellow apes with whom they desire to thump their chest at their perceived victory.
"Typical atheist," i.e., typical idiot for whom good form and decency mean nothing, especially if they can use their breaking of another man's explicit requestin order to mock that which they have neither the intellect nor the academic level to understand.
I understand better the atheists on FR after this thread. I assumed atheists here would be a notch above the average atheist with whom I have conversed. I was sadly disappointed. I should have known better than to assume there was any such beast as a true conservative atheist. I have yet to find one that breaks free of their own caricature. Including here. - #209 -
And you claim to be a good decent Christian, proud to be a Catholic.
I dare say your peers [I was confirmed RC 50+ years ago], would urge you to the confessional for the above rant.
Usually my peers freepmail me to thank me for saying that which all of them wanted to say, but charity prevented them from saying.
OK, I was uncharitable. Oh well. Of course, scruples over making charitable statements have not held the tongue of any of the atheists on this thread.
(Then again, charity is a virtue, God is the author of virtue, and atheists do not believe in God. So I should not expect anything resembling charity from an atheist.)
My point was that men of good will don't publically post email that they have been explicitly told was not to be made public. Men of good will do not break simple codes of conduct such as this just to win a point of debate, and in order to call in all their fellow apes with whom they desire to thump their chest at their perceived victory.
Before discussing the relative merits of goverment religious involvements, however, we had best define any ambigous terms and correct any mis-associations drawn by people attempting to insult others.
Myticism - A belef in a spiritual aspect to the Universe. Implied is that humans can become aware of and be affected by (for good or ill) this spiritual aspect of existence.
Materialism - The belief that there is no spiritual aspect of the universe, or that if there is, men cannot perceive it or be affected by it.
Theism - A beleif in a divine (or God). This is a personal beleif and does not imply (but does not exclude) a religion.
Atheism - A belief that there is no divine force (or God).
Agnostic - A person who is undecided about the existence of a God and is not willing to take your word for it.
Religion - A human organization composed of indiviuals with like beliefs about the nature of God and the way in which God desires humans to act. Most modern religions would agree that the purpose of a religion is, "To serve God, and provide services for the members of the religion." These "services" include fellowship, quidance, support, help learning more about how to serve God, etc. While this definition is not all-ecompassing, it is broad enough to serve this discussion.
Statism - A beleif in the supremicy of the state over the individual. The individual's purpose is to serve the state.
Individualism - The belief in the supremacy of the individual over the state. The state exists by and for the individuals that compose it.
Ideology - A set of priciples or beliefs. Usually (but not always) political. Thus adherence to the priciples of Communism, Fasism, or Democracy would all be ideologies. But so would Socialism, Enviromentalism, or Libertarianism.
Fanaticism - The beleif that the pursuit of one's agenda supercedes all other considerations. This would include the lives or welfare of anyone else. Thus a fanatic will happily kill, enslave, or anything else to advance his cause. Mullah Omar is a religious fanatic; killing people who violate the "laws of islam" (as he sees them). The people who spike trees to kill lumberjacks are ideological fanatics.
With that out of the way we can discuss the Points raised by the post. First; that atheism equates to statism.
As we can see from our definitions, there is no direct correlation between atheism/theism and statism/idividualism. Indeed, for over a thousand years Theism was used to justify extreme statism. This came to be know as the "Divine Right of Kings". At it's height, disobediance to the goverment was equated with heresy and critisism of the government was blasphemy. "As God has appointed your sovereign over you, disobedience to the sovereign is disobedience to God." Further, there are plenty of examples of people who combine these beleifs in different ways:
Thomas Jefferson was a Theist-Individualist
Ayn Rand was an Atheist-Individualist
Thomas Hobbs (author of "The Leviathon") was a Theist-Statist
Karl Marx was and Atheist-Statist
As we can see, the contention that atheism equates to statism founders on the rocks of both a thousand years of history and many of the brightest social-thinkers of our time. I must consider this idea "disproved".
I'd planned to make this longer, but I have to go now. I will address other points later if people are still reading this post, but I have to go now : my wife needs me, and duty must.
I've just skimmed some of your older threads on this same subject. - Weird. - Seems you have quite an obsession about atheists. Get help.
Thanks & regards.
athiest are God/Truth haters--Atheists are God-haters?
negative...propagators-carriers of hate-evil!Can you name one instance where the propagation of hate has had atheism at its root (rather than on the side, as in Soviet Russia and Red China - which were as much personality cults as they were atheist states)? Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, assorted other religions, have been, historically, the root causes of hate and evil on a number of occassions.
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