[HowlinglyMind-BendingAbsurdity]

By "ambiguity," I was only referring to the omission of definitional specificity for the content of religious expression or the "free exercise" of such. Given the background of the Constitutional signers and the controvervies of prior ecclesial establishments, we can develop some sense of what was meant - the existence of a Deity, a divine revelation, sacred scripture, codes of morality, and so forth. They weren't thinking about voodoo or animism, at any rate. The ontological presuppositions are implied, knowledge of which can be reconstructed from extra-textual sources. It's a legal ambiguity rather than dogmatic or propositional in the metaphysical sense. The assumption would be that there is an order of being which includes the spiritual and an eternal destiny.

[cornelis]

Yes.

Your citations made me pull out the a published essay, "The Origins of Totalitarianism" wherein he reviews Hannah Arendt's book.

Here's an excerpt for good measure:

The true dividing line in the contemporary crisis does not run between liberals and totalitarians, but between the religious and philosophical transcendentalists on the one side and the liberal and totalitarian immanentist sectarians on the other side. It is sad, but it must be reported that the author herself draws this line. The argument starts from her confusion about the "nature of man": "Only the criminal attempt to change the nature of man is adequate to our trembling insight that no nature, not even the nature of man, can any longer be considered to be the measure of all things" --a sentence that, if it has any sense at all, can only mean that the nature of man ceases to be the measure, when some imbecile conceives the notion of changing it. The author seems to be impressed by the imbecile and isready to forget about the nature of man, as well as about all human civilization that has been built on its understanding. The "mob," she concedes, has correclty seen "that the whole of nearly three thousand years of Western civilization . . . has broken down." Out go the philosophers of Greece, the prophets of Israel, Christ, not to mention the patres and scholastics; for man has come of age, and that means "that from now on man is the only possible creator of his own laws and the only possible maker of his own history." This coming-of-age has to be accepted; man is the new lawmaker; and on the tablets wiped clean of the past he will inscribe the "new discoveries in morality," which Edmund Burke had still considered impossible.

Voegelin feels shy about chastizing Arendt, but the point must be made.