Yup, right next to the tree.
Posted on 02/26/2014 3:05:25 PM PST by Notary Sojac
Yesterday, in response to one of the many brouhahas that CPAC seems always to invite, Brent Bozell issued the following statement:
The invitation extended by the ACU, Al Cardenas and CPAC to American Atheists to have a booth is more than an attack on conservative principles. It is an attack on God Himself. American Atheists is an organization devoted to the hatred of God. How on earth could CPAC, or the ACU and its board of directors, and Al Cardenas condone such an atrocity?
The particular merits of the American Atheists group to one side, this is a rather astounding thing for Bozell to have said. In just 63 words, he confuses disbelief in God for “hatred” for God — a mistake that not only begs the question but is inherently absurd (one cannot very well hate what one does not believe is there); he condemns an entire conference on the basis of one participant — not a good look for a struggling movement, I’m afraid; and, most alarmingly perhaps, he insinuates that one cannot simultaneously be a conservative and an atheist. I reject this idea — and with force.
If atheism and conservatism are incompatible, then I am not a conservative. And nor, I am given to understand, are George Will, Charles Krauthammer, Anthony Daniels, Walter Olson, Heather Mac Donald, James Taranto, Allahpundit, or S. E. Cupp. There is no getting around this — no splitting the difference: I don’t believe there is a God. It’s not that I’m “not sure” or that I haven’t ever bothered to think about it; it’s that I actively think there isn’t a God — much as I think there are no fairies or unicorns or elves. The degree to which I’m confident in this view works on a scale, certainly: I’m much surer, for example, that the claims of particular religions are untrue and that there is no power intervening in the affairs of man than I am that there was no prime mover of any sort. But, when it comes down to it, I don’t believe in any of those propositions. Am I to be excommunicated from the Right?
One of the problems we have when thinking about atheism in the modern era is that the word has been hijacked and turned into a political position when it is no such thing. The Oxford English Dictionary defines an “atheist” as someone who exhibits “disbelief in, or denial of, the existence of a god.” That’s me right there — and that really is the extent of it. No, I don’t dislike anyone who does believe that there is a God; no, with a few obvious exceptions, I am not angry at the religious; and no, I do not believe the devout to be in any way worse or less intelligent than myself. Insofar as the question inspires irritation in me at all it is largely reserved for the sneering, smarmy, and incomprehensibly self-satisfied New Atheist movement, which has turned the worthwhile writings of some extremely smart people into an organized means by which a cabal of semi-educated twentysomethings might berate the vast majority of the human population and then congratulate one another as to how clever they are. (For some startling examples of this, see Reddit.)
Which is to say that, philosophically speaking, I couldn’t really care less (my friend Andrew Kirell suggests this makes me an “Apatheist”) and practically speaking I am actually pretty warm toward religion — at least as it is practiced in America. True or false, American religion plays a vital and welcome role in civil society, has provided a number of indispensable insights into the human condition, acts as a remarkably effective and necessary check on the ambitions of government and central social-planners, is worthy of respect and measured inquiry on the Burkean grounds that it has endured for this long and been adopted by so many, and has been instrumental in making the United States what it is today. “To regret religion,” my fellow Brit, conservative, and atheist, Anthony Daniels, writes correctly, “is to regret our civilization and its monuments, its achievements, and its legacy.” I do not regret our civilization, its monuments, its achievements, and its legacy. And I do not regret religion either.
Constitutionally and legally, America is a secular state, and the principle that the government should be strictly prohibited from making distinctions between myself (an atheist) and my fiancée (a Catholic) is one for which I would fight to the death. (David Barton and his brazen historical revisionism can go hang: This is a republic, dammit.) But nations are not made by laws alone. Suppose we were to run two simulations. In one, America develops full of mostly Protestant Christians; in the other, it develops full of atheists or Communists or devotees of Spinoza. Are we honestly to believe that the country would have come out the same in each case? Of course not. For all the mistakes that are made in religion’s name, I am familiar enough with the various attempts to run societies on allegedly “modern” grounds to worry that the latter options would have been much less pretty indeed.
None of this, however, excuses the manner in which conservatives often treat atheists such as myself. George H. W. Bush, who was more usually reticent on such topics, is reported to have said that he didn’t “know that atheists should be regarded as citizens, nor should they be regarded as patriotic.” “This,” Bush allegedly told Robert I. Sherman, “is one nation under God.” Whether Bush ever uttered these words or not, this sentiment has been expressed by others elsewhere. It is a significant mistake. What “this nation” is, in fact, is one nation under the Constitution — a document that precedes the “under God” reference in the Gettysburg Address by more than seven decades and the inclusion of the phrase in the Pledge of Allegiance by 165 years. (“In God We Trust,” too, was a modern addition, replacing “E Pluribus Unum” as the national motto in 1956 after 174 years.)
Indeed, given the troubled waters into which American religious liberty has of late been pushed, it strikes me that conservatives ought to be courting atheists — not shunning them. I will happily take to the barricades for religious conscience rights, not least because my own security as a heretic is bound up with that of those who differ from me, and because a truly free country seeks to leave alone as many people as possible — however eccentric I might find their views or they might find mine. In my experience at least, it is Progressivism and not conservatism that is eternally hostile to variation and to individual belief, and, while we are constantly told that the opposite is the case, it is those who pride themselves on being secular who seem more likely and more keen to abridge my liberties than those who pride themselves on being religious. That I do not share the convictions of the religious by no means implies that I wish for the state to reach into their lives. Nevertheless, religious conservatives will find themselves without many friends if they allow figures such as Mr. Bozell to shoo away the few atheists who are sympathetic to their broader cause.
As it happens, not only do I reject the claim that the two positions are antagonistic, but I’d venture that much of what informs my atheism informs my conservatism also. I am possessed of a latent skepticism of pretty much everything, a hostility toward the notion that one should believe things because they are a nice idea, a fear of holistic philosophies, a dislike of authority and of dogma, a strong belief in the Enlightenment as interpreted and experienced by the British and not the French, and a rather tenacious refusal to join groups. Occasionally, I’m asked why I “believe there is no God,” which is a reasonable question in a vacuum but which nonetheless rather seems to invert the traditional order of things. After all, that’s not typically how we make our inquiries on the right, is it? Instead, we ask what evidence there is that something is true. Think, perhaps, of how we approach new gun-control measures and inevitably bristle at the question, “Why don’t you want to do this?”
A great deal of the friction between atheists and conservatives seems to derive from a reasonable question. “If you don’t consider that human beings are entitled to ‘God given’ liberties,” I am often asked, “don’t you believe that the unalienable rights that you spend your days defending are merely the product of ancient legal accidents or of the one-time whims of transient majorities?” Well, no, not really. As far as I can see, the American settlement can thrive perfectly well within my worldview. God or no God, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Declaration of Independence are all built upon centuries of English law, human experience, and British and European philosophy, and the natural law case for them stands nicely on its own. Thomas Jefferson, who penned the Declaration, was not a religious man in any broad sense but a Deist, and his use of the term “Nature’s God” in laying out the framework for the new country was no accident. Jefferson was by no means an “atheist” — at least not in any modern sense: He believed in the moral teachings of Jesus; his work owed a great debt to the culture of toleration that English Protestantism had fostered; and, like almost all 18th-century thinkers, he believed in a prime mover. Nevertheless, he ultimately rejected the truth claims of revealed religion (and the Divine Right of Kings that he believed such a position inevitably yielded) and he relied instead on a “Creator” who looked like the God of Deism and not of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
As David J. Voelker has convincingly argued, Jefferson
rejected revealed religion because revealed religion suggests a violation of the laws of nature. For revelation or any miracle to occur, the laws of nature would necessarily be broken. Jefferson did not accept this violation of natural laws. He attributed to God only such qualities as reason suggested.
“Of the nature of this being,” Jefferson wrote to John Adams in 1817, “we know nothing.” Neither do I. Indeed, I do not believe that there is a “being” at all. And yet one can reasonably easily take Jefferson’s example and, without having to have an answer as to what created the world, merely rely upon the same sources as he did — upon Locke and Newton and Cicero and Bacon and, ultimately, upon one’s own human reason. From this, one can argue that the properties of the universe suggest self-ownership, that this self-ownership yields certain rights that should be held to be unalienable, and that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. After all, that’s what we’re all fighting for. Right?
Yup, right next to the tree.
Thanks, since I am usually talking to the Notary Sojac types, I don’t often know if anyone is agreeing with what I post.
//I don’t care what my neighbor does, unless it is something that demands I shoot him or her.//
So the troll says now, but he has spent time on the religion board bashing Christians.
A well deserved Zot for Elk, IMO.
Thanks for the ping. Long overdue for both him and elk
Elkfersupper got a quiet zot but I didn’t want you to miss the 2fer
And yet, they promoted “scientific atheism”, in some cases banning religion outright, and in the cases they didn’t, they restricted religion, and discriminated in favor of atheists.
Amen. As I posted earlier in this thread, it's very revealing to find out that even longtime FReepers (elkfersupper since August 2000) mock God, comparing His Son Christ to satan's servant, mohammed. They are not Conservative if they deny the very foundation upon which America and our precious freedoms were built.
I'll confess that I may have played some small role in his riding the lightning since I sent a private message to the Admin Moderator about the disrespect shown to Our Lord and Savior as well as vulgar phrase used toward a FReeper.
And frankly, the whole born on date business smacks of the seniority so cherished by union goons and the tenure principle that keeps leftist professors employed for life. Likewise, the "born on date" of Senator Patrick Leahy is January 3, 1975. I'll take a "n00b" like our great Senator Ted Cruz any day!
FR has changed and grown as have people. But the original premise had a reason and a good one.
Thanks for the good times.
I think that you have to ask Jim Robinson. Why don’t you sleep on your request? You may change your mind.
“American Atheists is an organization devoted to the hatred of God. How on earth could CPAC, or the ACU and its board of directors, and Al Cardenas condone such an atrocity?”
I guess Brent Bozell hasn’t been paying attention to what CPAC has become.
“Capitalism in fact was usually considered, in most religious traditions, including most of historical Christianity, as essentially godless and morally compromised.”
Proof that you are profoundly ignorant of John Calvin’s writings on the subject.
The sterility of money concept that undergirds a hostility to capitalism comes out of ancient Greek philosophy, Aristotle in particular, not the Bible.
I warned elk back in post 66 he was itching for a zot. Later when he compared Christ to Mohammad..... I knew he was a gonner.
Damn elk. You need a bath. This is a God fearing website, not a place to claim you are nothing more than a mutated fish.
The Economics of Calvin and Calvinism by Murray N. Rothbard
“As for the Bible, Luke’s famous injunction only orders generosity towards the poor, while Hebraic law in the Old Testament is not binding in modern society. To Calvin, then, usury is perfectly licit, provided that it is not charged in loans to the poor, who would be hurt by such payment. Also, any legal maximum of course must be obeyed. And finally, Calvin maintained that no one should function as a professional moneylender.
“The odd result was that hedging his explicit pro-usury doctrine with qualification, Calvin in practice converged on the views of such Scholastics as Biel, Summenhart, Cajetan, and Eck. Calvin began with a sweeping theoretical defense of interest taking and then hedged it about with qualifications; the liberal Scholastics began with a prohibition of usury and then qualified it away. But while in practice the two groups converged and the Scholastics, in discovering and elaborating upon exceptions to the usury ban, were theoretically more sophisticated and fruitful, Calvin’s bold break with the formal ban was a liberating breakthrough in Western thought and practice. It also threw the responsibility for applying teachings on usury from the Church or state to the individual’s conscience. As Tawney puts it, “The significant feature in his [Calvin’s] discussion of the subject is that he assumes credit to be a normal and inevitable incident in the life of a society.”[1]
“A more subtle difference, but in the long run perhaps having more influence on the development of economic thought, was the Calvinist concept of the “calling.” This new concept was embryonic in Calvin and was developed further by later Calvinists, and especially Puritans, in the late 17th century. Older economic historians, such as Max Weber, made far too much of the Calvinist as against Lutheran and Catholic conceptions of the “calling.” All these religious groups emphasized the merit of being productive in one’s labor or occupation, one’s “calling” in life. But there is, especially in the later Puritans, the idea of success in one’s calling as a visible sign of being a member of the elect. The success is striven for, of course, not to prove that one is a member of the elect destined to be saved but, assuming that one is in the elect by virtue of one’s Calvinist faith, to strive to labor and succeed for the glory of God. A Calvinist emphasis on postponement of earthly gratification led to a particular stress on saving. Labor or “industry” and thrift, almost for their own sake, or rather for God’s sake, were emphasized in Calvinism much more than in the other segments of Christianity.[2]
You, My Dear, TheOldLady, are one of my heroes and always shall be. Thank you so much for the ping. Zot is what it is!
I find it amusing that so many people just have to redefine whatever they want at a whim. Conservative isn’t a fluid thing. It’s pretty simple, rigid and defined. And it has always included God.
I personally have no issue with Atheists that believe the other things that conservatives do. But it is farcical to think that you can gut the very core of what the philosophy is about.
IT IS BASED ON CHRISTIAN/JEWISH MORALITY.
Always was, always will be. And there is really no difference between a militant atheist whining that he’s a conservative and a militant homosexual whining that he is a conservative.
Simple answer here. No. They aren’t. How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a leg don’t make it one.
As posted above you cannot logically be an atheist and be conservative and Elk was more of an anti-theist anarchist than a Conservative.
Yeah some things you just can’t come back from, but he has been cruising for a zot for awhile now.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.