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?
Aristotle was not alone.
Rome had a traditional distrust of business built into its institutions way before Aristotle was an influence. And so did Greece. Sparta was not alone in its traditional attitudes.
One can best say that Aristotle reflected his milieu.
And European Christianity being the heir of the classical world carried it over with its own twists.
How wrong can you be?
I never said you support socialism, I said you probably like capitalism yourself, while most atheists don’t.
This is what I said.
“”Capitalism is seen as the most moral of economic systems, you seem to see it as immoral, and socialism as moral, while you probably like capitalism yourself, in general, atheists are only interested in short term gain, so they vote democrat to loot what they can today, and to live as they want, for today, with no concern of the future””
Christians are naturally the biggest supporters of capitalism, they created America, and created it as a capitalist nation.
Atheists are massively socialist and big government, and anti-American.
You sound young, and as though you come from a liberal background, is that the case?
I think this guy is too shallow and closed off from reality to waste much time on, he obviously doesn’t understand anything.
Yeah. I’ve given up.
You can be as selfish and self-centered as you like. God gave man free will but there's a price.
Have a nice day.
But you said I should help others because I want to out of love and now you are saying that I should do these things to avoid paying a price which I am assuming is a punishment. If I want to help people and get pleasure from it why does that require a belief in God?
If anyone will not welcome you or listen to your words, leave that home or town and shake the dust off your feet
“you seem to see it (capitalism) as immoral, and socialism as moral”
Are these not your words?
That is still not an answer to the question. Why won’t you answer the question?
What question was that now?
The ones posed to you where you keep running in circles chasing your own tail?
Give it up.
Sure it is. It’s the most simple of all politics. The very definition of conservative means not doing every new feel good/hair brained thing coming down the pike.
Liberalism is complex. It shifts with the winds. You always have to check and see which color bracelet to wear and read up on which words are now verboten that were in wide use the day before...lest some be offended. Liberalism is mental gymnastics given form.
Conservatism is simple. When something has worked well forever...do that. That’s it in a nutshell. No need to fix what ain’t broke. When you compare that statement to any given conservative idea, you see it fits in perfectly.
Simply.
Not so simple. What you have there is a simplified statement of Burkes ideas. Thats something but certainly not everything.
Russell Kirk defined conservatism (grabbing from Wiki as I dont have his book handy at the moment) -
A belief in a transcendent order, which Kirk described variously as based in tradition, divine revelation, or natural law;
An affection for the “variety and mystery” of human existence;
A conviction that society requires orders and classes that emphasize natural distinctions;
A belief that property and freedom are closely linked;
A faith in custom, convention, and prescription, and
A recognition that innovation must be tied to existing traditions and customs, which entails a respect for the political value of prudence.
And you can mix and match those, emphasize of de-emphasize as required.
In practice, as per Kirk and plenty of others, notably Buckley, conservatism is naturally heterogenous, being as it can come from many dissimilar and unique traditions; liberalism, etc. is by nature a matter of fashion which at any given time tends to conformity. As we see today.
We can cite conservatives as required and find huge differences between them.
Chesterton was quite a different fellow (even politically) from Churchill, who wasn’t all that much like Robert Taft.
I COMPLETELY DISAGREE with Bozell here.
The GOP and Atheism share core traits:
1. Arrogance. Atheists are, as we know, secular humanists so arrogant that they are unequivocal in their declaration that ‘There is no God but Man’. Agnostics, by contrast, are conflicted, and while they generally believe there is no God, there is room for doubt. You can have principled discussions about the matter with them. They can be swayed by evidence.
Arrogance within the GOP-e is such that there is no other Republican but the one they invented this week, which gets kinder and gentler with each passing day, to the point where today’s Republican is indistinguishable from Tom Harkin.
2. An inability to incorporate evidence as a survival instinct. The Atheist, should such a person actually exist in practice, is driven almost completely by short-term self-interest so intense that it overcomes almost any ability at even tactical cognitive behavior. Strategic behavior is COMPLETELY beyond the Atheist, in that even when presented with a probabilistic analysis of the ohysical and metaphysical survival rate of Christian vs Atheist, there is generally no response at all, whatsoever.
The GOP shares this same fatal similarity with its Atheist cousin. In that no matter HOW much evidence that truly conservative, strict-constructionist, small-government, free market positions ALWAYS succeed both politically and economically, in the words of George Wallace, they vow they are never going to be ‘outniggered’ again by their more ideologically bigoted progressive opponents, and thus seek to adopt the very policies that have been proven over the last 5000 years of public policy history to have failed with absolute consistency.
You see, the modern GOP is anti-baby, pro-UN, pro-socialist, pro-fascist (state run industries), anti-religion, pro-pedophile, weak-military, pro-stimulus, pro-subsidy, pro-regulation, pro-illegal alien, anti-middle class, pro crony capitalist in a way even more important to those causes than the Progressives actually are: They give cover and legitimacy to those causes by way of token resistance.
Today’s GOP - Home of the ‘Show Vote’.
“We were overrun.” - John Boehner. That short enunciation of the basic gist of the second shared trait lends the illusion that all of the provably failed concepts promoted by Progressives actually won in the arena of ideas.
At this point, we would lose less if Washington DC were destroyed by multiple ICBMs than to try and fix what we have today.
If the 50 states today decided to disband its union, and pocket all of the federal money it sends to DC, the economies of all but NY, CA, and New England would improve almost overnight, even if it had to mint its own currency based on Petroleum. (In fact, ESPECIALLY if it minted it’s own currency pegged to Texas Light Sweet).
Maybe that’s the stupidest part of Obama’s strategy here: If the USG doesn’t think it has a responsibility protecting our interests abroad militarily, and decides to no longer provide that to the states, then of what value does a strong central government continue to provide in a world with the technology available today?
It took a national effort to build the atom bomb, and we borrowed silver from the national mint for the wiring since copper was in short supply.
Today, the Federal government is nationalizing systemically important private businesses that it put in extremis with policies it foisted on those businesses and then mobilizing itself to prevent catastrophic economic collapse with its national bank.
So, where it used to protect us from the specter of the extermination of entire races, it now pretends to protect us from the economic annihilation it instigates on the entire world.
This is why your rights had to be modified, after all, to protect you.
No, Bozell is dead wrong here. The GOP and Atheism are ideological cousins, if not brothers.
That’s the old joke: What’s the difference between an Atheist and a Satanist?
One is honest about who the boss is.
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No kidding.
They “debate” like a liberal troll.
Yes its that simple. Reductionism gets you to the core. And the core of conservatism IS conservatism.
There is no need to complicate things. Complicating things is what leads to liberalism. Conservatism works BECAUSE it’s simple.
Don’t get me wrong. I appreciate the effort you put into your reply and I’m not saying you are trying to liberalize conservatism here. What I am saying is that you don’t need to look for deeper meanings. In the case of conservatism it’s meaning is plain for all to see right on the surface.
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