I should admit that I owe a debt of gratitude, though not one they'd be gratified to know about, to my antagonists at Duncan Black's blog and those of the past when I used to get into brawls at the Science Blogs, at some blogs of Marxists, etc. that they provided me with the first evidence I'd noticed of how the American and, I'd say, British lefts have failed through the enforced secular regime of the past century. Though before that it was the part the Black Churches, the Peace Churches, the Catholic Left (of which my mother was an active part) and other parts of the religious left that were the first part of what has developed into the major theme of my online activity. I just didn't realize that's what I was learning from the example of the height of success in liberalism which occurred when I was in my late adolescence in the 1960s. It was the wave of Civil Rights activism which was, in fact, most successful when it was centered in the Black Church, was staffed by figures such as St. Cesar Chavez, that was my first clue that any successful left, any successful American style liberalism is, in fact, and of necessity, based in religious conviction of the right kind, the kind that fuels and feeds and originates the morality of that left.
The atheist online invective and dishonesty, the new-atheism fad of the 00s and its contiued presence till today, had everything to do with why I have concluded it is and has been one of the main engines of failure on the American and British left, of lefts in other places. I have come to the conclusion that their intellectual products of the past two centuries are the major hurdle to the progress that others have made. Even what they and so many of us like to think of as their loftiest ideals, embodied in the slogan "The First Amendment" unguided by even more fundamental values, both those within and external to religion, will be turned into poison of self- government by people with sufficient moral conviction, willingness to sacrifice and adequate knowledge of the kind that can produce egalitarian democracy and a concern for posterity strong enough to do what needs to be done to create what we all claim to desire.
The quote from Eric Alterman I gave, again, the other day, confirming that Jurgen Habermas - an atheist who is also one of the most eminent post-war scholars in the relevant areas, the eminent historian James T. Kloppenberg, presumably Alterman - no novice in this area of study, himself, and, by inference FDR, agree with what I'd concluded independently from the experiences noted in my first paragraph, that any hope for any revival and effective American style liberal left, a left of egalitarian democracy, the salvation of the environment, the best chance for a decent life for everyone in a sustainable world, will come from the kind of religious belief that Christianity is based in but which is not exclusive to Christianity, it is shared by many other religious groups.
Those bases cannot be found in an effective way without religious foundation, the secular, allegedly scientific articulations of them will always be accompanied by stronger and more highly valued ideological beliefs which undermine them. If individuals within that secularism do not have their personal commitments to egalitarian justice or environmental sustenance diminished by their ideological camp, others in that camp will effectively thwart them being enacted. There is a reason that Habermas, an atheist and Marxist scholar and philosopher with every reason to find a secular basis for the foundations of freedom in equality and democracy could not, after a lifetime's study, find those though he could find them in the Jewish and Christian religions, calling those the only source that nourishes those essential values.
Other religious groups contain the potential to do that, I believe, as long as their firmly held beliefs in them are strong enough to overcome what Plantinga calls "defeaters". I was listening to a lecture about the history of the Cree language that led me to conclude that traditional Cree religion seems to contain that potential. But I know from a lot of reading of the history of secularism, of atheism, of scientism, of science, to know that none of those can generate or sustain such values and certainly, in practice, they undermine them in a very real and very dangerous way.
The insights I gained as to the folly of the traditional "left-right" graph of political identity were part of that as well. The massive spectacle of the secular left being willfully blind to the piles and mountain of corpses racked up by atheist governments, Marxist, amassed in the 20th century, rivaling those amassed by the Nazis and fascists and under capitalism, the claim that all of the non-egalitarian, non-democratic governments of all degrees are not all morally unacceptable and deplorable is confirmation of my theme, as well. When someone like Alexander Cockburn could argue in the 1990s (If I'm recalling the timeline correctly) that, somehow, Stalin was better than Hitler because their hit lists were drawn up slightly differently, that others pooh-poohed the as massive murders of Mao and other self identified scientific regimes, when they can ignore that it is, in fact, university trained physicists, chemists, etc. who have put us all in the greatest peril in human history, blaming the woes of the world on probably the least potent origin of some evil in the past, religion, provides anyone who is looking honestly all the reason they need to conclude that it is, in fact, secularism that has destroyed American style liberalism and kept us in the wilderness for half a century.
Update: Reading through this in my typical practice of publishing in haste and editing at leisure, I should note the part that the lefty magazines - I used to subscribe to four, not to mention newspapers and other media - played in my disillusion with the secular left. I think the first clue was when I read those annoyingly self-satisfied and pious claims of the virtue of non-voting that appeared in such magazines, the ones that advocated never-would-win candidacies and the "third parties" that popped in and out of existence as if out of some quantum vacuum, never producing a fucking thing except futility and publicity for their inventors, etc. I read those long enough to know they all, with perhaps the exception of the later years of Mother Jones and only then to some extent, were dedicated to exactly what was self-defeating in the secular left and dedicated to much of the pseudo-left depravity of the kind I noted in the last paragraph above. The line that The Nation magazine took on Putin's ratfucking in our last election, producing Trump who they railed about, otherwise, has really opened my eyes to the affection that left has for foreign dictators - apparently a fascist gangster like Putin gets in under the habits formed when it was other Soviet gangsters and others who had their support. I have to say it and the memory of things like Cockburn's columns mentioned above, killed off any residual affection or trust I had for such entities.
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