It is a product of the soul, not of the body. It is a contribution to common honesty without which nations as well as individuals sink to ruin - Hate Mail

IF YOU WANT A EXPERT OPINION in comparing the would-be secular with the religious left, I'd resort to the great American leftist Fredrick Douglas in his speech on The West India Emancipation where he explicitly said pretty much what I've concluded watching the regression of the American and other would-be lefts as they abandoned a foundation for it that works for one that doesn't.

The abolition of slavery in the West Indies is a shining evidence of the reverse of all this profanity.  Nobler ideas and principles of action are brought to view.  The vital, animating, and all-controlling power of the British Abolition movement was religion.  Its philosophy was not educated and enlightened selfishness, (such as some are relying upon now to do away with slavery in this country,) but the pure, single eyed spirit of benevolence.  It is not impelled or guided by the fine-spun reasonings of political expediency, but by the unmistakable and imperative demands of principle.  It was not commerce, but conscience; not considerations of climate and productions of the earth, but the heavenly teachings of Christianity, which everywhere teaches that God is of Father and man, however degraded, is our brother.

The men who were most distinguished in carrying forward the movement, from the great Wilberforce downward, were eminent for genuine piety.  They worked for the slave as if they had been working for the Son of God.  They believed that righteousness exalteth a nation and that sin is the reproach of any people.  Hence they united religion with patriotism, and pressed home the claims of both upon the national heart with the tremendous energy of truth and love, till all England cried out with one accord, through Exteter Hall, through the press, through the pulpit, through parliament, and through the very throne itself, slavery must and shall be destroyed.

Herein is the true significance of the West India Emancipation.  It stands out before all the world as a mighty, moral, and spiritual triumph.  It is a product of the soul, not of the body.  It is a contribution to common honesty without which nations as well as individuals sink to ruin.  It is one of those words of life that proceedeth out of the mouth of God, by which nations are established, and kept alive in moral health.

Now, my friends, how has this great act of freedom and benevolence been received in the United States.  How has our American Christian Church and our American Democratic Government received this glorious new birth of National Righteousness.  

I'll spare you the suspense and tell you Fredrick Douglas showed that the "land of liberty" didn't take well to it at all and it proved that in so far as its secular government was concerned, it had no intention of doing that because of the "rule of (secular)law."

The contrast between the Brits who worked effectively for abolition and most other great moral advances on the basis of belief in what the Scriptures say and those who pretend they can find the same or better in secular, usually admitted or unadmitted anti-religious thinkery is enormous.  As I've pointed out numerous times the effect of "educated and enlightened selfishness" (a far more honest description of secularism than what it is generally given) is everything from generally impotent to counter-productive if equality, material and spiritual equality is the goal AND THERE IS NO LEFT WORTH CALLING THAT WHICH DOESN'T REST ON THAT AS ONE OF A VERY FEW ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY FOUNDATION STONES.

"Freedom," "liberty," "rights," are either equally available and real in the real, material and spiritual lives of all or they are tools of enslavement.  The Taney court held that the restrictions on slavery, the existence of free states in which People were not enslaved was a violation of the "freedom" of movement of slave owners, their "liberty" and their "rights" to "their property".  And those are just the kind of "freedom, liberty and rights," that you can hear the Neo-Nazis and Neo-fascists and Republican-fascists and their media liars whine and cry about as those who are their victims object and who are denied to equally have any of those things because of the corruption of the secular laws that emanate from "educated enlightened selfishness," as imagined by those educated members of the 18th century "enlightenment" whose words the new-Taney Court, the Roberts Court just used to put Women in bondage, even those who are forced by rapists to bear children for them.  

In his speech on the Dred Scot decision published, conveniently with the earlier cited speech at the link, he said:

It is no evidence that the Bible is a bad book, because those who profess to believe the Bible are bad. The slaveholders of the South, and many of their wicked allies at the North, claim the Bible for slavery;  shall we, therefore fling the Bible away as a pro-slavery book?  It would be as reasonable to do so as it would be to fling away the Constitution.  .  .

The American people have made void our Constitution by just such traditions as Judge Taney and Mr. [William Lloyd] Garrison have been giving to the world of late, as the true light in which to view the Constitution of the United States.  I shall follow neither.  It is not what Moses allowed for the hardness of heart, but what God requires, ought to be the rule.  

This is remarkable considering William Lloyd Garrison was as much associated with anti-slavery as Taney was with championing slavery.   And it is clear that Douglas used him as exactly a representative of a secularist would-be abolitionism.  Though, typically, the atheist-family business, the "Freedom From Religion Foundation" exaggerates Garrison's a-religiosity, they managed to find a place where he sounds like a typical post-WWII pop-atheist in this regard.  He is, though, I think a good example of the secularist, would be secularist white condescending "abolitionist" who Douglass and his colleagues struggled against even as they were anti-slavery, read the two speeches and see for yourself.  They're more than worth the time, especially relevant in his description of the country in and around the Dred Scott decision.

But even the slavery laid out by the Mosaic Law due to that "hardness of heart" was mild as compared to that in the Americas upheld and championed by the reasoning of the Taney Court in the Dred Scott and earlier and later courts in other decisions.  Fugitive slaves were, by Mosaic Law, to be protected in freedom by those who lived where they fled to.  The limits on slavery as opposed to the ambient Roman and Greek slavery and later American slavery were remarkable and, as I've pointed out before, if you took the Law to treat others as you would have them treat you seriously you couldn't hold someone in that kind of slavery.   

Given the enormous inspiration that abolitionists, the real ones, starting with those who stole themselves away from slavery, those who rescued others from it, took from the freeing of the Children of Israel from slavery and the equality commandments contained in the Bible, given the habit of secularists to drift back into inegalitarian and anti-egalitarian ideology, I don't take back a word of my skepticism about impotent secularism on the left.

Yesterday, thinking about the objection to what I said, it occurred to me that you're far more likely to make yourself despised and a pariah for being skeptical of natural selection - founded on an elite conception of all things in terms of ranking for worth and inequality - than to be a college credentialed exponent of scientific racism or sexism or other proponent of inequality.  There is a reason that the flagrant racism of later day Darwinists like Jensen, Crick, MacDonald, Herrnstein, etc. had a place in eminent university science faculties until external criticism led to their being shunned,  but only partially in only some of those cases.   A modern education is eminently suited for talking yourself into moral ambiguity and agnostic indifference and, so, inaction.

And how much of today's huge collge-credentialed whine about "cancel culture" is a response to those who refuse to give their lazy, polite, self-enlightened indifferent silent acquiescence to it.   I think those who refuse to acquiesce to the promotion of their inferiority will have to, in the end, come to rely on the same things the Abolitionists and other fighters for equality did, religion because materialist secularism and scientism has nothing there to support them.  

Let me know when you achieve more than Fredrick Douglass did in the cause of the American left.