Yes, I really did mean to propose that Alternet, a venue which spews anti-religious, primarily anti-Christian invective almost daily and which hosts some of the most vicious hate speech you'll find outside of the explicitly violent right belongs on the Southern Poverty Law Center's hate group list. "Our" haters are no less hateful for supposedly appertaining to "the left". Given the guaranteed counterproductive feature of aiming your hate speech at the large majority of the population AND THE VOTERS any thinking person who cares about the left winning at the ballot box and would want to be associated with them is simply not thinking.
Anti-religious "leftists" have been an impediment to progress all along, their alleged contributions more than made up by the enemies they needlessly make for the left, the divisiveness and discouragement of possible allies and converts to our causes. The past ten years of observing, studying and researching atheists as I've encountered large numbers of them in the wake of Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins opening the floodgate of their vituperation have been a real education in their habits, thinking and presence in real life. I'm as certain as possible that the left will never make progress being led by atheists who have led us down a series of dead ends and cul de sacs whenever they get the chance.
Materialism, as Ernst Haeckel and many other proponents of atheist-materialist monism have pointed out, doesn't produce democracy. The most popular of those atheist systems among those who are mistaken as being on the left, Marxism, didn't have democracy as its pseudo-scientific endpoint and it was about the best try for reconciling what are unreconcilable starting points and goals among those who thought they really wanted democracy.
When you START by reducing people to objects there is no way to arrive at those objects having rights or any other transcendent attribute and the real left is all about those transcendent attributes. Which is why it has become so important for me to insist that science, the study of objects as objects, remain in its chosen subject matter and to not make claims that its methods and tools can't fulfill. The power of the name "science" to gull the ignorant is far stronger than just about any other force, these days. That is certainly true in the official educated class, most of whom have never confronted the philosophy of science in any way and for whom it really may as well be a religion or an even more primitive form of magic.
As it is, I do remember, very specifically, the incident that made me take the route I've been on, the thing that made me start writing blog posts. It was when a guy who took himself and who was taken as some kind of super-leftist figure of the frontier, no-sacred cows, rugged individualist type declared on Eschaton blog that "science proves that free will is a myth". And in reading that sentence I instantly had to face that if that were true then the entire theoretical basis of democracy was not only mistaken but inevitably wrong*. Which quickly led to me confronting what the growing materialism of alleged lefties would require a similar disposal of all other of the essential attributes of people on which the entire liberal political program rests.
I don't think it's any accident that in the period when the supposed leadership of the left became secularized and the left was gulled into first an impotent secularization of its activities and then into a totally counterproductive anti-religious pose that it has found itself to be dispirited and unable to accomplish much. That is even as it saw the progress made in the previous period attacked and destroyed. I think anyone who has read much of atheist literature would be forced to conclude that it was an entirely predictable result. When liberalism is divorced from its metaphysical roots it dies and rots. That is what the period of the new atheism has taught me. I believe in the stands of traditional liberalism BECAUSE I BELIEVE THEY ARE AN EXPRESSION OF THE LAW AND THE PROPHETS DO UNTO OTHERS AS YOU WOULD HAVE THEM DO UNTO YOU. AND THAT IS AN EXPRESSION ROOTED IN THE REALITY OF WIDER HUMAN EXPERIENCE, WIDER THAN IS ADDRESSED BY SCIENCE. WE ARE TO MAKE THAT REAL ON EARTH IN REAL LIFE AS PERFORMED BY PEOPLE BECAUSE THAT IS THE WILL OF GOD.
* It led to me posting this on the blog I wrote and the one I co-wrote.
No comments:
Post a Comment