Secularism That Denies The Moral Absolutes Necessary To Create Democracy Will Kill It

Democracy depends on a number of things, absolutely.  It can't exist where its necessary precursors aren't present.  Without those things democracy cannot exist.  In one of his lectures going on three years ago, Walter Brueggemann pointed out two things he considered absolutely vital to a democracy, an independent judiciary and an independent press.  He pointed out, three years before Trump! that under the Obama administration the Justice Department was headed by Eric Holder who, a fully invested member of the corporate establishment had failed to bring a single prosecution of the people who caused the financial meltdown of 2008 and he noted that the media that matters is almost completely in the hands of the billionaires, the corporate elite.  That is why, the other night, Rachel Maddow could discuss the dark and dire implications of the meeting of the fascist Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner with the head of Time Warner to complain about CNN's coverage of the Trump regime.

For about the fortieth time, I'll point out that, for all the horrific results for the American media in the Trump regime, he is their creation through such as the parent company of Rachel Maddow's show and the "reality" show he was on and through her own network's free time given to him on Morning Joe.   And, you can add such things as the quarter of a century of lies told about Hillary Clinton by just about the entire media up to and including the New York Times.   While I certainly see Maddow's point, I'm having a really hard time summoning a lot of sympathy for the media, even as I see that they are in danger of being crushed by the jack oxfords of a piece of shit like Jared Kushner on behalf of his fake-fur-fuhrer father-in-law.   Donald Trump is a product of the media regime that the secularists of such groups as the ACLU and the Supreme Court gave us.  He is a product of their secular assertion of free-speech-free-press absolutism, an absolutism which included a permission to lie.   That such people as Peter Thiel and his scummy lawyer-strategist have turned the tables on such media advocates of their right to lie, is an irony, it isn't shockingly unjust, it is an unsurprising result of the damage such "free speech" absolutism did to democracy, insuring fascism through their short-sighted regime of lying about people like Hillary Clinton with impunity.  And now Thiel's lawyer is working for the Trump crime family.

But, as you know, I have gone farther than that first floor level of what a democracy needs to exist and why if it is not based on a bedrock of moral absolutes being held with sufficient firmness by a large number, an effective majority of people in a population, democracy will probably never really happen and it will never be secure.   I've been through that a number of times and why the very assumptions of secular, modernist, materialist society cannot provide that moral foundation of democracy.

In order for democracy to exist, people who can or who merely believe they can rig things to get gain by violating rights and the good of other people, the environment, the economy, etc.  must be in the minority.  An effectively and continually defeated minority.  Those who believe they must not do those things with sufficient strength to keep them from doing or trying to do those things to rig things in their favor must be an effective majority, under our insane federalist system, they have to be an effective majority in enough states to prevent people from electing exactly the kinds of presidents our country has been electing for the past fifty years and Congresses such as we've been getting consistently and in ever worsening strength since the Reagan era.

I have challenged atheists, materialists, etc. to say where those moral bases of democracy can come from with sufficient strength to be politically efficacious without belief in a God who gives commandments and have never gotten a real answer to that question.  I understand their position, or, rather, their superstitious assumption that that was possible, with my witness to the United States in the past sixty years, I used to believe it myself.  I no longer believe it, at all.

I don't think that even a purported belief in such a God is sufficient.  People have to believe in the right kind of God with the right kind of moral commandments to produce democracy.  Unless someone believes that there will be consequences for himself or herself in not treating people as we would want to be treated, that that commandment comes from a God who will punish such injustice, their inhibition out of mere social expectation or habit or disinclination will not be effective enough to have that effect.

Magnified through a population trained in market-corporate-consumerist ideology and depravity over an entire country, magnified through a country trained by "reality" TV and cabloid "news" I think it is impossible for such a population to generate the continual political effect that democracy must be to exist.  I think we are on the verge of finding out that even that idol of secular superstition The Constitution with its Bill of Rights cannot produce or protect democracy without a population which is convinced that doing injustice will have the most horrific results, immediately or eventually.

I think that, when you read the Prophets, Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, etc. you will see that the warnings about that are contained all through them, it is why they spoke prophetically.   Only, now, we will find that secular prophesy won't do the same thing because it doesn't start with the only thing that will work, it doesn't contain the moral and, yes, religious basis that is essential for democracy.  I don't think the quasi-deist-quasi-agnostic-quasi-atheist, 18th century materialists built anything into the Bill of Rights or the Constitution that will do it.  There is a reason that virtually all of the great 19th century movements to remake the United States into a real, egalitarian democracy began as religious movements and why, as they turned secular that they lost steam and petered out into the ineffective form it took at the end of the 20th century and on to today.

I have come to the conclusion that unless the religious traditions, the Hebrew-Christian-Islamic tradition that contains those commandments for justice are revived, democracy will disappear.  To not say that, having looked at how we lost democracy, would be as bad as anything Trump is doing to this country and the world.  I think the only hope is for the people who really believe that to convince an effective electoral majority to be part of a secure foundation for egalitarian democracy.   Any secularism which doesn't include that bedrock of moral absolutism has failed, secularism that is anything other than an administration of egalitarian justice in light of diversity of belief but which admits to that bedrock of egalitarian faith as an absolute will impede democracy.