THAT PIECE ABOUT the separation of church and state was kind of raw and quickly written. As the fine actress Martha Burns said of TV acting, blog writing is "quick and dirty." Of course I didn't mean "church" as in organized denominations, I meant religion in general.
It's one of the interesting things about the religious demand for the separation of the church from politics that that is, with a very few exceptions, not an honest or sincere demand. The very same people who complain about "the church" or religion or their particular denomination being infected with politics is muchly due to the affluent hating it when a preacher or priest or lay person brings up the central pillars of the entire Jewish-Christian-Islamic monotheistic tradition of radical economic justice and the most effective means of putting that in place through the government, the expression of the collective power and resources of all of the People, in general.
Such people mostly have little problem when it comes to using the government to do other things on the basis of religion, regulating the bodies and sexual behavior of those they disapprove of or wish to control, depriving devoted same-sex couples of the protection of marriage. I would argue that all of the laws that keep the poor from taking the hoarded, plundered and stolen wealth of the rich, the reason they are rich, and leveling them to a general level of equality are the affluent using government to enforce the religious commandment against stealing - totally ignoring the very same scriptures that do that forbid the levels of economic inequality that has made the rich, rich in the first place and command a whole host of laws which would, if put in place, prevent that inequality and poverty to start with. I have yet to hear any religious conservative of any kind demand that, for example, the radical egalitarian and prudent economics of Deuteronomy 15 be followed even as they will insist that far more private and intimate areas of life, such as those they enjoy, not atypically breaking commandments as strong, be regulated by government in strict adherence to their most precision interpretation of scripture.
But they have their counterpart on, especially, the secular left who will demand that every part of government from the three branches of the federal government, to the states and local, down to the individual class rooms be strictly, not only religion free but free from all assertions that could be regarded as religious.
I will note that that all came together for me one afternoon on what was then one of the up and coming lefty blogs when there was a discussion of how tiresome talk about morality was and how they resented it when people talked about morality in government AS IF THE LACK OF IT IN AREAS THEY PREFERRED DIDN'T CONSTITUTE THE LARGE MAJORITY OF THE REASON FOR A LEFT TO EXIST, TO START WITH! It was part of the atheist fad of the, now thankfully over, 00's which will always remind me of the time when one of the CFI blogs raised a stink among the more ideological of atheists by proposing the idea that atheists should involve themselves with [whisper] charity. A number of the atheists boasted about some piddling recent efforts, I couldn't help but point out that these geniuses had discovered something that religion had been doing since before Jesus was born and was a central aspect of the reason for religion to exist. That and pointing out what a bunch of self-centered jerks the ones who whined that charity talk had no place in atheism and it was an imposition on their right to not be bothered with such quasi-religious junk. I don't think that the Malthusianism of the X Club members, a bunch of first-generation Darwinists whose main purpose was to kick god-heads out of science and society was unrelated to that last issue more recently. There was a big row between Thomas Huxley and Herbert Spencer over that that really made for some unpleasantness at their customary hotel table as they exercised enormous control over science and elsewhere in late Victorian Britain. Nor do I think the worst part of Oliver Wendell Holmes jr.'s Supreme Court rulings is unrelated, he being an enormous fan of theirs.
The peril of having religion involved with politics is real, it's as real as any peril we risk from ANY area of life being involved with politics as it is inescapable that other areas of life will inevitably be involved with politics. It is enormously dangerous for women, for LGBTQ people, that "white evangelicals" are swept away with a form of fascism and almost as dangerous that such fascists are a majority of the U. S. Catholic Conference of Bishops, who can't have their resignations accepted or die off fast enough to change that. It is enormously dangerous to us when greedy mega-church hallelujah peddlers and bishops demand that they be allowed to have dangerous concentrations of people together for in-person worship when that is dangerous. But it's no more dangerous than when the people who demand such evil of government and the fascists on the Supreme Court allow them what they want and ban what they don't like. There are anti-religious libertarians who want part of that same program and entirely secular non-religious Constitutionalist articulations of the same things.
The particular danger ascribed to religion in such stuff is a result of two things that I can see, one of them quite correct, the use of religion to give a reason for some of the terrible violence of such things as the Thirty-Years Wars, the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition - all of which had as much as if not more to do with the quite secular motives of those who had the power to wage such wars and abominations. As I've pointed out recently, it was Ferdinand and Isabella who insisted that the Inquisition in Spain be put under their control so they could solidify their rule and remove what they saw as dangers to it. There was certainly little if anything they did in that which accords with any rational reading of the New Testament and certainly not the old one - though I'm reading Joshua right now and it's clear a lot of the same kind of thing used God as an excuse in solidifying the control of what would become Israel.
It's something that is seldom pointed out that the primary motives in doing evil through government are the rich or those in a majority or those with power rigging economics for their own benefit, using such ignorant or marginally rational people as can be swayed using arguments of religion, but no more than using arguments of nationalism or patriotism or biological imperatives or historical inevitability or the more modern replacements for doing evil that took the place of religious sectarianism after the "enlightenment."
I have shocked a lot of people by my attacks on the liberal, lefty god of "free speech - free press" which is the primary vehicle that has brought us to the place we are today. When I have said that without regulations AND LAWS that distinguish between lies and the truth, taking the privilege given by the courts and modern life to lies from it, democracy is doomed. "But that's dangerous because if they can silence liars and haters and facists they can silence us too." Well, as I've also pointed out, if democracy goes we will be the ones silenced, as we have been largely disappeared from the "free press" the corporate media that has promulgated the lies and hate talk as they gave us Nixon, Reagan, two Bushes and their creation, Trump.
Yes, it is dangerous to have laws, it is dangerous because you can't trust judges and "justices" and lawyers and legal cess pools and law faculties that make and belong to them to want equal justice, to want economic justice, to want equality and the thing that depends on all of that to be anything like a possibility, a real democracy which is the result only of people with adequate knowledge to make good choices AND WITH THE GOOD WILL, THE SENSE OF MORALITY THAT IS EVEN MORE IMPORTANT THAN ADEQUATE INFORMATION.
It is dangerous to silence liars and haters and bigots, its even more dangerous not to and it's impossible to find the articulation of why you should do that from secularism, from materialism, from science or pure reason. For that you have no alternative but to rely on a particular kind of religion. It is not religion that is exclusively found in the three so-called "monotheistic" faiths, it exists in a number of others, though none of those has a sufficiently large population base or a sufficiently strong and unambiguous articulation of that to be effective on more than an individual or small community basis. I have recently thought that it is one of the characteristics of monotheism that if you believe in the One Creator God, that it is far more reasonable to believe in the equality of all of the People created by God - I'd go so far as noting that it gives all of creation a value that materialism cannot help but diminish. I have come to respect a number of religious called "polytheistic" by that most idiotic of pseudo-scientific cults, anthropology, many of which turn out, when you hear someone who knows those traditions from the inside, to be far more monotheistic the idiot anthropologists mistaking what are more like a Catholic conception of saints as "gods". I don't think the potential for egalitarian democracy is exclusive to Christianity, I would welcome any such strong articulation of it as would suffice to move it forward from any and all religious communities which have that potential. Like the great Jewish theologian, Abraham Joshua Heschel, I believe God must favor religious diversity as much as biological diversity. That's something that is clear from the Scriptures at an early period in which God instructs Moses and Joshua that there are other People with whom God has a Covenant and even earlier when he tells Noah he has one with animals ("all flesh").
So, no. I'm not a "Christian imperialist". Not at all.
Also: That link you sent me about "Freki" going on a really hate-filled, dishonest anti-Irish tirade isn't any surprise to me. I used to engage with her until I found out what a lying bigot she was. As well as being a typical brit-style anti-religionist, she's a typical brit-style hater of the Irish and Irish Catholics, most of all. That she's now located in Canada doesn't change that, you can take the bigot out or Britland but you can't take the Britland out of the bigot.
I watched the film clip she used. Where in the film clip does it identify the little street punks who attacked those girls as a. Irish, b. Catholic, c. Catholics who are following Catholic teaching. Where does it identify the cop she slams for not having the extra-sensory ability to read the intentions of the punks so as to prevent it as any of the above? For all she knew they were as anti-religious as she is - I've encountered violent street punks, I've been attacked by them. Typically their language alone gives them away as not being particularly pious and observers of Christian morality. For all she knew they weren't Irish, maybe they originated in those the Brits brought to Ireland to try to swamp the local population as led to such enduring problems in Northern Ireland.
No, what she said tells us nothing about the street punks, nor, I'll point out the girls who may have been devout Irish Catholics for all Freki knows. What she said tells us everything about her in that regard.
No comments:
Post a Comment