tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20943181.post1727512947480257257..comments2023-08-25T10:49:59.802-04:00Comments on One Reality: Dennis Prager: If There Is No God, Part 6Stephen Bourquehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13699468585645166392noreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20943181.post-14961628206270573602009-05-31T12:51:46.479-04:002009-05-31T12:51:46.479-04:00(Continued from the previous comment.)
Now, let m...(Continued from the previous comment.)<br /><br />Now, let me return to the more general point of the Founders and religion. My position is that any view that captures the <I>essence</I> of America’s Founders in the proper historical context will demonstrate that they were radically and revolutionarily <I>irreligious</I>. They devoted their lives and fortunes to questioning “with boldness even the existence of a god,” and to supplanting institutionalized superstition with reason. <br /><br />Certainly, one can cherry pick individual quotes from Washington, Adams, and Jefferson that seem to support either side of the argument - allegedly for and against religion - but an overall view resolves any ambiguity. For the Founders, nothing in heaven or earth stood between an individual and his right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of his own happiness. If the Founding Fathers invoked a “Creator” or “Nature’s God,” it was only to stress the absolutism of their principles, and to defend against any sophistry (like subjectivism) that would attempt to deny the inalienability of rights. <br /><br />Given the context of the time, it is hard to ask the Founders to have done more than they did. They identified and threw off the yoke of faith about as completely as anyone could have done then. They were radicals in this. Knowing what I know today, I wish they had more thoroughly and consistently guarded against a return to faith (a return that would have seemed inconceivable in the Age of Reason), but it is pointless and unreasonable to blame Thomas Jefferson for not being Ayn Rand.<br /><br />This issue of the historiography of the Founders with respect to religion is analogous to the issue of slavery. Just like the religious historians who seek to build a case for the religiosity of of the Framers, modern anti-west historians try to build a case for America being a nation of white male slave-holders. In this view, the United States stands as the supreme villain of history instead of its pinnacle. Concrete facts support this: Thomas Jefferson and George Washington had slaves, right? They founded this nation, correct? So, the United States must have been founded upon slavery. Of course, this view completely misses the <I>essence</I> of America’s founding as the only nation ever created with the purpose of emancipating human beings. In the same way, a few quotes from George Washington referring to “Providence” does not collapse the wall of separation between church and state that the Founders so painstakingly constructed.Stephen Bourquehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13699468585645166392noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20943181.post-49272004164234409262009-05-31T12:48:59.538-04:002009-05-31T12:48:59.538-04:00(Continued from the previous comment.)
The accusa...(Continued from the previous comment.)<br /><br />The accusation that I think Christians “must be idiots” is outrageous. I simply do not think in those terms about anybody. In fact, if anything, I generally assume that people I discuss things with are smarter than I am. Besides, intelligence is not always strongly correlation with getting things right. Some of the worst monsters in history had vast intellects, and some of the most dreadful, profoundly wrong ideas were born in the ivory towers of universities and in government “brain trusts.” I value honesty - honesty with one’s self, and an unblinking commitment to grasping reality as it is (not as one wishes it to be) - far more than I value intelligence.<br /><br />Perhaps what galls some readers is that I write directly and I aim for precision. If I write about a fact, I do not preface it with “in my opinion.” If I identify faith as <I>irrational</I> because it is incompatible with reason, I use the word <I>irrational</I>; I do not couch it as a simple “mistake” to spare somebody’s feelings. Everybody knows it is better to tear off a BandAid all at once than to make a hundred weak and painful pulls. It serves no purpose to speak or write in any manner other than directly. Civilized discourse is perishing in this world because of political correctness, the deterioration of the meaning of words, and the general fear of calling something what it is.<br /><br />(And by the way, you incorrectly characterized my position as that I “can’t see and also <B>can’t disprove</B>” God. My position is that I can’t see and <I>need not</I> disprove God.)<br /><br />_________<br /><br />Finally, you objected to my statement it is impossible to square religion with America’s governing institutions, and you wrote that the First Amendment makes it clear that the Founders thought “religious discourse in the governance of America” was a “GOOD idea.”<br /><br />Let me handle this last point first. The First Amendment guarantees freedom of speech, the freedom for an individual to think and believe anything he wishes. It explicitly forbids the government from attempting to impose thought control upon its citizens. “Religious discourse” and “governance” are two entirely incompatible things; to combine them as you have is a grotesque distortion of the Founders’ explicit intent, and it reverses the Amendment’s meaning. The entire point of the First Amendment is to <I>remove</I> governance <I>from</I> religious discourse, not to <I>establish</I> religious discourse <I>into</I> governance.<br /><br />I am an absolute and indefatigable defender of freedom of speech, including the right to say or write things that I think are crazy and irrational.<br /><br />(To be continued in the next comment...)Stephen Bourquehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13699468585645166392noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20943181.post-34682909157626263452009-05-31T12:41:38.426-04:002009-05-31T12:41:38.426-04:00(Continued from previous comment.)
And regarding ...(Continued from previous comment.)<br /><br />And regarding my use of the word “crusading,” I meant it in the generic sense - not specifically referring to the Crusades, though making some use of this connotation, I suppose. Interestingly, of these three adjectives - crusading, irrational, and medieval - crusading is the only one that I do <I>not</I> regard automatically as a pejorative term. After all, I am a crusader myself: a crusader for reason, objectivity, individual rights, laissez faire capitalism. <br /><br />Unfortunately, your own formulation of what you would regard as benevolent crusading - “Christians [having] zeal for the peaceful spreading of their religion” - is precisely the crusading that I meant. If this happens in the United States, it would be a disaster, not only because the world is already kneeling down before a government-supported, self-proclaimed “religion of peace” and we do not need another, but primarily because it would signal the demise of the one nation in all of history that was created specifically to protect individuals from such a catastrophe. <br /><br />_________<br /><br />Since you asked, the point of this series of articles is as I stated in the introduction: to reach the minds of religious people who are honestly trying to reach conclusions that are consonant with reality. I admit that none of this is likely to appeal to “true believers” who have constructed defenses specifically designed to help them evade this sort of reasoning. It is the religious-by-default that I hoped might be reached, the serious people who may have been brought up in religious households or may have turned to religion because they were revolted by the left-leaning media and culture.<br /><br />You introduced two ideas in your second paragraphs that simply do not apply to anything in my post, nor for that matter, to anything I’ve ever written.<br /><br />The first is that my essay amounts to “Christian bashing.” I cannot fathom how I could have been misunderstood so thoroughly. In no way have I singled out Christians in particular. Everything I have presented applies unambiguously to religion <I>qua</I> religion. The enemy of <I>reason</I> is not Christianity per se; it is <I>faith</I>. Sure, Dennis Prager is a Christian, but I picked his article because he seems to be very smart and relatively honest, and because a critique of his ideas is relevant to my purpose here: reaching moderately religious minds. I have not and do not criticize Christians for being Christians; I criticize Christians, along with adherents of all other religions, for rejecting reason in favor of faith.<br /><br />Worse than this, you wrote that my essays amount to “intellectual snobbery” and my position reduces to, “Christians must be idiots because they believe in God who we can’t see and also can’t disprove.” <br /><br />I am not an intellectual at all, never mind an intellectual snob. I do not <I>pretend to be</I> an intellectual; I am an engineer by trade. My credentials do not include an advanced degree in philosophy. My only qualification to defend reason is that I live a human life with my mind engaged and my eyes wide open, and that I have sufficient courage and honesty to state that A is A. Fortunately, that is all the qualification that I or any other human being needs to grasp reality.<br /><br />(To be continued in the next comment...)Stephen Bourquehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13699468585645166392noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20943181.post-63079685903252640732009-05-31T12:31:56.817-04:002009-05-31T12:31:56.817-04:00Thanks for the comments, Anonymous. There is a lo...Thanks for the comments, Anonymous. There is a lot of material in your note, but I’ll try to cover each of your points briefly.<br /><br />_________<br /><br />Regarding the “medieval” reference, let me repeat the sentence I wrote: “The proper alternative to our cowering before crusading, irrational, medieval fanatics is surely not to become crusading, irrational, medieval fanatics ourselves.” <br /><br />Obviously, the first set of fanatics I was referring to are the Islamic fascists who, despite using the guns and institutions created <I>by</I> the west <I>against</I> the west, are still operating essentially as if it were the 11th century. My point is that if we in the west continue a trend of abandoning reason and turning to God as a means of defeating them, we will have become <I>just like them</I> in all fundamental respects. I used the parallelism of the same three adjectives in my sentence to emphasize this equivalence. Sure, I don’t expect modern Christians to want to literally roll back the clock to medieval times - they like their televisions and cell phones (as is proper) too much for that, and the Black Death is daunting even for people who think earthly suffering yields heavenly rewards in the afterlife. However, to reject reason and embrace God with the thoroughness demonstrated by many Evangelicals today is to attempt to wipe out the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the Industrial Revolution, along with its accompanying this-worldly perspective, achievements, and liberty. <B>Governments informed by God are nightmares.</B> If the prospect of western armies shouting “Onward, Christian soldiers!” as they engage Muslim mujahideen doesn’t evoke the Middle Ages, I don’t know what does.<br /><br />Now, regarding my characterization of a belief in God as being <I>irrational</I>, there is no getting around this. It is simply not correct to dismiss it as a mistake, as you wrote. Mistakes are made when one does not have all the relevant facts in focus at a particular moment; mistakes are discovered and fixed by obtaining more facts, rejecting falsehoods, or by more clearly considering the information one already knows. A belief in God has nothing to do with facts or focus. It requires <I>faith</I>, and to accept something to be true by means of faith is <I>irrational</I>. That is, it is an explicit rejection of one’s rational faculty. What else shall we call a deliberate rejection of rationality but <I>irrational</I>?<br /><br />I obviously do not hold that every person who believes in God is <I>wholly</I> irrational, but he <I>is</I> irrational to the degree that he believes in God. If the average religious American is seriously ill, for instance, he will probably demonstrate rational behavior (e.g. visiting a doctor, taking medicine) and irrational behavior (e.g. saying prayers). The irrational behavior in this example is basically harmless, but it remains irrational.<br /><br />(By the way, just because theism is irrational, it does not follow that atheism is rational. Many or most communists are atheists, yet are far more irrational than most of the religious people I know.)<br /><br />(To be continued in the next comment...)Stephen Bourquehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13699468585645166392noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20943181.post-26644945051690028242009-03-10T16:33:00.000-04:002009-03-10T16:33:00.000-04:00I'm really trying to be kind and patient in my com...I'm really trying to be kind and patient in my comments, but it's quite difficult when faced by articles claiming that Christians want to be "crusading, irrational, medieval fanatics". Christians do not want to be medieval in any way - period (unless we are claiming that religious belief is medieval, which I deny). They are certainly not irrational (the best you can do is claim that their premise of the existence of God is mistaken, but that's not the same as irrational). Crusading? That depends what you mean. If it's meant as some kind of dig about the Crusades, you need to work on your history, especially what happened between Muslims and Christians in the 300 years prior to the Crusades. You also need to recognize that they happened over 600 years ago, so they may not be topical to an assessment of modern Christianity. If on the other hand, it's meant that Christians have zeal for the peaceful spreading of their religion, then I have no problem with the term. However, it clearly seems to be meant derogatorily.<BR/><BR/>What is the puprose of this series of articles? Merely to write for other objectivists so they'll join in on a chorus of "Irrational Christians"? Or are you trying to advance reasoned arguments why Christians are mistaken in their worldview, ones that might actually convince Christians that they are mistaken to hold their beliefs? This article just seems, at the end, to be so much Chrisitan bashing. I was hoping for thoughtful discourse on why Christians are mistaken in their worldview. I am giving up reading this series now, because this is clear intellectual snobbery (essentially, "Christians must be idiots because they believe in God who we can't see and also can't disprove"). Most distasteful.<BR/><BR/>One final note: "It is impossible to square religion with America’s governing institutions." I'm not sure what the reasoning is that leads to this idea, but the 1st Amendment to the Constitution makes it clear that the founders thought religious discourse in the governance of America was GOOD idea, not a bad one. Or were they "medieval" too?Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com