posted by Damozel | ....([defiant singing with footstomping/] IT WAS GOOD ENOUGH FOR JEFFERSON IT WAS GOOD ENOUGH FOR MADISON IT WAS GOOD ENOUGH FOR FRANKLIN; AND IT'S GOOD ENOUGH FOR MEEEEE! [/defiant singing with footstomping])
Ahem. Sorry. Got a bit carried away there.... Did I mention I grew up in the Carolinas?
1. THERE'S NO LEFT IN "RIGHT-WING" OR "RIGHTEOUS"....BUT IS THE ONLY GOD THE BACKWARDS ONE IN "DOGMA?"So first of all, let me disclose that I am a person of no settled denomination but of strong religious bent. I don't care much for dogma of any sort, , whether religious, political, or scientific. So it's not being left-wing or atheistic---merely in line with the founders---to insist, and even in my case to pray, that the wall between separation of church and state reach straight up to heaven and all the way down to hell.
The hallmark of a free nation, I'd argue is allowing other people the dignity of their choices as long as their choices don't harm anyone else. I will let my favorite rightward-tilting contrarian, Christopher Hitchens (in his response to Al Sharpton) answer the usual question of a certain sort of Christian: how can there be ethical standards apart from some sort of divine law?
But here's something I'd like to ask Hitchens: why does he insist on treating all religious beliefs as the same brand of naive, credulous, primitive, etc.? I mean, I know why, having read his book, but his position is similar, it seems to me, to Sir Richard ("My Critics are Wrong to Call Me Dogmatic") Dawkins' and the versions of God that Hitchens anatomizes end up looking very much the same. And to quote Elaine Pagels :
quote begins from Salon, Gospel According to Judas, by Steve Paulson]
Well, Dawkins loves to play village atheist. He's such a rationalist that the God that he's debunking is not one that most of the people I study would recognize. I mean, is there some great big person up there who made the universe out of dirt? Probably not.
[quote ends]
Yes, exactly. Exactly. This is where the arguments of Dawkins, [see my note ""That About Wraps it Up for God, Then."] , and Hitchens fall apart for me. Both Dawkins and Hitchens set up and knock down beliefs and attitudes about religion that I don't personally share. Furthermore, I applaud what they're trying to do, and think it's absolutely necessary---up to a point. .
Sir. Richard Dawkins need to speak out on behalf of science, a subject on which he is better qualified to speak than, say, the local minister at the local Church of the Nazarene.As a contemporary christian I think it's essential to have people point out from time to time what people lose in the long run by setting themselves against the insights into the nature of reality provided to us by those contemporary philosophers we call "scientists".
As for Hitchens, I certainly appreciate the part of his argument that has to do with calling religious people out for the things they do in the name of God and for certain dubious characteristics they ascribe (and have ascribed) to God in order to justify morally appalling actions. But when he speaks of God and of religion---and he seems to mostly mean organized religion, but not only it---the God he speaks about is clearly the impostor God made by man in his own image and his descriptions make me laugh and applaud because he is right, as far as he goes. To paraphrase Jethro Tull, the real one isn't the kind you have to wind up on Sunday. .
Hitchens on Lou Dobbs:
To paraphrase Jethro Tull, the real God is not the kind you have to wind up on Sunday.
At the end of the day, I tend to class the religion-deniers in the same category of reality-deniers as science-deniers. To be an atheist seems to me, speaking as a religious person, to be a form of blindness to reality. And I can't take any atheist as seriously as I otherwise might do if he or she begins by asserting or implying that people could only be religious out of of some sort of intellectual failing or some willful refusal to come to terms with reality.
If anything, the insights of science tend to confirm my deism rather than undermine it by pointing to some sort of observable organizing principle indicating that there is always order behind seeming randomness and apparent chaos. As an admirer since my university days of Bertrand Russell's mate Alfred North Whitehead (Science and the Modern World; Process and Reality; Religion in the Making) I see no real conflict between the findings of science and the notion of God as an actual entity. Perhaps science can rule out the necessity of intelligence design as Dawkins did in The Blind Watchmaker ; I don't think it can ever overrule or even explain the strong sense of some of us that there is intelligence behind, or even within, the design.[Compare"Why the Intelligent Design Theory is Bullshit"].
At any rate, I've gone into all this at some length because I want to make it clear to anyone reading this that, speaking as a believer, as a deist certainly and as a small-c christian (and from time to time, at intervals, even a Christian), I am prepared at any time to speak up on behalf of religion and of Christ. What I am NOT prepared to do is to see my religious values, or anyone else's, imposed on Christopher Hitchens, my husband Nick (also an atheist) or on anyone else who doesn't share them.
Jefferson and Franklin, deists who seem to have held views somewhat similar to mine, are my touchstone here. James Madison, who argues vigorously in Virginia about an issue---a special provision for teachers of the Christian religion---exactly expresses my views on the road we started to travel once the religious right became a force in politics and to remake the world in its own image.
As Hitchens says: BUILD UP THAT WALL. And I say it with as much love as I can muster toward my fellow Christians on the right or far right (which I realize isn't as much as it perhaps ought to be).
2. THE REAL OLD TIME RELIGION (OF JEFFERSON, FRANKLIN, AND MADISON). People opposed to the political influence of the Christian Right often try to deflect it by making the argument that the founders were not in fact Christians.
This is not, strictly speaking, correct, unless you define "Christianity" more narrowly than I do (or in fact, as narrowly as right-wing Christians generally do).
Thomas Jefferson's version of Christianity was certainly very far removed from the sort of Christianity which fundamentalist Christians would recognize as such. In 1823, Jefferson---one of my personal heroes---wrote to John Adams a lengthy letter rather rudely debunking/rebuking the Calvinist God and setting forth some of Jefferson's own views of God (including a theory of intelligent design):
The wishes expressed, in your last favor, that I may continue in life and health until I become a Calvinist, at least in his exclamation of `mon Dieu! jusque à quand'! would make me immortal. I can never join Calvin in addressing his god. He was indeed an Atheist, which I can never be; or rather his religion was Dæmonism. If ever man worshipped a false god, he did. The being described in his 5. points is not the God whom you and I acknolege and adore, the Creator and benevolent governor of the world; but a dæmon of malignant spirit. It would be more pardonable to believe in no god at all, than to blaspheme him by the atrocious attributes of Calvin....
...I hold (without appeal to revelation) that when we take a view of the Universe, in it's parts general or particular, it is impossible for the human mind not to percieve and feel a conviction of design, consummate skill, and indefinite power in every atom of it's composition. The movements of the heavenly bodies, so exactly held in their course by the balance of centrifugal and centripetal forces, the structure of our earth itself, with it's distribution of lands, waters and atmosphere, animal and vegetable bodies, examined in all their minutest particles, insects mere atoms of life, yet as perfectly organised as man or mammoth, the mineral substances, their generation and uses, it is impossible, I say, for the human mind not to believe that there is, in all this, design, cause and effect, up to an ultimate cause, a fabricator of all things from matter and motion, their preserver and regulator while permitted to exist in their present forms, and their regenerator into new and other forms. We see, too, evident proofs of the necessity of a superintending power to maintain the Universe in it's course and order. Stars, well known, have disappeared, new ones have come into view, comets, in their incalculable courses, may run foul of suns and planets and require renovation under other laws; certain races of animals are become extinct; and, were there no restoring power, all existences might extinguish successively, one by one, until all should be reduced to a shapeless chaos. So irresistible are these evidences of an intelligent and powerful Agent that, of the infinite numbers of men who have existed thro' all time, they have believed, in the proportion of a million at least to Unit, in the hypothesis of an eternal pre-existence of a creator, rather than in that of a self-existent Universe. Surely this unanimous sentiment renders this more probable than that of the few in the other hypothesis. Some early Christians indeed have believed in the coeternal pre-existence of both the Creator and the world, without changing their relation of cause and effect. ...
Of the nature of this being we know nothing. Jesus tells us that `God is a spirit.' 4. John 24. but without defining what a spirit is
. Down to the 3d. century we know that it was still deemed material; but of a lighter subtler matter than our gross bodies. So says Origen....
The truth is that the greatest enemies to the doctrines of Jesus are those calling themselves the expositors of them, who have perverted them for the structure of a system of fancy absolutely incomprehensible, and without any foundation in his genuine words. And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. But we may hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away with all this artificial scaffolding, and restore to us the primitive and genuine doctrines of this the most venerated reformer of human errors.
[quote ends; emphasis mine]
In other words, my dear Jeff (if I may take the liberty, and he can't exactly prevent me) had the same quarrel with certain branches of American Christianity then that I have now. He believed that "reason and freedom of thought" would "restore to us the primitive and genuine doctrines" of Christ, "the most venerated reformer of human errors." He certainly wouldn't be joining in a rousing foot-stomping chorus of "When the Roll is Called Up Yonder (I'll be There)" at the local Church of the Fundamentalist Jesus. He wouldn't concede, either, that the form of religion being preached in such places is the real old time religion dating back to the time of Christ. If you don't believe me, read the entire letter.
And nor would the estimable (and sex-ay!!) French-loving Dr. Ben Franklin. In a 1789 letter to Ezra Stiles, the President of Yale, he wrote:
You desire to know something of my religion. . . . Here is my creed. I believe in one God, Creator of the Universe. That He governs it by His providence. That He ought to be worshipped. That the most acceptable service we render to Him is doing good to His other children. That the soul of man is immortal, and will be treated with justice in another life respecting its conduct in this. [These are based on Lord Herbert of Chebury's "Five Points" of Deism.]
As regards to Jesus of Nazareth, my opinion of whom you particularly desire, I think the system of morals and His religion, as He left them to us, the best the world ever saw or is likely to see; but I apprehend it has received various corrupting changes, and I have with most of the present dissenters in England, some doubts as to His divinity; though it is a question I do not dogmatize upon, having never studied it. . . . I see no harm, however, in its being believed, if that belief has the good consequence, as probably it has, of making His doctrines more respected and better observed; especially as I do not perceive, that the Supreme takes it amiss, by distinguishing the unbelievers in His government of the world with any peculiar marks of His displeasure. . . .
[quote ends]
Note that Dr. Franklin too was a believer in a supreme being and the merits of small-c christianity, despite his doubts in the divinity of Jesus. In other words, while right-wing Christianity is entirely inconsistent with the beliefs of some of the most prominent founding fathers, what I'd call a rational deism (please, Mr. Hitchens?) is not.
Of course, whatever the founders individually believed about Christianity or Jesus, they did not regard religion as the proper province of the government:.
Article I Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peacably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
3. THE FOUNDERS: THE UNITED STATES IS NOT A CHRISTIAN NATION.
Nor did they consider the United States to be a Christian nation.
It's true. The 1796 Treaty with Tripoli---unanimously passed and signed ("and proudly proclaimed") by John Adams--- states:
Art. 11. As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity, of Mussulmen; and, as the said States never entered into any war, or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties, that no pretext arising from religious opinions, shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.
Jefferson was the great advocate for religious tolerance and for keeping the theocracy out of democracy. In Notes on the State of Virginia (1782), Jefferson wrote:
[quotes begin from "Jefferson Christianity Quotes."]
"The first settlers in this country were emigrants from England, of the English church, just at a point of time when it was flushed with complete victory over the religious of all other persuasions. Possessed, as they became, of the powers of making, administering, and executing the laws, they showed equal intolerance in this country with their Presbyterian brethren, who had emigrated to the northern government. The poor Quakers were flying from persecution in England. They cast their eyes on these new countries as asylums of civil and religious freedom; but they found them free only for the reigning sect."
and
"Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined and imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites. To support roguery and error all over the earth."
[quotes end]
In his 1785 remonstrance against religious assessments (a bill "establishing a provision for teachers of the Christian religion"), James Madison argued:
[quote begins from Document 43]
Because we hold it for a fundamental and undeniable truth, "that Religion or the duty which we owe to our Creator and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence." [Virginia Declaration of Rights, art. 16] The Religion then of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man; and it is the right of every man to exercise it as these may dictate. This right is in its nature an unalienable right. It is unalienable, because the opinions of men, depending only on the evidence contemplated by their own minds cannot follow the dictates of other men:..We maintain therefore that in matters of Religion, no mans right is abridged by the institution of Civil Society and that Religion is wholly exempt from its cognizance....
[I]f Religion be exempt from the authority of the Society at large, still less can it be subject to that of the Legislative Body. The latter are but the creatures and vicegerents of the former. Their jurisdiction is both derivative and limited: it is limited with regard to the co-ordinate departments, more necessarily is it limited with regard to the constituents....
Whilst we assert for ourselves a freedom to embrace, to profess and to observe the Religion which we believe to be of divine origin, we cannot deny an equal freedom to those whose minds have not yet yielded to the evidence which has convinced us. If this freedom be abused, it is an offence against God, not against man: To God, therefore, not to man, must an account of it be rendered. As the Bill violates equality by subjecting some to peculiar burdens, so it violates the same principle, by granting to others peculiar exemptions. Are the Quakers and Menonists the only sects who think a compulsive support of their Religions unnecessary and unwarrantable? Can their piety alone be entrusted with the care of public worship? Ought their Religions to be endowed above all others with extraordinary privileges by which proselytes may be enticed from all others? We think too favorably of the justice and good sense of these denominations to believe that they either covet pre-eminences over their fellow citizens or that they will be seduced by them from the common opposition to the measure....
[E]xperience witnesseth that ecclesiastical establishments, instead of maintaining the purity and efficacy of Religion, have had a contrary operation. During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the Clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity, in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution....
It degrades from the equal rank of Citizens all those whose opinions in Religion do not bend to those of the Legislative authority. Distant as it may be in its present form from the Inquisition, it differs from it only in degree. The one is the first step, the other the last in the career of intolerance. ...
Torrents of blood have been spilt in the old world, by vain attempts of the secular arm, to extinguish Religious discord, by proscribing all difference in Religious opinion. Time has at length revealed the true remedy. Every relaxation of narrow and rigorous policy, wherever it has been tried, has been found to assuage the disease. The American Theatre has exhibited proofs that equal and compleat liberty, if it does not wholly eradicate it, sufficiently destroys its malignant influence on the health and prosperity of the State. If with the salutary effects of this system under our own eyes, we begin to contract the bounds of Religious freedom, we know no name that will too severely reproach our folly. At least let warning be taken at the first fruits of the threatened innovation. The very appearance of the Bill has transformed "that Christian forbearance, love and charity," [Virginia Declaration of Rights, art. 16] which of late mutually prevailed, into animosities and jealousies, which may not soon be appeased. What mischiefs may not be dreaded, should this enemy to the public quiet be armed with the force of a law?
[quote ends; emphasis mine]
This quote from an interview with failed sematorial candidate and fellow Floridian ex-Florida secretary of state Katherine Harris, reflecting what I consider a very typical view of right wing Christians, would doubtless make Jefferson and Franklin and Madison cry.
[quote begins from Baptist Witness, Interview with Katherine Harris, August 24, 2006; see also The Washington Post, Rep. Harris Condemns Separation of Church and State, Jim Stratton, Orlando Sentinel, August 26, 2006)]
The Bible says we are to be salt and light. And salt and light means not just in the church and not just as a teacher or as a pastor or a banker or a lawyer, but in government and we have to have elected officials in government and we have to have the faithful in government and over time, that lie we have been told, the separation of church and state, people have internalized, thinking that they needed to avoid politics and that is so wrong because God is the one who chooses our rulers. And if we are the ones not actively involved in electing those godly men and women and if people aren’t involved in helping godly men in getting elected than we’re going to have a nation of secular laws. That’s not what our founding fathers intended and that’s certainly isn’t what God intended....
If you are not electing Christians, tried and true, under public scrutiny and pressure, if you’re not electing Christians then in essence you are going to legislate sin. They can legislate sin. They can say that abortion is alright. They can vote to sustain gay marriage. And that will take western civilization, indeed other nations because people look to our country as one nation as under God and whenever we legislate sin and we say abortion is permissible and we say gay unions are permissible, then average citizens who are not Christians, because they don’t know better, we are leading them astray and it’s wrong. ...
[quote ends; emphasis mine]
With all due respect to Katherine Harris, this is not---repeat; NOT---the true and traditional American Christianity or the true and traditional view of the relationship between Christian institutions and legislative ones. Instead, it springs from a view explicitly rejected by the founders.
VFP "Memorial Mile" Part 2 is now posted on YOU TUBE.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdQgjElJ54Q
Posted by: Harold Saive | May 30, 2007 at 06:38 PM