Church & State with Laurie, Part the First

I’m gonna break this one up into parts, because I got long-winded (surprise surprise). So, without further ado…

Laurie said:

I am sure you are aware the framers of the Constitution sought to prevent an Established Church from calling the shots in government. It was not that they wanted to rid the nation of a faith in the one true and living God, rather they simply did not want the church making governmental decisions. These days, the whole meaning behind the Establishment Clause has been marred beyond comprehension. It has taken on this sick mutation that has been maladapted to serve as the motto for any anti-Christian movement. “Gotta get that out of the pledge and off our money.” If you have ever been to D.C. you would realize this was never the intent of the framers.

First, I recommend you check out this Library of Congress exhibit, Religion and the Founding of the American Republic. I’m not saying it’s going to rock your world or change your mind anything, but it is the kind of stuff that doesn’t usually make it to the surface in these kinds of discussions. (And it’s got lots of cool images of original documents!) Most importantly, though, it shows that people have been arguing over this issue from the very beginning of our nation. I.e., there was never a “golden age” kind of period where Christianity was uncontested as the primary force of our government.

Now, on to the specifics:

How is it “anti-Christian” to want to neutralize the government’s expression of religion? Nobody is saying that we should force Christians to believe otherwise. Nobody is asking the government to take an active position against Christianity–not in the way that Christians take an active position against secularism via “evangelism,” etc. I don’t want a Pledge that says “one nation without god” or money that says “We do not trust in god,” or government officials who begin their sessions by reciting an anti-creed of atheism. Those things would most certainly be “anti-Christian,” but those things are not what most secularists want.

Here’s where I think you’re going wrong: You say “It was not that [the framers] wanted to rid the nation of a faith in the one true and living God…” No, but what do you mean by “the nation”? Do you mean the people who live in the United States, or do you mean the institutions that represent the United States? Because many important people in the colonial and revolutionary eras made it clear that they believed religious faith to be essential in the people of a nation. However, when it came to drawing up the functioning institutions of our government in the form of our Constitution, you will find not one mention of God. There is a difference between people and institutions and it is important in this issue. People represent only themselves, while institutions represent great masses of people. That is, the institutions of our government have to represent everyone–Christian, atheist, Muslim, Buddhist, Jew, or Jedi Knight (okay, maybe not the last one). Maybe the Christians think it’s cool to have their faith ascendant, part of civic rituals, printed on money, etc., but the rest of us don’t feel so nice about it. However, that doesn’t mean we think Christians shouldn’t exist. This is what, to be perfectly honest, drives me absolutely batty about Christians who say things like “the Establishment Clause has been marred beyond comprehension.”

Our money and institutions make no reference to Allah, or to the Buddha, or to Vishnu, or to any other deities, but for some reason none of the people of those religions (who live in the United States) seem to see the lack of such references in our government as anti-Islamic, anti-Buddhist, or anti-Hindu. Why not? It’s only Christians who seem to think that living under a government that does not pay lip service to their beliefs will somehow cause their religion to shrivel up and die. Why?

My theory, based on a long-range look at history over the last couple thousand years, is that Christians, at least in their central lands (first the Roman Empire, then all of Europe, then the “Western” world), have never, at least not since the 4th century, lived under a government whose rhetorical forms they did not control. Ever since Christianity took the Roman Empire by storm, the West has been, in one form or another, a “Christian” entity. The last time Christians lived under a different religion (Roman paganism), they were persecuted. I think this has created a mindset endemic to Western Christianity, especially in the United States, where we don’t have history so much as we have mythology, that living under a non-Christian government would somehow lead to the kind of persecution Christians saw under the watch of a few Roman emperors. Funny thing, though, American Christians seem to have forgotten all the Christian wars in Europe, and all the bloodshed and violence that lasted for hundreds of years, from which many of our earliest colonial settlers were trying to escape! The more historical-minded European Christians don’t seem to be terrified of living under secular governments though, probably because they still remember, at least historically, all the bloodshed that was wrought by various Christian sects trying to wrest political power from each other. It’s only we Americans who are saddled with Christians who think Christian government is the way to go, mostly because when we look at history, we completely forget all the Christian warfare that was the impetus for the emigration that led to our nation.

Meanwhile, once those Christians escaping from Europe for religious freedom landed on the shores of North America, many of them (though certainly not all of them) were just as hard and ridiculous in their persecution of those who believed and thought differently as were those folks from which they had escaped! This is the history that we doubters and secularists and atheists remember. All has not always been well with Christian governments.

However, that does not mean I am anti-Christian in the sense that I want to force Christians into some different kind of belief. That is ridiculous. I won’t let anyone force my beliefs into something else, and I won’t go behaving that way toward anyone else. I can be counted on, however, to engage in friendly and critical dialogue, because I think everything ought to be thought through entirely, no holds barred, and with no limits on what questions can be asked, and no preconceived ideas about what the answers might be.

Nor would a government purged of explicit Christian references be anti-Christian in that sense. It would simply not be pro-Christian, and between those two things there is a world of difference. Personally, I would rather live under a government that concerns itself with solving real problems and governing real people than one that governs from an unquestioned and unquestionable religious ideology. Anybody is free to question the principles of liberal democracy, and people do it all the time. But Christians ascendant with their religion on the lips of all public servants would hardly offer the same openness. A Christian government would operate the same way as a monarch with divine right–under the auspices of an (allegedly) incontestable ideology. If a government that was explicitly Christian passed a law that I felt was unfair, how would I challenge it? Would I be able to say it was “unconstitutional”? Could I even go to court? Or would such decisions have to be made by biblical scholars? (This, by the way, is how they do it in nations with Islamic governments–just substitute “Muslim” for “Christian” and “koranic” for “biblical.”)

I hope you can see the kind of trouble that would wreak. In our current system, both you and I have a right to dissent and challenge our government and its principles based on our perspectives–mine atheistic and yours Christian. That’s because the principles of a Constitutional republic are secular, and open to criticism from anyone. However, in a Christian system, if I was a dissenter, all you would have to do is say that as an unbeliever, I clearly do not comprehend the overwhelming goodness of the Christian government, which is really acting in my favor according to the love of Jesus, and that I would do best to just pipe down and start praying for more faith.

You may want to reply that such a scenario is unfairly presented, but try to think it through. What if we set up a thoroughly Christian government and I as an atheist came along and said, “Hey, this particular law is irrational and/or unfair, and I think it ought to be changed.” On what basis would my criticism be considered? Would the Christian government say, “Ah, this atheist fellow has a good point–our law that was built on a Christian principle is flawed”? I doubt it, because such a statement would also require them to admit that perhaps their Christian principle itself is flawed, which of course is like knocking over the first domino, and that would never do. Very quickly, the Christian government would face the same kind of anti-clericalism and secularism that swept Europe in the 16th through 20th centuries, and it would probably end in bloodshed, because, well, that’s just how pathetic we human beings usually are.

So, if you really want to protect your Christian religion, putting it in charge is probably not the way to go. Before you know it, people will be questioning Christianity left and right, because people always question and complain about the government. It is just an invariable fact of human civilization.

No, the best way to go is to have a government that is as neutral as it can be with regards to religion, which leaves all of the people free to believe whatever they want, and to participate, criticize, and affirm from whatever “worldview” they have. That is not anti-Christian. It is not anti-Muslim or anti-Jewish or anti-Buddhist, either. Nor is it pro-atheist. It is just neutral. How else can you govern people who disagree so deeply on religion? Do you really want to take a diverse nation and set up a single religion at the top? Do you really want to see what would happen?

Now, I’ve spent a lot of text explaining why I think a Christian government would be bad. But what do I think of Christian governors (by which I mean simply Christian politicians and leaders)? I have no problem with them. What my representatives and leaders believe is their business, and I don’t mind what it is. They are even free to vote according to those religious consciouses! However, if our politicians and leaders can be Christians, they can also be Muslims or Jews or atheists, because we have all kinds of people in this nation, and all those people should be represented. How this is anti-Christian I do not know.

So here’s the upshot…

Do all of us like to fantasize about living in a world where everybody thinks or believes the same way we do? You betcha. All of us, even if we don’t admit it, think that way, at least now and then. That’s what John Lennon’s song “Imagine” was all about. That friendly (if wacked out) hippie was just fantasizing about a world where everybody was just like him. Christians like to fantasize about a world where everybody is a christian. Those Islamic radicals in the Middle East, what do you think they dream about? Let’s see, how about a world where Islam is all there is? Yeah, that’s probably it. And I, yes I, like to fantasize about a world where everybody is an atheist who likes to think, read books, be informed, share opinions, and scorn lowbrow culture. (Yeah, I’ll admit it, I’m something of an elitist… don’t go beating me up or anything!)

So, how about we all just admit to this nasty little habit? As I’ve said elsewhere, underneath all this metaphysical clothing we all wear, each and every one of us is still a human being, and that ought to mean something. (It does mean something, we just forget it too often.) When we look back to the 16th century, when the Protestants emerged, and they and the Catholics started beating each other up in Europe, we see that kind of thing and we cringe. Why? Because we know that they were all human beings and it seems ridiculous to us that people would impale each other on sticks, disembowel each other, and do all manner of vicious and horrible things, simply because they didn’t agree on theology! What was the solution they eventually found? Divorcing religion from government, keeping the power to govern and the will to believe in different places.

So, in case you missed it, let me say it again: Secular government isn’t anti-Christian. It protects Christians (and atheists and Buddhists and Hindus and everybody else). Nor am I anti-Christian. You might say I am anti-Christianity in the sense that I oppose the Christian ideology, but I am not anti-Christian in the sense that I oppose Christians themselves and their right to believe whatever they choose, even if they don’t feel like it’s a choice.

Now, quickly, let’s look at some individual issues:

Theistic money: If suddenly none of our money said “In God We Trust,” would you stop believing? Would your faith shrivel up and die? Would Christianity collapse and die? Would people suddenly forget that Christianity exists and stop showing up in churches? [Cheat note answers: no, no, no, and no]

Theistic pledge: If you had to say the Pledge of Allegiance as “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all,” would you stop believing? Would your faith shrivel up and die? Would Christianity collapse and die? Would people suddenly forget that Christianity exists and stop showing up in churches? [Cheat note answers: no, no, no, and no]

Theistic government: If nobody in government ever mentioned “God” or “Christianity” or “Jesus” or the “Ten Commandments,” but we kept on living under the rule of law, kept on voting, kept on enjoying the same freedoms, etc., would you stop believing? Would your faith shrivel up and die? Would Christianity collapse and die? Would people suddenly forget that Christianity exists and stop showing up in churches? [Cheat note answers: no, no, no, and no]

One last thing…

If important people 200 years ago felt that the Christian religion was essential to the American republic, why does that mean the Christian religion actually is essential to the American republic? Let me also remind you that important people 200 years ago also felt that African slavery was essential to the American republic. Remember, also, that on both of these issues, there were prominent dissenters.

The American system of government has always been infuriatingly vague on the issues that most fire up the minds of our people. That vagueness is a major reason why we fought a brutal Civil War in the 1860s. Unfortunately for us, it is possible to read the documents of our nation and build a decent case for both sides of the debate. That means we are forced to think for ourselves and decide for ourselves. I am not at all opposed to this, nor am I opposed to debates like this one, because it makes all of us think harder about who we are, what we believe, where we want to go as a nation, and how we want to get there. The last thing I want is to put us on auto-pilot by having nailed down a particular ideological thrust, once and for all. Once that happens, we have nailed the lid on our coffin and will be due for replacement as an important nation.

So, to bring this post full-circle, no, I don’t think “the Establishment Clause has been marred beyond comprehension.” I think the Establishment Clause has been vague and nearly incomprehensible since it was written, and while that has led to these kinds of “culture wars,” it has also led every single generation of Americans to think for itself on this issue, and that, in my opinion, is the best we could have asked for.

Quickie

I still want to respond to stuff that Laurie wrote here, but it’s getting put off again. Work is taking a lot of my time at the moment–I have just been put into a fifth grade class for the next three weeks, and I have to whip up lesson plans on the fly. (Hooray for me.)

However, back to the focus of the blog: Leah said something interesting about society “forcing immorality on all of us” and that sorta shocked me. Forced immorality? Who? Where? When? What? How? Maybe I’m missing something. Could some of you fill me in on what’s going on? Am I just lucky enough to live in a safe pocket of the nation where freedom still exists, and nobody is forcing me to be immoral? Do tell… I’m puzzled.

Response to Glenn

Glenn says, “Of course there is a place for the voice and values of non-Christians and atheists to be heard.”

Thanks, Glenn. Glad you recognize my right to speak. But then, I never doubted that from you anyway, because in the last few days you’ve proven to be a pretty nice guy, in my opinion.

Glenn also says, “Some of us Christians feel like the courts and many other segments of the nation’s leadership are hostile to Christian values. BUT once, not that long ago it was not so.”

Here I’m curious. How are the courts and other segments of the nation’s leadership hostile to Christian values? Do you mean things like the gay marriage issue? Official prayer in school? The Pledge of Allegiance? Since those are the things I can think of on my own, I’ll address those things, but if you have other stuff you’re thinking of, by all means, bring it up.

(1) Gay Marriage. Personally, I don’t really understand homosexuality. I’m a guy and I like girls. If I ever get married, it will be to a woman, and I plan on being faithful to her. In that respect, I have a lot in common with most Christians. On the other hand, I just don’t buy the argument that gay marriage will dilute the power of the institution any more than heterosexuals have already managed to do. Divorce rates are high (for Christians and non-Christians alike), and among those who don’t get divorced, a whole lot of them aren’t exactly happy, either. In my opinion, an unhappy marriage where nobody deals with the problem isn’t much better than one where they deal with it by walking away from each other. To sum up, I don’t think heterosexual marriage has a lot going for it right now, anyway. Homosexual marriage may be weird and odd and even distasteful to me, but having seen a lot of weird, odd, and distasteful heterosexual marriages, too, I am not going to support a movement to disallow homosexuals from getting married. Does that mean I want to be hostile to the Christian idea of marriage? Nope. If Christians want to see marriage a certain way, then Christians ought to get married that way, and if they feel that strongly about it, they ought not give their blessing to other marriages, or to allow their churches to be used for other marriages. That would be fine with me. Personally, I don’t plan to get married in a church anyway, if that day ever arrives.

But the question here is whether or not our government shares my position. In my opinion, yes, it does. Our courts are not striking down “traditional” marriages, but beginning to allow “nontraditional” marriages. How letting other people get married in other ways is a threat to Christians and their own marriages, well, that’s lost on me. Someone recently wrote into my local newspaper claiming that homosexual marriage will destroy our civilization. I had to chuckle. Maybe our civilization is on a downhill slope (I tend to think it is), but gay marriage is not The Problem. We have way more pressing problems right now.

(2) Official Prayer in Schools. I wish this one was a no-brainer, but it seems that it’s not. Christians can pray anywhere they want. When I was a Christian, I prayed all the time (you know, “without ceasing”). The only reason I can think of that Christians would want officially sanctioned public prayers in schools is because they want such activities to some how impress upon the non-Christian kids that Christianity is really the only way to go. This, in my opinion, would be reprehensible in a tolerant society, and detrimental to our freedom. Should I ever find myself in that marriage mentioned above, I hope to have children, and I don’t want those kids to go into school and have religion pushed on them.

I know, I know–Christians don’t want to have their kids go to school to get stuff like evolutionary science pushed on them, either. What can I say? Despite the pronouncements of “creation scientists” and “intelligent design” folks, the scientific consensus is in favor of evolution. Don’t know what else to tell you. There is no conspiracy. I could point out a tall stack of books that illustrate this, but I don’t expect them to be read, or properly understood. That’s not intended as a slam against the collective reading comprehension skills of Christians, but as a sad observation of what I’ve seen. I go out of my way to read Christian books like the stuff by guys like Lee Strobel and Philip Johnson, and I’ve been trying for a long time to get my hands on Michael Behe’s book at my local library, but it’s always checked out. But I don’t know too many Christians who are going out of their way to read the serious literature of evolutionary science. Instead they’re reading science as filtered through “creation scientists,” and not straight from the horse’s mouth. I think that’s sad. (By the way, if you want to call my bluff, I’ll give you that list of books.)

Anyway, I’m getting off track here, aren’t I? I guess my point is that I’m not going to make your kids recite some atheistic creed in school, so you shouldn’t expect mine to recite a Christian one.

(3) Pledge of Allegiance. I was going to write more, but I’m having a really stressful day. So I’ll try to cut this one short. Patriotism does not equal theism, and theism does not equal patriotism. You shouldn’t have to believe in god to be an American patriot. I love my country, and think it’s the greatest one on the planet, and perhaps in the whole history of the world. I think our freedoms are the best there are, and I like the fact that nobody is pushing religion from the government. But I don’t want to have to stand up every morning to salute my country with a statement of theism. You can believe whatever you want about god and authority and the government, but not all of us agree. In short, I’m not going to ask anybody, ever, to pledge to “one nation without god,” so don’t ask me to pledge to “one nation under God.” Let’s treat each other equally. If you want to proselytize, and try to convince people that Christianity is the way to go, then do it by personally coming up to me, starting a conversation, getting to know me, and just being a friend or a neighbor or a genuine human being. Don’t use slogans or systems of control or the power of the government, because if your faith is really that powerful, then you don’t really need all that other stuff.

For what it’s worth, even though I’ve got approximately zero chance of becoming a Christian again, you’ve been doing pretty well at that whole friend/neighbor/genuine human being thing, Glenn, and I appreciate that. (Same to you, thedonald, if you’re reading this.) So don’t feel bad if you don’t convert me. You are very nice guys.

Coming soon…

There are some interesting comments from Leah and Laurie and Glenn. Very interesting. Lots of reply-text is lined up in my brain, but the time to compose it and the mental-emotional state required to sit down and actually do it, well, those things are lacking for the moment.

A quick response to Leah, though, based on her comments here. How much of my site did you actually read? Did you get past the sidebar? Could you give some examples of where I have “trashed Christians” (as opposed to criticizing the things some of them say)? What are my political views, anyway? Most people who know me have found it extremely difficult to pin me into a standard political viewpoint. Could you give more examples for why you are right and I am wrong, except to just say that I am “misinformed”? Misinformed on what? Misinformed by whom? Would you mind telling me exactly how my politics are “in the way”? Otherwise, your comments are vague and not very helpful. All they tell me is that you think I’m wrong, misinformed, deluded, and so on. None of your comments tell me why, though, so I can’t really make a decent reply, or even consider your comments seriously.

Atheist Alarmism?

Over at the Council for Secular Humanism website, they have the latest editorial by Paul Kurtz in Free Inquiry magazine. It’s called “The Passion as a Political Weapon.” Here’s an excerpt:

The Passion of the Christ reinforces a reality secularists dare not overlook: more than ever before, the Bible has become a powerful political force in America. The Religious Right is pulling no punches in order to defeat secularism and, it hopes, transform the United States into a God-fearing country that salutes “one nation under God” and opposes gay marriages and the “liberal agenda.” The interjection of religion into the public square (which in fact was never empty) by powerful religious and political forces has ominous implications. James Madison, framer of the Constitution, rightfully worried about factions disrupting civil society, and religious factions can be the most fractious.

. . .

Given the tremendous box office success of Mel Gibson’s film, there are bound to be other Jesus movies produced — for Jesus sells in America! The Passion of the Christ unfortunately may add to intolerance of dissenters; and this may severely endanger the fragility of social peace. It may further help to undermine the First Amendment’s prohibition of the establishment of religion, which has been the mainstay of American democracy. This indeed is the most worrisome fallout that the Gibson film is likely to produce.

Christian friends who read this blog (I know you’re out there)–tell me if this is true. How many Christians–ordinary, everyday Christians–really want to “transform the United States into a God-fearing country” by “disrupting civil society”? Do Christians really want to bring their faith into the United States at a level that “may severely endanger the fragility of social peace”? Do Christians really want to “undermine the First Amendment’s prohibition of the establishment of religion”?

I am curious, because I have read some pretty ridiculous things about atheists in books by Christians. I am thinking primarily of Mind Siege by Tim LaHaye and David Noebel and Persecution by David Limbaugh, though there are others I don’t recall at the moment. In those books, atheists and secularists are portrayed as some kind of underground army hoping to one day soon march into the civic sphere of the United States, take over the government, start persecuting Christians, and make religious faith illegal. That is, of course, absolute fantasy. Lots of atheists and secularists (myself among them) believe that the world would be a better place without religion (you remember that old John Lennon song, right? “Imagine all the people, living for today!”), but I don’t know a single one who would support making Christianity illegal. Christians have the right to believe whatever they want, just as I have the right to not believe whatever I want. It would hardly be fair of atheists to claim the right to not believe, and then go abridging the right of religious folks to believe.

So I’m wondering if those ridiculous things I read about atheists in Christian literature are paralleled in the things I read in secularist literature about Christians.

An atheist recently said to me that Christians don’t think people like us (atheists) should exist. That struck me as total lunacy. I know there are some extremists out there who would no doubt love to see atheists just disappear, but I have a feeling that most ordinary, everyday Christians are perfectly willing to let me live and speak and participate in society. So Christians, tell me what you think. I am really curious.

If you’re curious, my personal view on belief and unbelief in society goes something like this: Everybody should have the right to think whatever they want, or to worship whomever or whatever they choose–but, as Thomas Jefferson said, only so long as other people’s opinions and beliefs “neither break my leg nor pick my pocket.” (My grandpa always said something like “Your right to throw a punch stops at the end of my nose.”) However, in the civic sphere, where laws and decisions are made that will affect everyone, religion has no place. If elected officials want to have religious beliefs, that’s just fine. If they want to cast their vote according to a religious conscience, that’s just fine. But explicit, overt use of religious language in the civic sphere is inappropriate for a diverse society. Religion doesn’t belong in Congress, it doesn’t belong on our money, it doesn’t belong in our “pledge of allegiance,” and it doesn’t belong in our courts. Is religion a part of our history? You better believe it. Have many important Americans been religious? Absolutely. But that does not mean Christians (or any other religious groups) get the right to make our government into a religious government. Religious freedom for everyone, including the irreligious, can only exist when the government is completely neutral on the matter. For my part, I promise not to persecute you if you promise not to persecute me. (See also my post Secularism means Paring Down.)

At any rate, I am curious about Christian views on this matter. Tell me–do you want to take over the world? Do you want people like me to be eliminated from society? Do you really believe that freedom of religion is best served by a religiously biased government?

Lies and Adaptations

The other day, a woman approached me in the store where I work. (It’s a small store, so we know a lot of our customers, who are not afraid to start conversations with us. Makes the environment more enjoyable than, say, Wal-Mart.) She walked up, unbidden, and said, “I feel so bad about this war! I wish we could just cut and run!” I was then subjected to the fluttery ranting of an emotionally jarred person genuinely concerned that the U.S. should not be in Iraq. “The troops are being lied to!” she said, referring to how the tours of duty have been repeatedly extended. “We shouldn’t be over there until we improve our own nation!” she said.

I don’t mind dissenting opinions. And I don’t mind emotional responses because, after all, we are human beings and despite the goals toward which we may strive, emotions usually get the better of us. The woman in question is a regular in my store, and very friendly. She supports our people in uniform. In fact, I recently overheard her strike up a conversation with a young Marine who happened into our store. She thanked him for what he does, appending “God bless you.” Certainly, I too am grateful for all our military does (without the blessing of god). But I have trouble supporting them while condemning their mission. You may disagree, but this is my blog, and my opinion–but you’re welcome to click the comment link below and give yours.

This nice lady is a complicated person, as we all are. She is torn by conflicting emotions–pacifism on one hand, and support for our troops on the other hand. I respect that, because I know what it’s like to be caught between conflicting emotions.

But something she said really bothered me, and stuck in my brain for a couple days. It was her comment that our troops are being “lied to” regarding the length of their tours of duty in Iraq. First, I don’t think anyone is lying to the troops. Yes, their time in Iraq is getting extended. Yes, that’s hard on families. Yes, the natural human response is to be upset about that. But events in Iraq are neither stable nor predictable. Exigencies in Iraq require plans to be changed, and when we have the smallest military in decades, the only way to get the job done is to ask our troops to work longer than they expected. Was it a lie to tell them one length of time, and then change it to another? No. It was an adaptation to circumstances.

Let me pull back from the situation for a moment. There several possibilities for understanding “untrue” statements. Here are some of them:

If I know one thing, but say another, intending that manipulation of information to give me a benefit that truth-telling would not have provided, I have told a lie.

If I say something without knowing that it was untrue, I have spoken in ignorance.

If I say something regarding a set of circumstances, and after my statement those circumstances change so that a second, different statement is required, I have been forced to adapt my words to the changing situation. That is not a lie, or hypocrisy, but a problem inherent to being creatures of time and shifting circumstances.

Unfortunately, though, it seems that most Americans are unable to discern between these three kinds of statements, and we label all of them “lies,” when really only one of them is a true lie (the first one). The others are just unfortunate.

Diving back into the tumultuous territory of current events, I don’t think anyone can honestly say, according to those standards, that our troops have been lied to. Yes, our troops have been caught in an unfortunate situation, and yes, the government has had to make the unfortunate decision to extend their time in Iraq. But no one has lied. People have simply made mistakes of prediction.

Speaking of mistakes of prediction, remember those predictions about Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) in Iraq? According to everyone’s best intelligence, Iraq was a minefield of concealed WMDs. With that intelligence, was it a reasonable prediction that WMDs would be found when we invaded Iraq? Yes! However, it turns out that the intelligence was wrong, so the predictions were wrong, too. Meanwhile, people are claiming that we were “lied to” about the WMDs. No! We were not lied to! Our leaders fell prey to an error that has plagued we time-bound humans since we first began to think: they failed to accurately predict the future.

Of course, before World War II, when everybody thought Hitler was not so bad, world leaders also failed to accurately predict the future, and we have regretted it ever since. In fact, when the Bush administration announced its new policy of preemptive strikes, many people directly correlated this decision with the Hitler gaffe in the 1930s. But this time, the reasoning went, we will recognize the threat posed by Saddam Hussein–WWII will not happen again!

Once the WMD prediction was proven wrong, pundits and dissenters had a field day accusing the Bush administration of lying or deceiving the American public and the world. That kind of behavior is stupid, silly, and ignorant of both history and of how the universe works. No one can predict the future.

False predictions are not lies; they are just part of being human. You might say that since we cannot predict, we should not even try. But isn’t that what happened before September 11, 2001? Our government failed to predict that, and now they’re getting berated for that failure, too!

It seems that with a population as foolish as the American population, there is no way to win. I do not doubt that if we had predicted the attacks on September 11, and there had been an announcement that the U.S. had arrested twenty Saudi citizens for being suspected terrorists, there would have been an international outcry.

Should we try to predict the future? Or should we only respond to events as they unfold? I suspect that either way dissenters would be upset. Some people–and most of them admit this freely–refuse to trust anything the government says or does. Personally, I don’t think that’s a healthy attitude. Yes, the government needs to be held accountable. But there are better ways to do that than to accuse them of not seeing the future clearly. There is an old saying that hindsight is twenty-twenty. Some of our dissenters and protesters would do well to remember that, and focus instead on the issues at hand.

Maybe the war in Iraq will ultimately turn out to be a great mistake, or maybe it will become a great triumph. Right now, though, no one knows which it will be.

Answers to Questions

Thedonald left me a couple questions yesterday, and they are good questions, so I will try to answer them here.

What rocked your world? What derailed you, so to speak? You must have hit some kind of wall. You examined the evidence, probably more than I have, then you went the other way.

All those phrases–”rocked your world,” “derailed you,” and “hit some kind of wall”–are indicative of personal cataclysm. Many Christians, it seems from my experience, believe that people become atheists when these personal cataclysms hit. Their opinion is usually that if the “lost” person would have just stuck it out and had faith, the cataclysm would have passed and the road to atheism would have gone untraveled. Well-meaning as those folks are, they fundamentally misunderstand what it is like to become an atheist after having been religious.

My passage from Christian to atheist was not the result of a personal cataclysm (though it probably spawned a few personal cataclysms in the lives of some friends and relatives). Instead, it was a long process that took several years. Mostly, it just involved reading, writing, and thinking. For the most part, it was not an emotional process, but a rational one.

Usually, people who “lose the faith” because of some emotional disaster don’t become atheists–they become wounded theists. These are people who still believe in god, but are angry or disillusioned at god, or feel that the moral or behavioral demands of god are just too much for them–better to just go party and live a “life of sin,” they say. Invariably, wounded theists will find themselves back in the church someday, usually because of another emotional disaster–a crash of some kind, either literal, or psychological, or physiological. The classic “wounded theist” that always comes to my mind is the guy you find at church who tells stories about being in a gang, or being an alcoholic, or some flavor of criminal, and who is covered with tattoos and other scars of his “life of sin.” That’s just a composite caricature, but I think you’ll know what I mean. There are other kinds of wounded theists, too. Sometimes a wounded theist is the result of a child dying, or some other “unjust” thing that happened. Those are the kinds of people who are targeted by Harold Kushner’s book When Bad Things Happen to Good People. In some denominations, wounded theists are known as “backslidden Christians.”

Wounded theists are not atheists; the two could not be much more different. Unfortunately, most Christians don’t take this into account. They don’t understand what it means to be a real atheist, and I have even heard some of them say that real atheists don’t exist! The frustrating result is that most of the literature for Christians regarding atheists is inaccurate (or even downright dishonest) and misdirected. While you would have a good chance of success if you went to a wounded theist to evangelize, directing a similar attempt at a real atheist would be futile. Some of the myths about atheists is that they are sad without god, that they really want to believe but can’t because of the evidence, and that they are totally immoral. Hence, much of the evangelistic material directed towards atheists is an attempt to address one of those myths–to show us the joy of god, to present evidence, or to convince us that we are morally bankrupt. The first one just makes us laugh, because we know that Christians have bad days just like we do, and are not, on the whole, happier or more secure than we are. The second one is based on the philosophical mistake that the existence of god can be proven. The third one is just an insult. When you go to people who are endeavoring every day to live well, and tell them that they are morally bankrupt, they are not going to listen to you. However, all three of those techniques are likely to work on wounded theists.

So, to finally answer the question, no, I did not hit a wall, derail, or have my world rocked. Actually, my path to atheism was just an extension of my path to try and understand my faith better. It started with my desire to really know why I believed, to have an answer for anyone. This was probably a natural thing for a Christian kid on a state university campus, suddenly exposed to all that evil secularism I had heard about in high school. Christian kids who go to public universities usually feel embattled. My solution was to dig in, to become as strong a Christian as I could, and go for the gold. Except it turns out that the more I read, and the more I thought, and the more I wrote down my thoughts in an attempt to sort them out, the more the whole system started to crumble in my hands. I remember writing out very long critiques of Christianity, in which the whole thing began to look utterly absurd. This was difficult for me, because I was still under the spell of those myths that non-belief would turn me into some lost soul, bereft in a sea of meaninglessness. It was a difficult spot–believe all this stuff that looks like hogwash, or give myself up to a meaningless, unbelieving life? But even then, it was not a cataclysm, or a wall to hit, or a derailment. Even then, I was still convinced that god existed, that Christianity was true, but that it had been corrupted by generations of people. So I got more liberal. The Bible wasn’t literally true, I concluded. That eased the tension for a while. But then I had to start asking myself where I was getting the ability to judge which parts of the Bible were true. Sure, there were scholars and archaeologists to tell me which parts were more likely to be true, but still there were ethical decisions to be made. Why did I like most of the Sermon on the Mount, but find Leviticus repulsive? Certainly, there are lots of “answers” to that question within Christianity, but for various reasons, I rejected them all as nonsense. The further I got, the more I realized how little most of the Christians around me thought and knew about their faith. In Sunday school classes, I raised questions that made some people uncomfortable. A few people in the church actually went to the pastor and asked him to shut me down, to not let me ask certain questions. However, to be clear, understand that this social affront was not my reason for leaving. By that time, I just had to laugh at these people, how small-minded they seemed. I used to tell people that if their faith could not withstand any question, then it wasn’t a faith worth keeping.

Eventually, I came to a place where the whole thing hung by a thread, and I had the option of cutting that thread. So I did. And, honestly, it was a scary moment. But I was surprised afterward how good it felt to be free of all that stuff. No longer would I have to deal with Christianity, and constantly be sorting things out in my head, trying to find bits of value here and there. I was free to look at the world through my own eyes. It felt good.

This will date me, but at about that time, the movie The Matrix came out. Sitting in a theater one day and watching Neo emerge from that pod of goo, then learn that the world where he grew up was just an illusion, a system of control, I couldn’t help but see a metaphor for my own experience. Christianity was The Matrix and I was Neo. At last I felt free from belief, and when the words and ideas of Christians came at me as the bullets came at Neo, I was not worried.

Do you do this as a hobby, or job?

If I could get paid to do this, I would. Unfortunately, I get paid to do other things, and this is just a hobby.

Atheism and Politics

Got into a scuffle with somebody called “hermesten” over at the Raving Atheist. Reading back over both of our comments, I think we’re possibly just talking past each other, but still there is this comment of his, which is what first set me off:

If he’s anti-Bush that would make him a real patriot and a friend of America, as well as a friend of atheists.

He later followed with this:

I don’t think an atheist must be anti-Bush per se, or anti-religious-politician. If Bush was a Catholic or Jew, I don’t think he would be a problem. But he’s not. He’s a fundamentalist wacko. I do think atheists must be against fundamentalist wackos, no matter what party they are in. Read the agenda of these people: they don’t think you [an atheist] have a right to exist. They state openly that no one can be a good citizen without believing in Jesus. If they get enough power, you are going to suffer. Once they get that power it’s too late.

I also happen not to like Bush’s policies, but I can tell you in absolutely seriousness that if I liked everything he’d done so far I’d still be anti-Bush because he is a religious nut, for the reasons I have given you.

This is probably where I depart from a whole bunch of atheists, who are incredibly worried about George W. Bush. Personally, I think they’re engaging in paranoid alarmism. Take, for instance, the line from hermesten that says “They state openly that no one can be a good citizen without believing in Jesus.” Okay, that’s something George Bush the elder said once, a long time ago, and he caught flack for it–so we never heard him say anything like that again. And, to be fair, we ought to remember that George W. Bush said in 1999 that “We will keep a commitment to pluralism [and] not discriminate for or against Methodist or Mormons or Muslims or good people with no faith at all.” [emphasis added] So it’s inaccurate and dishonest to say “They” state these things openly because the rhetoric has clearly changed. And if President Bush doesn’t himself believe that atheists can’t be good citizens, then he clearly made that statement because he knows that the American people, by and large, are willing to accept “good people with no faith at all.” If the President was really a force for atheists to be worried about, he would have continued with his father’s ridiculous rhetoric, the public be damned.

So the statement that “If they get enough power, you are going to suffer,” is silly. If it really is the goal of the Bush administration to eradicate atheism, he sure isn’t trying very hard. And, as I pointed out in one of my comments over at the Raving Atheist, Bush is going to be gone, either in early 2005 or in early 2009. This is the beauty of term limits. The American people didn’t elect George W. Bush for life, and regardless of how much they like them, they would not support his declaring himself emperor. No, things are not that bad yet.

But what really worries me is when atheists like hermesten say that being “anti-Bush” is equal to “patriotism” is equal being a “friend of atheists.” I certainly believe that patriotism and atheism can and should be on friendly terms, but being anti-Bush is not necessarily patriotic–that’s just hermesten’s view. Furthermore, saying that being anti-Bush means being a friend of atheists is tantamount to saying that being an atheist requires one to be against George W. Bush.

Well, I’m here to say that even though I’m an atheist, and even though I am annoyed and angered by a lot of the things Bush has done regarding “faith-based initiatives,” and that cockamamie idea to amend the Constitution to define marriage, I will probably end up voting for him in November, even though I didn’t vote for him in 2000. Why? Because I think the main thing right now is making sure we keep the pressure against the insurgency in Iraq (because if we screw that up, then we are in big trouble), and I don’t see John Kerry as being particularly strong in that area.

Also, despite some of the anti-Bush rhetoric that sees the “War on Terror” and the war in Iraq as some kind of Christian crusade against Islam, I tend to agree that radical Islam is the biggest threat to anybody on the world scene right now. You don’t have to be a Christian to want to fight back Islam. You can be a secularist, too.

Anyway, I am mainly just annoyed right now at people who think that atheism = anti-Bush, and at people who think that dissent in and of itself = patriotism. It’s okay to be an atheist, and it’s okay to be anti-Bush, but they don’t have to come together. Similarly, it’s okay to be a dissenter, and it’s cool to be a patriot, but just because you aren’t a dissenter does not mean you’re not a patriot. Even if you don’t agree.

The world is a complicated place.

Down with Dead Philosophers

Someone calling himself “thedonald” has left a comment for me here, and another one for me over at Glenn’s blog.

In the latter, over at Glenn’s blog, thedonald drags out Pascal’s Wager. First, that’s just annoying. Pascal’s Wager has been consistently, thoroughly, repeatedly debunked for, oh, 350 years or so. To bring it up now in some vain attempt to make an atheist slap his forehead and say “What was I thinking?!” is just ingenuous.

But second, and more importantly, as an atheist, I try really hard to say things in a way that is unique and maybe even creative. When I talk to Christians, I don’t sit down with some “Guide to Annoying Christians” with a list of arguments to use. I try to stay away from debates about logic or historical philosophical issues, because those things have been so widely trodden they make my eyes glaze over. I would rather discuss atheism versus theism on my own grounds, and on the grounds of the Christians I encounter. We all do ourselves a disservice when we turn to the words of other people to defend our own views.

So while I appreciate that thedonald may be trying to have a meaningful encounter, I am disappointed that the first thing he did was turn to a 350-year-old philosophical question, instead of thinking for himself. (If you’re reading this thedonald, don’t take my comments as discouragement. By all means, I would love to talk to you, so long as you’re going to put in enough effort to manage without Pascal or any other dead people.)

This is another one of those “underlying theses” that I mentioned in The Irreligious Life. Too often, I think, philosophical games and the catalog of logical fallacies only obscure the problem between religion and atheists, rather than helping us work things out. Sometimes I read the debates between people who use these “tools” and they sound more like people who enjoy arguing than people who honestly want to figure out this whole religion-versus-atheism thing. Me, I honestly want to figure it out, and have been thinking and writing on this problem for years now.

So, Christian-folk who happen across this blog, you and your comments are welcome, but your dead philosophers can stay in the grave. Think for yourself! That’s all I ask. Generally, I’m a nice person, and I won’t go attacking you. I try very hard to stay away from ad hominem attacks. But if you say something that doesn’t make sense to me, you can count on me to find it, point it out, and push you to either make sense of it, or drop it.

The Irreligious Life

A while ago I left a comment responding to something Glenn said in a conversation we’ve been having that started here. I also left another comment on Glenn’s blog responding to a quote from G.K. Chesterton in this post from Glenn.

Both of these comments have reminded me of one of my underlying theses regarding relations between people with different religious beliefs (in this case a Christian and an atheist).

In my post Secularism means Paring Down, I discussed “consensual reality” and hinted that building a society based only on those things to which we can all agree is the best way to harmonious existence. By that I mean we ought to examine the tenets of our particular religious or philosophical views and try to root out those differences that are only linguistic or conceptual structures.

For instance, in this comment, while addressing the idea of “gratitude,” and whether or not atheists feel it, and what they might do with that feeling, I said this:

“My point is not that atheists don’t have the full range of emotional response, because they’re just as human as anyone, but that they don’t plug those emotions into the same conceptual structure as Christians. What [Christians] call ‘gratitude’ is not the conceptual norm, but an artifact of [their] preexisting belief in God. Hence, one who does not believe in God does not feel ‘gratitude’ and therefore has no need of an object at the other end of the sentence.”

Put another way, most people, some more frequently than others, experience the feeling that their life is going better than their actions merit. Religious people like Christians might label that feeling “gratitude” toward God, while atheists would express it differently, probably giving credit to contingencies beyond their control–not, as Chesterton suggested, by wishing they had someone to thank. The reality is that this feeling is common to people regardless of their religious or philosophical views, i.e., it is a human experience, and not a primarily religious one. Religion (or faith or theology) happens in the response to reality.

So Chesterton’s implication that the feeling of gratitude ought to lead us into belief was ill-founded because he assumed that his idea of “gratitude” represented the standard pattern of response to the human experience. But there are other possible responses, and most of them do not involve the Christian god or any other kind of religious belief.

This brings me to the other comment I made in response to Glenn, who went from agreeing that “identity has to come from your understanding that you are beloved by God” to saying that “humans generally long for meaning beyond themselves.” This conceptual metamorphosis happened at the behest of my prodding, and asking Glenn to clarify his views. If you have a keen philosophical or theological eye, you might have already noticed what happened to Glenn’s view in the process: it shed its theology and became essentially secular.

Maybe Glenn will protest this, and the direction of the conversation will change, but he hasn’t yet, and I’m still stuck in my own thought-rut for the moment.

However, I have recently noticed this pattern more than once while engaging various Christians in friendly dialogue. If I push them to clarify their views, the first thing to go is the theology. As an atheist, I certainly get some satisfaction from that. On the other hand, it worries me that the Christians I talk to seem to be oblivious to the non-theological core of their belief system (i.e., their perfectly mundane human response to life). In the last couple months I have exchanged a few letters with the pastor of an evangelical Christian church and have been oddly disappointed to have him agree with nearly everything I say. When I pressed him to explain why he was still a Christian (and a pastor, no less!) despite his clear understanding that a theological (or “faith-based” or “religious”) perspective is unnecessary to daily life, he said simply that he believed because he had “experienced” god. After having agreed with me that perceptions cannot always be trusted and that they are subject to unconscious bias, it struck me as extraordinarily hypocritical to then so uncritically accept his “experience” of god as the basis for Christian belief.

Many Christians have said that the difference between uncritical acceptance of god and critical skepticism of god is merely a decision, that some choose to believe and others choose not to believe. But I suspect most atheists would disagree, because for us, there was no choice. There was an overwhelming burden of silliness in religion that we could not reconcile with external reality and with our own need for things to make sense. The idea that religion is special precisely because it makes no sense (and is what they call “mysterious”) strikes many of us as little more than a lame excuse to keep fearful minds from having to look at a demystified world with secularized eyes.

When it strikes me that what religious people are saying is not too different from what I’m saying, except they have it dressed up in theology, I get annoyed. While theology may be essential to religion, it is superfluous to everyday life. There is no human emotion or experience that cannot be pondered, explained, or made valuable without theology.

When Christians or other religious people claim that belief in God or theological reflection or faith in the divine are required to “make sense” of life, the underlying message is that atheists, unbelievers, and irreligious folk have a life experience that is somehow incomplete, that we are missing out. That message is ignorant, insensitive, unfair, and flat out wrong.

But I don’t think religious people want to be told that their faith is dispensable. They don’t want to acknowledge that some of us out here lead full, thoughtful, virtuous lives without an iota of “faith”. Why? I suspect because if they admitted that religion is superfluous to life, they would be hard-pressed to explain why they stay in it.

Now that comment may be insensitive and perhaps unfair, but it is certainly not ignorant, nor is it flat out wrong.