Pawlenty: Gov't Is Not Protected from People of Faith

In this brief story, Gov. Tim Pawlenty is quoted at the Conservative Political Action Conference:
“It all starts with acknowledging that God is our Creator and it is from God that we receive our values and principles.”Pawlenty noted that the freedom of religion protections in the U.S. Constitution were “designed to protect people of faith from government not government from people of faith.”

This is troubling because, obviously, if people of faith govern according to God-given values and principles then the people being governed are subjected to and not protected from a government of faith. If government is not protected from people of faith, government is not protected from faith.

Re-writing Pawlenty’s statement as separate sentences helps uncover what he may really mean:
(1) Religious protections in the Constitution were designed to protect people of faith from government.
(2) Religious protections in the Constitution were not designed to protect government from people of faith.

Is Pawlenty using “protection” in the same way? We cannot tell because he does not specify the “what“ that needs and does not need the protecting from. Pawlenty, however, seems to imply in (1) that people of faith are protected from being persecuted by government for their faith. We will assume that is his meaning.

What about (2) though? He is religious so why would he say that government does not have “protection from” people like him? Is it that they are benign to government and therefore the idea of “protection” from people of faith is not a real concern? Or, does he mean that those who want the protection of church-state separation have no constitutional ground to stand on? That is more likely the case.

Considering that in his quoted statement Pawlenty emphasizes (2), that government is not protected from people of faith, only implies we should have government according to faith.

Pawlenty’s statement is a sophistry that is intended to imply that there is no church-state separation. He will not say so explicitly for obvious reasons.

It is both immoral and contrary to individual liberty for religious believers to use government - which is essentially coercion institutionalized - to make laws and policies that intervene in the lives of the governed which are based on “values and principles” that are “God-given,” meaning: non-demonstrable, non-provable, non-valid; in short, imaginary. In a free country under a constitution that is built on principles of political science which are derived from experience in reality, those with imaginary beliefs should keep them to themselves where politics is concerned.

Lastly, a question for Pawlenty is, do people without faith deserve protection from a government of people of faith?

I think I can predict the answer.

A Conservative Christian Evicts Facts from His Argument

In Evicting God from the Public Square Ken Connor writes against atheist Michael Newdow's lawsuit to get the phrase of "so help me God" removed from the upcoming presidential inauguration. The details of the matter aside, Connor concludes his column:
Newdow and company believe that man is the measure, that man is the center of the universe, and that the rights we enjoy come from government, not from God. They are certainly entitled to their own opinions, but, to paraphrase Daniel Patrick Moynihan, they are not entitled to their own facts. The fact is that American political history is inextricably bound up with religious tradition. All the denials in the world won't negate that fact.

The religionists' disparaging of atheists as arrogant for holding "man as the measure of all things" has been made irrelevant by Ayn Rand:
...Protagoras’ old dictum may be given a new meaning, the opposite of the one he intended: “Man is the measure of all things.” Man is the measure, epistemologically—not metaphysically. In regard to human knowledge, man has to be the measure, since he has to bring all things into the realm of the humanly knowable.

Attacking mens' arrogance, be it real or imagined, in that saying misses the point about the human mind's relationship to reality, a real relationship that prevents the mind from forming the mythical ideas of religion.

If anything, Ken Connor, like any religionist believing in the primacy of consciousness over reality, is trying to have his own facts.

Firstly, as for facts, God is definitely no fact; God and the supernatural are not within the realm of the humanly knowable.

Secondly, rights come from neither government nor God - rights are in human nature, and that is a fact. How is this assertion, that man's rights emanate from a supernatural cosmic consciousness, a "fact"?

Thirdly, that tradition, as conservatives believe, must be obeyed forever certainly is no fact; obedience to tradition is only second-handedness to ancestors and inherited, imaginary beliefs. Or, put another way, we can rephrase one of Connor's sentences and turn it against his position: "all the tradition in the world does not make it right." It is time to abandon these backwards religious beliefs in our politics, traditional or not. Ironically, for conservatives like Connor, religious tradition is the center of the universe and measure of all things, which, not so incidentally, reduces to: man as the center of the universe.

Connor's argument is intellectually empty, as can be demonstrated by a hypothetical counter-claim: what if there was no religious tradition in American political history, and a Christian sues so that the words, "so help me God," are included in the oath of office? Would conservative Christian Connor appeal to the sacred, infallible, authority of tradition then? How important would the facts of political tradition not being bound to religion be to him in that case?

Our Founding Fathers built a political system based on human nature and experience, in other words, based on observable, knowable, reality. Political science was a new field of study then - and that is what it was, a science. Rand may have restated Protagoras' old dictum, but the idea of her restatement - of bringing all things into the realm of the humanly knowable - was what characterized that period. The Founders (and other intellectuals of that era) studied the types of governments and laws Western man has lived under since antiquity and from that knowledge they established a government best suited to man's nature as a free and rational being. I am inclined to think this is ultimately why they established a government separate from religion: the "truth" of religious beliefs are not demonstrable nor provable when law and government are scientifically studied for their proper application in the real world (other than learning how the experience of theocracy, the divine right of kings and such are dangerous to liberty) so they are left out of the political realm. I do not know if our Founders explicitly viewed religion and government in that way, but it is certainly consistent with the intellectual atmosphere of their age and which they were products of.

D'Souza's Absentee Answer

In the opening of Dinesh D'Souza's column, An Absentee God?, his admission of being baffled by a debating opponent caught my interest by making me admire his intellectual honesty and determination to find an answer eventually, even if I would disagree with him. As it turned out, however, D'Souza would have been better off not attempting to answer his opponent, whose position he probably helped.

In my debate with atheist Christopher Hitchens... he raised a point that I did not know how to answer... Hitchens' argument bothered me.

Here's what Hitchens said. Homo sapiens has been on the planet for a long time, let's say 100,000 years. Apparently for 95,000 years God sat idly by, watching and perhaps enjoying man's horrible condition. After all, cave-man's plight was a miserable one: infant mortality, brutal massacres, horrible toothaches, and an early death. Evidently God didn't really care.

Then, a few thousand years ago, God said, "It's time to get involved." Even so God did not intervene in one of the civilized parts of the world. He didn't bother with China or Egypt or India. Rather, he decided to get his message to a group of nomadic people in the middle of nowhere. It took another thousand years or more for this message to get to places like India and China.

Here is the thrust of Hitchens' point: God seems to have been napping for 98 percent of human history, finally getting his act together only for the most recent 2 percent? What kind of a bizarre God acts like this?

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[Erik] Kreps noters [sic] that it is not the number of years but the levels of human population that are the issue here. The Population Reference Bureau estimates that the number of people who have ever been born is approximately 105 billion. Of this number, about 2 percent were born in the 100,000 years before Christ came to earth.

"So in a sense," Kreps notes, "God's timing couldn't have been more perfect. If He'd come earlier in human history, how reliable would the records of his relationship with man be? But He showed up just before the exponential explosion in the world's population, so even though 98 percent of humanity's timeline had passed, only 2 percent of humanity had previously been born, so 98 percent of us have walked the earth since the Redemption."

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Suddenly savage man gives way to historical man. Suddenly the naked ape gets his act together. We see civilizations sprouting in Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, China, and elsewhere. Suddenly there are wheels and agriculture and art and culture. Soon we have dramatic plays and philosophy and an explosion of inventions and novel forms of government and social organization.

So how did Homo sapiens, heretofore such a slacker, suddenly get so smart? Scholars have made strenuous efforts to account for this but no one has offered a persuasive account. If we compare man's trajectory on earth to an airplane, we see a long, long stretch of the airplane faltering on the ground, and then suddenly, a few thousand years ago, takeoff!

Well, there is one obvious way to account for this historical miracle. It seems as if some transcendent being or force reached down and breathed some kind of a spirit or soul into man, because after accomplishing virtually nothing for 98 percent of our existence, we have in the past 2 percent of human history produced everything from the pyramids to Proust, from Socrates to computer software.

So paradoxically Hitchens' argument becomes a boomerang. Hitchens has raised a problem that atheism cannot easily explain and one that seems better accounted for by biblical account of creation.

Excuse me? If atheism cannot easily explain something - man's recent progress - then the Bible easily explains it? That is a convincing answer? Perhaps for a Christian who reasons in circles, not for an atheist, though. The simplicity of "God caused it" is not a persuasive account, just an easy, imaginary answer.

Actually, D'Souza does not answer Hitchens question, but does answer a question that Hitchens did not ask.The question was not, why was there no progress for so long in mankind's span on earth? That, D'Souza answered. Nor was it, what happened when and after God finally intervened? D'Souza answered that also. The question, however, was why did God wait so long to intervene in man's life on earth and only in ancient Israel? That, D'Souza has not offered any answer to. One can say at its best D'Souza's answer is a lame excuse for God's intervention when it was - that only a small fraction of men missed out on it, but in the larger picture it was for the good of the greater amount of men - whatever the reason was for it not happening sooner.

What D'Souza thinks is an answer is flawed, anyhow.

Hitchens often asks this question and uses the 100,000 year figure of man's existence as a minimum that anybody has to accept, based on the science. This excludes the science-rejecting Biblical literalists who claim the earth itself is only 5,000 or so years old. Hitchens actually accepts the science that man has been around for much, much longer than 100,000 years. So what happens to D'Souza and Kreps' arithmetic based on science that man has been around for 500,000 years, say? Then how do they explain God's timing?

If they can say God's timing was nearly "perfect," with two percent of all men missing out on it, can D'Souza also claim with consistency that an intelligent designer made the universe? If He made a universe of fine-tuned, irreducible complexity, that same intelligent designer's intervention in man's existence failed by two percent. Two percent should fall well outside the quality specifications tolerance of such a supremely intelligent designer.

Furthermore, D'Souza does not answer Hitchens as to why God allowed 1,000 years to pass before His Word spread across the earth after Its arrival.

Man suddenly developing knowledge is a "historical miracle"? If a miracle is a violation of natural law, how does the correct use of the human mind qualify as one? "Because after accomplishing virtually nothing for 98 percent of our existence, we have in the past 2 percent of human history produced everything from the pyramids to Proust, from Socrates to computer software." (Never mind the dearth of knowledge in subsequent religious societies.) D'Souza offers that non-answer to Hitchens' question of "what kind of a bizarre God acts like this?" If anything, he elaborates on it! By D'Souza's admission, 98% of human existence passed by on a primitive level before God intervenes with the gift of knowledge. (Wait - isn't there a story about God and a forbidden tree?)

What D'Souza's "answer" consists of is merely recasting Hitchens' very question as a statement, albeit in Christian terms: "it is a miracle according to the biblical account of creation," and he is satisfied that he refuted Hitchens.

D'Souza and Kreps think they nailed Hitchens: "God's timing couldn't have been more perfect. If He'd come earlier in human history, how reliable would the records of his relationship with man be? But He showed up just before the exponential explosion in the world's population." Besides the fact that biblical scholarship has proved that the records of God's relationship with man are indeed unreliable despite God's intention, why would an omnipotent, omniscient, intelligent designer allow His intervention into man's existence and its timing be dependent on man's circumstances? If He is responsible for the sudden surge in man's knowledge at this specific point in time, He could have made that happen sooner, like at the beginning of man's existence. Is that expecting too much from a fine-tuning, intelligent designer? Why would He do otherwise - which is what Hitchens' was asking!

Hitchens is not the one who threw a boomerang at himself, D'Souza.

Prager Smears Secularism

Dennis Prager’s column, If There Is No God, lists fourteen supposedly harmful consequences following from atheism and secularism. Here is one:
7. Without God, people in the West often become less, not more, rational. It was largely the secular, not the religious, who believed in the utterly irrational doctrine of Marxism....Religious people in Judeo-Christian countries largely confine their irrational beliefs to religious beliefs (theology), while the secular, without religion to enable the non-rational to express itself, end up applying their irrational beliefs to society, where such irrationalities do immense harm.

Prager’s motto is “clarity over agreement” - but one would not know that based on this column. Just that excerpt has so much so wrong that needs clarification. Undoing Prager’s mischaracterizations requires expending a substantial amount of electronic ink which is why this post is on only the above paragraph. The same can be said for the rest of his column as well (which Armchair Intellectual philosophically rebutted in four parts).

Right off the bat, Prager's first sentence is simply untrue: "Without God, people in the West often become less, not more, rational."

Westerners have not been made more rational by religion. When Christianity ascended in the late Roman Empire it was openly hostile to reason. Many Church Fathers stamped out Greek philosophy and science, i.e. reason, and succeeded so well the “Dark Ages” is the name of the period they had created after Rome fell to the barbarians. Christian Europe was hardly rational. Philosophy, which relies on the use of reason, was the mere handmaid to Christian theology. This was the land of belief in an earth-centered, three-tiered universe, astrology, numerology, magic, witchcraft, alchemy, recurring end-times hysteria, and countless other superstitions. The non-rational definitely expressed itself to the detriment of society. People in the West embraced faith, turned a blind eye toward reason, and for centuries there was scant progress in any area of human endeavor. Discovery of the ancient Greek texts that contained reason, philosophy, and worldly knowledge saved Europe from the darkness of Christian theology, mysticism, superstition, and dogmas. The subsequent Renaissance and Enlightenment broke Christianity’s monopoly on men’s minds, opening the way to the modern secular world. What period in the West’s history Prager is referring to is beyond me.

His second sentence is more truthful by itself: "It was largely the secular, not the religious, who believed in the utterly irrational doctrine of Marxism." It is not fully true because there were Marxist theists (i.e. Liberation Theology). In the context of his column's argument, however, Prager is evading an important fact, one that helps in refuting it.

I will provide it - for the sake of clarity, Mr. Prager.

Prager neglects to tell his readers just who many of those secular irrationalists were and more important, where Marxism came from. He failed to explain how Marxism is modeled to a large extent on Judeo-Christian religion. (Prager is himself a Jew and an intellectual, so one would reasonably expect hm to know of the Judeo-Christian influence on Marxism.)

In his Philosophy of Religion (third ed.), John Hicks writes: "Jews mean by 'the Messiah' a nondivine being who will restore Israel as an earthly community and usher in the consummation of history" (109). If we merely change a few nouns in that sentence we get Marxism: "Marxists mean by 'the proletariat' an economic class that will restore mankind to a "fully human" community and usher in the consummation of history." Karl Marx (who was raised Jewish) secularized this important idea in the Jewish world-view, the messiah myth, which was appealing to secular Jews (among others, of course). It is the common denominator of Judaism and Marxism.

Furthermore, Marxism's history has no shortage of prominent Jews, from leaders of communist parties and organizations to intellectuals. Actually, according to J.L. Talmon in Political Messianism - The Romantic Phase, "Jews have played a prominent and conspicous part in extreme radical and revolutionary movements in modern times" that began with the philosophy of a socialist predecessor of Marx, Saint-Simon (77). Talmon further writes, "In the case of spiritual and idealistic sublimation, the age long Jewish tradition of solidarity and of imaginative compassion with the sufferings of others was able to find a kindred disposition in socialism, and Jews threw themselves into its arms enthusiastically and lovingly" (81). Secularized Jewish irrationalism began with Saint-Simonianism, and Marx's ideas fueled it even more.

In that context does Prager's claim, "it was largely the secular, not the religious, who believed in the utterly irrational doctrine of Marxism," still stand? If Prager clarified that the irrationalism he refers to is that of secularized religion, he would not have a false straw-man of "secular irrationalism" to knock down in his case against secularism.

So for clarity's sake, Mr. Prager, you should distinguish between secularism and secularized religion.

On to Prager's last sentence: "Religious people in Judeo-Christian countries largely confine their irrational beliefs to religious beliefs (theology), while the secular, without religion to enable the non-rational to express itself, end up applying their irrational beliefs to society, where such irrationalities do immense harm."

If irrational beliefs are confined to religion, religion is not confined to itself - it is indeed applied to society with immense harm. Examples are many and for all to see.

The irrationality of subjectivism is assumed by Prager to be innate and not to be examined, questioned, or purged from the mind. It is accepted as a law of nature that man has an irrational side needing expression. Besides the implication it has that a man's thinking cannot by nature be wholly objective, this is also the basis in man's nature of man's belief in God, the Kantian-like premise that we may not be able to prove there is a God, but man's belief in God is inherent in his nature - so he would do well to assume that a God created him with this belief in Him.

Prager gives us a choice: we naturally have an irrational side, so we either channel it to society - which is harmful, or channel it to harmless religious beliefs! That’s it, pick one or the other!

And why - for clarity's sake, Mr. Prager - is it not possible for rational beliefs to be formed regarding society; that it is not possible for man to use his mind's method of knowing reality - his reason - to live with his fellow men?

Ultimately, what is intellectually and morally scandalous - and Prager's column is just another instance of it - is that religionists continually use atheism and secularism as such as scapegoats for the harm (pseudo)secular ideas like Marxism do, ideas that would not be, were it not for theology in the first place.