Are You Atheistic Enough to Be Fit For High Office?

You can tell the secularists are getting nervous about their hold on power with the rise of Governor Perry as a leading Republican contender for the nomination. The Tea Party and Michelle Bachmann was bad enough, but this guy doesn't seem to care what the liberal establishment thinks about him or his views - which is unsettling to them. He seems to have the crazy idea that if he refuses to pander to the liberal media elite he might win more votes than if he panders. What if he is right?

So Bill Keller, writing in the New York Times Magazine, calls for the media to lead the charge in asking pointed, loaded questions of the Republican candidates in this article. Read it if you want; it is nothing but standard, boiler-plate liberal prejudice against Christians - pretty boring and predictable.

But this response by Anthony Scarmone is a must-read: "The NY Times/Bill Keller Irreligious Litmus Test." It is brilliant and entertaining, not to mention devastating. Enjoy!

The New Atheists: "Socially Awkward Iconoclasts"

Tim Stanley has some harsh but well-deserved words for the new atheists today in his Daily Telegraph blog on American religion. First, some background:

America’s culture war took an unpleasant turn this week. A group of atheists filed a suit to take down a cross erected at the Lower Manhattan memorial to the victims of 9/11. The cross was formed from two intersecting steel beams that were found intact in the rubble. Dave Silverman, head of the American Atheists, called the display a breach of the separation between church and state.

The fanatical, obsessive, anti-social drive to eradicate every vestige of Christianity from the world is a characteristic Marxist-Leninists and the new atheists. What does Stanley think of this attitude?

The story itself is a storm in a tea cup. The cross will probably stay because it has attained a cultural status beyond religious symbolism. To many viewers it is a physical reminder of the devastation and a metaphor for the resurrection of New York as a city. What is remarkable is where Silverman’s American Atheists have chosen to make their big stand. Picking on a memorial to the victims of 9/11 exposes the profound lack of sensitivity of the New Atheism and its obsessive, socially awkward edge. . . . The fact is that the New Atheists aren’t interested in either pluralism or being left alone. They are iconoclasts and they enjoy breaking things.

Yep. I'd say that is about the size of it: socially awkward iconoclasts who are anti-social and angry - the kind of people you hope don't move in next door.

A Marvellous Speech on Faith in Public Life

This is quite simply one of the most impressive speeches I have ever read from a politician in modern times. It is logical, informed, fearless and literate.

Rick Santorum, former US Senator from Pennsylvania and currently Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, recently gave this speech on the place of religion in public life and politics in Houston, TX, where 50 years ago John F. Kennedy gave his famous speech to reassure voters that he would not allow the Vatican to determine US policies. As Santorum shows, Kennedy opened the door to secularization and compromise by a generation of Catholic politicians who have failed to bear a faithful witness in the public arena.

Here is how it begins:

Three pictures hung in the home of my devoutly Catholic immigrant grandparents when I was a boy and I remember them well -- Jesus, Pope Paul VI and John F. Kennedy. The president was a source of great pride and a symbol to Catholics that all barriers had finally been broken. What my family and maybe even candidate Kennedy at the time didn't realize was that in a key moment in that election of 1960 right here in Houston, Kennedy began the construction of another, even more threatening wall for our society -- one that sealed off informed moral wisdom into a realm of non rational beliefs that have no legitimate role in political discourse.

Fifty years ago this Sunday JFK delivered a speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association to dispel suspicions about the role the papacy might play in the government of this country under his administration. Let's make no mistake about it -- Kennedy was addressing a real issue at the time. Prejudice against Catholics threatened to cost him the election. But on that day, Kennedy chose not just to dispel fear, he chose to expel faith. Let me quote from the beginning of Kennedy's speech: "I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute."

The idea of strict or absolute separation of church and state is not and never was the American model. It was a model used in countries like France and until recently Turkey, but it found little support in America until it was introduced into the public discourse by Justice Hugo Black in the case of Everson v. The Board of Education in 1947. (Black, by the way, was a Catholic-hating former member of the KKK who ironically enough advocated this strict separation doctrine to keep public funds from Catholic schools.)

Read the rest here. If this man runs for president, the US would have to be crazy not to elect him.

What Could Be Worse Than a Theocracy?

How about this? A theocracy in which the "god" is an idol - a deified autonomous self - a parody of the Christian God worshiped by heretics.

Kevin Staley-Joyce has a post entitled: "Nancy Pelosi, Theocrat" at First Thoughts.

"Imagine this: A conservative congresswoman, her voice edgy with religious fervor, stands before a press corps announcing her intention to end abortion rights in her state, and alongside her appallingly theocratic claims that human life at all stages of development is of equal value, she quotes the Bible, and even pushes Catholic piety, praying for the intercession of the Lady of Guadalupe.

Can we begin to imagine the media’s reaction? She would surely be Palinized, and, if all other efforts failed, would be called a pedestrian poser, having breached the cardinal rule of public life—that is, not to mention the transcendent. Well, such a shocking thing did indeed happen today, though its origin was on the persnickety religious left, not the religious right. Nancy Pelosi, chair of the theology department at Pelosi State, today invoked St. Joseph’s intercession as she pushed for health care reform. At a news conference she claimed, incorrectly, that today is the feast of St. Joseph the Worker:

Today is the feast of St. Joseph the Worker, particularly important to Italian-Americans. It’s a day where we remember and pray to St. Joseph to benefit the workers of America, and that’s exactly what our health-care bill will do.

Aside from the fact that today’s feast is, in fact, the Solemnity of St. Joseph, a colleague pointed out to me that the feast of St. Joseph the Worker—actually on the first of May—was placed there to foil May Day, a fete wrought with Communist labor philosophies. In any case, Nancy came just inches short of dubbing the United States a “worker’s paradise.” For good measure, she highlighted her recent photo shoots with babies and young people, and gave an admiring footnote to the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, and their missive promoting the health care as “life-affirming.” Theocracy, theocracy, theocracy!—right?"

We have a religious government in Washington, DC. The problem is that it is a liberal Protestant government riddled with liberal Catholic fellow travelers. If we must have separation of church and state, how about a little separation of (Liberal) church and state?

The Separation of Atheism and State

Given that atheists (and agnostics and liberal Protestants) are so obsessed about and fearful of the possibility of modern, Western, secular, liberal democracies being taken over (at any moment) by churches and turned into Iran-style theocracies, I have been wondering what the right response is to such and idea and where it is actually coming from. The possibility of Canada or the US suddenly turning into a Christian theocracy is probably lower than Richard Dawkins' little green men coming back to check on whatever became of that life they created and left on planet earth billions of years ago.

How does this anti-theocracy rhetoric function? When is it employed? For what purpose? The anti-Morman commercial I commented on in the last post was a last-minute, desparate attempt to sway the voters in California and keep them from standing up for natural marriage in the face of the revisionist attempts to reject natural marriage and create artificial marriage. The liberal forces were afraid of losing so they resorted to bigotry and scare tactics - not to mention emotional manipulation. (You ought to remember this the next time you are confronted with an appeal to theocracy as the reason you must allow secular liberals to have their own way.)

But why is it that every religion is a threat to the public order and those who take religious views that do not fit snugly into the grid of traditional religions have a free pass to impose their views on the rest of us? Why do those who believe a man can marry a man just because the State says it is possible (even though it is metaphysically impossible) have the right to impose their ethical, metaphysical and religious views on us by taking over the education of our children and teaching them their creed? How is that separation of church and state? I call it an "atheistocracy" run by atheist mullahs and I find it oppressive.

Religions come in many forms and the denial of the existence of a theistic god is no barrier to a movement of ideas being called a religion. If Buddhism can be a religion, why not atheism? A strong case can be made from the history of western ideas that atheism in the West is a Christian heresy and, if it is a heresy, what else could it be but a religion?

So here is my proposal: let us launch a campaign for the separation of atheism and state. When people propose public policy and demand changes to laws based on a philosophical belief in atheism, then we have to rule those people out of order and demand that they accept our beliefs as the basis of public policy and law. Then, with the shoe on the other foot, they will get to experience first hand how it feels to be marginalized and vilified while another group implements its agenda over their heads.

Maybe, if the experience is unpleasant enough, they might then be amenable to a rational discussion of how everyone's religious and philosophical views should be allowed into the public square. Maybe then they won't be so quick to try to run Christians (and Mormans and Jews and Muslims) out of the public square just because they are religious. After all, why should atheistic philosophy be allowed to determine marriage laws and theistic philosophy not be allowed to do so? Let the debate be open and fair. But don't tilt the playing field so that religion is ruled out and atheism given a free ride.