July 2, 2006
REJECTING THE RATIONALIST REACTIONS:
Melding Faith and Tolerance (Jim Hoagland, July 2, 2006, Washington Post)
A half-century dominated by the secular ideologies of capitalism, communism and physics has given way to a time of religious backlash provoked by the uncertainties and menaces of vertiginous modernization. [...]The spiraling growth of evangelical Christianity in the United States -- as well as in Latin America, China and Africa -- reflects the central reality that also helps drive the radicalization of Islam across the Middle East, Central Asia and the northern Caucasus. When people feel threatened by rapid and mystifying change, they turn to the most literal forms of religion for explanations and justifications.
It was not supposed to work this way, says Karsten Voigt, a political intellectual whose main job is studying the United States for the German government. It was assumed that "there was an indissoluble link between modernization and secularization. But that turns out to have been wrong," Voigt told a gathering of Europeans and Americans sponsored by the Council for the United States and Italy here last week.
Voigt argued that religion is becoming an important factor in a widening gap between Europe and the United States.
Mr. Hoagland wanders around an insight there. Capitalism is, of course, dependent on Judeo-Christian morality, while it is properly biology (Darwinism) that belongs with the modernist ideologies. And the backlash has come because those ideologies were wrong, murderous, and anti-human. As Europe has shown, to tolerate them is to destroy your own society. Posted by Orrin Judd at July 2, 2006 9:53 AM
... capitalism, communism and physics ... now that's a trio you don't see going around together very often. Has physics really become an "ism"?
Posted by: erp at July 2, 2006 10:50 AMAll of its attempts to avoid the implications of Heisenberg and Schroedinger are ismic.
Posted by: oj at July 2, 2006 10:53 AMBlocking the federal government from enacting laws that favor a religion was not put into the constitution to protect religion from the state but to level the playing field toward uniting the colonies, some of which had laws favoring a particular religion. If you'll recall your American history, you'll remember that the constitution was developed after the Articles of Confederation failed to produce a viable union. The constitution was significantly a unifying effort. After all, the preamble starts this way: “We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, . . .” The first amendment prohibits Congress from “establishing” a religion as well as from “prohibiting free exercise thereof.” It's neither nor. Mr. Voigt doesn't understand America.
I'd wager that one of the main reasons that traditional religions do poorly in Europe is precisely because there has been denominational monopoly in many of the European states since Constantine nationalized Christianity 1700 years ago. Either religion was running the state or the state was running religion until modern times. Secularism is just another religion.
No, I'd say that the main perceptual confusion between Americans and Europeans is that Americans live in a republic with free religion and mostly free markets, while Europeans are accustomed to living under the rule of an aristocracy that uses religion—be it Catholicism, Anglicanism, Lutheranism, Fascism, Communism or Secularism—to persuade the people of its divine right to rule. Oh, and Darwinism too, when you consider the elitism (dare I say racism) preached in his book “Descent of Man.” After all, Natural Selection proves that the aristocracy is chosen by the very laws of nature to rule over the rest of us with our inferior breeding.
Posted by: bill at July 2, 2006 4:45 PMNo. "Secularism" is not the absence of religion, but another religion.
In practice, it has been shown to be thinly veiled paganism. It is nothing other than worship of the god of this world. It has all been said before: deification of subconscious urges, libertinism, setting up gods with the heads of animals, "environmentalism" and a holocaust of children to moloch, abortion."
We all know what the spiritual freeloaders are going to say: "Nonsense!" they answer,"My friends and I are all secularists, and we are not perverts, pagans and murderers." It is easy to reply to this weak onjection.
Many individuals have the Judeo-Christian God-concept in their hearts, put there by the very institutions which surround them, by the law, by the economy, by the language. They like to boast that they have figured out these things on their own and that God is unnecesary.
As has been pointed out above, the history of the totalitarian fruits of secularism throughout the last hundred years gives us proof in our wounds.
Posted by: Lou Gots at July 2, 2006 5:23 PM