If Kevin Phillps is right in "American Theocracy" the failure of our empire will disillusion us the same way it did the Spanish, the Dutch, and the English, all of whom are now rather secular (or at least more so than before). Speaking of sad.

I agree, though, that there seems to be a worldwide surge in fundamentalism. In the case of countries like India or Iran this may be a reaction to the increase in awareness of competing peoples. That is, these societies are noticing they aren't acting in an insulated world of their own but have to deal with others.

In the case of America I am persuaded by Phillips that it goes along with power. Why it does is less clear but may include the impression of power being divinely bestowed.

The Phillips view explains why Europe's basic society is free of this trend. This does not include the not-assimilated Muslims, though.

I'm always a bit baffled that some people feel the need for a larger purpose. What's wrong with just living? Let's imagine a person that maintains that life without God would be meaningless. Let's then ask "Wouldn't you still love your children, obey the law, and want justice for all?" Can we imagine this person saying "No"?

I think it is a distrust of others. The "larger-purpose" crowd thinks others need it, not themselves. It may be hard for them to believe, but most of us would behave exactly the same (and I mean the VAST majority) if it were slam-dunk proved God did not exist, to everyone's agreement.

I think nothing can be done to change the minds of the fundamentalists--they are outside of reason. A lesson from recent history may offer a strategy, though. Consider two social campaigns that were very successful in changing behavior: those against indoor smoking and drunk driving.

Perhaps a similar campaign against "indoor" (inside politics) religion will get some traction if we continually point out the damage and danger. If we can make it embarrassing to discuss religion in political venues we'll have made some progress.

Michelle, I'm impressed by your connection of the fight against the Christian Right to electoral college reform -- too many people get caught up in conspiracy theories of the voting booth (albeit perhaps true) when the real problem isn't a corrupt system, it's the system as it was intended to work (so much for the great founders of the republic everyone wants to recruit as allies against the Right).

But fix the electoral college, and what do you get -- the Christian Right still presents what is to many an incredibly compelling story, a romantic view of history and the country's potential as a city upon a hill. Break the GOP stronghold on that story, and we end up with... Democratic Christian nationalists. Rushdoony, whom you write about so well, adored JFK's rhetoric. And although JFK was a lot better on a lot of issues, he did follow the Christian nationalist vision of a redeemer nation all the way to Vietnam. For that matter, the Cold War, the 20th century's version of manifest destiny, was as much a Democratic project as a Republican one.

So: Beyond busting up the electoral college, do we need to bust up the two-party system?

You write: "I believe that human beings can literally conquer the universe and should and I think social and economic liberalism is the best way to structure society to do it."

With all do respect, how is this anything but a secularized version of dominionism?

Religions Dominionists want to impose their specific laws. Within the Pax Humanica (not real Latin I know) I describe or subsrcibe to as it were, humans and even non-humans (assuming we run into them) will have:

1) their animals needs taken care of (food/sleep/shelter/etc.)

2) the opportunity and freedom to say what they will and do what they will (even politically) as long as it doesn't involve harming other sentient beings

This means ideally, that everyone will have the freedom and opportunity to find their own best way of expressing their beliefs without fear of social or institutional reprsial.

Re: I'm always a bit baffled that some people feel the need for a larger purpose.

Basic human nature. and a little like asking why people feel the need to have sex since they can after all live without it.
And even you are involved in some larger purpose as is evidenced by the very fact you are taking an interest in a topic that lies outside the day-to0day minutiae of your own life.

Why didn't you just name your book "Protocols of the Elders of Christian Dominionism" so it could be easily cataloged as fiction?

Are there some scary people out there trying to use Christian churches for their own ends? Sure. But the danger isn't a particular set of religious beliefs anymore than a communist economic system was the danger posed by the Soviet Union.

Aggressive authoritarianism or totalitarianism in whatever guise is the danger. People who think they know best, people who want power over others are the danger regardless of how they masquerade or what "ism" they use. They need to be unmasked for what they are.  They use fear and faux enemies to gain and keep power.

Unfortunately your book and cause will just give pretenders another faux enemy to rail against to enhance their own status with their followers. 

What a shame. 

Religion can provide no more answers about "why" than science can - not once you realize that God is a question, not an answer. Where did God come from? Why does God exist?

It is also not true that you can't gain an ethical system from evolution. The smartass answer is that since there is no god and religion is a byproduct of evolution, you most definitely can gain ethics through evolution. The more serious answer is that you don't need religion to realize the value of human life, family, etc. Once you start looking past an individual and towards society, you will arrive at ethics strikingly similar to the "God-given" variety. All the world's major religions subscribe to very similar systems of ethics -- is it because all those various gods magically happened to have the exact same ideas about ethics, or is it because those rules actually make most sense in human society?

"do we need to bust up the two-party system?"

Oh, hell, yeah, as long as both sides are corrupt members of the War Party.

There needs to be a near-total political house cleaning - perhaps fumigating would be a better term - of both Houses of Congress, the Supreme Court, and most of the managerial bureaucrats in the administrative branch (certainly everybody over at the Pentagon, the CIA, NSA, FBI, etc.)

Never happen, of course.

My view: there really isn't ANY way to stop the Christian right from continuing to gain power - until they overreach themselves.

Which they will - sooner or later. Domestically or internationally or both.

Iran is likely to be their international overreach. Another ten-year Vietnam is going to seriously damage this country's lust for "American Empire".

Domestically, I'm not sure what will trigger the backlash.

Another question people need to think about is: just how do you expect fifty-five million people are going to react to that overreach and the subsequent backlash?

Presumably most of them will sulk or get depressed. Tough. The real problem will be the real fanatics. Things could get ugly.

I assume when he says "literally conquer", he really does not mean "literally" or "conquer".

He means transform ourselves, expand into the universe, and learn to deal with it - and possibly even control it (assuming the heat death of the universe is not an absolute.)

And that is obviously entirely different from any form of dominionism.

"Even if you profess no religion, you can't really gain an ethical system from evolution."

Incorrect.

Religion does NOT deal with questions of "ultimate meaning" - it fakes that and produces incorrect answers based on conceptual imagination.

You can derive correct behavior in almost all situations from a consideration of the long-term economic consequences of cooperation vs coercion.

And you can also derive purpose directly from the fact that death is to be rejected, not feared or accepted. Life - existence - is the source of all value and purpose. That makes ocntinuing that existence the only primary purpose. All other purpose flows from that reality.

The very term "ultimate meaning" has no meaning beyond continuity of exiztence. Only purpose and behavioral principles matter. If your purpose is to survive in a society of sentient entities on this particular planet, then there are logical corollaries to that and to the economic, evolutionary and cultural histories of those entities that determine the best way for those entities to act in all situations.

It does not lead to social darwinism (at least if you're dealing with rational entities - unfortunately with most humans, you're not - you're dealing with chimpanzees.)

There is no need for "external" explanations of these matters.

Just because YOU can't derive these principles doesn't mean it can't be done.

What makes Kingdom Coming "fiction"?

This is really a reply to the last two posts. I fully respect those who construct an ethical system without reference to theistic religion. I just think it's a big mistake to use evolutionary biology as your organizing principle. The foundation of the latter is natural selection which is a pretty poor choice for an ethical system. As far as I can see, it leads inevitably to social Darwinism, which didn't work out too well, as we all know. It works fine for biology, badly for culture and ethics. I think Stoicism provides a better model. But it's not a science; it's a philosophical system.

I do object to the implied globalization of your principles. "I believe thus and so; therefore everybody who believes differently is superstitious and/or ignorant." It's nearly as objectionable as the Christianists who apparently want to forcibly convert everyone who disagrees with them. Once again, as others have said, these lunatics aren't really Christians. What happened to the idea of constructing a public space in which people agree to disagree on matters of personal belief and live in tolerant diversity?

If we've become this polarized, then the yahoos and know-nothings have already won.

 We are already in the universe, so we can't expand into it.  Every being ever in existence has dealt with the universe, because we have no choice.  Controlling the universe is a meaningless phrase.  And, "heat death" of the universe is another meaningless phrase.  The universe, by definition is everything, and it always will be.  Even the most pessimistic theory says the universe as we think it exists now, will continue for longer than it has existed before.  But, after that it still exists, but not like it does now. (maybe)  If you want to discuss the fate of the planet we live on, that's another story.

Hoppy in Sacramento

Physicist Frank Tipler worked the numbers on human expansion, with the assumption that people would not schlep their bodies over light-year distances, instead traveling in some kind of compacted way such as data. Using only the volatiles (fuel) contained in the large planets here, humans could colonize the galaxy in about one million years.

He also assumed (hoped) the universe would collapse, for two reasons. One would be so that previously dispersing signals would come back together. This meant the evidence of previous humans could be collected and the people resurrected.

The second reason was to skew the collapse into asymmetry, garnering an exponentially increasing energy source, which would allow computation speed to approach infinity, enabling Eternity for all humans living in a perfect virtual world.

Unfortunately for Tipler's imagined Heaven, the universe looks likely to expand in a runaway mode, so we'll never run out of space, but we'll get a bit lonelier.

Ain't science fun?

Some of us on the coasts sometimes chuckle over the fact that the regions that are the most up in arms over family values also have the highest rates of family dysfunction -- divorce, teen pregnancy, etc.

Quotes like the one above are really seen as disengenuous by me and other "theocons" like me.

It's easy to have lower divorce rates when the state you live in has given up, largely, on the idea of even getting married to begin with. Like the man who bemoaned to me what he feared the energy crises in California would falsely portray about California's energy consumption. Because, as he pointed out to me, "California's per capita energy consumption is among the lowest of the states. I was personaly involved with many in California's latin community at the time and I really felt to respond to him that a more likely reason for California's low per capita consumption rate had more to do with the fact that you had many small apartments housing in excess of 15 individuals in a single apartment with only a light or two, the TV and the oven using electricity. So to claim that families are worse off in certain states simply because they have higher rates of divorce and teen pregnancy than the one you live in is like saying that a swamp almost completely steril of life from environmental disaster is better off than a swamp that has currently has recently lost a higher percentage of it's wildlife population than the currently nigh sterril and contaminated swamp has.

So one place to start is to insure that the claims you make are not dependant on a witholding of all relevant information.

Then, when you employ the word "fiction," you mean you disagree with the considered judgment of the writer -- in this case, Michelle Goldberg. And I would say that your judgments are incorrect.

Dominionist political power arises out of the influence they have upon the results of Republican primaries in "red" Congressional districts. Over the past 20 or so years they have been instrumental in replacing one after another moderate Republican with radicals, many of whom are sympathetic to Dominionist demands to amend the Constitution to their liking.

There is no evidence of which I'm aware that what you characterize as the "Schiavo fiasco" or the fact of Tom Delay's indictment has embarrassed the Dominionists. Indeed, these events seem to have served as further proof of America's sinfulness and to have added to the energy they bring to their struggle against their bugbear, secular humanism.

This dwelling on perceived inequality in the electoral system, and the seeming delusion that this nation's system has ever acted in a from less skewed, for one side or the other, (things such as gerimandering have existed through this nation's entire history) seems to be rather hypocritical in light of a movement that sees it's opposition as seeking some fantasy vision of what was the 40's and 50's.

One could say that the above condescending attitude could be what could, or could help, propel 'liberals' in their ideology. Often when people feel they've explained some phenomena that they've overcome it, nevermind if their expaination can withstand all rigours, they want to feel to have overcome any ideology that may threaten their current lifestyle choices. If they've explained an event then they are above it. Conservatives are often labeled as anti-rational because the question some of liberal's questioning. Yet isn't eternal questioning the halmark of an openmind? It seems both sides often suffer from the idea that if their questions or answers are questioned that the individual questioning isn't giving due heed to logic, because to them it's so 'clear' that they are more logical.

And I'm the troll because I respond in light of my religious beliefs.

"But science as a system can deal only with questions concerning the material world, just as religion deals with questions of ultimate meaning. Even if you profess no religion, you can't really gain an ethical system from evolution. It leads to social darwinism. I think the philosophical mistake both sides have made in this debate is looking to their ultimate authority (be it science or religion) for types of meaning it can't provide."

Well said!

While I know ID is not in the realm of science I don't think it's just a political strategy to destroy scientific authority.

Otherwise I agree with you.

Well look at current marriage rates per 1000. Of course the likes of Nevada and Hawaii are skewed but look states like Massachusets and compare it with the likes of Utah or Idaho and then think about the comparative populations. Here's the CDC's site link to a pdf that shows the current rates by state of marriage.

www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvss/marriage90_04.pdf

It only stands to reason that if fewer people on average actually commit to matrimony that of course rates of breaking those vows will be lower. Of course then you have the exception like my home state which has a very high birth rate when compared to it's population and yet it has the lowest per capita divorce rate. And all this in the confines of what many still wrongly call a theocracy.

Yes, I've never read Tipler's books yet, but I did have some idea of his speculations. Interesting stuff.

Some Transhumanists get caught up in trying to speculate WAY out into the future. Then they get dogmatic about it, which is even worse! I try to avoid that, as I assume that our knowledge is not as great as it will be once Transhumans have accelerated brain power and nanotech - and perhaps femtotech and picotech - systems to investigate the physical universe in more detail and on a greater scale than anything we can do locked on this one planet.

I assume scientific knowledge that we take for granted as fact today will to some degree be supplanted by Transhuman scientific knowledge. So I don't concern myself about such issues as the eventual run down of the universe, or whatever.

I figure we have plenty of time to think about such things when we're really GOOD at thinking about such things.

Given that K. Eric Drexler posits that nanotech could produce a million-fold speedup of sentient thought - and systems of such could produce even greater speed - resulting in a million years of R&D per calendar year, I'd say it's premature to spend much time speculating about the ultimate fate of sentient entities or the universe in our present state.

One step at a time.

But it's fun to speculate - as long as one doesn't become dognatic about the conclusions.

Which, of course, is the problem with the religious community.

One doesn't have to assume that all the various sects will continue to be united, or that the majority of Christians will necessarily join them to recognize that the political influence they DO have is dangerous and could become more dangerous.

Calling this danger a "fiction" is putting one's head in the sand. It's cognitive dissonance - like believing the Iran war won't happen because it's too terrible to contemplate or conflicts with one's preferences in the matter.

If a prominent Democrat shared a conference stage with a member of, say, the Black Panthers or the Spartacus League, it would be grist for a thousand shrieking pundits, but Republicans consort with hardcore theocrats and never pay a political price.

If Republicans don't pay a political price for sharing a stage with hard-core theocrats, it isn't because Democrats and liberals haven't tried to make them pay a price.  On the contrary, they have usually tried very hard.  It just hasn't worked too well.

One of the great mistakes of progressive politicians and activists is to assume that a majority of the country is as revolted as they are by these people.  You see, while only a tiny fringe of people would share any political views with the Sparticist Youth League, a much, much larger proportion of people have quite a bit in common with the likes of James Dobson or Pat Robertson.  What's more, even if they don't agree with them on a lot of issues and even if they think they are prone to making dumb statements, an even larger proportion of people don't viscerally hate the theocrats the way liberals do. 

This is part of a fundamental misunderstanding of the electorate that is pervasive among progressives.  They assume that because a majority of people disagree on the issues with the Christian nationalists (to use Michelle's term) that they automatically are willing to fight them.  Perhaps that's true on an issue by issue basis - I think if the fundies tried to affect access to contraception in some significant way, for example, people would be up in arms.  But on a cultural, political level, the fundies speak to a lot of people.  If the choice is between a politician who wears his faith on his sleeve and connects on a cultural level with fundamentalists and an elitist intellectual who stresses the need for science-based policy and getting religion out of politics, the first guy will almost certainly win.

The thing people tend to forget is that Bill Clinton was one of the rare politicians who could span this gap.  He could speak to the Southern Baptist Convention as fluently and he could speak to the National Academy of Sciences.  As long as progressives persist in ignoring this, they are doomed to wander in the wilderness.

Re: To state the "purpose" idea more precisely, I mean a larger purpose given by something outside of the observable.

Political ideals are not “observables” either and political activism may involve goals that extend far beyond the activist’s life span.
I sometimes tell people that my mother was a Catholic, my father was a Republican, and in some ways that dichotomy was meaningful, since politics for my father was an interest that played much the same role that religion did for my mother.

The notion of deriving an ethical system from evolution is as absurd as the notion of deriving an ethical system from gravity. They are both claims or theories of fact -- descriptive, not prescriptive.

For that matter, insofar as religion deals with claims of fact -- God's existance, Jesus, Heaven with 77 Perpetual Virgins, and so forth -- one can't derive morality from religion.

It is absolutely impossible to derive (logically) any statement of morality from facts. You need a prior statement of morality as a premise.

-- Insane George W. Bush comment #394: See, free nations do not develop weapons of mass destruction.

I look forward to reading this book. This is something that has frightened me ever since I read A Handmaid's Tale back in the mid-80s!

The discussion of why this is happening now is interesting, and I have one suggestion. Michelle pointed out that there is a desire to go back to a kind of small town life that no longer exists. I'd go a bit further and say it is an attempt to go back to a kind of local community--which could easily exist in cities--that doesn't exist.

It used to be that people had a lot more connections with their community through clubs like the Masons and the Eagles, through community organizations, through sports leagues, etc. That's the thesis of the book Bowling Alone. And over time these bonds have weakened and become shredded. Lots of reasons--suburbanization, modern telecommnications (and now the internet), television, the automobile, etc. This is not to say that people no longer have community ties, or that clubs and local organizations no longer exist. They just are a lot less central.

But the one community organization that has survived this trend is the church. It has survived by evolving, as it has continuously evolved for 2000 years.

So now potential opinion leaders in the community only have contact with their church and their coworkers. Now in most workplaces, politics and religion are taboo subjects. So the only place in the community where one might discuss these things by default becomes the church.

This is not inherently bad, except that the Christian nationalist types are going to spread their views in church--it's their natural environment. So a guy who might have gotten some various one-on-one personal political views from his fellow lodge members, his bowling team, etc., now might only hear it in church.

So the implication here is that among other things, Democrats and liberals need to reach out to people in their communities. They need to make sure their neighbors and coworkers know that there is more than one way of looking at the world. And for the community organizations that still exist, democrats need to be joiners.

All easier said than done. I'm a classic example of a non-joiner. But I want to change that.

Exactly what point do you think I am missing?

I did not say the issue is statism. I said aggressive authoritarianism (i.e. bullying) which can occur at various levels and forms of organization.

My point is that the real threat is people, individuals or groups, who want to control others by unscrupulous means, usually by inducing anger and fear of something or someone.  

Your response is persuasive.  Those of us who have accepted the notion that divorce rates -- unadjusted for marriage rates -- are indicators of social dysfunction are going to have to do a rethink.

And there's no pride in the condescending and intended biting irony of the above?

As to why people look for higher purposes--for an "ultimate" reason for their actions, it might be helpful to look at this page on split-brain experiments:

When a split brain subject is subjected to tests where the left half of their brain does not know the correct answer, it will often make something up based on the information it does have.

In this particular test, each hemisphere was simultaneously presented with a different cognitive test. Each hemisphere was presented with a picture and told to pick the object which relates to that picture. The left hemisphere was shown a chicken claw, while the right viewed a snow scene. You can see that the patient is pointing to a chicken with his right hand, and a shovel with his left. After each hemisphere responded, the left hemisphere was asked to explain its choices. The way the subject verbally interpreted the double field stimuli is of particular interest. When asked what images he saw on the screen, the patient responded, "I saw a claw and I picked the chicken, and you have to clean out the chicken shed with a shovel."Trial after trial, this kind of response occurred. The left hemisphere could easily and accurately identify why the right hand chose the corresponding picture that it had, and then subsequently, and without batting an eye, it would incorporate the right hemisphere's response into the framework. While observers knew exactly why the right hemisphere and made its choice, the left hemisphere could merely guess. What is interesting is that the left hemisphere did not offer its suggestion in a guessing vein but rather as a statement of fact.

So when we do something, but we don't have a reason why, we make up a reason without even knowing it.  Which suggests that our conscious world of reasons and rationalizations isn't the dominant cause of our decision making--it's just what we use to explain our decisions to other people.

I'm not sure those who stick to the "observable" world are any more free from this phenomenon than fundamentalists.  No one can escape a toddler's never ending series of "Why?" questions--every motivation can itself have a motivation, and people want to find an "ultimate" motivation to end the infinite regress.  So whether you pursue God, Goodness, Truth, Beauty, or Freedom as your ultimate motivation, you can still ask what motivates that ultimate motivation?  Atheists ask "Why God?" and that is a good question, but the Naturalistic Fallacy suggests we will never have a good answer to the question "Why Goodness?

The truth seems to be that there is no "ultimate" reason, but that's not a major problem because reason isn't what drives us, it's just what we use to justify ourselves to other people.  Freeing ourselves from the delusion that we use reason to justify and choose actions rationally is, perhaps, a vastly larger task than freeing people from the delusion of Biblical literalism.

Fundamentalism = traditional Christianity. I think perhaps first of all we need to be clear about what we are talking about. While you make a very articulate argument, Michelle, you seem to be operating with the same set of assumptions as those you portray as "Christian Nationalists".

First, it seems to me what we are experiencing is just the latest manifestation of the end of the "absolute ethic" that existed in Western Civilization at least among most of the population up until the 19th Century. Nietzsche proclaimed that "God is dead, and that we have killed Him." What he was talking about imo, and I think this is common among Nietzsche scholars, is that "science" as in scientific enquiry, and in Nietzsche's case, philology, had shown that the Christian religion was not so much founded, as "forged", as in a metal is forged. Historians of Roman history knew that early Christian texts were crudely written and at odds with themselves. "Family values" from a Roman perspective very much meant the rejection of Christianity as anti-thetical to Classical learning and thought, as Theodore Mommsen pointed out. We see a version of this basic truth coming out now with the Dan Brown book/movie. . .I would of course refer to Nietzsche's famous 3rd Essay in the Geneology of Morals as well. . .

Second, Max Weber, a very Nietzschean thinker, but greatly influenced by Marx as well, carried on this thought with his concept of "disenchantment of the world". In other words we no longer have an absolute ethic to guide behavior in all the various values spheres associated with human existance. The traditional Christian believes that his actions on earth influence his attainment of salvation in the afterlife. In political matters the traditional Christian perspective is one of disinterest, "rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar's". Even Puritans, who carried the Christian ascetic ethic to extremes never would have assumed that they "knew" God's will. . . rather it would have been an existance with a high probability of doubt, ceaseless prayer, and constant self-searching, which is the very opposite of what we see among the "religious right" or "Christian Nationalists" today. . .

I think instead that what we are dealing with is a profound confusion of values, whihc may be your argument afterall since I have not read your book. That various interests and individuals hope to "re-enchant" the "old Gods" and provide that missing absolute ethic which will define all the value spheres - political, spiritual, legal, familial, ethical, erotic . . . This will provide the believer with a certain amount of certainty and "meaning to life", but will also open them to endless maniputation and swindle since the interests of their masters are very much tied to this world, not the next.

So in effect we see nothing new here, just another attempt to provide an absolute ethic to define the meaning of life for a culture which is hopelessly polytheistic. . . Communism and Fascism attempted this as well. I would refer to William Pfaff's, The Bullet's Song, since this seems to be his argument as well. . .

Religion does NOT deal with questions of "ultimate meaning" - it fakes that and produces incorrect answers based on conceptual imagination.

And who made you a World Expert on what religion "deals with" (there's a epistomologically precise phrase)?

How about this proposition: everybody shut up about religion who: (1) is not attending religious services OR (2) has not studied religious texts to the extent he/she actually knows them. Hmm, just got real quiet.

You know, I frequently tell my daughter that you can't learn when you're talking because you can't hear what's being taught. It seems like she's not the only one who could or should take that lesson to heart. But, she's an 8 y/o chatterbox and even in the midst of that yakking, still displays a fine curiosity about the world around her. Which is more than can be said for the TPM Band of the Ignorati, the members of which believe their intellectual nerf darts are actually penetrating the reality of religious belief. Talk about deluded.

We pray to see life as it is, to understand it and to make it better that it was. We pray so that reality can break into our souls and give us back our awareness of the Divine Presence in life. -- Joan Chittister

I personally stick pretty closely to a self-imposed rule: don't talk on subjects about which I know nothing. Its corollary is significant, too: if a subject is sufficiently provoking, study it. I recommend the rule and its corollary to you. You may find the results of implementing this rule surprisingly satisfying: more reading and thinking, less talking. And then when you do talk, you will feel a particular pleasure in actually knowing what you are talking about! (And, there's always the chance that you will find your original position was wrong!)

There is a saying, "opinions are like a**h***s, everybody has one." Some opinions are based on learning, thought and insight; others are just, well, stink air.

mp