Religion in Politics: Can't Live With It, Can't Live Without It
1. The more the Roman Catholic hierarchy resembles a Congregation for the Propagation of Coercive Fondling, the less credibly it clothes what the late Father Richard John Neuhaus called "the naked public square." The next time some politically presumptuous bishop announces that he won't give communion to a pro-choicer (like John Kerry in 2004), someone will ask him publicly if he's stopped letting child molesters give communion to anyone else. Unless you're avoiding the news stories, you know that that is actually an issue.
2. The longer that Israel is held hostage by the Bible-thumping, "full Israel" zealots in Benjamin Netanyahu's governing coalition, the more the slogan "Never again!" will remind everyone that, in peace-making with Palestinians, today's Israelis never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.
So much for religion in politics, eh? Well, not quite. These are tragedies, not occasions for the tongue-clucking and schadenfreude that some of us secular liberals are quietly indulging. Here's why it's too easy to survey the would-be theocrats in Rome, Jerusalem, Gaza, Tehran, and Kabul and say, "So much for religion."
We'd also have to survey how the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., a seminary student named John Lewis, and poor, black churchgoers managed to walk, trembling, into Southern squares, dressed in their threadbare Sunday best, to face fire hoses, dogs, prison, and, for all they knew, death.
We'd have to ask how hundreds of fire fighters and cops on 9/11 --- many of them brought up in Catholic Youth Organization sports teams, with an old parish sense of right and wrong - could rush toward death, not to take lives but to save them, at the risk and cost of their own. I suspect that some of these people's hearts are breaking over the church scandals and that they're feeling demoralized and outraged.
We'd have to ask about the courage and impressive dignity in the multitudes who took to the streets of Tehran last June to strip bare the pretensions of theocrats. They were able to do it because, like our civil rights marchers and Gandhi's followers, they meant to redeem their faith from ecclesiastical overlords who have broken their hearts, too, as well as their bones.
But not their spirits. "This paradoxical relation between the possible and the impossible in history proves that the frame of history is wider than the nature-time in which it is grounded," wrote Reinhold Niebuhr, who ran as a socialist for New York State Senate in 1932. "The injunction of Christ - 'Fear not them which kill the body but are not able to kill the soul,' (Matthew 10:28) neatly indicates the dimension of human existence which transcends the basis which human life and history have in nature."
In his compelling and profoundly moving A Stone of Hope, the historian David Chappell notes that King absorbed Niebuhr's writings as a divinity student in the early 1950s. Both knew that Marxism's secular eschatology claimed a similar transcendence and that many had died for it, but that Communism had become even more power-mad than the Church.
"How many [military] divisions has the Pope?" Stalin once quipped. Stalin's ideological heirs got an answer in 1989, when Pope John Paul II landed in Warsaw and was met by a million people, who soon brought down the regime.
More recently, though, the Polish parliament underscored the underside of religion in politics by passing a resolution declaring Christ the country's king. The operative lesson, as I wrote here during the marches in Tehran last summer, is that while religion is dangerous and odious when it tries to rule in states, it often proves indispensable as an inspiration to a body politic, especially to insurgencies against tremendous odds. Without its strength, republics falter, but when faith oversteps its bounds, they are lost.
Let me say a more concerning Israel and the Jews, drawing on an essay I published last fall. Judaism is the religion of an inflected nationalism that often rejects some of what nationalism usually claims - namely, sacred ties to "blood and soil." The Hebrew word ivry--close to the Hebrew word for Hebrew--means "he crossed over," denoting Abraham's separating himself from all he'd loved in response to God's command that he leave his homeland and set out on a journey across time.
Abraham's loneliness -- smashing his community's old idols, preparing to sacrifice his son -- sometimes approached existential grandeur. And it could be frightening. Taking the sublimity of man's distance from God straight up, the ancient Hebrew liturgy turned natural beauty into a metaphor of man's futility: "He is as the fragile potsherd, as the grass that withers, as the flower that fades, as a fleeting shadow, as a passing cloud, as a wind that blows, as the floating dust, yea, and even as a dream that vanishes." (Yom Kippur liturgy.)
Where Hellenism united love and beauty with nature in timeless cycles and embraced the world as it is, Judaism forces the imagination away from graven images and toward action for ends that haven't been attained yet on earth. It finds beauty in the arc of the deed that pursues justice across time.
As the Israeli philosopher Yirmiyahu Yovel puts it, the human subject begins to identify its own purposes with the transformation of a world that is not indifferent to its efforts. Abraham's grandson Jacob wrestles with an angel all night, trying to wrest truth from God; at dawn the angel names him Yisrael, which in Hebrew means, "He wrestles with God."
Many of us do something like that when we seek a trans-historical significance in our deeds. Puritans did it all the time, seeding the American experiment by emulating Hebrews explicitly. (Hence the Hebrew on the seals of Yale and Dartmouth, which they founded.)
To cope with the vast unknown that it had opened between man and God and between present and future, the ancient Hebrew religion fostered the nationalism of a people pursued by a mysterious, irascible Interlocutor. In the Bible and subsequently, Abraham's nation is sundered early and often from its Promised Land because its territorial claims turn out to be contingent on keeping a covenant to pursue spiritual and moral ends.
That gives this inflected nation a strange, new orientation on earth: "The Jewish nation is the nation of time, in a sense which cannot be said of any other nation," observed the Protestant theologian Paul Tillich:
"It represents the permanent struggle between time and space. . . . It has a tragic fate when considered as a nation of space like every other nation, but as the nation of time, because it is beyond the circle of life and death it is beyond tragedy.
"The people of time . . . cannot avoid being persecuted because by their very existence they break the claim of the gods of space, who express themselves in will to power, imperialism, injustice, demonic enthusiasm, and tragic self-destruction.
"The gods of space, who are strong in every human soul, in every race and nation, are afraid of the Lord of Time, history, and justice, are afraid of his prophets and followers."
Tillich is noting that, from its biblical beginnings, this tribe coheres through its unprecedented negation of what's usually tribal and through its imaginative, sometimes brilliant defiance of what the lords of space and power demand.
By that truly biblical standard, the Jewish religious zealots who are grasping at power and molesting Palestinians gratuitously through Netanyahu's government are preparing to sunder their people from the land again. They charge that Israel's secular liberals have broken the covenant. But so have they, like the ancient temple priests, like the Roman Catholic priests, and like the mullahs in Gaza and Tehran.
Yes, there are many differences. But my operative principle holds: While religion is dangerous and odious when it tries to rule in states, it's indispensable as an inspiration to the body politic, especially to insurgencies against what seem overwhelming odds. Without its strength, republics falter, but when it oversteps its bounds, they are lost.
The growing disgrace and isolation of Israel's blindest supporters and the Church's most arrogant priests should be understood as a long-overdue corrective, but it's not something that liberals should celebrate or be smug about. You don't have to be a Puritan to recognize that it reflects a corruption in the human heart that we all have to struggle with all the time.
We're just so darned clearly in "overstepping its bounds" territory these days. While it's indisputable that religion has inspired individuals and groups to do some wonderful important things it has also served as a salve against modern truths that people aren't happy with.
Take Iran. On one hand you have religious people braving government reprisal and risking their lives for the greater cause of opening Iranian society. But the people on the other side of the debate are religious too.
Many a Christian turned fire houses on Christian civil rights marchers in the south. The original slavers were religious men with religious rationales for the slave trade (those aren't people or they wear the mark of Cain).
So religion can be used to free people and to enslave them. I'd only add that it can be used to preserve the status quo against all reason and that, the use of religion to in effect stop time and delay change is the main goal of the zealot.
Just look at how many religious people who fought for race-based civil rights in America or for the establishment of Israel can't handle a simple idea like two men marrying each other or two women marrying each other.
Or, to put it more pointedly, that Judaism is very specifically a religion about one people's liberation from bondage certainly hasn't made it any easier to be a Palestinian.
On the whole I'll take our secular accomplishments over our religions ones any day.
March 26, 2010 7:31 AM | Reply | Permalink
Begorrah, and ’tis Paul Tillich that Professor Timewarp would be treating us to, Dr. Bones!
March 26, 2010 9:19 AM | Reply | Permalink
This issue illustrates the common malady that religious government and secular government have between them.
Both can and do become corrupt by the toxins in power which inspired "power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely".
March 26, 2010 9:37 AM | Reply | Permalink
RE: The longer that Israel is held hostage by the Bible-thumping, "full Israel" zealots in Benjamin Netanyahu's governing coalition... - Jim Sleeper
ALSO SEE: A Serial Obstructionist, By Rachel Tabachnick, ZEEK
(EXCERPTS) Did Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu deliberately sabotage the Obama administration’s attempt to restart peace talks?...
...Shortly after Vice President Joe Biden’s arrival in Israel, Netanyahu and Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat were the headliners at Pastor John Hagee’s two-hour Christians United for Israel (CUFI) extravaganza at the Jerusalem Convention Center...
...Monday’s CUFI production was based on the concept of “biblical Zionism,” or the belief that God mandates nonnegotiable borders of Israel, and any leader or nation who thwarts this divine plan will be cursed. Before introducing Netanyahu, Hagee stated, “World leaders do not have the authority to tell Israel and the Jewish people what they can and can not do in Jerusalem.” He added, “Israel does not exist because of a decree of the United Nations in 1948. Israel exists because of a covenant God made with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob...The settlements are not the problem.”
In his books and sermons Hagee has promoted a “greater Israel,” that will reclaim all of Israel’s former biblical territory, stating “In modern terms, Israel rightfully owns all of present-day Israel, all of Lebanon, half of Syria, two-thirds of Jordan, all of Iraq, and the northern portion of Saudi Arabia.”
At the Jerusalem CUFI event Hagee described Ahmadinejad as the Hitler of the Middle East who could turn the world upside down in 24 hours, words similar to those he made when lobbying for the attack on Iraq...
...During a performance by singer Dudu Fisher, the God TV camera panned to the audience and centered on Joel Bell, leader of Worldwide Biblical Zionists. WBZ is currently building a center in Sha’ar Benjamin for “facilitating absorption” of Christian Zionists into the West Bank. It was established after a joint meeting held in Texas of the Board of Governors of World Likud led by Danny Danon, and World Evangelical Zionists led by Joel Bell. Speakers included ZOA’s Morton Klein...
ENTIRE ARTICLE – http://zeek.forward.com/articles/116518/
March 26, 2010 1:56 PM | Reply | Permalink
We could actually live without religion in politics, it's well known that most politicians don't believe the things they claim to stand for, they just do it for the votes. If all of them were brave like J.F.K, they'd stand up and say "my church does not speak for me"
March 26, 2010 2:12 PM | Reply | Permalink
What would be the point of being a Jew if you couldn't see around every corner a potential pogrom? Of being an Israeli Jew if you couldn't say the whole world is against us?
A long lived nation must have enemies -- and short of having those enemies wipe it out, the more the better.
March 26, 2010 3:00 PM | Reply | Permalink
Religion In Politics...can't live with it..can definitely live with out it.
C
March 26, 2010 6:28 PM | Reply | Permalink
To paraphrase Barry Goldwater: Bring religion into politics, and kiss politics goodbye.
Kiss America goodbye.
March 26, 2010 8:33 PM | Reply | Permalink
I don't believe in God.
I do believe that Sister X... does lots of good work in my town.
March 27, 2010 6:08 AM | Reply | Permalink
There is another matter of faith in our politics, which is the religion of American exceptionalism.
When we, in our infinite faith about our infinite wisdom, destroy nations like Afghanistan and Iraq, in order to rebuild them, then force a "democratic election system" on them, the officials and the people don't believe the results. They yell "fraud"!
Afghanistan and Iraq have fraudulent elections and we just turn our heads the other way because our faith in our exceptionalism is the religion that glosses over the reality.
We can not believe that our own election system is flawed, nor that the one we are exporting at the end of a gun is too.
March 27, 2010 8:32 AM | Reply | Permalink
RE: Religion in Politics: Can't Live With It, Can't Live Without It - Jim Sleeper
ALSO SEE: Religion Sways Policy, Now in Israel, by Jerrold Kessel and Pierre Klochendler, 03/27/10
(EXCERPT) JERUSALEM – There was a time when Israel was held in contempt by its neighbors for its over-liberal ways. They felt it did not "belong" in the Middle East.
There’s been a twist in this negative perception of the possibility of the Jewish state fitting into the region. They were accustomed to an Israel that kept religion out of key political choices. Now they are concerned precisely because of the role religion plays in Israeli politics.
The Saudi Foreign Minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, recently told Maureen Dowd of The New York Times: "We are moving in the direction of a liberal society. What is happening in Israel is the opposite; they are moving into a more religiously oriented culture and into a more religiously determined politics and to a very extreme sense of nationhood."
This trend, said the Prince, was coming "to a boiling point. The religious institutions in Israel are stymieing every effort at peace."
Even though Dowd notes caustically that this comment from a prominent figure in a country known for its religious conservatism is overboard, the present Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is undoubtedly the most "religiously determined" in the country’s history. ...
ENTIRE ARTICLE - http://original.antiwar.com/kessel-klohendler/2010/03/26/religion-sways-policy-now-in-israel/
March 27, 2010 5:17 PM | Reply | Permalink
RE: Religion in Politics: Can't Live With It, Can't Live Without It - Jim Sleeper
ALSO SEE: 'Dual Covenant' Christians ~ Christian Zionists and the strangest alliance in history, by Jon Basil Utley, 08/02/06
(EXCERPT) The major internal conflict for the strangest alliance in history is about what will happen to Jews who don't convert to evangelical Christianity. The Armageddonites, those 30 million Americans who happily see Mideast chaos as hastening their one-way trip to paradise, are being increasingly questioned about the fate of Jews whom they urge to help fulfill the prophecies.
Once their death wish agenda is realized, the end-of-the-worlders believe that Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims (of course), other Christians (apparently including Catholics and Orthodox), and all the rest of humanity will be killed. But the born-again will be "raptured" to Heaven.
Now some enterprising Texans have "resolved" the big question. The Jews God kills will go to a parallel heaven, "their" kind of heaven, to enjoy eternity alongside the good Christians. The Jewish heaven will presumably be what "they" would like, perhaps different from the evangelical heaven, where there will be "no booze, no bars, and no need to mow the grass on one's lawn," according to a popular Gaither Singers song. (The fact that the Jewish faith has no afterlife at all similar to the Christian one is irrelevant, nor do the faithful Texans probably even know it.) It is called the "dual covenant theory" – the belief that Jews and Christians have separate deals with God. However, Muslims, Hindus, and others have no deal....
ENTIRE ARTICLE - http://www.antiwar.com/utley/?articleid=9456
March 28, 2010 12:59 PM | Reply | Permalink
Don't forget to include secular humanism as a religion also. For it is a system of thought that has controlling effect upon personal belief, social practice and public policy. Like all man-made creeds, its shortcomings are too many to mention. And in our times, the cultural tug of war for the American mind is characterized by the clash between liberal atheism and conservative theism.
We are human beings, spirit-beings in a temporal bodily vessel. Though we are biologically mortal, we have a spirit and a soul because we were created in the image and unto the likeness of our Creator, Almighty God. Without religion in our lives to inspire our thoughts and actions, our civilization would crumble and our world would decay. Atheism tends to encourage physicalism and temporalism--"live for today for only the flesh matters." But our Judeo-Christian heritage inspires us to thrive in hope for the discovery of just legal processes by which to live long and prosper.
Religion and life itself, can never be separated, as all human beings possess a worldview in which they invest all their psychic energies to guide their individual and social activities. So, then, the question is, which worldview will be incorporated in politics, education, science, and economics.
All worldviews are not equal. From the Judeo-Christian worldview, our rights are inalienable and eternal. But from atheism, they are man-made and thus can be destroyed. Therein is the crucial difference between life and death, and between liberty and bondage. We stand for spiritual liberty and moral freedom within secured constitutional blessings from our Forefathers. We willfully and lawfully choose to believe in God our Creator as the sole author and giver of our lives, liberty and pursuit of happiness.
The Supreme Court in 1961 declared that secular humanism or godless humanism is also a religion. Therefore, if they are not worshipping God, they are worshipping Darwinian apes--"the image of the beast" rather than the image of their Creator.
When animalism controls intuitive discernment from which thought processes gain objective conceptualization, destructive practices emerge to endanger civilized living and spiritual liberty.
FROM WEBSITE: IS SECULAR HUMANISM A RELIGION?
"John Dewey described Humanism as our "common faith." Julian Huxley called it "Religion without Revelation." The first Humanist Manifesto spoke openly of Humanism as a religion. Many other Humanists could be cited who have acknowledged that Humanism is a religion. In fact, claiming that Humanism was "the new religion" was trendy for at least 100 years, perhaps beginning in 1875 with the publication of The Religion of Humanity by Octavius Brooks Frothingham (1822-1895), son of the distinguished Unitarian clergyman, Nathaniel Langdon Frothingham (1793-1870), pastor of the First Unitarian Church of Boston, 1815-1850. In the 1950's, Humanists sought and obtained tax-exempt status as religious organizations. Even the Supreme Court of the United States spoke in 1961 of Secular Humanism as a religion. It was a struggle to get atheism accepted as a religion, but it happened. From 1962-1980 this was not a controversial issue."
Therefore, those who oppose Judeo-Christian principles of self-government and righteous morality are proposing that we adopt another religion for our culture, our children's education and our public policies--their godless religion of secular humanism from which they will contrive fictitious "rights" out of thin air that contradict common sense, logic, and God-given standards of right and wrong.
Atheists proceed from the evolutionist framework of ape ancestry that dispenses with the necessity for absolute standards of right and wrong. Hence, they aim to destroy personal responsibility and individual accountability for willful actions.
Christianity and Judaism are not the only religions that impact our society for individual morality and social policy. Secular humanists only wish we would not notice their religious extremism which is peculiarly destructive in its rejection of the existence of God. Atheistic secular liberal democrats are also practicing their religion as their political platform is marshalling homosexuality, lesbianism and abortion in the guise of fictitious "rights" that need government approval.
For the sake of our children, these immoral and antisocial practices must be countered by self-evident truths that expose the fallacy of their reasoning and the destructiveness of their doctrines.
Remember the Judeo-Christian foundation that ensures eternal security for our inalienable rights. Charles Darwin was a mortal human being who hated his own humanity by giving apes supremacy over his own God-created nature.
Apes cannot protect our rights; they are unthinking jungle animals. But God is always alive and active in securing, defending, preserving and protecting the blessings of liberty that give substance to our personal lives and social prosperity, for the good of our nation and its leadership of the world.
May 22, 2010 1:19 PM | Reply | Permalink
Don't forget to include secular humanism as a religion also. For it is a system of thought that has controlling effect upon personal belief, social practice and public policy. Like all man-made creeds, its shortcomings are too many to mention. And in our times, the cultural tug of war for the American mind is characterized by the clash between liberal atheism and conservative theism.
We are human beings, spirit-beings in a temporal bodily vessel. Though we are biologically mortal, we have a spirit and a soul because we were created in the image and unto the likeness of our Creator, Almighty God. Without religion in our lives to inspire our thoughts and actions, our civilization would crumble and our world would decay. Atheism tends to encourage physicalism and temporalism--"live for today for only the flesh matters." But our Judeo-Christian heritage inspires us to thrive in hope for the discovery of just legal processes by which to live long and prosper.
Religion and life itself, can never be separated, as all human beings possess a worldview in which they invest all their psychic energies to guide their individual and social activities. So, then, the question is, which worldview will be incorporated in politics, education, science, and economics.
All worldviews are not equal. From the Judeo-Christian worldview, our rights are inalienable and eternal. But from atheism, they are man-made and thus can be destroyed. Therein is the crucial difference between life and death, and between liberty and bondage. We stand for spiritual liberty and moral freedom within secured constitutional blessings from our Forefathers. We willfully and lawfully choose to believe in God our Creator as the sole author and giver of our lives, liberty and pursuit of happiness.
The Supreme Court in 1961 declared that secular humanism or godless humanism is also a religion. Therefore, if they are not worshipping God, they are worshipping Darwinian apes--"the image of the beast" rather than the image of their Creator.
When animalism controls intuitive discernment from which thought processes gain objective conceptualization, destructive practices emerge to endanger civilized living and spiritual liberty.
FROM WEBSITE: IS SECULAR HUMANISM A RELIGION?
"John Dewey described Humanism as our "common faith." Julian Huxley called it "Religion without Revelation." The first Humanist Manifesto spoke openly of Humanism as a religion. Many other Humanists could be cited who have acknowledged that Humanism is a religion. In fact, claiming that Humanism was "the new religion" was trendy for at least 100 years, perhaps beginning in 1875 with the publication of The Religion of Humanity by Octavius Brooks Frothingham (1822-1895), son of the distinguished Unitarian clergyman, Nathaniel Langdon Frothingham (1793-1870), pastor of the First Unitarian Church of Boston, 1815-1850. In the 1950's, Humanists sought and obtained tax-exempt status as religious organizations. Even the Supreme Court of the United States spoke in 1961 of Secular Humanism as a religion. It was a struggle to get atheism accepted as a religion, but it happened. From 1962-1980 this was not a controversial issue."
Therefore, those who oppose Judeo-Christian principles of self-government and righteous morality are proposing that we adopt another religion for our culture, our children's education and our public policies--their godless religion of secular humanism from which they will contrive fictitious "rights" out of thin air that contradict common sense, logic, and God-given standards of right and wrong.
Atheists proceed from the evolutionist framework of ape ancestry that dispenses with the necessity for absolute standards of right and wrong. Hence, they aim to destroy personal responsibility and individual accountability for willful actions.
Christianity and Judaism are not the only religions that impact our society for individual morality and social policy. Secular humanists only wish we would not notice their religious extremism which is peculiarly destructive in its rejection of the existence of God. Atheistic secular liberal democrats are also practicing their religion as their political platform is marshalling homosexuality, lesbianism and abortion in the guise of fictitious "rights" that need government approval.
For the sake of our children, these immoral and antisocial practices must be countered by self-evident truths that expose the fallacy of their reasoning and the destructiveness of their doctrines.
Remember the Judeo-Christian foundation that ensures eternal security for our inalienable rights. Charles Darwin was a mortal human being who hated his own humanity by giving apes supremacy over his own God-created nature.
Apes cannot protect our rights; they are unthinking jungle animals. But God is always alive and active in securing, defending, preserving and protecting the blessings of liberty that give substance to our personal lives and social prosperity, for the good of our nation and its leadership of the world.
May 22, 2010 1:05 PM | Reply | Permalink
Don't forget to include secular humanism as a religion also. For it is a system of thought that has controlling effect upon personal belief, social practice and public policy. Like all man-made creeds, its shortcomings are too many to mention. And in our times, the cultural tug of war for the American mind is characterized by the clash between liberal atheism and conservative theism.
We are human beings, spirit-beings in a temporal bodily vessel. Though we are biologically mortal, we have a spirit and a soul because we were created in the image and unto the likeness of our Creator, Almighty God. Without religion in our lives to inspire our thoughts and actions, our civilization would crumble and our world would decay. Atheism tends to encourage physicalism and temporalism--"live for today for only the flesh matters." But our Judeo-Christian heritage inspires us to thrive in hope for the discovery of just legal processes by which to live long and prosper.
Religion and life itself, can never be separated, as all human beings possess a worldview in which they invest all their psychic energies to guide their individual and social activities. So, then, the question is, which worldview will be incorporated in politics, education, science, and economics.
All worldviews are not equal. From the Judeo-Christian worldview, our rights are inalienable and eternal. But from atheism, they are man-made and thus can be destroyed. Therein is the crucial difference between life and death, and between liberty and bondage. We stand for spiritual liberty and moral freedom within secured constitutional blessings from our Forefathers. We willfully and lawfully choose to believe in God our Creator as the sole author and giver of our lives, liberty and pursuit of happiness.
The Supreme Court in 1961 declared that secular humanism or godless humanism is also a religion. Therefore, if they are not worshipping God, they are worshipping Darwinian apes--"the image of the beast" rather than the image of their Creator.
When animalism controls intuitive discernment from which thought processes gain objective conceptualization, destructive practices emerge to endanger civilized living and spiritual liberty.
FROM WEBSITE: IS SECULAR HUMANISM A RELIGION?
"John Dewey described Humanism as our "common faith." Julian Huxley called it "Religion without Revelation." The first Humanist Manifesto spoke openly of Humanism as a religion. Many other Humanists could be cited who have acknowledged that Humanism is a religion. In fact, claiming that Humanism was "the new religion" was trendy for at least 100 years, perhaps beginning in 1875 with the publication of The Religion of Humanity by Octavius Brooks Frothingham (1822-1895), son of the distinguished Unitarian clergyman, Nathaniel Langdon Frothingham (1793-1870), pastor of the First Unitarian Church of Boston, 1815-1850. In the 1950's, Humanists sought and obtained tax-exempt status as religious organizations. Even the Supreme Court of the United States spoke in 1961 of Secular Humanism as a religion. It was a struggle to get atheism accepted as a religion, but it happened. From 1962-1980 this was not a controversial issue."
Therefore, those who oppose Judeo-Christian principles of self-government and righteous morality are proposing that we adopt another religion for our culture, our children's education and our public policies--their godless religion of secular humanism from which they will contrive fictitious "rights" out of thin air that contradict common sense, logic, and God-given standards of right and wrong.
Atheists proceed from the evolutionist framework of ape ancestry that dispenses with the necessity for absolute standards of right and wrong. Hence, they aim to destroy personal responsibility and individual accountability for willful actions.
Christianity and Judaism are not the only religions that impact our society for individual morality and social policy. Secular humanists only wish we would not notice their religious extremism which is peculiarly destructive in its rejection of the existence of God. Atheistic secular liberal democrats are also practicing their religion as their political platform is marshalling homosexuality, lesbianism and abortion in the guise of fictitious "rights" that need government approval.
For the sake of our children, these immoral and antisocial practices must be countered by self-evident truths that expose the fallacy of their reasoning and the destructiveness of their doctrines.
Remember the Judeo-Christian foundation that ensures eternal security for our inalienable rights. Charles Darwin was a mortal human being who hated his own humanity by giving apes supremacy over his own God-created nature.
Apes cannot protect our rights; they are unthinking jungle animals. But God is always alive and active in securing, defending, preserving and protecting the blessings of liberty that give substance to our personal lives and social prosperity, for the good of our nation and its leadership of the world.
May 22, 2010 1:07 PM | Reply | Permalink
Don't forget to include secular humanism as a religion also. For it is a system of thought that has controlling effect upon personal belief, social practice and public policy. Like all man-made creeds, its shortcomings are too many to mention. And in our times, the cultural tug of war for the American mind is characterized by the clash between liberal atheism and conservative theism.
We are human beings, spirit-beings in a temporal bodily vessel. Though we are biologically mortal, we have a spirit and a soul because we were created in the image and unto the likeness of our Creator, Almighty God. Without religion in our lives to inspire our thoughts and actions, our civilization would crumble and our world would decay. Atheism tends to encourage physicalism and temporalism--"live for today for only the flesh matters." But our Judeo-Christian heritage inspires us to thrive in hope for the discovery of just legal processes by which to live long and prosper.
Religion and life itself, can never be separated, as all human beings possess a worldview in which they invest all their psychic energies to guide their individual and social activities. So, then, the question is, which worldview will be incorporated in politics, education, science, and economics.
All worldviews are not equal. From the Judeo-Christian worldview, our rights are inalienable and eternal. But from atheism, they are man-made and thus can be destroyed. Therein is the crucial difference between life and death, and between liberty and bondage. We stand for spiritual liberty and moral freedom within secured constitutional blessings from our Forefathers. We willfully and lawfully choose to believe in God our Creator as the sole author and giver of our lives, liberty and pursuit of happiness.
The Supreme Court in 1961 declared that secular humanism or godless humanism is also a religion. Therefore, if they are not worshipping God, they are worshipping Darwinian apes--"the image of the beast" rather than the image of their Creator.
When animalism controls intuitive discernment from which thought processes gain objective conceptualization, destructive practices emerge to endanger civilized living and spiritual liberty.
FROM WEBSITE: IS SECULAR HUMANISM A RELIGION?
"John Dewey described Humanism as our "common faith." Julian Huxley called it "Religion without Revelation." The first Humanist Manifesto spoke openly of Humanism as a religion. Many other Humanists could be cited who have acknowledged that Humanism is a religion. In fact, claiming that Humanism was "the new religion" was trendy for at least 100 years, perhaps beginning in 1875 with the publication of The Religion of Humanity by Octavius Brooks Frothingham (1822-1895), son of the distinguished Unitarian clergyman, Nathaniel Langdon Frothingham (1793-1870), pastor of the First Unitarian Church of Boston, 1815-1850. In the 1950's, Humanists sought and obtained tax-exempt status as religious organizations. Even the Supreme Court of the United States spoke in 1961 of Secular Humanism as a religion. It was a struggle to get atheism accepted as a religion, but it happened. From 1962-1980 this was not a controversial issue."
Therefore, those who oppose Judeo-Christian principles of self-government and righteous morality are proposing that we adopt another religion for our culture, our children's education and our public policies--their godless religion of secular humanism from which they will contrive fictitious "rights" out of thin air that contradict common sense, logic, and God-given standards of right and wrong.
Atheists proceed from the evolutionist framework of ape ancestry that dispenses with the necessity for absolute standards of right and wrong. Hence, they aim to destroy personal responsibility and individual accountability for willful actions.
Christianity and Judaism are not the only religions that impact our society for individual morality and social policy. Secular humanists only wish we would not notice their religious extremism which is peculiarly destructive in its rejection of the existence of God. Atheistic secular liberal democrats are also practicing their religion as their political platform is marshalling homosexuality, lesbianism and abortion in the guise of fictitious "rights" that need government approval.
For the sake of our children, these immoral and antisocial practices must be countered by self-evident truths that expose the fallacy of their reasoning and the destructiveness of their doctrines.
Remember the Judeo-Christian foundation that ensures eternal security for our inalienable rights. Charles Darwin was a mortal human being who hated his own humanity by giving apes supremacy over his own God-created nature.
Apes cannot protect our rights; they are unthinking jungle animals. But God is always alive and active in securing, defending, preserving and protecting the blessings of liberty that give substance to our personal lives and social prosperity, for the good of our nation and its leadership of the world.
May 22, 2010 1:09 PM | Reply | Permalink
I am very enjoyed for this blog. Its an informative topic. It help me very much to solve some problems. Its opportunity are so fantastic and working style so speedy. I think it may be help all of you. Thanks a lot for enjoying this beauty blog with me. I am appreciating it very much! Looking forward to another great blog. Good luck to the author! all the best! sun jar
January 28, 2011 9:09 AM | Reply | Permalink
Thanks For the sake of our children, these immoral and antisocial practices must be countered by self-evident truths that expose the fallacy of their reasoning and the destructiveness of their doctrines. occupational safety and health degree
February 12, 2011 3:36 PM | Reply | Permalink
Thanks The longer that Israel is held hostage by the Bible-thumping, "full Israel" zealots in Benjamin Netanyahu's governing coalition, the more the slogan "Never again!" will remind everyone that, in peace-making with Palestinians, today's Israelis never miss an opportunity health care informatics
February 20, 2011 3:30 AM | Reply | Permalink
I remember a Jonathan Swift quote: “We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.” I once spoke with my friend Aaron DelSignore about the importance of religion in politics. I agree that the two are somewhat inseparable and ambivalent and the intrusion of the religion could be beneficial to the people, as long as religion restricts itself only to afflicting moral teachings.
February 26, 2011 10:54 AM | Reply | Permalink
Israel is held hostage by the Bible-thumping, "full Israel" zealots in Benjamin Netanyahu's governing coalition, the more the slogan "Never again!" will remind everyone that, in peace-making with Palestinians, today's Israelis never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. kanban
March 5, 2011 9:08 AM | Reply | Permalink
Thanks Catholic Youth Organization sports teams, with an old parish sense of right and wrong - could rush toward death, not to take lives but to save them, at the risk and cost of their own. I suspect that some of these people's hearts are breaking over the church scandals and that they're feeling demoralized and outraged. green smoke discount
March 13, 2011 4:37 AM | Reply | Permalink
Electric utility stocks and their dividend feature is great for retirement plans and a conservative way to play the recovery of the economy in a regular investment account.
happy birthday wishes
March 23, 2011 4:28 AM | Reply | Permalink
Does anyone doubt that Goldman Sach shorted their own stock options on the way down with their early pre-release news of charges by the SEC?
Dogs for Sale
March 28, 2011 5:04 AM | Reply | Permalink
The last thing they should do is take charge of fixing the leak itself when they
Speeding Fines
April 24, 2011 6:23 AM | Reply | Permalink
I suspect that some of these people's hearts are breaking over the church scandals and that they're feeling demoralized and outraged.
Costume Wigs
April 25, 2011 2:57 AM | Reply | Permalink