June 21, 2022
Long - but it is a difficult subject. Read half of it now and finish it after you begin the caffeination process in the morning.
On the heels of a Gallup Values and Belief poll conducted from May 2 to 22 of this year showing 81% of people in America (a historic low number) answered that they believe in God, I returned to consideration of something that has been on my mind for a while.
This Gallup result is different from people not participating in religion. This means fully 20% of Americans do not even believe in the reason for religion.
For the past few years as I have argued that the absence of a specifically mandated religiosity in the Constitution of the United States is simply an example of the religious influence and tolerance that exists there, I have continued to consider the significance of religion and spirituality (the role of God) as it relates to the three enumerated concepts of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
I have stated before that I believe that we are mandated to have a secular government – with emphasis that the term "secular†holds the meaning that institution of government is limited to and pertains only to worldly things or to things that are not regarded as religious, spiritual, or sacred, that government is temporal and has no right to transgress into the domain of religion. I am often misunderstood as stating that governance should not include religion – that is not the case. I do not propose that "secular†means that religion should be excluded from the act of governance, only that the institution of government shall never dictate to religion.
There is a difference – governance is the act; government is the mechanism. One is intellectual, the other institutional – big difference.
I believe I share this vision with the Founders and that the enshrinement of that vision is the specific reason for the Establishment Clause, the First Amendment to the Constitution, that states:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.â€
It is clear to me that the Founding Fathers saw that God was the ultimate authority and guide and that government was to be utilized solely in the province of men, made clear by these words from the Declaration of Independence:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.â€
Society has perverted the meaning of secular to mean the exclusion of God and the elevation of man to His role. In my interrogation of this paradigm, the questions that I ask myself are these:
- If one accepts a secular view, does that mean that one must completely reject God?
- If one rejects God, how can one believe in the concept of eternity?
- If one cannot believe in eternity, can one believe that there is meaning beyond the limited span of a human life?
- If one believes that there is no meaning beyond the end of a human life, how can they understand the universal and eternal concepts of liberty and freedom?
There is a document that predates our Constitution and is largely forgotten as an article of our founding, but it is significant nonetheless. It is called the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. Formally known as An Ordinance for the Government of the Territory of the United States, North-West of the River Ohio, it was passed on July 13, 1787, under the authority of the precursor to the Constitution, the Articles of Confederation, by the Congress of the Confederation of the United States. The primary effect of the ordinance was the creation of the Northwest Territory as the first organized territory of the United States out of the region south of the Great Lakes, north and west of the Ohio River, and east of the Mississippi River.
On August 7, 1789, the newly created U.S. Congress affirmed the Ordinance with only slight modifications. The Ordinance purported to be not merely legislation that could later be amended by Congress, but rather "the following articles shall be considered as Articles of compact between the original States and the people and states in the said territory, and forever remain unalterable, unless by common consent….â€, in effect making the Northwest Ordinance part of the Constitution.
An important aspect of that last statement is that the Northwest Ordinance cemented the concept of Natural Rights into American law, foreshadowing the Bill of Rights. Many of the concepts and guarantees of the Ordinance of 1787 were incorporated in the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Various legal and property rights were enshrined, religious tolerance was proclaimed, and it was enunciated that since "Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.†The right of habeas corpus was written into the charter, as was freedom of religious worship and bans on excessive fines and cruel and unusual punishment. Trial by jury and a ban on ex post facto laws were also rights granted.
This statement effectively solidifies religion as part of the educational curriculum and demands that government encourage it, not ban it. There is no hint of secular humanism in this statement:
"Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.â€
There is significance in that this statement equates religion and morality with knowledge and, in what to me seems especially important, notes that religion and morality are two thirds of what is necessary for "good governmentâ€. They clearly saw worldly knowledge as being incomplete without God (religion and morality flowing directly from Him).
It seems to me that if life can be construed to have no meaning or worth, then liberty also has no meaning or worth. A secular humanist view has a very selfish and self-righteous perspective that presupposes that there is only what we can accumulate during our limited lives and there is nothing that we should leave behind for those who come after us.
I cannot reconcile the idea that a person can understand and believe in the concepts of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness without a belief in God. Secular humanism is a mechanism for the destruction of the American Republic and by extension, freedom and liberty.
God was necessary for the creation of the United States and is still necessary for its survival. A belief in the eternal life promised by God is necessary for the survival of liberty and people who love it.
Belief in God is necessary for liberty to exist.
America was founded on the principles of the Enlightenment philosophers, most of whom (with some exceptions like David Hume) were Christian or near enough.
But the modern world is not built on the Enlightenment but rather on the French Philosophes, most of whom were anti-religion and even atheistic.
In The Social Contract Jean Jacques Rousseau argued the Collective Will was the basis of all society. This was a break from Enlightenment thinking which argued that the individual was paramount and HE was subject to Natural Law aka the Law of God. Rousseau thought the sole determinant should be a democratic consensus. There are no boundaries to law because all law is based on what the Collective wants.
In this way Rousseau is the father of socialism.
And to achieve this he argued for the removal of religion and the church as forces in society. How to do that? Replace it with a new god, a new religion, and a new church. The new god would be the Collective Will, the new religion would be socialism, and the new church would be the government.
And since this all stems from inside a nation, the People become god and thus was born Fascism. Socialism and Fascism are the same thing. Communism was an offshoot of socialism that strove to remove the national identity, that is all.
But you see the root of this, the only way this scheme could possibly work, was to remove God, remove any organized religion, and eventually any religion at all. The loyalty of the individual had to be to the State and the People as a collective. There is no room for individual liberty in this.
So the endless war on God and His Church has been waged since the beginning of the 19th century and is now bearing fruit (rotten fruit) even in the U.S.
Is it any wonder that it first bore fruit in Europe, where the Europeans adopted Fascism and Communism first? Is it any surprise most of Europe has little to no faith, and at the same time they have become a collection of Epicureans, ever seeking their own pleasure and being unable to even defend themselves?
Is it any surprise America is in increasing turnoil as our faith decreases?
Belief in individual rights must come from belief in a higher power who imposes these rights. Our Founding Fathers argued there is a natural law that determines rights (and responsibilities) and they said the experiment in republicanism they were conducting could only work with a moral, God-loving people; the people had to control their own lusts and behaviors based on Natural Law or a despotic state would become necessary to maintain order. We are reaching the point of that despotic state now, and they are maintaining order by increasingly draconian meathods; just ask anyone still in prison over the Jan. 6 self-guided Capitol tour.
Religion teaches us to do what is right because it is right, and to exhort others to do likewise. Remove that and you wind up with a society governed by it's own lusts. Inevitably you have either chaos or the most horrible totalitarianism. Conservatives belief in self-government and restraint. Liberals believe in "letting it all hang out" as the definition of freedom and putting Law in place to restrain the more destructive aspects of human desires run amok.
It also explains why our politics is so nasty these days. Liberals understand only that power is a real entity and the only way they can ever hope to have any meaning in their lives is by having the power to force fundamental change on others. With no God, no Heaven, no promise of future justice, they MUST have it here and now or never. And thus anyone who opposes them must be crushed like a bug, as they are evil, opposing the good they wish to accomplish. We Conservatives have faith that God will make it right in the end, and that our lives have meaning even if we don't see a lot of headway.
The Left is therefore energized in a way that the Right can never be. Their time is short and they know it.
But they pose a terrible danger to everyone, good and bad, conservative and liberal, everyone. We need to revive our religious faith if for no other reason than to energize our side. We are fighting for reality, for the idea that there is something more than just the Collective Will and someone's personal beliefs. The subjectivism that is giving us such crazy ideas as transgenderism stems from the rejection of Natural Law. Then, if Man is god via the Collective Will, we can just wish away reality.
If we are ever to stop thatt we must resotre Faith, true Faith. Or the Muslims will restore it for us against our will.
The future belongs to either the atheistic Left or the Muslims if we continue down this path.
Mr. Smith replies:
One wonders if the next revolution will be like 1776 or 1789.
In Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s writings about the social contract, he writes that:
"These clauses, properly understood, may be reduced to one — the total alienation of each associate, together with all his rights, to the whole community; for, in the first place, as each gives himself absolutely, the conditions are the same for all; and, this being so, no one has any interest in making them burdensome to others.â€
While Rousseau can rightly be seen as advocating a form of collectivism, he perhaps unintentionally
But conditions can never be made equal for all. Human perception will not allow it. The class envy being shopped by this administration with their demonization of successful people by the implication that they are somehow not pulling their weight for society – that they are in violation of the social compact – is a prime example.
In John Locke’s 1689 Second Treatise of Government he wrote that individuals in a state of nature would be bound morally, by "The Law of Nature, not to harm each other in their lives or possession, but he also recognized that without government to defend them against those seeking to injure or enslave them, people would have no security in their rights and would live in fear. It seems plausible that movements like the Tea Party were in response to the fear that the current definition of the social contract strips the individual of his rights.
There is some legitimacy in the view that the government is not interested in equality of rights but the abrogation of the rights of some in preference to others.
Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at
08:29 AM
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