Meet the Original Libtards!

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American History, Enlightenment, founding fathers, History, reason, religion

Our friendly Tea Party “Patriots” often tell us that they love the constitution. In fact it takes second place only to that timeless book, the Bible–the one God wrote to tell us how to behave. Probing, (as I am always wont to do), I discover that it’s not only the constitution that is revered, but of course the “founding fathers” who, as you know, among other things, brought us the constitution.

That always amuses me ever so much.

Sadly, it seems common to the PayTREEots not to dig too deeply into the mantras they are taught by Fox and people like pseudo-historian David Barton. If they did dig a bit they would find that their adulation is ironic to say the least. Barton of course would have them believe that the FFs were all deeply religious men and that they basically made the Declaration and Constitution tracts which God hopefully would  approve of wholeheartedly. The truth of course lies quite a ways left of Mr. Barton’s imaginative ramblings.

We all know that many of the founders of our fair republic were anything but religious in their leanings. Jefferson is notable for his refusal to believe in the truth of any of the bible’s miracle stories, actually editing them out of his personal bible. (You can see his bible with all the little cut-outs somewhere, probably at Monticello). The other giant, Franklin might be defined as a deist at best.

This should not be surprising since all the FF were the rich elites of their day, and were well read. And what they read and what inspired them (oh you must remember this from high school) were the likes of Locke, Rousseau and Voltaire. All were “men of the enlightenment”. You could easily add Isaac Newton and Spinoza to the mix as well. They were men who started to see that the world could be explained through normal observation and reasonable deductive conclusion. Some, like Newton, were men of science, who were uncovering the physical laws that governed the universe.

In all cases, they were the heretics of their day as well, rejecting the church’s claims that the bible was the only resource needed to explain the world. Some professed a belief in God, but not in the traditional sense of their day.

The explosion of new thought spread across Europe and Britain, and eventually to America where it inspired Jefferson, Franklin, Madison and others to reject the “god-given” circumstances of both colonialism and monarchy. They were “enlightened” to perceive the world differently and their place within it differently. They could finally conceive of themselves as in control of their own destinies.

They formed a government based on enlightenment principles of freedom, democracy, and most of all reason as the basis for rule. They ushered in the concepts of capitalism, markets, the scientific method, religious tolerance (read tolerance to practice what YOU believed, or be free to believe nothing). It was a movement based on equality and commonality and shared responsibility.

In effect, they were the liberals of their day. They were the heretics to the religious right with all their talk of reason and science. They brought forth a new type of government.

The conservatives of their day? They were Tories.

It thus is so very ironic to think of Tea Party adherents touting their love and admiration for our Founding Fathers, today. In the time of our founding, such people would have been sending their sons to stand with King George III.

But of course Tea People never think that deeply.

I can see why.

It is just too embarrassing.

One Last Word

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atheist, faith, God, reason, science, spiritual experience

A friend told me about a spiritual experience he had.

As a faith-filled person, there should be nothing unusual in that. Yet the context of the story was not what you would expect.

For a variety of rational reasons, there was an initial fear that he was ill. And, more than anything,  he found it amusing. After all, being in a church, one should think spiritual first right?

Most of us don’t talk about these experiences, if and when we have them. I suspect frankly that we have them more than we realize. We just don’t see them as such.

Every moment of awe is a hidden such experience I am convinced. It is the reason why people ask each other “where do you find God’s presence the strongest?”

Most people answer nature, or in the faces of their children, or in quilting, or baking. It doesn’t matter, such things touch us deeply at times, and we lose time, and sometimes we lose a sense of where we are. We are lost in God, or perhaps more preciously God is using us to experience this moment, and our ego consciousness has submerged in that wave of Spirit.

Sometimes it lasts for a brief moment or two, other times it can be significantly longer.

I didn’t ask my friend to describe what happened. I never for a moment doubted the experience, but I know that the telling never equals the experience. That is because words are simply inadequate.

I’ve been reading William James, brother of Henry James, the great author. William had a varied career but ended up in psychology, teaching at Harvard. This is all in the 1890’s. The book, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, was a compilation of his Gifford Lectures, and published in 1902.

James, writing in the time of the awakening of science, speaks of religious belief, and explains how it is not a profitable subject of science, but lays outside it in most respects. In his world, many were arguing that science would replace religion, yet he found in testimony after testimony, experiences such that no science could approach.

Furthermore, James became convinced that no amount of scientific argumentation would ever change the minds of those who had had such experiences. He became convinced, and argued that there were indeed different approaches and different realities:

And why, after all, may not the world be so complex as to consist of many interpenetrating spheres of reality, which we can thus approach in alternation by using different conceptions and assuming different attitudes, just as mathematicians handle the same numerical and spatial facts by geometry, by analytical geometry, by algebra, by calculus, or by quaternions, and each time come out right?

And I realized in reading that that I was through with arguing with those who do not believe. In fact I have stopped that endeavor now for some weeks, but this gave me the final intellectual underpinning to my decision.

For the atheist will always insist that every religious thought must be put under the microscope of  empirical inspection. They will tell me about brain activity and various centers within it that can explain “mystical” occurrences. They will insist that I must convince them that it was truly a “real” experience.

Yet James claims that one who genuinely believes they have experienced a spiritual event, will never be persuaded that they are wrong:

. . .but if you do have them, [a spiritual experience] and have them at all strongly, the probability is that you cannot help regarding them as genuine perceptions of truth, as revelations of a kind of reality which no adverse argument, however unanswerable by you in words, can expel from your belief.

Thus it seems we are discussing a subject that in essence we cannot approach because we deny each other’s tools of discernment. In fact, as my experience on the Internet has shown, there is a refusal to even approach the subject calmly and with a certain decorum if you will. In this, the rabid atheist is much, as I have suggested, like the fundamentalist.

James seems to agree.

“He believes in No-God, and he worships him,” said a colleague of mine of a student who was manifesting a fine atheistic ardor; and the more fervent opponents of Christian doctrine have often enough shown a temper which, psychologically considered, is indistinguishable from religious zeal.

The atheist worships himself, demanding accent to the proposition that humanity is at the pinnacle of all that is; that it is the human brain that is the creator if you will, and that it is human science that is the final and only arbiter of all brought before it for examination. No other standard is acceptable.

In this, they are as rabid and obnoxious as the bible pounder who assaults us with his perfect interpretation of God which we are required to accede to and to have all judged by.

I find James insights and conclusions amazing, given psychology was in it’s infancy at the time. So was much of science truth be told. Yet, he has, it seems, nailed it. We are talking apples and oranges when we seek to engage in the discourse of this type.

Yet, if you accept what is being done in theoretical physics these days, our particular universe may be only one of an infinite variety of “types.” It would seem that reality really is much in the eye of the beholder. At least we can claim with some accuracy, that not a one of us can claim certainty.

If no certainty, then I in my faith and you in your lack of it, stand equally. And we should respect that, and let it go. I say that to those who spend their days in the effort to dissuade others of  their faith, and those who spend their days in the effort to prove the need of faith.

People of faith and people of no faith have but one goal: to live life as best we can as we see it. God, in my world, will determine the rest.