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Provided below are
articles that freethinkers should find quite
informative. Readers may scroll down to a desired
article or click on one of the titles listed below.
One Nation, Under Secularism
by Susan Jacoby
OUR SECRET U.S. - ISLAMIC FUNDAMENTALISTS
SHARE A FEAR
by Don E. Post
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One Nation, Under Secularism
by Susan Jacoby
In Campaign 2004, secularism has become a dirty word. Democrats, particularly Howard Dean, are being warned that they do not have a chance of winning the presidential election unless they adopt a posture of religious "me-tooism" in an effort to convince voters that their politics are grounded in values just as sacred as those proclaimed by President Bush.
On one level, the impulse to capitalize on the religiosity of Americans can be seen as transparently, and at times comically, opportunistic. Late last year, Ed Kilgore, policy director of the Democratic Leadership Council, earnestly advised his party's candidates to invoke "God's green earth" in supporting stronger environmental laws. Mr. Dean, the candidate stuck with the label (or libel) of being the most secularist Democratic aspirant, seems to be heeding the advice to get religion. He recently informed an Iowa audience that he prays daily, and in New Hampshire last week, he demonstrated his ecumenism by using the Muslim _expression "inshallah," which means God willing.
On a deeper level, the notion that elected officials should employ a religious rationale for policy decisions is rooted in the misconception, promulgated by the Christian right, that the American government was founded on divine authority rather than human reason. When I lecture on college campuses, students frequently express surprise at being told that the framers of the Constitution deliberately omitted any mention of God in order to assign supreme governmental power to "We the People."
Dismissing this inconvenient fact, some on the religious right have suggested that divine omnipotence was considered a given in the 1780's that the framers had no need to acknowledge God in the Constitution because his dominion was as self-evident as the rising and setting of the sun. Yet isn't it absurd to suppose that men as precise in their use of language as Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison would absentmindedly have failed to insert God into the nation's founding document? In fact, they represented a majority of citizens who wished not only to free religion from government interference but government from religious interference.
This deep sentiment was expressed in letters to newspapers during the debate over ratification of the Constitution. One Massachusetts correspondent, signing himself "Elihu," summed up the secular case by praising the authors of the Constitution as men who "come to us in the plain language of common sense, and propose to our understanding a system of government, as the invention of mere human wisdom; no deity comes down to dictate it, nor even a God in a dream to propose any part of it."
The 18th-century public's understanding of the Constitution as a secular document can perhaps best be gauged by the reaction of religious conservatives at the time. For example, the Rev. John M. Mason, a fire-breathing New York City minister, denounced the absence of God in the preamble as "an omission which no pretext whatever can palliate." He warned that "we will have every reason to tremble, lest the governor of the universe, who will not be treated with indignity by a people more than individuals, overturn from its foundations the fabric we have been rearing and crush us to atoms in the wreck." But unlike many conservatives today, Mason acknowledged even as he deplored the Constitution's uncompromising secularism.
Americans tend to minimize not only the secular convictions of the founders, but also the secularist contribution to later social reform movements. One of the most common misconceptions is that organized religion deserves nearly all of the credit for 19th-century abolitionism and the 20th-century civil rights movement. While religion certainly played a role in both, many people fail to distinguish between personal faith and religious institutions.
Abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison, editor of The Liberator, and the Quaker Lucretia Mott, also a women's rights crusader, denounced the many mainstream Northern religious leaders who, in the 1830's and 40's, refused to condemn slavery.
In return, Garrison and Mott were castigated as infidels and sometimes as atheists a common tactic used by those who do not recognize any form of faith but their own. Garrison, strongly influenced by his freethinking predecessor Thomas Paine, observed that one need only be a decent human being not a believer in the Bible or any creed to discern the evil of slavery.
During the 20th-century civil rights struggle, the movement's strongest moral leaders emerged from Southern black churches. But the moral message of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. obviously ran counter to the religious rationales for segregation preached in many white churches in the south.
In addition, Dr. King welcomed the help of nonreligious allies like Stanley Levison, his friend and lawyer, and the outspoken labor leader A. Philip Randolph. Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, murdered in Mississippi in the summer of 1964, were nonobservant Jews who died not in the name of religion but because of their secular humanist commitment to racial justice.
Many politicians today, including President Bush, use the civil rights leadership of African-American ministers as an argument in favor of "faith-based" government financing. But those ministers were free to pursue their moral vision within American society precisely because they were independent of both government money and government control. Government officials, by contrast, have a very different constitutionally mandated obligation to devise public policies based not on religious interests but on a secular concept of public good.
When President Lyndon B. Johnson proposed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and declared, in his memorable Texas twang, "We shall overcome," he was articulating a moral position that could and did command the respect of citizens of any or no religion.
That is real leadership. Not a scintilla of bravery is required for a candidate, whether Democratic or Republican, to take refuge in religion. But it would take genuine courage to stand up and tell voters that elected officials cannot and should not depend on divine instructions to reconcile the competing interests and passions of human beings.
Abraham Lincoln, whose spiritual beliefs were so elusive that both atheists and the devoutly religious have tried to claim him as their own, spoke eloquently on this point during his long period of deliberation before issuing the Emancipation Proclamation. "I am approached with the most opposite opinions and advice, and that by religious men, who are equally certain that they represent the divine will," he told a group of ministers in September 1862. "I hope it will not be irreverent for me to say that if it is probable that God would reveal his will to others, on a point so connected with my duty, it might be supposed that he would reveal it directly to me. . . . These are not, however, the days of miracles. . . I must study the plain, physical facts of the case, ascertain what is possible, and learn what appears to be wise and right."
Today, many voters, of many religious beliefs, might well be receptive to a candidate who forthrightly declares that his vision of social justice will be determined by the "plain, physical facts of the case" on humanity's green and fragile earth. But that would take an inspirational leader who glories in the nation's secular heritage and is not afraid to say so.
Susan Jacoby is director of the Center for Inquiry-Metro New
York and
the author of "Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism."
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OUR SECRET U.S. - ISLAMIC FUNDAMENTALISTS
SHARE A FEAR
by Don E. Post
The war in Iraq was winding down as I stood in the checkout line at the supermarket. The elderly lady behind me picked a morning newspaper out of a nearby rack and scanned the headlines touting a suicide bomber killing of several U.S. soldiers in Iraq. She forlornly cried, "Why does the world hate us so much?" I turned in time to see the elderly gentlemen behind her shrug his shoulders as a sign of bewilderment. Several others overheard the lady's anguish but said nothing.
The truth is, the large majority of non-Americans don't hate us. It may come as a shock to our collective egos, but the rest of the human race does not sit around wringing their hands over anything American. They're too busy worrying about their own families and trying to make a living. In the rare times they are confronted by America, they will opt for their own culture. Why should that surprise us? Nationalism and pride in one's own culture are common. They may think us weird or crazy, but they don't hate us.
Obviously, there are people out there who hate us with such intensity that they are willing to die to kill as many of us as possible. We've labeled these people as terrorists. Unfortunately, the number of terrorists may be growing. Although there are a number of nationalistic liberation organizations, the terrorists threatening U.S. and Western security are driven by Islamic religious impulses. In fact, we would do well to understand the danger inherent in all religious expressions.
Nothing stirs human emotions like beliefs associated with supernatural beings. Parents have even killed their children for religious beliefs (several cases were recently reported). Many preliterate people sacrificially killed their children on an altar to their gods and the same religious views justified the slaughter of their neighbors. Lest my Christian colleagues feel a sense of superiority, we should remember that we have historically killed non-Christians and, incredibly, one another in the name of Jesus Christ. All religious systems justify the killing of others in the name of their deity.
The historical U.S. tilt toward Israel is a strong element in driving Islam's terrorism. But even if we change that imbalance, Islamic fundamentalists will continue acts of terrorism. And hatred will continue to beat in the hearts of Islamic fundamentalists even if al-Qaida is eliminated. This is because Islamic fundamentalism's hatred is driven by a deep fear of modernity. Western modernity, with its scientific world view, stresses secularism and the rights of individuals to choose their own values and life style. This is believed to undermine Islamic authority. It does.
Americans should be able to understand this view. We have a number of Christian fundamentalists fighting modernity. This is our nation's "dirty little secret" that we loathe to acknowledge and confront. Look at the evidence:
• The bombing of abortion clinics is an act of terrorism. Supposedly, "these are evil places operated by evil people and need to be eliminated for the sake of creating a godly society. This is the same rationale used by Islamic terrorists.
• Christian fundamentalists work to ban books and magazines as a means of "protecting people from evil ideas. Islamic fundamentalists do the same.
• Christian fundamentalists also fear science, since it refutes biblical literalism and undermines the church's moral authority. Christian fundamentalists correctly view scientific evolution as undermining the authority of the Bible.
The modernist genie is out of the bottle. It permeates and drives Western civilization. It liberates the individual and questions historic, taken-for-granted world views, replacing them with what most Westerners consider to be more accurate and useful views.
It's unfortunate that religious fundamentalists, of whatever brand, seem unwilling to adapt to it. No matter how many Saddam Husseins we displace, religious fundamentalism, wherever found and however disguised, is the real breeding ground for terrorism.
Don E. Post is the author of "Beautifying the Ugly American."
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