Positive Liberty

Robert P. Kraynak’s Christian Faith and Modern Democracy is another book (there are many) written by a conservative Christian (he’s a Catholic) that debunks the “Christian Nation” thesis.

Dr. Gregg Frazer heavily relies on this work in his Ph.D. thesis. Kraynak’s work is important in illustrating the context which neither the Christian right nor the secular left well understand. Continue Reading »

Let’s hope he gets well. He’s one of the major perpetrators of the “Christian Nation” myth. What would this blog do without him?

I’ve long been an admirer of Richard Dawkins, whose book Unweaving The Rainbow I consider one of my Ten Favorite Books of All Time. I particularly enjoy his refusal to compromise with religion, as Stephen Jay Gould and too many other scientists have done. But it seems that in recent years, Dawkins has become more and more partisan, both in politics and religion, and in ways that are undermining his reputation and his accomplishments. In The Ancestors’ Tale, for example, he goes out of his way to make snide and childish political remarks—not even clever ones, but just things like calling Bush stupid—that make the book a lot less fun to read. And his recent signing of a petition urging the British government to prohibit parents from giving their own children “any regular religious teaching” is simply absurd. Brayton is right to liken such a proposal to the horrific censorship and persecution of totalitarian states.

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See ya’ Saddam. We hardly knew ye.

Robert Wright and Andrew Sullivan talk some fascinating stuff on religion. Their dialogue pretty much illustrates my reasons for why I am not an atheist. Though, I am not, like Sullivan, a Christian. (I accept Sullivan as a Christian because he accepts the Nicene Creed.)

The February issue of Liberty has my article on why Proposition 90 failed in California. You can read it on line now by clicking here.

My working paper, The Wolves and the Sheep of Constitutional Law: A Review Essay on Kermit Roosevelt’s The Myth of Judicial Activism, is now available on SSRN. In it, I discuss the debate over “judicial activism” and why Roosevelt, like Bork and Steven Breyer, fail to grasp the most essential element of the debate: namely, that the American Constitution was designed to protect liberty, not democracy, as a fundamental good.

Update: the article does have several typos and other minor errors…. That’s why it’s a working paper.

Check out this blog by a present day Unitarian Universalist blogger. His blog promises to have a strong historical bent. And that history interests me; the Congregational Church, which started to go Unitarian by the middle of the 18th Century, was the home to many thinkers and preachers who played a vital role in arguing the theoretical case for the Revolution. In fact, the most notable pro-revolutionary preachers — Mayhew, Chauncey, Gay, and West to name a few — were theological unitarians and universalists. They have a rich history indeed.

My exchange with Larry Arnhart has inspired him to write pretty extensively in defense of “fusionism,” arguing that libertarianism and conservatism can be reconciled into a coherent whole. I have to continue to disagree with him, but I want to set out some parameters first.

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After sharing John Adams’ quotation on a thread where many orthodox Christians participate, I got the question: Why the Trinity? What was it about that particular doctrine that so irked Adams and Jefferson? She raised a point to which I think fervent atheists like Richard Dawkins could assent: If one can believe in a God Himself, as these Founders did, what is so much more mysterious or irrational about the Trinity that it should be a deal breaker?

The answer, which I will reveal shortly, reminds me of the scholarly value of Gary North’s ebook, “Conspiracy in Philadelphia.”

Our Founders were influenced by literally hundreds of prominent thinkers who came before them often rattling off a plethora of names at once when explaining their ideas. Given so many citations to past authorities, scholars disagree on the level of importance to attach to each. Most agree on the primacy of Locke’s influence, and disagree over how seriously other figures impacted our Founders. North has convinced me (what I think this book seriously contributes to the scholarly debate) that scholars underappreciate Isaac Newton’s influence.

The Founders did cite him by name and otherwise greatly admired him; but they “lifted” far more from John Locke, Montesquieu, and others. Newton’s influence was mainly in their worldview that he helped to shape. Like them, Newton was a unitarian, not a Christian. Why did he/they reject the Trinity? The Newtonian worldview believed that all Truth — the natural law, scientific truth, moral truth, etc. — could be “discovered” in the same way that mathematical formulas were “discovered.” Hence theirs was a worldview dominated by math, geometry and architecture. One “built,” if you will, nations and governments as one built physical structures. And indeed, their writings are replete with geometric and architectural metaphors; this also explains why Freemasonry with its “Great Architect of the Universe” God appealed to so many of them. Thus, with mathematical proofs like 2+2 = 4 playing such a prominent role in discovering “self-evident” Truths, anything that appeared to violate simple math (like 1+1+1 = 1) was likely to be held suspect or worse.

Joshua Claybourn reproduces the following in his Christmas Meditation:

“The really staggering Christian claim is that Jesus of Nazareth was God made man — that the second person of the Godhead became the ’second man’ (I Cor. 15:47), determining human destiny, the second representative head of the race, and that He took humanity without loss of deity, so that Jesus of Nazareth was as truly and fully divine as He was human. Here are two mysteries for the price of one — the plurality of persons within the unity of God, and the union of Godhead and manhood in the person of Jesus. It is here, in the thing that happened at the first Christmas, that the profoundest and most unfathomable depths of the Christian revelation lie. ‘The Word was made flesh’ (John 1:14); God became man; the divine Son became a Jew; the Almighty appeared on earth as a helpless human baby, unable to do more than lie and stare and wriggle and make noises, needing to be fed and changed and taught to talk like any other child. And there was no illusion or deception in this: the babyhood of the Son of God was a reality. The more you think about it, the more staggering it gets. Nothing in fiction is so fantastic as is this truth of the incarnation.”

– J.I. Packer, “Knowing God”

John Adams reacts to the sentiment:

If I understand the Doctrine, it is, that if God the first second or third or all three together are united with or in a Man, the whole Animal becomes a God and his Mother is the Mother of God.

It grieves me: it shocks me to write in this stile upon a subject the most adorable that any finite Intelligence can contemplate or embrace: but if ever Mankind are to be superior to the Brutes, sacerdotal Impostures must be exposed.

– John Adams to Francis van der Kemp, October 23, 1816. Adams Papers (microfilm), reel 122, Library of Congress. Taken from Hutson, The Founders on Religion, p. 223.

Like Leo Strauss and his followers, Adams apparently thought Plato must have been joking. Bernard Bailyn writes about Adams that “in 1774 had cited Plato as an advocate of equality and self-government but who was so shocked when he finally studied the philosopher that he concluded that the Republic must have been meant as a satire.” The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, pp. 24-25.

And in a marginal note in Joseph Priestly’s The Doctrines of Heathen Philosophy Compared with those of Revelation, Adams writes, “Was there ever a country, in which philosophers, politicians, and theologians believed what they taught to the vulgar?”

Haraszti, Prophets of Progress, 290, quoted in James H. Hutson’s The Founders on Religion, p. 66.

Now that’s positively Straussian.

David Swindle writes to recommend a book, “Them: Adventures with Extremists” and it’s by a British journalist named Jon Ronson.

In the book he tags along with various people labeled extremists — Radical Muslims, Neo-Nazis, wild conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones and David Icke, KKK leaders, etc. — and finds that all of them share a similar view: that there is an elite group running the world, specifically, the Bilderbergers. The last chapter of the book reports on what Ronson found when he visited Bohemian Grove — he literally walked right in. What he discovered is, unfortunately, less interesting than the conspiracy nuts would like to believe. It’s a fun, humorous, quick read.

On a related note, I got two comments, here and here by people who want me to take the claims of Jones and Connor seriously. Sorry, that is something I will not do.

It’s time for me to recycle one of my old posts on the meaning of Christmas. Here it is. Some highlights:

Christmas perfectly exemplifies the larger phenomenon of the unique culture that is the West which has a religious (Jerusalem) and a Secular-Pagan (Athens) origin. Culturally, the West presently is and always has been every bit as much of a Pagan society as it is Christian.

And what makes the West special is this unique combination, this tension between Athens and Jerusalem. The orthodox and the Pagan agree on some matters, vehemently disagree on others, borrow from one another and create separately and together. Indeed, this tension enabled the West to be the greatest creative force there ever was.

Were I to write this passage today, I think I’d use fewer words. I’d describe the West as an evolving conversation between our religious (Judeo-Christian) and secular-pagan (Greco-Roman) roots.

In last year’s post, I jokingly put forth this line: “Merry Christmas fellow Secular Pagans. It’s our freakin’ holiday too.” Sometimes religious conservatives freak out when you point out that secularism and paganism have as much ownership rights over the heritage of the West in general and the United States in particular as Judeo-Christianity. That line led to one religious conservative to describe me as “a militant secular pagan.” I don’t think he understood that the line was a joke, and that I don’t place the term “secular pagan” as part of my personal identity. However, it is an important term for understanding the vital non-Judeo-Christian roots of Western Culture.