THE LITTLE ENGINE WHO SAID “I THINK I KANT, I THINK, I KANT…”
Sunday, April 12th, 2009(This post comes to us from our great friend and Scissorhead Jimmy Dean’s Fucked-up Cousin Clyde. JD’s etc. has been a long time supporter of the Blog Against Theocracy and always contributes a thought-provoking and creative post. He did it again for us in 2009! Rgds, T.G.)
Who rules in religion?
The God or Gods do.
God is The ruler. And the people are subservient to God’s laws.
Most religions follow this template. Granted, spiritualism has as many manifestations as possibly there are devotees, so there is not only one pattern which describes all, but… most organized religions follow this basic one of God the Ruling Force Of The Universe, God The Superior, Man Inferior (this is not a sexual position, unless you count the Missionary One, then . . . maybe, but probably only in the context of a patriarchy), God The All Powerful, etc.
God, as we understand the philosophical entity, may exist in either a state of formlessness—-an omnipresent Spirit, at once the eternal background matrix for all arising manifestations in the material world and equally distinct from those manifestations much as the sky is only a canvas (green screen, modern parlance) for the movie of the clouds, or as the existent manifestations themselves —-inseparably creation itself, in every form imaginable.
God as the ruler is either then a remote lawgiver, one beautifully likened in 16th Century-think to the clockmaker who has built the clock and who winds it but who is also busy with other projects somewhere else in the shop, or the craftsman and the clock and the shop and the winding all in a package.
There is a wee problem here.
IF God is remotely a creator, then the physical laws are ones pertinent to the creation. Indeed, this has been the explorational busy work of the physicists and chemists and mathematicians as long as we know such thinkers to have existed. The discovery of these laws and the refinement of the search to the least minutiae goes on at this moment. These boundary-defining statutes establish what can and cannot occur. Since they apply to the physical material realm they lend themselves to testing and proofs. Bit by bit, these laws are being revealed to man.
But IF God is the creation itself, everything changes. It is no longer simply a discovery of the laws by which creation manifests, but the creation itself revealing itself to itself, God singing “Getting To Know Me.”
The wee problem is this:
Laws created by politicians are not laws governing the material workings of the cosmos. (I will acknowledge that the State policeman with the radar gun who is waving at me as I sail past him at 75 in a 55 zone does have a beatific appearance . . . but maybe it is only oxygen deprivation since I stopped breathing when I saw him too late).
They are not laws governing physics, but people’s actions. And they are not God’s laws, but laws of people, issued by people, for people. God doesn’t make these laws anymore than people make the laws of electromagnetism.
But this is not clear to everyone.
Let me say it again: people make the laws governing people, and God makes the laws governing the physical universe.
Let me flip this one more time so it is painfully clear how wrong it is when Believers become (rulers) legislators and confuse who and what they are:
- GOD makes the laws governing people,
and PEOPLE make the laws governing the physical universe. - GOD says who can vote,
and PEOPLE say what gravity ought to be. - GOD says what tariffs there should be on foreign steel,
and PEOPLE say what the binding force between water molecules should be. - GOD says who can marry,
and PEOPLE say what ultraviolet radiation should be. - GOD says how much the states can tax the use of tobacco,
and PEOPLE say how galaxies rotate about an axis. - GOD says what boundaries exist between adjoining nations,
and People allow a plant to grow from a seed. - GOD says what the speed limit in rural Ohio should be,
and PEOPLE say how fast or how slow universe expansion should be.
When God and people become used interchangeably, it’s a theocracy, or rule by GOD/PEOPLE, and the limits separating religion and government no longer exist.
No longer is it clear what laws are laws affecting the physical workings of the universe, and what laws are laws made by people affecting other people.
No longer clear is it what belief is, and what knowledge is.
The boundaries between science and dogma become hazy and uncertain.
No one knows what’s real, and what isn’t. And the rulers can justify anything they do, with the claim they have the divine right.
Rulers love this.
hildren seem to be a lot in the news lately, and MPS is firmly of the belief that children should be seen and not heard from until they are old enough to make a decent martini. However, we do believe that children should be wanted. 
n sex education, we did learn about the sperm and the egg, and how babies are made (though it took a few years before we learned about Tab A and Slot B). We saw nifty black and white movies showing the moment of conception, and oddly there was no one from the GOP-Christian Right with a voter registration card.
ere’s another thing we are for: intelligence, but not intelligent design. The Texas Board of Education earlier this year proposed a new science curriculum that is designed to challenge the guiding principle of evolution. The proposed curriculum would prompt teachers to raise doubts that all life on Earth is descended from common ancestry.
I cannot recall how many people I’ve spoken with, either via blogs or in-person, who reacted with the word “But nobody wants a theocracy in America” whenever I bring the subject up. And indeed, until recently, there wasn’t really a specific push to alter our Constitution in any formative way, and the only reason the American public has come to recognize that there are some minority movements in that direction is because of the thankfully-failed presidential campaign of Mike Huckabee. Thanks to his “charming” southern style and disarming smile, however, even given the suddenness of the our coming to understand that conservative fundamentalists DO want to turn this nation into a Christian Nation, many still don’t realize the true threat that impetus represents. And since nobody in that campaign ever used the term “theocracy”, these very same people who were “a bit put off” by Huckabee’s stance on altering the Constitution still don’t believe that anyone is creating, or has ever made any attempt to create, a theocratic state.
When the Buddha was destroyed in Bamyan by the Taliban back in 2001, everyone here in America seemed taken aback. But at least on the part of some of us, that incredulity was largely feigned. After all, we already live in a society which unapologetically and unabashedly forces galleries and museums not to display works of art that are uncomplimentary to the Christian Deity and Its Holy Progeny. We already live in a society which disallows admittance to certain schools to those who are openly homosexual, refuses military service to the same and withholds benefits to service men and women whose homosexuality becomes known. We already live in a society where religious-sponsored abstinence-only education is taught in public schools, where religious-sponsored “alternatives” to centuries-established science are required to be taught alongside the scientific curriculum, and where educators must mark as correct responses from students whose religious doctrine define the Universe as a 6,000-year-old mechanism created and overseen by the Christian Deity. We already live in a society in which the government sets up programs exclusively available to religious organizations, and subjectively requires candidates for political office to publicly hold at least some form of religious belief that is not Muslim, Wiccan, Satanist, or Pagan.
What the Taliban did to Buddha in March of 2001 in one brazen act is no different than what conservative fundamentalists in America do each day to our nation as a whole through a measured, implacable series of legislation. The reason why we blog against these acts is to make people more aware that they even exist. Since ours is a society largely defined by convenience, attempting to recognize the patterns left behind by the religious fundamentalists takes work, and work is awful inconvenient. Even those who recognize these issues largely feel that anything they could do about them would be too limited, too small of a scale, to have any impact. That’s not true.
I believe it is relatively clear that our European allies, especially Great Britain, live in more secular societies than we do here in America. Especially where Great Britain is concerned, there’s a significant amount of irony involved in such progressivism: our founding families fled such places because of religious oppression at great personal risk, and a couple of hundred years later elements of our own government desire a steadfast adherence to religious edicts, and already have systems in place by which non-Christian business and organizations are disallowed participation in certain government-sanctioned areas of business. It’s ironic, and of course from my perspective, it’s considerably depressing. I believe the story of the American Revolution—pretty much all the stories of the American Revolution, in fact—is a grand tale of personal commitment, courage in the face of imminent threat, and indeed, the fundamental precepts of honor, perseverance, and integrity.
I once considered running for a local political office. After two days of discussions with local Party officials, I was finally contacted by the State Democratic Party and told in no uncertain terms that they would not support me as long as I refused to attend church. In other words, unless I was willing to violate my sense of self-integrity, I wasn’t a solid enough candidate in their minds to support. I lacked the personal funds (and the time, to be honest), to aggressively compete against the individual who sponsored the anti-abortion legislation that was so controversial on the national circuit (South Dakota’s Proposition 6), and even though the state party abhorred both the policy and the man, they simply weren’t willing to fight him from the opposite religious extreme. And as an already-established dynamic member of my community, heaven forbid that I would have brought some logic, critical thinking, and personal insight to the matter (the personal insight being that I was adopted and had a child placed for adoption and was in contact with my daughter from a previous relationship, whom i didn’t get to raise).
If candidates approached this issue logically, I don’t think they’d stoop to the church-hosted photo-ops. To the critical-thinking crowd (many of whom, in certain terms, actually exist in the religious crowd, too), the demonstration of a limited world-view, a relatively intolerant mindset, and a dependency on rote superstition should be quite unattractive. As well, the explicit deference to a minority (and active, participating Christians ARE a minority in this country) should be no more acceptable to the logical mind than the undue influence by any other political lobby. And the critical-thinking crowd shouldn’t be afraid to ask pointed questions to their candidates. Why should we allow such candidates to lead us? Why must we invest our own forms of faith in the good behavior and ethical conduct of those who show, time and time again, the willingness to defer to delusional thinking? Should we ever have to define the “best” candidate in terms of the admirable qualities that they lack? In many ways, those are unfortunately rhetorical questions. The status quo, after all, is a difficult thing to circumvent, let alone redefine. But I fear that if we do not manage to do some day, that even under progressive or liberal control, we will find ourselves living in a Christian State, rife with intolerance and dedicated on converting the world. And when that day comes, we will have no one to blame but ourselves.
