Secularism Lost...

polifrog



If we were a secularist nation 80 years ago, what are we today after pushing religion from our public places?  Whatever it is that we have become we are no longer a secular nation for if we were, religion would not be publicly rejected, but rather respected while establishing none.  No, we are no longer an all inclusive secular nation; we have become a nation that rejects religion.  We are an atheocratic state.


Mark  Steyn:

According to that spurious bon mot of Chesterton's, when men cease to believe in God, they do not believe in nothing; they believe in anything. But, in practice, the anything most of the West now believes in is government. As Tocqueville saw it, what prevents the "state popular" from declining into a "state despotic" is the strength of the intermediary institutions between the sovereign and the individual. But in the course of the 20th century, the intermediary institutions, the independent pillars of a free society, were gradually chopped away — from church to civic associations to family. Very little now stands between the individual and the sovereign, which is why the latter assumes the right to insert himself into every aspect of daily life, including the provisions a Catholic college president makes for his secretary's IUD.

...

"Atheistic humanism" became inhumanism in the hands of the Nazis and Communists and, in its less malign form in today's European Union, a kind of dehumanism in which a present-tense culture amuses itself to extinction.

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The Obama administration's "freedom to worship" leads to the same soulless destination: a church whose moral teachings must be first subordinated to the caprices of the hyper-regulatory Leviathan, and then, as on the Continent, rendered incompatible with public office, and finally, as in that Southampton homeless shelter, hounded even from private utterance. This is the world the "social justice" bishops have made. What's left are hymns and stained glass, and then, in the emptiness, the mere echo:

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar . . .

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Obama's Radical Effort to Push Religion From the Public Square...

polifrog





On Jan 20, the Obama administration announced that even religious based hospitals, universities and charities will be compelled to pay for health insurance that covers sterilization, contraceptives and abortifacients.

Why?

The answer is short. The Obama administration wishes to displace religious organizations in every and all possible public areas by forcing religious organizations to be faced with the choice of crossing governance, crossing their faith, or bowing out of the areas of our public square that are effected by this decision.

If the religious are to stay true to their faith and stay true to government they will ultimately be forced to retreat from engaging with their own society under this decision.

Although it is not only through hospitals, universities, and charities that religions expose themselves to those who may not be exposed to them, it is one that the statists among us wish to end. Statists understand that the marginalization of religion grows dependency on governance.

What we are witnessing with the introduction of this regulation is our atheocratic state in action. What is atheocracy? If is, of course, the opposite of theocracy. Just as there are theocratic states like Iran, there athocratic states like N. Korea and China.

Unfortunately each type of governance claims its own form of piety as a pretense for non pious rule.

That piety may come in different forms, such as religious piety (theocracy) or duty bound piety (atheocracy). Whereas the former’s power is circumscribed by the religion that empowers those who rule via a religious citizenry, the latter enjoys no such restraint, as duty bound piety is piety toward self.

The truer danger, then, is the atheocratic regime which is bounded by no wrong. History points to this. Pick your theocracy then pick your athocracy and compare the suffering under each. Based on sheer number of dead no theocracy can match the accomplishments of the atheocratic regimes of China, Russia, Nazi Germany, or N. Korea.

Does that make a theocracy desirable? No. But it is preferable to the atheocratic rejection of all religion.

There is a third way.

It is one that requires no false piety, as it is a choice that does not adopt a single religion for empowerment and it is a choice that does not reject all religion leaving only self in the form of duty from which rule is empowered.

That third way, secularism, is the inclusion of all the various religions or the lack thereof as legitimate voices informing a representative democracy.

Our nation originally chose option three, but unfortunately that third way requires a degree of tolerance the intolerant atheists and leftists among us find intolerable and it is they who are slowly forcing us toward the greatest threat to liberty, an atheocracy.





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