Venomous Column Full of Philosophical Holes...any ideas?

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edward_george

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Hello all

I was shown this today at school.

roanoke.com/editorials/commentary%5C24225.html

Should you not want to read all of it, it is a relativistic, anti-religious slap in the face, and I’m going to write a good refutation of it.

Please let me know if you have any ideas here.

-ACEGC
 
Just a few things that stick out to me:
  1. Government not founded on religion. Well, God is mentioned a whole heck of a lot indicating their belief of His existence and He is mentioned as an active partaker in the life of the nation. (eg. “In God we trust” on the $ bill, We investing all we have in God.) Furthermore, by ostracizing children who pray to the Christian God in school, or a lawyer or judge who bases their decision/argument on biblical foundations, we are not holding to the freedom of religion because Christians (esp. Catholics) are being persecuted. Propaganda is anti-Catholic and severely skews one’s understanding of the Truth (Jesus Christ).
2."It is the narrow beliefs and viewpoints it advances that are the real culprits. "
–>If one does not hold strongly to one’s beliefs then one’s belief is whimpy! Also, tolerance is to “agree to disagree” not to accept everyone’s ideas as right (ie. not wrong).
  1. “A vote for them is a vote for “moral values,” whatever they are.”
    → I’m not sure how you would tie this into your paper but this explicitly states why we need a moral authority! Relativism is the plague of society! (see Pope Benedict’s quote on relativism on Zenit.com)
  2. "On the positive side, of course, you get to leave God in the pledge; homosexuals can be relegated to second-class citizenship; stem-cell research is restricted; money for AIDS treatment is withheld from countries that promote the use of condoms; a pre-emptive war is launched that has only promoted more terrorism. "
    This little spat clearly shows that his article is anything but objective. It is aflame with personal bias’. Furthermore, he never defines what he understands “God” to mean. Thus, does he know the essence of what he is attacking or is he merely attacking the manifestations (practices by fallen individuals) which have rubbed him the wrong way. Let’s be honest there are A LOT of people who call themselves Catholic. ehem!
  3. Totally typical argument for compartmentalization of life. I hightly recommend (if you need a source) The Idea of a University by John Henry Newman (Venerable not St.). He speaks of how compartmentalizing life is unnatural b/c everything overlaps and affects e/t else.
Hope this helps and God Bless you! What an awesome opportunity to stretch you evangelical muscles! 😃 👍
 
Thanks for your reply. I will most certainly check out the Holy Father’s words on this–I know he made mention of the problem of relativism in one of the early speeches of his Papacy.

I think that the best way to refute what this man is saying is to turn it around…he’s got everything backwards from how it really is, in my view. I can’t believe that a newspaper in good old conservative Virginia would print something like that, but you wouldn’t believe the lies that come out of the Roanoke Times…

Thank you again, and God Bless You.

-ACEGC
 
It is impossible to have Democracy (or any just system of governance) without God. If the Declaration of Independence is wrong, that we are not endowed by the Creator with inalienable rights, then all social order devolves into struggle for power. This is what Nietzsche called the Will to Power. (Nietsche’s philosophy formed the framework for National Socialism in Germany. Compare that to the philosophy of the Founding Fathers.) Power becomes the ultimate end for which humans exist.
Nietzsche:
My idea is that every specific body strives to become master over all space and to extend its force (its will to power) and to thrust back all that resists its extension. But it continually encounters similar efforts on the part of other bodies and ends by coming to an arrangement (“union”) with those of them that are sufficiently related to it: thus they then conspire together for power. And the process goes on–
Click to expand...
Or as Jean-Paul Satre contended, we are born into the world without essence, and through the exercise of will, we make it for ourself. Thus, again, the exercise of will becomes the ultimate end for which humans exist.
Satre:
Existence precedes and rules over existence
Click to expand...
(Satre wrote that in a book entitled *Being and Nothingness. *By the way, the idea that essence precedes existence denies the philosophy of St Thomas Aquinas. St Thomas explains in On Being and Essence that essence is the potential for existence. Notice the similarity in the titles. It would seem to me that Satre constructed this philosophy around the denial of St Thomas, though I really don’t know.)

Might makes right without God. Without God guaranteeing us that by our very nature we have rights, then the State becomes the source of rights which it can alienate from us at its own whim. If however, God is the author of our rights, no human authority has the right to subject our rights to its dominion.

As the Declaration states, governments are instituted among men to protect these rights which are given by the Creator. If we exile God from Democracy, we find that Government as the giver of all rights may equally become the usurper of rights.
 
First I would want to check the accuracy of some of those quotes, especially the one from Lincoln, which doesn’t sound right. In some anti-Catholic material, Lincoln quotes sounding a lot like that one have been entirely fabricated.

Second, while it is true the the United States was not founded on Christianity, it was founded on a view of human rights as being derived from our Creator, and not the state.

If memory serves, the Declaration of Independence starts like this:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident–that all men are created equal; and are endowed *by their Creator * with certain unalienable rights. . . "

The view was that our basic rights come from our Creator and are given to each individual. Individuals them form the government and as a group, grant certain legal powers to the state, not the other way around. (Most states resulting from the “Enlightenment” perceived rights as coming from the State, which then granted certain of them to individuals–just the reverse of the United States founders’ idea.)

The Founders determined not to have a State religion, but they relied on the fact that citizens were generally religious (yes, mostly Christian) and thus, had a true motive for obeying lawful authority. They did not believe that democracy could survive in an irreligious society. And they may be right.
 
I wouldn’t vouch for some of the quotes, but the man does have a point. Our Country was founded on the idea that we are all equal before our creator, God, and that our rights and freedom as a people flow from that relationship. That being said the people of the United States were to have freedom of Religion. No one was to use the state to impose a system of belief on anyone else. It was very fortunate that our framers of the constitution and the laws that followed were pretty much in agreement as to what was right or wrong based on a long history of judeochristian ethics/morality held by almost every one no matter their particular faith. Since that time as a Nation we have come to place license over freedom and those who espouse license do not want to return to the responsibility we owe to each other under the code of freedom. Hence there are those who want to keep any sense of responsibility under our creator out of politics, that responsibility being variously defined depending on ones particular stance with regard to that creator. So it makes a real difference whether one is a Catholic, Jew, a variety of Protestant, an Atheist, Muslim, Shintoist, Hindu etc. Each one defines rectitude differently. So do you want your goverment to legislate, say a protestant view point on contraception, for you as a catholic? Both Christaian religions you know. The forefathers were very astute when they ruled out an establishment of any particular religion or its views. They had seen and experienced its effects in the European nations from which they were sprung. As indidviduals many of us do not believe in relativism, but as a collection of diverse people and cultures we have to espouse a national relativism and sometimes compromise when we cannot force things to be our way. Laws are only good and effective when the vast majority accept and follow them otherwise a bad law breeds disrespect for all law.
 
It is true that the Constitution prohibited Congress from establishing any particular religion. Curiously, it did not prevent the various states from having an established religion, and I believe that some of them did have an established religion at the time. Extending the congessional prohibition against the establishment of a religion to the states, was to come later.

In practice the country does have an established religion of one sort or another, even though unstated.

For a long time, the ‘established’ religion was protestantism. Even the public schools were basically protestant schools, which forced the Catholics to start their own.

As long as most citizens pretty much agree on the basics of right and wrong, having such an unstated national religion was no big problem. The founders were never forced to deal with a country in which a majority or very large minority of citizens espoused agnosticism, atheism, or secularism.

Today, in practice, secularism has become the ‘establishment’ religion. It is practiced in the public schools and generally enforced in all public venues. It has its own beliefs, many of which are contrary to the previously quasi-established religion of Christianity.

So in effect we have two large religious systems–Christianity and Secularism, whose tenets appear to be incompatible, fighting for dominance in the public culture.

Christianity had been largely dominant throught U.S. history, which secularists view as the bad old days. Secularism now appears to be dominant, which Christians view as the bad new days. Can there be a compromise?
 
Thank you all for your (name removed by moderator)ut. I will most certainly use these comments when writing this man.

-ACEGC
 
Why respond to this jerk?

He’s clearly a supercilious type who wants to pull your chain simply for the fun of it. People like that are better ignored – they’ll get sulky and go away.
 
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