Politics Can’t Avoid Religion

There is a recent New Yorker article titled “Of Babies and Beans:  Paul Ryan on Abortion.”  The author, Adam Gopnik, is agitated over something said by Paul Ryan at the recent vice-presidential ‘debate’ (I still can’t bring myself to say that those things are really debates).  Here is what shocked Adam Gopnik:

Paul Ryan did not say, as John Kennedy had said before him, that faith was faith and public service, public service, each to be honored and kept separate from the other. No, he said instead “I don’t see how a person can separate their public life from their private life or from their faith. Our faith informs us in everything we do.” That’s a shocking answer—a mullah’s answer, what those scary Iranian “Ayatollahs” he kept referring to when talking about Iran would say as well. Ryan was rejecting secularism itself, casually insisting, as the Roman Catholic Andrew Sullivan put it, that “the usual necessary distinction between politics and religion, between state and church, cannot and should not exist.”

Pause to note something significant in the sub-quote above from Andrew Sullivan:  the assumption that “politics and religion” is parallel to “state and church.”  State and church are institutions.  Politics and religion are (here at least) concepts.  The mere fact that we see wisdom in separating two institutions does not require that we agree that these two concepts can be separated.  Keep that in mind as we proceed.

Gopnik is especially disturbed with one place Ryan took this:  his opposition to abortion.  As Gopnik went on to say:

Ryan talked facilely of what “science” says in this case. But what real science has to tell us, of course, very different; it says that life has no neat on and off, that while life may in some sense begin at conception, the moment when the formed consciousness that distinguishes human life from bean life arises is a very different question, not reducible to a dogma or a simple claim. A bean isn’t a baby; a baby was once a bean, and between those two truths it is, or ought to be, every woman for herself.

Albert Mohler wrote a response to Gopnik.  I often like what Mohler has to say about such things.  Mohler emphasized Gopnik’s insistence that an early-stage baby is nothing more than a bean, and where such a view inevitably leads us.  But it was interesting that Mohler did not mention what is really a key point is this, and many related, debates.

Gopnik naively assumes that his assumptions and conclusions in this case are not religious.  By ‘religious’ here I obviously don’t necessarily mean ‘Christian’ (or any other religion in that sense).  What I do mean by ‘religious’ is something like this:  necessarily involving assumptions that cannot be directly empirically tested.

Secularists do this constantly, and they should just as frequently be called on it.  Science itself involves this kind of religious assumption.  Such assumptions, and the conclusions to which they lead, are not necessarily extra-rational.  But they are, in an important sense, religious.  The conclusion that there is no God, that there is a God but we can’t be too sure we know much about God, and all sorts of views like this, are religious.  Secularism itself is a religious idea in this important sense.

And very much so also is Gopnik’s idea that “consciousness distinguishes human life.”  This is an utterly religious idea, and Gopnik should know it, but seems oblivious to the obvious here.  When Gopnik brings this idea into his political views, he is guilty of exactly the same thing he condemns in Ryan.

I don’t begrudge Gopnik his religious ideas, nor do I think he can avoid bringing them into this kind of debate.  But he, like many secularists, need to realize that it is not a matter of mixing politics and religion – that is unavoidable.  The only real question is:  which religious ideas will you bring to your politics?

We get bad politics not because we rely on religious ideas to form our political ideas, but because we use the wrong religious ideas to form our political ideas.  Those dreaded ‘mullahs’ do not have horrible governments because they are religious.  They have horrible governments because they have wrong religious ideas.

This conclusion is exactly what a Gopnik-style secularist is desperately seeking to avoid.  But such avoidance is impossible – utterly impossible.  Religious views are everywhere, including every conceivable political position.  Everyone has them; no one can avoid them.  We need to make the Gopniks of the world face up to that.

‘Just Do It’ Faith

Michael S. Horton, professor of systematic theology and apologetics at Westminster Seminary in California, said Christians appear to be creating future "nones" by failing to adequately pass the faith on to successive generations.

"We are about a generation away from a worshiping community that is rather small in terms of those who know what they believe, why they believe, and practice their faith with some real conviction," he said.

[from a Christianity Today article found here]

Kent comments:

In my now significant number of years teaching people the Christian faith, I have to agree with this assessment.  It has been coming for a long time now.  My analysis is that lack of knowing what we believe and why we believe it is a significant contributing cause of the lack of practicing the Christian faith with real conviction.

The article focuses on a recent Pew poll that showed Protestants losing majority status in the U.S.  As the article points out, most of this has come from the “mainline” Protestant denominational churches.  Given my analysis, this is not surprising.  For many years most mainline Protestant churches have been moving in the direction of deemphasizing what they believe and why.  Instead, they have focused on promoting a somewhat distorted version of “doing good” that is often defined by current cultural fads.

So it is no wonder that people eventually tire of doing that kind of so-called ‘good’ – there is no real reason to motivate anyone to do it.  But even among more conservative groups, including the now-popular no-brand ‘community’ style churches, I get the impression that the emphasis has now fallen on the “just do it” approach.  People in our culture generally have no patience with whats and whys – they just want to do it.  We are a culture of people who want to try to play the game without ever understand, or even reading. the rules.  You can sometimes do that to a point, but the game will fall apart in the end.

I am sometimes shocked at the ignorance of the Christian faith I find in those who claim the Christian faith.  Some of these people are very sincere.  Sincerity has some force, but I think that, in the end sincerity alone is dead.  It is no wonder that ‘we’ have been failing to pass our faith on to successive generations:  ‘we’ don’t really understand our faith.  It is very difficult to pass along something you don’t understand.

A Syllabus for the Kingdom of God

I recently received this from a fellow campus minister:

We're kicking off a long a wholesome gander at Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, which is what folks calls Matthew chapters 5-7. Here's my thesis: Matthew 5:1-17 is like Jesus' syllabus for the rest of his teaching. So join us at Starbucks tomorrow (Friday) at noon, and let's figure out the syllabus for the Kingdom of God.

It is not uncommon to find this sort of thing, so we often think nothing of it.  What could be better than studying the Sermon on the Mount?  There is, of course, nothing at all wrong with studying the Sermon on the Mount.  It is, after all, part of the corpus of scripture which is the God-revealed content of that “faith once for all delivered to the saints.”

And yet, I fear that something like this might reflect a fundamental misunderstanding of scripture.  A syllabus should contain the main points of a course of study.  If this is the case, the Sermon on the Mount cannot be a syllabus of the Kingdom of God.  It is important ethical teaching for the Kingdom of God.  But it cannot be a syllabus for the Kingdom of God because it is limited and incomplete.

If the topics found in the Sermon on the Mount were the extent of the gospel, think of how very different the Kingdom of God would be.  The Sermon on the Mount does not mention sacrifice for sin.  It does not mention the Holy Spirit.  It does not mention many things that make the Kingdom of God the very distinctive kingdom that it is.  A kingdom of God limited to the topics introduced in the Sermon on the Mount would be a moralistic kingdom in which redemption went unexplained and even unmentioned.

And that is not the Kingdom of God.  In fact, it sounds a lot like the kingdom of 20th century Liberal Christendom.

I would never claim on my own that the teaching of Jesus found in the gospels is incomplete.  But I don’t have to be all that bold to make the claim, because Jesus said it was so.  Jesus made it very clear that during His very limited time among us, He did not tell us everything He wanted us to know about the Kingdom of God, as He made clear in John 16:12-13. He had much more to say, and He would say it through the Apostles.

If there is a syllabus for the kingdom of God in scripture, it is more likely something like the Book of Romans (though it is perhaps more of a textbook for the kingdom that a syllabus), where the Apostle restates much of what is found in the Sermon on the Mount, but adds some of the very important “much more to say to you” that Jesus promises in John 16.

Perhaps the note I received was just a bit of an attempt at hip marketing for a Bible study.  But if it was meant seriously, it was seriously wrong.

On Capital Gains Taxes and Other Boring Things

Thomas Sowell explains something important that I think many do not understand in “Capital Gains Taxes.”  This is not a review of the article.  It is rather short, and relatively easy to understand.  In it, Sowell explains why lower income tax rates for capital gains is a fair policy.  It is not just a fair policy.  It is a policy that makes us all wealthier.

This is, unfortunately, an example of an idea that is important, but which most people will not take the time to understand.  And in not understanding it, they will often damage their own interests in the candidates for whom they will vote and the policies those candidates will promote.

It is akin to discussions of corporate tax rates, which are relatively very high in the United States.  Because people will not take the time to understand the matter, it becomes easy for the demagogue to cry, “Those rich corporations don’t pay their fair share of taxes!”  There is, of course, much more to the story.  Corporations attempt to make money for shareholders.  When shareholders receive it, they are taxed on it as income also.  So a good case can be made for not taxing corporations at all.  The shareholders will pay the tax when – and if – a profit is made.

There are a lot of things like this that people won’t bother to understand.  We are much like the Ray Barone character of “Everybody Loves Raymond.”  In one episode he has begun to handle the family checkbook and bill-paying.  He screws it up, of course.  When his friend tries to explain how to do it, all Ray gets is the word “accrued” (an in “accrued interest”).  The rest of it bores him, and he refuses to listen or learn.  As a result, his electricity is shut off.  He should have paid more attention.

I was once relaxing with a fine Christian gentleman who had been a hard-core union man before he retired.  As we chatted he launched into the evils of corporations making money.  I asked him, “What does your union pension fund invest in?”  The answer:  “Stocks and bonds.”  There was a pause.  Then he said, somewhat thoughtfully, “I suppose I really want corporations to make money, don’t I?”

And even beyond that, do you realize where we would be if there were no investors in companies?  We would be poor – and that is probably an understatement.  Most of us would not even be here to be poor.  Invested money buys the tools that make all the material things we like possible.  So it makes sense, and is in everyone’s interest, to encourage investment via tax policy.

In a better world, taxes would be so low no one would notice them because government would be so small most people would seldom notice them.  But even in our big-government “taxed enough already” world, let’s not be so stupid as to promote tax policies that will make us all poorer.

Convinced by Mr. Obama’s Website: Now I Can Vote in Good Conscience

It’s almost October and thus time for me to decide for whom I will vote for President this year.  This is always difficult for me.  While I could just forget about it, I would take that as a dereliction of my duty.  The moral standards I profess and attempt to uphold are grounded in the Christian faith as expressed in the historic Christian scripture, the Bible.

Without going into all the details here, those standards require, in the political realm, a maximization of human liberty that is consistent with such liberty for all.  This is what causes difficulty for me:  liberty maximization, even proposals for such, are hard to come by these days.

Also, in my state (actually, commonwealth, in my case) my only significant choices are Democrat or Republican.  I would probably vote for a pro-life Libertarian, were one on the ballot here, but that is not the case this time around.  (Even that can be problematic, because many Libertarians do not recognize liberty for people from the moment they are conceived.  But that’s another story.)

Here is where I was on all this until today:  nothing done or advocated by Barack Obama so far is a move toward greater liberty.  On the other hand, Mitt Romney struck me as a typical ‘middle’ Republican who would probably not move the country off its current anti-liberty status quo.

So today I studied the candidates’ web sites, and I was convinced to vote for one of the two major candidates.  But I was a little surprised how that came about.

I first visited Romney’s website.  I saw some (not all, but some) decent ideas that would tend toward liberty.  But I must say that I was not convinced by what the Romney site told me.

Then I explored the official Obama website.  What I found on the official Obama website convinced me to vote for Romney.

What convinced me to vote for Romney were some things that I found under “Get the FACTS” and then “Issues.”  Here Obama’s site lists what he says on various topics, followed by what the Obama team has selected that they claim Romney has said on the same matter.  Their Romney material is in red, which makes it stand out.

Reading through all the issues, what the Obama website attributed to Romney convinced me to vote for Romney.  I am giving the Obama people some benefit of the doubt in assuming that they have not distorted Romney by taking him out of context.  But the red-colored Romney material on the Obama website is about 90% what my ethical standards call for in the way of government policy on various issues.

If I were the Romney campaign, I would run on this material.  I am not naïve enough to think Romney will actually do all this.  But if he acts on even a fourth of it, the country will be a better place.

Mr. Obama, I am convinced by your website to vote for Mitt Romney.  (I am not being silly or tongue-in-cheek here at all.  If you love liberty and are having trouble deciding for whom to vote, go read the red Romney material on the Obama website.  If you are not convinced, you either don’t understand liberty, or you don’t love it.)

A Cosmic Predisposition

This entry is a brief comment on a review of this book:

[Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly Wrong • By Thomas Nagel • Oxford University Press, 2012 • x + 130 pages] 

A review article, which brought it to my attention, is found here:

Moral Realism vs. Evolutionary Biology?

Mises Daily: Thursday, September 20, 2012 by David Gordon

If have read much philosophy you have come across the name Thomas Nagel.  I haven’t read the book, but I am somewhat familiar with Nagel’s work  Nagel is known for rejecting moral relativism during times when it was almost unquestioned in academic philosophical circles.  (I will never forget, just from the mental impact of the title, Nagel’s essay, “What is it like to be a bat?” which we once read in a philosophy of mind course.  It’s an amusing title, but it is Nagel at work opposing reductionism in another area.)

While Nagel doesn’t exactly think there is a moral reality ‘out there’ which is the proper basis of our moral judgments, he does think that moral reasons can’t be reduced (thus, ‘reductionism’) to something else.  Examples of ‘something else’ would be things like personal preference, social traditions, and the like.

Nagel thinks all, or at least most, versions of moral realism would be incompatible with Darwinism.  The usual approach is that since Darwinism must be true, moral realism must be false.  Nagel turns that around.  He contends that since many important considerations point to the truth of moral realism, we need to re-think our acceptance of Darwinism.

At this point I am right there with Nagel, so to speak.  So which way should we go given that Darwinism is under question?  As the reviewer puts it, “One alternative to the Darwinian view Nagel finds untrue to the moral facts is theism, but to this he is temperamentally averse. He prefers what he calls a teleological view.”

I wish I had a copy of the book to see what Nagel says about being “temperamentally adverse” to theism.  Whatever that means, here is Nagel’s current conclusion about all this as quoted in the book review:

But even though natural selection partly determines the details of the forms of life and consciousness that exist, and the relations among them, the existence of the genetic material and the possible forms it makes available for selection have to be explained in some other way. The teleological hypothesis is that these things may be determined not merely by value-free chemistry and physics but also by something else, namely a cosmic predisposition to the formation of life, consciousness, and the value that is inseparable from them. (p. 123)

So Nagel is temperamentally adverse to theism, and is then left with “a cosmic predisposition to the formation of life, consciousness, and the value that is inseparable from them.”

I’m sure Thomas Nagel is a much sharper philosophical cookie than am I, but it seems to me that, whatever he sees as the problems with theism, there are at least as many problems with a “cosmic predisposition.”  One starts to ask questions like, “What accounts for this cosmic predisposition?”  My best guess is that Nagel would say, “It’s just there.”

Nagel seems to be typical of the modern mind.  The rejection of theism is a temperamental adversity.  That seems to me another way of saying, “I’m just not comfortable with it; I just don’t like it.”  I’m sure many of us theists could come up with some good guesses as to why modern people just don’t like theism – three or four of which preachers might turn into sermons.

But this whole thing I found interesting enough to stop make these observations.

Same Old Show–Different Names

"There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what," Romney is shown saying in a video posted online by the magazine. "There are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it."
"Forty-seven percent of Americans pay no income tax," Romney said.
Romney said in the video that his role "is not to worry about those people. I'll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives." – Mitt Romney [link]

Kent comments:
Obama repulses me, but I am not a big fan of Mitt.  In that, I fear that I am like many considering the upcoming election.  People just won’t vote in significant numbers for third parties.  So hear we are.
But finally Mitt says something that catches my attention in a positive way.  If you don’t think there is a vast contingent of people who just want their stuff from the state, you are not being honest with yourself.  And in the vein of honesty, Republicans do not usually seriously challenge those with the “government should give me” mentality either.
The only problem with Mitt’s statement is that it’s only part of the story.  It’s not just the lower-income people who want their stuff from the government. Large corporations want it, unions want it, lobbying groups want it, well-to-do people want it.
But here a rather mainstream Republican finally at least says something accurate about this situation.  And what does he do?  Well, of course, he apologizes:

“It's not elegantly stated, let me put it that way. I was speaking off the cuff in response to a question. And I'm sure I could state it more clearly in a more effective way than I did in a setting like that," Romney said. "Of course I want to help all Americans. All Americans have a bright and prosperous future.”

Hey, Mitt – how about just reinforcing this something really good you said?  You are right - it is not the appropriate role of the government to “help all Americans.”  It is the appropriate role of government, fiscally speaking, to leave all Americans undisturbed so they can help themselves, if they care to do so.  And at this point, many do not.  And if they don’t, they don’t.  It’s called freedom.
Mitt Romney – what a weenie.  And we are back to our usual choices for President:  a leftist, collectivist, statist Democrat, or maybe-less-but-still-somewhat-statist weenie Republican.  Oh my!