Posted on 07/01/2007 11:45:23 AM PDT by tpaine
This is one of the most illogical posts I have ever read. Let us substitute Communism and Capitalism in there, and perhaps you can see the folly of it.
I know that some Communists have committed crimes in the past, but these crimes were motivated by Capitalism, not Communism. Those people let their rationality slip and lost site of the true meaning of being Communist.
Anyone can excuse anybody in their favorite group by saying “they were not true to the groups principles”.
Too stupid for words. Atheists are incapable of love>? Balderdash. Before God found me, I was very much an atheist. Despite what you and others might want to believe, I wasn't lost in a sea of debauchery, nor was I incapable of love.
As a Christian, I've certainly learned to forgive, but I always knew how to love. See, atheists like most of us learn to love via parents who loved them. Atheists aren't grown in an alien, loveless environment.
No. You most certainly have the right to say what you will, and call it free speech. However, you don't have the right to remain free from insults. Guess, what, those are free speech too.
This comes up often, but can't be said enough: There is no right to not be offended. If Jesus bothers you, then tough, sit through the prayer anyway. If you don't like Heather Has Two Mommies, then don't read it. If you don't like rap lyrics change the station. If fire and brimstone offends you, don't read the bible. etc etc.
I contend that these prescriptions are unconsciously derived from Judeo-Christian principles. For example, the idea that all human life should be equally protected from murder is derived from the principle that all humans, regardless of condition, are created in the image of God.
On what basis can one atheist claim that his view that all people, regardless of condition, should be protected from murder is superior to the view of another atheist, who might say it is okay to kill landlords, or kulaks, or city dwellers? The first atheist has as his moral authority only his own opinion. Perhaps he believes that a Lockeian-compact analysis would persuade his fellow atheists not to kill Kulaks, for the Kulaks might turn the tables and kill them (not sure how dead Kulaks would manage to do this). But this is at best only an appeal to pragmatism, and an empirical examination of history, in my view, demonstrates that this appeal generally has not prevailed, and that human society in the absence of the beneficial impact of Judeo-Christian principles is a society in which the strong exploit the weak, people become servile and are drawn to the strong for protection, and personality cults or tribalism or bolshevism or some other ism prevails. (You can argue that these conditions have been found in some ostensibly Christian societies, but I would counter that you would need to separate out both the Machiavellian rulers and those who have perverted Judeo-Christian principles if you are claiming it is Judeo-Christian principles that are the causative effect.)
Where there is only a relative basis for "morality," as in atheism, there is no authority higher than the opinion of one atheist over another as to what the "morality" should be. An attempt to persuade one atheist to come around to the view of another atheist at bottom boils down only to an appeal to convenience.
Atheists are not capable of being patriots because they are incapable of convictions or love.
Um, sure, "convictions of love" are somehow necessary to agree that our Constitution must be honored and defended? - Could you explain that concept a bit more? It's rather alien to me. The last time I heard anything like that was from Cultural Jihad.
Since they have denied God, they see no reason to practice either since they don't see how it will benefit their personal standing.
"Practice" what? And what does "personal standing" have to do with constitutional patriotism?
So no, atheists can not be [for?] Americanism.
Your conclusion is simply not supported by your previous words. Can you try again?
More here
A word from David Gelernter on Americanism
Power Line ^ | 6/13/07 | Scot Johnson
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1859115/posts
Where do you people get this stuff from?
Atheists don’t need the threat of eternal damnation to be good people in life. Anyone who does need that is simply not a moral person.
I won’t bother reading any books that promote atheist propaganda anymore than I will read books that promote religious propaganda.
I certainly don’t see myself as god or any type of god like figure. I’m a mortal, the same as everyone else on the planet.
“Atheists are not capable of being patriots” - Incorrect. Although rabid jingoism might not be so easy for them.
“because they are incapable of convictions” - That must be why there are so few of them in prison :)
“or love” - Completely incorrect. For example, I love my sister and all my friends, and yet I don’t believe in the existence of God.
“So no, atheists can not be Americanism.” - Assuming by “Americanism” you meant Americans, this is also incorrect. Atheists can be, and indeed often are, born in the United States, which by definition makes them Americans.
Nice try, though.
Nice try, but I'll go on, an American Orthodox Jew.
Are you a real mind reader, or do you just pretend to be one on FR?
It may well be possible that Professor Gelernter is a fine computer scientist…one can only hope so, for in light of his polemical panegyric lauding the wonders of the American Creed, he would certainly make an abysmal historian and an even worse political scientist. His noxious book is replete with misinformation, disinformation and with the grossest misrepresentation possible; but perhaps this is to be expected given the dark and malicious ideological leanings of the American Enterprise Institute (the publisher of this…this…essay {?})
There are untold billions of people fortunate enough to have been born anywhere but the United States; and most are likely to be deeply appreciative of that fact in light of the rapacity of the government of the United States in its attempt to impose a single ‘Washington Consensus” upon the rest of the world. Gelernter’s euphemistic “American Creed” has effectively destroyed the social cohesion of that unfortunate nation - and replaced it with the unbridled pursuit of individual self-interest at the expense of the commons. Gelernter’s sanctimonious bleating about his Creed’s concern for “widows” and “orphans” – for the downtrodden, the weak and the dispossessed– lies naked in its breath-taking hypocrisy. For this computer scientist disparages and dismisses one of the very few decent presidents which that unhappy country has ever had the good sense to elect…Frankin Delano Roosevelt. Here was a man who confronted the grotesque social, political and economic consequences of Gelernter’s “Creed” through his New Deal; a President who actually attempted to do something for the “widows”, the “orphans” and for the weak and dispossessed. And what was his reward: the smug Reagan, the self-interested pair of Burning Bushes (and Clinton the Dismal Democrat) all went quietly about the business of dismantling the New Deal. In so doing, they reinstituted the primacy of predatory business and shattered what little social cohesion which the United States enjoyed.
It is, in fact, difficult to know where to begin with Gelernter’s grand deception. Perhaps we should start with his portrayal of Jefferson - a man whom he places firmly in the camp of the bibliophiles. In his dispute with Adams over the Sedition Acts in 1790 (a grotesque forerunner of Bush’s equally grotesque assault on civil liberties more recently), Jefferson simply refused to apply these Acts upon his assuming the Presidency. Further, although Gelernter is quite correct in appreciating Jefferson as a seminal figure in the formulation of America’s foundation documents, he is simply lying about Jefferson’s attitudes. For, rather than placing Gelernter’s Bible at the centre, Jefferson actually took a literal pair of scissors to a literal Bible and cut the accursed thing up into very tiny fragments. Even more telling are Jefferson’s own words on what he called “monkish ignorance and superstition”. And again, in his Notes on the State of Virginia (1780) Jefferson noted that should a neighbour claim to believe in twenty gods or none that this “,,,neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg”. In formulating his famous statute in 1786 which established religious freedom in Virginia, Jefferson expressly rejected an amendment alluding to Jesus Christ as a source of religious liberty because he sought to establish freedom for the “…Infidel of every denomination”. Yet, Gelernter, in placing his beloved and “chivalrous” GW Bush in the same pantheon as Jefferson, plainly ignores Bush’s assault on Jefferson’s principles (through Bush’s support for “faith-based” programs – where the “faith” is overwhelmingly Christian; and even more so, fundamentalist evangelical Christian). One could go on at some length about Jefferson’s hostility towards the Bible. Then again, another member of the founding pantheon – Benjamin Franklin, no less – actively believed in such pagan notions as reincarnation.
So, given that Gelernter spends so much time and effort on the wonders of the founding Puritans – as the mediating source of his “Americanism” as religion, maybe we could take a passing glance. These people were so excited by God, Jesus and the Bible that they sought to experience, establish and pass on the notion of “freedom of religion”, that they fled Europe’s oppressive constraints. The problem is, they only believed in freedom of religion for themselves. Read for yourselves what an early puritan had to say about the indigenous peoples of the New World – where those poor peoples were to soon experience the “American Holocaust”. In 1590 Robert Gray wrote: …[Indians are] wild beasts, and unreasonable creatures, or…brutish savages, which by reason of their godless ignorance, and blasphemous Idolatrie, are worse than those beasts which are of the most wilde and savage nature….[They are] incredibly rude, they worship the divell, offer their young children in sacrifice unto him, wander up and down like beasts, and in manners and conditions, differ very little from beasts”. Does this ring any bells Professor Gelernter? Dehumanise a people so that your puritans and fellow-travelling American Creedists can either seize land and resources…or maybe just try to exterminate the vermin which seeks to merely resist your noxious creed as that creed is employed as justification for extermination. I mean, of-course, the Vietnam “gooks”, the Iraqi ‘towel heads”, etc, etc, etc. The fact of the matter is that you and your fellow-travellers use the laudable elements of the American ideal to disguise a rapacious foreign policy in order to assault foreigners; a rapacious domestic policy to assault your own population – and where both domestic and foreign policy is employed together to further the interests of your innumerable Halliburtons, and your neo-liberal ideologues. But these Indian peoples barely rate a mention in Gelernter’s two-hundred page book. They are either misguided idiots or little more than a minor obstacle to the grand unfolding of the “American Creed” (so little was thought of them that Andrew Jackson could simply ignore Supreme Court rulings which sought to restrain the “Creed’s” imperial enterprise)….The United States is no different from any other nation – yet Gelernter demands his exceptionalism. It pursues what it sees as the interests of various sections of its population. The only difference is that so many Americans seem to try so very hard to dress up an imperial program in nice warm fuzzy clothing. This is known as hypocrisy at best – yet also known by a variety of less flattering terms by the victims of such a program. And that program is the heart of Gelernter’s vile creed. That program was marked by the seizure of Indian lands, of Mexican land (a nice little war that one was back in the 1840’s – very profitable), the seizure of Hawaii (in order to prop up American business interests), the seizure of the Philippines – and the training of many and various Latin American torturers at the notorious Fort Benning - so that the US might keep Latin America under control on the cheap.
The United States devotes a smaller proportion of its GDP to foreign aid than any other country (yet many Americans so often deceive themselves into believing that they devote the most). Even Cuba has a bigger proportional foreign aid budget than the US – and Cuba also sends more doctors abroad as aid than the US…but then they’d only do that to achieve propaganda victory wouldn’t they?
There is so much more to say…but I doubt it would ever penetrate the warm misty comforting veil of the “American Creed”. Suffice it to say that if Gelernter is unable to comprehend his smug arrogance (which, naturally enough, he lays at the feet of those who see his “creed” for what it is) then he will continue with his highly selective and misrepresentative evidence. Why can’t you just leave the rest of the world alone - and cease your gross misuse of the very real sacrifice made by your compatriots from the 1940’s; for that really was a generation worth admiring. Alternatively, at the very least, stop trying to convince the rest of the World that the United States is a combination of both the Golden-Age located in the past, and of the Golden age yet to come. I suggest that Gelernter just enjoy the quintessential American Institution and indulge himself in the mindless joys of the Mall. It is possible that this is an option now only open to those members of the much-despised elites given that such a staunch upholder of the Creed as GW Bush has overseen the greatest rise in income inequality within the US in many generations. Still, one must be free to be poor (and certainly, “freedom fries” – and certainly does so on the hot-plate of American imperialism). Or, perhaps Professor Gelernter could assist the US dominated International Monetary fund in its unremitting efforts to impose vicious Structural Adjustment Programs on nations already struggling to feed themselves. But lastly, and perhaps most tellingly, Professor Gelernter might like to engage with a little intellectual rigor and reflect on his notion that America is so profoundly “anti-military”. The United States outspends every other country by absolutely massive margins on military expenditure. Why? The US is the most militarised nation on the planet; and projects a national reverence for its military (all those wonderful Hollywood movies about the glories of the American military life). Is this a matter of America’s military as the world’ policeman? I suspect so given the prominence enjoyed by America’s domestic police and associated institutions. On average, the US incarcerates about six-hundred people per hundred thousand of population. Most civilised nations incarcerate about sixty people per hundred thousand of population. It would seem that Professor Gelernter’s “American Creed” has criminalized poverty itself; given that so many US citizens (sorry, I meant “subjects”) are left to languish in jail because the “Creed” has itself played a significant role in their way of life. How else are the disposed to support themselves in a nation which espouses as a matter of public policy that the country is less a mutually supporting community than it is a tankful of piranhas?). I am an Englishman and an Australian. Am I “anti-American”? No! However, I loathe the betrayal of America by those Americans who seek to disguise wicked designs - and who seek to excuse wicked actions, and wicked elements, of the historical record – through rhetoric of exceptionalism. Not everyone actually wants to be an American. Even certain American groups don’t want to be American. In general, Amerindian peoples refused to ride the back of the Black civil rights movement but they wanted to remain Indian. If Professor Gelernter’s much-admired Puritans had had their way, there would have been no Indians left.
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