Posted on 12/19/2007 5:48:59 AM PST by SJackson
Last week, New York Times columnist Roger Cohen wrote a column titled "Secular Europe's Merits," in which he explained why he prefers the secularism of Europe to the religiosity of America.
To his credit (other New York Times columnists do not generally agree to debate anything they write -- Paul Krugman, for example, has refused to discuss his new book on liberalism with me), Cohen agreed to come on my show, and proved to be a charming guest.
A distinguished foreign correspondent for Reuters and the International Herald Tribune, Cohen nevertheless betrayed what I believe is endemic to those who favor Europe's secularism to America's religiosity -- emotion rather than reason.
Here are some of the points from his opinion piece followed by my responses.
Cohen: "The Continent has paid a heavy price in blood for religious fervor and decided some time ago, as a French king put it, that 'Paris is well worth a Mass.'"
There is no doubt that Western Europe abandoned religion and opted for secularism largely because of the blood spilled in religious wars, just as it abandoned nationalism because of all the blood it spilled in the name of nationalism during World War I.
However, Cohen and others who argue for a secular society ignore the even heavier price in blood Europe has paid for secular fervor. Secular fervor, i.e., communism and Nazism, slaughtered, tortured and enslaved more people in 50 years than all Europe's religious wars did in the course of centuries.
This point is so obvious, and so devastating to the pro-secularists, that you wonder how they deal with it. But having debated secularists for decades, I predicted Cohen's response virtually word for word on my radio show the day before I spoke with him. He labeled communism and Nazism "religions."
This response completely avoids the issue. Communism and Nazism were indeed religion-like in their hold on people, but they were completely secular movements and doctrines. Moreover, communism was violently anti-religious, and Nazism affirmed pre-Christian -- what we tend to call "pagan" -- values and beliefs.
In fact, the emergence of communism and Nazism in an increasingly secular Europe is one of the most powerful arguments for the need for Judeo-Christian religions. Europe's two secular totalitarian systems perfectly illustrate what G.K. Chesterton predicted a hundred years ago: "When people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing -- they believe in anything."
Cohen: "The U.S. culture wars have produced . . . 'the injection of religion into politics in a very overt way.'"
Cohen gives no examples, and though this charge is constantly repeated by many on the left, I have yet to figure out what exactly these critics mean. Do they mean, for example, that those who deem abortion immoral and wish to ban it (except to save the mother's life or in the cases of incest or rape) have injected religion into politics? If so, why is this objectionable?
What are those who derive their values from religion supposed to do -- stay out of the political process? Are only those who derive their values from secular sources or their own hearts allowed to attempt to influence the political process? It seems that this is precisely what Cohen and other secularists argue. But they are not even consistent here. I recall no secularist who protested that those, like the Rev. Martin Luther King, who used religion to fight for black equality "injected religion into politics in a very overt way."
The leftist argument against religious Americans' "injection of religion into politics" is merely its way of trying to keep only the secular and religious left in the political arena -- and the religious right, primarily evangelical Christians, out.
Cohen: "Much too overt for Europeans, whose alarm at George W. Bush's presidency has been fed by his allusions to divine guidance -- 'the hand of a just and faithful God' in shaping events, or his trust in 'the ways of Providence.'"
Cohen and his fellow Europeans sound paranoid here. President Bush has invoked God less than most presidents in American history, and the examples Cohen offers are thoroughly innocuous.
Cohen: "Such beliefs seem to remove decision-making from the realm of the rational at the very moment when the West's enemy acts in the name of fanatical theocracy."
At least in my lifetime, it is the secular left that has embraced far more irrationality than the religious right. It was people on the secular left, not anyone on the religious right, who found Marxism, one of the most irrational doctrines in history, rational. It was only on the secular left that people morally equated the United States and the Soviet Union. It was secular leftists, not religious Jews or Christians, who believed the irrational nonsense that men and women were basically the same.
It is overwhelmingly among the secular (and religious) left that people have bought into the myriad irrational hysterias of my lifetime -- without zero population growth humanity will begin to starve, huge mortality rates in America from heterosexual AIDS, mass death caused by secondhand smoke, and now destruction of the planet by man-induced global warming. It is extremely revealing that with regard to global warming scenarios of man-induced doom, the world's most powerful religious figure, Pope Benedict XVI, has just warned against accepting political dogma in the guise of science. We'll see who turns out to be more rational on this issue -- the secular left or the religious right. I bet everything on the religious.
There is no question but that most religious people have irrational religious views. However, as I wrote in my last column, theology and values are not the same. I am convinced that the human being is programmed to believe in the non-rational. The healthy religious confine their irrationality to their theologies and are quite rational on social issues. On the other hand, vast numbers of secular people in the West have done the very opposite -- rejected irrational religiosity and affirmed irrational social beliefs.
The heart of religion is morality, what is right and wrong. It is nearly impossible to escape morality when defining public policy. They can deny all they want, but secularists inject just as much religion into the political discussion as any evangelical Christian.
because in their own little world, these secularists beleive they are God. and how dare they let something be grater than them.
anytime i talk to an athiest, i always ask them what the date is? and when they answer..i ask how they like that. follow a dating system based off Jesus Christ.
Cohen makes the same mistake that so many on the left make. He starts with ideas that are incorrect...
bttt
What day of the week is it?
anytime i talk to an athiest, i always ask them what the date is? and when they answer..i ask how they like that. follow a dating system based off Jesus Christ.
_____
I’ve never met an atheist that denies the Judeo-Christian foundation of western culture. Have you?
I would think that most atheists to whom you pose the above question shake their head as they walk away from you, wondering the purpose of your complete non-sequitor.
Isn’t the IRA a product of “secular Europe”?
The year 2011 is dead; long live the year 2012!
I like Dennis Prager. He is a pretty smart guy and generally right on the issues.
But here he makes the classic mistake of equating secularism with socialism leaving out the really successful secular system: capitalism. This is your basic red herring/paper tiger argument that compares the damage done in religious wars with the damage done in fighting against the Nazis and the Communists. What it is ignores is the non-wars between cooperating, secular or at least somewhat secular, capitalistic countries. And I include the U.S. in that latter category. The U.S. conduct of business and mutual defense is not based on our religious beliefs at all. For example, what do we have in common with the Japanese and Koreans in the religious realm? The answer is nothing. We have an agreement to trade and provide mutual defense. We don't fight them despite the fact that we do not share religious beliefs with them - it is a purely secular arrangement and is based on a common belief in the principles of capitalism more than any other philosophy.
Sorry Dennis, you are just dead wrong on this one.
You are 1) comparing apples and oranges, and 2) changing the subject.
1) Capitalism is not per-se secular.
Capitalism addresses only the economic aspects. You can be a Nazi capitalist. All capitalism changes is how you address economic risk, not how you order the rest of (and the larger part of) the lives of the citizenry.
You can also be a Christian capitalist. Capitalism flowered in the Christian world.
2) Whether or not capitalism is successful, it doesn't change the fact that secularist wars killed a lot of folks. On the religious side, the fact that Tibetan Buddhism didn't do wars, doesn't change the fact that Arabian Islam does.
...he is just the most ruthless and meanest on the block.....always willing to murder any who would oppose.
No I'm not.
Secularity is simply the state of being separate from religion. The only connection that I see between Christianity and Capitalism is that they co-exist and that Capitalism generally does better co-existing with some religions than with others.
So I declare that Capitalism is just as secular as Nazism and Communism. It doesn't depend on religion. It doesn't need religion. It doesn't address religion. That is what secular means and you cannot exclude Capitalism from the list of secular philosophies no matter what you think.
So I will stand by my statement that it is not secularism that kills people in wars - it is socialism and the coercion that is inherent in trying to impose that ugly philosophy on human beings. Lenin didn't just kill Christians and Jews. He killed people who refused to give up their land. Hitler didn't kill Christians but he killed Jews, just like the Islamics want to do today. What is is so secular about that?
My point restated: Countries who trade with each other and provide for a common defense under a secular Capitalist arrangement do not go to war with each other. Don't blame Secularism as a way of defending the brutality and death that religion has brought and continues to bring to the human race. Blame Socialism and (these days) Radical Islam.
Allies don't go to war with each other most circumstances. And the phrase 'a common defense ...' cuts a pretty narrow slice of history, like only the 'NATO' countries? They have a lot more in common that just capitalism.
Not the happiest of examples, actually - that was Henry IV of France in 1593 to explain why he shifted from Protestantism to Catholicism. It may actually be apropos in a way Cohen didn't mean - our candidates are never so devout as when they're running for office.
I'm not entirely certain that transitioning from killing one another over religion to killing one another over ideology constitutes much of an improvement, actually. Despite the hoo-hah over the topic America is a very long way from a theocracy, and I think that Prager is correct in pointing out the level of concern over the Influence Of The Christian Right has reached the level of insensate paranoia over on the Left. This happens when you begin to believe your own hype.
Nevertheless, aggressive secularism in the form of multiculturalism has drawbacks in precisely the same areas as aggressive theocracy, which is one sign that it has attained a religious status of its own. One has a difficult time differentiating between strictures in public comment based on heresy and strictures on it based on "hate-speech" laws. But at the present time the Inquisition appears to be strictly a secular phenomenon. I'm not sure that's an improvement either.
It may be a narrow slice of history but it is a true slice. The wars that have caused death of millions arise from:
a. Religions fighting religions or everybody else.
b. Socialists fighting everybody else or occasionally each other.
Secularism has NOTHING to do with it. Prager is simply wrong.
What’s the body count for Planned Parenthood?
Secularists presume that if Christianity goes away, so goes the influence of religion in any form.
What they fair to realize is that Islam is waiting in the wings. Wonder how well they’d function with their idealism in that kind of world?
Prager's arguing that religious America hasn't been more violent or dangerous than Europe was in its most secular of centuries.
Cohen made the assertion that American-style religion was more dangerous than European-style secularism, and so far as I can tell, Prager proved him wrong -- Stalin and Hitler arose in Europe, not in America.
If he goes further and says that secularism as such and in itself has been more dangerous than religion, that's debateable, but he also shows Cohen's trick of defining communism and fascism and nazism as "religions" for the sham that it is.
But Prager may go wrong elsewhere: today's Western Europe is an exhausted society.
Arguably a vital, active society may be more dangerous than one that's become tired out and lost the will to assert its values.
Of course, the problem with that is that weak societies may be dangerous precisely in their weakness and inability to defend themselves.
That is very true and I agree that a religious America has not been the threat to the world that the Communists and the Nazis were. Not even close (despite what Nancy Pelosi believes.)
So Prager is correct in that simple comparison. But look again at what he says:
Secular fervor, i.e., communism and Nazism, slaughtered, tortured and enslaved more people in 50 years than all Europe's religious wars did in the course of centuries.
That is way to broad a generalization.
He is equating being nonreligious (i.e. secular) to Communism and Nazism. That is simply not true and by defining these aggressive socialist dictatorships by the single parameter of their nonreligious or even anti-religious foundations is way too much of an oversimplification for me. The world just doesn't revolve around whether you are religious or not. There are other things and Prager dismisses them all.
Now that doesn't make Cohen right either but I'm picking on Prager not Cohen.
bump
A very good question...:>
Yes. Be careful they don’t ask how you like the celebrations Xmas and Easter have co-opted.
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The last time Europe went to war over religion was the 30 Years War, that ended in 1648. And by the last years it had little to do with religion and everything to do with who would be dominant in Germany: Austria, France or Sweden.
There were at least eight general European wars after (depending on how you count the French Revolutionary Wars and Napoleonic Wars, as one or many), and none were over religion.
qam1: “What day of the week is it?”
Tricky one, eh?
Religious Wars were fought throughout the 20th century in Europe: mainly against Christians butchered by the millions at the hands of Nazis, Muslims, and Communists.
Jews suffered disproportionately, although not exclusively, at the handss of the Pagan German Nazis.
btt
Prager’s point is quite correct in that Nazism and Communism have never arisen in a Judeo-Christian nation. And that hasn’t happened because the foundations of those systems is in conflict with Judeo-Christian beliefs.
Have you read Marx? If so, how else can you consider the flavor of Communism he birthed anything but secular?
Of course Marxism is secular.
My point is that Marxism and Communism are characterized by much more important things than their anti-religious elements. Lenin and Stalin butchered millions of people for reasons that had nothing to do with their or Marx's views of religion. They were murdered because they refused to give up their land and homes to the state. I happen to believe that Nazism and Communism were very bad things but the reasons why have nothing to do with religion and everything to do with Marxism and Totalitarianism.
My problem with Prager is that, by inference, he is equating secularism with Nazism and Communism. That is simply a gross over simplification and, by inference, paints religion as the only alternative to totalitarianism.
And your missing Prager’s point, which is dead on, that secularism is required for Nazism and Communism. He never stated that it was the only component, or the most important component. He just stated that it was a requirement for those systems.
And that is absolutely correct.
I think you are wrong about that. You should re-read this from the Prager article:
"In fact, the emergence of communism and Nazism in an increasingly secular Europe is one of the most powerful arguments for the need for Judeo-Christian religions. Europe's two secular totalitarian systems perfectly illustrate what G.K. Chesterton predicted a hundred years ago: "When people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing -- they believe in anything."
So Prager is telling us that if we don't believe in God, we don't believe in anything. And by inference, this lack of belief leads us to socialism and totalitarianism. That is what he saying and that is just nonsense.
Wow, you totally misread that quote.
You said - “So Prager is telling us that if we don’t believe in God, we don’t believe in anything.”
The actual quote - “When people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing — they believe in anything.”
The quote clearly contradicts what you say.
What Chesterton said, and Prager quoted, was that not believing in God leads to a belief in anything.
The truth is that everyone has some system of beliefs, for religious people it is derived from God, for the non-religious it is based on something else, materialism, utopian philosophy, Communistic theory, the ideals of Nazism, etc.
Well you have me there but can you actually explain the difference between believing in anything and believing in nothing?
Think about it. What could believing in anything actually mean. It has to mean that you have NO core beliefs - you will listen and believe anything you hear. Believing in "anything" and believing in "nothing" are not actually opposites. Believing in "something" is the opposite of believing in "nothing".
In any case, the quote above is just nonsense. If it's not then explain to me what you think it means.
What it means is that people will latch onto something, even if it is self contradicting, illogical, irrational, etc.
As history has shown, in a secular society that situation has given rise to the most destructive forces in history.
The simple reason is that most non-God based belief systems ultimately put their faith in man, who then in turn creates their own morality.
Ravi Zacharias once made an astute point that the horrors of the Holocaust were made possible in the lecture halls of German Universities, where the philosophies of the time squashed religion and elevated the self. Nietsche’s groundwork for existentialism and postmodernism are prime examples. Hegel’s work that denied the existence of absolutes also played a role. There are other examples as well.
Secular Europe? I’ve just had a look at the religion breakdowns of a number of the ‘old europe’ countries on the CIA factbook - most appear to have followers of a religion at 70-80% of the population
B.S. Hilter wasn't an Atheist, he was a Christian.
Too avoid the pointless arguments and the no true Scotsman Fallacy. Even if he wasn't Germany was a very Christian country when Hilter was allowed to take over and it was Christians who carried out his orders.
As for Communism, Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Poland, etc.
And that hasn’t happened because the foundations of those systems is in conflict with Judeo-Christian beliefs.
All that believed were together, and had all things in common; And sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need. (Acts 2:44-45)
There was not a needy person among them, for as many as owned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold. They laid it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need. (Acts 4:34-36)
Sound exactly like, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need"
Your problem is that you are lumping anything that isn't Christianity into a single bucket called secular. That's just to big a bucket.
But here is some food for thought:
Hitler wrote the following in Mein Kampf:
"I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.."
And here is another:
-Adolf Hitler speech - Berlin 24 Oct. 1933
"We were convinced that the people needs and requires this faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out".
So maybe Nazism wasn't quite so secular as you might think.
btt
You are both showing a VERY shallow understanding of Hitler to consider him a Christian. Read a little deeper into his writings, and don’t just cherry pick what fits your preconceived notions.
And qam1, did you not read my post concerning how the Holocaust came about? I specifically stated that it wasn’t primarily made possible by Hitler.
Intercept - the specific horrors mentioned all rose out of secular societies. If you can’t accept that fact, I’ll not chase an irrational argument.
That point is that the very fact that Hitler at least paid lip service to supporting religious beliefs supports my view that it wasn't their secularism that defined the Nazi's philosophy. They were socialists who were hungry for the power to rule all of Europe and the issue of whether or not they were Christians or not just isn't very important in their grand scheme of things.
So once again, Nazism and Communism are not the opposite of religion. Neither really had anything to do with religion except to see it as a competitor for peoples allegiance.
And I do mean to include Communism.
Marx's view of religion (recall his "opium of the people" comment) was that people flock to religious institutions when the Capitalist system forced them into poverty. He believed that his system, by providing for the common man, would relieve the people of the need for religion. I'm sure you will agree that this was naive beyond belief. Certainly his system didn't work and even I don't believe that he had identified the source of religious beliefs in the human species.
But in any case, it was Marx, Lenin and Stalin's belief in the common ownership of property and the value of state planning and not their religious beliefs that defined their conduct and cost millions of people their lives. Once again, defining this as "secular" is just overlooking the real facts of history.
Secular isn’t the opposite of religion either.
Nazi Germany and Communist Russia were both secular societies. This isn’t exactly a complex issue. In fact, I haven’t seen anything that you’ve posted that comes close to refuting that simple point.
And the original article pointed out quite accurately that the greatest horrors the world has ever seen stemmed from secular nations. This fact hasn’t been challenged either.
You would be better off arguing that the next great horror will likely stem from a religious nation in the form of Islamic terror, that would be a MUCH better counter argument than trying to say Nazi Germany and Communist Russia were not secular nations.
Your problem is that you have only two baskets to place things in. There is a religious basket and a secular basket. If wars aren't religious then they must be secular. My point is SO WHAT. All secular means is that it is not based on religion. It tells you nothing else.
Your argument reminds me of an old saying: "The world is divided into two kinds of people; those that divide the world into two kinds of people and those that don't".
The answer to the question I posed about basketball is simply that it doesn't matter. If the Pope plays basketball then I guess that makes it a religious matter. If the Lakers play basketball then I guess it is secular. But who cares.
Here is a quiz: Name a non-muslim country that is not secular. In particular, give me a recent historical example of a non-secular Christian nation. I think you will struggle with that.
The point is that the only wars we have had in recent history were secular. The world is basically ruled by secular nations. Should we go back to having the priests rule just so that we can have religious wars instead of secular wars? I don't think so.
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