Posted on 02/26/2014 3:05:25 PM PST by Notary Sojac
Yesterday, in response to one of the many brouhahas that CPAC seems always to invite, Brent Bozell issued the following statement:
The invitation extended by the ACU, Al Cardenas and CPAC to American Atheists to have a booth is more than an attack on conservative principles. It is an attack on God Himself. American Atheists is an organization devoted to the hatred of God. How on earth could CPAC, or the ACU and its board of directors, and Al Cardenas condone such an atrocity?
The particular merits of the American Atheists group to one side, this is a rather astounding thing for Bozell to have said. In just 63 words, he confuses disbelief in God for “hatred” for God — a mistake that not only begs the question but is inherently absurd (one cannot very well hate what one does not believe is there); he condemns an entire conference on the basis of one participant — not a good look for a struggling movement, I’m afraid; and, most alarmingly perhaps, he insinuates that one cannot simultaneously be a conservative and an atheist. I reject this idea — and with force.
If atheism and conservatism are incompatible, then I am not a conservative. And nor, I am given to understand, are George Will, Charles Krauthammer, Anthony Daniels, Walter Olson, Heather Mac Donald, James Taranto, Allahpundit, or S. E. Cupp. There is no getting around this — no splitting the difference: I don’t believe there is a God. It’s not that I’m “not sure” or that I haven’t ever bothered to think about it; it’s that I actively think there isn’t a God — much as I think there are no fairies or unicorns or elves. The degree to which I’m confident in this view works on a scale, certainly: I’m much surer, for example, that the claims of particular religions are untrue and that there is no power intervening in the affairs of man than I am that there was no prime mover of any sort. But, when it comes down to it, I don’t believe in any of those propositions. Am I to be excommunicated from the Right?
One of the problems we have when thinking about atheism in the modern era is that the word has been hijacked and turned into a political position when it is no such thing. The Oxford English Dictionary defines an “atheist” as someone who exhibits “disbelief in, or denial of, the existence of a god.” That’s me right there — and that really is the extent of it. No, I don’t dislike anyone who does believe that there is a God; no, with a few obvious exceptions, I am not angry at the religious; and no, I do not believe the devout to be in any way worse or less intelligent than myself. Insofar as the question inspires irritation in me at all it is largely reserved for the sneering, smarmy, and incomprehensibly self-satisfied New Atheist movement, which has turned the worthwhile writings of some extremely smart people into an organized means by which a cabal of semi-educated twentysomethings might berate the vast majority of the human population and then congratulate one another as to how clever they are. (For some startling examples of this, see Reddit.)
Which is to say that, philosophically speaking, I couldn’t really care less (my friend Andrew Kirell suggests this makes me an “Apatheist”) and practically speaking I am actually pretty warm toward religion — at least as it is practiced in America. True or false, American religion plays a vital and welcome role in civil society, has provided a number of indispensable insights into the human condition, acts as a remarkably effective and necessary check on the ambitions of government and central social-planners, is worthy of respect and measured inquiry on the Burkean grounds that it has endured for this long and been adopted by so many, and has been instrumental in making the United States what it is today. “To regret religion,” my fellow Brit, conservative, and atheist, Anthony Daniels, writes correctly, “is to regret our civilization and its monuments, its achievements, and its legacy.” I do not regret our civilization, its monuments, its achievements, and its legacy. And I do not regret religion either.
Constitutionally and legally, America is a secular state, and the principle that the government should be strictly prohibited from making distinctions between myself (an atheist) and my fiancée (a Catholic) is one for which I would fight to the death. (David Barton and his brazen historical revisionism can go hang: This is a republic, dammit.) But nations are not made by laws alone. Suppose we were to run two simulations. In one, America develops full of mostly Protestant Christians; in the other, it develops full of atheists or Communists or devotees of Spinoza. Are we honestly to believe that the country would have come out the same in each case? Of course not. For all the mistakes that are made in religion’s name, I am familiar enough with the various attempts to run societies on allegedly “modern” grounds to worry that the latter options would have been much less pretty indeed.
None of this, however, excuses the manner in which conservatives often treat atheists such as myself. George H. W. Bush, who was more usually reticent on such topics, is reported to have said that he didn’t “know that atheists should be regarded as citizens, nor should they be regarded as patriotic.” “This,” Bush allegedly told Robert I. Sherman, “is one nation under God.” Whether Bush ever uttered these words or not, this sentiment has been expressed by others elsewhere. It is a significant mistake. What “this nation” is, in fact, is one nation under the Constitution — a document that precedes the “under God” reference in the Gettysburg Address by more than seven decades and the inclusion of the phrase in the Pledge of Allegiance by 165 years. (“In God We Trust,” too, was a modern addition, replacing “E Pluribus Unum” as the national motto in 1956 after 174 years.)
Indeed, given the troubled waters into which American religious liberty has of late been pushed, it strikes me that conservatives ought to be courting atheists — not shunning them. I will happily take to the barricades for religious conscience rights, not least because my own security as a heretic is bound up with that of those who differ from me, and because a truly free country seeks to leave alone as many people as possible — however eccentric I might find their views or they might find mine. In my experience at least, it is Progressivism and not conservatism that is eternally hostile to variation and to individual belief, and, while we are constantly told that the opposite is the case, it is those who pride themselves on being secular who seem more likely and more keen to abridge my liberties than those who pride themselves on being religious. That I do not share the convictions of the religious by no means implies that I wish for the state to reach into their lives. Nevertheless, religious conservatives will find themselves without many friends if they allow figures such as Mr. Bozell to shoo away the few atheists who are sympathetic to their broader cause.
As it happens, not only do I reject the claim that the two positions are antagonistic, but I’d venture that much of what informs my atheism informs my conservatism also. I am possessed of a latent skepticism of pretty much everything, a hostility toward the notion that one should believe things because they are a nice idea, a fear of holistic philosophies, a dislike of authority and of dogma, a strong belief in the Enlightenment as interpreted and experienced by the British and not the French, and a rather tenacious refusal to join groups. Occasionally, I’m asked why I “believe there is no God,” which is a reasonable question in a vacuum but which nonetheless rather seems to invert the traditional order of things. After all, that’s not typically how we make our inquiries on the right, is it? Instead, we ask what evidence there is that something is true. Think, perhaps, of how we approach new gun-control measures and inevitably bristle at the question, “Why don’t you want to do this?”
A great deal of the friction between atheists and conservatives seems to derive from a reasonable question. “If you don’t consider that human beings are entitled to ‘God given’ liberties,” I am often asked, “don’t you believe that the unalienable rights that you spend your days defending are merely the product of ancient legal accidents or of the one-time whims of transient majorities?” Well, no, not really. As far as I can see, the American settlement can thrive perfectly well within my worldview. God or no God, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Declaration of Independence are all built upon centuries of English law, human experience, and British and European philosophy, and the natural law case for them stands nicely on its own. Thomas Jefferson, who penned the Declaration, was not a religious man in any broad sense but a Deist, and his use of the term “Nature’s God” in laying out the framework for the new country was no accident. Jefferson was by no means an “atheist” — at least not in any modern sense: He believed in the moral teachings of Jesus; his work owed a great debt to the culture of toleration that English Protestantism had fostered; and, like almost all 18th-century thinkers, he believed in a prime mover. Nevertheless, he ultimately rejected the truth claims of revealed religion (and the Divine Right of Kings that he believed such a position inevitably yielded) and he relied instead on a “Creator” who looked like the God of Deism and not of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
As David J. Voelker has convincingly argued, Jefferson
rejected revealed religion because revealed religion suggests a violation of the laws of nature. For revelation or any miracle to occur, the laws of nature would necessarily be broken. Jefferson did not accept this violation of natural laws. He attributed to God only such qualities as reason suggested.
“Of the nature of this being,” Jefferson wrote to John Adams in 1817, “we know nothing.” Neither do I. Indeed, I do not believe that there is a “being” at all. And yet one can reasonably easily take Jefferson’s example and, without having to have an answer as to what created the world, merely rely upon the same sources as he did — upon Locke and Newton and Cicero and Bacon and, ultimately, upon one’s own human reason. From this, one can argue that the properties of the universe suggest self-ownership, that this self-ownership yields certain rights that should be held to be unalienable, and that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. After all, that’s what we’re all fighting for. Right?
If atheism and conservatism are incompatible, then I am not a conservative.
Yep
Finally. Somebody who uses “begs the question” correctly.
Conservative atheists are the ones who vote conservative and seldom mention their beliefs and don’t seek out groups to join so they can proclaim their atheism.
Agenda atheism is about as compatible with conservatism as agenda homosexuality.
A preponderance of atheists hanker for moral relativism, and as such, their foundation in conflict with the standards of virtue necessary for a free and prosperous society. It is not that no atheist can abide or thrive under such conditions, but that most of them prefer amorality and relish the confusion that ensues. There is danger in setting up the individual as the sole arbiter of right and wrong; in rugged individualism. A virtuous, prosperous society will take measures accountable also to, and for, the neighbor.
Deists are not atheists. They’re a softer more tolerable version of a pagan.
Besides, Atheism is only a transitional state.
If you’re an atheist, then ...
Where do your rights come from?
Why do you wear clothes?
Why are there seven days in a week?
How do you know what is good and what is evil?
If everything came from nothing out of nowhere,
if life is just a curious side effect of an unknowing and uncaring cosmos,
if when you die, you are just so much compost,
then why seek anything other than a life of self-gratification and a painless extinction?
I call BS. Prove it.
Yup.
OH really? What does it transition too?
Think about it. Without God, obviously we’d have no God-given unalienable rights. We’d have only the “rights” government decides we should have. That’s the way it was done all throughout history until our founding fathers recognized the “self-evident truth.” America was founded on the principle that all men are created equal by God and granted their unalienable rights to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness... and self-rule. No king. No dictator. No ruler. No king but God.
Without God, we have no life, no rights and no soul. The Marxists, fascists and godless totalitarians of every stripe want it that way. If man has no soul, then he’s no different from an animal. He can be bred, herded, worked and slaughtered like animals. Again, it’s been that way all through history. In our recent history there was Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Mao, Pol Pot, Castro and a host of others.
Now we have the godless Marxist/fascist Obama trying to repeat the 30’s. And our younger generations were not taught the truth of history. They have no idea why godless Marxism/fascism should be feared. Forgive them father, they know not what they do.
I don't care what my neighbor does, unless it is something that demands I shoot him or her.
The frightened bunny party is too stupid to figure it out but left wing groups are happily proclaiming their conservatism as a means of getting in the door where they can wreak havoc on the GOP.
I’ve got a hard left militant lesbian cousin who has proclaimed that she’s GOP proud....and she’s working on the Wendy Davis campaign right now.
Two birds with the same stone.
It's the agenda.
Leftism.
They clearly aren’t, the proof is that almost all atheists are liberal democrats, and are very powerful as leaders of the left and of liberalism, the few that vote with republicans, are almost all liberal republicans, judging by the ones on FR.
Even those few are almost all dedicated to challenging true conservatism and making the GOP more liberal.
A conservative atheist is a rare egg, hardly worth devoting much time to.
Historically speaking atheism is not an unknown element in conservatism. The philosophical antecedents of what we now know as conservative thinking do include quite a lot of non-religious ideas, and there have been non-religious or irreligious contributors here. Hume, for one. There is such a thing as a materialist conservatism.
On the other hand there are of course powerful religious roots in conservatism, even as a purely political philosophy.
For that matter there are powerful religious roots in liberalism or progressivism, socialism, even in socialist materialism. Its not for nothing that some call Communism a Christian heresy.
The GOP has already wreaked havoc on themselves.
That political party is cooked in my book.
Do I wind up voting for them? Yes.
Do I think they end up voting for and representing my belief system? NO.
Conservative thought and atheism are not compatible.
Godlessness leads to rejecting GOD GIVEN INALIENABLE RIGHTS.
Rights that are inherent in humanity that are given by God as the founders stated.
Atheism denies what the founders stated and believed.
Conservative thought seeks to preserve what the founders created and intended.
The Pilgrims and Puritans were Christians who came to this country seeking religious liberty. Early America, except for a few deists here and there (almost all of them Freemasons), was very much Christian. America was certainly NOT founded by atheists.
Conservatives seek to “conserve,” or preserve, original beliefs and values, in America’s case, it’s Christian heritage. Enter Notary Sojac an atheist who claims he is an American conservative. Is he seeking to “conserve” the Christian heritage of America? Absolutely not. He, thus, is no American conservative.
Maoist China was founded on atheism, there are “conservatives” there who bemoan the Christian meetings now taking place, who seek to “conserve” that country’s original atheism. Seems to me like Sojac should move to China, his kind of atheist conservatism would fit right in.
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