galiel

Thomas Jefferson said:

"The clergy, by getting themselves established by law and ingrafted into the machine of government, have been a very formidable engine against the civil and religious rights of man."

[SEE NOTE AT END OF THIS POST]

It is my contention that

a) Organized, hierarchical religion is inherently, fundamentally and irreparably incompatible with democracy in general and with the U.S. system of government in particular; and that,

b) There is currently a coordinated and wide-spread effort by radical theocrats to "ingraft" religion into all aspect of American life, with the express intention of not only weakening, but explicitly erasing the wall of separation between religion and government; and that,

c) This effort is different, in nature and in execution from efforts evident during previous popular "God" fads or cycles--that it is, in fact, not driven by natural grass-roots fear and reaction to world events but is, instead, the deliberate result of a sophisticated campaign to transform America into a literal theocracy, not through a violent coup, but through a cynical Hitlerian use of our own democratic institutions and popular media against us, by people with little or no allegiance to democratic principles or the rule of man's laws; and that;

d) This presents a clear and present danger to the constitutional representative republic in which Americans live, to which the only responsible answer is not to lie low, mock fundies and take a "this too shall pass" attitude, but to (within the law) fight and protest and educate and inform and litigate and legislate and campaign and vote and take every possible action, within the law, to counter this effort.

I don't want to make this first post too long, so I will stop with those four provocative statements, and save their substantiation for future posts by myself and by others who agree with this proposition.

I am also anticipating that individual threads on each of the four contentions wil and should be initiated, but I wanted to tie them all into the basic thesis I present here.

Let loose the hounds.

UPDATE:

Following helpful community discussion, this thesis has been significantly altered to read as follows:

1)An Accomodationist take-over of the Judiciary, coupled with a Christian Reconstructionist take-over of the Executive, coupled with a Creationist take-over of public education, spell grave danger to our democratic republic.

2) The underlying cancer which eats away at US-ian democracy is the institution of organized, hierarchical authoritarian religions, whose mechanisms, rituals and absolutist teachings are inimicable to a free, independent, self-determining citizenry.

3) Strict Separationism, strictly enforced, is essential to the survival of our republic.

[ September 24, 2002: Message edited by: galiel ]</p>

Bible Humper

Hi Galiel,

Let loose the hounds.

Ok, I'm here.

I have trouble believing that they are capable of this level of sophisticated co-ordination, and that they could keep knowledge of it under wraps.

I think that the right wing in Amerika is merely exploiting this current "God fad" as much as they can, I really doubt that the fad itself is the result of a conspiracy.

I can't imagine that the old money in America would allow America to become some backwards theocracy, they are just riding the wave to their own advantage until it peters out.

Rusting Car Bumper

Any ideology pushed by an organized group can be a threat to deomcracy

Fundamentalism is the grave threat and possibly the biggest one. This is especially true since, in thier minds, they don't answer to the people ultimately.

Some organized churches have made strong church-state seperation statements. Some Baptists had done that and Catholics say they favor it. Of course, times have changed for the Baptists and we see Catholics getting involved with all manner of things.

DC

Jayhawker Soule

Wherein lies the irreparably incompatibility between the Quakers and the U.S. system of government in particular?

Buffman

Bible Humper

I can't imagine that the old money in America would allow America to become some backwards theocracy, they are just riding the wave to their own advantage until it peters out.

That is exactly the same thought that many of these so-called "Old Money" Republicans held when the up-start, politically conservative, religious fundamentalists began their efforts to take total control of the Republican Party. "It will never be allowed to happen. We'll just use their organizations, religious fervor and "New Money" to beat the Democrats." Well surprise, surprise! Look who became President! Look who are the most powerful voices in Congress! Not "Old Money" moderate Republicans. It's the "New Money" fundamentalists.

Many times I have recommended that folks examine how a small group... almost never more than 15% of the total membership/populace...of zealously dedicated Communists were able to take-over entire nations and control much of the world at one point. And who were the greatest anti-Communists in America? Primarily the Christian fundamentalists. They studied their enemy in depth in order to be better able to fight and win. They had to determine which Communist techniques worked the best. They did. And now those same techniques are being used to successfully advance their own theocratic ends. They are only one or two Supreme Court appoinments away from total, brilliant, bloodless coup, victory.

IMHO, religion has always been an organized conspiracy to cloud the human mind in order to feed its own voracious dogmatic ends. It is accomplished by selling phoney Eternal Life Insurance Policies to those that are under-informed and fearful. Democracic pluralism and a secular, accurate, education system are the two biggest hurdles that organized religions must surmount before it can feel safe that the slaves will not rebell.

(Just out of curiosity B.H., to what "Old Money" are you referring?)

Buffman

ReasonableDoubt

Wherein lies the irreparably incompatibility between the Quakers and the U.S. system of government in particular?

Pacifism in the face of overt, uncompromising, aggression? There is no supernatural God to mete out justice.

galiel

Ah, there's the rub, and the reason I am no longer able to dismiss this as another paranoid conspiracy, which, like you, I did for a long, long time.

The goals and the strategy are *not* kept under wraps, they are just not trumpeted on CNN. Just as Arafat has, in the past, often said different things in Arabic for local consumption than he does in English for global consumption, so the extremists of which I speak declare their intentions freely in front of sympathetic audiences, and then lie through their teeth in public (or in Senate confirmation hearings).

I should really have worded things better, because I am not at all sure whether there is any central authority behind this (I doubt it), or if this is simply a loose but long-term consensus to act consistently, among a wide group of extremists, to achieve a common goal (I think so).

Of course they are just exploiting circumstances such as 9/11, although, unlike you, I don't mean "they" to be the right wing in the sense of conservatives or Republicans--the vast overwhelming majority have a strong commitment to democracy and freedom--just a different way of accomplishing and measuring them than the left does (or others in the spectrum, since "left and right" no longer accurately describe the political divisions in America)

It's not so much a "conspiracy", in the traditional sense of a small cabal of people gathering in a dark room to plot the overthrow of government. It is more of a coordinated effort among the leaders of different messianic extremist groups who share the ultimate goal of a theistic state and the hastening of the End of Days.

If you want to wade into the messy factionalism of modern Christianity, I am talking specifically about the extreme tail of the evangelical movement, the "Dispensational Premillenialists" - people who believe literally in the "Rapture", and in their duty to take action here on Earth in order to hasten the coming of the End Days. You might call them "muscular evangelists".

Dismissed until recently as a fringe source of amusement, even by the mainstream right, they now have a U.S. Attorny General, at least one Supreme Court Justice in Scalia, and hold many other positions of influence in media, education, corporate America and elsewhere (specifics to come or this post will never end).

Read what they preach to the choir, and you will hear things that go way beyond wanting to "restore morality" or bring prayer back to the public schools. They are openly hostile to and mocking of democracy, they view their ultimate allegiance to God as overriding any Earthly concerns. Just as Bush has simplistically equated Iraq with "Evil" (more of a traditional right-wing approach), these extremists identify "secular America" itself as the great "Evil", capitalized and iconized. For them, democracy is the Devil's work.

Again, in and of itself, the ubiquity of people of a certain belief system in positions of power does not mean anything in our pluralistic society with its checks and balances and cyclical politics. In and of itself, none of this would be such a problem, were the ultimate goal, a theocratic America, not inimicable to the U.S. system of government and way of life.

From time to time, a particular ideology holds sway and a particular set of actors control the stage. However, as long as our representative republic is intact, as long as free speech and assembly are preserved, and as long as education is not monopolized, competing ideologies have a chance to be heard and the natural cycle continues.

This is not the first time in our history that we have been faced with a deliberate effort to subvert America and destroy its democratic institutions, and in the past our institutional checks and balances have won out.

Hell, John Adams came damn close to turning this into a monarchy way back when. McCarthy, while not successful in destoying America in order to "save it", certainly destroyed a hell of a lot of lives along the way. But he, too, was stopped.


What sets these people apart is the extremism of their views, their belief in the need to act in this world according to messianic beliefs, and their belief that our current secular democracy is a barrier to acheiving their goals.


It is not an individual or specific organization that is fronting the effort. It is the combination of thousands of little efforts, all united by faith and galvanized through the community institution and communication conduit of the church. And they are cynically exploiting the "normal" conservative right, which does want to inject more religion into American society, but hardly would favor a theistic oligarchy.

The old money in America does not hold nearly the influence it once did. And, old or new, no American institution has had to confront the aggregate power and wealth of religious institutions, nor had to deal with their unfair advantages in terms of exemptions and waivers of the limits and laws that bind the rest of us.

You might as well have said that enlightend Germany would never allow something like Hitler. The thing is, unlike, say McCarthy, the Radical Messianic Right is very sophisticated in its public pronouncements and takes advantage of the narrow funnel through which most of the public still recieves their information. And they are tremendously patient.

Jayhawker Soule

Interesting response, particularly when generalized to encompass pacifism in general. I need to rethink what is meant by 'irreparable incompatibility'. Thanks.

galiel

Debating about specific religions deflects from the larger question (although judging from Nixon, one of only two Quaker Presidents--the other being the undistinguished Herbert Hoover--it is hardly clear that being a devout Quaker makes one any better a small-d democrat).

Organized religion is inherently authoritarian - US democracy isn't.

Organized religion believes in sacred, immutable laws passed down by a divine authority who holds precedent over the laws of man- US democracy functions based on laws created by humans, laws flexible, imperfect and always amenable to improvement.

Organized religion believes in the sancitity of certain texts - this has led to an inappropriate reverence for the Constitution, which has hampered efforts to keep it up to date and treat it as the living document it was for the first hundred years or so of our republic.

Organized religion filters down the "word of God" through a self-appointed priesthood; this indoctrinates unquestioned trust in officials and prominent public figures, which runs contrary to the US system's reliance on peer review and underlying equality of all the players.

Organized religion discourages free inquiry and discovery; it relies on indoctrination and limiting exposure to opposite beliefs; this is contrary to both tue principle of an informed, self-governing populace and the principles of reason, logic and the scientific method, which have proven critical to the enfranchisement and empowerment of increasingly greater spheres of society; for example, science helped overcome religiously based falacies regarding the inferiority of women to men, whites to blacks, etc.

Organized religion indoctrinates the idea that there is a unambiguous answer to everything, that it is important to have an unambiguous answer to everything, and that challenging assumptions is a bad thing--precisely destructive attitudes for a free democracy based upon reason.

Organized religion divides the world into "us" and "them" -- those who believe the "right" faith and those who do not; That is contrary to the interests of US democracy to unify and unite.

Organized religion relies on the idea that God responds to certain rituals and that one can change the world merely by asking for help from a Divine being, however a particular religion specifies that; for democracy to work, its citizens need to believe that the their actions alone can make a difference.

There is much more, but fundamentally, the amount of organized religious influence in a society is inversly proportional to the health of its democratic institutions.

[ September 23, 2002: Message edited by: galiel ]</p>

galiel

I think this exchange about Quakerism missed my point (which probably means I didn't make it clearly enough).

The issue is not any specific religious doctrine, any more than the issue is any specific religious believer.

The problem is that the INSTITUTION of organized religion is inherently hostile to the fundamental principles which make our USian system work. My argument is that, the greater the influence of organized religion, the greater the threat.

Perhaps some definitions are in order. by "Organized religion", I mean specifically one-way hierarchical systems of the following type:

God
|
\/
Law
(divinely and immutably written by God)
|
\/
Priesthood
(exclusively receive and interpret Law from God)
|
\/
Church
(centralized ritual and indoctrination space where Priests transmit interpreted Law,
collect $ which fund Priests, use peer pressure to "keep the faithful faithful" and influence new potential recruits)
|
\/
Followers
(Sole jobs are to unquestionably follow and fund Priests)

Note that by this definition, state Communism and other unquestioned, dogmatic hierarchical systems resemble but do not have quite the staying power of formal theistic religions.

Note, two, how utterly incompatible such a system is with democracy, with representational republics, with scientific inquiry, with the concept of acquiring new knowledge, with the mutability of law, with the rule of human law.

It doesn't matter that some organized religions cleverly adjust to changing times. It doesn't matter that some religions are evnagelical and some aren't. The underlying system depends utterly on indoctrination of followers in following, not participating, in unquestioned acceptance of authority, in belief in "right" answers and in dividing the world into "us" and "them".

[ September 23, 2002: Message edited by: galiel ]</p>