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Fighting Theocracy: A Cheat Sheet (Part 1) [1]

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Date: 2022-06-30

“Americans have fallen out of the healthy old habit of reminding each other how sinful Theocracy can be.”

It might make us feel better to rant and vent about the T-word, but let’s quickly get back to the serious business of situation assessment. Before we can project forward, we must comprehend the present, which requires perception of the past as well.

Today’s diary is prompted by a well-intentioned but mistaken comment I read here on DK yesterday.

I submit we blues have lost the last half century in part by being too passive combating a small set of memes that are flat wrong, but which the reds have drummed through repetition into the shared world-view of their flock, especially the MAGAt mob fringe. (To get a little pedantic, what Aristotle called endoxa.) Here below a summary table of the first batch of five bogus memes and their corrections:

Bogus MEME Correction 1 The USA was founded as a (Judeo-)Christian nation. “[T]he Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion” --John Adams, POTUS, 1796 See also Jefferson and Franklin, who thought the claim of Jesus’s divinity to be absurd and dubious, respectively. 2 The Founders believed the republic needed a Christian (= Protestant) citizenry. This one is trickier because it is true that many of them believed the people needed to be “religious”. But they meant the word religion in the sense that the Greco-Romans did, as a matter of honoring civic ritual for the sake of cohesion/union, so strength. They considered both Judaism and Christianity to be superstitions. George Washington’s Farewell Address is often quoted in support of the bogus meme, but it contains no form of the words “christ”, “jesus” or even “god”. Ditto the Constitution. 3 Separation of church and state is not what the Founders had in mind since at the time of the Revolution most states had established churches. The 1st Amendment was about states’ rights, not the People’s. To practice as we preach, pun intended, we blues have to accept this assertion … with a “Yes, but”. It is true that some states continued with established churches into the 1800s, until the 14th Amendment incorporated/applied the Bill of Rights to the state as well as federal level. “Originalists” pay lip-service to the fundamental architectural changes to the Constitution since the Civil War. This bogus meme is no more germane than would be arguments for re-instituting slavery. 4 Arguing against any religion is a form of bigotry, or worse, hate speech. Nonsense, as religion is a completely mutable set of ideas. Contra the UN’s bogus definition of Hate Speech, beliefs are not “inherent characteristics”. Memes are software. Inherent means hardware, immutable. If it’s permissible to criticize Bolshevism or Nazism, it must be equally permissible to criticize [— insert your favorite religion or religious idea —]. The hate laws in the USA in any case are about behavior. Yes, crimes can carry a kicker, but pure speech of a dialectic nature is fully protected. Beware the sophistry of conflating theocracy with religion, it goes without saying. They’re both fair game, but courtesy and liberal principles demand we treat the latter more gently than the former. 5 The US citizenry is majority Protestant and our “tradition” is Biblical (meaning the Judeo-Christianities). See Pew Research for the statistics. While it is true that the Christianities lumped all together still account for more than 60% of survey respondents, you have to unpack a bit. Of the three largest groupings (Protestant Evangelicals, Protestant Non-Evangelicals and Catholics), who by and large do not consider the others to be Christian, none has a higher plurality than Religiously Unaffiliated, trending toward 1/3 of total and also the fastest growing category of the majors. The Founders drew much more inspiration from their understanding of classical Greco-Roman (pre-Constantine) civilization. They were men of the Reformation and Enlightenment who used pseudonyms from antiquity, mostly Romans. Not a theologian or important religious figure in the lot.

The next batch in Part 2 will deal with the epistemology issues Jonathan Rauch covered in his excellent 2021 book The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth.

Feel free to add your own favorite bogosities in the comments.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/6/30/2107559/-Fighting-Theocracy-A-Cheat-Sheet-Part-1

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