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Fighting Theocracy: A Cheat Sheet (Part 2) [1]

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Date: 2022-07-01

6 Faith is reasonable. This is the most dangerous gaslight of all. (See Rauch for the full treatment.) Not to get too deep into the philosophy, but it’s the root of the mischief. Theocracy’s formulation is simple: truth splits into two branches, faith and reason; since there are mysteries still, meaning things that pure reason can’t explain, the authorities of their religion get the final say on those (un)truths, which must then be accepted on faith … and faith trumps reason when the two clash. This is why autocrats (popes, reverends, ex-Presidents, caliphs, General Secretaries, Führers … the bunch) cling to the word Truth/Pravda/Veritas so tenaciously, so Orwellianly. Even in the face of the logical and empirical collapses, the falsification of what they’re peddling. Not to mention they all disagree on those mystery-truths. Which is the thing we shouldn’t eat, pork or beef? Come back when you have an answer. Pardon once more the pedantry, but this is crucial: Faith is Taste. That is, philosophically speaking, faith belongs under the branch of axiology, not the branch concerned with Truth and Knowledge, epistemology. One has faith in things one cannot know. (An important corollary to the bogus meme: science is a religion. No, no. Religion is what kicks in when science runs out, things beyond the ever-expanding boundary of what can have evidence, what can be known … if you can’t handle question marks, consult a priest.)

7 Morality requires religion. It is true that our Founders believed roughly this, as did the Greco-Romans who inspired them. Both meant something different by the term ‘religion’ (see Part 1). To them it was practically a circular meme: morality meant living a disciplined, proper, honorable and regulated life; religion was the practice, the behaviors, of living in conformance with social norms “honoring the gods”, albeit variable from place to place. Parse the distinction. Has nothing to do with absolute rules of piety, like taking communion, or getting circumcised, or bowing this many times per iteration and per day in this or that direction, not eating shellfish or thinking the use of an IUD is a crime punishable by stoning … or damning one’s soul to the perpetual Inferno. There is for sure something approximating universal morality, cutting across the major civilizations: the Golden Rule. Add to it the biosphere de Waal cucumber test, or better yet, the noosphere version, John Rawls’s “justice as fairness”. Duh. All of the hundreds of sects of the Abrahamic religions underlying their dozens of permutations of theocracy are largely distinguished by their appalling and sadistic codes of rights and wrongs. Especially regarding matters of sex. From the Catholic faux-celibacy culture, to Islamic FGM, to Talmudic absurdities, to Puritan witch hunting, etc... Fine: y’all go off an have one of your retreats in a big tent. Come back and lecture the rest of us when you have a unanimous list of sins and virtues. We’ll wait. To quote Bill Barr: it’s bullshit.

8 Apologists aren’t promoting theocracy. This one falls into the category of “protesting too much, methinks”. Blues, watch some tape.

9 There is such a thing as Natural Law. Second only to #6 above, this one is truly pernicious and can have catastrophic consequences. The correction is that in our American system, there is no Law (capital L) higher than the US Constitution. That is quite its very point. The tricky part here is that the Founders were men of another age. Powdered wigs and ivory teeth, muskets and writing with quills by candle light. As much as they had broken free of the darkness of theocracy that had trapped our Western tradition for roughly a millennium and a half — Adams’s famous “spell that Luther broke” — they were at least three leaps of progress back in time. We must give them some grace. They were still continuing the intellectual tradition that releasing the mind from supernaturalism, and so imagining a reality, a cosmos, a universe that is #AllThereIs was a wrong, empty and scary thought. Push it away. The fudge then being the Enlightenmentists’ “Law of Nature”. These days, though, we would simply substitute the term ‘science’. Theocracy (religion/theology for that matter) has nothing to add to the rules of the cosmos. Unless it wants to roll the calendar all the way, way back to mythological, Moses style cosmogony and Divine Law. Or the Book of Enoch’s silly explanations of meteorology. The boxes of hail and snow. Nice. Which is precisely the agenda of Theocracy, rewinding us back to Divine Law, that is, and the point of this diary.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/7/1/2107629/-Fighting-Theocracy-A-Cheat-Sheet-Part-2

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