Old FURIOUS nads! by The One True b!X

Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism
by Susan Jacoby

The absence of triumphalism and religious certainty in the Second Inaugural merits particular notice in view of the political rhetoric, combining religion and the doctrine of American exceptionalism, that surrounds and attempts to sanctify America’s current military actions. As White notes, Lincoln “offered little comfort for those who in every crisis of war want to chant, ‘God is on our side.’” And even though the arguments of the Second Inaugural are grounded in biblical concepts, “Lincoln speaks forever against any ‘God bless America’ etiology that fails to come to terms with evil and hypocrisy in its own house.” Indeed, the impartial stewardship of Lincoln’s God — He gives both North and South this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offense came — may explain the initial coolness of the reception accorded his “greatest speech” in the North. The unmistakable implication of complicity in slavery on the part of all Americans, including Lincoln himself, was as far removed from the fervid moral righteousness of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” as it is from George W. Bush’s pious excoriation of evildoers.

…

… Lincoln, who has less than six weeks to live, was speaking not as a theologian or a saint but as a good and merciful man (too merciful, in the view of many northerners who wished to see their southern compatriots punished severely for their rebellion against the Union). After Lincoln’s death, his would-be canonizers would appropriate that goodness and mercy under the banner of religion. The attempt to Christianize a president who had never been a member of a Christian church was predictable, if paradoxical, after a war of extraordinary brutality fought by both sides in the name of Christian righteousness. “There was something in the hearts of good and typical Christian[s] … which exploded,” commented a Union general who had witnessed the savage guerrilla warfare between northern and southern sympathizers in Missouri and Kansas, where thousands of civilians were tortured, mutiliated, murdered, or driven from their homes. If these were typical Christians, could Christianity truly be termed good? Could religion be relied on to soften the exploding hearts of men? The transformation of the martyred leader into patron saint of the new American political religion was an attempt to proclaim, in a confident affirmative, that religion was the answer. For Lincoln, poised between belief and unbelief, religion was the question.

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Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism
by Susan Jacoby

… The real cause of America’s fratricidal conflict, many religious leaders asserted, was the failure of the founders to enshrine God in the Constitution. The war was nothing more — or less — than the fulfillment of the Reverend John Mason’s 1793 prediction that the godless document would one day impel the Divinity to “crush us to atoms in the wreck.” The only way to stop the destruction was to amend the Constitution’s preamble and finally acknowledge not only God but Jesus Christ as the source of all governmental power. In 1863, the “nondenominational,” albeit entirely Protestant, National Reform Association was founded for the specific purpose of lobbying Congress to put God into the Constitution. Today’s Christian conservatives frequently use the slogan “Let’s put God back into the Constitution,” thereby implying that “secular humanists” have managed to overturn what was originally intended to be a marriage of church and state. Nineteenth-century clerics knew better and were honest about their desire to reverse what they regarded as the founders’ erroneous decision to separate church and state. At an 1864 convention in Pittsburgh, the National Reform delegates were in a dither about how to word the proposed amendment before presenting it to President Lincoln and the Congress, so as not to offend any orthodox Protestant denomination. They were not worried about offending Jews, Catholics, or dissident Protestant sects like the Hicksite Quakers, who were appalled by the idea of tampering with the Constitution in order to blur the distinction between church and state. After rejecting acknowledgment of “Almighty God” and “His revealed will” as too imprecise, the ministers finally agreed on a rewording of the preamble that would replace “We, the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union…” with “Recognizing Almighty God as the source of all authority and power in civil government, and acknowledging the Lord Jesus Christ as the Governor among nations, His revealed will as the supreme order of the land, in order to constitute a Christian government…”

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Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism
by Susan Jacoby

… The connection between the nineteenth-century women’s movement and the abolitionist movement is well known, but the relation between both movements and anticlericalism has received much less attention from historians. Yet, the moral authority of churches — their claim to preeminence in determining the proper approach to the great moral question of the day — was challenged both by radical abolitionists and by the early advocates of women’s rights. Although many of the radical abolitionists, mostly notably Garrison, the editor of the Liberator, were deeply religious — as were early proponents of women’s rights such as the Grimké sisters and Lucretia Mott — they were also deeply anticlerical. “Truth for authority, not authority for truth” was the motto of Mott, a Nantucket-born Quaker lay minister, abolitionist, and feminist. What made radical abolitionists radical was their demand for an immediate rather than a gradual end to slavery. Beecher once argued that if everyone would only stop arousing public passions on the slavery question, white Christian benevolence would ensure that the system would disappear of its own accord — in another two centuries. This “solution” to the problem of slavery was seen as not only immoral but ludicrous by abolitionists, who were repelled by the contention that one group — whites — deserved the power to restrict the natural human rights of others. In parallel fashion, the nation’s first generation of feminists rejected the received opinion that male authority should determine the extent of women’s rights. The conjunction of radical abolitionism with early feminism is an important chapter in the history of American secularism because those who came of age in the 1820s and 1830s were the first generation of American social reformers to make the connection between reactionary religion and reactionary domestic social institutions. Unlike the grievances of the eighteenth-century colonists, nineteenth-century injustices could not be blamed on a tyrannical Enligh king but were indisputably made in America.

The religiously correct version of American history has never given proper credit to the central importance of the Enlightenment concept of natural rights — or to the anticlerical abolitionists who advanced that concept before the public — in building the case against slavery. Throughout the three decades preceding the Civil War, the anticlerical ethos of the radical abolitionists was used against them by religious opponents of emancipation, who frequently trotted out the specter of the French Revolution and even described abolitionism itself as an atheist plot. In 1850, the slavery-exalting Presbyterian J. H. Thornwell, who was about to be named president of the College of South Carolina, declared that “the parties in this conflict are not merely abolitionists and slaveholders — they are atheists, socialists, communists, red republicans, jacobins on the one side, and the friends of order and regulated freedom on the other. In one word, the world is the battleground — Christianity and atheism the combatants; and the progress of humanity the stake.” … While most abolitionists were neither atheists nor Jacobins, te defenders of slavery were right to make the connection between the revolutionary freethought of Paine and the radical wing of the antislavery movement. Religious conservatives today are the ones who are mistaken in their insistence that the antislavery movement had nothing to do with Enlightenment values — values that would, in turn, be adopted and adapted by abolitionist women who wished no less for themselves than they wished for slaves.

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Galatea 2.2: A Novel
by Richard Powers

For a while, I felt a low-grade thrill at being alive in the moment when this unprecedented thing congealed. But after weeks of jetsetting around the hypermap, I began to see the web as just the latest term in an ancient polynomial expansion. Each nick on the time line spit out some fitful precursor. Everyone who ever lied had lived at a moment of equal astonishment.

The web had been a long while in linking up. It, too, was just a stopgap stage in a master plan drawn up on the back of the brain’s envelope. A bit of improvised whittling, forever a step shy. A provisional pontoon in that rough pencil sketch for final triumph over space and time.

I explored the world’s first network in embryo. After days of disappearing children, I spent my nights playing in the greatest virtual sandbox yet built. I’d stumbled upon a stack of free travel vouchers. I put up in U., but I resided elsewhere. I thought: a person might be able to make a life in all that etherspace.

Each day produced new improbabilities. I searched card catalogs in Kyoto or book reports from Bombay. German soccer scores and Alaskan aurora sightings filled my office E-mail pouch.

I eavesdropped on international discussion groups, ongoing, interactive Scheherazades that covered every imaginable theme from arms control to electronic erotica. Notefile threads split and proliferated in meiosis. Debates flowed without beginning or end, through tributaries and meanderings, responses to responses to responses. Inexhaustible protagonists from every time zone posted to the continuous forum a dozen or more times a day.

Alone in my office, blanketed by the hum of the Center, I felt like a boy happening onto a copy of the Odyssey in a backwater valley library. I wanted to rush out into the hall and announce my each discovery. But who could I tell? Those lonely souls who stood most to gain would only shake their heads, dazed, locked out on every level. Those who had the wherewithal to see what the fuss was about had already habituated to the inconceivable.

…

But the longer I lurked, the sadder the holiday became. People who used the web turned strange. In public panels, they disguised their sexes, their ages, their names. They logged on to the electronic fray, adopting every violent persona but their own. They whizzed binary files at each other from across the planet, the same planet where impoverished villages looked upon a ball-point pen with wonder. The web began to seem a vast, silent stock exchange trading in ever more anonymous and hostile pen pals.

The web was a neighborhood more efficiently lonely than the one it replaced. Its solitude was bigger and faster. When relentless intelligence finally completed its program, when the terminal drop box brought the last barefoot, abused child on line and everyone could at last say anything instantly to everyone else in existence, it seemed to me we’d still have nothing to say to each other and many more ways not to say it.

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The Devil in Dover: An Insider’s Story of Dogma v. Darwin in Small-town America
by Lauri Lebo

After trial each day, I’d go back to the York Daily Record newsroom and write a story for the next day. This particular night I wrote as my lede, “One of intelligent design’s leading experts could not identify the driving force behind the concept.”

I wrote that Behe said that “intelligent design focuses exclusuvely on proposed mechanisms of how complex biological structures arose. But during cross-examination Tuesday, when plaintiffs’ attorney Eric Rothschild asked Behe to identify those mechanisms, he couldn’t. When pressed, Behe said intelligent design does not propose a step-by-step mechanism, but one can still infer intelligent cause was involved by the ‘purposeful arrangement of parts.’”

At about 11 P.M., I was gathering my things to leave the office, when Randy Parker, the managing editor, called. He wanted me to rewrite the story in order to make it appear more favorable to the pro-intelligent design side. He told me he thought my coverage had been “OK so far, but now I think we’re just piling on.”

I said that would be misrepresenting the truth. “They [the defense] must have done something you could lead with,” he said. The editors had long been concerned with my reporting on the case, fearing the newspaper would offend fundamentalist readers. They reminded me of my obligation “to be fair and balanced,” even as it became more obvious that there was nothing balanced about this debate. But until this phone call, no one had actively tried to force me to spin the story to favor a lie. Parker, who hadn’t spent one minute in the courtroom, was trying to impose a false notion of balance on my coverage. I could hear my voice, shrill, say into the phone, “No, they did nothing. Rothschild eviscerated them.”

Finally, Parker backed down. The lede stayed the same. When I left the office, I was shaking.

I thought of this notion of “fair and balanced” journalism and of how, somewhere along the line, we as journalists have gotten confused by a misguided notion of objectivity. It is our job to inform readers of the truth, not just regurgitate lies, even if it means the stories are no longer “balanced.” Every day, I watched what took place in the courtroom. And while I didn’t always get everything exactly right, this much I knew: If I went back to the newsroom and, in the interest of objectivity, pulled from my notes the best quote from the parents’ attorneys and the best quote from Dover’s attorneys and used them to present intelligent design and evolution as evenly balanced, then I’d be misleading readers.

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Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism
by Susan Jacoby

It is one of the greatest unresolved paradoxes of American history that religion has come to occupy such an important place in the communal psyche and public life of a nation founded on the separation of church and state. The tension between secularism and religion was present at America’s creation; a secular government, independent of all religious sects, was seen by founders of diverse private beliefs as the essental guarantor of liberty of conscience. The descendants of passionate religious dissenters, who had fled the church-state establishments of the Old World in order to worship God in a multiplicity of ways, were beholden to a godless constitution. From the beginning of the republic, this irony-laden and profoundly creative relationship produced a mixture of gratitude and unease on the part of its beneficiaries.

Given the intensity of both secularist and religious passions in the founding generation, it was probably inevitable that the response of Americans to secularism and freethought — the lovely term that first appeared in the late 1600s and flowered into a genuine social and philosophical movement during the next two centuries — would be fraught with ambivalence. Beginning with the revolutionary era, freethinkers periodically achieved substantial influence in American society, only to be vilified in periods of reaction and consigned to the margins of America’s official version of its history.

American freethought derived much of its power from an inclusiveness that encompassed many forms of rationalist belief. Often defined as a total absence of faith in God, freethought can better be understood as a phenomenon running the gamut from the truly antireligious — those who regarded all religion as a form of superstition and wished to reduce its influence in every aspect of society — to those who adhered to a private, unconventional faith revering some form of God or Providence but at odds with orthodox religious authority. American freethinkers included deists, who, like many of the founding fathers, believed in a “watchmaker God” who set the universe in motion but subsequently took no active role in the affairs of men; agnostics; and unabashed atheists. What the many types of freethinkers shared, regardless of their views on the existence or nonexistence of a divinity, was a rationalist approach to fundamental questions of earthy existence — a convinction that the affairs of human beings should be governed not by faith in the supernatural but by a reliance on reason and evidence adduced from the natrual world. It was this conviction, rooted in Enlightenment philosophy, that carried the day when the former revolutionaries gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 to write the Constitution.

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