Why I must Defend Religion From the Attacks of the Fundamentalists.
This short essay was actually a reply to a series of comments in a Facebook post by a friend, which was his commentary on a New York Times Opinion piece on the so-called "Christian Theology" at the heart of Trump's political base. This article brought forth many of the thematic arguments going back the the USA's inception regarding Separation of Church and State, and religious freedom. Here below is my commentary.
Just a thought that might add something here. I make a distinction between Religion and Religious Fundamentalism. Whichever faith we are discussing, a litmus test for its overall effect on society is whether its leaders claim sole authenticity and "Dominion" over the interpretation of religious text, as did the Delphic Oracles in ancient Greece, and use that interpretation as their platform for asserting arbitrary authority.
That is the origin for division, oppression, and discrimination in the secular world by failed religions. Its analogous to the posture of the "legalists" in other cultures, such as the Greece of Socrates, and the anti-Confucian movements in China. Also it parallels the legalists in our Court System today of "The Fedaralist Society", associated with Scalia, Alito, Barr etal, who promote "originalism", or what Scalia dubbed "textualism", the pernicious belief that they have a virtually Divine (occult) literal knowledge of the intentions of the Creator, the authors of the Bible, the Torah, the Koran, or the US Constitution.
People who claim to have superior wisdom through which they obtain "secret knowledge" are not theologians or legal authorities. They are aspiring Cult leaders, their purpose being control. They are using the interpretion of "text" to obliterate the spirit of the content of the words, in order to render beautiful and ennobling concepts into their opposite. What America's Founders were concerned about, I believe, was the historical use of perverted religion by Oligarchs to impose precisely the forms of division and slavery which we see coming from the Fundamentalists today.
Therefore, I, as an agnostic, feel I must defend Religion from an unfair generalization, and instead focus on the use of synthetic forms of Fundamentalism by Oligarchs to enslave and divide, our problem being the Oligarchy itself, rather than the tools they use to degrade and diminish people. Religion is not the only arrow in their quiver. They have Bloodsports, hardcore Porn, consumerism, Reality TV, superstition and other forms of bacchanalia associated with ancient Rome. So the problem and the solution, as I see it, that the Framers were preoccupied with is to insure that an Oligarchy never rises up to take power in the US, using whatever means, Fundamentalism or other.
Then, the question becomes, who and what is the Oligarchy, what are their institutional forms and arrangements that need to be broken, and how does one distinguish between an authentic religion and a synthetic Fundamentalist cult? How many leaders do we have today who are willing to risk assasination or Prison to fight the Oligarchs effectively, as did MLK, and his movement, or our martyred Presidents and other Civil Rights leaders?
To me, if Madison were alive today, he would be more frightened at the lack of and/or failure of leadership than the disorientation caused by bad religion. The failure of our leadership and our popular culture has destroyed our society's cultural defenses to Fundamentalism, in the same way a deadly virus overwhelms our immune system.
So yes, religious bigotry and irrationality cannot be allowed to commandeer our government or politics for all of the reasons stated here. I think though it is important to make the distinction I did, simply because so much of humanity's progress has been driven by the contributions of people whose actions and discoveries were rooted in a lawful and rational belief in a higher power, from Erasmus, to Rembrandt, Thomas More, to MLK. And it can be that way again, if we do what our Founders did, by kicking the shit out of the Oligarchy.
