Footprints On The Beach

Beliefnet columnist Rob Dreher is of the "what's the big deal?" and shrug your shoulders-variety of Christian conservative who believes that all of us folks that are concerned with the separation of church and state, and the civil rights inherent in the first amendment, should quit getting our panties in a wad.

[Rob Dreher] You might be able to say that the goal of secularism is to separate Christianity, particularly fundamentalist Christianity, from governance--but you'd have to prove, first, that fundamentalist Christianity is unduly entangled with governance. Aside from the matter of a few attempts to get either Intelligent Design or Creationism into government schools, though, or at least to remind students that the theory of evolution does not in any way prove the non-existence of God no matter how many times, or in how many ways, this is claimed, it's hard to see just where the excessive entanglement between Christianity and government might lie.

Putting aside the absolutely loopy insinuation that "secularists" make the claim that evolution somehow "proves the non-existence of God" (it doesn't - evolution says exactly ZERO about the Christian God), I would like to address Rob's paragraph here:

There is no logical secular reason to oppose the death penalty, for one example, after all; a true secularist could just as easily see such an act as a necessary operation to remove an unsatisfactory and destructive collection of self-aware human tissue from the body politic before the cancer of his lethiferous actions spreads to other self-aware tissue collections. But the new secular morality is taking some of its shape from the old Christian one, while rejecting other aspects of it--which means that it is not Christian morality in toto being rejected, just those elements of it which interfere with the secular vision.

There is no such animal as a "true secularist". Any more than there is a "True Christian(tm)". I call strawman.

And also, a "self-aware tissue collection"? Seriously? Does Dreher *truly* believe that these mythical "True Secularists(tm)" think of their fellow human beings in this way?

Now he's just being silly.

Because the right thing, in the new secular morality, will always be that thing which elevates the atomized individual and his choices in the sexual, biologically-manipulable, life and death arenas over any other thing. The manifesto was written, and it reads: "At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life." (Planned Parenthood vs. Casey).

That is the foundational truth upon which the new secular morality upon which the laws of our new national reality, devoid of "religion," will be based. And the reason the old Christian morality has to go is that it has rejected that insanely relativistic notion and the path to the nihilistic darkness to which it leads.

Gosh, it sure is fun to make up a parody of an entire group of people, then attribute wild and crazy motivations to them, thus making it easier to paint them as soulless freaks who are trying demoniacally to lead America down the "path to nihilistic darkness".

I mean, it's ever so much more interesting than, say, the truth. It certainly makes for a more interesting Beliefnet column - that is, if you can swallow the premise of a ravaging sub-human horde of baby-eating atheist liberals bent of the destruction of America.

So, what is the truth? The truth is that most folks are good people. They love their families and their friends. They celebrate Christmas. They give to charity. They consume, and in doing so, keep our capitalist economy chugging along. They vote for the guy they think will do the best job. They babysit their neighbor's kids, and carpool to work. They are concerned about the environment, but love their big V-8s and their ATVs. They hunt. They fish. They go to work, and bring home a paycheck for the family.

People are people. There are extremes, of course, but the vast middle-ground is filled with basically decent, friendly, good people. They are made up of all colors, and all political parties.

There is no sinister secular plot to supplant the "traditional Christian morality". Christian morality isn't "dissolving". That's just hogwash. Our HUMAN morality has developed and changed and - yes - evolved, throughout the history of our species. It will continue to evolve to meet the unique and changing conditions and needs of our societies. One does not "supplant" the other. "Morality" is all one big, homogeneous, changing, fluid set of guidelines that - through trial and error over hundreds of thousands of years, us humans have agreed-upon in order to make our societies work better.

Some "moral" things are almost always there; Don't murder. Don't rape. Protect women and children, etc. Other things come and go as needed by the species to better survive; Take more than one wife. Cannibalism is OK. Incest is OK if there aren't any other people around. Human sacrifice pleases the gods. Etc. All of these "sometimes" things have been "moral" at some point in our history. That fact that we generally don't consider them to be "moral" actually supports the idea that morality evolves and changes over time, according to it's "environment" (human society).

Please note that trying to stop this change, this evolution of morality, is akin to trying to stop the waves from washing away your footprints on the beach. Futile and childish.

Morality is an expression of our species-level human survival. It is not about a god, gods, God, godlet, goddess, or no-god.

So, Rob Dreher, great column and all - it was fun to read, and to pick apart. But ultimately it's nothing more than sound and fury, signifying nothing more that your own petulant denial of the nature of reality.