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I’d be interested to know how legal minds can believe, without evidence, in god. (I call it “sequestered rationality.”)

Excellent column. My sentiments exactly.

It would indeed be fun to discuss, if the site was comment-enabled (heh heh).

I don’t share the disbelief in God, but I’m sympathetic to the way comments like Ashcroft’s fall on the ears of many “rational” conservatives. Faith is great for the situations you truly can’t explain or the circumstances you truly can’t control (and here I’m probably open to the accusation of cafeteria spirituality), but that’s far from the case for so many political or foreign policy issues.

Probably no section of the political spectrum is immune from overfevered religion. I can’t tell you how frustrated I get by the pious insistence that Jesus would have supported socialism.

The discussion at National Review Online is illuminating, if depressing. John Podhoretz dismisses Heather’s concerns on the grounds that there are hardly any secularists in America anyway. That’s in notable contrast to the usual (and more accurate) social conservative breast beating about how Americans, especially on the coasts, no longer believe except notionally. Jonah Goldberg somewhat corrects this, but then goes on to state that the attitude of twice-a-year church-attending “cultural Christians” toward the deeply pious partakes heavily of _envy_ — which seems not only wrong as a sociological observation, but also at odds with the usual social-conservative complaint that secularists are snootily disdainful of fundamentalists, Darwin-deniers, etc.

Heather had cited the noxious assertion of perhaps the Religious Right’s most visible public intellectual, Richard John Neuhaus, to the effect that nonbelievers cannot be trusted to be good citizens or political leaders, a view that if memory serves has also been expressed over the years in such venues as the Weekly Standard. Ramesh Ponnuru calls foul on the grounds that Neuhaus wrote those words 15 years ago — without the slightest showing that the First Things editor has reconsidered, or that his view isn’t widely shared.

More convincingly, Andrew Stuttaford points out that as religious activism has assumed a larger role within the GOP, the party’s commitment to smaller/limited government has waned — not surprisingly, since many of the new activists display little seeming commitment to those precepts.

“I can’t tell you how frustrated I get by the pious insistence that Jesus would have supported socialism.” Yep. Jesus certainly did advocate sharing your good fortune with your poor neighbors, but he never suggested creating a mammoth government bureaucracy to extort money from you and give it to the poor. “Liberal” has come to mean people who can’t see the difference…

As a secular conservative myself, I apprecitate the article.

Hopefully part of the fallout of this article will be at least the notion that secular conservatives really do exist, contrary to popular opinion.

Egads! Are secular conservatives beginning to get a bit of that same silly “my offense trumps your free speech” disease that’s made so much of liberal chatter boring and left liberal talk radio dead in the water? For Pete’s sake, this world has all sorts of people. Learn to live with it and enjoy the differences. Don’t expect everyone to cater to your whims, likes and dislikes.

An analogy: When you go into a restaurant, do you expect everyone to order what you’ve ordered? Then don’t expect everyone to share your POV in public or private speech. Perhaps our 99.99% of conversations make no mention of God. Don’t get your cat’s fur up over the other 0.01%. Some of you seem to fit the classic definition of an atheist–someone who’s mad at God for not existing. Cool it.

And that brings up an interesting experience. I was part of an academic Internet discussion group that turned to the topic of replacing BC (i.e. “Before Christ”) with BCE (“Before the Common Era”). Talking sense–pointing out that that “common era” had absolutely no meaning–got nowhere, so I decided to play the devil’s advocate.

I claimed to be offended that our Western calendar used pagan gods (i.e. Thursday is “Thors Day”) for the days of the week and deified Roman emperors (i.e. August for Augustus) for the months. I then came up with a totally bizarre scheme for removing all religion from our calendar. It was so strange, I’m not sure I could recreate it, but it was something like Sunday becoming Firstday and January becoming Firstmon. Friday, July 4th would then become a tongue-tangling, mind-numbing Sixday, Sevenmon the Fourth. Yuk!

I wanted to point out several things. First, that for untold hundreds of years, Christianity had been mellow about these well-established and obviously pagan terms, so there was something a bit weird about secularists getting in ditter about them after only a few decades on top of the pile. I also wanted to show the absurdity of BCE/CE by pushing it to its logical extreme. I should have know better than to inject logic into political correctness.

Alas, one history professor, a nice guy, but so proud of being politically correct and using BCE/CE in his classroom, contacted me and seemed to be dealing with my name-changing insanity with almost painful seriousness. At that point I gave up. I couldn’t understand how to deal with people who would want us to have dates as silly as “Sixday, Sevenmon the Fourth.”

Would they want us to purge every mention of those religious terms from all literature? Would the “Ides of March” (i.e. Mars, the god of war) in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar become the “Ides of Threemon”? Would his 18th sonnet become, “Rough winds do shake the darling buds of Fivemon” even though that no longer rhymes with “summer’s day.” Insane. The churches demonstrated good sense when they left calendars alone. Why can’t our supposedly rational secularists show the same good sense?

In all this, I’m reminded of how a 9th circuit court concluded its decision over the use of “Pretty Woman” in a parody song. “Get a life,” it told the plaintiff/complainers. You’d don’t own what other people say.

That’s probably good advice for all of us to follow when we hear some word or words we don’t happen to like. Get a life.

–Mike Perry, Inkling Books, Seattle
Editor: Theism and Humanism by British Prime Minister Arthur Balfour

I am an atheist, that is, I deny the existence of God. That said, I don’t care about the little things, like getting Xmas off at work, the BC thing, etc.

It’s when idiots want to tell my child that the earth is 7000 years old that I get mad. As long as your (the generic your) crazy ideas don’t affect me I don’t care. But when zealots want to make laws based on a belief in magic, I get upset.

Mr. Perry,

I believe you missed the point of the article. Speaking for myself and the other secular conservatives I know, we’re not bothered by using BC, have no interest in changing the names of the months, and really aren’t offended whatsoever by people being religious in every day life.

Heck, I even voted to save the Mt. Soledad Cross in San Diego. I’m planning to send my future children to Catholic school.

The problem arises when people in power cite magical sources in their decisions regarding policies that have lasting effects on the entire world.

Consider how you would feel if the President stated he chose his latest policy by Ouija board and you’ll understand a secular conservative’s concern about it.