Imagine This and That

In my online feed earlier this week, someone had posted a cartoon illustration of The Beatles’ “Imagine.” I won’t argue the musical value of the iconic Beatles. But I do take issue with looking to them for civilization wisdom.

The cartoon illustrations, by Pablo Stanley, are charming, cute, and feel-good. But they portray a lie—because that’s what the song is.

from Pablo Stanley's illustration of "Imagine"
screenshot from here

Here are the words that are illustrated:

Imagine there’s no heaven

It’s easy if you try

No hell below us,

Above us only sky.

Imagine all the people

Living for today

Imagine there’s no countries

It isn’t hard to do.

Nothing to kill or die for.

And no religion too.

Imagine all the people

Living life in peace.

Yoo hoo ooh ooh ooh

You may say I’m a dreamer

But I’m not the only one.

I hope some day you’ll join us.

And the world will be one.

What does life look like without heaven? Or without hell? Only the here and now?

It’s a philosophical and religious question. If we have no conception of right and wrong—or whether it matters whether you do right or wrong—what matters? Does it matter what you do? How you affect others? Whether you accomplish anything or treat others fairly? Can you even conceive of anything beyond satisfying your current desires?

There’s a picture of an angel realizing it isn’t an angel, or even a representative of good, since there’s no arbiter of “good,” and there’s a devil realizing it isn’t a devil, or even a representative of evil, since there’s no judgment to identify anything as bad, or even worse than anything else.

In the depiction, the devil offers up a burning heart, which cools in the hands of the erstwhile angel, who, at the point of “living for today,” kisses the devil. Without any identification of good and evil, there’s only love.

Is that what there would be? Why? Why would we even want love, if we can’t identify love as good, or better than any other feeling or attitude? It’s a pretty huge leap of logic to claim that, if we threw out all conceptions of good and bad, we would randomly all happen upon ultimate good.

Humans naturally seek for meaning. And we can’t help but identify what we see as good, better, best, or bad, worse, worst. We can’t function if we don’t value doing one thing more than doing another. If you missed Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, now would be a good time to take a break and read that. Also, go pick up Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life.

Jordan Peterson often talks about doing what gives life meaning. There’s a video from last February that came up for me on YouTube yesterday, “Jordan Peterson on Masculinity, Meaning, God And Fatherhood (with Gadi Taub),” in which he spoke those truths again. Here’s a bit from that:

Jordan Peterson (right) with Gadi Taub
screenshot from here

What I’m trying to suggest to people is that the pathway to meaning—meaning is the antidote to suffering, as far as I can tell. The question is, where is meaning to be found? And my sense is that it’s to be found in responsibility

The next section is about archetypes, and he talks about what the devil is:

Let’s think about the great figure of evil, the figure of Satan. Well, what is that? Well, it’s cultural; it’s a cultural construct. It’s something that has its autonomous existence in some sense, as a meme—to use Dawkins’ terms—that’s extended over thousands and thousands of years. It’s a personality that occupies a transpersonal space. And this is independent of your religious beliefs. It’s something you interact with, whether you’re a believer or not.

People naturally believe in the personification of evil, I think he’s saying, because people experience evil and there has to be a way to conceptualize that.

What the song is saying, then, is, “Imagine there’s no evil.” OK. But if you do, and then you’re hit with it—well, that’s what causes PTSD—facing a malevolence that you weren’t prepared for and have a hard time recovering from. Elsewhere Dr. Peterson has said (and I've mentioned before) that the best known therapy for PTSD is understanding good and evil—religiously speaking: 

If you have PTSD, it’s because you’ve been touched by malevolence in one way or another. You need to reorganize your thinking along lines that are fundamentally religious. You need to start seeing the world as a battleground between good and evil—which is what it is, in the most real sense.

Maybe the song means to imagine a world where there is no evil. OK. I can do that. That’s heaven. But the song also says not to allow yourself to imagine heaven.

In other words, the song is not helping you imagine a better world. It is making a not-so-hidden claim that religion is to blame for evil in the world. If people stopped having religious beliefs, they’d stop hating one another—even though it is religious beliefs that change humans from hating one another to having a reason to consider even your enemies as human so there is a chance of finding common ground on which to build peace between you.

from Pablo Stanley's illustration of "Imagine,"
screenshot from here

The next section of the song in the cartoon talks about countries. The claim is that because countries exist, people are willing to kill for them and die for them. If we only got rid of countries, we’d have no killing. Is that true?

What is the purpose of a country? It’s a group of people, larger than a tribe, larger than a local entity, that live together under a form of government. In our country, that’s a form of government our ancestors set up in a way that would give us control over the government, rather than the government ruling over us. Not all countries have governments set up that way. Still, governments have a purpose, which they may or may not do well.

There’s a purpose in government: to protect the lives, liberty, and property of its people.

If there were no government, each individual—or each family, possibly—would spend their time defending their own life, liberty, and property. They would either subsist so that no one would want their stuff or care about them, or they would have to protect themselves from someone trying to take from them or use them. Government at its basic level allows us to thrive at pursuing our happiness, rather than spend our energies defending ourselves from the thieves, murderers, and enslavers.

What’s the quickest way to peace? Surrender.

But if you’re surrendering your life, liberty, or property, is peace under those circumstances really the outcome you want?

Smiley faces don’t really replace reality. Here’s what we know, here at the Spherical Model will lead to freedom, prosperity, and civilization:

Freedom requires government limited to its proper role of protecting life, liberty, and property. Anything beyond that will cause harm—usually more of the very harm the overreach claims to be ameliorating. Government must be limited to protecting our God-given rights.

Prosperity comes from free markets—with the addition of philanthropy to deal with the problems of those truly unable to provide for themselves. Monopolies are not a free market. Cronyism is not a free market. Government subsidizing its chosen winners and punishing its chosen losers is not a free market. The freer the market, the more prosperous the entire population.

Civilization requires a religious people. As we say at the Spherical Model,

Not all religious societies are civilized (according to my definition), but every civilized society is a religious society. This absolutely does not mean state-sponsored religion or lack of religious freedom; in fact, the opposite is true. Freedom of religion is essential, and the flourishing of religion in general must be encouraged.

Civilization also requires supporting the family as the basic unit of society. Whatever threatens the family threatens civilization. Preserving and protecting the family is paramount in laws and social expectations.

So, about the song. Those of us who promote freedom, prosperity, and civilization—and act in ways that will lead us away from tyranny, poverty, and savagery—are better dreamers of peace than those who lie about blaming all religious believers and all freedom-seeking nations for the lack of peace in our world.

We want peace. And we have a way to get there.

But since we live in a world in which people actually believe different things, hating religion and freedom will not get us the tolerance we would like to see in our world. With all due respect to The Beatles for their music, they're not my source for civilization. And with respect to that artist, whose work I would like if he were portraying truth, I'm just not with you on this one.

In a world where we face actual good and evil, you need to think deeper than a smiley cartoon.

Two Opposing Religions in an Ongoing Uncivil War

Rabbi Daniel Lapin was talking with Glenn Beck on radio, the third hour Thursday morning. It was a conversation worth hearing, about deep ideas.  

Let’s start with a definition of a religion, because that’s key to understanding some of the later comparisons. In the quotes of the transcript, I’ll refer to DL (Daniel Lapin) and GB (Glenn Beck).

Glenn Beck (left) and Rabbi Daniel Lapin
screenshot from here (subscription may be required)

DL: What it is that distinguishes a religion from, you know, a model railroad society, if you like, is that a religion has to tackle and answer the three basic questions, the fundamental questions. You know, if you’ve got an inquisitive kid sitting next to you on an airplane, the kids asks the three fundamental questions: where are you from, where you’re going, and what do you do?

Having established that, he takes on the first question for a comparison between his religious view and something more pagan.

DL: So, where are we from? How did human beings, capable of moving from being land bound creatures in 1902 to 2019 when we’ve got 10,000 airplanes in the air at any given moment. Anybody who remains an atheist in contemplating the fact that it’s not otters or beavers or camels or cows or kangaroos that have achieved this. It’s a being touched by the finger of God—a creature called human beings, made this leap into the air. We’re extraordinary creatures. But how did we get to this planet? And, as far as we know in the moment, uniquely in this vast empty universe? We’ve got to answer the question of how we got here.

And I answer that, that a God created us in His image and put us here. My answer is quick, brief, and simple. And nonprovable, by the way.

The religion of secular fundamentalism, which I think is a better term than—you’re right; I withdraw atheist—secular fundamentalism is the official state religion of America. But why are they a religion? Because they answer that question. They say, by a lengthy process of unaided materialistic evolution, primitive protoplasm turned into bookkeepers and ballerinas. That’s what happened. Now, that’s not provable either. But it’s a belief.

He planned to go on to the second big question. But Glenn detoured him with a question about heresy. Fundamentalists of a religion cannot withstand heresy. As Rabbi Lapin says, “leftism” in America is a religion of secular fundamentalism.

DL: And that’s what it is, because otherwise there’s no way to explain why a group of gray-haired old ladies in on the upper east side of New York have to file a lawsuit against a Louisiana parish for teaching creationism. What they are doing is just what the Moslems did when they invaded the Iberian Peninsula in the 7^th Century—basically demolish the Catholic churches and turn them into mosques. You cannot withstand heresy, if you are a devoted believer in your faith. And right there in front of you, right there in your face, somebody is committing heresy, you kill ‘em. And so, what is the connection between a group of ladies on the upper east side of New York and a Louisiana parish? The Louisiana parish has the audacity to violate their belief system—that we are here through a process of lengthy unaided materialistic evolution—by daring to teach creationism. Well, of course that’s outrageous.

He talks about the two cultures occupying the same real estate. And later in the discussion this comes up again. Glenn quotes from a 19^th Century Librarian of Congress wrote at the behest of Congress. There’s also an illustration of a map of the United States, with trees, one bent and gnarled running into the South, representing slavery, and the other is very straight and runs across the North, representing the blessing of liberty. (I’m not always sure where Glenn is quoting, but I’ve tried to put those portions in quotes to differentiate.)

GB: It says, “This map represents those colonies by two trees, whose striking contrast will be apparent to the most superficial observer. But not more, though, than the historic facts that make them appear. The student of history here can see at a glance that it would require him years of hard study to glean from textbooks, and many will see the moral of this subject here for the first time. It’s said that history repeats itself. We do not claim that it does, but there is a similarity between the first colony of the Old World and the first colonies of the New World.” The first colony of the Old World—what would you say that is? The first colony of the Old World?

Glenn Beck talks about the two trees described by
the Librarian of Congress
screenshot from here (subscription may be required)

DL: Garden of Eden?

GB: Yeah. And I would never have thought of it that way. I thought that was interesting. “The first colony of the Old World was established in the Garden of Eden, where good and evil existed, and the evil caused the downfall of man. So it was in the New World. Good and evil came here also. Good to Plymouth, bad to Jamestown. As the tree which bore the forbidden fruit caused the curse to be brought upon man in Eden, so did the tree of slavery Jamestown. There was constant warfare in the Old World between good and evil, and there has been in the New World. The evil of Jamestown has always been, and to this day, at war with the good of Plymouth. Much of the trouble in the New World was caused this way.

In 1620 each colony planted a tree, the tree of liberty, then quite small, was planted by the Pilgrims upon the Bible at Plymouth, where it receives God’s blessings, which accounts for its wonderful growth. The tree of slavery was brought from the Old World, and the people of Jamestown also planted this tree.”

It goes on to compare Lincoln to Father Abraham, who cuts down the tree of slavery.

I’m interested in the history repeating itself concept. Glenn and Rabbi Lapin talk about it as, not necessarily a repeat of events, but a repeat of spiritual beliefs that tend to play out the same way.

The discussing began with Glenn asking about a Fox News reporter who got fired recently for saying that, if the Democrats are claiming to believe in God, he didn’t recognize their God. “I think it’s more like Baal,” he had said. And got fired for that. But Glenn thinks he’s right. That led to discussing the definition of religion.

But later they talk about parallels between ancient pagan religions and what we see today. And it’s very uncivilized.

GB: OK. The reason why I say that I think this guy from Fox was actually onto something is not that they knowingly are worshiping. But we are unknowingly doing all of the same things their worshipers did. Can you go into that?

DL: Sure. Yes, certainly. One of the outstanding characteristics of both Moloch and Baal—and you’ve spoken about this many times; I’ve heard you—is that they used to sacrifice their kids. Now you’ve got a little bit of this as well among the Egyptians, during the pharaoh time. But, in practice, this worship means that you sacrifice your children as a way of expressing your fealty to this.

Well, how you do it and the reasons you do it are probably not that important. But we do it here.

In other words, right now in America there are two cultures. And you can find some of the nicest small towns in America which are basically governed and shaped by those who worship the big G of God. And then you’ve got cities like New York and Detroit and Baltimore and Newark, and many many other cities today, on the west coast, California particularly, that are run by those who worship something else entirely.

Now, where are the lives of young males sacrificed? It’s clear.

GB: Where?

DL: In these cities that are run by secular fundamentalism, young men in disproportionate numbers end up in the criminal justice system and in jail. Their lives are sacrificed completely. And that is an exact fulfillment. In other words, “What we do is so important that we don’t care if it costs the lives of our sons.” And that is what the culture is saying. We are so devoted to a lifestyle with absolutely no divine restraints.

‘Cause, after all, what has held Western Civilization together for centuries is really the essential rituals and restraints and rules of religion. We want to toss all of that out. None of that holds. We want to do whatever we choose to sexually, and we want to do whatever we choose to financially, which usually means taking it away from those who have created it and bestowing it upon those who are living multi-generational dysfunctionality.

So, as long as we can do the things we want to do, the fact that our sons end up dead and in jail—that’s just a fair price to pay. If you’re a believer in Baal or secular fundamentalism, that’s a deal with the devil you absolutely make. And you can see it. Just look at America.

GB: You’re also sacrificing your newborns, which they did.

DL: Absolutely.

GB: To be a follower, you had to have orgies and sex, get pregnant, and then you would return and sacrifice your newborn and celebrate, literally celebrate the death of that child. And that’s what we’re seeing with people who are touting Planned Parenthood.

DL: And if you think about it, it’s the most unbelievably selfish lifestyle. What you’re saying is, “I want to do whatever I darned well choose to, and if the next generation has to pay for it with their lives, so be it.”

What we’re seeing, Rabbi Lapin says, is what we see whenever societies follow this pattern.

DL: Because, in primitive societies—and all societies are stripped of faith in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob eventually devolve into primitivism. And we see that, by the way, today also with piercings, body piercings going on, very indistinguishable from the cannibals of New Guinea of a hundred years ago. Body piercing is an expression of primitivism and tribalism. And, when you strip away Biblical Judeo-Christian values, then automatically we devolve down into that.

There was another gross detail of paganism that is reappearing: feces. It happened during Occupy Wall Street. It’s showing up in city streets wherever homeless are allowed to live on the streets. In cities that used to be beautiful, but now they’re unsafe, stinking, and disease-ridden. And they’re all led by secular fundamentalists.

He said he’d been told over the years by law enforcement officers that, when homes were broken into in very wealthy neighborhoods near Los Angeles—well, I’ll use his words:

DL: They would tell me what the scene of a break-in sometimes looked like. When they had come to a place that had been robbed, usually on the west side of Los Angeles—Brentwood, Santa Monica, Beverley Hills, Beverlywood—in those upscale areas, when those houses were broken into, they almost invariably discovered that those who broke in had left a fecal business card behind, usually on the living room carpet. That’s what they did.

People who didn’t work for their wealth, but wanted to live off others—like slaveholders, expressed their contempt by defecating in the homes they broke into. And he added,

DL: We’ll also find that in low-grade street language, one of the worst invectives you can hurl at somebody also has to do with that part of the anatomy.

So, this is very primitive. This is very basic. This is basically toddlers who are 30 and 40 years old, still acting like toddlers. Baal is central to that.

We tend to think of people in our day as too sophisticated, to “evolved,” to fall for pagan worship; they’re not likely to call their god Baal, or even recognize what they do as their form of worship.

But without God, our loving creator, who defines good, and requires that we value life, family, truth, and property rights, there can be no civilization.

We are, again, at a point of repeating history. There was Cain against Abel. There was a civil war in ancient Israel between the north and south, over moral issues. There was the dichotomy between Jamestown, with slavery, and Plymouth, with the biblical blueprint for how to grow a civilized nation. There was our American Civil War between North and South, over moral issues—specifically, slavery. And today there is a split between people with Judeo-Christian values (including non-believers who nevertheless live by these values) and those who throw out those values and live by a creed of, as Rabbi Lapin puts it,

DL: We want to do whatever we choose to sexually, and we want to do whatever we choose to financially, which usually means taking it away from those who have created it and bestowing it upon those who are living multi-generational dysfunctionality.

In the Spherical Model, that dichotomy is also north (freedom, prosperity, and civilization) versus south (tyranny, poverty, and savagery).

It's not true, Rabbi Lapin says, that violence never solves anything. Violence usually solves difference. He doesn’t advocate that; he’s for solving them with the ballot box. But doing nothing allows the problems to continue festering. Not good news. And there’s no good non-apocalyptic future he’s laying out here. No one is willing to budge. He asks Glenn,

DL: Are you ready to crawl into your cave and say surrender? I don’t think so.

GB: No, I won’t. No, I won’t.

DL: And neither is the other side. I wish I could sing a lullaby and make everything good, but our job is not to massage people with warm butter; it’s to tell the truth.

As long as we love God—and the freedom, prosperity, and civilization that come from following His guidance—as much as the secular fundamentalists love their god—which brings slavery, poverty, and savagery—then telling the truth is what we must keep doing.

We're All Religious

Michael Knowles, of The Daily Wire, spoke at a YAF event at George Washington University Wednesday. During the Q&A, he answered a question about social degeneracy and religion. This was his answer:

Michael Knowles speaking at YAF event
at George Washington University, October 2, 2019
screenshot from here

Conservatives need to talk, not just about policies and economic issues, but about culture. And not just about culture, but about religion, because, there was a famous cardinal who said, “At bottom, all political disagreements are theological disagreements.” St. Andrew Breitbart, the patron saint of Hollywood conservatives said, “Politics is downstream from culture.” And cult and culture are related words. What the culture worships defines that culture.

Nobody wakes up in the middle of the night, says, “Aaahhh! We’ve got to lower the top marginal tax rate by 0.2%. We have to! And then we’ll have a country.” But no one cares about that. I like low taxes as much as the next guy, but that is not motivating to people.

Because, ultimately, we are religious beings. We long for religion. And everybody’s got to serve somebody. So, when the left abandons traditional religion, they don’t just become materialists; they become weird cultist materialists.

Just last week you had children taking off school for multiple days at a time to protest the weather or something. And it was being organized by the government, so I don’t even know what they were protesting. They were all on the same side.

Bernie Sanders came out and said that we need to sacrifice our children to the climate gods. We need to stop global warming by not having children anymore.

You hear this on— NBC News came out and created a climate confessional. Very Catholic; I kind of like that. But it’s like the opposite of Catholic, because they’re worshipping the creation, rather than the creator.

The rot begins at that level—at the religious level. You will not have an irreligious America that’s successful. John Adams put it very well. He said the country is built for a moral and religious people. It is not fit to the governance of anybody else. Moral and religious, because morality doesn’t just float in the air. It has a shape. It has form. It looks like something. And, if you are not going to enact that, if you are not going to deal in metaphysical reality, then you are going to find yourself very very confused. Not without religion, but with a very very strange looking religion, where you are clamoring and screaming at the sky for it to stop being so sunny everyday.

I’m considering that idea, near the beginning, about political disagreements being theological disagreements. This may be true, even when people who disagree aren’t aware of their religious premises.

Let’s take a look at a historical example: slavery. The anti-slavery movement took root among people who came to believe it was morally wrong. What kind of people think about the morality of something that had been legal and practiced in most societies for millennia? People who believed some basic things: human beings are divinely created by God. God is no respecter of persons (Acts 10:34, Galatians 3:28). God grants us certain inalienable rights, including life, liberty, the right to property ownership, and the choice to choose how to pursue our life’s work. Such people can see that taking the liberty of another person and using it for your own enrichment is morally wrong.

It took a religious people to recognize the divinity of human life, to raise awareness in a society that had accepted it as just the way the world always was, and then root it out.

That was a big task. And it took a good long time, which included a civil war here in America. But that society-wide repentance did happen. While slavery still may exist in the world, civilized people the world over all agree that it is morally wrong, and we must work to root it out.

There’s another divide now: abortion. The more we learn medically and scientifically, the more obvious it becomes that abortion is the killing of a human life. Looking at it morally, it appears to be a sacrifice to the religious belief that sex is a good, and a right, and should not have a negative consequence such as pregnancy. That’s not a Christian view. But it is religious—as Knowles calls it some “weird cultist” type of religion. This view actually sees killing a baby up to (and sometimes including shortly after) birth as a holy right (rite?), so moral that they require support of it by all of society through taxpayer money. It’s also political in our day.

Look at the religion of our founders. Sex outside of marriage was considered immoral. Sinning in that way, resulting in a pregnancy, was to be compensated for through marriage, since the important thing was to correct for the sin, for the sake of the new life coming from it. Killing the baby to cover up the sin was seen as abominable. That view was so long-standing that it is part of the Hippocratic oath, dating to about 275 AD Greece—not a Christian land, but you don’t get civilization without living the laws of civilization.

As a reminder, what are the principles necessary for civilization? You need a particular type of religious people—for the reasons I’m talking about today—who recognize God the Creator as the arbiter of good, to whom we are accountable, and from whom we are given our human rights. Such religious people need at least these five things: they honor God, life, family, truth, and property rights. As we’ve said here before, that is a summary of the Ten Commandments. And we emphasize the need for strong families—ideally a married husband and wife raising their own children in love and righteousness—in order to pass along the principles of civilization from one generation to another.

People can’t progress to being beyond a need for sexual morality, or beyond property rights. But many societies have decayed, or regressed, into sexual immorality and theft. Putting a government imprimatur on those things—or even government mandate for them—does not magically make them moral, good, or righteous. They lead inevitably to poverty and savagery.

So what we need is a moral revival—away from the pagan, selfish, prideful, life-sacrificing, liberty-depriving religion, and back to honoring God our Creator and right-giver, and therefore also honoring life, family, truth, and property ownership.

The question then becomes, how? Slowly, incrementally? Or fast, cataclysmically?

David Barton
screenshot from here

David Barton, at Wallbuilders, did a Facebook live this week (October 1), laying out the case for incremental progress in the right direction. He used the analogy of a football team, making relatively small progress down the field. From time to time they might make a long pass, but if they attempted the long pass every play, they’d probably be denied the progress they really want. He pointed out how slavery might have ended sooner if an incremental approach had been accepted at a certain point, but abolitionists insisted on all or nothing, and so the small step wasn't taken, and it was decades and war later before slavery was abolished.

I waiver between accepting small steps and wanting large leaps. We can celebrate small wins for civilization. But when we’re still wading in the muck of southern hemisphere tyranny and savagery, it’s hard to be patient enough to work our way up out of the swamp.

But the hopeful point is, social evils as long-standing as slavery can be overcome by a repentant people seeking to live the principles of civilization.

In my son’s elementary school, many years ago, the teachers used to give out awards—small things, such as a pencil, bearing the message “caught doing good.” It was an opportunity to interact with the kids when they were behaving in a way the teachers wanted to reinforce, and give them the idea that authority wasn’t always just looking for their mistakes. So, I’m in favor of catching people doing good.

Memorial Service for Sandeep Dhaliwal
screenshot from here

The outpouring of love in our local community for an officer, shot in the line of duty, was heartwarming. The incident happened just a few miles from our house. And the funeral yesterday was just a few miles further west. The love for this man, Sandeep Dhaliwal—and for his police brothers and sisters, and for the people of his religion (he was Sikh)—seemed unanimous.

Another heartwarming moment followed the upsetting trial of an officer who killed an innocent civilian when she entered the wrong apartment and thought she was facing an intruder. In the sentencing phase, the brother of the victim showed a sincere example of forgiveness, and asked if he could hug the convicted officer. She was found guilty and was sentenced to ten years, which is perhaps what society needed to do. But the brother—he was able to let go of the hurt and anger and see a contrite woman who had ruined her own life as well as his brother’s, and his compassion for her will be the most memorable part of that trial.

While both of these stories had people of various races and religions, these differences weren’t part of the story. Politics wasn’t part of the stories. Human love and decency were the important details.

If we keep finding the good, and refusing to accept the evil, maybe we can make incremental yardage toward the interrelated goals of freedom, prosperity, and civilization.

Freedom and Religion Are Connected

We worked an election on Saturday. The only thing on our ballot was a school district bond election (an astounding $1.76 billion). It won, of course, with 70% of the votes. But only 4.6% of registered voters voted (10,499 for and 4,544 against). So I could talk about education, or property taxes, but I think I'll forego.

This was our first countywide election on a voting day (early voting has always been countywide). Several voting places were combined, and our alternate judge was an experienced judge and very good to work with. He was an older black man, a retired police officer, and a faithful Catholic. We had pleasant conversations with him.

It’s not surprising that a he’s part of the 90% of blacks who vote Democrat. But, getting to know him, it’s hard to imagine he’ll be happy voting for any of the pro-socialism candidates for President in their primary.

We have so much in common with other religious people. I hope at some point that translates into voting to protect our Constitution. The Blexit movement is underway, but so far aiming mostly at younger voters.

Neal A. Maxwell
image from here

Anyway, I’m thinking about religion and freedom, and how they interrelate, as I share some nuggets from my quote file today. This first one is from Neal A. Maxwell, whose language is something I have always admired. I’m currently reading his biography. Anyway, this is from a talk in 1978.

We are now entering a period of incredible ironies. Let us cite but one of these ironies which is yet in its subtle stages: we shall see in our time a maximum if indirect effort made to establish irreligion as the state religion. It is actually a new form of paganism that uses the carefully preserved and cultivated freedoms of Western civilization to shrink freedom even as it rejects the value essence of our rich Judeo-Christian heritage.

Brothers and sisters, irreligion as the state religion would be the worst of all combinations. Its orthodoxy would be insistent and its inquisitors inevitable. Its paid ministry would be numerous beyond belief. Its Caesars would be insufferably condescending. Its majorities—when faced with clear alternatives—would make the Barabbas choice, as did a mob centuries ago when Pilate confronted them with the need to decide.

Your discipleship may see the time come when religious convictions are heavily discounted. M. J. Sobran also observed, “A religious conviction is now a second-class conviction, expected to step deferentially to the back of the secular bus, and not to get uppity about it” (Human Life Review, Summer 1978, p. 58). This new irreligious imperialism seeks to disallow certain of people’s opinions simply because those opinions grow out of religious convictions. Resistance to abortion will soon be seen as primitive. Concern over the institution of the family will be viewed as untrendy and unenlightened.—Neal A. Maxwell, “Meeting the Challenges of Today,” October 1978 

Religion and Liberty are the two great objects of defensive war. Conjoined, they unite all the feelings, and call forth all the energies, of man…. Religion and liberty are the meat and the drink of the body politic. Withdraw one of them, and it languishes, consumes, and dies. If indifference to either at any time becomes the prevailing character of a people, one half of their motives to vigorous defense is lost, and the hopes of their enemies are proportionally increased. Here, eminently, they are inseparable. Without religion we may possibly retain the freedom of savages, bears, and wolves; but not the freedom of New-England. If our religion were gone, our state of society would perish with it; and nothing would be left, which would be worth defending. —Timothy Dwight, President of Yale University, “The Duty of Americans, at the Present Crisis,” July 4, 1798

No compact among men… can be pronounced everlasting and inviolable, and if I may so express myself, that no Wall of words, that no mound of parchment can be so formed as to stand against the sweeping torrent of boundless ambition on the one side, aided by the sapping current of corrupted morals on the other.—George Washington, draft of First Inaugural Address, April 1798

Heaven knows the proper price to attach to something so celestial as freedom.— Thomas Payne

It was through and by the power of God, that the fathers of this country framed the Declaration of Independence, and also that great palladium of human rights, the Constitution of the United States. There is nothing of a bigoted, narrow-contracted feeling about that instrument; it is broad and comprehensive.—John Taylor, The Constitution Is an Inspired Document, p. 644

Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclination, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.—John Adams[i], 1770

David O. McKay
image from here

If I speak plainly, and in condemnation lay bare reprehensible practices and aims of certain organizations, please do not think that I harbor ill-will or enmity in my heart towards other United States citizens whose views on political policies do not coincide with mine. But when acts and schemes are manifestly contrary to the revealed word of the Lord, we feel justified in warning people against them. We may be charitable and forbearing to the sinner, but must condemn the sin.—David O. McKay, “Jesus’ Prayer for Unity,” General Conference, October 1939

I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.—Thomas Jefferson

The duty of a true patriot is to protect his country from its government.—Thomas Payne

It has been fundamental to our way of life that charity must be voluntary if it is to be charity. Compulsory benevolence is not charity. Today’s egalitarians are using the federal government to redistribute wealth in our society, not as a matter of voluntary charity, but as a matter of right.—Ezra Taft Benson, This Nation Shall Endure, p. 91

You cannot stop a decades-long march toward a socialist and authoritarian state if the family breaks down. Those who say we need to maintain a laser focus on government spending miss the forest for the trees, or refuse to accept what the Founders embraced. If we balance the budget and rein in government but do not rebuild and protect families, then the popular will for government intervention will irresistibly grow over time.—Ken Blackwell and Ken Klukowski, Resurgent: How Constitutional Conservatism Can Save America

Freedom and religion endure together or perish alone.—Mitt Romney, “Faith in America” speech, December 6, 2007

‎The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the laws of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence. If “Thou shalt not covet” and “Thou shalt not steal” were not commandments of Heaven, they must be made inviolable precepts in every society before it can be civilized or made free.—John Adams, “Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States,” 1787

Basing state policy on relative measures devolves into covetousness.

—Bill Flax, “Don’t Like Handouts? Neither Does the Bible,” December 12, 2011 

And as ’tis folly to suppose that princes will always be wise, just and good, when we know that few have been able alone to bear the weight of a government, or to resist the temptations to ill, that accompany an unlimited power, it would be madness to presume they will for the future be free from infirmities and vices....

If the public safety be provided, liberty and propriety secured, justice administered, virtue encouraged, vice suppressed, and the true interest of the nation advanced, the ends of government are accomplished;--Algernon Sidney, Discourses Concerning Government, pp. 319-320

Thus, the central problem of government, is a religious one, and anyone who assumes he can form his political beliefs without consulting his ethics, which have their basis in religious conviction, is deceiving himself either about the true nature of government, or his moral responsibility for its actions.—Elder H. Verlan Andersen, Many Are Called but Few Are Chosen

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[i] John Adams said this, in defense of British soldiers following the Boston Massacre. However, it is also credited to Tobias George Smollett, who in turn was translating a work, Gil Blas, from French author Alain-René Lesage. The phrase may predate all of these. 

Can Atheists Be Good People?

Can atheists be good people?

The short answer is yes. Of course.

There’s also a longer answer.

Ten Commandments Monument
at the Texas State Capitol

Civilization requires a critical mass of people honoring—or valuing—God, life, family, property, and truth. (An astute reader will see this as the condensed version of the Ten Commandments.)

If you’re an atheist, maybe that first one bothers you. But the reason it’s necessary is that God defines Good—and valuing life, family, property, and truth are Good. Without God as the definer of ultimate Good, then everyone is subject to their own personal definition of good, based on nothing but some combination of their reason and gut feeling. And they’re all different, and ever changing. So why should anyone see what you value as more important than what they value?

As Jordan Peterson explains it, you’re way too complex to know what you believe, but what you act on is what you value most. Indeed, what you act on—what you value most—that is how you’re intrapersonally defining god (or God). This is from a Q&A after a lecture[i]:

Everything you act out is predicated on your implicit axioms. The system of implicit axioms that you hold as primary is your religious belief system. It doesn’t matter whether you’re an atheist or not. That’s just surface noise….

It doesn’t necessarily have to do with your voluntarily articulated statements about whether or not you believe in something like a transcendent deity. So, what you act out is much more what you are than what you say about yourself. And what the hell do you know about what you believe, anyways? You’re complicated.

What you act on, then, affects civilization.

If you, as an atheist, indeed value life—as in the “Thou shalt not take innocent life” kind of value—then you are contributing to civilization.

If you also value family—by loving your family and being committed to them, rather than randomly having sex with whomever, or by abandoning, neglecting, or harming your family members—then you’re further contributing to civilization.

Property might not be as obvious. But property is the result of our labor, so it’s a physical representative of our life and its contributions. So you not only require others to respect what you own; you must respect the result of the labor of others—their property. You don’t steal or expect something for nothing. You don’t destroy other people’s property. You don’t cheat someone in an exchange or contract. If you’re honoring property ownership, then you’re contributing to civilization. Next to the failure to value family, the most damage caused to society is probably by people who don’t value the right to property.

If you value truth, you tell the truth. You’re honest in your dealings. You’re honest in your relationships. You seek to understand what is important, valuable, meaningful, and beautiful about life. If that’s true of you, then you are definitely contributing to civilization.

If you’re not acting out valuing life, family, property, and truth, then you’re contributing to the decay of civilization, creating its opposite, which is savagery.

On the other hand, if you’re a religious person who claims to honor God but does not live a life that honors life, family, property, and truth, then you’re decaying civilization and pulling society toward savagery.

It’s about what you do with your life more than what you say you believe.

So, yes, a person who claims to not believe in God can be a good person, contributing positively to civilization.

But there’s another question: why does an atheist live a good life?

A person who believes in God and is striving to please a loving Heavenly Father will have motivation to be the kind of person who values life, family, property, and truth—both for a better life here and now and hope of a heavenly eternity. A person who is an atheist has no obvious motivation, because he sees an effort to please God as meaningless.

Most of the religion/atheism debates I’ve seen or read are with what I would call “moral” atheists; they’re mostly doing the things that contribute to civilization. They claim they do this because it’s rational.[ii]

But, when atheists claim it is only rational to live a good life, they are able to make the comparison—between good and evil, between civilization and savagery—because they have seen enough of the good around them.

I believe if they were not surrounded by people trying to live good and honorable and ethical lives, the likelihood that such a choice would be rational is infinitesimally small.

If they were surrounded by liars, thieves, whoremongers, and power mongers, they would most likely find rationale to strive to be the fittest survivor in those circumstances. (We’ll save the discussion of harm done by amoral atheists for a different discussion.)

A few months ago, I wrote, in a piece called "Good Is Real,"

If you live in a society where masters have their slaves serve them, and that is all you’ve known, it is logically reasonable to see that as the right way, and perfectly moral—which most of the societies on earth have done. That reasoning doesn’t make it morally true. But true religion—which tells us humans are created by God and have a divine nature—tells us that enslaving a human being is morally wrong.

A person whose view is toward ultimate good recognizes that there is something beyond the surroundings, something more elevated, transcendent. Something worth striving for, regardless of the savage environment.

Andrew Klavan, screenshot from February 21, 2018 podcast

There’s an Andrew Klavan podcast in which he talks about this, from a year ago, right after Billy Graham died. [Listen to 17:00 to 31:00 for this segment.] Klavan talks about the conversion of Louis Zamperini—the change of heart. He also talks about his own conversion.[iii] He says,

When the anger and the rage fell from Louis Zamperini’s heart, when the tendency to depression fell from my heart, I was experiencing something real that nobody can do. They can give you a pill that stops you feeling your depression, but they cannot give you a pill that improves your life and suddenly gives you an understanding of who you are, why you were made, and where you come from.

And he adds,

The evidence of what God does in people’s life is evidence. It lasts over time. Just like my love for my wife; it lasts over time. And it can be experienced.

I’m a believer. And I try to live in integrity with that belief. We’ll see how I do over a lifetime.

I’m not concerned about atheists who are seeking the good. I’ll let a loving God sort that out in the final judgment, when all truth is known and a person can make a clear choice. I tend to think those who are seeking the good, living honorable lives that positively contribute to civilization, will want to choose ultimate good for their eternity.

But I also think life can be happier here and now, and over time—and especially through hard times—when we recognize God’s love and intentionally seek ultimate good out of love for that goodness that we religious people call God. My experience trying to do that decade after decade is evidence to me; it’s meaningful.

Compare that to what the atheist offers. Again, the debate about God’s existence or not we can save for another day. The outcome of that always is, it takes a lot less leap into the unknown to believe in God than to believe we have an ordered, predictable nature with complex life that just showed up randomly. But beyond that, there’s the despair that comes from a life without meaning.

In that podcast by Andrew Klavan, he comes back around to where he began the segment, where he noted that things are relatively good; poverty is down, horrible plagues are abated, hunger is much less a problem than overeating. And yet people are miserable. Why? He asserts that it’s a lack of hope, of meaning. And these well-meaning atheists are not helping:

These guys, without meaning to, without being bad guys, are contributing to this crisis in America. When you tell people that they’re just a bunch of chemicals, and they can solve their problems by opiates, they’re going to die of opiate overdoses. When you tell them that there’s no purpose to their life, that nobody made them, that nobody loves them, their sense of right and wrong comes—it’s just a kind of random, relative idea, you take away from them every single thing they have of value. Everything they have of value. Their house is not valuable. Their love is not valuable. Nothing is valuable if they themselves are not there; if you tell them they have no free will, they have no soul, they have no spirit. These guys, with all the best wishes in the world, thinking that they’re saving us, are really starting a crisis.

Jordan Peterson, a clinical psychologist, offers an awareness of good and evil—a religious viewpoint—as a necessity in treating trauma, such as PTSD:

If you have PTSD, it’s because you’ve been touched by malevolence in one way or another. You need to reorganize your thinking along lines that are fundamentally religious. You need to start seeing the world as a battleground between good and evil—which is what it is, in the most real sense.

That’s what we experience in today’s world. We see it in clear battle terms, clearer every day. Meaningless mind efforts, or reason, aren’t the right tools. Meaningful, purposeful choosing good over evil—that offers the world healing.

Moral atheists are welcome among us. Keep choosing the good, and we’ll just draw the circle big enough to count you in. But don’t expect us to stop praying that you’ll also be able to experience an even more abundant life.

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[i] I’m unable to locate which lecture this is from. I transcribed it from a YouTube video.

[ii] Some of these include Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris, published September 2018; Jordan Peterson and Susan Blackmore; Dinesh D’Souza and Peter Singer “God: Yes or No” debate at Biola University, 2008; Christopher Hitchens vs. Dinesh D’Souza , “Is Religion the Problem,” 2010; Talking with Pagans: The Great God Debates from the Hugh Hewitt Show, by Hugh Hewitt, 2013.

[iii] Klavan's memoir about his conversion is The Great Good Thing: A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ.    

Evidence and Axioms

I had a conversation recently about the evidence of God. In academia, and media, there seems to be an assumption that there’s no proof, and therefore no evidence, of God’s existence. I shared with my friend that, in my life, there’s a lot of experiential evidence. When I experience the spiritual presence of God, I often feel particular physical indicators. I was surprised, a few years ago, to learn that those physical sensations don’t happen to everyone. But they do happen to me, consistently under spiritual circumstances.

Also, there’s the way words come clearly into my mind, after prayer, when I’m paying attention. Sometimes long after a prayer, when a circumstance arises that seems to answer that prayer, I ask, “Was that…?” And the answer comes, “Yes.”

I can’t say that I can get the words I need on demand, at any moment, without some spiritual struggle. But I can say that my evidentiary experience that God is there is significant enough to convince me.

I described this evidence to my friend, who is also Christian but not of the same faith as me, and he said that was exactly how it was for him too. Also, he’d be reading scriptures (he has learned Hebrew to read in the original when possible), and his mind would open up and ideas and connections would come, seeming to just flow in, beyond anything he could think up himself. It wasn’t something he was imagining.

That happens to me too. They say, when you want to talk to God, pray; but when you want to hear from God, read the scriptures. The words on the page may or may not be your direct answer, but those words will seem to lead you to thoughts and connections that you needed as an answer.

For those of us who are religious, there’s so much evidence that it’s puzzling when people say there isn’t any.

There’s a new Prager U video about the evidence for God, as well as a number of older ones. But that’s not really what I’m looking at today. I’m interested in what religion is.

It's a principle of the Spherical Model that religion is necessary for civilization.

I’ve finally been reading J. D. Vance’s book Hillbilly Elegy. In it he talks about his grandmother’s personal brand of religion:

cover image from Amazon

The theology she taught was unsophisticated, but it provided a message I needed to hear. To coast through life was to squander my God-given talent, so I had to work hard. I had to take care of my family because Christian duty demanded it. I needed to forgive, not just for my mother’s sake but for my own. I should never despair, for God had a plan (p. 262).

There was a brief time in his life when he went to live with his biological father, who became strictly religious after leaving the family and starting anew. Vance didn’t quite ever feel at home there, but he did appreciate some things about that peaceful, structured, religious world (the footnote is included in his book):

Dad embodied a phenomenon social scientists have observed for decades: Religious folks are much happier. Regular church attendees commit fewer crimes, are in better health, live longer, make more money, drop out of high school less frequently, and finish college more frequently than those who don’t attend church at all.[i]

MIT economist Jonathan Gruber even found that the relationship was causal: It’s not just that people who happen to live successful lives also go to church, it’s that church seems to promote good habits (p. 282).

There’s plenty of social science discussion in that book for another day. But there’s another somewhat unorthodox definition of religion I came across in a Jordan Peterson Q&A at Lafayette College. I’m including the question, to give a bit of context, and I highlighted the essential definition:

Q: I was watching a few of your interviews in preparation for this, and I heard you speak about religion quite a bit. And, if you look up what religion means in the Webster dictionary, you get something like, “a system of faith centered on a supernatural being or beings,” or something like that. But I’ve heard you use religion to describe something like punk rockers, for example, that that’s a religious experience. So my first question would be, how do you define what is considered religious? ….

JP: Religious is what you act out.

Q: What’s that?

JP: Religious is what you act out.

Q: Anything you act out?

JP: Everything you act out is predicated on your implicit axioms. The system of implicit axioms that you hold as primary is your religious belief system. It doesn’t matter whether you’re an atheist or not. That’s just surface noise.

Q: So it has nothing to do with divinity or—?

JP: No, I didn’t say that. No.

Q: It doesn’t necessarily have to do with those?

JP: No, it probably necessarily has to do with it too. But it doesn’t necessarily have to do with your voluntarily articulated statements about whether or not you believe in something like a transcendent deity. So, what you act out is much more what you are than what you say about yourself. And what the hell do you know about what you believe, anyways? You’re complicated, man.

Q: It’s a fair question.

JP: Well, seriously, people are complicated. You know, like, we’re not transparent to ourselves at all. That’s why we have to go to university and study psychology. It’s like, we’re not exactly black boxes, but we are the most complicated things there are. Right? And we can’t even program our VCR clocks. So, it’s like, how the hell can we propose to understand ourselves? And, you know, I’m existentially oriented, which is to say that I think that what you hold to be true is best determined as a consequence of an analysis of your actions, rather than as a consequence of an analysis of what you purport to believe.

Jordan Peterson at Lafayette College

Now, in order to act—  You can’t act without a hierarchy of values… because you can’t act unless you think that one thing is better than another. Because, why would you act, otherwise? So that means that you’re embedded within a hierarchy of values, whether you know it or not. Or maybe multiple fragmentary and competing hierarchies of value, which is all the worse for you, by the way, because it just makes you very confused.

That hierarchy of values has an axiomatic—  It’s based on axioms. And the probability that you understand them is very low, because generally people don’t understand their axioms. But that axiomatic system is essentially your religious system. And there’s no way out of that, as far as I can tell.

And you can say, “Well, it isn’t predicated on a conscious belief in a transcendent deity.” OK, have it your way. But, you know, most people in this room act out a Judeo-Christian ethic. And not only do they act it out, if they’re treated in a manner that’s not commensurate with that ethic, they get very, very annoyed.

For example, if I fail to treat you as if you’re an embodiment of a divine fragment, let’s say, that’s characterized by the ability to make free choice, and to determine your own destiny in some sense, or if I fail to treat you as if you’re a valued member—a valued, contributing member of the polity, as a sovereign individual, then you’ll find that very offensive and become angry. OK, then, that’s what you believe.

If I ask you if you believe any of that, well, that’s a whole different story. You might give me some radical leftist nonsense. But that doesn’t take away from the fundamentals of your actions.

I’ve said before that, while it’s possible for atheists to live moral lives, they’re not doing it in a vacuum; they’re doing it within a civilization that sets up certain values.

·         We believe that each human life is precious.

·         We believe that human life is more precious than non-human life.

·         We believe that human beings should be free to choose how to live their lives—how to earn a living, how to form and raise their family, how to live out their religious beliefs.

·         We believe that people can own property, and we need to respect that ownership.

·         We believe that people should tell the truth to one another.

·         We believe that people should keep their word—have integrity, not betray one another.

·         We believe it is good to voluntarily help one another, especially the less fortunate.

·         We believe that purposely harming another person is wrong, except in self-defense.

We have laws against stealing, against perjury and bearing false witness. We have laws against murder and assault. We argue about the rightness of capital punishment (which takes non-innocent life as a response to serious crime), and about abortion or euthanasia (which takes innocent life but involves issues related to choice).

We think we should be decent toward one another, and generally polite. It makes it easier for all of us to live in peace, which we prefer.

The Ten Commandments
at the Texas State Capitol

An atheist can tell you these things are right and good, and moral, and that’s why he does them. But all of them relate to the Ten Commandments. They are moral questions, very much in the religious sense.

If an atheist lives in a savage community, never being exposed to the moral codes of civilization, what are the odds he will invent for himself a civilized moral code? Is it possible that he's actually a believer—as his actions show—even though he is unwilling to say so, even to himself?

I’m interested in that Judeo-Christian ethic that Dr. Peterson talks about. Do you feel “annoyed”—or hurt, or betrayed—when someone lies to you? Do you like it when the person you’re in a committed relationship with has sex with other people? Do you think it’s fine for people to be violent against you? If not, maybe you actually prefer civilization. We agree on that. That makes me hopeful.

In this world, in which we are split and splintering, I’m looking for things we have in common. It just might be that the Judeo-Christian foundation of this country is worth preaching—and by that I mean explaining better, more clearly, including the evidence we experience. Also by our actions. And by telling the actual truth. It may require that we stand up and insist on truth, while we still have the freedom to speak it.

We’re not a country built on geography or tribal heritage. We’re built on the idea that all of us human beings are created equal, with inherent rights—that come from God, not government. Among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, which includes property as well as all the other personal choices in our lives and families. And government’s limited role is solely for the protection of these rights.

You don’t get a country that doesn’t infringe on those rights unless you value these very religious ideas.

As I think about it, the very creation of this country is additional evidence that God exists.

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[i] Linda Gorman, “Is Religion Good for You?” The National Bureau of Economic Research, http://wwwnber.org/digest/oct05/w11377.html