Yikes,
My English teach would be appalled! (I guess you don't have to look at
your old source code to ask "What was I thinking").
My apologies to the linquisticly (or spelling?) sensitive for my previous
mangulation of the English language.
:-)
RAT
Rich Trapp <mailto:[log in to unmask]>
Consulting for Agilent Technologies, Loveland, Colorado.
Managed Business Solutions <http://www.mbsnav.com/>
200 South College Avenue
Fort Collins, Colorado 80524-2811
970.679.2221 (voice)
970.669.3071 (fax)
-----Original Message-----
From: Rich Trapp [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Friday, February 02, 2001 11:34 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: OT: Church & State (2nd try)
Just a sort point:
Speaking as someone who falls somewhere other than these "exaggerated
endpoints on a graduated scale" I don't have a problem with a God, who is
still engaged in the affairs of His creation, setting up an orderly
rule-following universe. I'm assuming that several of our founding fathers
may also fall somewhere other than the endpoints also.
RAT
Rich Trapp <mailto:[log in to unmask]>
Consulting for Agilent Technologies, Loveland, Colorado.
Managed Business Solutions <http://www.mbsnav.com/>
200 South College Avenue
Fort Collins, Colorado 80524-2811
970.679.2221 (voice)
970.669.3071 (fax)
-----Original Message-----
From: Wirt Atmar [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Thursday, February 01, 2001 9:25 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: OT: Church & State (2nd try)
Dennis writes:
> Many of the founding fathers were first generation descendants of colonist
> that came to America because of religious persecution, but at the same
time
> almost every one of the founders was "God fearing".
That statement is not correct, at least in its implications, and worse,
it offers the opportunity for the worst kind of historical revisionism:
a propagandist view that turns actual fact on its head.
The Founders of the American Revolution were intellectuals, and they
were very much men of their times. They were all products of the
Enlightenment, and because of that, they were overwhelmingly in the
majority Deists. Indeed, you cannot read nor fundamentally understand
the writings of Thomas Paine, Ethan Allen, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin
Franklin, John Adams or George Washington without first understanding
what deism is.
While there are any number of religious philosophies (animism,
naturalism, polytheism, etc), let me only concentrate on the differences
between three of them: atheism, deism and calvinism. Their very
differences make their distinctions clear, simply because these three
ideas are exaggerated endpoints on graduated scale.
CALVINISM
Calvinism arose as a direct result of the Protestant Reformation in
Europe, espoused first by Martin Luther and then, in a greatly more
exaggerated form, by John Calvin. Under Calvinism, God is an immanent
God, a personal God, a God that carries you through the worst of times
and watches over your every movement.
Calvinism is the underlying philosophy of the American fundamentalist
Christian community. Luther and Calvin both derived their views from the
teaching of St. Augustine, which was further developed by St. Thomas
Aquinas both in theology and philosophy. Aquinas argued that Will is
rational appetite. Man necessarily desires beatitude, but he can freely
choose between different forms of it. Free will is simply this elective
power. Under Calvinism, the Concept of Free Will is outrightly rejected
in favor of God's providence.
Under Aquinas' philosophy, Infinite Good was not visible to the
intellect in this life. There are always some drawbacks and deficiencies
in every good presented to us. None of them exhausts our intellectual
capacity of conceiving the good. Consequently, in deliberate volition,
not one of them completely satiates or irresistibly entices the will. In
this capability of the intellect for conceiving the universal lies the
root of our freedom. But God possesses an infallible knowledge of man's
future actions.
The question becomes then: How is this prevision possible, if man's
future acts are not necessary? The answer is that God does not exist in
time. The future and the past are alike ever present to the eternal mind
as a man gazing down from a lofty mountain takes in at one momentary
glance all the objects which can be apprehended only through a lengthy
series of successive experiences by travellers along the winding road
beneath, in somewhat similar fashion the intuitive vision of God
apprehends simultaneously what is future to us with all it contains.
In the Calvinist extrapolation of the Thomasian philosophy, God's
omnipotent providence exercises a complete and perfect control over all
events that happen, or will happen, in the universe.
Picking from the Scriptures, and particularly from St. Paul, the texts
which emphasized the importance and efficacy of grace, the all-ruling
providence of God, His decrees of election or predestination, and the
feebleness of man, the followers of Calvin have drawn the conclusion
that the human will, instead of being master of its own acts, is rigidly
predetermined in all its choices throughout life. As a consequence, man
is predestined before his birth to eternal punishment or reward in such
fashion that he never can have had any real free-power over his own
fate.
DEISM
This Calvinist perspective is completely antithetical to the Deist
philosophy. If God exists, God only created the Universe, its rules
(which are determinable and understandable through rational inquiry),
and then withdrew, leaving man to make either an earthly paradise or a
hellish inferno of his world.
Further, under Deism, all sense of mysticism is expunged from religion.
While Jesus is regarded as an accurate historical figure, he is not seen
as the Son of God.
As to the definitions of Deism, the Encyclopedia Britannica writes this
(in part):
"The proponents of natural religion were strongly influenced by three
intellectual concerns: a growing faith in human reason, a distrust of
religious claims of revelation that lead to dogmatism and intolerance,
and, finally, an image of God as the rational architect of an ordered
world.
"Renaissance humanism had rejected the orthodox Christian emphasis upon
the corruption of reason through sin and had affirmed a general faith
that human reason could discern universal religious and moral truths
apart from any supernatural revelation or specific church teachings.
Similarly, Deists argued that behind the vast differences in modes of
worship, piety, and doctrine of the world's religions and the Christian
churches lay a common rational core of universally accepted religious
and moral principles. The early Deists asserted that superficial
differences of ritual and dogma were insignificant and should
accordingly be tolerated.
"They rejected the elaborate liturgical practices and complex
institutional trappings of Roman Catholicism as analogous to ancient
pagan superstition. In place of the noxious "enthusiasm" and strict
individual piety of the Protestant sects, they sought to promote the
sober moral striving and tolerance of the religion of reason.
"The chief debate between the militant Deists and the orthodox Christian
thinkers concerned the proper role of appeals to divine revelation as a
disclosure of ultimate religious truth. Many orthodox thinkers argued
that, while natural reason did provide access to religious truths,
supernatural revelation was necessary as a supplement to teach these
same truths more clearly and effectively. Indeed, the Roman Catholic
tradition since Thomas Aquinas esteemed right reason as always in
harmony with revealed truth and capable of disclosing God's natural
moral laws. Deists countered that natural religion alone was certain and
free of corruption, and they launched a vigorous attack upon all of the
Christian additions to the simple moral truths affirmed by reason.
"In place of the orthodox Judeo-Christian conception of God as involved
actively in shaping and sustaining human history, the Deists argued that
after God's initial work of creation, He withdrew into detached
transcendence, leaving the world to operate according to rational
natural rules. Borrowing upon the general prestige of Isaac Newton's
vision of the universe as a mechanism obeying stable rational laws, they
propounded variations on the classic argument from design wherein the
existence of a rational creator is inferred from the evidence of the
rational ordering of the world.
"In England and later in Germany the Deists' attack upon Christian
doctrines remained moderate, but in France, where the political
influence of corrupt Roman Catholic prelates had spawned a strong
anticlerical reaction, the attack became exceedingly impassioned and
bitter. In the view of Voltaire, "every man of sense, every good man,
ought to hold the Christian sect in horror." For many other French
Philosophers, Deism was simply a station upon the road to complete
atheism.
"By the end of the 18th century, in addition to becoming a dominant
religious attitude among English, French, and German intellectuals,
Deism had crossed the Atlantic to shape the religious views of
upper-class Americans. The first three presidents of the United States
all subscribed to Deist beliefs."
Similarly, the Hutchison Family Encyclopedia (an English encyclopedia)
writes:
"Deism:
"Belief in a supreme being. The term usually refers to a movement in the
17th and 18th centuries characterized by the belief in a rational
'religion of nature' as opposed to the orthodox beliefs of Christianity.
Deists believed that God is the source of natural law but does not
intervene directly in the affairs of the world, and that the only
religious duty of humanity is to be virtuous.
The founder of English deism was Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1583-1648),
and the chief exponents were John Toland (1670-1722), Anthony Collins
(1676-1729), Matthew Tindal (1657-1733), Thomas Woolston (1670-1733),
and Thomas Chubb (1679-1747). In France, the writer Voltaire was the
most prominent advocate of deism. In the USA, many of the country's
founders, including Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, were
essentially deists. Later, deism came to mean a belief in a personal
deity who is distinct from the world and not intimately interested in
its concerns.
Deists believed in the light of nature and reason as a sufficient guide
in doctrine and practice. This had much in common with later German
rationalism."
ATHEISM
Atheism is not the hard-hearted philosophy it is demonized to be.
Indeed, everyone on this list is a practicing pragmatic atheist,
regardless of what beliefs you espouse or hold dear. The same is true
for every engineer and scientist.
No where in anyone's long printouts of massive amounts of code in this
group does anyone put in a line saying "poof, a miracle occurs here, a
miracle beyond our understanding." Nor does any engineer put that
notion into his schematics, or does a professor filling a room full of
blackboards with equations resort to demons, sprites, angles, or unseen
agents of any form.
Every step is a logical consequence of the steps before, and every step
can be understood. This is exactly what Laplace meant when he was asked
by Napoleon why God had not been mentioned in his celebrated work,
"Mechanique Celeste." Laplace replied, "Sire, I have no need of that
hypothesis."
Laplace's statement is neither a denial nor an affirmation of either the
existence of God or hand of God, it is simply a statement of the fact
that the imposition of a God-like actor was unnecessary to understand
the mechanism of the planets. Every step was a logical consequence of
the steps before it.
Western Rationalism grew out of the secular humanist movement that was
the Renaissance, and Rationalist thought permeated every philosophical
aspect of the Enlightenment. There was an extraordinary excitment in the
air at the time, and you know their names: Newton, Leibnitz (Leibniz),
Voltaire, Laplace, Descartes, Kant. After a thousand years of darkness,
we were beginning to understand the world and the universe, and its
movements, in a fundamental manner.
Its from this perspective that you must read Paine's "The Age of Reason"
and "The Rights of Man." These are the documents of the American
Revolution. And this is what is meant by these few sentences:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created
equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable
Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men,
deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That
whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is
the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new
Government..."
The American Revolution was not only an overthrow of the tyranny of
kings, but also the divine right of kings, and the tyranny of religious
dogma and its inevitable intolerances. It was also about the moral
obligation that we hold to ourselves and how we are to treat one
another. It was more than anything about the fact that governments are
instituted among men -- and that they derive their power only from the
consent of those governed.
It's difficult now to fully express how radical an idea that was at the
time, and 225 years ago, only a very small sliver of land on the eastern
seaboard of North America was the only place on the planet that held to
that idea.
Wirt Atmar
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