Diremption & Salvation

Painting by Darwin Leon

DIREMPTION & SALVATION

BY

DAVID ARTHUR WALTERS

A ''diremption'' is a violent divorce or split, sometimes identified as a "fall" into self-conciousness, which presents an objective world in opposition to the willing subject, now conscious of itself as an independence restrained, therefore, at once, dependent for its existence on outside forces to which it must respond in one way or another to perpetuate its existence.

Hence human self-consciousness is, in its radical division or the division at its root, is a moral division, a consciousness of good and evil that is not identical to the awareness of pleasure of pain that other animals experience - to humans, ''good'' might be painful, while ''evil'' might be pleasurable.

In other words, the individual is separated from its mother and is born or falls into the world where it soon discovers it is not omnipotent, that it is opposed to an it or object or objection.

Everything in its essence would continue forever in its existence unimpeded. The individual infant is in fact born free as a matter of ''natural right,'' for ''right'' is ''freedom'' and the infant, in its initial, unreflective feeling of omnipotence, is absolutely free by the essential ''nature'' of life, which is absolute freedom or love: "What is love? Love is your life." (Swedenborg). Whom do you really love when you are separated from the one you love?

So the infantine individual is cradled in love, and then encounters resistance to its will and is enraged at the violation of its inherent natural right. It soon perceives that its hate may further endanger it, and, fearing retaliation, works out a compromise by projecting its self-love onto others; that is, by loving others and imitating them for its own good, thus becoming a self-conscious person in the sense that a ''person'' is a socialization of the individual that would be absolutely free if only it could. The person masks the individual actor that it might survive, but the in-divid-ual is aware of its internal division.

The individual somehow ''knows'' it is not its real self but is playing a role, is really a hypocrite, an actor with an underling crisis, a ''hypo-crisis.'' The pleasant external smile of the person may disguise the inner pain, even to the point where the person is, as a matter of habit, unaware of the split, unaware of his own hypocrisy and ambiguity, for the full awareness of the same can make a man "sick," in need of a doctor.

While the normal man lives an anxious life distracted by social illusions, the sick man or woman is said to be closer to the reality of existence, or closer to God, or to the utlimate Power over him or her. And the nearer to death, the more intimate the individual, which would be absolutely free from restriction, is to the omnipotent maker that is Power over all individuals.  The isolate is then metaphysically healed by atonement with the universal.

The ancient Greek doctors were ''saviors,'' physicians of mind and body who could heal the sick in body and raise the depressed to life.

For example, Luke, Paul''s partner, was a "beloved physician." Of course Jesus was their Savior of saviors. The personal saviors did not simply provide the sick man with some drug or procedure, and with psychological counseling to restore him to normal mental health, for they saw normal life itself as a disease unto death, and sensed that, unless the patient were raised to and reconciled with the Power or Spirit, sending him back to a vicious society where individuals are divided within and without - amongst themselves in a war of all against all - would be like feeding a man to the sharks in order to save him, or, as our sick society does, heals a condemned man in order to execute him.

So diremption is a violent divorce in need of healing. The person suffers from that wound. Antibiotics and serotonin reuptake inhibitors will not heal that wound. What is prescribed is the Word, the Good News. He needs redemption. In that alone is he, as a painful synthesis of mind and body, reconciled to the spirit that transcends both.

"This we find in the Gospels, where the infinity of Spirit - its elevation into the spiritual world (as the exclusively true and authorized existence) - is the main theme. With transcendent boldness does Christ stand forth among the Jewish people: 'Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God,' he proclaims in the Sermon on the Mount, - a dictum of the noblest simplicity, and prenant with an elastic energy of rebound against all the adventitious appliances with which the human soul can be burdened. The pure heart is the domain in which God is present to man: he who is imbued with the spirit of the apopthegm is armed against all alien bonds and superstitions. The other utterances are of the same tenor: ''Blessed are the peacemakers; for they shall be called the children of God." (G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History)

XYX

Ten-Percent Revolution

The 'Holy Bible' is a best-selling book today. It was not always so popular but was virtually the private property of a tiny priestly minority. It was written in classical language, and few people were literate. The cost to produce a single copy exceeded the cost of building a substantial house. In some parts of the world, the local spiritual leader had but a single copy in his possession, and we know of cases where people were charged with plagiary for secretly copying the text.

With the advent of the Reformation, the invention of printing presses, the advances in literacy, and translations of scripture into vernacular languages, anyone may easily obtain and read a cheap copy of the Book - propagandists hand out the New Testament free of charge. Although the translations and interpretations of the ancient texts regularly distort the Word, which was and still is not fully understood in its original forms, many readers insist that they understand the Book and therefore do not need a priesthood or any other elite to enlighten them on the true meaning of its contents, thank you very much.

The liberal publication of the written Word in its perverse forms constituted a stunning blow to monarchy and aristocracy in religion and politics for church was married to state. Revolt was in vogue not only among the swinish bourgeois but among disenchanted nobles as well - ordinary folk do not ordinarily like revolutions and tend to be rather conservative. Intelligent monarchs curried favor with the vulgar people to keep the nobility checked. Certain compromising adjustments were made to constitute constitutional monarchy. The divine right of kings was losing its glamor as the word spread that the voice of the people is the voice of god. Certain enthusiasts or "god-possessed" people enthusiastically opposed the Love of Jesus to the Law of Moses. The peasants revolted, wanting a Kingdom of God right here on Earth - Heaven forbade it and 100,000 were murdered in the name of god by the prince's soldiers. Fortunately the lawlessness eventually took milder forms, and the most sinful 'antinomianism' against the sex-obssessed religion was eventually limited to free love. Many protestants tucked god away in a safe place and took up feel-good faith in Anything Goes - as long as it is profitable. The deists kept the moral code and took up the worship of science; they considered the deity as a sort of clockmaker who winds up the universe - the rest is up to us, thank god! Some who were displeased with the pursuit of happiness in property and with the money-god became seekers of divine enlightenment. There were certain finders among them, while the others came to believe the light is in perpetual seeking.

That is not all to the fall of god's secular estate. 'Republican' (democratic) deists took the Old Testament to task for its fundamental contradictions and its outmoded hateful attitude posing as love; that is, hate-based love or love founded on hatred of others, who must be murdered and whose land must be seized by order of the tribal god, or who must be stoned to death for non-violent or minor infractions - and innocent babies must be murdered and generation of kids killed for the sins of their fathers such as idolatry.

Of course the Old Testament was appreciated as a historical work, and its inspiring poetry and prose was admired; but as fundamental law it was, on the whole, said to be no better than a pile of incoherent rubbish; and the judges who abided by it were called foolish and hateful bigots, friends of injustice and diabolical enemies of humankind.

Thus the progress of relatively secret sacred scripture to best-selling book spread religion but did much damage to its god in the process of vulgarization until one day someone looked around and said, "God is dead." At least when scripture was kept in the hands of an educated elite, a relatively reasonable spin could be given to smooth out inherent contradictions. The religious authorities constantly debated the application of points of law. They were not ignorant of the fact that human customs change (even for the better!) over time and that change is part of god's evolving law. In fine, the law must be flexible. What fool would want to reinstitute today, for instance, the rudimentary customs of Neanderthal man? We think he had some religion; it might have included cannibalism and the collection and deposit of cave-bear power-heads in a 'bank' - an early form of capital-ism.

Wherefore the authorites behind scenes argue out the best course of action to fit the present needs. A gradual 'causistic stretching' or stretching of the law takes place. At first the dissenting opinions were destroyed. The oral explanation of judgements given to the people by the rabbis or teachers seem reasonable enough since they were the synthesis of a reasoned dialectic. In practice the law became milder and seemingly in direct contradiction to specific torah commandments, but there was an explanation for that.... Today we might complain that the judges are "legislating in violation of the separation of powers."

The Catholic church incorporated the hierarchical or patriarchal structure of the Jewish religion along with other systemic aspects. A comparison between the educational methods, including publicity of law, between Church and Temple would be a fascinating study - one issue faced by the Church was how to handle the conversion, often as a result of hostility, of many disparate, illiterate peoples. In any event, we know that when the Catholic cat got out of the bag, when the scripture was published to all, and each person thought that he was competent to interpret it without the advice of counsel, the political power of the Church was nearly destroyed.

Democracy was the watchword as the divine right to rule was dispensed with. But the arbitrary right or divine right to arbitrate was actually retained in a subtle, occult form in the new priesthood, the judiciary. The legal priests are assisted by juries. Juries were first of all instruments of government, but they too emerged as representatives of the people, a people's conventical instructed by the sitting priest - juries have an extraordinary power which they are seldom deliberately made aware of.

Although the law is supposed to be man-made, reasonable and even scientific in our day and age, in contradistinction to the a priori or found law of god's will, we still find judges thumping the Bible before and after they thumb the secular statutes. They say the law is really based on will and not on reason, and when their peers disagree on appeal with their blatantly irrational, arbitrary, and tyranical judgement, they claim their peers have placed themselves "above God." The over-ruled judge might even be so arrogant as to disobey the ruling of his superiors "in the name of god." That is, he refuses to submit to the first rule of law, the rule of law! And he sets his own opinion up as divine law. He might as well admit that he or his superego is god almighty. We are reminded here of Khomeini's seizure of power; the Shia clerics had maintained a traditional distance from Iran's secular state; Khomeini was merely a "legal advisor" until he issued his ruling or fatwa which literally gave him the self-declared right to decide what was good for the community even if it were actually a terrible evil; technically, he was equal to the Prophet; actually he was superior to the Prophet - he was Allah on Earth.

We might discover this sort of judge to be an elected judge. Ironically, the "democracy" which fought for the people's freedom from a tyranny which was exercised in the name of a god owned and operated by a power elite and justified by rationalizations of mumbo-jumbo, now wants to restore the archaic system. Of course the democrats who fought for democracy were a revolutionary minority who did their level best to protect the minority from majority mobocracy (ochlocracy). So the truth of the matter is this, that the mobs in some states of mind really want to be ruled by a tyrant who cites an unknown god to justify his fundamentalist interpretation of secular law. Since the legislature is elected by the majority too, severe laws are on the books or can be written for him to more easily apply and interpret. And since the top executives are also elected and supported by the majority of the legislature, there is no real separation of the secular branches of government.

Therefore again we see that democracy conceived only as majority rule is no guarantee of liberty. The judiciary is a sort of secular priesthood which is supposed to be independent of the special interests of warring politics and religions. But we see it drifting along with the political majority. If the trend continues to the right, we might see a born-again, right-wing authoritarian government placed into office by a fawning electorate. Attempts would of course be made to stack the courts with Bible-thumping judges. We can only hope that they are highly educated and reasonable. Even then we shall have tyrants on the bench, and in Congress and in the White House as well. We are told not to worry since there will surely be another swing towards individual liberty, a shift away from pseudo-religious fascism to the true-conservatism that protects the liberty of minorities. If not, no doubt another set of traitors will arise to fight for Liberty. If we count all traitors of the Revolution for American Independence including soldiers and sailors, we sum up a small minority of the population - some scholars estimate the number as less than ten percent of the population.


-10%-

I am not surprised

The case at hand is only one case but the issue is of importance to all those who love liberty. I have posted this article on this particular case and other articles on the general issue at several sites over the past few months. I have received various comments and am familiar with most of the positions taken.

I am not suprised that many commentators do not read the entire text they comment on, and, instead, render a knee-jerk reaction to some portion or phrase because they think their ideology or theology is being attacked. I understand. I have done that myself. I happy that individuals have written long comments and articles on this case and on the general theme. While doing so, on them insisted that this case is unimportant or impertinent, that it has no bearing on the American scheme of things, that it is not representative of a shift to the born-again self-righteous authoritarian government. They are sorely mistaken in my opinion.

I can understand why people might be embarassed by their ignorance of the significance of this issue and might want to remain ignorant as to why every citizen interested in liberty should pay careful attention to it. They would sweep it under the rug in order to remain ignorant about what is going on behind the scenes as the checks and balances are destroyed under their noses. After all, it is supposed, we have authorities to look into these matters, and most of us do not have time to be looking over their shoulders. But I have been interested in this significant issue for several years and have gladly even given up football to keep up with it. Of course I am not astonished when I am told to shut up, when it is suggested that I am somehow wrong (a moral term meaning 'bad') for doing what I consider to be my civic duty in voicing such objections as I have presented above.

I am not even suprised when someone comes along and blatantly preaches ignorance over reason although that would result in a bestial utopia ruled by one king of the jungle over another.

As for the stone in this case, the stone itself is irrelevant and so is the judge's unwitting violation of the first four of the ten commandments inscribed thereon. Humans have been setting up stone festishes since the dawn of history. That might be objectionable to iconoclasts and is demonstrative of primitive ignorance but it is not illegal unless prohibited by law. And it was prohibited by federal and state judicial decrees in this case. This particular judge's disobedience and contempt for the rule of law is relevant, and that is the fundamental issue. I personally have no objection to the judge's fetish or anyone else's idolatrous stone- and word-worship on private property. I can enjoy it for its aesthetic value, and, my taste being what it is, this monument to the Hebrew god pleases me. Of course everybody in Alabama knows what is going on. The judge deliberately pushed himself and the shrine, which represents his view of religion, into the public courthouse because he wanted to make a scene.

Many people in Alabama favor his agressive stance, especially those who since the Civil War deeply resent having their traditional symbols torn down and removed from public places. Nonentheless, everyone in Alabama and everyone who is literate and takes the time to do their research knows that the judge used (or abused) the Ten Commandments to get elected to the position where he now has shown contempt for the rule of law. Oherwise, it would have gone unnoticed. I do thank him for that and I thank those who brought legal objections to it because the controversy works to expose the ignorance and bigotry of those who would be removed from office or not elected to office providing that the controversy is aired.

I have on numerous occasions recommended that the Ten Commandments and other laws both religious and secular be posted in suitable places so they can be discussed - not worshipped. Just posting them and revering them is futile and absurd. Judges and priests and kings and presidents who swear by them are notorious for violating them. That is why they are regularly crushed.

Thou Shalt Love God Or Else Doom!

Thou shalt love YHWH or else! YHWH's contract with his Bride Israel specified that the Chosen People should love YHWH above all, or else. 

Or else what? or else all hell shall eventually break loose, and everything good shall be lost. That is why the first commandment enjoins us to bind ourselves to the Tribal God Before All Other Tribal Gods, eventually converted into the One and Only Universal God. If we do not love the Absolute Universal God, Who, as Supreme Lord, is the Supreme Socialist Dictator, we shall be ripped into shreds vainly loving the distinctive particulars of an infatuated existence.

Religion is the organized worship of Power and politics is the relative distribution of Power. Thus we find the Leading Principle of ancient religious politics expressed in the form of a Contract with YHWH posing as "the Lord." He covenants that, in consideration for being universally loved, the lovers will have Holy Land upon which to lovingly flourish and, furthermore, the Chosen People shall possess all the appurtenances attached thereto and all the goods thereon unto their heart's fondest desire; provided, however, that if the Covenant is broken by a few people, the Iron Hand of the Law shall spell out D-o-o-m for the whole tribe! 

Alas, after thousands of years, men of all persuasions are still learning the hard way. Fortunately, the Lord has been forgiving. We recall that Moses himself talked the Lord out of crushing the Chosen People for worshipping the Golden Bull while he was getting the Commandments. 

So in that case the Lord was merciful, and the Chosen People got a Big Break - Moses had his Levites kill a mere 3,000 of their brothers and friends for their idolatry, a very mild chastisement which made the slayers holy by baptising them in blood. Therefore the god feared is loved for one's own damned good. That is, Love must arise from fear, in hopes that a lawful, loving, cooperative response will be more successful than a grasping, competitive, hating one. 

Yet there is empirical evidence tending to prove that hate engenders hate, and that the best weapon of all is Love. So Universal Love is eventually declared the ideal for Mankind, but, alas, along the Way to Love certain obstacles present themselves. Love became so popular that some people, not understanding Love's origin in the Law or fear of punishment, and unaware that Love is the acquired habit of observing Law, foolishly believed that Love can replace the Law before everyone, down to the last man and woman, has donned the Habit of Love. The politically astute Supreme Commander, in an Appendix to the Contract, stipulated that everyone should love each other as they love YHWH. Of course, this implies that they should fear one other too, particularly those God-fearing, Self-righteous judges among them who have direct access to the Lord. They must not permit evil in their ranks.

No! Evil-doers must be executed. Evil must be hated and punished, but Good must be loved and rewarded. The Taliban judges knew that - the Afghan courtroom was simple: the Book on the Bench, a Sword for beheading and mutilating on one hand, a Whip for whipping on the other. 

Alabama judge Moore, a person of the Book, agreed with the Taliban, quoting his book Book. Sodomites must be executed forthwith before others misuse their gentalia and orifices. Blasphemers, female, thieves, adulterers, idolators, murderers - all must be murdered. Remember, the Greatest Love of is to love the Supreme Commander - those Manichean devils who don't must be executed - only the Red Dragon is honored by being enchained in the pit. T

That is the Deal, the offer we had better not refuse: take it or leave it. Yes, we can leave it if we will, and to the criminal extent that we leave it, the sinful individual will is free. 

The Law might seem harsh on individuals, but it is necessary if we would have divine order prevail instead of anarchic chaos, or instead of the infinite nothingness prior and subsequent to the order of life. We should never forget that, before all and first of all, there is a Power higher than any individual or group, and it is in our best interest to submit to it just as it behooves women to submit to men - do not cry "rape!" in response to "Thou shalt love god or else! 

Anyone who does not obey may have his free will, he may believe that he is a god unto himself, and he is, but he is also a "god" spelled backwards. 

Of course those who love YHWH should love one another as well, after they love YHWH first of all and always, for the Law of the Universal God necessarily applies to the distinctive particulars that it may be realized on Earth as a Concrete Universal or Person. 

Wait a minute, have we not contradicted ourself here? Never mind, this all works out in mysterious ways. Just remember this: as it is abstractly in heaven, so is it concretely on Earth. Since the power of individuals is relative and dispersed, it is nearly impossible to make them love each other; therefore they must be enjoined to love; but if they fail to positively love each other, they might still enjoy the benefits of society if they obey the negative injunctions - the Thou Shalt Nots - and vote for right-wing authoritarian governments who have faith in private property and "might makes right." It is lawful to hate and to kill enemies including missionaries of other religions; but one sort of hatred must by all means be avoided: Groundless Hatred of brother against brother, of Jew against Jew. 

Because of their Groundless Hatred, Jews lost their Temple, the Seat of YHWH and the Law and the Nation to the Romans. Hence the Jews are not supposed to have either religious or political center back again until the appearance of the Messiah. In the meantime, we have much to learn from them. 

The Catholic Fathers learned a great deal about Church Politics from them and the Byzantines. The Principle of Divine Leadership must be employed on Earth, and to that end a Hierarchy of Powers leading up to the Power is necessary: nothing gets done without the exercise of power. The High Priest is infallible! Yes, power can be abusively employed - used contrary to the Contract; that is the technical definition of blasphemy: the use of Power against Power, YHWH against YHWH. Of course, technically speaking, the Leading Principle is not the sole property of any one man or group of men, but some may represent it more than others in their various powerful offices. 

You see, men are not powerful, their offices are powerful. Mind you, lest power be abused, the prohibition against Groundless Hatred must be extended to all Mankind in the context that men should not hate each other without due cause; for instance: men should not hate others just because of their race; all that is required is that they be members of the one and only legitimate religion. 

As we know, Hitler was one of the many unholy examples of the abuse of power. His case reinforces the theory that the Universal God must be feared before all, or else all hell will break loose.

Therefore the Universal God is to be loved as the Law. Love on Earth is the expression of the Highest Law. It appears that any absolute distinction between Love and Law is dangerously false, as was proven by the example of Luther and others who learned the hard way, that there is no Love on Earth without Law to secure it, and had to back track and ask the worldly prince's professional soldiers to "stab and kill" 100,000 peasants who were audacious enough to fly the Rainbow Convenant Banner and to demand with pitchforks and sticks a Kingdom of God on Earth. 

 In any case, "Thou shalt love God or else!"

David Arthur Walters

Moving The Ten Commandments

MOVING THE TEN COMMANDMENTS

BY

DAVID ARTHUR WALTERS

Sept. 14, 2003

The scene outside the Alabama Judicial Building on August 27, 2003, as the two and one-half ton Ten Commandments shrine inside was moved to a back room pursuant to federal and state judicial decrees, was certainly moving, and any witness to it, no matter how calloused, could not help feeling some sympathy for the protestors.

Judge Roy Moore, without approval of the state authorities, had, in the middle of one night in 2001 of the Common Era, secretly inserted his mammoth shrine into the courthouse rotunda, and now the obtrusion had been almost miraculously whisked away on a hydraulic machine. Profound was the rage and grief of those who bore witness. One outraged man bawled through his cupped hands that the government was not going to take his Ten Commandments away from him; a woman sobbed and moaned hysterically as if she had just lost her best friend; several prayed silently on their knees; others laid on their bellies as flat as matzas and mumbled their prayers with lips touching the concrete pavement.

It was a sorrowful sight indeed. Your Humble Author is not a Christian but he respects Christians and he sympathizes too much with almost anyone who displays emotion. Surely something can be done to stop the flow of tears, to assuage the concerns of the children of god. Why not give each child a virtually indestructible wallet-sized replica of the Ten Commandments? That would be in keeping with the intention of the ancient prescription to post the commandments that they may be known to all. And the torah says they should be discussed every day too.

As for the courthouse display, it was definitely an instrusion of Chief Justice Moore's ego which by constant public practice he had managed to elevate over his almighty superego. The shrine was attractive enough, but it seemed to push one religion over others. Perhaps it would not have been obscene if it had been placed around the rotunda with other religious legal accouterments, such as one of Asoka's pillars inscribed with the Four Noble Truths - the pillar could be set on a granite elephant pedestal and have a golden buddha sitting on its capital; a block from the Wailing Wall inscribed with the Shield of David - Moses' Two Tablets could be hidden in an ark on top; a Koran in a glass case - a page to be turned each day; for the Vaisnava's, a lingam inserted in a yoni - the lingam might glow in the dark; a mural of Yin and Yang generating Five Elements would be nice; a replica of the tablets found by the Mormon seekers would do; an abstract painting alluding to Nothing would suffice; - but enough of this, we get the picture and we do not mean to slight anyone or leave them out, including good witches and religious atheists.

I respect Christians, and I therefore find occasion to show some respect for them here. We know who fought for religious freedom in the United States and built a wall between religious cults and secular state - Christians. Why? Because they were selfish and altruistic at the same time. Christians wanted their own cults and consciences, thank you very much, and they were reasonable enough in their spiritual foolishness to see that if each were to have their own, all must be secure from political interference as long as all abided by the same laws as every other corporation.

Take Roger Williams, for instance, who coined the phrase, "the wall of separation", who said that there must be a "hedge of separation between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world." There was no more opinionated man than Roger Williams, for, according to him, only his religious views were correct; nonetheless, if one is to have his views he must allow others to have theirs. That did not sit well with the Puritans of Massachusetts. In 1635 Williams was banished to England. He fled to Rhode Island instead and founded Providence. He was true to his word: he tolerated even the Quakers whom he despised. Rhode Island at the time was the most tolerable colony if you wanted a wide variety of religious liberty.

We learned about religious tolerance in grammar school some years ago, we can see where we are going with this theme: on to Madison and Jefferson. We do not want to regress to the colonial days we revolted against, the days of politically established religions with Old Testament laws: death for blasphemy; flogging for disrespecting ministers; whipping for not attending church; banishment; and much more. No, ma'am, no, sir, never. And that intolerance is what the Ten Commandments Judge reminds us of.

Everyone can have their commandments, whatever they are, inscribed on their circumcised hearts as far as this author is concerned, or referred to in context as part of our good heritage; but shoved on us under cover of night? Never. Of course many of us thank Judge Moore for making such a big scene for the individual liberty that put his individuality above all others. We need that every once in awhile so we can get a reading of what is going on behind the scenes in those chambers where judges have their conventicles. It appears that several of Judge Moore's colleagues in Alabama are conservative Christian judges, and they just said no to him after he tore up the law. Good. But it is not over until the fat lady sings, so we should keep our eyes on those conservative judges and test them again from time to time. People have a way of getting things done without flaunting their religion.

XYX

The Great Atheism Controversy

Sunday is a good day to mention Johann Gottlieb Fichte's alleged atheism. Fichte (1762-1814), was a German philosopher, religious thinker, and political radical. After being apointed professor of philosophy at Jena in 1794, he began a series of public lectures on Sundays, from ten to eleven o'clock, much to the consternation of the clerics. A local journal declaimed on Fichte's revolutionary politics, accusing him of subversively substituting the worship of reason for the worship of god.

That was a very serious charge in view of the situation over in Paris, where images of the savior and saints had been pulled down in churches - renamed "Temples of Truth" - and replaced with effigies of Reason and Liberty and with paintings of natural objects such as flowers. Atheism was in vogue to the extent that, if a priest bothered to even mention god in church, people openly guffawed. But Fichte had no such mummery or cynicism in mind although he was enthusiastic about some of the Revolution's basic principles and had written such tracts as Reclamation of the Freedom of Thought from the Princes of Europe and Contributions Designed To Correct the Judgement of the Public on the French Revolution.

The formal charge brought against Fichte for worshiping reason on Sunday was resolved in his favor by the university senate of the Weimar government, with the proviso that any future lectures be given at three o'clock on Sunday afternoons instead of in the mornings. No such compromise was available to Fichte, however, in the matter of Atheismusstreit, the famous Atheism Controversy which arose out of the publication of his 1798 essay on divine governance, On the Basis of Our Belief in the Divine Governance of the World - he was dismissed. Anonymous public attacks were then made on Fichte. The political authorities were embarrassed by the scandal, and they, in turn, ordered the journal publishing Fichte's purportedly atheistic views confiscated and forbade students from their respective regions to enroll at the university.

The grand duke of Weimar had a liberal respect for scholarship, yet he wanted the whole thing hushed up; nevertheless, Fichte insisted on raising a vigorous public response to the anonymous charges against him, because, he said, the matter at hand was a vital public issue concerning the most fundamental of all freedoms. After all, a public airing of both sides of the atheism controversy would expose the stupidity of the authoritarian morons. In one article Fichte promised that he would resign if censured by the governing authority. As it were, he was only lightly rebuked, but his offer to resign was accepted and he was dismissed from his university post.

What did Fichte say that outraged the anonymous religious authorities? In fine, he averred that god is the world moral order. And that sufficed to outrage the theists.

Fichte thought that a person truly believes in god if he does his duty "gaily and without concern", without fear or doubts about the consequences. A true believer is not afraid of the hateful hypocrites who go about casting anonymous aspersions on someone else's version of faith. As for the atheist, Fichte claimed that "the true atheist... raises his own counsel above God and thus raises himself to God's position" by concerning himself with the consequences of doing his duty. The real atheist, then, is a religious hypocrite who is concerned with what he can get out of his religion, the selfish person who does his duty concerned only with what is in it for him. But as far as Fichte was concerned, doing one's duty is imperative and not categorical - duties must be done regardless of the consequences. There are no ifs, ands, or buts about moral imperatives; for instance, the imperative not to lie: "You must not lie," Fichte said, "even if the world were to go to pieces as a consequence". One should be willing to sign his own name to his beliefs and suffer the consequences therefor.

It appears to this author that, if the same good works are done, then the practical effects of selfish atheism and dutiful theism are the same, leaving the question of a person's faith in god, which is really nobody else's business. For many Muslims, for instance, as long as a Muslim does her duty she is a Muslim; whether or not she believes in god is between her and god. As for lying, the biggest lie of all is told by those who profess the existence of god but do not really believe god exists. If only people would start telling the truth about god, nation, party, family, and person, we would embrace our common humanity - of course pessimists believe a world war would break out.

Do not worry, advised Fichte, the truth will not really cause the world go to pieces. If the truth is good for anything at all, surely it will keep the world intact. "The plan of its preservation could not possibly be based on a lie," quoth Ficthe. Obviously, if god does exist, she is not a liar. For Fichte, the moral world order that is god does not have to be proved; rather, it is the objective ground of all certainty.

Fichte was not an atheist at all in the learned opinion of many great theologians who happened to be influenced by him. He was, one might say, an ethical pantheist who believed god's moral order or logos was present in every individual and available to each conscientious individual. Of course that perspective led the bigoted dogmatists to charge Fichte with the mortal sin of deism - intolerant bigots insist that deists are atheists. Deism affirms the existence of god and of rewards and punishments after death. Deism posits that each person aided by reason can discover the few simple truths of religion. Since god gives all normal humans reason, secret doctrines are not god's doctrines; there are no specially anointed authorities who alone are able to understand and interpret god's word. Conscience is a private matter. Finally, as to the form o f worship, the deist worships god with good works.

The professors of stupidity charged Fichte with "making himself God" because of his reliance on reasoning rather than their irrational objective dogma. His concept of Absolute Transcendental Idealism and the Absolute Ego or "I" smacked of heresy to those who were looking for some godly object to idolize, a god of self-hate projected somewhere out there opposed to man and nature. Mind you, however, that Fichte's moral world order was not the mundane mores of the mob or crowd, but was the real moral order of a supersensible realm where duty is not done for pleasure's sake but for its own sake.

It does appear that an object-god, say a father-god who is out there somewhere, say in heaven, and who is opposed to man and to nature, is more of devil than a god. Wherefore we should also be wary of Fichte's absolute idealism, his apparent divorce of the subject (god and man) from the object (world and society). And his idealistic con-fusion of god and man on the subjective side is dangerous, for an idealist who thinks his personal ideals are the one and only reality can be ever bit as intolerant as the religious bigot. Indeed, an examination elsewhere of Fichte's patriotic German utopia reveals a totalitarian dsytopia. Of course, if he had known what we all should know, including the President of the United States and the Prime Minister of Great Britian, about that line thinking, he would not have been so enthusiastic about his German nationalism. On the other hand, the wild, anarchistic hand opposed to the totalitarian, heavy hand, we might admire Fichte for his assertion of the freedom of the will, the absolute freedom of thought and expression associated with the subjective nature of individualism.

Fichte was viciously and anonymously slandered by the professors of faith for expressing his conscience. The cowardice of the professors in remaining anonymous indicts their religion of ignorance, fear and hate. A profoundly faithful person rests secure in her faith; she is not pressed to prove the existence of her god; she certainly feels no need to make anonymous personal attacks on others. Of course those who are insecure in forced faith fear that someone else's reasoning might pull the rug called faith from beneath them, a rug laid on the shaky ground or shifting sands of their irrational fear, hence they respond anonymously unless they have a supporting mob; they answer with hate instead of love and would disallow any song except their own, desperately strident one.

College students conducting a recent study of hate-mongering cults were surprised by the loving friendliness the hate-cult members showed towards each other and towards new recruits. But they love not the god of neighborly love they rave about, and they condemn all to hell who do not agree with them. Surely this is not the worship of the god of love so many man-hating magpies chatter about in their assemblies, in churches, in neo-fascist meeting-places, but rather the worship of hate itself.

Whether or not we like Fichte's philosophy, the Great Atheism Controversy he was involved in, even though the atheism issue has grown increasingly moot since then, raises questions pertinent to our own time, For instance, Why would someone hide their name when expressing an opinion on an absract subject unless they are terribly ashamed of their own existence expressed in words? Why are they so ashamed of themselves? Why do so many people hide behind false identities simply to insult people? And why do so many "religious people", anonymously or not, resort to slander - as they did about Fichte's private life and sexual philosophy? Why, indeed, does their real god seem to be Satan, slander personified?

Copyright 2003 David Arthur Walters

The Ten Commandments Judge

THE TEN COMMANDMENTS JUDGE

BY

DAVID ARTHUR WALTERS

Sept. 11, 2003

"I will never deny the God upon whom our laws and country depend," declared Alabama's chief justice Roy Moore in the year 2003 of the Common Era, and his supporters cheered, fell to their knees and prayed outside of the state courthouse.

Judge Moore, the 'Ten Commandments Judge', was an Etoway County circuit judge. While serving in that lower capacity, he posted a plaque of the Ten Commandments in his courtroom, and fought opponents over the display, wherefore the purportedly sovereign people of democratic Alabama were greatly pleased and elected him to lead the superior court, apparently not as an equal among equals. In 2002 Judge Moore set up another scene by placing a shrine to the Ten Commandments in the rotunda of the Alabama Judicial Building.

The fetish is a 5,300 pound granite block upon which a truncated and revised version of the Hebrew tribal commandments appear in the form of Moses' tablets. A waterfall serves as a backdrop to the shrine; people are kept at a distance with a velvet cord. Judge Moore declared the shrine to be a testament to the "moral foundation" that American justice is based on - sodomy is one of his main concerns. His supporters aver that the Hebrew tribal commandments are the "cornerstone of our nation."

The prominent courthouse display is quite attractive to all sides: some believe it is scenic while others claim it is obscene and want it removed. Certain complaints were made, and U.S. District Court Judge Myron Thompson ruled that the shrine violated the Constitutional prohibition against state sponsorship of religious doctrine. He ordered it removed to a private place and said he would impose a $5,000 fine if his order was disobeyed. Judge Moore disobeyed. His eight fellow judges on the superior court said they were "bound by solemn oath to follow the law" and directed that the monument to the Hebrew tribal god - now believed by Jewish Christians to be the Judeo-Christian god - be moved. Judge Moore, their chief executive, continued to demur: "I cannot forsake my conscience." he said. He promised to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court "to defend our constitutional right to acknowledge God." He said his colleagues had placed themselves "above God."

At this writing Judge Moore has been suspended from the bench with pay; and rightly so, for he has defied and defiled the first rule of law: the rule of law. The law itself may be right or wrong, but all are subject to its general rule including the government and its officers. The only conscionable disobedience of law is in extreme cases of intolerable breaches of justice. The rule of law is our first defense against tyranny, our shield against the so-called divine right of sovereign persons to arbitrarily dispose of the lives of their subjects at will. And now Judge Moore officially claims that absolute sovereignty for himself. Those who would uphold the rule of law against his tyranny are summarily dismissed by him for raising themselves above his subjective god. As for him, he would not raise himself above god but would be god, the absolute power which brooks no resistance to his will as uncommanded commander.

Judge Moore's justification for his arrogance is a regression to the monarchical or "one ruler" principle derived from the early monotheism of one- god tribal life: thou shalt have no other god (or ruler) before me, for I am the lord thy god. If any objection to the king's ruling is made, it is dismissed with a reference to "god's will", and, if god's will seems injust, barbaric and cruel, we know that "His ways are mysterious." Ironically, the principle of sovereignty as it was interpreted by apologists for monarchy is contrary to ancient Hebrew tribal custom. The later doctrine of sovereignty was invented in response to civil strife, to rebellion against tyranny.

Almost all of us agree that, in extreme situations such as war, even in a democracy leaders are needed for an efficient defense or offense. Their commands must be obeyed - the commands can be questioned later in a democracy. Of course disobedience as a matter of conscience may be warranted, but that warrant comes from con-science or a rational social ethic which is of a higher order than mob psychology, and not from reliance on an indefinite, Supreme Anarch or Terrorist Almighty God of Chaos who is theoretically omnipotent and transcends all limitations

Threatened by the anarchy or revolution inspired by their abuses, the monarchs called upon their sophisticated ministers for a political theology to justify the continuation of tyranny. The kings' consciences ruled that, to live in peace, people need a sovereign power over them, to whom they should voluntarily submit to secure their lives - those who do not submit must be coerced to do so. Human nature being what it is, nearly seventy percent of people will submit to any recognized authority whether he is right or wrong, and most of them do not have nor do they want sufficient information upon which to make an independent judgement and act responsibly - for them, obedience is responsibility. What is wanted above all is security, and any order at all might do even if it is repressive; hence revolution is always in the hands of a minority.

Wherefore the will of the sovereign was rationalized by the sophists in order to justify arbitrary action by resort to something besides "god's will." Hence sovereignty is expedient and convenient for peaceful human existence. Sovereignty must be perpetual: it is not the sort of power that can be entrusted to others for a period of time, for that would contradict the principle of sovereignty in an uncommanded commander. Sovereignty must be absolute because, if conditions were put on it, such as having other authorities restrain it, there would be no sovereign principle. Sovereignty must be indivisible, for, if it were not, conflicts would arise among the divisions and there would be no sovereignty. In fine, the sovereign is above the law and he can lay down laws for others at his discretion but not obey them himself if he chooses not to.

The sovereign then is god on Earth and there is no other god before him; of course he may point his finger to empty space as the source of his authority. This is the principle resorted to by Judge Moore of Alabama in respect to his relatively minor position as chief justice of a smaller state. That is not to belittle the importance or significance of his office to those who suffer his occupation of it. For instance, he took away a mother's three children from her because she is gay. He cited Alabama's laws against sodomy in his brief as well as scripture, laws he felt bound to obey. He added later that Alabama law provides for the execution of criminals. When called to account for the remark, he hedged on the implication, and said that he did not mean a person should be murdered by the state for homosexual conduct. He said homosexuality was evil but that did not mean that he meant homosexual people themselves were evil - of course people are punished, not evil. Furthermore, he noted that lots of judges cite scripture. In this case he obviously demonstrated the sexual obssession of the ancient patriarchal tribal religion.

Fortunately, at least for the time being, the old sovereignty has been placed in the people. That is to say that the principle of the doctrine of sovereignty as rationalized by the monarch's lawyers has been successfully rebutted in respect to individuals, for now all individuals are theoretically subject to the law by, for, and of the people. Those officers who carry out the people's will wear the vestiges of the ancient principle of "my might is right" but they must answer to the sovereign people and not to subjective versions of gods who cannot even appear before the bar as lawyers or expert authorities. Of course people can elect and maintain a tyrant in office if the people's will be sovereign. Set against that possibility is the hopefully independent judiciary. And now Judge Moore repudiates the rule of law and cottons to the Alabama mob, giving them the judge they deserve because they elected him on the basis of his fundamentalist or regressive approach to law. Thankfully, other authorities in Alabama oppose his arrogation although they have not chastized him with a jail sentence for contempt - we suspect that if someone disobeyed Judge Moore's orders, she or he would be in jail for quite awhile.

If Judge Moore appeals and wins his case we shall honor the decision because this is really not the extreme case for rebellion he would make it out to be for sake of his ulterior motive, to use his official position to push his version of religion. If his example is imitated by judges throughout the land, no doubt in that extremity tyranny will have to be overthrown yet again because there will be no independent judiciary to protect the people from the born-again right-wing authoritarian government presently working overtime to destroy the very foundation of our liberties while taking god's name in vain.

XYX

Note:

The stone in this case is itself irrelevant and so is the judge's violation of the first four of the ten commandments inscribed thereon. Humans have been setting up stone festishes since the dawn of history. That might be objectionable to iconoclasts and is demonstrative of primitive ignorance but it is not illegal unless prohibited by law. And it was prohibited by federal and state judicial decrees in this case. This particular judge's disobedience and contempt for the rule of law is relevant, and that is the fundamental issue here.

Some of us may have no objection to the judge's fetish or anyone else's idolatrous stone-and-word-worship on private property. We may enjoy it for its aesthetic value, and, our taste being what it is, this monument to the Hebrew god pleases us.

In any event, every Alabamian knows what is going on. The judge deliberately pushed the shrine, which represents his view of religion, into the public courthouse because he wanted to make a scene. Many of them appreciate his aggressive stance, especially those who resent having their traditional symbols torn down and removed from public places. Furthermore, everyone who is literate and takes the time to do their research knows that the judge used (or abused) the Ten Commandments to get elected to the position where he now has shown contempt for the rule of law. Oherwise, it would have gone unnoticed. We may thank him for that, and thank as well those who brought legal objections to it, because the controversy exposes ignorance and bigotry in office.

The Ten Commandments and other laws both religious and secular should be posted in suitable places so they can be discussed, not worshipped. Just posting them and revering them is meaningless. Judges and priests and kings and presidents who swear by them are notorious for violating them. That is why they are regularly crushed by the very deities they worship.

Jefferson's Superior Race
by David Arthur Walters

Libertarians frequently identify their private or conservative interest in liberty with that of the founding fathers of the United States. Time and time again we have heard the doctrine that said fathers were not only Libertarians but were stalwart members of a "superior northern European culture" which must be protected and nourished in the United States because of its innate superiority.

A study of the signers of the Declaration of Independence reveals that the majority were well educated and prosperous. More than half of the southerners, including Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration, were planters who owned slaves - over a quarter of the grand total were either planters or landed gentry. More than half of the signers were trained in the law although not all practiced the profession. Many were merchants and shippers. They were all traitors who risked their lives and fortunes for what they perceived to be better lives and greater fortunes - only ten percent of the colonial population favored revolution, including those patriots who actually fought in the War of American Independence.

It is claimed that the leading founding fathers as well as most of the signers of the Declaration had their racial roots in the "superior northern European culture" extolled by many Libertarians today. It is safe to say that the great white fathers thought highly of the white 'race' and of their protestant religion. In other words, they were stereotypical white, anglo-saxon protestants. The crucial contributions of this type were well rewarded over time, sometimes out of proportion to the merit of their descendants. Many puritan-minded people were famous for their frugality and notorious for their religious intolerance and economic stinginess - god helps those who help themselves, therefore unwarranted charity must not get in the way of self-help. Wherefore the device of inheritance allowed fortunes to accumulate to the point that 'WASPS' were referred to as a kept class with a vested interest in free income, an interest no longer dependent on production of tangibles but in simply making money. A vested interest is an interest in getting something for nothing; the more money one has to begin with, the better, for it takes money to make money.

The vestiges of the old order are still with us - our economic dinosaurs are not extinct. All sorts of people have great fortunes today. Our Neo-Darwinian evolution was not enough to keep up the superiority of the old kept class, confronted as it was by the immigrating "inferior" southern and eastern cultures. Nevertheless, certain Libertarians among us are feeling powerless and are wont to insist, even though they might themselves be descended in part from "inferior" southern and eastern stock, that we must at least faithfully adhere to the principles of the "superior northern European culture" our forefathers and foremothers seemingly revolted from. Since they were traitors to England and repudiated such political principles as the divine right of kings and birth right to superior status and wealth favored by other European states, we might wonder why we should be loyal to so-called northern European principles at all.

Libertarians like everyone else frequently cite Thomas Jefferson to support their fraction, hence they will not blame us for turning to him for illumination on this subject. We discover that Jefferson's superior race was the barbarian Anglo-Saxon race from northern Europe, the German race. The Germans had been raiding Britain during the last two centuries of the Roman occupation. When the Romans withdrew to defend their disintegrating empire, the Scots and Picts beset the Britons. The Scots were Celts who had originated in Ireland; the Britons were probably of mixed, Celtic and aborigine, descent; the Picts or painted people were pre-Celtic aborigines who lived in eastern and northeastern Scotland, from whence they had given the Romans a very bad time. The British chief, Vortigern, asked the Saxons in Germany for help to fight off the Scots and Picts. The Saxon brothers Hengist and Horsa were much obliged to do so, and, around the year 450, three troop ships landed on Thanet with 1600 men. They were reinforced with another 5000 men in seventeen ships. The Saxons liked what they saw in Britain, and decided to take it away from their British allies. Hengist's successes aroused the ambitions of two other German tribes of the same language and institutions, the Angles and Jutes. Hence the Saxons, Angles and Jutes invaded and conquered the Britons despite the legendary resistance of King Arthur. The Angles hailed from the Angelyn district in Schleswig between the Schlei inlet and Flensburger Forde, an area they abandoned to settle in Britain - Mercia, Northumbria, East and Middle Anglia. The Jutes were probably from Jutland, and they wound up Kent, Wight, and Hampshire. The Saxons were from northern German, and settled mainly in Kent.

The term "Anglo-Saxon" was used on the continent in the 8th century to distinguish "the English" from the "Old Saxons" on the continent. Some citizens of the British Empire employed "Anglo-Saxon" as a term of racial pride to counter the Teutonic furor of their kin in the would-be German Empire of the Second and Third Reichs - Kaiser Wilhelm II, whose mother was Queen Victoria's daughter, had always hoped England would stand down, and he was deeply disappointed when the Anglo-Americans joined the Allies. Today historians use the term "Anglo-Saxon" to refer to the Germanic peoples who ruled England from the 5th-century invasion to the Norman conquest in 1066. However, when used as an ethnic term, Celts as well as the invading Vikings and Danes are included Anglo-Saxons.

As for the Normans of France who conquered the Anglo-Saxons in 1066, they were also from the north. They were the Norsemen or Vikings - pirates from Denmark, Norway, and Iceland - who invaded and settled in northern France in the 9th century, gave up fleets in favor of calvary, and became famous and infamous on land for their reckless courage, cunning, outrageous treachery, ruthless rule, rapid military movement, brutality, love of money, imitation, adaptation, and whatnot.

According to Jefferson, the Normans were Tories and the Anglo-Saxons were Whigs. The Anglo-Saxons he admired in a letter to Major John Cartwright were not Christians - they were warrior pagans who followed the Norse religion - its principal god is Odin. Jefferson was delighted to receive John Cartwright's "valuable volume", The English Constitution. Jefferson, in his letter June 5, 1824, declared, "I have read this with pleasure and much approbation, and think it has deduced the Constitution of the English nation from its rightful root, the Anglo-Saxon." Jefferson had read that Anglo-Saxons drove out the former inhabitants, mere aborigines in comparison to Major Cartwright's superior Anglo-Saxon race, an invading Germanic race that "doubtless had a constitution" albeit largely unwritten, but there were fragments extant from which the nature of their constitution can certainly be inferred.

"Although this constitution was violated and set at naught by a Norman force," Jefferson continued, "yet force cannot change right. A perpetual claim was kept up by the nation, by the perpetual demand of a restoration of their Saxon laws until the final reconquest of their rights from the Stuarts. The destruction and expulsion of this (Norman) race broke the thread of this pretended inheritance, extinguished all regal usurpation, and the nation re-entered into all its rights...

"The Whig deduces his rights from the Anglo-Saxon source, and the Tory from the Norman," pens Jefferson, a traitor to his motherland, and he calls the English philosopher and historian David Hume, "the great apostle of Toryism... a desperate son of science, this traitor to his fellow man", for supposing that the people had illegitimately encroached on a valid Norman right to rule, instead of vice versa, the truth writ large of course by Cartwright, that "the commons established a principle, that the people are the origin of all just power."

The author of the Declaration of Independence goes on to justify the violent overthrow of his former (British) government, referring to the same inalienable principles Locke had previously employed to justify the Glorious Revolution in England a century prior. "Can one generation bind another, and all others, in succession forever? I think not. The Creator made the earth for the living, not the dead.... A generation may bind itself as long as its majority continues in life; when that has disappears, another majority takes its place, holds all the rights and power their predecessors once held, and may change their laws and institutions to suit themselves. Nothing then is unchangeable but the inherent and unalienable rights of man."

Furthermore, Jefferson, an enemy of judicial independence and a foremost friend of a wall of separation between church and state, writes: "I was glad to find in your book a formal contradiction, at length, of the judiciary usurpation of legislative powers; for such judges have usurped in their repeated decisions, that Christianity is a part of the common law. The proof of the contrary, which you have adduced, is incontrovertible; to wit, that the common law existed while the Anglo-Saxons were yet pagans, at the time when they had never yet heard the name of Christ pronounced, or knew that such a character had ever existed."

It was not long after their invasion of England that the Anglo-Saxons were converted to Christianity, the religion of their resident enemy, the Britons, who had been converted by the Romans long before. Saxon King Ethelbert had already received Christianity in the 6th century. David Hume writes in The History of England that it was highly unlikely that the British victims of the German invasion would be preaching Christianity to the cruel barbarians. He speculates that the Saxons were duly impressed by the progress of Christianity among their brethren on the continent, and that they wanted to associate with the universal spiritual power.

David Hume, Britain's beloved "Great Infidel", was no friend of any kind of superstition. He believed that the whole Christian story from the Fall to the Day of Judgment was a superstition. He railed against the ancient Celtic religion in his history of England, but he apparently believed it was preferable in some respects to the Saxon religion: "The superstitions of the Germans, particularly that of the Saxons, was of the grossest and most barbarous kind; and being founded on traditional tales received from their ancestors, not reduced to any system, nor supported by political institutions like that of the Druids, it seems to have made little impression on its votaries, and have easily resigned its place to the new doctrine promulgated to them.... They believed that if they obtained the favor of this divinity [Woden] by their valor (for they bade less account of the other virtues), they should be admitted after their death into his hall, and reposing on couches, should satiate themselves with ale from the skulls of their enemies whom they had slain in battle. Incited by this idea of paradise, which gratified at once the passion of revenge and intemperance, the ruling inclinations of barbarians, they despised the dangers of war, and increased their native ferocity against the vanquished by their religious prejudices."

Here we have an example of Hume's eloquent style, which was jealously referred to by both Jefferson and Adams as one that had allowed Hume to poison English and American minds with toryism. Jefferson's criticism was particularly caustic and even and slanderous at times. That is certainly a shame, for Jefferson had many ideas in common with Hume since studying his history as a youth, and was literally biting the hand that had fed him. Jefferson wrote from Monticello to Colonel William Duane, on August 12, 1810, as follows: "Our laws, language, religion, politics and manners are so deeply laid in English foundations, that we shall never cease to consider their history as a part of ours, and to study ours in that as its origin. Everyone knows that judicious matter and charms of style have rendered Hume's history the manual of every student. I remember well the enthusiasm with which I devoured it when young and the length of time, the research and reflection which were necessary to eradicate the poison it had instilled into my mind. It was unfortunate that he first took up the history of the Stuarts, became their apologist, and advocated all their enormities. To support his work, when done, he went back to the Tudors, and so selected and arranged the materials of their history as to present their arbitrary acts only, as the genuine samples of the constitutional power of the crown, and, still writing backwards, he then reverted to the early history, and wrote the Saxon and Norman periods with the same perverted view. Although all this is known, he still continues to put into the hands of our young people, and to infect them with the poison of his own principles of government."

Furthermore, Jefferson wrote from Monticello, on October 25, 1825, that "Hume's [history], were it faithful, would be the finest piece of history which has ever been written by man. It unfortunate bias may be partly ascribed to the accident of his having written backwards. His maiden work was the History of the Stuarts... the object of his work was an apology for them. He spared nothing, therefore, to wash them white, and to palliate their misgovernment. For this purpose he suppressed truths, advanced falsehoods, forged authorities, and falsified records. All this is proved on him unanswerably by Brodie. But so bewitching was his style and manner, that his readers were unwilling to doubt anything, swallowed everything, and all England became Tories by the magic of his art."

Hume's history was an exceedingly popular history, and had made him, as he put it, "opulent." John Adams complained to Jefferson on July 15, 1813, that his books would not share the same popularity: "The English commonwealth, the fate of Charles the First, and the military despotism of Cromwell, had sicked mankind with disquisitions on government to such a degree, that there was scarcely a man in Europe who looked into the subject. David Hume had made himself so fashionable with the aid of court and clergy. Atheist, as they called him, and by his elegant lies against the republicans and gaudy daubings of the courtiers, that he had nearly laughed into contempt Rapin, Sydney, and even Locke. It was ridiculous and even criminal in almost all Europe to speak of constitutions, or writers upon the principles or the fabrics of them. In this state of things my poor, unprotected, unpatronized books appeared; and met with a fate not quite so cruel as I had anticipated. They were at last, however, overborne by misrepresentations, and will perish in obscurity...."

Jefferson's was infuriated by what was merely a footnote, referred to above in reference to Jefferson's June 5, 1824 letter to Major John Cartwright: "Hume, the great apostle of Toryism, says in so many words, note AA to chapter 42, that, in the reign of the Stuarts, 'it was the people who encroached upon the sovereign, not the sovereign who attempted, as is pretended, to usurp upon the people.' This supposes the Norman usurpations to be rights in his successors. And again, in C, 159, 'the commons established a principle, which is noble in itself, but is belied by all history and experience, that the people are the origin of all just power.'"

Hume was a conservative. He believed in the abstract superiority of republican principles, but he did not believe "dangerous experiments" were appropriate for his troubled country at a time when its hard-won liberties were being threatened by radicalism. He believed that ideological and theological fanaticism was a threat to civilization. As a matter of fact, Hume had, as Jefferson knew very well, extended at some length customary praise to the Saxons in his history of England, repeating the racialist myth derived from the classical author. At least it is praise in the estimation of those who are not insulted by the barbaric, violent record of human civilization, and tend to find some justification for current revolution and war in it. "Of all the barbarous nations," quoth Hume, "known either in ancient of modern times, the Germans seem to have been the most distinguished both by their manners and political institutions, and to have carried to the highest pitch the virtues of valor and love of liberty; the only virtues which can have place among uncivilized people, where justice and humanity are common neglected. Kingly government... possessed a very limited authority; and though the sovereign was usually chosen from among the royal family, he was directed in every measure by the common consent of the nation.... In peace the civil union was in great measure dissolved, and the inferior leaders administered justice after an independent manner, each in his particular district. These were elected by the votes of the people in their great councils.... The warriors of each tribe attached themselves to their leader with the most devoted affection and most unshaken constancy.... To die for the honor of their band was their chief ambition; to survive the disgrace, or the death of their leader, was infamous. They even carried into the field their women and children, who adopted all the martial sentiments of the men.... The contributions which [the leaders] levied went not beyond a bare subsistence; and the honors acquired by superior rank were the only reward for the dangers and fatigues.... And the leaders, by annually distributing anew all the land among the inhabitants of each village, kept them from attaching themselves to particular possessions, or making such progress in agriculture as might divert their attention from military expeditions, the chief occupation of community."

Again, the tenor of this Anglo-Saxon myth based on the classical source is that of the Teutonic myth advanced by Prussian leaders who led Germany into two world wars. Which makes one wonder, Who were the Tories and who were the Whigs of that struggle for moral advancement? Jefferson thought the distinction would disappear in his revolutionary era. He sent a letter dated November 25, 1816 to John Adams at Poplar Forest: "(T)he distinctions of whig and tory will disappear like chaff on a troubled ocean. Indeed, they have been disappearing from the day Hume first began to publish his history. This single book has done more to sap the free principles of the English constitution than the largest standing army which their patriots have been generous.... Hume has concentrated, in his fascinating style, all the arbitrary proceedings of the English kings, as true evidences of the constitution, and glided over its Whig principles as the unfounded pretensions of factious demagogues. He even boasts, in his life written by himself, that of the numerous alterations suggested by the readers of his work, he had never adopted one proposal by a Whig."

But John Adams disagreed with him in a letter dated December 16, 1816: "You think that 'in a revolution the distinction of Whig and Tory would disappear.' I cannot believe that. That distinction arises from nature and society; is now, and ever will be, time without end, among Negroes, Indians, and Tartars, as well as federalists and republicans. Instead of 'disappearing since Hume published his history,' that history has only increased the Tories and diminished the Whigs. That history has been the bane of Great Britain. It has destroyed many of the best effects of the revolution of 1688. Style has governed empire. Swift, Pope and Hume, have disgraced all the honest historians."

I must leave off here to consult my muse. I shall return soon enough if the gods are willing to examine my argument, that the English or the American constitution is not rooted in a particular race or its religion.

Thomas Jefferson's Religious Contradiction

Thomas Jefferson, the most popular founding father of the United States, learned much and said much about various subjects during the course of his illustrious career, and he naturally contradicted himself from time to time for one reason or another. Perhaps he changed his mind, just as people change or amend their constitutions. Perchance his opinion was unsettled. He might have been unaware of certain contradictions. Or maybe he found it politically expedient to reverse himself for a greater or higher cause. Therefore we are, fortunately for our independence as individuals, given a number of occasions to employ Jefferson's corpus to contradict each other: to cite him, for instance, in support of free trade; yet, on the other hand, or at least for the time being, he says trade must be restrained.

We claim our founding fathers as we do our gods, with all their goods and evils - and we often disagree over which is which. Jefferson was adopted by the recent patriot movement although Andrew Jackson would have been a much better match; Jefferson was used to refute the patriots as well as to support their views. Of course, Jefferson, tutelary founding father of both the Republican and Democratic parties, was not altogether inconsistent in his passions. For example, he was vehemently opposed to an independent judiciary: he tried to use the impeachment process, which he confessed was a political "farce", to smother the Supreme Court in its crib.

Now we may tend to sympathize with Jefferson's antipathy to the federal judiciary, at least to the extent that its decisions discomfit us, particularly at the highest court of appeal except god. Sometimes it seems that the judiciary is a high priesthood chanting a political theology opposed to the people or to the revealed will of mysterious divine god almighty. For example, during a televised appearance on September 5, 2003, Dr. James Dobson, an influential speaker for the religious right and founder of Focus on the Family, congratulated the Bush Administration for its war on Iraq and voiced his displeasure with the judiciary for ruling against his god and in favor of homosexuals - he thanks god that the president is sponsoring a federal law prohibiting same-sex marriage. Dr. Dobson is convinced that homosexual activists are abusing the law to destroy the institution of marriage in the heterosexual, monogamous family, and that homosexuality itself is a great danger to the world, especially the next generation. Therefore the judiciary, hell-bent on taking god out of public institutions, must be reigned in from its godless course and be re-submitted to the Christian god of love, without whom nobody can be saved. And not even the Jews can be saved without Jesus, he told Larry King; then he made the standard claim of the religious right, that the foundation of American common law is Judeo-Christian. To support his position, Dr. Dobson cited our foremost founding father, Thomas Jefferson.

Thomas Jefferson brought up the subject in a letter to Major John Cartwright dated June 5, 1824, at Monticello. Cartwright had abandoned a promising career in the British Navy to support the American colonists; he became an English reformer, urging the political combination of radical workers and middle-class moderates; he founded the first Hampden Club, and formed the Society for Constitutional Information. Jefferson thanked Cartwright for sending him a copy of his "valuable volume", The English Constitution.

"I was glad to find in your book," wrote Jefferson, "a formal contradiction, at length, of the judiciary usurpation of legislative powers; for such judges have usurped in their repeated decisions, that Christianity is a part of the common law. The proof of the contrary, which you have adduced, is incontrovertible; to wit, that the common law existed while the Anglo-Saxons were yet pagans, at the time when they had never yet heard the name of Christ pronounced, or knew that such a character had ever existed."

Jefferson had done some lawyering himself on the issue, and he cited a few cases in his letter to Cartwright, to demonstrate how the Christian judges managed to "stole this law upon us." A certain Chief Justice Prisot had used the phrase ancient scripture in one of his opinions, stating that the written laws of the church, meaning those church laws that were in ancient writing, should be recognized as laws. Thereafter the phrase was taken out of context and misconstrued to mean that holy scripture was part of the law of the land. For example, England's greatest jurist since Edward Coke, Lord Chief Justice Matthew Hale, declared that "Christianity is parcel of the laws of England." (I Ventr. 293, 3 K.B.. 607). This is the same Hale who personally ordered the execution of two women for witchcraft. In early 1676, it was Hale on the King's Bench, in the case of John Taylor, who rendered the most important decision during that dark part of English history which virtually made Christianity the law of the land, when blasphemy or heresy was called "nonconformity" and deemed seditious under the common law.

Taylor, a yeoman, had uttered what was deemed the most "horrendous blasphemy" to date: he called Christ a "whore master." He explained that he meant Christ was the master of the whore of Babylon - the Catholic Church. He said religion was a "cheat" and Christianity a "cloak", and that no man fears god but a hypocrite. He denied calling Christ a bastard, but he admitted to saying "God damn and confound all your gods." Now that is understandably insulting to believers although infidels might believe there is some truth to it. Taylor was believed to be off his rocker for saying this: "All the earth is mine, and I am a king's son. my father sent me hither, and made me a fisherman to take vipers, and I neither fear God, devil, nor man, and I am a younger brother to Christ, an angel of God." He was locked up in the mad house (Bedlam) but the keeper reported that Taylor was not mad and was a blasphemer, so he was tried and found guilty. The fine of 1,000 marks amounted to a life sentence since he had not the wherewithal or sponsors to pay it. One court reporter reported that Justice Hale said:

"And... such kind of wicked blasphemous words were not only an offence to God and religion, but a crime against the laws, State and Government, and therefore punishable in this Court. For to say, religion is a cheat, is to dissolve all those obligations whereby the civil societies are preserved, and that Christianity is parcel of the laws of England; and therefore to reproach the Christian religion is to speak in subversion of the law."

Now, then, Jefferson tracked the alleged insertion of Christianity into the common law to Blackstone, who repeated in 1763, "Christianity is part of the laws of England," and to Lord Mansfield who said in the Evans case in 1767 that "the essential principles of revealed religion are part of the common law. Jefferson complains that the judges do all this gratuitous citing on their own authority. Furthermore, he notes that even some of the Anglo-Saxon priests had interpolated some of Exodus and Acts into Alfred's laws.

"What a conspiracy this, between Church and State! Sing Tantarara, rogues all, rogues all, Sing Tantarara, rogues all!" sang Jefferson to Cartwright.

In retrospect, after centuries of research into early English history, it appears that the controversial "incontrovertible" assumption that English common law is rooted in primitive Anglo-Saxon law is in fact controvertible. The great founding father of the United States may have been correct in his view that the common law was and is not and should never be Christian, but mistaken in his view that its essence is somehow Anglo-Saxon. No doubt law or at least the need for it is rooted in the potential for human freedom, a rebellious "free will" possessed by every individual.

Of course this question on the whole might seem moot and even absurd to members of the human race, citizens of the cosmos, and residents of the city of god who have transcended such trivial pursuits. Nevertheless, since the disputes continue to have some influence over our mundane lives on Earth, I shall return with a discussion of the Anglo-Saxon controversy, argue that Western law is for the most part Roman, thanks to the Roman Catholic Church - even the relatively isolated English common law had points of contact with the Roman law during nearly all periods, resulting in similarities of legal thought between England and the Continent.

The Lawless Judge

The Lawless Judge

"Don't let anyone deceive you in any way,
For that day will not come until the rebellion occurs
And the man of lawlessness is revealed,
The man doomed to destruction.
He will oppose and exalt himself over everything
That is called God or worshiped,
So that he sets himself up in God's temple,
Proclaiming himself to be God."

Paul - Thessalonian 2:3

The Proper State is Secular

An elected chief justice of Alabama recently refused to obey a judicial order to remove a two and one-half ton granite shrine to the Decalogue that he had surreptitiously slipped into the courthouse rotunda around midnight one night. The reason he gave for disobeying the positive law of his peers was that true American law has its origin in his god, hence he declared that the federal judge and his colleagues on the state supreme court had violated god's law by placing themselves above god and above the law. After all, the First Table of the Law establishing Hebrew theocracy, as edited for the shrine, explicitly stated, "I am the Lord thy God, Thou shalt have no god before me," or the like. The Hebrew god has been revamped by Christians; therefore it was said that American law is Christian law. "I will never deny the God upon whom our laws and country depend," said the Alabama chief justice. At the time of this writing, he is suspended for disobeying the secular law upheld by the Catholic governor and the Baptist attorney general, somewhat to their embarrassment - they reportedly had condoned the insertion of the shrine into the rotunda after the fact. The governor himself acknowledged that, "God is the basis our legal system."

Of course every American citizen knows about the separation of church and state fought for by the founding fathers and mothers of this great state of ours. And almost every "schoolboy" in my grammar school knew about the religious liberty and multiplication of faiths resulting from that separation - indeed, the United States was world-famous for it. Religion was at its lowest ebb during and just after the War for American Independence. Of course the first three presidents were "Deists" or at least embraced the notions of Deism. Deists worship the deity directly, with works. Many good Christians considered Deism to be a form of atheism - Jefferson in particular was roundly cursed as an atheist. As far as the Catholics were concerned at the time, all Protestants were atheists. The hateful bigotry was too much for many people - they swore off of religion forever. Many people had come to America to make their fortunes on Earth and cared less about heaven. With the separation of church and state and the disestablishment of colonial religion, a sort of spiritual vacuum arose. But the competition of revivalism worked to fill the vacuum with a proliferation of cults and sects, something Europe marvelled at as its odd groups emigrated to American to take advantage of religious liberty and the democracy that implies even for the irreligious.

Therefore our ears perk up when we hear political authorities stating that our democratic state, constituting equality under law, is not only a religious institution but is a Christian one at that, and that the ultimate author of law is not the people who are sometimes said to be the voice of god, but is rather a jealous, fulminating Judeo-Christian god with less than a hand of secular laws. The more abstract Judeo-Christian god is an infinite god unknown to most intelligent inquirers, a god who cannot be called to testify, legislate, or judge, but one who apparently directly reveals divine will to privileged judges and politicians that they may rightly interpret the written and common law after reading Jewish and Christian scripture - incidentally, democratic Americans preferred to have their laws in writing although the federalist judges clung to the English common law.

The American Revolution is obviously not over. We are still struggling with the retrograde parochial tradition for which the tribal god, husband of Israel, and his mythical legislator, Moses, is the monotheistic, monarchical model for Christians. Christianity asserted the universal yet it could not make a clean break from cultish law to universal faith. It could not yet take up a new gospel, the glad tidings of a strange god of distributed love instead of the hate-based love of the tribe or nation; and that is why it is still waiting for the Stranger to appear again.

However that may be, the proper state, the living state, is not a static or dead state ruled by dead kings, dead gods, dead stones, dead letters. The proper state is present in the world as a living secular state. Yes, legal institutions evolved from religious institutions, and, in a manner of speaking, the judicial branch of our state is a "priesthood." Yes, state secularism is a sort of "religion" and it has its political "theology." It is the religion of political liberty that fosters religious liberty and freedom of conscience and protects a multiplicity of faiths, including faith in materialism, providing that all corporations, no matter how radical or irrational their membership's beliefs, abide by the rule of law. The German historian Heinrich von Treitschke made this interesting observation about Americans over a century ago:

"The 'voluntary system' of America treats the Church exactly as it treats every chess- or dancing-club. In the law-courts the clergy are on the same level as a railway director; the churches are places of public assembly merely; the State asks no rights of supervision over them, and allows them to exist upon the same footing as other private associations. This is all in accordance with the American Constitution, under which the State is more a free association than a compelling authority.... In America... the voluntary system is possible.... In Europe it would be a total contradiction of historical tradition.... Our ancient Church in Europe could never be treated like this or that club."

Treitschke believed that the early English sectarians of the American colonies fostered plurality of correlative politics and religion; he was apparently unware that the opposite was the case: the sectarians tried to set up theocracies - "Zions" and "Israels" - to protect their aristocratic interest in land and political power; it was the resistance to their efforts and the availability of other places to go, coupled with the need for trade between the colonies, that resulted in the spread of religious "toleration" and plurality. The emphasis on commerce as the modus operandi was so strong that the coin was stamped with the name "God" and virtually became the god most worshipped. Ironically, Trietschke credits the religious zeal of the voluntary American system with offsetting the money-grubbers who were "leading a life unworthy of a human being for six days on end, keep the seventh after the fashion of the ghastly English Sabbath, as a day of completely unintelligent repose." He goes on however to deplore the "religious hatreds and jealousies" of the sects, "which would be unbearable to us Germans." Trietschke was a premier propagandist for the German world-power state; we regret that he did not see that our sectarian religious hatreds and jealousies fostered by our political pluralism was much to our benefit rather than to our detriment.

The foregoing does not serve to deny or to repudiate the contributions of Christians to the American legal system. Nevertheless, judges who claim the law for their very own religion should be chastened for their arrogance, and they should impeached if they use religion to abuse their office, for they raise themselves above the law. They ignore the history of the law not only prior to the birth of their christ but thereafter as well. Such a narrow claim is an insult to Jews, Greeks, Romans, Barbarians, Pagans. And let us not forget the Native Americans or American Indians whose ways were intently studied while they were being murdered and run off the land. In fact the Jesuits among the Indians in Canada said that, notwithstanding the practice of torture and their natural religion, the Indians were far more civilized than Europeans and that they should not consort with whites lest they be corrupted.

And much more since then was contributed by way of legislation and the philosophy of law by many other people of diverse persuasions. Indeed, in view of the fact that our law is the living law of all human beings subject to themselves as the sovereign people, the effort to define it as particularly "Christian" attempts to kill the law and flirts with sedition. And that gives me occasion to conclude that the United States of American is not a Christian state although the majority of its citizens are Christians. Whether those Christians really believe their god exists or are simply lying to apppear to be good, whether they are really atheists or not is their business.

Empirical Pragmatics Index

The First Table of the Law



The sort of religious fundamentalism that would really or virtually conjoin church and state in unholy matrimony that they might live in the sin of theocracy is obviously the greatest threat to human liberty and world peace today. From that ungodly constitution certain legitimate Chistian fundamentalists disqualify themselves by rendering unto Caesar his worldy due and unto their god their spiritual faith, wherefore we exclude them so that we may speak only of the monstrous offspring of the marriage of church and state, called by Thomas Paine a "mule-animal."

"All religions are in their nature kind and benign," quoth Paine in Rights of Man, ".... How is it that they lose their native mildness, and become morose and intolerant? ... By engendering the church with the state, a sort of mule-animal, capable only of destroying, and not of breeding up, is produced, called the Church established by Law. It is a stranger, even from its birth, to any parent mother, on whom it is begotten, and whom in time it kicks out and destroys."

Paine thus voiced his objection to the "antipolitical doctrine" of the father of modern conservatism, Burke, who was preaching tradition over reason and chanting "Church and State." Then as today the regressive fraction ignored history or lied about it to maintain their tyrannical way. The ill effects of the satanic doctrine over the centuries were horrendous and disgraced Christianity even after what Heinrich von Treitschke identified in his Politics as "the great deed of Martin Luther." Treitschke was a premier propagandist of the doctrine that led Germany into the Great War and its sequel; despite the prejudices of his day, and the patriotic duty of German historians to express them, he was in many respects a good historian with considerable insight into politics. As far as he was concerned, a modern state is by definition secular - it cannot be Christian. Of course a nation of people without religion had never existed, and Germans were a Christian people - he said the slight admixture of Jew counted for nothing. Furthermore, he points out that the superiority of the Church over the State was once "neither inconsequent nor unnatural. It met, however, with the opposition of every sound secular state."

"In the freedom which followed upon the great deed of Martin Luther," wrote Treitschke, "the old doctrine was broken with forever, and not in Protestant countries only. It would, of course, be impossible to make a Spaniard understand that Spain owes the independence of her Crown to Luther. Yet it was he who first gave utterance to that great thought that the State is itself a moral organization, which need not rely uon the supporting arm of the Church. In doing so he rendered the greatest of all political services."

Alas, shortly after Luther's great deed, Protestants politicians proceeded to burn their own heretics at the stake over one doctrinal trifle or the other, and nations established Protestant religions which were in turn intolerant of dissent from the establishment's vain doctrines and injust laws.

"The resounding act of Martin Luther reawakened the inborn impulse of self-defence in the secular power," continues Treitschke. "State-supported churches were everywhere established, which at first sight bear a superficial though imperfect resemblance to the Caesaro-papalism of Eastern Europe. The temporal State put forward no claim to be deified, but became aware of its civilizing mission although with all the narrowness characteristic of new movements. This claim of the State was thus formulated by Melanchthon; the duty of the secular sovereign is the custodia utriusque tablulae (custody of the Two Tables of the Law), therefore also the guardianship of the First Table of the Law, which contains the first duty of man - to God. To preserve and uphold this pure doctrine of God and the things of God is one of the fundamental duties of authority.

"From this it follows that the sovereign is the head of the Church, and must himself conform to the true faith, moreover that unity of belief is the natural aim of political life. The French summarized these principles in the phrase, une foi, une loi, un roi (one faith, one law, one king), while the legal maxim in Germany is even more apt: cujus regio, ejus religio (whose region, his religion)."

That is to say that one should adopt the religion of the region in which he settles down; in those days that meant, "Like sovereign, like religion." The sovereign by divine right held the sword of life and death and it was therefore his duty to regulate both temporal and eternal affairs: supervise men's duties toward god, maintain moral order pursuant to religion, and so forth. There was a spiritual sword above the secular sword: the word of God, as it was interpreted and misinterpreted by the sovereign and his advisors from the kept classes.

Indeed it might be wise for a traveller when in Rome to do as Romans do, and to observe all religions in every region he passes through with the theoretical understanding that all religions worship one god; but today we would rather live in a free country where no man or combination of men can stand between a man and his god or conscience and blasphemously dictate to him the arbitrary will of a indefinite deity. Establishment religions, as Thomas Paine knew and every attentive schoolchild knows, whether they be Catholic or one of the Protestant cults, were abused by the kept classes and used as instruments of oppression. And that is one important reason why people emigrated from Europe to settle in North America.

But the pilgrims took their baggage with them, and the aspiring many were confronted by an intolerant few with charters and those few established virtual theocracies. Setting themselves up as landlords, the leaders spoke of Zion and of the terrifying land-god of Israel, using the old political religion for their own spiritual and material aggrandizement. The bigoted leaders of Massachusetts, for example, went so far as to hide the charter that provided all freemen with certain political powers. Membership in the Puritan church replaced the purchase of stock as the means of becoming a freeman. A prospective member had to undergo an ordeal of three-fold inquisition to gain entry, and then only by a special vote of the General Court might he become a freeman.

The colonial aristocrats called themselves Christians yet they were frustrated Hebrews with a vested interest in the First Table of the Law and the claim of its indefinite Lord, before or beside which no other landlord was allowed. "If any man after legal conviction shall have or worship any other God but the Lord God, he shall be put to death," read the 1642 Connecticut law. Ironically, many of the good people of Connecticut had fled Massachussets. They got their own government after proving their mettle in the Pequot Indian War. The 1639 charter of the "people" stated their goal: to preserve the purity of the Gospel; to discipline the churches; to provide civil laws. Some colonies were more tolerant than others: Rhode Island seems to have been most tolerant; Pennsylvania was not bad for Protestants; Maryland 's Lord Baltimore was a Catholic - to get settlers, he had to tolerate all sorts of Christians.

Something more was wanted in America than tolerance. Paine made a good point when he declared in the Rights of Man that, "Toleration is not the opposite of Intolerance, but is the counterfeit of it. Both are despotisms. The one assumes to itself the right of withholding Liberty of Conscience, and the other of granting it.... Toleration... places itself, not between man and man, nor between church and church, nor between one denomination of religion and anothers, but between God and man; between the being who worships, and the BEING who is worshipped; and by the same act of assumed authority which it tolerates man to pay his worship, it presumptuously and blasphemously sets itself up to tolerate the Almighty to receive it.

"Were a bill brought into any Parliament entitled, 'An Act to tolerate or grant liberty to the Almighty to received the worship of a Jew or a Turk,' or 'to prohibit the Almighty from receiving it,' all men would startle and call it blasphemy."

We might hope that every American schoolchild has learned that the struggle for liberty in the American Revolution was not only for freedom from political oppression in the form of monarchical tyranny but freedom from its traditional spiritual sword: the intolerant, one-god religion with its national landlord who says, "Take that land; it is yours, let the present inhabitants be damned to hell," then, once the land is seized, enslaves the people and kills them if they object or dare to look to another landlord or god. That strategy came in handy during the development of civilizations forged in bloody conflict, but that old-fashioned one-god and other one-gods after him are now dead although not completely rotted away. It is from that putrefying, blood-red carcass that the regressive faction which adores death would regenerate religious and political intolerance and destroy one of the most important accomplishments of the enlightened citizens of the living United States: the separation of Church and State. We speak not only of the formal, constitutional separation, but of the "virtual" separation we might enjoy by virtue of education and practice.

The separation of church and state has fostered our extraordinary plurality of faiths, our democracy, our prosperity. And the separation is not complete, hence there is room for further progress. Yet the regressive faction, fearful and jealous of freedom, would close the gap and abolish everyone else's freedoms but their own, wantonly casting aside the broad distribution of liberty so many have died for. The bigots are not satisfied with freedom of religion and conscience. The intolerant fundamentalists are not satisfied with having the word "god" identified with Coin so that all children get the blasphemous idea that God is Money and proceed to adulate and obey those who have the most of it. The religious right do not really care for the religious symbols they fight over; they worship Power and what they want is the power to destroy life and liberty in the name of the idealization of their self-hatred and resentment.

And that is precisely why anyone in their right mind will resist the strategic national and local campaigns of the religious right to establish a dead tribal-god theocracy, whether it be virtual or real, in any political division of the United States. The recent refusal of the Ten Commandment Judge - the now suspended chief justice of Alabama - to obey a legal order to remove a two and one-half ton shrine to the Decalogue from the courthouse rotunda, where he had inserted it in the middle of one night, is certainly an obvious albeit minor case that illustrates the regressive egoistic motive behind the scene. Evidently certain superstitious priests of the judical order still believe they are the sovereign's medieval custodians of the tables of the law, especially the First Table establishing the theocracy. We hear obiter dicta from the cloister that the United States is a Christian state; yet one of the greatest Christian insights is that those who depend on the law as if it were the rock of their salvation are damned. Furthermore, our state is in fact secular, not Christian; the state is by definition secular and must be just to all its citizens; there is no reference to "God" in our Constitution, and it expressly prohibits laws establishing religion. To designate the United States as a Christian state and to claim that its power is derived from a particular god, thus denying its legitimate source in the people, is exceedingly dangerous and even seditious.

The religious symbols are significant but the arguments over them of late serve more to distract attention from the born-again, right-wing authoritarian movement in the United States. A government office can be as devoid of religious trappings as a Quaker meeting house, yet that office can still have a right-wing, war-mongering, fanatic fundamentalist presiding in it - he might even claim that he is a Quaker whose political oath of office requires him to take off his religious hat in order to wage war on an evil empire of godless infidels. And a bigoted Christian judge can find a way to discriminate against homosexuals, Muslims, blacks and others regardless of the uniform laws under which all are expressly equal. No burning cross in the courtroom, or bible-thumping judges, or huge patriarchal shrines of the Decalogue inserted in public rotundas is really required to bridge the separation of church and state. Only the vigilance and wisdom of the people can maintain a wall between the two. People are falling down on that job lately with the rise of the religious right.

The danger of mixing right-wing power politics and old-time religion has been made more terrifying to many since the religious right helped get their favorites into the White House and other high offices - the elected and appointed all swore the usual ungodly hypocritical oath of office to set aside their personal principles and promises and to work for the whole people. They break almost every campaign promise yet they seldom work for the whole people. They are however true in one regard: they will not set aside the old-time god of land and war, of hypocrisy and self-contempt. And now the apocalypse preached by fundamentalist Christian and Muslim fanatics given over to the death instinct is increasingly likely to come true as more of them take office; in fact, their self-fulfilling prophecy, their wish for the world their god hates is dawning upon the world. It is no wonder that Pat Robertson could not help blurting out admiration for the diabolical work of Osama binLaden. And the presidential candidate Robertson supported, after saying he had "no mercy" for refusing to give a born-again Christian a thirty-day stay of execution - all he could give - speaks of "crusades" and of "good and evil." He says to our objections to war, "You are either for us or against us," as if all opposed are traitors. He lied about the reason for waging war. He spit in the face of the world assembly twice - he now begs for its help because things are not going as planned. He ignored the majority of his own people and the civilized world at the crucial moment. And he will not rest until he uses his pre-emptive presidential power to kill anyone deemed to be a threat to America. In the interim he plunges the nation into a deficit, gives hand-outs to the rich, and worries a lot about sodomy - he urges a law against same-sex marriage and reminds everyone else that they should not persecute sodomites as he would by law because everyone is a "sinner." Finally, he is said to be the best and most popular president that has ever lived, and that finally people have the leader they deserve.

We can thank god that the United States is not a theocracy at present given the gullibility of the fawning electorate. The United States seems to be becoming a virtual theocracy by default. Nonetheless, there are grounds for hope in future elections, that Christians and other lovers will not be fooled by the First Table of the Law. They will remember that the first thing YHWH had his magistrate do was to have 3,000 relatives and friends murdered for idolatry, that the killers be made holy baptised in the blood shed contrary to the first injunction on the lesser, Second Table of the Law: Thou shall not murder.


Empirical Pragmatics Index