Here’s a story that sounds like something out of the television show House. It came from the Wired Science blog, but I’ll summarize:

An elderly man slips and falls on a child’s toy and can’t get up. The paramedics take him away, but his symptoms are not what they expect. He is disheveled, incoherent, and does not know what year it is. From slipping on a toy? Did he hit his head?

The doctors run tests, even a CT scan. All they can find is that the pH of his blood is off. He gets agitated. Tears off his electrodes and IV tube. They give him a tranquilizer and he stops breathing.

They interview the guy’s niece, who says she found several empty boxes of baking soda in his home. He was using the baking soda as a home remedy for an ulcer apparently because he is uninsured. The doctors all slap their foreheads, give the guy some fluids with potassium, get him breathing on his own again, give him a prescription for ulcer medication, and send him on his way.

Throw in some soap-operatic subplots about drug-addicted doctors and sordid secret love affairs and you have yourself an episode of House.

But once you get past the sheer niftiness of knowing that a show like House, despite all its glamor, really does correspond pretty well with medical reality, there are some things to think about there. If you’re on the liberal end of things, you might ask why an elderly man must resort to home remedies like baking soda to treat an ulcer. Why doesn’t he have sufficient health insurance? If you’re on the conservative end of things, you might point out—correctly—that nothing in the story linked above precludes the possibility that he was just too stubborn and too cheap to go to the doctor, preferred to spend his hard-earned money on other things. Maybe even noble things. Who knows?

There could be other issues at play, too. What if he really was just too stubborn and too cheap to see a doctor? What if he doesn’t trust doctors? Keeping with the political theme, you can start to work your way out to a couple different extremes on those questions: the extreme anti-establishment left and hardcore libertarianism. Or, presented as questions, why should people trust the medical priesthood? why shouldn’t people be free to destroy their own lives by ingesting chemicals, be they baking soda or methamphetamines?

Or maybe, why shouldn’t people be able to use home remedies? Why don’t people trust scientific medicine? Can’t they see all its amazing achievements? But isn’t this an example of how scientific, reductionist medicine almost failed, except for the holistic technique of interviewing a family member?

When you think carefully and cautiously, you can begin to see the world in these splintered, apparently contradictory ways, that much of politics is reducible to the biases of the observer or the speaker. What is the right answer?

Ultimately, I think the right answer can only be the best answer and that is limited by the weight of our ignorance. No decision, individual or political, comes without unforeseen consequences—although sometimes they are imperceptible or positive, so that people don’t notice. We can predict, but we cannot foresee. In a perfect world, people would recognize that disadvantage inherent to our existence and cool it with their ideology and their political rhetoric.

Since this is not a perfect world, and since people can generally only decide for themselves how to behave, I suggest that everyone try to think a little more carefully and a little more cautiously, especially with this being a presidential election year here in the United States. Cool your ideological jets and remember that the most important part about politics, indeed the reason for its existence, is that we have to live together. When you use politics as a weapon, to beat people over the head, to make them conform to behavioral standards they would not otherwise agree to, no matter how strongly you believe they are wrong, you are fundamentally missing the point.

Here is some troubling hypocrisy:

U.S. intelligence chief Mike McConnell said in a magazine interview that waterboarding would be torture if it was used against him personally, but stopped short of condemning the controversial interrogation technique.

It is reminiscent to Michael Mukasey’s ridiculous hedging about the question of whether waterboarding is constitutional.

How much longer will this parade of spineless officials go on?

A few days ago, the Fresno Bee printed a disturbing letter from one of its readers, someone named Paul Deffebach:

On Christmas Day, Evelyn Sheldon, listed as a member of the Fresno Atheists Meetup Group, took umbrage that the House recognized “the importance [of] the Christian Faith” in HR 847. She suggested this recognition somehow violated the Constitution and “the secularity of our government.”

The Constitution embodies many ideas and principles from the Declaration of Independence: that all people are created equal, that the government derives its just power from the consent of the governed and that God has given all people inalienable rights. These ideas are in no way secular. They are profoundly religious notions of a God-created mankind.

A secularist or an atheist has no philosophical foundation for the notion “all people are created equal.” Darwin’s mechanism for evolution, survival of the fittest, focuses on inherent inequality. Great secularist or atheists in history include Robespierre, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and many other atheists leave a trail of tears, terror and destruction in search of the goal of equality.

The brilliance of the founders is that they viewed equality as a God-created premise, not a goal. The United States would be far worse off without its religious foundations.

Aside from a shortage of time that has kept me from answering these kinds of remarks more promptly, I have also been struck with a fog of outrage that prevented me from articulating my views as clearly as I would prefer.

It helps to re-state the assertions in the letter. Deffebach cites three principles:

1. “all people were created equal”;
2. “the government derives its just power from the consent of the governed”; and
3. “God has given all people inalienable rights.”

Those principles, which he has drawn from the Declaration of Independence, he says are “in no way secular” and “profoundly religious notions of a God-created mankind.” But he has stacked the deck by stating the principles in religious terms. His language is partially attributable to the Declaration itself, but even there I am not opposed to modern revision for the purpose of analysis, clarification, criticism, and reaffirmation. Here are those principles again, in slightly different language:

1. all people are equal under the law;
2. the legitimate power of government is derived from the consent of the governed; and
3. some rights cannot be taken away.

The first important difference is that, under the principle of equality, I have removed the word “created” because the source of equality is a different issue from the fact of equality, and I have further specified that the equality we are talking about is equality “under the law.” To say, as Deffebach does, that “all people were created equal” leaves open the question of what kind of equality. Obviously, there are many ways in which we are not equal. Not considering social and economic differences, some people are born with clear biological advantages and others are born with clear biological disadvantages. For example, some people are born without one or more limbs, some people are born predisposed to particular diseases, and some people are born with innate athletic prowess. It seems clear to me that the equality Deffebach refers to, and which the Declaration of Independence refers to, is equality under the law. This means Deffebach’s reference to Darwinian evolution is misplaced. Biological inequality has nothing to do with legal equality.

The second important difference is that, under the principle of inalienability of rights, I have again removed the alleged source of rights because that is a separate issue. If we can all agree that some rights cannot be taken away, then we can begin to talk about why that is. Plenty of people who do not believe in God also believe some rights are inalienable, that they cannot be taken away.

As to the middle principle, about the consent of the governed, I have just rephrased it to suit my style, substituting the word “legitimate” for the word “just,” because I think it plays better to the modern English speaker.

Looking to those principles without the stacked deck of theism provided by Deffebach, it seems much less clear to me that we are dealing with ideas that are necessarily of divine origin. Rather, they seem to me like inherently practical conclusions based on a set of observations and assumptions that are common to Americans.

For example, we observe that treating some people differently for arbitrary or logically insupportable reasons tends to cultivate dissatisfaction, which leads to social unrest, and is generally damaging to a society. Similar reasoning leads us to conclude, perhaps based on assumptions, though widely shared ones, that people who do not at least feel like they are participating in or consenting to their own governance will experience the kind of dissatisfaction that can lead to damaging unrest. As well, most of us assume, or believe we observe, or otherwise share the sentiment, that some things about being human cannot be taken away, but only crushed, and when that happens we tend to rise up and revolt, which again is damaging to stable society. Finally, all of that is based on our shared experience that we tend to be happier in a stable society, where civil unrest is kept to a minimum, where we are free to go about our business, conducting our affairs, associating with others, spending and earning money, and speaking as we see fit. If a society becomes unstable, the people become fearful and less likely to be satisfied with their lot.

None of that requires any reference to God or any other supernatural entity, creator, or law-giver, so I am troubled when people like Deffebach suggest that “a secularist or atheist has no philosophical foundation” for these principles. In my experience, secularists and atheists have the same philosophical foundations for their political and patriotic principles as religious people do, except secularists and atheists are more honest about it. I suspect that if Paul Deffebach were to cease believing in God, as many people before him have done, he would not cease sharing in the three principles he articulates, for reasons much like the ones I outlined above.

What exactly in Deffebach’s religion, which I assume to be Christian, gives rise to those three principles? The God of the Christian Bible does not seem to be interested in the equality of all people so much as he is interested in all people recognizing his sovereignty. Nor does the Christian God appear to care whether people give their consent to his governance, or the governance of his agents on earth; he presents himself as the supreme power to which every knee will ultimately bow. Finally, the Christian God does not appear to respect any “rights,” but rather threatens with eternal separation all people who exercise the decision not to recognize him, which situation, in my view, violates all three of the principles Deffebach claims to derive from God.

Furthermore, considering that some people, particularly those not part of the Protestant tradition that is especially important in U.S. history, believe in God but do not wholeheartedly accept those three principles, there is all the more reason to suspect that Deffebach and similarly-minded believers are not deriving their principles from their faith, but simply intermixing the two and trumping up causation or derivation.

Deffebach then moves on to his gallery of historical rogues and presents a stark false dichotomy. Either you adhere to the three principles he lists because you believe in God, or you fail to believe in God and must therefore be a proponent of tyranny. He fails to recognize the two other possibilities with the options he presents: theistic tyrants and secular democrats. Oddly, he cites Robespierre as an atheist, despite statements from Robespierre such as this one:

Is it not He whose immortal hand, engraving on the heart of man the code of justice and equality, has written there the death sentence of tyrants? Is it not He who, from the beginning of time, decreed for all the ages and for all peoples liberty, good faith, and justice? He did not create kings to devour the human race. He did not create priests to harness us, like vile animals, to the chariots of kings and to give to the world examples of baseness, pride, perfidy, avarice, debauchery, and falsehood. He created the universe to proclaim His power. He created men to help each other, to love each other mutually, and to attain to happiness by the way of virtue.

That does not sound at all like the pronouncement of an atheist. Instead, it sounds a little like Paul Deffebach, who also believes that his God has decreed liberty, good faith, and justice, that kings should not devour their subjects but that the governed should consent to their own governance, and that we should love each other mutually, perhaps because we were “created equal.” It is interesting that whoever framed that passage of Robespierre on Wikipedia needed to say that “his concept of a Supreme Being was far different from the traditional God of Christianity,” because, based on that passage, Robespierre’s “Supreme Being” sounds a lot like the “traditional God of Christianity” that modern American evangelical Christians love to tout.

Nevertheless, while Deffebach in his short letter manages to evince misunderstanding of history, his own religion, and of the people he criticizes, his views are popular, which is worrisome because that kind of psuedo-historical, intensely nationalistic mythmaking is exactly the kind of thing that can lead to the entry of yet another shameful tyrant. How many steps does it take to go from views like Deffebach’s to the conclusion that secularists and atheists do not belong in the U.S., that they should be quieted or, if they remain too noisy, imprisoned or sent out? What happens when a critical mass of individuals with views like Deffebach’s can obtain the power to enforce their ideology?

It is dangerous to pretend that one’s political or philosophical views are dictated by one’s access to divine revelation because it prevents one from recognizing the true merits both of one’s own views and of opposing views. When everything is simply either “from God” or “not from God,” then there is no longer a need to think clearly. One must simply ask, “Do you believe in God?” From there, one draws the conclusion one believes must be inexorable, ignores everything else, and acts to the extent of one’s power. Someone who conducts him- or herself this way should not be granted much power.

Unfortunately, it seems that people who think like this do seek power in all branches of the U.S. government. The problem is not that religious people serve in governmental positions, from the President on down, but that people who refuse to see anything in other than religious terms are serving in those positions. In particular, we are at the tail end of an executive administration where “Do you believe in God?” has been substituted with “Do you believe in Democracy?” The President has been careful not to articulate his policies in terms of theology, but he has not been shy about noting that his beliefs are much like those of Paul Deffebach, that he is in office because God put him there. He can justify the military enforcement of “democracy” on others by believing that he is doing the work of God through the United States.

You can try to spin the present administration as the handmaiden of oil companies, but while there may be truth in that assessment, we all know that the American people did not support the invasion of Iraq because they cared about oil companies. Many of them believed with the President that we were on a mission from God.

The principles that guide our nation should be derived from continuing practical reassessment, not from false ideas about divine origins. People who believe they act on behalf of God can never believe they are wrong and people who never believe they are wrong are just about the most dangerous kind of people out there. Although I do not think the three principles stated above—in my version, not Deffebach’s—are wrong, I do think it is absolutely imperative that we remain open to the possibility that they could be wrong, or in need of revision.

If we cannot open ourselves to the possibility that the basic tenets of our society are wrong, then we cannot possibly reaffirm those tenets in any meaningful way.