Dispelling Misconceptions
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:
- “all people were created equal”;
- “the government derives its just power from the consent of the governed”; and
- “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:
- all people are equal under the law;
- the legitimate power of government is derived from the consent of the governed; and
- 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.
Now then, can you pare that down to a nice Letter to the Editor length?
Actually, this post was an expanded version of a letter I already wrote and sent to the paper. The paper has a limit of 200 words, which makes it extremely difficult to portray complex or nuanced ideas. Here’s what I came up with:
It seems that my letter was accepted for publication.
Dear Peter,
I have only recently come accross your post about my letter to the Fresno Bee some months ago. Thank you for taking the time to provide a thoughtful response. I hope I can provide an equally thoughtful response to your response.
You are correct to note that my definition of equality was lacking specificity. What the declaration was referring to is a moral equality, namely the ability to decide good and bad, right from wrong and beautiful or ugly. In addition, we are inherently equal in our human dignity and right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It is not our physical or intellectual differences that are important, rather it is our sameness as moral beings that is important.
Steven Hawkins may be smarter than me, by he has no right to decide how I should live my life. By the same token, nor should a government official make decisions for me either.
Government has the responsibility to protect us from evil by threatening a fine, jail or death if someone takes a life, or steals, or injures or speeds. As a citizen, I decide if I wish to follow the law passed by the legislature or pay the fine or do the time. A law does not instill a morality, it can only reflect it imperfectly and often unjustly. He who can pay the best lawyer wins is oftn the case.
Your argument in response is basically that equality is good because it works, a very utilitarian answer. My question is what is the secular philosophical foundations for equality? Why is equality good? In the secular world view, Darwinism naturally leads to viewing some people are more evolved (smarter or wiser) than others. The social darwinists of both left and right justified their class struggle or race superiority with survival of the fittest and designating themselves as the fittest.
The christian world view is different. All people are created equal as moral beings. The poor deserve charity because they are God’s people, as we all are. To kill is to kill God’s handiwork. To oppress is to oppress God’s people.
To simply say that we are equal under the law does not deal with the notion of a bad law. Slavery was bad, and it was law. Germany legally passed laws taking the property of jews. It was a law and it was equally applied. Stalin passed laws regarding political speech, and sent thousands to psychiatric hospitals for adjustment to right thinking in the class struggle. It was a law, it was equally applied and it was wrong.
I would enjoy continuing this conversation. Equality as a premise is a key to the success and future of our country. Please let me know if you would like to meet.
Paul Deffebach
(I’m sorry it took me so long to respond. I have been occupied with other matters.)
What is “moral equality”?
You present it two ways: first, as a narrow species of choice, limited to things like good and bad, right and wrong, or beautiful and ugly; and second, as respect for the individual will, which you call “human dignity” and a “right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
But I suspect that, really, the first sense is subsumed in the second, because it appears you are most concerned with the matter of individual liberty: “he has no right to decide how I should live my life.” And, really, without liberty to decide between them, there is not point in bothering with categories like good, bad, right, wrong, beautiful, or ugly. Everything just is, and is valueless.
And what is “equality” that it requires a basis in anything other than your desire to be the master of your own destiny, or to decide for yourself, on the basis of your own perceptions and experience, or those shared collectively with your community or society, what is beautiful or ugly, good or bad, right or wrong? And I submit that, if you believe in a God whose purpose overarches, underlies, and penetrates everything, then the act of belief, of faith in that God, is fundamentally an act of giving up your individual liberty and putting yourself on par with every other human, no matter their expertise or position in the government, so that you, a mere man before God, have no right to decide how you should live your life. Your life is not even your own, but God’s.
I doubt that is where you intended your “moral equality” to take you, however, because I have a hunch that you don’t really pursue the freedom to place your life in the hands of your God, but the freedom to assert, perhaps even demand, that the rest of us place our lives in the hands of your God. I think—and you may certainly correct me—that you really prefer that we put away the idea, which probably arises in part from the kind of thoroughgoing individualism you assert as “moral equality,” that humans not only can make decisions about their own lives, but also learn facts and methods about human nature, be they psychological, social, or biological, that assist in more than just individual decision-making, but inform what we typically refer to as “public policy.”
My hunch arises from reflecting on the argument in your letter to the editor, that “religious foundations” are necessary for society, combined with your more recent comment that government officials should not make decisions for how you should live, and your rejection of the idea that ethics are useful for human society. You use the word “utilitarian,” which I avoid, because it brings a lot of unwanted baggage.
So I think, if you are going to be serious about your religious beliefs, you may want to re-think that aspect of your political beliefs.
You are right that there can be “bad law,” but you distort reality by immediately jumping to the infamous and ubiquitous fallacy, “Reductio ad Hitlerum” (a silly, but amusing, Latin-ish name for what I usually just call the “argument from Hitler”), followed in short order by a reference to Stalin. That Christians who want to talk about ethics cannot seem to see past Hitler and Stalin is more than just irksome—it demonstrates an absence of nuance in thought and argument that makes counter-arguments extremely difficult to frame in such a way that you are derailed from that particular line and pushed to see things freshly.
To say only that “[t]he poor deserve charity because they are God’s people” suffers from the same problems I suggested above regarding your original letter. Why bother with a theistic insertion? Why not “the poor deserve charity because they are fellow humans, with consciousness, will to live, and they participate in the creation of both society and their own individuality”?
You have a similar problem in saying only that “[t]o kill is to kill God’s handiwork.” But humans are not unique in killing. “God’s handiwork” regularly turns on itself and kills, without the psychological drama suffered by most humans when they do it. (And I assume you are only talking about killing other people because I doubt you are a Vegan, or are opposed to killing other organisms.) The important thing to note is that killing people creates psychological and social rifts that are destabilizing both for individuals and their families, but also for the community at large. Without laws proscribing murder and offering other, non-violent means of dispute resolution—such as that perennial favorite, the lawsuit—the potential for lethal danger posed by one’s neighbors and the possibility, even the likelihood of blood feuds, makes it much more likely that people must resort to an unending cycle of violence, and to seek protection from those who assert themselves with the most ferocious and efficient violence. Cooperative achievements that have only been possible when people have abhorred violence and worked toward a common goal would remain impossible, or at least highly unlikely and extremely difficult to carry out, without a prohibition on murder.
The argument in response to your statement about “oppress[ing] God’s people” should be easy to see from the two paragraphs above. It combines elements of each. People should not be oppressed both because they are fellow human beings and because, as should be abundantly clear in the modern world, freedom allows the enormous creativity and productivity of individuals and societies to blossom in ways that oppression can never do. When people are merely robots, made to do tedious labor for others, they have no incentive to innovate and devise better ways of doing things, higher standards of living, and other improvements to their condition.
But not only should it be apparent to us, as conscious beings, that cooperation and mutual respect for human life is beneficial to everyone, there is even a good argument for why such a state arose at all—and it does not rely on the insertion of a God with the particular characteristics of yours or anyone else’s. One of the more interesting bits of modern science is sociobiology, under which one can make the (in my opinion very convincing) argument that cooperation confers an evolutionary benefit on the organisms who practice it. It would make sense, then, that we have an innate sense of cooperation and non-oppression as “good,” while tyranny and torture are “bad.” (Darwin himself suggested something like this in his book The Descent of Man.)
At any rate, you asked a very good question: How do we determine whether a law is just or unjust? You might turn as far back as Aristotle to answer that question. His Nicomachean Ethics propounded the theory that everything we do should tend toward eudaimonia, which most modern translators render “happiness,” which he defined as “a being-at-work of the soul in accordance with reason, or not without reason.” He suggested that what makes humans unique is their ability to “articulate speech,” “to be persuaded by reason,” and “to think things through.” When we maximize those characteristics, we fulfill our humanity to the utmost. One could perhaps conclude, then, that a just law is one that works to maximize those characteristics, while an unjust law does not.
Indeed, Aristotle laid the groundwork for that kind of analysis in another of his works, Politics. Here is an excerpt:
I find that view far more satisfying and far more persuasive than a theological one because we are all familiar with what it feels like to be human, we all know our own needs, and we all recognize what it feels like to live in a human society that fails, in one way or another, to help us reach our full potential. We understand dissatisfaction, but we also have a good idea what we need. People like Aristotle, and many after him, have spent countless years of their lives contemplating these problems and devising thoroughly reasoned arguments, which can be (and have been) tested. We have seen, for example, that the communism of Russia and China of the 20th century was a failure, that the totalitarianism of Nazi Germany was a failure, and so on. History is littered with the lessons of failed civilizations. We can discuss the problems, we can work on them, we can strive to improve them.
A theological perspective, on the other hand, relies on something that is beyond the reach of anything we can discuss: revelation. Even assuming there is a God with the characteristics that most Christians attribute to him, there is the usually-ignored problem of how exactly that God communicates with us. We are left with little more than this idea of “revelation,” which, for most people, means assenting to the proposition, without any solid basis whatsoever, that the Bible, or some other ancient (or modern, in the case of the Mormons) scripture is the “Word of God.”
But what is God? Isn’t God, by definition, transcendent, beyond human understanding, beyond human reason? How can one ever know that the thoughts occurring in one’s head are communication from something transcendent, which is beyond reason, and not simply one’s imagination? And furthermore, how can one verify them? And what happens if someone else experiences a contradictory “revelation”? You can offer the easy answer that one must consult the Bible, but that only pushes the question into history: how can anyone know that the Bible is a revelation of the Word of God?
I have suggested before, and will recapitulate here, that in order to know that what we experience is an actual revelation, then two elements must be satisfied:
(1) What we perceive must have some intelligible, informational content. A “revelation” that does not present a message explainable in human language is worthless, except as a private, individualized experience of wonder or awe—which is an excellent experience that every person has, religious or not, though we all construe it differently.
(2) What we perceive must not have any feasible human or natural explanation. Even if you perceive intelligible, informational content, if it may have a human or other natural explanation, then there is no way to say for certain that it is in fact a “revelation” from something transcendent, like God.
I have never experienced anything for which both of those elements are satisfied, and I am almost completely certain that you haven’t either.
It’s one thing to say that individuals can have some kind of radical experience that relates to their perception of ultimacy, the ground of being, being-in-itself, the substance of reality, the meaning of life, the vastness of the universe, or whatever you want to call it. You can even call it God. There is no denying that kind of individual experience. But to move from there to making specific assertions about either the nature of the subject of that experience or about how it should impact on the conduct of other people is not warranted.
In other words, the better, more satisfying derivation of human morals and ethics is in looking to the problem ourselves, as ourselves, between ourselves, in some amalgam of what is pragmatic, what is beneficial, what promotes the ends of being human, and so on.
Ultimately, all of these things—morality, ethics, equality, humanity—are accessible to everyone simply by virtue of their being alive. We can discuss them, we can argue them, we can work to explain them, we can persuade each other, and we are in a better position when we can do that than if we can’t. What religion does is it takes those things outside the boundaries of what we can discuss, puts them into a zone of otherness, leaves them in control of a few people, most of them already dead, and closes the door to further discussion, development, and learning.
That is really the single most troublesome aspect of religion, for those of us who practice none: religious people want to dictate morality without bother to offer an explanation, to let us participate in determining what that morality would be, and to simply base it on an unverifiable “revelation” from a God whose existence cannot be proven.
We could go on for days, years, maybe forever, discussing this stuff, and that would be great—it needs to be a part of the public and political discourse, too—but I’m afraid that what I see from Christians and other religious people is a refusal to even start the conversation. All you religious people ever want to talk about is that the conversation is not possible, because we need God to have ethics and morality, and then once we have God, you say we don’t need to talk about it anymore—the rules are established and fixed. That’s what I meant when I said above that I suspect you really just want to dictate to others how they ought to live their lives. And, as I said above, you’re free to correct that as a misperception on my part.
I have to admit, the position of religious people on this subject is supremely irritating to me. It takes enormous effort for me not to bare my rhetorical teeth, so to speak, as I recently did in another forum. (And I am not convinced, as some others are, that baring the rhetorical teeth is always a bad thing. I think sometimes it’s necessary, because it invokes an emotional response that attaches to the subject and, at least for me, forces further contemplation. But, as I’ve also pointed out elsewhere, my perspective is as someone trained in an American law school, where learning through the shame of feeling like an idiot is an important part of the process. You can disagree.)
At any rate, I’ve gone on long enough for now.