The Libertarian War on Church Was Wrong

Miscellaneous History
1

Liberals in the previous centuries have had a hostile, anti-religious bent that has backfired and done more harm than good.

To the point of betraying their own principles, liberals have

  • used the Napoleon established state-funded-and-controlled schools in France to push for secular doctrines and anti-religious rhetoric, and slowly intensified this secularization of national syllabi

  • started a furious opposition in Germany against the Catholic Church, by seeing it as an enemy of German nationalism in the Bismarck years; having had soldiers arrest, humiliate, and parade nuns and priests across the streets

  • had private religious schools closed down in France in the 1900s after secular laws were introduced

  • passed anticlerical legislations in pre-war Spain

  • attacked Church’s religious education in Spain, and even the Jesuits, and Church property and investments.

It’s obvious that liberals are not a homogenous group that completely agree on all matters, and there are liberals who disagreed with these actions. Many on the Left disagree with each other just as much, with many of them seeing environmental legislations as anti-working-class.

But it just makes me wonder why many classical liberals thought that punishing the church was a useful or necessary endeavour. At what point does liberty become about being a militant atheist who starts a radical crusade against all religious order? And how does one man’s revolt against a natural society, evolved from years of development, successfully replace it with something better? The anti-Catholicism of liberals removed the last possible force to keep the state’s power from growing. It also opened the way for the worship of the new pagan deities of Progress, Equality, and Democracy in the Western World, which have eaten it alive.

For these reasons, I get irritated by libertarians who employ anti-Islamic rhetoric and who think Muslim society needs to be changed for Muslim good (“collectivist Muslims”). I once saw a blog by a user here, who had made a blog post where he posted a Prophet Muhammad picture and wrote, “You are NOT above criticism”. Yeah, and you are not above being a qualified judge for deciding how one billion Muslims with a fourteen centuries old culture should live their lives.

2

Well, as an atheist I don’t believe there is a religious order. Nor can there ever be one. Only people pretending.

So I can’t be a relativist and pretend truth is just what people want to believe.

I don’t think it is punishing the church, but realizing it is a falsehood and moving onto something else. The same way evolution isn’t a punishment of creationism. Or subjective value theory isn’t a punishment of labor theory of value. Or whatever else conflicts with one another.

3

All ideologues spend their time criticizing someone else. The people who move the world engage it, not stand on the sidelines making judgments.

4

As for Islam: I think you have to have a universal standard. It’s irrelevant how old their culture is. Or if it is a religion at all. Do they threaten to initiate force in order to ‘live the way they want’? The same standard for them should apply to one people regularly apply to the US government or their fellow citizens. Since ethics apply to people, not to Muslims or governments or this group or that. It just so happens that these are all people with different hats or costumes or whatever; but people all the same.

Aren’t anarchists telling the government how they should live their lives? That is… not being a government.

5

But just curiously, what is the local opinion on religion, and just how far would people here go in stopping a religious practice at all?

Liberty certainly would not stand as a value free belief that embraces relativism, for relativism itself opens the way to crushing liberty, such as killings in the name of greater good. It’s a moralist belief just like the teachings of any religion, and can only approach it on moral debate. That’s my opinion.

6

Prateek: Using the state apparatus to try to accomplish any end is counter-productive to liberalism. The generic hostility of liberals towards religion is misguided, especially insofar as liberals have fancied themselves warriors against all superstitions, generally. There is no well-defined difference between a hunch and superstition and hunches are the basis of all scientific hypotheses. So, the human propensity for superstition is nothing more than evidence of our capacity to imagine or make guesses.

But the Church, especially in the West, has often been the handmaiden of the State. There is an unmistakable resemblance between the omnimax God of orthodox Christian theology and the Leviathan of Hobbes. Both are all-seeing, all-knowing and ever-present. Monotheism - when mixed with State force - becomes a territorial monopoly of deity worship. It is easy to see how the interests of the producers of devotional services (religion/church) dovetail as nicely with the monopolizing powers of the State as the interests of producers in any other industry (law, security, etc.)

Consider that the granite foundation of United States recruiting lies in the Church, the Bible Belt. The very religious are more likely to join the armed forces than the general population. They are also more likely to support torture, at least when it is being done by a Republican President. There is clearly a synergy between the Imams and many of the armed factions of the Middle East.

Clayton -

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push for secular doctrines and anti-religious rhetoric

so? Other than it being the state doing it, so what if people don’t want to be religious? Are you going to make them?

The next two are tragedies I would not support.

The anti-Catholicism of liberals removed the last possible force to keep the state’s power from growing

Im sorry but that has to be the most ridiculous statement I have ever seen. Have you ever heard of medieval era feudalism and the Holy Roman Empire. You do realize the vatican of today is a state, and a dictatorship at that.

It also opened the way for the worship of the new pagan deities of Progress, Equality, and Democracy in the Western World, which have eaten it alive.

Eaten it alive? Do you consider the modern era superior to the feudal era or not?

I am sorry you are so against freedom and the progress it brings along with it. Would you rather we all toil the fields all day, bow to our lords, and watch the priests and nobles live lives of splendor off our labor?

And another thing, why are you so anti-pagan? You tell people not to belittle muslims and catholics (a righteous stance imo) yet you belittle pagans? So.. theism is the only religion now? Someone should tell those billions of daoists and hindus…

Haha, now that I got my militant anti-religionism out of the way :stuck_out_tongue: I agree that we should not supress the church. It has done many good things for many people (more so recently than in previous centuries, but that is because they have lost a lot of political power, and have to keep the coffers rolling). I’ll protect your right to practice your religion, if you protect my right not to.

And where are the members of this forum fighting against O’Reilly and his crusade to force businesses to say “merry christmas?” Why shouldn’t a business be able to say “happy holidays” if it feels it would better suit there customers?

8

A hunch, in so far as it is scientific, is at the beginning of a scientific method. That is one of the first steps in the scientific method. Perhaps after an observation of a phenomena. Which could lead to hypothesis or not if it is invalid. The Scientific Method is particular about the order and steps in which you come to a conclusion, because the wrong order leads to absurdity. A hunch never comes as the last step. A conclusion can never comes as first step.

Superstition on the other hand is merely a conclusion: meaning it is not part of a methodology at all, much less a rational or scientific one. (except in the empiricism that is implied in believing circular logic that a book is ‘valid evidence’ of the truth of the book). It is a bypassing over any sort of methodology. And a claim to knowledge all the same. And in doing so, one person cannot really blame another person for having incorrect conclusions. Because neither superstitious person has any idea how they reached the conclusion. For what are they comparing it to if not steps in a process or a methodology that attains the conclusion? Again, it has nothing to do with it being religious and so wrong. Religion is only a major subset of this.

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Clayton, it’s interesting that you take the examples of religious charlatans in a country like America, because America itself was established in the beginnings of a post-Christian age. Lincoln was said to be a closet atheist, Franklin was never a serious Christian since he had a bastard child, Jefferson was a deist, and Washington never really cared for faith.

While around the same period, anti-Catholic sentiment was raging in Western Europe, America borrowed the more “secularized” European laws into its territory, and its upper class elite later adopted “progressive” beliefs such as eugenics and scientific racism, especially Woodrow Wilson. This is the man who believed the poor and socially unfit should be sterilized - such laws were even implemented in Virginia.

The true American religion has largely been of Progress and social engineering.

So are you surprised that there are religious charlatans in America? In a country where many other beastly and amoral ideas have taken charge?

One might call it Christianity, but European Christians often disagree. Whatever it is, it reflects the more the manipulative top-down engineerings of its eccentric elite, that are empowered through the state.

10

It seems that Bakunin was right about one thing: If God existed, it would be necessary to abolish him (well, not objectively necessary but if you wish for freedom, then it is necessary ).

I oppose the State on the same grounds that I oppose religion: It totally undermines the self. I’m not saying, in the Randian fashion, that promotion of individual liberty at the expense of the collective is always desirable, just that when you are disconnected from your true wants and needs, chaos is generated in the form of a third party dictating to you what you want and need. So in that sense, religion and the State are extremely compatible.

So saying that, it seems that classical liberals were in turn vehemently anti-Catholic because of how it intermingled itself with the monarchies in Europe in the 1800s. So I can definitely see why they were extremely opposed to Catholicism. Anyway, it may not be practical to rebuke religion in the libertarian circles, but for people who think like I do (that the state and religion are synonymous), it is at least principled. I’m not going to judge your personality on your faith, but I will call your faith out as unfounded. I would much rather associate with a Christian anti-statist who happens to be a critical thinker than I would a “statheist”, though.

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its upper class elite later adopted “progressive” beliefs such as eugenics and scientific racism,

You are saying the church didn’t support racism, and biblically justify slavery?

Wilson was born in Staunton, Virginia on December 28, 1856 as the third of four children of Reverend Dr. Joseph Ruggles Wilson (1822–1903) and Jessie Janet Woodrow

Wilson’s father was one of the founders of the Southern Presbyterian Church in the United States (PCUS) after it split from the northern Presbyterians in 1861

In 1885, he married Ellen Louise Axson, the daughter of a minister from Rome, Georgia

I think it is safe to say Wilson had a christian background, at the very least

12

Yes, there was hostility to religion in old liberalism. Still, I would consider Bismarck’s National Liberal Party as really being anything but what you may think by its tittle, as others have pointed out on many occasions. Just as one might say Republicans have a semi-decent political platform, but how often have they actually acted accordingly?

13

The only half-way good thing Repubs claim to stand for is economic freedom, and they stand for that for all the wrong reasons; namely to establish a corporate plutocracy.

Democrats are no better, but at least they believe in freedom of expression.

Repubs; drug war

Dems; the FED

they both suck

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I agree that classic liberals underestimated how people would remain idiots after abandoning God. People still had a need for a magic “organizer” they could pull out of their ass anytime they didn’t understand something - for most atheists this was socialism and democracy.

When atheists finally become anti-statists, objective morality becomes the Big Magic Thing they desperately want to be true. After a while they give up and start developing a logically consistent systemic-evolutionary world view.

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What freedom of expression do they believe in? I don’t know of any such Democrats.

The only freedom of expression they seem to believe in is in how to mold, shape, and control individuals by political means.

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anti drug war, anti censorship, pro mosque @ ground zero, the ACLU is largely a democratic orginiation

If you consider ending seperate but equal “molding society by political means”… eh perhaps you’re right… but in that regard, so was defending capitalism as the economic system of early America

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I’m not getting your drift, Prateek. Religion in the United States is no more charlatan than it is anywhere else in the world. Producers of religious services are no different than the producers of any other kind of service… they provide goods and services that people demand at a price they are willing to pay.

This is entirely separate from the question of True Religion. Let us say for the sake of argument that there is one, true religion. Fine. Its customers will be the winners of the afterlife lottery. But we won’t know that until we get to the afterlife, anyway, so it’s beside the point. My point is that religion (in all parts of the world) has been coopted by the State to one degree of success or another and I think there is an identifiable pattern* in the order of the services which the State coopts as “civilization” progresses - first the warriors, then the priests, then the judges, and then the metropolitan services, and then everything else, culminating in the monopolization even of individual choice (absolute, universal enslavement… like, say, North Korea).

I think the fact that the ancient world was characterized by polytheism goes a long ways to explaining why empires and modern super-states have arisen at the time in human history when they did. Every ancient empire - Egyptian, Babylonian, Persian, and so on, has been characterized by the imposition of a religious and cultural hegemony. The people in subjugated nations who “jumped ship” and joined the religion of their conquerors became the local governors for the imperial powers.

Poly-law is a natural companion of polytheism. That is, polytheism is characterized by a tolerant rivalry among otherwise peacefully coexisting religious leaders and their adherents. The secular myth of religious disagreement as the root of all violence is ultimately in the interests of the monotheists… wouldn’t the elimination of all but one religion make religious disagreement (and therefore, violence due to such disagreements) impossible? The foaming-at-the-mouth anti-theists like Dawkins, Dennett and so on are little more than dupes of the Vatican. Short of rewiring human nature (or waiting enough generations for such rewiring to occur, genetically), the suggestion that religion ought to be completely eradicated is laughable on its face. People are religious, nothing can be done about that. The real issue is how ought people be permitted to produce and consume religious services to satisfy the innate, human demand for religiosity. The answer? Liberally, without restriction or coercion in any form. That’s how.

Clayton -

*This is 100% pure speculation on my part based off my own limited reading of history

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I’d say this is positive proof that religion isn’t really an issue that needs to be “attacked”. After all, it’s just another avenue that’s been subverted by the state. How is it any different than other forms of corporatism? Is the product really THAT toxic for people that it needs to be addressed independently of general anti-statism?

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anti drug war - Really? Democrats think that what I smoke, what I grow in my garden, and what I sell to my fellow neighbor is not the business of government? Can you support such a claim?

anti censorship - show me a Democrat who wants to privatize airwaves and abolish the FCC. Censorship is a problem of government ownership and not private property? I’m not sure you understand or agree with this point. Besides, how can you be anti-censorship when your most precious jewl is the state monopoly on education? Never mind Democrats who want to subsidize newspapers, regulate the Internet, etc…

pro mosque - On what grounds do they support this mosque and what is their motive?

20

Methodology isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

“How do we know X is true or false?”

“Method Y”

“How do we know ‘Method Y will tell us whether X is true or false’ is true or false?”

ad infinitum

There is no method for ascertaining truth (about the mathematical or physical world). Please do not mistake this as logical nihilism - there are, in fact, better and worse ways to ascertain truth. There just doesn’t happen to be One, Infallible Method that will guide us into all truth.

Clayton -