the USA a christian nation? quote questions

i was reading about some quotes from obama about the relationship of christianity to the USA's founding. this is always a topic that irks me. the idea that the USA was founded on christian principles is a new revisionist one. it suits the agendas of people today more than anything else. but the reaction of the far left and secularists is also troublesome. to state that christianity, the single most influential force in western culture, had no hand in the ideas that founded the US, even in a negative light if you wish, is absurd.

i was reading the comments on the article when i came across one that pulled out many of the alleged quotes from founding fathers (and Lincoln of course) that dispute the US christian connection. so i decided to look them up, something i had not done before.

first there was the quote: "The United States is in no way founded upon the Christian religion", which was attributed to George Washington & John Adams. this one appears legit and is sourced from article 11 of the Treaty of Tripoli. but it's not that black and white. first, the treaty was specifically aimed at appeasing muslims in tripoli. so one could immediately wonder if this wasn't political styling versus the whole truth. but then, there is also dispute over whether the quote even made it to the arabic version. and really this is only a restatement of the establishment clause of the first amendment of the US constitution. so there is nothing radical or new here.

second there is: "This would be the best of all possible worlds,
if there were no religion in it.", which is attributed to John Adams in a letter to Thomas Jefferson. again, this is legitimate, but is taken far out of context. the whole quote is:

"Twenty times in the course of my late reading have I been on the point of breaking out, "This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it!!!" But in this exclamation I would have been as fanatical as Bryant or Cleverly. Without religion this world would be something not fit to be mentioned in polite company, I mean Hell."

so clearly this is not any indication of atheism or even rejection of chritianity on Adams' part. it's a man struggling with religion on a personal level.

third we have a quote attributed to Abraham Lincoln: "The Bible is not my book, and Christianity is not my religion. I could never give assent to the long, complicated statements of Christian dogma." i could not even find a satisfactory source for this one, but there are many instances of it being attributed in many places. and it is consistent with things Lincoln is known to have said about religion and christianity. again, though, all this does is portray a man struggling with religion. well that he should in the face of a horrible war, a mentally ill wife, the death of his children and dealing with slavery.

lastly there is the lion of the secular quotes in US history, Thomas Jefferson: "I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature." what's funny is that the one they pick here seems to be disputed. again, though, Jefferson proves a man of his times that struggled with religion and faith:

"Do not be frightened from this inquiry by any fear of its consequences. If it ends in a belief that there is no god, you will find incitements to virtue in the comfort and pleasantness you feel in its exercise, and the love of others which it will procure you. If you find reason to believe there is a God, a consciousness that you are acting under his eye, and that he approves you, will be a vast additional incitement; if that there be a future state, the hope of a happy existence in that increases the appetite to deserve it; if that Jesus was also a god, you will be comforted by a belief of his aid and love. ... In fine, I repeat, you must lay aside all prejudice on both sides, and neither believe nor reject anything, because any other persons, or description of persons, have rejected or believed it. Your own reason is the only oracle given you by heaven, and you are answerable, not for the rightness, but uprightness of the decision."

this is from a letter to a friend. Jefferson's work provides much evidence that he was likely a deist and rejected all organized religion in his own life, but he also saw value to religion in the fabric of a society. perhaps the most revealing quote from Jefferson is this simple wisdom: "He who steadily observes the moral precepts in which all religions concur, will never be questioned at the gates of heaven as to the dogmas in which they all differ." this is taken from another letter.

in the end, the silliness of chasing quotes from men long dead who themselves saw many sides to these issues should be plain. the US is not explicitly a christian nation, and it says as much in the constitution. the US was founded by men who, for the most part, believed in some form of a god and were profoundly influenced by christianity, one way or another. and, in a move more profound than they could have known, those men left room for future generations to define things for themselves. and this should be the real arena of concern. what we say today, what we do today, what we allow people to define this nation as today is the real issue. let's be sure we leave room for everything we are.

happy new year all.

moral revolution

When is the last time the west had a moral revolution? Civil rights in
the US? Suffragettes in England? No. Both were just the logical
extension the west's prevailing moral attitudes. They were changes in
social, civil attitudes. As was said "men, their rights and no more;
women, their rights and no less." Those rights, their moral
entitlements, were long established. Similar with the civil rights
movement. There was no question what MLK jr meant when he said he had a
dream. That dream was well lodged in the collective consciousness.

To find the last moral revolution, you need to go very far back,
indeed. Though it pains me to credit him for anything, you need to
look to Descartes' era of thought. The idea that was so morally
revolutionary was the sovereignty of the individual. The idea that
each person had in them a universe to be reckoned with and that such a
reckoning had consequence for all. It was the codifying of the
assumption of our whole US culture and the force in the "me" of the
"me generation". That the world could not ignore any one person for
fear of violating a vast realm of ideas, this was a revolutionary
moral notion. And the apparent fact that this only applied to
european, caucasian males was only a vestigial, social, political
notion - one being shaken off over time.

In the last 10 years in the US, especially with the rise of the new
left, there seems to be a backlash forming against this "me" focus.
People at least pay lip service to living with others in mind, others
around us and those in far corners of the world. But it hardly seems
to dent the way any of us live. Are we too far wedged into the gears
of the machine? Is this not the harbinger of a new moral view and just
a slight pang of guilt - soon to be cleared up when "the next big
thing" hits? It seems all the discussions in politics have become
decidedly moral in tone. Not the usual sanctimonious politician
feigning righteousness for efficacy, but a real, gut reaction to right
and wrong in the eye of these beholders. If anything, the simplicity
demanded from politicians today, in word, deed and mind, seems to
smell of the return of the US mind to moral thoughts. Moral thoughts
always must seem simple.

having faith like a professional

The word faith is much abused. Faith makes many think of something very specific. It is a word the conjures religion. "You must have Faith, my son." "Faith is your only weapon in the fight to save the world!" But faith has a much less grandiose meaning here. Faith is a belief without proof. A belief is an idea we would attest to being true (True in some way. Gödel spoils truth with a big "t", but truth will serve as a word still, for now.). An idea is a thought we can express to some satisfaction in communication. And a thought is just a species of meme. What a meme is is best explained by others. I have understood a meme to be data capable of causing in-formation, where in-formation is a verb that is a process leading to information the noun. I struggle with whether the capability to inform is required for a meme, but the informing meme, even if there are other types, is the only type of meme that is interesting here. It is from this simple origin in a meme that an idea forms we feel is true so strongly that even in the absence of any evidence we will attest its truth. That attestation is the act of faith.

The more common forms of faith - faith in gods and supernatural occurrences - are indeed forms of the faith considered here. But faith in the supernatural is not the only form of faith. One may have faith in almost anything, though many things do not compel faith. Some would say it requires faith to believe that the sun will rise each day. The deep skepticism and cynicism required to doubt the inferential arguments of eons of daily sunrises coupled with science's demonstrations of the mechanics of the solar system is not common though. To rule out a lifetime of seeing the sun rise each day as evidence is, to me, excessive. That is not to say it cannot be done. One may have faith that the earth will not be hit by an earth destroying object from space today. The inferential evidence here is, of course, weaker. It is only negative evidence one can offer - so far this has failed to happen every day we have recorded history. There is also less evidence from science about what is out in space potentially ready to hit the earth. Again, it comes down to a question of the line drawn for evidence. How one considers evidence is core to how one draws up articles of faith and belief. What is considered good evidence for a belief? That is the question. For that which we feel is true but cannot rely on evidence, we have only faith as an option. Failing to have faith in the absence of evidence means giving up a belief and resigning the idea to being untrue.

Clearly, this is all very formal. The abuse of faith is abuse in the public square. The arguments offered in the informal world of everyday communication do not have such strict definitions of concepts like faith, belief, evidence, ideas, etc. And thus the abuse is in the eye of the beholder - the eye of the stricter practitioner of reason. Much in the same way a professional driver must shiver every trip through the streets of his home town watching how other people drive, much like a celebrated chef must get chills each time they stand in the kitchen at a friend's home watching them prepare a meal, the philosopher will be disturbed by how people argue their points in the public square. The lack of formality, the gross abuse of terms, the misuse of evidence, the offering of eons old fallacies as good bits of argument, all these things are like the grating sounds of fingernails on chalkboards. But, without any doubt, the reason someone pays the professional driver to drive is because they are so much better than average. Is it a good thing to wish everyone to be an expert? The world would benefit little if everyone was as adept at driving as professionals. But wouldn't the world benefit greatly if everyone could reason as well as the philosophers? Wouldn't it be good if simple words like faith were understood and not abused?

Faith is the bridge to all knowledge

Faith is the bridge to all knowledge. Any person who would make a case, who would prove their point, who would plea for truth in their notions will come to rely on faith in some form. It is the necessity of every syllogism. It is the animus of every argument - even the argument that there is no "faith" to be had. It is here that we find the dark specter of the Aristotelian error. Strip away the world, peel back each action and they say you find some thing a priori. But the matter which comes first is stripping and peeling the ideas of the world. And at the base of every idea you will find that thing one will not be denied. That thing one may not even be aware of - or able to express. This is the idea prima facie. This is the axiom to which all other ideas are like dew clinging in the morning. Under the light of the mind the dew will be gone, but the faith in one's axiom remains.

Whence come these axioms? How are they formed? Where do they find ground to grow and nourishment to thrive in one's mind? Does all that beg the question of mind? What is mind that it should bring forth axioms and the dewy notions that cling to them? The philosopher can not hope to hold sway over these answers any more. Science is the source from which all ontology must flow or be considered nonsense. We question the dew in the morning, but we can only do so by acknowledging the sun, the grass, the day, the earth and all that which common sense codified in process and method shows us. We live on a planet named Earth. The stars are distant beyond imagining and burn like a fire larger and hotter than anything we will ever truly know. The moon circles round the Earth, but the Sun stays fixed relatively at the center of our little part of the universe. Any first world child can tell you all these things, yet they were beyond the reach of all but the greatest minds for most of humanity's existence. All this science has laid bare. What we take from this - and all the other sundry input the world offers us - that is where the axioms we have come from.

We put a stake in the ground and take the moisture clinging to it in the morning light as nourishment. We ponder, or not, and we reach a place where we feel we understand what is going on - how ill fated a thought to have, but we all succumb to it. And it all starts with the morning of our minds, stirred by the rising of a fixed sun and aware of the fading, changing moon; when we look around at all that is plain to see and choose to think something of it. Our will binds us to an idea so real that the dew finds it solid enough to cling to. From there, we make the world's image.

the meaning of life (a modest post)

Today I found out that a friend died. He was not someone I was very close with, but he is the first person my age and connected to many people I know that has passed away. I recently started to re-read all of Nietzsche's works. As best as I can tell, I'm doing this to seek meaning. Of course, that's nothing new. I do that all the time - to a noticeable fault. Perhaps it's the convergence of Nietzsche and this untimely death, but I find myself feeling very lucky. Lucky to be alive. Lucky to be sitting high up the mountain. Lucky to be able to say these things at all.

Long ago I decided I was not smart enough to defy history. George Santayana said "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." My modification is that those who are aware of history are surrounded by those doomed to repeat it. I have made many of the choices in my life with this in mind. I've pursued the things that the vast majority of people, philosophers, moralists and writers have said yield fulfillment and happiness. And it seems I've gotten most of them - along with most of the attendant happiness.

But what is a person's responsibility to the world? A poet friend told me raising a strong family is the most noble thing one can do in the face of a world determined to destroy the family for capitalist advancement. But is doing something noble enough? Am I just really early for the mid life freak out?