Rightists & rationalists:

...The religious right does pose a problem...

...They have fingered secular humanism as their chief ideological enemy, and as if to form a more perfect target some secular humanists recently issued a manifesto which is as silly as fundamentalism is...

...it's these bright-eyed saved folk who push for prayer in public schools and the teaching of Genesis in science class-they worry me...

...and the reversion to obscurantist religions in Asia...

...Something must be taught in schools, after all, and values of one sort or another will be imparted...

...It would be unfair to bring up this particular example of bad taste if it were not politically significant...

...An education which stresses the importance of teaching in a "value-free, non-judgmental" environment assumes that values and morality are finally matters of personal choice, and that they are determined so subjectively that to suggest the existence of actions which are themselves good or evil is a violation of the student's rights...

...Fundamentalists know, at least, that ideology precedes action...

...Too much history is ignored here: the first opponents of slavery were Christians, and it was for reasons not to be found in the Secular Humanist Manifesto that the colonial-era Quaker John Woolman tried to persuade slave owners to free their slaves, and soldiers to lay down their guns...

...The Secular Humanist Manifesto was issued in response to "fundamentalist, literalist, and doctrinaire Christianity...

...They form so perfectly balanced a phenomenon that, in Norman Mailer's fine phrase-he was writing about how aptly Bella Abzug was named-you are moved to "praise the novelist in the Lord...

...But a society devoid of the values which are preached, for better or worse, in churches and in synagogues could be a living hell...

...The most interesting part of the Manifesto says that it is wrong to "baptize infants, to confirm adolescents, or to impose a religious creed on young people before they are able to consent...

...Which transcendent Being, or what they mean by transcendence, or Being, or salvation, isn't clear-but then, it doesn't need to be: like most agnostics, these people think they know exactly what believers believe...

...If values are completely subjective and must be regarded as such, unless they can be found scientifically to make sense, we will find it hard to explain, for example, what is offensive about Shockley's ideas on race, and the use to which those ideas can be put...

...The secular humanist would presumably raise his child with an open-minded faith in the power of reason to solve any important problem...

...More often than not the argument for the persecution of religious people is that they are superstitious, parasitical obstacles to the victory of reason...

...These necessarily involve a consideration of good and evil...

...Logical Positivism, for those of you who are not in the know, is a movement started by Englishmen to prove once and for all that philosophy is irrelevant to anything that matters deeply to human beings...

...During the course of his lectures Ayer said that ideas like "God" and "the One" are meaningless, nonsensical, beside the point...

...The secular humanist does not mind having his point of view taught as if it were the truth...

...As uncomfortable as it may make people whose point of view is thoroughly secular, a person who takes belief seriously must not regard it as an entirely subjective, private taste, to be indulged in only so long as it affects no one else...

...Please Potty Train Jimmy...

...Fundamentalists are responding-stupidly, all thumbs-to this situation, which really is a threat in many ways...

...The text predictably contrasts science and the scientific method (good) with religion (ignorant...

...That help is what the Moral Majority seems to want, and that is its greatest idol...

...Their vision drains the world of its life...

...Basil, and the unknowable nature of God is central to much Orthodox and Catholic spirituality...

...This justified the murder of believers in Albania, and their confinement in the Gulag...

...The man who says he knows God is depraved," says St...

...The Moral Majority and its allies would impose the sort of behavior which they think ought to correspond to belief on the rest of society...

...They used pseudo-science to back up their genocidal policies, and the Nazis could count on the support of such reasonable men as Jung and Heidegger...

...Secular humanism," the manifesto declares, ' 'places trust in human reason rather than divine guidance.'' I didn't know that this was so clearly an either/or affair, but they know it is...

...a rapidly growing and uncompromising Moslem clericalism in the Middle East and Asia...

...It is not their rights that are in question, but their ideas, which are bad ones...

...They are organized and simple-minded...

...They are equally intolerant...

...But because I may not teach, in a public school, that God revealed himself to the world, it does not follow that, to keep from imposing my point of view on some little Nazi, I should confine myself to saying that values are matters of individual choice...

...For some reason the right thinks of Bush (the only man so highly placed who has said publicly that a nuclear war is winnable, no nervous Nellie he) as a liberal, perhaps because he whines a little when he talks and has been seen jogging...

...There is another side to this: the scientific method and the optimistic faith of the enlightenment have indeed given us marvelous things...

...The most sensitive believers are not bad at a kind of agnosticism...

...Later the Nazis picked up on the idea...

...There's a point to be made there, all right: a few of the Lord's goons appeared on television the day after the election to warn Reagan and other conservative victors that they had better be true to the cause, or else...

...Beth, the Christian featured in this story, turns that task over to Jesus, but not without reflecting on a non-Christian neighbor...

...Virtue, the Magazine of Christian Womanhood, for example, features articles with titles like Lord...

...I can see Beth all ready to move in with a knowing smile, and perhaps a tract, when her neighbor's husband leaves her or her child dies...

...Among the sixty-one signers are B. F. Skinner, Sidney Hook, Walter Kaufman, Isaac Asimov, and Francis Crick...

...It isn't necessarily a bad thing mat parents who believe in secular humanism indoctrinate their children in this fashion...

...indoctrination is one of the things children are for...

...Secular humanists and fundamentalists deserve one another...

...brings to mind the statement of the Reverend Bailey Smith, who said before the nation what Beth knows in her heart: God does not hear the prayers of non-Christians, specifically (in Smith's version) of Jews...

...The scientific method can say nothing about good and evil, but once the idea that some things are good and others evil is eliminated, you have eliminated heroism, generous action, and nobility from education...

...Ayer is a signer of the Secular Humanist Manifesto, and one of the leading Logical Positivists...

...From her perspective as one of the saved, Beth knows that "although her neighbor breezed through potty training, there would be other times when her strength and patience would be spent and she would be without hope...

...JOHN GARVEYY...

...In rejecting the ideas of the religious right, however, we have to make sure that we don't back into the ineffectual role the secular humanists have assigned religion...

...The challenge for believers is to make our traditions live without Caesar's help...

...This is the point of view of those who object to any attempt on the part of religious people to influence society...

...The problem of teaching values in a pluralistic society is difficult...

...To raise a child in proper secular humanist fashion means getting across the idea that religion is a subjective, socially irrelevant taste for interpretations of the universe which are baffling and upsetting to Mom and Dad...

...Because liberal intolerance pretends to understand, it is not as obvious as fundamentalist intolerance, which thinks it understands the only thing that matters, and to hell (literally) with any other point of view...

...In our time more people have died at the hands of anti-religious governments than ever died at the hands of religious zealots...

...At the end of one lecture, during the time for questions, a Hindu graduate student of mathematics stood up and said, "Mr...

...But secular humanist intolerance is clear enough...

...We call them tone-deaf...

...Of several minds: John Garvey MADE FOR EACH OTHER THE FUNDAMENTALIST-HUMANIST COMPLEX WHEN THE ELECTION was over and right-wing fundamentalists were celebrating Reagan's victory and the defeat of liberal congressmen, a new moan was heard all over America...

...But it is also our duty to oppose the worst efforts of people for whom the ways of the Lord are about as mysterious and subtle as a sign pointing the way to the men's room...

...JOHN GARVEYone-deaf...

...Beth's version of "who is my neighbor...

...It is the obvious civil right of Bailey Smith to believe in a God less decent than most human beings, a God who hears the prayers of a born-again executioner and ignores the prayers of Anne Frank, and it is even his right to try to influence public policy...

...They aimed a special warning shot across George Bush's bow...

...Past attempts at this sort of thing range from Protestant prohibition to Catholic anti-contraceptive laws, and they were bad for society and for the churches...

...Religion is always reactionary, from this angle, always ready to reinstitute the Inquisition, replay the Scopes trial, and find Galileo guilty all over again...

...The history of religion does include crusades and inquisitions, but it also includes abolitionism, the construction of the first hospitals, and opposition to political oppression...

...What is incredible is the assumption that religious people indoctrinate, and secular humanists guide people toward truth...

...Both the Christian right and the secular humanists represent dangerous political directions...

...I guess this was to show that the chair was real, verifiable, whereas God wasn't...

...He demonstrated this by rapping the chair next to him and shaking it once in awhile...

...Reason alone will not help us be better humans...

...These happy folk believe that "men and women are free and are responsible for their own destinies" (OK, up to a point, but just Jry not dying and see where it gets you) "and that they cannot look toward some transcendent Being for salvation...

...Right-wing Christians may be a little like the canaries coal miners used to take into the mines with them, because they were the first to be affected by poisonous gas...

...But the first compulsory sterilization laws were introduced by reasonable men, to eliminate undesirable poor people from breeding-in the first case it was directed at a strange group of midwestern migrants, known as the Ishmaelite tribe...

...Real conservatives I can live with, liberals were saying...

...There are people who say the same thing about music...

...the reassertion of orthodox authority by the Roman Catholic papal hierarchy...

...Ayer, you say that ideas like God and the One are meaningless and without any point...

...nationalistic religious Judaism...

...Sir A. J. Ayer once delivered a series of lectures at Notre Dame...