The Grand Illusion
The guiding principle of the Founding Fathers was to maximize freedom within a framework of ordered secular laws and to keep religion out of the Constitution except to allow people to believe as they wished within that framework of secular laws.
That’s why the Constitution plainly states: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.
Unfortunately, too many Americans don’t seem to understand that. Nor do they understand or want to understand what the word “secular” means, which is “having to do with attitudes, activities, or other matters that have no religious or spiritual basis.”
Secular laws are a system of rules that a government or society creates to address issues such as business agreements, crime, and social relationships. Secular laws are created by non-religious institutions, such as popular assemblies or governments, and the purpose of secular law is to create a framework that allows people to live peaceful and orderly lives.
Now, if one looks around the world, it seems that a great number of conflicts, including here in the United States, center on groups wanting to impose their religious or faith-based beliefs on others.
Most of the conflict over abortion lies in belief, whether “life” begins with separate sperm and egg, at conception, at the time a fetus can survive outside the womb, or at actual birth. There’s also the basic conceptual question of whose rights are paramount and when, those of the mother or those of the fetus. People with different faiths/beliefs have different – and strong – opinions about each of those points.
They will never agree. Yet the right-to-life group insists on legally codifying its beliefs and imposing it on others, even when that imposition will kill other women, all too often totally needlessly, as recent events throughout the United States have shown.
Allowing women to choose when and if they have children does not preclude the right-to-lifers from following their beliefs as those beliefs affect their own lives. That removes religion and belief from the law, but the right-to-lifers want their religious beliefs imposed on others.
This only creates more conflict.
Look at the internal conflict in Iran, or Afghanistan, or Pakistan, where male religious zealots insist on imposing all manner of religious requirements by law and force, not by personal choice. Or Sudan. Or in all too many other Middle Eastern countries. In the past, wars over religion decimated nation after nation. The Thirty Years War in northern Europe killed roughly eight million people and fifty percent of the population in some parts of Germany.
Yet… for some insane reason, all too many human beings feel that they have to mandate religious beliefs on others by force of law, because only they have the “right” beliefs.
The Founding Fathers understood this all too well, unlike far too many Americans today.
Yes it would be wonderful to have an informed electorate. It would be especially nice to have an informed (read competent) population of elected officials representing that electorate. It seems an oversight to have any number of criteria one must meet to be elected or run for office and yet…not any requirement to show any knowledge or competency regarding basic civics. Sure, an immigrant wishing to become a citizen has to pass a test that most US citizens would never have seen or mastered. I guess we deserve what we get.
I agree with your point, but I think you’re missing a larger point. Abortion, immigrants, and crime are issues that can reliably trigger a subset of the US population. These “wedge issues” are then used by amoral politicians to motivate that subset (the “Republican base”) to vote for them.
When these folks are triggered, facts and explanations are useless. In the current election cycle, the Democrats have gained traction not with fact-checking, but by Tim Walz publicly saying that these Republican obsessions are just plain weird!
All we can hope for is that the size of this subset of the population isn’t a majority of the voting population.
Like it or not, religious law (minus sectarian specifics, where there could indeed be the potential for conflict or authoritarianism) is part of the history of secular law.
And at least in the US, the premise that rights come not from government but from God or nature (albeit that not all rights are enumerated, but not everything unenumerated is a right) and can only be upheld or violated by government but are never actually created but at most recognized by government, is useful, even if it’s just a metaphysical fiction and nothing but the material universe knowable by science exists, and nothing but us (debatably – and maybe other species here or elsewhere) is sentient (a terribly depressing view IMO, but it seems to satisfy some people). Government should NEVER be allowed to be the ultimate authority, even if we have to fantasize something higher.
The problem with making religion — or a deity — the ultimate authority is that men (and it is usually men) interpret the will of the deity to their own ends. There’s no real check on religious authority, and while government is often a poor check on tyranny, it has a far better record than theocracies.
God created in Man’s image.
That’s a great statement and so true. Along with “the graveyard being full of irreplaceable people”.
The point of the natural law interpretation is not to advance any specific view of God, let alone as a tool of human power. It is to propose that ultimate power cannot be in the hands of government. Some of the FF’s were generic deists with no particular doctrine to argue for, rather than Christians (Jefferson comes to mind, and he had strong views in favor of liberty and against excesses of human authority whether by government or church). But their view was that many of the predominantly Judeo-Christian values were essential to civil society, stripped of theology and sectarian differences.
I think people who pervert God as a tool of their own power should be dealt with very severely if they commit any crime under color of religion. Imagine if there had been intervention against Jim Jones or Marshall Applewhite before they killed off their followers.
That includes all too many leading members of ORGANIZED religion, although usually not the regular members, except as sheep to be fleeced. Demonstrably NO hierarchy, even if they were founded on Ultimate Truth (if that exists) is divinely protected from corruption; that’s a battle each individual must fight within themselves, if with support from those of goodwill with whom they share values.
Ultimate power will always be in human hands, unless aliens land or something. We call the humans holding that power “government.” I don’t see how your argument holds up.
If you’re saying “I want to be free from others’ control,” well, sure, we all do. It’ll never happen, though.
“Government should NEVER be allowed to be the ultimate authority, even if we have to fantasize something higher.”
Who or what the “Ultimate authority” might be ideologically, “humans” interpret the meaning and determine the actions of such authority. Even one’s personal sovereignty makes decisions based on learned behaviors and circumstances at the time of decision. Government is never the ultimate authority: one recognizes such a fact if one has any dealings with “the rule of law”.
Some explanation of this is available in: https://www.cato.org/cato-handbook-policymakers/cato-handbook-policy-makers-8th-edition-2017/limited-government-rule-law