Rational Philosophy

I didn’t post yesterday as I have pneumonia. I’ll try a quick post today because I’m feeling a little better, and because Mitt Romney’s speech on faith has me alarmed.

I highly recommend The NY Times editorial, Crisis of Faith, bravo. Of several pieces I’ve read it is the only one I’ve found that focuses on the distressing fact that Romney chose to make the speech in the first place. The rest seem to take it for granted that this kind of focus on religion is par for the course in a political race in America in 2007.

David Brooks, for instance, laments that Romney succeeded only in blurring the distinctions between faiths until one’s choice of religion may as well be a matter of picking “the one with the prettiest buildings?” I may be wrong, but Brooks seems almost offended that Romney didn’t rank religions by their degree of goodness.

As reported by CNN, Bill Bennett and Roland Martin debated the effectiveness of Romney’s speech; did it succeed in its political objectives. I can see how such inquiry can be of a certain amount of interest or even fascination, but if this is the primary level on which we judge such an event, surely there is a bigger problem.

As the Times editorial points out, Article VI of the Constitution states that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.” And yet this is exactly what is happening in politics today. Romney succumbed to pressure to take such a test. Other candidates are doing the same thing. The general media implicitly or explictly supports or condones such tests in all manner of ways ranging from allowing an explicitly religious test to be posed as a question in a debate, to focusing political commentary on the content or success of a candidate’s religious posturing rather than questioning why the candidate is posturing.

If you have the stomach for it, you can listen to Romney’s speech or read a transcript via NPR.

Everything that’s wrong about Romney’s speech is contained within it. He equates freedom with religion, for instance, and states that freedom is given by God, the Creator. He refers sarcastically to ‘enlightenment’ in Europe as if it is intrinsically a bad thing. He tries to concretize a definition of America as a religious nation.

The phenomenon of religious sway in America and the stranglehold it has on so many matters of national importance can be tied, I think, to a culture of isolationism and fear. America has yet to accomplish freedom from religion because too many of those with influence, in society and in government, fear the ramifications of such freedom and believe that America is right in clinging to the notion that God somehow looks down with favor on it.

Then is this freedom? Hasn’t religion now become a constraint?

Religion is humankind’s way of trying to conceive of where we came from. Religious faith is humankind’s way of holding on to an idea of where we came from in the face of obstacles to that idea.

Religion began as a natural and imaginative way for people to explain certain things that seemed inexplicable. The earliest religions focused on things such as the heavenly bodies (one could say that worshipping the sun comes closer to revering the source of life than any other religion!) or the spirits of the earth. As our scientific understanding of the world improved the basis for religious understanding receded ever further from the realm of everyday life, into something quite nebulous and remote.

This is the philosophical aspect to the piece: Religion cannot be supported logically or rationally. There are those who would rebutt that neither can atheism or agnosticism. I would beg that there is a difference. If we take as a ground for our awareness of our existence the input of our senses, we can build up a picture of the world as we perceive it from entirely logical and rational principles without ever calling upon the need for a god or creator. I cannot prove that there is no god, but I can demonstrate, logically and rationally, to my own satisfaction that my place in the world and the way the world works (even the way religions function) can be understood without calling upon some divine creator.

I’m alarmed by Romney’s speech because this culture of religion and its clamor will hold America back, and will continue to cause harm in the world in the name of good. As long as America defines itself as a religious nation, it will continue to spawn and support crusades, both here at home and abroad. It will further isolate America from the rest of the world. And it will perpetuate the religious moralizing that prevents politicians from making perfectly sound decisions because they’re afraid to stand up to the zealots in the community.