Militant secular "ascendency" has "brought with it immense suffering," William Barr said in a startling speech at Notre Dame. https://t.co/QJGZLothM9
— HuffPost Politics (@HuffPostPol) October 12, 2019
He sure did. I don't quite appreciate the value of a religious-freedom message that needs to exclude people of no religion, but I understand it in the same sense that I understand the use of the term "Judeo-Christian" to be inclusive of "People of the Book" regarding the Old and New Testaments of the Bible (to a certain degree)but to leave Muslims out of the coalition of Abrahamic faith altogether (because--brown? or maybe--exotic to Barr's reckoning?) and to also omit the equally vibrant Western traditions of people who philosophically rejected faith. Basically, this speech, even if I have not seen the whole text, rankles me in the way that Pat Buchanan's culture war speech did over 25 years ago (but more so, as he is in an actual position of power at a critical juncture for this country). I see it as rhetoric that singles out me as the problem in need of fixing, and we have seen in history where being the "problem" is a fatal diagnosis. But I do have this question from his speech that I can easily answer:
“Among the militant secularists are many so-called progressives, but where is the progress?” he asked. “We are told we are living in a post-Christian era, but what has replaced the Judeo-Christian moral system?”
I do not, as a "militant secularist" (I guess, as a practicing democracy-loving atheist) believe that we are living in a post-Christian era, except in the chronological sense that Christ seems to have lived some time before us. Christians certainly still exist. The text they read from still exists. The morality of Christ in the Book of Matthew is still instructive to even faithless secularists who profess progressivism.
What has replaced the Judeo-Christian moral system? Well, if you are one William Barr--partisanship and the notion that a unitary executive, however dodgy in his capacity, should rule over persons because ordained by electoral fate. Apparently. If you are me, the supposedly not Judeo-Christian secular militant (who nonetheless has drawn deep from that well, like a Samaritan of good will) you would hope that what follows from rote understanding of religion would be dialogue, moral testing, an appreciation that all humans should be treated as equal under the law of either God or mankind (or such laws are capricious and unworthy), and a cessation of blind faith in the divine right of earthly kings as revealed through a clearly jiggered legal system made to benefit top dogs as if they were tin pot gods.
Where Barr speaks the words "freedom to live according to one's faith", I can read the lines "to use one's faith as a cudgel against other people's ability to do so."
I do not find this point of view salutary or fit in the highest lawman for a diverse people. He reckons those of us of the inappropriate level of faith an "enemy" to the public good--but I have seen in his public duties where he has pardoned and exculpated the lawless deeds of an only nominally Christian president. How should I look at his rebuke of law-abiding faithless progressives, in his slavish toadyism to a tyrant of appalling lawlessness and nominal Christianity?
I can suppose he means none of it. I can assume he has blinders and lives in a delusion. He is either a liar or a mad idiot. But in neither situation is he a fit arbiter of law, so long as he does not appreciate it should fall on all equally without fear or favor.
He's pious, but poor in moral strength, for good would even be good without God to make it good, if God were logical and words meant things. Barr flings words about. What they mean is no good to those of us of religious minorities, or who oppose the would-be monarch he's become a dependent of.
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