Call it blasphemy

Glenn Beck seems to have attracted a significant crowd for his "Restoring Honor" event in Washington DC, Aug. 28 (yesterday.) I'm happy for his success and hope the movement continues to grow. He's going to be in Chicago in September doing the same thing, apparently, but I'm not going. Let me tell you why.

Watched his show the other day when he had about five clergy on with him. Two things... He said, and I believe this is a pretty accurate direct quote: "If God is erased, who issues the rights of man?"

Then later he said -- and elicited enthusiastic agreement from the others with him -- something to the effect that he didn't believe God would be on our side until we get on God's side.

He's right about the Great Awakening preceding the American Revolution and inspiring -- or helping to inspire -- rebellion. But the Revolution was not all about religion, and the Great Awakening wasn't much about politics. The two things interacted and fed into each other in something that Glenn Beck criticized the week before as "collusion" between religion and politics. Or something. I have no idea what the heck he was talking about when he attacked Andrew Jackson and Manifest Destiny -- and Andrew Jackson really wasn't half as much about Manifest Destiny as was Horace Greeley (newspaper publisher) and President Polk.

Anyway.... In almost every period of upheaval and/or uncertainty in US history, people have flocked to religion. Apart from the fact that many colonies were based on one religion or another, in the US now as well as in the North American British colonies, citizens here haven't had much else to rely on for moral support in times of trouble and uncertainty. But this also has a dark side.

For example, am I the only one who remembers the explosion of often-bizarre religious cults once the so-called "social revolution" of the sixties had left so many young people without any sense of values or direction? And maybe more importantly, am I the only person who remembers the truly evil fruits of this kind of revivalism: Charlie Manson, Jim Jones, Heaven's Gate? The movement initiated in the sixties also continues in New Age spiritualism, Oprah, and in phenomena like the increasing interest in UFOs.

Glenn Beck says, rather simplistically, that George Whitfield started colonials thinking about themselves as individuals and about individual salvation, and that this led to the concept of individual rights. I'm sure George Whitfield had that impact on some people. More significant in this regard, however, was Protestantism in general, which told the Catholic church to bugger off with all its priests, cardinals and Popes. Protestants promoted a personal, one-to-one relationship with God without the intervention of Holy Mother Church. 

Going even further back, Gutenberg and the invention of movable type played a serious role in the personal, one-to-one relationship with God. Before Guterberg, all Bibles and other written work had to be transcribed by hand -- that's what many of the monks did in the Middle Ages. All that fancy illumination. After Guternberg, Bibles were still hugely expensive, but they became much more available. All of these -- and many more -- elements helped the general cause of individuality vs. group-think and simply doing what you've always been told to do.

And all of this blossomed in North America. Right time, right place. A vast tabula rasa upon which anything could be written -- once we got rid of the Indians.

It wasn't one man's thunderous voice that raised conciousness about individuality. It was an evolutionary process over the long continuum of history. Preceding the advent of Protestantism was the Renaissance, marked by an emphasis on the individual and individual experience over the class or collective. And the Renaissance eventually morphed into the Enlightenment -- the promotion of science and rationality over what many Enlightenment scholars regarded as superstition and shallow knee-jerk sentiment.

Read the novel Madame Bovary (Gustave Flaubert) for a very interesting demonstration of the conflict between what was then the old and the new. And Flaubert was writing in the early to mid-1800s. The ideas took a while to get down to street level.

Critics of the Enlightenment -- perhaps including Flaubert, though he was pretty even-handed -- called the Enlightenment's reality-based scientific perspective "the Clockwork Universe." They objected to it because it took all the drama and romance and fuzzy emotionalism out of human life.

For my part, I don't believe there's a whole lot to be said in favor of filth, terror, ignorance, brutishness, and poverty. I'd prefer a Clockwork Universe any day.

And, let's get serious, has science yet created a Clockwork Universe? In its dreams. The idea is based on the rather arrogant assumption that some day, human beings will know everything there is to know with a mathematical certainty. That hasn't happened yet and I don't think we'll see in our lifetimes.

Getting back to politics and religion, Ayn Rand noted once that the greatest weakness of the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution is that they're based on "God-given" rights. Actually, Jefferson wrote with a deliberate vagueness that "men are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights." He doesn't say "endowed by a Christian God" or anything like that. What he says is we're born free. And he also believed fervently in secular law.

When Glenn Beck or anyone talks about God "issuing" human rights, he's falling into the same trap as Karl Marx and others who believe rights are handed out by some omnipotent something, some "greater authority" or "expert" of some kind.

Then to claim that God is not on our side; we must all get on God's side... Well, which god? And how can you tell if you're on his side or not? I'm quite sure the lunatics who blew up the WTC were absolutely convinced God was on their side. So was the KKK.

I mean, when it comes right down to it, how can you tell the difference between genuine divine revelation from God and the rantings of a crazy person? If someone went around promoting himself as the latest incarnation of Christ, would you believe him? Honestly, what's the test? How could you tell? Apparently a lot of people believed they were following a Messiah in the 2008 presidential election and look what happened.

It's also very interesting that the evolving UFO philosophy, which claims earth was either settled by super-beings from outer space, or some very primitive earthling species was interfered with (possibly via DNA engineering) by these same creatures, backs up its beliefs with much of the same evidence that's supposed to prove the existence and validity of most other gods. The UFO people claim that the fact that people in Egypt built pyramids and people in South America also built pyramids, even though these groups didn't know each other, is even more proof that we're descended from extraterrestrials. The Miracle at Lourdes? Probably a UFO. And it was the Anunaki -- from zeti reticuli or somplace -- that dictated the Ten Commandments.

Who knows? One very esteemed UFO researcher, Jacques Vallee, noted that where there is a vacuum of information, people will rush to fill it up with all sorts of things.

I'm not bashing Christians. I actually share many of the same values that Christians hold -- but not all of them. And it's starting to look like Glenn Beck is promoting some kind of theocracy, which actually contradicts the spirit behind the US Constitution. The US Constitution may be a  by-product of Christianity, but not without taking a lot of wind out of the Bible's sails. What the Constitution does is provide a rational (clockwork?) framework that fosters enormous religious diversity because it separates the sacred and the secular.

Here's for Glenn:  Render unto God that which is God's, and to Caesar what is Caesar's.

Politico.com observed that the heavy emphasis on religion, making it the litmus test of conservatism, may cause conflict within the tea parties. Yeah. I can see that, and I hope it doesn't happen. What we need is unity, which means we need to be able to agree to disagree.

Save the republic.