O’Reilly Outraged

I find myself muddled over this flap in Washington State that Bill O’Reilly is making much of.

Just in time for the Christmas season, the Governor of Washington State, Christine Gregoire, has insulted Christians all over the world.  Inside the state capitol building in Olympia, there is a traditional holiday display featuring a tree and the Nativity scene — perfectly appropriate since the Christmas federal and state holiday celebrates the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem.

But this year, Governor Gregoire decided to add another item to the display. Standing alongside the baby Jesus is a giant placard designed by atheists that reads, “There are no gods, no devils, no angels, no heaven or hell. There is only our natural world. Religion is but myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds.”

You read that correctly. The governor of Washington State has permitted an attack on religion to be displayed in her office building as part of a Christmas presentation.

My “Secular” is at odds with my “Right” here. My “Right” is mostly winning the argument.

If I were Governor of Washington State (I’m assuming that the Governor is the sole decision-maker here, or at least the signer-off) I would not have allowed display of that placard in that place. The Christmas decorations are customary. Christians may take them as Christian;  the rest of us take them as a cheery sign that an agreeable public holiday is coming up, trailing all sorts of happy connotations, childhood memories, permitted gluttony and tipsiness, auld acquaintance, etc., etc. Whatever, they are customary.  I don’t like fooling around with customary stuff. I don’t much care for menorahs being included, for the same reason. I suppose the menorahs are half-way to being customary, too, by now; but if I could have nipped that in the bud, I would have. Not every decorative feature of a public place is there for someone to make a point about it. Some things are there because we’ve always put them there, and we like the continuity and stability of seeing them there year after year.

The placard, if O’Reilly has transcribed it correctly, is anyway tendentious. “Hardens hearts and enslaves minds”? That’s an unproven assertion. My own opinion of what religion does to hearts and minds is the same as our Mr. Hume’s (from whom, in fact, I first heard it): it’s an intensifier, a “dispersive factor” flattening out the bell curve, with the overall tendency to make good people better and bad people worse, net-net effect probably zero. That’s likewise unproven, though, and if I were in charge of a government building, I would not allow it to be displayed on a placard in the lobby.

Obviously, since I’m blogging here, I don’t believe in the assertions made by the Christian religion, nor in those made by any other religion I’m acquainted with.  I agree with the first two sentences on the O’Reilly-offending placard.  I love Christmas, though; I’m fond of customary practices; and customary practices aside, I think public places should be left to public business, and not used as arenas for metaphysical argument. We have newspapers and magazines for that. And blogs.

I’m not sure I’ve really thought this through, though, and will be attentive to different points of view, quite possibly to the point of changing my mind.