Secular Right & Bloggingheads.tv

Posted on April 13, 2009 by David Hume

Heather & Ross Douthat did a Bloggingheads.tv, God and Man on the Right. See below.

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14 Responses to Secular Right & Bloggingheads.tv

  1. Ron Guhname says:
    April 13, 2009 at 2:31 pm

    Great discussion. To my mind, people make too much of the theodicy problem. I don’t deny it’s a problem for believers, and I appreciate Douhat’s point about the big picture, but it seems to me that people watch too many Lifetime movies of the week.

    Life is 99% pleasure, routine, or minor hassle and 1% tragedy. Chesterton is right: Life is a miracle, not a horror show. It can be quite boring, but that is just another word for uneventful (i.e., good). It’s out of boredom that people feel that they need to fill stories, newspapers, and books with every kind of atrocity. Humans are problem solvers, so they obsess over problems and fail to see how well things work.

  2. bh says:
    April 13, 2009 at 2:34 pm

    There is a very interesting conversation going on in the comments section of the bloggingheads.tv comments section: http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/18973

    I’d say its about a 50/50 split between those who thought that Heather made the best arguments versus those who thought that Ross made the best arguments.

  3. bh says:
    April 13, 2009 at 2:36 pm

    @Ron Guhname

    Very good point. You should participate in the comments section at bloggingheads.tv! 🙂

  4. Ron Guhname says:
    April 13, 2009 at 3:01 pm

    One problem I see: It seems like much of the secular Right’s firepower is unloaded on the validity, morality, and intellectual respectability of religion. For every one person they convince and convert into a atheist conservative, two will become atheist liberals. They will also tend to produce social liberals. Why would a social conservative cheer for your movement, unless he likes losing? I’d like to see a lot less acid and much more secular defense of conservatism. For example, blogs that make conservative arguments with survey data….

  5. Rowsdower says:
    April 14, 2009 at 12:07 am

    Ron Guhname :

    Ron Guhname

    For every one person they convince and convert into a atheist conservative, two will become atheist liberals.

    This is the problem to be fixed!

    Athiests are here, and many more Athiests are on the way. I don’t think a secular right will increase their numbers, but it can change where they end up on the political spectrum.

    If you don’t make a space for them on the Right (less stating of Conservative ideas in religious terms, etc) then they won’t come. That’s why a religious conservative would want the Secular Right to succeed; they need members for their coalition.

  6. Ken_K says:
    April 14, 2009 at 7:18 am

    Heather Mac rocks! She slammed down Douthat and his hokey theism quite eloquently and effectively.

  7. Cornelius J. Troost says:
    April 14, 2009 at 8:08 am

    Ron Guhname- You are perfectly right that we are obsessed about the validity, morality, and intellectual respectabilty of religion.You are profoundly right re the conversion of the unwashed into liberals rather than conservatives. The wave of political conversion favors liberalism because the engines of propaganda systematically omit the conservative message and assiduously stigmatize sites like vdare.com that are far more honest.Furthermore, all public schools have obeyed the multicultural mandate and PC prohibitions. Grade fudging and social promotion are standard fare.We live in a rampantly dishonest society.

    At takimag.com Robert Weissberg has exposed the massive fraud of public school social engineering based upon PC mandates and huge wastage of our money. Conservatives must fight for their basic values and continue to expose the lies, fraud, and waste attached to messianic campaigns of liberals.At vdare they do in fact use statistics to confirm liberal atrocities and logic and reason to attack mainstream idiocy.Guhname is correct that we must defend conservatism for its ideals and surely refrain from crusading against religion like one Richard Dawkins.While we agree with Heather on fundamentals, we must also follow her example by analysing social problems honestly and fearlessly. In the political realm we need to build on the great work of people like Pat Buchanan despite our metaphysical differences. Even a smart, eccentric, narcissistic Ann Coulter adds firepower because she intrudes into the MSM circus and attacks some liberal follies.

    Our friends are indeed a mixed bag and Christianity, for all its deficits, remains compatible with our national history and purpose. I still believe that its moral power is substantial but may be overtaken by the allure of hedonism, corruption, and violence growing cancerously in liberal society today. We have alot on our plate and conversion to atheism should rank rather low on our agenda.If we are not upset by the almost Soviet-style suppression of free thought today, we surely have a bleak future.

  8. Polichinello says:
    April 14, 2009 at 1:13 pm

    The discussion got a bit tiresome and trite at about the 50 minute mark. I was a bit annoyed that MacDonald kept cutting Douthat off.

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  10. Olivier G says:
    April 14, 2009 at 7:10 pm

    I discovered “Secular Right” through the Bloggingheads diavlog. Kudos to Heather for her clear and passionate arguments. She helps me articulate my own beliefs. I have been supporting democrats for many years, even though my natural inclinations (personal responsibility, entrepreneurship, respect for the rule of law, etc…) might be more on the conservative side. I am socially liberal though, or rather libertarian, and cannot reconcile myself to supporting a republican agenda. And the core reason behind my reluctance is their overt embrace of religion. Some might even say the GOP is coopting a religious agenda to manipulate the gullible masses, and assert their power.
    I have respect for people of faith, even though I’m a non-believer. However nothing scares me more than the intrusion of religion in government. Religious beliefs as a personal moral compass are socially valuable. On the other hand, organized religion as a tool of power has been responsible for too many crimes throughout history. Let’s hope the country will come back to its senses, and send religious leaders back where they belong: in their churches!

  11. Randall Parker says:
    April 14, 2009 at 8:39 pm

    Theists and Atheists: I grow bored of you. When you can’t actually know the answer to the question have the sense to admit it is a mystery.

    I would rather focus on winning battles that matter. We need to keep out the dummies. We need to save (conserve if you prefer) the environment that is getting overrun by human overpopulation. Give the omnivore species some technology and watch it outbreed and wipe out everything else.

    Is Jesus relevant? I never heard him preach about how technology was going to some day enable a huge human population explosion and that we needed to get ready to prevent this. I never heard him preach on how to deal with people who are genetically predisposed to criminality.

    Is atheism relevant? Okay, so you say you are sure that God doesn’t exist. Do you really need this faith in the non-existence of God in order to not believe the various ridiculous religions?

  12. Rowsdower says:
    April 17, 2009 at 12:33 pm

    Randall Parker :

    Randall Parker

    Theists and Atheists: I grow bored of you. When you can’t actually know the answer to the question have the sense to admit it is a mystery.
    I would rather focus on winning battles that matter. We need to keep out the dummies. We need to save (conserve if you prefer) the environment that is getting overrun by human overpopulation. Give the omnivore species some technology and watch it outbreed and wipe out everything else.
    Is Jesus relevant? I never heard him preach about how technology was going to some day enable a huge human population explosion and that we needed to get ready to prevent this. I never heard him preach on how to deal with people who are genetically predisposed to criminality.
    Is atheism relevant? Okay, so you say you are sure that God doesn’t exist. Do you really need this faith in the non-existence of God in order to not believe the various ridiculous religions?

    “Agnosticism” is just polite Athiesm. If someone asks if you Zeus or fairies exist, you don’t respond with “it’s impossible to know.”

    Encouraging religious conservatives to state their politics in purely secular terms broadens the appeal of correct ideas and builds political power. That’s relevant.

    A little off topic…
    And I grow bored of Neo-Malthusians. This time the world is going to hell, honest!

  13. Randall Parker says:
    April 17, 2009 at 10:19 pm

    Rowsdower, I fail to see how agnosticism is polite atheism. This claim strikes me as a demand by one of the two sides to take a stand in their ridiculous debate.

    I do not know whether God exists. Maybe a single entity created the universe. Maybe that entity is the ultimate creator of all things. But then maybe that entity was created by a more powerful being. Then again, maybe we are all running in a massive simulation. I can’t look outside this universe. So the answer seems out of reach to me.

    Zeus: I’ve been to the top of Mount Olympus in Greece and he wasn’t there.

    Fairies: Never seen any. I doubt their existence.

    Neo-Malthusians: The human population keeps growing and the animal population keeps shrinking. We have become users of a large percentage of the world’s biomass product. Seems like as we drive more species extinct we are hitting up against limits.

  14. Kevembuangga says:
    April 17, 2009 at 10:38 pm

    But then maybe that entity was created by a more powerful being.

    And then WHO did create this “more powerful being”?
    Don’t you see a point here?
    LOL…

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