Occasionally we get emails like this:
Up until now I thought I was the rarest of all ducks. A conservative atheist. I read Heather MacDonald’s piece in the Wall Street Journal today and was pleased to find I am not alone. I would love to know more about the organization.
Yours truly,
[name omitted]
One of the reasons that I participate in Secular Right is to simply explicitly demonstrate that Leftism or even libertarianism is not a necessary consequence of irreligiosity. Many people’s views emerge out of socialization and their peer groups, not through a consistent set of inferences from axioms.
When Secular Right first started some emails from individuals active in atheist organizations trickled in, the main question being how to make these organizations more politically inclusive. My main advice was simply not to assume that those who lack religion are uniform in their political views. As a matter of practicality most of the irreligious in Western nations have Leftish politics, and so self-consciously secular organizations or movements will reflect that. That is realistic. A secular conservative is conditioned to being in a minority. There’s no need for special treatment, simply an acknowledgement of existence and validity of the viewpoint. On the one hand we have to deal with religious conservatives who assert that by definition conservatism is connected with religion, while on the other hand there are secular liberals who simply can not understand how those without god might adhere to a conservative position. One might refute our existence through logic, but the empirical realities of the world tend to produce people who lay outside of the clean systems produced by theoreticians. That fact is one of the primary reasons that I am on the Right and not the Left, though I will admit to being troubled by a trend toward a lack of realism in politics in general of late.
mnuez: You are assuming that you can’t be a Christian and can’t also support the free market. Yeah, the average Christian isn’t as libertarian as me, but neither is the average atheist. David Hume showed us data a few months ago that congressmen that vote conservative on social issues also tend to vote conservative on economic issues. Protestant evangelicals are MORE conservative on economic issues than the average American, not less.
If Romney ran as an economic conservative, that should have made him more likely to get support from Christian conservatives, not less. Instead, they voted for Huckabee since he ran as an evangelical Christian, and Romney was a heretic. Apparently, being the right kind of Christian is more important than how someone stands on the issues. (Heck, Huckabee isn’t even all that good a social conservative–he’s awful on immigration, and remember the pardon?)
Of course, there are some Christian Republicans who aren’t really conservative at all, and do vote Republican only because they see the GOP as their team. If you ask me what I have in common with them, I openly admit the answer is “not much”. But it is they, not Romney or me, that are in the wrong party.
@kurt9
“Obviously a believer in the sophistry. hook, line, and sinker.”
Here is my cultural argument for the relative success of the West
http://lesacred.wordpress.com/2009/11/24/why-the-west-discovered-the-modern-world-draft/
“Religion is the opiate of the masses”…
You don’t seem to get the point. Religion or culture in general helps regulate behavior. Or at least it did.
@kurt9
“My three points in my previous post are with regards to my right to pursue my personal dreams and goals in life free from the interference of institutional authority (providing I do not cause harm to others), especially with regards to radical life extension and self-enhancement. I think you will agree this position is tangential to your argument about charity.”
This is why I think your line of thought is silly. Look. Societies work in systems. They are Economic-Political-Social complexes. You can’t change one part without changing the others. And you can’t have your cake and eat it too — ie you can’t do away with social regulations, which is what you seem to want to do with your libertarian stance. Sorry, not everyone has a 130 IQ. So we have these problems:
http://www.itari.in/categories/multipleintelligences/GeneralorgIntelligence.pdf
For example, given intelligence differences, societies will always have class disparities. This is a problem for many people and needs to be addressed. Disparities can be dealt with through encouraging charity this way:
http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/paul_vi/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-vi_enc_26031967_populorum_en.html
Or it can be dealt with this way:
http://www.amazon.com/After-Liberalism-Democracy-Managerial-State/dp/book-citations/0691089825
Now, in general, one way or another we are going to be regulated. I would suggest that bottom up, normative regulations are preferable in many way to top down regulations.
That, is assuming that socialism is necessary, I tend to think ‘conservative socialism’ is preferable to ‘liberal socialism.’ At least in this sense:
http://blog.mises.org/archives/007611.asp
Of course, everyone is biased in their judgment. A social system is inherently biased towards some — because it is based on some ideal of how things should be. And some fit this more than others. US Liberal socialism is preferential to minorities and aracial whites, Us Christian conservative socialism is preferential to heterosexuals and gentiles, ect.
Regardless, you will be regulated — so use that IQ of yours to decide which way is best, given your interests.
John,
This is true. Also, Mnuez’s arguments that Romney was more into corporate socialism or corporate fascism (whatever you choose to call it) than Huckabee is false as well. Both candidates, as I remember, advocated the use of public money to bail out the corrupt fat cats on Wall Street as well as many other failing corporations (e.g. auto companies) that should have been allowed to fail. The only candidate I recall that stood up to such corporate favoritism and corruption was Ron Paul. Huckabee was as much of corporate socialist as Romney and I remember this being discussed as such by both the legacy media as well as the internet.
Lasacre,
We all agree on the need to prevent transgressive anti-social behavior. However, religion goes too far by regulating personal behavior that has nothing to do with interpersonal relations. This is what is meant by those who say that religion sticks its nose into people’s private lives, where it has no business. This kind of interference into people’s private affairs is rude and unacceptable to me.
Lesacre,
A social safety net is considered an essential public good that we pay taxes to support. Most libertarians, including myself, have no problem with this and consider this to be necessary to a civilized, humane society. I assume this is your point. If so, I agree with it. However, it is quite tangential to the point that I made previously. As the case with Mnuez, you and I seem to be talking past each other.
@kurt9
“A social safety net is considered an essential public good that we pay taxes to support. Most libertarians, including myself, have no problem with this and consider this to be necessary to a civilized, humane society.”
My point is that behaviors need to be regulated. And religion does this. In our country it was a particularly ideal situation since we had, more or less, a separation of church and state.
I’m not sure what you mean by “religion goes too far by regulating personal behavior that has nothing to do with interpersonal relations.” … as opposed to replacing the religious system of normative regulations and metaphysical punishments with state imposed ones and legal coercion?
The beauty of religion, given separation, is that you can just ignore it if you don’t like the prescripts. If someone where to actually impede my freedom to bonk another guy, I would call the ACLU. If they just stick their tongue out at me, I consider this the cost of living in a normative system and meditate on the freedoms preserved by not transitioning to a statist-legalist one.
“Free Libertarian society” and “Free health care.” Nothing is free. What part of ‘Noble lie’ to circumvent the need for statism, legalism, and managerialism as otherwise needed in a rather diverse society is confusing?
Sorry, but secular charity just is not that popular. And Charity is the rightist counterposition to ‘social justice.’
From a secular perspective, Christianity can be seen as a functional organic form of societal self-regulation. It’s overgrow and over-interference is checked through constitutionalism. To the extent that it weakens, the conservative-right-minded secularist should try to supplement it with a type of compatible, complementary humanism.
From a rightist perspective that mean a humanism based on conservative social justice (some rightist version of the Kant-Hegel-Marx/Rawls progression), not progressive social “justice.”
Lesacre,
Again, you have said nothing that I either disagree with or is relevant to my initial arguments. We are still talking past each other.
My passion is radical life extension. I don’t give a flying f*ck what we have to do, but I want to develop effective anti-aging medical therapies. I will have nothing to do with anyone or any religion or ideology that would, in any way, attempt to interfere with or slow down the development of effective anti-aging medicine. Likewise, I will have nothing to do with any ideology or religion that in any ways interferes with my sex life or who I associate with, either in business or personal fulfillment. Other than that, I have no problem with Christianity or any other religion or meme. Anyone who would suggest that I give up these two personal conditions to join their religion is a complete arsehole. And I am entirely justified in calling such a person an arsehole.