{"id":2813,"date":"2009-09-28T17:11:01","date_gmt":"2009-09-29T01:11:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/secularright.org\/wordpress\/?p=2813"},"modified":"2009-09-28T18:30:11","modified_gmt":"2009-09-29T02:30:11","slug":"the-pope-rebukes-the-czech-republic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/the-pope-rebukes-the-czech-republic\/","title":{"rendered":"The Pope rebukes the Czech Republic"},"content":{"rendered":"

Vaclav Klaus, president of the Czech Republic, gave an unapologetic defense <\/a>of capitalism at the Cato Institute last week.\u00a0 The recent economic crisis did not result from too much economic liberty, he argued, nor would it be solved by greater government control over businessmen and investors.\u00a0 He spoke eloquently of the Czech Republic\u2019s determined post-Communist recreation of a market system.\u00a0 (This Cato essay <\/a>from 2007 gives a good round-up of Klaus\u2019s thinking; he identifies the three most serious threats to Western freedom at present as complacency that the central planning instinct is a thing of the past; the attack on state sovereignty:<\/p>\n

Freedom and democracy \u2014 those two precious values \u2014 cannot be secured\u00a0without parliamentary democracy within a clearly defined state territory. Yet that is exactly what the\u00a0current European political elites and their fellow travelers are attempting to eliminate.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I was surprised, therefore, to read of the Pope\u2019s rebuke <\/a>of the Czech Republic for its secularism (nearly half of respondents in a recent poll said that they did not believe in God):<\/p>\n

Your country, like other nations, is experiencing cultural conditions that often present a radical challenge to faith and therefore also to hope.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

No one can gainsay the essential and courageous role of Catholics in helping bring down Communism in Czechoslovakia.\u00a0 Yet it would seem that this small country has done pretty well in creating social stability and free economic exchange–which depends on trust\u2014without a pervasive religiosity.<\/p>\n

We are a calm nation that drinks beer and eats dumplings, and we have strong antibodies to any kind of religious persuasion because of our history,<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

the Rev. Ales Opatrny, a lecturer at the Catholic Theological Faculty of Charles University in Prague, told the New York Times<\/em>. \u201cI believe that after the pope\u2019s visit most Czechs will act like nothing happened.\u201d<\/p>\n

Is that such a bad thing?\u00a0 The Pope warned in Brno that<\/p>\n

history had demonstrated the absurdities to which man descends when he excludes God from the horizon of his choices and actions.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

History has also demonstrated that including God in one\u2019s horizons can lead to such absurdities as torture for scientific inquiry, burnings and stonings of heretics, religious wars, and terrorism.\u00a0 Can we call it a wash?\u00a0 Had Communism\u2019s proponents professed a belief in God (and many devout Christians support radical socialism), it still would have failed on the world stage because of its refusal to acknowledge the complexity of markets.\u00a0 Arguably its most fatal weakness was its utter misunderstanding of economics and civil society, not its atheism.<\/p>\n

The Pope admonished the Czechs that without faith, there can be no hope.\u00a0 Here are some other possible bases for hope:\u00a0 Confidence in the entrepreneurial creativity of one\u2019s fellow citizens.\u00a0 Awe at ever-accelerating information technology, which is unleashing an explosion of discovery, expression, and the exchange of ideas.\u00a0 Gratitude for medical science, chemistry, and physics, which produce a constant improvement in human existence.\u00a0 Delight in the ongoing recording of Antonio Vivaldi\u2019s operas.<\/p>\n

Religion\u2019s\u00a0proponents\u00a0will of course argue that Western society is nevertheless running out of steam as faith loses its dominance.\u00a0 They might be making that argument for a long time.\u00a0 Meanwhile, it’s certainly interesting that during the Bush years, theocons regularly argued that Europe’s distaste for the Iraq war was the result of its atheism-induced moral degeneracy.\u00a0 Now we learn, however, that ally Czech Republic easily matches Europe’s secularism.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Vaclav Klaus, president of the Czech Republic, gave an unapologetic defense of capitalism at the Cato Institute last week.\u00a0 The recent economic crisis did not result from too much economic liberty, he argued, nor would it be solved by greater … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":50,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2813"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/50"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2813"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2813\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2821,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2813\/revisions\/2821"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2813"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2813"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2813"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}