An unenlightened land
The US is a 21st-century nation with an 18th-century sense of right and wrong
By Hannah Naiditch 12/17/2009
Many crimes have been committed in the name of religion, from burning witches to the Inquisition to the Crusades that slaughtered Muslims and Jews alike. Scientific investigators like Galileo were persecuted because their findings contradicted the Bible. Priests were advisers to the kings. Kings claimed to be direct descendants from the gods, which gave them the “divine right” to rule.
The French Revolution of 1789-99 was hailed as the Age of Enlightenment and the Age of Reason. It was a people’s revolution fighting against divine-right monarchy and reactionary nobility who were determined to maintain their positions of power and privilege. The Catholic Church enjoyed a monopoly and tried to hold on to its powerful position. It was an intellectual revolution, a philosophy of liberation that swept Europe. Liberty and equality became the battle cry.
The French Revolution gave man the right to question values derived from the Old or New Testament. The very existence of a Supreme Being was open for debate. Nothing was sacrosanct.
Our Constitution was passed by Congress in 1789 and became the envy of nations striving to be free. It listed a number of inalienable human rights that government had to respect.
During the 18th and 19th centuries, scientific research became less constrained by scripture. Observation and experimentation became the new tools to help solve problems. Men tried to apply the scientific method to religion, politics and other areas, using reason as their tool.
Science teachers today have failed their students when only 28 percent of adults believe in the theory of evolution, while 52 percent believe in astrology, 83 percent believe in the Virgin Birth, 41 percent believe that dinosaurs and humans lived at the same time, 42 percent believe that some of us can communicate with the dead and 75 percent believe that miracles still occur today.
Even more disappointing, 58 percent of adults believe it requires a belief in God to be a moral person. US Sen. Joe Lieberman is one of them. In contrast, in France it is only 13 percent that believe it takes a faith in God to be a moral person.
It was Thomas Huxley, the famed English biologist, who said: “The deepest sin against the human mind is to believe things without evidence.” Can a nation that believes more fervently in the Virgin Birth and astrology than in evolution still be called an enlightened nation?
While some scholars still debate the very existence of Jesus, former President George W. Bush declared Jesus to be his favorite philosopher, and he made National Prayer Day into an annual event at the White House. In Bush, we had a president who had little respect for science and manipulated the results of scientific research to fit his own agenda. We had a president who thought he was guided by divine instructions, affecting issues like stem-cell research, abortion, the teaching of evolution and the right to die. In Europe, evolution is an accepted fact, but in the United States it is still endlessly debated.
Our Constitution does not mention God. As former Sen. Barry Goldwater stated, “Being a conservative in America traditionally has meant that one holds a deep, abiding respect for the Constitution … By maintaining the separation of church and state, the United States has avoided the intolerance which has so divided the rest of the world with religious wars.”
The wall between church and state is now crumbling as the religious right tries to impose their faith-based values on everyone else.
In September 2004, the Los Angeles Times published an article by Edward L. Glaeser titled “America the Conservative.” He claims “The big difference between the US and Europe is that the US kept its 18th-century Constitution, while most European countries discarded theirs. In a wave of revolutions and quasi-revolutionary general strikes, European countries, one by one, replaced their older conservative constitutions with ones often designed by socialist or labor leaders.
“Europe is in the 21st century,” he claims, “but we remain locked in the 18th.”
Hannah Naiditch is the author of “Memoirs of a Hitler Refugee: Activism and Issues Define My Life,” available on Amazon.com.
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