This Is The Patent Nonsense Christians Claim About Secularism

Thomas E. Brewton, (who later published “The Liberal Jihad,” in 2012) wrote a brutal farce of an essay in The National Ledger. Entitled Theocracy and Liberal Paranoia, Brewton rehashes a bunch of old canards about proponents of reason and secular governance. He sets up his straw men and spends the whole essay knocking them down.

Among his claims:

The liberal jihad…claims the prerogative to ban expressions of…faith outside the closed doors of homes and religious meeting places.

FACT: No secular group has ever tried to do any such thing–the goal is to get public funding and government sponsorship of religion curtailed, in accordance with the establishment clause of the first amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Liberals see themselves as entitled to regulate public discussion, because they have conflated their own religion of socialistic atheism with the supposed objectivity of the physical sciences. This combination of historicism and scientism leads them to the unquestioning certitude that they alone represent political and social truth.

FACT: There is no such thing as “scientism.” There is simply the collection of evidence. Secular public policy should be formed based on observable objective truth, which can and should be debated on the basis of said evidence. Pluralism clearly enhances secular society.

They fail to recognize the uniform lesson of history that societies survive only when they are united by common traditions and common precepts of morality.

FACT: Morality is based on human values, not on religion. Since religions differ widely in their concepts of morality, it is far more consistent to rely on scientific and sociological measurements of human flourishing, to determine what is moral. Human values such as The Golden Rule predate and underpin much of so-called “religious morality” in any case.

Atheistic materialism is…A world dedicated to nothing more than every-man-for-himself, in-your-face “doing your own thing” is inherently Thomas Hobbes’s war of all against all, in which life is nasty, brutish, and short.

FACT: No scripture can change the dynamics of human conflict and interaction. The forces of history have always been shaped by individual, tribal, and national self-interest. Anyone who decries self-interest is likely trying to promote their own interests at the expense of their rhetorical target.

The liberal jihad also has the full backing of the Federal and most state judiciaries and the benefit of unending propaganda from the self-designated mainstream media, including taxpayer-financed NPR and PBS.

FACT: Read “The Republican War on Science” and other documents. The U.S. Government has been stacked with religious ideologues in the past 5 years like never before in history. Bush appointees are subject to faith-based litmus tests, which is unprecedented in modern politics.

The gray-beards of today’s liberalism were, in the 1960s, the anti-establishment rebels…who perceived the entirety of existing society…as the power elite. Student anarchists of that era added a guerrilla-tactic edge to the normal rebelliousness of youth. Even Tom Hayden’s Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) became too tame for the violent wing, who split off into the Weatherman underground of bank robbers, murderers, and bombers.

FACT: Liberalism in the U.S. often supports the establishment, promoting government and taxpayer funding as the solution to almost everything. But it also includes secular right-libertarians who support the primacy of the individual and want small government. A pluralistic reality which confounds Brewton’s paranoid fantasy of some imaginary monolithic godless opposition.