Prof. Watkins intro continued:
David noted, for example, 'Would it have any effect upon Cruz's religious conviction or that of his audience to learn that the content of Proverbs, chapters 10 through 29, was lifted from ancient Egyptian wisdom literature ...? As such, Proverbs as a whole cannot possibly be considered 'original' religious precepts derived from the God of the Old Testament, but rather insightful aphorisms written by ... scribes, educators and policy makers in the palaces of pagan kings.'
Prof. Aaron's mostly complete written response -- including his thoughts of the dangers of religious fundamentalism in America -- is below:
Thoughts upon reading Ted Cruz's National Review column, "Calling All Conservatives."
by Professor David Aaron, Professor of Bible & History of Interpretation
Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, Cincinnati
As the political and religious Right in this country frame issues of security and economics in the language of democracy and freedom, those of us studying religions are aghast at just how close the Right and its foreign religious enemies are in terms of ideology.
The greatest threat to democracy is not militant Islamic fundamentalists who dwell as terrorists in foreign lands waiting to destabilize the free west; the greatest threat is religious fundamentalism within our own shores.
Democracy and fundamentalism are simply incompatible. That has always been the case. We are witnessing it now in Iraq--a state of affairs totally miscalculated by the Bush administration due to its utter ignorance regarding the true mandates for democracy; and that is what we are witnessing in the rhetoric of the religious right in America--itself barely able to sustain the core values of a liberal democracy.
The tension between liberalism and religion has persisted since the founding of this nation. If one's belief in God involves a creed that marks off the world into binaries--the good and the bad, the redeemed and the unredeemed--with ultimate clarity and certainty, then it becomes very difficult for those holding this faith to compromise beliefs regarding policies and governance for the sake of some abstract notion of liberty. After all, if God demands something of you, how can you subordinate that demand to the good of a faithless secular nation governed by mortals?
In 1788, James Madison wrote:
Happily for the states, they enjoy the utmost freedom of religion. This freedom arised from that multiplicity of sects, which pervades America, and which is the best and only security for religious liberty in any society. For where there is such a variety of sects, there cannot be a majority of any one sect to oppress and persecute the rest.
Just over thirty years later, Madison penned the following:
The idea also of a union of all to form one nation under one Government in acts of devotion to the God of all is an imposing idea.
But reason and the principles of the Christian religion require that all the individuals composing a nation even of the same precise creed and wish to unite in a universal act of religion at the same time, the union ought to be effected through the intervention of their religious not of their political representatives.
In a nation composed of various sects, some alienated widely from others, and where no agreement could take place through the former, the interposition of the latter is doubly wrong.
James Madison, Writings (NY: Library of American, 1999) 382, 767
(written in 1819) spellings left as in the original, abbreviations expanded.
These words were written when "liberal" and "liberty" still shared a semantic field and when both were core values of this country. They were written with the belief in mind that governance was to be constructed on the basis of natural rights, which were independent of and, in some sense, transcended the content of those allegedly "revealed" documents cherished by religious sects (Scriptures).
The freedom to practice religion required that the states not succumb to the ideology of any single religion. But that required that individual sects compromise on their own ideological evangelism. Whereas the religion required conversion of the unfaithful for the individual and the world to be saved, American liberalism demanded subordination of those goals for the ideal of liberty.
In the second paragraph, Madison was writing about the problem of what happens when a given religious perspective becomes that of the majority, usually framed as the tyranny of the majority. Let people unite through their religious leaders on the level of religion, but let them not transfer that desire for uniformity to their political representatives. That, he states, "is doubly wrong." Once a religion allows its desire for a universal faith to influence politics, freedom is curtailed for those who cherish other beliefs.
...The fact that the word "liberal" is now used to disparage a politician, as we have seen repeatedly in the current political debates, makes clear that the religious right has gained enough confidence to assert its divine mandates as more precious than those ideals established by people.
While "liberal" has been transformed into an anti-religious word, "conservative" has become a confession of religious convictions. ...
Thus, when Ted Cruz, in the National Review lists President Bush as a "strong conservative leader," he focuses on his belief that Bush is "a man of faith, principle, and resolve." In effect, the "values" Bush stands for are those Cruz applauds--religious values.
They are not the values of liberty, or the constitution of this country, which assiduously established a barrier between particularist religious truth and truths held to be self evident by everyone.
Structurally speaking, this is what a liberal does as well. ...The liberal says: what ideals of liberalism does this candidate embrace, not "what religious precepts does this candidate hope to integrate into government policy?" In contrast to Bush, Cruz depicts Kerry as "the single-most liberal senator in the U.S. Senate," which is to say that he is--according to Cruz--the opposite of Bush, and therefore not a man of faith, principle, or resolve.
It is all rather astounding that people don't see through this rhetoric for what it is, but quite obviously they don't, and that is what buoys the religious right.
What really separates Bush and Kerry is their willingness to allow religious fundamentalism to dictate the values of this nation.
What the religious right banks on is the utter ignorance of its population regarding all things historical. By arguing that they alone know what God wants they convince the population of the simplistic binaries God allegedly demands. Gone is the...suspicion that might cause every citizen to ask, "How can you be so certain of God's will in a world as complicated as this?"
Of course, there are moments of such profound absurdity that the historian of religion can barely refrain from letting loose a deep cosmic laugh. They emerge from the general policy of ignorance pursued by the right.
Take for instance, Cruz's gleeful use of Scriptures to back up his support of Bush. Cruz strategically chooses a verse from Proverbs. He writes: "Proverbs 29:2 admonishes, `When the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice; but when the wicked beareth rule, the people mourn.' Although those in politics should certainly be reluctant to claim righteousness, which comes only from the Divine, it is we the voters who decide who is in a position of authority."
I don't suppose it would have any effect upon Cruz's religious conviction or that of his audience to learn that the content of Proverbs, chapters 10 through 29, was lifted from ancient Egyptian wisdom literature, which preceded the composition of Proverbs by many centuries?
As such, Proverbs as a whole cannot possibly be considered "original" religious precepts derived from the God of the Old Testament, but rather insightful aphorisms written by an intelligentsia supported as scribes, educators and policy makers in the palaces of pagan kings.
They were composed in the context of a marvelously pluralistic religious community, one that understood wisdom did not find roots in certainty, but in humility. "One thing are the words which men say, another is that which the god does."
This is the same pagan civilization that gave us many of the Psalms now cherished by Christians and Jews alike. The first Psalm, for instance, which compares the righteous man to "a tree planted by streams of water, that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither," drew its imagery from the ancient Instruction of Amen-em-opet.
The Egyptian source tells us that the man who incites conflict through argumentation "is like a tree growing in the open. In the completion of a moment comes its loss of foliage, and its end is reached in the shipyards; or it is floated far from its place and the flame is its burial shroud."
The righteous in this Egyptian psalm is the man who speaks few but carefully chosen words. In contrast, "he is like a tree growing in a garden. It flourishes and doubles its yield. It stands before its lord. Its fruit is sweet; its shade is pleasant; and its end is reached in the garden."
So much for using Scriptures as our source of God's truth.
Religious certainty requires the abrogation of all reasonable standards of evidence, and this, in turn, requires a thoroughly ahistorical approach to life.
The proponents of Bible-based faith are so utterly ignorant of the history and development of the literature they engage to justify their stances as to prove comic.
But this is part and parcel of their cognitively irresponsible model of belief that should have fallen with the Enlightenment.
But here we are, at the onset of the twenty-first century, and we are mired in assertions regarding "faith, values, and security" that are founded upon notions no more substantive than illusions, and it is all propped up upon a scaffold that requires ignorance of its constituents in order to be sustained.
The very same ignorance of history and its various forces is what causes the severe blunders in domestic and foreign policy we are witnessing on a daily basis. But the non-fundamentalist community should understand this: religious fundamentalism is not deterred by periodic failings or unanticipated casualties, because religious fundamentalism--like all radical ideologies--sees the demise of the current order as the prelude to the awaited salvation.
Thus, even mistakes are justified as part of the promised redemption. The circular hermeneutic is impenetrable.
People of profound faith understand that their beliefs stand as personal confessions between them and their God. Faith does not mandate an aggressive stance regarding policies of governments. If anything, profound faith requires a retreat from so public a "confession" toward works that bring to the world kindness, humility, caring love for the needy and less fortunate--all that the God of Scriptures allegedly required as marks of righteousness.
This, too, was known to the authors of Amen-em-opet. "Do not cut off your heart from your tongue, that all your affairs may be successful. Be sincere in the presence of the common people, for one is safe in the hand of the god. God hates him who falsifies words; his great abomination is the contentious. . . ."
The religious right has as much right to articulate its ideals and purposes as any other religious or political community. But it has no right to abandon cognitively responsible discourse if it wishes to participate in this liberal western world.
That they fail to perceive the irony of their policy positions is only too typical of arrogant religions. For more than a liberal government, they should fear what could result from the diminution of those boundaries between church and state that they currently seek.
For the day will come when the religious right will be in the minority under the tyranny of a new fanaticism, far more radical than they. And that fanaticism's ascension to power will only have been made possible by the efforts of today's fundamentalists, who will have managed to chip away at the rule of civil law just enough to destabilize those very protections that currently secure us all against the tyranny of the majority.
Of course, they now think that breaching that boundary is in their interest. Later, they will pay for their arrogance and ignorance. But in the meantime, those of us who treasure pluralism and the freedoms it requires, live in fear of tyranny.
Madison understood this profoundly, as he made clear in his "Remonstrance against Religious Assessment" (1785).
True it is, that no other rule exists, by which any question which may divide a Society, can be ultimately determined, but the will of the majority; but it is also true that the majority may trespass on the rights of the minority. [. . .]
The preservation of a free Government requires not merely, that the metes and bounds which separate each department of power be invariably maintained; but more especially that neither of them be suffered to overleap the great Barrier which defends the rights of the people.
The Rulers who are guilty of such an encroachment, exceed the commission from which they derive their authority, and are Tyrants. The People who submit to it are governed by laws made neither by themselves nor by an authority derive from them, and are slaves. [. . .]
While we assert for ourselves a freedom to embrace, to profess and to observe the Religion which we believe to be of divine origin, we cannot deny an equal freedom to those whose minds have not yet yielded to the evidence which has convinced us.
If this freedom be abused, it is an offence against God, not against man: To God, therefore, not to man, must an account of it be rendered.
[We should reject the Virginia bill "establishing a provision for teachers of the Christian Religion"] because the Bill implies either that the Civil Magistrate is a competent Judge of Religious Truth; or that he may employ Religion as an engine of Civil policy.
The first is an arrogant pretension falsified by the contradictory opinions of Rulers in all ages, and throughout the world; the second an unhallowed perversion of the means of salvation. (Italics added)
