Theocracy Watch
The Appalling Morality of Supernaturalisms
Introduction
The worst narcissism of the supernaturalisms is the vanity of their moralities. I don’t mean (all) adherents as individuals, as there are plenty of ethical and virtuous faithful right across the spectrum of metaphysics, ideologies and sects. I mean the official doctrines, all of which flaunt themselves as Truth from Divine Authority, the font of eternal and universal objective morality.
Stress on the objective.
Hypocrisy is a related systemic attribute, touched upon by Bill Maher above, but not the central concern here.
The label supernaturalism may strike some as an unusual choice. My reason: it’s both more neutral and precise than the three more common alternatives, religion, superstition and theocracy. (I’ll make the case in future for these as bands of a gradient.)
The Maher quote captures some of the vocabulary challenge. ‘Religion’ is a GoodWord, in the connotation sense at least to the religious who are comforted by their beliefs and don’t hurt anything, at least not deliberately. It is woefully imprecise, though¹.
‘Superstition’, which the Romans defined as “dread of deities”², is probably the most accurate to describe the masses/flocks of adherents, but they’re much less of a problem for the USA in 2024 than the elite, pastoral/shepherd theocrats, who see the world very, very clearly … paragons of “cynical and pragmatic” to use Sergei Lavrov’s favorite laudation.
‘Theocracy’ is (a … just one) religion turned into law of the land, if that needs clarifying.
Those last two terms are BadWords/pejoratives, so while precise, they just derail any attempt at reasoned dialogue/dialectic into the ditch of pointless fussing over semantics, labels and name-calling.
(Not that these essays will be entirely free of that last, but I’ll try to limit it to counter-punching. The supernaturalists have a pattern of hissing or howling insults, execrating those who disagree with them, then crying “meanie” when you return in kind, per Maher.)
Using supernaturalism as the category label also spares us the idiocy of “[science|communism|atheism|humanism|…] is just another religion”. Um, no. None of those includes reliance on metaphysical speculation to ground their claims/truths. Religions are ideologies stacked on such handwave foundations.
I use Rome as the champion of the other camp mostly because they have such a comprehensive written record of their official positions, their underlying rationales, and their efforts to propagate them throughout their rich history. They’re also the most dangerous to the Great Experiment of Liberty-centric — which implies secular — democratic republicanism.
It’s also worth a mention that they don’t even hide: in plain sight on their own home page they call themselves a theocratic state ruled by a Unitary Monarch. The religion is the sheepskin cloaking the wolf, the state with the global diaspora that views everything the USA stands for as its nemesis.
The arch-villains of the piece are Wojtyła and Ratzinger, the intellectual pontiffs who assiduously led the Counter-Enlightenment for half a century. Their most insidious offense has been to epistemology, with their incessant sophistical arguments for keeping fides/faith on a par³ with ratio/reason. The most consequential offense, on the other hand, has been their project of reinserting (their) religious values into our politics, government and Law. In a word, Theocracy.
Don’t take my word for it, spend the three minutes to read Ratzinger’s take.
It’s a pity that so many Americans have completely lost the plot … the scheme that Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) has been trying tirelessly to expose. You know a strategy has been successful when legitimate opposition squelches itself in the name of some flavor of anti-bigotry.
It’s high time we revive our proud tradition of bashing theocracy. Ideas/ software are always fair game.
Let me also dispose of the meanie smear: we didn’t pick this fight. Just one example from the saintly Wojtyła:
In the case of an intrinsically unjust law, such as a law permitting abortion or euthanasia, it is therefore never licit to obey it, or to “take part in a propaganda campaign in favour of such a law, or vote for it”.⁴
Those of us who disagree are therefore always behaving illicitly. Softer words, perhaps (how many Americans can actually define ‘licit’?), than Calvin’s thundering Total Depravity.
A Polish-born theocratic papocaesarist absolute unitary monarch (RIP), permanent residence Rome, a continent away, is going to presume to opine as to the nature of the American democratic republic’s laws and urge his diaspora sheep to disobey the ones he doesn’t like and subvert the Rule of Law and our Constitution? And *we* are the ones being prejudiced, being “anti-Catholic”, being “anti-religion”, being evil pagans and atheists and deists … the meanies? Har.
It goes without saying that if there’s no supernature, there is no (super)natural law that gets the last word. By extension, then, no (super)natural rights or morality.
All three are up to us as humans to posit. We can look to actual nature for inspiration, by contrast … to biology especially of our closest cousins in the canopy of the tree of life, as well as to principles that have stood the tests of time and place once the noosphere started taking over from the biosphere.
The Golden Rule is a fine starting point.
I will even argue that ethics as subtle as Kant’s (“don’t use another as a mere means to an end”) and Rawls’s (“rules are only fair/just if those who write them don’t know in advance their own outcomes”) are largely expressions of the Golden Rule. Ditto the cucumber test. Ditto philosophies focusing on individual Liberty. Don’t press your moral tastes on others unless you want others pressing theirs on you.
Liberty crucially entails the boundary of the Other’s symmetrical rights. (See Madison below.)
The argument by priests that we need their kind to reveal a hypothetical superbeing’s Divine Law is self-serving on its face, not to say dubious here in 2024. Hiding behind tradition is no more solid a grounding, especially in the USA, whose Founders (if not contemporaneous society at large) were non-Trinitarian, rationalist anti-theocrats. John Jay, first SCOTUS Chief Justice and third author of the Federalist Papers went so far as to propose excluding Catholicism from the list of tolerated religions in New York’s first state constitution on the grounds of allegiance to a foreign monarch.
James Madison, along with Jay about the only personally traditional Protestants of Richard Morris’s big seven, stated the argument most plainly:
[3] […] Who does not see that the same authority which can establish Christianity, in exclusion of all other Religions, may establish with the same ease any particular sect of Christians, in exclusion of all other Sects? that the same authority which can force a citizen to contribute three pence only of his property for the support of any one establishment, may force him to conform to any other establishment in all cases whatsoever?
For good measure, adding a history lesson concerning the dark ages of Western theocracy beginning with Constantine and Theodosius back in the 300s and running through Luther up to the time of his writing:
[7] Because experience witnesseth that ecclesiastical establishments, instead of maintaining the purity and efficacy of Religion, have had a contrary operation. During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the Clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity, in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution. Enquire of the Teachers of Christianity for the ages in which it appeared in its greatest lustre; those of every sect, point to the ages prior to its incorporation with Civil policy.
Others like Adams, Jefferson, Paine and Franklin were rather more or less diplomatic about it, but to a man had nothing but antipathy for Rome. In Jefferson’s case, for Calvin as well, whose religion he described as a “blasphemous absurdity”. Take that, Presbyterians … sect of my youth.
No thinking person in the developed world looks anymore to theologians/ supernaturalists for knowledge of how the universe works. The priests cling to influence where they really crave it (Madison’s “Civil policy” … that is, political power) through a narrow and flimsy argument for being the guardians of morality.
Rome’s catechism, once again, does not try to hide the agenda:
2246 It is a part of the Church’s mission “to pass moral judgments even in matters related to politics, whenever the fundamental rights of man or the salvation of souls requires it. The means, the only means, she may use are those which are in accord with the Gospel and the welfare of all men according to the diversity of times and circumstances.”
Those “moral judgments” including ordering the diaspora flock to vote as the Church commands. It’s a reasonable question to ask when spokespersons, clergy or laity, pass into acting as Foreign Agents.
Contrast Rome’s rule above with this language from France’s cherished principle of constitutional secularism, Laïcité (which we Americans would be well served to adopt as an amplification of the overly-terse-bordering-on-cryptic establishment clause):
[…] No religion can impose its prescriptions on the Republic. No religious principle can be invoked for disobeying the law.
[…] Expression of one’s convictions cannot go so far as to question, in the name of principles considered to be “of a higher order”, the legitimacy of decisions taken by democratic bodies.
Can’t have it both ways French Catholics and Muslims. Would that we Americans also made the choice this clear.
We don’t need to address the FARA argument yet, however. The rest of this set of short essays will go right at the arrogant claim of superior morality.
Even if we were to treat Rome as just a religion, on a par with, say, Lhasa, and ignore its theocratic subversion of the US Constitution and our Founders’ first principles, we would still be left with the value beliefs/endoxa (in a word, ethics) that they preach.
Absurd, incoherent and appalling as they are.
No better place to start than with three of their “non-negotiables”: abortion, gay marriage and euthanasia.
Coda
To be clear: these essays are about nutty moralities based on any supernaturalisms. It may seem like I’m picking only on Rome, Calvinism and other Christianities, but that’s only because I know the most about them, how their philosophical foundations/stacks support appalling rules they want to turn into laws.
At a high level fly-by resolution, the Judaisms, Islams and Hinduisms are even more chock full of bad ideas.
“Chosen People”, Submission and Karma … where to start. Three foundations, all based on dodgy metaphysical ficta.
We’ll give them their turns under the microscope and in the barrel in future.
Notes:
[1] A fairly succinct albeit biased review by a Catholic university professor sums it up: “The Supreme Court has never settled on a definition of religion, and its decisions down the centuries point in different directions. Some of the Court’s rulings indicate that idiosyncratic personal convictions can qualify as religious; others suggest the opposite. Until recently, the question has been mostly academic.”
[2] Plutarch elaborates: “superstition, as the very name (dread of deities) indicates, is an emotional idea and an assumption productive of a fear which utterly humbles and crushes a man, for he thinks that there are gods, but that they are the cause of pain and injury”
[3] Even though they contort themselves to argue that Rome is against fideism, they don’t just place fides on a par with ratio, they argue for the superiority of the former, the very definition of fideism. See Wojtyła’s 1998 definitive statement of Rome’s doctrine, all 69 pages and 36,000+ words worth of mixed Latin, Bible verses, opaque academic vernacular, and stupefying repetition, Fides et ratio [emphasis added]: “On the basis of mistaken and very widespread assertions, the rationalist critique of the time attacked faith and denied the possibility of any knowledge which was not the fruit of reason’s natural capacities. This obliged the Council to reaffirm emphatically that there exists a knowledge which is peculiar to faith, surpassing the knowledge proper to human reason[…]” No. Faith is taste. Don’t confuse it with the only means of classifying belief as knowledge: ratio.
[4] And see the same encyclical for the full-throated defense of natural law jurisprudence/philosophy-of-law. It’s poorly named, should be supernatural law. As always with theocracies, if they were to go into a conference/congress and then read out a single code of Divine Law as ultimate moral authority which can override man-made laws, might be worth considering. As things stand, the venue would be crowded, even just with the sects of the Christianities, let alone the rest of the Abrahamics, let alone the Eastern cacophony. More’s the pity that MLK Jr fell into this same trap of “an unjust law is no law at all”. Clergyman moral vanity.
