We need a new enlightenment
Devin O'Keefe
Issue date: 4/27/06 Last update: 5/1/06 at 5:49 PM PST
Section: Opinion
- Page 1 of 1
With militant religious fundamentalism on the rise at home and abroad, the time has come for atheists, agnostics and other rational free-thinkers to stand up for the secular values of liberty, reason and humanitarian conduct.
The extreme right-wing that has come to dominate the American political establishment is fueled in part by Christian zealots actively seeking to impose their repressive values on the entire nation. Center-leftists, desperate to regain political influence, are mistakenly following the right's lead, trading in decades of secular strategies and goals for "progressive faith."
Baptists and Protestants within and without government exert restrictive influence on public health initiatives, reproductive rights and science education; the Catholic Church seeks to deflect attention away from its systematic protection of priestly child abusers by excoriating gay people.
Everywhere one looks, the often-violent intolerance of the faithful looms, threatening to reverse centuries of hard-won rights and liberties based on humanity and reason. Instead of messianic and apocalyptic policy, we need government grounded in the real world, driven by people who believe in human freedom and human potential. Rationalists have always been a minority, but we must not let that intimidate us into silence.
Polls suggest that U.S. citizens are still reluctant to elect people who are openly agnostic or atheistic. The truth is different. We who embrace reason and empiricism, who focus on the here-and-now rather than on an impossible-to-prove afterlife, tend to be deeply concerned with the human condition. Non-theists have been at the forefront of expanding human freedom and justice for centuries.
Our company includes philosophers (Aristotle, Giordano Bruno), scientists (Albert Einstein, Francis Crick), feminists (Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Hypatia Bonner), black liberationists (W.E.B. Dubois, James Baldwin), democratic revolutionaries (Ben Franklin, John Adams) and countless other humanitarians.
Will we follow their lead, and strive for greater freedom? Or will we remain bound to faith-based initiatives like jihad and preemptive war? Free-thinkers must stand up and be a voice of reason and compassion if we are to avoid fundamentalist religions' self-fulfilling prophecies of destruction.
The extreme right-wing that has come to dominate the American political establishment is fueled in part by Christian zealots actively seeking to impose their repressive values on the entire nation. Center-leftists, desperate to regain political influence, are mistakenly following the right's lead, trading in decades of secular strategies and goals for "progressive faith."
Baptists and Protestants within and without government exert restrictive influence on public health initiatives, reproductive rights and science education; the Catholic Church seeks to deflect attention away from its systematic protection of priestly child abusers by excoriating gay people.
Everywhere one looks, the often-violent intolerance of the faithful looms, threatening to reverse centuries of hard-won rights and liberties based on humanity and reason. Instead of messianic and apocalyptic policy, we need government grounded in the real world, driven by people who believe in human freedom and human potential. Rationalists have always been a minority, but we must not let that intimidate us into silence.
Polls suggest that U.S. citizens are still reluctant to elect people who are openly agnostic or atheistic. The truth is different. We who embrace reason and empiricism, who focus on the here-and-now rather than on an impossible-to-prove afterlife, tend to be deeply concerned with the human condition. Non-theists have been at the forefront of expanding human freedom and justice for centuries.
Our company includes philosophers (Aristotle, Giordano Bruno), scientists (Albert Einstein, Francis Crick), feminists (Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Hypatia Bonner), black liberationists (W.E.B. Dubois, James Baldwin), democratic revolutionaries (Ben Franklin, John Adams) and countless other humanitarians.
Will we follow their lead, and strive for greater freedom? Or will we remain bound to faith-based initiatives like jihad and preemptive war? Free-thinkers must stand up and be a voice of reason and compassion if we are to avoid fundamentalist religions' self-fulfilling prophecies of destruction.
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