Divided By Dogma

Divided By Dogma

No doubt, wordsmiths often hoodwink weak minded and weak willed people. This tends to be easily done by loading causes with examples that inspire passion in order to freeze out reason. Causes are thus rationalized under strange metaphors and dogmas, sometimes for the most perverse of purposes. Followings are attracted and religious and political dogmas and territories are jealously defended or expanded, often under quite ambiguous and non-explanatory contrivances. No doubt, that is a peril America’s Founders devoutly willed to inoculate us against.


In so willing, nothing suggests that the Founders meant to encourage disrespect for “Nature’s God” or the “Supreme Being” -- whatever its nature or character. They certainly did not mean generally to ban from the public square, or to erect a false “wall of separation” to preclude, the discussion of higher sentiments about the source of morality and meaningfulness.

The Founders knew what it meant to make law respecting an "establishment" of religion or of official salvation doctrine. They had before them the examples of Constantine, Mohammed, Charlemagne, Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, King James, etc. Notwithstanding contributions of deists among them, the Founders surely did not intend or expect that each and every local populace and slice of culture should be repulsed in its will for celebrating or comparing sacred images or ideas in its public squares or in its school lessons in history, literature, or philosophy.

Indeed, why should “higher values” of atheists be availed a preferential monopoly in the public square over higher values of believers, who may reasonably believe in a general Field of spiritual consciousness? Does any respectable, thinking person suppose atheists’ values are based purely in reason and “science,” as opposed to intuition, empathy, emotion, and inculcation?

If anything, the “better angels” of the consciousness of America’s Founders wished to preserve avenues for all decent expressions of free will to interact. In that, they did not mean to license the entire subjugation of free will and liberty; rather, they meant to defend decent regard for individual liberty. They did not mean to require that liberty loving people must in all things tolerate those agents, cults, and conspiracies that are irredeemably bent against tolerating good will among all.

The Founders would never have condoned as a “religious right” that a secular minded cult (such as for Sharia law, Human Secularism, Radical Environmentalism, or Anti-Family Statism -- that was bent on forcing everyone to submit … on pain of being fined, imprisoned, beheaded, stoned, lashed, disfigured, diminished, marginalized, or stripped of free speech based on thin prevailing winds of political correctness) should be entitled to terrorize, intimidate, or monopolize the public square in order eventually to force everyone to submit to its consolidating, collectivizing, all-intrusive, salvation beliefs, diets, ceremonies, and intricate restrictions and regulations of dress, song, and acceptable behavior. Now, that’s what is meant by establishing religion!

Yet today, proponents of traditional family values and individual liberty, and guardians against the consolidation of all-intrusive, central power, who base their values on respect for a higher, empathetic Field of Consciousness (regardless of mode or metaphor), find themselves being intimidated and all but barred from the public square …under such ridiculous and logically bankrupt notions as: “You can’t legislate based on moral values” (as if there were any good basis for legislation that were independent of moral values!).

Here and now, we need to honor values that are suited for sustaining decent and viable society, and we need as much as reasonably possible that the central government and its power mad judges for life keep their noses out of local and state concerns related thereto. I agree that decisions are often forced to be made at some level of decent assimilation. But that level tends not to be the central, federal level at which officious, know-it-all power tends to become absolutely corrupt.

The battle before us is between those who believe there is a higher or spiritual basis that legitimizes empathy among our various perspectives of conscious free will versus those who believe our experience of consciousness is purely and only meaningless artifact of random natural selection among entirely dumb bits and patterns of matter. The battle is between those who respect a Field of conscious will that permeates versus those who want to “save” an inanimate planet. The battle is between those who honor the dignity of each perspective of free will versus those who want to consolidate, reduce, and absolutely subjugate each and every independent perspective of free will. The battle is to preserve decent regard for free will, not to utterly squash it.

In that battle, however characterized, those of good faith, good will, and fellow empathy are in the large majority. Yet, they have for many years allowed themselves to be led around by the nose by subjugation-minded “consolidation’ists.” How has this happened? I submit it has happened because large segments among people of good will have allowed themselves to be blinded and divided by dogma – dogma that has little meaning when taken literally. By that I mean the various prevailing dogmas are not subject to empirical or logical demonstration. None are logically consistent, coherent, or complete. This is not to say they have no value. Indeed, their value consists in the difference between meaningfulness and meaninglessness. Or, as Ed Klingman recognizes in a brilliant book, Gene Man's World (2008), chapter 15, Consciousness and Life, the philosophical difference in respecting a field of consciousness is "The difference between heaven and hell."

The value of prevailing spiritual modes for relating to higher consciousness consists in the utility of familiar and loved music and figures of speech for bringing us together in intuitive empathy to communicate appreciation for the higher Artist from whom each of our perspectives of will is but an imperfect, incomplete and particular derivative.

So how is it that we have come to allow ourselves and our common cause to be hurt and divided by Marxists and Mind Subjugators? Well, we too often lead the weak minded and weak willed among us to be prey to those who would use our various dogmas to divide us. Why else should we have been hoodwinked into giving the Conservative base over to nominate McCain over Romney? Why else would Romney’s Mormonism have been so effectively used against him!?

If anything, Romney’s religious upbringing made him a better man than he otherwise would have been. Yet, Romney was discarded, because prevailing dogmatists found his system for relating to the higher Field of Consciousness (God) too different from their own. So what did we get for allowing ourselves thus to be divided by dogma? We got as President the most radical, collectivizing, false promising, false facing, enemy of individual liberty ever elected to the position. I fervently pray we never again fall into that error!