There is a desire felt by tens of millions of Americans, lumped into a diffuse and fractious movement known as the Christian right, to destroy the intellectual and scientific rigor of the Enlightenment, radically diminish the role of government to create a theocratic state based on “biblical law,” and force a recalcitrant world to bend to the will of an imperial and “Christian” America. JMvV: I could not have said it better in https://sites.google/site/forthuyse/Home: so let me quote what I wrote several years ago. It was my concern with the incremental loss of those values of the European Enlightenment on which the United States was founded, which made me decide to begin writing regularly on my forthuyse website, specifically created for that purpose--to present my views on these and other important matters. Our values are under attack by the amnesiac right wing, and we cannot passively let them spout their ignorance, since it is endangering not just our won country but the entire world! My criticism of them is not just negative--I am trying to present alternate and more positive ways of looking at reality.... Hereunder follows the text of my first entry: Over the past few decades we have seen in America a disastrous regression to pre-enlightenment religious and political thinking. The hard-won freedom of religion (from interference by any particular state or any particular church) has been in danger of being rolled back by the kind of mediaeval ideas exemplified by the dictum: "cuius regio eius religio" or the idea that whoever rules the state may determine what religion may be practiced in that state--and everyone else be damned.
Posted on: Tue, 08 Oct 2013 22:55:06 +0000