SOBRAN'S --
The Real News of the Month
June 2006
Volume 13, Number 6
Editor: Joe Sobran
Publisher: Fran Griffin (Griffin Communications)
Managing Editor: Ronald N. Neff
Subscription Rates.
Print version: $44.95 per year. For special discounted
subscription offers and e-mail subscriptions see
www.sobran.com, or call the publisher's office.
Address: SOBRAN'S, P.O. Box 1383, Vienna, VA 22183-1383
Fax: 703-281-6617 Website: www.sobran.com
Publisher's Office: 703-255-2211 or www.griffnews.com
Foreign Subscriptions (print version only): Add $1.25 per
issue for Canada and Mexico; all other foreign
countries, add $1.75 per issue.
Credit Card Orders: Call 1-800-513-5053. Allow
4-6 weeks for delivery of your first issue.
{{ MATERIAL DROPPED OR CHANGED SOLELY FOR REASONS OF
SPACE APPEARS IN DOUBLE CURLY BRACKETS. EMPHASIS IS
INDICATED BY THE PRESENCE OF "EQUALS" SIGNS AROUND THE
EMPHASIZED WORDS. }}
CONTENTS
Features
-> The Sins of Organized Irreligion
-> Publisher's Note
-> Our Endangered Flag
The Sobran Forum
-> Christianity and Science
Nuggets
"Reactionary Utopian" Columns Reprinted in This Issue
FEATURES
The Sins of Organized Irreligion
(pages 1, 3-4)
Nearly every Christian, I suppose, has had the
experience of being belabored by unbelievers about the
putative sins of what is termed "organized religion" --
the Spanish Inquisition, the trial of Galileo, the Salem
witch-hunts, and so forth. What surprises me is that
Christians have been so slow to turn the argument around
and point to the record of what we may call "organized
irreligion."
Since we Christians regard faith as a gift, we
seldom resent unbelief as such. You can't very well blame
someone for not having received a gift, but there are
those who angrily reject gifts, or who resent the good
fortune of those who do receive them, or who are
otherwise something other than people who don't "happen
to be" religious in all innocence.
If religion can be evaluated as a social phenomenon,
in terms of its visible effects on human behavior, so can
unbelief. To begin with the most colossal example, the
militant atheism of the Soviet Union has resulted in the
murder of tens of millions of people on grounds of their
mere membership in so-called counterrevolutionary or
reactionary classes. Graham Greene contends that the
Inquisition might have killed that many people, had it
been technologically feasible to do so, but we may doubt
this. The Inquisition executed tens of thousands of
people over several centuries for what were at least
treated as individual crimes. Just or unjust, these
executions were judicial in form and were performed
against persons, not classes. The perversions of
Christianity are also to some extent limited by
Christianity. The perversions of atheism recall
Dostoyevsky's famous remark, "If God does not exist, then
everything is permitted."
This or that atheist may protest against
Dostoyevsky's inference, but the fact remains that many
atheists have made the same inference themselves.
Enlightened atheists sometimes sneer at Christians who
behave themselves only because they fear hellfire -- and
it may be true that there are higher motives for good
conduct -- but it is hardly consistent to make this
criticism and then to assume simultaneously that such
Christians will keep behaving themselves once they cease
believing in the afterlife.
I can imagine one kind of atheist -- let us call him
"the pious atheist" -- who arrives at his unbelief
without joy, simply as an intellectual conclusion. I
suppose such a man would regard Christian civilization
with the kind of affection and respect a Roman convert to
Christianity in Augustine's day would feel for the dying
Roman Empire, for Cicero and Virgil and Marcus Aurelius.
He would feel that, although that world had passed away,
it had left much of enduring value. We actually do see
pious atheists who may regret the Inquisition but who
also cherish Dante, Monteverdi, Spenser, Milton, Bach,
Handel, Dr. Johnson. To cease believing in the viability
of this Christian civilization is not necessarily either
to condemn it or to assume an attitude of enmity toward
it.
Yet there is another sort of atheist who does regard
himself as Christendom's enemy. Far from cherishing its
past, he condemns it and would wipe out every trace of it
in the present. He hates and fears every sign of it: the
Catholic Church, Moral Majority, the inscription "In God
We Trust." He thinks that humanity is now free at last
from dogma and superstition, and he would get on with the
business of creating a new world on progressive and
scientific principles. The difference between the two
kinds of atheists is roughly the difference between
Santayana and Sartre.
Richard Weaver wrote that a person has no right to
advocate any reform of the world unless he shows by some
prior affirmation that he does indeed cherish some
aspects of the world as it is. Our pious atheist meets
this test. He sees the passing of the Christian order as
a highly equivocal development, if a necessary and
inevitable one. He knows he lives in a continuing world,
and he has the grace and wisdom to appreciate
Christianity as an attempt to express, however
imperfectly, truths about that world. If he finds some
who still believe, he is not altogether eager to correct
them. He understands Gonzalo's rebuke to Sebastian in THE
TEMPEST:
My lord Sebastian,
The truth you speak doth lack some gentleness
And time to speak it in.
And he understands the reflection of Henry V:
There is some soul of goodness in things evil,
Would men observingly distill it out....
The pious atheist, moreover, will not be so sanguine
about what is to succeed the Christian order. For him the
mere negation of God is, in itself, no cultural
substitute for the Christian myths and symbols that have
shown their power to sustain generations of human beings.
Atheism in itself has no cohesive force. Whatever social
cohesion it has provided so far has come more from its
destructive hostility to the Christian civilization it
has totally failed to improve on. Looking at the
organized masses of his fellow atheists, the pious
atheist may prefer erring with Augustine to being right
with such as these.
The godless order has brought us Communism and
abortion clinics. It has yet to produce its Homer,
Virgil, Shakespeare, or Dante. We can understand the man
of no religious faith feeling that he at least prefers
the company of the believers to that of the current pack
of unbelievers.
It may be that the characteristic evils of the
twentieth century don't necessarily follow, in strict
logic, from the denial of God's existence. The historical
fact remains that they =have= followed. As the Marxists
say, it is no accident. If it is fair to hold believers
responsible for the actions of Christians as an
identifiable historical body -- "organized religion" --
then it is equally fair to hold unbelievers responsible,
too.
Yet we persist in treating atheism as if it were
nothing but a private cognitive matter, of no public
concern, eligible for the conventional protections we
accord to, say, the varieties of Protestant belief. For
some people it may be that, but it is time to recognize
that atheism is also a systematic, organized, and
socially powerful negation, driven by furious hostility
to religious tradition. Personally, many of its votaries
are boorish and indiscriminate in their refusal to give
Christianity real credit for anything; they have no
desire to assimilate anything of its heritage, even those
parts Christianity itself assimilated from its various
pagan heritages.
The militant-atheist animus belongs to what I have
elsewhere called the "alienist" animus, the willfully
estranged attitude toward the general society typical of
modern intellectuals and found, in various ways, among
some so-called minority groups. The fault lines of
alienism don't really coincide with obvious social lines
of division. It may occur more often among, say, Jews,
than among Mormons, it may be increasing among Catholics
as it decreases among Jews, but its occurrence can never
be predicted in the individual case on the basis of group
membership. In fact, some so-called minorities, such as
"gays," are not even minorities by inheritance.
Some numerical minorities, like Mormons, aren't even
thought of as minorities in the subtle special sense of
the word now current. That word virtually embodies a
presumption of disaffection from the general society, and
this disaffection is itself presumed to be justified by
what is termed the minority's victimization at the hands
of a more or less monolithic majority. If we look more
closely, I believe we will even find that the very idea
of a minority in this sense is largely a rhetorical
device for covertly attacking what remains of the
Christian culture.
Tension and hostility between different ethnic and
credal groups is natural, but it is also a reciprocal
affair: neither side is likely to be wholly innocent.
Still, the Christian side, as it happens, is likely to
have a certain Christian willingness to give a charitable
benefit of doubt and to assume a share of the guilt. It
is only natural for the non-Christian or anti-Christian
side to accept this favor without returning it. For this
reason Christians in the modern world have been slow to
recognize and respond adequately to their enemies -- even
their declared enemies.
When an intellectual tells us that "the white race
is the cancer of history," clearly using "the white race"
as a surrogate for historical Christendom, we are hearing
something other than the voice of the disinterested
intellect. We are hearing an expression of nihilistic
hatred. Unbelief as such does not impel this kind of
fanaticism.
It is remarkable that we have been so slow to
recognize this specific form of hatred, so much in
evidence, as a social problem or even as a social
phenomenon. The language abounds in words signifying the
hatreds, fears, and suspicions of cultural insiders
toward outsiders. We are all acquainted with "racism,"
"ethnocentrism," "xenophobia," "anti-Semitism,"
"nativism," and the like; these words have a certain
hothouse quality about them, suggesting their recent
invention to serve particular needs. Even older words
such as "prejudice," "bias," "bigotry," "discrimination,"
and "hatred" itself have taken on the same
anti-majoritarian connotations, although it is humanly
probable that there is hostility of at least equal
intensity in the opposite direction. We have no specific
vocabulary at all to suggest this reciprocal possibility.
Yet disaffection from the society one inhabits is
always an available attitude. A glance at Shakespeare
confirms this. His plays offer a gallery of characters
who, for one reason or another, have chosen an attitude
of antagonism toward their societies. Some, like Shylock,
are not without provocation; some, like Iago, indulge the
universal temptation to envy, with no real excuse.
Shylock gives his angry reasons; Iago can't explain
himself except to himself -- and he is struck dumb when,
his full villainy exposed, his society confronts him.
For our present purposes, Edmund in KING LEAR may be
the most interesting example. Presumably Shakespeare
doesn't believe in the gods Lear believes in, but he
clearly doesn't care for Edmund's cavalier attitude
toward them. The pious characters -- Lear, Cordelia,
Kent, Edgar -- are all shown as Edmund's moral superiors,
whatever their other defects. We know little about
Shakespeare's own religious beliefs, but he patently
respects a society's right to its sense of the sacred, to
the shared symbols of holiness held in common by
unreflective people -- which is to say, by most people in
their unreflective moments.
Almost without exception, Shakespeare's "alienated"
characters are villains -- enemies of social peace and
order. They are recognizably human, and they sometimes
appeal powerfully to our sympathies, but there is no
doubt of their villainy in action. Their villainy
consists precisely in their active enmity toward the
society around them. The apostate is also a social
defector.
The assumptions embodied in the very structure of
these plays are directly opposed to the assumption that
hatred and hostility are always to be imputed to society.
This imputation itself expresses hostility, and we do
well to raise our guard against those who make it.
Whatever atheism may mean abstractly, in our own world it
often means a specific and militant hatred of
Christianity, a hatred as particularist as anti-Semitism,
and as deadly.
This essay originally appeared in CENTER JOURNAL (Spring
1985) of Notre Dame University, Notre Dame, Indiana.
Publisher's Note
(page 2)
Dear Friend of SOBRAN'S,
There is a lot of news at the international
headquarters of SOBRAN'S these days. As announced last
month, our newest booklet of excerpts from SOBRAN'S --
REGIME CHANGE BEGINS AT HOME: CONFESSIONS OF A
REACTIONARY UTOPIAN -- is now off the press. If you are
one of our hundreds of new subscribers, welcome aboard. I
hope you are enjoying the booklet. If you are planning to
renew, we are offering it as our gift for your loyalty.
Joe has just signed a contract with a major
publishing firm in New York to write part of a textbook
on Shakespearean plays. He is writing commentaries on
five plays: one comedy and four tragedies. I'll provide
more details as they are available.
As you probably know, Joe is a scholar of
Shakespeare and wrote a book on the authorship question
entitled ALIAS SHAKESPEARE: SOLVING THE GREATEST LITERARY
MYSTERY OF ALL TIME (The Free Press, New York, 1997). In
that book, he argues that Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl
of Oxford, is the true author of the plays and sonnets
attributed to William Shakespeare. It is out of print,
but it can be found by surfing the Internet.
In our "Sobran Forum" section (on pages 5-6), please
see "Christianity and Science," an article by Otto Scott,
a historian and eloquent author who died in May (see his
obit in our April-May 2006 issue). An award-winning
writer and author of ten books, Mr. Scott's articles
appeared in numerous journals over his 50+ years as a
journalist. He was a favorite of Joe's.
The subjects of Otto Scott's books range from the
high Renaissance of Elizabeth I and James I to the French
Revolution of the late eighteenth century, to
nineteenth-century America and the evil lunacy of John
Brown. We plan to feature more of his articles.
One more news flash: Joe is now writing occasional
pieces for the website of Taki Theodoracopulous. You can
read them at takistopdrawer.us/tfriends.html
Keeping a newsletter afloat is a tough, competitive
business -- but we're all survivors here and we have even
started to expand the influence and ideas of all things
Sobran. We continue because of your generosity. May God
bless you for your loyalty and support of SOBRAN'S!
Sincerely,
Fran Griffin
Publisher
P.S. If you enjoyed the photos in the last issue, you can
view them in color at our website, beginning at
www.sobran.com/articles/birthday/page1.shtml
P.P.S. Wait! Take a look at those enclosures before they
hit the recycle bin.
Our Endangered Flag
(pages 4, 6)
What do liberal Hillary Clinton and the conservative
American Legion have in common? Both endorse the most
imbecilic measure to be proposed in the last generation:
a constitutional amendment to ban flag-burning.
As a threat to public peace and order, setting fire
to the American flag ranks with such anarchic practices
as the campus panty raid, goldfish-swallowing, and -- let
us not shun the closest analogy here -- bra-burning. If
your city councilman proposed a local ordinance against
it, you'd think he was daft, and you'd be right.
Thankfully, the era of the reefer-crazed hippie is behind
us, contained by the brave men and women of the last
generation. There is no need to fight that battle again.
I'm not really surprised that the blood of the
Legion's patriotic octogenarians still boils at the very
idea of igniting Old Glory -- after all, a principle is
at stake here -- but I'm a little disappointed at Senator
Clinton, whose motives, frankly, I suspect. Her stand
appears to me a purely demagogic attempt to position
herself as a centrist before 2008.
Does anyone think she is acting from sincere
conviction? Really, now. Can you imagine her -- let alone
her draft-dodging husband -- raising a finger to defend
the Stars and Stripes from physical desecration? It just
doesn't go with socialized medicine somehow. Such
transparent cynicism! How she and her radical lesbian
friends must be snickering.
A more benign explanation can't be ruled out: that
Senator Clinton wants to show that she won't be bullied
by the ACLU. She is old enough to have heard of what
happened to Helen Gahagan Douglas in 1950, when Richard
Nixon dubbed her "the pink lady." And it's not too early
to anticipate future stratagems of Karl Rove.
But, to consider the issue on its merits, I can't
remember the last time a flag-burning incident was
reported. In 1967, perhaps? True, there is no way of
knowing how many such incidents go unreported, though the
Legion seems to believe they are far more common than the
general public is aware.
Let's suppose, then, that the real figure is in the
thousands. Even at that, can we say that the material
harm done, or that the danger posed by the absence of
safeguards against an outbreak of many more such
incidents, warrants altering the fundamental law of the
land? I can't see it, myself -- especially when the U.S.
Government isn't visibly inhibited by its Constitution
anyway.
THE SOBRAN FORUM
Christianity and Science
by Otto Scott
(pages 5-6)
We live in peculiar times. Times when the heirs of
Christendom are not taught that Christianity created our
civilization, nor what that meant and means. They are
guided into an admiration of science, without being
taught that the emergence of the scientific method is
precisely what distinguishes the Christian civilization
from all others.
Nor can it be said that Science is a recent
Christian undertaking. Science did not begin even in the
Reformation, though certainly the Reformers gave it great
impetus.
But Christendom was noted for its innovations and
advances long before the sixteenth century. Fr. Robert D.
Smith, writing in THE WANDERER, noted that "in other
cultures, in the East and in the New World, the native
music was that of single melodies, a single man playing a
sitar [but] polyphony, a central development in Western
music, the idea that different concurrent melodies can be
harmonized into one whole piece of music, the idea behind
a band, a choir (in the Western sense), an orchestra,
came from developments that started in Church music."
Medicine was another great area of Christian
innovation. Sickness was regarded as a condition ordained
by Fate in the Hindu and Buddhist religions: the sick
were not to be disturbed. The Muslims thought that a sick
man was impure and should not be touched. In primitive
areas, witch doctors wore devil masks, shook rattles, and
danced. Sometimes they achieved cures with roots and
herbs; sometimes (as today) they provided poisons to
unhappy wives or to ambitious rivals. Death and life were
alike to witch doctors.
Only in the Christian cultures, during the ages of
faith, did dedicated individuals devote themselves to
tending the sick. Hospitals are a Christian invention;
they did not exist before Christianity. Their very name
is Christian in origin. The dedication of Christians to
the sick laid the foundations of modern medicine,
benefited everyone in the world, and are seldom, if ever,
mentioned in histories or schools. All that is held aloft
are errors from the Medieval period, misconceptions that
in many instances were only corrected in very recent
times, at enormous expense and with great difficulty. Yet
a deliberate impression has been created that
Christianity is against the flesh.
Because Christians believed that the universe is
ordered, they created tools by which to measure Time and
Space. Clocks, navigational aids, measures, optical
advances, watermills and windmills, advances in boat
building, in architecture -- who can overlook the
cathedrals? -- were all contributions of Christianity.
Yet more than one modern historian goes to
extraordinary lengths to glide past the contributions of
Christianity to hold aloft the innovations of Asia,
especially China. Hugh Thomas, in his HISTORY OF THE
WORLD, excessively praised by the critics, incessantly
praises Asiatic peoples for their innovations and
describes Western inventions as "belated." Not once does
he refer to the odious tyrannies of Asia, the boundless
executions, the frozen and static nature of virtually all
Asian cultures before the advent of Christian
missionaries and merchants.
Much the same practice is followed in our government
schools: students are reminded again and again that the
Chinese discovered printing and gunpowder. Little is said
of what they did with printing, which remained static
until a Christian craftsman (not a scholar, not an
aristocrat, but the proprietor of a printing shop)
developed after experimentation movable type. Nor did
gunpowder provide the Chinese with anything more than the
material for firecrackers until the West developed it
into uses in both war and peace. Hardly ever are students
told that local self-government, in the form of
parliaments, was a product of the Middle Ages and not of
modernity; that scientific research into the properties
of metals, that the development of corporations (a mental
construct), that agricultural advances in Europe were
pursued more energetically and carried farther than in
any other region on earth. The individualism that rose in
the West was unknown to all other cultures, and held
repugnant in the ancient world.
Our students are not told that orthodox Muslims in
the twelfth century (then in the vast majority) decided
that all scientific research was heretical and
blasphemous and had it discontinued. Nor are students
told inventions in other parts of the world, in
non-Christian civilizations, were sporadic and virtually
useless, since there was no infrastructure, no societal
acceptance, by which they could be incorporated and
advanced.
Schools do not teach that before the European
nations could send their ships, merchants, and
missionaries around the world to explore the oceans and
map the islands and continents, Christianity had a
thousand years of development. Instead, students are told
about voyages of discovery (certainly discoveries to
Europe) as though these were in some way an offense
against civilizations too indolent, too inbred, too
incurious, too self-centered to be curious about other
inhabitants in the globe. They are even told that efforts
to write the histories of these non-Christian nations
constituted an injury to them, because European biases
were thus imposed upon other cultures.
Yet no barriers existed against explorations by
other civilizations; no fences prevented their historians
from writing about the West from an observational
vantage. The fact is that no neutral observer can deny
that it was Christianity which broke the narrow bounds of
separate civilizations and forced the entire globe and
all its peoples into the advances and inventions, the
discoveries and wisdom of the accumulated Christian
centuries.
The great spurt forward in scientific discoveries
attendant upon the Reformation are described without
reference to the Christianity that promoted and
buttressed them. Scientific historians are aware of, but
seldom dwell upon, the deeply Christian nature of the
early scientific societies and associations. And even
today, that the great majority of scientists are
Christian remains a secret from the general public and
students in our universities.
Otto Scott was a journalist, and author of ten books; he
was also the editor of OTTO SCOTT'S COMPASS
(www.the-compass.com). This piece was originally
published in CHALCEDON REPORT, and reprinted in CREATION
SOCIAL SCIENCE AND HUMANITIES QUARTERLY, volume IX,
number 2 (Winter 1986), by Creation Social Science and
Humanities Society, Inc. Reprinted with permission of the
Otto Scott estate.
NUGGETS
LEST WE FORGET: Even under Stalin, the Soviet Union had a
constitution that guaranteed all sorts of rights,
including, as Franklin Roosevelt enthusiastically noted,
religious freedom. Of course, as with Roosevelt's Supreme
Court, such rights were qualified: they meant what the
government wanted them to mean. In short -- a living
document! (page 8)
-- from REGIME CHANGE BEGINS AT HOME
Well, if conservatism can assimilate Lincoln, maybe it
can also incorporate Roosevelt. In the real world, it
keeps changing its mind about what it wants to conserve,
as well as what it's willing to discard. (page 11)
-- from REGIME CHANGE BEGINS AT HOME
REPRINTED COLUMNS ("The Reactionary Utopian")
(pages 7-12)
* Tolerance Strikes Again (June 15, 2006)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2006/060615.shtml
* Our Dreams Came True (June 13, 2006)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2006/060613.shtml
* The Cheap Pathos of Civil Rights (June 8, 2006)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2006/060608.shtml
* A Vibrant Democracy (May 25, 2006)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2006/060525.shtml
* The Commandments of Men (May 23, 2006)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2006/060523.shtml
* The Case for Popular Poetry (May 16, 2006)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2006/060516.shtml
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
All articles are written by Joe Sobran, except where
explicitly noted.
You may forward this newsletter if you include the
following subscription and copyright information:
Subscribe to the Sobran E-Package.
See http://www.sobran.com/e-mail.shtml
or http://www.griffnews.com for details and samples
or call 800-513-5053.
Copyright (c) 2006 by The Vere Company -- www.sobran.com.
All rights reserved.
Distributed by the Griffin Internet Syndicate
www.griffnews.com with permission.
[ENDS]