You couldn't pay a snail for arguments this silly.
"Their quasi-religious fervor apparently blinds them to their efforts to wield governmental power to impose their own values, whether on homosexual marriage, abortion, wealth redistribution or socialized medicine."
None of these things are central or relevant to secularism: these might make sense in terms of talking about "leftism" but that isn't what he titled his piece. Apparently though, for someone as lazy as Limbaugh, he just tosses in the same litany of accusations into every single article no matter what the subject matter.
Of course, never mind that it takes an amazingly paranoid person to believe that allowing OTHER people to do things forces them to accept them as good or participate in them.
A bunch of the same-old whining about how creationists and people with no testable theories aren't taken seriously in science doesn't exactly help his case.
Secularism IS advocating are a set of values, though not quite the ones Limbaugh is obsessed with. Those values are those of classical liberalism, which are designed to create a free society in which no view is specially privileged or sponsored by the government, rather than one in which only one religious group has a say.
By and large, we already live in such a society, and we are far better for it than the one wanted by the folks who spent centuries trying to re-write the evil "atheistic" constitution to fit their wishes, failed, and then implausibly spun around to claim the constitution supported their ideas all along.
Sour grapes are a real burden to bear, aren't they?
Damn those evil secularists with their hair-brained "theories" of evolution, global warming, and civil government!!
Evolution pre-dates secularism. Civil government pre-dates secularism. Global warming is, pardon the pun, hotly debated by those actually interested in scientific method.
So, yeah, damn them indeed. They don't have an original thought in their head if your list is to be believed.
This just in: those rabid, crazy gay activists you're always fantasizing about have finally conceded the struggle: they will no longer demand that the government force you to have sex with men!
Your argument is specious. That two of the ideas predate secularism does not invalidate their support those ideas' advancement. Moreover, you fail to defend theists' defense of the antitheses.
Liberals believe individuals should be free to order their lives according to their own moral beliefs provided their actions cause no harm to others. Various non-liberals would impose further restrictions on individual behavior based on moral considerations besides just harm. Accordingly, liberals favor a minimal government interference in individual lives as compared to believers of various other political ideologies. I eshew using the word "secularist" because I think there is nothing contradictory with being personally pious and not wishing to impose one's personal believes on others.
According to my above definition, I consider myself to be a liberal. Are there gray areas? Sure. For instance, can one justify using liberal principles regulations outlawing strip clubs in school zones? I believe so, though I'm sure hard-core libertarians might take issue.
Liberals believe individuals should be free to order their lives according to their own moral beliefs provided their actions cause no harm to others.
Sounds more like the definition of libertarian to me. Today's "liberal" is an intolerant group that consistently uses government to impose their values on others in the name of the "collective good". Individual responsibility takes a back seat to the progressive ideal of equal outcomes not equal opportunity.
I think Limbaugh has a point in some of the areas he mentions. As has been alluded to, "Secularist" is sloppy terminology and has essentially no bearing on the argument he presents. But insomuch as he is broadly describing an activist liberal agenda, he is correct that there is often an element of dogmatism put forth by its most vocal advocates. He invokes the speck/plank story, but I guess fails to realize that the essential point he is making is that BOTH sides have planks of approximately equal size stuck in their eyes.
But, I will qualify my agreement with him because he overreaches and tries to lump all liberal causes under the "secularist" banner. There are fundamental differences between GW legislation and civil rights legislation. people who advocate governmental restrictions on business based on global warming science seek to restrict freedoms based on dogmatic but as of yet unproven claims. This is correctly equated with religious groups attempting to legislate morality based on dogmatic but unproven claims. Contrast this with advocating civil rights in the form of allowing same-sex unions. Here proponents are trying to unbind freedoms that were wrongfully bound due to dogmatic but unproven claims. This is not legislating a viewpoint, but rather de-legislating one and returning government to an agnostic state in the absence of compelling evidence to the contrary. Is the difference clear?
Political 'secularists' believe in the division between church and state. The majority of Americans are religious, the majority of Americans believe in God, yet the majority of Americans do not think the state should legislate morality. The majority of Americans are also pragmatic.
Leftists and some religious fundamentalists believe that the state should legislate morality. These groups also share a variety of other non-pragmatic beliefs. While leftists call themselves 'secular' they really have more in common with the fundamentalists than they do with the rest of the country.
The conflict is really between the majority of pragmatists and the loud minority of utopian idealists.
I was going to post a bile-filled rant against David Limbaugh, but I just listened to the Nixon Peabody motivational song, and I feel much happier now.
"I wouldn't say "Secularist" is ill-defined. Roughly, it means a person who doesn't support religion or God. "
Hank, careful Hank, ignorance of that magnitude is contagious.
Many religious people are secularists: they believe that the government shouldn't be involved in religious matters. As an ethos or philosophy, the issue is civil society, not supporting or being against god or belief.
Various non-liberals would impose further restrictions on individual behavior based on moral considerations besides just harm.
Wrong. The reverse is true, in fact, since Liberals are the ones who typically seek this [gun control, 'hate crimes', anything multiculti-based, etc]
Anyway, to the topic:
Western small-L liberal secularists belong to a species of Protestant Christianity that's been pared down to accommodate science. Unfortunately, the only parts that remain are the pseudo-Calvinistic dourness and the propensity to damn anyone who doesn't agree. [Hiya, Leftist inheritors!] But neither 'side' would ever admit that.
Note the general uniformity of thought and reluctance to argue against their own, for example, that is typical of the breed. Their only real arguments are about tactics, not philosophy. Why do so when one has the truth, hmm? Shows a weakness of faith.
I see there aren't many people left who still believe that "liberal" should refer to those whose political philosophy advocates individual liberty.
Daniel, sometimes there comes a point where no amount of struggle will restore the original meaning of a word. From a practical matter, a word means what it is generally understood to mean, not what a lexicographer or etymologist or philologist say it should mean.
I'm not saying that has happened to "liberal" yet, but it's in the middle of happening.
i didn't at first glance find anything silly about his argument, Vic, but when i have more time this evening, I will study your contribution to the discussion.
Daniel, sometimes there comes a point where no amount of struggle will restore the original meaning of a word. From a practical matter, a word means what it is generally understood to mean, not what a lexicographer or etymologist or philologist say it should mean.
I'm not saying that has happened to "liberal" yet, but it's in the middle of happening.
Martin has a point. Over time things change and new meanings, or simple layers of meaning are added to (or subtracted from) an original term that it thereby connotatively becomes so transformed as that the connotation ipso facto becomes the new denotation.
I see the point of the original article, and I can see some of the counter-arguments.
Rather than argue those, since others have so well, I'll simply say that I neither equate liberal with Liberal, nor secular with Liberal, nor Secular with secular in the modern sense (or connotation).
Secular to me, as was the original Latin term, and later church use of the term, simply means "of this world." It was related in meaning to "profane" which simply meant, "unconsecrated, or non-sacred or devoted." Secular was like mundane, everyday, worldly, and had specific pragmatic and religious and political connotations.
The more modern connotation originally began in the church with things like secular priests, priests who serviced a parish or congregation rather than were administrators of church hierarchy, hence they serviced the world instead of the Church. Secular priests often stood in the gap between church hierarchy and the people, hence many were champions of the people. They were still very religious, they just believed the congregation and people should be served as well as the distraction, bishops, cardinals, etc. Hence the secular priest (though that term was not always used) became the counterpoint to the machinery of the church hierarchy. It had nothing to do with being anti-religious, but it often had a lot to do with being against Church Bureaucracy. (And I applaud that kind of internal counterpoint and contradiction, provided by Orders like the Franciscans and Jesuits and others, and of Protestantism versus Catholic, because any organization that has no completion over time tends to atrophy, weaken and die, whereas challenge and completion most of the time tends to strengthen and improve all competitors.)
But from that you can see how oeuvre time the term changed from "those who service this world" to "those who consider this world as important as the world to come" (basically my general position, that is I owe an equal obligation in behavior, service and conduct to this world, as to the next - that is to say that this world is "real" yet entirely temporal, and the next world is real, but totally atemporal) to eventually "those who consider this world most important or maybe even, the only real world."
So the word moved over time from "of this world" to a religious term of contrasting the importance of this world to other worlds, to mean a sort of revolt against any other world and a sort of single minded concentration upon this world (a fairly modern connotation).
But it wasn't the word that changed at all, but rather who was using it and to what end, and in what way (pragmatically, politically, religiously, anti-religiously, etc.)
Now that's just a semantics and linguistic argument as Martin pointed out.
But I do think it is important to remember that as terms transform over time and new meanings are added and new layers of connotations become fixed to the denotations of words that it is not uncommon at all for a world to transform so completely by both oblique/clever usage and misusage that a world can take on meanings which are often diametrically opposed to the original intent or meaning of the term.
So if Limbaugh is arguing, in a way, that Secularism is bad he is both connotatively (and to at least one modern definition denotatively) correct, and denotatively in error. What he is really arguing against though is secularism as a modern political movement (for which I am sympathetic to his argument(s), not against Secularism (which simply means anything of this world, against which I doubt he world argue that it is bad in itself. But you never know, I could be wrong in that speculation. It actually happens infrequently that I am wrong, so anything is theoretically possible.)
And if he is arguing against Liberalism then he is really, I suspect, arguing against modern liberalism as a political movement, which is just one skeletal connotation of the term that has over time taken on the flesh of a fixed denotation in the mind of most people, be they modern liberal, Classical Liberal, or non-modern liberal.
So in a way everybody is right, and everybody is wrong. To varying degrees.
Now why would I go through that whole song and dance, just to deliver a big crap at the end?
Because Martin is right, people most often argue terminology based upon their own subjective historical experience and the modern usage of a term as opposed to the overall and more long term objective historical development of meaning surrounding a term. For which I have no objection, after all, who but intellectual eggheads really bother to debate terminology based upon arcane or outdated usage, in everyday, mundane life?
But I think it does help to remind people every now and then that many terms, over time, develop new associations and linguistic attachments which transform a term into if not its diametric opposite, then at least render it meanings which are wholly in variance with the original term. And I think it's important for people to remember that kinda thing because it says a lot about the way humans think, how their culture and language changes, how meanings, real and implied, come to be confused and transformed, how words that would mean one thing in one context and time would mean something nearly totally different in another time and context, and how some things never really change, but that the people employing the things do.
And sometimes that's good, and sometimes that's bad, and sometimes it doesn't really matter much I guess.
Anyway I got no real opinion on this matter, other than to say I think a lot of you are right in one way, wrong in the other and the reverse is just about as true as well. But that being said I just really needed the superhuman typing practice.
Night all, I gonna go watch Eureka and then, God willing and fortune being with me, I gonna help catch me some sneaky mugging bastards. Wish me luck.
Vic, you jumped on his use of the term "securalism" in stead of, say, "leftism", basically conceding that his argument had merit regarding the latter, and then filled the rest of your comment with dismissive condescending rhetoric.
The fact is that there is a boat load of intellectual dishonesty on the left regarding the supposedly unacceptability of imposing personal values through the political process.
And he also makes a good point in stating that mankind does not seem often to exercise franchise
in a non ideologically imposing manner. I would add that true classical liberals have made an admirable
go at it.
Also, it could be argued that since securalism and leftism often--perhaps mostly--attend one another, and that they both seem to have idealogical compatibilities with one another, that the identification of one with the other is not quite so silly as your derision would make it seem.
I don't see sour grapes here; I see an astute observation.
"Vic, you jumped on his use of the term "securalism" in stead of, say, "leftism", basically conceding that his argument had merit regarding the latter"
Well, no, not really. His argument is about hypocrisy, but he can only get there by conflating two things to get both sides of that hypocrisy.
Standard sloppy hack job, nothing much more.
8.30.2007 11:18am
Commenting on Dean's World is a privilege, not a right. Dean is your host, you are his guest, and you should behave in that fashion. Dean is not your babysitter, nor is he your punching bag. Please remember this. In general, you are free to disagree with anyone on any subject you wish, but abusive behavior will not be tolerated.
Of course we all lose our tempers now and then. Dean freely admits to being imperfect in this regard, which is why regulars to this establishment will generally be cut more slack than people who we don't know very well.
Still: behave like an adult, or go find somewhere else to play. Thanks.
--|PW|--
"Their quasi-religious fervor apparently blinds them to their efforts to wield governmental power to impose their own values, whether on homosexual marriage, abortion, wealth redistribution or socialized medicine."
None of these things are central or relevant to secularism: these might make sense in terms of talking about "leftism" but that isn't what he titled his piece. Apparently though, for someone as lazy as Limbaugh, he just tosses in the same litany of accusations into every single article no matter what the subject matter.
Of course, never mind that it takes an amazingly paranoid person to believe that allowing OTHER people to do things forces them to accept them as good or participate in them.
A bunch of the same-old whining about how creationists and people with no testable theories aren't taken seriously in science doesn't exactly help his case.
Secularism IS advocating are a set of values, though not quite the ones Limbaugh is obsessed with. Those values are those of classical liberalism, which are designed to create a free society in which no view is specially privileged or sponsored by the government, rather than one in which only one religious group has a say.
By and large, we already live in such a society, and we are far better for it than the one wanted by the folks who spent centuries trying to re-write the evil "atheistic" constitution to fit their wishes, failed, and then implausibly spun around to claim the constitution supported their ideas all along.
Sour grapes are a real burden to bear, aren't they?
Evolution pre-dates secularism. Civil government pre-dates secularism. Global warming is, pardon the pun, hotly debated by those actually interested in scientific method.
So, yeah, damn them indeed. They don't have an original thought in their head if your list is to be believed.
Thank for providing it!
Victory is yours!
Your argument is specious. That two of the ideas predate secularism does not invalidate their support those ideas' advancement. Moreover, you fail to defend theists' defense of the antitheses.
--|PW|--
According to my above definition, I consider myself to be a liberal. Are there gray areas? Sure. For instance, can one justify using liberal principles regulations outlawing strip clubs in school zones? I believe so, though I'm sure hard-core libertarians might take issue.
Sounds more like the definition of libertarian to me. Today's "liberal" is an intolerant group that consistently uses government to impose their values on others in the name of the "collective good". Individual responsibility takes a back seat to the progressive ideal of equal outcomes not equal opportunity.
I think Limbaugh has a point in some of the areas he mentions. As has been alluded to, "Secularist" is sloppy terminology and has essentially no bearing on the argument he presents. But insomuch as he is broadly describing an activist liberal agenda, he is correct that there is often an element of dogmatism put forth by its most vocal advocates. He invokes the speck/plank story, but I guess fails to realize that the essential point he is making is that BOTH sides have planks of approximately equal size stuck in their eyes.
But, I will qualify my agreement with him because he overreaches and tries to lump all liberal causes under the "secularist" banner. There are fundamental differences between GW legislation and civil rights legislation. people who advocate governmental restrictions on business based on global warming science seek to restrict freedoms based on dogmatic but as of yet unproven claims. This is correctly equated with religious groups attempting to legislate morality based on dogmatic but unproven claims. Contrast this with advocating civil rights in the form of allowing same-sex unions. Here proponents are trying to unbind freedoms that were wrongfully bound due to dogmatic but unproven claims. This is not legislating a viewpoint, but rather de-legislating one and returning government to an agnostic state in the absence of compelling evidence to the contrary. Is the difference clear?
I used to think this, and I wish it were true. Liberals do favor minimal government in some areas (abortion, gay rights, etc).
But, then they favor massive government intervention in other areas. (Taxes, race relations, etc).
I'm not saying this is necessarily a bad thing, but it does seem a bit schizophrenic (at least to me).
I eshew using the word "secularist"
Me, too. It's a worthwhile discussion without imposing labels on the folks with whom you disagree.
HankB
Political 'secularists' believe in the division between church and state. The majority of Americans are religious, the majority of Americans believe in God, yet the majority of Americans do not think the state should legislate morality. The majority of Americans are also pragmatic.
Leftists and some religious fundamentalists believe that the state should legislate morality. These groups also share a variety of other non-pragmatic beliefs. While leftists call themselves 'secular' they really have more in common with the fundamentalists than they do with the rest of the country.
The conflict is really between the majority of pragmatists and the loud minority of utopian idealists.
--|PW|--
If the label -- "Secularist" doesn't bug these people, then I'll shut up.
HB
--|PW|--
Every-body's a winner at Nix-on Pea-bod-y!!
Hank, careful Hank, ignorance of that magnitude is contagious.
Many religious people are secularists: they believe that the government shouldn't be involved in religious matters. As an ethos or philosophy, the issue is civil society, not supporting or being against god or belief.
Wrong. The reverse is true, in fact, since Liberals are the ones who typically seek this [gun control, 'hate crimes', anything multiculti-based, etc]
Anyway, to the topic:
Western small-L liberal secularists belong to a species of Protestant Christianity that's been pared down to accommodate science. Unfortunately, the only parts that remain are the pseudo-Calvinistic dourness and the propensity to damn anyone who doesn't agree. [Hiya, Leftist inheritors!] But neither 'side' would ever admit that.
Note the general uniformity of thought and reluctance to argue against their own, for example, that is typical of the breed. Their only real arguments are about tactics, not philosophy. Why do so when one has the truth, hmm? Shows a weakness of faith.
I definitely don't equate "liberal" and "leftist" or "liberal" and "socialist."
Daniel, sometimes there comes a point where no amount of struggle will restore the original meaning of a word. From a practical matter, a word means what it is generally understood to mean, not what a lexicographer or etymologist or philologist say it should mean.
I'm not saying that has happened to "liberal" yet, but it's in the middle of happening.
Bad Conservative. No Ann Coulter porn.
i didn't at first glance find anything silly about his argument, Vic, but when i have more time this evening, I will study your contribution to the discussion.
Martin has a point. Over time things change and new meanings, or simple layers of meaning are added to (or subtracted from) an original term that it thereby connotatively becomes so transformed as that the connotation ipso facto becomes the new denotation.
I see the point of the original article, and I can see some of the counter-arguments.
Rather than argue those, since others have so well, I'll simply say that I neither equate liberal with Liberal, nor secular with Liberal, nor Secular with secular in the modern sense (or connotation).
Secular to me, as was the original Latin term, and later church use of the term, simply means "of this world." It was related in meaning to "profane" which simply meant, "unconsecrated, or non-sacred or devoted." Secular was like mundane, everyday, worldly, and had specific pragmatic and religious and political connotations.
The more modern connotation originally began in the church with things like secular priests, priests who serviced a parish or congregation rather than were administrators of church hierarchy, hence they serviced the world instead of the Church. Secular priests often stood in the gap between church hierarchy and the people, hence many were champions of the people. They were still very religious, they just believed the congregation and people should be served as well as the distraction, bishops, cardinals, etc. Hence the secular priest (though that term was not always used) became the counterpoint to the machinery of the church hierarchy. It had nothing to do with being anti-religious, but it often had a lot to do with being against Church Bureaucracy. (And I applaud that kind of internal counterpoint and contradiction, provided by Orders like the Franciscans and Jesuits and others, and of Protestantism versus Catholic, because any organization that has no completion over time tends to atrophy, weaken and die, whereas challenge and completion most of the time tends to strengthen and improve all competitors.)
But from that you can see how oeuvre time the term changed from "those who service this world" to "those who consider this world as important as the world to come" (basically my general position, that is I owe an equal obligation in behavior, service and conduct to this world, as to the next - that is to say that this world is "real" yet entirely temporal, and the next world is real, but totally atemporal) to eventually "those who consider this world most important or maybe even, the only real world."
So the word moved over time from "of this world" to a religious term of contrasting the importance of this world to other worlds, to mean a sort of revolt against any other world and a sort of single minded concentration upon this world (a fairly modern connotation).
But it wasn't the word that changed at all, but rather who was using it and to what end, and in what way (pragmatically, politically, religiously, anti-religiously, etc.)
Now that's just a semantics and linguistic argument as Martin pointed out.
But I do think it is important to remember that as terms transform over time and new meanings are added and new layers of connotations become fixed to the denotations of words that it is not uncommon at all for a world to transform so completely by both oblique/clever usage and misusage that a world can take on meanings which are often diametrically opposed to the original intent or meaning of the term.
So if Limbaugh is arguing, in a way, that Secularism is bad he is both connotatively (and to at least one modern definition denotatively) correct, and denotatively in error. What he is really arguing against though is secularism as a modern political movement (for which I am sympathetic to his argument(s), not against Secularism (which simply means anything of this world, against which I doubt he world argue that it is bad in itself. But you never know, I could be wrong in that speculation. It actually happens infrequently that I am wrong, so anything is theoretically possible.)
And if he is arguing against Liberalism then he is really, I suspect, arguing against modern liberalism as a political movement, which is just one skeletal connotation of the term that has over time taken on the flesh of a fixed denotation in the mind of most people, be they modern liberal, Classical Liberal, or non-modern liberal.
So in a way everybody is right, and everybody is wrong. To varying degrees.
Now why would I go through that whole song and dance, just to deliver a big crap at the end?
Because Martin is right, people most often argue terminology based upon their own subjective historical experience and the modern usage of a term as opposed to the overall and more long term objective historical development of meaning surrounding a term. For which I have no objection, after all, who but intellectual eggheads really bother to debate terminology based upon arcane or outdated usage, in everyday, mundane life?
But I think it does help to remind people every now and then that many terms, over time, develop new associations and linguistic attachments which transform a term into if not its diametric opposite, then at least render it meanings which are wholly in variance with the original term. And I think it's important for people to remember that kinda thing because it says a lot about the way humans think, how their culture and language changes, how meanings, real and implied, come to be confused and transformed, how words that would mean one thing in one context and time would mean something nearly totally different in another time and context, and how some things never really change, but that the people employing the things do.
And sometimes that's good, and sometimes that's bad, and sometimes it doesn't really matter much I guess.
Anyway I got no real opinion on this matter, other than to say I think a lot of you are right in one way, wrong in the other and the reverse is just about as true as well. But that being said I just really needed the superhuman typing practice.
Night all, I gonna go watch Eureka and then, God willing and fortune being with me, I gonna help catch me some sneaky mugging bastards. Wish me luck.
The fact is that there is a boat load of intellectual dishonesty on the left regarding the supposedly unacceptability of imposing personal values through the political process.
And he also makes a good point in stating that mankind does not seem often to exercise franchise
in a non ideologically imposing manner. I would add that true classical liberals have made an admirable
go at it.
Also, it could be argued that since securalism and leftism often--perhaps mostly--attend one another, and that they both seem to have idealogical compatibilities with one another, that the identification of one with the other is not quite so silly as your derision would make it seem.
I don't see sour grapes here; I see an astute observation.
Noooooooooo!!!!!
Can I still have my Michelle Malkin porn?
Naftali,
Thanks!
Well, no, not really. His argument is about hypocrisy, but he can only get there by conflating two things to get both sides of that hypocrisy.
Standard sloppy hack job, nothing much more.
Of course we all lose our tempers now and then. Dean freely admits to being imperfect in this regard, which is why regulars to this establishment will generally be cut more slack than people who we don't know very well.
Still: behave like an adult, or go find somewhere else to play. Thanks.