Render Unto Caesar

The road from “congress shall make no law” to tax-free churches, congressional chaplains, and currency sanctioned by Christianity is marked by complacency and conciliation on the part of the non-believers.

The argument, which you have no doubt heard plenty of times, that America was founded by people who worshipped the washboard-stomached Jesus seen in Pat Robertson's dusty sexual fantasies and who desired to build a new nation devoted to the glorification of that filthy hippie and his bizarre and thoughtless teachings is still pressed into service today, trotted out like a moth-eaten shawl to be draped over any number of the debates we face.

Despite the obvious unconstitutionality of the entire premise, to this very day the United States military pays official chaplains to serve in every branch out of taxpayer-funded government coffers, and has had authorization to do so since 1791. There is no interpretation of the establishment or free exercise clauses of the First Amendment that allows for a government-sanctioned chaplain of any denomination to minister to the armed forces, which is self-evident without the authority of Madison or Jefferson and their arguments to back it up. Despite being challenged in the United States Court of Appeals, no willingness has been shown to risk displeasing America's religious theocrats by forcing the position to be filled by a non-combat volunteer. The irony of a paid military chaplain swearing to uphold the Constitution should be obvious without me having to elaborate on it. Fortunately, those of us who would have no idea how to approach addressing the problem are shored up by the efforts of organizations like the Freedom From Religion Foundation and the Military Association of Atheists, both of whom work not only to defend the rights of the non-religious in both private and military life, but to re-establish the secular values our country was, evidentially speaking, established on.

We were pretty into Egyptian and Grecian style, though. Kind of our "Joy Division" phase.

Deism was, to be profoundly generous, still defensible at the time of America's establishment. Collectively, we were unfamiliar with microbiology and the Beagle's monumental voyage was still half a century away. It could be forgiven, knowing what the best scientific information was, for a thinking person to come to the conclusion that the intrinsic order in the universe – “the way of things” – was so impossibly clockwork and perfect as to necessitate, at the very least, an unimaginable force to establish the observable laws things operated by. This is the “unmoved mover” you may have heard of, a current favorite of the creationist cults to explain away their utter mindless arrogance in the face of an utter paucity of any evidence. It may not only have been defensible or forgivable, it may have been the only logical and rational conclusion one could come to based on the evidence at hand. Theism, with its nonsense based on an intervening wrathful creator who performs miracles and picks favorites, was already in decline among the population possessed of the luxury of free time to participate in Enlightenment thinking. People understood that a prime mover argument can and does only lead you to an infinitely regressing repetition of the same question: “Who made the maker?” These volleys of logic were met by the church, then as now, with vehement retaliation and dismissals based on arguments from ignorance. Unfortunately for us but incredibly beneficial for the religious, the tools with which the notion of a creator could be abolished entirely were still generations off.

The Presidents

George Washington appears to have been that most rare (and personally valuable to myself) of all religious people: the private one. While it is public record that he purchased pews in several churches and attended services regularly while in Philadelphia, Washington chose to spend his time at Mount Vernon more wisely. He attended services sparsely there, according to biographer Paul Ford, and later anecdotes seeking to discredit him publicly did so by reporting that cards and drinking were engaged in by Washington and visitors to his home most vigorously on Sundays. Washington almost never mentioned God by name in public speeches, referring instead to the ideas of Providence and a Grand Architect. His farewell address, which is most commonly referenced as concrete proof of Washington's Christian faith, was not written by him but by Alexander Hamilton, and Washington in fact deliberately removed passages connecting morality with divinity and avoided entirely addressing any particulars of his belief. As for his behavior in solitude, both Hamilton and Washington's staff write of interrupting his morning prayer, which was evidently a regular and solitary-by-preference practice. It is still contended that Washington introduced the oath of fealty to God in the presidential inauguration, despite refutations from the Library of Congress and Mount Vernon. People far more educated on Washington's life than myself continue to argue from both sides of the aisle exactly where on the spectrum from deism to Christianity he actually lied, but insofar as this subject is concerned his exact disposition is irrelevant. What matters is that if he was a devout and practicing Christian, he kept it to himself.

And we revere him to this day...

Thomas Jefferson, as a retirement hobby to kill the time not spent founding the University of Virginia as a bastion of higher learning unsullied by religious influence, engaged himself by taking a scalpel to the New Testament, removing any and all passages which he thought to be unfounded, magical, or otherwise insulting to the intelligence of a reasoned person. The resulting extant text, which is available to all, is an impossibly-thin tome which tells a rather uninteresting story of a young man who says things that irritate some while endearing him to others. The final page of this story, which I find the most edifying, is three paragraphs long and consists of Jesus dying, being buried, and everyone leaving. No resurrection, no fanciful rays of sunshine to be recreated in hideous oil paintings for the next two millenia, but the relating of a man's death. Furthermore, in the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom (one of the three things included on his obelisk as worth remembering him for, his time as President notably absent) Jefferson writes clearly on the errancy of religious faction having any influence in civil discourse whatsoever. In dissolving any affiliation between the colonies and the Church of England, Jefferson sought to prevent the cudgel of a state church from being wielded against the citizens of the new republic. The worst accusation that could be leveled at him would be the aforementioned label of deist, as he describes a creator of the mind and “departure from the plan” enforced on the populace by religious leaders who sought – then as now – to prevent the free exchange of ideas while lining their own pockets. However, nowhere does he mention any thought that the universe was created for him or anyone else, or that an intervening creator answered prayers, affected the outcome of events, or had a preferred sexual style. The personification of this deistic creator by Jefferson in the Statute, sometimes feebly pointed to as support for accusations of theism, can also be accurately dismissed as a poetic device, seeing as he later gives the concept of truth the same embodiment, albeit feminine.

Again, super respectful reverence is all we know how to do.

The Treaty of Tripoli & The First Barbary War

Securing our independence brought the need to ensure our own security. The treaties enacted by England to protect trade routes and crew obviously no longer applied to our nation, and in 1797 John Adams signed the Treaty of Tripoli into law. This treaty was to establish our business and cautiously peaceful relationship with the Muslim empire in the Barbary States, who consistently had great success in seizing both our ships and their crew for their own use. The second article of the Treaty, which I argue is second only to the First Amendment in clarity and intent of purpose, states as follows:

“As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility of Musselmen; and as the said States never entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.”

It's a rather beautiful passage, I think, especially when compared to the soul-crushingly indigestible language of our current legislation. But beyond beauty, the most important thing about this passage is that it clearly shows the intention of our nation to hold no brook with religion. Adams may have been far too naive and trusting when concerned with the Muslim theocracy and the ability of its adherents to be trusted, and he was completely mistaken in implying that our non-starter status meant we would never declare war against a religious state, but it couldn't be more obvious that our founding and principles are established as those of a secular nation founded on the rule of law, not a terrifying theocratic nightmare based on deluded religious texts.

It really is everything Hitchens warned us about.

Proving Adams' trust was wildly misplaced, the forces of Tripoli continued to hijack and make slaves of American ships. Seeking explanation, Adams and Jefferson traveled to Tripoli, where their only response was passages in the Qur’an commanding “all nations which had not acknowledged the Prophet were sinners, whom it was the right and duty of the faithful to plunder and enslave.” Jefferson fought with Congress, arguing that any money paid would only encourage repeated offense. Upon Jefferson's election, Tripoli vastly increased the amount of their demands, which Jefferson finally had the power to refuse. The Navy, recently reconstructed, was at Jefferson's disposal with the caveat to do no more than necessary to defend. Without consulting Congress Jefferson sent the Navy to attack Tripoli, beginning the four year conflict that would end with General Eaton's marines and mercenaries brought the city of Derna to the ground in 1805. This is, by the way, the first time the American flag was flown over a military victory in a foreign land, and the reason Tripoli is in the second line of the Marine Corps Hymn.

The Money

When the time came, as it must in any successful fledgling rebellion, to design a national seal representative of the ideals of the new republic, Samuel Adams appointed an artist in Philadelphia called William Barton. The now-familiar thirteen-layer pyramid crowned with the Eye of Providence was what Barton delivered, with the wholly unfamiliar-to-us latin phrases Deo Favente (“With God's Favor”) and Perennis (“Everlasting”). There was no attempt on Barton's behalf to obfuscate his intentions and belief that the Providential Eye belonged to an intervening Christian god, which was clearly not good enough for Adams.

It rocks your very world, doesn't it?

Charles Thompson, the Secretary of the Congress and a teacher of latin, was tasked with refining the design to bring it more in line with what Adams wanted. Thompson removed the religious references entirely, substituting the phrases Annuit Coeptis (“To/He Approve/s Our Undertaking”) and Novus Ordo Seclorum (“New Order of the Ages”) while retaining the thirteen-layer pyramid, Eye of Providence, and E Pluribus Unum (“One Out Of Many”). This adjustment fulfilled the requirements, changing the intended message from “God gave us this and it's ours forever” to “Can you guys fucking believe how lucky we were to pull this off?”

"I gotcha Deo Favente right here, pal."

The ridiculous motto of the United States since 1956 has been “In God We Trust,” a noxious phrase opposed by anyone who can recognize the meaninglessness of the words even without recognizing the direct contradiction to our nation's principles. This indelicate usurper is a holdover from the Civil War, where the phrase was used by both sides to claim divine support. Since at least 1873, this mindless affirmation has been on our coinage by order of the Congress, not appearing on the paper money until 1957. The same level of blind fervor for empty religious-themed patriotism wouldn't be seen again until the World Trade Center attack, when once again our Union claimed the backing of – for all anyone can tell – the same god who compelled our enemies.

The Congress

In examining religion's perfidious influence on democracy, specifically in our representative bodies, it is helpful to compare the original intent with the current reality. Given that, ideally, both the House and Senate would be filled with individuals selected by their communities as best suited to represent their interests and ideals, one would expect the resulting bodies to reflect the broad spectrum of ideas and attitudes seen nationwide. To examine that a little closer, we can apply that most tenuous of metrics: the public opinion poll. Opinion polls always make me wince the slightest bit, as there are so many clumsily simple ways their data becomes skewed. From convenience bias to acquiescence, these kinds of surveys have many obstacles to assembling data into information, but in many cases they are the best possible way to gauge what people say they think.

Which, unfortunately, assumes *they* know what they think.

Pew Research reported in 2012 that 16.1% of Americans who responded to their poll self-identified as having no religious affiliation. As mentioned, there is no reliable way to determine what percentage of people who respond in the affirmative are lying to the pollster to fulfill an imagined expectation, or claiming affiliation out of habit or guilt. As you can infer for yourself, it is improbable that there exist enough physical structures to house all the worshippers who claim to be such fervent practitioners.

There are 535 voting members of Congress, which would suggest that roughly 86 members of that august body should be atheist. If we further narrow the field by disregarding the 5.8% of Pew respondents who felt “religious unaffiliated” described their views (as opposed to the rather confusing group labeled “secular unaffiliated”) we are left with around 55 Congresspeople that should reliably be found doing something useful on Sunday morning. This is, self-evidently, at odds with the precisely zero (sometimes one, as of late, but not for long) representatives of the nation's public who profess to be unburdened by childish superstition, and flies in the face of the decidedly Christian-flavored political grandstanding we must constantly slog through.

It can only feed, never produce...

It may actually be fair and accurate to say that America is a Christian nation, not by design but through lazy arrogance or weakness on the part of those of us who knew better. To call it de facto is to give it too much credence, but the fact remains. To admit this is not to agree with the historically ignorant who claim a Christian founding for our nation, nor is it further concession or conciliation to theocracy with an enthusiastic allowance for it to reign. The fervor with which the cry of rationality and forced retreat for religion seems to keep growing can only suggest to us that the tide turns in our favor. We can perhaps now be said to be in recovery, a nation with a serious problem that we have just recently become mature enough to accept and fix.

Ignoring The Islamic State

We can make the collective choice to turn our backs on what the Islamic State represents, but that decision must be a deliberate one made with full knowledge of the trade we are making.

The somewhat limp and always disappointing-to-me backlash against American involvement in a military action against theocratic fascists in Mesopotamia seems to me, looking at it in a generous light, to be solely driven by the desire to not continue sending our countrymen to die in the desert at the hands of people we probably wouldn't collectively be thinking or talking about if our soldiers weren't there. This is drawing an affirmative conclusion from a negative or unproved premise, namely that our soldiers being there is guaranteed to result in their death and that non-involvement will somehow insulate us from the developments in the region. It is inaccurately described as “war weariness” by our media, as if any civilian opining on military action from the comfort of 6,000 or more miles removed has the right to claim to be weary of combat. This is more of the same petulant and smug complaining from the comfortable set, weary of nothing but the intrusion of other people into their self-serving cocoons. Instead of choosing action based on well-reasoned and logical argument for non-involvement, it is a complacent and conciliatory trade we are engaged in with this growing horrorshow, just as a lifelong laborer trades wage for cartilage.

The ignorant and self-defeating proposition from the more fuzzy-minded among us would have you believe that groups such as the Islamic State and Al-Qaeda are somehow extremists, that their incredibly barbarous and backwards ideas and actions are a perversion or corruption of the horrific relic referred to unironically as a religion of peace instead of a fundamental command from their holy texts. The latter is obviously true, and denial of that fact in the name of tolerance is one of the more odious symptoms of the virus running unchecked through otherwise intelligent people who would like very much to allow for religious pluralism while simultaneously not being at war with those same religions. This proposition necessarily requires peaceful co-existence with groups of people who are told they have divine warrant for the wholesale slaughter of anyone from any other group. As you can see, this is an incredibly difficult endeavor to simply imagine, let alone achieve with the rapidity we require to avoid the worst outcomes imaginable.

I'm actually referring to a nuclear war, but this is still somehow horrifying.

The population of a group of true believers relative to the rest of us, especially when they are committed to getting what they want through violence, has never created an obstacle to one crackpot religion after another shaping us through force both culturally and politically. It must be unthinkable to us to forget what all religions of the world have done – the damage inflicted and civilizations lost forever – when they thought they could get away with it due to no secular resistance. Dismissals of the Islamic State as being a non-threat to America due to their geographic distance and perceived logistical shortcomings may be technically true for the immediate future, however those dismissals ignore the fact that diseased beliefs like religion spread very quickly in both a benign vacuum as well as under threat of death. The converts flocking in currently small numbers to the pretender caliphate are not only people with no futures from the region, they are people from tolerant and pluralist countries like the US, Australia, and Great Britain, where publicly speaking out against the threat Islam poses us is not yet recognized as common sense. Whether their group grows by the dozens or thousands by year's end, there is no amount of them small enough or geographic region isolated enough to be tolerable or judged to pose no threat to the rest of us. I argue that if left unchecked they will grow and expand outside Mesopotamia to pose a constant and credible threat to all nations, and they will do so waving their holy texts.

Just like these extras from "Conan" and their ghost horses.

Either the writings of the Qur’an and hadith are the divine delivery of mandate from the creator of everything through the Archangel Gabriel to the prophet Mohammed or they are not. Within those writings are the mandates for the oppression of other peoples, the subjugation of women, the destruction of modernized civilizations, and the death penalty for apostates. If these instructions are the creator's divine word then these “extremists” are the only true believers getting it right, as it were, and our decision to pretend they're not Muslim is not only suicidally ignorant but incredibly disrespectful to their religious beliefs, which we claim to respect. On the other hand, if these mandates are nonsense dictated by an illiterate epileptic, which they are, what does that say about the parsing of real Muslims from false ones? And why, with the inability of influential mullahs and imams to issue a blanket fatwa against any kind of false crusade due to their religion, do we continue to pretend these actions are not recognized, promoted, and praised by the leaders of this sick and dangerous cult? I do not propose a false choice, and I do not see how any other conclusion could be reached.

Those other conclusions have an inordinate amount of 'splaining to do.

In anticipation of the immediately obvious rebuttal, that of the vast majority of people who profess the Muslim faith are peaceful and contributing members of society, perfectly wonderful human beings to all they meet, loved by puppy dogs and goldfish, let me offer this explanation. Every person I have personally met who claimed to be Muslim has been a genuinely warm and sweet individual, not including those whom I have met tangentially through debate. They do not want to kill me or anyone else, they are as furious at the actions of the Islamic State as I am with the added seasoning of shame and revulsion at what they feel is being done to their religion's reputation. Their wives and girlfriends speak openly, and I can see their face when they do so, and no one is missing any body parts. I can scarcely believe they're being honest with me about their faith. I again argue that if you are not adhering to the mandates handed down by the being you believe created you and will punish you for disobedience, on what authority can it be argued you are an adherent of that cult? If Allah told Gabriel to tell Mohammed to tell Muslims to kill apostates, and you're smarter than that, what need have you to still tie the noose of religion around your own neck? It should be cast off, as all the needs people fulfill with religion can be satisfied just as easily without it.

As illustrated here, in this poorly photoshopped metaphor.

On material costs. By postponing the extirpation of the Islamic State, we are actively delaying the reconstruction of a tragically and needlessly destroyed modern civilization that made irreplaceable contributions to the advancement of knowledge and humanity. This is a consequence that should cause any thinking person discomfort. We prevent the reconstruction of education and trade infrastructure, which the area is muddling through but can obviously use as much help and time as possible without ignorant savages blowing everything up. Postponing the stabilization of development of Mesopotamian oil supplies, which is approaching amounts unseen since the Hussein crime family controlled the region, strangles the financial benefits to both Iraqi and Kurdish people.

 Ignoring our pocketbooks for a moment, I want to explore what would result as the moral consequences of our decision. To begin with, we leave the peoples of the area who are powerless or ineffective at providing real resistance to the Islamic State at their mercy, which is a very grim thought if you mull it at all. The eschatology of Islam, along with all other religions, calls for the absolute end of all humanity. Total erasure of man from the face of the Earth at the time of (or to bring on) the second coming. Since these people proclaiming an Islamic State must have the primitive self-awareness necessary to understand how pitifully inept they would be at any kind of scientific or technological endeavor, they must outsource the brain power necessary to achieve their ends. Muslims educated at European and American institutions must go and help these savages with their work. The consequence of this, and no one can call it alarmist, is that every day we do not actively participate in the stabilization and reconstruction of the region we move one day closer to finding out what the religious will do with nuclear and biological weapons. This isn't news to anyone, but I bring it up to reiterate and reinforce that Islam calls for the extermination of all humanity to bring on the final judgement. 

Just in case you forgot what that will look like.

At that time, Mahdi the redeemer of Islam will come to Earth and team up with Jesus like some kind of post-modern Superfriends to do battle against the false messiah, whom they apparently have in common. Their inevitable victory will result in all of our deaths and the eradication of sin so that their ghosts may eat grapes and our ghosts may suffer eternally. As silly as all this sounds to anyone with half a reasoning mind, it barely begins to relate the sheer mindless nonsense the Muslim religion imparts to our enemies. The very real consequence of that nonsense, and our reward for trading in tolerance, is that as soon as these people get their hands on a way to carry out nuclear or biological attack on our civilization, they will.

Submission to Harpocrates

The self-imposed censorship when dealing with the murderous threats of our religious enemies is less a misguided attempt at retaining an imagined innocence and more our culture's inability to face a serious and fatal threat head on.

When the so-called "caliphate" that has imposed its noxious presence on Mesopotamia released a recording of the brutal slaughter of a non-combatant journalist, the immediate response of major media outlets was to omit access to the video entirely in their reporting, choosing instead to provide excuses that managed to be simultaneously groveling and self-aggrandizing. 

Their position argues that the dissemination of this recorded war crime (which they refer to as "propaganda") needlessly frightens Americans while providing encouragement and motivation to our enemies, thereby "helping the terrorists win." You will recall this dirge of a platitude from roughly 2004, the last time I can recall that level of childishly sniveling pseudo-psychology from our bastions of the fourth estate. Even if you choose to call the recorded slaughter of a civilian non-combatant sent to western civilization as a crowing threat propaganda, a descriptor which I find incredibly dismissive and diminutive in this case, we are swayed by that threat and not fulfilling our requirement as a civilized culture when we intentionally deny our citizens an opportunity to witness for themselves the horrific crushing force that nameless people half a world away face daily. Looking away, treating our sworn enemies as if they were schoolyard bullies that can be disarmed or dissuaded from hurting us by ignoring them, is an irretrievably fatal attitude.

The reactionary and mistaken argument that bearing witness to the vicious brutality of our religious enemies will bolster their credibility or respect ignores two simple points indicating the opposite to be true. No one thinks that these theocratic assholes are not serious actors in their region (not legitimate actors, mind you), nor does anyone think they lack the infrastructure and armament to accomplish their goals. The videos released by the "caliphate" therefore act as reminders and reinforcement, not as revelation. Consideration of what effect our reaction has on our enemies is entirely irrelevant in this case. Secondly, any kind of censorship ignores the irrepressible ability for people who want to see or hear something to seek it out, be they news addicts or the easily conned western jihadist, already planning on betraying both their community and their affiliation with humanity. Conversely, those of us who actively avoid graphic images from war zones are unaffected, as they would have no interest to begin with.

Regardless of the position taken by the major American media outlets, and independent of how many individuals choose to view the video in its entirety, our religious enemies are fervently slaughtering people from every subsection of humanity that isn't theirs. It may thrill them to hear that the spineless among us had our resolve crushed instead of steeled by this barbarism, but they're not sitting on their heels waiting for that news to arrive, nor would its arrival make them feel in any way understood or sated. 

Calls to censor and conceal the video represents a cowardly capitulation to our religious enemies on the part of the American media, as it shows we are willing to repeat the same reprehensible and indefensible mistakes engaged in during the Danish Mohammed cartoon incident. In that case, mindless and violent Imams cried without injury while threatening the rest of the world with violence if we should so much as look at a cartoon, which we spinelessly submitted to. Any kind of censorship is an assault on our first amendment, doubly so in the current case, when some external actor can cause us to voluntarily censor ourselves without so much as a request. Our culture's method of information gathering is now almost entirely visual. The idea of verbally relating an event when a video record of it exists is the kind of journalism better suited to a century ago. No interpretation of the first amendment requires or allows forcing people to watch anything they don't wish to, but any interpretation of it proscribes preventing or restricting the free flow of information.

Indeed, in our lifetime, the free flow of war zone information, images, and video have had huge impact. An increase in exposure to the engagement seems to herald its end, in my opinion. Following the cessation of conflicts, objective review of the timeline shows transparency and unfiltered images reaching the mass populace both beneficially increases our collective understanding of the location, consequences, and cost in lives while negatively affecting public support for the conflict.

We simply must know what we are up against. These people mean to kill us, one by one if they have to. And while they may not feel like the most proximate threat, our countrymen are defecting to their ranks in handfuls. The very real danger posed by the pretend "caliphate" is only going to grow until they are extirpated, and volunteering to cinch our own muzzle against them will be our collective future regret.