Elorza: Your Rights End at My Understanding of Reality

Yesterday, I found myself thinking of a scene from Stephen King’s 1975 book, Salem’s Lot.

Kurt Barlow, the vampire, is confronting Father Donald Callahan, Roman Catholic Priest.  The priest has been warding off the vampire with his glowing, transfigured cross, and the evil one dares the religious one to put it down and face him, “Your faith against my own.”

Father Callahan hesitates; his faith wanes; the cross ebbs; Donald loses.

‘God damn you!’ he cried out.

‘It’s too late for such melodrama,’ Barlow said from the darkness. His voice was almost sorrowful. ‘There is no need of it. You have forgotten the doctrine of your own church, is it not so? The cross . . . the bread and wine . . . the confessional . . . only symbols. Without faith, the cross is only wood, the bread baked wheat, the wine sour grapes. If you had cast the cross away, you should have beaten me another night. In a way, I hoped it might be so. It has been long since I have met an opponent of any real worth. The boy makes ten of you, false priest.’

Even as a teenage atheist, the scene struck me as unrealistic in a way that was much deeper than the fact that… you know… it was about a vampire.  It’s a recurring theme in King’s work (and the culture that it represents) that people in organized religion don’t really believe what they say they believe, but in Fr. Callahan, King’s created a character who has spent his life pondering and at least pretending to believe the doctrine of the Church.   Then, in a moment of crisis against overt, embodied evil, he reflexively turns to his religious implements and is rewarded with the empirical evidence of their power.

“The cross flared with preternatural, dazzling brilliance.”  Then the vampire recoiled.  Then, all of a sudden, the faith of the man of God wavered? That makes no sense.

Obviously, King is going for the idea that Callahan is using the outward symbols of his Church as a crutch, and when he puts them aside, he has no underlying faith.  What does that mean, though?  The fictional priest had spent his entire career expounding on the notion that the symbols were indications of a reality in which everything comes from God, that God has an intention for His creation, and that He is willing to intervene, to the point of allowing us to sacrifice His human embodiment as a means of turning us toward that intention.

(You don’t have to believe this worldview to understand that other people do.)

In turning away from this doctrine so quickly and after such a stunning display of evidence that it might actually be true, Callahan could not have had a sense that God actually exists in the world.  The dazzling, glowing cross, then, must have been like some sort of magical gadget that Callahan had temporarily lucked into activating; he didn’t have time to learn how to use it because it was something different than his religion.

Some atheists, Stephen King perhaps among them, have a belief (a faith) that not only does religion conflict with empirical evidence in some particulars, but that it must, by definition. In that worldview, the nature of religion is not that it supersedes evidence, but that it is inherently in opposition to it.

The reason all of that came to mind was its echo in the conclusion of Providence mayoral candidate Jorge Elorza’s law-review article, which Andrew posted, yesterday.  The theme appears in small ways — like the fact that Elorza cites the Big Bang as one theory that has “been effectively incorporated into various religious beliefs,” without seeming to know that the theory was first put forward “in scientific form” by Catholic priest, Georges Lemaitre.

And it appears in large ways — like when he attempts to comfort those who might be squeamish about his overt radicalism:

Every human society ever studied has had some form of religious belief. This strongly implies that the impulse towards religiosity runs deep in our composition. Religion is much more than the belief in a theist God and in fact, many religions have long thrived without such a belief. That religion depends on the belief in a theist God is plainly false. Instead, the core of religion, if in fact there is a core, is a set of shared beliefs, values, practices, rituals, and symbols that bring people together to form a community. Additionally, religion provides a framework for helping individuals answer life’s most profound questions and find purpose. While some people may believe that the theist God is the linchpin that holds this all together, many others will invariably conclude that the other aspects of religion are nonetheless worth preserving.

It’s enough to make one wish that the vampire Barlow were running for mayor of Providence, not only because of his more advanced understanding of religion, but also because one suspects his writing wouldn’t be so full of stolen bases and internal contradictions.

Considering that he’s presuming to write a legal article, the largest stolen base of Elorza’s essay comes when he dismisses all legal precedent, including multiple cases from the U.S. Supreme Court, to argue… actually, to assert… that “neither the Court nor the commentators had in mind that the existence of the theist God was an empirical question.”

One shudders to think that such a mind has sat before others between the ears of a judge.

Put simply, whether the existence of God is an empirical question is completely irrelevant to the rights that the people of the United States have secured through our Constitution.  Given some free time, I might be able to make a compelling argument, on an empirical basis, that it would be in the best interest of the human race for me to seek out Jorge Elorza and honk his nose good and hard.  That doesn’t mean I have the right to do it, or that he does not have the right not to have it done to him.

Rights, at the end of the day, are a matter of faith, not of scientific proof.

Elorza believes that he and his fellow progressives, in their blinding, domineering ignorance, have a right to indoctrinate other people’s children using government schools.  Once he’s decided to ignore that rights, by their nature, cannot be empirically substantiated, the rest is just provisional rhetoric to get around obvious barriers to his establishment of the progressive faith.

Consider that he even lapses into free-market talk when it serves his purpose: “In an open marketplace, religion will flourish so long as it meets the needs of its consumers.”

This statement is a bit hard to take after the writer has spent 65 pages implementing the progressive trick of claiming that his worldview is simply correct, and therefore the rules that allow our society to negotiate deep differences between people simply don’t apply to him.  In other words, he’s arguing that the marketplace should not be open.

Using government schools, which are mandated by law to be attended by the great majority of citizens, Elorza would have children taught not that a particular scientific finding appears to conflict with a particular religious claim. Rather, he’d have them taught that science has proven that God does not exist, which only a person ignorant of both the scientific and religious sides of the question could possibly believe to be true.

Our Constitution — indeed, the entire structure of our nation — is meant to allow us to live according to our own notions of reality and of government while giving us a structured and guarded way of resolving differences when they cannot be avoided.  That helps to reduce the opportunity for oppression while minimizing the necessity of violent resistance.  If I don’t buy Elorza’s arguments — on whatever grounds I prioritize — and if I don’t have the wherewithal to avoid government schools over which his clique has control, what are my options, other than to suppress my own beliefs or find some way of fighting back?

Since anybody this side of the caliphate should agree that neither option is tolerable in modern society, I find myself inclined to put the vampire Barlow’s proposal to Mr. Elorza: Your faith against mine in the marketplace of the classroom.  Your side gets to teach why science disproves the existence of God, and my side gets to teach what the materialist view misses in both science and religion.

Or do you worry that “the impulse towards religiosity runs deep in our composition,” as you write, and will overpower faith in science?  That impulse, of itself, is an interesting empirical data point, wouldn’t you say?

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