p13 atheism

The New Atheists and the Master's Law of Affinity

By John Taylor; 2008 Feb 09, 03 Mulk, 164 BE

To read the new atheists is to encounter an undisguised, unabashed, overarching sense of superiority. This witticism by Oscar Wilde points straight at their smug attitude,

"The only thing that sustains one through life is the consciousness of the immense inferiority of everybody else, and this is a feeling that I have always cultivated."

It would be funny if it were not true. An anti-theist can be open and above-board about what even the most haughty and bigoted theist must conceal under a hypocritical whitewash. The egotist who accepts an all-powerful, superior Being has to be humble and subservient before Him, or at least pretend to. Atheists are free of such constraints. They revel in their frankness, the fact that they have no inhibitions about calling a spade a spade.

An example is Alan Dershowitz, the lawyer-hero whose real-life exploits inspired at least one film, Reversal of Fortune. Disappointingly to me, this legal hotshot has become a strident anti-theist in his old age. Unlike most “new” atheists, Dershowitz does not stop at tearing down  belief in God but boldly sets forth policy based upon his anti-theist viewpoint. He lays it out with chilling clarity in a video interview at:

<http://www.bigthink.com/truth-justice>

In this talk, called "Towards a Preventative State," Dershowitz opines that the legal profession needs to advance beyond passively enforcing laws, it can actively intercede to prevent crimes from being committed in the first place.

"... the Constitution and our legal system was built on the premise that we wait until people commit crimes. Then we indict them and prosecute them, give them all the due process safeguards. Apply a standard of better ten guilty go free than one innocent be wrongly ... convicted.  We have worked on that jurisprudence for thousands of years. The Bible is based on that jurisprudence.  Christian legal systems and theology is based on that system . . . Islamic and Anglo-American and western in general." (http://www.bigthink.com/truth-justice/4044)

The theist model stacks the deck against his preemptive state by establishing universal laws that apply to the strong as well as the weak. Torture is forbidden. Punishments are restricted to the guilty, not their family and friends. Dershowitz openly deplores that. He calls a spade a spade. What goes unsaid is that the theist model, while it includes laws, is first of all based upon teaching. God loves us and teaches us the right way. Laws only kick in when teaching is rejected and all attempts at bringing back the Prodigal Son fail. Only the stiff-necked refrain from wrongdoing, and they are regarded as abnormal. In other words, teachers come first and only when instruction fails do you call in the bouncers, the police and the lawyers. Dershowitz's atheist legal model glibly rejects teachers completely. He puts everything into the hands of law enforcement, or in this case, law intervention.

"But we are seeing a paradigm shift. We are now not able, it is thought, to wait until the crime is committed. Particularly if the crime is a nuclear attack, a terrorist attack with biological weapons, with chemical weapons. Sexual predators running rampant. Drunken drivers killing people on our streets. All these potential dangers and harms have moved us ever so subtly, but very, very, discernibly toward the preventive state, where the state is empowered to move in before you have done any of these terrible things, and to try to stop you from doing them in advance. "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." "A stitch in time saves nine." We all know those cliches, but how do you turn those cliches into jurisprudence?"

I want to draw your attention to the "cliches" that he mentions. It is no coincidence that he invokes them even as he denigrates them; planning of all kinds is anathema to the anti-theist worldview. These are not cliches, they are proverbs about planning. In a teaching model, planning really would eliminate crime before it happens because only the foolish and the ignorant commit crimes. But as one commentator to this video interview points out at this site, Dershowitz's idea of pro-active law is indistinguishable from totalitarianism or fascism.

His ideas remind me of the science fiction film Minority Report, where a "pre-crime officer" travels back into time to arrest criminals before they can do the dirty. Except that Dershowitz does not need a time machine, he has his anti-theist ideology based on blind fear. That does his dirty work. Remember, the fundamental theist teaching is that love chases out fear. But in Dershowitz's legal model people are criminals until proven innocent, and only direct preemptive strikes will ever remove fear, if ever.

The divine model of justice comes from a God who is, first of all, Good. He sets an example of love, and gives us laws based upon the "choice wine" of love. God loves us, so He created us; God cares for and nurtures His creation, and we respond in kind by loving our neighbor. But for an atheist, at least this one, deterrence is the glue that holds us together. Only the threat of violence keeps us from committing criminal acts.

"The new paradigm of suicide terrorism makes our system of deterrents very hard to operate, especially when coupled with individual guilt and individual response. You could deter terrorism if you punish the families of the terrorists; but we cannot do that because we believe in individual guilt. So the combination of the use of deterrents and the requirement of individual guilt make it impossible for us to use the traditional legal methods and legal threats against suicide terrorists. That is why we need to move in preemptively."

Dershowitz believes that the belief in the afterlife is the root of all evil. That is why religion itself is the reason that the old legal ways that it invented must be hacked to bits. The law now has to allow for preemptive strikes on the part of the state. We must shuffle off religious strictures that hobble the law and force it to refrain from torture and only to punish individuals, never the families and tribes who bred the criminals. The government's hand is forced because religions are cynically and systematically training armies of fanatical suicide bombers willing to give their lives to destroy the nation. The only way it can defend itself is by throwing out individual rights and introducing a police state.

This would be amusing and pathetic were it not for the fact that Dershowitz's preventative state has been open policy at the White House for at least the past eight years. Before that it was less open, but characteristic nonetheless. The fact is that the Republican Party has been led by strong atheists since at least the Reagan era. In spite of their embrace of Christian fundamentalists, this shadow leadership is entirely, virulently atheistic, as are all ideologues. As another prominent anti-theist puts it, the "intellectual muscle" of the Republicans comes from its atheistic leaders of thought, the "Chicago School" of economists, Nathanial Brandon, Ayn Rand, and about a dozen others.

Because this is a political issue, I cannot argue against it directly. Nor do I need to. We are hurtling on a handcart to climatic hell and if atheists and fundamentalist believers raise their hands and identify themselves as the ones with their hands on the tiller, I say let them. A big crash is coming and what matters is that we concentrate on what conduces to our survival. The best I can do is to identify the principles involved. There are two principles of survival, one spiritual and the other material. Abdu'l-Baha explains here the spiritual principle that teaches us a better definition of the holy, one that non-believers can value the same as believers of all stripes.

"Whatsoever is conducive to unity is merciful and from the divine bounty itself. Every universal affair is divine. Everything which conduces to separation and estrangement is satanic because it emanates from the purposes of self. Consider how clearly it is shown in creation that the cause of existence is unity and cohesion and the cause of nonexistence is separation and dissension." (Promulgation, 207)

Unity is sanctified in this day and age, and planning is the way to unity. Faith in that teaches all to value our common oneness and hope that planned, cooperative action will make a difference.

The other principle is based on science, on pure mathematics. This short video explains it well, and I agree with its title that it probably the most important thing that anybody can learn at this historical juncture.

"The Most IMPORTANT Video You'll Ever See."
http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=CFyOw9IgtjY

As this retired professor points out, there are laws of growth that dictate how bacteria in a bottle will double their numbers, and they apply just the same to human beings. Even educated people, deluded by ideology forget that there are no exceptions to the laws of mathematics. The present political model is systematically ignoring this basic law. Ironic but true, this is not only an inexorable mathematical law, it is also the inevitable Law of God.

"Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked, nor stand in the way of sinners, nor sit in the seat of scoffers; but his delight is in the law of Yahweh; On his law he meditates day and night." (Ps 1:1-2, WEB)