GAVEL GAMUT
By Jim Redwine
www.jamesmredwine.com
(Week of 21 October 2024)
GODS NEED NOT APPLY
In this contentious election season, if the polls are valid, America is evenly divided with each side concerned a win for their opponent will end democracy and begin mob rule. Both factions could be prescient or both could be harbingers of 1 Corinthians 13, “Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal”. More likely is the conclusion that most of our country could care less since football season runs through Inauguration Day on January 20, 2025.
Unfortunately, if most of us “tune in and drop out” we will receive the ultimate bad fate:
“The heaviest penalty for declining to participate in government ourselves is to be governed by someone inferior.”
Plato, The Republic
That is why when some elected or appointed government official proposes bad policy, we should not shrug our shoulders as Ayn Rand might warn, but we should, as folk singer Phil Ochs pleads, “♪ Maybe we should raise our voices and ask somebody, Why? ♪”
One of those bad policies has been put forward by Oklahoma’s elected State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Ryan Walters. He being a preacher’s child it is not surprising he believes his Christian religion is essential to America’s well-being. That does not make Walters evil, just wrong. America not only did not need religion to found this great democratic experiment, our Founders assiduously sought to enshrine a prophylactic between government and any religion.
Our culture’s students can and should be exposed to the lessons of history. What they must not be is proselytized for any faith other than faith in themselves and the validity of what their public schools offer to them as truth. Once they gain their own ability to sift the wheat from the chaff, they can choose for themselves what system of belief, if any, they see as offering the best path for happiness.
The most important system of belief we need to inculcate in our children is that they must not seek their personal or our country’s salvation by reliance on the supernatural but upon their own wise decisions and hard work. Reliance on religion can easily become a crutch to avoid responsibility and effort to help ourselves. We humans often prefer even the malevolence or violence of our gods to the fear we are insignificant.
Most of us prefer almost any outcome to being ignored. Life is more bearable with an ironic view of callous, personalized authority which, while it may toy with us, at least provides an order and purpose to life and most importantly it does not ignore us. We are significant. We do matter as individuals and groups. One person or one group or even one nation can make a difference. The gods do take an interest in specific persons. This is comforting but dangerous. Instead of self-reliance, students who are led to believe the answers to our own or our country’s problems are in the stars might not understand it is the struggle that makes life worthwhile.
We must solve our own problems; gods need not apply.
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