It was a joy to read an article with this “right on!” title in yesterday’s Salem Statesman-Journal. Mary Ridderbusch is just 18, a recent high school graduate who will be attending the University of Oregon in the fall. But she’s wiser about religion and politics than most adults— and certainly the entire Bush administration.
I’ve attached her article in its entirety as a continuation to this post, since the Statesman-Journal’s free access to stories fades away after a week and I want people to be able to read Ridderbusch’s thoughts for a lot longer than that. She’s an excellent writer, knowing how to jump right into her subject:
One cannot legislate morality. These should be words to live by for the U.S. government. I hold a particular distaste for the legislation of religious beliefs and for the defense of this practice. “America is a Christian nation.” This claim is overused and overgeneralized.
I’ve frequently echoed her ideas in my politically-oriented Church of the Churchless posts. As I said in “Religious values have no place in politics,” we live in a real physical world, not in an abstract realm of faith-based ideas. Lawmaking has to be based on facts and values that flow from experience of a shared reality. Otherwise, democracy and individual rights are a sham.
Recently there was a lot of controversy in Salem about whether a historic black walnut tree should be cut down. Debate was vigorous and often heated. However, I didn’t hear anyone argue that because fairies live in the tree, it should be kept alive. That would have been a ridiculous argument for saving the tree, right?
Yet Ridderbusch points out that without a similar improvable belief in a unseen entity, the soul, stem-cell research would be a non-issue. Religious faith muddies the waters of political debate for it isn’t possible to have moral clarity when you’re blinded by fundamentalist preconceptions that have no grounding in the real world.
In the same vein, creationists are fond of saying that “evolution is just a theory,” which is what global-warming deniers say about climate change. This reveals a complete misunderstanding of what “theory” means in science. A letter by Roger Plenty in the August 27-September 2 issue of New Scientist says:
If educational institutions were required to label books “Evolution is only a theory,” as George W. Bush recently suggested, it might be a good idea to add a further label with a definition of “theory.” The Shorter Oxford Dictionary gives “a hypothesis that has been confirmed or established by observation or experiment and is accepted as accounting for known facts.”
Science and politics both have to be founded on facts. When faith-based beliefs are substituted for shared experience of the real world, society is in trouble.
Many thanks to Mary Ridderbusch for warning of the danger the United States faces from religious moralists who want to shove their personal views down the throats of everyone.
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