Why William Barr Is A Religious Extremist - And Why He's Wrong About Secular Humanism (& "Religious Liberty" )

“Religions are like bullies. One feature of bullying is that attacks are often made for no reason, aside from the ease of attacking the target. Such attacks can be used to establish dominance, or at least a reputation as someone to be feared and obeyed. …By forcing obedience in trivial matters – even harmless ones- religious leaders establish a reputation for punishment that allows dominance in more meaningful aspects of life. In this view the content of rules is relatively arbitrary"  - Skeptic magazine, (Vol. 15, No. 2, 2009) 

"When we give up on reason, the only tool we have left is coercion."-   Julian Baggini ('The Edge of Reason')

A true head -scratching moment transpired  barely five days ago on scanning through Kimberly Strassel's  WSJ  op-ed column extolling AG William Barr as '2019's Adult of the Year'.   Therein she wrote, presumably while sober and with a straight face:

"Mr. Barr has been vilified precisely because he has maintained an impartial view of the Justice Department and has kept his promises"

After which Kim wails about "one of the nastiest delegitimization campaigns in modern Beltway history" i.e. when  "Journalists and Democrats accused him of manipulating the rollout"  of the Mueller report back in March last year.  Which again makes one wonder which universe Kim inhabits - or perhaps it is a confected one induced by excessive MJ candy and too much vino?  But even if we're generous and grant her temporary sobriety,  anyone with an IQ over 100 would clearly have seen Barr tipped the scales with bias in that "rollout" - as I already noted, e.g.

Barr Gives Trump A "Get Out Of Jail Free" Card. No...

But the issue here is a larger, overarching one pertaining to Strassel's claim of Barr being some kind of impartial exemplar at DOJ.  Is this really true, or more of Kim's codswallop, in line with her belief in thoroughly debunked Steele dossier conspiracy  tropes, e.g.

Kim Strassel - Unable To See The "Conspiracy Theor...

Relevant to the question is a NY Times headline piece (Dec. 30) wherein we learned  that  Barr, aka Trump Toady No. 1,  has a long history of supporting expansive and extreme interpretations of “religious liberty.” For example, in  a spiel given barely 3 months ago at Notre Dame, he compared alleged violations of religious liberty with Roman emperors forcing Christian subjects to partake in pagan sacrifices, babbling:

 “The law is being used as a battering ram to break down traditional moral values and to establish moral relativism as a new orthodoxy,” 

Are these the words of an "impartial'   trustee of the law and justice, or of a latter day Oliver Cromwell, replete with all the elf-righteous zealotry and biased lenses of that historical personage?

Of course, Barr's quoted words were shameless codswallop, and perhaps ignorable if we don't take them too literally.  But can we afford that luxury, or I daresay reality blindness?  At the very least words matter and one must accept they are par for the course now for Barr, seeking to become the resurrection of Cromwell in Trump's authoritarian perversion of America.   As I've written in many previous posts, religionists and supernaturalists have all the religious liberty they need or want in terms of their beliefs.  They can worship however they wish and believe whatever nonsense and claptrap they want.  But what Barr and others bitch about mainly is assorted conservative religionists being thwarted in extending their "liberty" to controlling the behavior and beliefs of OTHERS.  

So they are convinced their religious freedom rests on the following extremist outcomes:

-  If a pharmacist, they are entitled to deny artificial contraception to a young woman seeking the pill

- If a cake maker, they are entitled to deny making any cake for a gay or lesbian couple.

- If a doctor, they are entitled to refuse referral for an abortion provider for an unwanted pregnancy.

- And in the milieu one beholds  the current "denial of service"  mandate backed by the Trump regime, a Christian nurse is entitled to withhold information concerning HIV treatment to anyone who needs it.   As this excerpt from The Denver Post  (Sept. 5, p. 6A) makes clear, e.g.

Thus, these fanatics and religious fascists (including their spokesman, Barr) , aren't satisfied with enjoying their own freedom to worship as they choose, they wish to extend their dominion to insist others do it their way as well, whether the atheist-secularist (like me), or the LGBTQ person, or the Muslim, Jewish person.    That generally means limitation of choices open to those they regard as heretics, secularists or  "demons"  who don't subscribe to their codswallop.

Barr watchers, as the NY Times piece observes,  know that this is nothing new. In a 1995 article he wrote for The Catholic Lawyer, as Emily Bazelon recently pointed out, appeared to be something of a blueprint for his speech at Notre Dame.  Therein Barr complained that:

 “We live in an increasingly militant, secular age” 

And expressed his "grave concern"  that the law might force landlords to rent to unmarried couples. 

Again, Barr overextends the definition of constitutionally -assured religious liberty to one of control and dictation of others' choices, lives.  My point? It is neither here nor there to whom landlords rent, if they are religious.  Such rental does not impinge or detract from their ability to attend whatever service they wish, or believe whatever they want.

Barr also implied that the idea that universities might treat “homosexual activist groups like any other student group” was intolerable.  Why? Again, it does not delineate actual religious liberty, only a fascist facsimile which grants absolute control to the fascists of others' choices.   Here, it would do  Barr well to get hold of Anthony Kronman's excellent book, 'Education's End - Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up On The Meaning Of Life."

Of particular interest is Chapter 2, 'Secular Humanism'  - a philosophy that Barr seems especially determined to trash.  But as Prof. Kronman elaborates (p. 41):

"All liberal arts education is defined in consciously non-vocational terms.  It is not a preparation for this job or that, for one career rather than another.  It is a preparation for the job of living, which of course is not a job at all.   The variety of liberal arts education is enormous but all rest on the assumption that one important aim of undergraduate education is to afford the young who are its beneficiaries the opportunity to reflect on the curious and inspiring adventure of life before they have gone too far into it."

Secular humanism thereby enters (positively)  as a philosophical template or infrastructure whereby "students and teachers pursue the perennial puzzle of human existence through the disciplined study  of an interrelated series of works in which how a person ought to spend his or her life provides a connecting theme and organizing focus of inquiry."

In other words, in the university setting it has been secular humanism which has provided the most confident path toward genuine free inquiry and the all important attribute of critical thinking.  And hence (p. 87):

"This was the tradition of arts and letters whose spiritual vitality secular humanism affirmed,"

Hence, to denigrate, trash or disparage secular humanism  - as Barr has in his various oral expulsions - is to undermine the validity as well as the primary purpose,  of what a liberal arts university education is for.  In may own case, it was while I attended Loyola University in the 1964-65 academic year that I got the opportunity to see and hear Jean -Paul Sartre expound on existentialism - and that prompted me to purchase a copy of 'Being And Nothingness' at the Loyola Bookstore.   That experience, compliments of the Loyola Jesuits (and irrespective of whether they intended it or not),  propelled my own inquiry into existentialism - and ultimately atheism.   That sort of freedom of mind and inquiry is precisely what Prof. Kronman is writing about, but which the theocrats want to squelch.

Let's return the sort of "denial of service"  laws as a control  form of “religious liberty”- which  Barr and his fellow Xtian fascists are all about.   All the evidence thus far shows this is not a mere side issue for Barr, or for the other religious nationalists who have come to dominate the Republican Party. It is rather, central to their authoritarian mandate, i.e.  to impose on the whole population, religious or not. It is, in effect, an expedient device by which to foment the culture wars to serve their own identity politics and political advantage. Indeed, Barr has made this abundantly clear as when he's asserted "all the problems of modernity — “the wreckage of the family, record levels of depression and mental illness,  drug addiction, senseless violence” — stem from the loss of a strict interpretation of the Christian religion."

In other words, this goober wants the U.S. to become a latter day Theocracy, likely governed not by the Bill of Rights and the larger Constitution - but by some freakish and exaggerated literal interpretation of  proto-Christian, i.e. Old Testament scriptures.   Thus, if Barr and his cronies have their way, we might well see a return to OT punishments of old - such as those cited below:

Deut. 22:22

"If a man is found lying with the wife of another man, both of them shall die, the man who lay with the woman and the woman; so you shall purge the evil from Israel"

Or:

Deut. 21: 18-21

"If a man has a stubborn and rebellious son, who will not obey the voice of his father or the voice of his mother, and - though they chastise him he will not give heed to them, then his father and mother shall take hold of him and bring him out to the elders of his city at the gate of the place where he lives, and they shall say to the elders of the city,'This our son is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton and a drunkard. Then all the men of the city shall stone him to death with stones, so you shall purge the evil from your midst"

Don't laugh! If one takes Barr's assorted brain farts seriously (and literally!) this is what he wants.  Which again is mind -boggling given he's resolutely defended one of the least moral beings on the planet: Donald J. Trump.  The same  reprobate who bragged in 2016 of  "grabbing 'em by the pussy" and having had sex with a porn star (Stormy Daniels) - while his own wife was having his kid.  One guesses here that hypocrisy for the Xtians never ends.

Let's note here that the "great evildoers"   in the Notre Dame speech are generally nonbelievers who are apparently out on the streets ransacking everything that is good and holy.  In other words, a caricature not too different from what my late youngest brother ("Pastor Mike") once used to depict atheists when he was still presiding over 'Living Water Church' in Miramar, FL:


Only a number of years later, while on his literal deathbed (from liver cancer) did he acknowledge how puerile and stupid that depiction was and how he was off base.

The solutions to society’s ills, Barr declared, come from faith, then blabbing:

“Judeo-Christian moral standards are the ultimate utilitarian rules for human conduct. Religion helps frame moral culture within society that instills and reinforces moral discipline. The fact is that no secular creed has emerged capable of performing the role of religion.”

But there can be no "secular creed" anyway, because the very nature of secularism is free inquiry and critical thought,  which rejects any credo or creed.   What the secular humanist offers instead is not moral absolutism but "moral provisionalism" or what I would call: "ethical incrementalism".  As Michael Shermer ('The Science of Good And Evil') describes it:

"Provisional ethics provides a reasonable middle ground between absolute and moral relative systems. Provisional moral principles are applicable to most people, for most circumstances, for most of the time - yet flexible enough to account for the wide diversity of human behavior"

Interestingly, within this ideological framework, the most basic ethical principle: the ends  never justifies the means', is violated.   In this light, as the Times' piece notes Barr’s hyperpartisanship is the symptom, not the malady. What we know already is that at Christian nationalist gatherings the Democratic Party and its supporters are routinely described as “demonic” and associated with “rulers of the darkness.”   This is the same strategy - demonization - that was employed by Hitler and the Nazis before they launched their pogrom on Jews, socialists, communists in the early 1930s.

By extension, if you know that society is under dire existential threat from secularists, and you know that they have all found a home in the other party, every conceivable compromise with principles, every ethical breach, every back-room deal is not only justifiable but imperative.  Hence, for Barr and the Christian fascist renegades the ends justifies the means - whatever means are needed to subdue the opposition.

And as the vicious reaction to Christianity Today’s anti-Trump editorial demonstrates, any break with this partisan alignment will be instantly denounced as heresy.  So what we have in addition, is a resurrection of Oliver Cromwell and his own brand of purists and persecution set to be unleashed - if we on the secular side don't check them. 

Barr’s maximalist interpretation of executive power in the Constitution is just an effect, rather than a cause, of his ideological commitments. In fact, it isn’t really an interpretatio, but simply an unfounded assertion that this sordid excuse for a president has what amount to monarchical powers. (The "unitary executive").  Douglas Kmiec, a law professor at Pepperdine who once held Mr. Barr’s position as head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, said of Mr. Barr’s theory:

 “George III would have loved it,”

 Needless to say, and as the conservative lawyers group Checks & Balances recently wrote,  Barr’s view of history “has no factual basis.”  And neither does his view of faith as a basis for jurisprudence, or secular humanism as a handwork of the "Devil".  Moreover, any person so invested emotionally in these archaic (and unconstitutional ) positions, cannot possibly be expected to be an impartial arbiter of justice.  All of Kim Strassel's  blarney and babble to the contrary.

See also:

IG Report Shows The FBI Had Legitimate Reasons to...

And:
Barr does it again! 

And:

Religious Right

Onward, Christian Fascists

by Chris Hedges | December 30, 2019 - 7:05am |