Reply #32: Democrats should not EXPLICITLY embrace Secularism... [View All]

[NAO]

...because they do not have to embrace secularism to operate with secular, rational principals.

And if the Democratic Party did embrace explicit secularism, the Radical Clerics of the Religious Reich and their millions of Electoral Shock Troops (the "values voters") would swarm over and destroy Democrats like Storm Troopers over Poland. Even rational people with moderate (?) religious beliefs do not like explicit secularism, which entails the "a" word.

But implicit secularism is just what the United States is founded on. Rational principals of good government, with powers derived not from ghosts and gods but from the consent of the governed.

Implicit secularism does not denigrate or oppose religion. It just ignores it as irrelevant. We do not have Baptist Mathematics and Buddhist Mathematics and Secular Mathematics. We just have Mathematics. The secularism is implicit. 2 + 2 = 4, and god or gods have nothing to do with it. It is just the principals of mathematics.

In a similar way we can have secular government without any talk of secularism. There are certain ways to administer a free society, construct and execute policy, etc, and god or gods have nothing to do with it.

Chemistry, Accounting, Metalworking, Astronomy, Politics, Auto Mechanics, Psychology - each discipline has a field of study, a methodology, and an application - and none of them have anything to do with gods or ghosts. People who believe in (and even worship) gods and ghosts can work in those fields, but they use the same information, methods, assumptions, and procedures as an explicit atheist who works in the same disciple uses, because the disciplines (except Theology and Priest-craft) are all secular disciplines.

This is certainly what our Founding Fathers had in mind when the conceived the United States. They did not make any statements for or against God in the Constitution - the completely ignored "God" - not making a single mention of "God" or "Creator" or "Supreme Being" or anything of the sort in the entire text of the document because this concept is utterly irrelevant to the constitution and governance of a nation.