A bit from the author Margaret Atwood while I'm getting settled on the East Coast. She's become fascinated by the French Revolution; she suspects its experiments with religion have something to tell us.
It’s very difficult to do away with religion altogether. You may attempt to abolish one kind, as the Revolution did, but then up pops another one — Goddess of Reason or whatever — and then another, Cult of the Supreme Being. If you’re going to have a religion, at least let’s hope it’s one that’s interested in kindness and mutual help, not just chopping people’s heads off and drowning them.
Civil wars are bad, but religious civil wars are worse, because people commit atrocities in the belief that they are being virtuous.
State religions are not consistent with democracy. They aren’t even consistent with religion, spiritually understood. The United States put freedom of worship into the Constitution so there wouldn’t be any attempts to force the United States into a state religion. They didn’t want religious civil wars of the kind that had been plaguing Europe since the Gutenberg printing press had given rise to splinter groups and factions.
There’s a movement at present to force a state religion onto the United States. If I were you I would resist it.
More on the Cult of Reason here. James Ford, a Buddhist writer, observes:
Perhaps, of course, what could have been a very interesting experiment in rational religion devolved quickly into mob reactions to the excesses of the Roman church, and mainly featured acts of desecration, quickly descending into bad theater, and more blood spilled on the ground.
Short lived, the atheistic cult of the goddess was suppressed by order of Maximillien Robespierre as he secured power, who was himself a deist, and who wanted a cult of the supreme being instead of the atheistic cult of reason…
As the great Kurt Vonnegut once observed, “So it goes…”
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