I read with interest Joe Vance's well-written inaugural efforts for his column, In Defense of Sanity, last Friday. I was dismayed, however, by some of the arguments he advanced.
First, he claims that the cancerous taint of organized religion is undermining the foundations of America ' The Enlightenment and reason. Christians, he charges, embrace dogma rather than make the effort to observe reality. Because they have a voice in the public square, our country is hurtling ever closer to the horrors of theocracy.
It goes without saying that people of faith, from all religious traditions, have been making the effort to observe reality for thousands of years. In the Christian tradition, there are Francis Bacon and Issac Newton as well as the Augustinian monk, Mendel, and the Polish priest, Copernicus. Faith and reason need not go toe to toe; they can go hand in hand.
I was also surprised to read in the same column statements such as Reason is the only absolute worth embracing and the only approach any thinking person can possibly adopt. Sounds pretty dogmatic to me!
I would like to further point out that reason and The Enlightenment alone provide no fail-safe refuge for the modern mind. The Enlightenment's optimistic evaluation of humanity has undergone heavy scrutiny in the wake of twentieth century atrocities; it has been suggested more than once that The Enlightenment died in the gas chambers of Auschwitz.
Perhaps Vance has also forgotten that episode of the French Revolution in which the revolutionaries, on a quest to destroy organized religion, profaned the altar of Notre Dame and transformed it into a Temple of Reason
destroying many of its treasures in the process. We are all familiar with the bloodbath these devotees of reason later inflicted on France. The Enlightenment left us a precious legacy, to be sure, and reason is obviously indispensable. But clearly neither is a conclusive solution, as Vance claims.
Organized religion is not the writer's only target. He also assails what he calls the social priests of the Left. In their quest for equality and justice, these individuals apparently preach entitlement and communitarian slavery and threaten to revert us back to the evils of socialism. Not being a part of the Left myself, I had to question my friends who are. They were unaware that in promoting social justice they were preaching enslavement. The insinuation that liberalism will usher in socialism was not new to them, however, as it predates Senator McCarthy by some decades.
I look forward to reading more of Vance's work. Hopefully his future columns in defense of sanity (and reason) will not be so unreasonable themselves.'- 17
Archives
