Den 3 april hade Robert Tracinski en bra artikel i The UnPopulist om ateism och liberalism, dvs klassisk liberalism, inte den vänsterinriktade hållning som gått under namnet ”liberalism” i USA under efterkrigstiden. Utdrag:
”Atheism as such is not a belief, but the absence of a belief, so it can include some illiberal philosophies(…) Yet in an increasingly secular world, God is mostly being driven out by the acceptance of key ideas that are essential to the defense of a free society. The first of these is the defining value of the Enlightenment: reason.(…)
Communism was yet another authority-based system, just with a different rationalization for authority.(…)
In effect, Communists rejected the metaphysics of religion but kept the epistemology of faith. All the answers are already known and handed down from some existing authority, and it is a sin to doubt. It’s just that instead of believing all important truths were announced by Bronze Age prophets, the Communists held that they were announced at the last Party Congress.(…)
[L]iberalism is grounded in the idea that one must be allowed to choose one’s own path simply because it is one’s own.
The individual’s right to the pursuit of happiness is not the same as philosophical materialism, which denies the significance of consciousness and of the psychological and cultural dimensions of human life. In fact, our basic biological capacity includes the fact that we have complex minds capable of thinking and dealing with abstract ideas, forming a worldview, making emotional attachments, and seeking companionship. You don’t have to believe in another world to acknowledge the importance of this psychological or “spiritual” dimension of life. It is a perfectly natural phenomenon.(…)
[T]o grasp the power and grandeur of the human mind does not require any leap of faith or specialized theology. We only need to look out at the world and observe. There is abundant evidence of the human capacity to think, to understand, to create, to build, and to express itself. There is also abundant evidence that this capacity is a necessity of our survival and the source of mankind’s greatest accomplishments: the scientific and technological achievements of the modern world; the debates that led to crucial political reforms; the highest expressions in art and music.”