PrintThe Established Religion of the United States
We're like a condemned man who worries about the preservatives in his last meal or its cholesterol content. We'll worry about anything but our real worries. If we lived in Sudan, we'd worry about cell phone radiation or the wrinkles around our eyes. The worse our problems are, the more we agonize about something else.
I exaggerate? We live in by far the richest country in the history of the world, and what do politicians talk about? Money. We have cocaine addicts who eat organic foods, animal rights activists distraught over the deaths of gorillas in Uganda, and people terrified that Bush will discover what books they are checking out of the library and put them in concentration camps. Divorced couples fight in front of their children and are horrified by accounts of child abuse. Teachers complain about the stultifying effects of rote learning as their students learn nothing. Educators worry that their charges have read too many literary classics and not enough trash. Civil libertarians warn of a police state when most of us see police officers only when driving past them as they ticket speeders. We go years, decades, with no contact with the police whatsoever.
One of the favorite worries of the professional worrying class is the establishment of religion. After reading accounts of recent Supreme Court decisions, which rule that display of the Ten Commandments is constitutional except when it's unconstitutional, a naive person might ask, "Just what religion are they talking about? If we're in danger of establishing a religion, wouldn't we know what religion we're establishing?"
The Court can't mean Judaism. It does some bizarre things, but to attribute that much influence to Jews is to enter the realm of Holocaust denial and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The Court must mean that an undiscriminating display of the Ten Commandments would amount to the establishment of Christianity, about which the Ten Commandments say nothing.
While Justice Breyer was busy defining with exact inexactitude which displays of the Ten Commandments threaten us with a state religion and which are mere memorials of a thankfully bygone era, a religion was indeed being established in America, a religion that receives hundreds of billions of dollars of public funds annually, a religion jealous of mere mention of other religions, jealous even, as in the case of the Ten Commandments, of non—mention of other religions.
An unintentionally revealing article in the June 2002 issue of Scientific American, one of the holy books of the established religion of the United States, begins as follows:
In 1998 God appeared at Caltech. More precisely, the scientific equivalent of the deity, in the form of Stephen W. Hawking, delivered a public lecture via his now familiar voice synthesizer. The 1,100—seat auditorium was filled; an additional 400 viewed a video feed in another hall, and hundreds more squatted on the lawn and listened to theater speakers broadcasting this scientific saint's epistle to the apostles.
Hawking, the rest of the article informs us, is not only God, a saint, a writer of epistles, and a Christ—figure with multitudes of apostles, but also "the Delphic oracle" and a "shaman." He gives authoritative answers to questions of "theology." He has a "transcendent mind." He preaches "sermons." He is the apotheosis of a "modern incarnation."
These surprising revelations come to us from "The Skeptic," a regular feature of Scientific American, by Michael Shermer, founding publisher of Skeptic magazine. This particular example of skepticism is entitled "The Shamans of Scientism" (scientism being a good thing in the eyes of Scientific American, and even shamanism, at least shamanism of the scientismist variety).
"Scientism is," according to the Skeptic, "a scientific worldview that encompasses natural explanations for all phenomena." It "embraces empiricism and reason." So some form of natural theology, not a special revelation, must have proved to the Skeptic that Hawking is God. The phenomenon of Hawking's divinity has a natural explanation; empiricism and reason tell us that Hawking is God.
Veneration of atheists is not new. Some of the schizoid attitude of scientism, at once materialist and New Age, is captured in a curious incident recounted by Martin Rees in Before the Beginning:
"When Hawking received an honorary degree from Cambridge, the Orator quoted the encomium of Epicurus by Lucretius: 'The living force of his mind overcame and passed far beyond the flaming ramparts of the universe, traversing in mind and spirit the boundless whole.'"
Who the "Orator" is, Rees does not say, nor why he deserves capitalization, but what we have here is the praise of one atomist (Epicurus) by another (Lucretius) echoed by the praise of one materialist (Hawking) by another (Rees), with atomist and materialist praised with what can only be religious fervor.
That Stephen Hawking does indeed consider himself "far beyond" the "ramparts of the universe" that enclose ordinary universe—bound mortals can be seen in A Brief History of Time, where he portrays the universe as a 1
