Review of Samuel Gregg's Book, Reason, Faith and the Struggle "Religion Finds Itself In" or…

Complete Real Name of Book…

Reason, Faith, and the Struggle for Western Civilization

The premise was very strained, like not enough Saran Wrap stretched over a casserole dish that ended up requiring duct tape to hold it together. Gregg doesn’t like liberals, fine. That said, the way he developed the ideas of the philosophes was by employing a very narrow agenda. He wanted to prove their ideas were so bad that we shouldn’t learn about them, or we will turn into Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, and Mao, and kill a billion people.

Yes, some people don’t get their minds fully around new ideas, and become horrible people, maybe due to a philosophy or quotes. Yet religion has spurred people to do bad things, both Christians (Crusades, colonization, slavery, KKK, American Indian boarding schools, W.’s Iraq war, etc.) and Muslims have done it. Rather than going back to Mao or Stalin, consider Trump. He was elected due to a similar mixing up of barely ideas into a terrible soup of nut-so, which he spoon fed to a ready audience, and at least half of Gregg’s audience likely voted for him. Does that make Gregg another Trump, because people know or "use” his ideas? According to Gregg’s logic, yes it would make him Trump’s puppet master. 

Many people may not always get my writing, sometimes it is because of general style of writing, when they don’t realize I am using sarcasm, because they don’t think through my ideas, etc. This does not, cannot, and should not make me responsible for the deaths of millions. Otherwise, we must stop trying out new ideas, whether heathen, pagan, recovering Catholic, etc.

That’s especially true if someone can stage a rally blocks away from where that person, let’s say an out of control POTUS, sent thousands of angry followers to destroy a constitutional democracy, then not be convicted for doing it, not even in the political sense. Therefore, Voltaire, Descartes, Hume, and Nietzsche are not responsible for Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, or Mao. Making sure every American gets a good education, would help avoid some of it, but conservatives are averse to equal education.

New ideas hardly ever come out fully formed into societal benefits, or usable widgets. Separating the good ideas from the bad is a constant process. The author tries to tie together, avoid, shave off, exclude, and hide from the realities of sausage making in a very tangential and leapfrogging manner.

Progress, or merely the passage of time, is not a straight line, and no one group gets to claim why today was made better than yesterday (when actually better). It is a fool's errand to separate the wheat (good people and ideas) from the chaff (bad people and ideas). If Hitler had also cured cancer, I wouldn’t want to "promote” his cancer curing “greatness", but I would have used his cure to help my sister, who died in 2016 from it.

The Bible has many statements we avoid today, like when the woman is bleeding, she is unclean (in many more instances than men are BTW), so she should shamefully go without hygiene products in prison. (Leviticus 15:19. And Erin Polka, 9/4/18, publichealthpost.org). 

The schizophrenia of the christian Catholic Church was bypassed by Gregg, not only the crusades, but after being fed to lions for a few decades, not in large numbers usually taught however, the church spent centuries burning “heretics” at the stake, and other tortures. While Muslims may be the religion of submission today, catholics were the pyre friars of the Middle Ages. If it weren’t for Luther/etc., and the philosophes, we’d still be smelling burning flesh every Friday, during no red meat, Lenten fish fries. Of course, Jihad (Jesuits ;-) and) christian fundamentalists kept dunking witches to death, and killing other sects like Mormons/ other “opponents” for another two or three centuries.

An article showing similarities between IRA (I am half Irish BTW, O'Connell) and IS/ISIS, link here.

In the 1940s, Father Coughlin inspired and publicized a violent group that was supposed to defend us against Jews and communists, and "in the days and weeks after Kristallnacht, Coughlin defended the state-sponsored violence of the Nazi regime" (ushmm.org). How is that for the Jihad “Jesuit” perspective? Gregg and his churchie beliefs and great reasoned thinkers have done almost zero to stop white supremacist christian zealot terrorists who have killed thousands in America, and still are plotting and killing as they did on January 6th. Most conservatives support it in some way.

Relativism is a problematic concept because it is endemic in progress. There is either slow motion or faster motion relativism, no status quo. Gregg likes the 1950s better, before liberal christianity, became a big thing. Yet, I bet he wouldn’t like the 1450s, or worse the 150s. In the 150s his wife would have been unclean almost as much as before Jesus was born, since many “christians” were actually “Jews”, for decades after christ died. So if he can coax his wife back into the 150s, I may agree that he isn’t a somewhat slow-mo relativist. But still a relativist. 

His economic ideas are a relativist's Fantasia. While I agree with much of his free market ideas, making it part of Jesus' gospel or some other straggly, snaggle tooth truth connection is going deep down the relativist hole. Much of Gregg’s economic theory was first developed by Adam Smith and others. Of course, he was a christian so that made it godlike. Like W. choosing to go to war against Iraq. 

Gregg also turns liberalism or science into religions, I guess because religions are a bad thing? I hear this kind of reversal all the time, it is too lame and contradictory to comment on. Yet… "No. You're a religion.” “We are not. You’re a religion!” "Shouldn’t we all just quit being religions and move on with things? Oh? I see. Yours is better than mine. You have the one true faith. Now I see for real, the whole Holy Sea. Huh.”

Has religion been part of learning and becoming who we are? Yes. Of course not for everyone. And humans have learned in many ways, and religion was not always there. Who is to say that it was before religion that we got are most important learning? Merely because scientists have been predicting we would have a singularity of all knowing all, that only means our imagination goes farther than our knowledge. Nothing religious about that. Our arrogance, engorged egos, and other brain swelling do not make god manifest; it just makes us stupid when we exaggerate. Finding god in our inability to discover everything yet, is circular firing squad logic. Nearly every other thing discovered in the last 3000 years was supposed to be something only god could do, understand and/or be. If your religion is partially based on science never getting everything figured out, it is a very lame and reasonless religion. It is like saying because I cannot disprove a miracle, then that means god is real. And whose god is real? OMG;-)

Yes, all our knowledge was built upon other knowledge, and religion was obviously part of that, but such a connection does not necessarily make religion the only valid way it could have happened. For one thing, all the philosophes Gregg talked about were under some if not a lot of threat from talking out against church teachings, either by the church leaders or their supposed friends, etc. i.e. burnt at the stake. How much of our “enlightenment" would have happened if the church was less domineering about the “truth” two or 1,000 years earlier? 

The west the west the west. That is a good reason for us to study about white men and priests and leave out women, Black Americans, and others for another thousand years. Women make up 51%, and your western focus is harmful to their future, current and was to their past. Move on, learn other things. 

As to the theory of evolution, first cataloged by Darwin, Gregg’s understanding has no science to it, just conservative christian mouth flappery. We have written history going back about 5000 years. The earth is nearly 5 billion years old. There have been at least three mass extinctions, where around 95% of all species disappeared. Did god get it wrong three times, then? Did god spring us up after everything else was killed? Did we put saddles on dinosaurs? And more reasonably, we cannot understand one million years let alone five billion. That inability to understand what that means, because we only live a 100, maybe more, usually much less, is the main reason we cannot understand evolution, us coming from bits of molecules, which came from bits of molecules, or neutrinos, Higgs bosons, etc. 

During the Nazi era Germany was 94% christian, about 40% of them were catholics. Hitler may have been a terrible person but the people who could have done something were christians, and most of them just lumbered along behind him. Most were likely not liberals. That is just like Trump who was also supported by the conservative christians Gregg has supported.

As to America, and whether it was founded as a christian nation, Gregg basically refuted this concept, when he mentioned the revival of the early 19th century. If America was so christian focused, why was a big revival required, or how could it be so very big to be toughed as something great? Maybe we could have done more with the enlightenment if religion would not have clamped down so much here, afterwards. 

Finally, the French Revolution happened for many reasons. But making new ideas, out there thoughts,  and deeper reasoning without religion the culprit is very limited and juvenile. Gregg should read more history. His love of Burke gives away his groaning mistake. Incrementalism is at least as bad as it is good, and it is getting worse. The French monarchy was a monarchy too long, taking too much from its people. The future was passing it up, and due to its stagnancy, the people eventually grew out of their stupor, and wanted more, or different. The dictator monarchy had nothing to offer, fast enough, and could not see the need for transition so it stumbled all over itself, and succumbed to its own inability to cope. Today, change happens faster, because others still see a bleak future in our slogging along society, and want better, LGBTQ, Black Americans, etc.

Note: The Will To Power was a posthumous book purported to be by Frederick Nietzsche, but it was edited/crafted/published by Nietzsche’s Nazi sister, screwing with Frederick's notes. I could not find where Gregg cited the book. Although he does use the phrase Will To Power, maybe three times. See @seanilling via www.vox.com from Dec 30, 2018.

Richard The Chwalek on Medium.