The gods on the DC Buses

Buses in Washington DC will now carry the "humanist" slogan, "Why believe in a god? Just be good for goodness sake." But what does that honestly mean? To me it's no different from asking, Why believe in goodness? Just be good for goodness sake. Or, Why believe in God? Just be good for God's sake. Nor can I consider that people who sing this song have seriously taken the music of goodness to heart; otherwise, I believe they would have discovered the desperate need to call upon a muse for divine help, for the art of morality and our inevitable failures to be good are, according to great men like St. Augustine, Blaise Pascal, and C.S. Lewis, the very motive for seeking revelation from God. Moreover, I'd argue that part of "being good for goodness sake" involves believing in God for people's sake; humanists who were good for people's sake wouldn't slight their deepest convictions, and spurn the hope, which attends their faith. To me, the "humanist" slogan is an oxymoron, I see nothing fundamentally humane about it.

The very slogan itself, really, is an embarrassing tribute to its own authors. I'm sorry to say, it shows they either lack an awareness of, or refuse to acknowledge, the fact that God is not just a being religion holds exists, but philosophy does as well; that He's not only an object of faith, but of reason too; and, in either case, that it's traditionally posited that God is distinguished from all else by having no limitations, so that the slogan reading "a god" is confused from the start. There is and can only be one God, THE God; another "god" would have to be distinguished in some way, which would involve a limitation, thus would not BE God. In a country founded by Christians and deists, who believed in a basic idea of God, which served as the foundation of human ethics, is there, then, perhaps more to this inaccuracy than meets the eye? It's an ever-present temptation for those who want dramatically to alter the present to blur the past, even, I would think, if it starts with the most subtle propaganda (like inaccurate and uncharitable bus slogans).

"Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath?" Apparently, Thomas Jefferson would seriously doubt that a nation "can be good for goodness sake", that is, if goodness is deprived of an eternal context, i.e., divorced from the notion of God. This philosophical deism of a Jefferson or a Franklin, however, is, in itself, practically dead, and only really survives into the present through living forms of Christianity (like Evangelical and Conservative Catholic Christianity). The rub for certain people is that these active forms of Christianity are, in large part, the primary forces behind things like saving traditional marriage, banning embryonic stem cell research, and attempting to overturn Roe v. Wade. In other words, belief in a God of "justice" and "wrath" currently translates politically, so that political reaction, I'd suggest, is what drives things like "humanist" bus ads.

I hear and read all of the time that people motivated by faith should keep their religion out of the political arena. To an extent I believe this principle is correct, but I think it helps to define that extent, which is really only to reclaim what I believe was understood by our founders, and by those in their succession, like Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr.

I'd like to do this, to define that extent, with the help of one more quote from Jefferson, "A free people claim their rights as derived from the laws of nature." For many, that quote might understandably bring to mind the phrase in the Declaration of Independence reading, "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God", especially in light of Jefferson's earlier quote. But the point is that no one that I'm aware of wants to introduce articles of faith into the political arena -- no one, for instance, wants to force public schools to recite the Nicene Creed or, perhaps instead of fluoride, to take Holy Communion wine. Instead, the controversial issues rest, and should be discussed, at the level of "natural law"; that is, as subjects of reason, not faith. Whether or not one's reason is motivated by faith should be of nobody's concern, but that, I'm afraid, is what really angers people.

Indeed, it's religious motivation, I believe, that "humanist" reactionaries attempt to undermine through things like inaccurate and uncharitable bus slogans. To be sure, humanists have their own motives. The atheist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche knew that the death of belief in God would mean the rise of our own selfish motives as gods in His place. Humanist slogans, in that case, might ultimately and more accurately read, "Why believe in God? Trust in OUR gods for goodness sake."