Biblical Inscriptions on Gun Sights and Kant Speaks from the Grave

Last week, a story broke about how the gun site manufacturer, Trijicon, has been for years placing subtly-imprinted biblical references on the gun sights of standard issue combat rifles used by U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Michael Weinstein of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), which seeks to preserve the separation of church and state in the military, explained that this practice should be stopped because, "It's wrong, it violates the Constitution, it violates a number of federal laws. It allows the Mujahedeen, the Taliban, al Qaeda and the insurrectionists and jihadists to claim they're being shot by Jesus rifles."

The company has agreed to discontinue this obvious attempt at proselytizing the Christian view to U.S. soldiers, and that it will provide kits to remove the inscriptions---a victory for MRFF and anyone concerned with separation of church and state.

But what is more menacing about this story is the response by an influential member of the American intelligentsia, columnist Leonard Pitts of the Miami Herald. In his January, 23 national column he took a superior-attitude pot-shot at the company president's little work for Jesus by asking, "But is that really faith, when you reduce God to a bigger version of you?"

In other words, how dare that company president show a glimmer of self-expression of his beliefs--albeit a misguided and totally inappropriate action violating the separation of church and state.

Pitts shows by comparison what REAL faith should be, best exemplified by nonetheless than the two most saintly figures of the 20th century: Mother Teresa and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Mother Teresa's faith drove her to foreswear material riches and spend half a century working to uplift the wretched poor of Calcutta. The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s faith drove him to gamble his very life in a dangerous campaign to win human and civil rights for African-American people... [T]he point is that truest faith is not seen in a secret code on a gun sight.....Rather, faith is seen in the substance of a life lived in service to others, lived as if God were "not" in fact one's personal echo chamber in the sky. [emphasis mine]

Well, my oh my. Isn't 19th century philosopher Immanuel Kant alive and well and speaking to the opinion-makers right from the grave.

In explaining Kant's philosophy, Ayn Rand says,

Kant's expressly stated purpose was to save the morality of self-abnegation and self-sacrifice.....As to Kant's version of morality....it consisted of total, abject selflessness. An action is moral, said Kant, only if one has no desire to perform it, but performs it out of a sense of duty and derives no benefit from it of any sort, neither material nor spiritual; a benefit destroys the moral value of an action.

Who better than Mother Teresa and Martin Luther King, Jr. to demonstrate for us duty of sacrifice without regard to themselves? To Pitts, Trijicon's little slipup with the Constitution to advance the cliche, "there are no atheists in fox holes," is simply a trivial waste of morality. In his view, what society REALLY ought to be striving for is a deeper, broader, truer test of faith: total abnegation of the self in a life dedicated " in service to others."

That is in fact President Barack Obama's mission: to be the next Mr. Mother Teresa as our President.

(Violins, please.)

"His story is the American story -- values from the heartland, a middle-class upbringing in a strong family, hard work and education as the means of getting ahead, and the conviction that a life so blessed should be lived in service to others."
(This is from the White House website, introducing Mr. Obama as our 44th President.)

(Stop the violins, please.)

When a member of the intelligentsia is trying to upstage another Christian, we are having a cultural war. Not only must we continue to fight the puritanical and rights-violating agenda of the Religious Right, we also have a more-focused and committed Religious Left whose altruistic, socialist agenda is already invading our liberties.

Little do these ostensible opposites realize they were already married in a shotgun wedding many decades ago, presided over by preacher Immanuel Kant.

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The Left Co-opts Religion for "Social Justice"

What could be a more concerning entity to a rational person than a religious leftist? But that's what's coming down the cultural pike.

The Religious Right has historically staked its moral claim on the Republican Party, focusing on what they call "pro-life" issues such as abortion, stem-cell research, euthanasia, human cloning, and other issues that pertain to life and death.

But we have an emerging phenomenon among what has traditionally been the morally-vacuous Left: a religious basis for their agenda to tackle the Iraq war, so-called "social justice" and environmentalism.

To many, the Left has been always been perceived as coldly "scientific" and therefore anti-moral. But now that the Democrats are eagerly embracing religion, it must be reassuring to some voters on the fence who "kind of like" the leftist ideology, but just can't embrace its moral hollowness. Now they have a new leader: Barack Obama, who has been unapologetically leading his Christian Democrat soldiers into battle.

This is a bad marriage of two kinds of faiths: belief in the supernatural with hatred for individualism.

The 20th century novelist and philosopher, Ayn Rand, opened the lid on the leftist movement in her book, The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution. Although published in 1970s, the essays are as relevant today as ever.

Now the Left can go beyond it's morally-absent statism: it can claim religious moral sanction for its platform, Obama's Blueprint for Change.

His plan is explicitly clear: Obama will expropriate wealth from capitalist producers and fund a welfare state on a grand scale with the the moral command that we are our brothers' and sisters' keepers (to paraphrase his exact quote).

What a rallying cry for a purposeful America! The Taliban couldn't do any better!

Where is that third alternative to the bible-quoting statism of the Left and the
mystical-biblical politics of the Right? It is a philosophy that is based on individualism, also called rational egoism.

Rational egoism means that an objective reality exists as we perceive by our senses and by a process of reason (not by prayer or mystical revelation). This includes the knowledge that humans are individuals, not globs of "society" that must follow the state's or God's commands. Morally we have the right to pursue happiness and our necessities of life without violating the rights of others to do the same. It means we can have a society where we interact benevolently with others on the basis of trade with one another, free from theft of our lives and property by the state or criminals.

The bleak reality is this: our politicians are ruining America. But they don't have our minds yet. It is the ideas of reason and individualism that will lead us to a better future--a future of freedom, wealth and happiness.

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The Preciousness of a Finite Existence

Most religious or "spiritual" values include the belief in eternal life, such as an afterlife in heaven or reincarnation into another life after death. The common theme is the idea that each person has an eternal soul that lives beyond the physical body after death.

Meanwhile, in the here and now, a key goal of modern religious activism is advocacy for what many faithful call the "sanctity of life". Believers are taught that life is given by and belongs to God, and therefore we must not meddle in the godly matters of life and death.

This is the biblical basis for prohibitions against abortion, euthanasia, and stem cell research, even though these practices are for the purpose of relieving suffering and improving the lives of living individuals. (And it is also the moral basis for the Colorado ballot proposal to grant rights to fertilized eggs.)

But when the religious interpretation of the "sanctity of life" is the law of the land, people are forced to endure suffering. For example, a woman who is impregnated by a vicious rapist must forever live with the psychological and social burden of raising a child she doesn't want. A terminal cancer patient with agonizing pain only has the option of withering away using ever-increasing mega-doses of pain drugs rather than being allowed the choice of ending his life with dignity. These examples demonstrate the opposite of respect for the sanctity of life.

How do the faithful psychologically tolerate these indignities? By believing in an eternal life: that when it's all over, one's soul will live on. It may go to heaven to be with God in a state of eternal bliss, or it may reincarnate and advance to a "higher plane" of existence with "lessons learned" from the previous life.

But this belief comes at a high price: believing in an eternal soul essentially renders one's life in the here and now expendable. If you live forever, it doesn't ultimately matter if you suffer in this life. All that matters is that humans must not "play God" by taking ownership over their own their lives.

One of the most difficult truths we face as humans is that our existence is finite. This is something we have to learn to accept and cope with. The religious belief in an afterlife is a total evasion of this blunt truth.

The fundamental fact that we all die means that it is this life that is sacred. Therefore, we must have a society that protects the unique, finite and precious life of each living individual. Such a society based on rational egoism has a moral code founded on the realities of our finite existence and the requirements of human life.

But a faith-based society that unquestioningly accepts the idea of an eternal soul can rationalize doing anything it wants to individuals in the name of God, because people get eternal life anyway.

A proper sanctity of life is for the living. It is not for potential life, a dreamy "eternal" life, or for God.

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