The Commonality of Faith

Posted on by L Reese Cumming

Portrait of a boy with the map of the world painted on his face.

In the modern, secular world, the average citizen has lost the appreciation of just how fundamental religious identity is to our basic existence.  The secularist – remote to the religious experience all about them each and every day – sees religion as a membership in an organization; a simple choice that can be flipped with an opportunistic lifestyle, a change in schedule, or a little enlightenment.  The results of such a naiveté is just beginning to roost like gargoyles on the growing discord we call diversity.

But religion is not an organization with a human leadership that shops for designer bargains at a factory-outlet store.  Religion isn’t just tucked neatly within the prefrontal cortex of the brain; ready to be affected by neuroplasticity brought about by human events.  Religion has demonstrated that it is much more pervasive and prevailing in all human cultures; signaling that it is embodied within every cell within every human body.  It is not likely to go away with a “shoo”, or retreat to its dog house with a “bad doggie”.

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The Breech of Equality

Posted on by L Reese Cumming

Cracking dam wall

The concern for the rights of women has been, and still is, a central issue in our American society in 2015. Amongst the many “rights” that have been identified as critical to the freedom of American women, is the right to self-determination of what a woman can do with her own body; to include the aborting of a woman’s own fetus – a human life – should she believe it to be a burden and an inconvenience to her future decision-making.

And with a similar rise to national attention, the rights of homosexuals have also come to dominate the attention of the American society. The cause is similar: the right to self-determination of what a homosexually-oriented person can do with his or her own body; without restrictions from the societal and political opportunities of open and endorsed relationships in which the legal status of marriage brings with it.

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The Moral Argument – Humanism

Posted on by L Reese Cumming

HumanismSymbol

Recently, a good friend of mine read my essay on Pluralism & Relativism, and asked the question if I could comment on Secular Humanism. As I had started a series of moral arguments, it seemed practical that the next one may as well be on such an “ism”.

I also have to note, with great emphasis, that this essay quickly became a satire and a screed, and for that, I apologize. It just became so ridiculous examining the humanist point of view and then dealing with it in a mature and educated fashion. So I took the gutter. And while the gutter is smelly, dirty, and offensive, it still leads us to where we need to go; to the understanding of the very dangerous nature of Humanism.

In taking a hard look at Humanism, it became efficient to deal with the primary doctrines of this movement of man, and for accuracy’s sake I went to the source: The American Humanist Association (AHA). Within their website I found the three, basic humanist manifestos; generated in 1933, 1973, and 2003. Though there are other affirmations of their common goals to be found, and well worth the read, I am going to concentrate my discourse on the three manifestos as noted in order to contain the content of this essay. Yes, the devil is in the details – in this case the applications of Humanism into our American society – and I do believe it is the Devil who writes any doctrine that attempts to usurp the authority of God.

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The Moral Argument – Pluralism & Relativism

Posted on by L Reese Cumming

Love 01

I had an accident a week back. I recently ran into the unyielding wall of cultural pluralism with an intellectual and spiritual “thwack”. There was no way I was going to miss hitting it. You see, I’ve been cruising my baby-boom mind & body along for many years believing in cultural pluralism; or the allowance of the diversity of thought and action.

CULTURAL PLURALISM

What is cultural pluralism? Well, I noted one such attribute: diversity of thought and action. Dictionary.com recites a definition as follows:

“A condition in which many cultures coexist within a society and maintain their cultural differences; also called multiculturalism.”

(As a side, I would suggest that this attitude runs contradictory to the most fundamental philosophy of America as the “melting pot” of the world.)

More in the necessity of the past several decades, dictionary.com also defines cultural pluralism as:

“A condition in which minority groups participate fully in the dominant society, yet maintain their cultural differences.”

(Here again aside…. All citizens of America enjoy the same traditional rights, freedoms, and equalities. What this definition is implying is that it is not the individual that enjoys these things, but the groups. So instead of one person equals one vote, it implies one group equals one vote; regardless of the number of individuals within any one group. Think how that changes representation and the resultant loss of individual rights that our Constitution blessed us with.)

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This Matter of Freedom of Speech

Posted on by L Reese Cumming

Je Suis Charlie Blood

This post came out of a sense I developed over the past two days that freedom, liberty, and equality are all perfected in their limits, rather than their excesses. This is the foundation of the teachings of Jesus Christ; that in love of God and man, and in practicing that love of God and man, we all have chosen to put aside what divides us in favor of what unites us.

After the horrible shootings at the offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris – leaving twelve dead, and eleven wounded – the politicians and journalists of the western nations all professed a unified theme of freedom of speech; the right to say what you want, when you want to say it, without the fear of a reprisal that would cause some form of immediate harm to the person exercising such a freedom. I had thought I could stop defining freedom of speech with just those three words, “freedom-of-speech”, but I immediately realized that there is no such thing as freedom of speech without the accompanied and reactionary or complimentary thinking and action that results from the observers of such a freedom.

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