It’s true that Protestant private schools sprung up a lot in the late 50s and early 60s. They were especially prevalent in the South, where they opened as a response to forced integration.

From a 1979 article:

Currently there are approximately 5.6 million students enrolled in private elementary and high schools — with two-thirds of them in Christian schools.

Another factor is that many of the most determined advocates of this new wave of Christian day schools are upwardly mobile black parents who are willing to make major sacrifices in order to enroll their children. Some of the fathers are ministers, and many of these parents are employed in the public schools.

The problem (leaving aside observations about the reality of trying to immanentize the eschaton as you suggest) is that at best your suggestion is questionably coherent.

What does it even mean to “make the world a better place” in a materialist worldview ? What is this standard of “better” you refer too ? You can’t be pointing to the internal moral compass that lets us tell right from wrong, good from evil, the is not, in a materialist worldview, something that reflects an external reality, but it instead just a set of survival aiding prudential suggestions.

So what does “better” even mean ?

Don’t worry, I don’t expect you to be able to answer. If you are consistent with your materialism then you need to deny that any such “better” as an external objective reality exists.

It’s true that Protestant private schools sprung up a lot in the late 50s and early 60s. They were especially prevalent in the South, where they opened as a response to forced integration.

I am not quite sure what you are trying to prove. That the country is growing more and more secular is a given. However, it was not always that way. It was never religious in the sense that it promoted a religion explicitly but it fostered religion. That is certainly disappearing through court actions and for no really good legal argument. Prayer is a part of Congress and the Supreme Court and Presidency and has been since the beginning. As I said above, Christmas is an official holiday of the US. And some of the states actually had a state religion at one time.

Separation of Church and State is the result of Hugo Black who was a Christian but anti-Catholic. The interpretation that led to less support of religion and specifically Christianity because that is what most were and still are in the US was to reduce support for Catholic education but it had the side effect of the hysteria we see about the display of the 10 commandments or religious displays at various times of the year on public property.

Support of religious education in the sense of vouchers was commonly accepted just 60 years ago. After World War II no one had any problem with vets using their GI bill money in religious schools. I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of vets used the money to become ministers, priests and rabbis. Such a program probably wouldn’t pass muster today under the bogus rulings because of Justice Black.

To keep up the pretense that the US government was secular from the start is nonsense. Not promoting a specific religion is the not the same as secular. To say it is now is very close to the truth but the reasons it is are based on bogus legal interpretations. I would bet that if there were significant number of Protestant schools in the 1950′s we would have a significantly different interpretation of the law today. But Protestants knew the teachers in the public schools were going to provide an education that was compatible with their religion including prayer in school.

Nietzsche did not eschew nihilism; he embraced it as the inevitable annihilation of Europe’s Christian past and its concepts of “the good.” Those who claim that he repudiated it are simply affirming the tactical advantage he gained by pretending to repudiate it. In reality, he invoked nihilism and then claimed the mantle of prophet for himself and the power to discern a new path that goes “beyond good and evil.”

Just how difficult is it to understand that there can be no goodness in such a path? That the annihilation of the good leads to evil? Nietzsche adamantly rejected the value of life. Our concepts of goodness are based on this value—on the golden rule, which reflects it. What goodness is still possible if the golden rule is annihilated? Global warmism? SETI? The Third Reich with its thousand-year jubilee of the blond-haired and the blue-eyed?

Nietzsche was kin to Plato, not Aristotle. His “unhappy consciousness” caused him to long for the annihilation of all existent values, including the value of life. But the same problem that plagued Idealism is also quite evident in Nietzsche and Nihilism. It is impossible to put forward any substantial concept of value after the annihilation of everything that exists. All that remains is nothingness and the vanity of the Zarathustras in our midst, who presume to save us from ourselves (when they’re not killing us).

“Fact: Social Darwinism is a persistent occasional theme in the world of the terrorist.”

Fact: religious commitment is a persistent occasional theme in the world of the terrorist. For recent examples see 9-11, the North of Ireland, bombings and train fires in India and Pakistan, the Bali nightclub bombing, Eric Rudolph, Paul Hill, James Kopp, John Salvi. All recent history. This proves what exactly?

“So everyone knows that social Darwinism led to mass murder.”

This is more than BarryA has been willing to claim, at least with regard to the Finnish kid. With regard to Eric Harris, he’s talking out of both sides of his mouth.

I dealt with some of the language of the treaties in [71] above. I still do not see what is relevant to the fundamentally secular structure and function of American government. What the treaties seem to show is this: the government will proclaim Christian allegiance when convenient, disclaim Christian allegiance when convenient, refer to a monarch it rebelled against as “keeper of the faith,” etc. etc. as convenient. This has squat to do with the structure of our government.

I have never denied that Christian faith was one of the formative influences on American society at the time of government. Of course it was! It seems both pointless and historically inept to suggest that that Christian belief somehow trumps all the other influences also at play.

All the language of those treaties does not change the secular structure of government under the Constitution. Nor — to answer a question posed by someone a while ago — does the reference to the “Creator” in the DoI. The foundation of government in America is the Constitution. The Constituition is a secular document.

As for DeMar, he was used to attack the supposed bias of Wikipedia. I thought it was silly to use one source with an obvious agenda to attack another source for being agenda-driven. I merely pointed that out.

Have you dealt with the information in the treaties yet? Or do you want to pick on the messenger to undermine it in the hope it will support your position. Was Gary DeMar wrong about the treaties? If not, then give up the attack on him. It is not the issue.

I certainly don’t share his position on the bible but that has nothing to do with what was in treaties 150-200 years ago.

You are not making the connection as you noted but just reporting that the killers in question made the connections.”

Denyse responds: Perhaps I can help explain that, Jason.

Barry’s offence (and mine) is to report accurately that people have used social Darwinism as a justification for murder. Murder of Holocaust proportions in the case of the Nazis, and community tragedy proportions in the case of Harris and Auvinen.

Fact: Social Darwinism is a persistent occasional theme in the world of the terrorist.

The Darwinist is at war with that very fact itself. Presumably because he has no other way of dealing with the fact, he must question why anyone ever reports it or brings it up – and asperse the characters of anyone who does. He engages in long, rambling, pettifogging quibbles about everything under the sun. He simply cannot admit the problem and move on.

I am not offering a theory of why the Darwinist has no other way of dealing with the menace of social Darwinism; I am pointing to a behaviour pattern that shows that he does not. If he could, this thread would have petered out long ago, and I would not have had to shut off the thread at the Post-D for time management reasons. (And the comments there represent only a sampling of opinion, with the fantically repetitive stuff removed.)

As I pointed out in my own recent post here, most communities hit by scandal must learn to deal with it. As a Christian journalist, I have considerable acquaintance with the problem of “bad news” stories for religious or pro-life groups of just the sort that Harris and Auvinen represent for Darwinists.

The Darwinists have behaved throughout this episode like people who are used to fudging the truth. Unfortunately for them, in this case, the events took place not in prehistory but in recent or current historical time. So everyone knows that social Darwinism led to mass murder.

Now I wonder more than ever about Darwinism and the old bones. Talk about skeletons in the closet!