'Nature's God' explores the religious underpinnings, or lack thereof, of the American Revolution

[SecularMotion]

In this politically and culturally fractured nation of ours — with no common ethnicity or creed to bind us like most other countries have — we will never properly understand the American experiment until we figure out the Founders.

Such is the underlying message of an absorbing and provocative new book titled "Nature's God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic" (Norton) by Matthew Stewart.

The book is an investigation — an often weighty and deeply rooted investigation — into the religious and philosophical influences of the Founding Generation and into the question that has bedeviled historians for more than 200 years: Were the Founders God-fearing Christians? Or revolutionary atheists? Or something in between?

The Founders have traditionally been called "Deists," but in contemporary America, Deism is an archaic and poorly understood term. What's lost in history, said Stewart, is that the word was often used, in derogatory contexts and otherwise, as a synonym for "atheist."

http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/news/ci_26161301/matthew-stewarts-natures-god-explores-religious-underpinnings-or

[Bragi]

1. Thanks!

Looks interesting. (Could be a companion book to Susan Jacoby's "Freethinkers", which I read some time ago.)

[Brettongarcia]

2. This is important. Note that the phrase "nature's God" implies that "God" is subordinate to nature.

This and the phrase on the "laws of nature" mean that deism/ atheism - or better said perhaps, naturalism - was built into our country at the level of our founding documents. Like the Declaration of Independence.

I've argued about this with that famous conservative theologian at Princeton. He was anxious enough about it, to make sure my remarks on this were deleted from the website (First Things? Or His own website?).

Religious folks survive, only by censoring the many facts that oppose them.

[Igel]

3. Possession is a tricky bit of semantics.

It's not that simple.

"The immigrant's home country" does not mean that the home country is subordinate to the immigrant.

"The ball's color is red." It's unclear what kind of "possession" is at stake.

"John's tendency to be pedantic is annoying." Is he even aware of "his" tendency? Can you possess a statistical summary of your behavior?

I seriously doubt that the writers of the OT intended "Israel's God" to mean that Yahweh was Israel's personal pet.

What's encoded linguistically as what looks like a possessive relationship can be any of a number of different semantic relationships. That particular linguistic tool finds a lot of uses, and we're okay with it. In other languages the same relationship might be expressed not in the way that you would show ownership or subordination but concommitance, co-occurence, or the attribution of some property to a person or object. Just because you can make sense of it in one way in a narrow context doesn't begin to imply that this is the only way that's intended.

Even worse is that this is a single document for a range of opinions with a range of meanings that can be attributed to ambiguous phrases. Much of the frothy verbiage in the organic law of the US is ambiguous on purpose. It has little purpose besides framing the chunkier core parts. And even then, the core often kicks the can down the road on certain points that were easier to paper over.

This is the kind of context in which the translator's adage "ambiguity is your friend" shines. It's also the kind of thing that unless you're exposed to the problem you tend to gloss over--and once the problems pointed out to you, you tend to just stare at it and blink for a long time. I know I did. But there's a bit of generative work on it, and semioticians like Sebeok and even H. Andersen have had a crack at it. Not an easy topic. Even collecting data and getting people to agree on what categories of "possession" there are in English is a bear--easier to classify them formally, but that's fairly facile in many ways.

[Brettongarcia]

4. Yes; and the Bible's language is endlessly equivocal too. It's a common sort of trick. However....

Without giving it all away to anonymous inquirers: there are finally strong arguments for my reading.

A first hint? It is precisely the nature of "democracy" that many traditional relations of ownership, like serfdom, were turned on their head. In this reading "Israel's god" say, in Humanism and Democracy, would indeed be the god developed by the people of Israel.

Related to this, consider also that "The Bible's language" in a poststructuralist reading, would also suggest a document written by, framed by, a larger host language or culture.