Atheist revisionists strike again
One Nation Under Nothing
str.typepad.com
It's hard to overestimate the importance of truth. Known, uncontroversial truth is the meeting point, the common ground around which all of us can debate and argue. The facts remain fixed and serve as an anchor, preventing opposing sides from shooting off into radical places, always pulling them towards each other.
But what if truth is no longer respected? What if instead of acting as an anchor out of which ideologies grow, altered "truth" is merely made to serve ideologies already chosen? What if there's no meeting place, but only shifting sand?
I don't really need to ask "what if"--we've seen what damage comes, what divisions result, how people are manipulated, what evil is done, when lies of all kinds are told. What totalitarian regime has not begun by telling lies about the past? I've been told of an old Soviet dissident joke that recognized this: "The future is known; it's the past that's always changing." Lies make evil possible.
This is why I'm extremely disturbed that we're beginning to see signs in Western societies of the use of altered history for ideological purposes. Since this is only the beginning and the abuses are seemingly small, now is the time to defend the principle of respecting unchangeable, historical truth, even to the smallest details. Once the principle is eroded and people feel free to make adjustments, the situation will be much more difficult to fix.
Robert George points to the latest example of revisionist history in First Things:
firstthings.com
In assembling their pamphlet [of American founding texts], [the people of the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy] were eager to include Lincoln as a founder--the author of one of America’s founding documents, the Gettysburg Address. But the Great Emancipator’s characterization of the United States as a nation under God appears to undermine the strict separationism that the American Constitution Society wishes to promote. What to do?
The answer they hit on was simply to make Lincoln’s inconvenient words disappear. Now you are thinking: How did they imagine they could get away with it? The Gettysburg Address is the opposite of an obscure document. Millions of Americans can recite it by heart.
Well, here the plot thickens. First, the society knows that it gets a certain level of immunity because its liberal secularist viewpoint is overwhelmingly the viewpoint of American legal academics and, indeed, academics generally. Even if the society were to be exposed, it would not be treated the way, say, the conservative Federalist Society would be treated if caught altering historical documents for ideological reasons. Second, the Society knew that in a pinch it could muddy the waters by asserting that, in fact, five copies of the Gettysburg Address in Lincoln’s hand exist, and two of them do not include the words “under God".... The Bliss copy [that contains "under God"] is generally regarded as the authoritative one, mainly because it is the last--and the only one to which Lincoln actually attached his signature....
Of course, none of these copies is actually the Gettysburg Address. The Gettysburg Address is the set of words actually spoken by Lincoln at Gettysburg. And, as it happens, we know what those words are.... Three entirely independent reporters, including a reporter for the Associated Press, telegraphed their transcriptions of Lincoln’s remarks to their editors immediately after the president spoke. All three transcriptions include the words “under God,” and no contemporaneous report omits them.
We ought to fiercely guard the truth about history, and even more importantly, we ought to fiercely guard the very principle that it is not okay to "adjust" history to suit your purposes. Not even for small adjustments. Not even for what you consider to be a good purpose. |
