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The Right-Wing War on American Law

By Brendan Beery
Posted on June 23, 2011

I wrote yesterday [ http://beeryblog.wordpress.com/2011/06/22/if-allegations-are-true-liberty-law-school-should-lose-its-aba-accreditation/ ] about Liberty University’s “law school” and how its indoctrination of students to place “God’s law” above “man’s law” renders Liberty’s law graduates unfit for admission to any state bar in the United States. But Liberty’s conflation of religion with law has even more troubling implications than that; after the inauguration of George W. Bush as president, American agencies and courts charged with the neutral application of secular law were overrun [ http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2007/04/08/scandal_puts_spotlight_on_christian_law_school/ ] by graduates of Liberty, Oral Roberts University, and Regent University.

As I mentioned yesterday, Libert University was founded by Jerry Falwell, this man:

[ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-CAcdta_8I ]

And Regent University was founded by–of all people–Jerry Falwell’s host in the last clip, this man (seen here with closeted homosexual rat-dog Ben Shapiro):

[ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EmYERHAb_XI ]

Regent has produced such famous alums as Monica Goodling [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monica_Goodling ], the barely pubescent political hack Bush appointed to rid the Department of Justice of career lawyers who were not “loyal Bushies [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/14/AR2007031400519.html ].” She was found to have committed serious misconduct [ http://jonathanturley.org/2011/05/10/monica-goodling-reprimanded-by-virginia-state-bar/ ] in her zeal to Christianize the Department of Justice, but in all her concern for the well-being of others, she sought and was granted immunity [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/11/AR2007051100779.html ] to rat out her fellow crusading footsoldiers. Naturally, her alma mater, Regent Law School, like Liberty, teaches that Christian Old-Testament doctrine trumps [ http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2007/04/08/scandal_puts_spotlight_on_christian_law_school/ ] the piddling US Constitution.

And let’s not forget Oral Roberts, whose law school spawned the inimitably insane [ http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/michele-bachmanns-holy-war-20110622 (four posts back at http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=64531860 )] Michele Bachmann; ORU was founded by this man:

[ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61_rPgitFmc ]

The Bush presidency saw a concerted effort to replace secular justice with evangelical dogma [ http://www.politicususa.com/en/obama-shines-some-light-into-the-doj-why-doesnt-he-love-america ], and the proliferation of law schools with religious missions created a pool of Jesus-first lawyers to draw from for appointments to governmental posts.

Since we’ve been on the subject of Liberty Law School, take a look at this reporting from Sarah Posner at Religion Dispatches Magazine [ http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/politics/4585/exclusive:_liberty_law_exam_question_on_notorious_kidnapping_case_pressured_students_to_choose_%E2%80%9Cgod%E2%80%99s_law%E2%80%9D_over_%E2%80%9Cman%E2%80%99s%E2%80%9D/ ] about Liberty’s mission:

The law school, founded in 2004, “upon the premise that there is an integral relationship between faith and reason, and that both have their origin in the Triune God,” claims a vision “to see again all meaningful dialogue over law include the role of faith and the perspective of a Christian worldview as the framework most conducive to the pursuit of truth and justice.” The law school received accreditation from the America Bar Association last year.

The folly in this is evident straightaway. There is indeed a relationship between faith and reason: it is the relationship of opposites. Reason involves [ http://waronignorance.net/reasoning.html ] inductive observation, deductive thinking, analogical precision, and above all the rigorous treatment of evidence.

Faith, on the other hand, is [ http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/faith ] “belief that is not based on proof.” We have “faith” in things that we cannot observe, cannot prove, and—to the unbearable anxiety of religious dogmatists—we are not programmed to know. So faith is nothing more than opinion.

I tell law students never to use the words “I think” or “I believe” in my classroom unless masochism is their bailiwick. In law, we reason [ http://waronignorance.net/reasoning.html ] from general premises (rules), apply them to minor premises (provable facts) and then arrive at legal conclusions. To resolve any syllogistic difficulties in this process, we use analogies, definitions, and common experience.

One of the most difficult things to get past as a law professor is our cultural disposition toward beliefs. We commonly hold beliefs—about ghosts, about UFOs, about the Bermuda Triangle, about the afterlife—that we have expended no intellectual travail in fostering. So beliefs are a dime a dozen, I tell students; check them at the door. In a court of law, you can either prove it or you can’t; no judge will have faith in your assertions and characterizations.

But Liberty Law School wants us to believe that both faith and reason have their origins in a Triune God. What role has reason played in discovering a three-part deity comprised of a human, an invisible spirit, and a man in the sky who’s in charge of the other two? What part of one’s belief in such a thing is anything but sheer faith?

When I was a kid, my mother once tried to prove to me with a sort of parable that the universe had to be created by an intelligent being. She said,

Imagine you are walking through a forest and you come upon an area where all the underbrush has been cleared away so that the bare ground is visible in the shape of a circle; and right in the middle of that circular patch of bare ground you see two sticks, each perfectly straight and equal in length, placed perpendicular to one another so that they form perfect right angles and are crossed exactly at the midpoints. What would you assume about how they got there?

I failed to see the point. I said, “I’d assume a person put them there.”

My mother continued, “Then how can you look at the order of the universe, infinitely more complex than those two sticks, and say that nobody put the universe here?”

I was not such an easy kid to “reason with,” so I shot back, “If God created the universe, wouldn’t God have to be far more complex than your two sticks? So who created God?”

And there’s even more to this example that merits rebuttal. The example (which I think my mother later told me was based on the writings of Thomas Aquinas) only works if the analogy between two meticulously placed sticks and an ordered universe is a good one; it’s not. Look around at the universe—it is not ordered; it is chaos [ http://www.imho.com/grae/chaos/chaos.html ].

All the crossed-sticks example shows is that nature is disordered, because only when the disorder of nature is cleared away by a person and something more structured than nature’s randomness is placed among the chaos of nature does evidence of intelligence emerge. Nature itself has no such order, so how does one conclude that the natural world–unaltered by man–was created by an intelligent being? The intelligence demonstrated by this metaphor is the intelligence of man, who creates order, not any god, since this god’s alleged creation is chaos.

As one might imagine, my mother was not pleased with my rejoinder, but she had provided me with a valuable lesson (although not the one she intended to): religion and reason don’t mix. Any attempt to make faith seem reasonable collapses under its own weight.

One needn’t have any opinion as to the psychological or spiritual advisability of faith to see that faith and reason are not compatible. If Liberty Law School wants to imbue its captive audience with faith, that’s between Liberty and its captive audience. But Liberty ought not conflate faith with reason and expect anyone intelligent to believe it.

Copyright 2011 Brendan Beery (emphasis in original)

http://beeryblog.wordpress.com/2011/06/23/the-right-wing-war-on-american-law/ [with comments]