President's Exhortation to Common Religious Bond is Important

This article was originally published by Technorati on 4 April 2010.

In his Easter address on Saturday, President Obama highlighted spiritual themes in route to plugs for some of his most important policy initiatives. "All of us know how important work is," was one lead-in. "All of us value our health," was another. And finally, "All of us value education."

Promoting these issues, Obama mentioned non-believers, but on this weekend of the Jewish Passover and Christian Easter, the emphasis was on the "common bond" that unites all people of faith.

What is that bond? That bond is a philosophy. More specifically, that bond is a philosophy of the nature of reality.

In basic terms, believers necessarily hold that there is something that is outside of our sense-perceived reality. Thus, they (we) believe in concepts like God, Heaven, Hell and the after-life. While this philosophical foundation necessarily underpinned the commonly-held position of the ancient and pre-historic world, it was first clearly stated by Plato.

Non-believers, by contrast, hold that nothing exists outside of our sense-perceived reality. The father of this view was Plato's pupil, Aristotle.

This distinction in American politics is important because of the First Amendment prohibition against the involvement of religion in government: "separation of church and state," as it has been called.

This separation of religion has also given rise to the inadvertent exclusion of Platonic philosophy from the public sphere by judges who don't realize or understand that both Aristotelianism and Platonism are equally valid philosophies on the nature of existence. And indeed, Platonism is in many ways preferable from the standpoint of governance, as it provides resort to ideals that would staunch western civilization's current flow toward nihilism, or what has been called "radical individualism."

This very concept is the basis for Volaire's famous quip, "If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him." A belief in God points us in the direction of our ideals, and that's good for maintaining the "domestic Tranquility."

People of faith hold a common bond rooted in Platonic philosophy. Though most adherents may not realize it, the desire to return Platonic philosophy to mainstream public life is the real motivation behind such initiatives as the posting of the 10 Commandments in public buildings and the teaching of "intelligent design" beside evolution in biology classrooms.

People of all faiths should strip away the religious elements of these initiatives and unite in returning a religion-neutral Platonism to our society before nihilism undermines the American experiment from the inside.