The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [208]
New ideas, invention and creativity in general, always spearhead a kind of freedom, a breaking out from hobbling constraints. Freedom is a prerequisite for continuing the delicate experiment of science which is one reason the Soviet Union could not remain a totalitarian state and be technologically competitive. At the same time, science - or rather its delicate mix of openness and scepticism, and its encouragement of diversity and debate - is a prerequisite for continuing the delicate experiment of freedom in an industrial and highly technological society.
Once you questioned the religious insistence on the prevailing view that the Earth was at the centre of the Universe, why should you accept the repeated and confident assertions by religious leaders that God sent kings to rule over us? In the seventeenth century, it was easy to whip English and Colonial juries into a frenzy over this impiety or that heresy. They were willing to torture people to death for their beliefs. By the late eighteenth century, they weren’t so sure.
Rossiter again (from Seedtime of the Republic, 1953):
Under the pressure of the American environment, Christianity grew more humanistic and temperate - more tolerant with the struggle of the sects, more liberal with the growth of optimism and rationalism, more experimental with the rise of science, more individualistic with the advent of democracy. Equally important, increasing numbers of colonists, as a legion of preachers loudly lamented, were turning secular in curiosity and skeptical in attitude.
The Bill of Rights uncoupled religion from the state, in part because so many religions were steeped in an absolutist frame of mind, each convinced that it alone had a monopoly on the truth and therefore eager for the state to impose this truth on others. Often, the leaders and practitioners of absolutist religions were unable to perceive any middle ground or recognize that the truth might draw upon and embrace apparently contradictory doctrines. The framers of the Bill of Rights had before them the example of England, where the ecclesiastical crime of heresy and the secular crime of treason had become nearly indistinguishable. Many of the early colonists had come to America fleeing religious persecution, although some of them were perfectly happy to persecute other people for their beliefs. The founders of our nation recognized that a close relation between the government and any of the quarrelsome religions would be fatal to freedom -and injurious to religion. Justice Black (in the Supreme Court decision Engel v. Vitale, 1962) described the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment this way:
Its first and most immediate purpose rested on the belief that a union of government and religion tends to destroy government and degrade religion.
Moreover, here too the separation of powers works. Each sect and cult, as Walter Savage Landor once noted, is a moral check on the others: ‘Competition is as wholesome in religion as in commerce.’ But the price is high: This competition is an impediment to religious bodies acting in concert to address the common good. Rossiter concludes:
the twin doctrines of separation of church and state and liberty of individual conscience are the marrow of our democracy, if not indeed America’s most magnificent contribution to the freeing of Western man.
Now it’s no good to have such rights