And what thinks he of rights, then? George Will, atheist.

God, the Founders, and George Will

So Conrad Black says Will is “a professed atheist”?

I have read of his irreligion before, but I wonder where and when he has professed it.

Anyway, he is one of those atheists who think it good that the plebs believe.

What then does he personally think of alleged natural rights?

It looks like he believes in the rights in the Declaration of Independence, but not the God.

Or is it just that he thinks it good that others believe in those rights, as he thinks about God?

According to author Conrad Black,

Will agrees with Irving Kristol that “it is crucial to the lives of all our citizens, as it is to all human beings at all times, that they encounter a world that possesses a transcendental meaning, a world in which the human experience makes sense.

"Nothing is more dehumanizing, more certain to generate a crisis, than to experience one’s life as a meaningless event in a meaningless world.”

Really?

Is that how he personally experiences his life?

That it is "a meaningless event in a meaningless world"?

If not, why not, since he seems pretty clearly to suppose that only religion, though false, supplies the meaning, and only for those who mistake it for true?

And is that government’s problem, anyway?

Still, he might be right (how very Marxist of him) to think, as he seems to, that with the decline in religious faith come greater demands on this, our one and only life.

So we should lie to people just to stop them making such demands?

Why?

Per Black, Will claims some key founders like Jefferson and Madison thought it good the common folk were actual Christian believers since that helped shore up their belief in the rights of the Declaration.

And Will sees (as does Black) a conflict between honoring those rights - I think he and Black are both assuming Locke's right to property is implicitly on that list - and trying to better the common fate in this life.

So much the worse for the rights, then, I say.

Why doesn't Will?

Black’s piece is interesting in more ways than one.

He is not at all happy with Will's atheism or his valuing Christianity only as a matter of expediency, whether personal or political.

Are conservatives really so obtuse as to take it for granted that of course we should not only believe what the founders believed (or wanted the hoi polloi to believe) two and a half centuries ago but want what they wanted (or what they wanted the hoi polloi to want)?

All of us?

Or are they just smart enough to pretend to be that obtuse?