Joan and I watched The Colbert Report the other night, on which Stephen interviewed Madeleine Albright, and we were impressed by her composure and her intelligence. But something about the interview, in which Ms Albright was defending her new book, The Mighty and the Almighty, bothered me. I didn’t pay much attention to my discomfort at the time, but now the Raving Atheist does a number on Albright’s performance and nails the source of my discomfort.Separation of church and state cannot be rationally defended except on one ground: that religious beliefs are fundamentally false and worthless drivel, no more useful than astrology or alchemy. The notion that religion is the ultimate and most beneficial truth, but for some reason must be nonetheless be walled off from politics, defies common sense. Nobody advocates separation of science and state, math and state, physics and state — or even separation of the state from softer sciences such as economics and sociology.
So it’s hilarious to watch purported believers, usually religious liberals or moderates, trying to justify separation on other grounds. Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, promoting her book The Mighty and the Almighty, took a crack at it the other night on The Colbert Report. Here she addresses the problem of religious elected officials keeping their faith out of public policy:
Albright: I think that we have to keep the separation of church and state, but we cannot separate people from their faith.
Colbert: Right, how do you separate people from their job . . . if the faith is in them, and they’re in their job, the transitive property of religion says their faith has got to be in their job also, right?
Her statement was complete double-talk, and Colbert nails her hard. Unfortunately, the audience reaction suggested to me that they were as clueless as Albright. They laughed at his question as if it were nonsensical (perhaps in part because of his usual mock-serious delivery), but what’s nonsensical is claiming you simultaneously “bring your faith to your job” without letting it influence you in the least.
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