An Ontological Election

For the first time in my life, a presidential election is taking place in which the conflict of constituencies has moved from one to three theaters

In every other elections, from Eisenhower / Stevenson to Obama / Romney, the conflict has been at the level of policy, with some modest dirty tricks and questionable voting thrown into the mix.

Nixon brought dirty tricks to new heights and from 1992 on conservatives in general and Republicans in particular began laying the groundwork for the international embarrassment of an election we are having this year.

The 2016 election jumped the rails of normality almost the moment that Donald Trump entered the race.

With his skill at playing the media he went from a joke to the Republican presidential nominee beating a large field of Republican candidates who, for the most part and however much I might disagree with them on policy, would be a competent Commander in Chief.

By the time Trump was nominated, the question was no longer between good policy and bad policy, but between solid if flawed competence and dangerous incompetence at the level of knowledge, experience, and temperament.

Now, in the home stretch, it has become clear that the battle occurs on a third plane: reality itself.

The election pits an understanding of reality that most of us began learning in grade school. A reality that finds the deductive logic of mathematics and the inductive logic of empiricism and the sciences persuasive. A reality in which facts both exist and matter. A reality that produces artifacts such as Scientific American, the Washington Post, the New England Journal of Medicine, etc.

Against that, we have a reality the produces artifacts such as The Drudge Report, Breitbart, and InfoWars. Or maybe, it's more accurate to say those artifacts have created the reality rather than the other way around.

This election is more than just a decision about the nature of America.

It is about the nature of reality itself.

A Secular Ethic In A Christian Context

1. LIFE MATTERS: The universal human experience is that life in its ultimate context or backstory, whether that context takes secular or mythological form, has meaning, value, and purpose beyond itself.
   
2. DEATH THREATENS: The anticipation of death experienced in fear, disappointment, and suffering fundamentally threatens this ultimate meaning, value, and purpose by challenging this context.
   
3. FEAR CORRUPTS: The threat of death, evoked in our continual experiences of people, places, and things - including those dark aspects of ourselves that we, our society, or our culture find unacceptable - corrupts our actions such that we become alienated from and destructive towards ourselves, other people, and nature. These corrupted actions may take the form of:
   
• Aggression: attempting to defeat the threat of death through the control or destruction of those anticipations,
  
• Escape: attempting to flee or ignore or be distracted from those anticipations, or
  
• Servitude: attempting to achieve a “negotiated peace” with the threat of death through service to some talisman vainly thought to possess power over death.
  
4. DEATH IS DISARMED: As compared to the corrupt response to the threat of death, there is a freely available freedom from death and its anticipations that replaces destruction with healing and alienation with reconciliation in this world as we know it.
   
5. PEACE IS ESTABLISHED: While this freedom from death and its anticipations is latent in all human experience, ironically it is most unambiguous and militant in our encounters with death and its anticipations where, rather than being explicitly defeated or destroyed, those encounters are subverted into occasions of healing and reconciliation.