Another WTF? Moment

Courtesy of Rick Santorum:

At one point, though, he opted for prose over accuracy by saying "freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom." Sociologist Os Guinness said it better, that "freedom requires virtue, virtue requires religion, and religion requires freedom."

Virtue - a person's ability to control his desires and order his actions according to the Golden Rule - makes freedom and democracy possible. For most, virtue is derived from religion, but that hardly means a man without religion cannot reason his way to virtue. Witness the ancient Greeks.

That could be the howler of the month: yes, indeed, some classical philosophers, most notably Socrates, made the attempt to establish a basis for moral behavior in purely secular terms (and quite successfully). This was a radical departure (let us not forget that Socrates was executed for, among other things, atheism).

The fact is that religion permeated the lives of the ancient Greeks to an extent that probably exceeds even that in contemporary America: religious observance was not only pervasive -- household shrines were ubiquitous, public shrines and temples were equally so (witness the scores of herms, votive figures that graced roads and streets, dedicated to Hermes, the god of travelers, that dotted the countryside -- it was one of the centers of civic life. Mark Kleiman has more analysis.