Faith can be a beautiful thing. An online dictionary defines faith as "complete trust or confidence in someone or something." In the context of religion, the same dictionary describes faith as "strong belief in God or in the doctrines of a religion, based on spiritual apprehension rather than proof." [1]  My personal faith is a great source of joy and comfort to me, but it is not fact, and I fear too many people do not understand the difference.

The First Amendment to the United States Constitution guarantees freedom of religion. That is a fact. The First Amendment was ratified on December 15, 1791 as part of the Bill of Rights.  The text of the First Amendment states: 
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...." [https://bit.ly/1zFG4Hh]. There is no debate about the text of the Amendment.  These words were ratified by the several states and made part of the Constitution. The history of these words and the history of the ratification process, the product of a cooperative effort by many people in different state legislatures over a roughly contemporaneous period culminating in 1791, is irrefutable. There is no need for any leap beyond historical facts that everyone accepts.

On the contrary, the many different varieties of religious faith have sparked controversy, conflict and disagreement throughout history. The history of persecution of some religious groups by others was a principal motivation for the European migration to America, and subsequently, for the guarantee of freedom of religion in the United States Constitution. There is no framework of fact sufficient to establish the truth of any specific variety of religious belief. For that reason, a person who believes in any religion must go beyond what the facts can prove--they take a leap of faith.

Under our Constitution, each person has the right to decide for themselves whether or not to take a "leap of faith."  The choice a person makes--whether to believe or not believe something beyond what the facts can support--has no impact on their status as a citizen. We are all guaranteed equal protection of the laws.

But the constitutional protection of religious belief is not a blank check. We do not, for instance, allow the practice of human sacrifice, even though that practice has been part of some religions in the past.  The reasoning is obvious--the Constitution guarantees equal protection of the law to all, and that is inconsistent with allowing religious practice that harms non-believers.

For their part, non-believers sometimes act as if their reliance on facts--and by facts, I mean those statements whose truth can be verified independently using tests such as correspondence, coherence, repeatability and predictive power--makes them more worthy than believers. Facts definitely have more utility than faith in the realms of science, engineering, criminal justice and similar professions. However, the constitutional guarantee of equal protection of the laws applies equally to people acting on the basis of religious faith as well as to those acting on the basis of fact. 

There is a bit of natural tension between religious faith and fact, but the two are not mutually exclusive because there are significant limits to what we know. Most of the matter and energy in the universe are "dark", and do not interact with light or other matter the same as ordinary matter and energy--we don't know what this stuff is! [2] Keeping what we can know to be true in perspective leaves room for reasonable people to choose faith, or not, and to tolerate those whose faith choice is different from their own. Indeed, even scientists can (and do) choose to take the leap of faith in realms they know are not governed by fact.

And the limits of factual knowledge leave plenty of room for faith, but not the overly specific faith that most religions espouse. There is a clear factual record that supports the current theory for the evolution of the life on earth from the Big Bang to homo sapiens. But in the words of astrophysicist Neil Degrasse Tyson, "What happened before the beginning? [We] have no idea..... religious people assert... that something must have started it all.... In the mind of such a person, that something is, of course, God." [3]  The factual record leaves room for belief in God. It doesn't support the culturally-driven, anthropomorphic mythologies we generally associate with organized religion. And it definitely doesn't support persecuting one another over the differences between our various mythologies. In other words, the factual record demands toleration of differences in religious faith--because of all we don't know--it supports the First Amendment. 

[1] www.google.com, dictionary; https://bit.ly/2Vb2q0v 
[2] Tyson, Neil DeGrasse, Astrophysics for People in a Hurry, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, NY, 2017, pp. 59-60, 108-14.
[3] ibid., p. 32.



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It's hard to avoid thinking about time on New Year's Day.  Arguably, it's the most valuable commodity.  We cannot buy more time.  We all have 24 hours in a day.  When we lack control over what we do during those 24 hours, we say we lack freedom. 

We can lack control because we are constrained by external forces--we can be enslaved or imprisoned or coerced by a despotic government.  The Constitution of the United States is a framework for enabling freedom. At the outset, the Constitution did not perfectly provide formal freedom--the freedom enabled by government institutions--to all segments of our population. Freedoms were unjustly restricted based on race, color, gender.  The history of our country has been marked by a history of extending formal freedom to ever-increasing segments of our population.  

Formal freedom has never translated to actual freedom immediately.  Even after the Constitution was amended to eliminate slavery and extend basic civil rights to people of color and, later, to women, those rights were denied and restricted by informal social mechanisms, domestic terrorism, and procedures specifically designed to obstruct the actual practice of basic freedoms by targeted groups. For these groups, the basic freedoms only became real in practice when sufficient numbers of individuals in society accepted and stood up for the rights of the targeted groups.  In other words, the structures of our government enabled freedoms, but only individual behaviors made them real.

And it is also true that, while we cannot buy time, we can buy more control over the time we have.  We can buy the services of other people to do tasks we would rather not do, giving us more choice in how we spend our time.  In other words, we can buy more freedom.  To a certain extent, if your ability to buy more freedom is strictly a function of your positive individual choices and behaviors, I say good for you.

But none of us are strictly a product of our individual choices and behaviors--we all inherit resources or liabilities from our parents.  And to the extent that your ability to enjoy more freedom than others is a function of systemic inequality, I say the government has a role in lessening the disparity between the freedom enjoyed by the wealthiest and the freedom allowed to the poorest.  That is what the beginning of the Constitution means:  We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.  

We cannot say that our government is living up to its constitutional mandates to establish justice and secure the blessings of liberty if it enables too great a disparity between rich and poor.  Such a disparity is no less than a disparity between the freedom of the wealthiest and the freedom of the poorest.  That disparity violates the letter and spirit of the Constitution, at least to the extent that it is a function of systemic inequality rather than individual merit. 

This is not an argument for communism or for any naive utopian concept of economic equality--those philosophies remove the incentive for individual choices and behaviors that are the engine of a productive human society.  It is, however, an argument for reasonable constraints on capitalism.  Such constraints clearly include a progressive income tax.  The purpose of such a tax is to narrow the inequalities in the initial conditions between children born to the rich and children born to the poor.

In his classic book, A Theory of Justice, John Rawls offers the most elegant defense of this idea.  He states it as follows: "Social and economic inequalities are to be arranged to that they are both (a) to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged and (b) attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity." (Rawls, p. 83) Progressive income taxes support Rawls' vision as well as the purposed enumerated at the beginning of the Constitution. Progressive taxes do not take away from the freedom of rich children, who do not choose or earn the circumstances of their birth families.  They can, however, enhance the freedom of poor children by giving those born to the poorest parents a reasonably level playing field from which to exercise the power of individual choice.

Even though we live in a society that maintains a facade of progressive income taxes, we do not actually enforce those taxes.  That is why Senator Romney pays 15 percent of his income in taxes [disclosed in the 2016 campaign and reported in the Salt Lake Tribune] when his actual tax bracket requires something more along the lines of a 34 percent tax payment.  For at least the past forty years or so, we have followed a path of empowering an aristocracy of hereditary wealth that is inconsistent with the principles of our Constitution.  Ironically, the increasing disparity between rich and poor is reducing the incentives for constructive individual choices and behaviors at both ends of the spectrum.
 
Constructive individual behavior is key to the freedom of others in society, but it is also the key to our own personal freedom.  Destructive behaviors can trap us in the slavery of addiction, debt or hate.  These forms of slavery affect all of us without regard for color, race, gender or economic status.  We can only liberate ourselves from these forms of self-imposed slavery by making wise choices, and a lot of those choices have to do with how we spend our time. 

There are, of course, other factors in our imperfect society. I have argued in this essay for the government's role in mitigating matters of health and circumstance that overwhelm the power of individual choice. I wish you all freedom from such circumstance. I wish you all the opportunity to leverage the power of your choices in the coming year to give yourselves the greatest possible freedom. I wish you all the satisfaction of knowing, on the next New Year's Day, that you have spent your time as wisely as possible in 2019.