Dear Marion,

Thank you for your letter, for your explanations and for
your questions. The reality that I addressed when I wrote:

-    - ... truth is independent of value, ... truth is
-    neither "good" nor "bad", but ... the sole virtue
-    of truth is being true.  In a truly "scientific"
-    perspective therefore, the history and the evolution
-    of social institutions, traditionally so gratifying
-    and so threatening to us, appear very different from
-    what we have been taught to believe
 
is, I think, the same reality which you described, when you
wrote: 

_    So in real life decisions, we can rarely fully trust. 
_    I believe that careful analysis of history, judicious
_    consideration of psychology, culture, strategy are
_    helpful in maneuvering reality to where we would like
_    to find it, but there is a lot of leaping and hoping
_    and luck involved.  We need to be courageous about this,
_    and know, also, that we will often be disappointed.
 
My statement that "truth" is independent of "value" aims at
a distinction between history as "truth" and ideology as
"value", where "truth" is the reflection of experience and
logic, while "value" is the reflection of emotional needs
in ideological myth.

My thesis is that the fundamental task of the "philosophy"
(I resort to that term very reluctantly) of history is to
separate truth from value, to winnow history from ideology,
with which it has been confounded from time immemorial,
from the days when Moses reminded the Israelites that 
pursuant to God's promises to Abraham, they were His Chosen
People, and that Canaan was their Promised Land, to our
fellow citizens' beliefs that this nation had a "manifest destiny"
to colonize the North American continent, and now has a
"manifest destiny" to bestow "democracy" and "freedom" on
the other nations of the earth.

I quote from Wikipedia:

This painting (circa 1872) by John Gast called American Progress,
is an allegorical representation of Manifest Destiny. Here Columbia,
intended as a personification of the United States, leads
civilization westward with American settlers, stringing telegraph
wire as she travels; she holds a school book. The different economic
activities of the pioneers are highlighted and, especially,
the changing forms of transportation. The Native Americans and
wild animals flee. 

Manifest Destiny is a term that was used in the 19th century to
designate the belief that the United States was destined, even
divinely ordained,[1] to expand across the North American continent,
from the Atlantic seaboard to the Pacific Ocean. Sometimes Manifest
Destiny was interpreted so broadly as to include the eventual
absorption of all North America: Canada, Mexico, Cuba and Central
America. Advocates of Manifest Destiny believed that expansion was
not only ethical but that it was readily apparent ("manifest")
and inexorable ("destiny"). Although initially used as a catch
phrase to inspire the United States' expansion across the North
American continent, the 19th century phrase eventually became a
standard historical term.

The term, which first appeared in print in 1839, was used in 1845
by a New York journalist, John L. O'Sullivan, to urge for the
annexation of Texas.[2] Thereafter, it was used to encourage American
settlement of European colonial and Indian lands in the Great Plains
and the west. It was revived in the 1890s, this time with Republican
supporters, as a theoretical justification for U.S. expansion outside
of North America. The term fell out of usage by U.S. policy makers
early in the 20th century, but some commentators believe that aspects
of Manifest Destiny, particularly the belief in an American "mission"
to promote and defend democracy throughout the world, continues to
have an influence on American political ideology.[3]

So much for Wikipedia. My own interpretation of the founding of this
country is that it was the consequence of a military, economic and
political power struggle with "the mother country", a struggle tinged,
if not camouflaged with the ideological, quasi-religious rhetoric of
the late 18th century, which persuaded Adams, Jefferson, Madison and
Washington that they were founding novus ordo seclorum - a new order
of the ages, under the watchful eye of an albeit generic - one size
fits all - benevolent deity, who - annuit coeptis - guaranteed their
undertaking with the full faith and credit of the Treasury of Heaven.
In this perspective the proverbial separation of religion and state is
a joke, the point of which has obviously been lost on the ACLU.

It is from this ideology, to which all of us owe allegiance because
we have all reaped its benefits, - that I believe each of us, for the
sake of his or her existence, must distinguish oneself, just as one,
as a matter of ultimate conscience, has no choice but to distinguish
oneself from all (other) organized religion. 

Here endeth the lesson for the day.

Jochen