The deepest penetration into the sick soul of liberalism that I have witnessed on these threads confirms what I've learned in the rest of my life and it comes from an article written by Dennis Prager a "Columbia-educated, liberal, Democrat, New York Jew" who tells us that whether or not you are liberal depends on your view of the essential nature of man. Do you think the man is essentially morally good or morally evil?
Many readers will be surprised to learn that if one sees man as essentially good one is very likely to be liberal and if one sees man as essentially flawed one is very likely to be conservative. Most modern people instinctively recoil from labeling any given human as "evil"much less every individual that walks the surface of the earth. Those who are schooled in the Judeo-Christian tradition, in other words those who are liable to have read the Bible, know that the fundamental assessment of man is that he is a fallen creature, inherently evil, in need of redemption even more than education.
Jeremiah of the Old Testament (17:9, King James version), "the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked" is echoed by the Pauline doctrine of the New Testament in Romans Chapter 3, " For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God." The leftist believes that man is misinformed, uneducated, desperately in need of the leftists benign hand of guidance. His conception of God is that of himself hovering in the cloud above A Huge Skinner Box which embraces the whole world and everyone in it as he judiciously applies measured doses of affirmative stimulus to generate wholesome behavior. Think of Jonathan Gruber.
The Judeo-Christian Testaments reject the liberals' worldview and especially his role in it, or should we say, above it. We conservatives are in agreement with the founding fathers who held this pessimistic view of the essential nature of man and designed a government to compensate for our inherent shortcomings with checks and balances, enumerated powers and articulated rights in the people. Every branch of modernist thinking, however, attacks the fundamental departure point. So we have all of the pseudo-sciences from the Freudians, to the sociologists, to the racialists, to modern political scientists, not to mention all the spawn of the Frankfurt School rejecting this assessment.
I am a conservative so I want protection against the evil that men do especially when they contrive to leverage their power by getting into government. I am enough of a Calvinist to believe that culture trumps politics because that is the nature of man but I am also enough of a libertarian to believe that conservatives go overboard when they invoke government to address man's sins rather than his actions. I would leave the former to a higher judgment.
To return to Dennis Prager: poverty does not cause crime because it is the nature of man that causes crime. The reason people are criminals is, as Prager points out, for the same reason they are poor-character flaws, or, to use an archaic and politically incorrect term, because they are sinners.
The application of the liberal doctrine of the nature of man to prison doctrine, education, immigration, welfare etc. is limited only by the scope of today's headlines.
The war between us will never end until the war metaphorically described in Genesis comes to an end.
