Posted on 02/17/2011 5:29:26 AM PST by scottfactor
No one agrees with that more than me. I spent some time wearing a uniform in support of that concept. (not to boast by any means, many pulled far riskier duty than I ever did).
But just because I share the philosophy expressed by Iris DeMent:
Everybody's wonderin' what and where they all came from.
Everybody's worryin' 'bout where they're gonna go when the whole thing's done.
But no one knows for certain and so it's all the same to me.
I think I'll just let the mystery be.
...my political worldview is no less worthy of being termed "conservative" than is yours.
because we have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, • would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
In other words, morality cannot be imposed by government.
Wait a minute. I thought we were to be warned about the danger of emphasizing purely SOCIAL issues.
Tell you what. Why don't all you prophets, soothsayers and hand-wringers get together and just have a few margaritas and enjoy life for a while.
We're grownups. We'll figure it out as we go along.
Every law that exists on the books of a local, state or federal government "imposes" a morality.
Simple example. If you obey the speed limit on the roads, you have just had morality imposed on you by the government.
Incorrect. Laws impose consequences--justice. If laws imposed morality, then laws against murder would eliminate murder. Laws against fraud would eliminate fraud. All laws can do is administer justice, according to whatever the law says that means. The murderer still murders. The crook still commits fraud. The morality of the people has not changed at all in that scenario.
If I drive the speed limit, motivated not by my own sense of duty or public safety, but rather by the desire to avoid punishment, that's not morality. It's self-interest.
Enforced morality isn't morality. If you're not free to choose, than how is that moral? It's servitude.
Your double-minded reply is a non sequitur - it doesn’t address the bottom line issue I brought up. Sorry.
The Golden Triangle of Freedom
The movement in our country to fly on "one wing," reason alone, will ultimately undermine the very foundation of our country -- freedom. America is rooted in the founders' belief that free people, whose God-given rights are protected by a government that allows the individual to pursue their dreams and reap the fruits of their labor, would build the most just and prosperous society in the history of man. They were right; freedom was the key ingredient in the American experiment. Our founders understood it was relatively easy to establish freedom in our Constitution, the harder task was to create a system that would maintain it against the corrosive force of time. The author Os Guinness describes how they accomplished this as the Golden Triangle of Freedom: "Freedom requires virtue, virtue requires faith and faith requires freedom and around again."
That freedom requires virtue was explained by the political philosopher Edmund Burke, who wrote: "Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites ... Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters."
Virtue requires faith because faith is the primary teacher of morality. That is not to say that one cannot be virtuous without faith, but for society as a whole faith is the indispensable agent of virtue. Faith requires freedom. Why has America remained a deeply religious country averting the road to secularism traveled by our European brothers and sisters? Again Madison's "true remedy," the combination of "free exercise" and no religious state supported monopoly, has created a vibrant marketplace of religions extolling everywhere the word of God to inspire people to fulfill His special plan for each of us. Our founders' inspired brilliance created a paradigm that has given America the best chance of any civilization in the history of man to endure the test of time. Time, this time now in American history is putting that to the test.
Psst. I don’t want you to believe in God. That’s your sole decision. I only want you to defend my right of free exercise of faith as a fundamental, essential and non-negotiable plank in the conservative platform. As I do fiscal conservatism and national defense conservatism. It is all for one, and one for all. Or we will all fail and the socialist libs 'win'.
I agree with this. Free people must be capable of governing their own passions. A corrupt people can't make themselves virtuous by fiat. And a virtuous people don't require a fiat.
PS- I am all for the free exercise of religion. And of all religions, I like Christianity the best, and prefer to live in a majority Christian area.
Thanks, Scott! I’m sorry you had trouble with the Word document I sent.
Outstanding replies! Thanks. IMHO, this is living proof of the three-legged stool. It’s the libs that are trying to set FiCons, SoCons and DefCons against each other. They’re creating divisions that don’t need to exist. The worst dividers are the libs within - Grover Norquist is at the top of that list.
Gaffney has spent years examining first hand the muslim/illegal alien promoting of CPAC’s Grover Norquist.
This is what we get when we don’t listen!
Latino Arab American Advisory Committee civil rights training, on Feb. 19
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2674877/posts
I know that a lot of people take that as capitulation or retreat or unacceptable compromise. Maybe it is, but I don't think so. I believe fiscal issues are most certainly a government matter,and can truly ONLY be fixed within the government sphere.
Moral issues overlap with government, I grant you. But surely government won't make us moral. It's up to us as a people to rediscover public virtue, to promote it, and pass it on.
Now if I could only stop fat fingering the keyboard, I’d be OK.
Great post. I appreciate the opportunity it gave to ‘preach’ the Reagan Coalition’s three-legged stool. ;-)
HA! I knew what you meant. :-)
bttt
"Imagine if this country were actually founded upon a wimpy rejection of metaphysical certainty and the leftist embrace of relativism?:
We hold these preliminary findings to be more or less accurate, at least for now, that all cultures have equal validity, and that each culture has its own ideas about rights and duties and so forth and so on and blah blah blah. In our case, we have hit upon this idea -- no offense, but we have this tentative idea -- subject to further studies, of course -- that we would like the government -- that would be your government -- to cut us some slack so that we can do what we want to do -- basically acquire property and be happy, but not limiting ourselves to that. Anyhoo, it is our culturally conditioned idea that Governments -- not all of them, of course, but ours -- should actually derive their power from the people, although we have respect and tolerance for the contrary view that you folks hold. Nevertheless, some of our more headstrong citizens think that we should be able to form a government based upon these vague hunches of ours, which, after all, are as good as your hunches. No, that was rude -- let's just say that our hunches are different than yours, and leave it at that.... No one can presume to be a judge of whose hunches are best.... At any rate, since, as the saying goes, "different strokes for different folks".... "
Thank you, Servant of the Cross! I also appreciate your excellent comments.
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