Posted on 04/21/2007 6:42:25 PM PDT by Jim Robinson
We've got some real challenges facing us. FR was established to fight against government corruption, overstepping, and abuse and to fight for a return to the limited constitutional government as envisioned and set forth by our founding fathers in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and other founding documents.
One of the biggest cases of government corruption, overstepping and abuse that I know of is its disgraceful headlong slide into a socialist hell. Our founders never intended for abortion to be the law of the land. And they never intended the Supreme Court to be a legislative body. They never intended God or religion to be written out of public life. They never intended government to be used to deny God's existence or for government to be used to force sexual perversions onto our society or into our children's education curriculum. They never intend for government to disarm the people. They never intended for government to set up sanctuary cities for illegals. They never intended government to “rule” over the people and or to take their earnings or private property or to deprive them of their constitutional rights to free speech, free religion, private property, due process, etc. They never intended government to seize the private property of private citizens through draconian asset forfeiture laws or laws allowing government to take private property from lawful owners to give to developers. Or to seize wealth and redistribute it to others. Or to provide government forced health insurance or government forced retirement systems.
All of the above are examples of ever expanding socialism and tyranny brought to us by liberals/liberalism.
FR fights against the liberals/Democrats in all of these areas and always will. Now if liberalism infiltrates into the Republican party and Republicans start promoting all this socialist garbage, do you think that I or FR will suddenly stop fighting against it? Do you think I'm going to bow down and accept abortionism, feminism, homosexualism, global warming, illegal alien lawbreakers, gun control, asset forfeiture, socialism, tyranny, totalitarianism, etc, etc, etc, just so some fancy New York liberal lawyer can become president from the Republican party?
Do you really expect me to do that?
So very true, dearest sister in Christ!
No Betty, they say we don't need 'a particular god' in order to have a base for our rule of law.
Considering the universality of the moral law, I wonder what "secular" (finite, contingent, man-made) thing can serve as the basis for moral law.
Our concept - "do onto others, as you would have done onto you", - is a man made virtually universal/world wide golden rule. -- And it works, as you can see demonstrated by our Constitution.
To say -- ("different strokes for different folks"), is tantamount to saying there is no moral law. Period.
Not true in an absolute sense, Betty. ~Harmless~ 'different strokes' are best tolerated if you seek tolerance for your own harmless idiosyncrasies.
And I'd say we can all agree that there are many varieties of 'different folks' out there. True?
You cannot have a just, secure society premised on such a shaky basis..
Our Constitution is based on the golden rule, [granted, much abused] and if followed, we can have a just, secure society.
I'd be willing to entertain all proposals!!!
Thanks for the opportunity to give y'all mine.
Secularists may say those things, but not all libertarians are of that persuasion. I am one myself; or more precisely, I began as one and wore the title with pride for years. But of course, I have no truck with the present breed! To me, Christian libertarian is the only political compass, and you can take it straight from Corinthians -- Where the spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. Secular libertarians go off the pier in pretending liberty means freedom FROM God.
Seems to me it's always a question of what Authority one recognizes. We have to get our certitudes somewhere and we cannot serve two masters. Politically, the choices are God or the state. Even libertarians (neo variety) will turn to the state if they will not have God. Libertarians of the old school see the state as innately evil. The Lord doesn't think much of it either :-) -- See 1 Samuel 8-18. Institutionally, the state seems bent on breaking all 10 Commandments at once. At the least an airtight case can be made that it supports itself entirely by taking other people's property without their permission -- they call it taxation, anyone else could call it theft. By any name it is wrong and destructive. Such has always been the nature of the state, all states, from the beginning: one class exploiting another. Even Marx got that one right.
The old-school libertarian stood uncompromisingly for the natural rights -- life, liberty, property. I still do. There is no telling what the new ones believe. Once you abandon God, the mind has no place to anchor.
I've always sort of regarded John Locke as the "classical libertarian." I have few "problems" with him....
But this modern breed -- I find it difficult to distinguish them from Left Progressives on many, many issues. :^(
I wholly agree with your statement: "Where the spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. Secular libertarians go off the pier in pretending liberty means freedom FROM God."
Yeah -- those guys of the "bite the hand that feeds you" school. For the life of me, I can't figure out what they think they gain from this attitude. Whatever it is, it seems it must be thoroughly illusionary....
And this observation of yours: "The old-school libertarian stood uncompromisingly for the natural rights -- life, liberty, property [e.g., John Locke]. I still do. There is no telling what the new ones believe. Once you abandon God, the mind has no place to anchor."
Oh my, that is so very, very true! Those who abandon God stand on shifting and shifty sands.... They take a flight from reason itself. Or so it seems to me, FWIW.
Thank you so much, T'wit, for your brilliant essay/post!
ABSOLUTELY TRUE AND A VERY KEY ISSUE IN OUR ERA.
The globalists have that relativistic philosophy and have been pushing it wholesale for many decades.
Of course, when they get in OVERT power it will be changed very starkly.
THEN or shortly thereafter, it will be ONE WAY—WORSHIP SATAN, OR DIE.
BTTT!
Of course, you and I have never, ever agreed about this issue! I don't suppose we're going to start doing that today. :^)
But follow the logic here. We have founding documents, principally the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, with a Bill of Rights. The Constitution itself has a Preamble, which is We the People's "chartering" of the federal government to carry out certain enumerated limited functions on the People's behalf, and on behalf of the future generations of We the People. This is a covenant between the People and the State, an arrangement in which the People are sovereign -- as befits their divinely constituted nature and dignity -- and not the State.
To my way of thinking, the Declaration of Independence is the "Preamble to the Preamble": It identifies who the "We the People" are. The DoI says that We the People are all equally creatures of God, created by Him; and that is the very reason we have unalienable rights: The human nature that God created requires life, liberty, property in order to come into its full human potential; and these the government may never infringe without just cause.
Of course, the gummint infringes away all the time, and especially so in more recent times, when increasingly God has been made to recede from the Public Square.... Go figure!
The fact that the "Golden Rule" is evidently a cross-cultural, universal moral code only testifies to me that there is a certain uniformity to the human nature that God made. We seemingly have an in-built recognition of moral imperatives: But this ability to discern and recognize is in-built into our nature by God.
Another thing to bear in mind is that the Word of the beginning which God spoke to make a universe and all the things in it is the Logos, another Name for which among Christians is the Son of God. The Logos is the alpha and the omega -- the beginning and the end. It is the foundation of universal order, the order of the human person, and the order of society. It was already in the world LONG BEFORE the Incarnation of Christ. It structures reality -- including its moral component. Humans seem to have an innate sense of it somehow. It is called the Golden Rule: It is God's universal rule, God's measure; for the Rule emerges from the nature of God Himself. All men everywhere can recognize it with little or no effort.
So I don't think you can really argue that there isn't something divine about the Golden Rule. And anyway, we are not trying to erect a theocracy in America here, for goodness sake. Further, this isn't really a question about organized religion at all. So your point about a "particular god" to me is moot. (There is only the One God, even though He is worshipped in different ways by different people(s).)
To say that God, Man, World, and Society constitute the reality we experience is not to declare a "particular god," or too give preeminence to any particular religious sect or creed, but to affirm God the Creator Who fathered "We the People" and gave them their liberty -- just as the Framers affirmed the Creator God in the DoI. The logical inference to draw here is that Americans (at least originally) understood themselves to be a people "under God."
Thank you so much for writing, tpaine!
AMEN! AMEN! AMEN! AMEN! AMEN! AMEN! AMEN!
Magnificent essay, dearest sister in Christ! Thank you so very much!
Libertarians are strongly in favor of limited government, and so am I. But you must have some government or you do get anarchy. Sometimes I wonder, though, whether in some libertarian quarters the desire for limited government is related to the same desire to get "quit" of God: To obtain for man absolutely unlimited freedom to do whatever he wants without moral constraints being imposed on him "from the outside."
But such a desire is nutz to me; it represents a total flight from reality.... It also is a repudiation of essential human nature...which ab ovo necessarily has a social dimension.
The fact is unrestrained individuality -- that is, a focus on the individual without regard to his participation in (and obligations to) the wider civil society -- can easily lead to anarchy. We've recently been chatting on another thread about Niels Bohr's complementarity principle, which states that two seemingly mutually-exclusive things can often be complementary and shed light on each other, that one is not necessarily "right" at the expense of the other being "wrong." It seems to me the federal Constitution ever seeks to justly reconcile a fundamental complementarity:
Early in the eighteenth century a philosophical statesman, the Marquess of Halifax, had seen a duality in the object of constitutional law to keep the balance "between the excess of unbounded power and the extravagance of liberty not enough restrained." -- R. V. Jones, in Niels Bohr: A Centenary Volume, 1985Finding that balance has been the great distinction and achievement of American political order. The difficulty -- the challenge -- is to maintain that proper balance....
Thank you so much for writing, metmom!
How long did it take, exactly? Science measures. Anything else you take on faith, yes?
AMEN! AMEN!
Thank you so much, dear Quix! AMEN, indeed!
>>>> Not the least of which is how long it would take to deposit the layers of the grand canyon, have them compress, bend and fold and then have water wear down through a mile of solid rock.
I can’t measure anything exactly. The objective is a good estimate with an error range and to eliminate things that are not true.
For water to dig a hole 20 miles wide and a mile deep takes many many times longer than 6,000 years. It also takes thousands of years for a layer of sedimentary rock with bones in it to fossilize and compress. There are thousands of layers there. The rock in the area has uplifted by nearly two miles - that takes millions of years.
Clearly the canyon itself is on the order of a million years plus and the rock its wearing down through is hundreds of millions of years old. People who study that sort of thing say you can actually rock layers dating back more than a billions years. Its pretty staggering.
>>One thing that perplexes me is secularists (e.g., Libertarians, et al.) say that you don’t need God in order to have a moral base.
>>You cannot have a just, secure society premised on such a shaky basis..
I like Clarence Thomas’ take on this during his confirmation hearing. He said he believes in natural law, as a Christian but he recognizes the Constitution as the only basis of American Federal law.
Yes, I like that, too. It's a truthful answer, albeit a rather artful one: For it's silent on the basis of this "only basis" of American law. Unless you think the Constitution just magically popped into existence out of a pure nothing....
Actually it is the brainchild of classically educated, self-identified men of God. Thus, the Constitution's roots trace back to Athens and Jerusalem....
Thanks so much for writing, gondramB!
Well put.
The Bork nomination changed everything. Unless you are John Roberts you need to be artful and short on your paper trail to get confirmed to the court. This is not good.
That's for sure.... Why do we keep electing rabble to the House and the Senate??? They ensure that truly good, eminently well-qualified people do not serve on the federal bench if they can possibly help it. Only those as corrupt as themselves will do! Sigh....
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