Posted on 12/01/2001 10:28:24 AM PST by Brian Kopp DPM
By Gary L. Morella
I have a question for those who believe that the atheistic worship of the state is to be recommended over an appreciation of a "higher" or "natural" law as the foundation for the rights that government ought to secure for the common good.
Natural law can be readily appreciated in the American experience, given the preamble to the Declaration of Independence: "When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary ... to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them ..."
Natural law is something above power or force that gives content to the notion of justice. This notion suggests that there is a higher law by which the positive law of the state is to be measured and judged. Slavery was ultimately abolished in America because of the recognition of this "higher law."
Thomas Aquinas sets the most famous variation of this approach in his Summa Theologica. His natural law is a participation in the wisdom and goodness of God by the human person, formed in the image of the Creator. It expresses the dignity of the person and forms the basis of human rights and fundamental duties. This was the approach later used by Martin Luther King, Jr. in his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," which contains references to Aquinas.
Simply put, what has state worship done for us lately? We only have to look at recent history for an answer. We saw the deaths of six million Jews and 20 million Ukrainians in the concentration camps and gulags of Hitler and Stalin, respectively. Today, we see the killing of 40 million innocents in what should be their safest place of refuge, their mothers' wombs.
If the state is the final arbiter of the law, the sole dispenser of rights, we're in big trouble, given the lessons of history. The state can easily take these rights away with catastrophic consequences. This is inevitable when each man is a universe unto himself, courtesy of Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which ignored a very important question: What happens when each citizen's "personal universe of rights" collides with another's? In the absence of some absolute, immutable, higher law, knowable through reason and not just faith, we're left with anarchy.
But more to the point, the traditionally recognized goal of a respected political regime is the common good. Does killing our children when they're most vulnerable and promoting aberrant behavior that leads to physical ruin meet that goal?
The fact is that ignorance of the necessity for human law to be rooted in the natural law has led to the major ills plaguing society today. This has nothing to do with theocracy. It has everything to do with common sense and the rule of right reason. This is obvious to any Christian who knows that God's supreme gift to us was the opportunity to choose him freely.
Interestingly, those decrying theocracies have no problem accepting a "state religion of amorality," which is promoted by demagogues who won't stand for any opposition. This is the current state of affairs in a "politically correct" but "morally bankrupt" America for which we can thank the example of the former "adolescent-in-chief," whose main claim to fame was making the country more comfortable with its vices.
Another false premise here is that atheism precludes belief in natural law.
Communism did kill with ruthless efficiency: 25 million in Russia during the Bolshevik and Stalinist eras, perhaps 65 million in China under the eyes of Mao Zedong, 2 million in Cambodia, millions more Africa, Eastern Europe, and Latin America--an astonishingly high toll of victims. This freely expressed penchant for homicide was no accident, but an integral trait of a philosophy....
I got you now. I assumed the worst. (As you can see, it exists among others.)
Does God accept Visa, or is it a cash-only affair?
Pure BS. Religion will NEVER rival the number of innocents slaughtered by atheistic communistic regimes in the last century. If you honestly believe this, your ignorance is worthy of ridicule.
Go atheism.
Please read it again, he sets up no such straw man. He is quite lucid in delineating those to whom he refers.
Again, that may well be the case. So "someone" is an idiot. {smile}
Further, comparing body counts in the 20th Century to the body counts of previous, religion-inspired body counts is flawed because the 20th Century had the "benefit" of industrial killing methods (machine guns, gas chambers, etc.)
This argument is fundamentally flawed. No pun intended.
As a fellow believer, I agree with the author except for this one part:
This is obvious to any Christian who knows that God's supreme gift to us was the opportunity to choose him freely.
No, we can not do this. He chooses us, not the other way around.
Atheism as an animating philosophy of the state always kills, eventually, every time the experiment has been tried, without a single exception.
This assertion is proven false by the fact that 85% of the Nazi Party membership were Lutherans, the source of their anti-Semitism.
Anyone who places the state over the individual - be they an atheist or religious - is a loaded gun pointed at the head of an innocent. (Sorry for the mized metaphor, but you get the idea.)
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