Posted on 02/05/2002 8:18:30 AM PST by JediGirl
England had a bicameral legislature, an executive branch and a relatively independent judiciary. The key change was an elected executive and upper house.
The origins of modern Western civilization are found in the Reformation and Renaissance, both of which introduced the idea of individual self-determination, one from the divine, the other from the secular perspective.
The Reformed Churches and the Anabaptists in particular believed that churches could govern themselves by electing officers and should not be run by aristocratic bishops or popes. That's why the crowned heads of Europe repressed religious dissent and why so many dissenters came to America.
The royalty recognized what you dismiss: If you don't need a pope or bishop to run a church (and in England the King himself was the head of the Church), similarly you don't need a King or Duke to run a country. If a church can be governed by the elected representatives of the membership, so too a country can be governed by the elected representatives of its citizens.
Thank you for the kind words! I think this is what you mean.
That's it! I may even steal a phrase or two someday...
By debating evolution, we are, in point of fact, contending for the philosophical soul of the conservative movement.
It is my belief that conservatism should be based upon objective moral principles rather than upon any received wisdom, and should not be tied to any particular religious dogma, especially when certain peripheral claims of that dogma conflict with established scientific fact.
That is not to say that conservatives should not be Christians, or even primarily Christians. What it means is that when conservatism comes into open (and so unnecessary!) conflict with science, it discredits itself in the minds of educated people, for reasons having nothing to do with the rightness or wrongness of its moral philosophy. Conservatism, in my opinion, needs to break itself of such self-destructive indulgences as creationism, or it will marginalize itself utterly, to our nation's peril.
Nobody created the creator. God is eternal.
1.Everything which has a beginning has a cause.
2.The universe has a beginning.
3.Therefore the universe has a cause
God doesn't have a 'cause' because He has no beginning or end. He is the First Cause.
I know its hard to comprehend something eternal, but think of it this way -- God is the creator of time, so he is not confined to the 'time' that we are a part of. He is outside, or transcendent to time, space and the universe.
The concept of "inalienable individual rights" not a belief of Christians or prized by the churches? I disagree. The whole idea behind the Reformation is justification by faith alone - that each individual believer had his own relationship with God without the intercession of priests or bishops. Even more radical was the idea that a believer could read and interpret the Bible for himself. The individualism of modern Western civilization was born in the Reformation (and Renaissance), in which many of the ideas of the Enlightenment are rooted.
The Declaration is quite clear, we are endowed by our Creator "with certain inalienable rights . . . ."
Ah, but is the Creator a person or a process? The important word isn't "Creator", it's "endowed" and "inalienable".
The Declaration speaks, in its very first sentence, of Nature and Nature's God, which is a deist, not a theistic formulation. In any event, if it is true, as so many here claim, that the Constitution is biblically based, then surely in the past two centuries some learned churchman has produced an "Annotated Constitution," with scriptural references following each sentence in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, so that we uninformed laymen can grasp the divine source of our governing document. Could you please direct me to such an "Annotated Constitution"? A link will suffice.
I believe that if there was evolution, it was designed by God.
I don't know why people have to argue about something like this. We probably won't know the answer to this until we meet our maker.
You might want to pick up From Dawn to Decadence, which is Barzun's recently published masterpiece, an overview of our Western civilization. He explains how the dominant themes of the last five centuries are rooted in the Reformation and Renaissance, which gave birth to the Enlightenment and the ideas now embedded in our Declaration of Independence and Constitution. Although secularism is a theme in the West, the emphasis on individualism and individual rights was advanced by the Reformation, without which it is highly unlikely the ideas of Locke or Montesquieu ever would have been written.
It's also a particularly good read today, because of the contrast between the Christian West and the Muslim world, which did not experience this development and began to go into decline around the same time the modern West was born. The Muslim world never had a Reformation and remains mired in authoritarianism and a benighted form of religious fundamentalism not seen in the West in centuries.
Do you want to be taken seriously? Please tell me that you are aware of the egregious errors in your above reasoning; people WILL notice when you violate basic rules of logic. Using grossly flawed arguments neither furthers your position nor does much for your credibility. (Variations of this "proof" have already been thoroughly dissected and analyses of such can be found in numerous places.)
And now I can run off to dinner!
Freegards.
My original motivation in getting involved in the crevo threads was a feeling of dismay. I knew that creationists were out there, but it was a shock to find that sensible conservatism had such a large anti-science wing. It has to be countered if we're ever going to get anywhere, so I started diving in on any thread where nobody else was doing the heavy lifting for the E side. But that's not why I keep coming back.
These debates have been a whole second education. It's fun. It isn't a life, but it's a hobby.
I'm almost disappointed now when the other side doesn't show up.
You needn't worry, evolution boy. I'm always close at hand.
Pretty serious hobby... what are you getting out of it?
I don't have to quote scripture for you to understand my point. You can see the difference in countries based upon Judeo-Christianity and those that aren't. I am not claiming these societies aren't faliabile, as we are all human. Indeed, many who "claim" to be Catholics/christians, in reality are liberals who support abortion, etc. There has also been a lot of conflict and violence in all of humanity--Still, truth exists. Whether or not the majority live up to the exercise is not my concern for this argument, only that the truth can be ascertained and therefore practiced on an individual basis, thereby achieving differing levels of spiritual perfection.
The truth is that the founders believed in a specific doctrine--that God is a well-spring of unfathomable love, mercy, and forgiveness--not war, hatred and oppression like we see throughout the Moslem world. The founders beliefs are reflected in how they constructed our political bodies.
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