Posted on 07/30/2002 9:09:34 AM PDT by Stand Watch Listen
Pardon me. It was your statement that "As long as due process is observed, the State has the power righteously to compel, and to forbid" that confused me. Even as I re-read it, it seems to me to say the state is unlimited in it's power provided it follows a due process. This is at odds with the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights.
While the United States is not omnipotent, its powers are not nearly as circumscribed as your formula flatly states they are. Article I of the Constitution is a long list of enumerated powers granted the U.S. Government under the Constitution by the Sovereign People.
Article I, section VIII, lists seventeen very specific powers. The list is hardly long and the powers are very clearly circumscribed.
I ask again....
Are you saying that you would kill homosexuals if you thought you'd face no risk of prosecution?
Either there is such a thing as an ultimate moral authority (i.e. G-d) or there is not. If there is, then this nation has the right and the responsibility to determine the requirements of that authority and to codify them into law. That would give the government the moral authority to define family and to pass laws along that definition.
If there is not, then this nation derives its moral authority from its governing documents. In that arrangement the will of the people determines what is right and what is wrong. Also, if there is no ultimate moral authority then the rise of the Third Reich was right because it was lawfully voted in. However, once established the people's support was not an issue because it became a totalitarian government that did not derive any of its authority from the governed.
You want to base your argument that there is no overriding moral authority on moral authority, similar to your claim of a right to ignore moral authority. (There are no rights if there is no ultimate moral authority.) It's a paradox that won't support itself.
Which is it?
Shalom.
Here and there.
Consider that Jesus is King of Kings, and what we have in this post is a government (Massachusetts), that believes that it is it's own god.
If we ignore any one of God's three great institutions of the New Testament (church, family, and the state) then I can guarantee you that those institutions will corrupt themselves, and our evangelism will fall on deaf ears within a generation. More people now listen to the government than the church as to what is right and wrong.
Are Christians to have nothing to say about abortion. Or a government that grows increasingly Messianic and openly corrupt with every passing year? Or an educational system that teaches untruths? Or a culture that has become coarse and decayed?
As for direct political involvement by the New Testament church, I would point you to Acts 5:29. There is the first principle. Then I would point you to Acts 16:37-40, where Paul demands that the corrupt authorities make a public show of their mistake in beating and imprisoning a Roman citizen.
God has a plan for the government. As I said, it is not the churches primary responsibility, but if we ignore it it will come back to haunt us. Indeed it already has. Jesus came for a very specific purpose - to save that which was lost and establish His kingdom.
The government, however, uses force constantly. That is the nature of the state. You are furious that I would insist on a moral standard by which to govern.
Yet even now our government follows a particular moral standard, one that in many ways comes from the Christian viewpoint of our founders. Murder, rape, kidnapping, thievery, persecution - we consider these things to be objective moral wrongs and we punish them. We believe (though less and less) that human beings have inherent dignity as created in the image of God. Not every nation does.
So you see that right away our government applies a particular moral standard and disregards others.
If I may be so bold, you would not want to live in a secular society. You would not wish for one if you understood what it entails. A secular society has no basis whatsoever for the dignity of man. Any rights a person has in a secular society are given them by the state. And all the lame discussions in the world by atheists about the "rights of man" does not change the fact that they have nothing to call upon higher than themselves. A secular society would end in tyranny, either by the state or by man. It always has and it always will.
That's what they would want. Then you would be arrested for assault, and the cops would have an excuse to toss out all conservatives from the area for "rioting". Meanwhile, you will not have noticed the gay activist had a dozen friends hanging around discretely, ready to jump to his defense upon your assault and having a legal excuse to pound you into the ground in the process of "arresting" you.
Leftists are only brave when they have the advantage of locally superior numbers, and are confident that the police will protect them against you, but not you against them.
The solution is to pick your battles for when YOU have superior numbers
I have not had time to read this entire thread. Which post of yours are you referring to? I'd like to read it.
Shalom.
They think they do, however, due to two problems. One is pride, the other is a very small imagination.
On the pride front, secularists believe that if they have decided something is true then everyone will eventually agree with them. If someone disagrees it is due to the fact that the someone either doesn't have access to the same facts or isn't bright enough to figure out what the secularist is saying. The idea that someone may be bright, have access to the same facts, and draw a different conclusion is a foreign idea. I can still remember the dismay of my friends in college when they would tell me some fact that they thought would blow the whole argument out in the open and I would say, "I know that. SO????"
They also have very little imagination. They think that the way things are now is the only reasonable way they would or could be. In America we have a basically moral society because we are still drawing on the "moral bank account" left to us by previous generations. Many of us realize this and recognize that the account is depleted if not overdrawn. But the secularists think that America is so moral because morality is obvious and any casual observer would establish property rights, personal rights, etc, the same way that we have them established now. The idea that a rational argument (absent a moral authority) could be made for a society where murder is not only legal but encouraged is beyond their imagination. However, they don't recognize the limits of their imagination due to pride (see previous paragraph).
In the end, they trip themselves up because they insist on rights based on some limited notion of reality that they can not defend, but must demand you accept as axiomatic.
Shalom.
That's a very good point, thanks.
Thomas Jefferon's proposed penal code for the state of Virginia called for the death sentence for those who commmit sodomy. That's a good start.
I hear in Afghanistan, the Taliban pushed a wall over on sodomites as prescribed in the Koran.
I didn't know you were a Muslim. What other facets of the Sharia would you like to see enacted here in the US?
Don't forget to live by WWOD--"What Would Osama Do".
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