Posted on 02/26/2014 3:05:25 PM PST by Notary Sojac
Aristotle was not alone.
Rome had a traditional distrust of business built into its institutions way before Aristotle was an influence. And so did Greece. Sparta was not alone in its traditional attitudes.
One can best say that Aristotle reflected his milieu.
And European Christianity being the heir of the classical world carried it over with its own twists.
How wrong can you be?
I never said you support socialism, I said you probably like capitalism yourself, while most atheists don’t.
This is what I said.
“”Capitalism is seen as the most moral of economic systems, you seem to see it as immoral, and socialism as moral, while you probably like capitalism yourself, in general, atheists are only interested in short term gain, so they vote democrat to loot what they can today, and to live as they want, for today, with no concern of the future””
Christians are naturally the biggest supporters of capitalism, they created America, and created it as a capitalist nation.
Atheists are massively socialist and big government, and anti-American.
You sound young, and as though you come from a liberal background, is that the case?
I think this guy is too shallow and closed off from reality to waste much time on, he obviously doesn’t understand anything.
Yeah. I’ve given up.
You can be as selfish and self-centered as you like. God gave man free will but there's a price.
Have a nice day.
But you said I should help others because I want to out of love and now you are saying that I should do these things to avoid paying a price which I am assuming is a punishment. If I want to help people and get pleasure from it why does that require a belief in God?
If anyone will not welcome you or listen to your words, leave that home or town and shake the dust off your feet
“you seem to see it (capitalism) as immoral, and socialism as moral”
Are these not your words?
That is still not an answer to the question. Why won’t you answer the question?
What question was that now?
The ones posed to you where you keep running in circles chasing your own tail?
Give it up.
Sure it is. It’s the most simple of all politics. The very definition of conservative means not doing every new feel good/hair brained thing coming down the pike.
Liberalism is complex. It shifts with the winds. You always have to check and see which color bracelet to wear and read up on which words are now verboten that were in wide use the day before...lest some be offended. Liberalism is mental gymnastics given form.
Conservatism is simple. When something has worked well forever...do that. That’s it in a nutshell. No need to fix what ain’t broke. When you compare that statement to any given conservative idea, you see it fits in perfectly.
Simply.
Not so simple. What you have there is a simplified statement of Burkes ideas. Thats something but certainly not everything.
Russell Kirk defined conservatism (grabbing from Wiki as I dont have his book handy at the moment) -
A belief in a transcendent order, which Kirk described variously as based in tradition, divine revelation, or natural law;
An affection for the “variety and mystery” of human existence;
A conviction that society requires orders and classes that emphasize natural distinctions;
A belief that property and freedom are closely linked;
A faith in custom, convention, and prescription, and
A recognition that innovation must be tied to existing traditions and customs, which entails a respect for the political value of prudence.
And you can mix and match those, emphasize of de-emphasize as required.
In practice, as per Kirk and plenty of others, notably Buckley, conservatism is naturally heterogenous, being as it can come from many dissimilar and unique traditions; liberalism, etc. is by nature a matter of fashion which at any given time tends to conformity. As we see today.
We can cite conservatives as required and find huge differences between them.
Chesterton was quite a different fellow (even politically) from Churchill, who wasn’t all that much like Robert Taft.
I COMPLETELY DISAGREE with Bozell here.
The GOP and Atheism share core traits:
1. Arrogance. Atheists are, as we know, secular humanists so arrogant that they are unequivocal in their declaration that ‘There is no God but Man’. Agnostics, by contrast, are conflicted, and while they generally believe there is no God, there is room for doubt. You can have principled discussions about the matter with them. They can be swayed by evidence.
Arrogance within the GOP-e is such that there is no other Republican but the one they invented this week, which gets kinder and gentler with each passing day, to the point where today’s Republican is indistinguishable from Tom Harkin.
2. An inability to incorporate evidence as a survival instinct. The Atheist, should such a person actually exist in practice, is driven almost completely by short-term self-interest so intense that it overcomes almost any ability at even tactical cognitive behavior. Strategic behavior is COMPLETELY beyond the Atheist, in that even when presented with a probabilistic analysis of the ohysical and metaphysical survival rate of Christian vs Atheist, there is generally no response at all, whatsoever.
The GOP shares this same fatal similarity with its Atheist cousin. In that no matter HOW much evidence that truly conservative, strict-constructionist, small-government, free market positions ALWAYS succeed both politically and economically, in the words of George Wallace, they vow they are never going to be ‘outniggered’ again by their more ideologically bigoted progressive opponents, and thus seek to adopt the very policies that have been proven over the last 5000 years of public policy history to have failed with absolute consistency.
You see, the modern GOP is anti-baby, pro-UN, pro-socialist, pro-fascist (state run industries), anti-religion, pro-pedophile, weak-military, pro-stimulus, pro-subsidy, pro-regulation, pro-illegal alien, anti-middle class, pro crony capitalist in a way even more important to those causes than the Progressives actually are: They give cover and legitimacy to those causes by way of token resistance.
Today’s GOP - Home of the ‘Show Vote’.
“We were overrun.” - John Boehner. That short enunciation of the basic gist of the second shared trait lends the illusion that all of the provably failed concepts promoted by Progressives actually won in the arena of ideas.
At this point, we would lose less if Washington DC were destroyed by multiple ICBMs than to try and fix what we have today.
If the 50 states today decided to disband its union, and pocket all of the federal money it sends to DC, the economies of all but NY, CA, and New England would improve almost overnight, even if it had to mint its own currency based on Petroleum. (In fact, ESPECIALLY if it minted it’s own currency pegged to Texas Light Sweet).
Maybe that’s the stupidest part of Obama’s strategy here: If the USG doesn’t think it has a responsibility protecting our interests abroad militarily, and decides to no longer provide that to the states, then of what value does a strong central government continue to provide in a world with the technology available today?
It took a national effort to build the atom bomb, and we borrowed silver from the national mint for the wiring since copper was in short supply.
Today, the Federal government is nationalizing systemically important private businesses that it put in extremis with policies it foisted on those businesses and then mobilizing itself to prevent catastrophic economic collapse with its national bank.
So, where it used to protect us from the specter of the extermination of entire races, it now pretends to protect us from the economic annihilation it instigates on the entire world.
This is why your rights had to be modified, after all, to protect you.
No, Bozell is dead wrong here. The GOP and Atheism are ideological cousins, if not brothers.
That’s the old joke: What’s the difference between an Atheist and a Satanist?
One is honest about who the boss is.
To: The poster self-identifying as Notary Sojac.
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No kidding.
They “debate” like a liberal troll.
Yes its that simple. Reductionism gets you to the core. And the core of conservatism IS conservatism.
There is no need to complicate things. Complicating things is what leads to liberalism. Conservatism works BECAUSE it’s simple.
Don’t get me wrong. I appreciate the effort you put into your reply and I’m not saying you are trying to liberalize conservatism here. What I am saying is that you don’t need to look for deeper meanings. In the case of conservatism it’s meaning is plain for all to see right on the surface.
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