Posted on 12/28/2011 8:28:19 PM PST by doug from upland
“Of course we do, but the inhabitants of Judah whom Jeremiah prophesied against had that same right not to be offended by the sin that was so prevalant then.”
In my copy of the Constitution I cannot find any specific right to not be offended. So you are saying that the Politically Correct are....correct? We need language/thought police to ensure that no one is ever offended?
So the second that we accept Christ, we have not only the right to not be offended, but the right to know exactly what is going on in the bedrooms of other people in case they might be doing something that could offend us?
I have never heard of these special rights granted Christians before.
OK I understand where you are coming from. I agree with your sentiment.
You are creating a logical error for yourself, the error of the complex question.
They aren’t “special rights granted Christians”. They are civil laws derived from the cultural mores of a basically Protestant society. It was a commonplace of American life from it’s beginning up to the mid 1960s.
The 1960s were a revolutionary decade marking the rise of the counter culture. The counter culture made a sharp break with historic American values. Evidently the counter culture’s values are what you are accustomed to think of as ‘normal’, to the point that you find the older culture preposterous and possessing “special rights”.
That idea is one that has long been promoted by the cultural left in its war against Christian influence in public life. So I have lived through a time when bible verses were read in public elementary schools to a time when even private firms replace ‘Merry Christmas’ with the odious ‘Happy Holidays’.
So we DO have a right to not be offended? As I understand it, speaking to another FReeper here, we have a right to not be offended based upon the validity of our morals and standards.
It’s a hypothesis that I lean toward supporting. Is it what you are trying to say as well?
“So we DO have a right to not be offended? As I understand it, speaking to another FReeper here, we have a right to not be offended based upon the validity of our morals and standards.”
Well your statement is a bit convoluted and I’m not sure I understand exactly what you mean. If you mean “do we have the right to enact laws that are based upon our moral standards?” the answer is yes. All laws are based in someone’s idea of morality. It’s just that over the last 50 years the traditional ideas of public morality loosely based on Christian ethics have been kicked to the curb and replaced by the values of leftism. The left has won the culture wars and a combination of coarse libertine behavior and political correctness rules the land.
The point is, you have your personal morals.
I have mine and I bet they aren’t that far apart.
I do not expect others to live up to my personal morals and then condemn them when they fail to.
Do you?
“I do not expect others to live up to my personal morals and then condemn them when they fail to.”
Maybe you should. Why should you be indifferent to the spread behavior antithetical to Christian ethics?
Well you see, I am a Christian but I am also an American that loves his Constitution and the freedom that it provides. The way I read the Constitution, it doesn’t really give anyone the right to personally condemn others based upon morals and values that they might not even hold.
If I fail to live up to my responsibilities as a father, a husband, a Christian and an American, then I have fallen short of my own goals. However, if someone that I do not even know has a different set, and I fail to live up to his out of simple ignorance, who is he to condemn me in front of Mohammed or whatever other demon he worships?
“The way I read the Constitution, it doesn’t really give anyone the right to personally condemn others based upon morals and values that they might not even hold.”
Free speech and freedom of religion guarantee exactly that right. The Bill of Rights restricts the government from setting limits on the ability of individuals to speak their mind.
Civil laws are based on morals and values. You would have a hard time finding any laws that aren’t based upon morals and values. The battles over abortion, gay marriage, euthanasia, animal rights, the equal rights bill, green energy, all of these are ultimately rooted in whose values and morals are going to prevail.
Over the years the social and political Left have worked tirelessly to expunge laws rooted in Christian tradition and to replace them with laws and customs hostile to it.
In the 1950s and probably every decade prior to it, Jeter’s behavior would have earned him a great deal of public condemnation if it had become known to the public. Even divorce was socially frowned upon, to the point that Nelson Rockefeller’s divorce was seen as sufficiently a problem to keep him from running for President in the 1960s.
As to your Mohammed comment, the values of Islam were never a concern in America until a terminal stupidity began to set in in this country, opening to doors to Islamic immigration. Dubya being one of the prime culprits. We will soon enough begin to reap the violent consequences of this folly, just like Europe.
“We will soon enough begin to reap the violent consequences of this folly, just like Europe.”
Because we live in a society that allows them to set a standard based upon a religion that only they adhere to, and then allows them to condemn the rest of us for not living as their religion dictates we should.
“Amazon has the value at $170.”
Once you’ve established what she is, the price is of little matter.
Islam will not coexist with anything not Islamic. Hardly news. But that particular clash of civilizations has no bearing on historical America, whose main contact with Islam was having its citizens kidnapped and enslaved by Muslim states. Captain John Smith shared that fate before becoming a founder of Jamestown. It’s a pity that our current crop of weakminded leaders have so little knowledge of the nature of Islam and the threat it poses to the West.
The facts are still that the founders cited Deuteronomy more than any other work while establishing American law. Christian mores were the root of American law and culture for most of its history. The references of America being a Protestant nation are too numerous to mention. There were two New England states with official churches well into the 1800s. The radical separation beloved by alienated Leftists and paranoid libertarians simply didn’t exist until the rise of the counter culture in the 1960s. Somehow the country managed to prosper with all that scary religious influence, whereas post 60’s American civilization hasn’t been anything to brag about.
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