Posted on 03/04/2005 11:04:27 AM PST by Zionist Conspirator
Okay. Here's where I get my head handed to me.
You know, I've just concluded a very frustrating and useless e-mail correspondence with a liberal editorial cartoonist who ridicules people who believe the government should "legislate morality," but who believes the government should conduct all sorts of projects to solve our "problems."
It was of course utterly useless to ask him to defend his opposition to moral legislation while opposing murder, discrimination, smoking, people driving without fastening their seat belts, and any number of other things. All he would say was that the government shouldn't get involved in legislating morality (which means, I suppose, that murder and discrimination aren't immoral, else the government couldn't legislate against them). In frustration I concluded my final e-mail to him by remarking that the wrong people advocate social engineering, and the wrong people won't to "leave everyone alone."
Then it hit me. Unfortunately, conservatives are just as hypocritical as liberals in these matters, which gives them a fig leaf to hide behind when debating us. If it is hypocritical (and it is) to insist that the government belongs in the workplace but not in the bedroom, is it not equally hypocritical to insist that the government belongs in the bedroom but not the workplace? If it is hypocritical to advocate the Bible's "social justice" concerns while opposing its sexual restrictions, is not the opposite position equally indefensible?
Okay. Now here's where I get "un-American."
I feel that for too long conservatives have allowed liberals to define conservatism for them. This means that conservatives have come to reflexively endorse the opposite of the liberal position, whatever it is. For example, because liberals hypocritically war against smoking (of tobacco, not marijuana), conservatives (many of whom come from religious traditions that have condemned tobacco long before any liberal ever did) have come to reflexively defend "the right to smoke" (tobacco, not marijuana) even though they may find it "personally repulsive" (the abortion debate, anyone?). And because liberals have become advocates of statism, conservatives have come to think of libertarianism as the very essence of their identity.
But really . . . is this the case? I have long insisted that atheists have no grounds on which to advocate a state of any kind (laws, morals, social engineering, etc.). Nevertheless they persist in imposing a moral vision on an essentially meaningless world. But if atheism is ridiculous as a basis for statism . . . what kind of bedrock does religion serve for libertarianism and laissez faire?
Americans thing of "the state" as a contract among sovereign individuals (even though no one has ever signed this contract or been given the option to defer from signing it). But in earlier times the state was G-d's agent for enforcing Divine Law. It was understood that man has a yeitzer hara`--and evil inclination--and that it was the duty of the state to legislate against sin, even doing so did not cause sin to disappear (it never has) and even though the laws are not always enforceable. The state had the obligation to have those laws on the books nevertheless.
Unfortunately, the traditional American concept of the state has basically destroyed the correct understanding of man's evil nature. If the state is a mere contract among sovereign individuals rather than G-d's agent in enforcing His laws, then what is that agent? The answer is the individual and/or private society. The problem is, in order for private man (individually or societally) to be the proper and sufficient enforcer of Divine Law, man would have to have an inherently good nature. His instincts would have to be an infallible guide to G-d's law. Yet ironically, many people whose theology has the lowest opinion of human nature (such as Calvinists) are today the loudest defenders of the sufficiency of the private sphere as the sufficient guardian or morality.
Is this not as great a problem as people who claim the universe is meaningless engaging in never-ending legislation and social engineering? What kind of religious believer believes in such an exaggerated notion of individual autonomy and human goodness?
It has gotten so bad that now some people have come to look on the state as a completely unnecessary institution whose only purpose is to provide leftists a means of "meddling in people's private affairs." There are even Nazis who think that the abolition of the state will create their perfect, ordered, racially separated world (once the state stops interfereing in people's infallibly sound natural instincts). If the state is so inherently evil and man so inherently good, why not abolish it altogether? If our moral conscience comes from custom or folklore or pure tradition (running on inertia by now), then obviously the state serves no legitimate purpose at all.
Something is wrong here, people. Way wrong. And it isn't just the left. It's the right. It's people who believe in G-d who don't think there should be any laws, or at least that morality ceases to apply outside the bedroom. Morality doesn't come from our instincts. It comes from an objective G-d Who exists outside and apart from all of us. The non-governmental sexual taboos the left so wants to do away with did not originate in the human conscience or in human reason but in a saner situation in the past in which those taboos were the law. As in government law--state law. Cultural memory has preserved those former laws as societal taboos, but without an external authority (ultimately G-d) society would never have had them. Society is made up of human beings, and human beings are inclined towards evil, not towards good (the evil inclination is much stronger than the good inclination). Is it really treason, is it really madness, to suggest that maybe both sides have gotten things backwards?
I do not advocate lawless government or totalitarian government. However, government exists because of G-d and owes its primary allegiance to Him. If we're going to be against all "statism" and all "government interference" and all "social engineering," mustn't we also eventually defend ourselves from the claims of G-d? Is not G-d, the Creator of all that is, the Ultimate (and the only truly legitimate) Social Engineer? If G-d is the Master of the Universe then He must be acknowledged both individually and corporately, and the state and its laws must derive from Him and not from either groundless social engineering or from ethno-cultural holdovers that may or may not be correct. But unfortunately American ideology was flawed in its very conception by Lockean "contract" philosophy.
Again, this does not mean that I advocate bureaucrats in every bedroom or cameras monitoring our activity 24/7 (G-d doesn't need cameras!). In fact, Halakhically it is quite difficult to prosecute someone for a sin, especially a capital offense. But even though the laws are not "enforceable," it is nevertheless society's (the state's) obligation to have those laws. I am merely advocating replacing the secular state with its myriad human laws with a state whose laws come from G-d--as they once did. I fear that the conventional "conservative" alternative--a minimalist "watchtower state"--cuts the ground completely from under us in our arguments against secularist social engineering.
There used to be a movement that advocated "realignment" of the political parties--a situation where all conservatives would move into one party and all liberals into the other. I suggest that what we need is a philosophical realignment in which believers advocate the the governmental "regulartion" that G-d intended (and no other!) and secularist believers in utter meaninglessness become libertarians who believe in live-and-let-live.
Finally, I am not a palaeoconservative, which means that I do not identify "gxd" with the traditional national/cultural religion, whatever it has to be. This is ultimately an indifferentist and atheistic conception. All individuals and societies must eventually conform to the True G-d Who exists outside of tribe and culture and soil. In this sense G-d is indeed (as the anti-Semites claim) a corrosive proto-Bolshevik Who wills that all nations turn from their particular subjective traditions and submit to his universal and objective "rationalist blueprint." Unfortunately, the people most likely to sympathize with my philosophy of government on this forum are probably "palaeos" or at least very traditional liturgical chr*stians. Jews have felt compelled to cling to the philosophy of Voltaire (at least publicly) as though it were a lifeline that provided the only rationale for Jewish freedom in the exile, and Fundamentalist Protestants have come to believe that man's fallen nature makes "big government" a bad thing (since government is run, after all, by fallen people) but that somehow human nature in the absence of the government isn't quite so fallen after all. As a result they have tended to internalize alien concepts and spend more time fighting for "small government" than they do for their own moral and religious beliefs.
I do not share the religious beliefs of Theodore Roosevelt or William Jennings Bryan or FDR. However, I realize that until modern liberals injected atheism and immorality into the "progressive" economic movement, that movement had the support of America's G-dly Heartland. It's a shame that in order to fend off abominations that could lead to Divine punishment I have to vote for people who have become convinced that some form of relief (even government relief) by people who have no alternative is basically indistinguishable from G-dless Communism. Oh well. As long as this remains so, I shall "vote against my own economic best interest" until I die, as I have done all my life.
William Jennings Bryan, where are you?
PS: I just hope that when I log back on on sunday morning I haven't been kicked off this libertarian forum!
When did God get to be a dirty word?
you better put some ice on that.
Bookmark for later reading
Observant Jews will not even write the name of G_d lightly for fear that what it is written upon will be defiled. When I respond to the Jews on this board, I respect that belief and practice and do likewise.
(How did I do with the explanation, Alouette?)
Check your tagline.
Tsk, tsk, tsk.
Yes, who are these g-ds anyways, with their holier than thou attitude?
I completely understand your position. But while the opposite of liberal is conservative, the opposite of libertarian is authoritarian. I believe that many more people are of the libertarian view than either pure liberal, pure conservative, or pure authoritarian. I for one land firmly in the libertarian/conservative corner of the spectrum as I am for a strong military, traditional marriage, but I believe firmly that this world would be far better off if drug abusers were allowed to kill themselves off by legalizing drugs.
The problem lies as it did with the pharases and saduces of the era around the Roman occupation of Israel: the insistence of the obedience to the law to the tiniest degree leads to a worship of the law, not of G-d. You can either have obedience to G-d, obedience to the law, or complete lawlessness. Obedience to G-d will set your heart right and you will have the law written upon your heart and will not even want to disobey.
Unfortunately the liberals don't even believe in G-d, and believe that the laws shouldn't even apply to them.
Until there is the perfect world without sin, there WILL be laws and no matter how liberal they are, somebody will want to disobey them. Heck, the only law Adam and Eve had was, "Don't eat the fruit from that tree", and it was too much to ask of them.
Sorry if I rambled a bit.
DOH! Oops!
Corrected.
God doesn't need police or judges, either. Being omnipotent, He has the power to compel all of us to do His will. However, He chooses NOT to. He instead grants us freedom of choice, even to do wrong or be self-destructive. Thus, God's attitude toward us is fundamentally libertarian.
God did not create government to try to bring about a morally perfect world; that will never happen. Even the numerous civil laws of Leviticus, etc., are not an exhaustive list of all possible sins; some moral wrongs are simply outside the realm of government.
When did this become a libertarian forum? If it is, I'm off it!
HA!!
Well, *someone* had to break the "bad news".
...to the old goat.
But, as for respecting their actual beliefs, I look at it this way. (1) What did Jesus do? (2) If they believe theirs is the true and living God -- as I do mine -- surely their beliefs are impervious to assault. Thus, I'm not the least bit offended if someone doesn't respect my beliefs.
No offense intended, of course.
"Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord your god in vain" is not taken litely in Judaism, thus the reverence even in typing. Kind of like how Muslims write PBUA or whatever it is after Mohammed's name (same, except for the bloodthirty religion part...)
God did not create government to try to bring about a morally perfect world; that will never happen. Even the numerous civil laws of Leviticus, etc., are not an exhaustive list of all possible sins; some moral wrongs are simply outside the realm of government.
Every time man tries to elevate government to enforce God's will, bad things happen, because man does not have all of God's wisdom.
It's not taken lightly in Christianity, either.
I'm afraid I disagree with the latter part of your statement, though I understand where you're coming from. The goal of history is the Kingdom of G-d (literally, not figuratively), when the evil inclination will be destroyed and all people will follow Halakhah. I suspect you have a different messianic belief from my own, but I just wanted to make this point.
The key word here is RIGHT. It's all about rights, rights that the left have no problem stripping away. Smoking is irrelevant, rights are not.
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