Posted on 07/20/2007 8:27:02 PM PDT by EternalVigilance
If we’ve allowed ourselves to become so wicked that the government has to control everything we do to “protect” us from ourselves, then we no longer are a free people. A truly free people are a moral people.
"If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind? The organizers maintain that society, when left undirected, rushes headlong to its inevitable destruction because the instincts of the people are so perverse. The legislators claim to stop this suicidal course and to give it a saner direction. Apparently, then, the legislators and the organizers have received from Heaven an intelligence and virtue that place them beyond and above mankind.
"They would be the shepherds over us, their sheep. Certainly such an arrangement presupposes that they are naturally superior to the rest of us. And certainly we are fully justified in demanding from the legislators and organizers proof of this natural superiority." -- Frederick Bastiat, The Law (1850)
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In reality the legislators aren't superior to the rest of us. Mostly they're inferior. For they don't create or produce the values that working men and women do in order to sustain life and raise people's standard of living.. Rather, they destroy values
Interesting quote.
History is filled with elites who felt superior over everyone else. What is unique about our American “experiment” is that trust and responsiblity was placed in the hands of the people and not the elites.
Reasoning with people is different from catering to their intellectual whims. I'll make note that you're calling him names.
200 years is a VERY short time for any peoples who have lived on the earth. Also for 80% of those 200 years we were a nation of people who understood self evident truth. Now we have become a nation or relative truth or deniers of any such truths at all.
This is also nothing new.
Pontius Pilate asked the basic question for all humanity when he asked Jesus, “What is Truth?” The irony of the scene is powerful and poignant because the Eternal Truth stood before him incarnate as a human person.
Jesus said, “My sheep hear my voice.” He said it in answer to his enemies’ demand, “If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly.” Jesus answered, “I have told you.” Then he said two things about faith: “The works that I do in my Father’s name testify to me” and “You do not believe, because you do not belong to my sheep. My sheep hear my voice.”
There are only two kinds of people in this world... those who hear truth and respond, and those who are unwilling to hear truth and reject it.
There are no others.
Even the most “unchurched” of our founding fathers knew that there was self evident truth, even if they did not always agree on WHAT that truth was, they sought it out, the reasoned it out, because they did believe IN it.
Even the Bible does not ask you to mindlessly believe, but commands rather:
Come now, and let us reason together, saith the LORD: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.
If ye be willing and obedient, ye shall eat the good of the land: But if ye refuse and rebel, ye shall be devoured with the sword: for the mouth of the LORD hath spoken [it].
Are really just tired of the Truth?
And Douglas beat Lincoln for the same US Senate seat in Illinois in 1858 too... so what?
Ya sayin’ that crazy outspoken Lincoln was unfit to be President and we should still have Slavery too?
That IS what the voters said !
Let's be real here. No one's advocating criminalization of any religion. For the past 20 years the only religion under attack and now under threat of criminilization has been Christianity, the very source for the principle that undergirds all our rights.
You must be new to FR. Quite a few people around here think Islam, as such, should be banned and all Muslims deported. I believe that would be an example of criminalizing a religion.
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