The Roberts Opinion: It's Not All Bad

Townhall.com ^ | 6/29/2012 | Kate Hicks

[Servant of the Cross]

John Roberts is not a “traitor to his philosophy.” He is not a liberal. He is, above all else, a very strict originalist, and the Chief Justice of a Court that is acutely aware – and wary – of its role in politics. Understand that his opinion, though certainly not ideal for the Right, contains more good news for conservatives in its pages than it does on its face.

So let’s take a look at his surprising opinion – the controlling opinion, as it’s called, which sets precedent and “say[s] what the law is,” as Marshall said so long ago.

The Good News

First: let’s give credit where it’s due. Roberts made it abundantly clear that he’s not a fan of the actual policy. Moreover, he shifted responsibility for this policy back to the American people, and revealed his respect for the separation of powers:

“Members of this Court are vested with the authority to interpret the law; we possess neither the expertise nor the prerogative to make policy judgments. Those decisions are entrusted to our Nation’s elected leaders, who can be thrown out of office if the people disagree with them. It is not our job to protect the people from the consequences of their political choices.”

Unhappy with the ruling though you may be, the wisdom contained in that paragraph alone ought to cheer you. And I promise, there’s more!

Now then. What hath he wrought?

“Commerce Clause” is everywhere in the news today, and if you’ll recall, that was considered the basis for both upholding and striking down the mandate. Roberts threw out the government’s argument that it could regulate inactivity because of the “substantial effect” abstention from the market would have on the market as a whole. This, he said, was way too much power:

“Allowing Congress to justify federal regulation by pointing to the effect of inaction on commerce would bring countless decisions an individual could potentially make within the scope of federal regulation, and—under the Government’s theory—empower Congress to make those decisions for him. […] Construing the Commerce Clause to permit Congress to regulate individuals precisely because they are doing nothing would open a new and potentially vast domain to congressional authority.”

Moreover, he created a new precedent in Commerce Clause jurisprudence that limits its scope significantly, by accepting the distinction between activity and inactivity. In so doing, he created a concrete definition of Federal power that will influence the way Congress makes law in the future, and the way the Court interprets future Commerce Clause cases. Here’s the key passage to that effect:

“People, for reasons of their own, often fail to do things that would be good for them or good for society. Those failures—joined with the similar failures of others—can readily have a substantial effect on interstate commerce. Under the Government’s logic, that authorizes Congress to use its commerce power to compel citizens to act as the Government would have them act. […] The Government’s theory would erode those limits [on the Commerce Clause], permitting Congress to reach beyond the natural extent of its authority, ‘everywhere extending the sphere of its activity and drawing all power into its impetuous vortex.’ The Federalist No. 48, at 309 9 (J. Madison). Congress already enjoys vast power to regulate much of what we do. Accepting the Government’s theory would give Congress the same license to regulate what we do not do, fundamentally changing the relation between the citizen and the Federal Government.”

It’s hard to see at first glance why we should celebrate this ruling, especially because it was evidently not enough for Roberts to overturn the mandate. But what Roberts did here was establish a defining limit on the Commerce Clause, which had heretofore not really existed. Congress is now restricted in its ability to use this very broad power, in that it cannot compel individuals to participate in the market. Consider, also, the wide array of tools at Congress’ disposal under the Commerce Clause to ensure compliance. Roberts has ruled that Congress can’t criminalize not buying something because of the effect abstention will have on the market. Indeed, that was at issue in this case; the fact that it’s unconstitutional is a win for liberty.

Furthermore, Roberts narrowed the definition of “substantially effects” to encompass activity that is already occurring, and curtailed Congress’ power to presuppose, and then regulate, activity.

“The proposition that congress may dictate the conduct of an individual today because of prophesied future activity finds no support in our precedent. We have said that Congress can anticipate the effects on commerce of an economic activity. […] But we have never permitted Congress to anticipate that activity itself in order to regulate individuals not currently engaged in commerce.”

Now, think back to the time when constitutional challenges to the mandate first began to surface: every legal scholar worth his salt, conservative or liberal, believed the Court would kill the activity/inactivity distinction. Yet that was the major victory the conservatives won in this case, and it’s now legal precedent. The mandate itself lives on, but Congress may never apply the full force of the U.S. government to compel anyone to make a purchase. This, the fight for the Commerce Clause, was the real war. And the right won it. Perhaps the fruit isn’t ripe yet, but it will prove juicy in time.

So now, to turn to the legal reasoning for why the mandate remains law. In other words…

The Bad News

Here’s Roberts: “And it is well established that if a statute has two possible meanings, one of which violates the Constitution, courts should adopt the meaning that does not do so.”

You may keep your law, he says. But let me redefine it for you.

In the opinion, Roberts applies a test from an earlier case, Drexel Furniture, to determine whether the “penalty” meets all the requirements of a tax. It’s another long excerpt, but worth reading, as he’s very clear:

“The same analysis here suggests that the shared responsibility payment may for constitutional purposes be considered a tax, not a penalty: First, for most Americans the amount due will be far less than the price of insurance, and, by statute, it can never be more. It may often be a reasonable financial decision to make the payment rather than purchase insurance… Second, the individual mandate contains no scienter requirement [i.e. it’s not punitive for breaking the law]. Third, the payment is collected solely by the IRS through the normal means of taxation—except that the Service is not allowed to use those means most suggestive of a punitive sanction, such as criminal prosecution.”

So here’s how it’s going to work from now on: the mandate is now just the “tax on not having healthcare,” which I’m sure will get a snappier name in the coming days, something akin to the “gas tax,” or the “income tax,” which most of us pay. Roberts says as much:

“[A]ccording to the Government…the mandate can be regarded as establishing a condition—not owning health insurance—that triggers a tax—the required payment to the IRS. Under that theory, the mandate is not a legal command to buy insurance. Rather, it makes going without insurance just another thing the Government taxes, like buying gasoline or earning income. And if the mandate is in effect just a tax hike on certain taxpayers who do not have health insurance, it may be within Congress’s constitutional power to tax.”

So after he invalidated the Commerce Clause justification, he determined that really, the “penalty” doesn’t force participation in the market; hence, why he didn’t throw out the mandate with the Commerce logic. It’s not really forcing people into the market; after all, it didn’t criminalize not owning insurance. It just puts a tax on it, and Roberts notes that taxes are often used to induce certain behavior:

“But taxes that seek to influence conduct are nothing new. […] Today, federal and state taxes can compose more than half the retail price of cigarettes, not just to raise money, but to encourage people to quit smoking. […] That Sec5000A seeks to shape decisions about whether to buy health insurance does not mean that it cannot be a valid exercise of the taxing power.”

Frankly, this doesn’t look like an expansion of the taxing power. Perhaps he’s articulating more clearly the intent behind so-called “sin taxes,” and other behaviorally-motivated taxes, but he’s not handing Congress more power. He’s just explaining a power they already had, and use.

Remember—he never said it was good policy, and in fact made it clear that he feels otherwise. What he did was invalidate an unconstitutional argument in defense of the policy, thereby banning it from future use, and then uphold a bad, but not unconstitutional statute, because it adhered to a permissible exercise of power. Congress passed a tax, he says, and it’s a bad one, and he doesn’t like it, but that doesn’t make it impermissible.

So, is this what the right really wanted to hear? Heck no! We like the dissent, where the whole thing goes. But Roberts is dumb like a fox, and it’s worth looking at the effects this ruling will have on the future, both near and far.

The Upshot

Over, and over, and over, President Obama assured us that this was not a tax. He was not raising taxes on the middle class (that’s what the Republicans were doing, remember?). Nope, says the CJ: ya raised our taxes. Politically, that’s going to prove troublesome for Obama this fall, and in a much more substantial way than having his “signature legislative accomplishment” overturned altogether.

For one, Roberts took away Obama’s ability to campaign against the Court. They upheld his law; he can’t do as he did after Citizens United and construe the ACA ruling as a massively political attack on the little guy and his uninsured plight. He has nothing to blame on the Justices. All they did was recharacterize the “penalty” as constitutional under the taxing power. Roberts robbed Obama of a scapegoat, and stuck Obama with an unpopular law in an election year. Ouch.

Second, Roberts has literally forced Obama to acknowledged that he broke a promise, and raised taxes. And tax increases don’t resonate well with the voters. Now, it’s doubtful Obama will assume responsibility for raising taxes – note that in his speech today, he didn’t acknowledge the Court’s reasoning for the ruling, only that they ruled in his favor. But the GOP has just added a major weapon to its arsenal: want to lower taxes? Then don’t reelect Obama.

This third observation is one that isn’t immediately eminent, but nonetheless just as important as those prior two, if not more so. Roberts has made it substantially easier to repeal Obamacare, and substantially harder to pass anything like it in the future. As noted above, Americans don’t like taxes. And thanks to the fact that many will opt to pay the tax rather than buy insurance (as that will cost less), the insurance problem in this country hasn’t been solved. The fact that we’ve settled the question of the mandate’s constitutionality means we can turn to the rest of the law, and address the flaws contained therein, and perhaps find a real solution to the healthcare crisis. As for future laws, Democrats lost the ability to hide behind “penalty” language. Roberts saw that the mandate waddled and quacked, and gave it the appropriate name. (He also forbade Congress from actually “mandating” anything, so that name isn’t even correct anymore.) The ACA barely passed the first time; future iterations of this theory are destined to fail, because Congress will have to stand up and say, “We propose to enact a new tax so as to influence your behavior.” If that isn’t the proverbial lead balloon, I don’t know what is.

So there you have it: it’s really not all bad. It’s not what we wanted, but then – as I suspect Obama will learn in the coming months – we must remember to be careful what we wish for.

[Eva]

It is not politically expedient to admit to being an atheist. In academic circles it is not politically expedient to admit that you do believe in a higher power than the state.

[C. Edmund Wright]

Your faux moral high horse is much closer to the horse doo doo than you think. I was not making a moral statement at all, I was making a logical one when I said your premise was wrong. For you to say that it is splitting hairs to say that either government tells us how to live or people do, I guess means you think a statist society is the same as a free society. How pitiful.

Your statements factually are wrong and your logic is flawed. If it makes you feel better, I would say that morally your heart was in the right place but your brain failed to follow suit.

I do not need government to inform me morally and neither does God. I am sorry that you need a nanny spiritual leader in secular government. That is really pathetic.

[spirited irish]

“Roberts ruling indicates that he is in fact a statist”

Spirited: Perhaps. But another view holds that Roberts ruling was totally out of character; an abrupt breaking of all that he stands for due to capitulation to threats, thuggery of the worst sort.

Not but two weeks ago Human Events reported a calculated smear campaign against Roberts.

Only creepy, oily low-life characters, Big Liars, would intentionally destroy the good name of another. And in an age where most Americans are themselves morally deficient if not degenerate, the very worst of our kind, Big Liars, et al, feel free to transgress at will, meaning Roberts would have something to truly fear-—falling victim to the conscienceless character assassination goons who have destroyed the good names and reputations of many decent men in recent years.

With regard to Roberts and his strange out-of-character ruling, I find the threat scenario most plausible.

[spirited irish]

“I was making a logical one when I said your premise was wrong..”

Spirited: Positivism replaced logic and reason for morality, hence you fallaciously believe that what are really your moral judgements are in fact logic and reason. This being the case, perhaps you aren’t guilty of splitting hairs but rather of expressing your ignorance regarding worldview, morality, politics, reason and logic.

[Eva]

The ruling was not out of character because Roberts has stated that he has no judicial philosophy, which indicates that he does not hold the power of the judiciary to be co-equal with the state, but rather Roberts simply believes that the state is all powerful.

If Roberts was ever an originalist, he would have stated that his overall judicial philosophy was that of an originalist.

[spirited irish]

If you haven't read Thomas Sowell's take on Roberts, it's well worth reading. According to Sowell, Roberts problem is not that he was threatened but that his elitist-ivory-tower existence has turned his head, hence his betrayal of the common people who trusted him---Pride goes before a fall and a haughty spirit before destruction. As Sowell said, Roberts will have a hard time living with his conscience---it won't be a pretty picture.

Judicial Betrayal, Thomas Sowell

Betrayal is hard to take, whether in our personal lives or in the political life of the nation. Yet there are people in Washington — too often, Republicans — who start living in the Beltway atmosphere, and start forgetting those hundreds of millions of Americans beyond the Beltway who trusted them to do right by them, to use their wisdom instead of their cleverness.

President Bush 41 epitomized these betrayals when he broke his "read my lips, no new taxes" pledge. He paid the price when he quickly went from high approval ratings as president to someone defeated for reelection by a little known governor from Arkansas.

Chief Justice John Roberts need fear no such fate because he has lifetime tenure on the Supreme Court. But conscience can be a more implacable and inescapable punisher — and should be.

The Chief Justice probably made as good a case as could be made for upholding the constitutionality of ObamaCare by defining one of its key features as a "tax."

The legislation didn't call it a tax and Chief Justice Roberts admitted that this might not be the most "natural" reading of the law. But he fell back on the long-standing principle of judicial interpretation that the courts should not declare a law unconstitutional if it can be reasonably read in a way that would make it constitutional, out of "deference" to the legislative branch of government.

But this question, like so many questions in life, is a matter of degree. How far do you bend over backwards to avoid the obvious, that ObamaCare was an unprecedented extension of federal power over the lives of 300 million Americans today and of generations yet unborn?

These are the people that Chief Justice Roberts betrayed when he declared constitutional something that is nowhere authorized in the Constitution of the United States.

John Roberts is no doubt a brainy man, and that seems to carry a lot of weight among the intelligentsia — despite glaring lessons from history, showing very brainy men creating everything from absurdities to catastrophes. Few of the great tragedies of history were created by the village idiot, and many by the village genius.

One of the Chief Justice's admirers said that when others are playing checkers, he is playing chess. How much consolation that will be as a footnote to the story of the decline of individual freedom in America, and the wrecking of the best medical care in the world, is another story.

There are many speculations as to why Chief Justice Roberts did what he did, some attributing noble and far-sighted reasons, and others attributing petty and short-sighted reasons, including personal vanity. But all of that is ultimately irrelevant.

What he did was betray his oath to be faithful to the Constitution of the United States.

Who he betrayed were the hundreds of millions of Americans — past, present and future — whole generations in the past who have fought and died for a freedom that he has put in jeopardy, in a moment of intellectual inspiration and moral forgetfulness, 300 million Americans today whose lives are to be regimented by Washington bureaucrats, and generations yet unborn who may never know the individual freedoms that their ancestors took for granted.

Some claim that Chief Justice Roberts did what he did to save the Supreme Court as an institution from the wrath — and retaliation — of those in Congress who have been railing against Justices who invalidate the laws they have passed. Many in the media and in academia have joined the shrill chorus of those who claim that the Supreme Court does not show proper "deference" to the legislative branch of government.

But what does the Bill of Rights seek to protect the ordinary citizen from? The government! To defer to those who expand government power beyond its constitutional limits is to betray those whose freedom depends on the Bill of Rights.

Similar reasoning was used back in the 1970s to justify the Federal Reserve's inflationary policies. Otherwise, it was said, Congress would destroy the Fed's independence, as it can also change the courts' jurisdiction. But is it better for an institution to undermine its own independence, and freedom along with it, while forfeiting the trust of the people in the process?

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2901993/posts

[xzins]

Then we don't need either a Supreme Court or a Constitution. Just elections.

FWIW, I heard Krauthammer use exactly that same response to O'Reilly last night, when Bill said Roberts was saying to America: "Don't leave the dirty work to us; you vote on it and make the decisions."

So, it is extremely scary, but we have Charles Krauthammer channeling P-Marlowe. :>)

I liked the Glen Beck riff on Roberts the other day, doing a knockoff of "The Princess Bride's" Andre the Giant (I am the dread Piwate Woberts):

I Am the Dwead Justice John Wobuhlts

[Eva]

I haven’t read the Sowell piece, but that is exactly what I have been saying, that Roberts’ ruling was not an outlier. It was based on who he is, a Harvard trained statist communist/socialist, who was embarassed to stand up and be counted as a conservative originalist.

Roberts is one of them, not one of us. He never was a conservative. He was a pragmatist, who voted present whenever a difficult question was asked, just like Obama.

[spirited irish]

Cartoon: Robert’s Rules of Odors http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2902479/posts

[C. Edmund Wright]

To put it bluntly, and somewhat crudely - and I apologize in advance for the pun, but the intellectual eunuch Roberts just slipped us all the dicta....

[betty boop]

But what is really wrong with Western society and America in particular is spiritual, not political. In this context, injury done to friendship over political issues is vain indeed.

Indeed. It makes me heartsick, and it is futile in any case — for you are right, dear spirited, what ails our society is the spiritual disorder of individual souls, collectively expressing as a Zietgeist that rejects Reality in favor of utopian, even magical dream worlds. The obvious disorder (one is tempted to say insanity) in the public or political realm flows from precisely that disorder; i.e., the personal one.

It seems to me there are only two kinds of people in the world: those who are open the the transcendent ground of Being, and those who are closed to it. In other words, those who order their lives in God, and those who believe that God is irrelevant, that everything in the world "supervenes on the physical, or material," and thus is totally amenable to unaided human understanding and ultimately human control. The latter view utterly rejects the notions that man has a spiritual extension and direction, and that man is subject to existential limits of any kind.

Thus for this type of believer, there is no God, there is no Spirit; Man is the sole master of his own destiny. And thus, as you note, "For much too long now, Americans have been seeking meaning, purpose, and salvation in all the wrong places, resulting in growing fear, hopelessness, despair, anger, anxiety, cynicism, and disillusionment."

The error in this line of thinking is that man really is more than just a physical body. But since science cannot observe the "what is more than the physical" of man, it is stipulated that it doesn't exist. Reality is reduced to what man can measure. God is gone; the soul is gone; Nothing replaces them. Man loses the essential core of his own divinely-constituted human nature; he can no longer rise to the full stature of what God intended him to be — the imago Dei — and lapses into a state of subhuman animality. At physical death, man perishes absolutely into the abyss of the Nothing. Life itself is meaningless.

There's more to say on this subject, but I must run along for now: Hubby's chafing at the bit to get down to the Cape now....

Thank you for your outstanding essay/post re: Ecclesiastes and the general topic of vanity. There is vanity, and there is eternal Truth. A reading of Ecclesiastes is extraordinarily helpful in illuminating the difference.

Happy Independence Day, dear sister in Christ, and to ALL!

[Alamo-Girl]

The error in this line of thinking is that man really is more than just a physical body. But since science cannot observe the "what is more than the physical" of man, it is stipulated that it doesn't exist. Reality is reduced to what man can measure.

So very true, dearest sister in Christ!

The point, that man is greater than the sum of his parts, can be made easily by breaking a man into his parts and then reassembling him.

Obviously the result of the exercise would be quite dead.

Thank you so much for your wonderful essay-posts.

[betty boop]

The point, that man is greater than the sum of his parts, can be made easily by breaking a man into his parts and then reassembling him.... Obviously the result of the exercise would be quite dead.

Even that project itself would be a most daunting enterprise to stage: the qualification of "parts" reaches, not only to the organic/systemic levels, but importantly, to the molecular, and sub-atomic levels as well.

But your main point was, for the scientific method to answer this question, one would have to kill the subject in order to abstract its parts for analysis. And if you do that, you are no longer talking about a living organism/living being. You are finally talking about the isolated behavior of "dead" molecules, and how that "sums up."

Such an approach entirely misses the point of what it takes to describe a fully living human being: We are not merely the sum-total of the configuration/deployment of an astronomical number of material molecules deploying (in their mutual relations) "randomly." The fullness of human experience/existence — the universal human condition — is finally not at all describable in, or "reducible" to such terms.

What we may call the "vagaries of actual human history" emphatically tells us that this presupposition is patently not true; and thus, meets a logical dead end....

"Philosophy" already knows this. When will "science" catch up?

Thank you ever so much for your excellent insights, dearest sister in Christ — and for your kind words of support.

[spirited irish]

betty: "...since science cannot observe the "what is more than the physical" of man, it is stipulated that it doesn't exist. Reality is reduced to what man can measure. God is gone; the soul is gone; Nothing replaces them."

Spirited: The "science" in question is evolutionary materialism and/or naturalism and is in every way the antithesis of two-dimensional Christian theism, even to the denial of man's immortal soul:

"Materialism is of the worldview of (one-dimensional) monism which is held in common by pantheism and spiritualism and dates back to pagan antiquity and was or is taught by all non-biblical thought systems.

Greek Stoics and Epicureans, for example, were materialistic monists and these two schools of natural science and evolution held the ancient world of thought in allegiance well into the Roman Empire. Epicureanism reigns supreme in our own age through modern evolutionary materialism, which is merely revamped and revised Epicureanism.

The pagan philosopher Epicurus (342-270 B.C.) believed in an infinite number of worlds, or parallel universes in the words of contemporary 'new' pagan materialists. Like his modern counterparts, Epicurus taught that there was no god or gods, first principles, moral law, souls and afterlife as all things on earth had evolved from the earth material.

Epicurus preferred lower things to higher things, as do his contemporary followers, thus he taught that "all that exists" is an eternally existing void and animated matter. This made human beings, their intelligence and volition, an evolved accident of chance. Reason is left, but reason is active only because sensations (i.e., firing of neurons, chemical interactions) stimulate it." (The Fall of Mankind, Linda Kimball

http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/kimball/120620

As the taproot of modern evolutionary materialism stretches back to Epicurus, and beyond him to Egypt, it is correct to define it as "new" paganism. Materialism is nihilistic because it conceptually nihilizes all Higher Things as betty noted: "God is gone; the soul is gone; Nothing replaces them."

Man is Nothing:

“Man was matter, that was Snowden's secret. Drop him out a window, and he'll fall. Set fire to him and he'll burn. Bury him and he'll rot, like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage. That was Snowden's secret. Ripeness was all.” Joseph Heller, Catch-22

The very air we breathe today is nihilism:

“If you live today, you breath in nihilism ... it's the gas you breathe. If I hadn't had the Church to fight it with or to tell me the necessity of fighting it, I would be the stinkingest logical positivist you ever saw right now.” ― Flannery O'Connor

The practical result of evolutionary materialism is nihilism (spiritual impoverishment)...

"a void in which men vainly seek for meaning and purpose. Always seeking but never finding. When higher things disappear, only the despair of meaninglessness, the pleasure principle, hectic diversions, personal power, and toys remain. And all of this said Solomon, is vanity, for it ends only in death. There is always a grinning skull behind everything we do, including both the Conservative and Liberal struggle for control of secular society." (Ecclesiates: Vanity of Vanities--Western Society is Without Meaning

http://patriotsandliberty.com/?p=17723

[spirited irish]

Spirited: Whereas the practical result of evolutionary materialism is nihilism...meaninglessness which is the same as death, the glorious result of becoming a child of the living, Triune God is spiritual liberty and life eternal:

"Oprahfication Leads to Bondage to the Law of Entropy"

“Because the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God.” (Romans 8:21

) Because of Adam and Eve’s abuse of choice, the living Triune God subjected the whole creation, animate and inanimate, to “the bondage of corruption.” This means that everything is governed by a universal law of decay that is recognized by Western science as the law of entropy. This basic law of science stipulates that everything tends to disintegrate and die. (The King of Glory, Henry Morris, Ph.D., icr.org)

When the Living Word Jesus Christ (John 1:1) died for sin He defeated death so that someday He will deliver and/or liberate the entire creation from its’ bondage to the law of entropy into eternal life.

The law of liberty (James 1:25) can even now be appropriated in principle when we become the children of the living, Triune God for then the Holy Spirit (Third Person of the Trinity) henceforth indwells our bodies and quickens and begins the process of purifying our spirits (minds, hearts), and “where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty” (2 Corinthians 3:17).

The essence of the human is not the body, but rather the immortal soul. In Biblical thought, the body is inert matter organized and vitalized by the soul. A human life is an immortal soul which informs inert matter, thus a body without a soul is no more than a disorganized mass of cells that would quickly disintegrate because it is subject to the law of entropy.

The noblest part of the soul is spirit (the heart, mind, will). The two essential properties of spirit that distinguish it from matter are intellect and will——the capacity for knowledge and moral choice. Spirit can will and think and is freely responsible for what it thinks, wills, and does, hence the living God held Adam and Eve responsible for having willfully abused moral choice.

Spirit is immortal, self-aware and free, the body being matter is not. The key to individual liberty in the material realm is man’s unique spiritual liberty contrasted against a genetically programmed animal-like orientation. Animals do not have spirits, which are linked to intelligence, imagination, sensitivity, self-consciousness, reflection and the capacity for truth and moral goodness.

In Biblical thought, because spirit is free of matter man is able to spiritually transcend the natural or material dimension in order to access the supernatural dimension, thereby allowing man to enter into a personal relationship with the Spirit of God.

A person is a spirit and spirit is uniquely free because only spirit can transcend matter to access the supernatural dimension as Paul affirms:

“Now the Lord is Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom” (2 Cor. 3:17)

To live in relationship with the Spirit of God is to live spiritually, and to live spiritually is to live morally, to have a heart for the eternally unchanging Higher Things—ideals of truth and goodness.

When a majority of a civilization’s people live spiritually, the result will be a good society properly oriented toward life, family, decency, and justice. A good society makes it easy to be good. Correlatively, a good society is one that makes it easy to be free. To be free, and to live freely, is to live spiritually, because only spirit is free——matter is not.

But when a critical mass of a society’s people have turned away from the Triune God, as is the case throughout the West and America, their spirits being no longer quickened by the Holy Spirit and their souls having become materialized, they no longer have a heart for the eternally unchanging Higher Things for they have fallen back into spiritual darkness and are once again subject to the law of death. Thus it is said of such a society, a spiritually dark society, that it is under Divine Judgement.

In this condition a man is like an animal rather than a person, for a person is a spirit, thus Paul speaks of such beings as beasts. Being animal-like, morality is nothing more than a fog of feelings, of disordered passions, compulsions, appetites, sexual perversions, self-centered desires and cold-blooded envy.

Cal Thomas makes this point in his article, “Oprahfication’ of America.” Thomas argues that Justice John Roberts’ bizarre ruling reflects what our nation is becoming, an Oprahfied society where,

“…feelings trump truth and personal experience and class guilt rule, not the Constitution. Oprah Winfrey, who endorsed Obama in 2008, might head a new cabinet department should Obama win a second term: the Department of Feelings.” (Oprahfication of America, Cal Thomas, Townhall.com, July 5, 2012)

Where feelings trump eternally unchanging Higher Truth and Moral Law, pride-induced moral relativism reigns supreme, and being hostile to repentance it imperils salvation.

Though a remnant are as yet spiritually free, America for the most part is no longer a spiritually free nation but rather a spiritually dead, increasingly amoral nation in bondage to sin—the universal law of decay that is recognized by Western science as the law of entropy that stipulates that everything tends to disintegrate and die.

C.S. Lewis saw that the entire human species is becoming Westernized, therefore relativized, and said that moral relativism will certainly end our species and damn our souls.

Yet at least for a while longer it still lies within our power to repent and turn back to our Creator, to be delivered from bondage to disintegration and death into the glorious spiritual liberty of the children of God.

http://patriotsandliberty.com/?p=17762

[Alamo-Girl]

Such an approach entirely misses the point of what it takes to describe a fully living human being: We are not merely the sum-total of the configuration/deployment of an astronomical number of material molecules deploying (in their mutual relations) "randomly." The fullness of human experience/existence — the universal human condition — is finally not at all describable in, or "reducible" to such terms.

So very true!

"Philosophy" already knows this. When will "science" catch up?

I can't be soon enough for me.

Thank you so much for all your wonderful essay-posts, dearest sister in Christ!