RELIGIOUS DICTATORSHIP IN AMERICA?
My friend Fish, from another forum, still smoking something...
Fish says to me:
"Your desire to have government control (he means dictate) the behavior of their constituents..."
Nowhere and at no time have I advocated any power of government to dictate or "control" the behavior of the people - a mindset that reeks of a totalitarian police state. The very idea is antithetical to the libertarian philosophy and Judeo-Christian value structure America was founded upon - things I believe in absolutely - because they work.
Fish, determinedly dwelling in the realm of his ignorance and ever busy building self-serving, imaginary conservative strawmen to knock down, attributes to me attitudes and intentions that never were and never will be. He thus proves again that, hunkered down in his anti-conservative elitist La-La Land, he has utterly no grasp of what conservatism is and what conservatives believe.
Moreover, Fish once more makes clear that he is spectacularly oblivious to the role religion plays in a free and enlightened society - the role it has played in America since its founding:
Fish says:
"The sooner we get rid of the religious right nanny state advocates...."
Asserting there exists people who could rightly be called "religious right nanny state advocates" - a fiction that has no existence in the real world and is purely a figment of his anti-conservative imagination - Fish's display of ignorance of the role religion plays in conservative thought and in an enlightened society of free men is simply stunning. He embarrasses himself every time he comments on it. Clearly, he thinks of it as some kind of aspiring dictatorship where, should it prevail, religious fanatics will rule the roost, install 1984-style monitors in every bedroom, and employ a Gestapo-like police force to make sure everybody toes the line:
"How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?"
(The answer required by the Gestapo is five, not four. You have to deny the evidence of your own eyes.)
Moreover, unbeknownst to himself, Fish repudiates and spits in the face of the Founders with his anti-religion diatribe, with his assertion that politics should be devoid of the moral framework inculcated by religion:
"Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens. The mere politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and to cherish them. A volume could not trace all their connections with private and public felicity. Let it simply be asked: Where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice ? And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.
It is substantially true that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government. The rule, indeed, extends with more or less force to every species of free government. Who that is a sincere friend to it can look with indifference upon attempts to shake the foundation of the fabric?
-George Washington
"Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is entirely inadequate for the government of any other."
- John Adams
"Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. The more vicious nations become, the more they have need of masters."
- Benjamin Franklin
"The care of every man's soul belongs to himself [not government]. But what if he neglects the care of it? Well, what if he neglects the care of his health or estate, which more nearly relate to the state? Will the magistrate make a law that he shall not be poor or sick? Laws provide against injury from others, but not from ourselves. God himself will not save men against their wills."
-Thomas Jefferson
Indeed, then, whom shall we trust? Fish and his self-important elitist ilk - those who are certain they are better and smarter that you and me, smarter than the Declaration, smarter than the Constitution (which documents they, having priorities other than human liberty, are ignorant of or dismiss out of hand), smarter than all of human history and certainly smarter than a moldy old God, who (some think) hasn't been heard from in millennia, whose existence they deny - or shall we give heed to the God-fearing, monumental heroes of history - arguably the most brilliant generation of men who ever lived, collected in one place at one time? Rhetorical question, of course...
With all due respect, in comparison with these intellectual, moral and spiritual giants - giants whose lives and work he is obviously, grossly and determinedly unfamiliar with - as he is unfamiliar with the entire founding generation and their history (I believe Fish sees these men and their work as a threat to his elitism) - Fish, like his elitist, everything-is negotiable, power-is-everything, politically amoral ilk, is an intellectual, moral and spiritual pipsqueak - a midget kicking at the shins of the towering monuments of history.
If not to subjugate, control, compel or dictate - which Fish, with his quintessentially liberal mindset, asserts is the intention of religious people in American politics - what, then, is the correct role of religion in an enlightened society and nation? What is the religious dynamic that Fish is so blatantly, willfully and determinedly ignorant of?
Though the same principle is clear in the comments of the Founders quoted above, I think no one has provided or could provide a simpler, clearer, more direct answer to this question than did Joseph Smith, the founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, when he was asked how he "governed" such a disparate hodge-podge of people as were then joining the newly founded church. Smith answered with this:
"I do not govern them. I teach them correct principles and they govern themselves."
Bingo!
The role of Christian religion in America never has been to seize control of government and dictate the behavior of the people, as Fish ridiculously and ignorantly asserts, but to teach and enlighten the people and imbue them with the Judeo-Christian moral and spiritual values and framework that, expressed through the political system, alone allow for the creation and sustainability of a society of free men and women.
Fish steadfastly refuses to confront the inexorable relationship between morality and liberty. Though he would like it otherwise - liberty without the inconvenient encumbrances of morality - you can’t have one without the other.
If individual human liberty is the foundational principle, the objective of government, as it was in the founding of America, it simply doesn't work any other way. As the whole history of the Judeo-Christian West attests, the God-based principles of that tradition provide the only viable and enduring foundation for such a society. The people are free to choose - right or wrong, truth or lies, reality or fantasy, law or lawlessness, order or chaos, liberty or tyranny, light or darkness, good or evil, God or Godlessness... As the people gravitate away from God and the Judeo-Christian morality that flows from him, they inexorably gravitate toward tyranny. You can't fool Mother Nature.
If we choose to turn from God as the wellspring of our free nation - and, indirectly, as the basis for our politics - as we are wholesale now in the process of doing, and abandon the intellectual, moral and spiritual framework within which America was conceived and founded, we will deny and reject the unique and critical dynamics of a durable free society and government - government of the people, by the people, for the people - and, having become more “vicious”, inexorably come to be governed by some other inferior principle - the "masters" Franklin spoke of - a principle and method of government that have no tolerance for individual human freedom, as we are presently seeing beginning to unfold around us.
Torquemada