Liberalism is America’s state religion. Most Americans might practice Christianity at home, but our elites certainly don’t, and they’ve taken pains to make sure Christians’ beliefs have a negligible impact on public policy. You can threaten the president with impunity, but refusing to celebrate sodomy is grounds for losing your livelihood.
This is as intended. Defanging Christianity was the whole point of Liberalism, after all. Here’s establishment bag man Bret Weinstein straying far outside his stated profession of biology to tell Christians to shut up.
Weinstein conveniently ignores the fact that the West had a shared set of values, rules, and assumptions called Christianity. Of course, he can’t mention that because the Christian faith is an obstacle to his paymasters’ immanentization of the eschaton.
Liberal professions of faith like the above always contain a germ of irony because Liberals must embrace a core set of values, ground rules, and assumptions while staunchly denying there are any. The foundational assumption of Liberalism is that freedom is absolute. It reduces all values to preferences, and its only rule is that no one may impose one’s preferences on another.
Most people don’t notice that Liberalism is a particular belief system with its own quirks and flaws. Even most Western Christians are so immersed in a Liberal worldview that they take its basic assumptions for granted. But this is an intellectual blind spot that non-liberalized Christians can exploit.
All species of Liberal–be they Progressives, Libertarians, or Conservatives–are so conditioned to accept unlimited freedom as a basic premise that they don’t know how to react when someone questions it. Try asking any of the three kinds of Liberal, “What good does your proposed policy serve?” Watch him sputter.
Some among the Libertarian subspecies have tried to answer that freedom itself is inherently good because the freer people are, the happier they are. Like all utopian ideologies, this one falls apart on contact with reality.
Suicide rates serve as effective shorthand for a people’s misery. If Liberals are right, and freedom produces happiness, we’d expect Russian suicide rates to climb under communism and fall after the end of the Soviet Union. Instead the exact reverse happened.
The truth is that freedoms aren’t self-necessary. Every freedom has a proper end, and the intrinsic value of its end determines the conditional worth of that freedom.
This is why every right has a reciprocal responsibility. The Framers of the US Constitution gave a nod to this reality in the Second Amendment. The freedom to own guns exists to obtain the greater good of security. This relationship inescapably implies a duty on the part of gun owners not to wreak mayhem. Only the Second Amendment states what its enumerated right is for, but using the same interpretive key, it’s not hard to see the duties implied by the others.
As Clown World slouches on and suicide rates in the US rise, we get a different picture than Liberals paint of what really makes people happy. Turns out that unbounded, undirected license isn’t the key to a thriving, fulfilled life. What people want is order–the kind of order those old Christian rules and values used to provide.
Christianity creates the conditions within which people can flourish. That’s a good indicator that Christianity is right about human nature. It’s only natural that people would hunger for a Christian order, despite the Liberal worldview they marinate in.
I’ll close with the prophetic words of Benedict XVI:
But when the trial of this sifting is past, a great power will flow from a more spiritualized and simplified Church. Men in a totally planned world will find themselves unspeakably lonely. If they have completely lost sight of God, they will feel the whole horror of their poverty. Then they will discover the little flock of believers as something wholly new. They will discover it as a hope that is meant for them, an answer for which they have always been searching in secret.
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In other words, when left adrift and without purpose in the total freedom of the modern world, a non-insignificant number of men kill themselves that don't in other scenarios.
This means those advocating for Freedom™ either have never experienced atomization and alienation, or they don't care about those that have and would rather live like locusts as the world around them melts down. Who cares about that tiny percent? My stereo system is coming in next month.
Not caring about your neighbor is not a virtue.
Every time we pray for the refugee, stranger, and whatever euphemism for invaders, I just want to scream WHAT ABOUT US? They only love us Americans when it's time to pass the hat.
Women are affected too. They just express it in a different way: most of my girlfriend are on at least one drug for "brain chemistry". The drugs never improve their lives one bit. One of them told me I should go on them because once I did, I'd have the strength to "deal with my problems."
Orly? Like how she "dealt" with her cheating husband (who didn't work, btw) by…upping her meds again instead of putting him on the curb like the trash he is.
To her, the illusion of companionship with a cheater was better than facing the honest, crushing loneliness of being single. Either way, she was alone.
I don't know a single woman who is super duper happy with Freedom(tm), either. They have to take drugs to drag themselves through another day of a job that makes them strong and empowered.
I'd say you're half right. The order is necessary, but the order also has to be accepted by free choice. Indeed, real order is possible only when the majority freely choose and support it; political and economic corruption is the inevitable universal response in any human society to laws, regulations and duties not widely, and freely, recognized as necessary and desireable for their own sake. A duty imposed by force is no better than a duty freely abandoned, in the long run.
The purpose of freedom is to be the proper means of duty; the purpose of duty is to be the chosen end of freedom.
History says otherwise. So do Paul and Aquinas.
Liberalism itself arose as an attempt to restore order following the wars of religion caused by the fracturing of the old Christian order. But instead of going back, they took it a step further and sawed off the branch they were sitting on.
The purpose of individual freedom is to seek personal goods. The purpose of government is to secure the common good. Duties naturally arise as a consequence of both.
He is wrong from the first statement. We don't have to figure out how to govern Earth. No one person or group needs to govern the whole world. Frankly, I'm not convinced we need government at all. But we certainly do not need one government for the whole planet, unless his goal is to rebuild Babel.
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The Statist religion requires the Earth be governed by the select few who have proven themselves so infallible over the last few decades.
Zaklong
Correct. In fact the revolts and riots around the world demand a more LOCALUZED politics and relationships and against centralism and uniformity.
Recently the Singaporean Justice minister took potshots at a defunct university student organization's home page on the subject of religion
https://www.theonlinecitizen.com/2019/11/25/deactivated-nussu-students-united-page-admins-strongly-disagree-with-allegations-by-k-shans-press-secretary-that-they-are-anti-religious/
What's amusing was the citation of Lee Kwan Yew's insufferable vanity that religious leaders were disallowed from commentongbod political 3conimic issues unless they became politicians
xavier
"We are going to have to figure out how to govern the earth".
Wow. Nothing bad ever started with THAT. But also… why?
"That requires us to agree on values…"
Right. Again, insisting that the entire world follow This Particular Value Set has never gone pear-shaped, but again, even if we needed to govern the world, why would that require an all-encompassing value-set? If for example, I were to gain total power and govern the world via an entirely voluntary anarcho-capitalism that carried no coercion to join, no penalties to leave, and no interference with the human right to form or maintain groups including nations; that would be an arguably very functional means of "governing the world", require no shared value-set whatsoever, and eliminate the need for a perfected system from the outset, rendering his entire argument false in every detail even if we grant the premise.
He needs to posit one-world government because he's a Liberal, and Liberalism is inherently totalitarian.
The Liberal lies awake at night, haunted by the thought that someone, somewhere holds to objective truth.
and refuses to bend the knee or offer meat to a false god.
I prefer to submit to Christ the king whose feast day was just last week.
He's merciful however much I struggle and grumble with obedience.
xavier
You are always going to ruled by an iron fist, in this life. The question is what kind of Caesar is going to rule over you.
I'm not sure about you, but the current one that allows child sex changes, the freedom to slash your own wrists, and the honor to destroy others based on what they say, is not quite the ideal.
When they make the move to pod living and bug eating it doesn't how much you kick and scream, and individual isn't going to stop a larger unified force from getting their way.
But at least you've got sex-trafficking funded fap sites and government-approved weed to consume!
The thing is, Christianity and even bloody Shariah have moral rules for permitting people to follow their pre-existing traditions. This is fine, because they are rules. Liberalism, demanding superficial consistency in all things, has no internal basis for tolerance, ever.
So, a Christian polity will allow me everything most people want anyway, AND isn't compelled to genocide by its own logic, whereas a Liberal polity….
That's why I shake my head when butthurt Libertarians try to own me with, "Wanting to ban porn means you want Sharia!"
Let's see … being given the option to pay a reasonable tax in exchange for being allowed to practice my faith in a patriarchal society, or being forced to live in a neopagan, weed-scented hellscape …
I'm a half crippled ex-farmer, by the way. If I can beat your argument senseless while granting your premise, you have no business being a "public intellectual" and should publicly apologize before retiring to a life of quiet humility more befitting your intellectual rank.
Who's this "we", Brett?
I wouldn't trust this guy handing me a bottle of water with the safety seal intact.
Important safety tip!
The right to keep and bear arms makes the most sense when presented as duty. I think it also disarms the accusation that, "You care about your rights than our children!" If it is a duty supported by a right, rather a right with no duty attached, it carries more weight. My duty to defend my family is real, concrete, immediate, and understandable.