Have you ever considered the problem we have created for ourselves? We let relativists, humanists, and scientistism strip the world of mystery and meaning beyond what they see. Their vision is the revealed truth. Their words are sacred.
Take a breath. Think deeply. Are you really allowed to disagree? Are they not, having infiltrated and unraveled nearly every cultural institution, angry earth-bound gods who brook no dissent?
A society increasingly run by men and women who cannot imagine any power greater than themselves (or their faction) is doomed. Not just human liberty. That can’t possibly survive the capricious whim of our temporal masters. We see the weight of it stressing the foundations of our Republic. Disagreeing gets you canceled. Something as simple as a meme could get you arrested. Our cities are overrun by foreign invaders, but not until after those who claimed a monopoly on public safety swore that policing was an injustice.
Even science, the foundation of rationalism, must be of the proper pedigree and toe the “party” line, or it is blaspheme.
Wrong thinking is the problem, but before you can have such a thing, someone with power and influence must decide what it is that is right.
There can be no science in such a place. Ideas, learning, innovation, exploration, and imagination all begin with questions, queries, and wonder. Morality itself, that thing we are supposed to agree on together, that which represents the basis for even common law, is impossible. Not where it is both denied existence but defined for us. A moving target whose restrictions are not universally applied but directed like a weapon at anyone who dares question why?
And our terrestrial gods want it that way. They need it that way. The infiltration of politics into every corner of life brings with it the desire to make everything a moral question, but in the absence of any shared morality. Rather than tell the politics to stay away, tell it that it has no business here, we let the venom exhaust us, followed like day follows night by the political will to intervene in the name of justice.
A lie at the end of which there is no justice at all.
They have so thoroughly poisoned the well that even theft and murder, once universally accepted as violations of our basic human rights, have been turned on their head.
The value of life has been eroded out from under us, beginning decades ago with abortion and moving on more recently to “assisted suicide, whose inevitable path toward state tyranny I have documented elsewhere. But to summarize, life is useful when it serves the temporal gods but a burden even when it is through their actions that it has lot some value.
In numerous American cities, theft has become an acceptable occupation up to an arbitrary point. The local deities who oversee order and justice are content to ignore property crime as if it is beneath them to care about those from whom it has been stolen.
Having stripped the “tree” of its fruit, those short-sighted fools motivated by immediate acts of transitory self-enrichment then act amazed down the road when nothing further grows.
No worries. The government is here to help.
These are not new problems. Human behavior is what it is. It is why the Bible remains relevant. It is why America’s founders framed our government, as best they could, to protect against it. A Republic, if you can keep it. A system of government for a moral people.
Can we? Keep it. Can we keep it in the absence of at least some shred of a shared morality?
Those who have worked patiently for generations to bring it down don’t think we can, and their work is proof enough. They who shouted about fears of a theocracy created a temporal one of their very own—a political belief system in nothing but themselves.
It is one of the many things Democrat-Socialism shares with Fascism and communism: nothing matters but the state (and those who run it).
It sounds hopeless. As if, even were it to come to victorious armed conflict—civil war—how could we replace the common moral underpinnings upon which the Republic once stood? The Constitution is paper and words, and without right-minded people willing to view it as more powerful than their own will, it means nothing.
Human beings will be what they are, and absent some shared morality, each incarnation that follows is little more than another version of mob rule.
I still have hope.
First, I think we need to agree that human rights apply equally to all humans, as would the violation of those rights. Any ‘right’ that we do not all share, regardless of race, religion, age, or sex, is not a human right. It is something else. We should call them what they are - privileges, which, ironically, is the accusation flung by people seeking demographic carveouts that cannot be applied universally.
I’ll leave it at that for now because not much else can be accomplished until we can agree on this.
The people most likely to pursue power in any system are those most inclined to abuse it. They benefit if we are divided and at each other’s throats. The one thing we all share is humanity. If we are all truly equal, and there are natural human rights, then they can only be things we all share.
Everything outside that is a political affectation meant to keep us from agreeing on who the tyrants truly are and that it is they who are guilty of injustice.
>First, I think we need to agree that human rights apply equally to all humans, as would the violation of those rights. Any ‘right’ that we do not all share, regardless of race, religion, age, or sex, is not a human right.
No argument from me, but the first thing that pops into my head is the difficulty that many -- perhaps nearly all? -- people would have accepting that an 8-year-old would have the right to keep and bear arms. He's human, right?
Does that mean we'd have to back off some, and say that all humans have a human right to self-defense, but only some humans have the privilege of keeping guns, and still fewer the privilege of bearing them? What kinds of adjustments would we have to make to other human rights?
I suppose we could say that humans who are in some kind of 'custody' have human rights, but those rights are held in trust by their custodians (whether those are parents or guardians or prison guards) until custody ends.
I'm happy to take the hard line: If you're human, you have human rights, and no one gets to violate them. Even though this could lead to undesired outcomes, the 'solutions' are almost always worse than the problems. I'm just saying that's a difficult position to rally people around.