Liberal Christianity

I don’t understand your question, so I don’t know how to re-word that to help you follow my thinking. Let’s wait and see if anybody else gets it.

I’m going home to nurse this ever-so-rare headache I have. It has nothing to do with all this, so don’t start taking credit for it. 'Night, all. Have at it.

I’m asking you exaxctly what tips the balance towards Bush considering you view him as the lesser of two evils? After reading your post, it’s seems to me to be the Christian factor.

He uses his daddy’s influence to get out of trouble.

Yes Tom, I'm fully aware that the Magna Carta was no statement of human rights, but, it was an erosion of centralised political power, which affected not only England's history but that of Great Britain and its colonies too, and as such, a significant step,
But the US's constitution drew upon concepts in it as I understand. I saw a copy of the MC when I was in England - it was really great to see it.

I think there's 3 copies of the MC still extant, and the one I saw was in Salisbury cathedral.

Yes - that's where I saw it.

Regarding natural or individual rights, I don’t think I can improve on Ayn Rand’s words:

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The recognition of individual rights entails the banishment of physical force from human relationships: basically, rights can violated only by means of force. In a capitalist society, no man or group many initiate the use of physical force against others. The only function of government, in such a society, is the task of protecting man’s rights, i.e., the task of protecting him from physical force; the government acts as the agent of man’s right of self-defense, and may use force only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use; thus the government is the means of placing the retaliatory use of force under objective control.


Where do rights come from, then? If the society you live in does not recognize them, there are none. I cannot argue with your right1 point, Ali; every collective that has been tried proves this out. Rights exist in freedom. Privilege exists in slavery or servitude.

This nation’s founders “held these truths to be self-evident.” Enough agreed that the decision was made to build a nation on that foundation. If the rights do not preceed the entity, then the entity is the granter of the rights and they cease to BE rights. If the sovereignty does not exist in the individual, then a government of, by and for the people is not possible, because there is no authority to establish it.

So the bottom line is that a higher authority had to be established in order to try our radical experiment in self-government over on this side of the pond. That authority was vested in its people. The results, sadly, speak for themselves.

Back to your quiestion now, Mike. Yes, I think my perception of Bush’s Christianity, as I have described it and IN THAT CONTEXT, was the piece that tipped the scale for me. Tipping the scale is the key concept here… there are other things in there too - on both sides, so it is not so neat and clean as you would like to make it.
Quote (MidnightToker @ Sep. 16 2004,17:52)
I don't think there is any way to make Jesus into an "extremist" - which in political philosophy we might call a "classical liberal," BTW - bet you love that.

Oh man - I thought Jesus was nothing but an extremist/liberal or whatever you want to call him. He challenged many, many things about the "status quo" and order of the day, didn't he? On top of that, he performed miracles like curing people. There's no way they were going let a guy like that get out alive, was there?
I think that makes him an "iconoclast." :)

OK, lessee now…

That there is a systematic problem seems pretty obvious to me, Pete. It also seems to me that Bush represents one of the more extreme manifestions of that corruption - sort of it’s logical conclusion. I’ve also come to believe that there is no way to “institutionalize” virtue. There is no system that will guarantee that corrupt people will be forced to act virutously. Tthe best one can do is to hire virtuous people and make sure there are lots of checks. Bush’s virtue seems to me to be more of the sort found in The Prince than in the Gospels. There is something interesting here, as a matter of history - most early Christians thought that what one did was more important than what one believed. The action was what mattered. Constantine changed all of that, so that now people can claim to be good Christians by virtue of what they believe, who are at the same time completely self-centered, and ignore Jesus’s very difficult moral teaching. That describes Bush, I think.

Ali, I meant no insult by calling it “British mythology.” I was using “mythology” in the anthropolgist’s sense - the story of the MC as the origin of rights1 theory is a foundational narrative for British politics, not just English, I think? So “myth” in this sense is not a “false story,” but rather a narrative that plays a foundational role in some cultural context. Some are true, some are false, in the historian’s sense, but that’s not the important thing. The US has its own myths - some of which are true, some are not - e.g., myths about Abe Lincoln - we all have to learn the Gettysburg address, he really gave the speech, but it serves as a foundational myth while at the same time being an actual event. This way of talking makes the US Consitution part of the US political mythology too. Think about the idea of the “intent of the framers.” :)

Now, as to the distinction between rights1 and rights2, let me ask this - what is the normative force of rights2 if not some rights1 foundation?

Finally, Pete, the “self-evident” claim in the US D. of I. holds that it is self-evident that God did this stuff, and the claim here is that we know that it is true that all people (or only men?) are created equal in the same way that we know that it is true that 1 + 1 = 2. Or in the same way that we know that Euclid’s 5th postulate is true. But it turns out that Euclid’s 5th postulate is not a necessary truth, and in fact most things that people have thought to be self-evident through history turn out not to be. As much as I would like self-evidence to work in this case, I’m afraid it doesn’t. :(

You see - I don’t see it that way. Where is the manifest corruption with Bush? Are you referring to Halliburton? I was horrified by that at first… until I looked into the choices of companies capable of doing that work in the world. Do you know how many there are? And do you know who owns most of the OTHER one? Do you know who Clinton chose in a no-bid contract to do the same sort of work during his administration, and why he chose them? Or is there something else?

I AM looking at actions, and how they line up with what he has said.

As far as self-evidence, of course it doesn’t work. It falls back to Ali’s assertion that Right1 is a fabrication. If a group does not agree to the existance of natural rights, no matter what they attribute the source to, then they don’t exist. Rand did away with the “mystical” origin neatly, but only in the context of capitalism.

So Right1 exists (or existed?) because a group of men got together a couple hundred years ago and decided among themselves that it did. They honored that assumption with each other, and used that assumption as the authority to found a nation.

It was quite a bootstrap, wasn’t it?

I guess a good question at this point would be how freedom and rights are related. It is becoming quite obvious to me that my idea of freedom is very different from yours. There is freedom “from” and freedom “to.” Is a “right” to health-care even remotely similar to the “right” to own property? Why would one exist and the other not?
(I have an answer to this for myself. The first presupposes having access to wealth or time that has no bearing on ability or effort to procure it. The second presupposes that you have a way to accumulate wealth and purchase something with it.)

All any of us really has is the time of our lives. All “wealth” translates in one way or another back to that, or to that of others. (Even natural resources must be harvested, mined, refined, etc… time.) The question beneath all of this, for me, has always been “Who owns me?” A free man can say “I do.” If that is so, then the time of that man’s life is his to do with as he sees fit. A collective will answer that same question with “we do.” At that point, freedom has been replaced by something else. That something may well bring security or other benefits… but the choice to participate is gone… and so is the notion of natural rights.

Quote (TomS @ Sep. 17 2004,07:45)
Constantine changed all of that, so that now people can claim to be good Christians by virtue of what they believe, who are at the same time completely self-centered, and ignore Jesus's very difficult moral teaching. That describes Bush, I think.

That's a rather strong statement to make ...
What do you base your assertions on ???


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Quote (Burning-SG @ Sep. 17 2004,08:56)
Quote (TomS @ Sep. 17 2004,07:45)
Constantine changed all of that, so that now people can claim to be good Christians by virtue of what they believe, who are at the same time completely self-centered, and ignore Jesus's very difficult moral teaching. That describes Bush, I think.

That's a rather strong statement to make ...
What do you base your assertions on ???


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Well, early Christian texts focus on actions necessary for a moral life. As the contents of the Bible settled in the 4th century, as orthodoxy emerged from the widely varying and competing views on the meaning of Jesus's message, so too did the idea of what was necessary to be called a Christian legitimately. It was no longer a matter of action, but a profession of belief, the Nicene Creed. Consider what it says and what it doesn't, and keep in mind that it was the product of doctrinal (and hence political) struggles. Most folks today think that the Creed itself somehow expresses Jesus' point of view, when it was the result of nearly 300 years of debate about what Jesus's message was, and was accepted as orthodox for a whole lot of reasons having little to do with what Jesus actually said.

:)

Or, perhaps you are asking why I think this describes Bush? ???

Pete, I am referring to the way in which he has used power and lies for decades to get ahead. Lots of recent cases come to mind, we needn’t look all the way back to his military service. There is the one difference between Bush and Clinton - Clinton always involved everyone in the debate. Take a look at the various bioethics commissions under Clinton and Bush, for example. One believes in democracy, the other believes in stronger, centralized government and limitations on participation. Haliburton is just a minor side note. :)

Well, Tom - I was DEEPLY involved in researching and tracking the Clinton-era scandals… got involved, in fact, as soon as it looked like he was the coming front-runner for the Dems originally. I can’t go into that in public anymore, but I’m glad to talk about it to a certain degree in private.

This goes back to my personal premise about corruption in general. We have Corrupt A or Corrupt B to vote into the most powerful position in a the most powerful corrupt government in the world. So what do you do? Weigh the relative corruption and choose accordingly? That’s sure what it seems like we are all doing here… and what we have been doing for years.

What does a rational person DO with that? Seriously? When are we going to start looking at WHY this situation is the way it is? And what are we going to do in the meantime?

Quote (TomS @ Sep. 17 2004,09:46)
Or, perhaps you are asking why I think this describes Bush? ???

No .... I think as the left slowly implodes - desperation sets in.
Considering, they have hit full force - (books, movies, false documents, concerts, ect) there's not much left ....
but turn on itself (?)

In the world of political corruption ... your assertions are vacuous. In as much as 'your' (the left) lack of self examination ....
Chappaquiddick Kennedy, Robert 'KKK' Byrd, et al ...


Certainly even you can see the humor in the 'anti-war' party
running a self confessed war criminal (?)


Clinton Happens !



- A National Party No More: The Conscience of a Conservative Democrat - Zell Miller

- Arrogance: Rescuing America from the Media Elite - Bernard Goldberg


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You might add the Treason speeches of Joe Lieberman (D) to that required reading list.